Holes

As cemeteries go, the Greenville Cemetery is rather a poor show. A few picturesque headstones crowded together atop a low hill, shaded by some handsome trees. The oldest headstones, tilting at odd angles and licked clean by wind and rain, are illegible. Meanwhile, below the small rise I’m standing on, newer stones bake in the hot sun, letters and numbers still crisp and emphatic.

About a forty-minute drive from New York’s state capital of Albany, Greenville is today little more than a crossroads in the Hudson River Valley. But more than a century ago, Vanderbilts lived here. You see signs of them around town. A former Vanderbilt farm, purchased by the citizens of Greenville from a descendent of that illustrious line, is today a large and featureless park. A Vanderbilt farmhouse in now an inn.  

After a half hour of cemetery, I’ve had enough and begin walking back down to the road. Just then a Ford F-150 roars up and stops beside me. A young guy with a scraggly beard and a faded black t-shirt sits behind the wheel. He eyes me expectantly, then realizes his mistake.

“Right, sorry,” he says. “Thought you were the caretaker.”

“Well, there’s a camera around my neck and I’m wearing sandals,” I say. “Probably don’t look like one of the staff, eh? Ha-ha.”

“Right, sir,” he says, ignoring my attempt at banter. He peers through a dirty windshield at the far end of the cemetery. “Just here looking for the hole.”

I glance at the flatbed trailer he’s pulling, on which a long steel box is tied down with chains. It looks about the right size and shape for a cemetery.

“Well, I’ve walked around a while and haven’t seen a soul,” I say. “At least no one above ground, ha-ha. Haven’t seen any hole, either. Anyway, good luck finding it.”

“Thanks, but shouldn’t be a problem,” says the young guy, scratching his beard. “I always find the hole.” He drives off, kicking up a cloud of dust.

* * *

I am twenty-seven years old. I am sitting at a table in Aladdin, a fancy restaurant that once stood at the corner of Gouin and Laurentian boulevards in Montreal. Thick tablecloths, dark paneling, Dover Sole and Tournedos Rossini on the menu. Across from me is Christo, my father’s closest friend and, given their age difference (Christo is thirteen years younger), something of a younger brother.

Christo and my father were born and raised in Skala, Laconia, which is to say they take their manhood and place in the world seriously. Which is to say, scowling comes as easily to these men as laughter.

I’ve known Christo since the day he arrived in Canada. My father briefly gave him a job at our grocery store to help him stitch together a new life. But Christo never needed much help. One year, he bought a hundred or so Christmas trees and propped them up outside our store. Christo spent every evening stamping his feet on the sidewalk, trying to stay warm in the biting cold. He sold every damn tree.

That was some years ago, and by now Christo makes enough money to treat his friend’s son to a fancy meal in the middle of the week. Although no one has come out and said it, I know why I’m here. This dinner is a favour to my father. Christo is supposed to talk me out of moving from my parents’ house.

But, instead of launching into the many good reasons I should stay put, Christo talks about his own early life. About moving from Skala to Athens as a young man. About the hard days and lonely nights. But also about the absolute necessity of it. He never got along with his father.

He takes a snapshot from his pocket, places it on the table. The photo was taken on a beach near Athens.

It’s the early Sixties. Bossa nova, James Dean, pink lipstick. Christo in a bathing suit and striped, short sleeve shirt. Standing with a group of young men and women. Everyone looks radiant, the sky and sea behind them limitless.

“See how my left arm is on my hip?” Christo says, pointing at the photo. “Can you guess why?” He pauses for effect. “So my wristwatch is visible. So people will say, now there’s a guy who can afford a nice wristwatch. A man on his way up!”

He laughs, remembering the absurdity of it, the vanity and the foolishness.

* * *

A week or so before this dinner at Aladdin, I had taken a few mid-afternoon slugs of Canadian Club to steady my nerves and summoned my parents to the living room to break the news.

In three weeks I’ll be moving out of the house, I announced. A lease had been signed, truck rented, furniture bought and stored in a friend’s garage.

Until that moment, I had properly calibrated the disruption this would cause in my parents’ lives, but not fully gauged the pain.

As usual, my mother did all the talking. Still nervously wiping her hands on her apron, and for once dry eyed in the face of calamity, she said she and my father would gladly leave the house on any night I chose. How could this possibly change anything, I asked? So you can be alone with a girl, she answered.

To this day, her offer still makes me burn with shame. Still reminds me of my own vanity and foolishness.

* * *

I will never know what Christo said to my father after our dinner at Aladdin, because Christo died a few weeks ago.

In the days since, I’ve tried to reconstruct their conversation, because there’s a hole where a memory should have been. I have to assume Christo let my father down gently. I have to assume that, out of grace and kindness, he lied. He lied about how hard he tried to talk me out of it, because in fact he barely brought it up. And he lied about how implacable I’d been. And then, no longer lying, Christo would have added that of course everything would turn out just fine, as it always does.

I have to assume all this because, well, I never thought to ask Christo when it was still possible to know these things.

* * *

If there’s a baby in the room, Christo is laughing and reaching for it. If the baby squawks and struggles, Christo laughs harder. The baby soon stops. It gazes up at Christo, who can’t stop squeezing and kissing it, laughing, laughing. This is what I remember best. But let’s be honest. Christo could be tough, too. Impatient, scowling, impossible. Which is to say, he was a Greek man from Skala, Laconia.