by Dian Day
“Are you learning any new music?”
“Yes,” I said, “I am.” But I didn’t elaborate. I didn’t know she would want to know the names of the songs.
I held the plastic wrap awkwardly and made a hash out of wrapping up my sandwich. To her credit, Annie let me muddle along without interference, although I was over-conscious of her presence and bit at my upper lip. Even when she passed me a paper lunch bag from the cupboard, she kept her eyes tactfully on the French blue hydrangea bush just outside the patio doors, and once in a while hummed the opening bars of the overture from The Marriage of Figaro to accompany the vibrating refrigerator.
“Are the other boys nice?”
I thought about my classmates, many of them still nameless to me, in their indistinguishable uniforms, running boisterously through the oak-panelled hallways.
“Nice?” I repeated.
“That’s probably not the right word,” she said, and she laughed. “I’ll have to learn what the right words are for things, won’t I? The words young people use these days?”
And so I was able to smile, and nod, and successfully avoided having to answer her previous question. When it was clear that she wasn’t going to go back to her newspaper until I had finished, I realized I would have to be direct.
“Can I have two sandwiches?” I was looking at the side of her face, ready to slide my eyes away when she looked at me, but she didn’t turn her head, just tipped her chin down and spoke as if the pebble linoleum had asked the question.
“Of course,” she said. “Help yourself. You should have told me you wanted a bigger lunch.” I wondered then why it had taken me two weeks to get up the nerve to ask.
Peanut butter and grape jelly and two more slices of bread. Annie was very precise in the kitchen: there was a separate knife for each jar. I’d watched her carefully while she was making the first one. Like her, I spread the butter to the very edge of the crust. When it was done I got out the plastic wrap carton, ripped off another piece—much too large—and made another mash-up job of the wrapping. Annie picked up the paper bag, and started to put the second sandwich in on top of the first.
“Can you—I mean, can I have that—can you put it in a different bag?” Her hands stopped moving. “I’ll eat it at morning recess,” I explained. She looked at me then, or at least her eyes flickered sideways, and then she simply went and got another bag from the pantry cupboard.
When she reached to choose an apple from the fruit bowl, she almost-looked at me again. “Do you want two apples?” she asked. “You could eat one for afternoon recess.” She didn’t wait for my response, but put one apple into each paper bag. And then two orange juice boxes, four Fig Newtons, and two twists of sliced celery were divvied up.
“You can do it yourself from now on,” she said. We both stood in the kitchen looking hard at the two fat bags of food, and not at each other. Outside, the hydrangea’s colour had deepened into navy blue, and then to black. After a minute, she reached over and turned the kitchen light on.
ANNIE NEVER SAID A WORD against my mother, and, before the fall break of that first year, explained to me matter-of-factly, and without blame, why I would not go home at holidays and why my mother refused to visit.
“She thinks it would be too hard for you,” she told me, “going back and forth. We try to tell her otherwise, Ed and Sylvia and I, but.….” It seemed all we could do was wait. What none of us understood was how that initial reluctance of hers would grow quickly into an absence too big to gulf. Within a short time, we were strangers; there was nothing of that old life that called me.
Meanwhile, as she so fruitlessly waited, Annie took me to the ROM and the Gardiner, as well as to Fort York and the Science Centre and the zoo. Once we got used to each other, we went regularly to the music collection in the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library and came home with our arms full of music scores and librettos. She fed me large platefuls of food; there was simply no opportunity to be hungry. She taught me how to hold my fork and knife properly and to sit at the table for an hour over several courses of always-delicious supper, and how to play Brahms, Schubert, and Schumann afterwards, to aid, she said, in our digestion.
And so, a few years later, when I stopped singing and, on top of that, gave up the possibility of Juilliard, it was for her a betrayal of everything she thought sacred. She’d been grooming me for God and greatness, just as my hometown benefactors had been. She could not forgive me. And even worse, she could not forgive her God for allowing me to choose as I did.
IN THE BEGINNING WAS WAR. And on the Second Day came rhythm. All those spears and clubs being beaten on the dusty ground, the drums calling from tribe to tribe, the frenzied stamping of feet. Afterwards, the making of flutes from the shin bones of the enemy, warriors blowing their souls right through the hollow places after sucking out the marrow.
My time at St. Mary of the Assumption Choir School seems so long ago, now. It’s easy enough to imagine what it was like. Testosterone and music—what unaccountable power grew in those of us who took our singing seriously! We ran through the hallways like delinquents and sang in church like angels. It was an odd mix, to be sure.
I sang for God. Not for the glory of God, not for His exultation. I believed my music went right into God’s ear. I thought I had a direct line to Our Father in Heaven.
I EMBRACED THE GOD OF THE CATHOLICS as fully as I had embraced the Anglican one a year or so earlier. There was no doubt in my mind that they were really one and the same Being. Or sometimes, after some reflection on the conundrum of the Holy Ghost, I conceded that there might have been two—a god and his ghostly twin, like Filander—sharing out human souls like penny candy. I didn’t mind, either way. I knew so little of religion then that it did not occur to me that there were in fact many other gods to contend with.
In the school’s eyes, of course, I was not remotely Catholic. I had not been baptized in the Catholic church—or anywhere—nor had I taken my First Holy Communion. I did not know the Catechism or the saints’ days or the Ten Commandments. As a result, I was an alien of sorts—at any given time there were only a handful of non-Catholics in the entire school—but even this did not subject me to “outsider” status. While I attended compulsory religion class with my classmates, I did not go to confession or take communion with the other boys. I did attend mass every Sunday because of choir, and quickly learned to say Our Fathers and Hail Marys and the Apostles’ Creed and the Act of Contrition, though I was sorry for very little at the time.
During my first year there was some talk of a Rite of Christian Initiation, but Annie was not enthusiastic, and they didn’t push it.
“I don’t know that we should make you that unrecognizable to your mother,” she said.
Since I was not Catholic, I did not understand how these things could be that important. I thought I already had the whole of whatever God was in my hands.
Still, I was curious about the Eucharist, and whether or not an active imagination might be called for.
“Is it really wine?” I asked Eric when he came back to the choir stall, the blood of Christ still moistening his lips.
“It’s blood,” he said.
“No really, does it taste like blood?”
“It tastes like wine,” he said, grinning. And he hiccupped and laughed at himself under cover of the organ playing the closing bars of “Ave Verum Corpus.”
“What does that wafer thing taste like?” I asked Kevin after the mass.
“I don’t know,” he shrugged.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? Is it like meat?”
“It’s like nothing,” he said. “It just tastes like nothing.” He shrugged again; he wasn’t the least bit interested.
THE WHOLE ST. MARY’S JUNIOR CHOIR sang at mass in the cathedral every Saturday evening and early Sunday morning during the school year. In addition, there were a number o
f us—perhaps a dozen or so—who were regularly selected to sing at funerals. Most people have probably assumed professional mourners had gone out with Dickens, but that would hardly be accurate. While we weren’t paid for our services, St. Mary’s was; I suppose it was part of what allowed the school to offer scholarships to boys like me. Certainly, there were a lot of scholarship boys in the ranks of the funeral choir, in a blatant “give and get” kind of process that I wish could have been handled with a little more circumspection, given the implications.
The coffins were always closed by the time they got to the church, so Mrs. Bern, thankfully, remained the only dead person seen during my boyhood. But there is something palpable about coffins when you know they are not empty. Especially in church, they emit an aura of contagion, as if something of the dust of death could escape that well-polished box, no matter how tight the seals. Occasionally, I would search the faces of the mourners in the front pews, examining them for the evidence that God would need to assign them to either a northward or southward direction.
The priest finished the Lord’s Prayer, began to walk around the coffin sprinkling holy water, and then went around again with the thurible. At the end of the Prayer of Absolution, I got up by myself to sing the “In Paradisum,” while pallbearers flanked the coffin and got ready to carry it out of the church. I knew what the Latin words meant in English; we were all required to know what we were singing about, no matter what the language. The body, and the dust of death, always made an exit with the promise of angels, martyrs, and eternal rest. I thought about that in practical terms as well. What I remember most is my belief that I would get to go to heaven without my brothers; my mother I left languishing in limbo with careless omission.
“PICK POCK,” MY MOTHER SAID. “Pick pock rock red pock pick.”
“Strawberry picking?” I suggested.
“Pick Pock,” she said.
“Pickpocket?” I tried again.
“Marmalade,” she said.
“Robertson’s Thick Cut?” I asked.
“Poison,” she said, with finality.
I SAID GOODBYE TO MY MOTHER and got up to go, but I turned back when I got to her door and watched my mother’s lips moving from across the room. She was seated in the blue wingback chair, her head framed by machine-stitched tiny golden lilies which, from the distance of the doorway, looked like starbursts around her limp curls. There was no one nearby. She was talking to ghosts, her eyes focused on a point halfway to the window, greyed with rain.
What is the value and the purpose of life? It’s not the first time I asked myself this question. Sometimes it seems that there is nothing except this question, and all our earthly activities are a way to avoid looking at it squarely. There were lots of times when the phone rang at home, I admit it, when I had a flicker of hope that the nursing home staff were calling to say, Sorry, Mr. Madrigal, Frederick, your mother’s gone … passed away. A flicker of hope, and a flicker of guilt, and a flicker of the question that can’t be answered, and then the whole thing gets shut down by the part of my brain that can’t deal with these things. I answer the phone as if there are no big questions, and after the call go back to making music or taking a shower or eating leftovers for lunch.
Sometimes it happens—the hope, guilt, question, click—when I walk into her room and find her deeply asleep, her breath so shallow and imperceptible that she could be—could almost be—dead; the air of the nursing home, diminuendo, trying to rend another human soul from shadowy existence. There is nothing like the sleep of the old to make us understand the fragility of life. And they sleep everywhere: seated at dining tables or in wingback chairs as often as in beds, blue eyelids and no dreaming.
Watching my mother across the room, seeing her lips move, hearing the faint whisper of words that never make any sense, I thought of the almost twenty years of Sundays that I’d witnessed, and taken part in, her unearthly, fragmented conversations. Twenty years of trying to hide from the meaning of a life without those elements of humanity that we consider ubiquitous: connection, communication, comprehension. To say something of meaning to another; to hear back a scrap of truth, a shred of lie, any words at all that, once strung together, form a sentence: subject, object, verb, and that carry a thought, wrapped like a gift, between two people. Cheap or expensive, it is the thought that counts. I went to the store; Mrs. Bern did my hair; I always liked vanilla ice cream best. Straightforward meanings, neat and clean. I would have been happy enough with these. More complex sentences would have been pure luxury: My husband left me when my youngest child was born; I kept his lucky penny on the shelf.
Perhaps only one side of the equation was required to be fully functioning, in this case, me. I was clearly still connected to my mother, even if only by guilt—how else might I explain my weekly nursing home habit? And I still communicate with her: “Are you cold? Here is your sweater; My dear, Mrs. Bern has been dead for many years; There is turkey soup on the menu for lunch.” Does it matter that she doesn’t understand me? If people have relationships with cats, or gerbils, or iguanas, then surely this is worth at least as much? But I think the difference is this: If I talk to a gerbil, I can make up the gerbil’s answer. If I talk to my mother, I cannot pretend to know what she is thinking. With this argument, it is comprehension that bogs me down, mires me in confusion, both about the meaning of what has been said between us, and whether understanding is something human beings absolutely cannot do without.
That expression, passed away. Such a strange way to say dead. Passed away to where? I always think. Wherever it is, most of my mother’s brain has already gone on ahead.
THE ONLY PART OF MY MOTHER’S BRAIN that hasn’t totally gone on ahead is the part that makes music. Singing is the only thing that connects her still to the vast and quaggy mudpuddle of human emotional experience, and the thread is as thin as a silkworm’s unwound cocoon. Sometimes when she sings, I can see her struggle perplexedly with feeling, as if there is something suddenly present that is both hauntingly familiar and unaccountably strange. When I’m feeling brave I watch her face, and I can see a momentary depth appear in her eyes, as if she can sense fullness or loss or hope, and understand what these emotions are—though not, I think, how they are intimately related to her own life.
Feeling arrives for her in the midst of a song, drawn up and out by the way notes lie next to each other, the rhythm of their expression, the melody line. It has no context other than itself. Mournful songs make her feel sorrow, but she cannot connect the sorrow to the sloping kitchen, the Welfare worker, or her lost sons. Happy songs do not make her think of fantasy journeys to Twinsburg, her far away sister Clara, or that dusty lucky penny on the shelf. Fierce and defiant songs do not make her think of how she paid the rent to our landlord with her body, month after month, the only way she could see to keep a roof over all of our heads.
Some people would say that emotion resides in the heart, not the brain, and harbours there like a ship at anchor until called out to sea by either storm or uncanny calm. Perhaps that is why my mother can still sing, why she can still feel. In her twenty years of being institutionalized, she has never had so much as a heart murmur.
When I am brave, I look in her face when she sings; but then I always turn away, with feelings of my own.
I THINK ABOUT MYSELF AS A CHILD before I was sent to St. Mary’s, stiff-legged, wedged into shadowlands. The hallway seems long, longer than I know it really is, and the bare bulb in the kitchen is like a halo around my mother’s head and shoulders, its harsh glare diffused by the distance and the darkness clinging to the corners of the room. The acoustics in that decaying house are inexplicably excellent, her voice perfectly clear and sweet, and the rest of the world enrobed in a silence so profound that I can hear her measured breathing and even the ends of each breath, when a note hangs in the air, al fine, before the next one sounds. How many times did I wake to her melodies, and creep out of bed to listen
? It could be a hundred times, or a thousand. It could be every night of my childhood, for what I cannot remember are any nights except a small handful where there was anything else except being woken in the dark hours by my mother’s singing to herself—or to ghosts perhaps, but never to me.
I think of those nights; I examine them closely; I pick at them like I picked at my scabs as a boy behind the elderberry bush, lifting the edges of memory to see if I can make my blood flow, red and bright and clearly visible. I think of the things I can recall: my mother singing, the elderberry bush, Mrs. Bern’s secret cookies, my mother’s striped dress, the bully who used to chase me home from school—whose name I only sometimes remember. Flickers of memory that, gathered all together like grains of sand in a glass, might fill a week or two of consciousness. Where is the rest of my boyhood? Where are all the other things my mother said to me: the scolding for “borrowing” her lucky penny (I did do that, I confess); the admonitions to finish my soup, the grease cooling around the edges of the bowl while I tapped a rhythm on the metal edge of the table with my spoon. Where are those moments—aren’t they inevitable?—when she would have been too tired, or too lonely, to censor her pent up feelings in front of her youngest child. When she might have said how much she missed Clara, who’d gone by ship to Australia, or how hard she found it not to get to Twinsburg with her boys, or how she hoped I wouldn’t think badly of her when I was grown, because she’d only done what she could do.
I sometimes have a feeling that all the memories I long for are in my head, trapped somehow in the topography of the pinkish-grey folds of my brain, sulcus and gyrus, my head a different kind of renovated house, the detritus swept into the cracks and covered up by more recent events. I poke and prod carefully, in selective corners, looking for any sign of her I may have lost: small stories about her childhood, an abbreviated explanation for her incomparable voice and her seemingly endless repertoire, an inconsequential, fragmentary mention of her hopes and dreams—all spoken in my hearing during some vulnerable moment that I have merely misplaced. If I look hard enough, think hard enough, surely I will unlock an entire catalogue of long-forgotten snippets, indexed by month and year, retrieving them as easy as pushing the brass pin down with my thumb and sliding open the drawer, laying them out on the table, rearranging them into categories, and adding them all up. Taking some little thing she might have said in an offhand way while wiping the cracked countertops with a rag made of small boys’ underwear handed down four times, adding it to something she said on the third day she lay in bed with the flu, no food in her for seventy-two hours, and adding that pair to what she said half under her breath, with terrible foreboding, as the police came to the door for the first time.