“Ah, what difference does it make?” the mayor lamented as he ground his jaw. He turned toward the stage door. “I’d best get on, pay my respects to Caruso. Vera, would you mind terribly… can you find your way back?”
Of course I could.
But I didn’t go directly. My heart was torn. The buzz from the lobby grew louder. I inched the door a crack just to see. A congealing nervousness, a decided edge, had taken hold out there. What the mayor and Abe Ruef wouldn’t carry, the room had absorbed. The uneasiness touched the shoulder of my new friend Alma, whose attention had been divided by her haughty, impoverished parents on one side, and a gang of young, laughing belles on the other. The feverish push-push, the jockeying for advantage, made me queasy. I saw ambition, beauty, fear, and envy. I saw the fervent desire for something more, something just out of reach, that would always be the mother’s milk of my city, and this country too, the more-and-more-ness of the ladies with their painted lips and bejeweled hair, the men in their tall hats and starched collars. I didn’t see Rose. I did not see Morie or Pie. The pack of reporters, having been denied a photo of Ruef and the mayor, had shifted their rabid gaze to Mrs. Evelyn Whitehall, whose husband had recently dumped her for a vaudeville actress.
I didn’t want to go out there, not for anything. I shut the door and headed the opposite way, in the direction of the singing. There was no one to stop me. On the way, I retrieved the note the mayor had tossed in the trash.
“Excuse me, miss, are you… with the opera?” The bald man with the thin wire glasses and a beard that stuck out like a hearth brush spoke with a German accent.
“I’m looking for the mayor,” I fibbed. “Have you seen him?”
He smiled, his grin elfish. “I’m afraid, miss, he’s gone to his box. Come, come, let’s see.” The man led me as though we were engaged in a curious conspiracy. He gestured for me to poke my nose, as he did, through a split in the curtain.
“Look up,” he whispered. “First balcony, center box. See?”
Schmitz was just taking his seat, between his wife and Eugenie; behind them sat Eugenie’s siblings. And there was Abe Ruef seated with the City Supervisors. A united front. Naturally, Schmitz had taken a seat in front. He was leaning on the box’s padded railing, studying the orchestra.
“I see him,” I whispered. “Thank you.”
Before the kind man could ask me to skedaddle, a stagehand approached, calling the man I’d been speaking to Herr Director. While they talked, I peeked through the curtain, to see if I could find Morie and Pie. The house was nearly full. Everyone was finding their seats and there was much dawdling in the aisles, with folks having to stand to make room for latecomers.
Four rows back from the orchestra, I spotted them, and the empty seat beside Pie. Morie was fanning herself with the program while she madly scanned the crowd. Pie looked stricken, searching the aisles for me.
Then a commotion in the balcony boxes. A collective gasp.
The stagehand took my place at the curtain to see what it was. “It’s the duke, Herr Director. From Paris,” he whispered. “He’s taking his seat. Look who he’s with, Madam Rose.”
“Madam Rose?” Herr Director asked.
The stagehand whispered something and the director chuckled. “Old friends, my eye.”
I peeked through the split in the curtain.
They were acting as a team: the duke bussing the cheeks of the ladies in the boxes on either side, while Rose, head high, flirted with the men. Her gown was all bosoms and silver, her elaborately piled hair embedded with a tiara.
“Miss, if I may, please, would you kindly stand over here.” The stagehand, pulling me back several paces and to the side, addressed me with all deference, which Herr Director did not correct. Backstage a world had assembled—in the wings and on the stage proper, actors and singers had magically taken their places.
Herr Director signaled the maestro in the orchestra pit with a decisive nod.
“Now,” he said to the stagehand. “Now.”
The lights dimming, the first whine of strings, the curtain rising, I scanned the boxes one last time. Mayor Schmitz was looking right at me, his expression both bemused and surprised. We’d been here before: one upstairs, one down. And just like before, he winked.
Before the third scene in the first act, Enrico Caruso appeared beside Herr Hertz. The tenor was shorter than I’d pictured, barrel-chested, with a monobrow. He wore a silk robe across his shoulders, like a king. The director did not speak to him though they stood shoulder to shoulder; no one dared break the great tenor’s concentration.
This was the moment Rose had prepared me for—Caruso was the one who mattered, after all.
I’d read up on him since the night at Rose’s, and assumed, as one does of a famous person, that I knew him. He’d followed his father into the trades; he’d sung in church and on the street. He was known as an amiable sweetheart. One day the great Vergine, the Italian impresario, heard Caruso sing. The voice was singular, so large, so tender. In its irregularity lay its genius; with training it would make audiences weep. Some said the maestro pushed Caruso too early. When Caruso debuted at La Scala, the snobby northerners booed the lowly boy from Naples. Caruso carried the wound of his debut for the rest of his days. He was celebrated the world over, but his own people had marked him an impostor. The shock weakened his nerves. The slightest shift of routine awakened fissures inside him. Backstage, to calm himself, he drew pictures, doodles with his likeness drawn at the center.
As he prepared for a performance inside his dressing room, he studied the two photographs he carried with him at all times: the first
