A City Called July

SEVEN

Old Man Bolduc, Alex’s father, was hoeing in the small backyard on Nelson Street. He was ruddy with short-cropped grey hair. His dark green shirt looked too hot for the day and too big for his frame. The two-inch belt that held up heavy industrial trousers was working on a new hole burned about a foot from the trailing end. The toes of his yellow work-boots peeked out from under his rolled cuffs. The sun shone on the skeleton of a canoe, and through its ribs green shoots were reaching up into the light. Near it, a rusted oil drum was crammed with old lath with chunks of plaster adhering to the wood. The grass in front of the unpainted porch was sparse and defeated, the walk cracked and uneven.

“Mr. Bolduc, is Alex home?” The old man didn’t look up. I repeated myself and the hoe stopped in mid-air as he turned to give me the once-over. His eyes were a watery blue that looked like they were seeing through wet doughnuts.

“Who wants see Alex?” The hoe was far enough off the ground for me to give him a straight answer. I told him I was an old friend from school. At that he softened, seemed to get even shorter and shrugged in the direction of the pink flamingo on the aluminum screen door. “It’s his house. He lets me live here. He’s in dere. Go ahead, knock.” I did and waited.

I hadn’t seen Alex Bolduc since I’d last been to the Grainger Park Lacrosse Box. There he’d been electric. As a hockey fan, I didn’t quite approve of this primitive approach to my favourite sport. Screened in, the players ran up and down the box like they were on skates, and the ball whistled through the air and moved from stick to stick with such precision that it must have been guided by remote control from up in the broadcasting booth. But lacrosse doesn’t attract the ink that hockey gets. So, it was on ice that Alex became a local hero. The papers watched him for a few seasons and then bounced rumours back and forth about which of the National League teams he was going to. Alex turned whatever he did into something between athletics and ballet.

At school, Alex used to make the announcements for the sports department at the end of the weekly assembly. He spoke in a voice that was down-to-earth, shy and precise all at once. He was one of the people you remembered from school-days. And now I could hear him coming to the door of his bungalow.

He looked sleepy and puffy. His unshaven face looked at me through the screen with suspicion. “Yes? What is it?”

“Alex, I’m Benny Cooperman. I was at the Collegiate with you. I remember you were on the hockey team and played lacrosse for the city.” I could feel that my knowing who he was wasn’t helping him figure out who I was. He let a suggestion of a smile work away at the left side of his mouth. It gave him pleasure to be reminded about those days.

“Come in,” he said, showing me no sign of recognition, but holding the door open so that I could get into the house under his arm. The front room was furnished in a matching wine living-room suite. The rug was a round hooked one and it covered linoleum that imitated the lines of a hardwood floor. The TV set was running. “Make yourself comfortable.” I found the couch. The ancient springs let me slide down through the pillow so that I was sitting scarcely two inches off the floor. With my back to the light I could see Alex better. “I remember you,” he said, pulling out a package of cigarettes and waving them in my direction. I leaned over and took one, lighted it and his, then settled back into the wine-dark couch again. “You used to be in plays. Right? You went on and became a doctor, right?”

“That’s Sam, my brother. But I was in plays too. We both were. Did you see The Merchant of Venice?”

“Sure. You were Shylock.”

“No, that was Sam. I was Old Gobbo.”

“Who? I don’t …”

“It’s the character part. Some funny lines. An old clown.”

“That’s right, you grabbed the hair on the back of your son’s head and said what a beard he’s grown.”

“I was supposed to be blind. That’s right. You remember.”

Alex had relaxed completely, and soon we were doing “Whatever happened to” games, taking turns and finding out that Mary Taaffe had married Bill Inkle and Fred Cameron was practically running the Canadian Armed Forces in Ottawa. Finally, I purposely let myself run out of gas so that I could get on with the business of my visit. I told him what I’d been doing since I graduated and that led through my professional snooping to the present snoop.

“So you want to know about the Gellers from me?”

“Could I come to a better source? Your family has been tangled up with the Gellers since we were kids, and from what I hear, your side hasn’t won all of the marbles.”

“I got to think about that.” He got up and looked out the window for a minute. I tried to imagine his father out in the back hoeing. “My old man’s been through the meat-grinder, Benny. I just got him back from Woodgreen two weeks ago. D.r Hodgins said that his system can’t take much more abuse. He’s always been a terrible drinker ever since I was a kid. It probably killed my mother. When he came to Grantham from Noranda he couldn’t speak a word of English, but he could carry a mule on his back without even breathing hard. He was an unskilled construction worker when he met Sid Geller. The two of them started a business that’s got millions of dollars worth of contracts today. You can’t drive a mile in any direction in this town without running into a sign reading “Bolduc.” I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t envious of Sid Geller. It may be my old man’s name up there, but the money’s Geller’s. Papa doesn’t own one cent on paper. Sure, he gets handouts. He’ll never starve. There’ll always be a place for him is long as there’s a shack in the Bolduc yard. He helps out. He draws a wage when he’s working. He knows that yard like I know the Ingram Papermill where I work. I know how he feels because I was dangled on waivers for three years by the Buffalo team. They said it was all settled, but I never even got to dress for Buffalo or any other big league team.

“Papa’s a mess today. But I guess he made most of it himself. Geller was the business head of the outfit, and the old man only ran the yard. After he hit the bottle, he didn’t even run that for more than a few days at a time. You couldn’t depend on him.”

“Did Geller get any help from anyone beside your father?”

“Sure. His family had some money. I know that. More than we had anyway. Geller never lived with a Quebec heater in a tar-paper shack.”

“Apart from that?”

“He got backing from Glenn Bagot. You know, he was in cement. Used to make concrete pipe down in one of the locks of the old canal. Bagot had a lot of good connections at Queen’s Park in Toronto. They used to say that everything he touched turned to gold.”

“Glenn Bagot? The name sounds familiar.”

“Sure it does. Bagot Street off Welland. The Bagot Block on St. Andrew Street. They’re old Grantham; go back to the first settlers in the peninsula. United Empire Loyalists. That sort of thing. Glenn got into highway construction, helped put the new highway through to Fort Erie.”

“When you say he’s well connected at Queen’s Park, you mean he has a fix in with the provincial government?”

“There are a few people in this province that the government doesn’t burp without consulting. Bagot’s one of them. Call him a bagman, call him an influential lobbyist. He has friends in all the right high places.”

“And he took an interest in Geller when he was just getting started?”

“And he’s stayed interested. Even after Bagot’s wife left him and started going around with Sid.”

“Is that Pia Morley? Drives an Audi?”

“Morley’s her first husband’s name. When I knew her she was Pia Antonioni. I always called her Toni.”

“But you’d think that trading wives would have soured the business arrangements, wouldn’t you?”

“Some people have more respect for business than I have. I do my shift at the mill and I’m glad to get back here. My wife’s a nurse over at the General. We mind our business.”

“You seem to know a lot about Glenn Bagot and his connections.”

“It’s the old game of ‘There, but for the grace of God …’”

“Tell me more about Pia Morley. Did she come between Geller and his first wife?”

“Hell, no. That was over years ago. No, Sid was a sitting duck when Pia came along. And she brought connections of her own.”

“Relatives to be supported?”

“Not on your life. Pia has no relatives as far as I know. She’s as close to a self-made woman as I’ve ever met. No. Her connections are with the leading edges of organized crime. She has friends who try to put their money into legitimate businesses.”

“There’s a lot of that going round.”

“Because it works. Pia counts among her pals Tony Pritchett and his English mob.”

“Anthony Horne Pritchett. Our paths have crossed before.”

“Then you know he’s nobody to fool around with.”

“What do you know about Sid’s brother, the lawyer?”

“I thought you’d get around to him. I don’t know him at all. I admire him, though. Taking those people for a ride like that. Incredible. Over two million. And tax free, Benny, tax free.”

We both thought about all of that free money and how it would look on us for a few minutes. I tried to imagine a life away from the City House, with a bedspread without cigarette burns in it and the sound of the rock ’n’ roll band downstairs on Friday and Saturday nights. Alex looked at his watch, one of those big things that tells you the time in six different directions. I pulled myself out of the wine velvet couch and found my legs had turned to synthetic rubber. Alex walked me to the door and held it open for me. The old man had worked his way around to the front. Together we watched him pulling off the dry dead blooms from a bed of petunias. Alex shook my hand and I’d started to turn away when a last question slipped into place.

“By the way, Alex, you said that Pia Morley was as close to a self-made woman as you’d ever met. When would that have been?”

“That I met her? Oh, Benny, that’s sludge under the trestle. We used to go together when I was playing for the Grantham Ospreys. You could say we used to be room-mates.”