Playing
Sarah Bernhardt
a novel
To the memory of my daughter
Emily Jane Givner
1966–2004
Playing Sarah Bernhardt
a novel
Joan Givner
Copyright © Joan Givner, 2004
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Editor: Barry Jowett
Copy-editor: Jennifer Bergeron
Design: Jennifer Scott
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Givner, Joan, 1936–
Playing Sarah Bernhardt / Joan Givner.
ISBN 1-55002-537-6
De la Roche, Mazo, 1879–1961 — Fiction. I. Title.
PS8563.I86P53 2004 C813’.54 C2004-903710-2
1 2 3 4 5 08 07 06 05 04
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Author’s Note
Biographical information about the relationship of Mazo de la Roche and Caroline Clement is based on my book Mazo de la Roche:The Hidden Life (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989). The dramatic scenes are adapted from my play Mazo and Caroline, which was performed at the Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre’s Spring Festival in 1992. The part of the novel dealing with the origin (about which nothing is known) and life of Mazo’s adopted child is pure fiction. Any resemblance to actual people is coincidental.
I
She was playing Sarah Bernhardt when it happened. Perhaps that was part of it, for Sarah herself had been plagued by stage fright. “Le trac,” she called it, “fear.” There were two kinds, Sarah said, “the kind that sends you mad, and the kind that paralyzes.” The whole cast would wait in horror while Sarah stood transfixed, speechless. Of course, it might have been a trick to create suspense. That would have been in character, too, because she always staged a dramatic recovery.
Harriet hadn’t recovered. Not on the first night, not on the second, not on the third. Each time she was striding across the stage when she was suddenly struck dumb, every part of her body frozen — her limbs, her vocal chords, her mind. It happened always at the mid-point in the play. So there was no alternative but to quit.
The voices rose around her in a chorus, like the women of Thebes, scolding and predicting doom.
“You can’t run away from it.”
“Just lay off the sauce, Harriet, and you’ll be OK.”
“See somebody. Get professional help and give it another try.”
“You can’t just run away.”
Oh, yes, you can. She ran away, speeding down the long, straight highway and into the foothills of the Rockies. She drove recklessly, taking the hairpin bends too fast and choosing the most dangerous roads. She stopped for gas and bought stale sandwiches and weak coffee in paper cups and picked up a newspaper, though newspapers never interested her. The theatre was her timeless world and its gossip her daily news. But she stopped in front of the historic markers, reading them as if they were stage directions:
Slowly, over millions of years, crustal pressures pushed the seabed skyward. Water, wind, and ice attacked the emerging land mass, but the mountains rose faster than erosion could whittle them down. About 40 million years ago, with uplift slowing, the Rockies began to waste away.
It had happened before, of course, this failure of memory; it happened to all of them. Even when she was young and starting out. Once she was playing Ophelia and craziness seemed natural. She’d stumbled, distracted for a moment, and the others had filled in. Then she’d garbled her lines, saying “his trousers all unlaced” instead of “his doublet all unbraced,” and afterwards they’d rolled about laughing. They said the improvisation was better than the original, that she’d improved on Shakespeare. It was the high point of the entire run. They all had these anecdotes; they were part of the repertoire. The youngsters didn’t mind; they covered for each other. Hung over, strung out on drugs half the time. Lapses were a joke, not part of anything permanent. They wet their pants at tragic moments, got fits of giggles, broke the props, and took it all in their stride. “I lost it,” they said with a shrug. “I freaked.”
But lately it had happened more often and caused more problems. Once she was an absent-minded old woman in an Athol Fugard play, and she covered for herself. She put her hands to her head and said she was losing her mind, turning it into an extension of the role, and the young girl playing opposite her immediately caught on.
The Bernhardt play also had a cast of two. They liked that these days; it cut down on costs, not needing to hire more actors. But this time her partner wasn’t about to help her out of it. He resented her from the beginning, disliked his role as Sarah’s ridiculous secretary, saw himself as a romantic hero. “A deplorable little billy goat of a man,” Sarah called Pitou, and that applied to the actor, too. So she never managed to recover from the lapse. Even now she couldn’t think of it without wanting to vomit.
It was a longish speech, and she was addressing the ghost of her old admirer: “We are the last of our kind, Oscar Wilde,” she said.
At that point each time the wires in Harriet’s head crossed, and Lady Bracknell’s words floated into her head: “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
And after that, nothing. Just an immense silence in her head. Paralysis. And the stupid jerk refused to come to her rescue.
“The last Romantics,” the prompter said, and paused.