Category: Fragments

Allister Hawkes walked along Huron Street to his Friday morning class. It was one of many old residential streets surrounding the University of Toronto campus, lined with Victorian houses mixed with some from the 1920’s and 30’s. Allister’s thoughts tumbled one over the other as usual: the studying to get done, especially what he had put off for the courses he didn’t like, lunch as usual with his friends at Hart House, maybe finding something to do in the afternoon rather than going to class, a brief self-recrimination for not being a diligent student, a fantasy about losing his virginity, something he didn’t do much himself to accomplish. He was bright enough that he could do well at the courses he enjoyed and too easily succeed without doing much work in the others that bored him. He had crammed linear algebra for two weeks before the examination, the only two weeks he had paid any attention to it and got an A+. He dismissed the result as another instance of the shallow demands of the university, ignoring the fact that he had never really learned anything that would keep, the crammed knowledge disappearing from his brain in about the same time as it took to stuff it quickly in.

Allister saw himself as ordinary and in many ways he was, never standing out as a student because of his inconsistent academic achievements, typical of others, enjoying in his own way the social life of the campus, affable but shy and more comfortable on the edge than in the middle of things. He was a slender five foot ten inches and when escaping in his thoughts, which were far more active than anything he did physically, he would sometimes slouch slightly until he self-consciously caught himself and straightened up. Independent and leery of conformity, he had taken a year off between high school and university, being determined to get a job for a few months and use the earnings to go to Europe on his own. He worked as an office clerk, discovering in it an unexpected camaraderie with his fellow workers, all much older than him, and a compelling curiosity about the mechanisms of business, which resolved his confusion about what to do after his planned return. He enrolled in Commerce and Finance before he left.

On his way along the street, Allister stopped in front of Saint Thomas church, looking at the modest red brick building tucked between the houses not much taller than them, its door and steps close to the sidewalk. It was Arts and Crafts architecture according to Allister’s friend Carl,  who sometimes joined the Hart House lunch group. He had told him about it in a casual conversation they were having about religion. He said that it was Anglo Catholic, the highest kind of Anglican, adding with a smirk “It’s more Catholic than the Catholics”. Apparently, the first congregation had had hopes for a magnificent structure to follow but it had never happened. Perhaps they longed for the grandeur of a cathedral Allister thought, as he drifted into a daydream about his time in Europe. He had stood in old cathedrals in awe of their soaring stone, vaulted ceilings, ascending ancient walls, luminescent stained glass and long, lit and shadowed approaches to alters. Sound and light were different in those places, which he liked best when he was almost alone. He would listen to the few other people’s voices as they returned from the far away-up distance, even whispers caught and sent back down to him as if somewhere up there God heard and repeated everything on earth, or finding a beam of light to shine on himself, watch it diminish or move slightly and splendidly away as the sun outside changed its illumination. He remembered how he would feel a yearning to be more completely a part of the astounding beauty and however tiny he was in these huge spaces, it was not threatening like the ordinary world outside could be. He envied those who participated in what he imagined to be magnificent rituals there in the past.

His mind coming back to where he stood, Allister remembered Carl’s description of St Thomas. Maybe Carl’s smirk came from his cynical view of all religions, or maybe something else because his eyes had twinkled like he was in on a secret joke. It didn’t matter, Michael, being not much of a believer now and later to be no believer at all, thought he might try it out sometime, not from religious conviction, but perhaps to recapture his feelings from those cathedrals, hardly from this structure which was nothing in comparison, but maybe by what went on inside. Easter was approaching and the sign in front of the church announced Easter Vigil for Saturday night at 10:00 pm, five days away. “What is an Easter Vigil?” he wondered as he turned and continued his walk to class.

His usual day began each morning when he left the house in the west end where he lived with his mother, walked fifteen minutes to Islington station at the end of the end of the of the Bloor Street subway line, sat for the twenty minute ride to the St George station and walked to the Sydney Smith building in which he took most of his classes, taking the same journey in reverse that evening and by that removing himself from the roommates, parties, pranks, sex and other social activities of the students who lived on campus.. His one constant social ritual was lunch at Hart House’s great hall, sometimes brought, sometimes bought. A group of friends met there regularly most of them in the same courses as him. He was not close to any of them and never saw them except for these lunches and in class, this being the same for all of them as far as he knew. They were all in their final fourth year. A starting class of two hundred had winnowed down to forty, a decrease caused mainly by students switching to other programs or switching out of university altogether. It was a time of marches, sit-ins and protests against the corporate and government establishment. Commerce and Finance students were not exactly part of the campus mainstream of social rebellion. Allister and the others were working to get good jobs and careers in some form of business. Some came from families whose fathers already owned a business and saw their sons’ futures in carrying it on. Other’s fathers were senior executives. A few like Allister had no such background and had enrolled because there were lots of opportunities, they wanted to know how business worked and graduate with a degree that would put them ahead. It was a man’s world even though two women were in the graduating class. Lunch conversation was usually about sex, politics, sports, campus events, music and occasionally religion or philosophy, seldom about business and hardly ever deep, nothing like stereotypical existential angst of young men in university contemplating their futures. If talk veered into dangerous territory it didn’t last long as everyone helped pull the topic back to practical agreeable affairs, usually led by the one who instigated the offense and realized his mistake. It was pleasant and nothing more for Allister, agreeable and meaningless, but still his single locus of campus friendship. Otherwise university was his solitary experience.

 

 

 

Adam rummaged through the desk drawers thinking his father might have put his draft essay in one by mistake. He liked to edit his work on paper, making notes and scrawling his changes on each page to use later when he would create the next version on the computer.  It was the same way his father worked, filling each printed page with crosses and arrows, new phrases and paragraphs, and in Adam’s case not a few doodles from daydreaming pauses. The essay was one of many Adam had to write in his first year at university and as usual he had left it to the last moment relying too much on the skill he believed he had inherited, hoping to finish just on time in a mad rush of inspiration. This was not the way his father worked.

He didn’t expect the essay would be in the filing cabinet next to the desk where his father kept his own drafts and manuscripts, but he looked there anyway. His father might have picked Adam’s up and put it away by mistake. He didn’t see it in the top drawer among his father’s most recent papers, making him think he might have to go through the whole cabinet searching everything, which he wasn’t going to do because it would be easier and faster now to edit it on the computer, remembering his changes as best he could. He looked in the second drawer just to be sure and saw a pile of journals stacked there.  His father always wrote in his journal, almost never missing a day, sitting in the evening at his desk to write down what Adam presumed to be ideas for his work. He had opened this drawer many times and had never seen these ones before.

Adam and his father trusted each other about their writing, never prying into each other’s work. There were no locked drawers. When he was little he would imitate his father by making lines of squiggles on blank paper before he knew words and began to learn how to string them together in a way that pleased him.  His parents encouraged him and promised that they would never read anything of his without his permission so that he would be free to write even his most personal thoughts. They had always kept that promise, and although it was unsaid, he felt he had made the same promise to them.  For some reason he thought these journals were very old although their appearance gave no indication, being the same Moleskine types that his father used all the time. He knew that he shouldn’t, but he picked one out of the drawer to check. Sure enough it was from 1970 by the date on the first page, forty years ago, when his father was twenty two, just four years older than Adam was now.  He was about to put it back, wondering why something so old was here now rather than in a box in the basement, when he remembered that his father had brought some up a few weeks ago and had been reading them. He hesitated with a journal in his hand and for the first time he broke his promise. He knew this was private but he couldn’t help himself and began to read it, curious about so long ago, hungry for insight into maybe how his father started as a writer, hoping to discover some of himself in it from when his father was close to his own age, yearning to find out that they were alike, that he had a chance of being as good as he thought his father was.

Recently a lot what he was thinking overwhelmed him, taking control and impelling him into actions that mostly meant trouble for him and for others. He didn’t know why, because until the last year he had strange thoughts sometimes, but they never took control of him. He sat down on the floor next to the cabinet, crossed his legs with the journal in his lap and began to read, much as he had done for as long as he could remember in this room. He was in the library, not built as such, but made so by the floor to ceiling bookshelves his father had installed in what was before a ground floor guest bedroom. Books made up the walls everywhere, even above the door and inside the room’s closet, its door having been removed, the only exception being the window onto the back yard and the space left below it for the dark oak desk and next to that, the filing cabinet beside which Adam sat.

This was his familiar and comfortable spot, his place in the library from his first readings of picture books that he would take from the bottom shelf now almost touching his right hand. Some of them were still there because this section about an arm’s length wide and up to the ceiling belonged to him, just like a similar section was for his sister in the opposite corner of the room. While the rest of the library was conventionally organized by subject and authors, these two sections were, as their father put it, life shelves for Adam and Allison. He wanted them to have more than height marks of their years on the frame of the kitchen door, so he set aside their own sections of the library to put and keep their favourite books as they grew up. The bottom shelf contained Adam’s favorites from when his father and mother would read to him. He would come into the library to sit just as he was now and look at their pictures, remembering the stories until he began to read himself. In the shelves above, the titles ascended with his age, each containing those he liked most from the time he was tall enough to reach them easily.

His collection ended at about the height of his shoulder still less than half way up to the thirteen-foot ceiling of the old house. Above that were some of his father’s books, which would be moved to another place as he used more space. A few of his favorite books kept moving up the shelves along with his reach such as “The House at Pooh Corner” which he still took down and read occasionally because it tethered him to when he was little and made him feel happy and safe. If anyone asked, he said he admired how it was written. It was here in his special spot that he held his father’s journal.

He didn’t mean to read much, but once he started he couldn’t stop, the journals swallowing him up into time. Two hours passed. Adam didn’t notice the library door opening. His father saw Adam sitting on the floor staring down at one of the journals in his lap quietly crying, some of his tears making droplet blue splotches on the journal page. Somehow, he knew his son would read his journals eventually, he almost hoped he would. He wondered if maybe he had forgotten to take them back to the basement on purpose. He cleared his throat to be noticed and Adam startled, looked up to his father’s face, in it saw not the anger he expected but concern and sadness. His father spoke, not loud, not angry, not an expected rebuke, but a quiet matter of fact statement.” I guess we need to have a long talk son.”

“I’m so sorry Dad, I didn’t mean to.” Adam said.

“I know son, but you did. It is all right though, perhaps a good thing. Let’s talk about it.”

“No you don’t understand… Well yes you do, about the journals I mean. But I really didn’t mean to.”

This was incoherent to his father. Adam now began to cry more as he closed the journal and hugged it to his chest.  His father now deeply concerned quickly sat down beside him pulling his head onto his shoulder. Adam laid it there and put his arms around his father like he was a little boy again.