The Romantic
Page 30
“I know.”
I leave at about nine o’clock. Some time over the next three hours he takes off his clothes, gets a blanket, a bottle of whisky and a bottle of tranquilizers and goes to the roof of his apartment building. It’s a clear night. Lots of stars. He drinks the whisky and swallows the pills, then lies on the blanket.
He is found a little after midnight by Archie, the superintendent, who wondered why the door to the transformer, which is the same door leading to the roof, was ajar.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
“Always on May eleventh the weather is beautiful,” Mrs. Richter declares.
“Is that true?” Mr. Richter says, sounding astonished. He drives below the speed limit, sitting very straight.
“Always,” she says firmly. “Always on Abel’s birthday.”
We are on our way to the ravine to scatter his ashes. The funeral was so crowded that at least a hundred people had to stay out on the church lawn, but today there are only the three of us. Mrs. Richter holds the box, not an urn but a carved wooden box. I have the three green plastic bowls that I bought yesterday at Zellers: green, his favourite colour, plastic because the glass ones were too heavy. We have rolled the windows down, it’s so warm … already, at only nine o’clock in the morning. Spring has come early this year, the forsythia blossoms finished, the big hardwood trees in leaf. Abel used to keep charts of when the leaves of certain trees opened. This year I have found myself keeping a mental note. Horse chestnuts: April fifteenth. Maple saplings: April sixteenth. Oaks: April twenty-ninth.
At the top of the ravine, there’s a small paved lot, empty at this hour. We set the bowls on the hood of the car and Mrs. Richter pours out the ashes.
“So,” says Mr. Richter, who has never been here before. “The famous ravine.”
But not the ravine it was. A six-lane highway now cuts through it about a quarter of a mile to the east of the river, roughly following the river’s course. The sludge factory is gone. Camp Wanawingo has been turned into a grassy area that the city supplies with picnic benches and garbage pails. This walk down, however, is much the same, with the wooded slopes rising up steep as walls. On the eastern slope the white bloodroot flowers are like little jagged cups. A brown butterfly flickers above them.
“Look!” Mrs. Richter cries. “What kind is that?”
“A mourning cloak,” Mr. Richter says.
“Ah,” she says.
We stop and watch it. Are they thinking it’s Abel, or a sign from Abel? I say,“If you want, you could start here.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Richter says, smiling at me,“let’s get started.” She goes over to the flowers and throws a handful of ash as if she were broadcasting seed. Mr. Richter goes to the other slope. He looks at it a moment, then selects a silver birch and carefully distributes a bracelet of ash around the trunk. I wait; I want to save mine for the cave. Because I knew I’d be climbing, I’ve worn running shoes and blue jeans. Mr. Richter wears a black suit. Mrs. Richter is all in red and orange—red skirt, orange shawl, a red bandanna around her head. You’d think she was on her way to a carnival, and it’s true that her mood seems gay. She hums and sways her hips, moving down the path.
I point out where the sumach grove is, having told them in the car that it was one of his favourite spots. Then I head for the cave. “Take your time,” Mr. Richter calls after me. “We’ll meet you back at the car.”
I’ve brought a Swiss Army knife, but the nettles have died back and I climb up easily. How many years has it been? Fourteen. Fifteen. Bars of sunlight spread across the ledge and into the cave’s mouth. I let myself imagine that they’re a sign from the Angel of Love, who, not unexpectedly, hasn’t appeared since before Abel died. I take a step inside. Without even looking up I know that the bats are gone. I go farther in. The spears are gone, too.
I start scattering the ashes. What do I feel? A heaviness of heart. I had hoped to feel something more, to have a revelation, but the things that occur to me have occurred to me a hundred times before. His excruciating sensitivity to the physical world. His rapturous dreams. His guilt and anguish over the death of the baby bat. His dread of interfering and of choosing. But why did he have these feelings in the first place? Why was he who he was?
I go back out onto the ledge and turn the bowl over, letting the wind take what’s left. I look for the Richters. After a moment I see them heading toward the river. I’d better go down, they might lose their way. They seem to get confused a lot lately. It doesn’t strike me as a sign of age, though. They’re like children, expressing amazement at the most casual news, stopping to stare, as if everything they’ve gone through has made the world more scenic.
The three of us eat an early lunch at the Greenwoods shopping centre. Over coffee Mrs. Richter asks where my mother’s ashes are, and I am forced to admit that I haven’t scattered them yet.
“Oh, Louise,” she says,“it’s time.”
Back home, after they drop me off, I go down to the basement and retrieve the urn from behind a bunch of old paint cans and bring it upstairs. I suppose I could just throw the ashes in my rose garden. But they’re red roses and I think she liked only white. I can’t remember.
I carry the urn outside and look around the lawn and this I do remember: her arguing with my father that it would be better to have stone courtyards, you don’t have to mow stones. I start walking up to Queen Street, toward the stores. Melba’s Fashions, Lila’s Beauty Salon. But when I get there I wonder what I could have been thinking. I can’t just throw the ashes on the sidewalk for everyone to tramp on, and nobody’s going to let me scatter them inside the stores.
I head east along Queen. I enter Kew Gardens. It’s sdii a gorgeous day, more like late June. I walk past people lying on blankets, past the purple and yellow petunia beds, the tennis courts. None of this would have appealed to her. I reach the crowded boardwalk. She hated crowds. What about the beach? We never went to the beach. I imagine her looking at the sand and seeing only dirt, looking at the sun-bathers and seeing only fat. I go to the shore and consider the blue lake, the blue sky, white seagulls lounging on air currents. What would her objection to this have been? Oh, the water’s polluted, the seagulls are vicious.
My vision blurs with unshed tears. Abel we could have scattered anywhere. So why don’t I just scatter her anywhere?
I can’t. Somehow I can’t.
Back at my house the door is open. I forgot to lock it. I go into the living room and push aside the things on my mantelpiece—books, a stone Buddha, the meteorite—and set the urn in the middle. It really is lovely; she probably picked it out herself. Of course she picked it out. She wouldn’t have risked the chance of being put in anything vulgar.
And she wouldn’t have wanted to be on a mantelpiece, either. Out in public.
I pick the urn up again and go out to the sun porch and put it on a shelf between some vases and clay pots. There, that’s better. Whenever I’m out here—watching the sun go down, looking at my roses—I’ll see it, I’ll think,“My mother.” I won’t forget her, that’s for sure.
Not that I would have anyway. Not that we forget.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For their generous counsel I am indebted to:
The experts—Dr. Rick Davis in Guelph, Dr. Donner Dewdney in Des Moines and Dennis James at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto;
The friends and family—Christopher Dewdney, Beth Kirkwood, Marni Jackson, Anne Mackenzie and Brian Fawcett;
The agents—Jackie Kaiser and Nicole Winstanley;
The editors—Iris Tupholme at HarperCollins Canada, who is my support, and Sara Bershtel at Metropolitan Books in New York, who is my beacon.
P.S. Ideas, interviews & features
About the author
Author Biography
Select Awards
About the book
An Interview with Barbara Gowdy
Read on
Web Detective
13 An Excerpt from Barbara Gow
dy’s Helpless
About the author
Visit the author online at www.barbaragowdy.ca
Gowdy speculates that if she had succumbed to kids and domesticity, she would have produced maybe three books instead of the six works of fiction,”
“Gowdy, who became a writer by default at age thirty-nine, after trying to be an actress, a broker, a secretary and an editor, really wanted to be a pianist like Abel.”
Author Biography
BARBARA GOWDY was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1950. When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction.
Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found herself writing characters into her clients’ non-fiction and took this as her cue to start writing professionally.
Barbara GowdyS1GRID ESTRADA.
Her first book, Through the Green Valley (a historical novel set in Ireland), came out in 1988; the following year she published Falling Angels to international critical acclaim. Her 1992 collection, We So Seldom Look on Love, was a finalist for the Trillium Award for Fiction. Four years later, the title story from this collection was adapted into Kissed, a film directed by Lynne Stopkewich. Falling Angels was also adapted to film in 2003, with Esta Spalding as screenwriter.
Gowdy’s books, including three bestselling novels—Mister Sandman (1995), The White Bone (1998) and The Romantic (2003)—have been published in twenty-four countries. Gowdy has also had stories appear in a number of anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English and the Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women.
Gowdy has been nominated repeatedly for many prestigious literary awards: four times for the Trillium Award and two times each for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The Romantic earned her a Man Booker Prize nomination in 2003. In 1996, she was awarded the Marian Engel Award, which recognizes the complete body of work by a Canadian woman writer “in mid-career.” Nine years later, Ben Marcus praised Gowdy’s literary realism in Harper’s Magazine, singling her out as one of the few contemporary writers who has “pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode, refusing to subscribe to worn-out techniques and storytelling methods.”
Barbara Gowdy has also appeared on television as a regular commentator on literary matters and has taught creative writing courses at Ryerson University. Her sixth novel, Helpless, will be published by HarperCollins in 2007.
She lives in Toronto.
Select Awards
Barbara Gowdy received the prestigious
Marian Engel Award in 1996, recognizing her
contribution to Canadian literature.
We So Seldom Look on Love
Finalist for the Trillium Award
Mister Sandman
Finalist for the Trillium Award
Finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction
Finalist for the Giller Prize
Named a Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year”
The White Bone
Finalist for the Trillium Award
Finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction
Finalist for the Giller Prize
Finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
The Romantic
Nominated for the Man Booker Prize
Finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
Finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’
Prize for Best Book
Finalist for the Trillium Award
About the book
“I don’t know how “I could get ideas … if I had the distraction of people in the house.”
“Gowdy’s peripatetic career path echoes Louise’s stumbling attempts to find a fulfilling job in The Romantic.”
“When people say reviews and prizes don’t matter, they are wrong.’”
“I always finish a book thinking, ‘That’s it. It’s over. I’m finished. I’m washed up. I have no ideas.’”
“Offering Gowdy gratuitous reassurance is like telling a woman who has already had five healthy babies not to worry during her sixth pregnancy.”
An Interview with Barbara Gowdy
The following interview by Sandra Martin appeared in The Globe and Mail just prior to the publication of The Romantic.
To complete [The Romantic], Barbara Gowdy spent weeks at a time secluded in a hotel room, pushing herself ever further into her work. As Sandra Martin writes, the result is the story of an abandoned little girl desperate to be loved.
Wednesday, January 29,2003
TORONTO—Barbara Gowdy lives in the ideal house for a writer, at the end of a Toronto cul-de-sac backing onto cemetery parkland. It is isolated, slightly sinister because it was built by wife-murderer Peter Demeter, and only large enough to house Gowdy’s boundless imagination and her deeply neurotic grey-and-white cat, Marni.
“When I leave a room, I come back and it is exactly as I have left it,” Gowdy tells me on a cold, sunny morning earlier this month. “I don’t know how I could get ideas or how I would know what I think about anything if I had the distraction of people in the house,” she adds, as I try to imagine the creative licence that comes with that kind of solitude.
And yet what Gowdy visualizes in her seclusion, as she sits at the desk in her third-floor study, or wanders from one obsessively neat room to another, are the lives of lonely young females desperate to form attachments and to find ways of being and belonging in families. ►
“I must tell you that I live in perpetual envy of women with children, no matter how troubled or what they are going through,” she says, as we sit across from each other drinking coffee and nibbling shortbread in her skinny kitchen.
Doe-eyed, with an appealing vulnerability on her heart-shaped face, Gowdy looks at least a decade and a half younger than her fifty-two years. She is wearing black trousers and matching sweater, and nursing her left jaw. An impacted wisdom tooth, which was extracted a few days earlier, has become infected, and Gowdy is downing Tylenol Fours.
Gowdy always imagined she would have children, but she never got pregnant through the course of two failed marriages and untreated endometriosis, and now she is past menopause. “I am not going to have babies now—at least not in a natural way,” she says in the same matter-of-fact manner that she introduces bizarre compulsions in her fiction, such as the necrophiliac in We So Seldom Look on Love who achieves orgasm by sitting on the faces of dead men.
“I do not know what it is to love like that,” she continues as I drag my thoughts back from Raelian cloning tales.
Marni leaps up on the table, turns her back on us, and wraps her twitching tail around her haunches in a territorial signal to me, the interloper.
“Some people can’t stand cats on the table,” she confides. “I am pretty clean and fastidious, but I don’t deny her anything.”
If I lived alone, I would let my cat sit on the table too, I realize with a start.
Gowdy speculates that if she had succumbed to kids and domesticity, she would have produced maybe three books instead of the six works of fiction, including Falling Angels and Mister Sandman, that have earned her international sales and a raft of award nominations.
Although Gowdy’s writing is not explicitly self-referential, she has mined her own past in a series of haunting novels set mainly in the suburban time zone of her own upbringing in Don Mills, Ontario, in the 1950s and 1960s. Even The White Bone, her African novel about a family of elephants, is really a quest for home, and a threnody, as Gowdy herself suggests, for the death of her father to cancer in 1996.
Louise, in Gowdy’s new novel, The Romantic, is the only child of a germophobic former beauty queen who disappears when Louise is nine, leaving a terse note on the refrigerator sayin
g,“Louise knows how to work the washing machine.” Bereft, the little girl falls in love with Mrs. Richter, a neighbour woman, and dreams of being adopted. Later, she transfers her affections to Mrs. Richter’s son Abel.
Gowdy, who became a writer by default at age thirty-nine, after trying to be an actress, a broker, a secretary and an editor, really wanted to be a pianist like Abel. She came to the piano late, at about twenty-five. Even though she practised eight hours a day—“I think it ruined my first marriage [to her highschool sweetheart],” she confides—she gave it up after six years because “I was going to be a good piano teacher or a bad barroom pianist.” ►
For a perfectionist like Gowdy, that wasn’t good enough.
She would still rather be a musician than a writer, because she thinks it is a purer art form. The arrangement of sounds has no politics and no ethics, she argues, whereas words are so commonplace that they can have a power and a meaning beyond your intentions. Her failure as a pianist has given her the freedom to write fiction, she thinks, because she doesn’t “revere it so much.”
The connection to writing came through editing. She was working three days a week in the late 1970s as a secretary at the startup publishing house, Lester & Orpen—“I was the ampersand,” she jokes.
She began working on manuscripts, but decided she wasn’t a very good editor, because she kept rewriting people’s copy. After inventing a character to liven up a non-fiction book, she quit to write short stories of her own.