Consolation

by Michael Redhill

Genres: Friendship; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From the award-winning author of "Martin Sloane" and "Fidelity" comes a riveting story of two families in different centuries -- one searching for the past, the other creating a record of it.

Release date: January 10, 2007

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 482

Sample

LATE SUMMER, the August air already cooling, and some of the migrators are beginning south. Hear the faint booming high up against windows before sunrise, pell-mell flight into sky-mirrored bank towers. Good men and women collect them and carry their stunned forms around in paper bags, try to revive them. Lost art of husbandry. By the time the sun is up, the reflected heat from the day before is already building again in glass surfaces.

A man is standing by the lakeshore at the Hanlan’s Point ferry dock. Cicadas in the grass near the roadway, cars passing behind the hotel. The ferry rush hour is over already at 8:15, and the Hanlan’s Point ferry is the least frequent of them all, as it takes passengers to a buggy, unkempt part of the Toronto Islands. But it is the most peaceful ride, ending close to wilderness. The Duchess. He sees it departing for the city from its island dock, on the other side of the harbor. He stretches his arm out at eye level, like he once taught his daughters to do, and the ferry travels over the palm of his hand.

At the kiosk beside the gate he buys a Coffee Crisp, struggles with the wrapper. He hands it to a woman standing near him at the gate. “My fingers are useless,” he tells her.

She neatly tears the end of the package open. Such precision. Gives him the candy peeled like a fruit. “Arthritis?”

“No,” he says. “Lou Gehrig’s. Sometimes they work fine. But never in the mornings.”

She makes a kissing noise and shakes her head. “That’s awful.”

“I’m okay,” he says, holding a hand up, warding off pity. “It’s a beautiful morning, and I’m eating a chocolate bar beside a pretty girl. One day at a time.”

She smiles for him. “Good for you.”

The docks are two hundred and forty feet out from the lake’s original shoreline. Landfill pushed everything forward. Buildings erupted out of it like weeds. The city, walking on water.

All aboard. The woman who helped him with the chocolate bar waits behind him — perhaps politely — as he gets on, but says nothing else to him. There are only six passengers, and except for him they disappear into the cramped cabin on one side of the ferry, or go up front with their bikes or their blades slung over their shoulders. He stays on the deck, holding tight to the aft lash-post, watching the city slide away.

The foghorn’s low animal bellow. The ship moves backwards through the murky water fouled with shoes and weeds and duckshit. This close to the skyline, an optical illusion: the dock recedes from the boat, but tiers of buildings ranging up behind the depot appear to push forward, looming over the buildings in front of them. The whole downtown clenching the water’s edge in its fist.

The lighthouse on Hanlan’s Point has been there since 1808. It marks the beginning of the harbor, and in the days of true shipping, if the weather in the lake had been rough, the lighthouse signaled the promise of home. He can’t see it from the rear of the ferry, but he can picture it in his mind: yellow brick; rough, round walls. A lonesome building made for one person, a human outpost sending news of safety in arcs of light. A good job, he thinks, to be the man with that message.

Five minutes into the crossing, he removes a little ball of tinfoil from an inside pocket and unwraps four tiny blue pills. Sublingual Ativan, chemical name lorazepam, an artificial opiate. Four pills is twenty milligrams, at least twice the normal dose. He puts them under his tongue and they dissolve into a sweet slurry, speeding into his blood through the cells under his tongue, the epithelia in his cheeks, his throat, up the mainline to his brain, soothing and singing their mantra. You are loved. He’s taken this many before, and ridden the awesome settling of mind and soul all the way down into a sleep full of smiling women, bright fields, houses smelling of supper.

Marianne is still at home, in bed.

He can see the whole city now, a crystalline shape glowing on the shoreline where once had been nothing but forest and swamp. After that, the fires of local tribes, the creaking forts of the French, the garrisons and dirt roads and yellow-bricked churches of the English and the Scots. It’s overwhelming only if you try to take it all in at once, he thinks, if you try to see it whole. Otherwise, just a simple progression in time. Not that far away in the past at all, even — the mechanisms that make it seem to be are simple ones. Just a change in materials, a shift in fashion.

This joyous well-being holds him. He doesn’t mind that it’s chemical: everything is chemical. Happiness and desolation, fear of death, the little gaps between nerves where feeling leaps. He holds tight to the lash-post and shimmies around to the front of it, drinking the moist air in ecstatic gulps. The vague slopings of the deck are transmitted to his brain as an optical illusion: the city pitching up gently and subsiding, up and down, his senses marvelously lulled. Water moving under the boat. Sky, city, blue-black lake, city, sky. The peaceful sound of water lapping the hull. He lets the swells help him forward and up. More air against him now, his thin jacket flapping, his mouth full of wind, the sound of a long, deep breath —

ONE

MARIANNE HELD THE phone to her ear and waited for her daughter’s voice. Outside the hotel window, the dark was coming earlier than it had the night before, a failing in the west. There was, at last, a slow exhale on the other end of the line: unhappy surrender.

“And you really wonder where Alison gets her drama gene?”

“She gets it from your father.”

“There’s a difference between passion and spectacle, Mum. This is spectacle.”

“I’m fine.” She scuffed her bare feet on the hotel carpet, thinner here, at the side of the bed. She lifted her face, breathed out quietly toward the stuccoed ceiling with her mouth wide. “How is your fiancé?” she said.

“Like you care how he is. Don’t change the subject.”

“I do care.”

“So you want to talk to him then? I’ll put him on.” Bridget lowered the phone and Marianne heard the close, hollow sound of the receiver being muffled. Under it, John’s voice saying, “Me?”

Bridget came back on the line. “I’m just going to come down there, okay, Mum? I’ll bring you something to eat.”

“They have room service.”

“You know what I mean.”

“And you know what I mean.”

“You want to be alone.”

“Yes.”

“And watch a hole in the ground.”

“That too.”

“And is Alison coming?”

“Your sister’s in Philadelphia.”

“I know that, but is she coming? Did you ask her to come?”

Marianne had thought of calling Alison, but her younger daughter had a second child to worry about now and didn’t need to know her mother was having an interesting reaction to the death of her father. “I haven’t spoken to Alison,” she said.

“She’ll freak.”

“Bridget, your opinion of your sister’s —”

“She will.”

“She’ll understand. It would be nice if you could do that too.”

“I understand but that doesn’t mean I —”

“I’m glad you understand,” said Marianne. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, I promise.”

She hung up before Bridget could say another word and kept her hand closed around the receiver as if pressing her finger against those lips. She took the phone off the hook and laid it on the bedside table. They charged two dollars for a local call here, but at the kiosk on the ground floor you could buy a phone card and, for eighty-five cents, talk to someone in Lithuania for an hour. She didn’t know anyone in Lithuania. She hardly knew anyone here, except for the room service people, and they never said anything but “Will that be all?” and “Thank you, Mrs. Hollis.” She stared at the silenced phone, imagined Bridget calling back and getting the hotel operator again, being asked if she’d like to leave a message. She didn’t want to hear it. This silence was necessary.

Through the room’s north-facing window she looked at the upper halves of downtown buildings that ranged up into the center of the city. At her feet, the room was tight with clutter, like something shattered and held in a fist. She got up and stepped over discarded newspaper sections and books splayed open on the floor where they’d fallen, their dustjackets loose. As she moved closer to the window, the object of her attention hoved into view: a slowly deepening hole at the foot of the hotel. From where she stood, she could see what anyone on this side of the hotel above the fifth floor could see: the whole expanse of a construction site, congested with yellow machines twenty-four hours a day, and the busy bodies of men and women ranging over the acre or so of dirt, with its steel framing, PVC piping, and heavy wooden beams. But to the occupants of room 647 or 1147 or 3447 — the room directly above hers — the busy excavation was just some faint hint of the future, like all the holes in this city were that eventually generated condominiums and shopping centers and bank towers. Marianne was the only person in the hotel for whom the pit at the foot of the hotel meant the past.

They were digging out the foundation of a new arena. A boondoggle of municipal and private money had been dedicated to the creation of an unnecessary new hockey palace. They’d broken ground on the new arena just as fall began in earnest, the leaves radiating back the whole spectrum of light they’d absorbed since April, fading out yellow, orange, red, and the builders were already three months behind schedule. They’d started gutting the old post office in June but had spent the rest of the summer wrangling with the municipal government, fighting with the National Hockey League, the National Basketball Association, the neighborhood associations, the seeming swarms of local citizens’ groups and area historians, all of whom wanted their say, and who were finally dispatched with reassurances that the local ecology (crushed Tetra Paks, rotting blankets and parkas, pigeons) would be respected, and any finds of interest turned over to the correct authorities. If she had learned anything from her husband’s life work, however, it was not to trust the promises of developers.

That bed of dirt was nothing more than landfill honeycombed with a century’s debris, but it had been of great interest to David Hollis. He’d spent his working life teaching “forensic geology” — a field he’d invented that combined landforms with sleuthing. He took his students out to local fields or caves with little hammers and corked phials of sulphuric acid to hunt down specimens and take note of various topographical events. They became adept at following old river paths, and learned to date settlements, when they found them, by overgrowth. Abandoned cemeteries presented fascinating opportunities for in situ casework: he’d ask them to determine the year of the last burial by comparing different stages of gravestone erosion and making calculations. All of this was actual geology, and by the third time he brought the same group out, they all came to within three years of the date of the last burial. Standing there, among the living, he felt the beautiful and numinous relationship of his young students to the community of these dead, whose last official moment they’d teased out of the silent witnesses to their lives. The forest that those people had built their houses and coffins out of now gave testament by counting out the hours and years since. There was (it had come to him in a flash, he later told Marianne) a science to determining how time passes. Human beings interrupt the natural cycles of growth and decay with their communities and their structures, but they don’t stop those cycles. Rather, the processes continue, like river water flowing around a stone. Except the river water is made of cities and buildings, and the stone is pushed underground and lost forever. Unless.

Before his death, he’d published a monograph about these shorelands that Marianne looked out on from the hotel. The booklet suggested there was greatness in that anonymous dirt, but his colleagues had ridiculed him, had accused him of inventing his source. These people (“those fuckers” was their official designation) had paraded him in front of committees, and only the intervention of his oldest colleague at the university had saved David from complete ignominy. But not, of course, from death. The lakebed accepted all manner of discards.

David’s source had been a diary he’d turned up in the rare book library at the University of Toronto. Pyramids of Bankers Boxes there held the barely cataloged papers of perhaps eight defunct archives dating back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Squinting academics had stroked the John Graves Simcoe papers with cotton gloves (the city’s founder! the holy grail!) and taken down every last bon mot muttered by him or any of his bucktoothed relations; Simcoe and Mayor Howland and William Lyon Mackenzie and Timothy Eaton had spawned biographical industries. And yet, David had somehow ferreted out an unknown eyewitness with a story of early Toronto.

But David refused to produce this diary — Let people show some faith, he’d said. His dean, Gerry Lanze, had all but begged him to produce it — or at least, for God’s sake, a call number — but David had declined. Proof lacks the power of conviction, he’d said.

He’d been made a laughingstock. The abandoned post office, still owned by the city, remained unexplored and the area was a hodgepodge of expressways, steakhouses, railway lands, breweries, shipyards, and printing plants. Faith in the “city before we arrived” did not hold any allure to the municipal klatch. Hockey and basketball did. Ten weeks after the publication of his monograph, they dredged him out of the lake.

SHE CAME to the hotel as October ended and requested a northwest corner room on the thirty-third floor. She wanted to plug in her own lamps and use her own linens. She would take care of the place herself, wanted to be undisturbed — intended to finish a novel there, she said, and she required the utmost privacy. Once the manager determined to his satisfaction that his hotel would be home to an artist (and was told he would personally be thanked in the acknowledgments), he admitted her on her terms. Five porters accompanied her to the thirty-third floor, moved her things into the small but comfortable room, and then clogged the little space in front of the door like Keystone Kops. She handed the one in front a twenty.

It had taken her a few hours to pack a bag of her things at the house and then two boxes of books and papers from David’s library. Some of these were his writings — older monographs, or books including chapters he’d written, books on urban development at the turn of the century, pamphlets done for the Department of Earth Sciences on specialty subjects such as archival practice before 1920, reverse erosion (a computer program that retro-modeled shorelines based on historical snow- and rainfall measurements), and air-to-ground cartographic reconciliations. He’d also written a textbook on forensic geology and topography that was the standard in many American schools (and as a result was coming into use in Canada). Marianne gathered up her copy of his damning monograph, a maquette of the city in 1856 that one of his students had made for him, and a tower of photocopied newspaper pages. Lastly, she took two art deco standing lamps from the front room (David had hated these lamps), some blankets and pillows, and called two cabs to bring it all downtown.

One of the lamps she placed beside the bed, a trilight that provided mood, reading, and daytime settings. She put the other one near the door, beside the bathroom, to give the impression of a larger space: when lit, it made the little entranceway look more like a foyer. Hotels never wasted lighting on entranceways, but she hated the darkness of exits and entries. They’d installed key-lights on a track down the middle of the front hallway at the house to make that space glow with welcome.

From a market below the hotel, she bought a bag of apples and a box of clementines, which had just made their appearance in stores. They’d scent the room of home and fall, and if she’d had so much as a hotplate, she would have boiled a cinnamon stick on it too. In the room, she peeled three of the clementines and scattered the skins under the beds and along the wide ledges, and sucked on the sections while standing in the middle of the space, looking for gaps where the hotel’s soul showed through too plainly. She unloaded her books and papers, and organized them in piles on the west-facing ledge, as much in categories as she could manage, so she’d be able to find sources if she needed them. She suspected she would not need them: in the main, her work was observation. She’d brought the books, books he had loved, to have his company while she was there.

SHE IMAGINED Bridget’s voice trapped in the cul-de-sac of the disconnected phone. She looked at it from the window — just a harmless thing when unplugged — and resolved to keep it off the hook for a couple of days. Knowing it would not ring made the room feel a little more lonesome, and she went to sit at the desk beside the television where she kept her copy of David’s monograph, leaning upright against the wall. She’d wrapped the cover of the little book in a protective plastic sheeting, and when she sat at the desk at a certain angle — which she avoided doing — she could see her face in it. The cover said:

A Deduction Using Forensic Topographical Methods in Conjunction with Archival Source Materials of the Location of the Plate Negatives of the 1856 Toronto Panorama and 352 Other Items, with Some Comments.

And centered below it:

David M. Hollis, Ph.D., A monograph published to mark the opening of The Symposium on the Victorian City in Canada, University of Toronto, May 30–June 2, 1997.

She picked it up, as she did many times in a day, and tilted it into the light from the window. It reflected the white-and-blue sky and elided his name in clouds. She put it down and crossed to the window. Maybe the hotel would not be an unpleasant place to be holed up with grief, she thought. Its windows drew in a clear bright light from the north and the west, and it would not be any harder to sleep alone in one of its two double beds than at home. There were sounds of machines from outside, and voices through the walls, and even art to look at: two lithographs on the walls, of the models of the solar system preferred, in one, by Copernicus, and in the other, by Ptolemy. They flanked the television set.

BRIDGET SAID, “WHAT I understand is that you’re acting like a madwoman.” She looked across the living room at John, who was sitting at attention on the couch, a book open in his lap. “Mum?” She shook her head slowly. “She hung up on me.”

“Let her be for now,” John Lewis said.

“Do you know what she’s doing?” He closed the book and pushed himself up from the couch, took the phone out of her hand. He tried to kiss her and she pulled her head back to see his eyes. “Do you?”

“She’s taking a break.”

“She’s living at the Harbour Light Hotel. Watching the Union Arena excavation.” She took the phone back from him. “Now do you think she’s crazy?”

He slipped the book back into its space on the shelf, running two fingers along its spine to ensure it was flush with the others. It was the sort of gesture Bridget noticed and made fun of from time to time, but she was silent now, looking through him. “I think you should leave her alone,” he said. “It’s been two months. She should do whatever she needs to help her cope.”

“She doesn’t want me down there.”

“You shouldn’t take it personally.”

She laughed at him.

“I have to go to Howard’s,” he said. “I have stuff for him. Have a drink, take Bailey for a walk.” The dog snapped to attention at the sound of her name. “You’ll feel different later.”

“That would suit you.”

“It’ll suit you too.”

She stood with her arms crossed, an obelisk. Then she seemed to decide to drop it for now. “Will you ask your employer to actually pay you?” she said. “Tell him you can’t wait until his next hit play.”

He kissed her and held her face against his. He felt the tendons in her neck standing up beneath his palm.

TWO

TWO YEARS EARLIER, on a spring afternoon, John Lewis had been in the Hollises’ living room waiting to see if he ‘d be needed. TV Guide open in his lap. Jerry witnesses an accident — and is attracted to the victim. In the kitchen, two rooms distant, all four Hollises were around their table, discussing what they knew, what they could not know, what they feared to know. David Hollis had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. John heard Bridget crying and he readied himself, wiping his palms on his pants, but then there were voices again.

Bridget said, “Normal for who?” and then he heard the murmur of David’s voice, calming some rush to judgment. Her father brought a measure of courtesy to a household of bull-headed women. He had honesty on his side, the women had bluntness and charm. If one of them disliked something you said or did or wore, you knew about it immediately. You heard We’re not having this conversation or Are you done with this? or Are you really going to wear that?

From the kitchen, Marianne: “We are getting a second opinion. And a third if we have to.”

“You can’t shop for a diagnosis you like,” said David. “This is what it is. But we don’t have to lose our heads over it.”

A chair squeaked backwards and there was the sound of a pile of something hitting the tabletop.

“Get those fucking handbooks off the table, Bridget. He’s a person, not an appliance.”

“You don’t know the first thing about these.”

“Mum sent them down to me.”

“Well, of course she did.”

“Trust me, the only thing they don’t have is a chapter on how to slit your wrists. They’re total downers.”

“Well, he doesn’t have the flu!”

“Come on, girls.”

“She thinks ‘Be Positive’ is a treatment option!” John could see Bridget gesturing with both her hands. About now he imagined she looked like the Greek men who sat all afternoon in the cafés near their apartment. “Are you going to sit here and meditate? We have to get to know this thing whether we want to or not.”

“The storm before the storm,” David said, and he laughed alone. John heard one of the sisters begin to cry. His money was on Alison, “the passionate one.” Her domain was the big emotional moment. Bridget’s famous story about her sister involved a drive from Toronto to Disney World when they were kids, during which they had so enraged Marianne with their incessant complaining that she’d made David turn around at the Florida border. An hour later, stopping for gas near Glynn, Alison used every last penny of her spending money to buy them all plastic Mickey Mouse ears. Then she sat weeping in the backseat until everyone put them on and Marianne agreed to point the car south again. Sometimes Alison frightened John, but she simply infuriated Bridget, and her living in the U.S. suited them both. John heard the passionate one say: “No matter what, you can’t give up, Dad.”

“Don’t be so dramatic. Of course he’s not —”

“I know he won’t.”

“Well don’t even suggest it.”

“Maybe I should move back,” Alison said. “To help you guys. Just for a while.”

John could hear Bridget’s thoughts as if they were being megaphoned from a passing truck: GOD NO. She said, “You have a six-month-old. He needs you too.”

“I’m just saying.”

“I know,” said Bridget, and there was relief in her voice. Her sister would get credit for the intent.

Alison’s penchant for emotional cabaret came from David, who once cried during a Campbell’s soup commercial. He’d wept when Alison called with the news that she was going to have a baby, and he’d cried when John and Bridget announced their engagement the previous fall. He even hugged John before he did his own daughter. They’d announced it in this very room, and John had been sitting in this same chair, with the same view of the closed television cabinet, appliqué flowers over yellow paint. He’d felt frightened then, as if what he and Bridget had chosen could be annulled by a secret word. This fear had translated itself into the two of them sitting at opposite ends of the small room. David came over to John and clasped both his hands in his. “John Hollis!” he said, laughing. “You really think she’s going to let you keep your own name?”

“Lewis-Hollis actually sounds really nice,” Bridget said.

“Or Hollis-Lewis.”

Marianne had not moved, and when David sat back down she said, “Any reason in particular why now?”

Bridget gave her mother an underwhelmed look. “Do you mean am I pregnant?”

“I know you would tell us that news first.”

Bridget was sitting with her arms crossed, physical shorthand, John knew, for come and get me. Because she was innocent of her mother’s accusation, Bridget would refuse to say so. “If I am pregnant, then have I done a bad thing by not telling you first, or because I’m getting married for the wrong reason?”

“I’m saying I’m certain you would give us the benefit of the right context and then we could be very happy to hear all of your news.”

“So you would be equally pleased with Mum, I want to get married and Mum, I have to get married, as long as we told you the news in the right order? It has nothing to do with the fear that you’d look bad in front of your North Toronto chums if I were standing at the altar already knocked up.”

“We’re not pregnant,” said John. “We’re not.”

“A wedding!” said David, clapping his hands together. His wife and daughter looked into their laps.

After another moment of silence, Marianne breathed in brightly and said, “I’m sorry. You caught me by surprise is all. I’m thrilled for you both. For all of us.”

“YOU’RE NOT MY frigging valet.” Bridget was standing in the doorway of the living room. “Why do you insist on waiting out here?”

“I don’t want to intrude.”

“If anyone’s the intruder here, I am. To judge from how much Alison already knows.”

“You guys should keep talking. Anyway, I don’t think your mum wants me in there.”

Marianne’s voice carried from the kitchen. “I don’t care where you are, John. At least if you’re in here, no one will think you’re eavesdropping.”

“See?” said Bridget, and then more quietly, “If you’re in there, I might be able to keep myself from garroting my baby sister with her own fucking necklace.”

He went in and sat down. Cups of tea in front of them, David at the head of the table, spent and pale. John had met Alison only once before, at her wedding two summers ago. The last happy family occasion? She was living in Philly with her husband, a baby, and another on the way, but she flew up as soon as she heard the news. She said, “John,” as if they were meeting in a boardroom, and he took a seat beside her.

There was a pile of pamphlets at Marianne’s elbow. The one on top was called Living with ALS: Managing Your Symptoms and Treatment. She saw him looking at it and slipped it over to him, and John instinctively covered the title with his hand. “We all know what it says, John. You can read it.”

“Plenty of good stuff in that one,” said David. “Cramps-slash-spasms, urinary urgency, swelling of hands and feet — none of which I have. Fatigue — I have fatigue, but I’ve always had fatigue —”

“But not like this, Dad,” said Bridget.

“Drooling-slash-salivation, thick phlegm–slash–postnasal drip, quivery jaw . . . anyway, what I’m trying to say is we need to be vigilant, yes? But for now: I’m fine. We don’t have to fight amongst ourselves, we don’t have to call in the army —”

“No one is calling in the army,” said Bridget. “But shouldn’t we be prepared? We have to know what to look for. Because we know you won’t ask for help when you need it. Right?”

“That means you want me to ask now, Bridget, but all I need is my family around me, and for everyone to stop panicking.”

“No one’s panicking.”

“Bridget’s right,” said Alison. “We have to meet this head on. As a family. You too, John.”

Bridget clenched her eyes to slits. “What the hell does that mean?”

“That he’s part of the family.”

“No, that’s your way of saying that even though he lost his parents he can probably still understand how these things work.”

“Bridge, I don’t think that’s what she means.” John tried to take her hand; she slid it away from him. “I consider myself a part of the family, Alison. Thank you.”

“So how does he look to you, John?”

He braced himself for Bridget to boil over. She had never mastered the art of letting her sister’s words roll off of her, and in the past couple of weeks her Alison threshold had become perilously low. Marianne had called Alison a week ago to tell her what Dr. Aubrey said about a twitch in her father’s cheek. “Bell’s palsy, right?” she’d said to the doctor, but it wasn’t that harmless, almost comic response to stress. “Never sick a day in his life,” she’d said to Alison, but she waited a week to tell Bridget. “I didn’t want you to freak out while you were cramming for the bar,” Mari