The only song my father, who could not sing, sang was one he learned while he was in the French Foreign Legion. He sang it with his fellow legionnaires as he marched in North Africa during World War II. The brisk pace and repetitive lyrics roused his spirits and helped him endure the oppressive heat of the Sahara Desert.
Auprès de ma blonde,
Qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon.
Auprès de ma blonde,
Qu’il fait bon dormir
Later, my father claimed that his time in the Foreign Legion was one of the happiest in his life. He reminisced about drinking the cheap yet good Algerian wine and his friendship with Josephine Baker—a lifelong one, as it turned out—whose lover was also a legionnaire. Later, too, when he tried to sing “Auprès de Ma Blonde” to my mother, who was in fact blonde and beautiful, she did not pay the song or my father much attention.
Briefly, when I was seven years old and living in Paris—a gray Paris, suffering the deprivations and food shortages that resulted from the war—twice a week I had piano lessons. I don’t remember very much about those lessons except that I learned how to play the scales and read a little music because soon, my teacher, whose name I long ago forgot, in her blunt French way told my parents that they were wasting their money and, she, her time. Instead, the person I remember best from that period was the one-armed elevator man at the Hotel Raphaël, where my parents and I were staying temporarily, whom my parents had engaged to walk me to school every morning. Maurice was a thin, dignified, gentle man who had lost an arm in the First World War and who always wore his high-collared, gold trimmed, hotel uniform, the empty sleeve neatly tucked inside the pocket. As we walked together down avenue Kléber, where the hotel was situated, past the Trocadero and up avenue Georges Mandel, where my school, Les Abeilles, was located—I holding his one hand—Maurice taught me to sing:
Malbrouk s’en va-t-en guerre,
Mironton, mironton, mirontaine.
A few years later, when I was living in America, and during my school holidays, I was sent to visit my stern German-born grandmother. Determined to improve me, she set herself the thankless task of giving me a classical music education. For an hour every afternoon, she had me sit in the modest living room of her Cayuga Heights apartment in Ithaca, New York—in Bonn, where she was from, her house had been destroyed by Allied bombing—and listen to the local classical radio station. An hour that dragged into an eternity; outside the sun was shining and I could hear the boys in the fraternity house across the street getting ready for another party. But one afternoon turned out to be different. I was listening to Beethoven’s Fidelio (my grandmother had outlined the plot and told me to listen for the sound of trumpets, which would signal Fidelio’s release from prison) and, to this day, I can recall the feeling of accomplishment and of triumph—especially of triumph—when I heard those trumpets.
In college, where I was delinquent in all my studies, I spent my time either in Boston taking ballet lessons —I had a sudden and unjustified desire to become a ballerina—or lying on my unmade bed, listening to records. I loved Adolphe Adam’s Giselle, for obvious reasons; Renata Tebaldi singing arias brought hot passionate tears to my eyes and furious banging at my door: “Turn the damn music down!”; Elaine Stritch singing “The Saga of Jenny” was another favorite, as was the English musical Salad Days; and I especially cherished a scratched recording of Noël Coward’s reedy voice singing “Someday I’ll Find You.”
While he was courting me, my former husband, who prided himself on his voice, which indeed was good, used to sing a song about how anything could happen on a “lazy, dazy, golden” afternoon. I had never heard the song before nor have I since, but for a short while then I fancied I would be the one to fill the nebulous and abstract role of anything, which in my mind translated itself into love, happiness and a marriage, all of which it did for a bit. For a bit, too, we lived in a large, elegant house in Charlottesville, Virginia, which had once belonged to my husband’s aunt. Along with the house, we had inherited her piano, a Bechstein. His aunt, a glamorous and charming woman, had been married to a Russian prince—one of the princes who unsuccessfully tried to kill Rasputin—and had lived in Paris. Among her many acquaintances—Colette, Coco Chanel, other exiled Russian princes—was Arthur Rubinstein, who, according to one of her stories, at lunch one day, announced that he was going to a Bechstein auction to buy a piano. “Of course, Arthur dear, you must buy yourself the very best piano,” said the aunt, “but will you buy me the second best?” A few days later, a piano was delivered to the aunt’s avenue Foch apartment—it was hauled up through the window—and a few weeks later, Arthur Rubinstein himself came to lunch again. After lunch, the aunt asked him to play something on her new Bechstein and Arthur Rubinstein sat at the piano and began to play a Bach prelude but, after only a few minutes, he banged down on the keys and abruptly stopped. “Arthur, Arthur, what is wrong?” cried the aunt and Arthur Rubinstein answered, “I bought you the very best piano.” Once a year, at great expense, I hired a piano tuner who came all the way down from Richmond to tune the “best” Bechstein. No one, except for an occasional guest, ever played the piano and, to compensate, the piano tuner suggested that I run my thumb down all the keys once a day. I tried to do this a few times but the ivory keys hurt my thumb and mostly I was too busy raising three small children.
I used to joke—only it was partly true—that if I could have only one wish, I would wish that I could sing. To this day, I would wish the same thing. What a pleasure and what a gift, I think, it must be to open one’s mouth and have a beautiful song effortlessly come out. Unfortunately, I cannot carry a tune. Nevertheless, when my children were small, to put them to sleep, I sang to them in French:
Il était un petit navire,
Qui n’avait ja-ja jamais navigué,
or my favorite, the less soothing:
Malbrouk s’en va-t-en guerre,
Mironton, mironton, mirontaine,
Ne sait quand reviendra,
Ne sait quand reviendra.
Thanks to Maurice, I still knew the lyrics and I also knew the reason Malbrouk’s wife was waiting for him in vain:
Monsieur Malbrouk est mort,
Mironton, mironton, mirontaine,
Monsieur Malbrouk est mort,
Est mort et enterré.
The reason, too, I sang to my children in French was I believed that anyone who might be listening to me—including my then husband—knew neither French nor the songs and therefore would not know whether I was singing off-key, which chances are I was.
One of my favorite paintings is Rest During the Flight to Egypt, by Caravaggio. At the center of the picture, an angel, his back to the viewer, stands naked, except for a swirl of white cloth, his wings—wings as startlingly black as a crow’s wings—gracefully outstretched. The angel is playing the violin for the Holy Family as they rest. Sitting on the ground, an attentive but weary-looking Joseph is holding up the sheet music for the angel to sight read while, next to him, Mary is holding the baby Jesus in her arms and both are asleep. The painting speaks to the power of music. This notion is taken a step further when, once a year, a concert is held in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, where the Caravaggio painting hangs, and the notes on the sheet music Joseph holds up to the angel are played.
My second husband also had a good voice, which makes me wonder whether I am drawn to musical men—and aren’t opposites meant to attract? He loved to sing and he was clever at making up lyrics (in his heart, instead of being a lawyer, he wanted to write songs and be a lyricist). He loved Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, he knew all the old show tunes by heart. The singer Carly Simon, too, was a favorite. Driving in the car, with his children, they all knew the words to her songs. Together they sang so well that, momentarily silenced and excluded, I was envious of them—of their talent and of their happiness at singing together.
When my husband died, I chose the music for his memorial service. For the prelude and the postlude, to be certain, I chose Bach; for hymns, I chose ones my husband had liked, “Love Divine” and “Jerusalem”; for myself, I chose Henry Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, the last part, the canzona, played by two trumpeters.
I spend the summers on an island in Maine and each summer, obsessively, I listen to a single CD: last summer it was Fabrizio De Andrè; the summer of 2006 it was Leonard Cohen; the summer of 2005 it was Mariza Nunes singing fado; the summer of 2004 it was the Pink Martini; K. D. Lang was in either 2003 or 2002, I forget; the year I did not listen to K. D. Lang, I listened to the soundtrack of Lars von Trier’s movie Breaking the Waves; the year before I listened to the Buena Vista Social Club. I am not a particularly sanguine person but when I listen to music, I can be transported. Also, I play the music as loud as I can and except for a bunch of seals, who at low tide lie not far away on an exposed reef, my nearest neighbor is a mile away. I listen to music at the end of the day, at sunset, and although my house faces east, I can watch the clouds turn from bright orange to pink and mauve, then purple streaked with gray—the colors reflecting on the water below them—and finally go dark; then, still to the sound of music, I can watch the moon rise.