When Mount Vesuvius erupted a few weeks earlier, it seemed a harbinger of bad things, he told the reporters at the Call. Getting to San Francisco had been a trial—ten interminable days on a train. The farther west he’d ventured, farther from his wife and sons in Naples, he couldn’t sleep and longed for the sound of his children’s voices. At night he was racked by ugly, prescient dreams.
What he didn’t tell the papers, what I’d learned from Hank as we waited that evening for Morie and Pie to come out of the house, was that Caruso believed that we San Franciscans were grossly immoral—worse than Sicilians.
He’d arrived to the fanfare of mobbing crowds. Caruso’s suites at the Palace Hotel offered the calm of gold-plated faucets and smoke and fire alarms installed on every floor. Each suite came with a butler on call day and night. The prostitutes, supplied by Rose, lit sweet-smelling candles and applied lotions to Caruso’s frayed nerves; they employed tantric methods guaranteed to promote relaxation. Caruso’s valet waited in the adjacent suite, should the tenor call for help. One of the girls was from Naples. Caruso asked the puttana if it was true, what he’d heard about San Francisco. She was a well-trained girl, clean, her fingernails unpolished like a good napoletana, her moustache barely visible. She didn’t deny the rumors, for she understood that the notion of danger was intoxicating to a man.
Now, at last, it was time for Caruso to sing. A couple of feet, no more, from where I stood, Caruso’s dresser removed his robe, revealing Don José’s costume: a fitted leather bolero jacket, matching britches with silver studs embedded in the seams, and lace-up boots.
I tried not to stare at his heavily made-up face, his cleft chin, shaped like tiny upside-down buttocks, his small, pudgy hands. But when I spotted the pistol he’d tucked into his belt, I exclaimed, “Ha!”
Caruso looked at me with alarm, his kohl-rimmed eyes shocked. “Eh?”
I couldn’t help it, I laughed. Oh, how I wished Pie were next to me, so I could say, “Look! Look, the pistol!”
Caruso strode onstage, and the audience—including all three rows of balconies—stood and applauded. Caruso’s right hand went to his gun, just in case. The crowd clapped wildly, without the slightest regard for decorum. The hoodlums and loose women of San Francisco stood on their hind legs and banged their paws.
My new friend—his name was Alfred Hertz, director of the Metropolitan Opera—turned to Miss Vivian, the costume mistress, and asked, “What’s with the pistol?”
Miss Vivian turned to her second-in-command. “Where did Don Caruso get the gun?”
As Caruso reached for the high notes of the libretto, the unschooled audience—my people, that’s who they were: my crooked mayor, my madam mother, my drunkard Swede, my everyday righteous, my people run amok (oh, I could have wept for how much I loved and hated them and was part of them)—began to murmur. The tenor paused. Were they booing? Just the opposite. They had been schooled not at the opera but at the roller derby. San Francisco’s finest in their tails and tiaras were commenting on how well Caruso was doing.
At intermission, I thanked Hertz and ran, in my too-tight, fancy shoes. Pushing through the crush of satin and silk in the lobby, the men inviolable as posts, I fought against the tide headed for the washrooms to climb the stairs. The Club was already filling with patrons intent on enjoying their share of oysters and champagne for as long as intermission lasted; the men had their whiskey and cigars.
Rose was chatting with the duke. He was an ugly man, with a hooked nose and pockmarked cheeks. Yet the longer I stared at him, the more striking he became; his tragic face underscored a regal bearing. He laughed easily, with pleasure and discernment. I had the feeling he was a genuine sort. The rest of their group, all men, not exactly top-shelf but jolly, were taking their cues from Rose, who was laughing riotously, as if she were acting in a play. Several of the stuffy men in the Club beamed when they spotted her, but the women, the swans and matrons, avoided her. In turn, Rose gave the ladies what she called the Invisible, a trick she used to disappear someone she didn’t like by focusing her gaze on the air above their head. Highly effective, the Invisible took great control to pull off. I was certain I’d never have the poker face to employ it. But Rose had the Invisible down. She’d invented it.
A gong sounded, and the lamps dimmed. It was time to return to our seats.
I couldn’t resist. “Rose!” I called out, though I knew I shouldn’t.
Never before had I been on the receiving end of the Invisible, and for a moment I kidded myself into believing she hadn’t seen me. But my heart knew she did.
Shaken
I lay awake thinking of all I’d seen—the who and what—preparing my clever treatise on the night of Caruso, not for Rose, who I’d decided didn’t deserve it, but for myself. There was Schmitz on the one hand, corrupt and eager, and there was Herr Hertz, who seemed like a rare, upstanding adult. Then there was Caruso, whose voice transported a city.
The story of Carmen perplexed me, though, how she returned Don José’s favor with her lovestruck hope. But her fate had already been decided. The girl was poor and sick, and love or no love, she died.
Frankly, it made me mad. Why did Carmen have to be poor? Poor then sick then dead? Why couldn’t she and Don José live on together? What was the point? Then again, the spectacle, the adult world with its ersatz diamond satisfaction, its music and musk, filled me with more questions than answers. The mayor, on his last night of freedom, sat
