He had expected a ladylike dragon. Instead he was seated across a lunch table from a motherly figure in a gray print dress.
“It’s impressive,” DiScelta said, “that Ariana can sing both Lucia and Aïda, music so different in character. Do you have any idea how scarce dramatic singers are? They’re scarcer than good stockbrokers. You are good, aren’t you?”
“I do my best.”
She lifted from her head a little black pillbox hat that was at least three decades out of date and placed it on the empty chair between them. It crossed his mind that this woman was not Ricarda DiScelta, but simply one of her character changes, pulled out of the closet and put on for the occasion.
“Ariana said you’re a minister. I hope that means you’re honest.”
“I studied for the ministry. I try to be honest.”
The waiter took their orders. Through soup and shad roe they talked of stocks and the coming split in IBM. Mark sensed that DiScelta had too firm a grasp of the market to need his advice and that she must have had another purpose in asking to see him. With coffee, conversation shifted back to music.
“Two months ago I would have said Ariana will be one of the great voices of our century. Now all I can say is, she may be.”
“Why are you suddenly uncertain?” Mark asked.
“Because you stand in her way.”
He felt atoms of color beginning to drain from his face.
“An operatic career,” DiScelta said, “is not just one or two performances, any more than an opera is one or two arias. An operatic career is a life. It cannot be divided.”
“But there are married singers.”
“Yes, the stable ones. But Ariana is not stable. Look at the evidence. She canceled engagements in order to travel with you. She made those television commercials to put you back in the seminary.”
“She never told me that was the reason.”
“Twice she compromised her career and came close to ending it.” DiScelta leaned forward, and shadows seemed to gather around her. “I believe in her talent. I believe in her voice. But her nature is volatile, divided. She lacks the ability to dedicate herself one hundred percent. And she’s competing with people who dedicate themselves one hundred-ten percent. An operatic career requires, above all, emotional concentration.”
Mark did not answer. Very carefully, he buttered a roll that he had no intention of eating.
“I’m not denying,” DiScelta said, “that she loves you and you her. That is not the issue.”
“Then what is the issue?”
“I see in Ariana a woman who could be one of the most dedicated servants of music this century has known. That is what I want for her. I make no secret of it.” Her eyes were blazing into his. They were the color of night. “And you, Mark—may I call you Mark?—what do you want for her?”
“I want her happiness.”
“Or is it her love you want? What if they’re not the same?”
Mark had a feeling that a great wave of will was pouring out from DiScelta, almost engulfing him. “What does Ariana want?” he said. “Doesn’t that count?”
“Each of us gets one chance.” DiScelta held up a single finger, and a diamond sparkled. “Only one. This is Ariana’s chance. She may succeed, she may fail. But if you make her give up her one chance, she’ll always wonder what might have been. She’ll be unhappy for the rest of her life. We all know what happiness is—songs and poetry tell us—but what about unhappiness, lifelong unhappiness—do you have any idea what that is?”
“How do you know she’ll be unhappy?”
“I’ve had students. I’ve seen careers. I’ve seen marriages. I’ve had marriages. I know. For a real artist, and I believe she is a real artist, there is only one satisfaction, and that is to share her God-given gift with the world. As you, were you a practicing minister, would share yours with the world.”
He felt inexplicably depleted. It was as if every impulse of joy and youth in him had suddenly died.
“You realize, don’t you, Mark, that she would give up her career for you? Is that what you want? Is that what you’re asking of her?”
A cold, irrational foreboding took him. It was as though when he looked at this woman in black another person were speaking through him. “No. I have no right.”
“Then I propose a bargain.”
He sat, powerless to move, and Ricarda DiScelta calmly stirred half a sugar lump into her coffee.
“In a little more than eight weeks,” she said, “Ariana will sing Aïda in Mexico City. This will be her international debut—the test of whether or not she can carry the major role of a major opera in front of a major audience. Can you be at that performance?”
He knew everything depended on his having the strength to muster a no. But he heard that other person speaking through him. “Of course.”
DiScelta smiled and took a little catlike sip of coffee. “If, after that performance, you believe she has the makings of an international star, you will step out of her life; give her up. If you honestly believe she hasn’t the makings, I will respect your judgment. I will urge her to give up all hope of an international career, to devote herself to lieder, to recitals, to teaching; to bury herself in the small satisfactions of music. To marry you. The nightingale will clip her wings and become the parson’s wife. With my blessing. The choice—the decision—will be yours.”
He could feel a grave closing over him. “That’s quite a responsibility you’re thrusting at me.”
“All responsibilities are dreadful.”
“Give me time to think this over.”
“You have one week. And then, one way or the other, the arrangements must be final.”
That evening Mark sat in the rocker, hands writhing in his lap.
“Supper in five minutes!” Ariana called brightly.
“Ready and waiting,” he called back, faking cheerfulness.
A smell of spaghetti marinara filled the little apartment, and a moment later in the next room Ariana was accompanying herself at the little spinet in a passage from Norma.
Mark stared desolately at the floor. It seemed to him that one pure soprano voice lifted in song went further toward God than any prayer he could muster.
Mark phoned his father and asked if they could talk. They met the next day in a quiet corner of the Union Club, and for twenty minutes Mark Rutherford Senior stirred his coffee and listened to his son. And then, with eyes that were hard but kind, in a voice that was aloof but gentle, he answered as best he could.
“I look at you and I see a young man who loves tennis and rowed in the Harvard crew, a young man who feels a calling to the Episcopal Church and, in my honest opinion, doesn’t give a damn about Puccini. Gilbert and Sullivan is enough for him.”
“And I love Ariana.”
“As what healthy young man wouldn’t? She has admirable qualities. She has intelligence, she has spirit, she has determination. I look at her and I see an undeniably attractive young woman who loves music, who loves the stage, and who—with the love that’s left over—loves you. But is that going to be enough for either of you?”
“I don’t see how I can live without her.”
“You have to realize, Mark, as people change—and life changes us all—love changes. In some cases, love dies. And lovers have to go on living. Are you quite sure you’ll always love her just the way you do now? Or she you?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“And you’re sure nothing hidden in the future—or in the past—can ever shake your faith and beat you down and break your heart?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Mark’s father smiled. It was a smile of remembering, of kindness, of youth recalled. “You’re both highly gifted young people. But the artist and the minister have very different gifts. There are bound to be moments of serious conflict.”
“Don’t all lives have moments of conflict? You and Mother—”
“Deeper than that. Conflicts of vocation.
I’m using the word in your sense, Mark. Does that surprise you? All human endeavor—law, medicine, the ministry, the arts—has to be seen in the light of vocation.”
Mark felt growing suffocation, as though DiScelta had closed the grave and now, with every reasoned, tolerant word, his father was shoveling topsoil over it.
“You and Miss Kavalaris worship different gods.”
“If you mean she’s Catholic—”
“Let’s not be parochial. I’m talking about opera and the church. The score of Traviata and the Book of Common Prayer.”
There was a moment of silence while the stooped old waiter, unbidden, poured them fresh steaming coffee from a tall pewter pitcher. Mark stirred a lump of sugar into his cup.
“She’s called to music,” his father said. “And you’re called to the ministry. I doubt that both callings can exist in the same marriage.”
Mark sat there quietly, like a schoolboy taking punishment from the headmaster.
“You have an obligation to consider not only the people you may one day serve with your gifts, but the people she may one day serve with hers. If you let her.” With that, Mark Rutherford Senior drained his coffee cup, signaled the waiter to bring the chit, and signed. “I’d better be getting downtown. Can I give you a lift?”
That evening after work Mark crept into the chapel in his old seminary. Evensong was in progress, and he slipped unseen into a seat in the rearmost pew.
His soul was in pieces as the last rays of day bled through the stations of the cross onto his folded hands. He felt more remote from God than ever before in his life.
His lips formed a voiceless supplication.
Dear God, please guide me. Thy will be done.
Mark phoned DiScelta from his office the next morning. He said two words.
“I agree.”
“Alima!” Ricarda DiScelta clutched the receiver close and shouted across the Atlantic from her living room to the Villa Graziella in Palermo. “Don’t sing the Mexico City Aïda!”
“I can’t hear you,” came the faint and incredulous voice.
“Don’t sing Aïda! Save yourself for Norma at Scala! Besides, the Mexican Aïda is a terrible production and Tumolti has organized the critics against you!”
“I didn’t want to sing it in the first place, but my agent—”
“Good! You’ve always had sense! I’ll take care of your agent! Enjoy your vacation and be sure to bring me back a box of those delicious Milanese macaroons!”
For eight days Richard Schiller negotiated over crackling long-distance wires.
The Mexican Opera, committed to an elaborate and costly spectacle, swayed by international reviews which Richard shouted to them over the phone, accepted Alima Harvey’s understudy as Aïda. But Patemio’s agents refused what they called “the breadstick singer.” Richard pointed out that she had sung Musetta to Patemio’s Rodolfo. The agents phoned back a day later, saying their client would absolutely, but absolutely, not sing with the “television salesgirl.”
Which left Giorgio Montecavallo, a tenor who if not over the hill had certainly passed the crest. A resident of New York, Paris, and Gstaad, he happened to be in New York at the moment; more important, he happened to be a client of Richard’s agency. He viewed himself as the equal of Patemio and had made a profession of stepping into his rival’s cancellations.
“But of course I will sing with Kavalaris,” he told the press and photographers in his East Side apartment. He was wearing only his blue-striped gym shorts, and his body of muscle-going-to-pudge glistened with a light glaze of sweat. “I have heard she is splendid. No true artist would be frightened of appearing with such a talent.”
11
“WITH VERDI,” DISCELTA SAID, “opera becomes modern. We have freer form. Arias do not always return to the opening verse—and why should they? Do our thoughts and emotions repeat?”
She pointed out that the early Verdi operas were beautiful melodies over an oom-pah-pah accompaniment. “Sometimes he sent a work into rehearsal with nothing more than the vocal parts, the bass line, and a few instrumental cues. His early scoring was formula. The aria opened with string accompaniment. Winds were added as the melody climaxed. And that was the Verdi style.”
DiScelta went to the bookcase.
“And then he changed.” She pulled down two leather-bound volumes and handed them to Ariana. “These are yours.”
Ariana opened them and was astonished to see that they were DiScelta’s own heavily marked editions of Aïda and Traviata. They were not the piano-vocal reductions that she and her teacher usually worked from, but full orchestral scores.
“With Traviata and Aïda,” DiScelta said, “Verdi added a character to the opera: the orchestra.”
And so Ariana had to learn to read orchestral clefs and transposing instruments, how to hear in her mind the difference between clarinet and bassoon on the same low E, between viola tremolando and violin sul ponticello.
And she had to learn a new vocal style.
When she first sang Aïda’s aria “Ritorna Vincitor,” DiScelta slammed the keyboard lid shut and waved her silent.
“What do you think you are giving the audience—beautiful technique?”
“I was trying to,” Ariana stammered.
DiScelta sighed, made two cups of herbal tea (this week it was lemon verbena) and sat Ariana down in the armchair by the window.
“Beauty,” she stated, “is for tunes, not for Aïda.” She explained that Verdi conceived his mature operas not as strings of songs, but as dramas told through music. “The drama never stops for the music, and the music never stops for the soprano. Always keep this in mind. In Aïda you are an actress who sings, not a voice that happens to act.”
She explained that beyond a certain point in Verdi projection of the words and a commanding stage presence were far more important than vocal polish or flash. “You must base your performance on the dramatic situation and the text. Nothing else matters.”
Ariana felt like an idiot. “I was only trying to please you.”
“Never try to please anyone but the composer. Finish your tea and let’s take ‘Ritorna Vincitor’ again, not as a soprano would sing it, but as Aïda would.”
Mark sleepwalked through the next weeks, stunned, bewildered, stupefied. And then it was The Day. Eleven A.M. Time to go.
He picked up two suitcases and she picked up the other two and the hinges went fa-do as they swung the door shut and locked it, and they struggled down the stairs with their luggage.
He prayed for there not to be a cab, but when he raised his arm a Checker cab swerved around the corner of Perry Street and slowed toward the curb.
It was an unpleasant ride to the airport. Not just the traffic, the jolts, the red lights, which he welcomed (Maybe we’ll miss the plane…maybe we’ll miss the performance), but the feeling of complete powerlessness, of total inability to control what was happening.
“Mark,” she said. “What’s the matter? I’m the one who should be worried, not you.”
He tried to smile. “Nervous for you, I guess.”
“Don’t be.” She patted his thigh. “I’m going to be the greatest. I’m going to knock Mexico City on its ear.”
Eight hours later she was tapping him in the ribs. He had dozed off on the flight. His dreams had been awful.
“We’re here—Mexico.” She said it with an “h,” the Spanish way, jokingly.
A limousine was waiting to whisk them to their hotel. Mark stared through the window at broad avenues that seemed to be Paris with palm trees.
The sun burned more powerfully in this latitude; plants and sky and even buildings radiated color, like excess energy. He felt a tiny chill—inexplicable, for the car was hot and underneath the sweater that he had foolishly worn he was perspiring.
Black palm fronds stirred against the evening sky as Mark and Ariana arrived at the opera house. He stayed with her while she vocalized, turning pages at the little spinet in her dressing room.
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br /> “I thought you hated hearing me warm up,” she said.
“I love it.”
“Panagia mou, now you tell me!”
The dresser arrived. He left Ariana and the little old woman fussing with a black wig, wondering why in the world a black-haired soprano needed a black wig to sing Aïda. He went into the corridor to smoke a cigarette.
The shape of a jeweled woman appeared in the shadows. DiScelta. “The green room is empty,” she said. “We can talk there.”
He followed her into the deserted room. He felt he was walking through a nightmare.
She chose an armchair, deposited herself on it with an odd little shimmy of possessiveness. Her gaze fixed him. “Each step in life—our actions, our failures, our successes—is an act of faith.”
“You sound like one of my teachers,” he said.
“No, I sound like her teacher.” Her eyes were dark with something more than night. “Whatever happens tonight,” she said, “you must never, ever tell Ariana of our agreement. May I have your word?”
He finished his cigarette, stubbed it out. “In for a penny, in for a pound. You have my word.”
DiScelta rose. “There’s just time for you to wish her luck.”
He went to the dressing room and found Ariana gulping down chamomile tea. He hugged her from behind. “It’s going to be fine,” he promised.
“It’s going to be awful. I don’t even remember my first notes!”
He set down her cup, took her hand and held it, lifting it into the space between them. “See this hand?”
“Yes, all too clearly—it has palsy, like the rest of me, including my so-called voice.”
“God has placed in this little hand a little light to lead you.”
“Mark Rutherford, of all times for you to turn minister on me…”
“No kidding. And this little light is the hopeful and believing soul of Ariana Kavalaris. All you have to do is follow it.”
He kissed the hand and gave it back to her. She stared at the hand, then at him, and there was wonderment in her eyes. “You couldn’t have said anything more perfect.” She managed a sort of half-smile. “But I still have this terrible feeling. As though if I kiss you it’s goodbye.”
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