The Madrigal Read online

  THE MADRIGAL

  Copyright © 2018 Dian Day

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Collective Agency (Access Copyright).

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

  Cover Design: Carter Pryor, Photograph: Katherine Knight.

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  The Madrigal is a work of fiction. All the characters and situations portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Day, Dian, author

  The Madrigal / Dian Day.

  (Inanna poetry & fiction series)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77133-493-8 (softcover).-- ISBN 978-1-77133-495-2 (Kindle).--

  ISBN 978-1-77133-496-9 (pdf).-- ISBN 978-1-77133-494-5 (epub)

  I. Title. II. Series: Inanna poetry and fiction series

  PS8607.A98M33 2018 C813’.6 C2018-901525-X

  C2018-901526-8

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765

  Email: [email protected] Website: www.inanna.ca

  THE MADRIGAL

  a novel

  DIAN DAY

  INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.

  TORONTO, CANADA

  For Andrea

  my best

  Four arms, two necks, one wreathing,

  Two pairs of lips, one breathing.

  Fa la la la la, Fa la la la la,

  Fa la la la la la la la.

  —Thomas Weelkes, 1608

  I WAS THE ABERRATION IN MY FAMILY: a single child. My mother had three sets of identical twins, and then me. Two boys, two boys, two boys. At least if I had been a girl it would have been some consolation for all of us. But I was not; I was the seventh boy, as unremarkable as anyone’s child, born without my other half.

  My mother favoured three-syllable names that could be shortened to one sharp sound:

  Nicholas

  Nathaniel

  Samuel

  Salvador

  Abraham

  Alistair

  Frederick

  On summer evenings, she would stand on our broken front step at dusk and yell down the street, in a steady rhythm like a metronome set precisely at ninety-two: Nick-Nat-Sam-Sal-Abe-Al-Fred! My brothers would run like hungry wolf cubs for the promise of meat—my mother learned early that the only way to lure them in for bath and bed was with food. She held off supper until it was almost dark. Once they were all inside I crawled out from behind the scraggly elderberry bush, where I’d been sitting for hours, picking the scabs from my insect bites and listening to the robins defend their territories with song.

  I don’t like people to call me Fred.

  When I was a child my Winchester cousins—before they emigrated to Australia with their worn-out mother—called me Fred Mad. They never tried this with any of my brothers; teasing a team was a lot riskier than tormenting a singleton.

  I never knew my Madrigal cousins, or even if there were any in existence. I knew nothing at all about my father’s family, since my father left my mother just after I was born, and my mother was not inclined towards storytelling. I was left to draw my own conclusions, and I grew up believing that my father, too, found it unacceptable that I was born a lone child.

  A MADRIGAL IS A MUSICAL SETTING of secular text for four or six voices, unaccompanied by instruments. Secular, not religious. Four or six, not seven. With a last name like Madrigal, you have to be precise about music.

  When people I don’t know very well learn about my involvement in music, they always ask, jokingly, about my instrument. It still makes me blush, though luckily the Madrigals are all dark-complexioned. Women, in particular, ask this question with a hint of sexual energy that suggests they have no idea this joke was overplayed by the time I was fifteen, let alone now, twenty-one years later. I blush for their sakes rather than my own, and I try to answer seriously, as if they were genuinely interested: I play piano, lute, harp, harpsichord, recorder, flute, and the viola d’amore—which, interestingly, has seven strings above the fingerboard and seven below.

  I rarely mention that voice is my instrument of choice.

  OF COURSE, MY FAMILY DREW A LOT OF ATTENTION. Three sets of identical twins out of the same mother is a very rare thing. It’s fraternal twins, apparently, that tend to run in families. After the SSs were born, it was bad enough. People stopped my mother in the street and in the grocery store, some of them to coo and others in simple shock at the reckless multiplying of the lower classes. But after AA came along, there was almost constant attention from the university. Nearly every week, graduate students would call my mother asking if the twins could participate in some research study or other. She always said yes—for a fee. Until they themselves were old enough to say no, my six brothers advanced the causes of biology and psychology considerably. They were taken to laboratories where every alphabetical part of them was tested and measured: CAT, IQ, and TED, along with any number of versions of Rorschach inkblots. You can read whole paragraphs about them in any of the books on twins that occupy the shelves of more serious bookstores. One myopic student, Courtney Glass, even wrote an entire dissertation on The Madrigal Twins, but she accidentally drowned in Lake Ontario a week before her defence date. The university let my mother have a copy of the draft; it sat curling on the kitchen shelf—a place of honour—with the chipped imitation-Doulton figurine, the shell from Adelaide sent by her sister Clara, and the good luck penny she’d found the day she met our father.

  When my mother was pregnant with me, the Ns told me that a reporter from the National Enquirer camped out in the empty lot across the street for pretty much the whole duration of her third trimester. When my parents came home from the hospital with one meagre child tucked under one of my father’s arms, the reporter packed up and went home to Boca Raton, Florida. Since I was born in an unseasonably cold November, he was probably doubly unimpressed.

  AFTER I WAS BORN, we did not have a living room or a dining room in our house. We did not have anything except a cramped kitchen with a sagging floor, a bathroom, and multiple bedrooms. My mother—and my father, while he was still there—started out in one of the small upstairs bedrooms, and Nicholas and Nathaniel got another to share when they were born. Samuel and Salvador got the third, and then, of course, they were all used up. After Abraham and Alistair came, the living room was blocked off from the dining room with a thin sheet of dark panelling, and converted into another bedroom; as soon as they were weaned my mother moved downstairs and put all her children thus far on the second floor. And me, I got the dining room, which, after its separation from the front of the house, had no windows, and a big open archway without a door. There was an old red curtain tacked up in the doorway at first, but the SS kept ripping it down to use as a Superman cape—it was so long that they shared it, one at each end. In her own doorway, my mother had rigged up a giant piece of flattened card
board that the neighbour’s new fridge had come in; my brothers took it down over and over again to make a big game hunter’s tent in the African jungle. After a short while, my mother gave up. In a house with so many twins, no one thought privacy was important. Sharing was just the accepted modus operandi. No one saw the difference between sharing with the other half of yourself, and being a constant victim of the unwanted attentions of double personalities. My brothers either never left me alone, or left me alone all the time. I was, perpetually, either completely overwhelmed or profoundly lonely. I imagine it was the same for my mother.

  We ate in the small kitchen in shifts. There were only six chairs. My six brothers ate first, like raucous pack animals—my mother standing by the table, cajoling and snapping and snarling over the top of their considerable noise. When they had run like a herd from the watering hole, with full stomachs and unbound energy, my mother and I ate their leftovers in a dead quiet kitchen. I see now that she was too exhausted to speak to me. At the time, I believed she had nothing to say.

  The kitchen may have been silent, but other noises came to us like faint music. I could hear the electric clock ticking in the front hall, and the occasional pounding of my brothers’ feet on the uncarpeted stairs, and often—despite my mother’s best efforts to keep them inside—the slamming of the front door. I could hear the rhythmic beat of their tennis balls against the brick back of the house, high and hollow, and their cries, agitato, like birds of prey. The scolding of Mrs. Bern next door came like the crashing of cymbals in the sturm und drang.

  Alone in the kitchen with my spent mother, I heard my first symphonies.

  Very early, I began to imagine myself a conductor. Three thumps on the stairs, presto, the syncopated tennis balls, prestissimo and spiccato, Mrs. Bern yelling, spiritoso. I stood on the wire-strung wooden chair in the sloping yellow kitchen. My arms waved in the air a split-second behind the sounds. Even when I knocked the overcooked Brussel sprouts off the table with the wooden spoon I used as a baton, my mother hardly noticed, except to look down at the green-grey balls rolling on the filthy linoleum and wish longingly and inexplicably for a dog.

  But as the symphony conductor, I could imagine myself in control of the noises. And the space between the noises, normally called silence, was for me where the heart of music lay.

  I spent a lot of my childhood standing liltingly on chairs.

  THERE’S A SAYING ATTRIBUTED TO JESUS, recorded by Thomas, the twin. Whose twin, nobody knows. It’s in the Gnostic Gospels, writings on the life of Jesus that were suppressed by the early Christian church. The Gnostic Gospels are the bits left on the cutting room floor in the making of the New Testament. Somebody gathered up all those out-takes and hid them in a cave in Egypt, in the third and fourth centuries, where they remained untouched until discovered by two brothers in 1945.

  This is what Thomas wrote: “If you bring forth what is in you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is in you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

  Some people think the out-takes are better than the movie. Myself, I rather thought that what was in me should stay buried as deeply as possible.

  IF PEOPLE THINK THEY ARE BEING ORIGINAL when they make instrument jokes, they think they’re beyond brilliant when they call me the Singing Postman—even though none of them would ever have heard me sing. But enough people downtown know me; they know I teach voice and direct choir, and they know I deliver their mail. They can’t help themselves; they put the two things together.

  This morning it was Steve Packer, standing outside his electronics shop, dragging on the end of a cigarette like he had sworn to quit right after lunch. Everything in the window behind him was dusty. “Hey, how’s the Singing Postman?” he asked, blowing smoke from the side of his mouth. I handed him his meagre pile of mail—bills mostly.

  “Dead,” I said. It’s what I always say, though I don’t know why. It just keeps the whole thing going. Most people don’t really know anything about the Singing Postman, except the stage name. I should remember to reply with a remark about the weather.

  “Say what?”

  “Dead, he’s dead. And I have better teeth.” By this time I was on my way into the next shop, the used clothing place the university students frequent, but I turned and showed him my perfect teeth before I went in. The bell tinkled on the door, ostinato.

  MOST DAYS AFTER WORK I WALK DOWN to the lake and along the bike path to the river, and then double back along Rideau Street to my house. Sometimes I make an extra loop and walk by the row house where I grew up. After standing empty for many years, it was finally bought and gutted by a young couple with a baby, and the first thing they did was replace the rotten front step. Sometimes when I see them outside, caulking windows or sweeping the leaves off the sidewalk, I think about stopping and asking if I can go in and have a look around—but I never do.

  You would think I get enough walking with my day job, but there is something about the way the river looks that helps me shift from mail to music. At this time of year, the tree tips are blushed orange with dead leaves, and even in mid-afternoon their shadows stretch across the bike path like a bar code for God.

  I could deliver the morning mail with my eyes closed, and tell you which shop door I’m opening by the sound of the bells hanging on the door. Luckily, it’s a small city with a vibrant downtown, I guess because of the students at the university. Princess Street is still lined with shops with real tinkling bells rather than electronic ones—though there are a few and growing number of exceptions. Lately, I have begun to think about composing a piece that circles around the music of opening and closing doors.

  My voice students are scheduled in the late afternoons and early evenings, after I finish the mail. I teach out of a music shop downtown. It’s funny, because the shop I teach in is on my mail route. So, every weekday morning at about ten o’clock I go into The Whole Note and hand the mail over, and I say “Hi, Ed,” and Ed says “Hi, Frederick,” and for some reason we mostly pretend we don’t know each other much. Especially if there are customers in the “Trade two for one” CD aisles, or fingering the guitars hanging along the wall. But, of course, I know he’d much rather be called Ed than Edward, and he knows very well I don’t care to be called Fred.

  No one wants to come into the house of a single man for music lessons anymore. Mothers would never trust me with their children in my living room. I guess I can’t blame them, really. There are a lot of crazy people in the world these days. Besides, I’m not sure what Ed would do without me. I wouldn’t want him to think that the soundproofed room was an unnecessary investment: a new sail for a sinking ship.

  Sometimes I give Ed mail in the morning that he hands back to me in the afternoon: people sending in cheques for their music lessons, or occasionally non-profit groups asking me to bring the choir to sing at a benefit concert. Ed told me once that I should just keep the mail addressed to me, but I said no. I like to keep things separate. You never know what would happen if the different parts of your life got mixed up.

  THE HOUSE I OWN NOW is long and skinny and semi-detached, and there’s only a very narrow lane between the house and the one beside it. There’s a place to park a small car, but I don’t own one at the moment. It seems silly to keep a car just to move large instruments around once every few months, at most, especially since Jiro has a van on account of all those kids, and the seats are removable, and he is always quite willing to pick me up. I have a very tiny yard in the back, bounded by a wooden “privacy fence”—so said the brochure—but it would only provide privacy for very small children, being all of three and a half feet high. The yard is overhung by my new neighbour Maya’s giant maple tree; its furrowed trunk has a significant lean, and I fully expect that one day I will wake up with the privacy fence flattened and the useless mast of a giant ship lying across my yard. Until then, it’s a convenient arrangement for her, since I have to
rake up most of the yellow leaves. When the branches are almost bare, as now, the bundled squirrels’ nest hangs like a ruffled brown globe outside my bedroom window. The nest is inhabited by two grey squirrels who can jump from their branch tip to the shelf I attached to my window ledge. If I forget to put out peanuts, they wake me early in the morning by scratching on the window glass with their tiny nails, dolente. I think of them as twins—they both cross their paws the same way over the same white markings on their downy bellies—though I expect they are really mates. Nonetheless, they are twin-named: Free-for-all and Fly-by-night. I can tell them apart because Fly-by-night has a small tear in his right ear.

  Sometimes it seems that I am surrounded by two of everything.

  MAYA WAS OUTSIDE WHEN I GOT HOME, trying to light her barbeque with her blow torch. I came home from teaching, went right through the house, and stepped out my back door—it was such a fine evening—and that’s when I saw her, over the privacy fence.

  “Maya! No!” I called out to her between flicks of the switch on the torch, so she could hear me. Fly-by-Night was in the middle of her yard, burying a nut, but he scuttled up the leaning tree when I yelled. I had my hand on the fence post. I was squinting and ready to duck. Maya keeps her barbeque along the opposite fence line, but you never know how far these things could blow.

  “It’s all good, Frederick,” she called back affably.

  “You’re going to blow yourself up!” I yelled. I don’t know why I don’t stop while I am ahead. What is it with me?

  At that moment the gas caught uneventfully with an understated puugh, and she turned the flame down some. She straightened up then and turned to face me, still flicking the trigger of her torch so the blue flame shot to the sky. I thought she might burn the tree down, and save me from having to pay for its removal after it had fallen, though I couldn’t speak to what the flying sparks would do to my roof. She was in the trademark orange coveralls she wore for work, with a wide black leather belt. There was an appliqued orange on the front of her coveralls over her heart, and at the back—I knew, though I couldn’t read it then—were the words: CITRUS PLUMBING: A New Twist for Old Pipes. She looked like a new-wave flame-throwing comic book superhero. She took a breath and opened her mouth, but before she could start with the friendly sarcasm I said, “Right then, you’ve got it lit. Great.” And I ducked back into my house and shut both doors behind me. I could hear her voice coming after me, but at least I couldn’t hear the words. I went into the living room, sat at the piano, and played some jazz riffs, just waiting until she’d finished cooking her veggie burgers before I went back in the kitchen to make my supper.