Gladys got blond oak veneer cabinets from IKEA and an expensive polished Tyndall stone countertop that looked, Harry thought, both clean and functional. The slate floor was heated. The backsplash was rectangular matte glass tile in Cherokee red, and there was far more space for their pots and pans and less clutter, and the kitchen was a wound in Gladys’s heart that would never heal. It cost $27,000, all of it put on their line of credit.
Harry’s world was unspectacular and unpaid for. If he had lived entirely within his means, if his consumption pattern had taken on the literal mien of a Mennonite farmer who arrived at the Ford dealership with $23,000 in twenties to buy the new F-150, what would his world look like? Who is content to live in the world they can afford?
SEVEN
H ARRY DROVE SLOWLY through the quiet streets of Rosedale on his way to his mother’s. He had grown up here, surrounded by the nation’s bankers, brokers, politicians, fixers, touts, lawyers, industrialists and heirs, a fountain of money that shot out of the ground, and in the gush of afterbirth came the nannies and cooks and gardeners who made multiculturalism such a success.
He had incorporated the neighbourhood into his lectures on political history (Revolutionary Toronto, 1826–1841), had in fact incorporated his life into what he feared was becoming a distracted personal narrative rather than an educational opportunity.
Harry felt the city’s aspirations, its longing and timorous steps, its distrust of grandness, the vestigial stump of its Protestant start. Toronto didn’t want to draw attention to itself, yet it wanted to shine. He saw himself in lockstep with the city, a victim of decreasing budgets and poor planning, bewildered by the future.
In the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, which Harry had visited several years earlier, doing research for a book on civic politics that still hadn’t entirely taken shape, there was a globe made in 1683 for Louis XIV by the cartographer Coronelli, and on it, plainly written in cursive script on the north shore of Lake Ontario is “L. Taronto.” Sometime before 1600, the Hurons and Petuns who lived on the site now occupied by the city packed up their settlements and moved north. The inventively savage Iroquois then occupied the site, looking to control the fur trade. Before the turn of the century, the confluence of trails had become an established village that hosted Senecas and Mississaugas and French explorers and British soldiers, all warily circling the notion of ownership. The Sulpicians set up a mission near the Don River, which teemed with salmon, rather than sewage, and they watched the Senecas spearing fish at night by the light of torches, and claimed their heathen souls for the king.
In 1793, Alexander Aitkin, a planner of limited talent, laid out the city’s relentless grid. It expanded in three directions—east and west along the shoreline and northward, orderly lines that incorporated the old trading trails. A rare exception to the grid was Rosedale, which was laid out according to the winding horse trails that rose up from the ravines. It was here that Mary Jarvis, wife of Sheriff William Botsford Jarvis, used to ride. They were the neighbourhood’s first residents, and it was Mary who named it Rosedale. The predictable civic grid was abandoned, and its streets wound in a concentric maze that deterred intruders.
Rosedale wasn’t where the wealthy first settled. But the grand homes to the south were too close to the water, finally. All the unhealthy things that arrived on ships crept up on them. Prostitutes and rats and drunkenness. Some of thosemassive Second Empire houses had been torn down or turned into rooming houses. The elegant park still had its greenhouse, a reminder of the nineteenth century. At night, teenaged prostitutes now patrolled, their midriffs bared to prove their youth, their feral small-town faces registering hope and fear as each car
Harry’s world was unspectacular and unpaid for. If he had lived entirely within his means, if his consumption pattern had taken on the literal mien of a Mennonite farmer who arrived at the Ford dealership with $23,000 in twenties to buy the new F-150, what would his world look like? Who is content to live in the world they can afford?
SEVEN
H ARRY DROVE SLOWLY through the quiet streets of Rosedale on his way to his mother’s. He had grown up here, surrounded by the nation’s bankers, brokers, politicians, fixers, touts, lawyers, industrialists and heirs, a fountain of money that shot out of the ground, and in the gush of afterbirth came the nannies and cooks and gardeners who made multiculturalism such a success.
He had incorporated the neighbourhood into his lectures on political history (Revolutionary Toronto, 1826–1841), had in fact incorporated his life into what he feared was becoming a distracted personal narrative rather than an educational opportunity.
Harry felt the city’s aspirations, its longing and timorous steps, its distrust of grandness, the vestigial stump of its Protestant start. Toronto didn’t want to draw attention to itself, yet it wanted to shine. He saw himself in lockstep with the city, a victim of decreasing budgets and poor planning, bewildered by the future.
In the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, which Harry had visited several years earlier, doing research for a book on civic politics that still hadn’t entirely taken shape, there was a globe made in 1683 for Louis XIV by the cartographer Coronelli, and on it, plainly written in cursive script on the north shore of Lake Ontario is “L. Taronto.” Sometime before 1600, the Hurons and Petuns who lived on the site now occupied by the city packed up their settlements and moved north. The inventively savage Iroquois then occupied the site, looking to control the fur trade. Before the turn of the century, the confluence of trails had become an established village that hosted Senecas and Mississaugas and French explorers and British soldiers, all warily circling the notion of ownership. The Sulpicians set up a mission near the Don River, which teemed with salmon, rather than sewage, and they watched the Senecas spearing fish at night by the light of torches, and claimed their heathen souls for the king.
In 1793, Alexander Aitkin, a planner of limited talent, laid out the city’s relentless grid. It expanded in three directions—east and west along the shoreline and northward, orderly lines that incorporated the old trading trails. A rare exception to the grid was Rosedale, which was laid out according to the winding horse trails that rose up from the ravines. It was here that Mary Jarvis, wife of Sheriff William Botsford Jarvis, used to ride. They were the neighbourhood’s first residents, and it was Mary who named it Rosedale. The predictable civic grid was abandoned, and its streets wound in a concentric maze that deterred intruders.
Rosedale wasn’t where the wealthy first settled. But the grand homes to the south were too close to the water, finally. All the unhealthy things that arrived on ships crept up on them. Prostitutes and rats and drunkenness. Some of thosemassive Second Empire houses had been torn down or turned into rooming houses. The elegant park still had its greenhouse, a reminder of the nineteenth century. At night, teenaged prostitutes now patrolled, their midriffs bared to prove their youth, their feral small-town faces registering hope and fear as each car
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