Starry-Eyed (10 page)

If there'd been a third Kilcommons daughter, she'd have played the fiddle no doubt, or maybe the flute, but after I was born, my mum declined to bear any more talent for Niall's unpaid employ. Instead she took up with a biker fellow with fearsome tattoos wrapped about both arms. His name is George and he's swarthy. Of Greek extraction, and therefore statuesque (that's a joke of my own making, but George is certainly well muscled in the classical style, not that I've noticed). He works construction and is a quiet type. By quiet I don't mean shy, or mumbling, or weak. George is anything but weak. But he's not a talker. He just gets up and does the thing. No preamble. No excuses. Can you imagine? The silence of George must have been a blessed relief for Mum, after all those years of listening to Niall talk about Niall.

Needless to say, there's not one drop of Irish blood in George's brawny, swarthy, nonloquacious physique. He has thick, blunt fingers, strong and reliable. Too thick to dance along the neck of a fiddle like pale fluttering birds, the way Niall's do. But his arms are strong enough to lift a tired woman's life into an easier place. So I can't blame her one bit, really.

. . . . .

The room is thick with smoke by now, and somebody's rigging up a microphone to the amp. I catch a glimpse of myself in an open spot on the hazy mirror on the back wall, my reflection slivered in between a poster for the Irish Rugby Football Union and a list of the day's specials. My father's
daughter? Sure, I guess there's a resemblance. He's got curly dark hair shot with wires of gray, uncombable. A broad pale face, like mine, and milky blue eyes capped by high, dark eyebrows that give him a look of perpetual happy surprise. Maybe that's why everyone likes him at first glance. He always looks glad to see you. Don't be fooled. It's just the eyebrows.

People are always crazy about Niall when they meet him. Then they get to know him a bit, and they like him well enough. After a few years they grit their teeth. Full-on abandonment comes soon after, sure as a hangover follows a binge, but it doesn't matter. He's always collecting new followers. Niall looks soft, like a pushover, a sentimental sap even, the way he caresses his fiddle and cries like a baby at an old song, but he's steely at the core. All right, he's a proper bastard sometimes.

He calls it being demanding. He's “demanding” of me and Evelyn, and of his students, and his women, and himself too, I suppose. Says high expectations are the only true compliment. Says it's the only way to achieve greatness. I used to think he was a hero, a grand whatever-it-is. Visionary. But you can't fool me, not anymore. Mean is mean, there's no need to tie a bow on it and call it something respectable.

. . . . .

“‘Danny Boy'! ‘Danny Boy'!” They're like vultures on a carcass, this crowd. Evelyn comes behind me and puts her hands on my shoulders. She smells minty, like she always does. It's an occupational hazard.

“Leave Fiona be,” Evelyn scolds the table. “She has school tomorrow. She needs to go home and to bed.”

A roar of protest.

“Just one song, love, before you go. It's Niall's birthday! Comes but once a year!”

“She'll wreck her voice singing in all this din, trying to be heard over your craic.” Evelyn smiles her disturbingly white smile, but she's dead serious. (The smile's another occupational hazard; her boss gives her free
bleachings so he won't have to pay her fair wages.) Always bossing me around, that Evie, ever since our mum moved to Tampa with George. His Mediterranean blood craved the heat, he'd said. Poor, fair, freckled Mum. She must keep the sunscreen companies in business down there. “Leave her be, I say.”

“Sing one for Niall. Do, Fiona!”

I look at the man, my father dear, who seems completely indifferent about whether I sing, go home, or do a striptease on the bar.

Evelyn gives it her last, best shot. “Don't be selfish, now. She's to sing for a famous teacher tomorrow. She shouldn't even be here, out so late. She's supposed to be home resting her voice.”

Supposed to be?
Supposed
to be? Well, sorry, Evie, but that's all I need to hear. I get up and head for the makeshift stage, and the cheers start all over again.

I take the microphone in my hand. And Niall grins so everyone can see his paternal pride, and he laughs too loud and drapes his arm around a girl not much older than Evelyn, Terry, I think her name is, and she looks at him adoringly and they kiss with beery lips while I sing. Can't refuse a fellow on his birthday, right? Poor Terry. Her song of love is just beginning, and it'll be over before the second verse.

. . . . .

I sing until the wee hours, you might say, meaning I sing until I have to wee. Only my bladder gets me offstage. I'm underage, of course, but no one tosses Niall Kilcommons's daughter out of the private party room at Kelly Ryan's pub on the man's own birthday. Or looks askance when she pours herself a drink from the beer pitcher, either.

I sing everything everyone asks for, and more. “Danny Boy,” oh boy, did they hear “Danny Boy.” Four or five times, at least. Me and songs is like my uncle Frank and a pint. Should've stopped at two, but I didn't.

Niall keeps up the jolly act for the first song, and the second. On the
third his face locks up into a mask. The smile is frozen in place, but his mind has gone elsewhere. And why isn't it him with the microphone, anyway? Him in the spotlight, instead of me? That's his natural position in life. Just ask him, he'll tell you.

. . . . .

By the time Evie drags me home, my hair stinks of pub and my voice is a rasp. I sleep in my makeup, too lazy to wash up. In the morning, I scrub my raccoon face in the shower and emerge in a girlish cloud of Herbal Essences. I didn't dare try to make a sound, even in the soothing steam of the shower. I knew I'd done myself in.

I get to school a bit late, just in time to hear the bells of doom tolling. My best friend, Lily, looks at me with big wild eyes as I slip into my seat. She's the type who'd show up to vocal technique class twenty minutes early on the day the great Sabrina Krause was coming. She's the type who'd have risen at 6 a.m. to warm up at home, in case she got picked by the great, famous Sabrina Krause to do a demonstration. She's the type to be punctual, prepared, and in good voice, on the day the great, famous, world-renowned soprano Sabrina Krause was coming to our snooty, private, hard-to-get-into performing arts high school to give the voice majors a master class, which is all we'd heard about, over and over and over again, for three Sabrina Krause—obsessed weeks.

Me, I am not the same type that Lily is. Obviously. And I don't just mean that her family pays and I'm on scholarship, although knowing this fact makes the epic scale of my stupidity all the more clear.

“Dammit, Fee!” Her whisper's so sharp, it's like a poke in the ribs. “How could you forget?”

I give her my best “hey, I'm a jerk” shrug. Still daren't speak. Anyway, Mr. Scharf, head of the vocal studies department, is about to introduce the woman of the hour. Doubtless his knees are trembling in his trousers (well, something in his trousers is trembling, I bet) to stand so close to the
twinkling aura of greatness.

“. . . made her debut at La Scala . . . starred at the Metropolitan Opera . . . recordings . . . concerts . . . Grammy Awards . . .” Blah blah blah, she's famous and we're not, we get it. And then: “It is an astounding privilege for us here at the Professional Academy for the Performing Arts to welcome the one and only, the
legendary
Sabrina Krause.”

“Legendary? I thought she was mythical,” I wisecrack to Lily, or try to, but my voice is a small dry pea stuck to the back of my throat. I'm left making jokes in my own head. The
manticore
, Sabrina Krause. The
griffin
, Sabrina Krause! Mythical creatures, see? I think it's hilarious. Poor Lily doesn't know what she's missing.

Everybody claps, and the unicorn Sabrina Krause herself takes the stage. Tall, straight as a ladder-back chair, with about as much meat on her bones. Carries a cane but doesn't seem to lean on it much. Probably uses it for delivering beatings, I say to myself, wittily. It's truly a shame Lily can't hear what's in my brain. She'd be in stitches.

The minotaur Sabrina Krause nods in slow motion and sits her skinny arse on the piano bench. No words of intro from her, she's all business. We stand up, and she runs us through vocal warm-ups. We
bzzz
, we
brrr
, we
nyah nyah nyah
.

Well, everyone else
bzzzs
and
brrrs
. I just make the faces. My throat's too raw to produce any sound. I feel like one of those fire-eaters at the circus—an incompetent one, the kind who sets her own throat on fire and has be doused with a hose in front of all the terrified children. Sorry about that, kids!

Scharf takes the mic again. “As you know, Miss Krause has opted to teach demonstration lessons, rather than give a lecture. In the interests of being fair, I am simply going to pull names out of a hat.” He smiles as he holds up a big straw boater left over from last year's production of
The Music Man
. “Don't worry, you're all in here,” he says, and reaches in.

I stare at the hat with all my might, trying to make it ignite with the pure force of my eyeballs. A name is drawn, a paper unfurls.

“Fiona Kilcommons, to the stage, please.”

All those “Danny Boys,” yet the luck of the Irish was nowhere near. I'm halfway to the stage before I think of appendicitis. Appendicitis! Brilliant. First I'll double over, then groan, then collapse, then vomit, then they'll call an ambulance. . . .

Too late. I'm already on the stage, grinning like a dolt and trying not to catch Lily's horrified eye. Krause plays a simple arpeggio, one measly octave, right in the sirloin of my range. “On the syllable
nay
, please,” she says. “
Nay-nay-nay-nay-nay-nay-nay
. Ready?”

I nod. She begins to play. I open my mouth. Out comes a hoarse croak, full of phlegm. Then a few tight, pitchy
nays
and a top note that's mostly air, until it cracks completely.

Her hands fly up as if the piano keys have suddenly turned into snakes. “Horrible, horrible! What have you done to your voice? Are you sick?”

“Not—ahem—not exactly.” I sound like a man. Crap.

She tips her head and peers at me over her glasses. Cute frames, I think. Expensive-looking. Little sparkly bits in the corners.

“You were yelling at a rock concert, hmm?” She sneers. “Or a football game?”

“No, ma'am. I sang at a party last night. It was my father's birthday,” I add, like that'll help.

She waves a hand, signaling that I'm no longer worthy of her disdain. “Sit down. You cannot sing today.” She swivels sideways on the piano bench and looks at Mr. Scharf. “May I have another student, please? This time, one that isn't broken?”

Scharf's face turns red at that little zinger. The man's having a hot flash of shame thanks to me. “Of course, Miss Krause.” Hastily he pulls another name from the hat. “Anthony Rutigliano,” he calls out.

Our resident Italian tenor jumps to his feet, both hands in the air. Did he really just double fist pump getting picked to sing? The lameness has no limit.

As he bounds up the stairs to the stage, the succubus Krause gives me a hard look. Then she bows her head to the keyboard and plays a rapid two-octave scale that drips with sarcasm. My exit music, I guess.

. . . . .

For the rest of the day, no one dares look me in the eye, since we all know humiliation is contagious. Now it's half past two. I'm almost out the door of the school. Almost. So close to being out—

“Fiona!” Mr. Scharf bellows. He's right there by the exit. No escape.

I slink over, and he hands me a folded note. Thick ivory paper, big “Krause” at the top in flowing script.

I read. “‘Send the broken singer to my studio. Saturday morning, nine o'clock.'” The address is written below. Central Park West. Fancy.

“You're going,” he says.

“Nine o'clock on Saturday is kind of early.” No way am I facing the dragon in her lair. She hates me. She probably wants to kill me with that cane, and use the polished shards of my bones to add more sparkles to her eyeglass frames.

“Consider it a mandatory make-up class for the one you blew off today by being unprepared.” Then, with a different kind of heat in his voice, “What an opportunity, Fiona! Sabrina Krause
asked
for you. You have to go. If you don't . . .” He doesn't need to say it. We both know he'll flunk me in a heartbeat, scholarship or no scholarship. The threat hangs in the air like a rancid fart.

I mumble yes, I'll go, and shove the note with the address in the pocket of my jeans. The “broken singer”? That's just mean. Mean mean mean.

And then,
crap
, I think.
If Niall finds out about this
. . . Auditioning for the private performing arts school had been my idea. Niall was firmly opposed. He didn't think I'd fit in, he said. Didn't want me mixing with the privileged. It'd just piss me off, or fill my head with longing for things I'd likely never have. “An artist's life is not about luxury,” he'd said to me, weirdly earnest. “We've already lost Evelyn to the money-making world. But music is your calling, Fee! Real music, from the heart, for good working people who crave a bit of beauty in their lives.”