Stanley Park (36 page)

Something was missing. Sound. The house had gone silent and black. As if he had slept for a long time, been forgotten, and everybody had left or gone to bed. He stood in the hall, wondering, until he saw the dim glow from the bedroom where Trout was sleeping. The unsteady wink of a flashlight or a candle. Maybe there had been a power outage and Margaret was checking on her boy. A restorative scene of mother and son. He walked numbly across the hall carpet and leaned his head around the door frame.

The black swirled with its flecks of red.

It was Dante. He was standing over Trout, looking down. No flashlight, no candle, but light radiated from the furniture and the walls. From the checkered bedclothes under which the little boy lay. The tall dark posts of the old-fashioned bed frame. The dresser opposite and the far wall where hung the blueprint of Stanley Park with every trail and culvert etched delicately through the forest. Dante was a silhouette in the midst of this scene, the bed shining whitely in front of him and the air incandescent with flying particles of red and now orange.

Trout’s eyes opened fully. His bright stare locked upwards on Dante’s face.

Jeremy couldn’t move his legs properly—he staggered, he stumbled, feet encased in concrete like in a childhood nightmare. And then he was in the bathroom again. He was on one knee on the cold tile. There was water on the floor, water dripped from his face. His hand held the sink edge, knuckles white.

He pulled himself up, plunged his head once more into the basin. Then out, into a towel, which he rubbed briskly over his face and hair.

There were footsteps in the hallway. Voices. Lights came on again under the bathroom door, bright and yellow.

“It’s nothing. Terribly sorry.” Dante’s voice. “I walked into this bloody door frame.”

Margaret and Dante were both giggling. “If you woke my child, Mr. Beale, you have to read him stories to put him back to sleep.”

“I will I, promise. Ouch.”

The voices disappeared into the front of the house again.

Trout’s bedroom door was closed when he left the bathroom. When he joined the others, Jeremy found himself carefully taking one of the armchairs furthest from the TV and sitting gingerly, unsure how he would be received.

They were watching a montage of cooking shows now. Dante appeared to have cut together a highlight reel of what he felt were the World’s Most Ridiculous Chefs. It was the Italian bread guy with the fake accent at that moment. Something about the way he was kneading a large round of peasant bread was a source of huge amusement. Olli was sniggering. Margaret tittering. Benny hiccuping. Dante sat smiling and pale with a handkerchief pasted to his nose, once again reddening as Jeremy watched.

“Trout fell out of bed,” Margaret explained, seeing him come in. “Dante went back to check him and walked into a door. What happened to you?”

Benny cracked only the briefest of glances at Jeremy, openly accusatory.

“I just need a little air,” Jeremy said to Margaret, and he went out onto the back porch.

“The Chinese,” brayed the Frugal Gourmet after him, “are
the most interesting people in the world.”

Jeremy sighed. No Emeril, he noted. Dante probably
liked
Emeril.

“Hey.”

“Jesus!” Jeremy jumped.

Trout.

“You’re up,” Trout said.

“Of course I’m up,” Jeremy said. “You being up is the issue.”

“I got woke up,” Trout said. And to divert Jeremy’s attention from the fact that he wasn’t in bed, he pointed through the trees and went on, “My dad said you used to live there.”

The Frugal Gourmet was now squealing from the living room. “Isn’t this just
gorgeous … TRIPE!”
(back-dropped by the quartet of dope-assisted hysterics).

“You go back to bed,” Jeremy said, looking down at the boy. There were no signs on his face or in his demeanour that anything unusual had happened.

“Over there,” Trout said again, pointing to the Professor’s house.

“To bed,” Jeremy said, more quietly.

And to his surprise, Trout did not object. He recrossed the back of the kitchen, unseen from the living room, and returned to his temporary bed.

Jeremy walked along the west wall, past the brick chimney and circled into the driveway, appraising the empty house. He crossed the gravel to the front walk, to the mailbox the Professor had built a lifetime before. It was a shingle-roofed and cedar-sided miniature of the house itself, with a little door that opened to insert the mail. Reaching in to the very back, he found the bent nail and the key hidden there.

He crossed the darkened main hall, with the stairs winding up to the bedrooms, the hall leading back to the kitchen and family room, and the narrow set of stairs running down to the right to the Professor’s study. As a child he had not been allowed to enter this room, so stacked and crammed was it with the fragile bits and pieces of his father’s intellectual enterprise.

He descended the stairs and leaned against the study door. It was nearly blocked with something; Jeremy had to apply a
shoulder to move the door inward. He slipped through and looked over the sea of yellow foolscap that now confronted him. The ceiling had snowed paper; there were drifts of words. Thousands of handwritten legal-sized sheets. Underfoot where he stood, in the corners, stacked near the wall of bookcases, flowing out of two leather easy chairs and cascading from the desk, from open drawers, thousands more.

He pushed the door shut and walked into the room, shuffling through this drifting chaos. In front of him the desk, covered; behind the desk the book shelves, filled and overfilled with the words of others. He took a sheet from the corner of the desk and examined the familiar handwriting. Not familiar from his early remembrances, not the uniform Pelikan brocade, but the hard scrabble ballpoint and pencil scratch that he had seen at the library. Pages of it, strewn in uneven piles, clipped into indiscriminate clusters.

As he sat on the desk and considered the enormity and confusion of the scene, Jeremy’s eyes rose to the far wall. On either side of the door he had just forced open, his father had been pasting pages to the wall. Pages of his own writing, articles from newspapers and magazines, photographs, sticky notes and other bits of paper detritus. A dense, overlapping series of clusters joined by a network of black connecting lines painted directly onto the wall. A flow chart of sorts, branches linked to larger branches carrying larger clusters of pages, which joined to various main stems and then to a single thick squat trunk that ran down the wall and into the baseboard.

He stood and approached this tree-like diorama and began to examine its leaves and branches. There were childhood pictures here. There, a wedding picture he had not seen before. The Pelikan pen itself Scotch-taped to the wall in a cluster that included a letter from the dean of anthropology approving extended sick leave. A page torn from
Will Work for Food
.

No picture of grandfather Felix.

In another place the Anya Dickie review, neatly preserved in laminate. A photograph of The Monkey’s Paw, taken on a drizzly day with a shaky hand. A closer photograph of their outside chalkboard: the mains that day were black cod with chive cream and chicken with cognac.

There was a cluster of leaves that centred on a photograph of Caruzo, his grizzled face smiling from the centre of overlapping handwritten pages, candy bar wrappers and a spray of sticky notes, presumably added later as the Professor had other thoughts on the matter. Caruzo with a small skull. Caruzo and a younger Professor. They both looked as dirty as they did now. He pulled this photo down and turned it over.
August 1982. Me and Caruzo
.

Jeremy only nodded numbly and repinned the photo to the wall.

There was a Chladek cluster.
Globe and Mail
articles about the Velvet Revolution. A picture of his camp, the bridge vaulting overhead. A Czech advertisement for Becherovka. Each image grew on the tree in response to the words that had been spoken.

There was more Babes in the Wood material than Jeremy could process standing there. Another photograph of skulls. Newspaper articles. A photograph of a small clearing in the woods. A fragment of what appeared to be bone.

One branch tried to hide itself, bending in an arch away from the main trunk, growing heavier with images towards the tip until it nearly disappeared behind the bookshelves. Jeremy traced it slowly with his finger, memories rising within him. There was the Polaroid snapshot of him lying in the arms of the goddess Sequana at the source de la Seine, the snapshot he had given his father those years before, a present of conciliation the effect of which he had never determined. Next to it, the reciprocal gift. A photograph of a Sabatier taken from an advertisement. A card next to it. An
anniversary card from his mother to his father. His mother’s squiggly, uncertain script:
We are reminded of our beginnings
.

Jeremy sat cross-legged on the floor and continued to trace the branch. There were more photos of Caruzo and his father at various points in the park. The final photograph of Caruzo alone in front of an anonymous salal bush. It was dated, and this made clear its significance:
October 1987
.

And so, Jeremy thought, here we come to our spiralling conclusion. The beginning of the end. He ran his eyes down to the very tip of the branch. Its last leaf a familiar photograph dangling upside down. His strongest family image, long since burned into his mind’s retina: his father beaming, his mother guarded. His own small presence under his father’s arm. The three of them staring up through the years, from a fixed site in his memory, and into the shifting uncertainties of their present sorrow.

He collapsed backwards onto the floor and lay staring at the ceiling. He lay on paper, all around him. The Professor’s obsessive output of those same years. He grabbed a page at random and pulled it in front of his eyes, threw it aside and grabbed another. Then another and another. He didn’t read a word, only scanned the handwriting. All the same. The scribble of grief, of guilt.

He thought of many other things, lying there. Of how, even taken from them, her life had spilled into theirs and theirs into each others. Of what, in total, had been built here in recognition. Their own tree, this Tree of their Life. The core experiences, the clusters and offshoots that were what they had been, what they had done, the offences and betrayals for which they sought redemption. The things they had each become.

But he thought mostly of what must surely lie ahead. Of what must clearly grow from this instant of understanding. This glimpse of life’s design. This fragment sense of what was plain.

She finally tracked him down. He wasn’t returning her calls, so she had taken to hanging up and phoning again. It finally worked. One afternoon on the third call he picked up.

It had been very rude to wander off from Dante’s without explanation, Benny told him. They had all been wondering where he’d gone. They had worried. But when Jeremy offered no excuses for his behaviour she said abruptly: “I hope you’re free for half an hour, it’s time for you to see something.”

In fact, he had plans to go to the park that afternoon. He left an answering-machine message only Caruzo or his father would understand fully.
I can’t come to the phone right now. I’m taking a walk around the lagoon, and then I’ll be working until after midnight at a private party. Leave a message
.

Benny insisted and offered to pick him up, so they drove together over to the site of the new restaurant, where she parked dramatically across the street, cut the ignition and sat there for a moment. What immediately struck him was that the next building, an almost identical structure one door north of the old Monkey’s Paw, had been refitted with the same vaulting front window.

She had keys, of course.

The front room was unrecognizable—three huge, antique chandeliers being only the most obvious reason. The room
itself was strangely vast. The old counter against the right wall was gone, the vantage point from which he had watched so many mornings unfold. Instead of one kitchen door there were now two, quilted aluminum with semi-circular tops and portholes, ten feet apart on the back wall, which itself was wider than possible. And it was only as he approached these doors to look at the kitchen, and stepped up a three-step riser to a new raised section at the back of the room, that it came to him.

He turned to look back at the street, looking at not one vaulted window but two. The north wall had been ripped out cleanly to the roof, twenty feet overhead, blowing the room out to twice its original size. Combining it, he calculated, with what must have been the building next door.

“Same building originally,” Benny said, watching his eyes as he took in the changes. She would not remember, he thought, that she was standing roughly on the spot where she had eaten his grenadin de porc au beurre La Fin du Monde. She had sat right there, against the wall that no longer existed, wrapped so beautifully in velvet that he had committed himself to her, to the shape of her swelling into his Ikea chair.