I thanked her, told her not to fuss, said I would arrive in early June, right after the Fairfield Day School’s last day of term.
She said, “What should I tell people when they ask why you’re coming back?”
“Who?”
“Friends, neighbours, people at the golf club.” My mother’s coterie.
“Tell them the truth: that Gerald and I have split up, and I’ll be back teaching at my old school and living in my old building in September.”
“What reason should I give for the split?”
“I’d go with incompatibility.” A good one-size-fits-all reason.
“And if anyone asks what you’ll do for the summer?”
“Say — I don’t know. Say I’ll use the summer to regroup.” And to shake off the post-separation lethargy that had made the task of moving home seem like a Herculean labour.
“To regroup,” she said, slowly, as if writing the word down. “Might you take a course? Or go on a trip? You’re not going to just mope around all summer, are you?”
I reminded myself she meant well, that living in close proximity to the parents would be short-term, that they travelled a lot. “How about this? How about if, between moping sessions, I walk the dog for you? Once a day at least. More when you go away.”
“You mean it? That would be a help. I’ll tell Dad.”
She talked on, I made appropriate responses, and I filled my mind with a greeting-card-perfect image of my parents’ house, nestled under the majestic maple trees that form a canopy across their street.
Rose Park is known for its trees. If you look at an aerial photograph of Toronto, you can easily spot, to the northeast of the grey sea of concrete and steel and glass that makes up most of downtown, the green island that is Rose Park. Or rather, the large, flattish hilltop on which Rose Park stands, separated from the surrounding area by the ravines that border it on four sides.
In the mid-nineteenth century, when the city was a small grid of neatly laid out streets clustered around the harbour and named after kings, queens, and English market towns, Rose Park was a wooded area ten miles away where rich people built country houses. By the turn of the twentieth century, once-isolated estates had acquired closer neighbours in newly constructed manors. Soon, roads were laid that linked Rose Park to its environs, and bridges were constructed across the ravines. With access came development, the building of more houses, many grand enough to confirm the neighbourhood’s reputation as an exclusive, moneyed enclave. Emphasis on old establishment money, of my father’s kind.
Dad is a third-generation lawyer. He grew up, as did generations of Morrisons before him, in the large house where he now lives with my mother, a like-minded import from Connecticut. More than a handful of my father’s childhood friends still live nearby — fair-skinned, blue-eyed men who attended the same private schools as Dad, summered in the same lake district up north, belong to the same private clubs, support the same political party. But Dad and his ilk aren’t the sole inhabitants of the neighbourhood. For every stretch of ravine-lot mansions with multiple car garages (and coach houses), there are a few blocks of modest, 1920s-era four-bedroom boxes. A short retail strip features railroad flats above the few stores. And here and there, on Rose Park’s outer, lesser streets, are small, one-storey, never-renovated houses built as workers’ cottages, some the size of a one-bedroom apartment.
Rose Park is not as homogeneous as it may seem, is what I’m trying to say, except when it comes to trees. The trees are everywhere.
My parents’ dog Tup (short for Tuppence) jumped up and wagged his tail on my arrival home, pretended he remembered me and couldn’t wait to begin our daily walks. I patted him in appreciation for this trick, said, “Good boy!,” and turned to my mother. We hugged and air-kissed, and neither of us commented on the other’s appearance. She bit her tongue about the wan, unhealthy look I was affecting, and I didn’t comment that the widening white streak in her professionally coloured auburn hair had increased her resemblance to Cruella de Vil.
The house smelled the same as always — cool and leathery, with a base note of dog. It looked the same, too, notwithstanding the new living room drapes my mother pointed out, drapes that appeared to me identical to the heavy, formal, valance-topped set that had always hung there. I admired them anyway, followed Mom to the kitchen, and, over coffee and banana bread, listened to an update on the block’s real estate transactions, followed by a report on the latest made-in-social-heaven marriages undertaken by the adult children of her friends. To match the job promotions they had recently received in their A-list professions.
A full twenty minutes of this chit-chat passed before Mom thought to mention the welcome back dinner party she’d organized for me, two days hence, when I wouldn’t yet have adjusted to the changes in time, climate, and culture zones.
“How kind of you,” I said. “But I’m not sure I’m ready to socialize.”
“Better to show your face sooner than later. Let the world see that you’re not down and defeated.”
I faked a perky smile. “You advocate up and victorious as the surface mood to aim for, do you?”
“Don’t act depressed and you won’t feel depressed — that’s my advice. How long since you and Gerald separated? Six months?”
“Eight.”
“Definitely time to move on. That’s why you came back, isn’t it? To start over?”
Perhaps, though not so publicly. “Who did you invite?”
“Our usuals.” She rhymed off the names of some of their couple friends, a few neighbours, an aunt and uncle who lived four blocks north, my married cousin and her husband from three blocks east. No one who had ever been close to me. “It’ll be a festive start to your summer,” she said, and stood up. End of discussion. “Shall we go over to the coach house now?”
The flat had been a tack room when the garage below it housed carriages, was converted to a spartan one-person dwelling sometime in the thirties, and had served as a home to various household staff for years after. When Noel and I were kids, a succession of live-in nannies stayed there. In our tween years, it functioned as a playroom, a kind of tree house, and Noel used it as a bachelor pad between terms at university.
The place had been uninhabited in the eight or so years since, so I wondered, when Mom unlocked the door, if I might find any signs of Noel’s debauchery inside — a wrinkled condom wrapper kicked under the bed, maybe, or an empty amyl nitrate vial jammed in behind the fridge, a porn magazine rolled up under the bathroom sink. But no. The three small rooms were pristine, had been thoroughly cleaned by Mom’s cleaning woman. The only visible evidence of Noel’s former tenancy was a small cigarette burn on the arm of the tartanplaid couch.
Mom opened the double-sash windows in the sitting room. “You might find it a little too cozy in here,” she said. “But you can always come stay with us in the big house if you’re not comfortable.”
The old pine kitchen cupboards and the aged hardwood floors were of a worn golden hue, but everything else seemed to be white — white walls, white bedroom furniture, white bathroom fixtures (including a large clawfoot tub with a shower rigged up over top.) The fireplace mantel and surround were also white, and empty of decoration except for an earthenware vase filled with two stalks of white freesia that my mother must have arranged there. I saw her hand too in the placement of a worn leather armchair, perfect for reading, next to a window that gave out onto a beguiling view of sunlight, shadow, and leaves, and near a bookcase filled with the old books I’d stored with my parents when I’d moved to California. The overall impression was of a retreat, like a monk’s cell in its simplicity. All that was missing was the