In the Skin of a Lion (25 page)

She sat on the floor, ten feet away from Ambrose, the lamp beside her, attacked by all the discontinuous moments of his past. Who were these women? Where did those destroyed enemies go? Ambrose spoke slowly, the uninterested words came from his dark, half-naked shape as if all this was just the emptying of pails to be free of ballast. The theatres, his wife, his sisters, the women, enemies, Briffa, even Patrick, spilled free.

The only clarity for him now was this bare room where Clara brought him food. He had imploded, had become a Gothic child suddenly full of a language which was aimed nowhere, only out of his body. Bitten flesh and manicures and greyhounds and sex and safe-combinations and knowledge of suicides. She saw his
world as if she were tied to a galloping horse, caught glimpses of faces and argument and there was no horizon. After all these years she would not be satisfied, would not know him. She pulled back.

Now his face serene. Now his upper torso bent forward long and athletic and the mouth of the heron touched the blue wood floor and his head submerged under the water and pivoted and saw in the fading human light a lamp that was the moon.

The girl was shaking him from side to side as he slept in the kitchen chair, in the apartment on Albany Street. Fragments of lobster were scattered across the table.

He put his face under the kitchen tap. Clara Dickens. After a hundred years.

He stood there breathing deeply. He walked into the dark room, his face still wet, and got to his knees. One arm was in a cast and he reached out the other hand feeling for the telephone. “Don’t hang up. Don’t hang up,” he was yelling, hoping she could hear him until he found the telephone.

He heard her half-laugh at the other end.

He was silent, lying on his back in a dark room. He knew this room well in the dark. He had been here often.

He could see the swirls in the ceiling.

At this he couldn’t stop laughing and turned from the phone. He could hear her voice, tinny in the distance.

He rose and went to Hana’s room. He felt exhausted.

She was beaming.

She stood by the door, watching him, wanting him to say more.

When Patrick had come out of prison six months earlier many dissident groups were already voicing themselves within the city. The events in Spain, the government’s crackdown on unions, made the rich and powerful close ranks. Troops were in evidence everywhere. When the last shift left the water-filtration plant the police and the army moved in to guard it. Military tents bivouaced on the rolling grounds. There were soldiers on the roofs and searchlights dipped now and then along the waves of the lake, protecting against any possible attack from the direction of the lakeshore. While most public buildings were guarded, the waterworks was obsessively watched – partly because of the warnings of Commissioner Harris, who reminded officials that the Goths could have captured Rome by destroying the aqueducts which led into the city. Cutting off the water supply or poisoning it would bring the city to its knees.

Harris saw the new building as a human body. For him there were six locations where it could be seriously crippled – the raw water pumps, the Venturi meters, the entrance to the tanks where ferric chloride was poured, the twenty-four-foot-deep settling basins, and any one of the twenty filter pools where an explosion would cause floods and permanently rust all engines and electrical equipment. There was also the intake-pipe tunnel that ran almost a mile and a half out into the lake. No boats were allowed within a half-mile of the shoreline and no one, not
even military personnel, was admitted into the building at night. Only Harris, who now insisted on sleeping there in his office, was allowed in, a pistol kept beside his bed.

In his dressing-gown, at two in the morning, Commissioner Harris was happy in the cocoon of humming machines. He would get up and roam through the palace of water which he had dreamed and desired and built. Every electrical outlet blazed, lighting up disappearing corridors as if Viennese streets, turning the subterranean filter pools into cloudy ballrooms. The building pulsed all night in the east end of the city on the edge of Lake Ontario. It was rumoured that people on the south shore in New York State could see the aura from it.

The filtration plant was one corner of a triangle of light that seemed to chart the city on this Saturday night in the summer of 1938. Another was a river of lights moving north up Yonge Street from the lake. And third was the dazzle from the Yacht Club on Toronto Island – holding its summer costume ball, with water taxis ferrying bizarrely dressed society across the bay on the one-mile trip over rough water.

Such dance floors the rich spent their evenings on! Strutting like colts in a warm barn, out of the rain. And in bed the following morning they would reconstruct the choreography of temptations which had carried them from the crowded periphery of the hall to the sprung dance floor beneath the thirty-foot coconut palms – clusters of which adorned the ballroom that seemed to have no ceiling, only false stars and false moonlight. In each set of trees was a live monkey, never able to reach the diners because of a frail chain. The animals had to dodge the champagne corks aimed at them – if you hit a monkey you were brought a free bottle. Sales of champagne soared and only now and then was there a shriek followed by a cheer.

There was a silk canopy over the band. Along the walls were
dioramas. Sometimes cotton snowballs were distributed and a battle broke out promptly, the guests soaking them in champagne or butter before flinging them around the room. The ballroom was lit indirectly; it seemed they were all in a moment of time that resembled the half-hour before the sun comes up over an oasis.

There is an image of Caravaggio among the rich which Patrick will always remember: meticulous, rude, and confident. A parting in his dark hair like Yonge Street at midnight. Dressed as a pirate, he had leapt off the motor launch on that midsummer night with his dog and Giannetta and Patrick, yelled his greetings to total strangers, and strolled into the false moonlight of the Yacht Club ballroom claiming to be Randolph Frog. Society women accepted his name with a straight face – the rich, being able to change everything but their names and looks, would defend these characteristics with care. In this circle a man with the face of a pit bull was considered distinguished.

They had not been invited. Caravaggio was eating canapés with his left hand and patting women on the ass with his right. When the orchestra’s playing brought out the couples, Caravaggio lifted his dog into his arms and waltzed among them kissing August wildly, exclaiming over the beauty of his moles. For the next hour he danced with women who noted to themselves the odour of hound on his neck. Patrick and Giannetta meanwhile hung back on the periphery of the ballroom, refusing to leave it as if they might fall into a snakepit. But Caravaggio was a man who had traipsed through the gardens and furnishings of the wealthy for many years. He nudged men, told jokes, discussed china and crystal with wives and connoisseurs, complaining about getting Louis
XIV
chairs cleaned, and in the privacy behind his drunkenness cemented away information and addresses.

Finally he found the couple he wanted. In their early forties, drinking hard, a flirtatious wife and a bully of a husband. He danced with his eyes against hers singing “Night and Day.”

She was impressed by his Italian, which he claimed to have picked up in Tuscany the previous summer. His fingers circled her shoulder blade. She leaned back.

He laughed, dropping a half-smoked cigarette onto the floor.

She glanced across the room to the hollow glare of Giannetta who held onto Patrick’s arm.

Taking the bus down to the dock earlier that evening, Caravaggio had said, “Let me tell you about the rich – they have a way of laughing.” And Patrick thought, Alice had said that. The exact words. “The only thing that holds the rich to the earth is property,” Caravaggio continued, “their bureaus, their marble tables, their jewellery.…” Patrick had been quiet, not even bothering to laugh.

There was an image he remembered of Caravaggio, waving
goodbye with a blue hand as he hung on the prison roof. And when Patrick had come out of jail he traced the thief down through his Blue Cellar compatriots. “Mr. Wilful Destruction of Property saved my life,” Caravaggio had explained to Giannetta. They showed him the city, where everything was five years older, and they became his friends. Late into those spring nights they had talked about each other’s lives.

On reconnaissance the week before the Yacht Club dance, Giannetta had watched Patrick get drunk, and during the ride back on the ferry she had held him, his head in her lap. She leaned over him in the darkness, her hand in his hair. He looked up. There was a tenderness in this sky of her warm face he hadn’t noticed before. Then everything had leapt from focus as Giannetta and Caravaggio lifted him off the ferry and brought him home to sleep on their living-room floor.

Now they step from the last stages of the costume ball out onto the dock: Caravaggio, his two rich friends, his dog, his ‘sister,’ and Patrick, who is supposedly her escort for the evening.

Caravaggio sings to the night, a bottle like a pendulum in his fingers, his arm sprawled over the woman’s shoulder. He pours out monologues about cut glass and bevelled mirrors and rubs her nipple to the beat of his singing as her husband unlaces the boat from its moorings. Patrick walks behind dressed as a thief in black, a red scarf floating behind him and carrying a bag of tools with
SWAG
written across it.

Boarding the couple’s yacht,
The Annalisa
, Caravaggio flings himself down the stairs laughing, looking for alcohol. He is
beyond order. He and the husband uncork several bottles and climb back up on deck. The wife winds up the gramophone, the silk dress with a thousand sequins fluttering upon her. Giannetta leans against the rail receiving the air while the husband unleashes the sails and they break loose out into the bay – from the island towards the city. Bunny Berigan pierces the air with his trumpet whirling up in scales, leaving the orchestras of the Yacht Club behind. They are off. Rich.

Caravaggio claims helplessness with ropes and asks the wife to dance. He is charmed by her flippant sexuality. They fumble against each other with the motion of the waves, Giannetta and Patrick somewhere by the prow. The boat tacks back and forth towards the city a mile away. Caravaggio and the husband and the wife drink fast. The wife winds up the gramophone and “I Can’t Get Started” emerges again under the hiss of the needle.