Clara Callan (42 page)

This gloom vanished listening to Anderson, a plain-looking Negress in a blue dress. When she sang “I Know that My Redeemer Liveth,” there was scarcely a breath in the auditorium. There was not one of us who didn’t feel chastened, humbled, enriched by this woman’s remarkable voice.

Yesterday a heavy wet snowfall that coated everything. Many roads are still blocked with cars half-buried by the sides of highways all over the province. Infuriating at this time of year and last night, watching it all come down, I decided to go to Toronto. I wanted to catch a glimpse of Frank and his family. A hare-brained idea, but still irresistible at eight o’clock this morning. So I was among only a half-dozen passengers on this Easter Sunday, passing through a white world under grey skies, the snow still clinging to the village signs as we approached their stations. Men and boys were shovelling walks and driveways. The city streets were slushy and twice my winter coat was splattered by passing cars. I was wearing a kerchief for concealment, though I knew I would be careful not to let him see me. The bells of the big downtown churches, St. James, St. Michael’s, the Metropolitan, were pealing and the streets were filled with worshippers. Easter is surely the happiest of feast days for Christians,
and walking up Bond Street I remembered the stirring of my own heart on this of all days.

I stood near the hospital, and from there I could see the people
entering the wide doorways of the cathedral. About ten minutes before the hour, I saw Frank and his family. Now across the street from me were the people he had talked about. His wife Edith is taller than Frank and dark-haired beneath the new spring hat. A handsome woman who had once perhaps been very close to beautiful, but now the Irish good looks have turned a little haggard. She walked behind Frank, holding onto the arm of one of her daughters, a blonde stout girl whom I took to be the nun-in-training. Frank walked ahead of them in his overcoat, white scarf and homburg, pipe in mouth; the man who had undressed me in a hotel room only a week ago. Beside him was his youngest son Patrick. The last two were the oldest of his children: a sullen-looking young man, fair like his father, and the dark-haired Theresa. I could see the mother’s intensity in her oldest daughter’s face, and I could picture this young woman filling a page with accusatory
words, her fingers typing furiously. Judgemental, recriminatory, a fanatic heart; it was all there in the angry, pretty face.

I watched them disappear through the church doorways, Frank standing aside at the last to let them enter, knocking out the pipe ash on his heel and removing his hat. Then I lost sight of him among the other dark-coated figures.

Something has happened between Frank and me. I felt it in his words and voice today. After school I drove over to Linden. It was exhilarating to be in the car again, out on the country roads with the windows down and the smell of the dark wet fields rushing at me. I was so happy driving over there and I wanted to hear his voice; I wanted him to plan another Saturday for us. But when I phoned his office from the booth near the public library, he didn’t sound himself; our conversation seemed strained and distant. I could have been exchanging words with a stranger. I asked him when we could meet again.

“Not this weekend,” he said. “It’s impossible.” He even sounded a
little put out by my suggestion. It was as if I were suddenly interfering in his life. I asked him if I was calling at a bad time and he said, “Not particularly.”

There followed a terrible silence as I stood there in the booth watching people carry their books into the library.

“When can we meet then?” I asked.

“Can you come into the city on the twenty-third?”

“Not to that awful hotel, Frank,” I said. “I am so uncomfortable in that place.”

More terrible silence and then he said, “Maybe we should talk about all this. I can’t go traipsing around the countryside every Saturday.”

Traipsing around the countryside!
Is this how he sees his time with me now? That word “traipsing.” I felt bewildered by the sound of it.

“I could come into Toronto on the twenty-third. Maybe we could just have lunch or a cup of tea together. I want to see you, Frank.”

“Yes. Well, I’ll meet your train at Union Station on the twenty-third. We can have a sandwich somewhere.”

“Frank,” I asked. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter. Why?”

“You don’t sound yourself,” I said. “You sound irritated with me. As if I’m intruding.”

“No. You’re not intruding. I’m just not having a very good time of it. Trouble at home. The usual thing.”

I told him I was sorry about that and so we said goodbye. Yet now I wonder if it is trouble at home that made him sound the way he did or is it something else? Perhaps I have arrived at the day that awaits women like me; the day when things stop, because there is no other place for them to go. I feel ill about all this. That foolish, foolish moment of abandonment.

Mrs. Bryden just told me that they have found Helen Jackson. Apparently she was wandering the streets of Buffalo, New York. She has been taken to the asylum in Whitby for observation. Letter from Nora.

Dear Clara,

Sorry not to have answered your letter sooner. You’ll never guess what I’ll be doing next weekend. I’m going to take an airplane ride!!! It’s a birthday present from Les.

I was too sick back in March to care about presents, and so Les held off until this week when he surprised me with dinner at the Rainbow Room. The real McCoy with steak and champagne, and at the end of it all, he put an envelope on the table. Inside were two tickets to Chicago. He has some business there a week from next Saturday and wants me to go along with him. It sounds so exciting and I’m really looking forward to it. I think when I’m there I’ll give Jack and Doris Halpern a call. Do you remember the Halperns and how good they were to me? It was Jack, of course, who helped me get my start in radio here in New York. It should be fun. Les has reservations at the Palmer House, which I am told is very swanky indeed.

This Sunday I am going to watch the Easter Parade with a couple of gals from the show. I’ve got my new Easter bonnet, how about you? Before that we’re going to the Easter service at St. Thomas’s right on Fifth Avenue. We’ve done this for the last couple of years, so it’s becoming a kind of tradition, I guess. Then we watch the parade and have breakfast together with champagne and everything. If you had come down, you could have joined us. I love going to church on Easter Sunday. I think I enjoy it even more than Christmas. Do you remember how Father would always have new shoes and dresses for
us when we were eight or nine years old? If Easter was early and there was still snow on the ground, we had to wear galoshes, and we’d take them off on the church porch so we could show everybody our new shoes at Sunday school. But if the sidewalks were dry, he’d let us wear our new shoes outside and for a while your feet always felt so light. It was as though you were walking on air.
Do you ever think about things like that, Clara? Gee, I do. Before I go to sleep at night I think about times like that. About growing up in Whitfield with you and Father. And I’m only thirty-three! What will I be reminiscing about in twenty years? I’ll sound like some old woman nattering on about “the good old days.”

Well, I better go. I have to wash my hair and do my nails. Tourists come through the studio now and stare at us while we’re doing the show. You look up from your script and there is a whole wall of strangers gawking at you from behind the glass. So we have to be as spiffy as we can make ourselves. Tomorrow is Friday and that’s always a big day for visitors to the studio. So I am going to dazzle them with this new red dress I bought at Bonwit’s the other day. It’s a pretty nifty little number and I don’t look half bad in it, if I do say so. I’ll let you know how my airplane ride turns out. Oh, way up in the sky like that. I hope I don’t get sick. Take care, sister.

Love, Nora

A letter from his daughter. In a way I expected something like this; I don’t know why, I just did. Yet how could she know about us? He told me she was no longer living at home. Does she follow him on Saturdays? Does she follow him every day? I am at an utter loss, but I feel defiled by it all, and perhaps I deserve to be.

Dear Miss Callan,

I am disappointed to learn that you are seeing my father again. I thought you had come to your senses last fall, but apparently not. I certainly expected better from you. After all, Miss Callan, you are not some little shopgirl working at Eaton’s. You are a schoolteacher and you should know better. I wonder if you realize that you are sharing him with another woman. She lives here in the city and he sees her through the week. He takes her to a cheap hotel room for sex. You probably don’t believe me, do you? Well, I can prove it’s true and I will. I am going to write this woman and tell her about you and my father. I expect you will hear from her one of these days. I don’t know why women like you can’t behave decently and leave married men like my father alone.

Yours sincerely,
Theresa Quinlan

Marion came by this evening and perhaps it was good that she did, for all week I have been stewing over Theresa Quinlan’s letter and my meeting with her father tomorrow. I am afraid he is going to end this. It was in his voice when I called him last week. He might as well have said, “Oh, it’s you, is it? What can I do for you?”

I should have written him a letter. I always feel more comfortable with words in a letter. Tomorrow I will be tongue-tied. He will tell me that it’s over and I will go to pieces quietly in the station cafeteria with its streaked tables and dirty cups. A waitress will stop wiping a counter and stare pityingly at me. Marion brought me out of all this for a while with village news, her head shaking in wonder at the follies and misfortunes of her fellow creatures. Yesterday she was down to the asylum in Whitby with her mother and Ida Atkins to visit Helen Jackson.

“What a place that is, Clara!” said my wide-eyed Marion. “The language some of those women use! It’s terrible.” She then told me about a girl who follows Helen around and says “shocking, dirty things to her.” A revelation for Marion and her mother and Ida Atkins, I suppose.

I thought of Helen Jackson, a gentle soul in that world and said “the poor woman” and I meant it. She cannot be mad, but merely distracted, overwhelmed by everything, unable any longer to deal with daily life. Anyone can reach such a point. Perhaps Mother felt the same way and perhaps one afternoon I will too. I think I came very near it when I returned from Italy.

Told Marion I would drive down one Sunday and see Helen Jackson.

“I think she would like that, Clara,” Marion said. “She asked about you. She really likes you. She said you were the most honest person in the village, though I don’t really know what she meant by that. It seems to me we’re pretty honest decent people around here.”

Marion was leaning forward with her elbows on the kitchen table, cooling her tea as she has always done by blowing short bursts of breath across her cup. It’s a homely and endearing habit that I have watched since we were children in her mother’s kitchen, drinking cocoa. Marion never asks me personal questions. It’s odd in a way. I am sure she has heard all the stories, all the gossip about the man in Toronto, my precarious nerves and peculiarities. Yet she has never once come close to serious inquiry. The truth is that neither of us is comfortable with the kind of conversational intimacy that I am sure some women enjoy: the secrets of the bedroom, the sorrows and joys of love. Is it politeness, diffidence, fear of exposing our innermost longings? Neither of us has the map for such a journey into the heart. Marion wants everything between us to remain as it once was when I was her only friend. And yet, we weren’t friends in sharing feelings. We never came close to doing so; there was always
an emotional distance between us.

No one else would play with Marion because of her foot. I see her
always on the edge of the circle, watching the other girls, waiting for them to tire of their games. Trying to catch up to me as I walked home. Following me about the house and getting in the way. I envied the mantle of shining clean hair which clung to her shapely head like a dark helmet. Her lovely eyes. Even sometimes her boot. I imagined what it would be like not to have to do things because you were crippled. I would scold her for being a nuisance and then promise to play with her another day. But we never shared secrets. Something within us held them back. So I could never reveal what’s important to me. Despite the romance stories and the radio plays she loves, Marion would only be embarrassed by accounts of genuine happiness or heartbreak: I could never speak to her of summer nights when Frank and I lay waiting for the breeze from the screened windows to cool our bodies. I could never talk to her of last winter’s loneliness. It
would make us both uncomfortable. Marion’s only nod to feeling is the frown that crosses her face as she leans into the cloth-covered mouth of the radio and listens to one of her heroines unburden herself.

On the train this morning I remembered that it was Shakespeare’s birthday. So thank you for the poetry, Will. I may need it in the months ahead, every syllable. He never showed up. He just wasn’t there when I walked down the passageway towards all those people who were standing behind the rope awaiting friends and lovers. On the loudspeaker they were announcing the arrival of a train from Montreal and so the waiting area was crowded. I looked among all those faces for him. How awkward not to have the one you expected there to greet you with a hug, a kiss, a word, a handshake! In a matter of minutes you are reduced to puzzled anger, forced against the wall to watch the others moving away. I had bought a new hat in Linden Ladies’ Wear, which the saleslady had said was “very becoming.” I
could see its jaunty absurdity in my reflection in the glass-panelled poster for train travel through the Rockies. “Becoming.” It looked ridiculous and I felt like shouting, “Liar, liar,
ten feet higher!”