The Age of Cities

by Brett Josef Grubisic

  And yet even after he’d followed the boiled beef and plain vegetable diet there’d been no change, though both of them had dropped a few pounds. Alberta reported that on the bright side she had noticed a new spring in her step. The foot remained resolute, inflating no further and still not diminishing by an iota. The swelling gave him no pain or discomfort. Still, Winston couldn’t help but notice the pinch when he laced his shoe.

  Alberta had wondered aloud if the problem might not be psycho-somatic, a word Winston imagined she’d picked up in some ladies’ magazine. A few years ago, he’d given her a subscription for Chatelaine as a birthday present, and she read it—always taking time to mock a sampling of its ludicrous articles—from cover to cover the day it arrived in the mailbox. She’d also explained to him that this word means a physical problem originating with a mental problem, like shell-shock, but hadn’t gone so far as to name anything specific. To his sarcastic retort, “Where’s the shell-shock in my life, Mother?” she’d raised her eyebrows and said, “You’re right, it’s as calm as a lake.” Later, she returned to the likelihood of gout and began to concoct new herbal remedies that could cure it.

  During quiet moments at his library, Winston had speculated with a smirk about the other root—laughably literary—of his ailment. He’d decided that the old Greek story had no relation to him, living thousands of years after the fact and in a wholly different world. That he was living with his mother and that his father was missing was sheer coincidence. There was no untoward affection here in River Bend City, and, certainly, no lost eye, no oracle, no murder. Even tragedy was a rarity. A drunken murder outside of a beer parlour five years ago was as sensational as it ever got. Not even a perverted crime of passion, like the one that had Alberta so worked up. Small potatoes only. Pathetic failings and petty scrambling for money or territory, those were the headline crimes in the Bend. Nothing tragic or epic. Ordinary, not remotely majestic.

  Relaxing in the humid kitchen air, Winston turned his attention to his vexing foot. He held steadfast to his belief that nothing psychological was involved and that there was something else he could do. Poised between his mother’s well-intended tonics and poultices and Doc Carter’s promissory but inconclusive prescription of time will tell, he decided that a trip to a specialist in the city would be the rational man’s wisest choice.

  A foot doctor’s the thing, he thought. He’ll discover what’s wrong. He’d stop by Doc Carter’s and ask for a recommendation.

  Winston slid the stewing rhubarb off its element and returned to his chair. He withdrew the problem appendage from a faded brown plaid slipper. The soft skin reminded him of putty. With the same gesture he’d been repeating for months he made an impression of his thumb and then watched it disappear. Without the insulating slipper the linoleum floor was cold, and he walked gingerly to his mother’s remedy. He sank a fingertip into the yellow fluid and drew it to his nostrils. Cayenne pepper snuck out from within the mustard’s overpowering vinegary miasma. He reached tentatively with the tip of his tongue. It tasted sharp but not unpleasant, as though Alberta had created it to be served with ham and bread at lunch.

  Fingers curved into a scoop, he collected some, then crouched and daubed it along the top of his foot just as his mother had instructed. The skin did not absorb the thin ointment, which looked like spilled sauce. With a frown, he scraped off the excess and wiped his hands on a dishcloth. Winston remembered that the egg white remedy had needed to cover the skin overnight. Alberta had told him it might take a while to soak in. He doubted this latest batch of folk medicine would have any more power than the last, but hopped to his bedroom to retrieve a worn pair of socks. If nothing else, applying the poultice helped him feel he wasn’t a weak and passive captive of an invisible hunter. The successes of religions and snake oil salesmen were clear to him. Same principle. Winston knew that credulousness was no fire ablaze in his soul and felt glad that his mother’s run of curatives had nearly finished.

  “I hear that you were going to the city to have that foot of yours examined by a specialist.” Mrs. Pierce was reclined on the staff chesterfield, the saucer holding the morning cup of tea poised on her lap.

  “You hear?”

  “Well, you know. There are no secrets safe in the staff room of River Bend City Senior Secondary School.” Winston returned her sly smile.

  “I was wondering if I could impose on you? There’s this delightful English candy that I have never been able to find out here. I’m sure Eaton’s Department Store stocks it.”

  “Of course, I’d be happy to.”

  “Delilah tells me you are going to the city to have that foot of yours examined by a specialist.” Miss Mittchel sat across from him as he was removing a sandwich from his lunch bag. He’d used the bag so often the paper was as soft as chamois.

  “She did, did she?”

  “Well, you know. It’s well known that there are no secrets safe in the staff room of River Bend Senior Secondary School. I was wondering if I could impose on you? There’s this delightful fabric shop that sells a veritable rainbow of embroidery yarns. They stock a Belgian brand that I have never been able to find out here. Jewel colours, remarkable. It is a few quick steps from Eaton’s.”

  “Of course, I’d be happy to.”

  Winston felt satisfied to reach the address on the map the porter had drawn for him; he was closer still to winning the bet he’d made with Alberta. It was childish, he admitted, but he was filled with a quiver of pleasure in proving his mother wrong. He’d collect the two-dollar bill from her—the clasp of her purse a vise of prudence—the moment he arrived home. And now he’d found the place on his first try. Her prediction had him losing his way twice during the time that he was away.

  Craning his neck upward, he imagined the constant stream of ailments that would lead to the building of an entire skyscraper stacked basement to penthouse with doctors’ offices, all reflecting what must amount to scores of specialties. Winston wondered whether all the excesses city living paved the way for—hazards and conveniences alike—opened the door to such medical industriousness. And all that close living: population density had been the reason London, England was so devastated by influenza during the Great War. Naïve people sneezing, spitting, coughing, and spreading germs in their sardine-packed neighbourhoods and to myriad strangers on the streets. Who needed goose-stepping Germans to wreak havoc? Beyond the constant city noise and the vertical clutter of buildings, he caught glimpses of soaring grey seabirds and yet greyer water.

  He pulled the door open and walked into the veined black marble foyer. Seeing no attendant, Winston found himself excited to be pressing 7 and DOOR CLOSE inside the elevator car. He thought of telling Alberta about it and then chastised himself for playing the country hick. “Cripes, it’s only an elevator,” he said to no one but himself.

  The office receptionist was near Alberta’s age, though her years of service had rendered her yielding and grandmotherly. An automatic smile hinted at her beneficence. Her familiarity with the room and her job seemed so established that for a moment Winston was gripped by the certainty that this woman was the doctor’s mother. She asked him questions gently and filled out the requisite forms with a confident hand, then showed him to a room and requested that he remove his shoes and stockings after indicating the squat leather stool for patients. Winston crossed his legs, but changed his mind and placed both feet firmly on the cool linoleum floor. Instantly tense in the sterile broom closet of a room, he began to count the mottled tiles.

  The doctor arrived holding a black wire-spine notepad in his mouth. He nodded to his water glass to mime that he needed the spare hand to open the door. His hopeful raised brow prompted Winston to think of the beleaguered door-to-door salesmen his mother shooed away only after allowing them in to fully pitch their truly invaluable, Madame wares. Regardless of what was being sold, she’d inform him, “We had a visit from the Fuller Brush man today,” and regale Winston with her story of the threadbare underdog’s ea
rnest attempt to scrape together a living. She’d never purchased so much as a pencil.

  At times, Winston thought that Alberta seemed little different than a cat that has caught some hapless mouse; she’d draw out the game for as long as it kept her amused. He reminded himself to bring up her vindictiveness the next time she got on her high horse about civility and man’s unqualified march of progress. When in the spirit to banter, Winston wagged his finger and asked her to see the bigger picture: that the man had a family to support, she ought to realize, and mouths to fill. “They knock at my door and invite themselves in, so they have to play by my rules,” she would never fail to retort. Her statement was a winning strategy.

  The doctor withdrew a pencil from the breast pocket of his smock. “Well, you’ve come a long way, pilgrim,” he said, and then told Winston he would try his best to get to the root of the problem. After quizzing Winston about his “medical history” (he’d embroidered needlessly: “that means the physical problems and operations you’ve had so far, basically”), the podiatrist squatted in front of his patient. He wrapped two warm hands around the bare foot so that the thumbs lay parallel on the veined surface. Winston looked at the man’s thick black hair, so carefully parted. It shone with pomade.

  Applying steady pressure to the inflated flesh, the specialist compressed it into normalcy, and then, leaning back a few degrees, created a vantage so they could both watch the glacial elastic return. An albino garden slug, Winston thought. Blue eyes beaming through thick lenses, the doctor joked, “Okay, we know you’re not pregnant. Otherwise your ankles would have ballooned.”

  Standing again, the doctor smirked and gave assurances that Winston did not have gout, and then guffawed—“Priceless! Gawd!”—over Alberta’s procession of home cures. He smiled with the doctor even though he found the man’s familiar joviality at his mother’s expense just a touch presumptuous. When Winston could not remember hurting his foot in any way, the doctor explained that it was possible to break one of the tiny bones there without ever guessing, and that in such a case a plaster cast was needless, a self-indulgent luxury. “Time heals all wounds,” he announced vaguely, his voice on the edge of jokiness again, eyebrows half way to Groucho Marx innuendo.

  “Besides, you should see some of the things that can really go wrong with feet,” he said, suggesting that he felt a patient ought to put his lot into perspective. He made notations in the notebook. Winston watched as he wrote metaplasia? and heavily circled the word. He wondered whether this young specialist—he couldn’t be much older than thirty—had taken a course in modern bedside manner. The man simply glowed with professional confidence.

  Winston agreed to visit again after six weeks if the symptoms persisted. The doctor said, “I’ll leave you to your socks,” and softly closed the door when he left. As he tightened his shoelaces, Winston felt a twinge of annoyance because he’d taken a day off work and made such a large effort for advice he’d already heard. He had imagined in choosing to become a podiatrist the young man would know each and every condition that could blight his patients—and have its cure at hand. At least Alberta had taken measures to remedy it; a saintly waiting for time’s healing properties to take effect seemed so pointless: you either got better as a result of medicine or you were defeated. Winston recalled the packages sitting on the dresser in his hotel room. Returning home with Chinese tea, English candies, and Belgian embroidery thread in hand, he thought, there would be three grateful women who would not consider his day in the city completely wasted.

  Back in the foyer, the doctor broke away from his breezy conversation with the receptionist and gave Winston’s hand a firm shake. Winston liked his heartiness as much as his grooming—he was combed, pressed, and polished with a truly military precision.

  Leaving the gleaming black stone foyer of the medical building, Winston wandered and inspected the contents in shop windows, enjoying the Sunday afternoon leisure surely he alone felt on this bustling Friday. He was astonished at the flow of faces and traffic—steady eyes fixed on responsibilities, every man and woman heading somewhere with what looked like important business in mind, opportunities knocking for everyone to hear. Passing by the Granville Street cinemas festooned with midway bulbs, he decided that Mr. Hitchcock and Elizabeth Taylor—or some Technicolor Treat in the distance—would have to wait. The hubbub was wearying. He stepped outside the commotion. Back resting against the white glazed brick theatre, he turned his face southward. The huge vertical signs that jutted out—

  CAPITOL

  PARADISE

  PLAZA

  ASTOR

  ORPHEUM

  VOGUE

  —brought to mind the plans he and Alberta had made for visiting Las Vegas or Reno. Winston wanted to see desert cacti in bloom and Alberta said she had a yen for some sin: drinking and gambling and Hollywood crooners. Maybe Dean Martin or that little Negro fellow with the glass eye. Failing them: Liberace.

  Unlit now, the signs were potent and talismanic, promises for untold thrills once the sun had set. Even the cackling clown’s head that invited patrons into the bowling alley arcade below it offered Winston a moment of temptation. He’d never bowled a game in his life. Those run-down lanes in the Bend were for the lowest common denominator. The cigarette smoke alone, he’d heard, could choke a coal miner.

  Winston watched as the street’s determined throng—business-suited men, errand-running secretaries, lady shoppers with lists to check off—strode with purpose, appearing to have no time for idleness till their tasks were accomplished. Winston thought of ant farms and cooped chickens. In a sense, only the down-on-his-luck rummy he’d passed a few blocks past could be his boon companion. No one else took a minute to dawdle. Winston felt depleted from standing witness to the noise and the city’s antic style of living. A catnap would settle his nerves, he decided: he felt brittle as a wood chip. How many blocks would he have to walk? He surveyed the stretch with dismay. Or else—the sudden notion sparked like inspiration—a cup of tea with marmalade and a baking powder biscuit in some quiet corner. He stopped at the White Lunch cafeteria, an establishment that advertised its hospitality with typical city gaudiness: floating above the entrance was an immense yellow neon cup and saucer from which rose strands of white neon steam that flashed bright and then subsided into long periods of dullness. Who could deny its tout’s pitch? “‘When in Rome,’ I guess,” Winston muttered. He walked through the double doors.

  The hotel’s beer parlour was cavernous, but as familiar as any he’d experienced in the Valley—lustrous panels of wood punctuated with mirrors and low lights, the dull murmur of talk, stains, laughter, tobacco, yeasty swill, clatter. Winston knew that he could become a teetotaler with no effort; drink was a social glue for which he’d found little use. He supposed that working men in their Sunday finest had been streaming into this basement to purchase their amber-coloured ticket to bonhomie and oblivion since the days of gas lighting and horse-drawn wagons. Spent years and replenished barrels: as cyclical and enduring as the seasons.

  He stood at the entrance and peered into the murky room. At a nearby table, a broad-shouldered man pointed two fingers at his companion sitting directly opposite. Menace was unmistakable in the gesture. Another typical sight, Winston noted. He walked toward an empty stool at the bar and sat at the polished oak counter. As he waited for a harried bartender’s “Yes, sir, what’ll it be?” Winston grimaced for a moment with discomfort. Out of habit, he’d run the nail of his index finger along a seam in the wood. This reflex test for cleanliness had dredged up a tarry paste that was in fact nothing except accumulated soil from who could say how long ago. He rubbed his fingernail on the side of the stool’s mushroom cap cushion. In the mirror he could see that no terrible row had broken out and that the two pals had resumed their drunk-loud banter. In this murky light, he observed, his silhouette was indistinct, one strand in the vast fabric of the crowd.

  Ordering a glass of beer, he wondered what gremlin had whispered in his ear t
o convince him that a drink in a basement filled with men would be a pleasant way to pass the evening. Alberta told him now and again, “Go out and make yourself some friends, it’ll do you a world of good,” and whenever he went to one of the Bend’s watering holes, he returned home in a sour mood, vowing to never again heed Alberta’s sibylline advice. She had no idea. The men’s easy talk—of sport, work, weather—eluded him. Nor did its slow-witted nods of agreement and platitudinous conclusions truly interest him. Time and again, he concluded that for him such superficial fraternity could serve no valuable purpose. Watching the bartender speedily towel dry a tray of beer steins, Winston calculated that one glass would not take long to finish.

  “Hello, sailor. Are you new to port?” The man on the neighbouring stool leaned toward Winston like a straw-stuffed scarecrow. He smelled bracing if sweet from aftershave.

  “I’m from the Valley.” Winston remained wary and impassive, catching the man’s muted reflection. He hadn’t anticipated conversation.

  “Surely you have a name?”

  “Wilson.”

  “Richard Williamson. But if you’re so inclined, call me Dickie like everyone else.” The man swiveled to shake Winston’s hand. He smiled: “That’s quite a fetching get-up, Mr. Wilson. Is that what they’re wearing out in the Valley these days?”

  Winston thought to upbraid the stranger for his cheeky innuendo. Turning to address him, he saw a newborn bird for an instant, a hatchling cheeping with hunger, fear, and panic, its eyes blind though calculating. He studied the translucent expanse of Dickie’s forehead and noticed shadowy veins. The man appeared delicate and vulnerable, someone with a skull that could be as easily crushed as an egg. Yet Dickie acted any way but frail. He’d have a peacock strut, Winston was sure of it. The uniform sombre suits of the tavern-goers stood in sharp contrast to Dickie’s camel coat and radiant silk tie. The man kept his hair—corn silk pale, fine, and thinning—slick with pomade and combed straight back. His eyebrows had been thinned into graceful arches. The man was strange but harmless. Trying to place him, Winston decided that Dickie was dapper, like a preening and silly though possibly malevolent English aristocrat in a Waugh novel, a creature with station and refinement, if no money. He’d have quite the collection of stories, Winston guessed, and not one about sports or weather.