An Audience of Chairs

by Joan Clark

“Do it now,” the doctor said, and she studied the cyclist’s mouth as he passed to see if he was speaking, but his lips weren’t moving at all.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  Moranna stood stock still, terrified to go on because she realized the voice wasn’t coming from someone on the bridge but from inside her head. The KGB had infiltrated her mind. While she was in the hospital, they had succeeded in planting a small device inside her head and it was this device that was speaking to her now.

  “Hoist yourself to the top of the rail,” the voice urged, “Do it now, before you reach the wire mesh. It’s easy here to climb up. Once you’re on the rail, all you need do is let go.” Moranna peered over the rail at the sweep of water below, nausea foaming in her throat. She felt the sickening abyss opening beneath her feet. “Do it and your husband will be freed,” the voice said. “You are a brave, courageous woman.”

  “Yes, I am,” Moranna said.

  “You have always risen to the challenges in life.”

  “Yes, I have.” She would save Duncan from the KGB and he would come home. “And I will rise to the challenge now.”

  She took hold of the rail, gripping it so hard her knuckles bled white, and tried to climb over. But the rail was shoulder high and the effort of trying to hook a leg over the top made her arms feel wasted and limp, as if all the blood had run out. The voice was wrong, it wasn’t easy to climb up. But she tried again and had just managed to manoeuvre one foot onto the rail when something bumped into her from behind. She yelped and her foot slid from the rail. “Shit!” she heard a voice say, then, “Sorry!”

  She turned and saw a girl with a ponytail pushing a stroller. “Sorry!” the girl said again, “It’s these frigging boots. They get caught in the grating.”

  Still clinging to the rail, Moranna looked at the girl’s spike-heeled boots, then the short skirt and skimpy sweater. Regarding her curiously, the girl said, “What were you doing with your foot up like that?”

  Moranna blinked at the girl as if she was a vision and slowly let go of the rail, her hands falling to her sides where they hung, trembling and limp. Her gaze fell on the stroller where a baby sucked on a pacifier while it slept.

  “I have two little girls,” Moranna mumbled, her voice unfamiliar to her ears. She felt weak, overcome with lassitude and, leaning toward the girl, asked if she could hold on to the stroller until they reached the end of the bridge. Nothing seemed more crucial to her at this moment than holding on to the stroller.

  “Sure,” the girl said, snapping a wad of gum. “If that’s what you want.” They set off together, Moranna holding on to the stroller as if it was a lifeline, which it was. Although small in stature, the girl took large strides and they hurried along, past cars and trucks rumbling over the metal bridge, Moranna on the outside, next to the water. She noticed that in the middle of the bridge green mesh was secured from the rail to the overhead cables, making it impossible to leap into the harbour. This explained why the voice had stopped talking to her and she would have to be careful when she came to the far end of the bridge where there was no mesh.

  “Stop!” Moranna said. “I have to switch sides.” The girl obeyed, too startled to refuse while Moranna reached behind her for the stroller handle, making sure she had a firm grip on one side before letting go of the other.

  “There!” she said. “It’s much better for me to be on the inside of the walkway!” She meant, away from the water.

  They resumed walking, the girl no longer cracking gum but keeping her eyes straight ahead, moving so fast that a passerby might think Moranna was being dragged along.

  By the time they neared the end of the bridge Moranna was convinced the girl was a special agent sent to rescue her from the KGB because even though the mesh was gone and it was now possible for her to climb over the rail, the voice was silent. It was silent because she was holding on to the stroller, which had appeared to remind her that in attempting to save Duncan, she had forgotten her own children. The girl didn’t seem aware she was an agent, but that wasn’t surprising because people were used as agents all the time without knowing, Elsie for instance. They walked off the bridge, the girl keeping her gaze firmly on Barrington Street. At the corner, she said. “We part company here. I have to meet my boyfriend.” She stared pointedly at Moranna’s hand gripping the stroller handle.

  “Can you let go?”

  “Of course!” Moranna said as if she was surprised to be still holding on. “Say hello to your boyfriend for me.”

  “I will,” the girl said, careful not to reveal how alarmed she was by this creepy woman who, she was now convinced, had escaped from the mental hospital.

  Moranna crossed Barrington Street and walked up Spring Garden Road, her intention being to keep walking until she reached St. Margaret’s Bay Road, where she hoped to pick up a bus or a ride. But she had no idea how late it was until she reached Oxford Street and noticed the neon clock in the corner store where she bought two chocolate bars registered 8:30. She turned onto Armdale Road. Jim and Lorene were in Chester with her daughters, but the housekeeper might let her into their Georgian house on the Arm where she could spend the night in comfort and go to Chester in the morning.

  Apart from the doorbell and a light shining from somewhere deep inside the rooms like an impenetrable star, the Fraser house was in darkness. She rang the front doorbell over and over before going around to the back where she encountered a wall of closed curtains. Even the French doors that opened onto the paving stone terrace were curtained. On the terrace was a set of four ice-cream parlour chairs, a table and three chaise longues. Shoving one end of a chaise beneath the table, Moranna used the other chaise longues to make a tent, and crawling inside it, lay down and fell into a fitful sleep, on her guard against the doctor who might have followed her here. But his voice was silent and she didn’t hear him when she awoke during the night shivering with cold. Relieved to have outsmarted him and the KGB who, she was certain, were out to get both Duncan and her, she went back to sleep.

  At daybreak she opened her eyes and saw that an overnight mist had drifted down the Arm from the sea, making the air a luminous pearly white. Hungry, she took the chocolate bars from her handbag and, peeling off the wrappers, wolfed them down. Then she set off for Chester to pick up her children. Half an hour later she had reached the outskirts of the city. It was too early for a bus and she would have to thumb a ride while being on the lookout for police cars—a Mountie was the last person she wanted to see. Tipped off by the KGB, a Mountie might at this moment be searching for her. She decided to hitch a ride with the first person who stopped.

  Two trucks went past without stopping before a white car with a golden-colored hood pulled onto the shoulder. Moranna studied the car, suspicious that it might contain a KGB agent, and was encouraged to see the hubcaps bore the symbol of the cross. Because Russia was an atheist country, a car driven by KGB agents would have hubcaps bearing the symbol of a sickle. It was therefore safe to approach the car.

  When she reached the passenger door, the driver leaned across the seat and spoke through the open window. “Do you want a lift?”

  “Who would you choose,” Moranna said, to test him, “Jesus or Brezhnev?”

  “Jesus,” he said without hesitation.

  “Good,” she said and asked where he was going.

  “White Point Beach.”

  “I’m going to Chester.”

  “Hop in and I’ll drop you off.”

  She got in the car and, with her hand still on the open door, looked at the driver. A handsome man somewhere in his thirties, he was wearing a white cotton tunic and pants and on his chest, below a blond beard, a large gold cross. She closed the door and looked into the back seat where two young girls were slumped against the windows, asleep. “Your daughters?” she asked although he didn’t look old enough to be the father of teenaged girls. No, he said and asked if she lived in Chester. No, she replied and asked if he lived in White Point Beach.

&n
bsp; “I live everywhere,” he said. “I am a resident of the universe.”

  “I am too,” Moranna said agreeably.

  He went on to say that it was an illusion to think a person lived at a fixed address, as if home could be relegated to a particular street, city or country. Home was a spiritual dwelling. Moranna thought he must be talking about God’s mansion with its many rooms, but he wasn’t. He was, he said, talking about inhabiting the pure place within everyone, a place where ego, ambition and pride were flushed away, leaving an open space yearning to be filled with the same purity of being that haloed Jesus with celestial light. All this was spoken while he drove with one hand on the wheel, the other on his knee.

  When he asked her name, she said, “Lily White,” the first words that came to mind. “What’s your name?”

  “Ari Van Woek.”

  “Are you a minister?”

  “I was a pastor until I saw the truth, which is that the organized church stands between us and the universal embrace of God.” He turned to her then and smiled serenely. “I’m on my way to a meeting with my followers,” he said, which made Moranna susceptible to the idea that he really was a messenger from Jesus. “We will be spending several days in discussion and prayer.” He turned to her again. “You do believe in prayer.” It was a statement, not a question. There was no need to reply and they drove the rest of the way in silence.

  He let her off at the Chester post office—she hadn’t told him exactly where she was going. As she was getting out of the car, he reached across the white leather seat and took her hand. “You are sorely troubled,” he said, “and I will pray for you to be healed.” Not the kind of thing a spy would say.

  Moranna made her way through the sleepy village passing only one person, a stoop-shouldered man in a golf cap, walking his dog. There was so sign of life at the Frasers’ Cape Cod house and at first she thought everyone must be in bed. The living-room curtains were open and for a long time she stood peering inside, her gaze fixed on the staircase in the hope of catching a glimpse of Bonnie and Brianna coming downstairs in their nightgowns. When they didn’t appear, she went to the back of the house and looked through the kitchen windows, noticing with alarm that the countertop and table showed no sign of being used. She thought her in-laws might have gone sailing and hurried down to the marina. But no, the Grey Goose was tied up, its vinyl cover buttoned down. Returning to the house, she sat on the step trying to recall the names of the cook and the maid so she could ask them where the Frasers had gone. After a while it came to her that she had never known their names.

  She walked through the streets until she found a pay phone and placed a collect call to her father. Edwina answered and immediately called Ian to the telephone. “Where are you, Moranna?” he said when he came on the line.

  “Chester. I came to see Bonnie and Brianna. Where are they?”

  “Did somebody from the hospital take you down?” Ian thought it likely patients were taken on outings from time to time.

  “I checked out of the hospital. I don’t belong there.”

  “You should have stayed,” Ian said, “for your own good.”

  “How do you know what’s for my own good?” Moranna said.

  Ian ignored the belligerence. “You’re not well. You need help. Stay where you are and I’ll drive down and get you.”

  “I want to see my daughters. Where are they?”

  There was a lengthy interval during which Moranna heard Edwina’s voice in the background, but she couldn’t hear what was being said.

  “They’re in Toronto with their father,” Ian finally said, reluctant to tell her news Duncan should have told her himself.

  Although no one was anywhere near the pay phone, Moranna looked furtively around before whispering, “Duncan’s in Russia. He’s been imprisoned by the KGB.”

  Ian said, “Duncan left Russia two weeks ago.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  Ian reminded Moranna that Duncan had said he would return in September, and he had. “He flew to Toronto and his parents drove there with the children to meet him.”

  “How long was I in the hospital?”

  “A month.”

  “Why didn’t someone tell me he was back?”

  “You were ill, Moranna. I’m sure Duncan would have told you himself, once he was settled in Toronto.”

  “Why didn’t he come see me with the children?”

  “I’m sure he’ll come as soon as he can,” Ian said; at the time he believed it. “In the meantime you have to get well. You should go back to the hospital so Duncan can find you.”

  “I won’t go back to the hospital and be manipulated and tortured. You have no idea what’s going on in there, Dad.”

  “You have to go back in order to become well enough to resume your duties as a wife and mother,” Ian said, speaking emphatically because coaxing hadn’t worked. “You have spent far too much time on your own projects when you should have been looking after your family. Don’t you want your children back? If you want …”

  Moranna hung up. It was futile talking to her father, who had clearly become a mouthpiece for the doctors, and didn’t know what was really going on. He didn’t know that her children had been kidnapped by Duncan, who had been duped by the KGB. He was being controlled by them, which was why she hadn’t received a coded message or a phone call from him for a month.

  Within minutes Moranna was on the telephone again insisting Edwina tell her father that it would be a waste of time to come looking for her because she would always be on the move and impossible to find. She didn’t wait for an answer but hung up and afterwards went to a café for a raisin bun and cup of tea. Then she walked to the highway, and sticking her thumb out for a ride, made her way to White Point Beach.

  PART IV

  TWELVE

  BUN DIDN’T MAKE IT to Baddeck in January as Moranna had hoped, but in late February. Doris’s recovery from hip surgery had been complicated by thrombosis in her right leg, which required further rest and another trip to St. John’s, after which Bun drove her to Baie Verde to live with her sister until he returned from Cape Breton. Snowed in, Moranna worked on the early pioneers. The snow sharpened her appreciation for the extreme hardships her forebears had endured during their first Cape Breton winters, and as she shaped people from wood, she often wondered how they had managed to survive. Knowing their religious faith had sustained them, she carved her great-great-grandmother with a Bible, imagining her inside a snow-banked log cabin reading by the fire while her son Murdoch was outside chopping wood. According to Great-Aunt Hettie, after the twins froze to death, the MacKenzie family lived in the smoky, one-room cabin for three more winters. By then Henrietta was wrapping herself in wool at night, having used her marriage bed linen to shroud her daughters.

  Moranna never had marriage bed linen, but she thinks of her daughters as wrapped in the same shroud as her marriage since both disappeared at the same time. She finds it difficult to avoid the thought that her children might be dead. But they can’t be dead, can they, because if they were, surely somebody would have told her—even Duncan would have honoured her right to know. When she can bear to, Moranna’s thoughts return to the question of why she has never heard from either of her children. The most likely reason is that at ages thirty-seven and thirty-six, they are fully engaged in their adult lives and are too busy to think about when they were little girls—she remembers forgetting her father and brother when she was caught up in various creative pursuits. No matter how many times she has tried to come up with explanations for the silence of her children, she never quite manages to admit to the possibility that they might have forgotten she is their mother. Depending on what they have been told about her, they might assume she is mouldering away in a mental institution, or perhaps they assume she’s dead. Or their silence might be explained by the fact that they are living on another continent, Europe or South America or Asia. It’s this possibility Moranna prefers because it allows her to imag
ine her daughters as mermaid sisters swimming the seven seas side by side, free of the world’s misery and strife.

  Moranna remembers her great-aunt telling her that when the MacKenzies pioneered Cape Breton, her great-great-grandmother kept a cow inside during winter and it was the cow’s bawling that woke her in the mornings. Sometimes it was so cold after an overnight blizzard, Henrietta would see her breath frozen on the coarse wool blanket, and the window would be swollen with snow.

  When Moranna asked how a window could be swollen, Hettie explained that the window wasn’t made of glass, but deer skin, which allowed some light through.

  “During the worst winter storms, snow drifted down the chimney and had to be cleared away before Henrietta could light the fire. When it was lit, she woke her son Murdoch.”

  “Was he the oldest?”

  “He was. Murdoch bundled himself in wool and when he opened the door to fetch some wood, snow tumbled in. He and Henrietta scooped up the snow in buckets and put them near the fire where the snow melted into drinking water.”

  “Why didn’t Big Ian get up and help?”

  “Maybe he did,” her great aunt said, “but he isn’t part of this particular story.”

  Imagining the courage and faith her great-great-grandmother showed in brutish circumstances inspires Moranna. Mornings when it’s a struggle getting out of bed, she sometimes thinks of Henrietta putting her feet on the packed-earth floor, not even a rag mat to temper the chilblain cold. How did she manage to get up when it would have been so much easier to stay in bed? Were there mornings when she didn’t get up and let others light the fire and milk the cow? Moranna sees herself on a continuum with Henrietta and believes that the strong MacKenzie blood flowing through her veins has sustained her through the worst of her emotional weather. As well as enjoying the satisfaction of running her own business, carving her forebears in wood reinforces her pride in being a MacKenzie.

  Moranna knows almost nothing about her mother’s side of the family. Except for the story of her parents’ meeting at a salmon pool in the Margaree River near Frizzleton, she has no information about the McWeenys and has not been inspired to carve them. She’s not without sympathy for her mother, but having walked through the valley of madness herself, she believes that if the McWeeny genes had been stronger, her mother might have resisted the urge to jump into the Minch. The McWeenys were weak and lacked the stubborn pride that kept the valiant MacKenzies going through the worst of times.