An Audience of Chairs

by Joan Clark

  Before the meeting was over Moranna had returned to the motel, changed into the pale blue skirt and sweater and was on the road carrying two of the motel’s blankets and a pillow, knowing she would be spending the night outdoors somewhere along the road. When she arrived at her farmhouse, she found a box containing tinned soup, apples, cheese and bread on the kitchen table, along with sixty dollars. The bread was blue moulded, having been delivered two weeks earlier. Moranna rigged up the old brass dinner bell over the back door to announce the arrival of unwanted visitors and give her time to hide in the cellar. She harboured a deep suspicion of Ian and Murdoch, whom she thought capable of bringing Dr. Ewing and his hypodermic needle back to the farmhouse and by subversive methods once again conveying her back to the hospital where Dr. Ridley would lose no time in applying electroshock therapy or worse. She printed two signs reading STAY AWAY and nailed them to both doors. These precautions allowed her to sleep most of the week and when she was rested, she walked to the village and bought a wig from the pharmacy’s Halloween section and ordered herself a pair of stout boots from the catalogue. Then she got busy ripping apart the moth-eaten black wool overcoat she’d found in the attic trunk and, using Edwina’s old sewing machine, made herself a knee-length cape. There were also two long dresses inside the trunk and, taking them apart, she made a two-tiered skirt. When the boots arrived, she slipped on a pair of yellowed long johns from the trunk and put on the skirt and the cape, the wig and a mangy beaver hat. Then she set out in the new boots to walk to Frizzleton carrying a bag of peanut-butter sandwiches. It was early November and most of the hardwoods had lost their leaves, but every so often she passed a sugar maple still holding its scarlet flags. It was a pleasant walk of about forty miles and by early afternoon she’d climbed Hunter’s Mountain and passed through Middle River. Three trucks went by, the drivers slowing down to gawk at Moranna, who was oblivious to the curious stares. At dusk she turned off the road and spent the night in a farm kitchen near Lake O’Law, sleeping on a daybed smelling of sour milk and sheep manure. Late next morning, entering the Margaree Valley she caught glimpses of the river through the trees, the water a honey colour where it was shallow and where it pooled deep a dark bitter ale. Alders grew close to the water’s edge but occasionally the embankment opened into a clearing, one of which was the place where Margaret McWeeny had hooked Ian MacKenzie’s ear.

  Eventually Moranna came to Frizzleton, a village of small garden farms on either side of the road. The village centre was a general store, a church and a graveyard. Inside the store, wooden shelves were stocked with men’s work shirts and pants, bolts of cloth, wash basins and frying pans, tools and fishing tackle as well as canned and packaged goods. The slim woman with short grey hair who minded the counter didn’t blink an eye when the strange-looking woman came into the store and said she was looking for the McWeeny family.

  “Can you tell me where they live?”

  “There’s no McWeenys here any more,” the woman said in a mild, inoffensive voice. “When I was a girl, there was a family by that name living here, but they left shortly after their daughter passed on.”

  “Was it Margaret who passed on?”

  “Why yes, that was her name. I remember her because she was such a beauty, and she was …,” the woman paused, searching for a tactful word, “unusual.”

  “What do you mean, unusual?”

  The woman hesitated. “She was different from the rest of us. We girls were a bunch of fraidy cats and stuck close to home, but Margaret wandered all over the countryside dressed in men’s clothes, and always did pretty much what she pleased. She was a few years older than me and I didn’t know her well, but I knew her younger sister Tessa. We were in the same grade.”

  “Margaret was my mother.”

  “I had no idea.” The woman studied Moranna’s disguise before speaking. “You don’t look like her at all.” It was the kindest thing she could say.

  “I look like my father.”

  “As I said, she was a beauty.”

  “Where’s Tessa now?” Moranna asked. Why hadn’t her father told her that her mother had a sister?

  “The last I heard of her she was an exotic dancer in California. Shocking, isn’t it?”

  “Does she take off her clothes and show her cunt?”

  “There’s no need to be crude. If you can’t …”

  But Moranna was already barrelling out the door, jostling aside a man on his way in to buy cigarettes, leaving his truck idling outside. He pushed back his cap and looked at the retreating figure “Who in Sam Hill was that?”

  “She didn’t give me her name,” the woman said, wrinkling her nose in distaste, “which is just as well.”

  Moranna began riding the ferries between North Sydney and Argentia, and Port aux Basques. She took a great many of these voyages—that is how she thinks of them now, as voyages. One purser became so used to seeing her aboard he would nod genially and say, “You again?” Moranna had a powerful urge to leave Cape Breton, preferably to flee the island for another country, and Newfoundland, not far into Confederation, was widely regarded as a colony, if not a country.

  She usually rode the Argentia ferry because it was a twelve-hour journey, giving her plenty of time to linger in the cafeteria or drink in the bar or doze in a reclining chair—there were often more chairs on the ferry than there were passengers. She never booked a cabin, she couldn’t afford one and being confined to a room defeated the pleasure of wandering at will, which she saw as a journey into herself. It was exhilarating to meander around the ferry in the middle of the night, past sleeping bodies slumped in chairs and sprawled on floors. It gave her a sense of invincibility and allowed her to imagine she possessed the nocturnal freedom of four-footed creatures who saw more keenly in the dark. She saw motionless bodies, empty tables and chairs, closed cafeteria shutters. It was a standstill world through which only the ferry and herself seemed to be moving.

  With the exception of a raft or a diving board, a ferry is possibly the easiest place to jump from, far easier than jumping from a rowboat or a canoe, far easier than manoeuvring herself over the rail of the MacKay Bridge. On one of the passenger decks all Moranna needed to do was to put a leg over the white metal barrier that hung like a curtain across the window of night. On the other side of the window the air was a watery black through which she saw shoal lights swimming like stars. The barrier was waist high, low enough to straddle before jumping down. Easier still was sitting on the deck edge below the folded lifeboats hanging overhead. No barrier of any kind, in fact the cave beneath the lifeboats invited her to sit on the deck edge beneath the open rail, dangling her legs while she contemplated the sea, delaying the moment of pushing off into the mesmerizing wake spreading like a lace shroud on top of the sea. The perfect dive, feet first. Then the breath gasp and salt suck, the gulping intake of sea water. The dreaded lung burn before the cold numbed and pummelled, swirling her around until she was released into oblivion.

  All this was contemplated on the ferry whenever the doctor’s voice urged her to jump. By then she had learned he only spoke inside her head when she was high over water and she was determined to face him down, knowing she would continue to hear him until she proved her will to live was stronger than his voice. Once, the vertigo of depression led her to mount a ladder in the stern. On the top step she leaned forward, arms at the sides, hair blown back, a wooden figurehead in a windswept skirt. It would have been much more difficult to leap from the high-sided ferry crossing the Minch because on that ferry there had been had no steps from which to jump. Also, the ferry did not run at night, which would have made it impossible for her mother to have slipped unnoticed into the sea. Did her mother clamp her lips shut as the water entered her nose and flooded her lungs? Did she, even for a split second, taste the salt of the sea, the life-giving particles nourishing the oceans of the world? Or had she been sucked so far into the black hole of depression that she could no longer taste the world in her mouth? If Moranna
jumped, she would want to die with the world in her mouth. As she was swallowing the sea, she would want the salt from all the beaches and rocks and islands to flood every pore and cell of her body. But she wouldn’t die that way because as soon as she tasted the salt, she would want to live and she would cry out for help. What if no one heard her? Most passengers were asleep in the middle of the night and would be deaf to her cries. That was why she clung to the open rail for dear life, holding on so tight the skin on her knuckles stretched bone white.

  In the sepulchral light of dawn, Moranna walked unsteadily on the ferry deck, keeping well away from the rail and the acrid diesel fumes. Ahead, the shoreline of Cape Breton took shape and the smoke stacks of the Sydney steel plant loomed like ominous castle towers belonging to a wicked warlord. As a child she used to watch the slag being dumped into ponds at night and saw it light up the sky above the harbour like a gigantic flower unfolding petals of fire. It was there, standing beside her father on the cliff below their house, that for the first time in her life she came face to face with the accidental nature of beauty, with the fact that it could be found in the darkest places and was not what it seemed. “Amazing, isn’t it?” her father had said. And it had been amazing how the poisonous fumes of the slag bloomed in the night like a magical flower. It was a sleight of hand, a deception, a transformation of perception, seductive and fleeting.

  Like beauty, madness altered perception, but instead of offering illusion, it offered delusion. Moranna learned the tricks madness played on perception the hard way as experience showed her how persuasively madness distorted reality. Experience also showed her that if she hung on long enough, the panic would subside and the delusions would pass. There were many dawns on the ferry when the sight of the ugly smoke stacks reassured her. They were proof that once again she had won the showdown with the voice and had delivered herself to the dawn, wholly alive.

  FIFTEEN

  IT WAS TWO YEARS before Moranna weathered the worst of the breakdown and no longer heard the voice, and another two before she stopped hiding from her father whenever he arrived with groceries and cash. Entering the farmhouse kitchen, Ian would see a jumble of unwashed dishes, books, wigs and clothes on the table. Knowing Moranna was either hiding in the cellar or the attic, he stood in the kitchen calling her name before going into the hallway and calling upstairs. He called only because he thought his voice might reassure her and never once tried to uncover her hiding place—he didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell him that his daughter was afraid.

  Ian had telephoned the asylum two or three times to talk to the doctor about Moranna and was always told the same thing, that delusional fear was a symptom of her illness. Dr. Ridley described her as a particularly difficult case and said that only if she was committed and underwent a strict regimen would she improve. Dogged by uncertainty and guilt that he hadn’t done enough to help Margaret, he still clung to the notion that his daughter’s wilfulness would keep her alive. He wanted her to return to the asylum, but he would never again force her to go, having discovered that forcing her required a tough-minded, clinical objectivity he couldn’t sustain. It was up to Moranna to decide whether to return to the hospital for treatment, and from now on the only help Ian could give her was to provide her with money and food as she limped from one hideout to another like a wild, wounded creature terrified of being captured, her freedom taken away.

  The unvarnished and unfortunate truth was that Duncan had deserted her. No one knew better than Ian that it couldn’t have been easy living with her. His daughter had always been unpredictable, impetuous and self-absorbed. But as her husband, Duncan had responsibilities and Ian would never forgive him for forsaking her, for taking their children away and disappearing so quickly and thoroughly from her life.

  When Moranna eventually stopped hiding from her father, she pretended he wasn’t there and spent hours ignoring him while she forked the garden and carved wood—Ian was pleased she had taken up wood carving and made sure Duncan knew she had. When his son-in-law telephoned to inquire about her, Ian, aware that he was the only link between Moranna and Duncan, made the effort to be civil and, telling him she was much improved, urged him to bring the children for a visit. Duncan always had an excuse: the children weren’t “ready,” or couldn’t be taken out of school, or had riding and swimming lessons, or other arrangements had been made for the summer holidays. Ian knew Duncan wanted to call it quits. Selfish and spoiled, he had decided Moranna was a liability and wanted to put their short and inconvenient marriage behind him so he could move ahead to the life he no doubt thought he deserved. Ian became convinced Duncan knew that if the children were brought to see their mother, they would want her to live with them, a risk his son-in-law was unwilling to take.

  When Duncan returned from Moscow and he and the children were back in Toronto, he had telephoned Ian every month, but after he moved to New York, his calls became infrequent and one morning four years after he left Moranna, he called to say that he was filing for divorce and advised Ian to procure a lawyer for Moranna. When the divorce papers arrived in Sydney Mines, Ian immediately made an appointment for Moranna with Greta Dunlop in Baddeck, and although he offered to go along, Moranna went to see the lawyer on her own. It was only by contacting Greta afterwards that he learned his daughter wasn’t contesting the divorce and that no alimony was offered or claimed. Ian expected the divorce would plunge Moranna into another breakdown and was surprised and relieved that it didn’t. When asked how she intended to get along without alimony, Moranna burst into that peculiar barking laugh and reminded Ian that he had always been concerned about how she would look after herself. She said she intended to open a business selling wooden people to tourists. That was what she called the carvings, wooden people. From a business standpoint, Ian knew that selling wooden people wouldn’t bring in enough money for Moranna to support herself, but he didn’t discourage her. Watching her work, he observed that carving did seem to calm her and he thought if she stuck with it, she could probably earn a few dollars. Except for carving, as far as he could see, Moranna lived an undisciplined and disorganized life. The farmhouse was a shambles and she dressed in an odd assortment of clothes, but at least she was active and no longer spent most of her time hiding or in bed.

  She was taking long walks. A few times he arrived in Baddeck only to find the farmhouse empty and no sign of Moranna because she had decided to strike out for another part of the island. It was shortly after she embarked on one of these walks that Duncan, now divorced and remarried, showed up with the children. When he drove past, Moranna was on the outskirts of Baddeck, dressed in the long black wig and cape, the two-tiered skirt and, although it was summer, the old beaver cap. An odd sight, too odd for Duncan. In spite of the costume, he recognized her and slowly drove past. Looking straight at him, she stuck out her tongue and waved him on. So he drove on. He didn’t want a scene in front of the children. He didn’t double back or roll down the window, but continued to Sydney Mines. While his new wife Sophie waited in the car with the children, he stood in Ian’s driveway and told him what had happened. Ian asked if Moranna had recognized him. “Yes. She stuck out her tongue.”

  Ian pointed out that unfortunately Moranna would do that to strangers and, seeing Duncan with a beard, may not have known who he was. Convinced she had recognized him, Duncan said that he didn’t want the children frightened. Ian leaned down to look at his granddaughters, now eight and seven, sitting on either side of a baby sleeping in the back seat. He knocked on the window and Bonnie, a sombre and wise-looking child, rolled it down.

  Ian said, “Won’t you come inside for tea and a visit with your grandfather?”

  “My grandfather is in Halifax!” Brianna piped up.

  “But you have two grandfathers,” Ian said. “One there, one here.”

  His granddaughters looked perplexed.

  “We can’t stop,” Duncan said quickly while Sophie nodded assent. “We have to be in Halifax by five.” He backed out of th
e driveway then stopped and called out the window, “Tell Moranna I’ll be in touch.”

  What Duncan meant by being in touch was sending a letter, which was the one Max Freeman attempted to deliver when she tied him up. Moranna recognized Duncan’s handwriting at once and, wary and suspicious of what might be inside, didn’t open it straight away but left it where Max put it, on top of the piano board. When she picked it up later, she held it by a corner, as if she had a viper by the tail. Telling herself she didn’t have to open the letter, she set it aside. Eventually curiosity got the better of her and she tore open the food-stained envelope and unfolded the letter written in Duncan’s precise hand.

  Moranna,

  The last time we saw each other I promised that when you were better I would bring Bonnie and Brianna to see you, and three days ago I attempted to do that, driving up from Halifax expressly for the purpose of having our daughters become reacquainted with you. But as we were driving into Baddeck, I saw you on the road looking unkempt and wearing strange clothes. I stopped the car to talk to you but you made a face and waved me on. So I did go on before the girls noticed you. I didn’t want them upset; I wanted them to have happier memories of you. Bonnie still talks about the storybooks you made together. It is my hope you will understand that I made the decision to drive on out of concern for our daughters.

  Before filing for divorce, I waited, albeit from a distance, occasionally telephoning your father to inquire if your health had improved. He always told me you were coming along, but slowly. The truth is, I was unwilling to keep my life on hold any longer. Sophie and I recently married and now have a year-old son. In a few days we will be moving to Britain, where I have accepted a new job.