This Magnificent Desolation

by Thomas O'Malley

  And then they cross into pastureland where men are shadows of black metal in the shimmering fields. They are burning the dead crop: bright flames cutting swathes across the valley, black choking smoke billowing and sweeping across flattened fields and rising, churning, up to the sky. Duncan has seen this only from beyond the walls of the Home and he wonders with not just a little fear at what will become of the two of them, him and his mother, now that they only have each other. He pulls his body inward; the comforting sense of his mother is gone—the physical space between them widening. His hands scrabble for his bag and the hard, reassuring edges of Brother Canice’s radio, which he wraps his arms about and pulls to his chest.

  If you’re tired, she says, and her voice seems very far away, you can lie down. There’s some blankets back there on the floor. It’s a long trip, and we’ll both need to rest.

  Thanks, he says, and stretches across the backseat, bunches a blanket beneath his head, pulls another over him. The thrum of the engine and the vibration of the road up through the chassis begin to lull him toward sleep. The partially open windows seem to shudder and bow silently with wind. He hears the clicking of the turn signal as she changes lanes, then the irregular thump of the wipers as they pass through a sudden rainsquall and the interior of the car grows dark. He looks at her in the rearview mirror, watches her glancing back every now and then, until he can no longer hold open his eyes.

  Maggie watches him until he is asleep, then allows her eyes to follow the far horizon, its indeterminate distance teasingly close and yet seemingly untouchable, always just beyond them. She turns on the radio, hums softly to an old Western ballad that comes crackling through the speakers, raises her voice slightly and attempts to sing, but her voice falters and breaks and she begins to cough. She reaches across to the glove compartment for the fifth of whiskey that she keeps there, but then pulls her hand back. She doesn’t need it, not yet. This is her time to prove to him and to herself that she is a different woman, a better woman than the one she has been all these years.

  An hour passes and she considers pulling over but doesn’t want him to wake. Heat lightning blurs the top of distant hills. The black shapes of wide-winged birds turn in slow circles way up there and she peers beneath the visor to get a better look at them: buzzards waiting for something on the ground to give up the fight. She punches in the cigarette lighter at the base of the dashboard, and when it pops out, she fumbles with lighting a cigarette, then takes it in long and deep before exhaling out the window, stares blankly at three bowed-backed, dun-colored cows taking water in a grassless pasture, ribs pressed like dark bars against their skin.

  When the cigarette is done, she runs her tongue across her teeth and grimaces, checks Duncan in the rearview: asleep and snoring softly. She chews on her lips, is conscious of how dry her mouth feels, heat and dust on back of her throat. Finally she reaches across, careful to hold the car steady, and opens the glove compartment, pulls the fifth from beneath parking tickets and the car registration, does the top with one hand, and takes a swig. It is only for the heat and for her nerves, she convinces herself, and for nothing more. She turns the radio louder over the sound of the car pushing forward toward the horizon and the hot wind pressing in at the open windows, and begins to sing softly. This time her voice does not falter but she knows that this is a temporary thing, that her larynx with its scar tissue will never allow her to sing as fully as she once did. Absently she takes another swig, holds the whiskey in her mouth, and touches her throat as it convulses and the alcohol slides slowly down.

  As a child and as a teenager, she’d been classically trained by Madame Buvelle of the Boston and Berkeley conservatories, and in her early twenties had debuted as a coloratura soprano with the Boston Opera. When she sang, she reached notes that had rarely been recorded before—in a bureau drawer, beneath her old stage dresses, programs, and all the yellowed issues of Opera with reviews of her performances, she’s kept the live recording of her reaching G7, the highest vocal note in the history of recorded opera. And with her remarkable low, which she sang as Amelia in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, her voice ranged over more than five octaves.

  People who’d heard her sing likened her to Erna Sack, the German coloratura soprano who was known to reach C4 and nicknamed the “German Nightingale,” and Mado Robin, the French coloratura soprano who could hit c7. But it was the Swedish soprano Silva Bröhm, to whom she drew the most comparisons.

  She looked like a pale, redheaded sister of Bröhm, the woman she would more and more come to resemble and venerate, the abused soprano who was forced to sing at such heights across such ranges again and again that she destroyed her larynx and committed suicide at the height of her career, threw herself from the forty-seventh floor of the Royal Düsseldorf on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in 1927.

  Maggie did not kill herself, but then her end took her by surprise. One winter night in 1962, during a performance of Mozart’s Zauberflöte, which had tested the full breadth of her range and in which her aria as the Queen of the Night brought the crowd to their feet, her voice broke—silently—forever; the folds of her larynx swelled and, in the days that followed, hardened like scar tissue. And all the while she was happily, blissfully, unaware.

  It was one note—a B3 perhaps—out of thousands of notes, in a three-hour opera that she had performed dozens of times, but it was the end of her career. After the performance she rushed ecstatically toward the railway station through lightly falling snow—through what was now left of old Scollay Square: the remnants of the Olympia, with its crumbling facade; the Crawford House, famous home of Sally Keith, queen of the tasseled breasts; the Half-Dollar Bar; the famous Crescent Grill; and around the corner from Tremont Row on Howard Street, the peaked roof of the 115-year-old Howard Athenaeum, one of the most famous burlesque theaters in the world. All stood still and empty now. The high-density sodium bulbs that once shone OLYMPIA in an arc across the avenue had been extinguished for years, and in their place all that remained were a few single lamps burning in the windows of derelict brownstones whose last residents refused eviction and awaited the wrecking ball.

  A sailor, arm in arm with his girl, both bundled in heavy wools, cross beneath the streetlamps of Cambridge Street, having just come from drinks and hot dogs at Joe and Nemo’s on Stoddard Street. At the edge of the square, they pause in a hazy circle of light amidst the slanting snow. They are laughing, and their laughter is bright and clear and resonant as a fine bell chime in the cold air, so attractive a sound that Maggie turns her head for a moment to gaze their way, and she catches the lovers in a kiss. When they part, that kiss—a bright red, full-lipped kiss—floats up, up, up the snowlit night. It rises above the cracked arch of the Olympia, the rusty cable-fretted and pinioned spire of the Athenaeum, high above the Crawford House and Joe and Nemo’s, until it is above the rooftops of Tops Hill, where it swells, and all the thousands of caterwauling candy butchers and tasseled strippers and crooning and dying singers and five-piece orchestras—horns and trumpets and drums blasting and grinding—of past burlesques reverberate with that kiss throughout the dimly lit, run-down row houses and huddled tenements of crumbling old Scollay Square.

  A tenant on a third floor looks from his lamp to gaze up at that kiss, and for a moment he pauses to wonder at those old ghosts that have haunted his memory so. And all driven white beneath the swirling storm like a magical kingdom within a snow globe, until everything is covered in white, but for that kiss, and Maggie Bright rushing on through it all, rushing to catch a train, the old B&M line from North Station, to meet the man who would become Duncan’s father, never thinking that her voice had reached a height it would never again achieve.

  As she drives, and as Duncan sleeps lightly in the backseat, covered in an old throw blanket smelling slightly of mildew and oil, she watches him in the rearview mirror and fights to keep back tears, her knuckles turning white upon the wheel, as both joy and fear work upon her and everything from her past—and all her fa
ilures, but Duncan—rushes to the fore, and the landscape heading west blurs before her. She wipes at her eyes with the back of a hand, glances again in the mirror, watches as wind from the partially opened windows trembles the hair atop his head. There are shadows beneath his eyes and he is much too pale, but she will make him eat and gain weight and put him to bed at a regular hour as any good mother would. She will make him strong and happy and make up for all that has been lost between them. He swallows and coughs as if his throat is dry, and anxiety momentarily quivers in her stomach until he settles again. She sighs, wants to pull to the side of the road and wake him up, hold him to her, convince them both that this is real. The presence of him within the car fills her senses and she smiles when she thinks of them together—the absurdity and the rightness of it finally—and suddenly she is laughing, laughing with such happiness that it startles her, amazed at where such an all-consuming happiness might come from and how now, after all this time, it could possibly be hers.

  Chapter 20

  Angels, (they say) are often unable to tell whether they move

  among living or dead.

  The eternal torrent whirls all the ages through either realm for

  ever, and sounds above their voices in both.

  —RAINER MARIE RILKE

  On a high hill in the middle of the humpbacked city is Ipswich Street, and between a row of once-grand but now-decrepit brick Georgians owned by successful shipmen of the 1800s—the only brick homes in this part of the city—is a gray, asbestos-tiled Victorian where Duncan and Maggie live as tenants-at-will, surviving from one paycheck to the next.

  They live in a world above the clouds, where gulls—terns and gannets and cormorants the color of pitch—shriek as they rise and fall and flap madly toward heaven. From his window Duncan can see the distant orange pitons of the Golden Gate Bridge showing themselves just above the morning fog, like the pointed peaks of some strange mountain range rising from the roof of the mist-shrouded world below. And during these moments he can forget that they live in a city, that its streets and buildings surround and encapsulate them with noise and the sound of so many people in pain, from the caterwauling drunks making their way from the Barrio down Ipswich toward the Wreck and the Barrows when the bars close at night, to the men and women who stand on the corner of Columbus and Vine waiting for the methadone clinic to open each morning. Sometimes it would be hours before the fog burned away and the cityscape revealed itself, amidst the tolling bells of St. Mary of the Wharves, and then it was as if a veil had been thrown off, as if he were waking slowly from a long, still-evolving dream.

  From the rented house on Ipswich Street: a long broken street of buckling sidewalk slabstones, like a bough curved over the hill, and then descending on either side into the bookends of the Wreck and the Barrows, from where rail workers, Edison power plant workers, and tannery workers trudged in the pre-dawn, lunch pails swinging, cigarettes bursting in silent fiery bloom between their lips, and the sound of their voices, carrying on the colder days, barking loudly in greeting to one another.

  In the evenings the distant-seeming shouts and hollers of the same men returning home after the Edison plant whistle has sounded the changing of shifts, and of barges making their way down into the bay, moaning like mournful sea creatures through the bruised light, and the briny smell of fish, of plaice and catfish and shad washed up upon the oily banks where the old wharves decay and where, during his walks home from school at twilight, he’d find the fish, left as the water retreated, half submerged in muck and oil, floundering and gasping their last.

  In the beginning, he hurried to pick up the fish, raced down to the water’s edge and, one by one, hurled them out as far as he could into the bay, wishing them safe passage back to the sea. But always they found their way back. The next day he’d stare into the eye of a gasping fish, its mouth puckering slowly, and know it was from the day or the week before—he cannot explain how he knows this, only that he does. Perhaps it is the shape of a tattered fin or a corkscrew scar upon the scales, the black dots upon the underbelly, or simply by the large eye that seems to gaze up at him, glassy and slick and filled with some inexpressible and indescribable longing. He’d watch over them and talk to them and sometimes offer up a prayer. Once, an old man in a peaked yellow rain hat and yellow waders stood, tottering, calve deep in the mud at the water’s edge, watching him. A rusted clam rake dangled in his hand. Duncan gestured helplessly at him but the man shook his head vigorously and bent back down to his scraping.

  And gradually their numbers multiplied, so that soon, of an evening, hundreds of stinking, dying fish lay scattered across the banks of the waterway like silver spars dotted with rot and decay, and only for the occasional slapping and convulsion did they appear like fish at all.

  When he asks his mother why they do it, she looks at him and says: Who do what?

  The fish. Why do they swim onto the banks and kill themselves like that?

  What fish, honey?

  Can’t you smell it? he says. On my way home from school there’s hundreds and hundreds of them every day washed up on the banks. Everything stinks of them. The street, the house stinks of them.

  He walks to the open window, puts his nose to the air and inhales. The tide has left the water in the channel at its lowest, and as the sun turns the hollow of the waterway orange and aflame, small black shapes flutter and flap in the mud there, impotent as moths. His nostrils flare with the odor and he gags. He draws his head back in and his mother is laughing.

  That look on your face, dear Jesus, Duncan. What on earth is wrong with you?

  You can’t smell it? he asks, incredulously.

  No. She shakes her head. I can’t, and I’ll have you know that I’ve got an excellent sense of smell.

  There is the park named after Joseph Wood Tyner, the business tycoon and owner of the tannery and steelworks who developed Salt Hill, with forlorn bushes that, ragged as they are, bloom a brilliant fuchsia in the early summer and a rusted swing set and slide and half a dozen crumbling, concrete animals—hippo, elephant, giraffe, rhinoceros, crocodile, and tiger—from the early sixties that no children dare climb anymore. On the days when Duncan chooses not to go to school he wanders here, at times kicking his legs lazily while on the swing, listening to its chains squealing in protest, and watches the trains making their way from the rail yards, the diesel engines thumping rhythmically, the sound reverberating and vibrating off the surrounding houses and, enlarged, sounding like a great heart to his ears.

  In Duncan’s room there are reminders of the Home—a mildewed, water-stained ceiling, yellowed wallpaper curling at the edges where it meets the painted baseboards—but there is no sense of children here, no haunting quality of their loss or desire or even their sudden, abrupt joyous cries of a day or night. Upon the wall over his dresser are the pictures torn from books and magazines that he brought with him—a smiling, nunlike Olivia de Havilland from Whose Baby Are You Now?; the Times cover of the ’69 Apollo moon landing—and a simple dark-stained wooden cross that Father Toibin said he should keep. Previous tenants left the dresser behind and his mother has painted it blue. In the mornings the sun rises above the waterway, casts its trembling light across the flitting, wave-flecked top of the channel and, as it rises above the dirty leaves of the three speckled and diseased maples, and pokes through his window—a gossamer of sheer lace curtains; a haze of spiderweb—it glows upon this veneer, shimmering waterlike, before reaching his bed.

  And then there is the sudden rain that lashes the glass at times, sends the frame shuddering, as surprising and startling violent storms rush in from the bay, or the great shoals of fog that settle oddly for only a few hours at most before being swept away and on those clear nights the brilliant curve of the moon angling bright upon his wall and illuminating Olivia.

  Of an evening around twilight, Mother stands beside him at the living room window and they look to the ruins at the bottom of the hill, a valley in which the old factory row hou
ses sit, a jumble of walls and gaps, entryways and alleys out to the channel, with brickwork about the empty windows, and built, seemingly, with granite slate and blue shale sloughed from beneath the waters when they dredged and dug the channel two hundred years before.

  You didn’t believe I would ever come for you, did you? she says.

  And Duncan looks at her, a tall red-haired woman in a black dress, her skin so pale and cold-looking he feels goose bumps rise upon his arms. He shakes his head. No, I didn’t.

  But here we are, she says and takes his hand and pulls him toward her and squeezes him so tightly, desperately it seems, that he can barely breathe. A record has just ended upon the old Victor phonograph, and Mother begins to sing, her raggedy yet strangely beautiful voice filling the large crumbling Victorian with nineteenth-century ballads, and bluesy tales of woe and loss, and spirituals ripe with redemption, and the smell of rotting fish is wafting in upon a nighttime breeze that stirs the sheer, yellow-bleached curtains before the windows as the earth turns through its meridians and darkness comes slowly down and spins them through the stars. And even with the smell of fish, to Duncan it seems the most wonderful place in the world.

  Chapter 21

  November 1981

  On weekends, after Maggie’s shift at St. Luke’s Hospital, they go to the Windsor Tap on Columbus where she sings every Thursday night. Flags and banners of various regiments, divisions, and battalions hang like bunting over the back of the bar. Most prominent are the AAs of Army Airborne and the globe and anchor of the Marines. She buys Duncan a Coke and orders him the one-dollar cheeseburger with fries, and as he sits at the bar and Clay grills the meat, she goes to dance with men on the beer-bleached dance floor. Mostly they are friends of hers whom Duncan recognizes, but sometimes there are other men, strangers who will arrive at their door in a day or two and mother will leave with for the night. He’ll hear the key in the lock sometime after midnight, and his mother whispering to this or that man to be quiet and to tread softly on the stairs. Then his mother’s door will close, the tabletop Victrola will begin spinning its record softly, and the bedsprings will groan and squeal as their weight settles upon the old mattress.