Clara Callan

by Richard B. Wright

  — Blaise Pascal, 1623–1662

  “There you have it, Dowling,” she said. “Nearly four hundred years separate the observations of two men who looked at much the same sky. Binding the scattered leaves of all the universe into one volume. There you have the medieval mind, Dowling. But Pascal sees only a vast loneliness. And there you have the difference between the medieval and the modern mind.”

  How that stuck with me. That stuff about the scattered leaves bound by love and then the vast loneliness that followed. I remember looking up those old guys, Dante and Pascal, in the library and memorizing those quotations. It started me thinking about God and all the rest of it. I am not quite as sure as you seem to be. I’m sitting on the fence and giving Him the benefit of the doubt.

  You ask what consoles me. A bottle of Gordon’s gin helps at times, though it’s not really to be recommended in the long run. Good books, of course, and music and all the rest of that art stuff.

  There’s a poem by Wallace Stevens called “Sunday Morning.” I was thinking of it when I read your letter. The woman in his poem sounds a bit like you. I think it’s in a book called Harmonium, but I can’t find my copy. I may have loaned it to someone. I’ll look for one in the bookstores on Fourth Avenue and if I find a copy, I’ll send it along.

  Love, Evelyn

  Whitfield, Ontario

  Sunday, September 22, 1935

  Dear Nora,

  Yesterday I received your dramatic account of how you thwarted the advances of Mr. Cunningham. Clearly he is smitten. I noticed his adoring gaze on the day I visited the studio. Well, I suppose you are lucky that he came to his senses.

  You have become quite the celebrity up here. People have been stopping me on the street to say, “Was it really Nora I heard the other day on that radio show? What a lovely program and she sounds so real.” Or this, “And to think that the little girl with the blonde curls I used to see going off to school is now on the radio in New York,” etc., etc.

  I want you to know, Nora, that I have to endure a fair amount of this guff, and I am holding you personally responsible for my actions on that day when I lose all patience and throttle a fellow citizen who is wondering whether Uncle Jim’s spell is serious, or when Effie is going to ruin her life by running away with the business college teacher.

  A terrible storm this past week. I have never seen such wind and rain and it might not be worth mentioning were it not for a casualty: that enormous oak tree near the Presbyterian church. You surely remember how people would come to the village to take snapshots of it. Mr. Grace told me it was at least two hundred years old. Well, it was split apart last Saturday night by wind and now men are busy with axes and saws cutting away at the great heart. A grim sight and I felt a little sick as I watched yesterday afternoon. I know the wood will go to the poor, but I will miss that old tree.

  In your letter you asked about my love life. I have no love life, Nora. Please do not imagine that I have been carrying on some torrid affair with a travelling salesman. It has not been that way at all. Perhaps it would have been better if it had. You needn’t worry that I will turn up again on your doorstep. That chapter in my life is mercifully closed. Say hello to Evelyn for me.

  Clara

  Tuesday, September 24 (7:40 a.m.)

  Awakened at two o’clock this morning and imagined a cycle of poems about the rape and its aftermath: how it came about on that spring afternoon; how I took a taxi ride on a hot summer night in New York City; how I saw Charlie again at the Exhibition. So I scribbled for two hours in the night, my fingers cramping. Then I fell into bed tired and deliriously happy. Three hours later, as I read my words, I am repelled, sickened at how they fail to do what I wanted them to do.

  Whitfield, Ontario

  Sunday, October 6, 1935

  Dear Evelyn,

  Thank you for sending me Wallace Stevens’s book. I’ve read “Sunday Morning” at least a dozen times. It is a remarkable poem. “Divinity must live within herself.” He follows that with a colon and then lists several emotional states that are all too familiar to me. “Gusty emotions on wet roads on autumn nights.” “Gusty” is perfect, a surge of feeling akin to happiness. In fact, I have walked on wet roads on autumn nights and felt just like that. But so, of course, have millions of others down through time. It is humbling to recognize that one’s private and peculiar moments are only part of a general pattern shared by countless others.

  I see many echoes of Keats in Stevens’s poem. It was good of you to send me this book, Evelyn. Thank you again.

  Clara

  135 East 33rd Street

  New York

  October 6, 1935

  Dear Clara,

  What a day! Just back from Evelyn’s where I spent the afternoon trying to get her to eat something. She’s in bed with a bad cold and just so croaky and crabby. A regular terror. You’ve never seen her like this, but she’s a sight to behold! Sitting there in bed with her writing board and her gin and cigarettes. When I went over there about noon, I walked right into the middle of a fight between her and Eunice (her maid). Eunice had been trying to get her to eat something, but Evelyn was just being difficult. She had thrown a kind of tantrum (there was toast and egg on the floor) and Eunice had put on her coat and was leaving.

  “That’s it, Miss Callan. I’m not working for that woman any more. I been in the family thirty-three years, but I’m not putting up with her any more.”

  After she left I tried to reason with Evelyn, but she just waved me off. She didn’t seem in the least concerned.

  “Oh, don’t worry about Eunice. She’ll be back. She’s done this before. She knows what side her bread’s buttered on.”

  And she was right. Eunice came back just before I left. She was pretty sore, but she’ll stay. Apparently this warfare has been going on for years.

  Evelyn won’t admit it, of course, but it’s not just the cold that’s making her so grouchy these days. It’s her love life. I don’t know if you got the signals when you were down here, but Evelyn likes women, not men. That’s just her way and I don’t hold it against her. She tried it out on me one weekend at her mother’s place in Connecticut, but I soon set her right about that. Anyway, last month she took up with this young woman, June. Don’t ask me where she met her, but she’s certainly crazy about her. You should see the presents! This June is a dancer in a Broadway show. She’s from Texas (you should hear her!!!) and nearly six feet tall. Only twenty years old, but a tough number, believe you me. She has Evelyn wrapped around her little finger (which isn’t so little).

  June hasn’t been around to see Evelyn while she’s been sick, and I think this is what has really upset our friend although she won’t admit it. She keeps offering excuses like, “Oh, Junie can’t afford to catch my cold. She could lose her place in the line.”

  But I think Evy is just sick with disappointment that this girl hasn’t even taken the trouble to phone. It’s pitiful to see an intelligent woman like Evelyn so wrapped up in this kid.

  What’s the old saying about it never rains, but pours. Just as I had Evelyn calmed down and eating something, our producer, Howard Friessen, phoned to say that Graydon Lott has disappeared. He’s our Uncle Jim on the show. According to his wife, he went for a walk after breakfast and hasn’t returned. She thinks he’s fallen off the wagon and is now on a bender that could last for days. Graydon once told me he’s been dry for two years. Told me he quit drinking when they did away with Prohibition. He said drinking was more fun then. But now we can’t find him and so Howard has all kinds of people out looking for him in the bars along Forty-second Street. But just in case they can’t find him, Howard asked Evelyn to rewrite the scripts for the next few days. Oh boy! Our Evy wasn’t exactly too thrilled about that. I was glad to get away, believe me. I’m nearly dead on my feet, so I’m going to have a bite and go off to bed. It’s just been one of those days, Clara. I’m sure things are a little quieter up your way.

  Love, Nora

  Whitfield
, Ontario

  October 15, 1935

  Dear Nora,

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but I found your last letter quite funny, if only because it points out the gap between what really goes on behind the scenes and what people hear on the air. What magicians you people are! I wonder what your listeners would say if they had even an inkling of the shenanigans that go on behind the scenes. In any case, I hope poor Evelyn has recovered and you have found the unfortunate Mr. Lott. I like to think that he sought refuge in the bottle for those terrible platitudes that Evelyn forces him to utter. I remember at least two from last summer when I watched one of your programs. “As long as we all pull together, we’ll get out of this.” And something about “the Lord hating a quitter.” Uttering such statements every day might even drive me to drink and it might go a long way towards explaining why our friend Evelyn likes the bottle so much. Anyway, I hope things have righted themselves and are back to what passes for normal in your life.

  I don’t know if the New York papers bothered to mention it, but we had an election up here yesterday and the Bennett Conservatives were soundly beaten by Mackenzie King’s Liberals. I don’t know if they can do anything about getting men back to work, but most people seem to think that they can’t do worse than the Tories. I believe it has been that kind of response; one born more of desperation than genuine commitment. Well, winter is just up ahead and I have been getting ready. The coal was delivered last week and I am preparing to do battle. This year, however, I feel more confident about handling that furnace. I am well, by the way. Nothing seems to have been damaged and I am back to “normal routines.” And that is very reassuring. Take care of yourself.

  Clara

  Sunday, October 27

  Last night I dreamt of Charlie, the tramp. Not Charlie, the funny, little celluloid tramp in his oversized shoes and derby hat, but my Charlie in his greasy overalls and suit coat. We were riding in the Ferris wheel and he was embracing me, singing over and over his infernal little love song. “I want to ____ you so bad, Missus.”

  As the wheel turned downward, I saw Marion looking at us and so was the pipe-smoking man, though it could also have been Father. I am not sure. Father used to smoke a pipe. I awakened then and lay in darkness thinking about Charlie. I imagined him born in the same year as Marion and I: 1903. On a farm somewhere north and east of here where the land is hilly and the soil poor. I saw ten or twelve children in an unpainted farmhouse up a lane.

  Charlie’s father was a lazy man but likeable enough when sober. On Saturday nights, however, he likes to drink, and then he turns quarrelsome and vindictive at the kitchen table, prophesying ruin on all those who have rebuked him over a lifetime of grievance and error. The mother and the children keep their distance. Later, when the boys get older, there will be ugly fights, with some taking the father’s side and some against: there will be swollen jaws and blackened eyes; someone’s arm will be broken; another’s fist will go through a window right up to the forearm, shredding nerves along the way, leaving a withered hand. A chaotic household whose weather is nearly always turbulent and unpredictable. How could it be otherwise among so many vicious hearts? They are a shiftless lot. Not worth a nickel. A bunch of damn fools. Those are the verdicts of neighbours, but uttered only among themselves. Who wants his barn burned down, his well poisoned? Who is anxious to find his best cow at the bottom of a pond? Minor villains to be sure, but you had to be careful what you said around them. They could be comical and lively at a dance, but the best advice was always to leave early. I imagined Charlie as one of the youngest; he had to make his way around that kitchen table. Perhaps that is where it started, that jokey, wheedling manner. When two of his brothers go off to the war, he wishes he too could go on the adventure. He follows the wagon down the lane, the old man holding the reins, the two brothers sprawled in the back with their cardboard suitcases. They promise to bring back a German for him as a pet.

  “We’ll keep him in the woodshed and feed him turnips. Maybe hitch him to the plough.”

  Charlie stands for a long time and watches the wagon disappear in the dust of the concession road. When he starts back for the house, he skips and hops about, a restless grasshopper of a boy with long legs built for dancing and a slyness beyond his years.

  In a few months one of the brothers returns. The army doesn’t want him. Something about an officer’s wristwatch. No one knows exactly what happened and no one wants to. The other disappears off the face of the earth. What happened to him? No one knows. One afternoon two men come to the farm in a big military car and ask questions, but nobody knows the answers.

  The next year Charlie leaves the little country schoolhouse for the last time, fed up with sitting and school books. He doesn’t like farming. He likes town life. Hanging around the feed store where he makes men laugh with the faces he pulls and the tricks he can do. He can do a backward somersault, for one thing. And step-dance! Those feet just fly. But he can’t stay with a job. He is restless and easily bored. When the Depression comes along, it doesn’t bother Charlie; in fact, the tramp’s life suits him: riding the freight trains, a morning’s work here and there, a sandwich at the back door (housewives like his deference and exaggerated courtesy). Always on the move is my Charlie; a friendly, unreliable, thoroughly vicious man, and lying in my bed early this morning, I was thankful that his worthless seed was scraped from my womb three months ago.

  Friday, November 1

  Last evening I made a pan of fudge and had plenty of apples on hand for the children who came to the door, thirty-two in all. Stayed awake until well past midnight, but nothing untoward on my property. Heard what sounded like an automobile backfiring in the night and learned this morning that Norbert Johnson had discharged a shotgun at some boys.

  Sunday, November 3

  Where does Charlie meet the boy and why would he choose such a pitiful companion? But a man like Charlie needs someone to boss around and kick. And one day he sees him on the side of a township road sitting in the stiff, dry grass.

  “Restin’ your dogs, are you? What’s your name, son? Mine’s Charlie. Want to tag along with Uncle Charlie? Travel first class or stay at home. That’s what I say. What do you say, boy?”

  Donald, looking up through his one-eyed world at this quick-footed whistling man who can’t bear stillness or silence. Always yapping or firing stones at crows on fence posts or barking dogs. A kind of ugly affection emerges between this pair, and I imagine sex acts brutal and swift. In abandoned barns and under bridges in the shadowy light of late afternoon. Panting and horrible, the dissolute life of byway and lane.

  And Charlie is forever scolding the boy who seldom gets anything right. Watching from atop the boxcar as Donald struggles to grasp the ladder.

  “You’ll lose a foot some day, you stupid bugger.”

  135 East 33rd Street

  New York

  November 17, 1935

  Dear Clara,

  I’m sorry I haven’t written for a while, but time just seems to whirl by and another week is gone. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been down here nearly a year now. Where does the time go? We’re all pretty thrilled with the latest Hooper ratings which have us third among the most-listened-to daytime serials. Only “Vic and Sade” and “Ma Perkins” were more popular last month. I’m getting bushelfuls of mail.

  Everything at the studio is back on an even keel, thank goodness. Evelyn and her Texas playmate are all lovey-dovey again and Graydon is back on the wagon. Like you, my love life at the moment is non-existent. Les and I have decided to be just friends and that means no dating. There are certain men that you just can’t go to the movies or have a drink with, because sooner or later you’ll get involved. Do you know what I mean? Sooner or later, you’ll feel this attraction and then, before you know it, you’re in over your head. And it’s just not professional to start that kind of thing with a guy who works with you and is married to boot. I have to hand it to Les. He was very apologetic about his performance tha
t night outside my apartment, and he’s decided to pay more attention to his wife and kids. We’re both glad nothing happened, though I can’t say I wasn’t tempted.

  So my only love life at the moment will be on “Chestnut Street.” Evy has decided to give Alice a beau, so next month listeners are going to meet Cal Harper, a handsome young doctor who is just starting up a practice in Meadowvale. What happens is that Effie has an attack of appendicitis and after the operation she wakes up to see this terrific-looking guy who’s been caring for her. Of course, Effie falls instantly for him. The business teacher is long gone in case you’re wondering and you probably aren’t. But it looks as if Dr. Cal is more interested in Alice. So you can imagine the conversations that will take place around the kitchen table in the Dale household. I don’t know if I’ll get to marry the guy, Evy isn’t saying. Anyway, I think it’s an interesting wrinkle in our little story of American life and it should help to keep the listeners tuned in and our sponsor happy. The Sunrise people say that sales have increased over forty percent in the last three months.

  How about you? Is everything the same up there? Would you consider coming down here for Christmas? Apparently the Amazon will have a week off and is going back to Texas. Evelyn is after me to go to her mother’s. But I just don’t feel comfortable there. Yet I don’t like the idea of being alone here either. What about coming down for a few days? I would really love to have you, so think about it, okay?

  Love, Nora

  Sunday, November 24

  Went with the Brydens yesterday to the Royal Winter Fair hoping that I might see Charlie cleaning out a cattle stall or feeding someone’s prize hens. The foolishness of that idea was soon evident: the stern-looking farmers at the fair would never entrust their livestock to the likes of my Charlie.