I’d rented an apartment in an old brown-brick low-rise at the corner of Huron and College, the building flanked by a rusting metal fire escape that people often used in lieu of the main entrance. Across the road was an institute for psychiatric research: at night, sometimes, from the sealed windows of the upper floors, where the inmates were held, came muted bellowings or sudden shouts or screams like distant jungle sounds; but during the day, amidst the noise of College Street, there was nothing in the building’s blank façade to betray what it was. A few minutes’ walk from my place and I was in the heart of Chinatown, with its restaurants and shops, its smell of spices and rotting vegetables, its broken packing crates forever stacked at the curbsides; a few minutes more, to the west, past Bathurst, and I was in Little Italy, though perhaps out of an instinctive devaluing of the familiar I seldom ventured there, aware of it only as something known and therefore inconsequential.
Despite the income from my inheritance I was sparing with my money, my apartment ample but slightly ramshackle, my furnishings scoured from second-hand shops. With school it was the same: because I’d been offered a scholarship I had accepted a place in a Master’s program at my old alma mater, Centennial, on the city’s barren outskirts, though when I’d left there to teach in Africa three years before I’d thought I’d shaken the dust of the place from my feet. Four days a week now I made the drive out to the campus in the car I’d inherited from my father, a cobalt-blue Olds, my one indulgence. Amid the tiny imports plying the roads now, the car seemed in its seventies extravagance already an anachronism, from another era, hulking and ghostly and huge like some prehistoric thing stumbled out from reptilian sleep.
I had dinner one night with a friend from my undergraduate years, Michael Iacobelli. He had married since I’d last seen him, and had a son, the family living just west of the Centennial campus in a house Michael rented from his father. The floor of his entrance hall was littered with baby’s toys when I arrived.
“Victor, my boy. I expected you to come back with tribal markings or something. A little local colour.”
He seemed to have aged a dozen years, grown frail, his hair, already thinning when I’d known him, now starting to grey as well, though he was only thirty.
“So it must be a bit of an adjustment coming back,” he said.
“A bit. Though exciting too, a new start and all that.” But I said nothing about my father’s death. “My sister’s in the city now, which is kind of nice.”
“Yeah, I remember you talking about her,” he said, though I couldn’t recall ever mentioning her to him. “So I guess you guys get along pretty well, is that it?”
“Better than we used to.”
“That’s the funny thing about family. You spend all your life trying to get away from them and then they’re all you’ve got.”
Michael’s wife, Suzie, was a non-Italian, on first impression pretty and bland like her name but then beneath the surface seeming to bristle, like Michael, with under-exploited intelligence.
“So I guess all this must look pretty boring to you,” she said.
“No, not at all.”
Michael brought up a gallon of his father’s homemade wine from the cellar and we began to get slowly drunk. He told the story of a feud he’d had with his father over an old maple tree in the back yard.
“It was a beautiful thing, it must have been thirty or forty years old. But it was something about the leaves or the shade, I don’t know what it was. So one day we come home from a camping trip and it’s like there’s a big hole in the sky out back, and where the tree used to be just this perfect pile of cut logs. The sad thing is he probably thought we’d be pleased or something when we saw how pretty it all looked, with the logs piled up like that. Maybe it’s some kind of immigrant thing. Man against nature. He thinks he’s a pioneer or something.”
The baby cried once or twice from a back room while we were eating and Suzie got up to quiet him, Michael leaving her to the chore with the unthinking air of a patriarch. But then at the end of the meal he got up to clear the table, he and I doing the dishes together while Suzie sat with her feet propped on a kitchen chair having a smoke.
“So are there any women in your life?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“Maybe we should fix you up with Michael’s sister.”
“Is she any prettier than he is?”
“About the same, I’d say. Less facial hair maybe.”
I had come up by transit to avoid having to explain my father’s Olds. Michael offered me a ride back to the subway. In the car, he grew suddenly candid.
“I’m not saying I regret any of it. But it’s not how I pictured it, the nine-to-five and all that. You’re trying to do things differently. I respect that in you.”
I felt a throb of affection for him, had an image of us standing elbow to elbow at his kitchen sink while Suzie smoked and the baby slept, and wanted to show him that I had nothing, had only my freedom.
“I guess we all make our own way,” I said.
And at the station door he got out of the car to shake my hand as if seeing me off on some tremendous journey.
I seldom thought much any more about my father’s death. It had remained, in a sense, the thing uppermost in my mind, and yet for that was perhaps more forgotten, already as unquestioned as air, something only the animal part of me made allowance for. I’d get a sense of him like a premonition whenever I got into the car, instinctively registering the lingering evidences of him still strewn about, the half-empty cigarette pack, Rothman’s, still on the dash, the muddied church program on the floor; and sometimes it seemed our whole history together flashed before me then, that he was suddenly tangible there beside me on the car seat like on our old Sunday rides to mass at St. Mike’s. But beyond that visceral sense of his presence, there seemed nothing more to know of him. It was my mother, instead, who I found myself going back to, as if my father’s death had finally freed me to re-imagine her. Her own death, giving birth to Rita on our way to Canada, during a storm at sea, seemed the stuff of stories to me now, of other people’s lives, not mine. It surprised me how vividly the feel of that voyage came back to me now, the sense of hovering over a chasm, poised between the world we’d left behind and the unknown one where my father was waiting, by then a stranger to me, long gone ahead of us to prepare our way. In my child’s skewed understanding back then of my mother’s pregnancy I had expected some demon to emerge from her, snake-headed and vile. But I’d been offered instead a simple blue-eyed child, a sister, and then my mother’s slow bleeding to death like an afterthought.
I drove around the city sometimes in my car like a cruising teenager, following roads I’d never heard the names of out to their furthest, most banal retreats. It amazed me all the different congregations of things I knew nothing of, the unknown neighbourhoods with their different peculiarities and moods, the closed doors and the curtained windows. It was both uplifting and oppressive, the thought of all this life going on every day, every hour, with its own sense of importance and purpose; sometimes I seemed to hear all the million voices of it in my head like jumbled radio waves. And yet still I’d get the sense that the city was an outpost merely, just the endless repetition of what College Street looked like when I gazed westward from the corner window of my apartment, a long vista of dingy two- and three-storey storefronts like the main street of some dusty frontier town. At dusk, with the sun settling in between the buildings there as if at the visible end of the world, the street seemed still only an instant’s remove from what it might have been a hundred years before; and I imagined then the wooden sidewalks and the clapboard rooming houses, the immigrant road gangs working bare-backed where the street trailed to mud to push the city out against the encroaching wild.
Outside my building I passed groups of children from time to time on excursion from some nearby daycare. Their leaders, usually earthy young women in denim and bulky wool, strung them out along the length of knotted ropes to keep them in line, moving calm and slightly distracted at their edges like a protective rim around their microcosm of prankishness and wonder. The children formed assortments like cross-sections of the world, black and yellow and white, seeming oblivious in their hopskipping bravado to each other’s differences. Once, as I stood staring after a group of them, a small Asian girl toward the back briefly broke formation as she passed to perform a tiny jig for me, secretive and quick; and then in a twinkling she’d resumed her place, in giddy self-containment, casting back an impish grin before trailing off with the rest in the autumn sun.