Fall on Your Knees (59 page)

2:00 am —
I dreamt of Pete. He was wearing Mumma’s apron and Daddy’s pit boots and he was crying and wanting me to hug him. There is no such thing. The lights are on now. No such thing as Pete.

I want to go home. I want to see my daddy.

Kathleen, grow up.

3:30 am —
don’t write it down

I can’t stop crying.

What if there’s someone outside my door?

Oh God. If I think about it, my door will open.

“Let nothing disturb you; nothing frighten you. All things are passing.” Saint Teresa,
ora pro nobis
.

thurs. 28 —
Giles made me drink a special tea so I could sleep last night. It worked. Has she been spying on me?

fri. —
One heck of a middle C today. Felt like I was gorging on a chocolate éclair. Kaiser none too pleased — after all, I’m a soprano. Sopranos don’t sing in chocolate.

sat. —
Today I cried. he told me to sing the C-major scale, my first time allowed to put more than two notes together at a time. But still no consonants, just “ah”. I felt like I was climbing stone steps in the dark and when I got a glimpse of light towards the top I started crying but I finished the ruddy scale.

APRIL FOOL’S DAY —
Today Herr Knibs gives me that bloodless vulture eye and — no, he’s more amphibian, he’s probably covered in dry scales (scales, ha ha!) from collar to cuffs and dines furtively on furry creatures thrice daily. I can just see the squirming lump making its way down his narrow throat. Does he regurgitate bones every evening? Well today he says to me, “I vill accept you as a shtudent, Miss Pipah.” Why didn’t I say the perfect icy thing? I said — and I am being completely honest here, so I’ll tell you — I said, “Thank you, sir.” May I be struck dead.

Wed. —
Daddy sent me a book today and Mercedes and Frances sent me salt-water taffy! I never thought I’d miss my little elves so much. I wish Daddy would put them in a special crate and mail them to me like kittens for a day or two.

Thurs. — “La voix mixte”:
In every head tone, the resonance of the chest. In every chest tone, the rarity of the head. Ascend directly to heaven.

Fri. —
Giles asked me to sing something for her this afternoon and I had to say, “I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to sing anything but scales and arpeggios.” The Kaiser says he can tell if I’ve been singing “ditties” on the sly. It’s like I’m committing adultery with my voice or something, he’s disgusting.

Mon. —
He’s making me wear my hair in a scalp-tight bun. What does he think I am, a ballerina?

Tues. —
I have had an epiphany. I now know what people mean when they say you have to suffer for your art. I always thought they meant rehearsing till you drop, performing when you’re not in the mood, starving until you get discovered and I always thought, “Great, I can’t wait to suffer” but that’s not it at all. The real suffering is this teacher trying to kill me with boredom by marching me up and down every scale known to man. Fine. I will beat him at his own game. I have begun repeating the entire morning’s lesson three times every day.

Wed. —
“Your vocal range is a freak of nature, Miss Piper, no more or less impressive than Mount Everest. It remains to be seen whether or not you have the stamina and skill to scale it.” Scale!

Thurs. —
I love the buildings. They’re called skyscrapers. They’re the closest thing to an ocean here. But it’s an ocean that goes straight up, not flat out. They say that the body of water stretching away to the east of Manhattan is the ocean but it isn’t. Not my ocean, anyway. It’s weird because back home I just took it for granted, my grey-green sea. Now I have a granite ocean. It gives me the same happy-sad feeling I need sometimes. When I look straight up at the buildings I can feel alone in a good way. Not in that horrible way of no one knows me.

fri —
This is not a city. This is a world with whole countries in it. You could go mad here if you were the type of person who thought you were sane in the first place. I have found something past the granite ocean. It’s a whole amazing world. You can walk for an hour and never hear a word of English, you can eat in five different countries in five blocks, you can hear music everywhere. Why am I studying, why do I want to be caged on a stage when the real singers are out here, singing about fish, hollering out rhythm across wheelbarrows full of fruit to the timpany of tin pan alley, a chorus of trams, horseshoes, knives and live animals, this is where the opera is. The Met is a mausoleum. The music room is a funeral parlour. God I don’t want to wind up in a museum.

Mon. —
There are places in Central Park that are better left unexplored and I won’t scandalize you by telling you why.

Tues. April 16 —
Coney Island! Ate only pink things. Threw up. It was worth it.

Wednesday —
Start at the South St. docks. Halifax times twenty. They better hope it never blows up. I see horses being winched up by their bellies in slings onto ships. They’ve been conscripted. That’s what most of the ships are for. New York feeds the war. New York goes to the whole world and the whole world comes to New York. I love seeing huge crates with Chinese writing swing through the air and pile up on the dock alongside every other language known to man. I’d like to spend a whole day just watching the men and the cargo but I can’t linger too long ’cause of all the tough customers wondering what a nice girl like me is doing… etc. What would they do if I said, “Hey pal, I think you’re beautiful, you move like Nijinsky, you’re my idea of a Greek god, in overalls.” But I’m not allowed to say anything at all because they’d think I was asking for it. Men get to chat to strangers and learn all kinds of things. Women get to take a book out of the library. When I am a famous singer, I will talk to whomever I please.

On foot up through the Bowery, the Italian quarter — kids, carts, food, women in black, good-looking guys but don’t let them see you looking,
opera verismo
— Greenwich Village, ladies and gentlemen, Tenderloin — get hungry here, buy a pretzel, have lunch in Hell’s Kitchen — really! Why do they call it that? Seems perfectly nice, in fact you can have
a free lunch
at Devlin’s Saloon Bar. It’s true, a sign said “Ladies Entrance” so I entered and there were a whole bunch of women with red faces and gristly elbows and all you have to do is pay a nickel for a beer that comes with a hot heaping plate. Up Broadway a bit tipsy — not used to beer — the golden mile, Union Square, Madison Square, Herald Square, past the Met — genuflect — promenade through Times Square, Columbus Circle, buy popcorn for the pigeons to keep them in the statue business (where they perform a valuable civic service by keeping the glorious past in perspective), into the Park, zigzag through that immense chunk of countryside smack in the middle of the greatest show on earth, past the Pond, the Lake, the Castle, skip the Reservoir it’s too big and too small, promise to go to the Metropolitan Museum next time, Haarlem Meer (sit down and decide I’ve walked far enough), out onto Central Park North, up Lenox thirty-seven blocks to the Haarlem River. It’s night.

Take the Eighth Avenue elevated back, dead happy tired with the whole city around my head like a halo. There are no Dutch people in Haarlem. I have noticed on walks that coloured people and foreigners in general are totally different here. In New York it’s not like they’re in someone else’s city, at least not in their own neighbourhoods. The neighbourhoods are whole cities themselves. At home when I passed by the Pier or Fourteen Yard I always felt sorry and thought how lucky I was not to be born into that, but here when I went into Haarlem I felt weird for being white. It’s full of churches, and families just out strolling in the evening. I felt conspicuous. But I never fit in down home either so what’s the difference?

Everything in New York is a photograph. All the things that are supposed to be dirty or rough or unrefined are the most beautiful things. Garbage cans at the ends of alleyways look like they’ve been up all night talking with each other. Doorways with peeling paint look like the wise lines around an old feller’s eyes. I stop and stare but can’t stay because men always think I’m selling something. Or worse, giving something away. I wish I could be invisible. Or at least I wish I didn’t look like someone they want to look at. They stop being part of the picture, they get up from their chess game and come out of the frame at me, blocking my view. What do they see when they look at me?

Fri April 19 —
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, last night I snuck out at midnight when Giles was asleep. Why didn’t I do this weeks ago? I thought there was music during the day, but the night consists of nothing but. The problem is I can’t get into any of the interesting-looking places unescorted. But so far it’s enough to drink up the night, the streetlights, the life on front stoops off Broadway, behind curtained windows, private clubs with shuttered doors, the faint sound of trumpets and drums, and the longest automobiles I have ever seen. I thought Haarlem would be asleep by the time I got up there, considering the number of churches, but maybe the churches turn into clubs at night like toys coming alive ’cause it was a different city — on the main streets anyhow. Daddy always says that in Ireland the number of churches is exceeded only by the number of pubs. Lenox Avenue was gorged with people dressed to the nines, lines of limousines, a fair number of white people, even mixed couples pouring in and out of places. It whitens somewhat at night. I’m on the verge of answering the next man who says, “Hey sweetheart, where’s your boyfriend?” just so’s I can step inside somewhere, anywhere, so long as there’s music, music, music. I did go to one place though. Jerry Chan’s Chop Suey House at Canal and Bowery. Delicious. Here’s my fortune: “You will meet a tall dark and handsome stranger.”
Très romantique, n’est-ce pas?

tues —
Today the Kaiser made me stand barefoot in a basin of ice-water while vocalizing.

Friday —
This morning he brought out the
Vaccai Practical Method of Italian Singing!
I could have wept to see my childhood friend. I never thought I would be so happy to start at the beginning all over again. How the mighty have fallen. Kaiser opened to page one, “The Scale” — at least it’s set to words — and said, “Vowels only, if you please.” I told him I can read Italian, but he ignored me. So. It is still not yet given to me to chew solid food. NO CONSONANTS. I plot his death.

Have an accompanist now. She is a machine he imported to plod through the
Vaccai
while I gum the vowels. Why bother? And he has the nerve to tell me to pay attention to the “music” she is plunking out.

sat —
I can tell when a piano is out of tune and, yes, it does matter.

mon —
Why am I wasting my time and anyone else’s? I can’t sing, forget how, forget why I ever wanted to. Giles says I look pale — good. I’m staying in bed tomorrow.

wed, May 1 —
The Kaiser went nuts when I came in today, “Vere in Gott’s name haff you been?!” “I was sick.” “I don’t care if you come here shpitting blood, you vill come! Next time you are indisposed I had better learn off it wia your obituary in ze papahs, do you understant me?”
“
J
a, mein Kaiser
.” He said he’d fling me out if I missed another class.

I didn’t say,
“Ja, mein Kaiser”
I said, “I’m sorry sir.” Then I thought, what the heck, he’s already wild at me, so I added, “Sir, I didn’t think one day more or less of scales would be any grievous loss to the music world.” And he slapped me. I looked over at the accompanist — that girl is made of stone. She didn’t look at me. She just waited for him to give the command, “E minor, Miss Lacroix.” And she started in like a player-piano you couldn’t give away. I sang but I don’t know where it came from.

If I told my father, he would come and kill this man. Why didn’t I hit him back? The strange thing is, today I felt like I was singing those ruddy scales for the first time. I can’t explain it, it wasn’t in words, it was this knowledge all of a sudden as though I knew it all along but didn’t know I knew it, and it was: all the music is in this scale. The scale is just a safe place where all the music can fold itself down and get stored. Like seeds.

And the scale sounded so pure to me. Like in the end, if you had to be stranded on a desert island, you wouldn’t take
Traviata
or
Bohème
, you’d take one scale. Because it has everything in it. I hope I don’t have to be whacked every time just to learn one crummy, measly, huge lesson.

Thursday, May 2 —
Singing words!

Saturday —
He asked me today if I knew the difference between sentiment and emotion.

Monday —
Today he said, “Your voice is a beautiful face. Which you manipulate with the coarseness of a circus clown.” My first compliment from the Kaiser.

Thursday, May 9 —
The Kaiser has set up an audition for me with Mr Gatti-Casazza,
il numero uno
of the Metropolitan Opera! November 12. He is going to let me sing an aria! Aria? What’s that? The Kaiser said if I’m lucky Mr G-C will put me in the Met chorus next season. And I finally got up the guts to say I’d rather go back to New Waterford and have ten babies than tote notes in the Met chorus behind some Franklin stove of a superannuated diva. No, Diary — I must be honest. I said, “Sir, I am not chorus material.” And he said, “That is the correct answer, Miss Piper.”

Saturday —
“Listen to the piano, you’re not listening, Miss Pipah.” I’m sick of the piano. It’s time the piano started listening to the voice.

Monday —
I asked the accompanist, perfectly politely, how long she had been playing piano and she raised one eyebrow and said, “I’ve always played.” Oh, allow me to prostrate myself before thee, oh sphinx of the keyboard!

Tuesday —
Miss Lacroix is in league with the Kaiser. She can do no wrong. She plays like an automaton and I’m supposed to follow her. I told the Kaiser I might as well go down to the Henry Ford plant and sing to the rhythm of the assembly line. I said exactly that and he just shrugged a bit. Maybe he’s mellowing. Maybe I’m wearing him down a little, or maybe — oh horrors — he likes me. She still never looks at me much less says good morning, who does she think she is? Where did he dig her up? I thought coloured people were supposed to have rhythm.