When I got home from the war in April of 1919, I felt I ought to pay a call on Horny’s parents, and yet it was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. Arthur Ingersoll sold tobacco and newspapers and, when I first met Horny, was making as good a job at it as could be made. By the time we both enlisted, Horny’s father ran the shop in the King Edward, the newest and by far the ritziest downtown hotel. In my adolescence, I’d found him an overbearing man, not just because he whacked his kids—all fathers did that—but because of his sulks. He was a real speak-when-you’re-spoken-to kind of parent. Being constantly exposed to news headlines made him feel he was better informed than anyone else, and so he did the talking in his home. He rarely wanted to hear other members of his family, let alone their callow friends, venture an opinion. Or even a fact. If he were angry about something, he wouldn’t speak for days. On the other hand, he loved his two boys and one girl, never stinting on their education or anything that would further it. Perhaps this was money wasted in the case of Horny, who was no scholar. Arthur, however, was forgiving, and rather admired Horny’s reputation as a lady-killer. His wife Gladys had been a Horner and had wanted her first son to carry that name. She was less happy with the tomcatting ways her son was allowed to develop, but was unable to stand up to her husband about this or anything else. On the very few occasions I had visited her home, she had been kind to me. Because I was quiet under the Ingersoll roof, I think she mistakenly saw me as a good influence on Horny. She hoped, she said, I would help him with his studies. When we enlisted, she said that since Horner wasn’t much of a correspondent, I must write and give her her son’s news. I tried to tell her we had enlisted in different branches of the service and wouldn’t in the normal course of events be seeing much of each other. She said to write anyway—and I did, once or twice, before Horny’s death. She actually sent me a pair of socks she had knitted for me, which I was able to use, and a loaf of her bread, which went mouldy before it reached me.
I can’t tell you the number of times I circled the King Eddy Hotel that April. I hadn’t been able to write to the Ingersolls since their first-born son had died, and yet I felt I had one final report to file. As it was really to Horny’s mother I felt I owed this, in the end I avoided the King Edward altogether. Around four one spring afternoon, I went to the Ingersoll home.
On the way, I stopped to gawk at Winchester Street Public School with its tall, thin windows and to recall having swatted a baseball through one of them. From the school, nose twitching with the memory of chalk dust, I followed our childhood footsteps to a terrace of red-brick Victorian houses, the kind where ceilings are so high that a two-storey house is as tall as any three-storey built after the war. This was Toronto’s mid-eastern neighbourhood of Cabbage Town, convenient to two cemeteries and to the city jail. And—of more interest to boys—near enough the Riverdale Zoo that we were able to hear the wolves howl at feeding time. A prestige address? Not everyone thought so. But residents suffered from no sense of inferiority.
Gladys answered my knock, looked me over twice before she recognized me, then gave me her old sweet smile. Her hair was greyer, her eyes sadder, her mouth tireder, the skin on her neck looser; she was basically a worn-down replica of the anxious mother who had seen Horny and me off. She brought me into the living room. There I was somewhat thrown by seeing Arthur sitting up on a chaise longue in a dressing gown. He was recovering from a bout of pneumonia, which explained his absence from the shop. He had aged differently from his wife. His black hair was very thin, and every sinew in his body seemed to stand out. Not feebly, however—angrily. For all the scuffling I’d done, and despite the fact that he was indisposed, I still wouldn’t have wanted to cross him. He’d barely been nineteen when Horny was born and was not yet forty-six. He claimed to have paid for his marriage licence by winning a boxing prize. But it had always been as much his disposition as his physique that intimidated me. I only recall seeing him smile once.
One time when I went over to the house, Horny and I had been scrapping, and his nose was bloody. That was when Arthur Ingersoll treated me best. He grinned; he chuckled. When the nose started gushing afresh, Arthur Ingersoll guffawed. He liked it that I’d hit his son. “Do him good. Toughen him up.” It ruined my appetite for fights for a whole week.
Today, he didn’t come close to smiling. A pout I had sometimes seen cross his pinched features seemed by now to have taken up permanent residence. At least, it never left him all the time I was in his home. It was embarrassing, really, to see such a childish expression on a man his age.
“It’s Paul, Arthur,” Gladys told him. “Horner’s friend, remember?”
“Good afternoon, sir.” I didn’t think he was going to answer me, so I turned back to Gladys. “It’s good to see you both.”
“You enlisted in the infantry,” Arthur said abruptly. “You ever manage to get transferred to Horny’s battery?”
“I wish you wouldn’t call him that,” Gladys sighed.
“No, Mr. Ingersoll, I didn’t.” I didn’t try to refute the assumption that it would, of course, have been my highest ambition to be promoted from the unworthy service that had been willing to take charge of my sorry carcass to Horny’s side at the guns.
“Then he can’t tell us anything about Horny’s death,” Arthur told his wife in a definitive, high-pitched voice.
“Oh, Paul, I hope you can,” said Gladys. “We got an official announcement about Horner’s dying ‘from wounds’, and then later his officer wrote. Let me get the letter. It’s just here.”
She went to her desk in a corner of the room. While she was looking, I noticed a popular book on how to increase your sales on the table at Arthur’s elbow, and in the folds of his coverlet one on how to invest your savings. The letter Gladys at length produced was limp from many foldings and unfoldings over the previous four years.
“Dear Mr. and Mrs. Ingersoll,” she read. “You have asked me if I can provide any more details regarding the death of your son than can be gleaned from the official notice. I was not present personally when he died, but understand that he was steadfastly manning the guns under heavy anti-battery fire. A piece of shrapnel hit him in the stomach and, despite prompt action by the stretcher-bearers, he died at the dressing station within the half-hour. I believe he was not conscious during this interval and suffered very little. His wound was of such severity that no surgical skill in the world could have saved him. Let me say how sorry I am for your loss, which is also that of his unit and of his country. I can only add that Horner Ingersoll died bravely in the defence of western civilization against barbarous aggression. I give you my word that we who are left will show your son’s butchers no mercy. Horner Ingersoll will be avenged. Sincerely, Geoffrey Dundas, Lieutenant, Canadian Field Artillery. That’s all he says. Can you add anything, Paul?”
“As a matter of fact—”
“He wasn’t there, Gladys,” Arthur piped up. “He was infantry. In the trenches. The guns are set up somewhere else entirely. Anyway, what more would you want to know? It’s all there in black and white.”
“Paul was Horner’s friend. I just thought he might have heard something . . . something more.”
“It’s all perfectly straightforward. The gunners did their job. The infantry did their job.” Arthur nodded towards me, as representing a necessary if inferior branch of the military. I thought it was big of him. “And then,” he went on, “the politicians made a lenient peace. The Hun got away with his aggression and is bound to try it again. How Horny died is clear. That he has not, despite what the officer says, been avenged is also clear. Now, can I have my tea?”
I went to the kitchen with Gladys rather than sit with Arthur. She said the other Ingersoll children were well and pursuing the studies Arthur had wished for them. The boy was to be a lawyer; the girl was taking a degree in household science. The family was not suffering financially. They had even bought a small apartment block in the neighbourhood and had four suites to rent out to carefully chosen tenants.
“It’s just Horner,” Gladys told me.
“It must be dreadful to lose a child,” I said lamely.
“Yes, but it’s not just that. I feel uneasy about him somehow, as if he wants to tell me something more. You’ll think me superstitious.”
“No—I—there is—”
“Maybe it’s because we’ve no grave to go to. Is there a grave—over there?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, of course. With a headstone, in a well-tended cemetery.”
“I’d so like to see it.”
“I hope you do.”
I said I wouldn’t stay for tea and asked her to make my excuses to her husband.