Boys were encouraged very early on to be men. Girls were kept children, their sexuality under the tightest of control, for as long as parents and the rest of society could possibly manage. “All I want is a party doll,” the 1957 Buddy Knox hit song went, and in our full, “poodle” skirts held out with pink and white crinolines and our little black velvet ballet-slipper shoes with coloured, light-catching confetti sprinkled on the toes, we were happy to be party dolls.
But being a party doll, a cute young girl with a nice figure who asked no more than an evening of good clean fun, ending with a decorous kiss—while this appeared to be easy and natural, it was not. It had a definite flip side. Even at working class Tech, our parents had firm expectations about our behaviour, our high school society laid down its own rules too, if you weren’t to be seen as having joined the ranks of girls with “bad reputations,” and most boys were just as keen as you were to stay on the right side of convention. Girls such as Alex and me followed the rules, came home mostly when we were told to, and despite necking, never went one step further. The penalties for breaking the rules—if you got caught—were too severe.
“Getting caught,” of course, meant getting pregnant. In a world where rape was never spoken of, and murder happened elsewhere, getting pregnant was too terrifying a prospect even to consider. Abortions were generally not to be had, and often marriage, for one reason or another, was not possible, and thus, many parents decided that you would have the baby in secrecy and give it away. We all knew of the large yellow-brick house across the street from City Hospital where unmarried pregnant girls were housed by the Salvation Army while they waited to give birth. It figured in our worst nightmares.
In the fifties sexual choices were limited: don’t have intercourse or any kind of sexual relations; have intercourse but practise coitus interruptus; or settle for long, sweaty, frustrating, back-seat “petting” sessions. Most of us, in fifties Saskatoon, stuck to the latter. And that meant that some of us were raped. We call it “date rape” now, but in the fifties it didn’t have a name, and it was commonplace—not perhaps, actual rape, although it is likely that there were many more rapes than were ever reported—but certainly it was the rare one of us who had never been on a date where we had to fight physically to keep our virginity. Getting thrown out of a boy’s car, having to walk home, or going home bruised and crying, but with virginity intact—these things happened a lot.
It is no wonder that among the girls I knew, the ideal, although rarely attained, was to get your grade twelve diploma in June, and to marry (while not pregnant) your boyfriend in July or August. And then the babies would start to come, the “diaper curtain,” as one of my old St. Mary’s friends called it, would descend, and for the next ten or fifteen years—the remainder of your youth—you would be lost to everything but the children, the household, the wifely duties. It seems to me now that, even loving our children and our husbands, it was little more than slavery. It’s no wonder that after 1968, when Canadian divorce laws began to allow for grounds of “marriage breakdown,” a lot of these early marriages ended in divorce.
If I was determined, eventually, when a high school guidance counsellor and my art teacher showed me that even I might go to university, that I would do so and that I wouldn’t leave until I had a degree, it was because, as a child in a family of five, I knew—as Alex did—what lay in store for me the moment I married. I wanted love in the form of a husband as much as my friends did, but I wanted middle-class respectability and a decent income just as much. And the only way I could be sure I would get those things was to get them myself.
All of Alex’s old friends insist that though she wanted to get married someday and to have children, there was no way she wanted to be one of those “graduate in June, marry in July” girls. She wanted to go interesting places and to do interesting things before she would even consider being tied down like that—up all night looking after sick ones, or nursing a new baby, and then on her feet all day, washing diapers and chasing toddlers, while she was still young, and the wide world was out there waiting for her. Locked into the fifties ethic, clear, at least, about what we didn’t want, short of rape Alex and I were not the “kind of girls” who got pregnant out of wedlock.
There hadn’t been a murder in Saskatoon through our entire childhoods, and it is no wonder that we felt safe, and no wonder that when pretty, smart, decent Alex met her brutal death, the city was stunned, shocked, and beyond horrified. Finding no handy culprit, it turned to Alex as the cause of her own death—she had to have been responsible, because otherwise there would be a lot more deaths in the city, and of pretty young women. And that turned into the rumours of promiscuity, of involvement in drug crime, of “pregnancy without benefit of husband,” of affairs with married men, and of whatever other disreputable behaviour might lead to somebody wanting to kill you. In the minds of many people, unable to believe that a murderer was loose in our city, it had to have been her fault. I suppose it could even be said that if she had brought her murder on herself by her bad behaviour, then it could not be our fault—“our” being the citizens of our city.
But those of us who knew her, who had gone to school with her, whether we were close friends or not, knew better. Whatever had happened to her that night, not one of us would have believed she had done anything more to bring it on than to have gone alone to the weir, and to have stayed too long, until it was dark and everyone else had gone home. It seemed to me that Alex deserved better, much better, that we owed her, among other things, the restoration of her reputation, that phone taps and ex-convicts and the other unexplained and unpleasant things that might happen to me would be worth it, if we could all, finally, know the truth about what had happened that night.
I seemed to have committed myself to writing a book. It had never been that I didn’t want to write one and was merely trying to avoid doing it, as much as that I couldn’t grasp the true story. Alex’s story was too brief, her life too brief, and the murder too sudden and disconnected from her life, or so it seemed to me then. And yet, already people were asking me if my book was finished, and when it would be published, and I was beginning to feel that I no longer had a choice, that so many people were depending on me to tell them Alex’s story, that somehow, I would have to do it.
Chapter Four
Love Me Tender
That first day in September 1954, when I crossed the parking lot, passing between the arena and the Legion building, and then over the back alley to the Saskatoon Technical Collegiate, going up the stairs and in the side door that I would use every day for the next four years, I was nervous. But I’d walked the last few blocks to the school in a crowd of kids all going to the same place, and even though I knew none of them, and my stomach was queasy with anxiety, I was positively buoyant with excitement, because I’d made it to high school at last. That I was going to Tech, and not Nutana or Bedford Road Collegiate, caused me no concern. Tech was closest to where I lived. I knew no reason not to go there, as (I was overjoyed to know) my parents couldn’t afford to send me to the convent where my best friends were headed, and surely there would be one or two kids from St. Mary’s at Tech, and if not, well, I would get to know the people in my class. I wouldn’t walk there by myself for very long, I was sure.
Sometime during my grade nine year our family moved across the river into Nutana. For reasons I cannot remember, I didn’t change schools, but kept on trekking every day for the rest of that year and the next three, across the river toward downtown and working class Tech. I suppose I was afraid to change schools; I’ve never been fond of change. Two of my younger sisters went to Nutana Collegiate and I can’t recall either of them ever complaining that they didn’t feel they belonged at Nutana, though they came from a working class home. But I think my fear was that I wouldn’t fit in.
Now I think with some anger of the purpose Tech was designed to serve: to keep us in our place, we kids of immigrants, the uneducated, the labouring class. We were to go to school to
be trained to keep right on being the working class, while kids at Nutana understood that they were to go to university, to acquire professions, and eventually, to run the city and the province, maybe even the country. (“We are trained to be leaders,” an eighteen-year-old told me recently, innocently, of the Toronto private school he was attending.)
Alex’s situation was, in that regard, very different from mine. She was sent to the city to get a high school education while her parents stayed behind on the farm. But she had an older sister in town, Marie, the oldest of the four Wiwcharuk girls—Marie, Pearl, Ann, and Alex. Marie and her husband, as I mentioned earlier, ran a successful plumbing and heating business in the Exhibition District, where he and Marie and their children also lived. Farm families who were keen for their children to go to high school often sent them into the city if there was a family member with whom they could stay, because city high schools, often having better qualified teachers and more facilities for sports, the sciences, and sometimes even music and art, were seen as better than the country ones. It was also the fact that in the fifties, before school amalgamation and routine bussing of farm and rural kids to a consolidated school, going to high school too often meant having to board during the week in the nearest big town. If you were going to have to board out in any case, it only made sense, provided a proper, safe living situation could be found, to go on to the city.
Because Alex was sent to live with her sister, and that sister lived in the Exhibition District, a long bus ride away from Tech, it occurred to me now to wonder what she was doing at Tech at all, when Nutana was on the same side of the river, and so much closer. For some time I had been trying to track down a close high school friend of Alex’s, but the only one—aside from the girl who lived on the same block as Alex’s older sister, and who was very close to Alex—was someone who had been in her class at Tech. In answer to my question as to why Alex went to Tech and not Nutana, she told me that she and a number of other young Ukrainian girls had been sent to the city to go to high school and were staying together in a Ukrainian institute and dormitory. She said, “Our parents wanted us to get the best education there was, and that meant, in those days, going to Nutana Collegiate.” (This imperative was very much in line with everything I knew about Ukrainian families, how ambitious they were for their children, what sacrifices they would make to be sure those children were educated into, at least, the middle class.) Nutana, though, did not accept them, so, however unexpectedly, Alex wound up spending four years at the Saskatoon Technical Collegiate Institute. (I would eventually hear the story from several of those eager Ukrainian farm girls of how they were turned away from Nutana for what certainly appeared to me to be spurious reasons.)
I needed to see what we had both looked like then, and to try to remember where our paths might have crossed, and if I hadn’t yet found friends full of stories about Alex in high school, I had come up with another avenue. The next time I was in the city I went to the public library, asked the librarians to dig out the old Techalogue, our high school yearbook. Tech Talk, our school newspaper, was too much to ask for, I thought—since it was unbound, surely all copies of it had vanished years ago. I sat down for the first of what would be many times, pen in hand, notebook open before me, and began to comb the yearbooks from 1954 through 1958.
Our class pictures in the early grades were en masse; it was only in grade eleven and twelve that individual headshots were used, and full body shots only in group pictures such as the senior girls’ volleyball team or the students’ representative council, where we stood, frowning in the sunshine, on the school steps or lawn. Alex looked slim in the early years. It wasn’t until grade eleven that she began, at least in her picture, to look a little plump, and I saw that in that same year I had also gained a disconcertingly large amount of weight. Something to do with hormones, I guessed, but I remember, too, how often high school bored me, how much I hated the “rules” we kids had generated ourselves to govern how we behaved and what we did (silly ones such as never wearing pink for fear of being called a “fairy”), and how much there was that I might have done to alleviate my boredom, but I refused, finding such things unthinkable. I think the eating was a result of that sheer boredom, and of the constraints that hedged us in at every turn—smart girls in a world where being smart wasn’t worth that much. If boys had their societal crosses to bear, and they did, they weren’t much compared to those that we girls had to deal with in the fifties.
The last firm memory I have of Alex took place in the gym where we had our dance practices and where we were sent to eat our lunches. I remember that my friends and I were the last to leave that day, and that Alex and a few of her girlfriends were already walking away, when one of my friends called something to her. Alex turned to look over her right shoulder to throw back a short, polite reply. I remember that she did not smile, that she seemed, if anything, bored, or perhaps even a little sad, and that she was wearing a wine-coloured cardigan over a white blouse, and a straight skirt in either navy or dark green that came well below her knees. I remember the rich colouring in her cheeks, the darkness of her thick, short hair, and especially, in that moment, her seriousness. I sometimes think that we had more maturity then, at seventeen—a result of our trained submissiveness—than we did a few years later when we had been more or less freed into the world and were acting out all the things forbidden us for so long. But why that picture of her, and that glance should be fixed in my mind for nearly fifty years, I do not know. What did I know that day that never came to consciousness? Did I know that, somehow, somewhere, one day we would be engaged together in an attempt to redeem her suffering and death, and perhaps even to find justice for her?
Thinking of that glance of Alex’s that I thought bored or sad, I sensed that she, too, felt the constriction of our lives: You must get an education, and Nice girls don’t do that, and Do as you’re told, when we had naturally such an abundance, a veritable torrent of life-desiring energy raging through us, at sixteen, at seventeen, at eighteen. We were kept children far too long in those days, girls especially. I think that was the source of our boredom, that and a simmering but buried rage at the absurdity of our position, which we did not recognize intellectually, so well-governed were we, but which dragged at us well below the surface calm of our lives. We yearned for what we thought was freedom, although instead of true freedom, we yearned for love, for a husband, for our very own family, because that was all most of us knew; it was what our culture taught us.
My perusal of the yearbooks showed me that Alex, in fact, was even then recognizable as the beauty queen she would become. I wondered why I had remembered her all these years as unremarkable looking, and that I had been so surprised and dubious, on reading of her death, to hear that she had won beauty contests, enough so that for a second I wondered if the murdered girl could be someone other than the one I’d known. I studied that face again, and it seemed to me that it somehow lacked…something—some, for lack of a better word, focus, or a distillation of spirit that I now know comes, if it comes at all, later in life. Maybe it was just the state of being a teenager in the late fifties, before the late sixties when the world burst open. I looked vague and unformed myself, much more so, in fact, than Alex did. Alex’s eyes were dark and strong-looking, serious eyes, I thought, and now I saw that her mouth was well-formed and beautiful.
I found myself gazing obsessively at her face, reading the class notes with close attention, as if they might reveal something more about her, even though I knew very well that those who wrote them had had to think long and hard to come up with something—anything—to say about their classmates, while giggling to each other about the impossibility of saying something nice about that person, but knowing that the teacher-adviser would not pass anything else. And nothing snide, either, would get past the adviser. The result was that the most innocuous person in class might wind up with the nicest note. At the end of our grade nine year, mine reads, “The friendly kid who has such a charming pe
rsonality,” read dork, although in those days we would have said pill, with flippant contempt.
We—Alex and I—are both in the choir picture, but only she is in the cast picture for The Pirates of Penzance, that year’s production, although I sang in it too, and will never forget the ghastly pale-yellow cotton pinafore things we wore.
Alex’s class note reads, “1G’s favourite half-pint,” which sounds marginally friendlier than my note. I was in 1I—we weren’t in the same class at any time through our high school years, which is the main reason we were never close friends, and why I now studied her pictures and notes with such intensity, hoping some long-forgotten incident would suddenly tumble from its hiding place. In the choir picture, I stand near the girl who was my closest friend then, and both of us are close to Alex.
How serious we all were, a little frightened to find ourselves in high school, mixed in with what must have seemed to us hundreds of other kids just like us, most of whom we’d never even seen before, and the lower hall—the freshie hall—so crowded with kids at breaks that you could only walk down it by dodging and squeezing between bodies. Or maybe we were concerned about our choir leader whose temper I remember as being explosive. I had no recollection of why I joined choir, I was not a singer, but it was probably because I felt I had to do something, and the usual—sports—I had always avoided. I found, after I’d searched all four yearbooks, that in that respect I was like Alex: she was not in even one picture of a sports team.
But we were both in Drama Club that year. Alex is listed as being in a play called Balcony Scene, and she tied with another girl for “Best Actress” of the evening of plays—her play was chosen to represent our school in the city “playdowns.” In her class picture, sitting next to her homeroom teacher, Miss Kerr, Alex is prim, and wearing saddle shoes and white socks. Part of our code was that the socks had to be brilliantly, spotlessly white, and to achieve this, to our mothers’ despair (because it wore the socks out in no time), we would soak them in bleach. Her class note reads, “Always laughing, always gay, that’s our Alex of 2CA.”
The Girl in Saskatoon Page 9