Mother’s judgement of all this was predictably harsh though I never heard her express her views to Aunt Nora. She wasn’t jealous of her sister’s success; I am sure that she wished her well, but she was scornful of programs like “The House on Chestnut Street.” To her they were only foolish diversions for housewives. She went out to work each day and had no time for such nonsense. I, however, was enthralled. “The House on Chestnut Street” came on in the middle of the afternoon when I was in school, and often I willed myself to be sick, so I could stay at home and listen. Usually Mother would have none of that; my being at home meant asking our neighbour, Mrs. Bryden, to look in on me from time to time, and Mother disliked bothering people. Now and then, though, I was genuinely ill, and on those afternoons I would come down from my bed to the front room and, wrapped in a blanket, wait impatiently for the program’s signature theme, Elgar’s Salut D’Amour, and then the announcer’s voice inviting me “once again to take a walk past these stately trees and white picket fences to ‘The House on Chestnut Street’ where today we find Alice and Effie in the kitchen talking to Aunt Mary and Uncle Jim. Yesterday we learned that Alice . . .” To hear my aunt’s voice coming through the cloth-covered face of that Stromberg-Carlson radio was magical.
Then, in the year following our Christmas visit to New York, the program was abruptly cancelled. I could not believe it and neither, I suppose, could millions of others. It took a letter from Aunt Nora to explain the circumstances. I remember Mother standing by the dining-room table reading that letter and saying to me, “It seems they think your aunt is a Communist.” She paused for a moment to stare out the window; she might have been talking to herself. “I haven’t the faintest idea why. I can’t believe Nora knows the first thing about Communism.” But this was 1951, the McCarthy era, when zealots, convinced that Communism was threatening American democracy, sought out suspects in public life, particularly those in the entertainment industry. People in film, television and radio were hounded from jobs; careers were ruined and livelihoods lost. Many innocent people were swept up in the net and Mother was certainly right about Aunt Nora. She had no interest whatsoever in politics; her marginal involvement with a group of New York actors in the 1930s, however, was enough to blacklist her.
That same year Aunt Nora surprised us even further with a telegram announcing her marriage. She was then in her middle forties. It was one of the few times that I have seen my mother express surprise at life’s strange and various turnings. She had to sit down to read it, and from her puzzled expression the telegram could easily have been in Sanskrit or Urdu. Later Aunt Nora sent us pictures of her husband, my Uncle Arthur. He was then in his fifties, but seemed years younger even with his curly grey hair. I thought he looked like Jeff Chandler, a handsome movie actor of the time. Not only was Uncle Arthur good-looking, but he was also a rich and successful advertising executive who promptly whisked Aunt Nora off to California to live. It was like a final episode from “The House on Chestnut Street” or “The Right to Happiness,” or any one of a dozen afternoon radio shows: the middle-aged woman endures and prevails and finally marries the prince who carries her off to the golden land.
My aunt’s charmed life seemed to widen the gap between my mother and me; I often compared their fates; my chance-taking aunt who had uprooted herself to seek her fortune in another land, and my mother, the stay-at-home, stuck in a drab Ontario village. It was an unfair comparison, of course, but what teenage girl is ever fair in her assessment of a mother? On weekday mornings we climbed into her twenty-year-old Chevrolet coupe, and drove along the township roads to Linden, often enclosed in a week-old brooding silence that had been provoked by some argument. I was mortified at being seen in that old car. Mother would drop me off in front of the high school on her way to work, and one day I overheard a boy I was half in love with say to friends, “I wonder when Liz’s old lady is going to get rid of that jalopy?” I never spoke to the boy again.
During the next several years I was away at university, and I seldom returned to Whitfield. Once or twice a month I talked to Mother on the telephone that she finally though reluctantly had installed. After graduation, I taught elementary school before returning to university for post-graduate studies of the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and a career in university teaching. I spent the summer of our country’s centenary in Los Angeles living with Aunt Nora and Uncle Arthur, and reading the poet’s letters in the UCLA library. There I met the rich young radical who would follow me to Canada and become my husband. The marriage was a mistake, but we were too engrossed in the temper of the times to notice: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the protests and demonstrations absorbed us totally. I now believe that we scarcely knew one another in the three years we lived together.
In that inflammable summer of 1968, my mother died suddenly of a heart attack. We could not locate my aunt and uncle, who were on vacation in Hawaii. Only a few people attended the funeral, and after we buried her next to her mother and father and brother in the little cemetery beyond the village, we returned to the house where I was born and raised. We were served tea and sandwiches by Mother’s oldest friend, Miss Webb, who could not help casting shy glances at my husband with his shoulder-length hair, his tinted glasses, his workboots worn to a funeral. Even country people knew better than that. Miss Webb wore an orthopedic shoe, and the sound of it on the floorboards stirred memories of her Sunday afternoon visits with Mother. On that warm and windy August evening, my young husband and I watched the news on the little black-and-white television that Mother had bought only a year or two before she died. The Chicago police were clubbing citizens in the street. We watched as the demonstrators and passersby were forced against the plate-glass window of the Hilton Haymarket Lounge. We saw the window shatter amid the screaming. Anarchy can be a tonic for the young, and we watched with the kind of gloomy excitement that often accompanies the possibility of change.
I also remember thinking how peculiar it felt to be witnessing all that brutality in the quiet of my mother’s house, surrounded by the density and heft of another age with its heavy dark furniture, its yellowing lampshades and patterned wallpaper. That “low dishonest decade,” as Auden called it, was as much the subject of this book as was my mother’s quiet yet turbulent life during the four years in which she recorded what happened to her. As far as I have been able to determine, she never wrote anything else in a journal after my birth.
Aunt Nora’s letters were in a trunk in my mother’s bedroom, but I never saw them; I was far too anxious to get away from that cramped village where I had seldom been happy. A month after the funeral, however, I returned to Whitfield with Aunt Nora and Uncle Arthur, who had come from California to visit Mother’s grave. We spent the weekend going through her things and arranging for the sale of the house. Years later Aunt Nora told me that she found the letters, but decided not to show them to me at the time. I think she wanted to spare my feelings, shelter me from the raw details of what my mother endured. Rape. Abortion. Adultery. Such subjects were not so easily and openly discussed by women of my aunt’s generation. She did promise, however, that one day I would know what really happened, but only after she was gone.
Aunt Nora outlived my mother by over thirty years and died in a nursing home in Los Angeles last January at the age of ninety-four. Her final years were clouded by senility, and she talked only of things that had mattered a long time ago: the sunlight on her father’s pocket watch, the taste of licorice, the whistle of a steam engine. When we went up to L.A. to sort through her belongings, we found all the letters exchanged between the two sisters, as well as those from my mother to the exuberantly cynical Evelyn Dowling whom I would love to have had as an aunt. Unfortunately I never got to know Evelyn, for she was killed in an automobile accident in the hills of Hollywood a year after I was born.
For all her help and encouragement in the assembling of these letters, I would like to express thanks to my dearest friend and partner of the last twenty yea
rs, Moira Svensson.
Elizabeth A. Callan
Saltspring Island
British Columbia
December 2000
About the Author
Richard B. Wright, is the author of nine novels, including The Age of Longing, The Weekend Man and In the Middle of a Life. He lives in St. Catharines, Ontario, with his wife Phyllis.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
ALSO BY RICHARD B. WRIGHT
The Weekend Man
In the Middle of a Life
Farthing’s Fortunes
Final Things
The Teacher’s Daughter
Tourists
Sunset Manor
The Age of Longing
Credits
Front cover painting: Tamara de Lempicka, The Orange Scarf (1927) © estate of Tamara de Lempicka/SODRAC (Montreal) 2001
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
CLARA CALLAN. Copyright © 2001 by Richard Wright All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Excerpt from The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, Barnes & Noble Books. Excerpt from Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, printed by permission of Random House Inc.
“Hero of the Humdrum” copyright © 2001 by John Bemrose. Reprinted with permission.
EPub © Reader Edition v 1. SEPTEMBER 2002 ISBN: 9780061740459
Print edition first published in 2001 by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com
Clara Callan Page 41