The Figures of Beauty (26 page)

Carving is an articulation of something that already exists in the block. The carved form should never, in any profound imaginative sense, be entirely freed from its matrix
.

—A
DRIAN
S
TOKES
,
T
HE
S
TONES OF
R
IMINI

C
ATHCART
, O
NTARIO
. A
PRIL
2010.

You are a daughter possessed of a thorough and inquisitive disposition. I knew this to be true by the time your visit last summer was over. Your questions were motivated by curiosity, not obligation. I could see that. And I can see that your writing has the same impulse. Beneath the well-organized information of your brochure was an idea that you raised quite irresistibly: What would it be like to go back in time? What would it be like to meet Michelangelo on one of the mountain paths he must have walked?

And so I’m guessing. But as an attentive reader of this letter, and as an asker of many excellent questions, you might be wondering how it was that Miriam Goldblum, daughter of Hannah and Haim, came to be the director of the Christmas pageant at Montrose United Church. It’s the first question about the story that comes to mind these days. But I never wondered about it when I was ten years old and in love with her.

To me, Miriam’s raven-haired involvement in our church’s Advent season was natural—as natural, I suppose, as the readings from the Old Testament that prophesy the merry celebrations of the New. Still, I learned much later from Winifred and Archibald Hughson that Miriam was the subject of intense discussion within the church. She first expressed her desire to direct the Christmas pageant in the fall of 1947.

“But you’re Jewish,” said Norbert Owen, the church treasurer, who liked to think he spoke plainly.

“So what’s this?” Miriam replied. “The Führerbunker?”

The gesture was worthy of Bernhardt. The sweep of arm took in the pale chintz sofa, the framed watercolours, and the
wall sconces of the Elsie McClintock Christian Fellowship Room of Montrose United Church.

The discussions that addressed this issue in the autumn of 1947 were not always as broadly ecumenical as might have been hoped. Feelings ran high. There were moments of the one joint meeting of the church’s management and youth activity committees that were downright unpleasant.

The debates wandered into what most participants considered were unnecessarily obscure theological realms—but then, unnecessarily obscure theological realms were a specialty of Reverend Arthur Gorwell, the minister of Montrose. He had delivered many a Michaelmas sermon on prophecy and revelation.

In the end, what was revealed to the Hughsons by the controversy was something nasty and stupid. Winifred and Archie suspected it lurked somewhere in the pews of a congregation of which they were faithful members.

It was the following June—the June, that is, that followed Miriam’s directorial debut at Montrose United Church—that Archie, coming up to the pool for his morning swim, discovered a dripping, crudely executed swastika emblazoned on the side of the bathing pavilion.

He had his swim anyway, since it was a lowering, muggy morning, rain was imminent, and he could see no reason not to. As he passed back and forth over the patio furniture that had been dumped into the deep end, he contemplated the nature of evil and the grace of forgiveness. With ten lengths to go in his morning regimen, the heavens opened, but as he had heard no thunder, he continued his stately breaststroke.

It was Archie’s custom to swim with his glasses on—he
enjoyed looking at the stone figures that surrounded the pool. He was particularly admiring of the three maidens at the corner of the deep end with their water urns. The central figure—the one actually pouring the trickling cascade into the pool—was convincingly ancient and very well done. His gaze seemed always to fall on her. There was some quality to her that separated her from the others. Nice jugs, he always thought.

His lenses were wet and streaked, but his vision was not so obscured by the heavy rain that he didn’t witness a sign of a just universe. At each of his consistently unhurried turns at the deep end he looked back to the pavilion where the water-soluble red paint, clearly not intended for application to stone, was being washed down the wall. By his eighth length the marking was gone, leaving only a puddle of watery pink on the flagstones. By his tenth that was gone too, seeping into the cracks of earth and grass between the old, worn slabs of marble.

That same afternoon a teenage boy from the neighbourhood—pleased to be asked to undertake such a mission—arrived at the pool with his swim mask and flippers and snorkel to fasten the ropes by which Archie and Winifred would pull the furniture from the water.

It might have been a random act, perpetrated by idiots too stupid to ascertain who was, in fact, a member of the group they claimed to despise. Were this the case, the Hughsons resisted what comfort might have been found in mistaken identity. They couldn’t see that hate was any less hateful because it missed its target.

The Hughsons suspected motives a little more specific, for it was generally thought that it was Mrs. Hughson’s burst of impatience at the joint meeting of the church management and youth activity committees the previous November that had carried the day for Miriam Goldblum. Mrs. Hughson’s
opinion was influential because of her reputation as a dedicated churchgoer, a long-time member of the women’s auxiliary, and a devoted volunteer. “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” she exclaimed when she decided she had heard quite enough. “If our Lord was Jewish, I don’t see why the director of the Christmas pageant can’t be.”

At the heart of the matter was not the dialectic of Judaic and Christian narratives—contrary to the presentation Dr. Gorwell made during the meeting of the committees in the Elsie McClintock Christian Fellowship Room. It was young romance. Miriam had a beau before the war who had been a drama student. His family went to Montrose.

He wrote poetry—mostly about Miriam. She had jet-black hair and the palest skin, as dozens of his sonnets made clear. He’d won the poetry prize in his last year at high school.

He was on the swim team. He was president of the drama club. He’d directed
Charley’s Aunt
. He’d played Romeo.

Miriam’s mother and father said that was all very well. They were sure he had many fine qualities. But it was hard to imagine anyone less Jewish than Bryson Scott.

“Yes,” Miriam admitted. She spoke with the exasperated defensiveness she always ended up using in fights with her parents. “He’s active in his church.”

“Active?” Haim Goldblum said. “In a church? I don’t like the sound of that.”

Miriam shared Bryson’s enthusiasm for Chekhov and Ibsen. And she shared his calling. She was an actress. “Since before she was five,” her mother said, rolling her eyes. “For her, the mumps was Garbo in
Camille
.”

Miriam helped Bryson with the Montrose pageant the Christmas before the war. She was listed in the program as
assistant director—an acknowledgment that raised no eyebrows so far as anyone knew. She was Bryson Scott’s girlfriend. That was all. He had been mounting the pageant for several years.

Bryson suffered no illusions about the amateur production standards under which he was obliged to labour. But he thought that he could bring some real theatricality to the annual tradition. True, his experiment one year with actual barnyard animals hadn’t worked out so well. But otherwise it was generally agreed he did an excellent job. And anyway, nobody else wanted to do it.

One terrible aspect of the war—insignificant in comparison to many others but relevant to the story at hand—was the way it distorted things by freezing them in time, like a photograph of a handsome young flyer in fleece-lined boots and leather bomber jacket. Had the war not intervened, Bryson and Miriam might well have stayed together, weathering the complications of religion and family bravely, and finally bringing together the Montagues and the Capulets at their happy, non-denominational wedding ceremony. On the other hand—and probably the more likely possibility in the more ordinary, more peaceful run of things—they might have just broken up. Young sweethearts often do.

They might have wondered, for a while, if they were going to get back together, and then, as time passed, they might have grown accustomed to the realization that they would not. Other boyfriends, other girlfriends would come along.

Over the years the two of them might occasionally have thought of one another. There is a place of special affection for a first love, and they might well have resided there in one another’s memories: a kiss on a grassy hill by a college walkway in the autumn sunshine, a trembling hand on the snug white angora sweater it was daring to touch.

But that’s not what happened.

Bryson ended up at the bottom of the English Channel along with the rest of the crew of a Lancaster bomber returning from a U-boat raid in 1945. Miriam ended up alone.

She decided—unwisely but with the conviction of the young and broken-hearted—that she would never love anyone else again. The photograph of the handsome flyer in fleece-lined boots and bomber jacket who didn’t know pickled herring from gefilte fish sat on her mantel for the rest of her life. And Miriam Goldblum, the daughter of Haim and Hannah, continued to oversee the annual production of Bryson Scott’s
The Wayward Lamb: A Christmas Story
at Montrose United Church.

My earliest association with the waxy, ecclesiastic sensation of marble occurred in 1958, when I was chosen for the role of the shepherd boy in Miriam’s pageant. By then,
The Wayward Lamb
’s association with Bryson Scott was growing more archival for everyone except Miriam. His name appeared in the program that was run off every year on the Gestetner machine in the church office. He was credited as playwright and originator. But there were fewer and fewer people in attendance every Christmas who were sure who he was. Over the years, the annual production settled unquestionably into Miriam’s domain.

The historic details of her association with Montrose United faded until it was only dimly known to the younger members of the congregation that there was something about it that was sad—but no more sad than the word frequently used to describe her. At what today seems a very young age to be defined with such apparent finality, she became a spinster.

Bryson Scott had written
The Wayward Lamb
because, when he was first asked to take on the pageant, he was enough
of an undergraduate drama major to know that there were serious challenges to staging a story in which nothing happens. “Chekhov notwithstanding,” Bryson always added. More challenging still: a story everyone knows.

Bryson couldn’t see that there was a lot of stagecraft to be employed in the business of abiding in the fields, however frost-covered he was able to make the choir stalls and pulpits in which the shepherds stood. There’s not a lot of action when it comes to watching sheep. And so Bryson Scott invented the story of a little shepherd boy who, searching for a lost lamb, becomes lost himself on a cold December night. But not just any cold December night, needless to say. His father sets out to find him.

The text was performed each Christmas at Montrose as faithfully as if the story had originated with one of the apostles. But in 1958—partly because I was quite small—Miriam Goldblum contemplated a change to the traditional staging.

Miriam could see possibilities in me that she had not previously imagined in the role of shepherd boy. I happened to be as slight and pale as any Hollywood casting agent would like a lost child to be. It wouldn’t hurt that most of the people in the congregation knew that I was adopted.

Preparations for the Christmas pageant always began in November. This extended Advent always ended with a post-performance buffet dinner at Miriam’s parents’ modern, single-storey home. The cast, the stage crew, their families, and anyone who had helped with the pageant in any way—a good third of the congregation, usually—were invited. Miriam served a feast: potato and onion knishes that were made with enough schmaltz to oil a tank; moist, tender brisket; smoked whitefish salad; and gefilte fish with red (it had to be red) horseradish.

Reverend Gorwell was particularly fond of the rugelach. “My,” he said at one of the first of what became a popular
annual tradition for Montrose parishioners, “yours is a rich culinary heritage.”

“We do what we can,” said Haim Goldblum.

The appearance every November of Miriam’s silk scarves, red lips, and black hair at Montrose was a clear sign of the passing of fall to winter. The caretaker took her arrival as the signal that he should soon retrieve the Christmas candles and wreaths from the cupboard above the tea service in the pale-blue kitchen behind the Sunday school piano. The choir began practising “The Trumpet Shall Sound.” The Women’s Circle started their careful planning for the carol service and poinsettia deliveries and white-gift Sunday.

Miriam threw herself into the challenges that each new production presented, insisting on more rehearsals than anyone ever thought necessary but that always proved, somehow, to be barely enough. Partly because the choir robe acted as a convenient duster, but mostly because it gave her a swoop of drama and authority, Miriam’s cashmere breasts and nylon stockings always preceded a black, billowing train as she worked through her blocking on the chancel steps. Rehearsals took place on Thursday evenings in the sanctuary.

Miriam liked everyone to go off-book as early in the process as possible—even if this meant her chief role for the first several rehearsals was prompting. “Frankincense,” she would intone from the shadows of one of the rear pews when Melchior forgot his line. “I have travelled far, bearing Frankincense for the king foretold.”

My costume was a bathrobe and a towel. Everyone’s was. Miriam was a good sport, which, of course, made me love her all the more. She laughed along with everyone else when Melchior read his line in one rehearsal as: “I have travelled far, bearing toothpaste for the king foretold.”