The Old Man’s False Beard
My brief memory unfolded into an entire world that I did not know existed.
The Memory: I round the corner of the dining room in my house, beginning to enter the living room, and I see my father, standing at the mirror. He is sticking a false beard to his chin, leaning into the mirror, examining it closely, trying to make it straight. Once fastened, he stands straight and looks at himself more fully in the mirror. He then begins to recite some lines. He doesn't see me--or more correctly, I don't remember anything after that. I think I retreat from the doorway, unseen.
What surrounds the Memory: First of all, my father had no connection with any kind of theatrical production, or institution, or culture, that anyone in the family knew of. He didn't even attend the theatre at this time, except for the Stratford Festival once a year. This is a memory at all because it was so unusual. A middle-aged man with a false beard in the home. No.
But of course, as I found out later, this was not the case at all. My father performed in a theatrical space for decades; but it was not a space to which any of his family could be admitted. He was a member of the Masonic Lodge, Ionic, and had been since he was a young man, attending regular local meetings wherever we lived. I knew this. What I didn't know was that, at set times of the year, at regional meetings in Hamilton as a part of the Scottish Rite, he was 'in the theatre.'
The Masons are an old and secret society that has been a part of Western culture and politics since the early 18th century, though their own story takes them back through the history of the trade guild of masonry through the medieval period and earlier. Those who join, all men, go through a series of degrees, 32 in all, each of which has a ritual event associated with it, performed at a meeting. In my father's case, as I discovered as an adult, the Scottish Rite members also performed a play associated with each degree. Members performed all the roles--and my father was one of the cast of characters.
As I grew older, my father would encourage me to join the masonic order, and one brother, several cousins, most of my uncles, did just that. I did not join, both because my own Methodist faith argued against it, and because I was a sullen teenager who rarely joined. Even so, I knew it existed, and that members of my family were devoted to it. The Masonic order was very secretive for a long time, but they have more recently opened up, and I now have some sense of the performance of my father. In particular, the Scottish Rite had an old mansion in Hamilton (Ontario), and still does, with its own theatre that can now be viewed on tour--I took classes of students on tour there when I taught theatre history and acting, in part because of the history of this kind of secret theatre. I also took them on a tour because this particular venue had an intact and working set of painted drops and flats, operated by sandbags and ropes and pulleys, still used for their series of plays, and intact from the early 20th century. The technology of the place went back a good deal further, and the drops and flats were purchased used (as I found out) in the 1920s, from a firm in the US that served a range of such theatres. The range of drops, all of which I once saw, was extraordinary, including biblical temples and deserts, domestic and exotic locations, and Hell--or perhaps it was Eden. Certainly that last one stuck with me. The plays were historical, as I understand them each related to the practice of masonry through Judeo-Christian and biblical culture. There is research on this now, and I don't know all of it, but I do know that one of them was about the building of the temple of Solomon, and the last one was set in the trenches of World War One.
So--in the middle of this city, and accessible to a limited number of men, but men from a fairly large region, and with many backgrounds--there was a fully functioning theatrical venue with all the accoutrements.
I can imagine my father 'acting' in such an environment, and how completely at odds with the rest of his life it must have been. There was a costume and props collections, that I have seen, and would not have changed from his days of acting to the time I was shown them. Full costumes, head-dresses, shoes, and armaments--swords and spears. There was a room backstage with three full reclining barbers-chairs, that were used to apply full makeup and create an appropriate theatrical look for each actor before entering the stage. My sense, later, when I knew more, was that the Masons had master craftsmen at their disposal--tailors, barbers, metalworkers--who could effectively maintain and restore and create all of this. I have no knowledge of rehearsals or line readings, though I'm going to assume there was a prompter at the side, just in case.
So my father would attend the meeting, perhaps once a year, for the induction of Masons into the next order in their progress through the ranks. He would be dressed and made up and provided with the appropriate props in order to play his role. He would stand in the wings and wait for the performance of the ritual, after which 'his' play would be performed, a brief work that was associated with that rite, and provided context and explanation for it. He would enter the space, stand his ground, be a part of the scene, and speak his lines.
He later told me, much later in his life, well into his 80s, and in a rare moment of confession about this secret life, that he played the role of Caiaphas, a priest, though I have no idea what the subject of the play would have been. I believe he played the same role over many years.
What did this all mean to my father? I can think of two ways in which he valued this, ways that I can't hope to understand, or not quite. First of all, my father was raised in public, on the streets. He sold papers, made weekly trips to the local tuberculosis sanitorium with 'the comics' for the residents, was regularly involved in the gymnasium attached to his church, and was on the church league basketball team. He was elected to a city-wide teenage 'city council' at one point, and just generally, for his entire life joined service organizations, I believe because, when he was young, organizations and causes helped him rise above his own family's and his own culture's expectations. Throughout his adult years, he was a mainstay of the local Kiwanis Club, Boys Club, and in his later years, into his 80s, he was a volunteer at the local young men's 'reformatory' (as it was called then)--as he told it, the oldest person any of those residents had ever met. He was a joiner, and he believed in the social value of joining.
One part of my understanding is that the Masons was another way of joining, of camaraderie, but of the 'good works' that he considered important to his life. And I have no doubt that he made use of it in this way. But on the other hand--he would occasionally try to convince me to join the Masons, and I would ask him to tell me why, and he would say that he couldn't tell me, because it was a secret society, and I would simply have to trust him. This was far different from other 'service' organizations he joined.
I think there was something else going on, best explained--or at least indicated--by two anecdotes. The first was my father's own memory of his father, who was an older man when he was born, and someone who had fallen on hard times, had no funds, a menial job--but who read and recited Shakespeare, and was considered well-educated. My father referred to his father as a 'broken man,' except for one thing. In a trunk in the house were all the items necessary to be involved in 'The Oddfellows'--an offshoot of the Masons, and this man, James Johnson, was apparently very much an important part of that organization. He was valued, supported, and 'seen to,' as my father explained it. It was, in his world, the only place where he was valued, outside of his family. This is what it meant to my father.
But I have a memory as well. When my uncle died, when we were at the funeral home for visitations, a group of men walked in. They asked permission of my aunt and cousins to assemble around the coffin. They did so, closely guarding their actions so we could not see what they were doing. They stood at the open coffin, and they did something, said something, performed. And then they turned to leave, and one of them went over to my aunt, told her how important her husband had been to them, and gave her an envelope of cash to help see her through this difficult time.
All of this from a moment standing in a doorway, seeing a man with a false beard, staring at himself in the mirror, practising his speech. The only time I ever saw him inhabit someone else's character.
I never saw this performance, and I never knew anything about this part of his life, except from a doorway into the living room of my house. Just the once.
