Ophelia's Fan

by Christine Balint

  “How are the children?” he would ask her, loudly, without opening his eyes.

  “Well, Father. Little Johnny poured ink on his trousers today.”

  “Tut, tut!”

  “And Kathleen recited Luke chapter 17 from beginning to end.”

  “Very good. And how are the patients?”

  “Mr. McIntosh seems to be recovering from his head wound, and Mr. Barnes’s appetite has returned.”

  “How pleasing.”

  Whenever he stopped asking questions, Harriet knew it was time to go. She would shut the door quietly behind her.

  Sometimes Harriet would return to hear voices in the drawing room. Each visitor had their own favorite time to visit. The brethren occasionally arrived at lunchtime but usually preferred the evenings. Mr. Owen often came on Wednesdays when his wife was visiting her sister. On Thursdays, it was usually Mrs. Baird. Sometimes Harriet would be surprised and delighted to discover Molly waiting in the nursery. They would take skipping ropes out into Chapel Lane. They made up songs and dance steps. Harriet particularly liked jumping in when Molly had already started skipping. Together they would perform a complicated dance, and sometimes the men in the Carpenter’s Arms over the road would cheer. Harriet taught Molly how to curtsy politely.

  Mondays were always a quiet day for visitors. It was too close to Sundays, Harriet thought, and most people would have seen Father Barrett in church. So on the Monday afternoon when Harriet returned from the infirmary to voices in the drawing room, she knew something was wrong. She stood outside the room for some minutes.

  “So you see, Father,” a man’s voice was saying loudly, “he decided to use a nine-pound shot in a wheelbarrow to make stage thunder in King Lear. An original idea, wouldn’t you say? During the play, the stage carpenter was employed behind the scenes trundling the barrow backward and forward. At first, the thunder was powerful and Lear braved the storm. But suddenly the thunderer slipped, and the stage being on a decline, the balls made their way toward the orchestra and laid the scene flat.” The man tried not to laugh, and Harriet sensed drama in his voice.

  “This storm was more difficult for Lear to encounter than the tempest of which he so loudly complained. The balls rolling in every direction, he was obliged to skip about like the man who dances the egg hornpipe!” There was raucous laughter, and Harriet thought she could detect the reverend weakly joining in.

  Just as Harriet was coming to the nervous conclusion that this must be the voice of her father, a woman’s voice spoke her name. Her mother stood quietly, in front of the closed door to the drawing room.

  “Mother.” Harriet crossed her arms in front of her chest and stared at her shoes.

  “You be taller than when we last saw you. Is Father Barrett looking after you well?”

  “Yes,” she mumbled.

  “Come see your brother and sister.”

  Father Barrett was sitting in his favorite armchair, eyes open, smiling dimly with a blanket over his knees. Harriet’s father, larger and more red faced than before, sat in the chair next to him, holding a glass of dark brown liquid in his right hand and clutching a bundle of rags to his left shoulder. Harriet thought that this was probably her younger sister, though she was so small and silent that she could well have been a doll.

  “Be ye my beautiful daughter Harriet?” he asked her. Harriet said nothing and stared at the vein bulging on his forehead. She noted with some satisfaction that little Joseph was looking very thin and had a hole in the knee of his trousers.

  “Hello, Harriet.” The boy walked formally to his sister and held out his right hand, touching his cap. Harriet blushed, taking his sticky hand. The grown-ups laughed.

  “Joseph,” she muttered.

  “Hetta.” Harriet thought her father winked at her mother. “Why don’t you take the children for a walk in Ennis?”

  Harriet’s mother exchanged her glass of clear liquid for the small bundle of rags and took Joseph’s hand with her empty one. Harriet opened the door, barely lifting her eyes from the floor, and led her family back out into the stone pavement of Chapel Lane.

  I DO NOT KNOW exactly what took place between James Barrett and my father during those last months of Father Barrett’s life.

  I do know that my mother sensed he was going to die all the way from Galway. She said that a dark and ominous feeling came over her during Macbeth and that it was still with her a week later when the actors were playing As You Like It. She told my father they had to leave. But moving my father from one town to another was a complicated business. It involved tired horses and carriages overflowing with actors and their properties and the scene painters. A special coach was required for the scenes alone.

  My mother did not mention her own worries for little Joseph, who at five saw more of the acting troupe than he did of his mother. Nor did she ever admit to concerns over Anne, who at three still waddled like a fragile bird recently hatched from its shell and unsure of its footing. I can imagine what that poor sister of mine looked like at three. When I first knew her properly at the age of ten, she still had the air of a very young child about her. My mother had never been firm with her. She pitied Anne for being born.

  And so my father sent word to Brother Foster Parsons at the Ennis Chronicle, who published the following tribute on October 7:

  Theatricals

  The inhabitants of Ennis and vicinity will be glad to learn that the gloom of the approaching season will, in a great degree, be dispelled by the timely interference of their old friend SMITHSON, who, with excellent company, intend commencing operations here in the course of the present month.

  Foster Parsons looked to my father as though he alone could melt a townful of ice. Mother always said that Father saw himself as the center of Ennis cultural life. She said he would never have left the town to tour if the local theater-going public had not been so fickle. There were only so many times you could call upon the brothers in their full regalia to parade down Cooke’s Lane singing before the performance. My father relied upon the interest his periodical reappearance would cause, and Foster Parsons’s glowing tones.

  I did not get a chance to say good-bye to him. I cannot be sure of any last words, any wisdom to carry with me throughout my life. Bridie, my mother, and even my father all seemed to have an opinion as to what was best for me. I came, I went, I played half-heartedly with my siblings. The sobs of grown-ups were bouts of thunder and lightning followed by gentle rain. Change hung over me like fog.

  He would have held my hand and stared beyond me in his vague manner. He would have repeated his favorite words to me like a lesson, one last time. He would have asked if I was listening and told me to close my eyes. “Benevolence,” he would have said. “Learning. Love. Harmony.”

  Part Three

  LOVE

  Why should I think that man will do for me,

  What yet he never did for wretches like me?

  Mark by what partial justice we are judg’d;

  Such is the fate unhappy women find,

  And such the curse entail’d upon our kind,

  That man, the lawless libertine, may rave,

  Free and unquestioned through the wilds of love;

  While woman, sense and nature’s easy fool,

  Let poor, weak woman swerve from virtue’s rule;

  If, strongly charm’d, she leave the thorny way,

  And in the softer paths of pleasure stray,

  Ruin ensues, reproach and endless shame,

  And one false step entirely damns her fame;

  In vain with tears the loss she may deplore,

  In vain look back on what she was before;

  She sets, like stars that fall to rise no more.

  —NICHOLAS ROWE, JANE SHORE: A TRAGEDY

  Hamlet: I did love you once.

  Ophelia: Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET: A TRAGEDY

  Mme Harriet Berlioz

  Rue de Londres

&nb
sp; Paris, 21 February 18

  My dear Louis,

  In all the time I have known your father he has had his favorite stories. And although I never said so, I watched those stories wind and grow; he would grin with satisfaction at a well-timed exaggeration. For your father liked to think of himself as a writer, and when there was no other place for his stories, they filled his letters. Music was merely one of his languages. Your aunt, Adèle, once wrote to me that Hector saw his life as a “very interesting novel”; indeed, it revealed itself in neat chapters.

  And although I know you have grown up with his stories, as you have grown up with his music, and that they, like the music, have formed the fabric of your own dreams, I feel it is important that I record the stories for you here. Through knowing your father and watching you grow, I have absorbed the truth of his history more honestly than I could have learned it through words. I knew those moments you were most like him, I remember your dreaminess and those times when I shouted and shouted, trying to draw you back to me. And then I saw your father looking with such sympathy—those moments broke my heart for I could see that you shared things I could never hope to understand. When Hector and I still shared a bed, his stories drifted to me through the rhythm of his breathing.

  Your father was taught in his early years by your grandfather, the doctor Louis Berlioz after whom you and he were named. In fact, I recall that Hector named you after his father in a hope that it would make peace between us all. As it happened, you were embraced as the only grandson. Packages of jam and linen began arriving from La Côte Saint André almost immediately. As you know, I never met your grandfather. He did not approve of our marriage due to my profession. In these later years I have forgiven him. I can understand why a respectable country doctor would not wish his eldest son to marry an actress, for even I would be wary if you were to one day announce your connection with such a woman. Many in the profession have marred the reputation of all within it. And since your grandfather did not meet me, he did not ever discover who I was.

  However, I still harbor some disappointment over this, and sometimes I imagine a meeting in which both Madame and Monsieur are so surprised at my humbleness, my ordinariness, my very respectability that they sob with joy. And I dream of a past in which we travel to see them each Christmas time. I dream that we are there to watch all our nieces grow and that I become very close to Adèle and Nanci. And that you are a boy always surrounded by aunts, uncles, and cousins, which is how life should be and how it never was for you or your poor mother, and that this makes you a happier person for feeling so loved by so many.

  I believe Dr. Louis cannot blame your father for embracing the arts, for as a boy these interests were encouraged in him. It was Dr. Louis himself who first taught your father to play the flute and the guitar and then later employed a music teacher for all the children in the village. Dr. Louis gave him the great novels, smiled to himself as Hector wandered in the fields and read Virgil lying in the grass under the oak tree. And it was Dr. Louis, somewhat stunned at his son’s sensitivity, who discussed this poet with Hector while Hector sobbed with overwhelming emotion. But I also believe that if Dr. Louis had done nothing but encourage an interest in mathematics and human biology, Hector would still have come to music in the end.

  It cannot be disputed that there were some years when relations between Hector and his parents were difficult. This began when Hector abandoned his medical studies to devote himself to music and ended when you were born. Hector claims things were never the same after he declared his desire to compose, but I recall moments when the family responded with great pride to his musical successes. I do believe Hector was partially to blame for this difficult situation. For he went in always fighting for what he believed. Life has been difficult for us, trying to survive on Hector’s income from music, supplemented by money made from music articles he wrote for the papers, which made him angry and frustrated. Louis, I think this is partially responsible for our troubles because your father was never at home, and when he was, he was exhausted and anxious. This is no way to live year after year. I would have lived in greater poverty for his art if it would have made him a happier man. I would have slept on straw rather than bear his anger and my increasing solitude, but your father felt he had no choice. And so your grandfather’s fears were partially justified. And had your father not been so hot-headed in his youth, I imagine he could have approached his parents at the crucial moments in a calmer, more reasoned manner which would not have alarmed them so.

  I was not the first woman your father had wanted to marry, and I am sure your grandfather was unnerved by Hector’s apparently sudden change of heart. The story of Camille was so important in his history that it was one of the first things Hector told me about himself during our early weeks together. I remember my surprise at his openness, for he confessed it as though it had been an infidelity, although it happened before we met.

  For two years Hector had taught guitar at a large school in Paris. After our marriage I frequently asked would he not return to teaching, and he would glare at me as though I had just suggested he dive naked into the Seine in the middle of winter. He lacked patience for lazy children whose parents wished them more musical. “Not one ounce of talent among twenty students,” he would shake his head sadly and then proceed with tales of their various pranks. Rats and mice were frequently released into the lesson room. Guitar strings broken to avoid practice. There were days when almost all students failed to appear for their lessons and Hector was left alone in the tiny room, as cold as a cellar. After some weeks he was introduced to a young German, also teaching music at the school. Hiller began using the adjoining room, allowing them frequent opportunity for discussion in between students.

  This happened after your father had seen me on the stage, and he says he already possessed strong feelings for me. He has often said that every waking thought and most dreams have centered upon my existence since he first saw me as Ophelia. I can certainly imagine that the foolish young man he was at twenty-four would have told the world about me as though I were his life’s great passion, in spite of the fact that he had only ever seen me on stage or running, to avoid him, between my carriage and the stage door for rehearsal. And so it is hardly surprising that his young friend Hiller did not hesitate in confessing his own passion for a female piano teacher known as Camille. He beguiled Hector with tales of secret nightly rendezvous and elegant Sunday outings. Suffice to say he had far more to confess than Hector himself. And your father never liked to be outdone.

  Hiller did not wish the news of his affair with Camille to be publicly known and thus employed your father as a messenger. Your father has never been able to follow instructions impassively. I imagine he was fascinated by a woman who appeared to give herself so freely. His curiosity was whetted as he walked into Camille’s classroom that first day clutching one of Hiller’s letters. And he saw instantly that she was beautiful. Camille was very slender with a pale, still face like a classical bust, and large blue eyes. She would sit at the piano, fingers poised and curved over the keys, wrists as fine as a dancer’s and back straight. But within her there was something like lightning that could burst forth into laughter or rage.

  I imagine that Camille took the letter from Hector and placed it unopened on top of the piano. Then she would have turned her back to him, his hair ruffled and wild, and begged him to sit. Camille Moke was already gaining a reputation as a virtuoso concert pianist at that time. She would have heard about Hector’s impassioned performances, his fiery successes and failures. And Hiller had told her about your father’s fascination with the young Irish actress at the Odéon, thus arousing her interest. But she would have awaited his own explanations, giving nothing away.

  Your father says Camille had a deep unblinking stare that drew information from him almost against his will. I find this difficult to believe for I have never known your father to desire to withhold information from any interested parties. In a strong clear voice, Camille began
to ask Hector questions. And bit by bit his story spilled forth. He would have told her about his parents, their disapproval of his chosen profession, his difficulties with the musical establishment. For these were the things that preoccupied him then and that preoccupy him still. In Camille he would have discovered a sympathetic audience.

  The next day Hiller sent Hector forth with another letter to his beloved. It was only as he began making his way up the stairs to the piano room that Hector realized Camille had not replied to his previous day’s delivery. He knocked and opened the door, shocked to see a young girl at the piano struggling through a slow movement of a Beethoven piano sonata. The girl looked up, startled by the sound. Camille touched her shoulder. “Keep going, Odile. This is Monsieur Berlioz, the composer. I am sure he would like to hear your Beethoven.”

  And so your father tried to hide himself unobtrusively in the corner, where he stood like a disgraced child, for there were no spare chairs. And rather than simply handing over his delivery, he suffered through one of his life’s worst audiences of Beethoven. I am sure he made his presence felt; Hector has never been any good at standing still.

  After the lesson had finished, Hector continued his interview with Camille, and on this occasion he noticed a softness in her eyes as she listened to him, wiping the occasional tear from her cheek. I have always believed Camille was as good an actress as she was a musician. However, your father was moved by her sympathy.

  By the third day, Hector did not need to await Hiller’s instructions. He began and ended his working day in Camille’s piano room. That afternoon, Camille confessed her attachment to him. Later he wandered the dark streets of Paris in an overwrought state, unable to sleep. It was time to tell Hiller of his feelings for Camille.