Free Mount Pleasant by Don Gillmor Page B

in her last friend. If that was the case, then the house would be a prison, Harry thought, parts of it still as dark and gloomy as a crypt. She would have alienated everyone, an impossible task she had embarked on forty-odd years ago and had finally completed.
    Or she had tired of her flawed friends. Felicia had a gift for unearthing weakness, for discerning moral lapses, and perhapsthis knowledge had become too great a burden. It occurred to Harry that she knew Dale’s former colleagues far better than he did. In the early years of the marriage, there had been a lot of socializing with them. And some of them she would still run into, or at least hear things about.
    “How well do you know Press?” Harry asked.
    “Press? God, I’ve known him for forty years. Since Dale went to work there. Ruthless man. I slept with him, but that was when I was married.”
    His mother was adept at giving him news he’d prefer not to have. “Do you trust him?”
    “No one trusts Press. They would like to. His silver hair, that fine patrician head— but he’s ruthless. Though, of course, at some point in a woman’s life, that’s quite sexy. His poor wife. I can’t imagine. Why do you ask about Press?”
    “I just wonder about Father’s estate. Dick Ebbetts told me Dale did well in the market in his last year, before the hospital.”
    “Dick. God, another thug. At least he looks the part. How would Dick know, I wonder. I suppose it’s all on computers now and you can find out somehow. If there is a way, Dick likely knows it. He shops for prostitutes on the computer. It’s like paging through the old Sears catalogue, apparently.”
    When Harry left, his mother walked out with him in her blue rubber boots and waved goodbye as he backed his Volvo out of the driveway.
    He drove up to St. Clair to scout his mother’s new apartment. It was in a cul-de-sac that dead-ended at the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, a lush, peaceful park filled with the famous dead, Harry’s grandfather and now Dale. Harry parked and approachedthe nondescript brick apartment building. What was inside? A student apartment with a fold-out bed? It was impossible to tell from the exterior.
    He passed through the iron cemetery gates. There were a few dozen people wandering the grounds. A small group was gathered in front of the Eaton crypt. Timothy Eaton had built an empire based on department stores. When he was a boy, Harry and his mother had sometimes gone to Eaton’s to buy clothes: corduroy pants and durable wool sweaters. The empire Eaton built had trickled away after 130 years, the last stores now gone. His competitor, Robert Simpson, was also somewhere in the cemetery, his empire gone too, though Harry couldn’t remember the circumstances. Those two grand stores used to face one another across Queen Street. And now the two men communed with one another, conversations that snaked through the damp roots and moved among the rhododendrons and violets. You see how fleeting an empire is, Timothy? I didn’t have any sons, and I look at your offspring and think perhaps that wasn’t such a terrible thing. Your Irish blood, carrying those temptations. We fought one another all our lives, and now we lie forgotten in this pleasant grove.
    Eaton, still unsettled after a century of death, buried in a black wool suit from the men’s department (goods satisfactory or your money refunded), answers, But I was a giant, Robert.
    Harry walked past Glenn Gould’s grave. He had all of his Bach recordings and still found comfort in them, in Gould’s fluidity and eccentricity, the creaking of his favourite chair that could be heard in the background. He had seen Gould on television once, hosting a show about the city, and was surprised to find him so normal-sounding. He had expected a twitchy genius. Though Gould had looked like a homeless man with that overcoat and tweed hat.
    Harry stopped briefly in front of his grandfather’s crypt, then finally came to his father’s grave,