An Audience of Chairs

by Joan Clark

  Upstairs, the windows in the cafeteria were similarly fringed, and during breakfast she and the other passengers listened to Captain Peters announce that the ship wouldn’t be docking in North Sydney as planned because it was stuck fast in the ice. The Cape Breton shoreline was only a few miles away, so close in fact that when Moranna looked out the window she could see the church spires of Sydney Mines. It seemed incredible to her that the ferry could be this close to land yet imprisoned so tightly in ice that it couldn’t break away. Later, when she went out on deck, she observed that the blockade wasn’t ordinary ice. It was pack ice, a jumble of floes, jagged pans and frozen slob rammed willy-nilly against the ship, locking it firmly in place, a phenomenon that later made newspaper headlines across Canada and the United States.

  For a week the ferry was locked in ice so thick that even the ice breaker couldn’t set it free. Several times a day, Captain Peters would start up the engines but the propellers couldn’t turn in the ice and rather than shear them he turned the engines off. There was nothing to do but wait for a change in the wind. During the week the formal arrangements between passengers and crew came apart as the mood on the ship became one of prolonged geniality. The collective view of the passengers seemed to be that since they were all marooned together, they might as well make themselves at home. Opening fridge doors in the galley, they helped themselves to snacks and loaded dirty plates and cups into the dishwasher. Once a meal had been served, galley stewards took off their aprons and hats and joined the passengers in the lounge. By the end of day three when the ship had run out of Camels, the young father dried tea leaves in the oven that he rolled into cigarettes.

  On the afternoon of day four, a helicopter dropped a bundle on the aft deck containing Camels, baby food, diapers, bakery bread, potatoes, baloney and playing cards. At any time of the day, wherever Moranna looked, people were playing cards, the crew often playing with passengers. Captain Peters, a stocky man in his late fifties, didn’t join the games but every morning and afternoon came down from his eyrie on the top deck and looked benignly on his charges, jollying them along, reminding them that they were all in this jam together and by helping each other would ride the crisis out.

  Moranna and Bun didn’t need jollying along and by day three of the blockade were spending their nights behind the locked door of her cabin. The narrow cabin bunk accommodated their long thin bodies as they lay together, fondling each other with leisurely ease, as if they had all the time in the world. And so it seemed. The illusion had as much to do with Bun as it did with them being hostages to the weather. As Moranna later discovered, no matter what he was doing, Bun took his time and refused to be hurried. For him, sex was slow and deliberate, unfolding in its own sweet time. It was a sweet time, a time of tenderness and affection that brought an explosion of surprised joy to Moranna’s throat.

  Early on day seven, to their mutual regret, the wind shifted overnight and by dawn the ice had loosened its grip. The blockade was over. Hearing the sound of the engines revving up as he lay beside Moranna, Bun groaned as the ferry inched forward. He got out of bed and looked through the porthole.

  “Open water,” he said and regretfully pulled on his clothes. “Must be off. A man’s work is never done.” Before he left her, he bent down and, caressing Moranna’s cheek, said, “I’ll see you one of these days.”

  Moranna didn’t believe she would see him again, soon or otherwise. She didn’t know Bun’s laid-back manner was underpinned with serious intent, that he was a man who, having decided he liked her, would follow her to Baddeck. As far as she was concerned, thanks to the blockade, they had held each other briefly captive and that was all—chance had presented her with a welcome interlude and no more. She remembered thinking after Duncan left that she would never trust herself to live with anyone again, and later that spring when Bun appeared on her doorstep, she surprised herself by letting him in.

  SEVEN

  MORANNA IS STILL TALKING to Bun on the telephone outside the Thistledown Pub. By now she’s made herself comfortable on the floor, one elbow braced against a knee as she asks if Doris is able to walk on her new hip.

  “She can get around with a walker,” Bun says. “But she’s nervous about leaving the house.”

  “So you won’t be here for a month or so.”

  “That’s right. She doesn’t want to go to her sister’s until she can handle the stairs.” Doris spends her winters in Baie Verde. “I sent you a card from St. John’s explaining the situation.”

  “It hasn’t arrived,” Moranna sounds offhand, cheerful. Pride prevents her from appearing plaintive and needy. Also, she doesn’t want to be reminded again that if she wants to stay in close touch, she should install a telephone.

  She and Bun finish their conversation, and Moranna goes to the convenience store for bananas and milk—she’s still boycotting the Co-op. She’s just leaving the store when the police car pulls into the parking lot and Trevor Grey waves her down. She stands, one mitt on the handle of the sled, while he unfolds himself from behind the wheel and gets out of the police car to speak to her.

  “I just wanted you to know that I haven’t heard a word from those Co-op fellows about the charges,” he says. “I don’t think I will.”

  “And I haven’t received an apology,” Moranna says.

  “You’re not seriously expecting an apology.”

  “I deserve an apology and if it doesn’t come soon, I’ll go to the Co-op and demand one.”

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Moranna.” Already Trevor regrets waving her down.

  “I guess you think your life would be easier if I never darkened the Co-op’s doors.”

  Trevor knows she’s baiting him, and having just returned to work after a bout of flu, he’s not about to put up with her games.

  “Don’t get chippy with me, Moranna,” he says testily. “I’m on your side.”

  Moranna knows that even a soiled ripped jacket and an unravelling toque can’t hide the fact that time has been kind to her in respect of her looks. Batting her eyes flirtatiously, she purrs, “But, Trevor, as a policeman you’re not supposed to take sides.” Before he can reply, she turns her back on him and begins pulling the sled across the lot.

  She rings Andy’s doorbell several times, but as usual he isn’t home. Opening the door, she picks up the bundled newspapers from the hall and carries them to the sled, then makes her way home through the village. It’s a gusty, cloudless day and the sun glancing off the snowy lake is so bright it hurts her eyes and she lowers her toque to shield them. She hums as she walks, pleased to have spoken to Bun, and to have put Trevor in his place.

  While she was in the village, the mailman has come and her box is crammed with junk mail. She stuffs the papers into her jacket pockets for burning in the stove. If it’s left in the box, the junk mail blows across the road and into her yard where it sticks to the shingles and catches on the electrical wires. Among the clutch of papers are two pieces of mail: Bun’s card and a newsletter from Shirl, an old university friend. Reading mail is a special event for Moranna and she makes herself a cup of tea and a slice of cinnamon toast before settling herself beside the stove and giving the mail her full attention.

  The image on Bun’s card isn’t the usual puffin and whale but a picture of a country house the same shape as hers with a peaked roof and three dormer windows upstairs. Inside, Bun has written a short message saying more or less what he told her on the telephone. Having been thoroughly lectured about Moranna’s aversion to the word “happy,” he has crossed out the word in the card’s greeting and scribbled See you in the in front of “New Year.”

  In Moranna’s opinion, one of the biggest swindles in life is the expectation that people should be happy. People are brainwashed into believing they have a responsibility to be happy and are a failure if they aren’t. Where did such a misguided notion come from? Certainly not from Burns, Shakespeare or the Bible. To insist that people be happy requires being able to ignore not o
nly their own messy lives, but school buses being bombed in the Middle East, Africans dying by the thousands from malaria and HIV, people’s lives cut short by catastrophic upheavals. So forget happy, it is enough to be cheerful, to manage the habit. Being cheerful is a habit Moranna has taught herself and can manage most mornings after she has performed her morning concert. After all, cheerfulness is a willingness to be pleasant in spite of difficulties, a disguise worn on the outside, not in the heart where happiness is said to reside.

  Every year Shirl Silver—Moranna still thinks of her as a Silver although her friend has changed her last name twice since they were roommates in university—sends a Christmas newsletter poking fun at what she calls the “lowlights of the year.”

  “Ron, who as you know, retired from the military last year, has given up drinking on the doctor’s orders and is grumpy as a bear with a sore paw,” Shirl wrote. “Last June we parked our camper near Lake Kedj so he could fish all summer and although he was on the lake every day, the only thing he caught was a muddy sneaker. On a brighter note, three months ago I dyed my hair black when it grew in after chemo, and at last got rid of my red hair. That red hair was so stubborn that I had to lose it so it could grow back grey! Ronnie and I will be spending Christmas in Sussex, New Brunswick, with his mother, who at 94 has all her marbles and is the only person alive who gets away with telling him what to do.” Beneath her signature, Shirl added the same postscript she scribbled every year: “I’ll try to make it up your way this summer.”

  Shirl has come to Baddeck twice to see Moranna. The last visit two years ago was a disappointment because Ron refused to come inside. Shirl kept stealing glances at the camper parked in the driveway and left after half an hour. Ron is her second husband. Her first husband was a fourth-year Acadia science major, Derek Pike, on whom Shirl had had a crush since the day she knocked the books he was carrying to the ground. From that day forward she set her cap to marry him, contrary to her mother’s plans that she marry a pre-med student who really was named Gilbert Blythe and lived on the farm next door in Prince Edward Island, not far from Green Gables. To hear Shirl tell it, she spent her childhood living down Anne Shirley. Her mother braided her flaming hair every morning and, when she could get away with it, slapped a straw hat on her head. The one thing she didn’t do, Shirl said, was paint freckles on her nose. Shirl and Derek were married a month after she graduated from Acadia and moved to Centralia, where Derek was a pilot. Eight months later he was killed when his plane crashed during a training exercise. Three years later she married a flying officer, Ron McMahon, and moved to Bonn, Germany, and from there to Greenwood in the Annapolis Valley.

  The Christmas letter is the first time Shirl has referred to having cancer. Did she have it when she last visited? Is that why she wore a hat although it was a warm day? She was thinner too, much thinner than Moranna remembered. In university Shirl had been thick-bodied and stocky, built the same, so Moranna used to think, as Saint Joan, the role she wanted, and Bella Maunder got to play.

  The first time Shirl came to see her—Moranna has never returned the visit—wasn’t in Baddeck but in Ottawa, after Duncan and Moranna moved there from Edinburgh. It was early January and Shirl was on her way back from having spent Christmas with Derek’s family in Smith’s Falls. Moranna was six months’ pregnant but with her slender frame looked nine months along and was sure she was carrying twins. She and Duncan were renting a furnished apartment on the bottom floor of a turn-of-the-century house on Metcalfe Street, a fifteen-minute walk from the Parliament Buildings where Duncan and another speech writer worked out of a small office in the Langevin Block. The apartment belonged to a retired couple who had moved to Vancouver Island and was filled with fusty furniture, settees covered in dark brocades and squat tables with clawed feet. The living and bedroom windows were hung with beige nylon curtains stiff with dust, and the bedsprings sank like a hammock until Duncan put a sheet of plywood beneath the mattress. Nurse Prin, who taught Mothercraft classes at the community centre, had suggested using plywood after Moranna complained of chronic backache from sleeping on the bed.

  Every Thursday morning Moranna lay on the floor along with a dozen other expectant mothers cradling their bellies as they practised breathing exercises. Nurse Prin, an unmarried, childless Englishwoman who espoused natural childbirth, wouldn’t allow the word “pain” to be used in class and would squelch any attempt to mention it. “There is no such thing as pain,” she boomed, flashing a fortress of gleaming teeth. “What you will feel are merely contractions.” She rubbed her hands in a V over her substantial stomach. “These contractions will stretch the muscles and gently ease the baby into the birth canal while you breathe deeply to help it along. The key to a successful birth, my dears, is steady, controlled breathing.”

  Before coming to Ottawa, Shirl had telephoned ahead, which had given Moranna time to prepare a wholesome lunch of potato soup and vegetable pie. She had set the kitchen table with mushroom-coloured placemats and napkins and lit a candle—the kitchen was gloomy and she usually lit the candle when she and Duncan had their meals. Just before noon, Shirl stepped into the vestibule wearing a maroon wool coat and a fox-fur hat. She gave Moranna a hug.

  “Quite a bump you’ve got there,” she said.

  “Twins, I think.”

  “Trust you. You never do anything by halves.”

  “I hope you’re hungry.” Moranna led the way to the kitchen and while Shirl took a seat, Moranna ladled out the soup.

  Shirl tasted a spoonful. “This is delicious, Moranna. Where did you get the recipe?”

  “I made it up. I made up the casserole recipe too.” Since taking an interest in cooking, Moranna had discovered how rewarding it could be. “I’m testing various recipes for my cookbook.” In a few months Shirl would be graduating with a B.Sc. in home economics and Moranna was eager to impress her. “I’m writing a cookbook for pregnant mothers that I intend to publish.”

  “Good for you. There never was any stopping you.”

  Moranna basked in the admiration. Her friend smiled, and Moranna leaned toward her, fascinated by the whiteness of Shirl’s teeth against the cherry red lipstick.

  “Do you mind telling me what you put in the soup?” Shirl asked.

  “Potatoes, minced onion and carrot, skim milk powder and vegetable water. Nurse Prin at Mothercraft advises us not to discard vegetable water but to use it in some creative way.”

  “Yes. It’s filled with nutrients.”

  They finished the soup and Moranna placed the casserole on the table and picked up the serving spoon. “Let me help you to some of this.”

  Shirl studied the casserole, which was a dirty beige colour, and asked what was in it.

  “Vegetable peelings,” Moranna said. “Nurse Prin says they should never be discarded but eaten. I’ve mixed them with brown rice and eggshells. Don’t worry, I put the shells through the meat grinder first.”

  Reluctantly Shirl handed over her plate. “A small portion, please,” she said and, snickering behind her napkin, asked if Moranna used her pee. “I mean, it’s full of nutrients too.”

  Failing to notice Shirl’s snicker, Moranna reported that using pee had never been mentioned in Mothercraft, probably because it would be difficult to swallow. Taking a forkful of casserole, she said, “Although I suppose if you added gelatin and something to disguise the taste, you could concoct an edible dish.”

  “Lemon jello,” Shirl said.

  Moranna still hadn’t caught on. “You would have to use a flavouring agent,” she said, “vanilla or almond.”

  “Cointreau might work better.”

  “Alcohol isn’t permitted during pregnancy,” Moranna said primly. “But I may experiment with different flavours for my recipe book.”

  “You are a card,” Shirl said.

  “Thank you for the compliment.”

  “I must say, pregnancy suits you, Moranna. You’re looking well, blooming in fact.”

  “That’s what Duncan
says. I am blooming. I haven’t been sick a day and I have lots of energy. I never take a nap and we make love every morning. Duncan says I’m wearing him out.”

  “Well then, I can hardly wait to get pregnant myself,” Shirl said. She never did get pregnant with Derek, but she and Ron would have four children, one of them born with Down’s syndrome. Shirl urged Moranna to tell her what else she’d been doing. She didn’t talk much about herself.

  “Well, besides the cookbook, I have another project on the go. I’m designing a line of women’s apparel made out of flags.”

  “Flags!” Shirl exploded with laughter but Moranna didn’t take offence. Shirl’s ignorance could be excused. She was, after all, a stranger to Ottawa and didn’t know much about the capital.

  “Ottawa is a town of embassies and consulates,” Moranna explained. “In fact, there are two embassies here on our street. Duncan and I have been to several embassy parties and have met people from all over the world. India, Africa and Asia, South America, you name it. Most of them dress in business clothes, you know, suits and dowdy dresses. Not much can be done with the men’s clothes, but the women’s clothes could be made from their country’s flags. I’ve been experimenting with several kinds of designs, from the toga look to Parisian chic, because I want clients to have several styles to choose from. The idea is that by wearing flag material, the woman’s nationality will be known without an introduction being necessary. The men will have matching ties.”

  “Wow.”

  Moranna leaned across the table again until her face was inches away from her friend’s. “This is a project you and I could do together, Shirl. You have experience cutting and sewing, and as the ideas person, I can come up with the designs. We could publish a catalogue together. What do you say?”