The Night Singers (6 page)

Prill glances thoughtfully at the dusky leaves of her sturdy tree. This year, she resolves, she'll pick the olives, preserve them in pungent brine. Already she can taste the chewy flesh, lush with garlic and salty oil. Grandpa always said olives were the best defence against disease, that they infuse you with a taste for the good life.

Her family has lived the good life in their farmhouse for over a century. She tries to maintain tradition in a shifting world. This is hard when the world growing up and around your home is in
San Francisco
. She loves looking out at the ancient olive tree which Great Grandpa Leo brought from Abruzzi.

Prill continues working on the wool and silk tapestry, the last in her series for next month's exhibit. She's had to postpone the opening twice because of that dreadful real estate ordeal three months ago. Daily, now, she resolves to forget the pointless, tragic violence. All that is
over
, she ruminates as she checks the tree again and carries on weaving,
finito
. Green silk swims nimbly through the creamy wool. No agricops at the border when Leo arrived; he brought slips and clippings and seeds to San Francisco where he intended to be a cowboy farmer in that Mediterranean climate on the other side of the world. Leo knew what he wanted and got it—a family prerogative passed down in the best sense to Prill. Over the generations, his farm was divided again and again until she inherited the farmhouse on a small plot. Her favourite cousin, Fred, got the adjacent lot, with the olive tree.

Prill lives simply, her days not unmarked by joy or grief. Joy in the person of her son Tony, a dark, handsome young man who dredged up all the Italian genes from his father and her great grandparents. Prill's side of the family developed a penchant for marrying Anglos, which is how she became blond, blue-eyed and named Priscilla. Prill, she claimed in the sixth grade. Prill Donatello, when she married the son of Milano immigrants. Joy in her son's frequent company. Grief in her husband's sudden death.

Dear, dear Silvio—she had begged him to slow down. Grateful as she was for the furnishings that his canny investments installed at their increasingly elegant “heritage house”, she urged Silvio toward healthier, less stressful habits. He'd laugh, “If I sat at a loom all day like you, I'd die of boredom in a week.” The massive coronary took him in twenty-four hours.

Tonight is unusually hot for June and she savours the faint breeze flowing between the east and west windows. She's set the Goldberg Variations CD at a soft volume, so as not to disturb the neighbours. She might live in a landmark farmhouse that survived the Earthquake and Fire, but she has no illusions of invulnerability or wide-open spaces. She's lucky with her neighbours—most of them—who also tend their gardens, hose down their sidewalks and keep the music low.

This front room is perfect for work, really. Prill has become even more thankful for her ancestral haven since Silvio's death; it's as if the house embraces her, holds her steady.

She was just surfacing from paralytic mourning when Cousin Fred lost his mind.

“
Why
Freddie, why do you want to sell to that voracious realtor? You know he works with developers and they'll want to build condos, using up every inch of ground.
They'll want to chop down Grandpa Leo's tree
.” They sat across from one another in her living room drinking strong black coffee.

“Prill, dear, I have five college tuitions to pay. I need to make a
profit
.” His familiar voice was both patient and ironic.

“But you could sell the place to that pleasant couple from Hayward. They adore the tree.” She sat back in her mother's green armchair.

“You're an artist, Prill. Silvio would understand. In business you take the best bid.” He spoke louder now and averted his gaze.

“Profit,” she sputtered. “How about fairness, civility, family loyalty?”

“Listen, honey, Grandpa Leo has been dead for a long time. And he would let go of the tree. He was a man of adventure, of progress.”

“Progress!” She was going to start yelling in a minute, yelling at Fred who had been like a brother when she was growing up.

During the next month, she struggled toward compromise. Maybe she could borrow the $5,000 and pay Fred the difference. The bank officers didn't understand. Then she decided that a good gardener could move the tree to her small lot. One month and four gardeners later, she accepted that the olive tree was too old to be transplanted.

Something turned in her. Maybe all this came too soon after Silvio's heart attack. With raging powerlessness, she had witnessed his strength ebbing hour after hour in the ICU. Or maybe the root of her tenacity was simpler to locate. She had watched the tree through each season of her life; she couldn't imagine continuing without it.

Private, diffident Prill found herself going door to door with a neighbourhood petition to preserve their family olive tree. Aunt Winnie admonished that this campaigning looked unseemly, so soon after Silvio's death.

But her son Tony said, “Right on, Mom, this will be good for you.”

Fred, who had already sold the property to the realtor who, indeed, sold it to a developer, had no objections now.

Prill stayed up late at night, neglecting her work, to compose impassioned letters to
The Chronicle
and
The Bay Guardian
and environmental newsletters.

KGO called. A farm in the middle of San Francisco? The interviewer was astonished. Listeners phoned in. The story appealed to their romantic impulses, to their senses of history.

Neighbours became her biggest supporters: those considerate, neat, apartment dwellers cultivating urban gentility. After all, her cause celebrated the City's frontier past and picturesque present. Prill's most effective allies were the Gay Greenies, which at first surprised her. Then she realised many of these sophisticates were actors or writers or artists who valued tradition. She liked these lithe, witty men, although she hoped Tony's current experiments in their world would be brief and that he'd find a less complicated path to love.

Prill gazes to the left of her loom—to the wall where she's hung family portraits. She spent months collecting photographs from aunts and uncles and cousins, having them reproduced and framed, designing the layout. She put as much work into that wall as she'd devote to hanging a textile exhibit. The reward: exclamations of delight from relatives. Everyone likes to find his or her face in a person from the past. Here is Great Grandfather Leo and his young bride Gianna in stiff studio setting, their pioneer fear and hope shining through. Then Grandfather Gino and his pale bride Eleanor being married at St. Mary's. Great Aunts and Uncles. Her father's siblings. Her own parents: Art just back from World War II and Dorothy dancing in platform shoes. Cousin Fred playing basketball. Silvio, herself and Tony from a 70s snapshot. And in the middle of all the faces rests her photo of Leo's olive tree at sunset.

The wretched developer, Clifton Monroe, a name straight out of the annals of WASP villainy, remained unmoved by the petition and protests and articles. For some reason he agreed to a radio debate. In a tiny studio, they sat next to each other, wearing big earphones and fastening their eyes on the interviewer. Prill tried to be civil, but lost her cool in four minutes.

“Why all this greed?” she railed, then steadied her voice. “If you built a single family house, you'd double your investment.”

“There's a housing crunch in San Francisco, Madame, in case you haven't noticed.”

Madame
, did he think she was running a brothel?

“So you're doing this out of public concern and not for personal profit?” she snapped, “losing it”, as Tony would say.

“There's no reason you can't have both?”

She breathed deeply to stop her voice from quavering. “The signers of our petition …”

“My lawyers have some questions about the circulation of that incendiary document.” His voice was deep, confident.

“Perhaps your lawyers haven't read the First Amendment.” She raised her volume again.

The studio phones started ringing. The balding host wore a big smile. Clifton Monroe flushed, cleared his throat and sounded perfectly authoritative.

Clearly she had lost.

So Prill was astonished when the zoning board scheduled a hearing. She hadn't expected the demonstrators outside the court house. Or the police.

Tony said her new silver blue dress brought out the steel in her eyes. Approaching the hearing room with Tony, she felt exhilarated by her lately discovered public determination.

Tony laughed and pointed to a black man dressed up as an olive tree. The guy must have laboured for days on those tiny rayon leaves and the
papiermâché
gnarled roots growing from his hands and feet.

Prill was charmed by the Irish guy in the Olive Oyl costume. Olive Oyl with a resonant Dublin brogue.

She counted TV reporters from the four main stations. They spent more time on the Tree and Olive Oyl than on her, which felt fine.

The hearing itself was chaotic with Monroe's legal acrobatics, with ardent pleas from neighbours she had never met.

Midway through the proceeding she could tell they were winning from the cheerful way the zoning board chair asked Olive Oyl to cease bopping the woman dressed as Popeye-The-Sailor-Man with her black patent handbag.

Mr Developer turned redder and redder, frequently interrupting his own lawyers with declamations about free enterprise.

He had changed since the radio interview, Prill noticed, and she could see through his bluster to something that scared her.

The dignified Landmark Commissioner, by contrast, made a soft-spoken address about the significance of preserving venerable flora as well as historical buildings. Especially in the City of St. Francis.

She found his invocation of the Bristle Cone Pine overdone, yet several board members nodded respectfully.

Prill's foot works the old pedal as her hands carefully guide silk through wool. The natural light will last until 8.30. Odd that Tony isn't back yet. Highway 101 had become a teeming conveyer belt.

A week after the hearing, the Greenies secured the street permit for their Victory Party.

Cousin Fred brought champagne, delighted to toast harmony between his profit and Prill's contentment.

Prill felt fully relieved by mended family bonds when Aunt Winnie arrived. Then came the TV cameras, Olive Oyl, Popeye, the walking tree, neighbours from several blocks away.

Reggae, salsa, tango. After a glass of wine, she danced and joked. For the first time in months, Prill laughed without feeling disloyal to Silvio.

Suddenly—unexpectedly, out of the blue—how to describe such shock?

A horrible crescendo of ringing, buzzing, whistling cell phones.

Followed by cameras and microphones aimed at her.

Had she heard?

What did she think?

How did she react to the news that Clifton Monroe, fuming with rage two hours before, had driven downtown, shot the realtor, then killed himself?

Both bodies—at that moment—were being transported to the coroner's office. How did she feel?

Dizzy. She felt turned upside down. Kidnapped back to the Wild West. Was this someone's gruesome idea of a farce?

Stretching, Prill stands up from Great Grandma's loom. She'll be crippled tomorrow if she doesn't do her stretches. In the kitchen, she prepares a simple salade niçoise, leaving a plate for Tony in the fridge. She pours Sangiovese, filling the globe of a large glass. Then she carefully carries her tray up steep wooden steps to the roof deck (built by Silvio before they were named a Landmark House with all the restrictions that distinction entailed). Seated at the wicker table, she scans neighbouring roofs, then glances further, down toward the Bay. Leo and Gianna would have been able to see the water from their first floor all those years ago. The olive tree was strategically planted to the side of their large window.

How had she felt about the bloody news? Appalled. Terrified. Sick deep in her soul.

Tony shooed away the reporters, escorted her inside the old farmhouse.

Fred switched off the sound system.

Revellers slowly dispersed.

“This isn't your fault, Mom,” Tony insisted, bringing her a cup of mint tea.

Fred nodded wholeheartedly. “Monroe suffered from an explosive ego.”

Aunt Winnie pulled up a chair and took her hand, stroking it gently.

During the next three months local mood shifted. People kept more to themselves. Once Prill spotted Olive Oyl at the grocery, but he'd immediately turned away. The nice family from Hayward, who had viewed the bloody drama unfolding on Eyewitness News, rescinded their interest. Finally, the property had sold to two women from Seattle, who knew nothing of this sordid history. They loved the tree. She hoped they would be good neighbours—considerate, friendly, yet as unobtrusive as she tried to be.

Prill picks at her salad. A little worried about Tony, she reminds herself he's an excellent driver.

She sits more erect in the cooling night, rolling her neck. Of course they were right. The deaths hadn't been her fault. Was she supposed to investigate the developer's psychiatric history before speaking at the zoning board? Still, she has nightmares about the shootings, imagines herself trying to disarm Monroe, imagines being shot by him. She can't talk about the violence without a quaking voice. She simply wanted to preserve a tree.

The first boom startles her, rattling the deck planks and opening the sky. A thunderstorm?

She looks up from her plate and gazes at dazzling garlands of red and blue and yellow streaking across the heavens. The Giants game must be over. And fireworks spell victory. That's what happens in a baseball game: one side wins; one side loses. In upholding tradition, you can win and lose at the same time. She sips the wine, tasting, as Silvio taught her, for earth and cherry flavours.