I once broke a blood vessel in my mouth singing opera. I had had a huge molar extracted, had gone to work the following day, and just as I was putting on my coat to go home, I heard that one of my coworkers was going to hear The Magic Flute that night at the Met. To give him a sample of the great music he was about to hear, I started singing the big “Queen of the Night” aria. At the end of a coloratura passage, I hit a note so high all the dogs being walked in Washington Square Park two blocks away must have jumped. All of a sudden, something popped like a bubble gum where the tooth had been pulled out. My mouth was full of blood. I ran into the bathroom and stuck some paper towel on the wound thinking, no sweat, it’ll stop. Since I lived only six blocks from the office, I waited to get home before I checked my mouth again. The moment I removed the wad of paper the blood started gushing. Somewhat alarmed, I stuck more paper towels between my teeth and went in search of a dentist in the neighborhood. I rang a lot of bells, but since it was Friday night no one came to my aid. Then I did something very peculiar. I went to the movies with my mouth clenched hard, figuring, I’m no bleeder, this is bound to stop sooner or later. I saw High Sierra with Bogart and Ida Lupino, which I had never seen before. I always liked her soulful, intelligent acting and she had me captivated. After the show, I went home, removed the wad, and the blood filled my mouth again. Now I was really scared. I put a fresh wad in and caught a taxi. It took me to the New York University Hospital, but for some reason which I now forget, they couldn’t take me. With my mouth closed I could not argue, so I took their advice and set off for the Bellevue Hospital, which was only a few blocks away. However, I had forgotten to ask in which direction. First Avenue was dark and empty, so I could see myself being mugged to top off a perfect evening. Somehow I got to the emergency room where they took my name and told me to take a seat. The waiting room was packed with people stricken with various emergencies. There were at least two pregnant women in labor pains, a young fellow with blood on his face, and dozens of others looking equally miserable. I was there for hours, or so it seemed, before I saw the doctor. He put in a couple of stitches and that was that. I was so overwhelmed with gratitude, and not knowing how to repay them at that moment, I grabbed and kissed the nurse’s hand on the way out.
Come to think of it, in our family we were always getting in trouble on account of singing. In the late 1950s and early 1960s my uncle Boris and I went often to the opera. At the old Met on Fortieth Street standing room tickets were sold an hour before the performance. There’d be a long line because they cost only a dollar, but if you came early enough you usually got in. The amazing thing about it was that once you were inside you stood next to some of the best seats in the house, brushing shoulders with men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns. Boris was a tall, balding fellow, an aspiring tenor who had quit a high-paying job in a trucking company to take lessons from an ex-voice teacher from the Juilliard School of Music. He was extremely opinionated about every aspect of the performance and put on quite a show himself. Like other standees, we tried to position ourselves as close as possible to the stage, then if someone did not turn up or left early we’d take their seats. The only problem was that every time the lead tenor struck up an aria, Boris sang along. Sotto voce, or so he imagined, but lots of people heard him and tried to quiet him down. He protested loudly. He was merely demonstrating to me how the role was supposed to be sung and he didn’t care to be interrupted. A couple of times an usher was summoned. Once the wife of one of the tenors singing who happened to be sitting close by came over to argue with Boris about the merits of her husband’s performance. The opera was in progress, the short, bowlegged tenor and the hefty diva were swearing eternal love on the stage, and that woman in the audience was about to punch Boris. On another occasion, he was so annoyed with the tenor in Cavalleria Rusticana that he made a move to climb on the stage and show the poor fool and the whole house what grand opera was supposed to be like. Boris had a voice to wake up the dead, everyone agreed. Unfortunately, he had a bad ear, which his friends and family kept secret from him. After the opera was over, he sang in the street and on the subway on the way home. I recall the astonished faces of sleepy passengers on some downtown local opening their eyes wide to find in their midst Andrea Chénier himself, the great French Romantic poet and innocent victim of revolutionary justice dying on the guillotine and singing with his last breath:
Come un bel di di maggio
che con bacio di vento
e carezza di raggio
si spegne in firmamento,
col bacio io d’una rima,
carezza di poesia,
salgo l’estrema cima
dell’esistenza mia.
It didn’t help that I kept laughing while Chénier told everyone between sobs how, kissed by rhyme and caressed by poetry, he climbed the final peak of his existence. Who let these two lunatics loose? the grumpy passengers asked themselves as they exchanged glances.
My mother, too, liked to give impromptu performances in public. She had studied singing in Paris with a famous voice teacher, had taught singing for many years in a Belgrade conservatory and then in Chicago. In her old age, she told every stranger she met the story of her life, interspersed with vocal accompaniment. Short and stocky, armed with an umbrella, she’d stand in line at the dry cleaners and belt out an aria. She would do the same in a supermarket or in a dentist’s waiting room. It embarrassed the hell out of me. Like her father, the much-decorated First World War hero, she was a lifelong hypochondriac who made almost nightly trips in an ambulance to the hospital where she entertained the emergency room staff with her vast repertoire. She had a small, well-trained voice that stayed youthful even into her eighties. Finally, some tone-deaf doctor got fed up with her and sent her to a psychiatrist. She broke into song there too. Eventually, I received a phone call from the shrink who begged me to come by and give him some basic information about my mother because he couldn’t make heads or tails of what she was saying when she was not singing. Mozart was the love of her life, so what she gave him were genuine bel canto renditions in original Italian with many hand-gestures and eye rolls. I’m Zerlina, she would say, batting her eyelashes. Don’t waste your time, I told the psychiatrist when I saw him. He was a young fellow and determined to get to the bottom of her imaginary maladies, or so he assured me. No sooner had we started rummaging in her dark closets than we heard my mother’s voice in the waiting room. That afternoon she was the countess in The Marriage of Figaro:
Porgi amor, qualche ristoro
Al mio duolo, a’ miei sospir!
“What is she saying?” the shrink pressed me.
“I think it means, Grant, O love, some sweet elixir to heal my pain, to soothe my sighs,” I told him. And that was the last I ever saw or heard of him.
Did my mother like the way Boris sang? Of course not. Her favorite singer in the family was my father. The two of them had met in a music school when they were in their early twenties. After graduation, they gave a recital together, sang lieder, old Italian art songs, and operatic arias. My father never sang professionally, only when he had too much to drink. He’d sit with a wineglass in his hand and start off softly. He was a handsome man with a pretty tenor voice and he knew how to deliver a song and make the lyrics vivid and poignant. I never heard anybody complain about him. He had the most incredible musical ear I ever encountered. He could harmonize with the hum of the refrigerator. Give him Johnny Cash or Billie Holiday on the radio and he’d immediately find a way to fit in. Otherwise he didn’t try to show off. Now and then, at the end of a fine meal in a restaurant, he couldn’t resist it, but he’d make it intimate, just for you and him and perhaps for that beautiful woman sitting alone at the next table.
Given that kind of competition, I never opened my mouth in public except for that one time, although I know lots of songs and arias. Once in a while in the shower, I’ll sing Otello’s “Esultate” or Figaro’s “Se vuol ballare, signor contino,” and then I remember Boris and my parents and stop right there with the soap stinging my eyes.
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From the Harvard Review (Fall, 2003).