Dreaming Sally

by James Fitzgerald

  In my sessions with Eva, the dreams and epiphanies proliferated apace. In the summer of 2014, she had been displaced from her office to make way for condos; she was now working out of a three-storey building at Yonge and Roxborough on the edge of Rosedale. Arriving for my first session, I realized that she had set up shop a two-minute stroll from Sally’s home on Chestnut Park Road.

  Three days after Ross emailed the legal file, I was walking up Yonge Street en route to a session with Eva, keen to decompress a new, hot dream. When I reached the front door, I glimpsed the blur of a red-headed man jogging past: it was, of all people, Ross. As we talked about the Sally file, I withheld my amazement, beyond surprised by the latest coincidence. Aren’t we supposed to meet only once every ten years? If it were all a dream, how would I interpret it?

  Again, related events seem to cluster in threes, like the throwing of the three coins of the I Ching. A few weeks later, I realized I had failed to notice the obvious: Eva’s three-storey office building contained a rectangular open courtyard rimmed by balconies—my archetypal pendulum dream of my mother and the “courting yard” made manifest, echoing the courtyard living room of Sally’s De Grassi cottage and the courtyard of death in the three-storey Paris hotel.

  Then I heard the cool tones of my skeptical inner scientist. Surely my collection of coincidences could be reduced to a severe case of apophenia—the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. I stood accused: Random. Anecdotal. Unscientific. Magical thinking.

  Guilty, as charged. With an explanation.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “My Baby Wrote Me a Letter”

  Dear Sally,

  I feel I owe you a letter. I know, even you might say I’m a delusional necromancer to believe I can communicate with the dead. But even if you are not there, not listening, I’m prepared, or unprepared, to take the risk. I feel like a ghost writer who doesn’t know what the hell he’s saying, but must keep talking, no matter what, not only to reconnect with the live wire of a single, spirited, once-loved girl, but to the entire spirit of an age not entirely annihilated. What were we all falling for if not each other’s potential?

  It must strike you as strange, if you are still capable of being struck, that with the passing of your unlived life I felt compelled to flush George, your lover and my rival, into the open. You must be wondering, if you’re still free to wonder, why it is not George, but James, the monkey in the middle, who is writing you now; let’s face it, in the end, you chose him over me, if I may assume conscious choice was involved. With your loss, he bore a cross heavier than mine, but who would have blamed me if I left him to die at the crossroad of 1968? Were we not implicitly taught that our happiness depends on ignoring the suffering of others?

  Stranger still that I am writing a letter in the digital Facebook world you never lived to see; long gone is the stamped, handwritten envelope borne through the slit of the brass letterbox, cradled in the palm, tingling with the thrill of the slow opening. How many times that summer did we dance to “The Letter”? How many times did the pair of us babble tableside in sweaty nightclubs, week after inseparable week, always you the first to slam down your drink, butt your smoke, push back your chair, always you the first to wing us across the floor, banging into bodies, pulling me out of myself? “Lonely days are gone, I’m a goin’ home.”

  Was it the curl of your smile, the curve of your hip, the turn of your head? How you swung your body as you danced? Or simply the way you wailed the lyrics? Any which way, I let you convince me it was our song, our lonely days, our home, and that you were singing to me, and only me, not an invisible deity named George, whose bearded face I chose not to see embedded in the gathering clouds. You made everything not only work but work like a dream. You made me feel like a potentate at the banquet; I did not know or care if you were merely sweeping crumbs from the tablecloth, and maybe you didn’t either. If you were playing me false, I was playing along and falling for you. When I look back now, why didn’t I burn us down with tenderness that night in Florence? Why did I settle for my diary and the consolation of the scribbled word?

  One of your lingering attractions is that you are forever fused with the best of the sixties, your fall out the door taking your flaws with you. That random cluster of bus-riding teenagers is nothing now but the stuff of fiction, and maybe in the end I prefer us that way. Maybe I am a romantic after all, pushing my hyper-ironic, hard-headed, left-brain, rational maleness into a corner for a spell, surrendering to the belief, the wish, the hope, the faith that you are not mummified in your nineteenth year but still listening, every so often delivering, if not a letter, then a sly gesture, a sign.

  For if we care to notice, you have been putting out all these years, haven’t you? We have, in fact, gone all the way. Maybe, all this time, you have been evolving down the road alongside the rest of us; maybe, wherever you are, you understand infinitely more than we do.

  Back in 2010, as George handed me your last love letter, composed hours before your freak fall, I must confess I experienced something more than the frisson of the voyeur. You’d been gone for decades, but as I read the words I was not meant to see, I felt as if a rusty three-sided fence had been re-electrified, as if he was giving you back to me. I wondered if that qualified as a good idea. That’s me—the radical doubter, but open to suggestion.

  When George forwarded me the rest of your letters, the fact that I fail to exist in any of them was not lost on me. But my total absence revealed a close presence, and an ocean away George knew it in his bones. On the trip, you were cruel in your kindness; why hide me if I did not matter? Did you choose to be with me every night for six weeks because I was safe? Or did I choose you because you safely belonged to George?

  But, dear Sally, we three blind mice did sense the truth: there was danger in the air.

  Once there was a time when George and I, invisible to each other, wished each other dead. Yet it was you who died. Maybe that’s the essence of the uncanny: we knew the ending, from the beginning, without knowing we knew it.

  But what if you had believed George’s premonition and stayed home? What if you had not been murdered by a Greek myth? Would you have lived your life any less mythically, not dying for art? Did your disappearance send me down a chute marked storyteller-by-proxy? Or was I doomed from the start?

  For years, Sally, I thought you were my first love, my first sudden death. But I was wrong, you were my second, and it is you who made me see and feel it. I did not know it back then, but I was magnetized by you on the Odyssey in 1968 precisely because you were so Heimlich, so familiar, the grounded, witty girl I knew six years earlier at De Grassi, a vitalizing antidote to the Balmoral crypt in which I grew up. The Greek root of “catastrophe” is “overturn,” and with your death, barely out of my sight, you joined the unheimlich—the unhoused generations of familial ghosts haunting my disowned body.

  Your sporadic yet insistent cameo appearances in my dreams compelled me to look back and pick up the reverberations of something older, something younger, something buried and forgotten. Dream by dream, I made my groping way down spiral stone steps into the blackness, drilling down into the Pompeii of the fragmented mother. Decades in the making, piece by piece my discoveries have yielded cold comfort, but comfort all the same, as I slowly perceived the cracked mirror of my mother’s face.

  It was no small victory, decades on, to spear an elusive truth: for most of my life, I was made to believe my feelings packed the power to destroy the ones I desired. I loved you enough, Sally, to hate you. I now understand how I unconsciously short-circuited my mourning of the loss of you, and the ones before and after you, lest I drown in the original psychic tsunami of my earliest abandonment. Slowly allowing myself to love and be loved by Katy, and others, has stemmed the tide. In releasing a ripple of compassion for my own mother, I knew that in her long life she never found a channel out of the tomb of her own flesh, right up to the winter day when her ashes were lowered under the one made
of stone.

  * * *

  —

  As for George’s premonitory dream, I am guessing it was something more than a lucky, or unlucky, guess.

  In my years of digesting literature on the uncanny, the Dead Mother Complex, telepathy, synchronicity and quantum physics, I have swung on a pendulum between pie-in-the-sky Jung and meat-and-potatoes Freud and everything in between. Are trauma and repression the parents of the paranormal? Are all deaths death wishes? I tend to align myself with those who believe the seemingly magical synchronicity is best approached as a waking dream inviting interpretation, its mirror-like correspondences between our inner and outer worlds reflecting the creative, compensatory purposes of Mother Nature.

  In his inspired essay, “Why Did Orpheus Look Back?,” psychoanalyst Michael Parsons imagines Orpheus entering therapy as his client. True aliveness demands the capacity to dream one’s own death, he proposes, and if I may continue to conflate ancient Orpheus with post-modern Orr, George’s fateful dream might be read, via Parsons, as paradoxically “a dream about the failure of dreaming.”

  On Christmas night 1967, protecting himself against the unbearable prospect of losing you, Sally, to someone like me, George kills you off in his dream. His mother had given birth to him while in a state of mourning for the recent loss of her father, also named George; twenty years later, the dream of her Sally-smitten son might be seen as a deep memory, a pre-emptive strike against re-experiencing the original maternal disconnection—the loss of his first love, the sudden psychic death, that had already happened. His “dream that came true” did not predict the future but the past.

  Over your two years with George, you had enlivened him, and after you sailed for Europe, he felt he was dying without you: “I’m never going to see you again.” None of this made him “crazy,” only all too human.

  He experienced your trip to the Old World as a death and a descent into the underworld. To protect himself against such unheimlich dread, he insisted on a total separation between the upper and lower worlds of life and death, Toronto and Europe. Charming his way into the underworld, George, the letter writer, was allowed to have you back, like Orpheus, but on one key condition dictated by the god of the underworld: never deny the existence of the inescapably dark place that comes to us all. In the anxious dispatching of the proposal by telegram, he meant to rescue you, and himself, pulling you up from the dark dream of the underworld into the turbulent, synchro-charged crossroad of August 1968 and beyond.

  His fatal look back, via the telegram, condemned him to watch you vanish forever. Instead of bearing the two-month wait until you returned home on August 30, instead of carrying you inside himself while he looked ahead to your future lives together, he could not stop anxiously looking over his shoulder to confirm that you were still alive.

  Then the hinge of the bus door pops, and you die for real, and forever.

  When he revealed his unheimlich dream of your death to me and others, George was once more reaching out for life. In leaving his birthplace and moving to the West Coast, in the slow acceptance of your death he earned a chance to dream his own death in a way that allowed him to be more imaginatively alive. As with George, so with James: on our prolonged journeys to becoming our own men, at last we were able to let in strong, loyal, generous, warm-blooded women, worlds removed from our Upper Canadian iceboxes, and find fresh meanings in our lives.

  * * *

  —

  But still, why, finally, Sally, did you die as you did? Were you sacrificed for a larger good? Did George’s path of self-realization—and even my own—hinge on your death? Caught between two Georges, a guard-dog father and a possessive lover, you ran into a third force, the familiar figure from De Grassi Point, like you the child of a doctor, a charged electron orbiting you in tentative circles. Or was the timing of your death, plain and simple, nothing but a coincidence?

  My mother was right: there are some things I will never know. But allow me to suggest that the universe is influenced, if not ruled, by the unruly forces of human desire. The lingering, fifty-year-old guilt of those of us who loved you, Sally—the notion that somehow we each and all contributed to your death—may stem from the hidden and mistaken belief that we can control events to prevent calamity. But the calamity had already happened. If there’s a secret, maybe it’s learning to accept, if not enjoy, that nothing turns out as expected. As Picasso put it, “Only the unexpected sally makes you laugh.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Talk to Me

  Just a few more stories, Sally, and then I’ll let you go.

  It was the autumn of 1962, mere weeks after I was entranced by the sight of you sunbathing on the De Grassi dock. Newly turned twelve, I was straining under the yoke of Tony Hearn, our Grade 8 master. With his glinting spectacles and black toothbrush moustache, he was a caricature of repression, an alcoholic middle-aged British bachelor partial to beating boys in the boarding house. Weekly he drilled us relentlessly in a spelling competition, dividing the room into two teams, the Morons and the Illiterates, and posting our mistakes. Frantically memorizing words out of fear of failure and humiliation, I stood first in the class, my perfect record not quelling but stoking my panic.

  One day, sitting beside a boarder I will call Brian, I was puzzled by the sight of his hand thrust into the pocket of his grey flannel trousers; why were his stretched-out legs gently vibrating under his hinge-topped desk? In the precise moment when I realized what he was doing, a purple-faced Hearn vaulted out of his chair. Charging down the rows of desks, he raised his palm and slammed the boy across the head with such force that he crashed to the hardwood floor at my feet.

  “I will not tolerate this behaviour in my class!” Hearn bellowed. In my splintering state of dissociation, I made a mental note to look up the word “tolerate,” and, oh yes, to never touch myself down there.

  Under Hearn’s watch as head of the boarding house, the sexual predation of dozens of boys by resident master Doug Brown would be covered up, only coming to light decades later. Brown was eventually convicted and jailed. I like to think Hearn was not entirely lacking conscience: having quit drinking some years earlier, the childless old man donated his entire estate to the school and retired to the womb of Florida, where he killed himself.

  * * *

  —

  Three hours after writing the passage above, I received out of the blue an email from Peter Page, a UCC old boy two years behind me. Over twenty years earlier, I had randomly picked his name from a leaving-class list as an interview subject for my oral history of the school. We talked for a few hours, then never communicated again. He did not bother to reintroduce himself after all this time; the first sentence of his perfectly crafted one-page message simply stated, “I have been haunted by Tony Hearn for over fifty years.”

  Smacked by the exquisite coincidence, I invited Peter to call me. Out came the wrenching story of the vulnerable ten-year-old Jewish boy abandoned to a WASP boarding school by his Holocaust survivor parents. Hearn beat Peter regularly, black and blue, on the flimsiest of pretexts or none at all, and when Peter complained to his parents, who bore scars of their own, they failed to intervene.

  I related my 1962 memory of Hearn’s mad attack on Brian the boarder. Peter revealed that he had lived with Brian in the same dorm—the same one my father occupied in the 1920s—under the tyrannical Hearn.

  Mere minutes after hanging up, I heard a fresh ping in my inbox. This time the message was from Brian, of all people, last seen in the sixties. Now living in San Francisco, he was, incredibly, inviting me to join LinkedIn. I thought, Why bother? We have all been linked in for a long time.

  * * *

  —

  At first I was enthusiastic about capturing your story, Sally, but something shifted as I dug deeper. I began experiencing the act of writing as increasingly onerous. Even when I knew that my earlier books had in fact been generously heard and appreciated, I could not shake off an ancient feeling of always falling short. At
last the thought hit me like a slap upside my head: at root, I had always been writing to reach my implacable mother. As a child, I rarely spoke, for why speak if no one is listening?

  As I think of the story I wrote for my mother as a silent six-year-old—about the boy starving for food and air on the surface of the moon—I now see more clearly than ever its psychological genesis. As a baby, I went straight to work on her, trying to get her to play. But it didn’t work. Experiencing no nursing, no back-and-forth smiling and babbling, no kissing or humming or singing or caressing, I lacked a mother tongue. To reach my marble-cold mother, I dutifully did my homework, silently making my mark on scraps of paper as if to illuminate the vellum of her skin. Orpheus moved the very rocks to weep, but the rock of my mother would not be moved, and I missed an entire developmental stage. My spine bent over a keyboard, pegging into my diary the minutiae of my daily movements like a crib-bound game of cribbage, I sentenced myself to an obsessive and unnatural task. If no one would remember me, I must remember myself.

  You of all people, Sally, you the happy yakker—I didn’t have to spell it out for you, did I? You have survived as the vehicle that drove George and me down into deeper places inside ourselves. Even in death, you challenged us to evolve into better men, moving forward yet looking back, compelled by a will to understand, even as we understand we never will.

  Still, year by year, George and I passed hours on the telephone, talking up a storm. Our conversations drove a book of atonement with your name and body adorning the cover. Of all that you have left us, I have grown to appreciate what you never got: the meaningfulness of a longer life and a slower death.