An Audience of Chairs

by Joan Clark

  Shirl fidgeted with her napkin. “I’m a dietitian, Moranna. My speciality is food science, not sewing. The truth is, I hate sewing.”

  Moranna sat back and dipped her chin in disappointment. “Oh well. I don’t think I knew that.”

  Shirl excused herself to go to the bathroom and Moranna scraped the uneaten casserole on her friend’s plate into the soup pot and put the dishes in the sink. Shirl came out of the bathroom wearing too much lipstick, so Moranna thought, having noticed a smear on her napkin. Moranna suggested they go into the living room to chat. The room was brighter than the kitchen but not by much. They sat down and before Moranna could take over, Shirl began talking about her wedding, which would take place in Cavendish in June. She said that as the only daughter—Shirl had four brothers—she had decided to give her mother her own way and go whole hog on the wedding.

  “Tell me about your dress,” Moranna said.

  “It’s satin with a V neckline, very plain except for the embossed roses. My mother has lined up someone to hand stitch them on. I can manage to sew the rest because the pattern is simple, there’s nothing fancy to trip me up, which is a relief because I really want to make my own dress …” Too late Shirl realized her mistake. “I’m sorry, Moranna. I really am.”

  By now Moranna was on her feet, leaning over Shirl. “If you didn’t want to become business partners, you should have said. You shouldn’t have lied.”

  “I didn’t lie. It’s true I don’t like sewing, but I do want to make my own wedding dress.” She looked at Moranna imploringly. “We’re friends. Please don’t take offence.”

  “We were friends,” Moranna said and went into the kitchen, leaving Shirl to find her own coat and hat.

  Moranna doesn’t spend much time regretting her mistakes, which is just as well because there have been so many, where would she begin? But having remembered Shirl’s visit to Ottawa, she knows it was churlish of her to take offence, especially after Shirl went out of her way to visit. Moranna never got around to apologizing and her friend has probably forgotten the incident by now. For years following the Ottawa visit Moranna didn’t hear a word from Shirl until eight years ago when the McMahons were driving around the Trail and Shirl turned up at the door, wanting to buy a carving. If Moranna remembers rightly, she went away with Anne MacKenzie. She doesn’t recall seeing Ron—probably he dropped Shirl off and drove on to the village. She stayed all afternoon and they talked for hours, filling in the blank spaces. As usual Moranna did most of the talking, telling her friend what had happened in the years between Ottawa and Baddeck.

  Moranna didn’t deliver twins and the birth was painful. Bonnie weighed almost nine pounds and by the time Moranna weathered thirty hours of labour, she was too exhausted to do Nurse Prin’s breathing exercises and disgraced herself by pleading for an epidural before producing a scowling infant with a misshapen head and tightly clenched fists. After a few days, the head rounded, the redness faded to pink and the hair fluffed up, fair as peach down. The child was named Bonnie because it was one of the few choices Duncan and Moranna could agree on. She wanted to name the baby Henrietta, but he was against using family names and threatened to use his mother’s alongside Henrietta’s if Moranna insisted.

  Lorene and Jim lost no time in coming to see their granddaughter and five days after Moranna came home from the hospital they checked into the Château Laurier Hotel, where they stayed two weeks, showing up at the door on Metcalfe Street every morning. One afternoon a delivery truck pulled up in front of the apartment and a bassinet, a change table, a pram and a high chair were carried inside. Defying Nurse Prin’s advice to feed the baby at specified times, Moranna was breast-feeding on demand twenty-four hours a day, usually in bed so that afterwards she could fall asleep—she was desperate for sleep. While she was breast-feeding, Lorene hovered around the bedroom door and as soon as Bonnie was fed snatched her up and, urging Moranna to stay where she was, carried the baby into the living room where she sat burbling and cooing to her granddaughter. If Bonnie cried, Lorene immediately returned her to Moranna, who by now felt like a lumpy reservoir of milk, a wet nurse, summoned by decree. Moranna was resentful of the way her mother-in-law monopolized Bonnie, the way she bought baby furniture Moranna didn’t want or need, having fashioned a cradle from a clothes basket and a change table from a second-hand desk. Whenever Moranna went into the living room and saw Lorene with Bonnie on her lap talking in a false, little girl voice and completely ignoring her—Lorene was the Pharaoh’s daughter and she the handmaiden—it was all she could do not to snatch Bonnie away.

  Jim made no attempt to hold the baby and did not ignore Moranna. He saw that she was “troubled” (a word he later replaced with “disturbed” whenever he referenced his former daughter-in-law) and tried to engage her in conversation by asking questions and reading aloud news he thought might interest her from the papers. Although she was flighty, Jim recognized Moranna’s lively if scattered mind and was making the effort to cultivate it, thinking it would be useful to Duncan’s career later on.

  Moranna had no way of knowing that in Ottawa Lorene was on her best behaviour. Swallowing her distaste for breast-feeding, which she considered uncivilized and bovine—her own sons were bottle-fed—she tried to be helpful and seized every opportunity to look after the baby, giving her a daily bath and changing her diapers. Bonnie was a delight and fortunately the spitting image of her father. Although there was no denying Moranna’s beauty, it pleased Lorene to think that apart from the hair, her granddaughter resembled the Frasers, not the MacKenzies.

  After her in-laws’ departure, Moranna went into a slump and, except for feeding her daughter, lay curled on her side in bed. Duncan slept on the den sofa and when time allowed, sat at the kitchen table working on a speech. He bathed and changed the baby and prepared the meals, waiting out what the doctor had told him was a postpartum depression that often followed birth. Duncan knew his parents’ visit had been premature and he had tried to persuade them to postpone it until Moranna was on her feet, but his mother, entranced with the novelty of having a granddaughter, would not be dissuaded.

  It was six weeks before Moranna got herself out of bed in the mornings and took over the responsibilities of looking after Bonnie, and Duncan returned to the office. Moranna doted on the child and spent hours playing with her, making mobiles from coat hangers and coloured paper and hanging them where they would attract the child’s attention. Using puppets made from Duncan’s socks, she propped the baby against the sofa pillows and entertained her for hours by taking on a cast of fairy-tale characters. Duncan came home to a sink full of unwashed dishes and clothes strewn on the floor. Although he himself was organized and methodical, he shrugged off the disorder. As long as his wife and daughter were content, what did sloppy housekeeping matter? He reminded himself that Moranna’s free spirit was what had attracted him to her in the first place. Her joie de vivre was infectious, and when he arrived home from the job that wasn’t working out as well as he’d hoped, he looked forward to being caught up in what his wife called the Welcome Home Daddy Dance, which had the three of them waltzing around the living room together.

  Duncan made a point of calling the MacKenzies every two weeks to tell them about their granddaughter, not at Moranna’s urging but because at that point in his marriage he was conscientious about keeping his in-laws informed. He liked Ian and Edwina and appreciated the fact that they kept a cordial distance from Moranna and himself. He took photos with the camera his parents had given him and mailed them to Sydney Mines, but stopped short of inviting them to see their new granddaughter.

  The MacKenzies had already visited the Frasers in Ottawa. Having been broken in by the arrival of Ginger, now a year old, when the MacKenzies were informed of Moranna’s pregnancy, Edwina made the wise suggestion that she and Ian go to Ottawa before, not after the birth, and in October they drove to Ontario.

  Neither of them had ever been to the capital and wanted to visit the Peace Tower and the Nation
al Library, the art gallery and the museum, and every day they set forth with Moranna in the crisp autumn air to one of these destinations. It was Indian summer and along the canal and across the river maple leaves flared in the Gatineau Hills. Ian carried a notebook with him and jotted down his impressions of Ottawa for the Rotary speech he planned to give on his return.

  Edwina didn’t always accompany Ian and Moranna and opted out of sitting in the visitors’ gallery in the House of Commons to watch the flag debate, preferring to spend the time cooking and tidying the apartment. She also wanted a nap—she and Ian were sleeping on the den pullout sofa and although they never complained, during the visit neither enjoyed a good night’s sleep.

  Ian and Moranna sat in the Commons gallery following the debate between Lester Pearson and John Diefenbaker about what ought to be Canada’s flag—Pearson favoured the maple leaf, Diefenbaker the British ensign. After he had spoken, Pearson left the House but Ian, an admirer of the prime minister, wasn’t in the least disappointed. It was enough that he had seen Pearson in the flesh, and he busied himself identifying politicians he had read or heard about in the news.

  Outside, he snapped a photo of the Mountie on the Peace Tower steps but he didn’t try to chat him up like he usually did. Ian had a knack for casual conversation and, wherever he went in Ottawa, struck up a conversation with someone: a guide, a commissionaire, a waitress in a department store restaurant.

  While they waited for their tea, Ian hunched forward so he could hear Moranna over the clash of china and cutlery. She was talking about her idea of designing a wardrobe made of flags. “I think I’d like being in the fashion business,” she said.

  Ian took her hand, moving the engagement ring back and forth between his large-knuckled fingers, stalling as he tried to think how he could steer her away from the fashion business. Making clothing from flags was a ludicrous idea, but she would be offended if he told her the truth. Moranna didn’t notice his hesitation and sat enthralled and attentive. Her father hadn’t held her hand since she was a girl, not even when they sat at the breakfast table in Sydney Mines discussing her ambition to be onstage.

  Gazing at the ring as if he was fascinated with its arrangement of precious stones, Ian said, “You know I am proud of you, Moranna.”

  “Yes, Dad, I know that.”

  Although he preferred to show his affection in more subtle ways, Ian heaped on the praise. “Obviously you are the creative one in the family, and have a head full of business ideas no one has ever thought of before. But I think you should drop the idea of the flag business.”

  “Why? I have to do something with myself while Duncan’s at work.”

  “The timing is wrong, Moranna. Your idea is far ahead of the political situation. Think how it would embarrass the prime minister to entertain foreign diplomats wearing their country’s flag when Canada has no flag of its own.”

  “I was introduced to the prime minister at a reception a few months ago and he didn’t seem to be a man who would be easily embarrassed.”

  “But I think he would.” Ian paused. “Have you discussed the idea with Duncan?”

  Moranna explained there had been no time to discuss the idea with Duncan because he arrived home from work late and was taking conversational French five nights a week.

  “I think if you talk to him you’ll find that the flag business would make it awkward for him to continue working for the PM. If I were you I’d wait.” Ian patted her hand. “Don’t forget you’ll soon have your hands full with the baby.”

  “Babies. I’m expecting twins.”

  “All the more reason to leave the flag business alone for now.”

  “You’re right,” Moranna said decisively. “I’m ahead of the times, as usual.”

  Their tea arrived. Relieved to let go of Moranna’s hand, Ian tried joking with the waitress. “Did you make those biscuits yourself?” She didn’t reply and returned to the kitchen without a word. Ian said, “Not very friendly, is she?”

  Moranna observed that Ottawa was filled with stuck-up people.

  “Well, quite a few of them have given me the time of day,” Ian said. As if to prove it, he smiled at someone across the room and, buttering a biscuit, took a bite.

  When they finished their tea, they went outside and crossed the intersection, Ian cupping his daughter’s elbow, holding her as carefully as a carton of eggs. For a while they went along in silence, both of them intent on matching stride for stride. They had crossed another intersection and were on Metcalfe Street when Ian squeezed his daughter’s arm and to make up for having discouraged her flag idea told her he was pleased she was going to become a mother.

  In fact, he had serious reservations about her impending motherhood but set them aside because, as Edwina had pointed out, his daughter craved his approval and he ought to use every available opportunity to provide it. Ian wasn’t apprehensive about the pregnancy itself, but about what might happen afterwards. Both of Margaret’s pregnancies had gone well but she had fallen into a depression following each birth. She had recovered from the depression following Murdoch’s birth, but not from the one following Moranna’s. Because his daughter was like her mother in so many ways, her pregnancy alarmed him and he had to keep reminding himself that mother and daughter were two different people.

  “I deliberately conceived the twins in Scotland.”

  Embarrassed by the disclosure, Ian felt his ears redden.

  “Being pregnant makes me think of my own mother. I did tell you we crossed the Minch on our way to Lewis, didn’t I?”

  “I don’t believe you did,” Ian said, regretting that he had mentioned the Minch in one of the letters he sent to Scotland. He supposed he had done it out of a latent desire to tell his daughter the truth.

  “Her body was never found, was it?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe not finding her body explains why I haven’t thought of her very much until now. Do you think of her, Dad?”

  “Sometimes.” Ian was about to remind Moranna that Edwina was her mother, but he didn’t want his daughter thinking Edwina had replaced Margaret, or that he had failed to honour her memory. Every Mother’s Day when they were young, he had taken his children to visit the gravestone he had erected in Brookside Cemetery to mark Margaret’s death, and once in a long while he went out there himself to see how the gravesite was being kept up.

  They were approaching the apartment and he was trying to think how he could deflect the conversation away from Margaret when Moranna leapt in with the question he had been dreading for much of his life.

  “Did she jump?” When she was crossing the Minch, Moranna had asked herself how her mother could have drowned. The ferry had been high-sided, and unable to explain to herself how someone could possibly have fallen overboard, she remembered thinking that her mother might have been seasick and, climbing a girder to relieve herself, lost her balance and fallen in.

  “Yes, she jumped.” That was what Ian wanted to say and get it over with. But he didn’t want to frighten his daughter, especially now that she would soon become a mother. Moranna had always been impressionable and unpredictable and he couldn’t take the risk. Instead, the man who had told his children that honesty was the best policy lifted his chin and, for the third time that afternoon, avoided the truth.

  EIGHT

  THREE MONTHS AFTER BONNIE was born, Moranna was pregnant again. Neither she nor Duncan was particularly surprised. She hadn’t resumed ovulating, so she thought, and hadn’t been practising birth control since Bonnie was born because according to Nurse Prin, breast-feeding prevented conception and no one in Mothercraft challenged the pronouncement. A virgin midwife, Nurse Prin had discouraged discussions about sex and said little to calm anxious mothers who feared becoming pregnant soon after birth. Moranna entertained no such fears and having been disappointed when the doctor told her she wasn’t carrying twins may have willed another pregnancy. Dismayed when Bonnie came along so early in their marriage, Duncan took the sec
ond pregnancy in stride. He thought Bonnie should have a sister or brother and it made sense to have the two children close together.

  Brianna’s conception occurred early in the morning. Her sister was present—Bonnie slept in a basket beside the bed, waking every morning as a slice of early-winter light appeared below the window blind. Moranna picked up the baby and, bunching the pillow behind her back, slipped the nightgown from her shoulder and breast-fed the child while Duncan rolled on his side to watch. Unlike Lorene, he wasn’t repelled by the sight of his daughter suckling at her mother’s breast. He didn’t think he had ever seen anything lovelier than Moranna’s hair falling over her shoulder, her thumb clasped in the baby’s fingers. The sight was sublime and sexual and Duncan watched, fascinated and aroused. After Bonnie finished feeding and was tucked into her basket, Duncan licked the milky residue from Moranna’s breasts and they made love, the nightgown swaddling her waist.

  Moranna wasn’t as robust and lively during the second pregnancy as she had been during her first, but she still had the energy to pursue one of her business ventures. Having dropped the idea of designing a flag wardrobe, she concentrated on publishing the cookbook for pregnant mothers, and withdrawing money from the savings account, arranged to have the book privately published. Duncan was annoyed that she had given Hot Shot Press eight hundred dollars without consulting him but by the time he found out about it, the book was already in print. Hot Shot printed 250 copies of the No Waist Cookbook, which was a compilation of recipes Moranna had tested on herself, cabbage leaf soufflé, fish stock aspic, apple core crumble, along with sketches she’d made of pregnant women practising breathing exercises while Nurse Prin exhorted them about the responsibility of delivering healthy children. Loading the books into the pram with Bonnie, Moranna took them to the community centre for inclusion in its flea market stall, and to bookstores where she cajoled managers into taking a consignment of two or three copies. One way and another she sold thirty-four books and, when she and Duncan left Ottawa, donated the remaining 216 copies to Mothercraft.