Harriet, listening in alarm, thought she’d gone too far this time.
And she had; that was the last of the yearly visits. The next morning her aunt packed her bags, refused her dad’s offer of a ride to the airport, called a taxi, and left even before she’d had her breakfast. She still sent presents at Christmas and remembered Harriet’s birthday, and about twice a year she called up and talked to her on the phone.
Eventually Harriet got over the disappearance of her aunt from her life, just as she got over her obsession with Mazo and her daughter, but like most childhood obsessions it was reactivated periodically throughout her life. It was odd that, although she wasn’t a reader of newspapers and magazines, she always seemed to stumble on articles about Mazo. When she did, they drew her back for a time into the world she’d inhabited for those two formative years in her young life.
There were always tattered copies of Chatelaine lying around backstage, and once she came across a back issue that had fallen open at a spread of pictures of Mazo and her home. It wasn’t one of the great houses that Harriet remembered from the photograph albums her aunt had shown her, but a mansion in Ontario with stables and an old carriage house that served as a garage. Mazo was sitting on the lawn in front of the house in a wicker chair, with two dogs lying on the grass beside her, and smiling up at her daughter, who was handing her a sheaf of papers. Antoinette was wearing a summer dress, and they looked odd together — an old woman and a young girl. The picture seemed posed somehow, and they seemed stiff and awkward.
Harriet had been down east playing summer stock when Mazo’s death was announced. This time the name jumped out at her in headlines from the newspaper stand: “Mazo de la Roche Dead at 82” and “Famous Author Dies.” She bought all the papers and learned the details of the funeral at the Anglican Cathedral in Toronto. She was near enough to make it there and back in a day, and for one brief moment she’d thought of making up a pretext, giving her young understudy a break, and catching the train into the city. She could have taken a taxi at Union Station and joined the throng of mourners, like any other fan. She’d have finally gotten to see Antoinette and Caroline, though she thought they would probably be veiled like queens following the cortège of a dead monarch. But she hadn’t gone after all, though at the appointed hour she’d drifted into a trance and been there in spirit, and for days afterwards she was abstracted and dreamy.
Harriet had entered many strange places in her life; it was what she did when she prepared for a part — Lady Macbeth’s Scotland, Cleopatra’s Egypt, Saint Joan’s Rouen, Sarah Bernhardt’s Paris — but the summer she visited her aunt had been the beginning, the first of those imaginary countries. So there was congruence in having this play offered to her at the end of her career, as if a circle had miraculously closed and her own people had come to reclaim her. Not only that, but it finally lifted the screen away from Mazo’s mysterious world and revealed all the secrets that lay behind it.
| MAZO: | Caroline, do you remember when you almost went off that time with ... that man? |
| CARO: | Of course, I remember. It was a very long time ago. |
| MAZO: | You didn’t love him, did you? |
| CARO: | Of course not, Mazo. |
| MAZO: | Darling, did you want so much to be a wife? |
| CARO: | Is that so very strange for a young girl? I wanted to have a home of my own, away from the family, away from your mother and Aunt Eva. |
| MAZO: | I want to marry you, Caroline, so that you can never, ever decide to leave again. |
| CARO: | So this is what all this restlessness is about? |
| MAZO: | The danger of almost losing you haunts me still. And now with this job you’ll be meeting people. Men, Caroline. I want them to know that you belong to me. I want a wedding in a church. I want a marriage certificate. I want to see you wearing a band of gold on your finger. I want you to say things like “thereto I plight thee my troth,” and I want to say “with all my worldly goods I thee endow.” |
| CARO: | But, darling, you don’t have any worldly goods. That’s why I’ve taken this job. |
| MAZO: | Oh, Caroline, why not? |
| CARO: | To put it bluntly, your late father was not much of a provider and no one else is going to provide for us. |
| MAZO: | I don’t mean that. I mean why can’t we be married? Why can’t two people who love each other as we do and plan to share everything and each other and live together for the rest of their lives.... |
She read on, transfixed, and what she read confirmed what she’d known all along, only she’d never actually put it into words. She fell asleep with the words going round and round in her head.
III
It was always the same with auditions. Because she was tense she drank too much, and the drinking only increased the tension and aggravated all the other problems — stiffness in the limbs, the inability to move gracefully and think clearly.
She woke up with a hangover and a panic attack, thinking for a moment she was in a motel room in the mountains, still in flight. But no, she was in a rooming house in a small prairie city. The room was shabby, verging on squalid — a torn curtain in the window, horrendous wallpaper with great feathers of some kind. She tried to figure out what they were. Fleurs-de-lys? Fans for dancing girls? Plumed pens for wedding guests? Just thinking about them made her stomach churn.
More familiar items stood on the rickety bamboo table beside the bed. A crumpled script, a bottle of Scotch with the level ominously low, and the tattered paperbacks that were her bibles — upbeat theatrical autobiographies with catchy titles and depressing biographies of celebrated actors. She craved coffee and cigarettes but knew she’d have to settle for aspirin and a cold shower with someone pounding on the bathroom door before she was halfway through.
The stress was proportional to the desire for the part, and in this case the desire was high. If she didn’t succeed she’d be relegated to the ranks of backstage workers, that army of dressmakers, builders of sets, painters of scenery, arrangers of wires and lighting. They called themselves artists — makeup artists, costume artists — but they were really just technicians. Everyone knew who the artists were, the only ones who really counted. It was the actors who had all the responsibility for the success or failure, for the livelihood and continuation of the whole lot of them. And they came together, the actors, a cabal bound together by that knowledge. They fired each other up, growing together, sometimes intensely, living and even sleeping together. And no one minded — all was permitted and justified by the importance of the play and the enormous responsibility they carried on their shoulders. They were apart from the world, with their own times and seasons like lovers, sleeping through the mornings, coming alive at dusk, the alertness lasting beyond the midnight hours, sometimes to daybreak. They were the aristocrats of this ragtag world, the others merely servants, bit players, like the spear carriers and the attendant lords.
It all built up to the grand climax of the first night. After that, if it went well, the momentum was sustained for the entire run. But already after the first night there was the imminence of death. The certainty of doom fanned the intensity. And when it came the ending was terrible, the final curtain like the start of a funeral, followed by partings, goodbyes, the diaspora, departures at the bus station for different cities. You wanted to die. You did die. You were dead in every way that really mattered,