Songs for the Deaf, page 14
In the library conference room, the clapping went on for an uncomfortably long time, as if they were waiting for a signal from Antonio to end their applause. Antonio, who had no such signal in his otherwise impressive vocabulary of dramatic gestures, never once looked any of them in the eye.
Finally, the librarian reached in and pulled the door shut, squinting her eyes to show mild annoyance.
Jeremy soon discovered he hadn’t gotten rid of Tony Sutter after all. The Magnificent Antonio wrote long letters home to his parents, who posted them on the city hall bulletin board. Even if Jeremy could have resisted the temptation to read the letters himself, he would have heard them all over town on the lips of others. People seemed to live and die by Antonio’s ups and downs, often allowing themselves to be overtaken by the drama of the moment, even when they knew things would turn out all right in the end. They were so certain of it that, even at the time, they referred to this period as the Years of Struggle and found each of Antonio’s failures strangely reassuring. Jeremy saw the myth rising up, and like the others, he sometimes found himself believing. He felt powerless.
Antonio’s letters related his New York struggles ad nauseam and with surprising candor. In the mountains, he reminded his parents, his voice had resonated perfectly in the bowl-shaped valley; in the city, the narrow concrete canyons thinned out its fierceness, while the car horns and bus brakes smothered its distinctive timbre. Failing all his classes, he soon dropped out of music school.
Only his own unflappable sense of self-importance kept him in New York. He picked up odd jobs around Lincoln Center, worked his way from the loading dock of the Met, inside to the cafe, and finally backstage, where he toiled as a stagehand’s understudy, moving sets around but only in rehearsals or when his man was sick. He sang as he worked, much to the annoyance of the others. To them, he was beyond aloof; he swam through life in an ego-massaging hot tub of self-praise. Almost universally shunned, his prospects steadily dimmed until the season they performed Wagner’s Ring. The craggy set of Die Walküre brought out the qualities in Antonio’s voice that hadn’t been heard since the mountains. The director noticed, and when both a singer and his understudy shared stale knish and got food poisoning, Antonio was tapped to play one of the bloodthirsty hounds who chase Siegmund and Sieglinde, a role unique to this production.
The Magnificent Antonio finally took the stage, chin perhaps not as high and vertebrae not aligned quite as neatly as they’d been a couple of years earlier, owing to the hard times and hard work. A drop of sweat found its way through his make-up and trickled down his snout. When at last the moment came to bark out his lines, his vuf-vufs and rolling-r-grrrs, he balked.
According to the letter he scrawled at the bus station and which arrived home just before he did, Antonio felt a sharp pang of guilt up on stage for the way he’d treated the folk back home. He’d deprived them of his perfect voice and abandoned them to the unlovely clatter of the everyday (those words scrolled across his brain that night like a subtitle translation in his ongoing personal opera). And then, he wrote, a tear formed at the corner of his eye, right there in front of all the cosmopolitan operagoers and the incestuous twins he was chasing across the stage. He broke character, strode through the fog of the mountainous set, and yelled out at the stunned audience through his furry snout: “My voice belongs to the people!”
When he bowed, his dyed black hair fell loose and cleared a space in the fog.
Like everyone else, Jeremy Jones read the letter on the city hall bulletin board. He, for one, had never minded the unlovely clatter of the everyday. During Antonio’s years in New York, Jeremy had escaped high school with a diploma and gone on to police academy. His mother sobbed at his graduation, partly because she’d never imagined she’d have a cop for a son, but mostly because she’d secretly been dating the town’s sheriff, indulging in the guilty pleasure of whispering his name in motel rooms and the back of his squad car, growling the r of his last name—Grrreeley—just slightly for effect. She worried that her son knew all about her affair and had turned cop either to spite her or to act out his unresolved Oedipal fantasies.
She was wrong: Jeremy knew nothing about it, not yet. And he suspected nothing when Sheriff Greeley hired him as his deputy, even though the town had never had one before.
Like almost everything else in Ermine, the crime was second rate. Every so often, there’d be a fight to break up, a drunk and disorderly to drive home, a borrowed tool not returned on time. But the fight was usually between the same pair of chubby girls in the trailer park who screamed a lot better than they scratched, the drunk and disorderly usually tipped him for the ride, and the borrowed tool was broken anyway. Few people outside the city government even realized that Ermine had a police force, and those who did figured that being a police officer in Ermine was the next best thing to not being one.
And then the Magnificent Antonio returned. Jeremy got wind of it and made a point of sipping coffee at the Trailways Station/American Legion Hall when the bus came in.
“Ain-TOH-nee-yo!” the Sutters said when they met their son at the back door of the station, holding their lips in the shape of an o.
Jeremy had struggled his whole life just to feel part of the unlovely clatter Tony Sutter so loftily dismissed. With the Magnificent Antonio back in Ermine, he again felt cast out. But with his hand on the pocket of his police uniform, where he kept his pea-less whistle, he reminded himself that now, at least, he was in a position of some authority. He had only to wait for an opportunity to use it.
Hopeful again, he touched his lips to his mug of hot coffee and blew a kind of prayer: whew.
At first, Antonio’s voice was welcomed back to the valley. He sang on the streets of the town and in the stores when he ran errands for his parents, and during weekly recitals at the school auditorium, sponsored by the Arts Appreciation League, Jeremy Jones’ mother still serving an indefinite term as president.
At his card table desk in the corner of city hall, Jeremy seemed to work at the exact point of resonance for Tony Sutter’s voice. After days of torture, he ventured a rare suggestion to Sheriff Greeley, who was watching a western with his feet up on the mayor’s rolltop, his usual position when he wasn’t out on mysteriously long patrols in the town’s only police car.
“Does that qualify as disturbing the peace?”
The sheriff kept his eyes on Rio Bravo. “What’s that?”
“The singing.”
“Mm. Pretty, ain’t it?”
Jeremy put a hand to his belt and asked permission to use the bathroom.
After a week or two, most of the town reacted to Antonio’s voice the way the sheriff did. Their lives spun like tractor wheels in the mud, full of unlovely clatter, and Antonio’s voice had become just another track in the continuous loop.
Antonio seemed to sense his diminishing powers to startle and amaze, and something happened that even New York hadn’t done to him: his unflappable sense of self-importance began flapping. His posture slumped and his blond roots showed and just maybe his voice wasn’t quite as lovely. He was on a downward spiral, but only Jeremy Jones saw it happening; his constant irritation had the undesirable effect of making him too-aware of Tony Sutter’s every expression, and the look on Tony’s face these days reminded Jeremy of that moment long ago at the junior high recital when the Magnificent Antonio was tormented by the deaf girl.
So maybe it was fate after all that led Antonio through the door of the Hats and Boots Mart one afternoon. In popular memory, Antonio arrives there on an errand to buy new boots for his mother’s birthday. In the diary of a local gas station attendant, Antonio was singing his way through town when a mannequin’s cape caught his eye in the window display. The editor of the Ermine Mountain Tribune-Gazette and Auto/ Truck Flyer maintains that Antonio intentionally sought the challenge of the deaf girl, as he was singing what sounded like an Italian version of “Careless Love.” Nearly everyone now believes there were larger forces at work.
As Antonio waited for the owner to dig up some plus-size boots for his mother (or to pull the cape off the mannequin), he sang a German aria he’d learned in the city (or the Italian “Careless Love”). Something caught his eye, and he turned to the deaf girl sweeping the floor. He didn’t seem to connect her then with that bored face at his junior high recital. Maybe he never did. He only admired her perfect posture and the way her straight blond hair fell over her shoulders and curled inward no matter how many times she flipped it back. He liked the peasant-girl dress she wore, which fit neatly with his now-famous decision to sing for “the people,” whom he imagined as European peasants with caps and dirty vests and noble but obsolete jobs.
Still singing, Antonio paid the girl’s father then pulled open the glass door. At that precise moment, it’s now believed, he glanced back at the deaf girl, and seeing her at exactly the right angle to accentuate her best features, he fell in love.
Jeremy saw the whole thing out on foot patrol. As deputy, he’d made it his habit to pass by the Hats and Boots Mart when he knew the deaf girl would be doing her chores. He’d never forgotten the effect her deafness and her mercurial face had had at the junior high recital, and he tried now and then to sneak a look at her, to decide once and for all if she was pretty or not, and whether that mattered or not. This time, he saw only the look on Tony Sutter’s definitely butt-ugly face, and he was certain Tony Sutter was doomed.
Because what did the angel-voiced Tony Sutter have to offer a deaf girl? Nothing at all. Or, put another way, exactly as much as Jeremy Jones.
According to witnesses, Antonio’s serenade began a few minutes after ten on a clear but moonless Wednesday night. A second-story light came on above the Hats and Boots Mart when his first sonic volley broke the calm. He paced back and forth under the girl’s dark window, singing and gesturing as if carrying on a melodramatic debate with himself. By now he’d heard the girl was deaf, and he was convinced that his voice would soon transcend that minor obstacle. After all, who better than she could appreciate both the unworldly perfection of his voice and the fearful depth of feeling behind it? Her mind was absolutely uncluttered by the unlovely clatter of the everyday. She wasn’t looking for momentary escape. His voice, when she heard it, would be the only thing she heard, the only thing she’d ever heard. She might not hear a sound exactly, but something purer and utterly uncompromised.
When the townspeople heard him, they peeled back their curtains and pulled up their blinds, and some of them said aloud, “Mm, pretty,” not speaking to anyone but saying it because they thought it needed to be said. After a few minutes of silent appreciation, they turned back to their radios, TVs, and orthopedic pillows, hoping the pretty noise would again fade into the background.
But Antonio sang louder. He lowered himself to one knee and put his hand to his heart. He held the high notes until his neck trembled and the windows of the Hats and Boots Mart shuddered in their frames. All the windows in town were lit but that of his beloved.
The girl’s father called the police, after first calling to see if there were police. Of course both sheriff and deputy had heard the singing the moment it began. The sheriff had been watching Viva Zapata! with his feet up on the mayor’s rolltop when he turned down the sound. “Mm. Pretty,” he said, and Jeremy, sitting at his card table stacked high with decades of incomplete paperwork, cringed. His new earplugs weren’t working.
“Come on,” said the sheriff when he’d hung up the phone. He tucked the front of his flannel shirt into his jeans.
They got into the old Dodge patrol car and drove the two blocks because the sheriff didn’t care for walking.
“Just leave this to me,” said the sheriff, “but watch carefully. One day soon you’ll need to handle these things yourself.”
Too distracted at the prospect of locking up Tony Sutter, Jeremy didn’t bother to ask what he meant. His best opportunity was finally at hand.
The lights were on up and down the town’s main street—in the apartments above the grocery store and the gas station/ hunting supplies shop, and in the trailer park wedged between them. Increasingly annoyed faces peered out the windows and the cherubic fighting girls in the trailer park began to shove each other. The peace was getting disturbed.
Antonio sang as though he’d been given a second chance at stardom. This time, he was standing, he knew, at the exact location on earth best suited to his voice.
When the sheriff stopped his car and shut off the motor, Jeremy had his hand on the door handle. The sheriff paused for a moment, as if enjoying the sound, then at last he took a breath and stepped out of the car. Jeremy followed.
“Son!” the sheriff shouted at Antonio. He strode over and dropped his big hand onto Antonio’s bony, cape-covered shoulder. The golden voice didn’t waver.
“Son! I ain’t gonna ask what you been drinking or smoking. I’m just gonna insist you step into the squad car.”
When Antonio didn’t respond, the sheriff fumbled behind him. He’d forgotten the cuffs, but Jeremy was right there with his own, scoring an assist. The sheriff snapped them onto one of Antonio’s wrists, and he was reaching for the other when he got a call on his cell phone. He could have quickly completed the arrest, but the sheriff was then the only one in town with a cell phone, and in Ermine there were only a few narrow shafts of unobstructed reception, so he flinched in amazement when it buzzed. He took the call, still holding Antonio’s arm with one hand, leaving the cuff to dangle from Antonio’s wrist.
All Jeremy could think about was the open dangling cuff. How easy it would be to grab Tony’s other wrist, twist it behind his back, and clamp it closed.
“I know it’s beautiful, darlin’, but the whole town wants him put away,” the sheriff was saying into the phone. “There’s a motion down at city hall to declare these The Nuisance Years. People’re getting tired of waiting for the Glory Years.”
Antonio’s free hand lifted and fondled each Italian syllable that left his lips. The window above remained dark. The other second-story window had filled with the girl’s father, hands on hips, undershirt half-tucked into his pajama bottoms, belly pressed against the windowpane, the model of a peasant patriarch.
The townspeople had begun to open their windows and make unlovely noises. They’d turned up their TVs and radios and still couldn’t hear their shows. Some of them were trying to sleep. Some of them had to work for a living, goddamnit. And the chubby girls had begun to pull each other’s hair.
The voice was so strong and full of yearning, the notes so purely sung, Jeremy began to think Tony might pull it off after all, and soon. He wondered about the deaf girl in bed. Was she stirring? Was she tucking her straight blond hair behind one ear because she thought she heard something? Were her smallish red lips parting in growing astonishment?
Jeremy stepped closer and put himself into position. All he had to do was to snap out at that lifted, vibrato wrist and yank it down and he’d be rid of Tony Sutter for good.
“Sure thing, darlin’,” said the sheriff. He gave Jeremy a sharp pinch on the bicep as he pulled the cell phone away from his ear. He held the phone up over his head, and for a moment they all stood there—Jeremy, the sheriff, and the person on the other end of the line—and listened.
Jeremy clenched his fists, unable to deny the voice’s heartfilling beauty. As tears welled up in his eyes, the shouts of the townspeople became operatic sobs, the chubby fighting girls became supernumeraries, and the Hats and Boots Mart became the set of his own riveting drama. He’d devoted his entire youth to his hatred of Tony Sutter, and yet here he was on the verge of giving up, wishing despite himself for the serenade to work, for the deaf girl to curl her fingers around the thin white curtains until the light captured her astonished blue eyes and made the whole town fall in love.
Smiling dreamily, the sheriff put the phone back to his ear. “Here we are, front row at the Paris opera house, just like you always said...”
A window broke nearby—one of the chubby fighting girls had gotten the upper hand.
Jeremy tensed himself. Antonio was coming to the end of a song, and when his wrist fell with the final note, sheriff or no sheriff, Jeremy would cuff him and bend him into the patrol car like he was taught in police academy.
“We could have that for real, darlin’,” the sheriff was saying. “All it takes is the courage to tune in and drop out, to paraphrase a little someone I know...”
As Jeremy raised his hand to strike, a big smile broke over the sheriff’s face, and he said something Jeremy didn’t catch.
He snapped his phone shut and slapped down Jeremy’s wrist.
“You keep this situation under control,” he said. “But let him sing, by God. For a good twenty minutes. Then you do whatever you like with this godforsaken hole of a town.” He unlocked the cuffs and freed Antonio’s thin wrist.
Jeremy watched the sheriff, suddenly thirty pounds lighter, trot back to the patrol car, fling himself inside it, and peel down the same dark side street where Jeremy and his mother still shared a house. He’d taken Jeremy’s handcuffs with him.
As Antonio began a new song, the chubby girls’ fight spilled out of the trailer and into the dirt. Their mother stood in the door yelling at them. Others banged on their walls and windowsills and shouted at Jeremy to just for God’s sake do something. Does this town have a police force? Are you it? Wasn’t there another guy there a minute ago? Are you all being paid by the hour?
Alone with Tony Sutter on the dark street, Jeremy couldn’t move.
Some would say he didn’t have the courage to shoot out the tires of destiny. But that wasn’t it. Something else had come over him. Despite all his prayers for Tony Sutter to suffer, to be stricken so badly it would take him down for good, it was Jeremy who’d fallen in love with the deaf girl. And now each beautiful note out of Antonio’s golden throat expressed with almost unbearable precision the yearning Jeremy felt in his chest. He wanted more than anything—even more than he wanted Tony Sutter to be shackled and gagged—for the deaf girl to appear at her window in all her somewhat bland but ethereal beauty.
