Dreaming Sally

by James Fitzgerald

  Approaching the familiar worn steps and the double screen doors, I recognized the home base of our blissed-out games of Kick the Can, and a voice was released inside me: “Don’t worry. We’ll always befriends. I’ll visit you at university this fall. I promise.”

  Dr. and Mrs. Wodehouse ushered me into the familiar two-storey-tall living room, its open atrium a reminder of the Paris hotel. I greeted Diana, so different from her sister, and a neighbour, John Harrison. I had not seen either of them since 1962, and I was relieved that they remembered I existed. When my eyes fell on the black-bearded face of a stranger, the doctor asked, “Do you know George Orr?” I thought I had quietly assassinated him in Rome, but as my hand rose to meet his, he turned as real as the flesh on our bones.

  As Dr. Wodehouse rolled out a trolley of liquor, Mrs. Wodehouse invited me to the sofa where I had watched TV with Sally. They urged me to speak freely of the trip, holding back nothing, a prospect both exciting and dangerous. They were playing to my strength—memory—so I conducted an animated six-week travelogue, from Sally’s first day on the Raffaello right through to the last hours on the Rhine steamer. I reported that the boys voted Sally the most popular girl on the trip, as if such a simple, happy fact might miraculously set all to rights. I did not think to ask why they held the funeral before we returned home. Why did they not wait for us?

  I filled myself with alcohol as I emptied myself of stories. One last all-nighter with Sally. Then I realized that the more I was holding up the parents, the more I was dropping George, who had withdrawn into a corner in silence and now stared at me with unnerving intensity. I could not say aloud what he needed to know: Yes, I slept with her, but I only slept with her.

  I could guess his thoughts: Did she actually fall for this shallow asshole?

  No one wept.

  Standing to leave, I shook George’s hand and glimpsed the void in his eyes. I did not know that Dr. Wodehouse had been treating his sleep deprivation with doses of thorazine; drugs, the young man was learning, were a blessing, for they killed the dreaming state.

  Declining Mrs. Wodehouse’s offer of a flashlight, I headed back to our friends’ cottage as pink glimmers of the rising sun streamed through the arms of the pines and reflected off the still face of the lake. Mercifully I was spared the execution-at-dawn feeling that never ceased to haunt my early mornings. Passing our old rental cottage fronting the baby beach, I remembered the salamander that as an eleven-year-old I buried in a glass jar back in that ancient August when Marilyn Monroe died. I knew exactly where it was, but I kept moving.

  * * *

  —

  Days later, Gerrie Grand entered nursing school at the University of Toronto, where she and Sally had planned to share a room in residence.

  At a small gathering one September night, two student nurses pulled out a Ouija board. Gerrie’s fingers were not touching the heart-shaped planchette, but the board was emitting a compelling energy. Gerrie watched as the girls posed question upon question:

  “Are you female?”

  YES.

  “Did you die under age twenty?”

  YES.

  “Do you know anyone in the room?”

  YES.

  “What is your name?”

  The planchette slowly spelled out SALLY.

  Gerrie felt the hair on the back of her neck rising. “Do you have a message for us?”

  Letter by letter, the planchette spelled out TELL GEORGE I’M OK.

  Despite her fear, Gerrie believed she had connected with Sally and bought a Ouija board. She tried to duplicate the experience with George, but nothing happened. George told her that he had burned all of Sally’s letters, the ones she had asked him to save. But, in fact, he had stored them in a box.

  If Sally was OK, George was not.

  THIRTEEN

  George Orpheus

  As the dying summer of 1968 seeped into fall, George was learning there was no value in room-clearing displays of emotion, no audience for his grief and guilt over the loss of Sally. His friends, save for Stewart, were sick of it; new people he met at school were made uncomfortable by it. His mother kept repeating, “He’ll be fine.” In the eyes of his war veteran father, George could see the question, Why lose sleep over one girl?

  Sally’s parents remained gracious and welcoming, until the day Diana spoke the words that while echoing George’s own suspicions, he did not need to hear: “You probably shouldn’t be coming around much anymore. You remind them of Sally.”

  One day from the radio the lyrics of “On the Way Home,” the new Buffalo Springfield song, seemed to witness his agony, and for a moment they served as a salve:

  When the dream came

  I held my breath

  with my eyes closed.

  I went insane,

  like a smoke ring day

  when the wind blows.

  Now I won’t be back

  till later on

  if I do come back at all.

  On a chill afternoon in late October, he drove alone through the Yonge Street gate of Mount Pleasant Cemetery, pushed open the door of the administration building and asked directions to the grave of Sally Wodehouse. A map was produced, a red circle marking the spot. Down the asphalt lanes he rolled, through the two-hundred-acre arboretum of rare and exotic species, past the serene autumnal lawns and tufts of orange leaves clogging the moribund flower beds, past the still fountains and statues. Arriving at plot Y, he stopped the car and moved among the waves of graves, compelled forward by a mix of longing and dread, until at last he found the upright granite slab, its flat, cold face meeting his own:

  IN LOVING MEMORY OF SALLY LYN WODEHOUSE MAY 25, 1950 – AUG. 13, 1968

  He averted his gaze, then turned back, staring. Wreathed in crumbling roses, the monument was divided into quadrants, the three blank spaces awaiting the inevitable appearance of the names and dates of her father, mother and sister. Flushed, nauseated, he felt worse than the moment of the funeral when he’d stood before the wooden box containing her ashes, flower in hand, for now the truth was carved in stone: she was never coming back.

  George could talk only to himself, not to Sally. And so he retraced his footsteps through the Toronto dead, returning to his mother’s car and the underworld of the undergraduate and the forgiveness promised by music and drugs.

  * * *

  —

  Stewart had planned to remain in Dublin and attend Trinity College, but Sally’s death changed everything. Quitting Ireland, he entered his first year of York University specifically to take care of George. In the figure of the stocky, bearded, blue-eyed “psychic Viking,” George would find in Stewart a sturdy post to lean on.

  Incapable of tolerating stillness or silence, George craved constant stimulation, yet parties weren’t working for him and nothing academic was sticking: psychology, philosophy, English and history all reeked of the rote data-cram of high school. In the works of Thomas Hardy and their gloomy skein of outlandish coincidences, he gazed into the mirror of his own life. He felt more real playing contact sports. Then, one Friday afternoon, he and Stewart passed six hours in the embryonic radio club, high on magic mushrooms, spinning records and driving each other into spasms of hilarity; from such small beginnings a campus radio station was born.

  They also discovered the student newspaper, Excalibur, affectionately nicknamed Low Calibre. Under the editor, Ross Howard, George typed out articles on the plight of the environment and the legalization of pot. When Stewart, the sports editor, organized a contest to name the inept football team, a stern Anglo moniker emerged: the Yeomen. At last, George felt he was tapping into the potent world of storytelling.

  Lacking fraternities, York University was an undeveloped nine-year-old bereft of a sense of community, and George set about enlivening the remote, soulless cow pasture, if only to enliven himself. The campus had no Homecoming Weekend, so that fall George and Stewart started an arts festival. Students were invited to attack an old Volkswagen with sledge
hammers, scope a twenty-four-hour marathon of Roadrunner, Bugs Bunny and Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons and razz the abysmal football team as it worked on a record-breaking losing streak.

  For the Saturday-night headline act, George and Stewart signed Gordon Lightfoot, but when Canada’s premier folkie inspected the condition of the makeshift stage, he snarled, “You’re a bunch of fucking amateurs. I’m not performing on that!” Charm and persuasion prevailed, and he did go on: the show sold out at $5 a head, and the next day the budding impresarios threw $8,000 in cash into the air. They paid themselves $200 each for their trouble and gave the remainder to the student council. Heading downtown to Sam the Record Man, George blew the entire wad on dozens of rock ’n’ roll albums. Stunned by the success of the festival, the university president told George and Stewart, “You guys will take over the world!”

  That same fall of 1968, a bright, vivacious, second-year arts student strolled into the Excalibur office. Valerie was amused by the sight of Stewart, a hulking, hirsute character in granny glasses, white jeans, fringed leather jacket and cowboy boots. Although Stewart was entranced by Val, he tried to manoeuvre her into George’s orbit. But soon Stewart realized that in this young woman he had found the meaning of his life.

  When she learned the Sally story, Val tacitly understood not to wade too deeply into the dark pool of George’s shifting moods. She also knew, uncomfortably, that if not for Sally’s death, she would never have met Stewart because he would have stayed in Ireland. A girl Val never knew had set the course of her life.

  * * *

  —

  On Saturday, May 24, 1969, nine months after they met, Stewart and Valerie were married in her hometown of Delhi, nestled in the tobacco belt of Southwestern Ontario. Stewart shaved off his beard to please a father who didn’t need pleasing. As best man, George did his best to transform himself from slouching hippie into well-mannered, upright gentleman, dancing with rural grandmothers who cooed, “Such a nice young man!”

  At the wedding, George found himself taken with Val’s cousin, Katherine Grant. One day in June, not long past his twenty-second birthday, he drove his mother’s Triumph two hours westward to Katherine’s hometown of Aylmer. With Val as a bridge between them, he anticipated a romance. George and his date passed a balmy evening strolling the sand dunes on the north shore of Lake Erie, but when he extended a single yellow rose, the young woman returned nothing but a tepid brand of Canadian politeness.

  By eleven that night, he resigned himself to the long drive back to the city. Puttering along a deserted two-lane road, he drifted past silent farmhouses in the pitch-blackness. Then headlights flashed in his rearview mirror, and he watched a hulking, Detroit-made car scorching up from behind at twice his own speed. Cresting a small hill, pushing 80 mph as it passed George, the yellow car seemed to lift off the road a second before it smashed head-on into an oncoming Volkswagen bug.

  Skidding to the brink of the ditch, George sprinted back to find the two cars welded together like a grotesque sculpture, gasoline spewing from the fuel line. Low moans from the drivers fused with the ominous ticking of hot metal. A sick terror flooded his stomach as a spark ignited the gas and a deafening fireball exploded the moonless night. Then came the wail of a police car.

  Stopping shy of the inferno, a cop got out of the cruiser and ran up to George: he had been pursuing the speeding yellow car. Bringing George back to his car, he opened his trunk and pulled out an extinguisher, blanket, flashlight and axe, and together they dashed back. They doused the flames, pulled the driver of the yellow car out and laid him on the side of the road. He was bleeding heavily but still breathing.

  Inside the wreckage of the VW bug, the driver was pinned by the steering column. The cop forced the door open with the axe, releasing a stench of roasting flesh. The spray of the extinguisher reduced the flames enough for the pair of rescuers to move in. But as George reached for the driver’s arm, he felt strips of flesh melt in his hands, and the limb detached. The cop kept hacking away, but George was certain the young man was past saving, and soon the cop gave up, dropping the bloody axe on the asphalt.

  More police cars, more swirling red lights. The driver who caused the carnage was loaded into an ambulance; cops murmured that he had been drinking. Miraculously George had suffered only a surface singeing of his hair and eyebrows. But three hours of cigarettes, coffee and police interviews gradually eased the blur of shock sheathing his nervous system.

  At dawn, George headed home, arriving as Mac and Dorothy Orr were rising. Ten months earlier, he had walked into this same house, this same living room, and told these same parents that Sally was dead, and their reaction had been only to stare at him wordlessly. But this time, as her son crossed the threshold, Dorothy Orr lifted her hands to her face and screamed: George was covered in blood from head to foot. For the next two days, he managed his distraught mother; to manage himself, he scribbled an account of the experience, another chapter for the melodrama of his life so far.

  Two days after the accident, George was charged with manslaughter. The drunk driver, the son of the local mayor, claimed that George—the man who had helped save his life—had forced him into the oncoming lane. A court date was set; if he failed to appear, he would be arrested. Two weeks later, George and his father drove back to the scene of the accident; their dread of a cover-up evaporated when the judge asked George a few questions, apologized for his trouble and told him he was free to go.

  For years to come, passengers in George’s car would tease him about driving like an old lady. But it was okay with him: he wanted to reach the end of the road.

  * * *

  —

  After four years of university and still no degree, George drifted through the summer of ’69 in a jobless fog. When the newlyweds Stewart and Val moved into an apartment building south of the university, George moved into the bachelor unit next door. Although the move freed him from his parents’ basement, he was more than ever prone to melancholy. He fed his head with a mix of narcotics and the daily news cycle—John and Yoko’s bed-in, the moon landing, the Manson Family murders. Even as he wallowed in endless replays of the double concept album, Odessa, and the quavering voices of the Bee Gees (“You’ll Never See My Face Again”)—he could not shake an amorphous physical pain and struggled to find its precise location in his body so he could make it stop.

  Hoping to divert his floundering friend, Stewart talked up a trip to the Woodstock Festival, to be held from August 15 to 18 in upstate New York. But the dates meshed with the third anniversary of the blind date with Sally, and the first anniversary of her death, so George passed up a defining moment in the history of his generation because a different moment was defining him.

  On an idyllic stretch of a Lake Erie beach, a gang of fast friends gathered outside a cottage for a day-long picnic. The gas-fired water heater had lost its pilot light, and as George crawled under on his back to reignite it, a burst of flame singed his eyebrows. His mind snapped back to the burning Volkswagen, hard on the heels of his failed wooing of Katherine. He rejoined the free-flowing game of Frisbee on the sand, and then…nothing. His chaotic inside conversation stopped cold, as if an audio jack was pulled. The dead-letter office of the mind.

  For a full year, his failure to control his feelings had shamed his nice, normal family who wanted nothing more than a nice, normal son. But now something new, something else, something darker, was upon him, as if he were a floating astronaut leaking oxygen from his space suit. The more he dreaded the white whale of emptiness, the deeper it seeped under his skin.

  * * *

  —

  As told by the poet Ovid in the two-thousand-year-old Metamorphoses, Orpheus was a legendary semi-divine augur and seer of royal blood venerated by the Greeks and Romans of the Classical Age. A charming and gifted player of the lyre, he made spellbinding music capable of calming savage beasts, coaxing trees and rocks into dance and diverting the course of rivers.

  He led a simple, shelt
ered life until the day he met the nymph Eurydice, and they fell deeply in love. On their wedding day, a satyr saw Eurydice and wanted to possess her. Fleeing in terror through a field of tall grass, she fell into a nest of vipers and suffered a fatal bite on her heel. Overcome with grief, Orpheus played mournful songs that made all the nymphs weep.

  Upon their urging, he slipped through the cleft of a cave and followed Eurydice’s ghost on her downward path deep into the Underworld. Crossing the Styx, the river of death, he confronted Cerebus, the three-headed dog guarding death’s door, who fawningly let him pass. Singing sweetly among the ranks of the dead, Orpheus suspended the repetitive tortures they were condemned to suffer: fetching water from cracked vessels, tantalized by luscious fruit hanging out of reach, sunk neck-deep in water but unable to drink, rolling boulders up hills. Softening the bloodless ghosts with the magic of his music, Orpheus came upon the implacable King Pluto and his consort Persephone.

  “How did you make it here?” demanded Pluto.

  “Love,” Orpheus responded, “had greater strength than I.”

  Then he sang for the return of Eurydice to earth: “If you deny me, I cannot return alone; you shall triumph in the death of us both.” Persephone was the first to be moved; Sisyphus himself ceased his labours, sitting on his rock to listen, and the faces of the wild Furies dampened with tears.

  Then the stern Pluto himself fell to weeping. He agreed to release Eurydice to Orpheus on one condition. As they silently surfaced to the sunlight, Orpheus must cover his eyes with his hand—symbolically blind to the reality of her death—and not look back at his beloved; if he did, she must dwell in the Underworld for eternity.