A Darkness of the Heart Read online

  Roy arrived at our front door promptly at 10:30. He was a strikingly handsome man in his early forties, mid-height and lean, with deep-set blue-grey eyes, a flawless complexion, and sculpted features. Moving with the lithe grace of the dancer he had always been, Roy removed his watch cap, jacket, and all-weather brogans and slipped into the pair of moccasins he’d brought in his messenger bag.

  After I hung up his coat, I held out my arms in greeting. Roy took my hands in his. “I’ve been looking forward to this,” he said.

  “So have I,” I said. “Come inside. That wind is nasty.”

  He shuddered. “Tell me about it. I walked here from the hotel.”

  “I’m impressed,” I said. “I have a fire going in the family room. It’s just off the kitchen. Why don’t you thaw out while I get our coffee?”

  “Sounds inviting,” Roy said, but it was clear his mind was elsewhere. He had moved towards the painting on the wall facing the door. “Sally Love?” he said.

  “You have a good eye,” I said. “That is Sally’s. Given the family connection, we own a number of her paintings, but that one has a special place in my heart. She painted it the summer Des took her to the Saugeen Reserve on Lake Huron. The women there make decorative boxes out of birchbark and porcupine quills, and Des wanted Sally to see the workmanship. The box they brought back for me had the pattern of a loon family on the lid. I still treasure it.”

  Roy half turned, his gaze intense. He looked like a man about to say something, but when he remained silent, I carried on. “Sally and Des experienced something remarkable that day. They were sitting on a hillside overlooking the lake when a band of wild horses streaked down the hill, heading for the water. The horses were only a few metres away from them. Sally said their hooves barely touched the ground, and their coats were so black they were almost blue.” I smiled. “She called that painting Flying Blue Horses,” I said. “Sally was never big on titles.”

  “How old was she?”

  “The summer she made the painting?” The memory of what came after that time was painful, and I hesitated before answering. “It was the year before Des had his stroke,” I said finally. “Sally would have been twelve.”

  Roy moved closer to the painting. “Twelve,” he said softly. “That’s incredible.”

  “It is,” I said. “And, as you know, Taylor inherited that talent. I had three children of my own when I adopted her. I was confident about my parenting skills, but raising a child like Taylor has been uncharted territory for me. Luckily, Sally’s family and mine had cottages next to each other when we were growing up, and I’d watched how Des was with Sally.”

  “He was a good father?”

  I nodded. “The best,” I said. “He knew exactly what Sally needed, and he gave it to her.”

  “What did she need?”

  “The things all kids need—love, family jokes, knowing that someone who cherishes them is always there, ready to answer questions and cheer them on when they’re afraid to jump off the high board.”

  “Encouraging kids to take the leap must be tough for a parent,” Roy said.

  “It is, especially for someone like me, who prefers safe harbours, but Sally was always a risk-taker. Years later, when I read that Karl Wallenda, the tightrope walker, said that being on the wire is life; the rest is waiting, I thought of Sally.”

  Roy’s smile was thin. “Not long after he said that, Wallenda fell to his death.”

  “That doesn’t change what he believed,” I said. “Sally needed the high wire too, and Des was able to stand back and urge her on.”

  “And you’ve been able to do that with Taylor?”

  “Not always,” I said. “But Taylor thrives in spite of me. Come see for yourself. She wanted me to show you her work when she wasn’t around. She thought you’d find it easier to focus if you were on your own.” I led Roy down the hall into the guest room I used as an office. One of the walls was filled with pieces Taylor had made as she was growing up. I drew Roy’s attention to a framed drawing of hula dancers with spiky eyelashes and corkscrew, shoulder-length curls, bumping grass skirts against one another. “Taylor was four when she did this,” I said. “Sally said she knew as soon as she saw the drawing that Taylor’s life would be making art. She had left Taylor with her father years before, but she was finally ready to be there for Taylor the way Des had been there for her.” I swallowed hard. “It wasn’t to be,” I said.

  Roy touched my arm. “But we carry on,” he said.

  “Because there’s no alternative.” I took a deep breath. “Now for something completely different.” I pointed to a poster in comic book format that Taylor had made when she was in Grade Four. “This one definitely has a narrative,” Roy said.

  “It does. The Grade Four students at all Regina’s public schools had to draw a picture depicting an event in the province’s history. This is Taylor’s illustration of Mouseland,” I said. “Tommy Douglas’s story. You’re a Saskatchewan boy. You must know it.”

  Roy raised an eyebrow. “I’ve lived in New York for twenty-five years,” he said. “I could use a refresher.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But Tommy Douglas tells it better. Once upon a time, there was a country called Mouseland. The mice of Mouseland had always been told that only cats had the right to govern them. There were two different factions of cats—sometimes one faction governed; sometimes the other, but whatever faction was in office, the mice suffered. One day, a particularly smart little mouse said, ‘Maybe it’s time for us mice to take charge of Mouseland.’ The cats called him a Bolshevik and threw him into jail. The mouse was philosophical. ‘You can lock up a mouse or a person,’ he said, ‘but you can’t lock up an idea.’ ”

  “That’s a great line,” Roy said. “But Taylor doesn’t strike me as political.”

  “She’s not,” I said. “But she chose our family’s old friend Howard Dowhanuik as her honorary uncle. He was premier of this province for over a decade, and he took his honorary uncle duties seriously. He must have told Taylor that story fifty times. I’m not sure she totally grasped the political message, but she liked the mice and the cats.”

  Each panel of Taylor’s illustration was dense with action, and Roy was rapt as he leaned in and narrowed his eyes to examine them. “Taylor didn’t just dash this off,” he said. “There’s real precision here.”

  “She won a plaque for that poster,” I said. “Our MLA presented it in the rotunda of the legislature. Unfortunately, our MLA was a cat, but it was still a nice moment.”

  We both laughed and continued the tour. As an older child, Taylor had made many striking pieces of art. Her portrait of the late twin sister of our daughter-in-law, Maisie, at the age of six always moved me. Roy examined each piece with care, but I had saved the work I was sure would resonate most strongly with him for last. Taylor had titled it Two Painters.

  The scene was an artist’s studio, with a floor-to-ceiling window that bathed the subjects in cool, atmospheric, and almost silvery light. The artists had their backs to each other. Both were barefoot. Both wore denim cut-off shorts and men’s shirts with rolled-up sleeves. Their bodies, long-limbed and graceful, had the same lines, although Sally’s body was more muscular. Both women had their hair tied back from their faces: Sally’s blond hair was knotted loosely at her neck; Taylor’s dark hair was in a ponytail.

  Physically and in their total absorption in the work before them, the kinship between Sally and Taylor was apparent, and yet there was no connection between them. It was clear that, despite their proximity, each woman felt that she was the sole occupant of the space in which she found herself. Propped on an easel between the two women was one of Des Love’s bright, joyous abstracts.

  “The way Taylor uses her grandfather’s canvas to link Sally and her together is a nice touch,” Roy said.

  “It is,” I agreed. “But Des’s abstract wasn’t part of the original work.”

  Roy frowned. “What was there?”

  “Space,”
I said.

  He took a step back to get a wider perspective. “That’s a large area,” he said.

  “It is,” I said, “and the space gnawed at me because of what it revealed about Taylor’s feelings towards her mother. Taylor told me once that making art allows her to see what she’s been thinking all along,”

  “And the space showed she felt alienated from Sally,” Roy said. “But ultimately she did fill that space.”

  “She did, and it was a watershed in her relationship with her mother. When Taylor first came to live with my kids and me, she ached for Sally. Not long before she died, Sally gave me one of her paintings. Taylor used to disappear into the room where I’d hung the painting and trace its lines with her finger. She said she felt happy when she touched something her mother had made.”

  “That’s heartbreaking.”

  “It was, but when Taylor began painting seriously, she wanted to learn more about her mother and, of course, there was plenty about Sally online.” My voice was tight.

  “That must have been terrible for her,” Roy said. “The first time I typed in Desmond Love’s name on my laptop and hit Search, the floodgates opened. There wasn’t much about Des, but there was certainly plenty about Sally’s private life, and it was all salacious.”

  “No thirteen-year-old wants to think about a parent as a sexual being,” I said, “and Sally’s affairs with both men and women were catnip for the tabloids. But seeing the stories wasn’t the worst of it. There was a TV interview that really tore Taylor apart. The journalist asked Sally if, in retrospect, she felt that leaving her husband and three-month-old baby had been too high a price to pay for her career. Sally appeared genuinely surprised at the question. She said she left her husband and child because family life was choking her, and that before she left the marriage, she destroyed every painting she’d made after Taylor was born. When the interviewer asked about her string of lovers, Sally shrugged and said that she did her best work when she had an interesting partner, and when the partner was no longer interesting, she moved along.”

  Roy winced. His emotions were unguarded, flying across his face with unnerving transparency. “Why would she say that publicly?”

  “Because it was the truth,” I said. “Sally was never able to lie. I tried to explain it to Taylor, but I couldn’t get through to her. She’d inherited a number of Sally’s paintings. After Sally died, many of them were on loan for a retrospective of her work, but when the paintings were finally returned to us, we hung them. After Taylor saw that interview, she took all the paintings down and turned them so they faced the wall. Finally, we put them in storage.”

  “But Sally’s paintings are hanging here now.”

  “They are. It took time, but Taylor finally realized that her mother did the best she could with the life she’d been given.” I took a deep breath. “But that’s a long story, and there was something you wanted to talk to me about. The coffee will be ready, and I made ginger scones.”

  “My favourite,” Roy said.

  “I noticed you headed straight for the ginger scones the day you took us to brunch at Loeb Boathouse,” I said.

  I set out the coffee tray on the table overlooking the creek that ran behind our house. On lazy days, Zack and I liked to have breakfast there. No matter what the season, the view of our yard and the creek was soothing, and that morning as the snow fell and the pine siskins fed on the fresh nyjer seeds in our feeder, I was at peace.

  Roy had gone back to the hall to pick up his messenger bag. When we sat down, he placed the bag beside his chair and I filled our cups. We each took a scone and settled in. For a few moments, Roy was silent, gathering his thoughts. Finally, he said, “What are your feelings about Des?”

  I had steeled myself for a discussion of Taylor’s future, and this was a soft lob. “I loved him,” I said. “Everybody did.”

  Roy leaned towards me. “How was Des with you, Joanne?”

  Uncertain about the direction of the conversation, I chose my words carefully. “Whenever I saw Des, I was with Sally, so I was peripheral, but he was always kind. I tried to impress him once by saying I knew his paintings were abstracts but I wanted to know what they were ‘about.’ It was a dopey question, but Des considered it carefully. He told me his work is about the magic of paint. I remember his words so clearly. He said, ‘I start with a blank canvas and then gradually where there was nothing, there’s colour and movement and life.’ ”

  “A profound answer,” Roy said.

  “It was,” I agreed. “It made me feel that what I thought mattered. It wasn’t a feeling I had often, and I was grateful. I still am.”

  Roy placed his cup in its saucer. “I believe you just gave me the opening I’ve been hoping for,” he said. “Joanne, do you remember Des and Nina Love’s house on Russell Hill Road in Toronto?”

  “Of course. On school holidays I visited the Loves there, and when Taylor inherited the house, it was put up for sale. As her guardian, I signed the papers.” I frowned. “Roy, that was fourteen years ago, is there a problem?”

  “Not a problem, but something has been uncovered. The present homeowners have been in touch with me. They wanted to soundproof a room in their basement for their son’s garage band. When the workmen were ripping out the walls, they discovered a safe.” Roy opened his messenger bag, removed an old office folder, and placed it on the table between us. “There was nothing in the safe but this,” he said. “When they read the material inside the folder, they tried to contact the real estate agent with whom they’d dealt when they purchased the property. He died ten years ago, so they got in touch with me.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  Roy moved to the edge of his chair. “Because they’d read about the Aurora show and were hoping that, because I’d been a co-curator, I’d have your contact information. When they told me the nature of the material in the file, I suggested they send it to me, so I could hand it to you in person. The package arrived yesterday.

  I felt the first stirrings of unease. “Roy, is there something in there that will affect Taylor?”

  “This isn’t about Taylor,” Roy said. “This is about you.” He paused, gauging my response, and when I didn’t say anything he continued. “There is no easy way to say this, Joanne. It appears Desmond Love is your biological father.”

  My mind went blank. “That can’t be true,” I said. “My father was Douglas Ellard. He was a doctor—a general practitioner.”

  Roy voice was gentle. He tapped the folder with his forefinger. “You need to look at this. If you’d prefer to be alone, I can let myself out.”

  “No, stay,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.” And, in truth, at that moment, it didn’t matter. I felt nothing. I opened the folder and began leafing through its contents. It contained five letters, all of which were addressed to Desmond Love at the Russell Hill Road address, and they were all from my father. He’d been dead for over forty years, and I seldom thought of him, but the image that flashed through my mind was sharp-edged. In it, he was the man I’d always known: tall and dark-haired with a cool, observant gaze and a smile that came seldom but was worth waiting for.

  In many ways, my father was an old-fashioned man. Except when we were at the cottage, he always wore a business suit. The walls he’d built around his inner self were seldom breached. He rarely expressed his private thoughts in words, but on occasions when his feelings ran deep, my father handwrote a letter. The stationary he used never varied—always buff cotton-fibre with his monogram in block letters. He wrote his final letter to me the morning of my sixteenth birthday, two hours before he died of a heart attack while he was making rounds at the hospital. On his way to work, he’d dropped the letter off at the club where my birthday party was being held and asked that it be hand-delivered to me when I arrived.

  Even the sight of my father’s elegant cursive handwriting didn’t move me. Together, the letters laid out the circumstances that brought forth my existence, but as I read them through I
was numb.

  The gist was this: After years of a childless marriage, my father learned that he was sterile. My mother refused to adopt, saying she didn’t want to bring a “stranger” into their lives, but my father was adamant. One way or another, there would be a baby in their house. My mother, knowing the results of artificial insemination were unpredictable, refused to waste months, perhaps years, in pursuit of something that might never happen. According to my father’s letter to Des, she said she wanted “to get this over with as quickly as possible,” so she could get on with her life. The idea of having intercourse with Desmond Love to produce the child my father wanted was hers. Des and my father had been best friends since they were boys, and my parents trusted him to keep the facts around my conception secret.

  The next letter was dated four months later. In it, my father told Des that since the first trimester of my mother’s pregnancy had been completed successfully, he was optimistic that there would be a child, and he thanked Des “for this great gift.”

  The third letter came three months after I was born. My father believed in dotting every i and crossing every t, and the letter reflected my father’s determination that Desmond Love possess legal proof that he was my biological father. He thanked Des for submitting to the blood tests and said he had forwarded them to the lab for comparison with mine and that the attached results had been conclusive. The tests were in the file folder. One had my name on the patient line; one had Desmond Love’s.

  Even a cursory glance at the tests suggested they’d been exhaustive. I checked the dates on the forms. “Those tests are over fifty years old,” I said. “The technology must have been rudimentary then. There could have been mistakes.”

  Roy’s voice was calm. “I’m sure there were mistakes,” he said. “But these results seem accurate. I looked online for information about paternity tests. DNA testing wasn’t a possibility until the late ’70s, but these tests were standard for the time. They allow doctors to compare blood markers that are inherited. It looks like the markers on the tests of your blood and Des Love’s match up, and they show that you and Des share a relatively rare blood type—AB positive. You’ll want to look into it yourself, of course…”