He smiled languidly. “Yeah. Someday I’ll run something like this. Gotta start slow.”
After the music and the poetry and the speeches ended, men began disassembling the speakers and clearing the equipment. Members of the audience reluctantly wrapped blankets around themselves and wandered off the field, leaving a trail of cups, cigarette butts, and various plastic wrappers behind them.
When Sassy looked at Davey, he was watching her.
“I guess it’s over.”
He gazed back, smiling. “Guess so.”
“I’m hungry,” she declared coyly, wondering if he’d take the bait.
“I have an idea,” he said, reading her mind. “How about I make you dinner at your place?”
threeMARION
Tuesday morning, bright and early as always, Marion rose and dressed for work. She’d laid out her clothes the night before, and it took no time to brush her long blond hair and roll it into a tight bun. She never rushed if she could avoid it, didn’t like the sense of urgency that stuck out like a hurdle in the path of her deliberate equilibrium. By rising early, she was able to make her routine comfortable then arrive at work fully awake and ready to be productive.
Humming to herself, she popped a couple of pieces of bread into the toaster, pulled a jar of her mother’s strawberry jam from the refrigerator, then plugged in the kettle. With her mind on her Tuesday schedule, she poured a spoonful of Nescafé into a cup and waited for the water to boil.
This was the perfect apartment for Marion. She’d learned all about it before she’d moved in two years ago. She appreciated knowing details before she agreed to anything. Being prepared led to fewer mistakes.
When she was considering 105 Isabella Street as a home, Marion’s first step was to figure out its location in relation to everything else. The apartment building was on a quiet street between Jarvis and Church, a short two blocks north of Wellesley. It was about a half-hour walk to work or campus, and the buses were conveniently regular, though they didn’t stopon her street. It was also a half-hour walk in the other direction to Yorkville, which interested her. Marion had strolled through the popular spot, and on occasion she had played with the idea of “hanging around,” as people called it, but so far, she hadn’t. She didn’t feel she was ready for that kind of scene, whatever that meant.
The apartment building was just under ten years old, built in 1959, and she’d liked the look of it right away. It stood out from the street’s redbrick, Victorian-style homes and low-rise apartment buildings. In comparison, the pale white bricks of 105 made the building look almost elegant. Every floor had twenty-four apartments, either one-bedroom or bachelor, divided into three hallways in a T, and almost every apartment had a huge balcony. The laundry room was on the first floor, where noisy machines chugged all day long, and Jack’s Variety Store was nearby for her groceries. And if she ever bought a car, the building had its own underground parking garage, tucked neatly beneath a grassy yard. But why buy a car when she never went anywhere? Walking suited her just fine.
“?‘Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday,’?” Marion sang without thinking, then she bent and stroked Chester’s head. “See you later.”
After throwing back her coffee then cleaning her cup and saucer, Marion collected her bag and stepped into the hallway, locking the door behind her. The heavy aroma of sweating onions immediately clouded around her, and she thought it was coming from 517, where Mrs. Moore would be making cabbage soup again. The poor woman always looked tired. Her husband was a veteran of the last war and had been badly wounded in battle. Mrs. Moore was a tiny little thing, so they hired a girl to bring groceries up to 517 as well as to clean. She rarely saw any sign of Mr. Moore.
The Levins lived in 503. They told Marion they had a nonnegotiable clause in their lease guaranteeing them a southern exposure and balcony to contain their massive garden.
Like Mrs. Moore, the Romanos in 505 were always cooking. Especially when their large family came to visit, which was fairly often. Every year near the end of summer, Marion came home to the heady aroma of Mrs. Romano canning tomatoes. Last year, she’d been invited to help, and thathad been an experience in itself. Marion had returned to her apartment afterward with an entire pot of pasta and two cans of homemade sauce. It had taken her three days to eat all that pasta. Just thinking of it made her mouth water.
Outside her apartment door, she paused, hearing a dozen tentative notes being plucked on a guitar in the next apartment. The melody almost sounded like a foreign scale, and she remembered enough from her childhood piano lessons to know they were in a minor key. The tune was vaguely familiar, though she couldn’t quite place it. A sad song, she thought, setting her bag on the floor. Something about painting things black to match the singer’s unhappy life. His voice came to her—the Rolling Stones, she recalled, pleased with herself. The notes stopped, then they began again, more confident this time. Marion preferred this tender, slower performance; the original sounded hostile. Then a girl began to sing, and Marion closed her eyes, soaking in the gentle melody.
“?‘I see a red door, and I want it painted black…’?”
Halfway through the song, the guitar gave a percussive twang, as if the musician had smacked the strings with her palm. She heard a woman’s muffled voice in conversation, so she collected her bag and proceeded briskly down the hall to the elevator. She had stopped to listen, not to be seen.
She pushed the button and heard a click behind her. “Good morning,” she said to Mr. Snoop. “Have a nice day.”
The door closed.
The song had embedded itself in her mind, and her steps matched the lyrics as she strolled down Jarvis to Wellesley then waited for the bus to Wellesley Station. It was a nice walk; the air was a little warmer today, and she’d worn her cheerful yellow cardigan.
“Good morning,” the bus driver said, nodding as she dropped her quarter into the fare box.
“It is, isn’t it?” she replied. “Transfer, please.”
She took a seat then watched the familiar press of rush hour from her window. Marion’s destination this morning, as it was three mornings every week, was the massive old Queen Street Mental Health Centre, popularlyknown as 999 Queen Street West. The original building had been constructed more than a hundred years before, in 1850, and had been named the Provincial Lunatic Asylum. It was the oldest public mental health hospital in all of English-speaking Canada. When the doors had first opened, the place had filled with every sort of society’s rejects: hysterics, depressives, psychotics, schizophrenics, idiots. Over the next hundred years, patients were admitted then treated within their walls, outside of the public eye. Out of sight, out of mind.
After its first twenty-one years, the building became the Asylum for the Insane, then the more dignified-soundingHospitalfor the Insane. After being inundated by a huge influx of veterans following World War I, the name was whittled down to the Ontario Hospital.
So much had been learned since those early years, so many improvements made, that a seismic shift in psychiatric treatment was underway. Deinstitutionalization, defined as the safe release of psychiatric patients into the community, had been made possible through astonishing developments in psychiatric drugs. The media and the general public supported the idea, declaring that people with psychiatric illnesses should no longer be hidden away. The provincial government hoped to promote community integration by transferring patient care to newly setup community mental health centres. By shutting down the institutions, they also hoped to save a great deal of money. The Ontario Hospital was about to become redundant.
Marion did not support deinstitutionalization in the least. For the past two years, she had burned internally over the dangerous plan. Closing down the hospitals and entrusting patients’ care to community centres could only do harm to both the patients and the public at large. At one point, she had mentioned her concerns to Paul McKenny, another doctor at the hospital, but their conversation had gone no further than that. To her shame, even though Marion believed very strongly that the plan was a bad one, she hadn’t worked up the nerve to speak with her boss, Dr. Bernstein, to voice her objections. As she had always done, Marion kept her head down, unwilling to rock the boat. She knew how easily a woman could get swept overboard by the men pulling the oars.
But there was a storm coming. She could feel it.
