My Father, Smoking

BY DENISE RYAN
ART BY SHARY BOYLE

The art for this story is by Shary Boyle, a Toronto-based artist known for her deeply personal and psychologically charged imagery in several media. In 2008, the Art Gallery of Ontario commissioned two major sculptures that were recently unveiled for the opening of the new Frank Gehry building, where they are currently on view. Shary Boyle is represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto. jessicabradleyartprojects.com

Untitled, 2005. Porcelain, enamel, lustre. Collection: The National Gallery of Canada; Photo: Courtesy of Jessica Bradley Art + Projects

My father has always smoked like alcoholics drink, compulsively, tortuously, lasciviously. Since the breakdown in relations with his second wife he lights one cigarette from the end of another, dividing each day into nicotine-filtered moods. Peter Jacksons for the morning, when invariably he believes today will be the day he will cut back or perhaps even quit. Camel filters in the afternoon, when reality begins to sink in, and at night, when he is tired and thickened with Scotch and hopelessness, Camel unfiltered.

All year, unexpected things have been happening in Europe. Spontaneous protests on campuses and in city squares. Free elections in Hungary and Poland. Now soldiers in East Berlin have opened gates in the Berlin Wall. My father calls me and I go to the house where he lives in Toronto. We watch on the CBC news as Berliners flow through the streets toward the wall that has separated East from West for so long. Some smash it with sledgehammers; others mass at its edges, hoist each other up and stand on it.

“Well,” he says. “I’m screwed now.”

Eight years earlier my father had travelled to Moscow to marry the woman my brothers and I dubbed “the Soviet.” After the civil ceremony they laid flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Red Square. The photo of my father and his bride ran on the front page of a Toronto paper. The reporter that accompanied him to Moscow was a woman he had once dated. In the article she calls my father “the ultimate Western man” for his willingness to risk everything, including his security, his law career, even his own happiness, for love.

Of course it didn’t work out.

Now he wants a divorce. A Cold War divorce. Not a Western-style, fifty-fifty divorce. He’s already had one of those, from my mother.

We watch on television as a young man, stupid with joy, strums his guitar on top of the wall that is being dismantled half a world away. My father slurps his Scotch and water and takes a deep, glum drag from his cigarette. “If this spreads and she gets over here, she’ll take me for half of everything.”

He thinks there is still time for a quick Soviet divorce. “Twenty rubles and she can do it at the post office,” he says. The coffee table is strewn with legal pads on which he outlines the future, makes notes on negotiations and plans his exit strategy. Between us hangs a toxic pall of smoke.

This is the last time I will ever see him.

My mother always said there were two kinds of people in the world. Those like him and those like her and that I was like her. She said we came from gypsies and Jews, people with no flags to carry. She believed we could read the world like a deck of cards. We were the kind of people, she said, that felt things. We were old country.

She taught me to read wax and tea leaves, to throw coins, to see the future in a curl of apple peel or a cloud of poured cream. She believed in omens and unbidden offerings, in black birds and bad dreams whose stony shards were markers to point our way.

My father believes in nothing. After my mother leaves – first she leaves him, then my brothers and I, the house, the cat and the whole country for Mexico – I am stuck with him. Although I am barely fourteen, I go to company dinners with him, I learn to foxtrot, drink port, eat Stilton and enjoy the symphony. He buys me clothes, high-heeled shoes. He tells me I am better than a wife.

One night we eat lobster, suck from the shells claw by claw. He licks butter from each finger, drinks too much Château Margaux and, leaning across the table, eyes bleary, says, “You’re not beautiful, but there’s something about you.” He starts to cry. I am devastated but do not flinch.

He begins to date other women. Women that are married, that wear zippered pantsuits and have television shows, that leave garter belts in the bathroom sink. One is a princess, one a genius. Another has a photographic memory. My father puts his hand over her eyes the moment she meets me and makes her tell me what I look like.

I stop going for dinner with him, drop out of high school and rent a room over Tiger’s falafel shop in Kensington Market. Across the street is a palm reader who eats Kentucky Fried Chicken from a bucket. She tells me I have the murderer’s thumb.

When I visit my father he looks at my thumb, the one that is short and wide. “Strange,” he says. “I’ve never noticed that.”

He offers to have it corrected with plastic surgery. “Cost is no object.”

He is having a bad night. Another romance is over. I consult the charts for him, plumb the stars, turn over cards. I tell him he will not always be troubled in love. “A difficult transit, Dad. The second coming of Saturn.” “Here,” I show him, “this card is you: The Fool.” I laugh, but he doesn’t.

“Your mother’s ruined you,” he says. “You need to finish school. Think about law school. I can get you in.”

Law school. My father knows nothing about the mysteries. I feel sorry for him and the rest of the lawyers. Cadillacs and women in fur. Château Margaux and filet mignon. So new country.

“Think about that thumb,” he says when I leave. “There are things you can do to fix yourself.”

When he meets the Soviet he begins to talk about destiny and things that are meant to be. When it ends he starts quoting Anna Karenina and other tragedies.

On the night we watch the Berlin Wall come down he drafts his divorce letter to her on his yellow legal tablet and says, “She made me cabbage rolls.” He shakes his head, as if this is an unspeakable crime. “I refused to eat them. I told her there are places in the world where people don’t have to eat cabbage.”

“What happened?”

“Her feelings were hurt,” he says with disgust. There is a list of offences. She won’t give up her Communist card. She’ll never defect. He suspects there are lesbian tendencies. The worst of it is, she’s gone and had a baby. In Moscow. “That certainly wasn’t in the plan,” he says.

“Besides,” he says dreamily, “there’s Harriet.” The new girlfriend. He met her at Club Med. She was wearing white pants. They’ve fallen in love.

I leaf through the newspaper. At the bottom of a page, I read, “New study says earlobe creases are related to coronary artery disease.”

I peer over the top of the newsprint. Two creases. One in each of his earlobes. This is a sign. Of course he doesn’t believe in signs, scientifically endorsed or not. He’s likely to say, as he has before, “Do you also believe the people on television are sending messages directly to you?”

I fold the paper closed.

After a moment I say, “I am thinking about law school.” I lie.

He looks up, foggy with cigarette smoke and Scotch, his face softened by surprise. “I’m glad.”

That night I dream he is dying of a heart attack. He goes down eating and smoking and giving me advice. My arms are around him and I help him, dying, to the floor. For two days I tell this story to my friends and we laugh.

During these two days he lies, blue eyes open, at the foot of his bed, wearing nothing but his watch and a pair of socks.

He dies alone. I don’t hear the ping of his soul as it disconnects from his body. I feel no loosening of strings, no unravelling, no buzz, beep or ring of something coming, something going.

I know only this. I call; he isn’t home. I try his office. His secretary, always chirpy, says, “He hasn’t been in. We’re all wondering.”