Dreaming Sally

by James Fitzgerald

  A morning excursion to Notre-Dame Cathedral felt like a funeral without a body. When Tammy suggested we light a candle and say a prayer for Sally, something in me protested: No, this is not good enough.

  Everywhere we turned, my eyes fell on monuments and memorials to the dead. In the Place Vendôme, round the corner from the hotel, I read a plaque marking the apartment where Chopin had died mysteriously at thirty-nine. In the Conciergerie on the Île de la Cité, I studied the prison table and chair where Marie Antoinette spent her last hours before losing her head.

  When I bumped into John, I noticed he was hobbled by a bruised thigh, which he’d jammed against the gearshift of the bus as Sally fell out the door. We said next to nothing. Decades would pass before I would learn that he and Walter had wandered haphazardly through the rainy, midnight streets of Paris, replaying over and over the scene of horror.

  * * *

  —

  In the Louvre, I stood before the Mona Lisa, disappointed by its smallness. Back at the hotel, I returned a phone call from my mother, handling her awkwardness with a practised reflex: “I’m fine, I’m fine.” She’d heard the news of Sally when my brother read a squib in the newspaper; other parents heard via CFRB Radio when the host, Gordon Sinclair, had ranted about the recklessness of teenagers spoiled by the permissiveness of the times. Bernie had been beaten by the speed of the media.

  Passing up a tour of Versailles, I spent most of an afternoon composing a letter to Sally’s parents, crossing out words, tearing up paper, starting again, struggling to nail down an honest feeling. As I sealed the envelope, I packed away Sally’s death as ruthlessly as I had her devotion to another, and in my diary I wrote, “Enough eulogizing.”

  Our five nights in Paris climaxed in the nightclub of the Folies Bergère. I couldn’t believe they let a seventeen-year-old through the door. Sitting with Nick and Tammy, I longed to exchange them for my real parents. A string of acts unfolded across the stage. As if spewn from the Delacroix painting Liberty Leading the People, with its bare-breasted allegorical figure, a brace of topless, figure-skating Gallic goddesses glided over a pad of ice. I cracked Tammy up with my inevitable Ed Sullivan imitation—“And now, for all you youngsters out there!”—and plugged back into the electric thrill of moving a woman to tears of laughter. Ringed with flutes of champagne, our table tipped into infectious hysteria. For the first time ever, I saw a row of perfectly formed breasts, and for a time Sally was forgotten.

  S.S. Raffaello, Sally and Robin

  S.S. Raffaello, Sally, Tammy, Nick, Stu, Barb

  Mount Vesuvius, Italy, James and Sally

  James and Sally, Rome

  Sally, Rome

  James buried on the Lido, Venice: Sally, Rich, Jane, Sean, Chris, Peter, Annabel, Ross

  James and Sally, Lido, Venice, July 1968

  Sally, Nice, France

  Tammy

  Sally and James, summit of the Schilthorn, Switzerland

  James, Innsbruck, Austria

  Annabel and Stu

  Jane, Stu and Sally

  Nick and Stu

  Dave, Jane, James, Paul, Sally, Sean

  Annabel, Steve, James, Barb, West Germany

  Group portrait, Rüdesheim, West Germany, August 12, 1968; James and Sally, top left

  Barb, Sean, Kathy, Stan, Wally, Sally, Rhine steamer, August 13, 1968

  Sally’s last photo, Rhine steamer, August 13, 1968

  Rich, James, John, Robin, Nan, Paris, France

  Ending of George’s letter to Sally, July 14, 1968

  TWELVE

  I Told You So

  On Monday, August 19, as the hands of the clock swept toward 1 p.m., a host of mourners filed into the chapel of Trinity College on Hoskin Avenue in Toronto. The Odyssey was scheduled to return home on August 30, eleven days later, but Sally’s parents had decided that her funeral would proceed without her summer companions.

  In the neo-Gothic enclave of grey sandstone, George and Sally had intended to be married. But never again, even for one last time, would George gaze into the universe that was her face, for when Dr. Wodehouse flew to West Germany, red tape had delayed shipment of his daughter’s body to Toronto, and he was compelled to order her cremation. He bore the ashes on the homeward flight, a father alone in his quiet devastation — all alone, for he had refused George’s request to accompany him on the trip.

  In the austere oak pews in the rear of the chapel, in Stewart-green kilts, dozens of Branksome Hall students clustered. The four-year-old girls that Dr. Wodehouse, the Branksome physician, had once bade not to cry as he jabbed them with their vaccination needles were all teenagers now, and now all were crying.

  Together with Sally’s father, mother and sister, George sleepwalked down the centre aisle, accompanied by moaning bagpipes. Through the overflowing congregation of 150, he glanced neither left nor right, not even into the faces of his parents. Feeling everything, feeling nothing, he followed Dr. Wodehouse, his face stoic as his wife shed tears for them both.

  George moved past familiar figures: Gerrie, Sally’s best friend and last-minute dropout from the Odyssey; Eve, regretting her enthusiastic endorsement of the trip to Sally and destined to one day adopt the two children of close friends killed in a car crash; and Nancy, feeling she was reliving the shocks of the King and Kennedy assassinations.

  Over the past six days and nights, George had dwelt on the pounding cruelties and compounding coincidences. The postal strike had lifted on August 9, and just two days short of the second anniversary of their blind date, her last letter had arrived, postmarked Munich, a letter he could not bear to open, for on the back of the envelope she had jotted the last words she would ever write him:

  “Don’t forget August 18!”

  He could not bear the fulfillment of his premonition, nor the thought of his last unspoken words as she’d left him at the airport: I’m never going to see you again. It was not his bride but her remains, raked from a German crematorium, placed in an urn and encased in a polished mahogany box, that now stood before the altar, alone amid the wreaths of brilliant flowers.

  George stepped close and placed a single yellow rose on the box. He would not remember a word of the biblical consolations that followed.

  * * *

  —

  His dread of the wake at Sally’s house was justified: nothing but an assembly line of clichés, akin to slow-drip water torture. From the familiar murmuring voices, gin and cigar smoke, George escaped into the open air of the front veranda, a blinding pain in his eyes. Loosening his tie and fumbling for a cigarette, he contemplated the branches of the maple tree rooted in the front lawn, the grace and beauty of the curving street, the small, triangle-shaped traffic island of grass where Cluny Drive met Chestnut Park, the erect lines of wrought-iron lamps stretching down the sidewalk of interlocking red bricks, reaching inexorably into a dark, mad place. Glancing at the self-winding Bucherer wristwatch that Sally had bought him as a present in Switzerland, retrieved by her father from her luggage, George was unsure whether to faint or vomit or scream.

  Then, the thought, most terrible of all, rose up, the unforgiving voice of accusation married to the force of perfect logic: If Sally is dead, then it must have been I who killed her. If I am responsible, I am guilty, and I deserve to die.

  The thought was written on his face, at least for those with eyes to see. But it was only Stewart who knew what to do. “Get into my car,” he commanded. “Right now.”

  George sprawled across the back seat of the 1965 canary yellow Skylark—the back seat of his first date with Sally two years past—as Stewart drove due north on Highway 11. Fifty miles out, they passed the De Grassi Point turnoff, but this time they did not stop. They pressed through the Sudbury nickel belt toward New Liskeard in the rough Northern Ontario bush. On the lip of Fairy Lake, nudging the Quebec border, they settled into a crude box of a cabin built during the war by Stewart’s parents—Fred, the most non-judgmental man George had ever known, and his wife, Mary,
the kindest of mothers he had ever met.

  The cabin provided the basics: food, beer, bunk beds, outhouse, wood stove, oil lamps, sunsets promising sunrise. George was barely able to move or form a sentence, but there was comfort in knowing that no one knew where he was. Filling the void left by Sally, Stewart let George feel what he needed to feel, and it felt like losing everyone, everything, his very self.

  Day upon day the two friends drank, swam, fished, raged, wept. Struggling to make sense of the nightmare, they backtracked through events and determined that Stewart’s impulsive decision to quit Ireland and contact George closely coincided with the moment on August 13 when Sally’s head cracked on the German asphalt. But the realization only deepened George’s torment: why had no one listened to his premonition, his pleas, especially Sally? And for all his hating, why must he hate her most of all? But he did, because it was Sally who had abandoned him to this place, this firepit of intolerable loss and guilt.

  Ten days later they returned to Toronto. All childhoods must die, and in the sudden death of his own, George grasped for a thread, a hidden meaning, a larger pattern and purpose. All he could find was Stewart, the natural, intuitive young man disdained by Dorothy Orr as a bad influence, yet who had saved his life. But for what?

  In his absence, the Wodehouses had buried Sally’s ashes in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in a family-only ceremony. In his mailbox, among many notes of condolence, George found one from Sally’s mother:

  Your flowers for Sally were simply beautiful and all the colours she adored. You were a tower of strength to us all and a great comfort to me. I know why she fell in love with you, dear, because you are as fine a man as I fell in love with 30 years ago. Come and see us often and look to the future where you will find happiness.

  Affectionately, Jane Wodehouse

  But George doubted the sincerity of the last sentence. He was now only a reminder of their loss, possibly its cause, for had they not urged the Odyssey on Sally to break her tie to him?

  * * *

  —

  Our group was scheduled to spend six nights in London, then return to Toronto on August 25, but a labour dispute delayed our charter flight an extra five days. With formal tours and lectures over, we were left to wander the city on our own. Instead of going to a funeral, we must keep having fun.

  Icons of the UK—helmeted bobbies, red double-decker buses, black cabs, brolly-bearing businessmen—passed me on the streets. The moon faces of Big Ben both echoed and dwarfed the UCC clock tower that had dominated the days of my childhood. In the Imperial War Museum, I touched a sleek Nazi V2 rocket; in Madame Tussauds I came upon a perfect life-sized mannequin of JFK lacking a bloody head wound. Wandering alone through Westminster Abbey, I found rows of chiselled heads in Poets’ Corner—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, the Brontë sisters, Dickens, Hardy. The storytellers.

  I felt like an unsupported idea of a potential person drifting through space. Could I extract a pinch of solace or self from fragments of cultural bric-a-brac? I might be marooned on the original island dedicated to the emotional strangulation of children, but I knew the antidote lived here too—the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, artists who embodied primal feelings—passion, anger, love.

  In the womb of a cinema, I swam in the images of Yellow Submarine, the Beatles’ psychedelic cartoon of Pepperland and its Sea of Holes. As the credits rolled, the four faces of John, Paul, George and Ringo popped onto the screen, and I was overwhelmed by the shaggy heads, fifteen feet tall, more than alive, more than real. John declared that a gang of music-hating Blue Meanies had been sighted near our theatre, and we must join with them singing “All Together Now.” But everything was falling apart.

  A heavy downpour confined us to the hotel for a full day. Wild world events meshed with my mental haze: the youth of the Prague Spring raining Molotov cocktails on Soviet tanks, Chicago police clubs cracking random heads in a political riot. Wandering from room to room in an agitated torpor, I sucked on a bottle of vermouth, the taste guaranteed to revive Sally and Rome; I craved a purging act of violence to make me feel I had not misplaced my body for good. Cash-poor Kathy pleaded for a pound to buy “Hey Jude,” the Beatles new single, released that day. I cut open the lining of my madras jacket and handed over the $20 Canadian note my mother had planted there in case of emergency.

  Opening a letter from my mother, I read the news that Millie, my friend Mike’s mother, had drowned in a backyard pool around the time Sally died. Mike was the one who had taken a sledgehammer to the walls of his parents’ bedroom during the crazy Dunvegan Road Destructorama, and now this. Why did my mother think I needed to know about another sudden death now?

  On our last night, we merged with kids from the other Odyssey trips, thundering through the halls, overturning beds, raising the dead. An uncanny moment came when I heard a Simon and Garfunkel song, “April Come She Will,” and was seized by the line “August, die she must.” I couldn’t believe my ears. I gushed recklessly about Sally into the faces of strange girls, then fell silent. When John crashed on the floor at the foot of my bed, I tried not to imagine his nightmares.

  On August 30, we crammed into a double-decker bus to Heathrow terminal, trailed by the cameraman, last seen in Florence, who was shooting the last scenes of Bernie’s promotional film of the Odyssey. The show must go on. Several of the group had undergone Carnaby Street makeovers—Dave was in a bowler hat, Stu in a deerstalker, Robin in a flowing cape, Stanfield in a blue Nehru jacket, white turtleneck, grey stovepipe pants and black Beatle boots. In sync with the unrelenting unreality, I turned to face the camera and gave Bernie what he wanted: the idiot grin of the happy-go-lucky. The whole world is watching. As we checked our baggage, Marywinn dropped the souvenir wicker-wrapped Chianti bottle she had been toting since Italy, the smash of the glass on the terminal floor flushing shards of anguish. Keep calm and carry on.

  * * *

  —

  As the wheels of the BOAC jet touched down in Toronto, clapping and crying engulfed the cabin. I sat in defiant silence.

  At the baggage carousel, everyone was poised to scatter on divergent paths, some out west, some back east. Out of self-protection I slipped away, dodging the hugs that might jolt my body into unthinkable emotion. Passing through the sliding doors into the din of the terminal, I scanned the faces of the crowd scanning me, until I spotted my mother and brother. From the back seat of the car, I blathered with nervous tension, sensing my mother’s unease. No FitzGerald knew how to transmit or receive an atom of sensitive concern, and it was far too late to start now.

  I had changed while away, but nothing had changed at home. Hovering on the threshold of the TV room, I watched my father watching the coverage of the Chicago riots, and we exchanged a few terse words. He was there but not there, stalled in the mad traffic in his head. Her marriage dead, my mother was reinvesting her energy in me. But I was too young, too blind, too stunned to notice the raising of the emotional stakes.

  When she wordlessly slipped into my hand a folded sheet of baby blue onionskin paper, I realized I was holding the effusive, vermouth-stained letter I had dictated to Sally in Rome. In my mother’s face I detected no feeling, but I needed to believe that this was her way of acknowledging the catastrophe.

  The sight of Sally’s delicate handwriting restored her to life, and a thin fissure cracked the concrete of my chest. I bolted up the stairs to the third-floor bathroom and behind the door I smothered the deluge. Perching on the toilet seat, I realized I was back where I started: out in the cold. The fever dream of Italy rewound at hyper-speed, image after image: Volkswagens, Vesuvius, Vespas, vermouth, Vercingetorix, vestal virgins, Venetian vaporettos, in vino veritas. My thoughts ricocheted from the Atlantic salt spray to the mouth of the volcano, the mosaics of Pompeii to the dance of the Roman nightclub, the orange roof tiles of Florence to the sands of the Lido, the sublime Swiss pasture to the peak of the Schilthorn, the ovens of Dachau to the dream castles lining the Rhine, our
six-week path marked by Sally’s bent smile. How could the loss of a single body and soul make me feel this way? I was thrown back to the solitary confinement of the infant crib, longing and fearing to be heard. But if I knew anything for certain, I knew that no one would climb the stairs, or open the door, or extend a word or a hand, for no one could give what they did not have.

  * * *

  —

  On September 1, the Sunday of the Labour Day long weekend, two weeks before my eighteenth birthday, my mother drove me up to De Grassi Point. After receiving my letter from Paris, the Wodehouses had invited me to their cottage, hungry for first-hand details of Sally’s last summer.

  They had also invited George Orr.

  My mother and I were staying with friends on the other side of the point. After dinner I set off alone. Six summers had passed since I had seen the place, and I deliberately took my time in the late-summer dusk, hugging the shoreline, marking the way, cottage by cottage, dock by dock, tree by tree. As I passed the sandbar of the baby beach, the gentle lapping of the waves seemed strangely drained of their original enchantment. I expected to come upon the acre of wild waist-high grass near the Wodehouse place where Sally and I had moved barefoot, single file. When I saw that the grass had been cut down, forming an open commons, something about the tidy flatness thickened the pang in my throat.