I widened my gaze to where the new—fairly new, commissioned about 1959—Queen Elizabeth power plant, a large building, red-brown brick on the bottom, silver-white on the top half, with its three tall chimneys, sat dominating the view to my left. It sat even beyond the CNR bridge, at the far south end of the road called Spadina Crescent that ran north and south through the heart of the city, all the way to the river’s west edge. Sometimes, on a sunny weekend in the warm months, we kids biked or walked to the road’s end where eventually the power plant would be built and while the sanatarium was still there. I don’t know if the place held such an attraction for us because we were children and children especially crave trees and grass and the proximity of natural bodies of water—children being closer to creation than adults—or because most of us had spent our earliest, most impressionable years on farms or homesteads in the wilderness and were drawn to such a place as one is drawn to whatever one knows first, as the right place, the true place. Of all my childhood memories of this city, going with my friends along that dirt road lined with trees and shrubs, the river flowing beside us, is one that clings to me.
I remembered, too, that this was the place where the frozen bodies of two Aboriginal men were found in January and February, 2000. (Two others were found elsewhere, one of them back in 1990.) How these men came to be there, not even properly dressed for outdoors in a prairie winter, remains a mystery, one fraught with undertones of—well—evil. The rest of the city lay behind me, or to my right, and it was hard to see because of the thick planting of trees, but far off to my right, I thought I could see the tower of Westmount Elementary School on its hill rising above the surrounding houses. Imagine that, I thought, for all the other really old schools, for one reason or another had been torn down, and for one second I was again transported back to my elementary school days.
I turned away then, went back to my car, and drove back toward the city centre. I’d decided to cross the river to the city’s west half, to drive north the length of Spadina Crescent, which meant the length of the river, just to see, if I could, the ways in which all of it had changed since I was a child. Or maybe I had no idea of that; maybe I wanted to think about this strange notion of loving this place, and to experience that while I passed through the parts of the city I knew best.
Once across the river, I turned north, and joining Spadina Crescent at the heart of downtown, just past the beautiful old railway hotel, the Bessborough, I began to drive slowly along the river, past the cathedrals on my left and eventually past the row of stately homes that face the river, some of which had been built a hundred years earlier by the first city fathers. Finally I arrived at the weir, and just beyond it, the CPR bridge that since 1908 has crossed the river there, and also Spadina Crescent, so that I would have to drive under it. From there, the railway continues through the city by running onto the built-up embankment parallel to 33rd Street. Since the earliest part of the twentieth century the heart of Saskatoon has been bounded by the two railway bridges. I had just driven from the far south end, where the CNR bridge still stands, and that still marks that farther edge of the city, to the CPR bridge that had once marked the north boundary; nowadays the city has spread well past it.
At the point where the bridge passes overhead, Spadina Crescent is narrow and the houses that face the river, although nicely kept, are hardly mansions. The landscape is grassy, dotted with shrubs and sometimes trees, or covered with asphalt, bits of gravel scattered along the street’s edges. I had been thinking, But how could anyone tell? From my low vantage point as I drove slowly past, the place appeared as mundane, as unprepossessing as any in the city. It was nothing, it seemed to me then, it was nowhere, and I faltered and was puzzled, because without realizing it, I had wanted this spot to be resting under a permanent cloud of dark memory, something that as you approached would settle on you, seep into your bones, into your very soul, so that you could not help but know that something had happened here.
This was where Alex was last seen alive; this was also where she had died. I had an urge to stop, to park, but I had done that many times over the past few years, and I was struggling with emotion that I could not understand: How could things so terrible happen without there being any way to tell? How could such emotion be spilled here and leave no trace? Years after Alex’s death I had been in Iraklion on Crete and at the grave of Nikos Kazantzakis had broken into sobs that I could neither stop nor understand, except as an artifact of the hundreds who had sobbed there at his burial, a flow of emotion so powerful that it still hung there—and so I knew such things could happen. I thought that they should, and to everyone, to greater or lesser degree, whenever we stand at places on the earth where terrible things once happened. But I saw nothing out of the ordinary, and so I drove on slowly, thinking about this as I went, north on Spadina Crescent along the river, until the street name changed to Whiteswan Drive where I passed the large new houses, with their mostly derivative architecture (Cape Cod, Tudor, weathered Atlantic cottage, southern American plantation).
The fact that there was no way to tell that a young, innocent, and beautiful woman had been violated, beaten, and killed next to the CPR bridge shocked and dismayed me; I did not want anyone ever to forget what had happened there so many years before. That people could come as strangers to the city now, and never know, not even want to know, hurt me—and almost immediately, frightened me. I felt a sudden, gut-wrenching fear, because if we didn’t remember, had no reminders at all of such a tragic event, then such a thing might happen to any of us, and the failure to remember would relegate it to the realm of the commonplace, the absolvable, the unnoteworthy. Not that when I felt that spasm of fear I understood it at once; only in later ruminations did I begin to see.
I noticed then that the two spots I’d made a point of visiting, and that had evoked in me a visceral sense of my relationship to the city, were also two of the places where the very worst had happened: not slums, not derelict buildings, not prisons or hospitals for the insane, or environmentally destroyed sites, but the places wherein the city’s infamy also lay. The very places where the beauty was greatest, where for several generations (although the city was only one hundred years old in 2006) Saskatoon people have gone to enjoy themselves on a Sunday afternoon or a warm summer evening or to toboggan in the winter, were also the places where terrible things happened, sometimes where unspeakable deeds were done: beautiful as they were, these were the places, also, where evil had triumphed. This is what I was thinking as I drove slowly on down Whiteswan Drive, the river flowing with me on my right, and the row of large, gracious houses on my left, appearing, looming, and retreating as I passed.
Well into my sixties as I write this, I was—I am—at last, in the process of facing the existence of evil, of trying to formulate some understanding of it that makes sense to me, never mind anybody else, and that, at the same time, will allow me to live. It seemed to me then that those locations in the heart of the city I’d only just discovered I loved, those that were so beautiful that day, or were usually so beautiful, acted as a metaphor for how I was beginning to understand life. Evil exists everywhere at every minute, just as good does, or the potential for both. And each of us is both subject to and object of both. Worse, in the constant, unending battle of good and evil, evil wins far too often, maybe even more often than good does. That is how I am beginning to understand life.
I couldn’t help but wonder how I could get so old without recognizing something so basic, how it could be that at such an age I had still failed to even try to conceptualize evil as anything other than the fire-and-brimstone hell of my forties Catholic upbringing. Over the years and without my noticing, evil had somehow become equated with rule-breaking or convention-breaking, rather than evil as measured by the harm done in the world. Such wilful innocence, I raged at myself, such—I wanted to say, such evil innocence—but I stopped myself. Refusing to see the truth that is all around you is not innocence; it is not the same as being unacquainted with t
he fact of the evil all around us.
But earlier that morning, as I’d been idly driving around the city and, for no good reason I could identify, finding myself passing the house that had been my mother’s—I loved my house, she told us on her deathbed—noting an old building in the process of being torn down, a building in which one of my sisters had once worked, choosing to drive by a church that had been turned into a theatre, and then, to my own bemusement, the house where at a party when I was only nineteen and newly dumped by the first man I’d ever genuinely loved, I had fallen under the spell of the man who became my first husband, I hadn’t been thinking about evil. I hadn’t been thinking about what happened to Alex, or about the book I was trying to write about her murder. I was thinking only about how we had once lived our lives between those two bridges, within sight and sound of the constantly flowing, constantly changing river, as it wound its way through the heart of the old city where both Alex and I once were young.
It seemed to me that despite the conversions or destructions, big or small, the new buildings and the modernizing, this central part of the city had kept its essential character. I was beginning to see the city as a living, breathing entity that could not, at its deepest level, be truly changed, its character expressing itself in an ambience that, no matter how many buildings were torn down and new ones built, could never be fully altered or eradicated. It was something in the air, a kind of muggy, invisible soul that touched everything. I was thinking how Alex, transported back from the unknown place to which she was so ruthlessly and too early sent, would still know where she was; she would still recognize it.
I had come to the city to attend a book launch and reception. This had happened the evening before and although it was still the first week in May, it was unbearably hot—at one point into the thirties Celsius—and at the packed reception we’d been fanning ourselves and hanging our light jackets or sweaters over our chair backs. Of course, we all attributed the unseasonable heat to global warming, the notion that weather might just be weather, having been, by then, lost forever. And so it was very hot, too hot, and we hoped that it would cool again soon because we were a little frightened by the notion of the intense heat we didn’t usually have until July, now beginning the first week of May, and with the possibility of it lasting right through until fall. If it did, we would be forced to change a great deal about how we lived. Besides, the farmers’ crops would be ruined by such heat and dryness, and then what? Not that any of us were farmers (except for me, and my husband was mostly a cattle rancher anyway).
It is just that in Saskatchewan, even the coolest of the city’s hipsters would have to pay homage to the farmers, if with a strong sense of irony—a hint of it in the way the mouth was held, or in the slight movement of the eyebrows. In a province whose entire mythology is the mythology of land, the twenty-first century has seen radical changes, with the small farmers forced out and replaced by giant farms and agribusiness, or else by the urban well-off who turn farmland into acreages. Displaced rural and small-town people are swelling our cities. People are now taking farmers, and the farm mythology, less seriously than they used to.
The day Alex was killed, May 18, 1962 (ten days further into May than the day I have been writing about), had been very hot too, the hottest day since the previous summer, about thirty degrees Celsius. Back in 1962 we would have been merely grateful for such a beautiful day, knowing it wouldn’t last, and feeling that such gorgeous weather was a gift straight from the heavens and not to be questioned. We wouldn’t have been worrying about global warming or UV rays, although our parents would certainly have given a thought to what the heat would do to the farmers’ crops. I don’t remember the day, or what I’d been doing, although I can make a good guess because I have always been (and I say this ruefully and not without anger) helplessly predictable and dutiful.
The whole city would have been giddy with the weather, not least because of our harsh winters and the great mountains of snow we had. Everybody would have been outside to enjoy the day in the afternoon. Teenage girls would have worn as little as possible (though considerably more than they would today), shorts, I think, and sleeveless cotton blouses, because the ubiquitous “T-shirt,” although around since the First World War, hadn’t yet blossomed into the all-purpose, unisex garment it was to become. By evening, entire families would have been sitting on the front or back lawn, or strolling easily through the neighbourhood, radiating contentment and smiling at everyone they saw.
Of course, the boys would have been out too, usually in cars, circling neighbourhoods or heading straight downtown to cruise up and down 2nd Avenue, its main street—the one that today is mostly a parking mall—where girls would be strolling in freshly polished white sandals, cotton blouses and long, full cotton skirts, or pedal-pushers (also called capri pants), waists defined by wide, colourful, elastic cinch belts. They’d changed from shorts because appearing downtown in them was considered improper, and, if you were over ten, in bad taste. St. Paul’s Hospital, on the far west side of the city, was also a training hospital and had a nurses’ residence, but since I was never near there after leaving elementary school, I can only guess that boys might have cruised there too. (This was the hospital where, in 1947, one of my sisters had spent seven months being rehabilitated from a bout with polio that almost killed her, and that would, from then on, define her too-short life.) Or maybe the presence of the nuns who ran the hospital and the over-vigilant, although for the most part kindly, priests at nearby St. Mary’s Church would have acted as a deterrent. Across the river, the nurses’ residence at the University Hospital was inside the university grounds, and the residence too close to the hospital doors to make cruising viable.
So mostly, they would have cruised east or west down Queen Street past City Hospital. This hospital, as well as its nurses’ residence, was set on the border of a large, well-groomed, and inviting park with a stream that ran through its width until it reached the edge, where it poured under Spadina Crescent and from there into the nearby river. The river and the beautiful park surrounding the hospital and residence invited strolls by people of all ages and walks of life, from dog-walkers to creaky senior citizens, to children on tricycles with their pregnant mothers, to young women, often graduate nurses or nurses in training, in pairs and groups, giggling and chattering while they kept out a weather eye for young males, and were ready to flirt at the drop of the proverbial hat.
After the boys cruised past City Hospital once, they might have turned north along Spadina Crescent heading toward the weir and the CPR bridge and, where 33rd Street meets Spadina Crescent, they’d have driven under the bridge and immediately turned west a few blocks to the corner of 7th Avenue where Mead’s Drugstore was, and there turned back south along 7th Avenue, which led, once again, to the front doors of the old (1909) red-brick City Hospital with the red-brick nurses’ residence between it and the river. It was a rectangular route that on beautiful spring and summer evenings practically guaranteed finding some girls to cruise along beside and try to converse with, or to entice into the car for a spin around the city.
Accepting such an invitation was an ordinary thing to do on a warm spring evening in the city then. Although our parents would have been horrified if they’d known, and we would have taken some care in deciding whether to get into the car—usually you did so only if you knew at least one of the boys or if you had a friend with you—trusting our instincts, we sometimes hopped in anyway. One of my girlfriends, who trained at City Hospital and would have been working there that spring day in 1962 when Alex vanished, met the man who became her husband in that way. She was hardly the only one. The city was a safe place, and no one I ever heard of came to harm from doing it, although I do remember once in the early fifties, standing at the bus stop at the corner of 2nd Avenue and 19th Street late one Saturday afternoon, when a car full of young people came careening by, and screeched to a stop. A girl was shoved out onto the street. The car sped away again down 19th Street, to
ward the underpass that used to be there and that led to the city’s west side.
I remember that she staggered, but managed not to fall. She was a pretty blonde, a bit on the plump side, she carried a small white purse, and she was wearing a summer dress with a full skirt, I recall a blue and green print on a white background, an outfit that said she’d been expecting to do something special. The few of us at the bus stop, strangers to one another, pretended not to notice what had happened to her, and she stood there, holding her purse in both hands, trying not to cry, and when the bus came, she got on it with the rest of us, as if that had been her plan all along.
And now I know, of course, that if any girl who’d taken a ride in that way had been driven out into the countryside or down a dark street and raped, we would never have heard about it; it would have been kept secret, such a terrible shame it was in those days because it had to have been your fault and, in any case, recourse was virtually zero. It was better kept secret, and if you got pregnant, you’d be sent away to have the baby in secrecy and to give it away.
The Girl in Saskatoon Page 2
