This Magnificent Desolation (42 page)

The show is over; the candles are extinguished and the musicians and Mother are in darkness. Beer bottles clatter and chairs scrape against wood. Clay calls out to them, says, Great job, Maggie! and begins to stack the chairs and the patrons slowly trudge out to the street. Ray Cooper and the Hi-Fidelity Blu-Tones break down their equipment. A Harley backfires and roars violently up the avenue. Then the footfalls of the musicians on the steps of the stage, Clay hollering for them to lock up after themselves, and after a long while mother's blue sequined dress shimmering through the dark toward him.

Hey, you, she says. How's my biggest fan? And Duncan grins.

In the alleyway behind the bar a radio is playing big band music by Tommy Dorsey, the horns blowing slow and melancholy. Duncan watches his mother's gaunt face, hears in the silent space between them her voice still resonating from her performance. He is sitting upon a hard-backed, fold-up chair, with shadows shifting upon the back of the bar wall, and they are all alone.

Maggie smells of sweat, cigarette smoke, and skin cream. One arm folded across her middle, she sucks hungrily on her cigarette, pauses to purse her lips and pick a fleck of tobacco from her lower lip. Slowly, she touches the side of her head.

What is it? Duncan asks.

Nothing, sweetie. Just got a headache. I think everything is finally catching up with me. I just need to sit for a while. She looks about the dark bar.

You know this—tonight—it's not what I thought it would be.

No. Duncan grins. Me either.

But that's all right too.

Yes, it is, Duncan agrees.

I'm done, you know, Maggie says, and clutches her belly unconsciously. Duncan nods. Anyone could see the toll the last week had taken on her.

She laughs softly. No, she says. I'm really done. I can't sing, Duncan. There isn't anything left. I tried, just now in the bathroom. My voice is gone. She opens her mouth and shapes it as if to sing, but when she exhales, only a whistle emerges, cracked and broken from her larynx.

Her voice is truly gone.

As they sit and he waits for her to say something more, she gradually leans against him, and she feels weightless, so tall and big boned yet weightless. He has no idea how much time passes but has the sense that the two of them have dozed. The lights are coming up slowly like filaments warming with heat, and a theater is taking shape about them. At the back of the Windsor stage a proscenium shimmers out of the darkness. Above the proscenium gilded balconies emerges. The blurred, dark shapes of people rise here and there, shuffling and whispering in mute, unintelligible voices, much like distant echoes piled one atop the other, as they find their seats.

Maggie sighs and then smiles slowly. The last place I performed, she says and raises her eyes to the shattered galleries.

It didn't look like this then, she says. The production was sometimes terrible but still … this place … you could almost see and feel what it wanted it to be—you could feel the small part of the opera that it had reached for, had wanted so badly to be.

The smell of grease and tobacco comes off the satin and velvet chairs, once red but now faded to a burnt umber and shimmering black in places where the felt has been worn away.

Let's stay here for a while, shall we? I'm feeling very tired, sweetie.

Maggie places her hands upon her stomach and Duncan lays his head against her shoulder and together they stare toward the front of the opera house. Slowly, so slowly that he imagines he must be dreaming, in the darkening light, as if a film is about to begin, flickering upon a invisible screen, there emerges a shimmering about them, in the seats, along the bas-relief of the proscenium, and upon the stage, where a young pale-faced soprano now stands in a white gown.

Maggie smiles. I forgot how young I was, how young I was when it all ended.

On the stage the young woman bows and Duncan hears applause, subdued and distant, like the rhythmic chattering of a far-off train. And then the woman lifts her face to the mezzanine and clerestory, a face unmarred by lines of pain and years of frustration and regret. Her red hair spills in tightly wound curls down her back. Duncan's mouth is open and he realizes that he's not breathing. You're beautiful, Mom, he says. You're so beautiful.

He senses the presence of the people about them—shades of people, shadowed angles and planes and strange coronas of light—a burning luminosity at the edges of black, shifting outlines, becoming more distinct and recognizable. There is movement in the seats, the low timbre of men and women speaking, the smell of pomade and Fragonard, the musk of rich perfume and cologne, and the settling of the opera house as it fits itself to contain the glittering memories of the past. The faded, decrepit paneling and bar stools of
the Windsor Tap are gone and in their place is ornate, gold-leaf filigree and the sculpted booths of the mezzanine, in which long-dead men and women sit in silent splendor, entranced by his mother's performance. The stairs to the foyer are enclosed by red marble balusters supporting a balustrade of onyx. Twenty monolithic columns of a pale opal-like marble, honeycombed with arabesques and ornaments and surrounded by smaller pilasters of peach and violet stone, rise to the panorama of the ceiling.

Duncan stares at the raised Italian plasterwork, the golden tiled sections of the orchestra, the elaborately painted ceiling, with dryads and nymphs playing music in Greek pastures, and suspended a hundred feet above them the shimmering grand chandelier and its thousand cut-crystal diamond tapers, through which electric flames revolve and refract in twirling hollow points of light. And below this and encircling the clerestory, a dozen gold painted statues: the muses of the arts.

What do you think, Duncan? Mother says. It's not the Palais Garnier, I know, but it's not so bad, is it?

No, he shakes his head and clutches her hand in all its feverish strength as the soprano's voice surges through them, vibrating in a crescendo that he can feel trembling in the nerve endings beneath his skin.
No, it's not so bad at all.

After a moment, he asks her: Is this the end then?

I suppose it is, Duncan.

For a while they stare at the stage. It really is a beautiful show. Mother reaches the heights of her range with such force of violence and pain, anguish and desperation and loss—and in this is the happiness that comes with the power of her abilities, when everything that is her essence pours forth from her heart—and with such seeming effortlessness the audience shimmers in appreciation. Upon the stage, beneath the bas-relief of the golden proscenium, Duncan's mother performs her final aria as the Queen of the Night, her arms outstretched toward the audience in pleading, in joy.

At its end she bows and then lifts her face to the clamouring audience, a sight that she will never see again. But for now she is momentarily illuminated and held, transfigured by the lights of the stage.

Disowned may you be forever, Abandoned may you be forever, Destroyed be forever.

Heads turn in their direction. Elaborately dressed men and women nod and silently mouth the words, Brava! Brava! Magnifico! and clap the tops of their hands in restrained and respectful applause.

Duncan senses Maggie smiling. I love you, Duncan, she says.

I love you too, Mom.

Cherry blossom petals, turned opaque and pearl by the stage lights, rain slowly from behind the curtains—the suggestion of pink-tinged snow in May, glinting in slow spirals to the stage as if they were falling onto a grave.

It's like the Festival of Lights, he whispers, and mother nods knowingly. The Festival of Lights Holiday Train, she echoes. How long ago it seems. Like this. Like a dream.

And he wonders how she can know about the Festival of Lights Holiday Train. It froze on the tracks the night I was born, he says, and everyone died. The night you left me at the Home. That's what they told me, what Brother Canice always said.

Mother nods sleepily. But we didn't die, did we sweetie? We didn't die. We should have died but we didn't. We were like Joshua and his angel, flying above it all.

No. Only the people on the train died.

We were on the train, my Duncan.
We
were the only survivors. I took us through the snow and walked until I couldn't walk anymore. It was so cold and everything was lost in the white and I prayed that God would take us.

Duncan turns and looks at her.

You weren't breathing. It was such a strange thing, an odd lurching in your throat, a little gasp of air and you were gone from me
and I was sure that we'd both die there in the snow miles from anywhere and I lay down with you, wrapped you up in my clothes, and fell asleep. Your heart had stopped Duncan, and I didn't want to live anymore. I never intended for us to wake up again.

When they found me, you were dead. But then your heart began beating again and I knew it was a miracle, a sign from God. I remember looking up at one point as they carried me over the snow and rockets were shooting through the air.

It was a meteor shower, he says.

Mother nods. A meteor shower, she says dreamily. I looked up through the snow and there in a tear of clearest dark starlit sky I saw hundreds of rockets arcing and sputtering and I knew that at any moment you would be born and that you would be special. My special Duncan.

Then I was never here with you?

I was in a delirium for days, sweetie, and when I finally came through I couldn't manage a baby, I couldn't look after a child. And then
he
came, because they'd called him and he said he'd take me back and everything would be right again, that we could start over. He said that we couldn't be on the road with a child, that if I didn't leave you, he'd go and never come back … He promised that we'd be together, that he'd take me back west and we'd get married, in a couple of years we'd start a real family.

Who Mom? Who are you talking about?

Your father.

I gave you up almost immediately and they took you without question. I think they knew that, after everything that had happened, I was in no fit state to look after a child. It was as if you were meant to be with them, as if the storm was merely part of some divine plan, as if it had been engineered to bring you to them. I knew you would be safe—I hoped you would be safe. I'm so sorry that I left with him, I'm so sorry I left you.

What about the pictures? I'm in them and you're holding my
hand. That had to be from a time before. And someone had to take those pictures.

No, Duncan. His mother shakes her head. That's not me. And I don't know who took the pictures.

He stares at her.

They're made up, Duncan. They're not really us. They're pictures of other people, not us.

The boy—

It's not you, Duncan. O my sweet, I'm so sorry, but the boy, he isn't you either. I don't know who he is. They were four for a dollar at the St. Vincent De Paul. They came out of a box filled with hundreds of other pictures.

You mean they're dead people.

I don't who they are, Duncan.

But those are dead people's photographs. The St. Vincent De Paul takes them when there's no one else to. Why? Why did you tell me that we'd lived together?

Mother sighs contently, as if the burden of fourteen years of lies has suddenly been lifted from her, as if she is fading, disappearing in the light.

I was so filled with guilt and shame, she says. I didn't want you to think that I was the type of mother who would abandon her child. When he left me, I wanted to come back but I was too weak. I've failed so much in life, made decisions I never thought I could make right again. When I came to get you, I was so frightened. I wanted you to believe in me.

But I do, he says. I do believe in you. I've always believed in you.

I never wanted to leave you, she says, never … I made a choice, one I've regretted my entire life …

It's okay, Mom. It's okay. We're together now.

She smiles toward the stage, waves her wrist weakly at the air. So long ago, she says. So long ago.

Don't leave me, Mom, Duncan says. You promised. You promised to never leave me again.

No, honey. Maggie shakes her head. I'll never leave you again. Never. I promise.

Cherry blossoms continue to fall on the stage like snow and suddenly he's cold. Maggie reaches for his hand, and missing, clasps her own and holds them to her breast, and Duncan takes them, works his own fingers amongst hers and holds to them tightly. The show is almost over. He sees Mother rushing through Scollay Square, and snow, white and thick, tumbling down around her. At a street corner she pauses to watch two lovers, arm in arm, kiss and their kiss floats, rises up to the rooftops, above crumbling lofts and soon-to-be-demolished tenements. The kiss rising upon the final notes of her performance, which still ring in her head, and the crowd rising to their feet, and mother bowing before them as the Queen of the Night and she blinks now into the snow coming upon her upturned face, like darts of soft yet brilliant light. Up, up into such white light. She is rising with the kiss up into the night above Boston, a night filled with the music of her, and into the white churning snow clouds, up up up—she is the woman in the snow from his dreams, the woman standing before the Festival of Lights Holiday Train, and the snow is coming harder now, blinding and white, and Mother moves into its whiteness and toward the divine music only she can hear.

Please, Mom.

My Duncan, Maggie says, and then her body seems to be leaning, yearning to rise, as if invisible strings were pulling her upright. A smile flickers on her face, her eyes shine so brightly that he imagines if he looks hard enough into them, he might see what she sees—and a thin, single drop of dark blood trickles from her nose. Her body settles back in the chair and her eyes look blindly and unblinking at the stage before them. He watches as slowly her eyes cloud and both color and fire are extinguished.