Tell

by Frances Itani

  She walked the long hall to the kitchen and filled the kettle for her tea.

  Maggie and Am’s apartment was the only one in the building. During the day, employees moved about the two floors below as if they were working the decks of a merchant ship. Before and after hours, and on weekends, those same offices were empty. Maggie was glad enough to have people in the building during the daytime, but she was grateful for the early-morning quiet. Grateful for afternoon light that spilled through the south-facing windows into the apartment, summer and winter. Grateful for the number of rooms and the privacy these afforded. Am, with the title of “caretaker,” was employed by the town. Along with being responsible for the workings of the clock and the heavy clapper that hovered, ready to strike the bell—though he connected it only once a year, every New Year’s Eve—he did maintenance work for the entire building. He was always downstairs doing something. Or in the basement, looking after the coal supply and the boiler.

  As for the apartment itself, it was long and spacious and took up the entire third floor. A private entry was accessed by a side door at street level. An equally private oak staircase led up to the landing outside their door.

  Despite the comfortable kitchen, Maggie missed the spacious farm kitchen she and Am had left behind a long time ago. She stood before the sink and pushed the memory aside and, instead, tried to call back the voice that had wakened her, the golden voice of Melba. As certainly as her left hand now lifted the kettle to the stove, Maggie knew that the great soprano Nellie Melba had been singing in pure, mellow tones while she, Melba’s private audience, had lain quietly in bed in the early morning. As certain as a dreamer could be.

  Maggie had not thought of the Australian diva for months. In her dream, she had fought wakefulness, knowing that if she opened her eyes, the voice would disappear. Reluctantly, she had given in. She had slipped out of bed, trying not to disturb Am, but he had shifted noisily when she’d shut the bedroom door.

  Maggie could easily detect the occasions when Am was feigning sleep. Easily, because her own night patterns were similar: legs bent, legs straightened, restless turning, never a deep sleep. She wondered, not for the first time, if Am was concealing symptoms of an ailment that was worrying him. Sometimes he acted as if every movement pained him. Sometimes he lay still for hours and then got up to wander about in the dark. Occasionally, he helped himself to food from the baking cupboard. From their bed, she could picture his every move. Am standing in the dark before the cupboard, pulling open the door as quietly as he could—the squeaking hinge gave him away. Am eating the oat-and-raisin cookies she stored there—a trail of crumbs was present in the morning. More crumbs lay in the sink—she rinsed these down the drain. A few were scattered on the floor—she swept them up. And crumbs were often hardened beneath the icebox door, where he’d stood staring with an unsatisfied look—not difficult to imagine.

  Maggie poured boiling water into the teapot and sat at the kitchen table on her high-backed chair. Am had made four of these, carved and ladder-backed, during the first year they were married. She did a rapid calculation: almost twenty-five years ago. The pine had come from trees on their own farm, and Am had made the chairs with love and care. Memories tried to crowd forward, but once more Maggie pushed them back. She was a town person now.

  She thought of Melba again. Two years earlier, in 1917, she had met Nellie Melba face to face. That had not been a dream. She sat quietly now and turned over every astonishing detail.

  MAGGIE HAD BEEN VISITING TORONTO DURING A GREY AND overcast weekend. The war was still in progress. Casualty lists were long and morale at a low ebb in the town and elsewhere across the country. Winter had begun to wane, but slush and a thin layer of muddied snow coated Toronto’s streets. During the winter, she had learned that Nellie Melba would be in the city for a fundraising tour, travelling to several places across North America, singing in theatres and halls, raising money that would be donated to the Red Cross to help soldiers and their families.

  From Deseronto, Maggie arranged to buy tickets in advance for a Friday evening concert: one for herself and one for her sister, who travelled across Lake Ontario from Oswego for the occasion. Maggie journeyed by train and met Nola in Toronto, where they shared a room in a downtown hotel.

  At the concert, Melba disappointed no one. She had been sponsored by the Heliconian Club and sang on a narrow stage, her voice strong and true, the notes floating upward in the high-vaulted room. Her expression while singing was intense and composed. She sang “Je veux vivre” from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, and Maggie felt the joy around her. She sang Gilda’s “Caro nome” from Verdi’s Rigoletto, and the undulations of her voice stilled the audience. After a full programme, her listeners begged for encores and Melba exhausted herself, trying to please. She even sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Comin’ Thro the Rye” at the end. And finally, giving in to the crowd, she sang “Home, Sweet Home.”

  The morning after the concert, Nola announced that she was tired and wanted to stay in bed for an extra hour. Maggie pulled on her heavy coat, stuck a hat on her head—she hated having to wear a hat—left her sister in the room and went out to browse in the downtown shops. She enjoyed being a visitor in the city but was not prepared for sharp wind, or for ice beneath the slush in the streets. On a side street not far from the hotel, she lost her footing and went down. While struggling to get to her feet, she realized that a woman was standing before her, reaching out a hand. Maggie’s reaction was first embarrassment, and then confusion. She was dazed from the fall, but from the ground looking up, she recognized the diva instantly. In the same instant, Melba knew she’d been recognized. The knowledge passed between them while Melba hauled her up from the sidewalk. Maggie brushed at her long coat, now smudged and soggy with slush and dirt.

  “Never mind the coat,” said Melba. “Are you all right? Broken bones? No? We’ll deal with the coat inside. There are people after me. Lord knows who.” She laughed lightly, as if she were a queen running from her retinue—though there was no one in pursuit. She pushed and steered Maggie through the doors of a large, half-empty diner that was near at hand, and the two slid into a booth in the farthest corner. Melba faced the rear wall, presenting her back to the door.

  “Remove your coat,” she said. She spoke rapidly, as if she was entirely accustomed to giving orders. “We’ll sponge it with a table napkin. Someone will bring water. Have you eaten? We’re going to have an adventure. Nothing fancy here, and who cares? I’m starving.” She was laughing to herself. Maggie thought her speaking voice was what royalty must sound like. Commanding, certain. “Let them look for me,” Melba added. “I need an hour to myself.” She removed tan suede gloves that matched her woollen coat, slipped her arms out of the sleeves and pushed the coat behind her. She held out a hand and took Maggie’s hands in her own.

  “Melba,” she said. “That’s what people call me. I’m sorry you went down so hard on the street. I’m sorry for hurrying you in here. I’m not a madwoman, I promise, but I needed to escape. I hope the fall wasn’t serious, even to your pride.”

  Maggie O’Neill, of the tiny town of Deseronto, had so far mumbled no more than two words. She was sitting across from a world-famous diva whose performance twelve hours earlier had, at times, brought her to tears and an audience to their feet. She had been yanked up from the sidewalk by Melba, and she had to push down her shyness and show the woman that she was grateful and that she could speak.

  Now, from her kitchen table in the tower apartment, when Maggie thought about the encounter and the breakfast they had shared two years earlier in the booth of a Toronto diner, it wasn’t food or the surrounds she first recalled. It was the dramatic, commanding presence of the soprano. And yet, almost instantly, Melba had put Maggie at ease.

  Melba had a prominent nose, full cheeks, bow-shaped lips, thickly rolled hair. A violet scarf was twined around her throat. Up close, Maggie saw that the diva’s eyebrows had been darkened artificially, as if in pre
paration for the next role. Her eyes, a mixture of intelligence and curiosity, revealed a woman of temperament, a woman who knew what she wanted and what was expected. At that moment, Nellie Melba was intent on being hidden. The size of her hat helped; her face was partly in shadow. Notices of her image—hatless—were posted around the city; the two benefit concerts in Toronto had been well publicized. Maggie was instructed to be on the lookout, as she was facing the door to the street.

  The miraculous part, she thought as she sat in her own kitchen, was that we conversed as if we’d known each other all our lives. I had the audacity to blurt out the news that I used to sing. Not the way she did, of course—but I told her how I had loved to sing when I was a child. I had the nerve to say that without embarrassment, a kind of declaration. At the time it didn’t seem strange; I felt I was confiding in someone I’d known all my life. I was forty-one then, and Melba was in her fifties. I could have been a younger sister she hadn’t seen for a very long time.

  Melba had made it clear that she needed to gather her forces to face what she must always face: the press, interviews, critics, the public and, that same evening, her second Toronto performance. Once assured that no one had pursued her, she ordered breakfast for the two of them—sausages, eggs, baked apples, toast, tea—and then, only then, she relaxed and turned her full attention to Maggie. She listened carefully, but she was also a woman with stories to tell. After full plates had been brought to the table, she turned over a stubby sausage with her fork and embarked on a story of herself and Caruso onstage singing La Bohème. The time could have been any time; the stage could have been Milan, London, Paris, Vienna. She did not explain. Maggie understood that the moment was about story.

  “Caruso was standing close, staring fiercely while he sang to me—I was the shivering, weak and pitiful Mimì. Your cold little hand, let me warm it—in Italian, of course. And then, furtive man that he was, he reached into his pocket and pressed a warm sausage to my bare hand. Wicked, wicked. The two of us could hardly keep from roaring with laughter. I drew upon every acting talent I possessed so that I could maintain my composure.” Melba held out a hand as if, at that moment, Caruso was bending forward at the edge of the booth, ready to press a second sausage to her palm. She wriggled her fingers, smiled, picked up her knife.

  “Now,” she said, “first tell me about your wonderful green eyes—from whom did you inherit those?”

  “My mother,” Maggie said. “Hers were greener, even darker than mine. I was always happy that I was the one born with the green eyes.”

  “And your singing? When did you begin?”

  Maggie found herself launched into a tale of being ten years old, little Maggie Healy singing “O Holy Night,” the highlight of the Christmas concert in her one-room country school. She told Melba about singing at year-end ceremonies and at June graduations for older students. She told about singing at her own graduation, when she finished school herself. How she had sung to the accompaniment of the teacher, Miss Miller, who played the only instrument in the school—a piano pushed to the edge of the platform that also held the teacher’s desk. This was the same piano upon which Maggie had practised after school, for days, months, years. Miss Miller had provided lessons at no charge. She had offered because she believed in Maggie’s ability to sing. She taught the scales and how to play with two hands and how to use the foot pedal. She taught until Maggie could sight-read sheet music and play almost anything that was put in front of her. All Maggie had to do to repay Miss Miller was tidy the classroom after school and provide a bottle of water for every two seats, along with a rag to clean the slates, though they both knew that some of the boys used spit instead of water. It became Maggie’s job to empty the water bottles, fill them again, distribute the supply of freshly washed rags. A pump in the school porch supplied drinking water.

  She stopped.

  Melba had been listening carefully. “Many people in the music world had similar beginnings,” she said. “You might be surprised. When I tried to get my first roles, your own Canadian, Madame Albani, was the reigning star. What was left over was what I was given to sing, and I dared not protest. In Brussels, I had no jewellery to wear when I performed. One of the directors gave me a set of paste so I wouldn’t look so pathetic and plain when I sang. There were many kindnesses. But there were also weeks when I went hungry. Tell me, Maggie, what were some of the other songs you sang—besides ‘O Holy Night’?”

  “Whatever was popular at the time,” said Maggie. “‘I Knew a Pretty Maiden,’ ‘Molly! Do You Love Me?’ ‘Whispering Hope’—songs like that. Irish favourites, of course. And hymns.”

  Melba nodded. “‘Little Brown Jug’? That was on everyone’s list when I was asked to sing. Vernon and Irene Castle danced to the same tune. Well, they could dance to anything.”

  Maggie was surprised to hear Melba say that she had sung “Little Brown Jug.” But what she didn’t and couldn’t say to Melba was what music meant to her, or rather, what singing had once meant. There had been times when she was so moved by what she was singing, she wept afterward. Music—she had known this as a child—was inside her. Songs played in her head. She could not have stopped them if she’d wanted to, not from the moment she’d first heard her own mother sing. As a young child, countless times during country parties, she had concealed herself beneath the kitchen table, hidden by an overhanging tablecloth, a dark cloth, sewn and patterned with indigo and scarlet squares. Her mother knew she was there but allowed her presence. Maggie had grown up listening to men play the fiddle, the tin whistle, the flute. And always she had listened to voices joined in song, men’s and women’s voices, but especially the voice of her mother. It was possible that Maggie’s own first songs had been sung from beneath the same kitchen table. She strained to grasp at those fragments of memory.

  On every occasion, with friends crowded around, her mother had sung by herself, some Irish song. Hidden behind the overhanging cloth, picking at a scarlet patch whose threads had become loosened, picking at it until the same threads bled into her fingers, Maggie had thrilled to hear the familiar voice buoy up the room with its own distinctive strength, its own distinctive spirit. When her mother came to the end of the last line, it was always with a burst of laughter, as if the song had been a joyous kind of mistake. As if the song had leapt into the midst of the party by some caprice of its own.

  When Maggie was older, she sang alongside her mother. But later, much later, Maggie stopped singing. Except for the church choir in town.

  Facing Melba, she reached under the diner table to rub at her own knee. She would have a bruise the following day.

  “You mustn’t feel badly about your fall,” said Melba. “I know the feeling only too well. Let me tell you the story of a time when I was beginning a tour in California. I was knocked hard on the head, hard enough to be rendered unconscious. I was in the home of old friends—I had just arrived—and sat on the edge of a settee that slid back and tilted as it slid. Later, I found out that a caster was missing from one of the legs. Well, the movement of the settee caused a bronze bust behind me to fall forward. The blow to my head knocked me out completely. I might have been killed. My hosts were horrified.” She shrugged. “Happily, I survived and lived to sing another note. What I still find strange, however, is that I experienced a feeling of pure sorrow when I regained consciousness. Quite some time passed before I could absorb what had happened, but that was secondary to the feeling of sorrow I was not able to shake.”

  They shared the moment quietly until Melba laughed, an enveloping laugh that made Maggie join in. Melba glanced furtively around the back of the booth and put a warning finger to her lips. “Hush,” she said. She shook her head as if to admonish herself. “We’ll be discovered. How wonderful is freedom! How wonderful to sit in a diner eating warm sausages.” And this set the two of them off and they laughed again.

  When they sobered and began to talk once more, Melba surprised Maggie with her next comment. “You’ve experienced
sorrow, Maggie. I see it in your face. Am I being forward? When one has had sorrow in one’s own life, one sees it in another. One of my early sorrows was my marriage, which I knew immediately to be a disaster. I married young, without the slightest knowledge of where I was headed. I had no direction whatever. But I recovered from my mistake, and freed myself to make many more. Now, well, I don’t care so much if I make mistakes. Nor am I afraid to speak up. I have opinions about the music I sing and where I sing it. I have opinions about what goes on in the big wide world, even though we women are not expected to express our thoughts about worldly matters. This terrible war, for one.” She paused for a breath. “Forgive me if I intruded on your privacy just now.”

  Maggie had not interpreted Melba’s observation as intrusion. Nor had she permitted her own sorrow to surface.

  Melba did not push. She looked down at a remnant of apple peel and a limp end of sausage that lay side by side on her plate. Once again, she took Maggie’s hand in her own. This time she began to sing softly, music Maggie recognized at once as lines from the end of “Donde lieta uscì,” one of Mimì’s arias from Bohème. Noises inside the diner fell away. Or did they? The room quieted. Or did it? Was everything shut out by the moment between them? In this distilled and indelible moment, Maggie received the gift of a private, almost whispered concert, until Melba allowed her voice its freedom, until the radiant sound suddenly swelled, soaring up to the tin ceiling and filling the room: