Authors: Alexandra Sellers
"Three months minimum," he told her. "If I really bust my ass we're looking at, say, the beginning of October."
In July and August several of her poems were accepted by two no-fee but prestigious literary publications, one in Canada and one in the States. In late August a poem was accepted for a publisher's anthology of modern Canadian poetry. She was to be included in a section that would be called the Poetic Future, or something similar, but still, she would be in the same company as the poets she had read in her high-school days, the poets she had revered and whose work she had cut her eyeteeth on.
"CanLit, here I come!" she carolled, showing the publisher's letter to Valerie.
She continued to collaborate with Lew Brady, not always with the inspired perfection of their first few efforts. They rarely fought, but there were times when neither could see virtue in the other's work, and times when they couldn't 'get the song off the page', as Lew called it. By late August they had learned to stop expecting so much of themselves and each other, learned that sometimes they were better off working alone. Smith had always been a hard worker, but this was a different kind of hard work, and she had to learn, like so many amateurs moving toward a professional status, that she had to work whether the muse was with her or not.
In spite of this period of adjustment, the collaboration was fruitful and worthwhile and often enough as exciting and inspired as the night they had worked on 'Wake Me Up to Say Goodbye'. They were concentrating entirely on producing songs for Cimarron's projected album, a decision Mel encouraged and Cimarron was delighted with. By the end of August the singer was rehearsing 'There's No Such Thing as Love' and 'Dark Night of My Soul', and Mel had begun to talk about her needing a couple of numbers with more upbeat lyrics.
But the upbeat lyrics wouldn't come. "Think of this as my Blue Period," Smith told Mel, because by this time she and Lew had learned that their big blocks occurred while she was trying to write happy lyrics to upbeat music.
That summer she discovered Gerard Manley Hopkins and spent the dark hours of many a sleepless night with his 'terrible sonnets'.
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief...
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
She would read aloud, but the face of God she had touched the day she had married Johnny was no longer within her reach.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there.
The poet's agony did not comfort her. But sometimes, as she hung above her own mind's black abyss, it was Gerard Manley Hopkins who saved her from falling in.
At other times, it was her work. Smith had always known what hard work was, and she had an enviable energy. Once she learned the lesson of creative work—of being able to go on without the blessing of the muse—she applied it constantly.
Early in September she moved into a beautiful condo of her own that overlooked English Bay, in a building not far from Lew's. It made their collaboration simpler, and in fact, she saw her father more often after her move, because when she visited him once or twice a week she was sure of seeing him.
Her father was deeply involved in some new aspect of the business, but she didn't ask him what it was that kept him so absorbed, and he didn't tell her. They talked instead of the past, of her mother and his artistic life in Paris. Her father was trying hard to get to know his daughter, to see the person she was rather than what he had wished her to be—or what she had tried to become to please him. They came to a troubled reconciliation: after all her outbursts it was difficult for him to feel that he could ever be the father she needed, and once she had let the lid off her years of hurt anger it was difficult to get it back on again.
But she loved him still and wanted him to love her—it would be hard to change that. And she no longer felt a deep revulsion toward her past and St. John's Wood. So when her father suggested that she hang on to her shares in the company for a while, she let the matter slide: it wasn't of urgent importance to cease to have any connection with the place where she had spent so many unnecessary years.
She had a busy and absorbing summer. She did everything she had intended to do and then some. Of all the things she had promised herself she would do, there was only one she did not have the energy for: she didn't go to a lawyer to file for divorce.
***
"I'm selling up," her father said to her one evening in September. They were sitting by the pool drinking cocktails, enjoying the last of summer. Smith was lounging in a deck chair with her feet up on another, and at this she sat up with such a jerk she spilled her drink.
"Selling up what?" she demanded, then, thinking she might have misunderstood, "The stock market?"
"I'm selling St. John Forest Products," Cordwainer St. John said. "Lock, stock and chain saws."
He had a half smile on his face, but Shulamith was aghast. "
W
hy
?"
"Why?" He smiled more broadly and shook his head. He had expected her to understand without being told, expected, perhaps, that she had known what he would do. "Well, I had three reasons for coming to the decision. First, my health. I've been told that I got off very lightly with the heart attacks: either one could have been much worse. So unless I want to die, I can't work the way I have done in the past. If I can't work hard, St. John Forest Products will never be as valuable as it is right now. It needs a younger person at the helm to keep it growing.
"Then, there's this damned problem with the Indians up in Cat Bite. Your husband's people: I have to bear that in mind, Shulamith. If the commission decides in our favour—as it almost certainly will—the decision of what to do with those damned trees will be on my plate. I don't usually back away from a decision. But I can't decide between something that might drive a permanent wedge between you and your husband, and something that, if economic conditions continue as they are for another two or three years, might mean the difference between the company's scraping through and disaster.
"But most important—now that you're not interested in stepping into my shoes when I retire, what am I working for? A man doesn't kill himself to build a company when there's no one to pass it on to."
He said it matter-of-factly, without reproach, but she felt a reproach anyway. She wondered how many times in their lives she had read things into his voice that were not there.
"You should have had a son," she said.
"I didn't want a son," he returned emphatically. "You are exactly what I wanted—you are tough and smart, smart as a whip, and you have enough of your mother in you to—" He broke off. "You're my child. Why should you have to be a son before I would want to pass the business on to you? You blame me for that now, because you've found out it wasn't what you wanted after all. But suppose I'd been different? Suppose I'd ignored your talent and your brain and wanted you to
marry
someone I could pass it on to? You'd have been telling me this summer I'd destroyed your confidence, your resourcefulness—whatever it is these women's libbers are saying. You expressed an interest in forestry—as I'd hoped you would, I admit—and I gave you every opportunity to prove yourself. If I pushed you, it
was no more than I would have pushed anyone who was going to be CEO one day."
It seemed it was her father's turn to respond to the charges she had levelled at him during the summer. He was right—his treatment of her, his expectations had always increased her sense of ability, her self-confidence. In the area of work. Perhaps the years under his tutelage had not, after all, been entirely wasted.
"I guess there aren't many blacks and whites in human experience, are there?" She suddenly wanted to try to express to him her confusion over her view of the past. "I'm sorry, Dad," she said softly. "I'm trying to understand." She looked into his eyes in the fading light and knew that though she had hurt him, he had somehow accepted it without anger. They smiled ruefully at each other.
"Have you worked out a deal yet?" she asked him then. "For the sale, I mean?"
"The only part that isn't finalized yet is whether you want to sell out your shares along with mine or whether you'd like to keep an interest. Jake will give you back shares in the new company if you like, or you can take cash. I don't guarantee you'll have any control over what he decides about Cat Bite Valley, but at least you'll have the right to say your piece."
"Who are you selling to?"
"Conrad Corporation," said her father. "I wanted to get a—"
"
Conrad
Corporation?" she nearly shrieked. It was almost dark now, and she bent to stare at her father's face, as though she might discover that he was joking. "You're not selling St. John's Wood to
Jake Conrad
?" She had never met Jake Conrad, but she had heard of him. He had started out in trucking, but he had not stayed there. Nor had he, like her father, been content to stay in one industry. His conglomerate was a mixed bag. Shulamith had heard his name every time his reach extended into the forestry industry. He was a bastard, she had learned. He was lucky, and he was a bastard.
"He's an excellent, hard-working young man. He's exactly—"
"He's a
bastard!
Daddy, he's a ruthless
bastard.
Everybody knows it—and you know it, too! He'll be cutting in Cat Bite before the ink is dry on the contract!"
Her father stood up to flick on the patio lights and the bug light. There were cricket noises and soft night smells. It was pleasant here, Smith reflected. This was something she missed down in the city—the privacy. Even having the ocean and park so near didn't make up for this.
"I don't think so," said her father, pouring himself another drink. "Jake Conrad has mellowed since his marriage. I don't think he'll do what you think. He's very shrewd and intelligent, and I expect him to give a lot of thought to whatever he does in Cat Bite Valley."
"He's married? When did he get married?"
"Last year. I suppose you were abroad. A very beautiful young widow. I've met her."
"Well, if she can mellow Jake Conrad, I wish her luck! I still think—oh, never mind." What did it matter to her anyway? Indians' rights were being ignored and abused all across the country. What difference did it make to her whether it was the Chopa?
"So what will you be doing?" she asked. "Are you retiring completely?"
"No, I'm going to be chairman of the board, as befits my age," her father said with a twinkle.
"Of Conrad Corporation?"
"The new company will be called Concord Corporation. It will be a very big conglomerate," he said with satisfaction. "Probably one of the top one hundred, in terms of sales, in Canada."
"The 'Cord' comes from Cordwainer?"
"Your grandmother's maiden name. She was the last of her line. I think she'd be pleased that the name isn't quite going to die."
Shulamith's middle name was Dayan, her mother's maiden name. Her mother had been related, though not closely, to Moshe Dayan. "You get your courage from the Dayans," Shulamith had been told over and over. "Also your strong chin."
"Maman did the same thing," she said now. "If I ever have a child, look at all the family names it's going to be saddled with, to keep up the tradition. It'll be the last of the Cordwainers, the last of the St. Johns—"
"You've got St. John cousins," her father said. The branch of the family he had not spoken to since going to Europe to study art. "Second cousins."
"That's good," she said, the blackness coming on her, as it did at unexpected moments. "There are lots of Dayans, too. It's a good thing the Cordwainer name is on the business, because I won't be having children."
There was a silence.
"You never see your husband?"
"He's not my husband." She shook her head and looked into her empty glass. "He's just..." She stood up. "It's getting late, I should go."
"I haven't talked to you about the house yet," her father said. "We'll have to discuss it another time. I thought I'd sell it."
Smith looked around at the pool, the house, the landscaped lawn. She had thought she didn't like this house, and yet it had a kind of peace.
"It's funny," she said. "Do you remember who I wanted you to get when we were building—when you got Hughie to design this?"
"Some young fellow who was barely starting out," her father said. "A little too innovative, I remember thinking at the time. Why?"
"He wasn't exactly
starting out
—he was already designing a big office building that year," Smith told him. "Right now—" she had read it in the paper "—he's doing a hotel in Amsterdam. It was Johnny Winterhawk."
***
On October 7, a Vancouver radio station aired 'Wake Me Up to Say Goodbye' for the first time. Smith had been alerted by Mel, so she was tuned in to the station while she worked that day, waiting to hear it, but still it was a shock to the system.
"We didn't wait to fall in love, we loved and then we met..."
I wrote this,
was her first thought, and a flower of surprised pride unfolded inside her.
This is my song!
Suddenly she was remembering the day she wrote it. The morning she had wakened up, full of contentment, to find the bed empty beside her, and gone downstairs to write it straight from the pen. She laughed lightly. She hadn't known how lucky she was that day. She had thought then—if she had thought about it at all—that all her writing would be as easy and inspired.
Oh, Johnny. The morning when she had sung the song to him, knowing that she loved him and that it was goodbye.
"But now it's over, all that's left is just goodbye." Cimarron's voice had a quality in it that said everything the song did not say. She had found the truth of the song, which Smith hadn't understood while she was writing it, hadn't known herself until the morning at the island. "But in the morning when you wake and know deep down—" her voice caught, giving the lie to the next three words "—it's a mistake...." Smith wondered how it was she had never noticed before that Cimarron had added a whole new dimension to the song: that the singer was a woman who was afraid to ask for love.