Starry-Eyed

by Ted Michael

  Needless to say, there’s not one drop of Irish blood in George’s brawny, swarthy, nonloquacious physique. He has thick, blunt fingers, strong and reliable. Too thick to dance along the neck of a fiddle like pale fluttering birds, the way Niall’s do. But his arms are strong enough to lift a tired woman’s life into an easier place. So I can’t blame her one bit, really.

  . . . . .

  The room is thick with smoke by now, and somebody’s rigging up a microphone to the amp. I catch a glimpse of myself in an open spot on the hazy mirror on the back wall, my reflection slivered in between a poster for the Irish Rugby Football Union and a list of the day’s specials. My father’s daughter? Sure, I guess there’s a resemblance. He’s got curly dark hair shot with wires of gray, uncombable. A broad pale face, like mine, and milky blue eyes capped by high, dark eyebrows that give him a look of perpetual happy surprise. Maybe that’s why everyone likes him at first glance. He always looks glad to see you. Don’t be fooled. It’s just the eyebrows.

  People are always crazy about Niall when they meet him. Then they get to know him a bit, and they like him well enough. After a few years they grit their teeth. Full-on abandonment comes soon after, sure as a hangover follows a binge, but it doesn’t matter. He’s always collecting new followers. Niall looks soft, like a pushover, a sentimental sap even, the way he caresses his fiddle and cries like a baby at an old song, but he’s steely at the core. All right, he’s a proper bastard sometimes.

  He calls it being demanding. He’s “demanding” of me and Evelyn, and of his students, and his women, and himself too, I suppose. Says high expectations are the only true compliment. Says it’s the only way to achieve greatness. I used to think he was a hero, a grand whatever-it-is. Visionary. But you can’t fool me, not anymore. Mean is mean, there’s no need to tie a bow on it and call it something respectable.

  . . . . .

  “‘Danny Boy’! ‘Danny Boy’!” They’re like vultures on a carcass, this crowd. Evelyn comes behind me and puts her hands on my shoulders. She smells minty, like she always does. It’s an occupational hazard.

  “Leave Fiona be,” Evelyn scolds the table. “She has school tomorrow. She needs to go home and to bed.”

  A roar of protest.

  “Just one song, love, before you go. It’s Niall’s birthday! Comes but once a year!”

  “She’ll wreck her voice singing in all this din, trying to be heard over your craic.” Evelyn smiles her disturbingly white smile, but she’s dead serious. (The smile’s another occupational hazard; her boss gives her free bleachings so he won’t have to pay her fair wages.) Always bossing me around, that Evie, ever since our mum moved to Tampa with George. His Mediterranean blood craved the heat, he’d said. Poor, fair, freckled Mum. She must keep the sunscreen companies in business down there. “Leave her be, I say.”

  “Sing one for Niall. Do, Fiona!”

  I look at the man, my father dear, who seems completely indifferent about whether I sing, go home, or do a striptease on the bar.

  Evelyn gives it her last, best shot. “Don’t be selfish, now. She’s to sing for a famous teacher tomorrow. She shouldn’t even be here, out so late. She’s supposed to be home resting her voice.”

  Supposed to be? Supposed to be? Well, sorry, Evie, but that’s all I need to hear. I get up and head for the makeshift stage, and the cheers start all over again.

  I take the microphone in my hand. And Niall grins so everyone can see his paternal pride, and he laughs too loud and drapes his arm around a girl not much older than Evelyn, Terry, I think her name is, and she looks at him adoringly and they kiss with beery lips while I sing. Can’t refuse a fellow on his birthday, right? Poor Terry. Her song of love is just beginning, and it’ll be over before the second verse.

  . . . . .

  I sing until the wee hours, you might say, meaning I sing until I have to wee. Only my bladder gets me offstage. I’m underage, of course, but no one tosses Niall Kilcommons’s daughter out of the private party room at Kelly Ryan’s pub on the man’s own birthday. Or looks askance when she pours herself a drink from the beer pitcher, either.

  I sing everything everyone asks for, and more. “Danny Boy,” oh boy, did they hear “Danny Boy.” Four or five times, at least. Me and songs is like my uncle Frank and a pint. Should’ve stopped at two, but I didn’t.

  Niall keeps up the jolly act for the first song, and the second. On the third his face locks up into a mask. The smile is frozen in place, but his mind has gone elsewhere. And why isn’t it him with the microphone, anyway? Him in the spotlight, instead of me? That’s his natural position in life. Just ask him, he’ll tell you.

  . . . . .

  By the time Evie drags me home, my hair stinks of pub and my voice is a rasp. I sleep in my makeup, too lazy to wash up. In the morning, I scrub my raccoon face in the shower and emerge in a girlish cloud of Herbal Essences. I didn’t dare try to make a sound, even in the soothing steam of the shower. I knew I’d done myself in.

  I get to school a bit late, just in time to hear the bells of doom tolling. My best friend, Lily, looks at me with big wild eyes as I slip into my seat. She’s the type who’d show up to vocal technique class twenty minutes early on the day the great Sabrina Krause was coming. She’s the type who’d have risen at 6 a.m. to warm up at home, in case she got picked by the great, famous Sabrina Krause to do a demonstration. She’s the type to be punctual, prepared, and in good voice, on the day the great, famous, world-renowned soprano Sabrina Krause was coming to our snooty, private, hard-to-get-into performing arts high school to give the voice majors a master class, which is all we’d heard about, over and over and over again, for three Sabrina Krause—obsessed weeks.

  Me, I am not the same type that Lily is. Obviously. And I don’t just mean that her family pays and I’m on scholarship, although knowing this fact makes the epic scale of my stupidity all the more clear.

  “Dammit, Fee!” Her whisper’s so sharp, it’s like a poke in the ribs. “How could you forget?”

  I give her my best “hey, I’m a jerk” shrug. Still daren’t speak. Anyway, Mr. Scharf, head of the vocal studies department, is about to introduce the woman of the hour. Doubtless his knees are trembling in his trousers (well, something in his trousers is trembling, I bet) to stand so close to the twinkling aura of greatness.

  “. . . made her debut at La Scala . . . starred at the Metropolitan Opera . . . recordings . . . concerts . . . Grammy Awards . . .” Blah blah blah, she’s famous and we’re not, we get it. And then: “It is an astounding privilege for us here at the Professional Academy for the Performing Arts to welcome the one and only, the legendary Sabrina Krause.”

  “Legendary? I thought she was mythical,” I wisecrack to Lily, or try to, but my voice is a small dry pea stuck to the back of my throat. I’m left making jokes in my own head. The manticore, Sabrina Krause. The griffin, Sabrina Krause! Mythical creatures, see? I think it’s hilarious. Poor Lily doesn’t know what she’s missing.

  Everybody claps, and the unicorn Sabrina Krause herself takes the stage. Tall, straight as a ladder-back chair, with about as much meat on her bones. Carries a cane but doesn’t seem to lean on it much. Probably uses it for delivering beatings, I say to myself, wittily. It’s truly a shame Lily can’t hear what’s in my brain. She’d be in stitches.

  The minotaur Sabrina Krause nods in slow motion and sits her skinny arse on the piano bench. No words of intro from her, she’s all business. We stand up, and she runs us through vocal warm-ups. We bzzz, we brrr, we nyah nyah nyah.

  Well, everyone else bzzzs and brrrs. I just make the faces. My throat’s too raw to produce any sound. I feel like one of those fire-eaters at the circus—an incompetent one, the kind who sets her own throat on fire and has be doused with a hose in front of all the terrified children. Sorry about that, kids!

  Scharf takes the mic again. “As you know, Miss Krause has opted to teach demonstration lessons, rather than give a lecture. In the interests of being fair, I
am simply going to pull names out of a hat.” He smiles as he holds up a big straw boater left over from last year’s production of The Music Man. “Don’t worry, you’re all in here,” he says, and reaches in.

  I stare at the hat with all my might, trying to make it ignite with the pure force of my eyeballs. A name is drawn, a paper unfurls.

  “Fiona Kilcommons, to the stage, please.”

  All those “Danny Boys,” yet the luck of the Irish was nowhere near. I’m halfway to the stage before I think of appendicitis. Appendicitis! Brilliant. First I’ll double over, then groan, then collapse, then vomit, then they’ll call an ambulance. . . .

  Too late. I’m already on the stage, grinning like a dolt and trying not to catch Lily’s horrified eye. Krause plays a simple arpeggio, one measly octave, right in the sirloin of my range. “On the syllable nay, please,” she says. “Nay-nay-nay-nay-nay-nay-nay. Ready?”

  I nod. She begins to play. I open my mouth. Out comes a hoarse croak, full of phlegm. Then a few tight, pitchy nays and a top note that’s mostly air, until it cracks completely.

  Her hands fly up as if the piano keys have suddenly turned into snakes. “Horrible, horrible! What have you done to your voice? Are you sick?”

  “Not—ahem—not exactly.” I sound like a man. Crap.

  She tips her head and peers at me over her glasses. Cute frames, I think. Expensive-looking. Little sparkly bits in the corners.

  “You were yelling at a rock concert, hmm?” She sneers. “Or a football game?”

  “No, ma’am. I sang at a party last night. It was my father’s birthday,” I add, like that’ll help.

  She waves a hand, signaling that I’m no longer worthy of her disdain. “Sit down. You cannot sing today.” She swivels sideways on the piano bench and looks at Mr. Scharf. “May I have another student, please? This time, one that isn’t broken?”

  Scharf’s face turns red at that little zinger. The man’s having a hot flash of shame thanks to me. “Of course, Miss Krause.” Hastily he pulls another name from the hat. “Anthony Rutigliano,” he calls out.

  Our resident Italian tenor jumps to his feet, both hands in the air. Did he really just double fist pump getting picked to sing? The lameness has no limit.

  As he bounds up the stairs to the stage, the succubus Krause gives me a hard look. Then she bows her head to the keyboard and plays a rapid two-octave scale that drips with sarcasm. My exit music, I guess.

  . . . . .

  For the rest of the day, no one dares look me in the eye, since we all know humiliation is contagious. Now it’s half past two. I’m almost out the door of the school. Almost. So close to being out—

  “Fiona!” Mr. Scharf bellows. He’s right there by the exit. No escape.

  I slink over, and he hands me a folded note. Thick ivory paper, big “Krause” at the top in flowing script.

  I read. “‘Send the broken singer to my studio. Saturday morning, nine o’clock.’” The address is written below. Central Park West. Fancy.

  “You’re going,” he says.

  “Nine o’clock on Saturday is kind of early.” No way am I facing the dragon in her lair. She hates me. She probably wants to kill me with that cane, and use the polished shards of my bones to add more sparkles to her eyeglass frames.

  “Consider it a mandatory make-up class for the one you blew off today by being unprepared.” Then, with a different kind of heat in his voice, “What an opportunity, Fiona! Sabrina Krause asked for you. You have to go. If you don’t . . .” He doesn’t need to say it. We both know he’ll flunk me in a heartbeat, scholarship or no scholarship. The threat hangs in the air like a rancid fart.

  I mumble yes, I’ll go, and shove the note with the address in the pocket of my jeans. The “broken singer”? That’s just mean. Mean mean mean.

  And then, crap, I think. If Niall finds out about this . . . Auditioning for the private performing arts school had been my idea. Niall was firmly opposed. He didn’t think I’d fit in, he said. Didn’t want me mixing with the privileged. It’d just piss me off, or fill my head with longing for things I’d likely never have. “An artist’s life is not about luxury,” he’d said to me, weirdly earnest. “We’ve already lost Evelyn to the money-making world. But music is your calling, Fee! Real music, from the heart, for good working people who crave a bit of beauty in their lives.”

  That Evelyn becoming a dental hygienist was somehow selling out to the temptations of luxury was news to me. Then again, Niall’s idea of luxury was paying the rent on time. And from my point of view, him begging me not to do it was reason enough to try. When I shocked us both by getting the scholarship, something went cold between us, and it hasn’t warmed up since.

  Would he act triumphant if I flunked out? I’d never forgive him if he did. And he’d never forgive me if I succeeded. Clearly, Niall and I were not going to get along again, ever.

  But there was good news in all this, too: with my ample bust, I’d never be able to pull off one of those boxy, blue polyester jackets with the pockets full of dental floss. Losing a second daughter to the ritzy, champagne-swilling world of “rinse and spit” is one thing Niall will never have to worry about.

  He’ll just lose me to something else.

  . . . . .

  Saturday it rains like a punishment. As it turns out, on a day of good Irish weather like this, Central Park West is as gloomy and gray as even the low-rent parts of New York, with the added charm of wet horse poop piled in the streets from the carriage horses across the way. The thought occurs: Perhaps I might step in some of that fine, fresh manure and track it into the Legendary Mythological apartment, and make like, oops. But I’m rather fond of the boots I’ve got on, so nevermind.

  The elevator is a cage with a man in it, and when he heaves open the black gate at Sabrina Krause’s floor, we’re already in the living room. The woman herself stands there, leaning on her cane, waiting. I have the urge to duck.

  “Thank you, Dominic,” she says, not looking at me.

  “My pleasure, Miss K.” He tips his hat. “No need to ring the bell. I’ll be back in an hour.”

  She shakes her head. “Thirty minutes today. Perhaps an hour next week. We shall see.”

  Next week! Kill me now. Mr. Scharf said nothing about next week.

  Dominic gives me a pitying look, and pulls the door shut with a mighty creak. The cage goes shivering back down the way it came. I’m trapped.

  “Good morning,” I say, just to break the ice.

  “Umbrella in the bucket, please. And take off your boots.” She arranges herself on the piano bench and hangs the cane on the edge of the piano. I do as she says. My big toe with the chipped black polish pokes proudly out the hole in the front of my sock. Classy.

  “So. You came.”

  I smile sweetly.

  “How is the voice? Still broken? Any more birthday parties?”

  “I’m feeling much better, thanks.”

  She tilts her head to one side. “So I hear. Let us begin.” She runs her fingers over the piano keyboard like she’s stroking a long black and white cat, from head to tip of tail. I ready myself to sing, feet planted, back straight, chin down, belly loose. I’m here, after all. Might as well knock her socks off.

  She pauses, takes her hands off the keys, and folds them in her lap.

  “So, broken voice girl. Why do you sing?”

  “Why?”

  She nods.

  “Well, people say I’ve a good voice.”

  Her face doesn’t change, but somehow she looks like she might vomit.

  “I like to sing. It’s fun,” I venture.

  Her eyes bore twin holes in my forehead, and my brains spill out. “I love music,” I say, desperate. “I just love music, that’s all. Even when I was a baby, I sang all day, that’s what my mum says. Made up songs about the potty and so on.”

  At that Sabrina Krause laughs once, short and sharp. Even her laugh is resonant, like a trumpet blast. “I would like to hear these potty s
ongs someday. So. You sing because you love music. I believe you. But why should you sing? Why should I? Why should anyone? Will it cure the sick? Will it feed the hungry? Will it end all wars?”

  “No.”

  She sizes me up. “Will it make you more beautiful than you are?”

  I snort. “No!”

  “You are wrong. Of course it will. All great singers are mesmerizing. The world falls at their feet. Singing makes us beautiful. What else does it do?”

  “It makes me happy.” I remember Niall’s friends at the pub, and their cheers. “It makes other people happy too.”

  “And these ‘other people’ you speak of—will it make them love you?”

  I’m about to say no, because the question’s so stupid. But what comes out is something else. “Maybe.” I think of Niall and that look of fake pride on his face. It used to be real, once. “Yes. It might.”

  “Now you are telling the truth. Good.” She plays a few chords, melancholy ones. “You cannot take a real breath, a singer’s breath”—she demonstrates, and her skinny body balloons like a blowfish on the dock—“and lie. A true singer’s breath will only reveal the truth.”

  Um, what?

  “If you lie, you cannot sing. The note will die in the throat.” She makes a choking sound. Her hands float back to the keys. “Ready?”

  I don’t know if we’re talking or singing or what anymore. I’m lost. “What do you want me to do?” I ask.

  “Breathe,” she says. “And tell the truth.”

  . . . . .

  We sing. Only scales, some sustained notes. Soft and loud, on different vowels. She’s taking me for a test drive, kicking the tires. It’s irritating, like being under a microscope. After a while, she asks, “How good a singer do you wish to be?”

  “Better than I am now,” I say.

  “You have a voice.” She says it more to herself than to me. “You could be a singer, if you work.”