Consolation

by Michael Redhill

  She held the booklet with both hands and tilted it up toward herself. The light swam over her face. “Why do you want him to be right?”

  “Because it would make his dying less awful.”

  She turned to the desk and carefully put her burden down, not showing her face to him. “Are you ready for a life with someone, John? Do you really think you are? Because this is what it comes to. When you start out with someone, you’re signing on for the long haul even though you have no idea what it’s going to be like.”

  “You didn’t know what it would be like? At all?”

  “I knew what David was. Who he was. I can draw a line back to the day I met him and he fits on it all the way. Everything he was, and all his choices in life, came out of the same man. I married him because he was bringing something to the table, do you know what I mean? I didn’t always know what shape it was going to take, but all of it — his work, the kind of father he was, the husband he was to me — all of it was a bud in him that was there from the beginning.”

  “You’re saying I don’t have that?”

  She turned her face to him, her eyes hooded by a fringe of her hair. “How are you going to contribute to Bridget’s life? What do you bring, John? You’re a decent person. Even though I haven’t always been on your side, I think I can say that about you. But what do you bring? You make no choices. You allow yourself to be moved by other things. David, who you obviously admired so much, did things his whole life. He invented his bloody specialty, for Chrissake. You finished a degree by inertia, not because you loved it. You’re like a powder that has to have some ingredient added to it to make it active, and you think Bridget is going to be that for you?”

  “Bridget is finding herself too, Marianne. I’m not standing in her way, and I’m not asking her to make anything happen for me, either.”

  “What a fine pair you are then. I dread your marriage, John. You’re like two little lost storm clouds, drifting around.”

  “And you have too low an opinion of Bridget.”

  She laughed at him. “Think about what I’m saying. You don’t have to respond to me, but think about it. What can you give that makes you worthy, more than your decency, John? Because she’s going to need more than that. We’re all going to need more than that.”

  AFTER HE LEFT, Marianne lay in the bed in the near-dark, the faint, bluey light from outside the only thing to see by. She shut her eyes and laid her hands palm down on the blanket and listened to the rooms around her. A woman’s voice from two or three rooms away, talking on the phone. Unintelligible words separated by silences. In the walls, the sounds of water coursing in pipes above and beside her, an invisible body containing her.

  He would curse in the shower, furious with himself for not being able to do even the simplest things. This came back to her when she cleaned, her arm sweeping in slow arcs over the surface of the tub. She recalled the squeak of the rubberized feet on his special stool. One night — was it the spring before he died, or a whole year earlier? Time had compressed itself since his death — one night, she put her book down and called to him. “Do you want help?”

  “I can’t reach up.”

  She’d gone into the bathroom. Rolling clouds of steam puffed out on either side of the tub, around the curtain. She worried he’d scald himself, his skin insensate to the heat, but that wasn’t supposed to happen, he was supposed to be able to feel it still. “How hot is it in there? ”

  “I need you to wash my back.” She drew open the curtain, and he tried to shimmy the chair sideways but couldn’t manage the movement. “For Chrissake,” he said. “This is pathetic.”

  “You know what? Wait here a second —”

  “Where else would I go?”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  She went out through the front hall into the garage, through the door they’d once argued over when designing the house. It was a kind of bourgeois sickness to have a door leading directly from your garage into your house, he’d said, but she’d carried the day on that one: just think of the convenience of not having to trudge into and out of the snow once you’d parked. Over the car’s hood was a ramshackle shelf piled with the summer things; she pulled down one of the plastic garden chairs and carried it back in. “Move over,” she said, pushing the curtain aside and lowering the chair. He watched her, amused, as she stepped out of her clothes and got in beside him, sat under the too-hot stream of water. “We’re going to turn into cooked shrimp, David.”

  “I can reach the bottom of my back but not the top. I can’t lift my arm up high enough.”

  “So I’ll do it.”

  “You’re going to wash my back every day now?”

  “Do you want to go around with a dirty upper back?”

  He passed her the soap wrapped in a wet facecloth and she maneuvered her body and chair so she was behind him. She revolved the soap in her hands and pushed the cloth around on his back. She felt the muscle there, trying to compare it to the texture it’d had in August, in June, but the deterioration was too gradual. She couldn’t detect the change. She brought the shower head out of its holster and ran it against his skin so the soap ran off him in sheets and his skin glistened. He said, “Showering together never lasts.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s something you do when you’re young. When you take every opportunity to be naked with the other person. Showering alone, a waste of time.”

  “And after, there’s not enough time for it.”

  “Mmm,” he said.

  She kissed a shoulder blade. “Do you miss being together like this?”

  He didn’t answer and she realized she’d asked a question canted toward her own future, a question he didn’t want her thinking about right now. She leaned into him and pressed her mouth into his shoulder, the skin there so hot that its heat pushed up into her eyes. She had a flashback to being in a hotel room with him. Twenty years ago? Thirty? In some European country, maybe it was the Italy trip. Sleeping beside him in the August heat, and this very smell, this fleshly radiance, coming off him. And then it was gone, and it was just the heat again.

  She stroked his leg and brought her hand back up the inside, and held his balls and his cock, and he twitched, pushed her hand away. She kept her mouth against his shoulder, rolled the soap in her palm, returned her hand to the other side of his body. The smell of him.

  “Mare,” he said.

  “Shush.”

  “Come on —”

  She wrapped her other arm around his chest and slid off her garden chair so he could feel her against his back. “Relax. It’s just us.”

  Could you heedlessly give yourself over to pleasure when you had to focus on the remains of your time? It was an unsensual state of mind. He held on to her arm with a motionless grip, trying to will her not to move. But she bent around him and kissed his mouth, felt his arm moving under her breast. His facial muscles had continued to weaken, so he could not kiss her back the way she wished him to, but he tried, wanting not to disappoint her. He pulled away to fill his lungs with air, then took her against him again. She remembered how, once collapsing together against the sheets, catching their breaths, he’d joked that there couldn’t be an afterlife, not when this was what life itself offered you. His palm on her belly, him saying, What could an afterlife give you that would make up for losing this? Now she imagined him much closer to finding out the answer to that question. He concentrated, trying for her, her hand stroking his cock, locking her motion to his, and felt in him at last nature’s mulish insistence, the old ways of the body. Lovemaking was once for pleasure, she thought, and then its worlds opened up. You knew the cosmos was using you to make the future happen, and it may have been frightening, to be caught like that. But then you wanted it to, you gave in to it. Later, it was a retreat to the way you once were, long past the point when you could be of any value to the cosmos, sex as a marvel of uselessness, a pension given the body.

  For a few moments, she forgot she was
trying to make a dying man come, and she leaned against him, loving him, knowing she’d remember being like this when the future arrived. She was too lost in her thoughts to notice that he was trying to lift her up, he wanted her to come around in front of him, and now she gladly did, raising her leg around him and using her palms on the shower seat to bear her weight. She took him into her. He could not move, so she did, but she could not look at him. She watched what they were doing, seeing the water pool in their lap when she pushed against him, then sluice away between them when she lifted up. She did this, mesmerized by the filling and emptying, until he pulled her mouth up to his and drew in a deep chestful of air through her, gasping unlike the way she’d become used to, and she felt him come. He leaned against her and his body shrank as if the weight inherent in his bones, in his muscles, had left him all at once. She felt the fight go out of him, and held him under the drape of water, riven by joy, listening to him breathe.

  IN THE BLUE of the kliegs and the burning white of the truck and backhoe headlamps and the flashing red lights of braking machinery, the nighttime digs were a confusion of swimming colors and retinal flares. Pale gray rocks appeared purple past dark, the dirt was a chiaroscuro of pink and green. There was only one woman on the night crew, Inger Wolfe. Her partner, Allan, waved her forward and she lowered the scoop to drag out another pile of dirt. She broke her nights up into one-hour periods. After one hour, coffee; after two, coffee; after three, ten minutes of talk and jokes and being flirted with. Then lunch, then coffee, then the sun would start to come up. The nights went quickly, and after four hours of sleep she’d spend the day designing her clothing line, the line that would get her out of the night shift.

  The scoop struck a rock and Allan went down into the hole to chip at it with his shovel. He disappeared behind the scoop and she could hear the repeated dull report of his blade. Sometimes he’d put a big slab of stone into her load once he’d got it out, other times he’d try to impress her by hauling it out himself and hurling it whatever distance he could manage. He was a nice guy, but she wasn’t interested. After a minute, the noise stopped and he reappeared below her door. He gestured to her to open it.

  “Back it up a bit,” he said.

  She pulled an earguard away from her head. “What is it?”

  “Just back it up.”

  She put the machine in reverse and cleared the middle of the hole, climbing the edge of it so her head tilted down. She could see through the dirt-encrusted window a pipe lying in the earth, yellowed from years, like ivory. She watched him dig more delicately now, scraping around the edge of the pipe, and she lowered the scoop to the ground to stabilize the backhoe and stepped out onto her footrest. “Come on, Al — I’ll go around the right and come at it from the side. How big is it?”

  “I think it’s huge. It comes out here and goes back in there.”

  “It’s old PVC. I’ll smash it up with the scoop.”

  He stood up and faced her in her door. “It has rivets in it.”

  “What?”

  “It has rivets in it.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Will you get out and look?” She jumped down to the ground and stood opposite him at the other side of the hole. He crouched down beside the object, pointing, and in the steady white light of the backhoe, she could see what he was talking about. Round, crusted brown rivets stuck out at regular intervals along a slightly curving old hardwood slat, four or five feet of which he’d been able to expose. He stood and faced her with an expression of boyish pride. “Holy shit,” he said, and she locked eyes with him. “It’s a boat.”

  FOUR

  IN CAMERA

  EARLY SPRING 1856

  ONE

  NEAR THE END of April, after his first encounters with Samuel Ennis, Hallam hired a trap and went west to Niagara, where he’d contacted an older apothecary by mail with a request for advice. The man, Mr. Taylor, had an excellent reputation, and Hallam’s father had consulted with him on the suitability of the Lennert property. He believed the man would answer him frankly.

  The eight-hour drive down the King’s Highway was not as terrible for Hallam as he imagined it must have been for the nag and the driver, but it impressed on him the notion that in no way must this country have first been visited during the rainy season. And had Simcoe or his wife set foot ashore in weather as unsuitable for human habitation as this winter had offered, he had no doubt there would be no Toronto. What excuse for Kingston or Cornwall, he could not imagine, and the existence of such colder, wetter cities as Montreal and Quebec suggested only that the French were a different, hardier branch of the species.

  He entered the other man’s shop with trepidation, as he knew whatever came of the discussion it would direct his life for some months to come, and this would determine the length of his stay in Canada. Hallam nursed some fantasy of failure: returning home, even under the shroud of defeat, appealed to him. In the worst hours of January, he’d been horrified to realize he was unable to bring his family’s faces to mind, and he was forced on more than one occasion to treat the intense panic that attended this disintegration with a significant dose of valerian in hot water, a cure that made him completely useless the following day but at least curbed the hysteria.

  Mr. Taylor listened patiently to Hallam’s tale of the Cockburns and how his business had suffered. Without inquiring any further, the older apothecary offered Hallam a loan, which kindness nearly reduced him to weeping. But Hallam explained he had come for advice only: this third outpost of the family firm was his own responsibility; the question was, what could he do to ensure its viability. This speech Mr. Taylor met with a tolerant silence. “If you wish,” he said, “I would be prepared to purchase your inventory at a fair market value.”

  “As I told Mr. Cockburn’s son, my business is not for sale.”

  “Do you read the papers, Mr. Hallam? We are at the beginning of an international decline that will see all unsecured businesses swallowed up. And if you are not in the absolute pink, you will be winnowed with the rest of them. Think of it as a gale wind that is going to sweep everything up that is not nailed down. I know of three chemists in New York State alone who are going begging for buyers. Not for their medicines but for their front doors, along with the keys. If you sell, you can return home and regather your strength for when the storm lets up. But you describe yourself as half-undone, Mr. Hallam. I have no advice for your recovery.”

  Mr. Taylor’s wife had prepared them some cold meats with fresh bread, and Hallam realized he was being shown compassion. He presented the aspect of a hapless, lost boy. He finished his food and thanked the man. As Hallam took down his hat, Mr. Taylor held him back from leaving.

  “I know the Cockburns,” he said. “I am friends with them because I deem it in my interest to be. They are true Scots and they see their interests as sovereign, and if they have determined for themselves that you will not survive in Toronto, then you will not survive. You should consider my offer.”

  Hallam walked back to the hotel, and in the morning collected the driver, and they started back to Toronto in the needled air. He thought on his luck in exciting the attention of a gang upon his arrival on these shores. A gang was the best way to describe them, all professions have such an element in them, a grouping formed around a protectionist idea and reinforced by exclusion and, if necessary, threats.

  All the way home, he weighed his options. He had but one customer to count on — Samuel Ennis — and against his custom he had hostile competition and a city whose economy was in decline. Converting the business was not out of the question; men in dire situations had done worse before. He could sell groceries; he could stock books. He could, he realized with a heavy heart, do anything but sell drugs.

  Hallam wrote to Mr. Taylor immediately on returning home and told him he would accept his offer if he was still tendering it. By return post Taylor sent an outline of prices he would pay for various compounds: the inventory his father had en
trusted to him would net one hundred and fifty-six pounds odd, plus some coin, and with that windfall the business of chemistry could be left behind. Hallam collected all but the compounds he might need for daily use and emergencies, and then boxed the contents. The shop stood all but empty, except for a surprisingly tidy collection of crates. He shipped the contents to Niagara. Mr. Taylor’s bank draft arrived the following week and Hallam’s career as an apothecary was over.

  With the money realized, he traveled to upper New York State, and posing as a photographer himself, he bought up as much of the silver compounds as he could in Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany. When he came back to Toronto, Hallam was the sole supplier of photographic salts west of Kingston, east of London, and north of Buffalo, and he had forty-nine pounds sterling to his name. Before the end of the spring he would have all seven photography firms in Toronto as his clients. He brought Sam Ennis over to the now-curtained store (he’d taken the sign down, and the wooden carving of the mortar lay across one of the empty glass cases like a reproach).

  “You’ve been robbed,” Ennis said, gazing around at the cold, echoing shop.

  “I’ve done the robbing, though.” He went into the back, uncrated one of the cases of silver nitrate, and placed a bottle on the table. Its label was as white as a cloud; the freshest bottle of anything that had been in J. Hallam, Apothecary, since they’d bought the shop. “There are fifteen more boxes of the nitrate and ten of silver bromide. All told, I have almost sixty pounds avoirdupois of silver in here. That’s almost half-a-million grains, Mr. Ennis. Enough to photograph the country end to end in a traveling cart and some left over to make rings. I’ve cornered the market.”

  Ennis was fairly impressed, a wide amazed grin on his face. “You turn out to be a pirate,” he said. “Let me shake your hand, Captain.” He held out one of his large, dark paws, and Hallam thrust the bottle of silver nitrate into it.