I shook my head. “Ain’t so.”
Adam looked back at the TV, stared blankly.
“Maybe there’s too much. Maybe nobody can get their head around it.”
A commercial broke the rhythm of the fourth inning.
“Shakespeare, Hemingway, none of them could handle it. Too big.” I looked at him. “I’ll get us a beer, right?”
Adam just looked at me. We were both thinking thoughts that couldn’t be formed into sentences.
I touched his shoulder as I got up and went into the kitchen.
That night I dreamed of my father as a young man, thirtyish, acting in a play, in something like summer stock. His sleeves were rolled up and his biceps were strong. That’s all I can remember.
I have no idea what the dream meant or why I dreamed it. Maybe it had something to do with the discussion of books with Adam. I don’t know.
Later, in the dark, when I got up to go to the washroom, a light in the spare room was on. I went in, stood there, puzzled. It was the lamp with the milky glass grapes cluster, with the chipped base. The one Dennis and I had dropped when my father moved in.
I turned it off.
FIVE
I
When I was a kid—five or six years old—after my father would have a few beers—maybe New Year’s, Thanksgiving, something like that, when there were lots of little kids around—he liked to shock us by calling us over and moving his dentures around in his mouth, then taking them out and putting them back in. He’d ask us to take our teeth out and show them to him. Stunned that this could be done, that we’d never known it, we’d all try, puzzled at why we couldn’t do it. He always laughed. It was a performance that he staged many times, one he clearly enjoyed giving. I watched him do it years later, to his grandchildren.
Jeanne tells me that she had an aunt who, even though she had an upper plate, also had several bottom teeth missing, and that when she ate peanuts she used her thumb as a bottom tooth.
And I’d heard the story of Dad’s sister, Loretta, who once got so drunk that she threw up in the toilet at Maxwell Avenue and accidentally flushed her dentures away.
All of these tales, memories, images flashed through my head, a small cascade of snapshots, when I asked the nurse to put my father’s dentures back in, that evening in the hospital, that evening he died.
Dennis and I had gone, two dutiful sons, to Morley Bedford Funeral Chapel on Eglinton Avenue to make the necessary arrangements. We’d been there eleven years earlier when our mother died. The place had become a strange touchstone in our lives. The gentleman led us down into the basement to see the display and selection of caskets, arrayed there like new cars in an automotive showroom, complete with price stickers—wood polished and burnished, brass and steel buffed and glinting under the display lighting.
We selected the second cheapest casket of the dozen surrounding us. It was tough ignoring the bottom-of-the-line container, but we raised our sights, ever so slightly, knowing that Dad would not approve of us going any higher. Only a damn fool, he’d say, would spend that kind of money on a coffin. Have to be crazy.
We displayed him and put him in the ground in a #20 H.P. Grey Cloth Casket, manufactured by Bernier, retailing for $895. Even then, though, we didn’t get off cheaply. Funeral costs are insidious, and keep on mounting: professional services, transfer cost, shelter for the deceased, full embalming, facilities, automotive, documentation, flowers, cemetery fees, funeral board licensing fee, clergy honorarium, organist, etc.
Cost us nearly five thousand dollars to say good-bye.
I can see Dad shaking his head in disgust, damn fools he’d say, telling us we should have buried him in the backyard.
When I was twenty-one, Adam’s age, I once asked my father if he liked his job. He had worked twenty-three years for The Globe & Mail, and was finishing up his seventeen- year stint at The Toronto Star—two of the city’s daily newspapers. He worked in the Circulation Departments.
It’s a living, he told me.
At twenty-one, I thought this was sad, but said nothing.
I’m fifty-one now. I work in the Circulation Department of The Toronto Star—my twenty-third year. My father got me the job. By the time I was twenty-eight, I was glad to have it, to work steady, to have some security.
I started in 1972. That was the year that my three-year marriage to Fran ended. It was one year after my son was stillborn.
It’s a living. But those words mean something different to me now. I’m older.
“I don’t even know his name,” I said.
Jeanne looked at me.
“Adam’s father. I don’t even know his name.”
“Jesus.”
Another night, the routines finished, propped up in bed on our pillows, the eleven o’clock news droning on the TV set at the foot of the bed.
She grew silent.
“I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“The past doesn’t go away, does it.” It was a statement, not a question.
“No,” I said. I thought about it. “It goes somewhere else. It stays, but it moves. Like to another city. You decide if you’ll visit or not, if it’s worth the trip. Or, sometimes, it comes to visit you, unexpected. Just shows up.”
“Bobby,” she said.
“Mm?”
“Not Bob, not Robert. Bobby. Bobby Swiss.”
I didn’t say anything.
“That’s his name.”
A weather map appeared on the screen at the foot of the bed. The blond woman demonstrated with hand motions the low front that was moving into the area, as if she were smoothing a bedspread.
“The things we do,” she said, “the people we think are interesting when we’re eighteen.” She shrugged, looked down at her hands. “I was a kid.”
“Even his name,” she said. “It was exciting.” Her foot touched mine beneath the covers. “Not as exciting as Leo Nolan.”
“Your foot’s cold. That’s because you leave them outside the covers at night. I don’t know how you stand it. My feet are toasty and warm.”
“You’re all swaddled up in the blankets all night. You’re so warm you sweat in your sleep.”
“What does ‘swaddled’ mean? What kind of word is ‘swaddled’?”
She leaned over me, her hair falling forward. “Swaddled is what they do to a mummy when they wrap it up. It’s what you do to yourself. You need me to cool you down. You sleep all whacky.” She put her other foot on my leg.
I looked at her face.
She tucked her hair behind an ear, smiled.
“You better cool me down.” I didn’t move. Didn’t touch her. The moment might disappear.
She put her head on my shoulder. Finally, I touched her hair.
“I’m okay,” I said. “I was eighteen once.” I didn’t know what more needed to be said. It was the past. Moved away.
To Dayton, Ohio.
Randy Newman has a song called “Dayton, Ohio, 1903.” It’s on his 1972 album Sail Away. It talks about lazy Sunday afternoons, evokes another, gentler time.
There’s another song on the same album called “Last Night I Had a Dream.” He sings about how everyone he knows is in that dream. He says he saw a ghost.
I keep seeing a ghost. In dreams too. Like that same night. I’m gambling at the slots in Las Vegas, wearing only a T-shirt and shorts. My father comes up behind me and tells me that I’m a fool. That’s the dream. That’s all I can remember.
And once again, the red garnet ring wasn’t in the Vegas ashtray the next morning. I found it later that day, on the kitchen counter, beside the microwave.
II
Life is about timing. We all know it. Sometimes there seems to be a pattern, sometimes it’s all hopelessly random. We meet people at the right or the wrong time in our lives, and based on the timing, we do or we do not have a relationship with them. Timing is everything.
And when the timing is right, you have to gamble. I enjoy a small wager. I like the slots in Vegas. I l
ike the blackjack tables. I like to bet on hockey games, baseball games. My friends tell me I’m a fool, but I don’t see it that way. It seems to me that life is a gamble, that every decision we make is a gamble. We’re always calculating the odds, at every juncture.
Getting out of bed in the morning is a gamble.
In my dream that night, my father had told me that I was a fool. Maybe he was right. But if he was, it wasn’t because I was gambling. It was because we’re all fools, some of the time. You can be a fool sitting at home in your room, all alone, not doing anything.
In the spring of ’85 I helped Dad sell the house on Maxwell Avenue. When it was empty, when everything had been cleared out, I went back for one last look around.
It was strange.
I had grown up there. It was our home before I was born, and after I left it had been the focal point of all extended family activity. We called it Camp Maxwell. Generations of us. Fifty-six years. I knew where the hiding places were in the rafters in the basement, how to put your feet on the hot-air vent under the kitchen table to get warm on winter mornings. I knew which stairs creaked, which doors wouldn’t close completely, which windows couldn’t be opened no matter how hard you tried.
My mother was sitting in her wheelchair in the kitchen, Nanny sleeping upstairs in her bed, my brother Ron standing by the sink with a beer, laughing, kids running up and down the back stairs to the basement where the madness could boil over.
Empty now. Silent. My footsteps echoing.
When I left, I thought I had closed the door on the past, that I had sealed it up when I had pulled it shut for the last time. But like Jeanne and I said: the past doesn’t go away. It just moves somewhere else.
The house on Maxwell moved inside me.
I make a point of driving by it whenever I’m in the vicinity, just to see it. Once I even got out of the car and walked down the driveway, curious what the new owners had done with the backyard.
There’s a new front entrance, a new garage, new windows. There’s new landscaping—it’s got interlocking brick now. And that’s only the outside.
I don’t want to see the inside. I know what it looks like in there. I just close my eyes. There it is.
Dad took the money from the sale of the house and put it into low-yield GICs—Guaranteed Investment Certificates. I tried to steer him, to advise. He’d listen, then do what he wanted: established, name-brand banks. No trust companies. No risk.
He didn’t care. Security and peace of mind were more important than investments that needed managing, more important than high-yield potential. Tommy Nolan was no gambler. He had seen the Depression, been the provider for too long, the elephant on whose back the rest of the family had ridden.
When I lost money in a limited partnership scheme last year, years after he had died, I thought of how he’d tell me that I was a damn fool. Then I heard Phil Berney, Jeanne’s father, tell me to mark his words.
As usual, they were both right.
He was meticulous. He kept a brown leather folder in the top drawer of his dresser, which he would show me occasionally. You have to know this, he’d say. You have to know where everything is when I die.
It was almost impossible for me to listen to him when he started up like that. I’d shuck my responsibility, block him out.
I have to trust somebody. I’ve decided to trust you. You’re the executor, he’d say. Everybody’s counting on you.
In it he had the original deed to the Mount Hope Cemetery plot, Lot 198, Section 16, dated September 18, 1904, deeded to his grandfather, Matthew Nolan, shoemaker by trade, born in County Cork, Ireland, June 29, 1842. It had been purchased the day after Matthew’s wife, Ann, had died. There was a receipt for two dollars for the final Lot Transfer to my father, dated August 20, 1980.
He had baptismal certificates dating back to 1876. There were death certificates for Nanny, his mother, (1974) and my mother (1984).
And he kept a book. It was gray, cloth-covered, an accounting ledger. In it was every family financial transaction he’d ever made: loans and mortgages given to family members, amounts and dates of principal and interest paid. You have to collect these debts, he’d say. It’s all in the book if anyone says anything.
He was the elephant. Everybody was riding him.
“When they bury me, nobody’ll come visit,” he’d say.
I heard this lots.
“Worked with a guy,” he said once, “who told me he was going to be buried underneath Holt Renfrew on Bloor Street. That way he knew he’d get a visitor. His wife would visit him once a day.”
But he was right. Again. I hardly ever go to the cemetery plot. I don’t need to. He’s like the house: he moved inside of me.
After he died, I threw away the gray cloth-covered ledger. Never mentioned it to anyone in the family.
I think, deep down, it’s what he hoped I’d do. I think he would have approved. Either that, or he’d call me a damn fool.
SIX
I
His glasses. The electric razor. The lamp. His ring. The tackle box. Instant coffee.
Our own lives start long before we’re born. Millions of years of genetic encoding funnel down into our great- grandparents, then grandparents, finally parents. I mentioned that Dad had macular degeneration, that his eyes were going. It’s something that I worry about myself, since I think I have his eyes, his skin, his hair. Like I have so much else of his. His job even, for God’s sakes.
Able to see only shadows, shapes, he’d been certified as legally blind by the CNIB—the Canadian National Institute for the Blind—and given a card with his photo and registration number to carry in his wallet. In his eighties, he liked to ride around the city on the TTC—the public transit system—because he got on for free with his blind pass. He’d visit places and streets he knew from his youth, then come home and tell us how it had all changed. He relished claiming the four thousand dollars or so tax credit available annually as a CNIB registrant—anything, even blindness, to one-up the government. And he told me once with a lilt in his voice that when people came to the door and asked him to sign petitions, whatever, he gladly signed them. I’ll sign anything, he’d say. I’m not legally responsible for anything I sign, because I’m blind. And he’d smile the half smile.
You might think, from everything I’ve told you, that my father’s death was the most overwhelming thing that has happened to me. It’s not true, not really. My brother Ron’s death in ’93 derailed me more than I ever imagined it would. He was twelve years older than me, lived in another city. I hardly ever saw him. But his death signaled something powerful in me. Of the five of us, my brothers and sisters and me, he was the first to go. I saw my father’s eyes at the service for Ron, weak, disbelieving.
Somebody was going to go first. It was an idea that darted into my head on rare meditative occasions, one I didn’t entertain at length. I kept wanting to tell my mother, who died in ’84, Do you know what’s happened to Ron? It’s impossible, I’d say to her. She’d want to know. Somehow, she had to know.
My mother. Good Lord. She was the archetypal mother. Selfless. Naive. If you say you loved your mother, a lot of people tend to squirm, even drop their eyes. It’s too sentimental an admission, they feel. It doesn’t need to be said. Nuts. It does need to be said. I loved her. In hindsight, I understand how much of my life was spent wanting to please her, to make her happy. One of my favorite memories is of her carrying me along Eglinton Avenue, my head on her shoulder, me half asleep. I was the fourth of five. She didn’t have me until her mid-thirties, so I know she was around forty when this happened. I know now how exhausted she must have been. And at age fifty-one, I know how much I’d like to put my head back on her shoulder, have her hold me, comfort me, stroke my hair. Just once.
Mom’s death, and the death of my son. Stillborn. We were going to call him Aidan. These were the watershed events. These were the ones that rocked my foundations, changed everything.
Dad’s death was different.
It didn’t have the same sense of incompletion. I’d had a chance to wrap up my relationship with him in a way that I had not with the others. I’m sure it was why I hoped that he would live with us for his final years.
I think of his half smile, of his pleasure at beating the government with a four-thousand-dollar tax credit, of signing forms for which he wanted no responsibility, and I understand that he taught me that happiness was a choice that we make.
II
April. May. June.
Adam got a job for the summer in The Book Cellar on the Danforth, perfect for him. I was glad. He’d sworn he couldn’t take another summer at Mr. Lube, staring up at the undersides of cars, draining crankcase oil. Jeanne’s work in the cafeteria at St. Michael’s Hospital carried on, unabated. My job at the Star droned on further into the summer.
Bobby Swiss and Dayton, Ohio, hovered, hushed shadows behind our lives, daring us to look at them, ponder them. Waiting to step into the light.
Later in the summer, Adam had said.
We waited. Silent.
Maybe it would all go away.
It didn’t go away. I had another dream.
Some dreams are blurs. If you describe them out loud, or write them down, they exist. Otherwise, they evaporate, morning mist rising, burned off by the sun. Others are as vivid and hard as colored glass. This was one of those.
Shadow of Ashland, A Witness to Life, and St. Patrick's Bed Page 32
