The Madrigal

by Dian Day

  She knotted it tightly around my neck, and rested her hands on my shoulders for a minute. She had slender hands, but their weight was not insignificant. Our eyes met in the mirror, but it was impossible for me to guess at the expression on her face.

  And then she untied the knot, and told me to do it again myself.

  THE LETTER FROM ANNIE was still lying on the counter a week later, half hidden by sheet music and Ed’s scratchy notes to himself. I saw a corner of it when I answered the phone.

  It was a call from a father wanting music lessons for his kid. Ed had disappeared into the storeroom, whether to unpack some of the new shipment of boxes, piled precariously and bulging into narrow aisles, or to sit sideways on the lid of the cracked toilet seat with his back against the wall to do a few sudoku to exercise his brain, I didn’t know.

  “We’re thinking voice would be best,” said the man. “Then we don’t have to worry about the instrument getting damaged.”

  This sounded pretty suspicious to me right off, but I did what I always did with potential students, and asked him to bring his son in sometime between the hours of such-and-such, and so on. He said the kids were already home from school and that they were free that afternoon and would be right in. I hung up the phone without thinking too much more about it. People say lots of things on the phone, and even face to face, that turn out not to be true at all. But, I didn’t even have time to turn more than a few virtual pages of the online Naxos catalogue before I heard the bell tinkle, and I looked up and saw the whole family coming in through the door. Or I should say the bell jangled, and the door burst open, and a tousle-headed child of about nine or ten burst into the shop like a baby kangaroo. I instantly understood the father’s remark about the instruments, and I knew who this kid was right off, even before the more sedate entrance of the rest of his family, and the formal introductions.

  There were four of them: father and mother and two boys. It was hard to tell which boy was older; they were about the same height but looked so different from one another. Maybe even twins, but in no way identical. It was also hard because tousle-head didn’t stay still long enough for me to get a good look at him. He charged from the row of hanging guitars to the world drums to the open keyboards, and everywhere he went he plucked strings and slapped skins and crashed keys, so the shop ran wild along with him.

  I wondered—not for the first time—where the hell Ed was when I needed him, but I was also grateful for his absence, since he deals less and less well with things going out of control in the shop.

  A shelf of music books slid sideways as tousle-head ran by, and cascaded, in slow motion, onto the floor.

  His parents introduced themselves like reasonable human beings, but made no effort to rein him in. They were both tall and thin and had deep eye sockets, and their bodies vibrated lightly, like they never got quite enough sleep. The brother stood just behind their mother’s elbow, reading a sepia-toned graphic novel with great concentration. You could tell they were all bookish, the whole family, aside from the kangaroo—they had the controlled movements of body, the fractional pause before speech, and the intensity of spirit common to many people generally immersed in worlds inside their own heads.

  “My grandmother was very musical, and we thought Daniel shows some promise in that direction,” said the father.

  “We thought it would channel some of the energy,” the mother added.

  The guitar pick display crashed to the floor, and a rainbow of plastic triangles scattered in all directions.

  Sometimes children aren’t seen by their parents. They’re not seen because the family culture is so strong that it can’t value—or even recognize—anything other. Bookish families don’t understand the child among them who doesn’t care to read; sporty families relentlessly drag their non-athletic offspring to inexplicable ball games; agnostic families think the born-again child is a kind of alien from another planet; child philosophers are routinely disregarded by their couch-surfing antecedents; musical parents don’t relate to children who don’t have the capacity to play the triangle in the school band, but would prefer to conduct science experiments that fill the house with smells of sulphur. There’s usually no deliberate or even conscious intention to leave aside, neglect, or discourage the displaced child’s interests. And we can hardly blame parents for believing overmuch in both heredity and upbringing. At some level, we all continue to believe we can create what we wish out of our lives.

  “He doesn’t need voice lessons,” I said to the parents standing in front of me. Behind me a banjo string was plucked too hard, and broke with a sharp twang. “He needs hockey.”

  ED EMERGED FROM THE BACK a few moments after the door had jangled shut behind them. “I heard a commotion,” he said. His hair was standing on end, and his eyelids were heavy, and I wondered if he’d been asleep back there. I thought that, even for Ed, this was strange, and I suddenly saw that he was old and getting frail. I realized, for the first time, that he was much older than my mother, and my mother had been in a nursing home for twenty years.

  “The commotion,” I said, “is in my head.” I was thinking of the child who felt unseen because his mother was exhausted from dealing with the six changelings who happened to be born first.

  MOST BABIES, ESPECIALLY THE YOUNGER CHILDREN of large families, get used to falling asleep amid the general rumble and roar of infant life: siblings clamouring, pots boiling over, mothers losing their fragile tempers. Babies normalize their noise environment and dream through such harsh music as if it were merely the sound of dust motes drifting past their cradles.

  My mother once told me that for the first two years of my life, any loud noise would set me screaming. If that were true, I must have screamed more or less all the time. Seven hundred and thirty days of screaming. No wonder my mother was done in by the time I came to consciousness.

  When I was born, my brothers, at ages five, seven, and nine, were beyond silencing, even for the ten short minutes it might take for my mother to rock me to sleep and put me in my crib. If they were in the house, their feet thundered on the stairs, their voices rang in the halls, their misdemeanours crashed and shattered on the kitchen floor. The house was a tempest, and I was tossed, howling, on its waves.

  This is my first clear memory:

  I am sitting on the floor in my childhood kitchen, my legs stuck straight out in front of me. My bothers are all at the table; I suppose they were there to eat a meal, though I have no idea which one, or what they are eating. I can see the backs of the Ns and the chrome legs of the chairs. Underneath the table is a snake pit of tangled limbs and chair legs, everything in motion. There is a great commotion, over top of which I cry and shriek, though few tears run down my cheeks. And there are my mother’s legs; her slippers are red with yellow flowers, the fabric interrupted on the insides by the premature emergence of bunions. The hem of her dress brushes my ear as she bends down. In front of me, she places an upside-down cookie sheet that fits perfectly, lengthwise, over the span of my legs. My bare toes curl under the cool metal. Into my left hand she places a wooden spoon, then takes my small fist into hers—engulfs it with hers—and brings the spoon down upon the tray, bam-bam-bam, three times. Her touch has not been gentle, but desperate. It seems she has not spoken to me at all, though if she had, in reality, I may not have heard her; there has been no let-up in the ruckus at the table. Her hand lets go of mine; her legs and dress recede. I can remember the sharp intake of my breath, that shudder that comes to children at the end of a long bout of crying. And then I banged the spoon on the tray until there was no more noise outside of me:

  Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!

  My mother taught me how to make music to regain control, the way she did. This is only my interpretation, of course. She would never have said anything like this. We never talked to each other about music at all.

  IT WAS SUCH A STRANGE THING TO
TRAVEL, in the space of only four hours, and a distance of a mere 250 kilometres, the great and unaccountable differences between my mother’s house and Annie’s. Nothing was familiar. I went from chaos into order, from dirt into cleanliness, from squalor into privilege, from cacophony into music measured by silence. I went from choking on everyday despair into inhaling trust, and expectation, and hopefulness. My young lungs filled with that peculiar oxygen, so tentatively at first, as if from the very beginning I half expected it not to last.

  I went from being a youngest son in an overcrowded family to being an only child, and, though I still missed Filander, I gradually grew used to Annie’s focused attention.

  As foster mothers go, Annie was efficient, generous, even devoted—but not affectionate. There was never a moment when she absentmindedly kissed the top of my head, or tucked me in at night and pulled the sheets up underneath my chin. Perhaps she thought I was too old. Perhaps I was too old, and only long for her physical affection now, when as an adult I can see something missing from my entire childhood, some essence of belonging to someone else—someone human. I was never at home in another person. Why I should have expected to be at home in Annie I do not know. While I did not understand then that she loved me, I did recognize that she wished the best for me. And she demanded the best from me, in a singular, intense way, and within a narrow range of possibilities.

  Annie believed in God-given gifts, and believed equally that it was a Sin—capital S, despite not being Catholic—not to use those gifts for the edification of the world. She had a mid-century, middle-class sense of good child-rearing practice: wholesome meals, cleanliness, and moral fortitude.

  I put on my school uniform, and my previous life wore thin and faded away like my hand-me-down jeans. Annie threw those jeans out and bought new ones for me to wear when I wasn’t at school. She bought me new socks and underwear at six-month intervals. At Christmas, there would be new shirts and sweaters under the tree and new sheet music rolled in my stocking. She drove me to school when the weather was inclement, saying the damp would ruin my voice. She looked over my report card with her mouth curled like a fermata, on guard for any evidence of slacking off. She attended every concert I sang in, including the last one, and many of the church services, although she was not a church-goer. She believed that God came to where you were, especially if you were singing. Making and sharing beautiful music was apparently at the very top of his list of what was good.

  I FELT IT WAS MY DESTINY to be at St. Mary of the Assumption Choir School. I began the year self-confident, sanguine in the direction my life was taking—or rather, for the first time, I felt like my life had a direction, and that it was inevitable that things were looking up. The year before, I had taken to singing in the streets in desperation, and I had gone to St. George’s in gratitude; both events had seemed like happenstance. St. Mary’s Choir School was different. God had chosen me. It felt like everything I touched would turn to gold.

  Despite my new and growing sense of the rightness of things, I was still, by nature, reserved. At home, Annie and I danced around each other congenially, while our mutual confusion about our new roles and responsibilities slowly worked itself out. In my first few weeks of school, I watched the other boys warily. I waited to see if I would be teased and taunted, or ignored. I made no assumptions about finding like-minded peers or developing friendships. Up until then, my only friend had been Filander; I did not look for that to change. At that point, I wouldn’t have said it even mattered to me. I thought music, and God, and the ephemeral Filander, were all that could possibly matter in the world.

  THE JUNIOR BOYS WEREN’T ALLOWED off the school grounds at lunch time. We ate our bagged lunches seated at long tables inside the basement cafeteria, and then, rain or shine, were evicted into the curiously fresh Toronto air in the quadrangle behind the school. There was no alcove underneath the stairwell for me to hide in. In the playground during that first month I stood up against the reassuringly solid brick wall of the school and watched as boys hurled balls and shouted rules and flung themselves across the pavement like the erratic atoms we learned about in chemistry class. It seemed to me, a boy unused to the unwritten rules of playground games, just as random and chaotic.

  “Play it, play it, play it!”

  “What do you mean, you dickhead?”

  “You’re out, Kevin. Out!”

  “Look out beloooow!”

  “Send it here, here!” cried a sandy-haired boy, running by so close to me that I could feel the air move as he passed. A soccer ball was kicked in his direction, and he stopped it expertly; everything was still and quiet for a frozen second as he stood with one foot on top of the ball, before he turned to travel past me again, keeping it close between his two feet, outmanoeuvring the small group of boys who now surrounded him.

  It was a warm September, and the sun shone directly down on us. I could feel the heat of the bricks against my shoulder. Absently, I twisted the toe of one foot into a crack in the paving, digging at a small line of gravel. It was hard to know where to settle my gaze, so I often looked down, trying always to give the impression that I was contentedly self-occupied—the second-best strategy in the absence of hiding. I started to gather the small pieces of rock into a pile, and noticed with alarm that my once perfectly polished shoe was scuffed and dusty. I was under the impression that our uniforms were sacred. I didn’t yet understand that it was the job of junior boys—even those at a Catholic choir school—to push the limits of decorum: the length of our hair, the tightness of the knots in our ties, the relative shine of our shoes, these were all tested regularly. There was an almost constant dance between boys and teachers to see how far things could slide. But that day, I anxiously rubbed the toe of my shoe on the back of my left calf.

  “Move over, Eric!”

  “Pass it! No! No!”

  It was as if I were hearing a colony of seagulls floating and wheeling and crying, so far from the sea, in the city air currents.

  “Hoy! New boy!”

  I looked up, and the boy who’d passed me earlier was calling from an opening in the jumble of moving bodies, with his arm outstretched and his finger pointing, and I saw the ball coming sideways, flying toward me along the ground like a tracking device that might explode when it reached me.

  It was instinctive, I suppose, though I never knew I could have such instincts. I drew my leg back in a panic, and my scuffed toe connected with the black and white leather. I heard a hollow thuk, and felt a jolt run up my leg like an electric shock, and saw the ball sail, like a winged miracle, towards the boy who’d called me. It landed perfectly a short distance in front of him, and once again he lifted his practised foot and held the soccer ball motionless for a split second.

  “Good one!” he shouted at me, and he twisted his way through the boys who were closing in. He dribbled the ball with his feet all the way to the fence, and kicked it, finally, through the net made from carefully folded blazers. I could just see the top of his head, bobbing up and down in the crowd, and hear him whooping with joy.

  I looked down at my foot like I had never seen it before. Beside me, a ghostly Filander stretched his leg in awe. I saw a shoe made entirely of gold, and I laughed out loud.

  IT SEEMED ENOUGH THAT I HAD DONE IT ONCE. After that, I could pass off my disinclination for playground games as disinterest rather than incompetence. The kick became legend, and for a long time—long enough—they continued to believe that I had a rare talent in soccer, as well as in music, and that I simply chose to concentrate my efforts on the latter.

  At lunchtime, whenever it was dry, I sat with my back against the brick wall of the school, my knees bent in front of me, and relaxed a little. When the ball threatened to come in my direction, I sometimes caught it and rolled it a short distance to Kevin or Eric or Brian as they ran past, and other times pretended I was focused on my sheet music and simply didn’t see it. And sometimes I w
as, though out of the corner of my eye I watched the other boys run into autumn, trading shirt-sleeves for blazers and fall jackets. Knapsacks were brought out to serve as goalposts, and the seagull-like cries wove themselves into a song that caught on the wind and rose above us; I imagined the sounds, far out over Lake Ontario, finally evaporating into the clouds.

  IN EARLY OCTOBER, I stood in the bright kitchen and watched as Annie spread peanut butter on one slice of bread and grape jelly on another, fit the top and bottom together carefully, cut the sandwich into triangles, and then took a piece of plastic wrap from the carton in the drawer.

  “I could do that,” I said, finally.

  “What? Make your lunch? Do you want to?”

  “Yes. I could get my own lunch. I always did at home.” I didn’t tell her that, in the previous year, I bought my lunch with my busking money, running into the corner store on my way to school and grabbing a bag of Cheezies or a Hershey Bar, and a pink lemonade.

  “Go ahead then.” She handed me the sheet of plastic wrap and moved out of my way. I thought she would go back to her Globe and Mail on the dining room table, but she stood beside the fridge, her arms loosely folded across her chest—Annie didn’t ever lean on counters or put her shoulder up against walls.

  “Do you like the school?” she asked. “Are you settled in now?”

  “It’s fine,” I said, and there was a pause. I was still getting used to this new life, and we were polite and rather formal with each other, every day for months behaving as if we were meeting for the first time. My answer seemed wholly inadequate, given how I felt about St. Mary’s, but I wasn’t used to being asked about things. It took me a long time to understand that this was called conversation. Annie worked hard at it from September until January of that first year, when at last I finally started to catch on, steadfastly asking casual-sounding questions on a variety of subjects that she hoped might elicit more than a perfunctory—and somewhat suspicious—response from me.