Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  The next number on the program was “Over the Rainbow.”

  “Let’s take it up a half-tone,” Austin whispered.

  “Take it up a whole tone,” she whispered back, “and up another tone for the second refrain.”

  Austin rippled her introduction. And then something, someone was chattering. Ariana’s eye traced the trickle of sound to the center box of the grand tier. Principessa Maggie, sparkling as though she had walked through a snow of diamonds, stood brandishing a white mink, reaching across three exquisitely golden-haired male companions to hand it to a fourth.

  Ariana missed her entrance.

  Austin glanced at her. He doubled back through the introduction. Ariana opened her mouth. A note came out, but the chattering from that box filled her head. The melody rose an octave on the second note, and she tried to shape another beautiful arc.

  Her voice cracked.

  She heard Maggie’s stifled laughter.

  With Austin’s help she faked the song, stumbling dizzily on through humiliation and disintegration to the end.

  She stood, waiting for some sort of reaction from the shocked audience. A lonely pair of hands high up in the balcony began clapping. Gradually the rest of the house joined in.

  She recognized the sound of mercy applause, and she cut it short by positioning herself for her next number—“Torna a Sorrento.” Her voice broke on the very first note.

  She heard laughter from the center box.

  A blinding mist of anger rushed into Ariana’s face. Her composure burst like an aneurysm.

  She threw her head back and howled. “Get out!”

  For an instant a look of bewilderment swept Principessa Maggie’s beautifully young, beautifully made-up face.

  “Yes, you! Get out of my concert!”

  Bravas, jeers, hurrahs, catcalls broke loose in the audience.

  “I will not sing until that woman is thrown out of here!”

  The rest was a nightmare that Ariana only dimly remembered. It took four stagehands to subdue her, and she dealt one a savage blow to the shoulder. After the house doctor managed to jab a hypodermic into her arm she quieted and they carried her away, black hair streaming down her white, $4,000 gown.

  Twenty minutes before Maggie came home, Nikos had the whole story by phone. He was waiting when she stepped through the front door.

  “Why?” Rage came spilling from him. “Why did you have to go to that concert?”

  She took a step backward. “It was a public event, I had a perfect right to go.”

  “You didn’t have to take those sadistic, idiotic people!”

  She opened the closet and hung up her mink. “It’s not as though I murdered someone. I went to a concert and one of my guests was a little drunk. What’s the crime?”

  “You insulted an artist.”

  “She insulted herself.”

  Nikos raised a hand and Maggie’s eyes flinched. There was a moment when he could have struck her and then the hand fell back.

  “Ariana’s my friend,” he said.

  “All right, she’s your friend, and yes, I resent her, and I went because I knew it was going to be horrible. Everyone there knew. But I didn’t make it horrible!”

  “You made it worse. You made it much, much worse.”

  “I’m sorry! What else can I say? It was a mistake and I’m sorry!”

  “You always make mistakes and you’re always sorry.”

  “What are we arguing about now? Your daughter again?”

  She knew immediately it was a stupid, wrong thing to have said. His face closed down and he hardly seemed to be breathing.

  “You’ll pay,” he said quietly. “And it’s going to hurt the one way you can be hurt.”

  She waited to hear how he thought she could be hurt.

  “The hospital bills will come out of your allowance.”

  Disbelief shot out of her. “What hospital bills? For her?”

  “For her, Maggie. I’ve been paying for your friends ever since we were married. This time you’ll pay for one of mine.”

  “She’s had enough betrayal for one lifetime. She needs to be someplace safe, where no one can touch her, where she can have peace till she’s able to cope again. There’s a place in Connecticut like that.”

  Stathis listened patiently to what he considered sentimentality from the ultrarich. He had $12,000 in debts and with $4,000 he could swing a cocaine deal; he wanted money and he was willing to sit in Nikos Stratiotis’s office and flatter him with obedience for as long as it took to get it.

  “Sounds good,” Stathis said.

  “She’d have to be committed by a relative.”

  Stathis nodded solemnly. “Yeah, well, since Mom died I’m her only relative.”

  “Are you willing to sign the papers?”

  “What does this place cost?”

  “Don’t worry. That’ll be taken care of.”

  Stathis looked up sharply. “I meant my percentage.”

  “Of course, your percentage. What was it we agreed on—fifteen?”

  Stathis’s smile had the shape of a grave. “How about twenty this time?”

  “All right. Twenty.”

  Spring came and summer went and Ariana groped through a Thorazine fog, barely able to wash or dress or feed herself. The nurses put her in a chair by the window. She stared at trees and lawns and banks of shrub unreal in their tidiness, at nurses and patients strolling along the paths like players on a stage-set.

  She understood that something was going on, that in some way she was part of it. But she could not hold on to her impressions long enough to shape them into thoughts. They passed across her mind with no more permanence than clouds.

  Dr. Peter Meehan, who directed the clinic, looked in on Ariana every day except Sundays. He was a middle-aged man, broad-shouldered, with a lined face and a sprinkling of gray in his hair and mustache. Their visits were always the same. He moved his chair close to hers, took her hand and raised it three inches from the table. He released it.

  The hand stayed in the air, unmoving.

  “Ariana, put your hand down.”

  She didn’t seem to hear.

  He moved his face very near to hers. “Ariana,” he said very distinctly. “Lower your hand.”

  She drew away, blinking, and the hand dropped back to the table.

  “Thank you, Ariana. That was very good.”

  In the fall Dr. Meehan brought a small portable phonograph.

  Ariana glanced up expectantly at him.

  He set a record on the turntable. He lowered the tone arm. Her forehead puckered.

  From the tiny speaker came the voice of Ariana Kavalaris, singing “Sempre Libera.”

  Her eyes darkened and something painful came into the curve of her mouth. She suddenly struck the table with a clenched fist.

  He lifted the arm from the record and set it back on its rest. “I’ve always liked that recording. I think it’s one of your best. You don’t care for it?”

  She sank back in her chair. Her eyes closed. “Where did I lose them? Where?”

  Finally. He had broken through. “Lose what, Ariana?”

  “My F—my A—my E?”

  Dr. Meehan sat late at night in his office, puzzling. What did it mean—an F, an A, an E? They were musical notes, of course, but years of delving into twisted souls had taught him there had to be a deeper meaning as well. In the private language of the soul, they spelled something.

  He doodled on a scratch pad, trying to arrange the letters into words. AFE. EFA. EAF. All he could come up with was FEA—the Spanish word for “ugly woman.” Or possibly an incomplete FEAR?

  Doc, he thought, you’re stretching pretty far for that one. He balled the paper into a wad and lobbed it into the wastebasket.

  Four years and six months later, as the nation celebrated its Bicentennial, one of the most respected weekly magazines in the country published the first half of a two-part profile by Alan Cupson, the noted music critic. The arti
cle began:

  Ariana Kavalaris is no longer of the slightest importance. It is perhaps in poor taste to scrawl graffiti upon the tomb of an artist while she in a technical sense still lives—but the Kavalaris case so clearly epitomizes the temptations besetting the serious arts in our time, and the disaster of succumbing to them, that it merits detailed autopsy.

  The day the article appeared doctors drained more than a half-gallon of fluid from Ariana Kavalaris’s right lung and almost a half-pint from a swelling under her umbilicus.

  Chest X-rays had revealed lesions in her lungs, the sequelae of a childhood bout with tuberculosis. Now proliferating soft tumors were discovered in her abdomen. Tubercular peritonitis was diagnosed, and—with permission of her brother—appropriate treatment was undertaken.

  For ten days, though she was not expected to live, Kavalaris was given transfusions of whole blood. It was not until the week before Christmas that she improved sufficiently to return to the clinic where she had been undergoing treatment for severe depression.

  Her doctors did not permit her to see the Cupson article, the second part of which concluded:

  As for Kavalaris the interpreter, her development was the opposite of any genuine artist’s: She grew progressively more trivial and shallow, evading not only the operatic repertory, but the very issues which lie at the core of music itself. Long before she drove her voice into ruin—who can remember without a shudder of embarrassment the pathetic high F’s, A’s, and E’s of her last years—she had renounced all claim not only upon her listeners’ intelligence, but upon their sympathy as well. As with her art, so with her life. Never has a performer so ferociously squandered unquestionable genius. Of her gifts, of what she might have been, nothing remains. She will be remembered only as a warning.

  It is an immortality of sorts.

  32

  “PERHAPS YOU’D CARE TO bring your wife?”

  “I’m not married, sir.”

  Ames Rutherford was standing in the office of Justin Crewell, a slender, gray-haired senior partner in the Wall Street law firm of Cudahy Crewell. The older man had just invited him to dinner.

  “Perhaps you’d care to bring your fiancée?” Mr. Crewell suggested.

  “I doubt I could pass Fran off as my fiancée. We’ve lived together for seven years and we’re both very happy with the arrangement.”

  Mr. Crewell’s face worked like a fist preparing to strike. “I’m a great admirer of your father’s.”

  Ames was used to people admiring his father. “Thank you.”

  “And I think you might make an admirable junior partner of this firm. Provided you regularize your private life.”

  “Thank you, sir, but I believe my private life is my private life.”

  When Fran came into the apartment she sensed Ames was furious. “Something the matter?”

  “Sorry. Long day. Just a little worn-out.”

  He went into the bedroom. Fran came to the door and saw him staring out the window. They lived on the fourth floor of a converted landmark townhouse, and for New York in 1977 they had a luxury view: Washington Square, the arch and the fountain, NYU students and joggers and drug people.

  Ames’s silence was like a cold air mass pressing against her. She knew that silence, and even after all the years they’d lived together, it still had the power to terrify her.

  She’d felt it the first time in Cambridge, when he’d been at Harvard Law and she’d taught elementary music at the Longy School. They’d been living in a cheap student sublease and she’d come home and found him gazing at the wall. She’d asked if something was bothering him.

  “Professor Hooker,” he’d said. “Know how he opened the lecture? ‘Everyone look at the person on your right. Then look at the person on your left. Next year, one of you isn’t going to be here.’”

  She’d sat down on the sofa beside him and one of the springs had twanged. She’d smiled and said, “In two years even if the whole rest of the class drops out, you’ll be there.”

  And she was right. Two years later Ames Rutherford was not only there, but on the Harvard Law Review. And in the months before graduation there’d been offers from eighteen firms.

  Ames had talked it over with her and they’d decided on New York. He’d chosen the firm of Cudahy Crewell when they’d topped the next-best offer by $5,000. In the four years he’d been with the firm she’d seen him come home moody now and then, but nothing like this evening.

  She watched him go into the living room and pour himself a straight Scotch. He took it in three swallows and poured another. Suddenly she felt she was watching a stranger. “Ames, before you drink yourself speechless would you mind telling me what’s gotten you into this mood?”

  He dropped onto the sofa. “Crewell invited us to dinner.”

  “Great,” she said. “I’ll wear my—”

  “Then he disinvited us.”

  She turned. “Why?”

  Ames felt awkward bringing up the marriage question. It hadn’t exactly been his idea not to get married and it hadn’t exactly been hers. Sometimes he felt guilty about it. Fran was his best friend, he loved making love to her, but marriage…

  “Because we’re not engaged and we’re not married and we’re not…what Mr. Crewell thinks a member of Cudahy Crewell should be.”

  “A member? You’re a member of the firm now?”

  “Far from it. He just exiled me to a nice little pro bono job. I’m defending a woman accused of homicide.”

  All the big firms did a certain amount of unpaid work pro bono—for the public good. Fran couldn’t see that it was such a disaster. “Sounds juicier than wills and corporate reorganizations.”

  “I have no criminal experience, no courtroom experience, and Crewell has put this woman’s life in my hands.”

  “They’re damned good hands.” Fran sat on the sofa beside him. No springs twanged. “Tell me about her.”

  “She’s an ex-nun, a nurse in a hospice for terminal patients. She’s accused of smothering a ninety-two-year-old charity case.”

  As he spoke, Fran could sense an excitement she hadn’t felt in Ames since their first days in Fontainebleau. “Know what I think?” she said. “I think Crewell may be doing you a favor. I have a hunch there’s going to be a lot more bono in this than you realize.”

  The DA’s office messengered the evidence against Maria Bartholomew to the Wall Street offices of Cudahy Crewell. Ames studied the documents in the quiet of the firm’s air-conditioned library.

  The state’s case rested on the testimony of a convicted felon and admitted drug user by the unforgettable name of Tex Montana. Mr. Montana claimed that Ms. Bartholomew had sold him drugs stolen from her hospice. Mr. Montana further claimed that Ms. Bartholomew had on three occasions remarked that one of her patients, a ninety-two-year-old with esophageal cancer whose drugs she had been diverting, was “on to her” and would have to be “taken care of.”

  Ames interviewed Maria Bartholomew in a stifling cinder-block cell in the women’s house of detention on Rikers Island. He was impressed by the serenity and acceptance radiating from the gray-haired woman whose seventy-year-old eyes peered at him without shame or apology from behind spotlessly bright spectacles.

  After four hours he came out of the cell with a strong impression that she was innocent. The impression was bolstered when he visited St. Anne’s Hospice, a brownstone on Horatio Street in Greenwich Village. Maria Bartholomew’s coworkers called her a tireless worker, a dedicated comforter of the incurable.

  “How do you think the patient died?” Ames asked a cheerful blond-haired girl whose job it was to read to the dying. (Most of them, she said, wanted to hear fairy tales and children’s stories.)

  “Rolled over in his sleep and asphyxiated in his pillow.”

  “Does that happen often?”

  “We have a lot of close calls.”

  As Ames turned a corner into the winter sunlight of Hudson Street, he collided with a thin line of picketers. Th
ey were carrying signs protesting a proposed change in the neighborhood zoning.

  “Hey!” The tip of a flute nudged Ames. He looked up from the papers he had spread across the dining table. Fran was smiling at him. “You’re happy, do you know that?”

  “I’m working my damned ass off. Don’t you sit there twiddling your flute and call me happy!”

  “You’re happy and you love it.” She kissed him on the crown of the head. “And so do I.”

  “At which point Montana—” Dill Switt broke off his description of a murder trial he’d been covering for a New York publisher and wiped a speck of marinara from his lower lip. “Montana changes his testimony and claims he provided Watts with the shotgun.”

  Ames looked up from his lasagna. “What was that name again?”

  They were sitting in Emilio’s Italian restaurant on Sixth Avenue. “Montana,” Dill said. “Tex Montana.”

  “Dill,” Ames said. “We have to talk. Someplace private.”

  They talked. They decided something very ugly was going on. And then Dill went digging.

  Tex Montana, it appeared, was a professional state’s witness. He gave credible testimony and juries had twice convicted on it. But his testimony in the Watts case and his deposition in the Bartholomew case contradicted each other on one essential point.

  Mr. Montana would have had to have been in Binghamton dealing shotguns with Mr. Watts at the very hour he was two hundred miles away in New York City dealing drugs with Ms. Bartholomew.

  Ames asked Justin Crewell if he could take a week off to attend a trial.

  “Anything to do with that pro bono case?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  Ames explained and Mr. Crewell nodded wisely. “I’ll see to it.”

  That afternoon Mr. Crewell’s secretary knocked on the door of Ames’s windowless office.

  “Crewell needs you, Amesie boy.” She was a trim woman in her early sixties and she spoke Warner Brothers 1940s dialogue. “He needs you in the Whitney-Strauss cash election merger and that means he needs you off the pro bono. Effective immediately.”