Composed (12 page)

As it turned out, Dad was off by only a week or so in his guess about my pregnancy. I conceived in Ravello that week, but I lost the baby seventeen weeks later, in late August. John was remarkably gentle and solicitous of my feelings and health, but I knew he was in a significant amount of pain himself. I wanted to turn to my parents for comfort. My mother tended not to be at her best in these situations, as her natural impulse was to withdraw into her own grief, metabolizing the suffering of her children as if it were her own. Dad was much better in dealing with raw grief, having experienced so much himself, and did not possess any inherent need to fix other people or solve their problems. I howled into the phone when I told him of our loss. He listened quietly, only murmuring little grunts of sadness. When I finished, he told me a story about his own mother, kneeling in the fields after the death of Jack, his brother, and how she thought she couldn’t make it through another moment. She would cry out to God to help her, and then that moment was accomplished, and soon another day had passed. And then another. Then he gave me some advice, something he seldom did unless it was specifically solicited. “Cling to John,” he said. “I’ve seen so many couples break up because of the loss of a child.” I took that advice seriously, and it was the clinging to each other that got John and me through that time, and strengthened us, when so much potential for disintegration afflicted us. Later, when we faced other hard times, we had that first, devastating loss to remind us that we could stay together through just about anything. It was so typical of Dad that no matter how strung out he was, if the occasion demanded it, he could reach inside himself to that inextinguishable wisdom and intuition and offer something from it to soothe or enlighten.

Shortly after our conversation he also wrote me this letter:

Aug. 28 ’95
Bon Aqua TN

Dear Rosanne

I was driving down to the farm this afternoon, grieving for you, when suddenly I felt the presence of my mother so strong that it was overwhelming.

I clearly saw her death again, but it wasn’t painful this time.

In my mind’s eye I saw several angels come down to each side of her, bear her spirit up and away and out of sight. It was a scene of total silence yet great joy. As I had seen at her death, again there was an “attitude” in the air, saying, “we are simply going about our unearthly business.”

I’m not trying to get dramatic or otherworldly, Rosanne. This is what I saw and felt.

I slowed down to a crawl in the right lane of the interstate, because, feeling mama’s presence and the angels so strongly, I shouted aloud, “Don’t go away!” And, thinking of how the angels had ministered spiritual things to my mother as she was dying, I said, “Go to Rosanne and minister to her because she desperately needs you. In the name of the Lord I ask this.”

So baby, this afternoon I sent my mother’s friends to you. I’m sure that her spirit brought this about. She loved/ loves you so much. And tonight I entreat the holy angels, your grandmother’s friends to stay with you and help bring about your (and John’s) healing. The scars will be deep, but there is power in the spirit here.

You must start to gain strength now and somehow rise above the pain of all this. Your family loves you very much, and although the days and nights will be hard for a while you will persevere.

All my love
Dad

I signed a new recording contract with Capitol Records, and in the months after the loss of our baby, John and I made a record together called
10 Song Demo
, which became an essential way for me to work out my grief. I can’t hear any of that record now without recalling the sadness of that time, and the quiet days spent in John’s basement studio on East Twelfth Street, recording those songs with sparse arrangement and heavy hearts.

O
ne day in 1988, I was lying on my couch, in a sleepy reverie as the afternoon sun spilled through the huge bay window in the living room of my log house outside Nashville, when it occurred to me, in a sharp, unsettling way, that—

I was a singer. Not only was I a singer, but I sang for a living, which meant that a lot of people who were strangers to me were familiar with my voice without knowing me personally. They might not even know my name, but they had heard and now could recognize the Voice, a product of my genes and experience: authentic, but extremely personal, in my estimation.

This was largely how I felt about my voice—that it was undependable, beyond my control, somewhat embarrassing at times; if not too low, then too high; if not too soft, then too loud, or too harsh, or too wimpy. It was simply not enough, not right, and as such it exposed me far, far more than I could comfortably allow. It presented the perfect conundrum, and therefore an irresistible career choice.

My ambivalent relationship with my voice certainly had something to do with the fact that, thanks to my father’s profession, our family was exposed to great singers—great singers who were also extraordinary personalities—from an early age. My mother, for her part, was a devoted Patsy Cline fan, and would say her name with slightly pursed lips: “Patsy . . .”—no last name needed, vowels squeezed a little by disapproval, but the tight mouth holding back a barely contained thrill. Patsy was wicked and fabulous when both qualities really meant something, before they became cheap ideas used to market more marginal talents. She was the object of fascination, distrust, and raw, if hidden, admiration. But not judgment: There was nothing to attach judgment to because Patsy did not judge herself. She was too truly and spontaneously alive, too rooted in her body, too in command of a startling sexuality that infused everything and that was the vehicle for a preternaturally affecting voice that both revealed and obscured her essence.

People who have genuine memories of her have become somewhat revisionist in their collective retelling. She was so great (also in the premarketing sense of the word) that they have felt almost obliged to polish and repair her wild and willful personality to suit the magnitude of her talent, particularly since she was a woman in an era that did not suffer female unaccountability gladly.

I once asked Mom what she remembered about Patsy—not as someone who would have a professional take (for that I would have called my dad), but as a woman who had been so deeply affected by her. She laughed but didn’t ask why I had posed the question. “I didn’t know her well,” she admitted, “but your daddy and I did have her over to the house not long before she died. She had a mouth like a sailor, and she didn’t put on airs. She was just Patsy, comfortable in her skin. I admired that. But that beautiful voice and body were so different from her . . . roughness.” Mom paused. “I love her singing,” she said passionately, present tense, and after considering the matter a while added, “Well, she was very
friendly
.”

I laughed, my revisionist theory confirmed. “Were you disillusioned when you met her, Mom?”

“Well, I wouldn’t want that to be said. She was ahead of her time, that’s all.” There was a quiet pause, then a little sigh. “I never got pictures with her.”

Patsy Cline’s gifts were extraordinary enough to have become a profound source of inspiration even to those of us without immediate memories of her, those of us whose voices weren’t so full-bodied and fully formed from the beginning and whose values were not so exquisitely self-determined. In my private quandaries about my own voice, it gave me a lot of satisfaction to connect her teeming personality to the gifts she possessed. She lived a life utterly her own, messy and self-defined, and it all fed and merged with that voice.

At the end of our conversation, I couldn’t help asking, “Mom, was I at that party?”

“Sure, honey! That was in, let’s see, 1963? All you kids were born then.”

I sighed wistfully. Somewhere in the blackout of early childhood I had had an encounter with Patsy Cline. I may spend the rest of my life trying to remember it.

(When I recorded “She’s Got You,” a song Patsy had made famous, for my record
The List
in 2009, I was nearly paralyzed with intimidation. I could not get
her
voice out of my head in order to sing the song myself. I finally thought to just ask for her permission, if she didn’t mind, and I felt the pressure lift. The rest of the session went smoothly.)

The other great touchstone was, of course, Tammy. I first saw her in person in the early seventies at one of my father’s “guitar pulls,” at which a lot of musicians and songwriters would gather in his living room to preview their new work. I was about nineteen years old at the time, with teenage insouciance to spare, and the honored guests were George Jones and Tammy Wynette. I sat slack-jawed and transfixed as they sang “(We’re Not) The Jet Set,” with Tammy perched on the plush blue antique sofa, hair poufed out to here, with nails, makeup, and outfit perfectly coordinated. She looked like a lotus blossom sitting next to George, a perfect foil, but completely herself. It was the most relaxed I was ever to see her. Tammy was sweet, in the way that only Southern women can be sweet, and a bundle of nerves. I don’t think she ever got over her ascendancy from the beauty parlor. At times it could seem as if she were merely a vehicle for her Voice, which had ambitions of its own, occasionally overreaching her own personal understanding of her goals. I remember driving by Tammy’s house in Nashville and staring at the wrought-iron gates with FIRST LADY ACRES scrolled across the top. I would think of her—proud but not egotistical (a feat in itself), delicate and strong—and of how the world would never again be innocent enough to produce another Tammy Wynette.

In the early days of my own career I may have spent too much time around Emmylou. Her voice became a template for me, but it was one I could never hope to replicate or even approach. I did not have the high, lonesome, elegiac tone, the pierce and warble, the crystal beauty, the tears under the snow. My own instrument was darker and roomier, damp and yearning, something more untamed and imperfect. It took me a long time to let go of viewing Emmylou as a model and getting down to business with what I had. I remained fiercely critical of my own singing for many years, which wore holes in my confidence and stamina. Content mirrored context.

I went on performing in the shadow of these great role models, and more—Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell, Grace Slick, Janis Joplin, Judy Collins, Laura Nyro—always questioning, always judging my own instrument, until one day in August of 1998, at a gallery opening I attended with John. I began to talk to someone in the crowd when I discovered I could not be heard because I was unable to get my voice above a rasp. As we walked out, John remarked, “Your voice has been like that for a few weeks. You should get it checked out.” I said it was probably allergies and forgot about it, as I was more concerned at the time about being four months’ pregnant and still suffering miserably from morning sickness. September passed, and my voice did not get better. I had a show scheduled for the following month—a big benefit for a hospital in California—and as the date approached, I grew more and more worried about my voice. I drank teas with honey, took various lozenges, sprayed it, gargled it, and doused it, but I sounded more and more like Tom Waits with a bad cold. The day of the show came and I was nearly mute. I went out onstage, praying that a miracle would happen and my voice would reappear just in time. After croaking my way through a few songs, I exasperatedly asked the crowd of hospital administrators, “Is there a doctor in the house?”

I made an appointment with Dr. Gwen Korovin, an ENT who takes care of singers. She put a camera down my throat, and when the image appeared on the screen, she stepped back as if someone had jumped in front of her. I had polyps, and they were huge, covering the entire left side of my vocal cords. Gwen stammered that she had not seen polyps this large on someone who had not been a heavy lifetime smoker, so she did not understand it. (She was certain, gratifyingly, that I did not have cancer.) While puzzled, she knew for certain that they had to be removed, and we scheduled surgery for six months after the birth of my baby, who was due in January.

As my pregnancy progressed, I grew even hoarser. Gwen checked my vocal cords shortly before I gave birth and shook her head. “The bigger you get, the bigger the polyps get,” she said.

I gave birth to my and John’s son, Jake, in January. I was overjoyed that at the age of forty-three I had given birth naturally to a healthy eight-pound baby boy, but I was bereft that I could not even sing him a lullaby. In March, Gwen attended a conference in Paris, where a husband-and-wife team (an obstetrician and an ENT) gave a talk on hormones and polyps. Gwen spoke to them about my case after their presentation. “Don’t operate,” they urged her. “The polyps will go away when her hormones return to normal, after breast-feeding.” During the fourteen months I nursed him, I had my doubts that I would ever have a voice again, but they were right: Six months after that, the polyps had disappeared. But my voice was a mess. Gwen sent me to William Riley, a vocal coach and voice therapist, to rebuild it. I was terrified when I started to sing for him that he would tell me it was useless, that my voice was irreparably damaged, but at the end of an hour he said, “You’re just seriously out of shape. You can get it back.” We spent the next year rebuilding my voice from scratch. During those long, frightening days of near-muteness, I vowed that if my voice ever returned, I would give up the internal monologue of self-criticism about it. I promised myself that I would enjoy it, for a change. And I did. I saw my voice in a whole new way once I really did get it back. It was so much stronger than I had believed, so much more lithe and nuanced. It was like meeting an old friend who I had not appreciated in my youth but who became a close and cherished companion in my middle age.

Jakob William Leventhal was born on January 22, 1999. I thought I knew just about everything there was to know about parenting after twenty-plus years of motherhood, but what I knew about was mothering girls. I had never believed that raising boys could be that different, but I soon discovered how wrong I was. I have grown to deeply love and respect the emotional singularity of the male psyche, particularly after decades of trying to navigate the complex and exhausting tunnels and curves of the inner lives of women: my daughters’ and my own. Jake keeps his own counsel. He is refreshingly transparent, but that is not to say he is one-dimensional. He has a remarkable sensitivity to music—to pitch, tempo, and song structure—which has been apparent in him since he was a toddler, when he would stand flailing at his plastic guitar in front of an armoire so he could hear the sound bounce off its surface. He is exceptionally even-tempered in a family with a lot of girls who incline toward the dramatic and convoluted in their emotional lives. He brought that with him when he was born—it was nothing I taught him. He has a dignity to his emotions that has inspired me to refine my own expression of feeling. In fact, I am certain I have become more circumspect about what I am willing to share with others because of his elegant example of judicious communication. I have to be careful not to make him a confidant or too close a friend; I remind myself that no matter how much apparent wisdom and self-regard he has in his emotional portfolio, he still needs a mother.

One day when he was four, he and I went to visit John at the recording studio on Gansevoort Street. When we left, it was bitterly cold. I couldn’t find his gloves, so I took mine off and put them on his hands. He looked up at me, confused. “But what about your hands?” he asked.

“It’s my job to take care of you right now,” I told him cheerfully. He looked down uncomfortably. I could tell he still felt uneasy and a little worried about my cold hands.

“Someday when I’m old and you’re a grown man, if I forget my gloves, you can lend me yours. Okay?” I smiled at him. He nodded, reassured, and we went on our way. My heart ached to witness his native compassion.

Although I was forty-three when I gave birth to Jake, I didn’t suffer unduly while carrying him or giving birth (except for a wicked and months-long postepidural headache, which turned out to be related to a then undiagnosed brain condition). It was, in fact, the perfect emotional age to have a baby. All the anxiety about balancing work and motherhood, about my own merits as a mother, about what was right for him, or right for me, dissipated. I knew what to do, and I was thrilled to do it. In a bittersweet way, losing the baby in the first year of my marriage to John enabled me to parent Jake from a context of pure gratitude. At his tenth birthday party, as I was setting up the balloons and the Lego party favors and the cupcakes, I overheard Hannah say to Chelsea, “Can you believe Mom is
still
doing the birthday cupcakes?” They shook their heads in sympathetic fatigue. I laughed. Thirty years of the birthday cupcakes. It’s a privilege.

I had begun recording a new album the summer of 1998, with John producing, and though we continued working as long as we could, we eventually shelved the project when it became clear that I could not sing at all. We picked up where we had left off after I began vocal work with Bill Riley. Although I had already written or cowritten eight out of the eleven songs I planned to record, I wanted to cast a net for some outside material, so preoccupied had I been first with trying to get pregnant and then with staying pregnant and feeling awful, and so frustrated at picking up the guitar when I couldn’t sing at all. We asked Craig Northey, from the Canadian band the Odds, and Joe Henry to contribute songs for the record. Craig sent “Beautiful Pain,” and Joe a song he cowrote with Jakob Dylan, “Hope Against Hope.” They were both great songs and a pleasure to sing, but the most fortuitous thing to come out of that commission was that I made two good friends in Craig and Joe. Joe and I have grown very close; he is a constant source of inspiration to me.