Inland Navigation by the Stars. Anne Coleman

shake my head now at how an intelligent girl like me fell into such an obvious and silly trap. Why had I not been able to enjoy those other fictional worlds without losing my common sense? Part of it was the era. I already had the makings of a feminist in me, without even knowing the word, but nothing around me echoed it back let alone encouraged it. All the messages from movies, magazines, radio, early TV when I encountered it had a common theme, whether overt or somewhat disguised. I must live for love. I must find it and then all else would take care of itself and take care of me. That might have been at least a safe goal, were it not for all the novels that ensured that an ordinary man would not do. I required drama and intensity, scariness even.

      I knew I was not the meek and compliant girl I was meant to be. I was tall and my walk was too forthright, my stride too long. When I’d boarded at King’s Hall for one awful year, I had to go to the gym before breakfast for “walking training” along with girls who had bad posture. I didn’t have bad posture but was made to know I must somehow tame my walk, take much smaller steps and put my toes down first. I could do this odd lady-like mincing briefly under the fierce eye of Miss Kaiser, but not otherwise. I was simply unable to hobble myself like that if I wanted to get somewhere. But my walk was the mere iceberg tip of my basic wrongness.

      I was learning there had to be a muffling of my true self and a substitution of another or I would bore or alarm any man. And it went deeper than not being willing to wear a girdle, as Ruth did, or walk as a lady ought to. I had no small talk — I didn’t even know what it was. When the boys from the boys’ boarding school nearby came over for a dance I had nothing to say to them. I knew perfectly well that bringing up my thoughts about War and Peace would be out of the question. But on the spot, shuffling around the gym gripped by sweaty boy hands, I was unable to come up with anything else at all.

      I had dream loves from my books, Mr. Rochester, Heathcliff, Prince Andrei and many more. Having seen Hamlet, I had Laurence Olivier. Brooding, passionate, often filled with pain and rage over some obscure past tragedy (which I would heal) and darkly handsome of course — such a man might have the kind of power to handle me. I would wait until I could find such a man in real life.

      I didn’t see the dangerous nonsense of this, or, perhaps more likely, I didn’t see the implications. What might a man who considered himself to have power over powerful me do with his power? Or maybe I did sense the danger. It’s impossible to feel myself back into that girl’s mind. Not completely. Did I think I deserved punishment for my wrongness? Is that why I was allowing myself to be the victim of literature?

      All along, beginning when I was fourteen, I did have my love for Hugh MacLennan, or Mr. MacLennan as I always called him, the writer who spent his summers in North Hatley and with whom I had long talks and a relationship no one else really knew about. But he existed somehow in a separate space. It was a secret that I surely knew all along would never become more than what it was.

       11

      Thus, Frank.

      Frank — born Frančišek Celešči Marcus Molnar — came into my life the summer I turned eighteen. Recently arrived from Yugoslavia, he was teaching science at Bishop’s College School (where my brother went) and had taken a summer job as the manager of the North Hatley Club. He also taught tennis, sailing and swimming. He was twenty-six years old, handsome and athletic, also clever. He had thick dark brown hair and high cheekbones and seemed exotic to me. In his tennis whites or his bathing suit, with his summer tan and his strong legs, his beautifully shaped hands, his gleaming very dark eyes, he laid a powerful claim on me.