As for me, I am well according to Murdoch; in fact, I am feeling somewhat exhilarated by all this, and as you know, being exhilarated is not my normal state. I don’t quite know why I feel as I do. I should be worried sick about what lies ahead. The stares and glares I get from some people should upset me, but they don’t any more. I am just fine, thank you. The child is beginning to kick at the door and Murdoch thinks I will probably have a boy. Apparently males are more boisterous in the womb. Well, of course, I don’t care one way or the other as long as the child is sound. So I am growing fat and lazy, Nora, and I don’t mind a bit. From the veranda I can hear the cries of the children in the schoolyard; a few weeks ago I missed all that, but now I am content enough to sit and wait for this to happen. Perhaps I’ll seek out other men and have more babies. A houseful of children, like the old woman who lived in a shoe. I could rent them out as help, or run a boardinghouse with all these strapping sons and handsome daughters to help me. I am fine for money at the moment, but thank you for asking.
Clara
Wednesday, October 19
Today the coalmen came over from Linden and poured six tons into the cellar. I suppose I’ll always think of F. on the day the coalmen arrive. Perhaps if he knew my state, he might have arranged for a lifetime supply to be delivered each October. Little enough, all things considered.
I had been worrying about how to keep the furnace going over the winter, but today the problem vanished. After supper, Mr. Bryden appeared at the back door with Joe Morrow.
“You’re not to worry about any of this, Clara. Joe is going to look after the furnace for you. He’ll come in every morning and evening and make sure it’s well stoked.”
Joe was shyly peering in at me from the doorway. They wouldn’t come into the kitchen. I offered to pay, of course, but the notion seemed to outrage them both.
“Not on your life,” said Mr. Bryden.
“I ain’t takin’ no money from you, Clara,” Joe said.
I told them I could manage for perhaps another month and then their offer would be gladly and thankfully accepted. Oh for a God to believe in, so I could have said, “God bless you both!”
Monday, October 31
A visit from Murdoch this afternoon. We talked about whether I should have the child here or in Linden Hospital. Because of my age and the fact that it’s my first, he wants me in the hospital. He warned me to pay attention to the weather too.
“The child could come any time after Christmas and you know what the weather can be like then, so make sure whoever brings you pays attention to the forecast. We don’t want you to have this baby out on some concession road in a snowbank.”
Having my baby in a snowbank! What a cheery old fellow he is!
Tonight the children came by for their treats and many of them said how much they missed me.
“Miss Bodnar is nice but . . .” Even if they weren’t telling the truth, it was good to hear.
135 East 33rd Street
New York
November 2, 1938
Dear Clara,
Sorry I haven’t answered your last letter before this, but we have had such a time over the past couple of weeks. Vivian Rhodes (I think you met her once at Evelyn’s — she plays Effie and is married to a professor at Columbia University) lost her brother in a car accident and Margery had to change the script to give Vivian time to get away for the funeral. The whole thing shook us all up because Vivian was awfully close to her brother. Not only that, but right now Effie is in the middle of things; she has fallen in love with an ex-convict who has this job at Henderson’s Hardware and now he’s been accused of stealing money. So Margery had to do some fancy writing to get Effie off the show for a few days. But that’s the radio business.
Speaking of radio, did you by any chance hear the “Mercury Theater” program on Monday night? What a sensation it has caused down here!!! It’s just been the talk of the town all week. Some people actually believed that Martians had landed somewhere out in New Jersey and apparently one man had a heart attack over this. People were out on the streets in a panic and I guess the CBS switchboard was jammed with calls. I have to say it really was a clever show, all put together like a regular newscast. The whole thing was written and produced by a young man. Only twenty-one! It just shows you how powerful radio can be.
It was good to hear you sounding so cheerful in your letter. You’ll be receiving a crib and some baby stuff one of these days. I had fun in Macy’s on Saturday buying these things, telling the clerks how I’m soon going to be an aunt. I think they got a kick out of me. Anyway, they promised delivery within two weeks, so I hope it arrives with nothing broken. Maybe you could let me know about that because they guaranteed safe delivery.
Love, Nora
P.S. Guess whose mug was in the Herald Trib on Saturday? None other than our dear old pal Lewis Mills!!! There he was with his new bride (number three). She is half his age, a graduate from some fancy women’s college. Brother!!! I’ll bet she’ll be tired of him and his tantrums in six weeks.
Monday, November 14
A mild rainy day and at the post office there was an enormous box awaiting me. I had to ask Joe to bring it home in his truck and this afternoon he assembled the crib for me. What would I do without this patient, unassuming man who lives with his sister and brother-in-law and never seems to have much of a life beyond working at tasks that others can’t or won’t do: spading gardens, liming outhouses, assembling cribs.
We decided to put it in one corner of my bedroom and so I sat watching Joe work: fitting the various pieces together in his unhurried manner, whistling under his breath, the large hands marvellously capable with a screwdriver. He must be over sixty now, though he seems to look much the same as he did thirty years ago when I was a girl, and he came by each fall to put on the storm windows. Father wouldn’t climb a ladder, and so Joe carried the big heavy windows aloft and fitted them into their frames. He still does this for me. In the watery light from the window I sat on the bed watching Joe work and thinking of my unborn child and the world awaiting him. Or her. On Saturday I read a long piece in the Globe and Mail about Nazi thugs destroying Jewish property in German cities. They seem to be on a rampage and the authorities are doing nothing about it. Last week a young Jew in Paris assassinated the secretary of the German Embassy and this has enraged the Nazis. Or given them an excuse to be enraged. What is it about the Jews that provokes such hatred among Germans? Nora says New York is run by Jews, and because they are clever and successful, others are jealous. We talked about this once, but I said that the Italians and the Irish also seem to run New York and they are not vilified in the same way. Strange thoughts for a grey wet afternoon here in the quiet of my home, far away from such things. I went over to the Brydens’ this evening and phoned Nora to thank her for the crib.
Monday, December 5
After Joe finished with the furnace this evening, I sat in the front room listening to a concert from New York. Dvorřák’s Serenade for Strings. It is a still, cold night and the signal was wonderfully clear. For an hour I sat transported. I could not read; I could scarcely think of anything except for the enormous fact that this music was travelling through all that dark air to reach me. When the music was over, I awakened as from a dream.
Chateau Elysee
Room 210
5930 Franklin Avenue
Hollywood, California
11 / 12 / 38
Dear Clara,
They burned down Atlanta, Georgia, last night and it was some bonfire. Yes, I saw it with my own eyes right on the back lot of MGM. Through the fog the sky was pale yellow and all these figures were running about. Fred and I watched the eerie scene together. I’m sure that all of Los Angeles thought that MGM itself was going up in flames, and there are plenty around who probably think that’s not such a bad idea. The Great Fire of London had nothing on this, believe me. What was it all in aid of? you might ask. The fire was no accident, of course. It was set so the cameras could r
oll for a crucial scene in the filming of Gong Mit de Vind, as it’s called by a fellow who recently arrived from Hitler’s Germany. Anyway, it was quite the sight.
I actually believe that I toil in a kind of madhouse: burning buildings, lunch in the commissary with cowboys and Indians and ballet dancers; for a while I was beginning to wonder whether the old gin bottle was finally playing havoc with my grey cells because I was starting to see “little people.” I thought, Here at last are the delirium tremens I’ve been dreading all these years. It turns out, however, that “the little people” are only Singer Midgets brought in to play the Munchkin people in The Wizard of Oz. And what odd, mischievous little gaffers they are! You’re apt to see them sleeping it off in a wastebasket or cupboard. They are awful boozers and they can’t seem to keep their hands to themselves. More than one script girl has complained of a pinched backside. So they are proving to be quite a headache for their keepers. I am grateful to learn however that the DT’s are still down the road a bit.
I saw the great L. B. Mayer the other day. I was summoned to his grandiose quarters and naturally approached in fear and trembling, convinced I had transgressed in some manner with my Nancy Brown series. But no, the great man thinks the scripts are fine and in fact went out of his way to congratulate me on writing that “reinforces the small-town values of American family life.” He said he could see no reason why the series shouldn’t be as popular as Andy Hardy, God bless the old coot. I might have told him, but didn’t of course, that when it comes to reinforcing “the small-town values of American family life,” I am the logical scribe. I have no family and have never lived in a small town. I also smoke and drink to excess and like to bed comely young women. Who better to write about American family life?
But enough about my sordid self! How are you? You must be getting very close to delivery time. I am, of course, crossing all fingers and toes that everything will go well.
Best always, Evelyn
P.S. I am enclosing a book that I think you might like. Maria Huxley told me about this woman and what a fine writer she is. I agree. Hope you enjoy it!
Christmas Day (9:45 p.m.)
A year ago today I was eating goose with greasy fingers and reading about lust and murder in California. How simple it all was then! Just don’t see him again and wait for time to salve the injured heart. But that was then and this is now, and now is very different. Now I move around my house with a cautious tread, especially on the stairs, holding firmly to the banister as I descend. The cumbersomeness of it all! How I long to be light again and walk unhampered with my legs together! Emily D. never went through this, damn it. And yet I am happy enough and this has been a good day. Marion came by with her gifts: a blouse and skirt for when I am again able to wear such things; and for the baby, a book of nursery rhymes and a silver-plated spoon. I gave her the new Taylor Caldwell novel. She cooked a small chicken and after dinner I played the piano, though with some difficulty, for I could barely reach the keys. I was, I suppose, a comical sight, but Marion sang the old carols with feeling in her clear alto voice. The Brydens dropped in to listen. How good these three people have been to me over the past few weeks!
An hour ago, with the help of Marion and Mrs. B., I waddled across to the Brydens’ and phoned Nora. Told her the baby is active and seems eager to get out and play a part in this tarnished old comedy. Nora was relieved to learn that Marion is going to stay with me now for the next few days. The four of us decided a few hours ago, because I think the baby is very close. I will feel better with Marion here, even though her fussing gets on my nerves. I must try to be more patient with her.
Tuesday, December 27 (8:35 p.m.)
I have a daughter, Elizabeth Ann. She was born at ten minutes to six this morning. Yesterday afternoon, I felt the first pains. I had been reading a book slowly, for it is one of those books that you don’t want to end. Evelyn Dowling sent it to me a couple of weeks ago and it is called Out of Africa. The author is a Danish woman who emigrated to Kenya twenty-five years ago and became the owner of a coffee plantation. I could not have chosen a more diverting book for a winter afternoon in Ontario. So I was among the lions and zebras with the vultures circling “in the pale burning air” when the contractions began. Marion went at once to the Brydens’ and phoned the doctor who said he would drive over after supper. This was a great relief to me, since I did not have to bother going to Linden to a hospital full of strangers. My child would be born in the same house as I was thirty-five years ago.
Murdoch arrived about nine o’clock. He is such a grumpy old blister, but he helped me through the next nine hours, and I shall not easily forget his gruff kindness and sure hands. At the final moments, the sight of the child emerging from between my legs was too much for poor Marion’s delicate sensibilities and she retreated to the spare room. Mrs. Bryden, childless herself but game, stayed to the end and was in tears. So perhaps was I when Murdoch placed the dark-haired little girl upon my breast.
And it is over and now I have a child and my life is changed forever. Elizabeth Ann Callan. It will be Liz, I think, rather than Beth, with Elizabeth Ann reserved for frowning moments. I have pulled up my knees to steady this page; the child is sleeping and I can hear Marion clumping around downstairs and Joe rattling the grates as he stokes the furnace. He is too shy to venture near this female world, and is happy enough to keep us warm on this clear winter night.
I want so badly to help you realize, Elizabeth Ann, how difficult and puzzling and full of wonder it all is: some day I will tell you how I learned to watch the shifting light of autumn days or smelled the earth through snow in March; how one winter morning God vanished from my life and how one summer evening I sat in a Ferris wheel, looking down at a man who had hurt me badly; I will tell you how I once travelled to Rome and saw all the soldiers in that city of dead poets; I will tell you how I met your father outside a movie house in Toronto, and how you came to be. Perhaps that is where I will begin. On a winter afternoon when we turn the lights on early, or perhaps a summer day of leaves and sky, I will begin by conjugating the elemental verb. I am. You are. It is.
AFTERWORD
My mother never did tell me any of those things. Perhaps on some “winter afternoon” or “summer day of leaves and sky” she wanted to, but something in her nature held her back. She was a difficult woman, secretive and self-possessed. It was her way, of course, but she had her reasons too. Having a child out of wedlock in an Ontario village in 1938 was more than enough to set her apart from the community. I grew up fatherless amid whispers surrounding my conception. By the time I was a schoolgirl, the people of Whitfield had grown used to the idea of Mother raising me by herself, and we were accepted in a polite and distant manner; a few perhaps even admired my mother’s grit. Yet at the end of schoolyard arguments with other girls, I was always left defenceless and ultimately defeated by their taunts. “Where’s your mother’s boyfriend?” and “Where’s your father?” Or the one question that seemed freighted with a kind of elemental truth that had perhaps been passed around family tables over the years to become a part of village folklore. “Where’s the man your mother knew down in Toronto?” In that childhood question, I heard something dark and unclean, and it inevitably reduced me to tears.
I asked my mother about all this, of course, and one day she told me that my father was dead, and I was to stop asking questions about him. I was nine, I think. Mother had just come in from her job in a law office in Linden, a town about twelve miles from our village. I could smell the smoke from the lawyers’ cigarettes on her clothes, and her fingers were still grimy from the carbon paper she used when typing their letters and contracts. It was the only work she could get after the school board dismissed her, and it took three years, and a labour shortage during the war, before she got the job. On that raw November day when she suddenly and remarkably told me that my father was dead, she was still wearing her coat as she stood by the stove opening a can of tomato soup, frowning as she stirred it into the pot.
“He was killed in a hunting accident before you were born, Elizabeth,” she said. “Now, please. No more questions about him.”
For the next few days I pictured a man in a hunting cap and checkered flannel shirt stalking deer through autumn woods. Then he was tragically killed before he could marry my mother! How had that happened, I wondered? And how would she have met him? Was this the man she knew down in Toronto? Yet the more I thought of it, the more I sensed that it was all wrong, a lie. How could my mother be attracted to a man who hunted animals? She was a lover of nature, of poetry and music; it all seemed unlikely, another of her stories to keep me quiet, contrived out of the fatigue of a long day. On her drive home along the township roads she had probably heard the gunshots of hunters in the woods. Years later I asked her why she had told me that outlandish story and she replied simply, “Oh, I don’t know, Liz. You were pestering me, I suppose, and I was tired.”
A child will look where she must, and growing up I turned from my mother with her Saturday armfuls of library books and her phonograph records of Rubinstein playing Chopin and Schubert to admire her sister, my Aunt Nora. How I wished she were my mother, for Aunt Nora was a glamorous presence in my life, a radio actress who lived in New York. Unlike my mother, Aunt Nora was blonde and pretty; she lived in the most sophisticated city in the world, and on the rare occasions when she would visit us for a few days in the summer, she always looked so smart in her New York clothes that I dreamt of running away with her. When she visited us, people stopped her on the street or came shyly to the door to seek an autograph. During those few summer days, I was no longer a child fathered by some man my mother knew down in Toronto, but a part of a richer, more important world. One Christmas when I was twelve, Aunt Nora sent us tickets, and we took the train to New York and stayed in her apartment on East Thirty-third Street. We went to the studio in Rockefeller Center, and Mother and I stood with other tourists behind enormous plate-glass windows, looking down at Aunt Nora and her fellow actors as they held their scripts and read into the microphones, while men in shirtsleeves and vests opened and closed doors or played recordings of automobiles in motion. From loudspeakers above our heads, we could hear the broadcast going across the country and even up to Canada where our neighbours were listening.
Clara Callan Page 40
