by Bruce McCall
Why I lived this shallow, meaningless existence and allowed this farrago to drag along, summer after summer, and went uncomplainingly along with it, is the single saddest legacy of my stunted commercial art career. Those long, long, empty summers cost me a normal, active, healthy life. It wasn’t as if I were contributing valuable effort to the cause: I reported to work not because my presence was needed but because I was afraid not to. Many a July Saturday and August Sunday, there was next to no reason for me to languish in my cubicle.
But to have preferred lollygagging outdoors would have offended Rudy. He gave up his summers without complaint. His example shamed me into guilty panic. The only way to assuage it was to demonstrate my enthusiasm and loyalty by never going AWOL. I was grateful to make a few extra bucks of overtime every week. Rudy, after Wilf Chauvin had been keelhauled and was gone, was now the studio’s key artist and also sole owner of Windsor Advertising Artists. He must have cleared hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of extra income from our grueling catalog seasons.
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A burst of candlepower suddenly exploded over the gray Windsor skies in the fall of 1956 when I met the first real friend in the emotionally barren life that started when we left Toronto. CBE was the Windsor outpost of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I was a dedicated listener. There was one deep-voiced CBE announcer who studded an otherwise humdrum morning program of light classical music with irreverent, non-CBC fare: witty asides, jokes, cultural rants balanced by personal enthusiasms, recordings of Noël Coward, folk singers out of the mainstream, such as Jean Ritchie and Pete Seeger, and uncommercial international artists. He often read passages from highbrow authors. Host Alex Pavlini expressed a worldview that jibed with my own taste.
My satirical talents were marshaled to create a fictitious CBE “Listener Guide,” lampooning CBC Radio’s dowdy, sobersided, elitist programming. I concocted new iterations of existing programs. One example should suffice to lend a sense of this idiotic exercise: Alan Hamel (later famed as Mr. Suzanne Somers) would do a remote broadcast from the Windsor jail, interviewing convicted criminals in their cells. Hard-luck tales, tearful confessions, random death threats—all parts of a rare mix of news, weather, time checks, and terror. I titled it Hamel & Yeggs.
I mailed my handiwork c/o Alex Pavlini, CBE Windsor. A phone call two days later introduced that deep-voiced personality in the flesh, so to say. I overcame my shyness—and the fear that something hilarious to its author was a bag of shit to adult sensibilities—and agreed to meet. Alex was shorter than me, and better groomed. He didn’t converse; he declaimed in a stentorian baritone. He was pompous by nature, ambitious for a CBC job in Toronto, and as self-absorbed as an Italian tenor. I paid these deficits scant attention. Our first exchange in our first get-together was a spontaneous survey of each other’s idols and villains, in literature, movies, music, and anything else that meant something important to us.
That checklist more than implied a mutual affinity. It ended up in soul-mate territory. The two of us shared an uncanny similarity in taste, attitude, and worldviews. Alex was the son of Hungarian immigrants with blue-collar values and almost no English who sealed themselves off from their adopted country. From that unworldly background Alex created the persona of an erudite, confident man-about-town. As was said of the gossip columnist Walter Winchell, he could strut sitting down. Alex felt guilty, I surmised, for betraying his parents’ values. Long after he’d established his own gaudy lifestyle, he still slept at home. His mother did his laundry and ironing.
It was by unspoken mutual agreement that I was never invited into his modest family home. Poor Alex, like so many second-generation kids of ethnic immigrant background, constantly balanced loyalty to his family and the culture they wouldn’t abandon with a fierce ambition to fit into cosmopolitan life. Yet he evinced pride in his Hungarian roots. Once, when I gently ribbed him about the superiority of my Scots ancestry, he reared back and in that stentorian voice declaimed, “Hungarians were composing symphonies when your ancestors were painting their asses blue!”
We spent many a late night discussing the profound issues of the day. The emerging folk goddess Joan Baez, Alex insisted, was a phony: backstage during one of her Detroit concerts, he had discovered that she was no barefoot child of nature because the labels on her clothes were from Saks Fifth Avenue. Once, we got deeply into it: I’d just watched on TV as Billy Graham exhorted thousands of followers in one of his well-publicized Crusades. I’d come away shaken. The fiery reverend made sense. The debate that followed this disclosure was heated, furious, and fervent. Having God on my side eventually failed to nail the pro-Christian argument. My budding romance with religion was snuffed out.
Our nocturnal debates were mostly held in a lane of the Big Boy fast-food drive-thru. For our daytime dining we favored Cindy’s, a strange, usually empty, latter-day Miss Havisham’s parlor on Walker Road, a riot of execrable bad taste festooned with fake flowers, framed photos of dead movie stars, Manitoba and New Brunswick license plates, and other, unidentifiable gewgaws. We suppressed our giggles. It would have been cruel condescension to chat with cook, waitress, cashier, and proud proprietor Cindy.
Alex’s nightlife (I lacked one) centered around the small bar in a fairly modern little hotel on the main drag. I’d order a rye and ginger ale and sit there assuming a sophisticated air. I soon mothballed my man-of-the-world pose. Even had I pulled the impersonation off, the question nagged: Was I supposed to be a habitué of a brothel in Cairo? Could be. An Argentine stud farm? Maybe. But why would a man of the world be hanging out in a tacky little bar in a small Canadian city?
We’d roam Essex County in Alex’s comfy old Mercury on winter Sunday afternoons, pausing at the shore of Lake Erie to watch angry gray waves pound the rocks along the banks. Alex never missed a photo op. He drafted my brother Hugh to deploy his Rolleicord reflex camera to shoot him prancing on the rocks and capture Alex the Great staring at the horizon, looking profound. Afterward we’d drive to nearby Kingsville and the Diana Sweets Restaurant. Alcohol was for adults; I preferred sugary treats. I’d order a pastry puff stuffed with vanilla ice cream and drenched in chocolate sauce, and would fall on it like an Eskimo wolfing down a slab of warm blubber.
Alex bought himself a neat little motorboat, taking our fun to the Detroit River. Hubris damn near tripped him—and me—up. On a humid August evening we ventured out to the middle of Lake St. Clair. It was a long haul back to the Canadian side. Of course, in minutes the sky turned purple, the wind was rising, and the storm raged. Half an hour later, a half hour that felt like half a century, a motorboat nonchalantly docked at Windsor and its nonchalant crew stumbled ashore.
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A young man in his twenties, with all limbs intact and no criminal record, shouldn’t want for foolish pleasures and the headlong pursuit of fun. I was keenly aware of my inability to find out how this was done. Before Alex’s advent, my husk of a life revolved around the studio. I feared spare time because it was a blank. There were too many days and weeks and months to fill without at least trying to make all that time count for something, ideally something related in some way to art.
So it was that I enrolled in the Famous Artists School. It was the late fifties, and magazine illustration had been my inspiration all my life. The school advertisement had me instantly wrapped up and sold. It was a photographic take on The Last Supper: sitting there, relaxed and genial, were—as the school’s name promised—the twelve most famous illustrators in America, my personal heroes, assembled to signal their personal recommendation of their eponymous school. I felt morally obliged to enroll.
Norman Rockwell, Robert Fawcett, Peter Helck, Austin Briggs, Albert Dorne, Fred Ludekens, Stevan Dohanos, Jon Whitcomb, and a few other stars had joined forces to pass on their secrets of success to eager acolytes with $350 to invest. My artistic dreams were revived overnight. The
illustrators who had bewitched me as a kid were reaching out to help me realize that original dream. A fat three-ring binder packed with diagrams, photos, and texts soon arrived in the mail. I was on my way!
Well, actually, no, I wasn’t. Illustration proved as effective a correspondence exercise as learning to drive by mail. The steady critical presence of a human teacher guiding your progress turned out not to be that of Norman Rockwell or another famous artist but a faceless “instructor,” qualifications unlisted, who occupied a cubicle at the school’s headquarters in Westport, Connecticut. I’d submit my monthly assignment and in a couple of weeks would get comments scrawled on a tissue overlay on my drawing. My first assignment was to draw a pastoral landscape, a farm with a large barn in the foreground. Grooming the next Rockwell, my instructor pointed out that barn doors open outward, not inward. Noted. Thanks!
It finally dawned on me that there was no way these guys could have a hands-on role in a correspondence course, that Norman and his elite fellow illustrators had traded their names for a share of the school’s profits, and that this—plus that group photograph—was the extent of their involvement. Eager hopefuls who sent their steep enrollment fees to the Famous Artists School could have saved a bundle by enrolling in one of those matchbook-cover “Draw Me!” contests. I felt cheated and dropped out.
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Μy youth ended abruptly one Sunday night in November 1957. I was upstairs in my room, working on a Famous Artists School lesson. Mother was sitting with Dad in the living room. Suddenly, something changed. I heard a different kind of background noise and clambered downstairs. Dad was gently walking Mother around and around. She was doubled over in pain. Dad was in command. I returned to my room and ran through every medical problem I’d heard of. An ambulance appeared and whisked Mother away. Dad was beside her.
He stayed at the hospital all night. It was a different father, a different man, who rounded up the four of us (Mike was by then in the navy and so was Tom) for a briefing. Mother had suffered a ruptured aorta. Her chances of survival were slim. He had been informed that a doctor, a specialist in such cases, was flying to Windsor to examine Mother.
Dad would lose most of his life if he lost his wife of twenty-seven years. This kind of thing happened to others, not to him. He had left it to Mother to raise their brood and made cameo appearances with Hugh, Tom, Walt, and me when the mood struck him. He knew little about our lives and showed no interest in any of us. Six kids and a wife who needed him, but for more than twenty years he had contrived to live like a bachelor.
Hugh and I visited Mother in the hospital that afternoon for ten minutes and found her relaxed and funny. We drove away in brightened spirits and went to bed that night relieved.
We woke the next morning to find that she had died in the night. Once again Dad assembled us in the living room. His voice broke. He was a defeated man. He had never thought about family structure. He didn’t know that concern for Mother was the glue that had held everything together. With her death the whole rotten, dystopian structure that had masqueraded as a family finally collapsed. Helen Margaret (Peg) McCall was forty-nine.
The service, held in Simcoe in a funeral home by the Dickensian name of Marvyn Veale, was brief. A last look at Mother in her casket, then the slow parade to Oakwood Cemetery. The place was crowded with dead McCalls, but this was my first interment. The devastation reached its peak—or its nadir—when the casket slowly sank into the ground. My clearest memory of that awful afternoon was watching our stoic fourteen-year-old sister, Chris, standing straight-backed next to her father as sleet, wind, and rain took turns whipping through the bare black branches.
Aside from feeding us and handling our laundry, Mother did absolutely nothing for her kids. By the time of her death she had given up even pretending interest in Tom and Walter, and evinced only a grudging degree more in Hugh and me. Her withdrawal kept us from even touching her or her touching any of us except Chris, and Chris wasn’t exactly swallowed up in maternal love. Yet the instinct of us all was to protect her. No words, no events, no overt affection linked us. We needed no psychiatrist to know the cruel, sad, hopeless life Mother had lived. She was intensely private. She suffered silently. She was small and thin and delicate. She’d gone completely gray at forty.
She lived most of those years loyally ensuring Dad’s comfort. Meanwhile, she was condemned to live an empty life: A victim of her husband’s arrogant self-centeredness. Of her Gilbertson family’s almost genetic passivity, letting her absorb the pain and never fight back. Of circumstance. Of the age she lived in, consigning bright women to the margins where life lacked challenge. Of a berserk disregard of birth control that burdened her with six kids, a family she didn’t want and couldn’t handle. Of a husband too thick to understand her and who cheated his kids of a father for nearly a decade by spending the workweek a hundred miles away in Toronto, then joining the RCAF.
Much of my affection for her was more like sympathy. Even when she sat night after night alone in the living room, too drunk to read or talk, I hated her condition but not her. She had slid down and down until alcohol became her one dependable friend, her only means of escape from unbearable reality. She was gentle and soft-spoken, and subversively witty. Her common sense balanced many of Dad’s impulsive notions. Whenever someone blows cigarette smoke my way, I see Mother in her living room armchair, a cat in her lap and a New Yorker in her hands, wisps of blue smoke from her Player’s Navy Cut cigarette curling around her head. Nostalgic perfume.
The mourning lingered, seemingly without an end. But eventually the dark fog lifted. Everything I saw, everywhere I went, and everything I thought ceased being a stabbing reminder of Mother. I was finally ready to slip back into quotidian life. I was twenty-two.
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Six months later Diane came into my life. Or, to be accurate, I came into hers. She moved with her parents into a mirror image of our place, the house directly across the street. A young girl was briefly visible looking after shrubs in front of the house. She was tall, thin, and from what I could discern from across the way through her veil of long brown hair, good looking. That was enough for me. One May evening I saw her doing something outside and strolled over to introduce myself. She was prettier than I’d surmised, healthy looking, well groomed, and friendly. She was twenty-one and a doctor’s assistant. I was hooked.
Her mother was a sweet soul, her life dedicated to cleaning up the messes created by her scapegrace husband, Milt, a cheerful near idiot who did whatever he wanted, paying nothing for his childish irresponsibility. Diane’s older sister had briefly married a man who turned out to be a homosexual, suffered a nervous breakdown, quit her menial office job, and at age thirty-four withdrew from the outside world by barricading herself in a back room. She watched TV all day and all night, grew bloated, and regressed to a state of petulant childishness.
Physical attraction is always needed to sustain a love affair, but for Diane and me, our mutually shitty family plights provided an extra bond. Each of us found in the other a relief from domestic strife and worry. Physically we were a pair of magnets. We had both craved intimacy and warmth, natural affection without tension, for most of our adolescent lives. In this, we McCall kids labored under a handicap. All our lives our parents had refused to express love to their offspring. In the absence of any gesture of intimacy, of the knowledge that you’re loved, powerful forces boil and stew. Mine needed only Diane to surface and explode.
My lifelong dread of physical intimacy evaporated. Maybe a firm handshake wasn’t the closest possible expression of affection. Every night the whole summer long, in my car in the driveway behind her family’s house, the passion I had buried was uncorked. I wandered home to bed at dawn. I should have been exhausted, day after day, by my lack of sleep. I was energized instead.
In late June I took Diane to a suburban Detroit touring production o
f a forgettable English romantic comedy, The Little Hut. Neither of us had ever seen a professional theatrical production. We left that theater a couple of cosmopolites, Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence fresh from the opening night of Private Lives on the Great White Way. Food tasted better. Music sounded sweeter and fuller. A life with love in it was incalculably richer. I was no better off at the Windsor Advertising Artists studio, but now I felt armored. The job receded into a distant second place in my world. Yet another catalog blitz arrived, and it rolled off my back.
By late 1958 Alex had ceded his dominant position—or, to be candid, I had demoted him in favor of spending time with Diane. Alex didn’t take it well. I hadn’t bothered to notice that the two most important figures in my life were at odds until he went on the attack. He insisted that Diane wasn’t smart enough for me. She would become a bore and a drag over time. She hadn’t read anything, had nothing to say about anything. He hammered away mercilessly—not just because of the rupture in our relationship, he said, but because, moonstruck as I was, I had failed to grasp the importance of common interests, the real pleasures of a true match of equals. If I didn’t wise up to that simple truth, a bleak future awaited me.
My defenses were puny and my susceptibility to Alex’s worldly experience went deep. I started judging Diane by his strict standards. Alex was right, I secretly concluded. She was happy to be the dependent member of our relationship, without ambition, lacking intellectual curiosity. I could learn nothing from her.
I broke the news to Diane one November night: We should cool it off. See other people. I wanted—needed—more mental stimulation than she knew how to provide. Diane was shattered. She’d never warmed up to Alex: he was cold, self-centered, his life devoted to his vanity. She withdrew into herself. We met a few times in the next few weeks by accident. She was drawn, depressed, and still didn’t understand the abrupt cutting of the link between us. She was the injured party. I was the injurer. Our idyll had crashed, and it was my doing. Bitterness replaced a placid innocence in her life.
