Martin Sloane

by Michael Redhill

Genres: Friendship; Literary Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

The story of a relationship across two decades, of Jolene's search for Martin Sloane when one day he disappears from their home without warning or explanation, is told in a novel that brilliantly and movingly explores the vagaries of love and friendship, the burdens of personal history, and the enigmatic power of art.

Release date: February 28, 2009

Publisher: Back Bay Books

Print pages: 290

Sample

Extraordinary praise for Michael Redhill’s bestselling, award-winning first novel

Martin Sloane

“Michael Redhill has achieved with this novel what Martin Sloane strives for in his boxes — a precision of emotions, life in miniature with all its details and complexity. Redhill’s language is exacting and carefully chosen as he creates for the reader a composite and contradictory world that is at once haunting and beautiful. The book is in its own way a replica of the boxes, capturing the human condition where perfection eludes us as love does. This is a stunning debut, life-size and moving.”

— Mary Morris, author of The Night Sky and Acts of God

“I read a superb novel yesterday, the kind that makes you lousy company for hours afterwards — because you want to mull over its details rather than be social, because you prefer its world to the one that, at dinner, you suddenly find yourself contending with.... Martin Sloane makes you realize just how thin and fleeting most of what passes for good fiction is.”

— Noah Richler, National Post

“Martin Sloane is remarkably assured.... Redhill has created a stunningly polished and powerful book.”

— Brian Bethune, Maclean’s

“Redhill’s language is masterful.... Mild and beautiful on the surface, Martin Sloane has explosives buried quietly in its emotional landscape.... An intimate novel that warns us how gray and empty life becomes when we settle for bad copies, for unsatisfying imitations of real things.”

— Beverly Daurio, Globe and Mail

“The scenes of Martin Sloane’s childhood are so beautifully detailed and psychologically compelling.... It is a childhood as achingly convincing as it is beautifully written — not a word too spare or an image too many. It is distant in time but vivid and lovely, as if we watch Martin’s past through a fourth glass wall, a tiny jeweled theatre of enigma and loss.”

— Will Aitken, Gazette

“Martin Sloane is such a good novel it is hard to believe it is Michael Redhill’s first. Lyrical, funny, moving, and writerly in the most engaging way, it deserves a wide readership.”

— Wayne Johnston, author of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

“Michael Redhill has a keen eye for physical and emotional detail, and he’s housed his mystery in an engaging narrative structure.... There is much to recommend here.... The latter sections that describe Sloane’s childhood are ravishing.”

— Bill Richardson, Quill & Quire

“Redhill’s turns of phrase often combine solid, well-hewn familiarity with leavening flashes of wit or beauty.... In the latter scenes, with young Martin Sloane growing up in Dublin, those twelve drafts pay off. Redhill’s found the sweet spot on his racket, and hits ace after ace.”

— Annabel Lyon, Vancouver Sun

“Michael Redhill’s first novel seems destined to become a classic, one of those books handed from friend to friend. …With this luminous, wonderful book, he highlights the complexities of human relationships in profound and unexpected ways.”

— Books in Canada

“Redhill shines.... Martin Sloane is a complex, introspective tale that puts love at odds with the power of place, and explores how those competing pulls upon our hearts define us and our choices.... Redhill has created a worthy piece of art.”

— Audrey Hensen, Hamilton Spectator

IT WAS A LIE THAT BROUGHT MARTIN SLOANE TO A picture house on O’Connell Street one night in the fall of 1936. (This was how I began, finding my way into his story, trying its doors.) He was eight, and it was the first time he’d ever gone anywhere by himself. It was a twenty-minute walk from his house and by the time he reached O’Connell, night had fallen and the wide boulevards were blazing with electric light. The hotel-lined street was busy with horse-taxis, news-hawks, chestnut carts; its café storefronts full of customers. Martin imagined that back at home the windows of his house were glowing orange with safe nighttime light.

He walked toward the cinema, the heavy coins in his pockets enough for the movie and a bag of steamed nuts. No one noticed him: although only a child, he was simply a part of what he walked through. A city dweller. Head up, cap clenched in one hand, he went down the middle of the thoroughfare, on the grassy strip that separated the two avenues. At that moment he thought his happiness complete, thought that it must have been like the happiness of being older, the way he imagined anyone might have felt, walking to the Grand Central Cinema at six o’clock at night to see the early show of The Informer

In this he was in league with his father, who the previous week had walked over the river, in the middle of the workday, to see the picture. He’d come home red-faced with excitement.

You Irish with your bogeymen, Martin’s mother had said.

They must see it, said his father.

Not these children, Colin. She is too impressionable, and he is too young.

The papers had argued back and forth over the film’s merits, some saying it was scandalous and a temptation, others that it told a sore truth. It was the story of an Irishman, the drunkard Gypo Nolan, who’d sold out his friends to the British. Now it was as if the Mail and the Herald were arguing in the Sloane kitchen over dinner and it soon became a forbidden topic of conversation. But his father had certain conversational gifts. He convinced Martin’s mother that her objections were about picture houses in general.

No, Colin, she said, it is about this film.

You mean to say, said his father, that you don’t object in principle to the viewing of motion pictures?

If they are wholesome, then no.

I don’t believe it, Martin’s father said, staring at her in disbelief. I thought for certain you were against the pictures in general.

Not at all, said Martin’s mother, happy for common ground. Send him to see O’Shaughnessy’s Boy, down at the Grand Central. It has that nice Mr. Beery in it.

And so, the following Sunday night, Martin’s father gave him directions to the Grand Central Cinema, at the bottom of O’Connell beside the river, and there, Martin paid his half-shilling. And, following his father’s instructions, he went in to the parlour beside the one showing O’Shaughnessy’s Boy where people were gathering for the six-o’clock showing of The Informer.

When the lights went down, rain began to fall in the street. Martin sat in the darkness, the voices of the actors intermingled with the quiet pattering hiss outside the thin cinema walls, and he was transported by it all, by his illicit visit to the movie hall, by the sensuality of Gypo Nolan’s drunken sin. The movie ended in heartbreak, the big man trying to outrun his fate, and when Martin went outside, the city had been transformed into mirrors of light. In the Liffey, the centre of town shone upside down in a cold radiance. He could see the buildings in the slickened car windows, on the street, against glistening rainjackets passing along the sidewalks, as if the whole place had sunk under the sea.

Martin’s father was waiting in the car with the motor running in front of the cinema. He waved through his window, swiping it with his forearm so he could see out. In the car, his father handed him a towel. So? he asked.

It was good, Martin said.

His father pulled out into the slow-moving traffic. The horses drove down through the streets with their heads lowered. Were you frightened?

No. But I think we shouldn’t have lied.

I suppose we could leave the country now, said his father, and he laughed to himself. This was one of the things Martin did not understand about adults, this laugh he sometimes heard. Let’s not call it a lie, though, his father said. Let’s call it a secret.

Now they were driving up Berkeley Street. His father’s favourite sweet shop was here, and as they drove past it they could see the windows were fogged and there were people inside. We could both use a cup of chocolate, his father said. To warm up.

Donnellan’s was popular with everyone, and Martin’s father kept his face averted from the other customers. He ordered two mugs of chocolate and a fruit bun for them to share, and when he came away from the register, a table was open in the window. They sat, and his father asked Martin to tell him the whole story of the film.

But you’ve seen it, Martin said. You already know how it goes.

I have seen it, said his father. But I want you to tell it me, the way you remember it.

Martin thought back to the beginning of the story and began telling it, and as he told it, it was as if he were seeing the film all over again, except that the Grand Central was in his mind, his mind was the cinema. He told of Gypo Nolan’s betrayal of his old friend, turning him in to the British for twenty pounds. The shock of watching the betrayer spend the money on drinks, and fish and chips. The way he teetered back and forth between remorse and pride. Then the trial, the lies Gypo told to cover himself, endangering even a neighbour, and afterwards, the mad run from justice. How it had electrified Martin to watch it, even the horror of Gypo, dying in the church at the feet of his victim’s mother. Frankie, your mother forgives me! Certainly, in the end, Gypo had regretted his actions, but regret is not enough for the people around you, Martin had thought, people have to see that crime is paid for. In this way, life was not like religion, in which, as far as he understood, sorrow in your heart came first.

That was it, his father said when Martin was finished. He nodded and fingered his chin. That was very good. Now, tell me what it was about.

About? Martin thought for a moment, not sure of what to say. It was about not lying.

Stop worrying about that, said his father. If I say something’s okay, it’s okay. Now what was it about?

Martin chewed on a piece of candied peel, rolled the bittersweet scrap around in his mouth. It was about being kind to others, he said.

It was, a little. Something else, though.

He could come up with nothing. He felt his face begin to burn and he tried to think what Theresa, who was quicker of mind than he was, would have said. He knew she would be thinking of what their father might have wanted to hear, and after another moment, Martin said: It was about you shouldn’t drink when you’re flush.

No, Martin. His father looked disappointed. He tipped back the end of his chocolate and picked his hat off the table. He left a coin.

The two of them walked back to the car in silence, and Martin searched his mind for the hidden meaning of the film, but he was so distracted by the anxiety of disappointing his father that he couldn’t think. Finally, driving up past the canal, his father spoke quietly.

Would you say it was about having a home?

A home, said Martin, agreeing gratefully.

Gypo doesn’t merely turn in a friend, Martin. He gives up the only thing he belongs to, thinking he will go to America with his blood money. But instead, he remains, and he is lost in the only place he has ever belonged. That is as good as dying.

But he does die.

Yes, said his father, mercifully, he dies.

They turned down to where they lived. For his whole life he had passed these houses, walked over the stones in these streets. Every night, the lights in the distance would appear between these same houses, slanting down alleys. He had never known any other place than this. His father had always said that every star had its place in the sky, every person theirs on Earth. Except you could not take a star out of the sky. People, though, he’d said. People vanish from the places they should be, people go to darkness all the time. Outrunning their fates.

And that had been Gypo Nolan’s lot.

Molly was still holding the box called Grand Central in her hands, staring at it as if the movie were playing deep inside it. How was that? I asked Martin.

Just about perfect. Except the candy store was called Goldman’s. She reads me like a book, he said to Molly.

She laughed. I can’t see you as a book.

He turned back to me. And the Grand Central had little pinlights stuck into their ceiling, so that when the room went dark, you could see above you a little pretend night sky. He raised his hands above his head and waved his fingers toward the ceiling.

Just like the one you’d see on a clear night over Dublin, I said.

Yes, said Martin. Just as if the roof had been lifted off.

Molly put the box back down on Martin’s workbench. She laid it down so gently it didn’t make a sound. Did your mother ever discover he’d let you go?

He got away with it, he said. It wasn’t the worst thing.

What was?

Martin raised his eyebrows at her, surprised that someone who’d known him only eight hours would ask such a question. Molly leaned against the bench, waiting him out. In the years I’d known her, she’d always been the kind of person who could expect answers to her questions, no matter how brazen. That was her effect on people; resistance was futile. But after a few moments of the two of them pointing their mandarin smiles at each other, she lowered her head and her black hair fell over her eyes.

It’s been a great day, she said. But maybe I should let you both go.

Martin moved around her and started collecting the boxes she’d pulled down from his shelves. Maybe Jolene can run you to the bus station, he said.

She watched him slide the artworks back into their cubbyholes — Pond, Linwood Flats, The Swan. Did your father ever see these? she asked.

He pushed Crossing into place. It was a box that put the viewer in the sky over a ship crossing the ocean. A woman’s face was painted on the deck, and where the smoke from the stacks washed across the glass front of the box, a man’s face seemed to hover. I wish he had, he said.

Well, at least he’s in them. It’s not a bad place for a person’s soul to end up.

No, said Martin, pushing the last box flush against the others. I suppose it’s a good place to be.

I.

THE SWAN, 1950. 6" X 14" COLLAGE. PAPER, SEQUINS, FOUND IMAGES. PRIVATE COLLECTION. DEEP IN A FOREST THE SNOW IS FALLING. BEHIND THE BARE TREES, A SWAN DRIFTS ACROSS A FROZEN POND.

SOME PEOPLE BELIEVE IN A CONNECTED WORLD IN which every one thing is cognate with every other thing, the bell tolling for you, for me. In this kind of world, orders are revealed within our own order, our beginnings woven with other beginnings, endings with endings. In this way, life is seen to rhyme with itself. For a long time this was my own religion.

But now, if I go all the way back to my own birth, I find only disconnected memories. A dusty shag carpet, a writing pad by a phone, an orange wall. I think I can recall an early dream: bedroom curtains opening on a carousel? Later, my mother in gardening gloves, smelling like soil, or my father undoing her shoes for her when my brother was in her stomach. A banana-seat bicycle, a bumpy road between two towns, jackdaws creaking in the air over gravestones. Some time later, a piano brought down from Syracuse, the one my mother played as a girl.

But this childhood narration doesn’t rhyme with anything. Not even with itself, for what could a dusty carpet have to do with gardening gloves, or a piano with gravestones? So many times in thirty-five years, I’ve known the feeling of that little girl I once was being erased. The girl followed by the young woman who was then given the hook for another, later, woman. I feel only a rough kinship with them, like they are co-conspirators in what has become of me. A lifetime of versions. But the little girl? She’s gone. I don’t have her. It’s only when you’re old enough to understand that the past is gone forever that you begin to store your own life, and like most children, at least as I recall, I thought I would be eight forever. Or eight and taller, eight with hips, eight with boyfriends. Never anything but eight.

I probably didn’t start keeping track of my own life until I left my childhood home. Then I’d lie awake in my dorm bed testing to see if I could remember how all the doors in the house I no longer lived in opened. Which ones swung easily on their hinges, which had a sticking point you had to tug it through. Which doorknobs were loose, which stiff. The folding closet door in my bedroom that slid open on a track and then came off the track and swung free. I thought to myself, once I’d forgotten the doors of my childhood home, my childhood would truly be over.

Martin Sloane was fifty-four when I started writing to him, fifty-six when we became lovers, now that’s the thing that seems shocking, the raw fact of that. Before then, I had a clear vision, so I thought, of the kind of person I would eventually love. It would be someone a little like me. Like me, but with improvements. Someone more open, someone a little smarter, a little stronger emotionally. But someone who’d fit in back at home, should I have ever wanted to return. After meeting Martin, I went down my list. He seemed more open, but I couldn’t really tell. He was smarter, but emotionally stronger? Did I really want that tested? Did I want to lose that test?

The problem of what other people would think was more serious (I dreaded the gossip) but in the end it was more easy to deal with. By the time I couldn’t live without Martin, it didn’t matter what anyone thought.

The first time we met in person his face surprised me. Although he was thirty-five years my senior, his face was smooth, his short mussed hair jet black with only flecks of silver. (I was to have more grey in my hair by the time I turned thirty.) His nose was too big for his face, and his eyes were as dark as his hair. His face made me think of the busts of dead men, the illusion of living eyes made by holes in the stone. So that from one angle, they would seem pitiless, and from another, they’d spring to life.

He’d just walked off the bus in Annandale, where Bard College was. I was waiting with a car I’d gotten from Rent-a-Duck, a rusted-out VW bug with a pipe for a gearshift and a steel plate over a hole in the floor. He was lugging his artworks in a plain old garbage bag, and I rushed over to him and forced him to put the bag down and let me stack the artworks, so they could be carried, tower-like.

Just dump them in the back, he said.

Let me be in charge of them. You’re a guest now.

If anything breaks, I’ll fix it. We’d gotten to the bug. This is a great little car, he said.

They were out of Jaguars. I put down the boxes gingerly to unlock the trunk. The lid had to be propped up with a stick. Then he began plunking them in, like they were groceries. He put the last one in and took the stick out, and the lid slammed shut. I’d watched him with paralyzed wonder.

You can’t treat them like they’re permanent. He went around to the passenger side. They’ll get ideas. He tried to put the seatbelt on, but the business end of it had been melted into a glob in some previous disaster. This is going to be an adventure, he said happily.

I started down the country road that wound between towns, one side a river, the other a forest.

Can I work the shift? he asked.

What do you mean?

You say shift, I change gears.

Do you know how to drive?

No. But when I was just a kid, my dad had a Saloon car and once we drove it from Dublin to Galway and part of the way I sat on his lap and shifted the car. So I have that part down good.

Did you travel a lot with your family?

Just that once. So, you tell me when, all right?

You’re not sitting on my lap.

I can do it from over here.

Shift, I said. And so we drove the eight miles back to Bard, me calling the shifts over the labouring engine, and Martin trying to get the gear into the right position, until we were on campus and he jammed it in reverse as I was trying to get him to gear down. I heard something big and metallic drop down and smack the road and the car leap-frogged over it and we both flew out of our seats and hit our heads on the roof. The car came to rest in some grass. We sat there panting as people I knew gathered around.

Well, this is Martin Sloane, I told them, getting out. He’s going to have a show at the Blithewood. Martin was still sitting in the passenger seat, looking at his palms, dazed.

My friends helped him out, introduced themselves; some of them knew he was coming, knew how hard I’d worked to get him to town. Then everyone took a box and we all crossed the field to the gallery, the glass fronts catching and reflecting the light at odd angles so the little crowd looked like a broken mirror spreading across the green. Martin glanced back at me and laughed.

You having fun now? I said.

You think we’ll see any of those again?

You obviously don’t care.

He made an Oliver Hardy face and shrugged, then got in step with me and linked his arm in mine. I like your friends, he said.

I tightened my arm, my heart whacking against my ribs, and I pulled him against my side. I like you.

But I crashed your car.

That you did.

Bard College was close enough to my hometown of Ovid but far enough away that no one from there could walk to it in half a day. The campus was a pastoral green hidden in the woods. Grassy patches, whitewashed buildings, a chapel in the trees. Towering maples clenched in brilliant vermilion down the main drives. The big athletic field with its unmown edges reeking of springtime through the summer and fall.

I’d been assigned one of the smaller dorms at the edge of the playing field, more a cabin than a dorm, with an angled rooftop and a jumble of windows, called Obreshkove House. I was on the second floor, with a window pointing out to the forest, where I sometimes saw deer in the gloaming. Molly Hudson was my suitemate; she’d arrived on the first day of school while I was out registering for classes. She liked me, she later explained, on the evidence of my bookshelf, and alphabetized her own books in with mine, a gesture that touched me.

She was well prepared for college, and determined from the start to run our social lives with ruthless efficiency. I’ve bought us a little fridge, she announced on the day we met, in case we want to have cocktails with the friends we’re going to make. She opened the door to the fridge to reveal four cocktail glasses frosting underneath the ice-element, and beneath them a loaf of bread, a small bottle of mayonnaise, and a single packet of corned beef. For anyone who comes over peckish, she said.

I stood in the doorway, looking suspiciously on her good sheets and her fabric-wrapped clothes hangers. How old are you, Molly?

Nineteen, she said. Today. Just squeaked into the class of ’88.

She had no doubt that she was already the centre of a coterie that didn’t exist yet. Coming from a . . .