The Madrigal

by Dian Day

  THERE IS SOME MUSIC THAT MAKES PEOPLE want to dance, the beat irresistible, the pulse infectious—the whole tune a thumping package of energy creation, like nuclear fission among the heavy elements. Other music uplifts and inspires; we hear a series of notes, and somehow we can imagine nothing less than universal tolerance, celebrated diversity, world peace. A few bars and the very fallible and much maligned human spirit is good enough, at last, and forgiveness is granted even to our worst enemies. Other music makes us so grateful that we are here, alive, and have music, that we can find ourselves laughing out loud with the joy of it.

  And there is some music—and it has existed in every era and is found in every style and genre—whose sole purpose seems to be to facilitate the expression of sorrow, where that sorrow has been caged somewhere inside us, a wild animal we are afraid to release, for fear it turns and devours us entirely.

  There was an animal like that caught inside Ed.

  When we were in the shop together, I sang to him. I began with every piercing song from my mother’s repertoire, and initially he would just listen without comment. The only way I knew he was listening at all was that when I stopped, he would invariably ask for another. After a while, he would ask for a specific song by name, and as more time passed, his requests were pulled from an ever narrower selection, a shorter short list. The first weeks I sang him dozens of different songs, and then a week came when he wanted only four or five, and the next week he wanted only one. I didn’t argue. He was like a child wanting the same bedtime story over and over, even though every picture and every word had been memorized long ago.

  The water is wide, I cannot get o’er

  Neither have I wings to fly

  It seems both ironic and obvious that the song that comforted Ed in his shop also comforted my mother in her kitchen.

  “Aren’t there more verses?” Ed always said, when I stopped. I dredged up a few more, half remembered. There are enough verses to suit both shops and kitchens, childless men and mothers.

  Martinmas wind, when wilt thou blow,

  And shake the green leaves off the tree?

  O gentle Death, when wilt thou come?

  For of my life I am weary.

  The tune has been sung, with minor variations, and the words, with major variations, for over four hundred years. It can be traced back even farther, in fragments of melody and phrase, to other, much older songs. It comes to us from the depths of time.

  “Sing it again,” Ed demands.

  SLOWLY, I BEGAN TO UNDERSTAND that loss can make us cranky with what we have that remains. We look around, and everything is meaningless. Why did you take this and not that? we yell to the heavens. Other things I could have spared! I do not need the extra bedroom, or the V8 engine! Leave me my eyesight, my sturdy legs, my lifetime of memory, my sense of hopeful possibility! We examine everything as if there is a contest underway. As if we can make a trade, as if it were not too late to compile a long list of all that we could do without. As if the weight of them could be traded against something merely held for ransom. Things we were once attached to, all the threads that weave us into neighbourhoods and businesses and countries, become clearly expendable. The morning paper with everyone else’s bad news. The public bus service with the express stop at the end of our street. Sidewalks and breakwaters. Pianos and banjos and clarinets. The Whole Note in its entirety becomes redundant. Music. Choirs and angels and churches and synagogues. God. We would trade it all away, we realize. We just want back what we have lost.

  ON THE NIGHT OF MY FINAL Christmas concert at St. Mary’s, Annie pinned the sprig of holly onto my jacket, holding the two pins in her teeth as she gripped my lapel with both hands, and pulled it away from my chest with such force that I lost my balance for a minute. She had been fierce with me all that afternoon and evening, saying no more than necessary; when she did, she was curt and talked at me from a distance.

  She pushed the pins in deftly, one at a time, around the holly stem; the light of her eyes was shuttered, and she would not look at me. She moved through the world as if her spirit had been transported elsewhere—to hell perhaps—while her body remained in that house in the Beaches and did everything that was required of it, but bitterly. At the time I thought it was a little like voodoo; years later, once I’d watched Ed realize that he was suddenly, unaccountably, inexplicably, old, I realized at last that it was their family way of expressing unspeakable grief.

  THERE ARE PEOPLE IN THE WORLD who are working on theories about which most of us know nothing, and understand even less. These days, the evolving concepts of science are as obscure to most of us as is the language of the Wessex Gospels. We go about our daily lives without any real sense that for hundreds of years, chemists, mathematicians, physicists, and astronomers have been determinedly trying to find God, and that many of them feel they are very, very close.

  It is in the intersection between quantum mechanics and general relativity where most contemporary scientists believe this deity, the theory of everything, may be found. There need be no exclusion of one for the other, except with the literalists. It is only necessary to break everything God touched down into a quantum particle, and to stretch time, and to call his first work a singularity.

  At the quantum level, it seems it is possible for two things to behave as if they are related to each other, even though there is no communication between them, and no other discernable explanation for their connection. It is as if I go through my life singing or not singing, randomly and unpredictably. But as soon as I sing, Filander is found to be singing, and as soon as I stop, Filander is also silent.

  This would be equally and instantaneously true whether we were in the same room, or whether one of us was singing, or not singing, on the moon.

  Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance” and refused to believe it. I call it obvious.

  CHRISTMAS DAY. WHEN YOU’RE ALONE, it’s hard not to be self-conscious about it. As soon as I woke up in the morning I had a sense of all the Christmas trees, real and fake, all the presents, all the expectation in countless houses and apartments, cottages and trailers, residences and shelters across the continent. The weight of it all kept me in bed for a good while past my usual rising hour. It didn’t matter; there wasn’t any rush.

  Despite everyone’s conviction that the day’s weather should admit only languid, large-flaked snow, or at second best that crisp and brilliant azure sky dotted with cumulus clouds—the kind of sky that seems at any minute inclined to crack open and reveal Saint Michael and all the angels in their heavenly glory—my experience is that the weather is usually perfectly ordinary, running to grey rain or blinding blizzard as often as any other winter day, and that the streets and sidewalks invariably remain bordered by frozen grime.

  This Christmas was no exception. I looked out the bathroom window onto a dull sky hovering unapologetically over my yard and my back neighbour’s frosted roof. In thousands of houses across the city, people were going downstairs to open presents. I went downstairs and opened the fridge.

  I didn’t have anywhere to go until eleven-thirty, so after I poached my egg and ate standing at the counter, I went and sat on the piano bench in the front room, facing out, and polished a small patch of the hardwood floor with my sock feet. I did that for a while, looking around the room at the silent instruments, the lute in its stand, the Japanese flute, the harp I’d traded my car for. I didn’t miss it, the car. An empty driveway made me feel less like I had to have somewhere to go.

  I thought I might listen to some music while I got ready, so I got up and rifled haphazardly through the CD shelves, looking for I don’t know what, but something different, something I hadn’t heard in a while. My fingers ticked through the plastic cases, shelf by shelf, but nothing seemed to suit. I got to the bottom shelf, and was about to give up and go get dressed, when I found the four recordings I had from St. Mary’s, one for each year
I was there. I shuffled through them and picked out the last one, turned it over slowly, and looked at the picture of myself and Alex on the back: St. Mary’s singing twins. My dark head and his blond one. Our shoulders touched, but there seemed to be a singular distance between us that the camera could not efface.

  I opened the case, and a tightly folded paper sprang out, as if it had been trapped there for years, aching for freedom. It was a thin concert program: a single page folded over. When I opened it, a strip of paper floated out from among the folds and landed printed side up, beside my knee. Please note that for tonight’s performance, the “Silent Night” duet will be sung as a solo by Frederick Madrigal.

  My hand was trembling a little, but I managed to get the disc out of the case and put it into the player. I checked the playlist and skipped to the last track, pushed “play,” and held my breath.

  In the bleak midwinter frosty wind made moan

  Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone

  People think that Christmas is a difficult time to be alone because of the absence of family, loved ones, company of any kind. I am not sure that that is exactly right. There are some days of the year that have threads running through them, threads that stitch a particular day with all the other such occasions we have known. Christmas is a day like that, swollen with what has been, vivid in memory, indelible like the pen marks on the door frame that show how much we’ve grown. What makes Christmas hard is the recognition of how much, year to year, things can change.

  Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow

  In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

  I remember being in the recording studio with Alex, before we had any idea how much things would change. Our adolescent voices held the final note and then died away, and the final notes of the piano died away, and the CD player clicked over to the next spot in the roundabout, but it was empty. I turned the machine off.

  After a while, I got up to find a suitable shirt to wear to the nursing home luncheon, and got out the ironing board, and wrapped my mother’s present—a soft toy cat, black with a pink nose—and signed the card I would bring to Ed and Sylvia’s for supper, along with a bottle of fancy Italian soda that almost looked like wine.

  The boy who’d sung that carol—in those days always his favourite carol—followed me out into the still-grey streets, but I didn’t recognize him. We walked along together to the nursing home, my breath white in the dull air, but we didn’t look at each other or speak to each other. Not even once. Not even on Christmas Day.

  ANNIE HAD LEFT THE ENVELOPE PROPPED UP in front of the cookie jar on the kitchen counter, wedged in place by the silver-topped crystal salt shaker. I picked it up, felt its heft—three or four folded pages, not just one—and noted the return address: The Juilliard School, New York. My hand shook a little, and I was over-conscious of Alex standing in the doorway watching me. I knew what that letter meant: one more step towards my goal. I imagined myself ripping it open with him looking over my shoulder; then I imagined myself placing the envelope back on the counter, face-down and unopened, nonchalantly collecting a handful of peanut butter cookies and going through to the music room to eat them sitting backwards on the piano bench, the way we always did. Both courses of action seemed impossible.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I already got mine.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. It came yesterday.”

  “Fat or thin?” I asked him, just to make sure.

  “Fat,” he confirmed. I knew he couldn’t tell from across the room, but he didn’t seem to have any doubt about the thickness of my envelope.

  So I opened it, even though I knew what it said. I took a paring knife from the drawer and slit the flap neatly, removed the folded sheets reverently. Even though I already knew—had known in fact since I first learned what Juilliard meant to boys like me—I wanted to see it, wanted to hold it in my hands and see the words singing on the page, words written to me, Frederick Madrigal:

  Bachelor of Music Live Audition Repertoire

  Faculty may ask applicants to sing several scales to check vocal range.

  All compositions must be performed from memory, and should include the following:

  I. An Italian art song or aria from the 18th century or before.

  II. An art song in English (not a translation).

  III. A third selection in any language.

  When I’d read all three and a half pages, I took the lid off the cookie jar and offered some to Alex.

  “Why didn’t you tell me yesterday?” I asked him.

  “I was waiting till you got yours,” he said. We made our way to the piano, dribbling crumbs. I swept them under the sofa with my sock feet. I was still holding my audition letter in my left hand. The auditions weren’t until March of our senior year, and auditions did not guarantee acceptance. But I knew that neither of us was the least bit worried.

  “D’you know what you’re going to sing?” I asked him.

  “Not yet,” he shrugged, nonchalantly. We wiped our hands on our school pants, swivelled on the bench, and began to play Mendelssohn’s “Allegro Brillante,” our four hands on Annie’s perfectly-tuned grand piano.

  ERIC WAS SITTING ON HIS KNAPSACK on top of the stone retaining wall across from the senior boys’ entrance. We’d come out together at the end of the day. It was a habit of his to sit on his text books and sheet music; I always kept my own bag slung across my shoulder, one hand on the strap, like a soldier carrying a kit bag in which he has stored everything necessary for life.

  “You get your letter?” he asked me.

  “Yeah,” I said. He looked at me and nodded, and one side of his mouth went up, to show he knew it. “Did you?”

  “Oh, well … nah,” he said, as if he’d been going to pretend he didn’t care, but changed his mind.

  “Bad luck,” I told him.

  “Nah,” he was resigned. “I’m just not good enough.” And he was right, so I made sure that the line of my mouth stayed firm and straight, so he wouldn’t know I knew it. But still I marvelled at his passive acceptance of a life without music, something that, in that moment, I myself was still utterly unable to imagine.

  “Anyway,” he continued, as if to reassure himself, “my father wants me to be a lawyer.” I didn’t know what to say.

  “Bad luck,” I repeated. He shrugged and steadied his expression so I couldn’t read it. We all knew how to do that so masterfully. We all knew, too, that it meant something underneath the surface was being smoothed over, covered up, buried. There was a small tremor in his hand, and he rubbed his face to hide it. I could tell he was desperate for a cigarette but didn’t dare risk it.

  On cue, the Cutlass Supreme turned the near corner and pulled up in front of the school. Eric got up quickly and shouldered his knapsack, but his father didn’t see him immediately, and honked. At the sound of the horn, Eric tucked his chin into his parka, as if to hide his face.

  He didn’t look back at me, just climbed into the passenger seat and closed the door carefully. Nobody offered me a lift. Like a soldier, I tramped down the white road. I didn’t need a ride in an icy car.

  I DIDN’T WRITE TO MY MOTHER to tell her the news. In keeping with the best child-rearing practice, Annie allowed me increasing latitude to make my own choices, good or bad, and watched me suffer the consequences of bad ones without pity. By the time I was in my senior year, she generally left me alone to write to my mother or not, and, in general, I did write several times each semester, though my letters held no warmth and little substance.

  Despite this, after I got my letter from Juilliard, Annie did ask me if I had written. I don’t remember now if I lied outright or was merely evasive. It wasn’t that I didn’t want my mother to know. But I didn’t want to crack open any door that might lead to the possibility of me going back for a visit before going to New York. Toronto, and Ann
ie’s, had come to feel like home. I had arrived there by extraordinary means, and I didn’t want to be reminded of what I had left behind.

  JANUARY CAME IN LIKE JANUARY DOES: dissonant, delusive, and cold. Despite the hype, there was no new beginning to things; there were just false starts, repetitions, and a few extra pounds from eating so much at other people’s houses.

  At first it seemed that everything was basically just going to go on the way it had been going. Any changes were like small bumps in the landscape, hardly even noticeable if you skirted carefully around them. I spent a lot of my free time at the shop with Ed, without any sense of where or how that would end. Day to day, there was no improvement in his outlook or in his ability to run the shop on his own; the fundamentals continued to elude him. He ordered too many harmonicas and misplaced the receipt—along with about fifty others. He blocked the route to the bathroom with precariously-piled instrument boxes. He plugged in the kettle but never made tea. Even when people asked for help, he seemed unable to sell the smallest piece of musical merchandise to the most credit-card-happy customer.

  On days when I sent him home early, assuring him a dozen times that I would stay and lock up, Sylvia and I had clandestine telephone conversations about what to do about Ed.

  “Okay, he’s on his way home,” I’d call and tell her. Partly I didn’t trust him to get all the way there without an accident. He refused to let me drive him home, and wouldn’t hear of Sylvia dropping him off in the mornings. I wanted her to be looking out for him, so we wouldn’t lose time if he didn’t appear on schedule.

  One day early on there’d been a two hour-fifty-five minute gap between his leaving the shop and arriving home—a driving distance of about seven minutes—and Sylvia had alerted the police after only half an hour. The cops had suggested waiting a little longer, but Sylvia had gone out driving through the neighbourhood, in ever-increasing concentric rectangles around their house, peering through the windshield and cursing the defroster. She’d found his car outside the bowling lanes, and went in to find him sitting at the lunch counter in bowling shoes, drinking a root beer float.