Green Glowing Skull

The old man looked at him testily.

‘You mustn’t make any jokes around these parts about the war, you’ll learn that smartly enough.’

Rickard protested, ‘I –’

‘You’re a recent immigrant, we’ve established that?’

‘I’ve been here just a few months.’

‘Ah, you’ll fit in well enough. We always do. There are American people today called Penhaligon and Thrispterton and the like who say that they’re Irish. And they probably are. Anyhow, she’s doing well, I believe, Ireland?’

‘She has been doing well, it’s true,’ Rickard confirmed, hoping that the matter would be left at that as he did not want to be drawn into a discussion on economics, of which he knew nothing.

‘I hear that now we’re a force on the world stage, that everyone seeks to imitate us. I have read that there are companies that will kit out your pub in Moscow or Peking in the Irish style, with advertisements for Whitehaven coal for the wall and Nottingham-made bicycles to hang from the beams.’

Rickard’s eyes wandered about the room, to the left and right of Denny, through the ornaments and vases, and settled on a small mottled wall mirror.

‘Perhaps,’ said the old man, evidently noting the pattern of Rickard’s scope, ‘if someone from one of these companies, someone less forgiving than myself, stood on the threshold there and said, “How much for the job lot?” I might agree a price. We have trouble moving these days for the bric-a-brac, isn’t that right, Aisling?’

Rickard glanced back at Denny and saw with some alarm that he was not addressing his dog but the ceiling or a point beyond. He guessed that this ‘Aisling’ was a dead wife, and he had no wish to hear about her, or about the old man’s being made a widower, or to be involved in his affairs by this knowledge and have it implied to him that he should care.

‘It’s not, though, as if I bought it all in one go. Although I have had to move a quarter of it twice, and half of it once, and arrange it in new ways, in different places. Though the last time it was a different place only to the one before it, and not the place it is now.’

Rickard was tiring already of these spiralling formulations. ‘Do you mean this present apartment?’

‘Yes. A fitting home for my belongings, I think it is. Did you notice the tracery in the hall?’

‘I did,’ said Rickard, lying.

‘It reminds me of Stapleton’s work, and the work of those great Italian stuccodores that came to Dublin in the eighteenth century.’

‘How long have you lived here?’

‘Oh. Twenty-one years. Twenty-one from last September.’

The old man tapped the dog’s head, nestled in his groin, evenly and gently now.

‘I have done more living in this building, in these rooms, than in any other building since I came to New York; many moons ago now. If living is taken to mean man-hours, and in this building, in these rooms, is taken to mean just that.’

Rickard detected self-pity creeping in. ‘It’s not such a bad space to spend time. A fitting venue, as you say, for a man of refined tastes.’

‘It is that. But, well … refined tastes. I must tell you, all this’ – the old man gestured magisterially with his hand – ‘this, ornamentation, all these pretty-looking things, you probably wonder if I’m a bit of a funny sort. Well I am not this way inclined, I would like you to know.’

‘I would never make judgements of that nature about a person.’

‘But these pretty things … What you see about you are monetary investments.’

He leaned forward in a manner that suggested he was about to say something very important, though the lower part of his face wrestled with a smile.

‘You’re not a – hoo hoo hoo – thief, are you? You’re not one of these drag-racing hooligan bucks who would twist an implement inside an elderly man and rob his things?’

‘No, Mister Kennedy-Logan. I have come here to be taught how to sing.’

‘Shall I tell you what is the most valuable of all the items in this room? It’s those curtains.’

He pointed to dark red drapes, drawn across, on the end wall.

‘You wouldn’t think to look at them, would you? They’re from Turkey, from the early nineteenth century. They look better tied back in the wings, I feel about it, where the gilt threading picks up the light, but they add an element of drama to the nightly act of blocking out the evening.’

He remained leaning forward, with a slump, as his dog trilled enquiringly and tried to catch his eye.

‘But I do not sleep in this room, so it’s an act best described as a ritual, then.’

At this moment Rickard felt that he could have risen from his chair and walked out of the room and apartment undetected, such was the completeness of the trance that the old man appeared to be in. Instead, in a life-changing intervention, he said, ‘Mister Kennedy-Logan, I am booked in for a singing lesson tonight, yes?’

‘Booked …’

The old man grasped, peevishly, thin air, as if he might have found an appointment book there.

‘Singing lesson … Yes. Do you have a song that you could sing so that I can gauge the quality of your voice as it is?’

‘I do,’ said Rickard. ‘I usually like to warm up with “Come Off It, Eileen”.’

‘Good choice. Not too challenging. Away you go.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Unaccompanied?’

‘Yes.’

‘All right. Here you have it, so. Ahem.’

Rickard stood up, cracked back his shoulders, and began:

‘With a nerve to match her rosy cheeks

And a cheek to pique my nerves,

My brazen Eileen, mo cushla …’

‘Stop there, stop there.’

The old man lifted a hand, his forefinger extended; and he was chewing, seeming to be assessing Rickard’s efforts with more than one sense.

‘You have very good vibrato.’

‘Thank you,’ said Rickard, still frozen mid-pose, his arms stretched around an invisible keg at his chest.

‘And more. And more.’

Rickard laughed, in astonished gratitude.

‘Yes. You have quite a range of gifts.’

‘I’ve been told that I have excellent control in the middle to upper register, if only you would give me the chance to show you.’

‘Oh yes … control … middle to upper register … I can tell that, I can tell. No, you’re ready.’

‘When you say “ready” …?’

‘I could do with a young man like yourself, and a voice like yours, pure and not so fraught with the years.’

‘I’m not as young as you think,’ said Rickard, with a suddenness and even a venom that surprised him, his arms dropping by his side. For some reason the use of the word ‘young’ felt like an attack on his very sense of himself. His reaction seemed to jolt the old man.

‘Do you not consider yourself young?’

‘I have not considered myself young for many years, even when I was young. Even the pop vocalists I admired when I was young were people who sounded old, like Kaarst Karst of Kaarst Karst and the Iron-filers.’

‘When did you technically cease to be young?’

‘I could last credibly claim to be young five years ago when I was in the middle of my thirties.’

‘You’re young in my book. It’s unusual for someone of your age to be interested in the old-style tenor singing. Your soul may creak but, I tell you, it’s exciting for my ears to hear a virgin voice like yours. You should revel in the light voice that you have, your spry and tinkling tone; do not be after some character that you do not possess. You would be ideal for a project I have in mind. I and the man you met in the club last night, Clive, wish to form an Irish tenor trio and we are on the lookout for a third person. We will play the front parlours and concert venues of this city, whose people’s appetite for Irish ballads and art songs and the singing styles of John McCormack and Joseph “The Silver Tenor” White I believe is dormant but has not disappeared.’

Rickard was still brooding over the ‘young’ comment.

‘Mind you,’ the old man went on, looking Rickard up and down, ‘young though you are, it’s not as if you’ll be attracting the attention of the ladies. Your thighs are swollen like upturned bowling skittles and you have hips like a hula hoop and your face looks like it’s been split with a hatchet and has gradually fused back together after many setbacks in a humid region of the world.’

It was an easy decision to make in the end. If Denny Kennedy-Logan could continue to offend him, Rickard would not feel so bad about spending time with the old man and not his parents. The next evening, finding him in the drawing room at the clubhouse again, Rickard said he would join his trio.

3

They began practising every night in the drawing room, in front of the fire and often in the company of others. In a typical session they talked about programmes for future concerts and considered the suitability of certain songs for future audiences. In Denny’s experience the Anglo audiences did not respond well to ‘Come Out Ye Black and Tans’, and neither did the black audiences; the Jewish audiences did not like the songs that laboured the point about Jesus. Early on Denny suggested that they include in their repertoire arias, bel canto, lieder, zarzuela excerpts and late-eighteenth-century pleasure-garden songs, but this idea was dropped owing to Rickard and Clive’s lack of training in and ignorance of these styles. A good deal of the evenings was spent in reminiscing. Denny and Clive were capable and guilty of great nostalgia. Clive remembered the village and hinterland of his youth, and the Dublin he later escaped to; Denny talked about Dublin – which he called ‘Dovelin’, with three syllables – as it could have been: a Hanseatic outpost, with terraces of tall Billy-gabled houses. But the real Dublin was not so bad, he said; it was where he had learnt to sing, and learnt all the songs that meant the most to him, and it was the city of his father and mother, and the city that gave birth to them: the floral Victorian city; and of the generations preceding them: the stout Georgian city; and of a less-easy-to-define lineage. (Twice in three weeks Rickard listened to Denny tell the story of when, as a young man of seventeen, he was invited to ‘Glena’ by the marsh, the home of John McCormack, to view the body of the tenor-count in repose, and how grand he looked in that cucumber- and lily-scented room in his dark blue papal uniform and his lilac sash, with a medal pinned to his breast and a ceremonial sword by his side, and that surely in such resplendence he had graduated to the ranks of the most exalted heralds.) They spoke of the entertainment that was had in the Theatre Royal on Hawkins Street. Clive bemoaned the day that establishment was razed (which he remembered well, because he’d been there the day that it happened, and he remembered not just the wrecking ball and the clouds of dust but the lament of many voices that came to his mind: Jimmy O’Dea and Maureen Potter and Noel Purcell crying for Dublin in the rare aul’ days and the big American variety stars who had graced the Royal stage down the years and under it all Tommy Dando’s organ playing a dirge). Denny dismissed that version of the Royal as ‘a seedy penny gaff’, and Clive as ‘an old blow-in’, and preferred to talk of the previous Royal on the site, the building that burnt down in 1880, where his great-grandfather had seen Pauline Viardot in Don Giovanni.

They spoke, both of them, about Ireland with such ardour and colour that it was as if Ireland were the only country that mattered to them and all their years in America amounted to nothing. But the Ireland that they spoke about was not one that Rickard recognised wholly from reality. It was an Ireland, perhaps, with ‘Dovelin’ as its capital; one that he knew only from the romantic Irish songs they practised. It was the Ireland of Airs of Erin. It was Hibernia herself. It was the Ireland that glowed brightly in the minds of a certain class of dreamer in about the 1840s – Thomas Davis and Gavan Duffy and the Young Irelanders.

It was a dream Ireland, yes, they both admitted, finally and without any provocation; but it was an Ireland that they once had been prepared to fight and die for to make real, just like those Young Irelanders.

‘Well, maybe not you, Clive!’ said Denny. ‘You were only in the movement because the Davy Langans was the only club in New York that would have you!’

‘Who were the Davy Langans?’ said Rickard. ‘Militant Irish republicans?’

‘Militant Irish patriots,’ said Denny, and stressed again: ‘Militant Irish patriots. It wasn’t from Marx or Thomas Paine that we drew our credo. It was from “Bright Fields of Angelica”. We were after a dream country, oh to be sure, unbound and unburdened by any social realities, or any of the other realities.’

‘It was there in the constitution all right, all of that,’ said Clive, with a drop of the head. ‘But by the end of it were we anything other than a drinking and gaming club like any of the rest of them? I don’t know.’

Denny glowered at his companion, causing Clive’s head to drop further and turn away. ‘There you have it! There you have it! As I said: Clive was only in the Langans for want of a roof over his head! There were some of us still in that movement idealists and activists! Some of us to the last meant to take the dream home and rescue Ireland. If only more of you understood what the Davy Langans was for and it might still have been a force today. But it’s all gone now, and a pity. The last branch of it died out in the Cape Colony some ten years ago, I believe. We once had been a very active branch here in New York.’

‘Ach,’ said Clive, ‘long ago, long, long ago, before any of us –’

‘We died on his watch!’ said Denny, wagging a finger in Clive’s direction. ‘He was both secretary and treasurer when we went under. All North American funding for the movement came through New York. A sudden disappearance of money killed us off! There are questions still unanswered! We died on his watch and he has to live with that!’

‘The writing had been on the wall for a long time,’ said Clive, laughing it off. ‘We folded anyhow, and we merged with the Cha Bum Kuns up the street, and the few of us left in the branch were taken in here, at a reduced subscription for a while.’

‘“Merged” is a good word for it!’ Denny adjusted himself in his seat. ‘Eaten up! Utterly subsumed! By golly, if they’d known there were some of us would have borne arms for a cause would they have taken us in so fast?!’

***

It was difficult to sing through all the many interruptions. There was one pesky club member, a man from an old Dutch family, who took enjoyment from bursting into the room. Usually this man had been enjoying wine somewhere else on site.

‘Here they are again!’ he boomed in one evening. ‘Oh, they’ll love you, the hussies! You’ll have them lining up outside the stage door at the Carnegie Hall.’

‘Go away now!’ said Denny. ‘I won’t have this, or any excuses that my friends make for you.’

This particular interruption on this night moved Denny to make a vow:

‘From tomorrow we take our rehearsals to my apartment. What do you say, men? The environment here is not conducive. I think it is time to strike out on our own.’

He pointed to the ceiling. It was a chequerboard, of orange and blue panels.

‘East Prussian orange amber and Dominican blue amber. The soapstone beside us was shipped from Persia. They’ve plundered the mineral and cultural wealth of the world. From us they’ll take our spirit, put it up there in mahogany in mawkish motifs of fiddles and harps. I’ve always felt a certain condescension within these clubhouse walls towards the Irish, haven’t you, Clive?’

Clive looked uncertain, rearranging the flaps of his jacket at his groin, and dithered over a response.

Denny jumped back in: ‘There’s a latent racialist sentiment in this city. The reason these pug-dogs are so popular in New York today is that blackface entertainment has been outlawed. There’s a latent irrepressible fondness in the people for little white clowns with painted black faces. They will seek to characterise you. I think it would benefit us to take ourselves away from this clubhouse. We must work to extract the essential in what we do and concentrate on it, never lose sight of it. Keep it and concentrate ourselves in it. We will not get that here.’

‘Hey, you guys! Are you still fighting off the hoes or what?’

‘We will not get it with that nincombocker around.’

Denny turned his gaze on the Dutchman until the Dutchman had shrunk behind the door again. His eyes lingered on the closed door for some moments; furious, then pensive.

‘I will say though that he has brought to my mind an important issue. If we are to be committed in what we do we must commit fully and no compromises. Both of you would do well to take on board, before the start of your singing careers, a bit of advice. I heard it first from Maestro Tosi, my singing teacher in Milan. I did not pay much attention to it at the time; I remembered his words only too late, and how forcibly they struck. I remembered them on the very day of my wedding. They seemed like the most fearful admonition at that moment. He had said, “Do not go rushing into marriage before your career has begun!” Now let me be fearful with you both – let me be fearful with both of you! But then the time for marriage has long passed for you, Clive! And you, young man – Rickard – no woman would have a man that looked like you!’

***

In the privacy of Denny’s apartment, away from the taunts of other club members, physical exercises could be performed. The purpose of these exercises was to improve the musculature of the chest walls, diaphragm, lungs, throat, tongue and mouth, and to bring legs, spine, shoulder-girdle, neck and head into the correct relationship.

The first exercise of any evening involved adjustment of the pelvis in a standing position by means of rolling movements so that it was relaxed and the intestines lay relaxed also, as in a basket. The idea was to inculcate good posture. Legs were held in such a way as to cause the balance of the body to shift backwards. To this end, splints and yokes carrying buckets of water were imagined. The singer, said Denny, was no different in a certain respect from the butler or the docker: his was work performed on the feet.

Broad vowels unknown in speech were held to keep the pharynx open. Denny said that eventually he would introduce eggs into the men’s throats and that when each man could keep an egg in his throat without breaking it he would know that his pharynx was elastic enough to achieve all the necessary shades of dynamics and timbre. Scales and a system of forced coughs would sharpen the ventricular mechanism. Correct unhinging of the mandible was practised, with particular regard to coordination with lip shapes. Awareness, on singing of the brighter ‘ee’ and the duller ‘ah’, of the muscles that closed the entrance to the smelling bulb in the upper nose would burn a nerve pathway to allow the voluntary control of these muscles. These muscles could then be brought into play for tonal manufacture, along with the muscles of the throat.

‘The face is a mask for the purposes of singing,’ said Denny. ‘It is one of our key resonators. The mask has to grow so that it reaches behind the ears. Then it will have the maximum opening.’

To improve suppleness of the ribs, the men vigorously beat imaginary timpani with their fists while singing in the middle voice for thirty seconds at walking tempo.

‘Let’s be wary at all times, men, of the Bs, Ds and hard Gs, and I am not here talking about musical notes. I am talking about consonants. Firm closure of the glottis could kill stone dead the vibrations of the vocal cords.’

Strength was built in the omohyoideus muscle by saying the word ‘omohyoideus’ one hundred times at an increasing pace. A strong omohyoideus was needed to keep the larynx lashed to the backbone during singing of the A-range of vowels.

All exercises were ultimately assumed to give native vowel sounds the best possible chance.

‘The special character of our songs is held in the vowels. You see, men, in music there is a unique set of Irish vowels. They are rounded like the English vowels but their articulation must never result in the sacrifice of the R sound. The R must, at the very least, be trilled. Our Irish vowels will be found by knowing and practising the Italian, English, French, American and German vowels. They lie somewhere among all of those.’

During exercises a set of charts was tacked to the wall depicting the anatomy of the structures under improvement. These charts were huge powdery things, variegated with minute creases, which had to be unfurled with great care. Denny had taken them from Italy with him. They had originated at the medical school in Bologna. The larynx looked an immensely complex piece of machinery in the charts. The ribcage was simple, stark and frightening. Awareness of these structures would lead, the thinking went, to more nerve pathways.

A formula for sublimation was written on a sheet of paper and also stuck to the wall. It was never mentioned. It read:

100 JOULES OF ONANISTIC FERVOUR = 100 JOULES OF RELIGIOUS ZEAL = JUST AS EASILY 100 JOULES OF ARTISTIC PASSION

***

‘Tell me more about Denny’s time in Milan with Maestro Tosi,’ Rickard said to Clive one Thursday evening ahead of rehearsals. They had met outside the clubhouse and were now – having been delivered by the uptown subway – waiting for a crosstown bus to Morningside Heights and Denny’s apartment. A smell of caramelisation on the air – a uniquely New York feature of the colder months – tortured them both.

Clive said, ‘It was a period so brief and embarrassing in Denny’s life and career that it rarely comes up, and I’m surprised that it ever does.’

Rickard said, ‘I’m ashamed to say that I hadn’t heard of Denny before.’

‘I’m not surprised that you hadn’t. This was a star that burnt brightly and went out quickly. But a source of historic light.’

‘I see it,’ said Rickard. ‘I see it. It beams through the universe.’

Clive stood stolid, beaky in profile, looking up the avenue at the crest of the hill against the fading pearl of the sky and at the approaching cells of headlights. Rickard was suddenly embarrassed at his own open enthusiasm. An icy cold wind blew through the cross-street. He pinched at his dripping nose.

‘Nineteen … when was it?’ said Clive. ‘Early fifties. I was a young lady in Heet. (Heet is the name of a townland.) My parents left me one night with my brother on our own to go to a concert in Bundoran. I believe it was for the opening of a ballroom. Denny Logan was giving the concert. I did not know this at the time. Only later, after I’d met Denny, and I wrote to my mother, did I know this, did I know anything about Denny. I’m afraid that Denny’s time in the limelight had passed me by entirely. He was one of a crop of young Irish tenors in his day, one of the best, so it was said of him. There was no shortage of tenor singers or concerts in those days. For a very brief time. Before the girls’ attention moved elsewhere, on to the rock and roll and what have you. Then the tenor voices were forgotten, and with them Denny Logan. You young people would find it hard to believe that tenors were ever a popular success. I found it hard to believe. But the girls went crazy for the tenor voices, they came with flowers to the concerts. The singers used to hand out photographs of themselves in the carte style, and they looked all blushered up in them, bruised below the eyebrows, and flushed in the cheeks. My mother brought home Denny’s that night, and posted it, later, to me here in New York. I could not understand the magnetism, but I understand it now I do. You bring me out you do.’

Clive took a long pause.

‘You do, you do. You bring me out in Donegal you do. I have not spoken like that in a long time. Must be that you’re Irish. I do not like it.’

‘I see it too,’ said Rickard. ‘That magnetism, despite certain masking features. But I don’t hear …’

He checked himself.

‘The voice?’ said Clive.