The Lost Daughter (40 page)

His heart. It felt like a foreign object right now, floating around somewhere in his chest. This morning, after he’d checked the schedules and ordered a reprint of Hartt School brochures, Larry Dobson had called him upstairs and fired him. No, not fired. Laid him off. There wasn’t enough work for two shifts anymore, that was the bottom line. And Larry couldn’t let McMahon go; McMahon was his last hope. So he’d promoted his cousin Ernie from the night run to the day shift and gone after Sean. Every time Sean had replayed the scene, through the long bitter afternoon, he had cut loose with a chuckle. There he’d been, in the same spot he’d put so many guys in over the last six months. Declining to sit down while Larry gave him the news. Watching Larry’s hand stray over the manila envelope with severance details. Wondering if he should’ve worked through those two personal days last week, if that would have made a difference. Debating whether to go graciously to the guillotine or kick the guy in the teeth.
That’s what guys like me and you do
, he remembered Seymour saying.
Make things easier for the guys doing better than us.

He wanted to trot across the street and give Meghan a squeeze, but they’d already said good night and she was happy now, not thinking about him. And his knee throbbed. Better not to mess with it. He filled his water bottle and let the dogs back in. Reluctantly, rolling west on Farmington, he put on the CD of the Evangelist again; he forced his vocal cords into service.

Christ, he thought as he parked by the church, he was tired. All he wanted was a way back. Back to where they’d been in August, when Gerry’s kid was christened and Brooke was looking forward to new responsibilities at her job. If only he hadn’t kept on her case
about a second kid! But no. There was something behind that refusal of hers, there had always been something behind it. And even if his jealousy hadn’t led him to the booze, even if he’d stayed late at work every day last week, Larry Dobson would still have laid him off. What the hell he was going to do now, he had no more idea than he had of Brooke’s whereabouts. He was lost.

The first thing he noticed as he entered the rehearsal hall was the line to the folding table where the white-haired alto who kept the books was sitting. “What’s this?” Sean asked a guy named Henley, at the back of the line.

“Paying the piper,” Henley said with a mock grimace. “Dues today or—” He drew a line across his throat.

Christ. Sean had forgotten. A hundred fifty bucks the chorale charged. Peanuts, they all agreed, for the experience. Then they joked about forming a union. But what was Sean doing, tossing away dough? He’d just lost his job. His wife was probably looking to divorce him. He might have to take some graveyard shift somewhere, drive a truck, Christ knew what, and then he’d miss rehearsals and be out of the performance.

Thinks he can sing
, Mum always said.
Thinks he can afford to idle his time away la-la-la’ing like some retired banker.
He smiled wanly at the thought of his mother’s barbs. He’d seen Mum yesterday, at Gerry’s new house in the South End, where he’d taken Meghan to play with her baby cousin Derek. Mum and Kate had stayed inside to clean up the Sunday lunch dishes while the brothers sat reading the Sunday paper on the patio, Gerry with a beer and Sean with iced tea. The day had been warm but damp—a storm had blown through the night before, the tail end of a hurricane down south, and fallen branches lay like pick-up sticks below the big maple at the back of the tiny yard. He’d been telling Gerry about the Evangelist when Mum’s voice had come through the screen door. “It’s the la-la-la!”
she’d said, like always. You figured her for deaf until something came up she didn’t like to hear. “Wants the attention!”

That was when Meghan had started climbing the tree, he remembered now. She’d come out from the house, saying that Baby Derry was down for his nap, and she’d scaled the wood fence at the back of the yard to hoist herself onto the lowest branch of the maple tree. He’d told her to be careful. Gerry had asked where Brooke was, why he was getting stuck with the kid even on his weekends. It was to avoid that question that Sean had gone inside, claiming he needed to take a whiz, could Gerry keep an eye on Meghan. The women had finished in the kitchen by then. The afternoon sun was shining on the lemon tree in its huge pot by the bay window, the tree Brooke had chosen for Gerry and Kate, eight years ago. Two fat lemons weighed down its branches. As he took in the sight of the tree—still bearing fruit, he thought, like everyone but him—his mother stepped into the kitchen and headed straight for the cupboard where Gerry kept his whiskey. “Can I get you something, Mum?” Sean had asked.

“You can get me a new life,” she said, pouring. “She won’t even let me hold my grandchild.” Mum’s eyes signaled the living room. “’Fraid I’ll drop him.” She gave a harsh chuckle. Ice cubes plinked into her glass—one, two, three. “Only dropped one, and that was you. Scrambled your brains, I think.”

“Knocked ’em right out of my head.”

Mum turned to face him. Hers had been a small, pretty face in old photographs. Not sixty yet, her features seemed to draw in toward themselves, like a drying apple. Her chin was reduced to a tiny knob. “Your father used to sing,” she said unexpectedly.

“Nonsense. Dad yelled and groaned.”

“Before you were born. Used to get paid for it, down in Brooklyn. Weddings, funerals. Sang at my sister’s wedding. That’s where we met.”

“You never told me that, Mum.”

She sipped her whiskey. Tears sprang to her soft eyes. “He tried, you know. With the music.”

“What d’you mean, tried?

“La-la-la for money. You know.”

“He sang professionally?” Sean felt his senses quicken, down to the hairs on his arms. “No one ever told us this. He always worked at the tool and die.”

“When I had Fanny,” Mum said, “I put my foot down. I said, ‘It’s lovely sounding, Derek, but it won’t feed a brood.’ He stopped, then and there. Said he’d never sing a note again.” When she slugged the whiskey, she looked ready to bite the glass, just to keep the tears from coming. She set it down on the counter and glared at Sean, as if the story she was telling had been his fault.

“And he never did,” Sean said.

“No. And he was never a happy man again. Not till he was brought to his rest.”

Not, Sean thought as his mother topped off her glass and left the room, until he drank himself to death. Stunned, he started back out to the patio. From the back of the yard he heard Meghan’s voice, calling to him, “Look at me, look at me, Daddy!”

“Where the hell is she?” he’d asked Gerry.

Gerry looked up from the paper. That was when Sean had seen the branch sway in the maple. Had seen Meghan’s pink sneaker between the leaves, reaching from one wet limb to the next. Had moved his legs, dreamlike, across the expanse of muddy grass. Had seen one sneaker lift off the branch. Then the branch on which she balanced had cracked with a sound like tearing paper, and like a wide receiver going for the football, arms out, Sean had lunged. He’d caught his daughter’s flailing body, all knees and elbows, and they had both rolled through the leaves and mud. His knee—he
took the weight off it now, as he stood in the line at the chorale—had twisted under him. Be a couple weeks healing at best. But his daughter, bathed in mud, had suffered no more than a scare.

La-la-la, he thought now. But only if you can afford it. Yesterday he’d had a job to complain about with his brother. Today he was a man adrift. He stood frozen to his spot on the wood floor while other chorale members passed around him and took their place in the line.

“Sean. Hey, Sean,” he heard finally, as if everything in the room had gone silent for a moment while Sean’s thoughts roared.

He turned. “Geoffrey,” he said.

The chorale director cocked his head at him, as if Sean were an interesting zoo animal. “Better stage presence without the whiskers, I think,” he said. “You ready to help us with the first movement tonight?”

“I don’t know, Geoffrey.” Sean’s eyes skittered around the room. Thad, the accompanist, was running lightly through the fugue. Suzanne was inclining her head toward the alto next to her—Betty? Bridie? They’d sat together as long as Sean could remember, and long ago when he dated Suzanne he used to glance over and Bridie would nod her head approvingly at him. They had not spoken since that time. “I’ve—ah—had some stuff going on recently.”

“We can use piano cues for tonight. No sweat.”

“No, I’ve got the part down. It’s not that.”

“Good. Let’s talk at the break, then. Hey, you’re not in this line, are you?”

“Well”—Sean gestured at the row of good-hearted volunteer singers now snaking around by the windows, waiting to pay—“that’s just the thing—”

“Because I thought I told you. Didn’t I tell you? You don’t pay dues as a rehearsal soloist. In fact I think we’ve cooked up an embarrassing
honorarium, I don’t know, five hundred bucks maybe. So should I call on your voice tonight, or—?”

Sean let out his breath. “Well, I don’t know, Geoffrey, I’m not sure…” he began. Then, as if Geoffrey had sent a delayed broadcast, he heard what had been said. No dues. Five hundred dollars. Which meant nothing, of course it meant nothing, he was a man without a job, without his wife. Still. He began to return Geoffrey’s genial, questioning smile, and tears rushed into his eyes. “I can sing,” he said quickly, turning his head away. “Better find my seat.”

In most ways the music worked its usual magic, rearranged Sean’s molecules the way it always did so that by the break he was knit together as a person again, even if he was a person with troubles heavier than he would be able to bear. But there was more. When he stood as the Evangelist and began the legato line,
Und da die Engel von ihnen gen Himmel
—and as the angels were gone into heaven—his voice at first felt shaky and thin, as if the tears he had managed not to shed had watered it down. But then the tenors came in, and the basses, all going to Bethlehem, and he felt himself borne aloft. When he sat again, the rest of the chorale burst into a round of applause, but it wasn’t the clapping that touched him. Rather he felt the urgency of it, the way he had thus far only understood the man who reaches for the next bottle, as if a voice inside were chanting,
Do this again, do this again, you have to do this again
.

When rehearsal ended most singers dashed from the hall, but a few lingered—the dutiful, the lonely, the gregarious. Stacking the chairs, Sean stopped to rub his knee above the joint. A bruise or tendon pull maybe, nothing bad. Meghan would have broken a bone at least. And Gerry, father of four, sitting there with the sports section. What a kinky way life had of doling out gifts.

With the room in order, he sat at the piano with Henley and another tenor, a retired podiatrist named Dick Peltier, and they
plucked out the tricky passage in the fugue. If they could hear it in their heads, Sean explained to the two men, as
bi-de-bi-de-bum
even as they ran the arpeggios on a sustained
ah
, they could get more articulation. Dick still ran flat when they tried it again, but the pace was better. As Sean shut the piano and prepared to leave, Geoffrey came over from the last cluster of choristers gathered at the door. He nodded at Dick’s square frame exiting. “You ought to collect a fee,” he said.

“He’s fine,” said Sean. “Tendency to scoop the note, but that’s most of us.”

“You get what you pay for. Mostly. Sometimes you luck out.” He clapped Sean on the shoulder. “You sounded great tonight,” he said. “Intonation, pitch, everything. I’d put you before an audience if I could.”

Sean shrugged. He could feel the snug knit of the music already loosing, letting in the sorrow of his life like a cold draft. “I’m glad it helped the group,” he said.

“You know, I really don’t get it.” Geoffrey folded his music stand and set it in the corner. He turned to face Sean, hands on his heavy hips. “You’re a printer, right?”

“Was.” Sean plucked his jacket from the back of a chair. “Until this morning.”

“What, man? You lost your job?” Geoffrey frowned, came close. Sean liked the guy. He was a great musician, and he wasn’t a prig like others Sean had seen. But he’d stuck to the narrow path—music lessons, music school, teaching at a conservatory, music director at a church, the chorale—and didn’t know much about how the rest of them grubbed their way through the world. “What’ll you do now?”

“Too soon to tell.” Sean rubbed the back of his neck. What was he supposed to say? He’d thought about drinking himself to death
but changed his mind? “Printers are hard hit. You’ve got desktop publishing, these young guys designing websites. I’m thirty-seven. I’m an old man.”

Geoffrey gave a bass snort. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re just ripe for a career change. You ever think of going back to school?”

“I’ve got a family to support, Geoffrey.” Even as he said it, Brooke’s yawning absence wanted to swallow him up. “I’ll figure something out.”

“Sean, I don’t know if you’re dense or just stubborn.” Geoffrey drew close. His eyes, small and bright blue, narrowed at Sean. “I’ve been trying to tell you for months. Years, maybe. You have a gift, man. Now, you may like the smell of printing ink—”

“It was a job, okay? It paid twice a month. I had a good eye for graphics.”

“All right, all right. I’m not knocking the paycheck. I’m sorry they cut it. I’m just saying. Carpe diem.”

Sean pursed his lips. He was tired. He was grieving. He wanted a drink. The Evangelist had floated away, on his angel wings or whatever transport he used. “I only speak the Latin they put to music, Maestro,” he said.

Geoffrey put his hand on Sean’s elbow. “Seize the day. Maybe not to be an opera singer, but Christ. You could teach. You like teaching?”

“Teaching’s a gas,” Sean said, which was the truth.

“Well, you could do that. You could perform locally, you could make this work. Not many people can say that.”

“I’ve got to go.”

But Geoffrey didn’t release him. “Let’s talk more about this, okay?” he said. “You’ve got some severance?”

“Six weeks.”

“Let me get to work on some stuff. Okay? Will you let me do that?”