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TWELVE
We
journeyed to the great brick eye of the new Museum of Modern Art, which may not
have been the best place to go for “beautiful things,” necessarily – but there
were certainly things that intrigued.
Arriving on the third floor, we were greeted with the sight of an infant
on the ground, placed at the center of a gold star, surrounded by concentric
rings of faceless, coal-black standard poodles – hundreds of them, identical,
standing at perfect symmetrical attention, all of them facing directly toward
the baby. Their neutral expressions gave
no great hint at whether they were on guard or preparing for attack (contrary
to the modern stereotype, standard poodles can be loyal, even fierce,
watchdogs). Gabriella found it a little
eerie, but for my part I could not keep my eyes off of it. After ten minutes of this careful study,
Gabriella cried uncle and dragged me off to the permanent collection, where our
first sighting was of a huge, gaudy ceramic sculpture of Michael Jackson and
his chimpanzee, Bubbles.
Our day and
our energies were very short, but a late morning’s sleep the next day inspired us
to venture out for a round of Christmas shopping at Union Square. Along one of the small side alleyways,
Gabriella found a little fashion store that specialized in accessories, and was
soon waving her arms like Leonard Bernstein over a table of half-priced
scarves. The scarf, of course, is the de
rigeur rehearsal-hall item for any serious opera singer – for reasons of
function as well as style – so to Gabriella this was the mother lode, the
answer to most of her Christmas-shopping needs.
She bought a different scarf for each and every principal from “Figaro,”
taking a full hour and a half to carefully weigh such matters as coloring,
personal taste, even roles played.
Jersey, for example, was quickly matched with a nautical silk number the
exact sun-yellow and royal blue as Cherubino’s first-act waistcoat and
trousers. Joe, who had made no secret
that he was dying to play Otello, would soon find himself cloaked in a banner
of deep umber, with wild slashes of burnt sienna straight out of Morocco. As for Maestro, ever the classicist, he was
destined to have his neck wrapped in a silver number with embroidered art-deco
geometrics of gun-metal gray, with a backside of soft raven-black fabric.
After she
had filled up a large bag with this textilian loot, Gabriella banished me from
the store – I suspect because I was her next target. I went out into the steel-gray overcast and
cut the square in a diagonal path to the lobby of the St. Francis.
I stationed myself in a high-backed armchair upholstered in blue and
gold flowers, ordered a martini and listened to an old black pianist playing
jazzified renditions of Christmas songs: “Winter Wonderland,” “Let It Snow,”
“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” and, believe it or not, “Why Do the
Nations So Furiously Rage Together?” from Handel’s “Messiah.” All done with a jaunty swing beat – I’m still
not sure how he pulled that off, but he did.
It wasn’t until a half hour later, as I was
paying my bill and heading off for the Square, that I recalled my big fat lies
to Stephanie two nights before at the Opera House. I had inadvertently placed myself right in
the line of fire, right where I had told her I would be spending the
weekend. Nevertheless, I escaped without
incident, met Gabriella at our appointed rendezvous at the ice skating rink,
and took her for a dinner of seafood at Pier 39.
On the ride
back to the hotel, Gabriella seemed to recognize the haze of dark memory still
gathered around my head like a cumulus baseball cap. Her eyes brightened, and she suggested we
cancel our plane tickets, rent a car and dawdle our way up the coast back to
Bainbridge. At this point, I was
agreeable to just about anything, I enjoyed the idea of sea breezes wafting in
through the car window, and I also thought it sweet that Gabriella would think
of new ways to rid me of my money, even though she was now aware of its evil
origin. So I said yes.
We started
out on a foggy Monday morning, and by the time we reached the northern end of
the Golden Gate Bridge, I could already feel the layers of crust loosening on
my skin. By the time we reached Gualala,
on the Sonoma coast, the sun had kicked off its morning blankets of cloud and
was giving us a full bath. We tooled up
a lush green detour past hillside fields of cows and sheep, sheep and
cows. Gabriella popped in a CD of Renata
Tebaldi’s favorite arias and sang along full blast, creating a kind of
stereophonic sound not available in any store, singing “Selva opaca” from
“Guglielmo Tell” as we tooled onto the farmland flats in search of
Mendocino. I noticed how the sound of La
Tebaldi and La Gabriella were beginning to meld, how her voice was beginning to
take on the same buttery breadth and rounded low tones of our favorite
Italiana. I counted myself a lucky
ragazzo to be in their presence. Still,
it was going to take something more than great singing to crumble the tectonic
plates of my brother’s sins.
A half hour
later, I was wrapping my road-sore fingers around a downhill curve toward Fort
Bragg, listening to Sinatra singing “The Summer Wind,” when I spotted a large,
brown, rather whale-shaped creature embarking on a low flight just over the
road, barely clearing an oncoming sportscar.
Twenty seconds later, as we were passing that identical spot, I glanced
to the roadside just in time to catch a blue-green blob heading directly for
the side window of our minivan. The blob
hit with a loud thwack! and shook Gabriella from her shallow slumber.
“What the
hell was that?”
“I’m not
positive,” I said. “But I think we’ve
just been hit by a turkey”
It must
have been a glancing blow; a look in the rear-view mirror didn’t reveal any
feathered corpses, and a few miles later, when we stopped to inspect our
vehicle, we were unable to find any blood, plumage, or even a recognizable point
of impact. We concluded that our fowl
flyer had somehow bounced clear of us and continued his way across the
road. (We confirmed our story later with
a local bed-and-breakfast proprietor who said there were, indeed, wild turkeys
in the area, and that they were, indeed, excessively stupid.)
In the end,
I think there was something about this surprise attack that knocked something
loose in my guts, some little tremor of silly haphazard poultry terrorism
forcing me to acknowledge that, outside of mathematics, things are not
obligated to come to some kind of reasonable solution, that one side of the
equal sign does not always come out the same as the other. Sometimes, for no reason at all, wild turkeys
fly into the side of your minivan.
I also
found myself being followed around by writing instruments. No kidding.
We climbed to the top of a seastack at Patrick’s Point, just north of
Eureka, and I found a ball-point pen.
Sitting on a seawall outside the botanical gardens in Charleston,
Oregon, I looked down to find a hunter-green pencil etched with merry silver
snowmen. Outside an ice cream parlor in
Florence, just beyond the Dunes National Monument, I opened my door to find a
fountain pen waiting for me on the asphalt, mapped out in finely drawn portraits
of kitty-cats.
What was
all this supposed to mean? I didn’t
know, and I didn’t actually care, but I was thankful for the intrigue, the
distraction of details, and the little homeless tubes of ink waiting for my
arrival, inviting me to write someone a letter.
We
concluded our second day of driving at Newport, two and a half hours
south-southwest of Portland, and in the morning we walked the widest flattest
beach I’ve ever encountered, a veritable desert of a beach, a dozen football
fields to the water. We walked until our
feet ached, until we hit a ring of rocky tidepools with mussel shells the size
of small fans and anemones tight as fists, pockmarked with shellbits, waiting
for the next tide to loosen up their flowered innards.
* * *
I wish I
could say that all of these inobvious wonders turned me into some kind of
constellation-watching, rock-collecting, flower-naming optimist, but once we
returned to Bainbridge I was bound to slip back downhill. My mother’s story, after all, had been tragic
but noble, 100 percent sympathetic, a prime candidate for non-profit grants
from the American Catharsis Society. My
brother’s story – that was different. It
was poisonous, and once spoken was bound to set off nasty chemical reactions
with Methuselan half-lives. I was in for
the mother of long hauls.
For one
thing, the winter mist had steadily gained weight until it worked its way up to
winter rain, dripping unceasingly from the sky for days at a stretch, too warm
to produce entertaining snow, too cold to do anyone any damn good. I stayed in my little cottage and listened to
tape after tape of Wagner from the Bainbridge Library; I also tried to read
several classic volumes that Maestro had stashed away in his closet – “Walden
Pond,” “Bleak House,” “The Brothers Karamazov” – but consistently lost interest
at or near the hundredth page.
The worst
of it came in mid-December, when Gabriella left for Vancouver, where she had
picked up a gig singing Rosalinda in a New Year’s Eve production of “Die
Fledermaus.” Even though it was only a single performance, it was one of the
company’s biggest fundraisers, so the singers were obligated to rehearse as if
they were presenting a crisply professional month-long run. I received postcards every two or three days,
and on Christmas day I opened her present, a beautiful pair of replica art-deco
opera glasses, modeled on a New York design from the thirties. But nothing could replace her voice.
I knew what
I needed; I needed work. But the one job
I had – those rambling plank walkways just outside my window, crying out for
the companionship of hedges – was something I could not possibly undertake in
this kind of weather.
That
Thursday night, I arrived at the low tide of my exile. I had wasted the entire day in an on-again,
off-again slumber, aided in no small order by a completely non-descript
overcast, dark enough to wipe all sense of time from the sky. Finally the dark had turned to nighttime,
and I was passing the time feeding logs into my woodstove, staring at the
smoked-over orange glass with dead, nerveless eyes. I had just turned on Maestro’s old radio,
searching for a broadcast of “Aida” from the Met, when a series of crisp,
rhythmic tappings came at the door. It
was the landlord himself – I could make out his long fishhook nose and the
sharp, rough outline of his mouth through the criss-cross puzzle of the door’s
tiny window. His very appearance brought
a smile to me.
“Maestro! Buona sera!
Come in – I have a fine fire for you.”
“Bene,
bene,” said Maestro. He walked slowly to
a rocking chair, measuring each step, left and right and left, and slid himself
into it by careful two-inch descents.
“You
will... excuse me,” he said, just above a whisper. “I have just FINISHED... my last...
lesson. I am very... tired. It is that RODRIGO. Always below the note, NEVER... on top. He thinks he is a JAZZ... singer, he thinks
he is SINATRA. He can creep up from
under like he is singing ‘Witchcraft,” and the girls swoon. He is a NOTE-hunter, he is a Spanish cat, he
is a SHARK. He will be good,
however. This much I know. His throat has been kissed by God. That is what... I tell myself. Oy.”
Maestro
slumped back in his chair, rocked it back a few inches and took a long,
gathering breath (you could almost hear him counting off the beats, as he would
with one of his students). Then he
passed his eyes over to where I sat, on a stool, next to my woodstove altar.
“And you,
my friend. How are you? Come stai?”
I weighed
Maestro’s questions in either hand – the Italian question, the English question
(they are never quite the same) – and decided it was best for me not to
lie. This was Maestro Umbra, after all,
and like Santa he knew things. He only
asked as a matter of etiquette.
“I am not
so well, Maestro.”
“You miss
Gabriella.”
“Yes. And there are other things – but I cannot
tell you.”
Maestro
blinked slowly. I could see the
wonderful old veins on his eyelids, the inside that comes out with age. “I understand these things.” He gathered his
hands and held his long fingers pad-to-pad under his chin. “Gabriella is your angel, is she not?”
I picked up
a section of birch from the woodpile – quarter-rest slashes of black on
startling chalk-white bark – and drew it into my lap like a small child. “My angel, my muse, my siren. I cannot seem to find a single mythological
figure to encompass her, Professore. How
would I put this? I am a man who is
constructed of Swiss cheese; I started out just fine, but as I matured there
came certain agents, certain yeasts and bacteria, that caused me to form great
gaping holes. Gabriella’s voice – and
Gabriella herself – she helped fill them in.
Not completely – I’m afraid nothing could do that – but she makes them
smaller, she enables me to walk around like a facsimile of a real human being,
and most of all, she gives me something to believe in.”
Maestro
nodded slowly, so slowly that I could separate the ups from the downs. I cranked open the woodstove and settled my
birch baby over the coals, watching the white bark take flame. When I turned back Maestro had shut his
eyelids, but the pressure of my attention brought them back up.
“I know for
a FACT... that Gabriella is an angel,” he said.
“BECAUSE... because... she wanted to cancel... her opera, this
‘Fledermaus,’ so that she might stay with you.
You have opened up an old wound for her sake, she said, and it will not
heal... quickly. And I will tell you
this, Guglielmo: this ‘Fledermaus,’ it
will make Gabriella MUCH more money than she makes at the café, or at the State
Ferry Opera, and it is a good company, a good contact. THAT... is how much she cares for you. But ME... I don’t care for you quite so
much. Because I tell Gabriella NO... you
cannot go back on your word to the company – that will TAINT... your
reputation, and I... will not allow that to happen. But you go, I tell her, and I... will keep an
eye on your friend.”
His hand
flared up in a sweep worthy of a Mozart overture.
“SO. Here I am, and I
have a story for you. Gabriella tells me
you saw Licia Albanese in San Francisco.”
“Yes. We did.”
“Good! I will tell you a story about Albanese. In Italia, you see, opera singers... they are
like Olympic gymnasts. We find them at a
very young age, and we bring them UP... in the art. That is why they are so good. That is also why, in AMERICA... you have
great baseball players, no?”
“Si.”
“I know
this, because this summer I see a game of Little League. Very impressive. Well.
ALBANESE... was apprenticed to a small touring company, and by the age
of SEVENTEEN... she had learned four or five major roles. Not PERFORMED them, you see, but she knew
them. Now. She was on tour with this company, watching
the older singers perform, studying the way they move, and they sing, and one
night, in Parma, I think, she was in the audience, watching BUTTERFLY... by my
teacher, Puccini. After the second act,
the teacher of Albanese... he comes to her, and he says, LICIA... the soprano
has fallen ill, and YOU... will sing the third act. So, ALBANESE goes backstage, puts on the costume,
and she sings the third act.
BEAU-tifully! One of the
TOUGHEST... acts in all of opera. But
you know this. And that was the first
time she sang a role, EVER. It
eventually became her signature role – she sang it hundreds of times. But she is so PETITE, you see, and her dark
features, and light voice – she is the perfect Cio-Cio-San. Now... let me see your palate.”
“Pardon?”
“Your
palate, Guglielmo. Open your mouth wide,
like the dentist, and tilt your head back.”
What could
I do? I did what I was told, and Maestro
made a careful study, leaning forward in his chair to get just the right angle
(though I couldn’t tell for certain, as I was staring at the ceiling).
“Ah, you
see, this I know, I know this.
Gabriella, she tells me you are not a singer, but I can tell, the way
you talk – and your palate. You have a
tenor’s palate, nice, high, even palate.
And this much more – you have a singer’s soul. You are made of Swiss cheese; this is what I
hear. And you love the opera, no?”
“The opera
is my church.”
“Bene! Bene.
You should come to me for a lesson.
I will MAKE you a singer. I will
BRING... you a voice.”
“Perhaps I
will,” I said, as I unlatched the stove and gave the coals a punch with the
poker, for no good reason. “But tell me,
Maestro. That story about Albanese. No offense, but... was there a point to that story?”
Maestro’s
eyes flashed in the firelight and he gave me his stage smile, the lips drawn
away from his gums like an oversize sweater.
“Some
stories have a point, Billy. SOME... are
for entertainment. THAT story –
entertainment. But you take from it what
you will. NOW... I have a job for you,
because I KNOW... you need a job. I
would like for you to make something.”
He reached
into the inside pocket of his tan corduroy jacket and handed me a fold of
papers. On one of them was an intricate
circular design, broad lines like a plate of fettuccine, looping back and back
on themselves until they came to a small, clover-shaped clearing at the center.
“I know
that you will make a labyrinth... with hedges, in the spring. But now, I would like you to work on
this. It is from the famous cathedral,
the Chartres, in France. It is for
meditation, for the spirit. It is for my
singers, when they come for lessons, to take them out of the world, into the
music – and for after, when I have worn them out, perhaps made them angry. I do that sometimes. Here.
I will give you this. The REST...
it is up to you. Let me know anything
else you will need.”
I traced
the path of Maestro’s strands with my fingers, then looked at him and
smiled. “Thank you, Maestro. Grazie.
I will start right away.”
Photo by MJV
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