The Madrigal

by Dian Day

  Neither have I wings to fly

  Give me a boat that can carry two

  And both shall row, my love and I.

  I leaned my back against an oak

  Thinking it was a trusty tree

  But first it bent and then it broke

  So did my love prove false to me.

  My mother was singing to the kitchen walls, and I was hiding. She sang this song as if her heart were breaking with it, a sweet and piercing pain, the notes so full and clear, even in that cramped space. I watched as I pulled aside the red curtain and stepped into the light of the hall, a bare bulb hanging from a broken fixture. How easy it seemed, to walk the ten steps towards her, to open my mouth and sing along. I did know the words. She saw me coming, and she didn’t stop singing, she sang and I sang, and she reached out her hand to me, almost there…

  And then I was standing in my kitchen, alone, singing one of the defining songs of my childhood, my hand on a granite countertop, the milk cold in the cup.

  Oh love be handsome and love be kind

  Gay as a jewel when first it is new

  But love grows old and waxes cold

  And fades away like the morning dew.

  WE WERE WAITING IN THE HALL in single file—a long line of navy blazers, hardly visible in the half-darkness, punctuated by bright white collars and maroon ties and lit by the whites of eyes, those twin windows of the soul. We weren’t allowed to talk, so each boy moved slightly, shifted his feet, leaned to one side as the boy next to him searched his pockets for nothing or bent forward to scratch his knee, so that words could pass back and forth between us without being detected by the choirmaster or the monitors, who would put you down for detention for the first offence, and make you sit out of the performance for the second.

  I pretty much never risked it. There wasn’t anything important enough to say except for the music itself. I waited in a kind of calm anticipation for the cathedral to fill with people; we could see a small view of the left aisle from where we stood, and flashes of dress or dinner jacket moved across this small screen like fragments of a dream as we are waking. I watched this space with interest, making a game of fitting the fleeting movements to the notes in my head—a pre-concert of my own creation. Even though I was watching, my eyes remained unfocused on the specifics. I registered colour without my brain naming the colour; I registered leg or arm without reference to bodies or anything except rhythm and beat. There was a roaring kind of echo as our audience filled up that great space, footfalls ringing on the stone floor, handbags dropping on pews, people talking freely amongst themselves.

  Alex was directly in front of me. We would be singing a duet together, Arne’s “The Lass with the Delicate Air,” arranged for two voices. Usually, our only interaction came just before we were about to start moving into the cathedral toward the choir stalls, when I would give him a poke in the ribs with my elbow or a kick on his shin with my polished shoe, the signal that it was time for him to return to this world from whichever other place he normally inhabited. But that day he was already in the real world, and fully present. For once, he too was focused on the patch of light ahead, the high doorway where colour and movement and sound flickered. He was craning his head, moving this way or that as the line of boys ahead of him undulated like the body of a snake in a cave.

  I watched him for a little while without thinking anything. His movements and those of all the boys in front of us and the monitors transecting the hallway and the growing audience made a symphony. I was content to conduct. But after a few minutes, his activity began to register as out of the ordinary.

  He was trying to see into the cathedral, as if he were trying to pick out a face or a recognizable cuff or collar or pant leg. But nobody ever came to concerts for Alex. I couldn’t think of who—or what—he was looking for.

  I turned my head towards the wall and spoke quietly into Alex’s ear, with only a minimal moving of lips. “What’s up with you?” I asked him.

  “I had a dream that my mother was coming,” he answered, his eyes still focused on the distant doorway.

  “Hughes! Monday detention!” hissed Braithewaite, the monitor.

  The long snake was moving, curling out of its dark den into the incandescent house of God. We entered singing.

  “DID SHE COME?” I ASKED, though I already knew the answer. During the concert, I had seen him look, and look—his eyes travelling back and forth, back and forth, across the rows of people seated in the pews—and finally give up looking, and stare hard at his choral book, though he knew every note it contained.

  It was a Sunday, the day after the concert. We’d come home from mass together on the streetcar, singing Sydney Bertram Carter’s “Lord of the Dance” with all our breath. Annie had made us pancakes and had gone out for a walk before we were halfway through the stack, for fear of missing the fading sunshine.

  Neither Alex nor I were overly concerned about the sun, and had gravitated to Annie’s music room when we’d finished eating. I was lying on the settee with my legs hanging over the wooden armrest. Alex was lying on his back on the carpet, his bent legs resting on the piano bench.

  “No,” he said. He lifted his legs straight up in the air and began to pedal an imaginary upside-down bicycle. “Well, anyway,” he added, “I didn’t see her.”

  “It was just a dream,” I reminded him.

  “She might have come,” he said, hopefully. “I don’t actually know what she looks like.”

  “You must have a picture,” I protested.

  “No,” he stated. “They don’t give you anything until you’re eighteen.” He put his calves back on the bench.

  “Not too much longer to wait, then,” I reassured him.

  “I guess,” Alex said, staring at the plaster medallion on the ceiling. Then he hummed a few bars of a tune I didn’t recognize.

  “What’s that one called?” I didn’t have to ask who the composer was; I knew it was him.

  “I don’t know yet,” he answered. “It’s about my family.”

  “Do you even know anything about them?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No,” he said, “so I have to make everything up.”

  “You can have all mine,” I said flippantly, “and make a song about them.”

  Alex was never flippant. “You only want to get rid of them because you know them,” he answered earnestly. “If you didn’t know anything about them, you’d do anything to be introduced.”

  I thought about not knowing my brothers, but all I could see was relief. “I don’t think so,” I said.

  And then, as is often the way with boys, we’d done enough talking. Alex leapt up and launched into “Simple Gifts,” the old Shaker song that Carter stole his “Lord of the Dance” tune from, as a round. Alex started with—

  ‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free

  ‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be

  And when we find ourselves in the place just right

  ‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

  And after the first line of the second repetition, I came in with—

  When true simplicity is gained

  To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed

  To turn, turn will be our delight

  ‘Til by turning, turning we come ‘round right.

  I don’t know how many rounds we sang, trying to make things right. It might have been an hour; it might have been two. We were inside the music, and it was inside every cell of our bodies. Distantly, from far away, I heard the front door, and felt the draft, when Annie came home from her walk. I felt the delicious full feeling from the pancakes wear off, and I saw the light change in the garden as clouds covered the whole sky. We wore our voices right out, but only stopped when Annie briefly poked her head into the music room to
interrupt us and beg for a change of tune.

  We watched her retreat once again to the kitchen through double sets of French doors. She wore pink knitted slippers, and her feet made no sound on the hardwood.

  “I think my mother was probably a prostitute,” said Alex hoarsely.

  THE HOUSE OF MY CHILDHOOD is up for sale again. I took a walk down my old street on Saturday during a brief reprieve from the myriad forms of frozen precipitation we’d been getting for weeks. The grey-toned blanket of the sky was ripped into a hundred irregular pieces. The sun shone weakly through the narrow spaces between the cloud fragments, brightening the January sky and casting thin shadows under the bare trees. Lots of people sitting inside their houses noticed that the light had changed, pulled back curtains, looked out their frosted windows to search for an explanation. A few even came out into the street to gaze at the sky, or, like me, decided to go for a walk; we had almost forgotten sunshine, and shadows were the stuff of dreams.

  The “For Sale” sign trembled a little in the wind.

  It seemed a strange time to try to sell a house, in the dead of winter. I thought of the young couple I’d seen earnestly fixing the front step, wearing designer jeans spattered in flecks of lime paint, with the knees frayed and worn. The two of them, straightening their tired backs and wiping their sleeves across their foreheads to keep the sweat from stinging their eyes. Looking at each other and then not looking at each other.

  “Getting divorced,” I bet myself. But then I thought maybe they had just planned it this way, planned all along to fix it up and sell it, move on to another. Some people do that, I know. As if a house is just a roof and walls and wires and pipes. But our histories are there, underneath the new surfaces. Everything gleams and shines, but memories are still trapped in cracks and crevices and false walls and chimney flues. My lost boyhood, sealed in there like a time capsule for ghosts.

  I’d been planning to go down to the river by Belle Park, but I turned the other way instead, back towards downtown. In between the doors at the real estate office, I picked up the most recent copy of The Real Estate Book, ducking in and out quickly so I wouldn’t be seen by the agent on duty. The office was on my mail route; I can’t go anywhere downtown incognito.

  “AS YOU CAN SEE, THEY USED THIS as their office, but it could easily be used as a third bedroom.” She was stating the obvious, but that is often the nature of real estate agents. I’d picked her from one of the new realty offices on the edge of town, her photograph, with the announcement that she’d recently joined the firm, confirming her youth.

  “If you need the space,” she said. “If you needed the third bedroom.”

  I grunted. I wasn’t giving her anything. We were up in the front room, overlooking the street. I’d steered her upstairs as soon as we’d entered. I thought starting upstairs would be safer.

  The house was full of beautiful furniture, but empty of clutter—staging, they call it now—and there was a curious echo when she spoke, an airless kind of vibration, as if the life was already gone out of the house along with the occupants. We’d left our wet boots on a cork mat in the hallway downstairs, and our feet made no noise on the refinished floorboards. Everything was immaculate; even the tops of the baseboards had been scrubbed. The walls of the office were inclined towards the yellow of ochre, and there was a fine wooden double pedestal desk pulled up in front of the window. Colourful framed prints hung on the walls, Aboriginal artists like Moses Beaver, Daphne Odjig, Norval Morrisseau. I went around trying to read the signatures, while Inexperience tapped her stockinged foot in the doorway. All numbered originals.

  But I was just killing time, and I knew eventually we would have to go back downstairs and look around.

  “Improvements to the house include all new windows, those, you know, energy efficient kind,” said the agent. She said “energy efficient” like it was something she’d memorized out of a handbook. “The house is super insulated. The oil bills are very low. There are copies of the spec sheets for the house down on the kitchen counter. If you want to go downstairs?”

  I think I was beginning to make her nervous. I grunted again, trying to smile reassuringly, and motioned for her to go on down. I held tight to the handrail behind her, relaxing my grip only enough to slide my hand down the freshly painted wood. I could hear a thunder of feet charging down stairs, perhaps from the house next door in the row. A big family, I thought to myself. At the bottom of the steps, she turned to her right and stopped under the living room archway, looking up at me expectantly. I could hear a door slam and tennis balls being thrown against the bricks, giocoso, somewhere outside.

  “The living room,” she said. She rested her hand lightly on the back of the leather sofa. “See, the windows are all new downstairs too. And they’ve really opened up the house to the light. It’s made quite a difference to the feel. You can see right through to the kitchen.” I poked my head into the room, and sure enough, the cheap paneling had been removed from the wall between the living room and dining room, and an interior window had been cut between the dining room and kitchen.

  I went down the hall and stood to the left of the original archway, just inside the dining room. There was a dark table, stocky and square, with two chairs along each side. A vase full of pink roses was set on a beaded mat in the middle of the table, and a solitary pink petal had fallen onto the gleaming wood. My chest was tight, but I pivoted on my sock feet until I was leaning inside the doorway, looking down the hallway into the kitchen. It wasn’t very far at all, perhaps six or eight feet. There was no door there now, the door jamb completely replaced so there weren’t even any rectangles chiseled out for the hinges.

  No cracked asbestos tiles, no chrome table, no sagging plaster, no dripping tap.

  The agent followed me down the hall and went to step into my line of sight, but I quickly put out my open hand to signal her to stop. She jumped back nervously, and I was sorry, but I couldn’t help it. When she got back to her office and told them about it, they’d teach her about the speed dial buttons on her cell phone, and the code words for “Help!”

  I kept my hand up to block the hallway, and I looked. I turned my head and listened.

  There was a kitchen island where my mother would have stood leaning up against the counter. I couldn’t see her sway, or watch her expressive arms keep time. I couldn’t hear her singing.

  “Would you like to see the kitchen now, Mr. Jones? I’ll just get you that spec sheet?”

  “I don’t need to see any more,” I said.

  She was happy enough to go and get her shoes and put them on with her hand on the door knob. I slipped my own boots back on, and we both went quickly out on to the front step. The street was deserted.

  The door shut behind us, and she fiddled with the lock box. The wind was blowing her hair sideways, and she brushed it away impatiently.

  “Why are they selling?” I asked. Suddenly it seemed the most important thing in the world. “Are they getting divorced?”

  She looked up for a moment, a strand of hair caught in the corner of her mouth.

  “Oh, I—no, they just—they’re just moving,” she said, flustered. “They’re just moving someplace else.”

  THERE WAS A BRIEF SHIFT IN THE WEATHER later in the month, one of those slightly warmer days when the air turns the snow to rain, but the ground holds firmly to winter. Cold rain fell down in sheets slantwise against the vinyl and clapboard and brick on the sides of buildings. It covered the dirty streets and froze into a smooth, treacherous, shining blanket. It was the ultimate worker’s compensation claim waiting to happen. I strapped metal coils onto my boots and walked my mail route gingerly, like an old man with thin bones.

  From Dave’s cell phone I had called Sylvia to tell her to keep Ed at home. On my way down Princess Street I let myself into the shop, cancelled my afternoon music classes, and wrote an apology for the door in case any customer
s actually made it out—though I wasn’t too worried about the possibility. The Whole Note has few enough customers these days even in the best of weather. I stomped and slid and tiptoed through the almost-deserted streets in an erratic tempo, accompanied by the faint music of falling icicles, and grasped at railings, lamp posts, and letter boxes whenever they appeared. Luckily, the rain stopped before I was completely soaked; the water solidified in the creases of my coat and crackled as I dug into my mailbag.

  WHEN I GOT HOME FROM THE SHOP on one of those kind of days, Alex Hughes, Second Best Voice, was sitting on my front step.

  There had been one other time much earlier in my life when Alex found out where I was living and sat waiting on my step until I arrived. I’d gone home after Introduction to Financial Accounting and found him halfway up the outside staircase that led up to my student apartment, directly above the vents, his clothes and his hair steeped in the sweet stink of dryer sheets.

  He’d been drunk. He’d stood up when he saw me and thrown up over the railing. I’d taken advantage of that preoccupied moment and run away. I’d hid in the university library among the periodicals and read about landscape architecture, whose aisle I haphazardly found myself in. When I dared return, late that night and for weeks afterwards, I could smell the lingering stench of vomit lifting on the hot air under my feet.

  Although I hadn’t seen him since, and we were both more than two decades older, I didn’t have any trouble recognizing him. His face still looked young—younger than mine did, I think. His darkening blond hair was long enough in front for him to need to flick his head back when he looked up, and he still had a shadow in his eyes—though it was different, somehow, perhaps now holding more ferocity than deference.

  He had a newspaper folded up under him, and he looked pretty cold.

  “Frederick,” he said, and he got up stiffly, and held out his hand.

  I took it, and shook, though I worried even in the moment that he might take that for a sign of some sort, and made it as brief as possible. He wasn’t wearing any gloves, and his hands were like cold iron. I didn’t look; I was afraid of what might be visible in the space between his cold hand and the cuff of his jacket.