Clara Callan (49 page)

After Joe finished with the furnace this evening, I sat in the front room listening to a concert from New York. Dvorřák’s
Serenade for Strings
. It is a still, cold night and the signal was wonderfully clear. For an hour I sat transported. I could not read; I could scarcely think of anything except for the enormous fact that this music was travelling through all that dark air to reach me. When the music was over, I awakened as from a dream.

Dear Clara,

They burned down Atlanta, Georgia, last night and it was some bonfire. Yes, I saw it with my own eyes right on the back lot of MGM. Through the fog the sky was pale yellow and all these figures were
running about. Fred and I watched the eerie scene together. I’m sure that all of Los Angeles thought that MGM itself was going up in flames, and there are plenty around who probably think that’s not such a bad idea. The Great Fire of London had nothing on this, believe me. What was it all in aid of? you might ask. The fire was no accident, of course. It was set so the cameras could roll for a crucial scene in the filming of
Gong Mit de Vind
, as it’s called by a fellow who recently arrived from Hitler’s Germany. Anyway, it was quite the sight.

I actually believe that I toil in a kind of madhouse: burning buildings, lunch in the commissary with cowboys and Indians and ballet dancers; for a while I was beginning to wonder whether the old gin bottle was finally playing havoc with my grey cells because I was starting to see “little people.” I thought, Here at last are the delirium tremens I’ve been dreading all these years. It turns out, however, that “the little people” are only Singer Midgets brought in to play the Munchkin people in
The Wizard of Oz
. And what odd, mischievous little gaffers they are! You’re apt to see them sleeping it off in a wastebasket or cupboard. They are awful boozers and they can’t seem to keep their hands to themselves. More than one script girl has complained of a pinched backside. So they are proving to be quite a headache for their keepers. I am grateful to learn however that the DT’s are still down the road a bit.

I saw the great L. B. Mayer the other day. I was summoned to his grandiose quarters and naturally approached in fear and trembling, convinced I had transgressed in some manner with my Nancy Brown series. But no, the great man thinks the scripts are fine and in fact went out of his way to congratulate me on writing that “reinforces the small-town values of American family life.” He said he could see no reason why the series shouldn’t be as popular as Andy Hardy, God bless the old coot. I might have told him, but didn’t of course, that when it comes to reinforcing “the small-town values of American family life,” I am the logical scribe. I have no family and have never lived in a small town. I also smoke and drink to excess
and like to bed comely young women. Who better to write about American family life?

But enough about my sordid self! How are you? You must be getting very close to delivery time. I am, of course, crossing all fingers and toes that everything will go well.

Best always, Evelyn

P.S. I am enclosing a book that I think you might like. Maria Huxley told me about this woman and what a fine writer she is. I agree. Hope you enjoy it!

A year ago today I was eating goose with greasy fingers and reading about lust and murder in California. How simple it all was then! Just don’t see him again and wait for time to salve the injured heart. But that was then and this is now, and now is very different. Now I move around my house with a cautious tread, especially on the stairs, holding firmly to the banister as I descend. The cumbersomeness of it all! How I long to be light again and walk unhampered with my legs together! Emily D. never went through this, damn it. And yet I am happy enough and this has been a good day. Marion came by with her gifts: a blouse and skirt for when I am again able to wear such things; and for the baby, a book of nursery rhymes and a silver-plated spoon. I gave her the new Taylor Caldwell novel. She cooked a small chicken and after dinner I played the piano, though with some difficulty, for I could barely reach the keys. I was, I suppose, a comical sight, but Marion sang the old carols with feeling in her clear alto
voice. The Brydens dropped in to listen. How good these three people have been to me over the past few weeks!

An hour ago, with the help of Marion and Mrs. B., I waddled across to the Brydens’ and phoned Nora. Told her the baby is active and seems eager to get out and play a part in this tarnished old comedy.
Nora was relieved to learn that Marion is going to stay with me now for the next few days. The four of us decided a few hours ago, because I think the baby is very close. I will feel better with Marion here, even though her fussing gets on my nerves. I must try to be more patient with her.

I have a daughter, Elizabeth Ann. She was born at ten minutes to six this morning. Yesterday afternoon, I felt the first pains. I had been reading a book slowly, for it is one of those books that you don’t want to end. Evelyn Dowling sent it to me a couple of weeks ago and it is called
Out of Africa
. The author is a Danish woman who emigrated to Kenya twenty-five years ago and became the owner of a coffee plantation. I could not have chosen a more diverting book for a winter afternoon in Ontario. So I was among the lions and zebras with the vultures circling “in the pale burning air” when the contractions began. Marion went at once to the Brydens’ and phoned the doctor who said he would drive over after supper. This was a great relief to me, since I did not have to bother going to Linden to a hospital full of strangers. My child would be born in the same house as I was thirty-five years ago.

Murdoch arrived about nine o’clock. He is such a grumpy old blister, but he helped me through the next nine hours, and I shall not easily forget his gruff kindness and sure hands. At the final moments, the sight of the child emerging from between my legs was too much for poor Marion’s delicate sensibilities and she retreated to the spare room. Mrs. Bryden, childless herself but game, stayed to the end and was in tears. So perhaps was I when Murdoch placed the dark-haired little girl upon my breast.

And it is over and now I have a child and my life is changed forever. Elizabeth Ann Callan. It will be Liz, I think, rather than Beth, with Elizabeth Ann reserved for frowning moments. I have pulled up my
knees to steady this page; the child is sleeping and I can hear Marion clumping around downstairs and Joe rattling the grates as he stokes the furnace. He is too shy to venture near this female world, and is happy enough to keep us warm on this clear winter night.

I want so badly to help you realize, Elizabeth Ann, how difficult and puzzling and full of wonder it all is: some day I will tell you how I learned to watch the shifting light of autumn days or smelled the earth through snow in March; how one winter morning God vanished from my life and how one summer evening I sat in a Ferris wheel, looking down at a man who had hurt me badly; I will tell you how I once travelled to Rome and saw all the soldiers in that city of dead poets; I will tell you how I met your father outside a movie house in Toronto, and how you came to be. Perhaps that is where I will begin. On a winter afternoon when we turn the lights on early, or perhaps a summer day of leaves and sky, I will begin by conjugating the elemental verb. I am. You are. It is.

My mother never did tell me any of those things. Perhaps on some “winter afternoon” or “summer day of leaves and sky” she wanted to, but something in her nature held her back. She was a difficult woman, secretive and self-possessed. It was her way, of course, but she had her reasons too. Having a child out of wedlock in an Ontario village in 1938 was more than enough to set her apart from the community. I grew up fatherless amid whispers surrounding my conception. By the time I was a schoolgirl, the people of Whitfield had grown used to the idea of Mother raising me by herself, and we were accepted in a polite and distant manner; a few perhaps even admired my mother’s grit. Yet at the end of schoolyard arguments with other girls, I was always left defenceless and ultimately defeated by their taunts. “Where’s your mother’s boyfriend?” and “Where’s your father?” Or the one question that seemed freighted with a kind of elemental truth that had perhaps been passed around family tables over the years to become a part of village folklore. “Where’s the man your mother knew down in
Toronto?” In that childhood question, I heard something dark and unclean, and it inevitably reduced me to tears.

I asked my mother about all this, of course, and one day she told me that my father was dead, and I was to stop asking questions about him. I was nine, I think. Mother had just come in from her job in a law office in Linden, a town about twelve miles from our village. I could smell the smoke from the lawyers’ cigarettes on her clothes, and her fingers were still grimy from the carbon paper she used when typing their letters and contracts. It was the only work she could get after the school board dismissed her, and it took three years, and a labour shortage during the war, before she got the job. On that raw November day when she suddenly and remarkably told me that my father was dead, she was still wearing her coat as she stood by the stove opening a can of tomato soup, frowning as she stirred it into the pot. “He was killed in a hunting accident before you were born, Elizabeth,” she said. “Now, please. No more questions about him.”

For the next few days I pictured a man in a hunting cap and checkered flannel shirt stalking deer through autumn woods. Then he was tragically killed before he could marry my mother! How had that happened, I wondered? And how would she have met him? Was this the man she
knew
down in Toronto? Yet the more I thought of it, the more I sensed that it was all wrong, a lie. How could my mother be attracted to a man who hunted animals? She was a lover of nature, of poetry and music; it all seemed unlikely, another of her stories to keep me quiet, contrived out of the fatigue of a long day. On her drive home along the township roads she had probably heard the gunshots of hunters in the woods. Years later I asked her why she had told me that outlandish story and she replied simply, “Oh, I don’t know, Liz. You were pestering me, I suppose, and I was tired.”

A child will look where she must, and growing up I turned from my mother with her Saturday armfuls of library books and her phonograph records of Rubinstein playing Chopin and Schubert to admire her sister, my Aunt Nora. How I wished she were my mother, for
Aunt Nora was a glamorous presence in my life, a radio actress who lived in New York. Unlike my mother, Aunt Nora was blonde and pretty; she lived in the most sophisticated city in the world, and on the rare occasions when she would visit us for a few days in the summer, she always looked so smart in her New York clothes that I dreamt of running away with her. When she visited us, people stopped her on the street or came shyly to the door to seek an autograph. During those few summer days, I was no longer a child fathered by some man my mother
knew
down in Toronto, but a part of a richer, more important world. One Christmas when I was twelve, Aunt Nora sent us tickets, and we took the train to New York and stayed in her apartment on East Thirty-third Street.
We went to the studio in Rockefeller Center, and Mother and I stood with other tourists behind enormous plate-glass windows, looking down at Aunt Nora and her fellow actors as they held their scripts and read into the microphones, while men in shirtsleeves and vests opened and closed doors or played recordings of automobiles in motion. From loudspeakers above our heads, we could hear the broadcast going across the country and even up to Canada where our neighbours were listening.

Mother’s judgement of all this was predictably harsh though I never heard her express her views to Aunt Nora. She wasn’t jealous of her sister’s success; I am sure that she wished her well, but she was scornful of programs like “The House on Chestnut Street.” To her they were only foolish diversions for housewives. She went out to work each day and had no time for such nonsense. I, however, was enthralled. “The House on Chestnut Street” came on in the middle of the afternoon when I was in school, and often I willed myself to be sick, so I could stay at home and listen. Usually Mother would have none of that; my being at home meant asking our neighbour, Mrs. Bryden, to look in on me from time to time, and Mother disliked bothering people. Now and then, though, I was genuinely ill, and on those afternoons I would come down from my bed to the front room and, wrapped in a blanket, wait impatiently for the program’s
signature theme, Elgar’s
Salut D’Amour
, and
then the announcer’s voice inviting me “once again to take a walk past these stately trees and white picket fences to ‘The House on Chestnut Street’ where today we find Alice and Effie in the kitchen talking to Aunt Mary and Uncle Jim. Yesterday we learned that Alice . . .” To hear my aunt’s voice coming through the cloth-covered face of that Stromberg-Carlson radio was magical.

Then, in the year following our Christmas visit to New York, the program was abruptly cancelled. I could not believe it and neither, I suppose, could millions of others. It took a letter from Aunt Nora to explain the circumstances. I remember Mother standing by the dining-room table reading that letter and saying to me, “It seems they think your aunt is a Communist.” She paused for a moment to stare out the window; she might have been talking to herself. “I haven’t the faintest idea why. I can’t believe Nora knows the first thing about Communism.” But this was 1951, the McCarthy era, when zealots, convinced that Communism was threatening American democracy, sought out suspects in public life, particularly those in the entertainment industry. People in film, television and radio were hounded from jobs; careers were ruined and livelihoods lost. Many innocent people were swept up in the net and Mother was certainly right about Aunt Nora. She had no interest whatsoever in politics;
her marginal involvement with a group of New York actors in the 1930s, however, was enough to blacklist her.

That same year Aunt Nora surprised us even further with a telegram announcing her marriage. She was then in her middle forties. It was one of the few times that I have seen my mother express surprise at life’s strange and various turnings. She had to sit down to read it, and from her puzzled expression the telegram could easily have been in Sanskrit or Urdu. Later Aunt Nora sent us pictures of her husband, my Uncle Arthur. He was then in his fifties, but seemed years younger even with his curly grey hair. I thought he looked like Jeff Chandler, a handsome movie actor of the time. Not only was
Uncle Arthur good-looking, but he was also a rich and successful advertising executive who promptly whisked Aunt Nora off to California to live. It was like a final episode from “The House on Chestnut Street” or “The Right to Happiness,” or any one of a dozen afternoon radio shows: the middle-aged woman endures and prevails and finally marries the prince who carries her off to the golden land.

My aunt’s charmed life seemed to widen the gap between my mother and me; I often compared their fates; my chance-taking aunt who had uprooted herself to seek her fortune in another land, and my mother, the stay-at-home, stuck in a drab Ontario village. It was an unfair comparison, of course, but what teenage girl is ever fair in her assessment of a mother? On weekday mornings we climbed into her twenty-year-old Chevrolet coupe, and drove along the township roads to Linden, often enclosed in a week-old brooding silence that had been provoked by some argument. I was mortified at being seen in that old car. Mother would drop me off in front of the high school on her way to work, and one day I overheard a boy I was half in love with say to friends, “I wonder when Liz’s old lady is going to get rid of that jalopy?” I never spoke to the boy again.

During the next several years I was away at university, and I seldom returned to Whitfield. Once or twice a month I talked to Mother on the telephone that she finally though reluctantly had installed. After graduation, I taught elementary school before returning to university for post-graduate studies of the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and a career in university teaching. I spent the summer of our country’s centenary in Los Angeles living with Aunt Nora and Uncle Arthur, and reading the poet’s letters in the UCLA library. There I met the rich young radical who would follow me to Canada and become my husband. The marriage was a mistake, but we were too engrossed in the temper of the times to notice: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the protests and demonstrations absorbed us totally. I now believe that we scarcely knew one another in the three years we lived together.

In that inflammable summer of 1968, my mother died suddenly of a heart attack. We could not locate my aunt and uncle, who were on vacation in Hawaii. Only a few people attended the funeral, and after we buried her next to her mother and father and brother in the little cemetery beyond the village, we returned to the house where I was born and raised. We were served tea and sandwiches by Mother’s oldest friend, Miss Webb, who could not help casting shy glances at my husband with his shoulder-length hair, his tinted glasses, his workboots worn to a funeral. Even country people knew better than that. Miss Webb wore an orthopedic shoe, and the sound of it on the floorboards stirred memories of her Sunday afternoon visits with Mother. On that warm and windy August evening, my young husband and I watched the news on the little black-and-white television that Mother had bought only a year or two before she died. The Chicago police were clubbing citizens in the street. We watched as the demonstrators and passersby
were forced against the plate-glass window of the Hilton Haymarket Lounge. We saw the window shatter amid the screaming. Anarchy can be a tonic for the young, and we watched with the kind of gloomy excitement that often accompanies the possibility of change.

I also remember thinking how peculiar it felt to be witnessing all that brutality in the quiet of my mother’s house, surrounded by the density and heft of another age with its heavy dark furniture, its yellowing lampshades and patterned wallpaper. That “low dishonest decade,” as Auden called it, was as much the subject of this book as was my mother’s quiet yet turbulent life during the four years in which she recorded what happened to her. As far as I have been able to determine, she never wrote anything else in a journal after my birth.

Aunt Nora’s letters were in a trunk in my mother’s bedroom, but I never saw them; I was far too anxious to get away from that cramped village where I had seldom been happy. A month after the funeral, however, I returned to Whitfield with Aunt Nora and Uncle Arthur, who had come from California to visit Mother’s grave. We spent the
weekend going through her things and arranging for the sale of the house. Years later Aunt Nora told me that she found the letters, but decided not to show them to me at the time. I think she wanted to spare my feelings, shelter me from the raw details of what my mother endured. Rape. Abortion. Adultery. Such subjects were not so easily and openly discussed by women of my aunt’s generation. She did promise, however, that one day I would know what really happened, but only after she was gone.

Aunt Nora outlived my mother by over thirty years and died in a nursing home in Los Angeles last January at the age of ninety-four. Her final years were clouded by senility, and she talked only of things that had mattered a long time ago: the sunlight on her father’s pocket watch, the taste of licorice, the whistle of a steam engine. When we went up to L.A. to sort through her belongings, we found all the letters exchanged between the two sisters, as well as those from my mother to the exuberantly cynical Evelyn Dowling whom I would love to have had as an aunt. Unfortunately I never got to know Evelyn, for she was killed in an automobile accident in the hills of Hollywood a year after I was born.

For all her help and encouragement in the assembling of these letters, I would like to express thanks to my dearest friend and partner of the last twenty years, Moira Svensson.