Ariana

by Edward Stewart

  He heard she was preparing Turandot for La Scala.

  He heard she was in Australia shooting a movie for British TV.

  He drank too much and came home with an heiress from Barbados and a very bad headache. There was a message on the answering machine.

  “Hello, Ames. This is your father. Can you give me a ring?”

  “I read your article,” Bishop Rutherford said the next day. “It touched me.”

  Ames stood with the phone, staring out the open window at the Atlantic. His head throbbed with hangover. He managed to say, “Thanks.”

  “I’d like to talk to you about it. Could you have dinner with me tonight?”

  Ames hesitated. “Look, I haven’t got my calendar here, but—”

  “Please.” The voice was tight with urgency.

  It was the first time in his life Ames could remember his father’s ever begging. “Okay, but I can’t stay long.”

  They finished their dinner and went to the study. The bishop crossed slowly to the sideboard. He fumbled with a latch, produced a bottle and two handsome snifters. As he poured, his movements seemed tired and a little sad.

  It occurred to Ames with pained surprise that his father was becoming old. I wonder how long I have before I’m old too?

  The bishop handed him a snifter. “To your very good health.”

  “And yours.”

  A conversation waited to be started. Ames tipped his head back and took half the brandy in a gulp.

  His father stood looking at him in the half-darkness, and Ames sensed in him a solitude that was strong and resigned and impenetrably patrician.

  “How are you getting along with Fran?”

  “You don’t have to pretend, Dad. I know you don’t like her.”

  “I don’t dislike Fran.”

  “She’s left me,” Ames said.

  Concern flickered in the bishop’s eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  “We’ve been breaking up a long time. Ever since we met, I guess.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “No.”

  “I hope—I hope you’ll love someone, someday.”

  “I do love someone.”

  The bishop looked at his son a moment, then walked to the window and stood gazing down through the graceful wrought-iron bars at evening strollers in the street below. They were mostly blacks and Spanish, peaceful tonight. It was a changed neighborhood. Once it had been a white, Protestant, patrician suburb of a white, Protestant, patrician New York. Only the cathedral remained from those days, and the blacks and Spanish rarely came to worship in it.

  The bishop sighed. “That was a fine article, Ames. Oh, I know you were poking fun a little, but that’s your right.” He came back to his leather armchair. “You were wrong about one thing, though—the reason I did the eulogy. It wasn’t that I’m father-confessor to some jet set. She was a friend—and I felt I owed her something.”

  Suddenly, Ames was interested. For years he’d thought of his father as a completed puzzle, no pieces missing, and without warning here was a brand-new piece.

  “It must seem strange to you,” the bishop said, “your father and…an opera singer. Sometimes it seems strange to me. As though it all happened to someone else.”

  But somehow it didn’t seem strange to Ames; not strange at all. In fact it seemed like something that a part of him had known all his life. “Dad, how well did you know Kavalaris?”

  “How well?” The bishop was silent a moment, his eyes lost in memory. “Long ago—when we were very young, and very full of hope, Ariana and I—were in love.”

  In a soft voice that only occasionally trembled, Bishop Mark Rutherford told his son the story.

  43

  BY THE TIME THE bishop finished, the room was dark. He walked slowly to the desk and turned the lamp on.

  Ames honored the moment by keeping silent.

  The bishop picked up a pipe. “I sometimes wonder if the road I’ve traveled all my life has been a detour, not the main road.”

  Ames recognized that it was a question, and that more than anything else his father needed the answer. He began to understand the sense he had always had of Mark Rutherford as a man waiting by the wayside of life, huddled, shutting things out. He began to understand things about his own life too, and about the part of himself that had always seemed to be missing.

  “Dad, the apartment that you shared with her—was it at 89 Perry Street?”

  The bishop looked surprised. “Yes—it was.”

  Ames rose and came across the room and embraced his father.

  “Thank you,” the bishop whispered. “Thank you for letting me say everything.” He began crying.

  His son didn’t speak, just held him close.

  “Silence is death. I’ve lived so much of my life in silence. No one’s to blame for it but me. It was my choice.” The bishop dried his eyes. “Excuse me for breaking down like this.”

  “Thank you, Dad.” Ames had a sense that those tears and those four hours of truth were the first real thing his father had ever given him. “From the bottom of my heart, thank you.”

  The next day Ames went to his father’s old seminary. His eye swept iron fences, trees that had grown undisturbed for a hundred years, buildings of ancient brick. A sudden conviction froze him.

  I’ve been here before.

  He knew what he would see if he followed the path around the turning. A boxwood hedge. Beyond it, a tennis court. A tall oak tree, as tall as these buildings. Beyond that, a jungle gym.

  He turned the corner.

  Three little children were scrambling on a jungle gym, too busy to glance at him. Two seminarians in swimsuits and T-shirts were batting a tennis ball across a net in the fading evening light.

  He sat musing on a bench under the oak.

  How could I have dreamed this? Why would I have dreamed it? Aren’t dreams fulfillments of wishes? What wish of mine is this place?

  Thoughts came to him that were not his own. A sadness filled him. He seemed still to be listening to his father. A weight pulled in his chest.

  He didn’t know how long he sat there. He sensed a shadow beside him on the bench, and then realized the sky was darkening. Drizzle was clicking against the leaves. He bolted for cover to the nearest doorway. Rain began slapping down. He pushed through the door.

  As his eyes adjusted to the blackness he could make out two candles shedding a pale light on a distant altar. Above it, chunks of the past peered out of a half-restored stained-glass window. He stood hunched and frowning. What the hell am I doing in a church?

  He slid down into a pew and emptied his lungs in a sigh.

  “Whoever You are, whatever You are,” he whispered, “help my father.” He hadn’t intended to ask anything more. He was surprised to hear the same voice whisper, “And help me.”

  The very first thing Vanessa saw when she opened the door that fall was a rumpled magazine on the music stand of the piano.

  “What kind of friends does my agent rent my apartment to?” She frowned. “Isn’t Knickerbocker a drug magazine?”

  Cynthia looked at her sharply—too sharply. “It prints a lot of gossipy trash about a lot of gossipy trashy people.”

  Vanessa held up the cover with her name on it. “You mean gossipy trash about me.”

  “Don’t bother reading it,” Cynthia said.

  “Honestly, it’s not going to break my bones.” Vanessa plunked herself down in the comfortable chair and turned on the reading light. She came to the byline. Ames Rutherford.

  His image floated before her mind. He seemed to have happened decades and not just a summer ago.

  It’s over, she thought. I chose for it to be over. I’ve always stuck by my choices.

  She began reading.

  The article glowed with affection and bristled with an accuracy that astonished her. There were details she was certain she’d never discussed with anyone. Time and time again she stopped and wondered how he could have known so much about voice,
about the people around her, and strangest of all, about her own feelings.

  I could phone him, she thought. There’s no harm in that. Just a phone call to say I liked it.

  Ames stared at the page where he had typed eight fumbling attempts at the same sentence. The room suddenly seemed warm. He threw open the window. Gulls were swooping over the Atlantic. He thrummed his fingers on the sill.

  The second hand of the electric wall clock glided evenly past Roman numerals. As it touched the V the sound of a bell crashed in on him like waves.

  For an instant there was nothing in the universe but one jangling phone. He saw a shadow in the air, a ripple of blond hair, the turning of a head. He lunged a hand for the receiver, but the answering machine had already cut in. Hello, you have reached…

  No, Vanessa thought; I don’t want to speak to his machine.

  Ames snatched up the receiver.

  There was only a droning dial tone.

  During the year till Nikos’s Dominican divorce became final under the laws of New York State, Vanessa buried herself in song and success. She spent the winter season fulfilling engagements in New York, Paris, Milan, and Munich. There were slack and empty weeks in May and her thoughts drifted back to the young reporter who had interviewed her so many months ago and to the turning her life had almost taken.

  She caught herself gazing out windows and one Wednesday afternoon she found herself, for no reason at all, standing on Perry Street in front of the door of 89.

  A jolt went through her. She marched to the nearest pay phone. “Austin, it’s time for me to learn Lulu.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “When can you run through the score with me?”

  “Baby, no one runs through that score, but come over at two-thirty this afternoon and we can try limping.”

  Vanessa allowed herself only one week’s vacation that year, seven serene September days with Nikos under the cloudless blue skies of Bad Luzern. And then she plunged into an October of Aïdas and Turandots in Australia and South America.

  “It’s no use, Austin. I can’t pull it together.” It was spring again, and the change in weather had made her edgy.

  “Come on, now. Take it from ‘al fin son tua.’”

  “I’ve been taking it from ‘al fin son tua’ for three weeks!”

  “And one of these weeks you’re going to get it right.”

  Vanessa’s voice broke on the first note. She sat down on the bench beside her coach and began crying. “Why can’t I breathe before the B-flat?”

  “Only fakes do that.”

  “No one does it in one breath.”

  “Kavalaris did.”

  “I’m not Ariana!”

  He was staring at her. “There’s nothing she did that you can’t do. I taught her to sing this passage the way Donizetti wrote it, and I’m going to teach you.” He nodded another upbeat and his fingers rippled into the accompaniment again.

  Vanessa slammed her fist into the keys.

  Austin closed the piano lid. “Five-minute break. Spill.”

  She sat trembling, wanting to let tears come. “I’m sorry. The whole winter’s been off. No, that’s a lie. The whole year’s been off. Sometimes I think my whole life’s been off.”

  “You’re tense.” His hand was on her shoulder, massaging. “You’ve got a big debut coming up. There’s not an artist in the world who doesn’t have moments of self-doubt.”

  “It’s worse than doubt. It’s fear.”

  “Fear of what?”

  She had to tell someone. It might as well be her coach. He knew everything else about her.

  “When I go onstage, I never know what’s going to come out of my mouth.”

  “The score’s going to come out of your mouth.”

  “But sometimes…” What was the use trying to explain something she could barely put into words? It was like trying to describe a shadow that hovered just beyond the periphery of vision. “In La Scala last May, in I Puritani, the end of the mad scene, I sang an E-flat—”

  “That Bellini indicated in the score.”

  “He didn’t indicate it in my score.”

  “Go to the library of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia and look up the manuscript.”

  “To hell with the manuscript! I held that note nine measures over an orchestral and choral tutti.”

  “So? You brought the house down.”

  “I don’t have that kind of lungs!”

  “You do now, sweetheart.”

  “Austin, I never prepared it, no one taught me, I don’t read composers’ manuscripts, there’s no basis. And it’s not just notes. There are bits of stage business I find myself doing and I don’t know where they come from.”

  “Such as?”

  She shut her eyes. “Lisbon. Traviata. Who ever sang ‘Addio del Passato’ from the floor?”

  “Are you trying to make a mystery out of it?”

  “I’m trying to make sense out of it.”

  “Okay. Sit. Let’s make sense.” Austin got up and poured two cups of coffee. “In Athens Kavalaris sang ‘Addio del Passato’ from the floor—trying to pull herself to the bed, like a broken doll—clinging to the spot where she and Alfredo first made love. She did it in Amsterdam too. And Rio. And it was damned effective. What’s the problem? There’s a lot of Kavalaris in you. Consider yourself lucky. She was the best, and she knew you were going to be the best. That’s why she taught you.”

  “Austin—she didn’t teach me those things.”

  “She didn’t need to. You saw her performances, you read about them, you have the same instincts she did.”

  “You’re not understanding me, Austin. I’m not trying to imitate Kavalaris. I’m not performing when those things happen. They just happen—” She dropped her saucer to the rug. “Like that.”

  “Sorry, honey, that was phony. They happen—” Austin slapped her across the face and she dropped the coffee cup. “Like that.”

  She stared at the stain on the rug and then at him and then she buried her face in her hands and began crying.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay.” He hugged her to him. “It’s called losing yourself in the role. It’s called going to the heart of the music. It’s called genius. You’ve got it. Keep it.”

  She pulled away. “But the person singing isn’t me. What comes out of my throat is someone else’s voice—singing through me.”

  He sucked at his unlit pipe. “It’s not that rare. DiScelta used to say that two or three times in every career—when conditions are perfect—the singer has that sensation of another voice singing through him or her. Usually it turns out to be his or her top performance. All that’s happening is, you’re giving a lot of top performances.”

  She sighed, shaking her head. “Austin, the voice isn’t me. And it’s not just the voice that feels wrong. The performances aren’t me. What’s more, half the time my goddamned life isn’t me.”

  Austin looked thoughtfully at her. “Tell me about your goddamned life.”

  “Have you ever had experiences you knew by heart before they even happened?”

  “Give me an example.”

  “I recognized Ames Rutherford the minute he came into my dressing room. I felt I’d loved him longer than I’ve loved anyone in the world.”

  Austin shrugged. “He wrote a great article. He called you great names. I’d love him too.”

  “Austin, I saw him three times in my life. No, four times. Once was at a party. How could I have loved a stranger?”

  “There must be something damned attractive about him.”

  “His eyes…seemed to know everything about me: my past, my secrets, my hopes…my dreads. As though I’d been confiding in him since we were six years old. And when he made fun of opera—it made me laugh. Laughter feels so good in this profession.”

  “I’ll say amen to that.”

  “And when he made love to me…Am I awful to tell you all this? He was so damned confident of himself. As though he knew every
pore of my body. It…excited me. Why do I hate to admit that?”

  Austin shrugged. “And Nikos? Does he excite you?”

  “Yes, but… Austin, I feel like some kind of tramp saying this. With Ames I was outside of myself, I was someone else. With Nikos…it’s wonderful, but I’m still plain old me.”

  Austin took a long reflective drag from his unlit pipe. “You’re an intelligent woman. You’re facing a painful dilemma. Maybe Ames Rutherford is your diplomatic way out.”

  “Out of what?”

  “Nikos has been generous to you. He’s a charming man, a lonely man. You’re grateful to him. You don’t want to hurt him.”

  “I don’t and I won’t.”

  “But you’re not going to marry him either.”

  She looked at her coach wonderingly. “Of course I’m going to marry him.”

  “That’s not what you just got through telling me.”

  She blinked as though he’d slapped her again and then she rose quickly to her feet. “Then I’m telling you now. I’m going to marry Nikos.”

  “Nikos—marry me today.”

  He smiled. “I have to be in Zurich today.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “And who’ll sing Tosca tonight? They’re not paying to hear your understudy.” He put his arm around her shoulder and drew her against him.

  Nuzzled against his cheek, she felt a fleeting sense of safety. “Will you marry me when you get back?”

  “Of course. Why do you think I’d change our plans?”

  “I mean the minute you get back. Please, Nikos.”

  He took off his glasses. His eyes met hers carefully. “Darling. Sometimes we have to wait for the things we really want.”

  You don’t understand, she thought. You don’t realize. How can I make you see things I can’t even believe myself?

  “It’s only a week,” he soothed.

  “But what if something changes?”

  “Are you afraid the world will blow up? North America will sink beneath the ocean? I promise you, nothing will change.”

  The world did not blow up. North America did not sink under the ocean. Nikos returned a week later, exactly on schedule. The following afternoon Vanessa went with him to the Greek Orthodox Church on Fifth Avenue and Ninety-second Street. There, in front of a very bearded patriarch by the name of Father Gregorios Lampodoupolos, they rehearsed their wedding.