The Barclay Family Theatre

by Jack Hodgins

  Then it was my turn. A strange calm fell over me when my name was called, the kind of calm that I imagine comes over a person about to be executed when his mind finally buckles under the horror it has been faced with, something too terrible to believe in. I wondered for a moment if I had died. But no, my body at least hadn’t died, for it transported me unbidden across the front of the audience, up the staircase (with only a slight stumble on the second step, hardly noticeable), and across the great wide stage of the theatre to stand facing Richy Ryder’s enormous expanse of white smiling teeth, beside the microphone.

  “And you are Barclay Philip Desmond,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  And again “yes,” because I realized that not only had my voice come out as thin and high as the squeal of a dry buzz-saw, but the microphone was at least a foot too low. I had to bend my knees to speak into it.

  “You don’t live in town, do you?” he said. He had no intention of adjusting that microphone. “You come from a place called . . . Waterville. A logging and farming settlement?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  And again “yes” because while he was speaking my legs had straightened up, I’d returned to my full height and had to duck again for the microphone.

  He was speaking to me but his eyes, I could see, were busy keeping all that audience gathered together, while his voice and his mind were obviously concentrated on the thousands of invisible people who were crouched inside that microphone, listening, the thousands of people who — I imagined now — were pulled up close to their sets all over the province, wondering if I was actually a pair of twins or if my high voice had some peculiar way of echoing itself, a few tones lower.

  “Does living in the country like that mean you have to milk the cows every morning before you go to school?”

  “Yes.”

  And again “yes.”

  I could see Mrs. Greensborough cowering in the back corner. I promise not to mention you, I thought. And the Korhonens, grinning. I had clearly passed over into another world they couldn’t believe in.

  “If you’ve got a lot of farm chores to do, when do you find the time to practise the piano?”

  He had me this time. A “yes” wouldn’t be good enough. “Right after school,” I said, and ducked to repeat. “Right after school. As soon as I get home. For an hour.”

  “And I just bet,” he said, throwing the audience an enormous wink, “that like every other red-blooded country kid you hate every minute of it. You’d rather be outside playing baseball.”

  The audience laughed. I could see my mother straining forward; she still had the all-purpose waiting-for-the-surprise smile on her lips but her eyes were frowning at the master of ceremonies. She did not approve of the comment. And behind that face she was no doubt thinking to herself “I just know he’s going to win” over and over so hard that she was getting pains in the back of her neck. Beside her, my father had a tight grin on his face. He was chuckling to himself, and sliding a look around the room to see how the others were taking this.

  Up at the back, most of my aunts — and their husbands, their boyfriends — had tilted their chins down to their chests, offering me only the tops of their heads. Eleanor, however, had both hands behind her neck. She was laughing harder than anyone else.

  Apparently I was not expected to respond to the last comment, for he had another question as soon as the laughter had died. “How old are you, son?”

  “Thirteen.”

  For once I remembered to duck the first time.

  “Thirteen. Does your wife like the idea of your going on the radio like this?”

  Again the audience laughed. I felt tears in my eyes. I had no control over my burning face. I tried to laugh like everyone else but realized I probably looked like an idiot. Instead, I frowned and looked embarrassed and kicked at one shoe with the toe of the other.

  “Just a joke,” he said, “just a joke.” The jerk knew he’d gone too far. “And now seriously, one last question before I turn you loose on those ivories over there.”

  My heart had started to thump so noisily I could hardly hear him. My hands, I realized, had gone numb. There was no feeling at all in my fingers. How was I ever going to play the piano?

  “What are you going to be when you grow up?”

  The thumping stopped. My heart stopped. A strange, cold silence settled over the world. I was going to die right in front of all those people. What I was going to be was a corpse, dead of humiliation, killed in a trap I hadn’t seen being set. What must have been only a few seconds crawled by while something crashed around in my head, trying to get out. I sensed the audience, hoping for some help from them. My mother had settled back in her seat and for the first time that surprise-me smile had gone. Rather, she looked confident, sure of what I was about to say.

  And suddenly, I was aware of familiar faces all over that theatre. Neighbours. Friends of the family. My aunts. People who had heard me answer that question at their doors, people who thought they knew what I wanted.

  There was nothing left of Mrs. Greensborough but the top of her big hat. My father, too, was looking down at the floor between his feet. I saw myself falling from that spar tree, high in the mountains.

  “Going to be?” I said, turning so fast that I bumped the microphone with my hand, which turned out after all not to be numb.

  I ducked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I don’t know. Maybe . . . maybe nothing at all.”

  I don’t know who it was that snorted when I screwed up the stool, sat down, and stood up to screw it down again. I don’t know how well I played, I wasn’t listening. I don’t know how loud the audience clapped, I was in a hurry to get back to my seat. I don’t know what the other contestants did, I wasn’t paying any attention, except when Cornelia Horncastle got up on the stage, told the whole world she was going to be a professional pianist, and sat down to rattle off Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini as if she’d been playing for fifty years. As far as I know it may have been the first time she’d ever heard herself play it. She had a faint look of surprise on her face the whole time, as if she couldn’t quite get over the way the keys went down when you touched them.

  As soon as Cornelia came down off the stage, smiling modestly, and got back into her seat, Richy Ryder announced a fifteen-minute intermission while the talent judges made their decision and the studio audience went out into the lobby to pledge their money and their votes. Now that the talent had been displayed, people could spend their money according to what they’d heard rather than according to who happened to come knocking on their door. Most of the contestants got up to stretch their legs but I figured I’d stood up once too often that night and stayed in my seat. The lower exit was not far away; I contemplated using it; I could hitch-hike home and be in bed before any of the others got out of there.

  I was stopped, though, by my father, who sat down in the seat next to mine and put a greasy carton of popcorn in my lap.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s that.”

  His neck was flushed. This must have been a terrible evening for him. He had a carton of popcorn himself and tipped it up to gather a huge mouthful. I had never before in my life, I realized, seen my father eat popcorn. It must have been worse for him than I’d thought.

  Not one of the aunts was anywhere in sight. I could see my mother standing in the far aisle, talking to Mrs. Korhonen. Still smiling. She would never let herself fall apart in public, no matter what happened. My insides ached with the knowledge of what it must have been like right then to be her. I felt as if I had just betrayed her in front of the whole world. Betrayed everyone.

  “Let’s go home,” I said.

  “Not yet. Wait a while. Might as well see this thing to the end.”

  True, I thought. Wring every last drop of torture out of it.

  He looked hard at me a moment, as if he were trying to guess what was going on in my head. And he did, he did, he always knew. “My old man wa
nted me to be a doctor,” he said. “My mother wanted me to be a florist. She liked flowers. She thought if I was a florist I’d be able to send her a bouquet every week. But what does any of that matter now?”

  Being part of a family was too complicated. And right then I decided I’d be a loner. No family for me. Nobody whose hearts could be broken every time I opened my mouth. Nobody expecting anything of me. Nobody to get me all tangled up in knots trying to guess who means what and what is it that’s really going on inside anyone else. No temptations to presume I knew what someone else was thinking or feeling or hoping for.

  When the lights had flickered and dimmed, and people had gone back to their seats, a young man with a beard came out onto the stage and changed the numbers behind the contestants’ names. I’d dropped to fifth place, and Cornelia Horncastle had moved up to first. She had also, Richy Ryder announced, been awarded the judges’ footstool for talent. The winner of the holiday in sunny Hawaii would not be announced until the next week, he said, when the radio audience had enough time to mail in their votes.

  “And that,” my mother said when she came down the aisle with her coat on, “is the end of a long and tiring day.” I could find no disappointment showing in her eyes, or in the set of her mouth. Just relief. The same kind of relief that I felt myself. “You did a good job,” she said, “and thank goodness it’s over.”

  As soon as we got in the house I shut myself in the bedroom and announced I was never coming out. Lying on my bed, I tried to read my comic books but my mind passed from face to face all through the community, imagining everyone having a good laugh at the way my puffed-up ambition had got its reward. My face burned. Relatives, the aunts, would be ashamed of me. Eleanor would never let me forget. Mabel would remind me of the boy who’d done the only honourable thing, blown off his head. Why wasn’t I doing the same? I lay awake the whole night, torturing myself with these thoughts. But when morning came and the hunger pains tempted me out of the bedroom as far as the breakfast table, I decided the whole wretched experience had brought one benefit with it: freedom from ambition. I wouldn’t worry any more about becoming a pianist for my mother. Nor would I worry any more about becoming a high-rigger for my father. I was free at last to concentrate on pursuing the only goal that ever really mattered to me: becoming a Finn.

  Of course I failed at that too. But then neither did Cornelia Horncastle become a great pianist on the concert stages of Europe. In fact, I understand that once she got back from her holiday on the beaches of Hawaii she announced to her parents that she was never going to touch a piano again as long as she lived, ivory, or cardboard, or any other kind. She had already, she said, accomplished all she’d ever wanted from it. And as far as I know, she’s kept her word to this day.

  Invasions ’79

  FOR TEN YEARS Bella Robson’s son had taught medieval literature at Harvard and lived in a three-room apartment overlooking the bridge where one of William Faulkner’s characters had killed himself. He used up nearly a ton of impressive letterhead paper explaining why he intended to stay in New England for the rest of his life. Apparently a young man who’d grown up on the West Coast had a great deal of catching up to do — especially in matters of history and culture. Long, convincing descriptions of the stone houses of Cambridge, the busy excitement of Harvard Square, and the incredible wealth of books in Widener Library made it clear he was doing the only intelligent thing. Bella Robson had flown down on one occasion and, after a few days of attending plays in Boston and dining in restaurants that looked out over the Atlantic, she saw there wasn’t a chance he would return to North Vancouver.

  His specialty (when anyone asked) was some old poem she’d never had the pleasure of reading. Its title went something like Toil Less and Crusade, though she couldn’t guarantee that she’d remembered it right. He’d even written a book about the poem, which everyone said would cause an uproar if it were ever published. Professors, she explained, tended to get excited about things the rest of us would hardly notice.

  Professors, she might have added, were a foreign breed to her. She had no idea what went on in her own son’s head. She couldn’t imagine how he could devote his life to a single poem. This wasn’t even his poem, either, but one that somebody else had written, centuries ago. She sometimes found it difficult to understand how a young man could be happy living as an alien in a city that was full of foreign landmarks and people with strange accents and not a relative in sight.

  How, then, could she possibly understand why those letters suddenly changed their tune? “When my own country is falling apart, how can I stay away?” he wrote. “I’ve got to move back home.” The next thing she knew he was teaching in Ottawa. How could he call that home? She knew better than to think he’d made the move in order to be close to his sister, who lived there with her husband and two small boys. He hated his sister; his brother-in-law was a moron; he thought their two little boys were a couple of vicious barbarians. He may have been Bella Robson’s only son but she’d learned long ago that she would never understand what made him tick.

  She also didn’t understand the first thing about the academic world, he wrote. When it came to jobs you took what you could find. But she didn’t need to think he intended to become a martyr, either. If he was going to sacrifice himself in the name of national unity by leaving Boston and Cambridge behind, he’d make damn sure he did plenty of travelling too. He would take advantage, he said, of every opportunity that came along to make connections with foreigners, to get himself invited on foreign lecture tours, to choose research topics that couldn’t be handled at home. And in order to encourage these miracles, he had found himself an apartment surrounded by foreign embassies. The Egyptians, the Belgians, the Swiss, the Pakistanis — all were situated within a few blocks of his door. Every time he stepped outside he expected to meet someone who would invite him to somewhere exotic. “From now on,” he wrote, “consider me a citizen of the world.”

  Bella Robson had little to say about this. Her garden was at its most demanding stage at the time. All the borders had to be dug for next year’s bulbs. If travel would make him happy, then let him travel — though she hoped, privately, that he would soon meet the girl who’d become her daughter-in-law one day, and settle down. She took it for granted that he would stay away from the countries whose very names had always made her uneasy. Israel, South Africa, Russia, Cambodia — let him stay clear of those. She watched television every night and knew what was going on.

  Friends wondered if it wasn’t a little lonely for her, a widow living so far from son and daughter both, and there were days when she was tempted to think they might be right. But Bella Robson liked to live her own life, undisturbed. She was convinced it was better to have them both a good safe distance away than to have them camped on your doorstep every day of the week, like the children of some of her friends. She would just as soon not know all their day-to-day problems, thank you, since there was seldom anything that she could do to help. A person had enough to handle, conducting her own affairs. And as far as distance went — in real emergencies there was always the telephone, though her daughter Iris had got into the habit of delivering her month’s call from Ottawa in such a brusque, even brutal, voice that it wasn’t always easy to distinguish what was a crisis from what was not.

  There was little ambiguity, however, when Iris called one evening in late October. “You’d better come see this for yourself,” she said. “Your brilliant son has got himself involved with the Russians!”

  Bella Robson nearly dropped the receiver. Was it possible? This might be the end of a decade that had seen the whole world trying to act like friends, but to her a word like “Russians” still conjured up images of barbed-wire fences and spies and firing-squads. Iris assured her it was even worse than that. “A woman.”

  When Iris was mad she stuck out her jaw and pulled her bottom lip almost up to her nose. Her mother had told her when she was small that it made her face look like a fist, and the comparis
on had pleased her so much she’d gone out of her way ever since to exaggerate the effect, in order to make herself as homely as possible. When Bella Robson stepped into the airport arrivals room, she could see the expression had become a permanent one. Her daughter, standing in a crowd of strangers with her purple knitted hat pulled down to just above her eyebrows, appeared to be on the lookout for someone to punch.

  “Well, he’s not in the salt mines yet,” she said, stepping forward to take her mother’s tote bag from her hand. Her tone of voice made it clear that she didn’t expect this state of affairs to last long. “But I can tell that his phone’s been tapped.”

  Bella Robson felt her heart skip a beat but she kissed her daughter’s cheek and told herself to stay calm. “If you can tell,” she said, “it must be amateurs who are doing it.”

  Iris lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “If it’s amateurs who throw him in jail, will that be all right with you too?”

  Bella Robson had neither the strength nor the courage yet for any of this. Flying tended to leave her drained of resources. Whenever she was forced to travel by plane — family crises and the funerals of friends — she expected to find herself in little charred pieces all over the side of a mountain. As soon as she’d strapped the seat-belt across her narrow lap, she always looked around for someone who was prepared to listen, from take-off to landing, while she distracted herself with nonstop talk. A trip as long as this one exhausted her.