We had played that game for years, talked music, discussed symphony/ballet/opera, listened to it on radios, played it on her old Edison crank-up phono, but never, never once in three thousand days, had Fannie ever sung when I was in the room with her.
But today was different.
As I reached the second floor her singing stopped. But she must have been thinking, planning. Maybe she had glanced out and seen the way I walked along the street. Maybe she read my skeleton through my flesh. Maybe my voice, calling far across town on the phone (impossible) had brought the sadness of the night and the rain with it. Anyway, a mighty intuition heaved itself aware in Fannie Florianna’s summer bulk. She was ready with surprises.
I stood at her door, listening.
Creaks as of an immense ship blundering through tides. A great conscience stirred there.
A soft hissing: the phonograph!
I tapped on the door.
“Fannie;” I called. “The Crazy is here.”
“Voilà!”
She opened the door to a thunderclap of music. Great lady, she had put the shaved wooden needle on the hissing record, then surged to the door, held the knob, waiting. At the whisk of the baton down, she had flung the door wide. Puccini flooded out, gathered round, pulled me in. Fannie Florianna helped.
It was the first side of Tosca. Fannie planted me in a rickety chair, lifted my empty paw, put a glass of good wine in it. “I don’t drink, Fannie.”
“Nonsense. Look at your face. Drink!” She surged around like those wondrous hippos turned light as milkweed in Fantasia, and sank like a terribly strange bed upon her helpless chair.
By the end of the record I was crying.
“There, there,” whispered Fannie, refilling my glass. “There, there.”
“I always cry at Puccini, Fannie.”
“Yes, dear man, but not so hard.”
“Not so hard, true.” I drank half of the second glass. It was a 1938 St. Emilion from a good vineyard, brought and left by one of Fannie’s rich friends who came clear across town for good talk, long laughs, better times for both, no matter whose income was higher. I had seen some of Toscanini’s relatives going up the stairs one night, and waited. I had seen Lawrence Tibbett coming down, once, and we had nodded, passing. They always brought the best bottles with their talk, and they always left smiling. The center of the world can be anywhere. Here it was on the second floor of a tenement on the wrong side of L.A.
I wiped tears on my jacket cuff.
“Tell me,” said the great fat lady.
“I found a dead man, Fannie. And no one will listen to me about it!”
“My God.” Her round face got rounder as her mouth opened, her eyes went wide, then softened to commiseration. “Poor boy. Who?”
“It was one of those nice old men who sit in the ticket office down at the Venice Short Line stop, been sitting there since Billy Sunday thumped the Bible and William Jennings Bryan made his Cross of Gold speech. I’ve seen them there since I was a kid. Four old men. You felt they’d be there forever, glued to the wooden benches. I don’t think I ever saw one of them up and around. They were there all day, all week, all year, smoking pipes or cigars, and talking politics thirteen to the dozen and deciding what to do with the country. When I was fifteen one of them looked at me and said, ‘You going to grow up and change the world only for the best, boy?’ ‘Yes, sir!’ I said. ‘I think you’ll do it,’ he said. ‘Won’t he, gents?’ ‘Yes,’ they all said, and smiled at me. The old man who asked me that, he’s the one I found in the lion cage last night.”
“In the cage?”
“Under water, in the canal.”
“This calls for one more side of Tosca.”
Fannie was an avalanche getting up, a tide flowing to the machine, a mighty force cranking the windup arm, and God’s whisper putting the needle down on a new surface.
As the music rose, she came back into her chair like a ghost ship, regal and pale, quiet and concerned.
“I know one reason why you’re taking this so hard,” she said. “Peg. She still in Mexico, studying?”
“Been gone three months. Might as well be three years,” I said. “Christ, I’m lonely.”
“And vulnerable,” said Fannie. “Shouldn’t you call her?”