Consolation

by Michael Redhill

  “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “I’m awake.”

  “Maybe I just want to keep an eye on her though.”

  He nodded, still swimming in a dream that involved a road. “Sure . . . maybe it would be good for the two of you to be together right now. You could sleep with her in here.”

  “She’ll say Mum needs her. There’s no point in asking.”

  If he let her now, she’d dash exhausted down some looping conversational path and then end up crying. He pulled her over to him and drew her head down against his stomach. Her shoulder was cool against him. She tucked an arm under his leg and pulled it close to her, like a blanket. His body stirred despite him.

  “I don’t think you really get what’s going on in my parents’ house.”

  “In what way?”

  “Just how it is. With everyone fighting for possession of my father. It’s sick. You don’t know how sick families are.”

  “I still had a family after my parents died, Bridget. I wasn’t raised by wolves.”

  “You always say ‘my aunt’s kids’ when you talk about them, though. You don’t call them your family.”

  “Well, they were my family. And now you are. Just because I don’t work up your sister’s hysteria about it doesn’t mean —”

  She sat up and he could see it was too late to prevent tears. His erection vanished. “Then why did you have to wait to be invited before you’d come and sit with us this afternoon?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why? You knew how alone I was there.”

  “I didn’t want to do the wrong thing. With everyone so tense —”

  “And standing by me could be the ‘wrong thing’?”

  “You know how your mother is, Bridget. When she’s like this.”

  She shook her head. Without knowing how, he’d confirmed something for her. When had this talent for taking everything the wrong way emerged in her? She slid back down under the covers and turned her back to him.

  “Bridget . . .”

  “You let me know when my mother’s stress levels reach a point where it’s safe to pay attention to mine.”

  “I don’t want to make things any worse.”

  She said nothing. After a moment, he lay down and turned the light off. He reran the conversation in his mind, trying to find the place in it where he could have turned, where he would have made her happy, where she’d have been comforted. But he could not find it.

  THREE

  SHE TOLD NO one where she was. She unpacked her clothes and put them neatly away, placed a couple of framed pictures on the small desk beside the TV: one of the four of them; another of David taken a year after their wedding, him reading the Toronto Telegram in their garden, a mug of coffee sitting in the grass.

  She spent her first night in the bed closest to the west-facing window, and shed photocopied pages of the Globe from 1855 to the floor beside her. Government lands for sale, new goods arriving daily at Rutherford’s. This world that had so possessed David seemed unwilling to impart any scent of itself to her. She’d heard his stories on an almost daily basis throughout their married life, and yet she knew now that she’d listened to so many of them only passingly, as one does when the commonplace is spoken of. Reading these papers, she tried to imagine men in costume standing on wooden sidewalks, snapping open their fresh, linen-like newspapers and scanning for tell of England. She read “Death of a Canadian in California”: a man “foully murdered” while on his mule. People gone a century and a half, but freshly dead in those pages, their bodies only just committed to their graves and the widows still keening. For some reason, Marianne had always thought that in earlier times people took death in stride, that they weren’t as attached to each other as people were in her own. It was to be expected that, in the rude, unfinished world, people would be lost. It bothered her to think that her pain was part of a tradition. That people so different from her could partner her in grief.

  She could not sleep and focused instead on relaxing her electrified limbs and trying to breathe. Now and then she was surprised to wake up and realize a little time had passed. She imagined she would probably sleep in fits for the rest of her life. Anything approaching normal in this room was not to be wished for, and yet, within a couple of days, she’d established a routine of moving to and from the bed all day, alternating lying in it with sitting on the north-facing ledge against a large throw pillow, reading. Sometimes she would move to the small desk to search the Web on her laptop. She felt sleepy occasionally, and when she tried to focus too long on something her eyes would become heavy, unless she was reading the monograph itself, which held her attention like a voice crying her name. She’d open it and it would hold her, saying —

  Men and women who were not our fathers and mothers brought us into this world. They made this city before us. We know that a man once stood on a scaffold eighty feet above the ground and painted in brilliant white the words gelber bros. wholesale woolens on the side of the red-brick building at 225 Richmond Street. We know because we have seen that sign since we were children, we have watched it slowly fade — the brick rising through the skin of the weathered paint like a welt — and although we do not know the name of the man who put those words there, and surely he is dead, we cannot doubt that he lived, he lived here, he worked here, he was a Torontonian.

  — and she might want to put it down, to return to the uninsistent view outside the window, but in this little booklet lay all his faith —

  So too the women who sewed fur collars at 121 Spadina at the dawn of the century, one of whom photographed her co-workers and wrote their names on the back of the print that resides in the Toronto archives at St. Lawrence Hall. Gusta, Hattie, Freda, Channa, Marie-Caroline. And before them, the men who baked bricks at the works in the Don Valley, and the men who mortared them for the houses on Palmerston before 1870, and the men who buried the gaslines that lit that part of the city in 1901. Go back farther, however, and our proofs are thinner. Someone made an ink drawing of Bishop Strachan’s house — the Bishop’s Palace — before it was torn down in 1890. I have seen a picture of Front Street’s grand Iron Block, destroyed by fire in 1872. But what of the city we know — should I say, we believe? — existed before then? Didn’t those men and women, whose names we have all but lost, wander home in the evening to their hearths and speak of their future here? We are only faintly aware of the city they lived in — it is just an intuition, a movement in the corner of the eye. Of that city which must have stunk of horses and offal and pine oils and roasted fowl, of that air that rang with the cries of newsboys and the sounds of boots on hollow walkways and hooves on stone. But a hint of it is all we have.

  Here, then, is something to buttress our faith: we already know of a thirteen-plate panorama of the city of Toronto. Made close to Christmas of 1856, the images were taken from the roof of the Rossin House — once located at the southeast corner of York and King streets (and demolished in 1969). The pictures were collodion positives pulled from glass negatives, and have always been attributed to the Toronto photography firm of Armstrong, Beere, and Hine. These pictures were the extent of the city we knew of before 1860. And until now, we have believed these pictures were all we would ever know.

  Allow me now to set forth the outline of an incredible discovery. This monograph — using modern methods of cartographic reconciliation, computer imaging of known weather patterns in the Toronto harbor of 1857, shipping records, as well as newly discovered source materials — will show that an unnamed photographer (who is unlikely to be any of the principals of Armstrong, Beere, and Hine) took the Toronto panorama, and also took a nearly complete photographic record of the city of 1856: its streets, its parks, its houses and industry, its people. Further, it will show that the original glass negatives and their positives were displayed in England in early 1857 and were returning to Toronto when the ship carrying the photographer, as well as his trunk of photographic documentation, was swamped in a violent storm ab
out two hundred meters from shore in the Toronto harbor. The photographer was also a diarist who survived the storm to describe it in his journal, where he gives the date of the sinking as April 28, 1857, but does not name the ship. However, he describes a harrowing barge rescue “in waters so enraged that though Brown’s Wharf be nearly made when the boat capsized, the journey to land with our rescuers seemed as epic as another ocean crossing.” Six ships sank that day in the lake, but the only one that close to shore was a screw steamer called the Commodore Walker.

  The remains of this boat would have sunk approximately six hundred meters from the 1857 shoreline. This shoreline, long since elided by landfill, would have run approximately twenty meters south of the railtracks behind the present-day Union Station, which is due north of where Brown’s Wharf was located.

  This monograph will show that somewhere within a five-square-kilometer area due south of Union Station lies the ruin of the Commodore Walker, and that in its stowage remains a steel container holding almost four hundred never-seen images of this city. These pictures, still graven on the original glass plates, will constitute the earliest photographic record we have of Toronto.

  Finally, she’d have to push it all away, push his passion out of sight.

  HE’D SURPRISED HER one night in the spring of 1996, calling her name from the driveway. She saw him fumbling up the dusky incline to the door and rushed out, the air still warm from the afternoon, and pulled him into the house. She put a cup of tea in front of him, mopped a light cover of rain off his hair with a paper towel. Two Coffee Break cookies on a plate. She watched his mouth as he worked the cookies against his back teeth. He’d been spending his days hunched over papers in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at U of T, hunting down information even he admitted was dull. The Fisher was his heart’s home — old teak cabinets full of file cards with the fading handwriting of dead librarians, local history, broadsides carefully peeled off last century’s lampposts by some archivist type just like himself. Newspapers, maps, advertisements for land, everything filed away in crisping folders, laid back to front in Bankers Boxes. A room full of voices. He was talking about a misfiled dossier. The phrase emotional lability scrolled across her mind as he fought to chew, catch his breath, and tell her of his find all at once. But that was excessive laughing or crying, wasn’t it? At least he didn’t look crazy.

  He was coughing out tea. She got up and rubbed his back with a circular motion until it was over. Dr. Aubrey had told her not to thump him on the back unless it looked as if he were really choking. David held up his hand for her to stop.

  “The wet and the dust is just a super combination for you, David.”

  “Will you listen to me?”

  “I am listening.” She stood, hand at the ready, behind him.

  He tucked his forearm behind one knee to pull the leg closer to the other. “That place is a giant jigsaw puzzle, you know? Three million pieces. Someone starts a thought in 1870, and then someone else completes it in a pamphlet a hundred years later. All you have to do is fit it together.”

  She was thinking about the air in the library — she couldn’t help it — and how often David yawned, his brain oxygen-starved. And the particulate matter, that’s what Dr. Aubrey called it, not just regular dust but flakes of insect exoskeletons and dander and mites’ legs and dead white blood cells, none of it worth breathing. She pulled her mind around to him again, the way she’d once had to turn the girls’ faces to her to make sure they were paying attention. “So you found something? That’s good.”

  “Will you sit down,” he said.

  She poured more tea for them both and furtively dipped a pinky into his cup to test the heat. She was trying, as she always did now, to keep her mind focused on the present, where he was alive and speaking to her. This moment is still happening, she thought.

  He watched her settle into the chair across from him with her cup of tea. He held her eyes. “I found a diary. An Englishman who came to Toronto in 1855. Faded gray ink and actual fingerprints in the margins. You can feel him sitting at his table and writing everything down in that very book. Drinking tea like I am right now. He was a photographer.”

  She felt a little calmer with a hot mug in her hands, and the present holding them in it. “They had photographers in the 1850s?”

  “They had them before 1850, Marianne.”

  “What are his pictures like?”

  “They aren’t with the diary.”

  “Okay.”

  He drank. Hands relatively steady. “They’re lost. He lost them in a storm. All of the original plates. But he could be the fellow who took the Toronto panorama. That was 1856. Or ‘57, I think.”

  “They know that man’s name, don’t they?” she said, trying desperately to hold on to his story, but he frowned at her. “What?”

  “Why would I say he could be the same man if I knew his name? Of course they know who took the panorama, but most people don’t address themselves in their own diaries, so I have no way of knowing if this is the same man. That’s why I said could be.”

  “All right, I’m sorry. It’s very interesting, David, for sure it is.”

  He nodded once, emphatically, and began to give her more detail, making links for her between times and seasons, but she couldn’t follow again, she was preoccupied with danger, with how excitement of any sort was no good for him. His words closed over her like a wave: he was talking about photos of the city, he said something about London (he must have meant England — no, he was talking about Toronto again), and there was even something about Queen Victoria, but all she could really focus on was his building childlike excitement. “Hold on, though,” she said, backtracking to regain purchase on the story, “he lost the plates where?”

  “In the lake.” He stopped to breathe and gulped for air, jaw unhinging fishlike. “He brought them back from overseas and his steamship foundered in Lake Ontario. They were in a leather-bound steel strongbox. Glass plates.”

  “But people dive in the lake all the time, David. Anything that went down a hundred and fifty years ago is long gone.”

  There was a corona of white around his pupils. “The box isn’t in the water, Marianne. The steamer was close to the shore when it went down and the city’s filled that area in long since.” His eyes went up toward the ceiling and for a moment it looked like he was going to close them. “It’s in landfill. It’s buried in the dirt somewhere close to where the old wharves were.”

  “But doesn’t the panorama exist, David? You’ve shown it to me in a book . . .”

  “For Christ’s sake, Marianne! I’m not talking about the panorama! What I’m talking about is other pictures taken by the same man, hundreds of other pictures, all intimate pictures of Toronto — stores and houses and people and streets and signs! And if it’s the same man, then the original plates for the panorama are down there as well.” His eyes were bright and glassy. “This is the mother lode.”

  She remembered that he hadn’t taken any medication since noon; he’d missed the four o’clock chemical correction, having overstayed his time in the library. She knew he wouldn’t eat dinner until he’d had his tea, so now the after-dinner pills too, with their tiny powers, were not at work in him keeping various symptoms in abeyance, systems in balance. This was why she’d had the odd tingling of danger: he was failing in that minor way he did when too much time passed between medications. At this time of day there was baclofen for stomach cramps, glycopyrrolate to keep salivation down, lorazepam for anxiety and shakes and to relax the breathing (to relieve “air hunger” — too beautiful a term for what it was: the sick-making sound of her husband snapping for air with dry lips), calcium pills for bone density, Mylanta for constipation, Rilutek to slow the decay (but she’d forgotten it had to be taken with food — shit — and now she’d have to convince him to eat something else just to get it in him), and finally a vitamin pill. The capsules were arrayed inside little dovecotes that had the hours of the day, rather than the days of the w
eek, embossed on their individual lids. When shaken, after being filled in the morning, the container sounded like an African rainstick. “We forgot your pills,” she said.

  “All I need is a couple of maps and I can triangulate the position. There’s probably even records of the wreck. Measurements.”

  “I think it’s terrific, David.” She pushed her chair back to rescue the neglected pill container from the window ledge above the sink. “You have to take these with something more hearty than biscuits.”

  “I can take them later. Gerry’s going to love this.”

  “It could be something, it really sounds like it could be.”

  “Don’t condescend, Marianne. It is something. I’m going to talk to him. This could keep me busy for years.”

  “The pills, David.” He reached for them, a gesture that would have been sharp and angry if his muscles were still listening to his commands. She held the container back. “Do you want toast or a banana with them?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “A bit of rice then.”

  He shook his head. “Give me a couple more of these.” He pushed the empty plate across to her and the few crumbs on it coursed over the side and onto the table.

  “The sugar can aggravate your shaking.”

  “Damn it, then just give them to me. I can take them on their own.”

  She didn’t feel like fighting him, and she popped open the two compartments that said “4 p.m.” and “7 p.m.” and tilted the case into his hand. He took them one by one, placing them near the back of his throat on his thick grayish tongue (the pale handwriting he’d described suddenly flashed in her mind, a strange cognate), and he washed them down with water. One round red, two long thin yellows, a pentagram in blue, a tiny white pill, one after the other like the beads on an abacus vanishing down into the dark of him, pills to count days by. When done, he opened his mouth wide and moved his tongue around, like a prisoner.