Blue Moon (2 page)

After I lost my family, I went to England, where I trained as an analyst (I had qualified as a doctor in Germany). I did not wish to return to Germany, had come—in fact—to hate my native language, the same tongue as our oppressors. I found England increasingly cold and damp. Having no interest in any other part of
Europe and suspicious of the Antipodes, I decided to immigrate to Canada and settled in the West because of its remoteness, its distance from Europe. Vaguely, I knew of the mountains and of the Pacific Ocean bracketing Vancouver. I knew there was little—or no—snow. I admit I ignored the warnings about the omnipresent rain. I imagined my chosen environment as a garden state, verdant, plentiful in fruits, vegetables and flowers.

I was dimly aware that Vancouver was a city attempting to find a cultural identity and, to that purpose, it did not mind making use of myself and other refugees from Europe, survivors of the madness Hitler had unleashed. An honest exchange many of us felt: our sophistication in books and music in exchange for the refreshing innocence of a culturally nascent city. Something to be gained on both sides.

While I was living in London, I had heard of the pre-eminent Herr Doctor Otto Klemperer's unfortunate Canadian sojourn just after the war. He accepted the leadership of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. The famous conductor, renowned for his majestic interpretations of Beethoven, Brahms, and Bruckner—who had escaped from Germany to the United States—was at that time suspected to be suffering from a rare condition, Gershwin's brain tumour. The powerful-looking but inwardly sheepish maestro had convinced himself that a nurse in California—at a sanatorium in Santa Barbara, where he had been a patient six years earlier—had offered herself to him as an inducement to remain there.

Shortly after his arrival here, he knocked in the middle of the night on the hotel door of Regina Resnik, the young Austrian soprano he had engaged to sing arias by Mozart and Beethoven. He did not make any advances but kept her talking for two hours. A few days later, there was a reception in his honour at the home of Amy Buckerfield, the chairman of the orchestra board. Discreetly, he asked her daughter to accompany him into the gardens where, attempting to be Adam to her Eve, he clutched her in a vice-like grip. She escaped with her virtue intact.

The conductor was also preoccupied with Lotte, his twenty-three-year-old daughter, who accompanied him to Vancouver. She placed sleeping pills in her father's soup, but his bouts of mania were unabated. The poor daughter had to collude with the hotel staff to co-ordinate the comings and goings of the many “women of the night” her father made assignations with.

The members of Mrs, Buckerfield's committee were so frightened of him that they once hid under the stairs when he announced his intention of attending one of their meetings. Within a fortnight, things came to a head when the great man demanded a villa complete with swimming pool as part of his remuneration. Mrs. Buckerfield balked. She did not have sufficient funds to hire the Villa Russe, the former home of a Russian Grand Duke and Sergey Rachmaninov, on the Crescent in Shaughnessy. In desperation, Lotte negotiated the cancellation of the contract and flew back with her father to Los Angeles. The European—not the North Americans—had misbehaved. The story intrigued me (I had heard Klemperer conduct many times before the war, and the name of Vancouver must have stuck in my mind). Subconsciously, I must have taken in that the Canadian city was in the process of trying to develop itself, had cultural leanings.

Those ambitions had literally soared a decade before Klemperer's brief sojourn and hasty exit when that twenty-five-storey art-deco-fantasy-made-bricks-and-mortar, the Marine Building, opened its doors in October 1930. The huge lobby was a cavernous Mayan temple as spectacular as the Ball Court at Chichén Itzá. But the swirling crabs, turtles, carp, and sea horses that graced the walls and brass doors were meant to remind the spectator of the nearer presence of the Pacific. These creatures were accompanied by designs of trains, ships, airplanes and zeppelins. All twelve signs of the Zodiac were worked into the corkoid—“battleship linoleum”—on the floor. The stained glass over the entrance way paid tribute to Captain Vancouver and his ship,
Discovery.
Doormen in bright scarlet and black uniforms opened the massive brass doors and then sailor-suited young women escorted passengers in five high-speed elevators—seven hundred feet per minute—to the top. But the building was a financial flop—it had cost $2.3 million, $1.1 over budget. Only the first four floors rented and, in 1933, the building was sold to the Guinness family of Ireland. The new manager's wife hated the two-storey, three-level penthouse, and that couple soon escaped. (A subsequent tenant of those lavish quarters was an affluent widow who treated her grandchildren to rides on a Shetland pony that galloped around the balcony and had his living quarters there.)

In the middle of World War II, the painter Lawren Harris moved to Vancouver and purchased the large white clapboard mansion at
4760 Belmont Avenue. He remained an inhabitant of the city until his death in 1968. It was here that his large brilliantly coloured monumental abstracts—so different from his earlier landscapes—were made. A wealthy man, he established a salon where all the “advanced” painters, writers and musicians in the area could gather. He terminated the soirées abruptly, however, when one guest had the gall to break into the house and steal his gramophone. No longer would he cast his pearls before swine. As the new directions he was taking in his career were not appreciated by the locals, Harris spent a lot of time on the train back and forth to Toronto. Committed though he may have been to the beauty of his adopted city, he never saw it as culturally advanced.

After the war, Vancouver's civic pride fell mightily. Few trees had survived in the downtown. Both Georgia and Granville Streets were filled with car dealers advertising their wares with plastic pennants and glaring billboards. The streets were littered with candy wrappers and wads of chewed gum. At night, the canyons created by the large Edwardian buildings were deserted.

Yet, by the time I arrived in the city, the refugees from Europe had made their presence known. There was the Bonton on Granville, where one could buy exquisite properly prepared pastries—Napoleons, Three Sisters, Rum Truffles, Gateaux St. Honoré—especially beloved by the Austrians, Hungarians and Russians who resisted the more ordinary fare available at other bakeries and confectioners. The marzipan animals at the Bonton bore the most amazing colours, colours even nature was too frightened to bestow. Nearby, on Robson, there wrere the Mozart Tea Room and the Schnitzel House. One could have one's fortune read in tea leaves and by Tarot cards at a host of small restaurants and cafés. The city had a
slightly
decadent feel to it, very much like sedate, high bourgeois Vienna. The Canadian character, however, deeply frightened at the prospect of going too far in the pursuit of pleasure, firmly resisted the debauchery of pre-war Berlin.

In July, a month after I arrived in Vancouver, the city, poised for yet another run at becoming a place of cultural significance, held its first International Festival. Since Otto Klemperer had been a mistake a decade earlier, there were some doubting Thomases among the committee that had decided to take a chance on Joan Sutherland—later affectionately nicknamed La Stupenda—the Australian soprano.
Could she really become another Jenny Lind, as the impresario Nicholas Goldschmidt predicted? Suffering from recurring bouts of sinusitis, elephantine swelling in both legs, and abscesses in both ears, she made the long air trip from London to Vancouver to make her North American debut as Donna Anna in Mozart's
Don Giovanni.
Most residents of the city were more interested in the visit of one of the Royals—Princess Margaret dedicated the Okanagan Lake Bridge on July 19. I found the visit of a member of the English royal family of little interest. I must admit that I attended all six of the singer's performances; my diary has entries for 26, 29 and 31 July, 5, 7 and 9 August. Even by my fanatical standards as an opera buff, I acted gluttonously, determined to feed on the soprano's overwhelmingly huge voice and thrilling, ornate trills,

I was ravished by the voice. Elegantly costumed in deepest black, Sutherland fully enacted the plight of the wronged, love-tormented and vengeful widow. In my diary, I see it was on the 8th of August—the day before her final performance—that I encountered the soprano on the street. In her street clothes and without makeup, she was simply a big, gangly, kerchiefed woman with a huge, monstrous jaw. All the magic was gone. The following night, she made me believe in her all over again as the wronged woman transformed into monster. Never before had I witnessed such discordance between an artist's imaginary existence and her real life.

My encounter with both Joan Sutherlands—the soprano whose voice was the incarnation of all strong human emotions and the unduly ordinary woman—sums up much of my own experience of my adopted city. And, as I was about to discover, of Elizabeth Delamere.

I had been in practice on Georgia Street for four years when Elizabeth phoned me. The voice at the other end of the phone was nervous, suspicious and peremptory—emotions I am used to hearing when persons call to inquire about becoming patients.

“I wonder if you have time in which to see me?”

“You are thinking of becoming a patient?

“Exactly. Do you have any spaces?”

“That is a negotiable.”

“Would you give me a straightforward answer?”

“So much depends on your expectations—and mine.”

“Your expectations?”

“Whether I am able to be of any assistance to you.”

“Yes. Right. I see your point.”

“Would next Monday at three suit you?”

A small, blond and exceedingly pale woman of medium height, dressed in a black frock, presented herself at my doorstep at the appointed time. I indicated she should follow me into the consulting room but, instead, she strolled down the corridor examining the prints on the walls. She seemed offended by them. When—a few minutes later—she entered the room and seated herself in the chair opposite mine, her disdain did not abate. She sniffed as if detecting foul odours. Then she looked at the couch behind her.

“I suppose you use that for all your clients?”

“Some patients are threatened by it; they feel utterly defenceless reclining there. They are afraid a predator might attack them. Others crave that space. For them, it is a refuge, a place of respite.”

“You don't force the issue?”

“Exactly.” The adverb was a lie. I consider the use of the couch essential. If a patient sits across the way from me, the interaction is inter-personal. My face is scanned for responses to what is being confessed. If the patient cannot see me, the therapy becomes inter-psychic. The patient, listening to the disembodied voice of the analyst, tends to internalize the therapist, make him a part of herself.

She abruptly switched the subject. “I suppose you believe everything Freud preached?”

“A great man, but I would not call myself a slavish follower.”

“You think for yourself?”

I refused to be drawn in and allowed her to ask a further number of questions before I intervened. Could she tell me her name?

The request startled her, as if the matter were none of my business. “I am Elizabeth Delamere. I work at Duthie's, the bookstore on Robson.”

I nodded my acknowledgement. Before I could ask her any more questions—her date of birth, her place of birth, the names of her parents—she proceeded to tell me she was an adherent of Jung rather than Freud. “Does that bother you?” When I assured her it did not, she elaborated a comparison and contrast between the writings
of the two doctors. This oral essay filled the remainder of the hour. It was concluded by my interruption when I informed her that our time had come to an end.

Startled, she asked, “When shall I see you again?” I suggested the following Monday at the same time. She nodded assent, quickly rose to her feet and proceeded down the corridor and out the door. At the end of that meeting, I had uncovered only her name.

Any expectations I had of discovering more about my mysterious visitor were dashed in the next five sessions. Each time she wore a different dress: a bright yellow, a drab olive green, a florescent green, a dismal brown, a jubilant pink. Her sombre mood was constant.

Briskly, she told me she had been born in the province of Ontario, had been a widow since 1946—seventeen years before—and had given birth to three children. She was now on her own. Any attempt on my part to obtain further particulars was deftly foiled. She complained of horrible dreams and when I attempted to learn something of the contents of these nightmares, she would turn the
subject away from herself. She would speak of the dream worlds of heroines from literature—Queen Dido, Clarissa Harlow, Jane Eyre. Or she would speculate on Ginger Rogers' dreams in the film version of Kurt Weill's musical about psychoanalysis,
Lady in the Dark.
More annoyingly, she would speculate on the theories of Freud and Jung. If I attempted to shift the subject back to her, she would ignore me. My belief was that she was waiting to become comfortable enough to reveal herself unabashedly.

Elizabeth was a challenging patient. As I was not sure she had any clear inkling of what she was doing, I decided to bide my time. I would wait to see what happened next. Six weeks went by. She came once a week; I became convinced nothing of benefit was transpiring.

On the Saturday following the sixth session, I was walking from the bottom of Robson Avenue towards Thurlow. All of a sudden I noticed a blond woman—her hair worn up in a chignon—on the other side of the street. Dressed in a simple but severely cut grey suit, she strolled purposefully along, pausing every so often to scour the contents of the clothing and shoe shops along the way. The woman reminded me of Kim Novak as Madeleine in Hitchcock's
Vertigo,
as if the woman I was observing had deliberately costumed herself as some sort of homage to that film, which had been released just five years earlier. Fascinated by this incarnation, I followed her along until she reached the corner of Robson and Thurlow, at which point she turned the corner.