The Madrigal

by Dian Day

  “Maybe,” he’d said, in a puzzled kind of way, after giving it considerable thought. He said it like it was possible that he didn’t know. I tried to imagine how that could be, and it just stopped me dead from asking anything else. I thought there was quite a bit of wisdom in that answer, and I’ve never forgotten it. So now we eat lunch together a couple of times a month, and we make a few remarks about the weather or how well or badly business is going, and the rest of the sounds are slurping and chewing noises, knives clicking on plates and glasses thunking on tables, the intermittent rise and fall of voices from nearby tables and the cook shouting at the waiter in the kitchen: an aleatoric symphony.

  Luke finished his soup and wiped the inside of his bowl with the last of his dark bread. “I’d better get back to work,” he said.

  He left me there finishing my French fries. He doesn’t like to see me pay the bill.

  IT WAS THE MONTH BEFORE I LEFT for St. Mary’s. My blazer and my robes had already arrived in a brown paper parcel, had been tried on for size, and were taken off somewhere to be altered so they would fit my skinny frame. God did indeed move in mysterious ways.

  During those nights, I watched and listened, sitting sleepless, for my mother’s music. I leaned up against the wall inside my flag-curtained doorway, the heat of summer making my shoulder stick to the chipped plaster with dull sweat. I watched and waited. My last nights in that condemned house were filled with familiar sounds: the tocking of the electric clock that lost three minutes in every hour, so I learned early that time was relative and unpredictable; the endless rushing of water through pipes not-well-buried in the walls, since my brothers never bothered to jiggle the handle of the toilet after they had flushed, and no landlord was ever going to come to fix the broken valve despite his promises, or the exacting of advance payments; the hum and click of the old refrigerator, the constant creak-breathing of humid wood floors; the tiny scrabbling of mice; the thundering of my brothers’ feet on the stairs, gods descending and ascending to heaven, their near-private second storey of the house; the slamming of the front door at all hours, the punctuation at the end of house-bound musical sentences.

  I waited for my mother to resume her kitchen singing. Since my audition, there had been a strange and particular silence during the late hours when my brothers were out carousing and my mother and I were alone in the house. She sat mutely at the kitchen table, staring at the wall in front of her, for hours on end. I could just see her almost motionless profile; every once in a while, she would lift her tired hand to brush a few stray hairs from her forehead, or to examine the skin around her fingernails. At the time, I felt those weeks of waiting only as a curiosity, gradually supplanted by a growing excitement about my new life at that unimaginable place: St. Mary of the Assumption Choir School, Toronto.

  I waited in vain, but I was not overly troubled. Once she heard that I could sing and saw the result of that singing in the chancel of St. Mary’s—her dyed hair, under her kerchief, seeping like blood on the brain—my mother’s music suddenly stopped. I never heard her sing again with all her faculties intact. I knew this silence had something to do with me, but I easily imagined it was fierce pride that had stilled those angelic notes, and not, after all, a feeling of betrayal, or jealousy, resentment, fear, or even relief—all things that I can now conceive during my worst moments in adulthood. My mother’s music was gone from my childhood, but at the time I didn’t mourn the loss any more than I mourned the loss of childhood itself.

  I DON’T REMEMBER SAYING GOODBYE to my mother. I remember Ed came to the house and parked his station wagon on the curb outside the front door. I was waiting for him. If there had been a leave-taking, it had already taken place. My brothers were not home. They were never home in those days, except to raid the fridge or use the shower or turn my bed upside-down, though it had been a long time since they were rewarded by spare change—the substance of their lives was lived elsewhere. My mother was somewhere upstairs; I had the distinct impression that she was in hiding. Arthur Grey and the social worker sat in the kitchen like an abandoned meal. I looked over my shoulder down the long hallway after Ed pulled up, and saw them fidgeting there in silence. My hand was already on the door knob.

  I swung open the door and stepped out into the late summer mid-afternoon heat, dragging my suitcase and the parcel of new school clothes over the doorstep. Ed got out of the car and came around to put my bags in the back, and the choirmaster came down the hallway.

  “Did you say goodbye to your mother?” Ed asked me.

  “Yes,” I answered, not looking at him. Had I? Was I lying?

  Arthur Grey came out, and Ed and Arthur shook hands and nodded solemnly at each other, as if they knew they were engaged in a most serious business.

  “The boy’s mother here?” Ed asked him.

  “Upstairs.”

  “Should I—?”

  “No,” said Arthur Grey. “Better not.”

  “Should I see your mother?” Ed asked me, then. I could see he wasn’t sure about the choirmaster’s answer. He put one foot on the bottom step. The heat wafted around us. I was sweating, and rubbed my palms on my pants.

  I looked up at the man who had introduced me to God. He shook his head, one shake, so small that I do not think Ed saw it.

  I shook my head at Ed, holding my breath.

  The moment passed. The two men shook hands again, and Ed went over and opened the passenger door of his car, and I stepped away from the house of my childhood for the last time.

  All the windows were rolled down in the car. We pulled away from the curb, and over the engine noise and the 8-track of Buddy Holly on Ed’s old car stereo, I heard the scream of a dying animal. I am almost certain that Ed did not hear it. But Arthur Grey—standing on the sidewalk outside my mother’s house, beneath the open window where she stood looking at us pull away, her two hands covering her mouth, her small frame collapsed against the window jamb, as if she would fall over without its support—Arthur Grey must have heard my mother’s cry, though he made no sign that he had done so. He stood, motionless and expressionless, his nostrils flaring slightly, gazing after us until we turned right at the end of the short block; I turned to look back at him, but he was quickly out of sight.

  Neither the choirmaster nor God did anything at all about my mother’s grief, which only served to prove its insignificance.

  I turned to face the front, and I believe Ed started humming with the music.

  GOD FOLLOWED ME TO TORONTO. In fact, for many years after the bedroom wall incident, God followed me everywhere. I saw every occurrence as being divinely ordained. God was at Bluffer’s Park and in the shops on Queen Street. He was in the front room of that tall house in the Beaches, and in the boy-filled corridors of my school. The hand of God orchestrated the music of my life and the lives of all those around me.

  Even though some music historians think that all the early folk music has been lost, great composers have always drawn on the music of the common people for inspiration. There are fragments of folk tunes and ancient chants in the works of Josquin des Prés, J.S. Bach, Martin Luther, Johannes Brahms, Béla Bartók, and pretty much everyone in between. The music made for the glory of God came first from humans singing about thoroughly human things: the harvest, or prowess in battle, or lustful love.

  Back then I thought it was the other way around—that all Original Thought originated with God. Newly Catholic, I bought the bit about Original Sin being the fault of mortals too eager for temptation. I didn’t see myself as a sinner, but as one chosen. I was encouraged to think this. My benefactors saw themselves as Samaritans, and I was the battered—but saved and converted!—Jew on the road to Jericho. My brothers were, of course, the robbers; my mother didn’t figure in the story anywhere. I did not wonder at all about why God had forgotten her. I had forgotten her myself.

  I CUT OUT THE PICTURE of the two-headed kitten. I wonder h
ow many people around the world cut it out, like I did, and pasted it into a scrapbook? It’s not that I think what I do is so unusual. It’s more a matter of my sense of the oneness of me. I sometimes wonder whether if I had gotten to keep what I still think of as Filander’s extra fingers, whether I would have felt more of a twoness, or less.

  Sometimes it does seem like there are pairs of everything. But other times it seems there are infinite one things trying to become two.

  The kitten theme came with me to the sorting station that morning. Dave, who sorts next to me, told me he’d gone to the humane society after work the previous day and picked out two six-week-old kittens for his kids.

  “So small they both fit in the palm of the wife’s hand,” Dave said. “Both kittens, one hand.” He is the fastest sorter I’ve ever seen, and, even as he was talking, his hands kept efficiently filing pieces of mail into their designated slots.

  “You know they got over fifty cats and kittens there now? They don’t have room to keep ’em all. They’re killing ’em, eight or ten a week.” I could tell that he was really proud of himself for saving two living creatures from certain death. I thought of the two-headed kitten, sure to die.

  Dave finished his sorting, sliding the elastic bands onto the bundles without even looking. Some guys just dump those elastics back into their bags when they’re on their routes, but Dave wears his like jewellery, blue bracelets as precious to him as gold. When he finally got this job, he’d told me, he was drinking methadone every day to try to keep away from the pills—he was that depressed. I always want to ask him if he ever ran into Luke on the streets, but that seemed ridiculous, like Canadian tourists in Bucharest being asked if they know the Romanian’s friend’s first cousin Reuben Pretty in South Dildo, Newfoundland. So I just looked at Dave, and at his bangles, and I thought, we have that in common, at least: being saved by the mail.

  He always finishes sorting before I do, even though he has a heavier route, north of the university, and so has quite a bit more mail to sort. On his way out, he glanced back over his shoulder at me. “Maybe you should go get yourself one,” he suggested. “Be a bit of company for ya.”

  I raised my hand goodbye, but I didn’t say anything. It didn’t really even register that he was still talking about kittens. I was looking at a piece of lettermail, a long white envelope addressed to Ed from his sister Annie. Annie, my foster mother. I turned it over a few times, looking at the familiar two-toned stamp. It felt like a message in a bottle.

  Later on, after I’d gotten my mailbags from the collection box and walked all the way up one side of Princess Street, I walked into Ed’s shop and that so-intimate bell rang over the door like a spiritual homecoming, as if I were being called to worship in some mysterious Eastern religion.

  Ed was tuning a guitar for a young woman with red hair—I mean red hair, the colour of cranberries.

  “From India,” I said to him, and I waved Annie’s letter in the air.

  “Excuse me,” said Ed, and he handed the woman the instrument, made some vague, ineffectual hand signals at her, and finally said, “You try it.”

  He came over and took the letter, weighed its thickness in anticipation, and slit it open with a grapefruit knife, still sticky from breakfast.

  There were four folded pages. I didn’t wait for Ed to look at them. I went back out through the tinkling door, an excommunication in miniature.

  In the background, fading away behind me, the berry-headed woman was plucking the A-string over and over again as she turned the key, and the string slid up past A and down underneath A, the elusive note tormenting the air with its absence.

  ANNIE HAD GONE TO WORK at Child Haven International in Hyderabad, India, the year after I left St. Mary’s. I believe that when she got there she took up with a different kind of God than the one she was used to.

  The four sheets of Annie’s letter to Ed lay on the shop counter for days, gradually getting smudged with peanut butter fingerprints and gathering toast crumbs inside its creases. She always sends photographs of happy children eating bowls of rice and playing with crudely made wooden toys in a flagstone-paved courtyard. Ed leaves them spread out where I can’t help but see them, because he knows I won’t read the letter, despite his invitation. Part of his life’s work seems to be engineering a quiet reconciliation between me and Annie, but I can’t help him much with that one since he doesn’t really know why we’re not talking.

  AT ST. MARY’S I WAS NO LONGER one of the Madrigal boys. I was no longer the singleton in a land of twins. There was no longer two of everything. I worked hard to forget that I’d been born into my particular family and fiercely resisted any attempts by anyone to encourage me to remember them. I made friends at school and found power in music. There was only One Best Voice, and it was mine.

  Ed brought me to the train station, and his sister picked me up at the other end: Toronto, the endless city. In direct contrast to my hometown, where all the streets led elsewhere to more important places, the streets of Toronto go nowhere except to more of Toronto. It is as if the city proclaims itself the most important place with every street, avenue, road, and crescent. I arrived at Union Station, a small boy even at twelve, with an unwieldy suitcase and an awkward parcel of private school clothes. Struggling off the train, I lost hold of the parcel and watched speechless as it tumbled down the steps past the attendant and broke open on the platform, bursting navy pants and maroon ties like ripe milkweed. The platform was crowded with people getting carelessly off the train, stepping over my too-white shirts. Already this city was different from the one I had come from.

  I followed with the suitcase, bumping it down the steps, until the attendant took it in a mighty hand and set it on the platform easily as if it weighed nothing at all. There was a woman waiting there.

  “Frederick?” she asked. She was younger than Ed, but had a more serious manner. She had on a flat black skirt that covered her knees and matched the colour of her hair exactly. She was thin and insubstantial in some ways, but she took charge, bending down and gathering the spilled clothing into competent arms, producing an extra plastic bag from her large handbag to gather up the stray never-worn navy blue socks. It was clear she was prepared for anything. Childless herself, she could still take twelve-year-old boys in her stride. She was nothing like my mother at all.

  “My mother doesn’t even know how to tie a knot properly!” I said to her in humiliation. I am ashamed still, thinking of this moment, but for different reasons. But Ed’s sister always spoke of my mother with an understanding that I did not possess.

  “Your mother was doubtless thinking about bigger things than knots,” she said simply, and, despite not knowing what she meant, her words still stung me a little. She straightened with the parcel under control and, having re-tied the knot over the torn brown paper, took the suitcase, shook her head briskly at the waiting porter to indicate that she had no need of his services, and set off down the platform so quickly that I had to trot to keep up.

  She looked back only once to make sure I was with her. “I’m Annie,” she called out. “Call me Annie.”

  Empty-handed, I just managed to keep her in view in the high-ceilinged station, dodging between travellers and bumping my knees on suitcases vaster than my own. She wove expertly through the crowd and led me out into the sweltering heat, late afternoon and no wind off the lake. I didn’t even know the lake was still there, only a few short blocks away. I was landlocked by skyscrapers, more belittling in real life than anything one could imagine from photographs or television.

  The school was not very far from the station, and she drove by it slowly, pointing out the junior boys’ entrance, now abandoned for summer; it seemed that she had done her homework. The two-storey red brick facade was disconcerting in its solidity amidst the steel and concrete. We seemed to drive a long way, that first day, but later, with a mere week’s experience, I knew that for this cit
y the distance was remarkably short and traffic-free.

  She pulled up in front of a tall house in the Beaches: a whole flight of steps ran up to the front door through a rock retaining wall, the garden a smeared palette of colour with late summer flowers. There was summer furniture on the big front porch, a whole arrangement of wicker chairs and side tables and large wooden planters spilling blooms onto the deck. She unlocked the front door, and we stepped into cool air, mutely lit, a relief from the glare and the heat.

  “Here we are!” Annie announced, as if that was all that needed to be said, and the bags hit the hall floor, strepitoso. She had carried in all my worldly possessions with such assurance that I hadn’t even offered assistance.

  I didn’t know anything about front gardens. I didn’t know anything about air conditioning. I didn’t know anything about French doors. But through the panes of glass, in the large front living room that really was a living room—a real sofa and chairs, no beds at all—stood the largest and finest, and the first live grand piano outside the music shop that I had ever seen. Even then, because of Ed, I did know something about pianos.

  ON MY FIRST DAY AT ST. MARY’S, Annie knotted my school tie, explaining what she was doing as she went. I was standing in front of the hall mirror, and she was standing behind me, easily a head taller, and held one end of the red tie—a red I would quickly learn was called maroon—in each hand. I watched my reflection in amazement. She had taken me to get my hair cut the day before, and I still found the tops of my ears pale and unrecognizable.

  “This side should be longer than this side by about this much. The long end wraps around the short end. Fold this over here and poke it through...”