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MY SECOND LIFE

 Chapter Five

Part one of Two

 COPING WITH RETIREMENT

I left work with a long-term disability pension. In effect, this meant
retiring twenty years early on 60% of my then salary of $55,000. The
monetary loss would have been shattering if Esther had not had the income
from her position as a public school trustee. I had already been feeling
guilty because simply by having Parkinson's I had limited our family's
economic potential. Promotion had effectively been cut off. Now, our
position was retarded. Cutting back would be tough, especially with Howard
going away to university in a year.
 There was another, no less pressing problem. What would I do with my time?
There was now all day, every day to fill. So, what did I do with myself
starting in that winter of 1989.
 One of the first things I did was to drink. There I was at home all day
alone, with spirits always available and an 800-bottle wine cellar in the
basement. I didn't set out to get drunk - it was all quite civilised. A
drink before lunch. Some wine with lunch; soon it became a bottle - no one
need know. Add that to the usual pre-dinner drink with Esther - as a rule I
would be sobered up by dinner time - and I was a walking time bomb. And
having had an alcoholic father, it would have been all too easy to blame it
on him.
 I was saved from this disaster by Parkinson's itself. It slowly dawned on
me that my speech was worse and my movements much more constrained when I
was drinking. At first, in my haze, I put it off to not taking my pills on
time. I gradually realized that alcohol was the cause; it was lessening the
effectiveness of my drug therapy. I had a decision to make: booze or coping
with Parkinson's? I opted for coping with Parkinson's. I didn't stop
drinking. I was able to cut back to moderation without difficulty, although
if I had carried on drinking heavily much longer it might not have been so
easy. In a way, Parkinson's was my ally. One of the things that tends to go
with Parkinson's is a less acute sense of smell. About three-quarters of
what we perceive as taste is really smell. Since I could no longer really
enjoy all the subtleties and nuances of fine wines, it wasn't so hard to
say, "To hell with it, I just won't drink alone any more!"

One thing that kept me busy over the next couple of years was looking after
family affairs, in particular my father's family. My father's had two
brothers, Archibald and Harold, and two sisters, Jean who had died some
years before, and Louise, who was unmarried and lived not far from us in
Toronto. Archibald, the eldest, was by far the most successful member of the
family. He had spent his career in the Bank of Montreal's Investment
Department working in New York and Montreal. He had done well personally in
the stock market before being wiped out in 1929, and then rebuilt his
fortune. He had married twice, but had no children. His first wife, who had
died while riding a camel in Egypt in 1950, was been a great-aunt of
Esther's. His second marriage was to Helen Edward. In 1975,. Arch had been
diagnosed with cancer. He said to Helen, "Now, I don't want the family
coming down to Montreal and trying to suck up to me on my deathbed. But I do
want Bill to come and see me. I have a special job for him."
 I arrived in Montreal and went to Arch's house on Rosemount Avenue in
Westmount. Aunt Helen took me to his room at once, saying, "He's been
looking forward to your visit for days, Bill."
 "Bill, as I lie here, I want to tell you that I have decided that you shall
be the head of the family after I die. Your responsibilities include looking
after Louise's finances. I am giving you a sealed metal box. It is yours.
Take it to Louise. She will tell you more. In the meantime, I want to give
you the bloodstone seal ring AT [for Archibald Thomas] - my grandfather &
his father - gave me."
 The scene was bizarre, like something out of The Godfather. The box was abo
ut the size that would hold a forty-ounce bottle of whisky, and it was
heavy. It was bound up with twine, each intersection being marked with blobs
of red sealing wax, jammed down by the impression made by the bloodstone
seal. Fortunately, those were still the days before you had to be inspected
by a metal detectors before boarding an airplanes. I got the box back to
Toronto and went directly to Aunt Louise. She immediately called her brother
to say that the metal box had arrived safely with the seals unbroken.
 She then broke the seals and opened the box. There were boxes within boxes,
containing coins - there must have
been a thousand of them of all shapes, sizes and descriptions, some were
gold. Louise explained that they were the property of the family and had
formed part of the immense collection of William Boyne, a great-uncle of
Louise and her brothers and sisters. They had been passed down from
grandfather to Arch and now to me. The principle behind the little hoard was
that it was a highly mobile reserve fund to be used only if urgently
required by the family. Arch had designated me as the next owner and
custodian. Louise wanted to keep them in her possession until she died.
 I thought nothing more about them for sixteen years, except when Louise
would bring them out to show me, which was usually before her brother, my
uncle Harold was making a visit to Toronto. "He's so interested in coins,
Bill," she would say with sisterly affection.
 Our family was very close to her. In the spring of 1989, shortly after I
left the bank, we realised that Louise could no longer look after herself.
She was now ninety-two and had been living in the same upper duplex in North
Toronto, three blocks from us, for fifty years. She had been living on her
own with some nursing care but the care had broken down, she now was
confused, her nursing attendant had not bathed her, the apartment was a mess
and she had a weak back. The previous summer, Louise had been quite sick as
a result of the heat, and had become mentally unbalanced, thinking she was
Princess Anastasia Romanov, the lost heiress to the Russian throne. Her
first words on seeing me when we got back from Blue Sea Lake had been,
"Bill, you have a sacred duty to kill Rasputin. Did you hear that knock? It
is one of my imperial messengers."
 There was some background to this fantasy. Some fifty years earlier, in the
late 1930s, Louise and her mother had read everything they could get their
hands on dealing with the Russian royal family. During the following five
days I heard the same story each evening, with only insignificant
variations.
  Aunt Louise was loved by all of us, particularly Emily. We hated putting
her in a nursing home, but it was the only thing to do. It was left to us to
empty her apartment, a task that we put off for a few months because Louise
wanted to keep the apartment on.
 The task was larger than we imagined. Esther and I had never thought of
Louise as having much in the way of possessions. How wrong we were. First
came the junk - a lifetime's supply of styrofoam trays of various sizes and
shopping bags from supermarkets, all arranged by size and store. Then came
bottles, bags and other containers, some full, the majority empty. These
were the legacies of her everyday life.
 Her other life was a fantasy life comprising memories, real and imagined,
from her childhood. They were mainly family memories, hagiographical in
nature, of her three sisters, four brothers, my grandparents and other
relatives. These and the rest of her things were her spiritual legacy.
 In the end, emptying the apartment took two weeks and took much out of us,
both physically and mentally. What wasn't there was almost as interesting as
what was. Some of her treasures were valueless - twelve bolts of antique
silk were ruined by mildew in the basement, fine China and crystal were
uniformly chipped where they had come in contact with the spout of the
faucet. There were some real treasures, principally associated with two
ancestors, Joseph Walker and William Boyne.
  Walker, my father's maternal great-grandfather, was a Major-General in the
Royal Marines, having served under Nelson at Trafalgar and Copenhagen, and
later in India. From Walker, Louise had a beautiful Indian mahogany campaign
desk inlaid with ivory, two Czech painted green glass vases and a good deal
of family portraiture.
 Boyne, whose metal box of coins I had brought to Aunt Louise, was the
greatest numismatist in Europe in the nineteenth century. He had lived in
England, and then for the latter part of his life in Nice and Florence. The
Boyne legacy comprised almost one thousand lithographs and engravings and
his entire literary remains, both holographs and printed editions of his
numismatic and bibliographical works.
 I had seen the prints before. They had figured prominently in Louise's
hagiography of the family. Boyne was reverentially referred to as Uncle
William even though he died four years before she had been born. The prints
were representations of friends of Uncle William, Louise said, although in
most cases the subjects, the painter, the engraver or all three had died
long before Boyne was born.
 The very best of the art work - two complete sets of engravings by John
Martin, Illustrations to Paradise Lost and Illustrations to the Bible - we
donated to the National Gallery of Canada. The rest of the prints and all
the books were donated to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the
University of Toronto.

Every family has a black sheep. In ours, he was more like a rogue elephant.
He was my father's middle brother, Harold.  Like his brothers, Harold
started off working in a bank, but left to join the federal public service,
working in the Department of Veterans Affairs. He seems to have made a
specialty of working in northern Ontario.
 He was a pack rat, acquiring collections of many things, but most notably a
fine collection of early Inuit carvings, and an extensive collection of
firearms and swords. How he acquired and paid for these many things is not
known, although it is known that he was bailed out by his brother Arch on
many occasions.
 In 1948 he was dismissed from his job, dare I say sinecure, for no reason
other than "they" were out to get him. The "they" were influential, because
the efforts of his brothers James and Archibald to obtain redress went just
about as high as one could go in those days. In these years of government
restraint, it is difficult to appreciate the prodigious achievement of being
fired by the government in 1948.
 Harold was a womanizer - that does not render him unique. What is close to
unique is the detailed daily record he kept of his dalliances with lady
friends and his activity with them before and during his marriage to
Winifred and after her death. I point this out not out of any puritan
disapproval, but to note that his public service salary, and later, pension
could not have kept him in the style to which he had become accustomed.
 His avocations were very expensive: collecting and women. At the time of
his death in 1989, he had leased warehouse space the size of a five-car
garage, and it was jammed full. One of the items stored was a coffin
containing the remains of a Caucasian female. As for women, alive that is,
his paramour at the time he died was pregnant and Harold was in the process
of establishing a trust for her issue. Only when the baby was born and was
black, which neither Harold nor the mother were, was the family able to stop
the process.
 A discovery that Harold's granddaughter made almost unhinged her. She had
asked her grandfather for financial help in going to university which he had
refused. She was able to go anyway, and one of her fellow students, a young
women with whom she became friendly, was telling her that her tuition and
residence fees were being paid by an older man, "old enough to be your
grandfather."
 It was her grandfather.
 Harold's life seemed to be a chain of ignoring his family in crisis while
providing for strangers. I would not be telling this story unless there was
probable cause to believe that I had been violated by this man and that he
took advantage of his sister Louise's good nature. He plundered the majority
of our family inheritance.