Career in C Major and Other Fiction

1

All this, that I’m going to tell you, started several years ago. You may have forgotten how things were then, but I won’t forget it so soon, and sometimes I think I’ll never forget it. I’m a contractor, junior partner in the Craig-Borland Engineering Company, and in my business there was nothing going on. In your business, I think there was a little going on, anyway enough to pay the office help provided they would take a ten per cent cut and forget about the Christmas bonus. But in my business, nothing. We sat for three years with our feet on our desks reading magazines, and after the secretaries left we filled in for a while by answering the telephone. Then we didn’t even do that, because the phone didn’t ring any more. We just sat there, and switched from the monthlies to the weeklies, because they came out oftener.

It got so bad that when Craig, my partner, came into the office one day with a comical story about a guy that wanted a concrete chicken coop built, somewhere out in Connecticut, that we looked at each other shifty-eyed for a minute, and then without saying a word we put on our hats and walked over to Grand Central to take the train. We wanted that coop so bad we could hardly wait to talk to him. We built it on a cost-plus basis, and I don’t think there’s another one like it in the world. It’s insulated concrete, with electric heat control, automatic sewage disposal, accommodations for 5,000 birds, and all for $3,000, of which our share was $300, minus expenses. But it was something to do, something to do. After the coop was built, Craig dug in at his farm up-state, and that left me alone. I want you to remember that, because if I made a fool of myself, I was wide open for that, with nothing to do and nobody to do it with. When you get a little fed up with me, just remember those feet, with no spurs to keep them from falling off the desk, because what we had going on wasn’t a war, like now, but a depression.

It was about four-thirty on a fall afternoon when I decided to call it a day and go home. The office is in a remodeled loft on East 35th Street, with a two-story studio for drafting on the ground level, the offices off from that, and the third floor for storage. We own the whole building and owned it then. The house is on East 84th Street, and it’s a house, not an apartment. I got it on a deal that covered a couple of apartment houses and a store. It’s mine, and was mine then, with nothing owing on it. I decided to walk, and marched along, up Park and over, and it was around five-thirty when I got home. But I had forgotten it was Wednesday, Doris’s afternoon at home. I could hear them in there as soon as I opened the door, and I let out a damn under my breath, but there was nothing to do but brush my hair back and go in. It was the usual mob: a couple of Doris’s cousins, three women from the Social Center, a woman just back from Russia, a couple of women that have boxes at the Metropolitan Opera, and half a dozen husbands and sons. They were all Social Register, all so cultured that even their eyeballs were lavender, all rich, and all 100 % nitwits. They were the special kind of nitwits you meet in New York and nowhere else, and they might fool you if you didn’t know them, but they’re nitwits just the same. Me, I’m Social Register too, but I wasn’t until I married Doris, and I’m a traitor to the kind that took me in. Give me somebody like Craig, that’s a farmer from Reubenville, that never even heard of the Social Register, that wouldn’t know culture if he met it on the street, but is an A1 engineer just the same, and has designed a couple of bridges that have plenty of beauty, if that’s what they’re talking about. These friends of Doris’s, they’ve been everywhere, they’ve read everything, they know everybody, and I guess now and then they even do a little good, anyway when they shove money back of something that really needs help. But I don’t like them, and they don’t like me.

I went around, though, and shook hands, and didn’t tumble that anything unusual was going on until I saw Lorentz. Lorentz had been her singing teacher before she married me, and he had been in Europe since then, and this was the first I knew he was back. And his name, for some reason, didn’t seem to get mentioned much around our house. You see, Doris is opera-struck, and one of the things that began to make trouble between us within a month of the wedding was the great career she gave up to marry me. I kept telling her I didn’t want her to give up her career, and that she should go on studying. She was only nineteen then, and it certainly looked like she still had her future before her. But she would come back with a lot of stuff about a woman’s first duty being to her home, and when Randolph came, and after him Evelyn, I began to say she had probably been right at that. But that only made it worse. Then I was the one that was blocking her career, and had been all along, and every time we’d get going good, there’d be a lot of stuff about Lorentz, and the way he had raved about her voice, and if she had only listened to him instead of to me, until I got a little sick of it. Then after a while Lorentz wasn’t mentioned any more, and that suited me fine. I had nothing against him, but he always meant trouble, and the less I heard of him the better I liked it.

I went over and shook hands, and noticed he had got pretty gray since I saw him last. He was five or six years older than I was, about forty I would say, born in this country, but a mixture of Austrian and Italian. He was light, with a little clipped moustache, and about medium height, but his shoulders went back square, and there was something about him that said Europe, not America. I asked him how long he had been back, he said a couple of months, and I said swell. I asked him what he had been doing abroad, he said coaching in the Berlin opera, and I said swell. That seemed to be about all. Next thing I knew I was alone, watching Doris where she was at the table pouring drinks, with her eyes big and dark, and two bright red spots on her cheeks.

Of course the big excitement was that she was going to sing. So I just took a back seat and made sure I had a place for my glass, so I could put it down quick and clap when she got through. I don’t know what she sang. In those days I didn’t know one song from another. She stood facing us, with a little smile on her face and one elbow on the piano, and looked us over as though we were a whole concert hall full of people, and then she started to sing. But there was one thing that made me feel kind of funny. It was the whisper-whisper rehearsal she had with Lorentz just before she began. They were all sitting around, holding their breaths waiting for her, and there she was on the piano bench with Lorentz, listening to him whisper what she was to do. Once he struck two sharp chords, and she nodded her head. That doesn’t sound like much to be upset about, does it? She was in dead earnest, and no foolishness about it. The whole seven years I had been married to her, I don’t think I ever got one word out of her that wasn’t phoney, and yet with this guy she didn’t even try to put on an act.

They left about six-thirty, and I mixed another drink so we could have one while we were dressing for a dinner we had to go to. When I got upstairs she was stretched out on the chaise longue in brassiere, pants, stockings, and high-heeled slippers, looking out of the window. That meant trouble. Doris is a Chinese kimono girl, and she always seems to be gathering it around her so you can’t see what’s underneath, except that you can, just a little. But when she’s got the bit in her teeth, the first sign is that she begins to show everything she’s got. She’s got plenty, because a sculptor could cast her in bronze for a perfect thirty-four, and never have to do anything more about it at all. She’s small, but not too small, with dark red hair, green eyes, and a sad, soulful face, with a sad soulful shape to go with it. It’s the kind of shape that makes you want to put your arm around it, but if you do put your arm around it, anyway when she’s parading it around to get you excited, that’s when you made your big mistake. Then she shrinks and shudders, and gets so refined she can’t bear to be touched, and you feel like a heel, and she’s one up on you.

I didn’t touch her. I poured two drinks, and set one beside her, and said here’s how. She kept looking out the window, and in a minute or two saw the drink, and stared at it like she couldn’t imagine what it was. That was another little sign, because Doris likes a drink as well as you do or I do, and in fact she’s got quite a talent at it, in a quiet, refined way. “... Oh no. Thanks just the same.”

“You better have a couple, just for foundation. They’ll be plenty weak tonight, I can promise you that.”

“I couldn’t.”

“You feel bad?”

“Oh no, it’s not that.”

“No use wasting it then.”

I drained mine and started on hers. She watched me spear the olive, got a wan little smile on her face, and pointed at her throat. “Oh? Bad for the voice, hey?”

“Ruinous.”

“I guess it would be, at that.”

“You have to give up so many things.”

She kept looking at me with that sad, orphan look that she always gets on her face when she’s getting ready to be her bitchiest, as though I was far, far away, and she could hardly see me through the mist, and then she went back to looking out the window. “I’ve decided to resume my career, Leonard.”

“Well gee that’s great.”

“It’s going to mean giving up — everything. And it’s going to mean work, just slaving drudgery from morning to night — I only pray that God will give me strength to do all that I’ll have to do.”

“I guess singing’s no cinch at that.”

“But... something has to be done.”

“Yeah? Done about what?”

“About everything. We can’t go on like this, Leonard. Don’t you see? I know you do the best you can, and that you can’t get work when there is no work. But something has to be done. If you can’t earn a living, then I’ll have to.”

Now to you, maybe that sounds like a game little wife stepping up beside her husband to help him fight when the fighting was tough. It wasn’t that at all. In the first place, Doris had high-hatted me ever since we had been married, on account of my family, on account of my being a low-brow that couldn’t understand all this refined stuff she went in for, on account of everything she could think of. But one thing she hadn’t been able to take away from me. I was the one that went out and got the dough, and plenty of it, which was what her fine family didn’t seem to have so much of any more. And this meant that at last she had found a way to high-hat me, even on that. Why she was going back to singing was that she wanted to go back to singing, but she wasn’t satisfied just to do that. She had to harpoon me with it, and harpoon me where it hurt. And in the second place, all we had between us and starvation was the dough I had salted away in a good bank, enough to last at least three more years, and after that the house, and after that my share of the Craig-Borland Building, and after that a couple of other pieces of property the firm had, if things got that bad, and I had never asked Doris to cut down by one cent on the household expenses, or live any different than we had always lived, or give up anything at all. I mean, it was a lot of hooey, and I began to get sore. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help myself. The sight of her lying there like the dying swan, with this noble look on her face, and just working at the job of making me look like a heel, kind of got my goat.

“So. We’re just starving to death, are we?”

“Well? Aren’t we?”

“Just practically in the poorhouse.”

“I worry about it so much that sometimes I’m afraid I’ll have a breakdown or something. I don’t bother you about it, and I don’t ever intend to. There’s no use of your knowing what I go through. But... something has to be done. If something isn’t done, Leonard, what are we going to come to?”

“So you’re going out and have a career, all for the husband and the kiddies, so they can eat, and have peppermint sticks on the Christmas tree, and won’t have to bunk in Central Park when the big blizzard comes.”

“I even think of that.”

“Doris, be your age.”

“I’m only trying to—”

“You’re only trying to make a bum out of me, and I’m not going to buy it.”

“You have to thwart me, don’t you Leonard? Always.”

“There it goes. I knew it. So I thwart you.”

“You’ve thwarted me ever since I’ve known you, Leonard. I don’t know what there is about you that has to make a woman a drudge, that seems incapable of realizing that she might have aspirations too. I suppose I ought to make allowance—”

“For the pig-sty I was raised in, is that it?”

“Well Leonard, there’s something about you.”

“How long have you had this idea?”

“I’ve been thinking about it quite some time.”

“About two months, hey?”

“Two months? Why two months?”

“It seems funny that this egg comes back from Europe and right away you decide to resume your career.”

“How wrong you are. Oh, how wrong you are.”

“And by the time he gets his forty a week, or whatever he takes, and his commission on the music you buy, and all the rest of his cuts, you’ll be taken for a swell ride. There won’t be much left for the husband and kiddies.”

“I’m not being taken for a ride.”

“No?”

“I’m not paying Lorentz anything.”

“... What?”

“I’ve explained to him. About our — circumstances.”

I hit the roof then. I wanted to know what business she had telling him about our circumstances or anything else. I said I wouldn’t be under obligations to him, and that if she was going to have him she had to pay him. She lay there shaking her head, like the pity of it was that I couldn’t understand, and never could understand. “Leonard, I couldn’t pay Hugo, even if I wanted to — not now.”

“Why not now?”

“When he knows — how hard it is for us. And it’s not important.”

“It’s plenty important — to me.”

“Hugo is that strange being that you don’t seem to understand, that you even deny exists — but he exists, just the same. Hugo is an artist. He believes in my voice. That’s all. The rest is irrelevant. Money, time, work, everything.”

That gave me the colic so bad I had to stop, count ten, and begin all over again. “... Listen, Doris. To hell with all this. Nobody’s opposing your career. I’m all for your career, and I don’t care what it costs, and I don’t care whether it ever brings in a dime. But why the big act? Why do you have to go through all this stuff that I’m thwarting you, and we’re starving, and all that? Why can’t you just study, and shut up about it?”

“Do we have to go back over all that?”

“And if that’s how you feel about it, what the hell did you ever marry me for, anyway?”

That slipped out on me. She didn’t say anything, and I took it back. Oh yes, I took it back, because down deep inside of me I knew why she had married me, and I had spent seven years with my ears stopped up, so she’d never have the chance to tell the truth about it. She had married me for the dough I brought in, and that was all she had married me for. For the rest, I just bored her, except for that streak in her that had to torture everybody that came within five feet of her. The whole thing was that I was nuts about her and she didn’t give a damn about me, and don’t ask me why I was nuts about her. I don’t know why I was nuts about her. She was a phoney, she had the face of a saint and the soul of a snake, she treated me like a dog, and still I was nuts about her. So I took it back. I apologized for it. I backed down like I always did, and lost the fight, and wished I had whatever it would take to stand up against her, but I didn’t.

“Time to dress, Leonard.”

When we got home that night, she undressed in the dressing room, and when she came out she had on one of the Chinese kimonos, and went to the door of the nursery, where the kids had slept before they got old enough to have a room... “I’ve decided to sleep in here for a while, Leonard. I’ve got exercises to do when I get up, and — all sorts of things. There’s no reason why you should be disturbed.”

“Any way you like.”

“Or — perhaps you would be more comfortable in there.”

Yes, I even did that. I slept that night in the nursery, and took up my abode there from then on. What I ought to do was go in and sock her in the jaw, I knew that. But I just looked at Peter Rabbit, where he was skipping across the wall in the moonlight, and thought to myself: “Yeah, Borland, that’s you all right.”

2

So for the next three months there was nothing but vocalizing all over the place, and then it turned out she was ready for a recital in Town Hall. For the month after that we got ready for the recital, and the less said about it the better. Never mind what Town Hall cost, and the advertising cost, and that part. What I hated was drumming up the crowd. I don’t know if you know how a high-toned Social Registerite like Doris does when she gets ready to give a recital to show off her technique. She calls up all her friends, and sandbags them to buy tickets. Not just to come, you understand, on free tickets, though to me that would be bad enough. To buy tickets, at $2 a ticket. And not only does she call up her friends, but her husband calls up his friends, and all her sisters and her cousins and her aunts call up their friends, and those friends have to come through, else it’s an unfriendly act. I got so I hated to go in the River Club, for fear I’d run into somebody that was on the list, and that I hadn’t buttonholed, and if I let him get out of there without buttonholing him, and Doris found out about it, there’d be so much fuss that I’d buttonhole him, just to save trouble. Oh yes, culture has its practical side when you start up Park Avenue with it. It’s not just that I’m a roughneck that I hate it. There are other reasons too.

I don’t know when it was that I tumbled that Doris was lousy. But some time in the middle of all that excitement, it just came to me one day that she couldn’t sing, that she never could sing, that it was all just a pipe dream. I tried to shake it off, to tell myself that I didn’t know anything about it, because that was one thing that had always been taken for granted in our house: that she could have a career if she wanted it. And there was plenty of reason to think so, because she did have a voice, anybody could tell that. It was a high soprano, pretty big, with a liquid quality to it that made it easy for her to do the coloratura stuff she seemed to specialize in. I couldn’t shake it off. I just knew she was no good, and didn’t know how I knew it. So of course that made it swell. Because in the first place I had to keep on taking her nonsense, knowing all the time she was a fake, and not being able to tell her so. And in the second place, I was so in love with her that I couldn’t take my eyes off her when she was around and I hated to see her out there making a fool of herself. And in the third place, there was Lorentz. If I knew she was no good then he knew she was no good, and what was he giving her free lessons for? He was up pretty often, usually just before dinner, to run over songs with her, and once or twice, while we were waiting for her to come home, I tried to get going with him, to find out what was what. I couldn’t. I knew why I couldn’t. It was some more of the blindfold stuff. I was afraid I’d find out something I didn’t want to know. Not that I expected him to tell me. But I might find it out just the same, and I didn’t want to find it out. I might lie awake half the night wondering about it, and gnaw my fingernails half off down at the office, but when it came to the showdown I didn’t want to know. So we would just sit there, and have a drink, and talk about how women are always late. Then Doris would come, and start to yodel. And then I would go upstairs.

The recital was in February, at eleven o’clock of a Friday morning. About nine o’clock I was in the nursery, getting into the cutaway coat and gray striped pants that Doris said I had to wear, when the phone rang in the bedroom and I heard Doris answer. In a minute or two she came in. “Stop that for a minute, Leonard, and listen to me. It’s something terribly important.”

“Yeah? What is it?”

“Louise Bronson just called up. She was talking last night with Rudolph Hertz.” Hertz wasn’t his name, but I’ll call him that. He was a critic on the Herald Tribune. “You know, he’s related to her.”

“And?”

“She told him he had to come and give me a review, and he promised to do it. But the fool told him it was tomorrow instead of today, and Leonard, you’ll have to call him up and tell him, and be sure and tell him there’ll be two tickets for him, in his name at the boxoffice — and make sure they’re there.”

“Why do I have to call him up?”

“Leonard, I simply haven’t time to explain all that to you now. He’s the most important man in town, it’s just a stroke of blind luck that he promised to give me a review, and I can’t lose it just because of a silly mistake over the day.”

“His paper keeps track of that for him.”

“Leonard, you call him up! You call him up right now! You — stop making me scream, it’s frightful for my voice. You call him up! Do you hear me?”

“He won’t be at his paper. They don’t come down that early.”

“Then call him up at his home!”

I went in the bedroom and picked up the phone book. He wasn’t in it. I called information. They said they would have to have the address. Doris began screaming at me from the dressing room. “He lives on Central Park West! In the same building as Louise!”

I gave the address. They said they were very sorry but it was a private number and they wouldn’t be able to give it to me. Doris was yelling at me before I even hung up. “Then you’ll have to go over there! You’ll have to see him.”

“I can’t go over there. Not at this hour.”

“You’ll have to go over there. You’ll have to see him! And be sure and mention Louise, and his promise to her, and tell him there’ll be two tickets for him, in his name at the boxoffice!”

So I hustled on the rest of my clothes, and jumped in a cab, and went over there. I found him in bathrobe and slippers, having breakfast with his wife and another lady, in an alcove just off the living room. I mumbled about Louise Bronson, and how anxious we were to have his opinion on my wife’s voice, and about the tickets in his name at the boxoffice, and he listened to me as though he couldn’t believe his ears. Then he cut me off, and he cut me off sharp. “My dear fellow, I can’t go to every recital in Town Hall just at an hour’s notice. If notices were sent out, my paper will send somebody over, and there was no need whatever for you to come to me about it.”

“Louise Bronson—”

“Yes, Louise said something to me about a recital, but I don’t let her run my department either.”

“We were very anxious for your opinion—”

“If so, making a personal call at this hour in the morning was a very bad way to get it.”

I felt my face get hot. I jumped up, said I was sorry, and got out of there as fast as I could grab my hat. The recital didn’t help any. The place was packed with stooges, and they clapped like hell and it didn’t mean a thing. I sat with Randolph and Evelyn, and we clapped too, and after it was over, and about a ton of flowers had gone up, and my flowers too, we went backstage with the whole mob to tell Doris how swell she was, and you would have thought it was just a happy family party. But as soon as my face wasn’t red any more from thinking about the critic, it got red from something else. About a third of that audience were children. That was how they had told us to go to hell, those people we had sandbagged. They bought tickets, but they sent their children — with nursemaids.

Doris took the children home, and I went out and ate, and then went over to the office. I sat there looking at my feet, and thinking about the critic, and the children at the recital, and sleeping in the nursery, and Lorentz, and all the rest of it, and I felt just great. About two-thirty the phone rang. “Mr. Borland?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Cecil Carver.”

She acted like I ought to know who Cecil Carver was, but I had never heard the name before. “Yes, Miss Carver. What can I do for you?”

“Perhaps I ought to explain. I’m a singer. I happened to be visiting up in Central Park this morning when you called, and I couldn’t help hearing what was said.”

“I got a cool reception.”

“Pay no attention to it. He’s a crusty old curmudgeon until he’s had his coffee, and then he’s a dear. I wish you could have heard the way he was treating me.”

That was all hooey, but somehow my face didn’t feel red any more, and besides that, I liked the way she laughed. “You make me feel better.”

“Forget it. I judged from what you said that you were anxious for a competent opinion on your wife’s singing.”

“Yes, I was.”

“Well, I dropped in at that recital. Would you like to know what I thought?”

“I’d be delighted.”

“Then why don’t you come over?” She gave the name of a hotel that was about three blocks away, on Lexington Avenue.

“I don’t know of any reason why not.”

“Have you still got on that cutaway coat?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Oh my, I’ll have to make myself look pretty.”

“You had better hurry up.”

“... Why?”

“Because I’m coming right over.”

3

She had a suite up on the tenth floor, with a grand piano in it and music scattered all over the place, and she let me in herself. I took her to be about thirty, but I found out later she was two years younger. Women singers usually look older than they really are. There’s something about them that says woman, not girl. She was good-looking all right. She had a pale, ivory skin, but her hair was black, and so were her eyes. I think she had the biggest black eyes I ever saw. She was a little above medium height, and slim, but she was a little heavy in the chest. She had on a blue silk dress, very simple, and it came from a good shop, I could see that. But somehow it didn’t look quite right, anyway to somebody that was used to the zip that Doris had in her dresses. She told me afterward she had no talent for dressing at all, that a lot of women on the stage haven’t, and that she did what most of them do: go into the best place in town, buy the simplest thing they have, pay plenty for it, and take a chance it will look all right. It looked just about like that, but it didn’t make any difference. You didn’t think about the dress after you saw those eyes.

She had a drink ready, and asked me if I was a musician. I said no, I was a contractor, and next thing I knew I had had two drinks, and was gabbling about myself like some drummer in a Pullman. She kept smiling and nodding, like concrete railroad bridges were the most fascinating thing she had ever heard of in her life, and the big black eyes kept looking at me, and even with the drinks I knew I was making a bit of a fool of myself. I didn’t care. It was the first time a woman had taken any interest in me in a blue moon, and I was having a good time, and I had still another drink, and kept right on talking.

After a while, though, I pulled up, and said well, and she switched off to Doris. “Your wife has a remarkable voice.”

“Yes?”

“... It keeps haunting me.”

“Is it that good?”

“Yes, it’s that good, but that isn’t why it haunts me. I keep thinking I’ve heard it before.”

“She used to sing around quite a lot.”

“Here? In New York?”

“Yes.”

“That couldn’t be it. I don’t come from New York. I come from Oregon. And I’ve spent the last five years abroad. Oh well, never mind.”

“Then you think she’s good?”

“She has a fine voice, a remarkably fine voice, and her tone is well produced. She must have had excellent instruction. Of course...”

“Go on. What else?”

“... I would criticize her style.”

“I’m listening.”

“Has she been studying long?”

“She studied before we got married. Then for a while she dropped it, and she just started up again recently.”

“Oh. Then that accounts for it. Good style, of course, doesn’t come in a day. With more work, that ought to come around.”

“Then you think she ought to go on?”

“With such looks and such a voice, certainly.”

With that we dropped it. In spite of all she said, it added up to faint praise, especially the shifty way she brought up the question of style. She tried to get me going again on concrete, but somehow talking about Doris had taken all the fun out of it. After a few minutes I thanked her for all the trouble she had taken and got up to go. She sat there with a funny look on her face, staring at me. A boy came in with a note, and left, and she read it and said: “Damn.”

“Something wrong?”

“I’m singing for the American Legion in Brooklyn tonight, and I promised to do a song they want, and I’ve forgotten to get the words of it, and the man that was to give them to me has gone out of town, and here’s his note saying he’ll give me a ring tomorrow — and no words.”

“What song?”

“Oh, some song they sing in the Navy. Something about a destroyer. Isn’t that annoying?”

“Oh, that song.”

“You know it?”

“Sure. I had a brother that was a gob.”

“Well for heaven’s sake sing it.”

She sat down to the piano and started to play it. She already knew the tune. I started to sing:

She got up, walked over to the sofa, and sat down, her face perfectly white. I had forgotten about that rhyme, and I began to mumble apologies for it, and explain that there was another way to sing it, so groan would rhyme with moan. But at that I couldn’t see why it would make her sore. She hadn’t seemed like the kind that would mind a rhyme, even if it was a little off. But she kept staring at me, and then I got a little sore myself, and said it was a pretty good rhyme, even if she didn’t like it. “To hell with the rhyme.”

“Oh?”

“Borland, your wife’s no good.”

“She’s not?”

“No, she’s not.”

“Well — thanks.”

“But you have a voice.”

“I... what?”

“You have a voice such as hasn’t been heard since — I don’t know when. What a baritone! What a trumpet!”

“I think you’re kidding me.”

“I’m not kidding you... Want some lessons?”

Her eyes weren’t wide open any more. They were half closed to a couple of slits. A creepy feeling began to go up my back. It was time to go, and I knew it. I did not go. I went over, sat down, put my arm around her, pushed her down, touched my mouth to her lips. They were hot. We stayed that way a minute, breathing into each other’s faces, looking into each other’s eyes. Then she mumbled: “Damn you, you’ll kiss first.”

“I will like hell.”

She put her arms around me, tightened. Then she kissed me, and I kissed back.

“You were slow enough.”

“I was wondering what you wanted.”

“I wanted you, you big gorilla. Ever since you came in there this morning with that foolish song-and-dance about getting Hertz to go to the concert. What made you do that? Didn’t you know any better?”

“Yes.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“I had to.”

“... You mean she made you?”

“Something like that.”

“Couldn’t you say no?”

“I guess I couldn’t.”

She twisted her head around, where it was on my shoulder, and looked at me, and twisted my hair around her fingers. “You’re crazy about her, aren’t you?”

“More or less.”

“I’m sorry I said she was no good. She really has a voice. She might improve, with more work... Maybe I was jealous of her.”

“It’s all right.”

“You see—”

“To hell with it. You said just what I’ve been thinking all along, so why apologize? She has a voice, and yet she’s no good. And yet—”

“You’re crazy about her.”

“Yes.”

She twisted my hair a while, and then started to laugh. “You could have knocked me over with a straw when I saw Hugo Lorentz coming out there to the piano.”

“You know him?”

“Known him for years. I hadn’t seen him since he played for me in Berlin last winter, and what a night that was.”

“Yeah?”

“After the concert we walked around to his apartment, and he wept on my shoulder till three o’clock in the morning about some cold-blooded bitch that he’s in love with, in New York, and that does nothing but torture him, and every other man she gets into her clutches for that matter. Oh, I got her whole life history. Once a year she’d send Hugo a phonograph record of herself singing some song they had worked on. He thought they were wonderful, and he kept playing them over and over again; till I got so sick of that poop’s voice—” There was a one-beat pause, and then she finished off real quick: “—Well, it was a night, that’s all.”

“And that was where you heard my wife’s voice, wasn’t it?”

“What in the world are you talking about?”

“Come on, don’t kid me.”

“... I’m sorry, Leonard. I didn’t mean to. From what Hugo said, I had pictured some kind of man-eating tigress, and when that dainty, wistful, perfectly beautiful creature came out there today, it never once entered my mind. It didn’t anyhow, until just now.”

“Then it was?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’ve had my suspicions about Hugo.”

“You needn’t have.”

“I thought he was taking her for a ride.”

“He’s not. She’s taking him.”

“What about these other men she’s got her clutches on?”

“For heaven’s sake, can’t a woman that good-looking have a little bit of a good time? What do you care? You’re having a good time, aren’t you? Right now? I’ll sock you if you say you’re not.”

“Believe it or not, this is my first offense.”

“—And, you’ve got her haven’t you?”

“No.”

“What?”

“I’m just one other man she’s got her clutches on, one more sap to torture. I happen to be married to her, that’s all.”

“You poor dear. You are crazy about her, aren’t you?”

“Come on, what about these other men?”

She thought a long time, and then she said: “Leonard, I’m not going to tell you any more of what Hugo said, except this: That no man gets any favors from her, if that’s what you’re worried about. And especially Hugo doesn’t. She sees that they keep excited, but inside she’s as cold as a slab of ice, and thinks of nothing but herself. I think you can take Hugo’s word on that. He knows a lot more about women than you do, and he’s not kidded about her for one second, even if he is crazy about her. Does that help?”

“Not much. You’re not telling me anything I don’t know, though. I’ve kidded myself about it for seven years, but I know. Lorentz, I think, he has the inside track on the rest, but only on account of the music.”

“That’s what Hugo says.”

“What?”

“That she thinks of nothing but her triumphs, feminine, social, and artistic, and especially artistic. She’s crazy to be a singer. And that’s where he fits in.”

“Her triumphs. That’s it. Life in our house is nothing but a series of triumphs.”

“Leonard, I have an idea.”

“Shoot.”

“I hate that woman.”

“I spend half my time hating her and half my time insane about her. What’s she got, anyway?”

“One thing she’s got is a face that a man would commit suicide for. Another thing she’s got is a figure that if he wasn’t quite dead yet, he’d stand up and commit suicide for all over again. And another thing she’s got is a healthy professional interest in the male of the species, that enjoys sticking pins into it just to see them wriggle. But if you want her, I’m determined you’re going to have her. And really have her. You see, I like you pretty well.”

“I like you a little, myself.”

“That woman has got to be hurt.”

“Oh, hurt hey? And you think you could hurt Doris? Listen, you’d be going up against something that’s forgotten more about that than you’ll ever know. You go and get your head lock on her and begin twisting her neck. See what happens. She’ll be out in one second flat, in one minute flat she’ll have you on the floor, and in five minutes she’ll be pulling your toenails out with red-hot pliers. Yeah, you hurt her. I’m all sore from trying.”

“You didn’t hurt her where it hurt.”

“And where does it hurt?”

“In that slab of ice she uses for a heart. In the triumph department, baby. You go get yourself a triumph, and see her wriggle out of that.”

“I won the club championship at billiards year before last. It didn’t do a bit of good.”

“Wake up. Did you hear what I said about your voice?”

“Oh my God. I thought you had an idea.”

“You’re going to sing in Town Hall.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. And will that fix her.”

“So I’m going to sing in Town Hall? Well in the first place I can’t sing in Town Hall, and in the second place I don’t want to sing in Town Hall, and in the third place it’s just plain silly. And in addition to that, wouldn’t that fix her? Just another boughten recital in Town Hall, with a lot of third-string critics dropping in for five minutes and another gang of stooges out there laughing at me. And in addition to that, I don’t go out and drum up another crowd. I’ve had enough.”

“They won’t be third-string critics and it won’t be a drummed-up crowd.”

“I know that racket, so does she, and—”

“Not if I sing with you.”

“What do you want to do, ruin me?”

“I guess that wouldn’t do, at that... Leonard, you’re right. The Town Hall idea is no good. But... Carnegie, a regular, bona fide appearance with the Philharmonic, that would be different, wouldn’t it?”

“Are you crazy?”

“Leonard, if you put yourself in my hands, if you do just what I say, I’ll have you singing with the Philharmonic in a year. With that voice, I guarantee it. And let her laugh that off. just let her laugh that off. Baby, do you want that woman? Do you want her eating out of your hand? Do—”

I opened my eyes to razz it some more, but all of a sudden a picture popped in front of my eyes, of how Doris would look out there, listening to me, and I started to laugh. Yes, it warmed me up.

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s the most cock-eyed thing I ever heard in my life. But... all right. We’ll pretend that’s how it’s going to come out. Anyway, I’ll have an excuse to see you some more.”

“You don’t need any excuse for that.”

“Me, in soup and fish, up there in front of a big orchestra, bellowing at them.”

“You’ll have to work.”

“I’m used to work.”

“You’ll have to study music, and sight-reading, and harmony, and languages, especially Italian.”

“Perche devo studiare l’italiano?”

“You speak Italian?”

“Didn’t I tell you I started out as an architect? We all take our two years in Italy, studying the old ruins. Sure, I speak Italian.”

“Oh, you darling... I’ll want payment.”

“I’ve got enough money.”

“Who’s talking about money? I want kisses, and lots of them.”

“How about a down payment now? On account?”

“M’m.”

It was about six o’clock when I got home, and Ethel Gorman, a cousin of Doris’, was still there, and the flowers were all around, and the kids were going from one vase to the other, smelling them, and Doris still had on the recital dress, and the phone was ringing every five minutes, and the reviews from the afternoon papers were all clipped and spread on the piano. They said she revealed an excellent voice and sang acceptably. One of the phone calls kept Doris longer than the others, and when she came back her eyes were shining. “Ethel! Guess who was there!”

“Who?”

“Cecil Carver!”

“No!”

“Alice Hornblow just called up and says she sat next to her, and would have called sooner only she had to make sure who it was from her picture in a magazine, and she was talking to her during the intermission — and Cecil Carver said I was swell!”

“Doris! You don’t mean it!”

“Isn’t it marvelous! It means — it means more than all those reviews put together. Think of that Ethel — Cecil Carver!”

Now who Cecil Carver was, and what the hell kind of singing she did when she wasn’t entertaining contractors in the afternoon, was something we hadn’t got around to yet, for some reason. I pasted a dumb look on my face, and kind of droned it out: “And who, may I ask, is Cecil Carver?”

Doris just acted annoyed. “Leonard, don’t tell me you don’t know who Cecil Carver is. She’s the sensation of the season, that’s all. She came back from abroad this fall, and after one appearance at the Hippodrome the Philharmonic engaged her, and her recital at Carnegie was the biggest thing this year and she’s under contract to the Metropolitan for next season — that’s who Cecil Carver is. It would seem to me that you could keep up on things, a little bit.”

“Well gee that sounds swell.”

She came in that night, to thank me again for the flowers, and to say good night. I thought of my date with Cecil Carver for the next afternoon. What with one thing and another, I was beginning to feel a whole lot better.

4

It’s one thing to start something like that, but it’s something else to go through with it. I bought a tuning fork and some exercise books, went up on the third floor of the Craig-Borland Building, locked all the doors and put the windows down, and ha-ha-ha-ed every morning, hoping nobody would hear me. Then in the afternoon I’d go down and take a lesson, and make some payments. I liked paying better than learning, and I felt plenty like a fool. But then Cecil sent me over to Juilliard for a course in sight-reading, and I went in there with a lot of girls wearing thick glasses, and boys that looked like they’d have been better off for a little fresh air. It was taught by a Frenchman named Guizot, and along with the sight-reading he gave us a little harmony. When I found out that music has structure to it, just like a bridge has, right away I began to get interested. I took Guizot on for some private lessons, and began to work. He gave me exercises to do, melodies to harmonize, and chords to unscramble, and I rented a piano, and had that moved in, so I could hear what I was doing. I couldn’t play it, but I could hit the chords, and that was the main thing. Then he talked to me about symphonies, and of course I had to dig into them. I bought a little phonograph, and a flock of symphony albums, and got the scores, and began to take them apart, so I could see how they were put together. The scores you don’t buy, they cost too much. But I rented them, and first I’d have one for a couple of weeks, and then I’d have another. I found out there’s plenty of difference between one symphony and another symphony. Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms were the boys I liked. All three of them, they took themes that were simple, like an architectural figure but they could get cathedrals out of them, believe me they could.

The sight-reading was tough. It’s something you learn easy when you’re young, but to get it at the age of thirty-three isn’t so easy. Do you know what it is? You just stand up there and read it, without any piano to give you the tune, or anything else. I never heard of it until Cecil began to talk about it, didn’t even know what it meant. But I took it on, just like the rest of it, and beat intervals into my head with the piano until I could hear them in my sleep. After a while I knew I was making progress, but then when I’d go down to Cecil, and try to read something off while she played the accompaniment, I’d get all mixed up and have to stop. She spotted the reason for it. “You’re not watching the words. You can read the exercises because all you have to think about is the music. But songs have words too, and you have to sing them. You can’t just go la-la-la. Look at the words, don’t look at the notes. Your eye will half see them without your looking at them, but the main thing is the words. Get them right and the music will sing itself.”

It sounded wrong to me, because what I worried about was the notes, and it seemed to me I ought to look at them. But I tried the way she said, and sure enough it came a little better. I kept on with it, doing harder exercises all the time, and then one day I knew I wouldn’t have to study sight-reading any more. I could read anything I saw, without even having to stop and think about keys, or sharps, or flats, or anything else, and that was the end of it. I could do it.

The ha-ha stuff was the worst. I did what Cecil told me, and she seemed satisfied, but to me it was just a pain in the neck. But then one day something happened. It was like a hair parted in my throat, and a sound came out of it that made me jump. It was like a Caruso record, a big, round high tone that shook the room. I tried it again, and it wouldn’t come. I vocalized overtime that day, trying to get it back, and was about to give up when it came again. I opened it up, and stood there listening to it swell. Then I began going still higher with it. It got an edge on it, like a tenor, but at the same time it was big and round and full. I went up with it until I was afraid to go any higher, and then I checked pitch on the piano. It was an A.

That afternoon, Cecil was so excited by it she almost forgot about payment. “It’s what I’ve been waiting for. But I had no idea it was that good.”

“Say, it sounds great. How did you know it was there?”

“It’s my business to know. What a baritone!”

“To hell with it. Come here.”

“... Sing me one more song.”

All right, if you think I’m a sap, falling in love with my own voice so I could hardly wait to work it out every day, and going nuts about music so I just worked at it on a regular schedule, don’t say I didn’t warn you. And don’t be too hard on me. Remember what I told you: there was not one other thing to do, from morning till night. Not one other thing in the world to do.

I had been at it three or four months when I found out how lousy Doris really was, and maybe that wasn’t a kick. She couldn’t read a note, I had found that out from listening to her work with Lorentz. But the real truth about her I found out by accident. Cecil was so pleased at the way I was coming along that she decided I ought to learn a role, and put me on Germont in Traviata, partly because there wasn’t much of it, and partly because it was all lyric, and I’d have to throttle down on my tendency to beef, which seemed to be my main trouble at the time. That was on a Saturday, and I thought I’d surprise her by having the whole thing learned by Monday. But when I went around to Schirmer’s to get the score, they were closed. It was early summer. I went home and then I happened to remember that Doris was studying it too, so I snitched it off the piano and took it up to the nursery and hid it. Then when she went off to a show that night, I went to bed with it.

I spent that night on the second act, and was just getting it pretty well in my head when I heard Doris come in and then go down again. And what does she do but begin singing Traviata down there, right in that part I had just been going over. Get how it was: she downstairs, singing the stuff, and me upstairs, in bed, holding the book on her. Well, it was murder. In the first place, she had no rhythm. I guess that was what had bothered me before, when I knew something was wrong, and didn’t know what it was. To her, the music was just a string of phrases, and that was all. When she’d get through with one, she’d just go right on to the next one, without even a stop. I tried to hum my part, under my breath, in the big duet, and it couldn’t be done. Her measures wouldn’t beat. I mean, I’d still have two notes to sing, to fill out the measure on my part, and she’d already be on to the next measure on her part. I did nothing but stop and start, trying to keep up. And then, even within the phrase, she didn’t get the notes right. If she had a string of eighth notes, she’d sing them dotted eighths and sixteenths, so it set your teeth on edge. And every time she came to a high note, she’d hold it whether there was a hold marked over it or not, and regardless of what the other voice was supposed to be doing. I lay there and listened to it, and got sorer by the minute. By that time I had a pretty fair idea of how good you’ve got to be in music before you’re any good at all, and who gave her the right to high-hat me on her fine artistic soul, and then sing like that? Who said she had an artistic soul, the way she butchered a score? But right then I burst out laughing. That was it. She didn’t have any artistic soul. All she had was a thirst for triumphs. And I, the sap, had fallen for it.

I heard her come in the bedroom, and hid the score under my pillow. She came in after a while, and she was stark naked, except for a scarf around her neck with a spray of orchids pinned to it. I knew then that something was coming. She walked around and then went over and stood looking out the window. “You better watch yourself. Catching cold is no good for the voice.”

“It’s so hot. I can’t bear anything on.”

“Don’t stand too close to that window.”

“... Remind me to call up Hugo for my Traviata score. I wanted it just now, and couldn’t find it. He must have taken it.”

“Wasn’t that Traviata you were singing?”

“Oh, I know it, so far as that goes. But I hate to lose things... I was running over a little of it for Jack Leighton. He thinks he can get me on at the Cathedral. You know he owns some stock.”

Jack Leighton was the guy she had gone to the theatre with, and one of her string. I had found out who they all were by watching Lorentz at her parties. He knew her a lot better than I did, Cecil was right about that, and it gave me some kind of a reverse-English kick to check up on her by watching his face while she’d be off in a corner making a date with some guy. Lorentz squirmed, believe me he did. I wasn’t the only one.

“That would be swell.”

“Of course, it’s only a picture house, but it would be a week’s work, and they don’t pay badly. It would be something coming in. And it wouldn’t be bad showmanship for them. After all — I am prominent.”

“Socialite turns pro, hey?”

“Something like that. Except that by now I hope I can consider myself already a pro.”

“That was Jack you went out with?”

“Yes... Was it all right to wear his orchids?”

“Sure. Why not?”

She went over and sat down. I was pretty sure the orchids were my cue to get sore, but I didn’t. Another night I would have, but Traviata had done something to me. I knew now I was as good as she was, and even better, in the place where she had always high-hatted me, and knew that no matter what she said about the orchids, she couldn’t get my goat. I even acted interested in them, the wrong way: “How many did he send?”

“Six. Isn’t it a crime?”

“Oh well. He can afford them.”

Her foot began to kick. I wasn’t marching up to slaughter the way I always marched. She didn’t say anything for a minute, and then she did something she never did in a fight with me, because I always saved her the trouble and did it first. I mean, she lost her temper. The regular way was for me to get sore, and the sorer I got, the more angelic, and sad, and persecuted she got. But this time it was different, and I could hear it in her voice when she spoke. “—Even if we can’t.”

“Why sure we can.”

“Oh no we can’t. No more, I’m sorry to say.”

“If orchids are what it takes to make you happy, we can afford all you want to wear.”

“How can we afford orchids, when I’ve pared our budget to the bone, and—”

“We got a budget?”

“Of course we have.”

“First I heard of it.”

“There are a lot of things you haven’t heard of. I scrimp, and save, and worry, and still I’m so frightened I can hardly sleep at night. I only hope and pray that Jack Leighton can do something for me — even if he’s like every other man, and wants his price.”

“What price?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Well, what the hell. He’s human.”

“Leonard! You can say that?”

“Sure.”

“Suppose he demanded his price — and I paid it?”

“He won’t.”

“Why not, pray?”

“Because I outweigh him by forty pounds, and can beat hell out of him, and he knows it.”

“You can lie there, and look at me, wearing another man’s orchids, almost on my knees to him to give me work that we so badly need — you can actually take it that casually—”

She raved on, and her voice went to a kind of shrieking wail, and I did some fast thinking. When I said what I did about outweighing Jack, it popped into my mind that there was something funny about those orchids, and that it was a funny thing for him to do, send six orchids to Doris, even if I didn’t outweigh him.

“And you won’t.”

“Don’t be so sure. I’m getting desperate, and—”

“In the first place, you never paid any man his price, because you’re not that much on the up-and-up with them. In the second place, if you want to pay it, you just go right ahead and pay. I won’t pretend I’ll like it, but I’m not going down on my knees to you about it. And in the third place, they’re not his orchids.”

“They’re — what makes you say that?”

“I just happen to remember. When Jack called me up a while ago—”

“He—?”

“Oh yeah, he called me up. During the intermission. To tell me, in case I missed my cigarette case, that he had dropped it in his pocket by mistake.”

It wasn’t true. Jack hadn’t called me up. But I knew Doris never went out during an intermission, and that Jack can’t live a half hour without a smoke, so I took a chance. I could feel things breaking my way, and I meant to make the most of it.

“—And just as he hung up, he made a gag about the swell flowers I buy my wife. I had completely forgotten it until just this second.”

“Leonard, how can you be so—”

“So you went out and ordered the orchids yourself, didn’t you? And rubbed them in his face all night, just to make him feel like a bum. And now you come home and tell me he sent them, just to make me feel like a bum... And it turns out we can afford them, doesn’t it?”

“He meant to send some, he told me so—”

“He didn’t.”

“He did, he did, he did! And if I just felt I had to have something to cheer me up—”

“Suppose you go in and go to bed. And shut up. See if that will cheer you up.”

She had begun parading around, and now she snapped on the light. “Leonard, you have a perfectly awful look on your face!”

“Yeah, I’m bored. Just plain bored. And to you, I guess a bored man does look pretty awful.”

She went out and slammed the door with a terrific bang. It was the first time I had ever taken a decision over her. I pulled out Traviata again. It fell open to the place where Alfredo throws the money in Violetta’s face, after she gets him all excited by pretending to be in love with somebody else. It crossed my mind that Alfredo was a bit of a cluck.

5

It was early in October that I got the wire from Rochester. It had been a lousy summer. In August, Doris took the children up to the Adirondacks, and I wanted to go, but I hated the way she would have asked for separate rooms. So I stayed home, and learned two more roles, and played around with Cecil. I got a letter from Doris, after she had been up there a week, saying Lorentz was there too, because of course she couldn’t even write a letter without putting something in it to make you feel rotten. The Lorentz part, it wasn’t so good, but I gritted my teeth and hung on. She came home, and around the end of September Cecil went away. She was booked for a fall tour, and wouldn’t be back until November. I was surprised how I missed her, and how the music wasn’t much fun without her. Then right after that, Doris went away again. She was to sing in Wilkes-Barre. That was a phoney, of course, and all it amounted to was that she had friends there that belonged to some kind of a tony breakfast club, and they had got her invited to sing there.

The day after she left, I got the telegram from Cecil, dated Rochester:

It caught me at the office about ten in the morning, and the messenger waited, and as soon as I read it my heart began to pump, not from excitement, but from fear. Because up to then it had been just a gag, anyway on my end of it. But this brought me face to face with it: Did I mean it enough to get up before people and sing, or not? I stood there looking at it, and then I thought, well what the hell? I called the Newark airport, found they had a plane leaving around noon, and made a reservation. Then I wrote a wire to Doris telling her I had been called out of town on business, and another one to Cecil, telling her I’d be there. Then I grabbed all the music I might need, went over to the bank and drew some money, hustled up to the house and packed, and grabbed a cab.

She met me at the airport, kissed me, and bundled me into a car she had waiting. “It was sweet of you to come. My but I’m glad to see you.”

“Me too.”

“Terribly glad.”

“But what happened? I didn’t even know you had a tenor.”

“Oh, you have to have an assistant artist, to give a little variety. Sometimes the accompanist fills in with some Liebestraum, but my man won’t play solo. So I let the music bureau sell me a tenor. He was no good. He was awful in Albany, and he got the bird last night in Buffalo, so when he turned up this morning with a cold I got terribly alarmed for his precious throat and sent him home. That’s all.”

“What’s the bird?”

“Something you’ll never forget, if you ever hear it.”

“Suppose they give me the bird?”

We had been riding along on the back seat, her hand in mine, just two people that were even gladder to see each other than they knew they were going to be, and I expected her to laugh and say something about my wonderful voice, and how they would never give me the bird. She didn’t. She took her hand away, and we rode a little way without saying anything, and then she looked me all over, like she was measuring everything I had. “Then I’ll have to get somebody else.”

“Yeah?”

“... They can give you the bird.”

“Hey, let’s talk about something pleasant.”

“It’s a tough racket.”

“Maybe I better go home.”

“They can give you the bird, and they can give it to anybody. I think you’ll win, but you’ve got to win, don’t make any mistake about that. You’ve got to lam it in their teeth and make them like it.”

“So.”

“You can go home if you want to, and if that’s how you feel about it, you’d better. But if you do, you’re licked for good.”

“I’m here. I’ll give it a fall.”

“Look at me now.”

“I’m looking.”

“Don’t let that applause fool you, when you come on. They’re a pack of hyenas, they’re always a pack of hyenas, just waiting to tear in and pull out your vitals, and the only way you can keep them back is to lick them. It’s a battle, and you’ve got to win.

“When is the concert?”

“Tonight.”

“Ouch.”

“Did you hear me?”

“I heard you.”

When we got to the hotel I took a room and sent up my stuff, and then we went up to her suite. A guy was there, reading a newspaper. “Mr. Wilkins, who plays our accompaniments. Mr. Borland, Ray. Our baritone.”

We shook hands, and he fished some papers out of his pocket. “The printer’s proofs of the program. It came while you were out, Cecil. He’s got to have it back, with corrections, by five o’clock. I don’t see anything, but you better take a look at it.”

She passed one over to me. It gave me a funny feeling, just to look at it. I’ve still got that proof, and here it is, in case you’re interested, [see below]:

“It’s all right, pretty nifty. Except that Leonard Borland is gradually on purpose going to turn into Logan Bennett.”

“Oh, yes. I meant to ask you about that. Yes, I think that’s better. Will you change it, Ray? On the proof that goes to the printer. And make sure it’s changed on all his groups.”

“I only sing twice?”

“That’s all. Did you bring the music I said?”

“Right here in the briefcase.”

“Give it to Ray, so he can go over it. He always plays from memory. He never brings music on stage.”

“I see.”

“You’ll attend to the program, Ray?”

“I’m taking it over myself.”

Wilkins left, she had me ha-ha for ten minutes, then said my voice was up and stopped me. Some sandwiches and milk came up. “They fed us on the plane. I’m not hungry.”

“You better eat. You don’t get any dinner.”

“... No dinner?”

“You always sing on an empty stomach. We’ll have some supper later.”

I tried to eat, and couldn’t get much down. Seeing that program made me nervous. When I had eaten what I could, she told me to go in and sleep. “A fat chance I could sleep.”

“Lie down, then. Be quiet. No walking around, no vocalizing. That’s one thing you can learn. Don’t leave your concert in the hotel room.”

I went in my room, took off my clothes, and lay down. Somewhere downstairs I could hear Wilkins at the piano, going over the Italian songs. It made me sick to my stomach. None of it was turning out the way I thought it was going to. I had expected a kind of a cock-eyed time, with both of us laughing over what a joke it was that I should be up here, singing with her. Instead of that she was as cold as a woman selling potatoes, and over something I didn’t really care about. There didn’t seem to be any fun in it.

I must have slept, though, because I had put a call in for seven o’clock, and when it came it woke me up. I went in the bathroom, took a quick shower, and started to dress. My fingers trembled so bad I could hardly get the buttons in my shirt. About a quarter to eight I rang her. She seemed friendly, more like her usual self, and told me to come in.

A hotel maid let me in. Cecil was just finishing dressing, and in a minute or two she came out of the bedroom. She had on a chiffon velvet dress, orange-colored, with salmon-colored belt and salmon-colored shoes. It had a kind of Spanish look to it, and was probably what she had always been told she ought to wear with her eyes, hair, and complexion, and yet it was heavy and stuffy, and made her look exactly like an opera singer all dressed up to give a concert. It startled me, because I had been married for so long to a woman that knew all there was to know about dressing that I had forgotten what frumps they can make of themselves when they really try. She saw my look and glanced in the mirror. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t I look right?”

“Sure.”

She told the maid to go, and then she kept looking at herself in the mirror, and then at me again, but when she lit a cigarette and sat down she wasn’t friendly any more. “... All right, we’ll check over what you’re to do.”

“I’m listening.”

“First, when you come on.”

“Yeah, I’ve been wondering about that. What do I do?”

“At all recitals, the singer comes on from the right, that is, stage right. Left, to the audience. Walk straight out from the wings, past the piano to the center of the stage. Be quick and brisk about it. Be aware of them, but don’t look at them till you get there. By that time they’ll start to applaud.”

“Suppose they don’t?”

“If you come on right, they will. That’s part of it. I told you, it’s a battle, and it starts the moment you show your face. You’ve got to make them applaud, and that means you’ve got to come on right. You go right to the center of the stage, stop, face them, and bow. Bow once, from the hips, as though you meant it.”

“O. K., what then?”

“You bow once, but no more. If it’s a friendly house, they may applaud quite a little, but not enough for more than one bow. Besides, it’s only a welcome. You haven’t done anything yet to warrant more than one bow, and if you begin grinning around, you’ll look silly, like some movie star being gracious to his public.”

“All right, I got that. What next?”

“Then you start to sing.”

“Do I give Wilkins a sign or something?”

“I’ll come to that, but I’m not done yet about how you come on. Look pleasant, but don’t paste any death house smile on your face, don’t look sheepish, as though you thought it was a big joke, don’t try to look more confident than you really are. Above all, look as though you meant business. They came to hear you sing, and as long as you act as though that’s what you’re there for, you’ll be all right, and you don’t have to kid them with some kind of phoney act. If you look nervous, that’s all right, you’re supposed to be nervous. Have you got that? Mean it.”

“All right, I got it.”

“When you finish your song, stop. If the piano has the actual finish, hold everything until the last note has been played, no matter whether they break in with applause or not. Hold everything, then relax. Don’t do any more than that, just in your own mind relax. If you’ve done anything with the song at all, they ought to applaud. When they do, bow. Bow straight to the center. Then take a quarter turn on your feet, and bow to the left. Then turn again, and bow to the right. Then walk off. As quickly as you can get to the wings without actually running, walk off.”

“The way I came on?”

“Right back the way you came on.”

“All right, what then?”

“Are you sure you’ve got that all straight?”

“Wait a minute. Do I do that after every song, or—”

“No, no, no! Not after every song. At the end of your group. You don’t leave the stage after every song. There won’t be much applause at the end of your first two songs, they only applaud the group. Bow once after the first song, and when the applause has died down, start the second, and then on with the third.”

“All right, I got it now.”

“If the applause continues, go out, exactly as you went out the first time, and bow three times, first center, then left, then right, then come off.”

“Go ahead. What else?”

“Now about the accompanist. Most singers turn and nod to the accompanist when they are ready, but to my mind it’s just one more thing that slows it up, that adds to the chill that hangs over a recital anyway. That’s why I have Wilkins. He can feel that audience as well as the singer can, and he knows exactly when it’s time to start. Another thing about him is that he plays from memory, has no music to fool with, and so he can watch you the whole time you sing. That gives you better support, and it helps you in another way. They don’t really notice him, but they feel him there, and when he can’t take his eyes off you, they think you must be pretty good. You wait for him. While you’re waiting, look them over. Use those five seconds to get acquainted. Look them over in a friendly way, but don’t smirk at them. Be sure you look up at the balcony, and all over the house, so they all feel you’re singing to them, and not to just a few. Use that time to get the feel of the house, to project yourself out there, even if it’s just a little bit.”

“Must be a swell five seconds.”

“I’m trying to get it through your head that it’s a battle, that it’s a tough spot at best, and that you have to use every means to win.”

“All right. I hear what you say.”

“Now go in the bedroom, and come out and do it. I want to see you go through it all. The center of the stage is over by the window, and I’m the audience.”

I went in the bedroom, then came out and did like she said. “You came on too slow, and your bow is all wrong. Shake the lead out of your feet. And bow from the hips, bow low, as though you meant it. Don’t just stand there jerking your head up and down.”

I went in and did it over again. “That’s better, but you’re still much too perfunctory about it. You’re not a business man, getting up to give a little talk at the Engineers’ Club. You’re a singer, getting ready to put on a show, and there’s got to be some formality about it.”

“Can’t I just act natural?”

“If you act natural, you’ll look just like what you are, a contractor that thinks he looks like a fool. Can’t you understand what I mean? This is a concert, not a meeting to open bids.”

I did it all over again, and felt like some kind of a tin soldier on hinges, but she seemed satisfied. “It’s a little stiff, but anyway it’s how it’s done. Now do it three or four more times, so you get used to it.”

I did it about ten times, and then she stopped me. “And now one more thing. That first number, Vittoria, Mio Core, I picked out for you to begin with because it’s a good lively tune and you can race through with it without having to worry about fine effects. After that you ought to be all right. But don’t forget that it has no introduction. He’ll give you one chord, for pitch, and then you start.”

“Sure, I know.”

“You know, but be ready. One chord. One chord, and as soon as you have the pitch clear in your head, start. Don’t let it catch you by surprise.”

“I won’t.”

We had another cigarette, and didn’t say much. I looked at the palms of my hands. They were wet. Wilkins came in. “Taxi’s waiting.”

We put on our coats, went down, got in the cab. There was a little drizzle of rain. “The Eastman Theatre. Stage entrance.”

The stage was all set for the recital, with a big piano out there, and a drop back of it. There was a hole in the drop, so we could look out. First she would look, and then I would look. Wilkins found a chair, and read the afternoon paper. She kept looking up. “Balcony’s filling. It’s a sell-out.”

But I wasn’t looking at the balcony. All I could see was those white shirts, marching down into the orchestra. Rochester is a musical town, and formal, and a lot of those white shirts, they had those dreamy faces over top of them, with curly moustaches, that meant musician. They meant musician, and they meant tony musician, and they scared me to death. I don’t know what I expected. Anybody that lives in New York gets to thinking that any town north of the Harlem River is out in the sticks, and I must have been looking for a flock of country club boys and their wives, or something, but not this. My mouth began to feel dry. I went over to the cooler and had a drink, but I kept swallowing.

At 8:25 a stagehand went out and closed the top of the piano. He came back and another herd of white shirts came down the aisle. They were hurrying now. Wilkins took out his watch, held it up to Cecil. “Ready?”

“All right.”

We all three went to the wings, stage right. He raised his hand. “One — two” — then lifted his foot and gave her a little kick in the tail. She swept out there like she owned the place and the whole block it was built on. There was a big hand. She bowed once, the way she had told me to do, and then stood there, looking up, down, and around, a little friendly smile coming on her face every time she warmed up a new bunch, while he was playing the introduction to the Rossini. Then she started to sing. It was the first time I had heard her in public. Well, I didn’t need any critic to tell me she was good. She stood there, smiling around, and then, as the introduction stopped, she turned grave, and seemed to get taller, and the first of it came out, low and soft. It was Latin, and she made it sound dramatic. And she made every syllable so distinct that I could even understand what it meant, though it was all of fifteen years since I had had my college Plautus. Then she got to the part where there are a lot of sustained notes, and her voice began to swell and throb so it did things to you. Up to then I hadn’t thought she had any knockout of a voice, but I had never heard it when it was really working. Then she came to the fireworks at the end, and you knew there really was a big leaguer in town. She finished, and there was a big hand. Wilkins came off, wiped his hands on his handkerchief. She bowed center, left, and right, and came off. She listened. The applause kept up. She went out and bowed three times again. She came off, stood there and listened, then shook her head. The applause stopped, and she looked at me. “All right, baby. Here’s your kick for luck.”

She kicked me the way Wilkins had kicked her. He put the handkerchief in his pocket, raised his hand. “One — two—”

I aimed for the center of the stage, got there, and bowed, the way I had practiced. They gave me a hand. Then I looked up, and tried to do what she had told me to do, look them over, top, bottom, and around. But all I could see was faces, faces, faces, all staring at me, all trying to swim down my throat. Then I began to think about that first number, and the one chord I would get, and how I had to be ready. I stood there, and it seemed so long I got a panicky feeling he had forgotten to come out, and that there wouldn’t be any opening chord. Then I heard it, and right away started to sing:

My voice sounded so big it startled me, and I tried to throttle it down, and couldn’t. There’s no piano interludes in that song. It goes straight through, for three verses, at a hell of a clip, and the more I tried to pull in, and get myself under some kind of control, the louder it got, and the faster I kept going, until at the finish Wilkins had a hard time keeping up with me. They gave me a little bit of a hand, and I didn’t want to bow, I wanted to apologize, and explain that that wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. But I bowed, some kind of way.

Then came the O Cessate. It’s short, and ought to start soft, lead up to a crescendo in the middle, and die away at the end. I was so rung up by then I couldn’t sing soft if I tried. I started it, and my voice bellowed all over the place, and it was terrible. There was a bare ripple after that, and Wilkins went into the opening of the Come Raggio. That’s another that opens soft, and I sang it soft for about two measures, and then I exploded like some radio when you turn it up too quick. After that it was a hog-calling contest. Wilkins saw it was hopeless, and came down on the loud pedal so it would maybe sound as though that was the way it was supposed to go, and a fat chance we could fool that audience. I finished, and on the pianissimo at the end it sounded like a locomotive whistling for a curve. When it was over there was a little scattering of applause, and I bowed. I bowed center, and took the quarter turn to bow to the side. The applause stopped. I kept right on turning and walked off stage.

She was there in the wings, a murderous look on her face. “You’ve flopped!”

“All right, I’ve flopped.”

“Damn it, you’ve—”

But Wilkins grabbed her by the arm. “Do you want to lose them for good? Get out there, get out there, get out there!”

She stopped in the middle of a cussword and went on, smiling like nothing had happened at all.

I tried to explain to her in the intermission what had ailed me, but she kept walking away from me, there behind the drop. It wasn’t until I saw her blotting her eyes with a handkerchief, to keep the mascara from running down her cheeks, that I knew she was crying. “Well — I’m sorry I ruined your concert.”

“... Oh well. It’s a turkey anyhow.”

“I didn’t do it any good.”

“They’re as cold as dead fish. There’s nothing to do about it. You didn’t ruin it.”

“Was that the bird?”

“Oh no. You don’t know the half of it yet.”

“Oh.”

“Did you have to blast them out of their seats?”

“I’ve been telling you. I was nervous.”

“After all I’ve told you about not bellowing. And then you have to — what did you think you were doing, announcing trains?”

“Maybe I’d better go home.”

“Maybe you’d better.”

“Shall I do this other number?”

“As you like.”

She did the Mozart, and took an encore, and came off. Wilkins had heard us rowing, and looked at me, and motioned me on. She went off to her dressing room without looking at me. I went out there. There were one or two handclaps, and I made my bow, and then paid no more attention to them at all. I felt sick and disgusted. He struck the opening chord and I started the recitative. There’s a lot of it, and I sang it just mechanically. After two or three phrases I heard a murmur go over the house, and if that was the bird I didn’t care. I got to the end of the recitative, and then stepped back a little while he played the introduction to the aria. I heard him mumble, so I could just hear him above the triplets: “You got ’em. Just look noble now, and it’s in the bag.”

It hit me funny. It relaxed me, and it was just what I needed. I tried to look noble, and I don’t know if I did or not, but all the time my voice was coming nice and easy. We got to the end of the first strain, and he really began to go places with the lead into the next. It was the first time all night the piano had really had much to do, and it came over me all of a sudden that the guy was one hell of an accompanist, and that it was a pleasure to sing with him. I went into the next strain, and really made it drip. There was a little break, and I heard him say, “Swell, keep it up.” I was nearly to the high G. I took the little leading phrase nice and light, and hit it right on the nose. It felt good, and I began to let it swell. Then I remembered about not yelling, and throttled it back, and finished the phrase under nice control. There wasn’t much more, and when I hit the high F at the end, it was just right.

For a second or so after he struck the last chord it was as still as death. Then some guy in the balcony yelled. My heart skipped a beat, but then others began to yell, and what they were yelling was bravo. The applause broke out in a roar then, and I remembered to bow. I bowed center, right, and left, and then I walked off. She was there, and kissed me. Wilkins whipped out his handkerchief, wiped the lipstick off my mouth, and shoved me out there again. I bowed three times again, and hated to leave. When I came back she nodded, told Wilkins to go out with me this time for an encore. “Yeah, but what the hell is his encore?”

“Let him do Traviata.”

“O. K.”

I went out, and he started Traviata. Now Di Provenza Il Mar I guess is the worst sung aria you ever hear, because the boys always think about tone and forget about the music, and that ruins it. I mean they don’t sing it smooth, with all the notes even, and that makes it jerky, and takes all the sadness out of it. But it’s a cakewalk for me, because I think I told you about all that work I did on music, and it seemed to me that I kind of knew what old man Verdi was trying to do with it when he wrote it. Wilkins started it, and he played it slower than Cecil had been playing it, and I no sooner heard it than I knew that was right too. I took it just the way he had cued me. I just rocked it along, and kept every note even, and didn’t beef at all. When I got to the G flat, I held it, then let it swell a little, but only enough to come in right on the forte that follows it, and then on the finish I loaded it with all the tears of the world. You ought to have heard the bravos that time. I went out and took more bows, and it was no trouble to look them in the eye that time. They seemed like the nicest people in the world.

At the end, after she had finished a flock of encores, Cecil took me out for a bow with her, and then my flowers came up, and she pinned one on me, and they clapped some more, and she had me do a duet with her, “Crudel, Perché, Finora,” from the Marriage of Figaro. It went so well they wanted more, but she rang down and the three of us went out to eat. Wilkins and I were pretty excited, but she didn’t have much to say. When she went out to powder her nose, he started to laugh. “They’re all alike, aren’t they?”

“How do you mean, all alike?”

“I thought she was a little different, at first. Letting you take that encore, and singing a duet with you, that looked kind of decent. And then I got the idea, somehow, that she liked you. I mean for your sex appeal, or whatever it is that they go for. But you see how she’s acting, don’t you? They’re all alike. Opera singers are the dumbest, pettiest, vainest, cruelest, egotisticalest, jealousest breed of woman you can find on this man’s earth, or any man’s earth. You did too good, that’s all. Two bits that tomorrow morning you’re on your way back.”

“I think you’re wrong.”

“I’m not wrong. First the tenor stinks and then the baritone don’t stink enough.”

“Not Cecil.”

“Just Cecil, the ravishing Cecil.”

“Something’s eating on her, but I don’t think it’s that.”

“You’ll see.”

“All right, I’ll match your two bits.”

We got back to the hotel, Wilkins went to his room, and I went up with her for a goodnight cigarette. She snapped on the lights, then went over to the mirror and stood looking at herself. “What’s the matter with the dress?”

“Nothing.”

“There’s something.”

“... It’s all wrong.”

“I paid enough for it. It came from one of the best shops in New York.”

“I guess one of the best shops in New York wouldn’t have some lousy Paris copy they would wish off on a singer that didn’t know any better... It makes you look like a gold plush sofa. It makes that bozoom look like some dairy, full of Grade A milk for the kiddies. It makes you look about ten years older. It makes you look like an opera singer, all dressed up to screech.”

“Isn’t the bozoom all right?”

“The bozoom, considered simply as a bozoom, is curviform, exciting, and even distinguished. But for God’s sake never dress for anything like that, even if you’re secretly stuck on it, which I think you are. That’s what a telephone operator does, when she puts on a yoo-hoo blouse. Or a chorus girl, wearing a short skirt to show her legs. Dress the woman, not the shape.”

“Did you learn that from her?”

“Anyway I learned it.”

She sat down, and kept on looking at the velvet, and fingering it. “All right, I’m a hick.”

I went over and sat down beside her and took her hand. “You’re not a hick, and you’re not to feel that way about it. You asked me, didn’t you? You wanted to know. Just to sit there, and keep on saying the dress was all right, when you knew I didn’t think so — that wouldn’t have been friendly, would it? And what is it? You haven’t been yourself tonight.”

“I’m a hick. I know I’m a hick, and I don’t try to make anybody think any different. You or anybody... I haven’t had time to learn how to dress. I’ve spent my life in studios and hotels and theatres and concert halls and railroad trains, and I’ve spent most of it broke — until here recently — and all of it working. If you think that teaches you the fine points of dressing, you’re mistaken. It doesn’t teach you anything, except how tough everything is. And she, she’s done nothing all her life but look at herself in a mirror, and—”

“What’s she got to do with it?”

“—And study herself, and take all the time she needs to find the exact thing that goes with her, and make some man pay for it, and — all right, she can dress. I know she can dress. I don’t have to be told. No woman would have to be told. And — all right, you wanted to know what she’s got, I’ll tell you what she’s got. She’s got class, so when she says hop, you — jump! And I haven’t got it. All right, I know I haven’t got it. But was that any reason for you to look at me that way?”

“Is that why you fought with me?”

“Wasn’t it enough? As though I was some poor thing that you felt sorry for. That you felt — ashamed of! You’ve never felt ashamed of her, have you?”

“Nor of you.”

“Oh, yes. You were ashamed tonight. I could see it in your eye. Why did you have to look at me that way?”

“I wasn’t ashamed of you, I was proud of you. Even when you were quarreling with me, back there during the intermission, the back of my head was proud of you. Because it was your work, and there was no fooling around about it, even with me. Because you were a pro at your trade, and were out there to win, no matter whose feelings got hurt. And now you try to tell me I was ashamed of you.”

She dropped her head on my shoulder and started to cry. “Oh Leonard, I feel like hell.”

“What about? All this is completely imaginary.”

“Oh no it isn’t... The tenor was all right. He wasn’t much good, but I could have done with him, once he got over his cold. I wanted you up here, don’t you see? I was so glad to see you, and then I didn’t want you to see it, for fear you wouldn’t want me to be that glad. And I tried to be businesslike, and I was doing fine — and then you looked at me that way. And then I swallowed that down, because I knew I didn’t care how you looked at me, so long as you were here. And then — you flopped. And I knew you weren’t just a tenor that would put up with anything for a job. I knew you’d go back, and I was terrified, and furious at you. And then you sang the way I wanted you to sing, and I loved you so much I wanted to go out there and hold on to you while you sang the other one. And now you know. Oh no, it’s not just imaginary. What have you got?”

I held her tight, and patted her cheek, and tried to think of something to say. There wasn’t anything to say, not about what she was talking about. I had got so fond of her that I loved every minute I spent with her, and yet there was only one woman that meant to me what she wanted to mean to me, and that was Doris. She could torture me all she wanted to, she could be a phoney and make a fool of me all over town with other men, and yet Cecil had hit it: when she said hop, I jumped.

“I know what you’ve got. You’ve got big hard shoulders, and shaggy hair, and you’re a man, and you build bridges, and to you this is just some kind of foolish tiddle-de-winks game that you play until it’s time to go to work. And that’s just what it is to me! I don’t want to be a singer. I want to be a woman!”

“If I’m a man, you made me one.”

“Oh yes, that’s the hell of it. It’s mostly tiddle-de-winks, but it’s partly building yourself up to her level, so you’re not afraid of her any more. And that’s what I’m helping you at. Making a man out of you, so she can have you... I feel like hell. I could go right out that window.”

I held her a long time, then, and she stopped crying, and began to play with my hair. “All right, Leonard. I’ve been rotten, and a poor sport to say anything about it at all, because this isn’t how it was supposed to come out — and now I’ll stop. I’ll be good, and not talk any more about it, and try to give you a pleasant trip. It’s a little fun, isn’t it, out here playing tiddle-de-winks?”

“It is with you.”

“Wouldn’t they be surprised, all your friends at the Engineers’ Club, if they could see you?”

I wanted to cry, but she wanted me to laugh, so I did, and held her close, and kissed her. “You sang like an angel, and I’m terribly proud of you, and — that’s right. Hold me close.”

I held her close a long time, and then she started to laugh. It was a real cackle, over something that had struck her funny, I could see that. “... What is it?”

“You.”

“Tonight? At the hall?”

“Yes.”

“?”

But she just kept right on laughing, and didn’t tell me what it was about. Later on, though, I found out.

6

We sang Syracuse, Cincinnati, and Columbus after that, the same program, and I did all right. She paid my hotel bills, and offered me $50 a night on top of that, but I wouldn’t take anything. I was surprised at the reviews I got. Most of them wrote her up, and let me out with a line, but a few of them called me “the surprise of the evening,” said I had a voice of “rare power and beauty,” and spoke of the “sweep and authority” of my singing. I didn’t exactly know what they meant, and it was the first time I knew there was anything like that about me, but I liked them all right and saved them all.

The Columbus concert was on a Thursday, and after we closed with the duet again, and took our bows, and went off, a little wop in gray spats followed her into her dressing room and stayed there quite a while. Then he left and we went out to eat. I was pretty hungry, and I hadn’t liked waiting. “Who was your pretty boy friend?”

“That was Mr. Rossi.”

“And who is Mr. Rossi?”

“General secretary, business agent, attorney, master of the hounds, bodyguard, scout, and chief cook-and-bottle-washer to Cesare Pagano.”

“And who is Cesare Pagano?”

“He’s the American Scala Opera Company, the only impresario in the whole history of opera that ever made money out of it.”

“And?”

“I’m under contract to them, you know. For four weeks, beginning Monday. After that I go back to New York to get ready for the Metropolitan.”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“I didn’t say anything about it.”

“Then after tonight I’m fired. Is that it?”

“No. I didn’t say anything about it, because I thought I might have a surprise for you. I’ve been wiring Pagano about you, and wiring him and wiring him — and tonight he sent Rossi over. Rossi thinks you’ll do.”

“What? Me sing in grand opera?”

“Well what did you think you were learning those roles for?”

“I don’t know. Just for something to do. Just so I could come down and see you. Just — to see if I could do it. Hell, I never been to a grand opera.”

“Anyway, I closed with him.”

It turned out I was to get $125 a week, which was upped $25 from what he had offered, and that was what they were arguing about. I was to get transportation, pay my own hotel bills, and have a four-week contract, provided I did all right on my first appearance. It sounded so crazy to me I didn’t know what to say, and then something else popped in my head. “What about this grand opera, anyway? Do they — dress up or something?”

“Why of course. There’s costumes, and scenery — just like any other show.”

“Me — put on funny clothes and get out there and — do I have to paint up my face?”

“You use make-up, of course.”

“It’s out.”

But then when I asked her what she got, and she said $400 a night, and that she had taken a cut from $500, I knew perfectly well that that was part of what they had been arguing about too, that she had taken that cut to get me in, so I could be with her, and that kind of got me. I thought it was the screwiest thing I had ever heard of, but I finally said yes.

If you think a concert is tough, don’t ever try grand opera. I hear it’s harder to go out there all alone, with only a piano to play your accompaniments and no scenery to help you out, and I guess it is, when you figure the fine points. But if you’ve never even heard of the fine points yet, and you’re not sure you can even do it at all, you stick to something simple. Remember what I’m telling you: lay off grand opera.

We hit Chicago the next day, just the two of us, because Wilkins went back to New York after the Columbus concert. The first thing we did, after we got hotel rooms, was go around to the costumer’s. That’s a swell place. There’s every kind of costume you ever heard of, hanging on hooks, like people that have just been lynched, from white flannel tenor suits with brass buttons up the front, to suits of armor, to naval uniforms, to cowboy clothes, to evening clothes and silk hats. It’s all dark, and dusty, and shabby, and about as romantic as a waxworks.

They were opening in Bohème Monday night, and we were both in it, and that meant the first thing we had to get was the Marcel stuff. She already had her costumes, you understand. This was all on account of me. Marcel was the character I was to sing in the opera, the baritone role. There wasn’t any trouble about him. I mean, they didn’t have to make any stuff to order, because a pair of plaid pants, a velvet smoking jacket of a coat, and a muffler and floppy hat for the outdoor stuff, were all I had to have. They had that stuff, and I tried it on, and it was all right, and they set it aside. But when it came to the Rigoletto stuff, and they opened a book and showed me a picture of what I would have to have, I almost broke for the station right there. I knew he was supposed to be some kind of a hump-backed jester, but that I would have to come out in a foolish-looking red suit, and actually wear cap and bells, that never once entered my mind.

“I really got to wear that outfit?”

“Why of course.”

“My God.”

She paid hardly any attention to me, and went on talking with the costumer. “He has to sing it Wednesday, and he’ll have no chance for a fitting Monday. Can you fit Tuesday and deliver Wednesday?”

“Absolutely, Miss. We guarantee it.”

“Remember to fit over the hump.”

“We’ll even measure over the hump. I think he’d better put a hump on right now. By the way, has he got a hump?”

“No, he’ll have to get one.”

“We have two types of hump. One that goes on with straps, the other with elastic fabric fastenings, adjustable. I recommend the elastic fabric, myself. It’s more comfortable, stays in place better, doesn’t interfere with breathing—”

“I think that’s better.”

So I put on a hump, and got measured for the monkey suit. Then it turned out that for two of the acts I would have to have dark stuff, and a cape, and another floppy hat. They argued whether the Bohème hat wouldn’t do, and finally decided it would. Then we tried on capes. The one that seemed to be elected hiked up in back, on account of the hump, but the costumer thought I ought to take it, just the same. “We could make you a special one, to hang even all around, but if you take my advice, you’ll have this one. That little break in the line won’t make much difference, and then, if you have a cape that really fits you, without that hump I mean, you can use it in other operas — Lucia, Trovatore, Don Giovanni, you know what I mean? A nice operatic cape comes in handy any time, and—”

“O. K. I’ll take that one.”

Then it turned out I would have to have a red wig, and we tried wigs on. When we got around to the Traviata stuff I didn’t even have the heart to look, and ordered blind. Anything short of a hula skirt, I thought, would be swell. Then it seemed I had to have a trunk, a special kind, and we got that. I’d hate to tell you what all that stuff cost. We came out of there with the Marcel stuff, the wig, the hump, the cape, and a make-up kit done up in two big boxes, the other stuff to come. When we got back to the hotel we went up and I dumped the stuff down on the floor. “What’s the matter, Marcellino? Don’t you feel well?”

“I feel lousy.”

There’s no rehearsals for principals in the American Scala. You know your stuff or you don’t get hired. But I was a special case, and Pagano wasn’t taking any chances on me. He posted a call for the whole Boheme cast to take me through it Sunday afternoon, and maybe you think that wasn’t one sore bunch of singers that showed up at two o’clock. The men were all Italians, and they wanted to go to a pro football game that was being played that afternoon. The only other woman in the cast, the one that sang Musetta, was an American, and she was sore because she was supposed to give a lecture in a Christian Science temple, and had to cancel it. They couldn’t get the theatre, for some reason, so we did it downstairs in the new cocktail lounge of the hotel, that they didn’t use on Sundays. Rossi put chairs around to show doors, windows, and other stuff in the set, took the piano, and started off. The rest of them paid no attention to him at all, or to me. They knew Bohème frontwards, backwards, and sidewise, and they sat around with their hats on the back of their heads, working crossword puzzles in the Sunday paper. When it came time for them to come in they came in without even looking up. Cecil acted just like the others. She didn’t work puzzles, but she read a book. Every now and then a tall, disgusted-looking Italian would walk through and walk out again. I asked who he was, and they told me Mario, the conductor. He looked like if he had to listen to me much longer he would get an acute case of the colic. It was all as cheerful as cold gravy with grease caked on the top.

Rossi rehearsed me until I swear blood was running out of my nose, throat, and eyeballs. I never got enough pep in it to suit him. I had always thought grand opera was a slow, solemn, kind of dignified show, but the way he went about it it was a race between some sprinter and a mechanical rabbit. I was surprised how bad the others sounded. It didn’t seem to me any of them had enough voice to crush a grape.

Monday I tried to keep quiet and not think about it, but it was one long round of costumes, phone calls, and press releases. I was still singing under the name of Bennett, and when they called me down to give them some stuff about myself to go out to the papers, I was stumped. I wasn’t going to say who I really was. I gave them the biography of an uncle that came from Missouri, and went abroad to study medicine. Instead of the medical stuff in Germany, I made it musical stuff in Italy, and it seemed to get by all right. Around six-thirty, when I had just laid down, and thought I could relax a few minutes and get myself a little bit in hand, the phone rang and Cecil said it was time to go. We had to go early, because she had to make me up.

When we went in the stage door of the Auditorium Theatre that night, and I got my first look at that stage, I almost fainted. What I had felt in Rochester was nothing compared to this. In the first place, I had never had any idea that a stage could be that big, and still be a stage and not a blimp hangar. You only see about half of it from out front. The rest of it stretches out through the wings, and back, and up overhead, until you’d think there wasn’t any end of it. In the second place, it was all full of men, and monkey wrenches, and scenery going up on pulleys, and noise, so you’d think nobody could possibly sing on it, and be heard more than three feet. And in the third place, there was something about it that felt like big stuff about to happen. I guess that was the worst. Maybe an army headquarters, the night before a drive, or a convention hall, just before a big political meeting, would affect you that way too, but if you really want to get that feeling, so you really feel it, and it scares you to death, you go in a big opera house about an hour and a half before curtain time.

Cecil didn’t waste any time on it. She went right up to No. 7 dressing room, where I was, and I followed her up. She was in No. 1 dressing room, on the other side of the stage. When we got up there, there was nothing in there at all but a long table against the wall, a mirror above that, a couple of chairs, and my trunk, that had been sent around earlier in the day. I opened it, and she took out the make-up kit, and spread it out on the table. “Always watch that you have plenty of cloths and towels. You need them to get the make-up off after you get through.”

“All right, I’ll watch it.”

“Now get out your costume, check every item that goes with it, and hang it on hooks. When you have more than one costume in an opera, hang each one on a separate hook, in the order you’ll need them.”

“O. K. What else?”

“Now we’ll make you up.”

She showed me how to put the foundation on, how to apply the color, how to put on the whiskers with gum arabic, and trim them up with a scissors so they looked right. They come in braids, and you ravel them out. She showed me about darkening under the eyes, and made me put on the last touches myself, so I could feel I looked right for the part. Then she had me put on the costume, and inspected me. I looked at myself in the mirror, and thought I looked like the silliest zany that ever came down the pike, but she seemed satisfied, so I shut up about it. “These whiskers tickle.”

“They will until the gum dries.”

“And they feel like they’re falling off.”

“Leave them alone. For heaven’s sake, get that straight right now. Don’t be one of those idiots that go around all night asking everybody if their make-up is in place. Put it on when you dress, and if you put it on right, it’ll stay there. Then forget it.”

“Don’t worry. I’m trying to forget it.”

“Around eight o’clock you’ll get your first call. Take the hat and muffler with you, and be sure you put them in their proper place on the set. They go on the table near the door, and you put them on for your first exit.”

“I know.”

“When you’ve done that, read the curtain calls.”

“To hell with curtain calls. If I ever—”

“Read your curtain calls! You’re in some and not in others, and God help you if you come bobbing out there on a call that belongs to somebody else.”

“Oh.”

“Keep quiet. You can vocalize a little, but not much. When you feel your voice is up, stop.”

“All right.”

“Now I leave you. Good-bye and good luck.”

I lit a cigarette, walked around. Then I remembered about the vocalizing. I tried a ha-ha, and it sounded terrible. It was dull, heavy, and lifeless, like a horn in a fog. I looked at my watch. It was twenty to eight. I got panicky that I had only a few minutes, and maybe couldn’t get my voice up in time. I began to ha-ha, m’m-m’m, ee-ee, and everything I knew to get a little life into it. There was a knock on the door, and somebody said something in Italian. I took the hat and muffler, and went down.

They were all there, Cecil and the rest, all dressed, all walking around, vocalizing under their breaths. Cecil was in black, with a little shawl, and looked pretty. Just as I got down, the chorus came swarming in from somewhere, in soldier suits, plaid pants like mine, ruffled dresses, and everything you could think of. They weren’t in the first act, but Rossi lined them up, and began checking them over. I went on the set and put the hat and muffler where she told me. The tenor came and put his hat beside mine. The basses came and moved both hats, to make more room on the table. There had to be places for their stuff when they came on, later. I went to the bulletin board and read the calls. We were all in the first two of the first act, Cecil, the tenor, the two basses, the comic, and myself, then for the other calls it was only Cecil and the tenor. On the calls for the other acts I was in most of them, but I did what she said, read them over carefully and remembered how they went.

“Places!”

I hurried out on the set and sat down behind the easel. I had already checked that the paint brush was in place. The tenor came on and took his place by the window. His name was Parma. He vocalized a little run, with his mouth closed. I tried to do the same, but nothing happened. I swallowed and tried again. This time it came, but it sounded queer. From the other side of the curtain there came a big burst of handclapping. Parma nodded. “Mario’s in. Sound like nice ’ouse.”

From where you sat out front, I suppose that twenty seconds between the time Mario got to his stand, and made his bow, and waited till a late couple got down the aisle, and the time he brought down his stick on his strings, was just twenty seconds, and nothing more. To me it was the longest wait I ever had in my life. I looked at the easel, and swallowed, and listened to Parma vocalizing his runs under his breath, and swallowed some more, and I thought nothing would ever happen. And then, all of a sudden, all hell broke loose.

Were you ever birdshooting? If you were, on your first time out, you know what I’m talking about. You were out there, in your new hunting suit, and the dogs were out there, and your friends were out there, and you were all ready for business when the first thing that hit you was the drumming of those wings. Then they were up, and going away from you, and it was time to shoot. But if you could hit anything with that thunder in your ears, you were a better man than I think you are. It was like that with me, when that orchestra sounded off. It was terrific, the most frightening thing I ever heard in my life. And it no sooner started than the curtain went up, except that I never saw it go up. All I saw was that blaze of the footlights in my eyes, so I was so rattled I didn’t even know where I was. Cecil had warned me about it a hundred times, but you can’t warn anybody about a thing like that. Light was hitting me from everywhere, and then I saw Mario out there, but he looked about a mile away, and my heart just stopped beating.

My heart stopped, but that orchestra didn’t. It ripped through that introduction a mile a minute, and I knew then what Rossi had been trying to get through my head about speed. There’s a page and a half of it in the score, and that looks like plenty of music, doesn’t it? They ate it up in nothing flat, and next thing I knew they were through with it, and it was time for me to sing. Oh yes, I was the lad that had to open the opera. Me, the lousy four-flusher that was so scared he couldn’t even breathe.

But they thought about that. Mario found me up there, and that stick came down on me, and it meant get going. I began to sing the phrase that begins Questo Mar Rosso, but I swear I had no more to do with it than a rabbit looking at a snake. That stick told my mouth what to do, and it did it, that was all. Oh yes, an operatic conductor knows buck fever when he sees it, and he knows what to do about it.

There was some more stuff in the orchestra, and I sang the next two phrases, where he says that to get even with the picture for looking so cold, he’ll drown a Pharaoh. The picture is supposed to be the passage of the Red Sea. But I was to take the brush and actually drown one, and it was a second or two before I remembered about it. When I actually did it, I must have looked funny, because there was a big laugh. I was so rattled I looked around to see what they were laughing at, and in that second I took my eye off Mario. It was the place where I was supposed to shoot a Che fai? at the tenor. And while I was off picking daisies, did that conductor wait? He did not. Next thing I knew the orchestra was roaring again, and I had missed the boat. Parma sang the first part of his Nel cielo bigi at the window, then as he finished it he crossed in front of me, and it was murderous the way he shot it at me as he went by: “Watch da conductor!”

I watched da conductor. I glued my eyes on him from then on, and didn’t miss any more cues, and by the help of hypnotism, prayer, and the rest of them shoving me around, we got through it somehow. What I never got caught up with was the speed. You see, when you learn those roles, and then coach them with a piano, you always think of them as a series of little separate scenes, and you take a little rest after each one, and smoke, and relax. But it’s not like that at a performance. It goes right through, and it’s cruel the way it sweeps you along.

I remembered the hat and muffler, and when I came off she was back there, smoking a cigarette, ready to go on. “You’re doing all right. Sing to them, not to Mario.”

She rapped at the door, sang a note or two, put her heel on the cigarette, and went on.

We had a little off-stage stuff coming, I and the two basses, and we stood in the wings listening to them out there, doing their stuff. I found out something about an operatic tenor. He doesn’t shoot it in rehearsals, and he doesn’t shoot it in the preliminary stuff either. He saves it for the place where it counts. Parma, who at the rehearsal hadn’t shown enough even to make me look at him, uncorked a voice that was a beauty. He uncorked a voice, and he uncorked a style that even I knew was good. He took his aria, the Che Gelida Manina, slow and easy at first, he just drifted along with it, he made them wait until he was ready to give it to them. But when he did give it to them he had it. That high C near the end was a beauty, and well they knew it. Cecil sang better than I had ever heard her sing. I began to see what they were all talking about, why they paid her the dough.

I went out on the first two calls, like the bulletin said, but when we came in from the second Parma whispered at me: “You hide, you. You hear me, guy? You keep out a way dat Mario!”

I didn’t argue. I got behind some flats out there in the wings and stayed there. Cecil had heard him, and after a few minutes she found me there. “What happened?”

“I missed a cue.”

“Well what’s he talking about? He missed three.”

“I wasn’t watching the conductor.”

“Oh.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s the cardinal sin, the only unforgivable sin, in all grand opera. Always watch him. Sing to them, try not to let them see you watch him. But — never let him out of your sight. He’s the performance, the captain of the ship, the one on whom everything depends. Always watch him.”

“I got it now.”

The next act was better. I was getting used to it now. I got a couple of laughs in the first part, and then when it came time for me to take up the waltz song he threw the stick on me and I gave her the gun. It got a hand, but he played through it to the end of the act. The Musetta and I did the carry-off we had practiced, and it went all right. The regular way is for Marcel to pick her up and run off with her, but she was small and I’m big, so instead of that, I threw her up on my shoulder and she kicked and waved, and the curtain came down to cheers. The third act I was all right, and we had another nice curtain. The four of us, Parma, I, Cecil, and the Musetta were in all the calls, and after we took the last one Parma followed me to the hole where I did my hiding. “O. K., boy, now on a duet.”

“Yeah?”

“Make’m dolce. Mak’m nice, a sweet, no loud at all. No big dramatic. Nice, a sweet, a sad. Yeah?”

“I’ll do my best.”

“You do like I say, we knock hell out of’m. You watch.”

So we went out there, and got through the gingerbread, and he threw down his pen and I threw down my paint brush, and we got out the props, and the orchestra played the introduction to the duet. Then he started to sing, and I woke up. I mean, I got it through my head that when that bird said dolce he meant dolce. He sang like that bonnet of Mimi’s was some little bird he had in his hand, so it made a catch come in your throat to listen to him. When he hit the A he lifted his eyes, with the side of his face to the audience, and held it a little, and then melted off it almost with a sigh. When he did that he looked at me and winked. It was that wink that told me what I had to do. I had to put dolce in it. I came in on my beat and tried to do it like he did it. When it came to my little solo, I put tears in it. Maybe they were just imitation tears, but they were tears just the same. When I came to my high F sharp I swelled it a little, then pulled it in and melted off it just like he had melted off the A. When I got through the orchestra had a few bars, and he sat there shaking his head over the bonnet, and out of the side of his mouth he said: “You old son-bitch-bast.”

We went into the finish, and laid it right on the end of Mario’s stick, and slopped out the tears in buckets. Buckets, hell, we turned the fire hose on them. It stopped the show. They didn’t only clap, they cheered, so we had to repeat it. That’s dead against the rules, and Mario tried to go on, but they wouldn’t let him. We got through the act, and Parma flopped on the bed for the last two “Mimi’s,” and the curtain came down to a terrific hand. We took our first two bows, the whole gang that were in the act, and when we came back from the second one, Mario was back there. Cecil yelled in my ear, “Take him out, take him out!” So I took him out. I grabbed him by one hand, she by the other, and we led him out on the next bow, and they gave him a big hand, too. That seemed to fix it up about that missed cue.

It was a half hour before I could start to dress. I went to my dressing room, and had just about got my whiskers pulled off when about fifty people shoved in from outside, wanting me to autograph their programs. It was a new one on me, but it’s a regular thing at every performance of grand opera, those people, mostly women, they come back and tell you how beautifully you sang, and would you please sign their program for them. So I obliged, and signed “Logan Bennett.” Then I got washed up and met Cecil and we got a cab and went off to eat. “You hungry, Leonard?”

“As a mule.”

“Let’s go somewhere.”

“All right.”

We went to a night club. It had a dance floor, and tables around that, and booths around the wall. We took a booth. We ordered a steak for two, and then she ordered some red burgundy to go with it, and sherry to start. That was unusual with her. She’s like most singers. She’ll give you a drink, but she doesn’t take much herself. She saw me look at her. “I want something. I... want to celebrate.”

“O. K. with me. Plenty all right.”

“Did you enjoy yourself?”

“I enjoyed the final curtain.”

“Didn’t you enjoy the applause after the O Mimi duet? It brought down the house.”

“It was all right.”

“Is that all you have to say about it?”

“I liked it fine.”

“You mean you really liked it?”

“Yeah, I hate to admit it, but I really liked it. That was the prettiest music I heard all night.”

The sherry came and we raised our glasses, clinked, and had a sip. “Leonard, I love it.”

“You’re better at it than in concert.”

“You’re telling me? I hate concerts. But opera — I just love it, and if you ever hear me saying again that I don’t want to be a singer, you’ll know I’m temporarily insane. I love it, I love everything about it, the smell, the fights, the high notes, the low notes, the applause, the curtain calls — everything.”

“You must feel good tonight.”

“I do. Do you?”

“I feel all right.”

“Is it — the way you thought it would be?”

“I never thought.”

“Not even — just a little bit?”

“You mean, that it’s nice, and silly, and cock-eyed, that I should be here with you, and that I should be an opera singer, when all God intended me for was a dumb contractor, and that it’s a big joke that came off just the way you hoped it would, and I never believed it would, and — something like that?”

“Yes, that’s what I mean.”

“Then yes.”

“Let’s dance.”

We danced, and I held her close, and smelled her hair, and she nestled it up against my face. “It’s gay, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I’m almost happy, Leonard.”

“Me too.”

“Let’s go back to our little booth. I want to be kissed.”

So we went back to the booth, and she got kissed, and we laughed about the way I had hid from Mario, and drank the wine, and ate steak. I had to cut the steak left-handed, so I wouldn’t joggle her head, where it seemed to be parked on my right shoulder.

We stayed a second week in Chicago, and I did my three operas over again, and then we played a week in the Music Hall in Cleveland, and then another week in Murat’s Theatre, Indianapolis. Then Cecil’s contract was up, and it was time for her to go back and get ready for the Metropolitan.

The Saturday matinee in Indianapolis was Faust. I met Cecil in the main dining room that morning, around ten o’clock, for breakfast, and while we were eating Rossi came over and sat down. He didn’t have much to say. He kept asking the waiter if any call had come for him, and bit his fingernails, and pretty soon it came out that the guy that was to sing Wagner that afternoon couldn’t come to the theatre, on account of unfortunately being in jail on a traffic charge, and that Rossi was waiting to find out if some singer in Chicago could come down and do it. His call came through, and when he came back he said his man was tied up. That meant somebody from the chorus would have to do it, and that wasn’t so good. And then Cecil popped out: “Well what are we talking about, with him sitting here. Here, baby. Here’s my key, there’s a score up in my room; you can just hike yourself up there and learn it.”

“What? Learn it in one morning and then sing it?”

“There’s only a few pages of it. Now. Go.”

“Faust is in French, isn’t it?”

“Oh damn. He doesn’t sing French.”

But Rossi fixed that part up. He had a score in Italian, and I was to learn it in that and sing it in that, with the rest of them singing French. So the next thing I knew I was up there in my room with a score, and by one o’clock I had it learned, and by two o’clock Rossi had given me the business, and by three o’clock I was in a costume they dug up, out there doing it. That made more impression on them than anything I had done yet. You see, they don’t pay much attention to a guy that knows three roles, all coached up by heart. They know all about them. But a guy that can get a role up quick, and go out there and do it, even if he makes a few mistakes, that guy can really be some use around an opera company. Rossi came to my dressing room after I finished Traviata that night and offered me a contract for the rest of the season. He said Mr. Mario was very pleased with me, especially the way I had gone on in Wagner, and was willing to work with me so I could get up more leading roles and thought I would fit in all right with their plans. He offered me $150 a week, $25 more than I had been getting. I thanked him, thanked Mr. Mario for the interest he had taken in me, thanked all the others for a pleasant association with them, and said no. He came up to $175. I still said no. He came up to $200. I still said no and asked him not to bid any higher, as it wasn’t a question of money. He couldn’t figure it out, but after a while we shook hands and that was that.

That night she and I ate in a quiet little place we had found, and at midnight we were practically the only customers. After we ordered she said: “Did Rossi speak to you?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Did he offer $150? He said he would.”

“He came up to $200, as a matter of fact.”

“What did you say?”

“I said no.”

“... Why?”

“What the hell? I’m no singer. What would I be trailing around with this outfit for after you’re gone?”

“They play Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, and Pittsburgh before they swing West. I could visit you week-ends, maybe oftener than that. I... I might even make a flying trip out to the Coast.”

“I’m not the type.”

“Who is the type? Leonard, let me ask you something. Is it just because his $200 a week looks like chicken-feed to you? Is it because a big contractor makes a lot more than that?”

“Sometimes he does. Right now he doesn’t make a dime.”

“If that’s what it is, you’re making a mistake, no matter what a big contractor makes. Leonard, everything has come out the way I said it would, hasn’t it? Now listen to me. With that voice, you can make money that a big contractor never even heard of. After just one season with the American Scala Opera Company, the Metropolitan will grab you sure. It isn’t everybody that can sing with the American Scala. Their standards are terribly high, and very well the Metropolitan knows it, and they’ve raided plenty of Scala singers already. Once you’re in the Metropolitan, there’s the radio, the phonograph, concert, moving pictures. Leonard, you can be rich. You — you can’t help it.”

“Contracting’s my trade.”

“All this — doesn’t it mean anything to you?”

“Yeah, for a gag. But not what you mean.”

“And in addition to the money, there’s fame—”

“Don’t want it.”

She sat there, and I saw her eyes begin to look wet. “Oh, why don’t we both tell the truth? You want to get back to New York — for what’s waiting for you in New York. And I... I don’t want you ever to go there again.”

“No, that’s not it.”

“Yes it is. I’m doing just exactly the opposite of what I thought I was doing when we started all this. I thought I would be the good fairy, and bring you and her together again. And now, what am I doing? I’m trying to take you away from her. Something I’d hate any other woman for, and now — I might as well tell the truth. I’m just a — home-wrecker.”

She looked comic as she said it, and I laughed and she laughed. Then she started to cry. I hadn’t heard one word from Doris since I left New York. I had wired her every hotel I had stopped at, and you would think she might have sent me a postcard. There wasn’t even that. I sat there, watching Cecil, and trying to let her be a home-wrecker, as she called it. I knew she was swell, I respected everything about her, I didn’t have to be told she’d go through hell for me. I tried to feel I was in love with her, so I could say to hell with New York, let’s both stay with this outfit and let the rest go hang. I couldn’t. And then the next thing I knew I was crying too.

7

We hit New York Monday morning, but there was a freight wreck ahead of us, so we were late, and didn’t get into Grand Central until ten o’clock. She and I didn’t go up the ramp together. I had wired Doris, so I went on ahead, but a fat chance there would be anybody there, so when nobody showed I put Cecil in a cab. We acted like I was just putting her in a cab. I said I’d call her up, she said yes, please do, we waved goodbye, and that was all. I went back and sent the trunk down to the office, then got in a cab with my bag and went on up. On the way, I kept thinking what I was going to say. I had been away six weeks, and what had kept me that long? On the Rochester part, I had it down pat. There had been stuff in the papers about grade-crossing elimination up there, and I went up to see if we could bid on the concrete. But what was I doing in those other places? The best I could think of was that I had taken a swing around to look at “conditions,” whatever they were, and it sounded fishy, but I didn’t know anything else.

When I got home I let myself in, carried my grip, and called to Doris. There was no answer. I went out in the kitchen, and there was nobody there. I took my grip upstairs, called to Doris again, knocked on the door of the bedroom. Still there was no answer. I went in. The bed was all made up, the room was in order, and no Doris. The room being in order, though, that didn’t prove anything, even at that time of day. Her room was always in order. I took the bag in the nursery, set it down, went out in the hall again, let out a couple more hallo’s. Still nothing happened.

I went downstairs, began to get nervous. I wondered if she had walked out on me for good, and taken the children with her, but the house didn’t smell like it had been locked up or anything like that. About eleven o’clock Nils came home. He was the houseman. He had been out taking the children to school, he said, and buying some stuff at a market. He said he was glad to see me back, and I shook hands with him, and asked for Christine. Christine is his wife, and does the cooking, and in between acts as maid to Doris and nurse to the children. He said Christine had gone with Mrs. Borland. He acted like I must know all about it, and I hated to show I didn’t, so I said oh, of course, and he went on back to the kitchen.

About a quarter to twelve the phone rang. It was Lorentz. “Borland, you’d better come down and get your wife.”

“... What’s the matter?”

“I’ll tell you.”

“Where is she?”

“The Cathedral Theatre. Come to the stage door. I’m at the theatre now. I’ll meet you and take you to her.”

I had a glimmer, then, of what was going on. I went out, grabbed a cab, and hustled down there. He met me outside, took me in, and showed me a dressing room. I rapped on the door and went in. She was on a couch, and a theatre nurse was with her, and Christine. She was in an awful state. She had on some kind of theatrical looking dress with shiny things on it, and her face was all twisted, and her hands were clenching and unclenching, and I didn’t need anybody to tell me she was giving everything she had to fight back hysteria. When she saw me it broke. She cried, and stiffened on the couch, and then kept doubling up in convulsive jerks, where she was fighting for control, and turning away, so I couldn’t see her face. The nurse took me by the arm. “It’ll be better if you wait outside. Give me a few more minutes with her, and I’ll have her in shape to be moved.”

I went out in the corridor with Lorentz. “What’s this about?”

“She got the bird.”

“Oh.”

There it was again, this thing that Cecil had said if I ever heard I’d never forget. I still didn’t know what it was, but that wasn’t what I was thinking about. “She sang here, then?”

“It didn’t get that far. She went out there to sing. Then they let her have it. It was murder.”

“Just didn’t like her, hey?”

“She got too much of a build-up. In the papers.”

“I haven’t seen the papers. I’ve been away.”

“Yeah, I know. Socialite embraces stage career, that kind of stuff. It was all wrong, and they were ready for her. Just one of those nice morning crowds in a big four-a-day picture house. They didn’t even let her open her mouth. By the time I got to the piano the stage manager had to ring down. The curtain dropped in front of her, the orchestra played, and they started the newsreel. I never saw anything like it.”

He stood there and smoked, I stood there and smoked, and then I began to get sore. “It would seem to me you would have had more sense than to put her on here.”

“I didn’t.”

“Oh, you did your part.”

“I pleaded with her not to do it. Listen, Borland, I’m not kidded about Doris, and I don’t think you are either. She can’t sing for buttons. She can’t even get on the set before they’ve got her number. I tried my best to head her off. I told her she wasn’t ready for it, that she ought to wait, that it wasn’t her kind of a show. I even went to Leighton. I scared him, but not enough. You try to stop Doris when she gets set on something.”

“Couldn’t you tell her the truth?”

“Could you?”

That stopped me, but I was still sore. “Maybe not. But you started this, just the same. If you knew all this, what did you egg her on for? You’re the one that’s been giving her lessons, from ’way back, and telling her how good she is, and—”

“All right, Borland, granted. And I think you know all about that too. I’m in love with your wife. And if egging her on is what makes her like me, I’m human. Yeah, I trade on her weakness.”

“I’ve socked guys for less than that.”

“Go ahead, if it does you any good. I’ve about got to the point where a sock, that would be just one more thing. If you think being chief lackey to Doris is a little bit of heaven, you try it — or maybe you have tried it. This finishes me with her, if that interests you. Not because I started it. Not because I egged her on. No — but I saw it. I was there, and saw them nail her to the cross, and rip her clothes off, and throw rotten eggs at her, and ask her how the vinegar tasted, and all the rest of it. That she’ll never forgive me for. But why sock? You’re married to her, aren’t you? What more do you want?”

He walked off and left me. I found a pay phone, put in a call for a private ambulance. When it came I went in the dressing room again. Doris was up, and Christine was helping her into her fur coat. She was over the hysteria, but she looked like something broken and shrunken. I carried her to the ambulance, put her in it, made her lie down. Christine got in. We started off.

I carried her upstairs and undressed her, and put her to bed, and called a doctor. Undressing Doris is like pulling the petals off a flower, and a catch kept coming in my throat over how soft she was, and how beautiful she was, and how she wilted into the bed. When the doctor came he said she had to be absolutely quiet, and gave her some pills to make her sleep. He left, and I closed the door, and sat down beside the bed. She put her hand in mine. “Leonard.”

“Yes?”

“I’m no good.”

“How do you know? From what Lorentz said, they didn’t even give you a chance to find out.”

“I’m no good.”

“A morning show in a picture house—”

“A picture house, a vaudeville house, an opera house, Carnegie Hall — it’s all the same. They’re out there, and it’s up to you. I’m just a punk that’s been a headache to everybody she knows, and that’s got wise to herself at last. I’ve got voice, figure, looks — everything but what it takes. Isn’t that funny? Everything but what it takes.”

“For me, you’ve got everything it takes.”

“You knew, didn’t you?”

“How would I know?”

“You knew. You knew all the time. I’ve been just rotten to you, Leonard. All because you opposed my so-called career.”

“I didn’t oppose it.”

“No, but you didn’t believe in it. That was what made me so furious. You were willing to let me do whatever I wanted to do, but you wouldn’t believe I could sing. I hated you for it.”

“Only for that?”

“Only for that. Oh, you mean Hugo, and Leighton, and all my other official hand-kissers? Don’t be silly. I had to tease you a little, didn’t I? But that only showed I cared whether you cared.”

“Then you do care?”

“What do you think?”

She took my head in her hands, and kissed my eyes, and my brow, and my cheeks, like I was something too holy for her to be worthy to touch, and I was so happy I couldn’t even talk. I sat there a long time, my head against hers, while she held my hand against her cheek, and now and then kissed it. “... The pills are working.”

“You want to sleep?”

“No, I don’t want to. I could stay this way forever. But I’m going to. I can’t help it.”

“I’ll leave you.”

“Kiss me.”

I kissed her, and she put her arms around me, and sighed a sleepy little sigh. Then she smiled, and I tip-toed out, and I think she was asleep before I got to the door.

I had a bite to eat, went down to the office, checked on the trunk, had a look at what mail there was, and raised the windows to let a little air in the place. Then I sat down at the desk, hooked my heels on the top, and tried to keep my head from swimming till it would be time to go back to Doris. I was so excited I wanted to laugh all the time, but a cold feeling began to creep up my back, and pretty soon I couldn’t fight it off any more. It was about Cecil. I had to see her, I knew that. I had to put it on the line, how I felt about Doris, and how she felt about me, and there couldn’t be but one answer to that. Cecil and I, we would have to break. I tried to tell myself she wouldn’t expect to see me for a day or so, that it would be better to let her get started on her new work, that if I just let things go along, she would make the move anyway. It was no good. I had to see her, and I couldn’t stall. I walked around to her hotel. I went past it once, turned around and walked past it again. Then I came back and went in.

She had the same suite, the same piano, the same piles of music lying around. She had left the door open when they announced me from the lobby, and when I went in she was lying on the sofa, staring at the wall, and didn’t even say hello. I sat down and asked her how she felt after the trip. She said all right. I asked her when her rehearsals started. She said tomorrow. I said that was swell, that she’d really be with an outfit where she could do herself justice. “... What is it, Leonard?”

Her voice sounded dry, and mine was shaky when I answered. “Something happened.”

“Yes, I heard.”

“It — broke her up.”

“It generally does.”

“It’s — made her feel different — about a lot of things. About — quite a few things.”

“Go on, Leonard. What did you come here to tell me? Say it. I want you to get it over with.”

“She wants me back.”

“And you?”

“I want her back too.”

“All right.”

She closed her eyes. There was no more to say and I knew it. I ought to have walked out of there then. I couldn’t do it. I at least wanted her to know how I felt about her, how much she meant to me. I went over, sat down beside her, took her hand. “... Cecil, there’s a lot of things I’d like to say.”

“Yes, I know.”

“About how swell you’ve been, about how much I—”

“Good-bye, Leonard.”

“... I wanted to tell you—”

“There’s only one thing a man ever has to tell a woman. You can’t tell me that. I know you can’t tell me that, we’ve been all over it — don’t offer me consolation prizes.”

“All right, then. Good-bye.”

I bent over and kissed her. She didn’t open her eyes, didn’t move. “There’s only one thing I ask, Leonard.”

“The answer is yes, whatever it is.”

“Don’t come back.”

“... What?”

“Don’t come back. You’re going now. You’re going with all my best wishes, and there’s no bitterness. I give you my word on that. You’ve been decent to me, and I’ve no complaint. You haven’t lied to me, and if it hasn’t turned out as I thought it would, that’s my fault, not yours. But... don’t come back. When you go out of that door, you go out of my life. You’ll be a memory, nothing more. A sweet, lovely, terrible memory, perhaps — but I’ll do my own grieving. Only... don’t come back.”

“I had sort of hoped—”

“Ah!”

“... What’s the matter?”

“You had sort of hoped that after this little honeymoon blows up, say in another week, you could give me a ring, and come on over, and start up again just as if nothing had happened.”

“No. I hoped we could be friends.”

“That’s what you think you hoped. You know in your heart it was something else. All right, you’re going back to her. She’s had a bad morning, and been hurt, and you feel sorry for her, and she’s whistled at you, and you’re running back. But remember what I say, Leonard: you’re going back on her terms, not yours. You’re still her little whimpering lapdog, and if you think she’s not going to dump you down on the floor, or sell you to the gypsies, or put you out in the yard in your little house, or do anything else to you that enters her head, just as soon as this blows over, you’re mistaken. That woman is not licked until you’ve licked her, and if you think this is licking her, it’s more than I do, and more than she does.”

“No. You’re wrong. Doris has had her lesson.”

“All right, I’m wrong. For your sake, I hope so. But... don’t come back. Don’t come running to me again. I’ll not be a hot towel — for you or anybody.”

“Then friendship’s out?”

“It is. I’m sorry.”

“All right.”

“Come here.”

She pulled me down, and kissed me, and turned away quick, and motioned me out. I was on the street before I remembered I had left my coat up there. I went in and sent a bellboy up for it. When he came down I was hoping he would have some kind of a message from her. He didn’t. He handed me my coat, I handed him a quarter, and I went out.

When I got back to the house, the kids were home, and came running downstairs, and said did I know we were all going that night to hear Mamma sing. I said there had been a little change in the plans on that, and they were a little down in the mouth, but I said I had brought presents for them, and that fixed it all up, and we went running up to get them. I went in the nursery for my bag. It wasn’t there. Then I heard Doris call, and we went in there.

“Were you looking for something?”

“Yes. Are you awake?”

“Been awake... You might find it in there.”

She gave a funny little smile and pointed to the dressing room. I went in there, and there it was. The kids began jumping up and down when I gave them the candy, and Doris kept smiling and talking over their heads. “I would have had Nils take your things out, but I didn’t want him poking around.”

“I’ll do it.”

“Where did you go?”

“Just down to the office to look at my mail.”

“No, but I mean—”

“Oh... Rochester, Chicago, Indianapolis, and around. Thought it was about time to look things over.”

“Did you have a nice trip?”

“Only fair.”

“You certainly took plenty of glad rags.”

“Just in case. Didn’t really need them, as it turned out.”

Christine called the kids, and they went out. I went over to her and took her in my arms. “Why didn’t you want Nils poking around?”

“Well — do you want him?”

“No.”

We both laughed, and she put her head against mine, and let her hair fall over my face, and made a little opening in front of my mouth, and kissed me through that. Oh, don’t think Doris couldn’t be a sweet armful when she wanted to be. “You glad to be back, Leonard? From Chicago — and the nursery?”

“Yes. Are you?”

“So glad, Leonard, I could — cry.”

8

I kept letting her hair fall over my face, and holding her a little tighter, and then all of a sudden she jumped up. “Oh my God, the cocktail party!”

“What cocktail party?”

“Gwenny Blair’s cocktail party. Her lousy annual stinkaroo that nobody wants to go to and everybody does. I said I’d drop in before the supper show, and I had completely forgotten it. The supper show, think of that. Wasn’t I the darling little trouper then? My that seems a long time ago. And it was only this morning.”

“Oh, let’s skip it.”

“What! And have them think I’m dying of grief? I should say not. We’re going. And we’re going quick, so we can leave before the whole mob gets there. Hurry up. Get dressed.”

The last thing I wanted to do was go to Gwenny Blair’s cocktail party. I wanted to stay where I was, and inhale hair. There was nothing to it, though, but to get dressed. I began changing my clothes, and she began pulling things out and muttering: “... No, not that... It’s black, and looks like mourning... And not that. It makes me look too pale... Leonard, I’m going to wear a suit.”

“Well, why not?”

“A suit, that’s it. Casual, been out all day, just dropped in, got to run in a few minutes, lovely party — it will be, like hell. That’s it, a suit.”

I always loved Doris when she dropped the act and came out as the calculating little wench that she really was. She heard me laugh, and laughed too. “Right?”

“Quite right.”

She was dressed in five minutes flat, and for once she had to wait on me. The suit was dark gray, almost black, and cut so she looked slim as a boy. The blouse was light green, but with a copper tone in it, so it was perfect for her hair. Trust Doris not to put on anything that was just green. When I got downstairs she was pinning on a white camellia that had come on the run from the florist. Another woman would have had a gardenia, but not Doris. She knew the effect of those two shiny green leaves lying flat on the lapel.

“How do I look?”

How she looked was like some nineteen-year-old flapper that spent her first day at the races, cashed $27.50 on a $2 ticket, and was feeling just swell. But she didn’t want hooey, she wanted the low-down, so I just nodded, and we started out.

It was only four or five blocks away, in a big penthouse on top of one of those apartment buildings on Park Avenue, so we walked. On the way, she kept damning Gwenny, and all of Gwenny’s friends, under her breath, and saying she’d rather take a horsewhipping than go in and face them. But when we got there, she was all smiles. Only twenty or thirty people had shown up by then, and most of them hadn’t heard of it. That was the funny thing. I had bought some papers on my way up from Cecil’s, and two or three of them had nothing about it at all, and the others let it out with a line. In the theatrical business, bad news is no news. It’s only the hits that cause excitement.

So they were all crowding around her with their congratulations, and wanted to know what it felt like to be a big head-liner. Of course, that made it swell. But Doris leveled it out without batting an eye. “But I flopped! I’m not a headliner! I’m an ex-headliner!”

“You—! Come on, stop being funny!”

“I flopped. I’m out. They gave me my notice.”

“How could you flop?”

“Oh please, please, don’t ask me — it just breaks my heart. And now I can’t go to Bermuda! Honestly, it’s not the principle of the thing, it’s the money! Think of all those lovely, lovely dollars that I’m not going to get!”

She didn’t lie about it, or pretend that she had done better than she had done, or pretty it up in any way. She had too much sense for that. But in twenty seconds she had them switched off from the horrible part, and had managed to work it in that she must have been getting a terrific price to go on at all, and had it going her way. Leighton came in while she was talking, and said the publicity was all wrong, and he was going to raise hell about it. They all agreed that was it, and in five minutes they were talking about the Yale game Saturday.

She drifted over to me. “Thank God that’s over. Was it all right?”

“Perfect.”

“Damn them.”

“Just a few minutes, and we’ll blow. We’ve still got my bag to unpack.”

She nodded, and looked at me, and let her lashes droop over her eyes. It was Eve looking at the apple, and my heart began to pound, and the room swam in front of me.

Lorentz came in. He didn’t come over. He waved, and smiled, and Doris waved back, but looked away quick. “I’m a little out of humor with Hugo. He must have known. You did, didn’t you? He could have given me some little hint.”

I thought of what he had said, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t care. I was still groggy from that look.

We got separated then, but pretty soon she had me by the arm, pulling me into a corner. “We’ve got to go. Make it quick with Gwenny, and then — out!”

“Why sure. But what’s the matter?”

“The fool.”

“Who?”

“Gwenny. I could kill her. She knows how crazy I’ve been about that woman, and how I’ve wanted to meet her, and now, today of all days she had to pick out — she’s invited her! And she’s coming!”

“What woman?”

“Cecil Carver! Haven’t you heard me speak of her a hundred times? And now — I can’t meet her today. I can’t have her — pitying me!.. Can I?”

“No. We’ll blow.”

“I’ll meet you at the elevator— Oh my, there she is!”

I looked around, and Cecil was just coming in the room. I turned back to Doris, and she wasn’t there.

She was with Wilkins, Cecil I mean. That meant she was going to sing. There wasn’t much talk while Gwenny was taking her around. They piped down, and waited. They all had money, and position from ’way-back, but all they ever saw was each other. When a real celebrity showed up, they were as excited as a bunch of high school kids meeting some big-league ball player. I was still in the corner, and she didn’t see me until Gwenny called me out. She caught her breath. Gwenny introduced me, and I said “How do you do, Miss Carver,” and she said “How do you do, Mr. Borland,” and went on. But in a minute she came back. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming here?”

“I didn’t know it.”

“Is she here?”

“Didn’t Gwenny tell you?”

“No.”

“It was on her account she asked you.”

“Her account?”

“She’s wanted to meet you. So I just found out.”

“Gwenny didn’t say anything. She called an hour ago and said come on up — and I wanted to go somewhere. I had to go somewhere. Why has she wanted to meet me?”

“Admires you. From afar.”

“Only that?”

“Yes.”

“Where is she?”

“Back there somewhere. In one of the bedrooms, would be the best bet. Hiding.”

“From what?”

“You, I think.”

“Leonard, what is this? She wants to meet me, she’s hiding from me — what are you getting at? She’s not a child, to duck behind curtains when teacher comes.”

“I should say not.”

“Then what is this nonsense?”

“It’s no nonsense. Gwenny asked you, as a big favor to her. But Gwenny hadn’t heard about the flop. And on account of the flop, she’d rather not. Just — prefers some other time.”

“And that’s all?”

“Yeah, but it was an awful flop.”

“You’re sure you haven’t told her about me? Gone and got all full of contrition, and made a clean breast of it, and wiped the slate clean, so you can start all over again — have you? Have you?”

“No, not a word.”

She stood twisting a handkerchief and thinking, and then she turned and headed back toward the bedrooms. “Cecil—!”

“She had a flop, didn’t she? Then I guess I’m the one she wants to talk to.”

She went on back. I went over and had a drink. I needed one.

I was on my third when she came back, and I went over to her. “What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“What did you say?”

“Told her to forget it. Told her it could happen to anybody — which it can, baby, and don’t you forget it.”

“What did she say?”

“Asked if it had ever happened to me. I told her it had, and then we talked about Hugo.”

“He’s here, by the way.”

“Is he? She’s not bad. I halfway liked her.”

She still didn’t look at me, but I had the same old feeling about her, of how swell she was, and thought I’d die if I couldn’t let her know, anyway a little. “Cecil, can I say something?”

“Leonard, I cut my heart out after you left. I cut it out, and put it in the electric icebox, to freeze into — whatever a heart is made of. Jelly, I guess. Anyway my heart. So if you’ve got anything to say, you’d better go down there and see if it can still hear you. Me, I’ve got other things to do. I’ve got to be gay, and sing tra-la-la-la, and get my talons into the first man that—”

She saw Lorentz then, and went running over to him, and put her arms around him, and kissed him. It was gay, maybe, but it didn’t make me feel any better.

Doris came out then, and I hurried to her. I didn’t want to let on about Cecil, so I began right where we left off, and asked if she was ready to go. “Oh... the tooth’s out now. I think she’s going to sing. Let’s stay.”

“Oh... you saw her then?”

“She came back to powder. I didn’t start it. She spoke to me. She remembered me. She came to my recital, you may recall.”

“Oh yes, so she did.”

“Don’t ever meet your gods face to face, and especially not your goddesses. It’s a most disillusioning experience. They have clay feet. My, what an awful woman.”

“You didn’t like her?”

“She knew about it. And she couldn’t wait to make me feel better. She was just so tactful and sweet — and mean — that I just hated her. And did she love it. Did she enjoy purring over me.”

“Maybe not. Maybe she meant it.”

“Of course she meant it — her way.”

“And what way is that?”

“Don’t be so dense. Perhaps a man doesn’t see through those things, but a woman does. Oh yes, she meant it. She meant every word of it — the cat. She was having the time of her life.”

I could feel myself getting hot under the collar, and all my romantic humor was gone. After what Cecil had done, and what it had cost her to do it, this kind of talk went against my grain. “And what a frump. Did you ever see such a dress?”

“What’s the matter with it?”

“Well... never mind. She did say one thing, though. To forget it. That it can happen to anybody, that it has even happened to her. ‘All in a day’s work, a thing you expect now and then, so what? Forget it and go on.’ Leonard, are you listening?”

“I’m listening.”

“That’s it. Nothing has happened. How silly I was, to feel that way about it. I don’t have to quit. I just go on. Why certainly. Even she had sense enough to know that.”

I could hardly believe my eyes, and certainly not my ears. Here it had only been that morning when she was broken on the wheel, when she heard the gong ring for her if ever anybody did. And now, after just a few words from Cecil, she was standing there with her eyes open wide, telling herself that nothing had happened, that it was all just a dream. And all of a sudden, I knew that nothing had happened, and that it was all just a dream. She was the same old Doris, and it would be about one more day before we’d be right back where we always had been, with me having the fool career rubbed into me morning, noon and night, and everything else just as it was, only worse. I wondered if the way she was acting was what they call pluck. To me, it was not having sense enough to know when you’ve been hit with a brick.

A whole mob was there by then, and pretty soon Gwenny began to stamp her foot, and got them quiet, and she said Cecil was going to sing. But when Cecil stood up, it wasn’t Wilkins that took the piano, it was Lorentz. She made a little speech, and told how he had played for her in Berlin, and how she would do one of the things they had done that night, and how she hoped it would go better this time, and he wouldn’t have to yell the words at her from the piano, the way he had then. They all laughed, and she waited till they had found seats and got still, and then she sang the Titania song from Mignon.

She had made her little speech with her arm around Lorentz, and Doris looked like murder, and during the little wait she began to whisper. “That’s nice.”

“What’s nice?”

“She brought her own accompanist, but oh no. She had to have Hugo.”

“Well what of it?”

“Don’t you see through it?”

“No. They seem to be old friends.”

“Oh, that’s not it.”

“And what is it?”

“She knows he’s my accompanist, and that he’s been attentive to me—”

“And how would she know that?”

“She must know it, from what I said. The first thing she asked me about was Hugo, and—”

“I thought Hugo was out.”

“Maybe he is, but she doesn’t know it. And these people don’t know it. My goodness, but you’re stupid about some things. Oh no, this I’ll not forgive. The other, I pass over. But this is a public matter, and I’ll get even with her for it, if I—”

The music started then. About the third bar Doris leaned over to me. “She’s flatting.”

I wanted to get out of there. I could smell trouble, especially after that crack about getting even. I said something about going, but there was as much chance of getting Doris out of there with that singing going on as there would have been of getting a rat away from a piece of cheese. All I could do was sit there.

After the Mignon, Cecil sang a little cradle song that’s been written on Kreisler’s Caprice Viennois, and then she came over to Doris. “How was I?”

“Marvelous! I never heard you better.”

“I thought I was a little off myself, but they seem to like it, so I guess it was all right. Do a duet with me?”

Now I ask you, was that being nice to Doris, or wasn’t it? Because that was letting her right into the big league park, it was treating her as an equal, and in front of all her friends. Doris looked scared, and stammered something about how she’d love to, if only there was something they could get together on, and Cecil said: “How about La Dove Prende?”

“Why... that would be all right, but of course I only know the first part, and—”

“Fine. I’ll do the second.”

“If you really think I can—”

“Come on, come on, it’ll do you good. You’ve got to ride the horse that threw you, haven’t you? We’ll knock ’em for a loop, and then good-bye to all that business this morning, and you’ll feel fine.”

“Well—”

Cecil went back to the piano and Doris put down her handbag. Her face was savage with jealousy, rage, and venom. She whispered to me: “Show me up, hey? We’ll see about that!”

Wilkins took the piano, and they started. It was terrible. Mozart has to be sung to beat, and I think I told you Doris’ ideas on rhythm. I saw Wilkins look up, but Cecil dead-panned, and they went on with her. She could have sung it backwards and that pair would have carried her through, so it got a hand. They had a little whisper, and then they sang the Barcarolle from the Tales of Hoffman. That was a little more Doris’ speed, and a little more that mob’s speed too, so they got a big hand on it, and started over to me.

As they left the piano, Doris put her arm around Cecil’s waist, and I had a cold feeling that something was about to pop. They got to me, and I started to talk fast, about how fine they had sounded, anything I could think of. They laughed, and Cecil turned to Doris. “Well — how was the support?”

“Oh fine — even if you do try to steal my men.”

Doris laughed as she said it, and it wasn’t supposed to be such a hell of a dirty crack. It was just a preliminary. I could give you the rest of the talk, almost word for word, the way she intended it to go. First Cecil was supposed to look surprised, and then Doris would apologize, and laugh some more, and say it was only intended as a joke. Then it would come out about Lorentz, and Doris would say please, please, he didn’t mean a thing to her — really. And then would come the real dirty crack, something that would mean Lorentz wasn’t really worth having, and if Cecil was interested in him she could have him, and welcome.

That was how it was supposed to go, I can guarantee you, knowing Doris. But it never got that far. Cecil winced like she had been hit with a whip. Then she looked me straight in the eye, the first time she had, all day. “Leonard, why did you lie to me?”

“I didn’t.”

“You did. You let me go to her, and you swore you hadn’t told a word—”

She tried to bite it back. It wasn’t what I said. It was the look on Doris’ face that stopped her. She knew, then, what Doris had really meant, but it was too late. We all three stood there, and Doris looked first at Cecil, and then at me. Then she gave a little rasping laugh, and her eyes were as hard as glass. “... Ah — so that was what you were doing in Rochester, and Syracuse, and Columbus, and Chicago, and—”

“I—”

“Don’t give me that foolish story again, about looking things over. I’ve followed her. I’ve followed her whole career since — I know everything she’s done! She sang in all those places, and you—! The fool that I was! I never once thought of it!”

Cecil licked her lips. “Mrs. Borland, I’m sure I’ve never meant a thing to your husband—”

“Miss Carver, I don’t believe you.”

Cecil closed her eyes, opened them again, grabbed for the one last thing she could say. “We saw quite a lot of each other, that’s true. We could hardly help that. We were singing together. We were singing in the same opera company, and—”

Doris gave a shrieking laugh, and half the room stopped talking and turned around. Gwenny came up, Doris put her head on her shoulder and kept on with that laugh. Then she turned to them all. “Oh my... isn’t that funny? If they took a trip together — I don’t mind. It means nothing to me — let them enjoy life while they’re young. But darlings! Singing together! In the same — I can’t stand it! Imagine Leonard — singing — ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

Gwenny decided to play it funny. She laughed too. A few others laughed. Then she decided to get witty. “Perhaps he’ll sing us something! — From Pagliacci!”

If that was what she said, I think I could have stood it. But that wasn’t it. That was only what she thought she said. What she really said was, “From Polly-achy,” and at the dumb, ignorant way she pronounced that word, something in me cracked. All the rotten, phoney, mean, cruel stuff I had taken off Doris, and all the stuff I had taken off Gwenny and her kind, came swelling up in my throat, and I knew I was going to kick over the apples or bust. I turned to Gwenny. “Since you ask me, I think I will.”

I went in the dining room and found Wilkins. He hadn’t heard any of it. “Feeling like playing for me?”

“Sure. What’ll it be?”

“How about the Prologue from Pagliacci?”

“The Prologue it is.”

We went in and there was a laugh, and they all started to whisper. He started the introduction, and they looked at each other, and looked at me, and looked at Doris. They were her friends, remember, not mine. Cecil came over. “I wouldn’t, baby. It was awful, but — I wouldn’t. You’ll regret it.”

“Maybe.”

She went away, and I started to sing. At the first Si può Doris sank into a chair. She didn’t turn white. She turned gray. I went on. Maybe Tibbett can do it better than I did it that day, but I doubt it. He couldn’t take the interest in it, you might say, that I took. I rolled it out and my head felt light and dizzy, because I could see every note of it going like a knife into her heart. When I got to the andante I gave it the gun, and when I reached the high A flat I stepped into it with a smile on my face, and held it, and swelled it, until the room began to shake, then I pulled it in, and cut. I closed it out solemn as I knew, as though a real performance was about to start, and I wanted them to get it all straight.

Wilkins played the finish, and waited. Nothing happened. They sat there like they were frozen, and then they began to talk, as if I wasn’t there. He looked up at me, like he was in a madhouse or something. I smiled at him, and bowed three times, the way I was taught, center, left and right. Then I went over and poured myself a drink. When I turned around, Doris was leaving the room. She walked like she had just gone blind.

9

I don’t know how I got out of there. But pretty soon I was down on the twelfth floor, where you change from the private elevator that runs up to the penthouse, to the main cars. Cecil was there, with Wilkins. She was leaning against the wall talking, with her head back against it, and her eyes closed, and he was standing close, listening to her like he thought somebody must be crazy. When they saw me they stopped. We went down, and when we got on the street a cab came up. He offered us a lift, but he had a dinner date uptown instead of down, so I told him to take the cab and I sent the doorman after another one. He went off, and I stood there looking Cecil up and down, and decided she was what I wanted in the way of a woman, and that I was going to hook up with her for the rest of my life. Maybe the love part wouldn’t be so hot, anyway on my part, but I had had all I wanted of that. She was decent and you could stick to her, and not feel you had a viper on your chest every time you put your arms around her. I hooked my arm in hers, and pressed it, and tried to get over what I felt.

The doorman came, riding the running board of the cab, and I put her in. I fished in my pocket to tip him, but when I tried to get in, the cab was moving away, and all I could see was a gloved hand waving at me from the window. In another second it was gone.

I started down the street. Then I wondered where I was going. Here I had just made a decision that was to change my whole life, and now it seemed to have evaporated into thin air. I crossed Park, and headed for home. My legs felt queer, and I couldn’t seem to walk straight. I remembered I had had four drinks. Then I heard myself laugh. It was like hell the four drinks.

I let myself in, and the hall was dark, and upstairs I could hear Evelyn crying. I opened my mouth to call, and nothing came out of it. I groped for the switch. Then I heard a rustle behind me. I half turned, and felt something horrible coming at me. It hit me. She was panting like an animal, and got my face with both hands at once, I went down, and those claws raked me. I must have let out some kind of a yell, because one hand grabbed my mouth, and the other hand raked me again. I tried to throw her off, and couldn’t. She held me, and pounded my head against the floor. Then I felt myself being beaten with something. The marks afterward showed it was the heel of her shoe. And all the time she was talking to me, not loud, but in a terrible whisper: “... You would do that to me... You beast... You swine... You can have her... What do I care who you have... But that... But that... Get out of here... Get out of here! Get out of here!..”

Her voice rose to a scream at that, and upstairs both children began to wail, and I threw her off, and got the door open, and staggered down the steps to the street.

Next thing I knew, I was in Central Park, on a bench. I still had the light topcoat on, that I had worn to the party, but I didn’t have my hat. The coat sleeve was down over my hand. I felt the shoulder. It was torn. Something tickled my mouth. I brushed it off, and it was blood. Then I saw blood on the coat. I took out my handkerchief, and my whole face was running blood. I wiped it, and wiped it again, until the whole handkerchief was nothing but a red rag, and it kept on bleeding. I tried to think where I was going to go. I couldn’t go to a good hotel. I remembered a dump on Twenty-third Street, where I had once made a speech to a banquet of equipment manufacturers, flagged a cab, and went down there.

I pushed through the revolving door, and hated to cross the lobby. The clerk looked up, with his plastered-on smile, and it stayed plastered on, when he saw me, like in one of those movies where they stop the camera a second, to get a laugh. He swung his turntable around, but slow, like he hated to do it. I registered:

While I was writing, his hand wandered to the key rack, and then it wandered to a button, and pressed it. In a second a big gimlet-eyed guy was standing beside me, and everything about him said house detective. They looked at each other. The clerk swung the turntable around again, read my card, and spoke mechanically, while he was blotting it, like an announcement on an old-time phonograph record: “Single room, Mr. Borland? We have them at a dollar-and-a-half, two and two-and-a-half. With bath, three, four and five.”

“I want a bedroom, bath and sitting room.”

I needed a sitting room about as much as an ourang-outang does, but I had to say something to take them off guard. I was in terror they’d give me the bum’s rush across the lobby. If they tried that, I didn’t know what I would do. I might take the joint apart, and I might do nothing, and just land in the gutter, and that was what I dreaded most of all.

They looked at each other again. “We have a very nice suite on the tenth floor, outside — bedroom, bath, sitting room, and small kitchenette with ice box — seven dollars.”

“That’ll be all right.”

“Ah... have you luggage, Mr. Borland?”

“No.”

I took out my bill-fold. I still had a hunk of cash that I’d brought back from the trip, and I laid down a $50 bill. They relaxed, and so did I, and began to talk like myself. “Have you a house doctor?”

“No, but we have one on call.”

“Will you get him, and send him up to me as quick as you can? I’ve — been in an accident.”

“Yes, sir. Right away, Mr. Borland.”

The house dick took charge of me then. He put his arm around me like I could hardly walk, and called a boy, and took me up to my room, and talked like I had been in a taxi accident, and said it was a crime the way those guys drove. If anybody could get a face like mine in a taxi accident, it would be a miracle, but it was his way of saying everything was O. K., that there would be no questions asked, that he’d take care of me. “You haven’t had dinner yet, Mr. Borland?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I’ll send the waiter up right away.”

“Fine.”

“Or maybe you’d rather wait till you’ve seen the doctor? Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll send the waiter up now, and after the doc gets through, you ring room service and tell them you’re ready. I recommend the turkey, sir. They’ve got nice roast turkey on the bill tonight, fine, young, Vermont turkey, from our farm up there — and the chef has a way with it. He really has, sir.”

“Turkey sounds all right.”

They sent the coat out to be cleaned and fixed up, and had a boy go down and buy me pajamas on Fourteenth Street, and the doctor came and plastered me up, and I had the turkey and a bottle of wine with it. I kept the waiter while I ate, and we talked and we got along fine. But then he took the table down, and I was alone, and I went in and had a hot bath, and by then it was about half past nine, and there wasn’t anything to do but go to bed. I took off my clothes, and put on the Fourteenth Street pajamas, and got in bed, and pulled up their sleazy cotton blankets, and lay there looking at the paper, where it was beginning to peel off the walls. I tried to think what there was funny about that paper. Then I remembered that paper hadn’t been used on hotel walls for fifteen years. Only the old ones have paper.

I turned out the light and tried to sleep. I didn’t seem to be thinking about anything at all. But every time I’d drop off I’d wake up, dreaming I was standing there, bellowing at the top of my lungs, and nobody would even turn around and look at me. Then one time this horrible thing was coming at me in the dark, and I woke up moaning. I tried to get to sleep again, and couldn’t. I told myself it was just a dream, to forget it, but it wasn’t just a dream. I must have dropped off, though, because here it was, coming at me again, and this time I wasn’t moaning. I was sobbing. I quit kidding myself then. I knew I’d give anything to have it back, what I had pulled at the party that afternoon. It wasn’t brave, it wasn’t big, it was just plain silly. I had made a jackass of myself, and put something terrible between me and Doris. I began thinking of her, then, and knew it didn’t make any difference what she had done to me, or anything else. I wanted her so bad it was just a terrible ache, wanted her worse than ever. And here I was, I had no wife, I had no home, I had no kids, I had no work, I didn’t even have Cecil. I was in this lousy dump, and had just made a mess of my life. I think I hit an all-time low that night. I never felt worse. I couldn’t feel worse.

10

Three days later, when I could leave, I went up and took a suite at a hotel in the fifties. I took it by the month. I didn’t hear anything from Doris. I began reading the society pages after a couple of days, and she was in. Every time I saw her name I saw Leighton’s. On the singing, I never opened my trap. One day a guy showed up at the office by the name of Horn. He sat down, and kept looking around kind of puzzled at the drafting room, and in a minute I asked him pretty sharp what he wanted.

“You’re Mr. Borland? Mr. Leonard Borland?”

“Yes, I’m Leonard Borland.”

“Well... I got the address out of the phone book, but it certainly doesn’t look like the right place, and you don’t look like the right guy. What are you, in the construction business?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m looking for the Leonard Borland that sang with the American Scala Opera Company under the name of Logan Bennett. Anyway, I hear he did.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“I was in Pittsburgh last week. I heard it from a friend of mine. Giuseppe Rossi.”

“... Well? What of it?”

He knew then he had the right guy, and kept looking me over. “I tell you what of it. I’m connected with this outfit that’s giving opera over at the Hippodrome, and—”

“Not interested.”

“Rossi said you were pretty good.”

“Nice guy, Rossi. Remember me to him if you see him.”

“I need a baritone.”

“Still not interested.”

“If you’re as good as he says you are, I could make you a pretty nice proposition. You understand, a singer’s no draw until he gets known, but I could offer you $125 a night, say, with three appearances a week guaranteed. That’s a little more than Rossi was paying you, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, quite a little.”

“Well... will you think it over?”

“No, I won’t think it over.”

“Listen, I need a baritone.”

“So I judge.”

“I got a couple of good tenors, and another one coming. I got a couple of sopranos I think are comers. But in opera, you’ve got to have one good baritone before you’ve got a show.”

“You certainly have.”

“All right then, I’ll come up a little. How about a hundred and fifty?”

“Maybe you didn’t understand what I said when you came in here. I appreciate what you say, I’m grateful to Rossi, — but I’m just not interested.”

The idea of singing made me sick. He went and I put on my hat and engaged in my favorite outdoor sport, about that time. That was walking around the Metropolitan Opera House hoping I’d see Cecil. A couple of days after that I did see her. I raced back to the office as fast as I could get there, and put in a call for her at her hotel. They said she wasn’t in. I knew she wouldn’t be. That was why I had been watching. I left word that Mr. Borland called. Then for a week I stuck at my desk from nine to six, hoping she would call back. She never did.

All that, what I’ve just been telling you, was in the last part of November. When the first of December came, it crossed my mind it was funny no bills had been forwarded to me. On the third I found out why. When I came downstairs in the morning and crossed the lobby, the clerk called me and he had my check in his hand, the one I had given him for my next month’s room rent. It had bounced. I blinked at it, and I knew then why there hadn’t been any bills. Doris was paying her own bills. The money was in a joint account, in her name and mine, and she had drawn every cent of it out, started an account somewhere else, and there I was. I don’t know why it never occurred to me that she would do it. It never entered my head.

I said there must be some mistake, and I would see him that afternoon. I went out, and hustled over to Newark, and borrowed $300 from a manufacturer of power shovels we had done some business with. I got back just in time to get in the bank, so I could cover that check before they closed, then went back and told the clerk it was all right, I had drawn on the wrong account, and he could put it through. I went up to my suite and counted my money. I had $75 over what I had deposited in the bank, and $7 over that. My expenses, over the $170 a month I was paying for the suite, were about $50 a week, not counting club dues and other things I couldn’t stave off very long. I was just about a week and a half from the boneyard, and I began to feel it again, that thick rage against Doris and the way she treated me. It would suit her fine, I knew, to have me coming on my knees to her, begging for money, and then give me a song and dance about how she had the children to think of, and send me out with the $12 she could spare from the crumbs she was saving for the household. I didn’t have to be told how that would go. I walked around the suite, and after a while something in me clicked. I knew I’d never go to her if I starved first. I began to think about Horn and his $150 a night.

Next day he called up. “Mr. Borland?”

“Yes?”

“This is Bert Horn again. Remember?”

“Oh yeah. How are you?”

“All right. Listen, my other tenor got to town last night. Fact of the matter, I stole him off Rossi and that was what I was doing in Pittsburgh. Guy by the name of Parma. You know him?”

“Yeah, I sang with him. Tell him I said hello.”

“I will, and he said to tell you hello. Listen, if you’re as good as he says you are, I might raise that offer. I might up the ante to $200.”

“Well now you’re talking. Come on over.”

He came, and looked me over again, and the place over again, and then he laughed and shook his head. “Well, if you’re a singer you’re the funniest-looking thing in the way of a singer that I ever saw. No offense, but I swear to God you don’t look it.”.

“You play?”

“Some kind of way, yes.”

“Come on up.”

I took him up on the third floor, where the piano was, and opened the windows, and shoved the Traviata aria in front of him. He played it and I sang it. When I got through he nodded. “I guess they weren’t kidding me.”

We went down again, and he got down to cases. “All right, how many roles do you know?”

“Three.”

“... Just three.”

“Marcel, Germont, and Rigoletto. I sang one other role, but it was a pinch-hitting job, and I wouldn’t know it now if I heard it.”

“What role was it?”

“Wagner in Faust. I don’t sing French, but they let me do it in Italian. They shoved it at me in the morning, I sang it that afternoon, and I had forgotten it by night.”

That made the same impression on him it had on the others. An opera impresario, he’s a little like a baseball manager. He knows all about smoke. He gets that every day. But a guy that can come out of the bull-pen and finish a ball game, that’s different. When he heard that, he quit worrying, and began to lay it out what I’d have to do. The hitch came over the guarantee. With just those three operas, he couldn’t make it three times a week, because they weren’t giving Traviata on a weekly schedule. He wanted me to get up Trovatore, Lucia, and Aida, and then later Don Giovanni, and they would revive it if they thought I was right for it. I said I couldn’t get up that many roles by the end of the winter if I had to sing three times a week too. So then he had a different idea. “All right, we’ll say Lucia and Trovatore, but get Pagliacci up by next week, and then we can put you on three times. You see, ham-and-eggs is once a week too, and—”

“... What is?”

“Ham and eggs. Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, the double bill. Pagliacci you can get up quick. After the prologue, which I suppose you know, you have almost nothing to do, just two real scenes, not over ten minutes of actual singing altogether. Then we can—”

“Oh. All right then.”

“You’ll need a coach. I recommend Lorentz. Hugo Lorentz, I’ll give you his address, a good man, works with us, and—”

“You know anybody else?”

“... Well, there’s Siegal. He’s more of a voice teacher, but he knows the routines, and—”

“Fine, I’ll take him. When do we start?”

“Next week. Get Pagliacci up by then, and then later we can work you in on the others. But we want to bring you out in Rigoletto. That makes you important.”

“Nothing I like so well as to be important.”

So by that afternoon I had connected with Siegal, and was back in the same old groove. I found out then how much Cecil had been giving me for nothing. Do you know what that bird took? He charged me $25 an hour, and I had to have him every day. I had to borrow $200 more in Newark, and it was an awful crimp in my $600 a week. But at that, $450 was nothing to be sneezed at.

I asked for a rehearsal on Rigoletto, with three or four of the choristers. In the scene before the courtiers there was some stuff I wanted to do, and I had to make them slam me down so I really hit the deck, so when I came crawling back to them I would really be on my knees. They told me to come over to the theatre. I went up to the third floor and put on an old suit of corduroys I always wore around concrete work, and walked over. That was so I could practice the stage falls. I hadn’t remembered about the Hippodrome, while Horn was talking. I mean, it just sounded like a theatre on Sixth Avenue, and nothing more. So when I went in the stage door and through, the stage caught me by surprise. I don’t know if you were ever back there to see that stage. It would have done pretty good for a railroad station if they laid tracks and put train sheds in, except there would be an awful lot of waste space up top. But did it feaze me? It did not. I was a pro now. I walked to the middle of it, let out a couple of big ones, and it felt pretty good. I stuck out my chest. I thought how I was putting it over on Doris, and how like hell I would come begging her for anything.

The conductor, Gustav Schultz, was at the piano, and we went through it. I think he wanted to look me over. I showed them how I wanted them to heave me, and after a while they got it so it suited me. When we quit, I saw Parma in the wings, and went over and shook hands. “Hello boy, hello, how’s a old kid?”

“Fine. How’s yourself?”

“O. K. Say, is swell, how you do this scene. What da hell? A goddam baritones, run for a bedroom, make little try, audience all a time wonder why he don’t get in. Look like he must be weak. Ought to fight like hell, just like you do’m now, and then pow! — down he go, just like this!”

He threw his shoulder under my belly, and I went head over heels on to the floor. It was one stage fall I didn’t expect. Then he laughed like hell. Singers, they’re a funny breed. They’ve got what you might call a rudimentary sense of humor, in the first place, and they’re awful proud of their muscles, in the second place. They spend half their time telling the conductor they’re going to knock him back into the customers’ laps if he doesn’t quit his cussedness, and I’ll say for them they could do it if they tried. People think they’re a flock of fairies. They’re more like wrestlers. Well, singing doesn’t come from the spirit. It comes from the belly, and it takes plenty of belly and chest to do it right.

I got up, and laughed, and he and Schultz and I went out and had a drink. He took red wine with seltzer. They don’t drink much, but a wop tenor likes red ink.

The afternoon of the performance I put off lunch till three o’clock, then went out and had a good one. I came back to the office and vocalized my voice. It came up quick, and felt good. I was beginning to get nervous. They all get nervous, but this was different from what I had felt before. It had a little tingle to it. I felt I was good. I walked up to the hotel and it was about half past four. I lay down and got a little sleep.

It seemed funny to be putting the make-up on without Cecil bobbing in to give me the double O, but I got it in place, and put on the funny clothes, and tried my voice. It was still up, and was all right. Horn came in, looked me over, and nodded. “The contracts are ready.”

“You got them with you?”

“My secretary’s bringing them over. I’ll be in with them after the show. How do you feel?”

“I feel all right.”

There came a knock on the door, and a little wop in a derby hat came in and stood beside me where I was at the table and began to talk about how some of my admirers wanted to hear me sing, but their tickets would cost them a lot, and more stuff like that, and I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, except it seemed to be some kind of a touch. Horn was behind him. He nodded and held up ten fingers. I got my pocketbook, passed out $10 and the guy left. “What was that?”

“The claque.”

“What’s the claque?”

“A bunch of self-elected noise-makers, that you pay to clap when you sing, and whether they do or not nobody knows. If you don’t pay, they’re supposed to take some terrible revenge, like blowing whistles at you or something like that. Whether they do or not, nobody knows. I generally go along with them, and so do the singers. They’re harmless, just one of those things that opera has like a dog has fleas.”

“There was nothing like that in the American Scala.”

“Maybe they took care of it for you.”

He went, and I wished everything that came up didn’t remind me of Cecil. I knew who had taken care of it all right, without being told. And I knew why. Knowing the applause was paid, or any part of it was paid, would have taken all the fun out of it for me. So it was taken care of. I tried my voice again, then remembered she had told me when it was right to leave it alone. There didn’t seem to be any help for it. Everywhere I turned, she was standing there beside me.

I went down, then walked over and had a look at the calls. Then my heart skipped a beat. On the first two calls at the end of the second act, we were all in it, me, Parma, the Gilda, and the people in the small parts. Then on the next two it was just the Gilda and me. And then it said:

I walked out on the stage to get the feel of the set, and the tingle was clear down to my feet. I made up my mind there wasn’t going to be any if about it. I was going to get that call or split my throat.

Parma was right in the Questa o Quella, so Act I got off to a swell start, and they ripped right along with it. I got a hand when I came on, whether it was the claque or the publicity I don’t know, but I don’t think it could have all been claque. There had been a lot of stuff in the papers about me. I was singing under my own name now, and it seemed to strike them as a good story that a big contractor should turn into a singer, but anyway it made me feel good, and I hit it right in the scene with the second baritone, and we got a fine curtain. Hippodrome opera wasn’t like Metropolitan opera. It was 99-cent opera, and that audience acted the way it felt. The second scene of the act went even better. The bass was a pretty good comic, and I fed to him all I could, so we got away with the duet in swell shape. The Gilda was all right in the Caro Nome, not like Cecil, but plenty good. The duets went well, and we got another good curtain, and were on our way.

When it came to the scene before the courtiers, the one I had rehearsed with the choristers, I did it a little different than I had been doing it. I got a break at the start. The Ceprano had one of these small, throaty baritones, and when it came to the place where I was to mock him on Ch’hai di nuovo, buffon, I shot it back to him just the way he had given it to me, and it got a big laugh. I had them then, and I chucked tone quality out the window. The first part of the scene I shouted, talked, and whispered, till I got to the place where they slammed me back on my hunkers. Then I remembered Bohème. I came crawling back, and plucked the hem of Marullo’s doublet, and gave them tears. I sang it dolce, and then some. I opened every spigot there was, and at the end of it I was flat on the floor, hanging on to the high F like my heart would break, and finishing off like I could just barely make myself do it. There wasn’t any pause then. The first “bravo” came like a pistol shot before I even got through, and then they came from all over the house, and the applause in a swelling roar. I lay there, the heart bowed down, for quite a time. There were thousands of them, and it took them longer to quiet down than in other places. The Gilda came running on, then, and we did the duet, and the curtain came down.

Did I get that call? I’m telling you I did. I took the Gilda out twice, and then Parma aimed a kick at me, and then there I was, in front of them all alone, trying to remember how to bow. There’s nothing like it.

I went to my dressing room, walked around, and was so excited I couldn’t even sit down. I wanted to go out there and do it all over again. It didn’t seem two minutes before they called me, and I went down for the last act.

The Gilda and I did the stuff that starts it, and then went off, and Parma had it to himself for the La Donna è Mobile. I think I’ve given you the idea by now that that dumb wop is a pretty good tenor. He knocked them over with it, and by the time the Maddalena came on, and the Gilda and I went out again for the quartet, we were in the homestretch of one of those performances you read about. So the quartet started. Well, you’ve heard the Rigoletto quartet a thousand times, but don’t let anybody tell you it’s a pushover. The first part goes a mile a minute, the second part slower than hell, and if there’s one thing harder to sing than a fast allegro it’s a slow andante, and three times out of five something happens, and many times as you’ve heard it you haven’t often heard it right. But we were right. Parma started it like a breeze, and the Maddalena was right on top of him, and the Gilda and I were right on top of her, and we closed out the allegro with all our cylinders clicking and the show doing seventy. Parma laid it down nice on the andante, and we were right with him, and we brought it home just right. We were right on the end of the stick. Well, that stopped the show too. They clapped, and cheered, and clapped some more, and Schultz threw the stick on me to go on, and a fat chance I could. We had to give them some more. So after about a minute, Schultz played the cue for the andante, and Parma started again.

He started, and the Maddalena came in, and the Gilda came in, and I came in. It seemed to me we got in there with it awful quick, but I was so excited by that time I hardly knew where I was, and I didn’t pay much attention to it. And then all of a sudden I had this awful feeling that something was wrong.

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.

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:

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.”

We sang it together, and it was terrible, and it was the sweetest duet I ever heard. That’s all.