Finally he stopped a passerby—elderly, he realized—on a bicycle. “Anne Slonemsky?” the man repeated. No, but an Annie Slone was one or two streets over.
Had she cut off her tail just as he had?
He stepped onto another bridge—or was it the same one? Across it, he found himself before a hutch transplanted from someone’s dining room, studded with nails from which hung dresses on wire hangers, pants, shirts, a sweater still holding the rumpled shape of its wearer. Boots dangling from their laces. Toys sitting on a ledge. Flapping in the wind was a woman’s grey blouse. He recognized it, Annie’s camouflage. Before he could touch it, a hand reached from behind to whisk it away. Had he really seen the blouse or imagined it? Dishes and cups rattled as the owner of the hand rummaged on the other side. Tacked to the front of the hutch was a handwritten sign:
WALK A MILE IN MY SHOES—OR DRESS, OR PANTS OR SHIRT FOR FREE!
Then the figure emerged: a woman. She wore glasses, and her hair was like Annie’s, but dulled by greys in the sunlight, its coils unsprung. She looked up.
“Hello, Frank,” she said. “Good to see you.”
He stepped close, smelling pine and cigarettes, and held out a firm hand to shake.
* * *
—
Annie had a cottage to herself, small as it was. It was surrounded by other cottages on tiny plots of wildflowers, grasses and dirt. There was no concrete or bricks out her window, and no lush isle of irises.
Through Annie’s years in Montreal, her mother had sometimes mentioned Frank in letters. But Annie hadn’t thought of him much beyond that—only when she contemplated her father, his love of beauty and his refusal to see her as she was. Only then did she recall Frank, who clearly worshipped Uri, and his clumsy attempts to mould himself in her father’s image, groomed by Hannah.
But not until she’d encountered him two weeks ago outside the tower, his tower, the children all around, did he settle into her. After that, she thought only of him, and remembered what she’d forgotten: that his son had died in a mysterious accident.
Now she found herself grateful to see him. In spite of the wall he’d built. She remembered his hair boyishly flapping down in his eyes.
He was lost. She knew the look of lost in the eyes, in the slump of shoulders. She’d seen it in workers worn down by the sameness and solitude of the tasks they’d been given, with no end or goal in sight, no value conferred on them. But surely he’d had value heaped on him, and stored in the bank.
“How are my parents?” she asked. He looked up in surprise. No, she explained, they didn’t know she was living here. It was the first lie, the first secret kept from Uri and Hannah: she’d closed the door to them while living in the same house. She’d meant to tell them. But days had gone by since she’d been here, then weeks, months, then suddenly a year.
“Hannah isn’t well,” he said in his taciturn way.
“She never was,” Annie said.
* * *
—
In his expensive coat and suit, no doubt chosen by her mother, Frankie slumped on Annie’s sagging couch, fast asleep. He was tired, he told her, before asking to sit. She recalled he was a man of few words, and that had been much for him to convey. So very tired.
At sunset, she lit candles and thought of Hannah and Uri. She always felt generous and endowed at the wick’s first flaming, with light enough to last.
Frankie woke to darkness. The last ferry to the city was long gone.
“It’s all right,” she told him, and he fell right back to sleep. His hair was still so thick and dark, she noticed, but the moonlight through the window turned it silver. In fact he did have a tuft of grey above his temple, to trick this trick of light. She covered him with a blanket and went to bed.
When he rose at last, it was morning. He wandered outside, found a rake and began cleaning the leaves and weeds from the yard. Through the small open window at the back of the house, he glimpsed Annie sitting cross-legged on her bed, very still with eyes closed. He heard her speak: Flee and be silent, in a brilliant flame, alone, fearful and trembling. Then nothing: silence. He got on with his work.
Flee and be silent, he thought as he gathered up stray bricks, pieces of wood and shingle. He ventured out on the path leading to the shore and, from there, gazed at the city. His eyes followed the shore west. Somewhere along there, Baby Yuri had given himself to the water.
Annie appeared on the path behind him. “Do you like it here, Frank?”
He nodded. “Yes, I do.”
“They say isolation is helpful to the soul.”
“What else do they say?” He gave a weak smile. He’d never felt so isolated before.
“The Kabbalists teach that the mystery of life will unfold to the contemplative mind.”
He took a deep breath. It wasn’t in his nature to wait. But for now he didn’t know what else he could do.
“You can stay for a while if you need to. Though my parents may be expecting you back, with me in tow.”
Abruptly Frankie glanced up. He hadn’t planned on telling her that Uri had sent him, not yet. Annie smiled.
“Thanks,” he said. He had a bit of cash, some cheques in his pocket and the suit on his back. He’d noticed some hand-me-down clothes at the hutch that might fit, and there was her couch.
He wasn’t Frank, he told her. “Call me Frankie.”
* * *
—
Annie looked at herself in the mirror for the first time in weeks and dragged a comb through the tangled nest of her hair. She dabbed on some lipstick, then wiped it off.
She’d become what they called an old maid, a spinster. Thirty had come and gone; forty had just passed. Her youth was no real loss. Hannah had always been the shining beauty; even with age, she naturally drew attention in any room. Annie knew her parents could never admire their plain daughter as much as they admired each other.
As a girl, Anne had read their story, not in words but pictures: her parents’ modest wedding ceremony, rabbi-less, in a friend’s apartment, her mother in a chic jacket and skirt of purple silk, a matching veiled headpiece and short, white gloves. In each photograph, Uri’s head turned away from the camera, his eyes for only Hannah: worshipful, incredulous, assuring himself, Yes, she is yours.
Annie had been left to wonder: Will a boy ever look at me that way?
If the two of them could see her now, lumpish and lumpen. Gone to seed as she collected flower bulbs to plant in her unruly garden.
* * *
—
With rusted tools and parts he found abandoned across the island, Frankie fixed the splintered window frames on Annie’s cottage and nailed down some loose shingles on the roof. That night, he dabbed the dirt from his good suit as best he could and washed out his shirt, hanging it by the wood-burning stove to dry for tomorrow’s work. After Annie had gone to bed, he washed his underwear too. He gazed out the window at the dark shadows of trees and houses huddled along the dirt path. Across the lake, the lights of the tower would be shining above the city.
He half-woke to a bulldozer’s growl. As if he were back in the Fujimotos’ attic amid the razing of half of Cabbagetown, with all the years ahead to be lived over again.
Outside, Annie was shouting. He ran out, bleary-eyed.
“Stop him!” She turned to Frankie in desperation.
A bulldozer rumbled toward the small house behind. A woman, her children huddled close in blankets, stood outside it, not moving. The driver waved a paper in his hand and shouted, even as he kept rolling closer.
Frankie pulled the woman and her children aside as the bulldozer crushed one side of the house.
“What is wrong with you?” Annie shouted. The wall buckled and crumpled. She strode up to the driver, who thrust the paper at her.
An eviction notice, signed by some city official. She reached down and took all the papers from the cab and threw them to the wind.
“It’s no use,” the mother called back to Annie. She led her two
children, a boy and a girl, off to a neighbour’s home.
Frankie spotted more of the signs he’d seen before: SAVE OUR HOMES!
“They’ve been trying to chase everyone off for years,” Annie told him. “Decades.” Since the island’s heyday when there’d been a hotel, theatre, dance hall. Carnivals with diving horses. All gone now, along with three hundred or more homes. First to make way for an airport.
“Where will they go?” Frankie asked.
“I don’t know.” Annie threw up her arms and sighed. She looked as if she might cry. “You could do something.”
“I don’t know what,” he said. He shrugged helplessly. “I’m sorry.
“It’s the expressway and the high-rises that took away future parkland. That’s why they want all this back.”
She stared hard at him. “Maybe everyone could move into those fancy apartments,” she said bitterly, then walked away.
“They couldn’t afford it,” Frankie muttered.
Later that day, he found her returning with a swarm of people. The little girl whose house had been mowed down scampered past. On the ground, more eviction notices thrown to the wind.
“City Council called them off,” Annie said, “for now, at least.” She gave a conciliatory smile and even cheerfully hooked her arm in his as they walked back. “For now the sun is shining.”
The rest of the day passed quickly, as days here did with chores to do, broken by lunch and dinner. They glanced up at each other every so often, though they had no words to exchange.
After Annie went to sleep, Frankie walked the path over the bridge, past the weeping willows to the shore. It had begun to snow.
He watched the snow taken by the wind over the water. He glimpsed a small, white swaddled mass suspended over the surface, held there as he held his breath. No one else could see this, he knew. Yuri, my Yuri. It rose higher, then unspooled in all directions, shaking off what it must have gathered up.
* * *
—
Until Frankie showed up, Annie had been taking the ferry each morning to stand shoulder to shoulder with the mothers beneath Cloud Tower, giving flyers to passersby, even tourists. She’d been absent since, so she rose early one November morning to rejoin the other women. Frankie was still sleeping and she scribbled him a note.
A few mothers were already there chatting about their children—something done or said to laugh or shake their heads at. Annie smiled at them and busied herself with assembling the flyers and placards. She’d once sewn children’s shirts in a factory and, whenever she finished one, she’d tried to imagine buttoning it on some tiny being. Someone belonging to her.
When school let out, Annie went with some of the mothers to collect their children. They were polite, mostly, and fell into a line behind her just as their picketing mothers did. They were used to not getting what they’d learned not to want. On the march back, Annie rewarded them with candies.
“Miss,” one said, tugging on Annie’s sleeve. The girl stuck out a bright red tongue. “Miss, look at mine!” another said: a green tongue. Annie laughed. A boy slipped his soft, tiny pillow of a hand into hers, oblivious to his effect on her. Had she once been a delightful little being like this to Uri and Hannah?
Then a mother held out a crumpled candy wrapper. “Miss,” she said. “We don’t have money for dentists.”
Annie hadn’t thought of that. She apologized and emptied her candy-filled pockets into the garbage, fingers sticky with shame. She fled around the tower away from the mothers and children, and wept.
All the women she’d tried to help with her picketing and petitions, their heads down at their machines in airless firetraps, some younger than her with children of their own. She hadn’t helped them. All they’d wanted and needed was to keep their jobs. She remembered being summoned by the foreman to the office from the factory floor, away from the zum-zum of the machines. Inside, overlooking the workers, the noise was muffled. Below, kerchiefed heads were down, necks bent over, hands moving robotically over and over. He spit at her feet. Troublemaker, riling everybody up! You can’t sew a stitch. She told him she was leaving. He dusted off his hands, pushed her back into the roaring cavern. Good riddance, Annie Slone!
Yes, good riddance. The hypocrisy of Anne Slonemsky, Jew of Rosedale, trading in her name to labour alongside the humble factory worker.
* * *
—
Frankie was sitting on the couch when she got back, looking more lost than ever. His face red and puffed. His good suit fraying at the seams. He was bursting with sorrow. She sat down by his side, let his head drop to her shoulder to absorb his dry sobs. “It’s all right,” she told him.
She let him rest with her that night, let him hold her until he fell away, asleep. She studied him there, his head on her pillow, hair so black, so thick and resilient. His brows darkly shading his eyes. Who was he to deserve her comfort? A rich man whose riches made others poorer, when he should have known better, having been one of the poor himself. But she would not deny him.
A copper red moon shone through the window. A lunar eclipse on the first day of winter: a wonder.
“Come look, Frankie,” she whispered in his ear as she slipped out of bed.
He woke to Annie bundling herself in a blanket. She put his coat around him, led him outside and stood him under the brilliant coppery moon. It was veined and awash with spirits passing through it. In moments, the moon turned raw, casting red everywhere.
He stumbled forward and fell; his heart tripped. The cold clogged his breath and scraped his throat. Now his eyes were clouding as he got up: all he saw was the red, red moon. His head was full, the inside straining against its shell. He eased himself back to the ground. Blood in the snow: his unborn taken, Baby Yuri taken, Yas, Taiji.
Annie knelt beside him. She touched his face. He felt tears coursing down, scorching. The hands that wiped his tears chapped red.
CHAPTER 15
Metaphysical Gravity
F or my days vanish like smoke; my bones burn like glowing embers.
He’d read that somewhere. On a gravestone in Tashme or the Necropolis in Cabbagetown. What could Frankie have known of his son? He didn’t know himself at that age. Just hunger and whimsy, nothing that made sense, at least to Frankie.
“He suffered,” Frankie said, choking. The burning cold, the frost splintering his boy’s breath, like a blade into wood. Annie could only press herself close. There was no denying.
Baby Yuri had been a tiny bud of secrets. In fleeting moments before he’d squirm from his father’s hold, Frankie had felt his own wilfulness to root them out, his inability to just let the boy be.
At the mortuary, he used chopsticks to place what had been found of Baby Yuri’s bones into a small urn, which he brought to the island now.
* * *
Frankie read and reread every letter Bucky had ever sent him. He closed his eyes to search Bucky’s through the thick of his glasses, to see him in that familiar pose with his eyes shut in contemplation, fingertips tenting the air. His voice was always somewhere in Frankie’s head, and now Frankie was waiting for an answer to the very challenge Bucky posed: So, Mr. Industry. The world awaits your initiative.
Should he take down the wall? To see the wrecking ball swoop across the sky and into it. Giant clouds of rubble rising up and raining down. Sunlight pouring in over the tenement buildings; children at their windows. The lake open wide to the city. But that was impossible.
No, he could not undo what he had done.
What should he do now? Frankie asked himself, over and over.
The things that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done.
* * *
—
A taxi sped Frankie from the Montreal airport onto a bridge crossing the St. Lawrence River. A forest sprawled across the island below, giving way to a rectangular block of oddly shaped buildings, some resembling the models he’d first seen in the Kidney. At the far edge of it
rose a huge latticed dome.
“Come aboard, Frank! It will hold.” Frankie squinted twenty feet up at Bucky climbing high as a spider scaling its own web, singing: Just give me a home in a great circle dome, where the stresses and strains are at ease!
So Frankie did climb aboard. Each metal rung a nine-inch-diameter tube under his foot, each joint in his hands, stable. The sun glinted off its subdivided triangles upon triangles curving into its spherical form. He glanced back down. They’d built the pavilion over water for the World’s Expo. They’d filled in the island site for Bucky to assemble—in days!—a model Spaceship Earth, a 250-foot-diameter geodesic dome floating over the fairgrounds; a giant glowing, sparkling blossom of a planet. He, Frankie Hanesaka, was aboard, whirling in his own uncertain orbit as he rode the vessel. It was no home on the range. It was a home in a dome!
Roam home to a dome
no banker would back with a dime
no mortgage to show
no payments to go
where you dream, dwell and spend your own time,
Bucky warbled.
Later they sat on the ground inside the dome with a bottle of wine and some bread and cheese. Frankie gazed up through the many triangles framing the sky. It was as if he were seeing the world reshaped, through Bucky’s eyes and by his restless ingenuity.
“It’s time to step into the twentieth century, Frank,” Bucky told him. He frowned. “I have seen your towers. There is no advantage in thermally and aerodynamically inefficient cuboid skyscrapers,” he said. “You’re using Stone Age logic.” Bucky gave him a very gentle pat on his arm.
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