Tell (4 page)

M
AGGIE
O’N
EILL STOOD INSIDE THE TOWER,
where giant hands on the four surrounding clocks pointed to twelve minutes before six. She had been wakened early in the morning by a singing voice, she was certain. In the apartment below the clock tower, Am was still in bed, sleeping or not sleeping. At this moment, Maggie couldn’t muster the effort to care.

She looked through the peering-out space scraped at eye level between IIII and V on the front-facing clock, and watched the moon drop from the sky. A flat-bottomed glow thinned to become a domed handle. The handle became a wisp. Finally, the last trace was swallowed by an ocean of darkness, though the nearest ocean was a thousand miles from this tiny Ontario town.

Light from the new day began to spread itself over shingles and chimneys, drifting through narrow alleys that wound in and out of a puddled Main Street below. Maggie glanced up at the hands of the clock and took a final look out. Dark woods,
which only moments before had shrouded the edges of town, were separating into particular tree shapes. Black waters of the bay lay to the south, wharves and piers directly ahead. A ragged shoreline curved east and west. She sensed the grey-brown tempo of late fall.

She pulled back, away from the clock. “The sun will rise of its own accord with no help from me,” she said to no one but herself. She gathered the folds of her dressing gown around her hips and realized that in her head, she’d been going through the lines of a gypsy song she would soon be singing to an audience larger than herself.

Her solo. One of them. She could not think of her upcoming performance without wondering if she would freeze in front of the audience. Forget the lines, the notes. Or worse.

She made her way around the massive bell that hung from the central beam in the tower; she tugged at her dressing gown again to prevent it from tangling, and stepped onto the wooden platform. When she was steady, she lowered herself onto the rungs of a ladder that poked up through the opening in the tower floor and was flush to the back wall of her parlour below. She left the trap door open. Am would be going up later; this was the day he oiled cogs and gears and checked the horizontal rods that jutted into the centre of the tower and controlled the hands on the faces of each clock.

Maggie made no sound as she placed her fingers against the door of a tall cupboard that stretched from floor to ceiling in the back corner of the room. Knowing the weight of all that was above it, she thought of the mahogany cupboard as a repository of woes. Cleverly disguised behind its door were long pendulum cables that hung from the clock above. The cables extended through the tower floor and were suspended over a three-foot bed of sand that filled the bottom of the cupboard. From the parlour, no one could possibly know that sand lay behind and below the closed cupboard door. Maggie had had more than one nightmare about the cables crashing down, or the giant bell falling and bringing the tower with it. Now, despite her thoughts of calamity, the music for the gypsy song played in her head again, and she had to consider how remote from a gypsy’s life was her own. She, who had been nowhere, had grown up on her parents’ farm and then, along with Am, owned a farm after marriage. After selling the farm, she and Am had spent the past twenty years in this same small town. Any trips she took were to nearby Belleville and back, or to Toronto to shop once in a blue moon, or across the lake to Oswego, New York, for a visit to her sister, Nola. That was the extent of her wandering gypsy life. Safe, and not far at all.

She walked the long hall to the kitchen and filled the kettle for her tea.

Maggie and Am’s apartment was the only one in the building. During the day, employees moved about the two floors below as if they were working the decks of a merchant ship. Before and after hours, and on weekends, those same offices were empty. Maggie was glad enough to have people in the building during
the daytime, but she was grateful for the early-morning quiet. Grateful for afternoon light that spilled through the south-facing windows into the apartment, summer and winter. Grateful for the number of rooms and the privacy these afforded. Am, with the title of “caretaker,” was employed by the town. Along with being responsible for the workings of the clock and the heavy clapper that hovered, ready to strike the bell—though he connected it only once a year, every New Year’s Eve—he did maintenance work for the entire building. He was always downstairs doing something. Or in the basement, looking after the coal supply and the boiler.

As for the apartment itself, it was long and spacious and took up the entire third floor. A private entry was accessed by a side door at street level. An equally private oak staircase led up to the landing outside their door.

Despite the comfortable kitchen, Maggie missed the spacious farm kitchen she and Am had left behind a long time ago. She stood before the sink and pushed the memory aside and, instead, tried to call back the voice that had wakened her, the golden voice of Melba. As certainly as her left hand now lifted the kettle to the stove, Maggie knew that the great soprano Nellie Melba had been singing in pure, mellow tones while she, Melba’s private audience, had lain quietly in bed in the early morning. As certain as a dreamer could be.

Maggie had not thought of the Australian diva for months. In her dream, she had fought wakefulness, knowing that if she opened her eyes, the voice would disappear. Reluctantly, she had given in. She had slipped out of bed, trying not to disturb Am, but he had shifted noisily when she’d shut the bedroom door.

Maggie could easily detect the occasions when Am was feigning sleep. Easily, because her own night patterns were similar: legs bent, legs straightened, restless turning, never a deep sleep. She wondered, not for the first time, if Am was concealing symptoms of an ailment that was worrying him. Sometimes he acted as if every movement pained him. Sometimes he lay still for hours and then got up to wander about in the dark. Occasionally, he helped himself to food from the baking cupboard. From their bed, she could picture his every move. Am standing in the dark before the cupboard, pulling open the door as quietly as he could—the squeaking hinge gave him away. Am eating the oat-and-raisin cookies she stored there—a trail of crumbs was present in the morning. More crumbs lay in the sink—she rinsed these down the drain. A few were scattered on the floor—she swept them up. And crumbs were often hardened beneath the icebox door, where he’d stood staring with an unsatisfied look—not difficult to imagine.

Maggie poured boiling water into the teapot and sat at the kitchen table on her high-backed chair. Am had made four of these, carved and ladder-backed, during the first year they were married. She did a rapid calculation: almost twenty-five years ago. The pine had come from trees on their own farm, and Am had made the chairs with love and care. Memories tried to crowd forward, but once more Maggie pushed them back. She was a town person now.

She thought of Melba again. Two years earlier, in 1917, she had met Nellie Melba face to face. That had not been a dream. She sat quietly now and turned over every astonishing detail.

M
AGGIE HAD BEEN VISITING TORONTO DURING A GREY AND
overcast weekend. The war was still in progress. Casualty lists were long and morale at a low ebb in the town and elsewhere across the country. Winter had begun to wane, but slush and a thin layer of muddied snow coated Toronto’s streets. During the winter, she had learned that Nellie Melba would be in the city for a fundraising tour, travelling to several places across North America, singing in theatres and halls, raising money that would be donated to the Red Cross to help soldiers and their families.

From Deseronto, Maggie arranged to buy tickets in advance for a Friday evening concert: one for herself and one for her sister, who travelled across Lake Ontario from Oswego for the occasion. Maggie journeyed by train and met Nola in Toronto, where they shared a room in a downtown hotel.

At the concert, Melba disappointed no one. She had been sponsored by the Heliconian Club and sang on a narrow stage, her voice strong and true, the notes floating upward in the high-vaulted room. Her expression while singing was intense and composed. She sang “Je veux vivre” from Gounod’s
Roméo et Juliette,
and Maggie felt the joy around her. She sang Gilda’s “Caro nome” from Verdi’s
Rigoletto,
and the undulations of her voice stilled the audience. After a full programme, her listeners begged for encores and Melba exhausted herself, trying to please. She even sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Comin’ Thro the Rye” at the end. And finally, giving in to the crowd, she sang “Home, Sweet Home.”

The morning after the concert, Nola announced that she was tired and wanted to stay in bed for an extra hour. Maggie pulled on her heavy coat, stuck a hat on her head—she hated
having to wear a hat—left her sister in the room and went out to browse in the downtown shops. She enjoyed being a visitor in the city but was not prepared for sharp wind, or for ice beneath the slush in the streets. On a side street not far from the hotel, she lost her footing and went down. While struggling to get to her feet, she realized that a woman was standing before her, reaching out a hand. Maggie’s reaction was first embarrassment, and then confusion. She was dazed from the fall, but from the ground looking up, she recognized the diva instantly. In the same instant, Melba knew she’d been recognized. The knowledge passed between them while Melba hauled her up from the sidewalk. Maggie brushed at her long coat, now smudged and soggy with slush and dirt.

“Never mind the coat,” said Melba. “Are you all right? Broken bones? No? We’ll deal with the coat inside. There are people after me. Lord knows who.” She laughed lightly, as if she were a queen running from her retinue—though there was no one in pursuit. She pushed and steered Maggie through the doors of a large, half-empty diner that was near at hand, and the two slid into a booth in the farthest corner. Melba faced the rear wall, presenting her back to the door.

“Remove your coat,” she said. She spoke rapidly, as if she was entirely accustomed to giving orders. “We’ll sponge it with a table napkin. Someone will bring water. Have you eaten? We’re going to have an adventure. Nothing fancy here, and who cares? I’m starving.” She was laughing to herself. Maggie thought her speaking voice was what royalty must sound like. Commanding, certain. “Let them look for me,” Melba added. “I need an hour to myself.” She removed tan suede gloves that
matched her woollen coat, slipped her arms out of the sleeves and pushed the coat behind her. She held out a hand and took Maggie’s hands in her own.

“Melba,” she said. “That’s what people call me. I’m sorry you went down so hard on the street. I’m sorry for hurrying you in here. I’m not a madwoman, I promise, but I needed to escape. I hope the fall wasn’t serious, even to your pride.”

Maggie O’Neill, of the tiny town of Deseronto, had so far mumbled no more than two words. She was sitting across from a world-famous diva whose performance twelve hours earlier had, at times, brought her to tears and an audience to their feet. She had been yanked up from the sidewalk by Melba, and she had to push down her shyness and show the woman that she was grateful and that she could speak.

Now, from her kitchen table in the tower apartment, when Maggie thought about the encounter and the breakfast they had shared two years earlier in the booth of a Toronto diner, it wasn’t food or the surrounds she first recalled. It was the dramatic, commanding presence of the soprano. And yet, almost instantly, Melba had put Maggie at ease.

Melba had a prominent nose, full cheeks, bow-shaped lips, thickly rolled hair. A violet scarf was twined around her throat. Up close, Maggie saw that the diva’s eyebrows had been darkened artificially, as if in preparation for the next role. Her eyes, a mixture of intelligence and curiosity, revealed a woman of temperament, a woman who knew what she wanted and what was expected. At that moment, Nellie Melba was intent on being hidden. The size of her hat helped; her face was partly in shadow. Notices of her image—hatless—were posted around
the city; the two benefit concerts in Toronto had been well publicized. Maggie was instructed to be on the lookout, as she was facing the door to the street.

The miraculous part, she thought as she sat in her own kitchen, was that we conversed as if we’d known each other all our lives. I had the audacity to blurt out the news that I used to sing. Not the way she did, of course—but I told her how I had loved to sing when I was a child. I had the nerve to say that without embarrassment, a kind of declaration. At the time it didn’t seem strange; I felt I was confiding in someone I’d known all my life. I was forty-one then, and Melba was in her fifties. I could have been a younger sister she hadn’t seen for a very long time.

Melba had made it clear that she needed to gather her forces to face what she must always face: the press, interviews, critics, the public and, that same evening, her second Toronto performance. Once assured that no one had pursued her, she ordered breakfast for the two of them—sausages, eggs, baked apples, toast, tea—and then, only then, she relaxed and turned her full attention to Maggie. She listened carefully, but she was also a woman with stories to tell. After full plates had been brought to the table, she turned over a stubby sausage with her fork and embarked on a story of herself and Caruso onstage singing
La Bohème.
The time could have been any time; the stage could have been Milan, London, Paris, Vienna. She did not explain. Maggie understood that the moment was about story.

“Caruso was standing close, staring fiercely while he sang to me—I was the shivering, weak and pitiful Mimì.
Your cold little hand, let me warm it
—in Italian, of course. And then, furtive man
that he was, he reached into his pocket and pressed a warm sausage to my bare hand. Wicked, wicked. The two of us could hardly keep from roaring with laughter. I drew upon every acting talent I possessed so that I could maintain my composure.” Melba held out a hand as if, at that moment, Caruso was bending forward at the edge of the booth, ready to press a second sausage to her palm. She wriggled her fingers, smiled, picked up her knife.