Clara Callan (33 page)

Dearest Clara,

I’m writing this in a hurry at home and I will try to mail it this afternoon. I’m so sorry about yesterday. You must have been stranded in that village all day, my poor darling, and it was so wet. But I couldn’t get away because my youngest child, Patrick, had an accident on his bicycle. He was hit by a car backing out of a driveway. This just happened down the street. We know the driver, an elderly man, and he’s terribly upset by what happened. I suppose he didn’t look behind him, but Patrick can be careless on that bicycle. He just goes like the wind. Anyhow, the man backed into him and Patrick struck his head on the sidewalk and we had to rush him down to St. Michael’s. This all happened yesterday morning just as I was about to leave. What a frightening experience it’s all been! We spent the entire day at the hospital, Edith, myself and Patrick’s sisters. The doctors have told us that they think he’ll be all right, but a head injury is always a worry. As
you can imagine, his mother is beside herself and I am concerned about her too. She is fragile in emergencies like this.

If you had a telephone, I could have called you about all this. Won’t you consider putting one in? I can just picture you going all the way to Uxbridge yesterday and then being surprised and disappointed that I wasn’t there waiting for you. My darling, I am so sorry but, of course, you will now understand the predicament I was in. I have to run now because we are going back to the hospital. So I’ll say goodbye and mail this with many, many kisses. Shall we try then for next Saturday at the same place? Things should be settled down by then. I miss you so much, my darling girl.

Fondly, Frank

Frank’s letter arrived, but I had just enough time to pick it up at the post office and get over to Mr. Bryden’s office. The letter “burned a hole in my pocket” all the way to Linden and I could only just manage a glance at it before Watts began his weekly torture session. I have decided to have a telephone put in the house, and I am going to get in touch with the Bell people tomorrow.

Dear Clara,

On Friday your sister read parts of your recent letter in which you suggested that I, poor little me, was “a sorceress bewitching the women of America.” I am taking that as a compliment, though sometimes when John Barleycorn and I get together for a little talk (like right now, for instance), I get somewhat lachrymose. There! You like words, so you can have that one. It’s not every day that one gets to read the word
lachrymose
in a letter. Now I get this way when I think that maybe I’m wasting my time entertaining the housewives of the nation with the intrigues surrounding Alice and Effie and dear old Uncle Jim and Aunt Mary. Sometimes, in fact, I feel I’d like to burn Meadowvale to the ground and leave not a stick standing.

At such times, I think of others who are doing more important things. Like those high-minded folk who are going off to Spain to fight the Fascists. I wish I had the courage, but the truth is, I don’t. I like my steak and gin and cigarettes too much. Anyway, I’m too old to wrap bandages. If it comes to that, I don’t know how to wrap bandages and doubt whether I could ever learn. All this comes to mind because yesterday on Fifth Avenue, I was accosted by an earnest young man and woman who were soliciting for the Republican cause
in Spain. They rattled their little cardboard box and pressed a pamphlet into my unwilling hand, lecturing me on the complacency of the American people while the suffering of our Spanish comrades, etc., etc. Well, I fished fifty cents out of my purse, which was generous, I thought, though it only earned me a scowl from the young woman. They gave me quite the little harangue there, and listening to them I got the feeling that on another day in another country, this pair could
cheerfully cut my fat, bourgeois throat. To care that much about something! For a minute or so, those youngsters made me feel (never mind that I am a sound, upright, tax-paying citizen) that my life is by and large worthless because millions of workers in Spain and around the world are enchained and suffering, etc., etc.

Well, a couple of gins soon fixed that, but those two Stalinists did unnerve me for a minute or two. I know that what I do is essentially frivolous in the grand scheme of things. Isn’t that true of most people’s jobs? Not yours, my dear. The good teacher may actually do something worthwhile in this tattered old world. If only someone would show this poor cynic a better way! And if only the Communists had better-looking gals working for the cause, I might consider joining ranks. I jest, of course. But they all look so dowdy and unkempt. I felt like saying to that young woman yesterday, “Why don’t you do something with your hair, Missy?”

Never mind. We do what we have to do in this old world. How are things with you these days? It looks as if we will be seeing you next month. With Nora guiding me (a somewhat unnerving thought, right?), your nearsighted correspondent will try to avoid other vehicles as she steers dear Mother’s Packard northward into the wilds of Canada. Should I bring warm clothes? Fur hat? Mittens? Oh, don’t take me seriously. I know it’s summer up there and it will probably be as hot as blazes. I think I told you once that as a child I went up into Quebec on a trip with my father, so I know a little about travelling in those parts. So, here’s to Adventure and Northward Ho!

Regards from the Sorceress E.

Yesterday was fair and warm and we had a picnic. It was my idea and Frank was delightfully surprised. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings because he has been so generous with meals, but I am tired of those brown hotel dining rooms with their awful pictures and dusty philodendrons. So I made sandwiches and we bought cold ginger ale at a store near the station. Then we drove to the brook where Frank first kissed me, and we took the car blanket and sat under a tree. Frank talked about his youngest son who is home now recovering, thank goodness. Then I told him I was having a telephone installed this coming week so we could keep in touch, and this appeared to make him so happy that he kissed me while I was still eating my sandwich. We laughed at that. And have I ever been as happy as I was yesterday afternoon looking at Frank’s eyes and listening to the water as it rushed over the stones in that stream?

Frank asked me about my life, and I told him about Nora in New York and my ordinary days as a schoolteacher in Whitfield, my walks and the music I used to play and the poems I used to write. He said he would like to come up and see me in my house.

“I have to be careful,” I said. “In small places like Whitfield, people talk. It’s all they have to do really and so anything is an excuse for gossip. A stranger’s car in your driveway, a man entering your house, it’s all noted and remarked upon. Some already think I’m a bit peculiar.” I thought he might ask why, but he didn’t.

Frank then began to caress me and I felt warm and nervous. I lay there looking up at the trees and their fresh leaves and through them the sunlit sky. I was being touched and my eyes closed under Frank’s kisses and warm tobacco breath. He told me I reminded him of the movie actress Claudette Colbert. “You look a bit like her, you know.”

“Nonsense,” I said, though I was happy enough that he said it.

“There is a resemblance, Clara, believe me.”

Then under his kisses I grew anxious. It came unbidden this anxiousness, for I remembered the tramp stepping through the long
grass and seizing my wrists and whirling me about, flinging me finally to the ground and covering me with his body. Pressing against me as he did with the oily machine stink of his overalls and the foul-mouth smell of him. The feel of the grass against my neck may have done all this. I don’t know, but I grew fearful and I asked Frank to stop touching me. His grey eyes seemed to grow milky. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

I wondered then if I should tell him what had happened to me two years ago on an afternoon like this, but I worried about what he might think of me. To be taken like that by a passing tramp! I sensed he might feel a kind of disgust with it all. With me perhaps. Even if he didn’t mean to feel that way, he might. And once I told him, it could never be changed. It would be a part of his view of me forever. So I didn’t tell him and there was tension between us. He sulked a bit like a disappointed schoolboy, so I told him that I had little experience in intimate matters and this was no place for it anyway. We could hear the sound of passing cars and I said that perhaps children might come along. We were not all that far from the road; everything would be rushed and unsatisfactory. I think I was so afraid of losing him then that I hardly knew what I was saying, but finally he took me in his arms and held me.

“You musn’t worry about that, darling girl,” he said. “You’re perfectly right. We must find some place where we can be alone and have plenty of time.” He suggested a motor court. “We must arrange something” was how he put it.

“Yes, I would like that,” I said and so we agreed to meet again next Saturday. I didn’t tell him that it would probably be a bad time of the month for me, though perhaps that will hold off until Sunday or Monday. I couldn’t bring myself to talk to him about that, though now I feel I should have. I should have told him that next weekend will be my time of the month. I should have done that.

Dear Evelyn,

Thank you for your letter. Never has the road to dissipation been so amusingly described. I think too that I can see you arching your eyebrows at the two young Communists on Fifth Avenue. I don’t know much about the Communists. We have them up here, of course, and they sometimes cause trouble in labour union rallies and so on. But they seem to confine their activities to towns or cities. They don’t appear to be very interested in farm and village folk. I am really not very interested in politics, particularly in the politics of extreme positions. Last summer in Italy I saw enough young men bullying people with their uniforms and flags. It seemed to me then that the Fascists like nothing better than pushing people around, and I imagine that the Communists are no different. In that sense you are probably right when you mention that “on another day and in another country, this pair would cheerfully cut my fat, bourgeois throat.” I think they are a bit like the fanatical preachers who used to
come through the village when I was a child. They would set up their tents on the fairgrounds and draw in people from the countryside, mostly Baptists from around Linden (a nearby town and county seat). I only went once because my father disapproved of evangelicals. He thought they preyed on impressionable hearts, and as in most of his evaluations about human nature, he was correct. But I do remember how earnest and intense that preacher was and how he promised salvation for the elect and damnation for the unsaved. He terrified me, but also made me ecstatic with promise for the future. I imagine your young Communists are something like that in their own way. They want everything turned upside down and a new order proclaimed, only here on earth. I don’t know if it’s working in Russia. Perhaps it is and certainly some of the things they are fighting for are worth the struggle. But they seem to want to change everything so fast and so violently, and I can’t believe any good will come of that approach.

Well, enough of my preaching. I am looking forward to seeing you next month, and you are right, it will very likely be “as hot as blazes” up here if last summer is anything to go by. Today, however, it is a perfect, balmy seventy-five degrees by the thermometer mounted outside my kitchen window. A light wind stirs the leaves. I am writing this on the veranda and there go the United Church minister and his pretty little wife on their Sunday promenade. They no longer visit me since I stopped going to church. But it is all a peaceful prospect before me. Nothing like your mythical Meadowvale with all its intrigues and adulteries. My little village is nothing like that. Or is it?

See you next month. Say hello to Nora for me and tell her that I am well and will have a surprise for her next week. She loves surprises and this one will especially please her.

Clara

On the way home from the dentist’s today, Mr. Bryden said, “You remind me of your mother, Clara. When I see you reading on the veranda, or walking home from school, I see your mother again. You have her ways.”

I was interested in this and asked him to tell me more about her, for she is now such a distant figure to me. I seem to see her only in outline, a slender dark-haired woman, almost girlish, still wearing an apron as she sat reading. He told me that from the first day she set foot in the village, every young man set his cap for her. “She was,” he said, “such a pretty little thing and so different from the other girls.”

“How was she different?” I asked.

“She was like no one I had ever met,” he said. “She was like a poet, I suppose, or an artist. Always a bit dreamy in her ways. She would go off walking by herself. Or read. She was always reading. She boarded that first year down at Mrs. Hallam’s by the Presbyterian church, and you would see her on the veranda there reading. All the young fellows
would walk by for a glance at her. Your father was bowled over by her. We all were in a way, though of course, I was married by then and happily married too. Don’t get me wrong, Clara. But your mother was just a very special kind of person, I thought. We all envied Ed when he caught her. We were surprised too, for as you know he was a good bit older than your mother. We thought he was going to be a bachelor for life. We didn’t think he stood a chance with Ettie Smith who was only nineteen or twenty at the time. But your father was a fine figure of a man all the same and they made a handsome couple.”

Then he told me about my brother’s death and how it seemed to push Mother beyond herself. I found that an interesting phrase to describe distraction or derangement. “She was never the same after the little fellow died of fever that spring,” he said. “That would have been in 1904. Good heavens, thirty-three years ago and it seems like yesterday. You were only a baby. You were lucky you didn’t catch it. You stayed at our house. Mrs. Bryden looked after you. After the little fellow died, your mother was lost. Even though she had you, she was lost. I could see it in the way she carried herself about the village. Then your mother and father had Nora and at first we thought she’d got over things. But she never really did.”