The Garneau Block (30 page)

 

87

the national

A
WELCOME HOME RAYMOND
banner hung on the wall behind Shirley Wong's television. Each letter was printed on a separate piece of white paper and the words were held together with packing tape.

“The professor made it himself,” said Jonas, in Madison's ear. “I love him so much.”

Madison had just arrived with her parents, and she was already settled into the best spot: between Rajinder and Jonas on the chesterfield. She wanted to hear more about the banner, and the details of his homecoming, but Raymond Terletsky appeared in front of them in a red smoking jacket. He kissed
Madison's hand. “I don't think I've congratulated you yet, have I?”

“Not yet.”

“Congratulations!”

“Thanks, Raymond.”

“What can I get you from the bar?”

“A water'd be nice.”

Raymond bounded away into the kitchen and the senior Weisses followed him. “Coming right up! Icy clean!”

Rajinder leaned forward. “I am no psychologist but…”

Jonas swirled his temple. “He's unzipped.”

They were all distracted by the start of
The National
's introductory music. Lines and photographs zipped across the screen. Abby clapped and perched on one of the dining room chairs next to the chesterfield. Shirley and David and Raymond filled the others.

Peter Mansbridge, in that million-dollar voice, introduced tonight's top stories. “And in our magazine…”

The residents of the Garneau Block screamed. There it was, the buffalo head. The neighbourhood. Jonas and Madison walking and talking on the block. The university president, a public relations official, the mayor.

Raymond Terletsky stood on Saskatchewan Drive with the gleaming late-afternoon city skyline behind him. At the end of her voice-over, a quick shot of the Toronto producer. “This is a story of tragedy, architecture, animal husbandry, and an historic neighbourhood in one of the most beguiling cities in Canada.”

The residents applauded.

“Did you hear that?” said Jonas. “She called us beguiling. She's from Toronto and she didn't patronize us once, even gently.”

“That was just the teaser.” David looked around. “She has plenty of time to patronize us during the documentary.”

The first half of the program concentrated on a federal poll, oil prices, Iran, and Newfoundland, allowing the residents to gather around the dining room table and eat dips and salty snacks. Jonas announced his candidacy for the Liberal Party, which inspired another round of applause. Then Madison dropped her Royal Chinette plate when her father announced he would be the campaign manager.

“What, are you a Liberal now?”

“Really, sweetheart, a Conservative who lives in the city
is
a Liberal.” David Weiss seemed to notice all eyes in the room on him. He lifted a triangle of pita and waved it about. “Can't I just be a
man
, without a label?”

In the few minutes remaining before the documentary began, Raymond cajoled them all downstairs to look at the Garneau Block model. He had acquired several toy people to represent his neighbours. “It's not to scale, of course, because Garith is bigger than the cars.”

“He's also a zebra,” said David.

“So it isn't perfect. But take a good look at the model. Tonight, on
The National
, I have a feeling the university is going to make an announcement. A wonderful announcement.”

Shirley shook her head. “What did I tell you about plans and projects?”

“But…” Raymond looked down at his hands.

“Did you hear something, Raymond?” Abby picked up the toy Abby, who stood on the lawn of 12 Garneau in a bikini. “Did the university call?”

“I had another
vision
last night.” Raymond started back up the stairs.

The rest of the Garneau Block residents cast a final look at the model before following him. Madison was a Strawberry Shortcake with a baby frog glued on to her stomach and Rajinder was a Ken doll who had been shaded with a brown felt pen.

Abby started up the stairs and stopped and turned. “Isn't that a hate crime, the little Rajinder?”

“It may be,” said Shirley. “It worries me more that he was playing with the toy people earlier, making them talk.”

“It's on! Get up here!”

Everyone hurried upstairs and settled into their seats. The story began with a montage of Edmonton, and a few words about the debt-free provincial government. The surplus, the university, the new mayor, the sprawl, the centennial year, the Garneau Block.

Next came file footage of August 28th, from the site of the Fringe Festival to Benjamin Perlitz leaning out the upstairs window of 10 Garneau. Screams and demands. Nightfall and, eventually, the single shot echoing through the neighbourhood.

String music played.

“I forgot to invite Jeanne,” said Shirley. “Damn it.”

Following the gunshot, the documentary veered into the past. In 1906, Premier Alexander Rutherford chose river lot five, Isaac Simpson's farm, on the south shore of the North Saskatchewan, to be the site of Alberta's university. Over the course of the twentieth century, the university grew until it overshadowed the adjacent Garneau neighbourhood, named after the fiery, Riel-supporting Métis who first homesteaded the land.

The producer walked through the block at night, lit eerily by the street lanterns, and said, “Some will tell you the ghost of Laurent Garneau still haunts these streets.”

Jonas laughed. “Laurent Garneau. That's a made-up name.”

“Who told her the ghost stuff?” said Abby.

Raymond raised his hand. “I might have.”

Madison was having trouble concentrating on the documentary, which was wholly sympathetic to the Garneau Block. Though she was moved by her father, who became teary-eyed during his interview, when the producer asked what it was like to raise a child around here.

“God damn it, they said they weren't going to use that part,” he said, crushing his plastic wine glass.

Madison was having trouble concentrating on the documentary, and on her father's protests, because the baby inside her was executing its first somersault.

 

88

an alliance of book clubs

C
ontrary to Raymond's vision, nothing revealed in the
CBC
documentary about the Garneau Block saved the neighbourhood. University officials stated that if the buffalo head were already on the site, they would reconsider. As there was currently nothing on the land that warranted cultural status, either
by the city's or the university's criteria, the Garneau Block would become the Ernie Isley Centre for Veterinary Research by fall 2007.

Which was, by the way, quite a wonderful thing for the city, the province of Alberta, and for meat lovers around the world.

Friends called from all over the country to tell David Weiss they had seen him bawl. The newspaper put him on the front page. Both national papers interviewed him and all the local television outfits came to do their own stories.

During his morning walk with Garith down Whyte Avenue, strangers recognized David. An elderly woman stopped him in front of the Granite Curling Club and told him he was a “real cutie.”

One of the men who slouched near Second Cup with a girl who looked to be about twelve, next to a
KICK A PUNK FOR A BUCK
sign, pointed at him. “Hey, are you the weather guy?”

All of this irritated David. Not only had he been forced to become a Liberal and buy a Toyota, now he was a crybaby. So far he hadn't told any of the media that he didn't mind moving nearly as much as his wife and neighbours.

While Abby and Madison scouted properties in North Glenora and Mill Creek with the real-estate agent, David hid out at home to pack. There was so much to do, as they had to get out of the house and prepare the parents-and-kids spa business for a grand opening in mid-April, but he was frozen. Not bored, but something.

In two hours of packing he filled precisely half a box of paperbacks.

In the office upstairs, underneath shelves of books, was a collection of photo albums. Instead of stacking Saul Bellow next to Margaret Atwood, he flipped through pictures he hadn't looked at in ten years or longer. The first classes he taught at Harry Ainley, with his beard. Family picnics at Emily Murphy Park before his own mother and father died, trips to the mountains, Madison's firsts–birthday, poop in the potty, bathing suit, kitten, tooth, playschool, concussion. Hidden in the drawer of an old armoire, David even found a few suggestive photographs of Abby, taken in the late 1970s.

David was pleased to be alone, as the photographs inspired his second crying fit in a week. His father's straw hat, stained by his father's sweat, made him cry. Two-year-old Madison, with her sand bucket and tiny plastic shovel, made him cry harder. He lay on his back on the upstairs carpet and looked up at the moulded ceiling that would soon twist into rubble and he didn't even bother to wipe the tears.

There was a knock at the door. David hopped up and snuck behind the office door.

Another knock.

Due to an overhang that protected the front porch, David couldn't see who was at the door. So he crept down the stairs and crawled across the living room floor. The wood hurt his knees so he travelled, instead, by modified slither.

Twenty women stood in front of the house, marching to keep warm in the snow.

David went into the bathroom to splash water on his face and pat his eyes dry. Then he straightened his shoulders, cleared his
throat, and opened the front door to a stirring of the crowd. The moment he appeared before them, the women began to applaud. They shook their heads and smiled. “We love you!” said one.

“Do you have the right house?”

An attractive black-haired woman nearest him on the porch, wearing a long purple jacket and a fluffy purple hat, nodded. “We have the right house, Mr. Weiss.”

David noticed each of the women carried an item in her gloved hands. There was a bucking horse carving, an antique camera, a woven blanket, a stuffed Richardson's ground squirrel, a tiny rocking chair, a framed map of Edmonton. “Can I help you?”

“We're an alliance of five book clubs,” said the woman in purple.

“That's great.”

“Independent of each other, we were struck by the story on
CBC
the other night. And then the newspaper.”

“They weren't supposed to show the crying part. I could take legal action.”

“Mr. Weiss, we were all so touched.” The woman in purple adjusted the old teddy bear in her arm and placed her right hand upon her heart. “Thank you.”

Before him, the women applauded again.

“But they weren't supposed to–”

“We decided, in our small way, we had to help you poor people.”

“Actually, the university's giving us ten per cent above market value for the house and prices are already at a historic high, so I don't know if poor is the right…”

A camera flashed. And another. While he was speaking to the woman in purple, the crowd had grown. Men had arrived. The photographers seemed like professionals, with khaki vests and bland looks on their faces.

Across the street, Rajinder stood on his porch in bare feet. David shrugged at him and said to the woman in purple, “What are you doing here?”

 

89

mob rule

M
adison was making her thirteenth batch of mulled wine when Jeanne Perlitz arrived with flowers. The
CBC
story had outed Madison as pregnant, and Jeanne wanted to congratulate her. She also wanted to understand what was happening to the neighbourhood and why Rajinder had left nine messages on her answering machine that afternoon. Strangers were packed into the four inhabited houses of the Garneau Block, their collected voices a roar within the walls, and more arrived every minute.

“Who are all these people?” Jeanne had to scream. “What is this?”

Abby took over at the stove so Madison could lead Jeanne into the only empty part of the house–her suite downstairs. Edmontonians in parkas high-fived them on the way. Next door, in Jonas's backyard, upwards of fifty people gathered
around the fire. The local urban radio station had set up speakers in the alley, and played a slow
R
&
B
song about rumps, a ruckus, and, of course,
making love to you, girl
.

In her tiny living room, Madison caught her breath. “Where's Katie?”

“With my sister. What's going on?”

“They watched the documentary and read the paper. They're here to help.”

“Looks and smells to me like they're here to get hammered.”

Madison had to sit. In three hours she had cooked ten litres of mulled wine and accepted over two hundred congratulations. Folksy wisdom and clichés abounded. Strangers assured Madison she would be a terrific mom, and smiled coyly as they said having a child would “totally change her life.”

The house creaked. On the old couch, Madison wondered if the floors could give out. Jeanne looked up and bit the tip of her pinky finger, evidently wondering the same thing.

“The university says your house doesn't count as a cultural site.”

Jeanne sipped the plastic cup of mulled wine Abby had forced upon her. “They're right about that. It's the house where a man died, and that's about all it is.”

Madison lay on her side, with a pillow between her legs. “Sorry. I'm just really sore from standing.”

“I understand, believe me. Katie was over nine pounds.”

“
Vive la France!
”

“Don't buy it when people tell you it's magical. Get the epidural early.” Jeanne inspected the photos on Madison's mantel. Two were of Katie. Something happened upstairs that
inspired applause. “This is all quite nice but I don't see what any of it has to do with my house.”

“A small group of women, in a book club, bought the professor's argument about mythic power.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So they decided to bring over things that, to them, held mythic power.”

“I don't understand what that means.”

Jeanne picked up a piece of petrified wood Madison had found on the shore of the North Saskatchewan River when she was a kid. Madison pointed at it. “Like that.”

“Wood.”

“Wood's just an example.”

“I still don't understand.”

“The university says they'd build the Ernie Isley Centre somewhere else if the buffalo head was already on your property. There's no time for that, so these people want to make your house into a cultural site now. Today. So that the university might reconsider.”

Upstairs, someone started singing “Jingle Bells.” Soon it was thunderously loud, and not only in the Weiss house. The entire block reverberated with “Jingle Bells,” and when the song stopped it started again.

“All these people brought something?”

“Yep.”

“How did they know?”

“Word spread. It was on the six-o'clock news, every channel.”

Jeanne sat down again and sighed. “So what am I supposed to do?”

“I don't know. You can either open your house and let these people leave their…”

“Wood.”

“Or you can say, ‘forget it,' and go back home. Take the university's money, move to Buenos Aires, and forget this ever happened.”

“I
can't
forget this ever happened. That's my problem, Madison.”

“So stop trying. Let the rest of the city help you. Let your house be, I don't know, something.”

“It's a bad place.”

“Make it a good place again. I remember when it was a good place.”

Jeanne slapped her glass of wine on the coffee table. “This is insane.” She started up the stairs. “I've told you people I won't do it. And I won't do it!”

The door slammed at the top of the stairs and Madison eased herself up. If she hadn't been pregnant and somewhat queasy from the mulling of wine, she might have chased Jeanne. She might have begged or enlisted her father to squeak out a few tears.

She drew a glass of cold water and peeled a banana. Through every one of her windows, all she could see were feet and legs. Hiking and snow boots. Madison finished her banana and started upstairs to find her father. Outside her door, bodies flowed down the icy concrete walking pad toward the street. Madison stood behind her door, unable to open it.

Finally, as the crowd thinned, she snuck outside. There was Jeanne, on her front porch, surrounded by people, opening the
door. Jeanne turned and saw Madison over the sea of heads and she paused. On the verge of a smile, Jeanne turned the key and walked inside. The people followed.

A teenage girl, in a knit toque and puffy down jacket, started past Madison. As she did, the girl opened the lid on her white wooden music box. A tiny ballerina spun to The Blue Danube Waltz.