by André Alexis
– Bong djoor, Mawnseer Dupwiss
and Franklin would answer
– ’morning, John
in what he thought of as Saskatchewanese.
Mr. Diefenbaker could be stubborn, narrow-minded, and thoughtless. He could be distant, preoccupied, a stickler for details that mattered to him alone or to his wife (the annual Christmas dinner for foreign students, for instance). And when he was annoyed, his remarks could be genuinely cruel. He was not flawless, but he hid his flaws from the public so well that there seemed to be two Diefenbakers. And those nearest him, the men and women who worked in his office, were more faithful to the public “Chief” than they were to the Diefenbaker for whom they actually worked.
Though Dief had often called him “witless,” “careless,” or “inane,” Franklin’s persistent memories of Mr. Diefenbaker were mostly agreeable. There was, for instance, an afternoon in summer when they walked together by the river. They’d taken egg salad sandwiches from the cafeteria and gone outside to eat. The sky was blue, the city almost white in sunlight, the river greenish and noisy. They stood wordlessly, uncomfortably proximate, regarding the modest sprawl of Hull, and then, when they’d finished eating, when Dief had rubbed a spot of mayonnaise from his lip, they walked along Wellington, the river on their right.
– And what are you going to do with yourself, Mr. Dupuis?
– I don’t know, said Franklin.
Mr. Diefenbaker looked at him as if he were suddenly interesting and asked, with faintly sulphureous breath
– Aren’t you a lawyer, Mr. Dupuis?
– Almost, sir.
– Then you’re halfway hanged already, Mr. Dupuis. You might as well finish the thing and take up politics.
The Diefenbaker who spoke these sweetly bitter words was, for Franklin, the Diefenbaker of Diefenbakers: a little gangly, square-faced, much of his curly hair still dark, with a shock of white, his voice a trifle shaky, his manner casual, but casual for the ages, as if historians lurked wherever he went. They spoke of other things that day, but Franklin particularly remembered the Chief’s kind advice, his mildly mocking tone, and sunlight that covered the city like quicklime.
Years later, Franklin took Dief’s advice.
He worked with Boluo and Associates in Ottawa, articling with the firm before becoming one of their junior corporate lawyers and, finally, deciding to run for office. He was a “junior” corporate lawyer, yes, but he had mentors from the business world as well as the political. Mr. Diefenbaker, for instance, allowed himself to be seen, smiling, in his vicinity, and Mr. Stanfield, leader of the Conservatives, had confidence in Franklin’s youth and his charisma. Franklin was restrained and thoughtful, personable and charming. He believed the Liberals were a nuisance, and he said so with conviction. He was, in other words, a flawless candidate and he should have won his riding (Ottawa West).
In fact, if he’d avoided Ottawa West, if he’d allowed his constituents to use their imagination, he might have won. Instead, inexperienced as he was, he chose to campaign among “his people,” without being certain who “his people” were. He went door to door, from Mechanicsville to Nepean, from the Ottawa River to Somerset, stepping into a host of foyers, smiling warmly, unable to disguise his own confidence, pleasing those who liked their politicians smug, alienating most others.
It was the year of Trudeau, it’s true, and Trudeau was at least as haughty as Franklin, but Franklin had no talent for the prickly phrase, words that would lodge in the minds and hopes of his constituents. His constituents: doughy faces in darkened interiors, moist hands, simple dresses, ruddy cheeks, hopeful smiles, worried frowns; homes smelling of onions, cabbage, wet shoes; filthy carpets and pebbled plastic doormats, lace doilies and low tables.
On Somerset, an old man, the front of his shirt soaked with the cocoa he drank from a proper porcelain teacup:
– I’m for you, boy. We haven’t voted anything but blue for forty years.
Off Carling, a black woman with bandages on her head, the fingers on one hand swollen to twice their size:
– Allayuh cyar come in.
On Nepean, a young couple, well dressed, living room in amber, smelling of pears, invited him in to speak of their money, their children’s education, their mortgage, their old age, smiling kindly:
– Du thé Monsieur Dupuis? Nous admirons tant notre Trudeau. because they mistook him for a Liberal, and were aghast to discover their mistake:
– Excusez-nous monsieur…Mais, quand même, les Conservateurs parlent pas français d’habitude.
Not all of his encounters were futile or mysterious or bitter, but they were all slightly unreal. Even those whose votes were assured seemed to be voting not for him, nor for his vision of the country. They were voting for the Great Mother, the dignified party, the one that had lifted Franklin up, brushed the lint from his clothes, and proudly sent him out. Of course, Franklin did not have a particularly personal vision of the country. He held to the party’s version of Canada, but what was this collection of faces, hands, and accents, of thresholds, doorways, and kitchens? What to make of the country that lurked behind this encounter with its citizens?
What was Canada?
On the evidence, it was a baggy and harmless hydra, a grey beast pulled from its wood-panelled lair by Trudeau, a man who dressed like a dandy and prattled like an academic, by Trudeau who, to his credit, wished the place were nobler than it was, nobler than it wished to be. Yes, that was the insight: a country like Canada, self-blind and addled by the cold, needed a visionary, a man to lead it from nothingness to nobility. Franklin had had no specific vision of the country or, if it comes to that, of his own riding, but he’d campaigned with the arrogance of one who did. Ambition had so clouded his mind, he had forgotten the basics: an identifiable position, relentless optimism, and good cheer.
He lost Ottawa West by five thousand votes to a Liberal drudge who feigned modesty, in victory, as gracelessly as Franklin, in defeat, feigned pride.
The painful truth was that, at the time, Franklin Dupuis had had nothing to offer save a vision of his own destiny. And what was this “vision,” exactly? Well, to begin with, it wasn’t quite a vision. It was a sense (one he’d had from childhood) that he was destined to leave an impression, to change the world. He was destined for “something” and this “something” had guided him until, the day after the election, he began to doubt the weight of his destiny and to question his own worth. Was he a great man? Was he the kind of man to whom vision came? Or was he dross? More confounding still was the fact of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. It seemed to Franklin that Trudeau had neither sought nor needed external proof of his own worth. Men like Trudeau drew strength from within, needing no one to feed them. That is, Franklin could not imagine Trudeau devastated (as Franklin had been) by his encounters with his constituents. And, if it came to “vision,” well, it seemed Trudeau did not have a vision but, rather, embodied a version of the world one could admire or disdain. He was his own vision. This idea, banal and, by Franklin, irrefutable, was so troubling it brought out the real abyss that had hidden behind his youthful nihilism. In the face of this, to save his soul, Franklin clung to the idea of his destiny and purpose.
If he had been an unexceptional man, a man with no sense of his own fate, Franklin might have taken heart in defeat. He might have renewed his attempts to win an election, butted his head against the door until he opened it. But, like many who feel “destined,” Franklin chose a form of exile. The next fifteen years were a wandering in the wilderness. He abandoned law, studied Russian, translated (for himself alone) the Life of Avvakum, and worked as a parliamentary secretary, working tirelessly, menially, for several Members of Parliament. His exile was lived beside the life he wanted, as a lackey to men who were what he thought he should have been.
Then a new age (or its possibility) glimmered.
Brian Mulroney was chosen to lead t
he Conservatives and, as if it had been waiting for Brian’s advent, something in Franklin came to life. Mulroney seemed wholly admirable and shared Franklin’s longing for a united party that acknowledged the differences among people but favoured those who had talent, integrity, destiny, regardless of class or station. With such a leader, if they won an election, the Conservatives might bring something of lasting value to the country: profitable co-existence.
In the months following Mulroney’s ascent to the head of the Conservative Party, optimism stole into Franklin’s soul, along with an inkling that his time and the party’s were twinned. They would rise together.
That is: if he did not yet know what his destiny looked like, he could at least hear its footsteps approaching.
So…
It was November 1983, and it was cold and Franklin was on Elgin, walking south, away from the Parliament Buildings. He was going to the studio of an acquaintance, Reinhart Mauer, to meet his friend, Edward. Perseus was well above the horizon and east of Perseus was Andromeda, swimming away from him and away from Cetus, who rose beneath them, as befits a sea monster.
Franklin was wearing a plain black coat, beneath which: a kangaroo jacket that gave him a bohemian allure. The hood of the jacket covered much of his forehead and his ears. (Franklin is a short man, but he has presence. His eyebrows are thick and dark; his nose large and hooked. His bottom lip is fleshy and makes for a slight pout. His cheekbones protrude; he is gaunt. His eyes are slightly sunken, but they are a beautiful brown.)
And what else?
The city smelled, faintly, of smoke.
{5}
IN REINHART’S STUDIO
–Sit still, Eddy, for the love of God.
Edward, dressed like a Venetian doge, stopped fidgeting, though the ermine cap made him itch and he was thoroughly bored. He was relieved Reinhart hadn’t asked him to pose nude, and grateful that Reinhart had tired of ecclesiastical subjects and crucifixions.
For some time now, he’d entered his friend’s studio with trepidation. In the service of Art, he’d spent hours naked, lashed to bicycles, burnt doors, or chicken wire while Reinhart painted. It was no longer amusing to see himself as Thief, Christ, or Pharisee. The thrill of being painted, if it had ever been thrilling, was long gone, but he sat still for friendship’s sake.
Ed Muir and Rein Mauer were as close as close siblings. Reinhart was a year older, but they’d met when he was three and Edward two, so the difference was only a slight impediment. Their parents, Muirs and Mauers, were friends, owned adjoining houses in Manor Park, and so abetted their sons’ friendship that Reinhart, who was taller and stronger, spent much of his early childhood protecting the slighter and more fractious Edward.
Edward had been born fractious. It seemed to his parents, who loved him, that he was also born cantankerous or that he became cantankerous moments after the doctor held him by the ankles and let him have it. You wouldn’t have called him an evil child, exactly. His parents called him “special” or “difficult,” though his difficulty lay less in what he did than what he did not: he rarely smiled, he did not like to be held, and he did not like toys (with the single exception of a wooden squirrel – ancient, its paint rubbed off long before it was given to him, not at all lovely).
Edward’s gloom permeated what had been a joyful home and dampened the mood, until the birth of his sister, Anne, and the beginning of his friendship with Reinhart, events that took place within months of each other. It wasn’t that Edward suddenly became outgoing or friendly, but he was both of those things, some of the time, with Reinhart, and he was both of those things, much of the time, around his little sister, whom, despite his temper, he adored. In fact, from the age of three to eighteen, when he first met Franklin Dupuis, Edward was somewhat spiteful, mean at times, but also thoughtful, optimistic, and, above all, loyal. He was fiercely devoted to his sister and to Reinhart, blindly loyal, unable to think anything but the best of those he loved. To Edward, Reinhart was, simply, a talented and generous man. Not that he was unaware of Reinhart’s peculiarities: Reinhart was preemptory. When he was on about something, when he was inspired, you couldn’t have a conversation with him. Reinhart was tireless. When he was inspired, Reinhart could go for days without bathing, eating, talking – not that unusual, save that he expected the same passion of Edward, Edward whose passions were more restrained. And, really, it was no picnic sitting for hours beneath a moth-eaten cape. Reinhart was homosexual. But Reinhart himself made so little of it, Edward imagined his homosexuality as a kind of drastic horsing around. Besides, Edward himself had ambivalent feelings for women. He was heterosexual, and loved the smell of women, but something in him could not stand the emotional clutter sex brought, the gratitude (his, hers), the exhausting late-night condolences, the “when next?” and “is this it?” He had not found the woman with whom he could build a nest, with whom he could live forever and ever, amen, and he often wondered if she mightn’t be easier to find if she were male. This being the case, he saw his friend’s proclivities in a flattering light: Reinhart chose his sexual partners rationally. That is, he slept with men because they were easier to get along with.
Reinhart was almost as devoted to Edward, devotion springing from similarity. For instance, both had been dour, inward children. They’d spent hours together doing nothing at all, at ease with talk or silence, and this habit of ease never left them. That’s not to say their affection for each other was untested. Painting divided them.
Reinhart had always loved to draw and had, from the time he could hold a pencil, scribbled on the paper his parents gave him. At first he drew without meaning to draw, mindlessly tracing the horses in racing forms or the faces in Redbook and Chatelaine. You wouldn’t have said he was interested in Art. He was unimpressed by the books his parents bought him, flipping through the monographs on van Gogh, Monet, and Seurat as if they didn’t concern him. And then, at eleven, without prompting, Reinhart began to read about Art, to drag his parents to the National Gallery. Everything changed. Over the next ten years, he spent hours in the National Gallery, studying the early work: El Greco, Rubens, Hals. At fifteen, he began to dress in his own version of finery: dark capes, frilled shirt fronts, narrow pants, bowler hats, anything his indulgent parents allowed, anything that caught Reinhart’s eye on their rare visits to a costume shop in Toronto. For a time, he even affected an Italian accent, in honour of Masaccio, Giotto, Spinello Aretino…names read in books on the Renaissance, their works poorly reproduced in old monographs about old churches.
What inspired this mania for painting, Reinhart himself couldn’t have said. The blue of a Poussin sky (in reproduction), the trees in a Fra Angelico (in reproduction), the curve of a shoulder in an otherwise dull Pontormo (yes, ditto)? Or was it the sky itself, or a colour wheel from Lefranc & Bourgeois, or the soapy smell of a boy he’d decimated? Whatever it was, his devotion was happy, slightly obsessive, and it pushed his gloom aside. By the time he finished high school, Rein Mauer lived more comfortably with the dead, with Brunelleschi and Dürer, Holbein and Alberti, than with the living. His contemporaries and their concerns were an unwanted distraction.
He studied architecture at Carleton, but only to please his parents, who worried that painting would not help him to pay the rent. He was not an architect. He didn’t care for the fashionable modernism of Le Corbusier or Sullivan. His taste ran to things older. Yes, his knowledge of materials, physics, math, and design was impeccable, but what architect could take Reinhart’s world of domes, towers, marble, and wood seriously? He was, perhaps, sadly, a little out of step with the times? Yes. He was, to his own detriment, obstinate? Yes. But what of it? It was painting that moved him, not architecture, and no one who heard him speak of this or that painter (Max Beckman, say, or Franz Marc), of this or that technique (egg tempera on stone or paraffin encaustic with northern umber), could doubt the depth of his passion.
Reinhart had given his soul to paintin
g.
From early on, Edward was Reinhart’s preferred model. For Edward, the “privilege” was, at first, flattering and sometimes tiring. He did not begrudge Reinhart the hours, but the nudity, stillness, and contortions of modelling were made bearable only by his admiration and respect for Reinhart. He did not think Art worth the suffering, though he would have said he did, if Reinhart had asked. It would have felt disloyal, otherwise. On the other hand, it occurred to him, every now and then, that in being dishonest he was also being disloyal. How to resolve the matter?
* * *
—
– What’s wrong, Eddy? I can see you thinking.
– Can we call it a night? This hat’s itching. Besides, Franklin should be here any time.
They had been at it for an hour. The sky was black and from his window Reinhart could see the three-quarter moon.
– Why don’t we go on ’til Franklin gets here? he asked.
{6}
ARS LONGA VITA BREVIS
– Why don’t we go on ’til Franklin gets here?
The sky was black and from the window of the studio you could see the moon. Reinhart’s studio was in a square, decrepit building on Argyle, near Elgin. On the ground floor, the Spanish ambassador kept a modest suite of offices whose purpose was obscure: no one ever entered, no one left. The rest of the building, whose elevator worked only in winter, was given over to studios, storage, and lofts.
As it was not quite winter, Franklin walked up to Reinhart’s studio and knocked on the metal door. He heard a muffled phrase, then nothing. He was about to knock again when the door swung out and open.
– Yes? asked Reinhart.
Franklin looked up and smiled.
