I tried to make the point that there was a difference between looting and protesting. One was against the law and one wasn’t. They weren’t buying it. They were relieved that white America could share their feelings of helpless outrage for once. Tamara, the one girl who was going to college — the one who the others called Oreo, saying she was white on the inside and black on the outside — came up to the front of the room and stood there in her collegiate plaid skirt and perfectly coiffed and straightened Gidget hair. She shook my hand, saying, “Miss McClure, welcome to my world.” Everyone in the class clapped.
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Less than a week after the Kent State slayings, I had to go to some distant suburb to Merilee’s wedding shower given by her mother. Most of the other guests were young teachers from the school. Merilee and her fiancé both still lived with their parents. However, they had already bought their dream home and furnished it down to the sweet gardenia potpourri. The previous week she’d guided me on a tour of the sterile furnished dream house, which was an ode to Ethan Allen. Merilee described it as “an easy, clean colonial look.” They were moving in on the day they returned from their honeymoon in Barbados.
I was surprised that Merilee lived in such an imposing old stone home with manicured grounds. I had the stereotyped notion that wealthy people were bright and worked hard and handed those values down to their children. (My dad used to say when we delivered medicine to wealthy people, “Hard work is how they got where they are today.”) Merilee’s work ethic was clearly an exception to that rule or else it was skipping a generation. As we sat there watching her open an avocado-coloured electric can opener, one of the shower guests said, “Well, Don is in the Guard and it has been so hard on him being at Kent State, but someone has to defend the country.”
“Defend the country? You have got to be kidding. No one in the crowd even had weapons. That was a massacre,” I said.
Another of Merilee’s guests, a sinewy woman who sat in a corner carefully attaching ribbons and bows from the gift wrapping onto a paper plate that would eventually be a bonnet worn by Merilee, said that the country should be relieved that Governor Rhodes had called in the National Guard and that they came willingly.
“Willingly? They joined the guard so they wouldn’t be deployed to Vietnam or now Cambodia. Who the hell thinks they did this out of kindness?” I asked.
A home economics teacher from Thomas Paine who wore a shocking pink print Marimekko shift with matching hairband said, “Well, my husband is also in the Guard, and he says that they felt they did the right thing. After all, the students were warned to disperse. It was their choice.” The other guests nodded in agreement.
“If your husband thinks he did the right thing, why doesn’t he and the rest of the Guard come forward and say they did it? In fact, according to the spokesman for the National Guard, no one is even admitting that they were in the front row and no one is admitting to shooting anyone.” There was silence, so I took that opportunity to continue. “It is almost a week later and no one in the Guard or the government has even done ballistic tests.”
Another woman said, “My brother-in-law was there and he said it was bullets shot in the air that went astray.”
“Really? Sixty-seven shots were fired. They shot for thirteen seconds straight. That’s a long time,” I went on. “Count them: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi …”
“Oh look!” Merilee said, interrupting my counting. “Jessica, how did you know that I was going avocado? Mom, look at this perfect avocado electric knife. It matches the can opener. I love the Formica stand as well.”
Another woman tore into me, ignoring Merilee’s pathetic avocado intervention. “You know it has been said that those so-called student demonstrators were really not students at Kent State at all.”
“What were they — duck-billed platypuses?” I asked.
She leaned forward and once she had everyone’s attention she said in a low voice, “They were Jewish professional radicals from New York City parachuted in to Kent State to disrupt.” Everyone looked shocked and in the silence she imparted her final zinger. “I have that information on the highest authority.”
“I beg to differ,” I said. “I met one of the murdered men once. He was a friend of my former roommate. He does not meet any of your criteria. He was not from New York City and was not a radical. In fact, he was a student at Kent State. He was on an ROTC scholarship. He was pro-Vietnam and was not demonstrating, but walking to his botany class and, finally, he was not Jewish.” No one said anything.
I was out of control. I kept counting. “Seven Mississippi, eight Mississippi …”
Finally Merilee’s mother called me into the kitchen and said, “Cathy. It is Cathy, isn’t it?” She, like Wiggles, seemed to think that “Cathy” was as difficult to remember and pronounce as “Rumpelstiltskin.” She wore a petite-sized navy blue wool sheath and pearl choker, and was helmeted by streaked and sprayed Ethel Kennedy hair. She said in a kind, soft voice, “Dear, I’m afraid you are ruining the shower that I worked so hard on.” She swept her hand around the kitchen, indicating hundreds of soggy rolled tuna pinwheel sandwiches sitting on blue and white Royal Copenhagen platters. There was a Baskin-Robbins ice cream bride cake as a centrepiece on the table. The face was beginning to melt from a demure smile into an Edvard Munch terrified scream. “I’m afraid that we will have to let history be the judge of the momentous Kent State uprising — that is, if they remember it.” She took my elbow and ushered me toward the back door. “Now I’m going to let you go.” She held out my purse for me to take. “It is clear to me you are not enjoying yourself and frankly,” she smiled and whispered as though the empty kitchen were full of people, “I’m not enjoying you.”
Shocked, I looked blankly at her. Was she kicking me out? Was I too dull-witted to pick up on it? She then turned to stuff her pinwheels with gherkins. When I didn’t move, she said, “I’m invoking my obligation as a hostess to ensure the majority of guests enjoy themselves.”
I slowly walked to the 409 and sat stunned in the driver’s seat. I had to have a whole cigarette before I could drive back to the apartment. When I gave it some thought, I didn’t blame her. If Merilee was going to marry a man who killed people at Kent State, then I was indeed ruining the shower.
When I got back to the Alcazar, I regaled Sara, Hay and Merlyn with the shower details. They hooted when I got to the part about Merilee interrupting my countdown of the shooting spree with the avocado appliance intervention.
Merlyn absolutely loved that story, and when he was in the hospital having yet another eye operation, all he wanted was for Sara and me to act out the Kent State wedding shower. Sara would pretend to unwrap the avocado can opener and I would do the bullet countdown. Sara pointed out one other upside to my shower blitzkrieg: “Now you won’t have to go to the wedding.”
Student teaching was actually rewarding, and I have more respect for good teachers than I have for anyone else in any profession. It should be the highest paid job in the country as it is in Japan. It’s a hard and often-thankless vocation — way too hard for me, that’s for sure.
Sara married Hay the following year. Hay gave up the police force to run a family home-heating business. She has spent the rest of her life in a small southern Ohio town only twenty miles from Ohio Universtiy. She now has a bit of a twang to her New York accent, and she is still teaching art in a middle school. Baby married Robbie and she is now principal of a school near where she grew up. Robbie went back to college in his thirties and is now a veterinarian working with large animals. Merilee is divorced and is a real estate agent.
I have never gone back to southern Ohio, and when I hear a southern Ohio accent, it sounds like fingernails on a blackboard to me. Though my eviction from Merilee’s shower was inconsequential compared to the real traumas of my life, being socially ostracized, even from the most
dreadful party imaginable, wreaked havoc on my unconscious. I still have nightmares that reenact Merilee’s mother demanding I leave, and I have a photographic memory of that kitchen, right down to the Royal Copenhagen china.
Part 3
Toronto
CHAPTER 15
a landed immigrant
The great themes of Canadian history are as follows:
Keeping the Americans out, keeping the French in and trying to get the Natives to somehow disappear.
— Will Ferguson, Why I Hate Canadians
When I finished student teaching in Cleveland in June 1970, my future yawned, and even drooled, in front of me. There were only two things in my life that I was sure of: the first was that I didn’t want to be a high school teacher, and the second was I wanted no more to do with men. Laurie and Clive, the two big romances of my life, had taken two huge chunks of my psyche. I decided to preserve what I had left.
Since I was going to be on my own, I needed a career that would be all encompassing, as it was going to provide my life’s meaning and offer me financial support. The problem was, other than Madame Curie, I had never seen a woman in a career other than teaching or nursing, so I was a bit stumped.
I had written a paper on Coleridge while at Oxford. Clive, who was kind to me, if not to everyone else, had taken me to some of the places that Coleridge had written about. These were places Archie had taken Clive when he was still in short pants. (Clive’s father wrote to me for many years after I met him. He never mentioned anyone in his family, but sent all kinds of enormously helpful esoteric Coleridge minutiae.) I wrote a paper declaring that a particular interpretation was incorrect because when I looked at the actual landscape, I could see Coleridge was referring to something entirely different. Professor Beech liked the paper and told me that it reminded him of the work that Professor Coburn, the world’s authority on Coleridge, was doing at the University of Toronto.
Professor Coburn had gone to Oxford, and in his meanderings about the countryside, following in Coleridge’s footsteps, he wound up at the bard’s birthplace. When Professor Coburn arrived in the 1930s, Coleridge’s descendants, Lord and Lady Coleridge, were ensconced in the poet’s ancestral home. They took a fancy to the professor and let him wander around the home, and in the back of a cupboard he found old notebooks and philosophical lectures that would revolutionize Coleridge scholarship. Professor Coburn was presently editing and annotating these collected notebooks and works. Professor Beech said he would “drop Professor Coburn a line” (the British way of saying he would pull out all the stops for you).
I found out that he did far more than that. He sent the Canadian professor a copy of my paper and wrote me a glowing reference letter. (It’s all an old boys’ club, especially on the small island of England where they probably played cricket together at Eton in the ’20s.) Professor Coburn wrote me a note asking me to apply for a Master’s in English at the University of Toronto and asking if I would like to take his course and work with him.
Years later, I learned that Archie Hunter-Parsons had also dropped a line to Professor Coburn. He was well known in the world of the Victorians and the Romantics and told Professor Coburn how much he admired me. I was shocked he’d done that after all the kerfuffle I’d caused. Only once had I casually mentioned to him that I might like to work with Professor Coburn. With two eminent Victorians in my parlour, I wound up with a scholarship to Victoria College at the University of Toronto, where Professor Coburn ruled the roost.
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I figured moving to Canada had one advantage: it was hard to screw up there since not much happened. Roy and I had delivered medicine on the Canadian side of the Falls. When I asked Roy why we never delivered tranquilizers in Canada, he’d said, “Canadians don’t need them.”
My family spent many summers in Canada, at a rented farmhouse on Ontario’s Lake Erie (when you could still swim in the lake) with quiet Canadians who collected teacups, admired the British monarchy, celebrated Queen Victoria’s birthday and even shopped at a grocery store called Dominion.
It was August 1970 when I rolled into Toronto. I needed a few weeks before school started to get my landed immigrant papers in order and find a place to live. I was relieved I was at a downtown university and I never had to live in a residence ever again. The university was spread over a few city blocks and was surrounded by once stately Victorian homes that had been converted into rooming houses. The streets were narrow and lined by leafy green maple trees that blushed beet red in the fall. Having no idea that there was a university housing service, or that newspapers had sections called classified ads, I decided to find the happening part of town and ask someone where the cool people lived.
Following the smell of incense, I finally hit Yorkville, Toronto’s Greenwich Village. While looking at a sign on the Riverboat coffeehouse that said that Gordon Lightfoot and Joni Mitchell had appeared, I heard someone from behind me say with a broad, black Buffalo accent, “Well, Cathy McClure, if it ain’t the empress from the Queen City.” I wheeled around and saw Rick James, an old friend from my high school years. Rick had lived in downtown Buffalo but used to come out to our suburban school parking lot and sell items from his trunk. I assumed his father was a jobber; I had no idea the stuff was hot. He once tried to sell me leather slacks. When I asked him how to wash them, he said, “Baby, they only be a dollar. Just throw ’em out.”
Rick was an entrepreneur even while we were in high school. He brought bands to the big summer patios of Buffalo’s lake taverns. He had an unerring ability to pick new talent. For example, he brought in Sly and the Family Stone for their first real gig. We saw guys who were on the skids like James Brown and Chuck Berry before they’d made comebacks. He often contacted me and told me about the concerts so I would get kids from my high school out on a Saturday night.
When I saw him standing there on Yorkville Avenue in Toronto, I screamed, “Ricky James, I don’t believe it. I’m not even in America.”
He started laughing his infectious, high-pitched screech, which was his signature, and said, “Your dad still the man? He had some real evil horn thing goin’ on.”
We laughed about the ooga horn and my father’s other antics. I didn’t bother saying he’d had a brain tumour at the time because Rick seemed to find my father’s stunts the most interesting and amusing thing about me.
Rick now had long dreadlocks — way before dreadlocks made an appearance anywhere that I’d ever seen. Rick was sporting a Jimi Hendrix hippie garb of beads, velvet flares and a black hat with a pink feather, an ensemble that appeared to be de rigueur in Yorkville.
He’d quit school at fifteen, had joined the Naval Reserve at sixteen at the beginning of his music career, but went AWOL when, as he put it, “weekend service interfered with my ladder to success.” He added, “You know me, girl. I got my ear to the ground. I leapfrogged across that border from Buffalo to Canada. I had some happenin’ shit goin’ down here in Hogtown.”
As we walked down the street, he pointed to a bar and said, “I used to play right there in a group called the Mynah Birds. I put together a band back in ’round ’65, but get this,” and then he shrieked, “we had to advertise pet food! We had to wear yellow boots and black jackets to look like mynah birds.” (I later found out that group also included Neil Young and Bruce Palmer, who’d go on to Buffalo Springfield, and Goldy McJohn, who joined Steppenwolf.) Rick started doing an inspired mynah bird imitation and told me he had to fly south to prison for a year for going AWOL. As he said, “Who knew the FBI had wings? I came back and got the Mynah Birds on the road, but we all flew the coop. I been in L.A. for a few years now writing songs and music for Motown. I work with Smokey Robinson and the boys.”
We sat on a bench to have a Coke in front of the Riverboat, and Rick said he’d gone to Buffalo to see his mother for the weekend. (I remember that she made a living as an “errand boy” for
the Mafia.) He continued, “Not much happenin’ in Buffalo since you and me blew out o’ town, McClure, so I drove up here to see who still be jivin’ in Yorkville.”
He looked around at the Yorkville scene, which was nominally still the hip section of town but was just on the cusp of gentrification, and said, “Looks like the Mynah Birds are minor birds now. So, what the hell you doin’ in Canada?”
“I’m going to graduate school.”
“Hey, I thought you graduated, girl.”
The great thing about Rick was you were never sure whether he was out of it or above it. He was either really ironic or a gifted fake.
I asked him for information about living in Toronto and he told me to live in the section of the city called the Annex. (In fact, I still live there forty years later.) He said he used to live in a house on Huron Street called the Crystal Palace because it was packed with speed freaks, but it was cleaned up now and full of “happenin’ dudes.” It couldn’t hurt that Huron Street was the closest to the university’s library.
Then he looked me in the eye and said, “Cath, now I’m tellin’ you this as an old friend since bobby-sox days, so don’t be takin’ it the wrong way, ya hear: you gots to know that no one in Toronto who knows their ass from Saran Wrap would be caught dead in that American Colonial shit you’re wearing. Those threads scream yesteryear.”
I looked down at my black chinos and sleeveless white blouse with a Peter Pan collar and said, “Lead on, MacDuff.”
“MacDuff, I like that. It got a ring. There’s only one place to buy clothes. It’s Crazy David’s.” We walked down Yorkville Avenue to the store, and suddenly he turned to me and said, “I got to run.” As he ran down the street, he yelled over his shoulder, “Tell Crazy David that I, Rick MacDuff James, sent you. He’ll get my meaning.” Then he was gone.
Coming Ashore Page 20