The Doctor and the Diva

by Adrienne McDonnell

  The impresario mentioned the name of a Milan theatre where he assembled opera casts—not La Scala, of course, nor the Teatro Lirico, but Erika knew it to be a reputable place to obtain a contract.

  Could she meet with them to talk over breakfast?

  Breakfast? Of course, she said.

  At the hotel she pinned up her hair, preparing to head downstairs to greet the Lorellos, when she heard a commotion under her window. Three men with rough, untrained voices burst out singing the “Toreador Song,” while a little assembly of other citizens waved their arms at her.

  “Erika von Kessler!”

  “L’Americana!”

  “Bellissima Carmen!”

  Erika pulled a bouquet from a vase and threw handfuls of dripping flowers down to them. The Lorellos, who were just stepping into the hotel, paused and glanced up, smiling.

  Perfect, Erika thought. Just the scene for them to witness.

  “I have no agent,” Erika said cautiously. “Surely I should find one before I sign anything?”

  “We can introduce you to agents,” the impresario offered. “We know many in Milan.”

  His wife’s quick currant eyes lingered over Erika’s dark curls, the lace cuffs on her lavender dress. “I can tell you one thing,” Signora Lorello said. “There is no agent in Milan who would refuse you as a client.”

  Was she joking? Erika wondered. As the impresario and his wife verbalized the sort of praise Erika had always longed for, their comments sounded oddly false.

  “We have in mind an important role for you,” the impresario said, “as Suzuki in Madama Butterfly.” They warned her that the publishers of Puccini’s operas, the managers of the Ricordi company, maintained the right to veto any singer whom they did not care for, should that person be under consideration for a Puccini production. “But in your case”—impresario Lorello relaxed an arm across the back of his chair—“this will present no problem, I am certain.”

  If Erika came to Milan, the Lorellos said they would present her as a singer of rare ability—as a potential star—to the owners of the theatre where impresario Lorello arranged productions. The Lorellos would press the owners to compensate her handsomely, because such an investment would force them to promote her name.

  Erika sensed that the impresario and his wife were not quite as important as they hoped to become. The Lorellos intended to cling to her, to ride her toward future success.

  When they finished breakfast, the impresario held the door for the two women, and his wife turned to Erika as they exited. “How unusual,” Signora Lorello said with slyness in her eyes, “that a lady so young and beautiful should sing with such fever and passion.”

  Erika did not want to mention that she was probably older than the signora herself.

  51

  Milan’s Galleria had an enormous glass and steel roof that arched over caffès and restaurants and offices and shops. This was a place where singers’ tours were conceived, where contracts were signed, where operatic careers were made.

  Erika and Christopher strolled past marble-topped tables where opera house managers, conductors, and librettists gathered. The Lorellos were due to arrive shortly. Two months ago, Erika thought, no one in the Galleria would have noticed or spoken to her. A striped cat slinking under a table or a waiter would have attracted more attention than she did.

  If she’d come here then, if she’d thrown back her head and sung upward at the Galleria’s glass roof, no one would have listened. The business people of the opera world would have gone on spreading pages of proposals across circular marble tables, and ignored her. Hands would have gone on scribbling contracts. Once signed, the pages would have been folded up—just as she saw happening now—and tucked into breast pockets as carefully as money.

  But today an impresario expected to meet with her, to hire her.

  Suddenly Signora Lorello hurried toward them, just ahead of her husband. The loose ruffled dress she wore to hide her corpulence swung wildly around her body, and she could not stifle her excitement.

  “Pietro Palladino is here,” she announced, seizing Erika’s arm. “My husband and I have just spoken to him.” Pietro Palladino was an agent, it seemed. “In the past he has handled tours for Caruso. Come,” Signora Lorello insisted, hooking her fingers through Erika’s, “you must meet him.”

  “Like this?” Erika glanced down at her plain gray traveling clothes.

  “Yes! Just come.” The signora beckoned Christopher as well. “You come, too.”

  At a corner table sat a large man with an extravagant moustache. Behind his table, an enormous potted palm fanned to the left and right of him. This corner of the Galleria seemed to be reserved for Pietro Palladino, the place he often held court at midday. Flanked by two charcoal-suited assistants, the agent sat like a man enthroned.

  A river of men circulated around him. One bent and spoke into his right ear, while another slapped Pietro Palladino’s left shoulder before moving on. Others tipped their hat brims and waved to the agent in passing, and he laughed and called out to them in man-to-man jocularity.

  As Erika approached, he stood up—a tall, stately man. The edges of his lapels were carefully pressed. “The Lorellos have been so enthusiastic,” he said, smiling. “I must say I look forward to hearing you sing.”

  One felt quick intelligence in Pietro Palladino’s glance, in the penetration of his eyes. The Lorellos and Erika and Christopher settled into chairs that the assistants pulled out for them. After ordering desserts and cups of bitter-tasting Americanos for them, the pair of lackeys withdrew.

  While Pietro Palladino questioned Erika politely about her prova, Christopher bit into the creamy layers of a pastry. His nostrils flared in jest and he made big eyes at her from across the table, as though to say: Can you believe that we are actually sitting here?

  The agent invited them all to come to his apartment for light refreshments. He wanted Erika to sing for him.

  “We leave for New York in ten days,” Signora Lorello reminded everyone. “We’d love to have everything settled before then. I loathe the anxiety of waiting.”

  “She loathes the anxiety,” Christopher said later, laughing.

  Pietro Palladino’s apartment consisted of the entire top floor of a palatial building not far from La Scala. The arched doorways and ceilings were so high that Erika felt she ought to be riding a carriage, not walking, through such rooms. The vast spaces made her feel dwarfed, inadequate.

  Pietro Palladino led them to a smaller, more intimate sitting room that contained a grand piano. An assistant closed the glass balcony doors to shut out the noise of traffic from Milan’s streets.

  A maid brought in platters of white grapes and Gorgonzola, green and potent, and a rectangle of mascarpone to spread across bread like butter. Erika ignored the food, but Signora Lorello took a full plate onto her lap and relaxed against an antique chair. Her husband sat in an antique chair, too, and he cupped his palms confidently over one knee.

  Before the little audition began, Pietro Palladino poured tastes of a black grape juice he loved. Erika did not sip from her glass, because she did not want to discolor her teeth just before she sang.

  When Christopher went to the piano to accompany her, he turned as pale as his shirt. Erika sent a twist of a smile in his direction, as if to say: My poor boy, why be nervous now?

  The pair of assistants in dark suits lounged against a peach-colored sofa, ready to render their judgments. The impresario’s wife grinned encouragingly at Erika. As the first aria began, Signora Lorello licked her lower lip, and her currant eyes shone.

  No matter what the celebrated agent decided to do, the Lorellos intended to hire her, and the certainty of her position made Erika confident. She sang “Una voce poco fa,” followed by the “Seguidilla”—both nearly flawlessly. What agent could fail to be influenced by the Lorellos, who lifted their faces toward her as if transfixed?

  (“A lovely-looking lady, don’t you think?” Erika had overheard Sign
ora Lorello murmur to the agent as they were being ushered down a hallway to this sitting room.)

  When the last vibrations of song dissolved into silence, Pietro Palladino and his assistants excused themselves and stepped outside into a hallway. After a moment, the famous man returned, smiling, and he bent to kiss her hand. “Yes, yes. Definitely yes,” he said. “We want to represent you. We must represent you.”

  The following day in the Galleria, Erika signed a contract with Pietro Palladino. From adjacent tables, men with thinning hair watched and smiled, expecting to soon learn who she was. Long ago her vocal teacher, Maestro Valenti, had told her: An impresario hires you to sing in a certain operatic production, but it is the agent who will protect you and shape your career. If an impresario does not treat a singer well, a brilliant agent will simply take you elsewhere.

  “I have never dealt with the Lorellos before,” Pietro Palladino said, “but their enthusiasm, their willingness to champion you—this is a crucial thing.”

  His underlings stood behind the fanning screen of a great palm while he spoke with her. “If we don’t like the offer that the Lorellos make,” Pietro Palladino said, “I have some ideas about where we might go for a better sum.” To what other cities might he lead her, Erika wondered—Brescia, Modena, Rome, perhaps? The unseen entrées this powerful agent might provide were beyond her knowing.

  She sent a letter to her master teacher in Florence, telling him that she had signed an agreement with one of Milan’s most illustrious agents. Maestro Valenti wrote back, “Every student who has a prova dreams of this. Such a victory comes to few!”

  The Lorellos had assured the agent that Erika’s audition before the other opera house managers and Puccini’s publishers would take place within a few days.

  The delay was fortuitous because Erika knew she would need every hour between now and then to refresh her knowledge of Madama Butterfly. Her one qualm during all of this, which she had shared with no one except Christopher, was that she had always disliked Puccini’s modern music and preferred old-fashioned bel canto roles. But who could be choosy? She had been trained to sing different styles, and sing she would.

  The Lorellos had booked a suite of rooms for Erika and her accompanist at a hotel where operatic performers frequently stayed. The dense walls made the rooms as sound-resistant as caves. Each suite had a piano with a vase of flowers.

  “I can’t believe this is all really happening,” Christopher said. “I’ve known so many opera students, and I’ve never seen this happen to anyone.”

  At twilight Christopher raised a foot and hoisted himself up onto the sill of a window so tall that he actually stood up in it. Framed against the evening coolness, he looked as if he might stretch out his hand and touch constellations that were just beginning to show. “You’re the chosen one among thousands! You’re the example that will give rise to people’s dreams.”

  She had never seen him so jubilant. A breeze lifted his tie. He clutched either side of the window frame and rocked forward, ready to fly.

  “A thousand lire per night—that’s what they’ll offer you!” he said, laughing.

  “Be careful,” she said. “If you fall out, our good luck will end.”

  “I loathe the music I am going to sing,” she told Christopher. “Surely they will hear that in my voice. I can hear it.” On the morning of her audition, Erika was convinced that it would be a fiasco.

  “Where is the actress in you?” he argued. “Put yourself in a trance and fall in love with Puccini, at least for today.”

  Just before her audition, the nearly deserted opera house smelled of cold, dead smoke. It was a huge theatre, though not as celebrated as the Teatro Lirico or La Scala. Two rows of men had come to hear her. In their demeanor Erika detected harshness, a consciousness of exactly how many seats had gone unsold at their most recent productions. She could not discern who among them represented Ricordi—Puccini’s music publishers—and which ones owned the opera house. Their faces had the blankness of morticians.

  The opera house at Montepulciano had been of more modest dimensions. Here, huge, sprawling balconies rose like terraces toward the gilded ceiling. She sensed the weight of echoing, invisible places, corners where seats ranged that she could not even see. To expect her talent to fill this entire space, and stir every particle of air with vibrations of sound!

  Impresario Lorello and his wife appeared nervous as well. Signora Lorello wore an ice-blue satin gown meant for evening and looked overdressed. She fidgeted and flashed her rings, her fingers like fat little sausages choked off at the knuckles by silver bands. The impresario stood with hands clasped behind him. Did he ever venture anywhere without his fussy, beribboned wife?

  The Lorellos, Erika had come to realize, were the newcomers here, their uneasy smiles betraying their longing to please. Just two years ago, Lorello had managed an opera house in an Italian city so minor that Erika had never heard of it.

  The hall was dark, the men in dark suits ready to listen.

  Why could she not vocalize a few arias of her choice? Why not “Una voce poco fa” or “Habanera”? If they heard her do those, they would realize the diva she was capable of becoming.

  But no. The Ricordi publishers were here to assess what she would do to their precious Puccini.

  Of the ten people present, surely only she had the awful, coppery taste of anxiety in her mouth. She felt as if she had sucked on a filthy penny. Only she had to sing, of course. The others were merely expected to utter an opinion.

  Christopher positioned himself at the piano. She had been wrong about one thing: she was not the only one suffering. On his stool he sat cane-straight, and his torso lengthened as it always did when he was on edge, his neck so thin that he looked hungry. He shot her a smile that twitched.

  Out it came, then—Suzuki’s first phrases from Madama Butterfly. Erika’s true voice fled like a frightened cat through a hole in a fence; what was left, what they heard, she could hardly guess at. Erika dropped her eyelids for a second, wanting someone to wake her after she had gotten to the end of it. After this, more singing from other scenes—just as bad.

  Before any objection could be interjected, she announced, “I am going to sing “Una voce poco fa,” and she launched into Rossini to save herself.

  She walked out knowing that she had done badly, though Christopher assured her that the Puccini had been passable, and the Rossini ravishing.

  Silence for three days thereafter. “How long can they expect us to sit around at this exorbitantly priced hotel, waiting for their verdict?” Christopher said. The Lorellos had recommended these accommodations, though no one had volunteered to shoulder the bill for them.

  To distract themselves, they crossed the square in front of the Duomo, admiring the variously colored tiles in the pavement. They studied the cathedral’s marble belfries, gables, and pinnacles. They discovered a restaurant where espresso was priced nearly as modestly as water, where they whiled away the afternoon reading Milanese newspapers. Not once during those three days did they venture into the Galleria’s glass-roofed arcade, so as to avoid seeing anyone from the opera industry.

  At last a summons came in the form of a note from Pietro Palladino. He was lunching on risotto alla certosina in the Galleria when they arrived. Though they declined his offer to join him for a plate of rice with crayfish, mushrooms, and peas, he insisted that they eat something. His assistants ordered them panettone—a fluffy currant cake—and the pair of underlings distanced themselves.

  Pietro Palladino turned to Erika in a measured way. “It seems—” he said, “that impresario Lorello and his wife have changed their minds about casting you in Madama Butterfly. Instead, they’ve offered you a booking for a recital.” The agent mentioned the sum they planned to pay her—a meager fee.

  Erika glanced across the table at Christopher, who pressed the tines of his fork aimlessly against the cake crumbs on his plate, his face devoid of expression. To the agent she said, “So what would y
ou advise me to do? Accept their offer?”

  Pietro Palladino sipped his water and patted his moustache with his napkin before answering. “You’re a gifted singer just beginning her career,” he said with great seriousness, “and everything must be handled very carefully.”

  Did he honestly admire her voice? Erika wondered. Or had he been fooled by the Lorellos, whose effusions had died the more they heard her sing?

  “I suppose I should take it,” she said. “I don’t want to quibble over money.”

  The agent nodded. He appeared tired, and his oversize shoulders no longer looked so powerful to her.

  He drew a gold watch from his pocket and peered into it like a polished mirror. “The Lorellos will be here in about fifteen minutes to speak with you,” Pietro Palladino said, and stood up. “Unfortunately, I have an appointment myself at the Teatro Lirico. Stay at this table for as long as you like. I’ve reserved it for all of you.”

  “What shall I say to Signor and Signora Lorello?” Erika asked.

  “Tell them you’ll think about their proposal over the weekend and respond on Monday.”

  After the agent departed, she and Christopher remained at the table. The previous day, Christopher had his hair cut. An unskilled barber had left his hair too short, in bludgeoned, uneven shingles. Why did the bad haircut pain her so? With too much hair snipped off, he looked skinnier, weaker. She could hardly bear to look at him.

  “Shall I meet you back here in an hour?” Christopher said. “Perhaps you’d like a little privacy with the Lorellos?”

  “Don’t leave me alone with them,” she begged.

  A slate-gray poodle jumped from Signora Lorello’s arms as she and her husband strode up; the little dog went straight under their table and rested there as though the pet were accustomed to being encircled by people’s shoes. Why had the impresario’s wife brought her pet dog to the Galleria? To relieve the unpleasantness of such a meeting?