The Barclay Family Theatre

by Jack Hodgins

  “Besides,” Iris said, moving towards the luggage carousel, “the phone-tapping is incidental. What’s at the bottom of this is that woman.” These highly educated university types, she added, could be so naive.

  Because driving was a recently acquired skill for Iris, she sat right up at the front of her blue plush seat with one hand clamped on either side of the steering wheel and her face pushed forward to scowl at the road. Bella Robson had never learned to drive — one lesson, soon after she’d been widowed, had left her a nervous wreck — but she could tell that Iris was just barely in control of the car. Had she flown all this way to be killed in an automobile accident? To keep from thinking about such things, she concentrated on what she could see outside. Though she’d left a morning rainstorm beating down on her garden at home, where her dark-red dahlias were still the envy of the neighbourhood, the light here was already fading from what appeared to be a perfectly cloudless sky. They drove through patches of short, half-naked trees in the direction of buildings she could see up ahead, while Iris filled her in on what she knew of this emergency that had flung itself on the family. “It started when that damn university invited some big-shot visiting Russian professor to lunch and made the mistake of including James. This woman was there as his translator.”

  “She works for the embassy?”

  “Her father works for the embassy. She calls herself a poet. Sometimes if they need her she translates. She hangs around the university now, they talk about books, she’s got him convinced he wants to do a lecture tour of the Soviet Union. Can you imagine? Obviously she’s a spy.”

  Bella Robson ignored what she was not prepared to handle. “And she’s what? . . . beautiful?”

  Iris cut her eyes so sharply at her mother that the car dropped off the pavement onto the gravel. “He says she’s beautiful.” She fought with the steering wheel until they were up on pavement again. “I haven’t seen her but I’ll bet she’s got greasy hair pulled back in a bun, and a jaw like a man. You know what they’re like.”

  Bella Robson was not at all sure she was equipped to handle this. Like any other mother, she felt her fighting instincts rise when her son was in danger, but the fact of the matter was that she had always been a timid woman, easily frightened. Even when her husband had been alive, it took no more than a threat of changing weather to make her jumpy. Uncertain profits in his import shop kept her awake at night. When he died and left the shop to her it was even worse. News of an international emergency could send her to bed with a fluttering heart, she’d had to sell the business. It was the price she paid for being a person who felt things deeply, she supposed, and tried to be thankful she wasn’t one of those calloused women who took everything in their stride.

  But one of those calloused women, faced with a son who was tinkering with dynamite, might have been less inclined to feel helpless. Bella Robson had no idea what she would do now that she was here. She wasn’t even sure why she had come, except that she knew it would have been even worse to stay at home, where she would become the victim of her over-active imagination.

  The only way to handle James was to let him have it with both barrels, Iris suggested as they approached the tall downtown buildings. He was too smart to be convinced by logic, and too bull-headed to admit he was wrong, and too innocent to see for himself the danger he was getting into. Though he was already at an age when most men were married, fathers of growing children, and making responsible decisions, James was just an overgrown baby and had to be shocked into realizing how dangerous the world could be. She would do it herself, of course, but she knew he paid her about as much attention as he paid to a flea. “What he needs,” she said “is to have his mother come along and slap him down, knock some sense into his stupid head for a change.”

  Bella Robson looked at her hands. When she thought of trying to slap her big husky son with these — parchment skin pulled over bones — she had to laugh. Sometimes she believed her skeleton was actually made of ice crystals, and would shatter easily on impact, collapse in a heap of splintery fragments inside her tightening skin. “What he needs is to meet a girl,” she said. “Someone with an education.”

  Iris looked at her mother and sucked the air through her teeth. “That’s why you’re here,” she said. “He’s already met one.”

  After crossing the canal, they started down a street that was lined with trees whose leaves were a deep rusty gold. Bella Robson supposed she had arrived at the end of their famous eastern fall and ought to make an effort to appreciate the leaves. You saw so many of them in paintings and postcards and calendars that you forgot you weren’t able to see them through your windows at home. What she looked for and couldn’t find was sign of some flowers blooming. Front-yard gardens seemed to be nothing but black broken stalks, but surely even here there’d be something still alive. Chrysanths, she knew, would bloom after frost, or didn’t these people know?

  More noticeable than leaves or blackened gardens were the signs in French. She recognized the Université d’Ottawa from James’s new letterhead, but what was L’auberge supposed to be? Of course, she knew better than to bring the matter up with Iris; it would only provide her with an occasion for one of her remarks about West Coast bigotry. Though she hadn’t been able to speak a word of French when she arrived in this city, Iris now bragged that she never watched any television channel but the French one. She called it the francophone station. Feeling vaguely threatened by the idea, Bella Robson wondered if she was losing both son and daughter to forces she couldn’t combat.

  Eventually they pulled up to the curb in front of an enormous building and stopped. “Of course, you can see he had to pick the oldest and ugliest apartment block in the city. He’s the only person in it under eighty. Says it’s quiet. One of these days it’ll fall down on his head!”

  The building didn’t appear to be in much danger of falling; it looked, with its thick brown columns and yellow brick walls, as if it intended to sit there forever. Brick buildings of any kind always looked permanent and settled to Bella Robson. She reminded her daughter that James had chosen the place for its location more than anything else, in order to be close to the foreign embassies.

  “Well, we know what that’s led to, don’t we.”

  Iris pointed out the Embassy of the Soviet Union just two blocks down the street, a large cement-grey building behind a black iron fence, as stark and unimaginative as a prison. Bella Robson felt a chill settle into her bones. Were there guards? If she squinted would she be able to see their guns? She had a vision of her son stepping through that gate for the last time, never to be heard from again. Did they shoot their people right on the property, or send them to Russia first?

  When they stepped off the creaky old-fashioned elevator, James — who had been alerted by their buzz at the outside door — was standing in the hallway, waiting for her with his little-boy grin on his face. Though he was more than six feet tall and stocky like his father — no chandelier of bird bones like his mother — he still knew how to look like a six-year old when he wanted to. A sheepish grin, the hangdog pose, the uncombed hair: a mother couldn’t resist. Bella Robson gave a small peep and forgot her reason for coming — she hurried forward at a tilt to fling herself into his arms. It was all she could do to keep herself from blubbering.

  He held her at arm’s length and frowned. “Haven’t you had anything to eat since I saw you last? Mother, you’re as thin as a stick. Have you caught the plague?”

  She’d never been any heavier than she was right now but he’d always liked to make fun. Thin as a stick indeed. “You know very well I keep myself like this on purpose. It’s the skinny women who save the most at dress-shop sales.” She turned and opened her coat for Iris. “This dress now, I paid a dollar for it on the junk table of a clearance sale. They figured nobody in the world was thin enough and it would have to be sold for scraps.” She’d done some poor woman out of a dusting rag, she supposed, but look how nice it hung on her, with its pattern of pink petuni
as.

  James groaned, as she knew he would, and put his hand over his eyes. Her talent for finding bargains had always embarrassed him. “You,” she added, “seem to be healthy enough.” And patted his stomach.

  He was proud of his paunch and gave it a hefty slap. “Haven’t been sick for years.”

  “Except mentally,” Iris said. “But that’s hardly news.”

  He twisted his mouth and rolled his eyes up to the ceiling of the hallway, as if to say he’d hoped for better from her but wasn’t surprised. When the two of them had been small, Bella Robson had spent much of her time breaking up fights, but James had eventually learned to treat his sister as if she were an imbecile determined to show off her stupidity every chance she got.

  “Iris may have a point, James,” she said, remembering why she was here. “Am I supposed to believe what I hear about Russians?”

  He chuckled and flipped his tie. You never saw James without a tartan necktie knotted perfectly at his throat. “Well, this is Ottawa, Mother, you know what I mean? Anyone with an I. Q. over sixty is in danger of dying from boredom here if he doesn’t cook up an international intrigue to entertain himself.” He giggled like a small boy, his body trembling. That, at least, hadn’t changed.

  But Iris cut his giggles short with an icy glare. “Do you still live inside or do you always entertain in the hall?”

  Those were her last words for the evening. The apartment, when they stepped inside, was already occupied by two men and a young woman who looked up with curiosity at the intrusion. Iris hurried across the room with her shoulders hunched forward and threw herself into a corner chair. Slumped down with her arms crossed over her chest, she clamped her jaw like a fist and lowered her brows in a suspicious scowl.

  Bella Robson, of course, was incapable of such deliberate rudeness. Iris’s lack of manners had always forced her into situations where she had to be twice as friendly as usual, in order to make up for her daughter. She made a point of shaking hands with every person in the room. If they were professors like her son, then she knew she wasn’t going to understand a word they said to her but at least they’d see that she knew how to conduct herself like a lady. If they were students, then it could only help her son to have them see he came from decent stock.

  They behaved, however, as if they didn’t know good manners from bad, or care whether she was in the room or not. The long-haired woman who sat with her bare feet tucked up on the chesterfield (introduced by James as Doctor Mallory) craned her neck to see past Bella Robson in order to ask a man in a heavy turtle-neck sweater and a beard if he’d recovered yet from the death of Elizabeth Bishop. Bella Robson had never heard of anyone by that name but it was apparent from the look on the bearded man’s face that her death had been an event of some importance. He would probably never recover, he said, shaking his head, nor did he want to recover. The world had lost one of the greats and didn’t know it.

  An emaciated young man sitting on the hardwood floor with his arms wrapped around his knees said that he had never read any of her poems, since she wasn’t one of the seventeen poets he taught every year, but now that she was dead he was thinking of reading them and maybe adding her to his course. He’d been to Harvard too, he explained to Bella — but only for a year.

  This apartment — what a contrast to the one in Cambridge! This was the same furniture, she could tell — the same bookshelves, the same lightweight couch — but the walls were such a dead chalk-white and the ceiling so high. The view out that one narrow window was of rooftops and chimneys. Poor James must be missing his view of the Charles River and the Boston skyline, and that bridge.

  When he sat on the arm of her chair, with his hand on her shoulder, she spoke with her voice as low as she could, so that she wouldn’t be accused of interrupting the others. “I thought you’d be alone — since I understand you knew we were coming.”

  James, however, didn’t mind interrupting them at all. “Mother has flown in,” he said, “in order to save me from a fate worse than death.” He had always called her “Mother” — never “Mom” or anything else — and pronounced the word as if it were a joke, in the way he used the word “periodical” while holding one of her Reader’s Digests between his fingers. “Mother is here to sabotage my plans to wangle a lecture invitation to Russia.” Everyone looked at Bella Robson. “She thinks that once they get me there they’ll lock me up in a mental institution, force me to betray all my country’s important secrets, then march me out into the snow to shoot me.” He giggled and dropped his arm around her neck to pull her close in a strangle-hold. To demonstrate, she supposed, that he was teasing. She tried to smile, to let the others know she was used to being made fun of by her son — it was part of her life.

  “Oh, Mrs. Robson,” the bearded one said, “you don’t want to go spoiling things for James.” Was he to be taken seriously? She couldn’t tell. “He’s worked so hard, I’ve never seen anyone so desperate to get a free trip. Some people,” he added, cutting his eyes to the others, “will do anything to get out of this city for a while.”

  While the others laughed, the barefooted woman crossed the room to the bookcase. “Look at this,” she said. “His friend has already given him a gift. A plastic miniature of the Pushkin Monument.” She held it out towards Bella Robson, who turned her head away. Was it feet she smelled? It couldn’t be. The girl was a university lecturer, and looked so clean.

  “Of course, we know it’s bugged,” said the man on the floor, and again everyone laughed. Iris’s face was tomato red. She’d pulled her head down between her shoulders as if she intended to imitate the exotic turtles her husband had sleeping in the backyard mud. Her eyes smouldered around the room and came to rest on Bella Robson, who shivered.

  “Well I want you to know,” Bella Robson said, looking only at James and trying to keep her voice from trembling too noticeably, “that I do not approve of any of this.” She clasped her hands together, in order to hide their shaking. “International politics is not a game.”

  No one took her seriously. “Would you repeat what you just said?” the woman said, holding the tiny Pushkin Monument in her face. Her feet did smell! “The microphone had a little difficulty picking it up.”

  “Bugged by the KGB, tapped by the RCMP,” the bearded one said. “Your son is obviously an important man. You don’t want to halt a glorious career in the service of the Motherland before it’s even got started.”

  “Professor Robsonov!” the skinny man said. “Vot does it mean, diss Troilus you ’ave come to our country to spik about? Iss it a new kind of tractor for increasing the production of Soviet wheat in the Ukraine?”

  By now everyone in the room except Bella Robson and Iris was screeching. James had his eyes squeezed shut and his head thrown back, shaking like someone completely out of control. When he threw himself forward, collapsed with giggles, she could see there were tears on his face. “And . . . and . . .” he could barely speak. “This Professor Robsonov, hiss book iss a marvellous work of literachure, in code of course, on bringing the glorious revolution to the decadent campuses of North America. ‘Troilus and Creseyde, a great Marxist tract!’” He fell right onto his knees and held his shaking stomach.

  As a child, she remembered, his talent had been for such mockery. She’d even expected him to become an actor. As a boy he could make himself helpless with laughter by imitating people he knew — sometimes silently behind their backs — and then go on to put his parodies into imagined exaggerated situations that reduced himself and his howling audience to tears. He had not changed his style in the slightest, she saw, except to become a little more bizarre. Certainly not what you expected from a professor of medieval literature, any more than this conversation was what you expected to hear when university people got together.

  If she wanted proof that her son had become a stranger to her, she need only look at what he had hanging on his walls. Bella Robson herself hung watercolours of flower arrangements, and a collection of porcelain pl
ates with painted scenes of gardens. Pictures were supposed to be something pretty to liven up a room. But James had put a bunch of posters behind glass in expensive frames, as if this living room with its chalk-white walls were actually the lobby of a theatre, or an art gallery. Faces of people she didn’t recognize floated behind the huge print of titles she’d never heard of — probably plays he’d seen while living in the States. Did he do this on purpose, to remind himself of all he was missing here?

  There was something else, a little smaller, which required a closer look. Behind glass again, in an expensive-looking frame, above a shelf of books. A page of poetry? Since she was not interested in encouraging any more of what seemed to pass for conversation in this place, she stood up and excused herself to the bearded young man who was in her way, and tried to make out the script. It looked like the kind of thing they used to copy out in the olden-days, with fancy letters and brilliantly coloured designs around the edge.

  She seyde, “alias! for now is clene ago

  My name of trouthe in love, for evermo!

  For I have falsed oon the gentileste

  That evere was, and oon the worthieste!”

  It didn’t mean a thing to her, but just imagine the labour that went into such a project! “Fourteen monks died working on that thing,” James said, coming up to stand behind her. Of course, she didn’t believe him. Were there monks, even today, who devoted their lives to such painstaking work? She doubted it. This was more likely something done by a grateful student.

  In a moment of silence, someone’s footsteps creaked across the ceiling over her head. Bella Robson looked at her son. That broad forehead, those quick clear-seeing eyes — such an intelligent man — how had he let himself become so silly? “I’m panting for a decent cup of tea,” she said. Perhaps these others could be encouraged, then, to go.

  But their silliness continued when the tea was served. The woman wanted to know if the bakery cakes had been checked out carefully because she didn’t want to go home with an electronic tracing device in her stomach, and the bearded man said he expected the Red Army Chorus to knock down the door any minute and march in to sing a little Soviet after-dinner music. “And perhaps a demonstration of peasant dancing.” He squatted on his heels and crossed his arms over his chest in order to give it a try but fell on his behind the first time he kicked out a foot. The skinny man who was already on the floor laughed so hard that he choked on his cake and had to be slapped on the back in order to start breathing properly again. James puffed up like an important official and demanded that he be purged from the Party at once for excessive laughter, which, as everyone knew, was not allowed unless you were issued a permit. The punishment, of course, was death. By the time they’d finished their second cup of tea, Iris’s face was nearly purple and her eyes had disappeared altogether beneath her glowering brow. Bella Robson sensed it was time to get out of there, before her daughter decided to let fly with whatever it was she’d been keeping bottled inside.