Dying Notes

Carol Reid

First movement

Helene

I was not sorry when that screeching soprano, Rhonda Dufresne, was silenced. In fact, I would have lit a candle to St. Cecelia to ensure her continued muteness. All too soon her “voice” returned, and with it her “we know who really leads the choir” attitude, but at least when she was singing she kept her red-nailed hands still, instead of waving them about at lap level in what she deemed a true and sensitive interpretation of the music.

We are the Norwood Community Chorus, a group of thirty…thirty two this past spring, when young Riley Danson and his cousin, Demmy, were somehow persuaded to come in and prop up the tenors. I have served as accompanist for the past decade. Since taking early retirement from teaching at Nor-Lyn Middle School at the end of last year, I find that choir business looms large in my life. I do not take kindly to impediments to my enjoyment of this pastime, nor to certain singers' attempts to usurp the authority of our conductor. On that eventful evening, Rhonda Dufresne was in fine form.

“Anton,” she said in the pathetic whisper she affected during the weeks after her surgery, “I believe there should be more crescendo at bar eight in the top part…”

Our director, Anton Browne, had become curiously accommodating after Mrs. Dufresne's illness. From my position at the piano, just to his left, I could see his fingers clench around the baton whenever she spoke and I could hear the two deep, rattling breaths before he responded, “Let me hear fuller sound at bar eight, sopranos,” and then she would show her teeth in that horrible triumphant smile.

Yes, I hated her.

In early April, after her doctor (bless him, poor devil) finally gave her the all-clear, she took to vocalizing in the few minutes before rehearsal, when the singers like to chat together, trading gardening tips and pictures of grandchildren. More than once she cornered our young tenors and demonstrated, with her hands upon them, how best to support the sound, or open the throat, as if their youth and vigor were not quite enough! And even after Mr. Browne took his place at the podium she would continue, holding up her left hand in a “wait now, I shall soon be done this important thing, more important than you, certainly” gesture. To be fair and honest, Rhonda Dufresne was an important member of the choir. She was loud and fearless, and in some of the German music it was she who carried the melody, if not lightly, at least doggedly, while many of the other singers floundered.

But in the madrigals, during which, of course, I may sit unoccupied and lose myself in the ancient a cappella harmonies, Rhonda Dufresne was an unadulterated horror.

After an ear-splitting rendition of “Come thou Sweet Love”, we had broken for coffee (she always brought her own perfumy tea in a flask) and many of us were milling about in the hallway or clustered in the rehearsal room, a meeting room adjoining Longview United Church . When we had all been called back to our places, one chair was very conspicuously vacant. Mr. Browne opened his score of American songs. I think we were about to start in on the beautiful “Shenandoah” when Mrs. Barbara Cole (an excruciatingly nice woman, an alto) suggested that really we should wait for Mrs. Dufresne. And wait we did, in a silence so thick and ponderous that it was very nearly a relief when we heard a soft gurgling, like the throes of some injured animal. Sam Dobbs, our one true bass, strode out the door. I followed to the sidewalk outside, where Rhonda Dufresne was sputtering out her last breaths, lying in a lake of her own blood. Her throat, of course, had been cut.

Mr. Dobbs knelt beside her and did what was necessary, that is, nothing. The blood from the wound had already stopped flowing and was setting into syrup. Her eyes were open and still, even as the night insects lit upon them. I put one arm around his broad shoulders and waved the other to disperse the bugs. It is a natural reaction, I think, regardless of one's opinion of a deceased fellow person. I have my failings, certainly, but I hope that hypocrisy is not among them.

When Mr. Dobbs stood, his foot nudged an object that had fallen next to the body. I could not help myself. I slid the bloody baton across the grass and into the sleeve of my sweater. I turned and saw Mr. Browne occupying the doorway, forbidding the choir to come outside. Even with tears streaming from his eyes, he kept his composure and authority. I basked in the certainty that Anton Browne was our leader. I was proud to take his direction, and there was nothing that I would have not done for him.

The police came and took our statements and fortunately I was able to say that Mr. Browne and I had spent the time in question discussing the arrangement of a new piece for the spring concert. Everyone else's movements were vouched for, except for the strange Mr. Alvo Darius, who never spoke to anyone. He was a tenor, with a piercing, womanly vibrato in the upper register, who had joined us the previous fall. Mr. Browne had some Handel for which he was considering Mr. Darius as soloist, but had not yet approached him, since I had not yet ordered the piano accompaniment for the piece. The police were very interested in his inability to account for himself during the break. It did not help his case that he swore quite villainously at the constable, but it was a boon for the rest of us, who were permitted to go home, while he was rather roughly pushed into the back of a police car and taken away.

The aftermath of violence is not always what one expects. In intimate relationships, an ugly incident often gives way to calm reconciliation or even renewed passion. I know this to be dangerously true. That night, when I was bundled up in bed, I allowed myself to imagine the choir giving a charged, superlative performance, with Mr. Browne proudly, passionately at the helm and myself at the piano, melancholy and inspired. But as the weeks passed and the investigation into Mrs. Dufresne's murder stalled, it was as if an unwholesome fog settled over me.

There was a service, of course, but her husband requested that the choir not sing, as normally we would after a member's passing. Some of us chose to interpret this request as one of general non-attendance. I called Mr. Browne the evening before the service and offered myself as companion if he wished to make an appearance. Somehow I felt that through this sad business a bond had been cemented between us. I was in an oddly stimulated state as I sat by his side, but he was still and silent throughout the eulogy and the rest of the ritual. Only his eyes moved. I followed his gaze and discovered that his glance was directed at the bereft Mr. Dufresne who sat in the front pew flanked by his daughter (whom I knew to be about twenty, but small, dark and slim). He looked pale and lost and bright-eyed, and Mr. Browne's expression as he studied the husband was a mask of stoic sympathy. Afterwards, he muttered an apology and left me in the receiving line.

That evening there was no answer when I tried to reach him by phone.

When, after several postponed rehearsals, the choir again met, we were like a group of strangers forced to share close quarters. Mr. Darius, who had apparently passed inspection and had been quickly released by the police, returned completely unchanged, but Sam Dobb's booming bass was absent and Mrs. Cole was subdued to the point of sullenness.

Mr. Browne was visibly unhappy with us and we were dismissed early. He departed even before the room was empty and it was left to me to lock up and deliver the keys to the minister's wife, to her surprise and my discomfort.

The balance of power had somehow shifted and I felt that I had been cast adrift in a less than seaworthy craft, but sleep washed me clean of my anxiety and I awoke with new determination. In the morning I called Mr. Browne and asked if I might drop by and talk about the future of the choir. My own voice was strange to me and I wonder that he did not notice the confidence in my tone. At any rate he accepted that I would come to his apartment at the hour of eleven.

I dressed carefully for the meeting in a dark blue suit with a string of pearls at my throat. When I went outside, the sun was bright in the brittle fashion of much of April hereabouts, but cool and fresh enough to comfortably walk the few blocks to Mr. Browne's house. He lived in a block of “Townhouses”, respectable enough depending on the caste of one's immediate neighbors. His was bordered by quiet couples and elderly, fit women, quite satisfactory. The landlord had endeavored to provide some barrier from the street by planting willow trees, but they were not thriving; their thin branches trembled in the light breeze. I pushed them aside and reached his apartment door.

He greeted me in his robe with his face half-shaven, but he allowed me to enter and wait in his living room while he finished dressing.

As I waited I grew anxious and uncertain and when he returned I forgot my civilized speech and tossed the baton, sealed in plastic, on the low table between us. He stared at it, then at me. I had longed for his rapt attention since the night of the murder, but the contempt in his eyes was not at all what I had hoped for nor expected. His voice was tight, expressionless.

“Explain, please,”

“None of us could bear that awful woman,” I cried. I dared in that moment to use his Christian name. “Please, Anton, you must come back to us and we…”

He reached over and drew the plastic package toward him. He took my arm and I was soon outside in the arms of the willow trees. I watched through the window as he went to the phone and made a call. I tapped against the glass and he turned his back to me. I walked back to my little house and went inside and closed and bolted all the doors.

***

Second Movement

Elly

Her hands, so sensitive to the oils of the precious cedar she had been working, were coated with cortisone cream and covered with thin cotton gloves. Magpie that she was, she had rescued an imperfect spike from her father's workshop, and now with its edge she worried the narrow block she had brought in her overall pocket. It was difficult to feel her progress, with the gloves, but when her skin healed she would do the fine work on the little totem she was carving for her sweetheart, her face below his, his hands and hers placed one above the other.

“Is this love?” she wondered as she crouched in the creaking greenness of a rhododendron tree. Was this what her mother had felt before she married Dad, this need to be smothered, filled, enveloped by his presence? She had been with boys in the past, had thought herself experienced, but the long, dark moments she had spent with her man made her ignorant again. She did not know what to offer him; sometimes she thought of razoring his name in the flesh of her forearm, but this, she realized, would be an adolescent act. She listened in the dark and tried to pick out his voice from the rest of the noise. Music was a tedious mystery to her ears, a useless vibration, so unlike the rasping and tearing of metal through wood as she carved in her father's workshop. Even on the worst of days, that noise was productive, revealing the true form of the cedar or pine; even the din of her father's torch was pleasing to her and the shower of sparks from the grinder like summer fireworks. This watery piano and plaintive bleat of voices was like some feeble argument, won by neither…but the pull to be near her lover was irresistible.

There. At last they had stopped. There was a scraping of chairs and a happy murmuring, then the doors opened and there he was, stretching his long arms and gazing out into the dark. Should she call out? Would he be pleased to see her? She sat immobile, made mute by her longing. Just as she began to rise, the evening breeze carried the familiar scent of Arpege to her nostrils. Her mother stood there now, beside him. Perhaps now was the moment. She could pretend to need the car. Later she could come for him and at his door wrap herself around him like a vine….

Elly's eyes opened, closed, opened and the heat in her belly turned hard and cold. What was her mother doing to him with her hands? He stepped back into the building and she remained, smiling into the dark. The air was gray with her unfashionable French perfume, a smoke of charred gardens and sunburned flesh. Elly felt her dinner rise up into her throat and she retched into a wad of tissues she pulled from another pocket. Her mother stopped smiling then. Righteous indignation replaced her look of distaste as the girl rose up from her hiding place.

“What in heaven's name are you doing?” her mother said.

“Watching you.”

“Oh, Elly, how young you are…”

Elly slapped her with her sore, gloved hand. The woman laughed, her practiced, tonal ah-ah-ah, a soft treble trill that vanished instantly in the cool night air. From inside the building came a rush of sound, a convivial thump and chatter of the singers rearranging themselves for the last half of rehearsal. The girl strained to hear the only voice that mattered to her, but the wind gusted and creaked through the shrubbery, knocking about a set of chimes that hung from a young tree planted next to the walkway. A car rolled past and even the soft purr of its engine roared in her ears. Her mother whispered, eyes glittering like cold green gems…what could it mean when someone hissed at you like that…evil serpent of a woman…

“Run along, Elly, really, don't hang about like an abandoned puppy…”

Perhaps she meant only to slap her again. No, not true. She pulled the spike out of her pocket purposefully, aimed it at the base of her mother's throat. She was no trembling puppy; she was her mother's daughter, hard and strong. She pushed and her mother fell.

The first thrust was a surprise to both; with the second, skin and vein parted and a great sigh shuddered through her mother's body. Elly's warm pulse was slow thunder; the air itself was a coagulating mass she had to slice through to escape. Beyond this thick curtain, someone else appeared, the tool was twisted from her grasp and she was flying through the cool dark, enveloped in the wings of an angel.

Her hands were hot, the gloves wet and stuck with tufts of grass. Her stomach heaved again, but there was nothing left to expel. The soft wings held her comforted her, until the rumble of the engine stopped and all was still.

In her apartment, the little refuge above the workshop, she melted out of her clothes and into her soft, rumpled bed and buried her face in the mound of pillows at the head. Please, she prayed, no more waking life, no more sharp edges, only a long, silent, soft, painless dream…

***

Third movement

Anton

Anton Boroni (now Browne) stood at the podium, his hands electric with the energy he was about to channel through his fingers. He knew that the silver baton he held marked him as a Luddite in festival circles; the fashion was for an ever-increasing debauchery in the dance between conductor and conducted; even the singers had taken to gesturing as they sang, reaching for the notes at some ill-defined point in the ether. Anton remained steadfast in his conviction that the music must be held and focused at the tip of the baton…all else was chaos.

A pointed whisper found his ear. He dared not look at her, for if their eyes met he would be tormented throughout the piece and here, with all eyes upon him, it would not do.

For years he had dealt with the tedious attentions of deluded women. The more obvious ones would volunteer for all the thankless jobs, taking in fees, repairing uniform jackets, cataloging sheet music. Many were more desirable, certainly more beautiful than this Madame Dufresne, so tall and straight, as imperious as an Olympian goddess. Was it her ruined voice, damaged by the recent surgery, which impelled him? She was like a ventriloquist, insinuating that rough whisper just inside the shell of his ear. She wanted more soprano? Very well. So it would be.

After the madrigal he left the podium, scissoring the air with two fingers to signal the break. Helene was upon him in a moment, pressing his arm.

“Is this a convenient time?” she begged and led him into the little office.

She spread the sheet music on the desk and stood back to let him examine it. She was an efficient woman, this one, and not too stupid. He approved her suggestion of first the American sampler, then the Bell Chorus and finishing with the Faure. He made a show of rearranging the booklets, as she would expect, then tossed them down in the same order. “Excuse me,” he said and moved in the direction of the men's room, where even she would not follow. He pushed open the door to the walkway and stepped outside.

Knots of tension tugged at his shoulders. He was only thirty seven, but perhaps not as fit as he should be. There was too much food and sleep in this new homeland of his, and no fire left in his soul to burn it away. He had made his choice the night he left Bucharest in the care of a faded Italian contralto and abandoned Hero to his fate. The current of the past seven years had carried him ever westward, to the very rim of civilization. With every degree of longitude he had shed another layer of himself until reduced to this, a creature increasingly without allegiance or conscience. His friend was certainly dead now. Prison was a savage place there, and Hero far too beautiful and foolish to have survived it. The young believe too much in truth and goodness, even in the East, where they should have been taught better. This Elly was the same, though far less tempting. He stretched his arms to the night sky and wondered why she had entered his thoughts. Something stroked his back and he turned just as a hand brushed the top of his leg.

“Come to dinner tomorrow, would you, Anton? We always enjoy your company”.

He avoided the Mme. Dufresne's eyes. “You are too kind to me,” he muttered and slipped back inside. In the restroom he leaned against the cool window for a moment, flexing his wrists in preparation for the last half of rehearsal.

The hallway was empty, the singers corralled, no doubt at Helene's direction. He paused at the doorway to the garden…it appeared that a few outlaws remained and he peered out, curious to know their identities. As his eyes adjusted to the dark a strange tableau came into focus, a family portrait of operatic fervor. Elly, the little toy, bespattered, looming over her mother's twitching form…Colton Dufresne, the honest-faced husband, struggling with the girl, flinching, tearing from her a shard of bright metal that fell from his grasp onto the damp grass. Anton must have made a sound. The husband lifted his head and met his gaze. Anton had seen this expression often during his last months in Bucharest , the dazed stare of a neglected child, the final dying of inner light. The two living were suddenly gone into the dark, their footfalls muffled, while the sack of flesh remained.

Anton took slow, measured steps toward the body. Her right hand moved once, then was still again. On the stage this scene would be punctuated by full orchestral chords; here on the thin church lawn there was only the faint chatter in the rehearsal hall, and the soft rumble of a car engine, pulling away.

His legs were heavy as he re-entered the rehearsal room. Helene had set out the folder of American songs. He stood at the podium for a very long time; there was a sensation of thick cotton in his ears and he shook his head to clear it. Then the crowd broke, first Dobbs, then Helene, and there was nothing to do but scuttle along beside them as they flowed to the scene outside.

Like ice melting, cold tears welled and spilled from Anton's eyes, blurring the sight of Madame Dufresne like a broken bird on the walkway, Dobbs beside her speaking into one of those telephones and Helene on her knees, flapping her hands. He wiped his eyes, then pulled the doors shut and directed the singers back to their seats. The younger members were talking loudly, using mild profanity and pacing, but they were few and the composure of the majority brought them into line.

“How could this happen?” someone kept asking, but the question died of neglect. The police came and made halting inquiries. He was surprised that his accent, thickened by distraction, went unnoticed, but of course he had to speak very little with Helene so eager to vouch for him. There was an embarrassed air about the situation until Darius began shouting. The officers flew into action, subduing him, and the rest of the company were readily dismissed.

The scene on the walkway ebbed and flowed in his memory as he rode home in silence. Pictures without sound were unfamiliar to his thought process; always his head was full of song, of symphony, or, when he slept, the sad folk music of his homeland. He seemed to have become intermittently deaf, with only the image of Colton Dufresne's eyes to fill the empty hallways.

He watched television until he fell into a sleep harried by repetitive dreams that brought him to the verge of consciousness then dropped him back into the maelstrom like a stone.

…He is in a crowd at a railway station. Everyone is overdressed in thick coats and hats pulled low on their brows. He is carried along by their movement, carried past the arranged spot of his assignation. Again and again he struggles to break from the sea of people…he sees Hero on the west platform, dressed in a yellow coat. The boy raises his hand to wave, confusion in his eyes, but the crowd is so close that Anton cannot even lift his arms from his sides. He is strait-jacketed and powerless and the boy's shouts are a faraway whisper. “Do you dream of me?” he cries in this awful whirlpool of a dream and Anton can barely choke out a laugh before he is again at the station gates and the thick, undulating procession begins anew...

Sometime in the night he staggered to his bed and pressed his face into the pillow.

In the morning Anton looked at his calendar. The day and evening lay like an empty canvas before him. The inevitable calls from the small but garrulous musical community had relieved him from his commitments; obligations had been forgiven, at least for the immediate future. There was no question of calling the Dufresne household. He shoved the ridiculous thought from his mind.

Ten days passed.

He returned to his private students, who had progressed surprisingly well in his absence. There was a desperate vitality in their efforts that was pleasing to his ear. He praised them a little and felt better. But it was a mistake to return to the Choir. He felt like a child forced to attend a despised aunt's funeral and longed for the rehearsal to end. That night, he tossed until the early morning, when the ringing of the telephone pulled him from his bed. Then at last he slept soundly, awakening late, remembering that Helene had asked to visit him.

When the bell rang he was still in his robe, shaving foam drying on his chin as he stared at the inhabitant of the bathroom mirror. Would Hero have caressed this face, falling into ruin, stroked the thinning hair that fell across his brow? In Anton's mind the boy lived an eternal youth. Perhaps an early death was a gift whose price was not so easily reckoned.

She was about to ring again when he opened the door and discovered her, poised, pink-cheeked, on the landing. He gestured toward the armchair and returned to his bedroom to dress. He pulled on a pair of shabby trousers and a smooth silk shirt, hesitating with a tie in his hand before finally bunching it up into a pocket.

Helene was pacing around his tiny living room in her drab blue suit, pulling at a string of beads around her neck. He felt suddenly tired again, despite his recent sleep. Perhaps if he touched her she would become frightened and leave quickly, but then again, perhaps not. He kept his hands clasped behind his back as she pulled a small package out of her bag and dropped in onto the low table between them. The clear plastic square had a pinpoint of red in its corner and the tip of a slim silver shaft pushed at its seam, threatening to tear it open. He looked into her fluttering face which was framed by those silly waves of hair.

“Explain please,” he said.

“Anton,” she said, surprising him to attention.

Her hand, hot as a brand, was on his sleeve, her eyes, hot with fear, locked onto his. For weeks she had believed him a cold assassin, capable of slicing a woman's throat. She had sat next to him in church, had entered his home, believing this. He took possession of the package, closing his hand around the slick plastic until he could feel the edge of the blade within. His English deserted him. In silence he propelled her out the door. With his back to the window he picked up the telephone and without dialing, whispered into the humming receiver one of the closeted prayers of his youth.

…”O thou who dost willingly give thy flesh to me as food…”

The droplets of blood in the bag seemed to spread and grow at his touch. “….O my Maker…nail the whole of me together with the fear of thee…” Had he cut himself somehow? A dark sticky smear covered his palm, pooled in his cupped hand. “…may I flee as from fire, every evil deed, every passion...”

There was a noise of hailstones on the glass, but he knew it was only she, Helene, she and the plague of women who had followed him since he sentenced his one true love to death, and he did not turn around.

When finally all was still, he looked blankly at the phone in his hand, and sat down heavily in the chair. Was it contrition or just fatigue that decided him, or the pleasure of remaining alone in the knowledge of his guilt? What depth of commitment did true atonement require? Would God appreciate this final jest? He took the blade out of the plastic, gripped it in his fingers. Then he replaced it into its protective covering, pulled the tie from his pocket, smoothed it and knotted it carefully under the collar of his silk shirt.

He picked up the phone again and dialed.

***

Final movement

Helene

I sat in silence all afternoon. By early evening, as twilight fell, I decided to pay a visit to poor Mr. Dufresne, whose daughter by now had surely returned to her own life. On the way I bought four little pastries and had them put into a box.

There was no answer at the Dufresne house, but I could hear the rasp and hum of power tools in the garage. I stood and waited for a break in the noise then knocked heavily on the side door. Mr. Dufresne was in his overall, his safety glasses pushed up high on his forehead. He thanked me calmly enough for the pastries and after finding a suitable spot to set them down, offered me a sherry or cup of tea. The garage was a foreign land to me, its floor peppered with metal shavings, the air heavy with the smell of hot metal and shorn wood, the lingering after-hum of machinery disturbing my ears. A conglomeration of copper and steel sprawled on a tarp in the middle of the floor, sharp thorns rising and twisting from a sun-like base.

“For the garden,” he offered as explanation.

I smiled and nodded and quickly followed him into the house. He removed his gloves and overall, draped them carefully over a kitchen chair and offered me a seat at a long, white-lacquered table.

“I'm glad to see you looking so well,” I said as he set down a glass in front of me. “It has been a horribly difficult time.”

He sat down opposite me and folded his hands on the table.

“Who would've thought I'd miss her?” he said with a rueful smile.

And it took all my will not to run from him, or scream that alive she was like a spoiled squawking bird that held onto its perch with embedded talons and that dead, the echo of her flapping wings was as deafening as a night wind! Instead, I muttered something about being fortunate in marriage. To avoid his eyes I examined the walls, which were decorated with an unremarkable collection of photos, the subject of which was predictable enough, except for one of the more recent shots which featured the young daughter embracing an uncomfortable young man whom I recognized as our newest tenor, none other than Riley Danson.

There was a noise of shuffling and running water upstairs and the daughter herself appeared, untidy and ill-looking, in the doorway.

“This is Elly,” he said to me and introduced me inaccurately as one of the singers but I was too distracted by her appearance to correct him. In the month since the service she had lost the glow that was so evident in the framed photographs and, apparently, any manners she might have previously possessed. She merely glared at me in silence before vanishing again up the curving staircase.

“I don't know how to help her,” her father whispered.

“Perhaps if the killer were found,” I suggested, but he shrugged and shook his head.

It was then that I noticed the packets of music books, scores, loose pages, tied with rough twine and set on the floor next to the rubbish bin.

“My life is so different now,” he said quietly and I was reminded of a film I had unfortunately attended the previous year about prisoners of war who after long confinement were rescued and released. Those very words had come from one of the film's subjects as he sat alone in his small apartment. It was an awful film, bleak and unsettling.

I got up to leave and already he was putting on his overall again, slipping heavy gloves over his large, white hands. He walked ahead of me into his workshop, picked up a large canvas sheet and shook it over the metal structure on the floor; a thorn caught a frayed corner, tearing the heavy cloth. Why would he fashion such a thing to put in the garden? If anyone were to trip and fall, it would be another sad situation. I was more than happy to leave him to it.

A few days later the Sloan Citizen ran a feature on the murder of Rhonda Dufresne. Mr. Anton Browne had surrendered a piece of evidence crucial to the case and was being held on a charge of second degree murder. Mr. Colton Dufresne could not be reached and was asked to contact the police as soon as possible. Both his blood and his wife's had been found on what was thought to be the murder weapon. I lost my breath for a moment. And then a sense of awe and wonder at Anton's greatness flowed over me and it all became clear. It had been all for me. The confusion, the moment of contempt, all because he thought it had been I who silenced that awful woman! And then, thinking to protect me, this.

The Norwood Community Chorus crumbled after Anton went away, but within the year I was asked to direct a small ensemble that wished to prepare a selection of Broadway show tunes. After each rehearsal my fingers and forehead ache but the group needs me and I will not abandon them.

I have written to Anton several times. Of course, I write only of mundane things, but I am sure he takes my meaning. When the day comes, as I know it will come, that he is returned to me, I will be ready. And waiting.