Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [14]
It meant so much more than not getting any more pennies thrown into his mouth. It meant power. Dressing like Bing was just the beginning of his transformation: what Frankie discovered, as he used the mike, was that it was his instrument, as surely as a pianist’s piano or a saxophonist’s sax. It carried his voice, which was still relatively thin and small, over the big sound of the band, straight to the kids in the back of the room—particularly the female kids in the back of the room.
For that was the power of the microphone: not just its symbolic force as an object, but the literal power it projected. Like a gun, it made the weak strong; it turned a runt with scars and a starved triangular face into … what?
Into a dream lover, was what. The quality of a man’s voice is one of the primal signals to a woman’s brain—it goes right in there and messes with the circuitry. It tells her stories, stories about all the wondrous things he’ll do for her … and to her. All at once, this dropout, this punk who was so going nowhere that Marie Roemer turned up her turned-up nose at him, had been alchemized into—well, into something else. Those blue eyes, formerly merely insolent, were suddenly compelling … And he was so thin! One night at a school dance, while he was trying to hold a note, his voice caught out of sheer nervousness, and—ever watchful—he got a load of what it did to the girls: they melted. This was a boy who clearly needed to be taken care of.
He filed away the memory.
Little Frankie wasn’t going nowhere anymore. Even though it was still far from clear just where he might be going.
When Marty wasn’t looking, Dolly slipped him a few more dollars for additional orchestrations. Now the musicians, hesitant at first, began to flock to him. He had charts, he had equipment, he had a car. He didn’t have much of a voice, but things being what they were, he played school dances and social halls and Democratic Party meetings and the Hoboken Sicilian Cultural League, singing mostly Crosby numbers: “Please” and “I Found a Million-Dollar Baby (in a Five-and-Ten-Cent Store)” and “June in January” and “Love in Bloom.” And—in his head at least—he really did feel like Bing up there, the mike allowing his voice to glide smoothly over the horns and piano and drums …
That summer he took a vacation. Not that he was exactly working his fingers to the bone, but it was summertime, vacation time, so he went to the beach—down the shore, as they say in Jersey: to Long Branch, where Dolly’s sister Josie Monaco was renting a place. It was his nineteenth summer, and he was finally a young man, no longer a boy—broader in the shoulders, deeper voiced. With a dark tan (he loved the beach and the sun) setting off those eyes, his hair floppy on top and razor trimmed on the sides, he cut a striking figure.
Across the street was a girl.
“All life’s grandeur,” Robert Lowell wrote, “is something with a girl in summer.” She was a little thing, dark haired, tan, and cute.
Nanicia—Americanized to Nancy Rose. Just seventeen that summer.
The clingy tang of salt air, the pearly morning light, the faint sound of someone’s radio carrying on the breeze. Bing. Oh God, that voice of his. The feeling of the warm, pebbly asphalt on the bare soles of his feet. She sat on the porch of the big house, watching him.
Maybe he called to her; maybe she pretended not to notice.
Later in the day, after the beach, he stopped by again, and there she was again, same wicker rocking chair, same nail file.
He ducked into Josie’s house and returned holding something behind his back.