Walter Kist & the Seven Whorls Chapter 5

At precisely 7:05 on a sunny July morning, a dull boom sounded in the heart of downtown Vancouver, and a bird came fluttering out of a glassless window in the Devonshire Hotel. A hundred kilos of dynamite detonated in the elevator shaft and the mighty Dev collapsed in on itself like a clumsy giant whose legs had finally buckled beneath the weight of its history: love, death, cocktails.

We watched from the Hotel Vancouver as the Dev made way for another bank tower. In ‘81 the city’s skyline was taking off faster than Harry Jerome out of the starting blocks in ‘64. (Harry won Olympic bronze for Canada and is fittingly remembered in a bronze statue in Stanley Park).

The dust settled, the crowd dispersed and I was thinking of the man in Room 712 and the woman he betrayed. I felt bad for having been part of that deception. Not that I hadn’t known back then that he was married, I did, but now Kist had put a face to my sorrowful deed by showing me photos of Irma: surreptitious shots taken at the Empress Hotel, sipping tea in the tearoom or primping before the ivy.

She looked like a nice enough woman and my self-centered actions now gave me pause.

Sitting on a log, eating fish and chips at Kits Beach après Dev destruction, Kist told me more about his one and only client:

“By the end of that tea service, after I’d shown her all the photos, Irma’s one liners about makeup had run their course and beneath her pink rouge I could see a rage starting to simmer. No concealer could conceal the pain she was feeling by the time she’d looked at all the shots, and her white linen napkin was streaked with black mascara.

"I wasn’t prepared for that. I’d forgotten when I put on my gumshoes to acquire some of that hardboiled nerve, the kind Philip Marlowe was born with. There I was stuck being Maurice Chevalier, singer of sappy songs. So I held her hand across the table and told her that she deserved better.

"She smiled and squeezed my hand. ‘Walter,’ she said - she always called me Walter – ‘You’ve been very good to me but in spite of everything I still love Errol so I’ll give him another chance. But if he can’t make it right, I’ll give you a call, dear.’ I think she’d taken a shine to me but much to my relief she never called again. I did get a postcard from her couple of months ago saying that Errol had taken her on a world cruise to prove his love for her. She seemed happy.”

My parents belonged to square dance clubs with names like Chicks and Hicks, Dudes and Dames, Belles and Beaux. And every Saturday night they all swirled and sashayed in our rec room. My father did the calling while my mother dosey-doed around the circle in her yellow cowgirl skirt, her big movie star smile outlined in scarlet lipstick.

Then, when I was eight years old, my mom up and rode off with a new dude, a better beau, a younger hick. She left my dad and me standing in the frontier dust like bewildered cowpokes. Our rec room, with its cowhides and wagon wheels, became a kind of ghost town. They called that summer the Summer of Love, and maybe it was for flower children and my mother but for my dad it was a dark winter of pain that would last the rest of his life.

He kept his nine to five as a salesman for Sheldrake’s Socks but gave up square dancing altogether. Most evenings, after we finished our TV dinners, he’d light a cigarette and go hide behind some pulp western novel, puffs of smoke rising up from behind the book like smoke signals - messages to my mother, who would never see them.

During my teen years, all was not okay at the OK Corral. My dad and I fought constantly. So when I turned sixteen I moved in with my then boyfriend. Instantly, my dad put in for a job transfer and sold our bungalow of bad memories. He got a promotion to assistant manager at Sheldrake’s head office in Toronto and off he went.

I was still exalting in the glorious summer of Kist when I received the news of my father’s death.

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Thank you to Shirley Connell, the fabulous actor/model who appears in these scenes. - MW