She bought a ticket, Rotterdam by ship $200, on an old freighter crowded with European students returning home after summer courses in America. In early September the waters of the North Atlantic were dark even at noon. She searched for the many shades of blue she had known since childhood, but the waves and swells were an un-changing sinister gray. She fought with herself over having sold the Kalākaua coins, her pili spirit stirring in aggravation whenever the memory came to mind. Two of the coins were “in case” money, Makua’s words, so they were not meant to be kept permanently. But the third, her mother’s wedding gift, with its tarnished strip at the back of the king’s neck, had lain on the counter of Manhattan Numismatics like an accusation. A coin, Maile had decided, that once belonged to a mother she’d never known, on the occasion of starting the kind of family life she would never have. A bit of monarchy silver passed down from a great-grandfather who had left only a name in Hawaii and disappeared on an unknown ship to an unknown destination. An ancestor ghost of the faintest kind, although he could help her now. She pushed the coin toward the other two.
The European passengers assumed that Miss Maile Manoa was Algerian. On discovering she held an American passport, they couldn’t believe she came from Honolulu, a fairyland none of them had visited. One Frenchman suspected her of being a secret Jewess, which made Maile laugh in amazement. At night she drank apricot brandy with Scandinavians, danced hula for them, and twice got into a cot with one man while another watched the door. The gospel of free love spreading across America had stolen aboard the ship.
5
IN ROTTERDAM, CUSTOMS officials announced that ship passengers planning to continue south by train must find alternatives: the tracks were obstructed by a protest over Soviet troop movements in Czecho-slovakia. Maile got a sudden, disturbing sense of Russian soldiers not confined to a news article in a Manhattan paper, but it was too late to change her destination: Salzburg, a city just a hundred-fifty miles from Prague. She left her trunk to be sent as rail freight, and arranged to go by Austrian Airlines. The flight would last just an hour, but she had never flown before. Spending extra money for a ticket made her doubly nervous.
Before leaving New York she’d sent a letter: “Dear Makua, This city is too dangerous and expensive for me to stay. I’m moving to Salzburg. That’s in Europe. My teacher says I’ll be a big success. I’m still coming home by next May. Love, love, and kiss the babies for me.” She couldn’t tell him that a career in classical music was far more competitive than she’d ever imagined, that opera singers needed patrons and luck, that they often sang in nine different languages, that she wasn’t sure of much anymore.
The small plane had Franz Schubert written on its side in curling Gothic script: a plane named for a Romantic composer who had traveled in horse-drawn coaches. “Austria heisst Österreich,” she murmured, “Ich heisse Fräulein Manoa,” baby German, tourist German, the words as mysterious on her tongue as when she first learned them in Honolulu. Like other women passengers, she wore a traveling outfit that included hat and gloves, but she still attracted glances, and her spirits would not settle down.
There had been a final chilly meeting with Madame at the door of her studio. Maile the rule breaker, demanding to know where she should go in Europe, although not invited inside to sit down for tea. “Paris is a lovely city,” Madame had advised briskly, “however the French music is not so worth your life devotion. Italy will train you beautifully, however their laws forbid hiring foreigners. Berlin is a possibility, Vienna. Or provincial Salzburg with its Mozarteum conservatory. I have a contact there. The summer festival is quite grand, other-wise Salzburg is a medieval village. The Fates play tricks to allow Mozart and Hitler to come from the same soil.” She had agreed to send a letter of introduction, and then closed the door.
A stewardess offered a dainty cup of coffee but Maile declined, her doubts about Salzburg growing. If Italy and France were out, Germany had eighty-two opera houses, more than any other country in the world. The Bayreuth Festival had been a cultural landmark well before the Nazis and was now fully reclaimed. The German economy was strong again but that meant a more expensive place to live. Austrian students supposedly got along on a hundred dollars a month. Their country was a tenth the size of Germany, the birthplace of Mozart and the waltz, which no one danced anymore. Her future now depended on Madame’s recommendation to a teacher in Salzburg who was only a name.
Too soon the little plane began a gradual descent. Maile’s chest stirred uncomfortably, and she peered out the window at what looked like a distant bank of fog clinging to the ground. It took on the form of a blue-gray frontier of mountains. Fields of snow glinted on every jagged peak—mountains without the familiar shape of a single volcano, dozens of peaks crowded together, a frightening, magnificent sight. Rainbows of sunlight flashed against the black rock, brilliant reds, yellows, oranges. As the plane turned in a diving arc, an oval of blue and white mountains opened up below like a gigantic crystal bowl, at its center a broad, bright green plain. A fan of blue lakes spread out to the west. The plane glided lower toward a long green river winding past three tree-covered hills, the tallest spiked by a castle, its steep walls topped by the spear points of towers, at its base a maze of twisting streets as dense as a coral reef. Maile stared in edgy enchantment. Buildings and spires crowded together reflected the golden light of a fall afternoon. Everything looked wonderfully old, as old as fairy tales.
On the ground a customs official stepped in front of her and sliced down with one arm. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” he asked in a pleasant tone.
“Ja!” she exclaimed.
He smiled, took her passport, sighed, and said in English, “The Americans, they are always so very fluent in our language.” Then, “Ach, du Lieber, born in Honolulu? You are my very first.” He asked about her future plans. She replied, and his eyes lost their flirtatious gleam. “Study, sing,” he remarked. “How vague.” All foreigners were considered tourists, he informed her, and must either stay at an official hotel or register at the police station within twenty-four hours. Failure to do so meant the possibility of deportation.
Sobered, Maile stared at the new entry stamp below the one for Holland. Police. Deportation. But the city of Mozart was just ahead. A cab driver recommended a hotel and asked if she was ready to go. “Jawohl!” she said.
A minute later the taxi was rolling along a cobblestone street of shops with arched wooden doors and flower boxes and green shutters. Windows were bordered in curlicues of wrought iron like graceful black ribbons suspended in the air. Bicyclists wove through clusters of women in full-skirted dirndls with puffed sleeves and aprons, men in linen shirts and leather trousers, a boy dressed like his father with an identical pheasant feather on his hat. Maile spotted what looked like an exclusive restaurant, with a wonderful name—Das Silberne Rehkalb, Silver Fawn—and wanted to go there for lunch.
Other signs highlighted with gold leaf announced SCHUSTER, GEMūSE. Shoemaker, she translated, scouring her memory, Vegetables; delighted to recognize words learned years ago halfway around the world. A large marble fountain had life-sized figures in long robes and at their feet an inscribed date: ANNO 1702. Europe, she wanted to shout, I’m in Europe!
In German the driver said, “The whole world comes to our summer Festival. From Japan, Arabia, Argentina. A shame you missed the performances.”
“Ja, das ist wahr,” she gasped, just to speak the language, to belong to the scene around them, so pretty, so clean, so unexpected.
The cheapest room at the hotel cost one thousand eight hundred schillings a night: seventy-two U.S. dollars. Maile had been prepared to pay fifteen. The taxi was gone, the only other lodgings were several kilometers outside the city, and she was afraid to spend more money looking around. She agreed to the three-day minimum, thinking of it as a temporary necessity. Apartments were supposed to be laughably in-expensive compared to New York.
In the room she stepped out of her shoes, took off her hat and gloves,
then fell back on the bed and lay there stiff as a plank. The toes on her right foot cramped. She shook her ankle. The cramp faded but reappeared behind her knee, and the drone of Manhattan traffic seeped into the room, as if she were still struggling to sing over the whirring, honking blare that reached high up into Madame’s studio, penetrated the walls at Juilliard, seeped through her old apartment window. Memories came to her like random snapshots spilling from a shoebox of photos: featured singer on national radio, Easter soloist in Honolulu, first Manoa to get a college degree, middle daughter in a large clan, unable to do the one thing expected of her, produce children. Details collided all the way back to Lihue Grammar School, to sitting in shocked silence after hearing opera for the first time, on a record, in a classroom full of children disturbed by the sounds. Why is the lady screaming like that?
She lay staring up at the ceiling, stunned to think of how ignorant she had been. People in Manhattan were raised with classical music. That had to be five times as true in Europe. Austrians grew up attending performances of The Magic Flute, knew Mozart by age seven. In the eyes of the world, Hawaiian music meant ukuleles and steel guitars, pretty or funny songs, light entertainment for tourists. The thought of Madame’s final coldness felt like a wound. For a year and a half the two of them had worked on arias that brought out the finest points of love, rage, devotion, joy. At their last meeting all that intimacy vanished. Maile wondered if she could ever succeed here, or if she even belonged in a country where Hitler and Mozart had been born just a hundred miles apart.
ON A MAP Maile found the Musik Akademie a short distance from the hotel, across a footbridge over the river and go left half a block. In addition to Madame’s letter of recommendation, she had to audition for the new teacher. Until the conservatory’s fall session began, applicants could rehearse there. After nearly two weeks of travel she desperately wanted to recover her singing voice.
On Schwarzstrasse a white four-story building had wide steps that led to a broad wooden door. Over it, in large letters chiseled into a white marble tablet: MOZARTEUM. Above that were tall windowed rooms with decorative railings, and four statues on the roof. A wing to the left extended to a porch of white columns in front of the concert hall. All tiny compared to Juilliard, she thought, but more beautiful.
The foyer was empty. At the far end of the main hall, a clerk in a gray suit stacked papers on a countertop. In the basement someone played a kettledrum, boom-boom sounds that droned up through the tiles under Maile’s feet. She climbed a zigzag of stairs to a series of doors with neat labels: ÜBUNGSZIMMER, practice room. Each was empty except for a chair and a piano. Cautiously she chose one and sat down.
The first tones she sang were sluggish, barely more than grunts. Do not rush, she reminded herself. Rough sounds could be expected after two weeks of traveling. Madame had said a singer’s basic gift never deserted one who was properly trained. Ballet dancers needed their daily warm-ups, and an operatic voice had to be awakened in the same way. Preparing for an audition meant faithfully completing routine exercises, not drinking red wine, not getting so nervous that one’s face broke out. After several minutes of low-range humming Maile felt a familiar vibration on her teeth. Her jaw and tongue loosened. With her breath she guided the humming into five low vowels. After another minute the first full tone emerged, “Aaahhh . . .”
Hele on, Maile-girl, she thought, go, go!
She broke off, horrified to realize she was thinking in pidgin, spoken at home by dishwashers and everyone in her family who couldn’t manage Standard English. For a moment she forgot where she was. “Salzburg,” she whispered, “Zalzburg,” pronouncing it as they did. She pictured the church spires she’d seen on the short walk from the hotel, the castle above them. The air and streets here were sparkling clean— like Hawaii rather than Manhattan—yet the encircling mountains were not green all the way to their peaks, and were much higher and fiercer than any she had ever seen. Each time someone spoke, the language hit her like a splash of water. People’s everyday clothes resembled costumes in an historical painting. Here she was Fraülein Maile Manoa, and constantly felt off-balance. In fact, she admitted, Miss Manoa from Hawaii was just someone with a dream based on a fantasy about a soprano named Zoila Mar y Sol. The name alone should have been a warning! Because of that fantasy she now sat in a practice room in an unfamiliar country, with no idea of where to go or what to do if the Mozarteum teacher did not accept her. Going home was not possible. Better to climb one of those frightening mountains and just step off.
THIS MORNING’S NUMBER was seventeen, chosen by randomly opening a book of Nietzsche’s writings on music and accepting any page number over ten and under twenty-five. Professor Aleksander Jann’s fingers had become adept at flipping to the lower figures, so it was necessary to be disciplined and avoid cheating.
Seventeen steps to the back porch to put on a gardening smock and clogs. At the rear of his handsome house was a patch of rich soil where cows once grazed. This fall his rows of yellow and auburn chrysanthemums were planted in a French style of chevrons. Carefully he removed seventeen weeds. He clipped an equal number of flowers for a bouquet to give his wife when she returned from her massage at Kurgarten spa.
On the back porch Professor Jann removed his smock and muddy clogs, and put on slippers. As he passed through the front room on his way to shower, he avoided looking at a particular cabinet. Seventeen minutes later, he sat at a desk in a narrow alcove that functioned as a library. He translated seventeen more lines of a Latin version of Tristan et Isolde. And so on through the morning, assigning himself chores or doing things that gave him pleasure until the number of different activities matched the arbitrary number he had started with. He didn’t always make it, especially on days when there was no chess game with Baron von Gref to look forward to, or a lesson at the conservatory. He dreaded the approach of old age and the steadily shrinking social life that accompanied the fact of no longer being on stage.
Often, after he completed a dozen or so tasks without cheating or repeating, his thoughts stalled and then revolted. At that point the urge could no longer be resisted. He went straight to the cabinet and took out a glass and the bottle of Chateau Montifaud with a grateful feeling that was as powerful as sex, as love, as music.
This morning, however, he made it to noon, just in time to enjoy luncheon with Dora before going to the Mozarteum. She was his fourth wife, womanly rather than prettily feminine, and she retained the slim figure of a runner who had participated in the 1936 Olympics. A whiff of notoriety still clung to her for having shaken hands with the Negro runner Jesse Owens, an act her husband deeply admired. They had been married for six years and were settled into the pleasures of a mature relationship. He’d promised to retire now that the Mozarteum’s summer session had ended, and his last student was under contract in Vienna.
As he and Dora were finishing their meal, the mail arrived with a letter from New York. Dora wanted to take their customary post-luncheon walk, but did not protest when he went alone to the conservatory. He’d intended to clear out his teaching studio but the letter from Leah Renska intrigued him.
Professor Jann hadn’t seen her since 1938 when they were both starting out as teachers, and Austria was joined to the German Reich. One day after returning a score to the library, Leah simply vanished. A year later he was relieved to learn she had found work in New York. For nearly three decades their contact remained cordial although infrequent. Professorin Renska retained her ability to “spot a winner,” as she put it, and still taught America’s finest singers, including several at the Metropolitan Opera. The three tenors she had sent him over the years eventually became well established in Germany.
Yet the fall session was about to begin. The admissions deadline had passed, and a singer from Hawaii was unusual enough to be almost bizarre. Jann opened the windows in his studio to air it out, then read the letter again: Maile Manoa, one of Madame’s beginning pupils, a select group with access to The Juilliard School. Th
ree solo recitals there, 1966 and 1967, eleven other recitals elsewhere in Manhattan. Performing arias gratis, he assumed, in college halls and hospital lounges, an admirable American custom. Miss Manoa had a degree in elementary pedagogy from the University of Hawaii, where she had also studied German. He couldn’t imagine the language of Heine and Hoffmannsthal being taught in Honolulu. He hadn’t even realized that any form of higher education existed in Hawaii. Sugar came from those distant islands, and pineapple in tins. Perhaps this young woman was from a wealthy plantation family able to fund her studies in Europe. It did not seem like a promising background for opera.
Some barriers, Jann felt, were insurmountable. Certain singers came from unusual places, but growing up in the middle of the Pacific surely entailed more risk than advantage when it came to performing sophisticated theater roles. If he trusted Madame’s judgment, he didn’t quite believe that a Hawaiian could make the leap to the European culture of music. He decided to audition Miss Manoa out of simple curiosity rather than any expectation of being able to forge a career for her. After all, listening to an aria or two did not imply accepting her as a student.
IN THE MOZARTEUM an elderly janitor was waxing the floor to a mirror shine. Three girls with long brown braids sat on the center staircase with notebooks balanced on their knees. A blond man on a bench pulled the mouthpiece from a French horn and examined it with a critical squint.
Over the last two days Maile had eaten regularly, walked for exercise, and focused on her mental routine for auditioning: withdraw, withdraw, withdraw into a knot of energy that would burst to life as music on command. Practicing had progressed from simple scales to great double-octave leaps. An hour ago at half volume she’d sung Aida’s lament for her lost homeland, saving her all for the moment that mattered. The final phrase lingered in her mind and gave her a jumpy sense of confidence.
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