The Stories You Write about Mimico

One: Oscar Peterson’s Piano Is Out of Tune

And he’s strolling—back and forth, back and forth—in front of a bank of impressive windows that look out from his penthouse in the Amedeo Court Apartments. He is alone. But if you were there, Bess, you could lean an elbow on the empty bar and watch him silhouette himself against Lake Ontario, that old body of water. She’s gray today, smoker gray. As if he takes his cues from nature, Oscar Peterson stuffs and lights his pipe. Coils of silky smoke curve from his nostrils, the corners of his mouth, to gather in a cloud above his head. Across Humber Bay, smokestacks. The CN Tower, blinking, red-eyed.

Where’s his wife? Don’t ask questions. Oscar Peterson just wants to play the piano right now. He wants to knock some sense back into the world, key by key. Sometimes you just have to make music, because music is the only thing that stays, isn’t it? Music can’t lie, music can’t be disappointed in you.

Oscar Peterson is on the phone again with the piano tuners. He called three hours ago. They promised to be here within the hour. He shouldn’t have to do this. He shouldn’t have to pick up the telephone today. Somehow it’s wrong in his hand, the soulless touch-tone with its pathetic tangled cord. It should be a big shiny receiver to bellow into, a heavy and rewarding rotary dial that yields to his finger and whirs back into place.

Oscar Peterson is eating a snack. He sits at the Steinway and tucks into whatever this is—leftovers? Something he made and froze before he went on tour. He’d never allow this, normally: food at the piano. But, now. He tests out a little something, just a little scale. Maybe it’s not so bad, maybe he can just sit here and play while he waits.

But the midrange is unbearable. Like a rake on his brain! Like a witch’s hand, plunged into his chest, icing his heart with the scratch of a fingernail. How can he still be waiting? How is it possible the piano has gone out of tune again, in such a short time? At least, it seems like it’s been a short time—but it’s been months, hasn’t it? Months since he’s been in Toronto at all, let alone this apartment. The light slants in nicely here at this time in the afternoon. It’s been awhile since he’s noticed that. You can notice it, Bess. It’s okay to notice it.

Oscar Peterson sits in silence. For the first time in a long time he listens to the voice of the lake.

Sssssshhhhhhhh, she whispers. Ssssssssshhhhhhh.

Two: A Gift for Mussolini

Two horses, soft nosed and tall. They are fresh brushed and shiny. They are hungry and attentive. They poke their heads out from their stables to greet the two men who approach with apples.

These men speak Italian; the horses do not, but they take the apples. One of the men, Mr. Franceschini, is familiar to the horses. You aren’t a horse, Bess, but you recognize this man too, from curious nights spent researching the complex you’d moved to, the strange hollowed out mansion at the center and its foreboding old gardens peopled with headless putti. The horses know Mr. Franceschini’s smell, and they know, even now, that he is ill, that every day he grows more and moreill, though he still doesn’t know it himself.

Mr. Franceschini comes often to the stables wearing fine riding habits and a tall top hat that reaches up to the horses’ ears, and carrying a whip. The horses remember most the whip, its snap at the haunches. Sometimes they remember the top of the hat, which is made of flattened fur, and which shows spooky propellers of light when he leads them out to the ring.

Today Mr. Franceschini does not wear the hat. Perhaps this is because the other man, the stranger, is not very tall. What the horses notice: the gleaming gold buttons on the breast of the stranger, his gray coat that smells of elsewhere, his velvet lapel. You may try to make out the stranger too, Bess, but he’s no one you recognize. Some lesser Italian official with a uniform made in Milan. When a horse noses forward to touch its lip to the bill of the stranger’s cap, the stranger reaches up and clasps that horse’s muzzle, lifts the tender lip to inspect its teeth.

Molto bella.

Now the horses are being saddled. Shiny oxblood leather, a smell that means they can expect next the cold bit, a man’s weight on their backs, the dust of the ring, and the clash of the nearby lake as it kicks the rocky shore.

With the help of a set of stairs, Mr. Franceschini guides the stranger onto the back of one of the horses while he mounts the other. Imagine yourself here, Bess, perched on the fence. You can watch them trot around the ring, their astonishing purebred gait, their mahogany coats lighting like fire.

This is the ring, to the horses: at one end the comfortable stables, the sweet smell of hay and sleep and food, and, beyond that, the place where Mr. Franceschini lives, his green-roofed dwelling with its greenhouse that sends off sparks of sunlight, and the little girl, the daughter, Martha, who wears flapping white hair ribbons and plays in the gardens and brings the horses pocketsful of sugar cubes. At the other end, within view, the edge of the ground, the meeting-place between water and land, where Lake Ontario stretches out endlessly. The lake smells of strange animals and plants. The lake is a place the horses have never been. Sometimes at night when they poke their heads out from the stalls, a spray drifts in carrying its scent of elsewhere. Sometimes that scent is sweet and inviting, like the newest, freshest hay. Sometimes it drifts in as a nightmare, bringing whiffs of the abattoir. They tuck their noses into each other’s necks and try to sleep that scent away.

Who would predict the keenness of the stranger’s bootheels and the force and frequency with which he uses them? Incessant kick, kick, kick at the ribs as he urges the horse forward. At the same time he yanks at the bit.

Mr. Franceschini, noticing this struggle, urges calm. Loosen up on the bit a touch. Yes, that’s the way. And maybe—with greatest respect, signore—maybe do not dig your heels in so hard, she’s very sensitive and well trained, she knows how to take corners.

The stranger, ramrod stiff. Of course. He loosens the reins.

But he is offended. Mr. Franceschini does not know this. Stranger and horse cannot connect. Horse feels for stranger, and stranger is— does horse feel this correctly?—not a rider but some cargo loaded onto her back, simply a machine that urges her forward. She gruntsagainst his tautness, but no one notices: not the other horse, not Mr. Franceschini. Why won’t they notice?

Look, Bess, at the way he rides her. He doesn’t bother to post; her trot jars him; he bounces and lands askew. Look at the set of his jaw, so tight. It belongs to a man who believes animals should be broken. If you keep looking, you’ll already know how this ends.

Yes, announces the stranger. She is a very fine gift indeed.

At that very moment, a commotion: Martha, in only her slip and hair ribbons, comes running from the house. The soles of her feet are blackened with dirt. Her mother runs after her. Little girl, climbing over the fence, throwing one leg over, then the other. She’s crying. She points at the stranger.

You can’t have her!

The stranger notices. The horse notices too. Turns her head toward the girl. Sugar cube? Warm stables?

Father signals to Mother; Mother grabs at daughter; daughter swats Mother away.

You can’t have my horse! she screams.

The stranger grits his teeth. Ticking jaw muscles. A slightly raised eyebrow at this little girl, this brat.

I hate you!

Three: No One Cares for Bauhaus in Toronto

As evidence, just look at the buildings. Soot blackened, Victorian, and so very Protestant in their proportions. Column, column, always an even number of columns, and dark little windows, always. Andor feels the buildings bearing down on him each time he grinds into the city on the streetcar, on his way to his weekly English lesson.

These lessons are taught by a woman named Ruth, whose stockings shush against her rayon skirt when she walks round and round the classroom, peeking over shoulders at her students’ work. And the hair! Stiff, sprayed until it is like something Andor might have carved from wood back in Weimar. Ruth, with her pinned-on smile.

That’s not fair. Perhaps her smile is genuine. Perhaps this woman truly cares about Andor’s essay on his favorite animal. Each week, an essay. Students read their essays aloud, one by one. For this week’s assignment Andor took Cornelia to the High Park Zoo again, on the Long Branch streetcar: the only transportation line he’s certain about.

You’ve been to this zoo hundreds of times, Bess. If you were walking with Andor and Cornelia on that chilly October day in 1952, you might have seen the same animals you’re used to, nosing for food among the fallen leaves: the llama, the sheep, the bison, the deer, the curious peacock. The father and the daughter.

Which is your favorite animal? he asked.

Cornelia pointed.

Andor’s essay is on the bison. This seems to trouble Ruth.

Really? Of all the animals?

The beard makes him look like a professor, says Andor. Ruth smiles. Well, that’s different.

Andor looks around for commiseration, for someone else who loves the bison. Nothing. His classmates have written about the lion, the butterfly, the dove. The beautiful animals. They dutifully read their essays.

Next week’s essay assignment: to describe his home, his street. There is a stop to make today before going home: Simpsons department store, that great brown edifice at the corner of Yonge and Queen, with its big avenues lit by sconces and its perfume ladies always reaching over counters. This is a poor substitute for Warenhaus Tietz or, dare he think of it, Le Bon Marché. Everything so held back here. The whole store is tentatively decorated with jack-o’-lanterns and black-and-orange bunting. You’ll remember this store from childhood, Bess, its green SIMPSONS sign announcing itself. The pleasing curve of the S. Long after the store went out of business your grandmother saved its plastic bags, neatly folded into a drawer.

Here is his destination: ABSTRACTS AT HOME. A series of mock rooms made up in the modern style, meant to nudge Canadian living rooms into the middle of the century. Here we find hairpin legs on streamlined tables; tight geometrical upholstery in green and yellow and red tweeds. The starburst clock. In each room an abstract painting.

The paintings are what Andor looks at now, hands clasped behind his back as he paces from room to room, stopping before each one. This group of artists will go on to become the famed Canadian abstractionists the Painters Eleven—but Andor doesn’t know that yet. All he knows is Jack Bush’s thick ribbons of paint in oranges and grays and blues. Tom Hodgson’s color palettes stolen from the sunset, orange and purple and gold. Kazuo Nakamura’s stick-straight lines and abstracted trees. And, of course, the aggressive work of young William Ronald—blood like splats, varicose veins resembling those that surround a bruise or a wound. This, in particular, makes a feeling in Andor. What is the feeling? Anger? No. This, the very shape of this splat of paint: this is the feeling of betrayal.

What had William said? We’ve got to have this one in the show.

A show in a department store? The idea had seemed crass, but William was so keen on it as he explained the idea that Andor simply smiled and offered another cup of coffee. All right, he would exhibit in this show. So hard, it was, to get any attention at all here in Toronto. People have to see your work, William had said.

This was in Andor’s small studio space, by the window of his snug rented living room on Norris Crescent. The sun had slanted in just then, illuminating William’s young broad face as he admired one of Andor’s crisp shape paintings, its body-like figures so full of energy they almost leaped off the canvas. This was a skill Andor had learned at the Bauhaus, under Wassily Kandinsky, who had lectured on color theory in a voice so authoritative that Andor was sure, then, he himself had begun to see new and altogether more beautiful colors. This anecdote he’d told William that afternoon, and William had paid rapt attention, asking question after question about Andor’s mentorship under Kandinsky and Klee and Moholy-Nagy. Young William, so impressionable. He’d only just graduated from the Ontario College of Art, which Andor had thought a rather gray technical school when William had taken him round it to look at the student exhibition. You are the only one with any talent, Andor had said then.

Now, in the home section of Simpsons, he regrets that admission.

May I help you, sir?

This is a furniture salesman.

I look at the paintings.

Different, aren’t they? asks the salesman. There’s a pride to the question, as if he’s painted these works himself.

Andor grinding home on the Queen streetcar. Figures, clothed in gray fabric, strolling on the gray sidewalk. Above Toronto, a gray blanket of sky. Here come the first snowflakes of the season, testing the air. Andor, in the streetcar, pushes west and west and west.

Here is Andor’s stop. Now he is walking down his street, Norris Crescent, with its low brown hipped-roof duplexes lined up like houses in a toy village. You know the feeling of walking down Norris Crescent, Bess, when it’s empty of people and the wind churns up from the lake. Little snowflakes pelting the eyes. You can slip between buildings and through the alley and wind up in your apartment building, which is just being constructed, now, on the old Martha Villa property, as Andor mounts the steps to his duplex. Cornelia is at the window. She presses her palms against the glass.

Andor must sit down and write a letter to William, expressing his deep disappointment. Why was he not included? Why, after their conversations? After the encouragement he’d given?

And, yes, there is something else he must write. It nags at the back of his brain. Vision of Ruth, with sprayed hair and pinned-on smile. An essay. My home. My street.

Four: No One Who Played with the Rolling Stones Ever Lived on Norris Crescent

This is you, Bess, hauling the first boxes into the elevator of your new building in Amedeo Court. In one arm a box, teetering dangerously, in the other the basset hound’s leash. He sniffs the carpet, tests a soiled patch with a lick. The elevator, midcentury, jitters as it rises. Its gold paint is flaking. It smells like cigarettes and skin and mushroom gravy.

This is your mom, arranging the unpacked boxes into shapes. A table-shape, a wall-shape. A week has passed since you moved in, and she refuses to unpack the boxes, just makes more shapes. We’ll be moving out of here soon, she says.

Her one concession to the setting: the little bell she’s hung out on the balcony to be teased by the lake wind. Wind teases the bell all the time.

Is this better or worse than living in the car? In the car, the landscape flung itself past and past, going from brown to green to snowy to hot. In the car, you could end up in Charleston or Des Moines or Niagara Falls or Halifax or Ithaca. In the car, possibility lay ahead, at the end of some road you hadn’t taken yet. You were with your mom and your dog, and all your things were in storage, and the old house was behind you, not lost but just something you’d chosen to leave. Now, back in Toronto, the old house is over there—way over there, in a neighborhood you can’t afford. It’s not yours anymore, but—you think about this sometimes, at night—it still contains millions of your cells and maybe the marks on the inside of your closet where you recorded your height every year. Also, the place inside the closet where, twelve years old, you wrote, light light in pencil, fuck.

This is Mimico, where you live now: the old Polish bakery and the old motels and the tumbledown storefronts with plastic torsos that flap in the wind. A drunk stumbles out of the Blue Goose Tavern and into the 7-Eleven. At night, screaming fights that leave scars on the pavement, an errant high-heeled shoe, a puddle from where bloody nose met sidewalk. Along the shore, man-made outcroppings of rock are host to little bonfires. Around the bonfires, on camp chairs and recliners taken from curbs and dumpsters, silhouettes of people. They raise bottles of beer and paper cups of coffee to their mouths. No one seems to stop this practice, the lakeside camps of homeless and addicted. Sometimes, by day, they yell out to you as you walk the dog, call him a good boy, raise their bottles. They are always nice to you. A thought—bad thought—does this make you one of them? There are certain drunks you recognize, will come, even, to love: Michael, who will die of a horrific tumor on his lip; the old man with the Chihuahua that rides on his walker. The old man smiles and smiles.

The lake is a character here too. It waves grayly. Beyond it, the Toronto skyline: the ever-multiplying condo buildings, glass and flashing steel, and the shell of the SkyDome, and the CN Tower always, you’ve thought, looking like the colors of a boot sock: gray, with a collar of white and red.

Here are the water birds. Ducks and geese and swans, and others that visit from distant countries and climates. A small preserve set aside for them, with nesting areas and a wooden boardwalk that’s bouncy underfoot. Later, when you lose the car, can’t afford to get it out of the garage it’s been towed to, you’ll walk the boardwalk with a heavy IKEA bag filled with the week’s groceries: cans and crinkly bags of veg and carefully planned cuts of meat. The lake wind will slap you across the face, making tears streak down.

On these walks you and your mom will name the water birds. The new crop of goslings, or strange black birds with spoonbills and oily-looking wings. Henrietta. Nicholas. Ryan Gosling.

Even five months, six months, seven months later, you still live among boxes. You arrange them into makeshift walls, section off the part of the living room with your desk. This is your study, itself like a giant cardboard box. Sometimes you do your schoolwork here. Other times you write.

Writing (maybe) an escape. Only, your stories are bad. No feeling, everything that’s real choked off and aborted midway through. All ideas and buzzing thoughts meant to push yourself away from yourself. You can’t imagine ever being a good writer, ever writing a good story or being anywhere else than here, in your box, in the Amedeo Court apartments, in Mimico, where you’d never invite your old friends. You want to write fuck on a box, light light in pencil. You do, and you erase it, and it leaves a dirty smudge.

A neighbor says famous people lived here. This is on Norris Crescent, with its little co-op of brown duplexes, where you walk the dog. The neighbor ashes her cigarette on the metal handrail of her stoop.

In your building, she says. Oscar Peterson. The jazz guy.

That can’t be right. Not Oscar Peterson. Not in our building, where a shirtless guy daily sits on his balcony, points his amp at the lake, and strums his electric guitar.

Yes, Oscar Peterson. In the penthouse. She squints up at the penthouse, points the glowing tip of her cigarette at it. That used to be a real fancy building.

The dog tugs at his leash, whines.

Another guy lived on this street here too, says the neighbor. I think he played with the Rolling Stones.

Here is your new hobby: After your mom goes to bed, you sit in your cardboard box and research the people who lived here before. Does it surprise you to find out it’s true, Oscar Peterson lived here? It does. You didn’t think much of that neighbor before. You thought she might be lying, or maybe she just didn’t know what she was talking about. But here is a passing mention of his penthouse at Amedeo Court, just a sentence or two. All you know of the penthouse is the extra button in the elevator. You need to turn a key in a special lock when you press the button. The keyhole is unusually round. Oscar Peterson must have carried an unusually round key.

Leaves skitter along the boardwalk. Ducklings now ducks. Skinny fires on rocky outcroppings leap at the November sky. Voices carry far in this air, thin and crisp. Bottles clink. In your IKEA bag, straps slung over your shoulders like a backpack, potatoes. Ramen noodles.

Your mom sees junk in the preserve. Plastic pop bottles, straws, napkins, floating on some foamy stuff like soap, dangerously near the nesting area.

This is a protected zone, she says. She leans over the railing. The top of her knit cap flaps over her forehead. I can’t believe people. Now she slings one leg over the railing, now the other. Now she’s edging along the beach.

You’re not allowed in there, you call. Are people looking? Ducks scatter as your mother tiptoes toward the edge of the water, an intruder as unwelcome as the bottles.

The IKEA bag shrugs low on your shoulders.

Your mom, picking up garbage, pinching it between two fingers. She gathers as much as she can while you glance left and right, hoping no one will notice her. Now she’s trudging her way up the bank with an armful of wet junk.

Help me, she says.

No one who played with the Rolling Stones ever lived on Norris Crescent, not as far as you can tell. The only person of any note who ever lived there was a Hungarian, an artist who seemed to hate Toronto even more than you do now. Here’s a little article in the Toronto Star about him, his little duplex on Norris, his studies at the Bauhaus right before the Nazis broke it up, scattered its students and teachers across the world. You find a small collection of his art online. It’s held in museums. Here, in a New York collection, his sketch of the lakeshore—your lakeshore—in bright pastels. Here is an angular sailboat like a water bird, its captain a maddened person-shape, eyes big and terrified.

And here are the old letters—MV—welded into the iron fence that surrounds Amedeo Court. Sometimes when you walk the dog, you come across a set of them. MV, you learn, for Martha Villa, the early twentieth-century house at the center of the place, once achingly grand, now chopped up into apartments. Here’s an old photo of the family: proud Italian father with merino suit and pomade-slick hair, demure Scottish mother with hands folded around the dumpling-plump baby, Martha, bald and dressed in white christening gown. Martha, privileged child, once loved so very much that everything from here to the lake was hers.

The letters are rusty now. Dilapidated, like so much else on the property. Its mossy garden, its dry fountain full of spitting stone frogs, and its crumbling stone walls. Its old stables, now garages that when open reveal the butts of trucks. As you walk the dog by, men in the garages cast spooky glances.

You try to write a story about that, the men in garages. It doesn’t go so well. Neither does your story about hauling groceries in a heavy sack, about the weight of the cans and the slimness of the straps on tender shoulders. Nothing happens in that story. Your protagonist—a thinly veiled version of you—contemplates life for a while, the unfairness of it, has a long walk, gets home, is tired, lies down and lets the difficulty of it all just buzz through her body. There is no change. You don’t know how to make change happen.

But you know how to lean over the railing to look at the new ducklings. Here they are, children of last year’s crop, furrowing their way through the water where, last fall, your mom fished for garbage. Now you hear music: the tinkling of piano keys. A gentle melody, floating down from a place you can’t identify. Some condo, maybe. Some fancy party in some glass-and-steel monstrosity.

You’re sure you’ve heard this song before, the cool way it pirouettes and steps across the air, patters all around like natty raindrops. Stormy weather. Yes, that’s it. These notes simple and elegant, clear as facts, sometimes lanky and pulled out like a loosened tie. First “Stormy Weather,” then “Angel Eyes.”

Five: Toronto Brings Me No Joy

This the sign-off on Andor’s first letter of the day, addressed to an old Bauhaus friend in New York. Andor draws an angular figure in the corner: himself, in a despairing pose. He folds the letter, tucks it into its envelope, affixes the stamp. Everyone in New York is succeeding. Right now they are having well-received shows of their work, talking and laughing at art openings, eating caviar, surrounded by Americans who respect the Bauhaus, the abstract figures and lines and colors. They’re selling their work for outrageous prices, he imagines, living in flats in the Upper West Side. But not Andor. Still he waits and waits for his visa, and every day spent waiting is a thousand years.

Eva in the corner of the living room, putting on her lipstick in front of a little hanging mirror. She interviews this afternoon at Eaton’s department store—across the street from Simpsons. She has practiced her English on Andor all week—Hello, sir, how may I help you? That will be 4.95. Would you like a receipt? Eva is altogether too elegant to work in a place that sells both silk stockings and washing machines. In Weimar she studied cabinetmaking. Glorious avant-garde creations in walnut. She used to recite poetry. Her father—her terrifying father—was a champion fencer. He had a deep scar on his cheek. Why think of this now? What does the scar matter?

I’m going now, she says. Wish me luck.

Good luck.

Remember Cornelia, she says.

Yes.

The click of the door, Eva’s practiced gait as she makes her way up Norris Crescent toward the streetcar stop. Andor watches, from his window, the form of Eva. In this suit and swing coat, with her pointy little boots and flecks of snow swatting at her legs, she is like the figures in his own paintings. An elegant triangle.

Here’s another thing Andor has waited for: a response from William Ronald. Nearly a week he’s waited. It comes in the early afternoon, twenty minutes or so before Cornelia finishes school. A hollow ring of the telephone.

Listen, says Bill. Simpsons got the final say, and they wanted work that

fit well with their new line.

New line?

Line of furniture. Ah.

We tried to put something together that matched the palette of the furniture. It wasn’t personal, but everything of yours was pinks and blues, and the upholstery, it was all oranges and greens and reds.

You could have told me the colors of . . . of the line. I work in reds and greens also.

It just didn’t work out this time, says Bill, and the finality of the statement hangs and hangs.

Next time, says Bill.

What does Andor say, Bess? Next time, don’t bother. He can’t be sure whether he says this aloud or thinks it as he hangs up the phone. Lately his mind has been doing this to him: playing tricks with his memory. Also, he’s had little outbursts, mostly when alone. The tossing aside of a pencil, too violent, that leaves a gray mark on the wall where its soft lead breaks. Sometimes, a Hungarian swear that eats its way from his gut out into the world. If you were here now, in Andor’s afternoon-dark living room, you might be able to give him some relief by telling him, No, your response was only in your mind. Or, perhaps, Yes, you could say: You’ve done it. You have cut the final and only thread attaching you to the Toronto art scene. But don’t worry—I’ve read it in books, when I was curious about you. You’ll get your visa. You’ll get to New York, a few miserable years from now. And you’ll never return to Toronto. Maybe you’ll never think on it again.

But you aren’t there. Andor is alone. What to do now? What to do? Sometimes, in moments like this, he makes furious art. But this time he can’t face it. The very look of his drawing table is something menacing, a flat and dangerous animal. The colors of his paints, in their gnarled tubes, all wrong.

Sometimes, air. Air is correct, in this moment. Despite everything, despite how the city makes his gut feel as if it were pierced and hung from a meat hook, he cannot deny the pleasant separateness of Norris Crescent, its hardscrabble children playing in the street, and its view of the gray lake, waves rising and falling. Sometimes, sailboats. Across the bay, the city skyline, its flat factory smoke and predictably triangular rooftops.

Andor walks as far as he can toward the lake, despite the weather. Seats himself on a bench that looks out on everything. Here are his little sketchbook and pencil, tucked, where they always live, into his coat pocket. He is drawing something. No, not drawing. Writing an essay.

“I live on Norris Crescent, Mimico.”

Some music has started up: a wonderful jazz piano that drifts from the sky, it seems, down toward the lake. Who on Norris Crescent plays music like this? The last time Andor heard, and truly enjoyed, jazz— well, that was in another time, another place, gone now. But this, he enjoys. It seems to amble down to the foot of Norris Crescent with an easy gait, sit beside him on the bench, sling one ankle over a knee. It seems to say, Go on, write, I’ll just be here, feeling the absurdity of the world alongside you.

“It is well for an artist to live here, where I look on an expanse of sky, on trees, small cottages, and on the bay of Lake Ontario.”

What more to say?

“I live with my wife, Eva, and our daughter, Cornelia, seven years old.”

Cornelia. He has forgotten to pick up Cornelia.

Six: A Palace for Horses

When Mr. Franceschini returns to Martha Villa, weak and broken, bald from chemotherapy, pushed around in a wheelchair with a cashmere blanket thrown over his tired legs, he is met by a line of well-wishers. Groundskeepers who pull open the wrought-iron gates, housekeepers and the maids and his brother Leonard and his own dear wife, Annie, and—there she is—Martha, princess Martha, so much older than when he left.

Try not to imagine yourself as Martha, Bess, though it is tempting—her beautiful life, her ponies, her ribbon bows, and the vista she owns, straight across Humber Bay to the pier, the King Eddie hotel, the beach. Hard not to view the whole Franceschini-era property through Martha’s young eyes.

Martha won’t leave her dad’s side, won’t stop asking questions—Was it terrible in the camp, Dad? What did you eat? Did you get mom’s and my letters?

Your dad’s tired, says Annie. They’re sitting in the greenhouse. She’s loading up a plate for him. Deviled eggs. Little toasts with salmon and asparagus. No more with the questions.

Terrible, no. Humiliating—maybe. After all he’d done for this country, building roads, hotels, battleships, to be—the most sanitary of words—interned. All because of a horse. One beautiful horse.

But it could have been worse. There were men of all sorts at Camp 33. Japanese, Germans, rich, and poor. The Italians, though: these were the men he grew to know best. Others like him, who’d come to Canada with nothing. This he explains to Martha, later that day, as she wheels him around the garden, down by the lip of the lake.

I was fifteen when I came here, you understand? A boy.

Of course she understands. She’s heard this story hundreds of times. Now look what we have. He gestures around, generally, at the property and the lake and the city skyline itself. His gesture somehow angry. Like he could swat the whole city away.

The lake, the beautiful lake. While her father was away, Martha visited it often—thinking of him, yes, but also of Duchess, off prancing somewhere in Italy. Duchess, with fiery flank and flared nostrils and gentle mien. She’d been Martha’s horse, Martha had thought. She remembered standing on a stepladder in front of Duchess’s stall, the horse’s warm soft nose and sweet breath on her shoulder. You know this, Bess, because you know what little girls think of when they don’t understand the adult world that surrounds them, when they have just begun to suspect the intentions of the grown-ups. Perhaps, like you, they felt the push and pull of warring parents, of lawyers, of counselors, of the law. Perhaps, like Martha’s, their fathers were taken away by a number of official men, and in the waiting-time they forgot something about their fathers, like the smell of their hugs or the angle of their smiles. When such a thing happens, a little girl thinks of horses. Remember two china horses, one brown, one blue, touch-nosed.

You’ve already forgotten not to be Martha.

More than ever before, Mr. Franceschini is visited by people now. Lines of small-business owners, hats crushed to their chests, snaking around the parlor and into his study. Politicians, local, and (more and more) provincial, national. Some sit on benches in the garden, where, in the fountain, four stone frogs spit onto an overjoyed putti. And Italian friends who stop Martha on her way out of the house or coming home from school—I knew your daddy when we were just little boys—always seem to be around.

Martha and her mother, sitting together in the living room. Mother is reading a book; Martha is doing homework. Laughter carries over from the study, where men in the construction business are gathered.

This house, says Annie, is too small.

Mr. Franceschini has an idea. He announces it at the dinner table.

A palace for horses.

Martha rolls the idea around in her mind for a moment. She imagines a king horse on his throne, a queen horse in a velvet robe. Princes and princesses; those would be the ponies.

Her mother has already leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms. Now wait, wait, wait, wait, says Mr. Franceschini. He reaches back onto the buffet for a pile of renderings. Here are photos of a property looking out at the Laurentians, an artist’s renderings of grand, gleaming stables, a mansion, a guest house, a smoking room, a games room, a greenhouse, an indoor pool, everything monogrammed, oxblood leather and glorious old carriages and antlers, so many antlers. He shows his wife a picture of a rose.

A secret garden, all for you.

He unrolls a blueprint. It unrolls and unrolls.

That place is a monstrosity, says Annie. Who needs all that space? But you said that this house was too small, says Martha.

Her father smiles.

It’s a waste of money, Jim, says Annie. It’s show-offy.

So, what’s wrong with showing off? Don’t we deserve to show off? After all we’ve done?

Annie rearranges the napkin on her lap, purses her lips.

Mr. Franceschini pointing out at the lake, the skyline. I built that city. I know, Jim.

Anyways, he continues, I already bought the property. Got a very good deal.

A little zing of excitement in Martha. A palace for horses!

Can I have my own horse? she asks. Sweetheart, you can have ten horses. When will it be finished?

It isn’t started yet. We’ve got to sell Martha Villa first.

That terrible dropping feeling.

I’ve got some guys interested in it. They’re coming to see the property next week.

Already Annie is wiping her mouth with her napkin, getting up from the table. She leaves the room. With careful hands Mr. Franceschini smooths out the plans in front of him, as if they were ancient scrolls.

You’re going to sell Martha Villa to some guys?

Somehow now, the image of Duchess, a week after the Italian stranger came to Martha Villa, being reluctantly loaded into a horse trailer. Her eyes rolled wildly, then, looking back at Mr. Franceschini, who cooed at her to settle, settle, and at Martha, who swiped tears from her cheeks. She would never tell this to Dad—never—but in the months, years he was interned, she thought just as much of Duchess as of him. Maybe more. Sometimes, in Life magazine, photographs of the devastation of the war, bombed-out Italian villages that were nothing but skeletons of places, empty windows like sockets in a skull. She imagined Duchess stepping timidly through that rubble, her beautiful slender legs matted with brick dust and mud. Somewhere, a baby crying. Martha would often imagine this at night after she’d gone to bed, and tears would roll hotly into her ears and down her neck onto the pillow. Comforting, to feel something for someone she loved.

You used to do this at night too, Bess. Maybe every girl cries at night just to feel tears crawling into the shells of her ears, thumping the pillow where they land. But you are not every girl; you are Martha, and Martha cried because she couldn’t save what she’d lost, and because she knew that Duchess was gone, that her father was gone, even when he’d returned. She knew that her own home would be gone, and that all the grand estates of Mimico would one day tumble or decay or be knocked down, that this would be a neighborhood of struggling artists and motels and stumbling drunks and little fires on crags and then condos, glass and steel, slicing the sky, and the rich on white boats, and commuters crushed together on the Long Branch streetcar, and that even she would die. Martha knew everything that would happen. Two men arrive—brothers, maybe twins, in strangely matched suits. Longo and Longo. You’ll recognize this name from the checks you signed each month when you lived here—Longo Brothers Properties. The kind woman in the office who takes your checks lives in the penthouse at the top of your building, Oscar Peterson’s old place. They say she’s the mistress of a Longo. When you came home, once, to the scene of a domestic fight, the hallway on your floor streaked with blood and dotted with punches in the drywall, the Longos sent a repairman and bleach.

The Longos: some Italians Mr. Franceschini knows from somewhere—he seems to know every Italian in the city. Martha watches from her bedroom window as her dad, walking again, takes them around the property, opening outbuilding doors, pointing. The brothers, heads swiveling this way and that, taking it all in: the vast grounds, the stables, the ring, the garden, the greenhouse, and the lake. The lake seems to glisten today, showing off for these two. Saying, Aren’t I pretty?

The Longos think so. Already, they envision buildings. Tall apartment buildings dotting the site, and the house itself divided into luxury apartments. Knock down this greenhouse, and there can even be a building here next to the garden, giving it a Sicilian feel. They make large and excited arm gestures. Mr. Franceschini agrees—yes, this would make a very nice courtyard, indeed, for an apartment complex. Why don’t we go inside and hammer out a deal?

Martha, in her bedroom. Can she leave the house named after her, the horse ring, the garden, the beautiful lake, the city skyline, her school, her friends? They have different schools in Quebec. Everyone speaks in French.

Outside the Longos are pointing. They point straight up. What’s there? Nothing Martha can see. But she hears. And what she hears—is it possible it comes from that empty spot in the sky that all three men and several grooms stare at? This piano music, clear and confident, full of swagger and elegance, doing a muscular dance down and out, across the garden, the ring, the lake.

Martha is in the yard now, standing with this ever-growing group of people who look up, up at sound and mystery. Here is Uncle Leonard, clenching a cigar between his teeth. Sometimes the lake can play tricks with sound, he says. Here is her mother, who puts two hands on Martha’s shoulders as she stares. However much her mother resists it, one finger taps along with the music.

Seven: Oscar Peterson Plays “’Round Midnight”

When he sits at the piano, Oscar Peterson’s socks go on and on and on. He’s a big man. He has to tuck himself into the instrument, legs bent at what looks like an uncomfortable angle. Trouser hem creeps up, revealing the trouser sock—brown, conservative, and seemingly endless, like the cosmos. This is what the piano tuner thinks, anyway. If you were here beside the piano tuner, Bess, watching Oscar Peterson play, you might feel the music spooling through your own body: liquid and smooth. And you too might marvel at the socks, at the simplicity of them, a simplicity that says: these socks don’t matter. The music matters.

The piano tuner, of course, waiting for Oscar Peterson’s approval. Even after so many years of tending to this particular piano, he can make mistakes. Oscar Peterson will find them. He’ll point them out— politely, of course—but the piano tuner knows to wait for the end of the music. The result is his own private concert. Only a sour note here or there. Just like life. The piano tuner sits on the couch.

What to do now, Bess? There’s no more story to tell.

There’s only the music, and the view from the penthouse as the sun sets: the sharp winking needle of the CN Tower, the old triangular roof of the Royal York Hotel, the dappled breasts of ducks and geese. And the lake, gilded orange, that carries away the cargo of the past and delivers new waves, new scents, new elsewheres to smooth the rocky shore.

Read more from Issue 17.2.