The Figures of Beauty (15 page)

N
O ONE IS EVER SURE WHERE
P
IETRABELLA IS
. This is the professional challenge Clara and I confront at the Agency of Regional Tourism every day. This was something my father and I had in common. Nobody knew where he was from either. Nobody had heard of Cathcart.

He’d been found there in 1948. He was in a cardboard box by an antique-looking pool. The box was beside a marble statue.

The fountain’s grouping included two other nudes. They were smaller, less precise in their carving, and, by a trick of perspective, apparently in the distance of the tableau. They were approaching the pool behind the larger central figure with their urns on their shoulders. There were a dozen other stone figures—some more weather-worn—around the grounds. But it was the partly naked water-bearers that prompted the joke Michael Barton made when he first proposed that Archie Hughson buy his swimming pool.

M
ICHAEL INHERITED
B
ARTON
H
OUSE
and the extensive grounds when his father, Argue Barton, collapsed on the sidewalk outside the offices of the Cathcart
Chronicle
on August 15, 1945. The Barton papers were among the few in the world that didn’t lead that day with Japan’s surrender.

The pool had been so rarely visited by Michael Barton and his young, generally pregnant, English bride, that the Hughsons came to think of it in the years after the war as a kind of forgotten conservation area at the end of their own garden—a blank plot of snow in winter and an empty space of crickets and heat-buzzers in summer. In the spring of ‘46 the pool’s never-very-efficient filter system broke down entirely. Frogs became part of the soundscape.

It was the first of several lots of the Barton property to go. But the truth was, Michael had never cared for the grounds. His mother had died when he was eight, and this was a well of sadness so deep and unexpressed he never spent a day without peering down into it. When, three months after her death, the tomb his father had commissioned was finished, Michael had been terrified by it. It was white and cold and not like his mother at all.

His father’s need to sustain his wife’s memory—honoured in her mausoleum, honoured in the gardens and pool, honoured in the establishment of the Grace P. Barton Memorial Travel Bursary—always reminded Michael of the honoured gloom in which he had grown up.

He’d had the pool area surveyed. He’d gone to Herkimer’s and had it divided from the estate. But before it was officially put up for sale, Michael telephoned Mr. Hughson.

Michael was no longer wealthy. But the habit of appearing so never left him. His voice had the jovial ring of condescension used, almost always, by the well-to-do in conversation with their former teachers.

“Mr. Hughson, sir. I have a business proposition I’d like to make,” he said. “Neighbour to neighbour.”

Archie walked around the block to the front door of Barton House. They spoke for a while there, and then made their way down the paths past terraced flower beds and rock garden to the pool. It was while they slowly strolled around it that Michael Barton made the joke that Archie would, for some reason, always remember.

Michael Barton said he feared that townhouses might go in. The land could even accommodate a small three- or four-storey apartment building. The zoning regulations were alarmingly flexible. He did not want the Hughsons to be disadvantaged by his decision to sell a portion of land for which he had little use.

The long summer evenings that the Hughsons spent in their garden were not pleasures they were willing to sacrifice to what
The Chronicle
referred to—a little giddily, Archie Hughson thought—as the “Cathcart economic miracle.” Cathcart was a long way from becoming anything like a major metropolis, but it prospered in the postwar years. It wasn’t far from the American border. That didn’t hurt.

Energy and enterprise were in the air, and one didn’t want to get in the way of such robust civic ambition. But the Hughsons were thankful to have a retreat from the exhaust and billboards of this progress, and their retreat was their secluded back garden. Their quince tree and blackcurrant bushes produced the fruit for their excellent jam. The Hughsons worked together boiling and canning. Their carefully labelled Mason jars were much sought after at Montrose United’s annual bazaar. They made excellent hostess gifts.

Their rose bushes bloomed profusely and the pink flowers were often the centrepiece to their simple dinners. At dusk especially, their garden often seemed as quiet as a country glen. Often,
on warm summer evenings, they ate cherries in the garden swing while Mr. Hughson read aloud to his wife from one of the red-bound volumes of the set of Charles Dickens they kept, along with a few Royal Doulton figurines, on the shelves of their living room.

Hillside Avenue marks the point at which the lower, older town and its newer, upper tracts are interrupted by woods and rock ledges too steep to develop. The Hughsons were grateful for this rough geography. When it became too dark for Mr. Hughson to continue his reading, they often sat together in silence. The deep volume of trees rose up beyond the old pool at the end of their garden.

But the world was changing quickly. This was clear to Mr. Hughson. Were he not to buy the property from Michael Barton, someone else would—and that would not have been at all satisfactory.

“Can we afford it?” Mrs. Hughson asked when her husband relayed to her the startling proposal Michael had made. Her face was open and alert.

“We can’t expect the royalties to last forever,” her husband replied, “but at the moment the purchase is possible. I could take a small loan, I suppose, but I don’t think it will be necessary.”

This was a rare departure from the fiscal certainty by which they liked to conduct their lives. It was a risk that, under the circumstances, they wondered if they might do well to take. They’d always admired the property. It had never occurred to them that someday they would own it.

There was nothing about the pool that admitted to imitation—the statues were worn with an age that seemed well beyond anything to do with Cathcart. The stone bathing pavilion at the deep end, the cracked tiled perimeter of the water, the thick marble flagstones outlined with thyme, the still, green
reflection of the surrounding trees—everything about the pool was entirely convincing. It was as if a grotto had been transported from a Tuscan villa, complete with its moss-covered, ivy-shouldered proof of age. It was a secret place that backed onto the Hughsons’ ordinary bridal wreath, and everyday wisteria, and their staked, practical rows of
tamatas
.

This was a pool that looked nothing like swimming pools in North America would soon come to look. This was no turquoise rectangle around which people sunbathed and drank soda pop and listened to transistor radios. This was from a much older world.

My father was never sure if the central stone figure—the one gently pouring her jug into the pool—was intended to be Mary Magdalene about to wash Christ’s feet, or Rebecca providing water to the strangers sent by Abraham, or just an unnamed woman at an unnamed well.

These details are all answers to questions I put to my father. His letters tended to be answers to my questions. And when they weren’t, they were usually reports of his day-to-day activity in Cathcart. “I’m just in from watering the garden” was more his letter-writing style. “The mosaic tile at the edge of the pool is chipping badly.” Only his last letter—the one he didn’t expect to be read for years—told stories I would not have known to ask him about. More usually he began his letters by telling me he was too tired to write much of a letter. The weather was a popular subject. “I can’t remember a colder February.” This was the written equivalent of the small talk that drove my mother crazy.

“N
ICE JUGS
,” Michael Barton said to Archibald Hughson, gesturing toward the fountain.

There was a moment of silence in which Michael waited for Archie to respond. It passed awkwardly. Michael was so accustomed to being amusing that his voice sounded unresolved when it was not followed by, at the very least, a chuckle. But Archie didn’t chuckle. He didn’t do anything. He was waiting on the marble flagstones of the old swimming pool, politely puzzled, for Michael to continue.

Michael cleared his throat—a nervously jovial habit. Recently this harrumph had been turning into a prolonged, two-pack-a-day rumble. The hack was, at first, a bit of a joke. Like his famous hangovers, it emphasized his reputation for partying. He’d always been too young and too good-looking to have a smoker’s cough. But that was a while ago. Things were not quite so amusing anymore. His eyes were tired.

It might seem a strange thing to say, but he was someone who had been very good at having summer holidays. He excelled at them, and as he grew older he made the mistake of thinking that he could turn his skill for docks and boats and girlfriends to commerce. But he wasn’t a businessman. His commercial objectives, like his skills of serious communication, were rarely directed with any single-mindedness.

But Archie Hughson was good at deciphering things. He was a teacher. He was accustomed to finding good answers, like good students, deep in the midst of distracting detail. And the first cogent point he retrieved from Michael’s confusing explanation was this: the pool lot had been legally severed from the grounds of the Barton estate. The second concerned some unpleasant possibilities: townhouses, or garages, or even a small apartment building.

“You follow?” Michael asked. He spoke as if it were Archie’s hearing, and not Michael’s explanation, that might give rise to misunderstanding.

“Oh, yes,” Archie replied. “I do. Perfectly well, thank you. And I am quite interested in what you seem to be saying.”

When, a few days later, Archie informed Michael Barton of his and his wife’s decision to purchase the pool, Michael marked the occasion by presenting Archie with a miniature replica of Michelangelo’s
David
. It was a souvenir of his parents’ trip to Italy, the summer before he was born.

A
RCHIE
H
UGHSON’S STATUS
in the community was largely based on his occupation, on his old-fashioned manners, and on the calm dignity he brought to his duties as an elder at Montrose United Church every Sunday. He was a beloved figure—a public persona that in no way differed from the more private view of him held by his adopted son or his wife. He was a shy man. He had a kind and quiet heart.

He met Winifred when he was at the Cathcart Teachers’ College. She really was five-foot-two with eyes of blue. On their first date he took her to the beach. They parked their bicycles under a willow tree, beyond the purple-shadowed spans of the high-level bridge. It was only a short walk to the lakeshore. Just past the railroad tracks, with the water gleaming through the dune grass like the Côte d’Azur, he took Winifred’s hand to help her over the deep, hot sand. And, as he was always proud to say, “I never let go.”

But the respect he enjoyed in Cathcart had also to do with the fact that he was “quite well-off.” The description seemed never to vary in Cathcart conversations.

Entirely to Archie’s surprise,
Our World
sold many, many copies. It was first published in 1946. And for close to twenty-five years, it was widely distributed and frequently reprinted. Its unexpected success only made Archie wealthy by a schoolteacher’s
standards, which wasn’t saying much, but that was a perfectly adequate windfall for the Hughsons. Anything more would have been unsettling.

It was the absence of financial anxiety more than the possibilities money presented to them that made the Hughsons thankful for their good fortune. Being “quite well-off” was not a condition with much applicability to their lack of consumption. But it had its advantages. For one thing, Mrs. Hughson devoted herself as a volunteer at the Cathcart General Hospital—an activity that neither she nor her husband considered less than a serious and demanding occupation because it earned her no income.

Their needs were modest: they ate simply, travelled rarely, attended church regularly. They kept an unassuming, comfortable home. The Hughsons were in their mid-forties when they found Oliver—not at all old, of course, but old for a childless couple to adopt a baby.

C
ONTRARY TO THE ADVICE
of almost everyone—and no one had been more outspoken on the matter than his own father—Michael Barton had turned his back on the family’s newspapers, took the money he had inherited on his twenty-first birthday, and, before the war was even over, started his own business. He wanted to oversee an enterprise that more suited his own sense of who he was. This motivation was not (as his father had argued, to no effect) much of a basis for profit.

The greyness of newspapers was not in dispute. The business of running them was not a colourful occupation. This, Argue Barton admitted. But in a town the size and modesty of Cathcart, newspapers were a much more reliable commodity than speedboats. On this Argue Barton insisted, uselessly, to his only child.

There were losses in the start-up of Barton Marine. And there were more losses in the quarters and year-ends that followed. It wasn’t that the product wasn’t good. On the contrary, the long-prowed, beautifully varnished runabouts were well made and well designed. They were soon in great demand. But Michael’s financing was not structured to accommodate the expanded production necessary to keep up with success. This was the first in a series of stumbles.

The direction in which things were heading soon became apparent. But they headed that way for a long time without much resolution—long enough for friends to learn to decline Michael’s invitations to unnecessarily long lunches at the Cathcart Club. His cheery confidence that he would find investors among old school pals, among regimental buddies, among business associates of his father turned slowly, over many Scotches and water, into the disappointment he became. He drank more heavily. He fought more frequently with his wife. He woke in the middle of every night for a cigarette. But for years Michael was able to prolong his company’s decline and his own downward spiral by unloading parcels of the Cathcart property.