The Daaé Case (ch5)
The issue with this story that I had not anticipated (I was worrying about coming across as whitewashing Raoul, or antagonising Americans by writing a grotesquely caricatured protagonist) is that the readers have spent most of the story wanting to know what 'Erik' is up to, what cunning plans he is going to unleash upon his opponents and how he is reacting to finding himself temporarily foiled. Everyone is waiting for the big showdown... and there simply isn't one. I didn't pay any attention to the Phantom's probable reactions or feelings at all; my subconscious (as usual) was simply not interested in him, and assumed that he would obligingly cooperate with whatever Christine decided to do.
I managed to come up with a theory or two in response to increasing audience disquiet at his failure to act... What we don't know, of course, is what exactly Christine wrote in that letter of hers to Mr Y (and we never will know, because Jos didn't get to read it). But I think it's a fair bet that those innocent lines incidentally confirming what she thought he had already agreed -- that the song she had promised him would be their goodbye -- had a rather more painful impact on their recipient than Christine ever intended.
Not least because the note was enclosed with the complimentary ticket sent from McWhirter's office on Manhattan Opera stationery, and was thus doubtless regarded as boring official business and dealt with by Madame Giry in her role as "the person who has to do all the day-to-day jobs that the Master operates on too elevated a plane to bother with". Not the most tactful person to deliver a note from the absent diva, especially given Madame Giry's existing opinions on Christine's general ingratitude and usurping nature, views which she is not known for keeping quiet about...
I predict wailing and gnashing of teeth ;-p And possibly some genuine repentance (because after all, as she makes innocently plain, he *did* promise her on the previous day that he wouldn't make any further attempt to keep her with him, and events have since conspired to prevent him from breaking that vow -- he has been gifted with a clear conscience through no merit of his own).
I thought I might be able to work this in somehow at the end of the final chapter (have the Phantom clutching Christine's note, at least), but given the narrative structure I'd used, I had to 'cheat' and switch viewpoints in order to get the character to appear at all. I just don't see how I can push any of that stuff into what I've already got written without massively altering the balance/structure of what was only supposed to be a brief epilogue, and one in which the Phantom literally only appears for one-and-a-half paragraphs at the very end :-(
My excuse to myself is that this ended up basically being a story about Jos himself and the effect the de Chagny family have on him rather than a story about Christine's escape from her fate in Phantasma. But to be honest, that wasn't my original intention -- the character subconsciously developed into much more of a self-insert as I was writing -- and indeed I did, at the start of this, flag up "how to prevent a furious Phantom from simply carrying off Christine" as a potential plot hole, but never really dealt with it. But even if I had, it wouldn't have occurred to me to come up with all the weird and wonderful intricate schemes for the Phantom that people are obviously waiting for: the reader-suggestion that Raoul and Gustave, sitting centrally in the auditorium, are going to be directly in line for another chandelier-drop, for example, is the sort of potential that's so obvious for Erik-sympathisers but to which I'm totally oblivious. (And if I had thought of it, I could easily enough have written instead of this chapter an action scene in which Jos confronts and foils the Phantom up in the roof and heroically saves the day, instead of navel-gazing over Raoul and Sally respectively...)
Theoretically, I still could. I could even combine the two and run this stuff somehow after that (although it would rather ruin the whole 'redemption' concept and the parallels between Jos and the Phantom, I suppose!) I just seem to have written a story that's completely different from the one that my initial set-up led people to expect... and while that's not necessarily a problem, I have this horrible sneaking suspicion that I ought to have had the Phantom live up to the omnipotent crime-lord reputation with which I endowed him earlier on :-( Chapter 6: Jos Confronts Christine
“He thinks the world of you,” Christine said softly, with a glance at the door. “I am so very grateful.”
And the smart thing to do would have been to leave it there. Take his thanks and go, and leave the lady to sing opera in peace for Hammerstein and the rest, with warm feelings all round. Only... he liked the pair of them, and maybe they were owed something more than that. Than just the easy way out.
“Nice guy - when he’s sober,” Jos said with a sigh. “What d’you reckon his chances at of staying that way? And... was there something you were planning on telling him sometime about the kid?”
“About- No. Oh no.” The lovely glow in the way she looked at him was gone, cut off like he’d slapped her in the face, just the way he’d known it would. And he was every bit as sorry for it as he’d known he’d be.
“Does he- did he-” Almost panic in her voice now. “Who told you?”
“You did,” Jos said quietly, the way he’d said it to so many others. Back when it had been just a job... “Just now.”
She was a brave creature, the Daaé. She didn’t weep, or faint, or curse at him the way the guys he nailed often did. She stood there with that distant, hurt little look... and then she sat down again in front of the mirror with her head in her hand, all silver and crystal like teardrops frozen into silk.
“Yes, it’s true. Gustave... Raoul is not his father. Is it- so easy, then, to see?”
He could give her that comfort, at least. “There’s no likeness... but no, ma’am. I wondered, from things your husband let out last night. Then I saw the way you acted around talk of him this morning - and then I met the kid up close. But if I hadn’t known, from Mr. Rowl... well, I guess I wouldn’t have thought to ask myself in the first place.”
She stood; turned, head held high with that arc of sparkling stones across the soft slopes of her throat. “Then I must take more care, Mister Perlman: I love my husband.”
It was a challenge flung down - daring him to do his worst - and Jos sidestepped. He didn’t want to hurt them; hadn’t ever wanted it. “Sure. I can see you do... but the thing is, that’s just what the guy has been busy beating himself up over, these last ten years. It takes more than that to make a marriage, and if you spend the rest of your lives together living a lie... what’s it going to do to you? And to him, if the time comes he finds out?”
“And do you think, then, it would be kind in me - would make my poor Raoul feel more a husband - for him to learn that he could not even manage one heir, one child? Do you think that small shred of self-belief means nothing, then, to him?” Her eyes were fierce, but it was not in her own defence. “And Gustave, who has known no other father - the little Vicomte, who will take Raoul’s place one day? How would he feel, to be branded as a bastard and a fraud?”
Her cheeks flamed suddenly as if the coarse words had burned her, but she’d brought them out without a stammer, and she was still glaring him down. It came to him suddenly that she’d look just that way on the stage: a pagan priestess calling down victory, or a fallen woman flinging defiance in her seducer’s face. In this small space, with barely a yard or two between them, it was nothing short of magnificent.
So he kept his tongue between his teeth on the subject of Gustave and his ambitions... which didn’t, right now, look like including any kind of title. And Christine Daaé’s chin came down a little as her eyes fell.
“And Gustave at least, he must not know. That promise I have made - to the single man who has the right to ask it.”
And if that promise had gone along with the other one she’d spoken of, Jos told himself wryly - and he rather thought it had - she’d just given him the last piece in the puzzle without the asking. Which, now that he came to look back on it, sure did explain a lot...
“I still reckon you ought to tell him,” he said quietly. And they both knew it wasn’t the kid he had in mind.
Christine sighed, with that same little eloquent shrug he’d always associate, now, with Mr. Rowl. “Perhaps. When the time is right, and we are back in France...”
“You’re not staying, then? Beyond the contract?” Fool that he was, he’d had no reason to think it; but he knew now that somehow he’d hoped.
She was shaking her head, smiling a little, now, but sadly.
“Yours is a young country, and soon you will have great singers of your own, like Miss Mary Garden who so much delighted us in Paris. Besides, now...” She colored up a touch, and her fingers were very busy, of a sudden, smoothing out the lace at her throat. “We have hopes, Raoul and I, and if... if it comes to pass, then I would wish to be at home.”
A loud bang on the door from outside; they both looked round with a jump. “Ten minutes, Miss Daaé. I thought I heard shouting - you sure you’re okay in there?”
“Thank you, yes,” Christine called firmly, turning back to Jos with a gesture of apology. “I am sorry; they are a little... zealous.”
“I guess that’s another reason not to stay in New York,” Jos observed, his voice a trifle dry. “You’re apt to be looking over your shoulder the whole time.”
A shake of the head. “A promise was made to me also: that we should go free. But it is hard to live always with the ghosts of the past...”
Her eyes, on a level with his, were very clear and kind. “Forgive me, but- is she here tonight? Your Sally?”
It was like a punch to the gut. And, from her, he’d deserved it. For a moment he couldn’t find any words at all - and he didn’t know, anyhow. He truly didn’t know.
“He told you?” It came out higher than he’d wanted, but it was all he could manage.
Dumb question, anyhow. They both knew the answer.
But she nodded.
“I do not think it was a betrayal, but if it is, then I am sorry... Listen.” She reached out and took his hands between both of her own, curling small, soft fingers round them tightly.
“You do not have to stop caring. I can’t tell you to do that - no-one can. But you must think of her with a life of her own: happy, sad, rich or poor, with a careless husband or quarrelling children... it does not matter. What matters is that it is her life, it is now and not then, it is not memory but living, breathing choice, every hour of every day. The past cannot be taken from you - you cannot lose it, and she would not want it wiped away. But you cannot keep Sally, the real Sally, locked within the walls of those years long ago. The woman in the memories, the one you love - she is only a shell of something that has long since left and grown. There are so many years that are hers now... and if you love her, if you truly love her, then you must love those too. And if you cannot- then she is gone. I am so sorry, but she is gone.”
Her great dark eyes were full of tears - tears for him - and somehow it didn’t matter that he couldn’t say a word. That the dressing-room blurred as he choked up, with his face down on her shoulder and her hands cool and gentle in his hair.
Christine Daaé held him. And then she raised him up and kissed him, long and slow and sweet, and laid her cheek against his own where it was still wet.
“There will be a place for you on the left-hand side of the stage, in the wings. If you want it. And I- I have a promise also to keep...”
She turned back again for an instant at the door, with a smile. Then it had closed, and he was alone. Alone with the memory of a woman’s mouth on his, and the knowledge she had set in his heart... and a man’s warm embrace to keep him company along that road.
The gala night that preceded the opening of Mr. Oscar Hammerstein’s new Manhattan Opera House was universally accounted to have been a success, by every paper from the stately New York Times (which devoted a column and a half to the occasion, and to a list of the notables who had attended) all the way down to the breathless paragraphs of Lindy Weiss at the Sun-Star, who’d been among the standees at the rear rail. The crush was immense, but the view from every part of the theater was pronounced admirable, and the acoustic ideal. The crowd encompassed every walk of life, from the factory-worker and his sweetheart in plain blouse and shirt-waist to the Weatherbees and Guggenheims in aigrettes and pearls, and the upper tiers were as appreciative of the performances on display as were those in the orchestra stalls.
The Daaé was voted a hit: a most tremendous hit, and the unquestioned star of the evening. Together with the tenor whom Hammerstein had engaged for the purpose, Signor Alessandro Bonci, a distinguished artiste likewise making his début upon these shores, she enchanted the audience with a series of ravishing duets in which there was no rivalry, but only the greatest of admiration and support on the part of both singers. But it was undoubtedly Miss Daaé for whom the audience rose in applause, and whom Bonci led forward with a bow to take her place center-stage for the solo part of the program.
A slim silver figure alone beneath the lights, she clasped her hands at her breast and sang from the heart, her voice soaring to fill that great space without effort and without a flaw. She sang Manon, Leïla, Juliette, Marguerite - all those roles with which French opera is so richly endowed - and turned her peerless instrument at last to the celebrated mad scene from that work by Bellini with which the Opera House, as yet incomplete, was to open in two scant weeks: Elvira’s aria “Qui la voce sua soave”. As the high echoes of that last note fell from the air, sweet and impossibly pure, the audience seemed to hold its breath. Then it erupted with a roar of acclaim.
The Daaé’s reputation, for those who still doubted, was assured. She took bow after bow until a bouquet of flowers was handed up across the footlights by her small son with his father’s assistance, to the laughter and delight of spectators and soprano alike. And then, as cries arose for an encore, she begged - and received - silence.
The simple aria which Christine Daaé introduced to Manhattan society that night was the same which has since attained such popular renown, and which one may hear upon the lips of any errand-boy whistling down the street. It is said to sell a thousand copies a week still, and its pseudonymous composer - “W.X.Y.” - is believed to have an opera in preparation, in which much interest has been expressed. But on that day of the gala, with the orchestra playing from improvised parts and the notes swelling from the Daaé’s throat across a vast hushed crowd, it fell as a sensation upon an eager world to which it was still completely unknown.
She sent her soul out over the audience as a gift. And on the highest balcony in the third tier that stretched up into the shadows, huddled beneath a hat and long coat despite the heat, a shrouded watcher sat silent and still, gazing down upon the silver flame of that tiny, distant figure on the stage as if there were nothing else in the whole world. She sang for him, and for him only. One last time, as she had given her word she would.
And if he too wept, it was not the greatest miracle of that night, but only the last and the latest. For he would have perhaps the hardest path to travel of them all.
.*.*.*.
(A/N: The Manhattan Opera House opened, after some delay, with a performance of I Puritani featuring Alessandro Bonci and Regina Pinkert in the leading parts, to the latter of whom I must apologise for here usurping her role!
The aria "Qui la voce sua suave" (Here his sweet voice called me) is here recorded ten years later by Amelita Galli-Curci, who had married, like Christine, into the aristocracy; the quality at the beginning of the hundred-year-old recording is a little ropy, but the sweetness and clarity of Galli-Curci's voice in the coloratura section show just what could be expected from a top soprano of the era.) This entry was originally posted at http://igenlode.dreamwidth.org/94169.html, where there are
comments.