Galore - Michael Crummey [143]
After her first full sentence to him, Esther seemed incapable of shutting herself up. She talked endlessly of which roles she’d sung in what productions in which storied theater, each opera’s intrigue and backstabbing and doomed affairs mirrored in the dressing rooms and backstage halls and hotel rooms of the performers. The mad directors and absinthe-addled librettists, the aging Lotharios who lost their nature and the nose off their face to venereal disease, the pedophilic impresarios who bankrolled the productions. Esther was always drunk when she reminisced, breaking into scraps of arias or humming the orchestra lines, and there was no clear narrative to the diatribe. Abel had trouble keeping the details of one theater or composer or horny, social-climbing tenor separate from all the others.
—Do you know what I am? she asked one afternoon and there was a belligerence to the question that made him wary of answering. —I, she said, striking a stagey pose meant to mock herself, am a mezzo-soprano.
The words meant nothing to him but he knew enough to let her carry on.
—Supporting roles, she said, that’s what a mezzo gets. Servants. Mothers-in-law. I didn’t go all the way to Europe for a life in the shadows.
She found a vocal instructor willing to stretch her range, an aging Swiss with an addiction to opium and few scruples, and she had to sleep with him before he consented to the undertaking. Esther mimicked his fussy accent. —You must sleep nine hours a night and drink only water, no coffee or tea, no alcohol, you must keep your throat covered at all times, you must never engage in Sapphic love.
—In what?
—He was a lunatic, Esther said. —But no one else would help me.
She pushed her way into lead roles with persistence and one judicious love affair after another. Crisscrossed the continent and left her audiences wet, roses thrown onto stages from Hamburg to Vienna to Paris, booking engagements a year ahead. —Then the voice started to go, she said. She shook her flask of gin and took a long pull. —I guess I should have steered clear of Sapphic love as well.
There was a man who did Esther wrong, a horny, social-climbing tenor with busy hands who swore his undying love to her. He practiced his scales with his face between her legs, those muffled notes rising through her bones to strike in her head like pleasure’s hammer. His father was German, his mother Italian, and he had confused the arts of love and war in his upbringing. He left her for a Frenchwoman with the breasts of a ten-year-old and a five-octave range.
The salacious detail aroused and appalled Abel. He was sorry to hear such things and hung on every word. Esther’s tone was strangely light when she spoke of the man who discarded her for the bird-breasted soprano, when she ran through the long list of others she’d hurt or been scarred by, the whole merry-go-round of desire and flesh and betrayal and hope. A tinge of regret in her voice, to find herself beyond it all now.
In July of 1916 the name of a town in France arrived on the shore. Beaumont-Hamel. The desolate numbers whispered back and forth—eight hundred and two members of the Newfoundland Regiment ordered out of their trenches into the muck and wire and relentless machine-gun fire. A morning of blue sky and calm. It took all of half an hour to cut them down as they stuttered toward the German line, chins tucked into their shoulders against the hellish weather. Only sixty-eight men standing to answer roll call the next morning. There were three local boys among the lost and every family on the shore could claim a brother-in-law or nephew or second cousin dead or wounded or missing.
Hannah came to Selina’s House to sit with Abel, just to watch him breathing across the table. Her