I stepped down off the curb and began to cross towards him. The light changed again: I was stranded in the middle of the street. Cars honked their horns; there were shouts; the traffic surged. I didn’t know whether to go back or forward.

He turned then, and at first I was not sure he could see me. I stretched out my hand, like a drowning person beseeching rescue. In that moment I had already committed treachery in my heart.

Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.

Sunnyside

Three days after this, Laura was due to arrive. I had myself driven down to Union Station to meet the train, but she wasn’t on it. She wasn’t at Avilion either: I phoned Reenie to check, provoking an outburst: she’d always known something like this would happen, just because of the way Laura was. She’d gone with Laura to the train, she’d shipped off the trunk and everything as instructed, she’d taken every precaution. She should have accompanied her all the way, and now look! Some white slaver had made off with her.

Laura’s trunk turned up on schedule, but Laura herself appeared to have vanished. Richard was more upset than I would have predicted. He was afraid she’d been spirited away by unknown forces—people who had it in for him. It could be the Reds, or else an unscrupulous business rival: such twisted men existed. Criminals, he hinted, who were in cahoots with all sorts of folks—folks who’d stop at nothing to assert undue influence on him, because of his growing political connections. Next thing you knew we’d get a blackmail note.

He was suspicious of many elements, that August; he said we had to keep a sharp lookout. There had been a big march on Ottawa, in July—thousands, tens of thousands of men who claimed to be unemployed, and who were demanding jobs and fair pay, egged on by subversives bent on overthrowing the government.

“I bet young what’s-his-name was mixed up in it,” said Richard, looking at me narrowly.

“Young who?” I said, glancing out the window.

“Pay attention, darling. Laura’s pal. The dark one. The young thug who burned down your father’s factory.”

“It didn’t burn down,” I said. “They put it out in time. Anyway, they never proved it.”

“He skedaddled,” said Richard. “Ran like a rabbit. That’s proof enough for me.”

The marchers on Ottawa had been trapped through a clever back-room stratagem suggested—or so he said—by Richard himself, who moved in high circles these days. The leaders of the march had been decoyed to Ottawa for “official talks,” and the whole kit and kaboodle had been stalled in Regina. The talks came to nothing, as planned, but then there had been riots: the subversives had stirred things up, the crowd had gone out of control, men had been killed and injured. It was the Communists who were behind it, because they had a finger in every dubious pie, and who was to say that waylaying Laura was not one of the pies?

I thought Richard was working himself up unduly. I was upset too, but I believed Laura had merely wandered off—been distracted somehow. That would be more like her. She’d got off at the wrong station, forgotten our telephone number, lost her way.

Winifred said we should check the hospitals: Laura might have been taken ill, or had an accident. But she was not in a hospital.

After two days of worrying we informed the police, and soon after that, despite Richard’s precautions, the story hit the papers. Reporters besieged the sidewalk outside our house. They took pictures, if only of our doors and windows; they telephoned; they begged for interviews. What they wanted was a scandal. “Prominent Socialite Schoolgirl in Love Nest.” “Union Station Site of Grisly Remains.” They wanted to be told that Laura had run away with a married man, or had been abducted by anarchists, or had been found dead in a checked suitcase in the baggage room. Sex or death, or both together—that was what they had in mind.

Richard said we should be gracious but uninformative. He said there was no point in antagonizing the newspapers unduly, because reporters were vindictive little vermin who would hold a grudge for years and pay you back later, when you were least expecting it. He said he would handle things.

First he put it about that I was on the brink of collapse, and asked that my privacy and my delicate health be respected. That made the reporters back off some; they assumed of course that I was pregnant, which still counted for something in those days, and was also thought to scramble a woman’s brain. Then he let it be known that there would be a reward for information, though he did not say how much. On the eighth day there was an anonymous phone call: Laura was not dead, but was working in a waffle booth at the Sunnyside Amusement Park. The caller claimed to have recognized her, from the description of her that was in all the papers.

It was decided that Richard and I would drive down together to reclaim her. Winifred said Laura was most likely in a state of delayed shock, considering Father’s unseemly death and her discovery of the body. Anyone would be disturbed after such an ordeal, and Laura was a girl with a nervous temperament. Most likely she hardly knew what she was doing or saying. Once we got her back, she must be given a strong sedative and carted off to the doctor.

But the most important thing, said Winifred, was that not a word of all this must leak out. A fifteen-year-old running away from home like that—it would reflect badly on the family. People might think she’d been mistreated, and this could become a serious impediment. To Richard and his future political prospects, was what she meant.

Sunnyside was where people went in summer, then. Not people like Richard and Winifred—it was too rowdy for them, too sweaty. Merry-go-rounds, Red Hots, root beer, shooting galleries, beauty contests, public bathing: in a word, vulgar diversions. Richard and Winifred would not have wished to be in such close proximity to other people’s armpits, or to those who counted their money in dimes. Though I don’t know why I’m being so holier-than-thou, because I wouldn’t have wanted it either.

It’s all gone now, Sunnyside—swept away by twelve lanes of asphalt highway sometime in the fifties. Dismantled long ago, like so much else. But that August it was still in full swing. We drove down in Richard’s coupe, but we had to leave the car at some distance because of the traffic, and the throngs jostling along the sidewalks and the dusty roads.

It was a foul day, torrid and hazy; hotter than the hinges of Hades, as Walter would say now. Above the lakeshore there was an invisible but almost palpable fog, composed of stale perfume and the oil from tanned bare shoulders, mixed with the steam from the cooking wieners and the burnt tang of spun sugar. Walking into the crowd was like sinking into a stew—you became an ingredient, you took on a certain flavour. Even Richard’s forehead was damp, beneath the brim of his Panama.

From overhead came the squealing of metal on metal, and an ominous rumbling, and a chorus of female screams: the roller coaster. I had never been on one, and gaped up at it until Richard said, “Close your mouth, darling, you’ll catch flies.” I heard an odd story later—who from? Winifred, no doubt; it was the sort of thing she used to toss out to show she knew what really went on in life, in low life, behind the scenes. The story was that girls who’d got themselves in trouble—Winifred’s term, as if these girls had managed the trouble all by themselves—that these troubled girls would go on the roller coaster at Sunnyside, hoping to start an abortion that way. Winifred laughed: Of course it didn’t work, she said, and if it had, what would they have done? With all the blood, I mean? Way up in the air like that? Just imagine!