Читать книгу Playing Sarah Bernhardt - Joan Givner - Страница 7

“Back already?” said the clerk at the desk.

It was ridiculous and made no sense at all. She’d returned to the hotel by the lake in Waterton Park because she’d given its name as the place where she’d receive the script. “Receive,” as if it were an immaculate conception and she needed to be in a hallowed place for the event.

“I’m expecting an important package by Federal Express,” she said. “Will you let me know the moment it arrives?”

She should have driven to meet it, to pick it up in Lethbridge or Calgary, because the time to prepare was short and the suspense was terrible. But once the decision was made, she felt she’d never been so eager to get her hands on a script before. Well, there was the Bernhardt fiasco; she’d been eager then, too, but it didn’t bear thinking about. That way lay madness, and pray god this time would be different.

“Is there a hairdresser around here?” she asked.

“Not one you’d want to go to,” he said. “For that you’d have to go to Calgary.”

She understood from his deferential tone that she was gaining stature already. She’d reasserted herself, regained something, and had presence once again. While she waited for the script she paced — along the lakeshore, around the periphery of the town site, up to the big CPR hotel perched on the headland, where she carried a drink onto the terrace outside the dining room. She stared out over the long lake below with mountains encircling it, barely seeing it.

After that summer with her aunt, she’d been like a traveller who returns from a foreign country with exotic terrain and strange customs and is disabled by the experience for re-entry into ordinary, everyday life. It all formed part of a gilded and mysterious community into which she’d been initiated, and she would never again be the same person she was before she went there.

Her family, busy with their own affairs, simply assumed that she was dissatisfied after living in luxury and being pampered, or that she was prey to the normal upheavals of adolescence. It would be nearly a year before she saw her aunt again, and her only solace was reading. For the rest of the summer she’d beaten a track to the little public library, where among the Harlequins and the copies of Gun Digest she’d found what was necessary to nurture her own private fantasy world.

The script arrived at last. It was not as bulky as she’d expected, and not so incendiary, either. In fact, the beginning was pedestrian, like those Shakespearean plays that start off limping along — two gentlemen conversing, “It wearies me, you say it wearies you,” clumsily setting out the necessary information.