The Best American Short Stories 2014 (38 page)

Our cottage was built at the edge of the village, along the banks of a tiny stream. One hot afternoon I awoke from a nap transfixed by the highest, sweetest sound I had ever heard. It was as if I could see, in my mind's eye, this sweet sound rapidly tracing the petals of a flower before plummeting down its stem. I learned later from my father that one capacity of the human voice had been described in such a way by Jerome of Moravia—as a vocal flowering. I went to the window. There my mother joined me, pointing to a nest in the bank-willow tree.

“That nest,” I asked, “did you make it?” For my mother was skilled in weaving, and in fashioning all kinds of things.

“Of course not,” she scolded me. “It is mother bird who builds it.”

“How can she make it so?”

“God gave her the knowledge,” she said. “Nothing perfect comes but it comes from God.”

Then from somewhere in the tree the beautiful thick chirp came again, a trill and a sweet clucking. How I wanted to see the bird! But as much as I strained and leaned, she did not appear.

“How does she learn this song?” I asked.

“God puts the song in her breast,” said my mother.

“And how can it be so sweet?”

“Tiresome boy.” She smiled. “This also comes from God.”

“And my eye?”

Her mouth twisted in irritation, and she dropped my hand. “From God,” she muttered. “The good and the bad are from God . . .”

And perhaps I remember this day so clearly because, soon after, it pleased divine providence to take my mother to the Lord, may he be praised for all things. This was in the year of our Lord 1376, in the month of June.

After my mother's death my father accepted a position as an organist in the town of Bishop's Lynn, in Norfolk. He explained to us that an organ was a wondrous and expensive piece of equipment, and only a church of good means could acquire one. We children admired our father greatly, and as the years passed he taught us whatever he knew of music and instruments.

At two and twenty I married a woman named Katherine, nine years my elder and the daughter of a well-to-do burgher. Her father accepted my appearance. “Though thine eye may wander,” he jested, “see that thy heart does not.” I assured him that because of my appearance, I was a devout man and had never been burdened with lust or pride. Katherine's inheritance was more than I might have hoped for, and we did not want for money. We had a cook, a maid, and a nurse; and Katherine was wise in shopping, never fooled by watered wine or the old fish sold at market, rubbed with pig's blood to make it look fresh. We enjoyed our supper over pleasant conversation, and in the evenings I would play the gittern or the psaltery, for my father had given me a small collection of instruments and I loved nothing more than music.

Katherine herself could not keep a pitch, and sometimes when I hummed a little tune without thinking, she might ask me to stop. But no wife is without such cavils, and she was gay in demeanor then, as middling comely as befit a woman of her years, and forthcoming in wifely duties. I was pleasantly surprised in my enjoyment of these, and called myself happy in life.

In the second year Katherine was with child, and when her time came she labored through the night. Never in my life had I heard such lamentation, and I wondered how the throat could bear such pressure unscathed. The midwife came out for the rose oil and sat on the stool beside me, her head in her hands, and when hours later she fetched some vinegar and sugar, she took bits of lamb's wool and tucked them in her ears before entering the birth room again. When finally the dawn came, I heard a small cry, but most of an hour passed before finally the midwife brought the child down the stairs to me. I was happy, although it was a girl. And as I held the babe, she brought another—twin girls.

I knew Katherine to be a good and honest woman, so I could not believe that twins must be sired by two fathers. But of course many did believe it. When the days of her purification were completed, Katherine was received, according to Leviticus, back into the church, made clean to make bread or prepare food. But on the way home that day some women tore the veil and wimple from her head so that she was made to walk home as bareheaded as a harlot. In the following week our neighbors spun a yellow cross to mark her garment and left it at our door, and spat at her as she went to market, and spat upon her babes. My old father the organist would no longer speak with her, and my sisters and brothers would no longer look upon her.

Was it out of sadness that Katherine refused me my marital rights, even as a year passed? I will never know. We did have a common devotion for the sweet creatures she had borne. We employed a nurse whose breasts were large enough for two, yet not large enough to flatten the children's noses, and we took joy as these two began to smile and babble and their curls were growing long. For my part, I felt a relief and pride at their smooth kneecaps and beautiful straight eyes. For though the woman carries the seed of the child, they may have shared my deformity. Together we looked and wondered at them as one wonders at the heavens and all the beauties of nature. They were so entirely alike that only a few tiny spackles on the nose could distinguish elder from younger.

But divine providence was pleased to take the life of our dear twins two days apart from each other, the first on the fifth of June at the hour of terce, in the year of our Lord 1393. Then I too was taken sick, and woke from my fever one morning to find that the second twin had been gathered back to the Lord on the seventh of June at 5 o'clock, in the year of our Lord 1393. For this may the Lord be thanked and praised, for every devout man knows the great mercy he shows us in taking a child out of the world. Yet had they stayed with us—had even one stayed—I believe I would not have this story to tell.

Katherine was a good woman, and, until this time, perfectly ordinary. But she began to weep all the day long and into the night, and no comfort I offered was of help to her. One winter's day I could not find my wife and, looking out the window, saw her sitting in the snow with her skirt spread round her. She wore no coat. I sent the nurse, who hovered over Katherine as she rocked back and forth on her heels.

“Sir, no coaxing could get her inside,” she told me. “She says she is warm inside the body, and God tells her not to fear illness.”

Then she leaned in and whispered, “She wears no knickers under the skirt.”

Shortly after this incident, it pleased the Lord to take to paradise my father the organist, and for this may he be praised in his wisdom. I was given the tutelage of some of my father's students who lived across the canal in the old city where there were large stone dwellings of Roman style. I found these houses impressive, for our own was timber, post and beam, and so close to its rotting neighbor that the two dwellings leaned on each other at the top like a pair of boureés.

My pupils were young girls who lived in the old quarter, from wealthy families in which the boys studied chess and hawking and the girls embroidery and singing. Most of them did not sing well, yet the lessons were pleasant for me, a diversion from our home and its growing strangeness.

Katherine no longer did the shopping. Together we went out only to church, and there she would cry. The cries began softly, and then grew to sobs, and she fell forward to the pew in front of us, and then into the aisle, writhing and groaning with a sound as great as the one she had poured forth in labor, so that it was only prudent to gather her and take her from the sanctuary. Then she smiled fiercely, her eyes gleaming in ecstasy.

“It is the Lord who makes me,” she told me, later. “He speaks to me. And when I fall to the ground I cannot stop myself; it is because I hear the most beautiful music, that seems to come from heaven itself.”

In truth I did not know if I could believe it. For we know of those who contract dancing fevers in the rainy season, when, for example, in Saint Vitus's dance, one town makes its way to another in a state of shivering frenzy. It seemed to be a madness of that sort. Indeed, Albertus Magnus has written that women who do not receive their husbands can become full of poisonous blood and it is better for them to expel the matter, but my wife dismissed this opinion when it was offered.

Still, she did seek the counsel of authorities, including William Southfield of the Carmelites, and Dame Julian, the anchoress, in her little cell. These agreed that God was speaking to Katherine through her fits. And so my wife had a new path to follow, this time as a woman of faith. And in time she was no longer shunned on the street. She had earned respect and her demeanor improved.

But though Saint Augustine tells us we might atone for any sin between married people by acts of Christian charity, our relations did not resume. At night we got in bed as usual, well-bedded in white sheets and nightcap. We took off our nightclothes under the covers. But when I turned to Katherine, she would feign sickness, or scratch herself.

“I have worms!” she would say, slapping my hand away.

“No,” I assured her. “You have not scratched all day.”

“They come out at night!”

“Let me see . . .” and smiling I would reach out to her nakedness.

But she thrashed and spun away from me.

During this time I visited for the first time a student of my late father's who had recently recovered from illness. Her maid showed me to where she lay on the daybed still in a dressing gown of yellow silk. She looked to be sixteen, as dark haired as a Jewess, with large brown eyes and rather dark skin. I did not think of her as lovely. I suppose that those who were said to be beautiful had very white skin and light hair, so it did not occur to me to define the girl in this manner. Then too, this dark girl covered her mouth in the manner of those with rotten teeth who have been trained not to offend others. So I sometimes covered my own sinister eye with my hand, or turned my face away, to avoid the onlooker's gaze.

“I am Olivia,” she said meekly. “I am happy to meet you, and I know your father is with the Lord.”

I thanked her and asked her if she felt well enough to stand, for standing is the best way to sing. She nodded and, with some effort, hoisted herself up by the table stand.

“Let us begin with a recitation,” I said, “for in this way I shall know what I need to teach you.”

I do not remember much of the first song she sang, or even, exactly, my own reaction to it. My surprise was first that she sang a worldly song, popular in the courts of great men, and sung by troubadours. It made no mention of God.

But soon I had forgotten the song itself and marked the contrast between this girl and my typical student, who strained so on high registers; who, if she hit the note, often pushed into it like a German, or broke the tone in the manner of the French. Olivia's voice lifted to each note directly, holding on the tone without excess of ornament or vibration—the sweet sound of a child. In its simplicity there was something wondrous about it, and I wanted to laugh and delight in it, rather than find something to teach her. Yet her nurse sat embroidering on the settle, and she would report to Olivia's father. I had to begin with a suggestion, and so it came to me what I might add. For Isidore of Seville told us the voice should be “high, clear, and sweet” and indeed something was not entirely clear.

I asked, “You are aware of the epiglottis?”

Olivia shook her head. I asked the nurse to fetch ink and paper, and drew a small sketch of this leaf-shaped part. “If the tongue, perhaps swollen from sickness, is sliding backward, it may be clouding the tone of what my father—working, as you know, on the organ as he did, and noticing its similarity with the human capacity for two kinds of sound—might call the lower register.”

The nurse looked up attentively from her embroidery, while the student studied my sketch with a worried expression. I suppose that I wanted to lighten this expression, though I don't remember thinking so, only that my throat ached, as it did in the moment when as a child, I raced to the window to find that the bird was not there.

“In spite of this,” I told her, “your voice at times comes close to a moment of perfection—what Jerome has called
la pulchra nota
. Let us begin to listen for it. Mostly it appears with no strain whatsoever. But be attentive, for when such a note comes, if you know it, you may ever after use its sound to guide you.” Then I smiled, for her brows were still knit in a childlike concern.

“Do not worry,” I said gaily. “It may be only a short while.”

And at this she smiled back at me quite fully and naturally. “Oh!” she said. “Do you think so?”

“Yes,” I said. “I'm sure of it.”

That I should not have said, I thought later. I myself had never reached such a note in singing. Why should I praise so strongly? Was there another reason to do so? In fact I went over the entire lesson in my mind for some reason, retracing what I had said and how I had said it, and I saw the image of Olivia's open face, her easy joy in singing. Perhaps I retraced our conversation only to protract the lesson in some way during the week. In this way I could avoid my circumstances at home.

For that night as I turned the psaltery, Katherine put her head in her hands and sighed, and said it would be better not to play at all. I changed my course and the next evening sang only plainchant, making my voice as soft and comforting as possible.

But she drew her shawl about her shoulders and came to sit next to me on my stool. There she repeated to me that the music she heard in her mind, whose perfection made her yell and writhe, was not of the world, but came directly from the Lord. So worldly music and sounds were only poor imitations, distracting from worship, as all worldly pleasures do.

There was quiet that evening in our empty house, empty of the sound of children and empty of conversation, empty of music. It was a place where sound became odious to both of us—the crack of a stool, the creak of our bed as we settled there.