by John Irving
With a shudder, I thought again about my Aunt Martha’s assertion that my mother was a little simple; no one had ever said she was a liar.
“She said there was a lawyer who told her she could keep the dress,” I said. “She said that everything burned, didn’t she?”
“BILLS OF SALE WERE BURNED, INVENTORY WAS BURNED, STOCK WAS BURNED—THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID,” Owen said.
“The telephone melted—remember that part?” I asked him.
“THE CASH REGISTER MELTED—REMEMBER THAT?” he asked me.
“Maybe they rebuilt the place—after the fire,” I said. “Maybe there was another store—maybe there’s a chain of stores.”
He didn’t say anything; we both knew it was unlikely that the public’s interest in the color red would support a chain of stores like Jerrold’s.
“How’d you know the store was here?” I asked Owen.
“I SAW AN ADVERTISEMENT IN THE SUNDAY BOSTON HERALD,” he said. “I WAS LOOKING FOR THE FUNNIES AND I RECOGNIZED THE HANDWRITING—IT WAS THE SAME STYLE AS THE LABEL.”
Leave it to Owen to recognize the handwriting; he had probably studied the label in my mother’s red dress for so many years that he could have written “Jerrold’s” in the exact same style himself!
“WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?” Owen asked me. “WHY DON’T WE GO INSIDE AND ASK THEM IF THEY EVER HAD A FIRE?”
Inside the place, we were confronted by a spareness as eccentric as the glaring color of every article of clothing in sight; if Jerrold’s could be said to have a theme, it appeared to be—stated, and overstated—that there was only one of everything: one bra, one nightgown, one half-slip, one little cocktail dress, one long evening dress, one long skirt, one short skirt, the one blouse on the one mannequin we had seen in the window, and one counter of four-sided glass that contained a single pair of red leather gloves, a pair of red high heels, a garnet necklace (with a matching pair of earrings), and one very thin belt (also red, and probably alligator or lizard). The walls were white, the hoods of the indirect lights were black, and the one man behind the one counter was about the age my mother would have been if she’d been alive.
The man regarded Owen and me disdainfully: he saw two teenage boys, not dressed for Newbury Street, possibly (if so, pathetically) shopping for a mother or for a girlfriend; I doubt that we could have afforded even the cheapest version of the color red available in Jerrold’s.
“DID YOU EVER HAVE A FIRE?” Owen asked the man.
Now the man looked less sure about us; he thought we were too young to be selling insurance, but Owen’s question—not to mention Owen’s voice—had disarmed him.
“It would have been a fire in the forties,” I said.
“OR THE EARLY FIFTIES,” said Owen Meany.
“Perhaps you haven’t been here—at this location—for that long?” I asked the man.
“ARE YOU JERROLD?” Owen asked the man; like a miniature policeman, Owen Meany pushed the wrinkled label from my mother’s dress across the glass-topped counter.
“That’s our label,” the man said, fingering the evidence cautiously. “We’ve been here since before the war—but I don’t think we’ve ever had a fire. What sorta fire do you mean?” he asked Owen—because, naturally, Owen appeared to be in charge.
“ARE YOU JERROLD?” Owen repeated.
“That’s my father—Giordano,” the man said. “He was Giovanni Giordano, but they fucked around with his name when he got off the boat.”
This was an immigration story, and not the story Owen and I were interested in, so I asked the man, politely: “Is your father alive?”
“Hey, Poppa!” the man shouted. “You alive?”
A white door, fitted so flush to the white wall that Owen and I had not noticed it was there, opened. An old man with a tailor’s measuring tape around his neck, and a tailor’s many pins adorning the lapels of his vest, came into the storeroom.
“Of course I’m alive!” he said. “You waitin’ for some miracle? You in a hurry for your inheritance?” He had a mostly-Boston, somewhat-Italian accent.
“Poppa, these young men want to talk to ‘Jerrold’ about some fire,” the son said; he spoke laconically and with a more virulent Boston accent than his father’s.
“What fire?” Mr. Giordano asked us.
“We were told that your store burned down—sometime in the forties, or the fifties,” I said.
“This is big news to me!” said Mr. Giordano.
“My mother must have made a mistake,” I explained. I showed the old label to Mr. Giordano. “She bought a dress in your store—sometime in the forties, or the fifties.” I didn’t know what else to say. “It was a red dress,” I added.
“No kiddin’,” said the son.
I said: “I wish I had a picture of her—perhaps I could come back, with a photograph. You might remember something about her if I showed you a picture,” I said.
“Does she want the dress altered?” the old man asked me. “I don’t mind makin’ alterations—but she’s got to come into the store herself. I don’t do alterations from pictures!”
“SHE’S DEAD,” said Owen Meany. His tiny hand went into his pocket again. He brought out a neatly folded envelope; in the envelope was the picture my mother had given him—it was a wedding picture, very pretty of her and not bad of Dan. My mother had included the photo with a thank-you note to Owen and his father for their unusual wedding present. “I JUST HAPPEN TO HAVE BROUGHT A PICTURE,” Owen said, handing the sacred object to Mr. Giordano.
“Frank Sinatra!” the old man cried; his son took the picture from him.
“That don’t look like Frank Sinatra to me,” the son said.
“No! No!” the old man cried; he grabbed the photo back. “She loved those Sinatra songs—she sang ’em real good, too. We used to talk about ‘Frankie Boy’—your mother said he shoulda been a woman, he had such a pretty voice,” Mr. Giordano said.
“DO YOU KNOW WHY SHE BOUGHT THE DRESS?” Owen asked.
“Sure, I know!” the old man told us. “It was the dress she always sung in! ‘I need somethin’ to sing in!’—that’s what she said when she walked in here. ‘I need somethin’ not like me!’—that’s what she said. I’ll never forget her. But I didn’t know who she was—not when she come in here, not then!” Mr. Giordano said.
“Who the fuck was she?” the son asked. I shuddered to hear him ask; it had just occurred to me that I didn’t know who my mother was, either.
“She was ‘The Lady in Red’—don’t you remember her?” Mr. Giordano asked his son. “She was still singin’ in that place when you got home from the war. What was that place?”
The son grabbed the photo back.
“It’s her!” he cried.
“‘The Lady in Red’!” the Giordanos cried together.
I was trembling. My mother was a singer—in some joint! She was someone called “The Lady in Red”! She’d had a career—in nightlife! I looked at Owen; he appeared strangely at ease—he was almost calm, and he was smiling. “ISN’T THIS MORE INTERESTING THAN OLD FREDDY’S?” Owen asked me.
What the Giordanos told us was that my mother had been a female vocalist at a supper club on Beacon Street—“a perfectly proper sorta place!” the old man assured us. There was a black pianist—he played an old-fashioned piano, which (the Giordanos explained) meant that he played the old tunes, and quietly, “so’s you could hear the singer!”
It was not a place where single men or women went; it was not a bar; it was a supper club, and a supper club, the Giordanos assured us, was a restaurant with live entertainment—“somethin’ relaxed enough to digest to!” About ten o’clock, the singer and pianist served up music more suitable for dancing than for dinner-table conversation—and there was dancing, then, until midnight; men with their wives, or at least with “serious” dates. It was “no place to take a floozy—or to find one.” And most nights there was “a sorta famous female vocalist, someone you woulda heard of”; although Owen Mean
y and I had never heard of anyone the Giordanos mentioned. “The Lady in Red” sang only one night a week; the Giordanos had forgotten which night, but Owen and I could provide that information. It would have been Wednesday—always Wednesday. Supposedly, the singing teacher my mother was studying with was so famous that he had time for her only on Thursday mornings—and so early that she had to spend the previous night in the “dreaded” city.
Why she never sang under her own name—why she was always “The Lady in Red”—the Giordanos didn’t know. Nor could they recall the name of the supper club; they just knew it wasn’t there anymore. It had always had the look of a private home; now it had, in fact, become one—“somewheres on Beacon Street,” that was all they could remember. It was either a private home or doctors’ offices. As for the owner of the club, he was a Jewish fellow from Miami. The Giordanos had heard that the man had gone back to Miami. “I guess they still have supper clubs down there,” old Mr. Giordano said. He was sad and shocked to hear that my mother was dead; “The Lady in Red” had become quite popular among the local patrons of the club—“not famous, not like some of them others, but a kinda regular feature of the place.”
The Giordanos remembered that she had come, and that she had gone away—for a while—and then she’d come back. Later, she had gone away for good; but people didn’t believe it and they would say, for years, that she was coming back again. When she’d been away—“for a while”—that was when she’d been having me, of course.
The Giordanos could almost remember the name of the black pianist; “he was there as long as the place was there,” they said. But the closest they could come to the man’s name was “Buster.”
“Big Black Buster!” Mr. Giordano said.
“I don’t think he was from Miami,” the son said.
“CLEARLY,” said Owen Meany, when we were once more out on Newbury Street, “‘BIG BLACK BUSTER’ IS NOT YOUR FATHER!”
I wanted to ask Owen if he still had the name and address—and even the phone number—of my mother’s singing and voice teacher; I knew Mother had given the particulars to Owen, and I doubted that Owen would have discarded anything she gave him.
But I didn’t have to ask. Once more, his tiny hand shot into his pocket. “THE ADDRESS IS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD,” he told me. “I MADE AN APPOINTMENT, TO HAVE MY VOICE ‘ANALYZED’; WHEN THE GUY HEARD MY VOICE—OVER THE PHONE—HE SAID HE’D GIVE ME AN APPOINTMENT WHENEVER I WANTED ONE.”
Thus had Owen Meany come to Boston, the dreaded city; he had come prepared.
There were some elegant town houses along the most densely tree-lined part of Commonwealth Avenue where Graham McSwiney, the voice and singing teacher, lived; but Mr. McSwiney had a small and cluttered walk-up apartment in one of the less-restored old houses that had been divided and subdivided almost as many times as the collective rent of the various tenants had been withheld, or paid late. Since we were early for Owen’s appointment, we sat in a corridor outside Mr. McSwiney’s apartment door, on which was posted (by a thumbtack) a hand-lettered sign.
DON’T! ! ! ! KNOCK OR RING BELL
IF YOU HEAR SINGING! ! ! !
“Singing” was not quite what we heard, but some sort of exercise was in progress behind Mr. McSwiney’s closed door, and so Owen and I didn’t knock or ring the bell; we sat on a comfortable but odd piece of furniture—not a couch, but what appeared to be a seat removed from a public bus—and listened to the singing or voice lesson we were forbidden to disturb.
A man’s powerful, resonant voice said: “Me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me!”
A woman’s absolutely thrilling voice repeated: “Me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me!”
Then the man said: “No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no!”
And the woman answered: “No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no!”
And then the man sang just a line from a song—it was a song from My Fair Lady, the one that goes, “All I want is a room somewhere …”
And the woman sang: “Far away from the cold night air …”
And together they sang: “With one enormous chair …”
And the woman took it by herself: “Oh, wouldn’t it be lov-er-ly!”
“Me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me!” said the man again; now, a piano was involved—just one key.
Their voices, even in this silly exercise, were the most wonderful voices Owen Meany and I had heard; even when she sang “No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no!” the woman’s voice was much more beautiful than my mother’s.
I was glad that Owen and I had to wait, because it gave me time to be grateful for at least this part of our discovery: that Mr. McSwiney really was a voice and singing teacher, and that he seemed to have a perfectly wonderful voice—and that he had a pupil with an even better voice than my mother’s … this at least meant that something I thought I knew about my mother was true. The shock of our discovery in Jerrold’s needed time to sink in.
It did not strike me that my mother’s lie about the red dress was a devastating sort of untruth; even that she had been an actual singer—an actual performer!—didn’t strike me as such an awful thing for her to have hidden from me, or even from Dan (if she’d kept Dan in the dark, too). What struck me was my memory of how easily and gracefully she had told that little lie about the store burning down, how she had fretted so convincingly about the red dress. Quite probably, it occurred to me, she had been a better liar than a singer. And if she’d lied about the dress—and had never told anyone in her life in Gravesend about “The Lady in Red”—what else had she lied about?
In addition to not knowing who my father was, what else didn’t I know?
Owen Meany, who thought much more quickly than I did, put it very simply; he whispered, so that he wouldn’t disturb Mr. McSwiney’s lesson. “NOW YOU DON’T KNOW WHO YOUR MOTHER IS, EITHER,” Owen said.
Following the exit of a small, flamboyantly dressed woman from Mr. McSwiney’s apartment, Owen and I were admitted to the teacher’s untidy hovel; the disappointingly small size of the departing singer’s bosom was a contradiction to the power we had heard in her voice—but we were impressed by the air of professional disorder that greeted us in Graham McSwiney’s studio. There was no door on the cubicle bathroom, in which the bathtub appeared to be hastily, even comically placed; it was detached from the plumbing and full of the elbow joints of pipes and their fittings—a plumbing project was clearly in progress there; and progressing at no great pace.
There was no wall (or the wall had been taken down) between the cubicle kitchen and the living room, and there were no doors on the kitchen cabinets, which revealed little besides coffee cups and mugs—suggesting that Mr. McSwiney either restricted himself to an all-caffeine diet or that he took his meals elsewhere. And there was no bed in the living room—the only real room in the tiny, crowded apartment—suggesting that the couch, which was covered with sheet music, concealed a foldaway bed. But the placement of the sheet music had the look of meticulous specificity, and the sheer volume of it argued that the couch was never sat upon—not to mention, unfolded—and this evidence suggested that Mr. McSwiney slept elsewhere, too.
Everywhere, there were mementos—playbills from opera houses and concert halls; newspaper clippings of people singing; and framed citations and medals hung on ribbons, suggesting golden-throat awards of an almost athletic order of recognition. Everywhere, too, were framed, poster-sized drawings of the chest and throat, as clinical in detail as the drawings in Gray’s Anatomy, and as simplistic in their arrangement around the apartment as the educational diagrams in certain doctors’ offices. Beneath these anatomical drawings were the kind of optimistic slogans that gung-ho coaches hang in gyms:
BEGIN WITH THE BREASTBONE!
KEEP UPPER CHEST FILLED WITH AIR
ALL THE TIME!
THE DIAPHRAGM IS A ONE-WAY MUSCLE—
IT CAN ONLY INHALE!
PRACTICE YOUR BREATHING SEPARATELY FROM
YOUR SINGING!
NEVER LIFT YOUR SHOULDERS!
NEVER HOLD YOUR BREATH!<
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One whole wall was devoted to instructive commands regarding vowels; over the doorway of the bathroom was the single exclamation: Gently! Dominating the apartment, from the center stage of the living room—big and black and perfectly polished, and conceivably worth twice the annual rent on Mr. McSwiney’s place of business—was the piano.
Mr. McSwiney was completely bald. Wild, white tufts of hair sprang from his ears—as if to protect him from the volume of his own huge voice. He was hearty-looking, in his sixties (or even in his seventies), a short, muscular man whose chest descended to his belt—or whose round, hard belly consumed his chest and rested under his chin, like a beer-drinker’s boulder.
“So! Which one of you’s got the voice?” Mr. McSwiney asked us.
“I HAVE!” said Owen Meany.
“You certainly have!” cried Mr. McSwiney, who paid little attention to me, even when Owen took special pains to introduce me by putting unmistakable emphasis on my last name, which we thought might be familiar to the singing and voice teacher.
“THIS IS MY FRIEND, JOHN WHEELWRIGHT,” Owen said, but Mr. McSwiney couldn’t wait to have a look at Owen’s Adam’s apple; the name “Wheelwright” appeared to ring no bells for him.
“It’s all the same thing, whatever you call it,” Mr. McSwiney said. “An Adam’s apple, a larynx, a voice box—it’s the most important part of the vocal apparatus,” he explained, sitting Owen in what he called “the singer’s seat,” which was a plain, straight-backed chair directly in front of the piano. Mr. McSwiney put his thumb and index finger on either side of Owen’s Adam’s apple. “Swallow!” he instructed. Owen swallowed. When I held my own Adam’s apple and swallowed, I could feel my Adam’s apple jump higher up my neck; but Owen’s Adam’s apple hardly moved.
“Yawn!” said Mr. McSwiney. When I yawned, my Adam’s apple moved down my neck, but Owen Meany’s Adam’s apple stayed almost exactly where it was.
“Scream!” said Mr. McSwiney.
“AAAAAHHHHHH!” said Owen Meany; again, his Adam’s apple hardly moved.