Blue Moon (31 page)

In her pleasantly bossy way, Lydia informed me one day that I should make the transition from reading books to making them. “You're completely different from all the other women here. The way you spend your time reading, thinking about things. You've been keeping a diary. You tell me you've tried to put some of your observations into stories. There's your future for you.”

“Hardly. My writing starts and stops. A very bumpy ride that doesn't go anywhere.”

“Beginner's faults. Practice makes perfect.” This was said more like an order than an observation.

“For you, Lydia. You're never daunted. But writing is different from sewing. With a pattern you know where to begin and end. With those stories of mine I'm flying blind.”

“I think you need to do a lot more gliding, my girl. Test your wings. Maybe you'll learn to soar.”

“Or fall flat to the ground.”

“Maybe. But you won't know until you try. You have your own point of view, I'll say that for you. And you have plenty of time on your hands to exploit your talent.”

Exploit. That awful word again. During my first few years at P4W, I blamed myself for exploiting others. Then I began to think of myself as having been exploited by my parents. The idea of exploiting myself—my inner self—was repugnant to me. Another metaphor used by Lydia was also repulsive: one day, she told me to mine the gold lying hidden within me. Buried treasure. But I was a person who saw herself as essentially worthless. Nothing could be dug up that would be of any value.

I attempted to share this observation with Lydia, but she would have none of it. “The past is a foreign country from which you were expelled. Here, you can begin all over again.”

The P4W in which I spent twelve years was vastly different from the prison described in Patricia Pearson's shocking
When She Was Bad of
1997, a book I am sure in its lurid details is completely accurate: “On April 22, 1994, six inmates attacked four guards in a pre-planned escape attempt, outside B range The guards, all of whom were female, were put in choke holds, punched in the face, kicked in the stomach, stabbed with a hypodermic needles, and assaulted with scissors and a telephone ripped from the wall.” This incident led to the shutdown of my former home in the summer of 1996.

In my experience, women in prison were occasionally violent,
but I never witnessed the kind of events recounted by Pearson. My life in P4W was an altogether gentler affair. I am also tempted to add the word “rustic.” We were withdrawn from the world; we suffered privations in dress and food; we had to work hard and diligently; we went to bed early and rose at dawn; we were not free to come and go as we pleased. In a closed environment such as ours, small events were easily magnified; tempers flared; harsh words were spoken on a regular basis. Yet, the idea of a close-knit community prevailed; the guards were not necessarily our enemies. When I skimmed Pearson's book, I could not make any kind of link between my life in the late forties and fifties and the prison experience of the nineties. I am not distorting the past, looking at it through rose-coloured glasses, or—heaven forbid!—romanticizing it. The world in which I existed in Kingston was remote from the real world and, like everything else in life, had its own hazards.

During those twelve long years, I thought of myself as serving time—paying for past mistakes. Only in retrospect do I see those years as a tedious apprenticeship in the art of fiction. A malicious sort of person might say of me: she learned to exchange one kind of lying for another. But that would be an unjust indictment. In my prison house, I studied the other women and, without really being conscious of what I was doing,” I made shorthand notes that I would later expand into my first three novels based on the lives of Eve, Laura and Lydia. Those books are not as fictional as most of my readers and critics think.

My first novel—
Celia
(1974)—is based on Eva Hoffman's story. When Anita Brookner's
Look at Me
appeared ten years later, many reviewers commented on the similarity of my heroine to Brookner's Frances (Fanny). To what extent had Brookner been influenced by me? The consensus was that although
Celia
is a much more emotionally engaging narrative than Brookner's, it lacks the English writer's precisely beautiful, sometimes ornate use of language.

My recounting of the life of Laura Daniels in
Dahlia
(1976) became enormously popular in the United States, where the trial was never reported. American reviewers tended to see the book as an allegory, as an account of the tribulations to which women are subjected by men. In Canada, I was confronted by interviewers with the facts of Daniels' life. I admitted that the book was loosely based on that case but denied the book had any political or feminist agenda.

Lydia's story is the basis of the plot action of
Camilla
(1978). Although they are not thematically dissimilar, the remainder of my novels—twelve—are not taken directly from prison life.

My own particular form of writing was obviously influenced by the many books I read while a resident of Kingston. Perhaps an even greater source for my work lies in some of the films I saw during those sequestered years. Every Saturday night, our rickety old projector was rolled out of the storage room adjacent to the first-floor auditorium, three or four large cans of film were handed over to Cass, the guard who served as projectionist, and we were allowed an all too brief escape from our ordinary lives. In Hamilton, films had been a refuge; in prison, they were no longer an indulgence—they were a necessary lifeline to the outside world. In those two hours, I could forget my entire past life and my present sorrows.

Without noticing it, I began to see films differently, although I think the cinema itself had changed in the years following the Second World War. Star and siren movies gave way to those much more interested in the ways in which people actually led their lives—their hopes, their wishes, their fantasies, their indiscretions. The age of escapist fantasy had been replaced by the age of grim realism. Mind you, since the films I saw were chosen by Mrs. Nelson and Mrs. White, they had to have a strong educational bias to them. (The wages of sin, etc.)

Some of the films were simply boring family life sagas or costume dramas such as
Cheaper by the Dozen, Quo Vadis?, The Kobe, The Ten Commandments.
There was
Sunset Boulevard
in which Gloria Swanson gave the performance of her lifetime as the self-absorbed, faded old actress. Yet when my mind wanders back to the films I saw in prison, I think of the actors and actresses who grabbed my attention. In particular, there is the Jimmy Stewart of
Rear Window
and
Vertigo.
In
Rear Window,
confined to a wheelchair because of an accident, he observes the activities in his low-rise apartment's courtyard; he uses his binoculars to spy on the people who live across the way from him. He witnesses what might be a murder and then uses his girlfriend (Grace Kelly) and an assortment of acquaintances and friends to gather further information for him. As a result, he is almost murdered.

Vertigo
is the most repulsive film I have ever seen—I don't care
what the film historians say about it. In the first half of the film, Stewart falls in love with Kim Novak's mysterious Madeleine; after she apparently dies, he comes upon Judy—also Kim Novak—whom he attempts to transform into the dead woman. He is harsh and cruel to Judy when she falters in following his most minute instruction as to how to dress and conduct herself like Madeleine, the woman she impersonated. The film is a depiction of obsessive love but more than that it is about the revenge men exact on women who do not occupy the pedestals assigned to them.

In
Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington
and
It's a Wonderful Life,
I had adored Stewart. In the two Hitchcock films I loathed him. Why?, I asked myself. Gradually, it dawned on me that in
Vertigo,
Stewart is a deeply passive person who—once his libido is fired up—becomes capable of great cruelty. As the wheelchair detective in
Rear Window,
he is restless, bored, waiting for something to happen. And then—in pursuit of the truth—almost winds up dead. Stewart's deep-seated passivity spoke to me. In him I saw a form of my youthful self, of the young woman who let others decide her life for her. When I became angry at him, I was, I now realize, merely activating my own self-loathing in being a similar sort of person.

The last film I saw before leaving prison in 1959 haunted me:
Nun's Story,
made into a film by Fred Zinnemann from the best-selling novel based on the real-life story of a Belgian nun, Marie-Louise Habets, is about a woman who, against her father's wishes, left home, became a nun, served as a missionary in the Congo and then abandoned the convent when she no longer felt she had a vocation in the service of God. Audrey Hepburn never gave a better performance. She completely inhabits the character, a person who is perfectly attuned to her own needs and to fulfilling them. She is a rebel, albeit one of a very strange stripe. When she decides to enter the convent, she dexterously tunes out her widowed father's imprecations to stay with him and look after her younger sisters; when she decides her vocation is over, she leaves. She is decisive in an extremely quiet way. This film spoke to me of the ways in which I had not lived my life in the past and of the necessity of becoming a truly independent person once I left Kingston. My fledgling interest in writing had bestowed on me a sense of a new self, but I knew it was going to be extremely difficult to maintain that self in the outside world.

As far as the outside world of Hamilton was concerned, they had one final glimpse of me in an article in the
Spectator
telling in glowing terms of my remarkable success during my first year at P4W playing the Christmas Angel in the annual pantomime. The not-so-subtle implication was that I was on the mend, well on the road to reformation: from whore to heavenly creature.

The outside world. What a strange concept that had become for me. What had once seemed ordinary was now bathed in an exotic glow. One constant was the dream, which had many variations at P4W. In one, I walk in broad daylight across a huge stretch of lawn heading towards a huge white church in the distance. After a lot of effort, I seem to be reaching the long set of stairs leading up to the portals. But then the perspective suddenly changes and I come to the sad realization I am making no progress in reaching my destination. My legs are heavy, I breathe heavily, my heart races. Often, that was the entire dream. I wake up exhausted, hardly able to drag myself through the following day.

Then there were the variations in which I reach the church's doors, which I swing open with considerable effort. The interior is deserted, the altar bare, a few comically coloured statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph being the only decorations on the walls. Then, off to my left, I see a set of stairs. I walk over to them and with considerable effort negotiate their steep, straight upward movement. I reach the belfry. I then wander over to the periphery and look down at the earth below, which now seems miles away. At that point, I turn to my right, where the baby is lying still, his bright blue eyes looking into mine. He gives me a wide smile and reaches his little hands up to me, signalling I should pick him up. When I do so, I cuddle him and become aware of the sweet smell emanating from him. I am happy; I am relieved. Then, I am aware of someone behind me. I turn around and can see, just beyond the large set of bells and their ropes, a figure in the shadows. Suddenly, that force lunges out at me and grabs the baby. I lose my balance and feel myself plunging towards the ground.

When I told Lydia of this new set of dreams, she was very reassuring. “Guilt, pure and simple. You feel responsible for the baby's death.” She touches me on the cheek. “Something which was completely out of your control.”

She was right. Yet, no matter how much my attempts at writing had become a buffer zone between myself and my past, the dreams reminded me that I remained the desperately frightened woman who had, from childhood, followed orders. The keeping of a diary can ward off feelings of despair, but it cannot completely vanquish those emotions. My struggle, I now realized, was to believe in myself as some sort of worthy human being.

Years after I had left there, Marjorie Campbell, while researching
Torso
, visited P4W: “Evelyn's record in Kingston was good. She accommodated herself to her changed conditions, got on well with Warden, Matron, and prison personnel, and became a confidante of her fellow inmates, always ready to listen to and give advice concerning their problems. Even today a staff member of that day recalls that Evelyn Dick was a * nicer woman than many of the others. She had nice manners, never used bad language, and never behaved in a coarse or rude manner.'” Although stripped of any details that might indicate an inner life, the passage is accurate.
If in part a person begins a life of crime because she is bored, she soon learns that prison life is the fulfillment of her worse fears. The schedule had to be obeyed, otherwise, Mrs. Nelson assured us, chaos would gain the upper hand. Then where would we be?

Routine. Regularity. Dullness. Monotony. These are the words that still leap to mind when I think of my twelve years at P4W. During that time, I had only two visitors. I had been in Kingston for almost nine years when Rosie showed up unannounced one day. She had written to me regularly when I was on Barton Street, only half a dozen times since the transfer.

A bit matronly. That was my first (ungenerous) thought as I kissed and embraced her. Her bright yellow hair was as beautiful as ever, although tied up in a chignon. Her grey dress was so severely cut that her body's ample curves escaped the boundaries to which they were unnaturally confined. Simple pearl earings and a matching necklace were her only jewellery. I noticed immediately that she was no longer wearing a wedding ring.