In the Skin of a Lion (17 page)

Alice was in sunlight on the grass slope leading down from the waterworks, looking out onto the lake, her hand keeping the sun out of her eyes. “I had to learn I couldn’t trust him. Not that he ever wanted me to. You must realize that Cato was not his real name, it was his war name. And who knows who he was with or what he was doing on a Wednesday or a Friday. He was self-made. He worked hard, he spoke out. On Thursdays he came shimmering along on his bike, dropped his tackle in the hall as if he were a hurried fisherman, and said,
Let’s go!”

“They were in the woods and came into a field to get away from the bugs. It was summer. Lots of bugs, my mom said. So they took off their clothes and went for a swim in the river. When they came back, there were all these young bulls where their clothes were. About five of them in a circle around the clothes. Only they were not interested in the clothes except for his socks! They were sniffing them up in the air and tossing them back and forth. It really embarrassed Cato. My mom told me he didn’t want to talk about it to others. I just love that – all those serious bulls throwing his socks back and forth. Mom thinks they were very excited.”

Patrick had the photograph from Hana’s suitcase in his pocket. In books he had read, even those romances he swallowed during childhood, Patrick never believed that characters lived only on the page. They altered when the author’s eye was somewhere else. Outside the plot there was a great darkness, but there would of course be daylight elsewhere on earth. Each character had his own time zone, his own lamp, otherwise they were just men from nowhere.

He was in the Riverdale Library looking for any reference to the building of the Bloor Street Viaduct. He collected the newspapers and journals he needed and went and sat in the Boys and Girls Room with its high rafters and leaded windows that let in oceans of light. He revelled in this room, the tiny desks, the smell of books. It was how he imagined the dining hall of a submarine would look.

He read the descriptions of the bridge’s opening on October 18, 1918. One newspaper had a picture of a cyclist racing across. He worked backwards. It had taken only two years to build. It had taken years before that to agree on how it was to be done, Commissioner Harris’ determination forcing it through. He looked at the various photographs: the shells of wood structures into which concrete was poured, and then the wood removed like hardened bandages to reveal the piers. He read up on everything – survey arguments, the scandals, the deaths of
workers fleetingly mentioned, the story of the young nun who had fallen off the bridge, the body never found. He read about the flooding Don River underneath, ice dangers, the decision to use night crews and the night deaths that followed. There was an article on daredevils. He heard the library bell. He turned the page to the photograph of them and he pulled out the picture he had and laid it next to the one in the newspaper. Third from the left, the newspaper said, was Nicholas Temelcoff.

Leaving the library, Patrick crossed Broadview Avenue and began walking east. He paused, suddenly stilled, wanting to go back, but the library was closed now and it would be pointless. They would not print the photograph of a nun. A dead or a missing nun.

He took a step forward. Now he was walking slowly, approaching a street-band, and the click of his footsteps unconsciously adapted themselves to the music that began to surround him. The cornet and saxophone and drum chased each other across solos and then suddenly, as Patrick drew alongside them, fell together and rose within a chorus.

He saw himself gazing at so many stories – knowing of Alice’s lover Cato and Hana’s wanderings in the baker’s world. He walked on beyond the sound of the street musicians, aware once again of the silence between his individual steps, knowing now he could add music by simply providing the thread of a hum. He saw the interactions, saw how each one of them was carried by the strength of something more than themselves.

If Alice had been a nun …

The street-band had depicted perfect company, with an ending
full of embraces after the solos had made everyone stronger, more delineated. His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. Patrick saw a wondrous night web – all of these fragments of a human order, something ungoverned by the family he was born into or the headlines of the day. A nun on a bridge, a daredevil who was unable to sleep without drink, a boy watching a fire from his bed at night, an actress who ran away with a millionaire – the detritus and chaos of the age was realigned.

The articles and illustrations he found in the Riverdale Library depicted every detail about the soil, the wood, the weight of concrete, everything but information on those who actually built the bridge. There were no photographers like Lewis Hine, who in the United States was photographing child labour everywhere – trapper boys in coal mines, seven-year-old doffer girls in New England mills.
To locate the evils and find the hidden purity
. Official histories and news stories were always soft as rhetoric, like that of a politician making a speech after a bridge is built, a man who does not even cut the grass on his own lawn. Hine’s photographs betray official history and put together another family. The man with the pneumatic drill on the Empire State Building in the fog of stone dust, a tenement couple, breaker boys in the mines. His photographs are rooms one can step into – cavernous buildings where a man turns a wrench the size of his body, or caves of iron where the white faces give the young children working there the terrible look of ghosts. But Patrick would never see the great photographs of Hine, as he would never read the letters of Joseph Conrad.
Official histories, news stories surround us daily, but the events of art reach us too late, travel languorously like messages in a bottle.

Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become
.

Within two years of 1066, work began on the Bayeux Tapestry, Constantin the African brought Greek medicine to the western world. The chaos and tumble of events. The first sentence of every novel should be: “Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.” Meander if you want to get to town.

I have taught you that the sky in all its zones is mortal
.

Her favourite sentence hovers next to Patrick as he wakens. By dawn he is on the livid floor of the tannery with the curved pilot knife. All day long as he cuts into the leather his mind moves over the few details she has given him about her life. Even in the farmhouse at Paris Plains there had been a silence about her youth, even with Cato she gave out only his war name. If Alice Gull had been a nun? A rosary, a sumac bracelet …

At six in the evening he returns from work and her open palms press into his ribs. He lifts Alice into his arms and Hana jumps onto her mother’s back. So they move, cumbersome, through the small room, falling onto the bed. The game is that Hana has to try and push them off, putting her feet against the wall and her shoulders against them. Then they are on the floor
and Hana falls on top. Then he and Hana try to lift Alice back onto the bed.

He is always surprised at Alice’s body. She seems physically frail, as if a jostle will break her, but she is agile, a dancer as much as an actress moving fluidly through rooms. She thinks the twentieth century’s greatest invention is the jitterbug. She can almost forgive capitalism for that. She is in love with Fats Waller. Patrick has seen her sit at the piano in the Balkan Café and sing

Clara, she would say later, was the classical one,
she
could play the piano like a queen stepping across mud. I play the way I think. And heartbreaking romance is all I want in music.

But Alice’s tenderest speech to him, as she sat on his belly looking down, concerned her missing of Clara. “I love Clara,” she said to him, the lover of Clara. “I miss her. She made me sane for all those years. That was important for what I am now.”

She could move like … she could sing as low as.… Why is it that I am now trying to uncover every facet of Alice’s nature for myself?

He wants everything of Alice to be with him here in this
room as if she is not dead. As if he can be given that gift, to relive those days when Alice was with him and Hana, which in literature is the real gift. He turns the page backwards. Once more there is the image of them struggling and tickling Alice until she releases her grip on her shirt and it comes off with a flourish, and Hana jumps up, waving it like a rebel’s flag in the small green-painted room. All these fragments of memory … so we can retreat from the grand story and stumble accidently upon a luxury, one of those underground pools where we can sit still. Those moments, those few pages in a book we go back and forth over.

Nicholas Temelcoff’s fingers sink into a ball of dough and pull it apart, then they reassemble it and fling it down onto the table. He looks up and sees Patrick enter the Geranium Bakery, awkwardly look around, and then approach him. Patrick pulls out the photograph and places it in front of Temelcoff.