Tell (5 page)

“Now,” she said, “first tell me about your wonderful green eyes—from whom did you inherit those?”

“My mother,” Maggie said. “Hers were greener, even darker than mine. I was always happy that I was the one born with the green eyes.”

“And your singing? When did you begin?”

Maggie found herself launched into a tale of being ten years old, little Maggie Healy singing “O Holy Night,” the highlight of the Christmas concert in her one-room country school. She told Melba about singing at year-end ceremonies and at June graduations for older students. She told about singing at her own graduation, when she finished school herself. How she had sung to the accompaniment of the teacher, Miss Miller, who played the only instrument in the school—a piano pushed to the edge of the platform that also held the teacher’s desk. This was the same piano upon which Maggie had practised after school, for days, months, years. Miss Miller had provided lessons at no charge. She had offered because she believed in Maggie’s ability to sing. She taught the scales and how to play with two hands and how to use the foot pedal. She taught until Maggie could sight-read sheet music and play almost anything that was put in front of her. All Maggie had to do to repay Miss Miller was
tidy the classroom after school and provide a bottle of water for every two seats, along with a rag to clean the slates, though they both knew that some of the boys used spit instead of water. It became Maggie’s job to empty the water bottles, fill them again, distribute the supply of freshly washed rags. A pump in the school porch supplied drinking water.

She stopped.

Melba had been listening carefully. “Many people in the music world had similar beginnings,” she said. “You might be surprised. When I tried to get my first roles, your own Canadian, Madame Albani, was the reigning star. What was left over was what I was given to sing, and I dared not protest. In Brussels, I had no jewellery to wear when I performed. One of the directors gave me a set of paste so I wouldn’t look so pathetic and plain when I sang. There were many kindnesses. But there were also weeks when I went hungry. Tell me, Maggie, what were some of the other songs you sang—besides ‘O Holy Night’?”

“Whatever was popular at the time,” said Maggie. “‘I Knew a Pretty Maiden,’ ‘Molly! Do You Love Me?’ ‘Whispering Hope’—songs like that. Irish favourites, of course. And hymns.”

Melba nodded. “‘Little Brown Jug’? That was on everyone’s list when I was asked to sing. Vernon and Irene Castle danced to the same tune. Well, they could dance to anything.”

Maggie was surprised to hear Melba say that she had sung “Little Brown Jug.” But what she didn’t and couldn’t say to Melba was what music meant to her, or rather, what singing had once meant. There had been times when she was so moved by what she was singing, she wept afterward. Music—she had known this as a child—was inside her. Songs played in her head.
She could not have stopped them if she’d wanted to, not from the moment she’d first heard her own mother sing. As a young child, countless times during country parties, she had concealed herself beneath the kitchen table, hidden by an overhanging tablecloth, a dark cloth, sewn and patterned with indigo and scarlet squares. Her mother knew she was there but allowed her presence. Maggie had grown up listening to men play the fiddle, the tin whistle, the flute. And always she had listened to voices joined in song, men’s and women’s voices, but especially the voice of her mother. It was possible that Maggie’s own first songs had been sung from beneath the same kitchen table. She strained to grasp at those fragments of memory.

On every occasion, with friends crowded around, her mother had sung by herself, some Irish song. Hidden behind the overhanging cloth, picking at a scarlet patch whose threads had become loosened, picking at it until the same threads bled into her fingers, Maggie had thrilled to hear the familiar voice buoy up the room with its own distinctive strength, its own distinctive spirit. When her mother came to the end of the last line, it was always with a burst of laughter, as if the song had been a joyous kind of mistake. As if the song had leapt into the midst of the party by some caprice of its own.

When Maggie was older, she sang alongside her mother. But later, much later, Maggie stopped singing. Except for the church choir in town.

Facing Melba, she reached under the diner table to rub at her own knee. She would have a bruise the following day.

“You mustn’t feel badly about your fall,” said Melba. “I know the feeling only too well. Let me tell you the story of a
time when I was beginning a tour in California. I was knocked hard on the head, hard enough to be rendered unconscious. I was in the home of old friends—I had just arrived—and sat on the edge of a settee that slid back and tilted as it slid. Later, I found out that a caster was missing from one of the legs. Well, the movement of the settee caused a bronze bust behind me to fall forward. The blow to my head knocked me out completely. I might have been killed. My hosts were horrified.” She shrugged. “Happily, I survived and lived to sing another note. What I still find strange, however, is that I experienced a feeling of pure sorrow when I regained consciousness. Quite some time passed before I could absorb what had happened, but that was secondary to the feeling of sorrow I was not able to shake.”

They shared the moment quietly until Melba laughed, an enveloping laugh that made Maggie join in. Melba glanced furtively around the back of the booth and put a warning finger to her lips. “Hush,” she said. She shook her head as if to admonish herself. “We’ll be discovered. How wonderful is freedom! How wonderful to sit in a diner eating warm sausages.” And this set the two of them off and they laughed again.

When they sobered and began to talk once more, Melba surprised Maggie with her next comment. “You’ve experienced sorrow, Maggie. I see it in your face. Am I being forward? When one has had sorrow in one’s own life, one sees it in another. One of my early sorrows was my marriage, which I knew immediately to be a disaster. I married young, without the slightest knowledge of where I was headed. I had no direction whatever. But I recovered from my mistake, and freed myself to make many more. Now, well, I don’t care so much if I make mistakes.
Nor am I afraid to speak up. I have opinions about the music I sing and where I sing it. I have opinions about what goes on in the big wide world, even though we women are not expected to express our thoughts about worldly matters. This terrible war, for one.” She paused for a breath. “Forgive me if I intruded on your privacy just now.”

Maggie had not interpreted Melba’s observation as intrusion. Nor had she permitted her own sorrow to surface.

Melba did not push. She looked down at a remnant of apple peel and a limp end of sausage that lay side by side on her plate. Once again, she took Maggie’s hand in her own. This time she began to sing softly, music Maggie recognized at once as lines from the end of “Donde lieta uscì,” one of Mimì’s arias from
Bohème.
Noises inside the diner fell away. Or did they? The room quieted. Or did it? Was everything shut out by the moment between them? In this distilled and indelible moment, Maggie received the gift of a private, almost whispered concert, until Melba allowed her voice its freedom, until the radiant sound suddenly swelled, soaring up to the tin ceiling and filling the room:

People turned to look. A man stood and applauded. Melba called for the waiter and paid him handsomely. The two women slid out of the booth. Melba bundled herself into her coat, kissed Maggie soundly on both cheeks and swept away. Maggie never saw her again.

Perhaps the encounter had never taken place. No, Maggie was certain it had. All in a brief morning. A singular moment in her life. She had told Melba about her love of singing when she was a child. Nellie Melba had talked to her about love, and told her how important it was that they continue to make beautiful and meaningful music with their voices. And then she had sung “Donde lieta uscì” privately, to Maggie, in the booth of a diner on a grey winter’s day.

N
OW, WITH THE WAR OVER, WITH THE ONSET OF WINTER
and the end of 1919 in sight, the New Year’s Eve concert in which Maggie herself was to take part was not far off. She wondered what she had allowed herself to be manoeuvred into. She had been singing in the church choir of St. Mark’s for years. But in the early fall, her friend Zel had persuaded her to audition for the new choral society and the end-of-year concert that would be held in the theatre.
Partly
persuaded. Maggie had to take responsibility for her own actions. Why had she so quickly agreed to audition? Because of Lukas. She had gone because she was curious. Not expecting that the man responsible for choosing the music would also choose her to sing solo.

Rehearsals at the theatre had begun in early October and were becoming more intense. Maggie found herself immersed in those, along with her usual choir practice at the church. No time to think of anything else. Christmas would come and go, as it did every year. She and Am would have dinner with his brother, Dermot, and his wife, Agnes, at the hotel across from
the wharf at the other end of Main Street. Dermot and Agnes lived in the house joined by a passageway to the hotel, but they took their meals in the hotel dining room, where they had their own family table. Agnes did most of the cooking, and the hotel was known for its good food.

Other family members would also be present at Christmas: Dermot’s youngest son, Patrick; his oldest son, Bernard, who along with his wife, Kay, helped manage the hotel—they would be there. Probably Am and Dermot’s father, too, would be brought in from the farm in the country. And then, one week after the end of Christmas celebrations, Maggie was committed to taking part in the New Year’s concert.

At that instant, as if responding to her thoughts of family, Am walked into the kitchen. He pulled at the icebox door and peered in. Maggie had not heard him come out of the bedroom. Her reverie ended. She waited for him to look across the room and say, “Have you made the tea, Mags? Hot enough to burn a hole in my throat?” He’d leave the tea in the cup for ten minutes anyway, before drinking. Or dump in so much milk the tea would be ruined.

“Have you made the tea, Mags? Hot enough to burn a hole in my throat?”

Maggie, refusing to answer the worn-out question, filled his cup.

He turned to look out over the slopes and angles of rooftop that were visible from their kitchen window. A fragment of bunting he’d hung outside in the fall to celebrate the returning soldiers had snagged on one corner of the roof and was caught there still.

“We’ll soon have snow,” said Am. “This week. I’ve been predicting an early winter, and now look at the dull sky. All the signs of a storm are there.”

Watching Am sideways now, Maggie was once more reminded that half his head was missing. The back half. She wanted to roar in rage. Grew had cut his hair several evenings before, even though she’d asked Am to go to a different barber. Grew’s need for drink was out of control since he’d lost his only son in the war. Now Maggie couldn’t look at her own husband because of the way Grew had snipped the hair on the back of his head. Removed it. Totally. Yes, half of Am’s head was definitely missing. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

K
ENAN WAS GRATEFUL THAT HIS BACKYARD
sloped down to the rocky shore of the bay. Grateful that Tress had chosen this house to rent. He had not told her as much, but there seemed no need to voice what she already knew: that his chief pleasure since returning from the war was to sit and face the waters of the bay. If it weren’t for occasional pains shooting through his dead hand, if it weren’t for the fact that he had stayed so long indoors—others no doubt thought him eccentric, even pathetic—he might consider himself, in some strange and empty way, whole.

With winter arriving, the veranda floor was cooling, but a cool floor was no deterrent. Kenan remained in the wicker chair and allowed his gaze to fall between the newly filled coal shed on his left and a leafless maple tree on the right. Snow was falling heavily, wetly, settling in clumps on the branches and on the clothesline, which gave the appearance of a mooring rope tethered to a ship. Along shore, he could see the ice house, which,
in another month, would be filled with squared blocks of ice. Farther along, an edge of the broom-handle factory was visible. Between the two were remnants of a ramshackle wharf.

During the past year, Kenan’s body had been forced to adjust to a narrower visual field. He turned his head and looked left toward the railway tracks that curved north and out of town. He knew that, out of sight, machine shops and warehouses were standing empty. He knew, too, that a couple of tugs and a steamboat or two would now be in winter layup at the main wharf.

He turned his attention to the horizon and the bay. Despite his blinkered view, he had been entertained through the changing seasons by considerable activity on the water. Fishermen out for a day’s catch of walleye; pleasure craft—plentiful during summer and fall; flat-bottomed boats, narrow rowboats, canoes. By now, and partly because Tress’s uncle Am had pointed out various shapes and markings, Kenan was able to recognize vessels that returned like old habits to the same shadowy inlets and coves. He knew which steamers headed south toward Long Reach and the open waters of Lake Ontario, and which ones chugged westward, staying close to shore, stopping at local docks and piers to discharge passengers and take on more. Water traffic had decreased with the beginning of cold weather. The last steamer had sailed more than a week ago.

This week, his interest was aroused by a new activity that inserted itself directly into the centre of the area under his watch. Stacks of lumber, poles and fencing had been dropped off no more than two hundred feet down the slope. At once, he’d understood that this year’s rink would be at his end of town. Last winter, it had been below Mill Street, near his in-laws’
hotel. Now, the entire construction seemed to be planned for his personal entertainment. After a good freeze, the boards for the skaters’ shack would be carried closer to shore. It was Kenan’s good fortune that the rink would be located in a line directly south of his own backyard.

He was surprised by the stirring of the old excitement, the anticipation of winter. He thought of the bay freezing, the testing of the ice, men and boys from town shovelling and clearing and pushing back snow until the banks enclosed a surface shaped in a near-perfect oval. After that, tall poles would be hoisted and secured, one at each end of the rink. Sometimes, a hockey net would be set up on a cleared space outside the oval. All of this construction was forthcoming, an annual event for the town.

Around the outer circumference of the rink, a walkway would be tramped into the snow, and this would be kept clear so that skaters could manoeuvre along the outer edge of the rink as they approached. The oval walkway would also provide a place from which non-skaters could watch the activities on the ice. On either side of the path from shore, long sticks or posts would be stuck into the snow at regular intervals, and loose fencing strung between. To enter the rink, skaters would be able to choose from one of two openings in the snowbanks so that they could step from the walkway onto the ice.

Kenan thought of the day he stood in the doorway of the shed of the Mill Street house when he was a boy, watching Uncle Oak bend forward in the bibbed overalls he wore in his welding shop. His uncle sorted through a heap of harnesses and old reins, and finally disentangled a pair of skates. He held them
up so that Kenan could see the smoothly carved pieces of wood into which long steel blades had been inserted, one in each.

“Fasten these to your boots,” Uncle Oak had told him. “Tighten the straps until they’re firm and snug. And don’t ask for anything better. They were good enough for me when I was a boy and I guess they’ll be good enough for you.”

Kenan did not want anything better. He loved the skates from the beginning, loved the way the straps attached through side slits, front and back, permitting him to tighten the grips when he fitted his boots to the wood of the skates. He loved the long strips of steel, curled at the toes and blunted at the heels, perhaps by a blacksmith from some earlier time when his uncle had been a youth, or maybe even before that.

On those same sharpened blades, Kenan had learned to dart around couples who swayed as they strained to hear music from the horn of the Victrola.
The Skaters’ Waltz
alternated with “We Will Meet at the Rink To-Night.” These were repeated over and over, but no one complained, no one seemed to mind. The skating couples cruised round and round, tracing patterns on the ice, laughing and intent at the same time.

Kenan found himself hoping that under the thin layer of white, everything would freeze quickly so that the rink could be resurrected. A few energetic souls used to skate across the part of the bay he could see; probably a few still did. He’d been one of those who’d skated the distance to Napanee, but he had done so only once. He was eleven years old when he and one of his boyhood friends, Orryn, had skated across.

He remembered the sensation of striking out, pushing off with a quick jump, pumping his arms—left arm crossing his
chest with the thrust of the right skate, right arm with the left. He’d allowed himself to glide when the strongest gusts were at his back, but he’d loved the speed, the freedom, the cold against his face, the exhilaration, the conquest, the sensation of carving his own path across the ice.

By the time he and Orryn reached the far shore on the Napanee side, it was late afternoon and darkness was dropping quickly over the bay. His long legs fatigued without warning; he collapsed onto his back in a snowbank and told Orryn he needed to rest. The snow cradled his head like a pillow. He might have gone to sleep against its warmth, but his friend yanked him up. Orryn needled and joked and teased that Kenan couldn’t make it back, and that was enough for both boys to get a grip of themselves, to force themselves to turn and face the wind. They hadn’t given a moment’s thought to the return journey when they’d started out; they’d been thinking only of the adventure of crossing the bay.

During the trip back, they did not try to speak. They had to keep moving. They had to concentrate: one breath, another breath; one skate, the other skate; backs low, bodies doubled over, pushing into the wind. They had to focus on the lights of Deseronto in the distance, lights that hovered above the ice to form a shifting mirage of hope, beckoning and promising safety and warmth.

Uncle Oak was neither surprised nor impressed by the boys’ adventure. He had taught Kenan from early childhood that “life is treacherous.” If he was grateful or relieved that Kenan had made it back to Deseronto’s shore, he had not expressed his thoughts aloud.

Where was Orryn now? As boys, he and Kenan had been inseparable. They’d left Canada the same year, but ended up fighting in different areas of France. After an assignment in Berlin at the end of the war, Orryn had gone on to England. He might have been demobilized there. There had been talk of an aunt and uncle and several cousins in Dorset. Maybe he had married in England. Maybe he had stayed there and begun to raise a family of little Tommies.

Kenan focused on the bay again. At one point during his childhood—he couldn’t remember the exact year—electric lights had been attached to the crossbars that were nailed up near the tips of the poles at each end of the rink. Skaters and onlookers came out at night to marvel at the miraculous cones of yellow light that pooled down onto the ice and blazed over its surface. Kenan was one of those who’d marvelled. He had raced in and out of the cones of light, never allowing fatigue—not until the last skaters were shooed off the rink at ten o’clock at night. Only then did his feet turn to unfeeling stumps; only then did his ankles give out. He was still able to call up the sensation of unstrapping the skates from his boots and dragging himself, his feet in pain, back to his uncle’s house and to bed.

Closer to the onset of war, when he was older, Kenan had skated with Tress, whirling around to the same waltzes they’d listened to when they were children. In January 1914, they had dressed for the carnival, too, for the masquerade, held every year on open ice. They had been a gypsy couple—Tress wearing a long skirt and curtain hoops for earrings. They’d been surrounded by the usual inventive array of costumes, the result of people rummaging in closets, piecing together relics and
props, some of which were hauled out for use year after year.

Now, an entire war later, the makings of the rink itself appeared to be unchanged. Boards for the shack were stacked in readiness a short distance from Kenan’s veranda—boards he was able to recognize by their size and shape. Was it possible that something familiar had not been altered by war?

He imagined the inside of the skaters’ shack, soon to assume its own shape. Workmen would nail boards together to make a floor that would be blade-scarred soon enough. There would be a hammering together of three rough timber benches, where the skaters would sit to lace up and unlace; a stovepipe would reach up and out of the pot-belly stove and through an opening in the roof. A sizzle and spit would be heard as hardened pellets of ice and snow were plucked from the folds of mittens and brittle socks, and tossed onto the hot surface of the stove.

Skating came to a halt every year at the time of breakup, usually in early March but sometimes as late as April. Depending on the severity of winter, breakup occurred within a predictable range of a few weeks. Some of the town men laid bets about the exact day this would happen, but it was Tress’s uncle Am who was most accurate in his predictions. He swore by a formula he’d created from records he’d been keeping for decades, scratching
ice out
dates into one of the corner beams of the clock tower up over the post office. Kenan had been taken up there several times by Tress and her sister when they were schoolmates. Maggie and Am were childless, but had always welcomed young people to their tower apartment.

Kenan stood now, and left his chair. All of those memories were far removed from his present state. He might have
been imagining the details of the skating shack—which, at the moment, was nothing more than a stack of boards in a heap on the ground—in the same way he had begun to imagine his memories of war.

He had been a child when he’d joined up. Or might as well have been. If anyone had asked, he’d have said that he considered himself a gentle person, not someone who shouldered a rifle and marched off to war. No one had asked, and he had done both. Tress, concerned about his decision, had nonetheless given her support. She wasn’t happy about moving back to her parents’ home while he was away, but both she and her sister, Grania, had done exactly that.

Kenan had been one of the first in town to enlist in 1914. He’d felt the excitement, the urgency to rush to the aid of Mother Britain. Thousands of young men across the country had signed up and were being transported toward the East Coast as they trained and boarded ships to cross the ocean. But in the same way that objects now fell off the visual horizon of Kenan’s left eye and vanished, so had all of those young men fallen from the peripheries of his life.