Nocturne Read Free

servicemen with nervous disorders were treated there. In the 1960s and 1970s it became the Guild of All Arts and the grounds were peppered with cabins and small studios where artists lived and worked. But the timefor the arts colony had come and gone. Since the artists had been offered life tenancy, they couldn’t be removed. Instead, when they died, their cabins were simply knocked down. Do you remember that Cathy took sculpture lessons from one of the last remaining artists on the property in the 1980s, Elizabeth Fraser Williamson?
    Miss Empringham came to our house once a week. She was an avid garbage picker and often brought me something from someone’s trash. Sometimes the items still smelled like garbage. One week she brought me an angel formed out of coat hangers and a pair of nylons.
    I was, frankly, more interested in Miss Empringham than in the piano. She did look alarmingly like Beethoven, and stamped around, brusque, moody, and impatient. She was often irritated with me, which I rather liked.
    You wanted to have piano lessons, but Mum said you were too young, so you asked if you could stay in the living room during my lesson. I didn’t want you there as a distraction, or as a witness to my clumsy playing, but Mum said you could stay so long as you were quiet. I remember you sitting absolutely still during my lesson, your hands on your knees, while I squirmed on the piano bench and Miss Empringhamsnapped and chided, waving her conductor’s wand, or crashing her beefy hands down on the keys.
    I don’t remember how many lessons you sat through. It couldn’t have been very many—maybe two or three—but one day, after Miss Empringham had left the house, you got up from the couch and came over to the piano and played, perfectly, for Mum and I, the piece of music that I had been struggling with all week. After that, Miss Empringham came to the house to teach you, and I was allowed to stop having piano lessons, which was a huge relief.
    After you died, some of your friends asked me what you were like as a little boy, and I said serious and sensitive. At the age of five you would walk up the street to the neighbour’s house and have tea with her and discuss the Vietnam War. At the age of seven you kept a diary that recorded how many hours a day you were practising the piano, and what competitions you had entered and won, all in shaky childhood script. When we went fishing—which we did a lot as children, left to our own devices at the boat club in Port Perry while our parents worked on their cabin cruiser—you would catch fish, take them off the hook, and kiss them before you threw them back into the water. I think you said something to the fish after you kissed them.
Good luck
, or
Thank you
.
    You were deadly serious as a little boy, but as a teenager and man you liked puns and practical jokes. And you were funny. I still have some of the Christmas labels you used to attach to my presents, where you would take the first letters of my name and your name, and make synonymous words from to those letters.
To Handel, Love Mozart. To Heavy, Love Massive. To Hope, Love Mercy
. You did this with everyone in the family, never repeating words or themes from one year to the next.
    I never regretted giving up the piano. I much preferred words to music. I loved the world of books, a world I felt was much more exciting than the one I actually lived in. To have some of the thrill of story, I would try to put myself in the way of adventure in my real life. Usually this involved riding my bike around the neighbourhood, or squelching through the pond opposite our house, although neither activity ever yielded anything interesting. For a long stretch of days one summer, I stood at the window of my bedroom, notebook in hand, looking for suspicious people to document. I made you stand with me, as my assistant. Your job was to look up the street while I looked down.
    Around this time, I read
Charlotte’s Web
by E.B. White. This