The Girl in Saskatoon

by Sharon Butala

  That fall, while I was shuffling happily down the campus sidewalks through the yellow, gold, and orange autumn leaves, and breathing in the crisp air mixed with the heady scent of the future, Alex had returned to her home country. She had gone to Yorkton, the city about an hour south of her home, in order to attend nursing school. In the fifties, girls were entering nursing in droves; it was one of the three professions routinely open to us: nursing, teaching, and secretarial work. Having been the first of her family to graduate from high school, she was now the first to go on to higher education. She had given no indication during high school that nursing was her plan, though. Twice in the school yearbooks she had recorded that her ambition was to be a stewardess, an ambition most of us wouldn’t have dared to list even if we’d dreamt of such a thing. Stewardessing was a new profession, and it was viewed as very glamorous—you got to travel and see the world (imagine, a different city every night!), and to meet sophisticated, successful men—and not for the likes of the ordinary, as most of us felt ourselves to be.

  I can actually remember reading Alex’s class notes with friends, and our saying to each other, “But she’s too short!” She was only five foot one, and in those days the rules governing who could qualify as a stewardess were strict: minimum height was five foot two. But you could also be too tall. You had to meet the airlines’ standards of slimness too—some airlines actually weighed their stewardesses before a flight—and you had to be pretty. Presumably there was no scale or ruler to judge that, nor, I think, was this written anywhere as a requirement, but there was never any question about it. I’m sure this was because most passengers were men, not to mention that, of course, men run airlines, and how better to attract customers than the promise of gorgeous young women bending toward you and whispering, “Coffee, tea, or milk?” or, as the unfunny joke went, “Coffee, tea, or me?” (It is only in the last few years that prettiness seems to have stopped being mandatory, at least in Canada. I’ve been served by middle-aged, slightly overweight women, much to my pleased astonishment, although I’m sure some men would still rather be served by Miss Canada than by somebody who reminds them of their mother.)

  I’m sure we must have wondered, though not aloud, whether Alex was pretty enough. The main reason we didn’t all give that “ambition” to the class notes editor was that to do so would have been to declare we were pretty, and only the very prettiest girls could get away with doing that, though most wouldn’t have because they knew that if they had, the other girls would hate them. I can only think that by the time she was seventeen and eighteen, both times she gave stewardessing as her ambition, Alex must have begun to see herself as a pretty girl. That must have meant that she was getting feedback from her friends, her family, and maybe already from boys, that told her she was growing into an attractive woman.

  And yet, whenever I remembered her, I thought of her as ordinary looking, and was surprised when others who had known her in high school described her as “attractive.” But now, these many years later, when I studied her pictures in our yearbooks, I could see the features that soon would earn her the designation “beauty queen,” and I wondered why I hadn’t noticed earlier. Maybe this was because we were physically alike: I thought I was plain, and on my bad days, worse than that, and maybe I simply believed that the same was true of her.

  We didn’t see how discriminatory the airlines’ rules were; as if only the pretty could pour a cup of coffee, or hand out a pillow. As if women existed only to please and serve men. Rather than seeing the unfairness of it, we simply sighed, and accepted that we could never be stewardesses, and went elsewhere for jobs. It may also be that we saw the discrimination very well, but in a world where there were wallflowers and girls with “bad” reputations and a limited number of female professions, we believed ourselves to be helpless to do anything about it. Or else we knew at an unconscious level that the fight for fairness would cost us too much, and so we pretended to ourselves, as women do all over the world most of the time, that the unfairness didn’t exist.

  As a woman in her mid-seventies said to me when I was talking about the profession, she had wanted to be a stewardess herself when she was young, but—and here she paused for a moment, and then spoke too loudly, dropping her head in embarrassment, something happening in her throat, a near loss of control that would next be tears—“It was because you could fly!” After a second, she went on, her voice light now, matter-of-fact, though with a hint of irony, “When I was young, a girl couldn’t be a pilot. So I thought, well, then I’ll be a stewardess.” It would take me weeks to sort out what I had heard: a sudden welling up of an old, still-powerful sorrow over a lost dream, mixed with the elder’s self-deprecation of the foolishness of youth. I found myself responding with the writer’s cold eye—isn’t that interesting!—and at the same time, with the richest empathy. But until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that lots of girls who became stewardesses really only wanted to fly, and regarded their work as what you had to do to get into the air.

  This motive wouldn’t have entered my head. Other than loving to dance, I was in no way physical, I hated sports; other than boys, paradise to me was a good book, and what I wanted most at that time in my life was a brilliant education. I wanted desperately to enter the heady realm of those who had read great literature, who could quote and recommend and understand, who could stride the world in the seven-league boots of knowledge. And I was fearful, very fearful—why else at that age to retreat into books? It wouldn’t occur to me then to want to fly—that flying was the reason many girls might choose to be stewardesses.

  Maybe I had misread Alex in this one important way: that she dreamt not of glamour, foreign lands, great cities, and handsome rich men, but of lifting herself above the mundane world; she dreamt of going higher, of soaring beyond the rooftops of her childhood village, and beyond the green pastures and dark forests of her own land, and even beyond the provincial little city of Saskatoon. Flying meant adventure, daring, escape from the chains of fifties girlhood.

  Neither Alex nor I figured on what falling in love, provided the love was mutual, might do to our dreams. I married during the summer between my third and fourth year at university, on my twenty-first birthday. Unbelievably, I thought I was getting dangerously close to being an old maid. Shocking, when you think that today the average age of marriage for Canadian women is twenty-seven. I doubt that the prospect of spinsterhood worried pretty, popular, and confident Alex much. At twenty-three, she wasn’t married or engaged to be married, and I am sure that this was only because she chose not to be.

  There was one more requirement to be a stewardess: that you had to be a graduate nurse. No one close to Alex was able to tell me whether or not she had decided to go to nursing school with the purpose of eventually qualifying as a stewardess, but no one would rule it out as a motive either. She stuck with that ambition in our class notes for two years running, so I know she had to be serious about it.

  I was being visited by a ghost. Not a white-sheet ghost going woo-woo and floating off the floor, arms outstretched, trying to scare me to death, but an experience that people, having no other name for it, call a ghost. One night, very late, and not being able to sleep, I was working in the basement at the computer, lost in whatever I was doing, and I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a white figure crouched against the far wall, crouched as though afraid—just a glimpse—and when I turned my head toward it, there was nothing and nobody there. The figure I thought I’d seen had been dressed in (or rather, was) some sort of white gown with hood and was very thin, but not tall, and the face—although I saw no face—was turned toward me. I dismissed what I’d seen as a fluke of light and shadow and went back to work. Some moments later, at the edge of my peripheral vision, I saw the same thing, only this time the figure was closer to me and still crouched in a fearful way, but when I looked, nothing. Again, thinking I’d imagined this, I returned to work.

  Finally I saw the figure a third time, still crouched, and
now closer yet to me. I came back to myself, my hands left the keys, and I thought, shivering a little, What is going on here? But when I turned my head and really looked, there was no figure, no person, not even a shadow. I was unnerved and anxious, and I shut down the computer and went back to bed. But I lay there for a long time, wondering who or what I had seen, or barely seen—or maybe I’d just imagined the whole thing—and although there was nothing identifiably Alex about the figure, I was sure it had been her.

  What I left out of this account is the small black object, about a third the size of the figure, that was, in each tiny glimpse, placed between the white figure and me, and that was what the figure was afraid of. I don’t even want to think what that was about, except to say that I wasn’t in the least frightened by the figure—it was, if anything, pathetic. It was the angular black object that was causing me unease, and this was the reason I left the basement; it had seemed to me that Alex wanted to talk to me, wanted to approach me, but couldn’t get any closer because of it. I see now that its blackness, its lack of features of any kind except that angularity of form, might well have been an absence—the absence of feeling, compassion, love, goodness. It was evil, I was sure, whatever it was.

  The next time she came to me was months later. Again, it was night, and I was sound asleep beside my husband. But something disturbed my sleep, and I turned from one side, or was in the process of turning from one side to the other, when I groggily saw an erect, graceful white figure that seemed to be leaving our bedroom, as if it had been at our bedside and was now moving away, out the door, its back to me. Most surprising and lovely was the shining white cat—incandescent, large, full rather than sleek—that jumped off the covers over my feet, where it seemed to have been resting, to follow the white figure. And that was all. I was left this time with a feeling of awe, and of happiness that Alex had left behind or managed somehow to get rid of that black thing that dogged her, and was now accompanied by—well, what? For a long time, I couldn’t figure out what that beautiful, weightless white cat was, until one day, as I sat gazing out the window thinking about her, it came to me. It was, I decided, a guardian spirit; an angel, if you like.

  That she had come again only strengthened my resolve to write this book no matter what happened to me; no matter what happened in the investigation; even if I had to self-publish. Oh, if only she would speak to me, I thought; if only she would tell me who it was that had taken her life. If only she could come to life again, and be Alex again, for all of us who care about her. Now I saw that the girl I’d barely known (although I wonder if I didn’t know her better than I can remember), the one who for years at a time I never even thought of, had become dear to me, had taken over my heart. And she had done this, somehow, long after her death. If I could not recount one conversation with her, if I could not remember details, or knew who she had dated, or who her friends at school were, or what dress she had worn to grade twelve grad, I had come to know and love her anyway. It stuns me to think of how wide and deep the world is, and of what humans are capable if only they would open to that depth of world.

  And I think, now that I am growing old, that this wisdom is part of what I sought nearly fifty years ago, when my heart’s desire was to go to university, where I firmly believed the wisdom of the world was gathered, and where I would learn, at last, what wisdom was, what things meant. Although, I never conceived of this wisdom I dreamt of as being “what things meant.” I thought it was facts, rules, insights and epigrams, equations and theorems, proposals and essays about…the turning of the wheels of the universe and time.

  I begin to think now that it was not so much the identification and capture of her killer that she wanted, as never to be forgotten; she wanted her story told. To catch the murderer at last, well, that would be a bonus, and a much-desired one. Maybe, it occurred to me one day, Alex herself was the reason that Saskatoon remains constant to her memory; maybe she haunts the city, whispering in people’s ears, floating through their dreams, touching them gently, and murmuring, “Remember me, remember me.“

  A year after they had decided to take on the case, in January 2004, the fifth estate aired its episode about Alex’s life and death. They interwove commentary about the case, analysis of events and reports, and interviews with family members, witnesses, and those they had discovered as potential suspects, with a dramatic re-enactment of Alex’s movements that night. They hired a young actor to play Alex, one whom all of us who had known Alex must have thought was nothing like her. She was, by the standards of the fifties, too thin, didn’t appear to have Alex’s feminine curves, and the coiffure she’d been given was wrong. Alex’s essential womanliness was missing.

  There was a mild furor in Saskatoon over that program; it served to bring back the original sense of horror and pity, and to remind Saskatoon people of things they remembered about that night or the event itself. I don’t know how many calls the CBC received about it, but even I (having been interviewed on the episode) received a few, as well as a couple of letters. One of the letters was from Alex’s sister, Ann, the closest to her in age, and in it she expressed her appreciation that Alex had not been forgotten, and pleasure at the recognition that family members were not the only ones who would never be able to rest easy until Alex had received justice. She offered to help me, too, with background about the family, and said that the rest of the family—or her sisters—were glad of what I was doing and would help me if they could.

  Then one of the witnesses to Alex’s last movements phoned. He’d been one of the boys looking longingly down at her from above as she sat alone gazing out across the river on the dam’s apron in the hours before her disappearance. He said, with a deep regret, “Maybe if we’d gone down to talk to her then, we’d have kept away her killer.” Another of the phone calls was from one of Alex’s nieces, who talked to me about things of which I had had no previous knowledge, things that had happened to family members after Alex’s death. Information was beginning to drop into my incompetent lap, some of it coming in ways so strange that I couldn’t help but wonder if Alex, having acquired this inexperienced and cowardly biog-rapher, wasn’t up there in exasperation prodding people who knew things, with a long finger, to check in with me.

  For example: a cousin of mine moved with his wife and family from the West Coast to Saskatoon. One night at a hockey game he happened to sit beside a woman who, they discovered in the course of their idle conversation, was daughter to another witness to Alex’s disappearance. My cousin e-mailed me at once with the woman’s name and phone number, and when the woman and I met for coffee, she handed me a typed account of what her father had told her he had seen that evening, before Alex reached the dam. I phoned him and he told me all about it himself. An old man now, he was still filled with anguish over what he thought he could have done that might have saved her, if only he hadn’t been in such a hurry that night, if only he hadn’t been late. Long after I forget every detail of his account, I will remember his decency, his anger, and his pain.

  After the episode was aired people would come up to me on the street to tell me what they remembered about the time of Alex’s disappearance and the finding of her body. At a public reading I was doing in Saskatoon, one woman told me about a certain man who had been bothering Alex, and another told me about a different man more or less in the same category. They told me what they could remember about these men, although this would turn out to be not that much, and in the end, it seems that neither of the men was responsible for Alex’s death anyway. One of the people who talked to me after a reading told me about a family member who had had a bad experience in Saskatoon, before Alex’s murder. It had happened at the end of the Second World War, when the girl in question was only ten years old.

  She and two younger children were on a berry-picking expedition on the far side of the river from where, eighteen years later, Alex’s body would be found, when a teenaged boy—described by her as “about sixteen”—rode up to them on a bike and lured her away
. Safely out of sight of the others, he knocked her to the ground, beat her, tore her clothes from her, threatened her with a jackknife, and raped her, before she managed to escape from him. Then she wandered, dazed, bleeding, and still unclothed, toward the university campus, until a professor and his wife, out for a stroll, came upon her, covered her with the husband’s jacket, and took her to the police station, and then to Saskatoon City Hospital, where she remained for several days. It turned out that her assailant returned to the other two children, both girls, ages eight and nine, but although he had told the first girl he was going to assault them, too, he did not, and he rode away on his bike across the CPR bridge—the one near which Alex’s body would later be found—toward “the city.”

  I was able to find this awful story in the newspaper, and I searched for word of capture of the rapist and, despite what seemed to be a good description of him and of the bike he was riding, did not find it. The family member who told me this story (a young child at the time) said that the boy who had committed this crime had not been caught, and that the family seemed to think that his father had been “someone important” and that was why the boy’s identity was never divulged. She said that the person who had been assaulted (who remains, more than sixty years later, traumatized by that terrible assault not just on her person, but on her childhood, her very innocence) had always thought that because of the location and the nature of the violence that that same boy had been Alex’s killer.