He’d finally realized that he did not understand himself enough to fully take in another human being. Having children with Alice was, if not a form of knowing, then one of expression: it joined them well enough, gave them likeness. But being in another place, alone and outside of the dailiness of his whole life, had immersed him in himself in a way he’d never imagined. There was too much of him. There was too much of others. A great simplicity lay under it all, and yet when he had been younger he lived in the presumption of that simplicity, that knowledge of being a living thing among others, never having to see what armored that beingness. Now he knew the cost of being connected to others, and he grieved knowing it.
He would never be able to explain this — not to Claudia, not to Alice. He wanted only to drowse a little in his life, as most people did, and carry along as if he’d gotten lost in a forest for a while, where the sounds of animals were too distinct for comfort and the scents too strong, and then the sounds of home came piping in through the boughs. The wish was for home and the wish was a weakness.
He was leaving in three days, on a saint’s day, the Immaculate Conception.
ON SUNDAYS AND Wednesdays, the packet steamers left for Oswego. Hallam would take a train from there to Boston, and thence across the Atlantic. Lines of hacks and people on foot converged on the two docks at the foot of Yonge Street, where the boats would arrive with those who had just made the trip, to exchange themselves with those going home. A common sight now, those emerging from the boats, their legs weak on the gangplanks but their faces grateful for an end to the journey, and on the shoreline their new countrymen and -women watching them. Those faces were familiar to them and yet also changed in a way the new arrivals could not name but would come to know, as they saw their own faces, over the coming months and years, transform with experience.
On busy shipping days, the sky over the lake grew dim with graying steam and smoke, a stirring vision of industry, the world arriving on their shore. Hallam and Claudia watched the lake approach them (so it seemed) as their driver brought them down Yonge Street toward the wharves, and it loomed through the front carriage window under a high bright December sky: one of the last perfect days for sailing before shipping would close for the winter. Already there were slugs of ice in the harbor, a slushy marsh not yet solid.
Hallam was dressed as a gentleman, a gentleman at last: a black greatcoat and a top hat, white gloves in his pockets. Leaving as he’d arrived, with a whiff of formality. He imagined he might be vomiting within hours, the top hat sitting on a deck bench, abandoned as he rushed to the railings. He hadn’t known he’d hate the ocean until he first crossed it, and now he dreaded the trip home, the long rolling motion of the boat on the water, the endless sea, the nights a huge dark expanse.
Stevedores pulled the massive trunk off the back of the hackney and took it below. He watched it vanish into the hold. “I think they could drop it once or twice without too much loss,” Claudia said. Another man took Hallam’s sack and, finding his name on the manifest, promised him it would appear in his room.
They stood together in the crowd that milled about in front of the wharf, too many people for solemnity or even quiet, which comforted him. He did not want to see her upset, and he carried himself with a bright cheerfulness that communicated everything between them had been settled when, of course, it hadn’t and never could be.
“Do you think you’ll actually be sitting down with the queen?”
“I doubt it,” he said. “I imagine she doesn’t even know they’re looking for a new capital.”
“What will you tell them? I imagine you standing on the table and stomping your feet. Will you be disagreeable?”
He smiled faintly. “I’ll be polite and let the pictures speak for themselves.”
“I’m sure you will,” she said. She waited a moment, moving from one side to another to let people pass. All the kinds of good-byes people made were around them, brief or tender or tearful. “There’s no need of a scene, Jem, so you can relax. It would be nice to have a friendly good-bye.”
“Yes,” he said, relieved. “I’d like that.”
“The only thing is, I can’t let you go while I still hold a debt. You never gave me my words. Could you not have thought of two words for me?”
“I could. At least.”
“Then I’ll take them now, while there’s time.”
He put his valise on the ground at his feet and crouched down to open it. He brought out a gilt-edged copy of American Notes, which he’d bought at Churchill’s especially for the journey. He took the stub of a pencil out of his pocket and opened the book to the endpaper. “I owe interest by now,” he said.
“How much?”
“Let’s say a hundred and fifty percent.”
She raised her brow. “That’s five words. It might be hard to find a story with all those words in it.”
He wrote on the endpaper and tore it out, folded it neatly in three, like a letter. “I don’t think it will be that hard, Mrs. Rowe. I’ve been listening to you talk for almost a year now, and five words is nothing for you. Put this in your pocket.” She took it from him and tucked it away. “Leave it there until home.”
“So this is what I am to have of you?” She patted the pocket.
“At least that.”
“Neither of us imagined this life, Mr. Hallam, but we did well by it. Tell me you agree with that.”
“It was different from what I was expecting.”
“But it was good just the same, it was worthwhile. Was it not?”
He smiled for her, but it felt as if the wind off the lake was blowing right through him. “It was magnificent.”
The crowd moving onto the boat was thinning and he felt that he was gone already. A shadow of his self was standing here on the land, while all of his substance had moved belowdecks already.
“You’re going to shake my hand, aren’t you?” she said, bringing him back. He held his hand out, and she stared at it for a moment and then took it in hers. They did not shake as men do, but stood facing each other, clasping hands. “Good-bye, Jem.”
“Good-bye, Mrs. Rowe,” he said.
From the foredeck, he watched her walk back up toward Front Street, her hands in her pockets, with the others who were staying. From the waterfront, they converged on Yonge Street, the shadows of buildings lying against the cobble in sharp, sunlit relief, the broad form of the crowd funneling into a thick line, like a liquid being poured somehow up, and she melted into their company.
SEVEN
CONSOLATION
TORONTO, NOVEMBER 1997
ONE
HOWARD HAD NOT wanted to meet at his apartment. There was a café at the top of his street, and when John came in he was already there, sitting alone with his coat on. John made a small show of taking his off and laying it over the back of the chair. The manuscript was sitting in the middle of the table, giving off rads. Howard regarded him with knitted brows.
“You okay?” John said.
“Am I okay?” said Howard. “What’d you — walk into a door?”
“Oh, this.” John touched his lip lightly. It was numb where it had swelled. “Something like a door.” He stared at the manuscript, the open secret lying dumb in the middle of the table. “Can I sit?”
“Go ahead,” said Howard, watching him into the chair. “So . . . you really wrote this, huh?”
“I don’t think it’s finished.”
“That’s a yes, though.”
“Yeah.”
Howard stuffed his hands into his coat pockets. “What happens next if it’s not finished? Does this Hallam come back?”
“I don’t know.”
“When are you going to know?”
“I have some more research to do,” John said.
“Am I paying for you to do that research as well?”
Ah, thought John. “I did this on my own time, Howard.”
“Ennis is me, right?”
“Why would you think th
at?”
“The grotesque savant who passes his knowledge on to his acolyte? And then dies a noble death?”
“You’re not dead, Howard.”
“I’m just asking.”
The waitress was a waif in combat boots. She signaled she was ready to take their order by silently cocking a hip at them. “I’ll have crow,” Howard said.
She blinked at him. “We don’t have that.”
“Coffee, then.”
“Me too,” said John. The girl went away. “Why are you angry?”
“I’m not angry. I’m . . . gobsmacked. Here I was, paying you to do my research, and you squeeze this out of yourself in your spare time? I can’t write a play to save my soul . . .”
“I didn’t show you this to make you feel bad.”
“I know that.” His employer looked shrunken in his chair, staring down at the tabletop. When at last he raised his eyes to John’s, his pupils were the size of pinholes. “So tell me, please, what the hell are you doing? What in Christ is this for?”
“Howard, can you lower —”
“Where does this come from? All of this was in your father-in-law’s diary? Surely there were no bloody drugstores in that thing.”
“There was no diary,” John said. He waited for Howard to process that.
“No diary.”
“No.”
“Why the hell would he have lied about that?”
“He was sick. There wasn’t time to be honest.”
“Time?”
“He had enough left to point at something, but not to name it.”
“Its name was Nothing.”
“No. It was more like Not-what-you-were-thinking.”
“I haven’t led a very interesting life,” said Howard. John watched the man’s eyes search the crumbs and salt flecks on the tabletop, as if they could constellate into something meaningful. “How do you know all this?”
“He told me.”
“When.”
“The morning he died.”
“I lied about the diary, fare-thee-well?”
“Not like that.”
“Then like what?”
“I asked him and he told me when I was driving him to the Hanlan Point ferry docks.”
Howard leaned away, and his forearms drifted back off the tabletop and fell into his lap. The waitress came with the two coffees.
“That was a joke, right?” she said.
Howard looked up at her as if she’d floated down from the ceiling. “What?”
“Crow. No one serves crow.”
“Plenty of people serve crow, miss. You just don’t serve it here.”
She screwed her lips into a moue and put down the coffees. “Is there anything else?”
“Thank you, no,” said John.
Howard leaned back over the table. “You drove him to the ferry.” John nodded. “You drove him to the ferry and he got out of the car and bought a ticket and got on the ferry and then jumped overboard and died? And you were the one who drove him there, John? You?”
“Yes.”
“And does anyone in his family happen to know this?”
“No.”
Howard laid his hand on the manuscript again, more lightly now, and pulled it halfway across the table. “And now you want to give them a gussied-up version of what might have happened here in place of all the things you know? My Christ, you’re a dark horse, John.”
“Should I keep it to myself, Howard? I was writing it for myself. But now I think I should give it to them.”
“Well, if you’re really asking for my opinion, I think you should get plastic surgery and change your name. Then run for your life. Aren’t you an accessory to a crime or something?”
“I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Well, if driving your fiancée’s father to his death wasn’t wrong, and keeping what you know to yourself wasn’t wrong, and shacking up with Bridget’s mother —”
“I’m not shacked up with her!”
“Then trying to fix a lie with another lie isn’t exactly right. Is it? Because that’s the math here, correct? Multiplying negatives?”
“David Hollis was a good man.”
“A liar who despaired, a good man? And what are you?”
“He deserves to be remembered differently.”
“You think this will turn that particular lock? John, he made it all up, and now you have too. This is just going to add to the overall badness of this situation.”
“No,” said John. “I’m a witness.”
Howard looked around wildly. It struck John that he’d suddenly woken the man up. Do you think you’re awake? David had said, and John had not been sure. But now: this alertness, this pain.
“So . . . what?” said Howard. “You hand them this . . . this alternate lie, and they thank you? And everything is fixed? That’s terrible.”
“I thought, of everyone I know, you’d be the one who’d understand. I thought you had faith in this kind of thing.”
“In a lie?”
“In a certain kind of lie.”
He watched Howard run his fingertips over his forehead, his eyes downcast. For one thing, thought John, I’m out of a job. But that felt fine, it was part of an inevitable stripping away. He remembered the feeling — he’d had it before: that willingness to remove oneself from everything known, everything familiar. Then (so he’d once believed) what was essential would stand out against the background of everything lost or left behind. His had never been a talent for acknowledging what was gone; he’d trained himself to accept absence as a kind of emphasis. Now the nature of loss, the way it operated on people, seemed to him a much more muddled thing. It lacked an organizing principle. If he was going to have clarity again, ever again, he would have to stand away from grief, just as he’d had Hallam do, sending him away from love. Even if he were coming back, first he’d have to leave. To ensure that all this mattered, it would have to be abandoned.
At last, Howard said, “So what kind of lie is this, John?”
“A comforting one.”
Howard blew a slow gust of air through pursed lips. “Then show it to them. If that’s what you need to do, and you’re willing to accept the consequences, show it.”
“I’m glad you agree with me.”
“I’m not agreeing with you, John.”
Howard still had a hand on the thick bundle of papers and John nudged it a little closer to him. It startled Howard, and he instinctively took his hand off it.
“There’s one more thing I want to ask you,” John said.
TWO
TWO DAYS LATER, he was awake at six a.m. in a hotel-room bed, with his fiancée and her mother sleeping two feet from him. What a shit I must have been in a past life, he thought. A faint light filtered in through the blinds. He called Bridget’s name as quietly as he could.
She opened her eyes and focused on him instantly.
“Is she asleep?” he said.
“What time is it?”
“Just after six.” He shifted himself up onto one elbow. Any change in position made his lip throb. He saw Marianne’s back hunched up under the covers, her face turned away from them. “She’s sleeping.” He lifted the blankets on his bed and moved over. Bridget looked at the empty space and quietly crept from her mother’s bed to his. He lowered the blanket over her and tucked it around her back. She lay facing him, both hands under her chin. “So?” he said.
“Nice lip.”
From this close, her face was broken into planes of light. He’d touched every part of that face. “How are you?”
“All right.”
“I’m glad you came.”
“Good.”
He shifted toward her under the covers and pulled her hands away from her face. She resisted a little, but let him push up against her. He kissed her on the forehead, then tucked his face down and found her lips. She kissed him only a little, showing him she was being a reluctant sport, but he put his hand on the small of her back and she
let herself return his kiss harder (pain shot into his back teeth) before she retreated from him. “She’s four feet away, John.”
“She’s asleep.”
“People wake up.”
“God willing,” he said.
She backed off further. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing.” He wanted to touch her more, feel her hair in his mouth, her chest against his. All the things that had no need of words were wonderful, and sometimes he thought if people would only shut up, these supernally simple things could find their level. She asked him what he was thinking, and he lied and said, “I know she didn’t seem that grateful to you last night, but she is. I think in the middle of all this, it’s hard to know how to act. For her.”
“This is still my mother we’re talking expertly about?”
“Sorry.”
“I wasn’t expecting flowers.”
“You deserve them, though.”
Marianne had held the transfer order in her hands and read it top to bottom. “They have to stop?” she said, and Bridget reassured her that they did. Further work on the site would happen on government time, no doubt a source of joy to the management of Union Arena. Marianne had folded the paper and put it on the desk, then laid her hand on it briefly as if confirming its reality to herself.
“It won’t change anything,” Bridget said now, turning on her back. A puff of warm air traveled the space between them, carrying the scent of the inside of her shirt to him. “If a little underling like me can get an order done, then think of what their lawyers must be cooking up. There are a hundred ways to get it overturned.”
“It won’t get overturned.”
“You don’t know anything.” She stared upward and, after a moment, closed her eyes. “This is an insane situation. I should be packing her up and taking her home.”
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