An Audience of Chairs Read online

  “All right.” She waded ashore and he pulled her to the top of the embankment where she stood breathless and laughing. She appeared not to notice the fish hook embedded in his ear and Ian had almost forgotten it himself.

  He drove her to a square clapboard house in Frizzleton, a tiny village a few miles along the road. Beside the house, a young, dark-haired girl was sitting on a swing watching a woman who was obviously her mother peg washing to a clothes-line. Hanging out a wash on Sunday in 1939 in Presbyterian Cape Breton was like thumbing your nose at the church, but since the house was set off by itself, the woman must have known churchgoers couldn’t see what she was doing. There was no sign of a father.

  “What happened to you, Margaret?” the woman said. She was tall and brown-eyed like her daughter but spare and gaunt, as if every ripe curve had been worn away through worry and work.

  “I fell into the river,” Margaret said, nonchalantly peeling off her blouse and slacks and hanging them on the line. It seemed she might have hung up her bra and underpants too if the woman hadn’t put her hands on her older daughter’s back and nudged her toward the house. Margaret went reluctantly, glancing over her shoulder at Ian. Her mother approached the truck and introduced herself as Helen McWeeny. “Thank you for bringing Margaret home,” she said and then, noticing the fish hook, asked how it came to be hooked in his ear. When Ian explained, Helen invited him inside where she could remove it. Ian sat beside the kitchen table and while Helen McWeeny worked the hook free, using an ice chip and petroleum jelly, Margaret, wrapped in a faded chenille bedspread, leaned against the door jamb and watched the procedure with detached amusement. She seemed to think it funny that instead of a salmon she had hooked a man on her line, a fair-haired, handsome man with a firm jaw and aquiline nose.

  The following Sunday, Margaret and Ian met at the same salmon pool but they didn’t fish; instead they talked while sharing the ginger beer and Fig Newtons Ian brought from the store. This time Margaret was subdued and, it seemed, womanly and mature. She had a curious, lively mind and appeared to hang on Ian’s words as he related droll anecdotes, none of them risqué, that he’d saved up for the occasion. She had difficulty sitting still and fidgeted with her hair, but he put this down to nervousness, a kind of sexual tension he also felt. Having persuaded himself that her zany behaviour in the river last week had been an attempt to capture his attention—which it had—Ian began driving to Frizzleton on subsequent Sundays to court her. He was more than ready to marry and move out of the house—his twin brothers, Henry and James, had married years ago and now lived in Sydney with their families, leaving him to lag behind. Three months after they met, Ian and Margaret were married in Carman United and, following a brief honeymoon spent touring the Maritimes, set up housekeeping in an apartment on Clyde Avenue, not far from the store. A few years later, after Ian’s parents died, they moved to the family house on Brown Street, the same house where Moranna and her brother endured the Christmas of the disappointing tree.

  When she reaches the village, Moranna slogs uphill to the manse and raps loudly on the door. Once, twice. No answer. Disappointed Andy Scott isn’t home, she feels abandoned, bereft. Although she often forgets her friends for long periods of time, Moranna nevertheless expects them to be available when she wants their company. There are only three or four people in the village she acknowledges as friends and one of them, the minister, isn’t home. Opening the manse door, which is always unlocked, she puts the sermon on the hall table and carries the bundle of saved newspapers outside and down the steps to stow them in the wooden box nailed to the sled. Then she makes her way to the Co-op, nursing her disgruntlement that she hasn’t been able to read Andy the sermon she composed especially for him. The sermon isn’t Moranna’s first. She sent half a dozen to Andy’s predecessor, Hugh Campbell, each with an invoice for thirty dollars, which Hugh never paid although she suspects he plagiarized her sermons.

  Moranna’s sermon writing began after she was inspired by a story passed on to her by Great-Aunt Hettie, who not only told her stories about the MacKenzies and other notable Scots but wrote them down—it’s these people Moranna now carves in wood. The story that inspired sermon writing involved a Presbyterian minister, Dr. George McPherson, who came to pioneer Cape Breton from the Isle of Skye in the dead of winter and walked to the Margaree Valley with nothing more than a few pennies in the pocket of his Harris tweed coat.

  He was on Egypt Road when he spied a woodcutter shivering as he worked and asked where he might find a parcel of land. “I will give you half my land if you will give me your coat,” the woodcutter said, and the exchange was made. The minister settled down with his family and remained as poor as the woodcutter. Not so his oldest son, Norman. Unwilling to live an impoverished life, Norman moved to the United States, where he became wealthy by writing and selling sermons to preachers all over America.

  Moranna’s father taught her the knack of “speechifying,” the word he used to describe public speaking and sermonizing. Over Sunday dinner he would often point out the shortcomings of the morning’s sermon, how the minister failed to develop his ideas and never lifted his eyes to the congregation but sweated his way through the sermon as if it were a cross to bear. Ian never wrote sermons himself, but he wrote speeches for presentation at Rotary meetings. Asked to fill in when a speaker cancelled at short notice, Ian, a natural and canny speaker, placed Volume A of the encyclopedia on the podium and, riffling through the pages until a subject caught his interest, held forth on the abolition of slavery; the battle on the Plains of Abraham; Absalom, the favoured son of King David; and the expulsion of the Acadians. Ian’s prepared speeches were usually biographies of well-known writers: Robert Burns, William Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott, whose books were in his library. Having left university after one year to help his father run the grocery store, Ian had begun collecting books, determined to educate himself. In addition to novels, biographies and poetry, his library—which is now Moranna’s—contained the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the histories of Scotland and the western world, Bartlett’s Quotations, Bullfinch’s Mythology and surprisingly, Collected Fairytales.

  As a schoolgirl, Moranna often plundered her father’s library and during her first year of high school wrote a speech entitled “Robert Burns, Saint and Sinner,” for the Rotary Public-Speaking Competition. Coached by her father, she entered the speech in order to prove to Mr. Estey, her homeroom teacher in grades nine and ten, that she could win, which she did. Shrill-voiced Mr. Estey didn’t like her and, because he never once let her answer a question in class, deprived her of the opportunity to show off the bits of obscure information culled from her father’s library.

  Feeling let down and cheated not to have seen Andy, Moranna tramps through the Co-op in expectation of finding a treat, but the store, an ugly barn of a building with aisles like cattle stalls, does nothing to lift her gloom. She heads for the produce department to look for green grapes. Unfortunately there are none, green or otherwise, and she moves on to the broccoli, pausing to sympathize with the forlorn lettuces and withered red peppers, the wilting parsley and anemic celery that, in spite of trick lighting and mirrors, look exhausted and depressed. On impulse she picks up a limp carrot and rubs it against her cheek.

  “You poor thing,” she croons. “I don’t need you, but I should take you home anyway and throw you in the soup pot.”

  There’s a snort of derision farther along the aisle where two young men in Co-op shirts, one of them wearing a nose ring, are unpacking a box of bananas and sliding sidelong glances at Moranna. She hasn’t noticed the workers, but when the plump one speaks, she hears the cock and swagger in his voice.

  “Don’t mind her. That’s Mad Mory,” he says to the other worker. Used to seeing the old loony clomp through town pulling a little kid’s sled, he dismisses her on sight. Anyone can see the woman’s cracked. Who cares what she thinks?

  Moranna cares. And she refuses to be slighted or ridiculed in any
way. Plucking two bananas from the box and holding them on top of the plump worker’s head, she bawls, “Why it’s the Devil himself!” He’s a kid, hardly wet behind the ears, but that doesn’t excuse him. He stands, baby chin tucked into his chest, arms at his sides. “All this creep needs is a tail,” she brays to the worker with the nose ring.

  “You’re crazy,” he says and continues to unpack bananas.

  Tossing aside the horns, Moranna grabs hold of nose ring’s collar. “You goon,” she says, saliva spraying his face. “What did you say?” He stands, sullen, unresponsive, and she shakes him to make him speak. “What did you say?” She shakes him again but he’s too much of a coward to repeat what he said in front of others—by now half a dozen shoppers stand watching. Before Moranna has another chance to make the goon recant, her arms are pinioned from behind while poor little Nose Ring makes a big show of being hurt, rubbing his neck and rocking his head from side to side. Jerking herself free, Moranna turns, expecting to see Billy Titus, one of the chosen she regards as a friend, but the man behind her isn’t Billy; it’s a different manager and he looks unfriendly. Although other people’s feelings usually escape Moranna’s notice, she’s quick to realize when hostility is being directed toward her, as it certainly is now.

  “You’d better leave,” he says, speaking in the way of a ventriloquist without moving his lips.

  “Not before those two give me an apology.”

  “From what I’ve seen, they’re the ones requiring an apology. Anything else to be said will be done through the police. You’d better leave.”

  “No one tells me to go,” Moranna bellows. “And you’d better teach your employees to watch their mouths. I’ve a good mind to take them to court for slander.” Rightly interpreting the sneer on the ventriloquist’s lips as a symptom of unease, possibly fear, she goes on, “You’ve heard of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, haven’t you? Don’t you know it’s against the law to go around slandering people?” When he doesn’t reply, Moranna assumes he now knows he’s no match for her. Taking advantage of the stunned silence, she sidles along the produce aisle at a defiant, leisurely pace—she has no intention of leaving until she’s finished shopping and to make her point, pauses to pay elaborate attention to the potatoes and turnips.

  Keeping his distance—he’s been hired on a temporary basis and wants to avoid rocking the boat—the interim manager follows Moranna up one aisle and down another while she picks up eggs and milk, then circles back for the bananas she has only now decided to buy, before proceeding to the checkout.

  It’s snowing hard and Moranna slips twice hauling the sled uphill on her way to the pharmacy to buy a bottle of calcium tablets. As a general rule she relies on food to supply the necessary vitamins and minerals and, apart from calcium, doesn’t take pills of any kind, no tranquilizers or antidepressants. Years ago, when she walked out of the asylum with the pills they forced on her, she chucked them into Halifax Harbour because she wasn’t sick and didn’t need them. Later when she finally admitted to herself, and only herself, that she had problems, she still avoided taking medication, convinced that if she did, she’d destroy the very essence of herself, the creative, vibrant, essential part of her echoing from every crevice and hillside of her being. Destroyed by drugs, she’d be easily manipulated and controlled, her will sucked away until she was nothing more than a zombie.

  Heading home pulling the sled, Moranna thinks about what happened at the Co-op, about the slanderous words of the produce workers and the enmity of the manager who obviously dislikes her. Moranna has never understood why people dislike her, although they often do. On those occasions when she’s paying attention, she notices that villagers passing on the street will grimace at her or look away. They’re strangers, yet they react with distaste. That’s because the locals are intimidated by the strength of her personality and resent the stamp of uniqueness she carries with her everywhere. The fact is she no longer cares what people think of her and is of the opinion that altogether too much time is wasted on the pathetic desire to be liked.

  She hasn’t always felt this way, and when she was growing up she put a lot of time and thought into being liked. She remembers attending a Halloween party in the church hall across the street from her father’s grocery store. Moranna was ten years old and, excited by the prospect of attending her first masquerade, decided to make herself a Heidi costume. Five years earlier, after giving her a Shirley Temple doll dressed as the little Swiss girl, her father had taken her to a movie called Heidi, a double treat for her fifth birthday. Remembering Heidi as sweet and kind and adored by everyone, Moranna thought if she dressed and acted like the girl in the movie, she would be adored by everyone too.

  Edwina, the calm, dependable church organist Ian married after Margaret died, gave Moranna a purple wool jacket and a dimity blouse to use for her costume. After trying a smaller version of the outfit on the Shirley Temple doll, Moranna made herself a purple jerkin to wear over a white blouse and a green skirt. It took days to finish the costume, but at least it kept her mind off the fact that she had no friends.

  The day of the party, Moranna went to school with wiener curls Edwina had made by tying up her hair with elastic sewing tape. The boys poked fun at her curly head, but she shrugged off their gibes because it was the girls, not the boys, she wanted to impress. When she showed up at the church hall after school looking and, she thought, acting like Heidi—she was Heidi—she was shocked that the girls didn’t seem to like her any better. They whispered among themselves and Pearl Davis, who was in Moranna’s grade-five class in school, stuck out her tongue when she thought Moranna wasn’t looking. Instead of admiring her costume, the girls were jealous of it because they themselves had no imagination and were dressed as boring witches and gypsies. The smallest girl, Davina Haggett, who sat across the aisle from Pearl in school, had no costume at all and it was she Moranna mistakenly tried to befriend. Putting an arm around her and smiling kindly, as Heidi would, Moranna said, “It’s all right if you have no costume, Davina. You can try mine on if you like.”

  Dismayed when stupid Davina ducked from beneath her arm and huddled close to mean Pearl, Moranna stomped home, determined not to spend any more time with such a bunch of silly girls. What Moranna took away from this masquerade was the conviction that the girls disliked her because she did everything better than they did. In order to be liked by them, she would have to pretend to be as backward as they were, which she steadfastly refused to do.

  Four years later, Moranna, Pearl and Davina were in the same grade-nine class. Although Moranna should have been seated at the front with the smart kids, the teacher, Mr. Estey (he of the shrill voice) had put her at the back of the room with slow kids like Pearl and Davina. During an arithmetic test, Mr. Estey was at his desk marking homework and didn’t notice Pearl stealing glances at Moranna’s answers. Turning her paper over, Moranna marched up the aisle to his desk and whispered, “Pearl’s cheating. She’s looking at my test.” Mr. Estey cocked one hand over his ear as if he were hard of hearing. “Pearl’s cheating,” Moranna said, not whispering now. “She’s copying answers from my test.” Mr. Estey didn’t even look up from his marking.

  “Go back to your desk,” he hissed, “and sit down!”

  There was a rumble of boos. The satisfied smile on Pearl’s face confirmed that not only had Moranna broken a cardinal rule but she had reminded the class, in particular the girls, of what they had always known about Moranna MacKenzie, which was that she thought she was better than anyone else. According to Pearl’s aunt, who used to cut Margaret MacKenzie’s hair, Moranna’s mother had been sick in the head, which explained, as much as anything could, why her daughter laughed hysterically when any of them gave the wrong answer in class. It was downright dangerous, for the girls especially, to be seen talking to someone as weird as Moranna, and they kept their distance. They seemed to believe that if they got too close, she would pass on a contagious disease like impetigo or, worse, a laughing sickness. M
oranna was also quarantined by the fact that she often came to school flaunting new catalogue clothes, a reminder that the girls were daughters of poor miners who were in debt to Moranna’s father.

  It was during these years that Edwina pushed Moranna to master piano playing. A quiet, unassuming woman, Edwina often praised her stepdaughter’s talent, particularly her touch and her perfect ear. Always hungry for praise, Moranna practised on Edwina’s Mendelssohn for an hour or more after school (even then she found music soothing), and entered the Kiwanis Music Festival every year, usually coming first or second in her class. Round-shouldered and chinless with a sausage of greying hair pinned at the neck, Edwina was an unobtrusive presence in Moranna’s life, and not once did Moranna take her seriously as her mother. Although she had hardly known her mother, Margaret had been her father’s first choice for a wife, whereas Edwina was a substitute who fulfilled the duties of piano teacher, housekeeper and cook.

  Moranna was slightly better liked in high school, primarily by the boys. Girls were treacherous and unworthy, and having given up on them, she concentrated on the boys, who she liked far better. The boys were often rude and flagrant, but sometimes she was too and made farting noises and gave the finger behind teachers’ backs. The boys were loyal, that was the main thing, and in return for having Moranna write their essays and do their homework, they never betrayed her. In grade eleven she adopted a boyfriend, the druggist’s son, Perry Dunlop, who was severely adenoidal and breathed through his mouth but had no trouble with the fact that her father was prosperous, because his was too. Moranna felt no sexual attraction whatsoever for Perry and apparently he felt none for her, which meant they had no expectations in that regard. She was strongly attracted to Danny Demarco, but he was glued to Pearl, probably because she let him go all the way.

  In grade twelve, Moranna was elected valedictorian by the class, mainly because there were more boys than girls in the class and she had done homework for many of them. She felt qualified to be valedictorian, having won the public-speaking competition a second time on the subject of the highland clearances. To make sure Moranna beat Patsy Chalmers, a studious girl who had the highest grade average, Perry bribed everyone in the class who voted for Moranna with an Oh Henry chocolate bar filched from the drugstore.