27

The Joy of a Simple Song

Walking into Emily’s house was like stepping into a blast furnace. She wore her usual turtleneck with a heavy hand-knit cardigan. I’d always thought of her as being pudgy, but now I wondered if it was just that she always had so many layers of fabric on her.

You know how you read about people being at a loss for words? That sort of thing usually didn’t happen to me, but as Emily closed the door behind me I realized I had no clue what to say to her. So how are you doing now that your husband’s been murdered did not seem like a viable conversational gambit. Neither did I rolled my ghost up in a shawl this morning, but he’s standing beside you right now.

I kept my mouth shut.

“I’ll make us some hot chocolate, Peggy. Hang up your coat and come on back.” Emily headed toward the kitchen. “You were right, you know,” she said over her shoulder.

“Right? About what?” I stuffed my gloves in my pockets and snugged the shawl under the collar of my parka before I slipped out of it, wishing I had on a sundress instead of my usual heavy winter clothes. I started to head the way she’d gone, but at the last moment I remembered that Dirk would be stuck next to the coatrack if I didn’t take the shawl with me.

“I thank ye,” he said as I slipped it over one shoulder. There was no way I was going to wrap the thing around me in this heat.

“You told me hot chocolate would warm me up,” she said as Dirk and I stepped into the kitchen, “and it does in so many ways. I must have drunk a gallon of that stuff since Mark . . . Marcus . . . since I found out he was . . .” The sentence trailed away into a vacuum. “It’s not like being alone is a new experience. I’ve spent a lot of time by myself while Mark . . . Marcus is . . . was . . . off collecting all sorts of exotic bacteria.”

All her self-correcting was beginning to wear on my nerves. Couldn’t she just pick one name and stick to it?

“Even when he was teaching, he’d leave early so he could walk to work, no matter how rainy or cold the weather was. When we were first . . . together, I used to walk part of the way with him, but I haven’t done that in years.” She rotated the wooden spoon back and forth. “Yes. I’m used to being alone. He’s been going to South America for three or four weeks every summer for . . .” She reached for a pot on the back burner, then stopped and rested her hand against her chest. Her heart.

Oh, dear. She wasn’t having a heart attack, was she?

Apparently not. After a moment she resumed her broken sentence. “. . . for years. Those times, though, when he was gone, I always knew he’d be back eventually. I never doubted it for even a moment.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss.” It was trite; it was one of those standard comments, but it was the only thing I could think of to say.

She pulled the pot to the front of the stove. “Sit while I get this put together.”

“Can I help with anything?”

“Of course not. You just park yourself on that chair.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Are you okay, Emily?”

She nodded, but it didn’t look very convincing. “Mark used to say that very same thing when I’d come home and he’d be making dinner. If I offered to help, he’d say, Of course not. You just park yourself on that chair. Always those same words. It wasn’t that he didn’t want me working with him in the kitchen. It’s just that he loved to cook.” She drew herself up a little straighter. “So, now all I have left is the memory. Now, you go ahead and sit.”

Her kitchen table was painted a stunning lemony yellow. The four wooden chairs ringing it were equally bright. One was Wizard of Oz green. One was an intense blue, the kind that, when I saw it in a picture of the Mediterranean, I always thought the color had been photoshopped. The other two were a deep neon red and jack-o’-lantern orange. It looked like a congregation of M&M’s. All she was missing was the brown.

I chose the green chair and waited, since I didn’t know what to say. Emily’s kitchen was disturbingly silent. I usually hummed to myself—or talked to my ghost—when I was cooking, especially when I made hot chocolate, but Emily was silent. I wondered if it was always like this or if she was still stunned by her husband’s death.

Eventually she set two delicate china cups on the table. Their muted vine-and-leaf pattern looked rather blah compared with the brilliance of the table and chairs. She sat in the orange chair across from me and poured frothy chocolate from a teapot that matched the cups.

All her actions were deliberate, almost choreographed, as if she were restraining herself out of fear that she might explode.

These cups didn’t hold enough for more than a couple of good slugs. We sipped in silence. Dirk must have known what to say, doggone it. Why wasn’t he helping me out here? Eventually I gestured to the chairs. “You must like bright colors.” Dirk ran a finger along the back of the Mediterranean blue one. I wondered if blue was his favorite color. I’d have to ask him sometime.

“Bright colors.” She raised a hand to her throat, tugged at her turtleneck, and trailed a finger along the front of her neck. I saw a faint scar I’d never noticed before. At least, I thought it might be a scar. I wondered if that was why she always seemed to wear turtlenecks. Well, not always. Not in the summer. But, thinking back, I realized that each time I’d seen her in warm weather, she’d had a pretty scarf wound around her neck.

She was silent for so long I thought she might not have heard me ask about the colors. I was just about to make another inane comment when she spoke. “I’ve often wished I’d given Marcus a bright blue scarf instead of that light brown cashmere one. His favorite color was blue. He always sat in that blue chair. He used to hang his scarf over the back of it.” Her eyes became unfocused, like she was seeing something nobody else could. I wondered if I looked like that every time I glanced at Dirk. “I spilled some coffee on it once.”

“Coffee? On what?”

“On his scarf. It left a brown stain that even the cleaners couldn’t remove. But he refused to get rid of the scarf. I wish they could have found it. It wasn’t with his things.” She studied her cup. “All the color in my life used to come from music.”

I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t say anything else. Did she not want to talk about it? Only one way to find out. “Music? What do you mean?”

Instead of answering, she pushed her cup away, stood, and motioned me to follow her down a narrow hallway. We entered a room that must have been Dr. W’s private study. An old-fashioned record player stood on the far side of the room behind a tidy desk. Emily looked at the vinyl record already in place. It was one of those little ones, what my dad called a forty-five, but I wasn’t sure where the name came from. She turned a switch, setting the turntable spinning, and lifted the arm. She held it for several seconds. I could see that her hand shook.

Violins, cellos. I could identify some of the instruments, but quickly stopped trying and just listened to the glorious sounds, utterly transfixed by the voices. “The Flower Duet” from Lakmé had to be one of the loveliest, most haunting songs ever written for female voices.

After the song faded into that final ethereal chord, Emily lifted the record, tucked it into a paper record jacket lying nearby, and returned it to a shelf that held what looked like hundreds of other records. She leafed through them, chose another one, and placed it on the turntable.

Again, we listened in rapt silence. This time it was a solo voice and its power was almost palpable as the singer’s notes soared. “My Turandot,” she said when it ended.

“I know,” I said. “When I was growing up, our neighbor, before she died, used to play opera records all the time. In the summer, when her windows were open, I’d sit in my backyard and listen to them.” I leaned against Dr. Wantstring’s desk. “Eventually she noticed me listening and invited me inside. She taught me a lot, although I’m no expert by any means. Turandot was one of her favorites.”

She nodded, but it looked to me like her thoughts were elsewhere. I couldn’t think of a way to bring her back, so I just waited, wondering who’d recorded those two arias. I was fairly sure it was the same voice on each record. The quality of the records was too good to be Callas—all her recordings were fairly scratchy, even the remastered ones—so maybe it was Sutherland? Fontini? Nilsson? Someone pretty remarkable, that was for sure.

Tears glistened on Emily’s cheeks. Dirk stood beside her in spellbound silence. I had no idea he was an opera fanatic. Well, of course he wasn’t. Opera hadn’t been around in the fourteenth century. Had I really not listened to any opera in the five months I’d had Dirk hanging around? I looked again at his face. Transfixed. Okay. Maybe he’d forgive me for wrapping him up if I pulled out a bunch of my opera CDs when I got home.

He leaned a bit closer to Emily, as if to comfort her.

I’d certainly been moved by the music—it was absolutely glorious—but I was nowhere near crying. I must have missed something. Maybe these songs were ones she’d enjoyed listening to with her husband? But her reaction seemed overly dramatic, even for a new widow.

“Mistress Emily is sad.”

Of course she was sad. What did he expect me to do—answer him? I nodded. “What did you do before you and Dr. Wantstring married?” Why wasn’t she chattering the way she usually did? And why wasn’t Dirk helping me out here?

Her quick intake of breath was audible. She wiped a hand across her eyes and gestured to the record player.

I waited for her to answer me. Maybe she’d been one of those women, so common in her generation, who never worked for a living and didn’t want to admit it.

She must have seen the question still in my face. “The recordings,” she said.

“What would be reecordinks?”

I ignored Dirk. “Recordings?”

She led the way into her living room and motioned for me to sit on the blue couch. She waited for me to settle in before she said, “That was my voice.”

“That was you?”

“What was? Who was who?” Dirk couldn’t keep quiet.

“Don’t sound so surprised. I sang with the Met.”

“The Metropolitan Opera?”

“What would be—”

“You needn’t keep parroting me like that. I was singing with a smaller opera company when I met Marcus, but then a couple of years later, shortly after we married, I had a chance to audition at the Met and . . . and I was accepted.” She leaned forward over her coffee table. The surface was so highly polished I could see her reflection upside down. She moved a magazine about a quarter of an inch to the left. I couldn’t see that the repositioning made any appreciable improvement. It had looked tidy enough to start with. “Now,” she said, “the only music I have is on those recordings of my voice.” She gazed back down the hallway in the direction of Dr. Wantstring’s study. “The ones I just played for you were only two of the hundreds we have.”

All of a sudden all the pieces clicked into place. “The recordings. You? You were Emily Fontini, weren’t you? I mean, aren’t you? The Great Fontini?”

“What”—Dirk cleared his throat—“or who would be a fonteenee?”

“I don’t know about the great part, but yes, I was Fontini. The verb is past tense.” She grimaced. “That’s right. Past tense. I was Emily Fontini. I certainly did have my name up in lights for quite a while.” She tugged aside her turtleneck and fingered the scar on her throat.

I looked away from the pain in her face. She sounded exceptionally bitter, but I could see why, if she’d had a voice like that—and then had given it all up. But why? Why would she stop when she was so famous? “My neighbor,” I said, “the one who introduced me to opera, thought Fontini was even greater than Sutherland.”

Emily raised an eyebrow in a denial that I happened to see because I’d glanced quickly toward her. “No. Not at all. Joan was one of my idols. I was blessed to have been able to sing with her in three different productions, but I could never have surpassed her sublime quality.”

Good grief. This woman I’d been berating for so many months had been on a first-name basis with one of the greatest operatic sopranos of all time, and—no matter what she said—had had a voice as wonderful as Sutherland’s. Why hadn’t I been kinder? Grasping for something to say, I asked, “Were your children born after you, uh, retired from the Met?”

“What a delicate way of phrasing your question. The answer is no. I sang twelve seasons and Mark . . . took care of the boys.” She crossed her legs and leaned back against one of the many fat pillows scattered over the back of the couch. “He was so good with them.”

I wondered why they weren’t here with their mother.

“But then the cancer attacked my throat. With surgery and radiation, my larynx was so badly compromised I was never able to sing again.”

I glanced up at Dirk, who stood poised, towering over her from behind the yellow couch. His face held a quizzical expression, and I could almost hear the queries ringing inside his head. What would be a lairynks? What would be raydeeasion? He still had a very fourteenth-century way of thinking about spelling, as I’d found out when I’d had to spell various words for him. Why wasn’t he asking his usual questions? Not that I wanted him to, because there wasn’t a way in the world I could have answered him. But it wasn’t like him not to question something like this.

I needed to say something. I’m so sorry didn’t seem adequate, but I said it anyway.

She didn’t even acknowledge my words. Not that I blamed her. She hugged her sweater tighter around her, even though her house seemed to have gotten ten degrees warmer in the last few minutes.

“I’m so very sorry,” I said again. This time I truly meant it. “I’ve listened to your recordings for years and never realized . . .”

“We didn’t let many people know why I had to quit.” She crossed her legs the other way, braced an elbow on her knee, and propped her chin on a fist that was closed so tightly her knuckles turned white. “Throat cancer. I didn’t want pity. Especially not from anyone in my old life . . . my life at the opera.”

I didn’t know what to say. “I love your voice.”

She turned her face toward the window, away from me. “Not anymore, you don’t.”

Dirk had spent so much time telling me what to say and when to say it, and now when I needed his advice—all right, his bossy directions—he abandoned me.

I finally made my excuses, draped the shawl around the neck of my parka, and left.

Opening the car door and pausing long enough for Dirk to get inside had become almost second nature to me. I waited until I was at least a block away from Emily’s house so she wouldn’t see me apparently talking out loud to myself.

“You could have said something in there. You left me floundering.”

“Flowndring? What would be—”

“A flounder is a kind of fish,” I explained. “When it’s out of water, it can’t breathe, so it flops around, and I think that’s where the word came from.” Or maybe not. I was making this up as I went along.

From the corner of my eye I could see him shake his head, sadly, slowly, as if mourning the passing of a minor intellect. Mine. “I didna say anything when we were with Mistress Emily because I didna know what type o’ rare beastie that canser must ha’ been to attack her and tear at her throat in that way.”

“Huh? What do you . . . Oh, cancer. It’s not an animal. It’s a disease. Emily got very ill, very sick, and her throat was damaged by the illness. ‘Cancer’ is what the illness is called. It hits a lot of people nowadays. I imagine it does feel something like an attack.” Obviously it did, if she’d used that word to describe what it had done to her. Poor Emily.

He cleared his throat—unnecessarily, I thought—and proclaimed, “And ye say that my time was bad. We didna have such . . .”

For once he seemed to be at a loss for words.