The Barclay Family Theatre

by Jack Hodgins

  “Besides,” she yelled back over her shoulder, “we’ve got obligations.” And rolled her eyes. “A silver-engraved invitation . . .” That ought to knock the cheek out of him.

  He swam in and came slapping up out of the water to stand beside her. The black hairs grew right down over his insteps and out onto every toe, to the edge of every thick yellow nail. Dripping water, he grunted and bent to check his watch, which was lying with the sweat-matted socks on his towel.

  “A big night,” she said. “At least for some.”

  “Which I sure as hell wish we could miss.” He flopped down beside her on the rock. The sandstone had been carved by the tides into smooth rolling slabs with granite boulders embedded here and there as if in concrete.

  “Well, I can’t imagine a good enough excuse for not going,” Gladdy said, and examined her hands. “Not when you consider.” She poked with her finger down into a pocket of trapped water and weeds left behind by the tide. “Not when it’s him.”

  “If one of us drowned.”

  She gave him a look. “I doubt even then. He never cancelled when the Payne kid — never even made noises about it — and that was only Monday. You’d’ve thought a thing as horrible as that happening right in the house would put him off, but no. An artist is like one of those actors, nothing’s important enough to stop the show.”

  “And when he’s your landlord, you’re over a barrel,” Carl said. He ran his hand down the hair on his chest, flicked the water off in her direction. “Paintings!”

  It could have been a curse. Because he knew she wouldn’t miss it for the world. “It won’t hurt you a bit,” she said, “to look at pictures for a while.”

  “Drowning might be easier,” he said. And winked. And sent a stream of brown-gold juice sailing out in an arc to land on a piece of twisted white driftwood.

  “Yes.” She sat up and rubbed the towel in her hair. “The old lady, Sylvi, says it’s the first time he’s ever done a one-man show. You wouldn’t dare miss it.” And dug her fingers in, to dry right down to the scalp. “Now I’ll have to set and dry my hair with the electric dryer, you and your ideas.”

  “It was hot.”

  “A swim before supper. You’d think we were kids.”

  He slid a hand into the gaping side of her bathing suit and bounced a breast. “Kids,” he said.

  “Here!” she said, and slapped at him. “Get your horny paws out!” She looked up the beach to see if anyone was watching. No one was, no one ever was. The people along this part of the bay had heated pools up on the top of the cliff, they never came down to the beach. A sailboat, though, was slicing through the water in this direction. “Can’t you ever think of anything else?”

  “What else?” he said, and laid one arm across his eyes.

  “Go on back in the water,” she said, and stood up. “Another dip in that cold will freeze the ideas off you.” Though she couldn’t help just a glance at the wet black hairs going down his belly out of sight. Carl Roote was a thick hairy man. Her father had warned her she’d give birth to monkeys with a husband like that, but all they’d ever had was Sparkle, pretty and dainty as anyone could ask for.

  “There’s only one picture I really want to see at that show,” she said, and nudged his ribs with her toe.

  He knew. “I’ll feel like a fool.” And squirmed.

  “At least he never asked you to pose in the nude,” she said, and snorting drove her toe into his navel before heading for the trail up the cliff. While he roared at her, she threw a towel-cloth robe over her shoulder and hugged it tight. Didn’t she know there were eyes at every window? There always were, all along the cliff edge, every house with its eyes watching her appear at the top of the long steep trail and walk across the yard to her own door.

  Mediterranean was what some called this place. Visitors gasped, especially at first, and said the place was practically like being in Naples or somewhere. All that cement and those dripping baskets of flowers. The whole bay laid out at the foot of the cliff, blue and shiny in the sun. Ha! She’d Naples them, she said. What it was was a basement suite, no matter how you looked at it. The cement patio was cracked and frost-heaved. And how much of the bay could she see from her kitchen window with that stupid big arbutus tree hogging it all? What she’d like to do was take a chain-saw to the twisted old bastard and get herself a view to match the people who lived above. Trunks were all she saw, big and thick and pink, busting out of their own bark once a year and dropping curled-up skin like parchment scrolls all over her patio.

  Though who in his right mind wanted to look across the bay to the spreading suburbs of the city? And farther off, the white stinking smoke from the paper mill?

  “Hungry enough yet?” she asked her daughter, who was laid out on a lounge chair reading a magazine.

  The girl only grunted. Sparkle Roote. Named after that little darling daughter of B. O. Plenty and Gravel Gertie in Carl’s favourite comic strip. Some Sparkle. Gladdy had seen more sparkle in day-old beer, when she was into one of her snits.

  It was the Payne kid that put her into the latest. The whole ugly business, it gave you the creeps, that kind of thing always did. And now those two, those Paynes, down at the funeral place, waiting.

  Still waiting too, if the silence above meant anything. Not a single footstep had creaked over her head the whole day. No radio playing. No water rushing in the pipes. The middle floor was empty, empty.

  Though up top, up in the real house, the A-frame building that sat on them all, old man Wainamoinen would be pacing now, biting his lip over his art show, barking orders at the poor stick of a woman he was married to, Sylvi.

  Making the supper, Gladdy Roote could almost have sung out loud. Her hair was in rollers now. The new long dress she’d made herself was ironed and hanging from the top of the closet door. Big splashes of red flowers. It must’ve been, oh, ten or twelve years since Carl’d taken her to anything where she had to wear a long dress. He wouldn’t be taking her to this either if they hadn’t got that silver engraved invitation — for him being a model for one of the paintings. She could just let rip into the loudest song she knew, she was that excited. For Gladdy Roote would rub elbows with the best tonight. Maybe she’d nudge the mayor’s wife and say, “That’s my old man in that picture there. Lookit the gleam in the bugger’s eye!”

  Though of course she hadn’t seen the painting yet. Not even Carl had seen the thing finished. They’d have to listen to speeches and who knew what all before they could get near it, just like anyone else.

  Suddenly, doors slammed above, and footsteps creaked across over her head. The Paynes were home. Gladdy put a hand over her heart, she was scared to think what it meant. She’d tried to avoid them the past two days; people under that kind of strain didn’t need nosy neighbours pushing in every time they turned around.

  Though she felt, when one set of footsteps went out onto the deck, that it wouldn’t hurt a bit to go outside and talk to Sparkle, ask her to help set the table, or ask her if she’d decided yet whether she was going to come along with Carl and her tonight. And discovered, when she did, that just up above their heads, leaning on the railing was Carrie Payne.

  A person had to say hello at a time like that.

  Though Carrie Payne, it seemed, would never have noticed if she hadn’t. Her eyes were on somewhere higher.

  “You look tired,” Gladdy said.

  Well it was true. Why not say it? A young woman like her shouldn’t have purple smudges under her eyes.

  “We’ve just come home for a bite to eat,” she said. Her hand at her throat.

  “Put your feet up,” Gladdy said. “Get some rest. It must’ve seemed like the longest day in the world for you.”

  “Yes. I wouldn’t have left but David insisted.”

  And then, because she just had to: “Anything happened yet?”

  Sparkle’s knees slapped together. “Mom!”

  Carrie Payne didn’t know where to look. Her eyes scurried everywhere
looking for something to anchor them.

  “No,” she said. “No, not yet.”

  While Sparkle, face red, stomped past into the house. From the door she turned and gave her mother a horrible scowl.

  If what you expect really happens, Gladdy thought, the newspaper writers will hound you into an insane asylum: and if it doesn’t happen, the cops’ll lock you in jail. They’ll get you one way or the other.

  It was the cheekiest she’d been since her surgery. She could almost believe she was on the mend. Humming, she went back inside to get the supper out, feeling the huge curls to see if they were dry.

  If Eli Wainamoinen were to let go, truly let go, who knew what might happen?

  Madness, some people would guess, or greatness. Some, like his wife, thought he had already let go enough and ought to spend a little more time being normal. Wainamoinen himself suspected that he might become one of the immortals, that if he let go altogether and released all the talents swelling within him, he would quite likely soar well above the world of ordinary men and find himself in some kind of timeless place of spirit and harmony.

  Not that he despised the world of man and nature.

  From his balcony he could see a great deal of it, and it was beautiful. Across the top of the arbutus there was the bay-harbour, nearly encircled by the string of beaches and apartments and houses of the town that curled around its edge. The forest, too, covering the slopes and reaching up into the harsh gashes in the blue mountains of the island’s backbone. It was a scene he had never painted, or ever wanted to. Too peaceful, too pretty, too pleasant. Art was an act of violence, not a sedative. Each work must begin as an assault on the pure canvas and end as a shock to the viewer’s sensibilities. There were harbours in his collection but not this one, not with its comfortable ordinary calm, not where the only colours could be green and white and blue: he preferred the cramped up-island inlets with storm-wrecked docks and crimson boats that bled their reflections into dark water.

  He could see the Payne woman on her deck below him. And had seen Gladdy Roote when she came up over the rim of the cliff, panting and hunched over like a sick cow. Two silly women. The incredible thing was that on this of all days it was possible for ordinary people to do ordinary things, completely unaware of how important it was to him, or how frightening. Completely oblivious to the fact that his name, if nothing else, should be enough to give pause on a day like this. You didn’t have to ride a Viking ship to save the land of heroes. His namesake would have understood that. That there were other ways.

  Back home, of course, this day would have come forty years sooner. But he had chosen, after all, to live here in this country, on this island, where a man had to be seventy years old before he could be sure there’d be people at his first show. They couldn’t trust themselves any earlier. How could they be sure he wasn’t trying to put one over on them, as they said, until he could show he’d been selling his paintings to art lovers all over the continent for nearly fifty years? Until he could list the museums that bought his work.

  And yet, “The people, the people,” he said.

  And thought of that old composer in Helsinki.

  He turned and went back inside the house, his legs aching from tension and the slow hours of pacing. He could be sick, he could easily be sick. But he hadn’t waited all these years just to miss out on his own first show. He would be there even if he had a stroke between now and then and had to crawl.

  With his wife, his Sylvi.

  Sylvi. The perfect wife. Who knew how to protect him. Who stood between him and the people. There were forty workers getting ready for the show and not once in the two months of preparation had she let a single problem get past her to bother him. He had been able to spend all his time painting.

  “Tired, Sylvi,” he said. “You look tired.” He put both hands on her tiny shoulders and she looked up, grinning, her eyes bright. And tilted her head to let her face rest against his hand. “Eli,” she said. And it was clear that she would have crawled through fire to serve. With joy.

  “You thought I was saving you from life on a farm, but look . . . look what you have instead. Servant to the selfish one.”

  Though the farm had been only a cow, and a field on the side of a rocky hill.

  “Mina olen onnellinen,” she said, and kissed the hand.

  But he put a finger on her lips. They had agreed: no Finnish, not even in private. They had done everything possible to eliminate any trace of an accent. If he had been Italian, he said, if he had been Spanish or Hungarian or English he would have worked hard to hold onto a foreign accent. It would have been a help to an artist. But not Finnish. A Finnish accent, he said, was something these people expected to hear in the logging camps. A Finnish accent was for fallers and bunkhouse cooks. It could only hurt an artist. It was better even to sound Canadian.

  That he used a language of his own they would learn soon enough. In less than two hours.

  “Sylvi!” he said and pulled his hand away. “Sylvi! My warm milk, please now.”

  “Yes,” she said, a gasp. And leapt to her feet. “Yes Eli. And you sit down, in that chair.”

  “Sit!” He waved his arms at the sloped ceiling. “Don’t be a fool, woman. How could I sit?”

  Instead he paced the full length of the house, from the carved oak door at the front to the sliding glass doors at the rear. Then back. When she handed him the mug of warmed-up milk he looked at it, felt his stomach lift, and gave it back. “Too late, Sylvi, take it away!”

  She took the mug and poured the milk down the drain. “Then please stop your marching, Eli, you’ll drive the people below crazy.”

  “Already crazy!” he shouted. The Paynes. Already crazy. “And the bottom floor not much better. You should have seen that woman in her swim suit.”

  “Hush. Now stop. Calm yourself down. It’ll all be over soon. Everything will be well.”

  They’d stripped the house. There wasn’t a painting left on any wall. The workers had come in yesterday and, under Sylvi’s direction, had taken down everything he’d painted and hauled it away to the ballroom of the hotel. Even the studio was bare, except for easels and blank canvas and pots of paint.

  In Helsinki there’d been such a house. A composer’s home. It too had been on a cliff overlooking the city harbour. His father had taken him there once, when he was a small boy too young for the composer to notice. He hadn’t listened to them talking; instead he’d memorized the house. Every corner, every board, every piece of furniture. And he had reproduced it here, years later, when he knew in his soul that if he’d been back home he’d have far surpassed that composer in the people’s hearts. Luckily the builders here were as accustomed to the proper use of wood as they’d been in Finland. And the furniture had been shipped directly from Helsinki. No North American imitation.

  He touched it all now. It was something to hold onto. The cedar walls. The thick red carpet. The spiral staircase to their sleeping loft. The lamps. The teak tables. The places where paintings had hung. The door frames at the entrance to his studio.

  While the windows in the house had been placed to take advantage of the harbour view, the windows in the studio were arranged for light. Made of a special glass, non-glare and very expensive, they ranged along the north wall, so all the light would be indirect, none of it ever straight from the sun.

  “Sylvi! Sylvi!” he called suddenly. “What is all this nonsense I’m doing? A painter should be painting.”

  “No!” she screeched. But he took off his dress shirt, stripped off the pants of his rented tuxedo.

  “My canvas!” he shouted. “My paints!”

  So she scurried around him and brought out the easel, set up the first canvas she laid eyes on, set out his paint. “At least you’ll be out of the way,” she said . . . “I’ll call you when we have only half an hour left.”

  “Sylvi,” he said, when she had almost escaped.

  “Yes.”

  “What will you be doing?”
<
br />   “My dress, Eli, I have to take it in. I’ve been so busy I haven’t got around to it. It hangs like a sack.”

  “Never mind.” He swung his hands in the air, beating her words away. “Leave the dress. Pray!”

  She looked horrified. “What?”

  “Go into the bedroom, Sylvi, and pray for me. Pray for the paintings. Pray for the people.”

  She put her hands to either side of her face. “And you?” she said. “What will you be doing while I’m arranging things with God for you?”

  “Working,” he said. And drew a blood-red line of paint down the middle of the canvas.

  “I don’t think He will mind if I talk to Him while I’m using a needle and thread on my dress,” she said, and wheeled away. But stopped. “He might even be persuaded to listen to a man holding a paintbrush.”

  “Aggh!” he said, as she slammed the door. And slashed red again, this time horizontally across the white rectangle. Every painting began as a violence against the perfect canvas. You had to understand that every work of art was a violence itself, a cry, a hand-slap to wake the hysteric to reality.

  He worked, thinking of the people who would be there, at the ballroom, for him.

  So long as none of the men were there. If any of the fellows from the maintenance shop showed up he’d clobber that Gladdy for talking him into sitting for that bastard painting. There was no point in hoping nobody would come from the paper mill; the bosses would be there, the office men with their white hands, everybody important. Old Wainamoinen knew where the money was in this town.

  Carl Roote lay out on his back and floated, looking at sky. A jet going somewhere drew a thin perfect white line that began immediately to drift and shred. Seagulls glided across, screeching. Riding air. Bastard birds, he’d be happy to shoot every one of them, if they let him. If they hadn’t made it illegal. As a kid he used to put out food for them on a fish-hook attached to plenty of string. Whenever a bird swallowed the food on the hook and flew up level with the tree tops he yanked hard and brought it down.