The Figures of Beauty (19 page)

O
LIVER STOPPED ON THE FOOTBRIDGE
. It was the last point on the walk at which he could change his mind.

He wasn’t certain. Looking up at the terraces of olive trees and the distant grey walls of the hillside town above, he wasn’t sure at all about his decision. A little ridiculously, and with a deep, hollow sadness that he was only just beginning to get to know, he was thinking: Anna has the most beautiful back.

Oliver continued across the footbridge. He was aware that he could be making a mistake. But he was not bold enough to share Anna’s belief in the unforgivable. He was naive enough to think that there were mistakes it was sometimes necessary to make.

He headed up the road, beneath an empty sky.

He crossed between the windbreak of bramble and through the buckled, wire gate toward the little farmhouse at the top of the narrow valley.

A country road, little more than two ruts made by the landlord’s tractor and hay truck, cut across the bottom of the garden of the little house. There was a red blur of poppies in the hedgerow.

The farmer’s rabbit pen was between the fields. It was built of wood and screening where once there had been a swimming pool. The villa had been destroyed in the war.

Tanned and slender and naked from the waist up, Anna was at the hand pump at the property’s edge. The well there is deep. However hot the day, the water is always cold. She filled a jug. She was rinsing a rosemary infusion from her hair.

Something was different about her that day. A lazy, ancient god could see that, even if she couldn’t. Yet.

She mistook her flush for the late-morning sun. She thought her shivers were caused by the cold water on her back and shoulders. She thought her drowsiness was only the remains of a long sleep.

Oliver did not call out. He did not wave. He decided that there was no way to soften this. He walked directly to her.

They stood together, face to face. He spoke.

And that was when she shouted. That was when she reached back as if swinging something.

Anna shouted
you fucking coward
and swung hard and hit Oliver’s smooth unfinished face.

No block of marble but it does not hide the concept living in the artist’s mind

—M
ICHELANGELO
B
UONARROTI

C
ATHCART
, O
NTARIO
. A
PRIL
2010.

Eventually, I gave up expecting any kind of correspondence with Anna. She never replied to the letters I sent after I returned to Cathcart. But I can’t decide whether the fact, as you report, that she kept all twenty-three of them means that she held me in higher regard than I’d hoped. Or whether, because they were all stored at the bottom of a cardboard box crammed with equally unopened bills and tax notifications, her opinion of me was lower than I’d feared. In either case, there was never any encouragement to write.

So far as I can bring to mind—up by the pool on this very bright, almost brittle April afternoon—the only people who have ever asked me to write letters are you (my newly found daughter), Robert Mulberry (my extremely well-dressed lawyer), and Christopher Barton (for a time, my closest friend).

The Barton property was adjacent to the Hughsons’—separated by the pool fence and, on the Bartons’ side, by a barrier of the lilac and forsythia and wild grape that nobody ever looked after. But Christopher and I might as well have passed our earliest years ten blocks apart. From his pre-kindergarten days, he attended Charlton House—a local private school. The Hughsons, naturally, were great believers in public education.

But even without its high chain fence of rampant morning-glory, even without its wall of untended bramble, the Barton grounds seemed distant and impenetrable to its more modest, more ordinary, more contemporary neighbours. This had as much to do with the stories that enshrouded the grounds as with any physical distinction. The place was famous—famous, at least, in Cathcart—as the wild flower beds, the overgrown statues, and the untended terraces of grief.

At Argue Barton’s instruction, Grace’s crypt was inspired in its formal, austere design by a tomb his wife had admired in Paris. It was in a chilly grey church they had visited the day before their departure for Italy on their honeymoon in the summer of 1922. Grace had always been a great one for museums and old cathedrals. Things of that sort.

The choice of Carrara stone for her tomb—supplied to Lino Cavatore with all possible haste by the Morrow quarry—was a more appropriate decision than Argue Barton fully appreciated. It was the kind of thing his wife would have explained to him. His interest in art, although entirely authentic, had only ever really been his interest in being in love with Grace. The finer points of cultural history usually passed him by.

Argue Barton noticed, in the many letters of condolence he received after Grace’s death, a slight disinclination to acknowledge the tragedy he knew it to be. This general sentiment was probably not conscious and, in any event, only hinted at. It was apparent more in what was not said than in what was. His well-meaning friends and colleagues had certainly been surprised by the wedding almost a decade earlier. Now they conveyed, in their black-trimmed notes, that they expected him, with God’s help, to weather this storm.

There was nothing mean-spirited in this, he realized. There was nothing heartless in their assumption that he would recover. He wasn’t a youth after all. He had just turned fifty-five when Grace died. She was not yet thirty.

But the truth was: in the slowed pace of the way, for the rest of his life, he walked to and from his office at
The Chronicle
; in the unwavering seriousness he dedicated to the business of running Barton newspapers; in the way he stood in his frozen garden on the coldest winter nights. He felt that his heart could
have been no more shattered had he been as green as Romeo. It would have been easier had people assumed that he would hurl himself, wailing, on her stone crypt. He had to be privately inconsolable—a condition he disguised as the stern, humourless demeanour that his employees and his neighbours and his son came to know.

Because, like that, she was gone—a finality that the arithmetic of his age made more cruel, not less.

Her grave wasn’t anything they had ever talked about. Nothing was ever further from his mind during his time with her. And anyway, even if it had been something they had discussed, he was certain he’d get it wrong. He’d always got his gifts to Grace wrong—the jewellery he later realized she would never have chosen herself, the peignoir she pretended so kindly to like. But what else could he do? Someone had to make a decision.

Something more Italianate might have been appropriate, but marble tombs did not come to mind when he thought of their time in Italy. The only occasion on which he could remember Grace saying anything about her taste in memorials had been not in Italy but in France.

They had walked beside a lake in a Paris park on the morning before their departure for Carrara. They had to hurry to an odd, deserted café for their luncheon when it began to rain. Her fine hair was up. The hem of her skirt had come partly undone. “My goodness,” she said when she noticed it, but somehow the ballooning silk struck her as very funny. “Perhaps I shall establish a new style.” She said the Café de la Paix would soon be full of society beauties trailing the lining of their skirts.

This was something he would miss. This was something he would miss terribly: the way she could make him laugh. She could even make him laugh at his own not-laughing. He could
hear her voice clearly sometimes. “Oh, Argue,” she would say, “don’t be such a stodge.” And then, embarrassed by how long it had taken him, he laughed too.

Sometimes he could feel the tilting rhythm of the way she used to walk beside him. He could remember her arm on his later that afternoon in that chilly grey church in Paris. She was an indefatigable tour guide. They were making their way through the crypt of Saint-Denis.

Isabella of Aragon, the first queen of Philip III of France, died in 1271. Italian marble was used for effigy in France before it was used for that purpose in Italy. The elegant, modest depth of the recumbent figure has led art historians to conclude that it was carved from a Roman column, probably quarried in Luni, near Carrara.

“Oh my,” Grace said to her husband. “Imagine being remembered by something as exquisite as that.”

Grace glanced around quickly, to make sure no attendant would witness what she was about to do. She reached a gloved hand to the stone figure and once, unhurriedly, stroked the straight, carved folds of the stone bodice.

“I can’t resist,” she said to Argue.

She let her hand drop and, for a long and silent pause, just looked. Her husband stood slightly behind her left shoulder, and during the same pause he wondered whether there were many men who had ever had such a view.

She was never severe in the way she put up her hair. There was always some of it unfurling at the back of her neck. Before meeting Grace, Argue had not realized how pretty the back of a neck could be. He admired the cut of her coat and the elegant swoop of her hat. When he wasn’t looking at Grace or her hat or her collar, he was looking at the tomb she was so obviously admiring.

“I suppose,” said Grace, “that even if death is cold, it is still somehow beautiful.”

“I suppose,” he replied. “In the grand scheme of things.”

She rested her arm once more in his. They moved on.

And that was all he had to go on. That was all he could think of when he spoke to Lino Cavatore, the young artisan Julian Morrow had appointed to oversee the design and installation of the Barton House gardens. Cavatore’s English was rudimentary, but Argue managed to make himself understood.

Argue Barton found someone at the paper to do the necessary research. He provided Lino with reference photographs.

Lino began in stone by roughing out the block with square hammer, point chisel, and punch. Then his strokes, made with his flat and his claw and his tooth chisel, became steadily more oblique and, very gradually, more and more refined. The figure that emerged under the applications of his rasps looked more like suspended liquid than stone. He finished with the increasingly fine abrasives of sand and emery. The tomb took almost three months. It was widely admired.

I remember when you asked me to write. I’m sure you do too. It’s not, I suppose, an unusual request for a daughter to make of a father. But in our case, it seemed momentous.

Your request came when you returned to me through the crowd at Security at the Toronto airport. You were on your way back to Italy after your surprise arrival in Cathcart last summer. Surprise being—as I’m sure you intended—an understatement.

I’m sure you are very good at your work. You have a talent that must be very useful in an office. You are quite skilled at not making it obvious that you are asking as many questions as you are. I’m sure I would have asked much more about the Agency
of Regional Tourism and about your husband’s teaching position at his community college and about your sons. But I spent most of our time answering your questions about me.

Still, I managed to get a few queries in. I was curious, naturally, about the child, the teenager, and the young adult I’d missed when you were growing up. But it was not until the last night that we were together that I finally asked the question that I’m sure you’d been worrying I was going to ask. It’s one I’d often wondered about over the years, but until the day you came striding up through the garden it didn’t have much connection with reality.

What if? Who doesn’t have their share of paths they didn’t take? I’d always thought this pointless conjecture. But your arrival changed that.

Do you remember? We were sitting in the dark, in the bathing pavilion, by the pool.

“Do you think your mother would ever see me were I to come and visit you?”

You surprised me with your answer. “I asked her that before I left.”

“And?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Of course I want to know.”

“She said it would take a miracle.”

This did not sound encouraging.

Still, not hopeless. The more I thought about it the more I found myself wondering if there might be some ambiguity in the reply. There often was with Anna.

You said nothing more about your mother that night, although we stayed up for quite a while as I recall.

The wooded slope rose up beyond the hedgerows at the deep end of the pool, like a bank of dark clouds. Against
them, framed by the shadows of the trees that surround it, was the turreted outline of what I still call Barton House. You asked me about it that evening. But it wasn’t for sentimental reasons that the view led me to the past. On warm summer nights, up by the pool, I honestly don’t know what else is there.

Christopher Barton rarely joined me and the other neighbourhood boys on warm, sunny Saturday mornings. Christopher kept to himself. He almost never played baseball.

He was tall for his age and, as a result, a little awkward. But we never thought of his lack of athleticism as the reason he stayed away from the vacant lot where we had tramped down something that looked almost like a baseball diamond. We had the sense that Christopher had better, more important things to do.

He knew how to countersink. He knew the difference between a crosscut and a ripsaw. He had a workbench. He was comfortable and careful with power tools.

He couldn’t catch a ball to save his life—a fact that I never thought of as significant. It was simply an aspect of Christopher’s character—no more meaningful than my own inability to hammer a nail straight. I never gave his rare, hopeless swings at sucker balls any thought at all.

Pickup baseball took place on Saturdays. But my time with Christopher always had to do with the second half of my childhood weekends. Christopher and I often spent our Sundays together on the Hillside trails. But unlike many childhood memories, this one ended abruptly.

It was a rainy evening in early November of 1958. I’d had my dinner early. I’d be leaving for Montrose United in a few
minutes. It was the first of Miriam Goldblum’s rehearsals for the annual Christmas pageant,
The Wayward Lamb
.

Archie Hughson shook out his umbrella at the front door and then leaned it, only partially folded, against the round, dark-stained table in the vestibule for it to dry. He took off his raincoat, and after clearing a space in the front closet so that its dampness would have no contact with Winifred’s lambswool, he hung it up.

Then he turned toward the living room, where I had the comics of the Cathcart
Chronicle
open on the carpet. Winifred Hughson, weightless as a bird on the green chesterfield, waiting for Archie’s return before she ate, was reading the front section.

Archie said, “I’m afraid I have some very sad news.”

Barton House seemed to turn in on itself in that bleak autumn. The curtains were drawn for a long time. And then, suddenly it seemed, the house was empty. Soon after Michael Barton’s suicide, his widow and their children moved away.

A month or so later I received a postcard from Christopher. It was from Bristol. They’d returned to his mother’s family in England. It said: “Dear General Eisenhower; Please write. Ready, aye, ready. Yours, Monty.”

But I didn’t. Eventually, I lost the return address, but that wasn’t the real reason I never answered. I didn’t know what to say.

I hadn’t spoken to anyone about Christopher for a long time until that night when we stayed up in the bathing pavilion talking. I remember that occasion very fondly. It was the same evening that you gave me your text for “Michelangelo’s Mountains” to read. And it was the next day that I drove you—very nervously, as you noted—to Toronto to catch your flight.

“I have never seen that before,” you said at one point on
the busy highway. You turned in the passenger seat to get a better look.

“You’ve never seen what?” My eyes did not shift for an instant from the bumper in front of me.

“Your knuckles. They actually are white.”

I have never taken much pleasure in driving. And the more crowded and fast the highways, the less comfortable I feel. I suppose this must seem to you a sign of my age, but I see it differently. It’s a sign of the age in which we live. But somehow we arrived safely at the airport. Somehow we parked.