The Madrigal

by Dian Day

  It wasn’t until After that I realized that not everyone had music inside them. I only figured it out because the music in my own head and heart and body suddenly stopped. What had been constant, familiar, companionable, and inherent disappeared like songbirds in September. It was like I forgot how to breathe. It was like I lived without breathing for years.

  TWO DAYS BEFORE MY FINAL CHRISTMAS CONCERT at St. Mary’s, the phone rang at Annie’s house, and I watched her cross the dining room, her heels clicking on the oak floors, giusto, to answer it in the kitchen.

  I was sitting on the sofa in old sweat pants and a brand new red flannel shirt—a recent birthday present sent from Ed and Sylvia—with my bare feet up on the coffee table, the floor around me littered with sheet music. We’d been discussing my audition piece for Juilliard, with Annie at the piano ready to play whatever I handed her, reaching out easily for the sheets of paper, outstretched hand to outstretched hand.

  “Hello,” she said, in her telephone voice.

  Her back was facing me, but as soon as the person at the other end began to talk she turned and looked at me intently through the glass in the French door, her forehead tight, and her face growing pale. So I knew right away it was something to do with me.

  She mostly listened. Whoever it was had a lot to say, so there were long spaces of silence for me in that living room, listening for clues. I don’t think I had any inkling of what it was about—how could I?—but I know I stopped humming and put down the piece I was holding in my hand. I just sat and waited with an anxious twist in my stomach that wouldn’t let the notes out.

  “Yes,” she said. “I see.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “No, no. That won’t be necessary.”

  “I think so, yes.”

  Finally, the conversation seemed to be coming to a close. I remember thinking how interesting it was that I could be aware of that, could accurately read all the little non-verbal clues that had to do with timing and cadence, could know, too, that there was something else Annie hesitated to say. But in the end, she did.

  “Will he be all right?” she asked, and there was praying in her voice.

  She got her answer, her head leaning against the side of the refrigerator.

  “Of course,” she said, “of course,” and the call ended. She turned slowly to put the receiver back in its cradle, and when she turned around again she did not look at me.

  “Who was that?” I asked, clearing my throat.

  “The headmaster.”

  “What is it?”

  There was a length of time when her mouth opened and closed, piangendo, but no words emerged.

  “Alex Hughes won’t be singing with you on Saturday,” she said, finally. “He tried to kill himself. They think he’s going to be all right, but he—” She waved one open palm over the upturned wrist of her other hand. It seemed she could not look at me.

  There was a silence that had nothing to do with music. There was a hollowness in my ears so profound that I felt I had gone stone deaf.

  The silence lasted a long time. It might have been twenty minutes; it might have been an hour. Annie sat on the sofa, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, and did nothing but stare at the carpet.

  I did nothing but stare at the top of her bent head.

  ANNIE’S HEAD STAYED BENT; when I left her for the last time, she was shrunken, like a distant shadow. She moved around—she cooked, drove the car, swept the snow off the steps—but something that had been holding her life up had been bent or broken.

  My heart ached, and I couldn’t bring myself to go to school. I sat in my room in Annie’s house for days, staring at nothing and chewing my cheeks raw. I was praying. I prayed for some miracle to save me from St. Mary’s, from my teachers and friends, from the statue of the Virgin I would have to pass as I made my way toward the school gate. I was praying to God, but the Devil was the one who heard me.

  Annie brought me sandwiches that I didn’t touch. Unseen, the crusts dried and curled and shrunk. Everything shrunk. Nothing mattered. She stood stooped in the doorway, over and over, and tried her best:

  “Do you want me to drive you to the hospital?”

  “No.”

  “I can. I can swing by there on my way to the library.”

  “No thank you.”

  “I just think it would be easier than taking the bus.”

  “I’m not going to the hospital.” The truth was, I could walk if I wanted to. The hospital where Alex lay with slashed wrists was in East York, and so just across the Danforth.

  “You’re his friend, Frederick. Don’t you think—”

  “No,” I said. “No. Leave me alone. I’m not going.” And she would leave me alone for a little while. But eventually there would be another sandwich, and another attempt.

  “Call, then,” she said, placing a fresh plate on my desk. “Just call him on the telephone. I’ll get the room number for you.”

  “I’m not calling,” I told her. My teeth ached with the effort. It was my last word on the subject, to anyone.

  MY MOTHER AND LOUISE AND I ARRIVED HOME in the dark. I parked the van in the fire lane, and we got my mother’s chair—with her asleep in it—strapped into the hydraulic lift and lowered onto the walkway in front of the care facility. I left the van there while we wheeled her upstairs to her room, where I helped Louise lift her into bed. I pulled her shoes off, and Louise unsnapped the back of her dress and pulled it away from her body. It came away like she was shedding a skin.

  She’d slept the entire way home. Louise said she’d sung the whole way through the reception with every song the DJ played that she knew. She had exhausted herself with music.

  I started to pull the blankets up around my mother’s shoulders, but Louise stopped me.

  “I should probably change her diaper first,” she told me. It was said gently, as if she understood full well what it is to hear that said of one’s mother.

  “Oh,” I said. “Perhaps I’ll get going then?” I had been pierced enough for one day.

  “Right,” she agreed. “You need sleep too.” I think we were both relieved. I went to go, but it didn’t seem right to just leave.

  So I said, “Thank you, Louise—” hesitating then, because that was both not nearly enough and at the same time all I could say.

  She came around the bed to where I was standing. “Good night,” she said. And she kissed me gently on the cheek, her lips leaving the faintest trace of her leftover courage on my skin.

  I COULDN’T IMAGINE SLEEPING. I lay in the too-soft bed thinking about my mother, her brain, singing in the street, the wedding. Thinking about Louise, and, rather alarmingly, about how her lips looked when she called for me to sing. Thinking about Salvador getting married. Thinking about all of my brothers, the lack of infant Madrigals, my mother’s brain. One of those round and round kind of nights, when you think you have finally freed yourself of a particular train of thought, only to find that the divergent ideas led you right back to the place you started, like a snake swallowing its tail. I went through it all again and again and again.

  THE DOORBELL RANG AT ANNIE’S. I went to answer it in my bare feet, feeling the hardwood beneath me as if I were made of stone. There was no glass in the door, nor any sidelights, so when I looked out at the two men on her front step, I was taken so much by surprise that I didn’t immediately realize that they were two of my brothers. If they had not been twins I would hardly have recognized them. Though they were only in their early twenties then, they were big men, fully grown. In my head, I can see them as I would if I looked back now, heartbreakingly young. But as a teenager, they looked to me as if they were ancient oracles of familiar and potent power. I was afraid, but then it seemed I had already been filled with fear, even before they arrived at Annie’s door.

  I held th
e door open so long that Annie came up behind me. I could feel her presence behind my left shoulder, as if there were something otherworldly there, hollow and wounded. Alistair introduced himself and Abraham, and Annie, called into action by middle-class training, invited them in, shutting the door firmly behind them. Alistair, who was always just a little more socially adept than the others, removed his boots in the hallway, and so Abraham followed suit. Although there were enough seats in the living room to easily accommodate the four of us, I stood in the doorway with one frozen foot in the hall.

  In their sock feet, my brothers’ discomfort was more palpable. I could see them fingering the arms of the leather furniture and sizing up the grand piano.

  Annie offered coffee, but they refused almost in unison, as if the refusal of refreshment had been something they had previously agreed upon.

  “It’s not really a social call,” Alistair explained, a line I had always believed belonged only in movies. There was twitching, and throat clearing, and eyes sliding, a wave that rippled across their twin faces, still rough and browned from the sun, even in December.

  “Well,” said Annie, into the vacancy of conversation, attempting to force a lightness into her voice that she was clearly unable to feel. “Perhaps you’d like tea?” It seemed an ineffectual way to incite them to state their business, since business was what they’d come for.

  “We have some bad news,” said Alistair.

  “More bad news?” said Annie weakly. She put out a trembling hand, but it patted the air uselessly in front of her.

  “We came to tell Fred.” My brothers both looked at me then, and Annie suggested she would leave for a few minutes, to give us some privacy. I think really she could not bear any more and she half got up out of her chair. They hurried to assure her that that was not what they’d meant at all. She sat reluctantly down again, putting her hand on the arm of the chair for support.

  Then there was some more delay, and rearrangement of legs and arms, and Annie asking impatiently for me to come and sit down, and me refusing. We all waited, wondering who would speak to break this ominous spell.

  It was Abraham who told me.

  The scene became more dreamlike. Faces float in and out of focus. Points of time were replayed and reversed and replayed again. I watched the whole scene from the outside: how I gripped the doorframe, how my knees locked my legs into an upright position, how everyone watched me so closely, how my face felt like it was made of flesh-coloured stone.

  How I felt, initially, nothing at all, and then a wave of shame for that nothingness briefly flushed my face. But it passed quickly, and I was conscious of controlling the muscles of my cheeks, hardening my eyes, holding my breath. I made myself into stone. For the next feeling was relief, and it overpowered the shame like a deluge. Relief, like a hymn to creation sung by a hundred angels. Like a miracle of music, as if music could be sung with such cowardly feeling.

  How I hid that so well from them all, my brothers and Annie. How they continued to look at me with concern.

  How I said: “We’re going to be late for the concert.” As if I could still think about a musical future.

  How everyone got up, and my brothers and Annie said things that I didn’t understand; they must have been talking another language, the way people do in dreams, a language our sleeping mind invents when things are simply too big to be properly understood.

  “Are you sure you still want to do this, Frederick?” Annie asked me, and that one sentence is like an island that I could recognize in fogbound waters. I noticed then that she had finally given way to crying.

  How I somehow communicated my impatience. How my brothers left Annie’s house, putting their boots on a hundred times in the hallway, tying their laces over and over again. How they promised to try to come to the concert. How they would wait in the lobby after the show. How Annie told them whom to call to see if there were any last-minute tickets. How she explained that they should say they are my brothers, as family members have priority seating.

  All that was the lead up to my last solo—or so the programme’s last-minute insert falsely announced. For a solo must be sung in order to come into existence.

  There was nothing but a void.

  In the void was my mother, speechless, lying unconscious and on life support in the ICU of the General Hospital in my home town.

  I hadn’t been home in four and a half years. I hadn’t seen her even once in all that time. I’d written letters with resentment.

  And she was my out, my escape, my excuse. Her catastrophe was my salvation. I could leave St. Mary’s. I could leave everything behind me.

  Scene by scene, night after night, that terrible evening replayed in vivid detail, meting out these events minute by minute, line by line, bar by bar, note by note. The thing that is the most painful for me to remember was that, when I was standing upon that stage with my voiceless mouth open, two of my brothers and Annie and half the elite of Toronto in the audience, I looked around desperately for Alex, Second Best Voice. As if, in my moment of greatest need, he might grant forgiveness and be a stand-in for God, or for Filander, however imperfect, and come to my musical rescue. But in reality, he was gone from me, gone from St. Mary’s, and already lost to singing.

  I WAS ON THE STAGE AT MASSEY HALL, wearing my St. Mary’s navy blazer and my best maroon tie. Annie had pinned a sprig of holly onto my lapel. It had a green smell and a brightness that shone out like a spirit light. I looked down to see evidence of snow still on my shoes, and small gritty puddles forming on the long boards of the stage. When I looked up again, the house lights were inexplicably up, and I could see the hall was packed with people, floor and balcony and gallery. Annie was sitting in the front row, with my brothers sitting awkwardly beside her, but on the other side of her there was an empty seat, and for a minute I was sure she was waiting for my mother. For a minute, I felt such relief, for if Annie was waiting for her arrival I knew she could not be in the hospital. She could not be ill; hadn’t my brothers always been liars? And if their news was false, perhaps my world was full of falsehood. There had been no shredded paper, no name-calling, no running away, no not-following. It was going to be all right.

  I heard the first few bars of “Silent Night” in my head. I opened my mouth. I could feel how my teeth came together for a fraction of a second, how my tongue touched the bottom of my lower incisors, how the “S” sound waited there for the right note, but the note did not get sung. Instead, the tune circled around to the beginning again, the orchestra conductor, our music teacher, looking at me intently. I inhaled again, ready to sing. No G note, but once again the opening bars of the song. Behind the music there was not the kind of quiet that is customary in concert halls when a performer is about to begin, the quiet of anticipation and good manners. People’s mouths were moving, their heads turning up and back, their hands gesturing as if engaged in animated conversation. I couldn’t hear anything except the opening bars of “Silent Night,” and then a musical circle so we could come once more to the beginning.

  I fell in and out of sleep, but whenever I woke up “Silent Night” was being played by the orchestra all the way through, as if it had always been intended as an instrumental interlude in the evening’s programme.

  I DON’T REMEMBER MUCH about the rest of the concert. I don’t remember at all how I got myself off the stage. Perhaps I was helped off, but I have no memory left of that time. I know the next day there was some discussion about me going home with my brothers, but Annie, in a last wise decision related to my care, refused to allow this, on the grounds that I needed something—or somebody—more familiar to me than they were. They took their fading tans and their monochrome tattoos and their steel-toed boots, packed themselves into a rusted-out and dented car, and drove off into the snow-struck day without any evidence of affront. I expect that they were as relieved as I was. They both slapped my back and shoulders before they
went, in a classic display of masculine solicitude.

  Annie looked out at her car sitting in the driveway dozens of times, listened to the weather report, looked at her boots on the mat, picked up her keys and put them down again.

  In the end, Ed came to get me, closing the shop early three hours away and driving all the way to Annie’s without even stopping there for a cup of tea before he turned around and went back again with me in the passenger seat. I remember the snow blew diagonally across the highway, riding the wind, and for an hour or more we drove in the wake of a hulking snow plow. I think I was fixated on that flashing light, so much so that all other thought became blessedly impossible. I remember Ed spoke to me rather earnestly during the trip home, but I have no idea what he said. Knowing Ed, I expect he offered up his usual mix of eclectic philosophies and grim pronouncements; I do know he was trying to be comforting. I was spared any more back-slapping, at least.

  He took me right to the hospital. He asked me if I’d eaten, knowing I hadn’t, and suggested we stop in the cafeteria for a sandwich, but when a meat and mustard concoction was placed in front of me, on that ubiquitous plastic orange tray, I found myself unable to swallow.

  We went up to the ICU. When we got there, AA came out so that I could go in— there was a rule about only two family members allowed in at one time. They were the only pair of brothers available for such a visit, since the others were either hospitalized, incarcerated, or in semi-hiding Down Under.

  Up until then, Ed had been beside me on this journey, but he hesitated in the doorway, unsure of his place. I could feel that, but I didn’t turn and encourage him, so he stayed where he was and let me go in alone. Long afterwards, he told me that my brothers, perhaps making the most of their singular freedom, soon evaporated into the elevator, and he himself sat indecisively in the waiting room for hours, contemplating questions of biology.