Annabel (33 page)

34

The Fire of Your Grace

W
HEN HE GOT ONN THE TRAIN
from Portland to Boston, Wayne felt what his father had promised he would feel.

“Don’t go in the van,” Treadway had said. “Leave your van and get on the bus to Port-aux-Basques. Get the ferry to North Sydney but don’t get on the train there. Go to Yarmouth and get the Yarmouth ferry to Portland, and then you’ll be almost in Boston. You don’t want to be in the van, navigating.”

Treadway had carefully studied a map he had bought in the gift shop at the Newfoundland Hotel. “You want to sit back and look out the windows at everything. You don’t want the trip to be one road sign after another and a maze of overpasses. Trains and ferries will give you a real journey to Boston. Your van is a responsibility. Navigating is a chore. A train will take the weight of the world away.”

The train went through what seemed to Wayne to be private sections of ordinary people’s lives: balconies and backyards where shovels had been left against fences, and clothes hung in a damp wind that made them tremulous, so that the clothes appeared intimate. The balconies had chairs on them: wooden chairs and a few upholstered chairs that no one minded leaving in the rain. Some balconies held small tables and the people who lived there had left pitchers and coffeepots on them, and had done so recently, so that the balconies, as Wayne passed them on the train, felt as if remnants of conversation hung inside them. There was a tumbledown feel to the flowers that clung to trellises at the backs of American towns, and in blue clematis or scarlet runner beans against red brick lay a feeling of peace Wayne found unaccountable, yet he felt it as he looked out the train window. His father had been right.

Wally Michelin’s aunt Doreen had answered the phone and told Wayne to come down. She had a small spare room. Wally was excited about having been accepted into the Boston Downtown Community Choir. Yes, the ticket had been for Thomasina, and no, Wally would not mind that Thomasina had given it to Wayne.

“Thomasina wrote and told us,” Doreen said. “She told us to look after you.”

In the weeks following Treadway’s visit, summer had turned. No leaf had changed colour but the sky had changed. It was silver and leaden and it brought out the colours beneath it in a way the summer sky did not. Summer sky swallowed colour, but the sky of late August made colour ricochet back to earth, and there were sharp edges on all the buildings and curbs and even on the leaves of the trees and on the impatiens in the flowerbeds of all the towns through which Wayne travelled to reach Wally Michelin. The closer he got to Boston, the sharper this light grew, and the more he feared he had done the wrong thing in coming. It was one thing to have a ticket in your pocket for a choir performance. That gave you permission to go into the theatre and take your seat. But did it give you permission to re-enter the life of a beloved friend after you and she had left each other behind?

Wally’s aunt Doreen had told him that Wally was happy he was coming, but as the train approached Boston Wayne worried about meeting her again. He looked again at the light wool coat he wore, and the thin scarf and the corduroy pants, which were the colour of malted milk and caught light from the train window so that there were pale and dark stripes. No one looked at him twice on the train. He had a haircut that made him look like any young person. He had gone to a salon on Duckworth Street that cut both men’s and women’s hair and had asked the girl to give him a haircut that suited his face. There were students on the Boston train, and he looked like one of them.

His train was delayed for an hour outside the city because something had gone wrong with the switches. A conductor announced that the switches had to be done by hand. By the time the taxi brought him to Wally’s address her aunt Doreen welcomed Wayne alone.

“She’s gone to choir practice. Are you hungry?”

“I had a sandwich on the train.”

“I’ve got a cup of broth for you. Have that and I’ll take you to watch the rest of her practice, then when you both come back, we’ll have a real supper.”

Wally’s aunt, Wayne discovered, was a gracious woman who looked through your eyes and into whoever was in there. Certain things were visible to her that were not visible to other people. He felt at home with her, and he felt nervous when they pulled up to the building where Wally was practising and her aunt told him to go in alone.

The place had been a church hall but was no longer affiliated with a church. The whole church and the buildings with it were rundown, but a group called the Appleton Street Neighbourhood Association was working to revitalize it. Wayne read this on a plaque in the hallway. He could hear chairs dragging across the floor inside double doors that each had a tiny pane, and he looked through the panes and saw the choir on a stage, and he saw the conductor and a piano player. They were between songs and the conductor was talking about the purity of consonants. Wayne waited until the choir resumed singing so that there was a wall of sound. There was not much light and he was glad of this as he quietly entered. The choir director kept starting and stopping the music. He told the choir to skip pages, and sometimes they skipped ahead to an entirely different song that they began singing but did not complete. It appeared to Wayne that the entire practice was all about ripping the songs into pieces and working on those pieces as if they would never again belong to the original song, as if fragments of music were all the conductor hoped for. He saw Wally Michelin in the back row, second to last. He recognized her not so much from her features, which he could not see, but from the way she stood, and had always stood, and from the rippling hair and the shape of her face. It occurred to him that Wally Michelin was singing, though she had been told she would not sing again, and he marvelled at that though he did not know if he should believe it, as her voice was not alone but was part of the choir’s sound.

When the practice was over, she came to his seat as if she had known he would be there, and as if it were ordinary that he should be in Boston with her. She sat beside him, and there was so much activity around them — people taking date squares and deli sandwiches out of purses and unwrapping them and eating them and talking about Linda’s new grandson and George’s holiday in Florida, which meant George would not be here for the concert — that Wayne felt he and Wally were alone in a sea of sound.

“You came.”

“You don’t mind?”

“No. I’m glad you came.”

He was not alone with her but he felt as if they were alone. He felt they recognized each other in a way that no one else recognized either of them. Other people could look at him but they did not see what Wally Michelin saw, and perhaps others saw in her the same thing he did, but he did not think they saw it. What it was was limitlessness. When you were with an ordinary person, you could draw a line around the territory the two of you covered, and Wayne had found that the territory was usually quite small. It was smaller than a country and smaller than a town and sometimes smaller than a room. But this room, the room they were in, did not really exist. Boston did not necessarily exist either, although Wayne could sense it, fizzing with the unfamiliarity of its lights, its parks and streets, beyond the practice-room doors. The way he responded to Wally’s presence was that he felt as if life at this minute was blossoming inside him instead of lying dormant. He felt the electric presence of his own life, and he did not want that feeling to end, although he knew it had ended in the past and that it would end again. She whispered into his ear and the piece of her breath was warm with cool edges.

“I won’t get a chance to use what your father sent me yet,” she said. “Not in this week’s concert. But I asked Jeremy if he had ever conducted it and if we could do it in another concert, and he said it is one of his favourite pieces of music too and we might do it next spring.”

“What my father sent you?”

Wayne knew nothing about the time Treadway Blake had ordered a replacement for Wally’s lost copy of Gabriel Fauré’s “Cantique de Jean Racine.” But Wally Michelin had not forgotten it, and she took it out of her black folder now. It had the imprint of Albert J. Breton on it and Wayne could see that the paper was now old and that Wally had bookmarked it in many places with green tags. She flipped it open and he saw she had highlighted many passages throughout and had written in the margins in exactly the same way she had done on the original version, the one Treadway had lost when they were both twelve years old.

“It was never meant as a solo piece,” Wally said, “It was always a piece for four parts, for a choir, and that’s only one of the things I didn’t realize.”

“My father gave you that?” All this time Wayne had thought his father had not been at all sorry. About the bridge, about the music, about anything.

“Remember how you used to sing the alto part to help me practise?”

“Yes.”

She leaned over and hummed into his ear. She was humming the alto part, the part that he had sung with her on the bridge. Wayne saw she still had her freckles. She was the same now to him as she had been when they were twelve years old, on the bridge, looking through its spans at the sky. She hummed the tune quietly at first. Around them blared the choir members dispersing and clicking their folders shut and someone fooling around on the piano: a din that began to contain echoing spaces as members of the crowd went out to their cars. Under it, Wally’s voice occupied a different wavelength. It did not have strength but it possessed warmth, and she sang some of the words.

“Répand sur nous le feu de ta grâce . . . I can’t sing the soprano part yet, but they told me I might never be able to sing anything, and I can already do the alto . . . De la paisible nuit nous rompons le silence . . .”

The sound insinuated itself underneath all the other sounds, and this sound, alone in the room, entered Wayne’s body. Wally Michelin was singing the tune she had always told Wayne she would one day sing.

The thing about Wally’s life in Boston, Wayne saw the next day and the day after as they approached the night of her concert, was that it was full of movement. She was forever in motion, between breakfast and registration and showing him around the campus she would attend, and the costume bank where she had salvaged yards of satin and linen and given it a new life, and two dress rehearsals and then the concert itself. He had thought before he came to Boston that the concert would be the most exciting thing Wally Michelin was doing, but it was not. On the day following, she showed him where she would be taking a course in music history, two in theory, and a fourth that was an introduction to formal voice training.

Wayne had a feeling, as she took him around the quadrangle and through the first and second floors of the library and out to the garden, where students sat on the grass studying maps of the campus and drawing circles around course numbers, that he was in a kind of wilderness; it was similar in some ways to being in the bush with his father. There was a sense that the sun was strong and there was no domesticity for miles. Any venture you made was because you were setting out on a kind of exploration that was the same as a hunt. The students around him were beginning a journey that was open-ended, like his father’s journeys away from the curtains of his mother’s kitchen and into a vastness of territory that remained unnamed. If anyone named it, you could unname it. There were no walls around the terrain. It occurred to him that his father would have liked such a place as this, and he wished his father had come with him so he could see it.

The other thing Wayne noticed was that among the students he did not feel out of place because of his body’s ambiguity, as he had felt on the streets of downtown St. John’s. Many of these students looked to Wayne as if they could be the same as him: either male or female. There was not the same striation of sexuality that there was in the ordinary world outside a campus. There were girls who looked like he did, and there were boys who did too, and there were certainly students who wore no makeup and had a plain beauty that was made of insight and intelligence and did not have a gender. He felt he was in some kind of a free world to which he wanted to belong, and he wondered if all campuses were like this.

In the train on his way back from Boston he kept thinking about this. His father had given him money. He had not known what to do with it when Treadway had handed him that bank book near the salt pile for the roads of St. John’s. But he knew what to do with it now. Wally Michelin had helped him see it, and so had his father, and so had Thomasina Baikie, and now, on the train, he did not travel the route by which he had come. Between the Vermont border and the Newfoundland ferry were five schools that Wally Michelin and her aunt had helped Wayne find in brochures and university calendars. He intended to stop at them all. He did not yet know which world he wanted to be in, but he had begun to glimpse the worlds.

Again as his train passed the backs of towns, Wayne noticed intimate pieces of domestic life like those that had touched him on his way to visit Wally Michelin. Washing lines with plaintive little pulleys; men and women who lived near the track and had watched a thousand trains pass. It was a beautiful world, the one inside the houses where kettles boiled on blue gas flowers, but he was glad he was not in it, and in this respect he was the same as his father.

He thought about the bridges the train would cross, and bridges that had not yet been envisioned. He knew now that there were schools where you learned how to design bridges that would be built, bridges that were beautiful. This was what he wanted to do. In his pocket lay the Labrador Credit Union bank book containing the record of his father’s gold. He knew on the train that in his thinking he was not so different from his father. His father would, this coming winter, walk his trapline towards unnamed places, and Wayne would finally be on his way to a landscape that was for him as magnetic and as big as Labrador.