Forever?
She laughs. Well, not forever, but for a long time. It’s the type of breathing that allows you to last as a singer.
Duncan thinks about this, and about his mother’s meteoric rise and her vertiginous fall, as if she were plummeting, blazing from the heavens.
But this isn’t how you sang?
No. She shakes her head, and in this gesture Duncan senses her defiance and her pride but also a great sadness. I sang like Silva Bröhm, she says.
What did your teacher say to do?
She thinks about this for a moment, stares into the mirror before them, her face fragmented in the splotches of gray-black mercury showing through from the undersides of the plate, reaches across the bureau, pulls a tumbler glass from behind her perfume bottles, and sucks greedily from it.
When he listened to the range I was capable of, he told me that I would be a star. He said To sing until my heart burst, to sing until my voice screamed. To sing as if every night was the End, and if I did, that there would never be anyone else like me. And he was right. There never was anyone like me. And there won’t be. When I’m gone, that’s it, kiddo. Done. Kaput. Kapow!
Maggie mouths a giant O, opens her hands wide mimicking an explosion and Duncan laughs. Maggie studies her face in the mirror, opens wide her Kohl eyes and asks him how she looks.
You look great, Duncan says, although even with the makeup her skin appears sallow and stretched thin.
Her lips curl and flex and then her face calms. She opens her mouth and a deep bass sound emerges. She begins singing the end of the duet between Rigoletto and Sparafucile and then, rising raggedly up the scale, into the Angelic Voice from Don Carlos, comforting the heretics, who are preparing to be burned alive, that their souls will find peace and that they will join Him in His Kingdom.
When she is done, sweat shimmers upon her upper lip and at her hairline. She coughs violently and then hacks phlegm into a plastic cup filled with cigarette butts sitting on the bureau. As she attempts to regain her breath, she wheezes, You recognize any of that? When Duncan nods, she leans over, spits some more, and takes another lungful of air. The tendons in her hands show white through the skin as she clutches at the desk.
Good, she says, wiping at her mouth. Living with me has taught you something then.
She purses her lips, folds her bottom lip over her top, moistening them, as if she were applying lipstick, then reaches for her tumbler glass, but it’s empty. God, she sighs, I need a drink. She begins rummaging in the bureau drawers, lifting and slamming things upon its top, and Duncan shakes his head, rises slowly, and leaves through the rear exit. In the alley he lifts the lid off a trash can and drops the whiskey bottle into it. In the room behind him there is the clatter of things being overturned and Mother’s voice bellowing in weak-trilled anguish: Dammit, Duncan! You’ve taken my bottle again, haven’t you? Duncan! I need that to sing!
Chapter 52
On the last hot day of the season, a day the native Ohlone Indians traditionally celebrated their harvest in the Bay Area, Duncan and Magdalene walk home from school together, trudge sluggishly along the streets. A strange silver sun simmers above the rooftops and casts its mercurial light down into the shadowy alleyways where drunks lie sleeping. When Magdalene spots an empty soda can or beer bottle poking from an alley or storefront trash can, they pause as she picks it up or rummages through the bin and pushes the bottles and cans down into her backpack. Soon her backpack is bulging and its underside dark and ripe-smelling. And then they begin to fill Duncan’s.
Jesus, he says, frowning, we’re going to smell like a brewery, Magdalene.
Yeah, but between us we collected twenty cans and bottles. That’s only a dollar.
She shrugs. A dollar more than we had when we started.
As they make their way up Ipswich Street, Duncan hears the sound of the Magnificat from Mother’s Victrola, humming and crackling in the muggy afternoon heat—you can hear it for blocks. The threadbare, overbleached lace over the windows lays so straight and rigid it appears to have been pressed by an iron. Duncan looks at the porch and at the windows and at the strange flickering shadows that move amidst the peeling columns and ivy-wrapped trellises, and there is his mother swaying in one of her ermine-collared and black-beribboned robes from Zauberflöte and singing the Magnificat.
Oh, Magdalene says weakly.
Duncan pauses on the pavement—he’s never heard her sing so loudly. Neighbors have come out on their stoops to listen. He stares at the porches, driveways, and sidewalks: Mrs. Uribe sweeping her porch; Mulligan in his greasy tank top rattles open his lawn chair and settles onto the meager patch of grass between their houses; Mrs. Scotelli lugs her week’s washing up from her basement in her large green hamper and begins stretching her laundry onto the clothesline; Jacko Bilty sits on his step smiling sedately, his elbows resting on his knees and his small head cupped within his large hands; L.J. the Loon has brought a sixty-four-ounce bottle of Private Stock, whose rim pokes from the top of a brown paper bag, and he leans against a lamppost, and faces the Bottoms; dog walkers rest against a wall at the intersection while their dogs circle and sniff one another, urinate against the dying, speckled maples. All of them bend toward the voice of his mother and Duncan feels a sudden tenderness and an intimacy for them—suddenly he understands that his mother’s voice captures each of their separate longings, longings that they can put no name to.
When Mother stops, the listeners remain suspended in that pause, the last note holding the air, and they are held in that finite moment. Mother hacks like a cat with a hairball lodged in its throat, and a bottle of Old Mainline 454 appears almost magically from the folds of her robe. She sways slightly as she lifts the bottle to her mouth and looks out over the bay. Her jaws clench and unclench and her throat works soundlessly. The bottle falls from her hands and clatters hollow on the stone, and then mother fills her diaphragm with air and begins to sing again.
And she keeps singing, even when the notes strangle in her throat and become a screech rising over the rooftops. She stands as straight as a lightning rod, her legs planted apart on the stone steps before the porch, her torso straight, her head arched slightly, and her mouth spread open in a ghastly yawning O. The veins in her neck bulge with blood. Her face turns crimson and then slightly purple—she is reaching for that single note that could reach the ears of God, she is reaching for a G7, and Duncan imagines this is what she looked like giving birth to him.
The tortured sound of her rises up over the rooftops and shatters the sky out over the bay. Duncan senses that the cars out on the bridge speeding to and from Oakland have stopped, that the boats in the harbor are still. That workers pause in their labors upon the high buttresses and cables, and even the hiss of their acetylene torches are muted before his mother’s wail—the pale blue flames jetting in impotent flickering shudders the only movement in the entire city.
The neighbors stare at her and then quickly turn away. Packing up their lawn chairs and blankets, pulling the leashes of their dogs, their features caught in a strange asphyxiation—a mixture of pity and revulsion—upon witnessing such a grotesque. A green laundry basket rolls across the grass like a tumbleweed. Doors close. Footsteps fade. A bicycle whirs over the hill. And his mother’s voice continues to press violently at the air, her whole body shaking with the effort of it, her arms tensed and her fists clenched at her sides. From Mother’s right nostril a bubble of blood suddenly blooms and then bursts and trickles slowly down to her mouth.
Then mother stops, and there is silence. Not even a seagull sounds. Her scream reverberates in his ears for a moment longer, and then that too is done. The Victrola’s stylus hisses in the record’s run-off, and Duncan listens as the vinyl spins without music.
Mother wipes at her nose and looks at the blood there, flicks her hand so that the blood splatters the porch.
Fuck Maria Callas. I was the Queen of the Night, she says and stumbles into the house.
Duncan
picks up the empty bottle of Old Mainline 454 from the steps and stands for a moment in the hallway as the shuddering sound of deep, belly-empty retching comes from upstairs. He looks toward Magdalene and she is staring at him with something like pity in her eyes. Softly, he closes the door behind them.
Later, Duncan stands at her bedroom door and listens to her moving about the room, pulling open drawers, the bedsprings creaking under her weight.
Mom? Duncan calls through the door, as she had once called to him, and he imagines her lost and unraveling and spiraling down through darkness.
The days pass and nothing changes. He leaves a tray at her door three times a day, but she never touches any food. The only time she leaves her room is to replenish the bottle of spirits she’s polished off with another and then another, leaving the empty bottles neatly arranged in a row outside her door, which he picks up and throws in the trash.
Lying on his bed Duncan stares at the haphazard arrangement of constellations painted on the ceiling plaster. He stares at the stars until the streetlights come on and the stars glow and then blur. He wonders if at his birth his mother might have offered up her own Magnificat in joyous celebration, or if, as she sometimes says when drunk, she cursed his father and was determined to forget all and any part of it. He likes to think that love and resentment and prayer were commingled, and that whatever his mother refused or was unwilling to acknowledge was in part due to the pain it caused her and, like her songs, called out the loss of something far greater than words could ever convey.
From his drawer he pulls the lunar landing schedule for the Apollo missions 1 through 20 from American Aeronautics and Aviation, the NASA transcripts of the communications between the astronauts and Houston command center, William Safire’s heartbreaking letter that the president read to the nation after the tragedy of Apollo 11, the NASA patches that mother gave to him at Christmas, and, at their center, the Apollo 17 crew patch.
The gold face of Apollo stares across the blackness of space, and behind his head the blue outline of an American eagle containing within it four red bars and three silver stars, and beyond this, the moon, about which a ringed planet and a galaxy appear to revolve. Duncan’s fingers trace the raised stitching in silver detail along the blue-gray edge of the emblem and the names of the astronauts: Cernan, Evans, Schmitt, who traveled 240,000 miles and walked upon the moon for the last time shortly after he was born and then abandoned to the Home.
Across the top of the bureau he spreads the other crew patches emblazoned with the names of long-dead astronauts. From Apollo 11: Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin; from Apollo 18: Commander Richard Gordon, Command Module Pilot Vance Brand, Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt; from Apollo 19: Commander Fred Haise, Command Module Pilot William Pogue, Lunar Module Pilot Gerald Carr; and from Apollo 20: Commander Charles Conrad, Command Module Pilot Paul Weitz, Lunar Module Pilot Jack Lousma. All of them still spiraling somewhere up there in the darkness.
From his mother’s room comes the sound of her retching again and then her toilet flushing. Duncan places the Apollo patches back beneath his T-shirts on the wax paper, and slides the drawer shut. He lies back on his bed and stares out the window at the night sky; fog has rolled in and climbed the hills: there isn’t a thing to see but he tries to imagine the stars anyway and the place where he was conceived.
Chapter 53
It’s not yet five o’clock, and a dense drizzly fog lies low upon the city. Even the horns of the bay seem very far away. Down the wharves, where bells are softly tolling and boats’ lanyards are jangling, the streetlamps shine with a diffused amber light through the mist. A yellow glare from basement walk-ups streams out into the steamy air and throws a murky, shifting radiance across the streets and on each passerby who walks, ghostlike, before their window. Maggie places the dinner plates upon the table before them. She’s been crying and her eyes look swollen and tired. Slowly, she spoons mashed potatoes and peas from serving bowls onto their plates, her shoulders trembling slightly.
Hush, Maggie, Joshua says. It’s okay, baby, it’s okay. Don’t fret so. C’mon, Sit down and let me do that. He pushes back his chair, puts on the oven mitts, bangs open the oven door, and checks on the roast.
She looks at Duncan, stares at him with her red-rimmed and bloodshot eyes. She sees an image of her mother in her blue-flowered summer frock with eyes as blank as pennies and the white glare of the bleached sheer curtains blinding and the smell of her parents’ bedroom high in her nostrils and all the things she’d wanted to say to her forever left unsaid.
I love you, she says now to Duncan and reaches for his hand. You’re my special Duncan. And then, when he doesn’t respond: You’re so special, she says and stares at him as if her look can convince him that this is so.
Yeah, that’s what they called me in the Home.
Forget about what they called you there, she says angrily. You are special, my special Duncan, and don’t you ever forget it. She leans forward and takes his face in her hands. Her nails are long and chipped, and without meaning to, she scratches him.
Her eyes widen, her brows lined in expectation. And I’m so lucky to have you as my child, she says. She almost impresses him with her faith, or perhaps it is her determination.
Sure, he says, and shrugs. After a moment his mother relaxes, lets go of his face, and reaches for her cigarettes. Damn right you’re special, she mutters as she fumbles with her lighter.
Just hush now, Joshua says. Let all that old stuff go. Let’s just enjoy our meal. He lays the roast at the center of the table, pulls off the oven mitts.
After dinner Duncan and me will do the dishes, he says, eyeing Duncan knowingly, and then you and me can head down to the Windsor. That’ll pick you up, baby. You’ll see.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, Maggie says suddenly and slams the lighter down upon the table. She raises her head back, and looks as if she might cry but doesn’t. She stares at some point at the top of the wall and speaks softly, as if to herself: Why does everything have to be so hard, kiddo, hmmm? Why?
And Duncan might have answered her then for he feels sure he knows the answer.
Later, when she and Joshua have gone down to the Windsor Tap, Duncan treads the carpet of her bedroom, slowly parts the clothes in her closet, runs his hands along its top shelf, opens and then closes shoeboxes, stares at the box of black-and-white photographs sitting in a box on the floor. Finally, he sits on the edge of her bed listening to the familiar creaking of its springs and watches the fading light wavering upon the lace curtains as it spills through the trees. Amongst his mother’s belongings, in the third drawer of her bureau, beneath frayed and faded underthings and tattered copies of Opera magazine describing her meteoric rise as a young soprano phenomena and a scathing and heartbreaking review of her final performance, he discovers a photo that she has never shown him: an image in black and white before he was born. It is a picture taken by the front-seat passenger in a car. His mother at the wheel of a convertible, her hair held back with a kerchief, and she’s looking toward the lens—looking toward the man whom Duncan imagines is taking the picture—and smiling, a length of hair pulled free from her kerchief and lashed in a blur across her face. She has on the large oval sunglasses that were in vogue at the time and she might have been a movie starlet or a Jackie O impersonator.
There are more pictures in this sequence, and when he looks at them, one after the other, he has the sense of movement, of her turning back to the road, and the car pushing ahead, moving farther and farther down the glittering desert road. It becomes a running silent film in black and white, her turning to the passenger and talking to him, laughing, nudging the wheel from left to right. But always Duncan sees only her, sees what the photograph has already given him, and the perspective the picture projects into some near future, but nothing more. He wishes he could make the leap and imagine the lens from her eyes, and see what she sees—the sweeping landscape, hundreds of miles of
flat plain or incomprehensibly vast peaks stretching to the far edges of the distant horizon and the towns and cities through which she passes, and the man with whom she shares this all, his father, he assumes—but he cannot. Perhaps this is due to a flaw within him, and the absence of something fundamental. Dr. Mathias might be interested in that.
Chapter 54
October 1984
Hours after her shift at the hospital has started Maggie is still sprawled upon her mattress, face turned into the pillow, spittle caking the side of her mouth, eyelashes fluttering in the dark hollows of smeared mascara. A record spins hissing on her turntable. Mid-morning sunlight traps the room in frowzy light through which clouds of dust motes spin and tumble, the windows shuttered and the sickly reek of stale alcohol and sweat lifting warmly from the sheets when Duncan pulls them back.
Mom, he calls. It’s time to wake up. He sits on the edge of her bed and shakes her shoulder, calls her again. He shakes harder and still nothing. Mom, you need to get up for work.
Eyes opening slightly and then rolling back in her head, Maggie slurs: Fuck ’em.
C’mon, he says and urges her up, wraps her arms about his neck and, staggering, drags her to the bathroom.
Let me go, she says.
Yes, Mom.
Shifting his weight from hip to hip for balance, he bangs them against the hallway walls, knocking a framed picture from the wall, which falls and the glass shatters.
Where’s Joshua? I want Joshua.
Duncan clenches his jaws in anger as her feet give out and the full weight of her comes down upon him. Where is he ever? he says. How should I know. He’s wherever Joshua goes.
They make it to the bathroom and he yanks the shower curtain wide and, slipping on the tile, drops her awkwardly into the tub.
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