Blue Moon (14 page)

The next time I visited Cannon Street, I had decided to marry John Dick. On that occasion, there was no jollity or banter as the cards were turned over by Mr. Washington. The whites surrounding his large brown pupils became immense and, for once, he was at a loss for words. “Cut the cards again, Evelyn.” I did so. He turned three or four over. “Let's try again.” I did as instructed. This time he uncovered only two. “Evelyn, I keep seeing the Hanged Man over and over again. He won't leave us alone. I've never seen such a bad fortune.” Then he tried to make a joke of it. “Sometimes a really mean-minded spirit gets into this room and makes havoc of everything I'm doing. He's here today. No sense trying to make sense of the cards when he's around. Come back in a week or two.” Two weeks was too long. I never had the opportunity to visit the Cannon Street house again.

My mother was flummoxed when I told her what I was about to do. We didn't need a cover or beard—we still had Norman White. That might be so, I assured her, but a recent widow was more vulnerable than a married woman. “But he's a lowly bus conductor, dear! Someone of no consequence!”

I assured her that made him all the more valuable in my profession. He was someone who posed no threat. I could not help but add that my father was an employee of the HSR. That observation really rubbed salt into the wound I was inflicting. Without wanting me to know she had taken this taunt in, she responded: “Your father hates foreigners. He'll kill him!” At that point, I suggested we keep the marriage a secret from him. When she saw my mind was made up—that I was beginning to conduct myself as her daughter—she ceased trying to dissuade me.

Even a diligent biographer like Jack Batten, who wrote the life of one of my lawyers, can get things wrong. After mentioning that the marriage took place on October 4, 1945, in the Church of the Ascension on James Street South, he continues: “The only two witnesses to the event were present by happenstance. A few days earlier, a nodding acquaintance of Dick's named Dominic Pollice had climbed aboard his streetcar where, to Pollice's surprise, Dick pressed him to attend the wedding. Pollice showed up with his fiancee, and afterwards the two
couples went to a hotel room for a few celebratory drinks. During the subdued festivities Pollice leaned over to give Evelyn, who was sitting on a bed, a kiss of good wishes, Evelyn reached up her arms and locked Pollice in an embrace that lasted far beyond the respectable time for congratulations. Perhaps it was at this awkward moment, as Dick watched in confusion and jealousy, that he began to realize he'd stepped in over his head with a woman like Evelyn “

Having made his editorial interjection, Batten continues: “As for the bride, her enthusiasm for the venture into matrimony cooled that very evening. She and Dick ate dinner alone in a downtown restaurant and spent most of the meal bickering. Evelyn expected Dick to set up the new family—husband, wife and Heather—in a house, but Dick talked of a flat on Barton Street in the north end. 'With all those dagos,' Evelyn said. The north end wasn't her style, and before midnight she left both the restaurant and Dick and returned to Henson Park, where, since the apartment had only a single bedroom, she spent her wedding night in the same place she'd been sleeping for the previous four months in bed beside her mother.”

Most of the information Batten supplies is correct, but cause and effect become completely muddled in the description of the kiss I gave Pollice. I met the man and his girlfriend, Dorothy Jackson, on the day of my marriage. I did proffer him a sedate kiss, at which point he turned to John and whispered: “Have you squared this with Anna Wolski? She'll kill you.”

After Pollice and his woman left, I asked John who Anna was and was told she was a girlfriend with whom he had recently finished. Shades of Bill Bohozuk arose before me, although I attempted to remain calm in the face of another betrayal. At our wedding supper, I told John about my wish to rent or purchase a home where our little family could be safely ensconced. He suggested shabby Barton Street; at that point, I might have made the racist remark attributed to me (I was such an ignorant hard-hearted young woman).

As the conversation continued, it became apparent my new husband was penniless: I would have to supply all the funds for our matrimonial home. At that point, I informed him there was no room for him on James Street; he would have to return to his boarding house at the corner of Emerald and Cannon. When I had first contemplated marriage to John, I had not dwelt on the
prospect of conjugal sex. That night, the information he had just provided me with allowed me to banish that subject completely from the horizon.

Thus began what was essentially a non-marriage. Three days after the ceremony, Bill phoned me, imploring me to see him. I agreed to meet him at the Tivoli after the movie the following evening. We nodded to each other as we left the cinema; he waited a minute or so to accompany me on the walk up James Street back to the Henson Apartments. Suspecting I had married Dick in order to get at him, he offered an olive branch. We were now both guilty of the identical crime of linking up with unsuitable partners. Couldn't we resume our relationship and couldn't we both rid ourselves of undesirable pasts?

As we reached the Apartments, I continued to listen in grim silence to his protestations and was about to turn him down when suddenly John Dick leapt out of the thick bushes that fronted the property. He accused Bill of being a home wrecker, an unmanly propositioner of a recent bride. Speech deserted Bill, but I told John to leave immediately or I would summon the police. Stammering obscenities, he wandered down Herkimer, the street that intersected James.

My anger at John fuelled my lust: Bohozuk retrieved his nearby car, and we drove to his home in the north end, where, careful not to make any noise that would wake his sister, we had sex for the first and last time. In the morning on our drive back to my apartment, I told Bill I had no wish to see him again.

My first and only act of genuine sexual passion was generated by rage. As a young woman, I had been taught by Mother to suppress my emotions—especially anger; I was the perfect prostitute because I experienced no sexual feelings. All of a sudden anger and the pleasures of the body were uncomfortably fused for me. I chose not to believe that either of these basic instincts was part of me—I was obviously afraid of veering out of control. I also wanted to revenge myself on Bill, to make him think I had forgiven him. In one fell swoop, I got even with him and made the pesky John furious.

In quick order, John proved to be a dreadful nuisance on another score—money, once going so far as to ask my mother to loan him some. A few days after the Bohozuk incident, he showed up at my flat asking for me. Mother explained I had gone out with a friend.

“I thought she was ill in bed.”

Such was the not the case, Mother ventured. Then she added: “How do you expect Evelyn to keep up with her social contacts if she doesn't go out, and doesn't have a nice apartment to entertain her friends in?”

At that point, the penny finally seems to have dropped for John. “Do you mean she earns money as a prostitute?”

Attempting to put the best face on the situation, Mother, as was her wont, gilded the lily: “I wouldn't say that exactly, but she has rich friends and she has to have a nice place to receive them.”

A very distraught—apparently shocked—John Dick then took his leave. To his cousin, Alexander Kammerer and his wife, Anna, he told how he had been taken in by a whore posing as a helpless widow. He characterized himself as a victim of a manipulative woman and, to a large extent and to be fair to him, that claim was accurate.

Unfortunately, John Dick began to broadcast his discoveries beyond his own family circle. He also continued to hide in the thick bushes surrounding the flat; he noticed when Mother and Heather left the flat and a gentleman caller would arrive five or ten minutes later. Some of these men he recognized from their photos in the
Spectator.
As he began to voice his litany of complaints and to mention the names of the men he saw, he also learned from fellow HSR drivers that many of them suspected my father—in collusion with one or two executives—was robbing the company blind. He began repeating that gossip.

In an attempt to check any damage my new husband could unleash, I decided to buy a house where my mother, Heather and I could live away from James Street. My hope was that I could settle John there and then decide my next step. Under those circumstances, I purchased 32 Carrick Street, a modest three-storey red-brick house with a white veranda, a small garden, and a garage opening into a narrow alley in the east end of the city but nearer to the centre than Rosslyn Avenue. When the three of us arrived there on the morning of the thirty-first of October, John was sitting on the steps to greet us. Later, he would untruthfully claim I swindled him out of $1,300 as part payment on the house.

His paranoid turn of mind took further flights of fancy when he told Anna Kammerer, as she later recalled, of his domestic arrangements: “He said he was never allowed to have any private talk
with his wife without the mother interfering. As soon as they would enter into conversation she would call Evelyn on some pretext or other. Evelyn and her mother also spent hours together whispering in a low voice so he wouldn't hear what was being said. He also remarked he was never allowed the freedom of the house, as one of them always made some excuse to accompany him wherever he went. He said there was a locked trunk and suitcase in the attic and when he asked to see the contents Evelyn always said, 'You wouldn't be interested. They are only my school things.'”

Just because one is paranoid does not mean one is not being looked at—or noticing the truth. John had given himself plenty of good reasons to be watching his back. My mother and I remained agitated about my father's wrath if he discovered what John was openly declaiming. We were also worried about my patrons and the obvious consequence of any gossip about them being spread about. Containment: this was the task to which I now had to turn my attention. I was not assisted by two mysterious visitors.

The first was a Ukrainian woman, who supposedly came in response to a classified advertisement in the
Spectator.

“You have an apartment to rent it says in tonight's paper.”

I assured her this was not true and retrieved that day's newspaper. In fact, I pointed out, there was no flat advertised anywhere on Carrick.

“Well,” she remarked in broken English, “I think I make a mistake.” She retreated quickly but Anna Wolski accosted John the next day on the streetcar: “I found your wife at home. You really are married.”

The next visitor was even more sinister: a stout, dark Italian, elegantly dressed in a dark overcoat, a bright tie, and a large diamond ring in a claw setting. When I invited him in, he bowed, removed his gloves, and held his bowler hat in his hand. According to him, John was breaking his home up. If he did not desist from visiting his wife, he would fix him. I asked him what he meant. He opened his mouth wide, revealing glistening pearl teeth with gold fillings, smiled and then fixed me with his dark eyes: “You know what we mean by 'fix him.' We fix him all right, one way or the other. Get him sooner than later.” With that, he bowed again, placed his hat on his head, turned slowly and let himself out of the house.
At close range, I now learned as I should have known that appearances can be extremely deceiving. My own skills in reading John had been minimal. He was a philanderer who kept a number of women on a string; he had lied about his financial prospects; he now showed little interest in Heather. He wanted me to
keep
him: he thought he had found a virtuous woman who would mother him, save him from himself and, at the same time, provide a ready source of cash.

When he discovered the nature of my profession, he acted the role of the generous, disappointed, betrayed lover whose expectations had been dashed. When that ploy did not work, he accused me of withholding from him what I gave to others. “I'm supposed to pay you? Just like the others? Otherwise, nothing?” Then he threatened Mother: “If my wife is a whore, I'll be the pimp. Where will that leave you?” When she tearfully informed me she did not like the tone in my husband's voice, I could appreciate both the irony and the comedy of the situation. John's self-effacing mannerisms—an elaborate charade—had totally vanished. Mother had met a man after her own heart.

I was badly frightened, realizing that I had created a situation that was quickly veering out of control. My fantasy was that I would rest easier if I did not have to see my spouse on a daily basis.

I told John he could stay at Carrick Street—sleeping by himself on the living room sofa—until after the Christmas holidays. After that, he was to find his own place. Our brief marriage, I instructed him, was over. Early in January 1946, he fled to the Kammerers, claiming he had heard gossip that both my father and Bohozuk were out to get him. On 28 February, he attended the funeral of his grandmother in Beamsville. On that occasion, he made—in his babyish yet pompous manner—a solemn declaration to his widowed mother: “If something does happen that I am missing, go after Mr. and Mrs. MacLean and my wife and you will get a lot more. But start there.” Tears filling his eyes, he added: “Mother, I believe in prayer to the Almighty God, and He might get me out somehow from that bunch, but if something does happen, go after those three people.” Ten days later, all that remained of John Dick was a headless, armless and legless cadaver.

“Any discussion of your guilt or innocence is a waste of k precious time. You are patently innocent, my girl.”

I felt very reassured by Mr. Sullivan, although he issued his declaration in an almost casual way. My lawyer loomed over me as I sat with him in the cubbyhole assigned to us. Refusing to sit down, the big, bluff Irishman, with the furriest, most outlandishly out-of-control eyelashes I had ever beheld, paced furiously.