“Does she want the dress altered?” the old man asked me. “I don’t mind makin’ alterations—but she’s got to come into the store herself. I don’t do alterations from pictures!”
“SHE’S DEAD,” said Owen Meany. His tiny hand went into his pocket again. He brought out a neatly folded envelope; in the envelope was the picture my mother had given him—it was a wedding picture, very pretty of her and not bad of Dan. My mother had included the photo with a thank-you note to Owen and his father for their unusual wedding present. “I JUST HAPPEN TO HAVE BROUGHT A PICTURE,” Owen said, handing the sacred object to Mr. Giordano.
“Frank Sinatra!” the old man cried; his son took the picture from him.
“That don’t look like Frank Sinatra to me,” the son said.
“No! No!” the old man cried; he grabbed the photo back. “She loved those Sinatra songs—she sang ’em real good, too. We used to talk about ‘Frankie Boy’—your mother said he shoulda been a woman, he had such a pretty voice,” Mr. Giordano said.
“DO YOU KNOW WHY SHE BOUGHT THE DRESS?” Owen asked.
“Sure, I know!” the old man told us. “It was the dress she always sung in! ‘I need somethin’ to sing in!’—that’s what she said when she walked in here. ‘I need somethin’ not like me!’—that’s what she said. I’ll never forget her. But I didn’t know who she was—not when she come in here, not then!” Mr. Giordano said.
“Who the fuck was she?” the son asked. I shuddered to hear him ask; it had just occurred to me that I didn’t know who my mother was, either.
“She was ‘The Lady in Red’—don’t you remember her?” Mr. Giordano asked his son. “She was still singin’ in that place when you got home from the war. What was that place?”
The son grabbed the photo back.
“It’s her!” he cried.
“‘The Lady in Red’!” the Giordanos cried together.
I was trembling. My mother was a singer—in some joint! She was someone called “The Lady in Red”! She’d had a career—in nightlife! I looked at Owen; he appeared strangely at ease—he was almost calm, and he was smiling. “ISN’T THIS MORE INTERESTING THAN OLD FREDDY’S?” Owen asked me.
What the Giordanos told us was that my mother had been a female vocalist at a supper club on Beacon Street—“a perfectly proper sorta place!” the old man assured us. There was a black pianist—he played an old-fashioned piano, which (the Giordanos explained) meant that he played the old tunes, and quietly, “so’s you could hear the singer!”
It was not a place where single men or women went; it was not a bar; it was a supper club, and a supper club, the Giordanos assured us, was a restaurant with live entertainment—“somethin’ relaxed enough to digest to!” About ten o’clock, the singer and pianist served up music more suitable for dancing than for dinner-table conversation—and there was dancing, then, until midnight; men with their wives, or at least with “serious” dates. It was “no place to take a floozy—or to find one.” And most nights there was “a sorta famous female vocalist, someone you woulda heard of”; although Owen Mean
y and I had never heard of anyone the Giordanos mentioned. “The Lady in Red” sang only one night a week; the Giordanos had forgotten which night, but Owen and I could provide that information. It would have been Wednesday—always Wednesday. Supposedly, the singing teacher my mother was studying with was so famous that he had time for her only on Thursday mornings—and so early that she had to spend the previous night in the “dreaded” city.
Why she never sang under her own name—why she was always “The Lady in Red”—the Giordanos didn’t know. Nor could they recall the name of the supper club; they just knew it wasn’t there anymore. It had always had the look of a private home; now it had, in fact, become one—“somewheres on Beacon Street,” that was all they could remember. It was either a private home or doctors’ offices. As for the owner of the club, he was a Jewish fellow from Miami. The Giordanos had heard that the man had gone back to Miami. “I guess they still have supper clubs down there,” old Mr. Giordano said. He was sad and shocked to hear that my mother was dead; “The Lady in Red” had become quite popular among the local patrons of the club—“not famous, not like some of them others, but a kinda regular feature of the place.”
The Giordanos remembered that she had come, and that she had gone away—for a while—and then she’d come back. Later, she had gone away for good; but people didn’t believe it and they would say, for years, that she was coming back again. When she’d been away—“for a while”—that was when she’d been having me, of course.
The Giordanos could almost remember the name of the black pianist; “he was there as long as the place was there,” they said. But the closest they could come to the man’s name was “Buster.”
“Big Black Buster!” Mr. Giordano said.
“I don’t think he was from Miami,” the son said.
“CLEARLY,” said Owen Meany, when we were once more out on Newbury Street, “‘BIG BLACK BUSTER’ IS NOT YOUR FATHER!”
I wanted to ask Owen if he still had the name and address—and even the phone number—of my mother’s singing and voice teacher; I knew Mother had given the particulars to Owen, and I doubted that Owen would have discarded anything she gave him.
But I didn’t have to ask. Once more, his tiny hand shot into his pocket. “THE ADDRESS IS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD,” he told me. “I MADE AN APPOINTMENT, TO HAVE MY VOICE ‘ANALYZED’; WHEN THE GUY HEARD MY VOICE—OVER THE PHONE—HE SAID HE’D GIVE ME AN APPOINTMENT WHENEVER I WANTED ONE.”
Thus had Owen Meany come to Boston, the dreaded city; he had come prepared.
There were some elegant town houses along the most densely tree-lined part of Commonwealth Avenue where Graham McSwiney, the voice and singing teacher, lived; but Mr. McSwiney had a small and cluttered walk-up apartment in one of the less-restored old houses that had been divided and subdivided almost as many times as the collective rent of the various tenants had been withheld, or paid late. Since we were early for Owen’s appointment, we sat in a corridor outside Mr. McSwiney’s apartment door, on which was posted (by a thumbtack) a hand-lettered sign.
DON’T! ! ! ! KNOCK OR RING BELL
IF YOU HEAR SINGING! ! ! !
“Singing” was not quite what we heard, but some sort of exercise was in progress behind Mr. McSwiney’s closed door, and so Owen and I didn’t knock or ring the bell; we sat on a comfortable but odd piece of furniture—not a couch, but what appeared to be a seat removed from a public bus—and listened to the singing or voice lesson we were forbidden to disturb.
A man’s powerful, resonant voice said: “Me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me!”