Ariana
Page 59
“So you see,” Vanessa said, “the story of this locket is quite special. It’s the story of a life that never reached its goal and had to be lived again.” The dressing room had the silence of a vacuum pressing in. “Are you frightened?”
“No,” Camilla answered. “Just scared to death.”
From far away came the lonely, unsupported notes of the violins, ascending as though into endless space. Act Three was beginning.
“Do you accept?” Vanessa asked.
She could feel the smallest seed of hesitation drop before Camilla silently bowed her head in acquiescence.
Vanessa handed the locket over, ensuring that there would be no turning back for her as there had been for Ariana. She fastened the thin gold chain around her pupil’s neck. “Now it’s yours, Camilla—the gift, the promise—and the duty.”
Vanessa turned now to Richard Schiller.
“Did you bring the contracts?”
He nodded and placed them on the dressing table.
Vanessa’s eyes skimmed, running down the list of roles and operas. Isolde came first. Then came the heroines in Tales of Hoffmann; then Nedda in Pagliacci and Marguerite in Faust; and on and on, four pages listing every role she had ever learned.
After each came a date and the identical stipulation: from the day specified onward, Vanessa Billings would never again sing the role; thenceforth Americana Artists Agency would use its best efforts to promote Camilla Seaton in said role.
Vanessa signed, then handed the pen to Camilla.
Camilla signed quickly and handed the pen to Richard. He shook his head. “Twenty years. No one ever signs a twenty-year contract.” But he signed.
At a desolate castle on the rock-strewn Brittany coast, Kurwenal kept watch over the dying Tristan while the two waited for Isolde’s ship. She had promised to come heal her lover. Tristan was on the verge of despair when a shepherd’s pipe signaled that a ship had finally been sighted.
Delirious, Tristan ripped off his bandages. With his last strength he staggered to his feet to meet Isolde. They embraced. He died in her arms.
King Mark arrived. He had learned of Brangaene’s potion and had come to forgive the lovers. But it was too late.
Across the stage, in the opposite wing, Nikos could see Ames Rutherford pacing.
In the distance, from the direction of the dressing rooms, a solitary woman approached. She walked along slowly, very small in a hooded black woolen cloak. She passed within a foot of Nikos.
He hardly glanced at her.
The grief-stricken white-garbed Isolde bent over the body of her dead knight. Her eyes closed. She began the “Liebestod”—the “Love-death.”
The shining line of her voice detached itself from the waves of orchestral sound and arched in a forever of longing. Note by note, then in a steady stream, the music entered the senses and nerves of the audience. It was as if they could hear time itself welling up. For a soaring quarter-hour, eternity was a place—that stage.
Wombed in mystery, rising into the sun’s glory, the voice threw itself outward toward the universe.
There was a war of climaxes, music and voice rising to separate peaks, finally peaking together, then falling back.
The voice faded and was still. Isolde sank to the floor and—following Tristan to the land of oblivion—fell across her lover’s body, dead.
The orchestra subsided. The strings sighed out a high, aching melody. There were two stinging woodwind chords, the longing motif, resolving into the final transcendant B-major chord. For a moment a single oboe held a lonely D-sharp. The chord returned and then all was stillness, peace, fulfillment.
The curtain fell in silence. Applause ripped loose.
The musicians filed out of the pit, the houselights were raised, it was five after midnight, then ten after, and still the curtain calls went on and torn programs and flowers rained down on the stage.
In the wings, Nikos and Ames waited to see which way she would turn. The curtain fell back for the last time. The applause died. She hesitated, then came quickly toward Ames.
He rushed forward, arms open. Then stopped. The woman in Isolde’s costume, the woman beneath Isolde’s makeup, was not Vanessa.
Camilla Seaton looked at Ames Rutherford curiously, then smiled. “Excuse me.” And stepped around him.
From deep in the shadow of the wings, the figure in the cloak watched the well-wishers flocking to Camilla Seaton. She couldn’t help feeling a surge of pride.
I taught her. I passed that on to her.
Then her eyes went to Nikos and Ames, still disbelieving, still lost on the outskirts of the confusion. Though she openly met both their gazes, neither seemed to recognize her. It was as though they were looking too far beyond her to see her.
And no wonder. Now she was only Vanessa Billings, the girl from a little town called Hempstead; she was Ariana no longer.
Ariana was there in the wings where she belonged, glowing from the face of Camilla Seaton.
Vanessa’s eyes misted. Goodbye, Nikos and Ames, you who thought you loved me; it was Ariana you really loved.
And she wondered, What about me? Did I ever love them? Or was that Ariana too?
Vanessa adjusted her hood and passed quietly through the stage door, raising scarcely a nod from the guard on duty.
She turned for one moment and whispered her goodbye.
On the underground sidewalk a mob of newsmen had collected. A man with a minicam shoved her aside in his rush to line up a better shot of the artists’ entrance.
She went slowly out to the street.
It was a clear early spring night. She raised her arm and hailed a taxi. She got in.
As the cab pulled into the Broadway traffic she turned to stare back at the opera house, at the arched glass façade with the bright red and yellow splashes of the Chagall murals on the grand tier.
I’m free now.
An emptiness ached in her.
Twenty feet down Broadway, a figure darted crazily into the traffic. The driver slammed on his brakes. Car horns blared angrily behind them.
A man was rapping at the passenger window, pulling at the door handle. Through the shield of glass, Vanessa’s eyes met Ames Rutherford’s.
In her memory a young man, flushed and eager, bolted up the steps of a choir loft; a little boy in a school blazer stared at her across the crowded promenade of an old opera house.
She unlocked the door.
Ames slid into the back seat beside her, out of breath. “Why did you run off like that? I panicked when I realized Camilla wasn’t you.”
“When did you realize?”
“During the curtain calls. You were standing by the artists’ entrance. You stopped and said goodbye.”
“You heard me?”
“I felt it. Don’t say goodbye, Vanessa. Please don’t ever say goodbye again.”
For a moment nothing moved in her face. Then she smiled and it was as though a rose were slowly opening its petals. There was memory and sadness in that smile but there was hope too.
“I was only saying goodbye to Isolde. She’s been good to me; and I’ll never sing her again.” Sadness brushed her. “One by one, I’ll have to say goodbye to all my roles. In twenty years…they’ll be gone.”
She was silent. He took her hand.
“Twenty years can be a lifetime,” he said.
She stared at him, sensing he was beginning to understand as she understood; to believe as she believed.
“Where are you going now?” he asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“We can catch the last train to the Hamptons.”
She hesitated.
“Vanessa, I’m not the person I was.”
It was as though for the first time she was hearing the voice that was truly his. And then there came a sound almost as surprising, the voice that was truly hers. “I’m not the person I was either.”
Her fingers closed tight around his. A strange wondering peace began slowly to fil
l them both—a peace of reconciliation that had been over a half-century in coming.
Somewhere far away a little boy in a school blazer kissed a little girl in a white skirt. A young seminarian held a dark-eyed voice student in his arms, at last, forever.
Ames leaned forward to the partition. “Driver, we’ve changed our minds. Take us to Penn Station, please.”
Acknowledgements
WITH UNFLAGGING GENEROSITY AND skill, Alexandra Hunt made available to this project her splendid musicality and operatic experience. She has been of invaluable assistance in not only the technical but countless other aspects of the preparation of the book. My thanks to her.
About the Author
Edward Stewart (1938–1996) grew up in New York City and Cuba. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and at Harvard, where he edited the famed Lampoon humor magazine. He studied music in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and worked as a composer and arranger before launching his career as a writer. His first novel, Orpheus on Top, was published in 1966. He wrote thirteen more novels, including the bestselling Vince Cardozo thrillers Privileged Lives, Jury Double, Mortal Grace, and Deadly Rich.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1985 by Edward Stewart
Cover design by Kathleen Lynch
978-1-4804-7059-0
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