Blue Moon (32 page)

“It's much more comfy here than I expected,” she observed, as she looked around the large sitting room in which inmates received guests. I assured her that we were well treated. “Not exactly the lap of luxury, but it's not a bad place.”

She smiled, acknowledging my feeble effort to assure her I was not suffering too much. I asked about her parents. Matter-of-factly she told me they had both died within the past eighteen months. She paused and then told me she had seen my mother in downtown Hamilton once in the intervening years.

“I was walking down Barton Street and almost bumped into her. 'Hello, Mrs. MacLean. Nice to see you.' She pretended not to see me, just continued on her way. Then, she and Heather vanished. No one has any idea where. A month or so before she disappeared, she made a funny sort of statement to a reporter from the
Spectator:
'My husband and I left the farm at Beamsville because the work was too hard for me. But I've often wondered. In fact, I've wondered so many times—if we had stayed on the farm, would things have been different?' I thought it was a strange thing to say.”

“Yes, almost like she's blaming Hamilton for what happened.
Mother always had to have a scapegoat. Her simple life in the country was disrupted by moving to the big city. She has an explanation for everything.”

“And what about your father? He's next door at the men's prison, isn't he?”

“Yes. I guess so. To be honest, I've no reason to make contact with him. And he obviously feels the same way about me”.

“You know, our parents were strange people. Crazy.”

“Yes, but your mother and father were 'normal' crazy. Since my mother felt the world owed her a living, she felt deprived when there wasn't enough money. My father felt the same way. I told you years ago: he interfered with me when I was nine or ten. Mother threw him out of their bedroom. I shared a bed with her from that time onwards. Seemed normal at the time.”

“My parents hated Jews and coloured people. Both groups were too uppity, taking over the world. Talked about kikes and niggers constantly. But that's as far as their insanity went. Evil words. Now, I've got a really crazy person to deal with. Stephen.”

I met Rosie's eyes and only then did I notice the hint of black and blue showing through the heavy makeup on her right jaw. Once detected, the heavy bruising—as on her visit to me at Barton Street—was unmistakable.

“We're separated. But he phones all the time. Threatens me. If I don't come back, he says he'll kill me. If I go back, I know he'll kill me. I don't seem to have any choice.”

“You could leave Hamilton. Escape.”

“He'd find me. Sometimes I think he's my destiny. He's always been cruel to me, even from the time we first started going out. You know all about that.”

“Yes. I remember. He's very nice looking. You were attracted to him. You didn't really know what he was really like.”

“Now I know. I'm repenting at my leisure.” A brief smile crossed her face. “But I should have got out early. Now I'm cornered.”

According to Rosie, she had no option but to make some sort of truce with Stephen. If he agreed not to hit her, she would put her wedding band on again and return home. “Facing the consequences. I'll have to sleep in the bed I made, no matter how uncomfortable it is. Nothing else to do.”

When I suggested a more radical surgery might be necessary, she looked at me as if I were a demented child and changed the subject. “Kingston's a pleasant little town. A funny place to build prisons.” During the remainder of the afternoon, we gossiped about the nuns at Loretto Academy, school acquaintances, and movie stars. In rapid turn, she talked about Judy Garland's suicide attempt by cutting her throat with a piece of glass. “How can Dorothy from
The Wizard of Oz
want to do herself in? Must be her husband's fault. I see she's just filed for divorce.” She mentioned that the court in Monaco had acquitted Errol Flynn of the charge of having sex with a seventeen-year-old girl. “I would have thought boys would be more his thing,” she added. “Like us, movie stars have feet of clay. Their lives are not as glamorous as we make them out to be.”

“Or as we
want
them to be,” I replied.

That day, I realized all over again what a wonderful friend Rosie had been. And continued to be. She had never judged me harshly. In fact, she always tried to see things from my point of view. But an invisible wall had been built between us. I was upset at the way in which she was quite content to let things happen to her, no matter how horrible they might be. My new life was completely different from hers. When all was said and done, she was the caged animal.

I had also become something of a snob. Without realizing it, I had come to see life in literary terms. Clarissa Harlowe would never have allowed Stephen to abuse her physically or mentally. She would have stood up to him. I judged Rosie severely because she did not meet my new standards. Like Richardson's heroine, I preferred a life of isolation to that of involvement. If you become involved, you can be badly hurt. In a strait-jacketed way, I saw two alternatives. Pure black and white. I had no concept of greys. Or, for that matter, colours.

When we parted that day, I asked Rosie to keep in touch. She promised to mend her ways, to write regularly. I reminded her that I could only reply to letters I received. I could not initiate a correspondence. “Oh, is that why you never wrote to me after I stopped writing? That makes me feel better.” We walked hand in hand to the door that separated my world from hers.

During the next twenty-four months, I was surprised not to hear from Rosie. I was so worried that, at Lydia's insistence, I asked Mrs. Nelson if I could write to my friend and was told that was an impossibility. “I can't do for one what I can't do for everyone.” Out of sight was not quite out of mind—occasionally I thought of Rosie. Almost two years to the day of her visit, Maureen, one of the guards, came to my room to fetch me. “There's an old lady in the visitor's lounge for you.”

I didn't know what to think. Mother? Would she suddenly turn up without any warning? My heart beat so rapidly I couldn't move for a minute or two. Then I thought I might faint. “I'll be right down,” I assured Maureen, who looked aghast at my performance.

When I finally reached the lounge, the only person seated by herself was a tiny sparrow of a woman. Certainly not Mother. Who was this strange person? I walked towards her, staring into her face in an attempt to place her. It was no use. Obviously a stranger. Then I noticed the hands pockmarked with eczema. At that point, I hazarded a guess. “Mother St. John?”

“You were always extremely observant, Evelyn. But I am now Marian Smith. I left the order two years ago. I happened to be passing through Kingston today on my way to Montreal and decided to pay a call on my favourite student. I hope I haven't startled you? You look like you've seen a ghost.”

“I was afraid Mother might be my mysterious visitor. Now I'm just plain relieved. And really happy to see you after all these years.”

“It's been a long time. Twenty years? I was a young woman when I taught you at Loretto.”

“Yes, many years. So much has happened to me. Or perhaps I should rephrase my statement? I allowed so much to happen to me.”

“You had a very difficult childhood. I was startled when I read of your arrest, and I followed all three trials in the newspaper. I knew you weren't capable of murdering anyone. That almost goes without saying. I must confess I did wonder what had become of the sensitive little girl I had taught.”

“What about you? I thought the convent was your life.”

Marian looked around the room carefully before returning her gaze in my direction. “You know, this room reminds me of the foyer of the convent at Loretto Academy. The same kind of institutional
furniture. The uniforms of the guards look like habits. The way the whole place is cut off from everything.

“I guess I saw my entire adult life as a self-imposed jail sentence. So I decided to get out. Live my life, as it were. But I may have left it too late. I have cancer and should be dead within a year So I'm travelling, leaving for England by boat from Montreal tomorrow night. I plan to visit Jane Austen's home in Hampshire, Shakespeare's birthplace at Stratford-upon-Avon, and the Wordsworth cottage in the Lake District. That will allow me to bring my life to an appropriate conclusion.”

I told my old teacher about my renewed interested in reading and then I told her I had begun, in the most tentative of ways, to fictionalize some of the stories the other prisoners had told me.

“Needless to say, I have become unreliable on the subject of vocations, but I always thought the life of the writer might be your true calling. You are not deeply intellectual but you are unusually sensitive and observant. I hope you pursue that path. Perhaps that is your salvation?”

Then we talked books for at least another hour, at which point Marian changed the direction of our conversation. “Did Rosie ever visit you here?”

“Yes. Once. Two years ago. She was not her old self. Very worried and depressed.”

“She had every reason. She died six months ago. Shot to death by her estranged husband, who hanged himself in the room in which he murdered her. The incident was whitewashed in the newspapers. The couple were buried together in Holy Mother Church's consecrated ground. Poor woman. The circumstances of her martyrdom were removed from her. “

“I'm not surprised. But I am horrified. Did the
Spectator
cover the story up because of Stephen's family?”

“Exactly. Money talks—especially in Hamilton.”

“Rosie was a dear girl. We were wee tiny bairns together on Rosslyn Avenue. Good pals since then, especially at Loretto.”

“The world is a very wicked place, Evelyn. Sometimes the only goodness I can discover is between the covers of a book. Strange that there can be so many wonderful visions of the world in fiction and then the world itself is completely bankrupt of goodness.”

“I have reached the same frightening conclusion. Reading and writing are the only realties that mean anything to me.”

“Maybe you have to follow that observation to its logical conclusion?”

“I've been wondering if it's the only path open to me.”

When she stood up to leave, Marian took a pair of gloves out of her handbag, put them on, and kissed me. “I suspect you shall do very well in your new life. You must say a prayer for me in mine.” A year later, a few days before I left P4W, I saw the obituary in
The Globe and Mail
for “Marian Smith, previously known as Mother St. John, a true lover of literature.”

I boarded the trans-Canada express at Union Station in Toronto on the evening of October 12, 1959, the day I was released from P4W. Janet White drove me to Toronto. Earlier that week, she had arranged to collect the remaining money in my bank account in Buffalo—$412. She also bought a new wardrobe for me and helped me to dye my hair red. To the remaining money she added the two hundred dollars given to all parolees. So that evening I had just over five hundred dollars in cash before I purchased the train ticket.

Why settle in Vancouver? I asked myself many times that evening. Janet also made the same query. My response was simple enough: “I wish to go as far away from Ontario as humanly possible.
Besides, I have always liked the idea of a place that blends water with mountains.”

“But Vancouver is such a dreary place, dear. Not a real city, no real culture. The Canadian equivalent of Australia. A lot of remittance men and undesirables there. Rains all the time.”

Before she could inform me of the current status of research on the undesirability of Vancouver as a place to live, I was safely on board waving good-bye to her. When I kissed her, Janet blushed, obviously unused to any demonstration of emotion.

Nestled among my clothes in my large suitcase was my small archive: seven small diaries and four scribblers filled with notes, observations, and stories. As I waited for the train to leave the station, I began re-reading
Pilgrim's Progress.

The notion of living in Vancouver had occurred to me when I read of the magnificent Carnegie Library Building built just after the turn of the century at Hastings and Main, next door to City Hall. During my time at P4W, the idea of a huge library where one could become lost in a world of books was entrancing. Confined for so long, I also hungered for a large city through which I could wander anonymously. So when the train finally pulled into Vancouver station, accompanied by two large suitcases, I asked a cabbie to take me to the Carnegie Building.

The shabbiness of the building and its immediate surroundings startled me. Unrealistically, I had expected a new Athens but all I saw was Skid Row, a plaintive collection of civic buildings that had seen far better days. Panhandlers roamed the neighbourhood; houses were in a bad state of repair; drugs—especially heroin—were freely available at many street corners. I did not know that during the Depression the Relief Camp Workers Union had occupied the building in May 1935.1 was unaware that the Japanese—incarcerated during the Second World War—had not returned to this area. I hadn't realized that Main and Hastings was now segregated from the rest of the city. Gastown, a few blocks away, was another hideous mess.

I saw no evidence of what the Americans called “the San Francisco of the North.” The water and the mountains were not readily visible. Even today, Canada's third largest city is thought to be an exceedingly glamorous place. That is so—if the constant,
relentless, destructive powers of rain are forgotten. Many are the days without sunshine leading to depression and, sometimes, suicide.

My first instinct was to flee, stay in a hotel for a day or two, take my bearings and find another spot in which to live. If necessary, I thought, I could flee into the interior of British Columbia like Maggie Vardoe in Ethel Wilson's
Swamp Angel,
a book I had read in prison. But I had no idea how long it would take me to find work and on paper I had no real qualifications. Besides, I was a jail bird. Would any respectable business hire me? I might have to work as a waitress, a job that might not require me to divulge my true identity.