Our Lady of the Snows

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Callaghan describes this as “a love story, a most unusual kind of love story.” In other hands, Our Lady of the Snows might have been just one more sentimentalization of that familiar fiction, the prostitute with a heart of gold. Callaghan has transformed the hackneyed cast of characters surrounding this stock figure (the sympathetic bartender with troubles of his own; the pimp/enforcer laboriously climbing toward respectability) into recognizably human beings. Somewhat less believable, but fascinating for all that, Ilona Tomory, the beautiful Hungarian waif in a once-handsome mink coat, is the catalyst affecting the usually placid atmosphere of the Bradley House, a sleazy hotel frequented by both the rich in a mood for slumming and the threadbare street people. Ilona is a whore, but a lady; she is resented but respected by the other hookers; she cannot be bought, like the others, for money alone; and she appears to see her degraded way of life as almost a mission of mercy. The story of Ilona’s progress toward redemption, and its effect on the lives of the other habituées of the Bradley House, was suggested by Callaghan’s earlier work, “The Enchanted Pimp.”