An Audience of Gulls

The summer I turned nine, my grandmother decreed I was old enough and – as she took great pains to tell me – responsible enough to have my own room.  Not only that, she’d added with a warning glance at my brothers, but I was to be allowed to choose from one of the two tiny, cramped bedrooms at the top of the stairs.

Nana had always slept downstairs in a spacious and sunny room off the dining room with twin beds, a built in chest of drawers, and a real closet.  She kept an overstuffed chair in one corner next to a freestanding full length mirror and the dressing table Uncle Len had built for her between the two front windows.  It was a cheerful room, always neat as a pin and usually warm.  Given the choice of being close to the telephone in the dining room or the bathroom upstairs, she’d chosen the telephone without hesitation.  Besides, she was always the first one up and she liked being just a few steps from the kitchen.

My mother’s room was on the second floor.   It was slightly smaller but had a row of small windows that overlooked the ocean, a small chest of drawers and a re-finished chifforobe against one wall. It had twin beds for when my daddy came and a rocking chair in one corner.

Of the two other upstairs bedrooms, one was barely large enough to accommodate a double bed and a bureau and the other, though roomier, was dark with only a single window and the slanted roof made it impractical for anyone of any height.  Uncle Len had added a clothes rack of sorts – a metal tube attached  horizontally at opposite ends of the walls – for a closet.

You can have either of them, Nana told me, Or you can have the room off the kitchen though you’d have to share when there’s company.

I still remembered my great grandmother dying in the room off the kitchen and though it was by far the nicer of the three, I chose the darker one upstairs.

You keep it picked up, Nana told me sternly, And you make up your bed every morning.  Put your clothes away and no shoes on the bed.  Them’s the rules.  Agreed?

I nodded and crossed my heart.

Oh, and don’t pay no mind to the mouse, she said as an afterthought, It ain’t scratched its way through in all these years and I ain’t lookin’ for it to make no  progress this summer.  You don’t bother it and it won’t bother you.

The mouse and I coexisted peacefully all that June and into July.  He scratched and scrabbled nightly, regular as clockwork, but as Nana predicted, the ceiling remained intact and I got used to waking up with paint flakes on my pillow.  Then just after my birthday, I woke up in the middle of one still moonlit night hearing a violin playing.  It was distant but very clear – Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring – music we’d learned in choir for the Christmas concert.  In the next moment I realized that the pawing above my head had stopped.  I had just enough time to think, Weird, a mouse that likes Bach, before I fell back to sleep.

The next night it was Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and the night after that, something I couldn’t place but was positive was Mozart.

When I told Nana, she patted my head absently and said what funny things dream were.

Several nights later, I made myself stay awake.  The mouse skittered determinedly overhead for what seemed like hours and I was just about to give up when he suddenly stopped.  For a moment there was dead silence and then I heard it – faint but clear as day -  Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, straight out of my music appreciation class.  I slipped out of bed and crept down the stairs in my bare feet, froze when the dogs stirred, then tip-toed past them and out the back door.  There was a moon, hung high and surrounded by stars and the tide was in-between times, quietly readying itself to turn but for the moment just still and almost completely silent.  I walked across the wet grass and down the path, stopping every few steps to listen and glance back over my shoulder to make sure no one was following me.  The stillness seemed fragile somehow and all I could hear was the music and my own whispery footsteps.  I shoved the risk of getting caught further back in my mind and kept walking.

By the time I got to the head of the breakwater and found the source of the music, the whole little adventure was seeming otherworldly and eerily enough, I wasn’t frightened or surprised.  As soon as I saw the gulls – a whole flock of them as far as I could tell -  gathered and rustling quietly in a crude semi-circle around the fiddler, I knew it was Doolittle.  The birds were cooing like doves at his feet, one was even roosting on his shoulder, several more were lined up in neat rows along the pilings and along the roof of the old guard shack.  It was an amazing thing to see, this blind boy, his violin, and an audience of peaceful seagulls but the most peculiar thing of all was how un-peculiar it seemed. 

There were several more dead of night concerts that summer.  I took to leaving the window open to listen and each time the music began, the mouse would stop his chew-through-the-ceiling mission.  He might've just been frightened off but then again, if a blind boy could play a violin and charm birds and a gull could be a music lover, then why not a mouse.