Tell

by Frances Itani

  SHE WALKED ALONG THE ROAD WITH ZEL, OUT PAST THE edge of town. They’d made a plan to go directly to Zel’s house to have something to eat and then practise their parts for the concert, maybe even sew a bit on their skating costumes for the January masquerade. Maggie had told Am she’d be at Zel’s for the afternoon. Am no longer attended church services. He’d stopped years before, after he and Maggie first moved to town. No one had been successful in persuading him to change his mind—not the minister at the time, or the present one. Am did what he wished to do. Maggie knew that he’d soon be heading over to Kenan and Tress’s home for his Sunday afternoon visit.

  “What did Am do to the back of his head?” Zel wanted to know. “I saw him in the post office a couple of days ago.” She took Maggie’s coat and hung it from a hook on the back of her kitchen door. They stomped clumps of snow from their boots and set the boots on a mat to dry.

  “What do you think? He went to Grew for a haircut again. Even after I asked him to go to one of the other barbers in town.” Maggie sat herself down at Zel’s long kitchen table. “I could have done a better job myself.”

  “Grew does have to earn a living,” said Zel. “There’s that to consider. And Am’s hair will grow back—hopefully.”

  “He should be wearing a hat to cover the deed,” said Maggie. “But you know Am. No one tells him what to do.”

  “Well, no one tells you what to do, either,” said Zel. “By the way, did you see Cora’s hat in the back pew this morning? All those feathers and wings. It looked as if it would fly up to the belfry at any moment.”

  Maggie waved her off with laughter. “I didn’t see Cora’s hat,” she said. “I was having enough trouble staying with the music. Could you tell from where you were?”

  “I saw that you were preoccupied,” said Zel, “and not by the notes on the page.”

  “I lost focus. If you noticed, so did others. Well, maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. I don’t know what was wrong with me.” She looked past her friend and through the window, where a small bird, one she couldn’t identify, was flitting from branch to branch in a leafless tree. It settled and puffed out its throat as if rehearsing for a larger adventure. “What a beauty,” she said. “I don’t see many birds from the rooftop of our apartment. Anyway, most of the birds headed south weeks ago.”

  “The almanac says we’re in for a long freeze,” said Zel. “Mrs. Leary made her declaration weeks ago.”

  “Your tenant?”

  “The same. When she isn’t reading her Bible, she has her nose in almanacs, past and present. She keeps a pencil on the sill in the parlour so she can mark passages in the Bible—and in the current almanac. I confess that I’m curious about what’s worthy of her attention, but so far I’ve resisted looking.”

  “I wonder,” said Maggie. She tried to recall the kind of books Mrs. Leary and her husband borrowed from the library over the fire hall, where Maggie worked two afternoons a week. She thought of the titles she had entered in the register on their behalf: Sir Walter Scott novels, Persuasive Peggy, books about the Antipodes. Mr. Leary had requested Tess of the d’Urbervilles but it had been deemed too controversial for Deseronto’s citizens and had been removed years before. He’d requested, instead, something about circus clowns. She had nothing to give him about clowns, but he’d borrowed one of two copies the library owned of The Life of P.T. Barnum. That had satisfied him at the time, though he’d returned the book with stains on its cover. She had wanted to ask, “Tea? Moonshine?” but she’d held her tongue.

  “Most days,” Zel went on, “the two of them stay in the parlour with the double doors closed. Except when they’re having meals. In the evening, Mrs. Leary putters in the kitchen, though she doesn’t cook anything fancy. A pity there isn’t more for them to see out the parlour windows—except the road and the old barn that’s falling down. They do like to watch the birds. I keep that room heated in winter just for the two of them. When I’m home, I’m always in the kitchen. Anyway, they love to sit in there during the daytime. Mrs. Leary reads by window light. She brought her rocker with her when she moved in. Her husband plays solitaire, but never on Sundays.”

  Does he slap down the cards? Maggie wanted to ask. Am had installed a shelf up in the tower—two shelves angled between beams. He kept a pack of cards on one of the shelves and sometimes played solitaire for hours at a time. From below she could hear every card as it snapped hard against the wood. Each time she heard snap slap she wanted to shout up to him: Don’t you have work to do somewhere in the building?

  She stopped herself. She hadn’t discussed Am’s behaviour with Zel. Except for the haircuts.

  Zel went on. “In good weather, Mr. Leary goes for walks. I swear he keeps a bottle of something stashed somewhere, because I sometimes smell liquor when he returns. When he’s out, Mrs. Leary stays in the parlour and talks to herself. If he’s away for a long time, sometimes she’ll ask me to help her wash her hair.”

  “Is that part of your agreement?”

  “Not really. But there’s something wrong with her collarbone, something not quite in alignment. She has trouble raising her arm to scrub her scalp. I guess she doesn’t like to ask him for help. And she does need help. There are times when I think her mind is off with the fairies. One day, after her husband went out for a walk, she came into the kitchen and said, ‘This is what happens when we get old, Harold. You should have stuck around.’ The two of us laughed out loud as if we were part of a conspiracy. Another time, she told me, with no reference point except what was going on in her mind, ‘People don’t die, Zel, not really. We think of them just as often after they die, and just as happily.’ I had no answer to that. Nor do I believe the just as happily part.”

  “Is she in the parlour now? Shall I go in and say hello? I haven’t seen either of them for a while.” Maggie was thinking of Zel scrubbing Mrs. Leary’s head at the sink, the fragile wisps of hair criss-crossed over the older woman’s scalp.

  “They’re away for a couple of months. Didn’t I tell you? They boarded the last steamer and went to New York to stay with Mrs. Leary’s sister in Rochester. You can’t blame them for wanting to be with family. And they pay rent for their room while they’re away. Although I do give them a special rate over this period.”

  “Maybe her sister will persuade her to move to New York permanently,” said Maggie. “I met the sister, you know. She used to come across the lake to visit the couple when they lived in the centre of town.”

  “I don’t know. The Learys are in their eighties, and I don’t think they’d move now. It’s easier for them to board here than to keep a house in town. Although there might come a time when they won’t be able to manage the back stairs to get up to their bedroom. I guess we’ll all face that when we have to.”

  “They sold their house in town. That couldn’t have been easy for them.”

  “They feel safe here,” said Zel. “Having others living in the same house.”

  “And the teacher?”

  “She’s still around, though she’s often out with friends on the weekends. She’ll be here until the school term ends in December, and then she’ll go home to her parents in Belleville for the Christmas holiday. I’ll be busy, because I still have a couple of rooms to work on so I can attract more boarders. I also want to cut some cedar boughs to strew throughout the closets. And I’ve promised the workroom out there to Lukas. Now that there’s heating—I had a stove put in—he can cook his meals and be completely independent of the main house. Eventually, we’ll move the piano out, too. He and the handyman will have to manage that with whatever help they can bring from town.”

  “Lukas is moving here? Our music director?” Did Zel detect her reaction, her surprise?

  “He came to see me about taking over the smaller building when the warm weather comes again. The space suits him better than the rooming house where he lives now. He’s already moved in some extra furniture, including a new dresser and bed. He and the handyman did the lugging a
nd carrying. They managed to get everything straightened around and presentable. They’ve quite converted the space. But don’t worry, you and I can still use the work table for our skating costumes. Lukas won’t move in until spring. Don’t forget, Maggie, he needs to have a piano wherever he lives. Mine isn’t used much except when I practise hymns for church, so here it sits, pushed against the dining-room wall. When he moves into the other building, he’ll be able to play whenever he wants. When Lukas was here to help straighten around the workroom, the teacher asked if he would play something for us, so he came into the house and sat at the piano and played Liszt—an étude. We sat in our chairs, transported. Sometimes he practises at Naylor’s when no one’s around. There are pianos in town, plenty of them, but not at his rooming house. He seemed pleased to know he could use the one here.” Zel stopped to remember. “No one has ever played my piano the way he did that day.”

  “The boarders at his rooming house are going to miss him,” said Maggie.

  “I suppose they might. Though from what I hear, he doesn’t talk much about himself.”

  “It’s the same at rehearsals.”

  “That’s true, but there are people who speculate,” said Zel.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” said Maggie.

  “About where he’s from.”

  “What difference does that make? He’s from Europe. And he’s creating something new in the town. People who care about music are glad he’s here. I’m glad.”

  Zel went over to the oven to slide in a cookie sheet that was covered with bite-sized potato logs. She had prepared them before leaving for church, and now they had only to be heated and browned. The tiny logs, along with slices of cold beef and tea, would be their midday meal before they got down to work.

  While Zel went upstairs to change out of her church clothes, Maggie thought about Lukas, who was responsible for the upcoming concert: her solos, three choral works, the tenor’s solo—everything on the programme that was musical, including his own performances. She thought of his hands, the way his long fingers became one with the keys when he broke into the silence. She thought of Clair de lune, the beginning notes that invited the listener to be attentive, expectant. She thought of the way he paused and then continued, seamlessly. When she heard his music during practice, she wanted to drift outside herself and into some parallel world. A world unbruised and filled with healing. She wanted to lie on the floor during those moments, and rest her head against someone’s arm. She wanted to close her eyes and imagine a world that held endless possibilities.

  The previous week at Naylor’s, Lukas had returned to the piano after rehearsal was over. He knew that Maggie and Zel were staying behind to tidy up. Everyone else had left. Lukas played for the two women, and Maggie was in no hurry to leave while he was bent over the keyboard. At the end of the piece, he stayed at the piano for several moments, looking down at the keys.

  Maggie and Zel did not move. They exchanged glances, waiting.

  “He died only last year,” Lukas said, finally, his voice low so that the women had to strain to hear. “Debussy. He died early, in his fifties. He might have created so much more.”

  He closed the cover over the keyboard then, and reached for his thin winter coat. The three, Lukas, Zel and Maggie, left the theatre together through the side exit, and said their goodbyes in the street.

  Until five months ago, Lukas had been living somewhere in Europe. So far away, Maggie could not imagine his part of the world. Her impressions of Europe were second-hand: images from books, photos in magazines, newspaper accounts—everything coloured by war. Ypres, the Somme, areas flattened, wiped out; areas in which injured soldiers readied for evacuation lay on stretchers lined up along the ground; photos of soldiers moving single file between trench walls; streets with rows of military ambulances ready to leap into service; wheelbarrows heaped with blankets and bedding; horses and carts dragging away sparse belongings when their owners were forced to move out of villages and towns. That was what Maggie imagined. That, and some sort of unfathomable darkness into which young men had disappeared.

  There had to be other, undamaged parts of Europe. She knew there must be places that remained as they had been before the war. She had seen photos of celebrating crowds in London; photos of Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George strutting along a Paris street in their top hats, bearing sticks and canes. She’d seen contrasting photos of chauffeurs playing cards outside on the street while, inside, their masters decided the fates and boundaries of nations. It was impossible to keep up. New books about the war had already begun to arrive on the library shelves, the ink barely dry on the Treaty of Versailles. How could Europe be imagined after what its people had been through?

  Maggie had never had the opportunity to travel to England, Ireland, Scotland, the Continent. Few people in Deseronto had crossed the ocean except for the Scots and Irish who had settled in the town and on surrounding farms, and the young men who’d been transported on ships in the opposite direction—men who’d fought and died, and men who’d lived to come home. Some of her nephews had taken part in the war—including Kenan, who’d never spoken to her of what he had been through, and probably never would.

  And then, after the war was over, Lukas, who had no connection whatever to the town, had made his own journey to Canada. Arriving in, of all places, Deseronto. Lukas had turned his back on his homeland, though Maggie did not know exactly where that homeland was. A wanderer, people in town were saying. Which meant: a wanderer without a home. What was astonishing, Maggie thought, was that Lukas had come to the town at all.

  She wasn’t sure of his age, though she wondered. Late forties, maybe. He might be about the same age as Am, who would be fifty in the new year. The few facts she was certain of were these: Lukas had boarded a ship that sailed to Canada, docking after some undetermined time at the port of Saint John. From there he made the long journey by train—probably one train after another—arriving in Deseronto during the summer of 1919. After finding lodgings on the ground floor of a rooming house on Fourth Street, he wasted no time before placing handprinted notices in store windows around town. The first of his purple-inked signs had been fastened to the news board at the entrance to the library where Maggie worked.

  Unaccompanied when he arrived, he had stayed on at the rooming house. Word around town was that he was a man who revealed nothing of his past. And yet, in a quiet way, he seemed to be fitting in. Or was he? No one was asking questions. Even the first sign he posted had contained minimal information. An identical notice had been placed in the Deseronto Post:

  MUSIC DIRECTOR LUKAS SEBASTIAN

  STUDIED IN PARIS, BUDAPEST, LONDON

  ACCEPTING STUDENTS FOR LESSONS IN

  PIANO AND VOICE

  That was all. That, and the telephone number of his rooming house. “Music Director” was how he referred to himself. In September he’d placed additional notices announcing his intention to form a choral society. When Maggie auditioned—in no way could she account for her audacity in doing so—Lukas had chosen her not only to sing with the group, but to perform several solos at the New Year’s concert. Now it was late November, and despite the man’s quiet encouragement, the prospect of singing by herself humbled and terrified her. Lukas believed she was able to perform. He did not make a fuss about this. His attitude was that it was up to her to believe in herself.

  She pushed the thought away and tried to add up what she knew of the man. He was unlike anyone she knew. He could speak four languages—she’d learned about the languages not from Lukas but from Zel. That was notoriety enough for any small town. He was beardless, had greying hair, was taller than Am by three or four inches. He had hands she thought of as fluid, and wore a brown jacket that was loose on his frame and had elbow-shine. Occasionally at rehearsal, instead of the brown jacket, he wore a button-up grey sweater over a white shirt. The collar of his shirt needed fixing. The button-up sweater was store-bought, easy to tell. He was soft-spoken. His expression he
ld expectation; he listened with concentration and was able to discern the smallest nuance of sound. His passion for music could not be denied. Yes, she thought, Lukas is a man of quiet passion.

  But something inside him had yielded. She sensed sadness. Some hidden part of him had given up. His shoulders were sunken, as if the bony structure that supported them was about to pull the soul of him deeper inside, if it could. He seemed unaware of this. He offered no extra information. He did not talk about Paris, Budapest, London during rehearsals. The singers had no knowledge of what he had done there. What he spoke about was the immediate moment, the notes that spilled from the throats of the singers. He responded to the sounds created by her, by Zel, by Andrew the tenor, by Corby Black the bass—all of whom would be singing the music of Elgar and Leslie and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Lukas cared about music that came from the voices of every one of the men and women who sang for him, those who gathered onstage at Naylor’s for weekly rehearsals—twice weekly now that the concert date was closing in. That was what he was passionate about.

  He had never once addressed her as Maggie. When he pronounced her name it came out as “Magreet.” The first time he spoke directly to her during rehearsal, she’d looked down at her feet as if noticing for the first time that her shoes were outrageously shabby. Wondering, not so disconnectedly perhaps, if she were shabby. She was used to being called Mags by Am and Maggie by her friends, but never “Magreet.” Not by anyone. She’d been aware of two red spots burning in her cheeks.

  “You must not lose pitch, Magreet. Support the note there—and there.”

  And later. “This passage will work only if there is a little drama, Magreet.”

  “Forget the note you just sang. It’s not there. Ah yes. Better. Very nice. Keep your mouth in the same position, shape the note, the next, then—a little break. Exciting, yes. Exciting, Magreet.”