Dreaming Sally

by James Fitzgerald

  Unlike most cub reporters, he had been gored by the world. But he loved the fact that no one knew who he was, or where he came from, nor cared. He crafted a sardonic, on-air James Bond persona that made him feel invulnerable. He disinterred his buried competitive streak, and it was a beast. It turned out that he loved winning, and hard news was a measurable, competitive, goal-scoring enterprise. At the same time, he was never rude or abrasive, falling back on his mother-trained politeness, his lending of a sympathetic ear broadening the dimensions of the story.

  He felt as if he was on a mission to tell the story first. It was not unlike war, long stretches of boredom punctuated by sudden detonations: staking out numbingly protracted labour negotiations in a hotel room, then jolted by the wail of a passing ambulance. One morning, he interviewed Miss America, an adorable little ice princess; that afternoon, he met the activist Elie Wiesel, author of Night, his memoir of surviving Auschwitz, and as George listened to the warm soul with the engaging smile and tattooed forearm, destined for a Nobel Peace Prize, he thought, I’m in the right business. As a teenager, Wiesel had endured one of the most unspeakable experiences of the century, yet emerged an exemplary man. That’s a story, George realized, and there are stories everywhere.

  It was a dream job.

  * * *

  —

  After a frenetic workday infused with acidic cups of coffee and drags of Camel cigarettes, George needed a counteracting bring-down that he found in booze. Sometimes, driving home across the Lions Gate Bridge, he saw three swaying bridges and threaded slowly through the middle one. On the hangover-hating return trip the next morning, he worried he was becoming his father. But he told himself he was different: he could handle the stress and control the drinking.

  Still, George felt that he was not fully part of the world but parked off to the side, watching from a safe place. He managed his emotions, for he knew what devastation felt like. The journalist-observer was a predatory, parasitic creature, but how else to function? A feeling of invincibility came with the job—the ability to build a brick wall, putty the cracks and distance the pain.

  Within such a frame he could place Sally, and he found a pinch of solace there. In 1968, he tried to capture his teenage passion in an article for Seventeen magazine and had mailed her a draft when she was in Europe; the most powerful story in his life, the mother of all stories, was the one he could not bear or dare finish, for the ending never changed. He could never forget how Sally’s cremation denied him a last sight of her body, and for the longest time he awoke from dreams in a trickling sweat, believing he was the victim of a horribly elaborate conspiracy, that on July 2, 1968, the Wodehouses had plotted to spirit Sally away from him, that her Odyssey trip was a cover story, that her death was staged, that she was living a secret life in a secret place where he would never, ever find her.

  For over a decade, he’d lugged from place to place the Sally Archives—letters, photos, mementos—contained in a cardboard box. In an idle moment, he might pick up a letter, scan the traces of her moving hand, then drop the pages as if he’d scalded his fingers on a stove. One day, his eyes fell on the photograph of his twenty-year-old tuxedoed self, standing beside Sally, slim and glowing and promising in her white gloves and formal gown, and a lost “what-if” world pierced his chest like a flung dart. He wanted to burn the box as passionately as he wanted to preserve it.

  EIGHTEEN

  The Cold Black Yonder

  In August 1978, the tenth anniversary of our Odyssey, I was the prime mover behind a reunion party. What compelled me to capture a block of time under the heading of a rounded numeral? Maybe it was a simple equation: if I don’t remember, I don’t exist.

  I’d lost contact with most of the out-of-towners, and I failed to unearth many of their new addresses and phone numbers. Only ten of the twenty-six showed—Sean, Dave, Ross, Marywinn, Barb, John, Nan, Robin and Annabel. A decade on, I remained more enamoured with a body of people than a single body.

  Many of the group had married, were starting families and heading down dedicated career paths. Even as I was touched by the sight of Nan cradling a baby daughter in her arms, the thought of “settling down” was beyond imagining. As we assembled for the obligatory group photograph, I was conscious that I was forcing something.

  I had recently been transfixed by 21 Up, the latest instalment of Michael Apted’s Seven Up documentary film series in which he was tracking the lives of fourteen English schoolchildren drawn from across the spectrum of the class system. He started in 1964, when they were seven, and was recording their progress every seventh year. One scene had taken up permanent residence in my mind: the trajectory of a Latin-quoting upper-class toff had been so seamlessly shaped by the parental board of control that in a clipped prep-school accent the boy politely declined to participate in the remainder of the series. What was the point when life was preordained?

  Over the years I had stayed in touch with Nick, now running his own European travel business, the Upper Canada Study Society, founded after the demise of the Odyssey in 1970. In a freak snowstorm on April 7, 1977, numbing our hams on aluminum bleachers, he and I witnessed the inaugural game of the nascent Toronto Blue Jays baseball franchise, and occasionally I would pinch-hit on Nick’s champion pub-quiz league team, his fluid erudition leaving me in the dust. He remained the same witty, wide-awake, protective older brother figure in my life, but we had never opened the cellar door marked “Sally.” Even as I tried to bottle the Odyssey vibe, a strange brew of the exultant and the catastrophic, I knew I was straining for an unrepeatable experience. The sixties were never coming back, and neither was Sally. But if I kept the magic bus rolling, could I orchestrate a different ending?

  * * *

  —

  Maggie, my boss on the medical journal, correctly perceived that I was a twenty-seven-year-old overburdened by the past, strangling his potential by slow degrees. Through her influence I began cautiously prospecting Therafields, a therapeutic community born in the early 1960s, its core composed of groups living in Edwardian brick houses in the Annex neighbourhood of the city.

  I learned that many of its therapists were brilliant apostate Catholic priests and nuns busy breaking their vows of celibacy while wedding liberation theology to depth psychology. They believed the overly rigid institutions of family, school and church no longer served the welfare of the young and sought to tap the energy of the collective to restore a balance. In addition to its houses in the city, the community ran marathon group therapy weekends that unfolded on an organic farm in the Hockley Valley north of the city. One weekend, Maggie invited me to a literary event at the farm. Although I was drawn to the concentration of long-haired poets, teachers and artists, the sixties anti-psychiatry sensibility espoused by the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, the respect for the restorative power of dreams and the unconscious mind, a cultish “us and them” vibe turned me off.

  * * *

  —

  On May 24, 1979, Queen Victoria’s birthday and a week before our fourth annual Elmbank Jazz festival, Jay died in his sleep. That he disappeared at the axial age of twenty-seven, as he often predicted, as we so often laughed off, doubled the shock. The autopsy found no trace of a drug overdose, although that’s how most chose to explain his mysterious exit; we invent answers when none are present.

  Days after the funeral, three hundred people gathered for our backyard festival, and I was spirited back eleven years to the courtyard of the Paris hotel and the surreal hours after Sally’s death. As we chattered and drank and danced to the trumpets and clarinets, drums and guitars, an elephant lumbered across the grass: Jay now slept under a small stone in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, not far from Sally, the place where we abandoned Fear, our irreverent, death-defying film.

  * * *

  —

  Months later, my maternal grandmother, Mabel, died at ninety-three. Despite her annual doling out of birthday cheques, her bankrolling of my private education and the Odyssey, I failed to s
ummon the sadness, love and gratitude I was made to feel I should. Strange to realize her part in my destiny: without her money, I would never have fallen for Sally.

  My routine Sunday visits to my grandparents’ three-storey red-brick house at 21 Delisle Avenue had given me something else: a free pass into the museum of my mother’s childhood and the chance to solve the Rubik’s Cube that was her character. How was it possible that my dynamic, protean, thoroughly modern mother—aesthete, world traveller, interior decorator, gardener, photographer, bookkeeper, fashion plate, sophisticate, wit, spy—had incubated in this stifling mausoleum?

  My head recorded like a silent-film camera the rooms and objects of my mother’s 1920s childhood: the giant sack of birdseed in the dank basement, the hand-carved, lion-headed arms of the Edwardian sofa set against the sickly yellow wallpaper, the elevator door of the dumb waiter, the foot-buzzer concealed under the dining room carpet to summon the kitchen help, the spooky third floor straight out of a Brontë novel.

  I pictured my mother as an exotic bird of a little girl, flying into precocious puberty and adolescence, boobs and gams busting out all over, attracting envy, male and female alike, for her beauty and intelligence. Her fervent wish to attend the Slade School of Art was stopped dead by paternal command; her acquiescence, her failure to honour her own rebel heart, spelled the beginning of the end.

  When my mother’s mother solemnly pressed a Bible into my hands on my fourteenth birthday, the message was clear: in this stilted, TV-less tomb of mothballs and lace curtains, Jesus outranked the Beatles. Yet neither here nor at home did I ever hear the word “love” passing through human lips, no gestures, no hugs, no kisses, no tender touch to give language flesh or meaning.

  The hatchet face of my imposing maternal grandfather gave even less away; all I knew was that he spared no time for me beyond occasional random, scalding scoldings. Only my precocious sister could find the feather to enliven that cadaver, and I could almost hear the face of Mount Rushmore crack when he surrendered to a fleeting smile. When his youngest daughter married my father—the young doctor from an eminent medical family—the groom was made to feel he was not good enough for her, and he refused to set foot in the house of his in-laws again. For this boycott, my father eventually earned my sidelong respect.

  One day, my mother let slip a story that cast a ribbon of light on the dark seams of a childhood she had idealized. Except for a stint in the army, her middle-aged bachelor brother, Dave, my godfather, had lived under his parents’ roof for his entire life. On an early Saturday morning visit, my mother revealed, she found her silver-bearded brother in the living room, astride his childhood rocking horse.

  * * *

  —

  In 1979 I backed out of journalism altogether and joined the less-stressful promotion department of the book publishing firm of Holt, Rinehart & Winston, an American-owned branch plant. My mother made it clear that she thought my change of course into a more feminized world rendered me unfit for the grit of a real man’s job. Yet even in publishing, the macho men dominated the executive positions and reverence for books as precious cultural objects seemed nowhere to be found. “As long as the dogs are eating the dog food,” pronounced our Darth Vaderesque sales manager. Executives and secretaries, editors and sales staff, married and single, coupled and decoupled with the checkmating moves of a chessboard. I confined myself to a tight box of a cubicle where I ground out even tighter promotional squibs for the company catalogue; escorting touring authors to radio and TV stations to pontificate on their new books, I allowed myself a brief thought: I could do that. But I didn’t.

  * * *

  —

  One night at a party, catching the eye of a tall, unknown woman across the dance floor, I resolved to seduce her. I was struck by how readily I assumed the role of Casanova for the first time, as if flicking a light switch. The next morning, as I turned a cold shoulder to my disillusioned prey, she scribbled in red ink on a piece of newsprint, like a headline: “A woman is like a bus.” If her intention was to induce guilt and shame, it worked.

  At a pre-wedding stag party for a UCC old boy in a penthouse suite of a downtown hotel, my moral education deepened. Anticipating booze, stud poker and sports banter, I was not prepared for the entrance of two prostitutes, no older than twenty, hired to inflict public acts of sex on the unsuspecting groom.

  I was struck by the equanimity of the naked women, the agitation of the clothed men, and I felt for the visibly mortified victim, forced by the intoxicated chants of his “mates” to strip down and submit to his humiliation. Under the leering gaze of twenty suits and ties, the rite of passage mercifully expired within seconds.

  I should have left on the spot, but I stayed put, disgusted by my own voyeurism. Over the next two hours, the women took on a receiving line of old boys in an adjoining bedroom at $50 a head, likely unaware of how they served as a homosexual bridge among and between the brotherhood. As the two women prepared to leave, one realized that the heel of her pump had been broken off and she erupted into a rage. Several of the men returned a blitzkrieg of a verbal gang rape—“Fucking bitch! Whore!”—and I took my cue to split.

  In the morning, I picked up the phone to hear the voice of the groom: “James, you were the sanest man there last night. What did I do?” I was amazed that he noticed I was noticing. Under the sewer grate of my continuing Upper Canadian upbringing, I tucked yet another Lesson Learned: in their collusive, camouflaged terror of the Big Bad Mother, old boys will be old boys.

  * * *

  —

  Standing on first base during a company softball game, I met Linda, a brown-eyed, curly-haired single mother of two sweet-tempered kids, ages seven and five. I was charmed by the combination of her relaxed ways and the sexy gap between her front teeth; maybe I could resolve my triangle drama by going for a quadrangle.

  But when, months later, Linda and I moved into a townhouse in the suburb of Mississauga, I was blindsided by the magnitude of what I was taking on. Over a nine-month stretch, the kids grew to accept and love me as their new father. One night I made an unprecedented leap of intimacy when I whispered into Linda’s ear, “I adore you.” A look of alarm crossed her face, or so I imagined, and a Sally-like kiss of death slipped into the bedroom.

  A short time later, smelling blood, my mother moved in for the kill. As Linda and I drove home from a Sunday family gathering, Linda looked as if she had been hit by a bus. After a long silence, she turned and asked, “Do you know what your mother just said to me?”

  I cringed in anticipation.

  “ ‘You’ve done a nice job with James, but he’s a dreamer and a loser.’ ”

  My first impulse was to defend my mother.

  Over a hellish Christmas, Linda revealed that she was warming to the advances of her boss, and I surrendered to a feeling of inevitability. Sitting on one of the kids’ bunk beds for the last time, I tried to soften the blow: “I’m not going to see you for a long time.”

  “You mean ten years?” the boy wondered aloud, stretching his arms to the imagined length of a decade, and I felt my heart blaze, then freeze, with guilt. Giving them each a last kiss, I turned off the lights, and closed the door. In the chill of the January night, I glanced back at the window of the children’s bedroom, and I was hit with an ancient agony, a buried memory of a boy lost in the cold black yonder, beyond stark, beyond bleak, beyond desolation, beyond abandonment, beyond all beyonds. If I hoped to keep breathing, I had to once again muster the will to kill that unbearable feeling. As I turned the ignition of the car, I welcomed the rescue of the neutralizing voice—Cut your losses and drive on; no one will ever know—and I retreated to the familiar well-lit surfaces where no sensation lived.

  * * *

  —

  On the rebound from Linda and the kids, at a party I met Ann, a palliative care nurse of Scots blood and waist-length black hair who wore her abundant passion on her sleeve. Sally, of course, had been destined for nursing, and in the
moment when Ann and I fell into bed in my downtown bachelor apartment, lust turned to stone.

  We continued dating, broke off, then reunited. As we returned on a city bus from a day trip to the Toronto Islands, the sight of a shuffling, balding passenger with glasses, fumbling to deposit his fare, conjured my father, hibernating in his cave, plugged into the boob tube.

  “Oh, God, that’s me not too far down the road. Losing my hair—then my mind.”

  “I’ll still love you,” murmured Ann.

  I shot back: “Don’t!”

  She buried her face in her hands and wept. I had not grasped it yet, but I was playing the Dickensian role of Estella in reverse, revenging myself on the female sex.

  Ann knitted me a red-and-blue wool sweater with the S of Superman on the chest, which I took as a Lois Lane slap to the “Clark Can’t” side of my face. As with Linda only months earlier, I penned Ann a eulogy to our relationship in the form of a letter and left her. It was still easier to write than speak.

  Something was happening here, but I didn’t know what it was. Only in the days to come, as I tasted an acidic edge to my daily interactions with others, did I sense something much larger, deeper, something altogether else, something I had not yet dared to attach to a name: blind rage.

  NINETEEN

  TV Dreams

  The best years of George’s life were spent at CKNW. But once he’d mastered the hot medium of radio, he felt it was time to tackle the cool visuals of television. In the spring of 1982, he joined Channel 13, a private TV station with 100,000 viewers. Standing on street corners in wind and rain, he fashioned a live-to-air face, catching the countdown of the studio voice in his earpiece, determined not to flub his lines, for now he was being heard and seen.