Mount Pleasant (12 page)

“Harold,” she finally said, “I told you this so you can make the appropriate plans. I know Dale’s estate was a disappointment. Mine, when it comes to it, will be as well. But at least you’ve been warned.”

They drank more of the wine and Harry felt like he was underwater, moving slowly through a sea of fresh debt, the wine heaving within him.

“I’ve had too much to drink,” his mother finally said, “and so have you. I’m going to bed. You certainly can’t drive yourself home. Call a taxi, or if you prefer, take the guest room. Good night.”

Instead of heeding her advice, Harry poured the last of the wine into his glass, took it outside and walked down to the wire
fence that bordered the cemetery. He peered through the conifers at the undulating rows of headstones. Barton McClary was there somewhere, sealed in his modest neoclassic crypt with the four Ionic pillars. Had they only visited once? When Harry was a child, walking on a Sunday afternoon as his mother identified the famous people. Frederick Banting, one of the discoverers of insulin, was buried there.

Harry tried to fit a toe into the crossed pattern of the wire, but it slipped out. If he could get a leg up, he could probably heave himself over. He held onto the bar and kicked one leg up, the way he had done as a child, his face going from heart attack red to violet. His arms shaking with effort, he hoisted himself up and teetered there and fell on the other side, ripping his sports jacket on the wire, landing on the hard ground. A distance of only four feet, but he was dazed and winded. Jesus, the blunt force of this earth.

Clouds scuttled by the pumpkin moon in dirty bunches. The cemetery looked like a Greek ruin, oak leaves drifting against the crypts. One hundred and seventy thousand lives—the eternal city—their final sighs leaking into green-walled rooms, their addled regrets muted by morphine. He scrambled up the ridge to where the bronze lions lay guarding the Eaton crypt. The road wound around late blooming asters and the brown remnants of impatiens, of Dicentra, Tiarella and Baptisia. Glenn Gould was playing
The Goldberg Variations
. It was the version he had recorded in 1981, sombre and mathematical. Harry could hear Gould’s squeaky chair. Had he been buried with it? The perks of genius.

Harry’s vision was unreliable. When he put his hand to his face carefully, it came away bloody and he stared at it without surprise.

Harry walked toward the looming mausoleum, a beautiful
Georgian building, his head filled with keening voices. There were shapes moving among the oaks. Romanesque crypts rose out of the mist, and hydrangeas drooped near the path. Grey headstones quoted Donne. It took twenty minutes to find his grandfather’s crypt. Ezekiel 3:14 was carved in stone on the lintel: A spirit hath lifted me up, and doth take me away. A winged angel perched on top.

You’ve come to visit, Harry
, his grandfather said.
This is a surprise
.

The money, Barton, where did it go?

Two visits in forty years and you want to talk about money. It doesn’t come up in conversation around here much. I made some money, mostly by luck. I enjoyed it while I had it. I gave most of it away to good causes
.

And the bad causes
.

There were a few
.

Did that girl die?

A terrible thing. The doctor was no back alley butcher. But something happened. Who knows what?

You weren’t with her
.

Don’t judge me, Harry. It was a different time
.

She had a family
.

In Texas. I sent them money
.

How old was she?

How old? I don’t know. Those girls were all the same age, seventeen going on thirty. Look, Harry, everyone here is haunted by something. Two hundred acres of regret. No one rests in peace. Even Banting, the saint, had mistress problems. He discovered insulin and saved lives. Some of those lives he saved are buried here, dead of something else. There’s no vaccine for death, and if there was, who would want it? You get tired, Harry. Better to leave it to others. Anyway, you have demons of your own; otherwise, you wouldn’t be here in the middle of the night
.

Felicia lives at the edge of the cemetery now
.

I wonder if I’ll see more of her. She’s been twice on her own, both times drunk
.

It hasn’t always been easy for her
.

Compared to whom, Harry?

Harry looked over to a plot of sunflowers, Russian Mammoths, seven feet tall, husks now, their frying pan heads bowed. There were thirty of them, a dead congregation.

But you wanted to talk about money. Why do people want money? As a unit of measurement. A certainty that God was never able to duplicate. I had few gifts, Harry. But I recognized money for what it was. People think it’s a medium of exchange. It isn’t. It’s a river we all swim in, and it flows to the same place in the end. You have money problems, Harry. Everyone does, just not the same ones
.

Harry shivered. It was cold; perhaps it would snow. The first of the season, a white Halloween, the children wearing masks and parkas. He had once dressed as the Monopoly character who wore the top hat and tails and appeared on the Community Chest cards. None of the neighbours guessed who he was—a magician? his grandfather? After an hour of frustrating explanations, he came home and went up to his room and sulked in his formal wear and ate his candy, then threw up a rainbow of colourful dyes.

Your money bought you distance from your family, Barton. If you’d been poor, you’d have been stacked up like cordwood in a railway flat with nine kids. It bought you sex with chorus girls. Another kind of distance
.

It gave me a chance to give to others, Harry
.

A girl dies and you give land to the Anglican church. Penance? A bribe in case there’s a God? You loved the love of strangers, Barton. Isn’t that what philanthropy is?

What would you know about philanthropy? You can’t even get a loan. Look, Harry, we didn’t think we could fix everything back then.
I knew my sons wouldn’t amount to much. Felicia was the smartest of my children, but she didn’t fulfill her potential and it soured her. I exceeded my potential and that’s what made me happy. So much is luck. But what is it you want, Harry? You’re getting cold
.

Harry wasn’t sure what he wanted.

And don’t say “closure” or any of those other claptrap expressions people use these days. If I had a nickel for every time some ninny stood over his father’s grave asking for “closure,” I’d still be rich. It never closes, Harry. Life can’t be resolved. If it could, it wouldn’t be life. Relax, Harry, laugh when you can. You don’t get another shot at it. So, what is it you need?

What was it he needed? Harry had no idea.

What do you hear from Dale?

Never cared for the man. A father wants what’s best for his daughter. Dale had appetites
.

He was too much like you, Barton. Now his money is gone too
.

There’s a difference between carelessness and philanthropy. It’s late, Harry. Go home. Get some sleep
.

I’ll sleep when I’m dead, isn’t that what they say?

Another lie, it turns out. I can’t remember the last time I slept
.

Maybe your conscience won’t let you
.

Oh Christ, Harry, you drunken halfwit, who are you to be such a sanctimonious prick?

Harry stared at the crypt, where the cement angel flapped its wings, unable to lift off, like an injured pigeon. He turned and walked down the path. Was this the way he had come? His legs were heavy, a mammoth’s legs. There was a fog coming off the creek. A rush of shapes in the pines. No longer playing the subdued 1981 version of
The Goldberg Variations
, Gould had reverted to the one he recorded in 1955, the audacious bebop interpretation that had made him famous. He was wailing now, sounding more like Coltrane than Johann Sebastian. The voices
were louder, the whole cemetery out of sorts. Even Banting was yelling about something as Gould crashed on his piano like it was a set of drums. If Bach could hear it, he’d have a Germanic fit. The sunflowers swayed in beatnik rhythms. A snowflake fell, landing on Harry’s nose, the first of the season. Wraiths crashed through the trees. The gravestones sang a hymn. The forest was on the march, the armies of dead sobbing in their graves. Ashes swirled and snow fell softly, a quiet blanket to lay everything to rest.

TEN

I
T WAS LATE MORNING
when Harry woke up, his head muffled and thick, a larva about to give birth to something lifeless. He recalled the cab trip home, half-conscious, bruised, going past the klieg lights of a movie set, the trailers lining the street. Harry spent a longish time in the bathroom, then walked gingerly down the stairs, his debt a high-decibel buzz saw in his ears.

Gladys was on the couch with the newspaper. “How was your charming, alcohol-free evening with your mother?” she asked sweetly.

“She told me she’s been renting the Rosedale house for the last seventeen years.”

“What? From whom? Your father?”

“From Dick Ebbetts.”

Gladys folded the paper and put it down.

“She sold it for $760,000 way back when,” he said.

“It has to be worth more than two million now,” Gladys said. “Maybe three.”

“Not to us.”

Gladys processed this information, another door slamming shut. “Where’s the car, Harry?”

He’d left it at his mother’s. “Safe,” he said. “Safe and sound.”

He was almost catatonic for the rest of the morning. At noon he took the subway to his mother’s and picked up the car, then drove to the gym. He entered his code into the machine at the front desk, then placed his hand on the biometric scanner and waited for the click that meant the automated gate would admit him. It took three tries. How many codes and passwords jostled in his brain, proof of his existence, of his poverty and security, and how long before a number from the gym code invaded his ATM code, or the ATM number displaced the security code, his memory grasping for some mnemonic that would grant him access.

He was there for the hot yoga class, a recent experiment. He changed quickly, then walked to the small studio and opened the steel door and stepped into a sudden Mumbai heat wave. There were a few women already there, lying on their mats, eyes closed. Within ten minutes their yoga clothes would be lightly stained with perspiration, damp maps that flowered around their openings, all the places Harry wanted to be.

He moved through the poses for seventy-five minutes, pouring sweat. The instructor, a lithe Asian woman, finally directed them to shavasana—the corpse pose, Harry’s favourite. She dimmed the lights and Harry lay there drained, near sleep. What he thought about wasn’t the soothing blankness that the instructor said he should seek, a nothingness that pushed all thoughts aside—
invest in the stillness
. Instead, he thought about sex. Dixie had given him a concrete fantasy, and
she returned in all her lascivious glory, anticipating his fantasies with courtesan-level knowledge. They moved together, a blurry image in an indeterminate landscape as Harry edged into actual sleep. The dreamscape became a beach, but the light was off; the sky looked like a charcoal painting and the sand was grey. Harry was alone, then a speck grew until it took the form of a woman. A siren perhaps, though when she got close Harry saw that she was talking into a cellphone. She passed without acknowledging him. The sky was streaked with red. The ocean threatened. The waves came in hard. Fish rained down onto the grey sand, writhing, those glassy eyes. He ran, but the sand made it difficult. Each step was heavier than the last, like jogging in peanut butter. He was exhausted. “That’s enough,” he said.

When Harry woke up, the room was empty. He got up unsteadily. How long had he been asleep? He walked dully to his locker, situated in a short row that dead-ended at a large floor-to-ceiling mirror. Sitting in front of the mirror was a man of seventy-five or so. He had wild, angled, snowy hair and was staring at his naked reflection, his buttocks flowing over the small metal stool like a Lucian Freud painting, his skin the consistency of drywall mud. Moles spattered his back like one of those children’s exercises where you join the dots and an elephant appears. His face was only three inches from the mirror, the fluorescent bulbs above lighting him in shades of grey and peach. What was he looking at? Harry wondered. He left the man to his examination and took a shower and shaved, and when he returned, the man was still there. He hadn’t moved. His eyes looked lit from within, bright and blue, a rheumy hint at the corners.

Harry edged closer. “You okay?” he asked as breezily as possible. What if he’d had a stroke or a seizure and one finger could topple him?

The man didn’t respond.

Harry got dressed, then stuffed his wet yoga clothes into his gym bag. He glanced at the man once more as he left the locker room and in the lobby suddenly felt he was abandoning his responsibility as a citizen. The man clearly wasn’t well.