Burning the Night

by Glen Huser

  “Now, my dear,” Carmody said, sinking into the sofa, “give me your honest opinion. Is this not a man who has been experiencing the pleasures of the flesh with others of his own gender?”

  “It’s an assumption …” I reclaimed my chair.

  “Of course it’s an assumption, or more accurately …” Carmody held a hand to his head as if multi-syllabic words were somehow taxing it. “It’s a deduction. We’re deducing from the evidence, from what we see in the photographs. Look at the eyes, the mouth, the unfettered sexuality.” He stopped on the word, savouring it although he had experienced some difficulty in actually saying it. “Sensuality,” he added.

  “I’m afraid I agree with Carmie.” Moira reached over and patted my arm. “Photographs do give us a picture even if they don’t always give us the whole picture.”

  “You’ve nailed it. I agree with you both. There is sensuality—I think he had an artist’s appreciation of its power and the time he spent at Malthus House brought it all to the front.”

  “I’ll say.” Carmody snorted. “Full frontal.”

  “But his love for Harriet didn’t diminish …” I wasn’t sure why I was making a case for Phillip’s virtue to people who had never read a word of his diary or heard Aunt Harriet’s declarations.

  “Confusion,” Carmody said. “We have all known confusion. I, myself, for a brief period—when I was twenty—fell victim to the charms of a young woman who played ingenue parts for a couple of years before relinquishing the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd for the aroma of polished Rosedale mahogany and the gossip of bridge clubs. She married a lawyer and settled into a life of predictabilities, but she had been a wonderful Kaye in Stage Door, and, as I say, for a while I was quite smitten.”

  “Carmie.” Moira was patting his hand now.

  “And the point of all this, of course …” Carmody refilled our glasses. “Is that, at the right time and place, it is quite possible to fall in love with anyone. Gender becomes a secondary issue.”

  “My point,” I mumbled.

  “But it had no future.” Carmody leaned suddenly toward me sending a small wave of margarita overside onto the carpet. “It sorts itself out, with time—and generally not very much time.”

  “Cerebral love,” Moira announced rather fuzzily, “cerebral love is powerful but temporal unless it is aligned to a physical disposition.” The margaritas had not seriously impaired her ability to summon the language of the Ph.D student to her lips. “Cerebral—and idealized. Take Ruskin—”

  “Ruskin!” Carmody giggled, and then whispered loudly to me. “You can count on Moira to slip a little Ruskin into any conversation. You did your M.A. thesis on Ruskin, didn’t you dear?”

  “I’m talking about the idealization thing,” Moira pouted. “And Ruskin is a perfect example. He married, believing that women, like Greek statues and Victorian paintings, had no body hair. He was never able to reconcile …”

  “Hair.” Carmody rolled his eyes. “Well—I guess we are talking about secondary sex characteristics. Or are we?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. I traced my finger along the edge of one of the photographs. “And I’m not even sure it’s cerebral.” I shrugged and nodded to Moira. “I think it may be more subconscious. An accumulation of all the romantic songs and movies and magazine advertisements and wedding photos. Our desires, I think, are shaped subconsciously in ways that we discover sometimes collapse against the realities of our nature.”

  Moira had edged over to me and clasped my hand. She had long lacquered nails, I noticed, that ended with white crescents.

  “Exactly,” she said, in a little whisper that was more Marilyn Monroe than Germaine Greer. “Do you think Thomson’s trees are phallic?”

  “Oh, God!” Carmody exploded and lurched across the room toward the kitchen where we could hear him splashing more liquid into the blender.

  “Lawren Harris’s,” I said, “might be considered phallic. Thomson’s are more …” I searched for the right correlation. “More androgynous, like hair. Tangled. Matted.”

  “Postcoital.” Moira decided.

  BEFORE THE EVENING WAS TOTALLY WASTED, MOIRA, who was meeting with one of her students the next morning, headed home, picking her way to the door carefully through the photos still on the rug.

  On my way to Malthus House I had passed a liquor store and picked up a bottle of the scotch Carmody favoured. I fished it out of my briefcase now and gave it to him.

  “A small gift. For allowing me to see these. To fill in …” I searched for words. “… some blank spaces.”

  “Dear boy.” He reached up a hand for me to help him up from the sofa, then worked his way carefully along pieces of furniture to the credenza where some liquor glasses nested alongside a cut-glass decanter. He broke the seal on the scotch and poured us each a good-sized portion.

  “Choose two to keep.”

  CHAPTER 16

  IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT WHEN I GAVE WALTER A call from my hotel room, just after ten, I knew, in Edmonton.

  “Hey, Curt-man.” Walter’s voice, as it usually did, came in a decibel or two louder than most people’s. “So, tell me, what’s up?”

  “Remember the conversations we’ve had about Phillip and those missing pages in the diary?” I said. “Well, as much as I hate to admit it, I think you might have been on the right track regarding Phillip and the Wednesday Club. There might have been reasons for Phillip to get rid of those pages himself.”

  “Tell! Tell!” It was the closest I had ever heard Walter come to squealing.

  I reviewed my day and its escalation of revelations.

  “Wow,” was all Walter could muster at first.

  “This Carmody guy—I think he was Radcliffe’s lover for a few years before he died. I guess he had quite an eye for physical beauty of the masculine form. Radcliffe Malthus.”

  “Did he make a pass at you?”

  “Carmody?”

  “Yes—Carmody.”

  “Yeah. I was getting up to leave. But we’d had some whiskey nightcaps after a few margaritas and he didn’t mind when I pushed his hands away. He still let me keep the two photos of Phillip Pariston he’d given me earlier.”

  “Wow,” Walter said again.

  “Yeah, wow,” I laughed. “I feel like I’ve been travelling back in time and the tour stopped at a point of interest, you know, only the point is Phillip, beautiful and vulnerable and so alive somehow, with only the air of the conservatory between his exposed skin and Radcliffe’s camera lens. God, it’s exciting. You would not believe how this man looked, Walter. Those photos on my bookshelf are nothing. Nothing. Walter, you need to see these.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  “I wish you were here.”

  “Me too. But it was good I stayed. I don’t think my sister would have survived with everybody coming at her with their ideas about the reunion. Ideas but not much assistance. Can’t meet your plane, though, when you get back. That’s the first day of the reunion and it goes on for three more.” There was a pause. “You’ve got those photos out, don’t you?”

  “When did you become a psychic?”

  He chuckled.

  We said our goodbyes.

  I did have the two photos out on the bedspread. In one, Phillip sat in a wicker chair in the midst of tropical plants of the conservatory, one leg draped over the chair’s arm, a hand resting against the extended knee of the other. It was the only photo I’d seen of him with his mouth open, caught in laughter, and I wondered if he were self-conscious about a chip in one of his front teeth. The hair on his head was artfully tousled and I could imagine Radcliffe himself brushing his fingers through it. Or perhaps the boy. Was it Andrew? Andy?

  In the other print, he leaned against a truncated pillar in the studio, a large, draped curtain pooling against the ankle of one foot. He had one arm hidden behind him while the other reached to touch the top of the pillar. The stretching brought bones to the surface, the tip of a pelvis bon
e, ribs. His eyes were cast down, perhaps studying the pattern of an oriental rug that ran a few inches from his naked feet.

  Seeing the photos, it was easy to understand Aunt Harriet’s lifelong passion for this man. I closed my eyes and saw them making love like ballet dancers, every move shimmering with desire and music, and then the melody changed, hovering uncertainly in the air, the young, blond Harriet faded, and the boy wrapped his arms around Phillip so there was an echoing in form of shoulder and hip bone and the long sweep along the side of the thigh to the opposing line of the torso, and the dance, sinuous, swaying, continued. Nijinsky the faun, mottled with desire. And, when it faded again, I was there. My own cheek was there, so close that it seemed possible to reach through time and trace the line of the jaw and brush my fingers against his nipples and feel the stirrings of his desire. But the sensations of my fingers was from my own flesh, and it was the fact of this—along with an incredible fatigue—that brought tears to my eyes as I slipped into sleep.

  I WOKE WITH A MASSIVE HEADACHE THAT STAYED WITH me throughout the plane trip home despite Aspirins and soda water. No Walter waiting to pick me up, of course. But there was a large bouquet of roses from him on my coffee table and their aroma filled the apartment. I moved the bouquet out onto my small balcony, mixed myself a seltzer and sank into a patio chair where I fell asleep.

  As I awoke, the smell of the roses hovered, a summery perfume that made me think of another summer day, I believe it must have been in the holiday following my first year of teaching, when Aunt Harriet suggested we visit the gardens of the Legislature grounds. In our slow progress along the walks, we stopped often to inhale the fragrances of floral beds in the height of their brief Edmonton season. Somehow, probably at my prodding, we got to talking about summer in Vancouver and she recalled it was July when Phillip went back to Vancouver and discovered Edwina had been hoarding Harriet’s letters. I could feel her grip my arm more tightly, making me a kind of ballast against the memory. “Why she didn’t just burn them, I don’t know. Kind of a British thing, I guess, a certainty that you will be damned to hell forever if you tamper with the Royal Mail.”

  “You were still in Montreal?”

  They’d been there for a few months, she told me. She was plagued with worry over why Phillip was ignoring her. Of course, she didn’t know he had been in Toronto most of the time she had been sending her letters to Vancouver.

  “I had a breakdown.” The hold on my arm tightened again when she told me this. “In Montreal I went a little crazy. I began crying and couldn’t stop. I quit eating. I think I wanted to die.”

  Per was beside himself. On his day off, he took her to the closest hospital, actually an army hospital, but a nurse took her to see a doctor who dealt with soldiers suffering from shell shock.

  “Dr. Bilodeau.” She remembered his name. He put her in a sanatorium for about a month to see if he could build her weight up as well as try to help her recover from her depression.

  “They didn’t call it depression then, of course. We’ve gotten better over the years labelling our insanities.”

  Harriet thought the doctor hid most of his costs from Per.

  “He told me that the violinists of the world were entitled to special concessions.”

  Per, she remembered, came to visit her almost every day, and the days she didn’t see him, she suspected he’d given in to his bottle of whiskey.

  “I think he was trying to pull things together,” she said, and laughed softly. “A fine twosome, eh—a madwoman and an alcoholic.”

  Later, when we’d left the legislative grounds and gone back to Aunt Harriet’s house, seeking the coolness of the living room, she asked me to read something from the summer pages of Phillip’s journal. I chose one of the first entries beyond the little ridge created by the removal of the pages.

  July 27, 1917

  I have heard from Hat today, a letter arriving that’s led me to believe that there have been many over the past months, all withheld. Edwina was out for tea this afternoon when the mail came, and it was probably a good thing. It gave me a couple of hours to cool off. If she had come home immediately, I might have run the letter opener through her heart.

  “Where are my letters from Hat?” I confronted her when she drifted in in the late afternoon.

  “Whatever are you talking about?” she said, bold at first, but when I threatened to take the whole business to Dads, she said, “It was only for your own good, my dear. I thought time—”

  She had them in a chocolate box in her room.

  “You are a woman capable of great evil,” I told her, and she said some very uncivil things to me in return. I told her that were it not for the peace of mind of my father, I would never speak to her again—and choose the first opportunity to remove myself from her sight as well. I had supper brought up to me and have stayed in my room all evening except to check on Old Grand. For hours I have been reading your letters, Hat, and weeping, I must confess. I ache to be with you and shall send a wire tomorrow to let you know what has happened. You only have to desire it and you shall be returned to Vancouver and my waiting arms. Leave your father and come home to me.

  Old Grand is a bit better today, I think. The doctor says he has had a series of strokes, and he has difficulty communicating, but when I told him that I would be seeing you again soon, Hat, I am certain he said, “Good.” Kind of a cross between a word and a clearing of the throat, but it sounded like “good” to me.

  “DID YOU NOTICE, CURTIS, HOW THE DIARY ENTRY becomes, as it goes along, a kind of letter to me?” Aunt Harriet’s voice was barely audible. I could see she was bone-tired from our earlier outing.

  “I think it was a letter to you,” I said.

  “I never got the wire,” she whispered. “Papa went on a binge and knocked over the landlord’s china cabinet, smashing just about everything in it. They ended up in a big fight, actually coming to blows, and we got evicted. He’d also gotten fired, so we were living in different rooms while he was looking for another job.”

  In a couple of days they were on the train again, heading east. Per had heard that, with the war on, there was lots of work for longshoremen in Halifax.

  “My life seemed to be filled with losses, and a draining away of my energy,” she said. “I’d regained a little of my lost weight—I still weighed about twenty pounds less than I did in February—and I hated the gaunt face that looked back at me whenever I looked in a mirror.”

  I asked her if she wanted me to go on reading. She gestured toward the cigarette box and nodded her head.

  August 1, 1917

  The train ride to Montreal goes on forever. It feels like a good part of my life over the past months has been spent on coaches clacking their way across the continent. I watch out the window a world of summer unfolding across the changing geography; I write in this journal; I sketch to make the hours go by. Some young infantrymen have been very willing models, providing I give them my renderings when they are complete. They have been company too in the dining car, anxious it seems to reach Halifax and convoy across the Atlantic and then on to the battlefields. I have not had the heart to tell them about Everett, shell-shocked and crippled in a Montreal hospital. I have with me a copy of the fattest Dickens novel I could find in Old Grand’s library, and I immerse myself in the world of the Nicklebys when I cannot sleep.

  August 2, 1917

  I’ve been able to find a room close to the hospital and went up to see Everett as soon as I unpacked. There is little visible damage, but it seems that Vimy Ridge has somehow sucked the true Everett out of him and left someone else in his place, a kind of vacant visitor whose eyes wander restlessly, as if assessing the possibilities of escape. His damaged feet keep him bedridden, but the sister on duty managed to tell me (I think—her English was as bad as my French) that the doctor feels they will mend now that the operations are completed.

  I am not certain if Everett recognized me. When I held his hand, I felt that his wandering eyes focu
sed briefly and I thought he squeezed my fingers, but he says nothing.

  When I got back to my room, I was seized with a fit of weeping. It is hard to make sense of this war, and to see those such as Everett made into husks of the men they truly are. When I think of how close I came to joining up myself, I feel I have been given a reprieve of sorts, and value each day for the fact that it is untainted by anything so dreadful as whatever cut into Everett’s soul.

  I thought of hiring a car to take me to the address on Hat’s letter, but I shall rest for a while first. My nerves are in great agitation. Writing helps, and I have Old Grand’s remedy of hot tea and brandy to settle me before I meet Hat.

  I think of our last meeting and remember it being dismal and raining. But your eyes were shining—luminous, wet shining. All that makes the thought bearable is the remembrance of your eyes, my darling.

  “My eyes,” Aunt Harriet whispered.

  CHAPTER 17

  NOT LONG AFTER MY TORONTO VISIT, MY MOTHER came into the city for an operation about which she was very close-mouthed.

  “They find things,” she told me, “and think they should take them out. I wouldn’t bother, but your father is quite insistent. What did people do before they had all this modern surgery?”

  “They died,” I said. Walter had driven us to the hospital’s admitting bay. From where I sat, cramped in the back of his car, I could see him in the rear-view mirror—rolling his eyes.

  “Thank you, Walter.” My mother winced as she got out. Most movements made her wince these days. As we waited our turn at the reception counter, she said, “Such good manners. I’m surprised Walter’s not married.”

  “That’s true,” I agreed. “It’s hard for women to resist someone who knows when to say please and thank you.”

  “Scoff if you like. But if he lived in Yarrow, he’d have been married ten years ago and would have three children by now. It’s this city. People don’t get close enough to find out what a person’s really like. Take you and Bradley. Look at how soon Bradley was married and here you are single still. It just supports what I say.”