The Night Singers Page 2

  “Both. More downhill. I love the exhilaration of the slopes. On July days like this, I dream of being in Chile or New Zealand, where it’s cold and snowy now.”

  We have arrived at the Ford Falcon. Father Jameson owns the silver Honda hatchback three cars away.

  We stand awkwardly, silently. Patrick pulls a bent white envelope from his pocket. “Thank you, Father.”

  “Take care.” Once again he is an ageless cleric. “God bless you. Be kind to yourselves.”

  “Happy skiing,” Patrick smiles.

  The traffic is heavier now. Patrick strains to follow the local automotive choreography. I think about the fact that neither of us has remembered to bring flowers. That we haven’t talked about the way Dad died, alone in the hospital, refusing to let any of us know he was sick. We are an accidental family, each of us surviving the accident with different scars. My eyes fill and, fearful of this grief, I grow angry. How foolish to wait all these years for people to come home. I am lucky Patrick and I are still talking, still fond of each other even if we don’t know religious affiliations and clothing preferences.

  There is something between us. A kind of grace.

  “So what time is your flight?”

  We are almost at the motel. I compose my voice. “Eight a.m. There was nothing before tomorrow.”

  “Wish we could have dinner.” Patrick pulls over to the curb. “But I told Cynthia I’d be back tonight. I’ll just about make it, leaving now.” He regards the traffic dubiously.

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “I’ve got a lot of reading to do. I guess I didn’t tell you I’m taking a course this summer. Astronomy.”

  “That’s nice.” He is distracted, clearly anxious to get on the road.

  “I’d like to help with the priest’s gift. How much did you give him?”

  “No, that’s all right. It was my idea. You don’t even go to church.”

  “Neither do you. Come on.” I pull out my cheque book.

  “OK. I guess. I gave him $100.”

  I write a cheque. “Thanks for doing all this.”

  “Sure,” he shrugs. “I’m not clear it’s what he would have liked. He was always so hard to figure out, you know?”

  “I know.” I hesitate, not wanting to crowd him. “But I’m glad we did it. I’m glad to see you.”

  “Yeah.” He is caught between pleasure and embarrassment.

  “Next time you’re out West, save some time to visit me in Idaho. “It’s a beautiful state.”

  “Great skiing,” I offer.

  Laughing, we both grow looser.

  He kisses my cheek.

  “Next time,” I say.

  Appoggiatura

  From time to time during his open studio, Paul noticed her sitting in the wooden rocker; a small woman, late fifties, greying, attractive. Then someone would ask a question about his music. Or congratulate him on the concert, one of two he would have performed here at the Chester Resident Composers’ Festival this spring.

  “Yes, yes, I often use percussion,” Paul answered the tall, thin man who had introduced himself as Thaddeus, “the music director” of a local elementary school.

  Gay. Paul could tell the teacher also thought he was gay—by the way Thaddeus touched his arm and gazed into his eyes. Paul got this often because of his trim build, fine features, curly black hair. When they were kids, his sister used to say he had a very beautiful face, kept saying it, even after a hard punch in her twelve-year-old stomach. He wasn’t gay. Not even bi or latent. He loved women. Found them fascinating, arousing. The idea of women, anyway. And this last relationship with Muriel had continued over a year. They were talking of moving in together. He still wasn’t sure why he broke it off.

  “I admired the vibraphone in your second piece,” the teacher was saying.

  Paul smiled, “Thanks.”

  A young, blond family entered his Open Studio.

  “Welcome, I’m Paul Timmins, a composer, and you’ll see examples of my work in sheet music over by the piano. Let me know if you have any questions.” He and the other resident composers were holding “office hours” all day. Some composers were playing CDs of their work, but Paul agreed with Copland that background music was blasphemous, like melodic wallpaper.

  The kids followed their parents to the Steinway.

  “Thanks,” called the father. “I’m sure we will.”

  These Vermonters were full of questions. Doctors. Cab drivers. Lawyers. Teachers. Waiters. It seemed as if the state bred inquisitive, music-loving people. So different from South Dakota where he’d been teaching at Clarksdale College for fifteen years. Where his notes seemed to vanish into prairie winds.

  An Asian couple walked in. “Is this the composer’s studio?” asked the tall woman.

  “Yes, welcome. I’m Paul Timmins.”

  “Great concert last night,” declared the man, extending his palm.

  They shook hands.

  “You’re generous to say so,” said Paul.

  The schoolteacher cleared his throat. “I should make room for your other fans,” he placed a brotherly hand on Paul’s shoulder. “But, hey, you’re in residence on the Festival Grounds for six weeks. Maybe we could have a drink sometime.” He offered Paul a card in the shape of a harp. “Thaddeus Wilson, Maestro.”

  Paul nodded. “Thanks.” He didn’t want to offend the guy or lead him on.

  “The card design wasn’t my idea. One of my friends made it, an art teacher. I can’t decide if it’s too kitschy, you know?”

  “Nice card,” asserted Paul. His eyes were drawn to the sad woman in the rocker, who had struck up a conversation with the young family.

  “See you around,” Thaddeus said reluctantly.

  “Yes, see you!” Paul aimed for a low-key geniality.

  He heard a long sigh run through the guy’s diaphragm. Well, other people’s fantasies weren’t his responsibility. That’s what his outrageous diva friend Marco had advised. Paul reminded himself he was a stranger in this little town and he’d be passing through in six weeks.

  Last fall, he’d been perplexed, yet thrilled, by an out-of-the-blue invitation to the prestigious Chester Composers’ Festival in Southern Vermont. The artistic director admired three of his CDs. Simple as that. Paul’s life was not simple, had never been simple, so he actually thought they were phoning the wrong Paul Timmins.

  Born in New York, raised across the Hudson in urban New Jersey, he took the unlikely major of music at a nearby state college and then—what was even more improbable—he won a full graduate fellowship to Northwestern. Since then, he’d belonged to the plains and the prairies. The Chester Festival Residency was his first extended visit to the East Coast in 20 years.

  Long ago, his father, a devoted, but practical man, asked, “They pay you a wage to write music? Music without words?” Mr Timmins was proud of his college-educated children who would not follow him into the ranks of night cleaners. He hadn’t asked such questions of Paul’s sister, the lawyer, or their accountant brother.

  “Absolutely, Dad,” he said with the unsure sure-ness of youth. “They’ll be performing my work at Carnegie Hall in no time.”

  The small, fit man shrugged and smiled, “OK, I’ll by a fancy new tie to wear on opening night.”

  Opening night! Maybe he thought Paul would write Broadway musicals. But who was he to tell his Manhattan bred father that West 57th Street was a world apart from the theatre district?

  As yet, Dad hadn’t had the occasion for a fancy tie because Paul’s muse drew him to “new music” played in alternative venues, especially on the West Coast. And he was grateful to find a job—even if it took him to South Dakota and a small, formerly Lutheran school which prided itself on intense student-teacher collaboration and lots of “community building” via campus social events. The dean who hired him for his classy degree expected Paul to write music in his “spare time.”

  When he left Clarksdale this year at the end of finals’ week, the snow was still
four inches thick in his back yard. Arriving in his pretty colonial town, he found the air was crisp, the lilac and crab apple were budding.

  He should have called Muriel to say good-bye. He still valued her friendship. She and Marco were the only people he could hang with in Clarksdale. Odd that they were both nurses at County Hospital. How could Muriel be so content in South Dakota? Clearly, they weren’t meant to be partners.

  Now an elderly man hobbled in—tall, gaunt, hawk nosed, the sort of guy who’d be called Zeke or Booth or Nathaniel on a TV docudrama about New England history.

  “You’re the fellow!” He actually shook his brass-tipped cane.

  Paul didn’t know whether to cower or grin.

  “My mother taught piano in this village for forty years. I still go to sleep hearing the scales.” He was leaning heavily on the cane now. “She would have hated your concert, would have had run you out of town by Uncle Clement, the magistrate, for musical obscenity!”

  Paul’s blue eyes widened. People in South Dakota didn’t have such strong feelings about music. Perhaps Lutherans were just too nice to criticise.

  The other studio visitors fell silent.

  The woman in the rocker leaned forward.

  “But I came to tell you that atonal sonata was one of the most interesting things I’ve ever heard. Music with ideas!”

  Paul grinned, tilted back against his oak desk and realised just how tired he felt. Stimulated but exhausted. The post-concert party had gone on for hours last night. Then he’d had to open the studio at 10am. All day, he’d hosted a continual stream of the curious, the confused, the complimentary and the curmudgeonly.

  “If I’d known this kind of thing were on the horizon, I’d have continued practicing those scales.”

  “What did you do instead?” Paul inquired.

  “Law School. Now I’m the magistrate.”

  Paul chuckled. “Well my parents would have approved of you.”

  “Too late to trade,” the man winked and waved his cane in farewell.

  The others laughed politely and then, as if they were all suddenly aware of the 4 o’clock hour, they each thanked Paul and said good-bye.

  He leaned on the doorway of his screened-in porch looking down toward the river. Paul loved watching the water, listening to its rumbling currents. Two large blue jays hopped along the branches of a huge hawthorn. The sun had ducked beneath the crown of this giant, its light softly filtered through lacey young needles.

  She released a sigh.

  Startled, Paul clutched a hand to his chest and pivoted.

  “I should be going,” murmured the woman in his rocking chair. “I had a question.” She looked up at the pine ceiling beams. “But you must be tired. I should be going.”

  Yes, he wished she would go. He hadn’t been alone for three days and he’d looked forward to evening light descending through the trees. Yet there was something compelling about this fragile woman in her smart black pants suit and red scarf. She was younger than Mom, older than he. Maybe halfway in between.

  “No, stay.” He found himself perched on the piano bench near “her” chair, bending forward. Waiting. “What’s your question?”

  “Do you ever write about grief?”

  He blinked. Reynolds had advised him that if any visitors got truly weird, to excuse himself and make a phone call. But that’s not what was going on here, he understood.

  Paul knew enough to ask, “Have you lost someone recently?”

  She shrugged, sniffing back tears. “Sorry, I haven’t even introduced myself. I’m Eleanor, Eleanor Dunham. My husband passed away last summer. We’ve been together thirty-seven years, you see. And I’ve read every book on grief and mourning—advice manuals, poetry anthologies, novels. Nothing mends the lesions in my heart.” She glanced away, then sat straighter. “So I thought music. Maybe music because Verlyn was a devotee, you see. Oh, I went along with him to the Festival each year, but he knew the instruments, the forms. I just listened and caught the occasional sound—bird song here, a waterfall there. But on a simple level. This was my first festival without Verlyn, yet I had to come.”

  He nodded, baffled about how to respond.

  “And I guess I visited your studio today because … oh, I know you’re meant to visit each studio and thank each composer. But your concert was the only one so far that touched me. And it all sounds so crazy now.” She put her delicate left hand to her pale lips. The diamond was small, elegantly set against the thin, gold wedding band.

  “I’ve seen crazy,” Paul shook his head. “Believe me, that’s not you.” He had no clue about the source of this kindness. He was not a kind or an unkind man.

  “So,” she sat straighter, a woman practiced in good posture. “I needed to ask you that.”

  “Ask me what?” Paul said. He really was tired. His lower back ached from standing and his brain was fried from conversing with strange visitors all day. In contrast, this woman seemed someone quite familiar.

  “Do you ever write about grief?” She spoke slowly, fiercely.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he muttered, humiliated by his insensitive forgetfulness. “I mean not consciously. But I’m not at my sharpest right now.”

  “See, I knew I was imposing.” Eleanor stood, folding the strap of her purse over one arm and offering the other hand in adieu.

  He took the hand and swung it gently. “If I promise to be more alert tomorrow, would you meet me for afternoon coffee?”

  “Oh, I don’t want to usurp your time,” she furrowed her pale brows. “You’re here to write music.”

  “I can’t write a note after 4 or 4.30.” He hadn’t meant it to sound like that—as if she were the filler in his day. See, he really was not a kind man. Muriel had told him that. “Indifferent,” she had complained. “So bloody indifferent.”

  Eleanor smiled. “There’s a nice little place, The Wisteria Street Cafe, next to the bookshop. I’d love to join you. Shall we say 5pm, so you don’t feel rushed?”

  “Five, yes, five,” he grinned. “I look forward to that!”

  He watched her walk along the dirt road to the Festival entrance. She had the gait of an actor, maybe a yoga teacher.

  Paul cleared his scores off the little studio bed, ready for a nap. Instead, he found himself at the piano, sketching out new ideas which came from somewhere.

  Overnight, the weather turned warmer. He could almost see the tiny light green leaves sucking up chlorophyll, growing larger, darker. At first it was hard to stay inside, but he reminded himself, he never had uninterrupted work time, not even in the summer.

  Inevitably Dean Wyckoff would call for a meeting or a retreat or, well, last summer it was that deadly pedagogy seminar led by Wyckoff’s tedious grad school buddy from Oklahoma. What a waste of time. And a strain on his hard-won equanimity. It had been then, actually, that troubles with Miriam began.

  Paul had said he needed time to compose, time to sit alone and watch the sun striping shadows on the grass through the front porch slats. He needed an escape from school and Muriel thought he was trying to escape her.

  “Compose,” she’d said, “who’s stopping you? But quit complaining.”

  She liked nursing. She liked South Dakota. Maybe he was jealous of such satisfaction.

  He feared losing his edge.

  So strong was his craving for solitude, maybe he was trying to escape her.

  This spring, he’d been able to say to Wyckoff, “Ciao, remember I have a Chester Fellowship.” Instead of being offended, the dean wrote a paragraph in the alumni newsletter about this distinguished honour bestowed on one of Clarkdale’s most accomplished professors. Accomplished, Paul laughed with Marco over a beer the night before he left town. Wyckoff once asked him why he never wrote melodies you wanted to hum!

  So he reminded himself, as he sat down at the piano this morning, he’d best make use of this residency. He worked through mid-day and he was fixing a late tuna sandwich in the little kitchenette—these studios wer
e ingeniously built, larger than ships’ cabins, but just as efficient—when he remembered the woman. Eleanor. Yes, Eleanor Dunham. It was three now. The walk to town was half-an-hour. That left only ninety minutes for work. Damn. Why had he suggested this? Paul gulped down the sandwich, yet never did retrieve his thread for the rest of the afternoon. He could pretend he had forgotten. Paul thought about her hands. And her question. He might not be a kind man, but he wasn’t cruel. He had invited her to coffee.

  Of course Paul was late leaving his studio, so he strode briskly downhill toward the picturesque village. Chester’s side streets and alleys felt so charming after years exiled to shopping at the half-abandoned strip malls of Clarksdale. During his cloistered absence, the outside world had ripened. Pale hearts of lilacs had burst from dark buds, their syrupy scent mingling in the warm air with fragrances of petunias, late narcissus and lilies. In town, he passed the large white tent with its meringue-like peaks where his first concert had been performed and where he would have another concert during the final Festival week. First and last weeks—good slots. Maybe someone would notice the work, someone from a better school, from a bigger recording label, from the MacArthur Foundation. Old Wyckoff would write two paragraphs in the newsletter if he won a MacArthur.

  The wood and brick Unitarian Church stood out handsomely on a central corner—so much more distinguished than Clarksdale’s little Lutheran and Catholic and Pentecostal chapels. He passed the stationery store and was tempted to stop, recalling their excellent score sheets and the seductive smell of pencils. No, he checked his watch. It was 5pm already; in his rush he almost zipped by Wisteria Street.

  Eleanor sat outside the coffee shop, in dappled light, reading a book and sipping from an overgrown tea cup. She looked so different from the formal matron he’d met the previous day. Her posture was still erect but she seemed less brittle in her jade blouse and flowered voile skirt. “Voile.” He’d learned the term from Muriel. Muriel loved the diaphanous feel of voile. He had loved the feel of Muriel and was momentarily engulfed with bewilderment about their break-up.

  “Hi.” She waved.