“Yes, I had thought on the great inspiring duets. Wagner and Verdi, of course. No hymns, we don’t want to frighten those that come in search of entertainment, either. You’ll catch more flies with honey.” She nodded like a female Machiavelli—no, Liam, corrected himself, as though she thought herself to be one. He pitied the men in her husband’s offices, the women in her service. “But also some of the homely songs, such as they would have heard as children. To soothe them, and remind them of wholesome things.” She smiled, carnivorous and maternal. “You look like the sort of man who appreciates wholesome country melodies.”
Liam swallowed, resisting the new image he had of himself in a shabby Girl Guide hall, beside a battered piano, singing “And Let The Rest Of The World Go By” to a shuffling crowd of coal miners and their wives, all done up in Sunday suits and hats with cherries on them.
He thought a moment, and then said, “You have the advantage of me, Mrs. Kilgour. You have heard me and I have not yet heard you. Will you sing for me?”
Mrs. Kilgour proceeded silently to the piano and stood beside the bench where she could see the music that she’d placed there before he’d set foot in the house. He waited, and then realized what she wanted and joined her at the piano. By some unpleasant chance the music was “And Let The Rest Of The World Go By.” He rippled through the opening bars. It was a fine piano, warm, with a pearly treble.
Her singing hurt, more than he had thought it could. He had assumed that she would be amateurish, but not this. She stood at his left, and as she approached the sentimental final bars, her fingers closed on his shoulder, so he felt them to his bones through the layers of suit and shirt and flesh. He glanced up and saw that something was expected of him, as she smiled at him, then shut her eyes and raised her head. But what, what could she possibly want more than that he listen without throwing himself from the window? Oh—there it was. He joined in harmony—or what would have been harmony under conventional circumstances: a place that’s known to God alone and let the rest of the world go by.
“Oh fine, fine!” she said, clapping her hands as they finished. “Oh Mr. Manley we will raise the heart of any who hears us!” She sat beside him on the bench. She smelled of peppermint and a sour stomach. “I will say, though, Mr. Manley, that I think you struck wrong on the dying fall. I like an even tone withdrawing there, so that the listener might have a moment to think on the meaning of the song, not just end it, plunk!” She struck his knee to show how she did not want it to end, and demonstrated her own ideal with a diminuendo honk. “But we’ll go to work before the concert series.”
“When did you have in mind for this—?”
“Oh, no more than a month or two, I think. January at the latest. I have thought on this a great deal, Liam, and I am ready to act!”
“But do you think, Mrs. Kilgour, it’s time enough—?”
She looked stern, but said gently, “We are artists, Liam, and it is a great, godly thing we do. We cannot help but be ready.”
PRODUCED BY THE ACTION OF LIGHT
There were no contracts. Mrs. Kilgour mentioned that some of the musicians had asked for them, and she had thought better of involving such worldly men. Instead there were large, irregular cheques, and he moved into a better hotel. Mrs. Kilgour was happy that she could now visit him in the afternoons, and even remarked that he was much healthier-looking since he had moved into the CPR establishment. By a kind of passive adoption he joined her circle, or her clan, more accurately, which orbited Craiglockhart Castle. He was often there for meals, and met her friends and the collection of cousins, nieces and nephews who appeared and disappeared by Mrs. Kilgour’s desires. In spring he thought he would play tennis on their courts, if he could learn how, and take a boat out on the little ornamental lake in the park, or go to their hunting lodge north of the city. He met the city’s fast set and went with them, once or twice, to the one nightclub the provincial little place afforded.
There was work to do, however, lazy rehearsals often interrupted by short sermons regarding the Power of Music, and photographs for the posters, the programs and the newspaper. He had already given a few minutes to a man from the society page, and quite a good picture had shown up in the paper. He liked it; he looked like a gentleman, though a bit threadbare. He didn’t yet have his new suits then and been forced to make do with old charcoal gabardine, but it was not so shabby after treatment in the hotel laundry.
She had wanted the photographs taken in the conservatory, but there he had put his foot down. It was no better than a wedding or engagement then, he said; if we are to set out as artists, we must begin as artists. She had fluttered, then submitted girlishly to his demand. Her secretary, Nora, hired the Temple Theatre for an hour in the morning before the first program, and made arrangements with her photographer, a nice man who worked for the theatre and photographed weddings around the city.
Liam approached the Temple, which had until the month before been the pinnacle of his aspirations. His immediate aspirations, he corrected himself. There was still the grey Lagonda and the contract with a large company, though it might not be New York or Milan. San Francisco, perhaps, or Buenos Aires. Now he stood at the theatre’s great doors, which were made of glass and copper, glimmered with vines and arched like the Alhambra. It was nine o’clock. He wore a new suit, charcoal broadcloth with a midnight-blue tie, purple socks, and jade cufflinks. He was to meet the photographer at nine, precisely, but it did not do to be kept waiting by a photographer, so he thought it better to be a little late.
The doors gave, and he was in a hideous lobby again; it was one of the new kind, meant for lounging and circulating, with gold plush benches and pink granite pillars. The steps were pink granite too, with a brass handrail and a carved pink granite balustrade.
He climbed the steps to the double doors that opened into the theatre itself, walking briskly, ignoring the janitor who looked at him, and seemed about to ask him his business. Liam raised his chin and the man did not stop him.
Inside, the photographer attended to his equipment, and at first did not seem to notice Liam. Liam waited a little longer, determined that the man should acknowledge him. He smiled what he thought of as his laconic smile, the one he had recently adopted for shopgirls and desk clerks.
The photographer looked up, and when he saw Liam standing in the centre aisle, he stood up straight, one hand at his tie, the other resting on the accordion-pleated cardboard of his camera. “Mr. Manley?” he said. “Is that Mr. Manley?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Walter Lyon. I was to meet you here.” He looked down at his watch. “I was to meet you here at nine o’clock.”
“Indeed.”
“I understood it was to be Mrs. Kilgour as well. I understood—”
“Later, Lyon. You’re to take my portraits first.” Liam felt expansive, warm, putting the man at his ease like that. He might have been chilly and superior. He might even have been rude. He could have reported badly to Mrs. Kilgour, if he had wished it. He was so happy to find that he did not wish it, that he smiled at Lyon, and at the little girl beside him. Liam could not guess her age, but she seemed reasonable, and sweet in her little white smock.
On the stage, Lyon had stopped. “I hope you aren’t bothering Mr. Manley, Hazel. I bring my daughter with me, sometimes. It’s a treat for her as she loves the Temple. I hope she doesn’t trouble you. She is a good girl.”
“Fine, fine,” he said, and Lyon returned to his preparations. With more of that laconic grace he had so lately cultivated, Liam walked the length of the apron to examine the caryatids that supported the proscenium, their substantial and nicely-shaped bosoms drifting high and round, clung all about with plaster drapery that looked like wet cheesecloth.
In a moment Lyon was with him again, standing at his elbow. As he turned to face them, Lyon bit his lip and said, “If you are ready, Mr. Manley, would you join us at the piano?” Leaving the caryatids and their impressive bosoms, Liam returned to the piano an
d leaned on the music rack, his legs crossed. He wished he had a slim, black cigarette between the fingers of his left hand. As Lyon and his assistant busied themselves with an extinction meter, then the cameras and the last of the flash powder, the little girl lolled on her chair and stared silently at Liam.
“Your name is Hazel?” he asked, pleased to condescend to a little girl, after the fussy, overdressed children at the Castle.
“Hazel Lyon,” she said.
“Are you here to help your father?”
“I like to watch him take pictures.” She was staring at Liam now, not having realized his condescension. He had forgotten that children could stare so steadily and openly.
“How old are you?”
She raised her right hand, the fingers spread wide. “I’m five. Pretty soon I’ll be six.” Now she stuck up her thumb.
“You should be in school, not hanging around in theatres. What does your mother say about it?”
“She doesn’t know. It’s just Dad and me.” The little girl smiled, then set her steady gaze on the stage, examining it with what seemed to Liam un-childlike intensity. “Do you have a little girl?” Hazel asked.
“No,” Liam answered, “but I have a little sister. Much older than you, though.” And Liam wanted, suddenly, to say more, and tell how he had not seen his sister in years and years, but Lyon and his assistant Berezowsky had finished their ceremony and made their invocations, and he did not even have time to tell her Ella’s name before Lyon looked up.
“Hazel, leave the gentleman alone.” And then, “If you would face Mr. Berezowsky, Mr. Manley, I think I could capture your profile adequately.”
Once properly at work on the portraits, Liam was himself again, finding comfort in the grave attention of the two men as they manipulated light and shadow around his face, and composed their frames by laws intriguing but unknown to him.
Liam was used to being watched. What success he had, he did not like to admit, was often due to pictures that appeared in local newspapers on the first day of his engagements, and he kept a greater variety of promotional photographs than most men of his profession. As Lyon set his flash powder, Liam imagined himself through that other eye, the one floating four feet above the stage, and in whose long glance he would become monochrome, rendered on paper and distributed on handbills and programs. Out in the city there were some young ladies who would keep those handbills and programs; some might even tuck them into the frames of their mirrors, to look at while they brushed their hair. Many of them would come to hear him sing.
The proofs arrived in the evening mail, which would impress Mrs. Kilgour, Liam thought, and good for Lyon; she would be a useful patron. Anyway, the man did fine work, especially these close studies where his eyes were so deeply shadowed they seemed kohl-darkened, and his hair so black against his white brow, and his hands wrought finely in soft grey and black. He was almost ashamed of his unruly happiness when he found himself on paper, looking as he did in his own heart. Lyon had seen him as he really was, had seen him as he could be, too, as an artist and a gentleman in charcoal broadcloth, leaning on the music rack. Liam propped his favourites up on the little lamp table, and took off his shoes so he could stretch out on the bed and look at the proofs.
That evening he went to the Castle for dinner, and together they picked out the suitable pictures. Mrs. Kilgour looked at him dewily and said, “You remind me so much of Clive!” And though Liam knew nothing about Clive, he smiled bashfully and said he was flattered by the comparison.
MARA O’MARIO
He was not prepared for her myopic generosity. After the initial flood of gifts and cheques, he tried to spend little and lay up a store against the days she forgot his dependence, though his name linked with hers meant unlimited credit and obliging shopkeepers who nodded and knew of course sir that they need not press, he was a gentleman. And did he wish a dozen pairs of socks or two—and had sir considered driving gloves, very useful in this climate. Once he had his cards (Liam Manley, Tenor they read) he went out each day and bought something, and when all the parcels arrived in his hotel, he set them on the desk in the bay window and looked at them in their brown paper, his name inked on their labels so nicely. Each afternoon he unwrapped shoes and books and socks, a wallet, a monocle, cologne, monogrammed writing paper, a fountain pen with three gold nibs, a traveller’s writing desk, a valise of mahogany leather and burgundy silk. He unwrapped cigarettes and imported chocolates; he unwrapped cigar clips, ties, handkerchiefs. He bought charms for the bracelets of ladies he had not yet met, and scent for women he had not yet seduced.
He unwrapped them and put them carefully away, but found his eyes ran over these possessions—so handsome, that writing desk!—and he took comfort in them when he was meant to be reading a new book or allowing the cavities of his head free play. Sometimes he did not even like to use the things, but just admired them stacked in their drawers and cupboards and thought how well they witnessed his discernment. Other men faced with such new wealth would spend like the newly wealthy, but his long attention to good taste had saved him, and he was satisfied that his selections were indistinguishable from those a young man of quality might make.
Once, though, a week went by without the nearly-anonymous arrival of a cheque (folded into a sheet of writing paper with no message but her name and address engraved at the top), and the panic rose again, and he resented their unofficial relationship. He never mentioned this to her, saying to himself that he did not like to embarrass her with the reminder that he was a professional, and she merely an interested amateur. Or perhaps he did not wish to offend her delicacy.
Or he must not be disloyal: she was generous. He returned one morning to his suite to see that her generosity had reached a new pitch. The phonograph, its huge horn like a dark morning glory, stood in the centre of the room, on a cabinet of deep red wood. Beside it a box of brown envelopes.
He dropped his coat to the floor and knelt. He knew who had sent it, though there was no letter. It was afterward he considered that she did not need to identify herself because her hand on the machine was unmistakeable: Mrs. Kilgour hardly needed a name. She was the nexus of his life and the hotel knew it.
But there was the phonograph. He touched the case and left a faint smudge when he drew back his hand. He wiped his fingers on his handkerchief and polished away the mark, then lifted the lid and touched the black rubber of the disk, as supple and cool as skin, with a faint burr that grabbed his fingertips. The machine’s scent was better than eau de cologne: beeswax, varnish, rubber, Bakelite, metal.
He turned to the boxes on the floor, fumbling through the closest; it didn’t matter what or which record, just so he would hear it. Then he slowed himself, running his fingers over the loose corners of the brown paper sleeves, so they fluttered in his ears like cards. He pulled out one to read the label. Not Nash’s gentrified Puccini, no nasal La bohème in the accents of the south. He flipped through the Caruso, the McCormack (he would listen to McCormack after he had found what he wanted, to determine what the man could possibly have. Liam had never heard anything compelling from McCormack) past de Reszke, Cortis, Gigli. Then he found the inestimable Mara O’Mario.
As he touched it he returned, in memory, to a night more than six years before at Covent Garden, when he had heard O’Mario in Le Cid, and been so transfixed by the man’s voice that he had felt something in his bosom he could only call “surrender.” He did not exactly know what he had surrendered, only that he had wept, and as he walked home across the city he had pledged himself to O’Mario, and to Rodrigo, and to the King and Judge and Father, and the life to which O’Mario seemed to call him. The exhilaration had lasted weeks, and for a time he had been sure (so sure!) that such a surrender must be accepted, and that a response was imminent.
Sometimes when he sang, Liam thought of the man’s voice and wondered if a little of it might live on in his own: he might still contain a rolling echo of that evening, in the pulse he felt that was more than m
emory; it was like a standing wave that reverberated in his own thorax, through his throat and his skull. If he had any gift, it was that memory inside him, which might one day change the quality of sound he produced.
Liam selected O’Mario’s “Ô Souverain, ô juge, ô père.” He slid it from brown paper textured like fallen leaves, and set it gently on the smooth disk of rubber. He dropped the needle, then rocked back onto his heels, then lay on the carpet with no regard for his shirt or his trousers. He shut his eyes. From the hiss the piano sounded, then the first whisper of the voice, beneath it the substructure of a breath not heard but felt. Liam placed his fingers beneath each ear and dropped his jaw, imagined Mara O’Mario’s breath underlying the lyric line, imagined his own open throat like a hollow reed.
He replayed the aria fifteen times, each time listening for O’Mario’s breath, so that it would become his own, and for a moment he held it. More than a memory, it seemed to him a change in his carriage, the angle of his jaw along his throat, the lift of his diaphragm and shoulders. Listening that way he could recognize (without doubt! without question!) the distance between his work and Mara O’Mario’s. Again he felt the flutter of doors opening and saw stretching before him the path he would take through them, and where it would lead, and the sound that, in the end, would issue from his lips.
THE KILGOURS OF THE WEST: TEMPLE THEATRE INSTALLATION TEXT (DRAFT ONE)
Having secured her position as the city’s Foremost Hostess, Leticia Kilgour turned her not insubstantial talents toward her first love: music. She determined that all the energies and resources of her extensive patronage would go to creating and supporting a community of musicians in this thriving outpost of Empire. Thus, Leticia Kilgour is responsible for the hybrid of frontier vigour and Old World sensibility that so marked the city in the early twentieth century.
The Paradise Engine Page 5