Blue Moon (29 page)

As she studied the photos, Laura had to admit to herself that the woman was indeed herself. But how? She told Mr. Tompkins the story of the Hastings Gallery. He obviously wanted to believe her, but the evidence of his eyes prevented him from doing so. “You say the artist in Toronto was called John Partridge. Look at the credit for this portfolio: 'J.P.'”

Completely befuddled, employee and employer talked about the strange situation. Mr. Tompkins had heard of trick photography whereby, for example, the head of a celebrity was pasted on to the body of a naked person engaged in an unseemly act. But you could always search for tell-tale clues in such set-ups. These photos looked all too genuine. Tompkins obviously wanted to believe a very distraught Laura, but the look of doubt that crossed his face revealed his conviction she was lying. That evening, she finished her shift, took the streetcar home, packed the two suitcases that contained all her worldly possessions and, early the next morning, took the train to Vancouver.

Almost immediately, Laura found lodgings in Gastown and, a day later, a job as a waitress in a nearby greasy spoon. In Winnipeg, she had escaped the feeling of being trailed or followed. Only intermittently had the conviction that some unseen force was watching her surfaced. In Vancouver—where she changed her name to Lynne Davidson—most of her waking moments were consumed with the idea that Partridge was somehow spying on her. No longer, she reminded herself, had she the slightest memory of what he looked like. Any man in his early thirties could be he. She was frightened but felt she had nowhere to turn for help.

About a year after she had tried to settle in Vancouver, she saw a review in the Sun of an exhibit at the Art Gallery devoted to a series of oil portraits “in the grand style, very much in the manner of John Singer Sargent, by the Toronto painter and photographer John Partridge. The fourteen portraits on display—all of the mysterious Leslie Dyment, the Toronto heiress no one has ever heard of—show Partridge has taken his career to an entirely new level of achievement and sophistication. This is portraiture that bears comparison to Ingres. From the raw materials of his model, Partridge has fashioned a style of painting previously unknown in the Dominion. Previously celebrated as a technical wizard in the art of drawing and having gained notoriety as a photographer of naked women, Partridge has at last discovered the enormous extent of his talent.”

No reproduction accompanied the notice, but Laura was quite certain of—as she entered the Gallery that afternoon—exactly what she would see. She did not even have to enter the rooms set aside for the exhibition. As soon as she approached the portals of the Gallery, she saw several women, obviously on their way home from the exhibition, nudge each other and glance in her direction.

The huge paintings—more in the manner of Reynolds than Sargent or Ingres—dominated the two rooms set aside for them. In some, Leslie Dyment stood full-length before the viewer arrayed in sumptuous evening gowns; in others, her face and shoulders filled the large canvases. The various stylings assigned to the model's dark black hair, the wide assortment of diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires that adorned her, the dexterous folds and nuances in the silks in which she was clothed—all these glowed with the force of life. But they would have been inconsequential were it not for the face and body of Leslie Dyment, for the abundant charm which she bestowed on all the objects in her universe, her authority giving the objects the right to exist. “Breathtaking” was the word that came to Laura in the gallery that afternoon. And yet she was disheartened to see herself rendered as the queen of an empire she knew nothing about.

That afternoon, Laura spent an hour looking at the portraits of herself. The following morning she called the Gallery to discover the artist's whereabouts. He had, she was informed, flown back to Toronto a few days before. When she insisted on being given his address there, she was given the name of the gallery—Starling's—
that represented him. “We never give out personal information, madam.” Later that day, Laura bought a small handgun from the pawn shop across the street from her restaurant and took the evening flight to Toronto. She took a room at the Park Plaza Hotel and began a daily vigil outside the gallery. No one going or coming bore the slightest resemblance to anyone she thought could be Partridge. Finally, she called Starling's, identifying herself as Lydia Dent. She had modelled for the great painter in the past and would like to offer her services to him again. As it turned out, the receptionist told her, John would be paying them a quick visit that afternoon at about three. Perhaps she could chat with him then?

Wearing her plain black raincoat, a kerchief tucked up around the lower half of her face, Laura positioned herself across the street from the gallery at quarter to three that afternoon. She only had to wait ten minutes for the yellow taxi to pull up in front of the gallery. The man who got out was obese, huge tortoiseshell glasses covering the upper half of his face. He paid the cabby, who pulled away quickly. Just as he reached the top step of the gallery, Laura ran across the street. “Mr. Partridge!” she shouted. “Is that you?” His concentration obviously disrupted, the artist looked in her direction and was startled to recognize the woman accosting him. He died instantly from the bullet that ripped through his heart. Laura remained there on the sidewalk, waiting calmly for the ambulance and the police to arrive.

Inspector Knox could not believe what Laura told him, could not fathom the confession she willingly offered. Partridge had stolen her identity—she had killed him in order to live. She could not have breathed, she assured him, a moment longer while he was in existence. The policeman reminded her that she hardly knew the painter, he had never threatened her, the only words they had ever exchanged were voiced by her just before she shot him at point-blank range. “Oh, but he murdered me over and over again. Took everything from me. He did not deserve to live.” If Knox was flabbergasted by Laura's motive, her lawyer, Ian Browning, was even more put out. “Surely, he threatened you? Must have assaulted—even raped—you? Maybe you have amnesia?” She calmly assured him this was not the case.

Mr. Browning's incredulity diminished markedly once the personal papers of the murder victim became available. The artist's diary revealed that he had been obsessed with Laura from the time
they were in the same class (Grade 10 Art) at Jarvis Collegiate. He had seen her in the nude because he had, as a teenager, spent many pleasurable evenings peeping into her bedroom window at her parents' home in Forest Hill. His knowledge of her face and body was so extensive that he had been able to make his drawings and then, subsequently, fake the photographs. At various times, in Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver, he had followed her; on more than a dozen occasions she had waited upon him. Having discovered this, Mr. Browning asked Laura: “Why did you kill him when you did? The portraits in Vancouver were innocuous.” She thought carefully before she told him: “Once again, he remade me in an image that was not mine. He was always stealing from me. I was left with nothing.”

Public opinion rendered Partridge into a monster of insensitivity, but Laura was, nevertheless, convicted of first-degree murder. Vengeance was the Lord's duty, said the jury and the Crown. Laura had overstepped herself. In those woebegone days, there were no feminists to champion her cause.

I think the technical word now used to describe a person like Laura is “schizoid.” She had absolutely no interest in being around other people, not that she seemed to take much pleasure in her own company. Mrs. White, who took a motherly interest in Laura, often tried to engage her in conversation. She got nowhere. At that point, she asked if I would help bring Laura round.

“Round from what?”

“You can be awfully dense, Evelyn. Laura's trapped within herself. She needs to come to the surface. Otherwise …”

“Otherwise what?”

“She'll become suicidal. All the best research indicators demonstrate that truism.” Over the years, Mrs. Nelson and Mrs. White had unofficially added the designations “social worker” and “amateur shrink” to my prescribed tasks. In Laura's case, it turned out to be an impossible assignment.

For me, the strange thing about Laura was her resemblance to Gene Tierney, the supposedly murdered subject of Otto Preminger's
Laura,
which I saw at the Tivoli when it was released—two years before my own troubles began—in 1944. At that time, I had
responded with cynical mirth to the famous throw away line by Clifton Webb in the role of the writer Waldo Lydecker: “In my case, self-absorption is completely justified. I have never discussed any other subject quite so worthy of my attention.”

There is a strange scene in that film when Clifton Webb, Vincent Price, Judith Anderson and Dana Andrews are assembled in a resplendent sitting room, the crowning touch of which is the portrait of the enigmatic Laura over the fireplace. In my mind's eye, I replayed that scene, trying to imagine what it must have been like for my Laura to walk into a large gallery filled with representations of herself. Dana Andrews, who plays the detective searching for the murderer of Laura, falls in love with the dead woman; John Partridge played a similar role in his Laura's life—he was obsessed with a remote girl and then woman. In trying to rid himself of his sexual feelings for her, he did two things: he became a first-class artist, in the process transforming himself into a miscreant. In the film, Laura—who shows up alive—turns out to be a milquetoast.

I did my best to talk with Laura, but it was slow-going. For one thing, she was not an avid reader and hardly ever visited the library. For another, Laura was remote, as if untouched by everything that had ever happened to her. Taking matters into my own hands. I suggested to Mrs. White that she rent
Laura
and show it on a Saturday night, the one evening a week the prisoners were shown a film. Maybe, I told her, that film would rouse her. She agreed.

Two weeks later, I sat behind my Laura during the film. Obviously never having seen it, she was struck by her own resemblance to Tierney. Like most of the inmates, she laughed at Waldo Lydecker's witticisms. She followed Dana Andrews' growing obsession with the dead woman, his startled discovery that Laura is alive, his involvement with her spoiled, wealthy friends, and his suspicion that Laura herself might be the murderer of the dead woman at first mistakenly identified as herself. She seemed taken aback with the discovery that Lydecker—infatuated with Laura—mistakenly killed the woman he thought was Laura and then, at the very end, is apprehended when he attempts to murder her for the second time. When Lydecker is mortally wounded, he has just a few seconds to reaffirm his undying love for Laura—“his better half” he labels her. If he could not have her, the writer was going to make sure no one else could. All for love, all for art.

Two days later, on Monday afternoon, I accosted Laura when she visited the library. “Did you enjoy the film the other night?”

“I liked the film. I'm not sure I could say I enjoyed it. Many people have told me that I look like Gene Tierney, but I had never seen even a photograph of her before the other night.”

“You look very much like her.”

“Yes. It spooked me. For minutes at a time, I thought I was looking at myself. That Laura is a bit like myself in other ways. She's what men want her to be—what they imagine her to be. That's really no excuse to fall in love with someone.”

“No excuse?”

“That woman was totally uninteresting. The other day I came upon the word * cipher' in a book. In the film, Laura's a zero, an absence. That's how I have also lived my life. The man I killed—he was like Waldo. Inconsequential, rodent-like. He was murdering me—he left me no option. Yet, he couldn't have seen anything in me to love—just a surface.”

“He was taken with your beauty.”

“Yes. And he didn't mind destroying me in the process. He was a sort of a cannibal, although he was eating me alive.”

“Maybe you followed the only course open to you?”

“Some days I think that. Most of the time, I'm not so sure. I allowed him to direct the course of my life, responding as I did to his actions. He was the cat; I remained the mouse.”

Laura did not say any more. Holding her head down even more than usual, she selected a book and left the library. Four days later, she was found dead in her cell, hanging from the ceiling. She had tied her single pair of nylon socks together and made them into a noose and rope.

After that, I decided to relinquish my role as inmate social worker. Mrs. White was unrepentant. “She had to be brought out of herself. We were doing the right thing.”

“We may have been doing the right thing, Mrs. White, but Laura's dead. She was a passive creature her entire life. She didn't want to think about who she was. You and I forced her to do that.”

“Yes, dear. I suppose we did. But human beings are thinking creatures.”

“And women are often manipulated by men to act in certain ways.”

Mrs. White would have none of my reservations. She certainly would not share any of the guilt I felt. I had encouraged Laura to reconsider her deep-seated passivity, to see her killing of Partridge as necessary to her well-being, her very existence. I had—under the instigation of one of my warders—encouraged Laura to break the mould. In so doing, I had forced her to kill herself. Years later, I tried to redeem myself by bringing her back to life in one of my first novels.

My closest friend during all my time at Kingston was Lydia, a woman twenty-five years older than myself. A mother figure, I suppose. Years before my arrival, she had assumed a key role at P4W in charge of the sewing room. Renowned for how quickly and efficiently she could turn her tiny, meticulous little hands to any task requiring a sewing machine, she was also a born teacher, one who deftly imparted her skills to others. Nevertheless, none of her charges—myself included—ever reached the same level of accomplishment as their instructor.