Barbara has seen the man again. The man Misty Mason, if she saw him, would call a bum. The man who sleeps on the park bench in front of the Queen Elizabeth Way statue. The concrete statue, commissioned to commemorate the opening of the highway by Elizabeth the Queen Consort and King George, stands tall and erect, its head topped by a concrete replica of Elizabeth’s crown, its base guarded by a ferocious concrete lion. The man, when he stands, hunches over and hides his crown underneath his old khaki army blanket. Like the statue’s lion, he is missing an eye tooth; like the statue, moved to accommodate the widening of the highway years ago, he has seen other, likely better, homes.
There is nothing concrete about him, though, this veteran of a road less traveled. Barbara believes a good stiff northwest breeze would huff and puff him off his concrete bed and into Lake Ontario. Good riddance, Misty would probably say. If Barbara could write, which she can’t--she hasn’t been able to since Philip--but if she could, she might find some eloquent phrase, discover some descriptive prose or lilting poetry lurking in her writer’s block, aching to be lovingly carved into Michelangelo’s David.
The first time Barbara notices the man, he is shuffling along the Humber Shores footpath, a nondescript jumble of black sweat pants and khaki blanket. The black sweat pants, she observes, taking in his entirety with a sharp writer’s eye, are polka-dotted with almost circular white patches as if a bottle of Javex bleach had dribbled over them. Barbara knows this isn’t likely; those pants have never seen any water except rain, much less bleach. A wizened brown nose peeks from under the army blanket flung over his shoulders and head and held together firmly at his chest by a wrinkled brown hand. His index finger swings a plastic Loblaw’s grocery sack. Misty claims most bums prefer liquor store bags because they’re stronger. Of course, Philip used to say the bums were simply recycling.
Then Barbara sees the straw. Underneath the blanket, cuddled under the man’s left arm, is a bundle of assorted marsh and woodland grasses and straw. Tied at intervals with pieces of dirty string, the three-feet-long straw bundle is a half-born scarecrow, a straw torso with a nipped-in waist.
He disappears behind a tree and Barbara is filled with a strange sense, a dread of the unknown and untrusted, yet a feeling of loss, as if some loved, but feebleminded, child had wandered into the surf off Sheldon Lookout. She shakes her head to rid herself of his presence. Silly. He’s just another old, smelly bum.
The next morning, still unable to thwart writers’ block, Barbara runs along the footpath, intent on finishing her two miles before her energy fizzles in the unexpected warmth of a late, late Indian summer. As she passes the Queen Elizabeth Way memorial, the park bench directly in front shivers. A ragged army blanket moves ever so slightly and Barbara catches a glimpse of the man’s grassy pillow, his scarecrow companion. She stops and leans against a tree, afraid he will rise up and apprehend her, fearful he will remain a huddled mass.
The man’s shoes, scuffed and trodden down in the ankles, are lined up neatly under the bench. Obsessive-compulsive. Everything in its place. “I’m scatterbrained,” Barbara explains when people laugh at her own excessive tidiness. “I’m so scatterbrained, I couldn’t find anything if I didn’t make sure everything’s in the correct place.” The man’s shoes are old, scuffed and downtrodden, but even from her hiding place, Barbara can see they are real leather, not the semi-cardboard or plastic worn by many of Toronto’s street people, and they are lined up, one toe not a fraction of an inch ahead of the other. His black- and- white speckled pants and his feet, covered with ratty dark socks, stick out from the bottom of the blanket which is just long enough to cover his head, shoulders and upper torso.
The huddled heap rises upright and as the army blanket slips, the man’s almost bare head faces the autumn sun, then quickly retreats, ducks back under, as if even a momentary look is too much. He has seen her. Holding the blanket tightly to prevent further lapses, he tiptoes into the shoes and totters to his feet. Undercover, he has tucked the straw bundle under his left arm. He reaches under the blanket for the Loblaw’s bag.
Slap slap slap slap. Barbara turns to watch four snowy white swans take off across the lagoon, their feet ballet-dancer straight and tight behind them, beating the water. Their long necks are stretched taut, their smooth heads are pointed, compass-like, toward their next destination. As they lift off, the soft, sighing whic whic notes of their individual wing-beats blend into a mysterious tune, a sound as old as the earth, a sound whispery and breathy, yet redolent with strength and purpose. The sound of life, the echoes of change.
When she turns back, the man is just a flicker of khaki, an autumn shade among the many colours of autumn. For the remainder of the day, Barbara wonders if she has imagined the quick flash of long, dull, brownish gray hair and straggly beard and the brown, leathery face, indented with clefts and cervices. Has she invented the half-smile? Has she fabricated from whole cloth the sudden flare of intelligence in the faded, rheumy eyes?
The next day, still fearful but determined, she walks past the park bench and stops a few steps away. Leaning into a tree, she begins her warm up, stretching, lifting, pointing, retracting, all the time watching the khaki and black heap. She bends over, one foot ahead of the other, leaning toward the forward foot.
“Ballet dancer.”
For a moment, Barbara believes her own spastic imagination has mothered the low, raspy statement . She looks up. He is standing a few feet along the footpath, wrapped into an unrecognizable blob. She strains unsuccessfully to see his face, but she can see only the nut-brown nose peeping from the depths of the army blanket.
“You were a ballet dancer in a happier life,” he says and shuffles away, like a dislocated hermit crab, carrying his home on his back. His pungent odor lingers on the morning breeze.
Stunned, Barbara abandons her planned route. She considers running after him, running in front of him, blocking his way and shouting, asking him to explain. Instead, she trudges back to her condominium complex, her head bent low, and creeps into her walk-in closet. She takes Philip’s old fleece-lined leather coat from the rack, where it has hidden among her winter sweaters and jackets, off and on, for eight months. She lies on her bed, pristine, unrumpled, the bed of a woman living alone, and arranges the coat over her body.
She knows she should take the coat to the Salvation Army or to the Goodwill store just down the road from her condo. She knows its presence is a crutch, a symbol of Philip. As long as his coat is here, he isn’t gone forever. Whenever she is tentative or worried or lonely, she seeks refuge in its solace. Sometimes, like now, she curls up on or in the bed, the coat wrapped around her, a fleecy cocoon not quite ready to become a butterfly. Sometimes she sits in the black leather recliner, the coat flung across her knees or clutched against her cheek. Sometimes she lays the coat, fleece side up, on the living room carpet and spreads herself across its soothing softness.
Misty walked in one day and caught her sitting in the sun-room overlooking the lake, Philip’s coat thrown over her shoulders, a fleecy shawl protecting her from the sudden chill. Philip had been gone how long? Three months? Four?
“Barbara, honey, what are you doing? You’ve got to let him go.” Barbara could have sworn to Misty’s part person-part machine parentage, but now as she sat beside Barbara, her arms around Barbara’s neck, Misty sounded almost ninety per cent human.
“Oh Misty, I know. I know I should, but I just can’t. It’s too soon.”
“I don’t understand you, Barbara.” That was more like the old Misty. “Philip was a total prick most of the time. He insulted you, embarrassed you in public, cheated on you with dozens of women you know, and now he’s gone, you want to idealize him? Are you crazy?”
Her head knows Misty is right; her heart refuses to part with the only comfort she has. If she could write, get past this dry spell that feels like it’s been forever, perhaps she could experience what her therapist called “closure” and Barbara calls “moving on”. Barbara wants to “move on”, she is desperate to hear the starting gun, but she’s not quite sure of the location of the starting gate or in which direction she should run.
Where did he come from, the homeless man? He is thin to emaciation; he has the weightlessness of someone whose dinners are seldom solid, whose lunches are drunk from a small flask. Yes, she nods, pulling the coat tighter, he is dissolute, but no matter what Misty would say, his face, viewed for the split second, the single heartbeat, the first skip of a stone, still houses intelligence and wit. How did he know she used to dance? How does he know she is not happy? Does he see with the all-knowing eyes of Christmases past and present?
She will confront him. She realizes now that this is what she had intended all along. He is an elegy, waiting to be sung. He is a burr just inside her sports socks, itching to get out. She has to speak with him.
“Oh, Barbara, no. He might be an ax murderer,” says Misty Mason when Barbara confides her plan.
“And he might be a famous impresario, down on his luck!” Barbara retorts.
“Well!” sniffs Misty, throwing up her hands. “Sounds like your mind’s made up. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“I can’t explain why, I just have to do this, Misty. It’s like I’m being driven to it, like there’s some force outside me pushing me.”
“Perhaps you should see your therapist again, Barbara. You haven’t fully dealt with the grief yet.”
I ndian summer’s promise has been retracted and winter chases the autumn leaves across the footpath and into the wrinkled water of the lagoon; even her footsteps hold a threat of chill winds and snow as she hurries toward the park bench. She is later than usual; her sister’s weekly check-up phone call has put her back twenty minutes. She’ll ask him where he came from. She’ll ask him how he knows.
She’ll ask him nothing. The park bench is empty.
She should have come earlier, should have told Annie she’d call her back. Shoulders hunched, she walks all the way to Ontario Place, as if walking will destroy her hopelessness. By the retired ship Haida, she turns and crunches back, staying on the path closer to the lake, searching, seeking, an island of grief in a sea of fallen leaves.
She tramps past the Boulevard Club, home away from home to Toronto’s idle semi-rich. He isn’t there; you don’t get past that gatehouse without flashing your Visa gold card and Barbara doubts her man has a gold card. She could be wrong; she has been wrong before. She stops, closes her eyes, and tries to wrest the details from her lazy memory. A few days before Christmas. Last year. The Quinte Mall store. Philip was in the back, working on the books. Barbara, already tired from teaching all day, was filling in for Monica Best, manning the front counter. Perched on her uncomfortable stool, she was on the verge of dozing off when the air filled with the most incredible smell. She described it later as a mixture of unwashed hairy armpits, rotten feet and the Front Street sewer in a hot summer. She looked up.
“How much for that?” the man said, pointing at the woman’s 18k gold Phillippe Patek wristwatch.
Oh sure. Like he has the necessary funds in his savings account. Like he has a savings—or any—account.
Several other potential customers hovered around the store entrance, then wandered away, put off by the old man’s odour and his ragged, filthy clothes. Philip gestured, arms waving, from the back window. Get rid of him.
“Five thousand, four hundred. With taxes, that’s well over six thousand.”
“I’ll take it,” he said.
Barbara remembers her mouth falling open, feels her eyes widening, as the man opened his faded brown leather wallet, a fat filled-to-overflow wallet, and took out six crisp thousand dollar notes, six crisp purple thousands, and laid them on the counter.
She remembers Philip charging in, screaming. “Get out of the store, you smelly old bum, before I call the police.”
She recalls, blip by blip, as if the scene plays in slow motion on a screen in front of her, the look on the old man’s face. Defeat. The feeling in her own chest. Shame. She remembers her own quiet, cold words: “Don’t you ever, ever, talk to a customer that way.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you changed your mind, sir,” she said, pushing Philip aside, clutching the old man’s grimy jacket. “But I sincerely hope you don’t.”
He riffled in the faded wallet, located three crisp new hundreds and carefully placed them on top of the thousands, the Queen’s head all facing the same direction, the bills neatly lined up.
“Can you gift wrap it?” he asked. “In something young? She’s sixteen Christmas Day.”
“Certainly, sir.”
“Sir,” he marveled, turning over the word, revealing its hidden underside. “Sir, sir.” As if the word is an echo from long ago halls, the ghost of Christmas past.
Strange, she had forgotten.
Up ahead, the Palais Royale hides its once proud head behind a canopy of trees, some leafless, some bare at the top and fully clothed below. Once, in the thirties and forties, even into the fifties, the best big bands on the continent played here. Tommy Dorsey. Count Basie. When she walks by, Barbara imagines she can hear the wail of the Louis Armstrong’s trumpet and the high reaching notes of a tenor sax, can still see the sheen of the ladies’ long, satin gowns and the glow from the gentlemen’s dinner jackets. If she closes her eyes, she can feel the rhythm of the music and the brush of the dancers’ skirts as they twirl past.
The Palais has, in the words of Misty Mason’s mother, “seen better times”. Misty’s mother and father danced many nights away at the Palais and if they’d stuck to just dancing, Misty says grimly whenever her mother mentions this, they wouldn’t have been forced to marry and make her life miserable. Dorothy Stanton, eighty-five years old and frail as a withered orchid corsage, always wants to drive to the Palais when she comes to visit Misty; she is always distressed by its “sad state of disrepair”. Though the Palais is still a dance hall featuring swing bands, each fall, more of the faded white paint, once as bright and vibrant as the music, peels and mixes with the brittle leaves. Each spring, the verandah facing the lake seems to sag another inch or two, despite its recent replacement. Perhaps, in the Palais Royale, Dorothy witnesses the progress of her own decline. Though she prefers to recall its “heyday”, she cannot dismiss the ravages of years of neglect.
Barbara doesn’t see him at first. She sees his straw bundle, neatly wrapped in his army blanket, on the verandah wall. Then he is there, on the verandah, just above the steps, facing Lake Ontario and he is free of covering, free of pretense, free, free, his arms outstretched, dancing to some melody only he can hear, swaying to some inner rhythm.
“Who are you?” Barbara is loathe to break his spell, but she has to get her answers. Somehow, she feels, she knows, he has the answers.
His eyes snap open. “I am Music. I am Dance.”
He’s crazy, she thinks. But she has to ask. “How did you know about the ballet?”
“Muscles,” he says, pointing to her calves.
“I don’t understand.”
He says only one word. “Flex.”
Barbara points her toe in classic ballet stance. Yes, it’s been years since her last ballet class, but the ballet muscle stands out against the tight cotton of her leggings.
“But, but why did you mention it?”
“Lady,” he says, nailing her with those faded gray eyes, “it’s not too late for you. You still have the muscles. You danced in another life. Dance again.”
She wants to ask more, other, questions, but he has returned to a realm where she cannot follow. With a wrinkled brown hand, he brushes back his straggly hair. He bows to his straw bundle, listens for its reply, picks it up and hugs it close against his skinny chest. He is dancing again.
“Thank you,” she says. “Thank you, sir.”
“Sir,” he murmurs. “Sir.” His eyes close and he waltzes with his straw partner, hums along with the memory of a melody, as he gently, reverently holds her near. He is lost in a past far richer than his present. “Sir. Darling, she called me ‘sir’.”
Barbara rushes home, stands waiting impatiently for the elevator, wills it to move faster, faster. She marches into her closet and grabs Philip’s old, faded leather coat. “Barbara, it’s time to bury Philip,” Misty had admonished last week. She’ll bury the coat on the Lookout, throw it out to sea, take it to the Goodwill repository, cut it to shreds with the kitchen shears.
The phone rings, she picks it up, says hello and listens, flicking the phone cord around her finger.
“Philip, old chap,” she interrupts, “talk to my lawyer. I don’t deal with your abuse, verbal or otherwise, any more.” Patting herself on the back, smiling, she hangs up. She is surprised to find she doesn’t feel depressed.
She sits in front of her office computer, which her son laughingly says is old enough to vote, and begins to write.
The fat, wild geese will leave me soon,
initiate their noisy exodus.
A brown tweed chain, they waddle
through the rustling autumn colours
and slice into the speckled autumn sky.
She writes non-stop for six hours. She is dancing again.
Before dark, she leaves the coat and two cans of ham in a Loblaw’s grocery bag underneath the man’s park bench. She has penned and pinned a tiny note. Many thanks from a grateful dancer. Merry Christmas, Barbara.
She sits on his bench and looks out across the rowing lagoon. Somewhere beyond the lagoon wall, a gull calls. A dog dashes into the water and four frightened swans take off, their dancer legs stretching taut, the whispery, sighing whic whic of their wing-beats melting into the warning honk of a lookout Canada goose. The sun sinks behind the Queen Elizabeth Way, throwing a ghostly orange luminescence at the Royal Bank Building in downtown Toronto. The shiny, gold building reflects the sun’s evening good-bye and in the reflection, Barbara imagines she can still see the man dancing, his arms around his favourite partner, swaying to the music of the night.
Copyright ©2001 Ev McTaggart
