Dreaming Sally Read online

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2018 James FitzGerald

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2018 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  This page constitutes a continuation of the copyright page.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  FitzGerald, James, 1950–, author

  Dreaming Sally : a true story of first love, sudden death and long shadows / James FitzGerald.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780345814531

  eBook ISBN 9780345814555

  1. FitzGerald, James, 1950–. 2. FitzGerald, James, 1950–—Childhood and youth. 3. Authors, Canadian (English)—Biography. 4. Coincidence. 5. Grief. I. Title.

  PS8611.I888A34 2018  C818′.603   C2018-900733-8

                     C2018-900734-6

  All interior photos are courtesy of the author.

  Ebook design adapted from printed book design by Kelly Hill

  Cover art: (photo) courtesy of Margaret Rayworth; (frame) © Dinga/​Shutterstock.com

  Interior art: © Dinga/​Shutterstock.com

  v5.3.2

  a

  For Katy

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART I

  1—James Loves Sally

  2—The Importance of Being George

  3—Mother Moon

  4—George Loves Sally

  5—The Act You’ve Known for All These Years

  6—“I’m Never Going to See You Again”

  Photo Insert

  PART II

  7—Sea Change

  8—Eruption

  9—Buried Alive

  10—Sleeping Together

  11—August 13, 1968

  Photo Insert

  PART III

  12—I Told You So

  13—George Orpheus

  14—Alma Mater

  15—Communing

  16—“Some Things You Will Never Know”

  Photo Insert

  PART IV

  17—The Long Goodbye

  18—The Cold Black Yonder

  19—TV Dreams

  20—Something Has Got to Give

  21—The Bell

  22—Kill Your Parents

  23—Therajournalism

  24—“I’m Not Dying”

  Photo Insert

  PART V

  25—Reunion

  26—Funeral in White

  27—Unheimlich

  28—“My Baby Wrote Me a Letter”

  29—Talk to Me

  Photo Insert

  Acknowledgements

  Selected Bibliography

  Permissions

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  No wonder I’m feeling anxious. Over four decades have passed since I saw George Orr, back in the sixties, back when we both loved an eighteen-year-old girl named Sally. Our adolescent triangle was undone by a catastrophe as sudden as it was uncanny, yet an unspoken bond has endured between us.

  Unspoken till now.

  It’s an October Sunday in 2010 and on the five-hour flight from my home in Toronto to his in Vancouver, I mull over our recent exchange of emails. After years of hesitation, I have asked permission to capture the full story, our story, in a book. Or will George think of it as strictly his story? Only if he consents will I plunge in.

  He loves and hates the idea of my writing about Sally and her impact on our lives. Yes, a book can heal, but a book can re-traumatize. After the summer of Sally, we both became journalists, lurking on the thresholds of power, sticklers for the facts, maybe even the truth. Yet George, a gifted professional communicator, has never been able to bring himself to record his version of events of August 1968.

  In his late twenties, George quit Toronto to reinvent himself in British Columbia. Now in his sixties and twice divorced, George has at last found happiness with Anne, his third attempt at a life partner. His three children from his first two marriages know nothing of the turbulence of his youth, but he felt compelled to show my email about Sally to his twenty-six-year-old daughter, Lily, and her response was swift: “Dad, you’re a journalist. You expect people to open up to you. What goes around, comes around.”

  And so George emailed back: “I respect my daughter’s opinion. I’m in.”

  After checking into a North Vancouver bed and breakfast, I find my way to his address at the appointed hour of noon. As I descend a steep driveway leading to his split-level house, as I ring the doorbell, I remember our first—and only—meeting shortly after Sally’s death. The image of George’s bearded Byronesque face—brooding, forbidding, looking half mad—had been permanently branded on my memory. When the door swings open, the face appears, now clean-shaven and crowned with silver hair. His smile and handshake break the tension faster than I imagined.

  When he introduces his partner, Anne, I’m struck by her physical similarity to Sally, especially the contours of her eyes and mouth. I blurt, “Thank you for tolerating my intrusion.” She murmurs some reassuring words, but I can sense that she’s uncomfortable with my mission. Why wouldn’t she be, knowing the shadow that Sally has cast on her partner?

  After lunch in a glassed atrium overlooking Burrard Inlet, George leads me down to a cluttered basement office.

  I know my end of the story, but not his. And vice versa. When I pull out my digital recorder, he smiles wryly. He knows my reputation as a buster of secrets through my two published books: Old Boys, an oral history in which I invaded the privacy of three hundred graduates of Upper Canada College, the exclusive Toronto boys’ private school to which we were both indentured at birth; and What Disturbs Our Blood, a dark family memoir in which the privacy I invaded my was own.

  As we talk, the connections and similarities between us pile up like a bed of falling leaves; if we are not full-fledged doppelgängers, we are close enough. We both have younger brothers named Michael whom we initially treated cruelly, then reconciled with. We both love music passionately yet never picked up an instrument. Both of our paternal grandfathers served as majors in World War I. His grandfather founded an insurance company, which his father obediently took over; my grandfather founded a medical laboratory, and my father similarly followed suit. Both our fathers were “old boys” of Upper Canada College, both naval officers scarred by the horrors of the North Atlantic, each of their combat vessels sinking a single Nazi U-boat, both becoming functioning Irish-blooded addicts, radiating the charm of Irish-blooded addicts. Both our mothers went to the same private school, St. Clement’s in Toronto, and both were bright, iron-willed, housebound “old girls,” chronically resentful of the weaker sex known as husbands. Their charming husbands.

  Each set of parents, Orr and FitzGerald, envied their children and the emerging personal freedoms of the sixties. The attitude they projected toward their children was implicit but all the more coercive for that: Reach for the sun—but never outshine us. George and I had evolved along parallel tracks into tellers of stories, iconoclasts and ironists of Irish
-outsider temperament and inclination, uncomfortable with, even contemptuous of, our inherited class privilege; the best part of our privilege was the freedom to have our cake and spit it out.

  One of my own preoccupations—the emotional vulnerabilities of men, especially “leaders,” born or made—strikes close to George’s heart. George reveals that he was a classmate of Michael Ignatieff, an Upper Canadian–White Russian aristocrat groomed for greatness. They both were precocious; high expectations dogged their paths: nothing short of the prime minister’s office would do. For different reasons, that destiny remains unfulfilled.

  Why does George’s path seem so mysteriously intertwined with mine? Why, over the years, has something compelled us both to hoard transcripts, letters, photos, artifacts, mementos? Why do we collect evidence and stock our memory palaces to the point of overkill? Why do we love the same films, the same books, right down to the same bars of music, the same poetic and comical phrases?

  Why were we crazy about the same girl?

  “It feels like we’re archetypal characters in an unfinished, unfinishable novel,” I tell him. “Who were those guys all those years ago? What happened to them? Where did they go? Or not go?”

  I hear footsteps on the basement stairs; it’s Anne, coming down to check the spinning clothes dryer. Her eyes say it all: Why is this stranger opening up old wounds? But she’s too late: we’ve already embarked on a mutually risk-fraught experiment in honesty.

  Three hours have passed, or is it more like forty-two years? As I follow George to the door, we pass by a cardboard box stuffed with old letters.

  George takes one off the top and thrusts it into my hand. “This is the last letter Sally wrote me from West Germany that summer. I never read it. Too painful. Take it with you.”

  For a moment, I feel as if the basement is flooding. Sally’s favourite song was “The Letter” by the Box Tops. We danced to it all that summer. Instantly I am pulled back to that overcast Tuesday afternoon of August 13, 1968, a day when entire worlds died and others were born. The day Sally died.

  ONE

  James Loves Sally

  From the back seat window of my mother’s Nash Rambler, I counted the short white lines stitching the black asphalt, the monotonous zipper of Highway 11 lulling me into a low-grade trance. The fifty-mile trip due north of Toronto unfolded with the unbearable slowness only a child knows. To kill time, I played obsessive word and number games in my head—I am ten years and eleven months old…Highway 11, take me to heaven—interrupting myself only to ask in my still-unbroken voice: “Are we there yet?”

  At last, the car swerved right onto Innisfil Line 3, and over the railway tracks we rumbled, mother, sister, brother and I, then past the Lefroy Harbour turnoff, through the remnants of old-growth forest, toward the familiar cluster of lakeside cottages. As my excitement mounted, I pictured the sandy bay beyond, in the lee of a windy tip of land that curved like a woman’s hip under the August sun, holding in its shelter a clutch of splashing children I longed to join.

  After helping unpack the car, I rushed to slip on my bathing suit, tying the frayed white cord at my belly button. I took a slim path that cut through soft, shin-high grass, skirted the cedar hedgerow, then skipped down a brief descent of rough-hewn planks to dig my toes into the communal sand of De Grassi Point, Lake Simcoe.

  The city boy, starved of tenderness of touch or kindness of word, would soon be born, or reborn, on what everyone called “the baby beach.” In the years ahead, I could and would revisit the place in my memory at will.

  * * *

  —

  I first saw Sally in a makeshift Sunday school, held in the McMurrich cottage, where we droned in unison the Anglican hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” She was six and I was five, both skinny, long-legged offspring of doctors who were colleagues at the University of Toronto. The McMurriches were a first-generation De Grassi family, a species of rural aristocrat stretching back to the 1890s, and Sally was related by blood. She was already enrolled in the all-girls private school Branksome Hall, and from birth I had been programmed to follow my father Jack’s path to the other side of the mirror, the equally exclusive all-boys private school, Upper Canada College.

  Sally was now a slim-hipped, wisecracking, eleven-year-old tomboy with brown eyes and curly hair, a ready laugh and a distinctively raspy voice. She was known as “Juno” around the point because she tended to run her words together, like, “Juno if you trap fireflies in a bottle, they’ll die?” Personality to burn.

  Most nights after dinner, kids gravitated through the tall grass of the commons to her cottage on the north side of the point, where she waited for us. The weathered structure echoed Sally’s last name, Wodehouse—pronounced “wood house”—suggesting equal parts vulnerability and stability. Her parents, George and Jane, seemed affable and outgoing, their overlapping laughter, lit by afternoon cocktails, sifting through the screens of the veranda. I already towered over Jane, nicknamed “Tiny” for her five-foot, one-inch stature, a wild contrast to her robust six-footer of a husband. Sally’s sixteen-year-old sister, Diana—round-faced, quiet, serious—seemed to occupy another universe from us.

  We kids loved playing Capture the Flag and our favourite, Kick the Can. I could never wait for my turn to be It. I tried to kick the can as far as I could, as everyone scattered to hide, often in the nearby grove of pine trees that cast a prickly carpet of needles and cones. A fast runner, I revelled in the darting and deking, the exhilarating tension between capture and liberation. Like extra-innings baseball, the game was theoretically endless and I yearned to keep playing in the dark.

  When nightfall chased us inside, we’d play Hangman, or Rock, Paper, Scissors, or, if I felt brave, engage in a staring contest; we were not quite ready to play doctor. I loved aggressive card games like War and Pig but especially Cheat. A game of chance that rewarded badness was too good to be true, and I won, won, won, gleefully slapping the killer cards hard on the tabletop as we gulped down sweating glasses of Kool-Aid and licked clean our Cheezies-coated fingers. One time, as Sally shuffled the next hand, I was mesmerized by a moth banging crazily against the screen, longing to merge with the light bulb, creating a halo behind her tanned face.

  During the day, we liked to visit Mr. Ed, the grey-haired local postman and handyman who stocked a small barn with massive chunks of ice insulated with sawdust. Ed waved us into the back of his pickup truck and we rumbled over the two miles of sun-dappled gravel into the village of Lefroy, where we split a five-cent banana Popsicle on the metal edge of the fire-engine-red mailbox. One day, John Rogers, dubbed “Roar” by his grandkids for his gruff voice, stopped our joyriding in the back of Ed’s truck: “You kids might fall out and crack your heads.” He was the Godfather of the North Point, and his word was law. A burly, leonine stockbroker with startling tufts of grey hair on his bronzed chest, Rogers had bankrolled the newly erected Upper Canada College clock tower, which loomed within eyeshot of my Toronto home. Every summer, Roar Rogers opened his long, white dock at the tip of the point, between the baby beach and the Over-Forty dock, as a communal gathering place. Sally and I now spent hours on a diving platform twenty yards out from the dock, anchored at the spot where the sandbar surrendered to unknown depths.

  Afraid of the dark waters on the far side of the platform, I preferred to jump off the diving board feet first. At first, Sally and I graded each other’s cannonballs from 1 to 10, but soon she surged ahead, executing graceful swan dives and jackknives while I hesitated. Pulling herself up the ladder, she flattened her unruly tangle of hair with her long fingers, then curled her thumbs under the elastic rims of her bum-clinging bathing suit, snapping it back in place. She shot me a look—scaredy-cat —and once more dived into the deep. Disgrace and desire forced me to follow suit, and for the first time ever I hit the water headfirst.

  * * *

  —

  It was the afternoon of August 6, 1962, weeks short of my twelfth birthday. We had arrived at the p
oint from the city only days earlier, and everyone was talking about the sudden death of Marilyn Monroe. I hadn’t seen Sally for nearly a year, and I found her down on the dock on the tip of the point, wearing an unfamiliar tight, dark blue bathing suit. She was lying on a towel on her back, perfectly still, eyes shut against the flood of sunshine. My stick-thin tomboy friend had acquired a new, winter-grown body of bumps and curves. Enthralled, I turned a silent thought over and over: So THIS is what everyone is talking about….

  As I slipped past, I cast a fleeting shadow over her body, and her head jerked up. I unfurled my towel and stretched out on it, face down.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi.”

  Her unusual aloofness unsettled me. It seemed we were starting from scratch. My mother captured the scene with her box Kodak, my insanely long legs shooting across the dock at a right angle to Sally’s feet, but the image failed to capture my inner tumult. It seemed only yesterday we were thrusting the heads of dandelions under each other’s chin—if your skin shines yellow, it means you love butter. Less than a year ago, winning a laugh from Sally had been as good as a kiss. But now?

  That August our circle expanded to include the fast crowd, led by a muscular, crewcut prep boy with the enviable name, Stephen Love. Despite the impact of the new Sally, I was also nursing a quiet crush on Marilyn Price, a pretty blond Branksome classmate of Sally’s—a smart aleck who spat out “Get lost!” and “Drop dead!” when you said nothing in particular. But Marilyn was sweet on Steve, not me, and so we went round and round, clanging the sides of the invisible triangle, even as I struggled to remain loyal to Sally.

  As if answering a prayer, Steve one afternoon proposed a game of Spin the Bottle. Marilyn was fated to take her life by her own hand, but in this patch of time, six eleven- and twelve-year-olds sat cross-legged and vibrating in a circle on a sun-swept veranda. But when the mouth of the twirling Orange Crush bottle stopped, pointing straight at my groin, I panicked and fled down to the dock, chased by the scalding laughter of sweet-scented girls. The lesson was as clear as it was cruel: in school, I regularly stood first in spelling and Steve Love last, but in real life the body ruled the mind.