DR VON HALLER: Did you have erotic dreams about her?
MYSELF: Not about her. But wild dreams about women I couldn’t recognize, and sometimes frightful hags, who ravished me. Netty began to look askew and hint about my pyjamas. And of course she had some awful piece of lore from Deptford to bring out. It seems there had been some woman there when she was a little girl who had always been “at it” and eventually been discovered in a gravel pit, “at it” with a tramp; of course this woman had gone stark, staring mad and had had to be kept in her house, tied up. But I think this tale of lust rebuked was really for Caroline’s benefit, because Tiger McGregor was lurking more and more, and Carol was getting silly. I spoke to her about it myself, and she replied with some quotation about showing her the steep and thorny way to heaven, while I was making an ass of myself over Judy Wolff. But I kept my eye on her, just the same.
DR VON HALLER: Yes? A little more, please.
MYSELF: It’s not a part of my life I take pride in. Now and then I would gum-shoe around the house when Tiger was there, just to see that everything was on the level.
DR VON HALLER: And was it?
MYSELF: No. There was a lot of prolonged kissing, and once I caught them on the sofa, and Carol’s skirt was practically over her head, and Tiger was snorting and puffing, and it was what Netty would call a scene.
DR VON HALLER: Did you intervene?
MYSELF: No. I didn’t quite do that, but I was as mad as hell, and went upstairs and walked around over their heads and then took another peep, and they had straightened up.
DR VON HALLER: Were you jealous of your sister?
MYSELF: She was just a kid. She oughtn’t to have known about that kind of thing. And I couldn’t trust Tiger to understand that the greater responsibility was his. And Carol was as hot as a Quebec heater anyhow.
DR VON HALLER: What did you say to Tiger?
MYSELF: That’s where the shame of the thing comes in. I didn’t say anything to him. I was pretty strong; I got over all that nonsense about being frail by the time I was twelve; but Tiger was a football tough, and he could have killed me.
DR VON HALLER: Should you not have been prepared to fight for Father Knopwood’s principles?
MYSELF: Knopwood prepared Carol for Confirmation; she knew what his principles were as well as I did. But she laughed at him and referred to him as my “ghostly father”. And Tiger had no principles, and still hasn’t. He’s ended up as a public-relations man in one of Father’s companies.
DR VON HALLER: So what was perfectly all right for you and Judy was not all right for Tiger and Carol?
MYSELF: I loved Judy.
DR VON HALLER: And you had no sofa-scenes?
MYSELF: Yes—but not often. The Wolffs lived in an apartment, you see, and though it was a big one there was always somebody going or coming.
DR VON HALLER: In fact, they kept their daughter on a short string?
MYSELF: Yes, but you wouldn’t think of it that way. They were such charming people. A kind of person I’d never met before. Dr Wolff was a surgeon, but you’d never know it from his conversation. Art and music and the theatre were his great interests. And politics. He was the first man I ever met who was interested in politics without being a partisan of some kind. He was even cool about Zionism. He actually had good words for Mackenzie King; he admired King’s political astuteness. He weighed the war news as nobody else did, that I knew, and even when the Allies were having setbacks near the end, he was perfectly certain the end was near. He and Professor Schwarz, who was his brother-in-law, had seen things clearly enough to leave Austria in 1932. There was a sophistication in that house that was a continual refreshment to me. Not painted on, you know, but rising from within.
DR VON HALLER: And they kept their daughter on a short string?
MYSELF: I suppose so. But I was never aware of the string.
DR VON HALLER: And there were some tempestuous scenes between you?
MYSELF: Whenever it was possible, I suppose.
DR VON HALLER: To which she consented without being sure that she loved you?
MYSELF: But I loved her. She was being kind to me because I loved her.
DR VON HALLER: Wasn’t Carol being kind to Tiger?
MYSELF: Carol was being kind to herself.
DR VON HALLER: But Judy wasn’t being kind to herself?
MYSELF: You won’t persuade me that the two things were the same.
DR VON HALLER: But what would Mr Justice Staunton say if these two young couples were brought before him? Would he make a distinction? If Father Knopwood were to appear as a special witness, would he make a distinction?
MYSELF: Knopwood was the soul of charity.
DR VON HALLER: Which you were not? Well, don’t answer now. Charity is the last lesson we learn. That is why so much of the charity we show people is retrospective. Think it over and we shall talk about it later. Tell me more about your wonderful year.
It was wonderful because the war was ending. Wonderful because Father was able to get home for a weekend now and then. Wonderful because I found my profession. Wonderful because he raised my allowance, because of Judy.
That began badly. One day he told Caroline he wanted to see her in his office. She thought it was about Tiger, and was in a sweat for fear Netty had squealed. Only Supreme Court cases took place in Father’s office. But he just wanted to know why she had been spending so much money. Miss Macmanaway, the secretary, advanced Caroline money as she needed it, without question, but of course she kept an account for Father. Caroline had been advancing me the money I needed to take Judy to films and concerts and plays, and to lunch now and then. I think Caroline thought it kept me quiet about Tiger, and I suppose she was right. But when Father wanted to know how she had been getting through about twenty-five dollars a week, apart from her accounts for clothes and oddments, she lost her nerve and said she had been giving money to me. Why? He takes this girl out, and you know what he’s like when he can’t have his own way. Carol warned me to look out for storms.
There was no storm. Father was amused, after he had scared me for a few minutes. He liked the idea that I had a girl. Raised my allowance to seven dollars and fifty cents a week, which was a fortune after my miserable weekly dollar for so long. Said he had forgotten I was growing up and had particular needs.
I was so relieved and grateful and charmed by him—because he was really the most charming man I have ever known, in a sunny, open way which was quite different from the Wolffs’ complex, baroque charm—that I told him a lot about Judy. Oddly enough, like Knopwood, he warned me about Jewish girls; very strictly guarded on the level of people like the Wolffs. Why didn’t I look a little lower down? I didn’t understand that. Why would I want a girl who was less than Judy, when not only she, but all her family, had such distinction? I knew Father liked distinguished people. But he didn’t make any reply to that.
So things were very much easier, and I was out of Carol’s financial clutch.
(7)
Summer came, and the war had ended, in Europe, on May 7.
I went to camp for the last time. Every year Caroline and I were sent to excellent camps, and I liked mine. It was not huge, it had a sensible program instead of one of those fake-Indian nightmares, and we had a fair amount of freedom. I had grown to know a lot of the boys there, and met them from year to year, though not otherwise because few of them were from Colborne College.
There was one fellow who particularly interested me because he was in so many ways unlike myself. He seemed to have extraordinary dash. He never looked ahead and never counted the cost. His name was Bill Unsworth.
I went to camp willingly enough because Judy’s parents were taking her to California. Professor Schwarz was going there to give some special lectures at Cal Tech and other places, and the Wolffs went along to see what was to be seen. Mrs Wolff said it was time Judy saw something of the world, before she went to Europe to school. I did not grasp the full significance of that, but thought
the end of the war must have something to do with it.
Camp was all very well, but I was growing too old for it, and Bill Unsworth was already too old, though he was a little younger than I. When the camp season finished, about the middle of August, he asked me and two other boys to go with him to a summer place his parents owned which was in the same district, for a few days before we returned to Toronto. It was pleasant enough, but we had had all the boating and swimming we wanted for one summer, and we were bored. Bill suggested that we look for some fun.
None of us had any idea what he had in mind, but he was certain we would like it, and enjoyed being mysterious. We drove some distance—twenty miles or so—down country roads, and then he stopped the car and said we would walk the rest of the way.
We struck into some pretty rough country, for this was Muskoka and it is rocky and covered with scrub which is hard to break through. After about half an hour we came to a pretty summer house on a small lake; it was a fussy place, with a little rock garden around it—gardens come hard in Muskoka—and a lot of verandah furniture that looked as if it had been kept in good condition by fussy people.
“Who lives here?” asked Jerry Wood.
“I don’t know their names,” said Bill. “But I do know they aren’t here. Trip to the Maritimes. I heard it at the store.”
“Well—did they say we could use the place?”
“No. They didn’t say we could use the place.”
“It’s locked,” said Don McQuilly, who was the fourth of our group.
“The kind of locks you open by spitting on them,” said Bill Unsworth.
“Are you going to break a lock?”
“Yes, Donny, I am going to break a lock.”
“But what for?”
“To get inside. What else?”
“But wait a minute. What do you want to get inside for?”
“To see what they’ve got in there, and smash it to buggery,” said Bill.
“But why?”
“Because that’s the way I feel. Haven’t you ever wanted to wreck a house?”
“My grandfather’s a judge,” said McQuilly. “I have to watch my step.”
“I don’t see your grandfather anywhere around,” said Bill, sweeping the landscape with his eyes shaded by his hand like a pirate in a movie.
We had an argument about it. McQuilly was against going ahead, but Jerry Wood thought it might be fun to get in and turn a few things upside down. I was divided in my opinion, as usual. I was sick of camp discipline; but I was by nature law-abiding. I had often wondered what it would be like to wreck something; but on the other hand I had a strong conviction that if I did anything wrong I would certainly be caught. But no boy likes to lose face in the eyes of a leader, and Bill Unsworth was a leader, of a sort. His sardonic smile as we haggled was worth pages of wordy argument. In the end we decided to go ahead, I for one feeling that I could put on the brakes any time I liked.
The lock needed rather more than spitting on, but Bill had brought some tools, which surprised and rather shocked us. We got in after a few minutes. The house was even more fussy inside than the outside had promised. It was a holiday place, but everything about it suggested elderly people.
“The first move in a job like this,” Bill said, “is to see if they’ve got any booze.”
They had none, and this made them enemies, in Bill’s eyes. They must have hidden it, which was sneaky and deserved punishment. He began to turn out cupboards and storage places, pulling everything onto the floor. We others didn’t want to seem poor-spirited, so we kicked it around a little. Our lack of zeal angered the leader.
“You make me puke!” he shouted and grabbed a mirror from the wall. It was round, and had a frame made of that plaster stuff twisted into flowers that used to be called barbola. He lifted it high above his head, and smashed it down on the back of a chair. Shattered glass flew everywhere.
“Hey, look out!” shouted Jerry. “You’ll kill somebody.”
“I’ll kill you all,” yelled Bill, and swore for three or four minutes, calling us every dirty name he could think of for being so chicken-hearted. When people talk about “leadership quality” I often think of Bill Unsworth; he had it. And like many people who have it, he could make you do things you didn’t want to do by a kind of cunning urgency. We were ashamed before him. Here he was, a bold adventurer, who had put himself out to include us—lily-livered wretches—in a daring, dangerous, highly illegal exploit, and all we could do was worry about being hurt! We plucked up our spirits and swore and shouted filthy words, and set to work to wreck the house.
Our appetite for destruction grew with feeding. I started gingerly, pulling some books out of a case, but soon I was tearing out pages by handfuls and throwing them around. Jerry got a knife and ripped the stuffing out of the mattresses. He threw feathers from sofa cushions. McQuilly, driven by some dark Scottish urge, found a crowbar and reduced wooden things to splinters. And Bill was like a fury, smashing, overturning, and tearing. But I noticed that he kept back some things and put them in a neat heap on the dining-room table, which he forbade us to break. They were photographs.
The old people must have had a large family, and there were pictures of young people and wedding groups and what were clearly grandchildren everywhere. When at last we had done as much damage as we could, the pile on the table was a large one.
“Now for the finishing touch,” said Bill. “And this is going to be all mine.”
He jumped up on the table, stripped down his trousers, and squatted over the photographs. Clearly he meant to defecate on them, but such things cannot always be commanded, and so for several minutes we stood and stared at him as he grunted and swore and strained and at last managed what he wanted, right on the family photographs.
How long it took I cannot tell, but they were critical moments in my life. For as he struggled, red-faced and pop-eyed, and as he appeared at last with a great stool dangling from his apelike rump, I regained my senses and said to myself, not “What am I doing here?” but “Why is he doing that? The destruction was simply a prelude to this. It is a dirty, animal act of defiance and protest against—well, against what? He doesn’t even know who these people are. There is no spite in him against individuals who have injured him. Is he protesting against order, against property, against privacy? No; there is nothing intellectual, nothing rooted in principle—even the principle of anarchy—in what he is doing. So far as I can judge—and I must remember that I am his accomplice in all but this, his final outrage—he is simply being as evil as his strong will and deficient imagination will permit. He is possessed, and what possesses him is Evil.”
I was startled out of my reflection by Bill shouting for something with which to wipe himself.
“Wipe on your shirt-tail, you dirty pig,” said McQuilly. “It’d be like you.”
The room stank, and we left at once, Bill Unsworth last, looking smaller, meaner, and depleted, but certainly not repentant.
We went back to the car in extremely bad temper. Nobody spoke on the way to the Unsworths’ place, and the next day Wood, McQuilly, and I took the only train home to Toronto. We did not speak of what we had done, and have never done so since.
On the long journey from Muskoka back to Toronto I had plenty of time to think, and I made my resolve then to be a lawyer. I was against people like Bill Unsworth, or who were possessed as he was. I was against whatever it was that possessed him, and I thought the law was the best way of making my opposition effective.
(8)
It was a surprise that brought no pleasure when I discovered that I was in love with Dr von Haller.
For many weeks I had been seeing her on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and was always aware of changes in my attitude toward her. In the beginning, indifference; she was my physician, and though I was not such a fool as to think she could help me without my cooperation I assumed that there would be limits to that; I would answer questions and provide information to the best of my a
bility, but I assumed without thinking that some reticences would be left me. Her request for regular reports on my dreams I did not take very seriously, though I did my best to comply and even reached a point where I was likely to wake after a dream and make notes on it before sleeping again. But the idea of dreams as a key to anything very serious in my case or any other was still strange and, I suppose, unwelcome. Netty had set no store by dreams, and the training of a Netty is not quickly set aside.
In time, however, quite a big dossier of dreams accumulated, which the doctor filed, and of which I kept copies. I had taken rooms in Zürich; a small service flat, looking out on a courtyard, did me very well; meals with wine could be taken at the table d’hôte, and I found after a time that the wine was enough, with a nightcap of whisky, just so that I should not forget what it tasted like. I was fully occupied, for the doctor gave me plenty of homework. Making up my notes for my next appointment took far more time than I had expected—quite as much as preparing a case for court—because my problem was to get the tone right; with Johanna von Haller I was arguing not for victory, but for truth. It was hard work, and I took to napping after lunch, a thing I had never done before. I walked, and came to know Zürich fairly well—certainly well enough to understand that my knowledge was still that of a visitor and a stranger. I took to the museums; even more, I took to the churches, and sometimes sat for long spells in the Grossmünster, looking at the splendid modern windows. And all the time I was thinking, remembering, reliving; what I was engaged on with Dr von Haller (which I suppose must be called an analysis, though it was nothing like what I had ever imagined an analysis to be) possessed me utterly.
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