Blue Moon (3 page)

I stood there, amazed by what I had witnessed. A minute later, my attention was attracted to a large window on the second floor directly opposite me. The woman I had been following came to the window, looked out and then sat down at a table. She stared straight ahead. Suddenly, tears gathered at her eyes. She brushed them away, but she could not control them. Finally, she placed her hands on her eyes. Her entire body began to shake as unhappy feelings gained full entry. The woman now looked more like Judy—Kim Novak's second incarnation in
Vertigo.
I had become Jimmy Stewart—the deluded but ultimately cruel and vindictive suitor—who pursues Kim Novak in the film. The woman I was watching was my difficult patient, Elizabeth Delamere. Despite the chignon and the grey suit, I should easily have identified her and desisted from any attempt to observe her life outside my consulting room. Her sadness was touching to the same degree her resistance to the therapy she had initiated was infuriating.

Her reticence stymied me, made me livid at myself for my inability to elicit the truth from her. My feelings of frustration had led me to follow her and to deceive myself that I was simply intrigued by a mysterious woman on the street. Rather than acting professionally, I had been play-acting a stupid role: the analyst as private eye, conducting myself as if I were some latter-day Humphrey Bogart on the trail of an elusive Mary Astor. My unconscious was out of control and had to be brought to heel. I decided to be much more direct with my patient at our next meeting.

When Elizabeth arrived for her appointment the following week, the session followed its usual course for forty minutes until I intervened.

“You have never asked me to give you a prognosis. Indeed, you have never asked me to make any assessment of our work here together.”

“I assumed you would speak when you wished to do so.”

“You have not given me many opportunities to do so. In fact, you have carefully avoided giving me any chance to obtain the details I require to form the basis for any kind of opinion.”

“I have spoken at great length in our meetings. Not a second is wasted.”

“The sessions are certainly filled with your observations, but you have evaded me at every turn, refusing to talk about yourself in any candid or intimate way.”

“I do not agree.”

“How do you see it?”

“You provide me with an opportunity to talk about matters that are important to me.”

“You can talk about books and movies with other people. In my opinion, you are wasting the time we spend together. I am not sure I am being of any assistance whatsoever to you.”

The patient's face turned bright red. “I have had curious thoughts about what I have been doing here. I want to come here; I desire to talk about the things that torment me, but I am desperately afraid that I shall commit an unpardonable sin.” She took a deep breath. “I am afraid that I shall lie to you. I was an awful liar as a young woman. I cannot act that way ever again.”

“So you have been waiting for the moment when you can put falsehoods away and reveal the truth?”

“Perhaps. But the moment for honesty has not yet arrived.”

“You must decide if that moment is to be reached. Our session is over for this week.”

Elizabeth, dressed in pale chiffon lemon, began our next session in an exceedingly curious way, “Do you know about Janet Smith?”

“Should I?”

“A Vancouver legend. Her story bears some resemblances to my own.”

“Then I am most interested to learn about her.”

Elizabeth related a gruesome account of one of the most celebrated crimes in Vancouver history. In the twenties, the death of Janet Smith, a Scottish nursemaid, had stunned the city.

On the twenty-six of July 1924, the police were summoned to 3851 Osier Avenue, Shaughnessey Heights, the magnificent home of F.L. Baker, an exporter of pharmaceutical drugs. Wong Foon Sing, the houseboy, took the detectives to the basement laundry where they came upon the corpse of the young woman, blood from her right eye having oozed all over the floor. A .45-calibre revolver was at her side. Sing explained that he had been peeling potatoes in the kitchen when he heard a loud noise—like a car backfiring—come from the basement. He investigated and called Mr. Baker, who rushed home before summoning the police.

The coroner discovered some irregularities. The bullet wound alone could not have caused the massive damage to the nursemaid's head, there were burn marks all over her torso, and there was a dark stain on the index finger of her left hand. But she was right-handed and would presumably have taken the gun in that hand had she indeed shot herself. Despite many clues that indicated a murder had taken place, the coroner ruled the death a suicide. Within a few days, an uprising by the underclass was in the making. Several other housemaids—friends of the deceased—came forward: their friend would never have killed herself. Someone must have killed her. Perhaps to keep her quiet. Then the rumours really began to swirl. One claimed that Smith had been raped by someone from Baker's social set and then killed when she threatened to expose the culprit. Further accounts suggested the police had been bribed to conceal the truth.

A subsequent coroner's jury ruled that Smith had been murdered
by a person or persons unknown. Things simmered clown. Then, on the evening of March 20, 1925, a group of Ku Klux Klan vigilantes kidnapped Sing from the front lawn of the Baker house. For six weeks, he was shackled to the floor of an attic room in Point Grey and subjected to beatings and death threats in order to force him to tell the true story of what had happened. On April Fools' Day, a delirious Sing was found by the police on a lonely stretch of Marine Drive. Immediately, they charged him with Smith's murder.

The following day, the attorney general of the province told a newspaper reporter that everyone in his office knew the houseboy was innocent. The Crown wanted, he asserted, Sing's case to come to trial so that the real murderer could be flushed out. This admission led the Grand Jury to dismiss the charges against Sing. The police chief of Point Grey, four of his constables and three private operatives were subsequently charged with the abduction of Sing. In turn, they accused the attorney general of having instigated the kidnapping. Then, quite suddenly, all charges were dropped.

For the next decade, stories about the real way Janet Smith had met her end were in circulation. The common currency had several versions and scenarios. She had been bashed to death by the jealous girlfriend of a wealthy playboy who had seduced her. She had slipped on the floor during an argument with a boyfriend and fractured her skull on a plumbing fixture.

The story with the greatest purchase on the public's imagination centred on F.L. Baker. Before he emigrated to Canada, Baker had run a drug smuggling ring in England. According to this variant, he covered up the circumstances of Smith's death because he did not wish too glaring a spotlight to be placed on himself. For him, an accident was much better than a homicide.

In January 1926—eighteen months after Janet Smith met her end—Wong Foon Sing returned to China. No one ever discovered if Smith had killed herself or been murdered.

Elizabeth told this story in considerable detail. She took virtually all the session to do so. At the end of the hour, I was no more ahead than before in penetrating her mystery. When I told her we had run out of time, she told me that I could—if I was sufficiently discerning—see her own plight in this account. A challenge had been made. Could I rise to it?

As it turned out, I was not clever enough to unwind precisely the strands in the strange true-crime story Elizabeth had given me. Had she, a servant in someone's house, been treated violently? Had she, like the servant, been falsely accused of a crime? Had she perpetrated a violent crime against another woman? My curiosity was more than unusually aroused by the time we met the following week.

“You must admit that the short, sad life history of Janet Smith is mesmerizing.”

Not wishing to lose track once again of my elusive patient, I told her the truth: “The story is of interest to me only if it sheds light on your life history. Otherwise, it is a distraction and of no account. I have a penchant for cat and mouse games in the films of Alfred Hitchcock but do not believe they will be of any use to us in our sessions.”

“Is that because you are accustomed to the role of cat?”

“You are accusing me of wishing to be in control. If I am not in that position, I am dissatisfied?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, there is some truth in what you claim. You are the patient; I am the therapist. I have to play my role properly.”

“And have I not played mine?”

“No.”

Elizabeth's face turned a bright red. She fingered her pearls, something she had not done before in my presence. When she spoke, the words rushed up, as if to escape: “Elizabeth Delamere is not my real name. I was born Evelyn MacLean in Beamsville, Ontario, moved to Hamilton as a child and married a man by the name of John Dick. I gave birth to three children: a girl who died at birth, a boy who died ten days after he was born, and a daughter, now grown. I was tried, convicted and then acquitted of the murder of my husband. I was found guilty of the death of the baby boy. Before coming to Vancouver, I spent twelve years in the Kingston Prison for Women.” I tried to mask my astonishment at what had been revealed.

“Like poor Sing, I was accused of a crime I did not commit “As if a terrible burden had been partially lifted, she looked me full in the face: “I have come here to plead for your help.” She was on the point of expressing how lonely, frightened and miserable she felt.

Then, abruptly, she collected herself and began speaking in what was becoming her customary detached manner, very much in the way of a schoolteacher instructing a slow pupil: “Had I not existed, someone would have had to create someone like me. I was a great distraction—a wicked woman who drew attention away from what was really happening in the city of Hamilton.

“In 1946, as soon as World War II had ended, the Hamilton labour unions—which in the interest of national defence had been largely silenced in making demands—propelled their members' economic interests to the fore. One of the steel giants—Dofasco—never became unionized because the company took on the guise of the benevolent grandfather showering employees with picnics, Christmas parties and gifts. When this ploy did not seem to work, they introduced profit-sharing.

“The workers at the other steel giant—Stelco—were unionized. Their leaders called the tactics of their employer fascist and Hitler-like. This set the scene for the company's establishment of Slag Mountain Lodge,' wherein two thousand men who spurned the strike call were sealed inside the plant gates by union pickets; a special company newspaper—the
Stelco Billet
—“Rolled At the Hamilton Works By and For The Loyal Order of Scabs”—carried anti-union and anti-strike news from Hamilton and across North America.

“Louis St. Laurent, the prime minister, defended the scabs. The strikers and the police were at each other's throats. The wrestlers Whipper Billy Watson and the Sharp Brothers performed at Scott Park Baseball stadium, all the proceeds going to the union. American folk singers Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie appeared on behalf of the displaced workers. During the summer of 1946, thousands gathered daily at Woodlands Park to hear news of the strike. The union flew a small rented plane over the Stelco compound; the company then hired a larger plane to engage in mock dog-fights.

“After a long, sultry summer which threatened all manner of menace and violence, the Stelco strike was settled in early October 1946. The strike against the Southam group—which owned the
Spectator,
the city's major newspaper—was carried over into 1947.

“John Dick was murdered in March 1946; my various trials for his murder—and that of the baby—were held throughout the remainder of 1946 and in early 1947.1 became a necessary distraction
to remove attention from the various swindles being perpetrated against the workers.”

As a recent immigrant to Canada, I had no means of judging the accuracy of what Elizabeth was telling me. Of more concern to me that afternoon was the pedagogical direction in which—after making her confession—she had turned attention away from herself. She was—once again—evading my analytical net by objectifying her experience. “That is the only way she has of dealing with painful matters,” I told myself. But my job was not to allow her off the hook. I might have a more pleasant relationship with the patient if I did not confront her, but I would be abrogating my responsibility to her.

“When you tell me these horrible things that have happened to you, it is perfectly alright for you to become emotional, show your real feelings.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You may
know,
but you don't allow yourself to
feel.
The horrors of the past torment you. You are at liberty to become upset when you come here. You can even lose control.”

She glanced at me as if I were speaking complete gibberish. Then, her eyes scanned my face for half a minute or so. I don't know what she expected to find. Then the dam burst. Hot tears coursed down her face. She simply sat in the chair facing me, making no attempt to control the flow or to conceal her now badly distorted face. On that day, the real work of therapy began.

Rumours had abounded since 1997 that Elizabeth Delamere might find the approval of the Nobel Committee in Stockholm: she wrote about the rights of women, had begun her career at a relatively late stage in her life and was now somewhat elderly. On those three scores, the politics of prize-giving favoured her. I had questioned her about such a possibility when we met for drinks in her suite. She shrugged her shoulders, smiled and then simply said, “There are far worthier writers than me.”

Two days before the Nobel Prize for Literature was to be bestowed in October 2000—less than forty-eight hours after my meeting with her—the concierge at the Hotel Vancouver refused to
put phone calls through to her suite; the management assumed that she wanted to be by herself and would surface in her own good time. The following morning, I was phoned by Dolly Smith, Delamere's publicist at Penguin in Toronto. She could not contain herself.