The Night Singers

by Valerie Miner

  But her son Tony said, “Right on, Mom, this will be good for you.”

  Fred, who had already sold the property to the realtor who, indeed, sold it to a developer, had no objections now.

  Prill stayed up late at night, neglecting her work, to compose impassioned letters to The Chronicle and The Bay Guardian and environmental newsletters.

  KGO called. A farm in the middle of San Francisco? The interviewer was astonished. Listeners phoned in. The story appealed to their romantic impulses, to their senses of history.

  Neighbours became her biggest supporters: those considerate, neat, apartment dwellers cultivating urban gentility. After all, her cause celebrated the City’s frontier past and picturesque present. Prill’s most effective allies were the Gay Greenies, which at first surprised her. Then she realised many of these sophisticates were actors or writers or artists who valued tradition. She liked these lithe, witty men, although she hoped Tony’s current experiments in their world would be brief and that he’d find a less complicated path to love.

  Prill gazes to the left of her loom—to the wall where she’s hung family portraits. She spent months collecting photographs from aunts and uncles and cousins, having them reproduced and framed, designing the layout. She put as much work into that wall as she’d devote to hanging a textile exhibit. The reward: exclamations of delight from relatives. Everyone likes to find his or her face in a person from the past. Here is Great Grandfather Leo and his young bride Gianna in stiff studio setting, their pioneer fear and hope shining through. Then Grandfather Gino and his pale bride Eleanor being married at St. Mary’s. Great Aunts and Uncles. Her father’s siblings. Her own parents: Art just back from World War II and Dorothy dancing in platform shoes. Cousin Fred playing basketball. Silvio, herself and Tony from a 70s snapshot. And in the middle of all the faces rests her photo of Leo’s olive tree at sunset.

  The wretched developer, Clifton Monroe, a name straight out of the annals of WASP villainy, remained unmoved by the petition and protests and articles. For some reason he agreed to a radio debate. In a tiny studio, they sat next to each other, wearing big earphones and fastening their eyes on the interviewer. Prill tried to be civil, but lost her cool in four minutes.

  “Why all this greed?” she railed, then steadied her voice. “If you built a single family house, you’d double your investment.”

  “There’s a housing crunch in San Francisco, Madame, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  Madame, did he think she was running a brothel?

  “So you’re doing this out of public concern and not for personal profit?” she snapped, “losing it”, as Tony would say.

  “There’s no reason you can’t have both?”

  She breathed deeply to stop her voice from quavering. “The signers of our petition …”

  “My lawyers have some questions about the circulation of that incendiary document.” His voice was deep, confident.

  “Perhaps your lawyers haven’t read the First Amendment.” She raised her volume again.

  The studio phones started ringing. The balding host wore a big smile. Clifton Monroe flushed, cleared his throat and sounded perfectly authoritative.

  Clearly she had lost.

  So Prill was astonished when the zoning board scheduled a hearing. She hadn’t expected the demonstrators outside the court house. Or the police.

  Tony said her new silver blue dress brought out the steel in her eyes. Approaching the hearing room with Tony, she felt exhilarated by her lately discovered public determination.

  Tony laughed and pointed to a black man dressed up as an olive tree. The guy must have laboured for days on those tiny rayon leaves and the papiermâché gnarled roots growing from his hands and feet.

  Prill was charmed by the Irish guy in the Olive Oyl costume. Olive Oyl with a resonant Dublin brogue.

  She counted TV reporters from the four main stations. They spent more time on the Tree and Olive Oyl than on her, which felt fine.

  The hearing itself was chaotic with Monroe’s legal acrobatics, with ardent pleas from neighbours she had never met.

  Midway through the proceeding she could tell they were winning from the cheerful way the zoning board chair asked Olive Oyl to cease bopping the woman dressed as Popeye-The-Sailor-Man with her black patent handbag.

  Mr Developer turned redder and redder, frequently interrupting his own lawyers with declamations about free enterprise.

  He had changed since the radio interview, Prill noticed, and she could see through his bluster to something that scared her.

  The dignified Landmark Commissioner, by contrast, made a soft-spoken address about the significance of preserving venerable flora as well as historical buildings. Especially in the City of St. Francis.

  She found his invocation of the Bristle Cone Pine overdone, yet several board members nodded respectfully.

  Prill’s foot works the old pedal as her hands carefully guide silk through wool. The natural light will last until 8.30. Odd that Tony isn’t back yet. Highway 101 had become a teeming conveyer belt.

  A week after the hearing, the Greenies secured the street permit for their Victory Party.

  Cousin Fred brought champagne, delighted to toast harmony between his profit and Prill’s contentment.

  Prill felt fully relieved by mended family bonds when Aunt Winnie arrived. Then came the TV cameras, Olive Oyl, Popeye, the walking tree, neighbours from several blocks away.

  Reggae, salsa, tango. After a glass of wine, she danced and joked. For the first time in months, Prill laughed without feeling disloyal to Silvio.

  Suddenly—unexpectedly, out of the blue—how to describe such shock?

  A horrible crescendo of ringing, buzzing, whistling cell phones.

  Followed by cameras and microphones aimed at her.

  Had she heard?

  What did she think?

  How did she react to the news that Clifton Monroe, fuming with rage two hours before, had driven downtown, shot the realtor, then killed himself?

  Both bodies—at that moment—were being transported to the coroner’s office. How did she feel?

  Dizzy. She felt turned upside down. Kidnapped back to the Wild West. Was this someone’s gruesome idea of a farce?

  Stretching, Prill stands up from Great Grandma’s loom. She’ll be crippled tomorrow if she doesn’t do her stretches. In the kitchen, she prepares a simple salade niçoise, leaving a plate for Tony in the fridge. She pours Sangiovese, filling the globe of a large glass. Then she carefully carries her tray up steep wooden steps to the roof deck (built by Silvio before they were named a Landmark House with all the restrictions that distinction entailed). Seated at the wicker table, she scans neighbouring roofs, then glances further, down toward the Bay. Leo and Gianna would have been able to see the water from their first floor all those years ago. The olive tree was strategically planted to the side of their large window.

  How had she felt about the bloody news? Appalled. Terrified. Sick deep in her soul.

  Tony shooed away the reporters, escorted her inside the old farmhouse.

  Fred switched off the sound system.

  Revellers slowly dispersed.

  “This isn’t your fault, Mom,” Tony insisted, bringing her a cup of mint tea.

  Fred nodded wholeheartedly. “Monroe suffered from an explosive ego.”

  Aunt Winnie pulled up a chair and took her hand, stroking it gently.

  During the next three months local mood shifted. People kept more to themselves. Once Prill spotted Olive Oyl at the grocery, but he’d immediately turned away. The nice family from Hayward, who had viewed the bloody drama unfolding on Eyewitness News, rescinded their interest. Finally, the property had sold to two women from Seattle, who knew nothing of this sordid history. They loved the tree. She hoped they would be good neighbours—considerate, friendly, yet as unobtrusive as she tried to be.

  Prill picks at her salad. A little worried about Tony, she reminds herself he’s an excellent driver.r />
  She sits more erect in the cooling night, rolling her neck. Of course they were right. The deaths hadn’t been her fault. Was she supposed to investigate the developer’s psychiatric history before speaking at the zoning board? Still, she has nightmares about the shootings, imagines herself trying to disarm Monroe, imagines being shot by him. She can’t talk about the violence without a quaking voice. She simply wanted to preserve a tree.

  The first boom startles her, rattling the deck planks and opening the sky. A thunderstorm?

  She looks up from her plate and gazes at dazzling garlands of red and blue and yellow streaking across the heavens. The Giants game must be over. And fireworks spell victory. That’s what happens in a baseball game: one side wins; one side loses. In upholding tradition, you can win and lose at the same time. She sips the wine, tasting, as Silvio taught her, for earth and cherry flavours.

  Prill pictures the nineteenth century farm, notices the dirt under Leo’s fingernails, the scents of basil and tomato mingling sharply in his sweaty palms.

  She closes her eyes in prayer. Surely Tony is just stuck in post-game traffic. Her worry for him is like a thin trail of blood. Of course he’ll be fine. Of course one day he will abandon the frail, pretty men, will marry and fill this old family house with children. She just wishes he were here now to share the view. Umbrellas of pink and purple sail over her head. Green rockets. Plumes of chartreuse. All these sparklers and pinwheels and flares climbing high, high toward the stars before tumbling safely into the Bay.

  The Sense of Distant Touch

  Jennifer shifted from one foot to the other as she stood in line before a window decorated with small American flags. While the décor might put some people at home, she was severely dislocated. After four days in Germany, this public affairs office seemed almost too American. What did she expect from an Army base? she could hear her brother asking. A colour photo of their dubious President hung on one wall. An oil painting of the Rocky Mountains on another. A beautiful Navajo rug over the door. Oddly, she longed for the pastoral paintings and prim furniture in Frau Muller’s gast haus.

  A short man in front of her was reading The Daily Register, the same English language newspaper that Frau Muller had been so pleased to provide. Jennifer had said Danke, of course, and had skimmed the headlines about wars in Africa. About fires in the American Southwest. (She was fairly confident her apartment in Phoenix was safe, but people in Tucson were obviously in danger.) And about some vague trouble at the base: soldiers misbehaving after a night on the town. None of it settled clearly in her brain. Could she still be jet-lagged after four days?

  Baby screams from the back of the room startled her. Jennifer turned to see a boy—maybe two years old—squirming irritably on his mother’s lap. Her breath caught at his black hair and precise little features, a handsome boy and such a contrast to the fair-haired plain woman who held him.

  The woman glanced at Jennifer. Dignity, pain, anger, resignation, resolve. All of that in those young blue-green eyes. Young, Jennifer felt peculiarly protective of the stranger, although she at 29 was probably only six or seven years older. Perhaps it was the child that drew her sympathy. More than the woman could handle. Despite Manfred’s earnest lessons, Jennifer’s Deutsch was nominal, but she could tell simply from the woman’s tone, that she was beyond exasperation with the child. Was she a nanny? No, a nanny wouldn’t bring children to a military waiting room. Nannies took kids to parks, to lakes, to ice cream parlours. Clearly she was a burdened mother. Jennifer nodded in a sympathetic unobtrusive manner, but the woman turned away. Perhaps she was being too American. Manfred had advised her that Germans were more reserved.

  She hadn’t anticipated waiting in line. Upon leaving Phoenix, she had no clear set of expectations; she simply knew it was time to get on the plane and visit the base. She smoothed away the wrinkles from the skirt of her blue cotton dress to dispel her irritation. (Brandon had always loved this dress, said it brought out the blue in her eyes and made her red hair even brighter. Of course she knew he was just talking through his love. Her husband was not a fashion-conscious man. Talking through my love, is how Brandon responded when she deflected any of his compliments.)

  The sergeant knew she was coming today. He’d helped her find Frau Muller’s gast haus via email. Perhaps he thought it had taken her too long to get here. Just about three years. As long as she didn’t come, she could still pretend in some small part of her that Brandon was alive. Of course they’d sent the body back home and they’d had a proper closed casket funeral, with a much larger flag. Thus it was possible they had misidentified the accident victim. She felt that visiting the site of the crash would make everything final somehow. So she had been postponing.

  “Closure,” her therapist recommended. Her brother had advised, “You should get back into circulation while you’re still young and pretty.” She didn’t want closure or circulation. She wanted Brandon and their adventurous life and their two beautiful children. From behind, she heard the young woman release a long sigh. Apparently there was even more waiting once you registered at the flaggy window.

  Naturally you remember when you hear something like this. Jennifer was in the middle of one of her favourite biology lessons—about how fish keep track of each other swimming in schools. “The Sense of Distant Touch”—and the kids were marvelling that the fish swam in synchronisation, without the aid of sight or sound.

  “I wish you were that well-behaved,” she teased. “Maybe what you need is a school of fish rather than an elementary school?”

  Marlene, in the third row, made a guppy face.

  Next to her, Arthur raised and lowered his elbows as if they were gills.

  Then Mr Thompson was knocking on the glass door. Something told her to ignore him. Ignore the principal, not usually a good idea. The children were all laughing and learning. You’d think that would be enough for him. But she saw his official face through the glass. Maybe Tommy Lacey’s mother had been picked up again. Or maybe Taylor had forgotten to report to the school nurse for her insulin shot that morning. Whatever it was, she did wish Mr Thompson would disappear—at least until she finished this fascinating lesson on the sense of distant touch.

  Her hands went cold from Mr Thompson’s persistent knocking.

  She had barely gripped the doorknob when she noticed Eileen Kaysen behind him.

  “You’ll want to step out of class, Ms Petrie. Mrs Kaysen can take over your lesson for you.”

  She nodded cordially to Eileen, a competent teacher, a mentor, in fact.

  Her older friend smiled wanly.

  “Perhaps I could just finish this lesson on the sense of distant touch?” she asked.

  “The what?” Eileen asked.

  She knew Eileen wouldn’t be able to handle it. Basically she was language arts. And while those with science majors could substitute in English classes, the language arts people were hopeless at biology and chemistry and physics.

  Mr Thompson actually took her arm. “Ms Petrie, there’s bad news.”

  She knew then.

  Knew it was Brandon.

  That he had died.

  Somehow on his safe base in Germany.

  She didn’t scream or cry. She nodded and followed him to his sterile little office. He introduced her to a soldier, who gave her the news and expressed formal condolences.

  After the soldier departed, Mr Thompson invited her to sit.

  He chatted with her across his large mahogany desk.

  She kept staring at a photo of the Thompson kids, four of them at the beach. Probably taken five years before. Cute kids. One of his daughters had the same name as Jennifer’s daughter—Amelia. Her own Amelia hadn’t been born yet. Did Mr Thompson, did anyone, understand how unfair this was?

  Just one more person in front of her. He offered Jennifer the newspaper and she declined, happy to be speaking a little uncomplicated English. She had a powerful feeling now that she shouldn’t have come. She could turn around. Return
to Frau Muller’s and pack, use up her credit card on a very expensive flight back to Arizona. This way, she couldn’t possibly betray him. She’d return to her job, continue visiting the embryos in the clinic, start the implantation procedures for Amelia and Brandon Junior. That way, when he came home, they’d all be waiting, just as in Mr Thompson’s picture.

  “Mrs Tobin?”

  She rummaged around her purse for the credit card with free travel insurance. She had several cards, but wanted the platinum one with the high credit line.

  “Or, rather, Ms Petrie?”

  She did come when called, a flaw of proper upbringing. The Military often forgot that she kept her single name. Brandon supported her. He was like that—sympathetic to women’s liberation. Flexible about what she wanted to do. In fact he took the assignment in Germany to please her.

  “Yes sir,” she spoke to a bald black man in his forties.

  “I’m Sergeant Mackie. It’s good to finally meet you, Ma’am.” He held out his palm.

  His handshake was firm, as she expected, but also warm.

  She smiled for the first time since arriving in Germany.

  “Frau Muller says you’ve settled in.”

  “Oh, yes, a very nice place. Thank you for the recommendation.”

  “You’re very welcome. It’s the least we could do.”

  That’s what her brother thought, the least they could offer. He wanted the Army to bring her over First Class. However, Jennifer knew a lot of people died in the service. All you had to do was look around at all those white crosses in the military cemetery three years ago. They couldn’t be flying widows around the globe to visit their husbands’ last stations.

  “I’ll be ready to escort you around in about five minutes, if you don’t mind waiting.” He glanced out at the room.

  She followed his glance to the young woman with the boy.

  “On second thought, why don’t you come back here? I have a comfortable chair in my office and I can get you a cup of coffee? Tea? A soda?”

  Soda, she thought, he must be from the East Coast.