Dreaming Sally

by James Fitzgerald

  After steering the Skylark up Mount Pleasant Road, Stewart parked on a Rosedale side street and suggested the couples switch front and back seats. As George and Sally, the Two Virgins, chatted amiably up front, in the back Stewart and Gerrie thrashed like an octopus. From the radio blasted “Summer in the City,” punctuated with the sounds of rattling jackhammers and Volkswagen horns, and the car literally rolled in sync with the rock. From the beginning, George and Sally shared something in common: Don’t look in the rearview mirror. But somehow their conversation flowed freely across their three-year age gap.

  The next day, George phoned Sally to ask her out, this time without Stewart and Gerrie. Once again braving the threshold of 30 Chestnut Park Road, he encountered the intimidating paternal figure of Dr. George Wodehouse, who led the young man to his lion’s den at the back of the house. Pulling a fat cigar from his mouth, George the Elder fixed George the Younger square in the eye and, deadpan, intoned, “Before you two go out, I want you to know I’m head of the student medical health services at the University of Toronto. I’m responsible for thirty thousand students. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Coca-Cola douche, but it…does…not…work.”

  What George was thinking: What the fuck?

  What George said: “I really like Sally, sir. But we’re just good friends.”

  The second date dispelled the suspicion that their ease with each other was not an illusion: another movie, another dinner, another magic carpet ride of talk, talk, talk.

  * * *

  —

  That fall George returned to York. After class he would borrow his mother’s Triumph Herald and roll down Mount Pleasant Road to pick up Sally. Nestled in a thirteen-acre patch of Carolinian forest, the campus of Branksome Hall occupied the gilded Rosedale address of 10 Elm Avenue, its main building, Hollydene, a three-storey red-brick Victorian mansion with gables and chimneys and a porte cochère supported by four Doric columns. Accommodating six hundred students aged four to eighteen, Branksome Hall was one of the city’s quartet of private, exclusive, Protestant, all-girl institutions, each accorded its own caricature, each holding a grain of truth: Bishop Strachan for snobs, Havergal for brains, Branksome for egalitarians and St. Clement’s (where George’s mother went to school), the poor cousin. Threading through knots of schoolgirls in red blazers, green kilts, knee socks and black Oxfords, George felt as if he was penetrating a forbidden enclave to retrieve his Sally.

  When Mrs. Wodehouse bought a blue Mustang with a white canvas convertible top, Sally was transformed overnight into the living song. On weekends, with George at the wheel, they would “do the crawl” through Yorkville, the teeming enclave of two narrow, parallel one-way streets, a short five blocks south of Sally’s house, where young hippies were converging from all over Canada.

  As they passed the dozens of coffee houses, clubs, art galleries and head shops, George and Sally studied like curious anthropologists the barefoot, beaded and bearded, the body painted and sandal shod, the panhandlers, potheads and pushers, the spaced-out bikers and greasers and Jesus freaks, the jugglers and the clowns, the rich-kid runaways expelled from houses and schools not unlike their own. In the window of the Mynah Bird, a drop-dead gorgeous go-go girl in leather boots and miniskirt gyrated like an Eaton’s department store mannequin jolted to life. The acoustics of Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot radiated from the doors of the Purple Onion, the Riverboat, the Penny Farthing; farther south, on Yonge Street, in bars such as the Colonial and Le Coq d’Or, Robbie Robertson, Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins, David Clayton-Thomas and John Kay, the future founder of Steppenwolf, rocked out a tougher, bluesier, electrified rock ’n’ roll. The bad bohemian young were everywhere disturbing the sleep of the puritanical old of Toronto the Good.

  As reticent as he was ambitious, George had longed for somebody soft and sweet to pull him out of himself, and now the magical Sally was obliging, listening closely as he released his true self into the world; under her spell, a raconteur was being born. He was a Canadian, he did exist and he actually felt articulate. It was all happening so fast, like some wildly exciting casino-run of dumb luck that he could scarcely believe, let alone control.

  Mere months had passed since a bearded, slightly more worldly George Orr had drifted home from a rough-and-tumble summer job in a subarctic gold mine, delivered by a dream-like August evening to the drawbridge of a Rosedale castle, where he succumbed to the sly smile of a sixteen-year-old blind date. But even as he was captivated, as he grew almost reluctantly happy, he caught a whisper from the depths of his mind: Be careful of what you wish for.

  * * *

  —

  From the start, George found the other members of the Wodehouse family a touch intimidating—George and Jane, intelligent, socially connected, opinionated, heavy drinkers and smokers, gladly unsuffering of fools, and the older sister, Diana, quietly envying the evolution of Sally into a social butterfly.

  Even at nineteen, George was mature enough to empathize with the adults: Who is this young man our daughter keeps bringing home for dinner? How do we deal with him? Do we like him? Is he a keeper? Do we throw him back? If we throw him back, do we upset Sally and make it worse?

  George soon learned that Sally’s father had pulled scare tactics on every suitor of his teenage daughters and driven most away. As the Wodehouses realized that George was gaining traction, they began to include him in family birthdays, Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas, the quartet-plus-one perching on stiff wooden chairs surrounding the hand-carved rosewood table positioned under the crystal chandelier. Having drilled her sons on the finer points of etiquette—work the silverware from the outside, don’t spill, drool, or speak with your mouth full—Dorothy Orr had done her sterling best to raise a young gentlemen of manners, and he could pass muster.

  Unlike George’s father, a charming treader of water, George Wodehouse was a bold, balding, cigar-puffing figure who commanded a room with the overwhelming self-confidence common to many doctors. And he could hold his liquor: on weekends, the Wodehouses started drinking steadily at two but unflaggingly made dinner by six. George never saw Sally’s parents drunk, an important lesson in image control.

  A classic raconteur, the doctor told stories in ways the damaged Mac Orr could not match. In August 1944, near Caen in Normandy, he was commanding a casualty clearing station in an open battlefield. Under intense German fire, within the space of a hellish hour he tied tourniquets and bandaged thirty-five wounded young soldiers with arms or legs blown off, saving some lives, losing others. He was awarded the Military Cross.

  After the war, Dr. Wodehouse got down to the business of doing good and doing well. When he met Jane Toller, the determined daughter of a privileged Maritimes family, he accepted that he occupied a slightly lower social station and let her drive him like a government mule; given his innate brains and ambition, his “marrying-up” worked as a comfortable contract of mutual gain.

  In the Medical Arts Building at Bloor and St. George streets, he built up a private practice until 1950, the year of Sally’s birth, when at thirty-four his career path curved dramatically upward. Appointed head of the University of Toronto’s student health service, he occupied an office at 256 Huron Street, a Victorian house in the heart of the aptly named St. George Campus of the university, supervising a staff of doctors cross-appointed from city hospitals. Attached to Branksome Hall as the school physician, he performed the annual polio shots for anxious lines of kindergarten girls, promising a lollipop to those who succeeded in suppressing their tears.

  He became a veteran observer of the gropings of countless hormonally crazed undergrad youth and their miserable outcomes from pregnancy to VD. A realist, Dr. Wodehouse co-authored a comprehensive paper on birth control, warning the reactionary, prudish, Victorian-minded administrators to avoid a head-on collision with the fast-advancing hordes of horny baby boomers. He believed that the University of Toronto still had time to forestall the worst-case scenarios erupting across American campuses
—rashes of unwanted pregnancies, coat-hanger abortions, young women bleeding out, sometimes to death. Students wanted facts, not morals, but in a Father Knows Best world—and sometimes he actually did—as long as birth control remained illegal for the unmarried, the doctor-in-chief of the nation’s largest institution of higher learning was bound to the letter of the law—even as an aspiring young pagan bearing his own Christian name was circling his own teenage daughter.

  * * *

  —

  George felt as if he’d inherited a new set of parents more glamorous than his own. The Wodehouses occupied the top link of the food chain: house in Rosedale, cottage on Lake Simcoe, friends in high places, enjoying being on a first-name basis with Lester Pearson, the country’s prime minister. George found Sally’s confidence attractive because he didn’t have any. Because she shunned nylons and lipstick, high heels and eyeshadow, beguilingly underplaying her own princess-ness, she rose even higher in George’s estimations. A flat-footed, slightly androgynous tomboy who swore like a sailor, she wasn’t dainty, and that’s why she was fun—wedding natural charm to an emerging fearlessness.

  She shared her mother’s sharp tongue but nothing of the fastidious snobbery, the status-based airs and attitudes. Yet Jane had a hard time resisting George because he liked her, and she’d always wanted a son. Siphoning bottles of gin like the Queen Mother, she trolled for hints as to whether he had yet made love to her daughter, but she was too well brought up to raise the subject directly. Enticing as it all was, George remained unsure if he wanted to fly into the gilded cage of the Rosedale Chosen, where young lives were mapped out in advance of their living. He heard the violins, but he saw the strings attached.

  The Orr and Wodehouse parents socialized on only two occasions: Jane, the social gatekeeper, maintained a genteel distance, anointing the Orrs “nice.” Dorothy Orr approved of Sally but not only for her membership in the right club; in the bright light of the teenager she recognized her lost, unfettered self and looked forward to Sally’s visits.

  * * *

  —

  The deeper George ventured into Sally’s lively social circle—much of it male—the faster her distressing popularity rose to meet him. Did she like someone better than him?

  On the Victoria Day long weekend of May, 1967, days before Sally’s seventeenth birthday, George first experienced the ritual spring opening of the cottage on De Grassi Point, the taking-down of the storms and the putting-up of the screens. Simultaneously, over four thousand hippies and their sightseeing admirers, inspired by San Francisco’s Human Be-In of months earlier, flocked two blocks south from Yorkville Village to the lawns of Queen’s Park to join the poet-singers Leonard Cohen and Buffy Sainte-Marie in the city’s first mass Love-In. Arrest-and-freak-out-free, the event radiated a gentle calm of flute playing, dancing circles and flowers passed to passersby. The media were charmed.

  Gradually Dr. Wodehouse was ceasing to perceive his daughter’s boyfriend as an existential threat. Most weekends that summer, the two Georges drove up north together, with or without the females, chopping down trees or swimming on the sandbar. He could not pinpoint the day it happened, but young George came to believe Sally’s father had resigned himself to him: she likes him, so I’ll like him. “Our house is your house” was the watchword, but the doctor was equally clear on another score: no one sleeps with my daughter under my watch.

  * * *

  —

  That summer, Sally headed south to Cape Cod for a six-week stint as an au pair, taking care of the unruly brat of a prominent family neighbouring the fortified Hyannis Port compound of the Kennedy clan. She wrote George letters complaining of the “madhouse” she was enduring; since absence may make the heart grow fonder (or colder), George drove down with Stewart for a week-long visit. Returning through New York State, the young Canadians were awestruck by the sight of open trucks crammed with thousands of crewcut green-fatigued draftees streaming down the highway.

  George acquired a new Honda 90, a meek excuse for a motorcycle that maxed out at 30 mph. Standing at the foot of his driveway on Gordon Road, George let his buddy David ride around the block helmetless. On his third circuit, a dog bolted into his path and David slammed the brakes, hurtling over the handlebars, hitting the asphalt on his forehead. To the horror of all, he convulsed on the road like a fish out of water. Luckily, the accident happened in front of a doctor’s house; the doctor stuffed a breathing tube down the teenager’s throat and stayed with him until the ambulance delivered him to Sick Kids Hospital. Emerging from unconsciousness several hours later, David made out the faces of his parents and George and his parents. He suffered only a concussion and some scrapes, and George’s Honda incurred nothing but a broken turn signal. But David’s father couldn’t forgive George—and George didn’t blame him.

  That autumn George entered his third year of university and Sally her final year of high school. In a friend’s station wagon, they drove Stewart up to Muskoka Lakes College for Grade 13, where he was destined to be chosen head boy—then fired, rehired and refired for his inevitable delinquencies, no small accomplishment. On the road north, Stewart indulged in a last thrash with Gerrie in the fold-down back of the car as Sally, clutching the dying vestiges of her prudery, interjected: “I know what you two are doing. Stop that!”

  When distance broke Gerrie and Stewart up, George grappled with an irrational anxiety that he might also lose Sally. He had moved from Glendon College up to the main York campus at Jane and Steeles, a flat, bleak expanse of brutalist concrete and glass where students scuttled beaver-like through underground tunnels to evade the vicious winter winds. Then suddenly the light went on: George needed to focus on art history. In France, he had fallen in love with painting and architecture, then forgot he had.

  As Canada’s Centennial Year, 1967, drove to a close, George knew he was in deep with Sally. Which made him uneasy: If your life seems too good to be true, it probably is.

  Sure enough, days later, Sally told him the bad news: her father wanted to send her on an Odyssey trip through Europe all of next summer.

  To George, this could mean only one thing: she was leaving home. And she was never looking back.

  FIVE

  The Act You’ve Known for All These Years

  During the Christmas holidays of 1967, my mother placed a green brochure in my hands. Under the carved face of a Roman sun god, I read a quotation from Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”:

  I am part of all that I have met;

  Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

  Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades

  For ever and forever when I move.

  My maternal grandmother was shelling out US$1,375, roughly equal to a year’s tuition at UCC, to send me on the two-month European Odyssey. Over July and August, twenty-six teenagers and two young leaders, mostly drawn from private schools from Halifax to Toronto to Vancouver, would tour Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and England in four Volkswagen minibuses. I was puzzled that my grandmother, a prudish, pious, classically trained pianist who produced three offspring by having sex exactly three times, thought the trip was a good idea. Was the Odyssey an unspoken reward for surviving ten years at UCC?

  I scanned two separate alphabetical lists of names, a pleasingly symmetrical thirteen boys and thirteen girls. Six of the boys were schoolmates whom I’d known forever, but as my eyes slid down the list of girls, I recognized no one until the last name leapt out at me: Wodehouse, Sally—Branksome Hall—30 Chestnut Park Road, Toronto 5, Walnut 4-4555. The number I never called. I was quietly thrilled that six years on, my playmate of the summer sandbar was magically re-entering my life. I remembered her, but had she remembered me?

  But I had to survive till then. Every morning I felt like Gregor Samsa of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, struggling to heave my giant cockroach thorax out of bed. I could not shake an unyielding inner pressure, as if I must immediately address the UN General Assembly without notes, single
handedly solving world hunger, disguised as my own. Each morning in the Prayer Hall—where long hair currently posed the direst of threats to the manhood of Western civilization—I slouched in a hard wooden pew, a reluctant prefect taking roll call for bodies as absent as my own. I resented being forced to take maths, physics and chemistry, for which I had no aptitude or interest; in fact, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was the subject of some depersonalized, controlled, double-blind, longitudinal science experiment—a subject being turned into an object.

  A disproportionate number of the school faculty were closeted homosexual men, adding a strange brew of homoeroticism and homophobia to the atmosphere we breathed. No one seemed to care when our algebra master, Walter Bailey, a tortured alcoholic of caustic tongue, spent an entire class reading aloud from a paperback of soft-core homosexual pornography provocatively thrown on his desk by a student. A wretched teacher infected by a world-class cynicism, face flushed with a self-loathing that he dumped on us, he doubled as a wretched guidance counsellor. Weirdly, I felt empathy for him even as he felt none for us.

  I stoically continued to ignore all signals from my body, including the intensifying bouts of cramping in my guts, the ceaseless cycles of constipation and diarrhea, symptoms of Crohn’s, though I didn’t know it then. I also tried to prevail over what turned out to be severe anemia. A strong swimmer, I had a few years earlier set a record in the backstroke and competed for the school’s first swim team. When, because of leg-aching tiredness, I had to ask to be excused from the year-end meet at Hart House at the University of Toronto against the rival boys’ private schools, the coach refused. In a suit of concrete, I finished dead last by a humiliating margin. I almost admired the dark simplicity of the centuries-old Master Plan: sink or swim in the social Darwinian piranha tank, and if you sink, you won’t be missed.