by Glen Huser
“I suppose so. Or he may have been worried that Harriet would get her hands on it and read it at some point. If the pages weren’t there, she wouldn’t be able to read them. But that doesn’t mean he would necessarily have given over what he found he’d acquired a taste for.”
“I think he was in love with Aunt Harriet throughout all these months.”
“I won’t argue that,” he said. “You’d expect he’d be pretty truthful to himself in a diary. Mind you, he wouldn’t have been the first person to try and convince himself that he didn’t have ‘perverse leanings’ or whatever they called it sixty years ago.”
“The love that dared not speak its name?” The fact that Phillip had loved Aunt Harriet with such undaunted commitment made me question Walter’s thesis, but I did wonder about what happened in Toronto. I had been reading a biography of Oscar Wilde and it seemed that he had a genuine love for his wife, fathering two children. Had it been a love such as Phillip had for Harriet? Perhaps people such as Wilde and Phillip gave themselves to many passions. There was that whole Victorian thing—still very present in the early 1900s—the romantic falling in love with love, the idealization and worship of women, not to mention the pressures of society to conform. In the language Phillip Pariston used in his journal, I sensed the power of these forces.
I retrieved a half bottle of leftover wine and a couple of glasses and put on a new recording of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor. “It would be interesting to know …” I portioned out the Merlot. “To know how their story might have unfolded if they’d been given years together—instead of months. And whether or not anyone would ever have been interested in them, apart from those with the most obvious kinship. Children. Grandchildren.”
“You don’t think he would have made his mark in the Canadian art scene?”
“Had his paintings hanging in the National Gallery along with Tom Thomson’s and Lawren Harris’s? It’s hard to say. Maybe he would have become one of the legion of Canadian artists who never make the first rank. A couple of showings in small galleries. Teaching art at colleges or community centres. Doing a few portrait commissions. Or maybe it would have gone the other way. Maybe he would have been able to bring attention to figure painting in the way that Picasso did? There doesn’t seem to have been much happening in that genre in Canada. With Varley, a bit I suppose. But not really until someone like Colville and that’s in the 1940s and 1950s. Maybe Phillip would have made it happen sooner.”
“Maybe he would have been Canada’s first gay painter.”
“The older you get, Walter,” I said, “the more obsessed you are with this …” I searched for a word and borrowed one that made no sense. “Homogeneity. It shouldn’t matter that much. I mean Michelangelo was gay and Leonardo was gay, but they’re not thought of as ‘gay artists.’”
“Interesting,” Walter drawled, shaping the word with an Australian edge, “to hear you give me the gears about obsessions. Someone who’s been obsessed for most of his life with an old woman and an artist who died twenty-five years before he was born.”
“What are you getting at?” There were times when Walter and I had scraped at each other, but he was generally easygoing and seemed to find, almost effortlessly, what he wanted in life. Maybe the Australian sun had hardened him into something leaner and tougher.
“What I’m getting at is—where is your life, Curtis? Have you ever stopped to wonder that? Christ, half the time you’re a shadow—not a person. Making the moves of that dead artist. Talking like him. Drawing like him.”
We were both quiet for several minutes. I got up and turned the Mendelssohn over.
“The only thing you don’t appear to manage,” he added as if there had been no break in our argument, “is making love like him.”
“I didn’t realize you were that interested,” I said.
“No, you didn’t.” He eased himself off the sofa, onto the rug. “You make me think of Eddie, that guy we met at the bar at my bon voyage party. You remember? His whole life was streetcars. Knew every tram that Edmonton Transit had ever employed. Carried around pictures of them. I think he could have an orgasm from just touching an antique ticket box.”
“Streetcars! How did we get into streetcars?”
“The same way everyone does. You steps up and pays yer fare.”
“Don’t be facile.”
“All right. I won’t.”
He eased himself off the sofa and took his wineglass into the kitchen.
“Here, I’ll give you a hand,” he said as he came back and began gathering the Pariston papers, placing them back in the wicker suitcase.
“Leave the journal out. There’s a part that’s been on my mind, and I think I’ll read it over later.”
Walter was getting his coat.
“You don’t have to go, do you?”
“Yeah, I better.” Walter enfolded me in a hug. “I think I’m still a bit jet-lagged. G’night.”
THERE WAS ONE PASSAGE IN OCTOBER AND TWO IN November. I read them in sequence.
October 9, 1917
Today Hat insisted I leave her to rest for the afternoon and go out and explore the city for a bit. She knows I’m anxious to find some studio space and so, with that motive in mind, I set off. The North End where Mrs. McTavish’s house is located reminds me of the area up from the docks in Vancouver or, maybe even more, New Westminster, with its steep cramped streets and hodgepodge of houses. But the city does have a different feel to it, quite a bit more bracing with the Atlantic before us, not soft and damp. Even the fog seemed different in some way as it rolled in last night. Perhaps it’s only that the blackout makes it seem different, the absence of streetlamps or the soft rectangles of light from windows.
No fog this afternoon though and Barrington Street bustles with activity. Trams and automobiles and cumbersome drays. I had coffee in a café after I’d walked for about half an hour and a young soldier with his arm in a sling joined me, intrigued, I think, with the quick sketch I was making of the street scene from my seat by the window. He has been in the Pine Hill Hospital but didn’t recall meeting Everett, even though they would have been there at the same time, before he was moved to Montreal.
I continued walking to the South End where the houses are more like what you’d find in our West End, and the streets are lined with trees—massive horse chestnuts, maples, elms and limes. If I can convince Dads to increase my allowance I wouldn’t mind looking for accommodation here. My studio, though, I think I will need to scout for closer to the docks where there might be a chance of getting some unused warehouse space.
Hat is looking better with each passing day and yesterday was able to walk, despite the steep incline of the streets, up to the public gardens at the Citadel, although we took the streetcar back, and she is tired today.
Halifax seems closer, somehow, to the war, and of course, geographically it is. I am reminded of it at every turn. Young men, many younger than myself, await transport, and the harbour is often filled with ships organizing to convoy. I know Old Grand is dubious about the motives involved in this conflict, and we are all horrified by the carnage, but I find myself consumed with a kind of embarrassment and mindless guilt as I go about buying pencils and drawing paper and making decisions about which ink is the best purchase when boys are perishing by the thousands in Belgium. The thought is more and more in my mind that I will be able, within months, to qualify as a war artist. I know the work I did at Spangler’s studio has helped me to improve my craftsmanship, and if I do some work at the Victoria School and get a recommendation from Lismer I think I have a good chance of receiving a commission.
It will be hard to leave Hat again, but easy roads are accessible to few these days. Whatever the precipitate, the war has become a great consuming force with sacrifice at its core. It grows and continues to grow. Many of the soldiers I’ve talked to tell me they are going because of a slain brother or cousin or comrade. Not for the flag-waving. Blood begetting blood. The most importa
nt thing may be to make a record of this horror as it is happening.
In the meantime I find it difficult to look the men in uniform in the eye—and that seems to be a good chunk of the Halifax population. The terrible trip home with Everett remains a vivid imprint, those countless hours in a sleeping car, trying to talk to him, to find some word ember to which a connection might flare. Reading to him and wondering if there is any penetration of meaning. The return trip, while I found myself close to being ill with the repeated monotony of days of train travel, was a relief. I think I shall not travel by train again, though, for a very long time if there is any way I can avoid it.
“There’s a terrible irony in those words,” Aunt Harriet whispered to me once I’d finished reading the passage to her. “He would, of course, return to Vancouver one last time by rail.”
November 9, 1917
I slipped away for a couple of hours this afternoon as Hat wanted to spend some time practicing. I need to spend time with Mrs. McTavish’s piano too but didn’t feel in the mood today. Restless, I guess.
As I headed to the harbourfront to have another look at the space I think I will lease for a studio, I noticed, through a café window, Per seated by himself. I smiled and waved and he beckoned me inside. He’d been doing extra shifts over the last few days and was having a late breakfast before heading home to sleep. He insisted on buying me a coffee.
“One of the few places where you can get a cup of coffee that wouldn’t be better for slopping pigs,” he grumbled.
“Not bad,” I had to agree. With shortages, most restaurants were skimping but not this little dive tucked between two warehouses.
“The owner’s a Swede.” Per glared at the proprietor. “But his coffee …” He made an airy, dismissive motion with his hand.
When he asked how Harriet was doing, I said she was doing well, improving every day, but it was as if he hadn’t heard me and he said, “I shouldn’t have brought her all this way. It nearly killed her.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You would have been good to her?” He looked at me as if the notion were something for which he actually needed affirmation.
“Of course,” I said.
“Of course,” he repeated, but with a hesitation in his voice. “This is more like home here,” he said. “More like Norway. But she didn’t need that—I needed that. Maybe I needed her too. She’s all I have left of her mother. Sometimes we just think of ourselves.”
I realized that Per had already been into his whiskey bottle, but only enough to become reflective—not morose or belligerent. Apparently he has a day off and I was relieved that I caught him at the start of it rather than at its end.
November 20, 1917
I am pleased with the studio space I’ve been able to secure in a warehouse, particularly as it is so difficult to find any unoccupied spaces with the war activity here. It has large windows and should be ideal for light. It needs shelving and a desk and work table so I’ve arranged for those. But first I think I’ll paint the walls white—the place needs freshening. Hat is determined to help me and I shall let her come for a bit of it. She is so much stronger and has gained back much of the weight she lost since February.
Today’s post brings a letter from Radcliffe. He says Barry has joined up and should be passing through Halifax sometime soon and may look me up. I hate to think of him headed for that carnage. Radcliffe reminds me to get in touch with Lismer if I wish to become involved with the Victoria School. He apparently is seeking both assistance and students—and who knows, I may be able to offer myself in both respects. I shall wait until after Christmas, though, when I am certain Hat is fully back on her feet.
We had supper alone this evening upstairs. I have several new records for the Victrola, so we dined elegantly on Mrs. McTavish’s Welsh rarebit, with Rubenstein’s “Melody in F” in the background. Hat sleeps now, and I will soon, but the loveliness of the evening with a fire lingering in the grate, makes me savour every minute of consciousness. Warmth and love and civility and music. Are we an island in a large sea of disquietude?
BARRY. SOMEONE FROM THE WEDNESDAY CLUB? A FIRST-NAME Barry, or a last-name Barry? Andrew Barry? Would a check with the war records reveal the name?
Aunt Harriet could recall no one from Toronto looking them up.
“We lived very much to ourselves,” she told me. “There would be letters from Vancouver of course. To start with we had meals with Papa once in a while, but he began drinking quite heavily again and we saw less and less of him. I think he had a ladyfriend who liked to party with him. He let something slip about a Mabel or a Myrtle a couple of times.
“I could feel my strength returning, and I didn’t think it was possible to be so happy. Phillip was so attentive I practically had to force him to get out and begin doing some things on his own. I didn’t want to stifle him, and I knew how important his art was to him, so I suggested he go hunting for some space for a studio. I began working on a couple of pieces, nothing too challenging—some variations on ‘Greensleeves,’ ‘The Londonderry Air.’ We thought we might have a little soiree in Mrs. McTavish’s parlour for Christmas. Phillip had the piano tuned.
“None of this was destined to happen, of course.” Aunt Harriet’s voice faded out for a minute, then resurfaced, only barely louder, as she recounted into the tape recorder what happened on December 6, 1917. The first time she told me about it—before I had the tape recorder—I recall her actually pausing in mid-sentence and gasping, as if the waves of terror continued to assault her. When she talked about the explosion, her voice lost the resiliency I had come to expect, and the firestorm of the past had an undiminished capability of sucking moisture from her vocal chords so that her words fell like bits of burning paper.
“If there is a gift attached to my blindness,” she whispered to me in those dehydrated, falling words, “it is that the last thing I was ever to see was Phillip sitting in the window seat sketching me where I lay, propped against pillows, drinking coffee. The morning sun seemed to spin gold around him with a kind of eerie beauty. He was absorbed in his task, but every once in a while he would look at me with the eyes of a lover rather than the eyes of an artist and smile. The Rubenstein piece we had been listening to a few evenings back played on the Victrola. Oh God, Curtis …” I placed a cigarette in her shaking hand. “What did we do to deserve that? For one second, for a mini-second, a blink of an eye, Phillip was illuminated by a great light that shone around his head and torso, the part of his body in relief against the window. It was like a halo, a light beyond anything earthly.
“The glass broke first, flying at me in a thousand pieces, assaulting my face, and for a fraction of a second there was just kind of a massive whump and the noise of glass breaking and shattering against itself. Tinkling, if you can believe it, and I think I heard Phillip yell ‘Hat!’ but maybe I only imagined it as the sound, a kind of high piercing shriek followed by a roar rolled in, a wave of sound like a locomotive bearing down on you, and I felt myself flying, actually borne in the air. It seemed like a long time, being carried on this wave of grinding sound, like being caught on the breath of some gigantic, enraged monster. But, of course, it was only for a few seconds. And then my body found the earth, and breath left it, and it was all blackness. Nothing.”
CHAPTER 20
I HAD ALWAYS KNOWN ABOUT THE HALIFAX EXPLOSION. It was part of my family’s stories. The story about what happened to Uncle Hartley’s wife, why she was blind and her face scarred, why she remained shut up at home and didn’t come with him to visit us.
“It’s too awful to think about,” my mother said when I was so young I could barely sift through details that drifted along currents of adult conversation. But in time I fit the pieces together. The most terrible explosion North America had ever experienced. Two thousand killed, close to nine thousand injured. Flying glass turning people into pincushions. More blinded than Canadian soldiers in all of World War I. Aunt Harriet among those left sightless.
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We knew the names of the doomed ships. The Mont Blanc, a freighter set to join an Allied convoy, and the Imo, a Norwegian tramp steamer with a cargo of Belgian relief.
“Just a stupid harbour accident,” was how my father described it. “Mixed signals, you know. Think of the shipping channel like a highway. With lanes—these two ships in the same lane, blowing their whistles at one another, neither one giving way until it was too late, both finally lunging aside but in the same direction. Well … they hit and even that shouldn’t have been too bad except the collision made sparks. The Mont Blanc was a bomb just waiting to go off—all it needed was something to light the fuse.”
Hartley had been in Halifax briefly in February following the disaster, waiting to head overseas. Always curious, I had pored over the letters he had sent to the family when he was in the army, letters my mother tied with a bit of Christmas ribbon and kept with her collection of photos in the bottom drawer of our living-room bureau. A few of them included newspaper clippings, yellowed and fragile in my fingers, about the explosion. One noted that more people died than in the Chicago fire, the San Francisco earthquake, or the sinking of the Titanic.
“I was surprised,” Uncle Hartley told us during a visit once he’d returned to Alberta, “how quickly the railways and docks were repaired. There was almost no let-up in convoys leaving. Hardly any break in the business of war.” His laugh was bitter as he shook his head.
From Hartley and our father talking over their beers, and the frayed clippings he had sent home with letters, the disaster was often in my thoughts. I tried to imagine the explosion sucking a tidal wave forty feet high out of the harbour, carrying off three hundred loaded freight cars on rail lines closest to the docks. But growing up in the midst of central Alberta with its small lakes and sloughs—and never having been to either coast—it wasn’t easy to fathom such a magnitude of water.
