Tell (11 page)

Maggie wondered if Luc ever dreamed about upcoming performances. She would like to ask. She had begun to dream about hers, and every dream ended the same way. She was onstage at Naylor’s, facing the audience, a full house. A disorderly sheaf of papers was propped on a music stand in front of her. She knew what she was supposed to sing, but as soon as she began, her tongue thickened. After a few phrases, her tongue flattened against her lower palate. Panicking, she looked down at the papers, only to realize that the wrong music had been placed there. She shouldn’t need the music at all, but she was unable to recall the text. Not a word, not a note. She began to have a heightened awareness of her own breathing. Her heart was beating too rapidly. She was afraid she would stumble, fall over. She was afraid she would cough uncontrollably. Her tongue and her throat were dry.

The audience became restless while she fumbled and leafed through the music. At the same time, her anxiety increased. And then, one person in the audience stood, and another and another, and whole rows of people began to shuffle into the
aisles. They turned their backs on her and filed out through the exits. No one looked in her direction.

The emptying of the theatre occurred at a slow tempo—what Luc might describe as
pesante.
It was only when she faced the room of emptied seats that she realized the correct music had been in front of her all along.

Too late.

“A panic dream,” she told Zel after the first of the dreams. “Which makes me wonder if I’ll be able to perform in the actual concert.”

But there was something she hadn’t told Zel. A part she had held back. She wasn’t even certain this was part of the same dream. It might have been sensed, or added later.

After the exodus by the audience, two figures remained. They were crouched in the back row, side by side, looking up toward the stage. Maggie, her curiosity aroused, began to make her way toward them, down the centre aisle. She needed to know why these two remained when everyone else had left. As she walked, she found that she was unable to increase her pace, and was forced to maintain the same tempo set by the departed crowd. Because she was unable to move quickly, the two figures had vanished by the time she reached the back row of the theatre.

She wondered if Nellie Melba had ever experienced panic dreams in advance of a performance. She wished she had asked when she’d had the chance. And what would Luc say if he knew about Maggie’s dreams, or even about her encounter with Melba during the war? What would he say if he knew that she’d met the diva by chance, face to face? That they had talked and laughed
like schoolgirls while hiding behind the walls of a booth in a Toronto diner. That Melba had sung softly to Maggie, “Donde lieta uscì,” from
La Bohème.

Maggie had told no one. She had kept the memory of her adventure close and private. She hadn’t even told Nola that day, though she’d considered doing so at the time. She knew it was foolish of her, but she was afraid that if she shared the details, she would render the encounter less meaningful. She wouldn’t know how to describe what the meeting meant to her. And who would believe, anyway, that she and Melba had spoken to each other, not only as one woman to another, but as one singer to another?

She had never told Am, the man to whom she was married, so how could she now tell Luc, whom she’d known less than half a year? There was even a possibility that prior to the war, Luc had also met Melba, had watched her perform onstage in London or Paris or elsewhere. Still, she kept her memories of Melba to herself.

Maggie was under no illusions about her singing voice. She was forty-three years old. She was not ashamed of her background; she held no pretences. When she was growing up on the farm, she had known that her real gift was not her work in the fields alongside the men but her voice. She had been in demand for house parties and kitchen dances as she’d grown older. She had the gift; everyone said so. She had the wondrous soprano voice that made people stop what they were doing, circle round and listen.

What did one do with such a gift? There was no thought of studying singing. There were no voice lessons to be had. With
no piano at home, Maggie had no place to practise except the schoolroom. Now, all these years later, she wished that she had insisted. But insisted what and to whom? She wouldn’t have known the possibilities that existed even if she
had
persevered.

Maybe she could have studied somewhere, travelled, found a good teacher. But there was never a suggestion or a single thought of becoming a singer or taking voice lessons. Not for the slender young woman whose schooling came to an end when she graduated from high school. Not for the young woman who could turn a load of hay on a dime, and who, during one January thaw in 1894, married Am from the next farm over, when he was not quite twenty-four and she was barely eighteen.

He was writing too formally. He couldn’t relax. He began to take rapid breaths, in-out, in-out. The photo was beside him on the table. He got up from his chair, paced quickly through
the house, returned to the table, sat again, picked up the pen, dipped nib to inkwell.

He didn’t have to ask what Hugh had meant when he’d described the coughing up of blood, the sensation of smothering or drowning, the threat of life being taken away. Every boy Kenan had seen die
over there
had hung on to his last breath. He couldn’t put a name to even one who’d wanted to die.

But they had. Died. The waste, the terrible, terrible waste of life.

And he was wrong: there was at least one who’d wanted to die. If there was one, there were more. A junior officer had once told Kenan that he’d held a wounded soldier in his arms and the man was so horribly injured, he’d begged the officer to shoot him.

Kenan paused, pen over paper. He experienced a quiet rejoicing while thinking about the orderly range of items he listed in the books brought to him every week by Mr. Edwards. After half a year, he was familiar with, had even become fond of the sound of, each item listed neatly on the page of its purchaser, line by line in the ledgers. When he was alone in the house, he spoke aloud as he worked, the words rolling off his tongue as the letters formed up to create pictures in his mind: Arnica flowers, Beeswax, Bugleweed, Balsam of Canada, Ginger lozenges, Rochelle salts, Creolin, Fenugreek, Lysol, Queen of the Meadow, Medicated pelts, Menthol plasters, Cod-liver oil,
Tan and freckle lotion, Oil of tar, McCrimmon’s Deodorant, Petroleum oil, Pitcher’s Castoria, Rheumatic capsules, Horse balls, Hair vigour, Smelling salts, Evaporated prunes, Orange sticks, Tooth powders, Horehound drops, Elastic trusses, Gold Label perfumes. And more.

He stopped and decided to add:

He pondered whether to remove this last sentence, and decided to leave it as it stood. After being through the war, Hugh would not think anything strange. Kenan’s blind walks
through the house with his good eye closed. The fingers of his good hand so sensitive—he’d trained them to be that way—he could feel his way through darkness.

Kenan wondered if he should also mention his walks out of town, the walks that led him away from Main Street and into the woods in two directions, east and west. How he sought out places after dark. How he had returned to the widow’s barn. The falling-down barn where he knew he was safe. He’d found a half-bottle of whisky there on a shelf and had taken a swig or two. If Hugh were here, laughing beside him, he’d say to Kenan, “Take me there, Old Stuff.” And Kenan would. And Hugh would stand with him in that dark room that smelled of apples and rotting hay, and he would understand how, in that place, Kenan understood survival.

None of this was the kind of thing to explain in a letter.

Would she? Would she welcome a soldier in the empty room upstairs, across the hall from their bedroom? Kenan didn’t know the answer to that. Nor did he know if their lovemaking would be stifled if Tress was aware of someone’s presence in the bed across the hall. Everything might become more intense than it already was.

For the moment, none of this mattered. He had no intention of saying a word about a visit from Hugh. He’d wait until his friend wrote to say he was healthy and had been discharged from the sanatorium.

He tried to imagine Hugh sleeping in the extra bedroom, face down, palms pressed to the mattress at shoulder level, ready to pry himself up at a moment’s notice. He wondered if Hugh shouted out in his sleep, as Tress told him that
he
sometimes did.

What was that? He looked at the word the ink had formed.
Walls.
The pen dropped from his hand. His arm stretched out with a will of its own and his palm sliced through air. Was that a sign? A sign that Grania had once taught him in the language of hands?
Walls.

He flattened a blotter against the word. Tried to organize his thoughts.

If he were capable of doing so, he would tell Hugh that he relived scenes in his head, terrible scenes, imaginings in dreams. There was one dream he could never get into focus. The one that caused him to shout into the room. The one that filled him with anger because he and his friends were close to danger and no one was doing anything about it, no one was giving the order to move them out of reach of that danger.

Those imaginings—what he saw in his mind, what he dreamed and felt and tasted and smelled—were not imaginings at all. They were real,
had
been real the entire time he was overseas. He had never put any of this into words and did not want memories to start tumbling out now. Better to hold the lid on what was behind his eyes. Memory saw with two eyes, no matter if one eye was blind or not. If half the memories had disappeared with the sight in his left eye, he’d be the better for it.

His heart was beginning to pound. He needed to get up and walk. End the letter here, he told himself.