Clara Callan (12 page)

A week of rest and recovery. I have been reading Louise Bogan’s poetry and Thomas Wolfe’s new novel
Of Time and the River
. It’s very good though I don’t like it as well as
Look Homeward, Angel
.

In the afternoons I listen to Nora’s program. How strange to hear her voice on the radio! It is Nora, of course, but then it isn’t. After a few minutes she is someone else, a woman named Alice Dale, likeable and wise, concerned about her headstrong, younger sister who has fallen in love with a teacher at the business school where she is training to be a secretary. The teacher is married, but Effie is determined to be “with the man I love.” There is a quarrel at the kitchen table and the kindly old aunt and uncle are fretting after the young woman storms out of the house. The announcer with his rich beautiful American voice then poses a question and offers an invitation.

“Will Alice’s heartfelt talk with the young and wilful Effie save her sister from a disastrous turning in her life? Tune in again tomorrow when the makers of Sunrise, the soap that awakens your skin, invite you to walk once again past the white picket fences and front porches of Meadowvale to ‘The House on Chestnut Street.’”

And then Elgar’s
Salut D’Amour
played on the organ. It is surely all nonsense and yet I could see the house, the curtains on the windows, the aunt and uncle at the kitchen table. And Nora is utterly convincing as Alice Dale. She is very, very good.

Beginning to feel more myself again. Yesterday Nora, E.D. and I spent the afternoon in Central Park. A bright day but it has cooled off in New York, and we sat on benches under the trees eating ice cream, watching strolling families and lovers. Nora wants me to stay until the middle of the month, but I am determined to go home next week. I was happy there under the trees listening to Nora and E.D. talk about their program, Evelyn grinding a cigarette under her shoe and lighting
another, as she talks about putting the listeners through “the emotional wringer.”

Everything is grist to her mill as I suppose it is for anyone who writes, whether it’s poetry or radio serials. E.D.: “Did you see that piece in yesterday’s
Herald Trib
? About the woman who stole from the collection plate to buy groceries? Just a small piece on the back pages. This happened somewhere in Ohio. They were going to arrest her, but someone intervened. I’d like to work something like that in. A woman in the town is hard up and tries to steal something from the offering plate. Maybe her husband is sick. Or better still, why not have her young and unmarried and pregnant.” E.D. gave me a wry look and shrugged. “So she’s desperate. And Alice is the only one who sees her steal the money. She follows her from church and discovers she’s living in some ratty place. Brings her back to Aunt Mary and Uncle Jim. A temporary thing, but she’s a good kid. Her name is Margery or Madeline. Something like that. Effie gets jealous because of all the attention. What
do you think, beauty?” We get up and walk under the dappled sunlight, peering through the leaves, and talk some more about this Margery or Madeline.

Today I went along with Nora to the studio at Rockefeller Center. The actors stand in front of microphones with their play scripts. Behind a glass partition, a man in short sleeves signals them and oversees things. Other men open and close doors, use wooden blocks, tread on light steps, play recordings of automobile engines. It all looks so contrived and pedestrian, and yet from the loudspeaker come the sounds and voices of people in this mythical town. When you close your eyes, as I did for a moment, you can see them clearly. It’s a kind of auditory legerdemain. Nora looked pretty and capable standing with her script before the microphone in a polka-dot dress and white shoes. The program’s announcer kept looking at her. He is perhaps in
his late thirties and has the weak, handsome face of a matinee idol. He couldn’t take his eyes off Nora, and looking at him, I wondered if there was something going on between them.

Yesterday Nora took me to the Automat on Forty-second Street. It is an enormous restaurant with hundreds of tables but the food is kept in locked glass cases along the walls. To get your sandwich or piece of pie, you must insert a nickel or dime into a slot. I found it a very strange way to eat, but New Yorkers seem to take to this kind of thing as if it were perfectly routine. I wonder if all restaurants will be like this in ten years.

Later we went to Radio City Music Hall and saw a vaudeville show and a picture. Then we talked far into the night, lying there side by side in her funny little pullout bed. Nora is doing well down here, but she is also discontented. Turning thirty has left her troubled; she would like to marry and have children before it is too late. She hinted that she and the announcer have been “flirting” a bit. Nothing serious. Besides, he’s married and so that could lead nowhere. At one point, Nora got up for a glass of water and then returned, falling into bed and staring at the ceiling as though entirely fed up with things. I remember her doing this at home after an argument with Father: storming into the room and collapsing on the bed, her sudden weight jarring the book I was reading. Last night as I lay there, she seemed embittered. I am going home on Monday and she may have felt (and I could hardly blame her) that in return for all she had done, she was at least owed an explanation. She said, “I
wonder what I would do if it happened to me.”

In the light from the window overlooking the street, I could see her angry little pout; she used to put on the same face when she felt unjustly dealt with by Father.

“Men just walk away from these things and leave the dirty work to us. I’ll bet the bastard who got you pregnant is now snoring away
beside his little wife. He didn’t have to take a taxi up into darkytown in the middle of the night, did he?” I could see she wanted me to reveal the identity of the villain. But my heart was not open to confession. I wasn’t about to tell Nora the sordid details of my encounter with the tramp. She wanted a love story: assignations, letters, meeting in cars on country roads, whispered embraces and the fluttering of hearts in hopeless passion. But since it wasn’t like that, the tale was beyond me.

“One day, Nora,” I said, “I will tell you all about it.”

Dear Nora,

I wanted to write you before this but I have been busy with the house (dusty) and the yard (untidy), though Mr. Bryden thoughtfully cut the grass in my absence. I also overworked myself a bit and for a little while on Thursday felt feverish and faint. So I took to my bed and pretended that I was merely enduring “the vapours” of a spinster lady in her middle years. Now, however, I’m feeling hale again. You will find enclosed a money order for my train fare to New York and back. Again, I cashed in the sleeping-car ticket so that amount is included as well.

How can I begin to thank you for everything you’ve done over the past month? I’m certain that you and Evelyn Dowling literally saved me from ruin. I can’t imagine what would have become of me without your help. So, Nora, I am in your debt now and forever.

Everyone in the village has plucked me by the sleeve at the post office or butcher shop to ask about my trip to New York City. It has made me, at least temporarily, quite the exotic traveller. Everyone is agog (don’t get to use that word very often) when I tell them that you are now on the radio in New York. My how that impresses them! Cora Macfarlane: “I always thought Nora would make something of herself. I said that to people when she used to do those nice recitations
at the Christmas concerts. And sing? Why she had a voice like a bird!” So there you are, a heroine in your hometown. Everyone wants to know when they can hear your program and I said I thought that it might be heard some time this fall through one of the Toronto stations. Was I right about that?

My trip, of course, made today’s
Herald
under the rubric of
Whitfield Notes
. Here it is in all its glory!

Miss Clara Callan has returned after spending the summer weeks visiting her sister Nora in New York City. Miss Nora Callan is now appearing in the radio show “The Home on Chestnut Street.”

Well, they got some of it right anyway. In the post office yesterday, the odious Ida Atkins pestered me to write something for the church bulletin. “My impressions of New York City.” I wonder what she would think if I were to describe a certain hot and thundery Friday night in Harlem. I could, of course, mention that Harlem is named after a city in Holland (they enjoy such details), but I didn’t see any Dutchmen that night, did you?

As you can tell, I’m feeling quite gay and buoyant. What happened to me, Nora, was such a burden, and now that it’s been lifted, I feel renewed and eager to get on with things: to get back to school, to ordinary routines, to life however pedestrian and mundane it might be. I know that in a few weeks (or a few days) I will sink, like everyone else, into the petty griping that accompanies daily life wherever it is lived. But right now I take delight in waking, in the opening petals of a flower, in playing my piano; everything is charged with a special music. With what I might call “The Perfectly Ordinary Day.” I had hoped to write a poem about how it takes deliverance from disaster to make us feel grateful for that perfectly ordinary day. But alas, I can’t seem to find the words. Well never mind — if I can’t write poetry, at least perhaps I can try to think and feel like a poet.

I must make some supper now and then put my feet up. The
summer is drawing to a close. The Exhibition opens a week from today and I have agreed to go with the ladies on the twenty-ninth for an outing. But I do enjoy the Ex. Remember when Father would take us for the day. I began to look forward to it as soon as school was out. About the middle of August has always been the happiest time in the calendar for me. Anyway, we are going down on the twenty-ninth for the day.

I shall drop E.D. a note tomorrow and thank her for everything she did. I found her rather remarkable, though her destructive habits were a little unnerving to a puritan bumpkin like me. From the bottom of my heart, Nora, thank you again for everything.

Clara

Dear Evelyn,

I should have written before this, but I have spent the last week trying “to put my house in order.” I do, however, want to thank you for everything. I really don’t know what I would have done without you and Nora. I live in a village of six hundred souls and of course everyone knows your business. I simply could not have survived here and this is my home; this is where I live and I can’t see myself anywhere else. So, I am extremely grateful to you for your help and generosity.

I suppose I may have struck you as a bit standoffish, but you can put that down partly at least to the unusual circumstances surrounding my visit. I am not as timid as I may have appeared, though I am the older, quieter, more reserved one in the family. Still you musn’t necessarily think of me as a dry spinster schoolteacher. Oh, I would like to live at least in part like some of the people I read about, perhaps like Madame Bovary or poor Anna Karenina. But I have no courage for those kinds of adventures and, more importantly, little opportunity, despite what happened to me.

I think Nora is very fortunate to have you as a friend. Thank you too for the meals and the flowers and the books. I particularly enjoyed Louise Bogan’s poetry. How I wish I could write like her! But I seem only to have the impulses and sensibility of a poet; I merely lack that other thing — what is it called? Oh yes. Talent!

Thank you again, Evelyn, for everything and do take of yourself.

Sincerely, Clara Callan

P.S. Are you absolutely sure that I can’t send you some money? It must have cost a good deal, and I feel bad about your paying for it all.

I was reading on this warm, still afternoon when a cicada began to shriek. It was not the insect’s usual cry from the trees, but something else, urgent and piercing. The sound of a creature imperilled. When I went around to the side of the house, I saw it in the sparrow’s mouth. The bird flew off at once, carrying aloft the insect’s rasping death cry. For a moment, I heard it in the big maple tree in front of the Brydens’ and then it was all drowsy silence once more. What a monster the sparrow must seem to the insect! I wonder what Emily Dickinson would have made of this. She would have written a poem about it. Sitting at her little bedroom desk, dipping her pen into the inkwell and imagining what it would be like to be a cicada in a sparrow’s bill.

I met Marion outside the post office today. She is just back from the cottage and was full of questions, a little too excited to wait for answers.

“Did you see any radio shows in New York, Clara?”

“Well, yes. As a matter of fact — ”

“Rudy Vallee is at the Exhibition. Wouldn’t it be something to get in to see him?”

“Well, I don’t know — ”

“I can hardly wait for Thursday.”

Are the ladies all going to hear Rudy Vallee? It seems improbable.

A remarkable thing happened only a few hours ago. I saw the tramp. I feel like Hamlet when his father’s ghost revealed the truth about his death. What did the prince say?

O villain, villain, smiling damned villain!
My tables — meet it is I set it down
That one may smile and smile and be a villain.

And I saw him smiling tonight at the Exhibition grounds. On the midway. He was working at the Ferris wheel, hopping about with an oil can in that nimble-gaited way of his, agile and quick as a monkey among the gears and levers of the machinery, chattering to the man operating the engine. I stood transfixed, my view blocked now and then by passersby, but there he was again, the sharp and flinty profile in flat cap and overalls. It was him all right and I could scarcely breathe for a moment. This was eight o’clock or nine o’clock, I don’t know. I was too beside myself at the sight of him yapping away at the other man. Telling some kind of story or joke. Marion wanted to see Rudy Vallee. I told her the lineup was a mile long and we’d never get in, but I felt sorry for her too. We had come down to the midway at my behest. Marion was prepared to humour me if I would go along with her afterwards to hear the crooner. The others were still in the buildings, inspecting the washing machines and vacuum
cleaners. But I have always loved the midway. Even as a child, Father would indulge me, though he hated the whole business. Its seedy charms were lost on him and lost on Marion too. But she had been stalwart about it and so we had walked under the lights by the tents with the painted dwarfs,
and the Giant Man-Killing Octopus, the chimpanzees in checkered suits, and the fellow who spoke for Eno, the Turtle Boy: “He walks, he talks, he crawls on his belly like a reptile.” I was happy there in my late-summer happiness, there among those sordid wonders.