At the annual regatta, I couldn’t wait to show off my swimming prowess to the assembled throng, but most of all to Sally. I dived off the platform, landing with a chest-smashing splash, and began wind-milling my arms stroke for stroke with Brian Love, the brother of Steve, all eyes watching, all mouths shouting, our hands slapping the nylon cord at exactly the same moment, our mad sprint ending in a dead heat. But the organizers had made no allowance for ties, so Brian Love received the first-place medal, and John Stevens the second place. Someone thrust a flashlight in my hand as a consolation prize, but I was inconsolable in my bitterness. Did I not finish first?
Days later, Brian’s mother pressed into my palm a disk she had bought and engraved herself. “I felt badly that you did not receive a medal, too,” she said, smiling at me with the palpable warmth that seemed to emanate from all mothers but my own. In our family, “love” was a four-letter word.
* * *
—
One night, after dusk scattered our gang homeward in all directions, I hung back to stargaze with Sally, raising our fingers to trace the points of the Big Dipper. As if reading my hope, she invited me into her cottage to watch TV, a black-and-white job with rabbit ears that pulled in a fuzzy signal from the nearby town of Barrie. In the dim light, I held my prize flashlight under my chin, shooting spooky shafts of light into the shadowed sockets of my eyes, and moaned like a ghost. I still liked nothing better than making her laugh, especially when she bit her upper lip to stop from exposing her gums.
It was just the two of us, alone together, no parents, no sister, no other kids, no spinning bottles. The interior of her place was unusual, with a living room that was open to the rafters like a courtyard, the bedrooms tucked around the perimeter of the second floor as if they were gazing down on us. I spread out on the sofa and Sally slouched in the chair beside me, the two of us engrossed by a World War II drama.
But soon a familiar, insidious feeling of entrapment choked me; it was late August, and the buttery flow of summer was ebbing away. Then Sally announced that she was leaving for the city the next day so she could go on an outing with Marilyn, and I fell into a well of premature mourning. The endless summer was a liar.
When the day came to pack up our car and head south, I felt as if I was leaving the only truly good thing I had ever known; the only place where joy flowed, unadulterated; the only sliver of time and space where the chronic anxiety of the city gave way, fleetingly, to an animal state of self-forgetting.
Days earlier, wandering alone in the woods, attempting to fill the gap Sally had left, I had found a wriggling dark pink salamander. Scooping my prize into a glass Mason jar, I dropped in leaves of lettuce to sustain it, but the creature quickly died and then liquefied. I buried the jar like a coffin in the narrow laneway beside our cottage, placing a rock on top to mark the spot. I promised myself, the son and grandson of forensic-minded pathologists, that when I returned the next summer, I’d dig it up and find a skeleton, a memento mori perfect in its whiteness.
But later that fall, my parents announced that we were not renewing the cottage rental for the following summer of 1963. They gave no reason for their decision, which felt like a death without a funeral.
I passed the next three summers at an all-boys camp farther north, taking week-long canoe trips into the mosquito-infested bush with pimply classmates, fending off the occasional homosexual advance inside our leaky, fart-ridden pup tents. As part of earning my Bronze Medallion for life-saving skills, I was forced to perform mock mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on an uncooperative fourteen-year-old boy. My first kiss but not my last medal.
We never returned to De Grassi as a family. While I envied Sally’s unbroken connection to the point, all those Mays to Octobers piled one atop another, I nearly forgot her.
TWO
The Importance of Being George
If my childhood load was heavy, George Benjamin Orr was growing up similarly burdened. If he became a rebel, it was not without cause.
One day in 1960, he was invited to tea by Alan Stephen, whose genial manner and Oxbridge accent perfectly suited his position as headmaster of an exclusive all-boys prep school. “Orr, I’ve had my eye on the two boys in your class who could be prime minister one day. There’s you and there’s Michael Ignatieff,” Stephen said.
Oh, God, George thought. Now I’ll have to do my homework. He was twelve years old. It felt like a life sentence.
Regardless of his class standing, the shy boy had much to puzzle out, especially as he was recuperating from a large blow. At the start of Grade 5, his parents had pulled him out of Owen Boulevard Public School, where he’d known the same boys and girls forever, and enrolled him in Upper Canada College. When he passed under the stone archway of his “alma pater”—no girls allowed, no questions asked—he lost all connection with his peers, and himself. A random caning by a free-ranging blond psychopath was but one of countless “character-building” humiliations of the British colonial–style snob school that delivered a home truth: a single tear was blood to the sharks. When punched in the face in the mandatory boxing tournament for seven- to thirteen-year-olds, George thought his head had exploded, and he preferred to keep his head. He simply quit, stepping over the ropes and out of the ring. Thinking outside the box.
Although three previous generations of Orrs had proudly worn the blue-and-white old-boy tie and crested blazer, the family lived four miles to the north in the suburbs of York Mills. The homes of both sets of George’s grandparents stood mere blocks apart, and the Christian name George had been passed down continuously on both sides of the family: six preceding Georges inhabited the dual streams of his bloodlines. Although no one said it aloud, he had someone big to live up to. Maybe several someones.
George was not fond of his paternal grandfather, a manipulative, alcoholic bully who was the co-founder of a successful insurance brokerage, Mulholland-Orr. While George’s father, George Jr., insisted on the nickname “Mac,” he could not resist being shunted down the tracks of the family business. If Mac had ever possessed the stamina to counter the inexorable will of his own father, his service in World War II had beaten it out of him. Even at twelve, George was at least dimly aware of the plight of his father and dreaded becoming the third-generation insurance man.
Just as I, in my own way, dreaded becoming a third-generation medical man, following the pattern of my father and my paternal grandfather.
* * *
—
In the summer of 1939, freshly graduated from UCC, Mac Orr had held the world by the tail. Handsome and athletic, gregarious and quick-witted, the six-foot teenager was a track star poised to glide into the winners’ circle of Toronto high society. But the outbreak of World War II hijacked his future. Instead of running for Canada at the Olympics, Mac joined the Royal Canadian Navy at age seventeen. His class background ensured a commission, and by the time he was twenty he was a lieutenant on the HMCS Calgary, a 110-man Flower-class corvette that had been bulked up with depth-charge throwers and anti-aircraft guns in order to escort convoys of unarmed munitions vessels between Canada and England, fending off wolf packs of invisible Nazi U-boats. The corvette’s living conditions were appalling, the pervasive stink of vomit speaking to the plight of beardless young men plucked from the prom and dropped into the maw of mass murder. Lieutenant Orr was trained to follow orders: During a battle, never risk more lives by slowing down to pick up survivors of sunken ships. Follow orders he would, but abandoning merchant sailors to perish in the flaming waves failed to square with a Christian conscience.
Together with two other warships, the corvette sank the Nazi submarine U-536 with depth charges off the Azores in 1942 and assisted in the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944. At war’s end, Mac, at twenty-three the youngest-ever commander of a Canadian corvette, pried off the vessel’s two-foot-tall brass bell, mounted it on a wooden stand and lugged it home.
His teenage sweetheart, Dorothy Benjamin, a pretty, strong-willed, well-bred graduate of
the girls’ private school St. Clement’s was there to meet him. To Dorothy, known as Do (pronounced Dough), Mac was a shining naval hero; somehow she managed to ignore the fact that three years of combat had arrested his growth.
Soon they were married; soon she was pregnant. All her life, Dorothy had been indulged by her beloved father, George Benjamin III, a successful businessman. But in the ninth month of her pregnancy, her father died of a heart attack in his sixties; twelve days later, her son George was born. Never speaking of the trauma of her own life—or the tripling of the name of George in father, husband and son—Dorothy soldiered on, giving birth to a second son they called Michael.
For six years, the family nestled under the umbrella of both sets of parents. Then, in 1953, Mac relocated his young family to a functional two-storey three-bedroom brick house he built on a dirt road in York Mills, overlooking open farmland. Their new home was miles below the gold standard of Rosedale and Forest Hill, a hard fact of no small importance to Dorothy, who in the face of other deficits in her life, had become a devout social climber.
By the end of her twenties, Dorothy found herself a rules-bound stay-at-home mother. She did not think to indulge her sons with hugs or stories or play but insisted they tightly grasp the social niceties. University-educated, more talented and intelligent than the average housewife, she reconciled herself to roles within charitable organizations like the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, still thriving in repressed, deferential Toronto.
As Dorothy plotted an upward trajectory, Mac drank. While veterans typically buried their scars in silence, Mac’s Irish tongue was loosened by shots of Canadian Club rye. Year after year, his two growing boys were held captive by his vivid tales of horror and heroism on the deadly North Atlantic, streaked with guilt and sentimentality and white-hot bursts of profanity. What could they make of a father driving the hull of his corvette over the bodies of hapless sailors? A chain-smoker, Mac routinely flicked the butts of his Player’s Navy Cut “Flat 50” cigarettes—standard issue for Canadian sailors—into the toilet bowl and, each morning, mustering a wordless response, young George targeted the floating tufts of tobacco with bursts of piss.
Dorothy gradually realized she had married the wrong man and the dream of her life would never happen. Driven by the intensity of the premature loss of her father and her disappointment in her husband, Dorothy began to reinvest her ambitions in her first-born son. Not that her mothering improved. George and Mike rarely saw their parents; after the ritual family watching of the six o’clock news, they left the boys alone and pursued a hectic social life. By then, George knew the playbook cold.
* * *
—
One day, George was furtively smoking cigarettes with his Grade 9 friend Patrick in the third-floor bedroom of Patrick’s Glencairn Avenue home. Suddenly a bulky fourteen-year-old kid backed through the window off the eavestrough. For reasons he will never understand, George grabbed a pellet gun and shot the boy in the butt, and from such a random event a deep bond was born.
Stewart lived down the street at number 297 and fitfully attended Lawrence Park Collegiate. An indulged, fearless, chain-smoking, sex-obsessed, learning-disabled, rough-and-tumble public-school kid, Stewart was like a shot of penicillin to the prim private-school mould, a Huck Finn of Irish-Icelandic-Geordie blood, unafraid of his own id, bursting to strike out for the territories and surrender to all impulse.
Stewart and Patrick pulled George like a water skier in their wakes. They experienced him as quiet and private, slightly out of sync with reality, not sure he was really there, but a shared irreverence sealed the threesome’s alliance. George was soon introduced to the art of boosting cigarettes, skin mags and random merchandise. They stole flags from libraries, made prank phone calls and whipped eggs at the door of a prominent violinist. For the sheer hell of it, they jumped fences at 3 a.m. and splashed in backyard pools, then cruised the nearby posh girls’ school Havergal College, where teenage boarders flung open their windows and flashed their boobs.
George felt like he had made it to Grade 9 on charm; now he was just trying not to drown. Besides his delinquent forays with Stewart and Patrick, he channelled his aggression into contact sports and weekend rambles in the city’s creek-fed ravines. Sharing a bedroom with his younger brother, George routinely bullied Mike until his sibling grew strong enough to hold his ground.
Girls remained alien life forms until a summer weekend in 1961 spent at Patrick’s cottage in Shanty Bay on Lake Simcoe. George, Patrick and a guy named Doug Woods gravitated to a trio of girls, each equal parts bright, cute and mysterious.
That first summer, Alison Lay felt like another buddy. But the next summer, as the sextet meandered up a farm road in the warm dusk, past ruminating Holsteins, split-rail fences and shimmering piles of hay, just like that, Alison gently slipped her hand into his. As the kisses landed, he felt he had stepped on a downed wire. Summer jobs disrupted future contact between the two of them, but the enchantment of his first crush never died.
Only two summers later, a UCC classmate, Graham Woods, invited George to join him and another sixteen-year-old boy and his girlfriend on a ride up Highway 11 from Shanty Bay to Orillia. George wavered, then declined; within the hour, the three teenagers were crushed to death in a five-car pile-up. That same summer, another classmate, Eric Humphries, was killed by a bolt of lightning. No parent or teacher helped George cope with any of the deaths, and he experienced potent and lingering shame after he failed to attend the funerals.
He could routinely think of fifty things more interesting than school work and purposely streamed down from the bright kids’ classes—2A1, 3A2, 4B1—retreating into a class by himself, fighting for a mind of his own. Over the dinner table, the headmaster’s words survived as an oft-repeated family joke: “George Orr is one of the brightest but laziest students I’ve ever known.” He felt for classmates such as Michael Ignatieff, the Boys Most Likely, the steady A-streamers, the straight-shooting, all-round, inside-the-circle Right Stuffers. They were willing participants in a powerful grooming process over which they had little or no control. In their hearts they wanted to do good and do well, but their personal authenticity was thrown under the school bus. They would never stop looking up to the teacher/father figures in anticipation of the coveted words “Good boy. Good job.”
* * *
—
Bored to death by school but riveted by current events, George devoured the daily newspapers and CBC Radio. He began dreaming of entering journalism, a profession considered suspect by his parents; newsgathering ranked miles down the ladder from law, business and politics.
In November 1963, a bullet to the brain of an idealized Irish-American president turned everything upside down. TV news went live overnight, and so flowed the cacophony—the Bomb, the Beatles, The Feminine Mystique, Andy Warhol’s soup cans, Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus, Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream, Malcolm X’s nightmare, Freedom Summer, the Gulf of Tonkin, the Generation Gap, The Medium Is the Message, the Free Speech Movement. In 1964, the impassioned plea of the UC Berkeley student leader Mario Savio—“You’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!”—pitched the first wild wave of baby boomers onto the beachhead of their parents’ material dreams, the peace generation declaring war on the traumatized, alcoholic war generation longing for peace. The Boomers vs. the Bombed.
In this year of 1964, a swirling family drama caught George in its vortex. When Mac wanted to accept the offer of an executive position with a large American insurance firm, his controlling father branded him a traitor to the family. In a brazen act of emotional blackmail, the Orr patriarch threatened to walk out of his tony Alexandra Wood mansion and jump off the Bayview Bridge if Mac dared desert the family business. The ploy worked but forged an irreconcilable generational rift. At the height of the feud, Mac’s invalid mother died; in a symbolic act of disavowal, Mac and his family wer
e consigned by his father to the last row of the funeral chapel.
George now faced his own do-or-die moment. How does a sharp sixteen-year-old boy question power from within a power school? Leaders who mislead? Parents who blindly follow?
One evening at the dinner table, he rocked his captors with a pointed question: “Why do you keep wasting your money sending me to a school I hate?”
At the sound of the dropped cutlery, he launched a second depth charge: he wanted to pass up Grade 13 at UCC and enroll in journalism downtown at Ryerson Polytechnic—at the time not a university but a disreputable community college.
The parental phalanx returned fire: how dare our firstborn, our lawyer-businessman-politician-in-training, even contemplate breaking ranks? Of not taking one for the team, as we had? The words “disgrace” and “over our dead bodies” engulfed him, and the ultimatum was swift: “If you spurn UCC, you spurn the family. Move out.”
So no journalism school but a small victory nonetheless: George was allowed to rejoin his beloved tribe of elementary school friends in Grade 13 at York Mills Collegiate. He moved his bedroom into the basement, where, immersed in a dreamy underworld of music and paperbacks, radio and TV shows, newspapers and magazines, he not only stripped off his despised blue tie but burned it. Under his graduating class photo, in the space for Intended Profession, he wrote, “Criminal lawyer.” Let people guess whom he might prosecute first.
* * *
—
Crossing the threshold of a classroom half full of girls proved a welcome shock. Then came a second welcome shock: after he graduated, he spent July and August of 1965 travelling by bus through Western Europe with three dozen mostly private-school teens from across Canada. Run by Bernie Taylor, a Latin professor from the University of Toronto Schools, whose then all-male students were accepted according to ability rather than privilege, the European Odyssey was a North American knock-off of the eighteenth-century British Grand Tour; on that rite of passage young male aristocrats, graduates of Eton and Harrow, bought up crates of paintings and sculptures and spread their seed across the Continent before returning sated, and often syphilitic, to their inherited islands of privilege.
Dreaming Sally Page 2
