Dreaming Sally

by James Fitzgerald

  After the photographer promised to forward twenty-eight copies to our hotel in Paris, we poured into the night. The Drosselgasse was jammed, and we broke into roving packs of five or six, criss-crossing the cobblestones from bar to bar. I was glad there were no rock ’n’ roll bands, for I had danced my last with Sally. The girls were all atwitter with the news of her engagement, but when Sean voiced his shock, I was grateful for the validation. When Sally mentioned she had organized a side trip to see a girlfriend in Amsterdam and would rejoin the Odyssey on the final leg in Paris and London, I pretended not to care, dabbing my finger with wine and circling the rim of my glass to make an eerie sound.

  Hour by hour, our group shrank, not so much survival of the fittest but the foolish. Sally and I wandered off the beaten track, losing our bearings, as lit as the lamps pinned to our lapels. As we happened on Stu necking with Kat, he turned to jump a fence, crossing the railroad tracks to piss in the Rhine. Just as he cleared the fence coming back, three feet short of the tracks, a bullet train whooshed past at a murderous clip, and only blind luck stopped his obliteration.

  A Good Samaritan, meanwhile, was trundling a well-greased Dave back to the hotel in a wheelbarrow. From dim mental back channels he recalled the angelic pre-dinner words of Annabel: “I’ve lucked into a single room. Come to my room at midnight and we’ll do it.” Two hours late, he knocked on her door and she appeared, smiling sweetly, in her nightie. Swaying like a hammock, he slurred, “Here I am!” The door shut in his face; Dave could not lift his head, never mind any other body part.

  Sally and I barrelled in after 3 a.m. Like an invulnerable cartoon character, I tore up and down the hotel corridor, trying to gauge how fast I could sprint backwards, a last attempt to wipe George Orr from the spinning face of the earth. My back slammed into a full-length mirror, but I found no rabbit hole. The crash raised the hotel manager, but his shrieks of “Dummkopf!” carried no weight, for he was the guy who had set us loose.

  With the help of my roommate, Ross, Sally peeled off my tie and jacket, pulled back the sheets and put me to bed. The root of my name, James, I was once told, meant “supplanter.” But I dared not ask her to stay.

  * * *

  —

  At dawn’s light, Nurse Sally rematerialized over my bed, tapping out two aspirins into her palm and extending a glass of water. Over breakfast, the news of her engagement continued to stir waves of girly chatter. George’s cousin, Robin, was over the moon, welcoming Sally to the family. Nan, who had shared a double bed with Sally, mentioned that last night a bird had flown in their open window, circled three times, then darted out—strange and beautiful, as if tied to Sally’s unfolding future.

  As a singing waiter poured the coffee, we heard the sound of men hosing down the cobblestones, washing away the crime scene. The unaged wine had aged us: I was suffering the Bad Mother of all hangovers, mirroring the overcast, autumn-brisk day. I made a silent vow of religious intensity: Never again. But words were as cheap as the wine.

  As we boarded a cruise boat for a morning-long northbound trip to Koblenz, Nick, Tammy, Stu and Steve drove the four buses alongside the Rhine to meet us. The folding deck chairs were portable, so we huddled in our own group, Sally the centre of attention. As camera clicks captured the bride-to-be, Dave strummed his ukulele, crooning an improvised tune, “The Ballad of Nick and Tammy.” I clowned around, as usual, pretending last night had never happened. As we headed north through the Rhine gorge, I gazed at the medieval castles on the vine-terraced hills crowning the shorelines. In sync with the current, we were gliding through history and legend and nature, along the river the Romans used as a barrier between civilization and the barbarians, through the land of the Gutenberg Bible and the Protestant Reformation, past the jutting slate cliff of the Lorelei rock and its mythic, bewitching siren singing sailors to their doom. A generation ago, the good guys had crossed these rushing waters to liberate Dachau and annihilate Hitler and returned home heroes if less-than-good fathers. Steve’s own father had navigated a Sterling during the war; did one of his bombs lie under our gliding hull, unexploded?

  Sally was quiet and wistful, even a touch melancholic. She was wearing her pink-turquoise dancing dress, her glasses perched atop her head, a white sweater hugging her shoulders. As she tapped ash from the tip of her cigarette, I struggled to read her thought stream. In the back of her mind, did I still hold a place?

  Docking at Koblenz, the confluence of the Rhine and Mosel, I followed Sally, Jane and Nan as they descended the spiral staircase. They were singing “See You in September” in falsetto voices, and even as the words taunted and burned, I strained to forgive their cruelty:

  “There is danger in the summer moon above;

  Will I see you in September

  Or lose you to a summer love?

  Bye-bye, so long, farewell…”

  As I watched Sally racing Jane to the buses, bitterness clogged my throat. But my family and school had drilled me well—Thou shalt not feel.

  Sally chose Steve’s red-and-cream bus while I climbed into Nick’s as the navigator. We faced a short—120 kilometre—westward run to Luxembourg, meandering through wooded countryside on a narrow single-lane blacktop, hugging the twisting shoreline of the Mosel. It was our second-last day of driving; after Paris, we would take the train to Calais, then the channel crossing to London, the last stop of a trip I had never wanted to stop—until now.

  As Steve’s bus took the lead, a light, intermittent rain slicked the road. About an hour on, our bus passed a gas station. Nick and I swung our heads to see Steve’s bus gassing up. All summer long, John, the lover of all things automotive, had been urging all five of the designated drivers to let him once, just once, take the wheel, but Nick had quashed the repeated requests. As Nick caught a backward glimpse of John climbing into the driver’s seat instead of Steve, he muttered, “That’s a mistake.” But we did not turn back.

  In Luxembourg’s Grand Hotel Cravat, I was sharing a room with Nick for the first time on the trip. I suspected it was no accident but his plan to help me deal with my “breakup” with Sally. As we unpacked, Dave rushed in, grave faced. He glanced at me, then took Nick aside and whispered in his ear.

  Nick turned to me and said, “There’s been an accident. Sally is hurt.” The two of them drove back down the highway and I was left hanging. Over dinner, word spread that Sally had suffered a concussion, but it was not serious. She might have to stay in hospital for a few days, then rejoin us in Paris. I felt a rush of uneasy relief, but in my diary, I didn’t know what to write.

  In the dead of the night, the ringing phone ripped me from my dreams. I picked up the phone and heard a man ask, “Nick? Is that you?”

  It was Bernie, calling from London. He told me he was flying to Germany to see Sally, and then he’d meet us in Paris.

  I couldn’t fall back to sleep.

  * * *

  —

  As we packed for Paris, I noticed the familiar red-and-cream bus parked in front of the hotel. My eyes fell on the dented front door on the passenger side, and it hit me: This was her bus. I passed my hand over a dislodged hinge. No big deal. I’ve seen far worse.

  Nick and Tammy were staying with Sally in Germany, so the leader of another Odyssey trip had taken charge of us. Over half our group took the train while the rest crammed into two buses. Lost on the Champs-Élysées, we finally spotted our hotel on Rue St-Honoré in the first arrondissement, the haut monde heart of the city. The barricade-crashing student riots of May, igniting the mass strike that turned France inside out, had surrendered to near-empty streets, the locals mostly fled to the seaside. The tear gas, the rubber bullets, the water cannons, the truncheons splitting the heads of enraged young crying for a life of freedom—Sous les pavés, la plage! (Under the cobblestones, the beach!)—all gone, extinguished by the tepid August stillness.

  A five-minute stroll from the Louvre, the three-storey Hotel France et Choiseul was home for the next five nights. Dave was in ch
arge of assigning the rooms, so six of the guys—Stu, Steve, Peter, Stanfield, Dave and I—scored the suite where Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had spent part of their honeymoon. The sight of a pet tortoise named Caroline, crawling through the open courtyard, lent a touch of the surreal; she was old enough to have met Napoleon.

  When Bernie arrived, I made nothing of it, secure in the knowledge that Sally’s concussion wasn’t serious. Lit by pre-dinner drinks in the courtyard, I cracked wise with a gathering circle of ten kids. Lurking in the dim foyer, Bernie began calling us over, one by one. As each person left and returned to our table, rendered silent by whatever Bernie had said, I was still not twigging, kept spouting juvenile one-liners, fishing for laughs that never came.

  Then he beckoned me over, having saved me for last.

  “James, I want to update you on Sally’s situation.”

  “I know, I heard she’s fine. She’s meeting us here.”

  Though I was slightly taller, he was still the muscular, big-boned alpha male overshadowing the rake-thin youth. He seized my hand and did not let go. He rambled on and on about the aftermath of the accident. Was this a need-to-know conversation?

  “Sally was taken by ambulance to Koblenz, but the medical technology was inadequate to treat her head injury. She was moved to another hospital in Mainz. That’s where she was pronounced DOA.”

  I had no clue what he meant.

  “What’s DOA?”

  “Dead on arrival.”

  The words had a delayed effect—like those three-second gaps on radio phone-in shows designed to block spontaneous outbursts of obscenity. Then a force beyond all control tore my hand loose from his grip. Charging through the courtyard, past the staring pairs of eyes, I fled upstairs to my room, pursued by scalding shafts of shame and Steve. He didn’t go to private school; he didn’t know the rules about strong feelings. Sitting beside me on the bed, Steve handed me a towel, and I buried my face in it. A violent spasm, then the dead arms of an all-embracing void. A grey nothingness. Volcanic ash.

  Bodies flooded the suite, a dream assuming the shape of a wake. A hand extended a glass of rye, last tasted on the Raffaello, and each shot restored my first blast of Sally, dancing until dawn over the surface of the sea. The invisible stage managers of my life had not lost their precision timing: my copy of our “class photo,” forwarded from Rüdesheim, landed in my lap. How did it arrive so fast? Why was it black and white?

  I stared at Sally at my side, our beaming, tilting, disembodied heads, floating above the bodies of the others in the back row, mere minutes after she’d stabbed me in the heart with George’s telegram. At the image of her, I stared and drank, drank and stared. The smiles, those goddamn smiles.

  Into the falling darkness we played cards, but games of chance only summoned scenes of De Grassi, and my mind splintered. Hearts. Crazy Eights. Kings and Little Ones. Pig. War. Cheat. Four suits, four seasons. Fifty-two cards, fifty-two weeks. Thirteen girls, thirteen boys. From the midnight street our windows glared like shark eyes, black and empty. I felt the room collapsing inward, squeezing my body down and back to its beginnings.

  As I crashed on a sofa, Dave pulled from his pocket a baby oyster shell.

  “Sally asked me to give you this after our epic lunch on the slopes of Vesuvius. But I forgot.”

  I wondered why she hadn’t given it to me herself. Maybe it was his memento, his talisman, all along; was he was just trying to make me—and him—feel better?

  * * *

  —

  On the afternoon of August 13, five time zones behind Paris, George Orr strode through the front door of 189 Gordon Road to find, as he hoped, a return telegram from Sally. Picking up the envelope with its cellophane window, he ripped it open and drank in the words:

  YES STOP CAN’T WAIT STOP

  Alive with a rapture that forgave all that had gone before, he delivered the news to his parents and was delighted by the softening of their faces. They had married young, they knew, they remembered.

  Racing to his mother’s Triumph, George cut through the euphoric August air down to Rosedale. Sally can’t wait, and neither can he. Pressing the doorbell of 30 Chestnut Park Road, her telegram in hand, he realized he was standing on the very threshold where he had first seen Sally’s face two years past.

  The familiar bald head shone through the half-moon window and the oak door swung open. But when the eyes of the two Georges locked, the young man’s hope vanished: only moments ago, the doctor had hung up the phone from West Germany.

  Placing his hand on George’s shoulder, he spoke three words: “Sally is dead.”

  Jane came up behind, her voice a crackling monotone in George’s ears: “Her bus was barely moving when it was clipped by a car….She fell from the front seat and cracked her head on the road….She died a few hours ago….”

  George was surprised by his first thoughts: My life has just taken a radical turn. The path I was walking stops right here. After today, these people will no longer welcome me.

  Then he was hit by that cold, granite certainty. He had been right to believe his dream when no one else would.

  His mother’s car carried him back up Yonge Street, robbed of all sensation. At Manor Road, he passed the florist shop where he had bought bouquets for Sally, and occasionally her mother, and he knew that when he next stepped inside the store, it would not be romance that called him.

  Back home, George walked into the living room and turned to his seated parents. “Sally is dead,” he said, and their two faces flattened into blankness. He stood and waited for some response, for some words of comfort and wisdom, but all his parents could do was stare.

  Moving to the phone, George called his friend Graham, who lived around the corner, and soon through the door a stream of friends flowed, saying the things young men say, unrehearsed expressions of shock and sorrow and sympathy. Slumped on the sofa, George knew nothing but a vast emptiness, growing vaster by the moment. As the evening seeped into night, half-human figures hovered and flitted around him, a slide show of shifting masks, a charade of useless bromides assuming the hue of white noise, until the moment when a feeling, savage and sweet, intruded sharply: If I die, I will welcome the release.

  The phone rang. George’s father picked up the receiver, listened and passed it to his son; it was Stewart, his closest friend, the one who had introduced him to Sally. All summer Stewart had been rumbling alone across Italy and France on a motorcycle, ending up in Ireland, where he intended to explore his Celtic roots. The two had not spoken since Stewart left in early June. Why was Stewart calling him at this of all possible moments?

  From the earpiece, he heard, “George! What the fuck is going on?”

  “Sally is dead.”

  Absorbing the words, Stewart was swamped by the force of the uncanny. He told George he’d been sitting in an apartment he’d rented near St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin, when out of nowhere he was hit with the irresistible conviction that he needed to fly home immediately because something was terribly wrong with George. He didn’t even think to telephone; he simply headed to the airport and caught the next available plane. But fog prevented the landing in Toronto, so his plane was turned back to Montreal. Stranded in the airport, Stewart found the nearest phone booth; he had to call George right that minute and had no idea why.

  Only now did it all make sense, and he told George he would be there as soon as the plane landed.

  * * *

  —

  In and out of the courtyard of our Paris hotel, the members of the Odyssey wandered, as if sharing a mass concussion. I picked up fragments of eyewitness accounts of the accident. After John took over as driver, he’d nosed the bus out of the gas station, stalled, then reversed to try to avoid the flow of traffic. A car nicked the edge of the passenger door, somehow pitching Sally backwards onto the road. I averted my eyes from the faces of drifting girls, Jane and Barb and Kat and Robin, and could not speak.

  Over the night and into the morning, Bernie so
ught out the ones who did not yet know. I wondered why he did not tell us all at once and together, why he separated us into units of Protestant isolation. He sat down with Stanfield and John in a Wimpy Bar and said, “Sally didn’t make it.” Stanfield thought he meant she didn’t make it to Paris, but John instantly understood and turned white. When Kat told her cousin Nikki, she unleashed a long laugh of unearthly weirdness, its intensity shocking them both. Later, anxiety robbing her of sleep, Nikki made out a black human figure at the foot of her bed. She closed her eyes, hoping it would disappear, but when she dared to peek, it was still there. Without waking her roommate, Nan, she fled downstairs to the courtyard and into the streets, shaking with fright. She changed rooms with Nan to be with her cousin. For years, she would tell no one of the quasi-human apparition that haunted her that night.

  * * *

  —

  The days and nights bled one into the other, and all of us killed time in our own restless ways. With Dave and Stu I hiked to the Eiffel Tower. Funnelled into a suffocating elevator full of tourists, we endured a three-hour ascent and descent. When Nick and Tammy arrived from Germany late in the evening, I was glad to see them, but we said little. I wandered the halls of the hotel, but Sally’s voice and face kept following me; she wouldn’t leave me alone. In the dark corner of the courtyard where Bernie had taken me aside, I made the mistake of taking a seat, for when Sally caught up, I broke down. Kathy and Kat came to sit quietly with the two of us, but when I lifted my head from my hands, Sally had disappeared into the night.