Herma

by MacDonald Harris

  Then, finally, came the first transatlantic telegram—an offer of a part at the Lyric in London—a minor part, but one she knew perfectly. So, after a quick crossing in the Saxonia (tourist class—no bath and no mirror—Herma made the trip alone), there she was, warbling the Canzonetta at the drab English clerks and their pudding-colored wives.

  “Voi che sapete

  che cosa e amor,

  donne, vedete,

  s’io l’ho nel cor.”

  But by this time Fred knew better how to handle the critics, so that instead of offering to go to bed with Herma they accepted his invitation to dinner at Ciro’s, with brandy and a cigar afterward. He was learning his business, she had to admit that. The reviews spoke in passing—since she was not yet the prima donna—of the “California nightingale” who had trilled Cherubino so charmingly.

  Still, the Lyric, of course, was not yet Covent Garden. But then came other second leads, on the Continent, and in better and better houses—the San Carlo in Naples, the Châtelet in Paris, and even a bit part at the Opéra; the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, the Verdi Festival at Parma. It was at Parma, in fact, that there occurred the humiliating little incident that—turned inside out—was perhaps the beginning of the prima donna roles. The humiliating part was that she was obliged to do Flora in Traviata, while a plump local sexagenarian, got up to look like the Spanish Armada in full sail, sang the “Dite alla giovine” that she knew so well. If the thing turned inside out, it was that she at least had the satisfaction of reading the next day in the Corriere della Sera the no doubt deliberately ambiguous comment, “It is possibly the young American who ought to have done Violetta, and not the familiar Bellancini, of whom it must be said that the best she has to offer is behind.” Somehow this clipping must have winged its way like a bird across the Atlantic and found its way to New York, for it was only a month later that the fateful cablegram arrived:

  “OFFER TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS THREE PERFORMANCES MIMI APRIL REPLY SOONEST BECKWORTH.”

  And so on the Mauretania to New York—this time in a double first-class cabin with connecting bath, even though it cost a good part of the two thousand dollars she was to earn. Beckworth, who met her at the pier, was cordial but businesslike—when she thanked him for the launch in San Francisco, he pointed out that he had never paid her for singing Violetta the night of the earthquake and wrote her a check on the spot. And Caruso—a plump and easy-going Rodolfo who sang the part almost with his hands in his pockets, so to speak—treated her precisely as he treated all his opposite leads—helpfully, with courtesy, and absolutely without favoritism, as though she were someone he had sung a single performance with, a number of years ago—which of course was exactly the case. When Fred offered him a cigar he took it, and he treated Herma to a lunch at the Knickerbocker, all with perfect correctness, a Neapolitan charm which was totally professional and at the same time natural and sincere. And he never forgot a voice—he told her, “I hope, carina, that since San Francisco you have learned to sing la voix dans le masque.”

  It was Caruso himself, pushing aside the director, who drilled her in the pathos, the gentle poignancy, of the final duet with the orchestra playing the love theme softly behind it—“Have they gone? I pretended to be sleeping so that I could be with you. There is so much to say.” Mimì coughed and expired, much as in Traviata, even though in less elegant surroundings. And Caruso demonstrated again that most sexy of all sounds, a catch of emotion on a high note, in his last broken sob—“ Mimì! … Mimì! …” Herma, sitting on the rehearsal stool opposite told him, “Be careful. Don’t bring down the chandelier.” But he didn’t smile. Evidently the memory of San Francisco was not a joke for him.

  For the opening night, even though it was the tail of the season, the Golden Horseshoe was almost full with its usual brilliant audience of New York’s Four Hundred. Only Mrs. Astor’s box, the famous number seven, was empty—the Dowager Queen of New York society had died the year before. But all the others—the Vanderbilts and Drexels, the Iselins and Havens—were there, in their starched shirts and diamond stud-pins. And, as Herma waited in the wings for Rodolfo to finish his “Nei cieli bigi,” the stage manager whispered to her, “The composer is in the house.” Herma said nothing. She only smiled to herself, the composed little fixed smile she had learned from Madame Modjeska. The stage manager waited for the cue, then he raised his arm and pointed at her. Herma knocked on the scenery, or rather a stagehand knocked for her. Opening the prop door, she entered timidly into Rodolfo’s garret.

  Caruso took her hand. “Che gelida manina!” he sang soulfully, his brown eyes rolling. “Se la lasci riscaldar.”

  After the Fourth Act was over, after the applause and the curtain calls, after the Diamond Horseshoe was empty and the sweepers began knocking away on the stage with their brooms, an odd silence descended over the Met. The small intermittent sounds that came through the walls only made the building seem emptier. Herma sat before the mirror in her dressing room removing her makeup, or pretending to—in reality she was waiting. Outside the door there were voices, snatches of conversation, as singers in street clothes and musicians carrying their instruments made their way along the corridor toward the stage entrance. Yet she lingered. She knew somehow he would come. She took a towel and slowly wiped away the pale deathbed makeup from her face, then dipped her fingers in cold cream and began working it upward from her throat into her cheeks.

  Her dresser wanted to go home. “Your street dress, Miss?”

  “Not quite yet.”

  A touch of rouge. As Mama used to do—rubbing it in so there was really no trace of color left, only a faint pinkness left by the friction of the fingers. And a hint of color on the lips, with a tiny brush. She set her hands on her face, lifted her cheeks upward and backward, and gazed into the mirror with its frame of bright electric bulbs. There were two taps on the door.

  “Come in.”

  The door opened. A gentleman entered, not in evening dress but in a dark English sack suit with a neckcloth and pin in place of a cravat. Above this the turned-up points of a white collar were visible. He had a large head, a broad intelligent brow, and a calm, slightly skeptical manner. His mustache and hair were long but neatly trimmed. He had both hands in his pockets and a cigarette in his mouth.

  He closed the door, then he took out the cigarette and said in a heavy Italian accent, “Good evening. Pardon me to intrude. I am Puccini.”

  “Piacere.”

  “Ah. Parla italiano. Benissimo.” From then on they spoke Italian.

  “You sing well, Signorina, at least in a light part.”

  “Grazie tanto,” she said with an irony that was evidently not lost on him, to judge from his expression. She turned back to the mirror, took up the towel again, and began carefully wiping her forehead along the hairline.

  “Is it true you can ride a horse?”

  “A horse!” She laughed. “Of course.”

  “Have your manager come to me. Signor Ee-tay. I understand that he handles all your affairs. I am staying at the Waldorf.”

  “Very well.”

  “Shall we say ten?”

  “D’accordo. Alle dieci.”

  “Buona sera, signorina. A nice Mimì. Not perhaps the finest Mimì I have ever heard, but perfectly adequate. For an American,” he added as he politely closed the door.

  In the room at the Waldorf, one end of which was dominated by a grand piano with some manuscript paper strewn about on it, he wore the same dark-gray suit and white collar, and his shoes were immaculately polished. He smoked incessantly, lighting a new cigarette from the last half inch of the other before he crushed it out. The saucer by the keyboard of the piano was overflowing with stubs. He got up from the piano, took the cigarette out of his mouth, and examined Fred from across the room.

  “Parliamo italiano. Bene?”

  “Bene.”

  They went on in Italian. Fred’s accent was not as good as Herma’s, but he made fewer mistakes in gramma
r.

  “This little girl of yours …” Puccini began. He used the word fanciulla, a rather poetic term, which might almost be translated “maiden.”

  Fred didn’t care for the way the conversation was starting. He said nothing and waited for him to go on.

  “Rico says she is the only soprano he knows who can ride a horse.”

  “Ride a horse? Altro! She’s a regular cowgirl.”

  “What is needed is a soprano, not a cowgirl. But she has to ride a horse.”

  “Onstage?”

  “Please don’t rush me, young man.”

  Puccini paused again, and seemed to study him for a moment before he went on. He drew at the cigarette and then removed it.

  “Have you seen Belasco’s play The Girl of the Golden West?”

  “No. I never go to the theater.”

  “I first saw it a number of years ago, in 1907. I came to America to see three plays of Belasco—The Music Master, The Rose of Rancho, and The Girl of the Golden West. The Girl of the Golden West is a beautiful play. It moved me very much. It is like a Sicilian drama of passion and betrayal—an American Cavalleria Rusticana. You know, the great American opera has not yet been written. And we are tired of waiting for some American to write it.”

  Finding some ashes on the elegant gray waistcoat, he stopped and brushed them away meticulously. “Excuse me,” he explained with an air of genuine concern, “this suit was made in London.” He went on. “It is like an American Cavalleria Rusticana, except that with the immensity of the land, of the setting, the theme is enlarged from the merely pathetic—even though I have a great respect for my friend Mascagni—to the tragic.”

  “Melodramatic, perhaps. It ends happily.”

  “I thought you said that you had not seen it.”

  “All American stories end happily.”

  “Ah, vero? Then perhaps this is why you do not have an opera. You will notice that I always kill my heroines. Manon, Cio-Cio-San, Mimì. Verdi does the same. The mark of a second-rate composer, like Leoncavallo or Mascagni, is that he kills his heroes instead of his heroines.”

  He stopped, lit a new cigarette from the old one, and crushed out the stub.

  “The great West of your country interests me. I have never been West, but I have read so much about it, I feel I know it thoroughly. It is a grandiose setting, a setting fit for a great work of art. In 1907 I bought the musical rights of The Girl of the Golden West from Belasco. Now”—he pointed to the littered piano—“I am working on a draft of it, from a libretto prepared for me by Zangarini in Italy.” He puffed at the cigarette and sat down at the piano as though he were about to play. Then he got up again. He strode about the room restlessly.

  “I am fed up with these frail heroines and their cose piccole, their little things. Manon, Boheme, Butterfly and company. Ce ne sono stufo. I want now a drama of love against a vast and dark background of primitive characters and untrammeled nature. Not an American Cavalleria but an American Tosca, with a heroine to match the great mountains of the West. Could she strike a man to the heart with a knife, do you think, this sopranino of yours?” He took up a letter opener from the table and stabbed an imaginary Scarpia.

  “Ecco il bacio della Tosca!”

  he sang in a warm and not unskillful baritone, with a deep note of passion. “That is a heroine. Could she do that, your little soprano?”

  “On stage at least,” said Fred a little nervously. “She has sung Tosca, in Naples. And she’s not a sopranino, by the way. She can sing mezzo if necessary, and also go to F in alto.”

  “Benissimo. Let us call her the fanciulla, then. La Fanciulla del West. Have her come and we will go over a little music together. Can she come this afternoon, do you think?”

  “Of course.”

  “Unless,” Puccini added quickly, with a concerned air of wishing to be correct in everything, “she is afraid of being in a room alone with me.”

  “Not unless you are afraid of being in a room alone with her.”

  Puccini smiled, politely.

  In the afternoon he was dressed in exactly the same way—perhaps it was the only suit he had brought to America—except that for some reason he had added a hat, an immaculate pearl-gray fedora. The fastidiousness of his person was in sharp contrast to the confusion and disorder of the hotel room. Containers full of crushed-out cigarettes stood about everywhere; some of the stubs had fallen onto the carpet. The remains of a room- service lunch were resting on the floor in a tray. The piano, with its lid down, was covered with manuscript sheets, in places piled three or four deep. Some of these too had slipped off onto the emerald-green plush carpet.

  “Eccomi,” said Herma.

  Walking about nervously with his cigarette, puffing it now and then, he examined her.

  “You are very slim and slight, my dear. Are you sure you get enough to eat?”

  “It’s because of the lemons. I have five lemons for breakfast, ten more for lunch, and I shampoo my hair with lemons. Everything is lemons. That is the secret of my voice,” she told him with a perfectly straight face.

  “Ah, vero?” He lifted his eyebrows. “Well, in any case both Rico and your manager Signor Ee-tay assure me you can ride a horse, so evidently you are strong enough for that. Signor Ee-tay says you are a veritable cowgirl.”

  “I’m a singer, as a matter of fact. It so happens that I can also ride a horse.”

  “That is exactly the way I put it to him. The singing is first.” He ruffled through the heap of manuscript papers on the piano, dropping cigarette ashes all over them. “The heroine, Minnie, is the girl of the camp. However,” he added quickly, “she is quite pure. She falls in love with a bandit named Johnson. A fine fellow really.”

  “I had a real Aunt Minnie. She was a pioneer. She crossed the plains in a wagon and fought the Indians.”

  “Ah,” said Puccini.” Then it’s a real western name?”

  “She was born in Naples. Her name was really Gelsomina.”

  “Ah, così.” He seemed a little disappointed, or bemused. Plainly he had to do with a queer creature here. “Well, try this, will you. It’s only a draft.”

  He finally found what he was looking for and sat down at the piano with it. Herma looked at the manuscript over his shoulder. It was scrawled over with totally illegible hieroglyphics, the notes huddling together in places like frightened sparrows, at other places soaring off across the page, the lines falling and rising like a sea in storm. The whole manuscript was covered with erasures, ink spots, and smudges from the composer’s lunch. The notations seemed to be in a totally unknown language, perhaps Egyptian. One phrase she could make out; a line was crossed out angrily and “merda!” written above it. There were no indications as to who was to sing what.

  “This is Minnie’s song from the First Act.” He set his fingers on the keys and played a few bars. “La, di turn turn turn. Poesia!” he roared in a heavy baritone. “That’s your cue by Rance, the villain. Then you start in with ‘Laggiù nel Soledad.”’

  She tried it, while he stared at her face rather than at the music which he knew by heart.

  “Laggiù nel Soledad, ero piccina,

  Avevo una stanzuccia affumicata,”

  and so on. When she came to the “merda!” scrawled above the line she sang it, in place of the “bella” which was crossed out below. “Mamma era merda, aveva un bel piedino.”

  He stopped. “Are you playing tricks on me?”

  “Well, I can’t read your writing.”

  “I don’t understand American humor. I believe I have a sense of humor, but the American sense of humor is different. It says, ‘Mamma was beautiful and had a pretty foot.’ Never mind the merda.”

  She went through it again. It was a nice little song, ending with a certain touching emotion as it soared up to its high C in the last couplet:

  “Si amavan tanto!… Anch’io vorrei

  Trovare un uomo: e certo l’amerei.”

  He had nothing much to say. He lit anot
her cigarette and crushed out the old one. He said “Va bene,” which was not exactly “That’s fine,” but simply, “All right, let’s go on.”

  He ruffled through the piles of manuscript looking for something else. “Later in Act One there’s your ‘I’m only a povera fanciulla’ song. I can’t find it. Never mind. Later, toward the end, Johnson has an aria in which he tells them, ‘Let her believe I am free and far away. Don’t tell her how I died.’ They’re about to hang him. I haven’t written that yet. I’m still in the second act. They don’t hang him, however, because Minnie comes in galloping on her horse and saves him. She says, ‘All you boys love me, and think of all I’ve done for you, so don’t hang him, but let us go off and start a new life.’ I haven’t written that either. All we have here is a few rough notes. Try this.”

  He found another sheet and propped it on the piano.

  Herma stared at it. “I can’t read it. Is that an A flat in alto?”

  “No, that is a piece of anchovy.” He brushed it away. “This is the duet of Minnie and Johnson, their farewell to the miners before they leave for their new life. It’s still very rough. I haven’t really written it yet. I’m not sure whether it should be keyed in E flat or in E. Can you sing up to the B natural?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, try it then. This draft is in E flat. You’ll have to transpose up a half note. Farewell beloved country, farewell my Nevada, mountains of my Sierra, addio!”

  “But the gold fields are not in Nevada.”

  “Ah vero? Ma dove sono allora?”

  “They’re in California, of course.”

  “I’ll have to write to Zangarini.”

  She took the sheet from the piano and tried to make out the chicken scratches. Seizing the pen, she crossed out “Nevada” and wrote in “California.”

  “Ahimè, an extra syllable,” he complained. “I have to put in a note.”

  “Well, I would think a great composer could put in one little note.”