Toby (23 page)

Rabbi Orlovsky appeared in the doorway with a bowl of chips and a small bowl of baba ghanoush. “There you are.”

“You couldn’t have brought a bottle of champagne, Rabbi?”

There were crumbs on the second chair. The rabbi wiped them before he sat. “I would suggest exercise. Learning. Good works. Champagne will give you more than a headache.”

Toby told Rabbi Orlovsky of his father’s five requests.

“Be careful with this, Toby.”

“He had brain tumours.”

“There is great truth in what he has asked of you. Even in the bit about
getting
his enemy. The strength of his feelings for that man. I don’t know the circumstances, of course.”

“It was an affair.”

“Lesser men have acted with less restraint. For the sake of his family, for you, he took a more challenging position. As for seeking your spirit—”

“I’m not capable of that sort of faith.”

Together they ate a few chips with baba ghanoush. Toby was careful not to drop any crumbs or dip on the boy.

The rabbi turned in his chair. “We’re all capable of that sort of faith.”

“Not me.”

“Bravado, my friend.”

They ate more baba ghanoush.

Garrett led a small procession down the hallway. They poked their heads into the library and he described the room and its contents, the mixture of his childhood books and his parents’ books, the books of his adult life—legal thrillers, mostly. The mourners laughed. Someone slopped a bit of champagne on the floor, and Randall wiped it with his sock and winked at Toby.

Mr. Demsky did not continue along with the tour. “Hello, Rabbi.”

“How are you, Adam?”

“Perfect. Perfect.”

Toby did not bother commenting on the fact that the men knew each other. They were roughly the same age. Mr. Demsky’s house was around the corner from the synagogue. He inspected one of the bookshelves, built into the wall.

“You’re offering counsel.”

“And our young friend isn’t accepting any.”

“The religious impulse is evolutionary, Tobias, did you know that? It was on the radio. An ironical thing: the force in society most resistant to theories of evolution is a product of evolution. I suppose everything is. Now that I say it aloud, it sounds obvious. But on the radio…Anyway, listen to Rabbi Orlovsky.”

“I am listening.”

Mr. Demsky addressed the rabbi. “I called him up and said, ‘I set up these meetings for us in New York.’ He said, ‘Great!’ Then we get home and his dad’s passed away
while he’s in New York.
Tobias knew the man was dying, and he left him, for a job interview. Part of me admires this. It takes
me back to earlier conversations, Tobias, no? But I make eye contact with his mother downstairs and she wants me dead. My face on a pole. I could protest: I did not know. I did not know. I only tried to help. I did not know.”

“I see.”

“Rabbi, what do I do?”

“You offer your condolences to the widow.”

“Yes.”

“And you quietly make your exit.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Demsky.”

He pointed to Hugo. “And this? Your son?”

“Yes and no.”

Mr. Demsky shook his head, bid adieu to Rabbi Orlovsky, and made his way out of the library. They listened to the slow and careful rhythm of his shoes on the stairs. The rabbi stood up and pulled out a card, placed it on the table between them. “I had promised your father. If you have any questions or quandaries.”

“I’d stand up and shake your hand, but—”

“Another time.”

Toby wanted to ask the rabbi, on his way out, to grab a book off the shelf and hand it over. Preferably one of the legal thrillers Garrett had mentioned. He wanted to ask the rabbi about the First Church of the Nazarene, if a church turning into a rotting whale was normal or meaningful or a sign of encroaching cancer. But what he really wanted to do was find a hole somewhere and crawl into it and stay there for a week or two, eating apple cores and cabbage.

They decorated the tree
on the sunny morning of Christmas Eve. Hugo’s ninja mask fit poorly and blocked a significant percentage of his peripheral vision, so the boy kept knocking decorations off the branches and stepping on the untangled lights. Toby had tried to convince him that assassins do not conform to the yuletide spirit, but Hugo had insisted to the point of a tantrum. Much of what Randall had taught the boy about ninjutsu was dangerous. The boy was convinced it was his duty to protect the family by foot-sweeping marauders and stabbing them, whenever possible, with his plastic samurai sword. In the absence of actual marauders in the living room, Hugo invented them and swung the sword wildly, injuring houseplants and bruising Toby.

The family tree was an artificial Bavarian pine, from back when plastic and other wonders of the petrochemical industry were considered sensible, not toxic. The lights had always been blue, from the hot twist-in bulbs that had melted several of the needles into aromatic clusters of polyvinyl chloride to
the efficient LEDs Edward had purchased one year earlier at the Wal-Mart in Côte Saint-Luc.

They could only be blue. For most of her adult life, Karen had been an atheist. Yet she adored the decorations, the Boney M. Christmas album, rum stirred into eggnog with nutmeg sprinkled on top, the smell of a freshly peeled orange. Blue was her compromise colour, somewhere between respect and sacrilege.

Toby lifted Hugo to place the star, a rare family heirloom, on the crooked top branch. It had been inherited from Karen’s grandmother, the family star, a mess of cardboard, sawdust, stuffing and tinsel with red wine stains and a permanent indentation in the middle from the year Toby’s maternal grandfather fell into the tree.

All week, Toby had received e-mails from the ABS relocation consultant, with links to possible futures in New York. He discussed them with Hugo, who did not have a strong opinion about living in Park Slope or on the Upper East Side off Lexington Avenue.

“If we live in Brooklyn, we’ll have to ride the subway a lot.”

Hugo sliced an angel off a lower bough of the tree with his samurai sword.

“If you do that again, you’re going to bed.”

“You are?”

The phone rang in the kitchen. Karen had started to help decorate the tree, but she kept weeping quietly as some memory or other came to her. She would try to explain the memory and its significance, but each time she would give up halfway through. There was a stricken look about her as she walked into the living room with the black cordless phone.

“Hello?” He expected Alicia.

“It is his birthday.” Her accent had transformed. At the end of
anniversaire
there was an
uh
that he had not detected before, a swing that was uncommon in the east end of the island. A faint echo on the line. “Did you know that? He was born on Christmas Eve, almost like Jesus.”

Toby took several steps back and sat on a bench that had come with an organ Edward had bought at a garage sale in the early eighties. The hope, of course, was that his son would become a musician. Edward was descended from violin-makers and-players, and Toby—the first son of the first son—had broken his grandfather’s heart by showing no interest in the violin. Edward had hoped for redemption in the organ, but there was only further heartbreak; his son had enjoyed only the electronic bossa nova function. The faraway-ness of Catherine’s voice was all that kept Toby from selecting a glass ball from the nearest cardboard box marked
XMAS
and crushing it in his hand. He immediately began devising strategies. He would change the boy’s name, his own name. They would leave for New York this very afternoon and spend Christmas in Harlem. Garrett was already at work on securing official guardianship for Toby. It had worked in their favour that she had not called after her son. Toby would lie. He would invent abuses. He would say or do anything.

“Today.”

“Today. It is his birthday.”

“Where are you?”

There was a siren in the distance, one of those sirens that reminded him of Alicia in a white bathrobe, with
Le Monde
or
El País
and a mimosa. Catherine was outside, in a
phone booth. “He lived here, in the fifteenth, a small apartment with these
people.
”

“Who?”

“He was poor, most of his life, did you know that? Then he was rich.”

“What are you doing for money?”

“Let me talk to him.”

Hugo had read something in Toby’s expression and watched him now. Karen kneeled down to help Hugo place another angel on the tree. Nearly all of the decorations were angels. It had started when Karen was a young mother. Someone had brought a small angel back from Mexico, a stout brown-skinned woman with colourful wings, holding a strawberry, making a kissy mouth. Every year Karen bought another few until the Santas and candy canes and whimsical sleighs of her own childhood were altogether replaced by angels.

Toby walked into the kitchen.

“Let me talk to him.”

The refrigerator hummed. Toby leaned on it and looked at Hugo in silhouette, the lazy winter sunlight in his hair. The boy reached up to the highest bough, his eyes squinting in concentration, and hung a crocheted angel. Nothing and no one had ever been more beautiful than Hugo. The previous evening, before bed, Karen had been reminiscing. Before she had remembered that she was furious with him, for New York, both of them had laughed, and cried a bit, and the crying had frightened the boy. Father crying. Toby remembered clearly one night in elementary school when he had presented Edward with some Valentine craft he had made, with gluey, silvery shell pasta and some crooked interpretation
of
I Love You,
and how his father had cried. His father’s helplessness. A hole in the sky opening.

“I thought, when I arrived here, that people would know me somehow. ‘There she is, the daughter of Brassens.’ I would be royal. I sought out a man, his biographer, but he did not believe me.” She sobbed, and quickly adjusted. “He tried to make love to me.”

Toby understood what she had wanted to find in Paris.

“He is my son. Let me speak to him.”

“No.”

“You will give him a nice birthday? And Christmas?”

“He’s decorating the tree right now. Dressed as a ninja.”

“A ninja?”

“Halloween costume.”

“Three years old. My baby is three.”

“Stay in France.” Toby presented this as though he were her best and wisest friend, or her psychiatrist. “Your life is there now.” There was a beep, an automatic voice warning that her calling card was near its end. “Merry Christmas,” he said.

Catherine did not respond, but he could hear her breathing in the phone booth, in the dark. She was about to say something. Another siren, this one closer. A man’s voice, a furious knock. “Wait,” she said, through her teeth, to the man and to Toby—intimate and frustrated. The dial tone.

Karen continued to decorate the tree with Hugo. She whispered, out the side of her mouth, “What did she say?”

“Today’s his B-I-R-T-H-day.”

“Oh my God. Where is she?”

“Paris.”

“Is she coming back?”

“No.”

“What do we do?”

“We get him a C-A-K-E and do it up right on Boxing Day. I’m taking him to New York and signing him up for playschool, and everything’s going to be perfect.”

“Do you have his birth certificate? Won’t he need a passport?”

“Absolutely perfect.”

There was an invitation on the refrigerator. It had been delivered during the lunch hour by one of the local courier services. Every year, Alicia had a Christmas Eve party in her house on Strathcona Avenue. On the back of the last-minute invitation, she had written in her florid handwriting, “
It would mean so much to me if you came.
”

He had planned to go through his
Toby a Gentleman
files, looking for items to adapt for the wives and girlfriends of dirt bikers, then browse Montessori playschool websites on the Upper East Side. But Catherine’s call had agitated him so much that he sneaked downstairs to iron a shirt; a drink with someone who was not his mother was in order.

The phone was still in his hand, and Karen had summoned the strength to continue decorating the tree with Hugo. Toby watched her, surrounded by her old tables and lamps, the art that was not art. The physical evidence of her life’s work would not be worth much in a bankruptcy auction. He pulled Steve Bancroft’s business card from the old bureau that functioned as his sock and junk drawer and stared at it for a while. The secretary at the Ford dealership in Pointe-Claire put the call through.

“Mr. Ménard. How are you holding up?”

“Thank you for the flowers, Mr. Bancroft. It was a great comfort to us all.”

“We’ve known each other since you were born. Let’s try being Steve and Toby.”

An intercom announced, in English, that the dealership would be closing in fifteen minutes. Toby waited. He wished he had prepared the exact words. “I was wondering if you would consider meeting my mother and me for coffee after Christmas.”

“Why coffee? Let me take you for lunch.”

“That’s too much.”

“A man has to eat lunch, Toby. As does a woman.” The way Steve Bancroft said this,
a woman.
“You like smoked meat?”

It was an honourable notion, to eat a lunch of smoked meat before decamping to New York. They made arrangements for the twenty-seventh, and Steve Bancroft said that his secretary would make reservations for three. He expressed “absolute delight” and ended the call cordially.

Toby and Karen quietly decided that they would celebrate Hugo’s birthday on Boxing Day, with his favourite foods—macaroni and cheese, sausage, and freshly sliced tomato. A fog settled over Montreal, with the early darkness of the holidays. Toby put on his funeral suit and drove to the mall. He had already bought several pint-sized Christmas presents: a lead-free watercolour set, pre-kindergarten math texts, and typically American plush animals, like alligators and eagles. For the boy’s birthday he did not want anything that would be difficult to transport, so he chose three classic children’s books about New York:
Stuart Little, The Little Red Lighthouse
and
The Great Gray Bridge.
They were too advanced for Hugo, but Toby would read them in short instalments, before bed, to help the boy adjust to a new mythology.

The lights of the towers in the distance twinkled and gleamed as Toby neared Westmount. It had snowed so much since the funeral that the drifts along the side streets were taller than the car. Pedestrians on Sherbrooke turned away from the wind, walking backwards with tiny steps, hands over their ears.

A black Hummer pulled out from a spot directly in front of Alicia’s house. Parking spots were scarce on Strathcona Avenue. Toby’s instinct would usually be to park several blocks away and walk, to avoid any identification with the Chevette. Instead, he took the Hummer’s spot and revved the car one last time to—in the words of Edward Mushinsky—“blow out the carbon.” The cloud of pollution had just about dissipated when he exited the car and walked to the blue door. A couple he had once known well, a doctor and a public relations executive he and Alicia had seen regularly in the early years of the decade, reached the door at the same time. The woman, Laura, was pregnant. She lifted her upper lip sourly.

Alicia’s cousin, a heavily medicated young woman whose name Toby could not recall, took their jackets. The couple immediately detached themselves from him, opening their arms to hug a dance choreographer Toby had also once counted as a dinner party friend. Before he could wave hello, the man looked away. At once Toby decided it had been a mistake to come here, his decision to accept the invitation the act of his phantom self—a man, he realized, he no longer cared to be. It was his boy’s birthday.

The sad cousin, who had been a regular in the rehab clinics of the northeast, had not yet reached the cloak room. A gentleman always walked—the slower the better—and he
spoke with calm and deliberation; Toby called out to Alicia’s cousin and ran to her, his shoes clacking on the wooden floor. The remnants of her drug abuse and recovery had formed a cloud of languid misery about her.

“You’re already leaving?”

At a McIntyre family Thanksgiving dinner, shortly after he and Alicia had begun dating, the cousin had been at the lascivious height of her methamphetamine blitz. Back then, her eyes caught the light hungrily and she tilted her head forward as she stared across the table. She strode haughtily about the McIntyre mansion, drinking Moët & Chandon. Every time Toby looked up from his turkey and cranberry, she was staring at him, open-mouthed. After dinner, Alicia had asked him to go out to the Mercedes, where she had forgotten her cellphone, and the cousin, who had been out smoking among the nymph statues, confronted him with an offer to blow him in the garage. When he declined as honourably as he could manage, she had called him a pussy.

Nothing of that remained in her. The flesh around her eyes was dark and had lost its elasticity. Her nose twitched as though she wanted to lift a pair of spectacles without using her hands. The dress she wore was fine enough, but all of her muscle tone had been drained with her spirit. She folded the jacket over his arm.

“Thank you. And Merry Christmas.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah.”

Toby had just about made it to the door when he smelled Alicia. Her perfume, a custom design from a boutique on boulevard Saint-Germain, had a peculiar way of filling a room without being overpowering when one was close to her. He could hear the familiar click of her heels.

“Where are you going?”

He spoke quietly so the pregnant woman and her husband, the choreographer, and others in the salon who had so recently populated his social life would turn back to their drinks and canapés. “I feel funny.”

“You don’t look funny. You look very handsome.”

Toby reached back for the door handle. “And you look—”

“Yes. Yes.” She placed her fingers lightly on his chest. Her cocktail dress was new; it had been designed and fitted for her, probably by Andy Thê-Anh. After tax, it was surely worth more than his mother’s yearly revenues.