The Barclay Family Theatre

by Jack Hodgins

  “Huh?” Conrad’s mind was obviously still on his uncompleted quest. “Whaddaya mean?” With his back to the youths he saw nothing but what was going on in his own busy mind. “If we’re still going to catch the wrestling we’d better get moving, I guess.” And drained his cup.

  Again Weins had waited too long. He should have broken his neck to get out before those boys had escaped. Now he could be stuck with this talking machine for the rest of the day.

  The man at the counter, however, provided another chance. With his till taken apart, he asked them to wait while he fixed it. Since it was Conrad who needed to pay, Weins made for the door. Out in the steam-bath heat he hoped for Hiroshi but had to settle for Eleanor. On her bedsheet she reclined with her blonde head against the trunk of a tree while she watched him crossing the street.

  He almost didn’t make it. An old man stroking by on a bicycle nearly ran him down before he reached the farther side. The handlebar grazed his arm. Had the old geezer done it on purpose? It was hard to tell. Without even missing a stroke he pedalled on by, and didn’t seem to be aware that Weins existed. A pair of flapping white pants was all he wore, and a yellow towel around his neck.

  Eleanor, who’d screamed and stood up, sat down again when a second cyclist turned out to be more alert. Pulling in to the curb and stopping, she put one foot on the concrete to steady her bike. “So sorry mister. Are you okay? Were you? Damaged?” Her voice was high, and thin. Each of her words seemed to tilt up at the end a little. A pretty voice. A pretty face too. Not a girl, exactly, but young.

  “It is! My grandfather!” she said. And flashed those snow-plough teeth at him. “He sees! Nothing!” Looking off down the street in the direction the old man had gone, she shook her head. With amusement or sadness — it was somewhere between. She even included Eleanor in her smile. “He rides like that, all day! He never! Stops! He follows the edge of the moat!”

  Weins laughed. Of course she was stretching the truth. “Never stops?” The old man’s tires had already bumped up onto the narrow park and he’d started around the curve. Weins could imagine him circling the moat — round and round the imperial palace all day. With this woman right behind.

  “From morning, until night! He never stops! Except for sleeping. Not since last Carissimassa!”

  More than eight months had gone by since Christmas. “And you — surely you don’t have to follow him everywhere.”

  “Oh yes.” She nodded her head rapidly, several times. “Oh yes. It is not! Safe! For him!” Then, perhaps noticing Weins’s doubt, she saw that her English had failed her. “Oh — not only I! All my family! We take turns! Otherwise, he may never! Get home! Safely!”

  Already she appeared to be restless. The old man was far around the curve of the moat, pedalling furiously. Another minute and he would be out of sight behind trees. Maybe that was his intention. Weins saw the poor old man cycling like mad all those months, hoping eventually to shake his pursuers and escape. But escape to what? How long could an old man survive unwatched in this Tokyo traffic?

  “So!” the girl said, pushing off from the curb. “I must go! So happy to see that my grandfather did not wound you!”

  The short conversation had given Conrad time to catch up. Typically, he wasn’t interested in finding out what had gone on, he was still obsessed with his only topic. “Listen,” he said. “In the modern world it’s not easy to know these things. I read in the paper about this guy that went way up north — up to the Yukon — on a hunting trip. You know — one of those lifetime dreams — and shot himself this beautiful albino caribou. An albino, Jake. Can you imagine how excited he was?”

  Eleanor sighed a ribbon of shredded smoke. “Oh Conrad.”

  Did he talk in his sleep as well? When an older woman looked around for someone younger to latch onto, was she willing to settle for this? Weins tried to imagine the pimply youth who could qualify for inhabiting his side of the bed. If Mabel was willing to put up with his talking her ear off, would he in return be willing to wake up at five every morning to exchange sides of the bed with her? Her shoulder demanded it once a night. Would he be prepared, like Weins, to stumble in the dark around the foot of the bed to dive under the covers on the other side?

  “No kidding, this really happened.” Conrad was ready to act his hunting triumph out, given a chance, right here in the open air. “A beautiful big white fellow like something in one of those books — y’know? But do you think anyone understood what it meant?”

  Eleanor used the tips of her scarlet fingernails to rearrange the folds of her skirt. “Of course not, darling. Nobody understands these things but you.”

  “That poor guy, he was so pleased with himself too. He draped the animal over the front of his pickup and drove it down the main street of this little town, but the kids went nuts!” Out went the arms, down came the hands on the top of his head, out bugged the eyes. “Do you know what I’m saying? The whole town went crazy, they nearly wrecked his truck. They threw rocks, they jumped up on the back and hammered on his roof, they chased him with clubs. He was so scared he got out of there as fast as he could to save his own neck.”

  “Good for them,” Weins said, and raised an eyebrow at Eleanor, who smiled. “You can’t get away with things like that any more, he’s lucky they didn’t throw him in jail.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” Conrad was shouting now. “That’s just the point. Nobody understands the importance of these things. What’s happened to ritual?”

  Weins couldn’t resist. “I heard about one of those Australian tribes that knock a front tooth out of a boy at a certain age, to show he’s a man. And carve pictures into his chest.”

  Conrad gaped.

  “Well, there are days when I could happily perform that front-tooth ceremony myself,” Eleanor said. “Today is one of them. And if you decide to go Australian, don’t forget the tribe that drills a hole in the base of a boy’s penis when he reaches puberty.”

  Conrad’s face lit up. Was this more to his taste? “A hole? They do that? My god!” His hand came down on the top of his head. In all his research how had he missed this goody? His eyes wide, he searched the world for someone who was equally impressed.

  “Get out the electric drill,” Eleanor said to Weins. “We’ll put him out of his misery.”

  If this was what Conrad was looking for, there was nothing left on his face to show he had found it. His excitement had somehow turned to distaste. They could knock out his teeth, carve up his chest, put a disk in his lip if they wanted, but nobody was going to monkey with his dick. And it was all, to judge by the furious scowl, the fault of Jacob Weins. He turned and walked away with his hands jammed down in his blue-jean pockets. Was he hoping they’d call him back?

  “He used to be fun when I met him,” Eleanor said. “Why do I pick such duds?”

  It was a question worth asking about. With so many men to choose from, why did Eleanor always pick out the worst? Didn’t she have any taste? What she had was a talent for finding them in the damnedest holes and then discovering when she’d dragged them into the light of day they weren’t all she had hoped. Weins had no idea where she’d found the first half-dozen or so, or even the first one or two she’d married. He did recall a Frenchman with a nasal drip she’d met on a Pacific cruise. In France, they were told, he’d been a teacher with a reputation for beating students. Deprived of students, he took to beating her, until she kicked him out. One husband was a fellow she’d brought back from a week of gambling in Reno. She hadn’t exactly won him in a slot machine but she called him the One-armed Bandit and joked about pulling his lever. He was a farm-machine salesman from Arkansas with three little hillbilly kids who said yawl if you asked them to, for a laugh. The four of them lasted a year and a half in her house before heading back to the States. Conrad’s background was pretty conventional, if you believed what you were told: for Eleanor he’d deserted a job, a wife, and two little kids Back East. Nothing else seemed to matter a damn. She’d fo
und him in a neighbourhood pub somewhere. Lined up with others on a makeshift stage, he was a contestant in a wet-jockey-shorts contest, on a Friday night. While all the others wore colours from mustard yellow to blue, Conrad wore pristine white, bought by his wife back home. The colours had nothing to do with whether you won or lost but something else did — and Conrad, Eleanor said, was something else. Whether this meant he had won was something Weins didn’t know, and he didn’t intend to ask.

  For Eleanor, Conrad’s sulking was apparently an excuse to break into song. It was her habit, anyway, to thread snatches of music through the gaps in her own conversation. Opera songs were her favourite, though she’d been known to stoop to Country as long as it was mournful enough. For the purpose of this trip she was naturally specializing in Madama Butterfly, though he wouldn’t have known if Mabel hadn’t asked. Weins had never seen an opera in his life, nor wanted to.

  Perhaps singing not only screened out the noises other people made but helped her organize her thoughts as well. And line up accusations. “And so?” she said now, cocking an eyebrow at Weins. “You left poor Mabel watching that play by herself?”

  When he nodded she put on a stern-actress face and shook her head. “Poor woman. Poor any woman in the world with a husband retired!”

  Was she joking? He couldn’t tell. What would she know about husbands who’d been retired? Any of hers who hadn’t died before they got that far she’d divorced while they were still young enough to earn her alimony payments.

  Whether she knew what she was talking about or not, it was an excuse for another performance. “I swear they retire on purpose in order to shackle you with chains of guilt and fear!” Was this a speech from a play she’d acted in once? The way her exaggerated hand movements seemed to take in trees and even the passersby suggested practice. “They shake off the single career of their lives and hand you your own last full-time job, which is to watch their every move for the first sign they are falling apart. Don’t take your eyes off me now, they say, not for the rest of my life! If you look away for a minute I’ll go into the final decline and it will be nobody’s fault but yours.”

  Weins swallowed a temptation to ask if that was the reason her taste in men had shifted to a taste for boys.

  Eleanor’s script did not take Conrad into account. She confronted Weins, face to face, with both hands on her hips. “How could you leave her there? Do you think she’s enjoying the play? All she can think of is that you’re out here somewhere.” Weins could tell from the look on her face that the actress in her was winding up for a knock-out line. And here it came, in a stage whisper, with her face pushed close to his. “She’s probably wondering, darling, how long it will take you to find yourself at the bottom of somebody’s lake.”

  Oregon. Weins turned away and walked to the fence that ran along the drop to the moat. It was in that sand-dune park, he remembered, that Mabel had discovered people were eager to pay her for her new-found hobby, they wanted to buy her drawings. In his retirement, she said, she’d found herself a career. Together they laughed at the thought. After selling a dozen sketches of dunes and half-buried trees to a woman from Austin, Texas, she got the giggles. The whole business seemed so ridiculous. How did it feel, she said, to be married to Grandma Moses? In bed that night they’d giggled and snorted together. When she was rich and famous would he mind being one of those men who were kept, those gigolos? They’d laughed so hard at that the springs of the truck protested and they’d had to duck their heads down into their sleeping-bags. Inside, they’d laughed even harder, they held their breaths and exploded like a couple of kids. Worse than a couple of kids, they decided they didn’t care who heard them, they laughed out loud. People would think they were tickling each other, carrying on in the dark. Eventually Mabel rolled close and held his hand, she wanted to know if they could stay in that park for a while, instead of hurrying on in their usual way, so she could do some sketches of the dunes. They lay like that, on their backs, and held hands until the caw-cawing of crows in the trees shattered the quiet of dawn. He’d managed to stay in that campsite for several days for her sake before the urge to move on became something he couldn’t stand. Faced with spoiling everything for her anyway, he found himself considering the little lake. The next thing he knew he was considering it from the bottom.

  Forty or fifty feet below him now the water was thick with streaks of different greens, like Mabel’s pea soup when you stirred it up. Was it true he’d ruined the play by walking out? He supposed it was. At the very least he’d made it less enjoyable than she’d hoped. After giving her a scare like the one in Oregon you could hardly expect her to relax when he was on the loose. Was it honest concern for his good or only guilt? He’d never know. Mabel had always put his welfare ahead of her own — he’d assumed she’d done it out of love but maybe she’d had other reasons as well. If Eleanor was right he’d been guilty of a kind of blackmail, along with every other retired man in the world.

  But Weins had no talent for brooding in public. Too easily distracted, he would usually decide to put it off until he was alone — and then forget. The distraction this time was a confusion of gabbling voices from up the path. Squinting, he could make out a half-dozen figures, bending, scooping, turning their raised rear-ends this way and that. Gardeners, weeding the flowers? They appeared, rather, to be sweeping up leaves. He wondered if they followed this tree-shaded path the full way around the moat once a day, going around in circles like the ancient cyclist. If so, were they ever invited across?

  Here the moat was as wide across as a six-lane highway. On the farther side, a lush tangle of growth swept down the steep slope from the base of the trees to trail leaves and vines along the water’s surface. “Thinking of swimming across?” Eleanor said, behind him. He wasn’t, but now that she’d brought it up he was sure he could make it, if he survived the initial drop down the bank and guards didn’t pop out from behind those trees to shoot him. There didn’t seem to be any alligators around, or crocodiles. If he stripped and dog-paddled across, would the Emperor be willing to entertain an interloper shivering wet in jockey shorts? There were questions he wanted to ask. Would a man like Hirohito, for instance, ever allow himself to be retired — even by a cataclysmic force of nature?

  “A few minutes ago a young man stopped to talk,” Eleanor said. “Told me if you rent one of the little rowboats down there and get across to the other side you’ll see it’s crawling with snakes.”

  What kind of a moat was it where a person could rent a dinghy? This wasn’t Disneyland. Naturally there would have to be snakes, and maybe land-mines as well. Otherwise His Imperial Highness might as well be living in an apartment block downtown, with his name on the door.

  Beneath a weeping willow that hung over the shallow water where the moat widened for a sharp turn, a white bird walked with slow deliberate head-jabbing steps, as if he were sneaking up on something. “A crane?” Weins asked.

  “An egret.” How did she know these things? She moved in close beside him and pressed her face against his arm. “Poor Jacob Weins,” she said. “I think he’s decided to dislike the person he used to be, and hasn’t yet found the person he wants to become.” Suddenly she put a hand on his shoulder, stood up on her silver-painted toes, and planted a warm kiss on his lips.

  Weins felt his face getting red. This woman had always liked to leave him gaping foolishly. An eccentric from the beginning, she considered him far too square. But the arrival of the street-cleaners amongst them saved him from having to react. A little old bent-over woman, sweeping leaves into her metal scoop with a broom made from a handful of willow twigs, paused in front of Weins and looked up at his face. Grinning, she reached out to whisk up a leaf from between his feet. In this heat she appeared to be dressed for winter. Under her huge straw hat a towel draped over her head was pinned under her chin. Thick green wool socks were pulled up over her slacks, which were themselves beneath a heavy black skirt. One of her gloves was white, the other brown, both were
dirty and worn.

  “Kon-ni-chi-wa,” Eleanor said. Trust her to have brushed up on the lingo. Enough to impress the natives at least. “O-gen-ki de-su da?”

  The old woman bowed several more times, to Eleanor, to Conrad. But it was Weins she was grinning so cheekily at while she rattled off a long rapid string of Japanese sounds. “I don’t know what she’s saying,” Eleanor said, “but it’s you she seems to be taken with.”

  “One of her own generation,” Weins said, and shrugged. Of course he didn’t mean it — at least he hoped this wrinkled old face was a few years older than he was. But there were some things you wanted to say before someone else said them, or worse.

  The old woman found him so fascinating that she reached up with one of her hands — the one in the soiled white glove — and touched his shoulder. What was she saying to him? Was there something she wanted him to do?

  Eleanor laughed. “That’s as high as she can reach. She’s admiring your ears.”

  His ears? Admiring his oversize ears? If anything she was making fun of them. If she was, it must be because they were burning now, as they sometimes were, and red. Hadn’t she ever been told that the Japanese were famous for being polite? Maybe she had, but someone else had told her old people could get away with anything, so long as they smiled while they were doing it.

  Talking and laughing at the same time, she yanked on the towel that was draped over her head, as if she would rip it off.

  Eleanor laughed and pushed her forehead against Weins’s arm. “I think she’s telling you if you wore a rag like that one over your head your ears wouldn’t have got so burnt!” Turning to the old woman, who was evidently prepared to abandon Weins in favour of her fellow workers down the path, she said a few more of her memorized Japanese words from the guide book. Mouthing each syllable with separate effort. “Domo! Domo go-shin-se-tsu ni! Kan-sha shi-ma-su.”