by Ann Claycomb
“Are you hungry?” Harry asks. “I had a bowl of granola already.”
“I’ll get something.”
“Who were you talking to?”
I carefully pick up my coffee cup. “What?”
“Down at the beach. I thought I heard you calling me and I woke up.”
“I didn’t mean to wake you! I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine.” She shrugs. “I got plenty of sleep. But then when I came out here you were sitting down there talking.”
“You talk to yourself all the time.”
Harry laughs. “True. It’s just that you usually don’t.” And the inevitable zinger: “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say. This is what will make me crazy, having to lie to her about not being crazy. I take too big a sip of coffee and it burns all the way down.
We felt the spell catch, a tug on the line we had flung across the ocean like the jerk a fisherman feels—she heard us, at least. Now we wait and wonder how to do what must be done.
We are not accustomed to doubt like this, to disagreements among ourselves that send fine fissures skittering across the surfaces we have rubbed to a silken sheen—tables and mirrors and bowls. We know what we must tell Kathleen, but we are uncertain—have we not acknowledged already that we are not storytellers?—how to spin the tale. Some of us want to begin at the beginning, when the little mermaid put a shaking hand to the string of teeth and bones at our front gates, setting them to chattering out her need. Some of us wish to unravel the story further as we have already begun to do by speaking of Moira first.
We rub the fissures out and agree (some of us murmur that we concede) that as we have begun, so shall we go on. From Moira back to her mother, Deirdre, to Deirdre’s mother, Caolinn . . . all the way back to Fand. That story, of course, is its own telling and counter-telling, against the way it has been told until now, and is best saved for last.
Deirdre, who was mother to Moira and grandmother to Kathleen, tried to drown herself every day. She huddled in her bath until the false warmth had gone and the cold had set in, bowing her head and setting her teeth against the chill because the shivering of her body did not feel real. Beneath the shivering was something more, something that she could not explain, about the feel of the water—even such stripped and colorless water as that—against her skin and in her mouth and her eyes and even her ears if only she could stay there. When she gave in, Deirdre chose this false drowning and made it real. She filled the bath and used the knife, which sent swirls of bright color into the water. It faded to pink, and her skin to white. We knew of Deirdre’s death when the knife returned to us, but she gave nothing else back to the sea.
Caolinn—slender, bright, and fair, just as her name promised—loved a woman. She thought that this love might save her, or at least that the curse might end with her, but she sang too long in the pub one night and was pushed against a wall on her way home, fingers scrabbling uselessly on stone and pain tearing through her while the man at her back tried to make her feel how her voice had torn a hole in him.
Her lover promised that they’d grow old together, two spinsters in a cottage. The baby could call her Auntie. Instead, while Caolinn was heavy with child, her lover left her forever, forced by her own father to don a black dress like a shroud, to cover her hair, and to live surrounded by other women, but without her beloved, without Caolinn.
Caolinn named her daughter Deirdre, which means “child of sorrow.” One night she nursed the baby, wrapped her warmly, and left her on the doorstep of the village church. Dry-mouthed, she gulped all the pills the doctors had given her for pain after the birth. She stole a rotted-out rowboat and let it carry her, shivering in her bare feet and her thin dress with icy water slopping in, as far as it could before the bottom gave way. She gasped when the cold enfolded her, but she slept like a child all the rest of the way down. Her hair was thick and straight and a dark red that, underwater, was the color of blood. She died with her hands clenched, the one around her nightmares of a man’s reeking breath on her cheek and the other around a lock of her lover’s hair. These things we pried out carefully and saved.
HARRY
Aria for Mezzo-Soprano
The first morning in Sanibel, I woke abruptly thinking Kathleen had shouted for me. She wasn’t in bed and she didn’t answer when I called her name, so I got up, pulled on a pair of shorts with my T-shirt and went out on the deck. When I saw her down on the beach I was relieved at first. Then I heard her talking angrily, gesturing as if she was arguing with someone. When a wave came up to soak the spot she was sitting on she seemed to flinch.
That was when I knew something was wrong. Kathleen flinching away from the touch of the water? I watched her a little longer, then I went inside to make some coffee and tried to feel annoyed with her at the crappy job she’d done cleaning up the kitchen. It didn’t work though, because the worry trumped everything else.
I’d been worrying about this trip as much as I’d been looking forward to it. Kathleen was on a high when we left, which meant there was a low coming. When I got into bed the night before we left, she was already asleep, her feet twitching beneath the blankets. That might have meant that her feet were hurting, but Kathleen was always a restless sleeper, practically swimming across the bed at night. Some nights the weight of the blankets was intolerable, sometimes the touch of the sheet itself made her cry. Watching her sleep for a moment before I turned out the light, I thought about Florida, hoped the sheets were soft. I thought about how if a low was coming, it was going to come anyway, in Boston or Martha’s Vineyard or Florida. I thought about how it was impossible to say no to Kathleen.
This morning, as I made coffee and rinsed the dishes from the night before, then put them in the dishwasher, I wished I’d thought more—thought of how far we were now from her father, from a hospital that had her records, from our friends. I’d gotten swept away by her excitement. No, to be fair, it had been more than that. I wanted to be here with her, to watch her in the ocean, make her happy by sharing it with her. Last night in the hot tub I’d felt her pulsing, abandoned around me like she never was in a bed. I flushed all over again, thinking about it.
I balanced a book on a bowl of cereal, my coffee cup in my other hand, and went out to sit on the deck. In the end, though, I didn’t open the book. I ate my breakfast and watched Kathleen apparently arguing with the tide coming in around her.
MY PARENTS, WHO have only met Kathleen once when they came to my recital last fall and took us out to dinner, aren’t sure they approve. My mother worded it cautiously.
“I just don’t want you to sacrifice your own happiness for someone else’s,” she said. “That’s all. Make sure you’re happy with her.”
Even our friend Tom, who loves Kathleen—he practically is Kathleen, only male—told me that he’s not sure she’s good for me.
“Don’t get me wrong, Harry,” he said, “and don’t frown at me like my high school English teacher. I adore her, you know that. But I love you too and you put up with way too much of her shit. Tell her no, for God’s sake, tell her to lay off the drama once in a while.”
There’s a line at the end of Jane Eyre that I could have used to answer them both, if I was the sort of person who went around quoting my favorite books, which I’m not: “To be privileged to put my arms round what I value—to press my lips to what I love—to repose on what I trust: is that to make a sacrifice? If so, then certainly I delight in sacrifice.”
I LOVE KATHLEEN the way I once imagined people only loved in books. Maybe that’s why I “put up with her,” but I think it’s because it feels like a gift, to feel this way. That’s so hard to explain that I’ve never tried, not even to Kathleen. She likes to tease me that I love books more than I love her, or that eventually I’m just going to have to succumb to my longing to be an English teacher, singer on the side.
If I had just majored in English as I’d planned, Kathleen and I would never have met. But I was also a cellist, good
enough that by the end of my first semester in college my cello teacher had convinced me to pursue a double major. This meant taking “foundations of vocal music,” a required class for all music majors except voice majors, nearly all of whom were exempt. The students who did take it were a bit of a motley bunch, vocally: violinists who could sing just fine, trumpeters who could carry a tune and not much else, and a few drummers and electronic musicians who made the professor wince when they opened their mouths.
We had to sing for her on the very first day of class. Her name was Alyce Koros, and I thought she was sexy. She dressed like a gypsy: kohl around her eyes, short, messy black hair, rings on every finger, and long flowy skirts all year round. When it was my turn to sing, she put me through twice as many vocal exercises as anyone else, then told me bluntly that I needed to change my major to voice.
The strange thing about a moment like that is how little choice you really have. I was a good cellist, a fine cellist. And I was a good writer, a fine writer. Teachers had the same compliment for my playing and my writing, said how “thoughtful” they were. I always knew that meant that I had to work at my playing, work at my writing, to be any good. The only thing I didn’t have to work at was reading, which wasn’t exactly a foundation for a career.
And then along came Alyce Koros, with her excited dark eyes and her revelation that I had a gift. A talent. An instrument, which is how people in the singing world refer to the human voice, that would let me do more than play music. It would turn me into a “mezzo-soprano,” a term I’d never even heard of before. It would allow me to use words, beautiful words, terrible words, and make them more my own than I’d ever felt able to do on the page.
I double-majored in English and voice, then went on to the New England Conservatory. I’ll have my master’s degree this summer, and I’m already contracted with Central City Opera in Colorado for their summer season. The strangeness of actually being an artist has never really gone away for me, though. I still hesitate when I introduce myself to people. I say that I’m studying voice, but then sometimes I add, “But I was also an English major, so . . .” as if to assure them that I have something to fall back on.
There’s another weird thing that happens when you start doing this thing that you love, something I wish Alyce had warned me about. It becomes hard to be a fan, to be uncritical. It’s not because I think I’m that good, because I’m not. It’s just that I know too much about singing, and about what singing ought to sound like in some ideal world. Even listening to great professional singers I find myself getting distracted, listening to their breathing, thinking about their phrasing and expression. I can pick up a poem or a novel or a libretto, read it, and just think, Wow, amazing! I wish I could do that with music too. By the time I got to grad school, though, I’d pretty much decided that it wasn’t going to happen, that I was too trained to ever be swept away by a voice. Then I heard Kathleen sing.
IT WAS APRIL, but it felt like summer outside. I was on my way to one of the practice rooms in the basement. My end-of-semester recital was in less than two weeks, and I was still having trouble with the Bach that I’d chosen. Maybe, I remember thinking as I collected a room key from the student at the front desk, I shouldn’t have picked all my music in January. Boston in January and Boston in April are almost different places. And Bach is best in the cold.
Kathleen was practicing in a room about halfway down the hallway. The doors of the practice rooms are designed to be fairly soundproof, but the joke among students is that the air-conditioning system is older than the building itself, so I wasn’t surprised to see the door ajar. Standing just outside the room, I could hear her clearly.
The voice itself was a clear, pure soprano with a lush fullness to the vowel sounds where many high voices go thin or shrill. It clearly revealed training and control, but it was the natural sound of it that was so exquisite. That was why her choice of aria was so jarring. She was working on “Suicidio!” from La Gioconda, in which the heroine lists all the reasons she wants to die: the man she loves doesn’t love her; another man has blackmailed her into sleeping with him; her beloved mother is missing and may be dead. “Piombo esausta fra le tenèbre! Tocca alla mèta,” she sings—I fall exhausted into darkness! I am reaching the end.
It’s an aria with a lot of emotional weight, obviously, just the kind of risky, unexpected choice that might get a young singer noticed. But it was so wrong for the voice on the other side of that door. The expressions of utter despair rise both on the scale and in volume, over and over again, with more muted expressions of how hopeless she feels in between crescendos. Kathleen hit all her notes and held them when she needed to, her voice bursting out through the doorway with enough force to make me feel the power of it. But the aria demanded that she sing with such bitterness. Every time she came down on the phrase fra le tenèbre she put the emphasis on the deadened r in fra rather than on the vowel. I knew it was the right interpretive choice, but I hated it. The sound clashed with the serene, liquid beauty of her voice so badly that I wanted to push the door open and beg her to stop singing, to sing something else, please, anything else.
I wouldn’t have, of course, but then, I didn’t get the chance. I was glancing up and down the corridor to make sure no one else was around to notice me shamelessly listening to someone practice when the singing stopped mid-word. A moment later the door was jerked open the rest of the way and Kathleen flung herself out into the hallway. She practically ran me into the wall at my back, and I was so startled that I didn’t think to do anything to minimize the obvious impression I gave of having been standing there listening to her. But she was headed for the water fountain, so our first-ever exchange of words was a mutually flustered series of “Oh! Excuse me! Sorry! Excuse me!”
She unscrewed the cap to her water bottle and filled it at the fountain, leaning down occasionally to drink from the top of the arc of water. I stood there like an idiot. I think by that point I had some vague intention of confessing that I’d been eavesdropping and telling her what a gorgeous voice she had. In the meantime, I noticed that she was as beautiful as her voice. There was also an intensity to her physicality that helped explain to me why she wanted to sing “Suicidio!” She was two or three inches taller than I was and slender. Her coloring was startling: dark red hair, white skin, and no freckles—at least none that I could see, though I blushed already at the thought of finding them.
When she straightened up and turned toward me I saw that her eyes were dark blue and thickly lashed. The hair at her temples was damp with sweat.
“Is it as hot in your room?” she asked, and I blanked, until I realized that I held the key to the practice room I’d reserved dangling from my fingers.
“It’s hot in this whole building,” I said. “I’m sorry if I was eavesdropping. It’s just that your door was open—”
“Oh God, you were listening?” she exclaimed, and instead of horror, delighted relief lit her face. “I can’t get it right,” she said. “I’ve been working on it for weeks on my own, because Bella won’t help me, and I’m starting to think I’m going to have to admit defeat. But damn”—she grinned at me, a reckless, mocking smile—“I hate that.”
“Bella”—Isabella Menotti—is one of the top vocal coaches in the country and a professor at the NEC. She works almost exclusively with sopranos and is known for the things a lot of top vocal coaches are known for: exacting standards, a talent for the excoriation of her pupils, and a flair for the dramatic in her self-presentation. In Bella’s case, this means that she wears vivid draped shawls or wraps over all-black clothes almost every day. She loves to toss the shawls over her arms or fling them around her neck to punctuate a point.
I wasn’t surprised that this girl was studying with her, but I was intrigued to hear that she was fighting with her.
“Why doesn’t she want you to sing it?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” She shrugged, then made a rueful face. “Yes I do. She thinks it’s too far into the
dramatic range for me. Every lesson lately she storms around ranting about how you have to earn certain roles through pain and how I can’t possibly have had enough in my life to sing La Gioconda.”
“Enough pain?”
“Yes.” She shrugged again and tipped her head back to take another drink. When she was done she smiled slightly, just a twist of her mouth. “Whatever.”
I didn’t know what to say. I thought Bella’s critique was probably true, especially now that I could see the girl who went with the voice. She struck me as very young, and far from suicidal in her white sundress and little blue flats. And I’d thought the song was wrong for her too, though for a different reason.
She cocked her head at me and held out her hand. “I’m Kathleen Conarn,” she said.
I took her hand, which was wet from the water fountain. “Harry Evans.”
Kathleen lifted an eyebrow—yes, just one. It’s a trick she’s perfected and uses to great effect.
“Harry?”
“It’s Harriet. I prefer Harry.”
“Hmm. I don’t blame you,” she said. “I like Harry. It suits you, even though that’s silly, because how would I know what suits you, but”—she made a small nervous motion as though she might have been about to touch my hand again, and I thought incredulously that she might actually be flirting with me—“it’s different. Sort of a warm name. Trustworthy.”
I laughed. “That’s better than a lot of things, I guess.”
“So,” she said. “Come on in while I get my stuff and lock up in here. I’m clearly done for the day. And,” she added over her shoulder as I followed her into her practice room, “since I’ve just declared you trustworthy, why don’t you tell me what you thought of the aria.”