Lear's Shadow Read online

  ALSO BY CLAIRE HOLDEN ROTHMAN

  Salad Days

  Black Tulips

  The Heart Specialist

  My October

  PENGUIN

  an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  First published 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Claire Holden Rothman

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Rothman, Claire, author

  Lear’s shadow / Claire Holden Rothman.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780735234253 (softcover).—ISBN 9780735234260 (electronic)

  I. Title.

  PS8585.O8435L43 2018   C813’.54   C2017-907158-0

                      C2017-907159-9

  Cover design: Terri Nimmo

  Cover image: Danuta Nierada / Getty Images

  v5.3.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Claire Holden Rothman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Act One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Act Two

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Act Three

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Act Four

  Chapter 20

  Act Five

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  For Samuel Leonard Holden

  Who is it that can tell me who I am?

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, King Lear

  PROLOGUE

  KENT.

  Alas, sir, are you here? Things that love night

  Love not such nights as these.

  (3.2.42–43)

  THE OLD MAN KNOWS he should watch the road, but he can’t. His eyes keep drifting to the black churn of cloud overhead. Nightfall is still an hour away, but the sky is so dark he can’t see the white lines on the pavement. He curses, gropes for the headlight switch, pressing buttons and turning knobs to no visible effect. The car plunges through the shadows down the final stretch of Pine Avenue, past the Royal Victoria Hospital and the grimy stone archway of the Neurological Institute. It weaves across lanes as though driven by someone crazy or blind or both.

  As the old man rounds the curve onto Park Avenue, brake lights ignite in front of him. These he can see. He slams down hard and stops a foot short of an aging Pontiac. Behind him, another car squeals to a stop. All the way up Park Avenue cars are at a standstill, their taillights blinking in frustration.

  The old man kicks open his door. Above him, the sky is as oily and opaque as the asphalt. Wind slaps him, claws at his clothes, whips strands of hair across his scalp. He puts a hand over his eyes to shield them from the swirling grit and fights his way forward. Then he hears it: the beating heart of the chaos, a faint, steady patter of drums. Through the blur of wind and flashing lights he sees them: arms linked, laughing like drunks at a party. They’ve choked the broad city street—they’ve brought him and everyone around him to a halt. And they’re laughing.

  The wind knocks him hard into a stopped car. He can see them clearly now. Youngsters, shirtless, their chests decorated with paint. Two girls are half-naked too, directly in his path, wearing bikini tops or maybe their brassieres. He moves closer, grabbing at the sides of vehicles for balance. One of the girls is fleshy, a pink-skinned child. The old man shoves her. He does it out of indignation, but also because she’s the weak link in the chain. She comes unhooked from her companions and staggers, looking up at him with round astonished eyes. A boy shouts. A second boy spits at him, then grabs his arm and shakes it so hard his vision tunnels.

  He breaks free and continues through the bodies, through the shoves and shouts and gusts of wind, until something makes him look up. Above him, a winged black enormity is etched against the sky’s lesser blackness. He freezes. Then he realizes it’s the angel—his angel—gazing down benignly, pointing the way home.

  The sky lights up making the angel gleam. A second flash comes and the old man sees again the thing that he thought was a hallucination. A rope is tied around the angel’s neck; someone is hanging from it.

  The sky blazes and goes dark, blazes and goes dark: God playing idly with a light switch. At the end of the rope is a girl, a thick tail of hair swinging behind her like a demented metronome. Her feet brace against the angel’s loins while one of her arms sweeps up and down, as if half of her were trying to fly.

  Thunder cracks followed by shrieks. A drop of water hits the old man’s forehead, then another. An instant later the sky opens, obliterating the girl and scattering the crowd. He tries to run but his limbs are useless, as in a nightmare. He collapses, first onto one knee, then onto his shoulder. For one electric moment as the pain sparks through him, his body fuses with the storm. The old man rolls onto his back. The last thing he sees, dimly, before closing his eyes, is a stricken angel in a drowned sky.

  ACT ONE

  FOOL [Singing].

  He that has a little tiny wit—

  With heigh-ho, the wind and the rain—

  Must make content with his fortunes fit,

  Though the rain it raineth every day.

  (3.2.74–77)

  1.

  BEATRICE ROSE STOOD in the kitchen of her apartment on Sainte-Famille Street, staring at the string of Christmas lights looping off her shelves. It was the end of May and the temperature was brutal, inside and out. Montreal was in the grip of the year’s first heat wave. She glanced through the window at the darkening sky and back at her brave little out-of-season lights.

  It was the day of her mother’s birth: Deirdre McMaster Rose would have turned sixty-five. A pain flared in Bea’s chest. Not a pain exactly, more a familiar squeezing, strong enough to block her breath. She knew it wasn’t a physical phenomenon. It wasn’t asthma, though years ago a pediatrician had concluded that it was and prescribed a puffer. And it wasn’t her heart. That poor, flapping organ would survive, she knew, after decades of living with this squeezing. She’d visited her mother’s grave at the Mount Royal Cemetery that morning. The grass around it had been lush, undamaged as yet by the sun. The first flies of the season had circled her lazily. She’d left a rose on the headstone instead of a rock.

  Her mother had been dead now for more years tha
n she’d been alive. She was killed in a car crash at the age of thirty-two. Bea’s father, Sol, was at the wheel. He never spoke of it. After the car overturned at the intersection of Park Avenue and Pine, he’d climbed out with bruises and a graze on his left cheek where his beard hairs would never grow again. Her mother hadn’t been so lucky.

  The kettle chirped tentatively then opened into a full-throated wail. Bea took it off the heat and made herself a herbal tea: calming nettles. The bright orange stove coil faded to black. Her tension wasn’t due entirely to the anniversary. There was a more pressing cause. She’d been invited to a party.

  She glanced at the kitchen clock, a whimsical thing she and Jean-Christian had picked up at the dollar store, fluffy clouds floating in a blue sky, and took a sip that scalded her tongue. The evening was too hot for tea. Her body was a furnace. She put the cup in the sink, taking care not to spill its contents. She was in her party wear, a pink kameez, the most beautiful thing she owned, bought years ago in northern India. The neckline, low by Indian standards, was embroidered with shimmering threads of gold. She knew it looked good, even if the body it adorned was no longer young.

  It was time to leave. She walked down the hall without turning on the lights. The apartment was typical of the Plateau Mont-Royal, long and narrow, with windows at either end, its middle cave-dark. Bea patted the wall at the bathroom doorway to find the light switch. Her face appeared in the mirror, lit up out of the darkness.

  Jean-Christian had come in February for his belongings. Among the items he’d left with was the rice-paper globe that had once softened the bathroom light and made intriguing shadows. A naked bulb remained, dangling dejectedly from the ceiling. Also gone was the shower curtain with its bright motif of tropical fish. She’d been at work when he dropped by. He knew her schedule. It was easy to find on the studio website, but he knew it without checking: her schedule had been his. For seven years they’d managed Om Sweet Om together, offering yoga classes and workshops and running a popular teacher-training program. They were well known. Their studio had been one of the best. Not as big as the places downtown, perhaps, but reputable, respected. Even her father was impressed.

  The light cast visible lines in the face in the bathroom mirror, especially around the eyes, from which they fanned like cracks in a windshield. Bea would turn forty this summer. No man, no money and a business on the point of collapse. She had spent the winter adrift.

  She should have gone for counselling. That was what her sister, Cara, said. But Bea didn’t have the money or, frankly, the desire for therapy. She didn’t need a psychologist to tell her what was wrong. The breakup had hit her hard. Jean-Christian had given her no warning. There had been a third party; she never did find out who. Behind that pain was the deeper anguish of her mother, the old trauma, the ghost in the shadows. It didn’t take a degree in psychology to see where the trouble lay. She would survive this loss, just as she’d survived the one in her childhood. She still had some fight left.

  In any case, she couldn’t waste energy thinking about her emotional state. Other matters required attention, like her failing yoga studio. Without Jean-Christian, Om Sweet Om was no longer viable. The clients were mostly women, whom Jean-Christian had held, literally, in the palms of his hands—large, capable hands with which he’d adjusted people’s postures while reciting Persian poetry. The mix was devastating. He wasn’t young anymore either, a full decade older than Bea, but no one ever guessed. Whereas Bea was short and wiry like her father, Jean-Christian was six three, with a dancer’s build and hazel eyes so piercing they made you weak-kneed. Bea used to think that was a figure of speech. But at the first sight of Jean-Christian, she’d felt it. And she’d seen other competent, sane women turn red and confused when he looked their way. Within three months of his departure a third of her clients had left, and Om Sweet Om had begun to lose money.

  Bea squared her shoulders and breathed. A deep breath, filling her belly. Whatever she’d once shared with Jean-Christian Dubois was over. It was time to move on.

  Tonight would be the first step. She’d found a summer job working on a production of King Lear. A young actor named Jay O’Breen from one of her yoga classes had posted the notice three days before on the Om Sweet Om bulletin board. When Bea asked him about it, he told her the theatre company was desperate: rehearsals were slated to begin this Thursday, the last day of May. The pay wasn’t great, but Bea supposed that was how things went in the theatre. One made sacrifices for art.

  Jay was surprised that she was interested, but enthusiastic, promising to put in a good word. Bea dialled the offices of Bard in the Parks that very morning, as soon as her last class ended and she had said her goodbyes to the small group of loyal students who had shown up for the occasion. No one answered, but the next day, an eager-sounding woman telephoned her. Could she commit to June, July and August? the woman wanted to know. And did she have a valid driver’s licence? There would be travel involved. Bea said yes to both questions. There was no mention of a CV or references. The only other question the woman asked was about cell phones. If she was surprised that Bea didn’t own one, she didn’t say so. Bea promised to buy a smartphone so she could receive emails as well as calls and texts. And that was that. The woman congratulated her and gave her the date and address for the company meet-and-greet. At first, Bea thought she’d misunderstood. But the woman had laughed—a pleasant, tinkly sound—and told Bea not to worry. They’d see each other at the party.

  Was this how things worked in the theatre? You were given a job after thirty seconds on the telephone?

  Still, it felt like a lifeline, a chance to pull herself out of the static and insular Montreal yoga community, where everyone knew everyone else’s history. Her world would change. She would meet new people, visit new places. Not to mention that the production was being staged in municipal parks, so she’d get to spend the summer outdoors. Everything about the job was right.

  And King Lear—now that was a play to conjure with. Bea had studied it back in high school and she remembered its power. She’d already begun rereading it. Working in theatre would be an entirely new venture. It would be her way forward.

  She pursed her lips and stared into the mirror. The scar vanished briefly in the unforgiving light and reappeared when she released her breath: a tiny chain of pale skin descending from her left nostril to the cupid’s bow of her upper lip. Her mother had referred to it as a trifle. Jean-Christian, in the glow of early love, had once called Bea “perfect in her imperfection.” At the studio no one remarked on it, though occasionally a gaze would linger for a second on her mouth. Most of the time, she managed to forget it entirely. She was luckier than many people with clefts. She’d once met a girl whose whole face was skewed, her speech so impeded that Bea had struggled to understand her.

  Bea’s father had hunted down the best doctors and treatments. Only the best would suffice, even if the result would never be perfect. From birth to her teens Bea had borne one intervention after another—structural surgery, bone grafts, cosmetic surgery to the philtrum, speech therapy and, after she started school, counselling from a psychotherapist to help her deal with the teasing. The efforts had paid off. Her speech was normal, her face symmetrical. You had to get right up close to see the chain.

  From the mirror, her nearly normal face watched her squeeze a dab of white paste onto her toothbrush. The dark hair and pallor, the slightly stubborn set of the mouth—it was her father’s face, really.

  2.

  THE NOISE OUTSIDE her apartment was a shock. Ahead of her on Pine Avenue a police car sped past, its siren wailing, lights spinning wildly. Horns blared in the distance like an orchestra tuning up. At the first gap in traffic Bea sprinted across Pine and then stepped onto the footpath beside the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital. A wind was blowing, a strong one, the kind that promised rain. She’d heard storm warnings on the radio before leaving for the cemetery. Now gusts were throwing grit in her eyes and kiting old wrappers into the air. On Park Ave
nue the traffic was gridlocked—the source of the honking that filled the evening air. The street was jammed all the way to Mount Royal and beyond, as far up as Villeneuve, where her sister lived. Behind the car horns, fainter but insistent, was another sound. Bea stopped on the grass and listened. There it was: the clang of pots and pans. Of course. It was past eight. The casseroles were marching. She could see their banner in the wind.

  For two months they’d marched every night in the streets of Montreal. To start with, it was students cutting classes in the unusually mild spring weather to protest tuition hikes. The printemps érable, they called it, comparing themselves only half-facetiously to the freedom fighters of the Arab Spring. But soon the protests had begun to transform. Young parents started showing up, pushing their children in strollers. Baby boomers joined in, nostalgic for the marches of their youth. The event turned festive, carnivalesque. The week before, half a million people had poured into the streets to celebrate the hundredth night of demonstrations. The organizers claimed it was the largest protest march ever held in the country.

  Bea, too, had come out that night, not because of the tuition hikes—in Montreal, you could attend university for a fraction of what you’d pay in most places in the world, not to mention the rest of Canada—but simply to join in, to leave the apartment and be part of something bigger than her own woes. She had danced for three solid hours. The whole city seemed to be out, making music.