WHEN I LEFT the austere High Anglican environs of Toronto’s Saint Thomas’s Church in the chilly spring of 2005, following the equally austere funeral service for Christina McCall, I felt she had been let down. The prescribed psalms, anthems, creeds, litanies and prayers had been performed faultlessly. But they offered little connection to the spirited life they were meant to celebrate. Having been Christina’s devoted husband for seventeen years and an admirer for much longer, I felt I had licence to comment on the liturgy she deserved instead of the one she received.
To her many fans, Christina will be remembered mainly for revolutionizing the non-fiction writing style of her generation, using deceptively simple phrases (such as her salute to Pierre Trudeau—”he haunts us still”) to describe the conflicting emotions she observed detonating around her. Her powers of observation transported the impact of cinema-vérité to the written word. Cameras never lie, and neither did Christina.
She taught me the essence of womanhood. She was the quintessential WASP shiksa who never misplaced her captivating aura. She had an innate sense of fashion, looking as though she had been born with pearls and a cashmere twin set. She was a singular woman—smart, beautiful, with the eyes of a nightingale and a zaftig figure, burdened by a hyperactive Presbyterian conscience—decent to the core.
Then there was the other Christina. Somewhere deep inside her, an unsmiling universe represented the dark side of her Irish ancestry that occasionally exploded into black tempers, when her company was best avoided. She resorted to brutal Hemingway cadences to challenge any male who ventured within firing range. But such occasions were more than compensated for by the pleasures of her company when she shared her heightened sensitivities to enlarge the promises of life.
During the 1960s we became an Ottawa power couple, the first English-speaking journalists to entertain Pierre Trudeau at home, along with his spirited Gallic companion, Madeleine Gobeil, then a professor at Carleton and the woman he should have married. Later, after Pierre had become prime minister, I published my second political book, The Distemper of Our Times, which included an appendix bursting with top- secret documents. When his cabinet debated whether or not to charge me with breaking the Official Secrets Act, Trudeau cut off the dispute by deciding instead to prosecute the individual who had given me the offending papers. I never knew whether he was defending freedom of the press or if he recalled having rolled around our living room with his sexy soulmate.
In 1971 Christina and I were hired as a team to save Maclean’s, then a general-interest monthly, by turning it into a weekly newsmagazine. As well as being our best writer, Chris tutored new contributors. “She was the most gifted editor I ever saw; her fix notes were often better than the pieces she was working on,” recalled Toronto Life editor John Macfarlane, who was a senior editor on Maclean’s staff at the time. “One felt that you kind of had to live up to Christina.”
She eventually left the magazine so that we could co-author the ground-breaking first volume of The Canadian Establishment. That was when our differences first surfaced: She wanted to attack the very notion of an elite; I hoped to probe, describe and reveal the uses and abuses of its power structure. Our disagreements made us realize that we no longer saw the world in the same way. The deterioration in our relationship took most of a decade to marinate, made worse by my self-inflicted workload. When I returned to my desk one sunny Saturday afternoon, I found Christina lying across it, staging a tearful, personal lie-in to protest my atrocious work addiction. It was the saddest moment of our marriage, but I did little to reduce my workaholic habits.
For most of our time together, not a single piece of copy left our various homes that didn’t bear the imprint of shared knowledge and joint editing. But as my output increased, I grew to depend more on her than she on me, and I received most of the public credit. I exploited her talents too blatantly for us to remain equal partners, so that while there still was love between us, there was no longer truth, and so, sadly, we had to part.
Years later, just before we both remarried, we exchanged letters. “For 20 years of my life I valued and loved you deeply, and I know that despite the pain that has swamped my spirit since we came apart, you loved and valued me,” she wrote. “I think of you at the wheel of your boat with that crazy cap on and have tenderness for what you were and regret for what we might have become. We were lovers for a very long time and I am glad.”
So am I, Christina. So am I.
It was her gift of joy, her unique combination of a cold eye and a warm heart that I expected would find echo in the epitaphs proclaimed by the Anglican officiates at her funeral. It was not to be.
Across the years, through the arid days and brooding nights, even after I found joy and happiness with my present wife, Alvy, I’ve often thought about Christina: the miracle of the love we shared and the tragedy of its loss. Now there is nothing left to say except the Latin blessing with which we parted: Pax Vobiscum— peace be with you.
We divorced over religious differences. I thought I was God and she didn’t.
— 2005