Annabel - Kathleen Winter [141]
His train was delayed for an hour outside the city because something had gone wrong with the switches. A conductor announced that the switches had to be done by hand. By the time the taxi brought him to Wally’s address her aunt Doreen welcomed Wayne alone.
“She’s gone to choir practice. Are you hungry?”
“I had a sandwich on the train.”
“I’ve got a cup of broth for you. Have that and I’ll take you to watch the rest of her practice, then when you both come back, we’ll have a real supper.”
Wally’s aunt, Wayne discovered, was a gracious woman who looked through your eyes and into whoever was in there. Certain things were visible to her that were not visible to other people. He felt at home with her, and he felt nervous when they pulled up to the building where Wally was practising and her aunt told him to go in alone.
The place had been a church hall but was no longer affiliated with a church. The whole church and the buildings with it were rundown, but a group called the Appleton Street Neighbourhood Association was working to revitalize it. Wayne read this on a plaque in the hallway. He could hear chairs dragging across the floor inside double doors that each had a tiny pane, and he looked through the panes and saw the choir on a stage, and he saw the conductor and a piano player. They were between songs and the conductor was talking about the purity of consonants. Wayne waited until the choir resumed singing so that there was a wall of sound. There was not much light and he was glad of this as he quietly entered. The choir director kept starting and stopping the music. He told the choir to skip pages, and sometimes they skipped ahead to an entirely different song that they began singing but did not complete. It appeared to Wayne that the entire practice was all about ripping the songs into pieces and working on those pieces as if they would never again belong to the original song, as if fragments of music were all the conductor hoped for. He saw Wally Michelin in the back row, second to last. He recognized her not so much from her features, which he could not see, but from the way she stood, and had always stood, and from the rippling hair and the shape of her face. It occurred to him that Wally Michelin was singing, though she had been told she would not sing again, and he marvelled at that though he did not know if he should believe it, as her voice was not alone but was part of the choir’s sound.
When the practice was over, she came to his seat as if she had known he would be there, and as if it were ordinary that he should be in Boston with her. She sat beside him, and there was so much activity around them — people taking date squares and deli sandwiches out of purses and unwrapping them and eating them and talking about Linda’s new grandson and George’s holiday in Florida, which meant George would not be here for the concert — that Wayne felt he and Wally were alone in a sea of sound.
“You came.”
“You don’t mind?”
“No. I’m glad you came.”
He was not alone with her but he felt as if they were alone. He felt they recognized each other in a way that no one else recognized either of them. Other people could look at him but they did not see what Wally Michelin saw, and perhaps others saw in her the same thing he did, but he did not think they saw it. What it was was limitlessness. When you were with an ordinary person, you could draw a line around the territory the