When it was all over, she remembered one of those evenings — they flew back to her unbidden, those last days they’d had together. She came upon him sitting at the dining room table, the whole surface colonized by paper. She’d passed behind, remembering to take the huge iron key out of the standing cabinet: he’d given himself a bruise walking into it once. “It’s right there,” she said, pointing at the jagged line below Palace Street that marked the lakeshore on his map. 1860. He turned stiffly in his chair.
“Marianne, I can see where it is on this map, but do you think I could walk down to Union Station right now and trace it for myself?”
“Don’t get mad at me, David.” (To have him mad at her once more! To have the pleasure of a disagreement!)
“I have to go up in a helicopter. You can probably still see the outline from the air.”
“You’re not going in any helicopter, hon. Forget it.”
She continued on into the kitchen, and when she turned back to look at him, expecting to have to argue the point further, he was standing on the chair, trembling, staring down at the city in the old, photocopied map.
In this other life, her afterlife, she kept the table clean.
FOUR
DAVID HOLLIS WOKE at six, a wave of awareness moving over him, and he began to lever himself against the bed to push his lower half out and over the edge of the mattress. His arms were weaker than his legs, it took a concentrated effort to get himself sitting upright, digging the heels of his palms into the bed. The movement woke Marianne; she sat up on her side, blinking hard, and threw her covers off, a lofting air carrying her scent over to him. He felt her steadying hand on his flank. “Everything okay?”
“I just have to pee.”
“Use the bottle.”
“I’m going to go like a man, Marianne. Just go back to sleep.” He let his top half tilt sideways until he was facedown on the bed, then pushed himself up to standing, as if he’d been kneeling beforehand on a pew. Everything shook as he did it, his spine and legs a tower of teacups, but then he was erect, and the habit of being upright steadied him. Standing for almost sixty years had to be worth something.
She let him go, tracking his progress with her eyes. The bathroom was ten feet from his side of the bed and required walking around the foot of it: the southern passage. He’d refused to change sides because he’d slept on the right his whole life, and there was no sense in trading that comfort for the convenience of being four feet closer to the toilet. He closed the door and Marianne lay back down again.
These days, his body felt both light and leaden at the same time: his muscles had wasted, but despite the loss of body mass he still felt like he was carting around an increasingly inert weight. He’d learned, in the past eight months, to balance natural momentum with muscle control: he could get himself moving and then continue by using the natural forces of walking or turning. His arms had become pendulums.
He urinated and washed his face — in the mirror it was long and slack. He tried to smile at himself and saw a novocained grimace. He would not shave, just as he wouldn’t cut anything with a sharp knife anymore or lift anything heavy. Gripping was one of the chief problems: he could not hold a fork anymore, and to stir a cup of tea he had to put his shoulder into it first and transfer the rotation down his arm and into his hand. Just to dissolve half a teaspoon of sugar into a mug required a motion that looked like he was churning butter. He had been balancing himself against the cream and sugar table at the local Tim’s when, without asking, a strange woman had plunged her stir stick into his coffee and finished mixing it. “My father had it,” she said, and she smiled kindly at him, but on her face he saw his own future.
Marianne had fallen back to sleep, and he watched her, his head tilted birdlike. He dressed quietly, negotiating the various garments with the new skill set he’d been taught by an occupational therapist. The trick to getting into a pair of pants was to sit on a chair and put the pants on the floor and arrange the two legholes so they looked like a figure eight. Then you put your feet in the holes and pressed them flat to the floor before threading the pants up your legs. You stood only when you had to, and if someone was needed to button and zip them for you, well then, so be it. T-shirts were out of the question, but he almost never wore them anymore. A button-up could give you grief if you put it on standing: it was almost impossible to get the second arm in if the sleeve fell behind you. So you had to arrange it on the bed and then lie down on it. On this morning, he took his chances, standing in the closet and swinging the second half of the shirt around until he caught it. Socks were still a breeze, so too a belt.
He returned to the room ready for the day and stood near the bed, watching Marianne’s ribs rise and fall. She wouldn’t wake now, was off-alert, thinking the danger had passed, seeing him to his oblations. She’d sleep deeply now till perhaps eight, thinking him propped up beside her with a book, or drowsing, and he felt, standing there in his own silence, that the present moment was reaching out to her, that his watchfulness would permit a long peace to descend on her before waking. The still and dreaming face of this good woman, heart of his heart, this woman who had seen him to this point in his life but could go with him no farther.
They’d installed a banister lift to get him up and down the stairs. He had to manacle himself into a little fold-down seat and push a button, which would then deliver him in a graceful spiral to the main floor. But when Marianne wasn’t around, he liked to walk it, turning to face the other banister and negotiating the steps like going sideways on skis down a hill. It gave him a powerful sense of accomplishment to get all the way down. Edmund Hillary returning to base camp.
He went down and set the coffeemaker for eight a.m., poured water in for three cups. He ate four low-sodium Triscuits out of the box while watching the weather on TV. It would get up to twenty-eight today, with clear skies. A storm building off the coast of Georgia, people nailing down the things they cared about, attaching themselves to the known world as the unknown rotated toward them.
At seven, John arrived.
TWO
BALSAM OF PERU
TORONTO, FALL–WINTER 1855–6
ONE
MEASURING WITH A dropper eight minims of Tinctura Opii into a glass of sherry, the chemist J.G. Hallam, late of Camden Town, said to himself, I am an average man. This was a somatic measurement, not a judgment, as twelve minims of laudanum was sufficient to put an average man to sleep. A full dozen would permit up to eight hours of rest. Hallam reduced the dosage to account for the depressant vehicle, and as a professional apothecary he knew a full dose of the addicting drug was excessive if all he wished was to sleep. The night before, twelve grains had combined with the sherry in an unpleasant way that was both stimulating and exhausting. He wanted sleep, needed sleep, and on this night doubled the sherry to ensure he could overcome the inciting qualities of the drug. Strange that there existed in the plant world a compound as likely to instill in one a “creeping thrill,” as a writer in The Knickerbocker had put it, as it was to induce pure catatonia. Pain was the main cause of prescribing the drug, not nervous sleeplessness. For this condition, Hallam almost always gave potassium bromide. That he gave himself the good stuff reflected the creed of chemists everywhere: careful with the needs of their customers, liberal with their own. Hallam’s father had known a fellow apothecary whose regular dosings with silver nitrate (for a gastric ulcer, when bismuth would have done just as well) had turned his skin blue, and yet he would not sell the same caustic in his own shop. Too dangerous, the old man had once told Hallam’s father. It will transform you into a dolphin.
Even so, he splashed the droplets in his drink and watched them spread in an oily slick on the dark surface, mesmeric. He drank it down and went to the hard bed on the other side of the room. He lay on it and faced the iron grate in the pot-bellied stove, watching the wood coals glow. The deep red light was the only illumination in the room; its bars reached across the floor like a maroon-colored paw. I
t grew until it held Hallam in its grip, and he slept.
In the dream that he would not later remember, he was back in Camden Town with his wife and two young daughters. He sat at the table with breakfast in front of him, a boiled egg in a cup, a glass of tea, a rack of toast. When Alice spoke to him, he heard her with perfect clarity. Is there anything you want, darling? and Drink up that tea, don’t keep your father waiting. But when she spoke to their children, he could not make out the words, as if Alice spoke to them underwater. He heard a songy echo.
The girls’ faces were turned up toward their mother, listening. Beloved faces, black curls framing the baby’s eyes, her older sister with her head tilted in an unconscious imitation of her mother. He turned his attention back to the egg, pried off the lid and scooped out a shivering mass of white. He salted it and laid it on a point of toast, put it in his mouth. He saw the black top of the yolk, idly thought: ferrous sulfide, and pushed the spoon down into it. What came out was solid black, though, and the cut through the center of the egg showed a yolk as dark as India rubber all the way through. The smell of ash rose from the egg cup, and he raised his head and called out, “Alice?” but neither his wife nor his daughters were in the room anymore. Rather, a picture of them in the very attitude he just moments ago had seen them in sat upright on the floor in a gutta-percha case, velvet on one side, silver and light on the other. His children’s eyes as sharp as stars.
After this J.G. Hallam slept for six more hours, and for each hour an inch of snow fell on the new city of Toronto.
WINTER HAD BEGUN quietly at the beginning of November, after sending its card round on October’s cold salver. Only a flurry for a day or two, but then, like a guest who’d peeked in the door and heard no protest at his arrival, the snow came to stay. It fell ceaselessly, piling up on streets and roofs, a weather that stifled the city as if in a huge blanket. Hallam began to understand why the slapdash wooden ladders leaning against every second house in the city were left up in winter. They were used in summer to gain access quickly to a burning roof, but in winter were needed to get up and broom off the weight of the snow. It was safe in the main in the damp and temperate median seasons, but in summer people died from smoke and flame and in winter might perish beneath a thin creosoted roof holding up a tonne or more of snow. A Toronto winter was a thing beyond imagining. Never in England had Hallam seen this kind of persistent snow or its attendant temperature. English snow was damp and sticky, white for only moments before the smoke from the day’s coal stoves (stoked high against what seemed to be cold) brought a familiar bilious tinge to it all.
Here there was no language, no simile for this shut-in weather: a city so benighted by snow that it was as if thousands of people were living, perforce, alone in it. Social intercourse had to be managed indoors, but few were willing to seek it out in such a punishing environment. And if one were to walk the covered streets in violent winds, then it seemed that the city was inhabited by a dark sect, its aspirants walking with their heads lowered, their eyes shrouded, their bodies hidden beneath thick exteriors.
In the middle of the third week in November, Hallam marked four months in his shop under the sign of the mortar (a costly wooden carving that was meant to impart seriousness and authority), and although he didn’t feel in the least celebratory, he did feel cheered by the thought that time was moving on. He mentioned the minor event to Mr. Terrace, the server at Jewell & Clow’s. He’d made the restaurant his regular, having only to pass south of King Street on Church to reach it, and from there it was only a short walk back to his shop. Hallam took breakfasts and suppers there, and it was a way to be around other people, something that in this unsociable town was essential if a man did not want to feel that he was traveling alone in a groove of his own making.
Mr. Terrace brought a pot of hot tea, and Hallam ordered the oatmeal as he usually did, but added a single egg on the side. “To mark one entire third of a year passed and survived,” he said. “A little splurging.”
“You’re entitled, Mr. Hallam.” He admired the waiter, well placed in his work. To feel that you were doing well the job suited to you: was it too much to dream for? Maybe Hallam was born to drink tea. Just to sit in a place like Jewell & Clow’s like a fixture, a part of the atmosphere. He was certainly good at it. The idea of being a regular held a mysterious sway over Hallam, as it did for many of the single businessmen whose faces he would see only in this place before they all drained away into the general population. Their society was made of two meals five days a week, with only rare conversation, but it was continuity, and it was nourishing. Sometimes Hallam imagined the restaurant as a trench full of men, and you cast your eyes around looking for the others who were in there with you, counting them off silently in your mind: There is Russell, and Burke, and Samuels is over there in the corner. But he would notice the absence of one of them, and before long word would go round that something had happened. Russell had taken to drink worse than ever, or Burke married, or Samuels felled by a bad heart. And the survivors would trade a sympathetic word, as they would in his own extended absence, and shake their heads. Strange, thought Hallam, that this minor society would convene at first at random and then by choice. And in a restaurant. These moments in his day filled him with a feeling not unlike hopefulness, and he brought that mood back out into the street with him like a scent of something freshly made. But then it would disperse and in would come the pong of creosote and dust, milk and offal. And a few moments later, as he unlocked and entered his shop, so would float in the scent of chemicals and disappointment.
In the beginning, when the days were still full of light, he’d taken his meals at the American Hotel at the bottom of Yonge Street. Because of its situation so close to the main docks, the hotel took its fair share of travelers fresh off the boats and, to Hallam, this meant the possibility of hearing news from home that was only three weeks old, and seeing faces still uncreased with the worries of the so-called New World. He remembered freshly his first glimpse of the city, as the ferry came around the western side of the island that lay off its shore: a vision of spires and yellow brick and white stone set against a wall of trees. And from that distance — even as the ferry bore down on Brown’s Wharf at the foot of Yonge Street — the seeming feebleness of the little twists of smoke and steam rising up from different buildings, Lilliputian industry while all around it raw nature went about its effortless business. Who thinks of making a city in the rough? he’d thought, seeing the place for the first time, and he knew from the expressions on the faces of the newly arrived that this was the wondering thing that occurred to everyone who made landfall here.
Some greater shocks were in store for those brave enough to leave their ships. Streets paved with little more than the accumulation of grit pressed into them by boots. Wooden sidewalks put together with penny nails. Tar-acrid log shanties with bank buildings made of Kingston stone in their backyards. German and French spoken freely in the streets and canoes out in the lake with actual Indians in them, spearing salmon at the river mouth. Then that same lake, frozen to stillness between December and April, ice-clenched with nothing coming in or out of it. And centered in it, with misplaced pride, a stuttering attempt at making an English town out of nothing, like a voice straining to be heard from a great distance. It would actually be funny, Hallam had thought, if he didn’t have to live here.
When he’d first come here, he needed those new arrivals to remind him who he was and what he’d come from, and one could also stop to ask after them a question or two about the war in Crimea or some late happening in London they may have been present for. And he could put forward a welcoming face for the city, since it lacked warmth, and that was something anyone would want to do for his countrymen.
But it aggravated his melancholy. He didn’t want to turn a lunatic face on those arrivals, and he himself had been warned not to fall in with the desperate. There was contagion in the looks of people; he’d already seen this in the distracted or haunted faces of pe
ople who walked from one place to another without purpose, as if attending a bell that would call them in for a meal or, worse, wake them up. He couldn’t think of a circumstance more chilling than to be the reason someone might avert their eyes, or move away from the bar with a full glass in hand because he’d turned too suddenly or spoken too loudly, perhaps blurting out How nice to meet you before proper introductions were made. And to see those fresh but exhausted faces full of hope and interest, the baggage lined up so neatly in the foyer to be taken to their rooms by the Negro men in white gloves. Why ruin anyone else’s hope? He found himself laughing nervously at the fantasy of himself dragging a piece of that luggage back up the gangplank, struggling with its owner, all the while babbling on about saving the poor fellow the trouble of unpacking and then packing again and booking passage home and the disappointment of crushing failure, ha ha, no need of a gratuity, off you go, lad. It made good sense to stay closer to home and work so as not to relive their expectations, and see their belongings trot up and down the stairs with such deceiving pomp. Once the days got shorter, he could no longer risk having his meals there.
Terrace moved Hallam’s paper aside without saying a word and put the egg in its bright blue cup under his nose, the oatmeal to the side. Hallam chipped the lid off the egg and a faint memory of burning leaves at his father’s country home entered his mind and then dispersed. “More slaves coming north,” Terrace said, lifting the corner of the paper toward his eyes. “They’re saying we ought to brace ourselves for another raid.”
“Another?”
“The Fenians came bounding up here only forty years ago, Mr. Hallam. Our guard is down.”
Consolation Page 4
