Charles Pachter. Leonard Wise
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One family, the Cowans, had their own movie theatre, to which Charles once was invited for a birthday party. The rich FOOFs (Fine Old Ontario Families) — the Matthews, Oslers, Laidlaws — were unknown to the young parvenus. It wasn’t until some fifty years later that Charles was invited to a cocktail party at one of these summer palaces, where he was greeted by a neighbour who introduced him as “the artist who painted the queen on a moose.” It was then that he remembered wandering as a kid along the cedar-hedged roadway outside the forbidding gates, slapping mosquitoes, and wondering who on earth was lucky enough to live there.
By 1950 the house on Chudleigh Avenue had become too small for the family of six. Wanting Maida and Charles to be closer to the Holy Blossom Temple religious school they were attending, Dibbles and Har bought a larger, mock-Tudor brick and stucco house at 83 Ava Road, across from the “Holy B,” as it was called. The neighbouring kids on Peveril Hill and Ava Road were quite different from the proper little Anglicans he had known on Chudleigh Avenue. These new kids were mostly Jewish, with names like Hushy (Harold), Moishy (Marvin), Gutman (Goody), and Gedalya (Gary), a far cry from the Jeannies, Johnnies, and Betties he’d known north of Eglinton.
The new house had diamond-paned leaded glass windows, a garage door that opened and closed automatically, and an unused attic that Charles transformed into a working studio where he spent the next two years painting. One day his sister Karen begged him to let her see the attic. He finally agreed and helped her up a ladder and through the trap door in the ceiling of his bedroom closet. Once she was up in the attic, he took the ladder away. She screamed, but eventually he brought the ladder back and let her down.
Alone in the attic he drew trees, still lifes, imaginary Middle Eastern cityscapes, and sketches of Centre Island.
If fine art was not a major focus in Charles’s family home, his parents still felt that the children should be exposed to the arts. His sisters had taken ballet and piano lessons, but his younger brother showed no particular interest in things cultural. Whatever their own interests, his siblings all felt that Charles got special treatment. At dinner, whenever Dibbles put a larger portion in front of him, they would point accusing fingers at the food and scream in unison, “FAVOURITE!” Everyone would then dissolve in laughter as his mother tried to defend herself by adding extra morsels to their skimpier allotments. This was a hilarious ritual, but underneath it there was a considerable amount of jealousy.
“The trouble with you,” Dibbles told Charles, “is that you think too much and you’re too smart for your own good.” When he told her he wanted to be an artist, she replied, “You want to paint? Paint the bridge chairs!”
Four Pachter children — Maida (rear), Karen, David, and Charles.
His widowed immigrant grandmother, Eva, who called him “Charl” because she thought Charles was plural, told him, “Go foist to university. After dat you’ll know if you still want to be an artist, but a doctor is better.” When he received an honorary doctorate from Brock University in 1996, he was able to tell an interviewer, “Now my mother can call me doctor.”[1]
Charles was also discovering that he enjoyed playing with words. The Pachters had a spotted black-and-white cat named Viveca, who had a mess of kittens, prompting twelve-year-old Charles to phone in an ad to the birth column of the Toronto Star. It read: “Katz, Viveca, is thrilled to announce the birth of quintuplets, at home, by natural childbirth. Mother and babies doing well. Father’s whereabouts unknown.” After the ad appeared, the papers called immediately, wanting to do interviews and take pictures, but Charles, the budding satirist, told them, “She’s resting after her ordeal and prefers to remain anonymous.”
Charles completed Grades 5 to 8 at John R. Wilcox Public School, and came in first in a public speaking contest. His Grade 5 teacher, Miss Dickson, told his parents that his work was satisfactory but “less talking would help.”
In the summer of 1953, his parents sent him to Camp Tamarack, a Jewish Boy Scout camp. After three weeks he wrote his parents:
Dear mom and dad,
I have just come back from swimming and I got a few bloodsuckers on me and now I have a few sores from them.… Last night I got sick in the stomach and was up all night.… I went to the bathroom and found out that I had diarea [sic]. Write soon.
Charles[2]
Along with the troubles that Charles outlined in his letter to his parents, he was also paddled by the old Scout Chief — a sort of initiation rite supposed by one and all to be an honour. Charles, however, thought it was weird.
He was told to climb the steep wooden stairs to the cabin of this old man who was held in awe by the rest of the camp. The Scout Chief promptly took a Ping-Pong paddle and whacked Charles on his bare butt a few times, taking an unnatural delight in his task, grunting as Charles grimaced.
Years later, at Camp Northland, Charles watched with nervous curiosity another example of a strange camp ceremony. In that incident he was witness to what was known as a “circle jerk” — six or eight boys sat around a campfire, displaying the newly discovered capabilities of their anatomical hoses to curious onlookers.
This experience caused Charles some unease. As is typical for adolescents, he experienced some anxiety associated with his emerging sexuality. Although by the time he reached puberty Charles had fooled around a little with girls, as he moved into his teens he found that he was less interested in them. In fact, he found that he wasn’t interested in many of the activities the rest of the boys of his age were engaging in.
As Charles grew, Dibbles often came to his bedroom door, concerned that her son wasn’t outside playing with the other kids or doing something useful like watering the garden. Charles came to realize he was not like the other kids.
“What will we do with him?” he heard his mom saying to his dad at the kitchen table from his vantage point on the stairs.
“Maybe we should give him some art lessons,” replied his father.
From that point on, while other little boys were outside in the street playing hockey or discovering girls, Charles was taking art lessons, music lessons, and drama lessons.
Chapter 2
Lessons Learned
Of the various teachers in Charles’s life, including high-school teachers Miss Hudgins and Miss Curran, and Ron Satok, an artist his parents retained to instruct him, the most influential and charismatic of his teachers was Rachel Cavalho, the forty-eight-year-old piano teacher who entered his life when he was eight. A tiny woman, she was always impeccably dressed, with a lace hanky wedged in her blouse sleeve and just the right understated necklace. She always wore her face made up like a little China doll, with false eyebrows painted black, little rounds of cheek rouge, and daubs of green over her eyes.
Temperamental and stubborn, she fancied herself the inspired mentor whose job it was to develop his skills, his higher thoughts, and his aspirations, and in so doing to transform him into an educated young man of breeding.
Once she took hold of Charles, Rachel wouldn’t let go. To describe their relationship as a teacher-student one is too simple; he was her full-time project. She was testy,