The Madrigal

by Dian Day

  “Louise is going to come with us. You know, Louise? She’ll be taking care of you.”

  “You know what I mean. It’s never like it is. What I can’t be saying. All the tremble, no, the thimble, no, the way I see it—”

  “You don’t have to worry about anything. Louise and I will make sure everything is all right.”

  “The drop is a hat. In a plan there is, but it must be. I used to be so, so….” She trailed off, but there was a strange look in her eye, as if, just for a moment, she was aware of her own confusion.

  “What?” I asked. “What?” I waited for her next words, put my face so close to hers, went in and out of her lungs on the very air she was breathing, my own breath unconsciously held.

  “Where is Frederick?” she said.

  “I’m here,” I said. I reached for her papery blue hand; it was as light as a bone flute. She hadn’t said my name in many years.

  “In the words you can see the bat. Here you never said you would, but all the same, the butter! Think about it. Please. On those days I saw it was the thing Jenny said, so many, so many. Where are they all gone?”

  The light went out of her eye; I took a breath, continued to hold her warming hand.

  “I’m here,” I whispered. I put my forehead down on the handle of her wheelchair, cold metal against my skin.

  THE QUESTION OF MY MOTHER’S CLOTHES had occurred to me on the way out. “Does she have anything she could wear?” I asked Louise. Of course I knew exactly what my mother had in her closet; I had bought all of it at some point over the years. It was really a question of dress codes and protocol. Would anything she already had do for the event?

  “It’s not like she’ll have any sense of that herself,” said Louise doubtfully. “She could be wearing anything at all. It wouldn’t matter to her.”

  “It matters to me,” I told her.

  “Well you’d better go shopping then,” she affirmed.

  She gave me her advice—both style and likely location, and I set off to find my mother a dress she would be proud to wear to her fourth son’s wedding. Even if she no longer knew about pride; even if she didn’t understand “wedding;” even if she didn’t know Salvador lived in Toronto and was still one of her lost boys.

  I’D BOOKED THE ROOMS through one of those internet travel deal sites. I spent a lot of time thinking about whether one or two rooms was appropriate, though in retrospect this seems ridiculous—another one of those What was I thinking? moments that seem so common in my life these days. No one would ever believe it acceptable for me to share a room with my mother and Louise, but at the time I was just thinking about giving Louise the message that she was not going to be left totally on her own with my mother. In the end, I booked adjoining double rooms, and told Louise we’d spell each other off. She didn’t seem worried about it one bit.

  “You are paying me,” she said. “It’ll be just like going to work but with a change of scenery. And maybe I’ll get to meet up with my cousin for a short visit at some point?”

  “Sure,” I said, but I didn’t have any premonition of what would happen in the only two hours she was away from her post.

  Some people get worked up about the traffic going in to and out of Toronto, but that part doesn’t really worry me. I just have to focus on staying in my own lane and trusting that other people are more intent on driving between the lines than in wishing me any deliberate harm. It’s a matter of self-protection, like in life itself. Pretty much no one wants to get hurt. So Louise and I stopped talking as the highway widened, and I turned the music on to drown out my mother as the cars and trucks started to rush by in ever greater numbers, buzzing through the early spring grime like out-of-season insects. I emptied my mind and watched the white lines and the white arrows, checked the speedometer and the mirrors in a circular pattern, every few seconds, and sensed more than saw the lanes merging in and out along the route. It’s like a meditation. I could still notice the look on my mother’s face in the rear-view mirror as a kind of absence, despite the fact that her eyes were flicking back and forth as she watched the four lanes of traffic on the other side of the highway. And although my brain was in many ways empty of everything else but the physicality of driving, I still also had the wordless thought that this was curious: she registers the input but it has no impact. Even a flower responds to its environment by sending its roots to the water and turning its face towards the light.

  IT HAD BEEN A LONG TIME, I guess, since Toronto felt familiar and more comfortable than my childhood home. When we got to Queen Street, I got overwhelmed by the city. The lobby and the valet parking are accessed by a hole built into the bottom floor of the hotel, and it took us twenty minutes to pull in and secure a place to park temporarily, and pretty much the whole time the back end of the van was stuck out onto the street, and cars behind us were honking and occasionally even pedestrians thumped the back window as they walked by, in protest of the fact that we were unintentionally blocking the sidewalk. There were more people milling about in the lobby than most Ontario towns can pull together for a classical music concert, and I stood another ten minutes in line at the check-in desk, surrounded by texting accountants and a multitude of Shriners carrying hatboxes. When I got back to where I had parked the van, Louise had lowered the lift and had my mother parked in her wheelchair on the curb, safely boxed in by luggage. She was just handing the keys over to the valet.

  “I’ve left my cat,” my mother was saying. “Can’t you tell him to stop the floor?” She was getting agitated, and her voice rose with every garbled sentence.

  I gave the valet the room number to go with the keys, and he got in the van and started the motor, and then I lost track of where he took it because my mother’s voice had risen enough to penetrate past the twenty engines idling under the overhanging building; the valet team yelling instructions; the constant clacking of the revolving doors; the man on my left having a heated discussion with his wife about which bags he was prepared to take out of the car, again; the woman on my right having a fight with her daughter about a tattoo; and the roaring, wireless, heavy-breathing over-charged hum of the entire city.

  “When the gut is out, send the marmalade!” yelled my mother.

  I picked up all the bags, one by one, and started strapping them across my body.

  “Inside the white!” she shouted. “Do you have any morning?”

  Morning or mourning? I wondered.

  I slung the suit bag over my shoulder, the metal hangers cold and weighty against my fingers. There was a bottleneck of people going back through the heavy doors, and Louise couldn’t make much headway cutting across the stream of pedestrians to the automatic door we needed to use because of the wheelchair.

  “Hide them to blue!” my mother called. People around us were looking, but only in that uncurious and selfish way that people in big cities look, to see if, for safety’s sake, they should put a little more distance between themselves and the yelling other.

  We moved forward into the small gaps between people’s legs. A hurried young man half-tripped on the footrest of my mother’s chair and subsequently sent Louise a look that suggested she had better be sure to lock her hotel room door once she got there. Draped with luggage, I tried to move forward so I could carve out a route in front of them.

  “I can’t snow in the dark! The trees are going hope, but there is no one! Do you see the sofa?”

  Louise gripped the handles of the chair and pushed her practised hip up against the metal button.

  “Why don’t you sing to her?” she said to me as the door opened. “That’ll calm her down.”

  “Sing?” I said, surprised. “I can’t sing here.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s so public,” I said. I wasn’t really thinking about anything except getting us all through the door, and the question confused me.

  “Do you think anybody ca
res what you do?” she asked, a little shortly. “This is Toronto.”

  LOUISE WENT OUT TO MEET HER COUSIN. The door closed behind her, slowly, and landed against the jamb with a decisive click.

  The room was quiet except for the background hum that accompanies almost all of our lives these days: the heating system and the mini bar and the water in the plumbing running up to the room next door and the distant traffic. Rather than the room, I guess I should say my mother was quiet. My mother was abnormally quiet. Louise had given her something—I don’t know what—and had helped her onto the bed for a nap; she lay on her back on top of the sheets, fully clothed except for her shoes. But her eyes were half open.

  She opened and closed her eyelids languidly, as if on the edge of sleep. When they were open, her eyes moved slowly back and forth across the ceiling. I looked up, but there were no cracks in the plaster; whatever she was looking at, it wasn’t visible to me.

  I sat down beside the bed and looked at the array of medication bottles Louise had set there. I picked them up, one by one, in turn, idly reading the labels. I shook each bottle; they were mostly pretty full. Enough in there to kill a person, I thought.

  There are moments in our lives that have a particular energy to them. They are more focused, perhaps, than all the other moments that make up our days and weeks and years. When these moments come—and we can’t predict their coming—we view the entire landscape clearly, and realize we are free to walk in any direction, choose any path, take any action.

  Enough in there to kill my mother, I thought.

  When you have a thought like that, there isn’t anything else. The one big thought takes up all the space.

  I didn’t think about any of the repercussions, whether I would regret it, or whether I would get caught. I held a bottle in my hand and I shook the pills inside in a kind of primal rhythm. Like a heartbeat.

  We stayed like that for a long time, me sitting with the bottle in my hand, my mother lying on the bed, looking at something on the ceiling. Me listening to the vibrations of the universe. After a while, my mother’s eyes closed, and she went to sleep. Even then, the big thought was the only thing I could think: Poison. It was what she’d been asking me to do for twenty years.

  PIVOT POINTS. FORKS IN THE ROAD. This hand or that. There are a million such moments, even in the most ordinary life. The seemingly mundane choices, the coincidences of a Godless world, the happenstance, the way the wind blows us forward or pushes us back. The restaurant the old man chooses for lunch; the acquaintance the middle-aged woman meets in the supermarket; the route the child walks to school.

  The edges of cliffs, now that’s another story. Those times when, looking back, we can easily separate our lives into Before and After. It is almost like we become different people and can hardly recognize any continuity in the world or in ourselves on both sides of the divide. No matter how hard or how long we think, we can’t know what might have happened otherwise, what other choices we might have made, whatever other accident might have befallen us. But we always seem to think it would be better than the reality.

  Before and After the old man chokes on his curried chicken sandwich; Before and After the middle-aged woman begins an affair with a married man; Before and After the child is abducted by someone lurking in the park.

  In between Before and After, I said the two words to Alex Hughes that changed the course of both our lives.

  These edges of cliffs are irrevocable, though they play and replay in our minds. Awake and asleep, we refashion the outcome through a succession of minuscule choices, finding all the possible ways to change the facts. In our fantasy, we imagine we are in control. We can turn back time. We can choose a different hand. But when we wake up we find we have not managed to change reality in any way. If we pray, we find that God has not managed to do so, either.

  The old man still has not chosen a restaurant where someone knows the Heimlich Maneuver; the middle-aged woman has not gone to buy her groceries on Wednesday instead of Tuesday; the child’s mother has not walked him to school.

  In my mind, I am still a boy in Toronto, and I’m still letting Annie pin the holly leaf onto my school blazer. Alex Hughes, truly the One Best Voice, has not left St. Mary’s prematurely, and is there with me to sing “Silent Night” in our fresh tenor voices, the last duet of our final Christmas concert. Or, at the right moment, I realize my own power, see I have a choice about how to use it, and hold out my hand for the stapled sheaf of paper, and for friendship, and for twinhood—I embrace it, even though this changeling twin never looked or behaved the way I expected. I’m perpetually standing on stage at Massey Hall, willing my memory of myself to open my mouth and sing. I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t make anything be different.

  I ONLY WOKE UP BECAUSE LOUISE WAS KNOCKING at the adjoining door. Well, pounding, really. I was half awake, with one eye open, but I couldn’t seem to move or speak, and after the brief pounding she opened the door and put her head in the crack, and hissed my name:

  “Frederick! Your mother! Like, now!”

  I grunted, she pulled the door closed, and I got my legs over the edge of the bed and pulled on some pants. I went through into the adjoining room, but there was no sign of either Louise or my mother, just two slept-in beds with the comforters slipping onto the floor, the way hotel room bedding always does. I sucked in some air and braced myself before continuing on to the bathroom.

  They were both in there. Louise was sitting on the edge of the bathtub with her hand on my mother’s shoulder. My mother was sitting in the tub, naked. There wasn’t a drop of water to be seen anywhere.

  “—told you I could put the cat in. Of all the crazy, no, brazen, no, broken, no—”

  Louise raised her eyebrows at me apologetically.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I can’t get her out by myself.”

  “How the hell did she get in?” I asked.

  “Did you ever hear the butter on the plate? I am not going to tell, no, telephone, and see bay lights, so never mind—” My mother seemed to be talking to her knees. They were, thankfully, bent up in front of her body, hiding most of her nakedness from my view.

  “I don’t know,” said Louise. “I was drying my hair. I took my eyes off her for maybe two minutes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me it was time to get up?” I demanded.

  “Never mind, never mind, never mind, never mind, never—”

  “I just thought I’d let you sleep,” she said.

  “Never mind,” I said. “What do you need me to do?”

  “When we went to the store the coat was on fire. I didn’t know how to eat it.”

  “I think if you get in behind her and lift her up that way?”

  I took another breath, and stepped over the edge of the tub, facing my mother’s back. I bent down and put my arms under hers.

  “One, two, three,” I said, and lifted.

  There is nothing that prepares a man for the sight and feel of his mother’s aged body, thin-skinned and soft, white as if all the years of sunlight come to nothing in the end. Her feet and hands seemed suddenly so small in relation to her body. I noticed the myriad dark moles and small skin tags on her back; I was trying to keep my gaze from the rest of her, a difficult undertaking in that room of mirrors. It was not a question of beauty or ugliness. It was a question of vulnerability. It is not nakedness itself, but the lack of awareness of nakedness, that is so piercing. My mother no longer knew what nakedness meant. She did not care a fig leaf about her lack of clothes. Like Eve before the Fall, she did not know that she was naked. She did not care that I was her son, that my naked chest was joined to her naked back, and that I lifted her up so her whole frail and mysterious body could not help but be seen.

  “In the dark days, a coat walked. The cat in the hat, hey. No, the cat in the hat. No.”

  That I did know that she was naked—that I kne
w, that I cared—was my issue, but thankfully I didn’t have time to deal with it then.

  Louise and I wrapped my mother in a giant bath towel. My mother’s skin was cold, and I shivered where she’d touched me. When we’d steadied her on her feet, I went out into the room and cranked up the heat.

  I THINK IT’S SAFE TO SAY THAT I HAVE BEEN to many more funerals than the average person, but I’ve only been to a handful of weddings in my life, and several of them had been held outside, on expansive lawns or breezy hillsides, where the wind blew the vows from the mouths of the bride and groom and tossed them over the hedgerows, out of everyone’s earshot. Except for Geoff and Linda’s—and they were divorced three years later—I’ve never actually heard two people repeat marriage vows to each other. And it seems very strange for someone with my childhood familiarity with God, but I’d never been to a wedding in a church.

  St. Giles’, Toronto, was a large pale-stoned building that could almost hold its own against the shining office towers that surrounded it. I had taken note of the fact that, for Catholics, St. Giles was the Patron Saint of cripples, beggars, lepers, and outcasts—you really can’t count on Catholics to keep up with political correctness—and that somehow seemed an appropriate venue for the first Madrigal wedding in a generation. This particular St. Giles was not Catholic, however, but Church of England, and I don’t know what, if anything, the shared saint was prepared to do for the Anglicans.

  Even though I’ve never been to one, I know enough about church weddings to know that Salvador and Johanna did it pretty much the way it’s supposed to be done.

  Except that instead of remaining hidden until the beginning of that Wagnerian standby, popularized in the past half-century as “Here Comes the Bride,” Johanna stood at the head of the receiving line warmly welcoming her and Salvador’s many guests.

  She was also six or seven months pregnant. She stood at the top of the church steps like a madonna, her white gown flowing over her rounding belly.