The Beggar's Pawn

by John L'Heureux

  And yet, as Reginald’s emails had helped her to realize, her mother had been a formative influence for the good. She had unintentionally helped Claire to become the Claire of today. Maggie had encouraged her passion for seeing things as they are and approved her determination to speak the truth no matter how unpleasant and allowed her to develop her fierce integrity. “She has, without intending it, helped me move toward the light,” Claire wrote, and for the moment she felt moved almost to tears.

  Reginald wrote back, pleased that he had helped her to new insight regarding her past life and her present devotion to art.

  Chiara mia: It pleases me greatly to hear that you have achieved such a benevolent understanding of your early life with your mother and I am prepared to grant you the validity of your conclusions.

  I continue, however, to find her interference in our lives to be a remarkable thing. Nonetheless I am trying to see her actions from your point of view, and to that end I have borrowed four hundred dollars from her to take my family to Chantilly for Thanksgiving dinner. You know the restaurant, of course. Très grand. Certainly the grandest here in Palo Alto.

  I’m certain your mother would not regard this as an emergency, but that’s because, in the minds of the rich, the poor are not supposed to rejoice but merely to survive. Perhaps I can instruct her a little with my own brand of fierce integrity.

  Paradoxically yours, Reg

  This response delighted and amused Claire, who found it easy to imagine her mother’s frustration and her father’s stroke-inducing rage when they learned how the latest emergency loan was used. And they would learn about it, she was certain. Ironies this rich could never be kept quiet.

  She wrote him back: “No wonder I love you.”

  How wonderful it was just to watch what would happen, with no ill feeling toward anyone, with just a keen eye out for what could be used in her art.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS FRIDAY, raining again, and David joined Maggie and Iris for a cozy chat in the living room. He had his cup of tea while they had their hot chocolate. The gas fire burned brightly in the fireplace and the atmosphere was lazy and warm and David placed his feet on the hassock, saying, “I’m going to toast these feet thoroughly, Iris, and I’ll never be chilly again. What do you think about that?”

  “I think that’s nice,” Iris said. She was not as comfortable with David as she was with Maggie. After a moment’s pause she asked, “Did you have a nice Thanksgiving?”

  They both said at once that they had had a very nice Thanksgiving. In fact it had been a tense dinner with their son Sedge, who had driven up from Los Angeles for the day. He had brought with him his new friend, Sophia, who worked in costume design for Columbia Pictures and who would undoubtedly become the next Mrs. Sedge Holliss. Everyone was relieved when it was over.

  “And how was your Thanksgiving, Iris?” David asked. “Did you have a turkey?”

  “But they’re vegetarians,” Maggie said. “They don’t have turkey.” And to Iris she said, “Did your mother make one of her lovely special meals?”

  “We had turkey because it was Thanksgiving,” Iris said. “My daddy said, ‘This is an exception and it’s Thanksgiving’ and he took us to Chantilly for dinner. It’s a restaurant.” In the silence that followed, she said, “It’s a very nice restaurant.”

  “Well, good for you,” Maggie said. “Did you like the turkey?”

  “Chantilly,” David said, growing pale at the thought. “Chantilly is a very fine restaurant.”

  “My daddy said, ‘We’ll have turkey and a superior white wine.’ And he said, ‘It’s a poor heart that never rejoices.’”

  “And your daddy’s right,” David said. “Your daddy is absolutely right.”

  11.

  Reginald had suspected that Claire was falling in love with him. It was one thing to have a go-for-it, balls-out sexual fling but quite another to allow it to turn into a love affair. He suspected or at least feared this was happening and so he took care to hold her at a little distance. “Very preoccupied with my book,” he wrote her. “Significant changes in the making.” Having written this, he actually began to see that changes were necessary and good. And indeed significant.

  As he had suggested at their dinner party and as he had explained to Claire in the greatest detail the day following, his novel was a study in big ideas—the metaphysics of personality—but it was much more than that. It was a psychological thriller and a neo-epistemological detective story.

  “And what is that?” Claire asked.

  “My novel.”

  “No. What is a neo-epistemological detective story?”

  “Neo-epistemological merely means it’s a whydunit. I investigate not only the nature of the crime but the nature of the criminal as well. Whodunit, plus why. You have to sense it before you can understand it. You can’t get bogged down in terminology,” he said. “And by the end of the book I’ll demonstrate that we can never know the nature of character and personality in their totality.”

  “Don’t we know that already?”

  “See, it all becomes one vast circle.”

  “A vicious circle,” Claire said.

  “These are some of the ideas I explore. The story itself is about a man who is writing a novel about a man who is writing a novel about a nineteenth-century novelist who may or may not have been the father of Jack the Ripper’s final victim. So the story is one vast circle as well. I explore the fifth dimension.”

  “Fascinating,” Claire said. “Who’s the novelist?”

  “Dickens, but my character is gonna be more philosophical than Dickens. Sort of a combination of Dickens and Heidegger. Heidegger said, ‘What matters most is to listen to what is not being said.’ So that’s my title: What Is Not Being Said.”

  “Fascinating. Really.”

  “But I’m thinking of changing Dickens to Gissing.” He had laughed lightly, wickedly.

  Claire laughed with him. “Poop will have a stroke,” she said. She was vastly entertained. She quite liked this change from Dickens to Gissing. She quite liked Reg himself, though he was nothing to crow about in bed, conserving his creativity and inspiration for his work, no doubt. In bed he remained methodical, uninspired.

  * * *

  —

  REGINALD’S INTENTIONS to discourage her from falling in love with him were completely lost on Claire. “How exciting,” she wrote about his plans for the novel, “I want to know all about it. Meanwhile let me catch you up on my discoveries about Hedda Gabler.” And here she proceeded to expound at prodigious length on the similarities between Hedda’s family problems and her own. “Hedda has no mother; mine was a mess. Hedda’s father was a general who left her nothing but his name and his dueling pistols. Mine was the same, practically, except he’s an academic. Our backgrounds really are almost identical, right down to Hedda’s great, unexplained feeling of inadequacy. The dueling pistols (Penis! Penis!) are the instruments of her creativity: she persuades her lover to use one of them to commit suicide and she kills herself with the other. I realize now that it’s been my father all along who has blighted my life, not my mother. He’s the one who has made me feel inadequate: not sufficiently a woman, too much a man. By the end of the play what’s left for Hedda except enlightenment or suicide? As I play her, she has no choice. As for me, I choose enlightenment.”

  She added in a separate paragraph: “See how useful our time in bed has been?” And she signed off, “Hugs and kisses, Chiara tua.”

  * * *

  —

  HUGS AND KISSES INDEED. Well, perhaps she meant this to be a merely conventional sign-off but it made him uncomfortable all the same. He clicked the Chiara icon to make sure it could not be accessed, double-checked it, and logged out. Time to make tea for Helen.

  “My one true love,” he sometimes said to her, and he meant it insofar as
love was useful. There had been other sexual relationships before Claire, and Helen knew about them in that way that wives know and do not know. That is, she was sure he was having sex with somebody else, she knew when the affair started and when it was over, but she was quite happily spared the details. Much better not to know names and places, much better not to have a mental picture of the rival who was of merely sexual interest. That interest would pass, sometimes with bitterness but most often with merely the awareness that it was over, and goodbye, goodbye to another anonymous woman who had shared Reginald’s bed but not his heart or his mind.

  Helen came through the door, tired and with her hair uncombed and her lipstick faded, and Reginald greeted her, “Helen, my one true love.” How good she was. How safe she was. How passionately she believed in him.

  * * *

  —

  HELEN HAD NO INTEREST in Reginald’s emails and no temptation to spy on him. Iris, however, was possessed of a limitless curiosity and not only curiosity but an ability to use computers with a beginner’s expertise. She was rarely alone in the house, but when she was, she used her time to advantage. Thus Iris was aware of the range and depth of the relationship between Reginald and Claire long before her mother had begun to suspect anything. But with her natural intelligence and her eagerness to protect her mother, Iris said nothing. She just made a point of checking “Chiara” as often as possible and turning these things over in her heart, knowing betrayal was part of her father’s legacy, just like Hedda Gabler’s father, whoever he was.

  * * *

  —

  “HAVE YOU READ CLAIRE’S EMAIL?” Maggie asked.

  David and Maggie shared an email address so that whatever was sent to one of them was accessed by both.

  “I’m wary of her emails these days,” David said. “She’s getting crisper and crisper.”

  “Meaning?”

  “More brittle, more biting. There’s always a little arrow to the heart in everything she writes. She thinks she’s found ultimate truth in Hedda Gabler. That bodes ill, if you ask me.”

  “Actually, she thanks you for helping her understand Hedda Gabler. She has just now recognized what a big influence you were on her, she says. I thought I was the big influence. At least I always got the blame.”

  “She was never a happy girl.”

  “‘The still point of the turning world.’”

  “Well, I’m glad to be the newest big influence, but I can’t help feeling it’s going to turn out bad.”

  “Badly.”

  “Pedant.”

  “Give us a kiss.”

  They shared a perfunctory, serviceable kiss.

  “Those dueling pistols are going to come into this eventually.”

  “Not really. This is life, not literature.”

  * * *

  —

  CLAIRE’S PREPARATION FOR playing Hedda was thorough and, from the start, dissatisfying. She had envisioned performing before an enraptured New York audience but scaled back her expectations as her private rehearsals went on and on and her acting coach, the former Broadway actress, grew increasingly critical. And unfriendly. “More feeling, more desperation,” her coach said. “This is a beautiful woman of the nineteenth century, not a truck driver of the twentieth. She is hopelessly repressed and she knows it, but she can’t really connect with a man sexually. She is afraid of men and she is sexually attracted to them and she has nowhere to turn. She is boring herself to death. She says so herself. She could be a great pagan if only she could let herself go.”

  “I am a great pagan. I can let myself go.”

  “Acting is not the same as life. Acting has to be more real than life.”

  This was true but Claire resented being told what she already knew.

  “My father was like Hedda’s father. He never really saw me. He left me only his pistols.”

  “What are you talking about? You told me your father is a professor of English literature. He’s alive in California. How is he leaving you dueling pistols?”

  “Metaphorically. He’s left me his penis.”

  “Let’s get back to Hedda Gabler. Hedda has no penis. That’s the issue.”

  Rehearsals grew more disappointing and the acting coach more dissatisfied. Claire was depressed. It did not help that during rehearsals all the other characters were played by that old has-been with the script in her hand, the bitch. She kept telling Claire to dig deeper, dig deeper, but Claire had already dug down past her domineering mother to the quick soil of her neglectful, selfish, inadequate father. Asked to identify some mitigating virtue in the foul mix of his character, Claire came up with evidence that he was insecure. He had only written two books in his entire career . . . because he was afraid. Afraid to fail. Perhaps even afraid to succeed. As rehearsals progressed, she became more interested in his failure as an academic, as a man, as a father. He was inadequate and insecure. Look at the wreckage he had made of his sons’ lives. The family was a disaster. Their only genuine affection was for a dog called Dickens.

  She wrote about these discoveries to Reginald and he wrote back asking for more, and more.

  He liked getting to know her in this way, he said, he liked learning all about the Hollisses.

  * * *

  —

  IRIS READ THE EMAILS between Claire and her father and pondered whether or not she should tell her mother. Her father, she knew, was a genius, and she knew, too, that geniuses did not have to observe the rules. Her mother had explained this often enough. Her father was special. He was a philosophical novelist and so he didn’t go out to work like other men. He worked at home. He worked all the time. Even when he watched Judge Judy, he was working. But until now Iris had not known about other women in his life.

  Uncertain how to respond to this new information about her father, she began slowly to withdraw from her mother and to lavish more affection on him. It was compensation for not loving him anymore.

  Iris wondered, should she talk to Mrs. Holliss about this?

  * * *

  —

  IN THE INTEREST of accumulating more material for his novel Reginald had put aside his worries that Claire was hell-bent on a love affair. He could always handle that later. What mattered now was collecting and sorting all this good, Judge Judy–ish information on the Hollisses’ family picnic. He wrote to Claire explaining that he liked knowing that theirs was an intellectual and artistic friendship and not just something patched together following an afternoon’s roll in the hay. Tell me more, he said, tell me more.

  * * *

  —

  CLAIRE’S PERFORMANCE as Hedda took place in Baltimore’s New Repertory Theatre on a Sunday afternoon. The stage was set for the current production of You Can’t Take It with You, not an ideal background for the mental anguish of Hedda Gabler, and the audience consisted of Willow, the backstage crew, and the members of the advisory board of the repertory company. The issue, as put to them by Willow, was whether or not they should stage a full-scale production of this difficult play. In fact, the issue had been all but decided. The advisory board had been thrilled with Claire’s performance as Grandma in The American Dream, but in the many months since that production they had discovered that Claire was Grandma on- and offstage, all the time, in every situation. She was tart talking, smart-alecky, pleased with herself. She was physically awkward and unappealing. She made a great snarky Grandma but how could this translate into the subtle complexities of Hedda Gabler? Nonetheless, to please Willow, who was so hardworking and such a good sort, they had decided to let Claire audition for the role by doing a solo performance of Hedda, with Willow reading all the other parts from the side of the stage.

  The performance, they concluded, was a disaster.

  In fact, the performance might have been a success had it been heard and not seen. Claire had managed to tap into some of the unidentified desperation
s of her own life and brought them to bear on the character of Hedda. Her strident voice had been softened and smoothed out by her vocal coach, and Claire had managed to give an ironic and sometimes even funny twist to Hedda’s repartee with her husband and his aunt and her would-be lover. Her sense of Hedda as a desperate woman had been deepened by all her digging into her own past and to those discoveries she had added her ruminations on Reginald’s wife, Helen, and her odd position as acolyte to her husband’s genius. In the end she had a sense of who Hedda was and what made her a doomed woman.

  In her own mind, Claire’s performance was both true and good, and what more could you ask? What she failed to perceive was that physically she was not prepared for the stage at all. She had no sense of stage space and how to occupy it. She had no natural grace. She moved with difficulty. She was short and square, she acknowledged that. She was unaware, however, that she was in herself awkward, that her gestures failed to come naturally, that she clutched at the furniture as if she could negotiate the stage only by lurching from chair to chair. And when it came time to kill herself, she grasped the pistol as if she were terrified it might go off.

  And so, after all her work, it came as a great shock that nobody laughed where she had anticipated laughter, nobody cringed when she physically attacked her rival, Thea, snatching at her hair and then smothering her in an embrace, and nobody gasped in horror as she blew out her brains.

  Worse still was the polite applause that followed her death.

  And worst of all was the gentle way the advisory board explained the decision not to stage Hedda Gabler, at least not now, at least not with Claire playing Hedda.

  She was inconsolable, she wrote Reginald, she wanted to kill herself. She had achieved personal truth in performance and nobody cared. It was enough to turn her against acting for good. But she would keep on. She had learned that much from playing Hedda: good old Claire would never kill herself.