The Madrigal

by Dian Day

  There was never any answer. The bottom half of the page remained blank as sheet music after the coda.

  That night I lay there in the dark with a longing so fierce it was like a fever. My skin tingled with it. To say now with any certainty what it was that I longed for seems impossible. Despite the loneliness of my childhood, I was not a sad child. But that night was full of sorrow, a malinconia, and I didn’t know its source. I held my hands out in front of my face and stretched my fingers wide. I could feel those missing digits, that absent twin. I began to sing a little duettino, so softly, estinto, from my self to myself, moving my head slightly from side to side for the different parts. It was a song I had been singing for so long that I think I must have made it up in the cradle, or perhaps in the womb—a two-part Aboriginal chant of syllables that could go on and on without a final resolution.

  As I sang, the room began to grow a little brighter. The wall beside me began to glow with an unearthly light, not grey like the street lamps, but silvery white and iridescent like mother-of-pearl. With every note, the light deepened and began to form a shape, a presence, a being that shone out from the wall beside my bed. The being became a Being and sat upon an immense white throne. Light spilled into the room. Like the god-lion Aslan singing the leaves onto the trees and the moles out of the earth, I sang the white hairs onto God’s great head and the fingernails onto God’s hands, until I could see every magnificent part of him in the finest detail.

  He was overwhelming.

  When God appeared and I had my one chance to petition him personally, I did not ask for world peace. More surprising to me now is that I didn’t ask him for another resurrection.

  “Get me out of here, God,” I prayed. And then I wet the bed.

  IT’S ALWAYS HARD FOR ME IN OCTOBER—there’s a Sunday that arrives, early in the month, too cold or windy or rainy, and no matter how tightly I tuck the wool blanket around my mother’s legs or how low I hold the umbrella over her, the weather is just too bad to take her out walking. I know the staff think I push it too far as it is. When I bring her back, some days in late September, with cheeks red and rough from wind, I know they think I shouldn’t have taken her out, that maybe she’ll get pneumonia as a result. “How will you feel then?” they seem to say with their accusing looks as we come in through the coded doors. Maybe that’s another reason I start her singing before we get back. It pacifies them, and also makes it harder for them to “have a word,” as the head nurse would say.

  “Can I have a word, Mr. Madrigal? Your mother doesn’t seem to be responding to the new medication. Can I have a word? You mother hasn’t moved her bowels in five days, and we need your permission to—” Well, you know what it’s like. Things you don’t want to know about, delivered in a way that makes them seem like the most important subjects in the universe. They take it all far too seriously. Or maybe it is just that they don’t realize that all the important things in my mother’s life have already happened. Whatever we do now, it’s too late.

  The leaves were heaped in wet piles in the gutters, and rivulets of the morning’s rain still ran down towards the sewers, a little water music for an overcast day. The trees were mostly bare, dark-bolled and agitated. We were passing under a beech when the wind tore at the last few leaves and laid one in my mother’s lap.

  “Bleeds,” said my mother. “Bleeds on the wind. Butter it like bread. I can’t see the sky. Can you lift it? Lift, lift, lift, lift. No, that’s not what I mean. The reeling, Chicken Little. Did you say you wanted to go? Bleeds like jam. She took it in her hands, but it slipped. I did the best I could. It slipped down, and then the jar broke—not jar, jam—not jam, blood.”

  We were a few blocks from the nursing home, on our way back. I know all those streets well because we’ve walked them a hundred times. A thousand times, maybe. She was rattling on, and I wasn’t really listening, just walking with my eyes on the sidewalk between my feet and the back of her chair. There’s only so much gobbledegook a person can stand. I tune out a lot of the time, tune into something else, some other tune, something more tuneful. I feel badly about it, but I can’t help it. In the beginning, I listened to every word, trying to piece together some sense out of her oblique references and repetitions. I wanted to have some meaning to hold on to. Now I usually let the words all run together and they make a kind of wandering melody line to the regular rhythm of my footsteps. I still have a fondness for shoes that make noise when I walk.

  I looked up suddenly when the way narrowed in front of me, and there, of all things, was Maya’s orange truck parked haphazardly with two wheels on the sidewalk. On the other side of the walk was a high cedar hedge. To get by, I would have had to push my mother’s shoulder into the branches on one side, “A new twist for old pipes” on the other.

  “Blood makes the best marmalade, the best, oh, marmalade, sneeze and sneeze, no, squeal, no, squeeze. I put it in the jar and in the sand wishes.”

  I started to reverse, to go back to the cut in the curb so I could get the wheelchair over to the other side of the street. I hadn’t noticed Maya at the back of the truck until I heard pipes clattering, and then her head poked around the cap. She saw my mother first. That’s where people look when you’re pushing a wheelchair. They look at my mother in her chair, examine her face, empty of understanding. Only after they’ve checked her out do they glance at me—is there blankness there, too, or suffering?—and smile in sympathy and encouragement.

  Maya looked at my mother, a good hard stare, and then up at me, and then recognition hit, slowly. It was almost like she couldn’t place me in this context. She didn’t seem to realize her truck was blocking the sidewalk. Wheelchairs can’t turn sideways, I always want to yell at people. But of course I don’t.

  “Poison in the water, all the children drowning. Get him to fix the noise. It is better if you make it by cutting up the peel with a knife. Tell me the recipe and I’ll tell Clara, she brought me a baby.”

  “Mother of Pearl!” said Maya, and dropped a length of copper pipe about two feet long. It clattered and rang on the sidewalk before rolling under the truck, though she made no move to retrieve it. I didn’t think it was possible for a person to look more surprised than she had on the night of the stuck squirrel episode, when she’d interrupted the live music, but she did then. She had a pipe cutter in her hand, and she held it out in front of her. My mother held up her arms as if warding off evil.

  “A knife! I wish he would fix it, but the children are in bed! Get them into bed, there’s a dear dead, dead, dead, no! Help me do it! Poison, please!”

  “Shike!” said Maya, still looking hard at my brain-damaged mother.

  My mother startles easily, and once startled becomes very agitated. I don’t know why I didn’t just back up. Back right up, without making more of a spectacle of myself, and turn that chair around. But with Maya staring at me open-mouthed, the way forward blocked, I did the only thing I could think of at the time.

  I sang very quietly, right into my mother’s ear.

  I wish I was a little swallow

  And my mother took over:

  I wish that I had wings to fly

  I’d fly away to some dark hollow

  And there I’d pass my troubles by.

  Maya just stood there at the end of her truck, one foot on the sidewalk and the other on the road. My mother’s music gave me courage. I sent Maya a little nod, backed up the chair and turned us around awkwardly. It’s always much harder to do something right when someone is watching you. I didn’t cross over at the corner; I couldn’t pass her after that, even on the other side of the road. We went right around the block and up the next street.

  My mother continued to sing. I heard something from Maya behind us; I don’t know if she was calling me back or congratulating my retreat. For a minute, I even thought she might have been singing along with us. I had a momentary sense of hearing two voices, though th
e street was suddenly busy with traffic. Likely it was just a weird echo effect from the limestone houses, that’s all.

  But I am not a little swallow,

  I have no wings neither can I fly.

  So I’ll sit down here to weep in sorrow,

  And try to pass my troubles by.

  “WAS THAT YOUR MOTHER?” asked Maya. She was carrying the inevitable armload of copper pipes in from her truck. I was fiddling with the key in my front door, trying not to drop the armload of library books I was carrying.

  “Do you have to carry those pipes in every night?” I said.

  “So you don’t want to talk about your mother?” I have to admit, she was pretty good at manoeuvring one-handed. She just shifted her weight a bit and dug her house key out of the pocket of her orange coveralls with her free hand. The bundle of pipes was balanced on her hip. Another good thing about hips, I thought to myself. My fingers were going to break, trying to hold those damn books against my sheer side.

  “You think someone’s going to steal lengths of pipe out of your truck while you’re asleep?” I didn’t really think I was going to be able to change the subject, not with Maya.

  “I don’t know why you don’t want to talk about her. It’s kind of a guy thing, isn’t it, to not want to talk about things? But I’m here for it, you know. I’m happy to listen.”

  “I guess maybe the lock on the back doesn’t work, is that it?”

  “Are you ashamed of her?”

  “This is not therapy on the front step. I’m just minding my own business trying to get my door open.” The key was jammed; the books were slipping.

  “Are you ashamed of yourself for being ashamed of her?”

  “Feel free to ask any personal questions you like,” I said, “and I’ll feel free not to answer.”

  “I could fix that lock for you,” offered Maya.

  But at that point, luckily, the door finally opened and I practically fell into my front hall. The books landed at the bottom of the steps, heaped like the preparation for a book burning. I kicked the door shut behind me with a great feeling of satisfaction. I was practising being rude, and I liked it.

  MY MOTHER HAD GRADE SIX. Where on earth would she have learned the words to Verdi’s Falstaff, in Italian? Another mystery. I should have asked her Before.

  I have a thousand little snippets of memory. They appear like scenes on a broken screen, with thirty seconds or so of the movie playing before once again the characters are frozen in place, heads turned and arms halfway to being raised, mouths opening as if to speak some crucial line in the elusive plot. A thousand narrative snippets, but the thread of understanding that holds them together has been long lost. They might as well be from a thousand different childhoods, for all the sense I can make of them.

  My mother and I in the kitchen, the house quiet—my brothers are clearly out somewhere. I am swinging my feet at the table; they don’t quite touch the ground. She is eating from my plate, reaching out a decisive hand, picking up the limp broccoli with her fingers, pushing the food into her mouth like one who is starving. She has an air of defiance, as if someone has told her this is forbidden.

  My mother in her bed. The curtain across the doorway of her bedroom—the house’s former living room—allows a small view of her. She is wearing only a slip and a bra, and one arm is slung over her head, gripping the horizontal rail of the bedframe. In the other hand is a dress, twisted like rope across the softness of her worn belly. Even in her sleep she is hanging on to her dismal possessions as if they might save her from drowning. I stand in the hallway and watch her, but she rests without moving for a long time.

  My mother on the front step of the house, sharing with Mrs. Bern a rare cigarette, the two women passing the dwindling butt back and forth between them, their left arms tucked along their bellies underneath their breasts, the folds of their dresses puckered, the wind a little too cold to be comfortable.

  My mother in the kitchen with her raw arms in the wringer washer that she got for five dollars, fishing in the opaque grey water for the final stretched-out sock. Me watching her reflection on the chrome edge of the kitchen table, my electric hair like a cat’s whiskers, picking up the slightest movements of air, her ragged breathing. There are hardly ever any words. There is never any conversation. I think a lot about what I might have asked her, and told her.

  I think, too, about how she missed my years of church solos and community concerts. She missed them all because I didn’t think to tell her what she had given me until it was too late.

  Those years were the hardest ones for my mother. I can see that now. You might think that three sets of twin boys, at two-year intervals, would be most exhausting in the early years of infancy and toddlerhood. Too many colicky babies screaming through the night, too many two-year-olds sticking table knives into electric sockets, too many four-year-olds under the sink drinking Mr. Clean.

  But babies are at least appealing because of their size, and my brothers were beautiful. Dark hair, big dark eyes, and dark complexions combined with fine, symmetrical features; sturdy bodies with perfectly proportioned limbs—they were like infant gods. Add that they were twins, and, in many ways, a sextet. They had no need for mirrors to have their beauty confirmed. It was never a subjective thing. While they were still boys, they got a whole world’s worth of attention. They were observed and studied and tested and wired. They were stopped in the street and exclaimed over. They were questioned incessantly. They were admired profoundly. They were envied. They needed to do nothing for all this fame except exist. There were no rules they needed to obey.

  There’s a natural kind of lull that happens after the age of about eight or nine. In our culture we celebrate early childhood, despise teenagehood, and almost completely ignore the step between the two. In that middle stage, my brothers began to feel deprived of the constant attention they had been led to believe was their birthright. There were still no rules.

  It was all sadly predictable. School progress began to falter, and the game of hooky came to be a favourite. Decorative picket fences in the more upscale parts of town began to be pushed over, prize roses—floribunda and grandiflora—to prematurely lose their delicate heads, and metal garbage cans to be deposited overnight in the middle of busy intersections. Beer began to be consumed behind the arena. Cigarettes were shoplifted from the corner store. Small change was stolen from my mother’s purse, and later from my thrift store cadet cap. The cars of friends’ parents were “borrowed” to ride out along the lake with crowbars stashed under the seats for the windows of boarded-up cottages. Beer gave way to pot, which in turn gave way to drugs that were sniffed or swallowed or injected. Boarded-up cottages gave way to suburban houses whose owners were at the cottage. Electronics were hawked at the back doors of pawn shops. Drugs were dealt at the side doors of bars.

  And I, her singleton child, was taken away to another life.

  In the years that I was away from home, my mother coped as best she could with the departure of the Ns from Terminal 3 at Pearson International Airport, where they boarded a plane for Australia and landed briefly, unannounced and unwelcome, on the doorstep of our Aunt Clara and our transplanted cousins; it seemed this emigration to the desert was inspired by the atmosphere getting too hot for them to stay in Canada. My mother coped with the three-year Medium Security sentencing of Salvador for the punching of his girlfriend Jenny, and the subsequent attempted suicide—or perhaps it was merely an accidental overdose—of Samuel in a motel room in Barrie. She coped with the disappearance of AA into the cesspit of gambling and cheating at cards. Or at least, attempting to cheat. They were beaten to within an inch of their twin lives in the washroom of the Akwesasne Mohawk Casino by three heavily-tattooed guys from Syracuse, New York.

  I knew little of this at the time. St. Mary’s Choir School was a distant cocoon. It might as well have been a distant planet. But I think my singing mi
ght have been some comfort to her.

  The double irony is that the Ns came back when things had cooled down some, and opened a garage on Everett at Sherbourne—they both had legit mechanics’ licences from Down Under to hang on the wall. Salvador was sprung for good behaviour after only serving nineteen months, and, after Jenny died in a car accident caused by a drunken pimp, he joined a group called Men Against Violence Against Women and eventually became its chief spokesman. Samuel voluntarily entered a residential treatment program, converted to Buddhism, and got a Youth Worker diploma from George Brown College. AA recovered—though Abraham still has a limp and an eight-inch scar across his left shoulder blade—and apprenticed themselves to a heritage bricklayer in Perth, the “prettiest town in Ontario.” These things all happened After. My mother doesn’t know any of it.

  I WALKED HOME ALONG THE LAKEFRONT and around the corner of the bay. The ferry was just pulling out into the steely water, and the wind whipped up paper scraps and brown leaves along the curb. I needed a warmer coat, but I hadn’t yet located it; once I was home, I couldn’t seem to remember to look for it. That’s one of the things about living alone—you fill up every closet by yourself. When you want something, you have to look through them all to find it.

  Maya had apologized before I left for my next visit to my mother, though I don’t really know why. Or, at least, she’d delivered the closest thing to an apology that I imagine she ever gave. She’d come out onto our shared front porch at about noon, while I was sweeping the leaves off my front step. She looked like she’d just gotten up, but at least she wasn’t wearing orange, since it was Sunday.