"Frank Sinatra!" the old man cried; his son took the picture from him.
"That don't look like Frank Sinatra to me," the son said.
"No! No!" the old man cried; he grabbed the photo back. "She loved those Sinatra songs--she sang 'em real good, too. We used to talk about 'Frankie Boy'--your mother said he shoulda been a woman, he had such a pretty voice," Mr. Giordano said.
"DO YOU KNOW WHY SHE BOUGHT THE DRESS?" Owen asked.
"Sure, I know!" the old man told us. "It was the dress she always sung in! 'I need somethin' to sing in!'--that's what she said when she walked in here. 'I need somethin' not like me!'--that's what she said. I'll never forget her. But I didn't know who she was--not when she come in here, not then!" Mr. Giordano said.
"Who the fuck was she?" the son asked. I shuddered to hear him ask; it had just occurred to me that I didn't know who my mother was, either.
"She was 'The Lady in Red'--don't you remember her?" Mr. Giordano asked his son. "She was still singin' in that place when you got home from the war. What was that place?"
The son grabbed the photo back.
"It's her!" he cried.
"'The Lady in Red'!" the Giordanos cried together.
I was trembling. My mother was a singer--in some joint! She was someone called "The Lady in Red"! She'd had a career--in nightlife! I looked at Owen; he appeared strangely at ease--he was almost calm, and he was smiling. "ISN'T THIS MORE INTERESTING THAN OLD FREDDY'S?" Owen asked me.
What the Giordanos told us was that my mother had been a female vocalist at a supper club on Beacon Street--"a perfectly proper sorta place!" the old man assured us. There was a black pianist--he played an old-fashioned piano, which (the Giordanos explained) meant that he played the old tunes, and quietly, "so's you could hear the singer!"
It was not a place where single men or women went; it was not a bar; it was a supper club, and a supper club, the Giordanos assured us, was a restaurant with live entertainment--"somethin' relaxed enough to digest to!" About ten o'clock, the singer and pianist served up music more suitable for dancing than for dinner-table conversation--and there was dancing, then, until midnight; men with their wives, or at least with "serious" dates. It was "no place to take a floozy--or to find one." And most nights there was "a sorta famous female vocalist, someone you woulda heard of"; although Owen Meany and I had never heard of anyone the Giordanos mentioned. "The Lady in Red" sang only one night a week; the Giordanos had forgotten which night, but Owen and I could provide that information. It would have been Wednesday--always Wednesday. Supposedly, the singing teacher my mother was studying with was so famous that he had time for her only on Thursday mornings--and so early that she had to spend the previous night in the "dreaded" city.
Why she never sang under her own name--why she was always "The Lady in Red"--the Giordanos didn't know. Nor could they recall the name of the supper club; they just knew it wasn't there anymore. It had always had the look of a private home; now it had, in fact, become one--"somewheres on Beacon Street," that was all they could remember. It was either a private home or doctors' offices. As for the owner of the club, he was a Jewish fellow from Miami. The Giordanos had heard that the man had gone back to Miami. "I guess they still have supper clubs down there," old Mr. Giordano said. He was sad and shocked to hear that my mother was dead; "The Lady in Red" had become quite popular among the local patrons of the club--"not famous, not like some of them others, but a kinda regular feature of the place."
The Giordanos remembered that she had come, and that she had gone away--for a while--and then she'd come back. Later, she had gone away for good; but people didn't believe it and they would say, for years, that she was coming back again. When she'd been away--"for a while"--that was when she'd been having me, of course.
The Giordanos could almost remember the name of the black pianist; "he was there as long as the place was there," they said. But the closest they could come to the man's name was "Buster."
"Big Black Buster!" Mr. Giordano said.
"I don't think he was from Miami," the son said.
"CLEARLY," said Owen Meany, when we were once more out on Newbury Street, "'BIG BLACK BUSTER' IS NOT YOUR FATHER!"
I wanted to ask Owen if he still had the name and address--and even the phone number--of my mother's singing and voice teacher; I knew Mother had given the particulars to Owen, and I doubted that Owen would have discarded anything she gave him.
But I didn't have to ask. Once more, his tiny hand shot into his pocket. "THE ADDRESS IS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD," he told me. "I MADE AN APPOINTMENT, TO HAVE MY VOICE 'ANALYZED'; WHEN THE GUY HEARD MY VOICE--OVER THE PHONE--HE SAID HE'D GIVE ME AN APPOINTMENT WHENEVER I WANTED ONE."
Thus had Owen Meany come to Boston, the dreaded city; he had come prepared.
There were some elegant town houses along the most densely tree-lined part of Commonwealth Avenue where Graham McSwiney, the voice and singing teacher, lived; but Mr. McSwiney had a small and cluttered walk-up apartment in one of the less-restored old houses that had been divided and subdivided almost as many times as the collective rent of the various tenants had been withheld, or paid late. Since we were early for Owen's appointment, we sat in a corridor outside Mr. McSwiney's apartment door, on which was posted (by a thumbtack) a hand-lettered sign.
DON'T! ! ! ! KNOCK OR RING BELL
IF YOU HEAR SINGING! ! ! !
"Singing" was not quite what we heard, but some sort of exercise was in progress behind Mr. McSwiney's closed door, and so Owen and I didn't knock or ring the bell; we sat on a comfortable but odd piece of furniture--not a couch, but what appeared to be a seat removed from a public bus--and listened to the singing or voice lesson we were forbidden to disturb.
A man's powerful, resonant voice said: "Me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me!"
A woman's absolutely thrilling voice repeated: "Me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me!"
Then the man said: "No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no!"
And the woman answered: "No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no!"
And then the man sang just a line from a song--it was a song from My Fair Lady, the one that goes, "All I want is a room somewhere ..."
And the woman sang: "Far away from the cold night air ..."
And together they sang: "With one enormous chair ..."
And the woman took it by herself: "Oh, wouldn't it be lov-er-ly!"
"Me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me!" said the man again; now, a piano was involved--just one key.
Their voices, even in this silly exercise, were the most wonderful voices Owen Meany and I had heard; even when she sang "No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no!" the woman's voice was much more beautiful than my mother's.
I was glad that Owen and I had to wait, because it gave me time to be grateful for at least this part of our discovery: that Mr. McSwiney really was a voice and singing teacher, and that he seemed to have a perfectly wonderful voice--and that he had a pupil with an even better voice than my mother's ... this at least meant that something I thought I knew about my mother was true. The shock of our discovery in Jerrold's needed time to sink in.
It did not strike me that my mother's lie about the red dress was a devastating sort of untruth; even that she had been an actual singer--an actual performer!--didn't strike me as such an awful thing for her to have hidden from me, or even from Dan (if she'd kept Dan in the dark, too). What struck me was my memory of how easily and gracefully she had told that little lie about the store burning down, how she had fretted so convincingly about the red dress. Quite probably, it occurred to me, she had been a better liar than a singer. And if she'd lied about the dress--and had never told anyone in her life in Gravesend about "The Lady in Red"--what else had she lied about?
In addition to not knowing who my father was, what else didn't I know?
Owen Meany, who thought much more quickly than I did, put it very simply; he whispered, so that he wouldn't disturb Mr. McSwiney's lesson. "NOW YOU DON'T KNOW WHO YOUR MOTHER IS, EITHER," Owen said.
Following the exit of a small, flambo
yantly dressed woman from Mr. McSwiney's apartment, Owen and I were admitted to the teacher's untidy hovel; the disappointingly small size of the departing singer's bosom was a contradiction to the power we had heard in her voice--but we were impressed by the air of professional disorder that greeted us in Graham McSwiney's studio. There was no door on the cubicle bathroom, in which the bathtub appeared to be hastily, even comically placed; it was detached from the plumbing and full of the elbow joints of pipes and their fittings--a plumbing project was clearly in progress there; and progressing at no great pace.
There was no wall (or the wall had been taken down) between the cubicle kitchen and the living room, and there were no doors on the kitchen cabinets, which revealed little besides coffee cups and mugs--suggesting that Mr. McSwiney either restricted himself to an all-caffeine diet or that he took his meals elsewhere. And there was no bed in the living room--the only real room in the tiny, crowded apartment--suggesting that the couch, which was covered with sheet music, concealed a foldaway bed. But the placement of the sheet music had the look of meticulous specificity, and the sheer volume of it argued that the couch was never sat upon--not to mention, unfolded--and this evidence suggested that Mr. McSwiney slept elsewhere, too.
Everywhere, there were mementos--playbills from opera houses and concert halls; newspaper clippings of people singing; and framed citations and medals hung on ribbons, suggesting golden-throat awards of an almost athletic order of recognition. Everywhere, too, were framed, poster-sized drawings of the chest and throat, as clinical in detail as the drawings in Gray's Anatomy, and as simplistic in their arrangement around the apartment as the educational diagrams in certain doctors' offices. Beneath these anatomical drawings were the kind of optimistic slogans that gung-ho coaches hang in gyms:
BEGIN WITH THE BREASTBONE!
KEEP UPPER CHEST FILLED WITH AIR
ALL THE TIME!
THE DIAPHRAGM IS A ONE-WAY MUSCLE--
IT CAN ONLY INHALE!
PRACTICE YOUR BREATHING SEPARATELY FROM
YOUR SINGING!
NEVER LIFT YOUR SHOULDERS!
NEVER HOLD YOUR BREATH!
One whole wall was devoted to instructive commands regarding vowels; over the doorway of the bathroom was the single exclamation: Gently! Dominating the apartment, from the center stage of the living room--big and black and perfectly polished, and conceivably worth twice the annual rent on Mr. McSwiney's place of business--was the piano.
Mr. McSwiney was completely bald. Wild, white tufts of hair sprang from his ears--as if to protect him from the volume of his own huge voice. He was hearty-looking, in his sixties (or even in his seventies), a short, muscular man whose chest descended to his belt--or whose round, hard belly consumed his chest and rested under his chin, like a beer-drinker's boulder.
"So! Which one of you's got the voice?" Mr. McSwiney asked us.
"I HAVE!" said Owen Meany.
"You certainly have!" cried Mr. McSwiney, who paid little attention to me, even when Owen took special pains to introduce me by putting unmistakable emphasis on my last name, which we thought might be familiar to the singing and voice teacher.
"THIS IS MY FRIEND, JOHN WHEELWRIGHT," Owen said, but Mr. McSwiney couldn't wait to have a look at Owen's Adam's apple; the name "Wheelwright" appeared to ring no bells for him.
"It's all the same thing, whatever you call it," Mr. McSwiney said. "An Adam's apple, a larynx, a voice box--it's the most important part of the vocal apparatus," he explained, sitting Owen in what he called "the singer's seat," which was a plain, straight-backed chair directly in front of the piano. Mr. McSwiney put his thumb and index finger on either side of Owen's Adam's apple. "Swallow!" he instructed. Owen swallowed. When I held my own Adam's apple and swallowed, I could feel my Adam's apple jump higher up my neck; but Owen's Adam's apple hardly moved.
"Yawn!" said Mr. McSwiney. When I yawned, my Adam's apple moved down my neck, but Owen Meany's Adam's apple stayed almost exactly where it was.
"Scream!" said Mr. McSwiney.
"AAAAAHHHHHH!" said Owen Meany; again, his Adam's apple hardly moved.
"Amazing!" said Mr. McSwiney. "You've got a permanently fixed larynx," he told Owen. "I've rarely seen such a thing," he said. "Your voice box is never in repose--your Adam's apple sits up there in the position of a permanent scream. I could try giving you some exercises, but you might want to see a throat doctor; you might have to have surgery."
"I DON'T WANT TO HAVE SURGERY, I DON'T NEED ANY EXERCISES," said Owen Meany. "IF GOD GAVE ME THIS VOICE, HE HAD A REASON," Owen said.
"How come his voice doesn't change?" I asked Mr. McSwiney, who seemed on the verge of a satirical remark--regarding God's role in the position of Owen's voice box. "I thought every boy's voice changed--at puberty," I said.
"If his voice hasn't changed already, it's probably never going to change," Mr. McSwiney said. "Vocal cords don't make words--they just vibrate. Vocal cords aren't really 'cords'--they're just lips. It's the opening between those lips that's called the 'glottis.' It's nothing but the act of breathing on the closed lips that makes a sound. When a male voice changes, it's just a part of puberty--it's called a 'secondary sexual development.' But I don't think your voice is going to change," Mr. McSwiney told Owen. "If it was going to change, it would have."
"THAT DOESN'T EXPLAIN WHY IT ALREADY HASN'T," said Owen Meany.
"I can't explain that," Mr. McSwiney admitted. "I can give you some exercises," he repeated, "or I can recommend a doctor."
"I DON'T EXPECT MY VOICE TO CHANGE," said Owen Meany.
I could see that Mr. McSwiney was learning how exasperating Owen's belief in God's plans could be.
"Why'd you come to see me, kid?" Mr. McSwiney asked him.
"BECAUSE YOU KNOW HIS MOTHER," Owen said, pointing to me. Graham McSwiney assessed me, as if he feared I might represent an elderly paternity suit.
"Tabitha Wheelwright," I said. "She was called Tabby. She was from New Hampshire, and she studied with you in the forties and the fifties--from before I was born until I was eight or nine."
"OR TEN," said Owen Meany; into his pocket went his hand, again--he handed Mr. McSwiney the photograph.
"'The Lady in Red'!" Mr. McSwiney said. "I'm sorry, I forgot her name," he told me.
"But you remember her?" I asked.
"Oh sure, I remember her," he said. "She was pretty, and very pleasant--and I got her that silly job. It wasn't much of a gig, but she had fun doing it; she had this idea that someone might 'discover' her if she kept singing there--but I told her no one ever got discovered in Boston. And certainly not in that supper club!"
Mr. McSwiney explained that the club often called him and raided his students for local talent; as the Giordanos had told us, the club hired more established female vocalists for gigs that lasted for a month or more--but on Wednesdays, the club rested their stars; that's when they called upon "local talent." In my mother's case, she had gained a small, neighborhood reputation and the club had made a habit of her. She'd not wanted to use her name--a form of shyness, or provincialism, that Mr. McSwiney found as silly as her idea that anyone might "discover" her.
"But she was charming," he said. "As a singer, she was all 'head'--she had no 'chest'--and she was lazy. She liked to perform simple, popular songs; she wasn't very ambitious. And she wouldn't practice."
He explained the two sets of muscles involved in a "head voice" and in a "chest voice"; although this was not what interested Owen and me about my mother, we were polite and allowed Mr. McSwiney to elaborate on his teacher's opinion of her. Most women sing with the larynx in a high position, or with only what Mr. McSwiney called a "head voice"; they experience a lack of power from the E above middle C, downward--and when they try to hit their high notes loudly, they hit them shrilly. The development of a "chest voice" in women is very important. For men, it is the "head voice" that needs the development. For both, they must be willing to devote hours.
My mother, a once-a-week singer, was
what Mr. McSwiney called "the vocal equivalent of a weekend tennis player." She had a pretty voice--as I've described it--but Mr. McSwiney's assessment of her voice was consistent with my memory of her; she did not have a strong voice, she was not ever as powerful as Mr. McSwiney's previous pupil had sounded to Owen and me through a closed door.
"Who thought of the name 'The Lady in Red'?" I asked the old teacher--in an effort to steer him back to what interested us.
"She found a red dress in a store," Mr. McSwiney said. "She told me she wanted to be 'wholly out of character--but only once a week'!" He laughed. "I never went to hear her perform," he said. "It was just a supper club," he explained. "Really, no one who sang there was very good. Some of the better ones would work with me, so I heard them here--but I never set foot in the place. I knew Meyerson on the telephone; I don't remember that I actually met him. I think Meyerson called her 'The Lady in Red.'"
"Meyerson?" I asked.
"He owned the club, he was a nice old guy--from Miami, I think. He was honest, and unpretentious. The singers I sent to him all liked him--they said he treated them respectfully," Mr. McSwiney said.
"DO YOU REMEMBER THE NAME OF THE CLUB?" Owen asked him.
It had been called The Orange Grove; my mother had joked to Mr. McSwiney about the decor, which she said was dotted everywhere with potted orange trees and tanks full of tropical fish--and husbands and wives celebrating their anniversaries. Yet she had imagined she might be "discovered" there!
"DID SHE HAVE A BOYFRIEND?" Owen asked Mr. McSwiney, who shrugged.
"She wasn't interested in me--that's all I know!" he said. He smiled at me fondly. "I know, because I made a pass at her," he explained. "She handled it very nicely and I never tried it again," he said.
"There was a pianist, a black pianist--at The Orange Grove," I said.
"You bet there was, but he was all over--he played all over town, for years, before he ended up there. And after he left there, he played all over town again," Mr. McSwiney said. "Big Black Buster Freebody!" he said, and laughed.