The ha-ha stuff was the worst. I did what Cecil told me, and she seemed satisfied, but to me it was just a pain in the neck. But then one day something happened. It was like a hair parted in my throat, and a sound came out of it that made me jump. It was like a Caruso record, a big, round high tone that shook the room. I tried it again, and it wouldn’t come. I vocalized overtime that day, trying to get it back, and was about to give up when it came again. I opened it up, and stood there listening to it swell. Then I began going still higher with it. It got an edge on it, like a tenor, but at the same time it was big and round and full. I went up with it until I was afraid to go any higher, and then I checked pitch on the piano. It was an A.
That afternoon, Cecil was so excited by it she almost forgot about payment. “It’s what I’ve been waiting for. But I had no idea it was that good.”
“Say, it sounds great. How did you know it was there?”
“It’s my business to know. What a baritone!”
“To hell with it. Come here.”
“… Sing me one more song.”
All right, if you think I’m a sap, falling in love with my own voice so I could hardly wait to work it out every day, and going nuts about music so I just worked at it on a regular schedule, don’t say I didn’t warn you. And don’t be too hard on me. Remember what I told you: there was not one other thing to do, from morning till night. Not one other thing in the world to do.
I had been at it three or four months when I found out how lousy Doris really was, and maybe that wasn’t a kick. She couldn’t read a note, I had found that out from listening to her work with Lorentz. But the real truth about her I found out by accident. Cecil was so pleased at the way I was coming along that she decided I ought to learn a role, and put me on Germont in Traviata, partly because there wasn’t much of it, and partly because it was all lyric, and I’d have to throttle down on my tendency to beef, which seemed to be my main trouble at the time. That was on a Saturday, and I thought I’d surprise her by having the whole thing learned by Monday. But when I went around to Schirmer’s to get the score, they were closed. It was early summer. I went home and then I happened to remember that Doris was studying it too, so I snitched it off the piano and took it up to the nursery and hid it. Then when she went off to a show that night, I went to bed with it.
I spent that night on the second act, and was just getting it pretty well in my head when I heard Doris come in and then go down again. And what does she do but begin singing Traviata down there, right in that part I had just been going over. Get how it was: she downstairs, singing the stuff, and me upstairs, in bed, holding the book on her. Well, it was murder. In the first place, she had no rhythm. I guess that was what had bothered me before, when I knew something was wrong, and didn’t know what it was. To her, the music was just a string of phrases, and that was all. When she’d get through with one, she’d just go right on to the next one, without even a stop. I tried to hum my part, under my breath, in the big duet, and it couldn’t be done. Her measures wouldn’t beat. I mean, I’d still have two notes to sing, to fill out the measure on my part, and she’d already be on to the next measure on her part. I did nothing but stop and start, trying to keep up. And then, even within the phrase, she didn’t get the notes right. If she had a string of eighth notes, she’d sing them dotted eighths and sixteenths, so it set your teeth on edge. And every time she came to a high note, she’d hold it whether there was a hold marked over it or not, and regardless of what the other voice was supposed to be doing. I lay there and listened to it, and got sorer by the minute. By that time I had a pretty fair idea of how good you’ve got to be in music before you’re any good at all, and who gave her the right to high-hat me on her fine artistic soul, and then sing like that? Who said she had an artistic soul, the way she butchered a score? But right then I burst out laughing. That was it. She didn’t have any artistic soul. All she had was a thirst for triumphs. And I, the sap, had fallen for it.
I heard her come in the bedroom, and hid the score under my pillow. She came in after a while, and she was stark naked, except for a scarf around her neck with a spray of orchids pinned to it. I knew then that something was coming. She walked around and then went over and stood looking out the window. “You better watch yourself. Catching cold is no good for the voice.”
“It’s so hot. I can’t bear anything on.”
“Don’t stand too close to that window.”
“… Remind me to call up Hugo for my Traviata score. I wanted it just now, and couldn’t find it. He must have taken it.”
“Wasn’t that Traviata you were singing?”
“Oh, I know it, so far as that goes. But I hate to lose things … I was running over a little of it for Jack Leighton. He thinks he can get me on at the Cathedral. You know he owns some stock.”
Jack Leighton was the guy she had gone to the theatre with, and one of her string. I had found out who they all were by watching Lorentz at her parties. He knew her a lot better than I did, Cecil was right about that, and it gave me some kind of a reverse-English kick to check up on her by watching his face while she’d be off in a corner making a date with some guy. Lorentz squirmed, believe me he did. I wasn’t the only one.
“That would be swell.”
“Of course, it’s only a picture house, but it would be a week’s work, and they don’t pay badly. It would be something coming in. And it wouldn’t be bad showmanship for them. After all—I am prominent.”
“Socialite turns pro, hey?”
“Something like that. Except that by now I hope I can consider myself already a pro.”
“That was Jack you went out with?”
“Yes … Was it all right to wear his orchids?”
“Sure. Why not?”
She went over and sat down. I was pretty sure the orchids were my cue to get sore, but I didn’t. Another night I would have, but Traviata had done something to me. I knew now I was as good as she was, and even better, in the place where she had always high-hatted me, and knew that no matter what she said about the orchids, she couldn’t get my goat. I even acted interested in them, the wrong way: “How many did he send?”
“Six. Isn’t it a crime?”
“Oh well. He can afford them.”
Her foot began to kick. I wasn’t marching up to slaughter the way I always marched. She didn’t say anything for a minute, and then she did something she never did in a fight with me, because I always saved her the trouble and did it first. I mean, she lost her temper. The regular way was for me to get sore, and the sorer I got, the more angelic, and sad, and persecuted she got. But this time it was different, and I could hear it in her voice when she spoke. “—Even if we can’t.”
“Why sure we can.”
“Oh no we can’t. No more, I’m sorry to say.”
“If orchids are what it takes to make you happy, we can afford all you want to wear.”
“How can we afford orchids, when I’ve pared our budget to the bone, and—”
“We got a budget?”
“Of course we have.”
“First I heard of it.”
“There are a lot of things you haven’t heard of. I scrimp, and save, and worry, and still I’m so frightened I can hardly sleep at night. I only hope and pray that Jack Leighton can do something for me—even if he’s like every other man, and wants his price.”
“What price?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Well, what the hell. He’s human.”
“Leonard! You can say that?”
“Sure.”
“Suppose he demanded his price—and I paid it?”
“He won’t.”
“Why not, pray?”
“Because I outweigh him by forty pounds, and can beat hell out of him, and he knows it.”
“You can lie there, and look at me, wearing another man’s orchids,
almost on my knees to him to give me work that we so badly need—you can actually take it that casually—”
She raved on, and her voice went to a kind of shrieking wail, and I did some fast thinking. When I said what I did about outweighing Jack, it popped into my mind that there was something funny about those orchids, and that it was a funny thing for him to do, send six orchids to Doris, even if I didn’t outweigh him.
“And you won’t.”
“Don’t be so sure. I’m getting desperate, and—”
“In the first place, you never paid any man his price, because you’re not that much on the up-and-up with them. In the second place, if you want to pay it, you just go right ahead and pay. I won’t pretend I’ll like it, but I’m not going down on my knees to you about it. And in the third place, they’re not his orchids.”
“They’re—what makes you say that?”
“I just happen to remember. When Jack called me up a while ago—”
“He—?”
“Oh yeah, he called me up. During the intermission. To tell me, in case I missed my cigarette case, that he had dropped it in his pocket by mistake.”
It wasn’t true. Jack hadn’t called me up. But I knew Doris never went out during an intermission, and that Jack can’t live a half hour without a smoke, so I took a chance. I could feel things breaking my way, and I meant to make the most of it.
“—And just as he hung up, he made a gag about the swell flowers I buy my wife. I had completely forgotten it until just this second.”
“Leonard, how can you be so—”
“So you went out and ordered the orchids yourself, didn’t you? And rubbed them in his face all night, just to make him feel like a bum. And now you come home and tell me he sent them, just to make me feel like a bum. … And it turns out we can afford them, doesn’t it?”
“He meant to send some, he told me so—”
“He didn’t.”
“He did, he did, he did! And if I just felt I had to have something to cheer me up—”
“Suppose you go in and go to bed. And shut up. See if that will cheer you up.”
She had begun parading around, and now she snapped on the light. “Leonard, you have a perfectly awful look on your face!”
“Yeah, I’m bored. Just plain bored. And to you, I guess a bored man does look pretty awful.”
She went out and slammed the door with a terrific bang. It was the first time I had ever taken a decision over her. I pulled out Traviata again. It fell open to the place where Alfredo throws the money in Violetta’s face, after she gets him all excited by pretending to be in love with somebody else. It crossed my mind that Alfredo was a bit of a cluck.
5
It was early in October that I got the wire from Rochester. It had been a lousy summer. In August, Doris took the children up to the Adirondacks, and I wanted to go, but I hated the way she would have asked for separate rooms. So I stayed home, and learned two more roles, and played around with Cecil. I got a letter from Doris, after she had been up there a week, saying Lorentz was there too, because of course she couldn’t even write a letter without putting something in it to make you feel rotten. The Lorentz part, it wasn’t so good, but I gritted my teeth and hung on. She came home, and around the end of September Cecil went away. She was booked for a fall tour, and wouldn’t be back until November. I was surprised how I missed her, and how the music wasn’t much fun without her. Then right after that, Doris went away again. She was to sing in Wilkes-Barre. That was a phoney, of course, and all it amounted to was that she had friends there that belonged to some kind of a tony breakfast club, and they had got her invited to sing there.
The day after she left, I got the telegram from Cecil, dated Rochester:
MY TENOR HAS GOT THE PIP STOP IF YOU LOVE ME FOR GOD’S SAKE HOP ON A PLANE QUICK AND COME UP HERE STOP BRING OLD ITALIAN ANTHOLOGIES ALSO OLD ENGLISH ALSO SOME OPERATIC STUFF ESPECIALLY PAGLIACCI TRAVIATA FACTOTUM AND MASKED BALL ALSO CUTAWAY COAT GRAY PANTS FULL EVENING SOUP AND FISH AND PLENTY OF CLEAN SHIRTS STOP LOVE
CECIL
It caught me at the office about ten in the morning, and the messenger waited, and as soon as I read it my heart began to pump, not from excitement, but from fear. Because up to then it had been just a gag, anyway on my end of it. But this brought me face to face with it: Did I mean it enough to get up before people and sing, or not? I stood there looking at it, and then I thought, well what the hell? I called the Newark airport, found they had a plane leaving around noon, and made a reservation. Then I wrote a wire to Doris telling her I had been called out of town on business, and another one to Cecil, telling her I’d be there. Then I grabbed all the music I might need, went over to the bank and drew some money, hustled up to the house and packed, and grabbed a cab.
She met me at the airport, kissed me, and bundled me into a car she had waiting. “It was sweet of you to come. My but I’m glad to see you.”
“Me too.”
“Terribly glad.”
“But what happened? I didn’t even know you had a tenor.”
“Oh, you have to have an assistant artist, to give a little variety. Sometimes the accompanist fills in with some Liebestraum, but my man won’t play solo. So I let the music bureau sell me a tenor. He was no good. He was awful in Albany, and he got the bird last night in Buffalo, so when he turned up this morning with a cold I got terribly alarmed for his precious throat and sent him home. That’s all.”
“What’s the bird?”
“Something you’ll never forget, if you ever hear it.”
“Suppose they give me the bird?”
We had been riding along on the back seat, her hand in mine, just two people that were even gladder to see each other than they knew they were going to be, and I expected her to laugh and say something about my wonderful voice, and how they would never give me the bird. She didn’t. She took her hand away, and we rode a little way without saying anything, and then she looked me all over, like she was measuring everything I had. “Then I’ll have to get somebody else.”
“Yeah?”
“… They can give you the bird.”
“Hey, let’s talk about something pleasant.”
“It’s a tough racket.”
“Maybe I better go home.”
“They can give you the bird, and they can give it to anybody. I think you’ll win, but you’ve got to win, don’t make any mistake about that. You’ve got to lam it in their teeth and make them like it.”
“So.”
“You can go home if you want to, and if that’s how you feel about it, you’d better. But if you do, you’re licked for good.”
“I’m here. I’ll give it a fall.”
“Look at me now.”
“I’m looking.”
“Don’t let that applause fool you, when you come on. They’re a pack of hyenas, they’re always a pack of hyenas, just waiting to tear in and pull out your vitals, and the only way you can keep them back is to lick them. It’s a battle, and you’ve got to win.
“When is the concert?”
“Tonight.”
“Ouch.”
“Did you hear me?”
“I heard you.”
When we got to the hotel I took a room and sent up my stuff, and then we went up to her suite. A guy was there, reading a newspaper. “Mr. Wilkins, who plays our accompaniments. Mr. Borland, Ray. Our baritone.”
We shook hands, and he fished some papers out of his pocket. “The printer’s proofs of the program. It came while you were out, Cecil. He’s got to have it back, with corrections, by five o’clock. I don’t see anything, but you better take a look at it.”
She passed one over to me. It gave me a funny feeling, just to look at it. I’ve still got that proof, and here it is, in case you’re interested, [see below]:
JOHN FREDERICK JEVONS
Miss Cecil Carver
SOPRANO
In a Song Recital
AT
THE EASTMAN THEATRE
Thursday Evening, October 5, at 8:30
Leonard Borland, Baritone
Ray Wilkins, Accompanist
Cavatina
ROSSINI
Fac Ut Portern Christi Mortem,
from the Stabat Mater
Miss Carver
Three Songs from the 17th Century
CARISSIMI
Vittoria, Mio Core
SCARLATTI, A.
O Cessate Di Piagarmi
CALDARA
Come Raggio Di Sol
Mr. Borland
Songs
Brahms
Der Schmied
Von Eviger Liebe
An Die Nachtigall
Miss Carver
Songs
SCHUBERT
Halt
Auf Dem Flusse
Der Wetterfahne
Gretchen Am Spinnrade
The Complete Crime Stories Page 11