Bellewether Read online

  Frank assured her it wasn’t a problem, and in ten minutes flat he had brought her up to speed on what she’d missed, impressing me as always with his gift for cutting through the fluff to get to the essentials. “So now,” he said, in summing up, “we’re down to what we’re going to have to beg, borrow, or steal.”

  I’d been studying the pages while he spoke, and now I pointed out, “Not all of these things have to be original antiques. In fact, there are some places where we’re better off with reproductions. Like the kitchenware—if we’re actually using the kitchen to do demonstrations, the way that we’ve planned, then we don’t want to do that with artifacts. Lots of these pots and pans and the utensils and things, we can get reproductions.”

  Dave thought he could probably talk a few dealers he knew into donating some of the smaller things. “But when it comes to the big stuff, like some of this furniture, there’s no way to get around it,” he said. “No one’s going to let stuff that old go for free. We’ll have to pay.”

  Frank asked, “How much are we looking at?”

  “For all of this last section?” Dave skimmed over the two pages with an expert eye. “Assuming we get maybe, what? A quarter of it donated?” He named a sum so large that it was sobering.

  Frank whistled, low, and Tracy frowned. She said, “See, I’d been thinking we could set a list up like the library does for the books it wants to buy. You know, list all the things we want to get and people could adopt an item if they wanted. Donate fifty dollars and adopt a candle snuffer, or a chamber pot.”

  Frank told her, “Good idea.”

  “But,” said Tracy, “if Dave’s right with his appraisal—”

  “My suggestion,” Dave corrected her. “I’m not allowed to give appraisals.”

  “—then it isn’t going to be enough,” she said. “We’ll need more money.”

  Lara, having helped herself to a cinnamon bun, took a thoughtful bite. “We could ask the Sisters of Liberty.”

  Tracy was shaking her head. “When they gave their donation to our restoration fund, they were very clear on how their bylaws capped what they could give each year for building preservation.”

  Countering with logic, Lara said, “But this wouldn’t be about the building, would it? It’s about the contents. And the contents will be used for education, and I’m pretty sure the bylaws don’t cap what the Sisters give each year for education.” Looking round at all of us, she gave a little shrug. “I think it’s worth a shot.”

  Frank thought it through. “You might be right.” He looked at Tracy. “Doesn’t your better half cater their luncheons?”

  “Not since they started to meet at the Privateer Club.”

  I had never set foot in the Privateer Club. It was one of the ritzier yacht clubs that fronted the bay, very modern, all windows and balcony railings. It sat on the opposite shore near Cross Harbor and often was easy to pinpoint from all the white sails dotted round on the water in front of it.

  Lara said, “A couple of my regular customers belong to the Sisters of Liberty. And I heard one of them saying the other day that their next speaker had cancelled and they’re on the lookout for someone to fill the September spot. I could pitch them a talk about Benjamin Wilde and this inventory we’ve got of his things, and how we’re using it to track down what belonged to him and bring it home to Millbank. I’ll bet they’d find that interesting.”

  I hadn’t known Lara long, but I had known her long enough to grow suspicious when she turned her innocent blue gaze towards me.

  “Who would give this talk, exactly?” I asked.

  “You could,” was her answer. “You’re good at talking to groups like that. It’ll be fun.”

  Frank was looking at me as though he knew there were few things that were further down my register of being “fun” than speaking to a roomful of strange women. I knew he wouldn’t push me into doing it, but since it was, beyond all doubt, a very good idea, I consented.

  “Fine,” I said. “You go ahead and make your pitch, and if they say yes, I’ll come do the presentation but I’m not quite in the same class,” I said, “as the Sisters of Liberty.”

  Dave said, “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “No?” From what I knew about them they admitted only those who claimed—and proved—direct descent from any member of the Revolution-era Sons of Liberty, which made them an exclusive club.

  “No.” Dave was very sure. “In fact, you could become a member if you wanted to.”

  He was really good, I thought, at keeping his delivery deadpan. So I played along. “Is that a fact?”

  Frank gave the answer. “Yep.” No trace of any humour. He was serious. “Our local chapter’s president,” he told me, “is your grandmother.”

  • • •

  The last time I’d driven the shore road, I hadn’t seen much past the taillights of Sam’s truck. This evening, without the rain, it was a different experience. Now I could see the broad view of the bay, as the curving road dipped into tunnels of trees and emerged again into the softening light. The road ran at a higher elevation than the shoreline in some places and at times I’d come around a bend and find that I was level with the roof of some expensive house built close along the water’s edge, its sloping driveway gated.

  These were few and far between, but when I passed the fourth one I slowed down deliberately, keeping my gaze forward in anticipation. One more bend to navigate, one more short closed-in stretch of arching trees, and there it was—the red brick wall that rose along the roadside. Not a high wall, but enough to shield the property within from prying eyes and passing motorists. I couldn’t see the house that lay beyond it, but that didn’t matter.

  I had seen the pictures.

  Once when I’d been searching through the closet where we kept our family photos, on the hunt for baby pictures of myself with which to illustrate my “All About Me” project in third grade, I’d asked Niels to help reach a box down from a higher shelf, and we’d dislodged an album I had never seen before. A small black photo album that had tumbled down and hit me on the head.

  “Ow!” I’d said. Then, as I’d looked inside the album, “Hey, it’s you! What house is that?”

  My brother had looked, too. “I don’t know.” He’d bent closer. “That’s not me.”

  “Is too.”

  My brother had been twenty, home to visit us that week from university, but he’d still answered back, “Is not.”

  “Who is it, then?” Frowning, I had flipped the pages, looking at the boy who had a face just like my brother’s.

  Niels had guessed the answer first. “It’s Dad.”

  We’d stood there in the closet looking through that photo album with a growing sense of wonder until Niels had reached to take it from my hand. “We shouldn’t have this,” he had said. He’d put it back where it had been, up on the shelf. “Dad wouldn’t want us looking at it.”

  “Why?” I’d asked.

  Niels hadn’t been specific. “He just wouldn’t.”

  But I’d gone back to that closet later, used a chair to stand on, and retrieved the album from the shelf to look at it more carefully. I’d seen the photos of my father, sometimes with another boy who looked like him, but taller; sometimes with an older woman, or an older man, or both. And very often with that house—that mansion, really—in the background.

  I’d gone back to look at it the next day, and the next, until my mother had asked why I had been standing on the chair. I’d been a truthful child. I’d told her.

  “Oh,” she’d said. I could still remember. She’d been dusting. She had kept her back towards me for a moment while she’d concentrated on the bevelled edge of the long mirror in our hallway. Then she’d said what Niels had said. “Your father wouldn’t want you looking at that. It would make him sad.”

  “That other boy who’s in the pictures with him. Is that Uncle Jack?”

  “Yes.”

  “And are those his parents?”

  “Yes.
”

  My grandparents, I’d thought. It had seemed strange, because I’d only ever known one set of grandparents.

  “And is that house the house where Dad grew up?”

  “Yes. No more questions, now,” she’d warned me, as we’d heard my father’s footsteps coming up the stairs. And when I’d looked to find the album next time, it was gone. I never saw it after that.

  My mother hid things like an expert.

  But that didn’t matter. I had seen the pictures. I’d remembered what was written on the sign above the gateposts. And the next time I’d been at my best friend’s house, I’d looked it up on her computer: Bridlemere.

  That’s how I’d learned that the house had been built in the late 1940s for my father’s father—my grandfather—Werner Van Hoek, on a piece of land that had belonged to my grandmother’s family—my family—for six generations.

  The driveway had come into view now, the gates framed by red brick posts standing like guardians, the name of the house wrought in iron above them. I couldn’t have counted the number of times, from my childhood till now, I’d imagined myself driving up to those gates and demanding they open to let me pass through, so that I could see with my own eyes where my father had come from. The home he had left behind.

  This evening, given that chance, I did nothing. I simply drove by. And if Bridlemere’s gates even noticed my passing, they didn’t let on.

  • • •

  “What I don’t understand,” said Rachel, scooping out the last piece of lasagne, “is how anyone could do it.”

  She was sitting at the breakfast bar and watching while I tidied up the kitchen counter, tucking takeout menus behind canisters and sweeping all the other papers into one of the deep bottom drawers, beneath the folded tea-towels.

  “I mean,” said Rachel, holding to the subject like a pit bull, “Dad would never have disowned me.”

  “I don’t know. That time you broke curfew and ended up getting in trouble with . . . what was her name?”

  “Amy. And the policeman was really nice.”

  “I’m sure he was. I’m just saying, you came pretty close, there, to being disowned.” We both knew I was only teasing, but I raised my glass to hide my smile so I’d at least look serious. I’d skipped the lasagne, myself, and gone straight for the wine. It was helping. “The only thing that saved you was the fact your dad had done the same thing when he was a teenager.”

  “My dad? My strait-laced, keep-it-legal father?”

  “That’s the one.” I told her all about it, then, because I’d found it did us both good when I told these stories—sharing all the little parts of Niels that I held close, and passing them like legacies to Rachel. She was laughing when I’d finished, and that, too, was good. “Your grandfather,” I promised her, “was furious.”

  “I can’t imagine Grandpa being furious.”

  “You’ll have to take my word for it.”

  “But see? That only proves my point. Your kids might make you really mad, but you don’t go and cut them off. You don’t stop talking to them.”

  “Well, I think with Grandpa and his parents, things were just a bit more complicated.”

  “How?”

  I couldn’t form an easy answer. Reaching for the wine bottle, I filled my glass again and thought about it, searching for the proper words.

  There wasn’t any simple way to talk of how wars had divided people’s loyalties and shattered family ties down through the centuries. I thought of Joseph Wilde, the brother Frank had told me no one really talked about, not even now, his name and birth date all that had remained of him within the family record. When he’d taken sides against his brothers in the Revolution, I didn’t doubt he’d been cut dead by all his family, as my father had been. Like my father, Joseph Wilde had travelled north to start a new life in another country. Like my father, probably he’d never seen his home again. A heavy price to pay, I thought, for following your conscience.

  My father’s conscience hadn’t made him fight against his family. But it had made him refuse to fight the war they’d wanted him to fight; the war that had already killed his older brother, Jack.

  My father’s conscience had been speaking louder to him, I supposed, than any threats or arguments his parents might have made. And so he’d let it lead him north, to Canada, and they had not forgiven him.

  It hadn’t been a secret in our house, when I was growing up. My parents had a lot of friends who also had been draft resisters; who’d come up to Montreal the same year as my father, and who’d formed their own community around the same shared neighbourhood. And even when my parents moved the family to Toronto after I was born, they all still stayed in touch and visited.

  My mother had explained to me, the year I’d started school, in simple terms.

  “There was a war in Vietnam,” she’d said. “Your father’s brother died there. Lots of people didn’t think it was a good war to be fighting. If you didn’t want to fight the war, you had to come to Canada, or go to jail. Your father’s parents didn’t think that he should come to Canada. They told him if he did, they’d never speak to him again.”

  “What did he do?” I’d asked, although I had already known the answer.

  “He came anyway.” She’d looked at me. “Sometimes, you can’t make everybody happy.”

  I had learned, as I grew older, that my father didn’t like to talk about the past. His past. He really didn’t like to talk about his brother. These were like the sometimes unseen bruises that were left when you had fallen from your skateboard on your knees and, even though there were no scrapes or scratches, if you pressed your fingers on the spot it still hurt afterwards for days. My father’s memories of the past were like those bruises, and we took care not to poke them.

  In my eighth-grade history class we’d watched a vivid documentary about the Vietnam War, and I’d finally understood in a more grown-up and complete way what it was my father and his friends had faced, and why they’d protested, and why it had been difficult for everyone involved.

  But sometimes, honestly, I thought the simpler answer I’d been given as a child was still the truest one.

  Sometimes, you can’t make everybody happy.

  “How,” demanded Rachel, “was it complicated?”

  With a shrug, I drank my wine and told her, “It just was.”

  Unconvinced, she said, “Well, it’s a good thing that it will be you and not me at that Sisters of Liberty lunch thing. I’d tell Great-Grandma Van Hoek what I thought of her, right to her face.”

  There were no guarantees that I wouldn’t be tempted to do the same thing, I thought. Even if, as the museum’s curator, I’d have to be diplomatic.

  My niece said, “I saw her once, you know. When Dad and I first moved here.”

  “Did you?” I’d only seen her in photographs.

  “Yeah. She looked like a—”

  “Hold that thought,” I interrupted. My cell phone was playing a personal ringtone—the iconic whistling theme from a Clint Eastwood western—which meant it was Tyler. I answered and put him on video. “Hi.”

  Rachel rolled her eyes, slid from her stool at the counter, and left me alone to my nightly call.

  Just seeing Tyler’s face made me feel happier. When I’d first met him I thought he’d been way too good-looking to wish for. His smile had been perfect, his tawny hair cut just a little bit long so the curling ends gave it a sleep-rumpled look, and his blue eyes so clear and so blue in his suntanned face that for the first while I’d thought he wore contacts. But all of it, as I’d eventually learned, had been real. And that smile was for me.

  I asked, “How was your day?”

  “Not too bad. Yours?”

  I told him, with help from a third glass of wine, just exactly how my day had been. And I threw in the highlights of last night’s board meeting.

  “Wow. Fun.”

  “Not really. But at least I’ll get a break from it next weekend. Oh, and the hotel said that we can hav
e the bigger room, the one that has the view. If I can pack the car the night before, I can drop Rachel at her residence and get her all unloaded and have time to make it down to the hotel to meet you there for lunch, is that okay?”

  “About that,” Tyler said.

  The way he said it warned me.

  “What?”

  “Well, Bob from work . . . remember Bob? His wife walked out on him last month, and he’s been having a hard time, so some of us decided we should take him to Atlantic City. Cheer him up.”

  “And?”

  “And the guys decided that we’re doing that next weekend.” He could see my face. “I’m sorry,” he said, sounding like he was. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise. We can meet up in the city anytime, right?”

  “But I made the reservation. Like you asked me to,” I said. “It’s non-refundable.”

  “I’ll cover that, don’t worry. Hey, you can still go and stay yourself. Go see a show, or something. Have a break, like you were saying.”

  “Ty.”

  He promised me again, “I’ll make it up to you.” And smiled the smile he knew would end the argument.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to argue; that I didn’t want to push the point and ask him why his boys’ night in Atlantic City had to be next weekend, why it couldn’t be the weekend after that, and why he felt it was okay to let me down but not his co-workers.

  But when he smiled like that—his salesman smile—I knew his mind was set, and nothing I could say was going to change things.

  “Fine,” I said.

  I said it once again when we were finishing the phone call, and he wanted to make sure I wasn’t mad at him.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  And not long after that, when Rachel came downstairs to put the kettle on and found me standing at the sink, intent on scrubbing every bit of baked-on spatter from the glass lasagne dish, she asked, “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  There was a pause.

  “Okay, then,” Rachel said. And very wisely left me on my own.