Toby
Authors: Todd Babiak
Todd Babiak
East of boulevard Saint-Laurent
on the island of Montreal, it was ungracious to speak the language of the sovereign. If one were forced by circumstance, one whispered. Yet under the society’s current leadership, on the eve of the federal election, they finished nineteen bottles of the second-cheapest Bordeaux on the menu, twenty plates of duck confit, and shouted at each other in English. Toby had admonished them several times, to kindly respect the dignity of the bistro. After all, dignity was the reason they had chosen it. His admonitions had been received with mockery. And since his fellows felt no shame, he resolved to feel it for them.
Despite the late hour, Toby had not yet addressed the membership. The Benjamin Disraeli Society was his creation, and he continued to prepare monthly speeches to be delivered during the dessert course, but he enjoyed no administrative power. He looked at his watch, sighed, apologized to the staff whenever possible, and tapped a small glass jar of unmolested tabletop cornichons while staring across the table
at the president. “Perhaps we could order crème brûlée for everyone, and move on with—”
“Perhaps we could stop bothering me.” The president, Dwayne, was also the station manager and, by some definition, Toby’s friend. He sat with his chin aloft, as though he were straining to see over a shelf. It caused Dwayne discomfort to sit in a chair for long periods, due to a car accident when he was a boy. At one time, Toby had known the details of this accident. Now he did not. “And while we’re perhapsing,” the president continued, “maybe I can introduce you to this little thing called the present tense.”
Toby looked up at the maître d’hôtel, who stood against the zinc bar with enviable posture. A handsome and elegant man in his sixties, wearing a pressed dinner jacket. The only one in the room who understood.
“It’s happening all around us,” said Dwayne.
The server opened another bottle of wine at the opposite end of the table. He presented the cork to one of the new members, who pushed it away as though he were a life peer and said, “I’m sure it’s fine,
garçon
.”
Toby balled his serviette and dropped it on his plate. “Did you hear that?”
“He doesn’t know.”
“But isn’t that the point of all this? To know? We’re devoted to knowing. Who is he, anyway?”
“My lawyer.”
“Discipline him.”
Dwayne lifted his wineglass off the agenda Toby had created for him as a non-administrative courtesy, and flicked it onto the floor.
Dwayne was a tall, thin black man with a cleanly shaved
head, a diamond stud earring in his left lobe, and a panhandle of deep acne scars on each cheek. He had unreasonably long eyelashes and a voice so rich he could have anchored the six o’clock news for twenty years, were it not for those cheeks.
None of the eighteen moneyed drunkards before him had thought to wear a dress handkerchief, despite his arresting demonstration of folding techniques in June. Toby accepted that spit-shining shoes or ironing shirts could be burdensome. But choosing and folding a handkerchief was an adventure, really the only radical act of the imagination open to a man of style. He had executed a perfectly imperfect fold at Alicia’s house some hours earlier, as a sort of challenge to his fellows.
Of course, the absence of handkerchiefs was the most subtle of their errors. The Disraelites were loud. They cussed. The four lawyers, new members who had recently moved to Montreal from the west, seemed to be comparing snowmobile vacations.
Garçon.
The wise maître d’hôtel had placed them in a tight agglomeration of marble tables near the window so the traffic and rain on Saint-Denis would mitigate any damage to the sensitivities of his regular clientele, the sorts of upper-middle-class Québécois who still believed in the transformative power of the theatre. Toby had been monitoring further acts of barbarism among the membership that he might detail as a preface to his remarks on the bow tie: rubber-soled shoes, poorly woven shirts imported from Asian free-trade zones, improperly fitted jackets, garish timepieces, cellular phones in bulging pockets or—worse—attached to belts.
Dwayne’s cellphone was attached to his belt.
Toby tried not to look at it. “I really thought I’d sold them on the handkerchiefs.”
“Stop saying ‘handkerchief.’”
“You want to be in a frat, don’t you? You didn’t bother in university, but now you’re thinking,
Hey.
”
“Can you at least call it a pocket square?”
“Chug, chug, chug. Cuss, cuss, cuss. Rape, rape, rape.”
Dwayne stood up, beckoned Toby up, and pulled him in for a hug of malice. “Please, Tobe. Please just be anyone but yourself for the rest of the night.”
Toby’s phone vibrated inside his suit jacket pocket. For hours his mother had been leaving messages about his father, whose erratic behaviour, in her estimation, had stopped being at all charming. Toby excused himself, but Dwayne did not acknowledge him. The president of the Benjamin Disraeli Society was already deep into a cross-table discussion of Las Vegas with the loudest of the western lawyers: the strip or old Vegas? Which kicks the other’s ass in terms of gentlemen’s clubs?
He stood under the soaked awning on rue Saint-Denis and phoned his mother.
“I can’t just leave. It wouldn’t be right.”
“Didn’t you invent the club?”
“It’s not a club. But yes, I did invent it.”
“So?”
“So the burden of respect is heavier for me. It’s the third anniversary meeting. I’m making a speech and, if I dare say it, setting an example.”
“Why do you do this to yourself?”
“The society’s at a fragile point. If I abandon it now, even for a moment, it’ll degrade into malt liquor, whoring, video games.”
His mother breathed.
“You should really be sleeping,” he said.
“And goddamn it, Toby, you should be here. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t serious.”
This was untrue.
“Tomorrow’s the election. I have to be up terribly early.”
“Fifteen minutes. You want me to beg?”
“Put Dad on the phone.”
“He’s out.”
“Then how do you know he’s acting up?”
“Just…What’s your speech about?”
Toby had worked on it for several hours, on paper and in front of his bathroom mirror. The health of a nation, its hope for progress and the power of its collective dreams, are contained in the manners of its citizens. Their capacity for empathy and compassion, their curiosity and creativity, their intelligence, their education, all of their most haunting secrets live in gestures—smiles and nods, introductions and pleases and parting words, the sincerity of their apologies. Handkerchiefs, bow ties.
“Bow ties.”
“Excuse me?”
“Bow ties, Mom.”
“For Christ’s sake, bow ties.”
Toby looked in at the historic photographs on the walls of the bistro, of waiters and managers shaking hands with presidents of banana republics, a few prime ministers, an impossibly old Charles Trénet. Yellowing photographs that Toby had avoided all night: mortality, pretend smiles, failure dressed up as success.
“You allowed your dad to stew in his own miserable…miserableness for hours here. Hours. And for what?”
“Mom.”
“Bow ties.”
“Bow ties are never just bow ties.”
“What are they, then?” The click of her lighter. He could see it: a Zippo engraved with a cheetah and her name:
Karen.
“You know what? Don’t even tell me.”
“I have a compromise. Tomorrow, when the election is over, I’ll pick up some Bombay Mahal. We’ll play Boggle.”
She had already ended the call.
The traffic lights leading to the autoroute flashed green, allowing Toby a rare opportunity to do what the turbochargers in his car—a black sapphire metallic BMW 335i sedan—demanded of him. His twenty-minute speech, in French, about the lost majesty of the bow tie had been ill received.
Dwayne, who had not bothered to restrain the membership, had walked him to the door. “You’re off home?”
“To my parents’ place, actually.”
“Then home?”
“I guess so.”
“In case I need to hunt you down in the morning.”
“When have you ever hunted me down?”
“Hot speech, by the way. Beautifully composed.”
“Mock on.”
“
Moi?
”
“The whole point of the society, Dwayne, is to make gentlemen of ourselves. There are rules of order. And you, as president—”
“Next time, you can talk at nine.” Dwayne opened
the bistro door, placed his hand on Toby’s back and lightly shoved. “I promise. Good luck with your mom and dad.”
Dollard-des-Ormeaux was tranquil. All the airplanes had departed. Toby turned onto rue Collingwood and removed his foot from the gas pedal. It was as though he had taken a wrong turn into a queer replica of his street. The house of his childhood glowed orange, almost prettily, with flashes and retreats against the white vinyl siding that suggested, somehow, a circus. He parked across the street and looked around for neighbourly confirmation, but it was eleven at night and there were no people and no sounds on Collingwood. Only the heavy breath of the fire.
Toby could see, from the sidewalk, a man in the driver’s seat of the burning Oldsmobile. He sat with impeccable posture as flames rose and crested over the hood. The man appeared to be meditating or chanting, drawing strength from God or some station of his heart. Strands corkscrewed from the tight black base of his hair—it was confirmed, his father’s hair. Toby ran toward the car and stopped. The stateliness of the man in the driver’s seat, the dignity about him, had fed Toby’s instant hope that the Oldsmobile held an imposter, his parents’ house randomly selected suburban geography. Its origin was the engine, his father’s fire. Melted plastic rotted the air; black smoke purled within white.
Toby watched his father from a point where the flat driveway sloped down to the street, and waved his arms. He waved Edward out. He screamed, though he knew he would not be heard. “What are you doing?”
Edward stared back at him.
“Are you trapped?”
Edward continued to stare. He was not trapped.
You must run to the driver’s-side door, open it. Carry him to the brown lawn. Speak to him.
Only it was hot, even at this distance. Toby had placed his hand on the red element of an electric stove at one of his parents’ dinner parties in 1977, and the scars remained. From a lifetime of cinema and television, he knew that a burning car was always one moment away from blowing up. He was already too close. He did not want to die. He did not want to watch his father die. Toby called out to Edward, jumping-jacked, gathered a handful of dry cedar chips from under the silver maple, and pitched them at the Oldsmobile. The chemical smell, the heat, the image already formed of the red hood twisting up, up, in slow motion, and landing on the roof of a nearby bungalow.
You must run to the driver’s-side door.
Patches of vinyl siding dripped. Toby pulled out his phone and dialled 911. The woman, a Québécoise, asked his name, asked if he had a fire extinguisher, access to water. She switched to English, then baby talk.
Toby dropped the phone and read his father’s eyes in the stillness.
Flame, and then darkness entered the car. Toby started to run, to run away, but he was interrupted by movement. The Oldsmobile shook and the door opened. A puff, an exhalation, and Edward fell onto the driveway on his hands and knees. The arms of his flannel shirt smoked, the back of his hair. He wailed and rubbed his head vigorously, rolled into the grassy ditch that separated the driveway from the front lawn. It had rained that afternoon, and the grass was blessedly wet. It squished under Toby’s brogues.
He pulled his father by his feet, by his baked leather sneakers. His father’s eyes were closed now, and he winced
and shouted in pain, just once. When they were installed on the neighbour’s lawn, away from the inevitable explosion, Edward said, in a voice that was not his own, “I am sorry.”
The grass would surely stain the knees of his suit, a three-week-old blue pinstripe Hugo Boss, so Toby crouched. Sirens. He crouched and slid close, put a hand on his father’s blackened face. A door opened with an echo, more doors, chatter. He whispered, “What were you doing?”
“A bow tie.”
“Dad.”
“You’ve joined a think tank.”
“Dad, I promise. I was just about to—”
“Shh.”
Men and women everywhere, thick uniforms,
joual,
water, his mother shouting. A small crowd separated him from his father, and Toby called out, vowed to meet him at the hospital. The
beep
of a vehicle in reverse. A fireman close, hands on Toby’s hands, yellow in the whites of his eyes, grey in his trim beard, sausage on his breath: “Monsieur Ménard?”
His legal name was Toby Mushinsky. Producers at the television station had insisted he Latin up shortly after he had been hired as a City Hall reporter in 2001.
“Mushinsky’s not Pepsi enough, what?” His father had sprawled in the navy recliner, purchased with a couple of fortunate income tax returns in the latter years of the twentieth century. “What’s the source of their hatred for the Semites?”
“And we’re off!” Karen had stood behind them, wiping dust off the succulent leaves of her aloe vera plants
with a mixture of milk and water. They had almost finished the bottle of Veuve Clicquot Toby had brought home to celebrate.
“How can we live here another minute, in this weather, among these cultural fascists?”
“That’s not even a thing, Ed. You’re ruining Toby’s most special day.”
“Dad, you’re right. I’ll speak to them.”
Shortly after his fiftieth birthday, Edward Mushinsky had learned he was one-eighth Ashkenazi, on his father’s side. An aunt with an interest in genealogy had discovered Edward’s purchase on Judaism, along with a break in the family tree initiated by a great-grandmother’s dalliance with a gypsy. Edward, who had been without religion and without any recognizable ethnic community, treated the news like a conversion miracle. One-eighth chosen. Somehow he had known it all along. He began sending cheques to the Jewish Defense Fund and B’nai Brith, volunteering at the Jewish Eldercare Centre in Westmount, and visiting the rabbi at Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom to discuss worldly and spiritual matters. He appeared on a database of Israel supporters and received piles of pleading junk mail from charities and neoconservative political parties every month. He signed up for Hebrew classes but realized, after the first couple of evenings, that it was really just too hard.