“What damage?” she asked. She did not actually know.
“Immense damage.”
“We would be fine,” he insisted. “As long as I can play, I’ll be happy.”
“What are you suggesting?” she insisted. Now that the picture of triumph had been complicated, she was greatly disturbed.
“I’m suggesting, although I know you would never be able to believe this, that what you have now, as you struggle, is something you may regret to lose.”
“What’s the difference if we sing on the street or in an opera house?” she asked.
“What’s the difference if you sing on the street or in an opera house?” I repeated. “All the difference in the world. The difference between hope and success, youth and age, and, in some ways, life and death.”
I knew what was coming, and was ready for a minute or two of storm. As I expected, he leaned forward in his chair, made a fist with the index finger extended, and lectured me passionately on their deprivations, beginning with “You don’t know. …” They came, with great power, one after another. “You don’t know … this,” and “You don’t know … that,” and so on.
When he was finished, and somewhat exhausted, after relating to me what it was like to sleep under bridges and go without meals and washing, I nodded, and said quietly, “But I do know. I grew up in the war, so I know very well.”
“Who would choose not to have what you have said we could have,” she asked quite sensibly, “in favor of what we have now?”
“No one,” I answered.
“Then, you tell us,” she went on, “what should we do? What makes sense?”
“First of all,” I said, “I’m not the only impresario in the world. You can always appeal to someone else—and then,” I said, almost as an aside, “I’ll have even more regrets to live with.”
“We don’t know how to appeal to impresarios except by accident,” he said. “It’s not that easy.”
He was right. I nodded. “Could you teach in Rapla?”
“Far too small.”
“Tallinn?”
“Yes, but it would be nothing like what you have held before us.”
“And you never thought of it before?”
“Of course we did,” she said, “but now you’ve made it seem real.”
“Because it is real. And it will remain real. This is what I suggest. First, stay for dessert, and don’t be angry with me.” I looked up at them. They agreed, and, to my surprise, happily. “I want only the best for you.” This was true more than they could know.
“You should understand, first of all, that if you do sign with me I’ll ask only ten percent.”
They looked at one another as if perhaps ten percent was a lot and they were about to be cheated. This made me laugh. “Anyone else, as you will see if you care to look, will take much much more than that. And anyone else would try to sign you immediately—my own first impulse. When I heard you, I ran down the stairs at the Accademia. And anyone else would never urge you to do what I am going to ask you to do now.”
They looked both expectant and disappointed.
“First, I’m going to give you ten million lire.”
“For what?” he asked.
“For nothing. You don’t have to pay it back. It will cover your expenses for the rest of the summer, and you can concentrate on what you do, without desperation. Then, go home. Think about what may happen, what life could be like. Think carefully, and keep working. It’s the work that in the end is worth something, and when you exchange it for something else, it leaves you in more ways than you know. Because of your perspective and your position, you won’t be able to believe me when I say this, but what you have now is more than you will ever have.
“Perhaps next year you’ll want to come to Milan. If you lose my card, just remember Cassati. You can find me. Even if you forget my name, you’ll never forget Rosanna’s, and you can reach me through her.”
“Next year,” she said, “our chances may not be as good.”
“No. Next year, your chances, once you have considered them in tranquillity, will be better. And if that is what you decide, next year, they will not seize you, you will seize them. Something that people are often afraid to know or say is that life is more splendid than career.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“From regret.”
The waiter was sweeping crumbs from the table before bringing dessert. He was my age, his hair was slicked back, and he must have wondered who we were.
THE NEXT MORNING, when I left Venice, I felt older than I am. The hotel provided a gondola that took me, via the Grand Canal, to the station. I had time to make the trip this way rather than on the vaporetto, because the fast train left at eleven. You cannot help but feel either very old or very young, like a child, when you are helplessly borne along in a gondola, and see young people making their way on the streets and crossing the bridges, knapsacks on their backs, sandals on their feet, their strength and youth a blessedness that they only half know.
I suppose they may have envied me, riding easily in the gondola, my luggage stacked, my hat, my suit, its cream-colored linen suggesting someone of influence and consequence, which I know is not true. They may have envied me, but I envied them—sunburnt, straight of leg, firm of arm, awake as I can never be awake again. It is in the nature of things, however, that my envy be quick and benevolent, for I have had my turn, and now it is rightfully theirs. And for all my dignity and wealth, I am an impresario, and an impresario, you know, is nothing more than a glorified parasite.
I have had this discussion too many times not to know where it leads. I explain the truth of my condition, and the people I am with—usually in a restaurant—protest. How can I say that? I brought Rosanna to the world, enriching it immeasurably. That is when I shock them, because I say that I should have left her in the laundry. And when they get their breath they pronounce with annoying certainty, no, for if I had, the world would be immeasurably poorer.
“Listen,” I say, “let me tell you this. I’m an impresario. I know the job. I know what to do. I work in the service of art, the art that you love, and I love. But if in my lifetime in service to art, surrounded by it, moved by its beauty again and again, I have learned one thing, it is that in its every expression and in its every utterance it is adoring of the human soul and the human heart. If I had left Rosanna in the laundry, her life itself may have been a work of art greater than the sum of all the songs she has ever sung.”
They don’t understand. They never understand. Why would they? They have not intervened, as I have. They have not interrupted the course of things. They have not broken apart lines. Or, at least, if they have, they seem not to care. I am now old enough to choose where I stand at the last, and though my friends and acquaintances in the world of music may not understand or approve, I stand on this. I see clearly. I know what I have done. And I know, finally, what is right.
In the gondola, on the Grand Canal, I felt that I was borne back toward where I had started, not by the power of the gondoliere and not merely with the gentle flow of the tide, but as if on a river that, though running into darkness and oblivion, was running swift and bright.
Soon after pushing off from the dock at the Celestia, we passed under the Accademia bridge. I strained toward the Rio Terrà Foscarini, but heard nothing, only the water and the noise of the crowd. It felt like sitting in a dark room, and I looked ahead as if I had lost every chance in the world.
But then, as if the lights of a room had come up, or the great and powerful lights of the stage were pushed to the full so that the rouge on the singers’ faces looked like roses in the summer sun, I heard her as she began to sing.
Her voice, not even a full day later, was more powerful, more masterful. She had ascended from her very high position at least a step or two, and her song was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, far more beautiful in its promise, despite a younger and less accomplished voice, than any song Rosanna has
ever sung, for, you see, Rosanna was not allowed to bloom.
And as I passed over the waters and heard this song that she sang on a side street, it said to me that no matter where you lead or you are led, no matter how the waves may break upon you, and what sins you may unknowingly commit, it is true that by the grace of God you can sometimes make amends.
Reconstruction
THE MOST DIFFICULT of the dinner parties I ruin are usually around Christmas, and always those of the younger members of the firm, who, no matter how well they have done, have yet to find their place because they have yet to fall from grace and restore themselves. They know I have built and rebuilt, that, quite apart from my military history, I have, in corporate terms, come back from the dead. That very thing, though I did not ask for it, is what they fear the most to get and fear the most in me.
It is why, while I sit still and merely smile, they hold forth in a volume of words that would blow up a tire. You would think that because they talk as enthusiastically as talking dogs, they would win. While they say everything, I say nothing. I am shown the second-tier paintings, and harried children who can play Mendelssohn, and from the corner of my eye I see the ineluctable Range Rovers, the Viking stoves, and the flower boxes perfectly tended by silent Peruvians with broken hearts.
Still, I win, they lose, and I couldn’t throw the game if I tried. They just don’t know. They’re younger than my sons and daughter. I find their claims embarrassing: I don’t care where they went to college; I don’t even care where I went to college. I want only to spy the youthful graces they cannot see in themselves, and encourage them to do well and spend more time with their children than I spent with mine. They won’t. I didn’t. They can’t. I couldn’t.
“We’ve just come back from Venice,” said the lady of the house, the wife of one of our foremost earners. He is less than thirty years old, and she is stunningly beautiful and looks eighteen.
“He knows,” her husband said, “he sent me.”
Her answer to this cruelty was, “Oh.” But that was not the end of it. Thinking that something was sure to follow, I sat there like the Sphinx. Unlike the Sphinx, however, I acknowledged with my eyes that she was alive.
“Do you know Venice?” she asked. I saw that I was now a strategical point in her troubled marriage. “What with the dollar so high, it’s like Disneyland. There are more Americans than in New Jersey.”
“Americans don’t live in New Jersey anymore,” her husband added, “and they actually wear mouse ears. I saw them.”
“Sometimes,” she qualified. “Sometimes they wear mouse ears, some of them. Have you been there?” she pressed, turning toward me as slowly as the aft turret of the Missouri.
“Yes, I have.”
“When?” she inquired, as insistently as the Bronx district attorney.
Thinking of the bayonet that had once been at the end of my rifle, I picked up my butter knife, and then returned it to the damasked tablecloth. “Right after the war.”
“The Gulf War?” she asked.
I must have looked incredulous that she would not understand which war “the war” was.
“Vietnam?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What war?”
“Alicia,” her husband said severely, because she had had three glasses of champagne, and because, of the long list of names by which the world knows our firm, mine is the only one that belongs to someone living.
“I want to know, Jared.” When she pronounced his name she did so as if she didn’t care for it, and then she looked up at me like a woman with whom you have been arguing and whom you are about to kiss, and she said, “Which one, babycakes?”
“The Second World War,” I answered. “World War Two.” I did want to kiss her.
“Well, you can’t possibly remember the Second World War,” she said. “How old are you?”
“I was born in nineteen forty-two,” I told her. Here I was, talking, I who am famous for sitting through social engagements like a ghost. “I was in Venice in ’forty-six, when I was four, and I remember everything. I remember the weave of the towels in the bathroom of the hotel. I remember the color of the paint on the iron chair on which I sat one day in the Piazza San Marco—it was green—and the shape of the dish in which I had yogurt and sugar. I remember the pigeon that lit upon the balcony, the slate gray and iridescent purple of his neck feathers. His eyes jumped when an ocean liner just outside the Grand Canal blew its whistle and scattered every bird in Venice but him. He stayed put, strutting like a pigeon. I wore a compass on a lanyard, and carried a rubber hunting knife in a cardboard sheath, in case there were any wild animals.”
Just as I realized that I was really building up to something—and I really was—my wife broke in with her accustomed diplomatic skill and turned the conversation to the reconstruction of Venice, to the floods in Florence, and to the restoration of wetted works of art in general. To make the break invisible she informed them of my ability to pull from the past the most extraordinary details of memory, saying with no apparent bitterness, “That’s the part of his life that is most vivid. If you lose him in your conferences, look for him there.” Now these people had become strategical points in our marriage, and though I cared, I drifted. I lost them, they lost me, voices faded, and the room became pale.
IN ITS STEAD, reconstituted before my eyes as if it actually existed, was a glass of amber-colored scotch, what I now know to be a double, on a white tablecloth next to my father’s dinner plate. We were in Venice, in a restaurant where everyone had to shout. In October 1946, my chin just cleared the table. I looked up like a cat at the glasses and plates, at the dishes and bowls and bottles that arrived or were taken away with surprising speed and a musical clinking. The room was bright, hot, and full of smoke, and women at other tables wore shoulderless gowns of what seemed to be a cloth of gold.
I can put the scene in order now from what my father told me long after and from what I have come to know myself. Although he was relatively young and worked for someone else, he and his friends were bankers and moneymen, American, English, and French, not long separated from their wartime units, investing in broken enterprises that they chanced would revive. My father put everything we had, which wasn’t a lot, and much more of other people’s money that, were it lost, would have dragged him down for the rest of his life, into businesses that had suffered the destruction of their plant, the death and dislocation of their workers, and the disappearance of their markets. “They have no factory,” he would say. “The railroad was destroyed. The roads were bombed. And the canals are full of explosives. But what is important is their habit of mind. What is important is the high probability that civilization, having come undone, will repair itself.” Though at the time it hardly seemed possible, he believed that Europe must be restored.
We had driven to Venice through Germany, Austria, and the Veneto. Because of that drive I thought that Paris, where we lived, was an island in a world of rubble. Whole cities were represented merely by blackened chimneys standing like fired trees on a savannah of brick and broken stone. And the few buildings that remained were like wounded animals, pockmarked and cracked, their balconies hanging by what seemed like threads. Refugees choked the roads, and military convoys passed with precedence.
My father and I were alone and had left my mother at home, the object of this being that I would by knowing my father gravitate less toward protecting my mother from him after, having invaded Europe, he had invaded our household. I met him only when I was three and had grown quite comfortable with the idea that he was a symbolic figure. This was our first time alone, and though I liked him I was convinced neither of his value nor his legitimacy. When he kissed me his beard was like sharkskin and his mustache like thorns. Although my mother may have been, I was not impressed that he looked like Ronald Colman. That my parents had had their difficulties was not surprising: they had not been able to touch or speak from February of 1942 to December of 1945, just short of four ye
ars. Without knowing it, I was the reason for the continuance of their marriage, and had become its strategical point. Evidently, a marriage without a strategical point is like a rhinoceros without a horn.
Late for me, perhaps at ten or so, the dinner ended with a torrent of words about business and politics that I could not fathom even though they were English, and my father and I broke out into the night air. The sky in Venice is too often the color of the Financial Times, but that night it was laden with stars. A wind blew steadily over the Adriatic, lifting it, swelling the cloudy melon-green waters until they lapped at the doorsteps. In the Piazza San Marco hundreds of people were walking about or had gathered around a little orchestra of the kind that plays concert waltzes on the terraces of expensive hotels. Sheltered beneath a canopy while the water rose in the piazza, the musicians were playing as if they were the orchestra of the Titanic. I was amazed by the river that was upwelling on the north side, with starlight broken in reflection on its streaming wind-blown waves. I wanted to go to an island, between ranks of abandoned café chairs, that it had not yet covered, but I did not think that possible. My father asked why.
“Because of the water,” I said.
“Why would that stop us.”
“Our feet would get wet.” Children are mystically upset by water out of place.
The island seemed ideal, and I yearned for it. God knows what I would have given to stand on its dry surface, surrounded by the rough and rising sea. This must have shown in my face, so, just as the orchestra had finished a song, he picked me up and, holding me in the crook of his left arm with his right hand pressing lightly against me to keep me in balance, he began to walk toward the ribbon of water.
I bent my head upward, blinking in the wind. More exciting than the island itself was the casual, unhesitating way my father walked into the water. Soon it covered his English shoes. The pants of his pin-striped suit disappeared almost to the knees. Although it was October and the water must have been cold, he seemed to enjoy it. He had crossed many rivers and streams in the four years that had just passed, in conditions that made this a blessing. He waded through without wincing or betraying concern. He wanted to show me who he was, and what I could be.