An Audience of Chairs

by Joan Clark

  The second term Moranna played the First Witch in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Again, she memorized the female lead role, mouthing the part during rehearsals to prepare herself for playing Lady Macbeth, should it be required. She also took on the job of makeup assistant, and using green grease paint and cornstarch, gave Bella a haunted Medean look. Moranna discovered she had a talent for makeup, a talent she later exploited whenever she wanted to wear a disguise.

  By the time she began working at Keltic Lodge, Moranna’s hair had grown to a shoulder-length pageboy. She wore no makeup except lipstick, which pleased Mrs. Murray, the staff manager who liked to think her waitresses looked like country Highland girls in their tartan dresses, starched white aprons and caps.

  Moranna had only been working at Keltic Lodge a week when a whey-faced, middle-aged man wearing a brown tweed suit and an unconvincing wig sat at one of her tables and ordered breakfast. After she brought his food, she felt his eyes on her as she moved between the tables with the studied indifference of someone who had undertaken the role of waitress and would eventually find her place on the world stage. When she returned to refill his coffee cup, the man asked if she was free to meet him in the lobby after breakfast. He was Leo McGarrity, a photographer with Weekend, and he wanted to take her picture for the magazine’s cover. Moranna told him she was free. “Wear your dress,” he said, “but take off the apron and cap.”

  The breakfast shift over, Moranna was outside leaning against the stone wall, the Nova Scotia tartan scarf Leo McGarrity had provided draped across her shoulders. “Perfecto,” he said whenever he snapped a photo. Behind him Moranna saw the other waitresses and bellmen, even Mrs. Murray, watching from the windows. Within an hour, Leo McGarrity had finished and was stowing his equipment in the car when Duncan Fraser came outside wearing the tartan kilt the bellmen wore and introduced himself to the photographer, although not to Moranna, whom he had not yet met. That he was using her photo session to further his own purposes did not immediately occur to her, and still basking in the glow of having her photograph professionally taken, she admired the bold way Lochinvar rode onto the scene. Duncan explained to Leo McGarrity that he was on his way to becoming a journalist and would appreciate the opportunity to write a profile to accompany the photograph. Did Weekend do that sort of thing? The photographer said that it was up to the editor, who usually ran a line or two about the cover. “Once in a while he runs a profile. It depends on how interesting you can make the subject.” He looked at Moranna. “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen.”

  Leo McGarrity turned back to Duncan. “It’s hard to make a nineteen-year-old interesting,” he said, “but you can try.” Now that her photograph was on film he couldn’t care less what he said. He had taken dozens of photographs of empty-headed girls as good-looking as this one. He took out his wallet and gave Duncan a business card.

  “Why don’t you see what you can do and send it to the editor, Maxwell Trotter. His address is on the card.”

  Duncan pocketed the card and went back to work; Leo McGarrity got into the car and drove away. Later, when Moranna remembered the rudeness of both men, she was furious at the way she was left standing in the parking lot as if she was someone who could easily be cast aside.

  That evening she asked her roommates, Donna and Boots, about the bellman. According to Boots, Duncan drove to the village every night to visit his girlfriend—he was the only one in staff quarters who owned a car, a cream-coloured Sunbeam. Her name was Susie Marr and her mother worked in the kitchen. Moranna knew her mother as Ruby, the white-aproned woman who spooned mashed potatoes and a medley of peas and carrots onto plates beside the roast meat or fish. Moranna told herself she didn’t care if Duncan had a girlfriend, and if he was expecting Moranna to ask about the profile, he could go on expecting because she had no intention of asking.

  Duncan Fraser had noticed Moranna MacKenzie the first day he returned to Keltic Lodge. He could hardly have missed her for she was the best-looking waitress of the summer’s crop. Stunning, with a graceful, artless way of moving, she seemed to occupy a reality far different than his own. She wasn’t so much unfriendly as she was oblivious of others, as if she enjoyed her own company better than theirs. Her unapproachability was one of the reasons he’d lined up an interview through the photographer who, though obviously a jerk, provided an opportunity to meet her. From the lobby, Duncan had caught glimpses of Moranna working in the dining room and observed the way she carried food trays and served guests without seeming to be waiting on them. She intrigued him, but he held back becoming better acquainted with her because of Susie, the girlfriend who had “waited” for him this past year and was expecting a ring. Susie was sweet-natured, uncomplicated and pretty. In spite of these assets, Duncan began to notice that he was bored when they were together, except when they were making out. After days of waffling and indecision, he set aside his allegiance to Susie and, entering the dining room after breakfast one morning, asked if he could interview Moranna for the Weekend profile. Was she free tonight?

  “I suppose I can spare the time,” she said in a bored, offhand way, “but not tonight. I’m busy tonight.”

  If she hadn’t been pretending to be indifferent, she might have noticed the knowing grin. Duncan had dated enough women to recognize their wiles—it was the absence of wiles that had drawn him to Susie, as well as her lack of sophistication, which made her so different from his mother. He and Moranna arranged to meet in her bedroom the following night, the only place either of them could think of that was private enough for the interview.

  There were no chairs in the hot stifling room and Moranna, dressed in shorts and halter top, sat on one of the beds beneath the window, fanning herself with a folded magazine. Duncan sat opposite on Donna’s bed, notebook on his knees. This close, Moranna found his physical presence overwhelming. He wasn’t what she would call handsome, but that didn’t matter because she preferred unusual, intelligent-looking men and Duncan filled the bill with his reddish-gold hair, granny glasses and high, narrow forehead that made him look erudite and scholarly. He asked how she liked being a cover girl.

  Moranna replied that she thought being a cover girl would be useful for her stage career—Bella had told her it was important to build up a portfolio of photographs and acting credits.

  It wasn’t the answer Duncan expected. He’d expected a flirtatious, disingenuous response. “Well, you’re certainly good-looking enough to become an actress,” he said. She didn’t deny it, but simply stared at him with that level blue-eyed gaze.

  “How much acting experience have you had?”

  “I’m still an apprentice but next year, with Acadia’s lead actress gone, my prospects for larger roles are good. In a year I expect to have enough acting credits to allow me to work in summer stock. I doubt I’ll do any more waitressing after this summer.”

  “How do you like waitressing?” A dumb question but Duncan was still fishing around.

  “Like it!” she hooted. “Nobody likes it! It’s just a job. Most of the time I pretend I’m doing something else.” She began examining the insect bites on her legs. Duncan followed her gaze. She had a dancer’s legs, long and shapely.

  “Such as?”

  “Well, this morning I was a slave serving at one of Nero’s bacchanalian banquets. I know he was a monster, but with me he was pleasant and polite. So were the other men and although they were sloshed, they were never rude.” Moranna looked pointedly at Duncan, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “Wasn’t it too early in the day for Nero and his men to be sloshed?”

  “They drink all day,” Moranna said, “which explains why Rome fell as easily as it did.”

  Duncan grinned. She was definitely more interesting than Susie. “Have you always wanted to be an actress?”

  “Originally I intended to become a concert pianist. I have perfect pitch.”

  Moranna watched Duncan’s hands moving swiftly across the page. She had never seen a man with s
uch slender, agile hands. “You have a pianist’s hands,” she said, imagining herself stretched naked across his knees while he played her like a piano.

  So far in her life, Moranna had only been attracted to one other male apart from Danny Demarco, and that was Roddy McNeil, a father of four who had delivered wholesale goods to her father’s store when she worked part-time during her last year of high school. The physical attraction to Roddy had been so strong that even without being touched she felt herself being drawn into the force field of his muscular, compact body, and one day after he accidentally grazed her arm, she thought she could smell his animal scent on her skin. Duncan’s maleness seemed more cerebral and was embodied in his elegant hands and high forehead, his inquisitive eyes, their blueness magnified by glasses.

  “I’ve never played the piano, much to the regret of my mother,” Duncan said and snapped the notebook shut. “That’s all for now. I have enough to begin writing the piece, but I’ll need to interview you again later on.” He waited for her to say, “Fine” or “All right,” but she didn’t; instead she asked if she could interview him.

  “Sure,” he said and, kicking off his shoes, stretched full-length on Donna’s bed.

  Lying sideways on her own bed, head cupped in one hand, Moranna asked him to tell her about himself.

  Duncan said he’d grown up in Halifax, in Armdale. “But I went to school in Windsor. King’s.”

  “A private school.”

  “Right. We spent summers sailing in Chester.”

  “Why aren’t you there now?”

  “I lost interest in that kind of life. You know, cocktails and tennis.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never had that kind of life.”

  “Sorry, I’m being glib.”

  His father was a lawyer from Sydney, his mother from Saint John. “She’s a Rawling,” he said, as if he expected Moranna to recognize the name. The family owned a brewing business, which Duncan’s older brother, Malcolm, also a lawyer, was being groomed to take over when their father retired. “Which leaves me the one who doesn’t fit in. I’m the odd one in the family, free as a bird to travel the world.” He lifted an arm and made a soaring motion with his hand.

  “The one who doesn’t fit in” struck a chord in Moranna and she was thrilled that, like her, Duncan was the odd one in his family. That meant they were both nonconformists and individualists, free thinkers who weren’t content with the mundane and looked for ways to put their unique stamp on the world. Duncan told her his ambition was to become a foreign correspondent, a writer who specialized in international affairs. He was the first man she had met who was ambitious to achieve something beyond the ordinary—so far, the men at Acadia, even those who acted in Professor Scipio’s plays, wanted to be accountants and teachers. Like her, Duncan had a strong sense of his own destiny and wanted to break free of real or imagined restraints.

  By the time he left the bedroom, Moranna was completely smitten, as much as with the idea of Duncan’s future as with him. But she wouldn’t pursue him. The MacKenzie pride, which in Moranna was monumental, wouldn’t allow her to chase him down. If he wanted her, he would have to come for her and carry her away on his steed.

  Except for a second interview, Duncan stayed away from Moranna. It took him three weeks to split up with Susie. He knew it was coming because he couldn’t stop thinking about Moranna, who was not only beautiful but bright and funny and exciting. He wanted to make a clean break and if he hadn’t slept with Susie, it would have been easier to stop seeing her, but knowing she’d lost her virginity to him made him feel responsible for her happiness. Before the breakup, he weaned them off sex, to warn Susie what was coming. He felt like a rotter, but he had to follow through. He couldn’t be saddled for the rest of his life with a woman who bored him.

  Meanwhile, Moranna, pretending Duncan Fraser meant nothing to her, spent her free hours reading plays or going for walks during which she anticipated what she would say if she by chance bumped into him. Once, when she was walking to the village with Donna and Boots, Duncan drove past on his way to visit Susie and stopped to give them a lift, but he didn’t say one word to Moranna. Instead he directed all his conversation to Boots, who was beside him in the passenger seat.

  Finally, near the end of June, he asked Moranna to walk around the golf links with him and when they reached the path skirting the fairway, he told her that he had broken off with his girlfriend. He didn’t give a reason and Moranna didn’t ask although she knew she was the cause of the breakup. He asked if she wanted to go swimming with him the next afternoon and of course she said yes. Soon the two of them were spending all their off hours together, swimming or lying on the beach or walking through the birch woods holding hands, talking all the while.

  Occasionally they joined the other waitresses and bellmen for a wiener roast or a singsong on Ingonish Beach, but Duncan preferred courting Moranna elsewhere to avoid running into Susie, and they usually drove to Black Brook, where they lay side by side at the far end of the beach, blocked from view by an outcrop of rock seamed with mythic shapes resembling prehistoric drawings painted in red.

  One afternoon they came face to face with Uncle Henry and his wife, Louise, who Moranna had seen only a few times in her life—their particular branch of MacKenzies had never been close. Henry and Louise were wading in the water with their pants rolled up, the broken surf circling their ankles in bracelets of foam. Hearing their approach, Moranna sat up just as Henry, a shorter version of Ian, looked at her, his mouth agape, as if he’d seen an apparition.

  “Is that you, Moranna?”

  “It’s me,” she said and, getting to her feet, gestured to the man lying on the blanket, “and this is Duncan Fraser.”

  Duncan stood at once. Looking him over, Henry offered his hand and asked if Duncan’s people were Cape Breton Frasers or Pictou Frasers.

  “My father’s from Sydney. He’s Stewart Fraser’s brother.”

  “Donald’s son, Jim,” Henry said. “Jim’s in the brewing business.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, well.” What more could be said about credentials like that? Peeved that his niece had not thanked him for getting her the Keltic job, Henry scolded her for failing to visit.

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “So I see.” It looked as if he might say more, but Louise took charge. “Come along, Henry. These young people want to be alone.”

  “Drop by one day, the pair of you,” Henry said. “James and Ida are here and you should drop by their cottage and see them too.”

  They did eventually drop by, at Duncan’s insistence; he was in the habit of following leads and establishing connections. During the visit the uncles paid no attention to Moranna, directing all their questions to Duncan, making her petulant and out of sorts. Uncle Henry had chastised her for not visiting more often but now that she was here, he and James showed no interest in her at all. Much later in life, after she’d weathered the worst of her troubles and recalled her uncles’ indifference toward her, she decided it was a symptom of their parochial minds.

  This was only partly true. As realtors, Ian’s twin brothers were used to meeting strangers as a matter of course. With his Sydney connections, Duncan wasn’t really a stranger, and because his family owned the biggest brewery in Atlantic Canada, it was to the brothers’ advantage to cultivate his company. Why would they waste time talking to a flighty girl who didn’t have the sense to write a letter of thanks?

  After the Labour Day weekend, Duncan drove Moranna to Sydney Mines and stayed overnight in order to meet her family, which now included Moranna’s former classmate, Davina Haggett. To his sister’s chagrin, Murdoch had given Davina a diamond for her birthday. Six of them sat around the dining-room table eating a pork-chop dinner Edwina had cooked at short notice. Davina had made Murdoch’s favourite dessert, banana cream pie, and completely heartsmitten, he praised every mouthful he ate. Ian also commented on Davina’s pie and what he called her “quiet efficiency
,” which rankled Moranna, who had never reaped much praise from her father, at least not enough to satisfy.

  She was also rankled by the fact that her usually voluble father was guarded and distant with Duncan and made no effort to chat him up. It was Murdoch who cross-examined Duncan about his family and upbringing. “Born with a silver spoon in your mouth, were you?” he said good-naturedly and just as good-naturedly Duncan admitted he was.

  The next morning after Duncan had driven away and Murdoch had left to open the store, Ian and Moranna lingered over late breakfast in the kitchen. Taking a swallow of tea, Ian looked across the table at his daughter and commented that it looked like she had a serious beau.

  “I do. We’re going steady.” Before he left, Duncan had given her his fraternity pin, to warn the competition that she was off limits.

  Ian took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose and put them back on. The glasses were new and, Moranna thought, gave him a worried, preoccupied look.

  “Now, Moranna,” he said and she knew a lecture was coming. “Before you become more involved with Duncan Fraser, I want you to decide what you want to do with your life.”

  “You know I want to become a stage actress.”

  “Do you have idea how hard that will be?”

  “There is nothing easy or hard, but thinking makes it so,” Moranna recited.