Dreaming Sally

by James Fitzgerald

  When I located Will, I learned that he was a doctor working in a London, Ontario, hospital; when I located Liz, I discovered that she was a nurse at the same hospital. Neither was aware of the other’s presence under the same roof. When I phoned Peter in B.C., his voice unheard in three decades, I tested his memory by simply saying, “It’s Fitz.” I expected him to say, “Who?” but instead he gasped. Preparing to step out with his wife to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, he reported that at the very moment the phone rang, he was gazing at the Rüdesheim group picture taken on August 12, 1968, wondering what we were all doing.

  From Nick I retrieved the reel of the Odyssey promotional film that Bernie had made in 1968; I transferred it to video and made twenty-seven copies to distribute to everyone. I blew up the totemic Rüdesheim photo to poster size to bring to the reunion, wondering what force was compelling me to do such a thing. Was I expecting some mystical revelation to burst out of the concentrated dots composing the image of Sally’s head, tilting next to mine?

  In my spare hours I was researching the life of my elusive grandfather, building a pitch that I hoped would translate into a book. One day I visited the City of Toronto Archives seeking information on his brother’s suicide. As the archivist directed me to the police reports, I smiled when she revealed that her name was Sally; then she introduced her colleague whose name, of course, was George.

  Cycling home a few nights later, I failed to see a speed bump in a darkened laneway, and I pitched over the handlebars. I snapped my collarbone, but my helmet buffered my skull from cracking like an egg on the pavement. Destiny had ensured that our thirtieth reunion would not be killed by my own funeral.

  On August 12, the thirtieth anniversary of Sally’s last night on earth, I dream we are all back on the trip, a year later, travelling in the same VW mini-buses. I am sitting beside Sally, vivid in her floral dress; I know she was killed on August 13 the previous summer, but she has returned to luminous life. As we move along the same German highway to Luxembourg, my dread mounts—I’m terrified she will die a second time. I want to warn her, but as the words stall in my throat, I surface from the underworld.

  The reunion was set for October 2. The night before, as I had done for the two previous reunions in 1978 and 1988, I called George in Vancouver to catch up on our lives. In a subdued voice, he told me that on Christmas night 1967 he dreamed that Sally would die in Europe, and that the premonition fulfilled itself hours after he sent his telegram proposing marriage. At first I didn’t let the story sink in. Why was he telling me this now?

  Then I experienced an obscure feeling that he had told me about the dream in 1968 at De Grassi Point, that I had always known it, but I had forgotten, and now here we were again, held in a dream state together. I felt a link to my brother’s recent confession, a sense of cracking a silence, that finding out things I was not supposed to know drove the wheel of my existence.

  The morning after speaking with George, the day of the reunion, he sent me an email that relieved my sense of transgression: “The conversation we had last night took me back to some very dark places in my life—and I do appreciate that.”

  The night of the party, I was as keyed up as if I were getting married. One by one, twenty of the surviving twenty-seven Odysseyites flowed through the door. Now divorced, Nick and Tammy had each remarried and lived a block apart on the same street. We took turns talking on the phone to the other seven in Vancouver and Halifax, passing the receiver around the room. Nick said, “You guys will always be eighteen to me.”

  In Nick’s basement, we jammed together on the floor and sofas to watch the 1968 promotional video we had never seen. The soundtrack played the pop song “Love Is Blue” and the theme of The Dating Game driven by cheesy Herb Alpert horns. As Bernie’s sonorous, senatorial voice-over narration was drowned out by our explosive bursts of hilarity, I was pitched into 1968: the Sorrento bikinis, Vesuvius looming across the Bay of Naples, Nick in his black Peter Sellers glasses leading us up the steps of Giotto’s bell tower in Florence, the bronze baptistery doors depicting biblical scenes, “the Gates of Paradise” said to have started the Renaissance. “Such scenes,” intones Bernie, “require interpretation.” In the grainy film transfer, I strained to catch a glimpse of Sally amid our bodies shuffling through the Uffizi Gallery—she was alive in Italy; is she alive now?—but her image never appeared, as if cut by a censor. In the final scenes in London, I saw myself boarding the bus to Heathrow, a dream within a dream, my dissociative grin translating her absence into a detail of no importance.

  Herding everyone upstairs, I orchestrated a re-enactment of the Rüdesheim group photo taken on August 12, 1968, hours before the catastrophe, everyone posing in the original configuration. As I stood in the back row beside where Sally should have been, I was engulfed in a cascade of joshing and kibitzing, as it was back then. In the front row, Nick and Tammy held the blow-up of the 1968 photo I had made: a photo within a photo. I couldn’t bring myself to tell anybody about George’s dream; I’d have felt like a killjoy, and I wanted the party to rage into the dawn. I couldn’t bear it when the bodies slipped one by one into the night. I was the last dog hung.

  In the months to follow, I pondered writing a magazine article about George’s dream, but I was consumed by my family memoir. Still, I allowed myself to imagine a book, my third, down the road, knitting scenes of a half-lived life, cinched by threads of inarticulate strangeness.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “I’m Not Dying”

  In June 2001, I was delivering a lecture on my work-in-progress at the Centre for Training in Psychotherapy on Dupont Street to an audience of forty psychotherapists. I stood in the room where I had spent countless hours over the past seventeen years. Wearing hard-won emotional stripes, I had recently “graduated” from the group at age fifty.

  An unknown, unattached woman my own age tagged along to a post-talk lunch with friends. Although Katy was a full foot shorter than me, her live-wire energy was large, and I was drawn to her easy smile, pale white skin and curious, kind brown eyes. When I learned she had graduated from the training school only days earlier, I thought about asking her out but hesitated, still touchy about letting the right one in.

  Weeks later, on August 1, a scandal rocked UCC when Doug Brown, a former master, was charged with multiple counts of sexual assault of pubescent boys in the prep boarding house during the 1970s and ’80s—enacted in the same curtained cubicles where my beleaguered young father once slept. Four years earlier, another former UCC master, Clark “Nobby” Noble, scion of a prominent medical family, had been charged with the sexual assault of two students from UCC and Appleby College; the testimony of his UCC victim, a schizophrenic, was deemed unreliable and Noble was given a one-year suspended sentence and eventually pardoned. At the time, I was disappointed by the minimal media coverage, but the Brown charges were once again exposing the dark, ignoble side of the institution.

  Only now did I allow myself the thought that my deepest unconscious motivation for publishing Old Boys traced back to the shadows of the Balmoral nursery and the trauma of the powerless boy (father-brother-self) long forsworn. Eventually, Brown was sentenced to three years in jail and a multi-million-dollar class-action suit forced the school to compensate the multiple victims. In yet another eerie coincidence, I learned that the UCC prep headmaster Richard Howard was instrumental in covering up the abuse when it was first reported, and the offender was allowed to run amok for years. As a child in the 1930s, that same Richard Howard lived with his family as a tenant in the third-floor apartment of my grandfather’s house on Balmoral Avenue, the same third floor where my brother was abused.

  * * *

  —

  When a mutual acquaintance separately invited Katy and me to a camping weekend with a circle of friends, I sensed a set-up, but I decided not to resist. As I was carless, Katy offered me a ride; over the two-hour trip into the eastern Ontario woods, I babbled with abandon as she listened, my captive
audience behind the wheel. As we dipped our bodies in a rushing river, I fell for her. The weekend was August 17–18, 2001, three weeks before 9/11; as Western triumphalism was to begin its slow unravelling, the puzzle pieces of my personal life started to come together.

  At first blush, our different backgrounds suggested we were not a match. Traumatized as teenagers, Katy’s German Catholic parents barely survived death by starvation in a Serbian slave-labour camp at the end of World War II. In 1954, Katy’s mother, stripped of her family home and possessions when the Red Army invaded her village, landed in Toronto’s Union Station not speaking a word of English; besides five-year-old Katy and her sister, Heidi, nestled in a baby carriage, she carried a single cooking pot. So began the classic 1950s narrative of working-class immigrants, a bricklayer and a cleaning lady with Grade 8 educations, hacking out a new life in the New World.

  Parental uber-pragmatism ruled Katy’s childhood, and she learned to hide her true self. Hungry to break free, she discovered, hand in hand with sixties liberation, her innate talents and sturdy self-reliance: aesthete, fashion plate, gourmet, gardener, award-winning flower arranger, steady reader, photographer, film buff, world traveller, counsellor of disturbed kids.

  In time, I realized that with Katy I was not swinging on a pendulum but settling into the creative tension of yin and yang. Growing up, she lived in a humble home but felt internally rich; I lived in affluence but felt internally poor; somehow we met in the middle. While my mother never touched me, her mother over-hugged. We discovered we were both veteran serial monogamists serially disappointed and found common ground; her earthbound constancy and the giving of the simple gesture grounded my floating Kubrickian intronaut. In the magpie hunt of the Saturday morning garage sale, she took pleasure in spontaneous interactions with strangers and the spearing of the desirable tchotchke; because money was not an obsession, she was rich. In 1984, in a savvy move, she’d bought on a teacher’s salary a grand but rundown three-storey 1910 red-brick house in High Park, complete with wraparound veranda and garden butterflies. Renting out apartments to cover the mortgage, she’d carried out gradual renovations. When I first visited the place, it felt like a fusion of my grandparents’ homes on Balmoral and Delisle but blessedly cleansed of the bleak, unheimlich vibe.

  Crucially and invaluably, we spoke the same language of the dream: hers sweeping Flight-of-the-Valkyrie epics, mine compressed WASP puzzles. When we fought, we learned to fight fair, each hearing the other out. She did not flinch from self-reflection, or if she did she came back for more. If we hit the black holes of our respective mothers, we rode out the storm. What could come of this except appreciation and gratitude?

  Given my mother’s history of divide and conquer in my romantic life, I delayed introducing her to Katy. But I need not have worried. On the appointed day, Janet set the first in what would become a series of leg traps by placing a bolt of cloth by the door of her condo with the intention of throwing it away; when Katy admired its texture, my mother offered to let her have it. Minutes later, she recanted, and into my ear Katy whispered, “I think I am getting negatively attached to your mother.” She had spotted the quicksand, which drew her even more closely to me. Later I posed the inevitable question, “What was it about my family history that attracted you to me? The bitch goddess mother? The suicidal fathers? The addictions? The pedophilia? The madness?” It was, she said, my endearing blend of nervousness and enthusiasm.

  * * *

  —

  On August 13, 2004, I flew with Katy to Europe on a holiday-cum-book-research trip to explore my paternal roots in medieval Ireland and track my grandfather’s career path through the pathology labs of pre–World War I Germany. Visiting Katy’s relatives near Cologne, I did not plan on retracing my last days of the Odyssey, but we found ourselves on the open deck of a Rhine cruiser, heading south in the opposite direction from 1968, from Oberwesel to Boppard, stopping short of Rüdesheim, the wine village of Sally’s last revel.

  Boarding an open chairlift up a thousand-metre mountain that overlooked the forested vista of the Rhine Valley, I was overcome by agoraphobia and I clutched Katy’s arm. Matrix of good and evil, Freud and Hitler and quantum mechanics, Europe remained, more deeply than I realized, my haunted yet precious memory palace of beauty and loss. Maybe with Katy, a European in her soul, I could step into the same river twice. Or maybe for the first time.

  * * *

  —

  Tortured by fibromyalgia and assorted psychogenic ailments, my mother had built up a superwoman tolerance for physical pain, a self-punishment, I was guessing, to gratify the backed-up unconscious guilt she had never faced. In the fall of 2005, she hosted a launch for her self-published book on John Ewart, her maternal great-great-grandfather and a pioneering Toronto architect; when she strangely declined to address her invited guests, I took it as an act of emotional cowardice. Though I had helped her find a freelance editor, she was peeved when I chose to focus on my own book and not hers. In her acknowledgements, she thanked my brother and sister but conspicuously left me out.

  Only months later, as she lay dying of pneumonia in her eighty-eighth year, I asked if she believed in an afterlife. “I’m not dying!” came her brusque retort. For a single open-ended heartfelt conversation I might have forgiven everything. Maybe that’s what I should have told her.

  In February 2006, during the last week of my mother’s life, I submitted a massively overwritten first draft of my family memoir to my publisher. I still had trouble believing anyone was listening, even when they were; was it any coincidence that the death of each of my parents coincided with the birth of a book? In the intensive care ward, I stood over my mother and enthused: “The book is very exciting, it’s going to be big,” as if speaking of a flight to the moon. Instead of the maternal pride I vainly hoped to raise—why had I not learned my lesson?—she rolled her brown eyes and snorted under her oxygen mask.

  Days later, my brother telephoned to tell me that the pneumonia was reaching its endgame, but I arrived at the hospital half an hour late. Mike left the room so I might sit with her alone. I perched at the foot of the bed, moving no closer, my gaze deflecting off the mask of her face. Then I became aware I was assuming the position of my first day on earth, when I was squeezed from her labouring body, then placed at a safe distance as she sank into her postpartum depression. My fingers skimmed over her upright white-sheeted feet, breaking the royal protocol: Never touch the queen. No tears of rage, no tears of grief. How was it humanly possible that on the death of a mother a son would feel next to nothing?

  Passing on a church funeral, my sister, brother and I showed a video collage of her life at a memorial service at the University of Toronto. I would have felt like a whitewashing hypocrite had I mouthed the conventional homilies, so I let the glamorous surfaces speak for themselves.

  As we cleared out her condominium, we agreed that I should take her vintage wooden bookcase with glass doors and the pick of her hardcover tomes. She habitually wrote fan letters to her favourite authors such as Farley Mowat, Mordecai Richler and Muriel Spark and stuffed their responses between the pages of their works. I recognized several of the books as my inscribed gifts of Christmases and birthdays past. For her last birthday I had presented her with Gore Vidal’s The Golden Age, alive with detail of 1940s New York City, where she had worked during and after the war. I suspected that happiness might have been hers in Manhattan had she stayed and never had me; yet she never told me whether she liked the book or even read it. Perhaps she saw the gift as a dig at her unlived life, and perhaps she was right.

  Among her possessions, we found several charcoal sketches of nude figures that had never seen the light, love letters from blindly passionate suitors and folders filled with scribbled fragments—dates, musings, regrets, guilt. On a page headed “My Mistakes,” she brooded over the fact that all three of her middle-aged children were single and childless. She berated herself for “not facing the truth that Jack did not like children a
nd should never have had any. He was not the faintest bit interested in them.” During my father’s descent into madness, she wrote, “I can’t help but feel dreadful guilt feelings but I must keep them down for my own salvation; if I keep my cool, I should be able to control things.” She decided that her own diarist mother “very wisely wrote for posterity, not baring her soul; daily events are more interesting than introspective rambles.” Another note read, “I keep hoping that you will understand me and my inner sadness, that our life has not been fulfilled in the way I had hoped.” In yet another, she wrote that she felt awful that she “never found the nerve to tell my three children that I loved them to their handsome faces.”

  Of course, from the start, my childhood intuition understood her better than she understood herself. Early on, I read her like a book, but I didn’t yet know what I knew. But now, as I read her words, I knew she intended me to find her diary, a perfect last testament to a perfect last thwarting, where she dangled high promise from the far swing of the pendulum, then died before I could reach her. Some things you will never know.

  Then came the motherlode. Stashed in a gold-yellow folder, I discovered my childish scribblings that survived her impulsive, censorious purgings of family artifacts. Pulling out an ancient, elementary school story titled “The New Rokeit,” printed in my wobbly six-year-old hand, I felt the thrill of the archaeologist discovering Pompeii. This was the story my mother had promised to show me when I turned thirty—“maybe one day you will be a writer”—but then forgot. Perhaps it was no coincidence that when I turned thirty, I passed a decade of not writing.

  Onece upon a time there was a man who made the first Rokeit. He was very proud of his Rokeit but he could not find a man who would go to the moon in it. So he decided that he would go himself. Lots of men storded in food for him so he would not starve. He was going to start at seven o’clock in the night. So when he was all redy he said to turn on the Rokeit. Soon as he was going to say good-bye he was one hundred miles away. He saw all the stars. Then he landed on the moon. He got out and put his helmet on. He walked and walked till he was out of breth. He sat down and went to sleep. When he woke up he went back to the Rokeit but the Rokeit was not there. He would die if he did not have food. But he lived very long. One day he was walking and he saw a very nice Rokeit. He looked for the pursun who owned the Rokeit but there was no one. So he got in and went right back home agen and he never found who owned the Rokeit.