The Freedom in American Songs (5 page)

“I'm not gay,” Xavier volunteered to Kerry, who had not asked. “I just like girls' clothes. My grandmother knows. She even buys them for me. And I know better than to wear any of this outside.” What seemed outrageous in school—the pink locker, the way Xavier walked, the length of his bangs—seemed normal here in his own house. Even the sequined mask with a feather pluming up from one eye, hung by a bit of elastic over the corner of Xavier's mirror, did not seem out of place.

 

The singing started as they lay on their backs on Xavier's bed, Kerry's forearm burning from its proximity with Xavier's body but not touching, not ever admitting he would like to touch. There was something about Xavier, now that they had become close friends, that prohibited it. Xavier was exactly like a girl, Kerry realized, only he was a boy. He was like a girl inside a boy's body, and he did not seem to want physical intimacy. Xavier asked the craziest things. He wanted to know if Kerry ever thought about the fact that the moon was moving and so was the sun and all the planets and really, the way days and weeks and years and time happened wasn't like a line of numbers, it wasn't really time at all, it was just things moving around in space and making shadows on each other. Or he wanted to talk about why clothing manufacturers did not make pockets inside your jeans, which would make the jeans smoother and nicer and the pockets wouldn't show under a long shirt and you could keep money a lot safer since no pickpockets could reach it. He talked about how the continents on the world map obviously fitted together like jigsaw puzzle pieces and how come no one ever told them about why that was in geography class, and he knew a lot about fish and aquariums and coral reefs of the world. He liked talking about ideas and Kerry got caught up in it because he would have done anything to lie on that bed close to Xavier, but talking about all Xavier's topics was pretty interesting too. And one day when he felt brave enough he asked Xavier if he liked singing. He was afraid to ask it in case Xavier did not like it, and it might have changed the way Kerry felt about him. He could not admit that he had fallen in love with Xavier, but he was not ready to fall out of love with him either.

“It's okay,” Xavier said.

“I love it.”

“I know you do. You never shut up singing.”

“I don't?”

Xavier laughed. “You don't know you're doing it?”

“Am I doing it loud?”

“No one can pick out the words. You're always mumbling-singing like water in the culvert out back.”

“Oh.” Kerry was embarrassed.

“Why did you want to know?”

“What?”

“If I like singing.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“Come on. Why?”

“I like singing … harmonies. I just wondered if you—but you wouldn't.”

“I wouldn't what?”

“Sing the melodies. The easy part. You probably wouldn't want to.” Kerry was dying to sing duets with a voice not his own tape-recorded voice.

“Are there any easy ones?”

“There's
Down By the Riverside
.” They started with that, and by the end of a week Kerry had taught Xavier every song his cousin Poppy had taught him.

“I have to stick a finger in the ear closest to you,” Xavier said, “or I'll lose it.”

“But then you're too loud.”

When they came out for some ham and gravy and mashed potatoes after one particularly successful song session, Mrs. Boland said, “My, that sounded lovely.” She had put maraschino cherries on the ham and she had placed the little jar with a few cherries left inside on the table with a tiny spoon in it.

“Did it?” Mrs. Boland was the very first audience Kerry had ever known. He was bursting with pride though he saw Mrs. Boland's comment meant nothing to Xavier, who poured a stream of gravy over his potatoes and started shovelling into them.

“Oh my, yes. I haven't heard anything like that since my husband was alive, when we were young. How do you know all those old songs?”

“Are they old?”

“My dear, they are ancient.” And then she started singing a song from memory.

When I grow too old to dream

I'll have you to remember.

When I grow too old to dream

Your love will live in my heart …

She had what they called a voice like a bird, although Kerry knew it was not really like a bird's—it was the voice of a human whose heart was kind. “That song,” she said, “was written by Oscar Hammerstein when I was twenty-two.”

“Can you teach it to us?”

“I'll play it for you on my organ,” she said, and after supper she pulled out her stool and played and sang the song over and over again with Kerry joining in until he had learned it. “I've got some more sheet music in my trunk,” she got up, “all Rogers and Hammerstein, and some of the old musicals from Broadway, I used to play them all on my organ.” Kerry followed her down the hall and there by her bed that had big cushions all over it she opened a box and took out all kinds of music. Some of it bore pictures or cartoons and Mrs. Boland told Kerry and Xavier they could lie on her cushions with the cat and see if they could sing any of the songs while she made them cocoa. “You'll know some of those songs,” she said. “See that one?” She sang
I'm Gonna Wash that Man Right Outta My Hair
… “You've heard it, I know you have. Everyone's heard that.” Mrs. Boland made the cocoa and they drank it on her cushions and she asked them to sing some of their old songs to her and they did, and she fell fast asleep. There was one little lamp on and the cat was asleep too, and soon they were all sleeping in those lovely cushions that smelled of Mrs. Boland's lavender soap.

Long past midnight, just before dawn, Kerry awoke. Someone had turned off the little lamp but he could see the cat, Mrs. Boland, and Xavier, still asleep, in the bit of streetlamp light spilling through the half-open curtains. His first thought was that his mother and father would be angry that he had not come home, but his second thought was more of a sensation than a thought—he realized his body and Xavier's had moved against one another and he had his face against Xavier's chest, and his arm was resting on Xavier's belly and thigh. He reached up with his mouth and barely touched it to the skin of Xavier's face, and at that moment he saw that his friend too was awake. The electric touch of forearm and belly, mouth and face, tantalized them, magnetic and feather-tentative, until Xavier reached Kerry's face and pulled it up to his and kissed him long and hard, his grandmother sleeping on the other side of the cushions. Xavier had always been the braver one, Kerry realized. Xavier the older, Xavier the taller, Xavier the bolder. They took their clothes off furtively and Kerry felt astonished that another human's body felt so hot, like a furnace. It was the most ecstatic event of his life, and the most terrifying. They gave each other the tenderest lovemaking in the world, and it was the first time Kerry had felt anything this exquisite, and he did not care whatever it meant he was. They fell asleep again but it was only five
am
when there was a loud knock on the door, then a pounding, and shouting voices.

Mrs. Boland woke, alarmed, and put her dressing gown over her clothes, and let Kerry's father and his brother Steve come in, and two other men who told Mrs. Boland as kindly as they could that she would have to come in to the station on Amherst Road and answer some questions about having a neighbour boy, who was a minor, in her bed, and about sexual practices that had been going on in that bed, practices which Kerry's brother Steve had witnessed through the window and reported to his parents.

 

After that night it was as if someone had taken Xavier Boland and his grandmother and their house and put them under glass, so that they were no longer part of Creek Bend but more like a forbidden diorama of which no one spoke. Because he was considered a victim, Kerry escaped judgment. He had been lured and had not understood what he was getting into. He was from a good, Bible-believing family for whom many prayers were being waged, as in a war. This was a troublesome blot, an unfortunate disaster, but shame would not spread beyond the doorstep of the Boland house. The Bolands would close their shutters. Mrs. Boland would be placed under probation for three months and her grandson would finish high school in a foster home in another town. The Bolands faded away, though Kerry never forgot Xavier Boland, and now, thirty-seven years later …

 

*

 

Kerry tried to go through the motions of showing his visitor the grand old gates that stood behind a bedstead, some plywood and a collection of shovels. Infernally he felt the second verse of Oscar Hammerstein's
When I Grow Too Old to Dream
running through his head: he just could hear Mrs. Boland singing it at her portable Hammond organ:

 

So kiss me, my sweet

and so let us part

and when I grow too old to dream,

that kiss will live in my heart.

 

“It's a lovely old gate, for sure,” the grown up Xavier Boland said.

“What were you planning on doing with it?”

“I have a client who can use it.”

“A client?”

“I find things for people. Big decor projects. Grounds. Windows. Plaster moldings. Gnomes. Statues of horses. You never know what people are going to want. But this gate … I have a client who's been looking for this kind of gate for a year. How much do you want for it?”

“I don't know how much to ask, to tell you the truth.”

“Well my client is going to pay fifteen hundred dollars for that gate. My mark-up is one hundred percent plus the labour of installing it. So how does five hundred sound?”

“Five hundred is exactly what my wife said I'd get for this gate.”

“Is your wife always that accurate? Maybe you should send her over to my office. It's hard to find people who are realistic about the price of antiques.”

“She's a realistic woman.” Kerry thought of all the times Jennifer had been right and he had been wrong about things. About all kinds of things. About money, about the children, about expiry dates on food. He wondered what she might have to say about his story of Xavier Boland, were he ever to breathe a word of it to her.

“Well, Keith,” Xavier gave him the money in cash, “I'll bring my truck around from the cul-de-sac and load this up, if you wouldn't mind shifting those few things out of the way while I get Nick and Trevor.” He went out and came back ten minutes later with the men, and the gates floated majestically out into the sunlight.

It was only after Xavier had followed them out that Kerry caught himself humming the end of the song that had been playing in his head. He caught himself doing that sometimes, and usually it didn't matter. Usually there was no one around, or the people who were around were used to him doing it. He caught himself humming the end and that made him wonder if he had also, today, in the presence of Xavier Boland, hummed Oscar Hammerstein's song all the way through from its beginning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of the Fountain

 

 

He had a broken tooth
and most of his body was stationary, but the feet moved in a special way that I understood. I did not look at him overtly but three men, not a broken tooth among them, they had a good look and I was afraid they'd laugh. We sat near the angel statue under the miniature crabapple trees. It was spring and everyone in Montreal had unfolded. How receptive and joyous we felt about the sun. We gave our bare arms to it for the first time that year. The man with the broken tooth did not appear to be thinking about the warmth on his skin. He was thinking about the accuracy of his feet. He wore headphones and his face was rigid with concentration. It did not seem possible that he should be doing advanced flamenco, not with his too-big sweatpants and, I think, a woman's oversized sweatshirt, and filthy sneakers. But advanced flamenco it was: I recognized the steps because I had recently given up on flamenco classes myself, having had a merciless instructor. I was sad about it. I'd had high hopes.

“What kind of dancing is that?” asked one of the three men, slim, young and smart. He had a careful five-o'clock shadow. He did not sound mocking and I was relieved. I couldn't have borne it if the smart man had made fun of the dancer.

“Yeah, man … it looks like some kind of ballroom thing, is it?” said the second one. He too seemed genuine. Maybe they were just nice men. Maybe I was used to toothless, shabbily dressed people being mocked, but maybe they weren't mocked all the time. The dancing man knew they were talking to him but couldn't hear what they were saying because of his music.

He peeled the headphones off. “Pardon?”

Pardon
… He said it so formally.

“You doing some serious footwork there, brother? Some kind of European dance step … me, I'm into rap.”

“Yes, it's …” and he told them what I already knew.

“Flamenco? That is serious shit, man. More power to you!”

The men watched him for awhile then left, and it was harder for me to observe him unnoticed, but I couldn't help it. He was methodical about his steps. They were correct, but halting. He did not care one little bit what he looked like. If I could have had his attitude while taking my flamenco class I might have made better progress. As it was, I had allowed the teacher to deflate me. One day I came to class wearing a comb that had silk roses attached. I'd bought the comb from a little vintage shop on Avenue Mont-Royal. I wore black and red lace, too. The other students were young, and practised in their street clothes, though of course we all wore proper flamenco shoes studded with nails. The teacher, Juliana de la Fuente, did not wear street clothes. She wore astounding tiered, asymmetrical flamenco costumes, and a different pair of shoes each week: blue, scarlet, silver and gold, with Cuban heels and every other sort of dancing heel. She was a real show-off, is what she was, and when I came in wearing my comb decorated with roses she laughed at it. True, a couple of roses dangled—I meant to stitch them back in place when I found some red or gold thread. She singled me out and mimicked my position—made her arms ungainly and ridiculous—and said I looked
stupid
. I was a bit taken aback—I wouldn't have thought any teacher would do that to a student. Then I wondered if maybe it was because English is her second language. Maybe she didn't really mean stupid—maybe she meant just that my stance lacked a certain amount of grace, or … never mind. There's no excuse for what she said. It hurt, and I did not go back.

The man with the broken tooth picked his plastic bag off the ground and began to walk away. There was something so humble about him, and about the way he had danced, that I drummed up courage to talk to him. He made me remember what I had wanted out of flamenco in the first place. It had a grandeur to it, a ferocity. An elegance. You could be an old woman and do flamenco. I had seen it. You could be ancient and still do it. It wasn't only for nubile young women. In fact, the older you became, the more you could imbue flamenco with the gravity of your experience. And those nails hitting the floor—they smacked it like horses' hooves, like castanets. The sound was arresting and declarative. You weren't pussyfooting around.

“Excuse me … would you mind if I asked you … I noticed …”

He turned to me politely. He and I were, I surmised, around the same age. We each had a few silver hairs. “Yes?”

“Well I was watching your dancing—I know it's flamenco because I started a beginner's course not far from here, and I … well I wasn't very good at it, and to tell you the truth, the teacher was a bit, well, she was a bit cruel, really … I sort of lost confidence and I was wondering …”

“Was it Juliana?” The broken tooth made him lisp a bit. He was soft around the edges, about twenty pounds overweight. There had been no men in the class I'd taken, no men in any of the classes in that building; not in the corridors nor the stairwells. “It must have been Juliana.”

“Juliana de la Fuente. How did you know?”

He had a gentle voice. His hair flew up a bit at the sides. He stood in front of me holding the plastic bag rolled up at the top. It bore a green dollar-store logo. “Believe me,” he said, “you shouldn't take anything Juliana says to heart.” He looked past the angel and toward the street where the dance school was, between the subway station and a discount jewellery shop. “Did you notice she has a lot of students in her classes? And none of them has taken her class before. She goes through hundreds of students but not very many of them come back to her. That's where I went, at first, but I didn't stay.”

“But now you can dance. I was watching. You dance beautifully.”

“Thank you. My mother was a dance teacher in Edinburgh. I learned a lot from her. She's eighty-nine now. My name's Ben, by the way.”

I told him I had bought a pair of real shoes with the nails, and he said he couldn't afford real ones but had bought a pair of men's Italian shoes with hard soles that clattered.

“I got them for two dollars at the nuns' Thursday bazaar.”

I felt bad for having said I possessed real flamenco shoes.

“I find,” he said, “you can make do with a lot of improvised things. For instance, a real flamenco hat, for men, is a very expensive black, Spanish hat. It's specialized, and it will be a long time before I can afford one. But today I found a substitute at the dollar-store.” He raised the plastic bag. “Would you like to see it?”

“I'd like to see you put it on.”

He took out a black straw hat with straight sides and a wide brim and modelled it for me. It transformed him.

“Wow. That's great.”

“I'm very pleased. I have to be careful about my spending. Have you ever seen people on the street selling the magazine
L'Itinéraire
?

“I think so … isn't it a journal of news about street people?”

“Yes. You should, if you have any change at all when these sellers ask you to buy a copy … you should, I don't mean to tell you what to do, but the magazine genuinely helps them to … it helps them transition from being homeless, to having a home. Myself, for instance, I just three months ago, after being homeless for years, got my own apartment because of my job selling the magazine. The next thing I'm saving up for is some plants. I want to grow some plants in pots—I have a little balcony in the back. I'd like to grow edible plants. Lettuces and carrots.”

He spoke, I thought, eloquently for a homeless person. He hadn't shaved in a few days but he had that eighty-nine-year-old mother who'd taught him to dance, and he had a desire to grow his own vegetables in pots …

“You don't seem,” I ventured, “like a person who has always been homeless, or who has been homeless for most of your life …”

“No,” he said. “I had a home. A lot of us had homes. A lot of people who sell the magazine had everything. But something happened that made us lose it all.”

He was vague. He implied some sort of story that involved the kinds of things that might make you judge or despise a person. He had done something that had caused other people pain, maybe something worse than pain. It was in the past and there was thick fog between then and now and he didn't want to think about it, though of course it was always there. I put it out of my mind as soon as he said it and focused instead on the Spanish hat and the idea of him tending seedlings in terra cotta pots in the sun on a balcony. This city had balconies for everyone, not just the lucky few. That was one of the reasons I lived here and not in a more utilitarian town.

“The thing I wanted to ask you,” I said, “is if you might know another teacher, not Juliana de la Fuente …”

“It means
of the fountain
.”

“What?”

“Her name. You wouldn't think someone with a name as lovely as that would be so uncaring. Fountains are generous … always bestowing.”

“Where did you live, before …” It was hard for me to imagine a person who knew the Spanish word for fountain living on the street … a person who used the word
bestowing
.

“Before I got my new apartment? … There are shelters. You get to know where to go. There's the Old Brewery Mission. A lot of men are there quite long-term.”

“So, you know another teacher?”

“I have a friend,” he took a bashed cellphone out of his pocket and fiddled around to look up a number. “I can call her now and ask her if she minds my giving you her number. She's the real thing. A good flamenco dancer and a caring teacher. I go to church with her and her little girl and she doesn't charge me for lessons.” He punched in her number. “Leni? …” He turned away and I heard him say, “… a woman in the park … wondering if … ” When he was finished he wrote Leni's number on the back of his dollar-store sales slip and gave it to me.

After that it was a long time before I saw Ben, and when I did he was selling
L'Itin
é
raire
in front of the liquor store at the outdoor fruit market. I had taken his advice and bought many copies from other sellers by then: a new issue came out every couple of weeks. Sometimes I bought the same issue several times, from different vendors. I bought one from him now and was not sure he remembered me. I had not called his friend Leni or taken any more flamenco classes.

“Ben,” I decided to remind him. Normally I'm happy when people forget they know me. I like to go around the fruit market without meeting people to whom I feel obliged to talk, but Ben was reserved, not ebullient. There was no danger he'd try to get too close. “We met in the park and you were practising flamenco. You might not remember …”

“Right,” he said. I still wasn't sure if he had any recollection.

“You gave me Leni's number … I haven't called her yet …”

He brightened. “I'm doing a show with Leni next Thursday night.”

“You'll be dancing?”

“Yes. It's just a small part.”

“Is it open to the public?”

“Of course.”

“Could I buy a ticket?”

He told me where to go. I knew the place because it had a cabaret-style set-up and I'd seen a comic book artist do a reading there with a cello player and a burlesque dancer. I didn't want to infringe on Ben's dancing life but if it was a public performance then what was the harm? The tickets were only ten dollars and I bought one. I wanted to see Ben perform his flamenco in a formal theatrical setting—it would bring to the foreground the elegance that came before his fall from grace in the world. I wanted to see that.

But on the night of the show there was a big electrical storm. Traffic chaos filled the whole downtown and crammed bridges leading to the city. The rain slashed down the way it does in New Orleans, like someone is up there chucking celestial buckets down everyone's necks. The subways were down and it was hard to get to the place for eight o'clock, the time printed on the ticket. But I did it. I got there on time and the place was empty. I sat at a little table and drank a gin and tonic slowly, then another, while eleven or twelve more people filtered in. I knew lots of gigs didn't start until a couple of hours after the doors opened, to give people time to warm up and spend lots of money at the bar, but by ten I realized the rain and the traffic congestion had kept everyone away. At ten thirty I spied some glorious Spanish women and men looking tense behind the stage. A woman with a comb full of roses like mine stepped up and explained we were waiting for a busload of ticket-holders stuck on the bridge. Another hour went by and normally I'd have packed it in and gone home to bed, but I couldn't bring myself to leave. At half an hour before midnight five men in black hats took seats onstage, and the women, in full Spanish lace and frill and piled hair and dangling earrings started a real firecracker dance set, all the imploded sexual rage of Spanish womanhood concentrated and then flung into the room with a flare of flaming skirt, a floorboard-shaking hard rain of nails, and those hands, twining incantations in the dim air, rings flashing— their foreheads and arms a sheen of sweat; little puddles glittering in the dips of their beautiful collarbones … but where was Ben?

The seated men had a special function and he was not among them. They played guitar or clapped: the clapping was fervent and meticulous—it gave voice to the dance and its rhythm was absolute, necessary and serious. The men's role was complicated and mathematical—the rhythm they clapped was far from obvious; completely unpredictable to me, yet perfect and dangerous. I decided Ben was not going to appear onstage after all and resigned myself to watching the show without him. I felt terrible about being one of only a dozen audience members and I'd be damned if I was going to leave before the show was over.