Serenade (18 page)

"All right then. You just sit here a while."

"No, if you're doing something I'll go!"

"I said sit there. Papa's going to get busy."

"At what?"

"There's your port, there's your biscuits, there's the fire, there's the most beautiful snow I've seen this year, and I've got the six big Rossini overtures on the machine--Semiramide, Tancred, the Barber, Tell, the Ladra, and the Italians, just in from London, beautifully played--and by the time they're finished I'll be back."

"I asked you, where are you going?"

"Goddam it, do you have to bust up my act? I'm being Papa. I'm going into action. And when Papa goes into action, it's the British Fleet. Sip your port. Listen to Rossini. Think of the boys that were gelded to sing the old bastard's masses. Be the Pope. I'm going to be Admiral Dewey."

"Beatty."

"No, I'm Gridley. I'm ready to fire."

He switched on the Rossini, poured the wine, and went. I tried to listen, and couldn't. I got up and switched it off. It was the first time I ever walked out on Rossini. I went over to the windows and watched the snow. Something told me to get out of there, to go back to Hollywood, to do anything except get mixed up with him again. It wasn't over twenty minutes before he was back. I heard him coming, and ducked back to the chair. I didn't want him to see me worrying. "...I was astonished that you missed that grace note in Lucia. Didn't you
feel
it there? Didn't you know it
had
to be there?"

"To hell with Lucia. What news?"

"Oh. I had forgotten all about it. Why, you stay, of course. You go on with the opera, you do this foolish broadcast you've let yourself in for, you sing for me, you make your picture in the summer. That's all. It's all fixed up. Once more, Jack, on all those old recitatives--"

"Listen, this is business. I want to know--"

"Jack, you are so crass. Can't I wave my wand? Can't I do my bit of magic? If you have to know, I happen to control a bank, or my somewhat boorish family happen to control it. They embarrass me greatly, but sometimes they have a kind of low, swinish usefulness. And the bank controls, through certain stocks impounded to secure moneys, credit, and so on--oh the hell with it."

"Go on. The bank controls what?"

"The picture company, dolt."

"And?"

"Listen, I'm talking about Donizetti."

"And I'm talking about a son-of-a-bitch by the name of Rex Gold. What did you do?"

"I talked with him."

"And what did he say?"

"Why--I don't know. Nothing. I didn't wait to hear what he had to say. I told him what he was to do, that's all."

"Where's your phone?"

"Phone? What are you phoning about?"

"I've got to call the broadcasting company."

"Will you sit down and listen to what I'm trying to tell you about appoggiaturas, so you won't embarrass me every time you sing something written before 1905? Varlets in the bank are calling the broadcasting company. That's what we have them for. They're working overtime, calling other varlets in Radio City and making them work overtime, which I greatly enjoy, while you and I take our sinful ease here and watch the snow at twilight, and discuss the grace notes of Donizetti, which will be sung long after the picture company, the bank, and the varlets are dead in their graves and forgotten. Are you following me?"

His harangue on the appoggiaturas lasted fifteen minutes. It was something I was always forgetting about him, his connection with money. His family consisted of an old maid sister, a brother that was a colonel in the Illinois National Guard, another brother that lived in Italy, and some nephews and nieces, and they had about as much to do with that fortune as so many stuffed dummies.
He
ran it,
he
controlled the bank,
he
did plenty of other things that he pretended he was too artistic even to bother with. All of a sudden something shot through my mind. "Winston, I've been framed."

"Framed? What are you talking about? By whom?"

"By you."

"Jack, I give you my word, the way you sang that--"

"Cut out this goddam foolish act about Lucia, will you? Sure I sang it wrong. I learned that role before I knew anything about style, and I hadn't sung it for five years until I went on with it last month, and I neglected to re-learn it, and that's all that amounts to, and to hell with it. I'm talking about this other. You knew all about it when you called me."

"...Why, of course I did."

"And I think you put me in that spot."

"I--? Don't be a fool."

"It always struck me pretty funny, that guy Gold's ideas about grand opera, and me, and all the rest of it. Anybody else would
want
me in grand opera, to build me up. What do you know about that?"

"Jack, that's Mexican melodrama."

"What about this trig of yours? To Mexico?"

"I went there. A frightful place."

"For me?"

"Of course."

"Why?"

"To take you by the scuff of your thick neck and drag you out of there. I--ran into a 'cellist that had seen you. I heard you were looking seedy. I don't like you seedy. Shaggy, but not with spots on your coat."

"What about Gold?"

"...I put Gold in charge of that picture company because he was the worst ass I had ever met, and I thought he was the perfect man to make pictures. I was right. He's turned the whole investment into a gold mine. Soon I can have seventy-five men, and 'Little Orchestra' will be one of those affectations I so greatly enjoy. Jack,
do you
have to expose all my little shams? You know them all. Can't we just not look at them? After all they're nice shams."

"I want to know more about Gold."

He came over and sat on the arm of my chair. "Jack, why should I frame you?"

I couldn't answer him, and I couldn't look at him.

"Yes, I knew all about it. I didn't tell Gold to be an ass, if that's what you mean. I didn't have to. I knew about it, and I acted out one of my little shams. Can't I want my Jack to be happy? Wipe that sulky look off your face. Wasn't it good magic? Didn't Gridley level the fort?"

"...Yes."

I got home around eight o'clock. I rushed in with a grin on my face, said it was all right, that Gold had changed his mind, that we were going to stay, and let's go out and celebrate. She got up, wiped her snoddy nose, dressed, and we went out, to a hot-spot uptown. It was murder to drag her out, on a night like that, the way she felt, but I was afraid if I didn't get to some place where there was music, and I could get some liquor in me, she'd see I was putting on an act, that I was as jittery inside as a man with a hangover.

I didn't see him for a week or ten days, and the first broadcast made me feel good. I said hello to Captain Conners, and there was a federal kick-back the next morning. Messages to private persons are strictly forbidden. I just laughed, and thought of Thomas. There was a federal kick-back on that "Good night, Mother," too, and they told him he couldn't do it. He just went ahead and did it. That afternoon there came a radiogram from the SS.
Port of Cobh:
TWAS A SOAP AGENTS PROGRAM BUT I ENJOYED IT HELLO YOURSELF AND HELLO TO THE LITTLE ONE CONNERS. So of course I had to come running home with that.

I made some records, went on three times a week at the opera, did another broadcast, and woke up to find I was a household institution, name, face, voice and all, from Hudson Bay to Cape Horn and back again. The spig papers, the Canadian papers, the Alaskan papers, and all the other papers began coming in by that time, and I was plastered all over them, with reviews of the broadcast, pictures of the car, and pictures of me. The plugs I wrote for the car worked, the horn worked, and all of it worked, so they had to put more ships under charter to make deliveries. Then I had to get Winston's program ready, and began seeing him every day.

I didn't have to see him every day to get the program up. But he dropped into my dressing room one night, the way he had done before, and it was just luck that it was raining, and she still had a hangover from the cold, and had decided to stay home. She was generally out there when I sang, and always came backstage to pick me up. There was a big mob of autograph hunters back there, and instead of locking them out while I dressed, the way I generally did, I let them in, and signed everything they shoved at me, and listened to women tell me how they had come all the way from Aurora to hear me, and let him wait. When we walked out I apologized for it and said there was nothing I could do. "Don't ever come around again. This isn't Paris. Let me "drop up to your hotel the morning after, and we'll have the post-mortem then."

"I'd love it! It's a standing date."

From the quick way he said it, and the fact that he had never once asked me where I was living, or made any move to come and see me, it came to me that he knew all about Juana, just like he had known all about Gold. Then I began to have this nervous feeling, that never left me, wondering what he was going to pull next.

What I was going to do with her the night of his concert I didn't know. She had got so she could read the papers now, and had spotted the announcement, and asked me about it. I acted like it was just another job of singing, and she didn't pay much attention to it. Her cold was all right now, and there wasn't a chance she would stay home on that account. I thought of telling her it was a private concert, and that I couldn't get her in, but I knew that wouldn't work. Going up in the cab, I told her that as I wouldn't have to dress afterwards, it would be better if she didn't come backstage. We'd meet in the Russian place next door. Then I could duck out quick and we'd miss the mob of handshakers. I showed it to her and she said all right, then she went in the front way and I ducked up the alley.

When I got backstage I almost fainted when I found out what he was up to. I was singing two numbers, one the aria from the Siege of Corinth for the first part of the program, the other Walter Damrosch's Mandalay, for the second part. I had squawked on that Mandalay, because I thought it was all wrong for a symphony concert. But when he made me read it over I had to admit it was in a different class from the Speaks Mandalay, or the Prince Mandalay, or any of the other barroom Mandalays. It's a little tone poem all by itself, a piece of real music, with all the verses in it except the bad one, about the housemaids, and each verse a little different from the others. One reason it's never done is that it takes a whole male chorus, but of course cost never bothered him any. He got a chorus together, and rehearsed them until they spit blood, getting a Volga-Boat-Song-dying-away effect he wanted at the end, and by the time I had gone over it with them two or three times, we had a real number out of it.

But what he was getting ready to do was have them march on in a body, before I came on, and I had to throw a fit of temperament to stop it. I raved and cursed, said it would kill my entrance, and refused to go on if he did it that way. I said they had to drift in with the orchestra after the intermission, and take their places without any march-on. But I wasn't thinking about my entrance. What I was afraid of was that those twenty-four chorus men, marching on at a Winston Hawes concert, would be such a murderous laugh that it would tip her off to what the whole thing was about.

I peeped out before we started, and spotted her. She was sitting between an old couple, on one side, and one of the critics, alone, on the other, so it didn't look like she would hear anything. In the intermission I peeped out again. She was still sitting there, and so was the old couple. She had sneaked a piece of chewing gum into her mouth, and was munching on that, so everything seemed to be all right, so far.

The chorus were in white ties, and they went on the way I said, and nothing happened. The orchestra played a number and Winston came off. He kidded me about my fit of temperament, and I kidded back. So long as everything was under control, I didn't care. Then I went on. Whether it was what Damrosch wrote, or the way Winston conducted, or the tone of those horns, I don't know, but before the opening chords had even finished, you were in India. I started, and did a good job of it. I clowned the second verse a little, but not too much. The other verses I did straight, and the temple-bell atmosphere kept getting better. When we got to the end, with the chorus dying away behind me, and me hanging above them on the high F, it was something to hear, believe me it was. They broke out into a roar. It had been a program of modern music, most of it pretty scrappy and this was the first thing they had heard that really stuck to their ribs. I took two calls, had the chorus stand, came off, and they called me out again. Then Winston did something that's not done, and that he wouldn't have done for anybody on earth but me. He decided to repeat it.

A repeat is something you do mechanically, God knows why. You've done it once, you've scored with it, and the second time out you do it with your mouth, but your head has already gone home. I went through with it, got every laugh I had got before, coasted along without a hitch. I hit the E flat, the chorus was right with me. I hit the F, and my heart stopped. Hanging up there, over that chorus, was the priest of Acapulco, the guy in the church, singing down the storm, croaking high mass to make the face on the cross stop looking at him.

"Who is these man?"

We were in the cab going down, and it was like the whisper you hear from a coiled rattlesnake.

"What man?"

"I think you know, yes."

"I don't even know what you're talking about."

"You have been with a man."

"I've been with plenty of men. I see men all day long. Do I have to stay with you all the time? What the hell are you talking about?"

"I no speak of man you see all day long. I speak of man you love. Who is these man?"

"Oh, I'm a fairy, is that it?"

"Yes."

"Well, thanks. I didn't know that."

It was a warm night, but on account of the white tie I had to wear a coat. I had been hot as hell going up, but I wasn't hot now. I felt cold and shriveled inside. I watched the El posts going by on Third Avenue, and I could feel her there looking at me, looking at me with those hard black eyes that seemed to bore through me. We got out of the cab, and went on up to the apartment. I put the silk hat in a closet, put the coat in with it, lit a cigarette, tried to shake it off, how I felt. She just sat there on the edge of the table. She had on an evening dress we had got from one of the best shops in town, and the bullfighter's cape. Except for the look on her face, she was something out of a book.