This Magnificent Desolation (27 page)

These things, Joshua says pensively, they remind me of other things. He holds up the musket ball and pulls something from his pocket, something small that he rolls in his fingertips, and then places it upon the table: a misshapen lump of gray metal, rubbed to a bright tarnish.

Once, he says and moistens his lips, when I was a kid and we'd first moved to the house in Brighton, someone shot into the house. We never found out who it was and my daddy wouldn't let my mother call the cops. Said it was probably cops who'd done it, and even if they hadn't, if we called, they wouldn't come anyway. I was young, so young I never really thought about the danger of it. All I remember is finding the bullet in my mother's drawer the next morning. I followed the path of it, through my wall all the way into my parents' bedroom.

I kept it with me, he says. I took it out of my mother's drawer and
I've had it all this time. Kept it through Vietnam, could always feel it burning through my pant leg as if it was made of heat, as if it was imbedded in me. I don't know what the hell I've kept it for. Perhaps to remind me. He shakes his head. This was before we moved to West Medford, before I knew your mother.

Duncan has rarely heard him talk so much, and he listens enthralled, watching Joshua's face as these memories work upon him.

Joshua rolls the bullet between his fingers, finally places it carefully upon the table and stares at it. His lips pucker. He doesn't tell Duncan that he remembers one other thing about that night, one thing he's never forgotten. When his mother told his daddy to call the cops, he told her to shut up. Shut the fuck up, he said to her. Shut the fuck up, you stupid bitch.

He tells Duncan: I was little still but I had my own bedroom, so it must have been in the fifties, and my mother slept next to me that night, her legs curled up beneath her so that she could fit on the bed. She was frightened, I could feel how frightened she was, and it had nothing to do with any bullet.

Joshua takes Duncan's hand in his own, presses the bullet into Duncan's palm so that he can feel the smooth ridges and divets upon its surface, and looks guardedly to the kitchen where Maggie is preparing a roast.

Breathing is the life of your voice, Maggie says as she applies kohl eyeliner, stares at her work in the mirror. It's Thursday evening and she and Duncan are in the room behind the bar, waiting for Ray Cooper and the Hi-Fidelity Blu-Tones to set up onstage. Maggie's blue sequined dress catches the meager lamplight in the room and seems to sparkle with small glints of flame. From the bar comes the sound of Clay shouting at a customer, a chair being overturned, and something hard slamming against the floor.

Any singer will tell you that. Common sense, isn't it? she says and laughs. We breathe to live, and we imbue life into our voice and our songs by breathing!

You let the breath come slowly. Your vocal cords, your larynx should never be pressing. It's the breath that does the work.

Always, she says, the voice is striving to reach the heavens. And as you sing, you strive for each note to remain pure, in pitch and tone, for each vowel to remain rounded as the notes rise in scale.

And if you can learn to sing on a minimum of breath, you can do all these things without harm to your vocal cords. You can sing … Maggie pauses: Forever.

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!

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.