by Jo Walton
“An open door into a noose,” she says.
He said he was going to look after her, and that she could work on her scholarship on her own, and read a lot and maybe write. “But not your hobbity nonsense,” Steve clarifies. She had shown him some of what she was writing then. “You could write real books. Books I’d be proud of.” It seems miraculous to her that a man so much older and more experienced, so confident and intelligent and well established can really want her. He is ten years older than she is. In 1967, when they marry, she is twenty-three and he is thirty-four. He is a lawyer, well established in his father’s firm. He wears hand-tailored suits and drives a black Camaro. He owns a house on Monkland Avenue, a big attractive townhouse, two bedrooms, a garage, a patch of garden with an elm tree and lots of bluebells. She loves the tree. It is dead now. She walked past the house last spring on her way to have acupuncture and noticed that the elm has been replaced by a magnolia. Steve doesn’t live there anymore. He moved to Toronto in 1979, afraid of the separatists and their talk of secession.
Sylvia’s father died in the late winter of 1967, cancer, a long, slow, painful process. She met Steve three months later at a party given by the parents of her college friend Miriam for the engagement of Miriam’s brother Daniel.
“I almost didn’t go,” she says. They were only a few weeks from finals and graduation, and she wasn’t recovered from the shock of her father’s death. Sylvia’s plan was to go to Europe as soon as she graduated, at the beginning of June, to travel around on her savings, sleeping in hostels and eating cheaply, seeing Paris and Athens and Rome before ending up in London and taking her place in Cambridge to begin her postgraduate studies in the fall. She intended to send her brothers and sisters postcards of wonderful places, and believed they would envy her.
Miriam begged her to come along to the party to support her. “Daniel’s fiancée is as thin as a rake, and my mother will be trying to make me feel guilty for not fitting into a tiny dress like hers. And she’ll keep saying that wedding bells are in the air and trying to introduce me to all the nice Jewish boys. She likes you, Syl, she thinks you’re good for me, and if you’re there she’ll tone it down to bearable. We don’t have to stay long.” At that time, Miriam had a secret boyfriend called Jamal, an exchange student from Nigeria. He was only a secret from Miriam’s parents, who lived in a big house in Côte-St-Luc. Miriam later, in the seventies, comes out as a lesbian, and in the nineties she and her long-term partner, Chrissie, are one of the first same-sex couples to marry in Quebec. By then she is confident and outspoken, not the girl who needed her hand held at her brother’s engagement party.
Sylvia, who was used to telling Mrs Levi that Miriam is studying at her house, and having Miriam similarly cover for her to her mother, sighed and went along to the party. She had no idea what would be appropriate to wear to a Jewish engagement party. “Oh anything,” Miriam said. At that time Sylvia never had much money for clothes. She always felt over or underdressed. She was lucky this time. She had a long white linen smock, with white-on-white embroidery around the neck, which looked and felt cool. She swept her hair up on top of her head with the Japanese comb Miriam gave her for her birthday, and by what felt like a miracle it stayed where she had put it. It was one of the first times she tried the style that later becomes her everyday look. She isn’t beautiful, not then, not ever, but she sometimes manages to look interesting and distinguished. That was one of the first times. “If only I’d failed. If only I’d looked a frump and he hadn’t noticed me and I’d gone off to Cambridge and had a completely different life,” she says now.
The party was terrible. Most of the people there were of the older generation, and although it was 1967, the summer of love, almost all of the younger people were wearing suits or very formal clothes. For three hours, Sylvia told Miriam at thirty minute intervals that she isn’t fat (which was true), while Mrs Levy kept pressing them to eat fish paste, roast chicken, iced cake, and chocolate pastries, in between telling Miriam she just needs to slim down a bit and she’d be a beautiful girl like Sylvia. If this was better than the way she would be otherwise, Sylvia was glad for her friend’s sake that she came.
In the third hour, Steve, who was in business with Daniel’s fiancée’s parents, or something like that, came over to her. “How do you manage to look so cool on such a hot day when everyone else looks as if they’ve been basted and roasted? Looking at you is like having a long cool drink,” he said. “I’m tired of this party, but I’m delighted with you. Can I drive you home? And could I see you again sometime? Who are you? Where did you spring from. I’m sure I’ve never seen you before.”
“I’m Sylvia Harrison,” she said. “I’m at McGill with Miriam.”
“A college girl,” he said, in a tone that edged on disapproving.
“Oh, I’m about to graduate,” she said, eager already to agree with him, to have him like her, approve of her. And indeed, he smiled. He was the first person she knew to have a car. In Montreal, then and now, you don’t really need one. But getting home from Côte-St-Luc would mean two long bus rides on a hot day. She agreed to save time and for the novelty of it, and because she already liked him. He blinked a little when he learned she lives in Griffintown, but drove her there without a murmur, dropping her off outside the front door, and waiting as she runs up the steps.
A few days later, he took her to Expo ’67, out on the island. And in that wonderful magical carnival atmosphere, with the pavilions and the art and the music, Steve seemed not just steady but exciting, and even his masterful way of making up his mind for both of them seemed charming and not controlling.
“I should have seen that as a warning sign,” Sylvia says. But back then she loved everything about him, from his quirking eyebrows to his neat loafers. She even saw the way he won’t speak French as a charming personal quirk. Her French was good enough for both of them, not to mention her Latin and Greek. He let her order for them at restaurants—that is, he decided what they would both eat, and he let her inform the waiter. She thought this was an equal division of labour, not seeing yet how all the power is on his side and all the work on hers, not understanding how he was patronizing her, how he regarded her French as something that reflected her low-class origins.
Montreal is a French city, it always has been, and it has become more so through Sylvia’s lifetime. At that time there were still some Anglophones like Steve who refused to acknowledge that they were a minority in the province. Many of them fled, like Steve, when they realised that the democratic tide was flowing against them. When Bill 101, which mandated that businesses must work in French and children must be educated in that language, was passed, there was a mass exodus. The Anglophones who stayed were prepared to accept the reality of the situation. Throughout the sixties there were mailbox bombings for separatism, and the violence culminated in the October Crisis of 1970, when a diplomat and a government minister were kidnapped and the government imposed martial law and petrified all those in favour of violence. This led, eventually, to the two referendums of 1980 and 1995 and the decision of Quebec, both times, to stay in Canada. Steve’s refusal to say more than a polite “Bonjour” in French was a reflection of his arrogance, but it wasn’t, in the late sixties, as unusual as it would be later. By now almost everyone like him had left. “And good riddance,” says Sylvia, emphatically. In English.
When she met Steve she was still very young, and, because of her mother, she had not had a real boyfriend before. She had been waiting until she could get away, and spending most of her time working and reading and dreaming and helping to look after her father. She was not just technically inexperienced, like many of her college friends, but truly without any sexual or romantic experience at all. Steve was not Catholic, he said that he was not anything, but he agreed to marry in church amiably enough. Then he suggested that they get married not in her childhood church but in the church of St Monica on Terrebonne, which would be her new parish church. She saw this then as exciting and not
as part of Steve’s plan to detach her from all her existing connections and make her dependent only on him. She confessed her utter inexperience to him, and he was charmed. “You were like a sleeping princess waiting for me to awaken you with a kiss,” he said. “Like Cinderella.”
But what was Cinderella’s life with the prince really like? Or the little goose girl with the king? Powerful men who choose young naïve girls who don’t know how to navigate in their worlds may be looking for somebody they can victimize.
“All these warning signs!” she says now. “All these red flags!” She didn’t see them, and neither did any of her friends. One professor expressed disappointment that she wouldn’t be pursuing her career, but that was the only shadow cast; everyone else seemed perfectly delighted in her new choice, her abrupt swerve, her changed priorities. She was doing what women were supposed to do, but she tells herself she and Steve are different, their lives will be different. His life was certainly materially different from her parents’ lives, though he corrected her when she said he was rich. “The Levys are rich, and the Goldsteins; Arnold’s rich, and the Singletons. I’m just comfortably off. If it hadn’t been for what my father left me I wouldn’t have been able to afford to buy this house.” She learned not to compliment his wealth, and conceded that she did not understand it. “My Cinderella,” he called her again. He was already criticizing her clothes, and she was already trying to dress the way he preferred.
They went to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon. “We’ll go to Europe together,” Steve said. “Not this year, because work is so busy and I’ll have to plan to take the time off properly. We won’t go on a shoestring the way you meant to. We’ll stay in the best hotels, eat the best food, meet people, artists and actors. We’ll take a whole month and travel. Paris, the South of France, Italy.” He was working hard at that time to get her, and she fell for it completely. He even charmed her mother. Sylvia committed herself to Steve like a ship launching itself with optimism and confidence to the mercy of the sea and the wind, soon to be driven onto the unseen shoals—or like Isaac meekly lying down under Abraham’s knife.
The honeymoon was not what she expected. Steve was as attentive as ever, if not more attentive. In 1967, Quebec still had name change on marriage, though by the time she married Idris it had been forbidden, and now everyone has to use the name on their birth certificate. But Steve spent a lot of time that first honeymoon week addressing her as Mrs Linton, and even Mme Linton, trying, and often succeeding, to make her blush. Niagara Falls was spectacular, and being there was quite different from photographs, because they cannot show the gulf of air between the falling water and where you are standing. Steve joked about going over the falls in a barrel, and took her to an old-fashioned museum about people who have crossed the falls, where he read every word of every exhibit and expected her to do the same. She did, of course, wanting to do the right thing, eager to please him. She bought new clothes for the honeymoon, many of which made him frown. “Never mind, Mrs Linton, I’ll dress you,” he said. “I’ll teach you taste.” For now, he undressed her.
She didn’t know what she’d expected, but from literature and from what her friends had said she had imagined sex differently. It’s not that she didn’t enjoy it, at least at first, but that Steve didn’t seem to want her to initiate anything, or even to participate. He wanted her to keep still and be a passive recipient of the sexual largesse he chose to bestow upon her. He smacked her hands away when she tried to reciprocate.
“That doesn’t count as the first time he hit me,” she says. “That was playful. Well, mostly playful. Naughty naughty, he said. Ugh. I should have got up and walked away right then. I wish I had.”
Once committed and cut off from all help, she was trapped. Steve bought new clothes for her. He detached her from her family, from her friends, by the expedient of finding them a terrible nuisance. When her younger sister, Maureen, was there when he came home from work one day, he was polite to her, even charming, but he said afterwards to Sylvia that he would prefer it if she didn’t see quite so much of those people. She tried to limit their visits to when he was in work, but they found it very hard to understand his restrictions. When he found her mother browbeating her, he forbade her to come to the house, which Sylvia at the time saw as chivalrous and protective.
Steve expected a very high and very specific standard of behaviour from her with his friends. The first time he did hit her, more than a year after their marriage, it was for flirting with one of his clients. She didn’t even understand the accusation. “You seemed to be having a good time with David,” he said, in a friendly tone, after their guests left and while she was still tidying up, putting leftovers away and separating plates and glasses ready to wash. They had eaten the terrible food of the era, half grapefruits soused in sherry and sprinkled with brown sugar and broiled, chicken with grape sauce, and a chocolate velvet pie. Everyone had complimented her on the pie.
“Hmm? David? Yes, he seems very nice,” she said, relieved Steve wasn’t reproaching her for errors she didn’t even know were errors, that he seemed to have enjoyed the evening for once. He had drunk rather a lot of the acidic white French wine, and she had had two glasses herself.
“Maybe too good a time?” Steve suggested, steel in his voice now, but she wasn’t paying attention, was trying to decide whether it would make him angrier if she washed dishes now, or angrier if she left them until the morning. Even before the violence, when it was no more than a raised voice and biting sarcasm, she was already attuned to his anger, vibrating to it like a harp string. She was trying to tiptoe around his moods and desires, making herself smaller to fit into the space he left her, though no space would ever be small enough.
Perhaps it was because she wasn’t paying attention, or because it seemed to her so absurd that Steve could seriously believe she’d been having too good a time with shy David, with his thick horn-rimmed glasses and bald spot, who clearly adored his wife, Ruth. The blow came out of nowhere, she wasn’t aware of it at all, one moment she was moving used paper napkins into a pile, and the next she was on the floor with her ears ringing. Tears came to her eyes from the force of the blow, and immediately Steve was apologising, saying he didn’t know what had come over him, he just loved her so much he got jealous and couldn’t bear to think of her deceiving him with another man. He cried, and begged her to forgive him, and then they went to bed where, with her head still ringing from the blow and the fall, she had to console him for having hurt her. He hadn’t started saying yet that she had made him do it. That came later. But he did make her apologize for flirting with poor David, who she hardly dared speak to the next time he and Ruth came around.
As time went on, the length of time it took for him to stop hitting her and apologize became longer, and the length of time between times when he hit her became shorter, and the amount of space she had to stand and breathe and be Sylvia became ever smaller. Her attention was all given to appeasing him, and her own thoughts and emotions became distant from her, wrapped up and held away, so that sometimes, at midday, eating an apple, she might realise that the night before she had been furiously angry, or resentful, or fiercely distressed, but she could not recognise it until later. When he came home at night he would ask her what she did with her days, and disapproved now not only of seeing family or friends but of visits to the library and walks in the park. These were the things which restored some of her equilibrium. He mocked the books she escaped into. She started hiding the books and lying about the library trips, and then he punished her when he found out about them. One day his sister mentioned having seen her in the Atwater Library. After she left, he made Sylvia admit her guilt and then he threw her across the room and broke her arm. This was around the time of the October Crisis, which she lived through numbly, her focus on trying not to upset Steve. This was when her other grandmother died, and she felt she had to apologize to Steve for it.
One day she was reading the newspaper while drinking her morning co
ffee, reading about the arrests, the suspension of habeas corpus, and she suddenly remembered the Cuban Missile Crisis, how frightened she was, how alive, how aware of her mortality and afraid for the world, poised on the knife edge. Now she felt numb, she didn’t care about any of it, she was only reading the paper so she would have the information to echo Steve’s opinions when he came home. She was appalled at herself, in that moment of clarity, but she told herself she loved him, and what could she do? She knew other wives who wore makeup to cover bruises. They didn’t talk about it, but she had slowly come to accept it as normal and necessary.
“It’s hard to say how I went along with it all,” she says to me, still angry with herself after all this time. “It built slowly, I suppose. But I don’t know why you have to talk about it. Almost nobody knows anything about it anymore.”
If she’d been in prison for five years, unjustly sentenced and then pardoned, you wouldn’t consider her weaker when you found out about it. But you wouldn’t think it didn’t matter, that it made no difference to who she was afterwards. Let’s get on with it. Illyria is waiting for us, and escape.
26
ONE LIFE, ONE DEATH, AND ALL THE THINGS IN BETWEEN
I wasn’t there for any of that. I only heard about it later. I don’t know where I was, really dead, or somewhere hidden in her head. I’m only telling you about it because she won’t. But the next part, that I was there for.
