Dreaming Sally

by James Fitzgerald

  * * *

  —

  Vienna

  August 6

  Dearest George,

  This is going to be a mushy but sad letter. I’ve been in a depression state for the last four days and it’s just awful. It all happened in Salzburg. A whole bunch of us went out for a walk and we went to this castle and climbed to the top. It was kind of neat but damn cold. Well, we climbed down from the top and went into this bar. Well, absolutely everything got on my nerves and I just got so fed up I decided I’d better leave cuz you know that when I get bitchy absolutely anything can come out of my yap.

  So it happened that another girl felt exactly the same way as I did so we stood up, said goodbye and left. George, we looked like two of the biggest bitches in the world but I just didn’t care. I was so fed up.

  So we walked back to the hotel and stayed in my room for a while and talked and then I went to bed. That’s when Niagara Falls started to flow. It was just terrible. I was so upset. I wanted to come home to you so much. Word got around that I was really depressed and all kinds of kids came round to see me. That made it worse cuz really all I wanted was to be in my own so I could think of you. Finally I went to sleep, thank God. The next day I was kind of OK, but not normal.

  Then we moved on to Vienna. God, what a drag and we have to live here for five days! The hotel is just like a pit. Not one room has a bath. We have to pay 50 cents for one so I smell this week. I’m in a double with Marywinn and it’s the size of my bathroom at home. Speaking of bathrooms, we have to walk a mile to the can to take a leak. It’s really bad news. And the food tastes like shit. Tonight we had the leftovers from the first night, just gross.

  Vienna closes down for the weekend. We got here on Saturday p.m. and there wasn’t any store or anything open. And last night it rained, so we stayed in and read. Sunday we went sightseeing. That wasn’t so bad but it just looks like another city to me. That’s the way I feel about Europe right now. It’s terrible to admit, I know, but it’s true. Christ, I’ve been gone five weeks today but I’m coming home three weeks Friday, thank God. I’m getting fed up and I want to come home to you. I think I can really say that I’ve loved Europe until about four days ago but I’m not coming back without you. So there. You’re stuck with me.

  Sunday night was really fun because we went to this amusement park, kind of like the CNE but a hell of a lot cheaper. They had rides like Wild Mouse, bumper cars, go-carts, a flyer. It was a lot of fun cuz we could just forget everything, almost, and just go wild like a kid in a park. It really was a lot of fun and took my mind off everything for a while.

  Well, yesterday I slept till noon and then went shopping. I found a black purse and it doesn’t look like a lunch pail, it’s really kind of smart. I think you’ll like it. Today we did nothing and tonight nothing also. Six of us girls just sat around and talked about how great it’s going to be to go home. Boy, we can’t wait. It’s so depressing over here at times. Oh well, it’s almost over, thank God.

  I loved Innsbruck. Just thought I’d change the tone. I’d really like to go back there with you. We were in a really nice hotel with a great bar downstairs. The bar had this fabulous band that played mostly English songs. They played “The Letter” and I don’t care if you hate it or not. I love it and it’s my song for the summer. That was a cool place there.

  I’ve decided I like Switzerland and some of Austria the best. It’s just as good as it looks in the movies. So anytime you want to go over, I’ll go with you. Going to bed now. Will write tomorrow.

  Love, Sal XXOO

  * * *

  —

  I was in Nick’s bus with Tammy, Sally, Robin, Annabel and Stanfield, bound for Munich, and the topics were hot: sex, relationships, birth control, marriage, adultery.

  “Males are primal like dogs,” Nick offered. “They’ll eat the meat put in front of them even if they’re not hungry. Females are like cats—they’re more discriminating.”

  “I can’t wait to be an adult,” I piped up, “so I can commit adultery.”

  Normally it was a cinch to get a rise out of Sally—a rolling laugh, or at least a Mona Lisa smirk—but she was too busy scribbling on a pad of paper on her lap to pay attention. Since Italy I had erased the thought of Invisible George, but now I allowed that she was probably writing him. As she whispered into the ear of Robin, who had made no secret that she was George’s cousin, I stared out the window, feigning indifference. Denial had got me this far.

  * * *

  —

  Munich

  August 8

  To My Love,

  I’m afraid I missed a day when I said I’d write. But yesterday I went sightseeing for the first time in five whole damn days. The rest of the time when I was supposed to be romping around looking at old buildings I just sat around on my old fat ass and thought about you, good old you.

  You will probably think I’m smashed by the way this little old letter looks and sounds but honest to God I’m not. You want to know where I am? Do ya, hon, do ya? Well, I’m in Nick’s bus and Robin is right beside me and I am on my way from Vienna back through Salzburg on our way to Munich. One hell of a long drive if you ask me.

  So I remembered that I hadn’t finished my last letter to you, so here I am sitting on my old fat horny ass (how about that for description) writing to you, my love. And also the mail strike is over tomorrow and I haven’t written to you very much because of this damn strike so I feel I owe you many, many letters. So here comes a long one.

  I really love you, no kidding, honest to God I love you. I think this trip has taught me a lot, not about culture but about me. I think that I really am ready to settle down with you in a couple of years. You know it’s really funny. All the kids know I’m unofficially engaged and they all ask when we’re getting married. But it’s really hard to say right now. I guess it all depends on when you decide what you want to do and when I graduate. But it really doesn’t matter to me when we get married as long as it’s not more than five years from now. So if you decide to take your MA, it’s OK with me. But I guess we should start thinking about our future plans. And three weeks tomorrow we can really talk about that—I can hardly wait.

  I bought a really nice present for me to wear but it’s actually for you. It’s a flowered half bra. It’s not as half as the one you bought me but it’s not like an ordinary bra either. But it’s really pretty. I think you’ll like it. Hope so, cuz I do. I’ve also bought some coloured bikini pants—they’re great. To hell with ordinary pants—it’s bikini all the way.

  Guess what—Barb is coming to Holland with me. Isn’t that great? I’m really happy because now we can goof around in the airport and I’ll have somebody to talk to. So now I’m not going to be all alone. We decided those four days are going to be great cuz we need a rest. So it will be great fun. Well, this bus is starting to get to me so I think I’d better stop. I’ll continue later on.

  Lots of love, Sal XXOO

  P.S. Just heard on the radio that the strike isn’t over. Damn it. Telegrams will have to do.

  * * *

  —

  As if apologizing for vile Vienna, the Hotel König in the prosperous, risen-from-the-ruins city of Munich boasted all the mod cons; we had returned to our own decade. In a nightclub we were thrilled to see the same shaggy English rock band we’d loved in Innsbruck. What a coincidence. Sally and I once again staked out space in front of the stage, and they remembered us with a wave. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Sally quipped, and yet again the band delivered “The Letter.”

  I was steeped in Holocaust literature, starting with reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich at twelve. As a result, our visit the next morning to the Dachau death camp, squatting grimly in a Munich suburb, came as more of a shock to the girls than me. There it was, the infamously sick, cynical slogan Arbeit Macht Frei—Work Will Set You Free—arching over the gate in black wrought-iron letters. For three hours, we shuffled and paused in sombre silence, taking in
the barbed wire, bunks and ovens. For the longest time I studied an excruciating photograph of a prisoner in striped rags hoisted by his hands tied behind his back, his body weight dislocating his shoulders. The act itself was evil enough, but the indifference of the photographer seemed to lengthen its shadow.

  The panels of text reminded me of what I had already extracted from books and films: I was standing on Ground Zero, the germ of the Holocaust. Built in 1933, the year of Hitler’s election, the first Nazi concentration camp was not an Auschwitz-scaled factory of mass extermination but an early dumping ground for political prisoners and assorted enemies of the Reich—roughly two hundred thousand pulled from thirty countries, including one hundred thousand Germans. At Dachau, “only” thirty-two thousand deaths were documented, a far cry from more than a million at Auschwitz alone. Within the one square kilometre of the original camp, smaller than my school and its surrounding fields (Dachau grew to include more than a hundred nearby subcamps), communists, socialists, democrats, trade unionists, Christian clergy, homosexuals, criminals, German Jews, “idiots,” “the work shy,” “the asocial,” “race polluters,” all bearing coloured badges not unlike the ones I wore at summer camp, were slowly and systematically worked and starved to death.

  As an enamel-skinned prep-school boy, I’d found something seductive in the Fascist state of mind, embodied in the endless rows of stiffened arms, hard-ons for Hitler, a purebred black-and-white moral universe where it was okay to unleash your inner killer and exterminate every last bastard who ever dealt you a bad hand. My brother and I had passed the occasional Sunday afternoon goose-stepping up and down our driveway, shouldering toy rifles, slapping our palms in Sieg Heil salutes against each other’s forehead à la the Three Stooges; I was the self-appointed five-star general and he the submissive private. Even at age eight he took orders like a man.

  Yet somewhere along the line, I grew a conscience. I became fascinated with the war from the enemy point of view and the drama of “the good German,” identifying with the aggressor and the victim. Maybe it was fed by my eavesdropping on the alcohol-fuelled war stories of my aloof father and his friends, their strangely blended tones of camaraderie, terror, guilt, nostalgia and hilarity; for them, the stories were a way out, for me a way in.

  I remembered how one of them had expressed regret that he had once idly aimed his artillery piece at the steeple of an Italian Renaissance church and blown it to smithereens, just for the hell of it; another, an eighteen-year-old infantryman fighting his way across France at the time, felt guilty for shooting his unarmed German prisoners in a spasm of revenge. I didn’t have to be Freud or the pope to figure out that they were seeking absolution and failing to find it in the solution in their cups. It could not be said aloud, but our fathers, the sensitive victors, felt like losers. Nobody won the war; everyone paid a price.

  At sixteen, I had read and reread a nightmarish memoir, I Survived Hitler’s Ovens, by Olga Lengyel, a Hungarian inmate of Auschwitz, amazed to learn that all the confiscated wealth of the prisoners was piled in a warehouse called Canada. One night after midnight, I put the book aside and crept downstairs in my pyjamas. I parked myself inches from the flickering TV screen, the sound low, hypnotized by a black-and-white documentary on the Nazi death camps. The camera panned over doomed Jewish women, clutching their naked breasts, pubic hair exposed, as they were driven into gas chambers; a bulldozer drove numberless naked corpses into a pit. A pornography of death.

  The trance broke when I felt the groggy figure of my mother at my side. Brow knitted, she quite reasonably asked, “Why are you watching this?” But I insisted on seeing it through to the end, and she went back to bed. It was my first and only sighting of my mother in her nightgown.

  Heading back to the gates with Sally, a final image burned in my mental archive: little stones, painted white, lining the exiting footpath, fringed with radiant yellow roses, a weirdly Disneyesque prettification of horror.

  * * *

  —

  On the autobahn to Heidelberg, our convoy was stopped dead by a traffic jam, as if re-enacting a scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s film Weekend. Suntanning on the roof, puffing cigarettes, snapping photos, we horsed around like the kids we still were. On her bus door Tammy drew the peace symbol with her eyeliner. Hours later we learned what caused the jam: an Innsbruck-bound British airliner had broken up in mid-air and crashed in a nearby field, killing all forty-eight people aboard.

  In the Hotel Schrieder, for the first time I roomed with Wally, the only black kid on the trip, whom I knew only slightly from school. I was curious to know what it felt like wearing a dark skin in a Wonder Bread world, but I never asked. Heading out en masse to the Hockenheimring racetrack, we watched sleek silver Porsches zoom round a five-mile oval track, slipping into a dark virgin forest, then reappearing, only to do it all over again. John, a car fanatic, told me that the British world champion Jimmy Clark had crashed and died here only months earlier when a tire burst and his Formula 2 racecar skidded into a tree. The allure of the internal combustion engine was lost on me—I saw cars only as modes of transport from A to B.

  To save my energy for the big bash planned for the following night in the wine village of Rüdesheim am Rhein, I was determined to hit the sack early, but Sally bounced in, ready to rock. Instead we talked for an hour, shame protecting the rough state of my guts. Finally, she took the hint and I retreated to my daily fix of homicide. I was almost finished In Cold Blood.

  * * *

  —

  Back on July 18, the postal strike had severed George’s lifeline to Sally. Through the rest of July and into August, he jabbed the Underwood with his two index fingers, saving up a stack of unsendable letters, trying to keep her alive inside him. Even when the postal strike lifted on August 9, releasing a backlog of her letters to him, he felt no relief, for between her lines he sensed an invisible rival and an effort to keep him concealed. Reading her suddenly plaintive letter from Vienna, he wrestled with his green-eyed monster: Thank you for hating where you are. Even though I see through it, I need to hear this.

  The day he had planned to formally propose to Sally, Monday, August 12, dawned at long last. Short of telepathy, a telegram had to do. Driving downtown, he once more pictured himself surrendering to the slow walk down the long aisle, the solemn vows, the slipping of rings on fingers, and as he entered the all-too-real telegraph office, he felt as if he was already facing the altar.

  Out shot the letters, all capitals:

  I LOVE YOU STOP WILL YOU MARRY ME STOP

  ELEVEN

  August 13, 1968

  On the morning of August 12, Dave and his ukulele drove our three-hour singalong ride to Rüdesheim, a wine-making village on the eastern shore of the River Rhine. Or, put another way, a tourist trap where dozens of cheap wine bars clogged a single street. Sitting beside Sally, I was feeling happily trapped.

  In Rüdesheim, the local product was light but sped to the head like a bullet. The manager of our hotel, the Lindenwirt, pulled out a flat three-inch-square battery connected to a light bulb, green for boys, red for girls, that attached to your lapel.

  “If you can’t make it home, sit on the curb and turn on your light,” he instructed. “The name of our hotel is on the light; one of the locals will phone us and we’ll collect you. It’s a tradition.”

  When he added that in two hundred years no one had ever made it upright to the end of the Drosselgasse, a narrow, pub-lined alley of non-stop music and revelry, he might as well have waved a red flag.

  After dinner, I slid into Sally’s room, hoping that another all-nighter was in the cards and that maybe this time we might do more than sleep together. She was perched on the bed, clutching a piece of paper. As she turned a flat face to mine, I knew something was up. Had somebody died?

  “George sent me a telegram. He asked me to marry him. I just cabled back and said yes.”

  I was engulfed by a weird moment of blankness. Then a shot of white heat flared straigh
t up the column of my body, flushing into my face. Six weeks of unbroken infatuation with Sally Wodehouse, all hope for our chaste but intensely promising affair shattered, and tears exploded from my eyes.

  I could tell Sally was as surprised as I was by the eruption. Was our summer nothing but some kind of head game for her?

  She tried to console me but did anything but: “Don’t worry. We’ll always be friends. I’ll visit you at university this fall. I promise.”

  Down in the bar, I confided in Nick. I wanted to kill our night of revelry. Swinging a fraternal arm around my shoulder, he drove home the hard truth: “Fitz, you’re only seventeen. You’re not marrying anybody anytime soon.”

  His words landed like ice water in the face. He was right: I was a glib, semi-formed, pimpled preppie still wobbly on his sea legs. The corners of the triangle collapsed into the straight white line down the middle of the highway, and I felt unexpectedly free. George and Sally were the real deal, destined to go the distance, and I would have to play her friend and sidekick, maybe even his, a third wheel, trailing behind.

  I joined the others on the open veranda where a hired photographer was setting up a group portrait. Nick and Tammy sat on the floor in front, and the rest of us clustered behind them in tiers, sitting, kneeling, standing, thirteen girls and thirteen boys giving one another the gears. Since kindergarten I’d usually been the tallest kid, so I perched on the railing, hanging back, and as Sally appeared at my side, I was once again hyperconscious of the imminent shaping of my future image on film. Our flurry of repartee was suspended for the click—act natural—and this time, I chose not to hook my arm around her shoulder.

  Even with two weeks left on the itinerary, this moment felt like the breaking of the collective spell. Was this a class picture? A birthday? A wedding? A funeral? Was I a graduate, a pallbearer, an usher, a best man on the worst day of my life? The timing was uncanny, as if, mere minutes after the landing of George’s transatlantic arrow, a photographer-spy had been charged to burn on a strip of film the lie of my smile, a smile so relaxed, so perfectly convincing, that I came to believe it myself—a sliver of time and space, labelled “The Height of Human Happiness,” that I will cram into an eight-by-ten frame and hang on the wall of my study to defy the decades of gathering dust.