“Yeah. The doughnut shop went out of business a long time ago. How have you been? And where are you going?”
“I’ve been fine. In fact, I’m a changed man. And I’m going to Anagni, south of Rome. Tomorrow.”
Daniel looked at Claude and tried to rethink him as the author of Tales of Terror and the destroyer of the Alaska pipeline. He couldn’t. “And what will you do in Anagni?”
“Build a cathedral?”
“You’re asking me?”
“It sounds ridiculous, even to me, even now, but it’s the God’s truth. There was a cathedral there, one of the best Romanesque cathedrals. Frederick Barbarossa was excommunicated there. It was bombed, and I’m going there to help rebuild it. As one of the stone masons. I’ve joined the Franciscans, you see. Though I haven’t taken my final vows. It’s a long story.”
“Congratulations.”
“It’s what I’ve always wanted. We’ll be using almost the original technology, though we do cheat a little as to actually lifting the stones. But it will be a step up from just scrabbling about in the rubble for souvenirs. Don’t you think?”
“I do. That’s what I meant — congratulations.”
“And you, Ben — what are you doing?”
“The same, pretty much. I’m doing what I’ve always wanted. You’ll see, if you stay for the whole evening.”
“You know, I don’t think you’ve changed an iota.”
“Does anyone, ever?”
“I hope so. I sincerely do hope so.”
A bell rang, the signal for Daniel to change.
“Gotta go now. But can I ask you a question first? Strictly between ourselves.”
“So long as you won’t be offended if I don’t answer it.”
“On second thought, I’ll just go on wondering. Anyhow, you’d pretty well have to say no, even if the answer was yes.”
“Those are always good questions to avoid, I agree. What a pity there’s so little time left. It would be nice to get together for a more formal good-bye. Anyhow — good luck with your cathedral.”
“Thanks, Claude. The same to you.”
He offered his hand again, but Claude went him one better. He grasped him by the shoulders and solemnly and unpassionately, as though he were awarding the Legion of Honor, kissed each of his cheeks.
For the first time that evening Daniel blushed.
While Rey sang his own brief offering, a Carissimi cantata abridged and ornamented by the trusty hand of Mrs. Schiff, Daniel changed into his costume, an old tux from the back of Rey’s closet, which he had, with the help of Mrs. Galamian, the Metastasio’s wardrobe mistress, meticulously tattered and torn. He still wasn’t feeling more than agreeably nervous. Maybe he was one of those fortunate few who just weren’t fazed by performing. Maybe he’d actually enjoy it. He tried to concentrate on Rey’s roulades, but for all the brilliance of the singing the music was almost impossible to fix one’s attention on. Carissimi had had his off days, no doubt about it. He was, however, one of the Cardinal’s particular favorites, so the propriety of Rey’s choice could not be called into question. If Rey’s impeccable pyrotechnics nevertheless left the audience (pared down now to a bare fifty or so) somewhat restive and willing to be cajoled into simply enjoying themselves, who could complain, except possibly Carissimi?
Rey finished and was applauded. He joined Daniel briefly in the green room, went out to take a second bow, and returned. “I shall go sit beside the Cardinal now,” he advised Daniel. “Don’t enter for another couple of minutes.”
Daniel watched the two minutes disappear on his wristwatch, then put on his ever-so-dented top hat, and made his entrance, smiling. Aside from the mildest tingling in his legs and lower back he had no symptoms of stagefright. The Cardinal was sitting in the third row of chairs with Rey, benignly impassive, beside him. Claude was in the first row next to the nun from Cleveland. Many of the Cardinal’s other guests were familiar to Daniel from the Metastasio. One or two had taken him to dinner.
He lifted his hands, fingers spread wide, to frame his face. He let his eyes roll, slowly, to the back of his head. He began to sing. “Mammy!” he sang. “How I love ya, how I love ya! My dear old Mammy.” He kept very close, vocally, to the authorized Jolson version, while exaggerating the body language. It was a polite version of the fractured minstrel-show he would perform to freak out selected strangers. He finished suddenly and, before there could be applause, moved right in to the next number, “Nun wandre Maria” from Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch. Daniel accompanied its tortured and rather schizzy pieties with the same overwrought gestures he’d used for “Mammy.” They seemed, in this context, more like kabuki than schmaltz.
“The next song I’d like to sing for you,” Daniel announced, removing his top hat and reaching into his pocket for a pair of rabbit ears, “needs a bit of introduction, but only a little bit. The lyrics are my own, though the idea behind them originates with the woman who wrote the music, Alicia Schiff. It’s Bunny Honeybunny’s opening number from a little musical we’re putting together called Honeybunny Time.” He fixed the rabbit ears in place. “There’s nothing much you need to know about honeybunnies that the song doesn’t pretty well explain, except that they’re very lovable.” He smiled. “So, without more ado—” He nodded to the pianist. The rabbit ears wobbled on their wire stems and went on wobbling to the end of the song.
Goodness gracious sakes alive,
The bees are buzzing in their hive,
Making honey strangely sweet
Such as bunnies love to eat.
He sang as if transfigured by delight, negotiating the various vocal hurdles with room to spare. The music was ravishing, a chocolate box of a song that managed to make his dopey lyrics seem not only sincere but even, in a disturbing way, devotional. Where it really came alive was at the refrain, a long, looping chain of alleluias and la-la-la’s that soared and swooped and skittered around the steady swirling compulsions of the piano. Wonderful music, and here he was, standing in front of Cardinal Rockefeller and all his guests and singing it. He was aware, all the while he sang, of faces beginning to break into smiles, and aware, as he took in their reactions, of the music, and there was no disjunction between these two awarenesses.
Eenie meenie meinie mo,
Aren’t those bees the limit though!
They love me so, they’d never sting,
And all I do for them is — sing!
Off he went on another roller-coaster ride of la-la-la’s. This time, knowing that he’d brought it off once and could therefore bring it off again, he began, diffidently, to camp it up in proper honeybunny style. The people in the audience — that’s what the faces had become: an audience; his audience — were grinning now, were eating out of his hand, were loving him.
Suddenly a switch flipped inside him, and a light came on, one bright flash of everlasting glory, and there was no way to explain it but he knew that if he’d been wired into a flight apparatus at just that moment (and the moment was gone already) he would have taken off. He knew it, and it made no difference, because he was flying already — up to the ceiling, around the chandelier, over the housetops, and across the wide blue sea.
He sang the last verse at full tilt, with wierd, bemused exuberance.
La di da and la di dee,
This is living, yessiree!
Eating honey from a comb
In my honeybunny home!
For the third chorus he did, impromptu, what’d he’d never dreamed of doing during the weeks of rehearsal: he danced. It was unabashedly naive, the merest hop and shuffle, but just right (he guessed) for a honeybunny. Anyhow it felt right, if also risky. Once, concentrating on his footwork, he almost lost hold of the vocal line, but if he’d fallen on his face it wouldn’t have made any difference.
He had become a singer. Which nobody could deny.
“And will there be more honeybunny songs?” Cardinal Rockefeller inquired, after Daniel had returned from the green room in his ow
n human character.
“I hope so, your Grace. We’re working on it.”
“When there are, I shall try to persuade you to exert your fascination over us again. Such charm and, if I may call it so, innocence are all too rare. You, and your distinguished teacher, are both to be commended.”
Daniel murmured thanks, and Rey, by way of advertising this accolade to the company at large, knelt to kiss the Cardinal’s ring. The Cardinal then led Rey off to an adjoining room, and Daniel was left to receive various metaphorical posies of praise and a single matter-of-fact posie, from Monsignor Dubery, of six rather washed-up lilies. The nun from Cleveland apologized for her snub and gave him the address of her convent so he might send her the sheet music of this and all future honeybunny songs. Old acquaintances from the Metastasio offered prophecies of greatness.
When the circle of well-wishers had dwindled to a few garrulous shoulder-rubbers, Shelly Gaines, asserting the privilege of prior acquaintance, came forward with a drink in each hand — beer for himself, a screwdriver for Daniel — and commandeered the new-born star for, as he said, “some man-talk.”
“Your own song is, of course, beyond all praise, and entirely anomalous, if that isn’t the same thing. It isn’t pop, though it is in a way, and it isn’t bel canto, though it requires a voice of bel canto elasticity, and it’s nothing at all like operetta, though I suppose that’s what it must be nearest to. Really quite amazing — and in that I speak only of the song, nothing of the singer, who was—” Shelly rolled his eyes in imitation of Daniel’s own neo-darktown-strutters style. “—the prophet of an entire new form of madness.”
“Thank you.”
“But beyond compliments, Ben… May I call you Ben?”
Daniel nodded.
“Beyond mere rapturous applause, Ben, I would like to make you an offer.” He raised a finger as though to forestall Daniel’s objections. “A professional offer. I gather, from the second song on the program, that your goals aren’t entirely limited to the, how shall I say, commercial side of show biz.”
“Really, I don’t have any goals.”
“Now, now, no false modesty.”
“I mean, I’m still a student. A student’s goal is just to learn.”
“Well then, my offer should interest you precisely as a student. How would you like to sing at Marble Collegiate? As one of our soloists.”
“No fooling?” Daniel said, lighting up. And then, “No, that wouldn’t be possible.”
“Ah, the Cardinal has already taken you to his bosom, has he? One just can’t be quick enough.”
“No, not at all. And I’m sure he has no intention of doing so. He’s got the whole Metastasio to take his pick from. I’m simply not up to that level.”
“You’d certainly be up to ours, Ben. And then some. We’re not especially notable for our music program. A Bach cantata is about our farthest stretch, and that only once or twice a year. On the other hand, we try for more than a sing-along. From your point of view it would represent experience, which is a commodity you won’t be lacking for long, but do you, at the moment, have any other plans? Rehearsals are on Wednesday evenings. And I think I could get a hundred a week out of the budget. What do you say?”
“What can I say? I’m flattered, but—”
“Mr. Rey would object — is that it?”
“He might. More likely, he’d haggle over the fee.”
“What else then?”
“Where would I be? In a loft at the back, or up front where people would be watching me?”
“Surely, Ben, after what I saw tonight, you’re not going to tell me that you’re the shy type! I’ve never seen such sang-froid. And in front of this audience!”
Daniel bit his lip. There was no way to explain. He’d known he’d come up against this problem as soon as he became, in any degree, successful, but despite the steady progress he’d made studying under Rey, success hadn’t seemed an immediate danger. Hope had sprung eternal, of course, in his all-too-human breast, but the rational half of him, which was in charge of major decisions, had considered such hopes to be pipe-dreams, and so he’d let himself drift with the current from week to week till he arrived at the inevitable moment of decision, here at last.
How long, once he became, even in the smallest way, a public figure, could he hope to preserve his incognito? And more to the point: was that what he wanted, forever and always?
“Shelly,” he temporized, “I’m grateful for your offer, believe me. And I’d like to say yes right now, but there’s someone I have to talk it over with first. Okay?”
“You know where you can find me. Meantime, yours sincerely, and all that.” Shelly, a little sad and rebuffed, departed, bumping into the music room’s disordered chairs. No one else came forward.
Daniel looked for Claude through all the other rooms, but he must have left at the end of the concert. A small desolation settled over Daniel’s spirit. He wanted to deposit his six lilies in a waste basket (he was certain they’d done duty at a week of funerals) and go home and crash.
But that would never do. It was important now to circulate, and so he circulated. But as far as he personally was concerned the party was over.
Claude had not forgotten him, however. The next morning a delivery truck appeared on West 65th with a peculiar and very precious cargo, consisting of (1) a Sony Flight apparatus, (2) a tombstone with a limerick on it, and (3) a tie representing raindrops. There was also a telegraphically short letter from Claude saying good-bye, explaining that Franciscans weren’t allowed to fly, and wishing him good luck as a honeybunny.
When the delivery men were gone and his room had been rearranged to accommodate the two new items of furniture, Daniel sat down before the flight apparatus and let temptation have its way with him. But he knew he wasn’t ready, and he knew that he’d know when he was, and he didn’t succumb.
That night, as though in recompense, he had his first real flying dream. He dreamed he was flying over an imaginary Iowa, an Iowa of marble mountains and blithe valleys, of golden, unreal cities and fabulous farms dazzling the eye with fields of Fabergé wheat. He woke unwilling to believe it had been only a dream. But grateful, nevertheless, to have been given so unmistakable a sign.
18
Earlier on the evening of that dream, in the taxi returning from Cardinal Rockefeller’s, Rey had hinted at the possibility, then announced the fact, of Daniel’s manumission. Daniel expressed an honest surprise and a not dishonest regret; prudently, he did not by so much as one hurrah express his jubilation.
It was not to be an absolute sundering. Daniel would continue to study with the great Ernesto, but on the more customary footing of offering him, in lieu of immediate payment, a third of his professional income over the next seven years. Daniel signed a contract to this effect, witnessed by Mrs. Schiff and Irwin Tauber, who, as Daniel’s agent, was to receive a further fifteen percent. If this were exploitation, Daniel was delighted to be considered prospectively exploitable. Could there be any sincerer testimony to their faith in his future than their wanting to secure a piece of it for themselves?
His delight was soon to be tempered by the reality of his first paycheck. His wage from Marble Collegiate was an even hundred dollars; after deductions for Federal, State, and City taxes and for Social Security, and after Rey’s and Tauber’s percentages, Daniel was left with $19.14. So, when fall arrived, it was back to the Metastasio. Mr. Ormund kindly allowed him to take off early on Wednesdays to attend his choir’s rehearsals. Further, he was promoted to the position (alternating with Lee Rappacini) of croupier on the casino’s roulette wheel, a post which, even after the Metastasio’s and Mr. Ormund’s rake-offs, was an undeniably juicy plum.
Not that Daniel was given to fretting about money. He was still predominantly of the grasshopper persuasion and unable to take alarm at remote contingencies. By the terms of his agreement with Rey, Boa would be looked after for another year. Congress, meanwhile, was drawing up a uniform code of laws co
ncerning flight, a code that would certainly see to it that no one would be put in the impossible position Daniel had been in, of being able to keep Boa alive only by resorting to the black market. In a year’s time, when Daniel would have to reassume the burden of her support, it should not, therefore, be quite so crushing and unfair a burden. If he saved, he might even be able to put her back in First National Flightpaths. Such are a grasshopper’s sanguine, summertime thoughts.
Having had, on the whole, a rather easy time of it during his year of concubinage, Daniel did not find freedom going to his head. In any case, these terms are relative. In a practical sense his life wasn’t much changed, except that now he could, when the urge came over him, go out and get laid. Mostly, however, except for a three-day binge right after the belt came off, the urge didn’t come over him, not in the old overmastering and time-consuming way. This diminution of his erstwhile perpetual motion may have had something to do with sublimation, but he doubted it. Renata Semple had always maintained that sublimation was a load of Freudian bullshit, that the best lays also transmitted the largests zaps of creative energy. Maybe he was just getting old and wearing out. Maybe his present sex-life represented the optimum level for his metabolism and previously he’d been overdoing it. In any case he was happy, wasn’t he, so why worry?
For two months he’d been letting his skin fade back to its natural color when an incident at the Natural History Museum made him think again. He was wandering lonely as a cloud among cases of curious rocks and mineral specimens, letting his mind get lost in the twists and turns, the dazzle and glitter of Nature’s own chinoiseries, when out of the dim past stepped Larry, the counterman of the now defunct Dodge ’Em Dougnut Shop. Larry, with more directness than grace, dropped a metaphorical handkerchief at Daniel’s feet, waited to see if it would be picked up, and, when it wasn’t, moved on to some ore-bearing boulders with a wistful, hard-boiled, “All right, Sambo, whatever you say.” And never a glimmer of recognition. There was a time, and rather a long one, when Daniel had seen Larry on the average of twice a day to pick up his phone messages and generally to coze. Larry, admittedly, had a partiality for phoneys, but even so! Is love as blind as that?
On Wings of Song Page 29