Prima Donna at Large (35 page)

“I think for not being the sort of person I wanted him to be,” I said. “But if I hadn't said anything, he would have spoken up on his own, eventually. He couldn't let Mr. Springer take his punishment for him.”

“It is not Mr. Springer?” Caruso asked Gatti-Casazza.

Emmy had a funny look in her eye. “You surprise me, Gerry. Jimmy has always been such a favorite of yours, I would have thought—well, I'd have thought you'd be more likely to help conceal what he did than reveal it.”

That hurt my feelings. “Really? Do you really think I'd do that?”

“The thought occurred to me. You've been championing his career for so long—why
did
you do it?”

“Because,” I sputtered, “because it was the right thing to do!”

“Well, good for you,” she smiled. “You do surprise me—but good for you.”

Now that was grossly unfair of her; I frequently do things because they are right. “I didn't like doing it, you know.”

“I know,” she said sympathetically. Scotti gave me a little hug.

“Such a waste,” Toscanini murmured, shaking his head. “That fine voice—locked up in a prison. A great waste, no?” We all agreed it was indeed a great waste.

Gatti-Casazza got up heavily from the chair where he'd been sitting silently for so long. “A member of the Metropolitan Opera Company in prison! I do not think … it does not … ah, such a promising young singer, lost, lost!
Cielo!
What a pity.”

“A great pity,” Toscanini agreed.

Gatti and Toscanini looked at each other quickly.
People draw together in times of misfortune
, I reminded myself and held my breath. Toscanini raised one hand a little, Gatti opened his mouth as if to speak—and for a moment I thought they were going to make up their differences then and there. But both men abruptly turned on their heels and marched off in opposite directions.

“No reconciliation,” Scotti moaned. “
Mi rincresce
.” I was sorry too.

“It is not Mr. Springer?” Caruso asked Amato.

“No, Rico, it is not Mr. Springer.”

“It is not Mr. Springer,” the tenor said leadenly, accepting Amato's word for it. “All the time—all the time, I think it is Mr. Springer.”

“We know, Rico,” Amato smiled.

“But it is Jimmy!” Caruso threw up his hands. “
Per dio!
Who would think young Jimmy can do such a terrible thing?” He turned and glared at me. “
You
think so! You think so, and you do not tell me!”

“Oh, Rico, I suspected almost everybody at one time or another,” I said lightly. “I was even wondering about myself at one point. The one person I never suspected was you.”

That made him feel better, a little. Amato said, “You know what you need, Rico? You need a nice dish of pasta. With clam sauce, perhaps?”

Caruso grinned his old familiar wicked grin and wagged one finger under his friend's nose. “Eh, you think I do not know what you do, yes? You try to distract me with talk of food. But I am too clever for you, Pasquale—I understand you! Besides, I have pasta and clam sauce last night.”

Amato laughed and said, “What about the rest of you? We go to the Café Martin, yes?”

“Hungry?” Scotti asked me. “Emmy, the Café Martin?” She didn't hear him; she appeared abstracted.

How the men could think of restaurants at a time like this was beyond me. “I couldn't eat anything, Toto,” I said. “In fact, I feel a little sick. I think I'll just go on home.”

He smiled in a kindly manner, understanding. “Gerry. It is not good, being alone right now. You go home, you brood, you make yourself more unhappy. No, you come with us. You eat a little something, you feel better, yes? You come.”

Food, the universal solace. Maybe he was right; anything to put off thinking about Jimmy Freeman a little longer. “You go on with the others,” I told Scotti. “Emmy and I'll catch up with you in a moment.” The three men sauntered off the stage, the grim little scene we'd just witnessed already behind them.

I had to say her name twice before she heard me. “Sorry,” Emmy said, “I was thinking about something else.”

“You were right all along,” I told her. “About Jimmy Freeman.”

She waved a hand. “A guess. The same way Rico guessed Mr. Springer.”

“But your guess was right.” We were both silent a moment, and then I roused myself and said, “The men seem to have decided on the Café Martin. Is that all right with you?”

“I think I'll go home.”

That surprised me. “You don't want something to eat after all?”

“No, I mean all the way home. Home to Prague, when the season's over.”

I was appalled. “Oh, Emmy, you can't mean that! You can't travel through a war zone!”

“Prague is home. My house is there, and my friends.” She sighed. “I miss my cats. It is
home
.”

I stared. “You're willing to get shot at because you
miss your cats
?”

She sniffed. “It's more than that. What if it was your country that was a battleground? Wouldn't you worry about it?”

“Of course I'd worry about it. But I don't know that I'd go there.”

She shook her head. “I have to see for myself. I'll stay only a month, maybe less. Nothing will happen to me—you'll see.”

I thought she was crazy and said so. But then, it was just one more evidence of the difference between us; she had her way, I had mine. “Emmy—shake hands.”

She looked surprised. “Why?”

“I don't know. I just feel like shaking hands.”

She shrugged and indulged me. We shook hands, and then went our separate ways.

Epilogue

Toscanini left the Metropolitan Opera in 1915 and never went back; he and Gatti-Casazza did not speak for seventeen years. Caruso married and settled down. Geraldine Farrar also tried matrimony but didn't like it much; she divorced her actor husband after a couple of years. Emmy Destinn spent the war years a virtual house-prisoner in Prague; the Austrians would not allow her to return to America. Pasquale Amato eventually turned his talents to teaching, joining the music faculty of Tulane University. Antonio Scotti continued the perennial bachelor, amiable, charming, and always in love—with Geraldine Farrar most of the time, with somebody or other the rest of the time.

But when they were all together, they made
glorious
music.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Opera Mysteries

1

Giulio Gatti-Casazza, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, was not in the habit of taking orders from scrubladies. But this time he thought he'd better make an exception.

“You come!” The woman was wild-eyed and distraught, motioning with both arms to compensate for her imperfect grasp of the English language. “Evil thing. Come now!”

Evil
thing? Gatti-Casazza gestured to her to lead the way. A big, lumbering man now with gray in his beard, Gatti did not normally move quickly; he had to exert himself to keep up with the woman.

The scrublady led him to the chorus dressing room on the fourth floor but stopped at the doorway. “Inside. You go!” she commanded imperiously, and refused to budge.

With a shrug Gatti stepped into the dressing room—and gasped. There, dangling from an overhead water pipe, the body of a man rotated slowly back and forth, his eyes bulging in death. Gatti covered his own eyes with one hand; the poor man had hanged himself with his own suspenders.

Evil thing
. When Gatti could stand to look again, he recognized the dead man as one of the tenors in the chorus. A new man, hadn't been with the Met long. With heavy step Gatti moved over to stop the obscene rotation of the body. The corpse was still warm.

The general manager edged back out into the hallway and closed the door behind him. He hurried downstairs and rounded up three stagehands to take down the body. After explaining their unpleasant chore, he swore them to secrecy. “The other choristers, they must not know of their comrade's sad end until after the performance tonight,” he insisted. “It is hard enough even then!”

The stagehands gave their word. “But won't they miss him?” one of them asked.

Gatti pulled nervously at his beard. “Perhaps they think he is ill. I myself tell them afterward.” He took out his watch and checked the time. “Please! The others, they start to arrive any moment now. You must make haste.”

Without another word the stagehands hurried up the stairs. That evening's opera was
Mefistofele
, a work that kept the chorus fairly busy; perhaps they would not have time to worry about the missing tenor. Belatedly, Gatti remembered the scrublady and looked around for her.

She had disappeared.

“The poor man,” soprano Geraldine Farrar said the next day. “What could have gone so wrong in his life that he'd do such a thing? He wasn't very old, was he?”

“A mere boy,” Antonio Scotti replied, “only twenty-nine, Gatti says.” He adjusted the limousine's lap rug. “Are you warm enough,
cara mia
?”

“I'm fine,” she murmured absently. “That's two members of the chorus who've died—and within four days of each other.”

“Ah, but the young soprano—she does not kill herself, remember. An accident,
cara
Gerry.”

And such a bizarre one
, Gerry thought. Right before the final scene of last Friday's performance of
Samson and Delilah
, an ornamental urn had toppled from its pedestal on to the head of the chorister unlucky enough to be standing beneath it. Fortunately the curtain had not yet opened and the audience was spared the sight of a member of the Metropolitan Opera chorus dying on stage. “It wasn't even a real urn,” Gerry said. “It was only a stage prop.”

“But heavy enough to crush the skull,” Scotti remarked. “The opera stage—it can be dangerous place, no?”

“So can the street,” Gerry gasped as the limousine unexpectedly swerved to avoid hitting a crowd of people. “What is it, Albert?”

“Don't know, Miss Farrar,” the chauffeur said. “Buncha men carrying signs. Couldn't see what they said.”

“Veterans, probably. Could you read the signs, Toto?”

Scotti shook his head. “Anarchists,” he muttered darkly. “They are everywhere.”

Gerry peered through the tiny back window of the limousine. “No, I think they're veterans. Several of them are on crutches. What a sad sight.”

The war had ended two years earlier, but the peace that followed had proved an uneasy one. Nothing could go back to what it had been, but the discontent that muttered and throbbed and threatened constantly to erupt into violence was in its own way as frightening as the war itself had been. The Allies' long-awaited triumph over the Central Powers had not restored harmony to the world, as everyone had been so sure it would do.

That lack of political harmony was nowhere more evident than at the Metropolitan Opera, where the international make-up of the company was a source of constant friction. During the war, singers, conductors, managers, members of the orchestra, valets, maids, and backstage workers had all divided into antagonistic camps, each individual loyal to his or her home country. Gatti-Casazza had responded to the American audiences' patriotic fervor and let all the German soloists go, vowing that the Metropolitan would be at least half American. Wagner was dropped from the repertoire.

The wound left by the war was deep and only now beginning to heal over. In the fall of 1920, Gatti-Casazza had nervously restored Wagner to the repertoire—but Wagner sung in English; the German language was still anathema to most of America. The first postwar performance of
Tristan and Isolde
had gone off without incident, however, and the opera company began to breathe a little more easily. But now a few weeks later, in December, resentments and bad feeling still lingered; it would be a while yet before any ‘family' atmosphere returned to the Metropolitan Opera.

The limousine carrying two of the Met's most lustrous stars turned on to Park Avenue just south of Grand Central Station and came to a stop in front of the Vanderbilt Hotel. Enrico Caruso and his wife had moved into the penthouse apartment only a few months earlier and had been ‘warming the house', as the tenor put it, ever since. Gerry Farrar had missed one of the Carusos' lavish dinner parties the evening before because of a prior engagement, so both Enrico and Dorothy Caruso had insisted she come to lunch to make up for it.

“You eat the left-behinds, yes?” the tenor had said, his face a study of guilelessness.

It was a joke; Caruso would slit his wrists before he'd allow leftovers to be served at his table. So Gerry had come to the Vanderbilt for her compensatory luncheon; Scotti, who had been at the dinner party, came along because he always came along.

“
Cara
Gerry! Toto!” Caruso greeted first the soprano and then the baritone with a warm embrace. Dorothy Caruso smiled and extended her hands in a less Italianate welcome.