The Madrigal

by Dian Day

  The unit was pretty full, unused curtains pulled back between occupied beds, so all the patients could be seen at once, in a long line of human catastrophe, held together with tubing and kept alive by machinery. I had never seen so much distorted and damaged flesh in my life.

  I went at once to sit at my mother’s bedside. In many ways, I suppose I have never left.

  MY MOTHER’S CONTORTED FACE WAS A HORROR I couldn’t bear to look at, nor could I bear to look away. I was caught there, looking and looking away, believing and denying. I did not pray. I knew my voice had gone to hell with my mother, and there was, after such an irretrievable loss, no such thing as divine intervention.

  After I’d sat with my mother for a while, a doctor came and asked to talk to me. He had a form on a clipboard that he wanted me to sign. He offered me a pen. He put the clipboard on my knee.

  “My brothers are in the waiting room,” I said. “They’re just out there. They’re older than I am.”

  “They’re not there,” he said. He put the pen in my loose hand.

  I SLEPT AT ED AND SYLVIA’S PLACE on my first night away from Annie’s, but the next day, perhaps to give me something to do aside from waiting for news of my mother, Ed took me over to my mother’s apartment. She had moved from my many-bedroomed childhood home, without my knowing anything much about it aside from her new address, into a small apartment provided by the city, at a fixed rent, to people in receipt of Social Assistance. Public Housing, they call it. And it’s a fitting name, as it seems that living in Public Housing gives Joe and Josephine Public the right to ask the tenants and their kin personal questions about their secret lives. Only some of us, it seems, are allowed to keep our secrets to ourselves.

  Ed was not related to the Publics. He sat at my childhood kitchen table and hummed to himself for two hours while I wandered through the apartment like a caged animal and rifled through drawers and shelves like a thief. He never once asked me what I had found, what I was looking at, or what I was reading. He hummed away, “Ain’t No Sunshine” and “Down on the Corner” and “Spirit in the Sky,” and had no idea that I desperately needed him to ask, waited for him to ask, prayed that he would ask. It was my last prayer, and it went unheeded.

  My mother’s secrets were in a shoebox in her kitchen cupboard, lodged between Courtney Glass’ undefended dissertation on The Madrigal Twins and a set of six chipped egg cups, with feet that looked like yellow chickens. The box was faded, the design outdated, and the shoe size—boy’s 7—revealing its age. In it I found the few historical documents my mother had considered important enough to file, weighted down by a cowrie shell that read Aloha from Big Island on its polished pink surface.

  These documents included a marriage contract, Winchester to Madrigal, and three sets of birth certificates naming our father, and one—mine—that did not. There was a small handful of baby pictures of each of us, and the negative of one of all of my brothers together that I recognized from one of the twin books. There was a red and white social insurance card. There was a letter that included her social assistance file number, circled in blue pen. There was an old receipt for bail paid for Nathaniel Madrigal, pending a charge of Theft Under $5000. There was a small and haphazard collection of elementary school report cards. There was a copy of each of the Christmas concert programmes while I’d been at St. Mary’s, with my mother’s name written along the top in Annie’s fine handwriting. There were ten or more years’ worth of pocket calendars, with lines scratched cryptically through some of the dates—perhaps two or three a month—with double-digit amounts written in the narrow margins.

  There were no divorce papers. There were no bank books. There were no answers.

  I did locate a stack of twin books underneath the bathroom sink.

  Over the next few days, I had to meet with social workers, fill out forms, and have copies signed by doctors in triplicate. I had no idea what any of it meant; I had only just passed my eighteenth birthday the month before, and it was clear that I’d been living a sheltered life. I just kept signing whatever they put in front of me. My brothers had disappeared into air as thin as the line my mother then walked between staying put in her damaged body or leaving it.

  My mother’s social worker was Ms. Public personified. What, exactly, were my mother’s assets? Had I come across any evidence that there had ever been a man staying in the house? Did I know if there were bedbugs, cockroaches, or mice? How soon could her belongings be moved?

  My mother’s apartment needed to be vacated to make room for someone else. Even though she had survived the brain surgery, there was a general consensus that she would no longer be needing her home. I packed up some of her clothes to take to the hospital and left the furniture for the next tenant. I didn’t want any of her things except the pile of twin books and a handful of relevant papers. I threw out the rest—the bail receipt, the report cards, the calendars.

  At least, I thought, she had gotten clean away from the slum landlord.

  And, I thought, I had gotten clean away from my guilt.

  WE CAN TELL OURSELVES WHATEVER WE LIKE, but our bodies don’t lie. I lost over twenty pounds that winter—quite a feat for a teenaged boy. Annie wrote to me, care of Ed, long fervent letters inviting me back to her house in the Beaches to finish the term out, reminding me that God-given gifts carry an obligation to be shared. “You are not to blame,” she wrote. When I didn’t reply, she forwarded all my mail to Ed and Sylvia’s—all of it related to an evaporated future of auditions, entrance requirements, an official mark of Incomplete, and other lost causes. I think she hoped that these letters might persuade me, when she could not. All of it failed; it was a year of failure. I didn’t go back to St. Mary’s Choir School, or to Annie’s house in the Beaches. I enrolled myself in the local high school and graduated in the spring. Despite Ed and Sylvia’s urging, I did not join the Honour Choir or the school band.

  I got a part-time job as a bicycle delivery boy, bicycle provided, and rented a minute flat above a laundromat in the student district. I lived for the next three and a half years in a rising fog of detergent dust and dryer lint. When all the machines were running, my bed migrated across the sloping floor. I fell asleep to the sound of their vibrations and routinely woke up on the opposite side of the room. I kept my head down and managed to produce a decent enough average to get accepted into Commerce at Queens. It wasn’t as hard to get into in those days as it is now.

  Not too long afterwards,the Ns came home from Australia, Salvador got out of jail, and Samuel got out of rehab. In the early years, my brothers came by occasionally, but never stayed long. I was always happy when they were gone.

  Every Sunday, as penance, I went to see my mother.

  She got better slowly, over the course of weeks and months and years. By “better” I mean she came off life support and breathed with her own lung power. She moved from being perpetually flat on her back, to sitting up in a chair without her head lolling. She re-learned to stand, and to take shuffling steps forward, but she had no sense of destination. She was moved from the hospital to the most attentive level of care available in a nursing home. She regained something of language, but nothing of meaning.

  I IMAGINE THAT MOST PEOPLE FEEL, at times, that their lives have been co-opted by forces beyond their control. Who gets to choose what happens? We are never safe from blameless accident, from misguided goodwill—nor yet from careless stupidity and unintentional evil. And even sometimes, from jealousy, anger, vengeance, greed, and brutality—the rawest and basest of all human experiences. I am not exceptional in having lived some of these things; my small story fades into nothing, a niente, compared to that of countless others. So why tell it? I suppose because making peace with a small story is as important as making peace with a large one. For most of us, the tragedies are not absolute. We get up and go on, in some deep way transmuted from our former selves, but usually not visibly so. And then we spend the
rest of our lives trying to answer the question: What the hell happened?

  I WENT BACK TO WORK AFTER THE WEDDING, and I delivered letters for two days without consciously thinking about much of anything. There was too much to think about; instead, I sang to myself in the streets, quietly, my feet keeping time on the walkways and driveways and front lawns of my mail route.

  When we anticipate something for a very long time, its arrival inevitably generates a different scenario from the million and one responses we’ve practised in our heads. For many years, I’d expected to feel a mixture of loss and relief—but mostly relief. When the nursing home called at 4:53 a.m., I answered the phone from a deep sinkhole of sleep, as if my waking life had been worn down to sand and washed into the sea. I tried to say “hello,” but my voice had been eroded by breathing underground, and a sound came out that was not related to speech, but to music.

  “Frederick? It’s Aileen. Are you awake? I’m sorry. Are you awake now? Your mother’s passed away.”

  I appreciated that there was no beating around the bush. I put the receiver down carefully, and I curled myself around my bony knees like a cannonball diving champion, and I left my body there on the bed. I floated upwards until I was touching the ceiling, and I watched as I wept fiercely like a father losing his only child. I could feel the shadow of a knife in my chest where my heart was, down below on the bed, a fierce, piercing point of sharpness.

  There are some times in life when there is nothing but wracking sobs and snot, and at those times there is no time at all; there is just the pain, and its slow release. When I stopped, finally—and I think I only stopped because any more sobbing and my ribs would have cracked from it—the sun was bright in a bitter sky and Free-for-all was tapping impatiently on the windowpane, and I was back inside my body, and my head throbbed and my eyes were swollen almost shut. I wiped the salt and the snot away with the edge of my sheet, and I wondered, as if it were the most important question in the world, what the hell I would find to do with my Sunday afternoons.

  I CALLED IN TO WORK, MUCH TOO LATE, and let them know I wouldn’t be in. I went downstairs in my bare feet, found the peanut butter, put some out on the windowsill in an old yellow bowl, and watched, for a good while, as my twin squirrel friends nibbled the bowl clean until the intricate pattern of cracks in the ceramic were once again visible. I got dressed slowly, putting on socks and underwear like I was the stroke victim, and searched way at the back of my closet for my second clean white shirt in a week.

  I didn’t eat, or drink any coffee. I thought about my stash of Ed’s Rickard’s Red, but it was a kind of a joke thought, and I noticed how the right corner of my mouth turned up just a little, like half of me recognized it as funny. When I was finally ready to go see my mother, I opened the front door and stepped out into a new kind of orphaned day.

  Maya was sitting on the rail that divided the front porches of our two houses, but her feet were on my side of the decking. She looked like she had been sitting there a long time—probably, in fact, since she had heard the phone ring through the too-thin walls in the pre-dawn, and then heard what came after. There was no sign of her orange coveralls or of the piles of pipe that normally accompany her on a working day.

  “Is it your mother? I’ll drive you,” she said. Instead of pipe, she had a box of Kleenex tucked under her arm.

  We went down the short pathway together and crossed over to her truck. I had to move a rusty tub faucet off the passenger seat before I got in. The shocks in her truck were shot, and it was a bumpy ride.

  She didn’t speak at all during the short trip, for which I was very grateful.

  MY FIRST LIFE—MY BIRTHRIGHT—was taken from me on the day I opened my mouth to sing where others could hear me, in dark downtown streets crowded with revellers, my cap open on the ground to catch the coins of passersby. How carefully I placed that cap; how well I watched those streets for signs of the second coming. With those nickels and dimes, I set the stage myself for all that came after. Didn’t I want to be found there? Hadn’t I desperately hoped my voice would call to someone, anyone, to bring me out of my prison? And hadn’t I gone into that borrowed life with such a feeling of joy and power—a kind of musical intoxication—and never once truly looked back at what I had left? What was there to look back at? An over-crowded kitchen with a filthy, slanting floor. A torn flag hanging limply in my open bedroom doorway, the joists rotting behind the wallboard. My mother making sure she could afford to feed us, and the police ringing the doorbell repeatedly for my brothers, her Madrigal boys. The drips and the creaks and the dirty spoons and the boots on the stairs and the bell made up the only symphony I ever wanted to leave at intermission.

  I was obliged by a miracle, swept from that improvised music to notes planned and executed with precision. Suddenly, light was everywhere. Light streaming in through the living room windows like radiant energy, touching everything, settling on Annie’s exquisite piano like dust from God’s long-handled broom. More rooms to sleep in or sit in than people, and a bathroom all to myself. A kind of hush over everything that waited only for the most pleasing of notes to sound. That expertly tuned piano. Annie’s fine voice. My own.

  But in its turn, the life given to me by my benefactors was derailed in an instant between absolute power and crippling remorse, between the opening of my mouth to sing, St. Mary’s One Best Voice, and the terrible silence that followed.

  I often think now about the irony of being taken from one mother into the arms of another, more saintly perhaps, yet even more remote. Mary, mother of God, patron saint of mothers. Would you have traded your body to feed and shelter your child?

  Hail Mary, full of grace, hear my sins.

  There are some things in my life that I haven’t done well. I deserted my past, as if it were possible to create an opus without the overture. I was too much a child, even when I should have been becoming a man. When I had my chance to be a hero, I behaved like a coward, and have been a coward ever since. I believed too much in my own salvation, yet I turned away from The Call. I wholeheartedly believed those who told me that I was the One Best Voice.

  I was never the One Best Voice.

  Hail Mary, patron saint of mothers, including my own.

  What started as a cowardly retreat to safety became, in time, a different kind of gift: in the last quarter of my mother’s life, though too late for her to know it, I was a good son.

  MY MOTHER, IT SEEMS, DIED SINGING the Thomas Morley madrigal we’d sung together at Salvador’s wedding. She got up in the middle of the night, got out of bed, and took off all her clothes. She did all this very quietly, and Aileen, who was on duty that night, heard nothing until the singing started. “At first, I thought someone down the hall had turned on a radio,” she told me afterwards. “It was faint, like the volume was turned down, and the music kept cutting in and out like the dial wasn’t quite on the station.”

  “Well, that part was maybe right,” I said, and it seemed possible. The idea of my mother’s voice as a garbled radio signal was somehow comforting. It meant that somewhere, for some people, her song was coming in loud and true; somewhere, nearer the radio tower, someone could have reached their hand out and laid it on the console—my mother’s heart—and would have heard clearly all that it contained.

  Aileen went down the hall to investigate and found my mother standing naked, facing away from the door, holding herself up by singing, with one hand on the headboard of her bed and the other waving the air in front of her in time to a trembling beat unrelated to her voice. The bed sheets were trailing on the floor, and her clothes and diaper were jumbled around her feet.

  “I tried to get her to lie back down, Frederick,” said Aileen, “but she really resisted me. I didn’t want to force her. She just seemed so determined to keep singing.”

  “It’s okay, Aileen. I’m glad you let her sing.” I know she was feeling badly about it all. Even with
all the endings nursing home staff experience, Guilt can still follow Death in through any open doorway.

  “I was just worried she would be cold. But I didn’t really have any choice. It was like there was someone else in the room she was singing to. Her eyes were focused, and she didn’t turn her head from the window. Not once. I don’t know what she thought was there.”

  “It’s all right, Aileen. She thought someone was there. That’s all that matters.”

  “Do you think so?” she asked me, doubtfully.

  “I am sure of it,” I said. It seems that it’s often the job of those who are most bereaved to offer comfort to others.

  But I don’t know what or who my mother saw at the window. I like to think she had an audience at the end, even one of her own imagining. I often think now of who it might have been: me, or my brothers, or perhaps my father or her own long-departed parents, or even God himself. I don’t think it matters who, as long as, in her demented mind, someone heard those final wavering notes and understood at last what she was singing about.

  When Aileen couldn’t get her to lie down, she pushed the button beside my mother’s bed for help. What she didn’t know then was that in the next ward over, a man named Clarence McKinley was having a noisy heart attack, so all the ward staff—her emergency backup—were already focused on the bed where Clarence lay. She didn’t know then that, after a time, he died there, clutching his chest and inhaling, the air like a rasp across his throat.

  So Aileen waited with my mother, but no one came.

  “She got to the end of the song, Frederick, and then she started singing it again from the beginning.”