A Chorus of Detectives Page 6

  But Scotti didn’t hear, caught up as he was in his perennial lament. He enjoyed his role of persistent suitor, Emmy thought, and he played it to the hilt. Emmy suddenly found herself thinking about another man. He was a man from whom she’d parted after a years-long affair, and the parting had not been amicable. Scotti knew about the affair, but it hadn’t seemed to occur to him that his lament about his own romantic misfortunes might be a source of pain to her. He would have done better to choose a different confidante.

  Scotti was off on a nostalgic journey now, remembering all the good times. Emmy tired of hearing of the perpetual wonderfulness of Geraldine Farrar and let her attention wander. They were in a large basement room. Someone had hung a few pictures on the brick walls and placed several overly optimistic potted ferns here and there about the place. The small tables and their uncomfortable chairs were shoved close together; at one end of the room was a Lilliputian bandstand, little more than a low platform. The place was only half full; it was early yet.

  Emmy was not comfortable there. She objected to having to break the law to get a drink; but ever since last year, when the United States of America in its infinite wisdom decided to make the consumption of alcoholic beverages illegal, these semi-hidden little speakeasies were the only answer. On a Saturday night the place would be packed. In a few hours three or four musicians would squeeze on to the tiny bandstand and start playing that ragtime or Dixieland or whatever they called it. Emmy could enjoy that kind of music for about ten minutes before she started getting bored; she couldn’t understand Rosa Ponselle’s enthusiasm for it. But then Rosa liked being different. Oh, yes. Rosa worked at being different.

  “All through her marriage I wait for her,” Scotti was complaining. “I marry no one! I wait for Gerry.” He broke off long enough to admire the shortness of the skirt a young woman was wearing. “She knows I am waiting.” He managed to establish eye contact with the young woman. “But does it make any difference to her? No!” A husky young man stepped in front of the woman and glared darkly at Scotti, who turned smoothly back to Emmy. “She has no heart, that woman.”

  “And yet you managed to survive somehow,” Emmy remarked dryly.

  “Eh, we must all bear our burdens as best we can,” he said with a long-suffering air. “But I grow no younger. And Gerry, she is no longer the early chicken.”

  “Early chicken? Do you mean early bird?”

  Scotti frowned in concentration. “Spring chicken, that is what I mean. It means no longer young, does it not?”

  “She’s not forty yet.”

  “Ah, but the day comes soon. It is time to settle down. For both of us.”

  Emmy consulted the lapel-pin watch she wore. “I must leave, Toto. I want to go to Brooklyn to hear Rico tonight.” That wasn’t true; Emmy was one of those who thought Elisir was not one of Caruso’s better operas, but she’d listened to Scotti’s complaints about Gerry as long as she could without becoming rude. “I must go home and change.”

  “And I,” Scotti said with sudden resolution, “I go to Gerry’s place and I wait. I meet this new lover face to face! I confront him!”

  And make a fool of yourself, no doubt, Emmy thought. The speakeasy was beginning to grow crowded; the two singers worked their way among the tables to the door. Outside, it had turned dark. Scotti’s limousine was less than a block away; he told the chauffeur to take Emmy home first and then drive him to West Seventy-fourth Street.

  A fine time to get a coughing fit, Enrico Caruso thought, fifteen minutes before curtain time. If only his side didn’t hurt so!

  “Let me call the doctor,” Dorothy begged. “You’re in no condition to go on!”

  He shook his head no and sprayed his throat generously, leaving enough liquid there for a good gargle. But even he became alarmed when he saw blood stains in the washbasin.

  “That does it,” Dorothy said firmly. “I’m calling the doctor!”

  “No, Doro, I cannot wait for doctor! Now is time to start! You go take your seat now—you do not wish to miss curtain!”

  Dorothy protested, but found herself gently shooed out of the Brooklyn Academy star dressing room. It was time to sing.

  Caruso’s throat hurt him. His side hurt. He was sweating. He got halfway through the first act of L’Elisir d’Amore without having to cough, but then when he did he looked down at scarlet flecks all over the front of his costume. He kept on singing, but he could feel the blood coming out of his mouth. He could see the first few rows of the audience staring at him, horrified.

  A movement offstage right caught his eye; someone was standing there waving a white towel. He sang his way over to the side, snatched the towel, and wiped his mouth. He kept the towel with him as he went on with his role, patting at his mouth in between phrases. Before long, the towel was thoroughly soaked and useless.

  Part of the scenery for Elisir was a well, placed in the exact center of the stage; that’s where Caruso decided to deposit his bloody towel. Unfortunately, the audience saw him do it. Unfortunately, he was still slobbering blood.

  A chorister nudged him and passed him a fresh towel. The chorus kept relaying towels to him all through the rest of the act.

  Scotti was surprised to find Gerry about to sit down to dinner with Pasquale Amato and Rosa Ponselle. What was this? The new lover was not here? “Where is he?” Scotti demanded.

  “Where is who?” Gerry asked.

  “Where is this man you spend the afternoon with?”

  “I am right here,” Amato said, puzzled.

  “You, Pasquale?”

  “He was helping me do some Christmas shopping,” Gerry said. “What are you carrying on about?”

  “Why you take Pasquale shopping and not me?”

  “Do not be stupido, Toto,” Amato whispered behind his hand.

  “Non capisco,” Scotti muttered. “What do you say?”

  Rosa was laughing. “I’d guess he’s telling you they were shopping for your present, Toto.”

  “Oh, do let’s change the subject.” Gerry sighed. “Toto, have you had your dinner?”

  Finally he caught on. “Cara mia!” he cried, and swept her up in a bear hug. “I think such terrible things! Can you forgive me? I am desolate! Forgive, forgive! No, I do not have dinner yet. You invite me?”

  Laughing, Gerry disengaged herself from his embrace. “I think I may invite us all to go out to dine.” She summoned the maid. “Will you ask the cook if she could possibly feed one more? I don’t suppose she can.”

  “Oh, there’s plenty of food,” the maid answered easily—and then blushed. “I made a mistake. I told her Mr. Caruso was coming tonight.”

  Gerry laughed again and asked her to set another place. The four singers sat down and actually managed to forget the troubles at the Metropolitan Opera for a while—until Rosa started talking about what the chorus had done to her that afternoon. Only this time she told it wonderingly instead of angrily, as if amazed at the depth of the mean-spiritedness the chorus had shown her.

  “They are changed,” Amato said, shaking his head. “They are not really a chorus anymore. They are many angry people who happen to be on the stage singing at same time.”

  “Anarchists,” Scotti muttered.

  “Oh, now the choristers are anarchists?” Gerry asked, amused. “But Pasquale is right. The chorus has changed.”

  “The Metropolitan itself is changed,” Scotti added sadly. “And Emmy—perhaps Emmy most of all. She is not simpatica as before.”

  “Try spending a war virtually locked up in your own house with armed Austrians watching every move you make and see how simpatico you are when it’s over,” Gerry said. “No wonder she’s changed—” She broke off suddenly, catching sight of Rosa drinking it all in, hoping for some gossip. “Besides,” Gerry finished, “can you name something in the world that has not changed?”

  The evening was well advanced by the time they’d finished dining, but no one seemed inclined to leave. Rosa tried to turn the talk back to
Emmy Destinn. “I know she’s had an unhappy love affair and she had a hard time during the war—”

  “Do you think it snows before morning?” Amato pointedly asked Scotti.

  “Sì, I think so,” he answered, wishing he’d never brought up Emmy’s name. She was still a friend. He walked over to a window. “Eh—it starts already! It snows now.”

  The maid came into the room. “Miss Farrar, telephone. It’s Mr. Gatti.” As Gerry passed her she whispered, “He sounds upset.”

  Dear God, not another ‘accident’. Gerry hurried away to the phone.

  “Why won’t you people talk about Emmy Destinn when I’m in the room?” Rosa complained crossly to the two men. “Is there some big dark secret about her?”

  “No, no secret, little one,” Scotti said kindly. “But Emmy, she does not have easy life during the war, and she does not wish to talk about it.”

  “But she’s not here, is she? Why won’t you talk about it?”

  Amato spoke up. “Because Emmy is lady we know for longer than you are alive, young Rosa.”

  Rosa made a self-mocking face. “None of my business, hm?”

  The two baritones smiled at her. Scotti glanced up to see Gerry standing frozen in the doorway. “Cielo! Do you see ghost, cara mia?”

  White-faced, Gerry stammered, “That, that was Gatti. Elisir … in Brooklyn—oh, it’s Rico! He started hemorrhaging. He was coughing up blood on the stage. It got so bad they had to stop the performance.”

  4

  Of all of Caruso’s friends, it was Scotti who was most visibly shaken by what had happened in Brooklyn. The others were stunned into a kind of paralysis; Scotti had burst into tears.

  According to what Gatti-Casazza told them the next day, Caruso had managed to finish the first act while filling up the stage well with bloody towels. Dorothy Caruso had called his doctor, whom she herself did not trust; he was waiting for the tenor in the dressing room by the time the act was finished. The physician who had cared for Caruso’s throat for most of his career was recently deceased; Dorothy did not believe his replacement was either conscientious enough or skilled enough to care for her husband properly.

  Her distrust was quickly justified. After a cursory examination, the doctor glibly announced that all the blood had come from a tiny burst vein in the tip of Caruso’s tongue—even though the tenor was so hoarse he could barely speak. The doctor pronounced him fit to continue singing; Caruso believed him and started getting ready for the second act.

  At that point the house manager took matters into his own hands. He went before the curtain and told the anxious audience that Caruso was ill but he was willing to continue if they wished him to. NO! they roared back, many of them in tears. Caruso had accepted their decision with relief. The rest of the performance was cancelled.

  The Sunday following the aborted Elisir performance the tenor spent resting his throat, not even speaking, pointing and waving his arms when he wanted something. Dorothy Caruso said, Please, no visitors; and the tenor’s worried friends honored her request. Caruso reclined in regal splendor on a chaise longue, surrounded by baskets of flowers, reading messages from well-wishers, eating ice cream.

  The next day he was ready to conquer the world.

  “I sing!” he told Gatti-Casazza over the phone. “You listen.” Caruso demonstrated he hadn’t lost any of his high notes.

  Gatti admitted the tenor sounded as good as ever. “What does the doctor say?”

  “Pah! What does he know? Doro is right, he is not good doctor. I tell you I sing now. Intendete?”

  “I hear. Do you find new doctor?”

  “I have many doctors, Mr. Gatti. Do not worry so.”

  “Still, more rest might be wise.” Gatti was torn; he wanted to get the tenor back on the stage as soon as possible—but not at the risk of losing him for the rest of the season. “Stay home, rest. Do not exert yourself.”

  “Stay home?” Caruso sounded insulted. “No, no, Mr. Gatti—I feel too good to stay home all the time! No, tonight I go hear the new tenor!”

  “Enrico—”

  “Everyone, they say I am afraid of him! They say that is why I do not go to his performances! So tonight I prove them wrong, yes?”

  Gatti argued with him for a while, but it was a lost cause. Caruso was determined to bounce back, and all the words of caution in the world weren’t going to stop him. He didn’t want to be sick, and that was that.

  It can be a mite disconcerting to see the man you’re trying to supplant stand up and applaud your efforts.

  Face frozen into a smile, Beniamino Gigli bowed as graciously as he could toward the artists’ box, where Enrico Caruso was pounding his hands together with enthusiasm. Everyone in the audience knew Caruso had risen from his sickbed to come hear Gigli sing, and most of them seemed to be paying more attention to the artists’ box than they were to the stage. Gigli felt his face would crack if he had to smile much longer.

  At last the applause began to die, and Gigli was able to escape. One more act.

  Backstage, a couple of the choristers sniggered as he hurried by; they thought it was funny, how Caruso had stolen his thunder without singing a note. Gigli sensed his face turning red as he rushed up the stairs to the star dressing room. He’d been haunted by the Neapolitan tenor throughout his whole career; even when the critics raved about his singing, they said things like Only Caruso could have sung it better. Caruso! To have to compete with his presence when he had a performance to concentrate on … it was too much. Besides, the big toe of his right foot hurt; one of the chorus singers had stepped on him.

  “Roberto!” he called. “Make haste!” Gigli’s valet had his fourth-act costume ready for him. Two costumes, actually. A simple black cloak was the first; it would cover the second, a fifteenth-century knight’s costume. Remove the cloak, and voilà! A costume change. The opera was Boïto’s Mefistofele, which had served as Gigli’s début vehicle at the Met only a few weeks earlier. Gigli had been quite happy with that choice until he learned that Gounod’s Faust would also be in the Metropolitan’s repertoire that season. Two operas about bargaining with the devil? Ridicolo. And all because that Farrar woman insisted on one role each year that she hadn’t sung the year before; Faust had been this year’s choice. If that was a fair example of the way Gatti-Casazza ran his opera house, there was going to be trouble ahead. Eh, well—the Viennese beauty Maria Jeritza would be joining the Metropolitan next year; they’d see how high and mighty la Farrar was then.

  The valet dressed the tenor without speaking; Roberto knew storm clouds when he saw them. Gigli was thinking ahead to the fourth act. The chorus would play a prominent part, but it was a women’s chorus. They might cross the stage while he was singing or do something else to distract the audience, but at least they wouldn’t be stepping on his toes. The corps de ballet would be on for part of the act, but the dancers never made trouble for him. Nor did the soloists. Nor the conductors. Nor the orchestra. Nor the stagehands.

  Only the chorus.

  Gigli exploded into a fit of cursing and looked around for something to break. Roberto quickly moved a flower-filled Limoges vase out of the way and handed the tenor a cherub-ornamented clock that was a pain to dust. Gigli hurled the clock against the dressing-room wall, where it shattered satisfyingly into a thousand pieces. But the tenor was still fuming. Here he was, after years of living in the shadow of Enrico Caruso, singing at the Metropolitan Opera at last—and he was spending all his time worrying about the chorus! Incredible.

  Time for Act IV.

  The first part of the act passed without incident. The chorus did nothing at all out of the ordinary; the women had evidently decided to leave him alone for the time being. Gigli forgot about them and poured his heart and soul into his performance. For the first time that evening, he felt like singing.

  Then, during a duet with the soprano singing Helen of Troy, the woman looked over his shoulder, widened her eyes, and screamed.

  Gigli whirled to see
a scenery flat come crashing down from the flies. Warned by the soprano’s scream, four of the chorus women jumped out of the way just in time. The orchestra couldn’t cover the sound of ripping canvas and splintering wood and a cry went up from the audience. Somebody was yelling. Somebody else closed the curtain.

  “Are you hurt, Mr. Gigli?” a voice asked.

  “No, no,” he said dismissively, already over his shock and beginning to grow angry.

  No one was hurt, as it turned out; the flat had come close but had not actually hit anyone. Within five minutes the debris of the shattered flat had been removed and a stagehand was sweeping splinters and nails from the stage floor. What little pleasure Gigli had been able to derive from that evening’s work was now gone forever. He gritted his teeth and determined to get through the rest of it somehow.

  He finished the fourth act and dashed off the stage. He donned a beard, a white wig, and a cloak to hide his knight’s costume. He went back on the stage. He sang the Epilogue. He bowed to the audience. He left the stage. He went up to his dressing room. He kicked a chair and broke it.

  And started his toe hurting again, the one the lead-footed chorister had stepped on. Deliberately. Gigli sat down on the dressing room’s remaining unbroken chair and philosophized about that for a while. What does it signify that a man should work all his life toward a single prize, and just as his fingers close around it—somebody steps on his toe?

  It was too much for him. He could understand the chorus’s badgering of Rosa Ponselle, in a way. She had not earned her starring-role status; she’d had it handed to her on a platter. She’d not spent her life learning languages, memorizing scores, practicing scales three hundred sixty-five days a year. She’d not experienced the rejections and the small humiliations that were part of every singer’s life. She had not suffered. The chorus was wrong to badger her—Ponselle had the true gift, after all—but he could understand why they did it.

  What he couldn’t understand was why the chorus was treating him the same way. He’d expected some resistance from the Caruso-lovers, but not to this extent! It was inexcusable. To think that a soloist at one of the major opera houses of the world should be subject to harassment by a gang of nameless musical thugs! And he could do nothing! He’d complained to the conductors, he’d complained to the chorus master, he’d complained to Gatti-Casazza, he’d complained to Gatti’s assistant.