that had been chosen for his eternity. The headstone closest to him was engraved with the name Death. Just beyond Death lay some one called Peace.
I don’t believe it, Keyes said to himself when he read these grandiose stone labels. He went closer and discovered more information about the man named Death:
Arthur J. Death
1893 - 1969
R.I.P.
“Okay,” Keyes mumbled. “Okay.”
“What’s that, Claude?” Betty said.
“Nothing. Talking to myself...”
Betty and Keyes had come together, and everyone else seemed to be there as well, or almost everyone, whether they wanted to be or not. Hobart Porliss had made a speech after the performance the night before, in which he urged the company to be at the funeral.
“Theatre tradition,” Porliss had proclaimed, “demands our presence, regardless of what we personally thought of the deceased man.”
O’Reilly stood a bit back and up the slope. It was the kind of position that he often found onstage – not in the centre or even in the front, but in a place where he could not be overlooked. Sandra stood close beside him, as she often had in recent days. She seemed almost to be sheltering in the lee of his bulk. Grace, for once, was conspicuously absent from Sandra’s orbit. Porliss and Ziemski-Trapp, the Festival’s Artistic Director, were at graveside with the rest of the company gathered about them.
The day was chosen so that members of the dead man’s family, most of whom worked in factories or on the land, could attend. A few did. The Wales family stood on one side of the open grave; the company of Macbeth on the other. The two factions did not mix.
It had been something of a surprise to Keyes, and to almost everyone else who knew Wales, that his roots were just twelve miles or so from Stratford, in the small town of St. Marys, a fact which had come out in the course of arranging for the interment.
“He told me he was from Montreal,” Betty had said.
“I thought he was born in England and emigrated here as a child,” was O’Reilly’s comment.
“Well, who would admit to being from St. Marys?” Porliss was heard to mutter.
None of the theatre people had turned up at the church service which had been held at an “evangelical” meeting house on the edge of town. A Reverend Wales was minister there, a cousin of Alan Wales. As a member of the family Reverend Wales had naturally been selected to preside at the graveside, even though his theatrical cousin had never thought of entering his church. The Reverend was a brittle individual in his forties who did his preaching, even at funerals, in a business suit of a painfully intense blue colour.
“Dearly Beloved...” he intoned, glowering across the coffin at the actors assembled beyond it, as if they were a coterie of demons rather than human beings.
Damnably Despised, Keyes thought, is what he means. It struck him as very strange that even here in the presence of death the truth could not be spoken. He wondered if the man in the blue suit trafficked much in truth. Somehow he did not think so.
Others were not so wary of plain speaking, of saying what they thought to be the truth at any rate.
“I knew something like this would happen,” a woman shrilled, “if he took up with them!” Keyes noted how much her “them” resembled Kiri Ellison’s.
The woman raised her hand Cassandra-like and pointed an accusing forefinger at the players. She was short and bulky and her blondined hair had been permed so violently that it resembled a scouring pad. She wore a great deal of make-up, very badly applied, and an aubergine trouser suit that can never have been in fashion, even in St. Marys, Ontario. Keyes took her to be the dead actor’s mother, the Mater Dolorosa of this weird Passion Play.
She’s not very old, Keyes thought sadly, surely not as old as Sandra, or even me. She must have had her son when she was hardly more than a child herself. The grief that she displayed was undoubtedly genuine.
“His mother?” Keyes whispered in Betty’s ear.
Betty shrugged. “Certainly not mine.”
The minister droned on for some time after the mother’s outburst, skirting glibly around the circumstances of Wales’ death, since the police had yet to release that information, assuming they even knew. Eventually, the Reverend invited Hermes Ziemski-Trapp, “Alan’s employer,” to say a few words.
“A few words!” Betty groaned. “I heard him give ‘a few words’ at the art gallery once – we were there for hours and missed last call!”
Ziemski-Trapp did blather on, but not so long as Betty had feared.
“We shall not know his like again,” Ziemski-Trapp said finally, as Keyes, and no doubt everyone else in the actors’ group, had known he would. Ziemski-Trapp was nothing if not predictable.
The minister called upon members of the funeral party to pray. Heads were bent and an archaic prayer of great form and little content was said, words that flew up, perhaps, although most of the mourners’ thoughts remained below.
“Could that really have been his mother?” Betty asked Keyes as the two were walking back toward the centre of town. “She wasn’t very old. She looked old because of all that paint and those clothes, but she wasn’t.”
“No, she wasn’t.”
“And it seems she loved him.”
“Betty, we have just established that she was his mother. Mothers are supposed to love their sons.”
“You sound suspiciously like that quaint preacher.”
Keyes wondered if he did. The grand banality of death was difficult to avoid.
“Are you coming back to the house?” Betty said. “I’ll give you tea.”
Keyes thought it a bit early in the day for her “tea.”
“No, thanks,” he said. “I’ve some shopping to do.”
“Al1 those women,” Betty said as she wandered off. “What did they see in him? Even his mother...”
There was one more mourner at Alan Wales’ funeral, but Keyes did not see her until he passed through the exit gate, because she had hung far back from both groups, had been almost hidden behind a marble monument, a grim, blindfolded angel of some kind. It was Kiri Ellison. She was dressed appropriately for the occasion, insofar as colour was concerned, at least: her spike-heeled shoes were black, her net stockings and tiny skirt were black, and her leather jacket the same, except for the glinting of metal studs and links of chain; even her lipstick seemed to be black, as far as Keyes could tell from this distance.
“The Dark Lady of the Sonnets?” Keyes said to a passing squirrel. Then he remembered something Betty had told him: this girl, too, was from the same mythical place called St. Marys.
From the notebook of Jean-Claude Keyes:
Well, that’s the end of it, for most of us at least, certainly for me. I didn’t even know Wa1es, except in his final role as corpse. And now that corpse is buried, last rites administered.
But I have to admit the whole thing still fascinates me. I can’t stop thinking about Kiri Ellison, and her dead paramour, and about Sandra. I should be over her.
These things keep going round in my head, round and round in a dozen different dialects and metres and forms. Kiri and Wales especially... how did they fit together – the girl naked before strangers and the boy hidden from them under pounds of make-up and fabric. The strangers who had watched Wales were of a different order, of course... or were they? A different slice of society, maybe, but voyeurs are voyeurs, whether they’re in strip joints or the grandest of theatres. And we’re all voyeurs...
Sandra, mature and glamorous, with such a capacity for love – how did she get mixed up, and mixed up so seriously, with a brute like Wales?
What am I to think? Where’s the dramatic shape, the artistic symmetry of such relationships? If it’s there, I can’t see it. And why do I feel that there should be anything as comforting as symmetry, anyway?
In the end, Betty is right – it’s none of my business and there’s no reason I should lose any sleep over it. Wales’ death will be dealt with by the police, and will pr
obably have a very simple explanation, as ninety-nine percent of murders do. The killer will be caught, tried, and fade away in prison...
Most of us will get over it quickly enough. It’s just a matter of repairing the damage done to our cages by the brief rattling, using whatever tools we have...
But Sandra? Dramatic scenes can’t solve all of our problems. And Kiri Ellison? What’s going to happen to a kid like that? What’s she got to look forward to but disease or dope or alcoholism, or all of them...? to dying alone and unloved...
Jesus, Claude, get a grip.
ACT FOUR
AS CAST
They say this town is full of cozenage;
As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,
Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,
Soul-killing witches that deform the body,
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many such-like liberties of sin...
– The Comedy of Errors, Act I, Scene 2
(4:1) Along the river-bank, and York Lane
Keyes had no shopping to do, in fact, but he was too restless to sit still in one place, especially if Betty stayed in whatever mood this was that made her want to speculate on the nature of motherly love.
Besides, the day continued to be fine. It was a day for strolling esplanades and boardwalks beside the sea. The closest approximation in Stratford was the lakeside, and that is where Keyes strolled. After a little of this he decided to stroll around the whole of it.
“How long will it take, I wonder, to circumnavigate Lake Victoria?” he asked himself