Dreaming Sally

by James Fitzgerald

  For George, Europe was not only where history was kept but also some notion of libertine sophistication. Yes, a guided tour was terminally bourgeois, but even in the slowly thawing Canada of 1965 the trip proved splendidly wild—fifteen boys, including a clique of UCCers, travelling in two Volkswagen vans along with twenty-five girls in a large bus, zooming from London to Paris to Vienna to Rome and through assorted country byways. It was sudden, exhilarating freedom, doing whatever you do when your parents aren’t looking. George fell into the arms of Bacchus, but not Venus, though not for lack of trying.

  Freshly turned eighteen, George wasn’t intending to develop depth in any capacity, but Chartres Cathedral changed his life. Nick, the erudite twenty-one-year-old leader, knew the history of glass-making, stone masonry and flying buttresses cold. Different kinds of supporting arches? Built by hand? Original stained glass intact? Still standing eight hundred years later? George had died, gone to heaven and didn’t want to leave.

  * * *

  —

  That fall, he backed into the Glendon College campus of York University, opened four years earlier at Bayview and Lawrence Avenues, a short mile south of his basement catacomb. (His 63 per cent average had excluded him from the University of Toronto, his mother’s alma mater, to her sorrow, not his.) He enrolled in psychology because it was the shortest line. Instead of gaining sublime insights into the human condition, he got lost in a Skinner box.

  But his thwarted passion for journalism found a subversive outlet. He was hooked on a CBC Radio show hosted by Don Sims, a crusty newshound, broadcast live from midnight to 1 a.m. from the downtown Royal York Hotel where a roundtable of hard-drinking editors of the city dailies, the Telegram, the Star and the Globe and Mail, stuck analytical pins into the news of the day.

  George routinely woke up at 11 p.m., quietly rolled his mother’s box-like, two-tone blue 1963 Triumph Herald down the street and turned the ignition. Driving down Yonge Street, he felt as if he were headed for a rendezvous with a forbidden lover. At the hotel, he took a silent seat in a corner to listen to the old pros holding forth on the history of news, competitive journalism, context, accountability, speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable. Asking questions. Difficult questions. He loved it.

  When he got back home, he switched off the engine and coasted up the driveway. His head hit the pillow at 1:25, then the next morning it was up and off to behaviourist psychology class where, like the food pellets deployed in a maze of starving rats, all wellsprings of inspiration evaporated from the dream of his life.

  THREE

  Mother Moon

  October 1962. Two months had passed since Sally Wodehouse had appeared to me like a revelation on the sunbathed dock of De Grassi Point. At twelve, I was a news junkie, spreading the evening paper on the living room carpet of our Toronto home, scanning the blurred reconnaissance photos of Soviet ships unloading nuclear warheads into the port of Havana. Impending doom, like sex, was testing my preadolescent comprehension. As I helped my mother stockpile cans of food, games of Monopoly and Clue and back issues of Life magazine in the damp, cramped freezer room under the basement stairs, I thought, When I die, let it be sudden.

  Our fraught nuclear family was conducting its own protracted Cold War. In their youth, my parents had both yearned for the jazz bohemias of New York and Paris. Instead they got married and stayed put. A perfect recipe for domestic hell? Take two thwarted rebels, add a pinch of charm, wit and cynical glamour, project high expectations in opposite directions, toss into the rotating blades of the blender and repress. When my mother wanted a divorce, my father blocked her request in order to save face. I was the product of a born career woman without a career, oppressed by three needy kids, and a needy man-child who had never wanted kids.

  From the moment of our births, it had been written that my brother and I would attend UCC. In my first year, I had thrived under my form master, Jack Schaffter, a former RAF pilot able to rip a phone book in half yet who responded tenderly to the acute sensitivities of an eight-year-old boy. “I am concerned,” he wrote on my first report card, “about his extreme nervousness inside and outside the classroom.” Only much later did I realize that this rarest of humans was the first and last person in my childhood who not only recognized my vulnerability but cared.

  After Schaffter came a near-unbroken chain of brutes, bores and automatons, forcing me to build a fortress of mute endurance. One day after lunch in Grade 7, our bachelor master, an ex-Grenadier Guard, ordered six of us to appear at his boarding house apartment at day’s end, where we would be caned for our “general attitude.” The three-hour wait outside his bedroom door felt like sweating out a death sentence. I was called in first; bending over, I resolved not to give him the satisfaction of hearing me cry out, but the blows extracted the trickle of a tear. The next day, in the swimming pool where we were compelled to swim naked, the welts on my backside shone like a redeeming purple badge of courage. When news of the caning eventually reached my mother, she responded with a laugh.

  I was learning my lessons well: Endure the ordeal. Turn the other cheek. We were future leaders, and leaders never complain.

  This same fall of 1962, while I was still dreaming of my summer with Sally, our dog-faced science master crudely chalked the convoluted insides of male and female possums across the Grade 8 blackboard and formally introduced me to the clinical term “sexual intercourse.”

  First violence, now sex.

  Never give a tongue-tied boy a Roget’s Thesaurus for his twelfth birthday—he’d sooner play with words than girls. As Tony Hearn, another erotically starved British bachelor master, hammered home grammar and punctuation, I was driven by fear and curiosity to memorize long columns of vocabulary. One winter day, Hearn read aloud the mythic story of the Spartan boy who hid a wolf cub under his cloak. The cub gnawed at his viscera but the stoic boy dared not cry out lest he betray his secret to the elders. When he fell over dead, intestines spilling out, the Spartan nobility hailed the child as a paragon of manly heroism. The story stuck in my mind, and guts.

  My father had written off his children, and I had written off my father, obeying the invisible sign hanging from his forehead: Don’t give me any grief. In my drive to stay alive, I pinned my last best hopes on my mother, mustering all the power of my despair to waken her maternal instincts and soften her toughness. My mother never indulged in daydreaming or naps and punished all who did; she was more a human doing than a human being. If she caught me drifting off, she intruded like a dream censor, rousing me from the forbidden cave of my inner life.

  In years to come, my mother would sporadically relate stories of my early childhood with such cool matter-of-factness that I realized she was immune to their very poignancy: that she was already overwhelmed by the demands of my toddler sister, so my birth triggered a postpartum depression; that she surrendered me to an agency, Mothercraft, for the first weeks of my life; that she could not breastfeed; that I was a celiac baby, spitting up my food. I squirrelled away her reportage to marinate in my memory palace, retroactive clues to understanding her and thus myself.

  An orphan in all but name, I was left to grapple alone with a persistent buildup and backlog of unanswered questions. Why was the parental bedroom door perpetually shut to me? If I cried, why did my mother lock me in the nursery until I stopped, but even then did not let me out? Why did night terrors routinely savage my sleep? Why did I feel like a china plate on a wall? Why was my older sister, a frantic bundle of perpetual protest, being drugged and strapped to the bed? Why was my three-year-old brother running away from home? Did my experiences actually happen? Was I real?

  When I was four or five, I dared to push open the bathroom door to find my mother soaking in the pink enamel tub, soap bubbles clinging to the black wall tiles. My eyes deflected from her pillowy breasts, landing inches westward on the circular smallpox-vaccination scar, no bigger than a nickel, indenting the filmy wetness of her tanned upper arm, al
luring, sensational, out of reach. I beat a retreat to the hardwood floor of the nursery, where every day I had been drilled to obey the unspoken Royal Protocol: Never Touch the Queen.

  It seemed I had but one strategy left: what if I planted myself on the living room floor a short distance from my mother’s feet, my back turned to her? What if I sat perfectly still and undemanding, a toddler pretending to read an upside-down book, never speaking, never crying? What if I looked back over my shoulder, then tentatively wriggled backward inch by inch across the arctic tundra toward the fireplace of her body, as close as I dared? How could such perfect goodness fail to inspire a perfect love?

  But she never reached down and pulled me up on her lap; never touched, kissed, cuddled or soothed me, never read me a bedtime story. I was compelled to withdraw into my imagination but never ceased attempting to engineer alternative routes up the cliff face that was my mother, negotiating endless hairpin turns, only to be cut off, each time, at the pass.

  * * *

  —

  The TV camera of my head points to the Grade 1 classroom of Brown Public School. A withdrawn child, nudging on a state of autism, I strain to copy the six letters from the blackboard to form my first written word: m-o-t-h-e-r. The survival instinct is inventing solutions; maybe writing down words will compensate for my fear of speaking up. If the statue cannot love me with her body, I will spoon stories into her mouth, like alphabet soup, hoping she will give something back. If I master spelling and the tool of writing, if I entertain, if I amuse, if I enliven, something has to give.

  My six-year-old hand drags a pencil over a page of foolscap, and out comes a tale of a boy starving for food and air, building a rocket to the moon, unaware there is even less food and air up there. Seemingly pleased, my mother, the moon, promises to keep the story and show it to me when I turn thirty, as if she alone controls the timetable of the one-way trip to Planet Janet, as if she alone knows she stands as my sole way out of the inner world into the outer. Perhaps, she hints, one day I will become a writer.

  * * *

  —

  In Grade 9 math class, the ancient stone-faced master who caned my father a generation earlier routinely singled me out for humiliation. I didn’t need to be clairvoyant to figure out that my father had been wildly and silently unhappy here. Why did he send us? Were we supposed to become replicas of him? I sank from the A to B stream.

  Week after week, the math master told me to stand up and verbally work out a baffling equation; week after week, I burned in paralyzed silence; week after week, he stood and waited for the eternity of five minutes without offering a word of help. As the class sighed and squirmed, my tears dripped on the page so that I could no longer make out the equation. I felt like the ants I incinerated at recess with sun rays concentrated by my magnifying glass.

  Mission accomplished: the waterworks ran dry, and I started giving as good as I got. I delighted in terrifying a phobic classmate with a rubber spider that raised panicked whimpers as he cowered on the grass. When I learned that the mother of a boy living across the street had died, I teased him viciously. Like Lawrence of Arabia, I was enjoying my own cruelty. I randomly tormented my younger brother, bruising his flesh with knuckle-driven “noogies” till the day he broke the spell with a slug to my face, and I desisted. Miming the protest movements of the times, he had taken to lying down, spread-eagled, in the middle of our street, stopping traffic, forcing a minimum ration of personal attention not to be found in our house or school. A gentle, undemanding character, Mike was the canary in the coal mine, and one day in a rare act of solidarity I joined him on the pavement.

  * * *

  —

  My developing keenness for spies and double agents proved no accident, for one night over dinner our mother made a startling revelation. As twenty years had passed since the end of the war, she explained, her own contribution was now officially declassified. In the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, she had worked in the British Passport Control Office, but the job was a cover; in fact, she was a “secret secretary” for Sir William Stephenson, the “Quiet Canadian” who ran the British MI5 spy network for Winston Churchill. Later, based in Guatemala City, she helped monitor suspected Nazi spies in Latin America. My daily strivings to decipher the enigma that was my mother assumed a whole new aspect.

  * * *

  —

  In the summer of 1966, I found refuge from the city working on a raspberry farm near Port Hope, Ontario, that was owned by my uncle, David Ouchterlony, the organist of Timothy Eaton Memorial Church in Toronto. Like me, he was addicted to puns, so we had a field day. His wife, Kay, my mother’s older sister, was everything Janet was not: warm, kind, simpatico. Hard physical work dispelled the trance of TV, radio and newspapers, and I thrived. In baking heat, I hauled irrigation pipes up and down hills and drove a tractor to collect the baskets of picked berries. Impersonating Huck Finn, I smoked a corncob pipe, assassinated groundhogs with a .22 rifle, counted passing boxcars and cooled off in the pond. For the first time since my summers with Sally, I lost track of time.

  One humid August evening, I was invited on a double date. In the back seat of a ’57 Chevy, my fifteen-year-old body was pressed up against the window by Linda, a girl who grew up on a neighbouring farm. Impressed with my pretentious vocabulary, she belted out the pop hit “James (Hold the Ladder Steady)” about a girl eagerly eloping, but I clung to the rung inside my chaste, airtight class bubble. Wasn’t it written that I was supposed to marry Sally, or someone like her?

  * * *

  —

  In the fall of 1966, entering Grade 12, I turned sixteen. My father’s lifelong struggle to live up to the impossible standards of a distant, eminent father had collapsed into a nervous breakdown; he was drowning in his self-hate, but we all pretended everything was fine. The wolf-toothed pain now skewering my guts every day would not be diagnosed as Crohn’s disease for another three years, but I knew that the consequences of asking for help were worse than the affliction.

  I had recurring dreams of transferring to a hyper-idealized public high school where wholesome blue-eyed boys and girls in jeans and T-shirts played out the sunny enthusiasms of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland Hollywood musicals. But when my sister left her private school for her final year at coed Oakwood Collegiate, she failed to integrate; I realized it was too late to change course and reverse the tide of our conditioning. To survive, some need to escape poverty, others to escape affluence, still others to escape both.

  FOUR

  George Loves Sally

  In the spring of 1966, George Orr, nearly nineteen, started a four-month stint working in a gold mine in the Northwest Territories after a lost first year at university. His father had procured him the job and a plane ticket to endless tundra, abysmal weather, tattooed roughnecks and mosquitos with the bite of vampire bats. A father’s revenge. George learned much about life outside the box of upper-middle-class privilege. He worked as a carpenter’s assistant at $75 a week, the first time he’d picked up a hammer or saw. The first thing he built was a coffin for a miner crushed in a cave-in.

  In mid-August, he returned to Toronto, a muscular six-footer sporting a wispy black beard and a pocket full of cash. The first day back, he phoned Stewart, the childhood friend who’d introduced him to the elemental thrill of shoplifting cigarettes. Grown into a self-possessed, deep-voiced, broad-shouldered bear of a guy, Stewart had fallen three school years behind George owing to a reading disability. George’s parents regarded him as a dangerous influence, but George loved him—the only guy he had ever known who had been true to himself from day one.

  “I’ve met a girl named Gerrie,” Stewart announced. “And she has a friend, Sally. Both are sixteen and going into Grade 12 at Branksome Hall. How about a double date—one half of it blind?”

  George’s experience of private school girls had so far not been encouraging, but what harm could come of a single date?

  On the sultry evening of Thursday, August 18, 1966,
hours after the Beatles played a sold-out concert at Maple Leaf Gardens, Stewart wheeled his father’s canary yellow Skylark into Chestnut Park Road, a Rosedale street studded with ten-foot-tall wrought-iron lamps and shaded by canopies of century-old elm and oak trees, a galaxy removed from the primal permafrost of the Far North. As George walked up to the front door of the genteel three-storey home and rang the bell, he was surprised by a queasy upsurge in the pit of his stomach.

  There she stood, long and tall, like the song, oval-faced, her brown hair with its subtle tint of red curving to the shoulders. Sally Wodehouse was not smack-in-the-head gorgeous, but she radiated something exciting, something real, something alive.

  At the Imperial Theatre on Yonge Street, a quartet of pink two-dollar bills produced tickets to The Endless Summer, a California surfer documentary. Afterwards, the foursome cruised back up to Fran’s Restaurant on College Street, cramming into a leather booth for burgers and cherry Cokes. After four months with rank cigar-smoking miners, who attached the word “fuck” to each foul breath, George saw Sally as a delight—sweet, bright, witty, vivacious, fresh.