Toby (25 page)

That night, Toby and Karen sang “Happy Birthday” to Hugo twenty times, during and after dinner. Hugo lay in bed for half an hour, singing “Happy Birthday” to his stuffed animals, to his bed, to the ceiling, to his night light, to Toby and Karen and Edward, and to several pairs of his pants.

The first sanctioned meeting of the Benjamin Disraeli Society was at La Moufette. Garrett had attempted to invite some young attorneys, but they had all been suspicious of his motives. Randall brought a drowsy man named Mike, who ran a rival tow truck outfit; he and Mike were on friendly
terms because, together, they looked like a company big enough to get dealership and Canadian Automobile Association contracts.

For the first half of the evening, Randall and Mike talked about the “fuckheads” they had towed that week. At nine o’clock, the society came to order. Toby officially welcomed their guest, Mike, and told him a bit about the society and its inspiration.

“Yeah, but why him?” Mike had been drinking Irish whiskey along with his beer.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if you’re gonna have a club, why not make it about Kennedy or someone that folks remember? Trudeau, even? I’m not a big fan of his, but at least I’ve heard of him.”

Toby explained, again, about Benjamin Disraeli, his sense of style in the early years of his career, his courage, the way he reimagined British conservatism. The revolutionary aspect. All that had been lost from North America that could be regained if the spirit of Disraeli were as alive and as forceful today as the spirit of, say, John F. Kennedy. Mike simply stared at Toby and blinked a few times.

“I should add, if you are interested in attending further meetings, that a business suit is the dress code.”

Mike looked down. He wore a pair of corduroy pants and an unironed blue dress shirt. “Randall, he said to dress nice.”

“It’s nice what you’re wearing, it is. But niceness, as you know, is subjective. The advantage of a business suit is it’s something we can all agree on—as a club and, really, as a people. That’s the point, Mike.”

“Aren’t you moving to the States?”

Randall spoke in a chastened manner. “He is, Mike, he is. But he’s still the boss. He thought up the society.”

“I just got to tell you guys, this is retarded.”

A moment or two of silence passed as Mike finished his glass of Irish whiskey, lifted it, and snapped his fingers at the waitress, who was watching a show about the best police chases on one of the television sets attached to the ceiling. She did not seem to remember Toby from last time.

“So I had this stomach ache last night,” Randall said. “I didn’t think I’d make it this evening. But I did.”

Everyone agreed this was fortunate news.

Toby lifted a satchel onto the table and distributed handkerchiefs to the three men. “Tonight, I thought the theme could be handkerchiefs.”

Mike held his handkerchief as though it were a gelatin dessert. “See, this is what I’m talking about. The retardedness keeps getting more retarded.”

“Do you know how to fold a handkerchief?”

“No.”

“Would you like to know?”

“I don’t think I’ve even seen one of these before.”

Toby pointed to his breast pocket, where he had folded and moulded a
pochette gavroche
by Hermès, a third anniversary gift from Alicia. “How about beauty? Harmony? Courage? Creativity? Our commitment to perfection, however remote—”

“
Courage.
How do you figure that?”

“Allowing the colour of your tie to clash with the colour of your handkerchief. It takes a daring touch.”

“This is what your show is about?”

“Yes and no. If you think about it, Mike, a handkerchief says a lot about a man. It’s the small details…”

Mike seemed to think about it. “And people are supposed to watch this.”

“They’re not
supposed to.
”

“You know what? I could be at home right now, putting my kids to bed. Or at a movie.”

“I have kids,” said Randall. “Toby’s adopting a boy. Benjamin Disraeli had kids. We’re doing this
because
we have kids.”

“Actually,” said Toby, “Benjamin Disraeli married a much older woman and—”

“I could give a shit.” Mike stood up and intercepted the waitress with his whiskey. He downed it in one gulp and accompanied her to the cash register.

“I’m sorry,” said Randall.

“Does Mike have a dirt bike?”

“He does, actually. Why?”

Toby stared at the handkerchiefs, piled on the uneven table, as Randall and Garrett consoled him. The life and beauty of the handkerchiefs seemed to drip away into the darkness of the sticky floorboards of La Moufette. Handkerchiefs were as random and as ill-used as stuffed parakeets.

This lasted for some time, until Garrett squeezed his arm. Randall was outside, bidding adieu to Mike and indulging in a cigarette. “You’re feeling okay?”

Toby wanted to tell Garrett about the handkerchiefs, or at least about the troubling phone call from Catherine. But since his firm was handling the legal aspects of the eventual adoption, which hinged on abandonment and utter silence
from the biological parents, Toby decided it was best to forget it had ever happened.

“Can I talk to you about something?” Garrett turned a hot wing solicitously around with his large fingers. “Something a bit personal?”

Toby only half listened, at first, to the real reason Tracy was divorcing Randall. An emotional drift in there somewhere, a coming-to-terms, and Tracy felt it.

“On the night she first asked him to leave—so she could think, you know—he drove over and we drank a bottle of premium Canadian whisky and watched the
Star Wars
trilogy and fell asleep together on the couch.”

“Like high school.”

“The next night, I made up one of the spare bedrooms for him, and I was nervous to say it, but I had to say it. I said, ‘Or you can sleep with me or whatever.’ I wasn’t going to
try
anything. Frankly, I didn’t know how. And you know him. He said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ So I said, ‘Don’t feel you have to,’ and he said, ‘Whatever, I don’t. Either way, really.’ But he did sleep in my bed that night. And he still is.”

“He still is what?”

“Sleeping in my bed.”

“Sleeping or
sleeping?
”

“I love him. Always have, I guess. I haven’t said it to him, out loud. But…”

Toby finished his beer and poured some more.

“It was me. I ruined a marriage. I shall to hell.”

“You’re not joking.”

“This is a secret. Randall would die if he knew you knew.”

“Shouldn’t I be the easiest person to tell? I mean, Garrett, look at me.”

“What about his kids? That’s what he always brings up. Imagine Dakota in high school, on the West Island, with a couple of…with parents like us.”

“Stairway to Heaven” was playing. Toby had never heard the song outside of a high school gymnasium, with the lights out, a DJ’s disco ball spinning cookies of light over the straight coloured lines on the floor, the basketball nets, the pennants of forgettable victory. He was pleased to give himself over to anxious memories of high school—wanting desperately to dance to this song in the dark gymnasium three times a year, with Tiffany or Charlene or Melissa. Never drinking lemon gin beforehand, never hitting the parties afterward, never a fist fight or a B.J.

“I don’t know if we had it any easier,” Toby said, “and our dads were straight.”

Randall returned with his arm around Mike.

“Tell him.”

“All right,” said Mike. “I’m sorry, man, for calling your thing retarded.”

“It’s not a thing, Mike. Say it like we planned.”

“Your society. Your society.”

Toby stood up and shook his hand. “It
is
a little bit retarded, Mike. And I apologize for diminishing your slacks. They’re lovely.”

The members of the Benjamin Disraeli Society put the handkerchiefs aside and talked about their children. They dispersed just before nine thirty, as it was a Wednesday. Toby had forgotten his phone at home, so he could not call Randall for a tow when the Chevette stalled and died on rue Hyman. He pushed it to the side of the road, tucked in front of a minivan, and walked home.

It was a fresh but windless night, with a gentle snowfall. Toby cut through Centennial Park, where the artificial lake was nearly ready to emerge as a skating pond. The neighbourhoods were silent but for the whoops and cackles of unsupervised adolescents out too late, shovel on sidewalk, a distant honk. The slices of conversation, mostly about weather, suggested a world he had already relinquished: the moderate, workaday, jean jacket and running shoes, kids-are-in-bed-so-let’s-have-a-beer world of mothers and fathers and influenza and credit cards. Knowing that he was leaving this place in a little more than a week made it much easier to adore. Already he felt the way he was destined to feel, like a man from afar briefly visiting the country of his birth—a warm and prosaic and condescending feeling he cherished. His posture was kingly. He briefly pretended, among the aspen trees, hidden from the Christmas lights of the suburb, that it was the seventeenth century, that he was leading a small band of brave missionary soldiers to destroy the godless Iroquois downriver. A stupid mission, but pure and memorable, inspired by perfection, stripped of the irony that threatened to render his own generation pointless and forgotten. His technologies were the technologies of transition. The golden eras of television and cinema were over, yet the digital revolution had not yet begun. None of this would endure like the Battle of Long Sault, in which Adam Dollard des Ormeaux sacrificed his flesh for the ascendance of the European story. Certainly not
Toby a Gentleman,
or whatever they wished to call it in New York City. There was a short list of possible titles circulating through a focus group.
How to Be a Gentleman in the Twenty-First Century
was apparently well loved by William Kingston, who had final approval over everything. Toby had
vowed not to be precious, even if they wanted to give it a cumbersome and boring—post-boring?—title. He had been exchanging e-mails with the producer, pretty and thoughtful Jill, whom he would call and court upon his arrival in Manhattan, to discuss the first month of topics—twenty shows. Cellphone etiquette, weeping in public, introducing one’s wife or girlfriend at a party, tipping, the trouble with the word “cheers,” elevators.

There he is, Dollard des Ormeaux, loading up his canoe with supplies and inspiring his fellow martyrs with a speech about Jesus and his sovereignty.
Gentle warriors of Christ, worry not for your blood. Already I can see it, just downriver, the promise of our reward.

A taxi idled in front of the house on rue Collingwood, its exhaust system even more harmful than that of the Chevette. The driver was reading
Le Devoir
with the window open. It was slightly below freezing, not nearly cold enough for idling to be necessary.

“Who are you waiting for, sir?” said Toby.

“The woman?”

“What woman? Karen Mushinsky?”

He shrugged and turned back to his newspaper. The car smelled like an alley behind an Indian restaurant.

Toby heard Hugo’s cries through the door. It was almost ten o’clock, much too late for him to be awake. A nightmare, surely. From time to time, usually in the middle of the night, the boy would cry out about a dog, or a bear, or his snack, and Toby would lie with him, rubbing his back, until the sobs powered down like an old engine, the intervals between them longer and longer and longer. The first stanza of “You Are My Sunshine” quieter and quieter and quieter. Toby had
vowed to learn the rest of the song, in the interest of self-improvement and to enhance the boy’s vocabulary.

It was unpleasant to wake up in the middle of the night, sometimes two or three times. Nothing was more pleasant, however, than giving the boy a glass of water and a hug, both of which he asked for as though they were equal commodities, and lowering him to his pillow, a kiss on his warm forehead. In the parenting books, they warned against going into the child’s room several times a night, for water and whimsy, but Toby did not see how it could harm Hugo. Soon enough, he would be a teenager—a monster of sleep. Soon enough, Hugo would not need hugs or back rubs or “You Are My Sunshine.”

Toby rushed in, eagerly, and nearly ran into her. Her hair was shorter, and she had acquired something in between a suntan and a permanent layer of dirt on her face. It was makeup, he realized. Catherine was hiding something—the largest pimple in the world or, more likely, a bruise.

In the kitchen, Karen stood in front of the stove, ready to collapse. Hugo cried next to Catherine, his new snow jacket over his baseball, baseball glove, and baseball bat pyjamas. His face a mess of tears and transferred foundation. He reached up to Toby, and Toby picked him up. Mid-cry, Hugo sobbed, into Toby’s ear, so loudly that it hurt, “You want to stay.”

Slowed, perhaps, by beer, Toby did not at first realize that Catherine intended to take him away. Then he did. “
Non, non, je suis désolé,
” he said, as gallantly as he could muster, “you can’t take him.”

“He’s my son. Thanks for babysitting. I’m taking him home.”

“No, you’re not. What home?”

“Our apartment.”

“You don’t have an apartment. A strange man lives there. This is Hugo’s home now, Catherine. Why don’t you come back tomorrow, for breakfast, and we’ll discuss it. For now, Hugo needs to be back in bed.”

Catherine reached up and pulled Hugo from Toby, who did not fight her off. The boy wiggled his way out of her arms and onto the entrance mat, and stomped next to Edward’s winter boots. He was nearly incoherent now, weeping and shouting a mixture of English and French. His eyes were red, he was recently awakened, and no one was listening to him. Hugo tried to make it simple, using his finger to conduct and punctuate each short phrase.
Mommy will live here. Poney will live here. Grandma will live here. Ici, ici.

“I’m his mother. He’s mine.”

“Not anymore.”

“How about I call the police. I wonder what they’ll say. Do you want to be kidnappers, maybe?”