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FOURTEEN
Dad:
In the
final year of our great sad story, mom would spend her weekday mornings in the
backyard, tending to her prize rose bushes.
Roses were a little too hardy for such an avid gardener. They required not half the daily attentions
she would like to have lavished, but it was enough for mom just to pay a
visit. She would talk to them, of
course, and, depending upon how long you’d been gone, she’d let out quiet
musical sighs, or hum, or sing perhaps, and sometimes she’d scare off a tribe
of aphids with a lively burst of descending “Traviata” laughter – Ah...
ha-ha-ha-ha! – and a backhand flick across the leaves.
In the
months from mid-spring to late summer, mom was joined in the backyard by a
mockingbird, a particularly energetic, vocally versatile specimen who liked to
hang out on the telephone wire running from the eaves over the kitchen to the
pole behind the bottlebrush. Using his
long gray tailfeathers to balance himself, he would spend the day rolling out a
running repertoire of whistles, cheeps, clicks and caws. Mother immediately named him Mario del
Mockingbird (after Mario del Monaco, a frequent tenor co-star of Renata Tebaldi’s),
and for years she tried to engage Mario in conversation. For a long time, she failed; Mario seemed
much more interested in the calls of other birds, as well as the occasional
cat, dog, airplane, police siren or creaking gate.
On a
morning in late May, however, she struck gold, claiming to have elicited a
direct response with a little run from Rossini (“Guillaume Tell,” I think),
delivered in a Minnie Mouse tone, much like the traditional marinara chirping
of Susanna in “Figaro.” Once she had established this beachhead, Mom was
determined to cast Mario into a broad scientific exploration of inter-species
intercourse. Through the mornings of
June and July, at least whenever you were gone on your trips, she would pull
out every bird-like sound she could muster, every operatic quote, warm-up
gimmick (mee-may-maw-moh-moo), messin’-around sound effect, mutter, bark or
squeal, and on the infrequent occasions when Mario responded in kind, she would
add it to their growing mutual vocabulary.
Among the operas, Mario displayed a general preference for baroque and
classical – Monteverdi, Purcell, Donizetti, Mozart, Bellini – and rarely
ventured into the romantic. Verdi and
Puccini were particularly ignored, their vocal lines being much too obviously
human, but there were exceptions: a snatch of Strauss from “Der Rosenkavalier,”
for instance, and even a little instrumental interlude from Saint-Saëns’
“Samson et Dalila.”
In late
July, mere weeks before Mario’s annual departure, I tiptoed around the corner
of the house to find Mom on mud-caked knees in front of her pièce de
résistance, a citrusy explosion of orange and yellow blossom known simply as
“Gala.” Mario was perched five feet away, shuffling back and forth like a
Vaudeville soft-shoer atop a trellis of passion vine, and for the next ten
minutes the two of them carried on an amazing tennis match of twitters, beeps
and splendorous songburst. It struck me
that Mario wasn’t precisely echoing Mother’s offerings; it was more like he was
offering birdish continuations, his expert opinions of where the line should
proceed from there.
Being a
nine-year-old boy, I inevitably lost patience – even with a scene straight out
of Disney – and made my presence rudely known by grinding a foot into the
gravel of the garden path. Mother turned
around at an instant, and Mario hopped away to his telephone wire. Far from being irritated, Mom broke into a
broad smile at my approach and spread her arms wide, pulling me into a deep,
rocking embrace.
“Buongiorno,
figlio mio! You surprised me! I was telling Mario del Mockingbird what a
good little boy you were, and you know, he didn’t believe me! He said there could not possibly be a boy
that good in the entire world.”
I didn’t
say anything, partly because, in thrusting my head over my mother’s shoulder, I
had planted my nose straight into the rice-paper folds of the biggest Gala rose
I had ever seen. I inhaled its
overwhelming tangelo scent and tried not to sneeze.
Mother let
out a long, faltering glissando of a sigh and said, “I think sometimes, Billy,
that I am Lucia di Lammermoor, and that Mario is my crazy flute. I will miss him so much when he goes.”
Some years
later, these late-winter mornings of my Northwest exile, my own personal
mockingbird is a willowy redhead with Lauren Bacall’s eyes and a lock on the
remnants of my heart. Now that we are
neighbors, I can see (I can hear) that Gabriella is a musical balloon, letting
out song in a slow leak that lasts the whole day long. Though my cottage sits a good fifty feet from
her room, I awaken to her showertime murmurings and unidentified sprinklings of
phrases that echo off the tiles and sneak out like tiny insects through the
windowscreen (and yes, apparently opera singers do sing in the shower). Through the remainder of her toilette, as she
picks out her day’s wardrobe, she runs through scales in a roughshod manner,
pausing whenever she has to put on a sweater or a shoe, or extend all four
limbs in a cat-like, full-body stretch.
After that,
she paces to the kitchen, from which place emanates the percussive clinkings of
the teapot, water running in the sink, the gathering metal-play of flatware as
she readies her tea and breakfast. The
accompaniment here is a dozen troublesome lines from Tosca, oft-repeated,
hammered in like blacksmith etchings on the orange-hot iron of her memory bank,
half-voice, just for the sound of them, just for the words (next to the sheer
athleticism of the singing, this is what I cannot fathom about opera singers,
the sometimes three-hours-plus of precisely timed, pitched and enunciated
words, words, words). I’ll admit, too,
that this is one phase of my spywork that gets a little irritating, but if I
take it all in as a malleable mass of sound, it doesn’t seem so bad (I’m sure
those who attend Philip Glass concerts do the same).
By this
time, I am ready for some overt reconnaissance, so I pull on a sweatshirt and
take in the thirty-one raindrops between my cottage and Maestro’s kitchen door
for my morning tea and visit. This
particular morning, I find Gabriella in her Pegasus outfit – khaki pants, white
blouse, black tennies – seated at Maestro’s timeworn Baldwin, picking out notes
from her score of Tosca. (The score is
her sole foray into the visual arts, a reckless collage of the singer’s media
triumvirate: highlighter, pencil, post-it note.
Lose it and she would be lost.)
When she
seems satisfied with her studies, she settles into a long, empty stare out the
picture window, the little kid from around the corner tossing the local weekly
onto Maestro’s front drive, seagulls painting a jumbled spiral against the gray
sky, and Gabriella inside, ignoring everything, letting all the neuromusical
signals boil down into the reptilian southlands of her mind. After two or three minutes she blinks twice,
smiles, and greets me as though I have just come through the door, as though I
have not been there patiently waiting for the past fifteen minutes. She accelerates quickly from niceties into
gossip – our favorite morning genre – as she straddles a stool and affords me
bracing country looks from across the counter.
Evidently,
the cast from “Figaro” was one of those rare productions which produced an
absolute void of backstage scandal (which is probably why they’re all still
friends). With “Tosca,” however, they
are threatening to make up for lost time.
The primary issue seems to be our baritone Joe, whose casting as Baron
Scarpia has apparently gone to his head.
The State Ferry regulars have all met Jagoda, the sweet little Serbian
florist from Tacoma with whom Joe has been involved for some five years (and
whose name, pronounced YAH-go-dah, means “strawberry,” which I find entirely
enchanting). Which is why we’re all a
little perturbed at his expanding flirtations with Lynn-Marie, the 18-year-old
Dutch foreign exchange student who is acting as an assistant to our conductor,
Antonio. I can’t entirely blame Joe,
since I myself have laid guilty dirty-old-man eyes on Lynn-Marie and found her
pretty irresistible, but I cannot approve of her as a replacement for Jagoda,
who in any case deserves better treatment.
The less
virulent gossip centers on Diego, the flaming gay tenor who has been
squandering flurries of Italian-mama cheek-pinchings and transparent
compliments on a unanimously hetero men’s chorus. Beyond a little initial discomfort, however,
Diego’s pretty harmless. I myself spent
a post-rehearsal gathering answering numerous leading questions regarding the
non-development of my relationship with the lovely Gabriella (I believe his
words were, “Maybe you’re fishing on the wrong side of the creek, bubbie”), and
was honestly more flattered than offended.
On
occasion, after I drive Gabriella to her job, I accept her offer of a
complimentary latte, sit in the corner under my “Aida” poster, and am quickly
astonished at how completely she has abandoned her hard-ass Cafe Trademark
personality. Whether it be the calling
out of orders, a greeting to regular customers, or just idle chatter with
co-workers, what comes out of Gabriella’s mouth is just as likely to be sung as
spoken. She has clearly reassigned
herself to her true identity, and doesn’t seem the least bit self-conscious
about people’s reactions. It seems as if
her persona is at last catching up to her talent.
The only
truly ugly moments in Gabriella’s mockingbird recitals come every other day,
just before her late-afternoon sessions with Maestro, when she spends a full
twenty minutes letting out the most horrible hacksaw lightning bolt
cat-on-a-rack screams – a process she refers to as “taming the monster.” My
reward for this traumatic domestication process comes soon after, when the full
blossom of Gabriella’s opera-level voice spreads its arms over the grasses and
stones of Cape Umbra (for that is what we call it) and noodles every ‘skeeter
and cricket into sympathetic vibration. It’s
a wonderful thing.
I make a
point at this time of wandering out to Maestro’s deck, rain or shine, to
further my slow progress on his Chartres labyrinth as I listen to the great
cascade of notes filtering from his studio.
My need to listen to this voice is insatiable; given a choice, I would
donate a pint of blood for each five minutes of song. More than a few times I have caught the faces
of children peeking from behind the young cedars at Maestro’s camp-side border,
curious children who heard momentous sounds pouring out of the sky and
scrabbled up the supposedly unscalable cliff to investigate. I pretend not to see them, and not to hear
them later as they return to camp, trying to conjure sounds as big as those
produced by the unseen opera singer.
Tonight, as
Gabriella wraps up the final touches on Tosca’s great lament, “Vissi d’arte”
(she first sang it when she was ten – did I tell you that?), I am out here
placing luminous chunks of white quartz along my carefully penciled-out
pathways. This is her last night of
lessons for a while – the cast is headed into stage rehearsals this Monday –
and I want to reward her with a stroll through these narrow, looping lanes: the
way in for peace, the way out for life.
And I’m
sure you know, Papà, that I am looking for more from this tiny Stonehenge than
the mere entertainment of my neighbors.
I don’t want to worry you, but the expulsion of Bobby’s final
ill-gottens, combined with my one and only telling of his story, have not
brought the great healing that I thought they might. I have to admit that I am a mess of a man,
reduced to playing with tinkertoys, and I can only hope that if I hold on to
these deck-bound dentures long enough, something in this odd, death-strewn life
of mine might come together.
Don’t
worry, mio babbino caro. I am not
thinking Butterfly thoughts. I am the
last Harness left, and to take that from you would be more evil and harsh than
anything else I could think of. But I
need to know: when does the devil’s mark finally get taken up from our family’s
doorstep? When does the singing return?
Please
write to me. I know that you find
writing a great labor, but because of this your words come to me as strong and
well-fashioned stones. I like to pile
them up in the cottage, under a photo of Freni, next to my clock, just to
remind me that you are still around, still with me.
Ciao,
Papà. Take care.
Love,
Billy
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