Sunday, August 21
Marion has returned from her summer at the cottage and today she came by. Filled with questions about my state. Almost childlike in her curiosity. What does it feel like to have a baby inside me? Do I think it will be a boy or a girl? Have I thought of any names? If it’s a boy, Marion would favour the name Lionel. Lionel? After she left I listened to the news. Trouble stirring again in Europe with Hitler now claiming that part of Czechoslovakia’s western frontier belongs to Germany. The man seems to have Europe in some kind of trance.
Wednesday, August 31
This afternoon I met the new teacher, Miss Bodnar, who comes from somewhere north of Linden. She is just out of Normal School and the board probably hired her for a pittance. No more than nineteen or twenty, with a fresh, attractive face and a head of blonde curls. She managed to conceal whatever scorn or pity she may have felt and said the usual things one expects in these circumstances. “I’ve heard so many good things about you, Miss Callan. Everyone I’ve talked to has told me what a good teacher you were.” Milton’s jowly face was mottled with embarrassment. It’s a burden to cause such distress in others. Miss Bodnar is a winsome little creature and the children will like her, though some of the rougher boys may take advantage.
Tuesday, September 6
A warm September morning and I am sitting on the veranda with this notebook in my lap. I can hear the cries of the children in the schoolyard at recess. Two hours ago I drove Nora to the train station and now the house is quiet again. Nora was up before me this morning, sitting at the dresser, preparing her face for the hours ahead. She has changed in small but important ways. She never used to fuss about time; she was nearly always late for everything. Now she is a model of precision; the radio business has taught her to be punctual. She wears an expensive-looking wristwatch and has a little alarm clock to awaken her. She looked smart this morning as she came out of the house in her navy blue suit and white gloves, a string of pearls encircling her throat. She has managed to stay pretty into her thirties, though it seems to take a great deal of work; she carries such a store of lotions and creams with her when she travels.
She arrived on Friday laden with gifts for the baby: clothes, toys, another book on child-rearing. Nora’s generous spirit has always puzzled me; she must have inherited it from our mother because Father was always close with money and so am I. Yesterday after a cocktail Nora finally summoned the nerve to ask me about F. “Now Clara, you really must tell me. Will there be no help from the father with any of this? Did he just leave you in the lurch, or doesn’t he even know about it?”
“He doesn’t know,” I said.
This required another drink and Nora busied herself with its making. “It’s so like you,” she said, pouring a measure of gin into her glass. “I can just see you walking away from him. Too proud to ask for help. Brother, I would have let him know in a hurry.”
“It has nothing to do with pride,” I said, but I wonder now if that is true.
We were sitting in the front room and I had put on a recording of Rubinstein playing the G-flat Impromptu. The window was open to the late summer afternoon. Nora asked me if I still loved him.
“I don’t know,” I said. I was thinking of Saturday afternoons in that motor court by the lake. The cry of the gulls beyond the open window. The slippery heat of our bodies and the pale skin beneath F.’s ribs. Had I loved him outside that bed? I couldn’t say for certain. Perhaps at one time I thought I did. Now I am not so sure. Our time together? There wasn’t much of it beyond half-eaten dinners in hotel dining rooms and brief afternoons behind venetian blinds. It was all calculating and devious on both our parts.
“You’re thinking of him right now, aren’t you?” said Nora.
“Yes,” I said. “I suppose I am.”
“I’ll bet you still love him.”
“I don’t know much about love, Nora,” I said. “Certainly I knew from the beginning that none of it could lead anywhere. A married man and a Catholic? Still I carried on, didn’t I? When you ignore reality and carry on as if the world will never end, well, perhaps that’s one definition of love. I sometimes wonder if it was like that for the woman in Rome. I know I envied the look on her face that day. I think I wanted to look as she did, at least once before I got old.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” Nora asked. “What woman in Rome?”
“Don’t you remember? She was a guide in Keats’s house. Tall and plain, even homely, but she had this handsome lover. We watched them go off together on his bicycle one afternoon and she looked so happy. How I envied her! It was the day Lewis got into trouble with the police.”
Nora shook her head. “The things you notice, Clara! I don’t remember any homely woman on a bicycle with a man.” She seemed irritated with my peculiarities, and so we sat without talking for a few moments, listening to Schubert. After a while, I got up to turn over the recording. Nora was not, however, ready to leave things alone and so she asked me how it had all ended. Had there been a quarrel? A scene?
“No,” I said. “Neither of us is the quarrelling type. A scene would have been embarrassing to both of us. There was another woman.”
“What a heel!” said Nora, emptying her glass. “Lewis was like that. There were always other women. Right from the start. But if I had got pregnant, he would have known about it and fast. He would have helped too. We talked about all that, and so we were always pretty careful. You have to have some ground rules if you are going to have a love affair, Clara.”
I sensed that Nora wanted to give me a good scolding for my careless ways, perhaps to pay me back for all the high-handed lectures I had inflicted upon her when we were girls and quarrelling in our bedroom. I always seemed to have the upper hand then. Now I couldn’t help myself; I wanted to tell her about those grainy photographs in the hotel room.
“You would never have guessed it to look at him,” I said, “but there was another side to Frank. He showed me some pictures once.” Nora looked at me sharply. She was a little tight by then.
“What kind of pictures?”
“Pictures of two women and a man,” I said. “They were doing things to him. Sex things. I suppose he meant it as a stimulant. As a . . .”
I couldn’t think of the word then, though it comes easily enough to me now. Aphrodisiac. I went on to say that the pictures had only made me feel a bit sordid. In a way, I wanted to explore all this with her. Was I being prudish to feel shame as I did? Was a woman supposed to be excited by pictures like that? I wanted to know such things.
“Lewis was like that,” Nora said. “He took me to a sex show once. It was in the middle of the night up in Harlem. Coloured people were actually copulating. A man carried a woman across the stage on his thing. She hung onto him with her legs around his waist and had a climax right there in front of us. Or she faked it. I think she faked it. How could you have something like that in front of a roomful of strangers?” Nora still seemed bemused by this episode in her life and suddenly I began to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“I was just thinking,” I said, “of what you told me and how strange it is to be saying such things in this house. Have such words ever been uttered within these walls? If Father could hear us now!”
Nora too began to laugh. “Good Lord! What would the poor man think of us?”
I was trying to arrange it all in my mind: the light glancing off the leaves beyond the window; the Negro man and woman clinging to each other on a stage in Harlem; the fingers of Rubinstein on the keyboard in the recording studio; the sunlight on the rear fender of my little blue Chevrolet in the driveway. For a moment, I was captured by this bounty of images, offered up to my senses on an ordinary Monday afternoon. And I was grateful for them all. Ahead lay money worries and the averted eyes of my neighbours, my own dreadful uncertainty. Yet at that moment yesterday I was entirely happy.
Whitfield, Ontario
Saturday, September 10, 1938
Dear Evelyn,
It is cool and showery in my part of the world, a perfect afternoon for writing a letter, though I can’t pretend to bear eventful tidings. I am leading a life of exemplary idleness these days, reading and nodding off as I read, my body ripening like the swelling gourd (image provided by Keats whose Ode to Autumn I have just been reading). My life is indeed langorous. Like an old woman I doze in my rocking chair, or stand by the stove eating tapioca from the pot. Most afternoons I manage to bestir myself, and walk the plank to buy my bread and butter under the stares of the townsfolk. Perhaps I exaggerate a little; by now most people are used to seeing me “in my condition” and only the truly morbid gawk.
Have you read anything interesting lately? At the beginning of the summer, I intended to study any number of worthy books. I even made a list though I have since lost it. I think I remember writing down such titles as The Brothers Karamazov and the Iliad and some of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays like Titus Andronicus and A Winter’s Tale. Alas for good intentions! After each visit to the library in the nearby town of Linden, I came away with lighter fare, though some of it was nourishing: Rilke’s Journey to My Other Self fascinated me (I don’t know how it found its way into Linden Public Library). For moral instruction, I read The Scarlet Letter, but the book I loved most was Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches. It’s odd in a way, for it seems to be a man’s book: a rich idle landowner walks about the Russian countryside with his dogs, hunting wild fowl and talking to the peasants a hundred years ago, but Turgenev’s style is so wonderfully lyrical in these stories. Also read John Steinbeck’s novel about the two tramps looking for farm work in California. It reminded me of some of the travelling men we see around here from time to time, though you don’t see as many now as you did three or four years ago. I also tried another book by Virginia Woolf, but couldn’t finish it, and something called The Return to Religion by Henry C. Link. Very popular according to the librarian, but I thought it mostly nonsense and wishful thinking.
Nora was here for a visit over the Labour Day weekend and we had a good session on why married men who seduce women should all be ground to powder. After all, we are only weak vessels, etc., etc. Well, something like that at least; feeling sorry for ourselves is what it amounted to, but delicious just the same. As you probably know, Nora has the part of Aunt Polly in a radio play of Huckleberry Finn. She’s very excited about this and I’m happy for her. It’s something different and it could be very good for her radio career. And how, by the way, are you getting on in your constant effort to mislead us all about the Arcadian innocence of American family life?
Clara
P.S. Do you think war is likely? The news on the radio these days is terrible, at least up here. I’m afraid if Britain decides to stand up to Hitler, Canada will be dragged in just like the last time. What about the United States?
Sunday, September 11
A strange occurrence today. Marion was visiting after church; we had been sitting on the veranda, but then it began to rain and we came into the house. I was closing the door when I noticed a dark green car (or was it black?) moving slowly along Church Street. It looked like Frank’s Pontiac, and the driver was wearing a hat. Because of the screen door and the rain I couldn’t be certain and yet for a brief moment, standing there by the front door, I felt a wild surge of excitement. He had come up from the city to see me again but had forgotten which house was mine. That was understandable; after all, he had driven me home only once and that was over a year ago in the middle of the night. He would ask at the garage and then turn around and come back. When he knocked on the door and saw me, he would . . . Well, what would he do or say? My imagination faltered at that point, and Marion was calling me to the front room. For perhaps a half-hour I waited tensely, but it had to be someone else. Poor Marion stoutly endured my distracted air and brooding silence.
Château Elysée
Room 210
5930 Franklin Avenue
Hollywood, California
19 / 9 / 38
Dear Clara,
As you can see I have moved again. A vacancy came up in this very nice apartment hotel with its very fancy name, and Fred (who also lives here with a pal) put me on to it. The place is filled with writing types from the east and so I feel right at home.
Yes, things look bad in Europe right now and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was another war. Germany seems to be spoiling for a fight. There are a number of Germans out here now, mostly Jewish, who fled for their lives. They have no doubt that Hitler means business when it comes to running Europe and kicking out all the Jews. As for the rest of the populace out here (at least in my funny business), you’d never know that Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini even exist. Out here people are more concerned with what’s going to happen to two big pictures that are due for production. They are just about to start The Wizard of Oz and we also await the imminent screen birth of that American classic, Gone With the Wind, which Selznick is producing here at MGM. Right now they are looking for the ideal Scarlett and that’s all anyone is talking about these days. Who will it be? Katherine Hepburn? Bette Davis? Jean Arthur? Paulette Goddard? Bella Lugosi? All this of course is taking place across the lot. Those of us who toil on the B pictures for jolly old L.B.M. only get to observe from afar these earthshaking events.
Your reading is certainly more impressive than anything I could muster. As soon as I am released from my cell, I crawl home to munch my nuts and berries. I do go out on a Saturday evening, however, and I have met a little friend through the kind offices of M. Huxley. There is quite a lively scene out here for folks like me. I apologize for this brief note, but I did want you to know that I am thinking of you. Please take care of yourself and the little one. I am looking forward to being called Auntie Evelyn. I think it has a very nice ring to it.
Love and kisses, Evelyn
Saturday, October 1
Marion and I took the train down to the city today. I no longer feel exactly comfortable driving any distance so down we went on the train, two old maids, and one beginning to look like a rather wicked, old party. One snippy clerk at Simpson’s was staring or glaring at my unringed hand as I fingered the maternity aprons. Marion, my protector, shouldered her way through the crowded stores with the sturdy cripple’s lifelong claim to space, as we searched for something to cover my swelling self. All those sibilants! Where did they come from?
I bought the city papers to read on the train home. All were filled with news of Chamberlain’s visit to Hitler. It now looks as if there will be no war and they are shouting hosannas to Chamberlain on the streets of London. Certainly today I noticed a cheerfulness or sense of relief on many faces in Toronto. Perhaps it will all work out, but one has to feel sorry for the people of Czechoslovakia. The Germans got what they wanted without firing a shot.
135 East 33rd Street
New York
October 2, 1938
Dear Clara,
I hope all is well. Aren’t you glad this business in Europe is over? This past week has been just so depressing. I thought for certain there was going to be a war between Germany and England. Of course, down here everybody is so blasé. What is all the fuss about seems to be the attitude. It does annoy me sometimes how Americans seem to think that if it isn’t happening in their own backyard, it isn’t worth worrying about. I had an awful quarrel with a fellow from the agency about this on Friday after work. Several of us went out for a drink after the show, and we got talking about all this. And this fellow says, “Where is Czechoslovakia and who cares anyway?” I just got so cross with what he said because it sums up their whole attitude about these things. To be honest, I didn’t know where Czechoslovakia was either two weeks ago, but at least I took the trouble to find out. So I told him and then we got into this big fight about it. Maybe I got a little carried away, but I was so mad. Anyway, I’m glad Mr. Chamberlain worked things out. I think he deserves a medal for it.
I’ve been busy with the show of course
and also with “American Playhouse.” In fact, I just got back from an afternoon rehearsal. We go on the air next Sunday at eight so tune in, okay? I’ve seen the network schedule and you can pick it up on one of the Toronto stations, CFRB, I think, but you should check the listings. How are you feeling anyway? Are you all right for money? I don’t want you worrying about money at a time like this. I know how proud you are, Clara, but just don’t get too proud with me. We’re all alone in this world, you know, and we have to look after one another. Write soon!!!
Love, Nora
P.S. Had an amusing letter from Evelyn the other day. She seems to have found some friends who share her “habits.” A lot of grumbling about phony people out there, but she seems to be enjoying herself. She also mentioned how much she likes hearing from you.
Whitfield, Ontario
October 10, 1938
Dear Nora,
I listened to your program last evening. Congratulations! You sounded very good. You ought to do more of this kind of thing. Of course, fitting Huckleberry Finn into a one-hour radio program is slightly ridiculous, but the show did manage to convey the spirit of Twain’s novel. So congratulations again. Marion came by and we sat there, drinking tea and eating Marion’s oatmeal cookies (which I am becoming too fond of).
Yes, I too am glad that the Czechoslovakian business is over. I’m not convinced, however, that we have seen the last of the trouble in Europe. This Hitler is awfully ambitious and he seems ruthless, even perhaps a little mad. A dangerous combination. And the German people are behind him. I don’t think they have ever really forgiven us for beating them in the war and they want revenge. So in my heart I fear there will be war with them one day. Perhaps not this year, perhaps not next year, but it will come, I think, and nearly everyone will eventually find their way into it except perhaps your Americans. They will probably just make money from it by supplying guns and bombs to both sides.
Clara Callan Page 39