Читать книгу Playing Sarah Bernhardt - Joan Givner - Страница 10

The town was familiar to her. She knew every heaving flagstone, every crack in the pavement in the grid of streets she’d walked day after day on her way to school, her perspective on it altering as she herself changed. In the beginning it was a celestial city whose core drew her downtown every Saturday afternoon. Then, after journeys to other cities, it dwindled to a rundown prairie town battered by the ordeal of its long, hard winter.

It was a schizophrenic town, leafy and full of flowers in the long summer days, ripe and mellow in the early fall when the smoky smell of distant forest fires mingled with the smell of fruit. Then, abruptly, sometimes overnight, the curtain came down on the pleasant sunny scene. When it rose again, the place was unrecognizable, transformed into a windswept settlement on the edge of Antarctica, almost uninhabitable. And there was no entr’acte. Spring was elided between the two extremes, the long, Lenten season of penitence culminating in no climactic resurrection. The drama was episodic and continual, consisting of daily ordeals of blizzard and ice.

For a long time it had existed only as the backdrop to her childhood recollections, and now she had stepped back into it. Whatever happened with the play, it was a homecoming of sorts. She hailed the surviving landmarks, finding them dearly familiar in spite of changes, like relatives rejuvenated by crude facelifts, and she mourned those obliterated to make way for new buildings.

In place of the old buildings there were skyscrapers — glass, metal, and air-conditioned — banks and sterile office buildings with institutional artworks in the foyer intended (presumably) to uplift the soul, but in fact constituting a silent rebuke. Several had cows, either depicted in paintings or sculpted life-size in bronze. There seemed to be an infestation of these domestic animals, perhaps because they too were going the way of the buffalo and were on the verge of extinction.

Among the disappeared were the fur stores, the corner groceries, and the cafés with their snakeweed plants, fly-specked oilcloth tables, and clientele of good old boys. Gone was the old Capitol Theatre, where she had lined up on Saturday afternoons, tantalized by the framed stills of movies she would never get to see and which seemed all the more alluring for that.

Yet in spite of the encroachment, and in spite of two downtown malls linked by a food court, the centre held. This was a town with a centre. There was a square park with a war memorial at the point where paths intersected, a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, a children’s playground, triangles of grass, and a few flowerbeds. Around its periphery stood the churches of various uncompromising, ununited denominations — the Anglican cathedral, the First Baptist, Knox Metropolitan. There was a library, too, a modern building with ramps for wheelchairs, and — dominating the whole — the old CPR hotel, which in spite of periodic facelifts remained its inimitable self, resistant to change or disguise. Solid, steady, and dignified with its spacious foyer and high ceilings, a living reproach to newer hotels with waterslides, chlorinated pools, and exercise rooms. It was a poor relation of similar buildings across the country — the Empress, the Banff Springs, the Chateau Laurier — but on a smaller scale as befitted its humbler setting, yet nevertheless deserving of the Homeric epithet “venerable.”

The theatre — The Globe — was housed in the former city hall, the last holdout of an earlier era, testimony to the human spirit not entirely quenched by commerce and technology, dwarfed and crowded though it was by bank buildings. On the ground floor, in defiance of the conspiracies of consumerism, a repairer of watches, the Tic Doc, had a small booth, and nearby a repairer of shoes for those who still wore out heels and soles by walking. One of the theatre’s side doors opened onto a pedestrian mall, a pleasant place with a few trees bravely planted at regular intervals in squares of unpaved earth. Vestiges of human creativity clustered about the theatre as if they had taken heart from its survival. There were two bookstores, a music store, and a hole-in-the-wall with a wide range of papers and magazines, and pornography in the back.

The rain had stopped, and Harriet walked out into the carnival atmosphere, recognizing the heady enjoyment that prevails on fine days in a cold climate. Buskers and street vendors and artists of all kinds drew the workers down from their cubicles in the high-rise buildings to linger in the open air.

She was arrested immediately by the spectacle of a mime with a white face and white gloved hands holding a pose on a small platform, arms outstretched, still as a statue. Passers-by paused more often in front of him than any of the others, a small crowd gathering to stand subdued as if his immobility were contagious. A Greek fisherman’s hat, identical to the one on his head, lay on the pavement garnering more coins than his competitors. When she stooped to put in her coins, Harriet noticed a healthy number of folded bills.

Moving along she passed a wooden cart, elegantly and skilfully painted with red Georgia O’Keefe poppies and emblazoned with the words “Carte Blanche.” From it a young woman dispensed drinks and sandwiches and carried on several bantering conversations at once. The people swarmed the cart and hung around much longer than the acquisition of food and drink warranted. For a moment, drawn by the poppies, Harriet thought of patronizing the cart but settled instead for indoor seating and quiet. The lunch crowd was thinning, the workers already drifting back to their cages, when Harriet ducked into a nearby restaurant where the tables were littered with debris and the waiters showed signs of battle fatigue. Only one table was still occupied — by four women obviously not part of the nine-to-five work force, and yet not housewives. They were talking animatedly, an empty litre carafe of white wine on the table. Naturally the waiters were not about to hurry over to a single woman, looking dazed and wanting only a cup of coffee and a place to sit.

“May I join you?”

The woman who wrote the play plumped into the chair opposite Harriet without waiting for an answer.

“I saw you come in and thought we’d better get acquainted. Hope Prince.”

She could have been Harriet’s age, perhaps younger, perhaps older; it was hard to tell. She had the air of a precocious child and spoke with an English accent.

“Do you mind the smoking section?” Harriet asked.

Hope ignored the question. Harriet would eventually get used to this, Hope’s tendency to ignore remarks that deflected the conversation from her idée fixe. She was almost ruthlessly focused.

“I saw your Sarah Bernhardt. I thought you were terrific. Saw it twice, in fact.”

“Oh.” Harriet flinched visibly.

“Don’t worry. I feel the same way when people say they’ve read something I’ve written,” said Hope, as if she read her mind. “Exposed.”

Harriet wondered if she should know what this woman had written and return the compliment.

“That’s one of the reasons I wanted you so badly for Mazo.”

Fireworks went off in Harriet’s mind as words and phrases connected — I thought we’d better get acquainted; I wanted you for Mazo. Of course; she’d known all along it wasn’t an agent’s sentimental fondness that got the script rushed out to her.

By now the four women were at the stage of divvying up the bill, rooting about in their purses for the tip. The jingle attracted a waiter to their corner so that he managed to take their orders without much effort.

“Grilled cheese. Caesar salad. Perrier,” Hope said so decisively that Harriet ordered the same. One of the four women came to the table to ask Hope how the play was going along, and Hope asked her how her own play was going.

“Second act problems,” the woman said. “Usual thing.”

Hope nodded sympathetically and introduced Harriet.

“She’s our Mazo,” she said.

“I saw you in something,” the woman said. “Sarah Bernhardt.” They all knew, of course they did. If they hadn’t been present for the debacle, they must have heard about it.

“What about Jane Merritt?” Harriet asked after the woman left.

“Too big a fish for this small pond.”

“Oh,” said Harriet, deflated even more. “Meaning she’d make the rest of us look like amateur night in the church basement?”

“And hard to handle. And she has other fish to fry. She’s hoping for a part in a movie with Dustin Hoffman. And she’s not altogether reliable.”

Not altogether reliable, thought Harriet, looking at the shrewd eyes swimming like fishes behind the thick lenses.

“And what about you? This is very different from Bernhardt!” Hope said.

“It’s a long story. I’ve been interested in Mazo since I read her as a kid.”

“Oh?” It was an invitation to say more.

“Well, there was a family connection in a way. My aunt worked for Mazo’s cousin ... so I felt she was in the family, the nearest I’d ever come to a real writer. And you? Did you read all the books when you were a kid?”

“No. They were popular in England, but I missed out onthem somehow. I found them much later, and since I did I’vegone through various stages — reading her, writing about her, researching her life, teaching her

“Teaching?”

“It’s my day job. I teach at the university.”

“But Mazo isn’t the kind of thing you teach, is it? I thought —”

“She was beyond the pale. The last mourner for the waning influence of the British Empire in Canada, the provider of pulp fiction for frustrated housewives.”

“So your project is one of rehabilitation?”

“In the beginning it was. I have to admit I’m evangelical by nature, but the consuming interest became something else.”

“The secrets?”

“If you mean all those narrative hooks I put in the opening scene — the love affair with Caroline, where the daughter came from, the fabrication of the aristocratic background — no! It was none of those, although they were part of it.”

Harriet waited.

“It was how anyone so out of sync with the real world could lead her own inner life, keep it absolutely intact, and yet appear before the world in a disguise that made her completely — or almost completely — acceptable. She didn’t just ‘pass,’ as someone of a different race might pass, but she led a double life, and she twisted that other life into fictional currency and used it to conquer the world. It was an incredible feat.”

Harriet tried to absorb Hope’s explanation.

“This will all become clear during the course of the play,” Hope said in a tone that signalled the subject was closed for the moment.

Suddenly Harriet knew who Hope reminded her of — her high school English teacher.

“Yes, yes,” said Hope with a grimace, “it’s my fate to remind everybody of their high school English teacher.”

She was applying herself to the food in front of her, eating the salad with her fingers and cutting up the sandwich into small pieces — the eccentric eating habits of someone who lives alone. Harriet began to warm towards her.

“It’s a compliment,” said Harriet. “She was wonderful. One of the reasons I went into the theatre. She had us learning masses of poetry. Passages from Shakespeare, the sonnets, sonnets by Milton and Wordsworth and Keats and lots more. I can still remember them. She had a wonderful voice. There are whole passages of Shakespeare that I still hear in her voice.”

“Ah yes. That’s what they said of Edith Evans. When she spoke a line, you heard it ever afterwards in her voice. But your English teacher probably had years of elocution lessons. We all did.”

“Oh really?” said Harriet, interested because she really hadn’t known what she’d been heir to.

“Well, those of us who came from Lancashire and Yorkshire or other benighted places and went to grammar schools. If we were headed to university, the first requirement for fitting into mainstream society was to shed our northern accents. And in the process of acquiring this verbal camouflage we learned so much poetry that it set us up for life.”

“It did?”

“All that rote-learning spawned a whole generation of good writers. Nothing like getting the cadences of the great poets — or even the third-rate ones — imprinted subliminally on your developing brain. Beats television commercials any day. So naturally we became English teachers, and, not wanting to be rendered back to our northern habitats, many of us skipped across the ocean and offered our talents to the New World.”

A certain inflection in her voice made Harriet wonder if she was serious.

“I’m afraid those talents weren’t much appreciated,” Harriet said, “at least not in my school. The parents complained that there was too much parroting of useless stuff and not enough thinking.”

“So they put a stop to the rote-learning, and you didn’t do a whole lot of thinking, either. And that created a great vacuum that provided fertile ground for all kinds of mischief. But you managed to slip in just under the wire and learn something useful. And that set you up for life.”

“Perhaps it did,” said Harriet, somewhat surprised to see her high school education summed up in such a way.

“It was the same all over,” Hope said. “I taught high school when the conventional wisdom was that knowing your subject didn’t mean you knew how to teach. So expertise in your subject became a liability. Meanwhile, learning how to teach, like learning how to be a good parent, remained elusive. Schools of education flourished, and high schools grew weaker. It was the beginning of a downward slide. Luckily, I jumped off the merry-go-round and hopped over to the university.”

“Just like that?”

“Well, it wasn’t quite that simple. There was the small matter of a couple of extra degrees that I had to acquire.”

“Were they worth the effort?”

“In some ways. You don’t have parents on your back, you have a certain amount of autonomy, and scholarly expertise still counts for something. But the same forces that eroded the high schools are now working on the universities — at least in the humanities. It’s a long story, Harriet. But as we’re still functioning, I’d like you to come and talk to one of my classes.”

“Be glad to,” Harriet said, although it was the last thing she wanted to do.

“But getting back to Mazo?”

“That’s a long story too,” said Harriet. They gathered their things together and emerged into the mall, then, discovering that they were going in the same direction, they walked across the park together.

The mime and most of the buskers had disappeared. The pictures drawn by the pavement artists remained, and the white cart was deserted, its owner packing up for the day. She waved cheerfully at Hope.

“Hi, Blanche!” said Hope. “Got any of those hashish bars?”

“Sure,” said Blanche, laughing. “I kept them back for you.”

“This is Harriet, the lead in the play,” Hope said.

“Wow!”

“One of my former students,” Hope said. Harriet would conclude eventually that the entire population of the city consisted of Hope’s former students.

“Is Blanche her real name?” Harriet asked, looking at the elaborate lettering of “Carte Blanche” in its circle of Georgia O’ Keefe poppies.

“Has been for as long as I’ve known her,” Hope said. “But I don’t know if the name or the vocation came first.”

“It’s hardly a vocation, is it?” said Harriet.

“For her it seems to be. She takes it very seriously,” Hope said, adding in her opinionated way, “Names can influence the directions lives take.”

Harriet was about to ask Hope if her name made her preter-naturally optimistic when they arrived outside Harriet’s rooming house. It was a white frame house, with an old sofa on the porch sprouting coiled wire springs and stuffing. Loud music blared out of one of the upstairs windows, and a compost heap at the side of the house was releasing a truly horrible smell.

“The usual foul and pestilent congregation of vapours,” said Hope as if she was familiar with the place. “Not a very peaceable kingdom.”

“True,” said Harriet. “I’ll probably move soon.”

“I have a house on the crescents,” Hope said. “I often let the top floor to a student. It just so happens that it’s vacant at the moment.”

“I’m more or less committed,” Harriet said. “I have an aunt in town.”

The excuse was the knee-jerk reaction of someone who leads an irregular life, needs freedom, and doesn’t want anyone taking note of her comings and goings or counting the bottles in the garbage. But even without that, the idea of living under the scrutiny of those shrewd eyes would have been too much.

“That isn’t the aunt who knew Mazo?”

“No, she died. This is another one.”

“Well, we must get together and talk about our shared obsession,” Hope said. “You must come and see my collection of photographs of Mazo and Caroline.”

“I have some photographs of them too,” Harriet said, “if I can only find them.”

“Passed on by your aunt?”

“No,” Harriet said. “As a matter of fact, I stole them.”

It seemed from the dilation of the eyes behind the glasses that an explanation was necessary.

“I stayed with my aunt when I was just a kid, and I was fascinated by the pictures in the photograph album we looked at. Just before I left I took one last look at the albums, and on a sudden impulse I slipped out some of the pictures. I don’t know what made me do it. It was the only time in my life I ever stole anything, and I felt terribly guilty for a long time afterwards. When I got home, I hid them so well it was years before I found them again.”

“And it was discovered, your theft?”

“I never knew. There was a rift in the family, and I didn’t see my aunt for several years. By that time, we had other things on our minds.”

Again, an expectant silence, but this time Harriet volunteered no further information.

“What a funny character you are, Harriet,” Hope said. “I’m glad we managed this lunch together. I hope we’ll have lots more.”

After Hope walked off up the street, Harriet went into the house, sat on her bed for a while, and then came out again and walked back in the direction of the theatre. She was headed towards the liquor store, intending to pick up a paper on the way so that she could look up places available for short-term rent.