by Glen Huser
“Need I remind you that Bradley and Bonita are in the process of going through a divorce?”
My mother pursed her lips and fished a plastic card out of her handbag for the receptionist.
“Are you able to charge your illnesses now?” I whispered.
“Hush,” she said.
While she was getting settled in her room, I went in quest of a flower shop. When I found one, it seemed to stock blooms suffering from their own forms of terminal illness, but I’d lost my energy to look further. I found a rose that had the appearance of being recalled to life, settled in a snowdrift of Styrofoam chips within a glass vase.
“Aren’t you sweet,” my mother said as I gave it to her. “A nice room, eh?”
It was hideous but I smiled stupidly and nodded my head.
I helped position her table so that she had the things she needed at hand—a Kleenex box, the United Church Observer, a small photograph album with an embossed plastic cover, a Lloyd C. Douglas novel that looked as if it had gone through someone’s wash.
“The Robe?”
They have a little library down in the sunroom. I read it years ago …” She lay back and closed her eyes. “Sometimes it’s nice to read a book again.”
I picked up the photo album.
“Just my latest roll of film. There’s a couple of pictures of you and Walter in there from when you took Dad and me out on our anniversary. Have you put on weight, Curtis? I didn’t notice until I got the pictures back.”
“The horrible truth is out,” I said. “Waistbands are being let out. Gym memberships are being renewed.”
“Oh, you’re not fat.” My mother smiled wanly. “But Bradley needs to watch. He eats when he’s upset and that whole breakup thing with Bonita has put thirty pounds on him.”
She was tiring I could see. We are not a family given to embracing or holding hands, but I let my fingers rest on top of hers, and she sighed with what I thought was a small demonstration of satisfaction.
As she fell asleep, I found myself thinking of Phillip Pariston sitting by Everett’s bed, his hand resting on his brother’s hand. When I got home, I found the passage in the journal.
August 9, 1917
I am reading Nicholas Nickleby to Everett. It is difficult to know whether or not he is able to make any sense of the words, but I think he finds the sound of them soothing, and once or twice as I read passages with Mrs. Nickleby dithering about (I have to confess to using something of a twittery voice), I thought I saw a smile catch on the edge of his lips. I read aloud, as well, the letters from Dads and the few words Old Grand manages to dictate. I even read a letter from Edwina, although it is difficult to have her words even briefly in my mouth. I feel as if I am eating poisonous food.
WALTER, WITH A GROCERY BAG IN HAND, LET HIMSELF IN while I was reading, gesturing for me to stay where I was on the sofa.
“You look dead,” he whispered, “and I have all the makings here for Irish coffee.”
Walter was in the midst of taking an evening bartending course from NAIT and I surmised this must be the drink of the week.
“Read aloud,” he called from the kitchen when the noise of the egg beater had whirred into silence.
“No,” I said. “You’re sick of me reading this stuff.”
“True—but I know you like to, the way you used to when your old auntie was still alive.” He emerged from the kitchen with mugs wearing extravagant caps of whipped cream. “Extra trips to the swimming pool this week,” he said. “How’s Mom?”
“She’s into her Martindale martyr mode. Refuses to push the button to call the nurse for anything. Grits her teeth and reads some ragged novel about early Christians in the Roman arena, where people really knew how to suffer.”
“She’s a dear,” Walter said, licking at his whipped-cream moustache. “Now read. Seriously. Read.”
“Really? Being at the hospital with Mom made me think of Phillip visiting his brother when Harriet was in Montreal—you know, when he was still trying to find her. I was just reading this part:
I continue to search for Hat but all the directions I’ve pursued have led to dead ends. Yesterday I was able to talk to Per’s boss but he could tell me nothing that I did not already know—namely that they’d had a fight, not just verbal but physical, and Per had left the job without saying where he planned to go next.
A letter from Radcliffe, forwarded from Vancouver, invites me back to Malthus House, but Toronto, I feel, is a finished chapter.
“And it’s even more finished,” Walter observed, “if you take a razor blade and cut it out.”
I laid the journal back into its nest of Pariston papers, my hand brushing Walter’s as he dipped into them, retrieving the two photos Carmody had given me. We looked at them often.
“It must have been difficult back then.” Walter held the photographs closer to the lamplight.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you know, difficult to admit to being gay or bisexual. Difficult to find fulfillment.” Walter had recently come out to his family and the topic was one that was often on his mind—and on the tip of his tongue.
“We don’t know that he was gay or bisexual,” I reminded him. “We only know that he posed in the buff for his photographer cousin.”
“Yes.” Walter smiled that little smile of his. “The evidence is circumstantial. But—ooh—what evidence.” He held up the photograph of Phillip Pariston seated in a full and unabashed display of his nudity. “This is a pretty racy photo for 1917. Very homoerotic, I’d say.”
“In the eye of the beholder.”
“More than that, I think.” Walter picked up the other nude photograph and studied it. “It’s not just in the eyes of the beholder, it’s—I don’t really know how to say it—a kind of attitude, I guess. A consciousness of the impact he would be making. Remember, when you look at the journal, the Wednesday Club was all men.”
“You’re probably right. But it could have been simply curiosity. He was still pretty young.”
“I think he knew how good-looking he was,” Walter mused. “And sure, he was curious. No doubt about it. We’ve all been curious.”
“Maybe everybody just took turns posing.”
“Yeah—maybe.”
“Seriously,” I said. “If you look at the photography of Thomas Eakins, he was posing nude himself and had his male students posing nude as well. The Swimming Hole—he photographed a tableau with his students and then painted from the photo. It was a way of studying the human form and getting it right. They were all very excited over what the camera could capture.”
“I looked at your book on the photographs of Eakins,” Walter said, “and I think there were more currents in the old swimming hole than ‘let’s get the muscles down pat.’”
“But then you’re not an artist.” I slipped the photos back into an envelope. From time to time I thought of getting them framed and hanging them, but then I would think of scrambling to hide them if my mother paid me one of her unexpected visits. “You’re not an artist,” I repeated, surprised at the pique I felt.
“But I know what I like,” Walter said, arching his eyebrows, looking knowingly, maddeningly at me.
CHAPTER 18
TWO YEARS BEFORE AUNT HARRIET DIED, MY father gave me a tape recorder for a Christmas gift.
“Good as new,” he said as I unwrapped it. “It was in a box with a bunch of records and a record player at the Goslin auction.”
“Mrs. Goslin liked to tape her students playing.” My mother smoothed the paper from the present I’d given her, a perfume that she liked but rarely bought because of its expense. “I don’t know who’s going to give piano lessons now that she’s gone.”
That Christmas night, when I played the tape left in the recorder, it filled the small space of my old bedroom with a concert of piano pieces—uneven, in places faltering, but somehow touching in a way that only another teacher might appreciate. At times Mrs. Goslin’s voice, soft, encouraging, patched
the pieces together. It was hearing her voice, I think, that brought to mind the possibility of taping Aunt Harriet. Of preserving her own story.
Would she allow herself to be recorded?
“Lord, Curtis,” she mused. “I can’t imagine why you’d want my old voice …”
But I could see that she could imagine, that she was intrigued.
“It’ll probably sound awful,” she laughed. “Like one of Macbeth’s witches.”
“Well, let’s test it.” I positioned the microphone on the bureau close to her armchair.
It wasn’t quite the voice that had charmed my ears in that childhood visit fifteen years earlier. But it was close. A little throatier now, an edge to it in places like brittle paper, but paper quickly smoothed. The laugh still tinkly, infectious.
In that trial run she recalled a time when she and Phillip had visited Vancouver’s Chinatown. Phillip was in quest of ink and brushes, but a merchant, a plump, smiling-Buddha of a man, kept steering him to a display of fans and hairpins and brooches. In broken English and extravagant gestures he indicated Phillip should not leave without buying something for his lady.
“He had us both laughing. Oohed and aahed and clapped his hands when I tried a fan and then opened a parasol. We left the shop with our arms full, the shopkeeper following us to the door, shouting jolly things in Chinese. Could have been ‘western fools!’ for all we knew.”
I stopped the tape and played it back.
Aunt Harriet was not displeased.
“I often wonder what happened to that parasol. It had a beautiful design of flying cranes on it. Somehow it got missed when Per and I left Mrs. Mezzkis’s. I suppose she kept it herself but I hate the thought of that lacquered handle in her pudgy hands.”
We didn’t have a chance to try the tape again until a month later. We’d come back from a chamber recital at Convocation Hall. The music had put her in a melancholy mood, a mood anchored with my reading aloud one of Phillip’s journal entries from the weeks he was in Montreal with Everett.
“When we first moved to Halifax, I didn’t write any letters.” Aunt Harriet eased into the silence broken only by the slight machine noise of the recorder. “I was truly despondent. Depression, I guess you’d call it now. It had been bad in Montreal and, not surprisingly, it came back on me with this move. I had trouble convincing myself to get out of bed in the morning, and sometimes I didn’t—I’d just stay in bed for two or three days at a time.
“I can hardly bear to think of how distressed Phillip was, and how he thought I’d abandoned him, when, of course, I was certain he’d abandoned me. That first month in Halifax we were living in a horrid little flat in the North End. There was no kitchen—we were expected to go downstairs and use a common kitchen on the main floor. It seemed to take all my effort to go up and down those stairs and, when I did get to the kitchen and eat a bit, I wasn’t able to keep anything down. One day I simply collapsed on the landing and Per called a doctor.
“To give Per his due, I think he was truly worried about me. He’d managed to get a job working as a stevedore at the sugar refinery wharf and he wasn’t drunk as often as he had been those last few weeks in Montreal. Dr. McCormack told Per he needed to get me out of that decrepit rooming house. A woman who did cleaning for Dr. McCormack, Mrs. McTavish, had a much better rooming house a couple of blocks off Gottingen and her tenants in a bed sitting room with a nice view of the harbour had just given it up. Per even hired a car to get me over there.
“‘Don’t you worry, little magpie,’ he kept telling me. ‘Here you will be in good hands.’ Mrs. McTavish’s hands did look like they could handle most anything. Per stayed on at the rooming house on Veith Street and I think he worked extra shifts to pay the two rents.
“I believe we’d been in Halifax for about six weeks when I finally set pen to paper. I remember it was a very short letter, more or less saying that I just needed to know that he was okay. Well, you know what that letter meant to Phillip when he finally got it.”
September 15, 1917
A letter, forwarded in Dads’ handwriting—block letters for legibility, but with his distinct A’s—arrived from Hat in the post today. For a few minutes I could not bring myself to open it. I have lived so long in the dark, unable to stop imagining the worst, that I believe I thought whatever illumination the words of this letter should bring, they might somehow blind me. I put it in my pocket and walked to the park. With the sounds of children chanting a French skipping rhyme and the slow traffic of the afternoon, I opened the envelope. It contained only one page—but for me it was everything! She is with Per in Halifax. Apparently well, although the brevity of the letter, and one sentence—“Today I went for a walk, only two blocks but came home very tired”—indicates she has not regained her vitality. I composed a cable and sent it within the next hour. We shall be apart no longer, I am determined.
When I went to the hospital, Everett’s doctor sought me out and told me he felt Everett’s feet are healed well enough that we might consider taking him home. It is great news, of course, but puts me in a quandary. I want to take him immediately but I also want to go to Halifax as soon as possible. As I think about it this evening, I have worked it out in my mind that I will go and collect Hat, return to pick up Everett, and then head back to Vancouver.
Ideas race in my head and I know I shall be unable to sleep, so I shall go out and walk now until I’m tired.
“I WAS SLEEPING WHEN MRS. MCTAVISH BROUGHT THE cable to my room. She was a big Scottish lady, a widow who’d raised her family with very little by the way of any frills and she’d never in her life seen a cable of that length. Of course, I began crying when I read it, and she wanted to know who’d died. A lie sprang to my lips and I told her it was from my husband. She left, shaking her head. At first Per forbade me to have any contact with Phillip, but when I told him I would run away if he kept that resolution, he relented. I think he was very worried over the amount of weight I’d lost and how ill I was.
“Phillip arrived two days later and the changes the last few months had wrought on my appearance, I could see registered in his eyes. He held me so closely, so tenderly, and we lay down and held each other, and both of us were weeping. I can feel the closeness of him this very minute, feel his arms around me.” Aunt Harriet began crying as she told me this, tears slipping along her creased cheeks. I paused the tape recorder and lit a cigarette for her. In a few minutes, she sighed and nodded at the machine and I released the button.
“I thought I’d never see him again. Oh, Curtis, you can’t imagine how wonderful it was to be with him. It was as if I’d been reprieved from a death sentence.
“But I wasn’t well enough to travel so Phillip said he would take Everett back to Vancouver and then return. My mission, during the interval, he said, was to eat and get some exercise and build myself up. Papa came over a couple of times and had coffee with us. I could see it was an effort for him not to be flaring up at Phillip. In the end he kept insisting Phillip should come back and settle in Halifax rather than me returning to Vancouver. I guess he didn’t want to lose me either.
“Although the station was only a few blocks away, Phillip wouldn’t let me go to see him off. We had our farewell at Mrs. McTavish’s. You can’t imagine how hard it was for me to say goodbye.”
The rooms in Mrs. McTavish’s house were comfortable, Aunt Harriet remembered. “It was more like a small parlour with its own fireplace and the bed in a small alcove. When Mr. McTavish had been alive, it had been a room he had set up for his sister, but before I’d got my stuff unpacked, Mrs. McTavish had told me the full story of how she had lost both of them the same year: her sister-in-law to appendicitis; her husband, a brakeman, to a railway accident. It was a room with a bay window that looked out onto the street and the harbour beyond. Even before he left to take Everett back to Vancouver, Phillip began putting some of his sketches up on the wall.
“He’d brought me bouquets of late summer flowers and had done a sketch
in chalks of some delphiniums. I was weak, but I was deliriously happy, Curtis. True to my word, while he was gone I made myself eat, and gradually, on Mrs. McTavish’s sturdy porridges and ever-present potatoes and fried chicken, I began to regain my strength. I even began to practice the violin again, generally in the afternoon when I was certain it would disturb none of the boarders. I extended my walks, making it as far, some days, as the waterfront where I was reminded by the blue skies and gulls of a happier time in Vancouver.”
CHAPTER 19
IN 1979, WALTER TOOK AN EXCHANGE POSITION TO teach in Australia. He was gone for over a year, a year in which we splurged on a few brief phone calls
and exchanged letters—mine lengthy epistles, his much shorter. Walter was not a letter writer but what he did write somehow embodied him. I could almost feel the sand in his shoes, the heat of that southern sun on his skin.
On his return, we had a couple of visits over dinner and wine to catch up on our months away from each other. Then he dropped by unexpectedly on a Saturday evening when I thought he was out of town.
“Change of plans.”
I had been making an effort not to have the Pariston papers or Phillip’s journal out so much when Walter came over. Caught off guard now, the journal and some of the more complete sketches were on the living-room floor along with sections of the weekend newspaper and the tape recorder playing, Harriet recollecting Phillip’s trip with Everett back to Vancouver before returning to Halifax.
Walter found his way through the maze of stuff and sprawled out on the sofa. He listened for a couple of minutes to the tape before I clicked it off.
“I wonder if he stopped to see one of those cute models in Toronto on the way back?”
“I don’t think so.” I set the recorder on rewind. “If he did razor out the pages, it must have been because he was remorseful about the episode and decided it was an aspect of his life he wanted to suppress.”
