No Gay Friends

Having reverted rather dramatically to the Catholic faith about ten years ago, I have an interest in conversion narratives (an interest which extends to my professional life, since the book I'm currently writing for a British publisher, one of the reasons for my currently scanty blogging, is about religious conversion in Victorian England). In light of this, I got hold of a book that made a bit of a bump in the Christian press a few months ago, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, the conversion memoir of Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, a reformed lesbian and erstwhile professor of feminist studies and queer theory. (I like that her name means "rosary"; she is Italian-American and was raised Catholic, but her conversion was into a Reformed, i.e. evangelical Presbyterian, denomination.)

This is not a book review; I'm only a few dozen pages into the book. I have to confess to being slightly put off by its slapdash writing and virtually-nonexistent copyediting (though I suppose a small Christian publisher like Butterfield's doesn't have much of an editing budget), but the book is both more complex and more honest than most conversion narratives I've read. What interests me most, though, is what Butterfield, after her conversion, did with her past. After becoming a Christian, she felt constrained to jettison not only her career, but also her friends, and she writes: "I felt like a vampire -- possessing no reflection in mirrors. I realize now that this is what it means to be washed clean, to be truly made new again. The past really is gone. The shadow of what was remains, but the substance is truly taken away." But is it really?

One of the things that stood out for me in the early pages of Butterfield's book was her description of  hospitality in the gay community.  She describes how "[on] Thursday nights, I had a regular tradition: I made a big dinner and opened my home for anyone in the gay and lesbian community to come and eat and talk about issues and needs." Wow, I thought; it sounds so beautiful. It reminded me of Christ, after the Resurrection, cooking breakfast for his friends on the beach and calling them to come and eat. Why can't we have that? Why can't we do that? Or is such friendship and camaraderie, such openheartedness, the special province of the marginalized and oppressed? I felt myself filled with longing for the community that Butterfield describes -- the community from which (thought I haven't read far enough to ascertain this) I am assuming she later cut herself off completely.

The book jacket states that Butterfield now lives in North Carolina with her husband and children, and I suppose that this kind of fragmentation of a formerly sprawling community into a nuclear family is not only the (hetero-)norm, but also the gold standard for a Christian family, but it made me wonder nevertheless how well such a narrowing and siphoning off of a once outwardly-directed hospitality would work. After many years of commitment not only to a sexual identity, but also to what sounds like sincere friendship and generosity within a community of the like-minded, what would it feel like to become someone else, someone suddenly rootless? Does the new community of believers who are strangers successfully take the place of the old community of hardened sinners who are beloved friends?

And then there's marriage and home life. If you marry young, when you're still becoming who you are, you and your spouse grow together in mutual recognition and come to share a certain language, a particular lexicon of references. But if you marry later, when you are already essentially who you are -- as I have done, and as Butterfield must have done -- I think there's a certain area in which you must always be a stranger to your spouse, and a certain degree to which you will have to attempt to translate the understanding of the world at which you arrived in the past, as if it were in a foreign language. If Butterfield's former friends are now strangers, she must now be engaged in the work of turning strangers, including those in her own home, into friends. Does this work?

The person that I believe myself essentially to be -- a lover of beauty, an associater of the workaday and the pedestrian with transformative aesthetic experience -- seems distant now from the person who performs the actions of my everyday life. When I think about my old life, I feel a sense of profound dislocation from its suchness, which was mainly concerned with finding meaning and beauty in the mundane. Now, perhaps like Butterfield, my life is primarily taken up with attempts to get through the day, to fulfill my commitments, and to make friends of the strangers with whom I live.

It's tempting to make a little joke here about having no gay friends, which was a bon mot in the opera world back when I was in it, and referred mainly to sopranos who chose unflattering audition- or recital-wear: "She clearly has no gay friends," we would say, because, obviously, if she had any, they would have put paid to these unfortunate sartorial decisions.

But when I think about it, it strikes me that I too have made it a practice to jettison people, places, and things when I felt that they had become (to quote the Catholic writer who once asked me to marry him, and later denounced me as a blasphemer and a bad wife, mother, artist, and person) "detrimental to me spiritually," or maybe when I felt they had just grown a little tiresome. So often in my life I've wanted to change, to be different from what I've been, to become somehow better, kinder, purer, and more sincere; and getting rid of personal effects, or dumping my friends, or going to hang out in new places were symbolic gestures that helped me believe I was inching forward in what I thought was a good direction. I left a thrift-store men's cashmere overcoat hanging over a chicken-wire fence once, because I felt it represented a dark time in my life; I gave away the flowing hippie skirts I'd purchased in the hopes that they would encourage a certain man to love me, since they would signal to him that we wanted the same vaguely-conceived alternative lifestyle; I gave a pair of expensive earrings from Tiffany's to my neighbor because of their painful associations; I left boxes and boxes of books in the basement of my building for the taking. And I placed my first wedding ring on one of the side altars at my old parish church a few years after that marriage went awry, and just walked away.

And I received my conversion. And eventually I got married and had a family and then moved away in space as well as in time from the site of my old self and my former understanding. Am I like a vampire? Am I washed clean? I don't know; but I do know that, when I walk through my new neighborhood at twilight, I sometimes wish for my old life. I sometimes wish for one of my old, far-flung friends to be there, one who would understand perfectly the lexicon of this particular darkening cloud, of that particular warm light illuminating a room in a house and pouring onto the grass outside, of the scent of this particular mock-orange tree, and would say, "Oh yes -- that." I do not know yet if Rosaria Champagne Butterfield wishes for these things too. I have to keep reading.

Great Things Have Happened

This is without a doubt one of the best poems I've ever read, by the late Canadian poet Alden Nowlan, who suffered a great deal of hardship in his life. The poem is about an experience he shared with his wife and her son, whom he adopted.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Great Things Have Happened

We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, "Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time." But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn't mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I'm sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.

"Is that all?" I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you've never visited
before, when the bread doesn't taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.

(From What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread. © Nineties Press, 1993.)

"How is it that those girls get married, and we don't?"

And you thought it was just because you were a faithful Catholic!

A lovely little essay here. An excerpt:

There we are. Me, in a high-necked, long-sleeved blouse, knee-length pencil skirt, in the midst of a heat wave . . . while the city’s bright-eyed interns run about with bare shoulders and flip-flops.

Oh, and if you liked the essay, then you have to see the lovely little chick flick Arranged.

When the Catholic Family is Not Holy

I have been assured by my priest that Christ suffers with us. Don’t get me wrong. I do not doubt that at all (though there are times I have some very strong words for Our Lord). But those words can be very cheap. Why? Because WE are the Body of Christ. US.  Christ is pragmatic. THE message that Mother Teresa gave to the world is that God wanted US to administer to those in need.  If Catholics are so offended by feminism, then why are they conspicuously absent from Rape Hotlines, Domestic Violence shelters, and worse, the complete lack of conversation on it?  Silence.

A hard-hitting post from my friend Sofia, a faithful Catholic who has lived through the horrors of domestic violence and family abuse.

The Lone Pilgrim

At the waning of winter, I want to do nothing else but sit in solitude in a spot near a window through which only a little light comes with a steaming mug of tea close to hand and read Laurie Colwin.  In honor of St. Valentine's Day, here is a re-post from 2009 of an excerpt from her wonderful story "The Lone Pilgrim."

*****************************************************
The writers one loves become our friends, and revisiting my beloved Laurie Colwin is like seeing a great friend again after many years, and finding that your conversation is as easy as if there had never been a pause in it. This is from her story "The Lone Pilgrim":

You get used to a condition of longing. Live with it over time and it becomes part of your household . . . . You cannot fantasize being married if you are married. Married to Gilbert, what would I long for? I would not even be able to long for him.

Woe to those who get what they desire. Fulfillment leaves an empty space where your old self used to be, the self that pines and broods and reflects. . . . The feelings you were used to abiding with are useless. The conditions you established for your happiness are met. That youthful light-headed feeling whose sharp side is much like hunger is of no more use to you.

You long for someone to love. You find him. You pine for him. Suddenly, you discover you are loved in return. You marry. Before you do, you count up the days you spent in other people's kitchens, at dinnner parties, putting other people's children to bed. You have basked in a sense of domesticity you have not created but enjoy. The Lone Pilgrim sits at the dinner parties of others, partakes, savors, and goes home in a taxi alone.

. . . . [N]ow the search has ended. Your imagined happiness is yours. Therefore, you lose your old bearings. On the one side is your happiness and on the other is your past -- the self you were used to, going through life alone, heir to your own experience. Once you commit yourself, everything changes and the rest of your life seems to you like a dark forest on the property you have recently acquired. It is yours, but still you are afraid to enter it, wondering what you might find: a little chapel, a stand of birches, wolves, snakes, the worst you can imagine, or the best. You take one timid step forward, but then you realize you are not alone. You take someone's hand . . . and strain through the darkness to see ahead.

(Above:  "Love Locked Out" [1889] by Anna Lea Merritt, which was used for the cover of The Lone Pilgrim, the collection in which the story with the same title was published in 1981.)

Desperate Romantics, Then and Now [UPDATED]

I am just finishing a new book about the lives of the artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Desperate Romantics, which also spawned a sex-saturated (and rather entertaining) BBC miniseries of fluctuating historical accuracy last year (a still from the series is above).  In my doctoral dissertation, which was about the use of music symbolism in Victorian culture to denote spiritual conversion, I analyzed some Pre-Raphaelite canvasses, but, for the most part,  my research did not require me to delve into the less-savory aspects of the artists' lives.  This book has taken care of that gap in my research, and I now know more about the sodden and depressing love affairs of these men, who started out in the world with such high hopes and such noble purpose, than I ever really wanted to.

One of the saddest threads in the book is the story of the open marriage between the great designer and second-generation Pre-Raphaelite William Morris and his wife, Jane, with whom Pre-Raphaelite gadfly Dante Gabriel Rossetti was also in love, and with whom he lived in a house rented by Morris for that purpose.  Everything, however, ended badly and sadly for everyone, and one can't help but feel terrible pity for all the players in the drama, especially those who, like Rossetti, strayed from the Brotherhood's original aim -- to bring a new social realism to art, and especially to religious art -- and began to put beauty for its own sake above all else, a privileging which surely led to Rossetti's mental deterioration and untimely death.

Then I was alerted by my friend Mrs. Darwin to this slice of modern life, which rang achingly true to what I'd just been reading in the lives of the PRBs.  The story of this newlywed pair, given prominent place in the Weddings section of the New York Times, begins: 

What happens when love comes at the wrong time?

Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla met in 2006 in a pre-kindergarten classroom. They both had children attending the same Upper West Side school. They also both had spouses.

Part “Brady Bunch” and part “The Scarlet Letter,” their story has played out as fodder for neighborhood gossip. But from their perspective, the drama was as unlikely as it was unstoppable. 

The rest of the article reads like a brave attempt written by a sympathetic friend to clear the good names of Ms. Riddell (a reporter) and Mr. Partilla (an advertising executive), who are quick to point out that they did not have an affair while they were still on their first marriages, and that they will spend the rest of their lives trying to bind up the wounds their behavior has inflicted upon their children from those marriages.  The article garnered many, many more comments than usual for a piece in what are essentially the paper's society pages.  While some comments came in the form of well-wishes, a significant number shared the tone of this one: 

Claiming credit for not having an affair while engineering the end to your marriage is like claiming credit for not speeding while driving drunk and causing an accident.

I actually had nightmares about this article after I read it.  The ethos of personal happiness as the highest good, a goal for which one must go through fire (though that fire destroy everything it touches), and summon all of one's misplaced courage to achieve, is one with which I'm all too familiar from an earlier chapter of my life.  Though my actions, by the grace of God, did not mirror those of the players in what is essentially a story of personal tragedy (one that someone at the Times inexplicably deemed "news that's fit to print"), I can fully understand the compulsions and the lack of compunction and other social barriers that encouraged Ms. Riddell and Mr. Partilla to blow up their own lives and the lives of all those dear to them.

One thing in the article that struck me as overwhelmingly sad is the theme of the inevitable messiness of life, "messiness" being a sort of unstoppable force that one is advised to accept and embrace, and which rationalizes the suffering of the innocents on the outskirts of the love story: 


“This is life,” said the bride, embracing the messiness of the moment along with her bridegroom. “This is how it goes.”

I'm quite familiar with this ethos of messiness; it used to come at me from all sides, and it's larded throughout our culture, and trotted out with alarming frequency to justify a great deal of harmful behavior.  Another New York Times "Vows" column that caught my eye last year for the same reasons was this one, with the added interest, for me, of both the bride and groom being opera singers, since I associate that messiness-to-personal-happiness equation with my own opera days. (New Yorkers might recall that the couple's "life coach" and minister, Aleta St. James, is the sister of Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, and became a news item herself a few years ago when she gave birth to twins well into her fifties, apparently via a donor egg.)

It strikes me that those who are working to uphold traditional marriage have far more to fear from the credo of life's inevitable messiness, tied to the goal of personal-happiness-above-all-else, than from any other quarter.

H/T:  Korrektiv

UPDATE:  Good analysis of the Times article here.

UPDATE 2:  A well-written analysis by someone who's been there, which also references one of my favorite movies, The Squid and the Whale.

The Book of Tears and Remembering

It's a Saturday, and I'm surprised to find myself doing what I used to do on Saturdays for years back in New York City, before I was a mother, before I had fully accepted my reversion back to the Catholic faith (and even then for a long time after), before I moved to the Bronx, a move about which a friend of mine said, "I thought people went there willingly only to die." I am sitting at the enormous sixties-era oak desk that I got for fifty bucks at the apartment sale of a divorcing Argentine woman in my old neighborhood, editing text while I listen to Jonathan Schwartz's weekly radio program on WNYC, on which I know he will play at least one song that will make me want to take to my bed in a paroxysm of tears -- probably something sung by Audra McDonald or Nancy LaMott -- and sleep until my heart is healed, a moment which, of course, will never really come.  In those days, however, most of the text I was editing was my own, and I was often longing for love, love either past or ambiguously present, and working against the feeling of shikata ga nai, the sense that everything I was doing was just to fortify my own very small world against the encroachment of despair, so I had better keep working.  And then, as now, I was constantly nagged by the feeling that I had to get up from the desk and go over to my little piano and start practicing already, because I probably had a gig or a university recital requirement right around the corner.

Back then, when I would hit the wall and not be able to read another word, I would push up from my mammoth desk and flee the apartment, letting the steel door slam behind me.  I would go out the side entrance of my pre-war apartment building and walk to Fort Tryon Park.  Now, I slink out the back door of my house and walk through my silent neighborhood, often meeting no one on the street except a young man with Down syndrome, like me an inveterate walker no matter what the weather.  Days like this, I miss everything about New York.  I miss the colors and the smells.  I miss seeing people on the street, even if I didn't want to talk to them, even if I hoped and prayed, as I did on many a day, that I wouldn't run into anyone I knew.

I know there must be a reason for my coming here, besides accompanying my husband to the place where he got a job.  When he got the job offer, he told me that if I wanted to stay in New York, he would turn it down.  But even I, with my more-than-occasionally faulty grasp of the theory of mind, knew that I couldn't hold him back from what was a step up.  Even I had a shred of humility large and sincere enough to swallow hard and accept that we would be leaving everything we knew and many of the things we loved, but that it would be willful and cruel of me to put my foot down and keep it in the city I love.

That was two years ago.  It's been a hard, lonely two years.  There have been many struggles, and few bright spots.  Sometimes it feels as if things are just getting more and more difficult, and as if none of my prayers are being answered in the way I want, not even what seemed like the inocuous-enough one for a friend.  I feel like my life is contracting, getting smaller and narrower, rather than expanding, which is of course what everyone wants to happen in their lives.

It is so hard for my prima-donna self to accept this smallness, this forced humility.  My heart aches when I think of what might be happening in my old neighborhood.  The plane trees are turning yellow and dropping their leaves to the sidewalks.  My friend N., the opera singer who lives on the other side of the building, is writing some software code for a design client.  My great friend F., who was my recital accompanist before he moved to England, is swinging his book bag full of bottles of Italian wine from Astor Wines and Spirits as he trudges with his idiosyncratic gait up the hill from the subway to his apartment, which is around the corner from mine, and from which he can see a sliver of the river and the bridge out of one window.  My beloved downstairs neighbor, Mrs. M., an Austrian refugee from World War II who died last year a month before her ninety-ninth birthday, is walking back from the hair salon, looking natty in a tweed jacket.

But all of this is long ago.  My friends are dispersed, and some are dead.  And if I remember hard enough, I will see M. on the street outside, waving to me over his shoulder as I stand in the window of our apartment, on his way downtown to work a night shift in a building that was destroyed in 9/11.  And then I will remember the day he stopped waving.

And then where will I be? At my desk in Appalachia, my heart aching, asking God that, if He's going to allow me to remember all of this, to let it be for a reason that will be helpful to someone else, even if I never know it.  As Pablo Neruda wrote, "Es tan corto el amor, y tan largo el olvido" -- love is so short, and forgetting is so long.  And now I really do have to go and practice.

Here's some music about tears and remembering on this lonely Saturday.

Music and Memory, Part 17: Old Wine in New Wineskins

Does anyone really believe T.S. Eliot about April being the cruelest month, "mixing memory with desire"?  The very presence of desire in the mix would seem to me to add a dash of hope to April's ethos.  But in the early autumn, no such hope -- of rebirth, resurrection, renewal -- is reflected to us in nature; just desuetude, dénouement, and fading away.  Schumann wrote a stirring setting of a poem called "Herbstlied" -- song of autumn -- which goes, in translation:  "The tender summer leaves fall from the trees;/Life with its dreams decomposes into dust and ashes . . . " (If you would like to hear a sample of this marvelous duet, go here and search for "Herbstlied," where you will find the redoubtable Peter Schreier and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau at it for a few seconds; unfortunately, I couldn't find a free download).

I am preparing for a gig in Boston at the end of the year which will require me to sing the kind of virtuosic repertoire in which I used to specialize, but which I haven't sung in almost ten years.  In the past, I used to use an elaborate, time-consuming methodology to learn florid music and work it into my voice and kinesthetic memory, and I will have to drag it again out of my body, mind, and memory.  But ten years ago my life was so very different from what it is today, and I wonder if I will be able to discover a new methodology, one that allows the singer to integrate old music into the new person.

This repertoire meant something different to me back then; it was my tool, and my ability to sing it well was my secret charm, my magic weapon, my mojo.  If other girls seemed to have lives so much better and easier than mine, or better apartments, or prettier clothes, or fantastic boyfriends, or happy marriages, I would console myself by reminding myself that they couldn't do what I did.  In my heart of hearts, I believed that my ability to sing was the only thing I possessed, and that my way in the world would be carved out through its use.  I would protect myself, keep myself safe and warm and afloat, by my abilities as a singer.  I believed this so strongly that, during my first marriage, my singing, that totem, always held its shining place first in my heart, and I considered my voice teacher a fractionally more important person in my life than my husband.

But then again, everything had become associated in my mind at that time with everything else.  My singing was my mojo, it was all that I had; I felt that with particular keenness after my abortion, which was also the time I began studying with the very influential teacher who was the most important person to me.  I remember how, right after the abortion, I realized that everything in my life had gone too far, and that it now had to stop.  It was a sunny Sunday two days later, and I left my then-just-barely-sort-of-boyfriend's apartment wearing my pajamas, feeling like I had to get out of there or die.  But I was so tired that I didn't make it to the subway, only to the park about a block away, where I fell asleep on a bench for a couple of hours, before heading for home as the sun was just beginning to set.

If my life in all its excess had hit the wall then and there, I would have to chisel my way out.  The only tool for that, as I had always believed, was my singing.  I began studying with the master teacher A.B., just at this time of year, and things began to appear to have more coherence.  He understood what I was trying to do as an artist, and he saw that I didn't have the technique in hand to do it.  He gave me that technique, and he showed me how to release the stream of artistic ideas -- musical phrases, sentences, whole conversations; creativity in collaboration with the composer -- through my voice, my intellect, and my body.

Then M. asked me to come back and live with him.  I did.  It was all I'd ever really wanted, anyway.  We got married a year later, and, as I see it now, that marriage was doomed from the start.  I never forgave him for sending me for the abortion, and we never, ever discussed it.  As Leonard Cohen sang, "Should rumour of a shabby ending reach you/It was half my fault and half the atmosphere."

Around the time I was last performing the music I'm going to perform in Boston, my marriage to M. had recently ended.  I was desperately trying to make someone else love me and stay:  the kind but pathetic Stoner Carpenter, the well-intentioned but ultimately weak sober alcoholic.  And I was having the busiest few seasons that I've ever had in my career before or since; I had management, some small recognition, a lot of gigs, and the belief that more would come.

Since my life in the ensuing ten years has turned out so completely differently for so many reasons, I am wondering how to relearn my old music.  We know from the Gospel that you cannot put new wine into old wineskins, lest the latter burst.  But what happens when you put old wine into new skins?

Twenty Years After

Twenty years ago, right around this time, I became pregnant with my first, lost child.

My whole world was M. then; all I wanted was for him to love me; I suppose that I believed somehow that the pregnancy would force his hand, would compel his love.  What I did not know was that the sacrifice of our child -- and his regret, and the way that we were now inexricably linked to each other because of that grim martyrdom -- was the thing that would finally inspire his love.

By then, however, it was too late.  I still loved him, but I had become bitter and cynical.  I married him because I felt -- we both felt, I'm sure -- that this was the one way to set right what we had made so wrong (though I can't really know for sure what he felt, because, after the abortion, we never spoke of it).  So I married M.  And I threw myself into my singing.  I have never met anyone who worked as hard as I did to become a good artist, who studied his craft from as many aspects, who strove to become an authority on the history and practice of his discipline the way I did.  (And I now know that, later on, when I taught college, I was much too demanding of my students; since this kind of striving, I believed, was the only thing that could save me, it was surely the only thing that could save them, all of whom were from humble backgrounds, all of whom were searching for the divine spark of beauty in their own hardscrabble lives, too).

I loved what I was doing as a singer -- all I ever wanted was to create something beautiful that would move people -- but, more importantly, it gave order to my life, it kept me from flying off into oblivion;  in short, it kept me from hitting bottom.  I trusted nothing and no one; I believed that all I had to hold onto in my life was my singing; I truly believed that singing would create a new, alternate reality for me, a realm in which the emptiness was filled, and in which I not only had power and agency, but also in which I became essentially good by virtue of the qualities I had developed as a musician.

I suppose it is no coincidence that I walked away from my opera career at the same time that I jettisoned my first marriage.  Too much had been predicated upon my first poor, lost child.

In the ensuing years, I have sometimes sought, sometimes resisted, the contraction of my life into a shape and a form more constrained than the expansive life I once imagined for myself, and which I have pursued at great cost.  I am both an accustomed and a reluctant penitent; as much as penitence has become a habitual stance -- to the bemusement of those who know me -- I would so much rather have all the nice, easy, kind, fun, pretty things in life instead.

My only prayer, as always, is that God will use the rest of my life for something good; that He will bring beauty and healing for others out of the abyss of my crimes and my despair.  Once, when I was very ill, I had a feverish hallucination of the Blessed Virgin standing at the foot of my bed; she showed me scenes from my life, little lozenge-shaped dioramas in her hands in which I relived all my misdeeds.  Then, as I lay there and watched, she turned each of the lozenges around, and they became roses, which she scattered from her hands.  Readers and friends, please pray for me too.

Life in a Northern (Appalachian) Town

I went to what I think would count as a society wedding the other day.  As the unlikely wife of an accidentally prominent man, I have to go to these things sometimes, and I always dread them.  First of all, I just know that I'm going to disappoint; the local society ladies are probably expecting a Sex-and-the-City, glamorous type of New York woman, and I turn out to have no jewelry to speak of and grad-student hair.  And then I always seem to say the wrong thing.  I started talking to a Very Important Person about concertinas at one of these events, for instance, prompted by the shape of a box he was carrying, and watched his face take on that look that you get when you're trapped with someone who at first appears to be normal, but whom you slowly start to realize is preoccupied with abnormal obsessions.

My husband was unsure if we should even attend at all, because it was the third marriage of a lapsed-Catholic son of a prominent Catholic father.  Politics prevailed over theology, however, as my husband works with the father, and besides, we were only invited to the reception; and so we went.  The groom, who was fifty, was a gorgeous, tanned creature with perfectly-gelled hair, who looked ten years younger; the bride was a rangy, slightly-loopy-but-sexy blonde about half his age, just a couple of years older, in fact, than his children.  When I said the wrong thing, which didn't take long, it was to her (though she started it, by suggesting -- rather wildly, it seemed to me --  that I possessed the entrepreneurial skills to start a small business of the kind that is desperately yearned for around here, in the hopes of sparking some sort of resurrection in this fallen-on-hard-times post-industrial town):  I asked her what her plans were once she got settled into her new, married life.  It became immediately clear to me that I'd been rude, though I hadn't meant it rudely at all.  I saw the bride an attractive, energetic young woman at the cusp of her adult life, and I felt I was taking a kindly interest in her.  Though I said none of these things, my conversational gambit, I hoped, implied the questions:  would she start having children right away?  (I doubted the couple, who had lived together before their marriage, were NFP practitioners.)  Would she take a class, pursue an interest, a career?  I was disheartened when she seemed flustered and upset by my question; fortunately, she got caught up in another conversation before we were both forced to walk our own back to some other, safer topic.

One of the groom's sons presided over a table right next to ours, which seemed to be populated by theater geeks; his wavy, Botticelli-esque hair hung down below his shoulders, and he wore a fedora, reminding me pleasantly of the Devo song "Through Being Cool":

If you live in a small town
Your might meet a dozen or two
Young alien types who step out
And dare to declare:
We're through being cool



I spent a long time talking to the groom's elderly mother, who was not at all hesitant to express her concerns about the union:  "He keeps getting married," she sighed.

The food was dreadful, but the band was really fantastic, and even included a horn section.  We danced to one song, and then we went home.

Still Life with Dutch Oven

I have had a cast-iron dutch oven for years, and it seems to have gone off completely.  Something has happened to the seasoning, and no matter how long or how often I boil vinegar in it and try to season it anew, the rancid smell lingers, so now I am going to have to purchase a rather expensive piece of cookware.  I suppose it evens out in the end, though, as the now-rancid one was free to me.  It used to belong to A., a conceptual artist who was a lifelong friend of M., my first husband.

A. and M. had come of age together, smoking pot in the basement of Buddhist church when they were supposed to be attending Sunday school.  Both became conceptual artists and moved to New York City.  A., who was several years the older than M., hit some rough patches in his life there, and spent time living in a storefront in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, known as the Cave, whose only furniture was the backseat salvaged from a defunct car and a bunsen burner for cooking.  This all took place before I ever met him, but I suspect the dutch oven originally dated from the Cave era.  I first encountered it a good while later, when it had ended up in A.'s painting studio, a basement apartment he had rented in a tenement on an ungentrified block of the Upper West Side when he was somewhat more flush.

A.'s studio was like an oasis for me.  Going there was like entering into some kind of strange clubhouse where everyone understood one another without needing to speak.  I truly loved his work, which consisted of things like sand in buckets stenciled with the word "FIRE" and bricks painted to look like wood, and I can't quite explain why.  There was something very clean, and also very heartfelt, about it; its ethos encompassed both bemusement in the face of the created world and compassion for those who stood in its face, bemused.  When I walked around the little basement room, surveying A.'s oeuvre, it all made perfect sense to me.  I would talk about it for hours afterward, and M. couldn't fathom why I loved A.'s work so much when I didn't really get his own.

When A. entered his forties, however, his life changed once more.  He and his longtime girlfriend bought a spacious apartment in the neighborhood between Columbia University and Riverside Drive, and their large monthly payments made it necessary for him to get a "real" job.  He and M. had worked side by side on the night shift in the word processing center of a large multinational investment house, but now A. needed a high-paying full-time job with benefits.  He began customizing computer programs for financial firms, and took a permanent position as a programmer for another investment bank.  He would no longer have the time to make his art, but, as he told M., computers would be his art now.  This comment made M. so furious that he dropped A. completely.  M., a purist, felt as if A. had gone over to the dark side, and as far as I know they never spoke again.

When A. was cleaning out his basement studio in preparation for his move to the apartment off Riverside, he passed the dutch oven on to us, along with a high-legged butcher block table.  M. left both these things behind when he moved out, along with our stereo and the dining-room table that I still have, which he kindly let me keep in case I ever wanted to entertain, which I didn't.  The dining-room table and the dutch oven have moved with me four times since then, though I left the butcher block behind in Washington Heights when I realized that its joints had become nests for roaches.  A. came over once after M. left to pick up some drawings that M. had made for him many years earlier (M. also left many of his paintings behind, which I lent to a friend, no longer wanting to have them around but unsure what to do with them.  As far as I know, my friend still has them.  M. no longer wanted them, as he had moved on to different media, and he, like A., eventually abandoned art too.  He is now a lawyer in a different city).

I have made scores of stews in the dutch oven, including many iterations of my favorite lamb stew with cerignola olives, and it's also made many wonderful round loves of crusty bread.  But I had completely forgotten its provenance until today.  It's funny how the implements of quotidian life can seem to possess all the animation of being and memory when we want them to, as if they had their own souls, and shared in our experiences.  And when we no longer want them, we divest them of the life with which we have infused them, and put them out by the curb.

Meritocracies of Love

While in New York this week, I had lunch with an old friend, a singer who has in recent years been much in demand for her performances of twentieth- and twenty-first-century classical music.  She revealed to me that she has canceled all her engagements this year because her husband has left her and their children, and she didn't want to give them the impression that she was leaving them too, even if only for the temporary absence of an out-of-town gig.  Her husband, also a musician, had become embittered by the new, essentially jobless reality of the classical music world, and had begun to blame his inability to make a living in his profession on the modest success his wife had begun, after many years of hard work, to enjoy.  Now, after a dreadfully harrowing year, my friend has met another man.  She told me that she feels magnetically drawn to him each time they meet:  could he be the soul mate she never had?

I have recently made a new friend in my new city, a beautiful, vibrant, expressive and gracious woman, a conservatory-trained musician, the mother of teenagers.  She is leaving her marriage after twenty-plus years because her husband, she is convinced, is not anywhere close to being her soul mate.  She is willing to risk her home, her financial security, and a partner who, though perhaps unable to show her in the ways she craves, does (she admits) love her -- not to mention the stability of her children's lives -- for the possibility that she may, one day, find her true soul mate.

She came over and had coffee with me recently, and I prayed to say the right thing (I always pray for that, usually, I fear, without much success).  What could I tell her?  That our spouses and children are dark continents, unknowable, like Africa?  That we can never really know them, nor they us?  (It is always a bittersweet shock to run into your spouse, or even a close friend, when both of you least expect it, when both of you are immersed in the concerns of quotidian life and don't see one another at first.  The second or two before your spouse or friend glances up give a glimpse into his utter hiddenness, his utter separateness, from you.)  I am not the sort of person to give anyone the advice to follow their bliss; doing just that pretty well ruined my life.  I'm more the sort of person to give others the advice to suck it up, which is advice I wish I had received myself.  And at this point in my life, I have come to believe the mantra my mother used to repeat to me as a child, though I resented it at the time:  we're not here to be happy; we're here to change things for the better in the ways that we can.

I suppose I've also come to believe that there's no real meritocracy.  Not everyone can be rich; not everyone, no matter how lovely, good, or gifted, will succeed professionally.  We grow up hearing that we can do anything we want to do; as adults, the world generally disabuses us of this notion in ways either gentle or cruel (this makes truthful parenting a tricky proposition, but that's a subject for another time).  And yet, egged on by our culture, we continue to believe that there is a meritocracy of sorts in love.  The good will be loved; the lovely will be loved; through hard work, prayer, or perhaps serendipity, it will happen for us, just as it appears to have happened for those couples we see whose marriages seem like overflowing fountains of the bliss that I just advised you not to follow.  But just as not everyone can be rich, or good, or attractive, or talented in the same measures, why should we believe that everyone can achieve the same kind of blissful romantic or married love?  After all, it was Woody Allen who rationalized his seduction of his de facto stepdaughter with the immortal words "The heart wants what it wants."  I suspect that for many people, love is work, even backbreakingly, or heartbreakingly, hard work.

On the other hand, perhaps I am just a cynical person.  Sometimes I worry that years of struggle have calcified my heart a little.

Terminal Degree

The first day of my doctoral program consisted of an orientation session in the music department.  I arrived on time, but the music students' lounge was already so crowded that I had to sit on the floor.  It was the end of the summer of 2002, and I was wearing an outfit that I don't think I ever wore again after that day, a hippie-ish ensemble held over from my days with Stoner Carpenter, consisting of a purple brocade dirndl skirt and a loose artist's blouse.  There was bad pizza, and the department chair, a composer, held forth to the incoming doctoral students on how, if you had to put up with what he called "the bullshit of living in New York," you might as well take advantage of New York's cultural opportunities.  I felt dismayed, even crestfallen, at his cynicism.  I will never make it here, I thought; I will fail out.  This department lounge, all of whose chairs seemed to be occupied by hipster composers, etiolated musicologists, and ethnomusicology dudes in sandals and funky hats, was not the place for my diffident post-hippie, post-opera-singer self.

Like most other endeavors in my life, I had auditioned for the doctoral program, passed the draconian music-theory-and-history entrance exam (it was so hard that I cried in the middle of it, and I knew some gifted singers, including one who was covering roles at the Met, who were denied admission after foundering on the rocks of that test), and enrolled at the university without having much of a plan.  In fact, it had all started shortly after 9/11, when I happened to run into G., my undergraduate piano professor (who had written the memorable line on my end-of-year evaluation, "Pentimento spends too much emotion away from the keyboard") at a friend's student recital at Juilliard.  We caught up, and, when I told her about the performing I was doing based on my own archival research, she urged me to get my doctorate.  "In what?" I asked, rather thickly.  "Get your D.M.A.!" she laughed.  I had never seriously considered getting my D.M.A. -- Doctor of Musical Arts degree -- in voice performance, but all of a sudden it seemed to me that it was indeed the next thing to do.

Influenced by G's suggestion (I have never seen her again since that fateful night), I briefly considered applying to Indiana University.  As soon as I worked out in my head that that would mean leaving my home and everything I knew to go and live in the Midwest, where I knew no one, had no idea how I'd support myself (there are few fellowships for D.M.A.'s in voice, unless the candidates are tenors), and would have to learn to drive, I abandoned that idle thought, and instead sent in only one application, to the urban university that would become my beloved haven for six years.  I passed the audition and then, rather amazingly, the wicked entrance exam.  Coincidentally, I gave a performance of my specialized repertoire in the spring of 2002, before acceptance notifications went out, as part of a scholarly conference at the same university -- it had been scheduled months earlier, before I'd even considered attending there -- and the conference organizer, a music professor who had been at my audition, said "See you next fall."

So there I was next fall (or, technically, late summer), sitting on the floor, feeling pretty scared.  What was I getting myself into? I wondered.  If I dropped out before classes started, could I get a refund?  I met my colleagues entering the D.M.A. program in voice -- all four of them -- and walked to the subway with one, who would become a cherished friend.  We told each other about our research interests, and, when she heard about my work, she excitedly suggested various grants and fellowships I could apply for.  "Um, I'm just trying to get through this day," I admitted sheepishly.

The next day there was a second orientation, but this one was for the entire incoming doctoral student body, hundreds of students across disciplines.  We met in the largest auditorium in the building.  The president of the doctoral students' council, a candidate for the Ph.D. in English, spoke.  She assured the audience that you could have a life while getting your doctorate.  You could get married while getting your doctorate, she said; you could have a baby while getting your doctorate (I would go on to do both of those things).  Suddenly I thought that maybe I could do this, after all.  And indeed, I could.  I didn't fail out, as it happened.  I earned a 4.0 grade point average during my coursework years, before I got married and had a baby while getting my doctorate.  During coursework years I also taught voice as a graduate teaching assistant in the university system, and after coursework, when my son was one year old, I was hired as an adjunct lecturer to teach voice, music history, and a special writing class for music majors.

Soon after my marriage, a traditionalist acquaintance of mine, the mother of a large family, urged me to lay aside my academic and performance pursuits.  She held up the example of a friend of hers who'd completed her medical residency and then gave it up happily when she started having children and never looked back.  "You can still sing," she told me.  "You can sing lullabies to your children.  Anyway, weren't you only doing all of those things because you weren't married?" 

I thought about it.  In a sense, it could indeed have been said that I was doing all of those things because I wasn't married.  If I had been married, I would presumably have been doing other things.  Or maybe not.  The truth was, I was doing all of those things because they were what I'd always done, and when you start doing something and get good at it, you're usually encouraged and even asked to do it more.  Gigs tend to beget more gigs, which is, if you're an artist, only what you want.  And beyond the pedestrian day-to-day work of any profession, making music with colleagues is one of the most incredible experiences that there is, especially when you know that what you're giving to the audience is being received and understood.  After each gig there was always someone who would come up and say, "I won't forget this night for a long time," sometimes with tears in their eyes.  And I was always particularly delighted when it happened to be an older Italian-American man or woman.  My peeps got it, I would think, they got the beauty I wanted them to have.

As a Catholic wife and potentially a mother, then, did my vocation imply the laying down of my craft?  The thought terrified me.  I made the mistake of attempting to justify myself by sending the traditionalist mom an offprint of my first article in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, which was published the month after I was married.  I thought she'd like it -- it dealt with certain musical tropes in patristic theology -- and I thought it would lead her to recognize that, among Catholic wives and potential mothers, I was one who didn't have to give up my profession, because I was special.

Well, the desire to be special, alternating with the belief that I was special, has permeated my life since childhood and led me to do many rash things that I now lie awake at night regretting.    Saint Paul said that woman would be saved through childbearing, and I wonder if that is particularly true for someone like me, for whom humility is bitterly hard-won.  My husband said recently that I act sometimes as if I still live alone, and it's true.  My ego, my sense of specialness, are painfully squashed every single day that I live in the community of my family, and being the wife and mother I feel I should be -- cheerful, helpful, present in all my senses, permeable, poured out like water for my loved ones -- is a constant struggle.

But still I wonder if I have to give up my profession.  Certainly it's true that I've performed a lot less since becoming a mother, though I have some fairly high-profile gigs coming up.  These gigs have no glamor for me anymore, though they might have if they'd come a few years earlier.  They are just hard work now, with the added stress and annoyance of having to travel for them and to rehearse on site; and the travel time and expenses, rehearsal time, and the practicing I'm able to squeeze in at home end up subdividing my fee from an amount that seems impressive to something hovering below minimum wage.  I wonder if I love my craft or my audiences the way that I used to.  Do I have anything more to give?  Does it matter?

And then, I'm also turning my dissertation into a book. A publisher has expressed an interest, and I've been working on the book proposal off and on for months, my progress slowed by the same question:  does it matter?

I don't know why I do these things anymore, except for the fact that, like graduate school, like marriage, like childbearing, like everything else in my life, they're right there in front of me and therefore seem like the things I'm supposed to do.  And also I think I'd miss them and become completely unmoored if I stopped..  I have asked God many times to show me if He wants me to stop singing and writing, but I haven't gotten an answer that I can decipher, and so I just keep doing the next thing that's in front of me.  I suppose, however, that if something else were in front of me, I'd do that thing too.

Prisoners of Love

I wonder if the reason that some who seek comfort or confirmation in the Catholic blogosphere are outraged when they find blogs like this one, is the commonly-held myth that everyone is exactly like oneself.

Sometimes I fear that I have little in common with many of my most admired colleagues and co-authors on these pages (though of course I could be wrong about that, too).  I still mull over the accusation of the erstwhile suitor who denounced me in an email after reading a post here that he found insufficiently anathematizing of Obama back in 2008 -- an accusation that alluded to the "unspeakable crime" I'd committed against my own unborn child.  I do not deny the crime aspect of it, and I say this not to defend myself: but not everyone, even cradle Catholics, grows up knowing that abortion is a crime, much less an unspeakable one, and I was one such.

Not everyone's parents marched in pro-life rallies; some marched in the opposite direction, to a place where the bumper sticker that reads "You can't be Catholic and pro-abortion" would have been met with real incomprehension.  My father, for instance, was not only glibly and openly pro-abortion, as well as pro-pornography, while my mother suffered silently by; he was also a drinker and a philanderer, and during fights on these topics my mother would sometimes, in a dramatic gesture whose symbolism could not be lost even upon young children, throw her wedding nightgown out the window (I think she would collect it later, after things had cooled down somewhat).  And there is many a church in which abortion is never mentioned at all (I can't recall a single bus going down to Washington in January from my own childhood parish, for example, though it was very much involved in the Sanctuary movement).

Suffice it to say that if you grew up in a family in which all its members loved God and each other, and if you had the added benefit of receiving good catechesis, you should really consider yourself extremely fortunate.  You might also consider that those you see embracing positions of apparent evil often scarcely have any idea that they are doing so.  It's easy to forget that evil rarely displays itself in all its ugliness.  On the contrary, evil almost always appears as if it were good, and had good ends in mind; if it did not, a scant few people would ever consciously choose it. 

It would be so much easier to love one another if everyone really were like oneself.  But I suppose if it were that easy to love, it would not be such a dreadfully painful struggle to try to be a Christian.

As for me, I thought that if I got pregnant M. would love me.  Then, when he offered it as the only possible solution to our predicament, I thought that if I had the abortion he would love me.  I had no idea at the time that (as it later emerged in marriage counseling) seeing me in that state of abjection and woundedness had in fact, or so he said, inspired him to love me.  It was too late; I never trusted him again, though I did marry him; but I suppose a love whose building blocks were desperation, need, misguided passion, and the sacrifice of an unborn child must have been doomed to failure from the start.

Down the One-Eared Rabbit Hole

The first few months of an adoption are taken up with what's called a home study, which involves compiling many pages of personal documents, writing autobiographical essays, getting background-checked and fingerprinted, and being interviewed on diverse occasions by the social worker overseeing the adoption process.  It's a little disconcerting, especially when you remember how relatively easy it is to get a baby in the usual way, should you be able to swing it.

I like the social worker who's handling our adoption.  She is soft-spoken and kindly, and she lived in New York for a time, which is enough to endear anyone to me around here (I almost started bawling at Mass the other day, at a parish in my town's old Italian neighborhood, when the old man behind me began intoning the responses in the cadences of the Bronx).  But I felt at a loss in our meeting the other day, when she was probing me about my relationship with my husband, and wanted to know what had drawn me to him when we first met.  His kindness, I answered truthfully, his masculinity, his qualities of strength and steadiness, the beauty of his voice.  Were these the qualities I had been looking for in a man? she asked.  Well, I answered, I didn't have a checklist.  And it was true; I didn't.  Nor did I plan on marrying him, no more than I had ever planned on doing anything.  It's usually been the pattern that I'm not sure what to do, but something appears to present itself as a logical option, and I investigate the option and see where it leads.  I don't believe in a dream spouse (I doubt that anyone who's had some of the experiences I've had ever could), and I don't believe we have very much control over the things that happen in our lives or in the lives of those around us, though I do believe we can influence those lives for good or ill (and that, perhaps, more than we know).  For the most part, however, I think that it's probably more realistic to wake up every day with open hands and abandon ourselves completely to the will of God, though I didn't tell this to the social worker. 

She had given me some adoption magazines at our last meeting, and I had enjoyed reading them, but I felt as if they created the expectation of a fairy-tale ending around every adoption story, and I told her so.  The editorial thrust seemed to be that you wait and wait for your child, and you finally bring your child home, and everyone is henceforth happy all the time (not, come to think of it, unlike the tone of most books and magazines directed towards bearing, bringing home, and parenting one's biological children; if there were less of that around, there would probably be less post-partum depression).  The social worker agreed that the magazines were very glass-half-full, which is not a bad thing; nor is presenting adoption in a positive light a bad thing at all.  However, she said, most prospective adoptive parents are mourning the loss of their dream baby, the biological child they didn't have, and many have come to adoption with the attitude that it is a second-best way to become a parent, so it helps them to have the dream story reinforced.

I don't see it as second-best, and, just as I don't think there's a dream spouse, neither do I think there's a dream baby.  No matter how you get your children, they will always be unplumbable, even incomprehensible, mysteries.  How can we ever really know anyone else, including our own children?  The people that God brings into our lives as friends, spouses, children, are, and will always be, vast, unexplored continents.  "Thou has brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger."

For all of my confusion and lack of planning, and all my lack of belief in goals and dreams, I do have a memory that has remained all these years, and has given me some sense of direction.  When I was a child, I loved and collected stuffed animals.  I would line all my stuffed animals up around the edges of my bed at night so that none of them would feel excluded while I slept.  One day, when I was about seven, I was with my father at a drugstore, where I spied a bin of little stuffed rabbits (this must have been around Easter) with coats made of real rabbit fur.  One of them, I noticed, was missing an ear.  I started to cry out of pity for this one, and begged my father to buy it for me.  He suggested that I get a nicer one with two ears, but I stood firm:  it had to be the one-eared rabbit, I said, because no one else would ever love it.  So he bought it for me, and I brought it home and loved it.  In fact, I may have loved it more than I loved my stuffed animals with both ears intact.  The one-eared rabbit, after all, just needed more love.

I wonder if finding and loving the one-eared rabbits is my real calling in life.  If it is, I have to trust that God will give me the strength I need to carry it out.

Music and Memory, Part 6: Treason

E.M. Forster wrote that if forced to choose between betraying his friend or his country, "I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."  While his proposition trifles with the notion of treason, I wonder what the comparable label is for betraying friendship.  If betraying friends were as feared and anathemized as betraying country, perhaps we would do it less casually than we do.  I know that I have sacrificed friends on the altar of my ambition, as well as simply because our beliefs diverged on matters that seemed to me absolutely fundamental (though few things really are).  Often in my life I've come to a fork in a friendship where continuing on has seemed like more energy than I've felt like giving, and so I've let those friendships fade away.  I'm ashamed to think of how lightly I've taken my friendships.  After all, Christ Himself called His disciples His friends, which certainly suggests that friendship is a holy relationship, or should be.

When I was a young singer, I had a beloved friend -- Soprannie, whom I've written about here before -- who was also, sometimes, a bitter rival.  Soprannie was a remarkable person on many levels:  not only a fine soprano, but also beautiful, highly intelligent, a marathon runner, a gifted jazz pianist, and possessed of a dry, wicked sense of humor.  She was courageous and feisty:  she lived all alone in Brooklyn, and once fended off a would-be mugger with a cast-iron frying pan.  Most of all, she had a great talent for friendship.  Her heart was more open than that of anyone I've ever known, before or since, and she suffered compassionately alongside her friends, whom she called her "volitional family."  Indeed, Soprannie's friendship was prized by her colleagues and semblables, for whom she always had a listening ear.  Her friends were so used, however, to her position as the listener, the shorer-up, and the scraper-down-from-the-ceiling, that few of them ever considered that she needed to be listened to and supported as well.  The self-absorption of her friends vis-à-vis Soprannie was probably the reason that, as she confided to me afterward, only two of the many guests at her wedding actually gave her and her groom a gift (I was one of them).  No one, apparently, thought that Soprannie needed anything.

Like every beautiful, brilliant, and talented woman I've ever known, Soprannie was subject to searing romantic disappointment (the more I know women who were raised in faithful Catholic families, on the other hand, the more they appear to me to have been inoculated against this hazard of modern femininity; but Soprannie, like me, was raised in a progressive-activist Catholic family, and she herself used to quip that God offered minimal protection and maximum support).  In those days, both Soprannie and I were scraping by on pocket change -- on one occasion, she had to panhandle her subway fare home from work -- and at one point I tried to set her up with a very nice young lawyer whom I worked for.  He was artistically inclined himself, one of the many lawyers and bankers I encountered during those years who had given up an uncertain future in the arts for the far more reliable and lucrative worlds of finance and corporate law, and he was very taken with Soprannie.  She, however, put the kibosh on their relationship one date night when, having a drink at her apartment, he propositioned her with the suggestion: "You have needs . . . and I have needs."

Soprannie and I used to go to the opera together, and, since we couldn't afford to go out to dinner first, we would each bring snacks -- a bag of baby carrots, a package of pita bread, a little tub of humus -- and meet in a public atrium on Broadway in the West 60s to share them before heading over to the Met.  I remember once we were at a star-studded performance of Mozart's wonderful, underrated opera Idomeneo -- Plácido Domingo, Anne Sofie von Otter, and Dawn Upshaw were all in the cast -- when Soprannie, in tears, asked if we could leave after the first act.  She was going through a painful heartbreak.  We left, and went to a bar instead.

In the mid-nineties, we were both at a point in our careers where we needed more credits and roles on our résumés.  So we did the sort of thing that enterprising young singers in New York often do:  we self-produced a performance of Le Nozze di Figaro, with Soprannie singing the Countess and I (still singing soprano roles at the time) Susanna.  It was not hard at all to find other young singers in need of gigs to take the other roles, and we ended up with quite an excellent cast.  We used the piano-vocal transcription of the score, and our opera was "played" by one of the best coaches and rehearsal pianists working in New York at the time.  Annie's church donated the space, and we packed the house with our friends and colleagues.  Our staging was minimal, but effective:  my costume prop was a sheer little black French maid's apron, and hers a string of pearls, and in the last act, when the Countess and Susanna exchange clothes in order to trick the Count, she put on my apron and I put on her pearls.

During the rehearsal period, I got angry at Soprannie when she explained to a non-singing friend the difference in our voices.  "Pentimento's singing," she said. "is exciting, like baklava.  But I am like a slice of rich dark-chocolate cake."  I wanted to be dark chocolate, too; who wouldn't?  But Soprannie was a singer of great intelligence and musicality, and singing with her, when she wasn't undermining herself with the kinds of semi-conscious, neurotic self-sabotage practiced by many singers, could be thrilling.

The truth was that, as much as we loved each other, Soprannie and I were fiercely competitive.  We concealed information from each other about auditions and coaches.  Once we were able to tag along together on a road trip to Washington, D.C. for an audition, in a car driven by an up-and-coming young woman conductor.  I told the conductor how Soprannie had recently been in a bike accident when a guy in a parked Mercedes had opened his door into the bike lane on Madison Avenue; she'd gone on to sing a performance a few days later with a taped-up cracked rib.  My point was to favorably reflect upon how tough and committed Soprannie was.  Soprannie, however, was furious with me:  the up-and-coming conductor had a car (a rarity in New York), and was, therefore, a driver.  Didn't I realize that New York drivers hated bicyclists?  She was sure my anecdote would have a negative effect on her career, and that I'd told if for that purpose.

Over time, Soprannie's life changed, and mine did too -- hers, it must be said, for the better, mine not so much.  In spite of her unstinting self-giving, she had long been lonely, and she finally met a suitable man.  Some of her friends were not shy about expressing their distaste for this fellow -- he was an M.B.A. working in marketing, and they were . . . artists (I'm wondering now if this may have been one of the reasons for the general withholding of gifts at their wedding).  Some in Soprannie's circle saw her choice as a true betrayal -- as a sort of friendship treason, if you will.  Soprannie wouldn't have to work her ass off anymore, like everyone else in her cohort:  it just wasn't fair.  The consensus was that she was selling out.  You can bet there was not a little resentment abroad concerning her happy reversal in fortune.

I, on the other hand, had gotten married young to M., a conceptual artist, and, while we had a great deal in common, were good comrades, and he was unselfishly supportive of my life as a musician, I, though I could never admit it, was eaten away by mistrust and anger towards him for taking me to abort our child before we were married, engaged, or even a real couple.  I understand now that I had a deep instinct to make him suffer in retribution.  That anger, combined with my selfishness and ambition, and the toxic delusion that neither he nor anyone else could ever really love me, spurred me on to destroy our marriage at the same time that Soprannie was forming the bond that would lead to hers.

For a few years after that, I meandered through my world in a kind of exile from my own life, musically, relationally, and professionally.  Soprannie was kind and reasonably tolerant of my changing cast of boyfriends and spiritual practices, and supportive of my career transition in the direction of scholarship and teaching.  Sometimes I wish that she had been firmer with me -- had told me, especially during the horrible times, that I was going down the wrong path, that I needed to stop.  But an unspoken rule of female friendship among our cohort was that we didn't judge.  Heartbreak and hard times were considered the price we paid for being highly-educated, artistic women making our own way in the metropolis.  In fact, even abortion itself was accepted, though not without chagrin, as part of the mixed bag of modern womanhood, and was thought of as a sad hardship that had become part of our landscape, but never as something that should be restricted in any way.

After Soprannie had her first child, and I underwent my conversion (which happened about the same time), our paths diverged even more.  She had different friends, and I did too.  But I always loved her like crazy.  I haven't seen her now in almost five years.  She moved to the West Coast with her family a few years back, and is now the mother of three boys.  I sometimes picture with envy what I imagine as her perfect life, and contrast myself, still struggling in so many ways, with what I picture.

But the other day I got a message from her on my cell phone.  She was saying, through tears:  "Pentimento, my heart was just filled with you.  Do you remember when we did that Figaro,  and we were so young and so in love with the music, and with being able to sing it so beautifully, and how we just wanted to sing on and on?"

Yes, I remember it well.  In fact, though Soprannie and I had our ups and downs both as musical colleagues and as friends, singing with her in our little home-grown Figaro was truly one of the greatest artistic experiences of my life.  I miss her.

Above:  An excerpt from the Act III Countess-Susanna duettino, "Sull'aria."

Friendship, Maine, and Marriage

Since my conversion/reversion, I've stood in a rather awkward position vis-à-vis my gay friends (having been a female opera singer in New York, they are rather many). One dear friend and colleague of mine expressed his distress that I was marrying a man who believed that my friend's behavior was aberrant. "God made me this way," he explained. Several years ago, before I understood that such things were really sins, I attended an old friend's gay wedding in Toronto. I had no problem with it at the time, and didn't see why anyone else should. The two had been together for years, loved each other, owned a house together. Love is love, I told myself, and I was happy that someone appeared to have found it.

In the light of conversion, I see things differently now. I still feel uncomfortable with the Church's injunction of celibacy for homosexuals, but no more so than I do about the same injunction for single heterosexuals: not because I think it's an undue burden, but simply because I know how hard and painful it can be. I am also very sympathetic to the feelings of hurt and exclusion that every gay person I know has felt at some point. Their suffering is not helped by the fact that some among my own faithful Catholic cohort effectively shun them.

However, my Facebook news feed is all abuzz today with cries of woe and outrage over Maine's adoption yesterday of a ballot proposal that would overturn the new state law permitting gay marriage. One friend wrote simply, "Muck Faine [sic]," while another, a deeply religious man who sincerely loves Christ, quoted Psalm 69: "Those who hate me without reason/outnumber the hairs of my head;/many are my enemies without cause,/those who seek to destroy me./I am forced to restore/what I did not steal."

I wish I had a good argument to refute them. To say that marriage is between a man and a woman, which I think now is a no-brainer, appears to gay-marriage advocates to be an argument based on a lack of charity and an outmoded morality. To be honest, I don't quite understand why gays even want to marry, other than for symbolic reasons of equality. Most states guarantee hospital visitation and property transfer rights to gay partners, and some recognize civil unions. Some of my gay Christian friends point to David's intense friendship with Jonathan in Samuel 1:18-20 as an example of a homosexual union blessed by God. I am no scriptural authority, but, as a musicologist, I'm all too familiar with recently-popular posthumous ascriptions of homosexuality for which there's no real evidence to certain great composers and musicians. (As for the Schubert claim, all I can say is that the construct of male friendship was very, very different in early-nineteenth-century Vienna from what it is today. And as a colleague of mine once noted as we browsed in the classical music section of the late, lamented Tower Records at Lincoln Center, recording companies need some filler for those "Gay Classics" anthology CDs, since it would be too boring if they were all Tchaikovsky.)

As it stands, I will have to refrain from making comments on my friends' posts, because I fear I have no consolation to offer. But I wish I knew exactly how to be a good friend to them, which I feel at a loss to do right now.

There and Back, Part 9: Born into Trouble

Occasionally when reminiscing here about my semi-glamorous past, I mention the time when I used to be a soprano. This was rather a long time, starting in college and continuing for most of the period that I sang opera. I was a small-ish sort of person, especially in contrast to the operatic norm of big bodies, and I could sing rapid passagework with ease, so teachers, coaches, and adjudicators listened with their eyes, so to speak, and most agreed that I was a coloratura soprano, in spite of the facts that I had a voice that was dark in color and that I could not really sing the notes above high C (on a good day I could reach a high D, but I lived in fear of ever having to sing one in performance).

The truth is, though, that although I worked as hard as I could (and entirely fruitlessly) on developing facility in my upper register, and also jumped (with more success) with both feet into the ball-breaking ethos of prima donna-hood, I never sat well as a coloratura. Coloraturas are not altogether untruthfully stereotyped as perky, flighty, beauty-pageant types (and there are more than a few opera singers who started their careers in pageants). There are all sorts of jokes about singers, and among singers these are subdivided into jokes about voice types, or fächer, as they are called in the business. One old saw concerns the various proscriptions against sexual activity prior to performance: basses, it goes, should forego sex for a month before performing, baritones for a week before, tenors for three days before, and mezzos one day before. Sopranos, the joke continues, shouldn't have sex the day of a performance . . . and coloraturas shouldn't have sex during the performance.

I started to come to grief in the coloratura fach around the time that I had signed with management and begun getting better and more important auditions. For the level at which I was supposed to be singing, I needed six audition arias in contrasting languages and styles, and I discovered that there were not six arias in the same fach that I could sing. None of the French lyric-coloratura repertoire -- Lakmé, Olympia -- worked for me, and the heavier French repertoire was just unwieldy in my voice. Likewise for German. In fact, there was basically only one subset of soprano repertoire that I could sing well -- Italian bel canto music from the early nineteenth century up to the period ending in the 1840s, the major composers of which were Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. This repertoire suited my vocal color, my technical abilities, and my emotional range extremely well, as I was often told at auditions, but an American opera singer could not specialize in one style of music only (especially a style that's rarely performed) and expect to have a career, and once, when I sang Bellini in a master class for Licia Albanese, she expressed displeasure with my dark tone in repertoire that had long been associated with a lighter vocal timbre.

In the meantime, I had begun performing steadily in the U.S. and abroad in recitals of Italian chamber music that I had uncovered through my own research. About the same time I was starting to have a little bit of success, my first marriage was starting to go very wrong. This was partly due to my overweening ambition, and partly due to the fact that, in my heart of hearts, I was consumed with a toxic anger bordering on hatred for M., who, prior to our marriage, had taken me to get an abortion. I was going to throw our marriage under the bus in the service of my muse, and felt justified in doing so, because I believed that it was the sheerest folly to trust anyone, and that to admit this was not cynical, but merely responsible. Since I could rely on no one else, I was going to do what I felt I was called to do.

As the marriage began unraveling, my voice began changing, or perhaps settling into its true position. I started studying with a new teacher who, to my initial resistance, suggested that I might not be a soprano after all. I asked my manager to come to one of our lessons to hear what I was doing, and my teacher had me sing a bit of "Nacqui all'affanno" (I was born into trouble) from Rossini's Cenerentola, a lyric mezzo-soprano role. As I sang, I sensed everyone in the room relax, and I understood that my teacher was right. I was not a soprano, but I had found my place at last.

But as things went from bad to worse in my personal life, I found that I was like a flight attendant who comes to work one day to find that she can't get on the plane. I had believed that singing was all I had in the world, and that, if I gave all my energies to cultivating my abilities as a singer, it would be not only my shield from danger, but even, somehow, my salvation. As my life crumbled around me, the career that I had worked long and hard for, paradoxically, was on the verge of taking off. My mother, who'd initially been reluctant to encourage me, told me quite honestly one day, "This is your time," and she was right; it was the pivotal moment in my singing career. If I put everything I had into it now, I had a chance at success, and possibly success on a high level. If not, well, then, as a prominent conductor told me at the time, "all you'll be known for is what guys you've hooked up with."

As it happened, I found that I couldn't go through with it. After M. moved out, I asked Hans, my manager, to stop sending me on auditions, in spite of the fact that he was getting me very good ones as a mezzo with conductors who were very interested. Just a few days before September 11, 2001, Hans and I had lunch and decided it would be better for both of us if he dropped me from his roster. I continued to work on and perform with my research-performance project, and eventually I went back to school and got my doctorate in voice in a research- and scholarship-heavy program. I had, to all intents and purposes, dropped out. I had willingly become obscure, and, according to some, thrown it all away. I would never be known for anything now, except perhaps by a handful of connoisseurs.

I am neither happy nor unhappy about the choice I made, though I am relieved, and sometimes I'm a little wistful. The tremendous freedom I knew when I sang at a high level is something I'm not sure I can manage to put into words; it's like nothing else I've ever experienced, and any singers reading this will know what I'm talking about. I don't know for certain if I made the right decision in walking away from my career, but I know that singing would never have saved me from the world or from myself, and that, in some way, my singing was inextricably tangled up with my moral failure, or at least it seemed to be. But my voice teacher told me once that her florist, who used to come and arrange fresh flowers in her studio sometimes during my lessons, asked her about me once when I hadn't been back for a while: "Where is that girl? I need her voice. Her voice is so . . . consoling."

If that is still so, it is my only good reason for singing now.

Above: Spanish mezzo-soprano Conchita Supervia (1895-1936).

Marriage and Trust

The best kind of writing, from Betty Duffy: naked, vulnerable, and unflinchingly honest.

How I Got That Dress

This is post is going up by special request from Really Rosie and Fallen Sparrow.

December 8th, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, was the fourth anniversary of my engagement (which took place, incidentally, in the church in whose excellent choir Fallen sings -- in front of the Blessed Sacrament, which is a good way to win a girl's heart). At the time my then-boyfriend asked me to marry him, however, I had already purchased my wedding dress. How did such an unorthodox thing come to be? Here, gentle reader, is how.

A couple of weeks before that fateful event, I was having a bad day. It was a cold, gray afternoon in mid-November, and I was late with my tuition payment at the university and wouldn't be able to re-enroll for the next semester until that matter was settled. I'd been working part-time while doing my coursework, and had recently returned from a recital gig in England, which, while it garnered me some attention, ended up being, like most recital gigs, rather unprofitable, and my bank account balance that day was hovering around $37.00. I had gone to my bank to ascertain this state of affairs (Amalgamated, "the working man's bank," natch, of which there were only three branches in New York, none of them anywhere near my home). After receiving the disappointing news, I caught a bus down Broadway, wondering what to do, and for some reason I decided to get off at West 37th Street and go into a church that I'd never been in before, the Church of the Holy Innocents, which is right in the heart of the garment district.

For those who haven't been there, it is a remarkable church. It is old, dark, and lit mostly by candlelight, and the walls and nearly every space not in prescribed liturgical use are covered and crammed with old-fashioned images of many saints, some of whom I can't even identify. At any hour of the day, you can find several mantilla-clad abuelas praying in the pews. Being an ethnic American Catholic myself, this is the kind of place I always feel at home.

Once inside, I knelt down and prayed fervently. Mostly I asked God to show me what to do with my life, and in particular to let me know if there was anything I was overlooking. Then I had to go teach a voice lesson (one of my jobs at the time was giving voice lessons to little girls on Park Avenue, which was very complicated for various reasons, about which I will blog another time), and, as I was leaving the church, I saw that it had a thrift shop in its basement. The thrift shop had a sign in the window advertising a very small-sized wedding dress for two hundred dollars. For some reason, I felt as if I should take a look at the dress, just for fun and just in case.

I went in and asked about the dress, but no one working there could find it. I looked at a few white things I saw hanging up, but they were not wedding dresses. All in all, the place looked sad and poor, with a few faded clothes draped limply on the desultory racks. So I made to leave, but just then a man came into the shop to start his shift there, and the other workers told me that his name was John and that he knew about the wedding dress.

John, a diffident, humble older man with kind blue eyes, brought out an enormous garment bag from behind a curtain. He laid it on a table, unzipped it, and inside was the most beautiful dress I had ever seen, white satin with a ten-foot-long embroidered train that could be hooked up to the skirt, and a bodice encrusted with artificial pearls - a princess's gown. Understandably, considering the location of the church, the dress was a designer's sample. It looked as if it would fit me, but I couldn't be certain by eyeballing it, so I asked John if I could try it on. He refused, because he didn't want it to get dirty, and anyway, there were no changing rooms. So I figured it wasn't meant to be -- and why would it have been, since I wasn't even engaged? -- and I made to leave. But then, for some reason, John relented, and said I could try it on, as long as I took off my shoes. So I stood on what honestly looked like a Muslim prayer rug -- I'm not sure why it was there -- and two women sheltered me, and I pulled the dress on over my head found that it fit like it was made for me. Then, to my great amazement, John fell to his knees, made the sign of the cross, and started praying and thanking God. He said he'd had the dress in the shop for a long time, and that many women had wanted to see it, but none could wear it; one, he said, had even left in tears because it was clearly the wrong size, so obviousy the fact that it fit me like a glove was a demonstration of God's holy will. He asked God to bless me and my fiancé (I didn't tell him that I didn't officially have one yet). All of this happened on a Friday, at three o'clock, the hour of Divine Mercy. So clearly I had to buy the dress. I put ten dollars down on it, all I'd been able to take out of my Amalgamated bank account that day, with a promise to pick it up on payday. I brought it home a few days later on the subway in an enormous garbage bag.

So then there I was a couple of weeks later on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, kneeling in front of the Blessed Sacrament as my husband-to-be produced a small box from his pocket.

We were married four months after that, on the day that Pope John Paul II died ("Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his saints" [Ps 116:15]), in a torrential rainstorm. Our son was born nine months and a couple of days later.

I had been worried that I wouldn't be able to have children; I was in my late thirties, and I couldn't shake the heretical notion that God would want to punish me forever for my abortion. But this whole story, after all, is about how His Mercy (as he made clear to Saint Faustina, who, it is rumored, will soon be declared a Doctor of the Church), is greater than his just judgment.

You can see a picture of me in the dress here. One of my friends in the Sisters of Life, several of whom attended my wedding, thinks that the dress was designed by the same designer who created their distinctive and beautiful habit, which can be seen in a couple of images on this blog.

It is important to emphasize, for my own benefit as much ss for the benefit of those reading this blog, that, as Christ said in Matthew 5:45, good things happen to bad people (and, sadly, vice versa). God allows the rain to fall and the sun to shine on the just and the unjust alike. Whatever God has given me is through no merits of my own, but rather through the storehouse of his unfathomable Mercy.

Dear readers, please pray for John, the man who worked at the thrift shop. I ran into him again with my husband a few months later, praying in another church (he was astonished to see me pregnant so soon after our momentous meeting). He no longer had his job at the thrift shop. He is a poor and holy man who lives a solitary life, and I know very little else about him, but I believe he could use our prayers.