Herma

by MacDonald Harris

  He looked at her questioning, waiting.

  “Your porcelains? All your fine things?”

  He looked down and found a flake of gray ash clinging to the silk of his tunic, and flicked it away with his fingernail. It settled to the ground and disintegrated into dust as it touched the pavement.

  “Poof.” He smiled. “Everything is gone. All the things of this world are cobwebs. A breath can destroy them. Every person of wisdom knows that.”

  “And what else is there?”

  “Nothing.”

  “And what will become of you now?” she asked.

  “Once I had nothing. Now once again I have nothing. That is not important,” he told her. “What is important is that a promise I made to you I will now not be able to keep.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I will not be able to marry you. Because now I have nothing. My house, my riches, my fine things, everything that I had to offer you is gone. I am like these other gentlemen, sitting in the sunshine, passing their time in talking about nothing while waiting to die.”

  Herma didn’t explain that she had never intended to hold him to any promise of the sort he described. This wasn’t the time to go into that, perhaps. She thought for a moment.

  “Do you have friends? Isn’t there someone …”

  “There are the members of my Tong. We are loyal to one another. But they have nothing either, so now we are alike.” Here he turned away from her and looked down at the old men sitting in the square. “When all have nothing, it is not so hard to bear. And perhaps they will build another Chinatown. But that,” he added, “will be after my time.”

  Then he turned toward her again. “I have said that I have nothing, dear child. But that is not quite true. I have an inestimable treasure. It is the treasure of what you have given me. A foreigner, and an old man who had ceased to hope for the love of a woman. That memory is more precious to me than all my porcelains.”

  He still did not quite look at her directly. Sitting on the blackened stone wall with his arms folded, he stared at the square before him, at the knots of dusty old gentlemen in their conversations, then at the hill falling away and the Bay beyond.

  Herma stood up. Mr. Ming seemed not to notice. When he said nothing, and did not move, she knelt in the ashes, bent forward, and touched her lips to his forehead. Then, reaching into her cloak, she took out the gold coins and slipped them into his pocket. He seemed about to remonstrate; he turned his head toward her and began to lift his hand. She hurried away up the street, without looking back, before he could follow her.

  Turning left on Dupont, Herma went on down the hill through the blackened and leveled remains of the Chinese quarter. There was almost nobody on the street. Here and there a Chinese was scraping in the heaps of cinders, looking for some scrap of treasure in his ruined house. At the corner of California, under the blackened wall of Old St. Mary’s, a Chinese boy came up the sidewalk toward her. He was neat and clean, dressed in blue trousers and a tunic she recognized as that of a telegraph boy.

  “Missy Helma?”

  “Yes.”

  “Missa Beck Wat, he send launch along you.”

  “Mr. Beckworth has sent a launch for me?”

  He nodded.

  She studied him for a moment. He seemed an intelligent boy, calm and with great self-possession. He spoke only when necessary, when she asked him a question.

  “But who are you?”

  “One time I job boy Nine Stolly House.”

  “You used to work at the Palace Hotel.”

  He nodded. “But Nine Stolly House he fall down. Now I job boy teleglaph office, chop chop message in all place city. Teleglaph he fall down,” he went on to explain. “Then fella put him up again. Now message come from all place to teleglaph office.”

  “The wires have been repaired, and now telegrams can be received again.”

  He nodded.

  “Where is the launch?”

  “Long watta. You come me, I take you.”

  He set off through the city, at not too fast a pace so that she could follow him. At Sacramento he turned left, going on down the street through the half-wrecked banks and office buildings of the financial district. During this journey, which took a half an hour or more, he spoke only once. As though a thought had occurred to him, he turned to her and asked curiously, “You flend Missa Ming?”

  She smiled at him for a moment. Then she said, “Yes.”

  He had nothing more to say. They went down Sacramento and came out presently at the waterfront. Here he turned left again and led her a little way down the Embarcadero. At the same wharf where Caruso and the others had left only four days before—it seemed like an eternity—a launch was waiting. Perhaps it was even the same launch, although Herma wasn’t sure. It had the same tall, spindly funnel, and the boatman was the one she seemed to remember.

  “Miss Herma?” he called up.

  “Where’s yer bags?”

  “I haven’t got any.”

  “Well git in then.”

  She turned back to the boy and felt down into the pocket of her cloak. It was empty. After a moment’s thought she reached up and unpinned the brooch at the shoulder of her dress, silver and green with its tiny design set in enamel.

  She held it out to him. “Please take this?”

  He shook his head. “Missa Beck Wat, he pay.”

  Finally she persuaded him to take it. He looked at it, noting the tiny scarlet fruit with its pair of green leaves, the details almost too fine to make out without a magnifying lens, and said without a trace of expression, “Stlawbelly.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s mine. I want you to have it.”

  He didn’t say anything to this. He didn’t thank her. He just stood there holding it somewhat awkwardly in his hand, since there didn’t seem to be any pockets in the uniform he was wearing.

  Herma, still in her gown by Worth of Paris and her velvet cloak, clambered down a rude wooden ladder into the launch. She took her seat at the stern, exactly where Madame Moellendorf had placed herself four days before. The boatman, ignoring her, busied himself casting off the lines.

  “I haven’t got any money,” she told him.

  He said nothing for a moment. Then, without turning his head, he said laconically, “Don’t need any. ’Tsall paid.”

  Then he went to the small pilot house and pushed open the throttle. The engine began chugging slowly, there was a thrashing under the stern, and the launch turned in a curve and headed out into the Bay. The wharf dwindled away astern with the Chinese boy still standing on it. In only a few minutes the city was receding in the distance and they were out on the open waters of the Bay, calm and yellowish green, with only a slight ripple here and there where the wind ruffled the surface. It was almost noon and warmer now, and the sunlight baked down on the tin roof of the launch. A plume of brownish smoke, filtering from the top of the funnel, was caught by the breeze and drifted on ahead of the launch across the Bay. In the clear sunlit air the Oakland Hills were virginal and green in the distance. Beyond them lay the great capitals of the world with their museums and monuments, their theaters and opera houses, the cities of marble and gold she had dreamed of in her secret reveries and seen only in books. Da capo, ma piú forte! After the childish awakenings in Santa Ana, after the triumph and exaltation, the suffering and smoky visions of San Francisco, the third great chapter of her life opened before her. Where’s yer bags, the boatman had asked her. She had nothing, not even a coin in her pocket. Everything was ahead, everything was new. What was behind was only a web of ephemeral shadows, like the blackened city dwindling away on the insubstantial shimmering surface of the Bay. She felt wonderfully free and light, powerful and capable of anything, as though she could fly, or convert herself into a thousand Ariel shapes to enchant the princes and monarchs of the world. She chanted to herself under her breath.

  “Si. Mi chiamano Mimì,

  Ma il mio nome e Herma.”

  With a
final glance at the tower of the Ferry Building behind her, standing like a Venetian campanile in the greenish water, she turned her face to the East.

  III. PARIS

  1.

  And now here she is—it has all happened, just as Mrs. Opdike and Madame Modjeska had prophesied years before—although neither, perhaps, would have imagined the degree of her triumph or the uniqueness of this precise moment that seems to hang, infinitely prolonged, like a drop of water about to fall into some limpid and virginal reflecting pool. She stands in the wings of the Opéra in Paris, waiting for her entrance cue. And it is she who is the prima donna, or rather—and this is the uniqueness of it—she is to sing all three of the leading roles in this complicated pageant of Offenbach which everyone, or almost everyone, said could never in the world be sung by the same soprano. Now she is Herma, but in a moment she will become, one after the other, the three heroines of the Tales of Hoffmann. The first is easy: Olympia is only an automaton, a mechanical doll that poet Hoffmann falls in love with because he is deluded by some magical spectacles. Giulietta, the second, is a little more demanding: a Venetian courtesan as cynical as she is enticing, who steals Hoffmann’s mirror-reflection under the orders of her sinister master, the magician Dappertutto. And then Antonia, a German maiden for whom to sing is death—driven by her love for Hoffmann, she sings, and dies. And the musical demands of the three parts too are formidable: the first role a tinkly and mechanical coloratura, the second a richer, more intricate lyric part with passages as demanding as the “Dite alla giovine” of Traviata, the third the most complex of all, beginning with a simple art song and ending in a dramatic, almost Wagnerian love-death sung in duet with the ghost of the mother. To do these three things in a single evening is like playing concertos successively on the violin, the piano, and the bassoon. Now all Paris, that most exacting and cynical of audiences, sits out there in the great crimson and gold auditorium, waiting to see if she can do it. She is confident. She glances out at the lighted stage and remembers: Herma can do any thing that she wants.

  She smiles to herself at her doll-like Olympia costume: a short satin skirt with a crinoline and lacy knickers, a bodice covered with large jeweled butterflies, and an improbable golden wig in rolls like German sausages. Bright red lip rouge, two red circles pasted on her cheeks, and false eyebrows of black wire. To top it all, a little golden crown no larger than a teacup. Around her the chorus stands in various negligent attitudes, waiting for their own entrance which will come a little before hers. To her right are the stagehands keeping an eye on the curtain ropes, and high overhead the scene-shifters, in shirt-sleeves, stand looking down from their posts among the pulleys and winches.

  Out on the stage, which is set as an opulently furnished scientist’s studio, Hoffmann is in the middle of his love song “Ah! laisse éclore ton âme.” He has already become enamoured of Olympia in his glimpse of her through the window, not realizing that she is only a mechanical doll. Hoffmann is sung by Wladislaw Czermak, known to everyone from the Director down to the stagehands as Vladi, a veteran workhorse of the Opéra who perhaps doesn’t resemble a young German poet very much, but is capable of singing everything from Siegfried to Rodolfo, has a repertory of thirty roles, and never makes a mistake.

  Chaliapin appears and introduces himself to Hoffmann in his powerful basso.

  “Je me nomme Coppelius,

  un ami de Monsieur Spalanzani …”

  He empties out a sack of magic eyeglasses and offers to sell Hoffmann any that he likes. Putting on a pair—they are three ducats—Hoffmann raises a hanging and looks out into the wings, catching sight of the fair Olympia and deluded by the magic glasses into believing that she is real. “Chère ange!” he cries in anguish. “Est-ce bien toi?” (Herma makes a face at him in an effort to make him smile, but to no avail; Vladi is an old hand at such tricks.) Now the chorus, shepherded by an overworked and sweating chorus master, pushes out through the drapes onto the brilliantly lighted stage, leaving Herma alone in the wings. They begin their minuet, while Herma gives a last touch to her sausage-curls and presses the red circles on her cheeks to be sure they are going to stick. The stage manager, watching Spalanzani and Hoffmann, has his hands raised ready to point to her for her cue.

  Then the moment comes, the drop falls at last into the waiting pool, and Herma circles out onto the stage in a stiff little pirouette. In his quavering buffo Spalanzani announces, “Mesdames et messieurs, je vous presente ma fille Olympia.”

  A great “Ahhhh!” arises from the chorus of guests on the stage. Still turning, Herma can see nothing. Then, the pirouette ends with a flash of the skirt, she sees before her the great gilded auditorium with its mass of faces—the men in black with white shirtfronts, the ladies in white or pastel—all pointed toward her like upturned flowers. The spectacle is dazzling, even though she can see it only imperfectly over the glare of the footlights. The five tiers of boxes in the ornate Italian manner seem carved of pure gold, heavy with statues, caryatids, and intricately worked friezes. The brilliance of this gilt contrasts luxuriously with the deep wine color, almost a purple, of the velvet hangings and upholstery. The flowerlike faces follow her as she moves across the stage, pirouettes again, and comes to a stiff and graceful little stop facing the orchestra.

  So far she has sung nothing. But now a harp is dragged onstage, Spalanzani sits down at it, and—wound up by the servant Cochenille—the Doll does her little trick. Hoffmann stands entranced, watching her through the spectacles provided by the evil Coppelius—for in opera all basso parts are villains. The Doll Song, in truth, doesn’t amount to much and could almost be sung by a real mechanical doll, except that the trick is precisely to appear to be mechanical and yet at the same time, somehow, human and charming. She trills it out lightly and jerkingly, to the harp continuo.

  “Les ois-eaux-dans-la-char-mille,

  Dans-les-cieux-l’astre-du-jour,

  Tout-parle-à-la-jeune-fille

  Tout-parle-à-la-jeune fille

  D’a-mour!”

  It is a classic coloratura aria in the high register, a frail vibrato waltz. There is a faint note of parody, even when Olympia is singing it properly, but this effect is easy enough too, since Herma privately believes it is a rather silly piece. When Olympia’s spring begins to wind down she falls into an exaggerated tremolo in head voice, on the edge of the comic. “A-a-a-h … a-a-a-h …”

  Cochenille, unseen by Hoffman, dexterously winds up the spring in her back. Out of the corner of her eye she sees the prop man, in the wings, spinning a watchman’s rattle to make the mechanical creak. Now she again attacks the trills, the succession of little Pekinese-like yips, with her old vitality.

  “Ah! voi-là-la-chan-son-gen-til-le,

  la-chanson-d’Olympia, d’Olympia!”

  Building higher and higher in the rapid cadenza of trills, she rises finally to B flat, but sinks like a wounded bird as the spring weakens again. “Ah. Oh. Oooooh …”

  After being wound up once more by the agile Cochenille, she lilts her way with ease through the rest of it—“voi-là-la-chan-son-mig-non-ne” and so on. Hoffmann is still entranced. The stagehands have stopped what they are doing and are watching from the wings. Even the audience seems a little bewitched; they are perfectly motionless and silent—intent. Probably they are just hoping for her to crack a note. Parisians! The cruelest public in the world, if they catch you in a single weakness, a single false trick. The devil with them! All she has to do is sing the part. In the final coda of trills she goes up to the C, then the E flat in alto, before falling in a long graceful swoop to the A flat four notes below—even that a needle in the chest for some sopranos. The high E flat is perfect—flutelike and effortless, exactly on pitch, held for a long and excruciating moment before the precisely controlled drop to the tonic.

  Applause. But it doesn’t last for long, the orchestra resumes, Hoffman sings his “Ah! Mon ami! Quelle accent!” and he and Nicklausse exchange their little recitative over the last
rattle of clapping. The harp is dragged away and the chorus streams offstage to the waiting supper. It’s over. She has done it. Herma, from Santa Ana, has sung a lead aria at the Opéra, before a première audience of the cream of Paris society. The act goes on; she is seated on a divan, and Hoffmann sings his little serenade (“How many things I have to say to you, O my Olympia, let me admire you”). She has nothing to sing now, except an inane “Oui oui” at intervals, which she can do while thinking of something else—especially since the part calls for her to show no expression and simply to gaze into the air with a vacant smile. She feels a triumph—behind the vacant smile there is a real one, which fills her whole body like the warm and fulgent grace that is left after love. Brava Herma!

  So this—a lead in the Paris Opéra—is the pinnacle, most would agree, although some would contend that musically speaking La Scala is a touch above Paris, or even perhaps the Staatsoper in Vienna. But for the French repertory—and Offenbach is French of the French, in spite of his slightly comic Rhenish name—no soprano can be said to have arrived until she has stood on this stage, facing out onto the five tiers of gilded boxes, and bent this exacting, jaded, and malicious audience to her will with a perfect performance. Herma had never lost her confidence—she had always known she could do it, even if others had doubted now and then. Yet it had not been easy to arrive at where she was at this instant. To sing Tosca, or the three parts of the Tales of Hoffmann, years of study and hard work were necessary—years of squalor and disappointment, of singing coaches hired with a dollar scraped together here and a dollar there, of bad parts in pickup touring companies, of newspaper critics who offered in shabby dressing rooms to go to bed with her in shabby hotels they knew just down the street. “Fred!” she wrote in the note she stuck into the mirror in Cincinnati. “Get that lizard off my back or I’ll scratch out his eyes.” And Fred, overworked, scrawled back, “What am I supposed to do, go to bed with him myself?”