Dreaming Sally

by James Fitzgerald

  In high school, Sandy had dreamed of becoming a newscaster, but she was now tapping into a gift for working with fabrics and textiles. In the spring of 1972, when a mentor figure invited her to work in the Muskoka Lakes resort town of Gravenhurst, George was thrown into a panic, afraid that he would lose her if she left. They argued and bickered constantly—a reprise of the intense days four years earlier when Sally had announced her trip to Europe and George had revealed his terrible dream and failed to divert her fate. Or maybe caused it.

  The shadows of August 1968 reinvaded his nervous system. No one was more shocked than he to find himself on his knees, wheedling, crying and pleading, Sandy suddenly Sally. She hesitated, then agreed to marry him, pushing down the inexpressible feeling that although she loved George, she was giving in out of pity.

  On April 21, 1972, George and Sandy, ages twenty-four and twenty-two, exchanged vows before a small circle of family and friends at Toronto City Hall, Stewart standing as best man. For the civil ceremony, George wore a full-length Little Lord Fauntleroy tunic, handcrafted by his bride, while she wore a gingham gown. The traditional phrase “Till death do us part” did not form part of the ritual, but four parental smiles telegraphed relief: their children no longer lived in sin.

  Two years of communal living had made George feel neither better nor worse, and he knew a magical, weird time of indulging not entirely stupid/not entirely bright enterprises was running its course. None of his tribal brothers and sisters had helped him metabolize anything emotionally deep or lasting, but critically, a string of warm, alive bodies had been consistently present, containing his half-deadness in their sweetness and generosity. With Stewart he had reached a point where they no longer needed to talk; they just understood.

  When George’s waterbed sprang a leak—sudden screams, a scramble for a siphoning hose—he took it as a sign. Somebody in a fit of rage hurled the last chunk of hashish into the compost bucket; multiple copies of John and Yoko’s “War Is Over If You Want It” posters were ripped from the walls and the Inkerman collective dissolved into a memory. Living up to its name but not its promise, the Never-Neverland farm was sold back to its original owner for the original $35,000. One by one, the communal bodies scattered. A sixties bust-up.

  The original quartet, George and Sandy, Stewart and Val, regrouped and rented 48 Summerhill Gardens, tucked in a quiet cul-de-sac near the Yonge Street liquor store. Val took on an administrative job at York; like George before him, Stewart was inching across the rope bridge from school to work. Because degrees were rare in his family, he persisted.

  As George struggled to conjure a career path with a pinch of personal meaning, Sandy knew, as Sally had before her, exactly where she was going. That summer, she learned that a former boyfriend was setting up an art gallery with his wife in Barrie, a town of twenty-five thousand an hour’s drive north of Toronto, buying and renovating a two-storey, three-bedroom semi-detached 1890s Victorian with gingerbread trim and twelve-foot ceilings. Numbers 1 and 3 Berczy Street shared a main floor kitchen, with bedrooms upstairs and separate store spaces below. How would George like to help Sandy run a semi-rural crafts business in the smaller, adjoining space of number 3 for a dirt-cheap rent?

  In August, that black dog of a month, they packed up and headed north. Stewart and Val elected to stay in Toronto until Stewart found his feet. Four years had passed since Sally’s death, and while Stewart was not cutting his soul brother loose, he was negotiating the right distance.

  With a neatly timed $10,000 legacy from his late unlamented insurance-broker grandfather—the one who once inflicted emotional blackmail on George’s father by threatening to jump from the Bayview Bridge if he deviated from the family business—George splurged on an AMC Gremlin and pieces of utilitarian antique furniture. He and Sandy gathered store inventory of jewellery, pottery, weaving, hand-blown glass, woodwork, dolls, quilts and crocheted bedspreads. Until they could build a business, Sandy taught at Georgian College while George toiled in the basement fashioning cabinets and a pedestal desk. When the store, Artifact, finally opened in March 1973, Sandy could never have imagined that it would thrive for the next thirty-six years.

  By summer’s end, after a year of separation interrupted by occasional visits, Stewart and Val moved from Toronto to the town of Bradford, twenty-five miles south of Barrie; the emotional bond between Stewart and George would not be severed. Now seven months pregnant, Valerie blessed the revival of the Nice Furniture Company, prodding aimless hippie hobbyism into a sustainable enterprise; together with the birth of the crafts store and a child, maybe the foursome could actually make real the sixties artisanal dream. When Stewart bought a used Volkswagen van from a York professor, he was not immediately aware that when he rumbled into Barrie to reunite with George on a late August morning, he was delivering a mixed message of help and horror: George was elated to see his soul brother, but the very sight of the vehicle drove him back five years to an overcast West German highway.

  Directly across from the store, George and Stewart discovered a vacant, long and narrow nineteenth-century, four-floor shoe factory, standing on the edge of Kempenfelt Bay with a vista of shimmering Lake Simcoe. Stewart set to work on a butternut wood cradle, finishing it just before the birth of Jessica on October 11; the young parents were delighted that their daughter, a future Crown attorney, possessed ten fingers and ten toes, clear refutation of right-wing propaganda that LSD invariably fried human chromosomes.

  Within weeks, three friends, Brad, Ted and Bill, expanded the manpower of the Nice Furniture Company to five. They worked hard and harmoniously, building maple boardroom tables, kitchen cupboards in laminated pine, a cherry dining room set. The task at hand filled George’s head, driving his moods into high and low and sideways places, hammering down sudden half-unwelcome thoughts of Sally. When they hit their stride, the quintet pumped out a table a day. Having removed the middle seat from the VW van to make space for their wares, they delivered orders across town, together with the feeling that they were improving one small corner of the world.

  Over the summer of 1973, George’s attention was riveted to the televised U.S. Senate Watergate hearings and the promise of executive criminality brought to heel; making the lying, devious bastards squirm and come clean served him as a kind of narcotic. Engrossed by the serial, what-will-happen-next political drama, he rediscovered his passion for journalism, driven darkly underground by parental disapproval and a lover’s death. Having amassed boxes of newspaper clippings on the scandal, he now had a place to hang them—the 150-foot-long walls of the furniture shop—and so they were covered, from floor to ceiling. He had never lost his fascination with the way that dedicated reporters could drive the story they were covering, influencing the direction of history.

  * * *

  —

  Commuting from Bradford, Stewart remained George’s daily anchor. In December, George was surprised and delighted when Stewart and Val decided to move to Barrie, a few blocks from his and Sandy’s place with a view of the lake, three-month-old Jessica in tow. Val landed a job with the Children’s Aid Society, and the Inkerman originals were reunited.

  But to Sandy’s growing bewilderment, the once-aggressive rock promoter she’d married was turning into a passive furniture maker. A self-admitted Type A, Sandy was frustrated by George’s phlegmatic want of motivation; he was a thinker, she a doer, and together they were failing to forge a combined vision of their future.

  Relying on occasional cash bailouts from his parents, George lacked drive and may even have suffered from depression in a time and place when such labels remained unspoken. His virtues—he was quiet, thoughtful, charming, funny, handsome and good company—had counted for much, but something essential felt unplugged, no doubt sustained by the smokescreen of pot that veiled truer feelings. In the car, their petty carping and backbiting often escalated into all-out gloves-off fights, shocking backseat passengers into grim silence.

  Feeling like a balloon trapped under a
n umbrella, Sandy struggled to break free, but George reeled her back. The moment she learned she was pregnant was the moment she fell into a rage. The weight of Sally’s six-year-old ghost had failed to lift off the shoulders of her husband, and so, on a brisk autumn day, after the couple agreed on an abortion—the only option, as both were too self-involved to raise a child, too close to childhood itself—George moved into Stewart’s basement. As he drove the hour south to the Wellesley Hospital in Toronto, the unrevivable relationship lodged between the couple like an invisible corpse; although a lapsed Catholic, Sandy felt the brute sting of conscience, then laid responsibility for the debacle at the feet of George. Marking their mutual capitualiation, Sandy stitched an eight-foot square wall tapestry, complete with horse and mounted knight wielding a spear, embroidered with the words, “St. George and the Dragon.”

  Renting a shabby one-bedroom apartment on Bayfield Street, George upped his narco-alcohol intake, lived in restaurants and crashed on the couches of friends, becoming worse and worse company. One night, barging in on Stewart and Val, he insisted on playing Apostrophe, the new album by Frank Zappa. The music woke up the baby, evoking such a rush of anger from loyal friends that not even his fabled charm could defuse it.

  A pivotal moment came when Ted and Stewart, who were putting in eighteen-hour days working at a Toronto furniture show, happened to catch sight of the truant George, his head nestled on the shoulder of a beaming beauty behind the wheel of her red convertible. The bottom of the bucket was leaking; no amount of drugs, music or casual sex could fill him.

  One night, as a passenger on a drunken joyride, George rolled toward the open back end of the speeding station wagon, a young man of unsound mind long past making love or money or war. Stewart grabbed him a split second before he fell out. It was the second time Stewart had saved his friend’s life, and for the moment at least, all were spared the shock of a cracked skull reddening the black asphalt, George merging with a dead girl in the underworld.

  * * *

  —

  One morning, a car pulled into the driveway to deliver something like a reprieve. Standing before George was Alison Lay, the giver of his first electric kiss on the sandy shores of Shanty Bay. She had matured into a striking brunette, seemingly unaware of the spell of her own kind gaze, and they spent the next hour catching up.

  Noticing his pickup truck, Alison asked for a favour. Her late grandmother was the youngest sister of William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s longest-serving prime minister. His ancient Montreal estate was being broken up by his descendants. Would George drive Alison and her mother to Montreal and help with the heavy lifting? When he agreed, she produced her mother’s address in Toronto. George was stunned: the Lay family home stood on Chestnut Park Road, eight houses east of Sally’s place.

  On the appointed morning, George appeared at their front door on a Rosedale street that had never left his memory. Mrs. Lay climbed in beside her daughter, and they headed east, straight into the teeth of a blizzard. When they reached Kingston, halfway to Montreal, police waved them off the highway. Needing to make it to Montreal that evening, the mother decided to take the train from Kingston, suggesting that Alison and George follow the next day when the roads were clear. Producing just enough cash for a single hotel room, Mrs. Lay, as if dispensing a blessing, bussed the cheek of her daughter, then George’s, and caught the train.

  The two found themselves occupying the front seat of a steamed-up pickup, holding hands, fourteen again, simultaneously realizing what they needed to do next.

  Still, in the days to follow, George knew he was not prepared to follow Alison to Quebec, and the thought only deepened his post-Sally, post-Sandy angst. It had been six years since Sally died, but he knew that growing back the charred tendrils of human feeling obeyed no timetable.

  * * *

  —

  Bleeding money from the moment of its birth, the Nice Furniture Company lacked a hard-headed business manager to staunch the flow; if David the Born Entrepreneur had stuck around, factories would be dotting South Korea by now. The five partners realized too late that Niceness Was Not Enough: they had consistently under-priced their products, unable to ask for more money.

  Just as George sensed his carpentry days were history, a galvanizing figure stepped into his path. A shapely, jeans-clad, brown-eyed young woman with shoulder-length brown hair, Ronda radiated a robust sensual energy. When George looked at her, he thought, She’s out of my league. But she looked back.

  Recently split from her husband, Ronda was a talented potter who had decided to relocate in Barrie to take courses at Georgian College. As they got to know each other, she was intrigued to hear the story of George’s uncanny dream presaging Sally’s death. In turn, George was interested to learn that Ronda came from an affluent but brutal family where her unhinged father fired guns in random directions. She became a teenage hellion, and her parents packed her off to board at Branksome Hall for a year, two grades ahead of Sally. But she remained hard-wired to boys, booze and fast cars, hot clay refusing to conform to the shape of cool porcelain.

  In late June 1975, Ronda told George she was heading for Vancouver, en route to Australia: she wanted to see the world. When she invited him to join her, George vacillated. She scribbled down a phone number in Calgary where she would be staying with friends for a spell, and her eyes said it all: Do come. He told Ronda what he had told Sandy: “You need to understand that I’m still emotionally involved with a dead person.”

  But it proved hard to let Ronda disappear down the road. He started to construct a wooden camper, complete with bunk bed and bookshelves, for the back of his Chevy pickup truck. On Canada Day, July 1, 1975, he laid down his tools, and although he was first tempted to disappear without a word, he told Stewart and his other friends that he was heading west—dropping everything, leaving for good, splitting the scene, burning the bridges holding him up.

  When he turned the key in the ignition and drove away, he suspected his loyal yet exhausted second family felt as massively relieved as he did. Since Sally’s death, George had been the magnet holding them together longer than needed, most of all himself. George knew the move would make or break him, but he chose to imagine that when he hit B.C., he would clean the slate and recast himself.

  In the original myth, after losing Eurydice a second time, Orpheus lingered at the brink of the Underworld for seven years. As George rumbled down the Trans-Canada Highway curving over the north shore of Lake Superior, pressing across the dead flatness of the prairies, chasing the sun falling behind the spiked wall of the Rockies, he declared his personal Seven Years War over. Third time lucky, he allowed himself to dream. Still, only a fool believed in the foolproof, and we are all guilty until proven innocent.

  SIXTEEN

  “Some Things You Will Never Know”

  In September 1972, I headed to journalism school, a one-year post-grad diploma course at the University of Western Ontario, a default position given that I could find no career listings for poets, dreamers or nihilists-in-progress. Although I admired investigative reporters who nailed the bad guys to the wall, I felt no drive to join their ranks; if anything prodded me forward, it was an aimless romance with words.

  I had not lost my fear of speaking up in class, although in my off-hours I was drawn to the noisy voices of the New Journalism: Wolfe, Capote, Mailer, Talese and the Nixon-shredding gonzo madman Hunter S. Thompson. Their intensely personal authorial slant was outlawed by the traditional third-person journalism taught at Western; no wonder my essay on the sixties underground press failed to enthuse the prof. When I did not pass his course—falling precisely one point short of 50 per cent—I took it as a sign and a point of pride. I left diploma-less.

  I returned home to my collapsed father and prickly, shape-shifting mother. Over the summer of 1973, while seeking a newspaper job, I was wired to the televised Senate Watergate hearings. Evasion, denial, deceit, duplicity, dissembling, whitewashing, cover-up—let us make the lies
we are telling perfectly clear. Journalists must ask hard questions of Authority, but I was nowhere near up to the task. As I tentatively edged into the hurly-burly of the real world, I sensed something large and low, dark and unfinished, the mother of all untold stories, sealed inside my own nuclear family. But when I tentatively pushed on the family secrets, my mother, the ex-spy and frustrated artist, cast out a one-liner of impeccable smugness: “Some things you will never know.” Perhaps one day I would muster the emotional muscle to expose the secrets of the two strangers who never wanted to have children but had us all the same.

  * * *

  —

  That same summer, my brother was earning his university tuition by mowing the lawns of Mount Pleasant Cemetery, circling the tombs of famous establishment Canadians from Fred Banting to William Lyon Mackenzie King to Egerton Ryerson. Every day after work, my friend Jay and I met Mike to shoot scenes of our latest Super 8 production, titled Fear, set among the vaults and headstones of the century-old city of the dead that I had dubbed “the Granite Club.”

  We loved collecting comic names carved on the grandiose crypts—“Captain Fluke” took the cake. But one August day, our mood abruptly deepened. Mike reported that as he was clipping the edges of a knee-high headstone, one among random thousands, he glanced at the chiselled capital letters:

  SALLY LYN WODEHOUSE

  Over the past five years, a mix of inertia and semi-amnesia had stopped me from visiting her grave, so I experienced the coincidence as a slap. Of all the sleepers underfoot, Sally was the only one I knew.

  When Mike said she was buried in plot Y, I thought he’d said, plot why? Criss-crossing the serene tree-shaded lawns, dodging the sputtering sprinklers, I moved from monument to monument until I found her. Standing before the stone, I experienced that familiar backing-up on myself, that blankness, as if I were as much an object as the stone itself. My gaze deflected off her birth and death dates, and with a suddenness that seemed involuntary, I turned and walked away.