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By Root 659 0

two of you covered, and Wayne had found that the territory was usually quite small. It was smaller than a country and smaller than a town and sometimes smaller than a room. But this room, the room they were in, did not really exist. Boston did not necessarily exist either, although Wayne could sense it, fizzing with the unfamiliarity of its lights, its parks and streets, beyond the practice-room doors. The way he responded to Wally’s presence was that he felt as if life at this minute was blossoming inside him instead of lying dormant. He felt the electric presence of his own life, and he did not want that feeling to end, although he knew it had ended in the past and that it would end again. She whispered into his ear and the piece of her breath was warm with cool edges.

“I won’t get a chance to use what your father sent me yet,” she said. “Not in this week’s concert. But I asked Jeremy if he had ever conducted it and if we could do it in another concert, and he said it is one of his favourite pieces of music too and we might do it next spring.”

“What my father sent you?”

Wayne knew nothing about the time Treadway Blake had ordered a replacement for Wally’s lost copy of Gabriel Fauré’s “Cantique de Jean Racine.” But Wally Michelin had not forgotten it, and she took it out of her black folder now. It had the imprint of Albert J. Breton on it and Wayne could see that the paper was now old and that Wally had bookmarked it in many places with green tags. She flipped it open and he saw she had highlighted many passages throughout and had written in the margins in exactly the same way she had done on the original version, the one Treadway had lost when they were both twelve years old.

“It was never meant as a solo piece,” Wally said, “It was always a piece for four parts, for a choir, and that’s only one of the things I didn’t realize.”

“My father gave you that?” All this time Wayne had thought his father had not been at all sorry. About the bridge, about the music, about anything.

“Remember how you used to sing the alto part to help me practise?”

“Yes.”

She leaned over and hummed into his ear. She was humming the alto part, the part that he had sung with her on the bridge. Wayne saw she still had her freckles. She was the same now to him as she had been when they were twelve years old, on the bridge, looking through its spans at the sky. She hummed the tune quietly at first. Around them blared the choir members dispersing and clicking their folders shut and someone fooling around on the piano: a din that began to contain echoing spaces as members of the crowd went out to their cars. Under it, Wally’s voice occupied a different wavelength. It did not have strength but it possessed warmth, and she sang some of the words.

“Répand sur nous le feu de ta grâce . . . I can’t sing the soprano part yet, but they told me I might never be able to sing anything, and I can already do the alto . . . De la paisible nuit nous rompons le silence . . .”

The sound insinuated itself underneath all the other sounds, and this sound, alone in the room, entered Wayne’s body. Wally Michelin was singing the tune she had always told Wayne she would one day sing.

The thing about Wally’s life in Boston, Wayne saw the next day and the day after as they approached the night of her concert, was that it was full of movement. She was forever in motion, between breakfast and registration and showing him around the campus she would attend, and the costume bank where she had salvaged yards of satin and linen and given it a new life, and two dress rehearsals and then the concert itself. He had thought before he came to Boston that the concert would be the most exciting thing Wally Michelin was doing, but it was not. On the day following, she showed him where she would be taking a course in music history, two in theory, and a fourth that was an introduction to formal voice training.

Wayne had a feeling, as she took him around the quadrangle and through the first and second floors of the library and out to the garden, where students sat on the grass studying