The Barclay Family Theatre

by Jack Hodgins

  From behind the drifting shreds of smoke Mr. Korhonen grinned at me. Sucked laughter between his teeth. “Yust teenk, boy, looks like-it you’re saved!”

  Mrs. Korhonen stabbed out her cigarette in an ashtray, picked a piece of tobacco off her tongue, and composed her face into the most serious and ladylike expression she could muster. “Yeh! Better he learn to drive the tractor.” And swung me a conspirator’s grin.

  “Not on your life,” my mother said. Driving a machine may have been a good enough ambition for some people, she believed, but the Barclays had been in this country for four generations and she knew there were a few things higher. “What we’ll do is send him to a real teacher. Mrs. Greensborough.”

  Mrs. Greensborough was well known for putting on a public recital in town once a year, climaxing the program with her own rendition of Grieg’s Piano Concerto — so beautiful that all went home, it was said, with tears in their eyes. The problem with Mrs. Greensborough had nothing to do with her teaching. She was, as far as I could see, an excellent piano teacher. And besides, there was something rather exciting about playing on her piano, which was surrounded and nearly buried by a thousand tropical plants and dozens of cages full of squawking birds. Every week’s lesson was rather like putting on a concert in the midst of the Amazon jungle. There was even a monkey that swung through the branches and sat on the top of the piano with the metronome between its paws. And Mrs. Greensborough was at the same time warm and demanding, complimentary and hard to please — though given a little, like Aunt Jessie, to taking off on long passages of her own playing, as if she’d forgotten I was there.

  It took a good hour’s hard bicycling on uphill gravel roads before I could present myself for the lesson — past a dairy farm, a pig farm, a turkey farm, a dump, and a good long stretch of bush — then more washboard road through heavy timber where driveways disappeared into the trees and one dog after another lay in wait for its weekly battle with my right foot. Two spaniels, one Irish setter, and a bulldog. But it wasn’t a spaniel or a setter or even a bulldog that met me on the driveway of the Greensboroughs’ chicken farm, it was a huge German shepherd that came barking down the slope the second I had got the gate shut, and stuck its nose into my crotch. And kept it there, growling menacingly, the whole time it took me to back him up to the door of the house. There was no doubt in my mind that I would come home from piano lesson one Saturday minus a few parts. Once I had got to the house, I tried to get inside quickly and shut the door in his face, leaving him out there in the din of cackling hens; but he always got his nose between the door and the jamb, growled horribly and pushed himself inside so that he could lie on the floor at my feet and watch me hungrily the whole time I sat at the kitchen table waiting for Ginny Stamp to finish off her lesson and get out of there. By the time my turn came around my nerves were too frayed for me to get much benefit out of the lesson.

  Still, somehow I learned. That Mrs. Greensborough was a marvellous teacher, my mother said. The woman really knew her stuff. And I was such a fast-learning student that it took less than two years for my mother to begin thinking it was time the world heard from me.

  “Richy Ryder,” she said, “is coming to town.”

  “What?”

  “Richy Ryder, CJMT. The Talent Show.”

  I’d heard the program. Every Saturday night Richy Ryder was in a different town somewhere in the province, hosting his one-hour talent contest from the stage of a local theatre and giving away free trips to Hawaii.

  Something rolled over in my stomach.

  “And here’s the application form right here,” she said, whipping two sheets of paper out of her purse to slap down on the table.

  “No thank you,” I said. If she thought I was going in it, she was crazy.

  “Don’t be silly. What harm is there in trying?” My mother always answered objections with great cheerfulness, as if they were hardly worth considering.

  “I’ll make a fool of myself.”

  “You play beautifully,” she said. “It’s amazing how far you’ve come in only two years. And besides, even if you don’t win, the experience would be good for you.”

  “You have to go door-to-door ahead of time, begging for pledges, for money.”

  “Not begging,” she said. She plunged her hands into the sink, peeling carrots so fast I couldn’t see the blade of the vegetable peeler. “Just giving people a chance to vote for you. A dollar a vote.” The carrot dropped, skinned naked, another one was picked up. She looked out the window now toward the barn and, still smiling, delivered the argument that never failed. “I just know you’d win it if you went in, I can feel it in my bones.”

  “Not this time!” I shouted, nearly turning myself inside out with the terror. “Not this time. I just can’t do it.”

  Yet somehow I found myself riding my bicycle up and down all the roads around Waterville, knocking at people’s doors, explaining the contest, and asking for their money and their votes. I don’t know why I did it. Perhaps I was doing it for the same reason I was tripping over everything, knocking things off tables, slamming my shoulder into door-jambs; I just couldn’t help it, everything had gone out of control. I’d wakened one morning that year and found myself six feet two inches tall and as narrow as a fence stake. My feet were so far away they seemed to have nothing to do with me. My hands flopped around on the ends of those lanky arms like speared fish. My legs had grown so fast the bones in my knees parted and I had to wear elastic bandages to keep from falling apart. When I turned a corner on my bicycle, one knee would bump the handlebar, throwing me into the ditch. I was the same person as before, apparently, saddled with this new body I didn’t know what to do with. Everything had gone out of control. I seemed to have nothing to do with the direction of my own life. It was perfectly logical that I should end up playing the piano on the radio, selling myself to the countryside for a chance to fly off to Hawaii and lie on the sand under the whispering palms.

  There were actually two prizes offered. The all-expense, ten-day trip to Hawaii would go to the person who brought in the most votes for himself, a dollar a vote. But lest someone accuse the radio station of getting its values confused, there was also a prize for the person judged by a panel of experts to have the most talent. This prize, which was donated by Nelson’s Hardware, was a leatherette footstool.

  “It’s not the prize that’s important,” people told me. “It’s the chance to be heard by all those people.”

  I preferred not to think of all those people. It seemed to me that if I were cut out to be a concert pianist it would be my teacher and not my parents encouraging me in this thing. Mrs. Greensborough, once she’d forked over her two dollars for two votes, said nothing at all. No doubt she was hoping I’d keep her name out of it.

  But it had taken no imagination on my part to figure out that if I were to win the only prize worth trying for, the important thing was not to spend long hours at the keyboard, practising, but to get out on the road hammering at doors, on the telephone calling relatives, down at the general store approaching strangers who stopped for gas. Daily piano practice shrank to one or two quick run-throughs of “The Robin’s Return,” school homework shrank to nothing at all, and home chores just got ignored. My brother and sister filled in for me, once in a while, so the chickens wouldn’t starve to death and the woodbox would never be entirely empty, but they did it gracelessly. It was amazing, they said, how much time a great pianist had to spend out on the road, meeting his public. Becoming famous, they said, was more work than it was worth.

  And becoming famous, I discovered, was what people assumed I was after. “You’ll go places,” they told me. “You’ll put this place on the old map.” I was a perfect combination of my father’s down-to-earth get-up-and-go and my mother’s finer sensitivity, they said. How wonderful to see a young person with such high ambition!

  “I always knew this old place wouldn’t be good enough to hold you,” my grandmother said as she fished out a five-dollar bil
l from her purse. But my mother’s sisters, who appeared from all parts of the old farmhouse in order to contribute a single collective vote, had some reservations to express. Eleanor, the youngest, said she doubted I’d be able to carry it off, I’d probably freeze when I was faced with a microphone, I’d forget what a piano was for. Christina announced she was betting I’d faint, or have to run out to the bathroom right in the middle of my piece. And Mabel, red-headed Mabel who’d played accordion once in an amateur show, said she remembered a boy who made such a fool of himself in one of these things that he went home and blew off his head. “Don’t be so morbid,” my grandmother said. “The boy probably had no talent. Clay here is destined for higher things.”

  From behind her my grandfather winked. He seldom had a chance to contribute more than that to a conversation. He waited until we were alone to stuff a five-dollar bill in my pocket and squeeze my arm.

  I preferred my grandmother’s opinion of me to the aunts’. I began to feed people lies so they’d think that about me — that I was destined for dizzying heights. I wanted to be a great pianist, I said, and if I won that trip to Hawaii I’d trade it in for the money so that I could go off and study at the Toronto Conservatory. I’d heard of the Toronto Conservatory only because it was printed in big black letters on the front cover of all those yellow books of finger exercises I was expected to practise.

  I don’t know why people gave me their money. Pity, perhaps. Maybe it was impossible to say no to a six-foot-two-inch thirteen-year-old who trips over his own bike in front of your house, falls up your bottom step, blushes red with embarrassment when you open the door, and tells you he wants your money for a talent contest so he can become a Great Artist. At any rate, by the day of the contest I’d collected enough money to put me in the third spot. I would have to rely on pledges from the studio audience and phone-in pledges from the radio audience to rocket me up to first place. The person in second place when I walked into that theatre to take my seat down front with the rest of the contestants was Cornelia Horncastle.

  I don’t know how she managed it so secretly. I don’t know where she found the people to give her money, living in the same community as I did, unless all those people who gave me their dollar bills when I knocked on their doors had just given her two the day before. Maybe she’d gone into town, canvassing street after street, something my parents wouldn’t let me do on the grounds that town people already had enough strangers banging on their doors every day. Once I’d got outside the vague boundaries of Waterville I was to approach only friends or relatives or people who worked in the woods with my dad, or stores that had — as my mother put it — done a good business out of us over the years. Cornelia Horncastle, in order to get herself secretly into that second place, must have gone wild in town. Either that or discovered a rich relative.

  She sat at the other end of the front row of contestants, frowning over the sheets of music in her hands. A short nod and a quick smile were all she gave me. Like the other contestants, I was kept busy licking my dry lips, rubbing my sweaty palms together, wondering if I should whip out to the bathroom one last time, and rubbernecking to get a look at people as they filled up the theatre behind us. Mrs. Greensborough, wearing dark glasses and a big floppy hat, was jammed into the far corner at the rear, studying her program. Mr. and Mrs. Korhonen and Lilja came partway down the aisle and found seats near the middle. Mr. Korhonen winked at me. Larry, who was not quite the hero he had once been, despite the fact that he’d recently beat up one of the teachers and set fire to the bus shelter, came in with my brother Kenny — both of them looking uncomfortable — and slid into a back seat. My parents came all the way down front, so they could look back up the slope and pick out the seats they wanted. My mother smiled as she always did in public, as if she expected the most delightful surprise at any moment. They took seats near the front. Laurel was with them, reading a book.

  My mother’s sisters — with husbands, boyfriends, a few of my cousins — filled up the entire middle section of the back row. Eleanor, who was just a few years older than myself, crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue when she saw that I’d turned to look. Mabel pulled in her chin and held up her hands, which she caused to tremble and shake.

  Time to be nervous, she was suggesting, in case I’d forgotten. Bella, Christina, Gladdy, Frieda — all sat puffed up like members of a royal family, or the owners of this theatre, looking down over the crowd as if they believed every one of these people had come here expressly to watch their nephew and for no other reason. “Look, it’s the Barclay girls,” I heard someone behind me say. And someone else: “Oh, them.” The owner of the first voice giggled. “It’s a wonder they aren’t all entered in this thing, you know how they like to perform.” A snort. “They are performing, just watch them.” I could tell by the muffled “Shhh” and the rustling of clothing that one of them was nudging the other and pointing at me, at the back of my neck. “One of them’s son.” When I turned again, Eleanor stood up in the aisle by her seat, did a few steps of a tap dance, and quickly sat down. In case I was tempted to take myself seriously.

  When my mother caught my eye, she mouthed a silent message: stop gawking at the audience, I was letting people see how unusual all this was to me, instead of taking it in my stride like a born performer. She indicated with her head that I should notice the stage.

  As if I hadn’t already absorbed every detail. It was exactly as she must have hoped. A great black concert grand with the lid lifted sat out near the front of the stage, against a painted backdrop of palm trees along a sandy beach, and — in great scrawled letters — the words “Richy Ryder’s CJMT Talent Festival.” A long blackboard leaned against one end of the proscenium arch, with all the contestants’ names on it and the rank order of each. Someone named Brenda Roper was in first place. On the opposite side of the stage, a microphone seemed to have grown up out of a heap of pineapples. I felt sick.

  Eventually Richy Ryder came out of whatever backstage room he’d been hiding in and passed down the row of contestants, identifying us and telling us to get up onto the stage when our turns came without breaking our necks on those steps. “You won’t be nervous, when you get up there,” he said. “I’ll make you feel at ease.” He was looking off somewhere else as he said it, and I could see his jaw muscles straining to hold back a yawn. And he wasn’t fooling me with his “you won’t be nervous” either, because I knew without a doubt that the minute I got up on that stage I would throw up all over the piano.

  Under the spotlight, Richy Ryder acted like a different person. He did not look the least bit like yawning while he told the audience the best way of holding their hands to get the most out of applause, cautioned them against whistling or yelling obscenities, painted a glorious picture of the life ahead for the talented winner of this contest, complimented the audience on the number of happy, shiny faces he could see out there in the seats, and told them how lucky they were to have this opportunity of showing off the fine young talent of the valley to all the rest of the province. I slid down in my seat, sure that I would rather die than go through with this thing.

  The first contestant was a fourteen-year-old girl dressed up like a gypsy, singing something in a foreign language. According to the blackboard she was way down in ninth place, so I didn’t pay much attention until her voice cracked open in the middle of a high note and she clutched at her throat with both hands, a look of incredulous surprise on her face. She stopped right there, face a brilliant red, and after giving the audience a quick curtsey hurried off the stage. A great beginning, I thought. If people were going to fall to pieces like that through the whole show no one would even notice my upchucking on the Heintzman. I had a vision of myself dry-heaving the whole way through “The Robin’s Return.”

  Number two stepped up to the microphone and answered all of Richy Ryder’s questions as if they were some kind of test he had to pass in order to be allowed to perform. Yes sir, his name was Roger Casey, he said with a face drawn lo
ng and narrow with seriousness, and in case that wasn’t enough he added that his father was born in Digby, Nova Scotia, and his mother was born Esther Romaine in a little house just a couple blocks up the street from the theatre, close to the Native Sons’ Hall, and had gone to school with the mayor though she’d dropped out of Grade Eight to get a job at the Safeway cutting meat. And yes sir, he was going to play the saxophone because he’d taken lessons for four years from Mr. D. P. Rowbottom on Seventh Street though he’d actually started out on the trumpet until he decided he didn’t like it all that much. He came right out to the edge of the stage, toes sticking over, leaned back like a rooster about to crow, and blasted out “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise” so loud and hard that I thought his bulging eyes would pop right out of his head and his straining lungs would blast holes through that red-and-white shirt. Everyone moved forward, tense and straining, waiting for something terrible to happen — for him to fall off the stage or explode or go sailing off into the air from the force of his own fantastic intensity — but he stopped suddenly and everyone fell back exhausted and sweaty to clap for him.

  The third contestant was less reassuring. A kid with talent. A smart-aleck ten-year-old with red hair, who told the audience he was going into show business when he grew up, started out playing “Swanee River” on his banjo, switched in the middle of a bar to a mouth organ, tap danced across the stage to play a few bars on the piano, and finished off on a trombone he’d had stashed away behind the palm tree. He bowed, grinned, flung himself around the stage as if he’d spent his whole life on it, and looked as if he’d do his whole act again quite happily if the audience wanted him to. By the time the tremendous applause had died down my jaw was aching from the way I’d been grinding my teeth the whole time he was up there. The audience would not have gone quite so wild over him, I thought, if he hadn’t been wearing a hearing aid and a leg brace.