Dreaming Sally

by James Fitzgerald

  As the funeral party departed down the aisle, Scott’s wife, Nancy, a lieutenant-commander of the Halifax-based frigate HMCS Montreal, glided past our pew in her own blazing white uniform. In the brief seconds of her passing by, mere feet away, I felt yet another shiver of the uncanny: her face, her expression, her bearing, the composed way she carried herself, everything about her fused to form a dead ringer for Sally. Then, ghost-like, she was gone from the chapel.

  I turned to George—“Did you see what I saw?”—and he nodded gravely.

  At the reception in the aptly named Rosedale Room, framed photographs of Sally and her father stood side by side on a mahogany table, gazing at me over the plates of crustless tuna sandwiches and cups of tea. That secret, knowing Sphinx-like smile. I was so rattled that I couldn’t bring myself to speak to Nancy, the seeming reincarnation, and neither could George. But I managed to introduce myself to her husband, Scott, and gripping his hand as Bernie had once gripped mine, I cut to the chase: “I was with Sally in Europe in 1968.”

  His eyes widened. Naturally he was curious about his mythic aunt whom he had never known, even in stories, for his mother rarely talked about the past.

  “Was she like my mother?”

  “No, very different, in fact,” I responded, but I did not elaborate. Don’t get me started.

  Then we introduced ourselves to Diana’s husband, Mark. He did not know the full story of Sally’s death, so I reported a short version, aware of George at my side and that an animated retelling would have seemed close to obscene at this time, in this space.

  Then Mark slipped yet another piece of synchronistic data into my bursting portfolio: in mid-August 1968, he and Diana had been set up on a blind date. That very day, Sally’s ashes arrived from West Germany, so the date was cancelled. A year later, Mark and Diana met by accident; love at first sight sparked their marriage.

  Absorbing the strangeness of it all, I struggled to manage my public face. I couldn’t decide if I was excited, or sad, or dreaming, a reporter scoring a lucky scoop but with nowhere to file. Then George whispered, “I’m sorry, I can’t stand it any more. It’s just visceral.”

  I suggested lunch at the Jolly Miller, one of his adolescent haunts in Hogg’s Hollow. As we took our seats in the sunlit patio, he ripped off his borrowed tie. The restaurant was aptly named; an offbeat lightness and jocularity sometimes seized me at post-funeral receptions, either a manic defence, or a culturally inherited Irish Wake-fulness, or both.

  Ever the storyteller, George pointed to a nearby gully where he’d played as a boy.

  “During Hurricane Hazel in 1954, when I was seven, five workers were killed right here. A sewer tunnel under the stream at York Mills and Yonge collapsed. Their bodies are still there.”

  “There’s a metaphor in there somewhere,” I quipped, and we laughed. “Let’s face it, we’re both stand-up tragedians—blended bits of Odysseus, Oedipus and Orpheus.”

  “How can you stand Toronto?” he suddenly interjected.

  “I guess I have withstood it,” I answered. “And done my Irish best to mirror it all back to them.”

  When George confessed that he had always felt like an outsider, I was quick to rejoin: “But so have I, and I was born into the dead centre of upper-middle-class Toronto. The inner circle that expels all inner life. If you’re lucky, or predestined, you learn that lingering on the periphery can be an advantage—there’s a better chance of spotting the herds of elephants filling the room. Then again, elephants aren’t all bad.”

  We had graduated from handshakes to hugs, and as we parted, he left me with words that seemed to say it all: “You know, the poor have one thing over the rich—at least they know when they have been loved for themselves.”

  On my drive home, the radio news swooned with a fresh piece of synchronicity: the birth of a British prince and future king, future Canadian head of state. His name, of course, was George. I thought, The little prince will be lucky if he is loved for himself.

  * * *

  —

  That night, Sally once again appeared in my dreams. It’s 1968, she’s still eighteen, but I’m aging apace. I’m both thrilled and unnerved to see her again, exactly as she was, in every numinous detail, except she seems aloof, like that mythic day at De Grassi when I saw her lying on the dock in her dark blue bathing suit. I want to say, Don’t you know me? It’s Fitz. Don’t you know that you were killed on the trip in the 1960s? But I hold my tongue in case words could kill her once again. Or maybe bring her back to life.

  But this new dream is subtly different. Here she is, forever eighteen, and now I’m old enough to be her grandfather. She’s standing behind a half-opened door, smiling, eating a chocolate doughnut, savouring it, like Eve. Or is it the Mona Lisa? She remains the invisible hand; the book is writing me; the story never ends. Since 1968, several members of the Odyssey have suffered cancer, a heart attack, a liver transplant, yet no one has died. I imagine more tiny miracles to come, more deaths, more births.

  * * *

  —

  Two days later, I received an email from George, who was back in Vancouver. After our lunch, he reported, he spent three hours wandering alone in the renovated Royal Ontario Museum, a far cry from the musty dinosaur rooms of his childhood. At first he couldn’t bring himself to visit the Wodehouse family headstone in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Sally’s name and dates carved on the smooth granite face next to the father and sister, soon to be joined by the mother. Then he changed his mind and went. His email ended with the words “My visit felt like a door closing.”

  I was struck by the image, echoing my recent dream of Sally smiling her secret smile behind a half-closed door. I was glad he didn’t say “a door closed,” past tense. There’s no closure, except the mystery of death, but even then, who knows? Maybe it was an opening. You don’t get over life, you travel through it.

  But with his parting words, I did feel a rush of relief, and not just for him. Forty-five summers on, something was shifting. Maybe, just maybe, we were all off the hook. And maybe it was true: “Nothing is written.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Unheimlich

  Over the Christmas holidays of 2013, I visited the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art on Queen Street West to view a collection of installations—videos, sculptures, paintings—inspired by the films of David Cronenberg. Two years earlier, I had sent the director a copy of my family memoir in the hope he would adapt it into a film; he was, after all, an explorer of the demented side of science.

  In the gallery, I was drawn to a video booth showing a looped five-minute clip of The Brood, a 1979 horror film that Cronenberg made during the breakup of his marriage. For the director, the film was a form of art therapy, a catharsis of the primal feelings aroused by the rupturing of his young daughter’s life.

  The scene depicted a wild psychiatrist played by Oliver Reed working in a session with a borderline patient played by Samantha Eggar. Fascinated, I rented the full film and watched it with Katy on New Year’s Day. The cover art of the DVD showed a five-year-old girl with a traumatized expression, and I linked it to the image of my three-year-old self on the cover of my book, standing in front of my grandfather’s (and father’s) haunted house at 186 Balmoral Avenue, squinting into my mother’s box camera, curious yet fearful. Chanelling something, as children and animals do.

  My attention was riveted when Cronenberg’s camera swooped over my childhood dreamscape of St. Clair and Avenue Road—the Imperial Oil Building, Peter Pan Park, Brown School. My parents first met as five-year-olds in the kindergarten classroom of Brown School in 1922 but did not discover that fact till they met again over thirty years later; I, too, had occupied the same kindergarten classroom in 1955.

  Playing the husband of Samantha Eggar’s character, Art Hindle stepped out into the Brown School playground after discovering the body of his daughter’s kindergarten teacher, murdered by the brood of feral children. I turned to Katy: “I loved my kindergarten teacher! I would hav
e never killed my kindergarten teacher!”

  Pointing his camera westward to Poplar Plains Road, the director panned south along the playground fence and the houses lining Balmoral Avenue. Then, for two seconds, the camera stopped to fix its gaze precisely on the rear of my grandfather’s house at number 186. Scarcely believing my eyes, I grabbed the remote to reverse and freeze-frame the image. Of all the houses, why did Cronenberg need the viewer to look at this particular one?

  Strange enough; something stranger still.

  Gazing at the image, I was rushed back to the day in 1995 when my brother had revealed his sexual abuse on the third floor of the house—in fact, in the back bedroom shown clearly by the camera.

  Then a second realization landed. When I first entered therapy in 1983, four years after the release of The Brood, I’d brought a powerful dream in to my third session with Peter. In it, I was standing in the playground of Brown School, a five-year-old kindergartener, looking at the rear of the Balmoral house. Eerily, I’d been in precisely the same spot as Cronenberg’s camera.

  I checked my dream diary and there it all was, written down just as I recalled it. In the dream, the image of a small boy being impaled on a stake heaved into view, and my mouth opened a voiceless scream of terror.

  I emailed Cronenberg to report the strange chain of coincidences. Responding within half an hour, he tossed another bone into the stew: the young actress, five-year-old Cindy Hinds, who played Candice Carveth in the film, had contacted him that very day. Now forty, she forwarded a tribute to the director she’d contributed to a film magazine, waxing rhapsodic that working on the set was the highlight of her childhood.

  The mysterious witnessing of The Brood felt like a personally customized bout of art therapy, the unconscious made conscious; I was left in a state of grateful wonderment.

  From my readings of Freud, I knew the German word for “uncanny” is unheimlich, the flip side of heimlich, the word for “secret,” while heim means “home.” With this cascade of recent experiences, I felt the truth, more deeply than ever, that over the years of our Balmoral childhood we were routinely left alone, estranged and unprotected—“homeless”—within our childhood cage, awash in the uncanny. The unheimlich, according to Freud, is a home truth that ought to have remained secret and repressed but has suddenly come to light, awakening an uncertainty about whether an object was alive or dead, animate or inanimate, like a ventriloquist’s puppet. The uncanny tricks the unknowability of death by seeming to make contact with the dead.

  “When life events seem to conform to old, discarded beliefs, we feel uncanny,” observed Freud. In a molten tantrum with his beloved yet frustrating mother, the boy-child wished her dead, then forgot he had. Years later, his teenage girlfriend, a second love-and-hate as passionate as his first, died suddenly, unhinging the door to the uncanny, and in the boy rose a conviction: “So, it is true we can kill people with our thoughts.”

  * * *

  —

  Six months after watching The Brood, I was contacted by Don Carveth, the director of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute, based in the same building as the Deer Park Library where as a child I’d first encountered storybooks. An admirer of my memoir, Don invited me to dine at a restaurant at Yonge and Eglinton, my father’s last neighbourhood, and a fresh round of synchronicities unfolded.

  I experienced Don as a charming, loquacious freethinker, the opposite of my buried father. A challenger of convention, Don was known for his confrontation of the rigid, paint-by-numbers orthodoxy that can afflict psychoanalytic societies the world over. The son of a doctor, he’d attended UCC five years ahead of me and hated it; as a boy he was treated for asthma by my allergist father; he currently lived on Orchard View Boulevard, the very street where my flat-lined father ground out the last eighteen years of his life in a one-bedroom high-rise apartment.

  When I started to relate my recent experience with David Cronenberg and Balmoral Avenue, he interrupted the moment I spoke the words The Brood. During the shooting of the film in 1978, he’d lived at 184 Cottingham Street, four blocks south of 186 Balmoral Avenue, and directly opposite Cronenberg’s home. The two men would often talk over coffee, as the director’s marriage was breaking up. In his honour, Cronenberg gave the family characters of The Brood—the couple played by Art Hindle and Samantha Eggar and their five-year-old daughter, played by Cindy Hinds—Don’s last name of Carveth.

  During this period, Don sold his house, 184 Cottingam Street, to Cronenberg. As if such a string of revelations were not enough to found a religion based on synchronicity, I recalled that Gary Ross, my editor and the publisher of Old Boys twenty years earlier, had grown up in that very house in the sixties.

  Curiouser and curiouser. Uncanny, yes, but strangely reassuring, as if meaning were attached to my life, after all.

  * * *

  —

  In the winter of 2014, after talking to George on the phone for two hours, I fall into a dream.

  I’m back with Sally on the Odyssey on the sunny Mediterranean. I’m not sure whether it’s 1968 or 1969. She’s still a bit aloof, but gradually I get to know her again. She asks me to fetch her a glass of wine and a steak, but it takes me fifty minutes to find them. When I return, she says she asked for oysters, which I take to mean sex. As we walk among the other kids, I keep my arm wrapped around her shoulders, and we talk tenderly. I sense she is trying to voice some regret about us.

  “So, you’re getting married?” I ask. Before she can answer, I add, “I’m going to be a writer.”

  In an instant, it dawns on us that Sally is fated to die, and there’s nothing to be said or done.

  I return to the hotel for a cleansing shower, moving from nozzle to nozzle in the communal space, colder to warmer to hotter. In a locker room I meet Steve, who had surrendered his driver’s seat to John. Together we strain to puzzle out the Sally riddle. I’m on the verge of saying, I know what it is—it’s our guilt!, when Steve says it first.

  We move to a hotel room full of the other kids. John, the driver, is sitting alone, crying inconsolably. I take his hand and say, “We’ll talk.” Jane is by my side, sympathetic. Just as I’m feeling I need to protect John from exposure to too much intensity, a hotel official intervenes and intones, “This is a matter for the FBI.”

  “No,” I quickly respond. “We know exactly what it is.”

  The dream reminds me of the day I wandered downtown into Toronto’s Occupy Movement, encamped young protesters confronting the One Per Centers. Among the forest of signs, one arrested my attention: “You know exactly why we are here.”

  * * *

  —

  In May 2015, the Toronto Odysseyites assembled at the Jolly Miller for a mini-reunion. Steve had taken it upon himself to call a rogue meeting, and this time I was happy to let someone else drive the bus.

  Over dinner, Steve in particular was bursting with spontaneous wit, and the laughter cascaded as in the old days, bringing our band of eight—Steve, Dave, Stu, Jane, Marywinn, Robin and Sean and me—close to tears. I passed on the news that George and I had donated $500 to Branksome Hall to install a donor/memorial brick with Sally’s name together with those of other alumnae, living and dead, on a curving path outside the new, multi-million-dollar Athletic and Wellness Centre. (Though my inner curmudgeon bristled that Sally was reduced to just another brick in the road.)

  The mood shifted when Steve began to recount his memories of the day of the accident, surrendering the driver’s seat to John, and being the first to arrive at Sally’s side after she fell out the door. I was struck that it was the first time, as a group, we had spoken of what happened that day.

  Before we left, Marywinn roused Nan in B.C. on FaceTime, opening up the east-west circuitry. On the subway home, I accompanied Robin, George’s cousin, and we fell into an intense conversation. She related a story I’d never heard: that when Bernie broke the news of Sally’s death to her in the Paris hotel, she burst into a hysterical scream. Bernie had responded
, “Now, now, Sally wouldn’t want that.”

  The next day, I received an email from Robin. When she’d arrived at work that morning, the phone rang. Picking up the receiver, she heard the voice of a woman with a West Indian accent ask, “Is Sally there?”

  It was a wrong number—or maybe the right one. Damn clever, these spooks.

  I called George to relate the latest happenings. In turn, he revealed a recent dream in which he and Sally were simply talking in a relaxed, easy fashion, as was their way, except now both were in late middle age; within days, George was turning sixty-eight and Sally sixty-five. He awoke with the realization that he’d been perpetually competing with Dr. Wodehouse.

  “I never felt so audacious in my life as when I was nineteen and courting Sally,” he recalled. “I had no idea where the energy came from, but I kept standing my ground. Wresting Sally away from her father, I was not crushed but tolerated. Then it all evaporated.”

  Days later, I was contacted by Ross, who had been unable to attend the mini-reunion at the Jolly Miller. His recently deceased father had owned the travel business that organized the Odyssey itineraries, and while dipping into his father’s files, Ross had found a legal document marked “Wodehouse.” Emailing me a copy, I discovered that in 1968, Sally’s father filed a lawsuit against Bernie and the Odyssey, but the case petered out in 1970. The file contained details of the accident, including the name of the Mercedes driver, Willem Huygh, and the West German village, Bengel.

  On Google Earth, I typed in Bengel, and like a bird in a dream I swooped back to the German highway, enjoying my defiance of my mother’s lingering, taunting phrase: “Some things you will never know.” Contemplating the arc of my life, I connected all the events I was never supposed to know or see or feel or remember, talk or write about, witnessed and unwitnessed experiences I must dam, disown, dissociate or deny: my three-year-old brother preyed upon in the third-floor bedroom of the Balmoral house; my grandfather murdering himself in his bed at Toronto General Hospital; my father injecting his arm with a lethal dose of morphine in my brother’s third-floor bedroom on Dunvegan Road; the multi-generational predations of all-boys private schools; Sally lying dying on a German highway.