The Madrigal

by Dian Day

  Our classmates had run off into late afternoon freedom and left us with fading echoes. I don’t think it occurred to either of us to mind; we wanted to sing more than anything, and we each had our own way of silently passing the inevitable waiting time in between practise pieces. While the choirmaster, hunched over the lectern, arranged and re-arranged the score to suit our voices, Alex closed his eyes and slept, or half-slept, his breath deep and easy as if the practice room was the only place at school he could truly relax.

  I listened contentedly in those moments the way a wild animal might listen for the wind in the grass or the rain on the leaves, silently singing along with the natural musicality of our habitat: Alex’s even breathing beside me; the choirmaster’s breath, the quick inhalation of a great idea and the long exhalation of disappointment; the electric clock on the wall over his head, its ticking as loud as a metronome; the reluctant creaking of the radiators; the branches of the naked trees against the long windows, like sentinels in the gathering dusk.

  When I look back from this distance it feels quite companionable. The other boys may have been set free to join the ball hockey tournaments at the end of their streets, or to play with their new Nintendo sets, or even to practice scales on their families’ pianos. I felt freer than that, cooped up in that classroom.

  When we were finally asked to sing, we sang like the sun coming out from behind a turbulent cloud, the bruised sky gathering light until its white strength hurt the eyes. When the choirmaster was particularly happy with us, he squinted and clicked his baton blindly against some nearby surface: the desk, the music stand, the hard palm of his own hand.

  Afterwards, Alex and I left the school together. As it turned out, we often took the same subway train, made the same station change—though he stayed on much longer than I did—so it was natural that we stayed together, waited by each other’s lockers, came out of the school doors and turned right together, walked past the cathedral together. Natural that we crossed the street together, and that I waited—more or less—while he kneeled and prayed in front of the Statue of the Virgin, his cap in his hands, his coat on the ground under the knees of his trousers, the holes in the heels of his socks almost always visible above his regulation black shoes.

  The first time I was with him when he stopped to pray, it was November of my first year. A few leaves had outstayed their welcome and fell from the trees like tiny missile shells, curled and dry and brown. The evening wind was full of the sound of their skittering.

  “Which way do you go?” Alex asked me. He held the door with his hip and tried to catch an oak leaf that had hit him lightly on the side of his head.

  “Subway,” I said, and pointed north. “Dundas.”

  “Walk to Queen with me instead,” he suggested. “I have money for pizza. I found five dollars this morning in the church yard! We can take the streetcar home instead.”

  I shrugged, and we turned south. He ran up the bank onto the retaining wall and walked along the edge, putting one foot carelessly in front of the other, without particularly looking. When he got to the end he jumped down, throwing his backpack into the air at the top, and catching it neatly seconds after his feet hit the pavement.

  We had come to the cathedral. He pushed his bag into my chest and turned to the stone Mary. She was slightly larger than life, her height augmented by a pedestal, her head tilted to one side, her hand reaching out towards us. Alex stood on his toes and put his hand up, but there was still an arm’s length between them. All the same, I felt like I was witness to a secret handshake.

  And then he unzipped his fall jacket, twisted himself out of it, and laid it at her feet. He knelt down on this makeshift pillow and bowed his head. I looked quickly around to see if any of the other boys were still around, lurking in the shadows out of range of the street lights, but I could see no one, just buildings and trees and tumbling leaves.

  I turned back and watched him. I knew he was praying. I didn’t understand yet about Mary, or confession, or sin; I hadn’t been Catholic long enough. I just waited. I don’t know why I did, that first time. Maybe it was because I was holding his school bag, and I didn’t think I could just put it down beside him and walk away. Maybe I was thinking about the pizza, my stomach as hollow as the city air. I wasn’t impatient, only a little worried about being seen. I moved along the road a ways, walking slowly, putting some distance between me and him. After a few minutes I heard running behind me and I turned to see him digging his arm back into his coat sleeve and reaching out for his bag.

  “Thanks,” he said. “It’s fucking cold out, isn’t it?”

  I didn’t answer. We reached Queen Street in silence, turned, and after another block he handed over his bag again and turned into a pizza shop.

  “Wait a sec,” he said. Through the glass of the dirty windows I could see him point energetically into the display case and then fish around in his pockets for his money. He came out with two fat slices of pizza, each with its own triangle of cardboard for a plate.

  I burnt my tongue, I was so eager. We stood on the street corner and ate in great adolescent boy bites, strangers moving around us unheeded, the flow of commuters trying to get home after work. With our appetites temporarily sated, we wiped our hands on the legs of our school trousers.

  It was when we started walking again that I asked him. “What were you praying about, anyway?” It was a question born of both innocence and curiosity. My own prayer had so recently been answered: We were in Toronto, and we were singing. What more there could be to wish for, I could not imagine.

  He didn’t answer, but ran a little way in front of me, turned suddenly and threw his backpack into the air in my direction. It slid through my outstretched arms as if it were a basketball being dunked through a hoop.

  WE WERE KEPT LATE TOGETHER OFTEN after that, perhaps once a week. It may even have been the same day each week—every Tuesday perhaps—but I don’t remember that now. Week by week we sang together in the practice room after the others had been dismissed, while outside the days shortened, brittle leaves flew off the trees, and dirty snow gathered at the edges of the streets.

  Outside, fall ran into winter; inside, our voices grew like curling weeds at the height of summer. When we pushed through the double doors at the end of practice, the frosty air rushed eagerly into our lungs, and Alex always pulled his scarf up around his mouth, as if to protect his voice. He wasn’t one of those boys who suffered the cold for the sake of looking tough.

  “You taking the streetcar or the subway?” he would ask me.

  I would shrug. It didn’t matter to me at all.

  ST. MARY’S IS ON A STREET almost hidden from noise, an arterial backwater, a miracle of calm. Only occasional sirens punctuate this oasis, and they reach through distantly and waveringly, as if made of the same fabric as a Saharan mirage. But step to the end of the block, and the rush and whirl and roar of Toronto breathes like something too-loudly alive, rasping and coughing in the smoggy air. Cars and trucks, buses and streetcars, bicycles and jaywalkers are drawn in and pumped out of Toronto’s heart by veins and arteries whose rhythm is circumscribed by the working day and the theatre-going or drug-dealing night.

  We walked out into the street, crossing in front of a lane of stopped cars, and boarded the 501. Alex had his bag in his hand, and stepped lightly through the congestion at the front of the vehicle, seeking more open space. We always went to the very back of the car, finding seats side-by-side or opposite each other, singing a duet or a duel accordingly. If a duet, our voices tangled and swirled around the streetcar in unison, filling that small space with perfectly synchronized sound and vibration. If a duel, we sang in rounds, watching each other carefully to anticipate the frothy notes, delighting in the harmony created by an echo of the melody line. In the beginning, our feet didn’t even touch the floor, but swung back and forth like lazy metronomes with pointed toes.

  My life flow
s on in endless song

  Above earth’s lamentation

  I hear the sweet, tho’ far-off hymn

  That hails a new creation.

  After a few bars, old men turned on their hearing aids, college students removed their Walkman earphones, babies stopped crying, and their mothers turned to us in hope and gratitude.

  Thro’ all the tumult and the strife

  I hear the music ringing

  It finds an echo in my soul

  How can I keep from singing?

  Alex had an intuitive sense of the speed of the traffic, the timing of the streetlights, the number of people waiting to board or disembark at each stop. Sometimes he adjusted the tempo of a tune as he went, but more often he discarded the note from one song and picked up a note from another, seamlessly, as if he were an old woman with her knitting—as if he’d been knitting for fifty years and could knit without thinking of speed or tension, as if he could change colours of yarn without looking, never dropping a stitch. And so he would turn from Robert Lowry in an instant, and join the last note to another, stitch to stitch, and my voice would follow with a split-second of hesitation too small for untrained ears to hear.

  Fare thee well, for I must leave thee

  Do not let the parting grieve thee

  And remember that the best of friends must part, must part

  Adieu, adieu, kind friends adieu, adieu, adieu

  I can no longer stay with you, stay with you

  I’ll hang my harp on a weeping willow tree

  And may the world go well with thee.

  It seems strange now that we were so careless with our voices: careless of the other streetcar riders, careless of their haphazard applause. We sat in the back of the streetcar and sang, our school ties loosened, our blazers unbuttoned, and our coats laid across our knees in the rush hour warmth. We were simply singing; it was neither performance nor gift, and we spared no thought to how it was received. We wove our music into the clang and clang-clang of the muted bell, the whine of the engine accelerating, the clacket-clacket-clacket as we bumped through the tracks of other lines at intersections, the mechanical sighing of the brakes, every two blocks, all the way along Queen Street.

  FIRST THING THE NEXT MORNING I sprang for Call Display. I never answered the phone again without looking to see who was calling.

  The phone rang only sporadically, not any more or less than it usually did. But I was preoccupied with waiting for that phone to ring again. Every time it rang, I left off what I was doing—tuning the harp or making toast, it didn’t matter—and went to look at the display. There was some interrupted music that month, notes broken off mid-breath, a B-sharp hanging in the air, perdendosi, while I was already moving across the room to the phone. The notes broke and hovered briefly as they had done when, at age eleven, I had ducked into the alley near the Limelight, my cap full of coins, waiting for my brothers to pass me by. The phone would peal; something about the triple pas de deux ring of boots warned me that they were coming up the street. The caller ID would appear; I recognized their drunken shouts. One ring, two rings, three rings. As then, I peeked out from the safety of darkness to watch them move on.

  Increasingly, I began to sit or stand beside the phone while I sang or played, or to move it to a practice chair beside me as I moved acoustically around from harp to lute to piano, to the spot in the front north corner where my voice sounded best in the small rooms.

  Alex’s second call came on a night when Ed was there, his bottle of Red dancing on top of the upright. We were singing Gospel tunes and I stopped suddenly after “O brother, let’s go down, down in the river to pray—” and Ed played two bars into the gap between rings, and then he stopped too when he heard it sound again. He looked at me like I was nuts—the incident of Maya and the squirrel represented the first time we had ever allowed an interruption in all our years of playing music together. I think he was really afraid disruptions were going to become habitual.

  I leaned over to look at the phone while it rang for the third time, and he raised his eyebrows and titled his head at it, like he was saying, So pick it up already, you’ve gone this far! But I just stared at the phone and the name on the Call Display, A HUGHES, and Ed just stared at me, and it rang three more times before it stopped. I kept staring, but this time there was no message. I felt like all the blood had run out of me, and I looked down at my feet and thought I had better sit. I landed on the end of the piano bench beside Ed. I put my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands. There was no music left in that room at all.

  “You’re taking this brother thing far too seriously,” said Ed.

  There was a kind of dread that grew in me, a premonition that whatever significance that call had had, it was large, ungainly, and unwelcome. I was afraid, I suppose. I could imagine no occurrence that would inspire those calls, except more catastrophe.

  “THAT WAS LUCKY,” SAID ALEX. He’d been watching me the whole time. He’d seen me close my eyes and pray and kick, and had watched the soccer ball land in front of Kevin, who’d called for it to come to him.

  “You’re not kidding,” I said. I rolled my eyes at him. “I never kicked a ball straight in my life.”

  “Me neither,” he said; he shrugged, as if it wasn’t important. “They might leave you alone now.”

  “Will they?”

  “Yeah, well,” he said. “They might.” He looked impassively across the courtyard. Kevin had kicked the ball through makeshift goalposts and there was a wave of distant cheering. Alex looked down at my foot. “Made of gold, that foot,” he said, “making a kick like that.” He stuck his own leg out in front of him and pretended to kick the air.

  “Mine’s made of shit,” he said, and we both laughed out loud.

  THERE IS AN ARCHANGEL in the Limestone City Youth Choir by the name of Blake, though he looks like he should be named Gabriel or Raphael, or Michael at the very least. Fine features, cherub’s curly hair, translucent skin like the veneer on a Renaissance painting. So he looks a lot like an angel, but mostly he looks almost exactly like Alex. Blake reminds me so much of Alex that it is sometimes hard to remember to call him Blake. He sometimes even tosses his hair, lusingando, just as Alex did on my first day at St. Mary’s.

  Unlike mine, Blake’s musical talent was fostered almost as soon as he could talk. His family had the resources to make music something he could take for granted right from the beginning. His infantile banging on kitchenware was rewarded with preschool music lessons. His mother and father pick him up after rehearsal, and you could tell, somehow, that the whole family was cultured.

  I’m so conscious of Blake’s perfect voice that sometimes it’s a strain to hear the other voices singing with him. I catch myself exerting all my energy not to pay attention to him, not to think about how much he looks like Alex. I work hard to have him be just like the others, just one great voice in a choir of great voices, just one more seraphic face that has no reference point with my past. He has no idea how I struggle, having him in the choir. He seems not to notice that I stutter a little when I speak to him, guiding his perfect voice gently even further upwards. He simply comes to choir and sings because he loves singing. That’s the thing about that small handful of choristers with souls—they never hold it against those who haven’t got a clue how to act in the presence of the divine.

  But a strange thing happens when I listen to Blake sing. I want everyone to hear him, the whole world. He opens his mouth and such sweet, evanescent sounds come out that it creates a pain in my chest, a trapped bubble of piercing emotion. Trapped, so I can hardly breathe.

  ALEX HAD OVERHEARD ME talking to Kevin. We were outside the cathedral, and Alex was leaning up against the statue of Mary, affectionately, as if he were a faithful dog waiting for an afternoon walk. The clouds swept across our patch of sky and tossed wind chaff in our flushed faces. A pigeon swirled in the air above our heads a
nd landed ungracefully at our feet, cooing for crumbs.

  “The Eucharist tastes like God,” Alex said.

  “Well,” I persisted, “what does God taste like?”

  He moved his mouth slowly as if he were chewing and tilted his head, as if to better remember, and he looked up at Mary, haloed by sky.

  “Stone,” he said. “Wind.” He looked along the street to where we could see Annie’s car rounding the corner. He hesitated. “Love,” he said finally.

  The station wagon pulled up to the curb, and I pulled open the passenger door and climbed in, leaving him with his stone Mistress, waiting for his ride. Both of us, despite our faith in the divine, shared a longing for something merely human, something we had so rarely experienced.

  TO BEGIN WITH, I KNEW LITTLE about Alex’s home life. I don’t think he was secretive; I just didn’t ask. Initially he was brought to concerts and funerals by a dishevelled couple who were preoccupied with leaving quickly, a couple I assumed were his parents, until the following semester, when he was brought by a tall man with a two-day beard who straightened his tie and brushed the shoulders of his blazer and admonished him to tuck in his shirt. After that year, he came on his own, and if there was ever anyone in the audience who’d come specifically to hear him, he never mentioned them, or appeared to look for their faces before the house lights went down. There were rumours about a group home, but in my first years at St. Mary’s I had no idea what that meant, and assumed he lived among some extended family consisting of many generations of Hughes’ under the same roof. Frankly, I had enough trouble explaining my own living situation to wonder too much about anybody else’s.

  I did manage to notice that while I was always hungry after school, Alex ate as if he were starving. It was as if, once released from singing, and having fulfilled his self-imposed obligation to pray to Mary for forgiveness, he finally realized a bodily hunger that had been secondary for much of the day. It was as if he ate music for breakfast and lunch, and only realized at suppertime that that wasn’t quite enough.