The thought of the Countess made Octavia’s heart lurch with panic. She wrapped herself in a bathrobe and went back into the bedroom, determined to make a clean breast of it all, to tell him everything and accept the consequences.
But the bed was empty. Massimo was gone.
Opera in America suffered between the world wars, and with it, Hélène Singher’s career. Audiences wanted the forgetful antics of speakeasies or vaudeville, not the challenging music of the opera. Nightclubs sprouted during the Great Depression, where those who could afford it went to drink and listen to big bands play hit tunes. To complicate things, Hélène Singher, who should have been growing older along with her colleagues, looked no older than in those difficult days of Caruso’s Carmen.
Hélène suggested to Ugo that she return to Europe to begin a new career, but he told her that disaster was brewing there. An oddly malevolent figure had risen to power in Germany, where there were more opera houses even than in Italy.
“It wouldn’t be possible now to make a big career without singing in Germany,” he told her. “And the elders tell me this man’s strength is increasing every day.”
“Are they helping him? La Società?”
Ugo nodded, his face grim. “Many of their acolytes are members of his secret police. They say he’s interested, too. Endless life is a hard prospect to resist.”
“It’s not truly endless.”
“No.” He was leaning against the window frame of their suite in the restored Palace Hotel, staring down into the busy streets of San Francisco. “No, but sometimes it seems like it.”
“I will never understand,” she said darkly, “why God would allow such things.”
He turned his face to her without moving his body. “Hélène. Why torment yourself? It’s not God who allows it.”
She shook her head, tired of the old argument. “If we can’t go to Europe, then where shall we go? I can’t stay here.”
“I know. Someone asked me just the other day to tell them again where you made your début—and when.”
“What did you say?”
He gave her a narrow, distracted smile. “The usual. The obscure French town, then a contract in New York, and I’m always vague about the year. But they remember Carmen, because of the earthquake. And you don’t look a day older than you did then.” He straightened and turned his back on the street scene. He was quiet for a time before he asked, “What would you think about Melbourne?”
“Melbourne? Where Nellie Melba was from?”
“That’s it. Australia.”
“I thought there was no opera there. That she went to France because there was nothing in Melbourne.”
“That was then.” He crossed to the desk and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. As he unfolded it, it crackled, shedding bits of paper on the glass top of the desk. He smoothed it with his fingers before he handed it to her. “See? Melbourne has an opera house. There’s talk of one in Sydney, too, and there are touring companies.”
Hélène took the stiff paper in her hands, and scanned it. “Touring, Ugo? Do you think we can manage—that is, that you can manage—touring in such a wild place?”
He said, a little sourly, “According to our Zdenka, I can.”
She made an unhappy gesture. “But do you want to? Maybe I should just stop singing for a while. A long while.”
He came to her and sat down in the little armchair opposite her chaise. Gently, he took the flyer and laid it aside, then put his hands on hers. “It was twenty-five years between Teresa and Hélène. I can’t imagine how you tolerated that, all alone, no colleagues, no work…. Do you want to be idle another twenty-five?”
She shook her head.
“And I don’t want you to go through that again.” He released her hands. “I think Hélène should develop some illness—rheumatoid arthritis, possibly, or senility.”
“Senility! No, Ugo!”
He laughed. “All right, no senility. But something that requires her to retire.” He touched her cheek with one finger. “A nice sea voyage sounds nice, doesn’t it? And no one from America is singing in Australia these days, except for tours. They all go to Europe.”
“I’ll need a new name.”
“I know. And a different accent.”
She laughed. “I’m getting awfully good at accents!”
“Yes. It helps to have plenty of time.”
Melbourne seemed a rough-and-ready place after the sophistication of San Francisco and New York. The Depression had hit the city hard. Its population had swelled in recent years with Greeks and Italians pouring in to fill the Victorian terrace houses. But nearly a third of the workforce had lost their jobs, and with them, their homes.
Ugo had no trouble finding a pretty apartment in the center of the city. It felt strange to take someone’s home, someone who might now be standing in soup lines and begging for handouts, but it was lovely to have a place of their own. The mood in Melbourne was troubled, with politicians ranting on street corners and charities struggling to meet the demands on them. It was an odd time, in which the wealthy lived in comfort while the poor—whose numbers seemed to be growing every day—struggled just to eat.
Ugo and the new singer, Vivian Anderson, scoured the newspapers and collected playbills, searching for theater companies. On the ship from San Francisco they had developed the new persona. Vivian now had a history, a slender résumé, and conservatory credentials. Three months after her arrival in Australia, Ugo arranged her first audition at Her Majesty’s Theatre on Exhibition Street, the theater where Nellie Melba had sung Violetta and Gilda and Mimi nearly thirty years before.
Vivian chose her dress carefully, a flared skirt with a fitted bodice and open collar. She brushed her hair back and tied it with a loose ribbon beneath a small dish hat. She was an expert now at auditioning, both at choosing her repertoire and at presenting herself well to an audience of no more than two or three. At Her Majesty’s Theatre she sang arias of Susanna and Cherubino, selections suitable for a very young soprano. She offered the director a short list of credits, mostly conservatory productions and one or two musical theater parts in obscure Canadian cities. The director of the theater hired her on the spot.
With Ugo’s help, Vivian had a much easier time building her career than had Hélène. Besides Her Majesty’s Theatre, she sang recitals in Brisbane and Canberra and Sydney. She sang oratorios with regional orchestras and added several musical theater parts to her repertoire. She was asked several times to sing at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne, but somehow she and Ugo always found a conflict in her schedule, and her refusals seemed not to attract much notice.
They moved to a more spacious apartment, with a lovely veranda overlooking the Yarra River. Ugo bought a two-year-old 1937 LaSalle. Both of them wore better clothes, and on nights Vivian wasn’t singing they drove out in the LaSalle to restaurants and nightclubs. They were delighted when the director of the theater decided to stage Così fan tutte as part of the city’s festivities for Christmas 1939. He engaged Vivian to sing Fiordiligi, and he brought in a young conductor from Canberra who was just beginning his own career.
But halfway through the rehearsal period, the conductor broke his contract and enlisted in the military. Australia had declared war with Germany in September. The news from Europe was even worse than Ugo had predicted. The German houses were playing nothing but Wagner. Only the largest Italian companies were able to keep up their performances. Rumors abounded, and Jews and Gypsies were already fleeing Germany and Austria.
The cast of Così gathered on the stage of Her Majesty’s Theatre to hear their director address the crisis. Ugo lounged in the front row of seats with the stage manager and the lighting designer, all of them waiting to hear what conductor would replace the one who had gone to be a soldier.
When the name was announced, the cast and crew applauded. The director went on speaking, detailing how they would manage rehearsals until the new conductor arrived from America, but Vivian heard non
e of it. She fled the stage the moment she could and found Ugo waiting for her just outside the stage door. The December day was hot and windy, with what looked to be a thunderstorm building in the north.
She said, “Ugo! What are we—” but he hushed her with a finger to his lips. He took her arm and led her around the corner to where the LaSalle was parked. Not until they were inside and driving toward their apartment did he speak.
“There’s nothing for it,” he said. “We’ll just have to go.”
“Oh, Ugo! All this work wasted!”
Keeping one hand on the big wheel of the automobile, he put out his free hand to take hers. “There’s no choice, Vivian. I’m sorry.”
With sinking heart, she stared out the window of the car at the Yarra spilling alongside the roadway. “I like being Vivian,” she said. She knew she sounded petulant, but she couldn’t help it. “And I wanted to sing Fiordiligi.”
“I know, bella,” Ugo said gently. “I know you did.”
“Now I have to begin again, start all over. How long? How long until I can sing again?”
He shook his head. “It will be a long time, I think.”
They were just pulling up in front of their building when she cried, “The pictures!”
In the act of opening the door, he turned back. “Pictures?”
“In the lobby! The theater put up photographs of every cast member.”
“Not in costume?”
“Ugo, we don’t have costumes yet. It’s a new production. The pictures are in street clothes—mine is a very nice little suit with that silly blue hat. He’s bound to recognize me.”
Ugo turned the door handle and climbed out of the car. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “We’ll make a list of things we need to do.”
They talked through the afternoon, while thunder shook the windows and the fierce Australian summer rain rattled on the roof.
The conductor coming to Her Majesty’s Theatre was one Hélène knew. She had sung under his baton twice in San Francisco, when he had been a man of thirty-five or so. It had never occurred to either Vivian or Ugo that a man of seventy would take a ship across the Pacific in wartime to conduct Mozart in Melbourne, Australia. But evidently he would, and he was, and it meant the end of Vivian Anderson’s brief and promising career.
“We’ll wait,” Ugo said at length. He stood beside the window, watching raindrops slide down the glass. And then, with a laugh, “Maybe his ship will sink.”
Vivian poured herself a glass of water and came to stand beside him, looking down at the Yarra. It churned energetically between its banks, enlivened by the rainstorm. “A little harsh for all those passengers, don’t you think?”
“Darling,” Ugo said, “conscience at this late date?”
“I don’t think we can put our hopes on a sunken ship, Ugo.”
“No. And besides, why waste all that nice sangue on the fishes?”
“Ugo.” She shook her head. “Not something to joke about.”
“Just trying to make you smile,” he said.
“How long do you want to wait?”
“The voyage should take a week. That will give us time to pack a few things, choose a place to go. Sell the car.”
“Sell it? Why don’t we drive it away?”
“Carissima,” Ugo said in a dry tone. He sighed and turned his back on the view to lean against the window frame. “License plates and so forth. Really, we can’t take anything but our clothes and whatever cash we can round up.”
“Oh, Ugo. All this lovely furniture—and the car? All of it?” She gestured at the grand piano they had recently acquired. Her Così score was open on the scrolled music stand.
“Yes. All. We’ll just have to walk away.” And at her expression of despair, he put his fingers under her chin. “I’ve done it before,” he said. “And so have you.”
“Only twice. Teresa went into retirement in respectable fashion. Hélène gave a proper announcement to the papers that she was going into a nursing home. This—this will have everyone talking!” She leaned forward to watch the water swirl below the veranda. The idea of starting over again, when her new career had just begun, made her feel unbearably weary. “Where will we go, Ugo? I can’t go back to San Francisco.”
“No. I think you’re in for a long holiday.”
Vivian straightened and walked to the piano. With reluctant fingers, she closed the score and laid it aside. “I don’t like holidays. I like working.”
Ugo said, “You’ll have to carry on with rehearsals this week, just as if nothing’s changed.”
“I know.”
“I’ll slip in the night before we leave and lift those photographs.”
“Take them all, so it’s not obvious,” she said.
“Of course.” He walked to the carved armoire they used as a coat closet, taking out his overcoat and hat, a nice fedora he had bought in Sydney. He lifted his umbrella from the stand beside the door.
“Where are you going?” Vivian asked.
He put on the fedora, checking its tilt in the armoire’s mirrored door. All softness had disappeared from his face when he turned to her. His eyes glinted darkly beneath the brim of the fedora. “Stocking up,” he said briefly.
“Oh.” She went back to the window, drawn to the constant movement of the water. She heard the door click shut behind him. She sighed, tracing the pattern of raindrops on the glass with an idle finger.
She had not used the tooth since before the earthquake. Ugo had set her free. She knew nothing of his network of suppliers. Occasionally she roused herself to ask, but he always refused to tell her. And it had been such a relief, after the long years of Teresa’s life, and then Hélène’s struggles, to surrender. To not have to go out into the streets and alleys—to be cared for instead, protected, even indulged—it was a gift she had never expected and could not have anticipated. Not since leaving Limone sul Garda, so many years before, had she experienced such tranquillity.
In the early days after the earthquake, she had asked Ugo why he should do this for her, what his gain could be.
He had smiled. “Even such as I can be lonely,” he said. “And then—there is the music.”
And now that she was in danger of being exposed, he turned his astounding abilities to the problem without complaint and without hesitation. Vivian pressed her hand against the window, feeling the condensation build beneath her palm. Not since Vincenzo had befriended her, a seventeen-year-old girl alone in Milan, had there been a person she could truly consider a friend. And Ugo, whose nature was as conflicted as hers, was even better than a friend. He was a companion, a brother, closer than she imagined a spouse could be, though he would have laughed to hear her say it. Every time he went out into the city in search of what he needed, she worried until he returned. Every time he administered her infusion, eliminating her own need to hunt in the streets, her gratitude was intense.
Teresa, and certainly Hélène, would have taken this setback with resignation. But when she became Vivian, she became someone different. She was more vulnerable, less resilient. She had grown soft. Her disappointment over the loss of Vivian’s persona grieved her out of all proportion.
She turned from the window with a little exclamation of disgust at her own weakness and started for the bedroom to begin to pack her things. Ugo would think of someplace for them to go, and he would no doubt have contacts there as well. There was nothing for it, and no other choice. They would simply have to begin at the beginning.
The day before the replacement conductor for Così fan tutte arrived in Melbourne, the soprano Vivian Anderson vanished from the city. Her assistant, well known to her colleagues, disappeared with her. Police found all of their belongings in the large apartment they shared on the banks of the Yarra River. Their two-year-old LaSalle automobile was still parked behind the building. The police found no clues at all as to their whereabouts. The newspapers proclaimed the production of Così fan tutte to be cursed, losing first its conductor and then one
of its stars. In a mysterious coincidence, a set of photographs of the entire cast of the opera had been stolen from a display in the theater lobby. The purpose of this theft no one could imagine.
For several days reporters hung about the theater and Vivian Anderson’s apartment. They talked to everyone who had known the two missing persons. The maid only came in during the day. The assistant had paid cash for the LaSalle. The apartment owner cleaned it out, finding no papers, no address book, nothing to link the singer to relatives or business associates. No one had heard anything, no one suspected anything. The most popular theory was that, somehow, both had been drowned in the Yarra, their bodies washed out to sea. For a week, the papers talked of nothing else.
But the war was going badly, and Australian forces were being deployed. The story of the singer who disappeared was submerged by accounts of battles and munitions. There were rumors of a Japanese invasion, and talk of the Americans coming into the war. Soon another soprano was found to sing Fiordiligi, and the story of Vivian Anderson was forgotten.
But Vivian and Ugo knew that her colleagues at Her Majesty’s Theatre would not forget.
Rôles were too hard to win for singers to simply walk away from them. She would not be able to show her face in Australia—or perhaps in any opera house anywhere—for a very long time.
31
Par che la sorte mi secondi.
It seems that fortune is on my side.
—Don Giovanni, Act One, Scene One, Don Giovanni
Domenico opened the English Times, which he had delivered with his breakfast each morning. He rarely bothered with much beyond the art pages. He had little interest in the current wars, or the state of American politics, or the wrangling of the United Nations. He flipped through to Arts & Entertainment and smoothed the pages beside his plate. He took a sip of coffee and ran his finger down the page, looking for something that would appeal to him.
He found it almost immediately.
The Times and several other papers had been following the current La Scala production with some energy, mostly because of the up-and-coming American soprano, Octavia Voss. Her reviews in New York and Paris had been raves, and now, even in Milan, she was being received with gushing enthusiasm. Domenico thought it was all over the top, a sort of hysteria, just because she was young and attractive. He read the articles anyway, though they made him grind his teeth in irritation.
Mozart’s Blood Page 30
