Dreaming Sally

by James Fitzgerald

  Orpheus said he understood and headed through the fog toward the light of day. Trailing behind him, a limping Eurydice begged him to acknowledge her; did he not still love her as madly as she did him? Approaching the threshold to the upper world, he could no longer bear the anxiety of losing her a second time. The instant he turned around, she disappeared into the darkness, fulfilling his worst nightmare. As Eurydice cried a final farewell, his longing arms swept the empty air.

  Orpheus tried to re-enter the Underworld but this time he was denied by the ferryman. For seven years he lingered at the brink, singing his pain to the rocks and mountains, uprooting oak trees and melting the hearts of tigers. Devastated, he vowed to never love another woman. Enraged by Orpheus’s failure to be a true lover and die for Eurydice, the god of wine, Bacchus, released the Maenads, a swarm of wild Furies. When Orpheus repulsed their lustful advances, the Furies tore the body of the musician to shreds.

  The pieces of Orpheus’s body were collected by the Muses, who buried them at the foot of Mount Olympus, except for his head, which was carried by a river to the sea, then buried in Lesbos. Jupiter fixed his lyre among the stars; shrines containing relics of Orpheus were regarded as oracles. Orpheus was allowed to rejoin his beloved Eurydice as a flitting ghost in the Underworld, gazing upon her as much as he desired. But the Upper World was now deaf to his music.

  * * *

  —

  In the North York General psychiatric ward, confined to a white room with black curtains, George Orr sat slumped in a circle of human forms he could only perceive as lost in space. The impersonal rotations of white-coated psychiatrists seemed to make no distinction between schizophrenia and a unique case of personal loss and attacked his natural grief with anti-psychotic drugs. Nothing worked.

  To the huddle of inert bodies, the twenty-two-year-old patient told his near-supernatural story of a dead lover, but he knew no one was sharing the same reality. The day he heard the word “electro-shock” was the day his experience of the inside of a locked mental ward unwittingly conferred a blessing: after two weeks, he realized he was not a terminal head case, merely a smouldering blanket amid three-alarm fires, and he found the door. Where else might a Nowhere Man go but a fifth year of university?

  * * *

  —

  When George and Stewart sought volunteers for the second annual York arts festival, among the first to appear was Sandy, a sunny and athletic twenty-year-old blonde. A science and phys ed student who had organized the cheerleading team for the hapless York Yeomen, she had for weeks been circling George, and when she finally introduced herself wearing a royal-blue-and-white jumpsuit, he jumped.

  In the spring of 1970, Sandy was poised to enter the workforce, but George remained adrift on his own not entirely unpleasant carpet of confusion. They were reaching a crossroads: Should we move in together? Parked with her cross-legged on a floor in an empty York classroom, George for the first and last time opened up to her about Sally, ending with a warning: “I am bad news.”

  Blinded by love, Sandy dismissed the Sally baggage: Why burden a new relationship with a previous one? If people are fine on the surface, she was cool. Although she regarded George’s parents as proper, private-school types, never saying what they felt—“Don’t you guys ever argue?” she wondered aloud at a family dinner—she was optimistic that George would evolve under her influence. Her father was a plain-spoken Nova Scotian jack of all trades; in her family, blow-ups were quickly forgotten.

  George’s reflexive reaction was that if he dared to love someone, that someone would disappear. But here stood a strong, flesh-and-blood young woman, willing to risk it. The least he could do was try.

  FOURTEEN

  Alma Mater

  In September 1968, I headed off to first year at Queen’s University in Kingston. I was innocent enough to hope that the stone mother of limestone slabs might offer sanctuary, but my residence, Leonard Hall, was irredeemably male, a facsimile of the UCC boarding house; visitors of the opposite sex were compelled to sign out by 2 a.m. and return to the aptly named Victoria Hall. From a coed summer romp in Europe I was back in the Presbyterian arms of God’s Frozen People. At the same time, I was disarmed to discover that most of my floor mates were not privately schooled, poison–Ivy League snobs, but small-town Ontario egalitarians from places like Port Hope, Barrie, Smiths Falls and Red Lake.

  In English class, I met Mark, a confident, witty character raised by his Polish Catholic immigrant parents in a humble suburban bungalow. Mark was everything I was not—quarterback of his high school football team, a junior hockey player, a provincial wrestling champion, brilliant yet comfortable in his own skin. I was amazed he stooped to befriend a self-effacer such as me.

  On my first weekend, I gained entry to my first porn movie—that bit really does go there—and my loss of innocence came cheap for the price of a blue five note. In French class, meanwhile, I was the sole male of the species, encircled by twenty razor-smart teenage girls. I had not shared a class with girls since Grade 2. I tried to disappear in the back row, but my long-lankiness was hiding in plain sight. One day the female prof asked with a smirk, “Monsieur FitzGerald, what is your masculine opinion?” Paralyzed by the rush of tittering, I could not muster the will to answer, or transfer out. The same went for psych class: hoping to find solace for Sally’s death in the wisdom of the sages, I was bitten by Pavlov’s dog and tuned out.

  Happily, Nan, one of the Odyssey girls, was installed in Victoria Hall, and together we organized reunions nearly every weekend. In late September, all the Torontonian tripsters—nearly half the original twenty-eight—convened in my parents’ house. Pulling back the dining room furniture to screen slides of the trip, we sprawled on the carpet in the dark, the intermittent figure of Sally riding the shafts of shifting light. I was startled when Jane disentangled herself from Sean, nuzzled up beside me and leaned her head on my shoulder. Convinced that I had stolen her, Sean retreated upstairs to the unsympathetic company of my parents. The next day my mother told me that she had found Sean’s display of distress “funny.”

  When, days later, a package arrived from Venice addressed to my mother, it took a moment to remember I had sent it. I explained that in a glass-making factory, Sally convinced me that a set of goblets would improve the rosewood sideboard. As my mother opened the box, I allowed myself to believe that finally, this time, she would be touched. But her expression of revulsion was unmistakable, and Sally’s glassware disappeared, never to be seen again. Like Sally herself.

  The following weekend, a group of us visited Mrs. Wodehouse in Rosedale to pass on an album of the best snapshots of Sally we had gathered from our collective cameras. I had never set foot inside Sally’s home and I felt a new layer of sadness, laced with guilt, for I was parked on the sofa beside the newly won Jane. Even as we attended to the grieving mother, my eyes fell on Jane’s crossed legs, where curving thigh nudged hem of dress.

  When some of the girls visited Sally’s grave in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, I was not invited. Nan reported back that they placed a vase of flowers on the headstone and stood for a moment in silence. When the flowers suddenly toppled over, it released a cloudburst of laughter.

  “We took it as a sign,” Nan said. “Sally was saying lighten up.”

  Easy for her to say.

  * * *

  —

  During the week of her eighteenth birthday, three weeks after my own, Jane threw the next Odyssey party at her house in North Toronto. She was in Grade 13 at Havergal, and her high school sweetheart was away at university. As she opened the front door, I hovered over her like a construction crane—I was a full foot taller. I breathed in the smile, the perfume, the party dress. This felt different from Sally; I couldn’t yet bring myself to say better than.

  For thirty seconds, a minute, I lingered like a delivery boy waiting for a tip. Exasperated, Jane finally grabbed my wrist and pulled me across the threshold. As the party unfolded in the basement rec room, Robin ap
peared with her cousin, George Orr. I was sliding down into the velvet womb of my third drink and his haunted face failed to snap the trance. We exchanged awkward words—he seemed older, so much older, than the rest of us—and before long our brainless pleasures banished him into the night.

  Week by week, Jane and I exchanged phone calls and letters. In one, she wrote in French that she liked me because I had “bonnes intentions”; I did not think to ask myself if she did. One weekend, our happy gang travelled down to Kingston for a bash in my residence; as the slide show flooded the white wall of my bedroom with Sally’s face, Marywinn, who had sat with her dying friend in the German ambulance, broke down. But I didn’t.

  By November, my academic progress was subverted by the arrival of The White Album. I stopped cutting my hair and started artfully dodging classes; I was now majoring in the Beatles with a minor in Hendrix and Cream, finding delicious masochism in the unfinished, undelivered essay. I was neglecting my higher education for a lower one; virginity was something to lose, and I wanted to join the losers. “Mustang Sally” was now supplanted by “Gotta See Jane.” One night four of us were parked in the dark lot of an elementary school and the song—“red light, green light”—was blasting from the radio. As Will and Marywinn thrashed in the front seat of our bedroom on wheels, Jane and I rolled around in the back, my long legs stretched stork-like out the window. As I came up for air, Jane whispered, “I want to have lots and lots of babies.” But weren’t we still babies ourselves?

  On a weekend in late November, I took the bus to Toronto where Jane, resplendent in black leather boots and a full-length coonskin coat, met me at the terminal. The Queen’s Golden Gaels were playing for the national football championship at Varsity Stadium, a night game, and I was staying over at Jane’s house. Before the game, I shot a game of snooker in the basement with her father, a charmer who put me so completely at ease that I let him win. I must have passed the audition, for I detected no hint of “Hands off my daughter.”

  The scene was set: Saturday night in her living room, her parents out, a December frost dusting the windows. Margi was visiting from Halifax, and on a nearby sofa Dave was conducting a clinic on how to separate a girl from her bra. I carried Jane up the stairs to her bedroom, buttons and zippers popping and sliding, no birth control, no control at all. At the moment of truth, her older sister stormed through the front door to find Dave and Margi, if not in flagrante, then almost. From the foot of the stairs, she bellowed, “What the hell is this? A bordello?”

  As Jane scrambled downstairs, I flashed on the voice of Sally, yelling from a Roman window, “Quanto costa, bella?”

  The next day, my mother asked me in a tone of accusation, “Are you going steady?” I felt like a stammering drunk caught in a radar trap. I couldn’t mount a simple defence—Why aren’t you happy for me? I was long past wondering why she had never talked to me about Sally, but now she was making me feel I must apologize for liking a girl. Any girl.

  * * *

  —

  On New Year’s Eve, Sean hosted the latest in our chain of post-Odyssey revels. It was a testament to the strength of our boyhood friendship that while Sean might be nursing thoughts of homicide, he seemed resigned to the sight of Jane nestled on my lap on his sofa. Playtime turned real when, embracing Tammy, Nick broke the news: they were officially engaged. The room exploded into squeals of delight, and the love-in began anew, pushing us through the dying moments of 1968.

  As midnight passed, the taste of the white wine shot me back to Rüdesheim, and abruptly an invisible hand pulled the circuit breaker. I pushed Jane off my lap and exploded: “I can’t stand it any longer!”

  Jane was blindsided, and the sight of her shock shocked me. Who could explain it? Was I making her feel what I felt when I lost Sally? Even as I scrambled to take the words back, I knew a body thrown from a bus stayed thrown.

  At three in the morning, Stu piloted me home past deep banks of snow. Shedding my shoes, I skulked up the stairs past my parents’ bedroom door, but I guess the creaks betrayed me, because at dawn, my father, a stranger to my bedroom and my life, charged through the door and yanked back the curtains of the dormer window.

  “Your mother and I have had enough. Get the hell out of this house right now!”

  Knowing it was my mother who had sent him, I felt immune: I had never lived here, and neither had he. A threat of eviction meant nothing to a squatter like me.

  Before heading back to school, I tried to reverse my suicidal split with Jane on the phone, but we both sensed something had snapped. Unwisely fishing for sympathy from my mother, I unpacked my distress on the sunroom sofa. Days past her fiftieth birthday, she was still as stunning as an arctic glacier, and she did not bother to conceal the look of glee in her eyes over the news of my breakup. No one usurps the queen.

  When Jane returned to her high school sweetheart, I wrote her a wounded letter accusing her of using me as a ploy to make her old boyfriend jealous. The moment I slipped it into the mailbox, I regretted it, for I knew none of it was true; our feelings had been genuine. Much time would pass before I began to see how I was playing an integral part in my own downfalls.

  * * *

  —

  In the concrete bunker of Leonard Hall, I burrowed into a winter of discontent. Guys were dropping out and other guys were digging in, the grasshoppers vs. the ants. I could not imagine following any of these future leaders into the future. A frosh in the adjoining residence tried to kill himself by swallowing five bottles of aspirin, setting his bloodstream ablaze but surviving. Others succeeded where he failed.

  One day in philosophy class, I was impressed when the prof remarked that we, a class of privileged whites, were “emotional eunuchs.” Repelling the daily maid service with a Do Not Disturb sign, I often slept till noon and continued to devote my waking affections to books, films and music bearing no relation to the curriculum. My Tuesday-afternoon economics class had come to signify all that was wrong with the world, and in my moody blueness I dropped the needle into the vein of Days of Future Passed and stretched across the unmade bed, awash in the Moog-synthesized fugue state of “Tuesday Afternoon.” Seeking a pattern, I realized that we had boarded the Raffaello on a Tuesday afternoon and Sally died on a Tuesday afternoon.

  On a weekend trip to Toronto, I waded through the hemp-and-hair haze of Rochdale College, the anarchic eighteen-storey free university and student co-op at Bloor and Huron Streets, then infiltrated a raucous frat house jungle on St. George Street. Through the strobe-lit blasts of acid rock and billows of pot smoke, I made out the bearded glare of George Orr. We exchanged wordless nods.

  By spring, a fledgling rock band, Led Zeppelin, was assaulting the halls and the walls of Leonard Hall. Night after night, roving packs of engineers burned off exam pressure by flinging “arts fags” into bathtubs of ice-cold water and inflicting thousands of dollars’ worth of property damage. The exhilarating violence released me, for a time, from my passive-aggressive funk. It now made sense to me why for millennia armies have recruited eighteen-year-old males lacking fully formed brains—at that age, we’re all potential killers.

  * * *

  —

  I acquiesced to my mother’s wish that I work the summer of 1969 as a trainee at a Royal Bank branch at Oakwood and St. Clair. Her father, Talbot, had been a banker, and my mother pictured me stepping into his giant rubber galoshes. As part of a four-year summer program designed to speed undergrads up the corporate ladder to their executive destinies, I was paid far more than the female tellers with twenty years’ experience, and I was not yet nineteen.

  One June day, my mother called me at work to ask if she could open my marks, which had arrived in the mail. At least she’d asked. A paper-cutting sound, a long silence, then the mother of all sighs. I felt a deep rush of pride that, given I rarely darkened a classroom after Christmas, I was worth as much as 31 in French, 38 in economics, 40 in psychology, 50 in philosophy, and 70 in English. My whole life I had tried
my best, to no avail; time to do my worst.

  The following week, Dr. and Mrs. Wodehouse appeared at our door for evening cocktails. They had never visited our house, nor would they again. I assumed their sudden appearance was my parents’ way of acknowledging that Sally had once walked the earth. I was struck by the doctor’s loud red sports jacket and the buoyant bonhomie of the two couples as they greeted one another. As I shook the firm hand of the university’s birth control expert, I recognized traces of his dead daughter in the lines on his face. As he lingered over the liquor cabinet, I fished for a conversation that I hoped would extend beyond three sentences. I revealed that I flunked my first year of university but withheld what I was feeling: I’ve been having a bad time, too, you know. Letting out a short laugh, he headed outside to the patio by the pool, and I realized with a jolt that Sally was not invited to this party, and neither was I. Watch and learn—this is how it’s done.

  * * *

  —

  In the summer of 1970, my brother toured Europe in an Odyssey group led by Nick and Tammy. On the Lido, where Sally had buried my body in the sand, Mike watched as a drowned man was pulled from the waves and could not be revived. The Odyssey itself expired later that year, capitulating to backpacking baby boomers and the rebuking ghost of an eighteen-year-old girl.

  The serial sieges of stomach, school, Sally, the breakup with Jane, my mother’s coldness, my father’s madness were flooding the projection booth in my head. I wondered if my parents’ toxic folie à deux had entailed a silent trade-off of mania and depression—you take the high road and I’ll take the low road—and I was the cyclothymic monkey in the middle. The fist clenching my guts was finally pegged as Crohn’s disease. When the medication failed to eradicate the pain, I took it in stride (only much later would I understand, if not fully eliminate, my need to be punished).