The Madrigal

by Dian Day

  It was a strange and difficult thing to walk downtown beside Luke and his squalling wheelbarrow. It is one thing to take him to lunch and be in charge of the agenda and the meal. It is another matter entirely to remain calm when everyone was staring at us and I had no idea where we were going.

  I thought at first that we would stop at the Sea Biscuit, but instead of turning down Princess Street towards the lake, we crossed over and kept walking, until I thought he had forgotten that I was there, and after a few more blocks I thought he had forgotten all about lunch, and was going instead to his regular pencil and pen gig at the library. But when we got to the library we went past it and continued down towards the lake.

  He stopped for good only one and a half blocks later, in front of the Cathedral Church of St. George, home of the very Anglicans who, a quarter of a century earlier, had bartered my voice to the Catholics so my soul could be saved by somebody. There was a billboard sign on the cathedral lawn that read “Lunch by George, FREE MEAL SERVED Monday to Saturday, All Welcome.”

  I was embarrassed, but I wanted to laugh, too. I needed to laugh so badly, I forced myself: a weak, knot-in-the-stomach kind of laugh came out of me. Predictably, on the distant dark side of the moon, a ghostly Filander laughed too, though I’m not sure if he was laughing with me or at me.

  I WENT TO THE WHOLE NOTE to buy new harp strings at fifty percent off. Actually, I went to the shop to talk to Ed. I was going crazy at home. The harp strings were my excuse.

  The small bells hanging on the back of the shop door tinkled as I went in. I stopped halfway through the doorway, pulled the door back and forth in front of me so this tiny, ancient music sounded again, and again. Finally Ed looked up and spoke, his voice a kind of old music in itself, the kind of music that echoes its sadness as it fades.

  “It’s cold, Frederick,” he said.

  “I was listening to the door,” I said, stepping in and closing it behind me. “One more shop bell bites the dust. You know, when you close. When The Whole Note is gone.”

  “That whole infra-red electronic chime thing,” he grunted. He was making piles on the counter, wobbling towers of strings in thin plastic packages.

  “That whole blasted ding-dong thing,” I agreed. “Whoever buys the building, they’ll change this bell.”

  He shrugged. “Probably,” he said. I shook the mist off my coat and hung it on a hook just inside the storeroom. I looked around in there and whistled.

  “Jesus, things are starting to clear out,” I said. The room was half-empty, the piled boxes only waist-high. There were gaps or clearings in the jungle where all that was left was dust, skid marks on the old asbestos tile, and used staples lying like discarded confetti. It had only been two days since I’d been there. “More stuff is actually going out than is coming in.”

  “Nothing’s coming in,” Ed said, looking up from his sorting, nodding at the door. “You can have the bell.”

  “Thanks, Ed,” I said. “I’d like that.” I stood there for a while, noted the hesitation in his hands.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked him. I leaned on the counter, watching his face. I decided I couldn’t wait for the following year, and our next road trip, to ask him. He knew what I meant, didn’t pretend otherwise.

  “That whole retirement thing, you mean.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you doing here anyway? Do you have a student coming?”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be the one answering the questions?”

  “Answers only lead to more questions.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, ‘Did I blink?’” he asked. “Did I fall asleep while my life went on without me? Did anybody tell me it was going to be like this?” One of the piles toppled and he re-stacked them, straightening the square base with the palms of his hands around the right and left edges, just so, and the top and bottom edges, just so. “When you’re forty—”

  He looked at me intently for the first time since I had arrived.

  “When you’re forty, Death moves into your town; you hear about it on the news, but you don’t think too much about it. When you’re fifty, you start to notice him in the street occasionally, but mostly you just cross to the other side of the road and let him go by. When you’re sixty, you see him in the lineup at the bank or the grocery store. He’s breathing down your neck behind the bench you like to sit at in the park. He even comes knocking at your door, fundraising for charity. But then seventy.… At seventy you realize that there is not one Death, but many deaths, countless deaths. You realize most of the time you just haven’t recognized him, he’s been in disguise. You realize that all we do all our lives is meet death everywhere.”

  His eyes were old, yellowing, tired.

  “What about meeting Life everywhere?” I asked him. “Can’t we do that too?” I was desperate for him to say Yes.

  “We don’t know where to look for Life,” he told me. “You might as well be my son. Neither of us knows where in Hell to fucking look.”

  The shop bell jangled, minacciando, and we both jumped, but it was just a shopper, searching eagerly for bargains.

  THERE ARE A LOT FEWER NEWSPAPERS delivered these days than there used to be, of course, but some neighbourhoods I deliver to are more Luddite than others. It was a dry, cloudless day; the newspapers weren’t tunneled into plastic bags, but simply folded into themselves and tossed onto walkways and porches. Old people, shift workers, moms at home with new babies, some of these folks came out as I was passing and tiptoed down the cold concrete to collect their morning news along with their letters.

  The geese were overhead, haunting the washed-out sky with their clamouring music. It seemed to me that the noise of their return was different from the noise of their leaving, though perhaps it was simply the energy that changed, their cries con gioco rather than con duolo. I heard them in wave after wave of sound, sometimes visible but most often out of sight behind the roofs of houses, apartment blocks, or occasional church steeples. It’s always a relief to hear the geese. It’s like they pull spring along behind them, a reluctant follower of their song of green.

  I was pretty busy looking up at the sky, but when I noticed I scooped a few newspapers up on my way and handed them over, unfolded, with the person’s mail laid neatly on top. I know the old folks, in particular, have a hard time bending over.

  I guess it was just the way I picked up Mrs. J. L. Franklin’s paper, and the fact that there was no mail that day for Mrs. J. L. Franklin. I saw her coming down her few front steps in a quilted housecoat and a pair of slip-on sheepskin slippers, and I saw the paper on the brown grass, already unfurled and laying flat.

  “Let me get that,” I said to her, and she smiled and nodded and stopped with one foot hovering in the air off the bottom step, one hand on the cold wrought-iron railing. I jogged two steps up the path, and bent over to pick up her paper. It was right-side up on the grass and facing me. We can’t help reading things in such situations. Our eyes and brains just take care of it without us having any choice in the matter. My eyes and brain read the headline as that paper was lifted between my knees and my belt buckle, even as I heard Mrs. J. L. Franklin say, “Oh thank you, thank you” and the geese cried like dark angels in the clear air.

  “Effects of Bullying Felt Into Adulthood,” it declared.

  I handed it over, as if it were burning my hands. But Mrs. J. L. had seen me reading, and turned the paper so she could read the headline, too. I could see her thin lips make the faintest of movements as she took in the words. Her hovering foot made it back to the safety of the step. She had that slight tremor that is common among the old, so that her head bobbed a little as if she were a person in silent agreement with something that had been said. But nothing had been said, I was sure of it. “Terrible, isn’t it? All this bullying nowadays?” she asked me, looking up into my face.

  My own
tremor was the only answer I could make. I tried to smile instead, but the skin of my face was taut.

  “Of course, in my day we’d have just said ‘fight back’, you know. ‘Fight back! Don’t let those bullies have their way! Don’t let them win!’ I suppose that wasn’t the best thing to say, though, was it? We didn’t know about these things then. Everything’s different now.”

  “No mail today. I’m sorry,” I managed to say, and Mrs. J. L. Franklin, still musing, turned slowly back towards her wide open front door.

  “Everything’s so different now,” she repeated.

  I pulled the next bundle of mail out of my bag and focused on the next house; the mailbox was around to the side. I didn’t pick up any more papers. I didn’t hear any more geese that day, either, but once I saw a scraggly line of birds in the air, so high above me that I had to squint to see them.

  THERE IS A MOMENT WHEN EVERYTHING that has happened in one’s past converges. It’s like all the disparate things that have happened—all the crazy, totally unrelated, and seemingly meaningless events—come together like an alloy, after a lot of heat, and a chemical reaction fuses discrete substances into a single element. I understand that there are some modern airplane parts that are made up of ten or more different metals: you take a big cauldron and you mix all these random metals, and then you stand back and look, and you realize you’ve made a big silver wing, and you think, what else could I have made? Nothing. All those hot rocks came together and made an airplane wing. Of course. I see it now.

  It was like that with all the bits of rock from my past, fusing together. The heat was getting turned right up, and everything started to melt. What else could I have thought? Nothing else. All those meaningless events coming together made me think there was such a thing as a universe of intent, such a thing as a guiding hand, such a thing as guardian angels—or that maybe there was a God after all.

  I don’t know why, but I didn’t find that reassuring.

  “I THINK I’M BEING FOLLOWED,” I said to Ed.

  “What do you mean, followed?” he scoffed. “This isn’t a movie.”

  “I don’t mean literally, I mean figuratively. Things are following me around that I thought I’d left behind long ago. And the newspapers—I pick up a newspaper and there’s an article on the front page that seems like it was written right at me. Why did I see that newspaper?”

  “Stop reading the newspaper,” he said.

  Outside the snow had turned to ice pellets and rattled on the glass of the display windows. My student had cancelled on account of the weather—she lived out of town—and so I had a free hour with nothing to do but stew. Ed was going through the shop marking down prices, but it was a painstaking process that involved first tuning and playing the instrument, and then laying it in his lap to be stroked, and then issuing a series of sighs that finally culminated in the reluctant use of the red pen he held behind his ear: a long drawn-out arpeggio. He was driving me crazy.

  “It’s not just the newspapers!” I didn’t want to tell him I felt like I was being followed by memories of Alex.

  “Ngh,” Ed grunted. “Shit happens.”

  “But why now?” I asked him.

  He looked at me accusingly.

  “Do you think the world waits for you to be ready?” he demanded.

  “FREDERICK,” SAID ED, suddenly emerging from the storeroom.

  “Mmmm?” I was sorting through the stack of last year’s receipts, trying to put them in piles according to month, getting ready for tax time.

  “What the hell are you going to do about teaching?” He spoke quickly, as if to make sure he got the whole sentence out.

  I stopped what I was doing, and looked uncomprehendingly at Steel Guitar Strings $37.25. It sounds ridiculous, but the question hadn’t occurred to me. I looked over at the soundproof practice room, littered with silent instruments.

  “Did you think about that,” he prodded, “in all your scheming with Sylvia about my retirement?”

  “No, I didn’t think about it,” I admitted.

  “Hah!” He cried, triumphantly. “Well?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll—I don’t know. But you can’t keep the shop open just so I have a place to teach.” I put $37.25 decisively down on the pile marked July.

  “That wouldn’t be the only reason,” he said belligerently.

  I decided to ignore the tone. “Maybe I’ll quit teaching,” I said. “Maybe I’ll quit delivering mail, too. I’ll quit everything and—travel. See the world.”

  “See the world? You’d get as far as Bath Road!” And he laughed. A good belly laugh, such as I hadn’t heard from him in months.

  “Naw,” I countered. “Halfway to Toronto, at least!” And I joined him, hollowly.

  “YOU WANT TO DO WHAT?” Aileen said. I had already anticipated that she would think she hadn’t heard me correctly, so it wasn’t a surprise that I had to repeat myself.

  “I want to take my mother out for the weekend,” I said. “To Toronto. For my brother’s wedding.” I added the bit about the wedding because I thought it might make her more sympathetic. I was wrong.

  “Are you crazy, Frederick?” she exclaimed.

  We were sitting at the nursing station on the locked ward, and I was twirling, somewhat belligerently, in my chair. The usual crowd was lined up along the hallway, staring at the floor, their wheelchair backs up against the wall. Louise was coming and going, writing case notes and answering alarm bells and wiping drool.

  “Your mother hasn’t been anywhere except around the block for twenty years!” Aileen said. Her tone suggested she didn’t really approve of even that.

  Aileen was the head nurse, and, other than the relatively recent business with the wheelchair seatbelt restraint, I’ve pretty much always respected her judgement. But I realized I’d never really had any reason to come up against her; that she was in charge of my mother’s life was something I hadn’t previously thought to argue about.

  Older than me by a dozen or so years, she had an authority that few tried to circumvent. I don’t know what she’d done before she came to minister over the locked ward in her late twenties, but she’d been there long enough to move into that lengthy wasteland called middle age. In general, she was at that stage in life when her eyelids were starting to droop, but at that particular moment there was no sag in evidence and the whites of her eyes were showing profound disbelief. On my way in, I’d spent fifteen minutes with Marilyn watching M.A.S.H. reruns, so I was hyped for battle. I knew I was going to have to fight. I thought it might be an idea to let Aileen run out of a little steam. I continued to twirl, risoluto.

  “Frederick, I really don’t know what you’re thinking, but it’s not a good idea. Your mother would be totally disoriented. She’d have no clue where she was going, or why. We just don’t know what she’d do in a completely new environment. She has no idea about weddings! Do you have any idea what this would mean?”

  “What would it mean?” I asked. Over Aileen’s left shoulder, I could see Louise give me an incredulous look, whether because I was arguing with the boss or because she’d overheard enough of our conversation to confirm my insanity, I didn’t know.

  “Well, there’s the wheelchair, getting her in and out of cars—you can’t do that, you’d need a wheelchair van with a ramp or a lift.”

  “I’ll rent a van,” I said. “Surely you can rent one of those vans. I’d need to rent a vehicle anyway.”

  “You’d need a driver; you need a special licence to drive one.” Behind Aileen’s left shoulder, Louise was shaking her head emphatically, but I decided not to argue.

  “So I’ll rent a driver,” I said, “if I need a driver.”

  “And there’s all her medications, and special food, and her—her toileting. You can’t possibly take care of all that yourself.”

  “Someone takes care of it here,�
� I pointed out. “Themselves.”

  “We have RNs and RPNs and PSWs here; they’re all trained to provide the kind of care your mother needs. And they work in shifts. No one person does it around the clock.”

  “I could have a crash course? It’s just one weekend.”

  “Are you suggesting you could learn everything you need to know about your mother’s care in a crash course?”

  “Enough for a weekend?” I suggested, tentatively.

  “Absolutely not,” she said with finality. She stood up. She thought she was done with me.

  Behind her left elbow, Louise was standing with her arms crossed in front of her chest, waiting with some amusement to see what I would do next. I nodded in her direction.

  “So, Louise is an RPN, right?” I asked. Aileen looked over at her, and they both nodded. “And she can look after my mother herself? She can do the meds and the feeding and the toileting?” More agreement.

  Incredibly, they didn’t seem to know where I was headed.

  “Then can I rent Louise,” I said. I stood up. I was done with her.

  “WHY DID HE DO IT? Where is the bat? And then along comes the butter. I wish it—”

  “Salvador is getting married, and I am going to take you to the wedding with me,” I told my mother.

  “I never knew the devil did say anything on the ground could be eaten,” she said. “But when people get—”

  “His fiancée is called Johanna. She seems very nice,” I said.

  “Can you get poison?” she asked. “There is something fishy here.”

  “I haven’t actually met her, but I’ve talked to her on the phone.”

  “Make them up and put them into short, no, shot, no, save, no—”

  “It’s in Toronto. The wedding.”

  “We can’t find the cat. Please make them get up; there are fish. I put them down there where there are those things, mortars, when you see—”

  “We’ll leave on Friday afternoon.”

  “I wish to have, not, but you can. In the dark. Please. You can see that, you can see that, you can see that—”