Читать книгу Playing Sarah Bernhardt - Joan Givner - Страница 8

A publisher’s office in Boston. The room is dominated by a large painting of the floating disembodied head of Mazo de la Roche. The publisher, Theodore Speaks, is meticulously dressed in a grey business suit against which his crimson Harvard tie stands out conspicuously. In constrast, the biographer Hamish Donaldson seems frowsy and crumpled.

DON:	That’s a striking portrait. I’m surprised that your current authors don’t resent it.
SPEAKS:	Possibly they do. But none of us would be here if it weren’t for her. Her books supported the house all through the Depression and the war years.
DON:	And yet you’re unwilling to publish this story of her life.
SPEAKS:	Mr. Donaldson, if I may be perfectly frank, there is no life to be written. She said so herself. “Whatever I am I have put into my books.” And there you have it in a nutshell. She wrote books, she lived a quiet life, and she died in her house in Toronto, attended by the sister with whom she spent her life.
DON:	Caroline was a cousin and not a sister, wasn’t she?
SPEAKS:	Sister, cousin, secretary, housekeeper — what difference does it make? They were two shy Victorian spinsters. They crocheted. At least the sister did. Made my wife a handkerchief once. Very fine work, my wife said. She has it still, I believe.
DON:	But there were rumours, weren’t there? One hears stories of unrequited love, broken hearts and so on.
SPEAKS:	And they were just that. Rumours.
DON:	But they were very persistent, weren’t they? Wasn’t Mazo jilted at the altar?
SPEAKS:	Come, come, Mr. Donaldson, you’re making it all sound like something out of Dickens. The mad old woman roaming about the ancestral home still in her wedding gown. All the clocks stopped at the very hour of the jilting. I’ve visited Mazo in her home in Toronto and I can assure you that was very far from the case.
DON:	What about the child?
SPEAKS:	Adopted. Antoinette was adopted.
DON:	But wasn’t it odd for two women advanced middle age to adopt a child?
SPEAKS:	Unusual, but certainly not unheard of. In fact, a maiden aunt of my own did the very same thing.
DON:	But couldn’t she have been her own daughter, born out of wedlock?
SPEAKS:	Well, Aunt Augusta was a lively old girl and it was said in the family that the girl bore an uncanny resemblance to the butler....
DON:	No, I don’t mean your aunt. I mean Mazo.
SPEAKS:	(laughing) Oh, Mazo? Was the daughter hers? Not a chance in hell.
DON:	Why ever not?
SPEAKS:	Mr. Donaldson, you never met Mazo. She was, how shall I say it, not a womanly woman. She was masculine, or sexless, rather. Certainly not attractive to the opposite sex ... not the type to appeal to a man at all.
DON:	But tastes do vary in these matters.
SPEAKS:	Do they, Mr. Donaldson? May I say something, man to man, and with no offence intended? It seems to me that your natural inclination is towards the novel form. The Gothic novel. And, as someone with a good sense of the current publishing scene, I have to say that the market in costume Gothics has never been better. It’s always brisk. Much better, in fact, than the market in biography — unless you have a sensational life, with some bizarre forms of sexuality. That always sells, of course. But my advice to you, my dear fellow, is to try your hand at a novel. Or a play.
DON:	Maybe someday. But at the moment, Mazo has her teeth in me. She’s cast a spell on me somehow, and I can’t shake it. When I read her novels I feel there must be a story behind them, a story in the person who wrote them. They’re the novels of someone with a fund of experience, someone who understands — well — passion, sensuality, adventure.
SPEAKS:	I’m a Harvard man myself, Donaldson, and inclined more to restraint than to colourful judgements.
DON:	I keep coming back to the rumours that were never put to rest. The child, for example. You say she couldn’t have been Mazo’s. What about Caroline? Did she appeal to men? Was she attractive?
SPEAKS:	Caroline? Oh very. Oh, yes indeed. In fact, I —
DON:	Well, there you are. Surely she holds the key to everything?
SPEAKS:	She holds the key to everything, but she won’t let anyone near the door. She’s very secretive. Even more secretive than Mazo. And besides, she sees almost no one.
DON:	Except the daughter?
SPEAKS:	Perhaps not even her. Antoinette was estranged from Mazo for years. It’s always just been Mazo and Caroline.
DON:	Mazo and Caroline.
SPEAKS:	It’s Caro-line, by the way, not Caro-lyn. Mazo had a very particular way of pronouncing it, as if she wanted to hang on to every syllable. Caro — LINE. I can hear her now, calling out the name with that special inflection she had — Car-O-line. Car-O-line.

“You seem to be very interested in this Mazo de la Roche,” the librarian said one day as she stamped Harriet’s book for the umpteenth time. “Is she any good?”

“It’s not Mazzo, it’s May-zo,” Harriet said before she could catch herself.

“My,” said the librarian, “you are well informed, aren’t you? And how did you know that?”

“My aunt Nina told me,” Harriet said. What she really wanted to say was “My aunt knows her,” but that would have been showing off, and besides it was not strictly true. Her aunt didn’t actually know Mazo, she just knew all about her. Harriet had almost the same conversation with her English teacher in school. But unlike the librarian, the English teacher had read some of Mazo’s books. She said she liked them on the whole but she had “some reservations.”

“Oh, like what?” Harriet asked.

“A bit too much sex,” the teacher said, looking first to the left and then to the right and lowering her voice.

Her aunt finally arrived the next spring bringing presents for all of them. She brought Harriet some new clothes and Mazo’s latest book. It was called Variable Winds at Jalna. There weren’t many opportunities for Harriet to be alone with her aunt, the odd stroll around the neighbourhood or to the corner grocery store, but whenever she could shake off her sister and her mother, she plied her aunt with questions about Mazo and Caroline and their daughter, Antoinette. They had now sold the mansion in England and lived in a big house outside Toronto. Mazo and Caroline had made a trip out to Vancouver, but Antoinette hadn’t come with them because she was in boarding school. Her aunt answered her questions thoughtfully and seriously, as if the subject was just as important to her as it was to Harriet. They discussed boarding school, both of them agreeing that Antoinette probably enjoyed being with girls her own age, and speculating about the sports she might play. Harriet, who had read lots of stories about boarding schools, thought she probably played lacrosse.

And then quite suddenly it all ended. Harriet, scheming to be alone with her aunt and often sneaking into the bedroom she’d been obliged to vacate to make room for her, hadn’t been monitoring the barometric pressure of tension in the house. And so she was oblivious to the growing storm between her mother and her aunt until it finally erupted.

Her aunt’s present to her father was a bottle of Scotch whisky, and she usually joined him for a glass of it after they’d had their supper. The bottle sat on the sideboard all day, and her mother scowled at it every time she dusted. Harriet could still see the label — Mortlach — because it was the same name as a small town on the highway that they passed on their way to Swift Current. When the row broke out, it had something to do with the Mortlach, and something to do with the book her aunt had brought her. It began innocently enough, all of them sitting around the living room, her dad and her aunt on the sofa with their glasses of whisky, and Harriet herself sitting on the floor beside them with Variable Winds at Jalna on her lap. Her mother looked up from her knitting and said she was doing so much reading she was going to put her eyes out if she didn’t look out and end up wearing glasses.

“Reading won’t do her any harm,” said her aunt, who usually avoided contradicting her mother. “In fact, it will help her with her education.”

“What education?” her mother said.

“There’s no reason she shouldn’t go to college,” her aunt said. “She’s smart enough.”

“She sure is,” her dad said, smiling at her. “She’d make a good teacher.”

“And what’s the use of going to college for three or four years,” her mother said, “when all she’s going to do at the end of it is get married? Waste of time and money, if you ask me.”

“Even if she does, it’s good to have something to fall back on,” her aunt said.

“Well, let’s hope she’ll behave herself, then she won’t need anything to fall back on,” her mother said pointedly.

“Oh, right, it slipped my mind. Getting married will provide her with everything she wants, just like it did you.” And her aunt looked around the room, dusting every shabby piece of furniture deliberately with her eyes. Even Harriet, listening in alarm, thought she’d gone too far this time.

And she had; that was the last of the yearly visits. The next morning her aunt packed her bags, refused her dad’s offer of a ride to the airport, called a taxi, and left even before she’d had her breakfast. She still sent presents at Christmas and remembered Harriet’s birthday, and about twice a year she called up and talked to her on the phone.

Eventually Harriet got over the disappearance of her aunt from her life, just as she got over her obsession with Mazo and her daughter, but like most childhood obsessions it was reactivated periodically throughout her life. It was odd that, although she wasn’t a reader of newspapers and magazines, she always seemed to stumble on articles about Mazo. When she did, they drew her back for a time into the world she’d inhabited for those two formative years in her young life.

There were always tattered copies of Chatelaine lying around backstage, and once she came across a back issue that had fallen open at a spread of pictures of Mazo and her home. It wasn’t one of the great houses that Harriet remembered from the photograph albums her aunt had shown her, but a mansion in Ontario with stables and an old carriage house that served as a garage. Mazo was sitting on the lawn in front of the house in a wicker chair, with two dogs lying on the grass beside her, and smiling up at her daughter, who was handing her a sheaf of papers. Antoinette was wearing a summer dress, and they looked odd together — an old woman and a young girl. The picture seemed posed somehow, and they seemed stiff and awkward.

Harriet had been down east playing summer stock when Mazo’s death was announced. This time the name jumped out at her in headlines from the newspaper stand: “Mazo de la Roche Dead at 82” and “Famous Author Dies.” She bought all the papers and learned the details of the funeral at the Anglican Cathedral in Toronto. She was near enough to make it there and back in a day, and for one brief moment she’d thought of making up a pretext, giving her young understudy a break, and catching the train into the city. She could have taken a taxi at Union Station and joined the throng of mourners, like any other fan. She’d have finally gotten to see Antoinette and Caroline, though she thought they would probably be veiled like queens following the cortège of a dead monarch. But she hadn’t gone after all, though at the appointed hour she’d drifted into a trance and been there in spirit, and for days afterwards she was abstracted and dreamy.

Harriet had entered many strange places in her life; it was what she did when she prepared for a part — Lady Macbeth’s Scotland, Cleopatra’s Egypt, Saint Joan’s Rouen, Sarah Bernhardt’s Paris — but the summer she visited her aunt had been the beginning, the first of those imaginary countries. So there was congruence in having this play offered to her at the end of her career, as if a circle had miraculously closed and her own people had come to reclaim her. Not only that, but it finally lifted the screen away from Mazo’s mysterious world and revealed all the secrets that lay behind it.

MAZO:	Caroline, do you remember when you almost went off that time with ... that man?
CARO:	Of course, I remember. It was a very long time ago.
MAZO:	You didn’t love him, did you?
CARO:	Of course not, Mazo.
MAZO:	Darling, did you want so much to be a wife?
CARO:	Is that so very strange for a young girl? I wanted to have a home of my own, away from the family, away from your mother and Aunt Eva.
MAZO:	I want to marry you, Caroline, so that you can never, ever decide to leave again.
CARO:	So this is what all this restlessness is about?
MAZO:	The danger of almost losing you haunts me still. And now with this job you’ll be meeting people. Men, Caroline. I want them to know that you belong to me. I want a wedding in a church. I want a marriage certificate. I want to see you wearing a band of gold on your finger. I want you to say things like “thereto I plight thee my troth,” and I want to say “with all my worldly goods I thee endow.”
CARO:	But, darling, you don’t have any worldly goods. That’s why I’ve taken this job.
MAZO:	Oh, Caroline, why not?
CARO:	To put it bluntly, your late father was not much of a provider and no one else is going to provide for us.
MAZO:	I don’t mean that. I mean why can’t we be married? Why can’t two people who love each other as we do and plan to share everything and each other and live together for the rest of their lives....

She read on, transfixed, and what she read confirmed what she’d known all along, only she’d never actually put it into words. She fell asleep with the words going round and round in her head.