Standing at the dining room windows,
the spent garden before her, she looked closely at the stark limbs of
the leafless trees and shrubs and thought they resembled the
branching architecture of elkhorn and staghorn corals, corals she
remembered swimming over with a feeling of great excitement and
pleasure, but as this memory washed over her, she couldn't recall the
context. Scuba diving? Snorkeling? The Caribbean? She noticed the
small stone bench in the far corner, and could see herself sitting on
the cold damp slab in the early morning, black-capped Chickadees
playing in the fir trees above her, the delicate pink dianthus plants
near her feet, robust spreading sedums and purple salvias reaching up
towards a diversity of grasses—greys, greens, reds, feathery and
slender—swaying and twitching in the light breeze. Raising her
right hand towards her face as if to sweep away a strand of hair, she
stopped and gently moved it back and forth as if waving to a friend
sitting where she had sat. Mrs. Shimoda noticed this as she
approached from behind.
“Such a beautiful space,” Thérèse
said, hearing the floor boards creak and feeling her presence.
Mrs. Shimoda stood at her right elbow
staring at the depth of the autumn garden scene wondering to whom she
had been waving. There were no neighbours to be seen, no faces in
rear windows, no stray cat to offer an appeal. Without words, she
reached out and clasped Thérèse's hand, and feeling the warmth and
pulse of her blood, in silence she shared the view. It was if she had
a daughter, a daughter reunited after a long separation, the daughter
whose loss she privately lamented. After her son had been born,
they'd decided a single child was best so as to focus all their
energies upon his upbringing and future. Uncertainties had guided
their thoughts and emotions, uncertainties rooted in the experience
of their parent's internments during second world war; their loyalty
to Canada dismissed outright, their basic human rights stripped. Born
in 1941, she often wondered if she had been a burden or a blessing.
She remembered her Mother saying that the looks of their friends and
associates who couldn't or didn't react to the injustice, haunted her
more than the faces behind the phrases of abuse. Her parents had
internalized the wounds, rebuilt their lives and looked forward,
always forward. Those years were painful to stir up, but whenever the
past was aroused, she would inevitably think of the injustices
suffered by allied soldiers and civilians at the hands of the
Japanese military, and this abstract balancing of sins made her feel
like she was on a teeter totter, suspended in air, her feet dangling,
dizzy with the vertigo of an invisible wavering counterweight in the
distance, gravity pulling at her heels, nausea rising up her spine,
until the thought of the atom bombs dropped on her distant homeland
broke the spell.
Mrs. Shimoda gently squeezed Thérèse's
hand and drew her towards the dining room table. “Do you remember
this pen and the signing of the lease?”
“Oh, I do, yes, the little colourful
carp.” She looked down at her signature and admired the bold and
even strokes. She sat down and taking up the pen, she wrote her name
beneath the signature to compare. Identical. She smiled up at Mrs.
Shimoda. “I guess that's a good thing. For a second there, I
thought I would have to scratch an X.” She looked back at the paper
and then across the table to the completed jigsaw puzzle, a spring
blossom scene in Japan, three woman in kimonos. Then she noticed the
dark polished wood of the table revealed near the centre, like a
deep shadow where one of the woman's hands should be, her arm
reaching out to . . . a strange thought occurred to her, did the
image arise from the dark hole, or was it being drawn into it? She
breathed deeply to clear her mind of such an odd question and in
doing so, she recognized the fragrance of incense. “I remember your
house always had such a lovely smell,” she said.
“Would you like to burn a stick of
incense? Relax with your thoughts? Come along. I'll leave you alone
for a few minutes while you have a moment of calm before your dinner
upstairs. You might need it. Adorable Hugh, the pet dachshund of
Amelia and Duncan will be sure to find you of interest.” She led
Thérèse to the living room and instructed her to sit upon the small
cushion and make herself comfortable. “You can start by lighting
the candle,” she said, withdrawing a dollar store disposable
candle-lighter from a cabinet drawer. “My son thought it would be
safer to use this than matches. I know it's not very authentic but,
let it be our secret.” Back at the cabinet in the corner of the
room she hesitated over which incense to offer Thérèse: one for
good fortune with the scents of sandalwood, cinnamon and clove? Or a
floral choice to relax her, such as lavender? She opted for the
latter and returned to find the candle lit and Thérèse looking
pleased. She handed the aromatic stick to her and instructed her to
light it from the candle, let it burn for a few moments, then wave it
out and place the smoking incense stick into the mound of ash within
the Koro, the ritual incense burner. When Mrs. Shimoda had made her
way to the kitchen, she followed the instructions and watched the
aromatic smoke spiral upwards, and as she breathed in the familiar
fragrance, she kept thinking how the ash of her incense would mix
with the ash of Mrs. Shimoda's previous rituals and meditations, and
this gave her a great sense of comfort, assurance, solidarity.
*
“In the midst of life . .
. we are in debt,” Duncan said, pouring Jerome a glass of red wine.
Jerome laughed. “In debt,
yes, that's a good one.”
Amelia came into the dining
room with a platter of assorted cheeses, crackers, sliced baguette
and grapes. “Please help yourself Jerome. Fresh from the Atwater
Market.” She popped a green grape into her mouth. “There's such a
lovely cheese shop there. So many choices, artisan, organic. We're
very fortunate being so close.”
The three of them stood
around the table in the awkward initial stages of self-revelation as
they waited for Thérèse to complete her visit with Mrs. Shimoda,
and Pavor and Melisande to arrive with the pizzas from Amelio's.
Hugh, having thoroughly sniffed and passed judgement on this stranger
in his orange socks, looked up at him with an expression of
benevolent anticipation of cheddar.
“I feel I've seen you
before Jerome,” Amelia said. “Perhaps at an art show or an author
reading, or maybe it was a . . . restaurant.”
“You might have passed me
on a sidewalk,” he said. “I like to sit on city benches and look
for interesting faces. Yours looks familiar,” he added with a
inquisitive turn of his head.
“So Jerome,” Duncan
said, breaking the flow of the conversation in his attempt to avoid admitting they'd stared at him from the Commensal Restaurant thinking he
looked like a Dickensian street character. “I imagine painting's
more lucrative than selling old rope and books.” Bringing the
subject back to the challenges of self-employment, Duncan could see a
greater breadth of conversational options. “Buyers willing to shell
out the big bucks for a portrait or two.”
Jerome cut a triangular slab
of soft brie and placed it on a slice of baguette. “I don't know.
It's all relative to how ambitious I want to be I guess. Values and
opinions are out of my control, but I try to make a living.” He bit
off half of the bread and cheese and pondered the shape of his career
while Hugh spotted a fluffy snowflake bit of bread descend to the
floor near the orange socks. “I recently had a very strange
portrait request. It'll pay well, but it's unusual. I was picked up
and driven to a large castle-like country estate an hour outside of
the city—exactly where I'm couldn't say—and I stayed there a few
days while I made preparatory sketches of the wife of the owner.”
“Sounds like something out
of a Gothic romance,” Amelia said.
“There's an odd
coincidence that involves you Duncan,” he said, bringing his glass
of wine to his lips.
“Me? Really?”
Jerome wondered how to frame
his story and how much to reveal. “I was waiting in their library
before the next sitting, and naturally I browsed the books. On a
bottom shelf, I noticed a book sticking out slightly, The Dark
Room, Strand, in gold letters on the spine. I thought it
might be a story from the Strand Magazine, but as I pulled it
out, it was a fake.”
Duncan felt a rush of blood,
a quickening of his heart beat. The Dark Room. Strand.
“Ah, dummy books. A sham library door perhaps?”
“Well, it was a
dummy book as you say, but the others were real. When I pulled the
book out, the bookshelf eased forward to reveal a secret room, a room
full of very old leather bound books, esoterica, magic, occult, and,
on a lectern, a catalogue for the collection, a catalogue with your
name on the title page.”
The cheddar-laden table
water biscuit in Duncan's right hand cracked between the pressure of
his thumb and fingers sending crumbs and cheese to the floorboards
(an offer Hugh couldn't refuse, messy though it was). “My name? The
Dark Room? That's . . . .”
“Yes, it is, isn't it,”
Jerome said. “Extraordinary. So, did you visit the house and make
the catalogue there?”
Duncan was lost in a moment
of astonishment. The looks of expectation on Amelia, Jerome and Hugh
made him feel as if he'd just taken Aldus Manutius's name in vain.
“No, no. It was all very odd. I was working for Stuart Grange at
the time—his shop name was Grange Stuart—and he received a
request to catalogue a special collection.” Duncan took a large sip
of his red wine. “Boy, that brings back memories. The collection
was held in an empty penthouse apartment on Mountain Street up near
MacGregor, or now Dr. Penfield. Every day for two weeks I would stop
off at a favourite bakery, buy a few cheese bagels, and then make my
way up Mountain Street, past Holt Renfrew, the Chateau Apartments,
and on up to the apartment. Those were carefree summer days. No
worries. So much easier being an employee. Anyway, it was arranged I
would show up at ten in the morning and wait in the lobby for a Mr.
Vigg. He was an older well-dressed man, slight build, military
moustache, cravat. At first I thought he was the owner, but no, he
was a butler I think. Anyway, he had the key to the penthouse, and
the key and security code to the locked room with the books. And what
books they were. It took all my effort not to lose myself in them,
search them for marginalia, read the texts, stare at the engravings,
breathe in and feel every page.” Duncan was looking off into the
corner of the ceiling as if the past hovered above the crown molding.
“I was often early and would talk with the doorman, who was this
tall guy named Dirk. The stories he had. Doormen see it
all. One morning I was holding the fort as it were as Dirk went to
the garage to bring up a beautiful dark green Jaguar XJ6 for one of the tenants,
when an older well-heeled couple came out of the elevator with two
children about the age of seven or eight, cute as buttons in their
private school outfits. They went out the door and got into the jaguar and off they went. Dirk informed me later that the parents would
often arrive home propping each other up in their expensive clothes, elegantly drunk. To me, the parents looked more like young
grandparents, the children their wards. Probably the first time I saw
rich people as . . . sad. I wonder if Dirk still works there? He was
a fan of the novels by Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove and all
that stuff. I'm sorry, I'm going off on a tangent. So, yes, I would
be let into the penthouse, and Mr. Vigg would leave me sitting at the
fine leather-top desk, with a library lamp, and he would come back at
four to lock up. The kitchen had everything to make coffee or tea,
and there was black forest ham in the fridge, mustard, fresh bread in
the bread keeper. I could help myself. It was a great gig. Loved it.
Didn't want it to end. I would go out on the corner balcony and look
down the street, the sounds of traffic, the lights, the bustle, the
St. Lawrence river somewhere in the distance. Something very special
that only those up at those heights experience. And the panopticon
behind the building where the four apartment blocks created a square
of wasteland, provided the occasional distractions of other lives,
glimpses of diverse routines, a man at a typewriter, a woman doing
yoga in the passing phase of sun, a cat sleeping on a sofa back, a dinning room table still life with a vase of faux flowers and a bowl of faux fruit, windows forever curtained, blinds forever drawn. Fascinating.”
“Did you ever meet the
owner?” Jerome asked.
“Nope. Never knew his name
either. Just the initials . . . what were they? D. G. K., a gentleman
I think it was. I have a copy of the catalogue at the shop. I did the
cataloguing, neatly pencilled, and Mr. Grange's wife Miriam typed it up. This was before computers had entered the scene. She was a librarian from McGill's McLennan Library who smoked Rothman's cigarettes and could swear
like a sailor. She would sit at the
heavy IBM Selectric and type away with tremendous speed and accuracy,
sometimes with a cigarette between her lips, the smoke trailing up,
resembling what I assumed a mystery writer might have looked like
when pounding out their suspense novels, someone like
Margaret Millar; and whenever Miriam changed the ribbon on that heavy monster she reminded me of a mechanic looking under the hood of an
old car." Duncan shook his head. "Good days, good days. Mr. Grange put out some interesting catalogues in his time."
“Well, Duncan, I did meet
the owner and his wife. Her name might, or might not be, Lucrezia, and
his first name is Declan. Nice guy. Self-made. Rose from very little
in Griffintown to become a real estate developer. Condominiums,
hotels, that kind of thing.”
“Declan? Of
Westlake-Declan Entreprises?”
Jerome shrugged his
shoulders. “Could be. Is the company into condos and hotels?”
Duncan looked at Amelia, who
looked at Jerome. “Duncan just received a letter from his landlord
informing him the building where he has his shop and the land around it
has been purchased by Westlake-Declan Entreprises for condominium
development.”
Jerome, with his mouth open,
managed, “That's . . .”
“Yes,” Duncan said, “it
is isn't it. Extraordinary.” Their laughter felt silly but they
couldn't help but find the whole business absurd.
Duncan's mind wandered off
as Amelia and Jerome helped themselves to the cheese and baguette. He
thought of old Stuart Grange looking at the location where he'd once
had his bookshop, now a prominent highrise commercial building
downtown, and the sad news that his dear wife Miriam, such a robust
bigger than life character, had developed cancer and their hoped for
retirement together had been diminished to his small apartment and
her photographs.
The doorbell brought him
back to reality and while Amelia went to greet either Thérèse or
Pavor and Melisande, Duncan raised his glass to Jerome in a toast.
“Here's to happenstance!”
© ralph patrick mackay
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