by Dian Day
WE WERE GOING TO TAKE MY MOTHER in by the side door where there was a ramp, but Abraham and Alistair picked up her wheelchair and swept her up the front steps as if she weighed no more than a child. At the top of the steps, she was installed in a position of honour next to the groom, and solemnly greeted each new arrival with statements like “The cat is in the feather!” and “Staples and marmalade!” I was worried that she’d start to get really worked up, but Louise just shook her head at me.
“She’s okay,” she said. “Just look at her. She’s having the time of her life.”
And it was true that she seemed more contented than usual. All the same, I think to mollify me, Louise went and stood as innocuously as possible behind her chair. I was swept up by the flow of people and embraced—“Frederick, I’m so very delighted,” said Johanna—after which I was clapped on the back and cuffed on the side of the head—“Hey guy, good to see you! You see my lovely girls?” said Salvador, tipping his head at Johanna and her belly—and then I was handed down the line of Madrigal Boys like a mystery gift in the children’s game of “pass the parcel.” At the end of the line, it was made clear that I was expected to take up the welcoming torch at the tail-end of this boisterous clan, and I stood awkwardly, as if I didn’t know that I belonged there and had forgotten how to wag.
After an enormous amount of time and an entire symphony of guests, Samuel, best man, herded Salvador and Johanna into the vestry and the rest of us to the two front rows that had been reserved for family with garlands of white ribbons. My mother’s chair was wheeled up the wide centre aisle of the packed church and parked beside Louise and me in the creaking pews.
The ceremony remains a bit of a blur. The priest appeared wearing a white surplice over his cassock and a stole the colour of an unripe pear draped around his neck. When the organ started, the bride and groom walked down the aisle together, hand in hand, side-stepping neatly around the wheelchair.
“Is the hat under the bed?” asked my mother. “Nuts and bolts!”
There was a great deal of speaking by the priest, and some amount of praying. Everyone stood up and sat down quite a number of times. Salvador and Johanna had prepared words to read to each other, and spoke them solemnly. My mother had a lot of things to say, too, but nobody seemed to mind, so I tried to stop being anxious about it.
I sat in my pew and watched Johanna’s belly. I watched Samuel, standing beside Salvador; a fraction shorter, a few pounds heavier, but otherwise two identical faces, note by note, built from the same material. All their faces, each a double of one other, but all of them so similar that it seemed impossible to forget the sight of them, lined up, shining a dark light, but still so beautiful.
I NOTICED, FIRST, A PARTICULAR SILENCE, and then saw that my brother and his wife, newly married, were looking expectantly in my direction. I saw how everyone else had followed their gaze. My brothers in the row across from me; all their startling girlfriends and partners, beautiful in yellow and peach and lilac dresses; the family of the bride, the men all wearing bow ties and the women all wearing cardigans; all the heads in the church had turned, and were looking at me, Frederick Madrigal, waiting with an inexplicable confidence in my ability to overcome inertia. The organist had moved to a piano, and quietly sounded the first note of a Thomas Morley madrigal I had sung countless times in the lady chapel of St. Mary’s. A tune I had heard my mother sing in that tilting kitchen, a lifetime of longing in her golden voice.
The note hung in the air and faded away like my childhood, dream-like and distant. Beside me, my mother struggled up from her wheelchair to stand in the aisle, the centre of attention in the flowered dress I had bought for her. I was afraid she would fall and leaned over to try to get her to sit down again.
Louise elbowed me, hard, in the ribs.
I stood up beside my mother; I had no choice if I wanted to keep her from falling over. I put my arm around her back and tucked my hand into the crook of her elbow. The skin of her arm hung loosely across my scar. The silence surrounding us was full of waiting, but I could not break into it alone.
Louise had surely only heard those words for the first time the day before, through the half-open door adjoining our rooms, as I practised the song over and over. But, brave in ribbons, like a character from Dickens, she stood up beside me and began to sing,
Sing we and chant it
While love doth grant it
All things invite us
Now to delight us.
Her soft voice crackled when she began, a half-note too low. She was forcing the notes, trying to lift her breath into the music. But as she sang the music moved into her chest, and the power of it grew quickly until it had a kind of raw purity that shimmered until all the air of St. Giles’ was etched with silver.
And my mother joined in, already standing and waiting for her cue to the lines she still, even then, remembered.
Not long youth lasteth
And old age hasteth
Now is best leisure
To take our pleasure.
What choice did I have? I had been brought to this moment by all the music in the universe, and there was nothing to do but give it back to itself.
Hence, care, be packing
No mirth be lacking
Let spare no treasure
To live in pleasure.
I sang for Johanna and Salvador and their coming baby—my miraculous singleton niece. I sang for their multitude of friends, arranged in pews like memories, as far back as we could remember. I sang for my brothers’ identical forms, and for my mother’s damaged brain. I sang for my lost boyhood, both my salvation and my fall from grace. I sang for Alex’s stolen dreams, and my own, so guiltily discarded. I sang to both innocence and cruelty. In the end, it seems that singing is the only way we can expect to go on.
Then the whole church of witnesses joined in. It was like a hymn to hope.
Fa la la la, la la la, la la la!
Fa la la la, la la la, la la la!
TRUE TO FORM, THE RECEPTION HAD A WILD, Madrigal edge to it, a party alla zingarese.
I watched the dancing from a corner of the room; I was exhausted and desperately wanted to be alone.
I hadn’t planned it, but after about twenty minutes I told Louise I was going out for a walk to get some air. I put on my hat and coat and went out of the room and down the hall to the curving staircase, where I skirted the lobby, and met the night.
I emerged into a foreign land, but one that has appeared regularly in my dreams. The energy of the city is different once the streetlights come on. There is both a sense of solidarity and a heightened awareness of our own frailty. I felt like an echo of myself, sensed that dull ache in the sternum that makes us feel apart from everything, invisible and unknowable and unworthy.
I wandered aimlessly for a while, turning this way or that when I came to the end of a block. Before I knew it, I found myself in Yonge-Dundas Square.
There were people everywhere. People smoking and skateboarding and drawing on the sidewalk and fighting and handing out leaflets and talking and drinking, but mostly just standing around in the cold, waiting for something to happen. There were a few white open-sided tents set up for some soon-to-be-held event, and there were small groups huddled under their shelter, as if warmth could be made without walls. There were people lying on the ground alongside them, wrapped in dirty sleeping bags, dead or drunk beyond measure, or perhaps merely over-weary of the hardships of their lives and in need of a little time out.
There were people on the move, too. Weaving through the crowds, making deals, running for the subway, sauntering home with an air of nonchalance but clutching the straps of their shoulder bags closely to their chests.
I stood for a while at the corner of Yonge and Dundas, with my back against one of those great pillars near the subway station entrance, half-hidden by shadow. It was still dream-like a
nd familiar, those night people moving in those night streets. Here and there, music was being made. I could hear the anaemic sounds of a harmonica far to my left, and there was a classical guitar being plucked straight ahead of me on the opposite side of the square. But none of them was near enough for me to hear more than a few faint bars before being interrupted by loud swearing or the blaring of a horn on the street behind me.
I thought of an old Irish folk song, “Wild Mountain Thyme.” The song was one of Ed’s favourites. I had an image of Ed sitting alone in the shop looking hollow like a thin reed, with no music of his own left, and I could see how wrong that was. I could see that without music, he would die.
I’ve said that I never thought of Ed as a father figure, but I realized then that that was no longer exactly true. Maybe part of the shift had come about because Ed had suddenly emptied out, and because I’ve wanted to try to fill him up again, to satisfy some kind of unfillable need. It was the same role I’ve played with my mother all my adult life. Maybe it’s the only way I know how to be a son.
And then I saw a vision of Louise in the crowded doorway of the hotel, the way she’d been that afternoon. I saw the way she held on to the handles of my mother’s wheelchair with an unexpected ferocity—for her, taking care of my mother and the other residents was the thing she lived for, her soul, her music.
“Sing for her,” the image insisted.
I opened my mouth, and the trembling notes emerged like declarations of first love, soft and uncertain.
My heart was hammering in my throat.
Nobody cares, I thought. As Louise had suggested, there are times when this can indeed be a reassurance.
O the summer time has come
And the trees are sweetly blooming
And wild mountain thyme
Grows around the purple heather.
Will you go, lassie, go?
By the time I got to the end of the first verse, people around me were beginning to turn and look, faces distracted, or curious, or surprised—a few even seemed pleasantly surprised. The lights from the billboards and the windows of the Eaton Centre and the shop fronts stretching down the street, as well as those of the countless offices and apartments around the square made the dark sky almost inconspicuous, a mere backdrop to life, not even a single faint star visible. But it was a big night all the same, a bigness engineered by human hands. The energy of all those lights and all that noise and all those people made any one thing, any one person, seem profoundly insignificant. And so my voice gathered strength and grew louder.
I will build my love a tower
By yon clear crystal fountain
And on it I will pile
All the flowers of the mountain.
Will you go, lassie, go?
I moved out into the light. I inhaled the whole city. I found my younger self and touched him, lightly, on the outside of his palms. I could sense the graphite on my downy upper lip. I could feel sharp coins under the arches of my feet.
A passing woman dug into her bag and threw some change in my direction, and it scattered along the pavement like lost wishes.
If my true love she’ll not come
Then I’ll surely find another
To pull wild mountain thyme
All around the purple heather.
Will you go, lassie, go?
In between the final verses I took off my cap and laid it in front of me on the cold pavement. Beside me, my shadow played on the concrete column, and, when I straightened up, I imagined for a minute that Filander smiled.
And we’ll all go together
To pull wild mountain thyme
All around the purple heather.
Will you go, lassie, go?
I MEANT TO GO BACK THE WAY I HAD COME. But I was disoriented, trying to put the lights and the buzz and tangle of traffic noise behind me. Somehow I ended up at the other end of the block.
I walked along, brushing shoulders with myriad men and women, both broken and whole and in transition. I travelled only a few blocks before turning off into a much quieter and more familiar street. I stood in the middle of the block and leaned against the wrought iron gates, and the strange silence and stillness stretched around me like a dark cocoon. The cathedral, the school building, nothing had changed. I zigzagged up the street, and my shoes on the pavement sounded as if from a closed room.
In front of the cathedral, the statue of Mary still held out her stone hand, as if beckoning, asking, begging for my return. Her stone face was fine-featured, and her stone gaze was filled with compassion. She was looking right through me.
“Hail Mary, full of grace,” I began. “The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, Amen.”
I remembered the words to the prayer as easily as I did the lyrics to any song, the way we remember the songs and poems and prayers of our childhood, one word tumbling out after the other, the stream of words taking us by surprise, coming from a distant place in our minds so rarely touched and almost completely buried.
“Hail Mary, full of grace,” I repeated. Most of my brain was watching the sentences line up, word following word, without paying any attention to their meaning. I might almost have been reciting my Social Insurance Number or my bank card number or my address. “Blessed art thou amongst women.”
Even if we speak only by rote, calling into the darkness invokes a mystery more profound than our own solitary mind. Even if we have no belief in the summons, we begin to feel a Presence.
The shift was almost imperceptible. At the edges of my field of vision I began to see dust motes sparkling in the dark. The statue looked a little less stone-like; her hand stretched out a little farther towards me. It was impossible not to want to reach out my own hand. I ached for it.
I thought of my own mother, how she’d been hovering for twenty years between life and death, without the comforts of either: not the strength of communication, not the sympathy of the void. But with a blessing, too: she’d lived those twenty years without guilt.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”
I noticed I had kneeled before I realized I was praying.
THE CLOAKROOM DOOR SWUNG SHUT behind Alex, and I did not go after him. I held tightly to the gloves he had left behind, limp and hollow versions of his fine hands. I offered them to the closed door, as if I could pull him back by such insubstantial means. He did not come back. Not then.
In that terrible moment, he ran away from me, and he kept running until he had cut himself loose from shadowy twinhood. He cut himself loose, literally, with a disposable double-edged razor blade carefully removed from his foster father’s Gillette. And then I ran from him, my own hands already scarred by the loss of Filander, and now somehow doubly scarred by the loss of a second-chance twin.
Every life has its defining moments, even if we cannot see until much later where those moments begin and end, how they get sewn together to make the fabric of our lives, or how they get ripped apart to make scraps and offcuts that don’t make a quilt, no matter how many times the pieces are turned. What I said, and then what I didn’t say, to Alex, has unwound and unravelled my life for over twenty years. It has unravelled both of us. Nothing fit together neatly after that. The edges of the present overlap. The holes in the past persist.
Alex did not come back then. And when he did come to find me again, the following year—when he sought me out despite what I had done to him, and to myself—he was fortified by drink, which I mistook for cowardice rather than a bolster to courage. Twenty years passed before he gave me another chance to hand back those gloves, and do the right thing. Even though I was still unforgiving, he came again, perfectly sober, as if, unlike me, he had grown strong enough, at last, to imagine al
ternatives to a life without song.
I did not then think of Alex as my twin, more real even than Filander, and I have not allowed myself to consciously think it since; but on some deep level I have always felt it, and conscious of it or not, in the moment when he ran I felt the full impact of the loss. When I ran, it was because I was unable to lose any more of myself, even if I was sure he did not look like me at all.
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I thought that everyone had melody the way I did, that it was for all of us an automatic part of human existence like breathing or blinking. Music is our first home after all. What we hear in the womb—our mother’s heartbeat, the rushing river of her blood, the tuning of her bowels, the vibration of her vocal chords—prepares us for the time when percussion, strings, brass, and woodwinds combine to create a life. When I walked, I marched to a tune that came into being with the slap of my shoes on the sidewalk and the stretch of my tendons and the pumping of my own small heart and the rush of my blood. If I started to run when I caught sight of Dougie Fairweather waiting for me after school, lurking behind a lilac bush, the tempo changed of its own accord, keeping time with my thrice-worn sneakers as easily as a professional symphony responds to the conductor’s baton. When I read the words in a book or turned its pages, there grew organically a song about books and reading, full of cadence and flutter and the cymbal crash of the last word. When I bathed, I did so with a liquid melody punctuated by dripping scales. When people talked around me, I heard a euphony in their words that I assumed was part of speech itself, like fragments of birdsong strung along a melody line. If the music inside me met with music externally—in a shop or an elevator, or in our kitchen at home late at night—there was a seamless merging of notes, strung together in a perfect medley. When I got to St. Mary’s, my assumptions were confirmed. Everything in the world was guided by music, accompanied by music, created by music, note and tone and timbre. I assumed we were all Aborigines calling the world into life with our songlines.
I believed everyone had music; I only wondered how it didn’t show in some people, how it didn’t come out of them, how it was contained inside. It wasn’t easy to suppress, this I knew. How could one suppress breathing or blinking? I’d tried it myself, lying in my bedroom at Annie’s, staring at the ceiling with my eyes wide open until they ached with the effort. I conceded defeat time after time and closed my lids slowly across my dried-out pupils, the lullaby playing, the mystery unsolved.