“There are no monkeys in Canada, and no flying monkeys anywhere,” Em assured him, but Matthew had decided the third floor was off-limits for sleeping. So much for being drawn to attics. Before Matthew chose his bedroom, he wanted to know where Em and I would be sleeping. Thus Em and I were playing the game of imagining what the empty rooms were for. Matthew was in no hurry to determine the fate of the rooms in the house; prolonging the game was the fun of it. To divine the use of Em’s bare rooms was an ongoing mystery, and Em had other plans for Matthew and me in Toronto.
When you’re new to a city, the landmarks you latch on to may seem peculiar to the natives, but Em and I were hell-bent on keeping Matthew entertained. Em had done her Toronto tourism research for six-year-olds. The top attraction for Matthew was a Gothic Revival castle called Casa Loma. There were about a hundred rooms—copied from Austrian, English, Scottish, and Spanish castles. There were a couple of towers, scary passageways, secret panels. There was a stable made of mahogany and marble; Matthew didn’t like the underground tunnel you took to the stable, but he loved everything else about Casa Loma. There were opulent chandeliers in the dining rooms and the ballrooms; there was a white pipe organ. Matthew wished Em’s house had stained-glass windows. There were military uniforms, displayed under glass—Matthew wanted one of the uniforms. Matthew wanted the moose head he saw in the billiards room, too. Matthew wanted a canopy bed—a funny thing for a six-year-old to want, but Em explained Matthew’s reasoning. The canopy was protection; the flying monkeys came from above.
It was our first trip to Toronto together, but I knew this was only the beginning. Em hadn’t limited her research to six-year-olds. We stayed in a hotel in Yorkville; we could walk from there to Em’s house, or we could take the subway two stops north to Em’s street. Summerhill Station, on Yonge Street and Shaftesbury Avenue, was on the Yonge-University subway line. From Em’s street, we could take the subway one stop north—then the St. Clair streetcar to Spadina. It was an easy walk to Casa Loma from St. Clair and Spadina; Em had also explored some interesting but longer walks to Casa Loma.
Matthew and I loved the subway in Toronto. (Matthew’s mom was one of those New Yorkers who eschewed the subway.) One day, Em took us on the subway one stop south from Bloor-Yonge to Wellesley Station. She wanted us to walk around Wellesley and Church Streets—an LGBT neighborhood called the Gay Village, or just the Village. With every subway or streetcar we took, Em knew where to get on and when to get off. No walk was too far; with Em as our guide, we were never lost. “You’ve been busy here, not only with your mystery house,” I told her. I saw shades of her nonspeaking days—the way Em nodded her head, like it was going to fall off, not saying a word.
In the coming years, getting to know Toronto, I grew tired of Casa Loma—until Matthew was old enough to be tired of it, too. Parents of younger children had to leave their strollers on the first floor. I used to look longingly at the left-behind strollers, wishing I could stay on the first floor with a book I was reading, pretending to guard the strollers. I felt some sympathy for Sir Henry Pellatt, the soldier and financier who had commissioned Casa Loma. Pellatt lost his dream house to the taxman—the way another soldier and financier, Jerome B. Wheeler, lost his hotel for back taxes. Those long-ago big spenders had an air of fascination about them. In spite of the lost hours in Casa Loma, Em made Toronto magical for Matthew and me.
Schools were in session in Toronto over American Thanksgiving; it was late November, 1997. For Matthew and me, this was our third time in Toronto that year. Canadian Thanksgiving was in early October, Em had explained. For Matthew and me, it was the first time we saw those girls in their uniforms from the Bishop Strachan School, where Em had gone when she was a little girl—Matthew’s age, or a little younger.
Em remembered certain girls at Bishop Strachan, but she only dimly remembered herself as a little girl in a BSS uniform. When Em and Matthew and I arrived to see the school, it was the time of the afternoon when the day girls were going home; the little ones were leaving with a parent or a nanny, the big ones on their own. Matthew was mesmerized by these girls of all sizes, wearing identical clothes. Their short pleated skirts and their knee-highs were gray; they wore burgundy blazers or sweaters, matching the burgundy stripe on the sailor collar of their white middy blouses. The girls’ neckties had regimental stripes of gray and burgundy. Matthew stared at all the girls, but Em was fixated on the little girls; she still hoped to remember herself as one of them.
Matthew really liked the uniforms; he was attracted to the uniformed girls, but intimidated by the big ones. Most boys would be. For Matthew and me, our third time in Toronto marked the first time Em’s house was sufficiently furnished for the three of us to stay there. The furniture was sparse, but the designation of the rooms was to Matthew’s liking—so far. Em gave Matthew a grown-up bedroom with his own bathroom on the second floor; the king-size bed served to compensate Matthew for the lack of a canopy. It was a big bed for a little boy, but Em assured Matthew it would always be his bedroom; when he was “all grown up,” she told him, perhaps all the rooms on the second floor would be his. I could see it was strange for Matthew to imagine himself all grown up. Those big girls in their school uniforms were the clearest images of all grown up in Matthew’s mind. Em was just thinking like a fiction writer; she knew how to construct a plot, even for her house.
For now, Em chose the kitchen on the second floor for her workspace. She used the kitchen table for her writing desk; in a desk chair, with casters, she could cruise the length of the table. She kept cold drinks in the fridge; she had a coffeemaker and boiled water for tea on the stove. “When your father and I are too old to climb stairs, this can be your kitchen—if you end up living in Canada,” Em told Matthew. “I’ll find a room to write in downstairs.”
My writing room and our bedroom were on the ground floor. When Matthew woke up in the morning, Em and I could hear him coming down the stairs to our bedroom. Our first time sleeping in the house on Shaftesbury Avenue, Matthew and I loved lying in bed and listening to the trains; we weren’t thinking about my being too old to climb stairs, or when Matthew would be old enough to decide for himself to try living in Canada. Em was the one who was good at imagining the future. In every family, even in a makeshift family, someone should be good at foreseeing the future.
Not only as a writer, I felt more at home in the past—the longer ago it was, the more sure I was about it. Em was a fiction writer who had done stand-up; she was good at reacting to the present. We can all see hatred when we’re confronted with it, when it’s in our faces, but Em was good at seeing what was coming; she could see the hatred and the backlash ahead. Em saw Ronald Reagan coming—at a time when no one was worried about Reagan, not even Nora.
The past has a certain finality; the past isn’t subject to change. Em had decided that the house she’d restored on Shaftesbury Avenue would be her last house, even before she’d moved in. She was blunt about it, from the beginning. “Listen, kiddo,” Em said. “When you start sleeping somewhere you know will be the last place you’ll get to make your home, that’s when the future has a certain finality, too.”
“Okay,” I said. Not only politically, I would always be Nora’s little cousin. Nora and Em went somewhere first; I got there later.
The fourth time Matthew and I were in Toronto that year, it was the week between Christmas and New Year’s—the first time we were riding on the subway by ourselves. There was no school that week in Toronto; Matthew was disappointed not to see girls in BSS uniforms. On the subway, we would look at various girls and try to imagine them in those school uniforms. “Not her,” Matthew was the first to say.