This Magnificent Desolation

by Thomas O'Malley

  Duncan shifts and the mattress groans. Mother is breathing softly next to him; her breath sour on his face. Her skin is sallow and gaunt in the nether light, and as he watches her, he mouths a prayer thanking God for everything He has given him and asking that his mother be well and strong and happy and kept in His care. Mother’s breath catches, and she wakes, eyes open wide, as if startled. She looks at Duncan and about the room. After a moment, relaxes. What are you doing, my Duncan? she says tenderly.

  Nothing. Just saying a prayer.

  Well, prayers never hurt. And neither does coffee and cigarettes. Hand me my bag, would you?

  Duncan climbs from the bed and fetches her bag from the table in the kitchen, the floor bowing and creaking under his footsteps. Mother pulls herself upright, leans back against the bed frame as Duncan bunches tobacco from her pouch onto a rolling paper.

  Joshua teach you that?

  Duncan nods as he licks the edge of the paper, lights the cigarette, and hands it to her, watches as she sucks on it weakly. You’ll go to the doctor today, he says firmly and stares at her until she looks at him.

  I’ll make an appointment for later in the week. After Joshua’s memorial, okay? She smiles feebly, lifts the cigarette in her hand. See? I feel better already, but Duncan continues to look at her and she says: After Joshua’s memorial, I promise.

  Chapter 85

  October 1985

  The last night of Joshua’s memorial Maggie begins her final set by singing the mad scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, a song Duncan knows she no longer has the ability to sing, but her first note—a rising, startling B, sustained and lengthened by playful flourishes—is like no other she has sounded. The audience stares at her, and their mouths open unconsciously. The note falters and then Maggie catches it shakily again.

  Her voice rises quickly up the scale—and up up up the audience rises with it—and crescendos at that elusive C, held until it is one pleading pitch, shaking but sustained at such a height that it does not seem possible any person could be capable of sustaining it, and then falling slowly back to the middle range with twirling, spiraling ornamentation, so that her voice resembles the broken sound of the plunge itself and of a flock of starlings at twilight. Duncan sees Lucia’s madness and her loss. Her pleading to her lover to believe that she is not mad, to not condemn or imprison her. He sees Joshua swimming out into the bay, his thrashing strokes leaving spears of white froth upon the black surface.

  As twilight creeps across city from the east, turning the glass of the city a fiery purplish orange, the inside of the bar darkens and candles flickering in the candelabras surrounding the stage cast Maggie’s misshapen shadow upon the backdrop and the walls.

  Duncan watches as his mother sings and holds nothing back—she sings as if this were the End, sings as she did during those years before her performance at Symphony Hall. And the crowd knows it, and because of this, they believe in her, and they give themselves to her, and she takes them with her. And in that place, every note is perfect.

  Maggie begins to sing “Senza mamma,” from Puccini’s Suor Angelica, which Duncan has only ever heard sung in broken fragments before. Sister Angelica, who was put away in a convent after giving birth to an illegitimate child, learns after seven years without news of her son that he died in infancy. She sings of not being able to forgive herself for abandoning him and wishing that she could be together with him in heaven.

  Senza mamma,

  o bimbo, tu sei morto!

  Le tue labbra, senza i baci miei,

  scolorriron fredde!

  e chuidesti, o bimbo, gli occhi belli!

  Non potendo carezzarmi,

  le manine componesti in croce!

  E tu sei morto senza sapere

  quanto t’mava questa tua mamma.

  Ora che sei un angelo del cielo,

  ora tu puoi vederla la tua mamma,

  tu puoi sendere giù pel firmamento

  ed aleggiare in torno a me ti sento

  Sei qui, mi baci e m’accarezzi.

  Ah! Dimmi, quando in ciel potrò verderti?

  Quando potrò baciarti?

  Oh! Dolce fine d’ogni mio dolore,

  quando in ciel potró salire?

  Quando potró morire?

  Dillo alla mamma, creatura bella,

  con un leggiero scintillar di stella,

  Parlami, parlami,

  amore, amore, amore!

  My baby, you died without your mama!

  Your lips, without my kisses, grew pale and cold!

  And your lovely eyes closed, my baby!

  I could not caress you,

  your little hands folded in a cross!

  And you died without knowing

  how much your mama loved you!

  Now you are an angel in heaven,

  now you can see your mama,

  you can come down from heaven

  and let our fragrance linger about me.

  You are here to feel my kisses and caresses.

  Ah! Tell me, when will I see you in heaven?

  When can I kiss you?

  Oh! Sweet end to all my grieving,

  when can I greet you in heaven?

  When can I greet death?

  O creature of beauty, tell your mama,

  by a small twinkle of a star.

  Speak, speak, speak to me,

  my love, my love, my love!

  A cigarette lies bent in a tin ashtray upon the piano’s edge and a string of gray-white smoke churns slowly upward from it. The musicians sit silently on chairs watching her performance. Maggie’s voice echoes and resonates with such vibrating pitch, resonance, and harmony that it is as if she were singer and tenor and chorus intermingled as one emerging slowly from the darkness and rising, surging quickly together toward the end. And Duncan feels God turning slowly toward them with the last of the sun descending into the hills and the glass and metal valleys and the darkness above sweeping its vast shadow across the bay.

  In listening to his mother he knows that on this night, this rare, particular, star-aligned, tumid night, she has been granted a reprieve. She stands in another time, before an audience at Symphony Hall in Boston; she is nineteen and immune to the world of pain, before one note fractures the membrane in her throat, swelling her voice box, and causing her larynx to harden with coarse cartilage, a time before he was born.

  After her performance she will race to North Station through the snow toward the man who will become his father and it will feel as if it is snowing just for her, as if the world has momentarily stopped and His great gaze has paused from its cosmic ruminations and a light has shot the bow of the universe and materialized out of the darkness merely to consider the wonder of her. Maggie will raise her face, her chilled cheeks to the tumbling snow and to the invisible glittering stars beyond the billowing white of the sky, and briefly understand her part in everything. Her life will begin and end here in the brief time before Duncan is born, while she is still very much a young girl and while the promise of all manner of dreams lie before her. And he knows that when his mother stops singing, there never will be another like her.

  Chapter 86

  The show is over; the candles are extinguished and the musicians and Mother are in darkness. Beer bottles clatter and chairs scrape against wood. Clay calls out to them, says, Great job, Maggie! and begins to stack the chairs and the patrons slowly trudge out to the street. Ray Cooper and the Hi-Fidelity Blu-Tones break down their equipment. A Harley backfires and roars violently up the avenue. Then the footfalls of the musicians on the steps of the stage, Clay hollering for them to lock up after themselves, and after a long while mother’s blue sequined dress shimmering through the dark toward him.

  Hey, you, she says. How’s my biggest fan? And Duncan grins.

  In the alleyway behind the bar a radio is playing big band music by Tommy Dorsey, the horns blowing slow and melancholy. Duncan watches his mother’s gaunt face, hears in the silent space between them her voice st
ill resonating from her performance. He is sitting upon a hard-backed, fold-up chair, with shadows shifting upon the back of the bar wall, and they are all alone.

  Maggie smells of sweat, cigarette smoke, and skin cream. One arm folded across her middle, she sucks hungrily on her cigarette, pauses to purse her lips and pick a fleck of tobacco from her lower lip. Slowly, she touches the side of her head.

  What is it? Duncan asks.

  Nothing, sweetie. Just got a headache. I think everything is finally catching up with me. I just need to sit for a while. She looks about the dark bar.

  You know this—tonight—it’s not what I thought it would be.

  No. Duncan grins. Me either.

  But that’s all right too.

  Yes, it is, Duncan agrees.

  I’m done, you know, Maggie says, and clutches her belly unconsciously. Duncan nods. Anyone could see the toll the last week had taken on her.

  She laughs softly. No, she says. I’m really done. I can’t sing, Duncan. There isn’t anything left. I tried, just now in the bathroom. My voice is gone. She opens her mouth and shapes it as if to sing, but when she exhales, only a whistle emerges, cracked and broken from her larynx.

  Her voice is truly gone.

  As they sit and he waits for her to say something more, she gradually leans against him, and she feels weightless, so tall and big boned yet weightless. He has no idea how much time passes but has the sense that the two of them have dozed. The lights are coming up slowly like filaments warming with heat, and a theater is taking shape about them. At the back of the Windsor stage a proscenium shimmers out of the darkness. Above the proscenium gilded balconies emerges. The blurred, dark shapes of people rise here and there, shuffling and whispering in mute, unintelligible voices, much like distant echoes piled one atop the other, as they find their seats.

  Maggie sighs and then smiles slowly. The last place I performed, she says and raises her eyes to the shattered galleries.

  It didn’t look like this then, she says. The production was sometimes terrible but still … this place … you could almost see and feel what it wanted it to be—you could feel the small part of the opera that it had reached for, had wanted so badly to be.

  The smell of grease and tobacco comes off the satin and velvet chairs, once red but now faded to a burnt umber and shimmering black in places where the felt has been worn away.

  Let’s stay here for a while, shall we? I’m feeling very tired, sweetie.

  Maggie places her hands upon her stomach and Duncan lays his head against her shoulder and together they stare toward the front of the opera house. Slowly, so slowly that he imagines he must be dreaming, in the darkening light, as if a film is about to begin, flickering upon a invisible screen, there emerges a shimmering about them, in the seats, along the bas-relief of the proscenium, and upon the stage, where a young pale-faced soprano now stands in a white gown.

  Maggie smiles. I forgot how young I was, how young I was when it all ended.

  On the stage the young woman bows and Duncan hears applause, subdued and distant, like the rhythmic chattering of a far-off train. And then the woman lifts her face to the mezzanine and clerestory, a face unmarred by lines of pain and years of frustration and regret. Her red hair spills in tightly wound curls down her back. Duncan’s mouth is open and he realizes that he’s not breathing. You’re beautiful, Mom, he says. You’re so beautiful.

  He senses the presence of the people about them—shades of people, shadowed angles and planes and strange coronas of light—a burning luminosity at the edges of black, shifting outlines, becoming more distinct and recognizable. There is movement in the seats, the low timbre of men and women speaking, the smell of pomade and Fragonard, the musk of rich perfume and cologne, and the settling of the opera house as it fits itself to contain the glittering memories of the past. The faded, decrepit paneling and bar stools of the Windsor Tap are gone and in their place is ornate, gold-leaf filigree and the sculpted booths of the mezzanine, in which long-dead men and women sit in silent splendor, entranced by his mother’s performance. The stairs to the foyer are enclosed by red marble balusters supporting a balustrade of onyx. Twenty monolithic columns of a pale opal-like marble, honeycombed with arabesques and ornaments and surrounded by smaller pilasters of peach and violet stone, rise to the panorama of the ceiling.

  Duncan stares at the raised Italian plasterwork, the golden tiled sections of the orchestra, the elaborately painted ceiling, with dryads and nymphs playing music in Greek pastures, and suspended a hundred feet above them the shimmering grand chandelier and its thousand cut-crystal diamond tapers, through which electric flames revolve and refract in twirling hollow points of light. And below this and encircling the clerestory, a dozen gold painted statues: the muses of the arts.

  What do you think, Duncan? Mother says. It’s not the Palais Garnier, I know, but it’s not so bad, is it?

  No, he shakes his head and clutches her hand in all its feverish strength as the soprano’s voice surges through them, vibrating in a crescendo that he can feel trembling in the nerve endings beneath his skin. No, it’s not so bad at all.

  After a moment, he asks her: Is this the end then?

  I suppose it is, Duncan.

  For a while they stare at the stage. It really is a beautiful show. Mother reaches the heights of her range with such force of violence and pain, anguish and desperation and loss—and in this is the happiness that comes with the power of her abilities, when everything that is her essence pours forth from her heart—and with such seeming effortlessness the audience shimmers in appreciation. Upon the stage, beneath the bas-relief of the golden proscenium, Duncan’s mother performs her final aria as the Queen of the Night, her arms outstretched toward the audience in pleading, in joy.

  At its end she bows and then lifts her face to the clamouring audience, a sight that she will never see again. But for now she is momentarily illuminated and held, transfigured by the lights of the stage.

  Disowned may you be forever, Abandoned may you be forever, Destroyed be forever.

  Heads turn in their direction. Elaborately dressed men and women nod and silently mouth the words, Brava! Brava! Magnifico! and clap the tops of their hands in restrained and respectful applause.

  Duncan senses Maggie smiling. I love you, Duncan, she says.

  I love you too, Mom.

  Cherry blossom petals, turned opaque and pearl by the stage lights, rain slowly from behind the curtains—the suggestion of pink-tinged snow in May, glinting in slow spirals to the stage as if they were falling onto a grave.

  It’s like the Festival of Lights, he whispers, and mother nods knowingly. The Festival of Lights Holiday Train, she echoes. How long ago it seems. Like this. Like a dream.

  And he wonders how she can know about the Festival of Lights Holiday Train. It froze on the tracks the night I was born, he says, and everyone died. The night you left me at the Home. That’s what they told me, what Brother Canice always said.

  Mother nods sleepily. But we didn’t die, did we sweetie? We didn’t die. We should have died but we didn’t. We were like Joshua and his angel, flying above it all.

  No. Only the people on the train died.

  We were on the train, my Duncan. We were the only survivors. I took us through the snow and walked until I couldn’t walk anymore. It was so cold and everything was lost in the white and I prayed that God would take us.

  Duncan turns and looks at her.

  You weren’t breathing. It was such a strange thing, an odd lurching in your throat, a little gasp of air and you were gone from me and I was sure that we’d both die there in the snow miles from anywhere and I lay down with you, wrapped you up in my clothes, and fell asleep. Your heart had stopped Duncan, and I didn’t want to live anymore. I never intended for us to wake up again.

  When they found me, you were dead. But then your heart began beating again and I knew it was a miracle, a sign from God. I remember looking up at one point as they carried me over the sn
ow and rockets were shooting through the air.

  It was a meteor shower, he says.

  Mother nods. A meteor shower, she says dreamily. I looked up through the snow and there in a tear of clearest dark starlit sky I saw hundreds of rockets arcing and sputtering and I knew that at any moment you would be born and that you would be special. My special Duncan.

  Then I was never here with you?

  I was in a delirium for days, sweetie, and when I finally came through I couldn’t manage a baby, I couldn’t look after a child. And then he came, because they’d called him and he said he’d take me back and everything would be right again, that we could start over. He said that we couldn’t be on the road with a child, that if I didn’t leave you, he’d go and never come back … He promised that we’d be together, that he’d take me back west and we’d get married, in a couple of years we’d start a real family.

  Who Mom? Who are you talking about?

  Your father.

  I gave you up almost immediately and they took you without question. I think they knew that, after everything that had happened, I was in no fit state to look after a child. It was as if you were meant to be with them, as if the storm was merely part of some divine plan, as if it had been engineered to bring you to them. I knew you would be safe—I hoped you would be safe. I’m so sorry that I left with him, I’m so sorry I left you.

  What about the pictures? I’m in them and you’re holding my hand. That had to be from a time before. And someone had to take those pictures.

  No, Duncan. His mother shakes her head. That’s not me. And I don’t know who took the pictures.

  He stares at her.

  They’re made up, Duncan. They’re not really us. They’re pictures of other people, not us.

  The boy—

  It’s not you, Duncan. O my sweet, I’m so sorry, but the boy, he isn’t you either. I don’t know who he is. They were four for a dollar at the St. Vincent De Paul. They came out of a box filled with hundreds of other pictures.