The Age of Water Lilies

by Theresa Kishkan

  She shook her head, as though in disbelief. “In any case, I would love the part. I will give it everything I have.”

  Ann reached for her hand and held it between her own. “I’m so pleased you came. And how lucky for us that you’ve seen a production and will have some knowledge to share with us. You will have to tell us more about the Chorus because I think that music was composed just for that tour. But before we talk about that, are there others who think they might like to try a role?”

  A tall, stout woman in her later middle years said, “I don’t think there’s any doubt that you will be our Hecuba, Ann. You have the voice, the knowledge of the play, and I think you are a natural for the role. Like Miss Leach, I, too, have seen this play, in Chicago a few years ago. The Woman’s Peace Party—my sister is a member—organized a tour. And I, too, will never forget it. I would like to be part of the Chorus, please, as I don’t really think I am bold enough for a part of my own. But do the others agree that Ann should play Hecuba?”

  There was instant assent. Many of those present had heard Ann sing at one time or another and were aware of her confidence in front of an audience, the strength of her voice, her projection.

  “I would honoured to play Hecuba if you are quite sure no one else wants the part?”

  No one did. In the next few minutes, other women chose parts, a few of the younger ones gleefully asking for the male roles and the youngest of all, a girl in her late teens who had arrived with her mother, asked to be Helen. The part of Andromache went unclaimed until Ann suggested Flora.

  “Oh, Ann, I was thinking I’d paint sets, if we decide to have sets for a simple staged reading. Painted curtains, perhaps. I have some ideas . . .”

  “Flora, nothing would make me happier than to have you opposite me as my daughter-in-law. We have the perfect domestic situation for our rehearsals, don’t you think? We can practise as we do the sheets on Monday mornings! And there is no reason why you cannot also think about sets. A little team can help with that.”

  That was it, then. The play was cast. Ann and Flora had baked a special cake for the occasion, rich with sultanas and Madeira wine. The lovely Aynsley tea service had been set out on the dining-room table; two pots were quickly warmed for India and China. The cake was sliced and served on plates so delicate one could almost see through them. The room was filled with the sound of laughter and talk as the women discussed the play, theatre in general, the state of world politics, their own domestic circumstances. Some of them were friends; others were unfamiliar, but, before long, they were forming bonds as they discovered that a brother or sweetheart had served in the same battalion in Europe.

  Before they departed, Agnes Hunter, gathering her wrap and gloves, asked, “Is there a reason why you’ve suggested a staged reading, Ann? I would like to say that I, for one, think we could make this into a proper production. Flora, for instance, said something about painting sets. Surely if we go to those lengths, we can think larger? My cousin’s daughter has been working with Carroll Aikins in Naramata . . .”

  “Naramata?” someone exclaimed. “Surely you don’t mean there’s a theatre in Naramata, of all places?”

  “Indeed there is. Or soon will be.” Agnes Hunter replied. “Mr. Aikins is building a theatre over his fruit-packing shed, very professional, with proper lighting and everything. He has people come in to help with lessons in movement and so forth. A few young people from UBC have gone up to study with him, my cousin Amelia Carr’s daughter Anne among them. I know she would give us advice if we wanted it. If we are going to the work of getting together and reading the play, I think we ought to aim to be a little more ambitious.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Caroline Leach, holding her hands up imploringly. “Let’s do the thing properly! I would do any amount of work to have this happen!”

  And everyone agreed.

  A tentative schedule for rehearsals was set. Ann would find a rehearsal space suggested. When the women left, pulling down hats against the bitter wind off the sea, they were eager for their next meeting.

  • • •

  Evening. The lamps were lit. A log fire snapped in the grate. Ann and Flora sat in the warm room with The Trojan Women, each reading and making notes in the margins of their scripts.

  “These women! Well, they’re not strangers to us, are they? What strikes me at once is, they’re so familiar, somehow.”

  Ann looked up from her pages. “Absolutely, Flora! When I read something like, oh, so much of it really, but this speech, for example: ‘And I the aged, where go I, / A winter-frozen bee, a slave / Death-shapen, as the stones that lie / Hewn on a dead man’s grave . . . ’ —well, it is completely taken into one’s heart, isn’t it?” She clutched hers in emphasis. “How many women, widowed by this war, or the last, or now faced with the loss of their sons, their brothers, might read this also and weep?”

  Flora took a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her eyes, hearing Ann read those words. “I have been reading the part where Andromache learns that her son is to be killed. To lose her husband, and now her child! How will she bear it? I’ve not come to the end yet so don’t tell me but this play seems like a dirge, beautiful and yet so heartbreakingly shocking.”

  Ann got up from her chair and went to the window. Pulling the curtains aside for a moment, she looked out into the darkness, her hands small fists against her thighs. “Who would have thought when we were girls, you in Wiltshire and I in Scotland, that men we loved would die in combat so far from home. That we would go on without them. And to read this play, to realize that it was happening in the five centuries before Christ, well, it brings out the need to do something, if one only can.”

  • • •

  The practical details took some time to work out: what would be a reasonable time frame for rehearsals; where might a performance take place. And the most immediate problems of direction. Ann would take on that role as much as she was able to do. The women who had seen productions would offer information, insights. There were a few scholars in Victoria who might be consulted about the conventions of Greek drama. Ann knew some basic but important points—that a tragedy contained two key structural elements, the choral song (with or without musical accompaniment) and the dramatic exchanges between characters. But it seemed that this play by Euripides was unusual in that it did not adhere to those traditional conventions. It had very little plot, no straight narrative. It did not focus on heroes or kings but on the anguish of women who, having lost everything, are in the tragic position of being divided up among the conquerors as spoils of war.

  “Gilbert Murray says in his introductory notes that this play—and I will quote—‘is something more than art. It is also prophesy, a bearing of witness.’”

  She paused to let the words take effect.

  “All of us have done it, one way or another. Witnessed the wounds, the terrible sorrows of others, tended those we love, or stood in a room with a letter in hand, wondering how we could possibly go on after learning of the death of a husband, a brother. And knowing that we have no real power to do anything about it.”

  “But, Ann,” said Priscilla Foley, “we have the vote now. Surely this means something.”

  Other women nodded and agreed.

  Ann paused, smiled a small smile, then continued. “I think it will take a long time before we can make any difference with our vote. At present, though, and at risk of repeating what some of you have heard me say so many times, I have no voice they’ll hear to protest the treatment of innocent citizens. But maybe they’ll hear Hecuba, Andromache, Cassandra . . .”

  They were gathered at the Women’s Christian Temperance Union Hall to begin the process of blocking out the action, learning their lines, their cues, learning how to project their voices to the audience. Not one of them was an actress. Indeed, only two had done any theatre work at all. Although Ann had performed many recitals as a singer, she was quick to acknowledge that the experience of singing to an audience as a solo performer was as d
ifferent to theatre as chalk to cheese.

  “But I’m not shy,” she smiled, “and I know how to make my voice reach the far corners of an auditorium—or my singing voice at least, if not my political one. Hecuba’s wild lament will reach a few ears. I think we should begin by simply giving this play a read-through, all of us taking our parts, the chorus perhaps standing together and trying to read more or less in unison. I don’t expect any of us will be very satisfied with the results of this, but it will at least give us a sense of how it might shape up.”

  With much confusion, and some laughter, Ann gave directions for the opening prologue. Agnes Hunter and Alice Ramsay took their places self-consciously on the stage. Ann arranged herself on the floor, tucking her clothing under her neatly, and pretended to be asleep. The room was cold and most women kept their coats on. So Poseidon stood in her long grey wool coat, fox collar around her neck, one tail casually tossed over one shoulder, with a small felt hat close on a head of bobbed chestnut-coloured hair. Her bright eyes twinkled as she declaimed the opening lines:

  Up from the Aegean caverns, pool by pool

  Of blue salt sea, where feet most beautiful

  Of Nereid maidens weave beneath the foam

  Their long sea-dances, I, their lord, am come,

  Poseidon of the Sea.

  Everyone laughed, Alice most of all. Despite her fifty years, she had the sweet voice of a young girl. Hecuba raised her head from the sleeping position and said, “I hadn’t realized how funny that would sound, coming from a woman! Never mind. We’ll work on making you sound stentorian, Alice. And for now, we’ll just keep reading, I think, in order to see how the whole thing sounds.”

  Agnes Hunter’s Athena was something to hear, speaking firmly and clearly, the voice of a woman accustomed to being heard:

  Is it the will

  Of God’s high Brother, to whose hand is given

  Great power of old, and worship of all Heaven

  To suffer speech from one whose enmities

  This day are cast aside?

  Agnes was a Presbyterian minister’s daughter, middle-aged and unmarried, an intelligent woman who had spent her life doing good works. It was her mother who’d suggested she participate in Ann Ogilvie’s project, revealing a side that Agnes never knew existed. Her mother, who’d watched her son sit by the window, catatonic, or else moaning in his bed with the covers over his head, said, “There must be another way, Agnes, for nations to settle their differences. This is simply too high a price for anyone to pay.” So Agnes put down her work basket, took up a script, and was now attempting to be the voice of Pallas Athena in an ancient play.

  The reading progressed, awkwardly, hesitantly, ill timed and at times faintly, but each woman stood in place on the bare stage and read her part, or in the case of the Chorus, read in unison (more or less) with others, until the final lines:

  Farewell from parting lips,

  Farewell!—Come, I and thou,

  Whatso may wait us now,

  Forth to the long Greek ships

  And the sea’s foaming.

  And then there was silence in the cold hall as the women waited for what Ann might say. She stood with head bowed, in silence, as though allowing the play’s words to settle into her before she might speak. And when she did, it was with emphatic pride.

  “Oh, brava!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands. “It is even better than I hoped, this play, in our voices.”

  “But, Ann,” said Mary Morrison, “I know I’m a little disappointed at our awkward reading. Are you saying you’re not?”

  Ann smiled at Mary, a lovely willowy girl of eighteen or nineteen, not long out of school. “I didn’t expect us to be perfect, Mary, not by a long shot, not on our first reading. But I was very moved, both by the language of the play and by the way each of us took it so seriously. We will get better. I know this. There are things I know I can help you with, having given voice lessons for some years. I have some ideas about comportment that I’ll share with you too, as we progress. And you are all here so now we can set the next rehearsal date. And perhaps make a cup of tea for ourselves in the kitchen . . . Oh, Flora, how good of you! You’ve anticipated my hope!”

  For Flora had already slipped away to set the kettle on the gas flame to boil. She and Ann had packed a basket with a packet of tea leaves, a flask of milk, some sugar, and a tin of Ann’s shortbread, crunchy with brown sugar. Soon each woman held a cup of tea and a shortbread biscuit as they chatted, clearly excited about the play.

  “It is so different to hear a thing aloud rather than just reading it on the page, do you agree?” asked Frances Gibbs, who had taken the part of Menelaus. “Like poetry, the way the lines sing out and rhyme. And it asks something of the voice, I think.”

  And Alice Ramsay, whose Poseidon opened the play, laughed. “Asks of the voice what might well be impossible, I say! But I am really thrilled to be part of this and hope to be . . . what was your word, Ann? Stentorian?”

  “I wanted to cry many times throughout,” said Elizabeth Washburn, who was a member of the Chorus and one of the sisters who had first expressed concern about the thrust of the project (her sister, Mary Styles, was playing a soldier). “Every time Hecuba spoke, it tugged at my heart. The words felt so timely and so personal. And of course your Andromache, Flora—I can tell you’ve been working on your part already. You read the lines as though they came from somewhere deep inside you, with such a clear and steady voice. Your performance is something to aspire to, my dear.”

  Flora blushed. “Well, yes, Ann and I have practised a little. I needed convincing that it wasn’t beyond me.”

  Ann told the group that she had some ideas for blocking that she would try to work out before the next time they met. And could they arrange, if possible, to get together in small groups to work on the script together? Poseidon and Pallas Athena? Menelaus and Helen? She and Flora would rehearse together in the evenings and would welcome others—Cassandra, for instance—to drop by as was convenient. She told them again how pleased she was with their work thus far.

  Robert Alexander was waiting for Flora and Ann in his car. He had taken Grace on an outing for the afternoon. The child was animated, having had the attention of a doting grandfather as well as a sumptuous tea with cream wafers, a current favourite treat.

  “The thespians return! How did it go, ladies?” asked Robert as he helped them into their seats.

  “It was excellent, Robert,” Ann replied. “For a first reading, I think we did very well indeed. They are keen, the women, and I think we might be able to do this old play a kind of modern justice.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  1962

  When school started again, it seemed too soon. The days in Miss Oakden’s garden had been lovely. Tessa hadn’t wanted to take the money that the woman pressed into her hands each week, but Miss Oakden insisted.

  “Oh, yes, my dear! You’ve worked hard. I could never have trained the honeysuckle so well myself and you’ve been a godsend when it comes to the fruit. And see how tidy the borders are! My knees no longer like to bend, Tessa, the way they used to, so weeding has become a trial, I’m afraid. You have been a willing and cheerful helper and you deserve this.”

  Tessa had never heard the term godsend before and she cherished it. To think of herself as special to someone, to have helped someone’s knees—it felt like an honour.

  She was no longer in the Annex. Grade threes went to the big building. At first Tessa worried that she might not be able to find her classroom—there were so many doors!—but after a week, she was confident. In any case, when the bell rang each morning, her class lined up outside like all the other classes. They were led to their classroom by Miss Anstey. Tessa didn’t like her as much as she had liked Mrs. Barrett. She was very brisk and efficient, giving directions or instructions once, expressing impatience with those children who didn’t catch on the first time. Luckily Tessa was a quick learner, but she felt a little pang of anxiety when she realized that
someone else needed more help and Miss Anstey got the look on her face that indicated she was not happy to have to say things twice. Or three times, even.

  Mrs. Barrett had encouraged Tessa to pursue her own reading interests after discovering that she was a fluent reader of novels and other books, saying, “You must participate when we do things as a class but for the quiet reading, I see no point in you having to work on the Readers. Dick and Jane are perhaps not quite as interesting as Nancy Drew!”

  “Oh, and Cherry Ames!”

  Mrs. Barrett had given her the paper for the map and allowed her time in the school library to look up information on map-makers. Even though Tessa was no longer in her class, she sought her out to find out how the map was progressing.

  “You may keep that atlas as long as you like, Tessa. We have plenty in the classroom and I’m glad to know that you find it so useful.”

  But Miss Anstey said she did not want a student who was not a part of every classroom activity, so Tessa was required to do all the assignments on Streets and Roads. When the class went to the library on Thursday afternoons, she had to choose her book for the week from the stack the librarian had put on a table for the grade threes. Most of them she had already read; the ones she hadn’t seemed very dull. There were several Bobbsey Twins stories, for example. Tessa tried one, involving a trip to the beach; but the two sets of twins were boring and their ideas of fun too lame. The book was a lot like those previous Readers in which Dick, Jane, their little sister Sally, the dog Spot, and the cat Puff had adventured confined to things that might happen in one or two syllables. When the class read the chapters aloud in the earlier grades, Tessa had felt she would burst with impatience as some of her classmates sounded out each word, each sentence, one syllable at a time. Not that she was cross with the kids themselves, but she wanted to be reading something herself, something that grabbed her attention the way a good Nancy Drew could do, taking her away with the girl detective as she drove her smart car off on adventures involving mistaken identity, kidnapping, sinister dealings on ranches and golf courses.