Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  “Mark, there’s one thing Mama may mention—she usually does. I had TB when I was a kid.”

  He didn’t know how she expected him to react. “What difference does that make?”

  “The doctors got me over it, so I guess it doesn’t make any difference. But she likes to bring it up. Be prepared.”

  Ariana knocked.

  The door opened and a woman stepped out onto the threshold. She was in her mid-fifties, neatly dressed in a pale cotton print with a lace collar. She reminded Mark of the kind of waitress who would kiss the regular customers.

  Mother and daughter embraced. Quickly. Very quickly. Ariana said, “Mama, this is Mark. Mark, my mother, Yvonne.”

  Yvonne Kavalaris angled her fine-boned, pert-nosed face upward, studying Mark. Finally she held out a hand. She had a very gentle grip, surprisingly soft skin.

  “How do you do, ma’am?” he said.

  “Very pleasant to meet you.” Speaking with a slight French accent, she turned to her daughter. “It’s a long time since we’ve seen each other. Why is that?”

  Ariana shifted weight a little guiltily. “You know how it is, Mama. My studies, my work…”

  “Strangers see one another more often.” Yvonne led them into the dark little apartment. She served cakes and cookies and candies and coffee.

  Mark complimented the cookies.

  “Mama baked those herself,” Ariana said.

  “Il est très gentil,” Yvonne said to her daughter. She turned to Mark and said, “I was telling my daughter that you’re a very nice boy.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Of course, I knew you were nice the first time we met.”

  Mark registered bafflement as politely as possible.

  “You don’t remember? It was at the opera. You were standing at the fountain with Ariana. You were wearing one of those private school blazers, with shiny brass buttons. That’s how I knew you were nice. Though I have to admit, when I saw you kiss my daughter, I wondered. But you were only eight years old or so. So I let it pass.”

  “That’s right.” Mark remembered now. “And you were wearing—”

  “Black. It was two months after Ariana’s papa died. I shouldn’t have been at the opera, but Ariana begged me and begged me. We sat way up in that balcony. Are you an opera fan?”

  “I love opera.”

  “I’ve never understood it. But it’s a living.” She glanced at her daughter. “At least they say it’s a living.”

  “You’ll see, Mama. It’s a living.”

  At that moment there was the sound of a key in the lock. The door opened, and a young man with a narrow face and dark eyes sauntered in. He was wearing a wide-shouldered black pinstriped suit that could have come from a thirties’ gangster movie, and he sailed a fedora onto a chair halfway across the room.

  “Hey, Sis!” he shouted.

  “Hey, Stathis!” Ariana ran to hug him.

  He lifted her and gave her rump a pat. “Eating a little zabaglione, Sis?” His gaze took in Mark. “Hey, we got company?”

  “As if Mama didn’t tell you I was bringing a friend.”

  And out came a flood of Greek, two pairs of dark eyes focusing on Mark and leaving no doubt who was being discussed. Finally Ariana said, “Mark, this is my brother Stathis. Stathis, Mark.”

  Mark accepted a tough handshake from her brother. What hurt was not the bone-grinding grip, but the sandpaper calluses.

  “Mark, you got yourself quite a girl.”

  “I told him already,” Ariana said.

  Following dinner a chocolate layer cake was produced, oddly tasteless after Yvonne Kavalaris’s home cooking, and Stathis—his mouth full—proudly explained that it came from the bakery he ran public relations for.

  Yvonne tried to have a serious talk with Mark about the Episcopal ministry. “You can earn a living at that?”

  Ariana, who had taken over the serving, called from the kitchen, “Mama, we’ll be secure, okay?”

  “Sure you’ll be secure, but what about your kids?”

  “We’re not going to have kids.”

  “No kids? Because of your lungs?”

  “Mama, I happen to have terrific lungs.”

  Yvonne glanced at Mark. “You know what I mean.”

  A sigh came from the kitchen. “Panagia mou, voïthia!”

  “I won’t have that Greek cursing in my house.”

  “Just because it’s Greek doesn’t mean it’s a curse.”

  “I may not speak Greek but I know a curse when I hear one.”

  Ariana came back into the room and bent to kiss her mother. “Relax, Mama, we’re just not going to have kids right away.”

  “Of course not right away, no one has kids right away, but—”

  “What Mama means,” Stathis cut in, “is when you do have kids will they be Catholic or Protestant?”

  “We’re leaving the church out of this,” Ariana said.

  Yvonne’s face drained of color.

  “Mama, we’re not going to get married. Not right away. We’re going to live together, just to see how it works. Like you and Papa did.”

  A silence flowed by. “That’s fine,” Yvonne finally said.

  Stathis rose gloweringly from the table. “Hold it a minute, that doesn’t sound so fine to me.”

  “Stathis, it’s what they want, it’s what they’ll do. So shut up. Who wants coffee?”

  “I’ll get it, Mama,” Ariana said.

  “You sit. You’ve done enough.”

  While Yvonne was in the kitchen clattering saucers Ariana exchanged what-can-you-do raised eyebrows with Mark.

  After a very long time Yvonne returned with the coffee. Her eyes were red. She bent down to hug her daughter. “I’m happy for you, Ariana. You too, Mark. I hope all your fairy tales come true.”

  In the taxi going back downtown, Mark asked Ariana how she felt the evening had gone.

  “They’ll get over it,” she said.

  “About your young friend, Ariana…she’s a charming girl.”

  They were sitting in a softly lit corner at the library of the Union Club. Mark Senior had left the brokerage house early, Mark Junior had cut hermeneutics in answer to his father’s summons.

  “You’re in love with her?” Mark Senior asked.

  Mark nodded.

  “Might I ask what, if any, are your intentions?”

  “I have no intentions, Dad. Hopes, yes. Intentions, none.”

  “Is she pressuring you?”

  “To marry her? No.”

  “Then I have a suggestion. Miss Kavalaris is an attractive young woman. You’re a healthy young man. She’s willing, she doesn’t expect marriage.” Mark Senior raised his cup of bouillon and carefully sipped and set it back noiselessly in its saucer. “Have your romance with Miss Kavalaris. Get her out of your system. Finish your studies. And in time you’ll meet the right young woman.”

  “You’re overlooking one thing, Dad. I have met the right young woman. And I love her.”

  “I’m sure you believe that.”

  “Have you ever been in love, Father?”

  “Of course I’ve been in love. Everyone’s been in love.”

  “Were you ever in love with Mother?”

  Mark Senior stared out the tall club window at Fifth Avenue. A double-decker bus went by. “Your mother’s a fine woman. She’s made me very happy. And someday, if you don’t make a grave mistake with your Miss Kavalaris, some fine woman will make you very happy.”

  “I’m not certain that’s the sort of happiness I want.”

  “I’m not certain you’re completely sensible at this stage.”

  “Father, I could bear your honest disapproval far more easily than this queasy tolerance of yours.”

  “Your mother and I only want what’s right and happy for you.”

  “Thank you, Father. And please thank Mother too. Because that’s exactly what I want too.”

  Mark told Ariana about his talk with his father.

/>   “That does it,” she said. “We’re going to find an apartment.”

  They searched Hell’s Kitchen, the Upper West Side, the meat-packing and warehousing district just south of Chelsea, and finally they found a two-room apartment on Perry Street in Greenwich Village.

  As such things went, it was cheap. The building, pink stucco with a garden courtyard that had a fountain with a prancing Pan, had originally been a two-family townhouse, and was now converted into flats. The super, a limping old woman with dyed red hair, led them up a flight of stairs and pushed open a door on the first landing.

  “Perfect fourth,” Ariana said. “The hinges sing do-fa. The first two notes of ‘Amazing Grace.’”

  She explored. There was a bathroom with a tub that—if you hugged your knees tight—you could just manage to crouch in. Tucked away in what had obviously once been a closet was a two-burner stove and a two-shelf refrigerator and a sink. There wasn’t a right angle or a window that slid easily or a straight-hanging door in the place. But there were two rooms, and a door between.

  “I love it,” she said. “Let’s live here.”

  They paid the red-haired old lady $37 deposit—all the money they had in their combined pockets—and asked her to hold the apartment for a week.

  At her next lesson, Ariana asked DiScelta what sort of strings came attached to the Stratiotis scholarship.

  “None. He simply wants to support the arts.”

  “How much support?”

  “He mentioned $300 a month.”

  “I’ve changed my mind. I’ll take it.”

  Two days later Ariana presented the landlord’s agent with a certified check for a month’s rent plus a month’s security. The next day she and Mark moved into 89 Perry Street.

  They scrounged for paint and beat-up old tables from the warehouses on Tenth Street. They argued dealers into giving them mark-downs on worn rugs and battered lamps and scratched pots and an old oaken armoire with a cracked mirror.

  In three weeks, they had the beginnings of a home. It was cramped and cluttered with musical scores and New Testaments and falling-apart Hebrew-English lexicons and a third-hand sofa and an upright piano from a Brooklyn warehouse and a brass bedstead Harry Forbes let them have from his barn in Vermont. Though they couldn’t afford anything to eat but pasta, they were happy.

  “Magda hates me,” Ariana remarked over a bowlful of their Thursday evening special, tortellini marinara. Magda was the super with the limp and the bad dye-job. “I caught her looking at our mailbox. There are two names.”

  “That’s logical. There are two people.”

  “Two people who aren’t married. She looked at me like I was leading you astray.”

  “If you ask me, Magda shows great accuracy of judgment.”

  Ariana made a slingshot of her fork and flicked a spatter of marinara onto the exact center of Mark’s forehead. “Watch it, smarty, I’m pretty accurate myself.”

  Richard Schiller entered Ariana’s life with little steps.

  First there was a polite note on Americana Artists Agency letterhead, asking if she remembered him, a friend of Nikos Stratiotis, asking if she might be interested in singing Annina, the maid, in a St. Louis production of Traviata.

  She talked it over with DiScelta, who said, “This agent is hungry. He’ll work for you. Do it.”

  Then there was the phone call asking her to stop by his office. A receptionist walked her to a windowless cubicle where a heavyset man with a fringe of black hair was speaking on two phones at once.

  He saw her and hung both phones up, and right away she liked him for making her feel important.

  “What would you think of Micaela in Atlanta?” he said.

  “I’d think yes.”

  “I’m going to like working with you.”

  He got her jobs: Mimis in the Midwest, Musettas in L.A., a Rosalinda in Kansas City. Every month there was a check in the mail from his agency, and every month it was a bigger check.

  The checks changed a lot of things. The Perry Street apartment bloomed in little ways: a shower attachment in the bath, lace curtains on the windows, a small eighth-hand Persian rug in front of the rocker. When Mark passed hermeneutics with a straight A, they were able to celebrate by going out for dinner.

  After a Rosina in Louisville, Richard invited Ariana to lunch at the Russian Tea Room.

  “Why are you knocking yourself out for me?” she asked.

  “It’s my job.”

  “Other clients are more important. Why me?”

  “With you, Ariana, I hear the distant winds of fame blowing. I have a stable of warblers and hoofers and keyboard tinklers and fiddlers, and of the whole bunch you’re the one sure thing. Which is why I want to ask you a question. Will you sign with the agency? Three years, exclusive. And I’ll work for you. Really work.”

  “You mean you haven’t been really working?”

  “I mean you’ll see some results. And I mean real.”

  “Sure. I’ll sign.”

  They went back to his office. It was still on the seventeenth floor but now it had a window looking at the seventeenth floor across the street. He gave her a three-page document and she signed without even looking at it.

  “It’s nice to be trusted,” he said.

  She gave him a glance of her brown eyes. There was a glint of another color in them, a changing color like the shimmer in a peacock’s feather. “You’re easy to trust,” she said.

  He went out of his way to book dates for her, pushing and lying and hustling just a little harder than he would have for anyone whose eyes didn’t have that extra glint. She never let him or the agency down and, more important, she made him feel good about his own judgment. He knew she had a voice and he liked to think he was nurturing her.

  He didn’t like to think he might be in love with her; and the thought only crossed his mind once or twice a week.

  Besides which, he’d been married for eight years to an angel by the name of Sylvia who gave terrific back rubs.

  Stepping into the apartment on West Fifty-ninth Street, DiScelta kissed her old teacher. “How are you, my dear?”

  Hilde Ganz-Tucci managed to suggest a great deal of suffering with a simple shrug. “With back pains life is not always comfortable.”

  DiScelta sat on an overstuffed chair. She bent forward to search through slices of cake arranged fan-style on a Dresden platter and selected the one with the most almonds.

  “I dozed this afternoon,” her teacher said. “I had terrifying dreams. Sleep frightens me. It’s too close to death, and I can’t afford to die yet.”

  DiScelta chewed a moment in smoldering silence. “You spend your life worrying.”

  “What have I to do except worry?” Ganz-Tucci closed her eyes. Her hair was sparse and totally white. “I’ve accomplished my task. Now why don’t you accomplish yours!”

  “If I go too fast with Ariana it will be a botch.”

  “Your standards are artificially high.”

  “No more so than yours. I used to leave this very room in tears.”

  “And now you’re having your revenge.”

  DiScelta sighed a sigh of conciliation, of compromise. “All right. I’ll start her on Tosca. Will that satisfy you?”

  Ariana saw the announcement in the New York Times. Due to health problems, DiScelta was canceling three Toscas at the Met and two at Covent Garden.

  Yet at their next lesson DiScelta seemed perfectly robust, feisty as ever, with no diminishment of bad temper. They began with cadenzas from Sabaggi’s Solfège des Solfèges. After the seventh cadenza, a killer, DiScelta looked at her.

  “See?” she said. “You’re not even winded.”

  It was true. There was still breath in Ariana, a reserve that had never been there before.

  “You found your breathing that time, just as you came to the A-flat trill. Isn’t that so, Austin?”

  It was the first genuinely encouraging remark DiScelta had ever made about Ariana’s singing,
and she seemed to be calling on the accompanist as much to witness her own generosity as her pupil’s newfound skill.

  Austin nodded. “Yes, madame. She did very nicely.” His dark eyes met Ariana’s. And I mean it, they said.

  “It happened because you stopped trying,” DiScelta said. “You let the music take you.”

  There were other oddities during the lesson. A “Nice, very nice,” when Ariana came off a pianissimo high D-flat. A hand touching her shoulder, warning her to save strength for the next roulade. She was aware of dozens of infinitesimal gestures and inflections, veiling the shape of some hidden, mysterious change.

  At the end of the lesson her teacher leaned quietly against the great Steinway, wrapped in her cobalt blue woolen shawl. “I won’t be singing Tosca anymore.”

  “I saw in the Times,” Ariana said. “I’m sorry you’re not feeling well.”

  “That was just an excuse. I’m tired of the role.”

  Ariana’s eyebrows went up.

  “Tired of singing it,” DiScelta said quickly. “Instead, I would like to teach it.” She took both Ariana’s hands between her own. She smiled gently and said, “I should like to teach it to you, my child.”

  Ariana wondered at the thickening layer of doubt that seemed suddenly to fall on her. Doubt where there should have been excitement. Hesitation where there should have been eagerness. It was one of the greatest roles in the entire repertory. “I’m honored,” Ariana said softly.

  “It will be work, you realize.”

  “I can work.”

  “I know. That’s why I chose you.”DiScelta’s eyes held Ariana’s strangely. “I will never sing the role again. You will be my Tosca.” And then she added, “You will be the world’s Tosca.”

  DiScelta’s Tosca lessons began with a somber warning. “Puccini has ruined more young voices than any other composer. Though his characters are youthful, his melodies take strength and maturity to sustain. The accompaniment is rich, the lines are long. A deadly combination for untrained voices. He is the killer of youth.”

  She pointed out the dangers of the often-sumptuous orchestration. “See how he doubles the vocal line in the orchestra. Sometimes he triples it, even quadruples it, sometimes he even plays it in the bass. The listener thinks, what luxurious sound! But that sound is your rival. You must be heard above it. And the secret is not volume, but enunciation. Keep your consonants crisp. One thing the orchestra can never take away from you is your consonants!”