The Barclay Family Theatre

by Jack Hodgins

  You had to punish greed. Seagulls would eat anything at all and so asked for what they got. Tourists said, Oh aren’t they beautiful, so graceful! But Carl thought of the way they hounded you for food, the way they’d gobble up a fish’s bloody guts. You had to stomp on gluttony.

  He lay out, relaxed, flat on his back. He would lie like this in the back of the family pickup when he was a kid, eyes closed, feeling the wheels beneath taking him steadily toward some place he couldn’t see. Relaxed, a sense of motion, surprise. Smelling the dirt and sawdust and rotting leaves that danced around him on the floor of the pickup’s bed. You trusted the truck to take you there, you trusted the Old Man to drive safely and quickly and to know where he was going. Just as you knew that if you let go, if you relaxed, the water would hold you up, keep you floating, even when the waves hit.

  Then, treading water a hundred yards out from shore, he watched the ferry move out of the loading slip and pass silently along the opposite shore, heading for the open strait and the mainland. The waves would be a few minutes crossing the bay, and then they would toss him like a piece of kelp. Behind the ferry the houses in the subdivision were still and quiet in the sunlight; they might have been empty, every one. He could pick out the ones he had built, before. Carl Roote, Building Contractor. Before it had become necessary to get the job at the paper mill, in maintenance, patching up other people’s rotten work.

  Their owners would live in those houses five years, if they were like the others around here, before they moved on to another. While Carl Roote rented old Wainamoinen’s basement.

  He couldn’t see the basement from here, but he could see the A-frame top floor standing up above the trees. And through the arbutus he could make out Carrie Payne on the middle-floor deck, looking this way. He raised an arm to her, in case she saw, but she made no gesture at all in return.

  It was Kit O’Donnell who returned his wave, walking along the beach directly below the house. She was in her bikini, flapping a huge towel in the air. You couldn’t help wanting to move in closer, to see. Carl Roote started to swim.

  He came out of the water streaming wet, laughing, fingering back his hair. He pulled out the waistband of his trunks to let air inside, to keep the cloth from clinging like a piece of seaweed.

  “Well,” he said.

  And “Well,” she said, and spread out her towel on the stone shelf. She lived by herself down in Kennedy’s boathouse and could have done her swimming there, but she liked this spot. Fewer crabs, she said, and laughed.

  Skinny as a two-by-four but still that bathing suit drew the eyes. Two little pieces of rag. She twisted in the skinny body as if there was another her, inside, separate. And tossed her hair. And spoke with a phony English accent.

  She was a teacher. Hardly more than a girl herself, he’d say, but still she was paid to teach teenagers older than Sparkle.

  Carl Roote slapped his belly, still hard as it had ever been, though thicker, and danced on his feet on the hot stone. “Mrs. Payne is home,” he said.

  She looked up the cliff and of course saw nothing. “Oh,” she said. Then looked down at his hairy feet.

  “Stupid woman,” he said.

  “To see God in a bathroom mirror.” She put a toe in the water, danced back. He could have counted the ribs; and the small black moles on her back.

  “G’on in,” he said. “It’s a shock at first but you get used of it.”

  “I saw Gladdy earlier. The two of you were out here like a pair of seals. I couldn’t resist coming down. It’s wonderful that she hasn’t given up swimming.”

  “Aw Gladdy’s gone up, to get supper. She’s probably gabbing away with Carrie Payne if I know her at all, or across the fence. That woman would talk to a statue if there was nothing else.” He knew his own voice sounded as if he was bragging. As if he had married the only friendly woman in the country. As if nosy was a virtue.

  But she didn’t dash into the water, or walk in. She crossed her ankles and sat down — folded down — onto her towel, and frowned at a cluster of rocks. “I wonder if it’s even possible to imagine what it must feel like to be them right now.”

  “The Paynes.”

  She nodded, then threw back her head and scanned the sky. You never knew, either, what a girl like that was thinking about. Suddenly she slapped her hand on the rock beside her to tell him to sit down.

  He did, too, and tried to hide his feet down under a cluster of mussel shells and kelp. A crab brushed past his toes and scurried for new cover. “I guess it’s not really all that fantastic an idea after all,” he said. “My grandmother . . . they figured she was dead once and then she up and came alive again.”

  She looked at him. “Really?” She pulled her lips back over her teeth in a way that some speech teacher must have taught her. This was a great town for speech teachers. Kids learned to talk as if they’d been brought up in bloody Buckingham Palace.

  So he was conscious of his own voice, flat and rough as a fresh-sawn board. “I was a kid at the time. She got blood poisoning from something, in her hand, in one of the fingers. She died in the hospital, the doctor even sent my grandfather home to break the news. But she revived after that, and they had to call him back.”

  She watched him speak, her own lips moving with his, and smiled when he stopped. “Oh but that’s different. That’s a doctor’s stupidity.”

  “I could hardly stand to be in the same room with her for a long time after that. A big woman, sitting in one corner of her kitchen with that crippled hand in her lap. Like someone who knew something the rest of us had to wait for.”

  She drew both bony knees right up under her chin. He could see hairs curling out from under the suddenly stretched-tight bikini. “Children,” she said, “see things magnified a dozen times. As I believe flies do, or bees.”

  “So it’s not so far-fetched,” he said. “And then there’s that story in the Bible, that fellow.”

  She laughed. “Oh but such nonsense has been said about that!” When she said “nonsense” it sounded like a word she’d invented herself, a special velvet word. “Do you think if he believed even for a minute that Lazarus really was dead he’d have been able to raise him up? The only reason he could do it was he knew better than to believe in death at all.”

  “And so Mrs. Payne?”

  “Is fooling herself.”

  He set his jaw and nodded. Though, somehow, it was a disappointment. You needed a little excitement now and then. Or at least the possibility.

  “Anyway,” he said, “that’s two people won’t be there at the old man’s show tonight.”

  “The only people who won’t. I heard they used the phone book to make up the guest list.”

  He snorted. “They didn’t waste their time inviting people who can’t afford to buy. But that still leaves more people than I want to have finding out I was fool enough to sit and let him paint me.”

  She put a hand on his knee and laughed, showing him all her teeth. “In the old days mostly they painted royalty. And the nobility.” And shook her head at the thought, stirring up her hair. “Count Carl Roote!”

  The hand left, went back to join the other in a bridge across the back of her neck. She didn’t shave her armpits. That was one thing you’d never find on Gladdy, a single hair or even stubble under her arms. If I wanted to be a European, Gladdy said, you might persuade me to chew garlic but I’d never let my legs become jungles.

  “He should of painted Carrie Payne,” he said. “Her and her damn mirror!”

  She didn’t laugh at that. Because of course you couldn’t make fun of everything in this world. A few things were beyond that.

  So he said, “They’re quiet enough people. If you got to have people living on top of you they’re good enough. Hardly move, hardly talk. When we lost the house Gladdy didn’t know how she could stand living so close to people, but she shut up about it when she saw how quiet those two are.”

  “And their girl.”

  “Was a friend of
our kid’s. A nice enough girl. Quiet, too, until the two of them got alone in a bedroom with a radio. Then watch out.”

  Then suddenly Kit O’Donnell was on her feet. “Well if I sit here all day talking to you that sun will go down and I’ll never get my swim.”

  And ran in, squealing. On those skinny legs.

  Sparkle Roote wouldn’t go to the stupid old art show if they paid her. To see a bunch of dumb paintings by that old fart. What was so special about him? Personally she wouldn’t walk across the street.

  She ate her supper with them all right. There was no way for an only child to avoid that without causing a great big commotion. She tried not to look at her dad, who sat with both arms laid out on the table while he slurped up his macaroni without lifting his hand more than two inches from the plate. In his soiled white undershirt. Black hairs growing on his shoulders. She didn’t want to look at her mother either. There was something disgusting about the excitement that flushed up her cheeks, shone in her eyes. She couldn’t have stood to see her flouncing around like a lady at that art show. She’d eat her supper with her eyes on the open pages of her book Lucky at Love and then she’d play records all night.

  There wouldn’t be a person left in this building to bother. She could turn the noise up as loud as she wanted. Even the Paynes would be gone again.

  She would dream of being a television actress.

  Anna Payne had wanted to be a television actress too. First she wanted to be a nurse, but they said with her health it was a silly idea. So the two of them had planned to become tall and slender women who slunk and pouted through prize-winning dramas. Anna would get a part in a doctor series, she’d be a television nurse. Sparkle would be a bitch, a sex-goddess, a destroyer of men.

  “By then,” she said, “you won’t need your medicine any more.”

  But Anna had shaken her head. “I’ll always need my medicine. This thing is part of me. I’ll have it with me all my life, to the very end. Like a twin, or a lover.”

  Though other kinds of lovers, too, were important.

  Sparkle would sleep with every man that worked for the television company and then pick out the half-dozen she wanted to keep with her all the time. Anna would be on the verge of marrying the doctor-star of her show when a wealthy South American would fall in love with her and spirit her away to his plantation where they would live in sin. Whatever that was.

  “But isn’t eleven too young to be planning these things?” Anna said.

  And of course Sparkle, who always knew better, said, “No, you’re never too young to plan your life.”

  The alternative was to end up like Mom and Daddy, or Mr. and Mrs. Payne, or like nearly everyone else they knew.

  She wished with all her heart that it was possible for the police to come and take Mr. and Mrs. Payne away to jail and then put nooses around their necks and drop the trapdoors open to let them snap dead like a couple of chickens. But that was not possible any more in this country and so she wished that the two of them would be put in a prison until they were old old old and would rather die than come out.

  “It wouldn’t hurt you a bit to come with us,” her mother said.

  And her dad: “If I have to go . . .”

  She told them she’d rather be tied naked on an ant pile. That shut them up.

  It’s somewhere in the middle of the week, thought David Payne, but the day escapes me because it doesn’t really matter and I’m sitting here at this table beginning to hate my wife. Trying to eat, God help me, trying to bring the fork up coldly, silently, with food I don’t want and will never be able to keep on my stomach while she stares out that window and waits for me to finish. Like a parent who has taken his child to the bathroom and stands at the door, waiting, looking off somewhere else as if it doesn’t matter but really saying with every line of posture and angle of bone, “Hurry up and get your business over with, so the more important aspects of life may continue.”

  David Payne was beginning to hate, more than anything else, the dark line of tension that creased down the centre of her forehead.

  The air in the room was stagnant. All of it tasted secondhand in his mouth, warm and still and slightly sour. She had gone out onto the deck for a while and so a little of the sea air had managed to creep inside but old lady Roote had said something that sent her scurrying back inside to lock the sliding doors. She sat now on the arm of a chair by the window, like a bird ready for immediate flight. Despite the waiting, the days of waiting, the days of sitting and sweating in the heat, her white suit was still impeccable — uncreased, unsoiled, undisturbed.

  Her voice, too, was as perfect and cool.

  “I have no idea whether that arbutus is a blessing or not. How many people have come in here and said, ‘Oh you’ve got to get them to cut that tree down so you’ll have a better view’? But then, the tree itself is our view, isn’t it David? It fills up everything and still we can see between some of its branches and watch the swimmers, follow the ferries in and out.”

  He had no idea what she was getting at. Three days of sitting in a mortuary had made him uninterested in anything she could say. I know what has happened to me and to her and to Anna, he thought, but no amount of sitting in the damn place waiting for something to happen will ever convince me that any of it is real. Because you don’t really believe, despite the knowing and the feeling and the way you can see people all around beginning to treat you as if you’ve suddenly grown an extra skin of mustard yellow, you don’t really believe for a moment that it could really have happened to you and that there is nothing you can do to reverse it.

  “Remember Aunt Gwennie at Christmas, when she came out from the prairies, she said My word that’s a leaf tree but it’s still holding onto every one of them at the end of December. You said it’s an evergreen despite these big leaves and she didn’t believe you. She said evergreen had needles. She said all those pine and firs and hemlocks were hard enough to get used to in the middle of the winter but this, this was some kind of freak. So you had to admit that yes, they did lose their leaves, in July. You told her they went dry and yellow and fell off like big crisp flakes all over the yard. And then you told her the special part: that not one of those leaves fell off the tree until the new ones had already opened up like flower buds on the end of every tiny twig and shone like fake wax leaves in the sun!”

  He stood up and carried his plate into the kitchen where he scraped the food off into the garbage container under the sink. Then he carried the other dishes in and put them in the sink. Yesterday’s dishes were still piled there, bits of food hardened, turning black. And dishes from the day before. I am an architect, he thought. Within a year I will have built up the healthiest architecture firm in this city and by that time we’ll be ready to build ourselves the house we’ve been dreaming about and planning for a dozen years if the world hasn’t fallen in around our ears before then.

  Forgetting for the moment that it already had.

  He returned to the living-room and saw her from behind. The back of her neck. If you want to know whether you love someone, his mother used to say, then approach her from behind and see what the back of her neck does to you. That is the most vulnerable spot, or seems it, and if you love someone you will want to weep at the knowledge of how vulnerable she is. Why do you think a mother weeps at a wedding? It isn’t the music, it isn’t the happiness, it isn’t even the unhappiness. It’s the sight of her son’s bare neck turned to her and to life as if to the executioner’s axe.

  But Carrie’s hair was up, swept up, like a girl in a brown old-fashioned photograph. Even at a time like this she made sure not a hair was out of place. And her neck with that white smooth skin made him think of something someone had laboured over for days and weeks polishing to a perfect shape and shine. But it was a rigid thing, as marble works of art must be, and not in the least vulnerable.

  “Remember how she didn’t want to believe about the bark either! How you can hear it on certain days. How the trunk seems to
have swollen too big for its casing and so the bark on a hot day snaps and cracks and splits and curls up like scrolls and corkscrews and springs. For an afternoon or two it will sound as if the whole world is rustling old dry newspaper! And there it is, the brand-new skin beneath, pale and smooth and already doing all the things a tree’s bark is meant to do.”

  David Payne sat in a chair and put his feet up on a padded stool. There was always the chance she had decided not to go back. There was still the possibility that when she’d stepped inside this small house full of stale air and neglect she realized that all she was doing was wearing herself out and that hope can last only so long.

  He really did, David. He really did.

  Don’t.

  An unbelievable light from the mirror. I was blinded. White as snow-glare. And His voice.

  Stop it.

  Three days. Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up. Oh David, David, I know!

  He was aware that already there were some who were calling it more than a tragedy. Each time they left the house in their month-old station wagon there were people all down the street who, if this had been another time, another place, would gladly have thrown stones.

  I am beginning to hate my wife, thought David Payne. It’s somewhere in the middle of the week but the day escapes me because it doesn’t matter and I’m sitting here beginning to hate my wife. At a time when she needs to be loved, God help me, more than at any other time in her life.

  “The others will be right across the street from the . . . from the place,” she said. “At the art show. When it happens they’ll be right there, they’ll be the first to know. After us.”

  She looked at him for the first time since they’d come home. Her eyes, her pale face, were as rigid and polished as her neck. There was not a flush of doubt. Not a flicker of vulnerability.