by Dian Day
“He never bowled in his life!” she told me after. “And root beer?” Apparently, Ed hadn’t had a single real beer in months.
“He can’t seem to enjoy anything,” Sylvia said. I knew she wasn’t enjoying much herself, between worrying about Ed and trying to keep him safe. After that, we both made him promise that he would always go right home, and, surprisingly, he did.
“He’s been drafting his will,” she said. “He’s suddenly obsessed with what to do with everything. The house. The shop. The canoe. Everything.”
“Oh,” I said. “Maybe that’s a good thing?” I was thinking about my mother. “Isn’t it a good thing to have a will?” I was leaning on the counter, and The Whole Note was empty, so I didn’t have to worry about keeping my voice down to protect Ed’s privacy.
“He’s obsessing about it,” she said. “I’m not sure it’s the best thing for him right now. He thinks he’s going to die any minute. He wouldn’t talk about it for years when I wanted him to, and now he won’t stop talking about it.”
“He hasn’t said anything to me about it,” I said.
“That’s because you’re in it.”
“In what?”
“In the will. He wants to leave you the shop. He thinks you’ll leave it open, run it yourself. He’s put a clause in there that it’s yours if you’ll run it, and if you don’t, the place will get sold and the money will get added to a music scholarship fund at the university. Oh Frederick, I’m only telling you this because I’ve been trying to talk him out of it. It just sounds like a make-work project for you; I know you don’t want to run the shop. You’d end up having to handle the sale of the building and all the inventory and everything.”
I looked around me at the racks of hanging guitars, the disordered recorders, the curling sheet music; a thin layer of dust lay over everything. Salt stains on the worn carpet. I breathed in that so-familiar musty, musical smell. I didn’t know what I would do without the place.
“No, I can’t really run the shop,” I agreed.
“It’s not making any money, you know. It’s costing us money to keep it open.”
“I know,” I said. My elbow was on the accounts ledger.
“But you can’t tell him that,” she said. “He won’t hear anything like that. He just refuses to believe the evidence.” Her voice was overtired, and I thought she might cry. But then I heard her sniff deeply, and I imagined her wiping a handkerchief across her watery eyes. “He’s here now, Frederick. He’s in the driveway. I have to go.”
“Okay,” I said, “talk to you tomorrow.”
That was how it went. Every day, seven minutes of conversation with grief, about grief. It was almost more than I could stand.
I’M A POSTIE; I DON’T MIND WEATHER. It’s one of the requirements of the job. Guys who hate it when it rains for three weeks in a row aren’t going to last. But, Jesus, it had been raining for three weeks in a row, a bitter cold rain that got under your skin and into your bones—and into your vocal chords. Voices were damp, and notes were flat; students and choristers were painful to listen to.
“Holy Raindrops, Batman! Could it get any wetter?” I handed Ed two pieces of mail across the counter. The ink was running on the envelopes. My poncho made rivers on the floor.
Ed took them distractedly. He was more interested in the Joe Louis he was trying to unwrap to eat with his tea. I took the packaged cake from him, ripped open the plastic, and handed it back soggy. Funny thing, the guy can still move those fingers like lightning over the ivories, but he has trouble unwrapping a fake chocolate cake.
“Dammit, these’re both for you,” he said with his mouth full.
“I know,” I said.
Ed grunted and tossed them under the counter. He has an old person’s fondness for letter mail.
When I got back just before three, I had to dig them out from under the Yellow Pages and the Fender guitar catalogue. I put them out on the counter and was ready to slit the tops with Ed’s plastic peanut butter knife, but Juanita came in early and got her umbrella stuck in the door so I had to go rescue her from being pierced by a spoke. After her lesson, I had to dig the letters out from under the Community Telephone Tree for Ticket Sales and the hand-written accounts book. I just can’t convince Ed to download accounting software; he has to do it by hand.
He was using the plastic knife, so I took a music stand clip off the display on the counter to open the envelopes. The first one was an overdue cheque from one of my students, but the second was a handwritten letter. I read it—it took all of three seconds—and then made some kind of involuntary noise, a quarter-note of surprise, and avoided looking over at Ed.
He came and stood over my shoulder, chewing his peanut butter toast. “Don’t mind me,” he said.
“Huh,” I said. I held it up so he could read it. To do anything else would have given him an even clearer signal that it was important.
Please, it said. Call me back.
There was a phone number, but no signature. It really didn’t need one. I could still recognize the handwriting. I put the letter down, and Ed looked directly at me with his forehead all tightened up. I could see that from the corner of my eye. I kept my focus on the page, because there wasn’t anywhere else that was safe to look.
Ed was still breathing peanut butter into the damp air.
“This a new kind of fan mail?” he speculated.
I grunted. I didn’t know what to say. I just felt sick. I had seen the spectre face-on and had recognized it as the Ghost of Christmas Past.
ALEX GOT HIS HAIRCUT AS DIRECTED by the choirmaster, and came to school the following day—my second day at St. Mary’s—with his severed blond forelock tied into a tuft at the end of a chopstick, like an oversized paintbrush. He held it between his fingers like a cigarette holder, inhaled loudly at the end of the stick until the saliva rattled in his mouth, and pretended to drop ash into the obsolete inkwells drilled into our wooden desks. Then he dipped his sham brush into the non-existent ink, and tried to paint an imaginary moustache on the face of one of the itinerant boys milling around his desk. It was my first experience of his quirkiness.
“You idiot,” said the boy, and struck the thing out of Alex’s hand with a backhanded swipe. It arced to the floor and skittled under the cast iron radiator beneath the classroom window. For a moment, Alex was left with his empty hand suspended in the air, before he raised his other arm and began to move in some kind of parody of an Egyptian dancer. The bell rang, and the boys moved off, trailing their laughter behind them. When I looked back from the doorway, his waving snake arms were still in the air above his head, and the grin on his face was only just beginning to fade.
Nobody ever shortened my first or last names at St. Mary’s, but Alex Hughes got teased mercilessly for his name. Boys called him Lick Shoes, which just goes to show that, if so inclined, kids can make any name into torture. He got teased for a lot of things, actually; he was the kind of kid who seemed to invite ridicule. He didn’t do anything about it, didn’t beat anybody up or call anybody names in return. He didn’t run away, either, as I had done at Central Elementary when the bullies were after me. He didn’t hold his breath in terrified anticipation, as I had with my brothers. Alex laughed it all off, but there was something about that laugh—how it always ended on a higher note than you would expect—that once I got to know him better, could tell was insincere.
ST. MARY’S WAS A DIFFERENT KIND of high school. It wasn’t only the absence of girls that made it an anomaly. It was the presence of music more than anything. Like a holdover from another era, it took “twentieth-century boys” and “Western art music” and put them together like you might put bulls in a china shop—if you expected the bulls to act more like nightingales, and expected the china shop to be rather more like upscale Berkeley Square in London’s West End. In lots of ways it was a fantasy on everyone’s part. While I was
there, I wasn’t afraid of anything, even death; I thought I was already in the afterlife.
For Alex, boyhood was another kind of afterlife, much worse than anything I felt I’d suffered through before arriving there at the place—or so it first had seemed—of my salvation.
I DIDN’T SLEEP MUCH THE NIGHT AFTER the letter arrived at The Whole Note. After choir, the feeling of deep unease had grown on me, and I’d gone around the house making sure all the latches were closed on the ground floor windows and checking for drafts and stuffing a rag into the mail slot in the front door, as if the past could seep in through the cracks and find me. I didn’t know what to do with the letter after I’d opened it. I hadn’t wanted to bring it into the house, but that impulse was outweighed by not wanting to leave it anywhere else, for fear it should be found. I thought about going out to the yard and burning it, but I couldn’t find any matches. In the end, I sat on the edge of the bathtub and ripped it into tiny pieces over the toilet, flushing about seven times to make sure they made it all the way out to the sewer. When that was done, I wandered around the house for hours, playing a few notes on the harp, opening the door of the fridge to stare at the empty shelves, and checking the phone for a reassuring dial tone.
At bedtime, I just couldn’t settle down enough to go to sleep. I was sitting by the waiting sound system, thumbing through my CDs, when the phone rang. I leaned over, my heart thumping istesso tempo, and checked the caller ID. Of course I couldn’t sleep at all after that.
WE WERE IN THE SCIENCE LAB, dissecting rats. Alex had been paired with Eric, and I with Kevin, and the four of us stood around the two rats laying spread and pinned on the square table, the air heavy with the stink of formaldehyde. Our science teacher was talking to us about urogenital systems and body cavities and seminiferous tubules.
“How can you tell if it’s a boy or a girl?” asked Eric, poking at the rat with the end of his pencil.
“Males will have a penis and scrotum—” the teacher began, but the whole class was laughing.
“Look, Lick Shoes,” whispered Eric, “it’s bigger than yours!” He poked some more, and a tiny pink penis emerged from the white fur.
“—and females will have a urethra and the vaginal orifice—” There were howls and hoots, and some boys at the next table put their fingers in their ears.
Eric and Kevin laughed. Alex was laughing too. His fake laugh. So I laughed too, but I didn’t think anything was funny. I laughed, I think, to cover my own embarrassment.
“Okay, boys, settle down,” called the teacher. “They’re just body parts.”
THERE WERE FIVE SOUNDPROOF practise rooms at St. Mary’s, grouped at one end of the long hallway that ran the length of the second floor. Each room had a resident piano, a scattering of music stands, a small handful of stackable chairs, a chalkboard—though there was rarely any chalk—and a wooden bench under a row of coat hooks by the door. On the outside of the door itself, under a notice that said “No Food or Drink Allowed,” was a sign-up sheet for time slots before and after school started, and for lunchtime. The junior boys had a monopoly on lunchtime; we weren’t allowed off school grounds, and were less likely to be able to arrive early or stay late.
Most days, Alex booked himself a half-hour slot. The rooms weren’t perfectly sound-proof. I could stand in the window alcove at the very end of the hall and listen carefully while the muted notes of five different melodies ran together like disparate colours, creating a blanket of white noise. From one room, piano; from another, perhaps violin or viola; from most, treble and soprano voices.
Alex favoured the room closest to the stairs, though he invariably approached from the hallway, which was lucky. If I ran up the stairs quickly enough at the end of morning classes, I could check for his name on the list, duck into the room, take the paper bag out of my backpack, lay it on the bench, and run back into the stairwell before any of the other boys got there.
Only once, the very first time, did I write his name on the bag, so he would understand it was for him.
Sometimes I crouched on the landing for five or ten minutes, pretending to tie my shoes. When I’d heard five doors slam I came back to stand in the window alcove, and I waited while backpacks and book bags were searched for sheet music. I heard the strings start up, first in one room, then in another. The music was almost always something we were learning in choir or band. A voice from the third room joined in, and then the fourth: piano scales. From the door closest to the stairwell there was no sound. It always made me smile, that ten minutes of silence. I knew Alex had found his lunch.
I WENT THROUGH MY DAYS at St. Mary’s in a kind of ecstatic dance in which it seemed that everything I sang turned to gold and gilded the lintels of the school, the beakers in the science lab, and the choirmaster’s baton. For the first time in my life, I felt I was connected to something, had friends, and loved learning. I drank it all in—the glittering concert halls, the names of the fancy cars that dropped off and picked up my classmates, and the thoughtless disregard we displayed for the street people when, once the cars had pulled away, we ran around the corner to the coffee shops and bought lattes—the latest new thing. I came to know a whole different class and culture, and pretended I belonged there. My shadowy friendship with Alex Hughes was a secret thing I never admitted to. Now I see him always standing tragically just outside our circle; then, I paid him little public attention.
His successes, while celebrated, were tinged with an air of inadequacy, as if the entire school felt he could do better and was holding something back from God. In hindsight, I am not sure he could have done better, except to be less tired and to stand up for himself once in a while. His voice was exquisite, and he always gave his singing his utmost. If there was any drop of him that he did not pour out into those ethereal notes, I did not hear it. He was pure Voice. But if my coming to St. Mary’s had displaced him from that most illustrious spot, it almost seemed that they were waiting for me, so quickly did they announce my supremacy; indeed, one might have thought that they had chosen me precisely for this purpose.
He was punished for things that seemed trivial or contrived. It was as if they thought they could discipline the affectation out of him. Once he was kept late because his tie lay over his shoulder like curled seaweed after he had run to choir practice, another time it was because he had neglected to put the sheet music in order, and another, because he walked to chapel without his shoes, his red heels showing through the holes in his fraying socks. His shoes had been taken off his feet while he was held down by a group of boys, and the scuffed brogues had been hidden behind the creaking hall radiator by Kevin—we all knew, but Alex never once spoke up in his own defense. He took the teasing of our classmates and the punishments of our teachers with laughter, as if he were careless of the calamity that followed him from room to room. He appeared determined to enjoy the joke along with the rest of us. Knowing he could not escape notice, it seemed he resigned himself to being the centre of ridiculing attentions.
Set down a notch, no longer the One Best Voice, they made Alex Hughes into a kind of shadow twin, a doppelgänger, despite his fair hair and pale complexion.
In the end, it seems that I was the dark-hearted one, as my Madrigal heritage would suggest.
“LOOK HERE,” SAID ED. He was behind the rack of hanging guitars, and I thought for a minute that he wanted to show me something. I half stood up, one heel still resting on the lowest rung of the wooden stool.
“What’s up? Another mouse?” The previous week, he’d discovered tiny chew marks around the sound hole of an ergonomic Iberica. He’d gone immediately to the hardware store up the street and bought a four-pack of lethal looking plastic mouse traps, loaded them liberally with peanut butter, and set one in each corner of The Whole Note, hidden behind upside down music stands. I didn’t really want to know whether he’d caught anything.
But today it wasn’t about a mouse, though it soun
ded just as serious. He came quickly out from behind the guitars, sending them all swinging like someone had walked into the shop with the North Wind behind him.
“Do you have enough money?” he demanded.
“I think I can buy us lunch,” I said, and reached for my wallet.
“I didn’t ask if you have any money, I asked if you have enough money.”
“Enough for lunch?”
“Enough for life!”
“I think I should go get us a couple of muffins, at least. You could make some tea.” I thought maybe his blood sugar was getting low.
“I’m not hungry,” he said, and he almost stomped his foot with impatience. He was across the counter from me by this time, and he leaned toward me with his elbows on the concert posters we’d been asked to put up, making dents in the head and left knee of the lead singer of a band called Tapeworm. “Do you have enough money to live on? Do you need a car, a new car? Does your house need new windows? Maybe a new kitchen? You know, stuff like that.”
“You’re asking me if I need a new kitchen?” I asked, incredulous.
“Right. Oh. Right.” He stood upright, and his eyes rolled in his head a little. “A new piano?”
“Are we talking about your will, Ed?” I demanded, finally catching on. I could see from the way his eyes flickered that I’d got it. “If you leave me any money, I’ll kill you,” I told him. “And then I’ll just hand it all right over to the scholarship fund, so you might as well save me the tax implications!”