An Audience of Chairs

by Joan Clark

  “Duncan’s in Russia.”

  “That’s right, and he’ll be calling you this Sunday.”

  “He didn’t call last Sunday.” Why hadn’t he called? Moranna tried to remember what Duncan had said he’d been doing last Sunday and recalled him saying he had to do some detective work on Brezhnev. Or was it for Brezhnev? He must have got himself mixed up with the government over there. She knew about the KGB. Maybe they had taken him away and that was why she hadn’t heard from him Sunday.

  Moranna’s reply sounded like a bark, nothing plaintive or piteous, rather a sharp yip of protest “He shouldn’t have left us.”

  “He didn’t leave you,” Ian said. “He’s in another country doing his job. He’ll be back one of these days.”

  In a rare moment of prescience, she mumbled, “But not soon enough.”

  With Paula looking after the children and Edwina making the meals, Moranna had no reason to get up and remained in bed. Two or three times a day her daughters would come upstairs and, whispering to one another, play on the quilt. Without opening her eyes, Moranna would stroke their faces like a blind woman intent on memorizing their features, while the little girls wriggled with pleasure. Reassured that her children were healthy and safe, she would sigh, then will herself to enter that blank space where nothing took shape and she was beyond all reproach and no one expected anything of her, least of all herself. When she arrived at that place, she could secret herself away until only her body registered the fact that she existed. If she lay inert for a disquieting length of time, Bonnie would prod her and say, “Talk to us, Mama.” Sometimes Moranna roused herself enough to reply.

  Ian and Edwina watched and waited for her to show some interest in resuming her responsibilities, but she showed no inclination to get up and remained incurious about her surroundings. It was difficult for them to comprehend the dramatic shift in her behaviour when their own was so deeply rooted in moderation. Edwina turned to the solace of food, tempting Moranna with casseroles and puddings, but all her stepdaughter would eat was toast and soft-boiled eggs. It was worrying that a twenty-five-year-old woman would want to sleep all the time. “A few days’s rest will put her to rights,” Ian said, speaking with false hope as an incident similar to the one on Kidston Island involving Margaret preyed on his mind. He remembered that when Murdoch was a few months old, Margaret put him on a crumbling stone wall while she picked blueberries in the cemetery where, she claimed, the sweetest fruit grew. She arrived home hours later with a pail full of berries but without the baby. When Ian asked where Murdoch was, she laughingly replied that she had been so caught up in berry picking she had completely forgotten the baby.

  By Friday when there was no apparent change in his daughter, Ian telephoned Russ Ewing, a doctor in Sydney Mines, and asked if he could come by on the weekend to examine Moranna. There was a doctor in the village, but Ian didn’t want to bring him in for a consultation, he wanted a doctor who was familiar with Moranna and the family history. Russ said he would drop in on Sunday.

  Duncan telephoned from Moscow on Sunday morning before the doctor arrived, and while Edwina held the receiver for Bonnie and Brianna, Ian went upstairs and urged Moranna to come down and talk to her husband. He expected her to resist but she didn’t.

  Taking the receiver from Edwina, Moranna said, “You didn’t call last week.”

  “I told you I wouldn’t be able to telephone last Sunday,” Duncan’s voice was so tiny and unfamiliar that Moranna doubted it was him. “I had to travel to Kiev for an interview with a doctor who once worked at the Serbsky psychiatric hospital where Brezhnev’s brother is imprisoned.” There was a click on the line. “How are you, Moranna?”

  “I’ve collapsed,” Moranna said dramatically. “I think I’m ill. I have a pain in my stomach.” It was a phantom pain but real enough for Moranna to feel something sharp was scraping against the inside of her belly.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. You must get to a doctor.”

  “What do you care,” Moranna said and hung up. She stomped back to bed, leaving her daughters and parents perplexed and mute.

  Within five minutes Duncan telephoned again and while Edwina hustled the children outside, Ian spoke to him at length. It was true Moranna wasn’t well, some sort of depression and she was spending all her time in bed. No, he didn’t know about the stomach pain, it was the first he’d heard of it. Dr. Ewing was coming to examine her later on today, and after the visit he would have a better idea of what was wrong. He suggested Duncan call back tomorrow. Ian didn’t mention the incident on the island. No point worrying his son-in-law about spilt milk. He agreed with Duncan that it might be a good idea to ask his parents if they would take Bonnie and Brianna to Chester for a couple of weeks to give Moranna a rest.

  Russ Ewing arrived late morning wearing rubber boots, baggy green pants, a fishing vest and stained canvas hat—he intended to spend a few hours fly fishing after he finished the house call. A widower, he spent most Sunday afternoons casting for trout in Middle River. A heavy-footed man with an untidy moustache, he followed Ian upstairs. Hearing their approach, Moranna hid beneath the quilt. Pulling it back as far as her shoulder, Ian said, You remember Dr. Ewing. He removed your appendix when you were six.”

  Moranna recalled the operation but not the doctor. She shifted onto her back and looked at the visitor. Who did her father think he was kidding? This man was no doctor, but a spy disguised as a fisherman.

  The “fisherman” lowered his bulk onto the bed and said, “Your father tells me that you have a pain in your stomach. I think I should examine you and see if anything’s wrong.”

  Moranna shook her head vehemently. She should never have mentioned the pain on the telephone because the line had been tapped and the KGB spies were under the illusion that she had swallowed the taped interview Duncan had sent her from Russia for safe keeping. They didn’t know it hadn’t arrived and had dispatched this man to cut her open and take it out. That was why her father had mentioned the appendix operation, to warn her of the danger. She made the effort to speak. “It’s gone,” she said. “I don’t have it any more.” Then she added, “the pain.” Realizing she still hadn’t made herself clear, she shouted, “I don’t have the tape so you might as well leave.”

  But the spy wasn’t easily put off. Picking up the chair and plunking it beside the bed, he sat down and, stretching out his legs, crossed his arms. Her father had gone downstairs, but it was clear this so-called fisherman intended to stay. “You’ve been spending a great deal of time in bed lately,” he said.

  “It’s safe here,” Moranna replied and closed her eyes.

  “Safe from what?”

  Moranna meant safe from the impossible demands of motherhood and from making mistakes she couldn’t fix, but admitting her shortcomings had always been anathema to her and she was a long way from admitting them now. And it would be foolish to admit that by staying in bed, she was safe from the KGB when beside her on the wooden chair was one of their spies. She lay motionless, not even an eyelash fluttering against her cheek.

  “Are you sleeping, or are you lying in bed awake?”

  Moranna knew she was trapped. If she allowed the spy to think she was asleep, he would try to trick her. But if he knew she was awake, he would question her and that would interfere with her ability to receive a code word from Duncan. She opened her eyes.

  “I can give you something to help you relax and sleep,” he said.

  “No.”

  “It would be for the best. You have an exceptionally active mind, Moranna, and from time to time you should give it a rest.”

  “I’m brilliant,” Moranna said so he would know what he was up against and closed her eyes again to shut him out and blank her mind.

  How long he sat there she didn’t know, but eventually he got up and went downstairs. She heard a car door slam. The “fisherman” was leaving, which was a relief. Later when she heard his heavy tread on the stairs followed by her father’s, she knew that sla
mming the car door had been a ruse—like all spies, this one was slippery with deceit and had only pretended to leave.

  What happened next was unforgivable. Her father betrayed her. The man she had trusted all her life leaned his full body weight on her shoulders, pinning her to the bed so that the so-called doctor could lift the quilt and jab her buttock with a hypodermic needle.

  “Nervous exhaustion and depression,” Russ Ewing told Ian downstairs in the kitchen. “Plenty of bedrest. Give her another week, and if she’s not improving we’ll have to take other measures.” He wrote out a prescription for tranquilizers and advised Edwina to open the capsules and mix the powder with Moranna’s food. “All she’ll eat is toast,” Edwina said, “and eggs.”

  “Then mix it with eggs,” Russ Ewing told her. “I’ll be back next weekend.”

  When the doctor returned a week later, Moranna was still in bed. She had not even bothered to come downstairs that morning when Duncan telephoned. “Tell him to come home,” she said to her father. By now it was clear she was undergoing a major breakdown. Russ Ewing advised admitting her to the Nova Scotia Hospital in Dartmouth and Ian agreed, having lived all these years with the belief that with hospital care, Margaret might not have taken her life.

  The Frasers were eager to come to Baddeck and take their granddaughters to Chester where they would stay until Duncan returned from Moscow. The arrangement wasn’t to Ian’s liking, but he could see no alternative. He and Edwina had been in Baddeck for almost two weeks, during which Murdoch had kept the business going, but the bookkeeping and paperwork had been piling up and Ian had to go back and deal with it. Edwina agreed to stay on until Moranna was taken to the asylum.

  Ian had made it clear to Russ that he wouldn’t commit his daughter and refused to sign anything that would force her to stay in the hospital. In spite of what had happened to Margaret, he maintained a stubborn belief in the importance of free will and insisted that Moranna be admitted on a voluntary basis. As long as Moranna was kept on tranquilizers, Russ said, she could be persuaded to stay in hospital without too much trouble. He would speak to the chief psychiatrist, Hugh Ridley, so that when she arrived Hugh would be familiar with her case.

  Ian explained to Russ that he was worried about how Moranna would react when the Frasers came to take Bonnie and Brianna to Chester. Now that she was on tranquilizers and her appetite had improved, she was spending more time with her daughters, sitting outside watching them play, sometimes joining in play herself. She was distracted and wan, but it was clear she was enjoying her children and Ian worried about what she would do when her in-laws came to take them away. He was well aware she didn’t like her mother-in-law and would be upset if she knew Duncan had arranged for their daughters to stay in Chester while she was in the hospital. Hating himself once again, on the day she was scheduled to leave for Halifax, Ian put his full body weight on his daughter’s shoulders while Russ administered the hypodermic needle.

  The longest Moranna’s daughters had been apart from their mother were the hours they spent on Kidston Island. Before the Frasers took them away, they went upstairs to say goodbye to her. Clutching her kewpie doll, Brianna flung herself down beside Moranna and refused to budge so that Jim had to forcibly loosen her grip on the blanket and carry her away while she kicked and screamed. Bonnie clambered onto her mother’s sleeping body and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Mama.” Lorene had told her they would be spending the night in a nearby motel and would return next day, which they did, but by then Moranna had been taken away and all her children saw was the empty bed.

  Murdoch had volunteered to take his sister to the hospital, to spare his father, who had aged years during her breakdown. Murdoch knew his father was worried that Moranna might do herself in like their mother, a fact only recently made known to Murdoch. Two weeks earlier, a determined Davina confronted her husband with the brutal fact that everyone in Sydney Mines except Moranna and himself knew about their mother’s suicide. The Grahams, their mother’s travelling companions in Scotland, had seen her jump off the ferry. Davina said it was high time Murdoch faced the truth that his sister was headed in the same direction. The sooner she was put away in the asylum the better it would be for everyone, especially for her children. Murdoch winced, not so much at what Davina said, but the way she said it. Even in high school, he’d known that a core of toughness lay beneath the shy, prudish exterior, but he hadn’t known she could be pitiless and vindictive. Although he was angry at his sister for her reckless neglect of the children, it was a shock to hear Davina’s condemnation of her and he couldn’t help wondering what his wife would do if he himself ever had the misfortune of breaking down.

  ELEVEN

  THE TRIP TO DARTMOUTH was uneventful. Davina did not accompany Murdoch when he took Moranna in, but advised him to lock the car doors in case his sister tried to escape. Unnecessary advice. Moranna slumped in the back seat in a stupor and made no effort to move. She ignored the pillows and blanket her brother had put beside her, a gesture of helplessness as much as anything else, because beyond driving her to the hospital, there was nothing he could do for his sister—now that his anger had abated, Murdoch wanted to help her.

  No one knew better than Murdoch how difficult, how impossible she could be. Moranna was unreasonable and unpredictable and he never knew where he stood with her from one moment to the next. She had always been smarter than he but, unlike him, did not possess one ounce of ordinary common sense and sashayed around as if she owned the world and everyone in it. But what was the point of reviewing his sister’s shortcomings and delusions? Knowing what they were did nothing to lessen his guilt, or make it easier for him to accept the fact that she had become so ill there was no choice but to admit her to the asylum. Maybe the doctors there could cure her and he told his sister as much. She gave no indication she heard him, and during the rest of journey, he said little.

  Moranna had nothing to say to her brother because like the rest of her family—Duncan, her father, Edwina—he had betrayed her. Edwina’s betrayal was the one that had finally alerted Moranna to the danger of staying in bed and allowing herself to be treated like an invalid. Those meals of eggs and toast, the warm sponge baths, Edwina rubbing a soapy cloth over her arms and legs, the radio thoughtfully placed beside the bed so that Moranna could listen to music. You rest now, Edwina said, killing her with kindness. Before her father held her down a second time while the doctor administered the needle, Edwina brought a custard upstairs and fed her. I made it especially for you, she said, spooning it in while Moranna obligingly swallowed. The custard was drugged, she knew that now, to prevent her from resisting too hard while being jabbed with the hypodermic needle. It had all been part of a cruel and fiendish plot to drug her insensate so that her children could be taken from her while she slept. When she awoke and asked why she couldn’t hear her daughters playing outside, Murdoch told her that her in-laws had taken them to Chester for a visit. Lorene and Jim hadn’t had the consideration to speak to her or ask her permission but had come and gone like thieves. But she knew where they had taken her children and she would get them back. That was why she was sitting in this car on her way to the hospital. Dartmouth was no more than forty miles from Chester, and using the cover of the hospital she would work out a plan to get her daughters back. Before she got into the car with Murdoch, her father told her he hadn’t signed committal papers, that her stay at the hospital was voluntary. Although Moranna no longer trusted her father, she believed in this instance what he said was true. She didn’t believe, however, that being taken to the hospital was for her own good or that she would get better if she listened to the doctors. She had no more respect for doctors than she had for anyone else.

  Crossing the MacKay Bridge, Moranna kept her gaze on the massive brick hospital on top of the bluff overlooking Halifax Harbour. When she and Duncan were courting, she’d often glimpsed the hospital but casually, in the offhand way she’d glimpsed McNab’s Island and the piers. There had been nothin
g sinister about the building then, but there certainly was now. Its faceless sprawl looked like the pictures of ugly Moscow buildings Duncan had shown her before he went to Russia, to make the point that she would be better off staying in Baddeck. He had described the buildings as Orwellian and remembering that now, she muttered to herself, “Here I go into the temple of truth.” Stepping out of the car with her suitcase, she said, “Don’t come inside,” the only words she spoke to her brother that day.

  After she’d been admitted, and was waiting to see the doctor, Moranna contemplated the utilitarian bleakness of the corridor—the speckled tiles waxed as slippery as butter, the black-and-white photographs of staff bureaucracy on the wall, the cryptonymic signs posted beside the door. Cocking her head from side to side, she attempted to read the signs but they were in code. No doubt they were messages or directions of some sort from the KGB. How clever of them to have infiltrated an institution—she refused to acknowledge the word “asylum.” A hospital provided perfect cover for her while she worked out a plan to rescue her children. It was fortuitous that she was in the hospital with the KGB because it meant she could help Duncan with his work. Between them, they might be able to break the spy ring. Moranna laughed, tickled by the thought that both she and Duncan would be renegades working together in espionage. Really, it was too funny for words. But exciting and well worth the risk because when they finished the assignment, she and Duncan would pick up Bonnie and Brianna and resume their life together. Hearing footsteps in the corridor coming her way, Moranna stopped laughing. Be careful, she warned herself, don’t give yourself away. Trust no one.

  Especially not Dr. Ridley, she thought, when he introduced himself and indicated the chair on the other side of the desk. She sat down and watched while he busied himself with a file, presumably hers, which gave her the opportunity to study him without appearing to stare. The doctor was the dead spit of Leonid Brezhnev: blocky shoulders, bushy eyebrows and hair as black as ink. Dyed of course, anyone could see that. Was he the brother Duncan had interviewed in Serbsky, or was this another brother of Brezhnev’s? Whichever brother he was, there was no denying his resemblance to Russia’s general secretary. She was amazed he wasn’t wearing a disguise. Perhaps he thought working out of a hospital provided enough cover that he didn’t need a disguise.