by Dian Day
If anyone had asked me then, I would have said my mother’s greatest regret was that she didn’t get to take her twin-bound family to Twins Days in Twinsburg, Ohio. At the end of every school year from the time I was six years old, when the annual event was inaugurated, she would borrow our neighbour’s outdated North American road atlas. Mrs. Bern had once driven across the border in a rented car, imagining she would go all the way to Graceland, but she had returned without explanation the following afternoon with a forty-ounce bottle of Captain Morgan, duty-free. Even then, I took some comfort in knowing that the Madrigals were not the only people with unfulfilled dreams.
My mother would flip through the washed-out, un-travelled maps and show me the pink state drooping underneath Lake Erie. Twinsburg wasn’t in the atlas, but I’m not sure that mattered. It didn’t matter that we didn’t own a car, that she held no driver’s licence, that she couldn’t afford one bus ticket to Toronto, let alone seven to Ohio, or that by the time I was six, my brothers wouldn’t have been caught dead on a family excursion with me and my mother. It didn’t matter that by the time Twinsburg started inviting twins to town, my brothers were petty thieves and heartbreakers.
She told everyone we were going, except my brothers.
“It’ll be a surprise for the boys,” she’d say.
She told Mrs. Bern next door when she borrowed the atlas. She told her sister Clara in a blue airmail letter to Australia. She told Angel Hammersmith when she went around the corner to use the telephone to call Greyhound Bus Lines. She told the Chinese couple who ran the corner store. She told the postie, who she was always friendly with, opening the door every day with a smile when she saw him coming, even though she hardly ever got any letters, only bills she couldn’t pay.
She worked herself up into a state of trembling anticipation. Her voice would lower to a conspiratorial whisper. She became unbearably bored with the routine of her life, as someone does when they think they are about to escape. She tapped her fingers on the kitchen table and the counter top and the side of the fridge. As the time approached, she stopped cooking meals, instead buying what she called “picnic food” that could be served out cold on paper napkins, and eaten without creating any dirty dishes.
“We’ll go to the wiener roast, and the boys will all walk in the Double Take parade,” she told everyone. “We’ll win a prize for the most twins in one family.”
Inevitably, there was a moment when she had to admit to herself that such a scheme was impossible. She was not ever able to imagine what my brothers might contribute to the talent show, nor how she could clothe them in six identical sets of t-shirts and Bermuda shorts. She had no money, and her boys could not be found.
“We’ll go next year,” she’d say, when the first weekend in August had passed her by. “Next year for sure.”
MY MOTHER WENT OUT AT NIGHT sometimes. I try to remember how often—once a week? Once a month?—but the memories are blurred like out-of-focus photographs, one superimposed over the other. There’s a picture of my mother on the top, clear and sharp, and underneath a pile of similar images, the lines indistinct and the colours faded. She would dress carefully in her dimly-lit room and leave me in my brothers’ care. I don’t think I ever had a babysitter. She never said where she was going, and as soon as the door was shut behind her, my brothers would be making their own plans to go out. Really, I was probably safer all alone in that dilapidated, about-to-collapse house than I was with the six of them.
One night I remember she wore a billowy black-and-silver outfit and big silver earrings shaped like shooting stars, and headed blithely out into the jungle of the night. A rare thing: she leaned down and kissed me on the top of my head before she closed the front door gently behind her. Her merriment gave out a false light, however, and she left a heaviness in her wake. Even at eight or nine I could sense this, and I was uneasy enough that I stood in the hallway looking at the inside of the door even after I heard my brothers start down the stairs. They jostled each other like cattle going through a chute.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in bed?” asked Samuel.
“Why aren’t you in bed?” asked Nicholas.
“Get in your room and go to bed!” demanded Alistair.
And Nathaniel picked me up by my pyjamas, one hand on my shoulder and the other on my thigh, and carried me sideways through the dining room archway and dropped me, not ungently, onto my bed. He’d decided a few days previously to try growing a beard, and after he dropped me, he rubbed the rough stubble against my cheek in what I believed was a form of animal-like affection, much as a lion might rub up against you when it purred—right before it ate you for dinner.
And then he put my pillow over my head and pretended to smother me. I’m sure now it lasted no longer than mere seconds, but it was long enough for me to panic, and at the time I was certain he was going to kill me.
I felt like I was still coughing up feathers ten minutes later as they made their final descent down the stairs and out the door, six pairs of army boots shaking the house like a Molotov cocktail, ready for an atomic night on the town.
THERE SEEMS TO BE A MYTHIC TRADITION about having seven sons. I wonder if my mother was aware of that, and, if so, whether it added to her pride or her grief about her boys. Since most of the stories of sevens are rather alarming, I would guess grief. I don’t, myself, consider it a glad heritage.
The Jewish martyr Hannah, and Christian martyrs Felicitas of Rome and Symphorosa of Tivoli, all had seven sons who were tortured and killed for refusing to worship “pagan” gods—or, in the case of Hannah and her clan, for refusing to eat pork and worship idols. It’s likely that all these ancient stories have the same origin, but it shows that people liked this story so much that they kept passing it around and appropriating it for their own through a little sleight-of-hand like changing names and dates and hometowns. Hannah-Felicitas-Symphorosa watched her sons being put to death one by one, by various means impossible to imagine. They were first castrated or flogged, then beheaded, thrown off precipices, or cut in two. It is interesting to me that in many of the stories, the mother gets to be a saint, but usually never any of the boys.
According to the Old Testament, the seven sons of Japheth—who himself was one of Noah’s sons—were the origin of most of the people of Europe. The Hindu Medhatithi also had seven sons who conquered kingdoms and spread their DNA across the land. Job’s first family shared in his famous god-sent afflictions, and his seven sons died when a house collapsed on their heads. The Guaraní people of South America told stories about seven god-brothers, six of whom were literally monsters. In Greek mythology, one of the seven sons of the sun god Helios, the reckless Phaëton, set the earth on fire with his joy-riding; the others squabbled and pillaged and conquered, and ultimately a few of them got together and committed fratricide. More contemporary fiction is not devoid of this leitmotif, either: Tolkien’s seven sons of Fëanor died by suicide, murder, and violent accident, and the one remaining brother went over the edge of despair and wandered around alone for the rest of his life.
My brothers and I may not have conquered new lands, nor pillaged the towns and villages of our enemies, nor have we, so far at least, killed each other. We have more modern issues and concerns to contend with: we have been individually and variously laid low by Driving Under the Influence, personal debt, and relentless guilt; we are collectively undermined by commitment phobia and a complex system of non-communication. It would seem we are still worshiping the wrong gods. Our mother, the martyr, has the twenty-first century version of seven sons—and not one acknowledged grandchild to show for it.
THE FIRST TIME I REMEMBER having some small inkling of what was going on, I came home from school to the sharp smell of men’s cologne stuck in the dead air of the house, mixed with a faint, sick smell of something else I couldn’t then identify. There was a curious presence in the air, as if someone had just brushed past me in the
hall. I even turned to look—back and forth, back and forth—though I could see both the front and back doors standing shut from where I stood in the kitchen doorway.
“Who was here?” I asked. We rarely had visitors, and most of them, like social workers from the Children’s Aid or from the Welfare, were harbingers of trouble.
“No one,” she replied. She was sitting on one of the battered kitchen chairs, rocking back and forth slightly—whether the chairs legs were uneven or the floor wasn’t level, or both, I don’t know. Her eyes were half closed and focused unwaveringly on her lucky penny on the corner shelf. She looked dishevelled, as if it were morning and she had just woken up.
“What did he want?” I persisted.
“Nothing,” she said.
“What happened?” Even at that age—seven? eight?—I could tell when I wasn’t getting the truth. You might say I had an instinct for it.
There was a long pause while she, too, seemed to be contemplating the meaning of luck. The kitchen tap was dripping rusty water, allegro, making it seem like time was both standing still and speeding up.
“I paid the rent,” she said, finally.
She went and picked up the penny, turning it over and over in her hands.
MY MOTHER HAD A SECRET: she sang like an angel. She sang through the deepest part of the night in the kitchen, over the sound of the washing machine that went on for hours: load after load of boys’ thin-kneed trousers, in four sizes. For years I sat hidden in the dark doorway of my room and watched her sing her soul out; I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She stood with her back to me, one hand on the back of the kitchen chair and the other hand dancing and swaying in the air like a diva’s, full of emotion. Even though I couldn’t see her face to read the expressions there, I could hear the notes deep in my heart. During the day, my mother was preoccupied and distant. It was at night, unknowingly, that she taught me how to feel. Often, I fell asleep there, my head leaning against the wall, and the pillow from my bed wedged against my side so I would not fall over into the hallway and be seen.
Music is not mathematics, despite the attempts of an array of modern composers to make it so. Music is about feeling, not formula. The best music makes us feel, not intellectualize. I’m not even sure it matters what we feel—love, despair, wholeness, murderous rage—only that we are called to acknowledge that mystery within ourselves. My mother’s music was my first feeling—a dozen years of myself exposed, a thin slice of time and purpose, a cantabile of meaning. Not only did she birth me, she fashioned my soul with her songs.
As far as I knew during all the years of my childhood, I was the only one who ever saw her sing—whether or not others ever heard her through those thin walls I have no idea. She had a broad repertoire. Old Judy Garland songs: “After You’ve Gone” and “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.” African-American spirituals like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Oh Freedom.” Snatches of opera she’d heard who knows where: Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Puccini’s La Bohème. “La destinée, la rose au bois” and “L’eau vive”—the old standbys of her maternal grandfather, sung in a language that had been lost from the family in one generation. When she sang in French, the airborne hand moved to her thigh, where it tapped a lively rhythm, sending her tattered housecoat swaying. She may have been on the Welfare, scraping the pennies together at the end of every month, but she was rich in music. I don’t think she could have survived the seven of us without it.
MY MOTHER SINGS NOW FOR ANYONE who will listen. In fact, it is one of a very few ways to get her to stop her incessant, nonsensical chatter; the others involve sedation, radio static, or sleep. You only have to start her off with one line of a song, and she’ll deliver the remainder, word- and note-perfect. She stands when she sings, as she always did, struggling up from her wheelchair and placing her veined arm on the fake-veneered supper tray. Sometimes she even still waves one arm in the air for expression, though there is no indication she understands the meaning of any of the words.
Last Sunday, I started her off with:
In Dublin’s fair city
And she sang, sweetly:
Where the girls are so pretty
I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone
As she wheeled her wheel-barrow
Through streets broad and narrow
Crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o!”
“Marmalade,” said my mother, interrupting herself.
“Do you want me to bring you some?” I asked.
“Poison,” she insisted.
“No, no,” I said. “You love marmalade. I’ll bring you some. You’ll remember.”
But she just went back to her singing:
Alive, alive-o
Alive, alive-o
Crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o.
It’s amazing what the brain forgets and remembers. And what we can’t forget, no matter how much we want to.
AT THE MUSIC SHOP, Ed makes tea perpetually. He offers me some every time. I don’t know how his bladder copes with it: tea all day and beer all evening.
“I don’t drink tea, Ed,” I say every time. Sometimes I add, “You know that,” but I try not to. I know he doesn’t mean any harm by it. I’ve cultivated patience with people repeating themselves. It seems my whole life is about repetition: the mail route, the scale of C minor, the dripping tap of my mother’s mind, Ed’s tea, and “All the way through now, one more time” at choir practice.
Ed was the man I first brought my busking money to, all those years ago, for music lessons. He’s owned The Whole Note for forty-two years. He taught me how to play piano. But first he found me a voice teacher from the School of Music at the university and drummed up four other pupils from the children of professors so it would be worthwhile for her to come to the shop one evening a week. Not much later, when I made the switch from St. George’s to St. Mary’s, he drove me to the station and put me on the train to Toronto, and at the other end his widowed sister picked me up and drove me to a tall house in the Beaches where I stayed, free of charge, until I was eighteen years old. Ed tried his best to make sure I was different from the Madrigal twins in more ways than just being a singleton.
ED OFTEN WANDERS OVER AT NIGHT, not on any regular schedule or any particular day, just when things get too intense at home and he needs a break. It’s not that he and Sylvia have a bad marriage, but I guess after fifty or so years with just the two of them, things begin to repeat themselves. So I open the door and he’s standing there, and we just nod at each other, and then I say “Rickard’s Red?” while he’s coming in and taking his coat off, and I go back to the kitchen to get him his beer while he takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and blows his nose. I keep a supply of Red in the fridge for him, and I keep the thermostat on six. If I tried to keep lettuce in there, it would freeze.
Ed chugs back most of the first bottle right away, and then he gets himself settled at the upright. There’s a bit of a ritual he has to go through: running his long fingers across my music books—though he always plays by ear—and touching the bent corners of my sheet music; pulling out the bench and wiping his hand across it; stroking the ivories without pressing down on them at all. It’s like he’s warming his hands up to the very idea of music.
And then he starts, wham, his hands are jumping and sliding on the keys, and his butt is dancing on the piano bench. As a contemporary said of Scarlatti, “when he played it was as if ten hundred devils had been at the instrument.” Well, that’s also Ed, early in the twenty-first century. The notes are hot and wild and fill the whole house with a crazy consonance. Ed’s fanny—I laughed to myself when I remembered my last visit with my mother—is lifting and his hands are lifting, and there’s just no way to stay down. I get up and stand behind him and I sing and wave my hands in the air like an idiot. We do all the old Motown favourites, and then we start on early rock ‘n rol
l from the fifties, and then swing tunes from the forties. As long as there’s beer flowing Ed will stay half the night, and some nights we get all the way back to union music and early Gospel tunes before I get tired and remember I have a mail route. It used to be hard for me to get rid of him, but now when I feel like I’d better get to bed I just tell him that there’s no more Red.
Last night we were just getting going, still working on Motown, when the sound of someone banging on my door finally broke through. Once I heard it I knew I’d been hearing it for a while.
“Hold on,” I said to Ed, and he stopped playing while I went and flicked on the porch light and answered the door. Maya was standing on the porch. She still had that orange suit on, almost fluorescent against the darkness. She has five of them, apparently, one for every day of the work week.
“Hey,” she said, “I need a man.”
“No you don’t,” I said. At that point, she looked past me into the living room and saw Ed sitting there at the piano, and then she took a minute to survey the whole scene: most of the double room is filled with straight-backed wooden chairs and an array of musical instruments. You especially can’t miss the harp, a 47-string Lyon & Healy with a glistening walnut finish. I traded my car in for it.