I want you to get it straight now, what happened. The andante is the same old tune, Bella figliav dell’amore, that you’ve heard all your life and could whistle in your sleep. The tenor sings it through once, then he goes up to a high B flat, holds it, comes down again, and sings it over again. The second time he sings it, the contralto comes in, then the soprano, then the baritone, and they’re off into the real quartet. Well, our contralto, the Maddalena, was an old-time operatic hack that had sung it a thousand times, but something got into her, and instead of waiting for Parma to finish that strain once, she came in like she would on the repeat. And she pulled the Gilda in. And the Gilda pulled me in. You remember what I told you about speed? Up there you’ve got no time to think. You hear your cue, and you come in, and God help you if you miss the boat. So there was Parma and there was the orchestra, in one place in the score, and there were the Maddalena, the Gilda, and me, in another place in the score, and there was Schultz, trying like a wild man to straighten it out. Not a whisper from the audience, you understand. So long as you keep going, and do your best, they’ll give you a break, and even if you crack up and have to start over they’ll give you a break—so long as you do your best. They all want to laugh, but they won’t—so long as you keep your head down and sock.
But I didn’t know then what was wrong. All I knew was that it was getting sourer by the second, and I started looking around for help. That was all they needed. That one little flash of the white feather, and they let out a roar.
You can think of a lot of things in one beat of music. It flashed through my head I had heard the bird at last. It flashed through my head, in some kind of dumb way, why I had heard it. I turned around and faced them. I must have looked sore. They roared again.
That whole big theatre then was spinning around for me like a cage with a squirrel in it, and me the squirrel. I had to know where I was at. I looked over, and tried to see Parma. And then, brother, and then once more, I committed the cardinal sin of all grand opera. I forgot to watch the conductor. I didn’t know that he had killed his orchestra, killed his singers, brought the whole thing to a stop, and was wigwagging Parma to start it over. And here I came, bellowing out with my part:
Taci e mia saràla cura, la vendetta d’affrettar!
They howled. They let out a shriek you could hear in Harlem. Some egg yelled “Bravo!” A hundred of them yelled “Bravo!” A million of them yelled “Bravo,” and applauded like hell.
I ran.
Next thing I knew, I was by a stairway, holding on to the iron railing, almost twisting it out by the roots trying to keep myself from flying into a million pieces. The Gilda was beside me, yelling at me at the top of her lungs, and don’t think a coloratura soprano can’t put on a nice job of plain and fancy cussing when she gets sore. The stagehands were standing around, looking at me as though I was some leper that they didn’t dare touch. Outside, Schultz was playing the introduction to the stuff between the contralto and the bass. He had had to skip five whole pages. I just stood there, twisting at those iron bars.
Somewhere off, I heard the fire door slam, and next thing I knew, Cecil was there, her eyes big as saucers with horror. She grabbed hold of me. “You go out there and finish this show, or I’ll—”
“I can’t!”
“You’ve got to! You’ve simply got to. You went yellow! You went yellow out there, and you’ve got to go back and lick them! You’ve got to!”
“Let me alone!”
“But what are they going to do? You can’t let them down like that!”
“I don’t care what they do!”
“Leonard, listen to me. They’re out there. They’re all out there, she, and your two kids, and you’ve got to finish it. You’ve just got to do it!”
“I won’t! I’ll never go out there—”
They were playing my cue. She took hold of me, tried to pull me away from the stairs, tried to throw me on stage by main force. I hung on. I hung on to that iron like it was a life raft. The bass started singing my part. She looked at me and bit her lip. I saw two tears jump out of her eyes and run down her face. She turned around and left me.
I got to my dressing room, locked the door, and then I cracked. No iron bars there to hold on to. I clenched my teeth, my fists, my toes, and it was no good. Here they came, those awful, hysterical sobs I had heard coming out of Doris that day, and the more I fought them back, the worse they got. I knew the truth then, knew why Cecil had laughed at me that night in Rochester, why Horn had been so doubtful about me, and all the rest of it. I was no trouper, and they knew it. I had smoke, and nothing else. But you can’t lick that racket with smoke. You’ve got to care about it, you can’t get by on a little voice and a little music. You’ve got to dig up the heart to take it when it’s tough, and the only way you can find the heart is to love it. I was just another Doris. I had everything but what it takes.
Down on the stage, the bass was doubling for me. He carried the Gilda in, put her on the rock, then picked up a cape, turned around, and did my part. They gave him an ovation. After Parma had taken Schultz out, and they had all taken their bows, they shoved him out there alone, and the audience stood up and gave him a rising vote, in silence, before they started to clap. His name was Woods. Remember it, Woods: the man that had what it takes. But Rigoletto didn’t know anything about that, yet. He was up there in his dressing room, blubbering like some kid that saw the boogey man, and looking at himself and his cap and bells. Maybe you think he didn’t look sick.
11
Back in 1921, when Dempsey fought Carpentier in Jersey, some newspaper hired a lady novelist, I think it was Alice Duer Miller, to do a piece on it. She decided that what she wanted to write up was the loser’s dressing room after it was all over. She had been reading all her life about the winner, and thought she would like to know for once what happened to the loser. She found out. What happened to him was nothing. Carpentier was there, and a couple of rubbers were there, working on him, and his manager was there, and that was all. Nobody came in to tell him he had put up a good fight, or that it was a hell of a wallop he hit Dempsey in the second round, or even to borrow a quarter. Outside you could hear them still yelling for Dempsey, but not one in all that crowd had a minute for Gorgeous Georges, the Orchid Man.
That’s how it was with me. There were no autograph hunters that night. There were feet, running past the door and voices saying “I’ll meet you outside,” and tenors showing their friends they knew “La Donna è Mobile,” and the whistle brigade, but none of them stopped, none of them had a word for me. It got quiet after a while, and the noise outside died away, and I lit a cigarette and sat there. After a long time there was a tap on the door. I never moved. It came again and still again, and then I heard my first name called. It sounded like Doris, and I went to the door and opened it. She was there, in a little green suit, and a brown felt hat, and brown shoes. She came in without looking at me. “What happened?”
“Weren’t you there?”
“I had to take the children home after the second act. I heard some people talking, on my way backstage.”
I remembered Lorentz and his real crime at the Cathedral Theatre that day. I was glad there was one person in the world that hadn’t seen it. Three, because that meant she had taken the kids out before it happened. “… I got the bird.”
“Damn them.”
She walked around, saying what she thought of them. Cecil never talked like that. She might tell you they were a pack of hyenas, but she never got sore at them, never regarded them as anything but so many people to be licked. But Doris had felt their teeth, and besides she had a gift for polishing them off, you might say, on account of her cobra blood. The cobra strain was what I wanted then. She snarled it out, and I wanted all she could give. Down in my heart, I knew Cecil was right, that it’s never anybody’s fault but your own. But I was still bleeding. What Doris had to say, it hit the spot.
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But it wasn’t any consolation scene. That wasn’t what she came in there for, I could see that. She seemed to be under some kind of a strain, and kept talking without looking at me. When I started to take the make-up off, she got busy with the towel, and when I was ready for my clothes, she helped me into them. That was funny. Nothing like that had ever happened before. We went out, and got a cab, and I called out the name of my hotel. She didn’t say anything. On the way up I kept thinking there was something I had forgotten, something I had intended to do. Then I remembered. I was to sign the contracts. I sat back and watched the El posts go back. That was one thing I didn’t have to worry about.
When we got into the lobby, I could see something glaring at me from a chair near the elevators, and I didn’t tumble at first to what it was. There had been so many glares coming my way lately that one more didn’t make much impression. But then I came out of the fog. It was Craig, my partner, that I hadn’t seen since we built the gag chicken coop up in Connecticut, and he had dug in at his place up-state. I blinked, and looked at Doris, and thought maybe that was why she had come around, or anyway had something to do with it. But she seemed as surprised as I was. He still sat there, glaring at us, and then he got up and came over. He didn’t shake hands. He started in high, and he was plenty sore. “Where’ve you been?”
“Why—right here.”
“And why here? What’s the idea of hiding out in this goddam dump? I’ve been looking for you all night, and it was just by accident that I found you. Just by accident.”
Doris cut in, meeker than I ever heard her. “Why—one of the children was threatened with measles, and Leonard came down here so he wouldn’t be quarantined.”
“Couldn’t he let somebody know?”
“He—it was only to be for a few days.”
That seemed to cool him off a little, and I tried to be friendly. “When did you get to town? I thought you were up there milking cows.”
“Never mind when I got to town, and never mind the cows. And cut the comedy. Get this.”
“I’m listening.”
“You’ve got just forty minutes to make a train, and you pay attention to what I’m telling you.”
“Shoot.”
“Alabama. You’ve heard of it?”
“Sounds familiar.”
“There’s a big government-aid railroad bridge going up down there, and we build bridges, this here Craig-Borland Company that we’ve got, even if you seem to have forgotten it. You get down there, and you get that contract.”
“Where is this bridge?”
“I got no time for that. It’s all in here, in this briefcase, the whole thing, and you can read it going down. Here’s your tickets for the two of you, and remember, you got thirty-nine minutes. When you get there, I’ll wire you our bid. I’ll put the whole thing on the wire, it’s being figured up now. The main thing now is—get there.”
“O. K. Chief.”
He turned to Doris. “And you—”
“Yes sir.”
“Listen to what I’m telling you. This is a bunch of well-bo’n South’ners dat dey grandaddy had slaves befo’ de wa’, lo’s’n lo’s o’ slaves, and they’ve got to be impressed. You hear that? You take a whole floor in that hotel, and you roll out the liquor, and you step on it. You do all the things that your bum, sassiety, high-toned, good-for-nothing upbringing has taught you how to do, and then you do it twice.”
“Booh. I know you.”
“For once in your life, maybe you can be of some use.”
“Just once?”
“If you don’t put it across, you needn’t come back.”
“We’ll put it across.”
So we put it across. They’ve got a bird in my business too, that rides the trusses while the scows are taking them out, and flies around and flaps its wings and crows whenever one of them falls in the river. But his wings didn’t get much exercise on that job, and neither did his voice. It was my trade. The river got pretty tough once or twice, and we had some close squeaks. But not one of those trusses took a dive.
But I’m ahead of my story. Craig had a paper stuck in his pocket, and after he had laid the law down he began to get sore again and remembered it. He tapped it with his finger. “And you keep in touch with me. If it hadn’t been for this, seeing your name in this paper just by accident, I wouldn’t have known where to look for you.”
He took it out and opened it, and pointed to a great big picture of me in the whiskers, and wig and cap, and bells, on the theatrical page. “Is that you?”
Doris let out a cackle that made everybody in the lobby look up. It was just a silvery peal that came from the heart, and did you good to hear it. She wasn’t laughing at me. She was laughing at Craig, and when I looked at him I had to laugh too. I had to laugh so hard I folded into one of the lobby chairs, and so did she. The look on that old hard-rock man’s face, holding up that picture, was the funniest thing I ever saw in my life, or ever hope to see.
I scrambled up and threw my stuff into a bag, and was so excited over getting back in harness that I kept singing all the time and didn’t even feel bad about it, and down in the lobby Doris called the house and we made the train. We had the drawing room, but I was out of cigarettes, and I went in the club car to get some. I would have sent the porter, but he was still making up berths, and I didn’t want to bother him. When I got back she was already tucked in, in the upper berth, and all you could see was a tousle of red hair. I undressed, got into the lower. I waited, and she didn’t say anything. I turned out my light, and still nothing from her. All you could hear was the wheels, going clickety click: They kind of beat time, and I started to sing the opening of a duet:
Là ci darem la mano!
Là mi dirai di sì
Vedi non è lontano
Partiam ben mio da qui
It was time for her to come in, and I waited. Then: “Did you sing that with her?”
“No, I never did.”
“Are you sure?”
“They were going to have me do Don Giovanni. This last outfit, I mean. So I got the score, and found it in there. I had heard you humming it around, so—I learned it.”
She came tumbling down the ladder, all floppy in a suit of my pajamas. She slipped in beside me, put her arms around me. “Leonard.”
“Yes?”
“I’m glad you flopped. Because I flopped, and—if you could do this one thing I’ve always wanted to do, and can’t—I couldn’t stand it. And—”
“Go on. And what?”
“It’ll be all mine, now, this that you have in your throat. That’s why I came back there. Leonard, when you sang that day it almost killed me. I think you wanted it to. Oh, I’ve been a terrible wife to you, Leonard. I’m jealous, and spiteful, and mean and nothing will ever change me. But when I get too terrible, just sing to me, and I’ll be your slave. I’ll come crawling to you, just the way you came crawling to them, in the second act tonight. That woman has given us something that was never there before, and I’m going to thank her, and win her, and make her my friend. Oh, I can, I don’t care what has gone before, I can win anybody when I really want them. … Now I’ll say it. Something you’ve never heard me say before. I’ve fallen in love. With my own husband.”
I held her tight. She put her mouth against my throat, and began kissing it. “Now sing, and I’ll sing.”
Là ci darem la mano!
Là mi dirai di sì
Vedi non è lontano
Partiam ben mio da qui.
Vorrei e non vorrei
Mi trema un poco il cor
Felice è ver sarei
Ma può burlarmi ancor. …
We sang it together, and it was terrible, and it was the sweetest duet I ever heard. That’s all.
Death on the Beach
His name was Diego, and he was
bound for Playa Washington, a beach in Northern Mexico, partly for a Sunday’s outing, partly to drum up business for the “taxi” he was driving. He was a good-looking Mexican in his late twenties, a bit taller than average, and of the café con leche color, lightly flushed with cinnamon, that bespeaks the mestizo, or mixture of Spanish and Indian. He wore khaki shorts, sport shirt, two-toned shoes, and brown cloth hat with eyelets. He whistled Cielito Lindo and glanced occasionally at the tremendous afternoon sky, but his attention was on his gauges, especially the speedometer, for the road, through improved, was rough, and tended, at too fast a clip, to heat tires and explode them. His car was a sedan, and though he operated it for hire around Matamoras, a little city on the Rio Grande, there was nothing about it that was different from any family bus.
After 22 miles from Matamoras the road ended, and he pulled off to a field, parking with other cars and leaving the road clear for the special buses that are a feature of fiestas in Mexico, and often run on rough-and-ready principles. To the boys who swarmed over him, he amiably passed out coppers, Mexican coins the size of half dollars, and to a character in snuffy cottons, who professed to be in charge, twenty-five cents American. Then, after locking up, he headed for the dunes which give this coast its special character. They are 8-10-12 feet high, of sand so bright it blazes under the sun and sends up shimmering refractions of light. The result is, the land is screened from the sea, the sea from the land, so Diego didn’t see the beach until he popped through a break in the dunes, and was in the middle of it. It was well worth the smile it brought to his face. It was a riot of color, from rugs, robes, rubber animals, and gaudy beach umbrellas; and thousands of people lolled, joked, flirted, and snoozed on it. Also, many swam, especially girls in infra-Bikini suits, with the eager zest for water that is the immemorial heritage of these people. When they went out too far, so far the porpoises offshore took an interest, the nearest Gendarme blew his whistle, calling them in. they came, but not meekly. Volubly they expressed their opinion, and volubly he answered them back. Lately, proper lifeguards have been provided for Playa Washington, with pulmotors and fancy equipment, but at this time the Gendarmes were the only supervision it had, and if they overworked their whistles, the danger, as we shall see, was real.