“Why don’t you go stay with your mother for a bit, do you good, so Ada could see her grandma and her aunt. Be good for you, too, in the city again.”
“And how are we going to manage that, Max? Can I just get on a transport from the Gwaii? Can I just go?” She heard in her voice the sarcasm she had hated so much in Claire.
Max said nothing, returned to the steady back-and-forth of his boot brush. The caked polish gave way under his hands first to a dull shine, then a hard parade brightness. Beside him sat two of her own little shoes, already caked with polish, the black leather pumps she wore to church on Sundays and when she visited for tea in the afternoons, that were otherwise useless on the dirt roads of the base.
Hazel was secretly happy that the Japs advanced along the Aleutian Islands, giving some RCAF wives an opportunity to leave the Gwaii. Max told her the Aleutians were a long way from them, and had sketched a map on the back of an envelope, but Hazel allowed herself to panic and talked very fast about rape and the special pain-enhancing wrist-knots she’d seen in a Life magazine pictorial about what would happen if the Japs attacked the Pacific coast. Max found a real map to show her, but then she cried harder and Ada began to whine, and he gave up. She wrote Mother the next instant, and used the word “evacuate” several times. The next day, she and Ada were on a transport, crying again, but this time because they were leaving Max to defend the coast against invading Japs armed with pain-enhancing wrist-knots.
After she had been home for a few weeks, she insisted on going downtown. Mother said no, she should rest in her condition and considering what she had been through, with the evacuation, but Hazel couldn’t stand the house anymore. It’s too, too grim, darling, she told an old high school friend on the second afternoon. Dreadful for a young wife and mother, who had endured such hardships and separations and needed cheering up. Practically haunted, she said to the same friend, a week later.
It was in the middle of Woodward’s, looking at little cotton gloves, that her feet began to hurt, and by the time she was four blocks west of there, she felt one of the sudden, irresistible waves of melancholy and fear that marked late pregnancy for her. Her feet were so very sore and her bag so heavy, and Ada so demanding. She held tight to Ada’s hand. For a moment she couldn’t imagine what to do next, but the hard part lasted only minutes, and when she surfaced for a moment, she realized she was near the Hudson’s Bay Company lunchroom, and she had five dimes and two quarters in her pocket. She would have a cup of tea. It would be good for Ada to see the HBC lunchroom, having spent so many months in those dark islands at the edge of the world. The very thought of the Gwaii gave her shivers, the thought of returning there filled her with dread: the little shack, the darkness, the rain.
In the lunchroom Ada began to whimper. Hazel ignored her at first, finishing her tea and leafing through a magazine, while Ada clutched her sugar cookie, her bottom lip wobbling and her nose snotty. The whimper became a whine.
“What a mess you are!” Hazel said to her, then took her to the ladies room, where Ada began to cry good and proper. “Good little girls carry a handkerchief, Ada. Do you have a hankie?”
Ada shook her head no.
“Well, I suppose we’ll have to go home, then. I suppose we won’t visit the toys, and you won’t see the bears. I thought you wanted to see the bears.”
“No!” Ada said, but it was not a command; it was long and whiny. “No-oo!” Ada said again.
“If you were a good little girl, darling, you would see the bears. There are bears in the park, too. Perhaps we’ll see them one day.”
“Bear?” Ada said. “Bear?”
Accepting that she had lost her afternoon out to a child’s snotty nose and dirty hands and irrational demands, Hazel cleaned up her daughter in the lady’s and took the escalator to the bottom floor, past the jewellery and the perfume, out the big golden oak doors to the street.
It was on the street that she had a curious experience, brushing through the crowds as she dragged Ada toward their stop. The streetcar was coming, and she would not miss it, though Ada hung on her arm and said “No, no” faintly, and, sometimes, “Bear?” She could not imagine where Ada had learned to love bears, real bears, too, not the fuzzy toys that seemed appropriate for a little girl. They often saw them on the Gwaii, when they went out to pick blackberries. The three had been out together at the end of August, before Hazel got too big, and they had seen a black bear squatting among the salal bushes eating constantly and intently. Max had held Ada up and pointed toward the woods, and they had all watched it, and Max had said he was just a young bear, not three years old, and out on his own for the first time. Hazel had been afraid, and made them go back to the jeep without filling their buckets.
On the street with Ada hanging on her arm and slowing her as she pushed toward the stop, Hazel brushed past a man who, for a moment, seemed to touch her wrist with warm fingers, a touch that lingered on her skin long after he was gone in the crowd. As she rushed away from that touch, a familiar shape emerged in her mind and in the corner of her eye, one she had not thought of for years, one so long gone he had seemed a fantasy from her overwrought adolescence and the stunted years of depression that followed on her father’s death. They had hardly known each other; it was a few weeks that had bloomed, temporarily, into something enormous that consumed her waking hours and her dreams. But she had recovered, and six months later, it had died back into some lightless part of her mind and heart. She did not often think of him, but as she rushed toward the streetcar a memory—distant and precise—blossomed again in her mind.
At the time, she had thought it was like being splashed with very hot water. She didn’t know what she felt, and it was a moment before she had even recognized pain in the reaction of her fast-beating heart, the constriction of her throat and stomach, the prickling skin, the sudden appearance of sweat. And then she had felt her knees go funny and wobbly, and she was glad she was sitting down. She had looked at the floor in front of her feet. The toes of her new shoes were still bright and uncreased. She had bought them because they were so adult—black patent with ankle straps like Joan Crawford—and perhaps Liam would like them. She had saved the money in a dozen tiny ways, skipping church collections, eating nothing. She thought that when they went away, she would need nice shoes.
He hadn’t noticed the shoes. He was leaning on the horrible little mantelpiece that never had a fire under it. He stooped slightly to examine one of the stupid little prints on an easel. She thought it was called “The Blue Boy,” and looking at it she realized that it hung—in one version or another—in every house she had ever visited as a child, in every front room and guest bedroom and entrance hall. She wondered how many copies of “The Blue Boy” hung in homes and hotels and tea rooms around the city, and wondered why it had been chosen, of all the pictures in the world, to scatter on every wall.
He stared for a long time at the horrible little picture.
“Mr. Manley,” she started. He looked up at her, his eyebrows pushed together and his forehead squashed. His mouth was slack and shiny with spit, like he had just licked his lips, and she thought, suddenly, how ridiculous he was, with his jowls beginning to sag on his jaw, and how white and pasty the skin on his bum, and how long were the black hairs under his arms, around his navel. She thought of how his breath had smelled once when he kissed her after eating garlic, in itself a disgusting habit that nice people didn’t countenance. She was suddenly revolted by the thought that she had ever touched him, his horrible body, bad-smelling and elderly and creaky, and the horrible purplish scar that ran down his right thigh and over the kneecap, and how slowly he moved in the morning, and how he blew his nose, right there in front of her, and looked into his handkerchief for a moment before folding it up in his pocket, then smiled and kissed her, as though he hadn’t done anything disgusting at all.
And that was the whole of her memory, the sudden flood of it as Ada hung on her hand and the streetcar arrived and she pulled Ada forw
ard and the child dragged her feet. They took their seats, Ada in the window, and Hazel looked down at the poor, dark, lost little girl for a moment, and suddenly she found that the ache in her heart turned soft, and she looked at her child without bitterness or anger. In a sharp, quick movement, she wrapped the girl up tightly in her arms, pressing Ada and the unborn child close together. She said, “Daddy will show you a bear, darling. He will show you the bears.”
Her face buried in the girl’s hair, which smelled like white soap, Hazel would not look out her window toward the man who had left the touch that still lingered on her skin.
THOSE WHO AREN’T
Three weeks haunted, one week fired. She brought in the things she’d taken from Rm 023 and, for the last time, turned her key in the stiff lock. It took two trips. Among the boxes she returned were a dozen notebooks that had not originally belonged to the Institute, but which were easily hidden in one of the other rooms, along with Mrs. Kilgour’s private correspondence. They were journals. Very tedious journals written in a lovely, slanting cursive, driven hard west by some invisible momentum.
After that, she cleaned up her desk in the R.A. office. Brynn had cleared out because, she told a mutual friend, she didn’t want to embarrass Anthea in a moment of such total humiliation. If Brynn had been there, Anthea would have pointed out that it really wasn’t so bad, then Brynn would have imparted words of wisdom in her counsellor-voice, telling Anthea that it was hard to make a go as a real academic, and Anthea probably had other gifts, anyway.
She was done quickly with the desk because she mostly just tossed everything into the recycling, the common room or the garbage. She was almost finished when she looked up to see Dr. Blake standing in the doorway. He nodded to her, then walked out of view down the hallway. A moment later he returned to the open door, took a step into the room, waited, and then fetched up beside her desk. He held an envelope in his hand.
“This is for the thing down at the Temple Theatre.” He opened the envelope and held the ticket toward her. “You might get a kick out of it.”
“Is that okay?”
He still held the ticket out to her, so she took it. Then he said, “You might as well. You’ll get to look around.”
“I’d like to see the inside of the Temple.”
“I thought. And I wanted to say before you left that I’m sorry it worked out this way. You did some good work for us, at the beginning.” And then he was gone.
Three weeks later. The ravages of memory receded, and though the dead still cast their long shadows, Anthea felt convalescent for the first time in a year. She got to the Temple Theatre early and waited for half an hour before the doors opened. She wore a red dress and sunglasses and heels, and hoped it wouldn’t be too chilly later on the October evening.
Soon Anthea stood in a little knot of well-dressed people waiting to slip through the doors. Above their heads, she could make out the T and the E, but the restorers had only just reached the leading edge of the M. From where she stood, she could see faint traces of what the doors had been early in the Temple’s history: polished copper, vine-patterns and leaves that curled around Moorish arches, above them a pink granite archivolt framed the porch and the doors. Through clean patches in the glass, she could see the lobby, dirty grey carpeting and fat, pink pillars of granite, lit by white light from fluorescent squares in the low, false ceiling. Anthea knew that if she could see into the darkness past the fluorescent panels—part of renovations in the 1970s—there would be plasters, arabesques and mandalas and fleur des lis. Colm had walked among them on his way to Easy Rider in 1969, one of the last people to see the plasters before the false ceiling covered them. Long before that, Hazel had gone with her father to see John Barrymore perform soliloquies from Shakespeare’s tragedies, and she had stretched out her little girl’s hand and touched them as they walked past.
Outside, Anthea wanted to touch the broken faces that decorated the box office, the corners and the columns around the entrance. She could still make out ivory-coloured gods among the papyrus and acanthus leaves, though many were gouged from the wall, revealing the tracery of wire that supported the concrete ornaments. She wondered who had stood in front of the façade like that, and struck it again and again with a hammer or a stone, and how long it took to chip away a face.
After they unlocked the doors, she knew she had an hour to explore before the program began. She walked into the lobby among potential investors and future-possible-members, high muckety-mucks, artists and journalists, academics, performers, politicians. In one corner of the lobby, beside a pillar, there were white-linened tables covered in bioplastic goblets, bottles of cider, white and red wine from a biodynamic vineyard near Duncan’s Crossing. The attendants were uniformly elegant in black trousers and shirts, like actors with day jobs. In the corner opposite the food and drink there were easels with large posters that told the story of the Temple, the city’s theatre district and Mrs. Kilgour’s contributions to both. Anthea avoided that side of the lobby. Brynn would probably be there, somewhere, networking, looking for people interested in the Institute, telling them clever anecdotes about vaudeville and burlesque. Dr. Blake might show up. She hoped she would not see them.
According to the narrow strip of paper Anthea held, there’d be a speech about the original theatre district, and there’d be representatives of the local arts community, a Q&A, a few words about plans for the renovation, and some performances. A note from the Orphic Voice Arts Society indicated that they were scrupulously aware of the dangers of gentrification and would endeavour to make a welcoming space for people of all backgrounds and from all neighbourhoods. Looking around, Anthea guessed it meant that some of the attendants—those who didn’t handle food, at least—had been drawn from the city’s poorest postal code. They held flashlights where the wiring was still in pieces, and warned people away from the doors to the structurally unstable backstage, and the dressing rooms below the orchestra pit. She recognized them because often their skin was darker than that of the other guests. The men wore jeans that bagged at the knee and the back pockets, and layers of matted polar fleece. One or two women had dressed up, and wore white high heels and little stretchy dresses under their fun-fur jackets. The theatre was cold, and Anthea worried about their thin, bare legs.
She found her way through the lobby to the stairs, hoping to see through holes in the floating ceiling to the original walls. She sensed what hung above them in the darkness: plaster rosettes in pink and robin’s egg and pale green, up past the galleries that ringed the lobby, rising toward the invisible vault. She stopped at the bottom of the enormous staircase that led to the upper balconies, and looked up past visitors who stood in knots and condescended to Eastside men and women, then she climbed up through the crowd to the double doors.
The auditorium was lined with more ugly, grey wallboard, but where it had been torn away, Anthea saw chipped gilding and paintwork. She was alone beside one of the struts that supported the box at stage left, near a long slit through which breathed damp and cold, a smell like abandonment. She knelt, listened for rats, then reached one hand through the dark tear, and touched the blue and gold mandala on the other side. It was softer than she expected. It would give under her fingernails if she scratched it, and though she didn’t, her hand still came away with grey dust and mildew. In the damp and dark above their heads, she knew there was a dome, painted on plaster supported by a wire net, in the manner of Parrish or Wyeth, a frieze of Isis, Hermes-Thoth with the head of an ibis, Anubis the Jackal, attended by papyri, palm fronds, sand-dancers in white muslin, and the distant, hazy blues of the Nile.
The ceremonies began as she climbed up to the balcony, and knelt and touched the old wall of the theatre. A man on stage spoke into a portable PA: “We at the Oh Vee Ai Ess,” he said, then stopped. “But you know we’ve been calling ourselves Oh-vas, and I think that’ll catch on. So we at OVAS. We’re proud to be part of this amazing recovery project that will not only rescue a piece of our
heritage, but also reinvigorate a neighbourhood that’s been neglected—we’re going to bring a whole lot of people to the Eastside with the place, just like in the old days when there were a half dozen theatres around here. And I think that alone deserves your support, and maybe a round of applause for our volunteers?”
After they’d all clapped he went on: “You know, it’s funny the sort of things you learn doing this—we’re finding out all sorts of crazy nuggets, just the thing for a bunch of history nuts! Did you know that this place was bombed in 1933? Apparently it was a hotbed for revolutionary types during the Depression. Crazy stuff like that I’ve been hearing since I got involved! Dr. Ojea over there will tell you more about that later when she takes you through some of the history. First off, though, we’re lucky enough to have a couple of kids in from the university to give us a show, and maybe wake up some of those old theatre ghosts from the Twenties. I hear they’ve got a program that dates back to the Temple’s first decade, and I can’t think of a better way to welcome you all to the evening than listening to them. Thanks, I should add, to Brynn at the Kilgour Institute for helping us figure out what sort of music would be suitable. You should take a look at her work in the lobby, too! She put together quite a little exhibit out there.”
The gentleman clapped again, then they all clapped and he left the stage. Two figures stepped forward to the apron; a tenor, and a soprano in black wool and boots, gold taffeta glimmering under the long skirt of her coat.
Anthea stood forward in the dress circle, where the centre aisle had been, though there were no longer seats, nor even a balustrade to mark the edge. Below her on the floor and before the stage, men stood with flashlights and caged work lights, casting shadows and gleams on the prima donna’s taffeta. After the introductory bars the duo sang:
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