An Audience of Chairs Read online

  Praise for An Audience of Chairs

  WINNER OF THE WINTERSET AWARD

  “[Moranna is an] intense, indelible character…. An Audience of Chairs [is] a powerful story about the creative spirit and the conjunction of madness and motherhood.”

  —New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal

  “Joan Clark dares to write about those who live with a disability that is not physically manifest, but makes of life a labyrinth of potential disasters. Her risk is our benefit—if we only have the wit to live as intensely as Moranna lives.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “Elegantly written and deeply grounded in place, this moving, compassionate novel is far more than a story of mental illness. Moranna’s quest is for peace, joy and connection—the samyearnings that drive us all.”

  —Quill & Quire

  “It’s a well-told story, and Moranna is a truly memorable character.”

  —Winnipeg Free Press

  “Clark … is a mesmerizing writer…. An Audience of Chairs [is] such a rich and rewarding novel.”

  —The Sun Times (Owen Sound)

  “Powerful…. What Clark has done so well is to show mental illness from the inside out, how it affects every aspect of Moranna and those who touch her life. The redemption Moranna eventually seeks is hard won, but because Clark has showed every step of it, it’s wholly believable. Equally impressive, it manages to be heartbreaking and satisfying at the same time.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  for Carol

  Ae fond kiss, and then we sever!

  Ae farewell, and then forever!

  Deep in heart-wrung tears I’ll pledge three,

  Warring sighs and groans I’ll wage thee.

  Who shall say that Fortune grieves him,

  While the star of hope she leaves him?

  Me, nae cheerful twinkle lights me,

  Dark despair around benights me.

  ROBERT BURNS,

  written for Agnes McLehose

  Truth is only to be had by laying together many varieties of error.

  VIRGINIA WOOLF,

  A Room of One’s Own

  PART I

  ONE

  PICTURE A WOMAN PLAYING a piano board at the kitchen table on a late December morning. Her hands, warmed by knuckle gloves, move across the wooden keys as she leans into the music. Pedalling a foot against the floor, her strong, supple fingers pound the opening chords of a Rachmaninov concerto. As she plays, the woman imagines heavy velvet curtains drawing apart and lively notes rush onstage, where leaping and skipping, they perform a short, spirited dance. The dancers depart and, swaying from side to side, the woman plays slower notes and hums along, her voice mellifluous and soothing as she imagines herself beside a stream sliding through waving grass. Outside the window, the winter landscape is frozen and drab, but inside the farmhouse it is summer and music shimmers on sunlit water as notes flow from the woman’s fingertips, moving outward in ever-expanding circles. Except for the fire crackling inside the wood stove and the woman’s hum, no sound can be heard in the kitchen, for the painted keys of the piano board are as mute as the table beneath.

  The music shifts and now there is a spill of high notes trickling down a mountain fell. The woman hears the lonely call of a French horn from an alpine meadow and the answering shiver of strings. Lifting her hands from the board, she begins conducting the orchestra, combing and parting the air, keeping time as she leads the musicians toward the finale, which she plays with a burst of energy, thumping her hands on the piano board, bringing the moderato to a satisfying end.

  Having concluded the morning’s concert, the woman lowers her head and for a few moments rests, hands in her lap. The performance has exhausted her, but not for long, and soon she is on her feet, bowing to an audience of chairs. Over and over she bows to the thunderous applause that always follows a perfect performance. A benevolent smile illuminates her face. You are so kind, she says, attempting to be gracious and humble, but she is far from humble and is merely acknowledging the praise that is rightfully hers. Every audience has its limitations and shortcomings, but today’s has been particularly responsive. They know they have been listening to the gifted playing of Moranna MacKenzie, musician extraordinaire.

  Tomorrow she will play the adagio.

  Picture a glass globe of swirling snow. Inside the globe, at the end of a winding drive, is a low, wide house with three dormer windows above a veranda wrapped in clear plastic. The house is badly in need of repair, but most of the dereliction cannot be seen from the road, and at first glance it might be mistaken for a genteel country hideaway whose privacy is maintained by a thick stand of trees. Assuming the house has an interesting and possibly distinguished past, winter visitors approaching Baddeck by way of the Bay Road will sometimes pause between the crumbling concrete posts at the entrance to the driveway for a closer look at the old farmhouse, but the locals, well aware of its occupant, continue on without a glance.

  Inside the house, Moranna, still basking in the satisfaction of the morning’s performance, goes into the bedroom adjacent to the kitchen and begins dressing in clothes laid out the night before. Until she knocked down the wall—who would have guessed whacking a wall with a sledgehammer could be so much fun?—her bedroom had been used as a dining room, but its proximity to the wood stove makes it more practical for sleeping.

  Laying out the next day’s clothes is a strategy carried over from a time when Moranna was chronically depressed, but she still employs it as a way of avoiding an early-morning decision. There is the occasional day when she wakens heavy-headed and lethargic, unwilling to make a decision, and stays in bed as late as mid-afternoon. More often than not, these decisions concern what she will do today and in what order. Will she, for instance, work on a carving of the Brahan Seer or finish a sermon? Will she do her errands this morning or this afternoon? Will she write another letter to the Cape Breton Post castigating the government for its slowness in cleaning up the Sydney tar ponds, or will she put it off to another day? These decisions weigh heavily on her and, like choosing what clothes to wear, are better decided the night before. A creature of the moment, Moranna must constantly remind herself to follow the schedule she has worked out in an effort to keep herself balanced and sane.

  As she pulls on a sweater and jeans, not for the first time she wonders if the poet Robert Burns laid his clothes on a chair before retiring for the night, in order to avoid having to decide if he should wear a clean shirt in the morning. His wife, Jean Armour, might have decided for him but, having so many children to look after, what her husband would wear the following day was probably the last thing on her mind. There was a time when Moranna regarded Burns as a confidante and friend, and although she no longer writes him letters, she still feels a strong kinship with him. Not only was Burns melancholic, but like her he was a musical genius, gifted with the ability to hear every note on the musical scale with the precision of a tuning fork.

  Once she’s dressed, Moranna puts on her Army and Navy jacket, goes out into the snow and carries in two loads of firewood from beneath the tarp where she and her lover, Bun, stacked it before his return to Newfoundland. She stokes the fire, adds wood, then makes herself porridge and strong tea. While she’s drinking the last of the tea, she gets out the old portable Royal she once used to write a novel about Robert Burns and types the sermon she’s been composing for the new minister of Greenwood United Church, Reverend Andy Scott. Moranna has no patience for badly performed music and, because the choir cannot sing an anthem without going flat, rarely attends church. That hasn’t prevented her from pegging the minister as a thoughtful, unstuffy person, a breath of fresh air who, unlike his predecessor, doesn’t mind being given advice. She has decided she
likes him and, because he saves his newspapers for her, intends to give him the sermon free of charge.

  According to Lottie MacKay, Moranna’s neighbour and a regular churchgoer, Andy’s vague sermons ramble on far too long, and Moranna figures she can help him by providing a sample of a concise, hard-hitting, effective sermon. When he was alive, Moranna’s father, Ian MacKenzie, rarely missed a Sunday service and often expressed the opinion that sermons should be short and straight to the point. He wasn’t suggesting the United Church return to the dour agenda of the Presbyterians and Methodists, but he thought a good sermon should offer fare the congregation could sink their teeth into while they were eating their Sunday dinner at home.

  The Seed of Christ

  Did you ever ask yourself why Christ had no corporeal children, why his Seed did not manifest itself into a brood of children running over the sun-baked hills and splashing through the waters of Galilee? Was Christ gay? Was he sterile, the result of severe mumps as a boy? Had he chosen celibacy to keep himself free from human temptations? Whatever the reason, Christ did not father corporeal children because if he had, surely it would have been documented in Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.

  My friends, I put it to you that Christ was childless because he wanted to put his Seed into our hearts. To some the image of Christ’s Seed entering our hearts may evoke a carnal image, but to Christians the placement of Christ’s Seed is a profoundly spiritual image, for it brings to mind a love of humankind so great that He chose to become a father to us all.

  With the Christmas season upon us, it is more important than ever to remember Christ’s message of being kind to one another, a message that even in the village of Baddeck, we too easily forget as we are assaulted by the relentless barrage of consumerism. From every quarter we are besieged by the message: buy this, buy that, as our capacity for greed is exploited, and children demand far more than they need or is good for them. In newspapers and store windows we see pictures of the beautiful people in front of an obscene, gift-laden tree as they quaff apple cider and sing “Deck the Halls.” Their halls are already decked with giant bows and swags of artificial fir. I ask you: What are they celebrating? Certainly not the birth of Christ whose manger is nothing more than a diorama hidden beneath the gifts, a token of thanks to the babe, as if He had done the shopping and paid the bills. What they are celebrating is a cancerous capitalism that cannot grow unless we buy, buy, buy, which is what North Americans have been exhorted to do since the bombing of the World Trade Center a few months ago. Surely here in this tiny corner of the world, we can resist these exhortations and celebrate Christmas by remembering to open the womb of our hearts to receive the Seed of Christ. Let us pray, etc.

  With the sermon shoved inside the old sock Moranna uses as a purse, she tucks her hair out of sight beneath a woollen toque. Although she has for the most part given up wearing disguises when she goes out, she’s still vain about her hair, which, although thick and fine, is no longer oak blond but oyster white. Outside, she pulls the sled down the driveway and through the slushy snow on the roadside running parallel to the Bras d’Or, an arm of an inland sea Cape Bretoners call a lake. Locked in ice, the lake looks as bleached and porous as bone. Walking the mile to the village, Moranna bursts into sudden laughter when it occurs to her that she’s on her way to deliver a Christmas sermon when Christmas is a time of year she prefers to forget.

  Moranna hasn’t been able to celebrate Christmas since her daughters were taken from her thirty-three years ago. Her older brother, Murdoch, has given up inviting her to spend Christmas with him in Sydney Mines, knowing she will refuse—she and her sister-in-law, Davina, have never liked each other; worse, seeing her niece, Ginger, home for the holiday would remind Moranna of her own lost daughters.

  The first years she was without her children, Moranna spent Christmas in Newfoundland, in a Port aux Basques motel that was all but shut down, and a spindly spruce tree inside the cramped office was the only reminder that it was Christmas. She had fled to the motel to avoid her father, who at that time drove to Baddeck every Christmas in an effort to persuade her to celebrate it with her stepmother and him in Sydney Mines. Moranna had no wish to celebrate Christmas without her daughters and harboured the notion that weathering Christmas alone would make her stronger. She still harbours that notion and now gets through the last week of December by playing the piano board, reading Burns and Shakespeare, going for long walks and immersing herself in her work. She is a sculptor, a carver of wooden people. If she’s in the mood, she puts Ravel on the old record player her father bought her years ago, and slipping out of her clothes and into a costume of diaphanous scarves, she dances around the furniture, waving the scarves as she weaves between the chairs. Climbing onto the kitchen table, she tosses her head like a flamenco dancer and stomps her feet, rattling the stack of plates with food squashed between, evidence of meals interrupted by a whim and set aside. She dances with abandon, improvising as she moves through the rooms, every motion fluid and sublimely free. As such times she imagines she has the talent and beauty of Isadora Duncan. She might have been Isadora too if she hadn’t thrown herself into other creative pursuits.

  Moranna has an attachment to certain objects—the painted rockers and ladderback chairs, the pine table, the books, the piano board, all of which have been with her for years and furnish her insular world. She believes these objects are more trustworthy than people and will never willingly give them up. She’s particularly attached to the wooden sled she’s pulling, a sled given to her the Christmas she was four. Trudging past the frozen lake, Moranna remembers the Boxing Day she and her father went sledding on the snowy slope across from their house in Sydney Mines. It was the last hour of daylight, the crystal hour before winter dusk, when the air was blue with magic and she imagined she saw elves in silver boots and caps dancing on the snow.

  She remembers that particular Christmas for another reason besides the elves and the sled. It was the Christmas Great-Aunt Hettie came to help out and wouldn’t allow Moranna and Murdoch to look at the tree until Christmas morning, and when they did, they were dismayed to see there were no ornaments on the tree, no balls or bells or tiny angel lampshades circling the lights. There were no lights, only strips of scraggly tinsel tossed here and there. If their great aunt had got her way, there wouldn’t have been a tree at all for she didn’t believe in showiness or adornment, and they were stuck with her repressive regime until after New Year’s when their housekeeper, Lucy, returned from Glace Bay. The Christmas of the disappointing tree was the children’s first without Margaret, their mother, who they were told, had died in Scotland and wouldn’t be back. Ian hadn’t informed the children about the circumstances surrounding their mother’s death. They were too young to know more than the bare facts and, in any case, the sudden loss of his wife had rendered him uncharacteristically silent and taciturn.

  Margaret McWeeny was eighteen years old when she met Ian MacKenzie, who at thirty-five still lived with his parents, Murdoch and Georgina, on Brown Street in Sydney Mines. Ian worked in his father’s grocery store six days a week and on the seventh, after singing in the Carman United Church choir and eating one of his mother’s roast beef or chicken dinners, usually spent the afternoon in a wingback chair, his sock feet resting on the bed as he read undisturbed. While his parents napped, he would set the book aside and, tiptoeing downstairs to the kitchen, make himself tea. He was more restless than discontent, especially after a lengthy spring, and stirred by the spectre that his life might go on like this forever, he would drive to the Margaree Valley every summer during fishing season, park the delivery truck by the roadside and make his way to his favourite salmon pool in the Margaree River as it found its modest way between farms and wooded hills. He had passed a clump of alders and was walking along the embankment enjoying the seductive heat and the scent of wild roses when he felt something sharp pierce his left ear. Thinking it a wasp or bee, he tried to brush it away and felt a fish hook embedded in the earlobe. Usin
g his right hand, he grabbed the line as it was being tugged by someone fishing in the pool below.

  “Hey!” he shouted and, fumbling for his Scout knife, cut the line just as the fisherman looked up and saw him. Only it wasn’t a man, it was a woman wearing a slouch hat and hip waders. Whooping with laughter, she lost her footing, splashing backwards into deeper water. Although peeved at her apparent disregard for having hooked his ear, Ian loped down the embankment with the intention of offering her a gentlemanly hand.

  “Are you all right?” he called, prepared to swim out and tow her in.

  She let out another whoop. Did she think everything was funny?

  “You mean, do I need rescuing? No, my hip waders are full of water, but I can get myself ashore.”

  He stood and watched while she dog-paddled into shallow water, a wide grin on her face. She stood on the gravel bottom, lost her footing, fell back and whooped again.

  An unusual young woman, he thought, unlike any woman he’d ever met. He saw women daily in the store, but they were predictable and plain and mostly married, nothing like this free-spirited woman who seemed completely at home in the water. Ian stared at the half-wild, enthralling creature in front of him and thought he had never seen a woman more beguiling. Her hat had fallen off, and as she stood there in green hip waders, long black hair tumbling past her shoulders, nipples clearly visible beneath her shirt, he entertained the ridiculous notion that she was a mermaid who had swum upriver from the sea. Abashed that so fanciful a thought could spring from a mind daily employed in business matters, he addressed the practical problem of where she lived and, seeing no vehicle parked nearby, correctly assumed she had come on foot.

  “You’re soaking wet,” he said. “If you like, I’ll drive you home.”