Джеймс Кейн - Career in C Major and Other Fiction

All that, what I’ve just been telling you, was in the last part of November. When the first of December came, it crossed my mind it was funny no bills had been forwarded to me. On the third I found out why. When I came downstairs in the morning and crossed the lobby, the clerk called me and he had my check in his hand, the one I had given him for my next month’s room rent. It had bounced. I blinked at it, and I knew then why there hadn’t been any bills. Doris was paying her own bills. The money was in a joint account, in her name and mine, and she had drawn every cent of it out, started an account somewhere else, and there I was. I don’t know why it never occurred to me that she would do it. It never entered my head.

I said there must be some mistake, and I would see him that afternoon. I went out, and hustled over to Newark, and borrowed $300 from a manufacturer of power shovels we had done some business with. I got back just in time to get in the bank, so I could cover that check before they closed, then went back and told the clerk it was all right, I had drawn on the wrong account, and he could put it through. I went up to my suite and counted my money. I had $75 over what I had deposited in the bank, and $7 over that. My expenses, over the $170 a month I was paying for the suite, were about $50 a week, not counting club dues and other things I couldn’t stave off very long. I was just about a week and a half from the boneyard, and I began to feel it again, that thick rage against Doris and the way she treated me. It would suit her fine, I knew, to have me coming on my knees to her, begging for money, and then give me a song and dance about how she had the children to think of, and send me out with the $12 she could spare from the crumbs she was saving for the household. I didn’t have to be told how that would go. I walked around the suite, and after a while something in me clicked. I knew I’d never go to her if I starved first. I began to think about Horn and his $150 a night.

Next day he called up. “Mr. Borland?”

“Yes?”

“This is Bert Horn again. Remember?”

“Oh yeah. How are you?”

“All right. Listen, my other tenor got to town last night. Fact of the matter, I stole him off Rossi and that was what I was doing in Pittsburgh. Guy by the name of Parma. You know him?”

“Yeah, I sang with him. Tell him I said hello.”

“I will, and he said to tell you hello. Listen, if you’re as good as he says you are, I might raise that offer. I might up the ante to $200.”

“Well now you’re talking. Come on over.”

He came, and looked me over again, and the place over again, and then he laughed and shook his head. “Well, if you’re a singer you’re the funniest-looking thing in the way of a singer that I ever saw. No offense, but I swear to God you don’t look it.”.

“You play?”

“Some kind of way, yes.”

“Come on up.”

I took him up on the third floor, where the piano was, and opened the windows, and shoved the Traviata aria in front of him. He played it and I sang it. When I got through he nodded. “I guess they weren’t kidding me.”

We went down again, and he got down to cases. “All right, how many roles do you know?”

“Three.”

“... Just three.”

“Marcel, Germont, and Rigoletto. I sang one other role, but it was a pinch-hitting job, and I wouldn’t know it now if I heard it.”

“What role was it?”

“Wagner in Faust. I don’t sing French, but they let me do it in Italian. They shoved it at me in the morning, I sang it that afternoon, and I had forgotten it by night.”

That made the same impression on him it had on the others. An opera impresario, he’s a little like a baseball manager. He knows all about smoke. He gets that every day. But a guy that can come out of the bull-pen and finish a ball game, that’s different. When he heard that, he quit worrying, and began to lay it out what I’d have to do. The hitch came over the guarantee. With just those three operas, he couldn’t make it three times a week, because they weren’t giving Traviata on a weekly schedule. He wanted me to get up Trovatore, Lucia, and Aida, and then later Don Giovanni, and they would revive it if they thought I was right for it. I said I couldn’t get up that many roles by the end of the winter if I had to sing three times a week too. So then he had a different idea. “All right, we’ll say Lucia and Trovatore, but get Pagliacci up by next week, and then we can put you on three times. You see, ham-and-eggs is once a week too, and—”

“... What is?”

“Ham and eggs. Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, the double bill. Pagliacci you can get up quick. After the prologue, which I suppose you know, you have almost nothing to do, just two real scenes, not over ten minutes of actual singing altogether. Then we can—”

“Oh. All right then.”

“You’ll need a coach. I recommend Lorentz. Hugo Lorentz, I’ll give you his address, a good man, works with us, and—”

“You know anybody else?”

“... Well, there’s Siegal. He’s more of a voice teacher, but he knows the routines, and—”

“Fine, I’ll take him. When do we start?”

“Next week. Get Pagliacci up by then, and then later we can work you in on the others. But we want to bring you out in Rigoletto. That makes you important.”

“Nothing I like so well as to be important.”

So by that afternoon I had connected with Siegal, and was back in the same old groove. I found out then how much Cecil had been giving me for nothing. Do you know what that bird took? He charged me $25 an hour, and I had to have him every day. I had to borrow $200 more in Newark, and it was an awful crimp in my $600 a week. But at that, $450 was nothing to be sneezed at.

I asked for a rehearsal on Rigoletto, with three or four of the choristers. In the scene before the courtiers there was some stuff I wanted to do, and I had to make them slam me down so I really hit the deck, so when I came crawling back to them I would really be on my knees. They told me to come over to the theatre. I went up to the third floor and put on an old suit of corduroys I always wore around concrete work, and walked over. That was so I could practice the stage falls. I hadn’t remembered about the Hippodrome, while Horn was talking. I mean, it just sounded like a theatre on Sixth Avenue, and nothing more. So when I went in the stage door and through, the stage caught me by surprise. I don’t know if you were ever back there to see that stage. It would have done pretty good for a railroad station if they laid tracks and put train sheds in, except there would be an awful lot of waste space up top. But did it feaze me? It did not. I was a pro now. I walked to the middle of it, let out a couple of big ones, and it felt pretty good. I stuck out my chest. I thought how I was putting it over on Doris, and how like hell I would come begging her for anything.

The conductor, Gustav Schultz, was at the piano, and we went through it. I think he wanted to look me over. I showed them how I wanted them to heave me, and after a while they got it so it suited me. When we quit, I saw Parma in the wings, and went over and shook hands. “Hello boy, hello, how’s a old kid?”

“Fine. How’s yourself?”

“O. K. Say, is swell, how you do this scene. What da hell? A goddam baritones, run for a bedroom, make little try, audience all a time wonder why he don’t get in. Look like he must be weak. Ought to fight like hell, just like you do’m now, and then pow! — down he go, just like this!”

He threw his shoulder under my belly, and I went head over heels on to the floor. It was one stage fall I didn’t expect. Then he laughed like hell. Singers, they’re a funny breed. They’ve got what you might call a rudimentary sense of humor, in the first place, and they’re awful proud of their muscles, in the second place. They spend half their time telling the conductor they’re going to knock him back into the customers’ laps if he doesn’t quit his cussedness, and I’ll say for them they could do it if they tried. People think they’re a flock of fairies. They’re more like wrestlers. Well, singing doesn’t come from the spirit. It comes from the belly, and it takes plenty of belly and chest to do it right.