Dinner Along the Amazon (13 page)

“Thunder and lightning and music,” she’d said. It was like that. If there was ever thunder and lightning and music, then he’d come.

I began to get scared. There was thunder all right, and there was lightning, but there wasn’t any music.

Then there was.

I didn’t exactly think I’d sit around to make sure. I thought I’d better tell my mother.

Thunder and lightning and music. Yes, there certainly was music all right. It was faint, but it was there. Maybe I’d better warn Effie too, I thought. Mother first, and then Effie.

I went into the hallway. My mother’s door was open, and she was King there only covered with the sheet because it was so hot. She was asleep, though. The street lamp shone through the window and I can remember the metal smell of the screens. They smelt sort of electric.

“Mother.”

She son of moved.

“Hey, Mother.”

I was very quiet, but I had to wake her up. I could hear that music even more now.

“Neil?”

She rolled over towards me and took my hand. I could tell she really didn’t want to wake up. Maybe she’d been dreaming. Our dad was away.

“I’m sorry, but I had to.”

“Are you sick?”

“No’

“Then what is it?”

“Can I get in with you?”

“All right. Pull the cover up. That’s right.”

We lay there and heard the rain.

“Now tell me about it. Can’t you sleep?”

“No.” I didn’t know where to begin. “Mother, has Effie ever talked to you?”

“What about?”

“I don’t know. But she said to me that if there was rain, and if there was thunder, and if there was lightning, then maybe something would happen.”

“The end of the world?” Mother laughed very quietly.

“No, I don’t mean that. Some man.”

“A man? What do you mean?”

“Well, she said if there was thunder and lightning and everything, to watch out for music. Because if there was music too, then he’d come.”

“Who’d come, dear?”

“This man. This man she’s waiting for.”

“Well, if she’s waiting for him, then it’s all right.”

I guess she didn’t take it very seriously.

“Besides,” she said, “there isn’t any music.”

“Yes there is.”

“There w?”

She sounded serious now all right.

“Yes, I heard it. That’s why I woke you up. I thought maybe we’d better tell her so she could be ready.”

“Ready? Does she…does she really know who he is?”

“Well, she seemed to. She never said his name or anything. She just said that—”

“And you heard it? The music, you really heard it?”

“Yes.”

“Now don’t joke with me, Neil. This may be very serious.”

“Spit. Honestly, I really heard it.”

“Where from?”

“I don’t know. I just heard it.”

My mother got out of bed.

All this time the thunder was getting louder and the lightning was like daylight.

“Well, we’ll wake her up and ask her what it’s all about. Is Bud awake?”

“No.”

“Leave him, then.”

She tried to turn on the lights, but they didn’t work. (That always happened two or three times a year in those big storms. Toronto never worked when you needed it to.) So we went into the hall in the dark.

Effie’s room was at the top of the stairs. Very small, but it was the only one we had for her. It used to be mine. It had a sloping ceiling.

We knocked on her door.

No answer.

It was pitch black. Effie always pulled the blinds. My mother went over and opened them and a bit of light came in. And then we saw that she wasn’t there. Her bed was all slept in and everything, but she wasn’t there.

My mother let out a yell. Very quiet, but it was certainly a yell.

We didn’t know what to do.

We went out into the hall again.

“Shall I get Bud?” I said.

“No. No, not yet.” She was trying to get calm. Very calm. And then she was all right.

“Maybe we’d better go and look downstairs. We can get some candles from the dining room.”

We started down the staircase. Halfway down we heard the music again.

Very low it was. No words or anything, just the tune. It didn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular—it was just there.

We stood still and listened. If we hadn’t been so scared, it would have been pretty. I mean it was a good tune. One that you could hum.

My mother caught my hand and we started down again.

“Dining room,” she whispered.

The dining room was down the hall, and beyond it there was a sun room, all glass windows, and in the summertime, screens.

We got into the dining room all right, and from there the music was louder.

Then we saw her.

She was in the sun room, watching from the windows. All her black hair fell down her back. When there was lightning she stood up, and when there wasn’t she sat down. All the time she sort of rocked to and fro to the sound of the music.

She was crying—but she had that wonderful smile.

Just once, when the music stopped, she said something. I don’t know what it was because she said it too quietly for me to hear. And the reason she said it when the music stopped was because she was the music. She was. It was Effie singing.

My mother and I didn’t bother her, though. She looked so happy there—even with the tears down her face—and as my mother said, “It doesn’t hurt people to sing once in a while.

Even at night.”

So we went back to bed and my mother said would I like to sleep with her, and I said yes. We got in and we thought about Effie downstairs.

“Do you know?”

“No. Do you?”

“No.”

Then, later on—I think it was about three months later—Effie came to my mother and said she’d been called away.

“Where to, dear?” my mother asked her.

“Just away,” said Effie, like a princess. “And so I’ve got to go—”

My mother didn’t ask her because Effie had been such a good person in the house, and Mother knew that if she had to go away then she had to, and it was honest. You never had to think about that with Effie—she always told the truth and everything had a reason. Even if you didn’t get to know what it was.

We certainly hated to see her leave us. Even Bud was sad about it, and he was never much good with maids. He used to be too shy with them.

Before she left, she gave me a set of toy animals, little ones—a pig and a cow and a horse and four sheep—all in a box. She knew that I had this toy farm.

And for Bud she had a box of toy soldiers. Only they were very peaceful soldiers, just standing at ease, and there was a little sentrybox too, for them to go into when it rained.

She gave my mother a hankie with an M on it because my mother’s name is Margaret. It was real linen and she still has it.

The day she left, she was having a cup of tea just before she went to get on the streetcar and I found her in the kitchen just like the first time. I had some flowers for her. Little ones, that she could carry without them getting in the way.

And she looked at them and said: “That’s his favourite colour.” (They were purple.) And she thanked me.

So I asked her right then and there.

“Tell me who he is.”

She smiled and winked at me.

“That’s a secret.”

“But is he real? Will he really come for you some time? Please tell me.”

Then she did this wonderful thing. She got down on her knees and put her arms around me and her head against me. I remember looking down at her hair underneath her hat.

And she said: “Don’t worry about me.” Then she got up.

“Now it’s time to go. Thank you for the flowers.”

She picked up her suitcase and went in to say good-bye to my mother.

“Do you want Neil to take you to the streetcar?”

“No, thank you, Mrs Cable. I’ll be all right. It’s such a lovely day.”

I think we both knew what she meant.

I didn’t watch her go. Not at first. But then I ran out to see her before she turned the corner. Then she did—and was gone.

Effie.

So you can see what I mean. It still worries me. And that’s why I want you to be sure—to be sure to recognize her when you see her. She’ll look at you, just like she did at me that first day in the kitchen, as though you were someone she was looking for. But if she does, don’t be scared. This man, I don’t know who he is, but if it’s Effie he wants, then he’s all right.

Sometime—Later—Not Now

1950

We’re over thirty now, Diana and I, but in 1950 we were twelve. It seems such a long time ago that I can’t quite connect it up to the world we live in today. Certainly, there seem to be no straight lines back to that time, only the crooked, wavering lines of spliced memory. We were peaceful children, then.

No.

We were placated children.

Our world had been secured for us by a World War that closed in a parable of Silence. And so I think we were placated children—doped—by horror. And I only say it here because I think there was a crazy serenity to our childhood which you might not understand if you were not alive then. The adults we lived with walked around our lives very often on tip-toe, with plugs in their ears and with shaded eyes. So much of holocaust had happened that people acquiesced to reality without daring to look at it, because it could only turn out to be another nightmare.

And so we grew up protected from all subtlety. We were quiet and with good reason. We knew the big things—life and death, period—but none of the small things. The best we knew was how to be still and quiet, which meant that we learned, excessively, not to know ourselves.

My name is Davis Hart and I grew up loving Diana Galbraith.

Her parents and my parents had been in the War together—which is to say that our fathers had served in the same regiment and that our mothers had spent the War wandering from army camp to army camp, sometimes taking us with them, but more often leaving us behind with a woman called Maria Tungess, whose grasp of discipline was still back in the “Child-in-the-Locked-Cupboard” era.

When the War ended our fathers returned to civilian life, which was a life of absolute comfort supported by absolute money—got by absolute panic. People didn’t just want to be rich in the 1940s. They had to be.

The Galbraiths owned a summer island and we would spend our vacations there like one family—my brother Eugene, my sister Maudie and me and Diana.

I remember a day of the summer in question, 1950, when Maudie, Diana and I sat high up on a rock we called, for obvious reasons, the “Elephant’s Back.” Eugene, being older, was allowed to own a gun and he was elsewhere on the island trying to kill something. He was fourteen, then, and Maudie was eight—almost nine.

My memory of this conversation starts with Diana flinging a stone into the water far below us and I look back on the whole scene as if I were that stone—looking upward—plunging down. I see us, high on our rock, through the shimmer of a surface I shall never be able to break open. And our conversation is as stilted and formal as something heard without inflection.

“Mother thinks we’re going to get married,” said Diana, and Maudie laughed. “It isn’t at all funny. She really thinks so.”

“Maybe we will,” I said. I was lying down with my hand over my eyes.

“No. I don’t think so,” said Diana, and I sat up. I was hurt by the matter-of-factness with which she dismissed me from her future, and not at all by just the marriage question—which, naturally, had never entered into my thinking at that age. “In fact, I’m quite certain,” she went on, “I’m not going to get married at all.”

“How do you know your mother thinks we’ll get married?” I said.

“I heard her say to your mother. She said ‘when Diana and Davis are married…’—just like that. And Aunt Peggy didn’t argue about it, either. They both think it’s going to happen.”

“What’ll happen to your children,” said Maudie, “if you don’t get married?”

“What children?” said Diana.

“Your children,” said Maudie. “Aren’t you going to have them?”

“You don’t just have children, stupid. Doesn’t she know anything, Davis?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, and lay down again.

“I know everything,” said Maudie—and immediately refuted that by saying, “You’re not allowed to have your babies until you’re married. And if you don’t get married your babies die inside of you.”

“Who told you that?”

“Miss Tungess. She didn’t get married yet and she’s had seventeen babies die right inside of her. So far.”

“You can’t walk around with something dead inside of you,” I said. “If you did—you’d die yourself.”

“She flushes them down the toilet.”

There was some kind of pause after that while we all thought about what might be floating around in the sewage system and then Diana said, “Anyway, the important thing is, I don’t want to know who I’m to marry at all—‘til I decide to get married. And so far, I’ve decided not to get married, so I don’t need to know anyone.”

(She stands like a boy in my memory, wearing khaki shorts. Feet wide apart. Canvas running shoes. A pale yellow pole shirt with a hole over the point of one shoulder blade, and she pulls her braid over this shoulder and starts to undo it and then to do it up again: weaving, unweaving her hair. She is always preoccupied with some nervous gesture of this kind.)

“If you don’t get married, what will you do, then?”

“I’m going to play the piano. You know that. Go to Europe and go to France. I’m going to become a very, very famous person.”

She wet the end of her braid in her mouth and looked at it closely.

“As famous as Rubinstein,” she said after a moment, drawing the braid through her fingers. “As Rubinstein. As Malcuzinski—as Moiseiwitsch.” These names were magic to her. Incantation.

“They’re all men,” said Maudie.

“They’re the three greatest pianists in the world. That’s what they are. And I’ll be one of them.”

I watched her carefully. As I’ve said, I was “in love” with her. I had loved her from the moment I realized she could be taken away from me, which first happened for about six months when we were seven years old. I didn’t want her to grow up to be Rubinstein, because I realized that being Rubinstein meant belonging to another world and to a lot of other people.