It was too beautiful to stay indoors.
On September 4, 1989, before noon, a woman threw open her front door to the molten gold of the fall day.
She walked past the close-packed, uneven housefronts of MacPherson Avenue, waving to the aged Mr. Boswell, who was bent over in his peaked cap, raking orange leaves into a clear plastic sack. She turned up Poplar Plains, crossed it and carried on up to Clarendon, where she took the path to the ravine. Reaching the open space, she angled down the grass slope to her favourite picnic table and sat on the bench.
In warier moments she had taken careful stock of the table, eyeing the distance it stood from the edge of the woods. Could she be dragged that far? Not if she positioned herself with her back against the woods, so she had a view up and down the clearing. None could approach unseen, except through the underbrush—and a premeditated attack launched from under a bush seemed far-fetched even to Blair.
Blair Bowker. So carefully placed in the familiar but not entirely trusted landscape, her face upturned to catch the sun, she was forty years old, the daughter of a teacher and a scientist from Medicine Hat, Alberta, the mother of one. After an intoxicating year of fame as a singer twenty years ago, she had gracefully declined to semi-obscurity. She had moved east four years before. It was a desire for excitement, and perhaps for privacy that brought her; she still remembered what she had believed twenty years ago, that Toronto was the centre, where it all happened. You could lose yourself in Toronto.
Today her chosen city was at its most beautiful; the sky an effortless blue, the trees rusted but still full, like plump chrysanthemums, yellow, electric orange, red. The air was not sweet, not like the air in Alberta, but for once it was fresh. Squirrels played tag in the branches, leaping through clouds of dried leaves that burst with their passage like soft, silent fireworks. The reservoir to the north-east rose in three flat planes above a little stone house with a greened copper roof. A crest over the door bore the initials W. T. W.—Toronto Water Works—and Roman numerals MCM XXX. It was neoclassical, symmetrical and solid, impersonal—the creator forgoing individual glory, assigning his works to the greater whole of the city.
Steps descended from the door of the stone house to an archway with its own miniature copper roof. It looked for all the world like the gatekeeper’s cottage attached to a mansion that had been scraped off the top of the hill. That severe flatness, the man-madeness of the surface hinted of something buried underneath: a bunker, the tomb of a forgotten, new world Pharoah?
Let’s say the Nile then, and pyramids. There were planes along it, levels; the path below, the intermediate rim, the razed top. Joggers inched along the edge, meeting and passing. A bicycle wheel spun slowly, generating sunlight. A man with his suit jacket slung on a crooked finger over his shoulder walked down the diagonal. His profile, made flat, became that of an Egyptian slave on a vase.
Now, out of a third dimension, a springer spaniel bounded down from the top, straight toward Blair. He passed her and skidded to a stop, pointing into the bushes behind. The leaves rustled. The dog trembled but did not bark. Blair held herself absolutely still. She knew there were animals in these ravines. She had had a naturalist on her show not long ago discussing the wild population of Toronto: porcupines, rac-coons, foxes, skunks, rabbits. Nothing dangerous, though a skunk would be inconvenient. She had to go in to work at three.
Animals did not frighten Blair. People did. But wasn’t that normal for a woman, “a hick from the sticks,” as she called herself, living alone in Toronto? Surely only large white males felt secure here. Blair had had one on air the other night. “Rosedale is the last safe place in the world,” he’d said. His proof? That Graham Silkin, reputedly the eighth-richest man alive, walked his dog on Chestnut Park alone and unprotected every day at exactly the same time. That revelation brought in the joke calls.
“Don’t spread that around,” said one. “But is it true?”
“Where and when did you say?”
“I consider jokes about hold-ups in very bad taste,” said another, sniffily.
“Oh, Toronto the Good speaks,” said Blair into her mike. It was a slip, the kind that got her into trouble with the fat pro-ducers.
The dog crashed into the leaf-fest. Two bluejays rose up, then settled again on the brush top. The dog circled impotently. Get ’em, dog! Bluejays were bad birds; they ate the eggs and young of other birds. Only Toronto would name a baseball team after them. Once again, the Jays were choking on the way to the playoffs; served people right. Blair had said that on the air, too, and got her second warning from one of the fat producers, who seemed to be twins, at least she never knew one from the other.
“You can’t make those smart cracks! You gotta realize, you’re not on some little fringe outfit, sniping from the sidelines. This is a major Toronto station! People love their Jays.” He filled the doorway, his regular scowl stretching sideways and downward in a boiled-cabbage face. At this rate Blair was unlikely to pass probation on this job, either.
The dog bounded away up the slope. Temporarily the walkers were out of sight. A plane moved in the sky directly overhead, its outline glazed by the invisible poisons that coat the distance. The crack of a helicopter was there, and then not there, disappearing southward toward the city. A dragonfly whirred over her shoulder and turned sharply left, a miniature replica of the helicopter. Under Blair’s feet was the sound of water running past a metal grate, overhead the periodic surge of traffic on the Spadina overpass. In between was silence.
Silence, and Blair’s own breath going in and out. To her surprise, peacefully, even happily. She was on her own, and if she lost this job she didn’t know where she’d get another one. Her daughter was a little strange. Company would be nice, and there were no men on the horizon. But what the hell. It was September. The day was incomparable. Her daughter had started grade one. Blair had nursed, coddled and cajoled that warm dumpling into a walking, talking, cognizant being who was now joining society, or at least the society of twenty-two other six-year-olds. Congratulations were due. When you’re alone, you learn to award these to yourself. Congratulations, Blair: You had a tough time, but you’ve done it. So far, so good.
She felt connected to everyone—the joggers, the drivers, the mothers pushing prams, her friends, seen and unseen around the city. There was just enough warmth in the air, and a dusty smell of fall coming on. There was forgiveness in the air, in the decline of summer. This futile, fruiting season would pass, and she too could get on to some non-biological project.
Berenice ducked out of the house and took the untidy clutch of letters from the mailbox. The porch floor was ankle-deep in leaves, red and yellow and green and orange, weightless, ancient. A gust of wind rattled down. Berenice was uneasy about all those leaves coming down. “The wind hastens the leaves to fall,” she said, using her new word from yesterday.
Blair had been sitting at the window looking out into the dark as Bernie came in.
“‘Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten to their end.’”
She’d said that in the voice that Berenice had come to recognize as her poetry voice.
“Who said that?”
“Shakespeare. A sonnet.”
“What’s that word, hazen?”
Every day Berenice took one of the words Blair used and asked her how to spell it, found the meaning and then practised using it.
“Hasten,” Blair said. “H-a-s-t-e-n.”
Bernie went upstairs and looked it up. All the words together, one after the other, explained themselves.
“hasten, 1. v. trans. To cause to make haste, to urge on, to accelerate, expedite, hurry.
2. v. intrans. To make haste, to come, go, or act quickly, to be quick, to hurry.”
Most of the words she knew separately; she could puzzle it out. “To make haste” was to go quickly. “To urge on”—well, “urge” reminded her of “urgent,” which people always said on the phone when they wanted Blair. It meant right away, or else there will be trouble. “Accelerate” had to do with cars, which Bernie knew because she had taken her learner’s permit and then the driver’s lessons, and got her licence.
So “hasten” meant to go fast, like in a car, because it was an emergency. It was what they did, what they all did, all the time. Berenice, whose name had been hastened to Bernie, had wondered about all the hurry when she’d arrived in Toronto, but she did not wonder now. She could manage acceleration in all activities.
She picked out two air-mail envelopes from the pile, the pale-blue, lightweight paper ones with the red and blue notches around the edges of the envelope. Both were addressed to Miss Berenice Serapion. Both were from the Philippines. One was from Dugale, and the other was from her sister Philomena.
Putting the other letters in a careful pile on the pine hutch in the entranceway, she picked up hers and set off up the two flights of stairs to her room, carrying her paper towel and her Windex with her. On the last flight she swung around the banister on the landing and turned off into her bedroom. She had the attic floor, two rooms and a bath, rent-free, plus $200 a week, for doing the housework, picking up Sissy after school and looking after her for the evening, while Blair was at work. It was a good deal. She could keep her other jobs, which were many: on her key-ring she had keys to twelve houses and she cleaned at least two of them a day.
Shutting her door behind her, she sat on the edge of the bed. She turned the letter over in her hands several times before tearing the seal. It was a satisfying thickness, several sheets of the fine paper were obviously folded inside. She hadn’t heard from Dugale in three months.
At first he had been so angry that she left that he had not written. After one year, a letter came to say that he was engaged to marry someone else. After all, what did she expect, leaving a man such as himself, good-looking, healthy, young? But he did not mean it. Bernie continued to send the money every month, and Christmas and Valentine’s cards. Last spring he’d started to write her love letters again.
She unfolded the rustling blue sheets with their small, Greek-styled letters in black ink. She bent her head over the letter. The clock ticked.
On the walls of her room were two posters. One was of herself, at the Ex, in a very short red miniskirt and black halter-top with a chunky metal belt and net stockings. In this photograph Bernie stared into the camera in a glow of what might be anger or injuredness. (Whatever it was, it was understood by the furnace man who entered her room to check the radiators to be smouldering sexual energy. He gaped and whistled.) The second poster was a blown-up colour portrait of Jesus Christ. Bernie didn’t go to mass much in Toronto, but she liked him as decor because it made her feel at home. He was like a father but he stayed in the frame. Her own father was a fisherman. He was a kind man but he had too many children, thirteen in all, whom he could not feed, which was why they had to go away.
Bernie’s shiny black head remained bent over the pages of onion skin.
dearest beloved, he wrote. i am missing you every day and more every day. we are made by God to be together and how is it you are over there so far from where i sit? my mother is ill once more and we are taking her to the doctor but she screaming all the time. they say she is crazy and give her some medicine which makes her quiet.
She read on and was transported to the village, where he lived with his mother and his father and his brothers and sisters and their children. It was only a stone’s throw from her parents’ nipa hut. She saw the corners she had swept and the walls she had wiped, and the light falling in squares through the small windows.
i do read the books you send and one week work with my sister’s husband to build a wall against the sea. So now no more is fishing hut swept away in rainy season, sometimes the fishermen with it. i sit beside the door of the house and watch the children, all the children of my sisters and brothers who are away like you, and i wonder if i am left behind all my days. Do you still remember our love Berenice? the fifty dollars you send each month does not buy so much food now I think you must send more. My mother must have medicine…
She put the letter down, to finish later. She could not untangle the complicated knot of questions it raised. Money, love, love, money; it was up to Bernie to give, and give more. She had not understood when she came to Canada to work that she would become a figure of authority to the entire clan of twenty or more, the one who said who got what and how much.
She heard the clock tick. It was time to tidy the house. In two hours she must get Simplicity at school. She folded her hands and said a prayer for Dugale and her relatives at home. She said a prayer for herself—the same one she said automatically, every day—that she should one day marry Dugale. She picked up her spray bottle of Windex and her roll of paper towel with something like nostalgia and hurried downstairs.
The Windex bottle was nearly empty, and she would not get another. Blair had cut an article out of the newspaper that said you could do all your household jobs with baking soda, vinegar and ammonia, and that these cleaners were safer for the environment. Environment had been her new word several months ago. Because Windex was bad and paper towels a waste, Blair wanted Bernie to use vinegar and old newspapers to clean the windows. They tried vinegar and old newspapers together on the mirror in the bathroom.
“It’s very effective,” Blair said. “I don’t even mind the smell. What do you think, Bernie?”
Bernie said that it was okay and she would do it, although in fact she did not like it as well. All the other housekeepers at the Loblaws at St. Clair and Spadina bought buggyloads of Pledge and Fantastik and Wisk and Sparkle and Vim, of Easy-Off. (“That’s the worst!” said Blair.) It gave greater value to their work to know that the household was putting out this money for materials. Reducing to vinegar would lower Bernie’s status, and, by extension, Blair’s.
Balanced against that was the fact that Bernie loved saving money and was good at it. She knew Blair, being alone, was not so rich as other people here. Bernie brought coupons home from Canadian Tire and Loblaws; she saved the folders offering 25 percent off that came in the mail. She’d gone to St. Clair West and come back with a new backpack for Simplicity that had been on sale for $9.99, the very same one she had seen for $25 in the Kitchen Bazaar.
At first Blair didn’t notice Bernie’s thrift. It took Bernie’s friend Conchita to explain why. It was because Bernie went quietly around the house doing the very best job she could, and not drawing attention to herself.
“It’s different here. Not like at home where girls are meant to be soft and make work seem easy. Here you are in the business world, even though your business is a house. You must describe in all the details how you did your job. Make it sound very very difficult.”
So Bernie stood firm on the diamond-shaped tiles that she had washed so many times they were like her own feet, and said, “We saved fifteen dollars today. I looked at the Kitchen Bazaar and Grand and Toy and those places in Forest Hill Village but I knew I could get it cheaper. So I went down to Bargain Jimmy’s and there were some. It even matches the colour of her jacket, see?”
And Blair smiled absently and said, “That’s great, Bernie. You’re wonderful. Thank you for going to so much trouble.”
The door slammed. Blair came into the house. She stood at the foot of the stairs holding something brown and shrivelled in her hands. Bernie looked down at her.
“I bought some ginger root because it looked so fresh. Would you like some ginger tea?” she said.
Bernie smiled brightly, although she did not feel bright. She felt confused, by questions about love, questions about money. “No, I have to do work now,” she said, and ran into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her. She took the toilet brush and pumped it up and down, making a sucking whirlpool in the bowl. Sometimes Bernie’s aunt asked her, did she not get bored of doing housework and looking after a child? She should go to school and take a course, because soon she would be a citizen.
“You’re landed now,” her aunt said. “Down from the clouds. No air under your feet.” Working in other people’s houses wasn’t a proper job at all but something to be ashamed of, her aunt implied. Bernie didn’t agree. It felt good to scrub a toilet. Besides, she learned from Blair; she drove a car now and she could shop. She could clean twelve houses in a week. She was not shy like she used to be. When she first met Blair she called her “Madam.” Blair laughed.
“Oh heavens, don’t say that here. My name is Blair. You mustn’t call people sir and madam here.”
She finished the bathroom and walked out into the hall. The telephone rang. Berenice answered. “For you! It’s Ruby.” As she handed the receiver to Blair, she remembered. “She called already. She wanted you to call back.”
Blair lifted the receiver to her ear. “Hi Ruby,” she said, warily.
Philip sat in the open window of the Future Bakery on Bloor. He raised a mug of café au lait to his lips. It was a warm day, like summer again. The steam from the coffee made drops on his already damp forehead. It was nearly eleven now, and everything was opening; across the street the Lick’n Chicken, which had had nothing to do with chicken for a decade, and the Vinyl Museum. Two doors down, a black man on a stepladder was roller-painting the ceiling of a store that sold Latin-American crafts.
A low, red car pulled up and parked. A dark-haired, steroid-stuffed muscleman withdrew from the driver’s seat. Out from the passenger side climbed a woman with a tiny waist and a short, incredibly tight black skirt. He stepped into the lanes of traffic. She stopped on the curb. Checking out the oncoming traffic, he then strolled across the street, thighs rolling and buttocks tight as an apple. On the opposite curb he rotated to face her, as she fretted on the opposite sidewalk. He jerked his hand. Fast, fast, very delicately placing one high-heeled shoe directly in front of the other, she crossed the street like a trapeze artist. Reunited after the tension of the crossing, they clasped hands and went into the Lick’n Chicken.
At the table next to Philip three women were talking politics. The Rosedale candidate, they said, made his EA pregnant, got her an abortion, left and then returned to his wife, and still beat out the feminist.
“When I win the Nobel peace prize,” said one, “I’m going to wear a shocking-pink strapless dress. Just to show, to show you can do it and still be feminine.”
Philip thought that, these days, there were too many women in restaurants. “What do you object to?” Blair had said to him, when he expressed his view to her. “The fact they’re not with men or the fact that they’re not home cook-ing?”
“They’re flushed out of their natural habitat. Too visible,” he insisted. “It’s not a good sign. It’s like animals when they’re going extinct.” Blair just laughed at him. He was an old shoe to her, he thought. Philip with his storefront smile, his sheared-off black trousers, the genial, faded blue eyes. He looked like an overweight, balding ex-hippie, but he had looked like that at twenty, too. The diffident rancher’s son from Cereal, Saskatchewan, by way of Los Angeles. He had walked out of Hearts of Flame in a rage, tried law school and hated it, and ended up in California making masks for the movies. After two decades, he had come to Toronto. It wasn’t really clear why, except he’d never made a home down there. Like Blair, like Ruby, like Oswald too, probably, he had made no permanent connections anywhere. It was the curse of Hearts of Flame, they joked.
Los Angeles had not affected him. Philip was as solid, as there as a horse in the barn, the very opposite of Californians, indeed of Torontonians, most of whom still seemed like flashy, insubstantial people. Another hick from the sticks, Philip had become the essence of the city, the artist underclass. He’d proven his worth a hundred times over, and had nothing to show for it.
The coffee was finished. Breakfast was over and it was almost lunchtime. He signalled the waitress and ordered a beer.
Philip did special effects for films and stage productions. When the film and television contracts didn’t come in, he paid his bills by working as a make-up artist. The night before he had made up the girls for the Miss Canada pageant. They were all so obsessed with their appearance they screamed bloody murder over a pimple. One today was bitching about couldn’t he do something to cover up this one zit. So he gave her a dab of plastic wood. All he really wanted to do was spend all his time making chandeliers fall and eyeballs pop out.
The beer came. Philip drank deeply from his glass. He’d had a call from Ruby on his machine that morning. He thought she was in some kind of trouble. Philip’s eyes opened wide, watered, and then narrowed down on their privacy again. Even as he thought about her, his great relaxed body expressed resistance. He pushed her away, pushed what she had to say away, pushed all difficult and unhappy things away.
He hadn’t seen her in ages. Didn’t know what she was up to. Married man, he’d heard from Blair. That was inevitable, he’d also heard. The men all were, apparently. He wouldn’t know. Philip was apart from all that. He didn’t enter the fray. He never had. It added to the security of his presence, his utter faithfulness, his crotchety, stubborn, principled views, his having no entanglements, no side as they said in the west.
He put his hands flat on the table and looked at them. His hands were beautiful, large, with long-boned fingers. They were darker in colour than his pale face, reflecting childhood days in sunny fields, perhaps, or even this past summer’s rides around the city on his bicycle. His fingers had calluses on their tips from the strings of his bass, still, after all this time. The skin furrowed between Philip’s eyes. He pushed his rimless glasses back up his nose.
He remembered that night in Banff when he was with Ruby. Blair said he should have stayed with her, kept her out of trouble. Not Ruby: she didn’t want the likes of him.
Philip leaned back in his chair and looked out the window. A tall woman with a long French braid, like an exposed spine down her head and back, was locking her bike to the Toronto Sun box. She stood up and looked straight at him, blankly, and looked away. No curiosity.
He wondered if anyone wanted to know him, to know what his life was like. He spent Saturday sleeping till three. Then he went to Bay-Bloor Radio and looked at systems he couldn’t afford and got depressed. He had no money. He’d gone out and done exactly what he loved. The income was a bit unsteady, but it was worth it. And he had some great jobs coming up…that horror film…
Philip kept on looking out the window. Knots of people stood on corners and in front of stores. Another cheerful thing was that his uncle was dying of cancer of the esophagus. It was Sam. Sam was the musician in the family. When Philip dropped law for show business, Sam had calmed his father’s apoplexy. His dad had come to town, and they all got together on Sunday for dinner. And Sam was there, looking all tanned and brown and slim, as if he’d spent two years at tennis camp instead of the Princess Margaret Hospital for peo-ple with terminal cancer. And he was super cranky. All he did was demand special food and drink. He wanted caviar and then he wanted marinated lamb kebabs from this fancy butcher—and his wife ran around and got all this—and then he threw a fit because there wasn’t any chestnut puree in between the layers of the cake. He hadn’t always been a fussy eater. He’d started out eating meat loaf thirty years ago and graduated to peanut butter sandwiches and macaroni. No money.
So then Sam took Philip by the elbow and led him out through the sliding glass doors onto the balcony of this hotel, and gave him some advice. He said, “I wanted to play music so much and I spent years teaching here and there and barely making it, and now I’m going to die and I have nothing. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Give up this special effects bit, this clowning around, and go out and go back to law school.”
Philip shook his head and directed a snuffly laugh down into the bottom of his beer glass. That was not how it was supposed to go. When people were dying they were supposed to come on to you and tell you to do exactly what matters most to you, not to worry about money. He always had this argument with Blair.
“You don’t need a lot of money,” she said. “You don’t have a kid. You don’t rent a house that eats your money. You might as well do what you want. Life is short.”
“Life is not short. Life is long,” said Philip.
“Short,” said Blair.
“Long,” said Philip.
He stood up, put five dollars on the bill, then pushed his hands into his pockets for a two. He wondered if they should do anything about Ruby. He took off his glasses and rubbed his large, soft, red-rimmed eyes. He could do something. Stage a mishap. A special effects mishap. Get this married guy off her case. But it was probably the last thing she wanted. If they were talking mishaps, it’s the wife he had to do. And he didn’t do wives. Get Oswald on the case, thought Philip. Isn’t that his specialty? Changing fate?
There was a girl standing on the corner with a tame rat on a leash sitting on her shoulder. Two drunks came and leaned against the door frame.
“Your body dies but your spirit goes on,” said one drunk in a confiding tone to the other, as if he were explaining a fact unaccountably left out of the operating instructions.
“That’s what I’m worried about, where does it go on to?” said his friend.
“Me too,” said Philip, passing through the doorway.
The man, who looked as if his nose had been bloodied some hours ago, looked puzzled.
“Not anywhere around here, that’s for sure.”
“Maybe Varsity Stadium. The bleachers on the west side,” said Philip. He bent to unlock his bike. The drunk looked surprised and elbowed his friend. They moved off.
Max Ostriker strode out of the house on Castle Frank into the noon sun. He’d been in there all morning, attending to the will of an aged descendant of some branch of the Family Compact. Mr. K. New would have burnt his money if law allowed, rather than let anyone else get hold of it. “Are you telling me I hafta…” said the testy old guy.
“You don’t have to do anything,” Max had said, sitting at the old mahogany table beside Mr. New’s wheelchair. “Well, let me say that again. The only thing you have to do is die, some day.” The old man had actually liked that remark; he’d chortled and gripped his arm rests, pulling himself half out of his seat. But it had not made him any easier to deal with.
In the park, a group of boys was playing ball. Max jogged toward second base and scooped up the ball as it rolled near an inattentive shortstop, legs scabby with insect bites.
“Can I play?” Max shouted, tossing the ball back to the pitcher, a serious blond boy with an oversized cap on his head and a rat-tail hanging down his back.
“Sure!”
He chucked the shortstop under the chin and told him to look sharp and then trotted out to field. The batter fielded the ball and took off around the bases. Max ran up to intersect his path between second and third, and, waving his arms, prevented the kid from reaching the base until the other fielder threw the ball to second.
The kids were screaming at him, and each other. While the frustrated batter kicked at his legs, Max held his head, laughing out loud. Then he let the kid go and slapped his shoulder to let him know it was a joke.
The kid’s face puffed up red and tears burst from his squeezed-up eyes.
“He cheats, it’s not fair. Get him outta here.”
The batting team cheered Max.
“It’s a game, it’s a joke,” protested Max.
The serious pitcher glared at him from waist height. “I know kids who play like that, but not grown-ups,” he said.
Max’s long, lean jaw jutted forward. He was dashed. He was just trying to have fun. Kids weren’t like they used to be, couldn’t take a little teasing.
“Okay,” said Max. “You got it!” He picked up the ball again and threw it way, way up. They all stared blindly after it. It came down in its own split-sun halo and landed smack in Max’s hand.
“Hey, give it, give it!” They were around his legs.
He let the ball drop into the pitcher’s hand and walked away, rousing a rough chorus of protest behind him. Halfway across the park he stopped. The boys were still watching. He saw something glint in the grass. He bent to pick it up. It was a loonie, gold in the sun.
“Look what I found!” he called back at them. “My reward.”
“Ah, no fair! The guy cheats and then he finds money!”
“Just luck, kids. My luck!”
“In your dreams, bub!”
He waved his arm and swung off the grass onto the sidewalk. Luck was Max’s today, and all life, too, to toy with. And about time. He didn’t mind lording it over the kids: people had lorded it over him long enough.
He was a tall man, indifferent to his height, broad-shouldered enough to be taken for a football player. He was strong, but his strength had been usurped by others; he had carried their burdens without complaint. His father had bullied him. His mother had depended on him; he was her daily visitor until she died. He offered a brass shoulder to suffering women friends. Still single, he styled himself as a rake. Though he had little justification, it was the best protection. Fake it ’til you make it, they said, and that’s what Max had done.
He’d been faking it, basically, since elementary school, when he was gawky, timid and friendless. He grew tall and strong without noticing, developed his profession. Then, when he was thirty-five, his mother died. He suddenly realized he was an eligible man, and free to find a life. These were facts she had kept obscured from him, or perhaps he had kept obscured from her, and hence from himself.
At one point he’d longed to be a musician, but he played an indifferent guitar, and besides, it was an unreliable line of work. He went to Woodstock a year after everyone else and took a photo of himself, with his guitar. He had it framed. “This is me, playing at Woodstock,” he said when he showed people. During law school he tried to manage musical groups, but that was a dirty business. When he got out in 1971, he formed his own firm, with Andy Mugwell, and began to write wills—a quieter life.
Ostriker, Mugwell: it was an unusual firm. Clients were struck by Max’s nonconformity, by the relaxed way he leaned behind his desk, jacket off and tie loose, by the rumpled hair and the fact that every time he stood up he had to hitch up his pants. Secretaries were struck by his courtesy, by the way he accorded them dignity, asking them serious questions about their views: “Are you in favour of pay equity?” “Do you feel safe in your apartment?” They were struck, as they were meant to be, by his openness, but they never really got to know him.
Andy and Max fit nicely together, trading on each other’s strengths. Max had steady, reliable clients who paid good money. Andy had inherited money, and could do the kind of law he wanted. His flamboyant civil rights cases attracted attention and gave credibility where they wanted it. (Anyone who went to law school in the late ’60s wanted that.) Meanwhile, the reassuring social history of the Mugwells, being descended from the Colonel and all, helped bring in the trust business for Max. Andy amused himself with his defence of the bizarre, the friendless, the forgotten. Yet the minute that he took such a case, it revealed itself to be irresistible to the media. They called it the Mugwell touch: whatever he put his hands on turned to ink.
At Bloor and Sherbourne Max glanced at the Star in its blue dispenser. Speak of the devil. Blurred by the glass, grinning above the fold line, was Andy himself. Max did not put in his thirty-five cents; he got all he wanted by looking. Andy had been photographed going into the courtroom, holding hands with the young lady whose boyfriend had wanted to stop her abortion. In the photograph, Andy’s balding pate, his avuncular smile, his firm, strong arm showed up to advantage, with the young blond girl looking appropriately grateful as he protected her from the outflung arms and waving placards of pro-life fanatics.
Moving off, Max groaned audibly. Some admired Andy greatly for defending the downtrodden, the unclean, the powerless. It was indeed noble, because these rights cases were never perfect. Each victim of the system was himself (or herself) a victimizer. To the extent that he has been victimized, he is damaged, and damaged people tend to bring a lot of trouble upon themselves. To Andy this was not a problem; indeed, it made his work more interesting. But it gave Max headaches. The likes of Mr. New did not appreciate meeting an exotic dancer and her leather-clad keeper in the waiting room, much less a tattooed ex-con.
Take this woman: three previous abortions, a job at the Zanzibar Tavern, and she was a “slow learner.” Okay, you don’t expect them to be paragons of virtue. But Andy seemed to prefer those he championed to be as suspect as possible, the rape of a drug-addicted prostitute posing much more of a challenge than that of a Branksome schoolgirl, or the defence of High Times from charges of promoting drug use a sexier case for freedom of speech than, say, The Merchant of Venice banned. He loved a case to rub Torontonians’ noses in their own doodoo, their own tight, tense and unreasonable set of rules.
Andy continued to be on Max’s mind as he sped along Bloor Street toward his lunch date with Ruby Mason. Max was not among those lawyers who said Mugwell was only out for himself, that he never acted without first calculating the amount of ink that would flow, and then the amount of money. He knew for a fact they were wrong about the money. It was merely a by-product. But then Andy was born to it. It comes more easily to people like that: money goes to money. He didn’t include himself in that. His father made money but he didn’t come from it. A big difference.
Max was good at placing other people, even if he couldn’t place himself. Successful, self-made, a free agent, that was his vanity. He was well liked without having close friends; he kept himself apart, even from his old classmates; his family, too, had been singular and outside society. About his clients Max felt an endless, almost prurient interest; and for the rest of Toronto, out there, a general—probably defensive—disinterest, though he must confess, he would have loved to see his picture in the newspaper. Always, when he thought he was on top, there was Andy to remind him: some lived in another realm.
The sun went in again, and rain began to splatter. It was just about noon. He was meeting Ruby Mason at Enoteca. She said she had a problem to discuss. He never thought of Ruby as a fashion designer, as everyone else did: he remembered her as that shimmering, radiant singer he’d seen perform at Mount Norquay. It was a memory at once erotic and touched with shame: the spotlights and the sweat, the bare brown arms, the press of swaying bodies up against the stage, voices that could break down all the chambers of the heart. Hearts of Flame: they could have been great. Too bad they split up. He’d had a hand in it, too, to his regret. That night was buried in him, under a stone marked “Failures: don’t look too closely.” He never heard from the others, though he knew Oswald was in town—who didn’t—and Blair, too. Only Ruby called, from time to time. He didn’t know if she wanted free legal advice or to pick up old ties. Either was okay with him.
He dodged down the subway at Castle Frank and went over to the westbound platform. Behind him a black woman in a brown velvet jacket and miniskirt with very high heels walked briskly down the escalator on the right side and turned toward the track. The train entered the station, its central light diffusing in the lit and white-tiled platform area. The crowds were no more than one-deep at the platform. The woman elbowed, nonetheless, to the very edge of the platform with a look of great concentration.
Max watched her; something about her face and her posture drew him; she was so determined. Her hair blew back as the train approached. She narrowed her eyes; everyone did, in the intense headlight, the gritty wind. When the train was ten feet away she dropped her purse on the edge of the platform. Calling out over her shoulder, “Excuse me!” she leapt off the platform.
Max lunged forward to grab her arm but she was gone. She fell onto one knee but righted herself when the train was still a few feet away. Looking down, Max saw that there was room under the lip of the platform; she could have drawn back in there. But instead she pushed off the wall and dove forward again into the path of the train. The driver’s face distorted, he shouted behind the windshield. She was three feet above the track, flying horizontally when she met the train.
Max was in a direct line to see the body smash against the metal catcher and fall under the rails of the train. He felt the blow as in his own guts. Then all hell broke loose. The driver pounded the window. Brakes squealed; people on the platform screamed. The lights went out. The train pushed past in the dark before finally, somewhere down the platform, brakes grabbing, the engine sobbed to a stop.
Bent over, Max tried to vomit, but his throat only clutched dryly and let go. As he stood up he retrieved the woman’s purse. The station seemed to go mad. Someone behind him toppled over. There was an eerie silence in the darkness, then voices yelling for calm and to let them through. A yellow light came on the sides of the tunnel, and two guys in transit uniforms appeared telling people to keep back. Passengers inside the train pressed their faces to the window.
Max moved back. The crowd was crazy with people crossing themselves, shaking their heads and covering their faces. He didn’t know the tears were running down his own face until a woman offered him a kleenex. Some saffron-robed character was chanting and would not be moved, and a guy beside him who looked like a stockbroker swore repeatedly, “I shoulda walked, goddamn it I shoulda walked, I’m gonna be late.”
Meanwhile, it got more and more crowded on the platform. No trains left, but one arrived on the other side. More people came down the stairs. The passengers were let off the train. The platform was jammed, a solid mass of people. It was hot, and there was no air. He wanted to get out, but he knew better than to start pushing. Max kept thinking she was under there, under the train.
Finally a voice came over the loudspeaker saying “Please leave the station, please leave the station. Eastbound travel will be interrupted for some time.” A way opened up on the staircase. He made for it.
Then he realized he still had the purse in his hand. The handle, which was plastic made to look like horn, was still warm. Max found the police and offered them the purse, which they took. He said he was a witness but they had plenty already. Some uniformed medical workers rushed down the stairs with boxes of tools and plastic bags and shovels. The driver, with his head down, was led away by an ambulance worker.
At last he found his way back upstairs to the outside. He was wondering why the woman said, “Excuse me.” It wasn’t for pushing people aside, or for dropping the purse, or even for inconveniencing them. It must have been for making them witness to this death she had designed. “No, I don’t excuse you, lady,” he cursed as he hailed a cab. He was going to the office to hide; he didn’t trust himself in public. He’d have to call Ruby and cancel lunch.
Ruby Mason was not having her best day.
At ten o’clock that morning, when she was still in her spaghetti-strap satin nightgown, sitting with a huge mug of coffee in front of her on the turquoise arborite table, the phone had rung. It was Marvin.
“Trouble,” he said. “The wife figured out where I was last night.”
“She did?” Ruby said evenly. “Oh no. How?” She looked down at her acrylic fingernails. She turned the radio lower. This was the news she had been waiting for. Still, it could go either way. Marvin’s wife had been a stumbling-block for a year; Marvin said he didn’t love her, but he never complained about her. She remained entirely unknown to Ruby, a kind of headless monster.
Marvin was a producer at City-TV, a day-and-night operation. It was easy most of the time to say he was working. This time, however, the wife had phoned the office and got no answer, so she drove over and found it was all closed up.
“When I got home she was sitting up waiting for me.”
A Cheshire cat smile on her face, Ruby began rubbing her satin thigh. She was proud of her thighs, long-muscled and hard. They were the products of diligent exercise, a skimpy diet and the nearly constant state of nervous excitement in which she existed. She was pleased, yes, about the wife; curious, too. That was normal. It was the pity that took her by surprise.
“So how’s she taking it?”
“Bad bad bad,” he said. “It’s a gruesome scene. I had to promise her just about everything to keep her from completely falling apart.”
“Poor you,” said Ruby.
“For instance, I had to promise I’d stop seeing you,” he said. “Oh-oh, there’s my other line. I’ll call you. Lunch tomorrow, okay? You’ll have my undevoted attention.”
“Undivided, you mean,” said Ruby to dead air. He always got his clichés wrong. She put some kisses onto the receiver, and then she thought about what he’d said. Promises not to see Ruby, was it now? Marvin could never keep a promise like that. Again, she felt for his wife. The poor woman would find she was bargaining with the devil.
Slowly she got dressed and, without hurry, went in to work. She’d only been there long enough to sift through her messages and decide there wasn’t anyone she wanted to talk to, or even any single piece of business she could handle, when Max Ostriker called.
“I can’t make lunch,” he said. His voice was shaking. “I was on the subway and some damn woman committed suicide right in front of me.”
“Oh shit. Poor you,” said Ruby, for the second time that day.
“We’ll do it another time,” he said, and hung up abruptly.
Instantly, before the bad feeling could hit, Ruby phoned Blair. When she didn’t get her, she waited fifteen minutes and tried again.
“Hi, what’re you doing?” she said, through her teeth. She’d spied a hangnail on her left pointer finger and was trying to bite it off.
“I went and sat in the ravine. Now I’m going to sit on the porch in the sun, drink ginger tea and read a novel,” said Blair. She gave the impression she did not want to be dislodged from this position.
“What’s it called?” Not that Ruby knew the names of novels; she just wanted to talk herself past this little bit of aggra-vation with Marvin.
“Fly Away Home.”
Ruby waited. “As in Ladybug, Ladybug?” Her voice had a familiar needy quaver.
“As in.” Blair relented. “Why, what about you?”
“Max Ostriker cancelled lunch because somebody jumped in front of a subway train, right in front of him.”
“Max Ostriker? You still see Max Ostriker?” Blair remembered him as a supercilious, smug kid out to make millions off the backs of poor folk singers. Of course, they were all kids back then.
“I see lots of people you don’t know I see,” said Ruby. “Come down, can you? Half an hour? I’ll get take-out.”
“No don’t, I hate that miso soup. We’ll go out,” said Blair reluctantly. She didn’t feel like going downtown. But Ruby sounded bad. Old ties pulled Blair. She wondered what it was this time. She put down the telephone and gazed out the window. It was still too beautiful to stay indoors.