Shadow of Ashland (Ashland, 1)

Terence M. Green

For my brother
 

Ron

Whom we all miss
 

Now and Always
 

1932-1993

Acknowledgments

Acknowledging debts and gratitude upon publication of a book is something I do with immense fondness. It is a way of saying to the people who have supported, abetted, encouraged, that all our faith has been rewarded.

I would like to thank the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council; Doug Gibson, Linda Williams, Paul Stuewe; Rob Sawyer, Andrew Weiner, Lou Fisher, Ken and Judy Luginbuhl, Bill, Judy, and Brigid Kaschuk, Joe and Pam Zarantonello; George Wolfford, Rick Conley, Harold Freedman, Bert Cowan, Bruce Gillespie, Carol Bonnett, Phyllis Gotlieb, Douglas Barbour, and Don Hutchison.

Special thanks to my agent, Shawna McCarthy, and my editor, David Hartwell, both of whom believed in this story enough to get it into your hands.

As always, with love, I thank my family: Merle, for everything, and Conor and Owen for everything else. (Conor deserves special mention this time around for helping me with the ending; he's a better writer than he knows.)

But without Jack, there would be no story.

And without my mother, I would never have known the story.

ONE

Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness—these are threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life. I dare not assume to give their order, but I name them as I find them in my way.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson
 

Experience

1

My mother died on March 14, 1984. It had been inevitable, as all such things are inevitable, and although it had not been unexpected, it nevertheless left me in shock. A large chunk of the past was gone. A large chunk of
my
past.
 

Gone.

She had been hospitalized just before Christmas. Accelerating arteriosclerosis, recurring strokes, and crippling arthritis had rendered her virtually immobile. She was seventy-four. I am forty. Soon I will be forty-one. But these are mere numbers. And what numbers measure, especially those linked to Time, I have never understood. And now I understand them less.

She died, they say, of heart failure.

When I visited her in January, she was rambling. She upset me so much that I cried. There were three other beds in the hospital room, and now I realize that I can't recall anything about their occupants. I only recall how, that day, I got up and pulled the sliding curtains around the bed so that we could be alone, so that I could hold her hand.

Her fingers were welded into the timeless claw of the aged, the skin of her hand stretched thinly across bony knuckles. Lesions and brittle remnants of skin cancers dotted her forearm.

But her eyes ... It was her eyes—glazed, darting, frightened, the blue diluted as with a watery thinner...

"Jack was here," she told me.

I frowned. "Jack?"

"And my father." She nodded. The eyes darted.

I stared at her. Jack was her brother. She hadn't seen him for about fifty years. Her father had died thirty years ago.

"Jack was here," I repeated, finally.

She nodded emphatically. The eyes never ceased their wild circumspection. Her hand gripped mine.

"I told him not to go."

I nodded, understanding.

"But he went anyway." Another nod; a pause. "He was always a good boy. We were good children. Never got into any trouble. Always did what we were told."

I felt the frail bones of her hand, watched the frantic eyes jump about, saw my mother as I had never seen her.

"He gave me this." The hand that I was not holding fell open, and a fresh red rose fell out. It was part of the delirium, I realized. She could have gotten it anywhere.

"He's coming back tomorrow."

I nodded.

Her eyes darted.

I returned the next day. The wildness had passed. In its stead, tubes, suspended from a bottle by her bedside, snaked into her arm.

"How are you today?" I sat down, took her hand in mine.

"Okay." The word was soft and dry. Her eyes, I noted, were steadier.

I tried a smile. "What do you think about all this?" I indicated, with an open hand and a postured inspection, our surroundings: the beds with hand cranks, the crisp white sheets, the gray tile floors, the plastic wrist bracelets.

My mother smiled. She was back from wherever she had been yesterday. "I don't want to die," she said. "Nobody wants to die. But," she added, "I don't want to live like this either."

I nodded, comforted by the clarity of her answer. She understood what was happening, saw no solution, expressed it simply.

How much more time?

"Who would you like to see? Is there anybody you'd like to see?"

Her eyes focused on me calmly. "Oh, yes."

"Who?"

"Jack," she said.

2

My parents had moved to their home in North Toronto in 1929. At the time, so I have been told, there were fields all about and a creek within half a block.

The fields are gone; no one is sure today where exactly the creek was. The most general consensus is that it's under the city-run parking lot that serves the subway—which is now the proposed site of the new police station. My father still lives there. Alone.

That afternoon, on my way home from the hospital, I drove to the house where I had grown up—the house I had left twenty years ago. It
looked
like a house that an old man lived in, alone: peeling paint on the eaves, a pitted and corroded aluminum screen door, snow unshoveled in the driveway.

I knew he was in there. He is always in there.

"Tell me about Jack."

My father lit a cigarette, holding it in his right hand. He jammed his left hand in his belt, as was his habit. He is eighty years old now. I am astonished at his white hair, his groping movements, the thickness of his glasses.

"We don't know what happened to Jack," he said.

"I know."

"He left in the nineteen thirties."

I nodded. We sat opposite one another at the green arborite kitchen table. "Why did he leaved? What happened?"

He inhaled on the cigarette deeply, then let it expel slowly. "What did your mother say?"

"Nothing much. I asked her who she'd like to see. She said 'Jack.' That's all."

He nodded. "Things were never settled. That's why. Things have to be settled, or they never go away."

I waited. "What happened?" I asked. "Nobody ever told me."

He paused. "I'm not sure," he said.

He lit another cigarette. It was time, he knew, for confidences. "There were only the two of them, you know. Just Margaret and Jack. Jack was two years younger—born in nineteen eleven. We all lived on Berkeley Street together. That's how I got to know your mother. We were neighbors." He smiled, remembering something. "We've been married fifty-four years now."

I smiled. "I know."

"Their mother died when your mother was just a kid. As a result, your mother ended up playing mother to Jack. Margaret adored her father, but the old man, as I understand it, wasn't much help. He always had a big cigar, always boasted. He didn't like me much either," he added. "I remember him saying once, to me—'You don't like me, do you?' I told him that I didn't." He paused. "It's all too bad now. Doesn't seem to matter much either." He lifted the cigarette to his lips and gazed off to the wall behind me.

I waited for him to continue. The smoke spiraled patiently toward the ceiling of the kitchen.

"The old man left Jack and Margaret with his various sisters. He was incapable of raising two kids on his own. He was an only son, in the midst of a flock of sisters, and he was spoiled rotten." My father looked at me. "Always had a big cigar," he said, "but always lived in rented rooms. Those were different times, the nineteen twenties." He sighed. "You want a cup of coffee?"

"No, thanks."

"Me neither. Bad for your heart."

I smiled, looking at the cigarette.

"The two kids lived with the old man off and on from that point. But half the time he was never home. They raised themselves. And Margaret played mother to Jack. They were very close." He switched topic suddenly. "Do you remember the old man? Your mother's father?"

"No. Nothing."

"He died when you were three. Died of a heart attack on the streetcar, on Christmas Day, coming up here to see us. And that was it."

"That was what?"

"The end of the line for your mother. There was no one else. Her mother and father were dead. Her brother had left and hadn't been heard of for years."

"There was you. There was me."

"Yes. But it wasn't the same. The past was gone for her. Do you understand? The past was gone. No one wants to give up the past. At least, no one I know."

The smoke hung in tendrils between us.

His eyes were watery behind the thick lenses. The skin of his forehead was discolored and flaking. He hadn't been eating properly. "Jack was jealous of me," he said.

I listened, without changing expression. I wanted to hear it all. It was time to hear it all. And it was time for him to tell it.

"Your mother married me when she was twenty—when Jack was eighteen. They'd been living alone for a while at that point. The old man had remarried—a girl half his age. The stepmother didn't want his kids. In fact, I was never sure why she wanted him. So he abandoned them for her. This was the 1920s. Family life was strong then. Nobody did those kind of things. At least," he amended, "nobody I knew. So they lived down the street—Berkeley Street—together."

"Where did my"—I paused over the word—"grandfather, live?"

"Out in the west end. Nobody had cars. It was a long way." He inhaled the smoke. It drifted out as he talked. "I guess she chased him because he talked big and smoked a big cigar."

"Who?" I wasn't sure I was following him.

"The girl he married."
 

"Oh."

"She died three years later, giving birth to their second child."

I was silent.

"It was the nineteen twenties."

I turned my head to look out the kitchen window—to the parking lot that would become the police station. It was beginning to snow.

"So then he had two more kids, and no mother to look after them, and it was all starting again." Then he stared at me, hard. "And he was still living in rented rooms."

"She wants to see him."