Leeway Cottage (8 page)

Though herself was the last thing she was expressing. She felt like a worm caught out on a lawn when the early birds began arriving, lost and exposed, trying desperately to find her way out of danger in a world she could barely recognize. She had to work for hours a day at the piano. Not that she would ever play well enough to accompany herself, but (as her vocal teacher said) she had to train her ear. She gathered that if her ear had been a child it would be on its way to reform school. It needed discipline, it needed guidance, it needed years of remedial work to teach it to coordinate the notes on a page with a sound imagined in the brain. And the brain, ah! The
brain,
before she could sing a note, had to be taught to make an
image
of the sound she wished to produce, which would involve
color,
and
timbre,
and speaking of that, she had to learn all about the mechanics of
making
that sound, to learn to envision the vocal cords running from front to back, not up and down, to understand where the breath went, how the larynx moved, how the lips and the tongue and the opening of the mouth shaped the tones that she produced, she felt she might as well have signed up to learn how to build a pipe organ from scratch, it would have been easier. And then the physique, oh, well, to learn to support the sound from the soles of her feet upward, who knew how essential was the abdomen to the art? And then, languages! In addition to the hours a day of sight-reading Clementi at the piano and pieces that Mozart wrote when he was six, and the exercise of Hanon, she needed total immersion in German. (A private tutor was engaged, a fusspot named Frau Blucher, who was augmenting her income teaching in a girls' school where fewer and fewer wanted to speak anything but French.) Sydney needed Italian and French as well, and as soon as possible, but she already had more hours of work scheduled in each day than she could actually do in a week.

And where in all this was the music? When did the nightingale sing? When she had prepared her song, the way a painter prepares a house that hasn't been painted in forty years. First there was patching and puttying, scraping and sanding, then a coat of primer, then more sanding, fifty hours of that before one hour of applying color. Her vocal teacher, a vast Romanian woman named Madame Dumitrescu, looked at her with scorn when she expressed disappointment. What did you think, little polliwog, we get to stand on a stage before discerning multitudes by having
fun
?

When she was finally given her first song, it was not to sing it, it was to translate.

“Yes? What did you think? You could sing a song you didn't understand? Translate it. Yourself. And check the pronunciation of every syllable; Thursday you will recite it for me from memory in German and in English.”

So, on Thursday did she sing? No. On Thursday she memorized the rhythm of the poem without words or notes. Laaa-lalala laahlalala laah laah. When she could say the words on one note perfectly in the rhythm of the music, with a metronome, she was allowed to learn the pitches. Over and over, with one finger, she played the notes in order. She was not allowed to sing along, no, no, no, what a stupid suggestion. Sing? No.

She must play the notes, hearing the intervals until she could hear the notes without playing them
and
form a mental image of the sound she would produce for each one. (That again. An image of a sound. Yes, of course, did she not even speak English?) When she could do all that, and only then, might she stand with the music in her hand and with the metronome, very slowly, sing the
notes
in rhythm, lalalala. That of course was an appalling moment, after all that work and all that waiting, as the difference between the sounds she heard in her head and what came out of her mouth was so terrible. Next, she sang the
words
in rhythm but on one pitch. Then she had to put the song away for several hours. And after all that, she was allowed to think of it as a song, and try to
sing
it.

 

Sydney worked and worked through October. The landlady downstairs slipped in the tub and broke her wrist. She took to waiting in the hall for Sydney to come down on her way out to class, with her list of necessities for the day. Sydney found herself trudging in cold wet weather from stationer to grocer to pharmacy in search of things she had never heard of. Cocomalt Powder. Saraka granules for constipation. One windy evening she delivered to the landlady her bag of oranges and the jar of Vicks VapoRub she had asked for; she stayed to listen to the new Stromberg-Carlson that had been delivered that morning. The first news out of it was that soldiers in Berlin had attacked the Jewish neighborhood and broken everyone's windows. The news was all so awful all the time now. Sydney climbed the stairs to her apartment. Maybe she ought to get a cat. Or a boyfriend.

Once at school she casually asked another student, a Danish flautist, “Is Laurus a common name in Denmark?”

“Not at all,” said the girl. “Laurus Moss is the only one I know of. Have you met him?” Sydney, mortified, blushed and said it was only an idle question.

“Oh. Well, Lauritz is the common name. Like Melchior, the tenor. Laurus is a family name.”

“Have
you
met him?”

“Of course,” said the girl. She was tall and lanky, with honey-colored hair and a beautiful accent.

November passed. Sydney thought maybe her mother would want her to come home for Thanksgiving, but neither of them made the first move. She spent Thanksgiving Day with the Maitlands, who lived on Park Avenue in a duplex apartment as big as a house. It was like visiting a foreign country; she'd been in the land of starving students so long she was half surprised it could be done without a passport. At least when she asked the Maitlands to call her “Sydney” henceforth, they said, “Of course, dear,” and did it.

In December she began work on
An die Nachtigall.
“Die Nachti-gall,” trilled Madame Dumitrescu, “that is the masterpiece. So simple, but profound, that last line, the way the piano
melts
into the inversion of the major chord, under the high G…”

Sydney tried to look as if she had been just about to mention that very thing. Madame Dumitrescu pounced down at the piano and plunged in at the last line of the song, a strange event, like coming upon a severed limb that pranced, unaware it had no body. “‘Sing mir den Amor…'” She blared it out in her meaty mezzo as the piano demonstrated the
melting
business. Sydney struggled to appear to understand.

Madame Dumitrescu looked at her with demented eyes, aswoon in Schubert. Sydney meanwhile was in the grip of terror. She had picked this song because it looked easy and was short. The last thing she wanted on earth was to be stepping up to a masterpiece, beloved of Madame.

“Now, then,” cried Madame. She closed her eyes and played the lilting first measures of the song, swaying with the music. When Sydney began to sing, Madame's eyes snapped open and the music stopped.

“He lies sleeping upon my heart! He lies sleeping upon your
heart,
he didn't hand you a tub of lard! ‘He lies sleeping upon my heart…'” She sang the line her way. Sydney knew this was going to be a long hour.

He lies sleeping upon my heart, my guardian spirit sang him to sleep.

She sat at the piano while night fell and an east wind blew in from the river, turning their street into a rattling canyon. She realized she had nothing in the apartment for dinner but a can of hash. Ugh. She played the melody of the “Nightingale” over and over again. She pictured herself, outdoors in summer, with a beloved man asleep in her arms, asleep because he is so safe in her presence and protected by her love that he has let down his guard all the way to the ground. And she is safe from him too; a man asleep is a man one is free to love without defenses, unlikely in that state to find fault or turn satiric or even to say merely, “No, that's not what I meant.”

She stopped playing. She sat in her catless, plantless apartment and pictured a young woman, perhaps Berthe Hanenberger, with her heart full and her love asleep in her arms, somewhere in the world where there are nightingales. She felt what that would feel like. A young man, kind, handsome, asleep and in love…who? Laurus Moss? Were there nightingales where he came from?

It had to be somebody. She closed her eyes and imagined herself, beloved, the guardian spirit of a dear sleeper, herself awake to the beauty of the world, and speaking the language of the nightingale. And what sound would you make to represent that feeling? She closed her eyes and sang the song.

When Laurus arrived the next day to accompany her practice, a complicated thing had become simple. For the first time since she began her training, she could forget it and sing. Laurus played. She pictured the feeling. Her throat made the sounds. As she sang, her eyes turned to him. In fact, what she was seeing was inner entirely, but her eyes moved to Laurus's face, and in surprise, when she hit the G, he turned to her and their eyes briefly locked.

When the song was over they were both silent. Then slowly, both began to smile.

“Well!” he said. “That was fun—let's do it again.”

But they didn't begin again immediately. For a while both of them just smiled. She could sing. Sydney could sing. The girl could sing.

And had he fallen in love with her when their eyes locked? Sydney always thought so. For the rest of their lives, though she never asked him, she believed that. The day she really sang, and he suddenly saw her.

But actually, for Laurus, it happened differently. The “Nightingale” afternoon was for him only the moment he stopped feeling sorry for her and began to take a genuine interest. When they went out for coffee after their session he joked with her in a new way. She felt the difference and it made her looser, warmer, and easier to be with.

He asked her what she was doing about Christmas. She said she had no plans, except to work. He said, as he never would have before this afternoon, that well then—perhaps she would like to come with him to a party on Christmas Eve. Some musicians, all far from home. They would have a real Scandinavian Yule celebration. Her eyes shone. She hoped more than ever that Candace would write or call, to know when she would be home. Maybe never, she could now say.

There was another week and a half until the school closed for Christmas break. Laurus canceled one practice hour because it was the first night of Hanukkah. Sydney pretended she knew all about that, and wondered if he was Jewish. She rather hoped so, as she hadn't found the nest of Christians she'd been raised in all that warm and cozy and was interested in exploring other options. But maybe he was just a citizen of the world, as so many musicians, and New Yorkers, seemed to be. She bought a balsam wreath for her door, and another for her landlady. She was invited to go caroling with some of the music students one Sunday evening and afterward they all ate cheese fondue at a restaurant called Chalet Suisse, and laughed and sang some more, and if you lost your bread in the stiffening melted cheese, someone kissed you.

She was oddly happy. Having braced herself to be stunned with loneliness, she was instead luxuriating in an aloneness that had its own advantages. She enjoyed the crowds of shoppers on the streets of Midtown. She took herself to see the Christmas windows of the stores, and even went to watch the children sitting on Santa's knee in the toy department at Macy's. As she watched the children squirming with pleasure and whispering their desires into his big pink ear (and also the confident ones in velvet clothes who had memorized their lists and recited them as if placing an order), she thought about going as a child with her father to see Santa at the May Company. Afterward she was allowed to choose one toy right then, whatever she wanted, and her father bought it for her. She remembered the year she chose a little shaving kit, with a soap brush and shaving soap and little toy razor so she could cover her face with lather and then peel it back off in neat strips along with Daddy as he stood in the bathroom in his trousers and undershirt in the mornings. She remembered Candace's scornful laughter when they got home. She was very little, and didn't understand what was wrong with it. She remembered the year her father had made her what he called an Advent stocking—a stocking with twenty-four tiny presents, all wrapped, so she could open one every day until Christmas morning and that would help her wait for the great day. And of how livid Candace had been when she found that Annabee, who hadn't really understood the Advent concept either, had opened all the little packages the first morning.

On Christmas Eve day, in the early dusk, Laurus arrived to take her to the party. It was just cold enough for snow and big soft perfect flakes had started around noon. They were going to Greenwich Village, and though Sydney could easily afford a taxi, Laurus led her as a matter of course to the subway, although it took three different trains and at that, they didn't get very close. It was fun to make their way through the throngs at Grand Central as they ran for the shuttle to the West Side, and then again in the dirty and cavernous catacomb under Times Square, full of buskers making Christmas music and passing hats.

The apartment on Downing Street was up a narrow flight of stairs, uneven and sporting a carpet runner that was already soaked with slush. On the landing before the door of the party was a pile of wet galoshes. Inside people crowded together, drinking punch, talking and laughing. Laurus led Sydney in her stocking feet to meet their hostess. Gudrun was slim and blond with bright cheeks and eyes, perhaps the most beautiful flesh-and-blood woman Sydney had ever seen. She was assembling a large platter of gravlax, scattered with dill and capers. She kissed Laurus, wished Sydney a happy Christmas, and handed her the platter. “Here, you can pass this. Laurus, take the toasts.”

The two of them made their way through the party with the platter. Imre Benko greeted Sydney warmly and took her by the elbow, explaining that it was the Swedish custom to shake hands and introduce yourself to every person in the room, and though neither he nor she was Swedish, he wanted to be sure she behaved herself.