by Dian Day
“I bought it,” I said. And then to prove it I gave her the receipt.
She took it from me and studied it carefully. After a few minutes, she took it and the radio and went down the hall. She changed out of her slippers and into her shoes, pushed her arms into the sleeves of her coat and did up the buttons, and then she went out with the receipt in her pocket and the unopened box under her arm.
I said nothing to her when she returned after an hour or so. She was not empty-handed. The box was gone, replaced by bulging bags of groceries. She struggled in through the front door and up the hallway; I did not offer to help her. I said nothing when I heard her rattle the pots and pans in the kitchen, nor when I smelled cooking: onions, meat, tomatoes. I said nothing even later when my brothers came in from God-knows-where to eat supper, filling the kitchen with noise and laughter and swearing, oblivious to what they were eating.
I said nothing after they’d gone out again, when I stood on the sloping floor with the refrigerator door open, finding nothing left there for me to eat.
She never asked me where I’d gotten the money to buy the radio. I never told her, not even to clear my name.
I THINK A LOT ABOUT WHAT MUSIC ACTUALLY IS. Some people think it’s simply another language, a universal language that everyone in the world can understand, whether they speak English or Arabic or Cantonese. I don’t think this is quite right.
On the one hand, there is some music that doesn’t cross easily over generations or cultures. When people trained in a Western musical tradition hear music based on a non-Western musical scale, it’s often hard for them to identify with the rhythm. When blues and boogie and country and gospel and jazz were thrown together into the great American melting pot, gradually evolving into rock and roll, our grandparents shook their heads and wondered what all that noise was about. There was nothing universal about it.
On the other hand, as far as anyone can tell, people started singing and playing instruments just about as soon as they took to grunting and pointing and developing spoken language. Lullabies all over the world are sung high and slow, instinctually, like mothers everywhere are pre-programmed to it, whether they live in mud huts or skyscrapers. They bend their heads over their child as they hold him or her to the breast, and they sing. It seems that the first use of music in our lives is to tie us together emotionally.
I think about all this when I sing myself to sleep. Music is the Mystery. There’s no way to explain what it does for us, or what humans would be like without it—what kinds of cultures and belief systems we would have built in the absence of beat and melody—or even whether we would still be human without it. Whether we would survive our grief. There has never been a people found who do not make music; it is like trying to find tribes who do not dream when they fall asleep at night.
IN THE EARLY FALL after that first long year of midnight busking, I was picked up by the police. It took me by surprise; I had gotten pretty adept at ducking into darkness. The police, our neighbours from Bay Street, my old grade three teacher who was a lush, anyone who might recognize me—I hid from them all. I got to know my brothers’ haunts and the carousing routes they took between them, and got much better at avoiding them, too. Sometimes I had to stop singing in middle of a line, grab my chinking hat, and retreat. It became one clean motion: the music hung on a note while I stooped and grabbed and ran. I don’t know what my audience made of my regular disappearances; I expect they were mostly too drunk to care. No doubt I missed out on quite a bit of spare change, though, leaving before the end of a tune.
On the night it happened I didn’t see it coming. There was a wind off the lake and a misty kind of rain, and it must have fogged my eyes. I was singing “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” and I delivered the last line like I was on a show tour, bending onto one knee, opening my arms from my heart to include all of them in a theatrical embrace, swinging my head up to the right with a triumphant smile.
So shine on, shine on harvest moon, for me and my gal!
“Hello there,” a voice said. There was a policeman standing just behind my right shoulder. He was a tower of a man, and looked down at me from what seemed a great height. He must have been left-handed, because his gun holster was hung on his left hip. Kneeling down, my eyes were exactly at trigger height. I froze there, staring at gleaming gunmetal. I was glued to the sidewalk. My knee was getting soaked. The jangled music from the bars up and down the street hung heavily in the mist. My audience evaporated into doorways and around corners, until it seemed I was kneeling alone in the empty street in front of an immense man with a gun.
“Fine voice,” he said. “Why don’t you stand up so I can have a better look at you?”
I stood up slowly, eyeing my up-turned cap. The cop picked it up with one hand—a colossus bending for quarters—felt its weight, folded it over. The coins clinked a protest, then were silent.
“Past your bedtime, isn’t it?” he said, raising his eyebrows. All the blood in my body pumped directly from my heart to my face. Up until then, I think I had really believed in the effectiveness of my penciled moustache.
“Your mother know where you are?” he asked.
I shook my blood-boiled head.
“Crawl out your window using knotted sheets, did you?” He tapped the bulging cap against the side of his leg, below his gun. He did that for a long time, looking at me, narrowing his eyes, sighing. Around us on the sidewalk people passed by in an imitation of being sober.
“What’s your name, then?” he finally asked. “Don’t bother with invention.”
The whole time I’d been standing there, I’d been trying to think of an alias I could give him: Will Begone or Justin Time. Would it be better to make something up, or use the name of one of my classmates? Randall Cheeny, who waited in the stairwell for me? Dougie Fairweather, who threw rocks at my back as I was running home? As soon as he said that I could see it wouldn’t be any use, either way.
“Frederick Madrigal,” I gasped.
“Madrigal?” he repeated, as I knew he would.
“Yes,” I admitted. All the blood now went to my feet. I thought about running away—I was good at it—except I’d just given a cop my real name, one of the best-known names, for the worst reasons, in this small city.
“Ah.”
“Yes,” I said again.
“What am I going to do with you?” he demanded. There wasn’t much compassion to be heard in his voice.
“Send me home,” I suggested. “I’ll go right home. To bed. I promise.” After I said “promise” I stopped; It sounded too much like wheedling, like begging.
“Climb back up the sheets, eh?”
I nodded vigorously. I didn’t tell him I’d walk straight in through the unlockable front door and slam it behind me with no fear of waking my mother.
“I’ll give you a ride,” he said decisively, and then after he saw my panic he added: “Don’t worry, I won’t come in to meet your family—not tonight, anyway—and I won’t drop you directly in front of your house. We don’t need to give your mother the impression that you’re following in your brothers’ footsteps. But I’ll be waiting to make sure you go right in.”
He led me down the block and around the corner to his patrol car. There were a lot of coins under my arches; I tried my best not to limp. My boot-bolts rang on the road. He opened the passenger door for me to get in.
“Try to keep yourself out of the back seat, okay kid?” he asked, but it wasn’t really a question.
It took only a minute to get to my house, enough time for me to be overwhelmed by the dials and knobs on the dash, and the static on the police radio. I didn’t have to tell him where home was. He stopped just short of the corner, and I went to get out. He put his huge hand on my shoulder and stopped me.
“Monday after school,” he said, “you come on down to the station and see me there. We gotta talk about this some more. Y
ou don’t show up, I’ll come looking for you, you understand? You go to Central? You get out at three-fifteen? Right, three-thirty, I’ll be expecting you. You know where the station is? Ask for me at the front desk, Constable Miller.” He let go of my shoulder, and he handed me my folded-up cap, fat with money.
“You got a fine voice,” he said. I got out of the car and shut the door. I could tell he would be watching me in his side mirror as I crossed the street and ran back to the middle of the short block. I hesitated only a minute before I pushed open the dark front door and slammed it shut behind me with my hand through the letter slot, fortissimo.
I HAD ALMOST TWO WHOLE DAYS after what I thought of as my near-arrest to stew about Constable Miller and what was in store for me that Monday after school. All day Sunday I grew more and more anxious. I roamed the hallways of our house like a restless dog. If I’d had a tail, I’m sure it would have been tucked between my legs. I tried to distract myself with food, my homework, my brothers’ Penthouse magazines, but nothing worked. I started out to walk up along Montreal Road to sing under the underpass, but stopped when I got to the arena, and threw rocks for a while at the impenetrable metal siding. Sunday night I had nightmares that always ended with Constable Miller handcuffing me and tossing me into the back seat of his cruiser. On Monday at school I weathered my teachers’ displeasure at my lack of completed homework and my distracted state. By the time three-fifteen came and the bell rang, I had to run out behind the school and throw up in a basement window-well before setting out for the police station.
I didn’t have to ask for him. Miller was waiting for me in the lobby.
“Well, Frederick Madrigal,” he said, “Let’s go for another drive.”
He drove to the corner of King and Johnson and parked in front of St. George’s Anglican cathedral. I didn’t know at the time that it was Anglican, or that it was a cathedral. I had never been in a church in my life.
He told me to get out of the car, and I did. We walked right up the front steps and in through the huge double doors, taller than any doors I had ever seen, tall enough for giants twice the size of the giant Miller. Inside, it was dim, but, high up, light filtered through coloured glass. I followed him right down the side aisle to the front. When we got there, I saw that there was a man sitting on what I now know was the organ bench, a few steps up from the floor, and he seemed to be waiting for us. He nodded sideways to Constable Miller, but he kept his eyes on me.
“Sing,” he said. Just like that.
I was too surprised to speak, let alone sing. I did nothing but stare. He had on a black robe that covered even his shoes, and I was taken by the impression that he was legless, and would come gliding towards me if he stood up.
“Sing!” he commanded.
“What?” I stammered. “What—should I—sing?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, impatiently. “It’s not the song that matters.”
I could hear Constable Miller sitting down behind me. I opened my mouth. I wasn’t worried about singing; my summer of busking had made me pretty comfortable with performance. I just didn’t know what to sing. I tried to think of something religious. I sang the first song that came into my head that had anything to do with church. I’d heard my mother sing it in secret so many times, it was like a lullaby:
I’m in a nice bit of trouble, I confess
Somebody with me has had a game
I should by now be a proud and happy bride
But I’ve still got to keep my single name.
My voice filled every alcove and flew to the lamps hanging near the vaulted ceiling. There was a most beautiful resonance that was not a dead echo, but a living wish. The sound of my voice in that place was pure and light, like a bird’s melody. It was way better than the underpass.
There was I, waiting at the church
Waiting at the church, waiting at the church
When I found he’d left me in the lurch
Lor, how it did upset me!
I saw the man on the organ bench draw his hand down across his face, pulling the skin on his cheekbones down so his eyes looked baggy. He left his hand pressed over his mouth, like he was trying to stop himself from crying out. Many years later, he would tell me how hard it had been for him not to laugh.
All at once, he sent me round a note
Here’s the very note, this is what he wrote
“Can’t get away to marry you today
My wife won’t let me!”
I continued right through to the end, and it wasn’t until the long silence afterwards that I wondered if I’d chosen the wrong song. I knew I had sung it well. Finally, the man cleared his throat. He didn’t talk to me, but to Constable Miller behind me.
“Well, there may be a few kinks to be worked out,” he said. Miller appeared to consider this seriously.
“I expect you are up to the challenge,” he replied.
“For that voice?” the man said, rhetorically. “Anything.”
I forgot about the woman on the street who’d given me my first coins. This was the beginning of my love affair with God.
THERE ARE THREE KINDS OF PEOPLE WHO SING. The first and the best—the ones I wait for with my fluttering heart caught behind my sternum—are the kind whose immeasurable emotion spills out freely with the words and music. Their faces, their whole bodies, their entire lives, the expanding capacity of their love, pour out among the rafters. If they are outside, they effortlessly carry their audience up to the very stars, until, if we looked down, we would see mere shadows of our earthly bodies far below. But we don’t look down while we are listening, for there is nothing important there. Such voices lift the audience up to heaven with them, if there is a heaven—and if there is an audience, for these are the kids that sing in the back of the school bus or the streetcar on their way to their final exams. When they grow up, they sing in stalled traffic on their way to a make-it-or-break-it corporate meeting, or at the laundromat in time with the chewh, chewh, chewh. These are the people that start singing to their babies when they are still only one-celled amoebas; the ones who sing to the deer transfixed in the hayfields; the ones who sing all alone at night in their sub-standard kitchens, too exhausted to sleep. If you are lucky enough to be there when they sing, you can’t take your eyes off them. Well, I can’t, even after years of choir directing, and an early lifetime of spying on kitchens. There’s only a small handful of these people in an average-sized choir—maybe four out of twenty.
The second kind are performers; their bodies move and they give great facial expression but they know they’re on stage—they only sing when someone’s listening, and preferably watching too—and they’re conscious of making all the right moves. Oh, they sing well. But you can tell it’s not real joy. It’s not true despair. They’re not feeling, but imagining feeling. It’s performance art. There are only a handful of them, too. Another fifth.
The last kind are those whose voices make the perfect notes but they don’t add anything to the music. It passes right through them, like a ghostly melody through a wall. They just stand there, singing. Looking somehow disconnected from the music, from their own amazing, technically perfect voices. Given that they are often the majority, you can’t have a choir without them, but I wonder about singing without any feeling other than enjoyment, and I lament whatever they have done with their souls.
It’s one of the reasons I don’t believe in God anymore, even though I want to. But I still love the church because I love the sound of the young choristers’ feet going down the wooden stairs to the basement to get a drink when choir practice is over. The whole place creaks, like a living thing.
THE LIMESTONE CITY YOUTH CHOIR has won awards at the Toronto International Choral Festival for two years in a row. That’s not bad considering that four years ago there was no independent youth choir here. There are the choirs at the high schools and at St. George�
��s—and in fact some of our members are in these other choirs as well—but I like to think we are the only choir in the province without any higher agenda except to sing.
As soon as we got through September, we started rehearsing for our concert at the end of January. We settled on January so no one would expect any Christmas carols out of us. After being involved in the recording of five Christmas CDs at St. Mary’s—one for every year I was there, including the disastrous last—I have vowed never to sing another piece of Christmas music again. Besides, there are all kinds of kids in the choir, from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds and all kinds of religions. For me, Christmas has had its day in the sun.
“Scramble,” I called, and they all got ready. Their muscles were pulled tight like the strings of my new harp. I only give them sixty seconds so they know they have to move fast. “According to age!” There are twenty-two of them. There are a couple of twelve-year-olds but the majority are nearer seventeen or eighteen. True to my mathematical predictions, four of them have musical souls, and five of them are trying.
The choristers all pretty much know by now the order of everyone’s birthdays, but I still hear the occasional check.
“No, Becky, I’m in April. You have to move up.”
“Yeah, April! But March is before April, like, duh!”
I handed out the piece of music I’d brought. It was a William Holborne madrigal that I had edited so they could read the notes—I had decided to give myself a bit of a break and not teach them early music notation. I give half the pile to the kid at one end, and half to the kid at the other, and they pass them down the line without looking, until everyone has a sheet. When I say, “Okay,” they go ahead and look; they are supposed to be looking at the key signature and the time signature and the words, while I’m looking at my watch, and then they have about thirty seconds left to hear the music in their heads before I expect them to start sight-singing, one line each, all the way down the row. The ones nearer the end of the line have an advantage, since they can usually get a good hold on the timbre and the rhythm before the music reaches them, which is why I have to keep changing the way they line up.