This Magnificent Desolation (41 page)

It's raining and Maggie and Duncan are strolling through the nearly deserted fairgrounds at Golden Gate Park. An empty Whirligig spins in alternating parabolas, its lights blurred by speed and rain so that it seems to entwine with itself as each brightly lit arc crisscrosses the other. Giorgio Moroder's “Chase” theme from
Midnight Express
plays loudly from the ride's speakers: whooshing synthesizers, accelerating snare and high hat, bass beats, and looping four-chord sequences—the suggestion of speed and escape and of a strange, thrilling contagion; and of a carnival thronged with shrieking, laughing people.

Mother lifts her skirt to jump the puddles, and as they come closer to the music, she raises her hands and begins clapping. She leans her head back, lets loose her arms, and swings them about her, turning in circles first one way and then the other like some mad disco queen, and then she reaches for him and without pausing takes his hands in her own and begins to spin him about.

I love this song, she says, breathless, as they slow. Here comes the
chorus—are you ready? Quicktime! And they spin off again, splashing through the rust-colored water and through the divets and grooves gouged out by the tractor trailers and past the stalls and booths and the fun house mirrors that turn them into ridiculously wide-mouthed misshapen things and with everything a speeding blur about them—the faces of the few remaining parkgoers, vendors with open mouths and weary eyes, the bedraggled performers rolling their painted drop cloths, watching them and smiling—as they turn and turn and turn and it begins to rain harder, multicolored windswept darts spilling down through the Whirligig's bright-lit revolutions, shining brightly on mother's upturned and glistening face, and if she is saddened by some foreknowledge of what is to come, Duncan has no sense of it.

The only riders aboard the Whirligig, Mother and Duncan hold each other's hands and lean their heads back and are flying, laughing, through the low, pulsing cloud-gray sky. The carousel turns lazily in bright, blinking multicolored arcs while the Whirligig centrifuge spins above them in endless, vacant revolutions. Mother lays her arms across the back of the chair, stares up at the sky, and sighs long and deep and content.

Upon the fairground's sound system an old Tangley Calliaphone plays a medley of old seaside carnival tunes, and the smell of rain: of damp wood and canvas and soggy, moldering trash, melds with the lingering odors of disinfectant from the portable toilets, diesel, popcorn, and old cooking grease from the food stalls.

It's getting cold, mother says, and shivers. They say it could even snow soon. The sky continues to spin about them: A seagull flaps madly, rising toward a blurred and crooked zenith, and the Callia-phone suddenly begins to play manically and off-key, as if it were slowly winding down, and when Duncan turns to smile at his mother, her face looks pale and shaken. Mom? he says and she pulls forward, letting loose his hand, and clutches at her mouth as if she's about to be sick.

Duncan looks down for the Whirligig attendant and waves for him to cut the ride. As the sounds of the motors and gears subside, he and mother continue in their slow, lazy orbit above the fairgrounds. Mother lays her head back and closes her eyes, and there is only the sound of the wind sighing through the metal buckets and cantilevered tie-arms, gnawing like invisible rats at the thin metal cables. Gradually the chairs come to a stop upon the ground and the attendant swing theirs forward to the gate and unlocks it. He reaches for mother's hand and he and Duncan help her as she steps off. Her ankles buckle and for a moment it seems as if she will fall, but then she reaches for the guardrail. She closes her eyes again, inhales slow and deep, and as Duncan and the attendant watch her, she vomits, a yellow, strong-smelling bile that spatters against the rail.

Mom, are you okay?

Is everything all right, Ma'am? the attendant asks.

I'm just not built for these things anymore. I'll be okay in a little while.

A fine rheum of vomit greases Mother's mouth and she wipes at it with the back of her hand. Then she attempts to smile but her lips are pressed tight and she squints as if she is having trouble seeing them in the gray light. Her pupils have shrunk to mere pinpricks.

Mother takes his hand and they step across the runoff from the rows of plastic port-a-potties turning the edge of the park to black muck. From somewhere comes the low thumping of diesel generators and there's the constant hum of electricity passing along cables between trailers and tents, and farther, a dog's hesitant bark sounding fearful in the encroaching darkness.

On the street, people seem to emerge out of the strange crepuscular light like milky apparitions, as if they had only the moment before come into existence, footfalls splashing through neon-lit puddles. A wide bar of bright yellow light spills across the alley from the Chinese Garden kitchen and from within the rapturous clattering of pots and pans; a radio sputtering jazz, jubilant footfalls on the thin
floors as if someone were dancing; and the sudden, violent beauty of a woman's voice in song. Mother pauses and slants her head unconsciously toward the music, then she looks about her, squints as if looking for something that moments before was there and is now gone. She chews on her lower lip, pulls at her hair.

The streets are mostly deserted. Stoops are filled with bulging trash bags and here and there various broken electric devices: a portable television, a stereo turntable, speakers, a toaster, transistor radios, a hair dryer and curling tongs, a typewriter, a fan.

A man coughs—a smoker's cough: first hoarse and then thick and moist with phlegm—in the kitchen over the soft sound of slow-running water and the clatter of dishware. From another window the opening music to
Ironside
, with its three repeating notes of warning, like a clarion. Mother blinks, eyelashes fluttering, and licks her lips savagely as she stares at the city about them.

Do you feel it? she asks, and absently squeezes his arm, harder than she intends.

Feel what?

There's something missing here—can't you feel it? It's all wrong. She shakes her head. I'm sorry, she says. I'm so sorry.

Just after dawn gray light filters through the gap beneath the window shades and Duncan wakes and sniffs the stagnant, sulfurous air. The rain must have stopped sometime during the night. A hammer is banging somewhere in the rail yards, a thunk of metal on wood—perhaps driving cross ties into the ground—followed by a loud clanging, and he can hear men's voices calling to one another. He'd been listening to the church bells from St. Mary of the Wharves and as they sounded he was standing crying in his suit and tie at the grave overlooking the bay where they buried an empty coffin in place of Joshua. He sees Joshua flailing far out at sea and the water pulling him down and then Joshua no longer struggling but welcoming this strange peace, and his mouth opening and closing soundlessly as if he were still singing.

Duncan shifts and the mattress groans. Mother is breathing softly next to him; her breath sour on his face. Her skin is sallow and gaunt in the nether light, and as he watches her, he mouths a prayer
thanking God for everything He has given him and asking that his mother be well and strong and happy and kept in His care. Mother's breath catches, and she wakes, eyes open wide, as if startled. She looks at Duncan and about the room. After a moment, relaxes. What are you doing, my Duncan? she says tenderly.

Nothing. Just saying a prayer.

Well, prayers never hurt. And neither does coffee and cigarettes. Hand me my bag, would you?

Duncan climbs from the bed and fetches her bag from the table in the kitchen, the floor bowing and creaking under his footsteps. Mother pulls herself upright, leans back against the bed frame as Duncan bunches tobacco from her pouch onto a rolling paper.

Joshua teach you that?

Duncan nods as he licks the edge of the paper, lights the cigarette, and hands it to her, watches as she sucks on it weakly. You'll go to the doctor today, he says firmly and stares at her until she looks at him.

I'll make an appointment for later in the week. After Joshua's memorial, okay? She smiles feebly, lifts the cigarette in her hand. See? I feel better already, but Duncan continues to look at her and she says: After Joshua's memorial, I promise.

October 1985

The last night of Joshua's memorial Maggie begins her final set by singing the mad scene from Donizetti's
Lucia di Lammermoor
, a song Duncan knows she no longer has the ability to sing, but her first note—a rising, startling B, sustained and lengthened by playful flourishes—is like no other she has sounded. The audience stares at her, and their mouths open unconsciously. The note falters and then Maggie catches it shakily again.

Her voice rises quickly up the scale—and up up up the audience rises with it—and crescendos at that elusive C, held until it is one pleading pitch, shaking but sustained at such a height that it does not seem possible any person could be capable of sustaining it, and then falling slowly back to the middle range with twirling, spiraling ornamentation, so that her voice resembles the broken sound of the plunge itself and of a flock of starlings at twilight. Duncan sees Lucia's
madness and her loss. Her pleading to her lover to believe that she is not mad, to not condemn or imprison her. He sees Joshua swimming out into the bay, his thrashing strokes leaving spears of white froth upon the black surface.

As twilight creeps across city from the east, turning the glass of the city a fiery purplish orange, the inside of the bar darkens and candles flickering in the candelabras surrounding the stage cast Maggie's misshapen shadow upon the backdrop and the walls.

Duncan watches as his mother sings and holds nothing back—she sings as if this were the End, sings as she did during those years before her performance at Symphony Hall. And the crowd knows it, and because of this, they believe in her, and they give themselves to her, and she takes them with her. And in that place, every note is perfect.

Maggie begins to sing “Senza mamma,” from Puccini's
Suor Angelica
, which Duncan has only ever heard sung in broken fragments before. Sister Angelica, who was put away in a convent after giving birth to an illegitimate child, learns after seven years without news of her son that he died in infancy. She sings of not being able to forgive herself for abandoning him and wishing that she could be together with him in heaven.

Senza mamma,

o bimbo, tu sei morto!

Le tue labbra, senza i baci miei,

scolorriron fredde!

e chuidesti, o bimbo, gli occhi belli!

Non potendo carezzarmi,

le manine componesti in croce!

E tu sei morto senza sapere

quanto t'mava questa tua mamma.

Ora che sei un angelo del cielo,

ora tu puoi vederla la tua mamma,

tu puoi sendere giù pel firmamento

ed aleggiare in torno a me ti sento

Sei qui, mi baci e m'accarezzi.

Ah! Dimmi, quando in ciel potrò verderti?

Quando potrò baciarti?

Oh! Dolce fine d'ogni mio dolore,

quando in ciel potró salire?

Quando potró morire?

Dillo alla mamma, creatura bella,

con un leggiero scintillar di stella,

Parlami, parlami,

amore, amore, amore!

My baby, you died without your mama!

Your lips, without my kisses, grew pale and cold!

And your lovely eyes closed, my baby!

I could not caress you,

your little hands folded in a cross!

And you died without knowing

how much your mama loved you!

Now you are an angel in heaven,

now you can see your mama,

you can come down from heaven

and let our fragrance linger about me.

You are here to feel my kisses and caresses.

Ah! Tell me, when will I see you in heaven?

When can I kiss you?

Oh! Sweet end to all my grieving,

when can I greet you in heaven?

When can I greet death?

O creature of beauty, tell your mama,

by a small twinkle of a star.

Speak, speak, speak to me,

my love, my love, my love!

A cigarette lies bent in a tin ashtray upon the piano's edge and a string of gray-white smoke churns slowly upward from it. The musicians sit silently on chairs watching her performance. Maggie's voice echoes and resonates with such vibrating pitch, resonance, and harmony that it is as if she were singer and tenor and chorus intermingled as one emerging slowly from the darkness and rising, surging quickly together toward the end. And Duncan feels God turning slowly toward them with the last of the sun descending into the hills and the glass and metal valleys and the darkness above sweeping its vast shadow across the bay.

In listening to his mother he knows that on this night, this rare, particular, star-aligned, tumid night, she has been granted a reprieve. She stands in another time, before an audience at Symphony Hall in Boston; she is nineteen and immune to the world of pain, before one note fractures the membrane in her throat, swelling her voice box, and causing her larynx to harden with coarse cartilage, a time before he was born.

After her performance she will race to North Station through the snow toward the man who will become his father and it will feel as if it is snowing just for her, as if the world has momentarily stopped
and His great gaze has paused from its cosmic ruminations and a light has shot the bow of the universe and materialized out of the darkness merely to consider the wonder of her. Maggie will raise her face, her chilled cheeks to the tumbling snow and to the invisible glittering stars beyond the billowing white of the sky, and briefly understand her part in everything. Her life will begin and end here in the brief time before Duncan is born, while she is still very much a young girl and while the promise of all manner of dreams lie before her. And he knows that when his mother stops singing, there
never
will be another like her.