Clara Callan (47 page)

I must also tell you a little about my social life which up to this point had been somewhat sparse. Now, however, it shows signs of promise. Fred, whom I discovered to my delight is another incorrigible invert, has taken me to a couple of parties and I met an interesting woman the other night. Now, my dear, I don’t like to drop names, but she happens to be Aldous Huxley’s wife. Do you know Huxley’s books at all?
Antic Hay
,
Point Counter Point
,
Brave New World
? He is a Britisher who is out here for the money. As are we all, of course. His wife Maria is European, French or maybe Belgian, though she has an English accent. Anyway, she was very nice to me and, as it turns out, we
happen to share similar tastes. She has promised to introduce me to some friends, and so at last I may actually have some fun out here. After all, that’s one of the reasons I emigrated to this benighted state.

I’m glad to learn that you are coping so well with your “situation.” By all means, frame and hang that letter by your mantel. Then invite your fellow citizens in to see what kind of homespun neighbourliness exists in hamlets like yours.

Your sister phones once a week to give me all the news from New York. As I’m sure you know by now, she has broken up with Les Cunningham who is going off to Chicago. I think that’s for the best. I wish Nora could find a decent feller and settle into family life. It’s what she really wants. The problem is she has lousy taste in men. Well, I should talk? I have lousy taste in women. Maybe our luck will change. Maybe everybody’s luck will change! Let’s hope.

Love and luck, Evelyn

Dear Clara,

I have some wonderful news and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Last Thursday we had a going-away party for Les, and I know it’s over between us, but I couldn’t help being a little blue about things and so I had a let-down there in the studio. Had to go into the ladies’ for a damn good cry and then was so horrified by how I looked that I left early. I went home and was moping around the apartment when I got this phone call from Harry Benton, a producer at CBS. They are planning a new dramatic series for the fall called “American Playhouse on the Air.” They are going to dramatize “classic” American novels. Full network on Sunday nights. Benton said he liked the sound of my voice and would I be interested in reading for the part of Aunt Polly in their first production of
Huckleberry Finn
. Would I?

It’s just what the doctor ordered. Not only to take my mind off Les, but also for my career. I love “Chestnut Street,” but it does get a little tedious day after day and this would make an exciting change. And who knows, it could lead to other things! Of course, I have to clear all this with the agency, but I don’t think there will be a problem. Sometimes they are fussy about people on their shows taking on other roles, but this will be an evening program and a different audience. I think I can persuade them to give me a chance. Wish me luck, okay?

Marjorie has written me out of “Chestnut Street” for a few days, and so I’ll be able to come up and see you on Labour Day weekend. I’m leaving on Thursday evening’s train. Don’t bother driving into the city to pick me up. It will be so busy with the Ex on. I’ll catch the afternoon train to Whitfield. I hope you are taking good care of yourself.

Love, Nora

Turmoil in Murdoch’s waiting room this afternoon just as I was leaving. Three men and a boy, country people in overalls and work shirts, had come into the room. The boy was clutching a blood-soaked towel, his eyes dulled with pain. He was helped to a chair by one of the men who looked like an older brother. The oldest (father? grandfather?) was apologetic for all the fuss and inconvenience. Shrugging at Murdoch. “He lost his hand. We were sawin’ firewood.”

Murdoch was already reddening with rage. “Why didn’t you take him to the hospital, you damn fool? Where’s the hand?”

The man shrugged again. “There’s no use to it now, is there?” His face and neck were as brown as leather, a tough sinewy old man inside the baggy overalls.

“Get him into my office, for God’s sake!” said Murdoch and the other two helped the boy through the doorway. I thought of Frost’s poem about the youngster who lost a hand on a sawing machine.

In the library I saw Ella Myles holding an armful of books. So at
least she was still reading. She had obviously heard the news about me and tried not to stare, but I could see it was difficult by the wary look she gave me. When I approached her, we talked only briefly; she asked me no questions but merely answered my inquiries about her. I was disappointed to see that all her books were romance novels. A sullen prettiness lingers in Ella’s face, but she has coarsened since I last saw her; there’s a pale slatternly look to her now. She told me she candles eggs at the creamery and boards with a family in Linden. She still sees the Kray boy and they are planning to marry next spring. As far as I could tell, she has at least managed to stay “unpregnant.”

Marion has returned from her summer at the cottage and today she came by. Filled with questions about my state. Almost childlike in her curiosity. What does it feel like to have a baby inside me? Do I think it will be a boy or a girl? Have I thought of any names? If it’s a boy, Marion would favour the name Lionel. Lionel? After she left I listened to the news. Trouble stirring again in Europe with Hitler now claiming that part of Czechoslovakia’s western frontier belongs to Germany. The man seems to have Europe in some kind of trance.

This afternoon I met the new teacher, Miss Bodnar, who comes from somewhere north of Linden. She is just out of Normal School and the board probably hired her for a pittance. No more than nineteen or twenty, with a fresh, attractive face and a head of blonde curls. She managed to conceal whatever scorn or pity she may have felt and said the usual things one expects in these circumstances. “I’ve heard so many good things about you, Miss Callan. Everyone I’ve talked to has told me what a good teacher you were.” Milton’s jowly
face was mottled with embarrassment. It’s a burden to cause such distress in others. Miss Bodnar is a winsome little creature and the children will like her, though some of the rougher boys may take advantage.

A warm September morning and I am sitting on the veranda with this notebook in my lap. I can hear the cries of the children in the schoolyard at recess. Two hours ago I drove Nora to the train station and now the house is quiet again. Nora was up before me this morning, sitting at the dresser, preparing her face for the hours ahead. She has changed in small but important ways. She never used to fuss about time; she was nearly always late for everything. Now she is a model of precision; the radio business has taught her to be punctual. She wears an expensive-looking wristwatch and has a little alarm clock to awaken her. She looked smart this morning as she came out of the house in her navy blue suit and white gloves, a string of pearls encircling her throat. She has managed to stay pretty into her thirties, though it seems to take a great deal of work; she carries such a store of lotions and creams with her when she travels.

She arrived on Friday laden with gifts for the baby: clothes, toys, another book on child-rearing. Nora’s generous spirit has always puzzled me; she must have inherited it from our mother because Father was always close with money and so am I. Yesterday after a cocktail Nora finally summoned the nerve to ask me about F. “Now Clara, you really must tell me. Will there be no help from the father with any of this? Did he just leave you in the lurch, or doesn’t he even know about it?”

“He doesn’t know,” I said.

This required another drink and Nora busied herself with its making. “It’s so like you,” she said, pouring a measure of gin into her
glass. “I can just see you walking away from him. Too proud to ask for help. Brother, I would have let him know in a hurry.”

“It has nothing to do with pride,” I said, but I wonder now if that is true.

We were sitting in the front room and I had put on a recording of Rubinstein playing the G-flat Impromptu. The window was open to the late summer afternoon. Nora asked me if I still loved him.

“I don’t know,” I said. I was thinking of Saturday afternoons in that motor court by the lake. The cry of the gulls beyond the open window. The slippery heat of our bodies and the pale skin beneath F.’s ribs. Had I loved him outside that bed? I couldn’t say for certain. Perhaps at one time I thought I did. Now I am not so sure. Our time together? There wasn’t much of it beyond half-eaten dinners in hotel dining rooms and brief afternoons behind venetian blinds. It was all calculating and devious on both our parts.

“You’re thinking of him right now, aren’t you?” said Nora.

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose I am.”

“I’ll bet you still love him.”

“I don’t know much about love, Nora,” I said. “Certainly I knew from the beginning that none of it could lead anywhere. A married man and a Catholic? Still I carried on, didn’t I? When you ignore reality and carry on as if the world will never end, well, perhaps that’s one definition of love. I sometimes wonder if it was like that for the woman in Rome. I know I envied the look on her face that day. I think I wanted to look as she did, at least once before I got old.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Nora asked. “What woman in Rome?”

“Don’t you remember? She was a guide in Keats’s house. Tall and plain, even homely, but she had this handsome lover. We watched them go off together on his bicycle one afternoon and she looked so happy. How I envied her! It was the day Lewis got into trouble with the police.”

Nora shook her head. “The things you notice, Clara! I don’t remember any homely woman on a bicycle with a man.” She seemed irritated with my peculiarities, and so we sat without talking for a few moments, listening to Schubert. After a while, I got up to turn over the recording. Nora was not, however, ready to leave things alone and so she asked me how it had all ended. Had there been a quarrel? A scene?

“No,” I said. “Neither of us is the quarrelling type. A scene would have been embarrassing to both of us. There was another woman.”

“What a heel!” said Nora, emptying her glass. “Lewis was like that. There were always other women. Right from the start. But if I had got pregnant, he would have known about it and fast. He would have helped too. We talked about all that, and so we were always pretty careful. You have to have some ground rules if you are going to have a love affair, Clara.”

I sensed that Nora wanted to give me a good scolding for my careless ways, perhaps to pay me back for all the high-handed lectures I had inflicted upon her when we were girls and quarrelling in our bedroom. I always seemed to have the upper hand then. Now I couldn’t help myself; I wanted to tell her about those grainy photographs in the hotel room.

“You would never have guessed it to look at him,” I said, “but there was another side to Frank. He showed me some pictures once.” Nora looked at me sharply. She was a little tight by then.

“What kind of pictures?”

“Pictures of two women and a man,” I said. “They were doing things to him. Sex things. I suppose he meant it as a stimulant. As a . . .”

I couldn’t think of the word then, though it comes easily enough to me now
. Aphrodisiac
. I went on to say that the pictures had only made me feel a bit sordid. In a way, I wanted to explore all this with her. Was I being prudish to feel shame as I did? Was a woman supposed to be excited by pictures like that? I wanted to know such things.

“Lewis was like that,” Nora said. “He took me to a sex show once.
It was in the middle of the night up in Harlem. Coloured people were actually copulating. A man carried a woman across the stage on his thing. She hung onto him with her legs around his waist and had a climax right there in front of us. Or she faked it. I think she faked it. How could you have something like that in front of a roomful of strangers?” Nora still seemed bemused by this episode in her life and suddenly I began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“I was just thinking,” I said, “of what you told me and how strange it is to be saying such things in this house. Have such words ever been uttered within these walls? If Father could hear us now!”

Nora too began to laugh. “Good Lord! What would the poor man think of us?”

I was trying to arrange it all in my mind: the light glancing off the leaves beyond the window; the Negro man and woman clinging to each other on a stage in Harlem; the fingers of Rubinstein on the keyboard in the recording studio; the sunlight on the rear fender of my little blue Chevrolet in the driveway. For a moment, I was captured by this bounty of images, offered up to my senses on an ordinary Monday afternoon. And I was grateful for them all. Ahead lay money worries and the averted eyes of my neighbours, my own dreadful uncertainty. Yet at that moment yesterday I was entirely happy.

Dear Evelyn,

It is cool and showery in my part of the world, a perfect afternoon for writing a letter, though I can’t pretend to bear eventful tidings. I am leading a life of exemplary idleness these days, reading and nodding off as I read, my body ripening like the swelling gourd (image provided by Keats whose
Ode to Autumn
I have just been reading). My life is indeed langorous. Like an old woman I doze in my rocking
chair, or stand by the stove eating tapioca from the pot. Most afternoons I manage to bestir myself, and walk the plank to buy my bread and butter under the stares of the townsfolk. Perhaps I exaggerate a little; by now most people are used to seeing me “in my condition” and only the truly morbid gawk.

Have you read anything interesting lately? At the beginning of the summer, I intended to study any number of worthy books. I even made a list though I have since lost it. I think I remember writing down such titles as
The Brothers Karamazov
and the
Iliad
and some of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays like
Titus Andronicus
and
A Winter’s Tale
. Alas for good intentions! After each visit to the library in the nearby town of Linden, I came away with lighter fare, though some of it was nourishing: Rilke’s
Journey to My Other Self
fascinated me (I don’t know how it found its way into Linden Public Library). For moral instruction, I read
The Scarlet Letter
, but the book I loved most was Turgenev’s
A Sportsman’s Sketches
. It’s odd in a way, for it seems to be a man’s book: a rich idle landowner walks about the Russian countryside with his dogs, hunting wild fowl and talking to the peasants a hundred years ago, but Turgenev’s style is so wonderfully lyrical in these stories.
Also read John Steinbeck’s novel about the two tramps looking for farm work in California. It reminded me of some of the travelling men we see around here from time to time, though you don’t see as many now as you did three or four years ago. I also tried another book by Virginia Woolf, but couldn’t finish it, and something called
The Return to Religion
by Henry C. Link. Very popular according to the librarian, but I thought it mostly nonsense and wishful thinking.