by May Sarton
“You have sung with her before?”
“No, but we got along famously at the rehearsal yesterday afternoon. She was extremely kind to me. I feel honored to be singing with her.”
“People say she is losing her voice.”
“Nonsense! People don’t know what they are talking about. Lotte Lehmann was still wonderful at sixty!” Anna felt passionately about this and showed it, “The very people who have adored and applauded a singer for years, seem to be lying in wait for her to fail, seem to get some sort of kick out of a diminishing talent. It’s horrible. I sometimes hate the audience. It’s like some beast one has to go in and kill. Caruso felt that, you know. He said it was like being a matador and having to kill a bull.”
“But you don’t feel that, do you?”
“Yes, I do. Every single performer is exposed to the possibility of jeers—but of course one forgets that once the music is there. It’s worse in a concert when one goes out alone. That agonizing moment of confrontation.”
“Wow!” said Miss Springhof. “I never thought it was like that.”
“You won’t publish your question about Madame Elgar, will you? She does not deserve that comment about failing powers. Promise me, you will cut that out?”
“I promise,” Miss Springhof looked at her notes. “Anyway the interview is about you, Mrs. Lindstrom.”
“If it’s Mrs., then it is Mrs. Fraser. Otherwise, Anna Lindstrom, please.”
“I’m sorry. You are married? I didn’t know.”
“Yes, I married Ned Fraser two years ago. We live in Boston.”
“You have children?”
“No.” It was said with such finality that there was an inevitable pause. Miss Springhof was obviously daunted and did not know quite what to say next. “You want to ask whether I want children, I expect.”
“Well … maybe … I suppose it’s hard to combine a career like yours with a family, but …”
“I’m accused of being much too frank,” she laughed, “but we’re on earth such a short time, why not be honest? What will it matter in two hundred years? I’m thirty-six years old and I am on the brink of real fame, on the brink of being able at last to choose what I shall sing and where and when. I can’t afford to stop now and take time off. So the answer is that one has to make choices and I made a choice long ago, long before I married Ned.”
“I see, of course.” Miss Springhof looked doubtful.
“Somehow we are taught in America that we can have everything: a career, children, everything. A woman who becomes a nun gives up all idea of having a family … and I suppose a career taken seriously implies some sacrifice.”
“You don’t seem like a nun at all,” Miss Springhof smiled out from under her hair.
“Oh, I’m not. The impurity, the passion, the rage even—they are all there. That animal inside me, my voice, has to cope with them all!” And Anna laughed. “You see!”
But of course Miss Springhof did not see and could have no idea, and when Anna suggested that she herself must now rest and saw the young girl to the door, she felt as usual that she had made a fool of herself. Interviews were always dangerous because to make it worth the interviewer’s time you had to try at least to be interesting and being interesting too often meant confidences.
Anna put on her coat and went out for a walk to calm down. The sun had come out and it was a cool, brilliant day. She spent an hour browsing in a bookstore and came away with a paperback of Rilke letters and a novel of Eudora Welty’s she had always meant to read. Then she was ravenously hungry—why did bookstores have this effect?—and by great good luck found a small Italian restaurant. There she ate a plate of ravioli and drank a glass of wine. Strange how a small piece of luck could appear on such a day as an augury. All would be well.
And in the remaining hours before she must bathe and dress, Anna knew she was on the beam. Dread had given way to expectation, and her only moment of panic was at seven when she could not get the zipper up of her dress. “Don’t do this to me,” she said to the dress, and finally it gave in. Anna then looked herself over in the mirror.… “Of course I am too fat,” she thought, then she remembered that Ned had told her he couldn’t stand what he called clotheshorse women. And she remembered also that beside Madame Elgar she was a sylph. “Such vanity,” she scolded herself, “Get on with it, Anna. It’s Bach now, not Anna Lindstrom who matters.”
And in the dressing room she and Sophie Elgar joked and waited, wished each other good luck, joked some more. “I’m always afraid I’ll burst out of my dress, aren’t you?” Sophie said, smoothing herself down for the twentieth time. “Then,” she laughed aloud, “there I am, immense, but I suddenly feel tiny in front of that huge orchestra. You know, it really takes weight, Anna, to put a voice out over the orchestra!”
And then the knock at the door and they were making their way out onto the stage on a ripple of applause. It died out and there was a second of silence, then the chorus seemed almost to lift the roof with the Kyrie and Anna felt freed, lifted out of herself on the power and glory of it. She clasped her hands. They were ice cold. Then it was time to turn the page before her, take a deep breath, and summon her voice. And it was there! Oh, the effort as though she were throwing her voice like a discus as far as it would go, soaring out beyond her. Oh, the supreme effort she felt right down to her feet! The thrill of blending with, then separating from Sophie’s soprano, of battling the orchestra, an ocean of sound behind them! It seemed only a long moment before her solo, “Que sedes ad dexteram Patris, miserere nobis,” and her voice was there interweaving with the flute, as serene and pure as the flute. When it was over, she closed her eyes, unaccountably close to tears, remembering Protopova and all she had done to make it as perfect as they could make it together. The phrasing, the long breath needed had been there at her command, better than ever before.
No concert appearances alone could ever bring this joy, this ecstasy of being a part of such a company of instruments and voices in the service of Bach. Solti was pulling it out of them all, pulling it together with such grace!
And now he was turning to Sophie and her for their duet and Anna felt the joy of the two voices singing with and against each other in a glorious interweaving. “Et in unum Dominum …” No rehearsal could give any idea of what the performance, this performance, was to be. Worth all the work, all those hours with Protopova, all the anxiety, to have this power and to be able to use it well.
At the end of the performance Anna felt she had been in heaven. The soloists were called back five times but they all knew that what had happened was the result of a union of all their gifts. And in the dressing room Sophie embraced Anna and said, “My dear, what a great night it was!”
It was.
When Nancy came backstage, she was in tears. “Oh Anna, you were so marvelous. I don’t know why I’m crying!”
“It’s that music—what Bach does!” And Anna pulled Nancy out into the green room where they could sit down and talk. “Where’s John?”
He had been shy about coming backstage and was waiting in the auditorium, Nancy explained. “It’s worth everything, to be able to do that—to be part of it, isn’t it?” she asked, “I envy you!”
“Not with four children, you don’t!”
“Well, I suppose there are compensations for not making it,” she admitted.
“You haven’t changed a bit, Nancy. How we used to laugh, do you remember?”
But Nancy was taking Anna in and hardly responded to this. “You have changed, Anna.”
“How? How have I changed? I feel just the same, just as much a fool as ever!”
“Do you still cry at the drop of a hat?”
“Oh yes! The Italian is still very much in the ascendant.”
“But you seem not older exactly, but rounder,” and as Anna giggled, she amended it, “That’s not what I meant.”
“I’m much too fat, but that’s no change.”
“No, I meant, rounded out inside, ma
ture, I suppose … happiness does it. You must be very happy. Somehow I had imagined you would never marry.”
“Happiness?” Anna was taken by surprise by the word and what it obviously implied.
“I wish I could meet your husband.”
“Ned is a very funny man.”
“He makes you laugh?”
“No, he makes me furious.”
“I get awfully cross with John sometimes …” But this was not the place or the time to talk about marriage and Anna changed the subject by asking about Nancy’s children.
Finally, since Nancy was clearly nervous about keeping John waiting, they said goodbye. They had never been intimate but felt the impulse to do more than shake hands, and ended by kissing each other warmly on each cheek. “I hate to let you go …” Anna said. “Old friend.”
“Whatever happens, Anna, you’ve done something tremendous with your life. You’re going to be a great star. Don’t let them get you down, honey.”
“I won’t,” Anna said.
But back in the hotel she felt so empty and so alone that she simply lay down fully dressed on the bed. Ned, Ned, she tried to fill the emptiness with his name, but it didn’t help. Finally she called her mother. “I was absolutely transported by the music, Mama. I’ve never done better. Everyone was wonderful.”
“You don’t sound exactly happy,” Teresa said.
“No.”
“Well, you’re having a reaction I expect. You’d better order some supper sent up and then get a good night’s sleep.”
“I think I’ll stay over one more day, go to the museum maybe. I think I need a day all by myself, without tension.”
“That’s a good idea.”
“Maybe you could call Ned before eight-thirty tomorrow. Tell him I’ll be home Tuesday and could we go out for dinner.”
“Why don’t you call him yourself?”
“Oh, he’ll be asleep now, and I might not be awake tomorrow morning. Tell him the concert was a triumph,” she added.
She did not tell her mother that she wanted Ned to read her letter before she saw him again. That had been the real reason, but nevertheless a day without obligations, a day of solitude, of not having to respond to anyone or ask anything of herself proved to be a good plan.
The papers came with her breakfast and the reviews were all right. There was a flattering mention in one of her duet with Sophie. “The two voices seemed to be in perfect harmony, neither dominating the other. Bach was well served.” A crumb, but at least not a poisoned crumb. Relieved, relaxed at last, Anna lay there, watching the sunlight make a broad band on the yellow wall, and for the first time in months thought about Ned without wincing and without anger. Perhaps she had fallen in love two years before, with that closed handsome face just because it was a foreign country to be discovered, to be made hers, a compelling mystery to come to understand … only she had not come to understand. And what had touched her at first, the loneliness of the man, his inability to relate, to give, later became what she hated and fought. “Oh Ned,” she murmured, “Ned …”
Had he also fallen in love with what he came to hate, that had grown to be simply irritation? Her exuberance, her quick changes from joy to grief, from laughter to rage? No, he had fallen in love with a performer not a woman at all. What had he imagined then? Capturing a singing bird and putting it in a cage? What had he expected? Damned if I know, Anna thought.
She wondered then if passionate love was always like this, whether all marriages became a frightful war where each partner was determined to change the other and, if the marriage lasted, simply came to accept the unacceptable, gave up. That was true of Paul and Hilda, she imagined. But perhaps they had stuck it out for the sake of the children …
Here Anna got out of bed. Children? A child? Last night she had for a moment envied Nancy, secure in her family, but that was once more to long for the normal, the acceptable, to be like everyone else, to feel justified. How could a childless woman feel justified?
“But I do when I sing!” Anna said aloud. “I do!” She looked at herself in the mirror as she pulled off her nightgown. That broad chest, the full breasts, the strong throat were all there for a purpose, to have the power to project a voice, to be the exact sound box that was needed. And she felt for a second exultant, rejoicing in a gift, in the flesh itself. Oh, why couldn’t Ned make love seeing what he desired? Why always in the dark?
The thought forced her to get dressed and go out. By now he would have her letter. Pulling on her stockings, Anna was shaking. She felt the sweat on her upper lip, the signature of panic. What if I never went back? What if I ran away?
In the same instant she had an impulse to get on a plane and go back at once. No, Anna, she told herself. Take this day and use it well. Use it to achieve composure for once. But how did one do that? With everything in a whirl of questions without answers inside her? One did it if one could by taking refuge in art. I’ll sing the Kindertoten Lieder at that concert next month, she thought, and during this day she would plan the program, a morning musicale at a club in Dallas. She would go back with her mind made up, with something accomplished, whatever Ned did in answer to her letter. She would go home as Anna Lindstrom not Anna Fraser.
Anna Lindstrom spent the morning at the art museum where by great good luck there was a show of French Impressionists from private collections. In the silence of the museum rooms, she was at first lonely and a little self-conscious, unable to concentrate, walked too rapidly from one painting to another, not involved beyond ticking off the painters, waiting for the moment when she could see and be absorbed. Finally she sat down on a low velvet couch and let everything subside. A bearded young man went past, clearly doing what she could not do, stopping before a Monet of haystacks at sunset, walking away from it, coming back. After he had gone on into the next room, Anna slipped into the state of grace she had waited for. She began to see that Monet painting, the astonishing crimson on one side of the haystack catching the setting sun, the strange light on the field surrounding it, light caught at an instant of change, and held there forever. A work of art that could happen like this for one pair of eyes after another forever. Anna sat there for a long moment in a prolonged state of vision, simply seeing. After that she walked through the next room, acutely aware of a Pissaro of a few houses along a country road, and finally again sat down to take in a large Cezanne still life. Why did the monumental white tablecloth and its blue fold at one corner create such sensational response? Finally she was delighted by a small Vuillard interior and decided that that was the one she would like to steal and take home to Ned. When they were first married Ned had taken her to the museum in Boston several times and they had played a game, separating for a half-hour or so, then leading each other to the painting they would like to steal and take home. Ned had often chosen Vuillard, of course she realized now because in those small records of bourgeois life in Paris, he felt at home. “It is intimacy,” he had said once. “How few painters have ever communicated that!” “Bonnard maybe,” she had suggested. “Oh yes, but in a far less subtle way.” In those days they had enjoyed arguing things out. Now any difference of opinion seemed like an assault. And perhaps was used as an assault.
Ned’s shadow had followed her to the museum, and Anna left.
Chapter IX
Ned, feeling peaceful, was reading the paper with Fonzi at his feet. Just as well that Anna would not be home for another night, he thought. He would have a game of court tennis with Johnny and dine at the club. It felt like a reprieve. And just as Anna was thinking about the program for her concert, he was cogitating a rather radical change at the bank. The very high interest rates were becoming a real problem, but he had an idea about short-term investments and he was eager to talk it over with his colleagues. It was nearly nine and he intended to walk to the office, but first he would get the mail. How amazing to open the box and take out a fat envelope from the Pittsburgh hotel! He turned it over in his hands, then decided to go back to the ap
artment and read it before taking Fonzi for a short walk.
“Yes, Fonzi, in a minute,” he said, as the little dog barked and ran around the room in a frenzy of expectation. “Lie down,” Ned said firmly, as he slid a thin letter opener under the flap and neatly opened the letter, as though it were some sort of official document. He had had very few letters from Anna, and those few were usually full of exclamations and written in a large flowing hand. This one covered two pages on both sides and was written with care. “Oh dear,” he murmured, full of dread. “If only Anna would be silent,” he said to Fonzi. “Only three days and she has to write me a small essay, it would seem.”
At first what he read he had heard many times before … a defense of her anger. But when he came to what she said about love-making, Ned felt the blood rising to his head and his only need was to black out on it, not know that it had been said. He tore the letter into small pieces and threw it down the chute. There! “That’s torn it, Fonzi,” he said. Never never would he expose himself again. He would pretend that he hadn’t read the letter. He was so angry that all he could feel was a need for violence, for some wild offensive act. He paced up and down, while Fonzi followed him with frightened eyes. “Come on, we’ll go for a walk. Don’t cower like that. I’m not angry with you,” but the tone was angry and Fonzi followed him on the leash with his tail between his legs.
She had called him an angry man and she was damned right. People shouldn’t ever talk about such things. It was … it was—Ned hunted for words as he walked fast, hardly waiting for Fonzi to do his business, he was so driven—invasion of privacy. Destructive. So that was what was going on in her head while she lay there, crying out in what he had presumed was ecstasy! How could he ever see her again? Sit across the table at breakfast from a woman who had stripped him down to the marrow? I didn’t deserve this, Ned thought, filled with self-pity, and what’s more I’m not going to take it lying down. Divorce? And have her tell a lawyer all about it? No, they would have to live along side by side in enmity forever. Whatever Ned did that day he did in a black fog. And the only release was a punishing game that evening which he lost because he went at it in a fury.