He had rings on four of his fingers, and his fingernails, Stan noticed, were perfectly manicured. He reminded Stan of many of the League higher-ups he’d met in his time. Men who took care of their appearance, who were certain of their power.
“I think you’re going to like what I have to show you,” Gino said, for the third time. “Cottage country is moving, you know. Muskoka’s all well and good for those rich Toronto types, but ordinary schlubs like you and me deserve a place to relax as well, am I right?”
He is right, Stan thought. He’d never imagined even wanting to own land in the country, let alone being able to afford it, but that morning the pictures in the office window on Dunlop Street had enticed him, and the prices were suddenly within reach. Gino directed Stan along a single- lane country road crowded in by trees. The road ran along a ridge above Kempenfelt Bay. Here and there, the water shone blue through a gap in the forest. They drove through Shanty Bay, a hamlet of a dozen or so houses and one small whitewashed church, and eventually turned down toward the lake on a dirt road rutted here and there with washouts from a recent downpour.
“There’s absolutely no development this far up yet,” Gino said, pointing out the open window to the thickly wooded land crowding the shoreline. “Only the old-timers, folks who’ve lived up here year-round for a century or so. And you want them types around in case anything goes wrong. It’s awfully quiet up here at night, and dark. Nice to know someone’s around even if they’re a mile away, am I right?”
Again, there was no arguing with Gino. By his own count, his practised patter had sold fifteen lots along this stretch of Simcoe shoreline in the last five months.
“Right here will do, sir.” Stan pulled the car to the edge of the road and stopped the engine.
“Are you ready for paradise?” Gino smiled at him from the passenger seat. He’d turned to face Stan and his body blocked the entire view from the passenger-side window.
The way down into the property from the road was a narrow cut through thick pines, untrimmed, their lower branches brushing the ground in wide skirts. Stan inhaled deeply the combined scents of evergreen and lake water. Squirrels leapt from tree to tree thirty feet above his head.
“That’s your fresh air you’re smelling, Stan.” Gino slapped him on the back and took the opportunity of contact to pull him by the arm past the last of the pines, his left arm opening wide, like a maître d’ showing off the prize table. What remained of the property was a deep grass meadow speckled with yellow dandelions and buttercups. Here and there, giant weeping willow trees bent their long soft branches to the earth around elephantine bodies. The land ended at large boulders falling away into the gently rolling waters of the lake.
“Christ Jesus,” Gino sighed, looking out across the water, “if every showing looked like this I’d have none of these lots left. You’ve hit it on a great day, I’ll say that.”
The property was 150 feet wide and ran from road to lake another 150 feet, forming a near-perfect square. There was a small, falling-down cabin near the lake, doubling as living shack and boathouse, though no boat was present.
“The owner built that cabin in Shanty Bay and floated it here just as you see it. Easier than hauling the materials. That hazy patch of land there,” Gino pointed directly across the lake, “is Georgina Island—Indian reservation, but don’t worry, they can’t get you all the way over here—and that close bit of land there just the other side of the bay is Big Bay Point. There’s a lighthouse at the very end. Kind of comforting to look at after dark. If you head down the bay there you get back to Barrie and directly to the other end of the lake there is Orillia. You’re about right in the middle. A prime spot if you ask me, but I’m just the salesman, what the hell do I know?”
Stan asked for a little time to himself, and walked back and forth across the shoreline, his shoreline he’d decided, while Gino smoked nervously back up by the car. Stan saw a family on this land. He saw continuance, and that was a lot better than anything he’d seen for himself back on Saulter Street. He could give himself no reason for the feeling; he was simply sure in his decision.
Back in the realty office on Dunlop Street, Stan signed all the papers and pulled the fifteen-hundred-dollar total from his jacket pocket.
“Hello, darling!” Gino yelled, drawing the attention of the two other salesmen in the room.
“Holy crap, man, if I’d known you were packing that much cash, I’d have hit you with a rock and dumped you in the lake.”
“I know you would have,” Stan said, and the two other salesmen laughed.
Four
The Cup went missing in the summer of 1952. It was gone for almost two months. No details of its disappearance or its whereabouts while it was gone have ever been publicly known. Stan Cooper, now the head custodian and cleaner at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, found the Cup at centre ice one morning when he happened to be the first person in the building. Training camp for the new season had just begun, and the ice had to be maintained every day even if the team spent the whole day in the gym. He threw the switch for the secondary lights, and there it was. The League had never reported it missing. The police had never been consulted. A private investigator worked for three weeks but was eventually fired after falling down drunk in the League president’s office while making a report. There were plans in the works to create a duplicate cup from photographs, and then one morning it just appeared at centre ice in Toronto.
Stan walked out across the centre line still carrying his coffee and doughnut in a paper bag. He had seen the Cup in this building many times. He had seen the Cup both won and lost in this building. He burned at the thought of seeing the Cup being won. He felt a wave of nauseating embarrassment about it, and then embarrassment about being embarrassed. He looked at his own face reflected in the perfect silver and thought about his wife.
He circled it, shuffling around the ice in his rubber-soled work shoes, watching the shine and reflection in the dim glow of the secondary lights. He reached out and pushed at it to see if it would move. His hand left a dull smudge on the silver. It was the only print he could see on the entire trophy. Whoever had left the Cup there had polished it before they left. Stan took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped away his fingerprints.
He put the doughnut shop bag on the ice beside the Cup and jogged back across the rink to the timekeeper’s booth where he knew there was a phone. By the time he returned, his coffee had melted a circle of water around the bag, soaking the apple fritter inside. League officials arrived within the hour.
While he waited for them Stan stayed on the ice, drinking cold coffee, one hand on the Cup. He helped carry the trophy into a back office and watched as it was authenticated. As they were putting it in the back of one of the official League cars, one of the men turned to Stan and said, “Well sir, I guess this makes up for that little fuck-up last year,” and then laughed, slapping Stan on the back with a gloved hand.
Stan and the Cup were driven out of the city on the same morning, bouncing down the Queen Elizabeth Highway in the back seat of a black sedan. By noon they were in Windsor, crossing the border, and at one that afternoon they were both presented to the owner of the Detroit hockey team.
There were four other men in the room, one of whom Stan recognized as Sid Abel, Detroit’s captain. Three months earlier, Abel had won the Cup, beating Montreal. He and his goalie Terry Sawchuk had been captured by a photographer hugging the Cup in the Detroit dressing room. The photo had been clipped from a Toronto paper and pinned in the lunchroom back in Toronto. Beneath it someone had written “In the arms of the enemy.” Stan looked at the photo every day for weeks.
