An Audience of Chairs

by Joan Clark

  “What about the use of aerosol tins at home, like all-weather protectors, household cleaners, insect repellents, hairspray … Should we stop using them?”

  “Stop interrupting!” Moranna shouts. “Let her talk!”

  Unperturbed by the interruption, Bonnie says, “Well, it would probably help but considering the scale of problem, not by much.”

  Passing a hand over her lacquered hair, the newscaster says, “I’m afraid our time has run out. Thank you for coming in, Dr. Fraser.” The camera leaves Bonnie and zeroes in on the newscaster. “For those of you who want to learn more about this fascinating subject, Dr. Fraser will be giving a free public lecture tomorrow night at Dalhousie University.” Reading from her notes, the newscaster says. “That’s tomorrow night at 8 p.m. in Room 127 in the Computer Science Building.” She turns to Bonnie, “Again, congratulations on winning the Canadian Science Award, and thank you for enlightening our viewers on your important and timely work.”

  “You are most welcome,” Bonnie says while Moranna sits, entranced by the clever, charming woman her daughter has become.

  In a blink she’s gone and Moranna pounds the table in frustration. How capricious and fickle television is, presenting her daughter then whisking her away, replacing her with fluffy angora cats once again meowing to be fed. She stares at the screen in a turmoil of excitement and disappointment, watching one commercial after another before accepting the fact that Bonnie will not return. Only then does she feel the swell of satisfaction. “I found her!” she says. “At last, I’ve seen her with my own eyes.” She turns to Bun. “Isn’t she wonderful?”

  He nods. “She certainly is.”

  She grips his arm. “And to think she’s lecturing in Halifax tomorrow night. I’m going.”

  “I’ll drive you.”

  Bun wonders if the woman they’ve just seen really is Moranna’s long-lost daughter or another woman with the same name. He isn’t entirely convinced Moranna isn’t deceiving herself, that she isn’t caught up in one of the dramas she enjoys acting out. But not for one moment does he consider her going to Halifax without him. He wants to be there to support her if she has to face the disappointment that the woman on television isn’t her daughter. And even if she is, it doesn’t mean she will want to meet Moranna, although she appeared friendly enough on the screen.

  Leaving the pub, they drive past the lake but not once does Moranna look at the dark reservoir of that botched summer; instead she keeps her eyes on the headlights as if they, not Bun, can be relied upon to lead her home. Bun knows she doesn’t want to talk and is brooding about her daughters, maybe picking up at where she saw them last. He doesn’t know much about that part of her life beyond the fact that Moranna’s children were taken away while she was drugged and that she never saw them again. The cruel way she’d been treated shocked him even though he had been cruelly treated himself—his grandfather had told him about being thrown out the window. Bun has already decided to spend the night in his workshop. He keeps a stash of yellowing Louis L’Amour paperbacks out there and will pass the time reading. If he stays in the house, he knows he won’t get a wink of sleep because Moranna will be awake all night, hyped up and restless and pacing the floor.

  Moranna is riding the wave of euphoria, wanting but unable to quite believe she has actually seen her older daughter. After all these years she had given up hope of ever seeing either of her daughters again, yet tonight she saw Bonnie and all because Bun, dear Bun, insisted on taking her to the pub. What if she had refused to go? She feels as if she’s been squeezed through a narrow crack, not a crack in her personality, but an opening created for her by the Fates, those powerful witches on a wild moor who decided the destiny of the Scottish King. She believes that she is fated to be reunited with her daughters and this very night has been given instructions on how to proceed to their meeting place. The irony that the message has reached her through the television isn’t lost on Moranna and she titters and hoots as she paces the kitchen floor, making plans for tomorrow.

  Over and over she reviews the television interview. Abruptly she stops pacing and a mist of gloom rains down. Moranna remembers the newscaster saying, “Welcome back,” and “What brings you to Halifax this time?” Obviously Bonnie either lived in Halifax or visited the city many times. Whichever it was, it’s clear that at some point in time, she was less than a day’s drive from Baddeck. Had she thought about Moranna? Had she known her mother was here waiting for her and her sister? Had she thought about her at all?

  When they meet in Halifax tomorrow night, Moranna will tell Bonnie that she never wanted to be parted from her and Brianna, that they had been taken away against her will, that she had sent them dozens of letters, which were returned. It’s important her daughters know she never wanted them to leave and that she did everything within her power to get them back.

  Along with the letters to her children collecting dust upstairs are others Moranna wrote to her now-deceased lawyer about obtaining custody of her daughters. For a while Moranna thought Greta Dunlop was working on her behalf, until the July day in 1975 when she sat in the lawyer’s office and Greta admitted that she had not yet made a case for even partial custody of the children and wouldn’t until Moranna had “straightened herself out.”

  “Straightened myself out,” Moranna protested. “You speak as if I were a criminal.”

  “Don’t misinterpret my words, Moranna. And don’t dismiss the difficulties of your situation that would interfere with you being able to cope with raising children. As a mother, I know how demanding the job can be.” A huge-breasted woman, Greta put her fleshy arms on the desk and leaned toward her client. “One of my sons is adopted and I will always be grateful to his birth mother for giving him up because she couldn’t look after him properly.”

  “I can look after my daughters properly.”

  Greta looked at her with woeful eyes. “No, you can’t, Moranna.”

  “If they were living with me, I would get better.”

  “With your husband’s stable situation, at this late date the most you can hope for is visiting rights.”

  By then Bonnie and Brianna were eleven and ten years old, and Duncan was remarried. The divorce papers, also unread, are upstairs beneath the bed.

  “It’s been far too long,” Greta said, then hesitated, “since the breakup.” At least she knew enough not to say breakdown.

  Moranna knows Greta was right about one thing, which was that when she visited the lawyer for the purpose of getting her daughters back, it had been far too long. The fact is it took so many years for her to gather her wits and by the time she had most of them back, she lacked the power and resources to retrieve her daughters.

  Moranna wants Bonnie to know that although she wasn’t able to manage joint custody with their father, she never stopped wanting to be with her and Brianna. She never rejected them. She was the one who was rejected when she became ill. Moranna has no idea if her daughters were told what had happened to their mother or even if Brianna, who was only two when she was taken away, remembers her Mama at all. In the beginning, she and Bonnie would have asked about her but after a while, when they hadn’t heard from her, they would have stopped asking. Ever since her children disappeared, Moranna has been plagued with these thoughts and after seeing Bonnie on television tonight, she asks the question she’s asked over and over—why hasn’t she heard a single word from her children?

  Six months after returning from Russia, Duncan came to see Moranna. He came at a time when the Fates were against her and she was living a furtive existence in the Baddeck farmhouse, hiding whenever her father or brother arrived, fearful they had come to take her back to the hospital. In those days, if Moranna heard a vehicle in the driveway as one of them arrived with groceries and money, she opened the trap door that later so terrified the postman and crouched in the cold cellar beneath the kitchen floor beside bags of coal and a shelf of dusty preserves, waiting until she heard the tires crunch away.

 
; Duncan surprised her by arriving on foot. She was playing the piano board Edwina had left in the farmhouse and her humming blocked the sound of his entrance.

  “Moranna.”

  She was sitting in the same chair she’s sitting in now, her back to the door. Recognizing his voice, she didn’t move a muscle or acknowledge she’d heard, but sat pretending to be invisible. She didn’t want him to see her dishevelled hair and soiled clothes, knowing he had once been attracted to her looks.

  “Moranna.”

  She would have bolted upstairs if his voice hadn’t made her weak and faint-hearted. She heard the scrape of a chair and knew he had sat down and was waiting her out. She doesn’t remember how long they sat like that. It might have been ten minutes, it might have been twenty, it might have been a half-hour, although remembering how closely Duncan kept track of time, she doubts it was that long. Finally she dragged her voice from the mire of fury and shame. “I want you to bring my children here. I haven’t seen them since your parents took them away.”

  “I can’t do that, Moranna. I can’t bring Bonnie and Brianna here. They need playschool, the stimulation of other children their age. And you need to get better.”

  “I will get better.”

  “I want you to listen to the doctors and co-operate with them. There are drugs you can take that will help. If you take the drugs, you’ll become well enough to look after the children.”

  She barked out a derisive laugh. He was obviously part of the conspiracy to blot out her memory and her creativity with drugs. Did he really believe taking drugs would make her a better mother? And did he really want a wife who was a spook like Elsie? No, he didn’t. She might be crazy but she knew that much. Drugs would wipe out her vitality, what Duncan used to call her joie de vivre, and he wouldn’t love her any more.

  “You shouldn’t have left me and gone to Russia.”

  “I know that now.”

  “I told you I needed help. If Sophie had been here to help me I wouldn’t have become ill.”

  “We couldn’t afford to fly her down.”

  “Maybe we could get her back.”

  “She is back. She’s looking after the children in Toronto.”

  “I went to Chester to find them but they weren’t there.”

  “They were in Toronto with me.”

  Swallowing her vanity, Moranna turned around and faced Duncan, letting him see her raccoon eyes and blemished skin, the result of poor hygiene.

  “When I thought you were in Russia, I tried to break the KGB espionage ring,” she said, her voice a monotone. “Brezhnev’s brother had taken over the hospital and they were brainwashing patients, which is why I left. I came close to throwing myself into Halifax Harbour in order to save you from the KGB, until I remembered the children. That might never have happened if you had come to see me when you returned from Russia. I was in the hospital a month and you never called me or came to visit with the children.”

  “I had to get the children settled first, Moranna. That was the priority at the time. They were upset and I didn’t want to leave them.”

  “How are they?”

  “They’re fine. Now.”

  “I miss them. Will you bring them for a visit?” Moranna pushed the hair from her face. “I don’t always look like this.”

  Duncan turned his head sideways and gazed out the window. At the time Moranna didn’t recognize his discomfort, never mind his anguish, but she remembers it now, remembers how he bit his bottom lip, which he did sometimes when he was upset. He said, “When you’re better, I’ll bring them. It would trouble them to see you now. They’ve been traumatized, Moranna. They need a stable, routine life.”

  “And you’ll come back?”

  “Yes. I’ll come back.”

  Eventually Duncan did come back, but not soon enough for Moranna. In any case he did not come back in the way she meant, which was come back to me, your wife.

  “It’s time I was going,” Duncan said, then added, “I was fortunate to find you in.” Polite formality was all that could be rescued from the landscape of a marriage that was over before it really began—if a bomb had gone off there might have been more to salvage. Duncan stood up but made no move to touch her, which was probably just as well because if he had laid a hand on her, she might have pushed him away. Addressing her back, he said, “Goodbye, Moranna,” and let himself out.

  She heard his footsteps on the driveway and hurrying upstairs to the bedroom, watched him walk toward the road where he must have parked the car. He walked slowly, hands in his pockets, head down, dejected. It wasn’t his usual brisk, confident stride but the walk of a defeated man—he had seen for himself that she had fallen apart. In spite of her agitation and distress, Moranna believed Duncan had loved her once and was walking away from her now because she was no longer the woman he thought he had married. How she longed to be that woman again. But like Saint Joan, Abigail and Hermione, the person she’d been was a role she’d forgotten how to play. The Moranna he’d known had become an illusion.

  THIRTEEN

  WHEN BUN COMES IN from the workshop in the morning, Moranna, still wearing the blue dress, is asleep on top of the blankets, the coat over her legs. Bun lights the fire, makes tea and porridge before he wakes her by switching on the radio to the FM station she likes. Piano music ripples through the kitchen, he doesn’t know what it is but it’s Moranna’s kind of music.

  By mid-morning, his breakfast long over, he shaves and puts on clean jeans and jacket and when Moranna still hasn’t stirred, he leans over the bed and gently shakes her awake.

  “We should be leaving for Halifax soon,” he says, “if we want to get to the lecture on time.”

  Without opening her eyes, Moranna says, “I’m not going.”

  “Why not?” Bun sits on the bed. “I thought you wanted to see your daughter.”

  “I do, but she won’t want to see me.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “But I think that.”

  “That’s what you think now, but you may change your mind in an hour or two. We should at least go to Halifax …”

  “I don’t want to go to Halifax. I haven’t been there since I left the hospital.” Moranna still hasn’t opened her eyes.

  “Well, we’re not going to the hospital and I want to go to Halifax so you’d better get up.” Bun pulls the turquoise dress he likes out of the closet and throws it on the bed. “Wear this,” he says. To save time, she could be getting herself ready while he’s away gassing up the truck, but he doesn’t suggest this because he knows Moranna is contrary enough to still be on the bed when he gets back. “Come on, when you’ve showered and dressed, I’ll braid your hair.” He takes her hand and she allows herself to be pulled to her feet, which is a relief because it’s impossible to predict what Moranna will or will not do. He interprets her willingness as a sign that she really does want to go to Halifax and is experiencing cold feet.

  While Bun braids her hair, she sits with her eyes closed and hums along with the radio music, playing the music of the Beethoven string quartet on her knees. Her hair is long and silky, a silver mixture of blond and white. Some day he’ll try to persuade her to wear it pinned to the top of her head, but for now he settles with doubling the braid and tying it at the neck with a length of turquoise wool—Moranna keeps a nest of coloured wool on top of the dresser and, depending on her mood, weaves different colours into her braid. When he’s finished, he holds out a navy blue winter coat he bought her a few years ago and she puts it on. “We’re off,” he says.

  “To see the wizard,” Moranna sings and, launching into Judy’s song, skips across the floor—it’s as if she’s flicked off one switch and turned on another.

  She talks non-stop all the way to the Strait of Canso, telling him more than she ever has about the summer her daughters were taken away, about how her husband went to Russia and how she began working on illustrations for a book and forgot that she left her children on the island.

&
nbsp; “We made mistakes. I made mistakes,” she says, then lapses into a brooding silence that lasts all the way to Antigonish where they stop for chili at Tim Hortons, Bun eating Moranna’s chili because she’s too agitated to eat. After lunch, she falls asleep, her head against the denim pillow Bun keeps in the truck. Moranna doesn’t wake up until they have crossed Halifax Harbour and the heavy drone of the metal bridge beneath the tires has stopped. Only then does she shake her head and look through the early dark at the city skyline ahead.

  “We’re here,” Bun says. “We’ve got a couple of hours before the lecture and I suggest we find a place to bed down.” Years ago, he spent a boozy weekend in Halifax with his buddies, but he doesn’t remember much about the city except the general layout. When he was crossing the bridge, he recognized Barrington Street and now he follows it along, passing a couple of big hotels where neither he or Moranna would want to stay. He remembers the university is in the city centre and near it there used to be a small inn. Maybe it’s still there. They pass the Old Burial Ground at the south end of the campus and, sure enough, Bun spots a large rambling house with a sign, The Waverly Inn, posted outside and pulls into the parking lot. “Will this do?” he says.

  “I don’t know.” She’s thinking about the Edinburgh hotel, where she drank too much at dinner.

  “Then we’ll check it out. Come on.”

  Inside, Moranna stands on the floral carpet and, looking at the grand staircase and the heavy parlour furniture, she suddenly smiles, enthralled, like a child coming upon a miniature house. “Why, it’s a Victorian mansion!” she says. It’s nothing like the staid hotel in her past.

  Setting down the overnight bag he packed for both of them, Bun asks the receptionist if they have a double room.

  “At this time of the year, we’re wide open,” he says. “Even the Oscar Wilde room is free.”

  Moranna snaps to attention. “Did Oscar Wilde stay here?”

  “He did.”