The Box Garden

  “Okay.”

  “Now, you want to jog right at the stop sign. I know this neighbourhood pretty well.”

  “Parking?”

  “Anywhere now.”

  Eugene slows the car. “Maybe we’d better not park right in front of the building,” he suggests.

  “Squeeze in there by the hydrant, what the hell. Anyway there it is, that’s the house. That big bugger on the left.”

  This is a certain type of Toronto street—narrow and, despite the streetlights, deeply shadowed. Cars park all along one side. The houses are tall and narrow and old; wooden porches hang on to their blackened brick fronts. It’s a warm night, and here and there people are sitting out on their front steps; I can see the glowing red tips of their cigarettes. The front yards are small and, though I can’t see in the dark, I know they are made up of packed earth and clumps of weeds; this is the kind of neighbourhood where there are always too many children and where it is shady even on the brightest days.

  The blue flicker of television sets fills most of the front windows. Eugene turns off the ignition and says, “Let’s go.”

  The policeman stands outside for a moment checking the other cars on the block. “That’s one of ours,” he says pointing to an unmarked Ford. “And those two guys are ours too.”

  “Let’s go in,” Eugene presses.

  “But Doug Savage isn’t here,” I say, suddenly confused.

  “They’ll be a few minutes yet,” the policeman says, checking his watch, “all the way from Weedham. Even in good traffic that’s a fair run.”

  “No sign of a Volvo,” I hear Eugene saying.

  “She could’ve ditched it anywhere.”

  “I’ll go in,” I tell them.

  “I wouldn’t advise that,” the policeman says, “you never know about these characters.”

  “I’m going in,” I tell him again.

  “I’ll come with you,” Eugene says.

  “I think it would be better if I went alone, Eugene.”

  “We could back you up,” the policeman says, thinking hard.

  “If I could just talk to him alone. For a few minutes.”

  The policeman ponders a moment and then asks, “Is he, well you know him, he was your husband. What I mean, is he a dangerous guy?”

  “Is he, Charleen?” Eugene turns to me.

  “No,” I almost smile. “He’s not dangerous at all. He’s like a ... like ... like a baby.”

  The policeman checks with his friends in the parked car. When he comes back he nods at us and says, “Okay. We’ll have a go.”

  It’s a large house, one of the largest on the street, a three storey with jutting bays and ugly round-topped windows. Even in the dark I can see that it’s in shocking condition. A few of the windows are broken, and most of them, except for two or three at the top, are dark. The front steps are shaky. The open porch is garishly lit by a naked bulb and it’s filled with dirty plastic toys, a wicker chair with a rotted cushion, a dead plant in a pot. I’m frightened now, reluctant; perhaps I’ve made a crucial error in coming here.

  The three of us stand on the porch for a moment, and for some reason the policeman is telling us about himself. His name is Bill Miller, he says, and he doesn’t usually come out on jobs like this. He’s filling in, he tells us, because this is a special case. Of course, he says shrugging, every case is special if you think about it. “We’ll back you up,” he says again in what sounds to me like Dragnet dialogue. “If your boy’s up there, we’ll get him out.”

  There are six doorbells stacked in a wiggly line on the door frame, but the name we want isn’t there. A man appears in the doorway, a short, scrawny man, neither young nor old, with a rabbitty neck and a small, sharp nose. He is so drunk he has to lean on the door jamb to keep from falling down.

  “Yeah?” he challenges us.

  I explain whom we want to see.

  “Sure, sure, he’s up there,” he tells us. “Lives at the top. I told him I’d put up a lousy doorbell for him, but what the fuck for, no one ever comes to see him.”

  “Is there anyone up there with him now?” Eugene asks.

  “Naw. ‘Less they come up the fire escape. I been here all night.”

  Bill Miller says, “Look, mister, what we want to know is, did a woman come in here tonight?”

  “Woman, eh?” he winks obscenely. “I always tell him that’s what he needs, a good roll in the hay to straighten him out. He’s a real nut.”

  “A woman with a boy?” Eugene asks carefully.

  “Search me,” he shrugs. “Why don’t ya go up and have a look for yerself. Third floor. Name’s on the door, ya can’t miss.”

  Eugene and Bill Miller position themselves on the dark second floor landing. The stairway to the third floor is narrower and there is no railing, but a dim lightbulb shows the way.

  I am at the top of the house standing in a tiny hall; there is only one door and it is clearly marked in blocky, hand-painted letters, The Priory, Bro. Adam. (The diminutive “Bro.” is a warning.) Silence. Then the sound of my own breathing rushing out into the silence. I knock smartly on the door. Twice. Three times.

  No answer, but through the old cracked wood I can hear something stirring. Like cloth being moved. Like someone sighing. Someone moaning.

  I knock once more and wait. And then I turn the knob. It opens easily, a wide swinging, and I call out, “I’m coming in.”

  Afterwards I could hardly believe that I spent less than five minutes in that room. A small square room under the eaves, and yet my first impression was one of blinding, dazzling space. It was the mirrors, of course, huge mirrors mounted on two facing walls and lining the sloping ceiling, so that the small space seemed endless and unbelievably complex, like the sudden special openings that sometimes occur in dreams.

  It was like stepping into the warm, glowing, artificial interior of a greenhouse with its combination of plant life, glinting glass and stillness. The air, after the reeking hallway, was deliciously fresh and smelled of earth and new growth. A narrow window let in the fragrant early spring air and on the other side a door stood open to an iron fire escape.

  The room was alive with tiny lights. They were strung on wires and they beamed like miniature suns on the wooden flats of grass. The whole room, except for a neatly made-up army cot, was carpeted with grass. In the rebounding arrangements of mirrors and lights, the grass stretched endlessly, acres of it, miles of it; it was like coming upon a secret Alpine meadow, like a pocket of perfect and perpetual springtime where there was no night, no thought of cold or death. Even time seemed to fall away from me, as though the endless grass lived in another dimension altogether where growth and fertility took the place of hours and days.

  Watson sat on the bed in a lotus position; I was conscious first of his gleaming skull and then of a certain bodily heaviness under his robe of dull red cloth. A book lay open on his lap. “I was afraid you might try to come,” he said after a moment.

  My throat closed soundless over his name: Watson, Watson, Watson. Still there, still there, that tender—no, no, more than tender—sliver of pain and youthful love lodged in the centre of my body. A twisting breathlessness like a rising funnel-shaped cloud of anguish pressed on my lungs, robbing me of speech and, for a moment, of coherence. What was I doing here leaning on this doorway, gasping for breath and for that portion of love that had surely died?

  “Why are you here?” he asked again.

  Then, like a stone sinking, I regained the powers of speech and thought.

  “Brother Adam.” I pronounced the words with finality, as though they were a summation. He gazed at me with detached calm.

  “Brother Adam,” I said again, deriving a curious energy from the flat sound of those two words. I couldn’t summon surprise. I couldn’t pretend surprise even to myself; nor could I distinguish the moment in time when I’d begun to know who Brother Adam might be. It seemed to me at that moment, standing in that incredible room, that I must always have kno
wn.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” he said. (No, I shouldn’t have. I had wanted a holy man with a bright prophetic eye and a tongue threaded with psalms, not this squatting, middle-aged would-be-sage grunting his way into being.) Of course Watson’s vision of himself had never been less than apocalyptic: It occurred to me that the name Adam was just slightly substandard in its patent simplicity. A swindle really. Adam, king of his rooming-house Eden.

  “There’s something I have to ask you,” I said firmly.

  “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  “Where?”

  “East. I’m going East.”

  I came close to smiling, for there was a central, un-nourished innocence in the way Watson pronounced the word East, and I saw that I would have to be careful or run the risk of destroying him entirely.

  “Tell me exactly where you’re going,” I persisted.

  “India, Japan,” he waved vaguely.

  “Alone?”

  “Of course!”

  “You’re not taking anyone with you?”

  “No one.”

  “Something’s happened, Watson. Something you should know about.”

  “Is it really so important? I’m sure you can look after whatever it is.”

  “Seth is missing.”

  I watched his eyes; they blinked once, that was all. I remembered once years ago when Watson had seen a dwarf tapping his crutch by a bus stop; he had come close to weeping; something should be done, he had said. But the compulsion to relieve suffering was an abstraction for him, a folk belief in husk form. (Later I realized that outrage was only another form of innocence.) For a missing son he could only blink.

  “I said Seth is missing.”

  “Missing?”

  “Have you seen him, Brother Adam? Just tell me if you’ve seen him.”

  “No. Why would I see him?”

  “Greta Savage has taken him. Taken him away.”

  “Greta Savage.”

  “We think ... the police think ... she’s going to bring him here.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Are you sure they didn’t come here?”

  “They wouldn’t come here.”

  My throat closed with helplessness. Why did he have to speak in these dead, ritualized negatives? This convoluted room with its lights and mirrors and riotous grass was just another dead-end. I bent down for a moment and touched the tops of the grass. “You’re leaving all this behind?” I asked.

  “I’ll take seed,” he said, pointing to a suitcase beside the bed.

  I stood up abruptly, and at that instant Watson’s face took on a startled expression. For the first time I became aware of a commotion down below on the street, a screeching of brakes, car doors slamming, people running on the road, some of them shouting. We heard too the sound of footsteps on the stairs of the house. Brother Adam rose with haste; the folds of his robe sighed around him.

  Then, quite clearly, I heard Eugene’s voice calling me. It seemed to come from the street. Or was it echoing up the stairwell? He was shouting something. It sounded like, “We’ve got Seth, Charleen, we’ve got him. We’ve got Seth and he’s okay.” I stood completely still. I had never, it seemed, listened before with this degree of intensity. There were more voices. And again there was the sound of running on the stairs.

  Brother Adam picked up his suitcase, and with a sweep of his robe, he moved toward the fire escape. But he stopped there, staring at me for a moment as though waiting to be released.

  “Charleen,” was all he said. A question or a cry? Even afterwards I couldn’t decide. Who was it who said that the sounds of our own names are the only recompense we have for the difficulties of living? I am certain, however, of one thing: that Watson didn’t actually step out onto the fire escape until I nodded across at him. Then without a sound he dropped into darkness. I never even wished him good luck.

  The next face I saw was Seth’s. He burst into the room with Eugene behind him, absurdly off-hand in his tan windbreaker. My arms around him, his tumbled hair smelling of potato chips, his familiar face laughing at me above the brilliant jungle of living grass.

  Late Wednesday night. Some days are too long; it seems too much to ask of mere human beings that we live through them. What we need, what Ineed, is release from today. I need sleep, darkness.

  But I can’t sleep. Consciousness is flaking away, but I’m still absorbing the various levels of unreality which have suddenly invaded my mother’s Scarborough bungalow; I’m breathing them in, examining them, puzzling over their intricate folds and, like a classic insomniac, reliving all of it.

  The policemen—they’ve all gone home now. How do policemen manage to get to sleep after a night like tonight? Of course, it’s probably nothing to them; line of duty and all that; a ho-hum affair really; wouldn’t even make the papers, one of them had told us.

  Doug and Greta. It has been so simple in the end, so completely unspectacular. (Greta had simply driven up to the house and opened the car door. She never even suspected she was being followed.) How tender Doug had been with her. In the middle of the street with the searchlights and the beginning of a curious crowd, how gently he had held her, crooning into her hair, “It’s okay now, baby, I’ll take care of you, there now, don’t cry like that.” But she had cried. A small, animal weeping perforating the quiet neighbourhood, her thin shoulders shaking, “I don’t know what I was doing. He was going to India. I wanted Seth to see him. I didn’t know what to do. All I want to do is go to sleep.”

  “I know, I know,” Doug had said. “You need to sleep. I’ll take care of you now. You don’t have to worry about anything.”

  Watson. No one had seen him come down the fire escape. No one knew where he went. “Too much confusion,” one of the officers had said, rather embarrassed. “Anyway, it looks as though he wasn’t involved.”

  “He was moving out anyway,” the scrawny man told us. “Paid up his rent yesterday, but the bugger left all his goddamn garbage behind. Lived there two years and you oughta see the goddamn junk he’s got. A real nut, one of yer hopheads, oughta be in jail.”

  Watson living alone for two years! Watson, a crouching ascetic! How extraordinary really, considering his terrible need for an audience. (Then I remember the mirrors.)

  Louis Berceau, another solitary—but his time is coming. What a lot he’s giving up, the enormity of the sacrifice! Why? Why? His blissful detachment is ending; now he will be assaulted by all sorts of troubling concerns; his life will begin to overlap with others in ways which are not casual but responsible and which may throw into jeopardy his springy step and his childish good faith. Ah, Louis, sleep well tonight.

  My mother who will be married the day after tomorrow: she has taken a sleeping pill. As soon as we came home with Seth, she announced that she was going to take a sleeping pill and go to bed. She explained that she does not normally indulge in such drugs. The doctor had given her these, but she takes them very sparingly. Only for pain and anxiety, she explained. Pain and anxiety: she pronounced these two words absently as though they amounted to nothing more than a case of indigestion, a stomach cramp, a twinge of heartburn. Judith and I exchanged wry looks. Only pain and anxiety? Was that all?

  Judith and Martin. They are sleeping together in the back bedroom off the kitchen. Judith has been offhand but tactful. “Look, Char, it’s not that I don’t love you and all that, but as long as Mother’s dead to the world—if you don’t mind—the fact is, I just can’t sleep soundly unless Martin and I are ... you know ... you get used to the feel of someone, and Eugene probably—”

  Eugene, yes. Lying in my mother’s veneer bed, his arms around me—he is sound asleep now, but he has thought of everything: he has set his travel alarm for six-thirty so we can be sure to switch back before morning. He has also driven Greta to a hospital, found Doug a hotel room nearby, bought Bill Miller a bottle of rye. And checked Seth over for damages: “Of course I’m not a doctor, but there’s nothing wrong with him that a
good night’s sleep won’t fix.”

  And Seth is here in this house. Still a little baffled, a little confused—“I know it sounds crazy but she said you and Dad were getting back together again and she was supposed to take me to Toronto and I was too mixed up and half asleep. I guess I even believed her for the first day or two. It sounded like a dream, you know ... like a wish come true.”

  “A wish? You mean you wished—?”

  “Well, not exactly a wish—” He stopped, smiling suddenly, a self-mocking grin, but I could tell he was smiling at something else too, smiling at that swelling intangible that the “pome people” refer to as fate and others simply call life. It was a dazzling smile.

  He was glad to see Eugene. Eugene is going to get him a plane ticket so we can fly back together Friday night after the wedding. The concert is Saturday; with luck they’ll let him play even if he did miss a few rehearsals. He’s in good spirits and went to sleep almost immediately.

  And that’s the most extraordinary thing of all: Seth is asleep in this house and he’s sleeping where no one else has ever slept before, not my father, not Cousin Hugo, not Aunt Liddy, not Eugene, not anyone. Wound in a sheet and topped with a single blanket—for it is surprisingly warm tonight—he is sound asleep in the living room on my mother’s sacred chesterfield.

  The whole house, in fact, is asleep.

  Chapter 7

  Friday. My mother’s wedding day. I wake up early and something whispers to me: get this right. Remember every detail. Be accurate, be objective, be thorough. Make a Chronicle of this, make a Wedding Album, get it Right. Begin with the cloud-crammed dawn, the sky oily-blue and unsettled. A heavy dew, a choking, webby haze. Around noon the sun nuzzles its way through, making the day exceptionally humid. A little cooler late in the afternoon. At six there is a brief downpour, at eight a swollen, streaky-eyed sunset, but by that time Eugene and Seth and I are on our way back to Vancouver and it’s all over.

  We start the day by eating breakfast together, my mother and I, Eugene and Seth, Martin and Judith. Since there are only four kitchen chairs, Eugene carries in two from the dining room. It occurs to me that this is perhaps the largest number ever to gather in this room for breakfast.