Mount Pleasant (9 page)

His mother turned to her with that cobra smile. “Why? Your husband made a pass at me the week you moved in. Perhaps he mentioned that. You’d been married a month. Jack was drunk, of course. I imagine he still is. It was that cocktail party at the Harrises, and Jack said you were like the Queen Mother in bed and he needed an outlet. Such a romantic word, don’t you think? ‘Outlet.’ And here we are, forty years later, and by remarkable coincidence you look like the Queen Mother, especially with that hat, and Jack, by the look of him, I’m guessing no longer needs an outlet. So it’s all worked out, and we’re all friends, thank goodness.”

Harry had witnessed dozens of speeches like this, delivered to his father, to his father’s business associates, to neighbours, to concierges in European hotels, to police officers. Felicia never raised her voice, so you had to move closer to hear her, and of course everyone did. And when a woman with such an emasculating tongue is cut loose from her marriage, two things happen: some men want to sleep with her and others want to avoid her. After Dale left, they did both.

It occurred to Harry that the reason his mother was moving might be that she had snuffed out the last flicker of friendship in the neighbourhood. Maybe one final gin-fuelled speech had killed the last spark of affection in her last friend. If that was the case, then the house would be a prison, Harry thought, parts of it still as dark and gloomy as a crypt. She would have alienated everyone, an impossible task she had embarked on forty-odd years ago and had finally completed.

Or she had tired of her flawed friends. Felicia had a gift for unearthing weakness, for discerning moral lapses, and perhaps
this knowledge had become too great a burden. It occurred to Harry that she knew Dale’s former colleagues far better than he did. In the early years of the marriage, there had been a lot of socializing with them. And some of them she would still run into, or at least hear things about.

“How well do you know Press?” Harry asked.

“Press? God, I’ve known him for forty years. Since Dale went to work there. Ruthless man. I slept with him, but that was when I was married.”

His mother was adept at giving him news he’d prefer not to have. “Do you trust him?”

“No one trusts Press. They would like to. His silver hair, that fine patrician head— but he’s ruthless. Though, of course, at some point in a woman’s life, that’s quite sexy. His poor wife. I can’t imagine. Why do you ask about Press?”

“I just wonder about Father’s estate. Dick Ebbetts told me Dale did well in the market in his last year, before the hospital.”

“Dick. God, another thug. At least he looks the part. How would Dick know, I wonder. I suppose it’s all on computers now and you can find out somehow. If there is a way, Dick likely knows it. He shops for prostitutes on the computer. It’s like paging through the old Sears catalogue, apparently.”

When Harry left, his mother walked out with him in her blue rubber boots and waved goodbye as he backed his Volvo out of the driveway.

He drove up to St. Clair to scout his mother’s new apartment. It was in a cul-de-sac that dead-ended at the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, a lush, peaceful park filled with the famous dead, Harry’s grandfather and now Dale. Harry parked and approached
the nondescript brick apartment building. What was inside? A student apartment with a fold-out bed? It was impossible to tell from the exterior.

He passed through the iron cemetery gates. There were a few dozen people wandering the grounds. A small group was gathered in front of the Eaton crypt. Timothy Eaton had built an empire based on department stores. When he was a boy, Harry and his mother had sometimes gone to Eaton’s to buy clothes: corduroy pants and durable wool sweaters. The empire Eaton built had trickled away after 130 years, the last stores now gone. His competitor, Robert Simpson, was also somewhere in the cemetery, his empire gone too, though Harry couldn’t remember the circumstances. Those two grand stores used to face one another across Queen Street. And now the two men communed with one another, conversations that snaked through the damp roots and moved among the rhododendrons and violets. You see how fleeting an empire is, Timothy? I didn’t have any sons, and I look at your offspring and think perhaps that wasn’t such a terrible thing. Your Irish blood, carrying those temptations. We fought one another all our lives, and now we lie forgotten in this pleasant grove.

Eaton, still unsettled after a century of death, buried in a black wool suit from the men’s department (goods satisfactory or your money refunded), answers, But I was a giant, Robert.

Harry walked past Glenn Gould’s grave. He had all of his Bach recordings and still found comfort in them, in Gould’s fluidity and eccentricity, the creaking of his favourite chair that could be heard in the background. He had seen Gould on television once, hosting a show about the city, and was surprised to find him so normal-sounding. He had expected a twitchy genius. Though Gould had looked like a homeless man with that overcoat and tweed hat.

Harry stopped briefly in front of his grandfather’s crypt, then finally came to his father’s grave, which still seemed fresh. The loss of the house was the final pillar of Harry’s childhood to topple. The comfort of his father’s money was gone, and now the refuge of his mother’s house. His line of credit had been murdered by the bank, and, of course, there was Dixie, that moral quicksand he had willingly jumped into. His father lay beneath him, with his many sins. How had he managed to carry all that?

“Dixie called for you,” Gladys said when he got home. “Your father’s … what do we call her now? Widow?”

In his head, Harry reacted as if Gladys had crept up behind him and yelled in his ear. He hoped he hadn’t looked startled. “Ex-girlfriend might be more accurate.”

“She left a number.”

Gladys’s tone was neutral. Was it calculatedly neutral, or genuinely neutral? Harry couldn’t tell. Her face didn’t offer any clues, and into this void, Harry projected a terrible feminine knowledge.

What could Dixie want? Was this a threat? Or was she just registering her presence, her dangerous proximity? Like thugs loitering casually at your children’s school, just to remind you of what you’re risking.

“What do you suppose she wants?” Gladys asked.

Harry shrugged. “Who knows? What we all want.”

EIGHT

H
ARRY PUT OFF CALLING AS LONG AS HE COULD
, which was just under twenty-four hours. Any longer, he felt, and Dixie would call again. There was no possibility of good news. She would either want to get together for another guilty coupling (or she would make it clear she didn’t want to, which somehow wasn’t good news either, another affront to Harry’s potency), or she would want to formalize their mutual effort to find Dale’s money.

“Dixie.”

“Oh, Harry, I’m glad you called me back. Look, after we talked, I was thinking that we owe it to Dale to find that money.”

“Well, if there is any.”

“But he must have had more money. I mean he couldn’t have only had that.”

Dixie’s options were few. She was an attractive woman of a certain age, unattached, listlessly working in the travel business, now largely the province of the Internet. Once it had been fun,
Harry guessed. Endless trips to sunny places. The kind of job you do because it has the promise of adventure. How many times had she visited Mexico? How many margaritas? None of the tanned men she had flirted with at beachfront bars, who spent the night licking the faint salt tang on her skin, tasting the ocean between her legs—none of them had lasted. A life lived in the present.

“Well, if there is money, we should definitely find it,” Harry said.

“But, I mean, where do we start, Harry?”

Harry twitched uncomfortably. “I’m going to make some calls,” he said, noncommittally.

“Let’s check in a few days from now, then.”

“Give me a week.”

There was an awkward silence before they hung up, a few seconds that contained their coupling and its messy, unstated aftermath.

He went downstairs and sat in his Volvo and turned the key to complete silence. There wasn’t even the discouraging sound of the engine sluggishly turning over without catching. The last repair bill had been $1,438. The car was eleven years old. Perhaps it was dead this time, another Swedish suicide.

If the car was dead, they’d have to buy a used one. A new car was out of their range. A used car was out of their range. It would devastate their budget, if they’d had one. The notion of a budget had loomed on their horizon for years. It sat like a threat, an organizing principle that they both suspected would somehow diminish them. And there was, in their marriage, as in most marriages, the instinctive shared knowledge of what the relationship could bear. Harry knew they had reached a threshold of disappointment with their lot that was best left unstated and undefined. A budget would establish borders that
they could not comfortably live within, so it existed as a code word for the reality that they had to spend less money. The reason they had to spend less money was so they could avoid ever having to sit down and make a marriage-destroying budget.

Three days later, the Volvo irrevocably dead, he and Gladys stood in the toasty showroom of the Toyota dealer, looking at the Camrys.

“This is the one I drive,” the salesman said, opening the door of a gleaming XLE. The features went by like he was a child reciting the books of the Bible in Sunday school: Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Smart Key, Blue Tooth, Dual-Zone Climate Control with Plasmacluster. He listed the automotive awards it had won, the sterling resale value and the safety record, which, despite recent setbacks that may or may not have been politically motivated, was now even more unimpeachable than it had been before the recalls. “You drive into a wall, no kidding, this is the chariot to do it in.” The salesman wore a grey sports jacket. His face was as wide as a prairie wheat field, his eyes separated by an unfortunate span. His teeth weren’t up to salesman standards.

As a child, Harry had believed that Cadillac manufactured a superior luxury car (the Eldorado). He had believed in God and the Maple Leafs, and that the X-ray glasses advertised in his Aquaman comic would allow him to see his grade three teacher’s nipples. And he had watched in sorrow as those beliefs had joined St. Nick on the scrap heap.

Harry remembered going to the Cadillac showroom with his father, who bought a new Eldorado every two years. He did it for decades before switching abruptly to Lincolns without explanation. The salesman knew Dale by name and would
expertly steer him toward the new Eldorado and recount the amazing innovations that had been added in the previous twenty-four months, as if a team of engineers in Detroit had spent all that time trying to figure out what Dale Salter might want or need two years down the road. Inside the trunk would be a revolutionary new strap that lashed down his golf clubs so the Ben Hogan driver wouldn’t rattle around. They would drive away in the new car, the warm September air rushing in and meeting the new car smell as Harry tested the electric windows until Dale told him to stop fiddling with it or you’ll break it.

But he and Gladys weren’t looking for a new Camry. The showroom spiel was simply the standard, fruitless prelude before the trudge outside into the unseasonable October cold and the particular bitterness it held, to look at the used Camrys lined up at the edge of the lot. Glad had collated the stats and reviews from Consumer Reports and three semi-authoritative online sources on all four of the cars they intended to test drive that day. A two-year-old Camry with low mileage was the Holy Grail. They wanted to buy from a dealer, despite the obvious markup, because they would have recourse if things went wrong.

Harry looked south through the spotless showroom windows to the stream of traffic on the highway, new vehicles speeding toward downtown. He had gone to Shenzhen, China, two years earlier to deliver a paper at a conference on the future of cities, and the traffic there had left a lasting impression. Not just its volume, but its extraordinary variety. Large trucks, Buicks and Volkswagens shared the road with tiny Chinese-manufactured cars and thousands of scooters and dirt bikes and old women on ancient black bicycles with four feet of Styrofoam strapped to their backs and braces of soft dead birds draped over the handlebars. The traffic in Toronto was approaching that level of
chaos, a Third-World mélange of scooters, motorized bicycles and inline skaters weaving through stalled cars.

“Now, I don’t want to steer you away from what you want,” the salesman, Dick or Dirk, said. “Believe me, that is not what we are about. We want you to leave here with what is right for you.” They stepped outside to where the used cars were. The air was hard and carried the iron tang of industrial pollution. They walked up to a Camry that was on the list Dick/Dirk carried with him. “Let me just get the keys,” he said, and walked briskly back toward the showroom.

“Is it Dick or Dirk?” Harry asked Gladys, staring after him.

“It’s Robert.”

Gladys was wearing a wool peacoat and a flowing silk scarf that might be too light for this weather. It was grey near the lake, with a thin line of light near the horizon as if to mark where the edge of the world was. They stood out there in the wind, waiting for Robert to return with the key.