Charles Pachter. Leonard Wise

unknown.” After the ad appeared, the papers called immediately, wanting to do interviews and take pictures, but Charles, the budding satirist, told them, “She’s resting after her ordeal and prefers to remain anonymous.”

      Charles completed Grades 5 to 8 at John R. Wilcox Public School, and came in first in a public speaking contest. His Grade 5 teacher, Miss Dickson, told his parents that his work was satisfactory but “less talking would help.”

      In the summer of 1953, his parents sent him to Camp Tamarack, a Jewish Boy Scout camp. After three weeks he wrote his parents:

      Dear mom and dad,

      I have just come back from swimming and I got a few bloodsuckers on me and now I have a few sores from them.… Last night I got sick in the stomach and was up all night.… I went to the bathroom and found out that I had diarea [sic]. Write soon.

      Charles[2]

      Along with the troubles that Charles outlined in his letter to his parents, he was also paddled by the old Scout Chief — a sort of initiation rite supposed by one and all to be an honour. Charles, however, thought it was weird.

      He was told to climb the steep wooden stairs to the cabin of this old man who was held in awe by the rest of the camp. The Scout Chief promptly took a Ping-Pong paddle and whacked Charles on his bare butt a few times, taking an unnatural delight in his task, grunting as Charles grimaced.

      Years later, at Camp Northland, Charles watched with nervous curiosity another example of a strange camp ceremony. In that incident he was witness to what was known as a “circle jerk” — six or eight boys sat around a campfire, displaying the newly discovered capabilities of their anatomical hoses to curious onlookers.

      This experience caused Charles some unease. As is typical for adolescents, he experienced some anxiety associated with his emerging sexuality. Although by the time he reached puberty Charles had fooled around a little with girls, as he moved into his teens he found that he was less interested in them. In fact, he found that he wasn’t interested in many of the activities the rest of the boys of his age were engaging in.

      As Charles grew, Dibbles often came to his bedroom door, concerned that her son wasn’t outside playing with the other kids or doing something useful like watering the garden. Charles came to realize he was not like the other kids.

      “What will we do with him?” he heard his mom saying to his dad at the kitchen table from his vantage point on the stairs.

      “Maybe we should give him some art lessons,” replied his father.

      From that point on, while other little boys were outside in the street playing hockey or discovering girls, Charles was taking art lessons, music lessons, and drama lessons.

      Chapter 2

      Lessons Learned

      Of the various teachers in Charles’s life, including high-school teachers Miss Hudgins and Miss Curran, and Ron Satok, an artist his parents retained to instruct him, the most influential and charismatic of his teachers was Rachel Cavalho, the forty-eight-year-old piano teacher who entered his life when he was eight. A tiny woman, she was always impeccably dressed, with a lace hanky wedged in her blouse sleeve and just the right understated necklace. She always wore her face made up like a little China doll, with false eyebrows painted black, little rounds of cheek rouge, and daubs of green over her eyes.

      Temperamental and stubborn, she fancied herself the inspired mentor whose job it was to develop his skills, his higher thoughts, and his aspirations, and in so doing to transform him into an educated young man of breeding.

      Once she took hold of Charles, Rachel wouldn’t let go. To describe their relationship as a teacher-student one is too simple; he was her full-time project. She was testy, hypersensitive, unhappy, and judgmental, but thoroughly dedicated to her work. She lived in a world of novels, minuets, and sonatinas, nostalgic for a civility and grace she had left behind in London and was unable to find in Canada. Above all, she was dedicated to keeping the banal outside world at a distance. Discipline was her religion; emotion to her was base and self-indulgent.

      She compelled Charles to help her move to an apartment over a hardware store on Eglinton Avenue at Warren Road, where he studied with her from age ten to twenty. The main room was dominated by her pride and joy and raison d’être, a Bechstein concert grand piano and some carefully chosen exquisite objets d’art: a nineteenth-century painted-wood sculpture of a serene Japanese woman, which she always referred to as “my goddess,” a Chinese carved chair, some silk tapestries, and a nineteenth-century ink drawing by Rousseau.

      Charles’s music teacher, Rachel Cavalho, 1963.