The last night of Joshua’s memorial Maggie begins her final set by singing the mad scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, a song Duncan knows she no longer has the ability to sing, but her first note—a rising, startling B, sustained and lengthened by playful flourishes—is like no other she has sounded. The audience stares at her, and their mouths open unconsciously. The note falters and then Maggie catches it shakily again.
Her voice rises quickly up the scale—and up up up the audience rises with it—and crescendos at that elusive C, held until it is one pleading pitch, shaking but sustained at such a height that it does not seem possible any person could be capable of sustaining it, and then falling slowly back to the middle range with twirling, spiraling ornamentation, so that her voice resembles the broken sound of the plunge itself and of a flock of starlings at twilight. Duncan sees Lucia’s madness and her loss. Her pleading to her lover to believe that she is not mad, to not condemn or imprison her. He sees Joshua swimming out into the bay, his thrashing strokes leaving spears of white froth upon the black surface.
As twilight creeps across city from the east, turning the glass of the city a fiery purplish orange, the inside of the bar darkens and candles flickering in the candelabras surrounding the stage cast Maggie’s misshapen shadow upon the backdrop and the walls.
Duncan watches as his mother sings and holds nothing back—she sings as if this were the End, sings as she did during those years before her performance at Symphony Hall. And the crowd knows it, and because of this, they believe in her, and they give themselves to her, and she takes them with her. And in that place, every note is perfect.
Maggie begins to sing “Senza mamma,” from Puccini’s Suor Angelica, which Duncan has only ever heard sung in broken fragments before. Sister Angelica, who was put away in a convent after giving birth to an illegitimate child, learns after seven years without news of her son that he died in infancy. She sings of not being able to forgive herself for abandoning him and wishing that she could be together with him in heaven.
Senza mamma,
o bimbo, tu sei morto!
Le tue labbra, senza i baci miei,
scolorriron fredde!
e chuidesti, o bimbo, gli occhi belli!
Non potendo carezzarmi,
le manine componesti in croce!
E tu sei morto senza sapere
quanto t’mava questa tua mamma.
Ora che sei un angelo del cielo,
ora tu puoi vederla la tua mamma,
tu puoi sendere giù pel firmamento
ed aleggiare in torno a me ti sento
Sei qui, mi baci e m’accarezzi.
Ah! Dimmi, quando in ciel potrò verderti?
Quando potrò baciarti?
Oh! Dolce fine d’ogni mio dolore,
quando in ciel potró salire?
Quando potró morire?
Dillo alla mamma, creatura bella,
con un leggiero scintillar di stella,
Parlami, parlami,
amore, amore, amore!
My baby, you died without your mama!
Your lips, without my kisses, grew pale and cold!
And your lovely eyes closed, my baby!
I could not caress you,
your little hands folded in a cross!
And you died without knowing
how much your mama loved you!
Now you are an angel in heaven,
now you can see your mama,
you can come down from heaven
and let our fragrance linger about me.
You are here to feel my kisses and caresses.
Ah! Tell me, when will I see you in heaven?
When can I kiss you?
Oh! Sweet end to all my grieving,
when can I greet you in heaven?
When can I greet death?
O creature of beauty, tell your mama,
by a small twinkle of a star.
Speak, speak, speak to me,
my love, my love, my love!
A cigarette lies bent in a tin ashtray upon the piano’s edge and a string of gray-white smoke churns slowly upward from it. The musicians sit silently on chairs watching her performance. Maggie’s voice echoes and resonates with such vibrating pitch, resonance, and harmony that it is as if she were singer and tenor and chorus intermingled as one emerging slowly from the darkness and rising, surging quickly together toward the end. And Duncan feels God turning slowly toward them with the last of the sun descending into the hills and the glass and metal valleys and the darkness above sweeping its vast shadow across the bay.
In listening to his mother he knows that on this night, this rare, particular, star-aligned, tumid night, she has been granted a reprieve. She stands in another time, before an audience at Symphony Hall in Boston; she is nineteen and immune to the world of pain, before one note fractures the membrane in her throat, swelling her voice box, and causing her larynx to harden with coarse cartilage, a time before he was born.
After her performance she will race to North Station through the snow toward the man who will become his father and it will feel as if it is snowing just for her, as if the world has momentarily stopped and His great gaze has paused from its cosmic ruminations and a light has shot the bow of the universe and materialized out of the darkness merely to consider the wonder of her. Maggie will raise her face, her chilled cheeks to the tumbling snow and to the invisible glittering stars beyond the billowing white of the sky, and briefly understand her part in everything. Her life will begin and end here in the brief time before Duncan is born, while she is still very much a young girl and while the promise of all manner of dreams lie before her. And he knows that when his mother stops singing, there never will be another like her.