As the dancers finished, the Manoa clan traded glances, then began to sing, “‘Imi au . . . ia ‘oe,” I search for you with love. The solid four-part harmony absorbed the cracked tones of elders and the shrill voices of children, a mournfully sweet melody that engulfed Maile. Tourists turned to stare, looking pleasantly surprised. The song moved past its midpoint, and she felt the end coming on, a page about to be torn from a book. She pictured Tūtū on the dock at Nāwiliwili, calling out and waving, her grandmother dead now two years, never seen again. Soon Auntie Lani and Makua would be lost to her as surely as a coin dropped into the deep harbor water; yet she had set all this in motion, had demanded it, and now must claim it.
A last call to board came from a loudspeaker. The farewell song dissolved into a flurry of final embraces. A baby wailed. Auntie Lani’s lips left a moist streak on Maile’s cheek. Makua’s chin stubble grazed her forehead. Her pili spirit clutched at all of them with greedy fingers, but she pulled away to follow the last passengers mounting the gangway.
FOR DAYS MAILE could not clearly remember leaving, or the trip to the West Coast, or getting on a train bound for New York—hours of staring out at a disturbingly flat landscape, occasionally broken by mountains, going on and on with no glimpse of the ocean. She tried to concentrate on which cities and states she was passing through, but felt only a confusing sense of endlessly moving forward into strange territory.
At her final stop she stepped out into the dark underground heat of Pennsylvania Station, harshly lit by racks of lights. Engine brakes screeched into the surrounding blackness. The dust-filled air stank of oil fumes. Men in suits and fedoras flowed past her toward a distant exit sign, lighting cigarettes and carrying briefcases the way actors did in movies. On the narrow passenger platform she stood like a tree in a flooded river, alone and anonymous.
Terrified, she had a vision of the high green ridges of Kalihi, still visible from the ship a mile out to sea, crested by white strips of mist moving upward into a late afternoon cluster of purpling rain clouds. Slowly she had lifted each lei from the heap on her shoulders, inhaled its fragrance, and flung it overboard, the carnation, the rope of orchids, the frail white ginger, the crinkled yellow plumeria strung by little children, the precious pīkake. On the water below they formed a long colored band drawn toward shore, a guarantee of her return, in triumph, two years from now. But now she was on a packed train platform with air as suffocating as a heap of hot sand. Her three spirits were a lump under her ribcage. She dragged her suitcase into a stream of people that never thinned.
Outside the terminal she paused amidst a racket of traffic, groups of men at the curb yelling at yellow cars, a jackhammer ripping into pavement. Across the street a wall of glass panes blazed yellow with reflected suns. High temperatures had softened the tarred cracks in the sidewalk, snagging her high heels. She took a taxi uptown to Washington Heights and a furnished one-room student apartment on 153rd Street, arranged in advance. In a daze of excitement she got a key from the manager, entered the room and sat on the bed until the little square of sky framed by the window faded to night. At last she got up to turn on the light and unpack, and felt a strange, wonderful sensation.
Privacy! For the first time in her life she had a room to herself.
4
ON THE TOP floor of 3660 Broadway at 88th Street, Madame Leah Renska put the last Venus Nipple on her tongue and closed her lips over it. Her students were trained to be exactly on time. This gave her the opportunity between lessons to enjoy ein kleiner Luxus, a reminder of a genteel life once lived in Germany. At fifty-seven, she could again indulge herself regularly, although decades ago she had given up on a face and figure that resisted improvement. Her hair had the consistency of steel wool. Her protruding eyes gave her a permanently startled expression, and her nose leaned slightly to the right in a banana curve. Her small mouth was a poor match for her large head, which was an even poorer match for a stubby figure and broad hands with elongated fingers capable of spanning well over an octave on a piano. But the looks that had tortured her in adolescence and denied her a husband as an adult no longer mattered. She had made it out of Europe alive and established herself in Manhattan. She had a beautiful ear for sound.
As the sleek icing melted on Madame’s teeth, she heard an unexpected knock on the apartment door. Annoyed, she swallowed her treat and got up to peer through the spy hole. A young woman of a decidedly exotic cast, with thick black hair wound into a topknot, held up a business card with solemn urgency. This was certainly peculiar yet also intriguing. Madame decided to take a chance and opened the door.
The young woman wore a red and white sarong with white high heels. The theatrical effect pleased Madame, but she distrusted it offstage. The business card was printed with a familiar name, under it Madame’s own name and address in black ink. The young woman held out a slip of paper saying, “The doorman asked me to give you this.”
Madame read the note and stifled a huff of exasperation: her next student, a brilliant but nerveless tenor, had again excused himself from a lesson. This young woman had managed to slip into his time slot. The name on the business card made Madame suppress a smile: Señora Zoila Mar y Sol—the former Sarah Sonnenberg—was still on world tour to small theaters in remote places. A genuine stage animal who had evidently recommended this young woman. Señora would not do that lightly. Or it might be an elaborate joke. The sarong, um Gottes Willen, was certainly an attention snatcher.
“And what is it I can do for you?” Madame asked. “Miss . . .”
Maile faced down the hallway and sang the loudest tone she could manage, a solid high C. Madame stood stiffly, waiting for the reverberations to stop. “Mere boldness is nothing,” she said. “Come in.”
She intended to spend only enough time with the young woman to determine if all this was in jest, or worthy of consideration. Forty-five minutes later Maile had sung scales that demonstrated an excellent range, and a spirited solo from The Messiah that demonstrated an utter lack of coloratura technique. Madame decided that Miss Manoa was a true oddity. Opera singers rarely came from west of the Mississippi, let alone Hawaii—which had a musical heritage Madame didn’t care to think about. She also distrusted exoticism, even when backed by what Americans referred to so childishly as “talent.” Yet this young soprano not only had the necessary basic gifts, but might possess intelligence as well. She had studied the German language—in Honolulu! And was very attractive; tall and slender as a ballet dancer, with liquid black eyes, highly expressive, a hint of Chinese about the lids. A delicate nose, low and flat, and naturally pouted lips.
Having asked few questions and invited no opinions, Madame mapped out her new student’s life. “You shall take one lesson a week, for at least two years. A minimum this long you must study. I shall arrange for you a little access to Juilliard Conservatory. You pay my fee of ten dollars each week in a white envelope. You are always timely and do never ask financial assistance because I give you my lowest fee because you are the unemployed soprano. The room you rent has a piano? Good. You have other clothes? Good. Next Tuesday, then, at this same hour. Perhaps Señora Mar y Sol has made the good guess.”
Maile strode up Broadway toward 153rd Street, too elated to take the bus. Her spirits spiraled from throat to pelvis and back again. Street after street she marched uptown, oblivious to the stares her sarong attracted. Two years of study fit her own estimate exactly, as in a Verdi plot where the heroine’s life was ruled by the forces of destiny. Then she would spend six months touring the world’s opera houses and six months singing with the Honolulu Symphony, and at Royal Hawaiian Hotel concerts, performing all the local music she could want. Her glorious escape from Danny O’Doyle nine months ago still felt unreal, but she passed the gates of Columbia University, and those were real. The strange American trees she glimpsed along the bank of a wide, dark river were real. And farther on was Harlem, famous for jazz and Negroes who looked great in clothes no haole could wear.
B
y the time Maile reached 153rd Street, her toes ached and her arches throbbed. Trash filled the gutters. A half-dozen dented, stinking garbage cans awaited pickup. Across the street the marquee of a closed movie theater was streaked with rust. Maile’s bright mood swept her into the apartment building, up the elevator to the eighth floor, and into the room where she now lived. New York was the most important city in the world, the source of taped radio shows that had reached all the way to Kauai.
OVER THE FOLLOWING weeks Maile’s radiant optimism faded as Madame Renska discovered the depth of her ignorance about music. “Vocal, symphony, ballet, you must know all,” Madame stated, “even the string quartet. I do not allow the uneducated soprano.” She brushed aside Maile’s music study at the University of Hawaii, assigned her regular listening sessions in the Juilliard record library, then quizzed her on the differences between French and Italian composers. Every free concert on the West Side had to be attended, early English lute music with tenor, a Finnish choir on tour, a Japanese prodigy playing Paganini.
For better or worse, Maile realized that she had taken a leap into the foreign world of New York, where all languages and races came together. Men flirting with her on the street assumed she was Caribbean, South American, Gypsy. If people asked about her ancestry, they refused to believe she was Hawaiian-Chinese-German, as though she’d attempted to tell a joke that failed. The general rudeness of New Yorkers appalled her, their clothes intimidated her, their food both pleased and repulsed her. What she didn’t know about fine art was a constant embarrassment. That began to fade as daily study allowed her the pleasure of developing personal taste. She put aside the dewy-eyed sweetness of Gounod in favor of Verdi, Puccini, and above all Mozart.
Making friends was more difficult. At Juilliard the few Chinese spoke little English, and several Negroes on scholarship never lingered in the building to chat. Caucasian students were brusque and arrogant compared to haole in Hawaii, unconcerned with a part-time auditor like Maile. Most students concentrated on fiendishly difficult piano and violin works, and seemed to focus solely on outdoing each other. At recitals she heard performances of explosive beauty from tigerish young musicians who stepped offstage to collapse in exhaustion, or to boil over with fresh competitiveness.
She met few women students, and fewer singers. Her three hours a week at the conservatory were filled with requests to fuck in a back room: Please, baby, gimme relief. She was shocked to find that most Americans considered sex either dirty, or entangled in a weird romanticism of purity and rescue. But musicians and musicmaking were also wildly, unavoidably attractive. She went to a violinist’s tiny bare studio in a fifteen-floor walkup, drank sour wine, and ended up under him on his couch. For a month they staged teasing lovers’ games, then went back to being acquaintances who exchanged nods in the library.
Week after week Maile drifted along in a loner life that she nevertheless enjoyed. Madame was all business and didn’t allow even the usual mild intimacies between student and teacher: no little jokes, no hinting questions about Madame’s past. Maile practiced in her apartment, cooked for herself, washed and ironed her own clothes. In one typical week she heard Purcell songs at the Cloisters and a concert version of Mozart’s Abduction in Queens, with a wobbly-voiced soprano and a spectacular tenor. She learned to rate singers, and understood that not all operatic voices were good.
An elderly widower in Maile’s building took to greeting her in German after he saw her carrying a book of Schumann songs. “Der geniale Komponist!” he declared, and introduced himself as Herr Melvin Landau. He wore fine three-piece suits and a heavy gold watch that hung loosely on his thin wrist. Twice they shared a pot of tea at the grim cafeteria across the street, exactly half an hour of proper conversation that remained with Maile the rest of the day as a pleasant interval in a disciplined life with few variations. When he mentioned being Jewish, she said that until she attended the University of Hawaii, she had never realized that Jews were a modern people. She had assumed they were confined to biblical times, like the Romans and Hittites.
“Ach, wohl,” Herr Landau remarked, smiling, “I am very much here.”
MANHATTAN BILLBOARDS ADVERTISED the coming of summer with cheerful beach scenes and smiling couples in cruise wear. Maile found the July heat oppressive. The subways were unbearable, so instead she rode city buses crammed with passengers whose clothes stuck to their chests, arms, and backs. Windows were often jammed shut, but smokers lit cigarettes and filled the interior with a gray cloud. She ached for the Waikiki breezes that flowed through the shoreline palms all year long, threading the air with the faint taste of salt. Even more she missed Auntie Lani’s energy and Makua’s quiet presence, and she sent them postcards of Manhattan with no expectation of a reply. She ate her first slice of pizza (awful), discovered mangoes in a Jamaican market (great!), but everything from rent to clothes to a packet of tissues bought at a newsstand was ominously expensive. With the approach of autumn she would need a coat, a hat, a scarf, things she had forgotten to budget. “I shall advise on the wardrobe,” Madame Renska said toward the end of summer. “Your sense for style must develop.” August was so hot that Maile began washing her hair every night. In Washington Heights whole families slept outside on the fire escapes of their buildings, which Madame claimed was a fool’s invitation to theft and rape.
Despite soaring temperatures, the Manhattan music community was in a state of high excitement about the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center. Maile had difficulty pronouncing the Italian title of the work scheduled for the opening performance: La Fanciulla del West. She wished that Aida had been chosen instead. The grand aria O patria mia remained a personal landmark, first heard in sixth grade and the cause of her exile from Kauai—although no one would ever get that backcountry story out of her.
Advanced music students were allowed into the noon dress rehearsal for the premiere of The Girl of the Golden West. Maile joined a crowd that radiated the exhilaration of being present for a historic occasion. Even though she’d studied the libretto beforehand, she couldn’t quite follow the action, but for the first time she experienced what it meant for singers to bestride a world stage with full orchestra and chorus. Leontyne Price fascinated her, every tone, every gesture, the delightful and unexpected flashes of wit. The marvelously trained voices projected into a true theater, built for singers, where a fantasy world was created for the sole purpose of enchanting listeners.
After the performance, Maile was swept along with a group of students who piled into a coffee shop to analyze the new building’s acoustics. They argued about tempi for chorus versus soloists, and swooned over phrases of perfection. Two hours later, going home by bus, she still felt the excitement, along with something new in the air. It was only five-thirty, but the sky was darkening. A chill swept through the drafty bus doors. Under the seat, the heater blasting at her feet gave little relief. She began shivering: hands, arms, shoulders.
The Negro driver glanced at her in his mirror and said, “Winter’s coming, little lady. Next time you’re out, now, don’t you forget your sweater.”
DURING OCTOBER MAILE watched the world blaze with the disturbing beauty of autumn leaves. She feared the increasing cold. Ads she had never seen, for flu medicines and cold remedies, appeared in newspapers, on billboards, in subway stations. On Madame’s advice she bought a coat, classily styled camel hair the color of Waikiki beach sand and lined in sheepskin. Its soft luxuries pleased them both, but Maile concealed the fact that it had cost only fifteen dollars at an East Side thrift shop.
As the temperature sank, she bought a fox fur hat, gloves, and a red cashmere scarf from the same shop. For her first Juilliard student recital, she wore them all and walked through Central Park to the performance hall. There she changed into a gown, which she realized too late was not appropriate, but she conquered her nervousness by single-minded concentration on her Schubert song cycle. Easy pieces compared to the aria Madame would not yet allow her to present in public.
Herr Landau was ill with stomach flu and unable to attend.
Maile’s performance was applauded politely by the small audience. Offstage, her accompanist gave her a thumbs-up and dashed away to a lesson. Madame came over to say, “Singing, yes.” She paused for a curt nod of approval and stepped back to eye Maile’s gown. “Such a satin creation, no.” She left to coach a tenor in the newest production at the Met. Maile realized there would be no detailed praise for what she’d sung particularly well, no listing of tiny mistakes, no joyous postmortem in a coffee shop. It was now simply on to the next lesson, the next challenge.
Back at her apartment she found a bill taped to the door: the cost of the space heater she had bought was not included in her rent, which only covered radiator heating, a detail she’d forgotten. Thirty-seven dollars was due immediately at the manager’s office. She burst into tears.
AFTER SIX MONTHS in the city Maile’s life was still an unbroken round of study. She didn’t miss a lesson or a concert, and the treasure of music continued to unfold: Mendelssohn lieder with delicate melodies like sparks rising from a driftwood fire at night, the grand sweep of art songs by Richard Strauss, with his passion for women’s voices. She also heard performances by singers past their prime who couldn’t hold a pitch, or whose voices were trained but ordinary, or who had a slightly grainy quality that betrayed secret cigarette smoking. Her worst frustration was having expected to be on stage by now, part of an opera production. Instead she sat in the audience at graduate student performances with a score in her lap. She ushered at Carnegie Hall so she could hear a soprano from Berlin. Tickets at the Met were unaffordable, and sold out through next year.
Aloha, Mozart Page 6