Читать книгу The Hidden Keys - Andre Alexis - Страница 11

The worst of it, when Willow was younger, was being told how fortunate she was, how thankful she should be, despite the death of her mother. She had been blessed with intelligence and beauty and wealth. She did realize, didn’t she, that she’d been blessed? And she would say ‘yes’ and bow her head and accept the condescending praise she got for her good manners. It was almost a relief to grow up thin, with a mild case of scoliosis that gave her body a slight but noticeably eccentric curve. She moved from the realm of the beautiful to that of the ‘elegant’ – a realm of fashion, education and silence, things she at least aspired to master.

From early childhood, Willow had felt herself judged, held to standards that had nothing to do with her. Her parents warned them that, because they had money, they would be treated differently, that people would have unspoken and, occasionally, strange expectations of them. Her siblings, each in his or her own way, managed to deal with the feeling on their own, but Willow found foreign substances helped best. She began drinking and smoking from the age of twelve. She was discreet, always, where alcohol was concerned. But there was no great need for discretion with cigarettes. Her father smoked and was only dutifully annoyed when he discovered his youngest was a smoker, too.

In those days, Willow’s most persistent habit was discretion. She found ways to hide her drinking and its effects. It was only when she drank heroic amounts that her intoxication was noticeable and, even then, she kept quiet and, mostly, to herself. Drink was not a means of losing her inhibitions. It was another way of being alone. It was joyless, but it did bring her relief from the feeling of being observed and, for the most part, it allowed her to function. She earned three doctorates while a drunk: Philosophy (summa cum laude with congratulations of the jury, École normale supérieure, 1976), Doctor of Letters (University of Tokyo, 1981), Comparative Literature (summa cum laude, Harvard, 1990). She was not alcoholic, not by her own measure. By her own measure, she was only a drunk – that is, someone who drank to pass out.

It was not until much later, back home and in her forties, that she discovered her drug of choice: heroin. This discovery was a surprise. The first time she’d tried it had been at Harvard. She had snorted it at some gathering or other and it had done nothing much for her, although, admittedly, it had not been as annoying as cocaine or meth, both of which tasted like laboratories felt. But the first time she shot it, heroin was like discovering that a legendary panacea actually existed. She’d loved it at once: the euphoria and its afterglow, the clean taste it left in the mind, the liberation from thoughts about looks, station, fears and neurosis. Yes, the things she loved – languages, philosophy – faded, too, but that was to be expected and, besides, it was tolerable to lose something when you gained such a pleasing alternative.

Willow could have remained a stay-at-home user. Her money allowed her that choice. Moreover, the first time she shot up had been with one of her mother’s friends, Mrs. Fraser, a woman in her seventies who only ever used at home.

Strange moment: she had visited Mrs. Fraser and had, as she did when she was being discreet, turned down an old and rare whisky, when Mrs. Fraser brought out a black leather pouch with what looked to be a gold zipper. In the pouch was all the woman’s paraphernalia: rubbing alcohol and cotton batten, sterile needles, a World War II naphtha lighter, a silver plunger, a silver spoon and long silk scarves to tie off an arm or leg. She was old-fashioned. She cooked her shots with citric acid. And she believed that silver, having medicinal properties, was good for her arthritis.

– I’m feeling a little flushed, Mrs. Fraser had said. I apologize for my manners. Would you like to join me?

Willow politely admitted that she had never shot heroin, though she had tried it.

– Oh, it’s not the same when you sniff it, dear, said Mrs. Fraser. Let me show you.

With little more fuss or nerves than if she’d been serving ginger snaps, though with more precision, Mrs. Fraser herself had prepared a shot for Willow, using a disposable needle and plunger she kept for guests.

The afternoon was odd, its pieces not quite consonant: Mrs. Fraser’s makeup – too much rouge, a skin-tone face powder that stopped at her neck so that paleness began at her neckline; the smell of an aggressively floral perfume; the way Mrs. Fraser’s hands shook as she prepared Willow’s needle; the feel of the living room – wall-to-wall white carpet, indigo-and-orange drapery, indigo sofa and armchair; an impression of pink or pinkishness; and then, while she was high, Mrs. Fraser’s talk of redecoration, a subject that seemed to come up again and again, though really, Mrs. Fraser must have mentioned something about wallpaper or throw rugs once or maybe twice and Willow’s mind had taken it in and held it so that, along with the ecstasy, there were thoughts about furniture.

Willow’s introduction to the ritual of shooting up was unusual, but only slightly. There were not many like Mrs. Fraser, it’s true. For one thing, few addicts – wealthy or otherwise – were as old, and very few old women were as open about their habit. Rarer still: those willing to share their paraphernalia and their heroin. It made Willow wonder if Mrs. Fraser had recognized something in her. On the other hand, Rosedale, where she and Mrs. Fraser lived, had at least as many addicts as Parkdale. They were better sequestered, but if you were a member of ‘society,’ as Willow had been, you were bound to know one or two. Though she was grateful for the introduction to junk, Willow no more wanted to shoot up with Mrs. Fraser than she would have wanted to shoot up with her own mother.

For years, she shot up in her Rosedale home, alone and in private. Her habit grew, but her discretion was such that, she imagined, few knew of her addiction. In fact, her family did know she was an addict. What they did not know was the extent of her addiction. She was careful to be herself – an innocuous version of herself – in their company. So, her discretion was at least partially effective. At her father’s death, however, everything changed. Rosedale, her home, became a torment. All of it reminded her of him and she could not bear to be there – not even in her own house – when she was not high.

Which is where Errol Colby came in.

– No, we’re not close in that way, said Willow

answering a question Tancred had not even thought to ask.

Willow had never been much interested in sexual congress of any sort. This was not said as warning to Tancred or as an excuse for what some called her coldness. Her libido had been low long before junk squelched it. She supposed that she was heterosexual. When she was much younger, she had been aroused by men. She was not aroused, in that way, by women. At least, not that she knew of. But, given her lack of interest in sex, the thought of an emotionally hectic union – billing, cooing, pecking – filled her with indifference.

She had never been in love, but this thought in no way saddened her. On the contrary, Willow found it amusing that she had devoted so many years to the study of literature – novel after novel, poem after poem – devoted to the thing she had never known nor much desired: romantic love. This did not stop her from being curious about Tancred’s emotional life. On a couple of occasions, she’d asked if he’d ever been in love.

– I have been, but I’m not in love now, he’d answered.

But Tancred, as a matter of principle, never spoke of such things to anyone but Daniel or Olivier, and even then rarely. His discretion was a way of protecting the one he loved. He supposed it was old-fashioned, but he believed in the sanctity of love. Not only love but also the feeling, ever-different, that exists between two who might fall in love. He did not like to read fiction or poetry for this very reason. He had never found a work that spoke of the feeling with dignity. Most were a desecration of it, save The Divine Comedy – read at the behest of a woman he was seeing – which was sublime but over-the-top. It had been more entertaining, reading Dante, to imagine the circle of Hell he, a thief, would occupy: the eighth, with its snakes, ashes and humiliation. All that for taking toys from grown men!

No, with Nigger, Willow continued, it was all about the pharmaceuticals. Whoever his supplier, Nigger’s junk was – at least in her experience – clean. Then, too, he treated her with respect. Yes, it was because she had money. But why should his motives matter to her?

In the beginning – that is, not long after her father’s death – she would take taxis to Parkdale, get off at King and Jameson and walk up to the Dolphin. In those days, she dressed normally – that is, normal for Rosedale. Not a good idea, as people either mistook her for a social worker or called her a Dickless Tracy to her face. She then, briefly, dressed down. This was worse, as it drew the attention of drunks or men who wanted to fuck her. It was then she decided to wear her mother’s clothes – that is, the fashion from her mother’s youth. A variety of old-fashioned duds, day after day, a uniform of sorts. The clothes attracted attention, but most of those who saw her in, say, her black dress, elbow-length black gloves and a plumed hat assumed she was either ‘artistic’ or ‘touched’: not wealthy, not a worth-while mark. She added to the impression of eccentricity by openly talking about her addiction. This was surprisingly effective. You could almost feel the cool breeze as people turned away. And once Parkdale knew who she was (or imagined it did), it left her alone. She would shoot up in the washroom at Bacchus or Ali’s – plastic spoon, cotton batten, needle from PharmaPlus – and then, if she was able, stumble to the lake to zone out. More than once, she’d passed out on a bench and woken in the dark, the murmuring lake before her, the shushing expressway behind.

That’s not to say she was never bothered. She was still a woman, after all. She’d had her purse stolen – grabbed in passing so they nearly took her arm off. She’d been screamed at by aggressive outpatients from Queen Street Mental. She’d been knocked into the street by people who’d have crushed her without qualms. But here, too, Nigger was helpful. As long as she was around him or Freud, people left her alone or paid immediately for bothering her. Freud, in particular, liked to hit. He was happy to sit with her at the Dolphin and quick to take offence on her behalf.

(Tancred said

– Freud’s your knight in shining armour?

– No, you’re my knight in shining armour, she said.

She was joking, but the idea – which she must, to some extent, have believed – made Tancred uncomfortable.)

Nigger, Freud, the lake, the Dolphin, the greengrocers at Queen and Jameson where she could buy sugary Indian sweets, the Coffee Time at O’Hara: these were the reasons she preferred Parkdale to Rosedale. Nothing about the neighbourhood reminded her of her father or of home. The faces, the languages she sometimes heard spoken, the accents, the slightly seedy buildings from Queen and Roncy to Queen and Dufferin – all of it reminded her, more than anything else, of somewhere south, of Key West or Freeport or Havana. At least, in summer. In winter, Parkdale was unpleasant. In winter, she preferred Rosedale, but she made the trek anyway, spending hours in the dog’s mouth that was the Dolphin with its heat on – or, once the police shut the Dolphin down, hours in the Skyline.

Getting to know Willow as Tancred did – that is, in short bursts, from just before the Green Dolphin closed to sometime after Rob Ford’s election – seeing her decline, her skin growing sallow as it clung to her skull – it was inevitable that he would come to mourn her passing: a brilliant woman with a sickness that left her incapacitated for long stretches, a sickness that sometimes brought out the worst of her and ate away at her already-meagre body. On those occasions when he imagined her passed out on a bench or sitting in the doorway to some business on Queen, he preferred to think that her soul had flown while the chemicals did to her whatever it was they did. But the thought of what she might have been troubled him less and less as he strove to accept the woman she actually was.

Days after their meeting by Masaryk Park, Willow asked him to come with her to an address on Chestnut Park in Rosedale. It being Sunday, Tancred found the request inconvenient, but he went along, thinking she needed help with some domestic chore and that it could, whatever it was, be done quickly.

The address in question was Willow’s, though she seemed ill at ease in her own home. The house was, for Rosedale, modest. A hedge formed a rectangle around a bit of lawn, a rectangle bisected by stone steps that led up to a landing. Between the top of the steps and the house there was a larger patch of lawn on which, to one side of the house, an ash tree sustained a cloud of leaves while, to the other, a dogwood – its trunk forked – shaded part of Willow’s house as well as her neighbour’s front walk.

Willow’s house was three storeys high with what looked like a gabled attic on the top floor. All the windows seemed to be French, their slats painted white. The dark brick walls were partially hidden by ivy that ran up to the two chimneys, one on each side of the house. The entrance to the house did not face the street. It was on the side, hidden from view.

Tancred had the unpleasant feeling that he’d once broken into this very place. Each step toward the house gave him déjà vu.

– I apologize for the mess, Willow said as they entered.

But it was a peculiar kind of mess. The house was immaculate and smelled of nothing in particular. Yes, the kitchen was like a room lived in by transients. There were pots and pans about. There were empty containers here and there: boxes that had held chocolate bars, boxes that had held doughnuts, containers of Häagen-Dazs. But even the kitchen was oddly antiseptic, there being no sign of anything organic or rotten. The rest of the house was elegant. That, in any case, was the word that came to Tancred’s mind, elegant. The floors were a polished, blond hardwood. There was very little furniture: Quakerish tables and chairs in the dining room, a single, ghost-blue sofa in the living room, no curtains or drapes anywhere, the windows spotless, the walls white and, from the look of them, recently painted.

– So, said Willow

pointing to the screen that stood facing the sofa

– Do you believe me now?

It was a moment before Tancred realized what she was referring to. Here was the six-panelled screen, one of the supposed clues to something or other, left to his children by a father playing games from beyond the grave.

The screen was beautiful and no doubt valuable in and of itself. It was some five feet tall and, when opened out, twelve feet wide. Its backing was thick, light-apricot-tinted paper. The front of it, a painting of willows by a bridge, was so well done that, when the screen was at its widest, the breaks between four of the panels were barely visible, unless you knew where to look. Five of the panels – thick paper – were done with black ink, coloured ink and gold leaf. The sixth and final panel was willow wood.

Had the screen been an original from sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Japan, it would have been invaluable. As authentic as it looked, however, it was not meant to deceive, not meant to pass for genuine. It was not flawed. It was what it was deliberately. But what was it, exactly? An exquisitely done memento? A work whose meaning was playfully obscure? Having seen the screen for himself, Tancred at last understood Willow’s certainty that there was more to it than one could easily figure out.

– Now that you’ve seen this one, said Willow, will you steal the others?

– Won’t your brothers and sisters be angry? asked Tancred.

Willow ignored this and, instead, went to get something from the kitchen: a circular, covered tin that had once held Royal Dansk butter cookies.

– Here are the others, she said.

Inside the tin there were four photographs, one of each of her siblings’ mementos: a bottle, a painting, a poem, a model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.

– Now you know what you’re looking for, said Willow, promise you’ll do this for me.

The hepatitis that would kill her was beginning to do its worst. Willow’s face was sallow, gaunt and frightening. The disease was changing her into an emaciated, waxlike version of herself. It was partly for this that Tancred promised to do what she asked. He felt pity. The other reason was that he did not believe there was any money or treasure to be found. He did not believe a proper businessman would deliberately bury millions of dollars – or anything of great value. Not on a whim. A treasure hunt, whatever else you might call it, was a whim. So, to his mind, he was doing this for Willow, doing something to bring her peace, a kindness to one who was in need of kindness.

He gave his word.

He agreed to steal the four other mementos.

He agreed to try to work out the significance of each.

He agreed to return the mementos to Willow’s siblings along with most of anything he and Willow might find.

– You’ll get my share, she said.

– You’d give me your inheritance? asked Tancred.

– There’s nothing I need, said Willow. This isn’t about gain, Tancred. I just want to know I’m right about Dad hiding something. I want to know what’s hidden and I want to know why. That’s all. I know you, Tancred. Even if you are a thief, you’ve got principles. I want you to promise me you’ll take my share of whatever you find. And promise you’ll give the rest to my brothers and sisters.

When he thought about her words, later, it seemed pointedly significant that she made him promise to take her share, as if she’d known she would not be around to see it. Whatever the case, he’d agreed to this, too. He again gave his word.