A Witness to Life (Ashland, 2) (3 page)

I was not what I seemed, so I was convinced that they may not be what they seemed either. And when we sat there, resting, what did they await? When we flew, what did they
see? The world, I know now, is mystical, not magical: mysteries that human reason cannot plumb.

I stared down at the city, through the hole in time, and saw the cleansing, the conflagration begin.

FOUR

Tuesday, April 19, 1904

The Queen's Hotel

Fine cuisine, courteous
staff

210 boudoirs, 17 private parlors

Running water to all rooms

Telephone in lobby

Accommodation for 400 guests

Private garden, fountains

100 Front Street West, Toronto

"I'll be twenty-four years old in less than two months," I say.

My boyhood friend, Jock Ross, sitting across from me in the lounge of the Queen's Hotel, pours his second bottle of Carling's Ale carefully down the side of his tilted glass and nods. He watches the foam rise to a proper head before he smiles.

"So is that a complaint or a boast?" He sips the ale, sighs, sets it down, stares at me, eyes twinkling. "You're in your prime, same as me."

It is past seven o'clock and we have been sitting here since we finished work. "So what's going to happen to you and Nancy?"

Jock looks surprised. "What do you mean?"

"Isn't she on about marrying?"

He shrugs. "They always are. So what?"

"How do you put them of?"

"It's a talent. A gift. You should know that." He strokes the end of his moustache, still smiling.

I smile in return, sharing some imagined masculine confidence. Then: "Does it bother you?"

"What?"

"That you're deluding her."

"I'm not deluding her. She's deluding herself. I've promised nothing."

I sit back, thinking. Jock is an Orangeman, something that meant nothing to me when we were boys. Now it is an irony that we both view with amusement. Yet I wonder if there is some fundamental difference in our outlook that is rooted here.

My sister Teresa married Peter Curtis, a molder at Massey-Harris, last year. The wedding was enormous. Emma was maid of honor; his brother Fred, who works as an attendant at the asylum, was best man. The year before that it was Elizabeth who got married—to Jim McKenna, and I was best man, with Kate as maid of honor. There were one or two weddings a year it seemed. I danced with Peter's sister, Maggie, but now I cannot picture her face when I try.

"You want to end up like your father?" Jock asks.

Yes. No. I don't know.

"Not me. I've seen how my old man's been eaten alive with the responsibility." He sips his ale. "He'd give his eye-teeth to be here with us right now, doin' this."

I allow that this is true, but the argument still does not satisfy. "There must be more."

"There is. And I'm going to see Nancy later to indulge in it." A wink.

"Don't you want your own place, your own family?"

"Someday."

"When? When is it time?"

"Don't know. I just know it isn't time yet." He pauses, serious for a moment. "I guess you just know. I guess it depends on the woman."

"And Nancy?"

He frowns, thinks, dodges the question. "I tell you, Martin. It all scares the hell out of me."

"But living at home with our parents? It's got to end."

He concedes this with a nod. "That it does." Then he smiles. "Maybe next year." He empties the rest of the bottle into his glass. "And what about you and Kathleen?"

I smile, shrug. I know what he means. Lillian is a memory, as is Suzanne, Judith, others. Kathleen will join them, inevitably. And Harriet. Dear Harriet, back in Elora, my first girlfriend, my childhood love. Her head resting on her forearm, soft hair cascading across her wrist, her other hand laboring over the printed letters in the notebook on her desk in Miss Lecour's class. Gone like a wisp of smoke across the hills, from a time that I can scarcely comprehend.

And a new smoke wafts toward us from the present.

The wail of the sirens turns heads everywhere in the lounge, a mutter of curiosity floating among us.

The noise overwhelms, all talk stops. We wait, listening.

A man enters, tells one of the waiters loudly enough so that we can all hear that flames are rising from the roof of Currie Neckwear on Wellington, two blocks north of us.

Jock and I look at each other, drain our glasses, pull our coats and hats on, and head for the door. We are not alone.

How does this happen, this inferno? The newspapers the next few days will detail it relentlessly: the wind, the shortage of hydrants, the low-pressure water system, the errors in judgment, buildings with no internal firebreaks. The intestinal wonder of the modem high-rise—the elevator shaft—provides wind tunnel after wind tunnel, as flames roar upward through the chutes four stories at a bound.

After an hour of watching, our faces lit by the horrible glow, Jock and I return to the Queen's Hotel, sip another ale, subdued. We are numbed by both the weather and the event, but we do not go home. We remain near the flames, like moths, wanting to see how it will all play out. For now, the hotel is safe.

But it is not over.

Around 11 P.M., a blackened firefighter enters the lounge, tells us that we should vacate the premises, that we should go home.

No one argues. The lounge empties.

We venture back out into the unnatural heat and light, the sound of a nightmare unfolding mere blocks away. The flames have crossed Wellington, have moved south and east, leapfrogging to Brown Brothers' Stationery. As we watch, it and other once-dominant edifices collapse in upon themselves, become boiling ash-mounds that will not rest, a spectacle scarcely believable. A dozen or more buildings are ablaze. The heat cooks our faces, bakes the grimace into our mouths.

And still the radius grows. The firefighters work in the center of the maelstrom about us, beaten at every step, losing ground in inevitable stages. Flames rise higher than imaginable, a riotous Babel. Slowly, the hours like days, detachments pour in from Hamilton, then as far away as Niagara Falls, Buffalo. The wind whips our faces, whips the fires; the temperature drops, and strangely, snow begins to swirl.

It is 2 A.M. The news continues to spread. Troops and police jockey to maneuver the crowds. When the heat becomes too much for the firemen, they turn their hoses on nearby walls and stand angled beneath the ensuing spray, the suspended water drops like lit diamonds, adding to the dizzying visual. The downtown core is swollen with bodies. Looking upward, we see the roofs of buildings for blocks around, beyond any anticipated circumference of the fire, filled with onlookers seated on chairs, wrapped in blankets for warmth. And blankets again come into play—water-soaked ones, hanging from the top of the upper window sashes of the Queen's Hotel, to prevent the wood from catching fire. People fill every inch of street space, every step that affords a better vantage point, perch on every windowsill: a front-row view of the Horseman who rides among us.

We watch because we cannot draw ourselves away.

There are no words.

Then the Howland warehouse, stored with cartridges and dynamite, explodes, a volcano erupting, and we stand breathless. Plate glass windows shatter in icy showers. Burning walls topple, dust roiling upward. Against the orange of the fire and the black of the night, sparks from fallen electrical wires arc in blue crescents. From broken feed pipes, gas belches in mad jets high into the frozen air, as the earth splits and the pavement buckles.

The sky glows for miles and night disappears as we witness the apocalypse that levels our world.

Strangely, no one is killed. Twenty acres of our downtown world disappear, two hundred and twenty businesses. Things will never be the same. In the destruction we sense a new beginning, a chance to transform our world, ourselves.

The dynamiting of buildings rocks the city for days. It is two weeks before every small fire dies.

I never call on Kathleen again. I am changed. We are all changed.

FIVE

Wednesday, June 15, 1904

Gramma Whalen sits silently in what has become her chair at the kitchen table with us, her wide eyes focused on her plate, her mouth a small oval, her white hair pulled straight back. Since the fire, Ma has brought her to live with us. The very next weekend, in fact. First the asylum at Longue Point in Montreal, and now this, Ma says often, convincing herself. Two hundred people, including nuns, burned. Even though she cannot read, Ma saw the before-and-after drawings of the Longue Point asylum that were printed in
The Globe.
No place is safe, she says.

"Eat up, mother," Ma says.

Gramma Whalen ignores her, touches nothing.

Da and I pretend we do not notice. Da stares down into his dinner, slicing potatoes.

We are alone in the house. Gramma sleeps in Rose's old room. The girls have all married. It is what Ma wanted, but she seems to take little pleasure in the fact.

"Mother."

But Gramma doesn't look up. We don't know if she is thinking, dreaming, despairing, or merely resigned.

Ma gets up, goes over to her, cuts her vegetables, spoons some into her mouth, sits patiently beside her. Gramma chews absently. Sometimes she swallows, sometimes she does not. Today she swallows, and Ma sighs, relieved.

Da pushes his plate away, finished. He watches the two of them, expressionless. Then he lights his pipe, blows a stream of smoke upward.

Gramma watches it float aloft, disperse, disappear. She does not move.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I will be twenty-four years old. Nobody knows how old Gramma is.

Ma has made a small cake—chocolate, my favorite—which she sets before me at dinner's end. There are three small candles on it—white, red, and blue. Gramma stares at it, fascinated. There are only the three of us. Da is not yet home from work. Once again, I am the only man.

Ma strikes a match, lights the white one, does not light the other two. Then she sits back. "If you're lucky," she says, "the good Lord willing, you'll get seventy-five years on this earth. The white one is for the first third."

We watch the flame.

My glance slides in measured stages to the red one, the blue. The white one is a third gone already, wax gathering hotly at its base.

"Happy birthday." She pushes a gift-wrapped box across the table toward me—silver paper with gold ribbon encasing it. Gramma's eyes, unblinking, follow the movement of the package.

I smile. The ribbon slides off, the paper tears away, and I lift the cardboard lid beneath the glitter.

I am surprised.

First, I take out the straight-edged razor with the wooden handle. Unfolding the blade, I read "Killarney Razor" etched in its steel, and in smaller letters, near the hinge: "Marshalls, Argyle Street." I fold it, set it down, take out the shaving mug with the pattern of roses circling its wide lip next, lift out the brush inside it, touch its softness.

"The brush is made of badger hair," she says.

I can think of nothing to say yet.

"They were your father's grandfather's. Great-Grandfather Radey's. Your father's aunt had them when she died. They were with the few things they sent us after she passed." She looks at me. "This was almost fifteen years ago, when you were a boy." She pauses. "But now you're a man."

"Doesn't Da want them?"

"He wants you to have them," she says firmly.

I am moved. "Thanks, Ma."

We watch the candles. The white one is only a flame floating in a clear pool. Now she strikes another match, lights the red one. "The red one is for your next twenty-five years," she says, sitting back. "Your best years. Make them good ones,"

I blow them both out. The blue one stands apart, unknowable. I look first at Ma's face, which is smiling, proud, then at Gramma's. Behind the wisps of smoke, Gramma's face is blank, as ever. But her eyes, I see with certainty and astonishment, are filled with water, staring into the smoke.

"Martin. Can you give me a hand?" Ma's voice, unusually abrupt, is coming from Gramma's room.

When I enter, my eyes scan the bedpan, the commode chair, the tubes, clean diapers piled high. The deadened air smells of talcum, of age. Gramma has slipped between the wall and the bed, wedged herself, and Ma is trying to wrest her loose. I lean across them, mother and daughter, and insert myself, holding Gramma's hand in assurance. Ma backs away, and I lift Gramma free, noting her weightlessness, feeling her frailty.