Dreaming Sally

by James Fitzgerald

  At a jammed press conference, he encountered a federal Liberal cabinet minister, Robert Kaplan, the man for whom he’d cast his first vote as a twenty-one-year-old in June 1968. Within the scrum of reporters, there was a tendency to play it safe: let the competitor ask the difficult question, risk appearing wrong or stupid and suffer the flip putdown of the smug politician. But George figured that if journalists served the public trust, they must never be cowed. As Kaplan skirted an issue of cable TV regulations, George shouted, “Excuse me, that’s a lie!” As the politician mumbled to his handlers and left, the phalanx of cameras turned on George, and for a moment he was the story. He was forging an existential code: never let the powerful, from parents to teachers to politicians, control the narrative. Only God was unavailable for comment.

  Now seven years into their relationship, George and Ronda, each burned by a divorce, continued to embrace a mutual disdain of matrimony. But then an unexpected pregnancy changed everything, and that spring of 1982 he stood with Ronda before the altar of St. Francis-in-the-Wood, an Anglican church in West Vancouver. Stewart and Valerie flew in from Ontario for the wedding. When he left Barrie in 1975, George had waited a year before contacting them, ashamed of how he had abused the good graces of his old friends who for seven years stood as emotional substitutes for Sally. But the old bond ran too deep to be permanently broken.

  * * *

  —

  Ronda’s pregnancy was arduous, their son born prematurely at four pounds on August 8, 1982. After spending two months in an incubator, George Nicholas Orr happily emerged as a robust, healthy boy, a strength that would play out in his insistence that although he was the fifth-generation male Orr to bear the name of George, he would answer only to Nick. Their daughter, Lily, born on May 25, 1984, was named in homage to Lillian, the widowed builder of the Keith Road cabin.

  As the father of a growing family, George felt his ambitions intensify. When CBC-TV cleaned house in the wake of a lawsuit over an erroneously reported story on an influence-peddling politician, he was hired as an assignment editor and forged a new skill: deploying troops into battle. He closely eyed the competition, BCTV, which pulled in an astonishing 700,000 viewers in a province of two million, the largest single audience share in North America. How did they do it?

  One day in 1985, he called his direct competitor: “If I can beat you every day for a month, will you hire me?” George delivered and moved over to take a job as an assignment editor in the CTV building on Enterprise Avenue in Burnaby. He was scaling the money-and-status beanstalk.

  His one-year stint at CTV skidded to a halt in 1986 when his boss, driven by a blend of heartlessness and a peerless news instinct, crossed a line. In pursuit of a story, a helicopter was hovering over a man pinned under a tree in the mountains, and the newsman on board radioed George for permission to land and help the victim. When George relayed the message to his boss, he replied, “Our job is to cover the news, not save people. Tell him to shoot it and get back here pronto.” George had been thinking of quitting, and now his moral idiot of a superior had provided a pretext.

  Returning to the CBC, he was quickly promoted to producer of the nightly six o’clock news. Sent on a marathon forty-two-day training course in Toronto led by Donald Brittain, the legendary National Film Board documentary director and producer, he felt inspired and galvanized, a dissonant experience in a city he had long linked to slow suffocation.

  A few days before flying home, George was driving down Mount Pleasant, the avenue of bottomless dreams. At his side sat Ronda, who had been vacationing with the kids in cottage country; Nick and Lily, now four and two, were safely belted in the back seat. Impulsively George swerved through the cemetery gates and pulled up to plot Y, last seen in the fall of 1968, eighteen years earlier. He stepped out, but Ronda stayed in the car. She knew where he was going.

  * * *

  —

  As a producer, George embraced each morning with the words, “I have no idea what’s going to happen today.” Dispersing news trucks and helicopters across the Lower Mainland, he “juggled the Jell-O,” as the raw material flowed in over the morning and afternoon, chopping stories into tight segments in the race toward the immovable deadline. The job demanded the multi-tasking instant-response skills of an air-traffic controller: fluidity, dynamism, decisiveness, adaptability, stamina.

  On the morning when he learned that a stricken 747 airliner was flying in from China with a broken undercarriage, dumping fuel over the Pacific, he didn’t waste a second. Deploying seven cameramen to the airport, he savoured a twisted thought: If it crashes, I can sell the tape and retire. In his head he brilliantly directed from every conceivable angle a perfectly framed, giving-the-people-what-they-want film spectacular: the slow, doom-shadowed descent onto the foam-covered bed of the concrete runway, the apocalyptic Hollywood crash, the livid fireball, the crushed fuselage and severed wings, the screaming crimson fire trucks and ambulances, the riveting chain of master shots and close-ups, the whole hypnotic theatre of total human disaster and its aftermath, an award-winning blockbuster that, alas, failed to deliver: “Fuck, they landed!”

  In a moment of serendipity, George one day caught a news item that the Calgary city council had received as a gift the bell of the HMCS Calgary, the corvette on which his father had served in the North Atlantic. George knew it was a mistake because his father possessed the real bell. He phoned the mayor of Calgary to set him straight, then called the CBC National newsroom in Toronto. When a camera crew appeared in the living room of 189 Gordon Road, Mac Orr was thrilled to authenticate his ownership of the bell and spread his war stories across Canada, his first and last time on TV.

  For George, the real story turned on an emerging moment of truth. For decades his parents had tagged him as “poor George,” the unrealized lawyer/politician/businessman who had settled for the apostate life of a hippie carpenter, a lowly tradesman who worked with his hands, giving the finger to the Upper Canadian gentry. But with the appearance of a national news team in the place where he lived, Commander Orr saw his son in a new light: a maker of waves, a man of influence, a force, a big wheel. For George, the bell rang cleanly in his head. The son who had once looked up to his war-hero father now looked down; the father who had once looked down on his disappointment of a son now looked up. If there was a moment when they saw eye to eye, it lasted but a blink.

  When Mac retired from the family firm in 1987, he visited his newly respected son in Vancouver. He was much taken with the soft green climate, the winter-blooming flowers, the over-the-rainbow independent utopia of “Cascadia” filled with ex-Easterners freed of the freight of their eastern-ness. While driving drunk in an elite neighbourhood of West Vancouver, Mac was pulled over by a policeman. When he mouthed the magic words, “Be careful, my son is a CBC producer,” the cop let him off with a warning.

  Back in Toronto, Mac and Dorothy asked George to shoot a video of a house in Horseshoe Bay, only five minutes away from George’s Copper Cove Road home: they were thinking of leaving Toronto and relocating not only to Vancouver but to their son’s very own neighbourhood. When they bought the house, George experienced serial rushes of shock, bewilderment and anger, but he could not bring himself to forbid the gross intrusion.

  Naturally, he felt compassion too. Childhood sweethearts, his parents had passed their entire lives in Lawrence Park and York Mills, prisoners of social convention. They had finally got it: maybe the sky will not fall if we do what we want. At first, his mother needed persuading: uprooting from a lifelong network of friends was no small feat. But George thought it was the bravest thing she had ever done, and so, weirdly, he realized that years after striking out west, he had liberated his parents too.

  Buying a second-hand cabin cruiser with a smoke-leaking engine, Mac ploughed up and down Howe Sound reliving the myth of his naval days. On the occasions when George joined his father on board for drinks, he was struck by a familiar feeling of detachment: Who is this guy? Why am I here? Why
is he here? He sensed his father’s loneliness, made plain by his parents’ refusal to babysit their young grandchildren, Nick and Lily. Children remained messy, noisy little creatures, best unseen and unheard. Over Christmas dinner, when Dorothy was vexed by the rambunctious play of the kids, Ronda confronted her mother-in-law. Caught in the crossfire between an outlaw hippie wife and a Victorian-stiff mother of equal willfulness, George swivelled from one face to the other, beached in the middle of nowhere.

  * * *

  —

  In April 1989, George was fired by the CBC, one of many casualties of cost-cutting. When he returned to his office, he found his possessions stuffed in a cardboard carton, but one was lined with silver: he figured that if he had not been shown the door, alcoholism would have dropped him into a larger body-fitting box. He soon landed a job teaching journalism, starting in September, and the buyout package included 120 days of unused paid vacation that allowed him to dry out over the summer.

  But now he was at home all day, face to face with Ronda, and his presence struck them both as worse than his absence: George’s intense, decade-long affair with current affairs had stolen his passion for his partner. One evening, Ronda waved a magazine article on the adult children of alcoholics in his face: as if awakened from a spell, she recognized herself and the scars of her father’s booze-fuelled oppression. She began to attend meetings, which in George’s eyes made her a better mother but a worse partner. She’d resented his overworking and overdrinking and the intrusion of his parents; he resented her accusation that he in any way resembled her father.

  When Ronda proposed couples’ therapy, George thought she was plotting an exit strategy, assuming that he, like most men, would resist help. In fact, he wanted to save the union. When, after two months of one-way anger, the female therapist tactfully invited more give and take, Ronda threw in the towel. George stayed on; when the therapist confronted him over the fact that he was an alcoholic, the-man-who-will-not-be-told-what-to-do retorted, “No I’m not.” After a time, he quit therapy—and drinking.

  The coming-apart of the marriage was horrible. In the Greek myth transplanted to British Columbia, Orpheus, tied to the dead Eurydice by his prolonged grief, was torn to pieces by the enraged Furies, and Ronda was nothing if not furious. When it seemed she might move away with the kids, George panicked and gave her everything she asked for. More than anything, he could not bear losing the children.

  Ronda went back to school while George moved into a rented apartment; flung back to ground zero, he found much to contemplate. The parental invasion, followed by the sudden firing and the family breakup, threatened to rekindle the crisis that had nearly killed him in 1968, when Sally died. When you were a silver-haired forty-two-year-old man encircled by aging, clinging parents, an angry ex, needy kids of seven and five whose normal developmental tantrums you overcontrolled as if your own; when you were once a humble carpenter who dreamed his way westward to stake out a patch of freedom on Easy Street, living life his own way, only to find his shoulder harnessed to the wheel; when you were ashamed to be still haunted by the ghost of a long-dead girl; when you were all of these things, all at once, you were a man at risk.

  In his compulsion to get it right at work, he got it wrong at home. But wasn’t he dead right when he’d dreamed the fate of Sally? If her ghost killed his first marriage outright, she was at least a guilty coconspirator in the demise of his second. But in the ashes of his life, he discerned a seed.

  TWENTY

  Something Has Got to Give

  My denial of my situation had grown so all-consuming that even I could no longer deny it. The bodies were piling up, the back-to-back losses of Linda and Ann heading back down the highway to Sally; I was the unconfessed serial killer of the ones I loved, a failed idealist, a chronic cynic, blocked writer, and it was a toss-up whether I would ever again find value in human effort or desire.

  Awakening one morning, I recalled the loving face of Linda’s son, confused by my abrupt departure from his world, and felt a spike of honest pain. I was living three feet north of my body and it was time to move back in; time to confront myself; time to give myself the time of day.

  The damage inflicted on my hapless father by the drug-and-shock troops of conventional psychiatry had made me wary of seeking help. But now I saw a shaft of daylight: Therafields, the grassroots lay therapeutic communal experiment that I had cased five years earlier had recently disbanded and planned to open a formal training school on Dupont Street devoted to individual and group work. No self-serving cult would have packed it in.

  The community took the soundest thinking of the sixties and ran with it. Unbound by dogma or ideology, their unorthodox philosophy drew on an eclectic Canadian-style synthesis of Freud, Jung, Klein, Winnicott, Reich, Laing, Sullivan, Bowlby, Kohut, Fairbairn, Bion et al. From the trenches of a long collective experiment, they had developed a working method that was psychodynamic, bioenergetic, nutritional, interactive, humanistic and non-medical. They respected the power of dreams, transference and resistance. I decided if talk therapy was good enough for John Cleese, it was good enough for me. The spawn of a spineless father and a monstrously manipulative mother, Cleese once said that what he most derived from his therapy was that he no longer feared the intensity of his own feelings.

  In my screening interview in the fall of 1983, I was asked if I wanted to work with a man or woman. A man, give me a real man; I don’t know who I am. On the night before my first session, I dreamed I was sitting on a hill in a leather swivel chair of the talk-show variety, facing my mother and Peter, my assigned, still-unmet therapist. Turning to him, I pointed to my mother: “Tell her to leave me alone.” My mother was right about my being a dreamer but not in the way she meant.

  We met in the basement office of Peter’s home, and I basked in his wise tough-tender regard. For the first time I began to feel safe in the presence of a male elder, a paradoxical safety that would, in time, allow me to take risks. Built like a linebacker, Peter emanated a calm intuitiveness and a cast-iron integrity; his benign, bear-like presence made me feel that if I did my best, I could potentially bear the worst. He became an actual mentor, not a tormentor; if there were answers, if there were more questions, they were camping out inside me.

  In my third session, I reported a seismic nightmare that would serve as a template for the hard work to come. A five-year-old, I was standing in the cinder playground of Brown Public School on a moonless winter night, staring over the fence at the rear of my grandfather’s grey Edwardian Gothic house, all squinting dormers and slanted slate roof—the cauldron of the first seven years of my life. Heaving into view was an image of a small boy impaled on a stake. My throat burning, I screamed a stomach-emptying, silent scream. The original cold black yonder.

  For years, my family had lived with a secret, known but never voiced: as a toddler, my younger brother was routinely sexually molested by Hank Besselar, a Dutch carpenter who was the husband of the live-in help; the couple occupied the third-floor apartment in our house. Even when three-year-old Mike ran away on two separate occasions and was returned by the police each time, our parents remained oblivious—isn’t that what parents did?—and the abuse rolled on for two more years. Peter helped me see that the dream was like a movie trailer of a real event I could only now bear to view: that as a boy of kindergarten age, witnessing the quiet exploitation of my younger brother and identifying like mad, my nervous system had been fried like an egg on a skillet.

  Through Peter, and the dreams to follow, I realized that the resurrection of my own disowned voice was the only way out. Had I been naive enough to relate my dreams to a psychiatrist, he would likely have reached for his prescription pad and sentenced me to the fate of my drugged-to-the-gills father—a slow, silent, cotton-batten death-in-life pinioned to the haunted house of his, and my, childhood. I’d rather feel bad than feel nothing at all, since what you can’t feel you can’t heal.

  Session to session, I moved three steps forward,
two steps back, one step forward, pulled by hope and fear. Though our parents had separated in 1975, my sister insisted on bringing them together every Christmas, complete with gift exchanges, the struggle to make-nice breeding migraine-inducing tensions. A clean break seemed impossible.

  That Christmas of 1983, one month into my therapy, a full-blown psychotic break landed my father in the psych ward. Days later, I landed in hospital myself after fainting from intestinal bleeding, but the baffled psychologically impaired GI specialist could find no pathology in my bowel. I was opening myself up in ways I did not anticipate.

  Eventually I found myself recollecting to Peter the scene, from some years earlier, when the family was discussing the fate of the family dog, a decrepit seventeen-year-old poodle then staggering blindly into the furniture. Our mother could not bring herself to have her put down, nor could our father. He had given the dog the attention and affection he denied us—a put-down all its own—and when the issue reached a head at a family meeting in a restaurant, my sister Shelagh’s vulnerability tripped the family alarms against feeling. Our father needled her cruelly and I piled on, our callous, scapegoating laughter chasing her from the table in tears. I failed to twig to the link—how my mother, knowing our father was suicidal, had heartlessly set up my sister to save our father’s life when he injected himself with a lethal dose of morphine. Madness, I had yet to see, wore many masks.

  Listening intently to my confession, Peter responded with only four words—“I get the picture”—and instantly, of course, so did I. The next day, I walked over to Shelagh’s apartment to apologize and make amends. With the expression of her relief, mine followed. For the first time, I hugged my sister. I was breaking the dead branches of the family trance, one snap at a time.