Sara sat forward. “Actually, we’ve been talking a lot about our connection in all of this. I mean, of course the phone is tapped. But you should feel there’s a way to contact us if you need help. Maybe a code word. Maybe ‘maple leaf’ or ‘beaver.’”
“Or ‘help,’” laughed Susan. “We’ll be the safe ones.”
They spent the evening counting up immigration credits—Susan spoke French and had relatives in Canada; he had more years in university.
“Kind of classist, isn’t it?” asked Guy.
“Every country has its problems,” said Hank.
“I have five more points than you,” said Susan.
“Doesn’t count,” said Sara. “A wife goes through on her husband’s points.”
Irritated, Susan thought about this new women’s lib business, and resolved to do some reading. She wondered, dopily, what Guy would do if she became a raving feminist.
Hank picked up the booklet and ripped off the cover. “Don’t let them see it when they search you at the border. Stick it inside one of your chemistry texts or somewhere.”
The dope wore off quickly. Guy shaved his beard. Disguises were prepared in rote timelessness. Susan ironed her shirtwaist dress and set her hair. Once these chores were done, the evening lost shape. They crawled into the sleeping bags and read Hank’s and Sara’s new Newsweek before falling asleep.
The next morning, Susan jiggled out of the sleeping bag and walked over to the picture window. Grey. The fog outside the third floor window overlooking Pauline Street was as colorless as the apartment walls. Susan reheated the coffee and found some more bearclaw pastries. Were bearclaws Californian? Was she more Californian or American? Could she be a Canadian? Canada was just over the bridge. Just across the border. Only a few miles away. Canada, land of the free. No reason to believe in Canada. (“What an idealist,” her brother Bill had said. “What are the choices?” Susan had said.) So now it was to be Canada. A country big enough to believe in. Yes, she did believe they would be admitted.
“Breakfast, sir?” she said, setting a tray on the floor, next to where he lay, still cosy under the down.
“Feels more like Extreme Unction,” he said.
“Good code word.”
They laughed, as easily as if they were back in Berkeley.
Detroit was the classic exit. She recalled headlines from the ’66 riots. She remembered that unmailed thank you note to Aunt Martha and Uncle Cardiologist who sent them an American flag for their wedding from Grosse Pointe. (Mother insisted it wasn’t a joke.) The ride up Michigan Avenue was horrific. Every white man looked like he was about to duck into a telephone booth and emerge in a Klan hood. The blacks frightened her like no one in Oakland had scared her for years. Her racism? Their hostility? They drove past Bertram’s department store where Aunt Martha had bought that pinafore when Susan was eight. (Susan’s mother had inhaled sharply when she saw the pink and grey box. Bertram’s was a very fine store. Aunt Martha always sent things from very fine stores. Mother might have sent more pink and grey boxes herself if she hadn’t married a feckless sailor and moved to California.) Grey, humid Detroit heat. Petulant showers and then sudden sun evaporating everything. What if they didn’t get in? Just get out of Detroit. Love it or leave it. Just get out.
“Shit, Susan, this is the tunnel. I told you we wanted the bridge. Everyone says the bridge is an easier crossing.”
“No, they say it’s quicker, but the guards at the tunnel are easier.”
“Hell, Susan, don’t you remember what Hank said about the deserter from Georgia? Shit, Susan.”
Her voice was blocked with tears.
“Just tell me the way to the bridge,” he barked. “I’m the one who’s driving the van. I’m the one who’s resisting the damn draft.”
“Oh, I see,” she turned to him, glared at him, raising her voice. “And I suppose I’m just along for the ride?”
He rubbed the back of his hand along her cheek and kept his eyes on the traffic ahead. “I’m sorry, hon. It’s our decision. Let’s not get at each other. It’ll be over in an hour. We’ll be in Canada. Maple leaf or beaver,” he tried to laugh. Then he lowered his voice to soothing. “We’ll be OK in Canada.”
She didn’t say, “if we get in.” She said, “It looks as if the Ambassador Bridge is just about ten blocks from here.”
When they passed the U.S. border guards, she wanted to wave or give them the finger, but their escape was too tenuous. A small sign in the middle of the bridge said, “Welcome to Canada. Bienvenue au Canada.” Before she noticed it, they had pulled up to the Canadian border guard.
“Good afternoon,” he said. “What is the purpose of your visit?”
Guy’s face grew pale. She looked for reassurance in his familiar features and all she could see was his pale.
“My wife and I would like to apply for landed immigrancy.”
(“My wife and I,” she thought. They had married for this charade. “Immigrancy.” Ellis Island. Her mother and Rosa Kaburi. New World. But no one would muck up their name here. Not a High Anglo name like Thompson. She knew what she was doing when she took that name.)
“Eh, what was that? Could you speak up, please?”
Those were the right words. She knew they were the right words. What kind of game was this fellow running?
“OK” the guard said finally. “Go to the green building over there after you’ve filled out these forms.”
“Out,” Canadian “out.” He hadn’t smiled.
“My wife and I would like to immigrate to Canada.”
“Did you bring your gear with you?” Another foreign official. Never before had she thought of Canadians as so foreign.
“Gear?” Guy asked.
“Furniture,” barked the official, “pots, pans, baby carriage.”
“Oh, my parents are sending up that stuff,” said Guy, who was always good at charades. “We do have a few things in the car.”
Susan wondered what they would think when they saw the sleeping bags, typewriters, guitars. Hippies? Actually, it was true that Guy’s mother insisted on sending up the mahogany bedroom set once they got settled.
“Draft dodger?” the guard asked casually.
“In fact,” Guy answered coolly, “I’m a teaching assistant in primatology at the University of Toronto.”
“I’m the draft dodger,” she joked, feeling vomit rise in her throat with the forced laughter.
The guard smiled and nodded to the door with a grey mesh window.
“Don’t have nothing to do with me anyway. He’ll see you in a minute.” He returned to their forms to make sure they had left no white spaces.
“What about the Manual?” she whispered.
Guy looked confused. Or was it annoyed? Maybe he was signaling her to shut up. But the question was important in case the van were searched. She leaned over and whispered, “Did you put it in the chemistry book?”
“You were the one who had it last,” he said between his teeth and then turned back to a travel brochure. “Did you know that Nova Scotia is the only region outside Scotland to have a registered tartan?”
Her stomach turned. She rummaged for a Tums in her purse. There, bunched with the birth certificates and marriage license, was the Manual. Did they search purses?
“Mr. and Mrs. Thompson?”
They followed another guard into a small, spare room. Guy didn’t have to repeat so much this time. Maybe the acoustics were better. Maybe he was learning Canadian. The officer asked them questions which they had already answered on the application.
“And you, Mrs. Thompson, what do you do?”
She paused for a moment, as if listening for her mother-in-law (Will the real Mrs. Thompson please speak up?) and then she answered, “I’m a teacher.” The words came too easily. She dreaded hearing them. It had taken her a year to feel able to say “writer,” when people inquired. “Teacher” was just what she wasn’t going to be her whole life. However, they needed teachers in Canada, in places like Ba
ffin Island. She would do anything to get them in.
He checked their diplomas, licenses and bank books. Pedigrees seemed to be in order. That was all for now. No questions about why they wanted to immigrate. No speeches about the Great National Park or the three party system or the ethnic mosaic. He had no more questions.
“If you’ll wait here, I’ll be right back with an answer for you.”
When he closed the door, she looked at Guy for the first time since they entered the room.
“Your purse,” he said.
Her purse lay open on her lap to the Manual For Draft Age Immigrants To Canada.
He squeezed her hand. “Don’t worry,” he said.
She didn’t have the strength to squeeze back. She just wanted to throw up. Of course good immigrants don’t throw up. The guard might think she had typhoid or something. She stared at the grey mesh window.
“That’s it, Mr. and Mrs. Thompson.”
The immigration officer was handing something to Guy.
“That’s it,” Guy said, louder, to her.
The man had his hand on Guy’s shoulder, “Bloody awful war.”
Toronto. Two hundred miles. The road signs had crowns on them. “Welcome to Canada. Bienvenue au Canada.” She turned on CBC to distract them from Windsor. “War Measures Act.…”
The city seemed to mirror Detroit through foul Lake Michigan. And the water looked just as dead from this side.
“… War Measures Act. Prime Minister Trudeau said in a press conference in Ottawa this afternoon that the decree of martial law will be in effect all over the country. Primary surveillance will take place in Quebec. In Montreal so far, thirteen people suspected of knowing about the Pierre La Porte kidnapping have been taken to jail. The CBC has received no official communiques from the FLQ. Martial law is.…”
“Find some music, will you?” said Guy.
“In French?” she asked.
The Common
Stinkweed
Her father offered a Harris tweed suit and a silk blouse if she would go out and get a real job. “Why, that would cost a hundred quid,” she exclaimed. Her father nodded, threateningly, generously—she couldn’t distinguish anymore. They each laughed it off rather too loudly. He complained that she always knew more about what she didn’t want than what she did want.
Not true. She knew she wanted to go to America. It would be different when she got to America. She didn’t know what started this “Yankophilia” as she called it. Maybe it began in University when she met all those kids from L.A. She liked the offhand way they referred to “school” rather than university, the way they called professors by their first names and the way they called lecturers “professors.” They had turned her on to grass (much more sensible than lager, not as fattening and no hangover) and to their music. Funky rock. There was something so down-to-earth (now, that had to be an American term) and honest about their music. It wasn’t like that cerebral Pink Floyd nonsense. She loved denim. So unpretentious, like everything American.
Originally, she had planned to leave in September. But Diane’s husband left her. The poor girl was at the end of her tether. So she gave Diane a few quid and a little time. Diane would need company for a couple of months at least.
She looked forward to airletters from her friends in West Virginia (“Did you catch Deliverance? Have you heard the music, seen the quilts?”); and friends in Washington D.C. (Fred was a Nader’s Raider in the nerve center of American corruption); and her old beau in Bellingham (Those photos of mountain goats in the Olympic range were tacked around the ancient victrola in her bedsit).
She painted on weekends and was rather proud of a couple of watercolors that she gave her parents for Easter. However, she knew she wouldn’t really get into her art until America. So much to paint there. Mary told her they would take a caravan—no, it was called a trailer—through the Grand Canyon and up the California coast to visit Len. Then she would find the Black Hills of South Dakota and the Dells in Wisconsin and the Fall in New England and the green fields of Mississippi. She consumed travel books, started reading regional fiction and fell in love with William Faulkner.
Meanwhile, another six months passed as she worked in the Engineering Library, cataloguing journal articles. A tedious job, yes Mother, beneath her talents. But it allowed time to think, to plan. Somehow she had made herself indispensable. It was a curious circle: the harder she worked to make money for the trip, the more difficult it was to get away for things like a visa and tickets.
She almost made the plane reservation the morning she heard that radio program about the common stinkweed. The Common Stinkweed. Bloody English even made class distinctions about plants. As if people had the leisure to be botanized at eight in the morning. The BBC’s mentality was absolutely stifling.
The news wasn’t any better. So lethargic. So sober. Almost as if the broadcasts were conjured to reassure. She could never understand her parents’ commitment to Britain, their unflagging patriotism and their maudlin memories about “finest hours.” As far as she could tell, even the War had been distilled and produced by the BBC.
Well, she couldn’t really leave before Christmas, could she? Mother would be too disappointed. It was bad enough to be going away for a year. Actually, it might be longer, but she wasn’t going to upset them until she knew definitely. She decided she shouldn’t go before January. That was a proper time for a fresh start. Then it would all be different, in America.
III
In the Company of
Long-Distance
Peace Marchers
They said it would be the last peace march. Peace was at hand. The treaty would be signed that week. Susan marched because she believed—in her most optimistic soul— that it was the last peace march. She marched because she believed—in her most realistic head—that there would never be a last peace march. She didn’t know why she went.
She didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay at home and do all the editing and writing and reading that had fulfilled her life for the last year. But she couldn’t stay home. Maybe she went out of faith in ceremony, in public proclamation of principle. Since girlhood, she had been possessed by processions and professions of faith. In fact, when she didn’t go to Mass the next morning one of the small excuses (she still needed excuses, but only small ones now) was having attended the march.
How many antiwar demonstrations had she joined here in Toronto or back in San Francisco? Not enough, evidently. Marches were as much part of her immigrant identity in Canada as “festas” were for Italo-Canadians. Cultural critics classified demonstrations as “60’s phenomena,” but the decade was two years past and she was still marching. Once she expected marches and chants and speeches to change things. Yes, she expected the Moratorium in November, 1969, to bring change. Thousands of people marching across San Francisco to Golden Gate Park. They were going to start a revolution according to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. (Hell, they couldn’t stay together long enough to run a rock group.) Yes, she did believe it then. And in the sense that she didn’t want to be a liberal cop-out, she still believed it. A little.
Usually Susan went to marches with Guy. But he was working on his thesis today. “My research is political,” he had said that morning even though she hadn’t asked him why he wasn’t going and, in fact, was glad to be going alone. “There are other ways to be a political person,” he protested. She nodded, thinking how she was almost comfortable calling herself a “political person” after two years in Canada.
So after all this you would think she might know something about marches. That they never start on time, for instance, like poetry readings and other secular rituals. However, when she realized she was going to be “late,” she flew out the front door, worried the subway down to her stop and then raced to the Metropolitan United Church. Inside, four hundred people sat listening to speeches. A warm up. An examination of conscience. It would last for another forty-five minutes.
Rhetoric. Did these phrases ever
mean anything? “Fighting imperialism in the people’s struggle,” or was it “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”? Rhetoric was a bond, a common language. They knew the platitudes by rote—the middleaged minister who spoke first and the young Trotskyite who spoke last. Peace and self-determination. Amen. Right on. Folded hands. Clenched fists.
But the woman who spoke in the middle, the small, grey-haired Montreal nurse who had worked in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, offered more than rhetoric. She gave figures about Canadian complicity in the war. She tied the Indochinese fighting to other struggles. “I don’t know if I’m the first woman to speak from this pulpit, but I know that I won’t be the last.” She delivered sense and feeling. She was more interested in peace than rubric and thus performed an intricate balance before this scrupulous congregation.
The people didn’t look much different from those Susan marched with in California. Mostly young and blue-jeaned. Their hair was longer than two years ago; their clothes were heavier than those worn in San Francisco. Otherwise, they were the same people. The poor students and lefties wore balled sweaters and rotting shoes. The week-end working class insulated themselves in $60 army green parkas. The marshals, veterans of other marches, wore red arm bands. The photographers—there were going to be lots of pictures for the time capsule—posed Nikons and Pentaxes at the speakers and listeners. The skinny man from CKEY radio had pinned a large red PRESS sign to his cashmere lapel. Freaks in peacoats and linty mufflers passed the silver collection plates for publicity funds as the speakers harangued from a stained glass sanctuary.
Out in the vestibule, portable bookstores were assembled. The Vanguard man peddled inspirations from Marx, Che, Engels, Trotsky. Friends greeted each other after long holiday absences. She recognized several feminists, a Guerilla reporter, the lawyer for a political refugee, a friend of a friend who wrote Young Socialist articles, a Cabbagetown teacher, the editor of an American exile magazine and several still nameless people she always saw at demonstrations.
Susan thought how her mother would cringe at all this “Communism,” would worry for her daughter. Mother had finally become reconciled that she and Guy were draft dodgers. She had stopped calling them “deserters.” She just wanted them to come home.
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