Anger (15 page)

Chapter VIII

Teresa called while Anna was having her breakfast in bed, and Anna was able to tell her that she had slept well, that the rehearsal had gone almost too well, and that she was feeling quite calm.

“I'll go for a walk later on. The rain has stopped, I see.”

But when Anna put the receiver down she felt the day ahead would be interminable, a day of walking on eggs, holding everything in balance and not allowing panic to move in. She read the paper with close attention, even the business pages which she usually shirked. Then she lay there for an hour prolonging the moment when she would have to dress and go out.

She reread her letter to Ned, decided to tear it up, and then decided to mail it, and went out in her wrapper to let it fall down the chute by the elevators. Would it do any good? What good for waves to beat against rock? For the next hours Anna knew she must shut Ned out, so she got up and dressed. She suddenly remembered there was to be an interview at noon. A woman reporter was being sent over from the paper she had just been reading.

She dressed carefully in a black suit with a white ruffly blouse, examined herself in the mirror, wondering whether she should have her hair done again. It looked quite all right, those massed black curls had held well, but it would be something to do later on … only what if the hotel hairdresser wrecked it? No, too nerve-wracking, Anna decided.

It all seemed trivial suddenly. And she imagined Ned in a meeting, no doubt, with men who had real power in their hands, while she, Anna Lindstrom was about to waste a day simply trying to control her nerves. Absurd. Then she heard Protopova's voice, “Bach, absurd? That is blasphemy!” And Anna told herself, looking quite severely at the face in the mirror, that whatever might be trivial about her, at least she served something greater than herself as best she could. She lifted her chin and laughed at the solemn face in the mirror. What fools we mortals be!

Three baskets of flowers were delivered. One had a spray of orchids in a charming rectangular glass. The card was signed with a woman's name that Anna did not recognize, “Homage to Anna Lindstrom.” The second was a round bowl of pink roses, rather sweet, Anna thought and smiled as she read the card, for it was from a former schoolmate at Juilliard who had married and given up her career. “I'll be there tonight applauding you.” Dear Nancy! Anna seemed to remember that she had four or five children and adored her husband, a pediatrician. The third was a huge formal basket of glads from the management and Anna hid it in a corner … she had always hated glads, even the name.

But the flowers had started the whole machinery of anticipation and tension in motion and Anna felt happy, felt, she described it to herself, like an empty glass which was beginning to be filled with that intoxicating liquor of performance ahead. That was what Ned simply could not imagine when he said things like “You don't need luck!” She desperately needed every reassurance she could get! And flowers always gave her a tremendous lift. In the impersonal hotel room which, like all hotel rooms, destroyed identity rather than recognizing its existence, the flowers told Anna Lindstrom who she was.

She was glad to open the door at noon to a young woman in peasant skirt, high black boots, and a long mass of fuzzy hair which looked as though it had never been combed, and who seemed to Anna absurdly young.

“You have so many flowers,” she said looking around dismayed and holding a single red rose wrapped in cellophane awkwardly, as she laid her big satchel down, “I brought you a rose.”

“Thank you, my dear. That is sweet of you.”

“Do you mind if I use a tape recorder?”

“Not at all. Sit down and set it and I'll just put the rose in water … we can't let it fade,” and Anna went into the bathroom. Of course the rose was much too long to fit in the hotel glass, but Anna managed to cut it with nail scissors and brought it back and set it on the small table beside the two armchairs where they would be talking. “There!” she said sitting down. “Now, what can I say? What do you want to know, Miss Springhof?”

“I just have to be sure this is working,” and the girl played back Anna's questions, which sounded now rather loud and very self-conscious.

“I do sound pretentious, don't I?”

“No, oh no—you have such a wonderful voice!”

“Do I?” Anna smiled. “You know on the day of a performance I am always in a state of terror for fear I shall wake up with no voice at all!”

“Has that ever happened?”

“No, but it might … it's like having an eccentric animal inside that may rebel,” and Anna laughed, then added, “Seriously, it's nerve wracking to be one's own instrument, so to speak.”

“But you are looking forward to the concert? It's sold out, you know.”

“Is it? Oh dear … that's scary. But of course it is always thrilling to be part of such a tremendous work and to be singing under Solti with a great orchestra, and with such a star as Madame Elgar at my side.”

“You have sung with her before?”

“No, but we got along famously at the rehearsal yesterday afternoon. She was extremely kind to me. I feel honored to be singing with her.”

“People say she is losing her voice.”

“Nonsense! People don't know what they are talking about. Lotte Lehmann was still wonderful at sixty!” Anna felt passionately about this and showed it, “The very people who have adored and applauded a singer for years, seem to be lying in wait for her to fail, seem to get some sort of kick out of a diminishing talent. It's horrible. I sometimes hate the audience. It's like some beast one has to go in and kill. Caruso felt that, you know. He said it was like being a matador and having to kill a bull.”

“But you don't feel that, do you?”

“Yes, I do. Every single performer is exposed to the possibility of jeers—but of course one forgets that once the music is there. It's worse in a concert when one goes out alone. That agonizing moment of confrontation.”

“Wow!” said Miss Springhof. “I never thought it was like that.”

“You won't publish your question about Madame Elgar, will you? She does not deserve that comment about failing powers. Promise me, you will cut that out?”

“I promise,” Miss Springhof looked at her notes. “Anyway the interview is about you, Mrs. Lindstrom.”

“If it's Mrs., then it is Mrs. Fraser. Otherwise, Anna Lindstrom, please.”

“I'm sorry. You are married? I didn't know.”

“Yes, I married Ned Fraser two years ago. We live in Boston.”

“You have children?”

“No.” It was said with such finality that there was an inevitable pause. Miss Springhof was obviously daunted and did not know quite what to say next. “You want to ask whether I want children, I expect.”

“Well … maybe … I suppose it's hard to combine a career like yours with a family, but …”

“I'm accused of being much too frank,” she laughed, “but we're on earth such a short time, why not be honest? What will it matter in two hundred years? I'm thirty-six years old and I am on the brink of real fame, on the brink of being able at last to choose what I shall sing and where and when. I can't afford to stop now and take time off. So the answer is that one has to make choices and I made a choice long ago, long before I married Ned.”

“I see, of course.” Miss Springhof looked doubtful.

“Somehow we are taught in America that we can have everything: a career, children, everything. A woman who becomes a nun gives up all idea of having a family … and I suppose a career taken seriously implies some sacrifice.”

“You don't seem like a nun at all,” Miss Springhof smiled out from under her hair.

“Oh, I'm not. The impurity, the passion, the rage even—they are all there. That animal inside me, my voice, has to cope with them all!” And Anna laughed. “You see!”

But of course Miss Springhof did not see and could have no idea, and when Anna suggested that she herself must now rest and saw the young girl to the door, she felt as usual that she had made a fool of herself. Interviews were always dangerous because to make it worth the interviewer's time you had to try at least to be interesting and being interesting too often meant confidences.

Anna put on her coat and went out for a walk to calm down. The sun had come out and it was a cool, brilliant day. She spent an hour browsing in a bookstore and came away with a paperback of Rilke letters and a novel of Eudora Welty's she had always meant to read. Then she was ravenously hungry—why did bookstores have this effect?—and by great good luck found a small Italian restaurant. There she ate a plate of ravioli and drank a glass of wine. Strange how a small piece of luck could appear on such a day as an augury. All would be well.

And in the remaining hours before she must bathe and dress, Anna knew she was on the beam. Dread had given way to expectation, and her only moment of panic was at seven when she could not get the zipper up of her dress. “Don't do this to me,” she said to the dress, and finally it gave in. Anna then looked herself over in the mirror.… “Of course I am too fat,” she thought, then she remembered that Ned had told her he couldn't stand what he called clotheshorse women. And she remembered also that beside Madame Elgar she was a sylph. “Such vanity,” she scolded herself, “Get on with it, Anna. It's Bach now, not Anna Lindstrom who matters.”

And in the dressing room she and Sophie Elgar joked and waited, wished each other good luck, joked some more. “I'm always afraid I'll burst out of my dress, aren't you?” Sophie said, smoothing herself down for the twentieth time. “Then,” she laughed aloud, “there I am, immense, but I suddenly feel tiny in front of that huge orchestra. You know, it really takes weight, Anna, to put a voice out over the orchestra!”

And then the knock at the door and they were making their way out onto the stage on a ripple of applause. It died out and there was a second of silence, then the chorus seemed almost to lift the roof with the
Kyrie
and Anna felt freed, lifted out of herself on the power and glory of it. She clasped her hands. They were ice cold. Then it was time to turn the page before her, take a deep breath, and summon her voice. And it was there! Oh, the effort as though she were throwing her voice like a discus as far as it would go, soaring out beyond her. Oh, the supreme effort she felt right down to her feet! The thrill of blending with, then separating from Sophie's soprano, of battling the orchestra, an ocean of sound behind them! It seemed only a long moment before her solo,
“Que sedes ad dexteram Patris, miserere nobis,”
and her voice was there interweaving with the flute, as serene and pure as the flute. When it was over, she closed her eyes, unaccountably close to tears, remembering Protopova and all she had done to make it as perfect as they could make it together. The phrasing, the long breath needed had been there at her command, better than ever before.

No concert appearances alone could ever bring this joy, this ecstasy of being a part of such a company of instruments and voices in the service of Bach. Solti was pulling it out of them all, pulling it together with such grace!

And now he was turning to Sophie and her for their duet and Anna felt the joy of the two voices singing with and against each other in a glorious interweaving.
“Et in unum Dominum
…” No rehearsal could give any idea of what the performance, this performance, was to be. Worth all the work, all those hours with Protopova, all the anxiety, to have this power and to be able to use it well.

At the end of the performance Anna felt she had been in heaven. The soloists were called back five times but they all knew that what had happened was the result of a union of all their gifts. And in the dressing room Sophie embraced Anna and said, “My dear, what a great night it was!”

It was.

When Nancy came backstage, she was in tears. “Oh Anna, you were so marvelous. I don't know why I'm crying!”

“It's that music—what Bach does!” And Anna pulled Nancy out into the green room where they could sit down and talk. “Where's John?”

He had been shy about coming backstage and was waiting in the auditorium, Nancy explained. “It's worth everything, to be able to do that—to be part of it, isn't it?” she asked, “I envy you!”

“Not with four children, you don't!”

“Well, I suppose there are compensations for not making it,” she admitted.

“You haven't changed a bit, Nancy. How we used to laugh, do you remember?”

But Nancy was taking Anna in and hardly responded to this. “You have changed, Anna.”

“How? How have I changed? I feel just the same, just as much a fool as ever!”

“Do you still cry at the drop of a hat?”

“Oh yes! The Italian is still very much in the ascendant.”

“But you seem not older exactly, but rounder,” and as Anna giggled, she amended it, “That's not what I meant.”

“I'm much too fat, but that's no change.”

“No, I meant, rounded out inside, mature, I suppose … happiness does it. You must be very happy. Somehow I had imagined you would never marry.”

“Happiness?” Anna was taken by surprise by the word and what it obviously implied.

“I wish I could meet your husband.”

“Ned is a very funny man.”

“He makes you laugh?”

“No, he makes me furious.”

“I get awfully cross with John sometimes …” But this was not the place or the time to talk about marriage and Anna changed the subject by asking about Nancy's children.

Finally, since Nancy was clearly nervous about keeping John waiting, they said goodbye. They had never been intimate but felt the impulse to do more than shake hands, and ended by kissing each other warmly on each cheek. “I hate to let you go …” Anna said. “Old friend.”

“Whatever happens, Anna, you've done something tremendous with your life. You're going to be a great star. Don't let them get you down, honey.”