I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place (6 page)

I slumped onto one of the benches. “But you know what Peter Dykstra said just now?” Pinnie continued. “He said, ‘I'm not about to press charges on a war hero, fellow I've been talking and drinking coffee with every day for months who just got overcome by a desperate notion. Besides, I think this heat's made everyone go haywire. You'd almost have to have gone haywire to reach into a cash register like that.'”

So, I thought, my father had told everyone in the apothecary that he was a war hero.

And here is the last remembered truth of that summer. The next day, when we parked the bookmobile across from Dykstra's, my father was inside having coffee, as usual. I decided now was the time to walk in the door and set the record straight. Marcelline was there, and of course Mr. Dykstra. So was Robert Boxer, who was packaging up this and that item for delivery. WGRD was on the radio. I ordered a root beer. Robert introduced me to his dad. Peter Dykstra and I shook hands. I said, “Larry here is my father.” Everyone but my father looked incredulous. “You let my father drive your Studebaker. That was nice of you.”

 

Perhaps I should not admit this, but at the end of that summer I found it compelling and not peculiar to talk to ducks, gulls, even swans at a distance. After school started up again, I continued to go to Reeds Lake—through much of that unseasonably hot September, if memory serves. I'd swim around under the steamboat's paddle wheel. By talking to the birds I meant to reinstate each night an unthreatening familiarity. I could scarcely sleep because of my relentless sorrow over the dead swan. Simply put, it wasn't so much that I felt things any more deeply than anyone else, but that this was the thing I'd chosen to feel most deeply about. How unhinged this seems to me now, my murmuring and cooing and stuttering and imitating nighttime birds like that. What was wrong with me? And I had an inkling that my soul was off-kilter, askew, and that I was in a phase of moving away from people. I wasn't exactly afraid of this, only curious, and wanted to chronicle it. In late October, when the lake got too cold to swim in, and the ducks and swans had jettisoned my useless presence and apologies, migrating south in their formations, I remember feeling bereft.

M
Y CANADIAN UNCLE
, Isador, knew the actor Peter Lorre. In fact, Lorre had arranged for a bit part in a movie,
The Cross of Lorraine,
for Isador. And Isador insisted on calling Lorre, a Hungarian Jew, by his original name. “If Laszlo Lowenstein doesn't wish to acknowledge he's Jewish, that's his professional choice,” Isador said.

In September of 1969 I moved to Nova Scotia, because a friend of mine was going to live in Amsterdam for a year and said I could sublet his room in the Lord Nelson Hotel in Halifax for thirty-five dollars a month. I had no prospects but this cheap room. And that was enough to get me there.

I was adrift. Between graduating from high school in 1967 and moving to Halifax in 1969, I had lived in Toronto, Ottawa, Berkeley, and Vancouver. As for employment, for eighteen months I wrote pop music reviews for the
Interpreter,
an alternative newspaper based in Grand Rapids. One of my assignments was to cover a concert in Vancouver by Donovan, an immensely popular Scottish singer and songwriter. The next assignment was to write an article—my idea—about the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, in Palo Alto, California. To get from Vancouver to the institute, I purchased a jeep for $350 and began to drive south. It was my first time on the West Coast. I stopped in Inverness and Point Reyes Station, California, where I stayed for a dollar a night in a kind of fisherman's shack at the end of a dock jutting into Bodega Bay. Under the dock, ducks found shelter from the rain. Pelicans were a constant presence. By the time I had walked three trails at the Point Reyes National Seashore, I had planned to return there.

When I finished my article on the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, having met its two founders, Joan Baez and Ira Sandperl—the most enthralling intellect I'd ever met—my antiwar convictions solidified. Yet when I left Palo Alto I still felt unsettled. I spent the summer in a cottage in Jeffersonville, New York, a twenty-five-minute drive from Max Yasgur's farm and the Woodstock festival. I attended this monumental event. At the end of that summer, my only goal was the cheap hotel room in Halifax.

So I found myself in a Canadian city that I was determined to know better. I also had designs on writing radio plays for the CBC. I thought I would trace one family's story from their fleeing Hitler's persecution to their arrival through immigration at Halifax's Pier 21—a major port of entry for refugees—and their subsequent life in the city. I had outlined a ten-part drama on this subject, but I'd never written for radio before. Truth be told, I simply wanted to be able to say to someone, “I write for radio.” Just that sentence gave me inspiration, as fatuous as it may sound. In fact, I'd seen a CBC advertisement for “auditions,” which meant you could send in a radio play and they would decide whether to use it or not. I was twenty; it all seemed like a good idea at the time. It was my only idea at the time.

 

For a few evenings I'd been listening to the jazz pianist Joe Sealy's record
Africville Suite.
Sealy's father was born in the section of Halifax known as Africville. Sealy himself was working there at the time of the unspeakable “relocation” of the mostly black community during the years 1964 through 1967, and Joe Sealy composed the
Africville Suite
in memory of his father. My girlfriend Mathilde Kamal's mother was also raised in Africville. I'd been thinking about the last conversation I had with Mathilde, two days before her four-passenger charter plane, subjected to blizzard conditions and possibly pilot error, slammed to the frozen ground in Saskatchewan—the bleak winter landscape that was the exclusive subject of her latest watercolors.

 

Mathilde was twenty-six when I met her. She was worldly, and I was a pin stuck in a street map of Halifax, at 416 Morris Street, my address that autumn and into the winter of 1970. Too often self-deprecation can be a form of self-regard:
I'm nothing—praise me.
To my mind, self-deprecation is useless except when it is used as the first rung on a ladder of self-reckoning. Once at a restaurant, before we ordered dinner, when I'd lamented the great differences in our educations and experiences—“Mathilde, after all, you've lived all over Europe!”—she tapped her wine glass with a spoon as if about to offer a toast. “Distasteful way of thinking, my friend,” she said. “You are what you are. I love you. Now let's order. I'm very hungry.”

But by any standard, Mathilde
was
worldly. She had been born in Morocco of a French father and a Canadian mother—her parents had moved to Morocco the year before Mathilde was born—educated at the Sorbonne, had had exhibitions of her work in London and Bruges, and had been married for a year to a much older man, a museum curator in Amsterdam. After finalizing her divorce, she moved to Halifax, where she lived in a shabby two-room apartment on Robie Street near Citadel Park. “I moved to Halifax because the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design offered me a course to teach,” she'd said. “I wasn't good at it. But it paid the rent and I liked the city. So here I am.”

The moment we met, in early September 1969 in a café on Hollis Street, I was attracted to her, but not in a head-over-heels way. I think she sensed this, and it put her at ease. Mathilde had, as she put it, “suffered adoration” in her life. She often spoke autobiographically, but seldom confessionally. When she was nineteen, her future husband had pursued her, which she emphatically said bored her to tears. “Because men look, doesn't mean you look back.” She had aphorisms about such things; some were more convincing than others.

During the first months of our courtship, it was almost entirely a matter of her fixing on me her affection and commitment. She did this with her eyes wide open, with full agency, and without compromise, and because it pleased her. She wanted life to be different, so she made it different. This, for the first time in my life, made me feel attractive, but it was because she intensified the attractiveness of life, and drew me into that. It was like being invited into a philosophy. I wasn't passive, I was just riding a strong wave. She had purpose. She had talent and flair. She liked to quote some movie or other in a defiant, Bette Davis voice: “Like I said, I don't quake when things get tough, and I don't make deals with the devil.” I was what might be called a work in progress; Mathilde already had definite refinements and opinions enough to fill a thick volume. Her opinions always struck me as born of experience, but of course they couldn't all have been.

With Mathilde I was taken by surprise, grateful, but resistant, questioning, and vigilant about complications—and then slowly, painstakingly, I realized I was indeed head over heels. We held hands everywhere. One summer day I called her darling. This just flew out; it was not a word I'd heard used by my parents, nor had I ever used it myself. (I'd heard it in the movies.) Mathilde used it often and freely. She said it with feeling. It all seemed a lot to fit into less than a year's time. Then Mathilde was gone.

 

Mathilde first exhibited her work in 1967, part of a group show in a warehouse space in north London. I saw only photographs of the paintings: eight works in oil that were as far in aesthetics, style, and subject matter from her future watercolor landscapes as could possibly be imagined. For one thing, the early paintings were full of people; her final landscapes not only had no people in them, but the settings suggested that people had never lived in them.

Her part of the London exhibit was called “Memories of Africville.” The title referred to her mother's memories and to things Mathilde had discovered while doing library research. To the extent that these paintings comprised a cumulative portrait of hardscrabble life in Africville, there was a near-documentary immediacy to them. Mathilde, at that young age, used paint in a way she herself said was influenced by Chaim Soutine, whose paintings she'd studied in Paris, where Soutine had lived. “Paint put on thickly, emotion put on thickly,” she explained. “Even his trees are emotional.” She made portraits of black seamen, Pullman porters, domestic servants. She painted meetings of the African Baptist Association and local churches. There were three paintings of the Africville prison. One work depicted a solid-waste facility built to take the filth of a neighboring town, another showed people scavenging for clothes and lengths of copper pipe in a garbage dump. There was a painting of children in an infectious-disease hospital.

When referring to these documentary works, Mathilde was measured if not dismissive. “I don't regret painting them. It felt like I was saying to my mother, I know where you come from. But I gave every last painting away. Finally they felt more like an obligation, things I was supposed to paint. Nothing wrong with that, but I couldn't paint out of obligation anymore, pure and simple. But don't tell me life isn't strange. Who could've predicted, the first time I went out there, the effect Saskatchewan would have on me? It was like my soul had new eyes. I felt my soul come alive. Like in my past life, I was actually part of that landscape. I thought, Now I'm me, present-day Mathilde, but painting my former self. That's probably kind of Buddhist.”

 

“We should elope,” Mathilde said. We were walking on Water Street near Historic Properties. “I've always wanted the experience of eloping.”

“Elope to where?” I asked.

“I was thinking Saskatchewan.”

“Knowing you,” I said, “you'd want to get married standing out on some godforsaken prairie.”

“Godforsaken?” she said. “I don't think that's true at all. I find God out there.”

“An abundance of churches doesn't necessarily mean hospitality.”

“What's bugging you? Is it our age difference again? The age difference bothers you a lot, doesn't it? Let me put it this way. I've already tried older. Now I'm trying younger.”

For whatever reason, hearing herself utter this made Mathilde double over in laughter. Other pedestrians out in the bitter cold that day stared at us. Then, as if by some telepathic communication, we both noticed we were standing in front of a small art gallery. Wordlessly we agreed to go inside. It had begun to snow. The gallery was nearly empty. Tea, hot cocoa, wine, cheese, and crackers were laid out on a long table. Mathilde was immediately drawn to a painting called
Grey Geese Descending.
I got two paper cups of cocoa and joined her.

Grey Geese Descending
was about twenty-four inches wide and eighteen inches high, and showed five grey geese about to alight on a pond. Their wings were spread to slow and balance their gliding descent. One appeared to be mishandling its approach, its body slightly contorted, its feathers decidedly more ruffled than the others', as if its flight through the mountain pass and valley in the background had been more harrowing, as though the gods of travel themselves had put up resistance.

Mathilde stepped back and pointed to the disheveled goose. “See, that's what happens when it got confused.”

“I had no idea you could read the minds of Japanese geese.”

“I never told you that?” She was keeping things light.

“Melancholy day, isn't it?” I said. “In the painting, I mean. Overcast sky and everything.”

“Geese may not get sad about the same things you get sad about. Besides, overcast skies are better to see birds by. Haven't you noticed that?”

“Yes, I have.”

“I mean, you love to go out and look at birds over at Port Medway, and even at the harbor here in the city, right? I like to see crows against the grey skies out in Saskatchewan. Then there's my seagulls everywhere that I love so much. That's something we truly have in common, right? That and things that go on with us under the quilt. Tell me, do you like this painting or not?”