“Grilled cheese. Caesar salad. Perrier,” Hope said so decisively that Harriet ordered the same. One of the four women came to the table to ask Hope how the play was going along, and Hope asked her how her own play was going.
“Second act problems,” the woman said. “Usual thing.”
Hope nodded sympathetically and introduced Harriet.
“She’s our Mazo,” she said.
“I saw you in something,” the woman said. “Sarah Bernhardt.” They all knew, of course they did. If they hadn’t been present for the debacle, they must have heard about it.
“What about Jane Merritt?” Harriet asked after the woman left.
“Too big a fish for this small pond.”
“Oh,” said Harriet, deflated even more. “Meaning she’d make the rest of us look like amateur night in the church basement?”
“And hard to handle. And she has other fish to fry. She’s hoping for a part in a movie with Dustin Hoffman. And she’s not altogether reliable.”
Not altogether reliable, thought Harriet, looking at the shrewd eyes swimming like fishes behind the thick lenses.
“And what about you? This is very different from Bernhardt!” Hope said.
“It’s a long story. I’ve been interested in Mazo since I read her as a kid.”
“Oh?” It was an invitation to say more.
“Well, there was a family connection in a way. My aunt worked for Mazo’s cousin ... so I felt she was in the family, the nearest I’d ever come to a real writer. And you? Did you read all the books when you were a kid?”
“No. They were popular in England, but I missed out onthem somehow. I found them much later, and since I did I’vegone through various stages — reading her, writing about her, researching her life, teaching her
“Teaching?”
“It’s my day job. I teach at the university.”
“But Mazo isn’t the kind of thing you teach, is it? I thought —”
“She was beyond the pale. The last mourner for the waning influence of the British Empire in Canada, the provider of pulp fiction for frustrated housewives.”
“So your project is one of rehabilitation?”
“In the beginning it was. I have to admit I’m evangelical by nature, but the consuming interest became something else.”
“The secrets?”
“If you mean all those narrative hooks I put in the opening scene — the love affair with Caroline, where the daughter came from, the fabrication of the aristocratic background — no! It was none of those, although they were part of it.”
Harriet waited.
“It was how anyone so out of sync with the real world could lead her own inner life, keep it absolutely intact, and yet appear before the world in a disguise that made her completely — or almost completely — acceptable. She didn’t just ‘pass,’ as someone of a different race might pass, but she led a double life, and she twisted that other life into fictional currency and used it to conquer the world. It was an incredible feat.”
Harriet tried to absorb Hope’s explanation.
“This will all become clear during the course of the play,” Hope said in a tone that signalled the subject was closed for the moment.
Suddenly Harriet knew who Hope reminded her of — her high school English teacher.
“Yes, yes,” said Hope with a grimace, “it’s my fate to remind everybody of their high school English teacher.”
She was applying herself to the food in front of her, eating the salad with her fingers and cutting up the sandwich into small pieces — the eccentric eating habits of someone who lives alone. Harriet began to warm towards her.
“It’s a compliment,” said Harriet. “She was wonderful. One of the reasons I went into the theatre. She had us learning masses of poetry. Passages from Shakespeare, the sonnets, sonnets by Milton and Wordsworth and Keats and lots more. I can still remember them. She had a wonderful voice. There are whole passages of Shakespeare that I still hear in her voice.”
“Ah yes. That’s what they said of Edith Evans. When she spoke a line, you heard it ever afterwards in her voice. But your English teacher probably had years of elocution lessons. We all did.”
“Oh really?” said Harriet, interested because she really hadn’t known what she’d been heir to.
“Well, those of us who came from Lancashire and Yorkshire or other benighted places and went to grammar schools. If we were headed to university, the first requirement for fitting into mainstream society was to shed our northern accents. And in the process of acquiring this verbal camouflage we learned so much poetry that it set us up for life.”
“It did?”
“All that rote-learning spawned a whole generation of good writers. Nothing like getting the cadences of the great poets — or even the third-rate ones — imprinted subliminally on your developing brain. Beats television commercials any day. So naturally we became English teachers, and, not wanting to be rendered back to our northern habitats, many of us skipped across the ocean and offered our talents to the New World.”
A certain inflection in her voice made Harriet wonder if she was serious.
“I’m afraid those talents weren’t much appreciated,” Harriet said, “at least not in my school. The parents complained that there was too much parroting of useless stuff and not enough thinking.”
“So they put a stop to the rote-learning, and you didn’t do a whole lot of thinking, either. And that created a great vacuum that provided fertile ground for all kinds of mischief. But you managed to slip in just under the wire and learn something useful. And that set you up for life.”
“Perhaps it did,” said Harriet, somewhat surprised to see her high school education summed up in such a way.
“It was the same all over,” Hope said. “I taught high school when the conventional wisdom was that knowing your subject didn’t mean you knew how to teach. So expertise in your subject became a liability. Meanwhile, learning how to teach, like learning how to be a good parent, remained elusive. Schools of education flourished, and high schools grew weaker. It was the beginning of a downward slide. Luckily, I jumped off the merry-go-round and hopped over to the university.”
“Just like that?”
“Well, it wasn’t quite that simple. There was the small matter of a couple of extra degrees that I had to acquire.”
“Were they worth the effort?”
“In some ways. You don’t have parents on your back, you have a certain amount of autonomy, and scholarly expertise still counts for something. But the same forces that eroded the high schools are now working on the universities — at least in the humanities. It’s a long story, Harriet. But as we’re still functioning, I’d like you to come and talk to one of my classes.”
“Be glad to,” Harriet said, although it was the last thing she wanted to do.
“But getting back to Mazo?”
“That’s a long story too,” said Harriet. They gathered their things together and emerged into the mall, then, discovering that they were going in the same direction, they walked across the park together.
The mime and most of the buskers had disappeared. The pictures drawn by the pavement artists remained, and the white cart was deserted, its owner packing up for the day. She waved cheerfully at Hope.
“Hi, Blanche!” said Hope. “Got any of those hashish bars?”
“Sure,”