She tied up the dog, and now he was crossing King Street where the late-November snow was falling a little harder, bursting bright in the streetlights. Soon they’d turn the kliegs on in the site, and in his future, Bridget showed him how to toss the target ball. The game was a little like curling, she said, except the “house” was the little white ball. He didn’t know curling. “What kind of Canadian are you?” she said, grinning at him, and she explained it a little more and it would take only one more meeting for him to fall in love with her. How was it that this sleek beautiful creature was allowed to appear in his world? It was the beginning of happiness, and he did not think, as no one does, that folded into that sweetness, like a seed, was its end.
He let her beat him nine to three. “Good move,” said the dog, who wanted to sleep against him and curl up at their naked feet after they made love. John walked them home. She lived just a couple of streets away and there wasn’t much time to leave the right impression.
“Me and my roommate are having some friends over next weekend. Just for some beers,” she said. “You’ll like my friends. They’re all very sporty.”
“Lawyers like you?”
“Hey, I’m not a lawyer yet.”
“So there’s still hope,” he said, and she whacked him.
“You’re cute, eh? But you need a haircut.” She studied him a moment longer. “Although you shouldn’t cut your curls off,” she said. “You have nice black curls. Are you Jewish?”
“No, but I work for a Jewish guy.”
“It rubs off?” They turned onto her street and Bailey strained against the leash. “She’s thirsty.”
He brushed a clump of snow off the dog’s face and then turned to stand in front of Bridget. He pulled her against him and their summers and winters spun before him against the backdrop of the street.
He stood there on Crawford, holding her to him in desolate love. “Puppy!” Bridget called over his back. “Don’t run off.” He released her, and she looked at him with excited eyes. “Will you come next week?”
“Yes,” he said. He saw the kliegs burst under the lowering sky and he pushed his hands down in his pockets and continued south.
IT WAS ACADEMIC — the fate of the indigo and violet boat on the screen — because the lawyers for the owners of Union Arena had already shut down the dig. Paper covers rock. Out on Lakeshore Boulevard in the near-dark of five p.m., a line of eight cement mixers was waiting to enter the site, and a crew had assembled at the back of the excavation where the machines had sat silently for two days. Bridget looked on unsurprised and took her mother’s hand. “Let’s go back to the room.”
“I want them to do it in front of me.”
“They will.”
“There could be cameras here,” said Richard Lowinger, “in five minutes.”
Jarvis came out of the truck, squinting across the expanse at the pale headlights flickering on. “They won’t let any reporters in here now,” he said.
“They don’t have to be inside the site in order to see,” said Lowinger, looking up at the buildings that ringed the hole in the ground. “Cameras are quite portable.”
Marianne separated from her daughter and went back up the steps, holding her hand out to the student who’d interpreted the sounder results for them. “I want you to show me exactly where the strongbox is. Out here.”
“Gearbox, Mrs. Hollis,” Jarvis said.
“I want to see where that shape is, whatever you want to call it.”
“Go ahead,” said the doctor. “Show her.”
The young woman led Marianne thirty paces from the door and stopped. “How far down?”
“At least twenty-five feet, ma’am. The farther down, the less accurate the reading.”
“But you’re sure it’s right under here.”
“Near here, yes.”
Marianne stood on the spot and faced the lake, smelled the blade of frigid air that sheared off it. The construction wall blocked the view, but Marianne could still see it: the street and the buildings, traffic lights, the cold-contracted streetcar lines, the thin ribbon of grass and then concrete along the water’s edge, the water and the islands a kilometer out — islands where, David once said, Indians had hunted wild pheasant. There had been fox out there as well and black bears when the islands still connected to the mainland. In the shallower water, lake trout in schools. She closed her eyes and saw the reel of time go backwards: the roads and condominiums scattered to dust and dirt, and the brick and stone the city planners had used to make the lake smaller drifted back to its undisturbed sources and the water came up to her feet. She saw the afternoon storm that made the captain of the Commodore Walker consider turning back toward Kingston, and except for the unpredictability of winds that might have blown him clear to Rochester, he would have. David’s diarist was aboard — she had to believe this — returning from England where he must have dissuaded the queen’s committee from choosing Toronto as the new capital of the Province of Canada. He was standing on the deck with the rest of the passengers, his photographic cargo below, returning to source, all of them watching the city approach. The irony of being at sea for two weeks in all manner of conditions, and only now — perhaps half an hour out of port — a monstrous lake tempest. They came into the lee of the island and the lake grew rougher. Usually the harbor guarded the city and any traffic against the wind, but it was a northeasterly system and they began to ship water, the hull creaking and the boat shaking violently. They made for Brown’s Wharf, tacking against the wind to keep it in line, to keep the boat from launching over the breakwater and landing in a vat at Gooderham & Worts. Here it comes now — Marianne saw it fighting the wind. She felt Bridget’s arm on hers. “Come on, Mum —”
“They’re almost in,” she said —
— trying to come around, but the wind is pushing them past the wharf, the bosun calls everyone to deck, it’s safer to stand out in the cascading rain than to remain below and they can see the city rushing up now, the rockfall lining the bottom of the esplanade that keeps the macadam from silting away, and everyone is moved to the stern as the captain tries to slow her down.
She hears the crack and her name called, a hand on her arm, the prow of the boat grinding into the rocks and the soft bodies at the back of the ship thrown to decks; she hears Mrs. Hollis and she can see the man coming forward from the stern, rain sluicing off his hat, the boat is cracking and dipping quickly. No one can see for the rain, he cannot go below and also live, everyone is rushed front and there is no way to shore but through the freezing water. In they go, clambering to land and then standing drenched on the other side of danger, the place they call home — this is home! — and Marianne sees the city pushing forward, the roads unfurl in front of her, the condominiums break through the man-made earth, and soil covers it all in strata of piled dirt and garbage, the lost scene of the broken ship and the voices in the towering rain. She is standing over it, witness.
“Mrs. Hollis, I know I can’t make this any easier for you.” She took in a man in a yellow hard hat. “If it counts for anything, I did want you to find what you were all looking for.”
“Go pour concrete on him then. Go on —”
“I’m sorry,” the man said, and she thumped him on the chest. Bridget sprang forward in time to keep her from leaping at him. The man lifted an arm to signal someone in the distance behind them, and Bridget drew her mother away.
“Awake long?” November 1996, more than two years ago now. Christmas music in all the commercials.
“A while. I drank my pills.”
“What are you reading?”
“Some reminiscences of a pioneer.”
“Which one?”
“Seton Thompson. I think the British came over to drain bogs and rivers. It feels as if that’s all they really wanted to do here. Drain stuff.”
“Maybe they’d drained all the good ones at home.”
He put the book down in his lap — this book that she can still find in the ho
use, shelved with the rest of his touchstones — his gaze fixed on the wall across from them. “History is just a long story about a fight with water, you know? You have too little and you can’t eat so you bend a river, or you have too much so you bury one to build houses, and then there’s too many people and too much competition, so you cross some water to get more resources or find more places to put people and when you get there you don’t like where the ponds and ravines are, and so on and blah blah blah.”
“And that’s your man’s story? He came over and drained rivers?”
“They’d done most of that by the 1850s, or they were in the middle of it. No, he came over to make money and send it home to his people, or bring some of them over. He had a family. A couple of young children.”
“It doesn’t end well, does it?”
“He doesn’t say how it ends, Marianne.”
“No, he wouldn’t have, would he?”
“That’s always in someone else’s diary.”
Frost on the inside of the windows.
FIVE
WHEN JOHN LEWIS entered the hotel lobby, a knot of people stood on the marble floor in front of the bar, their necks craned. He heard, “That’s just outside of here,” and he pushed in and got near the front. The bar’s television was tuned to an aerial view of the Union Arena site, a view he knew well, although it was from a different angle. After a moment, he figured out that the shot was being taken from another building, one adjacent to the hotel. The report carried the live proceedings of what seemed to be Marianne conducting a seance. She stood apart from the rest of the group (he easily made out Dr. Jarvis and Bridget, and as he was looking at Bridget, she stepped toward her mother), and beyond them, in a phalanx, stood the diggers and plowers and stampers-of-dirt, all at the ready. Marianne stared out at the south wall of the site. There were cement trucks standing on Lakeshore; you couldn’t hear the slow rumble of their barrels turning, but he understood their presence to be sinister just the same.
He went up in the elevator and used the key card Marianne had given him to enter the room. He snapped on the television and could see from the window that it was all happening in real time. He had the strange sensation of being in three places at once: the actual place, where he stood and witnessed; the electronic place that confirmed his witness; and the place in memory where he knew how that earth smelled, what the people he loved were saying to each other. He was woven into all the layers of the story and could not be unraveled from it.
For some reason, the television’s reality was the most immediate — he retreated into the room to look at the screen. In watching it, he was tied to hundreds if not thousands across the city who had tuned in to this odd dumb show. It may not have mattered to them when they’d read the one or two little squibs that had appeared in the newspapers, but this was the news on TV — this was happening to everyone, at the same time. A woman alone on a patch of ground for some reason, surrounded by people who seemed frightened to go near her. Something about this mattered, that is what the image said. Here is our present passing at this very moment.
Now a man in a yellow helmet approached Marianne and they spoke. John was only a little surprised to see her shove him.
He heard the sound of machines changing gears, chunks and rumbles. The first cement trucks were entering the site. The ministry group had pulled back and the construction workers moved themselves into place. Men with spades and rakes stood nearby. A moment later, Marianne and the others disappeared from view, hidden behind the wall, but he was certain they were still there; some form of decency demanded they be allowed to watch the unhappy proceedings. The trucks went directly to the southwest corner of the site, and he knew now for certain that the ground was not ready, that this was not the foundation being poured: it was an assertion of who belonged here, who owned this dirt, even if it meant breaking the concrete up in a week to lay it properly. Three of the trucks lined up in a fan pattern above the exposed rib of wood, and at once they tipped up their tanks and the white mixtures began to flow out. The three streams met and became a pool, spreading. The men with the spades shoved the slow-coursing mixture forward, and the men with the rakes leveled it. From above, on the television and through the window, the ground looked as if someone had knocked over a huge bucket of white paint onto it. An unfolding, soothing nothingness. A surface becalmed.
As with people, so things also had an inclination to vanish; they were by nature truant. The world below this one was accomplice to its own passing. It kept no names for its legion things; it had no sentiment for them. Boats and dead pets and lost shoes became layers of earth; wooden carts, yellow brick and stamped tin ceiling tiles, cherished knickknacks and empty liniment bottles and gutta-percha photograph cases and ceramic dolls with their painted eyes rubbed almost clean — all things cooperated with extinction; only people held them tight. He imagined with sudden clarity David Hollis aboard the spectral Commodore Walker, holding on through the wrack and smash of the storm, the water pouring down in sheets through gaps in the deck, and John felt his terror, his anticipation of release, the sound of ruin so near.
John collected a couple of books from the room and, for the last time, descended the thirty-three floors to the ground. When he left, the first shift of cement mixers was backing up onto Lakeshore Boulevard to make room for the next.
LOWINGER HAD LEFT before they began to pour. When he saw the cement trucks begin their stately march onto the grounds, he quickly shook Bridget’s hand and held his arm out to Marianne, but she refused it. Lowinger, in an awkward gesture of fellowship, tried to lean forward to squeeze her upper arm, but Marianne caught him in an embrace and he teetered against her, his ear against her mouth. Bridget did not hear what she said to the reporter, but when she released him he was nodding absently at her, enchanted or frightened or both.
The line of white trucks moved like metal elephants onto the site, and Bridget took her mother’s hand and pulled her finally away. In the hotel, Marianne paid the bill. The clerk behind the desk said, “I hope we’ll see you again.”
They went up silently to the thirty-third floor. Marianne’s face was gray and her eyes dull, and Bridget wanted to get her back to the house and make her something to eat. The business of letting go would begin in earnest now, and at last she felt ready to be child to this broken heart.
At the door, Bridget took the key card out of her mother’s hand and slipped it into its slot. The mechanism drew back smoothly and they went into the stale-smelling room. Under the scent of dried clementine skins there was now a persistent funk of unwashed laundry and sleeping bodies. The lights were already on.
Bridget saw Howard Rosen before her mother did. She’d only met him once before, but his long gray hair was too distinctive to forget. He’d risen with the sound of the door and was waiting patiently to be noticed, his arms at his sides. His presence here closed a circuit that had opened for Bridget when John told her he was not coming back to the hotel. Howard’s presence would provide both the question she could not formulate at that moment as well as its answer.
“Excuse me?” said Marianne, and Rosen stepped forward, holding out a key card of his own.
“John gave me this —”
“John?”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Bridget stepped forward. “This is Howard Rosen, Mum. John works for him.”
“I know who Howard Rosen is,” she said. “Why is he here? Why are you here? Where is John?”
Rosen lowered his still-outstretched arm to his side. The gesture told Bridget that there was an order to things that would have to be followed now and that Rosen would be deciding that order. “Could we all sit down for a moment?”
He retreated to Marianne’s bed and sat on the end of it, and Bridget pulled out the desk chair for her mother, who sat and looked about the room as if it were unfamiliar. “Are you going to answer my mother’s questions?” said Bridget. “Why isn’t John here?”
“He’s reduced me to errand bo
y,” said Rosen. He spread his hands to take in the room. “This is my errand.”
“And what is ‘this’?” said Marianne. She continued to scan the space for clues, taking inventory. She noticed an empty space on the desk. “Where’s my monograph?”
“He’s borrowed a couple of items. He’ll return them —”
“Borrowed?” She wagged a hand toward the phone. “Call him, Bridget.”
Rosen leaned forward on the bed, a hand out. “Marianne? Mrs. Hollis? Listen to me, please. You know what I do, yes?”
“You are a supposed writer.”
“Okay, that’s fair. I’ve been writing a play about an imaginary family for about seven years. I have no real model for such a thing. Actually, I have no idea why I ever chose it as my subject matter.”
“What do your failings have to do with anything, Mr. Rosen?”
“John never had a model either.” He reached down to the floor beside the bed and brought up what Bridget recognized as John’s shoulder bag. It frightened her to see it. He drew a thick manila envelope from it and handed it to Marianne. She stared at it in her palm.
“Where’s John?” she said toward the packet. She looked back up at their visitor. “I’d like to speak to John, Mr. Rosen. Many things have happened here today, and I don’t understand why he’s not here. When will he be here?”
“This is the end of something, Mrs. Hollis,” Rosen said. “You need to understand that.”
For a long moment no one moved, and then Marianne leaned down and put the manila envelope on the floor.
“Start with telling us where John is,” said Bridget.
“He’s left for the airport.”
“Goddamn it!” She went around her mother and strode to the window, hiding her face.
“He flies tonight for England.”
“What the hell for?” said Marianne.
“Research,” said Rosen. “That’s what he told me.”
Consolation Page 34
