by Don Gillmor
ALSO BY DON GILLMOR
FICTION
Kanata
NON-FICTION
Canada: A People’s History
The Desire of Every Living Thing
I Swear by Apollo
PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
Copyright © 2013 Don Gillmor
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2013 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.
www.randomhouse.ca
Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Gillmor, Don
Mount Pleasant / Don Gillmor.
eISBN: 978-0-307-36074-8
I. Title.
PS8563.159M68 2013 C813′.54 C2012-905602-2
Cover design by Andrew Roberts
Cover image: Alan Thornton/Getty Images
v3.1
To Anne Collins
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
April
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Men have been swindled by other men on many occasions. The autumn of 1929 was, perhaps, the first occasion when men succeeded on a large scale in swindling themselves.
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH, The Great Crash, 1929
ONE
SUNDAY DINNER ARRIVED WITH ITS DREAD. Harry was making a squash risotto with Moroccan lamb and asparagus. The organic lamb cost $82, bought from the swarthy criminal at the boutique butcher shop. Harry had grown up in a world where university professors such as himself were financially comfortable and well respected, and butchers were dropouts with cleavers. Now, professors were marginalized and indebted, while butchers were wealthy artisans.
Lately, Harry’s debt had taken on an auditory quality, a buzzing that usually remained in the background though rarely went away. At times it was all he heard, awful moments when it had the quality of a high-speed periodontist’s drill, a brilliant German instrument that was burrowing into his skull, shrieking as it got closer to his brain. He stood in the kitchen, stirring the risotto, adding wine in the dull white noise.
Tonight Ben was bringing his girlfriend, Sarah, a wiry, pugnacious psychology major who had spent their last dinner together outlining the appalling state of the world and ascribing blame to Harry’s generation. He first tried appeasement, then argued unsuccessfully with her, then got drunk and blithe.
Gladys appeared behind him, dressed in a cashmere sweater and navy pants. “You’re not going to fight with Sarah, are you,” she said, her tone balanced between the imperative and the interrogative.
“I won’t have to. She’ll fight with me.”
“Remember who the grown-up is.”
At dinner, Sarah ignored the food. “If the money spent on the American military was used to buy food, it would end world hunger in one year,” she said. Harry had heard versions of this thirty years ago when he was an undergraduate. Sarah’s hair was spiky and she wore loose jeans and a second-hand curling sweater with the name “Brian” stitched over the heart. She was, as Gladys had noted on more than one occasion, extremely bright. But she used these worn liberal platitudes like a club. Shouldn’t that phase be coming to an end? Harry wondered.
“While we’re having this dinner,” Ben added, “four thousand children will starve to death.” He stared at his father accusingly, as if the dinner Harry had made was the actual cause of the children’s deaths. Why is it never Gladys’s fault? he wondered. How is it that I’m solely to blame for the world’s poor showing?
“If the money spent downloading music by people under twenty-five was used to build affordable housing, there would be no homelessness,” Harry countered. He felt liberated by this fabrication. He tried another one. “The aggregate annual salary of North America’s athletes is greater than Pakistan’s GDP.” This was probably true.
“Harold,” Gladys said. A warning.
“It’s you people who are paying their salaries,” Sarah said. “You watch them.”
“I’m not much of a sports fan,” Harry said.
“Dad, you are a freak for sports,” Ben said. “You dragged me to those football games when they played outside at Exhibition Stadium. I’m, like, still cold from watching them.”
“I lost my appetite for it,” Harry said. “I was probably losing it back then.” He’d thought he’d regain his interest in sports by taking Ben, that his son’s enthusiasm would reignite his own. He once took Ben to an intersquad game, a father-son event sponsored by the league. Ben was nine, cold and uncomprehending. After the game, Harry took him to field level, where they collected autographs from sullen, oversized men. It was an overcast late-October day, and the icy wind from the lake distorted the players’ features so they looked monstrous. Ben started to quietly cry. On the way home, Harry bought him hot chocolate, a consolation.
“I think it’s pathetic that men need football as a metaphor for war,” Sarah said.
“We don’t need a metaphor for war,” Harry said. “We have war.” Who had said that? Susan Sontag? Perhaps it was Bud Grant, a glacial, crewcut football coach he remembered from the sixties. Harry examined his son’s girlfriend, her fox-like face, the nose small and upturned, eyes predatory. He wondered about her sexual appetites. Was it sex as politics with them, and she a strict, non-penetrative anti-imperialist; or did they practise tantric sex, a holy ritual illuminated by scented candles and drawn out to the point of boredom; or, lucky Ben, was Sarah surprisingly wild? She caught his gaze then, returning it as if she could hear his thoughts.
“This risotto is marvellous,” Gladys said. “It reminds me of that restaurant in Florence. What was it? Il …”
“La Fenice.”
He and Gladys had gone to Florence last year, both of them careful not to bill it as a romantic vacation so it couldn’t be declared a failure. They were in a marital lull and Florence became an (unstated) romantic grail. The planning, the reading of civic histories and Renaissance biographies, the immersion in all things Florentine. The hope was that when they walked its ancient streets and ate gelato in the Piazza della Signoria they would find themselves swept up in one another. They had been careful not to talk about the cost of the trip. It went wi
thout saying that it was unaffordable. But Harry had shielded Gladys from the actual state of their debt. She still had some of her own money, left over from the early retirement package she’d received from the library. She suspected, of course, that things weren’t going swimmingly, but made a point of not asking, the way some people who suspect they have a health problem make a point of not going to the doctor.
When it wasn’t buzzing in his head like a swarm of wasps, Harry tried to think of his debt the way governments thought of theirs, a mounting deficit that was worrisome but not lethal. Debt was a necessary burden that was passed on to others. Florence was like floating a government bond to pay for improved health care in rural areas.
He felt he wasn’t extravagant but knew he hadn’t entirely forsaken the sense of entitlement that he’d been born with. His generation didn’t carry the deep fiduciary scars that the Depression generation did, where every nickel had measurable weight. Savers of string, collectors of rainwater, backyard gardeners, buyers of cuts of meat that had to be slow-cooked for eight hours to be edible. They mended clothes and made do. They lived the lives they could afford, measured daily in pennies. But not Harry’s generation. Money was a vague ideational pool they all splashed in. Saving was futile. If Harry bought the $14 Shiraz rather than the still very modest $24 Bordeaux, what would it save him? A few hundred a month. A spit in the ocean.
In Florence he’d returned to their hotel room late in the afternoon one day to find Gladys in the absurdly large faux marble bathtub and he took two overpriced drinks out of the mini-bar and took off his clothes and joined her. They chatted pleasantly and sipped their Campari out of water glasses, but when Harry began to soap her breasts, which sat, still invitingly, partially submerged, he could see the sudden shift in her eyes.
“I’ll get your back,” he had said, swiftly downgrading it to an affectionate service. When they did finally make love, it was with a sense of obligation, fulfilling the (unstated) pact that Florence would bring them joy.
It was the mornings he loved most on that trip. He would get up at six and walk for an hour through the compact city, watching it come alive, people sweeping the pavement in front of their stores and cafés, deliveries of meat and fish and newspapers dropped off. He stopped at the small piazza not far from the Duomo and sat at an outdoor café and slowly sipped espresso and read the International Herald Tribune. As he surveyed the dinner table, Harry wished, suddenly, that he was in Florence, alone, lingering in the Uffizi, following a dark-haired Italian tourist who looked like Audrey Hepburn.
“It was a wonderful restaurant,” Gladys said, bringing Harry back from his reverie. “You would have loved it, Ben. Absolutely unpretentious. Like being in someone’s home. The food was extraordinary, but it wasn’t fussy.”
This was for Sarah’s sake, Harry suspected, designed to show her how down-to-earth they were, yet how sophisticated, and how this could be the life that she and Ben would embrace in time. Did Gladys actually think that Sarah was somehow good for Ben? Perhaps she saw her combative nature as complementary to Ben’s innate passivity, and that their son would need her aggression to navigate life’s forest. Gladys wasn’t a romantic, her judgment obscured by issues of love and sexual compatibility (though who wasn’t sexually compatible at nineteen?). She was looking at survival, the maternal Darwinism that women carried in their hearts.
“Do you plan to continue with psychology?” Gladys asked Sarah.
“I don’t know, Gladys. I’ve been thinking about environmental law. Do you know how much particulate the Sunways Paper plant put into the atmosphere in 2009? Eleven thousand tonnes. Being exposed to it for twenty-four hours can raise blood pressure, not to mention the carcinogenic nightmare.” She glared at Harry as if he were the CEO of Sunways. “And we’re dealing with it every day. I mean, you can almost see the stacks from here.”
Harry glanced at Ben, who was examining the two women in his life, perhaps gauging that future dynamic.
“I think that’s admirable, Sarah,” Gladys said.
“It’s a growth industry,” Harry offered. He examined Sarah, her second-hand clothes and ongoing defiance. Would he have fallen for her when he was nineteen? The fashions weren’t dissimilar from Harry’s own years at university. The music was similar as well. Sometimes it was the same. Ben had three hours of the Grateful Dead on his iPod, which seemed like an abdication of responsibility. Shouldn’t he embrace the sound of his own generation?
“Most working women leave the house each morning with 127 toxins either in them or on them,” Sarah said. She began listing on her fingers, “Formaldehyde, lead, phthalates. Methyl, ethyl, propyl and butyl, which can seriously fry your hormones and cause breast tumours. Cosmetics are basically toxic waste dumps. I mean, we’re killing the planet so we can look good.”
“I mean, the laws are there,” Ben said. “But no one has the balls to enforce them.”
“Maybe it’s more a question of money than balls,” Harry said. “Environmental cases tend to be wars of attrition.”
“Which is why the major polluters always win,” Sarah said. “Someone has to stand up to them.”
“One of the problems,” Harry said, “is that these lawsuits tend to come down to a balance of probabilities. The company lawyer argues that the lead in the plaintiff’s blood isn’t from the massive chemical fire but from chewing his HB pencil in sixth grade. The irony is, as we all become more toxic just by walking around and breathing bad air and eating carcinogenic hot dogs, it becomes increasingly difficult to prove that some company was responsible for the whole neighbourhood being diagnosed with leukemia on the same day.”
“So you’re saying we should just give up?” Ben said.
“No, no, of course not.” Even when he sought solidarity, Harry ended up drawing some line in the conversational sand.
“When I think of all the shit we put into the atmosphere,” Ben said. “Those Lincolns that got, like, a kilometre a litre, everything we burned up at the cottage, those bottles we threw away. I mean, it blows me away.”
“Well it was a different time, I think everyone now knows—”
“But we should have known then. I mean, it isn’t that hard to figure out. The world isn’t that big.”
“It used to be,” Harry said. He remembered that sense of space; when he was little, people still heaved litter out their car windows, confident the landscape would digest it. His son, he noticed, was more tenacious in Sarah’s presence. Perhaps she was good for him.
As Ben aggressively quoted landfill statistics, Harry silently invented one of his own: If all psychologists were placed in a landfill, we would gain a better understanding of ourselves.
Harry thought about his father. Now there was a planet killer: a chain-smoking, leaf-burning, pesticide-spreading clear-cutter (slightly, at the cottage), a driver of motorboats. He never owned a car that got much better than ten miles a gallon. He shot raccoons, poisoned squirrels and once, in Florida, fished drunkenly for a marlin he later had stuffed and then abandoned (he would never have put it up in the house). He ate bloody steaks and burned trash. His only nod to conserving anything was refusing to have air conditioning installed because he thought it was vulgar.
At the moment, his father was lying in a hospital bed, his limbs and brain withering; he would have just finished commenting on the woeful, largely untouched dinner that had been presented by the smiling nurse. He was disappearing now, unable to conserve himself.
“Remember those beetles at the museum?” Harry said to Ben, trying to bring the conversation back to some environmental common ground. When Ben was young, they had taken a private after-hours tour of the museum, part of a fund-raising effort. Ben had been so obsessed with dinosaurs that Gladys feared it was a sign of a learning disability. They became members of the museum and regularly went to examine the dinosaur skeletons and listen to Ben recite their diets, habitats and idiosyncrasies with authority. In the sub-basement, there was a steel door that sealed tight. The e
lderly man in the grey cardigan who was giving the tour said, “Now this isn’t going to smell very pleasant.” He gave them a horror movie butler smile and opened the heavy door. A wave of frightening air came out, the heavy smell of decay. “Be cautious where you step,” the man said.
There were bones everywhere, birds, animals, things that had been given to the museum. Hundreds of dermestid beetles crawled over everything, stripping the bones right down to the bacterial level. In this age of cleansers and technology, it was extraordinary that they used insects for something like this, and that it was done in the actual museum. When Harry examined his son for his reaction to this vision of hell, he could tell that Ben was worried that the creepy tour guide was going to shut the steel door and lock them in the sub-basement, and the next person he showed the room to would see their bones, stripped clean of all flesh. Harry knew Ben was thinking this because it was what Harry would have thought at that age. A part of him still laboured against the thought.
“That creepy room. God.” Ben turned to Sarah. “Like a million beetles, they use them for cleaning bones. In this special sealed room in the basement. You wouldn’t believe the smell. We smelled like death for hours after.”
“In the actual museum,” Gladys said. “I find it difficult to believe—
“Remember, I told you,” Harry said.
“It seems so primitive.”
“It is. But it was the best method.”
“I’ll remember that if I ever need a skeleton cleaned,” Sarah said.
“Would you like more risotto?” Gladys asked her, despite Sarah’s almost untouched plate.
“No, I’m good.”
Harry poured some wine into his glass. He could feel antipathy building, and this made him angry, this failure in himself to put up with his son’s girlfriend, to show her kindness and demonstrate wisdom. He should try to be more sympathetic. Who knew what kind of family life she’d had? Gladys, who prodded Ben’s friends for details about their parents, hadn’t been able to get anything from either Sarah or Ben. “Why are you so obsessed with where everyone’s from, Mom?” Ben had said. And Glad responded, as she always did, that she wasn’t obsessed, merely interested in who her son was spending time with. To which Ben had predictably yelled, “I’m spending time with Sarah. She’s who she is. Why can’t you just let things be?”
