by Ann Claycomb
We stare at each other a minute in the hallway. “Well, it’s not that you think my crazy is contagious,” I say, “because you’ve had a death grip on my arm for the last five minutes. And you know Robin is here, which means”—I feel a smile tugging at my mouth—“they got you. You’re singing the prince’s part after all and you’ve been too embarrassed to tell me that you gave in.”
He grins back at me. “Guilty. Though it wasn’t entirely embarrassment. As soon as I heard what they’ve written so far I wanted you to hear it too, but Harry wouldn’t let me. I think she’s determined to present it to you all finished and perfect. But this afternoon”—he is delighted with himself—“she’s in class. And it’s high time you heard this, so you can stop messing around ruining La Gioconda.”
“Ruining?” I shriek, but Tom turns me around by the shoulders and propels me into a practice room.
My father is sitting at the piano. He looks abashed when he sees me and he doesn’t get up from the bench. I think he’s hiding.
“Hi, honey.”
“Hi, yourself.” I’m not letting him off easy, even if this was Tom’s idea and not his. I’ve sung with my father at the piano hundreds of times. But this feels awkward and stiff, like an audition. And I’m not even sure I want the part.
Tom swivels his head theatrically from one of us to the other. “So, umm, Robin, this is Kathleen. She’s a second-year student here and—”
“Tom,” my father says, “please don’t take this wrong, but would you—”
“Get the hell out?” Tom asks. “Gladly. Between the two of you and your preperformance jitters or whatever the hell you’ve got, I feel like I’m going to throw up.” He gives me a smacking kiss on the cheek. “Break a leg.”
“Go away, Tom.”
“By the way,” he says, “if you don’t do this—open yourself up to this, for whatever the hell reason you want—I will think you’re crazy. And not just regular crazy either. Full-on batshit.”
“Go away!”
It is silent for a moment after he does.
“Well,” Robin says finally, “I can see why you and he are such good friends. He’s nearly as good at making people want to throttle him as you are.”
We are smiling at one another now, but neither of us moves. We can’t. He’s got to stay behind the piano because if he gets up then he’s my father, not The Composer, and he can’t ask me to sing the lead role in the opera he’s writing. And I’ve got to stay here because if I get up and go over to him, put my arms around him, sit down on the bench beside him and bump him with my hip until he slides over, then I’m his daughter, not a singer about to do the first run-through of music written especially for her.
But I can’t sing yet either because I haven’t even read the damn score. I go over to the music stand and try to take in the pages spread out on it.
“Is this for full orchestra?” I ask, a question I should have asked months ago. Only that was back when I was pretending no one in my father’s house was actually writing an opera. For me.
“It is,” Robin says.
“Who’s—do you have an orchestra lined up?”
He flushes slightly and adjusts the score in front of him. “Well, Jim—you remember Jim Dolan, don’t you? He’s underwriting The Scarlet Letter and now this piece as well? He suggested we pitch it to Opera Boston, not for a full run of course, but it fits their mission statement of producing contemporary opera and it’s not a long piece. So they’re tentatively on board.”
“Tentatively.” He is not getting off the hook this easily. “Have they heard it?”
“They’ve heard the music.” My father looks even more chagrined, plunges a hand through his hair in a gesture of frustration so familiar that I feel dizzy, because nothing else about this moment feels familiar at all.
“But not the vocals.”
“No.”
It really is an audition then, for Opera Boston if not for Robin. How funny. I try to read the music in front of me again, but all my training seems to have deserted me—Menotti would have a field day with this scenario—and I’m having trouble sorting notes from words. I can tell, however, that this is a really difficult piece to sing.
“This is your first aria,” Robin says. “You’ve seen the prince from afar and fallen instantly in love with him, but you love the sea too. You’re trying to reconcile the two loves. You imagine swimming with him, embracing him, showing him the beautiful garden that you tend on the ocean floor, but then you realize that he would die if you dragged him under.”
“Play the lead-in first,” I say, “then play it all the way through.”
He plays it and I follow along in the score. Then I make him play it again and I follow again. The words are lovely, written with an ear for how they’ll sound when sung and not spoken. The music is something else entirely.
“Play it again.”
I close my eyes and listen. Even without the words I can feel the mermaid’s voice shaping the sea. At first, she outraces the waves that the prince’s ship leaves in its wake, her voice leading, the strings following, cresting, receding. Then she plunges into the water and dives deep, her voice spiraling and softening. She sings of her garden, darting from one melodic line to the next as she describes the gorgeous undulating plants that grow there.
“Stop.” I open my eyes. “It’s strange-sounding but I like it, sort of like making the listener play a game of hide-and-seek, or catch-me-if-you-can. Play that section again.”
He does. I stop him again—from nervous auditioner to peremptory diva in ten minutes flat—and shake my head at him.
“Daddy,” I say, “there’s no way to sing this without losing the effect. It just—the breath control it requires . . .”
He frowns in concentration, eyes on his score. “Try it.”
“Start at the beginning then.”
So we begin again and I chase a man I’ve glimpsed only once and long to see again. I leap through and ahead of the waves, feeling the water that his ship cleaved return to itself, the waves retaining no memory of his presence or his absence. But I cannot return to myself. I am changed by that glimpse of him and for a moment the music leaves me stranded, my voice without accompaniment. I sing recklessly, higher and higher, like flinging myself out of the sea and knowing I will only be airborne for a few seconds before I drop back in. Robin’s hands hover over the keys, his eyes on me reflecting the same terrified exhilaration that I feel in my throat as the song pours out. How did he know I could sing like this? How did I not?
Now comes the tricky descending section. I sink down into my voice as I sink into the sea, down to my garden on the ocean floor. “Flowers like flames, red and blue, and in the heart of them all, a statue of a handsome man, blank eyes blind to the beauty around him. His body, once white, is now streaked with green and black, the colors of the sea itself at its depths.” The words are as familiar as if I have sung them before and it is not, after all, difficult at all to sing as if giving a breathless, excited tour. I sing as if I have what I have always dreamed of—Harry underwater beside me, both of us breathing easily as we swim—and because she wrote the descriptions, I can almost believe that she can see it, and that she finds it beautiful too. Robin nods as he plays, lifting his fingers from the keys for a moment at the end of each fragmentary line. His hands move as if over the surface of rough water. When the section ends on a plaintive, repeated phrasing—Never him, never here—we keep going. The woodwinds will come in here, flutes taking over for the clarinets as the melody goes higher, rising from the bottom of the sea to the surface again. I sing a fantasy: since I cannot live on land and my beloved cannot live in the sea, we must both learn to fly and then we can soar away like birds. I do not so much swim up from the depths as fly from them, breaking the surface of the water with a sound that splinters in the air like water droplets in sunlight, flash and dazzle that cannot last, but that sinks back and vanishes and was only an illusion after all.
I come back to m
yself, standing at the music stand in a practice room. My feet, astonishingly, do not hurt. I should be out of breath, anyone would be out of breath after singing that, but I am not.
“How did you know?” I ask.
My father’s hands are shaking. He removes them from the keys, puts them carefully over his knees. “How did I know what?”
“That I could sing that. It’s ridiculous to expect anyone to sing that. Those runs, the range it calls for, the push in the last lines and the crescendo at the very top . . .” I am shaking too, the all-over shakes I get sometimes when the pain is really bad. But nothing hurts. At this moment, nothing hurts, not my feet, not my tongue. I feel like I’ve been underwater and am still emerging.
“You sound like you’re angry,” Robin says. Abruptly, he laughs. “If you think about it, this may be the most cliché father-daughter fight we’ve ever had.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know you, Kathleen,” he says gently. “I knew you could sing this when I wrote it. I could hear you singing it in my head. So are you going to be angry at me for knowing you too well? Because I’d rather that than—well, than what you’ve been angry at me for.”
“Which is what?”
“For wanting to save you. For trying to save you”—he gestures at the music in front of him—“with this. I know you don’t think it’s possible. I didn’t think it was either.”
“But now you do?”
I cannot fail to see that there is joy lurking in his eyes, cautious and newly kindled, but there all the same.
“You didn’t hear what I heard,” he says. “You didn’t see yourself as you were singing that. I could see your feet stop hurting.”
I jump. “How?”
“You shifted your weight on them and I could tell. Maybe Harry was right after all.”
I don’t have a response to that. I look down at the music again. I want to ask him if we can do it again. I want to do another aria. It won’t matter, I know. They’ll all feel like this one did, maybe even better. The pain is lapping back in around the edges of my feet. What will it feel like to sing the moment when she kills him? I shiver.
“What’s wrong?” Robin asks.
I cast around for something else to think about.
“You said Opera Boston was ‘tentatively’ on board with the production but hadn’t heard any vocals.”
“Yes.”
“They were worried about the lead role? They weren’t sure it was doable?”
“Well.” My father is suddenly very nonchalant, and very pleased with himself. “What was said was that the role was unsingable—I’m fairly sure that was the term used—as written and that I needed to make the demands realistic, especially for a young singer. So they were waiting for me to do that and deliver them a singer, which I promised to do.”
“Liar! You never had any intention of rewriting the music.”
He arches an eyebrow at me. “Should I have? Because if you don’t think you’re up to it, I could rein it in a bit, I mean, if it really is ‘unsingable.’”
I giggle. “They really thought it was?”
“They did.”
“So can you imagine the expressions on their faces when they hear me?”
Robin grins. “I can.”
I can’t hold out anymore. It’s like the music lurking in the score and in the piano keys is a current tugging at me, as strongly as the sea ever has.
“Can we go through it again, Daddy, just one more time?”
HARRY
Director’s Notes
By March, only weeks away from opening night, I had narrowed my list of things I hated about writing and directing an opera down to three: doing interviews, dealing with the lighting designer, and lists.
I had a clipboard of lists that I carried with me everywhere. I’d used my iPad at first, but there was something so satisfying about being able to throw away a piece of paper when the list was all checked off that I switched. I had a list of the cast, their entrances and exits, and the state of completion of their costumes. I had a list of scenes, a list of arias, a list of duets, all marked with the system of check marks and abbreviations I’d come up with to indicate how well-rehearsed they were, who needed to be where when, what props and costumes went with—or on—which actor when.
Kathleen said I’d clearly found my calling in directing and producing, a way to channel my knack for details and organization into art. When we were getting ready for bed at night, she’d steal lists from my bag and quiz me on them, laughing and shaking her head when I remembered even the nonsense notes I’d made in the margins, scribbled phrases like nt wh or rd or bl dress—yell?
“Yell? Somebody is going to yell? Is that a stage direction, Harry? And are we going to yell at a dress or in a dress?”
“That’s just an abbreviation. It’s yellow, yellow not white or red or blue because I’ve ruled out all those colors for the wedding dress. The prince’s bride can’t be wearing red because then the blood won’t show up—even though we’re just doing it with lighting, it has to be a vivid effect. And not blue because that’s a water color, so the costume designer suggested yellow.” I rubbed my forehead, reached for the toothpaste. It wasn’t that any one detail like this was too much. It was just that there were one hundred of them to think about. One thousand.
“But not a white dress either?” Kathleen asked. “I assume that’s what ‘nt wh’ means? Why not? It’s a wedding dress, isn’t it? Seems obvious it should be white.”
I brushed my teeth instead of answering. I had immediately pictured the prince and his bride in white, the Little Mermaid in blue as she stabbed them. The effect of the red light would then turn her dress purple, a deep water color. But it would also heighten the brutality of the scene.
Kathleen waited for me to spit.
“You know,” she said, “I am—she is—murdering them. You’re the one who made that decision with the script in the first place. Kind of late to back off it now, don’t you think?”
“But if the bride is in white—if they’re both in white—it’s something else that I don’t know if I like. It’s lambs to the slaughter, it’s a virgin sacrifice—”
Kathleen burst out laughing. Her color was high these days, the flags of red along her cheekbones vivid as if she were in constant stage makeup.
“But, Harry, that makes it better, doesn’t it? I mean, listen to you, Madam English Major, shying away from a chance to double the metaphor, or the symbolism, or whatever it is. They are sacrifices, just like her tail was a sacrifice, or her pain or her sisters’ hair. The whole story is one sacrifice after another.”
I shook my head.
“I’m so tired I can’t even think straight,” I said. “I’ll worry about it tomorrow.” But mentally I crossed out the note and scribbled wh for pr and prs over it. I hadn’t wanted to make Kathleen a murderess, even though I knew that the Little Mermaid had to be, to save herself. There were moments, as the performances drew near, when this whole production felt not just out of control but beyond control, inevitable, inexorable. Thus, my many lists.
“Go to bed,” Kathleen said. “I’ll be there as soon as I’ve dried off.”
She was soaking her feet in the tub, her skirt tucked up around her knees. During rehearsals, her pain eased visibly—you could see it in both the way she placed her feet and in her increased ability to be still for long moments, listening to another singer. When she sang the music Robin had written for her, her pain went away altogether. The only problem was that it always came back.
I worried that in some ways it was worse to have those reprieves. I remembered how she’d been on Inis Mór, when she’d started to dry off after being drenched in seawater, like a junkie coming down from a high. But she seemed okay. I saw her wince or bite her lip more often than before, as if it was harder to hide the pain when it wasn’t constant. Well, it probably was. But she was also more willing to try to do something about the pain. She soaked her feet a lot, drank water
without my having to remind her. Once when I heard water running in the bathroom and couldn’t resist peeking in, she was sitting on the edge of the tub with her feet under the faucet murmuring “please, please, please.” But when she saw me, she smiled and pulled me over to stand behind her. She rested her head against my stomach while the water ran over her feet.
“It’ll be okay,” she murmured when she turned the water off. “They’ll feel better again tomorrow when I sing.”
I should have thought about that, about what would happen when the opera run was over. We were only doing two weeks of performances, after all. What was Kathleen going to do if—when—the pain came back for good? But I couldn’t think past opening night, couldn’t see past my piles of lists and my clipboard, couldn’t be anything but grateful for the small miracle that this music was working on Kathleen. Because there were times when I wasn’t sure we were going to get this thing to the stage.
ROBIN DIDN’T SEEM to share any of my anxieties. In interviews, he fielded even the worst questions—So, given that this is a vehicle for your daughter, would you characterize this as a vanity project?—with a faint smile. There were a surprising number of press interviews, because Robin was the composer and because Opera Boston was involved. Robin charmed every reporter, handsome and relaxed, legs crossed at the ankles, nursing endless cups of tea.
“How do you do this over and over again?” I complained. “I’m scared to drink anything because then I have to go to the bathroom halfway through the interview.”
Robin grinned. “Just go,” he said. “They’ll wait for you to come back. Can’t do the interviews without us, Harry.”
“They could do it without me,” I said. “You’re the genius. I’m just an MFA student with Post-it flags stuck to her shirt.”
We were waiting for the Boston Globe reporter today and I was in a bad mood. I’d been onstage with a couple of lighting techs all morning, trying to light the underwater scenes without turning the singers’ faces blue. They’d used me as the dummy singer, so I stood center stage with my hands out at my sides while a girl with a headset on stood with one foot on each of two armrests in the orchestra and bellowed instructions to her partner up in the lighting booth. My hands went blue, dark blue, pale blue, then yellow, and my head started to hurt. In the end it was agreed that the only solution was to “Get George.”