The Freedom in American Songs (4 page)

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Marianne had stopped crying but now needed to blow her nose. Doris Keys gave her a tissue out of her pocket. She said it was slightly used but not too bad, then glanced over to where her handsome husband stood over a petite woman who wore a velvet band in her blonde hair. Marianne blew her nose on Doris's tissue. She saw a red stain on the tissue and hid it under her thumb, aghast that blood must have come out of her nose when she'd been blowing it. She crammed the tissue in her coat pocket. At the same moment, Doris's little girl emerged from the crowd.

“Mommy, can I go up to the top floor of the hotel and look out the window?'

“We have to go talk to Daddy. He's the one to ask about that.”

“But Daddy's busy talking to Mrs. Pettigrew. He said …”

Doris's husband was indeed talking to Mrs. Pettigrew, bending over the velvet hairband while Mrs. Pettigrew laughed into his eyes. Doris Keys took her daughter's hand and excused herself somewhat abruptly, leaving Marianne with Stephanie Munden in her sea-green dress.

“Turn it over,” Stephanie said. “Read the back.”

On the back of her card Stephanie had written in flowing capitals with a fine-tip purple pen,

 

Marianne:

FOR GOD HAS NOT GIVEN ME

THE SPIRIT OF FEAR, BUT OF

LOVE
AND OF
POWER
AND OF

A
SOUND MIND.

1 Timothy

 

“The verse is no longer of much use to me,” Stephanie Munden said, then leaned closer and whispered—“But it's my own fault. I can't do without
sex
. I've tried and I just can't, I'm too weak. But you—take that verse to heart, I promise it'll work. The Lord is real, and all-powerful, and He'll meet you where you have your greatest need. He tried to meet me, He really did, but I couldn't make the sacrifice. I'm weak, and I just love sex way too much …”

Marianne remembered hearing somewhere, maybe in the Anglican crypt, something about the word of god falling onto different kinds of ground, some fertile, others not. How much, she wondered, did Stephanie Munden love sex? Was she a woman whose appetite led her to pursue men on the street and arrange to have sex with them; strange men whom Stephanie did not even know—young, suit-clad workers at the new Toronto Dominion building, innocently carrying vinegar-stained packets along Water Street from the chip wagon on their lunch breaks, until … No, Stephanie had not meant that. Marianne remembered that these people, the Pentecostals, in fact did not or were not supposed to have sex unless they were married. Stephanie was, Marianne realized, a single woman, hardly older than herself … a normal woman, but one who believed she was somehow wrong to crave nakedness, body heat, or the salt lick of a lover's translucent skin, filled with stars.

 

Two nights later Marianne went to see a movie with Lloyd. There was no toilet paper in the cubicle at the cinema washroom. She took a tissue out of her pocket. She uncrumpled it and saw that the red stain was Doris Keys' lipstick. It was a perfect outline of Doris's open mouth, and it showed all the fullness and membranes of her lips like the segment of a juicy orange. It spoke to Marianne.

“Pentecostal women are very careful about keeping their husbands,” it said. And then Marianne flushed it down the toilet, and went back to watch the movie with Lloyd. When it was over he asked if she wanted to drive outside town to see Halley's Comet.

“It's a clear night and you were saying you'd like to see it.”

He drove her down the Southern shore in his cream-coloured Volkswagen and parked at the top of Tors Cove where an old lane with a wooden fence led over a hill and down to Hare's Ears beach. The comet was a blur, hardly illumined, a stain of milk spilled on a black coat and only half sunk in. The fact that it was a blur reminded her it was moving fast, though it appeared as at a standstill. She kept her eyes raised to it as they walked, linking her arm in Lloyd's and relying on him for direction, leaning on him; she did not need to look down at the lane. By the time they got down to the pebbles and the edge of the water, the hill's spruce silhouettes had angled to obscure the comet.

“That walk,” she said, “was a once-in-a-lifetime happening.”

“Was it?'

“Yes.” Didn't he know Halley's Comet came only once about every seventy-five years? Unless they lived to be a hundred …

“Did you enjoy that?”

“I loved it.”

“Would you like to do it again?”

He led her back up the hill, turned around where they'd begun, and together they walked all the way down the hill again, to the water and the stones. Neither spoke. It felt extravagant, as if Lloyd had really caused the comet to make its visitation twice in a lifetime instead of only once, through some miraculous intervention. It delighted her. Only later, as they lay tangled in his bed, did it occur to her to wonder whether Lloyd had bothered to look up at the comet at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part Two

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Freedom in American Songs

 

 

Jennifer had been at Kerry
to get rid of the antique gate in the garage for over twenty years. She was right. He knew she was—it was just that it was a beautiful gate—its sinuous garlands and lilies reminded him of the elfin grot in Keats'
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
—and he'd always imagined he might put it up at the entrance to their nonexistent country place, though he'd known the gate really belonged to something out of the last century, some humongous heap of a place in the rich part of town. It was outrageous, really, the size of it—Jennifer was right. And he had put ads in the paper and online, but he had never in a million years dreamed that who should come to see the gate but …

The visitor shook his hand and said, “Xavier, my name's Xavier Boland,” and Kerry wondered if there could be more than one Xavier Boland, or if he had misheard the name.

Looking his visitor in the face he could not see the features of his old acquaintance, and the visitor made no intimation that he recognized Kerry at all. That was what happened, wasn't it? How many times had people from thirty-five years ago contacted him on Facebook and how many times had their photographs—bald, mature, devoid of life, some of them—how many times had those faces borne no resemblance at all to Josh Gardner's or Roderick Forestall's faces as he had known them in high school? Roderick Forestall and his crowd had not given him the time of day back then. In fact they had made Kerry's life miserable, yet now they were somehow supposed to be his Facebook friends. But this visitor, who wanted to see the antique gate—Kerry had never expected to lay eyes on him again, though hardly a week had gone by in the last three and a half decades when the thought of Xavier Boland had not crossed his mind.

“Keith,” Kerry lied. “My name's Keith.” He did not feel too bad about the untruth, because he had hated his real name from childhood and had he taken the step of officially changing it, Keith would have been one of his first choices.

 

*

 

In 1976 Kerry Fallon had daily wished his mother had not called him Kerry, at least not in Creek Bend. His mother had been innocent: she had been thinking of Irish things, though she was not Irish and had called her other son the normal name of Steve. All Kerry knew was that his name hampered his wish that his grade ten classmates at Dearborn Collegiate High School would stop calling him queer, or a girl. He wished this all the more since he himself suspected he might be at least partly gay. What other explanation could a person have for getting weak in the chest every time Xavier Boland passed by on his way to the only pink locker outside Mr. Stockley's chemistry classroom? How had Xavier got away with it? Xavier had somehow managed to get the painters to leave his locker the old pink shade that had covered all the second-floor lockers prior to the summer of 1975, without Roland Artufi or Kenneth Handler or their friends beating him to a pulp. Maybe you had to be a raging queen for them to leave you alone. Maybe being unsure of what you were was a worse sin in the eyes of the Rolands and Kenneths.

Kerry was sure of some things though. He was sure that he loved, more than anything else in the world, singing harmony. In the Tongues of Flame Pentecostal Assembly everyone knew how to weave in and out of a major chord, and that place felt to him like the home of angels, and he was excited to attend even if his comfort there was tarnished by Pastor Best warning that to be homosexual meant a person was certain to be left behind on the day of the Rapture, and not only that, the person would know a punishment that had no end. But this punishment would wait until Kerry was dead if the Rapture did not come first, and before then, if he were lucky, he would have figured out some way to make peace with god, and with his raging sexual excitement in the proximity of Xavier Boland.

But the Assembly met only three times a week, and only one of those times, Sunday mornings, had an hour given over to choruses, and, he had to admit to himself in all honesty, there were songs he'd far rather sing than
Alive, Alive
or
Let the Anointing Fall on Me.
For his own enjoyment, he had changed some of the words to
I Keep Falling in Love with Him Over and Over Again
so that instead of “Oh what joy between the Lord and I” the chorus spoke of joy with a certain other person, and likewise he altered the words to
I've got a Longing in my Heart for Jesus.
This he did as he walked home from school, making sure no one was close behind, especially not his brother Steve, who specialized in spying on people. But the songs he was really interested in were not these adaptations, nor were they the top ten from CFTO Radio, Your Voice of Reason in the Valley. The songs he loved were songs he had learned from his American cousin Poppy, the summer she had come up from North Carolina to get her illegitimate baby out of her system. The baby had been born by the time Poppy came to stay, born and given away in an adoption process somewhere north of North Carolina but not as north as Creek Bend. He'd been eight and Poppy had to him looked like any normal girl, and he had found it hard to envision her as Clothed in Stain's Disgrace. By the time she arrived at his house, Poppy had forgotten her disgrace enough to begin singing, if she had ever stopped, and she took it for granted that he, Kerry, would be her singing partner on the back steps under his mother's clothesline.

American songs were different. American songs had sunshine in them. They had sunny sides of the street, and riversides, and mockingbirds. They had not only two-part harmony but two-part verses and words, which, overlaid one on another, created a complex lattice that had harmony added to it by-the-way, as if a bird had come to visit and begun singing a third element. There was land in American songs; there were wildwood flowers and bright mornings and sweet little Alice-blue gowns. It was as if everyone in America was getting dressed for a never-ending riverside dance, and sometimes the Americans would sail downriver or fall in love or even murder their lovers and bury them in the reeds, but there was always fresher air than here, and a shining sun, and there were ringlets. Kerry knew in his heart that this was ridiculous and that America was not like that at all, but the songs were joyful and had all these things in them; the songs were a kind of America of their own, and he and Poppy brought it into being with the words and the music and their voices.

“You have a good voice,” Poppy said, and he suspected it was true—maybe the songs made his voice even nicer than it was in church, and this was one of the things that sustained him once Poppy had long gone and he was without a singing partner in the world outside church. It sustained him and he saved a dollar a week out of his lunch money and he bought himself a Panasonic cassette tape player, into which he recorded himself singing the melody lines of all the songs Poppy had taught him. When his mother was at Bible study and his dad at the plant and Steve out playing hockey, he played his own voice back to himself and practised harmony with it. He loved this activity, and the longing he had for a friend with whom to sing did not feel quite so painful.

He began to grow his hair a bit longer and to wonder if Xavier Boland might not be so unapproachable after all. Xavier was only one year older than Kerry, and there were friendships that crossed that boundary between grades ten and eleven: Loretta Howell and Gwen Payne, for instance, or Roderick Forestall who had won two peewee curling trophies and the boys on the grade eleven senior team.

There was something of the beauty of America in the way Xavier Boland's locker stood the colour of a wild rose in the otherwise grey-green corridor, and there was something joyful and carefree, like the freedom in American songs, in the very way Xavier Boland moved: not all crunched up and restricted like everyone else, but with his arms loose and long, and his legs too, so they sort of swayed a bit whenever Xavier was on his way somewhere. Kerry began experimenting to see if he too could let his limbs move free and easy like this. At first he did it on his walks home and in the hallway between his bedroom and the kitchen, and then he sneaked a swaying movement or two into his step in the corridor which passed Xavier's locker.

There is energy between people when they have never spoken but have noticed each other's presence, and between Xavier Boland and Kerry this energy existed, but Kerry could not tell its exact meaning. From himself, he knew, came energy that admired, that longed for even a tiny recognition, that felt scared. Now that he had consciously given his own body echoes of the way he believed Xavier Boland walked and moved, this energy of Kerry's felt more exposed and dangerous. He restrained it, but he could not resist lingering whenever he passed the rose locker in case Xavier should come to retrieve his chemistry book or his scientific calculator. And one Thursday Xavier did come—Kerry was on his way to Most Hated of Classes, gym class, when Xavier Boland, alone in the corridor because the bell had rung and they were both late, clicked his combination lock off and reached for a binder off his top shelf.

Kerry suddenly needed to see if Xavier Boland had anything decorating his locker. He might have a music poster, and wouldn't it be amazing if Kerry could know what kind of music Xavier Boland loved the most. He slowed down and looked. Incredibly, there was that sepia Jesus peering soulfully, the one everyone knows even if they are Pentecostal and not given to images of Jesus as much as to flames and doves and bare crosses with light coming off them to show how Jesus is not here any more but has risen to become the firstfruits of all creation. But the Jesus in Xavier's locker had not yet been on the cross. He was praying to his father, his hair long and goldy-brown. He was wearing a pink robe and around him hung ruby-red glass beads, a rosary. Xavier Boland, Kerry realized, was either being sarcastic in his locker decor, or he was a practising Roman Catholic. The only thing Kerry knew about Catholics was that they could get away with anything. They could sin to their hearts' content and then go confess it to the intermediary, the priest. Pentecostals had no intermediary but the Holy Spirit who did not, Kerry's mother said, oppress and terrify the people like Catholic priests did. But still, Kerry knew, before becoming terrified the Catholics could do what they wanted. They could have babies as his cousin Poppy had done and they could parade those babies around in their own homes and even in their church, and all would be forgiven. Even, Kerry felt this flash through him, kissing another boy, loving another boy, instead of a girl … if you were Catholic …

“Are you having a good look?” It was the first time Xavier Boland had spoken to Kerry. His tone was not unkind.

“I was just …”

 

*

 

Xavier Boland lived with his grandmother. She had stucco ceilings with sparkles in them, and her bathroom had a matching pink shag rug and toilet cover and she kept the toilet paper inside a doll with a crocheted skirt. She had a cat and a miniature Hammond organ and over the organ hung her own picture of Jesus holding in his hand his own heart which looked something like a cupcake with wings or flames and a cross sticking out of it. But instead of terror or any other bad feeling connected with priests or churches of any kind including his own, Kerry felt in Xavier's grandmother's house a feeling of the greatest comfort he had ever known. He supposed it was a feeling he had heard and read about but not felt—a feeling of unconditional love. This became more apparent as Kerry observed more and more of Xavier's and his grandmother's life together. Had Kerry's parents caught Kerry with some of the clothes Xavier stored openly in his bedroom, for instance, they would have … what would they have done? Would his father have taken him down to the basement and given him the belt as he had done when Kerry had stolen a
Bounty
bar from Tammy's Convenience when he was eight? Or would they have telephoned Pastor Best and had him come over or sent one of his Youth Leaders over to lay hands on Kerry and cast out demons like they had done to Mildred Stevenson the time Mrs. Tilford and her Ladies' Spirit Association decided that Mildred had the spirit of witchcraft in her? Or would his mother have hidden the clothes from his father—might she have destroyed them and made Kerry promise never to bring home anything like that again or his father would … what would his father do? Perhaps living with your grandmother made new things possible. Kerry surveyed the white bell-bottoms and the other clothes and even purses that Xavier displayed openly in his room, slung over the chair-back and hanging out of the drawers. Laid out on the bed was a makeup case with mascara and eye pencils in it.

“Call me Kay,” Mrs. Boland said, but Kerry couldn't even though she did look like a Kay and she said, “I can't stand being called Mrs. this and Madam that.” His own mother made home-cooked meals but they were dry pieces separate from each other on the plate, whereas everything Mrs. Boland cooked was smothered in gravy, or if it was dessert, in warm custard or cream or chocolate sauce. Sometimes she made fried chicken and she didn't put gravy on that but the batter was twice as thick as the batter on any fried chicken Kerry had ever tasted, and Mrs. Boland did not formally invite him to supper, she just put an extra plate out as if Kerry belonged to the family. There was no accusation of any kind in the air, unlike the atmosphere at his own house, and he kept fearing that his mother would put a stop to his visits to the Bolands, but she never did. It almost made him wonder if his mother was glad to have him out of the house. The only person at home who said anything about his new friendship was Steve, who warned if Kerry brought that fag home here even for five minutes, Steve would personally rip both their fucken balls off—“and don't think I'm not watching you and that little fucker's whereabouts.”