“Uri doesn’t believe in the mystical,” said Hannah, “not the way we do.” She sighed and flapped her silk sleeves. Her hair fell loose. “The world is nothing if not mystery. You and I know that. Bucky knows it: the sun, the moon, the stars. Bebop and jitterbugs.” She squeezed Frankie’s hand.
“Uri says a building earns its aura, or doesn’t, by the hand of its creator—not the Creator.” Hannah sat back in her seat.
It was true: Frankie believed in mystery, even if he didn’t want to.
* * *
—
On a visit to check on his houses, he spied envelopes poking out of each rusting mailbox. The notice had arrived: expropriation. Then, not long after, four cheques, each made out to Frank Hanesaka. He handed over his deeds and deposited his windfall. Now he could invest in a proper metal shredder.
And from that, he’d soon have enough to finance his high-rise apartments: his Tomorrow Living for Today.
In the marshy backyard of the Kidney, miraculously, the irises began to poke their heads above the pond, gulping the air and sunlight. In a week or two they were sprouting anew. “Lovely!” uttered Hannah, squeezing Frankie’s hand. He’d almost forgotten the rich purple of them, how regally they stood. It was as if the flowers were assenting to his plans.
Then one morning, Reiko gave him a look that said yes. She was pregnant again.
He told his mother. She studied Reiko’s walk, looked her over. Hannah, in her way, did the same.
“Boy,” his mother announced.
“Frank, it’s a boy!” Hannah declared.
“A boy!” Frankie repeated. The feel of it bouncing from his mouth, the sound of it in the air! A body was sprouting—a being—and he’d planted it.
Guinea Pig F wasn’t just going round on his exercise wheel. He was climbing, rung by rung.
* * *
—
Frankie surfaced from the basement to find Uri Slonemsky bowing repeatedly. “Frank. Just the man I need,” he said as he straightened up. Would Frankie help smooth the path to a deal with the Japanese manufacturing firm, Minamoto Electric?
A little instruction, a few words in Japanese?
“Yes, sir!” Gladly!
The project on which Uri Slonemsky had set his sights suited the architect to a T, if not an M: a building to house the first Canadian office of Minamoto Electric. As an admirer of Uri’s gold-dusted skyscraper, Mr. Minamoto contacted him from his Tokyo headquarters. Mr. Minamoto had adapted the company’s wartime munitions production to the manufacture of small appliances. Japan’s postwar rehabilitation under American occupation was complete, and Minamoto Electric was ready to expand into North America with an arsenal of shavers, steam curlers, toasters and transistor radios.
Frankie bowed low to Uri—low enough to expose the back of his neck. Like so. “The samurai demonstrates trust and honour in this way,” he told Uri. Trust that his counterpart won’t behead him.
“Eyes downcast,” Frankie instructed.
“Ah, yes.”
The two men took turns bowing to one another. “You’ve been a help already, Frank,” Uri said with a final bow.
But it was Uri along with Hannah helping Frankie, laying down stepping stones for him to climb up from the basement.
Frankie’s rusting Japanese had very little metal left under its tarnished surface. He practised some phrases and bowed to himself in the mirror. But no matter: he and Mr. Minamoto were in the same business. The business of making livingry out of weaponry, as Bucky might say. Frankie’s yard was now brimming with scrap recovered from the South Pacific. The metal arrived by ship, departing from the same Yokohama dock as Frankie’s mother and the Priest did all those decades ago. The foundation of his enterprise and now Uri’s had come to rest on the rubble of Japan’s defeated military: its rusting flying contraptions for suicide missions with their piggy-back cockpits for the doomed pilots. Salvaged from land, sea and obsolete hangars throughout the former empire. The machines would be reincarnated as the suicide pilots had hoped to be, but in the forms of fuse boxes and money boxes, girders and railings, street lamps and smokestacks, bicycle frames and elevators, even airplane parts—anything made of metal.
As it turned out, Mr. Minamoto spoke excellent English. When Frankie and Uri bowed, he stepped forward and held out his hand to shake—to Uri, but not to Frankie.
The M in Minamoto, he explained, stood for modern. Japan had long led all of Asia in modernizing its people and industries. This was why he had chosen Uri Slonemsky to be his architect. He’d seen photographs of Mr. Slonemsky’s soaring Towers of Finance with their shimmering panels of gold glass. He wanted modern, sleek and streamlined with the soaring possibilities of a new postwar world.
It was the future that Mr. Minamoto wanted. Frankie understood: Tomorrow Living for Today.
What Uri Slonemsky proposed was a form that was neither up nor down nor across, but angled skyward, outward. Like a jet plane taking off. Ascension.
* * *
—
Frankie found a suitable lot for the offices of Minamoto Electric in the northwest end of the city. In summers past, you could pick your own strawberries there. The farmer had left his berries to rot in the autumn sun; too many planes were streaking too low overhead in and out of the nearby airport. Frankie offered the old man his handshake, an invitation to sell, and his new business card. There were no impressive initials after his name, but with a new career launching, the card felt substantial in his hand and in his wallet.
“Hanesaka,” the farmer pronounced slowly and studied Frankie, looking him up and down. “What kind of name is that?”
“A good name,” Frankie said, forcing himself to stand tall in his suit and meet the farmer’s eyes. “The name of a man who stands by his word.” The farmer shook his head and crossed his arms. No. He wanted to sell to someone who’d farm the land just as he had and his father before him. And he wouldn’t sell to people who’d nearly starved his brother in a POW camp.
Uri visited a week later. The farmer scrutinized his card too. He hemmed and hawed until Uri increased the offer. Then he accepted.
* * *
When Reiko introduced Frankie to his newborn son, he immediately peeked under the baby’s diaper. There it was, of course, faint but unmistakeable: an inky pool between the buttocks. Surely his son’s Mongolian spot would fade and shrink as it should.
For weeks, he delayed naming the boy. Until one morning, he brought his mother to Reiko’s side.
“Uri,” he announced. The sound of it embarrassed him at first, and it dismayed Reiko as she held the infant in her arms. Momoye snorted indifferently. He was more creature than boy: tufts of hair sprung from his head; forehead to ankle, his body was furred. But his eyes: his eyes were wholly human—round and searching. Reiko kept nudging his chin, meeting his eyes with hers as if to say, Here, look here.
The thought of their son being Uri Slonemsky’s namesake—would people call Frankie a kowtower?
He didn’t mind being a kowtower to Uri Slonemsky; he was envious, yes, but he’d learned so much in the man’s wake. He’d once watched Mr. Koga and Mr. Fung, who knew little and did more wrong than right. But Uri Slonemsky did things right, and knew it all.
Frankie said his son’s name aloud, this time tapping the r and with a Y in front to make it Yu-ri, a Japanese name. For the boy’s second name: “Richard,” Bucky’s first name, which might in time become the name printed on Yuri’s business cards. Frankie patted the bundle in Reiko’s arms.
He named himself too. Already Hannah had christened him Frank, a man, not a boy, nor anyone’s servant. On his newly printed business card, raised letters that he could feel with his fingertip made it official:
FRANK HANES
Slonemsky & Associates Architects
He’d severed the “aka” from the end of him, the tail that would drag him down.
* * *
—
Construction began in late summer, the ground broken by di
nosaur backhoes with long necks and gouging jaws; cement poured out of churning mixers to fill the gaping hole.
Mr. Minamoto returned to Toronto, this time with his second-in-command Mr. Yamamoto, who walked the perimeter of the base with its protruding steel rods, stomping the concrete as he went.
“Very good,” he said. The man gave a wide, crooked-toothed smile to Uri and Frankie. “The meaning of the last half of my name is foundation, so I have made this my specialty.” He gave a little laugh.
Mr. Minamoto was pleased with the progress of the construction. “Thank you very much,” he said, bowing deeply to Uri Slonemsky, who bent awkwardly in return. Mr. Minamoto was saluting Uri’s intelligence and talent, and his being a Jew. “Jews survive,” he said, “as do Japanese.” He himself had survived the war and prison. His family survived the atomic bomb. When he emerged, he understood how the world had changed, and he would survive that too.
“There is a new war to be waged in the marketplace,” Mr. Minamoto declared.
“A war?” Uri raised an eyebrow.
Through fall and winter, the two towers rose quickly. By late spring, they were linked by two glass-enclosed escalators, each slanting down at forty-five degrees to meet at the base. From the nearby highway and intersecting concession road, one could see the giant letter M forming, sunlit by day; by night, lit up and down each of its lengths.
Mr. Minamoto and Mr. Yamamoto returned months later to survey the progress. At the end of the visit, Frankie drove Mr. Minamoto to the airport, leaving behind his second-in-command. Mr. Minamoto turned ruefully to Frankie. “It’s regrettable that your family left Japan.”
To which Frankie could only nod.
“Our country will be strong again.” Mr. Minamoto instructed Frankie to pull over. Through the window, Mr. Minamoto gazed back across the razed strawberry field at the new Canadian outpost of Minamoto Electric.
“What do you see?” he asked Frankie.
“M,” Frankie said. “Minamoto. Your name.”
“Do you know the name?”
Frankie didn’t but he nodded dutifully; no doubt it was a prominent clan in Japan.
“It means the source. The origin.”
The building was rising with steel beams and cased in glass. Far from the wood and paper dwellings cindered during the firebombing of Japanese cities. Across the field, a pictogram was taking shape in the deepening dusk. What Mr. Minamoto saw was two men bowing deeply to one another. Over the coming months, he would return with his lieutenants, the salarymen, who would work quietly, dutifully, to ensure Japan’s new rise in the years to come.
“Drive on,” he told Frankie.
* * *
—
Then it was Frankie’s turn to lay a stepping stone at Uri Slonemsky’s door. He drove Uri to the foot of the city to show him the lot at the shore of Lake Ontario. Uri paced its perimeter just as Frankie’s mother had.
“You own this?” he asked.
“Me and the bank,” Frankie answered. He didn’t mention Hannah, though she was the bank. He presumed it to be another something kept between them.
Uri studied him, as if in a new light, then turned to the lake. The bright light turned the water tropical sea blue, and the trees on the adjacent islands were a lush emerald. Yet to the east of the lot were the dirty silos of the flour mill and the sugar refinery. Farther along to the west was an old fishing boat and dock whose owner wouldn’t sell, then the ferry terminal for the islands. And there were the three rusted tanks on the lot itself.
“That’s a lot of land to garden,” Uri remarked. They both laughed.
“What do you see here, Frank?”
“Tomorrow Living for Today,” said Frankie. He bounced on his toes just as Uri would, but nervously. Held his arms out toward the water. “Apartments. With a view.” Frankie had been reading about the city Chairman, a man bent on skyscrapers and expressways. High-density City Living! A bold man.
Uri studied Frankie ever more closely. Was he seeing through him? Seeing what he shouldn’t see, or should see: that he wasn’t just a gardener, he was a man with ideas and gumption.
“The zoning would have to be changed,” said Uri.
“Yes.”
“I could talk to the Chairman. Just to feel things out.”
Of course Uri knew the Chairman. Big Daddy, as he was called, even in the newspapers. The way could be paved; investors could be convinced. After all, shipping was moving to the bigger suburban ports, out near Frankie’s scrapyard. This could all be a new neighbourhood for people to live and work. More than a neighbourhood: a city within a city.
Frankie held out his hand to Uri Slonemsky to shake on their partnership, and all his practice made it the firmest handshake of his life.
* * *
—
The Chairman was a metropolis of a man, sprawling and dense. He pulled a flask of whisky from his breast pocket.
“You see that?” the Chairman shouted, pointing at nothing in particular across Frankie’s empty lot.
At his side, Frankie nodded emphatically, dizzying himself: He saw it, yes siree, Mister Chairman!
Port Alberni had never had a chairman. Its two-bit mayor had only given Frankie the time of day to herd him and his kind first off the land, then off the water, and then out of town.
The Chairman held up his arms to embrace the breadth of space on either side of them. “The Yanks will see our scrapers clear across from Rochester. Lit up at night, on fire!” He slapped Frankie hard on the back, whisky-breath gusting him forward.
Back at City Hall, the Chairman reached low into his desk for a bottle of single malt Scotch whisky. Finer stuff than Canadian Club, Frankie guessed.
“Frank, my boy!” The Chairman clinked Frankie’s glass hard.
The Chairman spun round and leaned in. “The city’s shrinking at the core and bursting at the seams. We have to build up and then out,” he declared. He spread his arms even wider to be understood. “That’s the master plan.”
“Up and out,” Frankie echoed after catching his breath. He downed another glass. Inside the ice cube crackling at the bottom, he thought he saw his reflection.
“It’s like a garden here at City Hall, Frank,” he said. “It’ll need a little fertilizer to get things growing.”
After a top-off and then the one-for-the-road presently raised to his lips, Frankie was red and tingling, and swaying. The Chairman’s eyes were a colour Frankie couldn’t name, between brown, green, even yellow under his thick, flaring brows. The Chairman rubbed his thumb against two fingertips. Then he winked. “Fertilizer,” he repeated.
In a second, Frankie was ushered out to the bright, garish hallway. Others were waiting for their audience.
The Chairman leaned out to give a thumbs-up sign before slamming the door.
Frankie wended his way up Bay Street, fists tight and thumbs up, fighting to keep himself on the straight and narrow. He could see it in his mind’s eye: before long, trunks of concrete would rise higher and thicker than any forest, foundations riveted deep in the ground so they couldn’t be felled. One next to the other, unmovable, unshakeable. Instead of Bloedel, Stewart and Welch on Port Alberni’s waterfront, it would be Frank, Frank and Frank on Toronto Harbour. He laughed and snorted on the dark, empty street. He could hail a cab, like Uri did: a flick of the wrist in the air. Let someone else do the driving; the wrist-flicking too, for that matter! He had enough bills in his pocket—not nickels and dimes. He had deeds. Up and out. Yes siree!
But he reached the Kidney the way he’d gotten most places—at least without his bicycle: one foot in front of the other. He headed to the basement without a stumble even when he hopped from the third step to the fifth to miss the bad-luck fourth. In his new home, he laughed to himself, there would be no fourth step.
* * *
—
Uri and Big Daddy Chairman did pave the way. Like the mill owners, the Chairman was a top-rung man who could corner the market, pile the timber high and
keep the workers working below. Before long, the backhoes and diggers and bulldozers and cranes came in, the dump trucks hauled away the scrapped tanks to Frankie’s warehouses, and the foundation was laid. Salesmen spread out their wares of tiles and carpets, countertops and panels of wood before Uri and Frankie, sealing their deals. Frankie wore a hard hat with his name on it and inspected the site at Uri’s side, every detail big and small as the building went up, so nothing would come down.
Tomorrow Living for Today High-Rise Apartments was not quite as high or as tomorrow as Frankie or Uri had hoped. But its simple, sleek form rose alongside the silos and rubble and a lone, stranded fishing boat. Bucky suggested a revolving dome perched on its roof, to house a restaurant, perhaps, something like a circular house Bucky had once designed around a single mast in its centre.
“A dizzy notion,” the Chairman snorted when Frankie mentioned it. Frankie knew precisely what Bucky would say, giving back a snort of his own: But Mister Chairman! Spaceship Earth is spinning at its equator at a thousand miles an hour and orbiting the sun at one million miles each day. Are you dizzy now?
It was Frankie’s idea to present a rose to every lady who attended the opening of the sales model of Tomorrow Living Apartments. “A corsage,” insisted Reiko. “A rose corsage.”
The renting, however, was left to the real estate agent. It wouldn’t do for Frankie to show his face there. The morning of the open house, he spread out the newspaper for his mother. The advertisement took up a quarter of the page, with his tower sketched at water’s edge. It had cost him a lot to buy that quarter-page, but the Chairman had insisted.
His mother touched each word there with her calloused fingertip, as Frankie read it aloud for her:
NOW RENTING:
Tomorrow Living High-Rise Apartments Canada’s Largest Apartment House Project!
Floating City Page 15
