Blue Moon (27 page)

“Evelyn, I have just spoken with Mrs. Nelson about something which you may find of interest.” Full-stop. She scoured my eyes for at least twenty seconds. “I have informed the warden of the remarkable progress you have made in such a short space of time. In fact, I told her how much I admired the way you had challenged us, forced us to readjust our perspective in the matter of the wayward sisters, as Mrs. Nelson calls them. She refused to say anything on that thorny subject. 'Tell me what you have in mind, Janet,' she instructed me. So I mentioned how useful an instrument reading could be in the reform of our charges. Much more emotionally powerful than music. Much more didactic than pep talks or sermons. Having laid the groundwork, I suggested we do something about the so-called prison library, a hit-and-miss affair.

“At first, Gloria said little. Then, when I mentioned what an eager reader you had become, she started to take notice. 'You want her to become the prison librarian, don't you?' Yes, I admitted. 'Not a bad idea,' she replied, 'Such an activity might keep our friend out of harm's way. I don't have a lot of money to spend. But Evelyn could spend a few hundred dollars a year—and we could allow her eight hours a week away from the sewing room. Anything to keep her happy.'”

Mrs. White halted herself. “Well, what do you think, Evelyn? Interested?”

With an alacrity that surprised me, I told her I would welcome the challenge. “That would give me great pleasure. It is a task that really needs doing.” (I almost said: “Be it done to me according to your word”)

“Precisely, Evelyn. Your rehabilitation would consist of helping to rehabilitate others. The Horatian principle. Literature delights us as it instructs us.”

And so a whole new turn introduced itself into my prison years. I was assigned a small room in the basement, given an old beaten-up desk,
provided with a barely serviceable typewriter and a supply of file cards and given time to teach myself the Dewey Decimal system. I received catalogues from Basil Blackwell in Oxford, from whom I purchased about forty books a year. On their breaks, my fellow prisoners were allowed to browse the collection during the two hours, four days a week, I kept the library open.

In order to buy the right books, I had to get to know my fellow prisoners more intimately than before. I had to understand what they wanted to read so that I could buy accordingly—mainly romance novels—but I felt an obligation to acquire some serious books that would edify—in so doing, I met my own needs. In my new capacity, I became the confidante of many women who, as they read stories, were anxious to tell me their own. As I discovered, stories beget stories.

Most of the stories I heard from the inmates were humdrum, accounts of missed opportunities, foul-ups, and indignities perpetrated by evil parents and even more vile husbands and men friends. In a very real sense, I was seeing shards of my own life in Hamilton, and witnessing accounts that bore many points of comparison to the genesis of my own life as a prostitute and, later, a convicted felon. My imagination having been sharpened by reading and diary-keeping, I developed a sympathetic ear for the tales of woe that were whispered to me in the library. More than the nearby chapel and the Catholic priest who once a week heard confessions and said Mass there, my little office became a confessional, where any prisoner was
assured empathy and compassion. In large part, it was my own residue of guilt that made me a sympathetic witness to tragic lives.

I became more and more fascinated by the most ordinary falls into sin and crime. Like the collector who hungers for objects that look remarkably alike to an outsider, I was seeking further understanding of what had befallen me. Sometimes, you need to hear the same script over and over again before it finally makes its real emotional impact. I was thirsty for some sort of self-knowledge—I wanted to know what had made me into me.

Occasionally, I would cast autobiographical tales told to me into short narratives. The results occupied a strange no-man's land between fiction and non-fiction—the invented and the drearily real. Looking back at those first efforts, I now see that I simply could not turn them properly. Their dross remained dross in my hands. I lacked any kind of precision in transforming these accounts into good writing. Nevertheless, I had developed a craving to hear tales that I could write about.

My first break from this routine—although I did not realize it until years later, the turning point in my life as a writer—was my encounter with Eve, who arrived at Kingston in the summer of 1952. Like me, she was in her early thirties. I vividly recall how frail she looked, very much as I imagined Andersen's little match girl. A true white blonde, only her pale blue eyes and china complexion demarcated her from an albino. Miserably thin. Of normal height, she stooped when she walked and studiously avoided eye contact, even when revealing intimacies. Deeply passive, I thought to myself.

Eve—whose real name was Eva—had been born to elderly, wealthy parents in Vienna in 1922. The childless couple had been surprised by her arrival; they had given up hope of being blessed with a baby. Mr. Hoffman was a furrier, many of whose business associates were Jewish. The Hoffmans, both amateur violinists, frequently held musical evenings in their magnificent home on Huberstrasse, one street away from where Beethoven had spent his last years. Although the Hoffmans were Aryans and thus not threatened by the rise of the Nazis and the racial laws, both mother and father routinely received many of the newly proclaimed undesirables at their soirees.

In 1932, just as Eve turned 10, her mother and father precipitously decided to emigrate to Canada. Mrs. Hoffman's younger sister had settled in Toronto five years earlier, and business prospects in the rapidly expanding city were excellent. Afraid of the coming storm, Eve's parents wanted to settle somewhere where their only child could be raised in safety. Years later, they assured her, “we did it only for you, but, of course, we saved ourselves as well. 'Hog Town' is nevertheless a strange place for people from Wien to live. No coffee houses, no serious music, no interesting pictures to look at.”

The kindly meant words carried a burden for the child as the impetus to immigrate had been fuelled because of her. In reality, her mother and father might have been murdered or lost everything they owned in the ravages of war, she later told herself. But she could not escape the burden of being the perfect daughter in order—to use her exact word—to propitiate the sacrifices made on her behalf.

At Bishop Strachan, Eve was a brilliant student, and no one was surprised when Karl and Maria determined that their daughter was to pursue higher education at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, widely regarded as one of the finest colleges for women in all of North America. Karl told Eve that
his
choice of Smith over Bryn Mawr was determined by a careful examination of some crucial differences between the two. The women from Bryn Mawr were schooled better in Greek and Latin, but Smith seemed to turn out a more well-rounded
fraulein.

At Smith, Eve was again an outstanding student. Although not as forward as some of her classmates, she nevertheless fit in to the long hours of study and the heavy party-going. On weekends, the girls were often bussed to nearby all-male colleges such as Amherst or Dartmouth for get-togethers—dances followed by heavy-petting. Sometimes, the men were bussed in to Northampton. At one of the Smith parties at the beginning of her sophomore year, Eve met Sam, a junior in economics at Amherst College.

Sam was not at first glance the most prepossessing of the men Eve had encountered. Of medium height and slightly overweight, his jet black hair and eyes nevertheless decisively drew attention to themselves. She could feel his charm and, she was certain, his goodness. They slept together the second time they saw each other. As it turned out, both had been virgins before that encounter. The more she knew
him, Eve was convinced that no one but Sam would ever do for her. She made her mind up: she intended to marry him. They had been going steady for three months before Sam insisted they visit his parents in Yonker, just outside Manhattan. Eve was enthusiastic about this meeting, convinced she would uncover even more information about what made Sam so wonderful. The Stein home was large, opulent and decidedly grand—unlike the house in Toronto where she had been raised, the owners of this home put their wealth on display. For Eve, the furniture was too large, the colours of the rugs too bright. Yet, she adored Sam's parents immediately, although she was certain Hilda Stein was holding herself back when speaking with her. The visit went well enough, Eve was invited back, and when she and Sam parted for the school week, she felt even more confident about her future with him.

When Sam arrived at her dorm five days later, his face was crestfallen, all of the usual animation drained. His mother had been very upset by his attachment to Eve. The Steins did not mind their son seeing a non-Jewish girl, but they were repulsed by Eve's blondness, her Aryanness. Yes, they understood the Hoffmans had many Jewish friends, but the pure whiteness of Eve's skin was an abomination, especially in light of what was happening in Europe. Sam and Eve spent the weekend together, but Sam's courtliness had deserted him. A dutiful son, he was obviously not going to break with his parents. When they made love for the last time, Sam was so vigorous he hurt her, almost as if he were trying to wound her and thus make the break with her easier. Perhaps that's how he deals with guilt, she thought.

After Sam, there were no more boyfriends. Eve returned to Toronto when she finished at Smith. She took a job with Stabler's, a picture agency that supplied images for books, magazines and newspapers. Although she dealt with all manners of requests, Eve specialized in pictures showing disasters, natural and man-made. Publishers from all over the world began to use Stabler's because of Eve's knack of finding exactly the right painting or photograph to commemorate the tragic.

She had been at Stabler's for five years when Geoff Smith joined the firm. At first, she found his wildly handsome features annoying: he was simply too perfect to be human. After a while, succumbing to his charms, she spoke with him much more openly and readily. He asked her almost nothing about herself, but he told her a lot about himself,
particularly about his marriage to the glamorous, exotic Pat, the only daughter of a Brazilian oilman and his Irish wife. “You must come to dinner,” he often told her, but no invitation was forthcoming until the day Pat phoned the office to speak to her husband, who was away from the office. When Eve picked up the phone and offered to take a message, Pat thanked her and then became expansive, asking all kinds of questions. What did Eve do when she was not at work, who were her friends? Obviously displeased by the reticent responses she received, Pat peremptorily issued an invitation. “I fear you are hiding your talents under a bushel. We must have lunch together to discuss the situation. You can present yourself here next Tuesday.” Although Eve was not aware of the existence of a situation, she was intrigued by Pat and agreed to meet her the following week.

On the phone, Pat spoke in a reticent, upper-class English accent, but Eve was not quite prepared for what her new acquaintance would look like. The thin, intensely white-faced woman who opened the door to her large Avenue Road apartment was at least six feet tall and had masses of flowing, Titian-red hair. After embracing Eve as if she were a long-lost friend, she exclaimed, “Geoff is completely wrong—the silly man doesn't understand women. You have loads of potential!” Having made this observation, she waved Eve into the flat, which was a monument to both International Modernism (chairs by Mies van der Rohe, a minimalist sofa of the Bauhaus variety) and art deco (two or three substantial Clarice Cliff Yo-Yo vases, white rugs by Syrie Maugham). The two styles were not comfortable with each other but somehow Pat had negotiated a truce between them.

Pat, who had answered the door in a red silk dressing gown, confessed that she always slept in, was not yet ready for the world, and ushered Eve into her bedroom. While Pat, seated at her dressing table, completed her toilet, Eve perched herself at the edge of the bed. Although she commanded Eve to “tell me all about yourself,” Pat did most of the talking, the chief thread of which centred on her mourning for her father, who had passed away five years before. “They don't make men like that any more,” she told Eve. “Geoff is very pretty—handsome, some would say—but he's just not as substantial as Daddy. I think about him all the time.”

In the midst of a lot of chatter about herself, Pat skillfully asked pointed questions about Eve's life. “So you live with your parents—
aren't you a bit old for that?” And: “Why doesn't a woman of your beauty have a lover?” And, even more pointedly: “A woman of your age needs to be more experienced in the ways of the world. Why are you so stand-offish?” Eve sparred with Pat as best she could, avoiding any revelation about the past to escape her lips. Despite her new acquaintance's bossiness, Eve was enchanted by her, especially by her animal-like energy. Even at the outset of their strange friendship, Eve wondered why she was so attracted to this particular exotic creature. But she ignored all such doubts, so captivated was she. Soon, Eve became a satellite in Pat and Geoff's small circle, taking meals two or three times a week with them in small, chic restaurants.

Happy to have escaped her drab, unrewarding existence with her parents, Eve wanted to let herself go. So, she was particularly susceptible to Sean, Pat's Irish cousin from Dublin. A tall, well-built thirty-two year old doctor who had emigrated to Canada a year before, he was deeply fond of his cousin, who, he observed, was the sister his parents had never given him. Two days after they met, Sean phoned Eve to ask her to go out with him alone. She agreed and, within a week, the two became lovers, meeting always at his Rosedale flat. From the outset, Eve feared Sean might be feckless—she was also certain he was a bit of a rogue as far as women were concerned. Yet, the more she saw of him, the more she was able to see other sides, sides which rekindled memories of Sam.