The Barclay Family Theatre

by Jack Hodgins

  Two weeks later my mother would still be worrying about the victims but the aunts would have written them into a three-act play which they staged in the garage of the Barclay dairy farm, two miles down the highway from our place. Neighbours, relatives, people of all ages paid a few cents for a ticket and sat on a kitchen chair or a block of wood to see what tales these crazy sisters had managed to spin from local events. Loggers would have been transformed into knights, and housewives into elegant ladies of the court, but you could tell, if you knew anything, that beneath all the melodrama was a story manufactured out of their neighbours’ lives. An invasion of privacy? Nobody seemed to mind. Suffer today, people said, and then watch yourself suffer all over again a week from now when the chenille bedspreads were parted on that piece of clothesline in the Barclay garage.

  Not that my mother objected to putting on plays. That was the one thing they did, in fact, that she found acceptable. Sometimes she even joined them. When they staged a medieval romance based on stories people told about Dennis Macken’s self-inflicted bachelorhood, she played the part of her own sister Frieda, the girl who’d turned him down and broken his heart and set him off on a career of escaping one unsatisfactory female after another in a trip around the world. Mabel and Gladdy and even timid Bella had roles as the other girls, though Gladdy could never be trusted not to add her own coarse observations, just to show she was different from all the others. Christina played the part of a rumoured African princess who kept him captive for several months for her own convenience. Mabel made faces at the audience and mocked the other actresses behind their backs and tried to steal the show. Frieda, of course, boycotted the performance and spent the afternoon with my grandfather out in the barn. It was Eleanor, sweet young innocent Eleanor playing the part of a dying invalid, who captured people’s hearts. Which demonstrated, my mother said, that there was a big difference between making fools of people and entertaining them. Eleanor now, she said, was an example of someone with a healthy attitude. Though she was the youngest in the family, with all those bad examples to follow if she’d wanted to, she did it all for fun and never meant people harm.

  She didn’t know, she didn’t know. Being the youngest of the family — in fact just a few years older than myself — Eleanor with her fluffy curls and her Shirley Temple dimples had already perfected the art of appearing innocent amidst the chaos of her own inventions. She was practising up, even then, to outdo every one of her sisters. How was it possible for my mother to forget the time Eleanor dressed herself up in torn clothes and smeared herself with ketchup to lie moaning out in the middle of the highway on a Saturday afternoon? Old Joseph Macken had driven straight into the ditch in order to avoid running over her. The whole neighbourhood came out to poke at her body to see if she was alive but eventually she roused herself and said she felt much better now and thought she’d just walk home.

  It was Eleanor who told it around the district that she’d found out she was actually adopted, not a Barclay at all like the rest of them, but a Polish princess. When people laughed and said they remembered my grandmother’s pregnancy, she narrowed her eyes and challenged them to ask about the baby who’d died and been replaced on the sly. Sometimes she slipped into a thick foreign accent, as if she thought that would reinforce her claim, and developed a taste for jewellery.

  A day without a manufactured crisis of some kind was a day sacrificed forever to the grey world of dullness, according to Eleanor. My parents, she claimed, were dull. And if I weren’t careful I too would grow up dull. If I watched her in action and picked up a few tips, on the other hand, there was still some hope that I might create myself a life of a little interest. For a boy.

  “For instance,” she said, “I bet you’ve never even put a box out on the highway on the end of a piece of string.”

  “Never,” I admitted.

  “What a poop!”

  To give her credit, she never entirely dismissed me when I confessed my innocence. She taught me instead. You put a box in the middle of the road, she said, and when someone stopped his car and got out to pick it up you pulled the string and stood up in the ditch to laugh at him. “Only I’ve got a better idea.”

  Her better idea was to fill the cardboard box with cow manure from the barn and wrap it in wedding paper topped with a bow. We spent a good half-hour getting it to look just right. It might have been an electric kettle or a waffle iron. We even stole an envelope from my grandmother’s drawer and wrote two names on it — Sam and Janet Evening — to make it look authentic. You could see by the way Eleanor admired the results that she hated to part with the parcel, it looked so pretty. She clearly thought she’d created a masterpiece.

  And so she had. At least that seemed to be the opinion of the drivers of three cars that stopped all at the same time when they saw it on the pavement just up the hill a few yards from the gate. Ducked down in the ditch in the thick tangled broom, Eleanor held her breath. Two men and a woman got out from their cars and stood over the parcel.

  “Someone must have dropped it on the way to a reception,” one of them said.

  “When are we going to jump up?” I whispered.

  “Shut up,” she said, and kept a hand over her mouth, perhaps to stifle her giggles.

  The drivers argued over what to do with the thing. One wanted to take it into my grandparents’ house, and one wanted to take it up to the general store. The woman was all for tossing a coin and keeping it. Obviously none of them trusted the others.

  “Now,” Eleanor said.

  “No,” I said. My heart was pounding. “Think . . . if they take it to the store . . . and it sits on the counter, smelling.”

  She looked at me and grinned. “You’re learning, kid.” The important thing, she had told me more than once, was not only to manufacture excitement but to sweep up as many unsuspecting people in it as possible. Then you knew you were living at the heart of drama.

  Yet once the drivers had settled the matter and driven off with the box, she decided that my brilliant idea was more the result of fear than superior talent. She and Gladdy rolled me up inside an old carpet and left me behind the dairy for nearly an hour. I couldn’t move. Inside that dirty thing I could hardly breathe. When they came to see if I was still alive they said they’d unroll me if I agreed to let them practise a home-permanent kit on my hair, but I refused. They sat on my head. When they asked me again I told them I was nearly dead and they would both be hanged. They rolled me down the slope to the edge of the creek and said they would drop me in if I didn’t agree. They wouldn’t hang, they said, because they would bury my body under the manure pile and no one would ever find me. For that matter, Eleanor said, no one would even miss me. I said they could use my hair to practise on, but only if they confined themselves to the ends, where it could be cut away.

  “Don’t you try and tell me this was entirely Eleanor’s fault,” my mother said. “Did you or did you not sit still while they did it to you?”

  I’d sat still, I said, but what choice did I have when they’d allowed nothing out of the carpet except my head?

  My mother said she guessed it was born right in me to be as bad as the rest. It couldn’t be helped. My father didn’t agree. I was a boy, he said, and there was still some hope if only I’d spend more time at home with my brother and sister, or doing chores, instead of hanging around with that bunch.

  But how could I take his advice? It wasn’t possible. Should I have refused to play the part of a rhinoceros in the Barclay Family Circus? Pacing on my hands and knees inside an overturned baby crib, I had little to do but ram my horny nose at the kids who poked their hands between the bars. Hardly melodramatic. Not when you considered that Mabel was dressed as the fat bearded lady you had to sneak into a darkened tent to view. And not when you considered that Eleanor, innocent Eleanor, set up business in the root cellar where she looked into an overturned fish-bowl and told children about futures so horrible that half of them left in tears. “Don’t go to sleep tonight,”
she told Cornelia Horncastle. “Your mother is looking for a chance to slit your throat.” Cornelia Horncastle got her money back, but Eleanor continued to indulge her imagination. My brother and sister were the Headless Twins. They mingled with the crowd in outfits that were built up on the shoulders to hide their heads, each with a papier-mache skull under an arm. When things threatened to get dull they picked a fight and rolled on the ground, puncturing bags of watered ketchup that splashed on people’s legs and smeared their clothes.

  The climax of the circus was a garage performance of a play in which a beautiful Polish princess, maddened by the loss of her prince in a noisy offstage battle, murdered the entire royal family before turning the gun on herself. Written by Eleanor, it was an obvious parable based on Noolie Dahlburg’s crazy behaviour when her husband Homer ran off with Greta Trent. Eleanor, of course, had the leading role. My mother had no lines to say this time, she was the servant who handed the princess my grandfather’s shotgun to do her dirty work with and was then rewarded for her loyalty with a blast of buckshot in the chest. My mother took advantage of her moment at centre stage to take longer to die than anyone else in the play. She staggered, groaned, gagged, rolled her eyes and stuck out her tongue, she slammed against first one wall and then the other, she pleaded with the audience for help, and dragged herself on her stomach across the floor to expire, at last, at the feet of the first row of spectators. The audience responded with a round of applause and she thanked them with a few more life-like twitches before she lay still.

  To put everyone back into a happy mood, the concert ended with what that cardboard sign promised would be “the mellow sounds of a sister act, imported at great expense from Hollywood.” From behind the hanging bedspreads a voice announced: “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FABULOUS BARCLAY SISTERS!” And there they were, when the makeshift curtains had parted, all seven of them lined up in a row, dressed in long slinky dresses glittering with sequins. One at a time, from oldest to youngest, each stepped out from the line, dropped a curtsey, and introduced herself. “I’m Frieda.” “I’m Lenora.” “I’m Christina.” “I’m Mabel.” “I’m Bella.” “I’m Gladdy.” “And I’m Eleanor the Tramp.” They hummed a note, then broke into a seven-part harmony version of “Apple Blossom Time” that called for swaying from side to side, kicking one leg out this way and the other out that. My father, who’d built the concession booths out of packing crates but refused to stay for the show, came early to pick us up and caught the last few minutes of the singing act by mistake. He closed his eyes and backed outside the garage, then went off to find my grandfather’s hiding-place. At least he could see that I had nothing to do with this. Dressed in my rhino costume I was sitting innocently there in the second row.

  The men in those women’s lives were going to have one time of it, my father said. Being one himself he ought to know. The men in those women’s lives would have much to endure. If my mother thought the worst crime was making fools of other people, my father thought the worst crime was making a fool of yourself. To him, drawing attention to yourself was virtually daring fate to drop you on your face, and bring you down to size. How did you think it felt to be married to one of these show-offs, and have to stand by and watch? The thing that saved my mother was that she restricted her bouts of exhibitionism to when she was with her sisters; the other six kept it up all the time. “Life at your place is so dull,” Eleanor said. “I don’t know how you can stand it.”

  I began to wonder myself. My parents were fairly quiet and sensible people. Everyone trusted them. Everyone counted on them to keep their word, to do the honourable thing, to be consistent. Eleanor warned me that if I continued to live in that household I’d become like them, honoured and trusted and dull. Life would be much more fun if I lived in the Barclay house.

  If only it were possible for my grandparents to adopt me! If only I could live like my quiet, unshakable grandfather in that house of eccentric women, at the very centre of their exciting chaos, then I would be able to witness dramas unfolding before my eyes every minute of the day. If I’d been living there, Eleanor said, I’d have seen the looks on my grandparents’ faces when Christina announced she’d been secretly married to Eric Maclean for nearly a year and was probably carrying his child, or somebody’s. I’d have been right at the centre of things when Jacob Weins got engaged to each of the girls in turn, from oldest on down until he came to the one he really wanted (Mabel) and lost his nerve. I’d have been there when my grandmother fell down the back verandah steps, breaking her leg, and could have helped spread word around the district that she’d been jumped from behind by a whiskered prowler in a bowler hat. And of course I’d have had a ringside seat when Christina decided to go mad and carry a knife in the top of her dress while she waited for the most dramatic moment to do herself in. “Any minute now,” she’d say, and flash her mad eyes at someone, anyone, to keep the household in an uproar, expecting bloodshed. “I think I shall simply wander off into the woods,” she said, pushing back from the table in the middle of a meal, “and never be seen again.” If I’d been there, I could have been the one they sent to follow her, at a discreet distance, to wrestle the knife out of her hand at the very last moment and save her life.

  “But you’d have failed,” Eleanor said, “because they’re bringing you up to be so ordinary and dull. You have no flair.”

  To have flair was the thing that mattered. The aunts had flair. The young men they spent their time with all had flair. Frieda’s husband Eddie Macken drove a salvaged hearse, painted yellow and black like a swollen wasp. Jacob Weins showed up for his dates with whoever he happened to be engaged to at the time in period costumes — one day Cyrano de Bergerac, the next day Henry the Fourth. Eric Maclean owned a whiskey still somewhere back in the bush that the police were trying to find, and had once been almost married to a girl who’d moved to Hollywood, perhaps a star by now with a different name. Gladdy’s boyfriends liked to drop hints about life behind bars, and drunken fights with police.

  In the life they led, no incident was allowed to pass without someone turning it into an event. A drive to the Union Bay dance became a Ben Hur race, with cars sideswiping cars and wheels falling off in the ditch. The most ordinary movie became either a masterpiece or a bloody riot, depending on who was reporting. When Frankie Laitenan’s two-door Ford went off the road and sank to the bottom of the river, you can be sure that three of the aunts were in it, screaming their lungs out. How they eventually swallowed their panic, how they rolled down the windows and struggled out into the water, how they floated to the surface and shouted for help in the direction of a truckload of soldiers in uniform was the subject of long, embroidered tales for several months. The soldiers, who were on their way back from a day of practising how to kill people in the mountains, demonstrated by the way they kicked off their boots and dived into the river that they had more than mere courage — they also had flair. I, on the other hand, had neither. Barclay Philip Desmond was in mortal danger of becoming as dependable, consistent, and sensible as his parents.

  Consistent and dependable were hardly the words that came first to mind, however, when I came home from school a week before my eleventh birthday and found my mother standing in the middle of the living room loading shotgun shells into my father’s double-barrel 12-gauge. Was she going to shoot herself, or me? Maybe being in Eleanor’s play had put ideas into her head, I’d heard of mothers going berserk, I’d even picked up the information somewhere that it was the quiet ones you had to watch, the sensible ones. If she shot me now she’d have a two-hour wait before my father came home from work so she could shoot him too. Maybe she’d only tie me up for now, and plan to shoot us both at supper-time. I assumed my brother and sister were already dead. Either that or tied up behind the woodshed waiting their turn. “You don’t need to go telling anyone, either,” she said, and levelled a warning eye. She couldn’t have guessed how relieved I was to hear her say that. If I were going to be in a position to tattle, then I could
hardly be marked for death. Maybe she had plans to simply maim me. At that moment I’d be grateful for a couple of blown-off legs.

  “That pheasant there in the garden is out of season for another month,” she explained, “but I’m not about to turn down a chance like this.”

  The pheasant? It took a while to register. I was looking at the thing but hadn’t been able to make the connection. Strutting, he dragged his long narrow tail-feathers between the rows of peas, not fifteen yards away, and held his brilliant head up high on his white-ringed neck as if he owned the place. If my father were here he’d have blown that head off in a second, as he’d done to dozens of others, and handed it over to my mother to clean for supper. Wild pheasant was his favourite game, in or out of season.

  “If I don’t get him somebody else will do it,” she said. “Stand back a minute, you know how I hate doing this kind of thing.”

  Shooting some dinner was better than shooting me, but I felt a little sorry for that pheasant. At such close range he hardly stood a chance. My mother leaned on the front-porch rail and aimed. With her feet apart and her mouth screwed to one side, she sighted down the barrel with concentration and prepared to do something she’d never done before — kill a living thing.

  The gun, it turned out, had other plans. When she pulled the trigger I heard the explosion but saw the pheasant run and beat his wings up into the air. When I looked at my mother, she’d dropped the gun to the floor and thrown her apron up over her head. I could see blood already soaking through the cloth and smeared on her hands.

  Was she dying? My mouth was dry, I was afraid to go closer to see. This was much more drama than I’d ever bargained for. My mother had shot herself by mistake, she was bleeding into her hands, she was staggering back inside the house to find a place to fall. She chose the chesterfield, and slumped back with her wadded-up apron pressed against her forehead. “Shall I get help?” I said. “Shall I go for a doctor?”