Clara Callan (40 page)

After lunch Marion and I sat with hundreds of children and watched the dwarf movie. Entrancing in its own way and the colour is extraordinary. Yet I wonder if children who see it will ever again read
Snow White
in quite the same way and with quite the same magic?

Have just now finished some Christmas cards including one to Frank. “I hope you have a happy Christmas and best wishes for 1938. Love, Clara.” The innocuous and banal words of the defeated who hopes to stir just a spoonful of guilt in the heart of the marauder.

A year ago the house was filled with Nora’s chatter. People dropped in to see Alice Dale in the flesh. “Can it really be you I hear every afternoon, Nora? My goodness, I wouldn’t miss ‘The House on Chestnut Street’ for the world.” This year, the solitude of the grey day enclosed and comforted me. There are worse fates than being alone, especially when accompanied by a good book. I spent the day in a roadside diner in California where the discontented young wife and the handsome drifter are planning to murder her husband. This is what happens when you no longer believe in the divine origins of the day. Once upon a time I could summon forth the wonder of the old narrative: the weary carpenter and his wife struggling through the narrow crooked streets of Bethlehem, turned away by surly innkeepers, arriving finally at a stable; the shepherds coming down from the hills to pay homage to the child in the straw. Today, I settled for adultery and murder in California. Sat all afternoon
in my yellow and purple dressing gown, eating crackers and drinking tea, the voluptuary at home. At four o’clock Mrs. Bryden came to the door to invite me to dinner.

“You can’t spend Christmas all alone, Clara. We have a huge goose. More than enough.”

I begged off, hinting darkly at the fluids that gather within a woman and upset her equilibrium! As the Negro man said to his lady friend on a New York street, “Don’t you understand, woman? I got to get back my equilibrium.” To each his equilibrium!

Looking around the house, Mrs. B. uttered a small cry of distress.

“Not even a tree this year, Clara!”

“Not this year, I’m afraid. I suppose I’m not feeling very festive.”

Mrs. B., however, was not to be denied. “I’m going to bring you over something later. You have to eat. It’s Christmas Day, for heaven’s sake. You can’t just have crackers and tea on Christmas Day.” Yet I sensed her relief that I am no longer returning from trysts at ungodly hours of the morning. She now regards me as a repentant
sinner who is slowly and painfully recovering from the errors of her past. This notion provides her with the licence to indulge me. Frowning over my slovenly habits, but feeding me on feast days. Later she brought over a plate of goose and turnips and potatoes, and I ate it all ravenously, turning the pages of Mr. Cain’s book with greasy fingers, reading right through until Frank gets the hot seat.

Nora phoned around ten o’clock. She was at a party; I could hear the laughter and jazz music. But Nora was penitent and teary, going on about how cruel she must have seemed in her last letter. Drink brings out the worst in her and she was a little tight. She is also upset about Evelyn’s leaving for California next month. “She got your Christmas card and is writing you. She thinks the world of you, Clara. You do forgive me for writing that mean letter, don’t you?”

“Yes, Nora. I do. I deserved every word.”

“Oh, don’t say that.”

“It’s true.”

“Are you happy, Clara? I mean, with your life.”

“Not very.”

“Neither am I.”

Dear Clara,

Thanks for the card. I don’t send them as a rule. A letter is better, if you will forgive my glib tongue. Glibness comes naturally to one who toils in radio and is rewarded for doing so with the goods of this world. As you know, I am about to abandon this gilded isle for another fantasy land on the other side of the continent. These days I am capering around my apartment (okay, I’m not exactly capering) singing the old Jolson song, “California Here I Come.”

Why am I doing this, you may well ask? Well, I’ve decided it’s time I made a change before I am too old and all this gin I pour down my throat completely addles my brain. I once looked up the word
addle
. Did you know (bet ya didn’t) that it comes from Middle German for liquid manure? Speaking of which, I’ve decided I might as well try to make my fortune in the moving picture business. Hundreds of lesser talented folk are doing it, so why not me? It can’t be any worse than radio. I fully expect to meet the same brand of crumb and creep I see every day here in the broadcasting studios and ad agencies. The only difference, so far as I can tell, is that the crumbs and creeps in the m.p.b. have more money and seem to have a better time. I’m also hoping, of course, that out in Hollywood I will find some poor little budding star from Broken Nose, Nebraska, who is looking for an older wiser roommate to help her cope with the wickedness of the West. As Winchell the Windbag puts it, “I
am told by reliable sources” that the place is crawling with such damsels.

As you have no doubt discerned, I have had a few Beefeaters, but what the hell, it’s Christmas Eve and I’m all alone.

Anyway, it was nice of you to wish me well as I head out next month to the land of orange juice and hopeless dreams. There is a great deal about New York that I am going to miss, including the friendship of your sister. I know that I am also going to miss the old city itself. When you come right down to it, there just ain’t no other place like it on earth. But maybe I can get used to all that sunshine and stucco. Now, dear Clara, I am about to disgrace myself by polishing off the biggest martini ever made on this side of the park and tottering off to my innocent bed. Once I’m in California, I’ll send you my address, so please stay in touch.

Best always, Evelyn

P.S. Here I have been nattering away about myself without inquiring about you. Nora mentioned something about your clinging to the wreckage of an affair and trying to stay afloat. That is, by the way, my
tattered imagery, not your sister’s. You can tell that I will have enough clichés in my valise to survive in Hollywood. Anyway, I hope that your heart hasn’t been completely broken, and that the rat is now in his cauldron of hot oil, the ladle in the hand of his wife who is stirring vigorously. Au revoir for now.

Awakened in the night by the wind and this morning I looked out upon a blizzard. The elements in disarray. That line makes no cognitive sense, but I like the sound of the eight syllables, and so I spoke the words aloud several times. Will I be like this in twenty years? An elderly woman standing by the bedroom window in her housecoat talking to the weather. At least the furnace is well stoked and I am warm enough. Spent most of the day reading one of Nora’s Christmas presents, a novel by A. J. Cronin called
The Citadel
. Not nearly sweaty enough for my depraved tastes these days.

In the afternoon, I bundled up and went for a walk; only a few children in the streets with their new sleds. The wind really was too difficult to cope with, and at the end of the village, I turned back. I was thinking of that night a year ago when I walked out into a storm like this and nearly allowed myself to perish.

By evening the wind had settled down and the cold had deepened. Here was the very breath of winter. A great deal of work at the furnace door, yet I could still feel the house cooling as the night wore on. Lay
awake for the longest time thinking of Frank and wondering if I shall ever meet another man like him. Where would I? Felt a little melancholy on this bitter night.

Dear Clara,

Why on earth did you have your phone taken out? It doesn’t make sense in this day and age to be without a telephone. A party line in a place like Whitfield is a nuisance, but why didn’t you get a private one? Honestly, Clara, you’re still living in the last century. How am I supposed to get in touch with you in an emergency? I know, phone the Brydens! What about this Frank? Is he out of your bloodstream yet? I sure hope so. Les and I are still dating, but things seem to be cooling off. Maybe we just see too much of one another. We’re across the microphone all day and then we meet a couple of nights through the week and sometimes on a Sunday. I’m still getting phone calls from his wife, but I’m used to them now, and sometimes, believe it or not, we even manage to have a sensible conversation. At least until she starts bawling. Oh well! Such is life for wicked women like me!

Evelyn is now working with our new writer, Margery Holt, though Margery has lots of experience. She’s worked on “Pepper Young’s Family” and “Big Sister,” so she knows the ropes. I don’t think she’ll be as good as Evy, but you never know. We’re having a going-away party for Evy on the twenty-fifth. Too bad you couldn’t be down here for that. Speaking of being down here, I don’t suppose I could persuade you to visit me for Easter, could I? Once Evy leaves, I’m going to be awfully lonesome and it would be nice to see you. We could watch the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue. It’s quite the event down here. Could you at least think about it? Damn it, Clara, I’m going to miss talking to you on Sunday nights. For my sake, at least,
you could have kept the phone. Well, I guess we’ll just have to keep in touch the old-fashioned way. So write me a letter, why don’t ya?

Love, Nora

Dear Nora,

I had the telephone taken out because it was a damn nuisance and a waste of money. It rang all day and half the night and it was never for me. A private line would have been a pointless extravagance; aside from your weekly call, I didn’t get two rings a month. So would I not be just throwing money away? Most people in the village live without a telephone, so why can’t I? Let’s hear no more about telephones, for my house is blessed with quiet once again.

Am I over Frank yet? you ask. I don’t know. I only think of him maybe ten or twelve times a day. How do you get over the presence of another in your life? The general maxim is to keep busy. Lose yourself in activity. Perhaps I should join the Missionary Society and write letters to orphans in Africa and China. Have Ida Atkins and her cronies over for tea once a month. Unmarried women do make a kind of life for themselves in villages like ours. Take Marion, for example. She seems perfectly content with her radio shows and society meetings, her shopping trips down to Toronto and her choir practices on Thursday nights; the glorious splurge of Sunday morning. In a way I envy her, but I know too that I can’t be like her. Yet I am not strong enough or talented enough to go off to a strange city like you and earn my living. By nature I am reclusive. So I will have to wait for time to do its customary work. Time takes away our days, of course, unravels the threads of our lifespan. But it comforts too, and sooner
or later, the lovelorn one gets out of bed and boils an egg. Starts dusting the figurines on the mantel. Ventures out to the moving pictures and even smiles at the antics of the fat fellow and his skinny chum.

It’s been cold up here and I seem to spend a good part of each evening shovelling coal into the maw of the monster. My fuel bill this year will be horrendous. And it’s only January! Well, in another couple of weeks I shall look for the returning light; watch it slowly spread into the hours of early evening, reminding me that spring is out there somewhere.

Easter in New York? I’ll have to think about that, Nora. Say hello to Evelyn for me and tell her that I hope things work out in Hollywood. Hollywood! Imagine knowing someone who will be working in Hollywood. Take care of yourself.

Clara

Yesterday a Mr. Dalton from Linden came by to ask if I wanted my piano tuned. I seldom play it any more, but decided to have the work done anyway. Mr. Dalton was thin with a pale, homely face. Probably not yet forty. He folded his suit coat across a chair and rolled up his sleeves and set to work, laying out his tiny hammers and brushes on a mat which he spread across the rug. There was something altogether unprepossessing about him, and perhaps it comes from working alone all day in church basements and in the parlours of houses like mine. It felt peculiar to have a man in the house with his sleeves rolled up, even this lacklustre fellow tapping away at the piano strings.

After an hour or so, I brought him a cup of tea and watched him pause from his labours to drink, grasping the cup with his long fingers. I tried to picture him moving those fingers over a woman’s body in the dark of night. Thought it unlikely and asked him if he were married. He offered a slow smile and seemed to brighten. “Oh my, yes. Married now ten years. We have three kiddies.” So he had caressed his wife with those hands. How strange to imagine others as sexual beings with their clothes off, and all this at five o’clock on a Saturday afternoon! After he left, I worked on a poem all evening
called
Cow in a China Shop
. All about sexual desire and the havoc it can create. It was ribald, brazen and indecent. Threw the various drafts into the stove this morning.

Hi there,

Well, here I am in the land God gave to orange growers and movie dreamers. I thought I’d drop you a line and give you my address. I’ve been here a couple of weeks now, and I’m settled in at Louis B. Mayer’s sweatshop. They’ve put me to work fixing up a comedy about three young women in a college sorority and their troubles with boys. Mating-game stuff. You can imagine what it’s like. They also want me to develop a series along the lines of Andy Hardy. I don’t suppose you’re an aficionada of such fare, but it’s a series about small-town life and is wildly popular thanks to that brat Rooney whom audiences seem to find adorable. Beats me why, but there it is, and so they’d like a female version of the same with this character, Nancy Brown, who is cute and mischievous and gets into all kinds of silly trouble in small-town U.S.A. Well, that’s why I’m out here, I guess. To concoct some amusing falsehoods for the Saturday matinee crowd.

I have found an apartment and it’s in Hollywood, but the studio is in Culver City, so I’m going to have to buy a car. Everybody out here drives. You feel like the village idiot if you are caught walking. Los Angeles is a strange, somewhat goofy place, geographically speaking, especially if you are used to New York. To start with, you have all these towns, Hollywood, Glendale, Pasadena, etc. It doesn’t really matter because it’s all just one main street about twenty-five miles long. No skyscrapers. Gawd, I never thought I would miss big buildings, but I do. Here you can see lots of blue sky all the time, plus traffic lights, automobiles, palm trees, orange drink stands, studios and
movie theatres by the dozens. Most of the swells live up in the hills between Hollywood and Los Angeles. Galley slaves like yours truly are confined to more mundane surroundings. The people out here are tanned and full of orange juice. A pale fat old New Yorker like me seems out of place among these bronzed creatures.
Even the old folks with their brown ropy arms and legs look good. Maybe this is the place Ponce de Leon was looking for after all.

The people at the studio are okay, but they expect you to put in a full week, Monday to Friday from ten until six and a half day Saturday. If they don’t hear your typewriter chattering away, one of the story editors is apt to poke his head through the doorway to see if you’re malingering. A girl has hardly time to light a smoke. You have to understand that I am working on what are called B pictures. These appear as half of a double bill at your local Bijou on Saturdays. The big wheels are working in another part of the lot. It ain’t very democratic. At the cafeteria (ominously called the commissary) the people are seated according to rank. It reminds me of boarding school where the head girl sat with her best friends and the rest of us made do with our places “below the salt.” Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of the stars picking daintily at their chicken salad. Saw Norma Shearer the other day, so there.

There’s a gentle fellow in the cubicle next to mine named Fred Anderson. Fred has written a mystery novel or two and came out here from Iowa a couple of years ago. Now and then he drops in to see how I’m getting on. I think he keeps a flask of vodka in his desk, though that is strictly verboten on the orders of Mr. M. My boss, Ed Barnes, warned me on the first day about the perils of John Barleycorn and the problem it can be with galley slaves. He asked me if I indulged, to which I replied with a simper, “Only socially, of course.” His smirk suggested disbelief.

Anyway, this will take some getting used to. I already miss the old city with its curbside slush and its noise and its pale, abrupt denizens.
But the cheque every Friday looks mighty fine. We line up for it in front of a cashier’s cage, just like factory hands. Another way of telling us, I guess, not to get too big for our britches. After all, we’re just scriptwriters. How are you anyway? Broken heart all mended? I hope so. Stay in touch.

Love, Evelyn

Dear Evelyn,

How good it was to get your letter on a snowy, cold Canadian day! Your description of California with its palm trees and orange drink stands was just what I needed in this stark world of black and white and wind and snow. How I long for some colour, for fresh green leaves and flowers! The past two weeks have just been terrible with one storm after another. But your letter has completely shattered my illusions of the writing life in Hollywood. Cubicles? Cashier’s cages? I was picturing you in a grand office, leaning back in your leather chair, smoking your Camels and drinking coffee, as you dreamed up impossible stories for the screen, surrounded by eager stenographers who were taking shorthand and then rushing off to type your every word. So, it’s not like that at all? What a shame!

It’s kind of you to inquire after my broken heart. I have spent the winter recovering and I wish I could say I am over it, because life would be less confusing and complicated and I believe simplicity is at the heart of contentment. I can’t prove that, of course, but I believe it to be true. To tell you the truth, however, I’m not sure that I am completely cured.

Nora and I have not been in touch for a while, and I’m feeling a little guilty about not writing to her. I had my telephone taken out; I was on a party line and it was such a nuisance that I could no longer endure it.
I believe this has so annoyed Nora that she is punishing me by not writing. She was used to phoning me every Sunday night. Of course, I am a quaint, stubborn soul who doesn’t like to give in.

Have you been reading anything interesting lately or do you have the time? Last month I got Virginia Woolf’s
A Room of One’s Own
from the library in a nearby town and I enjoyed it so much that I took out two of her novels,
Mrs. Dalloway
and
To the Lighthouse
. Both are beautifully written, but I found their tone a little astringent. It’s the only word I can think of at the moment. Perhaps I am still under the spell of James M. Cain. I can’t think of two writers who are so apart in temperament and sensibility and yet both are strong and clear.

I apologize for the disjointed quality of this letter, but my thoughts seem astray these days. I am waiting for something, spring probably. I keep reminding myself that I must try to enjoy each day as it comes along, but I haven’t been able to do as much enjoying as I would like to this winter. I hope all works well for you out there and do write again soon.

Clara

All week the radio has been carrying news of Hitler’s soldiers in Austria. There seems to be a general edginess in the air. Is another war possible? It’s all so depressing and today I felt a sense of panic over everything: the radio news, the endless winter, this corrosive loneliness that eats at the hours of my days and nights. Perhaps this is what Catholics call despair. In the midst of it all, I sat down an hour ago and wrote Frank. I think the moment I dropped the letter through the slot I regretted it, but it’s done. He may reply and I may see him again. Isn’t that what I really want? If I had not written, everything would remain as it is. Now at least I may hope. And does hope not assail despair?

Elation! Sheer as the smell of earth in March. This joy surging through me as I walked up Church Street from the post office with letters from Frank and Nora. A day of sunlight and pale sky and icicles melting. And so my neighbours saw me smiling for a change.