Clara Callan (19 page)

Where has the last month gone? Yesterday was the end of another school year and now I am ready for my summer adventure. Ida Atkins stopped me on the street this afternoon. She crowds you so when she talks. The rankness of her breath. Spring onions from her garden for lunch.

“I’ve heard of your holiday plans, Clara, and I’m delighted for you. Perhaps an evening next fall you’ll tell us all about your trip. I’m sure the ladies would enjoy hearing about it.”

What did I say to that? I may have agreed to speak to the Women’s Auxiliary or the Missionary Society. Something. It was all a bit indeterminate. The woman flusters me so. But what of that? It’s weeks and weeks away and today is my birthday. Today I am three and thirty as the poets used to say. My life must be half over now and what have I accomplished?

Dear Nora,

It’s ages since I’ve been in touch. What are you up to these days? I hope that all is well and that our travel plans are still in force. By my reckoning (as you can tell, I am already adopting the argot of the seafarer), three weeks from today we should be aboard the
Genoa Princess
, outward bound for Naples. If this be but a dream, please so inform me. If it’s all true, I am planning to leave Toronto on Tuesday,
July 14, arriving in New York the next morning. Is that all right with you?

Clara

Dear Clara,

I am
really
sorry not to have written before. Honestly, I don’t know where this spring has gone. I even forgot your birthday!!! I’ll make it up to you when you get down here, believe me. We’ll go on a real shopping spree. I have been awfully busy with the program and then it seems that Lewis has to say goodbye to just about everybody in New York. So a lot of people have been taking us out to dinner or throwing parties.

I have been a little preoccupied lately (another reason I haven’t written, I guess). These days I sometimes don’t know where I stand with Lewis. Not perhaps the best situation to be in when you’re planning a holiday with somebody. Boy, am I glad you’re coming along. I’m not suggesting that Lewis and I are breaking up or anything, but there is no denying that things are a little unsettled at the moment. I have told you about his sharp tongue and I recognize that he is a very intelligent man and has mixed all his life with brainy people. I told him right off the bat that I was not the college type, and he accepted that. I have always said that you have to accept people for what they are and not for what you think they ought to be. And I have never pretended to be anything other than what I am. Everything else between us has been wonderful, especially you know what! That part has been just fine.

It’s when we are talking about things that sometimes there is trouble. Lewis can be damn cruel. Mind you, I knew that from the first day when I had lunch with him in the cafeteria at Radio City. But he was
always pretty good about saying sorry and how he didn’t mean it and I could accept that. But he can be really mean! The other night at this restaurant, we were sitting around after dinner with some people talking about this movie and I said how much I enjoyed it. All right, it was a corny movie. I could see that, but it was also kind of sweet and had a nice story. Well, that set His Lordship off, believe me. He started going on about how “Nora, of course, is in the sentiment business with her little radio show” and all that. I just got up and left. He came out and I was waiting for a taxi and he said, “What are you doing embarrassing me like that in front of my friends?” Imagine! Embarrassing him? What about me? I said to him, “I’m not taking any more of your guff
about my job, Lewis. If you don’t like what I do for a living, too bad.” I guess we made quite a scene there in front of the restaurant. Anyway, I went home by myself. I was in tears. He phoned the next morning and apologized, blamed it on the drinks, and that’s part of it, of course. He’s usually okay when he’s not drinking, but put a couple of whiskeys into him and look out. So we made up, but that’s just an example of the kind of thing that sometimes goes on between us.

A couple of weeks ago at a party I met one of his ex-wives. Can you imagine going to a party where you run into one of your beau’s ex-wives, but that happens all the time in New York, which in many ways is a very close little world, especially among the artsy and writer types. The ex-wife is also a writer and a bit of a mess from what I could see. Lewis practically ignored me at this party while he talked to “Peggy” who was having some kind of emotional trouble. Seeing her psychiatrist and all that. And drinking buckets as far as I could tell. You should have seen the look she gave me across the room. It was as if I was this little backwoods peasant from the forests of Canada. Oh, I’m sorry to go on like this, but I wanted to explain why I have been so preoccupied.

Maybe getting away from New York will be good for us. When Lewis and I are alone everything is usually fine. The thing is I’m still very much in love with him. Right from the start I could see all his
faults, his grumpiness, his snobby attitude, his short temper and so on. But I have always been prepared to take a person as they are. You have to take the bad with the good, don’t you?

Anyway, you get the general idea, so enough of this. We’ll have fun on our holiday, don’t you worry. We’re sailing on the eighteenth and you are going to be here on the fifteenth, that’s a Wednesday. Clara, could you do me a favour? Wednesday is a workday for me, and I’m always a little nervous before the broadcast, so could you find your way to the taxi stand at Penn Station and just give the driver my address? It’s only a few blocks away. Make sure you have a little American money, but it’s only a forty-cent cab ride. If the train is late and I’m not here when you arrive, just ring the superintendent’s buzzer and Mr. Shulman will let you in. I have told him all about you, so don’t worry about being left out on the street. Just make yourself at home. Put your feet up and turn on the radio. At three o’clock there is a really good program!!!

It’s the American holiday weekend and this afternoon Lewis and I are going to friends of his out in New Jersey. Some place called Sea Bright. I like the sound of it anyway, and it will get us out of the city and the heat. It’s hot as Hades down here, so be prepared.

Love, Nora

P.S. Yesterday Evelyn reminded me to pass along her good wishes. She is looking forward to seeing you again and is planning a little party for us. Ciao! That’s Italian for “cheerio” or “see ya,” according to His Lordship who is busy these days with his dictionaries and phrase books.

This has been the hottest week on record in Ontario according to today’s
Herald
. It was 100 degrees in the driveway today. Thirty people in Toronto have died from this heat and hundreds are
sleeping in the parks. What must New York be like? In her letter Nora says it’s “hot as Hades” but doesn’t elaborate. She is too busy chronicling the woes of life with Mr. Mills. It doesn’t bode well for a holiday. I don’t care to be around quarrelsome lovers with their sulks and tears and recuperative embraces. All that emotional theatre can be wearing to an onlooker. Nothing I can do about it, of course. A book left on the veranda last night with a note from Marion wishing me a safe and happy journey. She is off to Sparrow Lake first thing in the morning.

The book is called
Death in Venice
and in her note Marion hopes “it will be a good read on the ocean.” She must have bought it in a second-hand bookstore in Toronto. It has no wrapper and it feels unread; the pages are stiff; it smells a little musty as though years ago its owner, perhaps one day after Christmas, started the book and then, disappointed by the absence of blood and corpses (What the hell! This isn’t a mystery book.), put it aside and forgot about it. So it became part of a rich man’s library, and then was sold finally to one of those shops along Queen Street. Marion was no doubt taken by the title and thought it was a crime novel. A good read on the ocean. In fact, the book is anything but a mild crime novel and I read it at a sitting this afternoon. It’s a brilliant story about an artist in crisis. An aging writer, vaguely dissatisfied with the course of his life and the demands of his art, journeys to Venice for a holiday and falls in love with a beautiful boy. The
entire experience, unconsummated and unheralded, enthralls, bewilders and destroys him. An extraordinary book. Thank you, Marion. Mann’s observations on those of us who live alone seem accurate to me. He writes,

The experiences of a man who lives alone and in silence are both vaguer and more penetrating than those of people in society; his thoughts are heavier, more odd and touched always with melancholy. Images and observations which could easily be disposed of by a glance, a smile, an exchange of opinion, will occupy him
unbearably, sink deep into the silence, become full of meaning, become life, adventure, emotion. Loneliness ripens the eccentric, the daringly and estrangingly beautiful, the poetic. But loneliness also ripens the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the illicit.

From about midnight we moved through heavy rain, but everything had cleared up by the time I arrived at Penn Station. The morning was fresh and cool, and tired though I was, I felt exuberant as I looked out the taxi window at the streets of New York, cleansed and glistening in the sunlight. I was thinking, of course, of how different everything is this year from last, when I had arrived feeling so burdened and perplexed, frightened for my life in fact. Nora was here when I arrived, but she is now at work and I am sitting by the window on this glorious summer afternoon, watching the people pass below on Thirty-third Street, listening to the honk and blare of the cars and trucks, the muffled racket of the elevated train on Third Avenue.

Directly below me a smartly dressed light-skinned Negro couple are having some kind of disagreement, the man putting forth his position with gestures, ingratiating himself with the lady. There is a kind of rakish glamour to this pair, the man in his suit and straw hat, his two-toned shoes, and the pretty woman in her flowered dress, the long hair straightened and gleaming with oil. As he helps her into a taxi I catch at least a little of his predicament as he raises his voice in mild exasperation. “Don’t you understand, woman? I got to get back my equilibrium.” What a good phrase! Get back my equilibrium.

Met Lewis Mills tonight. The three of us had dinner in a fancy restaurant near the park, and Mills met us there, rising from the table as we
entered. He was friendly enough, holding onto my hand perhaps a little too long as Nora introduced us.

“Ah, our travelling companion, the sister I’ve heard so much about.”

A mild satirical tone in his voice. Mockery, even kindly meant, is probably second nature to him. He’s an intellectual bruiser, one of life’s critics, charming and convivial when things are going his way, abrasive and difficult when crossed. I think I could see a little of all that in him tonight. He fussed over Nora in his mildly critical style.

“Are you going to have the oysters again, sweetie? You raved about them the other night.”

Had Nora gone a little overboard in her enthusiasm for the oysters “the other night”? And was he now reminding her with the use of that verb?

Mills is a stolid handsome man with a perfectly round bald head. There is a no-nonsense air and look about him. He is used to having his way with women and that can have its appeal, I suppose. Perhaps it’s what attracts Nora whose taste in men usually runs towards the matinee idol. No point in appearing like a total bumpkin, so I asked about the elections in November. “Would Roosevelt win again?”

“In a landslide,” said Mills, who just last month attended the Republican convention in Cleveland and didn’t think much of either Mr. Landon, or his vice-presidential choice, a wealthy Chicago newspaperman. “The Republicans keep shooting themselves in the foot,” said Mills. “They can’t read the mood of the country. They pay too much attention to the big shots in their party and not enough to the little guy on the street. The little guy loves FDR.”

He asked me many questions about Canada and the King government. He’s a very well informed man, intelligent and imaginative, and despite his sometimes overbearing manner, I found myself liking him. When we got back to the apartment, Nora showed me L.M.’s magazine article on radio. She wasn’t happy with it.

“Lewis thinks we should be listening to highbrow stuff all the time,
but ordinary people deserve to be entertained too. Not everyone likes the opera or lectures on dead writers.”

Nora was tired and out of sorts tonight and I didn’t argue with her. After she went to bed I read Mills’s piece. Entitled “The Demotic Voice,” it is highly critical of programs like “The House on Chestnut Street.” Mills grudgingly admits that such programs employ “gifted people and a great deal of craft goes into even the most banal offering.” But he objects to radio’s simplified view of life and laments the increasing commercialization of popular culture. No wonder poor Nora didn’t think much of it.

Went shopping with Nora this afternoon after her program. The big department stores like Macy’s and Gimbels are very busy and there is such a quantity of goods on display. Little evidence of hard times in Manhattan! Went to a big bookstore on Fifth Avenue and bought cheap but good copies of Keats’s letters, Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
, a collection of Heine’s poetry and
A Brief History of Modern Italy
. Nora bought a copy of
Gone With the Wind
, the Civil War novel that, according to her, “everyone in New York is reading.” It would certainly appear so judging from the bookstore windows which are filled with copies. Tonight a party for Nora at Evelyn’s.

difficulty sleeping, so have got up to sit by the window. The big city seems to be settling down for the night. A police siren now and then, but only faint traffic noise from the avenues nearby. L.M. is picking us up at noon, and in twelve hours we’ll be aboard the ship.