The Hidden Keys. Andre Alexis
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