Mount Pleasant (13 page)

“There’s a man in the change room,” Harry said to the bored woman behind the front desk. “I think he’s having a … I suspect he’s having a problem.”

“Like with his lock or something?”

“No, a health problem, I don’t exactly know …”

“You want me to call an ambulance?”

“Yes … well, no … wait, hang on.” Harry went back to the locker room, bouncing up the stairs two at a time.

The man was gone. He checked the sauna, which was empty. He checked the bathroom, but there was no sign.

Harry returned to the front desk and the girl looked at him expectantly. “He’s not like dead or anything?” she asked.

“No, no, he’s fine. The patient made a full recovery.”

Harry emerged into the ugly maw of rush hour. All hours were rush hour now, it seemed. On the sidewalk, a man pushed a shopping cart filled with scavenged metal. He was wearing a military greatcoat, a dirty toque and what looked like children’s mittens; on top of the cart was a rusty sheet that was maybe six feet square, too long and wide to deal with comfortably. He needed to hold it down with one hand while he pushed with the other. A wonky wheel spun uselessly. His face was hollowed, and beneath the beard Harry could see that his
skin was deeply pitted. The man was walking at roughly the same pace as the traffic, in lockstep with Harry. He looked to be roughly Harry’s age.

Harry’s cell rang. He picked up and heard Dixie’s voice and immediately realized he’d forgotten to call her. Not that he had any news.

“I know, Harry,” she said. “Do you understand? I
know
.”

“Know what, Dixie?”

“Dale’s estate. I know it was worth a hell of a lot more than $13,000.”

“How do you know?”

“That’s my business,” she said, with a sudden girlishness.
None of your beeswax, mister
. “And I have a lawyer, Harry. You knew there was more. A lot more.”

“There may be more, Dixie. But if there is, I don’t know how much or where it is.”

“But you withheld this information from me.”

“Dixie, I don’t know if it’s true even, let alone how much there is. It could be two million, it could be nothing. It could be that eight million was taken and we’ll never find it.”

Harry glanced over at the man with the scrap metal. With his long coat and beard, he looked as though he was on a pilgrimage. The neighbourhood was a mix of industry, poverty and gentrification: a gold mine for scrap. Washing machines were set out to be cannibalized. Front porches held rusted dryers and Slant-6 engines. Every third or fourth crack between the sidewalk pavers jarred or stalled the man’s cart, and he shoved it with his chest, getting lower and using his legs for power. His gait was like a very complicated limp.

Dixie’s voice broke the silence. “What do you think is fair, Harry?”

“I don’t know what’s fair, Dixie.”

“My lawyer says that two-thirds is fair. That three-quarters is not out of the question. There is a precedent, Harry, and the law is based on precedent. Dale left me more than he left you and your nightmare sister put together. And if my lawyer can prove that you withheld information, that you withheld actual money, then that would be a crime, Harry. That could be jail, the whole nine yards.”

A welcome anger began to rise in Harry. He had regarded Dixie sympathetically, and had been feeling guilty about the sex. He thought she was a woman who was a bit opportunistic and who hadn’t made ideal life choices—a plight he empathized with—but he felt she wasn’t a gold digger per se. Now Dixie was leaning on him like a gangster.

Were her fourteen months of occasional sexual sacrifice worth more than his and Erin’s years of paternal neglect? It seemed to Harry that decades of Dale’s epic silence had to be worth more than Dixie’s few months of minor nursing. And who was Dixie, anyway? She filled the hole that Tess left. Dixie was what Dale settled for, a serviceable companion who had just enough awe of his apparent wealth to make the relationship work. On this front, Dixie was a minority stakeholder.

“The first thing I’m going to do, Harry,” Dixie said with some force, “I’m going to get my lawyer to start working his magic.”

“The first thing you want to do, Dixie, is talk to your gospel source. A lawyer isn’t any help unless there’s a crime, unless there is evidence. If you’re the one who’s going to benefit, if this two-thirds or three-quarters is rightfully yours because of the fourteen-month hiatus you took from an otherwise rich and rewarding life to care for my father, then you should phone the police, hire a forensic accountant, set up a surveillance team, do whatever you need to do to find that money.” Harry
didn’t like being muscled. “The first thing you do, Dixie, is fuck that reliable source until he gives up the goods. That’s the first thing you do.”

“I don’t think we need this to get any more complicated than it is. Now that you’ve brought up fucking, Harry.”

The unstated threat—she would call Gladys. But Gladys would despise Dixie. She would be disgusted with Harry, but she would terminate Dixie with extreme prejudice, would assess this tacky shakedown, then banish Dixie with a goodbye as chilling as a Taliban death threat.

In the silence on the line that followed this threat, Harry imagined Dixie sitting on the couch in Dale’s living room. Her highlights were fresh. There were lines around her mouth where the possibly precancerous UVA radiation hadn’t penetrated.

“Call Gladys if you like, Dixie,” Harry said. “I don’t care. I wish you and your ‘source’ luck. Let me know if you find any money.”

He hung up and felt a lurching nausea, immediately regretting his angry ultimatum. He couldn’t imagine that she would actually call. Surely she was shrewd enough to realize that the possibility of it gave her leverage, while the reality would only leave scorched earth.

As Harry drove past the ancient distillery, a sprawling collection of brick buildings from the nineteenth century that was used by film companies to approximate a dystopic Europe, his cellphone rang. He picked up, optimistically thinking it might be Dixie calling back to reconcile already.

“Harry, it’s August. I didn’t really have a chance to talk to you at the office. So I’m just calling to say how much I thought of your father. He was steady as a rock. All those years.”

August’s voice was monotone, as if he were reading from a script.

“It’s good of you to call, August. I appreciate it.”

“You know, Harry, you were in the office, talking about your father’s estate …”

“I don’t know that you can call it an estate.”

August was silent, not quite long enough for Harry to ask if he was still there.

“Was there something you wanted to tell me, August?”

After another pause, August said, “You know, about thirty years ago we went on a fishing trip, down to Florida. Me, your dad, some clients. Fishing for tarpon. We were out in this boat, fishing and drinking in that sun. We weren’t having much luck, and we left to find another spot. We were moving pretty fast over the water, and Bennett Cain, a client, he’d been drinking quite a bit and he fell off the boat. Like hitting cement at that speed. This was before everyone wore life preservers all the time. Your father was about half a second behind him. Jumped over the side and swam to where Cain was already sinking. Your dad saved him.”

Harry turned up past some pawnshops and August’s voice was suddenly distorted.

“I’m having trouble hearing you, August.”

“I just want you to know that this business wasn’t always like this, Harry. Your father, he was a good man. We were all good men.”

Static sounds.

“What?” Harry said.

August said something that sounded like Dale susceptor.

“I’m losing you,” Harry said.

Why had August called? Harry wondered. A deathbed confession, perhaps. He pushed Redial. There was no answer.

ELEVEN

O
N HIS WAY TO THE UNIVERSITY
, Harry pondered the unfairness of his life. He hadn’t been unsuccessful, had worked as a reasonably well-known journalist for a formerly prestigious public television station, was employed as a professor (albeit untenured), had a lovely wife who he still wanted to fuck after more than twenty years of marriage, though she didn’t seem to want to fuck him back. Still, he chalked up his desire for her as an accomplishment of sorts. Maybe the sterile patch they were mired in at the moment was only a temporary and inevitable phase in a long relationship. His one indiscretion still put him in what he guessed to be the top tenth percentile for morality in this city.

But it was irksome that without what he had come to regard as his rightful inheritance, his modest success looked for all the world like failure. He had called August Sampson again, but had been unable to reach him. He wondered if August was in a hospital.

While it wasn’t entirely a relief to be back teaching after his condolence leave, it did give him some comfort to feel employed again. Though his mind was on money as he surveyed the faces of his students and absently guessed at the student loans they carried, what their chances were of paying them back before they turned forty (slim), what kind of job market waited for them (cramped, confusing and competitive), what kind of post-sexual revolution lurked.

Harry’s students had the glossy, drugged faces of privilege. Today’s lecture was on the Family Compact, the group of families that had controlled Upper Canadian politics for decades in the nineteenth century, the cozy exclusion and casual corruption of Protestant Tories. That arrogance had led to rebellion. The people rose up! Would these students rise up, Harry wondered, this generation that had a statistical voter turnout of twenty-eight percent? What would galvanize Briscow in his
FUCK THE WHALES
T-shirt, or Melanie, whose hair appeared as a new sculpture every week; what would incite them to take up arms?

“Imagine you’re a citizen of this city in 1828,” Harry began. “A sexless city in black and white, a colonial outpost with airs and cholera. The legislative assembly has no real power; the elected officials are empty suits. The power still comes from London, and it is apportioned to Anglican Tories, who use it like a sword.

“It was William Lyon Mackenzie, a Scot, who coined the term ‘the Family Compact.’ He was denounced as a reptile, a combustible redhead. The sons of Toronto’s finest families dressed up as Natives and broke into the office where Mackenzie printed his newspaper and smashed his printing press and then threw it into the harbour. Mackenzie sued and won and got a new press and began a larger newspaper operation. ‘To die
fighting for freedom is truly glorious!’ he wrote. ‘Who would live and die a slave? Never never never!’

“Does this remind you of anything?” Harry asked the class. “Briscow? What are your thoughts?”

Briscow was on the brink of sleep. “Yes?” Briscow stared at him, blinking.

“Mackenzie. Rising up against the rich and powerful. What does it bring to mind?”

Briscow’s blank, helpless face.

“Well, the Occupy movement.” This from Verma, one of the few bright lights. She was wearing a modified sari and leggings and a wool watch cap. “It’s basically the same scenario, isn’t it?”

“Have you been down there,” Harry asked, “with the protesters?”

“I’ve spent a little time.”

“What do you think the impact has been so far, Verma?”

“We brought attention to a critical problem.”

“And what was the result of that attention?”

“You’re going to say that nothing has changed,” Verma said.

“It’s a bit early, perhaps.” Harry said. “An inequity that has existed for centuries was highlighted. Grievances were aired.”

Verma said, “We’ve had coverage in the media every day.”

“But will it lead to change?” Harry asked. “For a revolution, you need two things. You need preconditions, and you need a precipitant. It’s not enough that people are oppressed. Something has to set them off. Who starts revolutions? The people? That’s the myth, isn’t it? They rise up as one. They’re tired of being cheated, being hungry, whatever. They rise up and overthrow the corrupt regime.

“But the great gift of the people, the great sad gift, is their ability to adjust to almost anything. So they endure. They live with the horrible inequities, the mouldy bread, the shortages,
the unfairness of it all. They trudge home and make dismal Russian jokes, or pray to a flinty Highland god, they pay the soul-destroying taxes.

“What makes a revolution is someone coming along and making people believe that things could change. You have to understand that the idea of change isn’t just foreign, it’s inconceivable. There is no model for it, either in their restricted worlds or in their restricted imaginations. Someone has to create that world, they have to draw the outline and colour it in and then sell it to thousands of people who are without hope and ammunition.”

“But the people
are
rising up,” Verma said.

“The issue is whether they’ll subside again.”

“You’re saying we shouldn’t do anything?”

“Not at all, Verma. It’s admirable to join in. But in the end, when you all go home, will anything have changed? The dogs bark and the parade passes.”