Of course, once a woman like Inger was dead she became immune to the living’s expressions of sympathy or censure. This was because Inger’s soul, as Helle assured me, would have gone straight to heaven; Jesus, that aspect of God encased in a human body, would have wanted Inger for his own, partial as he was to food-loving, overweight women. Whereas it was the Devil, Helle said, who went for the skinny ones. The skinnier the better. The Devil, she claimed, went for the ones who could sneak back, threading their way through the gaps in God’s creation. An affront, she said, the ones like you and me. The stream was sending its dark tongue of water across my feet, Helle’s feet. Bright coins of early-morning sun falling through the cedar trees, the twins just stirring in their beds, Lily furiously barking somewhere off to the west, a thrush in the ferns on the far bank. Three notes, tuk-tuk tuk. Tuk-tuk tuk; greenish ferns unfolding, bright coins falling, cigarette smoke. I could see her toes and they were not webbed. The notes of an opera waiting to be composed, she was saying. “Never” was the key. Only in order to be able to touch each other after you were dead, you had to have touched while you were still alive. Sam wouldn’t be there. Believe me, Frances. You shouldn’t count on Sam. She tossed away her glowing cigarette, startling the thrush into flight, and like two wings her hands were flying toward me. No! No! I said. Why couldn’t it have been you, she said (echoing, although I didn’t know it at the time, the words of Heloise’s final aria in The Heroine). Back then. Back when I was still young and desirable. Damn it, Frances! And then Lily came running up, her muzzle stuck through with porcupine quills, and we spent the next hour extracting them with a pair of needle-nosed pliers.
Maybe it was a combination of elements, a disturbing confluence of the personal and the political—the fact of Inger Nissen’s death, of Maeve Merrow’s treachery and her subsequent move to Paris, of the war itself—that left Helle bitter and humiliated, grief stricken, assailed by fundamental, crippling doubts. Maybe it was the war alone, although hadn’t Helle already proved how the wartime death of a friend might be turned to her own advantage, how the unsettled condition of war merely served to enhance her creative powers? Maybe, after all, what she could no longer tolerate was her growing sense that to make a thing was to set yourself up for the loss of it; that creation was nothing more than a prelude to mourning.
In any event, ten years went by. Helle left Denmark and commenced an aimless wandering from city to city along the eastern seaboard of the United States, where she became a brooding presence at the dinner tables of a variety of boardinghouses. The New World, she said, a ruthless, unconsoling, gigantic landscape filled with large, optimistic people—in which a small, dark creature like herself could easily disappear. In fact, she claimed, it was when she was living at one such boardinghouse, on Arch Street in Philadelphia—from 1946 until mid-1948—that she had seen me for the first time. How could you know it was me? I asked, and she sighed. “Even before I knew who you were,” she said, “I recognized you. I may have made some mistakes before, but not then. As you say in English, the scales had fallen from my eyes. A disgusting image, no? Disgusting yet apt.” According to Helle, once you’d decided to recognize your fate you had to be prepared to give up any hope of protecting yourself from what it might actually look like.
She was quick to explain, however, that there’d been nothing unpleasant about her first glimpse of the slim, dark-eyed girl she insisted had been me, a girl of about sixteen sitting with an older man at a table in one of those South Street restaurants where opera singers gathered after the performance, restaurants notable not so much for the quality of their food—even though you could always count on getting a decent plate of spaghetti, a half-decent dish of bisque tortoni—as for the tendency of their guests, once they had a little wine in them, to start singing. A tenor at a corner table would begin—“Parigi, o cara” perhaps, the heartbreaking duet from the last act of Traviata—and a soprano on the opposite side of the room would join in. “You were laughing, weren’t you?” Helle said. “Of course it was silly, the dying Violetta shoveling ice cream into her mouth. The man with you had a little black mustache and a bow tie. He tried to get you to stop laughing, only you were laughing too hard to stop. That pretty mouth! That little tear squeezing out of the corner of your eye! That bright red dress with a boat neck and a white piqué collar. It was you, wasn’t it?” Helle asked, and I had to admit that I knew the place she was talking about, that I’d been there more than once. Joe DiSanto used to take me, I said—an opera buff whose wife hated classical music. He worked for a caterer and I’d met him at Anna Clay’s wedding reception. As for the dress, I couldn’t remember. Maybe I had a dress like that. In those days I had hundreds of dresses, most of them from Nan Duskin, because my mother wanted me to attract the right class of husband. Except Frances liked them married, said Helle. Even back then my Frances had a weakness for married men. And what if she’d scooped me up, quick as a wink, in my nice red dress from Nan Duskin? I’d just like to have seen you try, I replied.
In any event, she didn’t. Instead, shortly thereafter Helle moved to New York, where she stayed for a while in a boardinghouse on Carmine Street, her fellow boarders mainly older women who made their living modeling nude at the Art Students League, Cooper Union, Pratt. Crazy women, Helle said, elderly bohemians, who showed up for meals in chenille bathrobes or grease-stained kimonos embroidered with dragons and peonies, who seemed to apply their pancake makeup with palette knives prior to painting their lips maroon, their eyelids aqua, their cheeks bright pink. It was like living among courtesans whose sense of dignity had been eroded by the persistent absence of patrons, although at first Helle didn’t care, her own sense of dignity having been likewise destroyed. She had a small inheritance from her father as well as the money she’d earned from her operas. The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep, for example, had been a tremendous popular success in England, and there’d been some talk about City Opera mounting a production of Waves. Still, from time to time she would take a brainless job making doughnuts or selling neckties, such jobs as might be counted on to turn the brain to mush.
Then, one April day, she was sitting in her Carmine Street room, another of those boxlike, single-windowed rooms in which she was apparently destined to spend her life, when a mouse came out of a hole in the wall and, instead of fleeing, remained poised for a moment on the threadbare carpet, regarding her with frank curiosity. The same luminous dark eyes, the same hinged muzzle, the same long flickering whiskers as its predecessor, that rat in her conservatory practice room—Helle quickly rummaged through her pocketbook for the pack of saltines she’d stowed there after buying a bowl of corn chowder at the Automat. Hungry? she’d asked the mouse, and it had blinked once, slid like a mechanical creature on wheels toward the hand which held the cracker, paused halfway across the room, blinked again, and run back into its hole. It seemed to Helle as if she were being shown a sign. A gentle spring breeze lively with the smell of lilacs, of coffee and moist pavement, flew in through her window; she could hear a woman hailing a taxi, and the percolating noise of pigeons on nearby rooftops. A tapping on her door and in walked Marie Lavallee, the woman from the room next door, distraught, to tell her that Cynthia Poole had locked herself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out. Cynthia, as they all knew, had been depressed ever since the man she’d pinned her hopes on had dumped her for someone younger. But by the time they finally managed to break down the bathroom door, Cynthia was already dead, lying in the now-pinkish water of the claw-footed bathtub with her eyes wide open, her fake marabou slippers carefully positioned, side by side, on the pink bath mat, which she’d likewise positioned carefully on the tile floor the way a person does who doesn’t want to get the floor wet after she climbs, dripping, from the tub.
It was too much, Helle said. She hadn’t composed a note of music since leaving Denmark, hadn’t even listened to any music, aside from what she couldn’t avoid hearing through boardinghouse walls or piped through the ceilings of restaurants a
nd stores. Marie, she noticed, had a sentimental fondness for a certain French chanteuse with a childish tremor in her voice, recordings of whose songs she would play over and over, singing along, “N’y va pas, Manuel, n’y va pas,” until Helle was ready to scream. Piaf, I said, probably the great Edith Piaf, to which Helle coldly replied that if you’d heard one French chanteuse you’d heard them all. She hated the French, and in particular French opera, claiming that the language turned to an unctuous blur, a kind of audible drooling, when sung. In any event what she found herself thinking—Woman or mouse, am I woman or mouse?—at last acquired the force of a line of music waiting to be written. Nightingale, she remembered; she’d been working on an opera which was to have had a nightingale as its heroic central character. If her vision of the character had changed, did that mean she should abandon the project? Of course not. Nor, she warned me, should I be fooled into drawing the obvious conclusion—that the revised character of Nightingale was meant to represent Maeve Merrow—just as I shouldn’t assume, along with the critics, that Nightingale was meant to represent Hitler, and that the entire opera was an allegory for the atrocities of the Third Reich.
This conversation occurred during the week preceding the catastrophic masked ball. We were sitting on either side of the fold-down table in our separate beach chairs, drinking tea, watching the twins and William paw through the contents of the steamer trunk, removing costumes and trying them on. “That looks good,” Flo told William, after he’d settled a turban of red and orange silk onto his white-blond head. The only problem was, if they decided to use any of these costumes they wouldn’t be able to keep their identities secret, at least from each other. Anyway, the hat was too big, William said, taking it off and frowning at it; too big and too hot. And too round, Ruby added. It made him look like Jack Pumpkin-Head in Return to Oz. Only it was Selim Pasha’s turban from a 1930 production of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Helle pointed out. A pity it didn’t fit, because William was perfect for the part. She was trying to persuade me to wear the pirate queen’s costume from a Munich production of Lahloo; her own costume, she said, had already been chosen and hidden in her closet. When I told her I didn’t even know if I was planning to attend the party, she laughed. Was I going to turn out to be a coward, now, just as things were getting interesting? Cowardice, she said, was a crime like any other, except that it was essentially boring, a crime you didn’t so much commit as surrender to. This at least was what she’d discovered that day in the Carmine Street boardinghouse; this was the discovery that eventually propelled her to Canaan, to the Blackburns’ house, where she finally summoned the courage to complete Fuglespil. To Sam and Maren’s house, where, in a room whose three windows let in the clear northern light, the shameless light of annunciation, she finally allowed the nightingale to perch on her finger. Took a good look. Saw what she was really confronting. Meanwhile, in an adjacent room, a husband and wife were making love. Making William here, Helle said, pointing. A man and a woman were making love while she, a more isolate and suspect deity, was making Nightingale.
NIGHTINGALE! Such a tender, charming creature, each wing beat and song note animated by that impossible set of desires peculiar to adolescence, by that yearning to remain a child and, at the same time, to leave childhood behind forever. Dark-eyed and lithe, a little slut really—“Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio … Or di foco, ora sono di ghiaccio” (“I no longer know who I am, what I’m doing, if I’m made of fire or of ice”), to quote Cherubino—Nightingale continues the hosenrolle tradition of Det omflakkende Møl and Lahloo. Helle imagined a soprano voice not unlike the legendary Nellie Melba’s, which she’d heard on the gramophone at Clara’s, a star sailing into the infinite. The perfection of Melba, combined with the passion of Malibran? A touch of Jenny Lind, whose famous trill, despite her reputation for moral rectitude, had at its heart a distinctly sexual, liquid throbbing? Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale. For even though the typical diva is usually perceived to be exotic and larger than life, and even though the nightingale is a small, drab bird, comparisons between the two would seem to be inevitable, given the heavenly quality of the nightingale’s voice. Isn’t Hans Andersen’s story “The Nightingale” truly a paean to his love for Jenny Lind? And wasn’t Adelina Patti reported to have eaten, every night before retiring, a sandwich containing the tongues of twelve nightingales?
Lounging along the foremost branch of the gigantic elm, Nightingale is boyish and diffident, his left knee bent in a vee, his winged arms raised above his head, the wing feathers fanning outward from their carpal arch. It is as if we have caught him in the act of waking up, yawning and stretching. “Calm, light air, light breeze, fresh,” Nightingale sings. “Strong breeze, fresh gale, whole gale, storm. Boreas, Notus, Zephyr, Eurus; blizzard, willy-willy, bise, simoom.” At this point we are not yet aware of Nightingale’s deeper longings, merely of the beauty of his voice. He describes the winds as an aggregation of limbs compassing the globe: the two long pale arms of the trade winds cradling its green hills and blue oceans; the thick, flaccid arms of the doldrums gripping its equator; the polar winds clapped like the palms of two hands over its icy extremities. “Petrel and chat, hawk and lark, the winds hold us back from the outer dark, from its coinage of stars, we can’t get away, sparrow and plover, chaffinch and jay.”
The scene changes. We are now at a greater remove from the house than before: the kitchen window is a tiny square of yellow light, in front of which we see the elm’s silhouette and an expanse of moonlit meadow. Following the scene in the kitchen, in fact, the entire opera is constructed so our angle of perspective widens with each subsequent change of scene: a refinement of the cinematic technique Helle first experimented with in Det omflakkende Møl. Her purpose here was to visually underscore the action’s increasing distance from its point of origin and, at the same time, to create increasing distance among the individual birds, not unlike the dispersal of matter into the universe following the big bang. For the moment, however, the birds remain close enough together that we can still see them all: several roost within a cluster of shrubs, stage left, others in the grass, stage center; Nightingale and Shrike are perched on the adjacent posts of a barbed wire fence which crosses the apron, stage right. You must be hungry, sings Shrike, thus beginning an extended stretch of recitative; a voice such as yours needs to be fed properly. How about something with some meat on it for a change?
Shrike’s own voice, a dramatic soprano, emerges from the narrow, hooked beak of her feathered hood. Steel-gray her plumage, a black mask over the eyes, a black tail, and black wings—Shrike’s human aspect is limited to her torso, naked from the clavicles to the pelvis, revealing breasts, navel, pubic hair. “A nice mouse?” she suggests. “A tasty salamander, caught just this morning?” By a tilt of the head she indicates the diversity of her offerings, a row of lifeless bodies impaled on the barbs of the fence. But Nightingale declines, reminding Shrike of his preference for bugs and worms. Besides, it isn’t food which feeds his voice. “What, then?” asks Shrike. Can it be that such purity of sound has its source in the impure yearnings of the flesh? Can it be? she taunts, swiveling to face him, arching her back and spreading her legs. It was Helle’s intention that Shrike’s personality more closely resemble that of the typical basso buffo, shrewd and lascivious, than that of the typical dramatic soprano, declamatory and histrionic. In other words, Leporello, not Donna Anna. Let’s appease our appetites together, Shrike suggests. Let’s eat the food that, no matter how much of it you eat, never gets completely eaten up. But again Nightingale refuses. When you choose to have your cake and eat it too, he says, all you can think about is cake. Your voice becomes too sweet, too sugar-clogged, too crumbly. He then begins singing the first verse of the crucial “If only” aria, the other verses of which he will sing at intervals throughout the opera’s third and final act. “If only,” Nightingale sings, “I could fly forever, beyond this field, this grass, these trees. This fence, this post, this knot of wire—if only my w
ings could carry me to where the land breaks into water, to where the world breaks into air. Why am I cursed with just two wings? Why can’t I have another pair? If only I could fly forever, then light and dark would meet in me, my voice would be both bloom and rot, salt and fire, root and sea.”
As he sings, Nightingale moves closer and closer to Shrike, the implication being that the fulfillment of his wish might spell, likewise, the satisfaction of her desire. Fate’s complex machinery is set into motion; Shrike assumes the role of go-between, conveying Nightingale’s message to the rest of the birds, who respond by breaking into a noisy, dissonant chorus. And then out of the chaos arises the single voice of Magpie, the familiar chak chak chak chak culminating in an impassioned plea for action rather than talk. Magpie is the expert thief, and explains the secret of his success: you must first understand the difference between that which is truly valuable and that which is merely protected as if it were valuable. Once you understand this, you will have access to the victim’s point of greatest vulnerability, and you can then steal whatever you want without fear of being caught.
The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Page 31