The Madrigal

by Dian Day

  “You were such a little egg-head,” Alistair said to me. “Wasn’t he a little shit?” he asked the room.

  “He was always so fucking serious,” said Samuel to Maya, as if letting her in on a bit of secret gossip.

  “Remember that time we brought him a watermelon for his birthday, and told him it was a dinosaur egg?” said Nathaniel. “He fucking believed us! He took it to bed with him for a week, remember?” They all laughed.

  “When we finally cut it open he thought it was full of dinosaur blood and he wouldn’t eat it!” said Nicholas.

  “Oh yeah, what about when he stuck his arm in the wringer washer?” said Abraham. “We told him it would get flattened and just pop right back, like Bugs Bunny! There we all are with our sleeves rolled up, like we were waiting to take our turns, and the idiot sticks his arm right in!”

  “Or the time he decided he was going to sing everything, instead of talking. God, that went on for ever! Like we’d go to the table for supper and he’d sing “Please be seated” like we were at some fucking opera!”

  They all laughed some more. I didn’t remember any of it. Like my mother, I didn’t remember a thing.

  “You never stopped singing,” said Samuel. “Waving your hands around. It was like The Sound of Music all the time, except nowhere near so upbeat. No, no, it was more like a cross between a musical and a morgue!”

  “Damned good voice, though,” said Salvador, and the shock of his pronouncement was like an explosion inside my head—and that seemed to be, at last, the final word on the subject of my boyhood.

  After that, Nicholas went out to his car and brought in a case of Australian wine, and Maya went next door to get some of her basement grow-op harvest, and someone decided he was starving and picked up the phone to order pizza, and someone else decided he was starving and got up to order Chinese, and the doorbell rang more times than twice, and mountains of food in cardboard boxes and paper bags appeared in installments, and Samuel went outside to his car and brought in a birthday cake with white icing and blue letters that read “Happy Birthday Frederick.” All these things have run together in my mind, but I know that there was a considerable time lapse between them, and that, when the cake appeared, I had already been breathing second-hand cannabis indica smoke for some time, the room hazy with it, the instruments stoned and silent, having clearly decided they wouldn’t get a word in edgewise.

  I don’t remember anything much after the cake, because once I saw it, it seems I fainted dead away.

  Luckily, my uninvited company merely thought I had had too much to drink, and my six brothers, like careless pallbearers, dragged me sympathetically up the stairs to bed.

  “SO YOU THINK YOU MIGHT BE ADOPTED?” asked Maya, during our Monday morning exodus in uniform. “You’re so different from your brothers.”

  “I wish,” I said, before I could stop myself.

  GOING BACK TO WORK AFTER my brothers’ visit was a relief. Delivering the mail is simple and straightforward. I just walk through my route putting goodwill into people’s doorways. Other than the ad mail—which on good days I can argue is at least not harmful—and all the bills, and the occasional notice from a collection agency, most of what I deliver is friendship, connection, and love. It might be a stretch to put the bulk of my job aside to consider the few postcards, greeting cards, and handwritten letters that get sent these days as the true meaning of my weekday mornings, but I suppose everyone justifies their work somehow, even stock traders, helium balloon sellers, and soldiers.

  But pretty much all the hate is now sent by email, text message, and twitter. “Dear John” letters are dispatched with a click. Bullies hound their victims online. Terrorists use the internet to plot destruction. I find it comforting that most of what I push into mail slots won’t cause that kind of suffering.

  ONCE IN A WHILE, NOT VERY OFTEN, Eric’s father picked him up in his Cutlass Supreme. It was more like a boat than a car, and had a T-top that added to the nautical effect. Very rarely, if I happened to be on the school steps when the car pulled up, he offered me a ride. His father drove with the panels off in almost all weather except outright precipitation, so most days it was a cold ride and I sat in the back seat with my hands between my knees. There was never any conversation in the car that included me, and if Eric and his father ever spoke to each other I couldn’t hear what was said over the blistering noise of downtown Toronto streets. Not one to go out of his way for any child, including his own, Eric’s father drove me to their house in the Beaches, and I walked home to Annie’s from there.

  What this meant was that, a handful of times a year, I ended up standing, chilled to the bone, outside the automatic garage door attached to Eric’s house. He never invited me in; I got the impression that he wasn’t allowed to. But he was never quite ready to let me go, either.

  We stood in his driveway with our hands in our pockets. Eric would talk, and I would try to figure out what to contribute to make it look like I both cared about what he was saying and knew what he was talking about.

  “See the game last night?” he’d ask me.

  “Yeah,” I’d say. “Killer.”

  And then he’d mention a player by name, and their particular brilliant and astounding goal, or pass, or miss, and most of the time I wouldn’t know whether we were talking about football or basketball or hockey.

  “Wicked,” I’d say, in agreement, or, if his tone was one of disgust, “lame, yeah, really lame.”

  Sometimes he talked to me about movies he’d seen or his favourite TV show, which was Magnum, P.I.—a detective series I had never watched. Even then I didn’t like the idea of uncovering secrets.

  At some point the cold would become alarming, and I would stomp my senseless feet and try to tuck my elbows eve n tighter into my rib cage.

  “Better get going,” I’d say. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “No problem, man. I’ll walk with you.” And he would toss his bag underneath a juniper bush, and I would shoulder mine, and we’d set out to walk the eleven blocks between our houses.

  In the middle of Grade 10, Eric started smoking, and as soon as we’d rounded the first corner he’d look over his shoulder with a calculated bravado and light himself a Marlboro. He always used matches rather than a lighter, huddling next to a power pole or a parked car or a stone retaining wall to outwit the wind.

  One day there was a delay in this routine—he’d been talking about a girl named Emily whom he had met at his cousin’s party—and he stopped next to a mailbox and dug around in his pockets. “Va-va-voom, man!” he said, lit his cigarette and sucked at the smoke in relief. It would have been his first nicotine for the day.

  Instead of tossing the spent match onto someone’s lawn, as he usually did, he pulled opened the flap of the box and threw the still-burning match inside. “Fucking crazy!” he said, laughing. He looked up and down the street, across the intersection, and at the nearest houses. There was no one to be seen except for a distant middle-aged woman walking away from us with a poodle. He lit another match and threw it in after the first, and then another. His cigarette was stuck in the corner of his mouth, and waggled up and down when he laughed.

  “Got any paper?” he asked me.

  “Don’t do that!” I said, too loudly. I felt nothing except panic. But I surprised him, and he hesitated just a little, and the wind blew out the flame.

  “You wuss,” he said, but there was no malice in it. He put the matchbox back in his jacket pocket and, without any further reaction, resumed walking towards Annie’s and talking about Emily. “You should see her tits,” he told me.

  No detail of Emily’s body penetrated my confusion. I had surprised myself with my own power.

  SOMETIMES A PERFORMER OR CHOIR or band will come to sing for the residents on the locked floor of my mother’s nursing home. Once in a while, on a Sunday afternoon, I show up for my regular visit
and find the place in an astonishing state of preparation.

  The singers bring with them an apparent need to alleviate the suffering of others, and provide an hour or so of, at worst, a diversion from listlessness and confusion, and, at best, the musical stitching of a thin thread of memory onto the selvage edge of lost lives. Perhaps the time the residents spend listening will count, minute for minute, as a direct detour from Death, who waits at the hall door for all of them, uninvited.

  I visit with my mother in her room for a while first, as it takes the staff a symphonic amount of time to propel, tilt, cajole, and wheel everybody into the dining room. They make a party out of it; an admirable attitude, since doing anything at all out of the ordinary in that place is twenty times the work. The cook, inevitably in the middle of supper preparations, generously puts out lukewarm tea and coffee, and leftover muffins—which go down as quickly as they do when they are fresh, inefficiently chewed by loose dentures and swallowed haphazardly, or crumbled onto the parquet flooring and poked perplexedly by canes.

  The musical tastes of the demented elderly are in general fairly narrow: they want to hear the songs they sang as twenty-five-year-olds, songs from the pop charts and folk tunes from their summer kitchens or sing-alongs from around the campfire. The ones they love best have simple sentiments as well as melodies, and a lot of repetition. They want to recognize the tune, to remember the words. They want the tune and the words to bring back time—not youth, exactly, but the feelings of youth: the struggle and solidarity of the war; the innocence and pain as well as the lust of love; the joy of being alive and immortal. They want to know again what it feels like to see unlimited tomorrows stretched out into the distance like a long coastline that invites adventure, and fades gently into the mist. They want to turn away from the rocky promontory at the end of the road.

  They recline in the familiar, put their feet up on the notes, and hang their hearts on the lyrics.

  Goodnight Irene, Irene goodnight

  I am an expert of detection among the old. With some residents, the only way I can tell the songs they want to hear from the songs they don’t involves tiny and irregular movements of index fingers tapping on the arms of wheelchairs, or the slight lifting and lowering of tongues inside open mouths, or perhaps simply an excess of drool. If Franklin is present, there may be a frenetic keening, akin to a hound accompanying a piano, but he is the exception rather than the rule.

  From glen to glen, and down the mountain side

  My mother sings along. I always position her near the front of the room, where there is a small ramped platform permanently set up near the kitchen door, ever hopeful for any kind of free entertainment. She stands the whole time, so I have to watch her out of the corner of my eye, in case she begins to waver. She can last longer than you would think; the music opens her airways, fills her lungs, toughens her muscles, and strengthens her bones. I don’t know what she makes of these occasions, supposing she ever tries to make anything of anything. Her voice is clear and sweet and carries to all the corners of the room, and her memory is flawless for the words of any song anyone can think to begin.

  I spied a poor cowboy all wrapped in white linen

  In this, as in many things, my mother is different. Some of the others do join in, remembering the chorus near the end of the song, finally catching up and rasping out the last three or four words of each line. The staff often sing along too, as well as the occasional visiting family member holding the thin-skinned hands of loved ones, but their voices generally have a heartiness they do not feel.

  While they are singing, all the eyes in the room change. The demented eyes lose their vacancy or confusion, and a rare light shines bluely out of them; the undemented eyes fill with unbearable sorrow. I don’t know which is worse to see. It is always exhausting.

  If you want anymore, you can sing it yourself, Uh-huh, Uh-huh, Uh-huh.

  At the end, the residents don’t start to applaud until the staff do, standing in doorways and leaning against walls, cueing them. The bringing together of hands turns out to be just another social convention that drops away with lost synapses. They clap their palms together lightly, surprised to feel living warmth at the tips of their own fingers.

  “TWO PEAS IN A POT,” said my mother.

  “Is that right?” I said. Does she mean me and her? I wondered. Is she anticipating the dinner menu? Is she remembering all those twins?

  “He made me do it,” she said. Did she mean our old landlord?

  “Yes, I know that now,” I reassured her, just in case.

  “I did not want to wear the soap,” my mother said. “Old Maid, old Maid.”

  We were sitting in the dining room, waiting for the supper trays to make it to the tables. She had picked up the knife from her place setting—they were all purposefully blunt, those knives—and was turning it over and around in one hand, running her thumb intently up and down along the smooth handle, with her head turned determinedly away, as if she was playing a game of being blind, trying to figure out the mystery object that she held in her hands by feel alone.

  “What do you have in your hand?” I asked her.

  She didn’t look at me; she didn’t look at her hand. She didn’t stop rubbing the knife handle. She didn’t stop muttering. There was no sign at all that she had even heard me. I looked across at Jack, and he looked at his wife, Isobel, who was smiling warmly and vacantly around the room. Jack and I had shared a lot of looks across the table in the past month of Sundays, since Isobel had first arrived.

  “How are you today, Isobel?” I asked. Unlike calling my mother, using Isobel’s name would at least guarantee that she would look at me.

  “Do you know me?” she asked, surprised, the way she always does when first spoken to, as if she herself is always the stranger.

  “I do know you,” I said. “We’ve eaten supper together a few times, haven’t we? You and Jack and me and my mother.” I looked around the table as if helping her out, introducing her to all those people once again.

  “Oh,” she said, and visibly relaxed. “Well, yes, I am a good, I … I see the … yes, we are having … did you know that when … Jack is my … Oh, yes.”

  “Jack tells me you were dancing last night, Isobel. Did you enjoy the music?”

  “Oh yes,” she said, and for a split second I can be fooled into thinking she has understood the question and made the right answer. “They fly off … when I can … it all was so … so hard to say why it is so … do you see when I … always wanted to know … Jack did that.”

  Isobel’s brand of dementia has caused her to lose pretty much all the nouns out of her speech. Jack is the only noun she can still always hold on to. My mother, on the other hand, is full of nouns that no longer mean the thing intended.

  “Cut myself with the ring,” my mother said. “Cut it off rather than use it. He tied me to the bed. No, bad.”

  The kitchen staff were slowly making their way to our table, and trays were rattling all around us. Finally, plates were lowered in front of us, and Jack reached across to his wife’s meal and began to cut the pre-cut roasted chicken breast into even tinier pieces. He lifted his eyes to mine for an eighth-note.

  “We had forty good years together,” he said, and then turned his head away.

  “Light. Light. Leitmotif,” said my mother, and she dropped her empty teacup on the floor.

  THERE WERE THREE MESSAGES on my voicemail when I got home:

  Hi Frederick. This is Jiro. Can you come over sometime this week and help me get the seats out of the van? Any evening is good. Just let me know.

  Beep. Erase.

  Hi Frederick, Salvador here. Johanna and I were just talking about the music selection, and uh, well I guess we need to talk about that, huh? We’re kind of undecided between John David and Elton John. So, uh, maybe you could call me back. Or call and talk to Johanna. That’d be best. She’
s really the one who’s organizing this thing. Talk to you soon!

  Beep. Erase.

  Hello? Frederick? It’s Alex, Alex Hughes. I was hoping to talk to you about…. Look, I just want—shit, I’ll call back.

  Beep. My finger hovered for a few seconds over the delete button, but I didn’t push it. I pushed Replay instead, and listened to Alex’s message, over and over, maybe ten times. I sat on the bottom step with the machine balanced on my knees, and the rain from my boots all over the hardwood floor. His voice brought everything back. Talk about shadows.

  I MET ALEX HUGHES at my first St. Mary’s choir practice. I hadn’t particularly noticed him in any of my classes, but at choir he stood next to me, holding the right side of our shared choir book, and tossed his blond forelock out of his eyes with a flick of his head at the appearance of every rest and fermata. Each time he did this the page jumped slightly and I lost my place in the progression of notes for a split second. It didn’t really matter—we were singing a piece that I knew off by heart from St. George’s—but I remember feeling quite frightened on his behalf when the choirmaster rapped his baton on the edge of his music stand to interrupt our singing and told Alex he had until the next morning to get his hair cut.

  “You should know better by now,” he admonished, severely enough for the first day.

  I lowered my head in an effort to avoid notice, but Alex smirked into the corner of my eye and elbowed me mildly in the ribs as soon as the choirmaster’s back was turned.

  “Arse-pick,” hissed Alex. I bit my lip to keep from laughing.

  “FREDERICK AND ALEX,” SAID THE CHOIRMASTER, “you two stay back.”

  It was like a gun had sounded for the beginning of a race to the exit. All the other boys picked up their book bags and ran off through the hallways, throwing their blazers over their shoulders, eating the Crunchie bars and Granny Smith apples that their mothers had packed into their school bags. I listened as the echoes of the boys’ receding footsteps faded into the late afternoon. I turned my gaze to the windows and watched the trees tremble, watched as the line of cars at the entrance gradually dwindled, watched as the street lights came on by ones and twos along the street outside.