Six o’clock and here she was back again at the entry to the canyon, almost deserted now save for the animals with motheaten pelts, sickly from being fed junk food by the tourists. She had come full circle and was back at the first sign:
The crumbly bedrock erodes quite rapidly on its own. Unfortunately man hastens this process, as the red rock cannot endure your footsteps. PLEASE STAY ON THE TRAIL AND LET THE CANYON ERODE AT NATURE’S PACE.
Well, then, it was decided. Already her mind was beginning to script a new role. She would walk into the theatre and the buzz in the green room would stop, everyone watching her entry. And it would start up again, the good old backstage gossip, inaccurate, malicious, but infinitely diverting.
“Did you hear about Harriet? My dear, a mountain climber!”
“No! I heard it was a park ranger!”
Back at the toll booth, she placed her call.
“Yes,” she said, “yes, I’ll do it.”
He gave the dates of the audition and said he’d courier the script if she’d just give him an address to send it to. Where the hell was she, anyway?
“Send it to the Lakeshore Hotel.”
It was the play’s title that had clinched it. It was a name from her childhood, or rather from that imaginary world that had run parallel with it, peopled by extraordinary beings in faraway exotic places. She’d dwelled in that world the way her friends had dwelled in a world of royalty or Hollywood stars. And that world had been orchestrated by one magical being, the only famous person she’d ever come close to knowing and who she came to think of as a distant member of her family, a friend of her Aunt Nina’s.
And now, years and years later, when her aunt was gone, the name she hadn’t heard for years had been spoken again, conjuring that whole world back into existence. Mazo de la Roche. Surely this was a talisman against disaster if ever there was one.
“She never married,” her aunt had said as they looked at a photograph.
“Like you,” Harriet said.
“No, not like me, not like me at all,” her aunt said.
“Well, what’s she like, then?” Harriet said.
“Like nobody you’ll ever run across,” her aunt said.
II
“Back already?” said the clerk at the desk.
It was ridiculous and made no sense at all. She’d returned to the hotel by the lake in Waterton Park because she’d given its name as the place where she’d receive the script. “Receive,” as if it were an immaculate conception and she needed to be in a hallowed place for the event.
“I’m expecting an important package by Federal Express,” she said. “Will you let me know the moment it arrives?”
She should have driven to meet it, to pick it up in Lethbridge or Calgary, because the time to prepare was short and the suspense was terrible. But once the decision was made, she felt she’d never been so eager to get her hands on a script before. Well, there was the Bernhardt fiasco; she’d been eager then, too, but it didn’t bear thinking about. That way lay madness, and pray god this time would be different.
“Is there a hairdresser around here?” she asked.
“Not one you’d want to go to,” he said. “For that you’d have to go to Calgary.”
She understood from his deferential tone that she was gaining stature already. She’d reasserted herself, regained something, and had presence once again. While she waited for the script she paced — along the lakeshore, around the periphery of the town site, up to the big CPR hotel perched on the headland, where she carried a drink onto the terrace outside the dining room. She stared out over the long lake below with mountains encircling it, barely seeing it.
After that summer with her aunt, she’d been like a traveller who returns from a foreign country with exotic terrain and strange customs and is disabled by the experience for re-entry into ordinary, everyday life. It all formed part of a gilded and mysterious community into which she’d been initiated, and she would never again be the same person she was before she went there.
Her family, busy with their own affairs, simply assumed that she was dissatisfied after living in luxury and being pampered, or that she was prey to the normal upheavals of adolescence. It would be nearly a year before she saw her aunt again, and her only solace was reading. For the rest of the summer she’d beaten a track to the little public library, where among the Harlequins and the copies of Gun Digest she’d found what was necessary to nurture her own private fantasy world.
The script arrived at last. It was not as bulky as she’d expected, and not so incendiary, either. In fact, the beginning was pedestrian, like those Shakespearean plays that start off limping along — two gentlemen conversing, “It wearies me, you say it wearies you,” clumsily setting out the necessary information.
ACT ONE
A publisher’s office in Boston. The room is dominated by a large painting of the floating disembodied head of Mazo de la Roche. The publisher, Theodore Speaks, is meticulously dressed in a grey business suit against which his crimson Harvard tie stands out conspicuously. In constrast, the biographer Hamish Donaldson seems frowsy and crumpled.
| DON: | That’s a striking portrait. I’m surprised that your current authors don’t resent it. |
| SPEAKS: | Possibly they do. But none of us would be here if it weren’t for her. Her books supported the house all through the Depression and the war years. |
| DON: | And yet you’re unwilling to publish this story of her life. |
| SPEAKS: | Mr. Donaldson, if I may be perfectly frank, there is no life to be written. She said so herself. “Whatever I am I have put into my books.” And there you have it in a nutshell. She wrote books, she lived a quiet life, and she died in her house in Toronto, attended by the sister with whom she spent her life. |
| DON: | Caroline was a cousin and not a sister, wasn’t she? |
| SPEAKS: | Sister, cousin, secretary, housekeeper — what difference does it make? They were two shy Victorian spinsters. They crocheted. At least the sister did. Made my wife a handkerchief once. Very fine work, my wife said. She has it still, I believe. |
| DON: | But there were rumours, weren’t there? One hears stories of unrequited love, broken hearts and so on. |
| SPEAKS: | And they were just that. Rumours. |
| DON: | But they were very persistent, weren’t they? Wasn’t Mazo jilted at the altar? |
| SPEAKS: | Come, come, Mr. Donaldson, you’re making it all sound like something out of Dickens. The mad old woman roaming about the ancestral home still in her wedding gown. All the clocks stopped at the very hour of the jilting. I’ve visited Mazo in her home in Toronto and I can assure you that was very far from the case. |
| DON: | What about the child? |
| SPEAKS: | Adopted. Antoinette was adopted. |
| DON: |
But wasn’t it odd for two women advanced middle age to adopt
|