‘What are they listening for?’ I said to Dad.
‘The music of Orpheus. He made such wonderful music that he almost brought his wife back from the dead.’
‘Are these people dead?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Where’s Orpheus?’
‘He’s not here.’
‘Where is he?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is one of the women his wife?’
‘I don’t think so. All that’s here is his music and these people listening.’
I listened hard but all I heard was the whisper of the spray and the splashing of the water falling back into the fountain basin. ‘I don’t hear any music,’ I said.
‘The music is in the silence,’ said Dad.
But I thought it must be very faint and far away from those eight in the fountain; they seemed to be trying hard to hear it, yearning for it to come to them. One of the men seemed to be saying, ‘Louder!’ with his arms up, both fists almost clenched as if he was trying to pull the music out of the air.
‘I don’t think they can hear it either,’ I said to Dad. There was a sadness welling up in me that was almost choking me. ‘They’re trying but they can’t hear it. Can you?’
‘No.’
‘But you said the music was in the silence.’
‘It is but it’s not music you can hear. You keep trying but you can’t hear it. Maybe that’s all there is.’
‘All there is to what, Dad?’
‘All there is to what I can tell you.’ He rubbed the top of my head and gave me a hug. We had our cooler with us and we went and sat down on the lawn to eat our ham-and-cheese sandwiches and drink our drinks. Dad had his regular beer, Stroh’s; I had a soft drink called Vernor’s. I can almost remember the taste of it: sweet and gingery and the first swallow made you sneeze. While we ate and drank we watched the fountain people and the ducklings and the other visitors. That was the only time I ever saw the Orpheus fountain. Even after I was old enough to drive there myself I didn’t; I was afraid I might not feel what I felt that time with Dad. It was something that I saved inside me.
After Dad died and then got smashed up again as a crash-test dummy I didn’t do very well in school and I didn’t feel much like talking to anybody. Mr Falco, the art teacher, gave me some clay and modelling tools. ‘Maybe your fingers feel like talking,’ he said. I tried to make a figure like the ones in the fountain but it wouldn’t stand up; the legs gave way and the arms fell off. Mr Falco showed me how to make an armature, and then I did a figure of a man reaching for the music he couldn’t hear. It wasn’t very good but Mr Falco said it wasn’t bad for a first time with clay.
I used to hang around the art room a lot, and as I got older the figures got better. When I was twelve I brought one home and showed it to Mom. ‘What’s that supposed to be,’ she said, ‘a basketball player?’
‘He’s reaching for music he can’t hear,’ I said.
‘Aren’t we all?’ said Mom. ‘I hope they’re teaching you something useful at school; reaching for music you can’t hear is not going to pay a lot of bills when you’re older.’
Actually the figure wasn’t all that good; none of them were and after a while I stopped making them. I didn’t do any drawing or painting and I didn’t hang around the art room any more. I was good at maths and algebra and when I got to high school I did well in chemistry. I kept reading Dad’s notebook and I was understanding more of it all the time. There wasn’t much else happening. I read a lot; I had a girlfriend for a while, her name was Pearl; she ditched me for a quarterback on the high-school team. I still had my part-time job at the supermarket. Mom was always talking about saving for the future but there wasn’t a whole lot to save back then.
Finally the chemistry and the notebook began to pay off: in the high-school lab I produced a lump of malleable plastic but you couldn’t do anything with it that you couldn’t do with Silly Putty. In the notebook Dad had been trying out product names: Memoplast and Mnemoplast appeared several times so I knew I was looking for a plastic with a memory. I took over the basement workshop/lab and put in many hours there but it was slow going.
After graduating high school I got a job at Spectrum Displays in Eight Mile Road and worked my way up to making papier-mâché figures on chicken-wire armatures. Soaking strips of newspaper in flour-and-water paste and building up the forms on the chicken-wire was a restful and contemplative thing to do. The mixed-up bits of headlines gave me strange stories to think about: THREE DEAD IN STOLEN BASES AS INDIANS LOSE SENATE SUBCOMMITTEE. All human life was there in interesting variations, slowly assuming male and female form for Hallowe’en, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other seasonal occasions. Sometimes they lifted their arms, sometimes not.
By the time I was in my twenties Mom had retired. She had two offers of marriage from men who seemed all right in their way but she didn’t accept either of them. ‘“Vanity of vanities,”’ she said to me. ‘There’s a time for gathering husbands and there’s a time for having less bother.’ She was heavily into Ecclesiastes around then and there was a new bottle of Jack Daniel’s under the kitchen sink. Her faith in Jesus was no longer what it had been; she used to sing her own version of ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’: ‘Thou art short but I am tall, Jesus, why are you so small?/ If you’ve got no help for me,/ Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.’
‘You never used to be a drinker,’ I said to her.
‘Your father’s name was Daniels, as in Jacks,’ she said. ‘Daniel, as in Jack. Or whatever. He died for my sins.’
‘Who?’
‘Your dad. I always put him down, never encouraged. Night he treed in the drove, drove in a tree, I told him …’ She trailed off into silence but she was still awake.
‘What did you tell him?’
‘Told him he was a failure and I was sorry I married him. Crying when he left the house.’
‘You or him?’
‘Him. Not a good wife. He died for my sins. Jesus, why are you so small? Don’t be like him, Sonny?’
‘Like Jesus?’
‘Like Dad. Be something, do something. My fault.’
I hugged her and said, ‘Don’t blame yourself,’ but I knew I wasn’t very convincing. With my arms around her I was remembering the Orpheus fountain at Cranbrook, the whisper of the spray and the droplets on the cool bronze.
I stayed on at Spectrum and I kept working on my basement chemistry. My mother needed more and more looking after as the years went by. When she was sixty-eight she had a stroke that paralysed her left side. At the hospital they did CT and MRI scans; they did EKGs and EEGs. Mom was looking very small. ‘She’s doing all right,’ the neurologist told me. ‘The brain does a surprising amount of self-repair. I think we’ll see improvement in her speech and left-side mobility.’
‘Ihha I, orihha ah I?’ said Mom.
‘Say again?’ I said.
She said again and there was something familiar in the rhythm but she had to repeat it several times before I thought I recognised the Clever Elsie quote: ‘Is it I, or is it not I?’ was what Elsie said after she fell asleep in a field and woke up with a fowler’s net and bells hung on her by her husband Hans. She was frightened and uncertain whether she was Clever Elsie or not. She went to her house but the door wouldn’t open, so she knocked at the window and said to Hans, ‘Is Elsie within?’‘Yes,’ said Hans, ‘she is within.’‘Ah, heavens!’ said Elsie. ‘Then it is not I.’ She tried other doors but when they heard the jingling of her bells no one would open for her. Then Elsie ran out of the village and was never seen again.