Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  Act Three began with a storm building. Gilda and Rigoletto watched through a crack in the wall as the duke entered the house of Sparafucile, the assassin, and asked for wine and a room. The duke sang “La Donn’ è Mobile”—“Woman is Fickle”—and flirted with Sparafucile’s sister, the prostitute Maddalena. Gilda was heartbroken.

  Rigoletto ordered his daughter home to change into men’s clothes and precede him to Verona. Sparafucile came outside. Rigoletto gave the assassin money—half his fee for murdering the duke. The rest would be paid at midnight, when Rigoletto returned for the body.

  Maddalena, attracted to the duke, now pleaded with her brother not to kill him. Gilda returned, dressed in male clothing and determined to save her faithless lover. She overheard Sparafucile agree that if another man arrived before midnight, he would kill that man and substitute his body for the duke’s.

  The storm was raging in full fury as Gilda knocked on the door, entered, and was struck down by Sparafucile’s dagger.

  Rigoletto arrived. Sparafucile handed over a body in a sack. At that moment the duke’s voice could be heard offstage singing “La Donn’ è Mobile.” The jester tore open the sack and discovered his daughter. With her last breath, Gilda begged his forgiveness. He collapsed over her lifeless body, crying “La maledizione!”—“The curse!”

  The curtain fell. The cast took their bow, and then the soloists.

  Mark got to his feet and led a standing ovation. It seemed to Ariana that all the wealth and glitter of Mexico City were cheering her. The din refused to die away and even after a dozen curtain calls the audience still would not let her go.

  Mark’s eyes stayed fastened on hers and there was a promise in his glance.

  Her eyes questioned. Did you get my message?

  His eyes answered. I’ll meet you. Soon, my darling, soon.

  The audience called her back eleven times. Bouquets and torn programs rained down on the stage and Mark was there beside the empty seat, his eyes promising.

  The dressing room overflowed with well-wishers, packed thick as trees in a forest, but Ariana didn’t see Mark.

  “Didn’t you deliver my message?” she asked the usher.

  The usher nodded toward a large man in a dark suit. His gray hair was full and curling and the lines in his face seemed intelligent and kind. But he wasn’t wearing a clerical collar and he didn’t resemble Mark in the least.

  He was waiting for Ariana’s glance. He approached, his hand outstretched, a smile blazing out of his dark, tanned face.

  “Miss Kavalaris, what a sublime performance.” He bent over her hand and she felt the shadow of his lips. He said his name was Raul Rodriguez. “May I present my wife, Madalena?”

  The woman beside him murmured, “Encantada.”

  Ariana stared at the woman. The seat beside Mark had been empty—she would certainly have noticed if Señora Rodriguez with her ash-blond hair and diamonds had been sitting there. “You were in the third row? Third seat to the right of the aisle?”

  Señor Rodriguez reached into his vest pocket and from behind his gold watch pulled two ticket stubs. “Usually my brother-in-law uses the seats, but he is in Geneva. His bad fortune was our good luck.”

  Ariana could only nod in dumb embarrassment. “I’m sorry, I made a mistake. I thought you were someone else.”

  “I hope you are not disappointed that it was only my wife and I. Could we trouble you to autograph my wife’s program?”

  “Of course.” Ariana took the pen that Señor Rodriguez held out and splashed a signature across the cover of the program.

  It took twenty minutes to get rid of all the visitors, and a desperate loneliness welled up in Ariana.

  Boyd smacked a kiss on the side of her face, his white teeth flashing. “It came together, sweetums, it came together!”

  “Did it?”

  He looked at her. “Don’t tell me you’re glum. You should be dancing on ceilings.”

  “I’m a little disappointed, I guess.”

  “Then you’re the only disappointed person in Mexico City.”

  “I thought someone was here. And he’s not.”

  “So? Big fat end of the world? What does it matter, sweetums, so long as you sang like a goddess?”

  Ganz-Tucci squinted at the bootleg tape that one of her informants had smuggled in from Mexico.

  Her vision was blurring with age and her entire body ached but she managed torturously to slip the reel onto the player. She found the button that made the tape go forward.

  She shut her eyes, listened to the entire recording, and went to the telephone and dialed a number.

  “Ricarda? Get over here immediately.”

  “Are you a criminal or just an imbecile?” Ganzi-Tucci was poking the air with her arms like a furious old monkey.

  DiScelta watched, unimpressed. “Whatever I am, you taught me to be.”

  Ganz-Tucci rumbled with the tape player, and motioned the younger woman to be quiet and listen.

  A voice glided upward, filling the room. At moments it had tones like shadows slanting away from the sun; at others it had the brilliance of a diamond. Ganz-Tucci stood by the window and with the edge of her folded spectacles tapped time on the sill.

  The tape finished.

  Ganz-Tucci gave DiScelta a dark look. “Your pupil?”

  “My pupil,” DiScelta acknowledged. “How did you get it?”

  “There are people willing to help me. You are not my only friend. Happily.”

  DiScelta did not answer. Something congealed in the silence.

  “That is the sound we’ve been searching for. I feel it here, inside me.” Ganz-Tucci rapped her spectacles against her heart. “Ricarda, that is the voice.”

  DiScelta was silent.

  “Are you going to answer me, or are you just going to stand there and flaunt your ignorance and incompetence as though they were gifts from God?”

  DiScelta looked at her teacher. She’s aged, she thought. Even by the glow of sunset creeping through the curtained window she could see that Ganz-Tucci was a very old woman with stiff white hair and painfully brittle movements.

  At that instant Ricarda DiScelta loved her old teacher with a melancholy, almost overpowering tenderness. She wanted to rush across the space that separated them and embrace her. She wanted to spend the evening talking about their careers and their youth and all the music they had ever made and all the singers and composers they had ever known and loved.

  But that was not the way they behaved with one another. They were teacher and student, still, even after all the decades they had shared.

  “I hope you’re right,” DiScelta said with forced coolness. “I hope she is the voice. Soon I’ll know.”

  “We haven’t time for your inertia!” Ganz-Tucci screamed. “I could die tomorrow!”

  “That would be very sad, but I am the judge of her readiness,” DiScelta reminded her teacher, “not you.”

  13

  “IT’S DIFFICULT TO PUT into words. I’ve worked twice with Ariana. And both times I’ve sensed an improvement in my work. The second time I knew it was no accident. It was her.” Only the skin of DiScelta’s throat reacted to what Boyd Kinsolving had said. It pulsed rapidly just above her pearls.

  “With Ariana,” he said, “my ear is sharper, my control of the musicians is firmer.”

  “I know, I know,” DiScelta said. “You think a shading or an accent, and it’s there. You are the music and the music is you.”

  They were sitting in her apartment. He had requested the audience. She had granted him ten minutes between pupils.

  “You have power over her,” he said.

  DiScelta did not deny it.

  “I thought you might encourage a collaboration between her and me.”

  A silence fell. DiScelta sat in absolute motionlessness.

  “She sang only eighteen performances at major houses last year,” Boyd went on. “She has only sixteen this year. If she works with me, she’d double her p
erformances. In two or three years she could be singing eighty to a hundred.”

  “And you would be conducting those eighty to a hundred?”

  Boyd nodded.

  “Ariana will be the greatest voice of our age. You are developing into a good conductor, but you will never be considered one of the greatest.”

  “I can’t deny that. On the other hand, I could save her ten years’ struggle for recognition. In return, she would be an enormous help to me later, when I’ve peaked.”

  “No. I’m against it. She’s giving you too much, you’re giving her too little. Unless…” DiScelta paused. “Why not marry her?”

  “Marry her?” Boyd frowned thoughtfully. “Look, you’re perfectly aware I’m not attracted to women. Sexually, I mean.”

  She shrugged. “There have been marriages of the spirit, especially between artists. As husband and wife, you would be attractive to audiences. The exclusivity would make sense: agents and impresarios would cooperate, whereas if you were unmarried they would resent you. And Ariana would have a home. She wouldn’t waste time looking for emotional security.”

  Boyd hesitated. “What makes you think she’d accept me?”

  “Perhaps she wouldn’t, but what do you risk by trying? Propose to her, but don’t force a reply. Give her whatever time she needs—a week, a month, a year. Plant the seed.”

  There were too many intriguers at the party, too many small people ready to condescend: “Would I have heard you sing at the Met?” and then that startled look when she said she’d sung three Butterflys that season. “Oh, we gave our Butterfly tickets to the maid.”

  A hunger for fresh air drove Ariana into the garden.

  “You look lovely and lonely,” a voice said.

  She turned. Boyd Kinsolving, not quite steady on his feet, was holding out two glasses of champagne. She took one of them. They sat on a bench and sipped for a silent moment.

  “What do you think of me?” he asked.

  “Oh, I think you’re probably drunk.”

  “At the moment I think you’re probably right.”

  “But I also think you’re a promising conductor.”

  “Thank you. And personally?”

  “The truth?”

  “Please.”

  “I think you should spend more time with your scores and less with rich and famous fools.”

  “You don’t like our fellow guests?”

  “Half of them have names, half have fortunes, none have minds. They bore me and I’m going.”

  “They bore me too and I’ll help you find a cab.”

  He walked out to Beekman Place with her and hailed her a cab, and then he asked if he might ride with her because New York always looked so beautiful through the windows of a taxi. After three blocks he took her hand and said, “Would you consider marrying me?”

  She turned in the seat, surprised.

  “It’s only something to think about,” he said. “Nothing needs to be decided today.”

  “I don’t love you,” she said.

  “You may come to. I’m quite lovable, you know.”

  “Boyd Kinsolving proposed marriage to me.”

  Ricarda DiScelta leveled a long, smoke-colored gaze at her pupil. But she did not answer. She opened the score of Barber of Seville and laid it carefully on the music rack.

  “It’s a ridiculous idea. Boyd and I are completely wrong elements for marriage.”

  “Elements are strange. From horse tails and cat intestines you can get a string orchestra.”

  “You think I should marry him,” Ariana said. In her eyes was a mingled expression of disbelief and indignation.

  “An artist’s life is solitary and difficult. It can be a great help having a companion who shares one’s values. Boyd Kinsolving knows his deficiencies. And he knows your qualities.”

  “You actually want me to marry him.”

  “My child, you must do what makes you happy. But never forget that love, what you call love, once made you very unhappy. With this man you would never have to endure that again.”

  “Ricarda, he doesn’t even like women.”

  “But he likes you. And he’s offering you companionship, a shared interest, and professional support.” DiScelta glanced at her watch. She smoothed her skirt, lowered herself to the piano bench. “Fascinating as your emotional life is, we have more important problems to discuss. You’re breathing wrong in the cadenza to ‘Una voce poco fa.’”

  By the first Sunday in November autumn had come with sharp windy gusts to the little park on Bleecker Street. But the sun was sparkling and the children in the playground made a cheerful noise, and Ariana decided to take a bench and read her Sunday Times outdoors.

  She went through the entertainment section first, studying the music reviews and the announcements of upcoming concerts and operas. Then she searched through the news section for late reviews.

  The name Rutherford leaped out at her from the society page.

  Miss Farnsworth Weds Mr. Rutherford.

  She stared a moment at the bride’s photograph. She read the article slowly.

  Nita Farnsworth had married Mark Rutherford at her family’s estate in Lloyd Harbor, Long Island. The ceremony had been performed by the rector of Phillips Exeter Academy, one of the groom’s alma maters. The bridesmaids—among them the daughter of the Vice President of the United States—had worn cream taffeta.

  Ariana ached as though there were nothing in her life except his absence. It was an hour before she could gather herself together and stand and tell herself that Mark Rutherford was gone, that a chapter of her life had ended forever.

  She phoned Boyd Kinsolving and asked him to meet her at the Palm Court in the Plaza Hotel. She chose the Palm Court because it seemed the sort of place where people who went to weddings in Lloyd Harbor might take afternoon tea. She asked Boyd if he knew a family called Farnsworth.

  “I used to date a girl called Nita Farnsworth. She got married last week. Poor Nita.”

  “Why poor Nita?”

  “She married a minister. Nice fellow, but—” A waiter passed and Boyd beckoned. “Ariana, what are you having?”

  “Aren’t we having tea?”

  “God, no, it’s much too early in the day for tea. Have you ever had French seventy-fives?”

  French seventy-fives turned out to be an enormous cut-glass bowl of brandy and champagne. Boyd ladled two glasses full. He sipped and sat back and looked over at the pianist and violinist playing Fritz Kreisler waltzes.

  “Do you know Nita Farnsworth’s groom?” she asked.

  “He went to Buckley, I went to Allen-Stevenson. He went to Exeter, I went to Groton. He went to Harvard, I went to Yale. Our ships kept passing in the night. I see him sometimes at the Knickerbocker Club. We say hi.”

  The bowl of French seventy-fives went on forever, like a magic pitcher in a fairy tale, yet instead of feeling drunk or giddy Ariana felt distant and isolated. Suddenly she slid over on the bench next to Boyd and laid her head beside his.

  “Do you still want me to marry you, Boyd?”

  He stared at her. She had the impression shock had suddenly sobered him.

  “I want to marry you, Boyd. We’d be good for each other. I’m making my debut at La Scala next month, singing Lucia. We could get married afterward; in the spring.”

  “Not till you sing Isolde.” He gulped the rest of his drink, and then he smiled and put both hands on her shoulders. He held her at arm’s length and kissed her very deliberately on the tip of the nose. “I could never marry a woman who hadn’t sung Isolde.”

  “No one sings Lucia and Isolde.”

  “You could.”

  She sensed he was drunk. “Boyd, I need a friend.”

  “You got one, sweetums.” He snapped his fingers in the air. “Waiter—more French seventy-fives here, please.”

  “Boyd, do you think we ought to?”

  “Of course we ought to. We’re celebrating our engagement.”

  “He want
s me to sing Isolde,” Ariana said.

  DiScelta shrugged. “First things first. We start with Lucia.”

  For the next month DiScelta lashed Ariana and herself like workhorses. She demonstrated whole sections, hammering out the beat with her fist on the piano top.

  “You have to find a terrible crazed quality for the voice. After all, you are mad. The voice is the role. You must find the voice, and then you will have Lucia.”

  Her demands were often almost beyond reason. “Who told you to breathe there, Donizetti? Show me in the score.” Her fury at Ariana’s mistakes was murderous—“Cocente, cocente, not concente”—her praise for Ariana’s successes only moderate—“Very well, Austin, we will move on to the arioso.”

  And, during the final week of preparation: “Forget the notes. You know the notes, the audience knows the notes—pay attention to the character!”

  On March 15, five days before the first performance, Ariana and her teacher boarded Alitalia Flight 612 for Milan and hurtled toward La Scala, toward Lucia di Lamermoor.

  “I have not been kind to you, have I?”

  It was moments before the performance and DiScelta was sitting beside Ariana on the little pink sofa in her dressing room. DiScelta spoke slowly and gently. The dark wooden walls, so good for vocalizing, cupped her voice in soft resonance.

  She took from around her neck the ruby and amethyst locket that Ariana had so often seen her wearing, the locket of large heavy stones glowing softly in their gold setting. It seemed to pulse with indecipherable mystery.

  She pushed a spring, and the locket snapped open with surprising force. There was a miniature portrait of a woman inside.

  “What an extraordinary face,” Ariana said. It was difficult to resist the steady gaze of those painted eyes.

  “Her name was Alberta Gesualda. She was said to have the greatest voice of her century. Her voice was so beautiful that she moved even the Pope. It was said that she was the first woman to have his permission to sing upon the Italian stage. He gave this locket to her. She gave it to her pupil, who gave it in turn to her own pupil. It has been passed down from teacher to pupil ever since. It belonged to Grisi, to Patti, to Melba, to Ganz-Tucci, who was my teacher, and for twenty-five years it has been mine. I have never given a poor performance while wearing this locket. They say no one has. I don’t know the reason. Perhaps there aren’t reasons for such things. But I like to think that some of the greatness of its past owners is still living in it.” DiScelta’s eyes met her pupil’s. “Perhaps it would give you courage to wear it tonight?”