The Barclay Family Theatre

by Jack Hodgins

  He’d devoted his life to that town. Though he’d made his living from running his store, all his energy, talent, and attention had gone into dreaming up schemes that were meant to put the town on the map. Imaginative attractions designed to bring in the tourist dollars. Expensive real estate developments to help them enter the twentieth century. Mill expansions to create new jobs. None of it had ever come to much in the end, but every failure had spurred him on to even greater attempts. Who cared if his giant cactus imported from Arizona had rotted and died? No one had ever rivalled his ability to bounce back from defeat with even greater and more imaginative ideas than before. And what had happened to it all? Once that slide had destroyed the town, it dispersed the people who’d elected him and eliminated his job. How could you be a mayor when there wasn’t any town left to be mayor of? Not only had that slide taken away his official reason for dreaming up schemes, but it had stolen his well-known talent for bouncing back as well.

  What was even worse, or seemed it, the slide had also gobbled up his famous wardrobe. These sticky Fortrel pants and pullover shirt that Mabel had bought in some department store were not the kind of thing he liked to wear. As mayor he’d had a closetful of costumes. One for every occasion that came along in small-town life, some for no occasion at all, and every one of them felt exactly right. For holidays of an historical nature he’d had his Captain Vancouver outfit, an English naval officer’s uniform complete with three-cornered hat and telescope. Who cared if it strained a little at the buttons? When he wanted to please the native population he wore his papier-mache Thunderbird costume with its enormous wings and its beak that stuck out from his forehead. It brought back memories of all those totem poles which had been taken away to museums. On ordinary days he had a wider range to choose from — his Dieter Fartenburg logger outfit, his Big Depression beggar’s rags, his twentieth-century astronaut suit. The last was a favourite with the young. Had anyone ever suggested that he hadn’t been colourful enough? Only he knew how necessary those outfits had been.

  But a person who was not a mayor could not go around dressed as an early explorer. A person who was not a mayor could not show up at meetings dressed as a man from space. He’d felt naked ever since. He’d worn nothing but ordinary pants and shirt like these since the day of the slide, which was to say that he’d been parading a certain kind of nakedness through the world. He couldn’t imagine one of those wrestlers wearing such humdrum clothes. When they weren’t stripped down for the ring, what did they wear? A long kimono, maybe, but he doubted it. The only kimonos he saw on the streets were worn by little old ladies. He remembered seeing a photo of a wrestler once, leaning against a doorway in an alley while he held a little dog’s leash. The man had been wearing nothing except his skimpy loincloth, a dirty one at that, with his stomach bare and round as a baby’s in the sun. But an alley wasn’t quite the same as being on the street. Surely he didn’t go visiting dressed like that, or down to the corner store. Yet in a shirt and baggy pants he’d be transformed from giant athlete into pitiful slob. What other choice did he have?

  No use asking a question like that of the only person out there that he recognized. Mabel’s sister. Eleanor had no idea how anyone could live a life that wasn’t the same as her own. Beneath one of the trees of the park on the edge of the moat she was draping a white sheet over a bench and tugging at corners to get it hanging just right. Who else but Eleanor would steal a hotel’s sheets just so she wouldn’t get dirt on her filmy white dress? A stranger might wonder if she were preparing herself for a modelling session. From a certain point of view he might be right. This woman was convinced there were unseen photographers snapping secret pictures of her wherever she went. The world for her was not only a stage, it was also a series of backdrops for those picture hounds who couldn’t resist when they saw a mature woman of considerable beauty and class. Or who knows? — recognized her from Crossroads of Life. Had that silly day-time series been seen in Japan? Weins doubted it. When no one had watched it at home, why should foreign countries pay for the privilege of letting it bore them to death?

  Always on the look-out for eyes that watched, she spotted him in the window and waved, a beckoning gesture. Wouldn’t he like to come down? Even from here at this fifth-floor window he would see the brilliant red of her nails as she took a cigarette from the package at her waist and tapped it before she put it between her lips. Did she expect him to race down four flights of stairs to light it? She would claim there were men who had. She knew how startling she was, in any landscape. Here, she had chosen white. Her tanned skin, her nails, were the only colour. Even her eyelids would be the pearly-white of an oyster shell. Against a paler background, he’d seen her decked out in scarlet, from turban to shoes. The opposite to a chameleon, she chose to be always seen. More than that, she chose to be always the only thing your eyes would permit you to see.

  She waved again. Not enough people were paying attention to her. Where had she installed that lover-boy she’d dragged along on this trip? It was part of his job to make sure she was constantly the centre of someone’s attention. Why, for that matter, wasn’t she off in the city shopping somewhere? The excuse she gave Mabel for avoiding that Kabuki play had been a desire to get into one of those department stores where girls at the door bowed as you passed by to go out. After being admired, her second favourite activity was buying things for herself: clothes, makeup, and jewellery. Anything that glittered enough she was willing to hang on her body. With that white dress she was wearing there would have to be silver: necklaces, bracelets, even (he could see the light glint off it from here) a silver chain for her ankle. When they packed to go home she’d throw everything she’d brought with her into the garbage, or give it all to a maid, then fill her suitcase with all the stuff she had bought. When she stepped off that plane in Vancouver she’d make sure that anyone looking would know she had been to Japan. Pearls, cameras, oystershell dolls, she’d even got one of those expensive kimonos that girls here bought only once in their lives — for their wedding. Weins doubted that she’d have the nerve to wear it off the plane, but considering the frequency of her own marriages she was probably smart to have it on hand. A woman like her must eventually get tired of trying to think up something new in the way of a wedding dress.

  She’d given up on trying to lure him down. In fact she was making a point of not looking in his direction. Something much more interesting, her posture implied, was going on down the street. It was enough to make him decide. If he went down now to talk to her he would be saving time when Hiroshi came along, which ought to be any minute.

  But crossing the lobby he was spotted by her gigolo, her whatsisname, who sat behind one of the little low tables in the tea room. His companions, a pair of boys who could have been any age from fourteen to twenty-four, turned to look. “Jake! Hey Jake!” Half-rising from his chair, Conrad waved an arm. “C’m here!”

  Weins cringed. Nobody called him Jake. No one had called him Jake since childhood until this fool had taken it up. Within fifteen minutes of meeting Weins he’d announced that Jacob was too old-fashioned a name to be used today. They weren’t living in Bible times. He couldn’t call him “Weins” like other people, of course, that would be far too normal; he had to make it sound as if they’d been pals for a hundred years.

  Aside from cringing there wasn’t much else to do. Stepping out of sight wouldn’t help since Conrad (what the hell was his last name anyway?) came out to the lobby after him. “Come in and meet my friends.”

  If Conrad had friends, Weins was a giant carp. He couldn’t imagine anyone standing him for longer than twenty minutes, let alone calling him friend. “I haven’t got time. I’m on my way out. You go on back to your pals.”

  “Going out where?”

  Had Conrad spent the afternoon drinking? His eyes were the colour of fish’s innards, his breath like rotting hay. “To a wrestling tournament. I’ll stop in for a drink with you later, when I get back.”

  Another fata
l mistake. And stupid besides. Naturally, wrestling was something this creep had done in college. “A champion too, it was the only thing I lived for.” He expanded his chest inside that golfer’s shirt. “Ontario champion two years in a row. I’ll come along.” And hooked both thumbs into the pockets of his skin-tight jeans.

  Weins could sometimes be stupid, but he was also quick to recover. “And leave your friends? Come on, I’ll join you for five minutes before I go.” Steering the Ontario champion back into the tea room wasn’t hard — wrestler or not, he was loose and light as a girl. With his build he might have been a tennis star but Weins didn’t believe for a minute the guy had ever been on a mat. The only thing he’d ever been champion at was talking.

  Of course Weins had already discovered, from just a few unavoidable meals together, that Conrad never just talked. Like Eleanor, he preferred to put on a show. People at other tables would stop their conversations to watch. Talking, he bugged out his eyes, he threw out his arms, he clamped his hands on his head. He delivered each sentence like a small boy relating the most outrageous tale. “Do you realize what I just said? Do you have any idea what this means?” He wept, if necessary; he sweated, he pretended to faint. He threw his hands over his round boyish face, peeked through his fingers, stirred up his dark hair until it stood out in tufts all over his head. He acted out his stories and reacted to them at the same time — performer and audience both — a wide-eyed incredulous little boy who was wetting his pants with excitement and horror and anticipation and delight. Some people found him entertaining, but Weins couldn’t stand to be near.

  “Oh it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair,” he was saying now. What wasn’t fair was left for Weins to guess. The two youths already seemed to know. They nodded sympathetically and sipped their tea and looked at Weins with grave compassionate faces when Conrad asked why it was that North America had never adopted an official initiation rite for manhood. Was Weins supposed to supply an answer? He wasn’t even sure he grasped the question. “What we’re talking about here is a manhood ceremony, one of our own so we could know! A simple initiation rite, so that a guy like me doesn’t have to be wondering still at the age of thirty-three!”

  Wondering about what? Weins didn’t want to imagine. The guy had deserted a wife and two kids in order to spend his life in the sack with Eleanor Barclay-Broune. To some, that would be proof enough that he’d entered puberty at least. Maybe he wanted proof that he’d survived it. Why should Weins, who had better things to do, provide the reassurance? Let Conrad confront his doubts alone.

  And doubts of some kind was what he was yammering on about. Did an African pygmy have these doubts? The youths didn’t know. A headhunter in New Guinea knew, and had the scars to prove it. And what about that Amazon tribe that stuck a wooden disk in the boy’s bottom lip? “Just think how much simpler adolescence would be for everyone if all you had to do was kill a rhinoceros with your own two hands and eat its testicles raw!”

  What would this jerk say next? Weins made no effort to hide his disgust, it was time he got out of here. No one seemed to be paying him any attention, no one had come to take his order, no one seemed to care about anything except what this fool would come out with next. What was taking Hiroshi so long?

  “Now I want to tell you people something true.” This happened, he said, when he was working in a logging camp as a youth — “in your part of the country, Jake. There was this huge bohunk chokerman, I can’t remember his name, this big lummox with dirty filthy longjohns rotted out at the armpits . . . oh good Christmas did he smell!” The little-boy face was both disgusted and delighted. He drew out the important words as if they had a taste he loved to roll around in his mouth. How much of this made any sense to the boys across the table Weins couldn’t guess, but they seemed satisfied just to watch the performance itself. “What the hell was his name?” A hand slapped itself down on top of his head to help him remember. “Seven feet tall, a gorilla — Christ I admired anybody who could stand to be so foul. I wanted to be just like him — big and ugly and stupid and oh, to smell so foul!”

  His bugged-out eyes were waiting for Weins or someone to say they couldn’t believe a person like Conrad could ever have admired such a pig, but he’d wait until hell froze over before Weins would co-operate. Let’s get this done with was all he was tempted to say.

  “I remember” — whatever it was he remembered it was enough to make him bounce in his chair, and bubbles appear on his lips — “I remember one morning, I was standing beside him at the sink, both of us shaving, I felt nearly faint from that delicious hideous smell, that stink, while I scraped off my few weak little whiskers — I probably had about six of them at the time. And he let the water out of the sink . . . and there . . . at the bottom . . . was this filthy sludge, this mat of whiskers, each one as wide as it was long for Christ sake!” In disgust he leaned his face away from the imagined mess on the table. The two youths moved forward, as if they expected to find something hideous on the table-cloth. “HEY — he nudges me with his elbow — HEY, LOOK AT DOT! WHAN YOU LEAVE SINK LIKE DOT THEN YOU KNOW YOU ARE MAN!” Horror! Conrad’s arms flew out, his head leapt back, one hand returned to slap on his forehead. “Oh my god I’ll never make it, I’ll never make it.” He sat upright again, his eyes wide. “Do you realize what I just said?” He meant all of them, and looked at each in turn. “Do you realize what I just said? Do you know what that must have meant to me? I just knew I would never make it, never!”

  The youths shook their heads, in sympathy, and started to rise. This seemed like a perfect time to escape — exactly what Weins himself was thinking. You leapt when he took a deep breath or you waited — who knows how long — for another. This creep had gone on long enough for him. But Conrad was letting no one escape, not yet. One hand clamped down on a youthful shoulder, the other rested on Weins’s right knee. The expression on his face turned from public horror to confidential wonder. He came as close as he was capable of to whispering. “My god, I guess you never know. Thirty-three years old, married twice, with two children, and you still don’t know.” The two youths might have been watching a madman; alarm was as strong as amazement in those eyes. “You take your first cigarette and you think, Is this it? You smash up your first car. You get pissed. You shoot a beautiful moose. You go behind the bushes with Knockers McKechnie, and even while you’re zipping up your pants you still don’t know for sure. It isn’t fair. They should send you out into the mountains for a month in the dead of winter, stark naked, and when you come back with a cougar’s eyeball between your teeth, they should give you a certificate to hang on the wall that says you are a man now, so stop torturing yourself.”

  What did Mabel’s sister ever see in this guy? Though she’d demonstrated over and over again that her taste in men was disastrous — feeble old crocks and vicious bullies and momma’s boys and dozens of others that Weins could barely recall — all of them had something to explain the attraction — money or power. What did this fellow have? Not money, that was for sure. The guy hadn’t paid for a meal since they’d arrived. And it couldn’t be a glamorous career — he was a salesman of some kind in Toronto. Lord knows it wasn’t brains. Could it be simply that he was younger than she was, and apparently healthy? Every time Weins picked up one of Mabel’s magazines he saw another article on this new trend of older women taking up with young men.

  Making fools of themselves, as far as he was concerned, but every old gal who thought she was somebody was getting herself a young stud. Magazines exaggerated everything, naturally, but take a look at Eleanor. She’d started herself out with a series of old goats who croaked, luckily, just as she’d planned, then worked her way down the scale until now, with this latest turkey, she’d got someone who was fifteen years younger than she was. Forty years younger if you wanted to take his behaviour into account. Even Jill, who wasn’t much past thirty herself, was shacking up with a boy — something her mother hadn’t known about until they’d arrived here. How much of it would Mab
el have to see before the idea started to appeal to her as well? If one old gal could make a fool of herself, why not another? Would she wait until he was dead, or dump him here?

  The youths climbed out from behind the little table and made it clear, in their English, that this had been a most enjoyable and educational conversation thank you. The taller one even added that he wished he could stay but could not do so. Then they made their escape. Weins stood up to follow, before the opportunity passed.

  “But wait . . .” There was something more that Conrad wanted to tell them yet. His hand reached out to stop the boys but both slim bodies neatly side-stepped it. Weins was not so lucky. Alone, he was Conrad’s only audience now. It was clear that it wasn’t enough. “I wanted to ask them if they had anything like that here. In an ancient culture like this, surely there are old ceremonies. Something that’s never told to outsiders.”

  The only ancient ceremony that could have been applied to Conrad with any success was beheading. Weins himself would offer to wield the sword. In ancient Japan this baby would have found the manhood test that he’d been looking for when he was ordered to kill himself while a witness stood over him waiting to lop off his head the minute he’d cut into his gut.

  “Nice boys,” Conrad said. And drank tea. “These people are so polite. But dammit, I was hoping they could fill me in on the local customs.”

  The nice boys, Weins could see, looked back over their shoulders and heaved with giggles. A local custom? Free of that restraining hand, and those eyes, they could laugh at the fool in the corner. Or was it fools? When their hands touched one another and then closed in what looked like a lover’s clasp, he suspected it was fools. All this talk of manhood rites must have been more entertaining than Conrad could ever have hoped. Weins laughed. “Those boys probably thought you were trying to pick them up,” he said. Oh, it was good to laugh at this creep! At them both! “They probably thought you wanted to make it a threesome.”