Burning the Night

by Glen Huser

  “Can I get you something?”

  “Absinthe,” she said. “I shouldn’t, but …”

  The cabinet contained a jumble of bottles and decanters.

  “In the corner.”

  I found what I imagined to be the fabled drink of Beaudelaire, Rimbaud, and Hemingway—not to mention the poison of choice for a host of impressionist painters.

  “I thought it was impossible to get hold of absinthe nowadays,” I said.

  “Difficult,” she wheezed, “but not impossible.”

  I poured myself a drink of Madeira.

  “Louella would dress up like a young man and go to his parties.” She took a butterfly sip of the absinthe. “He seemed to like that.”

  “Do you have more of his photos?” I asked.

  “Oh, heavens yes,” she laughed. “You go and look in the study. The walls are lined. And there’s a boxful or two. You can look at those.”

  “Did you know him well?”

  “Not really well. Louella and I were born in England and Mother didn’t bring us to Toronto until 1928, and he died in 1939. As I say, Louella saw more of him than I did.”

  The absinthe seemed to precipitate a wheezing attack. “I always suspected he was something like Oscar Wilde. A thin Oscar Wilde,” she added. “You know. Liking to hold court, tell stories, have elegant people around him.”

  “Do you recall him ever talking about Phillip Pariston, ever mentioning him?”

  She shook her head and I could see she was beginning to tire, her eyes fluttering closed, her chin settling into the nest of bright silks. I asked her if I might spend some time in the study.

  “The boxes of his photographs are under my work table.” She told me that she had donated the original plates to the City of Toronto Archives. “I just don’t have the space to keep it all.”

  There seemed to be no order to the photographs in the boxes. There would be one or two from his once-acclaimed lakeside series. Men in bathing suits creating a shaky human pyramid at Scarborough Beach Park. Children clustered around a street musician at Sunnyside. Next to these would be portraits of affluent Torontonians from the turn of the century, women choked with jewels and bows, Gibson girl hairdos sweeping up into massive feathered hats, vested men in starched collars. There were a few from his visits to the French Quarter in New Orleans and Central Park in New York. Other photos were from the ’20s and ’30s, starch and lace giving way to a kind of looseness in clothing and boldness of design that I could imagine Radcliffe Malthus enjoying a good deal. There were pictures of Toronto streets and buildings, and photographic records of political rallies, exhibitions and festivals. It was a shuffled deck that I sorted through carefully but I could determine no photos of Phillip Pariston or the art studies he referred to in that April entry in his journal before pages were razored out.

  On the walls of the study, copies of some of the same prints I had seen in the boxes had been framed and hung alongside pieces of Edith Bircombe’s works on silk, and mementos that suggested some time spent where? The Far East? Indonesia? Puppets, fans, elaborately cut paperwork. The room was beginning to darken in the lateness of the afternoon. As I sought a lamp to turn on, wondering how the drawing lights on her table worked, I sensed her presence at the door, confirmed by the slight mechanical noise of the oxygen apparatus and the pulse of her wheezing.

  “He was a wonderful photographer.” She struggled to find breath for her words. “I love that one with three girls and their bicycles. All gangly legs and spokes and circles. The design.” She waved the hand not supporting the canister in airy circles.

  “Is this a complete set of his work?”

  “Heavens, no,” she whispered. “Some things I don’t think he kept copies of. Just the showier pieces. And then that Carroll got to his things before anyone else. I think some of his prints were spirited away.”

  “Carroll?”

  “Uncle Radcliffe’s secretary when he died.”

  “Does she still live in Toronto?”

  “He.”

  “He?”

  “Carroll Carmody. I think it was a stage name. He was an actor for a while in the ’30s before Uncle Rad took him under his wing. He was very kind to young men.” It was a knowing statement and Edith Bircombe glanced at me quickly to see what effect it had created. I raised my eyebrows a touch, enough to indicate interest, not enough to express shock.

  “He’s still around as far as I know,” she said. “I think he lives comfortably off what Rad left him.”

  CHAPTER 15

  AT A CAFÉ ON CHURCH STREET, I CHECKED A phone booth and found a Carmody listing for an address just north of Bloor and Church.

  “You’re not the first to be doing research on Malthus,” a mellifluous voice informed me. “Are you coming from the art angle or the history angle? Someone a couple of years ago was thinking of doing some kind of a photographic history of Toronto. But it’s not that easy to get rights to some of his stuff …”

  He was a talker, I realized with some relief, gliding from topic to topic—the copyright on Malthus’s photos, the many disservices “Beady Edie” had done her uncle, tourism in Toronto, the weather. He agreed to meet me at Buddy’s, a bar on Church Street, later in the evening.

  Even after poking my way through dinner and reading a couple of chapters of an E.M. Forster novel I’d brought with me, I was still early getting to Buddy’s. The bar was busy, a mix of men, a hubbub of chatter, canned music, laughter, the air infused with smoke and overhead lighting glinting off glasses. I spotted a couple of seats not far from the entrance, claimed one, and slipping off my blazer, draped it over the other.

  By the time Carroll Carmody arrived, I was nursing a second gin and tonic. Even though we hadn’t discussed how we would find one another, he zeroed in on me within seconds. But then I was one of the few drinking by myself.

  “Curtis from Alberta?” He had a slight lisp.

  Rising, I shook his hand—pudgy fingers, a bit moist, three rings, one with a large green gem.

  “Carroll …” I retrieved my blazer and gestured to the seat.

  “So …” He let the word roll so that it became almost an exhalation, a sigh. “A traveller in the world of art. I, too, have been a connoisseur. Drama for me, but that’s art too, isn’t it?”

  He was a man who, I suspected, had once been strikingly handsome but whose early good looks had slipped away with the weight of years. One of the buttons on his patterned silk shirt had given up the struggle to remain secured. His over-coiffed hair was bottle blond and his deep-set green eyes with their long, dark lashes had a studied, exotic look.

  He caught the attention of a waiter and ordered a double scotch.

  “An artist with an interest in Radcliffe Malthus. I knew him well. His secretary, you know, for five years before he died.”

  “There’s a connection,” I said, “to an aunt of mine.”

  “Ah.” Again, a reflective sigh. “He was a man of connections.” The scotch arrived and we raised our glasses in a salute.

  “Of course, he was a crusty old bastard in his last years. But my gracious, the stories he could tell you about Toronto in the early days. And he lived it all, I tell you, Curtis.” Carmody reached over and clutched my arm. “I mean he wasn’t just there—he lived it! In with the Arts and Letters Club. The Masseys. The Harrises. The Group of Seven. Tom Thomson. He knew them all. Mind you, although he admired their work, he wasn’t into what he called the ‘school of canoe paddle painting.’ Boating through the wilderness to find the perfect dead stump or wind-blasted tree. He used to say there’s more poetry in a man with good limbs than any jack pine he ever stumbled across. This scotch is quite wonderful.”

  He drained the swallow remaining and I signalled the waiter for a refill.

  “Brandy for me.” It seemed right. Aunt Harriet’s drink, of course.

  We settled into the evening, becoming one with the hum of the bar, its dark rubble-stone walls, its smoke and music. At times, men stopped
by to chat briefly with Carmody, obviously a regular. I felt I was being sized up as his companion.

  “Did he ever mention a young artist—Phillip Pariston—actually a shirt-tail relative who stayed with him for a while during World War I?” I asked during a rare pause in Carmody’s loquacious reminiscences. “I think he was a part of a group that met for drawing and photography. The Wednesday Club?”

  “I don’t recall the name. But he did talk about the men who met on Wednesdays back in the day. Men and boys. He’d studied under Eakins in Philadelphia, you know, and from him he’d learned to photograph the nude. Eakins’s students posed for the master and they’d shuck their briefs in a trice if he asked them to. But say, come and see some of the photos I salvaged from the clutches of Beady Edie. Maybe tonight?” He raised an eyebrow.

  I glanced at my watch. It was just after midnight. I didn’t really want to spend the early hours of the morning with him. He was obviously working up to something more than a nightcap and a viewing of Malthus’s photographs.

  “I think I’d better call it a day … er … a night. Maybe a rain check? Tomorrow? I’m hoping to visit Malthus House tomorrow and I think the shack where Tom Thomson painted is available somewhere for viewing …”

  “We’d need to take a trip to Kleinberg to see a replica of his shack.” Carmody leaned in, a pudgy hand again on my arm. “But I’ll be your guide at Malthus House. And I’ll ask my friend Moira to join us. She’s a Thomson fanatic too so you should hit it off. I literally tripped over her in the McMichael Gallery a few months ago. I’m afraid we toppled a rack of calendars in the gift shop but we became—you know—instant friends. You’ll like her.”

  We agreed to meet at Malthus House at noon the next day, both of us a little wobbly as we headed different directions on Church Street.

  A THUNDERSTORM RUMBLED THROUGH TORONTO JUST after I got back to my hotel, and by morning, a heavy, moist heat enveloped the city. Malthus House was not a long walk but I was already mopping perspiration from my face by the time I got there, wishing I had left my briefcase in which I’d tucked the copy of the Thomson to show Carmody’s friend.

  From the gate, I could see the building was one of understated elegance, with a frontal arcade that made it look like something that might have rested more comfortably in the bright sun of the French Riviera than the shaded copses of Rosedale.

  I found Carmody and Moira Greckel waiting inside the arcade where it was a touch cooler. She was a head taller than Carmody and, also in contrast, a thin and angular study in white, black and red. Pale skin, long black hair, black dress and pumps, lipstick as red as ketchup.

  After introductions, Carmody immediately ushered us into the building and through what must have been a conservatory onto an adjoining patio serving as a restaurant.

  “Memories,” Carmody said, after we’d ordered our tea. “I’ve spent a few hours on these flagstones.”

  His companion raised her painted eyebrows.

  “I said flagstones, darling, not fagstones.” He gave her a playful slap.

  “Moira’s quite enjoying being a fag hag these days,” he explained to me. “Expanding worlds. She’s filling me in on postmodernism and I’m filling her in on post-Stonewall points of interest.”

  Moira Greckel winked at me. “I’m dying to see the Thomson,” she said. Her voice had the controlled throatiness of someone equally comfortable giving a gallery lecture or ordering a cranberry scone.

  “Ah, yes,” she said, holding the colour photograph I retrieved from my briefcase. “Definitely from 1916, I’d think. Do you realize the treasure you have here?”

  “Moira’s doing her doctoral thesis on Thomson.” Carmody settled back, with a cigarette, into the patio chair. “Something on the iconography of the tree. Right, darling?”

  “It’s fascinating.” She flicked a straying strand of her Morticia hairdo back over her shoulder. “All that business with trees. It’s all wrapped up with colonialism. You know what I mean—taking over the trees.” She held the Thomson photo at arm’s length and dug a pair of glasses out of a large black straw handbag.

  “Of course, Thomson often focused on the isolated tree. Totem, crucifixion pole, or—as I’ve said—the terrible signature of the colonist.”

  “Moira can get more mileage out of a stump than …” Carmody’s sentence trailed into his teacup.

  “I’m reminded,” Moira said, as if the thought might just have come to her, “of some of the landscapes you see in battlefield paintings from World War I. Something from Flanders, contorted trunks …”

  “Thomson’s tree does have foliage,” I said, tracing the masses of verdure in the print that Moira had returned to the table.

  “But dark and flat as bloodstains,” she countered. “The only life is in the trunk—and there’s comment in the branches.”

  “Supplication and distress?”

  Carmody seemed relieved with the arrival of our food. “Would you believe I actually used to have toast and tea out here in the summer, catching up with Radcliffe’s correspondence? Poor man. He was nearly blind the last year or two so he had no idea what I was writing. Would sign his name to anything.”

  Moira broke her scone into crumb-sized bites. “He was murdered of course.”

  “Murdered?”

  “Thomson.”

  “Oh yes,” I said, slathering jam onto a crumpet. “One of the Canoe Lake summer residents. A belligerent German …” I scoured my memory for the name I had read in a biography of Thomson.

  “Oh no, my dear,” Moira scolded. “Discounted. Totally discounted. Everyone’s certain it was the owner of the lodge, Probably manslaughter though, not actual murder.”

  Carmody’s attention was wandering, I could see, and he looked impatiently at Moira’s remaining pile of scone crumbs. “Nibble up, darling,” he said. “I want to show Curtis the rest of this old shack.”

  WE ENDED UP BACK AT CARMODY’S APARTMENT AFTER A supper downtown during which we managed to kill two bottles of overpriced wine. Visa bills, I had decided fatalistically, were a fact of midsummer, and not something to be fretted over in the heat of holidays.

  Carmody’s apartment was cool, but at the price of an intrusive air conditioner. Moira sat in a spot that allowed the air stream to play on her long hair.

  “Oh my god, that feels delish,” she murmured, letting the straps from her dark cotton dress slip off her shoulders.

  I sank into a chair opposite. Carmody was busy in his galley kitchen, visible through a counter-height opening. The living room, which had the unsettling appearance of a second-hand shop, began to acquire features. I realized that behind the bric-a-brac, plastic statuary, fringed lamps and wanton plants of a number of ivy families, there was actually a series of male nudes among photographs on the wall behind the sofa where Moira sat. One, I guessed, was a study of a much younger Carmody himself, fully displayed.

  He peeked in from the kitchen. “Ah—you’ve found it,” he giggled. “I was twenty-two.”

  “You haven’t changed a bit.” Moira’s red lips tipped into a smile as she lit a cigarette.

  “Liar. Margaritas coming up.” He sang out. The sounds of a blender rode in on the base noise of the air conditioner.

  As I allowed my gaze to wander from the nude photo of Carmody to others on the wall, all different models, all young men, one, I knew with sudden certainty, was Phillip Pariston himself, leaning against a pillar in the midst of hothouse greenery, a lazy smile on his lips.

  “Who’s that?” My voice came out as a squeak.

  “Where?” Carmody emerged with a pitcher and glasses on a tray, pushing aside a pile of After Dark magazines to set it on the coffee table. I walked over, and through a smudge of Moira’s cigarette smoke, pointed at the photo, partially hidden by the leaves of a trailing philodendron.

  “Oh—just one of the models the Wednesday Club must have hired. Posing for sketches and paintings and photo studies. From back in the ’20s I think.”

  “He’
s the one,” I said, “the one I asked you about. Phillip Pariston.”

  “Really.” Carmody took a closer look. “Interesting. So not a paid model—a volunteer?”

  As Carmody and Moira sipped their margaritas, I filled them in on Pariston’s journal and its missing pages.

  A smile grew on Carmody’s face as he licked salt from the rim of his glass.

  “It’s not the only one. There’s more of your man,” he said. “I rescued all the naked boys before Edie could get hold of them. I have a stash, probably worth some money these days if I ever choose to sell them.”

  “Shame about the part missing,” Moira lit another cigarette. She could see I’d lost her train of thought. In fact I could think of nothing but Carmody’s cache of photos.

  “The part about Thomson,” she added. “Missing from the journal. Might have shed more light on his last days.”

  Carmody replenished our margaritas and then hunkered down to pull a large box out from between a credenza and a stand supporting a Boston fern.

  “You look through.” He caught his breath as he got back up from the floor with some trouble and sank onto the sofa beside Moira.

  Although the photos in the box were a jumble, the ones of Phillip were not hard to find. I pulled them out and arranged them on the rug. A variety of poses. All nude. In some he smiled, in others he was not really solemn but pensive. In a couple he seemed to be making love to the camera.

  Moira nudged the one closest to her foot and picked it up. Carmody pinched a corner of it and wiggled it into a better light.

  “Look at that cock. Can you imagine getting your mouth around that?”

  Moira gave him a playful slap, careful not to spill her drink. “Less romanticized than Von Gloeden’s photographs,” she observed. “Although that man’s handsomeness gives them a kind of veneer of romanticism, and the Malthus House conservatory has all the trappings of neoclassicism that Von Gloeden loved. You know the photos I mean. Surly Sicilian farm boys trying to look like house slaves. Everything hanging out.” She gestured for me to hand her some more of the photos. “God, he was handsome.”