by Joan Clark
When the last of the wedding guests have departed, Moranna returns to the Old Burial Ground and sits on the table grave, the bouquet in her lap, until her spirits gradually revive. Again, she reminds herself that she has accomplished what she set out to do, which was to declare her existence to her daughters. They have grown up without her yet today they welcomed her with courtesy and goodwill. But their meeting was so brief, so fleeting, and after all these years without them, she wants much more. If she was at the wedding reception now, she would be getting to know her daughters. Why wasn’t she invited? When Duncan shook her hand outside the church, he could have asked her to join the reception. Why didn’t he? Did he think she would drink too much and talk too much as she had at Ken Morrison’s dinner party in Edinburgh? Did he think she would make a scene? Of course he did. He thought she wasn’t to be trusted. He had no idea of the woman she’d become. The thought that she has become far more than he knows pleases her. He may have kept up with what has been happening in Afghanistan and Iraq, but he hasn’t kept up with what has been happening to the mother of his daughters.
Moranna goes back to the inn and telephones Bun, but he’s on the ferry and can’t be reached. Disappointed, because she’s eager to talk to someone about having seen her daughters, she telephones Shirl Silver, who lives a short bus ride away—although she’s never visited her friend, Moranna remembers from her university years that the bus ride is two, maybe three hours at most.
When Shirl’s husband, Ron, answers the telephone, Moranna tells him who she is and asks if she can visit Shirl later on today; if not, in the morning.
“You can’t visit Shirl today or any other time,” Ron says. “She’s in a coma.”
“Oh no, not Shirl!”
“She put up a brave fight, but now she’s …” His voice breaks. “She’s upstairs, dying.”
“Could I come anyway?”
“No, you can’t.” Ron says. “It’s Shirl’s wish that only family be with her at the end.” He is close to breaking down again but he pulls himself together. “You’re too late,” he says and hangs up.
Moranna feels she has been slapped and her first impulse is to telephone Ron back and tell him he’s been rude. But then the truth of his words sinks in. He wasn’t being rude. He was stating a fact. Shirl is dying and she’s too late. Moranna knows that since having the telephone installed, she could have called Shirl, but the thought hadn’t occurred to her. When she and Bun were in Halifax attending Bonnie’s lecture, they could have driven to Middleton to visit Shirl, but Moranna was so eager to return to Baddeck that the thought of seeing Shirl hadn’t once crossed her mind.
She remembers Shirl’s cryptic response when she last visited Baddeck, and Moranna asked her why she thought she had never heard from Bonnie and Brianna. “Maybe they’re like their mother,” Shirl said, speaking in the dry, wise voice she sometimes used, “waiting for someone else to reach out.” She paused. “Meaning you, Moranna.”
EIGHTEEN
IN THE MORNING, MORANNA catches the Cape Breton bus, but instead of going straight to Baddeck, she gets off in Sydney Mines because she’s decided she has something to say to Murdoch and won’t go home until it’s been said. The trip to Halifax proved she is better; well, she will always have to be careful but she is far, far better and is feeling confident and strong.
She hasn’t been in Sydney Mines since Ian and Edwina’s funeral and is shocked how changed the downtown is. A redbrick bank has swallowed the space MacKenzie’s Grocery once occupied. Across the street from the bank, where the People’s Store had been, is the boarded-up exterior of a failed mall. The hairdresser and barbershop are also gone and in their place is a fast-food takeout. The changes are disorienting, but after she’s passed what’s left of the downtown, familiarity asserts itself as she remembers how every summer, the town affirmed its faith in the redeeming value of paint. The Baptist Church has a new coat of robin’s egg blue, and two houses farther along have been freshly painted pea green and lemon yellow.
Murdoch’s house is an indeterminate colour, something between sage and brown, a muted, inoffensive colour. The front door and the wheelbarrow on the porch are a lighter shade of the same colour. The wheelbarrow is filled with some kind of exotic flower, Moranna doesn’t know what it is—she doesn’t go in for exotic flowers. She lifts the brass knocker and waits. Her brother’s car is parked in the driveway, which means he’s home. When he doesn’t answer the door, she follows the driveway to the back where there is a large wooden deck edged with planters containing the same exotic flower. There is a barbecue, an umbrella table, and chairs upholstered the same colour as the house. Murdoch is lying on a chaise longue in the shaded corner with his eyes closed and his hands clasped over a radio on his chest. He’s asleep and because of the earphones doesn’t hear her approach. Moranna stands for a few minutes gazing at the face that even in sleep seems to be frowning, and thinks how much her brother resembles an angry, oversized baby. Disarmed of gruffness and gloom, he seems entirely without defence. It strikes her that he is a man so burdened with discontent that there is no fun in his life. In spite of her bouts of anxiety, her morning depression, her propensity for error, Moranna knows how to have fun, how to let herself go in the pleasure of the moment. She sits on one of the lawn chairs, the leather grip on the deck beside her, and waits for her brother to wake up. Although it’s warm on the deck, she notices he isn’t wearing shorts but baggy cotton pants and thick-soled shoes. She recalls how even on warm days he always wore more clothes than he needed. She can’t remember ever seeing him wear shorts or sandals as a boy, although she supposes he must have.
Sensing a presence, Murdoch wakens and seeing his sister sitting on the deck is seized by the momentary and terrifying fear that she is a premonition signifying another calamity. Thumping his shoes onto the deck he sits up and says, “My God, Moranna, what are you doing here?”
“I came to see you. Why else would I come?”
Murdoch could have said, “Because you’re in trouble,” but he doesn’t because now that his eyes are shaded against the glare by the Tilley hat he’s taken off the chaise arm and jammed on his head, he notices his sister isn’t in any obvious distress. Moreover, she isn’t wearing her usual baggy thrift-store clothes, but a becoming reddish-coloured dress he’s never seen before.
He says, “That’s a nice outfit you’re wearing.”
“It’s new.” Moranna glances around. “Is Davina here?”
Murdoch says Davina is working in North Sydney, although he wonders if this is true because recently he caught her in a lie. His wife claimed she and her partner were working at their office when in fact he and Janine were standing at the same checkout in Sobeys. Again, he wonders if Davina and Noel are fooling around.
“To what do I owe the honour of this visit?” As with most of Murdoch’s clumsy attempts at being offhand, this one is freighted with sarcasm.
“I came to apologize.”
Did he hear right? “Apologize for what?”
“All these years I’ve been convinced you had some idea of where my daughters were and weren’t telling me. It wasn’t until I was at Bonnie’s wedding that I realized you didn’t know any more than I did.”
“You were at Bonnie’s wedding?”
“Yesterday in Halifax.” Moranna’s smile opens up her entire face in a way Murdoch hasn’t seen since she was a girl. “She was a beautiful bride. I met Brianna and her daughter.”
“You have a granddaughter?” By now Murdoch is sitting halfway down the chaise.
“Yes. Her name is Gemma.”
“Good for you.” He could have said, “Lucky you,” because he has always wanted a grandchild and it’s clear Ginger has no intention of producing one. As much as he has resented his sister’s ingratitude and selfishness, he’s pleased she has found her daughters, and has a granddaughter. She deserves it too, he thinks, after all these years of being shunned.
“Will you be seeing them again?”
&n
bsp; The smile fades and she begins fidgeting with the hem of her dress. “I don’t know,” she says and goes on to explain how she had seen Bonnie being interviewed on television at the Thistledown Pub and assumed Murdoch had seen her too. “The interview came on after the evening news.”
“No, I didn’t see it.” Murdoch finds it awkward to admit that Davina won’t allow the television to be turned on while they are eating, even to watch the news. The most he will say is that since his retirement, his wife thinks he’s in danger of becoming a couch potato. He asks if Moranna is hungry and offers to make sandwiches. They go inside and while her brother prepares lunch, Moranna wanders through the rooms, which, like downtown Sydney Mines, have completely changed since she was last here. When she attended the tea after the funeral for her father and Edwina, the house was crowded with the dark heavy furniture she grew up with, but now the rooms are spacious with gleaming hardwood floors, pioneer furniture and paintings on the walls. The paintings, which are a mix of abstract and impressionistic, take Moranna by surprise. She didn’t know Davina was interested in such things—obviously her sister-in-law’s taste has been revolutionized since she crocheted a doily for the back of Murdoch’s easy chair.
In the dining room, in the middle of a round oak table, is the polished silver quaich in which Moranna used to admire herself as a girl, but she doesn’t pause to look at herself now because she’s caught sight of Edwina’s upright Mendelssohn. Moranna hasn’t forgotten the piano, but neither has she given much thought to its whereabouts. When her father and Edwina died, she was too numb to think about what would happen to the piano and, in the years since, assumed it had either been sold or given to Carman United. She now knows that like the rest of the furniture, it was passed on to Murdoch when he inherited the house.
Moranna sits on the piano stool with its worn velvet seat and, lifting the keyboard cover, plays Brahms’s Lullaby, humming as her fingers move over the keys. How thrilling it is to actually hear the music coming from the piano, as well as inside her head. Exhilarated, she plays one of the early Brahms sonatas Edwina taught her.
Standing in the kitchen doorway, Murdoch watches his sister sway from side to side, completely unaware of his presence. Murdoch knows his sister played the piano board, but he always regarded it as make-believe; he hadn’t known she could really play a piano. He remembered as a girl she spent hours at the piano and bragged about having perfect pitch, claiming she would one day become a famous concert pianist. He had dismissed the ambition as another of her foolish pretensions, yet here she is, playing music she obviously remembers. He has never played the piano himself, nor has Davina, but Ginger took lessons for five or six years. When the sonata is finished, Murdoch claps and says with genuine admiration, “That was quite a concert.”
“Thank you,” Moranna says and, getting up from the stool, offers a mock curtsy.
Murdoch carries the tuna sandwiches and iced tea outside and he and Moranna sit on the deck eating while she tells him how she and Bun drove to Halifax to hear Bonnie’s lecture.
“And afterwards you had the telephone installed,” Murdoch says.
“Yes. I ordered wedding bouquets to remind Bonnie and Brianna who I was and later I caught the bus to Halifax and watched the wedding party from across the street.”
As his sister talks on, Murdoch becomes increasingly impressed by her restraint. He didn’t know she was capable of holding back from acting on whatever impulse popped into her head. Moranna sounds completely rational and normal and he’s startled to realize that he’s enjoying her company. When they finish eating, he offers to drive her to Baddeck. It’s a pleasant day for a drive and he wants to get his sister out of the house before his wife comes home. He will of course tell Davina his sister’s news, and when he does an arched eyebrow or a remark—How do you know she wasn’t making it up—will diminish the pleasure he wants to hang on to for as long as he can.
They are approaching Boularderie when Murdoch says, “I’d like you to have Edwina’s piano.” Since leaving Sydney Mines, he’s been thinking that the piano should rightfully be Moranna’s. He should have given it to her years ago and he feels badly he hasn’t. Davina will protest, having often said that one day the piano will belong to Ginger, but he will override her objections. “Would you like to have it?”
“Would I? Oh Murdoch!”
But Murdoch has anticipated the outburst of affection and holds up his hand.
“I’ll see that you get it,” he says.
As soon as he drops her home, Moranna telephones Fox Harbour but there’s no answer. For the next two hours she continues telephoning until finally Doris answers. She’s been to the church lobster boil and has only just got home. She was one of the last to leave. She was down for clean up and washed dishes until her legs ached from the thrombosis because she was standing so long but it was worth the while because there was a good crowd and they made over four hundred dollars. They need twice that much to repair the church roof but at least it’s a start. No, Bun isn’t home. He’s been called to an extra shift and won’t be back until after midnight. Yes, she’ll tell him to call in the morning.
Bun telephones a few minutes after Moranna finishes breakfast.
“Thank God,” he says, “I’ve called you several times.”
“I was only gone two nights.”
“How did it go?”
“Bonnie threw me her bouquet.”
“That tells you something.”
“Yes, and Brianna and I spoke. She has a little girl named Gemma. I asked Brianna to visit.”
“And did she say she would?”
“No, but she smiled.”
“Did you talk to your ex?”
“Briefly. My friend Shirl is dying.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I won’t see her again.”
There is a long silence before Moranna goes on.
“I stopped in Sydney Mines to visit Murdoch on the way back and he drove me home. He says he’s giving me Edwina’s piano.”
“Good for him. It sounds as if you’ve had quite an adventure.”
“I have.”
“Maybe we’ll make it to California after all.” When Moranna told him earlier that Murdoch had located their aunt, Bun suggested putting a camper on the back of his truck so they could drive to San Francisco to see Tessa the Temptress. He said he’d like to see her big bosoms and bedroom eyes.
“We’ll go in the fall after the tourist season is over and you’re off work.”
“You mean it?”
“I do,” Moranna says. At this moment she feels strong enough to travel around the world. She knows the feeling won’t last, but she thinks it might last long enough for her to cross the continent with Bun.
“Maybe we should aim for some place closer the first time out, like Bar Harbour. We could take the ferry across from Yarmouth.”
“Aren’t you tired of ferries?”
“I never get tired of being on the water.”
After she hangs up the telephone, Moranna decides to put off moving her wooden people out to the veranda. Once she nails up her signs at the end of the drive, tourists will begin trickling in and her time will be interrupted. Before she opens for business, she wants to reclaim the unused bedrooms. Tying a cloth to the broom, she goes upstairs and swipes at cobwebs and windows, and sweeps the floors. Retrieving the bundle of returned letters she sent her daughters from the dusty clutter beneath the bed, she burns it in the stove along with Duncan’s letter and the divorce papers. She also burns what’s left of the illustrations for “The Mermaid Sisters,” including bits of braided hair chewed by mice. She is making a clean sweep of any evidence of her mistakes on the chance—and there is always a chance—that her daughters come to see her. She doesn’t want anything in the house to remind them of the incident on Kidston Island. It is the possibility that one or both of her daughters might visit that has sparked her determination to rid the house, and herself, of her many varieties of er
ror. This is hope, not expectation. Expectation sets the sights higher than hope. Hope is more tentative, less likely to plunge her into the trappings and suits of woe. Hope is a flicker, a candle flame kept burning by the simple act of breathing. Ever since her children were taken away, she’s been acting in the dark, groping across the stage, not even a spot to light her way. But now she has firm hold of a candle and who knows where its shadowed and fragile flame will lead her?
When she’s finished cleaning, she takes her daughter’s bridal bouquet apart and presses the wildflowers inside the worn copy of Shakespeare, scattering the petals among stories of betrayal and misplaced ambition, mistaken identity and mistaken love. The scattering of flowers isn’t a sentimental or even a symbolic gesture, but the grand gesture of an aging prima donna.
The prima donna sits at the piano board and, nodding to the audience of chairs, feels her way into Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. It’s been several days since she’s heard it played on the radio but that doesn’t stop her from trying to play it and, undaunted, she hums the violin solos while directing the orchestra with a wooden spoon.
The following week the piano is delivered and Murdoch himself brings the piano tuner from North Sydney, along with a box of Edwina’s sheet music. The tuner insists the piano be positioned partway between the kitchen windows and the wood stove where it won’t be affected by extreme cold or heat. Murdoch fusses about the necessity of keeping the piano free of dirt and dust and the tuner agrees that when not in use, the keyboard cover should be shut. When Moranna is at last alone with the piano, she sits on the stool and plunges into Chopin, but the Polonaise proves too difficult for her to play on a real piano. Similarly, she stumbles her way through Rachmaninov. When she plays the piano board, the music she hears inside her head is flawless, but when she hears the same notes played on the piano, she realizes with chagrin that her hands aren’t as nimble as she’d thought and she knows she’ll have to regularly practise her scales. But oh, the sheer delight of playing a real piano and hearing the soft round notes and tinkling keys, the chords reverberating through the air, the sounds circling the room in an embrace. As she plays, she thinks about Edwina, the woman who was always kind and supportive, who never tried to be her mother yet gave so much. Edwina demanded so little for herself that it has taken Moranna this long to realize that with every note she plays, she is mourning her stepmother. Without Edwina’s encouragement, she might never have played piano at all.