* * *
—
On the night of Saturday, May 11, 1968, I was hanging out with Mike, a neighbourhood friend. We had formed the habit of watching old movies together, turning down the sound and ventriloquizing our own ad-libbed dialogue. Mike also possessed a bizarre facility for reading the scrolling names of movie credits backwards at lightning speed, a source of convulsive hilarity, especially when stoned; Ringo Starr will forever remain Ognir Rrats. The violence flowing from the nightly newscasts, meanwhile, kept us wondering: Why were masses of Sorbonne students throwing up barricades on the Left Bank of the Seine, hurling Molotov cocktails at security police?
A year older than me, Mike was home from his first year at the University of Western Ontario. He had hated every fucking second of it and had resolved to drop out and hitchhike to Kathmandu and beyond. I had just received early acceptance at Queen’s University, unwittingly trading one austere Protestant enclave for another.
Until recently, Mike had lived half a block down Dunvegan Road at number 45. His mother, Millie, was one of those warm, sweet-smiling, sandwich-making wives who humanized the neighbourhood, gamely propping up their war-traumatized husbands; with her I basked in a kindness unknown at home or school. Her husband had recently sold their three-storey mansion to a nouveau riche hipster-architect who, on this very evening of May 11, was bent on razing the place in a wild “Destructorama” party, then erecting a red-brick townhouse in its place. When Mike decided to crash the bash, I was in.
We found the house jammed with over two hundred architects, artists and engineers clad in bell-bottoms, Nehru jackets and hard hats. Wielding sledgehammers and pick axes, the Beautiful People were doing their less-than-beautiful thing, ripping out the radiators, light fixtures and bathtubs as a live band rocked out “Light My Fire” and a hovering film crew shot the mayhem.
In the smoky din we threaded through the glut of bodies, brushing past a stoned dolt with a toilet seat hung round his neck. Up the staircase, I followed Mike through the rooms of his childhood, and as we passed the splintered Ping-Pong table, the screens ripped from the sun porch, the piles of shattered lathe and plaster scattered under the black holes punched in the wall, I watched his face redden. Turning into his parents’ bedroom, we encountered a miniskirted goddess, wobbling in her intoxication, struggling to lift a sledgehammer. Snatching the tool, Mike started in on a wall. As a ring of guests recoiled from the intensity of Mike’s psychodrama, the host appeared and demanded that we leave. Mike said, “What if it was my father who sold you the fucking place?” But to the new owner, the obvious anguish of the teenager cut no ice, and we were escorted to the street.
* * *
—
Only one teacher, who ran a redemptive Grade 13 English class, cared enough to let me explore who I was. Jay MacDonald was a trained actor who had studied under Vladimir Nabokov at Cornell University. A suspected homosexual, he was blessedly free of the Lord of the Flies perversity that infused the institution. Countercultural shrapnel was shredding the classical canon, and I was picking up the scattered pieces like a magpie, stuffing shreds of human compassion and conscience into the rows of glass jars arrayed inside me. I identified with the low raised up, from Jane Eyre, the plain, orphaned governess, to Pip, leaving flowers on his mother’s grave, worshipping the beautiful yet coldly rejecting Estella who provoked his tortured vow, “I’ll never cry for you again.”
One day in class, MacDonald observed how many of the plots of the books we were studying were driven by multiple coincidences and the unseen hand of fate. When he remarked that such seeming contrivances in fact reflected archetypal truth, I was not buying in. Abandoned as an infant, Oedipus Rex not only unwittingly killed his father at a three-way crossroad but turned around and unwittingly married his mother? I mean, pull the other one.
On my own time, I had recently devoured The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield was a lanky, six-foot-three, seventeen-year-old, dyspeptic preppie, fending off phonies and a nervous breakdown, and so, astonishingly, was I. For our end-of-year assignment, MacDonald invited the class to pen a parody of any of the books we had studied over the year. I couldn’t believe my ears—I was being granted permission to speak with my true voice. The sentences poured onto the page, and within an hour I had spoofed the plot of Jane Eyre in the sulky, injustice-collecting, teenage tones of Holden Caulfield.
At the start of our next class, MacDonald announced that during the last five minutes of the lesson he would present “a new interpretation of Jane Eyre.” I thought, That’ll be interesting, not dreaming he’d read out my paper. Which he did.
“Well, if you really want to know about it,” went the opening sentence, “my crummy life started out pretty depressing, being an orphan and all.”
As MacDonald reduced the class of twenty-five to hysterics, the nail-biting introvert with churning bowels sat at the back of the class, beside himself, his cover blown. My parody ended: “All I can say is that I’m goddamn glad that nothing too way out or too coincidental has happened in my life so far, because I want to sell a lot of copies of this book I’m going to write, and I don’t think too many people go in for the long, unbelievable stuff every guy and his brother are writing these days.”
As the laughter subsided, MacDonald asked the class, “Now, who do you suppose wrote this piece?”
No clue.
“It was Mr. FitzGerald.”
Twenty-five heads swivelled as one, fixing me with an incredulous stare. Him? The hunched-over nonentity, the mute beanpole who disappeared years ago? Such intense scrutiny would normally deliver a splash of psychic napalm, but instead I felt like a swallow released from a dark, empty place.
Still, there was a catch: in the sanctum of my inner world I found Jane Eyre a poignant, tender love story, but I was conditioned to mock the very stuff that moved me: the sublime sufferings of Jane trapped in the frigid orphanage, her telepathic response to the voice of the blinded Rochester calling from across the heath. Being clever was safer than being real.
* * *
—
On June 6, I came downstairs for breakfast to find the headlines blazing another political horror: Robert Kennedy had been gunned down in Los Angeles only weeks after the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. At the table, I struggled to hold back my tears, puzzled by the power of my feelings. In the five years since his brother’s murder, Robert Kennedy’s character seemed to have deepened in a crucible of introspection and pain. Witnessing the hopeless poverty of the black ghettos and migrant workers, the privileged liberal was radically transformed by moral passion and genuinely championed the underclass. If anyone would have led us out of the wilderness, it was RFK, a rare figure in the pages of history. The potential you loved in others was ultimately your own.
As we watched the televised images of the funeral train bearing the flag-draped coffin from New York to Washington, massive, solemn crowds lining the tracks, I was stirred by an eerie sensation: I felt as if I was connecting with something unspeakable that might have happened in my own Irish family, backwards down the tracks, back to early childhood, back to before my birth. Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
My father was now a broken man who saw his life as fraudulent, a wrong turn, all past fixing, the public shell of his Forest Hill utopia masking a particular private hell, his only escape route the quiet plotting of his own murder. It was no accident that with such a role model, I might wonder about his own father, my grandfather, a forgotten medical hero whose name was never mentioned in our house.
At the same time, rumours of the sexual predation of UCC students by masters whispered down the corridors of our daily lives as open secrets; in flashing, uncanny moments, I dared to suspect that the unlit underground of family and school were fused within a single circuit, haunted by monsters in disguise.
Within the slow-motion implosion of my own nuclear family, I was buffeted by a maelstrom of contradictory messages. Should I carry the torch? Or torch the carr
iers? Still, I was absorbing a vital lesson at home and at school: violence inflicted on children in the name of love was a Big Lie.
Many of my peers were set to seal their fates, either dutifully moving on to manage the inherited family wealth or splitting the scene for good. I was muddling around somewhere in the middle. I was disinclined to sleepwalk into the old boys’ network, the whole point of my education; I preferred not to rule the unruly world but to hang backstage and watch.
Stripping off my blazer and blue tie for the last time, I retreated to the coach house for a private celebration. I dropped the holy disk on the turntable, the needle in the groove and twisted the knob to full blast. Uplifted by the power trio of Eric, Jack and Ginger, I merged with the blistering congress of guitar, bass and drums, and for a moment I found hard proof of the existence of God.
* * *
—
On Saturday, June 15, I boarded the Queen Street streetcar bound for 1 Fallingbrook Road, the home of Professor Bernie Taylor. Perched on the windy Scarborough Bluffs overlooking the white-capped blue of Lake Ontario, the three-storey wood-frame house was ringed by shade trees and a white picket fence. As Bernie, a strapping, grey-haired man in his mid-fifties, greeted me at the door, my stomach tingled at the prospect of meeting my summer companions.
Gathering in the sunroom, the boys gravitated to one side, the girls to the other. The opposite sex. Catching Sally’s eye, I felt blood rush to my cheeks. Play it cool, man.
“Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” I tried.
I recognized her answering smile across the gap of the years. The twelve-year-old was now eighteen, but I was relieved that she had not shed her quirks: the slightly raspy voice, the lowering eyelids and upturned upper lip, the long fingers casually hooking strands of reddish-brown hair around her ears, the expressions shifting from goofy to foxy, from plain to striking and back again, her body a touch ungainly, a touch graceful. An actual, familiar girl, one who knew me, and liked me, lost and now found. Love at second sight.
When Bernie touted the trip as “an experience you will remember for a lifetime,” sniggers ensued—we weren’t swallowing the propaganda. A savvy marketer who for the past twenty years had sold his trips in the living rooms of the well-to-do, Bernie recruited his leaders from the country’s top private schools, cherry-picking the best and brightest—not necessarily the richest—head boys, head girls, team captains and promoted their star power to attract other students. A veteran of five Odysseys, Nick was Bernie’s twenty-four-year-old protege and heir apparent, and as he stepped forward to speak, I liked him instantly: blond, blue-eyed, self-confident, quick-witted, charismatic.
We were asked to stand up, one by one, and say something about ourselves. When my turn came, I stammered something inane, my affectation of rock star coolness mocked by my turtleneck, cardigan and horn-rimmed glasses. But if I couldn’t find the right words, it did not seem to matter. In my seventeen years, I had known the wondrous and the terrible, and their distressing proximity, but on that radiant June afternoon I had reason to hope my chronic worries were history. If I must obey a higher authority, let it be the Law of Attraction, and let it be Sally.
SIX
“I’m Never Going to See You Again”
When Sally told George she was going to Europe, he did not take it lying down. Terrified that the eight-week trip would give her endless opportunities to stray, he convinced himself that some private school snake-in-the-grass would triumph where he had failed on his own Odyssey in 1965. Full of passion, George swore up and down that he’d sooner rot in hell than let Sally cross the road without him.
She had come to know him as quiet and lovable, and seeing him act so possessively shocked her. “Guess what? I am going. What are you going to do about it?”
The more George protested, the more she resisted. If he was playing Othello, inflamed by the green-eyed monster, she was not about to channel Desdemona and expire under the smothering pillow.
Then it got worse. Dr. Wodehouse insisted that his daughter was not only destined for a nursing career but that she should train at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. George interpreted this latest paternal edict, on top of the trip, as part of a conspiracy to distance his daughter from her overanxious suitor.
Feeling as if it was a full-time job managing the two Georges in her life, Sally huddled with Gerrie to forge her own plan. First, she persuaded her best friend to come with her on the Odyssey. Then they both applied to nursing school at the University of Toronto for the fall of ’68 and agreed that, one day, they would stand as each other’s bridesmaid. When she returned home, Sally assured her boyfriend, she would be right where he wanted her.
* * *
—
On Christmas Night 1967, George was as usual invited to the Wodehouse family dinner. But as he scanned Sally’s family members taking their set places at the polished rosewood dining room table, he felt his distance from their circle and the class codes conducted with such symphonic seamlessness by Dr. and Mrs. W. Here was the gilded box that to his eyes increasingly resembled a coffin; here was the rarefied heaven-on-earth his mother so unambiguously wanted for him. But did Sally want it too? As George sipped the cold vichyssoise from the monogrammed sterling silver spoon, he wondered how long before he would need the same spoon to tunnel out of prison. The question gnawed: do I belong here?
Past midnight, George and Sally ascended the staircase and lingered in each other’s arms on the threshold of the second-floor guest bedroom. After Sally broke off their kiss, he watched her slip away into the darkness to her bedroom on the floor above.
In the dawn light of Boxing Day, he was jolted awake by a dream of primal intensity. As the phantasm of faces and voices melted away, he was left with a single thought drumming his head: Sally will die in Europe this summer.
Over breakfast, he could not help telling Sally the dream. As he watched her face fall, he knew he should back off but instead found himself begging her to drop out of the Odyssey. She was bewildered, then creeped out, then irritated. For weeks he had been badgering her to not to go, and now he was pulling this stunt?
Undeterred, George told the dream to his parents, Sally’s parents, his friends, to anyone who would listen: “Sally will die in Europe this summer.” Almost to a person, the response came back: “Get over it. She loves you. The dream is just a dream.” The sole exception was his neighbour Graham Gillman. Destined to divert from a promising corporate path into a Buddhist monastery in Sri Lanka, Graham was the only one in George’s world who actually knew how to listen. All the same, George could not shake a deepening sense of isolation.
* * *
—
Through the winter of 1967–68 and into the spring, George and Sally squabbled over petty things—which movie to see, which restaurant to choose, which route to take home. Soon they were making excuses not to see each other every day, since the less they saw of each other the less they made scenes. They loved each other, but their mutual irritation forced them apart until their attraction pulled them back together. The dream, the talking about it, the not talking about it, the dressing-downs and the making-ups, the lust, the mistrust, all mirrored the larger riotous, crazy, unravelling world. Soon only one thing united them: losing their virginity.
But where could they find the space and time? The third floor of Sally’s house? George’s basement? Her mother’s Mustang? His mother’s Triumph? Four no’s spawned a single yes: one Saturday afternoon, feeling half his age of twenty, George booked a room in the King Edward, the venerable downtown hotel where the Beatles had slept. While Sally waited upstairs, George survived the worst fifteen minutes of his life summoning the nerve to buy condoms in the lobby drugstore.
But even their new physical closeness failed to relieve the dread simmering in George’s chest as the date of Sally’s summer Odyssey edged closer.
* * *
—
On the afternoon of Tuesday, June 11, George joined family and frie
nds to watch the seventy-one graduates of the Branksome Hall class of 1968 gather in front of the Metropolitan United Church at Queen and Church Streets in downtown Toronto. Tradition called for all grads to wear a dress of pure white—nothing sleeveless, strapless or touched with colour—but the girls fashioned a creative mix of semi-dodgy designs: long-sleeved, short-sleeved, some high-necked and virginal, others daring a flash of cleavage.
A kilted highlander in full-dress regalia led the line of girls through the arched doors of the church and down the centre aisle to the front pews, his elbow squeezing from his bagpipe a primitive droning and chanting sound originally designed to spur Celtic warriors into the madness of battle but which, on this tranquil day, released nothing but an air of dignified poignancy. The principal handed out the diplomas in alphabetical order, Sally Lyn Wodehouse the last in line.
Piped out of the church, the grads returned to the school where they picked up bouquets of roses sent by family and boyfriends, then gathered behind the boarding quarters of Sherborne House to pose for the official black-and-white class photograph. For the final act, all were piped, two by two, through the gates of the Junior School, back to their beginnings, past the old Deacon House, while along the path, family and friends clapped and snapped photos as traffic hummed through the wooded ravine of Rosedale Valley Road. On the back lawn of Jarvis House, a three-storey Victorian, all gravitated to the shade of the maple tree planted in 1867, the birth year of Canada. Murmuring mothers in stylish hats spooned dishes of ice cream shaped like strawberries while cherubic kindergarten kids skipped across the grass, their kilts fastened with tartan suspenders.
Around the fringes of what was clearly a family affair, boyfriends such as George hovered self-consciously, disguised in jackets and ties, like untrained foxes circling the henhouse. George found himself dreaming of some kind of rescue mission, but he was still unsure whether it was Sally or himself most in need. A dreary clerical summer job confined to his father’s insurance office had already induced a near-chronic lethargy. For her part, Sally exulted in the freedom promised by the soft June breeze. She was now done with the tight schedule of the swimming, badminton and basketball teams, all that jolly-hockey-sticks crap, the demerit points issued for drooping bloomers, the age-old “You can’t be too rich, thin, smart and athletic” pecking orders.
Dreaming Sally Page 5