A Minor Third

by Mark Sabourin

The interior wall of our living room had been refashioned into a seven foot high bookshelf, and its lowest shelf held the 20-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary. Language, I’d been told, was more than a means of expression. Its careful use would set me apart.

She opened Volume 16. “Statuesque,” she read. “Having the qualities of a statue or sculpture. Its use dates back to 1834. Coleridge. You remember Coleridge?”

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” I replied. My mother patted my head and smiled. “Among others, yes.”

I had described her as tall.

She was Head of the Middle School at Bishop Strachan, where I was a student, but the only privilege that earned me was insulation from the mocking comments directed at her from the other girls. My mother dyed her hair red. She polished her nails silver. Uplifted by two inch heels, she stood a head above most women. Her maiden name was McGonigle, and though it had been her grandparents who immigrated from Ireland, she still affected a mild Irish brogue that only thickened the more she spoke. They called her the Fenian.

We planted a Victory Garden in the spring and harvested from it in summer and fall. Evenings and weekends, I practiced piano and studied voice while my mother organized Victory Bond rallies and War Savings Stamp drives.

“We girls must play our part,” she often said. My father was President of Massey-Harris. The Toronto plant was operating around the clock, now making tanks as well as tractors. When he was not at the Weston factory, he was in Ottawa conferring with Cabinet Ministers.

Before the war, he would share the hour after dinner with me. In winter, we might gather by the fire and assemble a jigsaw puzzle. When the weather warmed, we’d sit in the back yard and make up names for the birds perched at our feeders, the rusty-throated nutwobble, the thin- legged coalmaggot. He’d read to me in the plummy voice of CBC radio announcers: “And then there’s Badger, of course. He lives right in the heart of it,” he’d read, deepening his voice and elaborately rolling his Rs.

Now, he returned home weary. He’d greet me with a forced smile and a word or two. After dinner, he’d retire to his study. My mother would tuck me in.

The music room was adjacent to my father’s study, and his absences left me time for it. My mother had learned to deafen herself to my practice, particularly my singing, which consisted mostly of lip trills and vowels sung in ascending and descending scales. She was more often out of the house after the Dieppe Raid, preparing food packets for our soldiers taken prisoner, and it was then that I would accompany myself at the piano and work on a piece.

The war was distant to me, mostly an inconvenience that denied me my father’s attention. My mother would not permit it to enter our home. Instead, she brought it to school. At her urging, every Thursday afternoon was given over to knitting. We knitted socks and hats and mittens for our soldiers overseas. Portions of the school grounds between the sports fields were converted to vegetable gardens. The harvest went to our school kitchens, freeing up rationed goods. At morning assembly, following prayer and between the singings of O Canada and God Save the King, my mother would rise onto the podium and play a passage from one of Churchill’s speeches. “Pay heed to the delivery,” she’d say, “the rhythm of his speech, the careful pauses. Feel the emotion rise in you as he speaks.” She’d hold her arms before her. Over Churchill’s voice, her hands would slice through the air as if she were conducting, her silvered nails catching the light, and my shoulders would sink. Then she’d read the passage anew in a slowly-thickening brogue, and parse the sentences. She’d note the familiarity of the words, the methodical use of repetition, the metaphors, the patterns. “Mr. Churchill is both a great wartime leader and a master of the language,” she told us. “When finely honed, language will be a tool that you will wield to carve out your place in the world.” Girls around me would snicker and whisper about her flaming hair and darkening roots.

For me, much of this would end soon. In June, I would pass from Middle to Senior School. My classes would move to a different quadrant of the building. I would not escape her presence entirely, but it would be less palpable. There would be a ceremony, brief performances from members of each graduating class, Junior, Middle and Senior. I would play Puccini, O Mio Babbino Caro. I had been practicing the piece, and I knew it well.

Two years earlier, when I graduated from Junior School, I had pleaded with my mother for a spot on that stage. I had been practicing Grieg’s Dance of the Elves. Even then, my father was spending more time away from home. He had not heard me play it. It was to be a surprise. She refused. It would be unseemly, she said, for her to exert influence on a colleague. I was in the Junior School and subject to the decisions of the head of that school. In two years, the choice would be hers. If I were deserving, the opportunity would be mine.

And so I sat with my father, eight rows back, and listened to the recitals and the poetry from the junior class, The Principal and the two other Heads of School and my mother, rising above them all in her sharply cut teal wool suit, stared from their seats at the side of the stage, clapping and smiling. My father, too, smiled and clapped, and when we got home, he listened as I played the Grieg.

When news reached us of the Allied landings in Normandy, he was summoned once more to Ottawa and I knew he would not attend my graduation from Middle School. But in a young mind, knowledge and hope are strangers to each other. His summons was immediate. He had driven rather than wait for the train. I knew he had sufficient ration coupons. He could drive back. It was a thin thread, but I clung to it.

It would be this curious mix of disappointment leavened with childish optimism that my mother would have sensed. I was determined to play, and to play well. I imagined the door to the auditorium flying open as I took the stage, or as I took my place on the bench, to reveal my father’s silhouette, his shoulders square, his fedora.

I also feared a spectacle. My mother favoured teal, or sapphire blue, colours that drew the eye, but she dressed demurely that evening, a charcoal-grey wool crepe suit, with wide lapels and gently padded shoulders, over a silk blouse in ivory. Each ear held a single pearl. She’d rolled her hair into a chignon at her neck.

We arrived by cab and waited backstage as the room filled. I limbered my body. I stretched my fingers and I peered through the curtain at the auditorium’s rear door.

“Tell me how you feel,” she said. “Nervous? Perhaps sad?”

I’d thought about this over the previous days. I’d sought the right word.

“Bittersweet,” I answered. She’d coloured her lips coral red. A strand of hair had fallen from my shoulder, and she swept it back.

“You understand that he can’t, don’t you? For you this will be a poignant moment,” she said. “Poignant. We can look it up when we get home.”

And then she took her place between the other two Heads of School, and smiled and clapped through the junior school’s performances, and the first two from my graduating class. I took the stage when my name was announced and scanned the crowd. I wasn’t saddened by his absence. I knew he would be coming home.

I took two deep breaths and began the prelude. I played it in F Major, a minor third down from Puccini’s A Flat Major to suit my range. I intended to sing it. I had always intended to sing it.

I played and I sang. After I struck the final note there was a pause, a half second at most, before the applause began. I didn’t turn to the auditorium. I looked instead across the stage. In practice, my eyes sometimes clouded over at the climactic moment, when Lauretta pleads, “Babbo, pietà,” but that night they remained clear. I saw the Principal and the three Heads of School smiling and clapping, and I watched my mother rise from her chair. She stood, statuesque. Her face was unblemished. In long strides, her hair aflame and now released over her shoulders, she strode toward me.

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