Heather O'Neill - Daydreams of Angels

Forester was screaming at the maid one day for breaking a vase. The young girl sat in a corner of the staircase later, crying. Violet looked at her and thought she and her mother also had a job. He was their boss too. They were expected to earn their keep like the servants. The maids had to scrub the floors, and she had to adore him. Violet had to be sure not to appreciate anything that Forester gave her. As long as she refused to get one shard of pleasure from anything in this world, she didn’t owe him any love.

After her mother had a heart attack in the bathtub one evening and was buried in a fancy cemetery on the mountain, Forester kicked Violet out. He didn’t want to have anything to do with her. He was glad to have his revenge. He let her take the clothes. He didn’t want to have any reminder of Violet hanging around. Anyway, she would certainly see how far her pretty clothes would take her now. She would probably end up selling them to pay her rent.

Forester knew that Violet could easily get a rich man to fall in love with her and take care of her. But he also knew that Violet had terrible taste in men. She couldn’t stand him, after all. She would be attracted to her own idiotic kind, back in the east end. What a fool, he thought, someone who wants to move down in the world.

And suddenly, watching her go, Forester was filled with a terrible longing for her. She was the great love of his life, and it had been an unrequited one.

Violet took the trolley to the east end. She had hardly ever gone down to this part of town since she and her mother had left it. There was no reason to. You didn’t come to this neighbourhood unless you lived here. Forester hated this part of town and could never forgive Violet’s mother for being from the east end.

The streets were narrow and were still cobbled. The buildings were tall and had black soot stains on them. A woman who looked impossibly tired passed Violet. Her mushroom hat was down over her eyes and her coat was old. Her four children followed after her, holding one another’s hands. They all had short, stringy blond hair like milkweed pods that had just split open. The whole family looked messy and malnourished.

Violet was shocked at how squalid it all was. For a minute she saw it through Forester’s eyes. But this quickly went away.

She went to stay at the Eiffel Tower Hotel. It was a skinny grey stone building with stone roses framing the big wooden door. The carpet running up the stairs had red and yellow flowers on it. The concierge seemed a little surprised to see such a refined-looking eighteen-year-old girl checking into her establishment. She looked Violet up and down. Violet had on a top hat with a blue veil and a pretty white collar around her neck.

It’s because of my clothes, Violet thought. I am dressed like a very rich woman. Perhaps she thinks that I was kicked out by my lover. Perhaps she thinks that I am the type of girl that entertains men until they tire of me.

She felt more at home in this hotel room than she had during all the years she had spent at Forester’s house. The hotel seemed so familiar. It was because she somehow knew that she would be spending the rest of her life inside these hotels. She also intuited that more concierges would judge her. She would come to learn that if you ever enter a hotel and find a concierge that does not judge you, then you know that you have died and that you are in God’s Hotel.

The wallpaper in her room made her sad. But at Forester’s house, the wallpaper had also made her sad.

She got a taste for travelling from reading books. She had no idea how a girl was supposed to go anyplace in this world if she didn’t have a cent to her name. As she walked downtown, she saw the posters that were advertising different acts coming to Montreal from all sorts of foreign places. They travelled all over the world and they had roots nowhere.

Violet went to see a friend of her stepfather’s named Mr. Bertrand a week later. Bertrand had come over to their house for dinner several times. Each time he hadn’t been able to keep his eyes off her. This was a strange basis for believing that you could go to someone for help, but it was all she had. She went to the office where he worked as a barrister on St. Jacques Street. The secretary supposed that she had to let the girl in.

Bertrand was surprised to see her.

“I have been thinking that I might like to go on the stage,” Violet said. “But I need some money for dancing and singing lessons, you see.”

Bertrand looked her over. She had a brown derby hat with a little rim and a giant brown and purple ribbon tied up in a great bow on the side. Her brown jacket matched it perfectly. She looked like a beautiful lost schoolgirl. Women would probably want to be cruel to her. But why shouldn’t they be? What right did she have to go about acting like it was criminal not to do something for her? What right did she have to sit there asking to be saved? Perhaps she had practised having that woebegone face since she was a child. And now her entire life was going to be shaped by that expression.

“Can I at least hear you? Will you sing for me?” Bertrand asked.

Violet sang with a bit of hesitation in her voice — the way that we sound after we have been crying for a spell and are no longer sad, but our body, for some reason, does not want to give up crying yet. He couldn’t even quite make out the words as she sang. She sang as if she was doing something that was completely humiliating. She sang as if she was standing there naked.

Maybe men in the audience would like that, Bertrand thought. Some of the men definitely would, anyway. They would look at her and they would feel as if they were degrading her. As if they were talking her into doing something that she didn’t want to do.

He was suddenly afraid that someone would walk in and see him having this girl sing and dance in his office. And what would they think about him offering her advice? They would think that he must frequent nightclubs. They would change their opinion about him and he would never, ever be able to make them change it back.

He gave her some money to take singing lessons, feeling that he had played a part, although he wasn’t at all sure why he had to play a part at all. He didn’t think she would spend the money on singing lessons. He thought she would just use the money to survive a little longer.

But despite this prediction, Violet did spend the money on singing lessons. She auditioned for an American touring company when it was putting on a show in Montreal a month later. The director didn’t know quite what to think of her either, but he thought she was beautiful enough to take a chance on. He told her to pack her bags and that she could be a member of the chorus line. Getting an opportunity because of her looks gave Violet the feeling that she had begged for it. But what were her options? She put her fancy clothes back into a suitcase. The motley company travelled on a train from one little town to another.

The girls stood in a row with their identical blue dresses and headbands with silver buttons on them. They tapped their feet and blew kisses at the audience. The sound of the taps hitting the floor sounded like a knife being sharpened.

They sang a song about being flowers. Or something so stupid that Violet thought it was practically criminal. She wondered if wondering this while she was dancing affected her performance. Women were all made to be idiots one way or another, there was no way around it. In each town, the seats were filled with people who dressed and talked like Forester.

There was a popular act in which the chorus girls dressed up like sailors. They wore white top hats and bathing suits with small white sequins. Cardboard clouds dropped from the ceiling and a huge fan blew their curls about wildly. There was a big metal drum that someone pounded when they needed thunder. A girl named Rose would roller skate around the stage with sparklers in her hands, representing lightning. She always had burn marks on her wrists.