“One day, Nora,” I said, “I will tell you all about it.”
Whitfield, Ontario
Saturday, August 17, 1935
Dear Nora,
I wanted to write you before this but I have been busy with the house (dusty) and the yard (untidy), though Mr. Bryden thoughtfully cut the grass in my absence. I also overworked myself a bit and for a little while on Thursday felt feverish and faint. So I took to my bed and pretended that I was merely enduring “the vapours” of a spinster lady in her middle years. Now, however, I’m feeling hale again. You will find enclosed a money order for my train fare to New York and back. Again, I cashed in the sleeping-car ticket so that amount is included as well.
How can I begin to thank you for everything you’ve done over the past month? I’m certain that you and Evelyn Dowling literally saved me from ruin. I can’t imagine what would have become of me without your help. So, Nora, I am in your debt now and forever.
Everyone in the village has plucked me by the sleeve at the post office or butcher shop to ask about my trip to New York City. It has made me, at least temporarily, quite the exotic traveller. Everyone is agog (don’t get to use that word very often) when I tell them that you are now on the radio in New York. My how that impresses them! Cora Macfarlane: “I always thought Nora would make something of herself. I said that to people when she used to do those nice recitations at the Christmas concerts. And sing? Why she had a voice like a bird!” So there you are, a heroine in your hometown. Everyone wants to know when they can hear your program and I said I thought that it might be heard some time this fall through one of the Toronto stations. Was I right about that?
My trip, of course, made today’s Herald under the rubric of Whitfield Notes. Here it is in all its glory!
Miss Clara Callan has returned after spending the summer weeks visiting her sister Nora in New York City. Miss Nora Callan is now appearing in the radio show “The Home on Chestnut Street.”
Well, they got some of it right anyway. In the post office yesterday, the odious Ida Atkins pestered me to write something for the church bulletin. “My impressions of New York City.” I wonder what she would think if I were to describe a certain hot and thundery Friday night in Harlem. I could, of course, mention that Harlem is named after a city in Holland (they enjoy such details), but I didn’t see any Dutchmen that night, did you?
As you can tell, I’m feeling quite gay and buoyant. What happened to me, Nora, was such a burden, and now that it’s been lifted, I feel renewed and eager to get on with things: to get back to school, to ordinary routines, to life however pedestrian and mundane it might be. I know that in a few weeks (or a few days) I will sink, like everyone else, into the petty griping that accompanies daily life wherever it is lived. But right now I take delight in waking, in the opening petals of a flower, in playing my piano; everything is charged with a special music. With what I might call “The Perfectly Ordinary Day.” I had hoped to write a poem about how it takes deliverance from disaster to make us feel grateful for that perfectly ordinary day. But alas, I can’t seem to find the words. Well never mind — if I can’t write poetry, at least perhaps I can try to think and feel like a poet.
I must make some supper now and then put my feet up. The summer is drawing to a close. The Exhibition opens a week from today and I have agreed to go with the ladies on the twenty-ninth for an outing. But I do enjoy the Ex. Remember when Father would take us for the day. I began to look forward to it as soon as school was out. About the middle of August has always been the happiest time in the calendar for me. Anyway, we are going down on the twenty-ninth for the day.
I shall drop E.D. a note tomorrow and thank her for everything she did. I found her rather remarkable, though her destructive habits were a little unnerving to a puritan bumpkin like me. From the bottom of my heart, Nora, thank you again for everything.
Clara
Whitfield, Ontario
Sunday, August 18, 1935
Dear Evelyn,
I should have written before this, but I have spent the last week trying “to put my house in order.” I do, however, want to thank you for everything. I really don’t know what I would have done without you and Nora. I live in a village of six hundred souls and of course everyone knows your business. I simply could not have survived here and this is my home; this is where I live and I can’t see myself anywhere else. So, I am extremely grateful to you for your help and generosity.
I suppose I may have struck you as a bit standoffish, but you can put that down partly at least to the unusual circumstances surrounding my visit. I am not as timid as I may have appeared, though I am the older, quieter, more reserved one in the family. Still you musn’t necessarily think of me as a dry spinster schoolteacher. Oh, I would like to live at least in part like some of the people I read about, perhaps like Madame Bovary or poor Anna Karenina. But I have no courage for those kinds of adventures and, more importantly, little opportunity, despite what happened to me.
I think Nora is very fortunate to have you as a friend. Thank you too for the meals and the flowers and the books. I particularly enjoyed Louise Bogan’s poetry. How I wish I could write like her! But I seem only to have the impulses and sensibility of a poet; I merely lack that other thing — what is it called? Oh yes. Talent!
Thank you again, Evelyn, for everything and do take of yourself.
Sincerely, Clara Callan
P.S. Are you absolutely sure that I can’t send you some money? It must have cost a good deal, and I feel bad about your paying for it all.
Sunday, August 25
I was reading on this warm, still afternoon when a cicada began to shriek. It was not the insect’s usual cry from the trees, but something else, urgent and piercing. The sound of a creature imperilled. When I went around to the side of the house, I saw it in the sparrow’s mouth. The bird flew off at once, carrying aloft the insect’s rasping death cry. For a moment, I heard it in the big maple tree in front of the Brydens’ and then it was all drowsy silence once more. What a monster the sparrow must seem to the insect! I wonder what Emily Dickinson would have made of this. She would have written a poem about it. Sitting at her little bedroom desk, dipping her pen into the inkwell and imagining what it would be like to be a cicada in a sparrow’s bill.
Monday, August 26
I met Marion outside the post office today. She is just back from the cottage and was full of questions, a little too excited to wait for answers.
“Did you see any radio shows in New York, Clara?”
“Well, yes. As a matter of fact — ”
“Rudy Vallee is at the Exhibition. Wouldn’t it be something to get in to see him?”
“Well, I don’t know — ”
“I can hardly wait for Thursday.”
Are the ladies all going to hear Rudy Vallee? It seems improbable.
Friday, August 30 (1:30 a.m.)
A remarkable thing happened only a few hours ago. I saw the tramp. I feel like Hamlet when his father’s ghost revealed the truth about his death. What did the prince say?
O villain, villain, smiling damned villain!
My tables — meet it is I set it down
That one may smile and smile and be a villain.
And I saw him smiling tonight at the Exhibition grounds. On the midway. He was working at the Ferris wheel, hopping about with an oil can in that nimble-gaited way of his, agile and quick as a monkey among the gears and levers of the machinery, chattering to the man operating the engine. I stood transfixed, my view blocked now and then by passersby, but there he was again, the sharp and flinty profile in flat cap and overalls. It was him all right and I could scarcely breathe for a moment. This was eight o’clock or nine o’clock, I don’t know. I was too beside myself at the sight of him yapping away at the other man. Telling some kind of story or joke. Marion wanted to see Rudy Vallee. I told her the lineup was a mile long and we’d never get in, but I felt sorry for her too. We had come down to the midway at my behest. Marion wa
s prepared to humour me if I would go along with her afterwards to hear the crooner. The others were still in the buildings, inspecting the washing machines and vacuum cleaners. But I have always loved the midway. Even as a child, Father would indulge me, though he hated the whole business. Its seedy charms were lost on him and lost on Marion too. But she had been stalwart about it and so we had walked under the lights by the tents with the painted dwarfs, and the Giant Man-Killing Octopus, the chimpanzees in checkered suits, and the fellow who spoke for Eno, the Turtle Boy: “He walks, he talks, he crawls on his belly like a reptile.” I was happy there in my late-summer happiness, there among those sordid wonders.
And Marion, game to the end, had hung onto me through all this, her bad foot doubtless tired and throbbing. Now she wanted to hear her singer, but I was steadfast too, rooted to the ground by the Ferris wheel, watching the tramp leap across the guy ropes and poke at the engine with his oiling can.
The great wheel jolted to a halt, the seats rocking back and forth, and I looked up at the August sky darkening now, astonished anew that he was there. My tramp, my nightmare, and only yards away. The other man was lighting his pipe and then he eased the lever forward, and the wheel again began to move. Then stopped, and two girls got out, their seat taken by a young man and his sweetheart. The wheel again churned forward and I heard the tramp say something to the engine man, but his words were lost in the grinding noise of the machinery. Marion was tugging at my arm like a cranky child, but I said to her, “Let’s take a ride on the Ferris wheel.” I might just as well have suggested we take off our clothes and jump into Lake Ontario.
“Clara, I’d be frightened to death in that thing.”
I told her I was tired and wanted to sit down for a while, hoping thereby to make her feel stronger and whole; I was the flagging one, not she.
“We can’t, Clara. We’ll be late for his second show.”
But I was having none of it. I had seen the tramp and my heart was racing. “Very well, I’ll go by myself.”
“Clara, what’s got into you anyway?”
“I want to ride on the big wheel.”
And so I joined the lineup and there was nothing Marion could do but accompany me. I knew she was too timid to stand by herself in the midway. So we were settled finally by a rough-looking young man into a swaying seat. He dropped the safety bar across the front, and we were carried aloft with Marion’s fingers digging into my arm and her cries of “Oh! Oh!” accompanying us skyward. She was frightened, of course, but confounded too. Imagine that such things should come to pass! I guessed that that was what was going through her mind. And I too was astounded to find myself there wheeling around in the sky. At the summit we plunged, as we had to do, and Marion screamed.
Then we rose again, passing the tramp who was wiping his hands on a piece of waste and staring out at the crowd. Looking down at him as we climbed, I wondered what I could do about it. What could be done about the tramp? I concluded that nothing could be done. There he was, but the time for doing anything had long passed. Nothing could now connect that man with what had happened to me three months ago by the railway tracks near Whitfield, Ontario. It was my fault entirely because I chose not to tell anyone, and we must live by our choices. The tramp would carry on with his various labours, laughing and joking with his wide monkey mouth. Not even divine retribution would strike his black heart.
Those were my thoughts as the rough-looking fellow lifted the bar and helped us onto the platform. Marion was delighted with her adventure.
“That was something, wasn’t it, Clara? I never thought I’d see the day when you’d get me on that thing.”
As we walked away, I looked back once more at the tramp who was smoking a cigarette and coiling a length of rope, chattering again at the engine man. The lineup for the second Rudy Vallee show was impossible; it snaked across the fairgrounds with no end in sight, mostly young people. Marion and I had ten or fifteen years on them and I felt foolish. They had set up loudspeakers so we could hear the great man singing about love, forever and ever. Marion was stoic about not seeing him and I think that her foot was sore. We joined the others at the Food Building and drove on home arriving just an hour ago.
Sunday, September 1
I don’t know why I did what I did yesterday. What was I hoping to accomplish? Still I did it. I took the train down to Toronto and returned to the Exhibition. It is Labour Day weekend and so it was very busy. By late morning the buildings and fairgrounds were jammed. But no sign of the tramp. I walked by the Ferris wheel and the pipe-smoking man was at his levers, but he had another fellow helping him. Yet it was early and I wondered if the tramp came to work late in the day. So I left and spent some time in the Automotive Building, admiring the new motor cars and listening to men ask questions about them. Everyone stood abashed and respectful before these gleaming machines, and the salesmen in their blazers had set aside their newspapers to answer the hesitant questions about torque and horsepower. They knew that none of the men asking could afford a new Packard or Studebaker, but they were good-natured fellows and fielded all questions.
In the early afternoon I returned to the Ferris wheel, filled now with screaming youngsters circling in the grey close air. Still no tramp, but I was determined to wait. Around two o’clock the pipe-smoking man was replaced by another and made his way through the crowd. I hurried after him along a path behind the sideshow tents. I could hear the shuffling feet and the murmuring voices from the other side of the canvas as people moved past the cages of snakes and monkeys. I called out, “Excuse me,” and he turned a surly face my way. I was sympathetic to his confused and angry look which seemed to say, who are you and what is it now? He was a man used to trouble but tired of it all the same. Yet I could see his surprise at the respectable-looking woman standing behind the monkey tent. I was surely no carnival tart. He took the pipe from his mouth, the baffled, unfriendly face composed into a stare.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “I’m looking for a man who might be working at the Ferris wheel and I noticed you there a moment ago. I am a nurse and the man’s sister is a patient at the hospital where I work. The woman is gravely ill. She has no family except her brother and she has expressed a desire to see him. He’s in his thirties, dark-haired, with a wide mouth. A friendly man, according to the woman, and filled with stories. She told me he was going to look for work at the Ferris wheel down here. That’s what she told me. It’s really very important that he come to the hospital to see her before it’s too late. Can you help me?”
This outlandish story had presented itself as I was calling to the man. I don’t know where it came from. Who knows where such tales abide and why they make their appearance on demand? He continued to stare at me.
“I don’t know anybody like that,” he began, “unless you mean the fellow who worked with me yesterday. Charlie! An awful gabber. I couldn’t shut him up. Is that who you mean?”
“Yes,” I said, “Charlie. That’s his name. Can you tell me where he lives? He moves around a lot according to his sister. Will he be back to work today?”
The man sucked on his pipe.
“No, no, no. He just came by yesterday morning and asked if there was any work. Turned out my helper was sick so I took this man for the day. But he wasn’t much good. I paid him off last night. He told me he knew all about four-stroke engines. Why, that man didn’t know any more about four-stroke engines than probably you do. I had to let him go. About all he could do was use an oil can. A comical fellow. Liked to talk.”
The pipe-smoking man didn’t know anything more about Charlie.
“Not even his last name?”
“Nope. He just came by and I took him because I needed someone. But like I said, he wasn’t much good.”
So there was nothing more to be done, and I may have felt some relief in that. On the train home I thought of how foolish I had been to go back there and hope that I could find something useful. And what if I had? What could I have done? T
hen I started thinking that maybe it wasn’t the tramp at all; maybe my eyes had played tricks on me in the summer darkness of Friday night. All the way home I doubted whether I had really seen the tramp, and it made me feel better about not being able to do anything. Yet now I really do believe it was him.
135 East 33rd Street
New York
August 24, 1935
Dear Clara,
Thanks for your letter. For goodness’ sake, take it easy on yourself. You shouldn’t be cleaning a house after what you went through. Why don’t you hire some girl in the village to help you with that kind of thing? Anyway, thanks for the money for the train ticket, but it really wasn’t necessary. For the life of me, I can’t understand what you’ve got against sleeping on a train.
I am glad to hear, however, that you are feeling “gay and buoyant” because I’d heard that women often become depressed after those operations. So I hope the blues don’t hit you. I suppose you’re just glad that it’s all over, and I can certainly understand that. You’ve always kept everything to yourself, that’s your nature of course and I can appreciate that. But I just hope that you don’t keep everything bottled up forever. Sometimes you have to talk about what happened or it will just kind of fester inside you. What I’m thinking about here is the man. I hope you are over him and don’t become involved again. After what you went through, the heel doesn’t deserve another chance, so I hope you will take that advice in the spirit in which it is offered.
Clara Callan Page 10
