Good as Gone: My Life with Irving Layton

To Grant Hickman

… ’til the rivers all run dry …

Table of Contents

Cover

Dedication

Preface

A Note on the Quoted Material

Leave-Taking

1: The Bull Calf: Controversial Poet

2: Meeting

3: Europe and Other Not-So-Bad News

4: From Cabin-on-the-Lake to Niagara-on-the-Lake

5: At His Invitation

6: Chance and Appetite

7: Meshing

8: Oakville

9: Buckle Up

10: Coming Out

11: Telegram Written on Water

12: The Carved Nakedness

13: Showdown

14: Italy, Kakania, and Poetry 101

15: First Trip: Italy

16: Family Portrait

17: Montreal Awaits

18: Montreal

19: Ordinary Miracles

20: On the Inside Looking Out

21: The Golden Boy

22: How to Dominate Reality

23: Lunch with Ettore and Fellini

24: On the Writing of Waiting for the Messiah

25: The Fire Is All That Matters

26: Full Swing

27: The Cameron Affair

28: Wedding Over the Atlantic

29: Downdrafts

30: Of Triumphs and a Dedication

31: Weight of the World

32: Israel: There’s a Crack in Everything

33: What Did You Expect?

34: Goodbye

35: Escape

36: Final Scene

Epilogue: Idiot Wind: Catharsis

Acknowledgements

Notes

Copyright

Preface

Whenever I see an old photo of Irving, say from the 1960s, it is like glimpsing an icon in its natural setting, removed from ordinary life. If shown with a former mate, his children, or bygone friends, a feeling of subdued respect takes hold. Many came before me; each had their Layton moments — good and bad — all of which will forever be beyond my ken.

Taken to its extreme conclusion, that sense of awed respect could preclude any attempt to write about Irving. That, however, would be grossly unfair to him, to me, and to who we were as a couple. After nearly fourteen years at his side and twenty years of silence, I must share something of my story. To paraphrase Irving: until I, fabulist, have spoken …[1] none of what transpired happened. Sophists might argue that even if all I saw, heard, and did with Irving took place, so what? Why should it matter that I know who he was at his most vulnerable, and during moments of hard-won triumphs? Does it ultimately matter that I can describe the afternoon he wrote the last complete poem of his career, or that I witnessed the effects of old age cutting relentlessly into his body and mind? He will always have his loyal detractors, just as he will continue to gather new readers. The best among the latter, like me, are never quite the same for having truly tasted his worth.

This book is my homage to and thanks for all that he lavished on me: his absolute trust, an Ivy League education taught at the table, during long walks, and in the pre-dawn light as he challenged me like the extraordinary teacher he was, all imbued with unconditional love.

Writing Good as Gone took close to a decade, partly due to the wrenching blows each memory of him loosed on me, like stinging jabs to the face and gut. Guilt and sorrow left me nearly mute for those first years after leaving him. I missed him. I miss him still, and wish I could have stayed on. That, however, would have meant my creative and emotional, if not physical, death. Because he loved me, he helped me to leave before the age difference transformed me into a hollowed-out, broken shell.

What I hope to convey in these pages is something of the sheer exuberance that marked our days and nights. He made pronouncements, some of them incendiary, but always, always, with compassion at the heart and root of the matter. Having practically no one to share my story with while living it, nor afterwards, I want now to take you by the hand and sit you down beside us, there to laugh, be surprised, and perhaps even be shocked at how very possible it is for love to conquer all. We had it, that secret ingredient that permitted us to overlook the obvious challenges and to nurture one another, cherishing the good that flourished between us. If I have done my best, the reader will come away feeling as if they, too, enjoyed a few moments in his company.

I regret nothing, but am pained to say whether I would do it all again. Very likely, yes. Yes, I would take the same risks, jump off the same cliff. It was worth it, though I could not survive another such aftermath.

Writing this book has been tantamount to building a long tunnel, fitted with a leather-bound, brass-studded door at the far end. Good as Gone, now done, enables me to open that door, step through, and close it ever so gently behind me with strength enough left only to whisper: Thank you my wild, peculiar boy, thank you and adieu.

A Note on the Quoted Material

The desire to stave off oblivion by writing things down began when I was at least nine years old. Taking note of Irving’s words thus came naturally. Whether prompted by him to record a poem’s meaning or my own impulse to capture his thoughts, I scrambled for pen and paper, capturing his words verbatim. Underscores and bold lettering helped preserve his emphasis and rhythms of speech. Such jottings were caught scraps, written on whatever lay at hand, and were meant to be transcribed into journals such as The Blue Book or The Ledger. Most helpful, a near photographic memory enabled me to transpose entire conversations late at night directly into journal pages. Irving spoke with such forceful, well-crafted language that even casual remarks rang with memorable phrases. Transient Notes are snippets set down when I was away from the house and without my journal at hand. Some quotes are from The Changing Book, a journal begun in November 1981 while travelling in France. Its purpose was to record events that, well, left me irrevocably changed. The slim hardcover book, filled to its inside back cover, spans nineteen years. Much of the dialogue attributed to Irving throughout this work is from these sources. They have been edited for grammar, the underscores replaced with italics, but not for content. The words quoted are all Irving’s.

Leave-Taking

Irving died on January 4, 2006. It had been eleven years since I left him. There would be no more bedazzlements, no more schmoozing, laughter, or his annoyingly funny rendition of the 1928 hit song Ra-monaaa. No more of that brilliance coiled in his every gesture ready to blaze, startle, and delight. He was dead. Like Shakespeare, he would not trouble us with any new masterpieces, ever. He is dead. Shall I write it five hundred times? Will that show me the shape of his absence?

Days slip by me. Is this the feeling he had — quietly circling his grief[1]— when he stared at a page for weeks and weeks after his mother passed away? Any poem of his, any mention of him, brings him back. I hear the timbre of his voice; I see the forearms packed with muscle as if put there by decades of stonecutting. Reading a line of his work brings back his warmth, the smell of his sweet breath —

The coffin, so plain and simple, was brand new. Its freshly sawn pine gave off an unexpected tang, ricocheting me back to childhood days in the Nova Scotia woods, or playing in the sawmill my father had built. The scent linked my past with the unavoidable present. A fine layer of sawdust lay on the coffin’s closed lid. I swept it gently away, one last bit of housecleaning. I stood by the coffin, needing these last moments to make up for the years without him.

The entourage — lifelong friends of Irving’s, Leon Schwartz, his wife Musia, and Sandra Goodwin, widow of Irving’s nephew Bill — soon arrived. Leon and Bill had been given power of attorney over Irving’s affairs. Musia had helped hire and fire staff, even raised funds for his upkeep toward the end. I overheard Musia remark, I always said, when he closed his eyes, I would be done. She was choosing not to take sides in the anticipated fallout. The entourage stayed grouped by the entrance. Their job was over and it looked like they were in a furniture showroom for all the bonhomie. Not one of them approached me.

Irving’s fourth wife, Harriet, and their daughter Samantha arrived. They promptly went out for a smoke before joining the entourage, where they formed a tight group, their backs studiously turned to me in a wall of exclusion. It was so obvious and so hurtful that even the shomesh (funeral home attendant) was appalled. He rose from his chair and, shaking his head, said, J’ai tout vu, j’ai tout compris. Ces gens-là ne sont pas intelligents. Quel théâtre! Pas d’intelligence du tout! (I’ve seen it all now, and I understand. Those people are not very bright. What theatre! No brains whatsoever!) His words eased some of the sting at being unjustly ostracized.

Most of them had been guests in my home, and I in theirs. Every High Holiday, year after year, saw Irving and me in our finest duds, flying along The Boulevard in a taxi to the Schwartzes’ splendid home for Rosh Hashanah and Passover. I learned to sing Dayenu in their dining room, Seder after Seder, beaming at their approval. Marrying Irving had meant, in many ways, losing my family; but, as I told myself, I gained a people. The entourage, however, began turning its back to me as soon I left Irving in 1995 — this despite Irving’s profound understanding and support of my leave-taking.

By the time of his funeral, the shunning was absolute. One of them, Sandra, became increasingly agitated, and started calling out that she had to sketch Irving like she had sketched her dead mother. She pulled a large drawing pad from her purse while pacing to and fro before the coffin. At least she said hello to me. And wasn’t I almost as ridiculous, with nail scissors and an envelope in my purse, just in case I’d be permitted to cut a lock of his hair? Or the digital camera, in case I’d be allowed one photo, just for me?

Contrary to tradition, it was agreed they would open the coffin. When they did, Irving’s name flew from my mouth. I was almost felled seeing him, his square hands discreetly folded underneath a white cloth, beyond my or anyone’s gaze. I was grateful for the neat, simple covering. It would have been hard to see those hands, so familiar, now dead. To my immense relief, he had put on his round mischief-maker face, his best boy punim.

Photos from his last years had shown him ravaged, haggard, covered in age spots, and hauntingly distant. Now, in his coffin, he was full-faced — pale as death but without disfiguring furrows or blotches. His hair. So clean and white and beautifully combed. A white yarmulke sat lightly on the famous mane.

I knew the colour of his eyes beneath the closed lids to be blue — blue as the edge of the sky on a late summer day. Those eyes are what had first caught and held me.

Through the noise roaring in my head, I suddenly made out the word cremation. This was more than a breach with tradition — it was an abomination. All I could imagine were his blue eyes melting, perhaps bursting in the heat. The trademark hair would go in less than a second. Two thousand degrees Fahrenheit, for two to three hours …now black, now ash.…[2]

Irving never wanted to be burned.

I was gutted, broken. He was not supposed to die. To whom had I given the very best of myself? Now they were going to burn him. He was the only one who ever tried to bandage my hurts and cherished me so. There would be no more encouragement, no more heart’s delight or that seamless complicity of ours. Nothing.

My only consolation, standing there by his coffin, was that I had kept the promise I made to myself after my leave-taking. Leaving Irving had, in a way, made him become old almost overnight; as long as we were a couple, he remained a force to be reckoned with, like a super-charged dynamo. He had laughed when I dubbed him my wild, peculiar boy. I could not imagine seeing him in an institution being spoon-fed, diapered, or whatever else befalls those rendered helpless by the inescapable lousiness of growing old.[3] No, I would not see him on some geriatric ward. I vowed never to set foot inside Maimonides, the care facility in Côte-Saint-Luc where he spent his final years.

I did see him from time to time, however. The last encounter had been five years earlier. Concordia University had invited me to a reception marking the acquisition of the last batch of Layton material for their archive. By then, Irving was in Maimonides. He arrived at the Loyola Campus Faculty Club in a limo. I was not prepared for the sight of him in a wheelchair. Photos of that day show a vivid connection that still held us, one in the other’s eyes, in the other’s soul.

He asked the same questions several times over and I answered them brightly as if hearing them for the first time. My patience was still intact, my love was unchanged, but I was in pieces. I put my hand on his forearm, surprised at its burly strength. His eyes danced blue and then blank, disappearing a bit behind the cloud, then back again. You look like one of the Pottiers from Nova Scotia! Irving said, pleased to no end that he had made the connection. He was partly right. I was indeed one the Pottiers from Nova Scotia — the Pottier who had been his wife for nearly fourteen years.

I drew up a chair next to him. Pictures were snapped discreetly. Everyone left us alone in front of the tall window, the sun pouring in onto our laps. Perhaps they sensed, the way animals sense earthquakes, that we two would never see each other again. The reception over, I contained my sobs and kissed him goodbye as he was bundled into the limo. I knew I would not see him again until he was in his box. That was the phrase. My mountain was turning into grains of sand, and I could not support the weight of such desolation.

At the funeral home, my hand instinctively reached for his face. It was astonishingly cold, much colder than ice. As tradition dictates, no embalming had been done, no artificial attempt at prolonging a likeness when the soul is already gone. His mouth was still full-lipped. I put my hand flat over his heart, half-expecting to feel the familiar thud. He was always proud of astounding doctors with that heart of his, beating with such a force and rhythm that it was almost an aberration. Now, as I moved my hand gently back and forth over his chest, there was a hard stillness, the ribs still strong and prominent, but they were just skeleton now.

There were only minutes left in which to confront an entire lifetime, to say hello and farewell all at once — not only to Irving, but to all that our life together had been. Where had it gone?

No one could know the awfulness of those last moments, or how utterly ruined my life seemed. The heat from my hand and the warmth of the room had begun to disturb his face. His lower lip fell away, almost imperceptibly, leaving a thin black line. It was so black a void, blacker than midnight, blacker and vaster than infinity. My love for him, beyond reason or measure, appeared in that blackness like tiny stars a million miles away in what had been our very own firmament.

Seeing the coffin wheeled into the chapel was surreal. Had Irving ever approached a podium in front of a packed house and not performed? The most impassioned eulogy came from Irwin Cotler, a former student and one of Irving’s favourite spiritual sons. Cotler, now a renowned human rights lawyer and federal cabinet minister, had interrupted his election campaign to eulogize his teacher. He was visibly upset, unabashedly grateful for all that Irving had taught and shown, not only to him, but also to the world. Leonard Cohen sounded another note, alluding to their friendship as a private thing, and then read Irving’s poem The Graveyard.

I forget now who read the famous lines:

… They dance best who dance with desire,

Who lifting feet of fire from fire

Weave before they lie down

A red carpet for the sun.… [4]

There was no rabbi — not that Irving had ever been a traditional Jew — because no rabbi would agree to preside over the funeral service of a Jew who was going to be burned. I was told afterwards we were lucky to be allowed to sing Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Service over, the coffin was wheeled slowly out. Beethoven’s Ninth played, but I did not hear it. I folded in with the family and friends, but could not help walking faster until I was almost close enough to touch the coffin. Harriet shot me a look, seemingly annoyed by my visible and audible grief.

There was the hearse, waiting. People crowded past on either side. I saw the news cameras; saw the coffin lifted in. My hand clamped over my mouth as the finality began to hit home. Irving’s teasing voice in my ear sounded out: "I take my Anna everywhere …"[5]

Not this time. Not ever again.

Irwin Cotler embraced me, as did Moses Znaimer, another spiritual son, this one having gone on to practically invent MuchMusic and found a media empire. Then, Leonard Cohen came up and hugged me close. Taking my hand tightly, he thanked me for all that I had done for Irving, saying he knew how happy I had made his irreplaceable friend. I’m a witness! he said, smiling softly, I am a witness.

I was terrified to both see and perhaps to miss seeing the hearse drive away. News teams, finished with Leonard, Moses, and Cotler, now gathered around me. It was strange, me answering questions after having removed myself from the scene all these years. I would have to sound good, deliver with punch and a flourish, the way Irving always had.

He once remarked that a man’s funeral is the wife’s report card. We laughed at that, and even pictured his funeral and send-off. We imagined the event taking place on a warm sunny day, joked about how traffic would be disrupted, how the crowds would no doubt spill down the steps and onto the street. It was not arrogance; it was whistling a duet in the dark.

Now, on this bleak January morning on Jean Talon the sun had not shown. A cutting wind pushed the damp winter air right through my body as I stood before the funeral home’s open maw. Sickly yellow-grey clouds hung over the concrete departure zone. The news teams were already gone; and the crowd, homage duly paid, had thinned to nothing. I looked up and the hearse was gone.

1: The Bull Calf: Controversial Poet

Spring, 1977. We were agitated and giddy with the end of high school in sight. I was, as usual, half-drunk on the salt-air breezes tendrilled with the damp earth smells that oozed in from the woods and fields that surrounded my village of Belleville, Nova Scotia. Three kilometres away, Ste-Anne-du-Ruisseau High School sat in the L-corner between two grassy expanses. One, more meadow than playing field, sloped down to a saltwater marsh sluiced by the Atlantic Ocean some twenty kilometres from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.

My classmates were children of Acadian fishermen, carpenters, and other tradespeople. We spoke multi-accented versions of seventeenth-century French cut with English. We were all Catholic, shaped more by family ways and tradition than by dogma. Country music played on the town’s one radio station, though I had a small radio by my bed that could catch Boston at night. Some locals considered my family fortunate, but to Yarmouth’s townies, we were just Frenchie hicks. Ours was the only house without a phone, as my mother detested the party lines that were shared between several houses, and insisted on waiting until private lines became available. In our big sea-green kitchen we had a black and white wood-burning stove. There was one road, no store, and two lakes: one fresh, one salt, and no other girls my age for nearly four kilometres.

The Class of 1977 was divided into three groups of twenty. Mr. Meuse, our English teacher, played Leonard Cohen’s So Long, Marianne over and over on the battered record player in his classroom. It was, to put it mildly, unlike anything we’d heard before. The mournful voice and strange music spawned irreverent asides. More peculiar, however, was how the song mesmerized Mr. Meuse. He stared at the dusty turntable, oblivious to our nervous discomfort.

He also had us read a poem called The Bull Calf by the controversial Irving Layton, though the controversy went unexplained. Mr. Meuse, no more than I, could not know that I was destined to leave my Acadian village of some 150 people and become Layton’s fifth, and final, wife. Equally unimaginable, that I would one day greet Leonard Cohen at my door, that he’d hand me a bouquet of flowers, smile, and say Hi, Darlin’!

As I had done the previous summer when school ended, after graduation I left for Cohasset, Massachusetts, an affluent suburb south of Boston, to serve as au pair for the Babin family. The duties were light, their two young girls a snap to watch over.

Charles and Anna called me Honey and said Thank you for anything I did, a novelty I responded to like a lost dog to a loving hand. My Acadianisms and wit developed apace with their appreciation.

The Babins introduced me to a world of sophisticated urbanites, in-ground pools, and my first sip of Tanqueray gin. People in Cohasset owned grand pianos, wore cologne other than Aqua Velva, and took ailing pets to the vet instead of into the woods to be shot. One day each week, Charles ferried me to Boston where I wandered the streets and museums, too young to exploit it fully. On the crowded Cohasset beach I stood out as the only chubby teenager, fully dressed both in and out of the water. With one eye on my charges, the other on the lifeguards, I wished for invisibility while observing beach life. Uncouth and awkward as I was, the Babins fostered a sense of personhood that had been sorely lacking and for which I remain profoundly thankful

The Babins were very different from my family. My father, best described as a self-taught engineer, was the man in the white hard hat supervising commercial construction jobs for Kenny Construction and, later, Boyd & Garland. He was held in high regard by architects as well as the crews under his careful eye. My mother worked at Dominion Textiles, the big cotton mill in Yarmouth. She manned her looms ten hours a day, six days a week, for ten years, and continued working after marriage, though with better hours. She was good at what she did, her canvas chosen for the sails on the HMS Bounty. In 1964 a car accident prevented her from ever working again. My brother, four years older than me, said the accident changed her personality, though I was too young to make such a distinction.

Shortly after my seventeenth birthday in August 1977, the Babins brought me back to Belleville. Once home, I packed a blue steamer trunk for the start of my four years at Halifax’s Dalhousie University to study medicine. No one doubted my desire to attend Dal. It was as close to the Ivy League as I could get, and so natural a next step that I did not bother applying to any other school. I was meant to do well at Dalhousie, like my father’s uncle, the Honourable Justice Vincent Pottier, who had been sent to Boston at age eleven to learn English. He graduated from Dalhousie Law School in 1920, became a distinguished lawyer and professor, and founded Halifax’s Legal Aid service. He was also the first Acadian from Nova Scotia elected to the House of Commons, and the first Acadian Justice of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia. Our family was humbly proud of these achievements.

My parents drove me the 290 kilometres to Shirreff Hall, Dalhousie’s stately women’s residence, and left quickly, without ceremony, no doubt intimidated by the doctors and lawyers fussing over their well-groomed offspring. Framed by Shirreff Hall’s massive doorway and the spray of fall-yellow leaves, I watched, heart crushed by pity and fear, as my parents’ truck eased out from the Cadillacs and Buicks.

Did I want to be a doctor? Not really. I had initially planned on going into nursing, but at the last minute, to please my parents, changed programs. My desire to get into medicine grew, in part, from admiring my Aunt Bernadette, herself a nurse, whose bearing and knowledge epitomized what it meant to be a professional caregiver. If I could be half as adept, I would be able to write my ticket, travel the world, able to rent that all-important room of one’s own.

Another early influence on my career path was the nurse who tended me after my first near-death experience, a car accident when I was five. A drunk driver had smashed into us head-on at ninety miles an hour. I was unhurt except for a friction-burned left cheek. I recall shards of glass coming silently toward my face in slow motion, pretty and shiny. Apparently, the drunk driver’s flesh remained intact, with every bone in his body broken. At the hospital, a doctor and some interns materialized and, stupidly, lifted and shook each of my limbs in turn, as if unaware I might have something squashed inside me. In comparison, I thought my nurse to be far more capable. I studied her through half-closed eyes, deeming her ability to draw a smile from my swollen face commendable. She acknowledged the doll Uncle Hubert and Tante Marguerite retrieved from the wreckage, asking me its name. I never named my dolls, inventing Nancy on the spot in order to seem normal. Then, she helped me stand up on the bed so I could look into the mirror. Instead of making a big deal of my big cheek, she laughed, setting me to laughing too, earning a gold star in my mind. Nursing thus became a possible future career.

Years later, however, my true desires were writing and travelling. But no one in my milieu encouraged such folly. For my parents, art was neither real nor valid, and I had not yet found the courage to oppose them. Not surprisingly, I went from being the high school valedictorian in June, to failure in December of my first year at Dalhousie. In retrospect, I should have majored in English, or enrolled at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, but that would have been like announcing I wanted to be a weatherman on Mars. Much of my parents’ life savings went toward my tuition. Personal choice was not an option. I still break into a cold sweat remembering my first chemistry exam, staring at the page for forty-five minutes, not daring ask permission to go to the washroom. Professor Terzis, an angry, pencil-thin Greek who made leftist speeches against the Junta all term, took pity. I left the exam room, returning to scrawl rambling equations for twenty points.

The Killam Library with its five floors of books attracted me like a cave of tantalizing delights. I ventured to it early that September. It should have been my second home, but its reading room, clotted with the cream of Eastern Canadian youth, who — to my mind — all knew each other and spoke unaccented English, so intimidated me that I did not set foot in the Killam again that year. Uncle Vincent had an office at the Law School but, paralyzed with fear, I could not approach him or an advisor to confess my terrors.

Overweight, with no definable style, I wore thick glasses that were ever on the brink of steaming up or sliding down a perpetually shiny nose. The only high point of my freshman year might have been pivotal if not for a Thomas Hardy–esque moment. My favourite class was English. Professor Michael Klug sounded like Faulkner, looked like Hemingway, and filled his pipe with movements so delicate they might have belonged to Emily Dickinson. I sat up front, eager but mute, crippled by a reluctance to reveal my Acadian accent.

Midway through the first term, we had run aground on Dover Beach. What did this poem mean? Professor Klug asked. I sat there, lumpish, heavy, but with my spirits lightening. Epiphanies began to form. I pursed my lips, glanced up, and looked at the page, sucking air, not daring to speak. Klug boomed, I’ll give fifty cents to anyone who can tell me what this poem means. Up shot my hand as I blurted out something about Nature looking beautiful, but Man losing faith in God. Miss Pottier, Klug intoned in his Missouri-like drawl, you’ve earned about seventeen cents. Can you take it a bit further? Another inspired burst about the Sea of Faith receding like the tide and Nature alone not being enough; Klug drove his huge fist into his pocket and plunked a mass of coins down onto my notebook with a gratifying bang. After class, with Klug’s change burning a hole in my pocket, I contemplated buying him a coffee. The moment took on what I would later recognize as Prufrockian intensity. What I really wanted was to ask about the English program and becoming a writer. One word from Klug and I would have enough ammunition to confront my parents. I stood outside the classroom in King’s College, gathering courage, imbibing the chalky, dust-flecked air. Just as I was about to take those nine or ten steps across the marble foyer, Klug’s change barely contained in my sweaty hand, a teacher’s assistant ran up to him, arms laden with exam papers. The moment passed. I never again found the courage to approach Professor Klug. Had I done so, who knows? Instead, I stayed in the science program for two more tortured years.

Buoyed perhaps by Klug’s recognition and appreciation, I ditched my thick glasses for contact lenses after that first year at Dal. By summer’s end, I was down thirty-eight pounds thanks to Weight Watchers, swimming, and biking six miles a day to a job as lab technician. My social life began to improve, but not by much. By my third year, unable to stomach more science prerequisites, I enrolled in Dal’s four-year Nursing program and moved into Fenwick Towers in Halifax’s south end. Filled with Dalhousie students, its windows clad in various Rebel and British flags, my mother pronounced this thirty-two-storey high-rise no better than a whorehouse.

Helen MacLeod, my roommate who came from Cape Breton with a Fender guitar and an acerbic take on life, introduced me to her music-making friends. She had a ringside seat for the fierce abandon with which I blew off my schoolwork in order to correspond with Vincent, a French artist I spent one memorable evening with the previous semester. It had been my first encounter with a Frenchman, and my second intimate encounter with a man. He had left Paris and zigzagged from Alaska to Halifax. His massive blue pack, road-hardened thighs, and hiking boots called to me as the Sirens to Ulysses. When he left, I watched from my fifteenth-floor balcony, barefoot on the frozen concrete in my red satin robe, until the blue speck of him disappeared in the distance. I was stuck; he was free. Annette, anyone can be a nurse, but very few can be an artist like you, he said, kissing me goodbye. It was as if Hemingway’s Paris had caressed my cheek.

Vincent set my imagination on fire with the desire be a female Hemingway. Concentrating on how to give injections or take blood pressure became nearly impossible. Helen exhorted me to do what made me happiest. So after two dismal years of pre-med courses, and that one horrible year of nursing (including a six-week practical in a full cap-to-shoes white uniform) handing in late but imaginatively written care-plans, I packed in Helping Professions and switched to English Literature. My parents were fountains of negativity and doubt-inducing scorn. A change in faculty meant, if nothing else,