I heard the tenement outer porch door open as Mrs. Gutierrez stepped out onto the third floor and leaned to call down through the sunshine at the second floor.
“Aai, Fannie! Aai! It’s the Crazy.”
I called into my end, ‘Tell her I need to come visit!”
Mrs. Gutierrez waited. I could hear the second-floor porch creak, as if a vast captain had rolled out onto its plankings to survey the world.
“Aai, Fannie, the Crazy needs to visit!”
A long silence. A voice sprang sweetly through the air above the tenement yard. I could not make out the words.
“Tell her I need Tosca!”
“Tosca!” Mrs. Gutierrez yelled down into the yard.
A long silence.
The whole tenement leaned again, the other way, like the earth turning in its noon slumbers.
The strains of the first act of Tosca moved up around Mrs. Gutierrez. She spoke.
“Fannie says—”
“I hear the music, Mrs. Gutierrez. That means “Yes’!”
I hung up. At the same instant, a hundred thousand tons of salt water fell on the shore, a few yards away, with exquisite timing. I nodded at God’s precision.
Making sure I had twenty cents in my pocket, I ran for the next train.
She was immense.
Her real name was Cora Smith, but she called herself Fannie Florianna, and no one ever called her otherwise. And I had known her, years ago, when I lived in the tenement, and stayed in touch with her after I moved out to the sea.
Fannie was so huge that she never slept lying down. Day and night she sat in a large-sized captain’s chair fixed to the deck of her tenement apartment, with bruise marks and dents in the linoleum which her great weight had riveted there. She moved as little as possible, her breath churning in her lungs and throat as she sailed toward the door, and squeezed out to cross the hall to the narrow water-closet confines where she feared she might be ignominiously trapped one day. “My God,” she often said, “wouldn’t it be awful if we had to get the fire department to pry me out of there.” And then back to her chair and her radio and her phonograph and, only a beckon away, a refrigerator filled with ice cream and butter and mayonnaise and all the wrong foods in the wrong amounts. She was always eating and always listening. Next to the refrigerator were bookshelves with no books, only thousands of recordings of Caruso and Galli-Curci and Swarthout and the rest. When the last songs were sung and the last record hissed to a stop at midnight, Fannie sank into herself, like an elephant shot with darkness. Her great bones settled in her vast flesh. Her round face was a moon watching over the vast territorial imperatives of her body. Propped up with pillows, her breath escaped and sucked back, escaped again, fearful of the avalanche that might happen if somehow she lay back too far, and her weight smothered her, her flesh engulfed and crushed her lungs, and put out her voice and light forever. She never spoke of it, but once when someone asked why there was no bed in her room, her eyes burned with a fearful light, and beds were never mentioned again. Fat, as Murderer, was always with her. She slept in her mountain, afraid, and woke in the morning glad for one more night gone, having made it through.
A piano box waited in the alley below the tenement.
“Mine,” said Fannie. “The day I die, bring the piano box up, tuck me in, hoist me down. Mine. Oh, and while you’re at it, there’s a dear soul, hand me that mayonnaise jar and that big spoon.”
I stood at the front door of the tenement, listening.
Her voice flowed down through the halls. It started out as pure as a stream of fresh mountain water and cascaded through the second to the first and then along the hall. I could almost drink her singing, it was that clear.
Fannie.
As I climbed up the first-floor steps she trilled a few lines from La Traviata. As I moved on the second flight, pausing, eyes shut, to listen, Madame Butterfly sang welcome to the bright ship in the harbor and the lieutenant in his whites.
It was the voice of a slender Japanese maiden on a hill on a spring afternoon. There was a picture of that maid, aged seventeen, on a table near the window leading out onto the second-floor tenement porch. The girl weighed 120 pounds at most, but that was a lone time ago. It was tier voice that pulled me up through the old stairwell—a promise of brightness to come.
I knew that when I got to the door, the singing would stop.
“Fannie,” I’d say. “I heard someone singing up here just now.”
“Did you?”
“Something from Butterfly.”
“How strange. I wonder who it could have been?”