by Glen Huser
My mother sipped her tea silently, refusing to look at me, and then she said, “Have you ever wondered how Harriet and Hartley met?”
“No—I haven’t wondered because she told me. They met over a picnic in a park. He began playing ball with Phip.”
“Ha!” she snorted.
I sat calmly down across from her at the table. “I want you to please tell me what you’re getting at,” I said. “I’m not going to rise from this table until I know what’s on your mind. There’s no need for you to be jealous of Aunt Harriet. I never wished she were my mother. For heaven’s sake …”
“Well, you should know that Hartley never met her at a picnic. He met her at one of those places men go to … when they want to meet a woman. She worked there. And, you’re right, his heart was captured by her little boy. But the little boy wasn’t as old as you think.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was born in 1919. I’m surprised you and Phip never had a conversation about that.”
“No—he couldn’t have been.”
My mother looked up from her teacup and sighed. “I don’t think Phip ever knew who his father was—and maybe Harriet didn’t either. It certainly wasn’t Phillip Pariston.”
“MY TIME OF THE DAY IS THE HOUR BETWEEN MIDNIGHT and one. You can think of it as really late or really early,” I had told my grade eight language arts class earlier that day as I reviewed an exercise I’d posed for them on biographical writing. “What choices define you? Choose a colour, your favourite food and drink, the clothing you prefer to wear, the time of day you like best. If you were to take one piece of music to a desert isle—what would it be? For me: black (I didn’t tell them that it had been Phillip Pariston’s favourite colour as well—a detail that Aunt Harriet had given me; that Phillip’s diary had corroborated), crab salad, California wine, a turtleneck sweater, Bruch’s Adagio, the hour past midnight.”
They looked at me balefully, sadly, as they might view someone slipping, without hope of rescue, to the edge of a sloping world. And now I sat poised at that world’s edge, confronting a sea of shifting waters, the Pariston papers scattered before me, drifting, sinking. Would it be possible to retrieve any of them? I saw the elegant curling words of Phillip’s journal pages and, on loose, crumpled sheets—chalked limb, the twisted trunk, traces of clothing, seared edges and torn holes.
All the negative spaces.
Perhaps not all?
How much of it had been a lie? Desire hardened into dream-facts. Missing months congealed into what she wanted to be true—a child of her heart’s desire.
Had Hartley deliberately let the delusion drift? Out of kindness? Not wanting to stir currents that no longer mattered, careful not to trigger another bout of depression? Some kind of pact between Hartley and Phip? And what about Jean—refusing to revisit a past that didn’t fit with her Edmonton churchgoing?
Well into that hour past midnight, none of the sweet comfort of that quiet, gentle midpoint of the night came to me. There was a bitter taste in my mouth. I found a tape of the Bruch adagio and tucked it into the player by my studio bed but it failed to ply its usual magic.
“It was a piece I never managed to master, but I loved to listen to it,” Aunt Harriet had once told me. “Phillip and I heard Antonio Scech play it at one of Edwina’s soirees. When Dad and I were in Montreal those terrible first days—it was impossible for me to keep any food down, it seemed, but I remember getting dressed one day when there was some March sun and walking to a little bakeshop that had a couple of tables. I ordered café au lait and one of their freshly-baked croissants, and by sipping the milky coffee and eating tiny bits of the bun, I was able to keep it down, and I remember feeling so thankful. It was warm enough that the shopkeeper had opened the window a bit and, from a rooming house across the street, from an upstairs window—also open—someone was practicing Bruch’s adagio. I felt it was a sign.”
It had nourished me too, in small ways. The perfect music for midnight but now it seeped around me like a fine, choking dust. I poured myself a glass of the white wine we’d had with supper. One of my mother’s concessions to this modern age was to take a few sips of wine with a meal. Her preference for something sweet and German always left me with half a bottle, for which I had little taste, in the refrigerator.
I retrieved it now and drank it like medicine. Fortified, I rapped on the bedroom door. She was a restless sleeper —a Martindale trait she reminded me often—and it was almost as if she had been waiting for me to knock.
“Curtis?” Her voice was tiny in the dark room.
I let a shaft of hallway light slice across the rug to her bed.
“How could you ever …” My voice was shaking, ready to crack, as it had been when I was a child on the verge of tears. I stopped and took a breath. “How could you know such a thing? You made it up didn’t you?”
“Hartley told your father.” I sensed a note of regret in her voice, as if circumstances beyond her control had contrived to wrest this information from a securely-locked vault of family secrets. “One time when they had a little too much to drink.” She was sitting up in bed now, and I heard her sigh. “Your uncle never had much what-do-you-call-it. Never thought girls—women would take a second look at him.”
“Self-esteem.”
“He never had it. Your father thinks he took comfort from the fact Harriet could never see him. I was so ashamed to think of him going to one of those places. I think they must be just in big cities. We never had anything like that around Yarrow.”
“She might have worked there, but as a housemaid and … and playing in a little band. She played the violin …”
My mother closed her eyes for a minute.
“It was a long time ago,” she sighed, “and it is true that Hartley was captivated by her little boy. Who knows …”
“She—” I’m not certain what I was going to say but my voice shuddered and cracked on the first word, and I felt the warm, acidy Rhine wine surge back up my throat.
“I’m sorry,” my mother said. She was not a woman given to apologies and I knew how difficult it was for her to say these words.
“’S okay,” I managed to say and closed the door before I threw up.
LATER, I CLIMBED BACK INTO BED, SHIVERING, MY HEAD pounding. The trick to falling asleep, I knew, was to force myself to focus on something free from any anxieties. “‘Imaging’ or ‘visualizing’ I believe one of our school psychologists called it during a professional development session he’d given our staff on ‘Defeating Stress—Channelling the Mind.’”
A street light shone through the window creating a panel of light defined by a cross on the wall opposite the sofa bed. In the bottom of the quadrant the small Thomson painting assumed the colours of the night, the trees in the foreground darker, the blazing fall colours of the background muted to softer shades of gold.
I visualized being there, by Thomson’s shoulder as he applied paint with bold strokes of his brush, sometimes—with just a touch of impatience—grasping his palette knife and manipulating the paint with that. I felt I could reach out and touch his checkered shirt. Somewhere on the lake a loon called, its sound echoing through the Algonquin wilderness. With the last ripple of sound, I conjured up the other figure, the young man, the beautiful young man, sketching by Thomson’s side.
Thomson stopped and looked at the piece Phillip worked on and the young man said, “I know. I need to give over chalks and crayons, be bolder.” There was a gentle self-amusement in his voice, and the words fell softly into the afternoon. It would be afternoon light. Afternoon light seemed right, and as the hour wore on they would pack up paints and chalks and brushes, secure the materials and the sketches in the panel box in the canoe, and push out into the lake.
Why not?
The stillness, the slow progress of the canoe across the lake became cushions against which I lay my head, rubbing out the pain.
And then, I could see them at the wharf—Harriet and her baby in her
arms, waiting.
Let us reclaim the ordinary scenes, I thought, in these long minutes before sleep. Allow the momentum of life, pull the bludgeoned artist free from the water, let him hum “Annie Laurie” in the early evening air, let the young man step clear of the collapsing walls, let him greet his wife at the dock, relieve her of the child, let her see her husband holding the boy, gently rocking him. To sleep. To sleep.
But sleep, while it circled and teased, backed away from me. Maybe it would not be possible to win back lives this night. The crossed panel of light remained relentlessly on the wall. For the last couple of years I’d kept a bottle of sherry in the top shelf of an old glass-doored bookcase Walter and I found at an estate sale. I got up and poured a glass, weighing this indulgence against a likely resurgence of the headache and the effect it might have on my still-queasy stomach. I took the Bruch out of the player, replacing it with a tape I’d left out on the end table—a collection of ragtime piano. I turned the volume down to something barely audible, ragtime that would not reach to the next room and its guest who had the Martindale problem of elusive sleep as I did myself. Was it ragtime they played in that House? A Russian girl on an accordion? Harriet on violin? The piano player who came early to visit with the blind woman, read aloud to her from a cherished diary? In that house where Jean boiled the stained sheets and painted eyebrows onto the scarred face of one of the many who had come through hell and were scraping out a corner for themselves while the fire and brimstone was being banked for the night.
A piano player with something of the grace of her dead artist? Maybe not as handsome but what does that matter when you have no vision? A piano player who could not keep his eyes off this wounded woman who could summon familiar melodies on the old fiddle the house had to offer, dance tunes that paced the shuffling feet of couples in the parlour? Maybe once, during a break, she said, “Play the ‘Moonlight Sonata.’ Play Beethoven for me,” its recursive notes smoothing the way, later, to her room where she lay on a rumpled bed while a dampness from her sightless eyes seeped along powdered scar trails. Did he kiss her then and make love to her in a way she remembered, so that she arched and cried and pulled the seed deep within her? And, later, didn’t wash it away.
Oh, Harriet.
Hat.
Hat.
For her another beginning? But one she could layer onto an ending, in time refiguring it as a reality?
Morning is a strange territory. Its earliest hours, for the insomniac, are filled with restless fantasies. In this night of revelation, of half-dreams, I found not only the young Phillip and Harriet but I sought out Phillip again, an older Phillip, his handsomeness edged with circumstance, a man who, perhaps like Nijinsky, danced away from prescribed circles. For Nijinsky it had ended in sorrow and madness. Where would the dance take Phillip? In the early morning, I followed him to Toronto coffee houses where young Greek men met him, sharing cigarettes and, later, sharing the lips and hands that held these cigarettes. Or was it just one man?
Phillip.
Now, with the lurid red announcement of 4:37 from my digital clock in my peripheral vision, I let Phillip and Harriet go back to their secrets, their graves. And, lying in bed, the crossed panel dimming with the light of pre-dawn, I thought of Walter. He filled, I realized, the space surrounding me. Was it too late to let him know I knew this now?
I could picture him laughing.
“You always knew it,” I could hear him saying. “But you have a way of not looking at things head on.”
I wouldn’t argue.
What would I do?
Maybe I would reach over and pull him so close to me he wouldn’t be able to talk, wouldn’t even want to talk. I would inhale the smell of him and trace with my fingers the trinity of small moles that nestled at the back of his neck, feel the ridge of his shoulder bones through the fabric of his shirt, touch those full Slavic lips in ways that would surprise him—and me.
Maybe Walter had been wrong. Maybe I had learned from Phillip Pariston how to love.
I closed my eyes. I may even have slept for a couple of hours.
BEFORE MY ALARM WENT OFF, I GOT UP AND MADE coffee as quietly as I could but, within minutes, my mother joined me in the kitchen, clutching around her the mossy green housecoat dotted with leaf shapes that my father had given her for their fortieth anniversary.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said, searching my face. “You look like death.”
“I couldn’t sleep either.”
“I’m sorry …”
“No, it’s okay.” I poured our coffees.
“It’s odd, you know.” She took a knife and levelled a spoonful of sugar before easing it into her cup. “I feel like some kind of weight has been lifted just letting you know things weren’t quite the romantic dream you made out. It’s important to be truthful …”
I grasped her hand. “I know. It’s okay. I’m discovering that all the time myself.”
She looked at me oddly, the idea jelling in her mind, I could see, that I would forever be a mystery to her. It was a fact she relied on that I never agreed with her.
In the small, magnetized mirror attached to the fridge door across from me, I thought I did indeed look like death with a trace of a smile on his face.
“What are you grinning about?” My mother was always suspicious of anyone who smiled in the absence of any obvious cue.
“Oh—nothing.”Idrainedmycoffeecup.“Andeverything.”
Even though we were not a family given to hugs, I wrapped her in my arms before I left for school. Awkwardly she returned the hug and then brushed back some hair that had fallen over my forehead.
“Now you’re all set,” I said. “The cab will be here at 8:30. It’ll get you to the bus depot in lots of time.”
She nodded and forced a smile herself.
“Say hi to Dad from me—and Bradley.”
A LONG NIGHT’S JOURNEY INTO MORNING. WEDNESDAY morning. Wednesdays Walter and I regularly got together after work for drinks and dinner at that café—our café—at the south end of the High Level Bridge. There was the day to get through, but with my classes writing exams, it would be an easy day. A smooth blank page, I thought as I caught my bus. Settling into my seat, though, I closed my eyes and along the bottom of that blank page, tore out a jagged, irregular piece, creating a shape that shimmered with possibility. In my mind, I traced the random pattern, reading with my fingertips, as Harriet Ahlstrom once had with her own torn papers, a world beyond the surfaces.
BURNING
THE NIGHT
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Burning the Night was shaped by the convergence of some of my life experiences with abiding interests I have had in twentieth-century Canadian history and art. When I was a teen I did learn, in bits and pieces, about Tom Thomson and the development of the Group of Seven, but I somehow managed to go through grade school without ever encountering information about the Halifax Explosion. I must have been in college when I picked up a copy of Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising. I think the climactic scenes of the disaster shook my own rafters a bit. How did I know about the San Francisco earthquake, the great Chicago fire, the sinking of the Titanic—and not know this? Easy answer: I’d seen the American movies that played the Legion Hall on Saturday nights in the small Alberta town where I grew up, or, once my family moved to Edmonton, on the first television we owned. I’m a compulsive researcher, and once bitten, I read everything I could find on that World War I tragedy in Halifax, adding, over the years, to a clippings file and a dedicated bookshelf.
As I trained to become a teacher in the late 1950s–early 1960s, I majored in art and studied figure drawing under the guidance of Dr. Henry Glyde. Taking a break after teaching junior high in Edmonton for three years, I moved to Vancouver for a year of courses at the Vancouver School of Art. Then I was back in Edmonton, teaching again but taking art courses when I had a chance.
Increasingly I became interested in Tom Thomson who died in a canoe accident (some speculate he
was murdered) just before his colleagues adopted the name “The Group of Seven.” In time I was able to view Thomson’s originals in art galleries across Canada. His distinctive paintings of the Ontario landscape continue to mesmerize me, and as I did with the Halifax material, I gradually gathered everything I could find about the artist’s life, his craft—and his mysterious death.
When I lived in Vancouver, I spent a good deal of my free time walking and exploring its streets, particularly fascinated by the remaining mansions once owned by those who had grown rich on the bounties of BC’s forests and minerals and the port industry. What were the stories these houses had to tell? A staunch fan of historical fiction, I began thinking of shaping a narrative in which several strands might meld, settling on 1917, the year of the explosion and the year Tom Thomson died, as a focal point. Phillip Pariston emerged from one of those Vancouver mansions; Harriet Ahlstrom from the city’s waterfront. On microfiche I delved into copies of the Vancouver Sun (1916–1917) for weeks on end, finding details, living the days. Microfiche also allowed me to roam through Toronto and Halifax. Nijinsky danced in Vancouver; Toronto artists met at the Arts and Letters Club; a ravaged Halifax chronicled its wounds.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. In some ways this is a “doubly historical” novel with parts set in 1916–1917 and other parts ranging over the 1950s to the 1970s. In contrast to our current time, what details are distinctive to these periods? Are there some aspects that resonate with today’s world?
2. Major Canadian cities serve as settings from sequence to sequence—Edmonton, Vancouver, Toronto, and Halifax in particular. Do you feel the author captured distinct features of each? Anything missing?
3. What parallels do you see in Phillip’s and Curtis’s lives? How does Curtis shape his life to fit the Phillip who emerges from journal entries and Aunt Harriet’s remembrances?
