Tell

by Frances Itani

  Think of this! What a marvel!

  The ice on the bay holds strong. A few adventurous souls have already taken the shortcut to Napanee with horse and sleigh.

  “Salada” TRY IT—A teapot test is better than a volume of arguments.

  Chapter Thirteen

  WHY DO YOU HAVE TO SPEND SO MUCH TIME up there? During work hours, too.”

  “In the tower?”

  “Yes, the tower.” She didn’t mean to sound irritated, but her words had come out that way.

  “I like it up there. I can see what’s going on in the town.” He thought of the peering-out space, the people he’d watched trek up and down Main Street through an entire generation: the leaders, the followers, the slackers, the workers, the timid, the brave. The adventurous comings and goings of children.

  “You see out, but no one sees in.”

  “Something like that.” She could tell that Am had not considered this in quite the same way.

  She wanted to shout. She wanted to scream: There has to be something better to do than slap cards against a board one after another, hour by hour. The shelf will be scarred from the beating it’s taking. There has to be something more instructive, more vital, more interesting to do than peer out through a space between numerals on a clock. Think of your life, ticking away in that confined space.

  And then she thought of her own life and wondered why she should consider it to be any better. With remarkable self-control, she said, “Agnes and Dermot have invited us for Christmas dinner again. They plan to close the hotel dining room after breakfast Christmas morning, and take it over for the family the rest of the day. Bernard and Kay will be there. Young Patrick will be coming home for a few days. Your father, too. Dermot will go to the farm to get him the week before, and he’ll stay on awhile at the hotel, as he did last year.”

  “I knew my brother would want us to join the family. Dermot likes to eat his goose at noon, you know. Twelve o’clock on the nose. Our father, too. That’s how it was done on the farm.”

  “We can eat early. We’ve done it before. We’ll have a light breakfast Christmas morning.”

  “What about Zel? Weren’t you thinking of inviting her here for supper in the evening?”

  “Zel will be in Belleville. I’ve told you before that she has an older brother, nieces and nephews, too. She wants to spend a few days with them, but she’ll be back in time for the dress rehearsal. She’s been busy making gifts. Sewing non-stop. Buying a few gifts. I’ve seen her in the shops several times.”

  “If we eat at my brother’s, we’ll have to be on time,” said Am. “Dermot sticks to his own schedule. Always has. If we don’t have a foot in the doorway by twelve o’clock sharp, he’ll tell Agnes to go ahead and serve.”

  “Why would we not be on time?”

  Am ignored the question and then considered, or reconsidered.

  “Aren’t you singing in the choir Christmas morning?”

  “I am, but there’s an early service, nine o’clock. I’ll sing at that. And I’ll be singing at the carol service on Christmas Eve.”

  She thought but did not add, If you’d bother to come to church, you’d know these things. But that discussion had ended long ago. There were times, she admitted, but only to herself, when she wondered why she bothered to attend. If she tried to think through the beliefs she’d been taught since childhood, her thoughts tangled in confusion. She prayed the same prayers by rote, sang the same hymns. But some part of her basic beliefs had altered. If this had happened gradually, she wasn’t aware. A silent earthquake might have shaken every part of her, but she hadn’t felt the ripples at the time. All she knew was that, some of the time, she came away from church with emptiness inside her.

  “Will Tress and Kenan be at Dermot’s for Christmas dinner?” said Am. “Has young Kenan been out during the daytime?”

  “You’d be the one to know that,” said Maggie. “You’re the one he talks to.”

  “I know he goes out after dark. Sometimes he comes here, not always.”

  “Where else does he go?”

  “He’s been on the rink.”

  “Ah yes. Tress told me. He tried out the new skates she bought for him.”

  “He goes other places, too,” said Am. He did not add that, several times, he’d watched Kenan enter the woods.

  “Maybe he’ll venture out in broad daylight on Christmas Day. Maybe Agnes and Dermot will invite Oak for dinner, too.”

  “I doubt that,” said Am. “Oak will eat with Tress and Kenan at their house. As he did last year.”

  “I think you’re right,” said Maggie. “Kenan isn’t ready for any larger family celebration. Yet.”

  “He will be.” Am headed for the tower ladder as if he’d said all there was to say and even that had been too much.

  Maggie was thinking about Kenan’s upbringing. Oak was a quiet man but known to the town and respected. People took their business to his welding shop. At one time, he’d raised hens. Oak had always been one to rely on. He was loyal. He’d adopted Kenan and raised him in a womanless house, treating the child as his own.

  Well, Kenan was no longer a child and Oak was no longer responsible for him. Since Kenan had returned, Oak didn’t seem to know what to say to the lad. Was it because of Kenan’s injuries? His changed appearance? It was hard to say. According to Tress, Oak arrived to visit when Kenan first came back, stayed ten or fifteen minutes, excused himself and backed away. He continued to visit, of course. It was just that he wasn’t strong on conversation.

  Maggie heard noises from above. Cards set out, one at a time. Snap slap. And then, Am tinkering with the clock. She wondered if he had conversations with himself when he was alone—the way she did when she was by herself.

  The person she couldn’t help wondering about was Luc. Where would he be on Christmas Day? What sort of Christmas celebration was he accustomed to? No doubt the lodgers on Fourth Street would do something special. She’d never been inside his rooming house, though the building was close enough. She’d heard that the cook could put together a good meal. It was a popular enough place.

  The week before, Luc had walked into the parish hall at St. Mark’s while she and several other women were decorating for Christmas. She’d been surprised to see him. After he was introduced to the others, Luc spoke quietly about the choral society’s upcoming concert. He told the women he’d been given permission to play the piano in the hall when it wasn’t being used. He told them he’d wait, or come back later if he was in the way.

  But the women asked him to stay. They were thrilled to meet the music director and wanted to hear him play. They invited him to go ahead, and then they moved toward the doorway, where they continued to arrange branches of evergreens. Their movements, their conversation became more deliberate after Luc’s arrival. Notice me, they were saying, silently. Or so Maggie imagined.

  Luc removed his overcoat and tossed it over a nearby chair. Underneath, he wore the jacket with the elbow-shine. He had taken off his galoshes at the entrance. Maggie, aware of the women in the doorway—as she knew they were of her—stayed beside him and gestured to a crèche into which she was placing a doll to represent the Christ child. Unsettled by Luc’s arrival, she began to blurt out a story about an old doll from her childhood. He watched her as if listening for some other, parallel conversation. She felt the red spots in her cheeks. She looked past him and saw cracked paint on a cupboard door. She kept on.

  “I lived on a farm,” she said, “when I was a child. A farm north of here.”

  “I, too, lived on a farm,” Luc told her. Gently, as if to slow her down. She was close enough to see the lines in his face. Not hard lines. Sad. Always sad.

  “Ah.” Where? she wanted to ask. And then she thought, What difference does it make? I wouldn’t know the place anyway. She carried on, wondering why she had chosen this story to tell. Nerves, she told herself. My nerves get the better of me, no matter where I am anymore. She continued to speak rapidly, as if she’d b
een allotted only a short time.

  “My sister, Nola, and I owned one doll between us. I’m not sure how we dreamed this up, but we named her Jezebel. She had a red skirt, red bonnet, white petticoat—our mother must have sewn the outfit. And green eyes that closed when she was lying down.” Like mine, she wanted to say. I loved the doll because she had green eyes like mine. “Every December, our church needed a doll for the crèche, so Nola and I volunteered Jezebel. We took off her skirt and bonnet, pulled her hair back as tightly as we could, swaddled her in strips of cheesecloth and renamed her Jesus. She was put on a bed of straw in a wooden manger our father nailed together for the occasion. She had to lie there with her eyes shut tight until we went back to collect her a week after the new year. And once again, our doll became Jezebel.”

  Luc had laughed. The women looked over as if impatient to hear his music. When Maggie thought about the encounter later, she realized that she hadn’t seen Luc laugh out loud before. She couldn’t bring one instance to mind. He was serious during rehearsals. An occasional smile, but serious most of the time. Intense. Yes, that was the word. Intensity surrounded him like an aura, no matter who was present.

  After meeting him that day in the parish hall, she had written to Nola in Oswego.

  I was thinking today of the way we used to tart up our doll eleven months of the year. And then, come December, we turned her out as plainly as we could so she could switch identities and become Baby Jesus. Do you ever think of old Jezebel? Why did we give her such a name? What ever happened to her? Do you have her with you in New York?

  She never mentioned Luc in her letters. She wouldn’t know where to start. Nola knew that Maggie was to sing solo in the concert, but from her home across Lake Ontario, she would know nothing about Luc. And what was there to share? If Maggie mentioned even one innocent detail, more would come pouring out. But more of what? There was nothing to tell.

  MAGGIE WAS IMPATIENT. SHE WANTED TO WORK AT something, but Am was in the tower. She wanted time alone, wanted to practise her solos. She wasn’t able to sing when he was around, even if he could not be seen. No matter where he was in the apartment, she was aware. He went up and down the ladder with such regularity, she could tell when he was carrying something and when he was not. She was aware of him standing, sitting, aware of his shoulder slump, his breathing, his imagined expression, his squinting to see, his sighs over whatever pain he was trying to hold in, his right hand pressed to his lower abdomen. She wondered if he had a problem with his bladder. Dandelion fluid, she said to herself. Sarsaparilla mix. One spoonful before bedtime. But she could not concoct dandelion fluid at this time of year.

  She thought she would go to the bedroom to sing, but she heard footsteps above, as if he were deliberately asserting his presence. She could not free herself of the weight of him. She heard him descend the ladder, and suddenly he was in front of her. She looked at his face and her body went cold. He was about to speak, but he must not speak. Maggie brushed past, went to the kitchen, busied herself at the table, turned her back. She heard his footsteps on the ladder again as he went up.

  She paced in the kitchen, paced up and down the hall, not knowing what to do. She was agitated, tried to calm herself. She told herself she had to practise, focus on the music that was in her head all the time. Notes and phrases and instructions and corrections and encouragements from Luc. She should be rehearsing her part for “Peace, Gentle Peace.” The four soloists were to sing, partly with choral backup, but the entire piece was a cappella. Maggie wanted to go through not only her own part but the entire work by herself and perhaps with Zel, and certainly before the next rehearsal. Repetition would help. Practice would help. She had to be certain of every nuance of text. She was attracted by the way the lines flowed, the gentleness, even the tone of melancholy. Why, then, did she feel that at every turn, the words pulled her down, that they clung to her feet like mud?

  Thou dost restore the darkened light of home

  Give back the father to his children’s arms.

  Even with the Boer War over, Elgar might not have included “Peace, Gentle Peace” as part of his Coronation Ode had he known of the conflagration that lay ahead.

  But who was she to know what Elgar might have done if he’d been capable of peering into the future? Maybe it was appropriate after all. That Luc had chosen this to be performed for the ebbing away of 1919, for the greeting of the first moments of 1920. New beginnings. Perhaps the ode was truly appropriate at the culmination of the year the boys had come home, the year the world had vigorously, if confusedly, attempted settlements of peace.

  But the hurt, the death toll, the pain, the damage done. Those could not be erased. Maggie had seen the faces of returned men, the faces of wives and children left to mourn. She had watched Kenan’s struggles, which were now Tress’s struggles, too. These were far from over. What possible belated effort could turn memories of war into hopes for peace? Peace had to be something separate, something untainted by war. Surely.

  She glanced up toward the hatch in the tower floor, afraid that Am would come down again. She and Am did not own a piano. If she were to try to sing in the parlour or kitchen or bedroom—with or without accompaniment—ears would hear. Am would hear from above. Workers would stop and listen on the floor below. She wanted no premature audience through wall or floor or tower hatch.

  She decided to walk to Zel’s and practise there. Zel had urged her to come to the rooming house whenever she wanted to use the piano, whether anyone was at home or not. The boarders wouldn’t mind, but Maggie hoped that everyone had by now departed for their holiday destinations. Mr. and Mrs. Leary were already in Rochester. The teacher might or might not be at Zel’s.

  Perhaps Zel would be home alone and would want to accompany her while she sang. She didn’t mind singing in front of her friend. Zel would be helpful, and sensitive to Maggie’s mood. Zel, singing alto at her side, had a steadying effect.

  If Zel happened to be out, Maggie could accompany herself. She gathered up the music for the pieces she’d be singing, called out abruptly to say where she was going and left the apartment. If Am had heard, he did not reply.

  A brittle, metallic sun shone through the afternoon cold. She could hear skaters before she could see them, the voices of adults and children laughing and calling to one another while their blades criss-crossed the ice. The echoed depth of the bay declared its presence beneath the frozen surface. She crossed the street to be closer to Tress and Kenan’s house, and looked toward shore. The sight of the rink and the skaters gliding around the oval tugged at her, made her want to join in. Music started up near the skaters’ shack while she stood there—The Skaters’ Waltz—and she stopped to listen. The music calmed. She felt lighter, as if she were out there gliding around. She decided that she would go out on the bay this very week. All she had to do was pull her skates out of the closet and check the blades to see if they needed sharpening. Maybe she’d skate with Tress on a day when neither of them was working. Or with Zel. The length of the skating season was unpredictable because it was dependent on weather, so most people in town took advantage of the ice while it was in good condition. Even the older residents came out to the rink. One of the frequent visitors to the library, Mrs. Woodley, was on the ice every year in a kind of improvised wheelchair. She wasn’t strong enough to skate anymore, but she was sure to be seen, her grandson steering her chair from behind, the two of them having a grand time. Mrs. Woodley’s chair had narrow metal blades that glided over the surface like sled runners. The boy took wide-legged strokes as he pushed the chair over the ice. Like a grand duchess, his grandmother wrapped herself against the cold, her eyes and a bit of nose showing. A multi-coloured scarf was always twisted around her head and face, and knotted at the side so that the ends drooped like petals over one shoulder. Maggie hoped Mrs. Woodley would be out again this winter in her specially designed chair.

  Maybe, Maggie thought, maybe I’ll ask Am to skate with me some evening after supper. But a
fter refusing to listen to him today, she didn’t know how she would ask. There were tensions between them that she couldn’t explain. If she did ask him to skate with her, he might say no. She didn’t want him to refuse her. She didn’t want to be refused.

  She walked to the edge of town and passed the falling-down barn on Zel’s property. A new wooden sign had been hung outside the door of the house: JACKSON ROOMING HOUSE, APPLY WITHIN.

  Zel was ready to take in more boarders. She had cleared and prepared the last of the available rooms. Her house had two sets of stairs. The stairs off the kitchen were located behind the pantry and led up to the private area of the house, which included Zel’s personal quarters. Her roomers used the stairs that were closer to the front door, though the front door was rarely used. Zel had told Maggie that she’d be advertising after the new year, for either a couple or two single persons.

  There was no light in the kitchen when Maggie approached the house. Despite the dimness inside, she rapped at the door. She rapped again and let herself in. She took off her coat and hat and turned on the kitchen light. The stove was lit; she’d seen chimney smoke as she walked up the road. Zel was burning coal now, as was most of the town. Maggie warmed her hands over the stove and took her music through to the dining room. Where the piano had stood only a week before, a small table was now pushed against the wall. How had the piano been moved? That would have been a heavy job. And where had it moved to?

  She was about to put on her coat to return home in disappointment, but she remembered that she had also seen smoke coming from the chimney of the small building next to the house. Zel must be out there. Maggie gathered up the pages again and ran, coatless, from house to workroom. She gave a quick tap at the door and pushed her way inside. Luc was sitting at the table, reading. He was alone and startled to see her. Zel’s piano stood against the wall on the left. The room was warm, warmer than Zel’s kitchen.