Dreaming Sally

by James Fitzgerald

  Promising to meet her at the hospital, Tammy presses ahead to Luxembourg to fetch Nick. As the ambulance races back toward Koblenz, Sally rolls over and throws up, but she does not wake up. Trembling at the sight and plight of her friend and classmate, Marywinn holds back a wail that yearns to fuse with the siren, and the woman up front who speaks no English reaches for her hand.

  Within half an hour, the ambulance pulls into a small Catholic hospital. In the rush, Marywinn had forgotten her purse and passport; she is alone and she can’t speak a word of German. A nurse needs to know the identity of the unconscious girl, but Marywinn can’t remember her surname, repeating “Sally, Sally, Sally” over and over and over. In the waiting room she sits, one hour becoming two, nodding senselessly as a passing nun, shrouded in black, babbles in the unrecognizable tongue of a childhood nightmare. At last Nick and Tammy arrive, and the trio climb the stairs. The image of the second-floor hospital room—stark, white, plain—burns into their memories a permanent frame: Sally lying in the bed, an IV tube infusing her arm, her head heavily bandaged on the left side, covering the ear, a spot of red seeping through the layers of white gauze. To calm herself, Marywinn murmurs, “She’s only sleeping.”

  Marywinn finds herself sitting in Sally’s seat in the damaged bus with Steve at the wheel, or so the frame of retrospective memory will tell her. Steve has used his belt to cinch tight the semi-unhinged door, and they putter at 20 mph back down the highway, passing the scene of the accident, driving over the spot where the chalk outline of Sally’s body had been marked, though it has now been erased by the tearful rain. In the back seat John sprawls white-faced, near-catatonic, held together by the murmuring words of Steve. In his head John carries a hyper-vivid replay of the collision, but all details of what happened before and after will be erased into nothingness. By the time they cross the border into Luxembourg, darkness has fallen.

  Circling the unconscious Canadian girl, the German doctors corner the hard clinical truth: with the initial blow to the back of her head, and the contrecoup of the brain against the forehead, bone fragments have torn the blood vessels that radiate over the cranium like the tributaries of a river. The withdrawal state of the coma is easing demand on her system, but as her blood pressure rises, the force of the trauma is cascading like the breached watertight compartments of an ocean liner. The more the blood vessels leak, the more oxygen the brain needs, the more it swells, encased in the skull; expansion and pressure destroy more brain tissue, jamming the brain stem, in turn ramming down into the canal of the spinal column. Lacking the expertise needed to trepan the swelling of her brain, the doctors know they must transfer Sally to the city of Mainz, over a hundred kilometres back down the Rhine.

  Past the romantic doom-rock of the Lorelei, past the ancient village of Rüdesheim, the wheels spin southward, backtracking along the path of her summer fling. Down and up, up and down surge the unfathomable, pulsating forces of love and death, churning in the wake of a single human life, gliding back down the throat of the darkly dreaming Rhine one last time, bearing her toward her destination. Sinking down into the gentle fingers of light, Sally reunites with the source, seeing and hearing and feeling and touching and understanding everything now, all within all, all at once, her eighteen years and eighty days melting into the timeless flow, without beginning, without end, remembering, forgetting and remembering anew. Everything changes, nothing is lost.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Funeral in White

  In 2010, George quit teaching after a twenty-year run. Inhabiting an empty nest, he and Anne prepared to sell their North Vancouver home and move to a smaller townhouse. Painfully he culled a lifetime of omnivorous archiving and hoarding, the filing-cabinet memory palaces stuffed with letters, videotapes, cassette tapes, vinyl albums, CDs, DVDs, books, magazines, manuscripts, photographs, film canisters, posters, artifacts, story ideas and research, family correspondence dating from the mid-nineteenth century, future projects that will never see the future. He could not yet bear to dispose of the physical traces of Sally, the expired Swiss wristwatch, the cufflinks, the photos, the letters, the fatal telegram. I’ll read it all over one day, he told himself. One last time. But then what? Burn it? Bury it? Give it away? But to whom?

  When my memoir What Disturbs Our Blood was published in that same year of 2010, my life path swerved in an unanticipated direction. The title, drawn from a line from Yeats, referred to the death wish, yet here I was, enlivened and revitalized as I embraced my sixties. My dreams of my haunted father and grandfather evaporated together with my fear of public speaking; holding forth on the book in dozens of venues, I experienced validation in the sound of my own voice, legs and spine planted on equal parts fact and feeling.

  Writers are wise not to care how others judge their work, and when praise came my way, I felt a subtle, reflexive resistance; such was the tragic legacy of father and grandfather, neither of whom were able to savour the fruits of their labours, and starved amid plenty. Trace elements of the dead pathologists still lived inside me, and still deeper down the well dwelt the primal mother: She Who Is Never Satisfied.

  As I emerged from my dreams each morning, my body vibrated with intense but just-bearable psychic pressure. I was still working for my dead mother, and working on her, dropping opposite Eva week by week into tender and savage places. At her suggestion, I drew sketches of Sally and the labyrinths of images driving my dreams. Often I longed to retire from the battlefront, yet quiescence still felt too close to premature death. I started to feel a third wave, a culminating vow to finish my impossible homework.

  * * *

  —

  In the spring of 2012, a friend of Katy’s offered us a free apartment for a week in Place de la République in Paris. At first I hesitated, nagged by an ancient ambivalence; for me, Paris was never a movable feast but a courtyard of death. But how could we refuse such a gift, for surely I was over August 1968 by now?

  Wandering the streets, I discovered that our Odyssey hotel, in the haute-chic first arrondisement, had been upgraded to five stars and renamed Hôtel Costes. Walking down Rue St-Honoré toward number 239, we passed through a Cartier-Gucci-Fauchon boutique land of gold-rimmed windows radiant with cashmere sweaters, lace negligees and silk undergarments. Expecting a snooty hotel doorman would peer down his nose at two mundane Canadian tourists, I could feel my guts sink into a churning bag of liquid.

  I couldn’t bear seeing the place; I couldn’t bear not seeing it. But as I approached the young restaurant manager, her face lit up with kindness, and the second she smiled and spoke in charming broken English, the moment I caught the sweet name on her lapel badge—Chloe Tatin—my stomach relaxed. When I showed her my 1968 photos of the hotel, she led us on a tour of the candlelit, bed-lined sauna in the basement, then a plush, multi-mirrored upstairs suite, wallpapered as red as a Belle Époque bordello.

  “May I take a picture of the courtyard?

  “Mais oui,” she responded. “You know, I was not even alive in 1968!”

  Katy at my side, I stood in the corner of the courtyard where Bernie, gripping my hand, spoke the incomprehensible letters “DOA.” I conjured the seventeen-year-old prep boy, aflame with shame, fleeing upstairs, ahead of his tears.

  The next day we visited the Panthéon, unseen in 1968, where I was stunned to find Foucault’s Pendulum. Assembled a century before my birth, a twenty-eight-kilogram brass-coated lead bob was attached to a sixty-seven-metre-long wire suspended from the crown of the dome; the plane of the swing rotated relative to the spin of the earth, taking a full day to complete a rotation. Transfixed, I recalled my pendulum dream, born in the early weeks of my psychotherapy: the image of my swaying infant body clutching the umbilical cord, suspended from the ceiling of a courtyard, my mother’s face shifting from radiance to repulsion in eternal sync with my approaches and retreats, a first and final statement of my failure to court her. First love, sudden death. I felt as if I was back on the chairlift in the Rhine Valley; without the l
oving, earthbound presence of Katy, I’d have been lost in space.

  On our last day in Paris, trolling through the Pompidou Centre, I experienced with a surprising sangfroid yet another uncanny moment when I happened upon a video installation, Kulik Is a Bird in Fact. In a courtyard, naked as a newborn, Oleg Kulik, a wild-eyed Russian artist, was swinging back and forth in a suspended harness, echoing the courtyard of the Paris hotel, echoing Foucault’s Pendulum in the Panthéon, echoing my primal mother dream. Of course, of course, of course: such things come in threes.

  * * *

  —

  Over the past three years, George and I had been cultivating a friendship, as much as the distance could allow, talking regularly on the phone. I was delaying pitching Dreaming Sally to my editor as I was worried I had no ending to the story.

  On Sunday, July 14, 2013, George flew to Toronto for a week to visit his brother and conduct what he called a “roots tour.” I was surprised, given his unvarnished revulsion for the city, but he was riding his own pendulum. Before he came, he’d asked me whether he should visit Sally’s ninety-three-year-old mother, Jane, in her retirement home. Over the years, a sense of duty, or good manners, or lingering guilt, had compelled him to drop in on Jane when he was in town. But he knew that each time, Sally crossed the threshold at his side. Why remind a mother of the pain of a long-lost daughter?

  On Monday, George and I squeezed into a booth at the Ace, a retro restaurant on Roncesvalles Avenue; all that was missing was a jukebox of sixties pop. He told me that the day before, an old friend had confided that her outside perception of George’s childhood was that his parents perpetually tried to tamp down his precocity: Do Not Ever Outshine Us. I nodded; like George, I’d negotiated a long and twisted road before I could grasp that thwarted parents can actually envy and hate their own children. Or worse: I told him about the times my mother had tried to deep-six my romantic relationships. As I heard my own words, I experienced a flash of shame that I hadn’t stood up to her sooner.

  After dinner, as George and I strolled through the July night, the sounding cicadas evoked reveries of child-play in the ravines of the summering city. George said he had left a message with Jane, and from her voicemail she sounded as lively as ever. She hadn’t responded yet, but he expected to see her.

  I couldn’t resist the impossible question: “What if your dream had not come true and you’d married Sally—parent-pleasing career, three-storey house, kids, dog, everything she said she wanted, the ‘full catastrophe,’ as Zorba called it? Or might she have been diverted by the late sixties?”

  “I think we would have likely imploded by our forties,” he responded more quickly than I’d anticipated. “I’m guessing I would have become a rigid, humourless boozer.”

  I wanted to protest, but I realized he might be right. God knows, he had been all too right before. I thought of my young self-betraying father: the radical consumed by the reactionary.

  When I found myself telling him stories of my ecstatic rambles across Europe with Sally, unsure of exactly what I was trying to confess, George said what I could not: “You must have hated me!”

  For a second I held my breath, then laughed nervously. From birth I had been schooled to bury my hatreds so fast and deep that I never knew I felt them.

  “If I did hate you, George, the feeling must have been mutual.”

  We mused on about the sixties, that inscrutable confluence of historical forces that coincided with our own coming of age and held us still, now in our aging sixties. I quoted the line from “Sympathy for the Devil,” and I wondered who, or what, killed Sally, as if an answer were possible. Fate? Hate? Fear? Envy? Rage? Lust? Love? Luck? Hope? The lineup of four-letter suspects.

  “I hate to say it, but maybe Sally’s death was a blessing in disguise,” George offered. “My life path was reset and I ended up where I should be. Sometimes bad luck is protection against worse luck.” Then he paused. “But she had that spark; if she’d gone radical, I’d have gone with her.”

  I thought of the countless films we had watched, the constellated archetypal characters we had identified with and become. I recalled Coming Home, with Jane Fonda playing the character of Sally, a naive, culturally programmed, selfless nurse married to a nasty gung-ho marine. When Sally was emotionally transformed by a paraplegic Vietnam vet, blossoming into her loving, authentic true self, her incorrigible husband ran naked into the surf to his death.

  “That was us, George, life imitating art. Aspects of those characters, our various possibilities, lived in all three of us.”

  “Sally was spared the nightmare of getting what she wanted,” George said.

  Then we totted up the numerous, and numinous, life coincidences that connected us, which included and extended beyond Sally. What to make of our near clone-like family constellations; our idiosyncratic penchants for writing friends and family long, entertaining letters that extended into newsgathering proper; our back-door drifts into, and evolutions out of, journalism; our synchronistic reset-tings of career paths in the spring of 1989, another hinge year when we were both usefully fired from our stuck, mid-life jobs; our “lucky” dodgings of death, near-death or life-in-death?

  I segued into a story about my recent trip to Ireland, land of the uncanny, where I’d showed my brother the medieval crypts where the ancestral FitzGerald bodies lay buried. We’d visited the Lake Isle of Innisfree, the inspiration for the famous Yeats poem; the name “Innisfree” resonated for me, as the founders of De Grassi Point gave it that name. De Grassi and the Odyssey were the only two chapters in my life when I felt weightless, blissful moments of self-forgetting; only now in my anchored life with Katy was I dreaming my way into a third.

  When Mike and I boarded a boat to tour the lake, we were told that the captain liked to recite the poetry of Yeats over the loudspeaker. As we shoved off, he introduced himself as George. Naturally. I smiled to myself.

  Then I turned to my brother: “I bet you all the spuds in Ireland that he is now going to recite ‘Down by the Salley Gardens.’ ”

  On cue, George’s melodious Donegal accent fused with the sheen of the green water:

  Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;

  She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.

  She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;

  But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

  In afield by the river my love and I did stand,

  And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.

  She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;

  But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

  In the days after our dinner at the Ace, George explored the landmarks of his youth for the last time. Most were altered or rebuilt—189 Gordon Road, 30 Chestnut Park Road, 7 Inkerman Street, the Wodehouses’ De Grassi Point cottage, the Nice Furniture factory in Barrie, Yorkville Village, Rochdale College. Only Branksome Hall, last seen on June 11, 1968, on Sally’s graduation day, held something of the way it was.

  Four days passed. On Friday morning, a flurry of emails pinged my inbox. Did I see the obituary in the Globe and Mail? Jane Wodehouse had died on Sunday—the very day George chose to fly to Toronto. Over our Monday dinner, we were talking about her as if she were still alive.

  I punched in George’s cellphone number, needing to know how he was handling this latest wild stroke of synchronicity. The cell signal was weak, but I could make out his crackling voice: he was staying at a friend’s cottage near Gravenhurst and right now he was huddled under the stairs; only minutes earlier, an Oz-like tornado had toppled two massive trees, which had crashed neatly on either side of the cottage. They could have all been killed. If this were a dream, did the two trees, like twin towers, symbolize Sally and her mother? And why was George handling the news with far more equanimity than I was?

  Then I recalled a scene from De Grassi Point in August 1956, when I first met six-year-old
Sally in Sunday school. A hurricane had swept the point that summer, driving our family to huddle under the stairwell. A massive oak tree flattened a station wagon twenty feet from our rented cottage. We could have all been killed. On the Odyssey, Sally and I used to talk about how that storm had scared us half to death.

  To attend the Sunday funeral of Sally’s mother, George delayed his return to Vancouver by a day. Meeting at the Miles Funeral Home on Bayview Avenue, we occupied the last pew. As the presiding minister quoted William Blake—“Joy and woe are woven silken fine”—I felt the surge of a wish that the entire Odyssey were here, now, all four buses full, filling the rows, Nick, Tammy, Sean, Jane, Robin, everyone—all party to the communal mourning denied us in 1968.

  Family and friends stepped forward to eulogize Jane. Sally’s nephew, Scott, decked out in a white uniform as lieutenant-commander of the frigate HMCS York, spoke fondly of his grandmother, revealing that she carried a four-leaf clover in her purse for years. Scott’s mother, Diana, had died of cancer three years less a day earlier, at sixty-four; at the premature loss of her second child, Jane Wodehouse wept for two days.

  Tales were told of Jane’s marriage to George in August 1941 at age twenty-one; how they were quickly separated by years of war; her caring for the returned, decorated stranger and his invisible wounds; her fondness for bridge and gin, ungladly suffering fools, a “great tiny lady,” tough, resilient and smart. In St. Michael’s Hospital, sensing the end, she roused herself from bed and slipped into her high heels, determined to enjoy a last supper with family at her retirement home on Balmoral Avenue. Hours later, on Sunday morning, she died, even as George’s plane winged eastward. She’d outlived Sally by forty-five years.