Fiction: The last house on Howard Street

READ or LISTEN to a literary fiction story about a crafty old woman, a greedy developer and the soul of a neighbourhood hanging in the balance.

If you want to listen to this story, narrated by the author, this is your link.

All this time I thought I tricked Barry good. But in the end, Barry tricked me.

I’ll leave the ending out, though, when I tell Cheryl about him. She’s making herself comfortable across from me on the floral-print couch—it’s one of a matching set I brought with me from Howard Street.

The couches are too wide for the modern bungalow living room, but Cheryl pretends not to notice. She’s the Avon lady for these parts—a Toronto suburb I just moved to a month ago. I remember seeing her the day I moved in, rolling past the moving van in her wooden station wagon, eyeing me up.

“Sorry, I don’t have coffee,” I say, while I pour her a cup of tea, taking note of the way her eyes land on my liver-spotted hands. I sit back on the matching couch opposite, and her gaze flicks up my green wool dress, resting on my old-lady hair, coiffed into the shape of a cauliflower. She’s appraising me like any salesman would, searching for a way in through the cracks of my personhood.

“Tea is just splendid,” she lies. But it’s okay, because I lied too—I do have coffee, I merely want to test her commitment.

“You’re the first visitor I’ve had since moving. I haven’t had the chance to stock up on essentials.”

“It’s no bother,” Cheryl says, smiling—probably because she thinks an apologetic, lonely old woman will be easy to sell things to. “So, what brings you to the neighborhood?”

“Well, Cheryl, funny you should ask. The last visitor I had at my old house is what brings me here. He was also trying to sell me something.”

Cheryl’s lips tighten at this; colour rises to her rouged cheeks as though she’d been hoping I wouldn’t realize her neighborly visit had an ulterior motive. And just like that, I have her. My audience is captive. She can’t leave now without seeming rude—a good salesman has to see it through to the end.

“Oh?” she says, the least amount of question she can ask—but a question, nonetheless.

“Yes. My last visitor was a man named Barry.”

***

It was the spring of 1967 the first time he came around my house. Even the way he knocked was rehearsed. Little old me answered the door with my face arranged into its best ‘confused grandmother’ expression: a slight frown with furrowed eyes, peering up at the tall man in his pale-blue suit.

“Yes?” I said to him through the gap in the door. He was thick around the middle and sported a red, bushy mustache.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Chaffey,” he said in a booming voice. “My name is Barry Sobczynski, and I’m with the Marion Group. I wondered if I might trouble you for five minutes of your time?”

“Oh my!” I said, feigning surprise-guest shock. “Do come in, but forgive my appearance.”

He sat on my floral-print couch and undid the button of his jacket to give his stomach room, then set to admiring my copper fireplace.

“I polish it monthly, if you can believe it,” I told him, placing a tray of tea and shortbread on the coffee table between us.

“It’s… stunning, Mrs. Chaffey,” Barry sputtered, as if he’d already gone off script.

“Please, call me Greta. We’ll just let this steep.” I gave the tea bags a couple dunks, then settled back into the matching couch across from him and tucked my homemaker’s apron over my knees. At this point, I’d switched my expression over to one of bewildered delight, making like Barry was the first guest I’d had since my husband, Gregory, passed away the previous year to stroke—quick and painless, thank the Lord. No endless years of spoon-feeding and ass-wiping required, which—to be completely honest—I didn’t think I was up for.

Barry unzipped a leather folio, and I could see by the practiced way he unfolded it he was about to give me a spiel. But I wanted to play with him a bit. So, when he took a breath and opened his mouth to begin, I sat forward.

“Let’s have some tea, shall we?” I poured him a cup, then myself, and then placed one of the shortbread cookies on a plate in front of him. “Please, treat yourself,” I insisted, barely able to conceal the little smirk lifting one corner of my mouth.

“Oh, thank you, Mrs… Greta.”

I began picking at some fluff on the couch as if distracted, all the while watching Barry struggle through his shortbread cookie. I’d made them with salt instead of sugar. This was my test of Barry—to see how committed he was to the game I planned to play with him. And he surprised me by eating the entire thing, blinking back tears while his eyes remained fixed on me.

After he ate the salt cookie, I owed it to Barry to let him deliver his spiel, and I nodded along, smiling like a contented fool as he spoke.

“As you can you see,” he said, handing a document across to me with a chart of numbers, “what we’re offering you here is not inconsequential.” I held the paper up close to my face, squinting like I’d never squinted before.

“Well, Barry,” I said, peeking over the top of the paper, “I don’t have my magnifying glass on me, but I’d say that looks like a boatload of zeros.”

***

“I promised Barry I’d consider his offer in exchange for his promise to come back and see me again,” I tell Cheryl, whose eyes have gone moist with fright, fingers at her throat—like she’d convinced herself I poisoned her. “Would you like more tea?”

“No!” Cheryl says too eagerly, glancing down into the cup of liquid in her hand. “Thank you…” she adds quietly.

“Don’t worry, dear,” I say with a wink. “The thing with Barry’s cookie was that I knew he would be coming by that day—bringing with him ill intentions—so I made it just for him.”

Cheryl’s hand drops from her throat, and I see her chest relax as she releases a breath she’d been holding.

“You see, Barry’s employer, The Marion Group, was tearing down the old Victorian houses of St. James Town to make room for apartment buildings. But what Barry didn’t know was that myself, the Thompsons, and the three neighbours to the west, had all made a secret pact—me being the ring leader, of course—to stand our ground and not sell.”

***

Barry kept his promise, coming back to visit me a few months later and then a few months after that the next year—all the while chipping away at my and the neighbors’ resolve.

Like clockwork, with each new year another of them caved to the pressure and betrayed our informal pact, selling their land and house off to Barry. After which, the developers promptly bulldozed it with no hesitation or remorse. And in broad daylight so we could all see it from our windows. They tried their best to make a mess, turning the surrounding land into a war zone; piles of rubble, air full with dust, great, hulking machines wheeling back and forth like tanks.

“There are days when I just wish it would end,” I told Barry on one of his visits. He’d come in from the rain and was warming up on the couch beside the fire I had going. “It’s a lot for an old woman like me.”

“It must feel terribly unfair,” he said softly, because he’d started to wriggle himself into the position of the champion who could save me from impending doom. At this point, I had him convinced that I was a touch senile. I would pretend to forget who he was halfway through his visit, or call him my late husband’s name. Not full senility, mind you. Just enough that I could present myself as a competent enough old lady—one who might be a little more easily persuaded to sign my house over to him.

“The neighbours will talk,” I said conspiratorially as we stared into the fire, side by side on the couch.

“Talk?” he said.

“Why of course,” I said, placing a wrinkly old hand on his knee—I’d sat inappropriately close to him. “A man coming around to see a single woman so much. The rumor mill must be up and running.”

He was a good sport about it, my Barry. I started calling him ‘my Barry’ secretly—in my own head—because we had something really special. The following winter, when it was only my house and the Thompson’s next door left on the block, Barry confessed the troubles he and his wife were having. Children—or lack thereof—being the main trouble.

“We’ve been trying for years,” he said. He handed me a little photograph of her from his fat wallet. She was a plump woman, unfortunately short, with a too-pleasant smile that I knew right away was meant to conceal the busybody hiding underneath. At this point, he’d cottoned on to the fact I wasn’t senile, so I’d gone full ‘sweet grandmother’ on him. He responded just as men do in the presence of a motherly figure; they let their guard down.

“Gregory and I struggled a bit with that,” I told Barry, truthfully. “Funny thing was, once we stopped trying, I finally got pregnant and had Rose, then Mae the following year. Perhaps it was the stress.”

“How do you stop trying, though?” he asked me pathetically, the possibility that he was shooting blanks written into the lines around his eyes.

***

“Doubt always shows in the eyes,” I tell Cheryl in a stern voice. It hadn’t escaped my notice that she would glance at her watch every few minutes. “But with Barry, I knew just what he needed. I gave his arm the squeeze that only a mother has to offer, and I told him in the softest of voices, ‘Sometimes you have to let life unfold as it does.’”

I pause, letting the statement sink into Cheryl, who goes a little glassy-eyed—not unlike Barry. Then I let loose the laugh that had been building in my chest.

“And like a fool, he drank it up!” I say between giggles, noticing Cheryl frowning in response to my cruelty.

“But I’m not a monster,” I say as my laughter dies. “In truth, I was struck then that Barry was just a baby himself. His innocence drew my own motherly instincts out and into the open, and with them, my own memories came flooding back so vividly that it nearly took my breath away.”

***

As much as I loved the house on Howard Street, I was afraid of it too. It made everything too easy, like a blank canvas just waiting for a lifetime of memories to be painted on it. But a painting is a fragile thing.

I was a blank canvas myself when I first met Gregory. Among my birth family, I alone was accepted as a refugee alongside a few thousand other Jews Canada reluctantly took in during the late 30s. Gregory was a born and bred Newfie who came to Toronto looking to lose his accent and find a wife, and he proposed to me on a skating rink.

“Let’s make a go of it, shall we?” he said in his effortless way. I knew I would say yes, but I skated off, playing a little hard to get, and he chased me down. We ended up tumbling and sliding a ways, and the other skaters watched on as I kissed Gregory deeply while our bottoms froze against the ice. That was my way of saying “Yes.”

Shortly after we got married, Gregory bought the house on Howard Street with all the savings he’d scrounged together. We fell into a harmonious routine, and Gregory’s success with carpentry—he was truly talented—continued to grow. He became famous for his skills, and soon there were rich folks from Rosedale knocking on our door, looking to have one of Gregory’s famous wood fixtures or furniture pieces designed and built for their homes across the valley.

Our future was made even brighter when the girls came. As toddlers, Rose and Mae would run through the hallways, up and down the lengthy flight of stairs with its beautifully built banister that Gregory had refinished in a black-cherry stain.

“No running in the house!” Gregory would shout at the girls. But he was useless at being strict, and the girls sensed it. Any measure of discipline fell to me, the mother. Rose seemed less affected than Mae by the domestic power dynamics and took to making “I hate you” her favorite phrase.

“Well, you’re free to feel as you feel,” I’d tell her. “That’s a privilege not everyone is afforded.”

She eventually grew out of her I-hate-you phase, though I suspect she harbored resentment toward me while doting on her father. Rose, on the other hand, came into a rebellious streak that had Gregory terribly worried. She got herself a black leather jacket and had more than one boy pulling up in front of the house to whisk her away into the night.

“You don’t know what young men are like,” Gregory said to me once at the kitchen table on one of his sleepless nights of worry.

“You were a young man yourself once, were you not?”

“Exactly. So I know.”

“It’s just a phase, dear. Let it unfold, and, in time, it will pass on its own.”

Indeed, it did pass—but not how we expected. Rose turned from a rebel into an explorer, finishing high school and heading off in a van with a few other girls. They drove across the country, and I guess the mountains tamed Rose, because that’s where she stayed.

The following year, Mae left for university in Halifax, and Gregory let loose a broken dam of tears only a man could hold inside himself. Soon after, the arthritis that had begun to nag him took hold like an infection. There were days he’d lie prostrate on the couch, in front of the fireplace, unable to move. For a while, I feared he might just shrivel up and die.

“Maybe a walk would do you some good?” I’d suggest. But nothing seemed to help—his eyes getting glassier and glassier with each passing year.

But then Mae surprised us both by coming home after finishing university, getting married, and setting up shop in the suburbs. Her return inspired a second wind in Gregory. It was a dramatic transformation—a miracle, some might call it. He dusted off his old tools and began making furniture again in the backyard, the smell of sawdust wafting in through the kitchen windows like it used to, as if life had gone full circle.

I remained stoic through Gregory’s sudden passing, which I believe Mae resented me for. I’ve never been one to let myself get weighed down by sentimentality, because regrets are a fool’s possession. Holding on to the past is how people get stuck, and the story takes control of them.

Despite my beliefs, I’ll admit I had a moment of weakness after the Thompsons sold and I watched their house crumble to pieces from my bedroom window. I lay down in my bed as a wave of dread washed over me at the thought of my house being leveled along with the others, a lifetime of memories with it.

Paranoia started following me around in the hallways of the house like a shadow as I tried to go about my days. I heard echoes of the same fear I’d fled from in Germany.

Then one day, when I was hanging laundry in the backyard, I could have sworn those skyscrapers were closer than they were the day before. Like they were creeping toward me, inch by inch. I called Mae that night just to hear a familiar voice. I tried to hide the quiver in my words, but she could hear it.

“Tell me what’s wrong, mother,” she said in her impatient tone. I knew that she cared underneath all that angst toward me, and for a second, I thought about reaching out to that part of her. But then I could hear that her children in the background were getting unruly, and I was reminded of how busy she was.

“It’s nothing that a little sugar in a few gas tanks won’t fix,” I said, thinking of the bulldozers parked just at the edge of my property, waiting like vultures to pick me clean.

But Mae hung up on me when I said that.

***

“Not everyone gets my sense of humor,” I tell Cheryl, giving her another wink. At this, a little smile lifts the corners of her mouth, which I take to mean she’s succumbed to my story.

“So what did you do then?” the saleswoman asks, surprising me.

“I waited a few months,” I tell her. “It’s always good to wait before making big decisions. Then I got in touch with a woman named Ingrid Bartt.”

***

I found Ingrid’s phone number on the bulletin board in Simmington’s Grocers, down Parliament Street south of Carlton. Ingrid was part of the ‘Cabbagetown Collective,’ a bunch of residents from the neighborhood to the south and east who’d banded together to prevent the sprawling of the monstrous buildings across Wellesley Street into their neck of the woods.

The woman could spin a good yarn, and she’d rallied huge support by painting a picture of how our city was being transformed, and how that change would leave it unrecognizable to those of us who’d lived here all our lives—or most of our lives, in my case.

Ingrid came by my house on a hot Sunday afternoon, and we sipped lemonade on my wrap-around porch. She was a very tall woman, a bit like a giant bird—all bald-eyed and head-bobbing.

“He’s persistent, I’ll give him that,” I told her, relaying my years-long relationship with Barry.

“How much are they offering you?” she asked. “If you don’t mind my asking, of course.”

I passed her Barry’s offer documents, which had grown exponentially since that very first visit, and she looked down past the edge of her nose at them. The ice in her lemonade clinked as she reacted to the amount they wanted to give me.

“Well, that’s… an offer,” she said, looking up at me. Then her eyes scanned around, letting the reality of my situation settle into the tight muscles of her face: surrounded by buildings, on the opposite end of St. James Town, a clear path to freedom written on the papers in her hand. All of it a kink in the narrative she’d constructed for her own cause.

She promised to be in touch, but never was.

After Ingrid fizzled, but my fear didn’t, I tried Larry Weiner from The Toronto Daily, who unreservedly latched on to my story.

Larry came out, on Halloween of all days, in a boater hat with a camera around his neck and notepad in hand. I walked him through the great, big house as he interviewed me, asking about my life story. He was captivated by the copper fireplace, running a hand over it like he needed to check if it was real. I had a fire going, and the flames danced on the reflection in his glasses.

“May I take your picture for the article?” he asked.

“Why certainly,” I said. “How about in front of the fire?”

“I was thinking outside, actually.”

We went out to the porch, and I stood on the stairs, trying to smile. But Larry had other ideas. He plucked my broom from its place on the wall and suggested I do some sweeping. I obliged, and he went all the way down to the sidewalk and snapped off his photographs.

I didn’t understand why until the article came out, showing little old me, humbly cleaning my wrap-around porch with a tidal wave of towers bearing down on me in the background.

Even the article’s title made me laugh: “The Last House on Howard Street.” I read it in front of the copper fireplace, and could see in the opening lines that Larry was positioning me as the story’s hapless victim, introducing me to the world as a “grandmother-widow.”

But for balance, however, he dropped in a few quotes from Harold Bremerman; a spokesman for the city. Harold talked about how the new St. James Town was modeled after “Towers in the Park,” a planned type of neighborhood that had been successful in New York.

Harold called it a symbol of “progress,” and when I read that, I crumpled up the paper and threw it into the fire—that happens to be one of my least favorite words. Once they call it ‘progress,’ you can’t speak out against it—that makes you the enemy. At the same time, I couldn’t blame Harold Bremerman for wanting his version of the story to be the one everyone buys; he was no different from Larry Weiner or Ingrid Bartt.

***

“—Even you, Cheryl. I’ll bet you’ve got a story to tell me that revolves around those products you want me to buy,” I say, gesturing to the paisley Avon case at her feet. “Because you know what it’s all about in the end? Power. I may be an old woman, but I know what the hunt for power smells like.”

“Then why did you move?” Cheryl blurts, clattering her empty teacup and saucer on the table. I let out a big sigh, waiting a tick to allow the tension to build before confessing.

“It was Barry,” I say, softening my voice. “I signed his papers when he came by five years after the first day we met, and his face was lit up with pride even before. You see, he’d taken my advice and stopped trying; his wife was pregnant after all these years. And it struck me that maybe it was time for a new generation to build their lives on that plot of land—like I had the privilege of doing. Many new generations, in fact.”

Cheryl’s expression changes, softening, and her shoulders seem to relax. She is a mother too, I realize.

“Besides,” I continue, “I was tiring of polishing that copper fireplace. And it wasn’t as if they simply kicked me out onto the street, either. They paid me enough money that I could buy this bungalow close, but not too close, to Mae and her family—which I don’t think she was happy about, mind. My bones, on the other hand, are thrilled to be where there are no stairs. I can live here comfortably for the rest of my remaining days, not be a burden to anyone, and meet some new people—like you, Cheryl.”

At this point, Cheryl slumps back into the couch, her eyes darkening.

“You think I gave up too easily?” I ask her candidly.

“No, it’s not that,” she says, blinking back into the room. “It’s just that… I’m late to another meeting.” She stands up, then bends awkwardly to lift her paisley case in the tight space.

“This time again tomorrow?” I say with a smirk buried under my straightest of faces.

Cheryl makes a little grunt, then turns and shimmies between the couch and wall, and I follow behind her—really closely—out through the front door and down the walkway.

“I’ll have coffee for next time,” I say, hovering at the door of her station wagon.

She forces a smile before backing out, nearly striking my mailbox, then speeds off. She’s probably already licking her lips at the thought of calling the other hens on the street and telling them to watch out for the crazy old bat who just moved in.

Back inside, I smile to myself as I carry the tea cups to the kitchen, noticing that Cheryl left behind a smudge of lipstick on hers. For the first time since moving, I feel a renewed sense of purpose as I fill the sink with suds. Though I have to admit, Cheryl had broken a little too easily. Not like Barry; he did me proud.

I plunge my hands into the water, the scalding heat reminding me of the shock I had the first time I turned on the television in my new living room. Because who did I see on it? My Barry was on the news! With his bushy red mustache and a pair of scissors, he stood in front of a length of ribbon. It was opening day of one of the new buildings in St. James Town.

I finish the dishes and go back to the living room, shimmying between the wall and armrest, then sit down on the floral-print couch.

Barry had cut the ribbon to applause. He waved to the adoring crowd and stepped back to that short, plump wife of his.

But between them was a boy of about twelve or thirteen years old—and Barry ruffled the boy’s mop of red hair in the way that fathers do. And that’s when it hit me. Barry’s story about the pregnancy troubles was all made up.

I run an old hand across the fabric of the couch, thinking it may be best just to toss them out—get one of those hide-away sofa beds in case the grandkids ever want to sleep over. I shouldn’t even have bothered bringing them with me, having let my sentimentality get the better of me.

But then regrets are a fool’s possession, and an old woman like me must always travel light.