Threnody of a Nightingale Unraptured

Things missed, things lost, loves unloved, and songs unsung.

Oct 10, 2022

This post is part memoir, part short story, all fiction, and all true.

“What do you want?”

I gave the wrong answer. I mean, it was the right answer for me, but the wrong answer for him. Which I’ll get to.

Before I was, at age six, dragooned into the clutches of the School Sisters of Notre Dame for what was the first of many collisions between how I thought I would be greeted by the world with how the world thought I should be greeted, my days were mostly spent at home, back a barely paved country road, attended to by a mother who’d been roundly walloped by decades of loss and disappointments, and for a playmate I had my younger by nineteen months sister. There were four older siblings, but the closest in age was seven years my elder, and they were almost a separate family, not part of the secret language of looks, mind reading, nonsense words, and imagined worlds in which my little sister and I lived.

I don’t remember many specific moments, but, rather, the outlines and feelings of the daily routine; every morning we watched Captain Kangaroo, Romper Room, and Dialing for Dollars; each time Miss Sally did not call our names when telling the magic mirror who she saw, and the host did not dial our phone to give us that day’s dollars, I would be surprised. I had so much belief, then, in happy endings, a certainty that everyone would get their turn. Mommy cut up our grapes and took out the seeds. She had a phobia about foods on which we might choke, so we never had fish, she was terrified we’d get a bone caught in our throats, and for the same reason, she cut fried chicken off the bone for us, we weren’t allowed to eat it in whole pieces like our older brother and sisters.

Decades later, Mommy’s last year, she was eating a dinner I’d made of her favorite foods: ham, kale cooked all day with bacon fat and country ham ends, cabbage, and beaten biscuits — which I lied about being beaten, but they were made from scratch. By then she’d begun having trouble swallowing, and that day a piece of faux beaten biscuit got caught in her throat. She started to choke, couldn’t breathe, grabbing her throat, turning red, crying. I was paralyzed, horrified, frozen, waiting for it to end, someone to do something — until I realized I was that someone. I jumped up and wrapped one arm tightly around her, holding her in place as I pounded her back with my fist, thinking, “Please don’t let me beating my mother be the last moments we have together.” The elder-battering dislodged the biscuit of shame — I was pretty sure her choking on it was karma for my lying about how they were made — and while Mommy’s after-choke-effect coughing slowed, she started to pat me and reassure me in not-very-convincing half-gasps, “I’m fine.” Once recovered, she decided she was no longer hungry, and said, “That’s why I never gave you kids fish.”

I knew, then, what she meant to say, but, later, wondered how it was she conflated choking in her nineties with not having let us eat fish when she was in her thirties? After she’d died, when there was time and heart-space in which to breathe, to think again beyond the following minute, no longer on alert and steeling myself for her next health crisis, always waiting for the call from the elder-residence telling me Mommy wanted me to ride in the ambulance with her, it became clear to me that she had started to live in a new kind of plastic time as she made her way those last months toward the death she knew was coming. Her reality and memory no longer aligned in a linear way, but, rather, coalesced around like events, emotions, people.

And since having accompanied her on that trek where all that had been “before” was turned into “is and now”, my sense of time and distance has begun to blur. My days have little structure, I wander through reverie and chimera, a reality all and only my own, like the one little sister and Mommy and I shared before I was forced into the world.

Back then, in addition to the moratorium on fish and fried chicken, and the mornings with the Captain, Miss Sally, and dollars for which we were never dialed, little sister and I made up endless realities, roamed the woods, played with paper dolls for whom we designed outfits of our own, those with which they came never being quite what we thought constituted fashion, and we were — in my memory, anyway — content. Happy.

Mostly. Until nap time.

I am not now and was not then a good sleeper. I am chronically fatigued because I cannot make myself go to bed at a decent hour, nor stay in bed in the morning; I average four or five hours of sleep a night and have for years and years. And then, as a child, I every day asked if I could stay up, not nap. Every so often (rarely) Mommy would agree if I would promise to be completely quiet in my room. Most days though, I did not win reprieve, and often she would say I had to nap because my little sister needed her sleep, if she didn’t get enough sleep, she’d get sick. Which she often did anyway. But I felt it grossly unfair that I should have to be sentenced forever and ever to a nap and early bedtime because she might get dark circles under her eyes or throw up her dinner at the table. Which, again, she often did anyway.

I would do anything to prove I was not tired. At night, somehow it became a thing to ask if we could sing for a while, from our separate rooms. Little sister rarely made it through even one song, but I would — if allowed — have done an entire concert, and so Mommy would say, “You can sing two songs tonight.” Sometimes more. But more often than not she’d say, “Only one song tonight and I mean it. Then go to sleep.”

I did not. I’d continue singing quietly, until either she heard me or I finally passed out. Often, I’d slink from the bed to the floor, where there was a hole through to the living room ceiling over top the oil burning stove which heated the house. I’d lie there and listen to the t.v., or to my brother and sisters talking, sometimes my mom. And always, at least once, I’d call for Mommy to ask if I could go to the bathroom, or have a drink, or … whatever excuse I could come up with to interact.

Mommy was on to it, I was, after all, fifth of six children, and rather than give me the satisfaction of seeing her, of getting another hug and kiss goodnight, she would stand at the bottom of the steps — since we were not allowed to get out of bed once tucked in — and say, “What do you want?”

I would answer. She’d say no. And eventually, “don’t call me again.”

“What do you want?”

And so, back to where this started, because I gave him the wrong answer, though it was the truth, there would be no more peeling off his American Eagle briefs.

Here I am, fifty-some years after being tucked in and ticking off Mommy, and recently, in bed, having just — as Anonymous termed it in MY SECRET LIFE — spent, and feeling a little dead inside, a sense of vacancy and loss, I heard myself asking, “What do you want?” And realized it was a refrain that had replaced what had once been the afterglow from having — well, spent.

Though I didn’t figure it out until much later in life, when Mommy had said to the child-me, doing his mini-concerts, refusing to sleep, “What do you want?” it was said in exhaustion, a sort of quiet keening from the place in her soul yearning for some little peace, some few solitary moments where it was just she, herself, no one to watch or comfort or worry about, an unspoken and probably un-thought pleading of “Haven’t I done enough? Can’t you let me rest?”

I understand.

My family dynamic is difficult to describe; imagine if Tennessee Williams had written The Beverly Hillbillies, or, Nick & Nora Charles somehow fused with Ma & Pa Kettle; there was a sense of belonging to a diaspora of the expelled monied, genteel, well-bred who’d been involuntarily dispersed to a plebian rural backwoods, pauperized among the skint unwashed. One of the very most acid-etched memories of my youth is the constant ache of knowing I did not belong, and with that, a painful longing to find an escape — not just an escape, but the portal through which I’d be transported to a place where I’d fit in, which, there, where I was, I didn’t know how to do; I knew it required a skill-set outside my abilities, which was bad enough, but even worse, I feared I lacked the courage, talent, toughness, and whatever else it would take to survive where it was to which I wished to escape — musicals. I wanted to be a Broadway star — and Broadway to me, then, (and now, who am I kidding?) meant MUSICALS!!!

What do you want?

Someone who knows what FLAHOOLEY is. (Which is not what I answered him.)

It is a spectacularly demoralizing and grizzly loneliness to be stranded without even one’s self for company. And deadly. I don’t remember what had happened, not the specifics, just the feeling that Mommy loved me less than she loved all the others, and if she couldn’t love me, who would? So why bother. I found the orange tablets she’d been given when she’d sprained her back. She hadn’t taken them. She didn’t believe in surrendering to pain — physical or emotional, and as with the Valium she’d been prescribed, she kept that cache of Darvon in reserve, the bottles full of cure there should she need them, but more as a reminder of how stoic she could be; whatever it was, she would withstand it.

I swallowed them. I don’t remember what happened in the immediate aftermath, how my Neely O’Hara-ing was discovered, but I wasn’t hospitalized. The family doctor asked Mommy to leave the office, after which he asked me why I’d done it. I said I didn’t know. He basso profundo -alpha male adjured, “Let’s not do that again, it’s upsetting for your mother.” And that was meant to be that. The cure. I stayed home from school for a few days, my mother afraid to force me to go back, and my chorus/drama teacher having heard the story, came to the house to see me. He, too, asked why, and instructed I not do it again, it was very upsetting and made me too unreliable to be given solos or leads in shows. And finally my mom, when she felt she could talk about it without prompting me to another attempt, asked me not to do it again, it was — you guessed it — upsetting.

There was no mention of counseling, but more a feeling among all of us that I hadn’t really meant it, I was just being dramatic again, and all that was wrong with me was that I had made a bad choice, done a bad thing. No wondering why. The only effort at comforting me happened a week or so later when my mom said she would buy me one thing if I promised not to do it again. And asked me:

What do you want?

What I wanted was the soundtrack album and souvenir sheet music book to Barbra Streisand’s A STAR IS BORN. And Mommy brought them home for me. And accepting them meant the deal was sealed, it was over. I took the suicide-prevention bribe with me when I went back to school, and during lunch I and the other outcasts with whom I hung — Kathy, Debi, Lynda, Pam, and Missy — would sing the songs in the chorus room or backstage by the grand piano. Because it was my music, you’d think I’d get first choice, but that went to Kathy, who was the biggest star in the group. She wanted EVERGREEN, which worked out well since having seen CAROUSEL at age 6, I'd ever after had a penchant for weepy ballads, preferably sung during or in response to someone’s death1. I chose WITH ONE MORE LOOK AT YOU. In case you didn't see the movie seventeen times, as I did, then, that is the death ballad Streisand sings once Kristofferson has committed car-suicide. And though I cannot, now, remember to turn off the burner reheating the coffee nor the names of people from my past who approach me in public, usually in grocery stores2, I can remember every word to every Streisand song from her first album -- THE BARBRA STREISAND ALBUM3 -- through THE BROADWAY ALBUM4, after which, for reasons to do with the work then consuming my life, I listened almost exclusively to Original Broadway Cast recordings (they are NOT, I repeat NOT called soundtracks5) and cabaret singers -- Nancy LaMott6, Barbara Cook7, Karen Akers, Judy Kuhn, Liz Callaway, Alison Jiear, Blossom Dearie, Mabel Mercer, and ... the list could go on for quite a while longer, and I know the lyrics to most of the songs most of them recorded. Some of which -- classics -- I'd sung as a child during my bedtime stay-awake concerts.

During my cabaret-singer obsession, middle age years, I never tried to kill myself, but many, many nights I would pray — I still believed in God, capital G, then — to die in my sleep, or, even during waking hours, just as long as I got the fuck out of my life — a life not at all like the one I’d imagined, wished for, wanted.

What did I want?

There was the problem. Things it was too late to get. Or, rather, things I never would have gotten even had I tried. Which I hadn’t. Which is still hard to admit now, and which I did not, could not admit to myself in my twenties, thirties, forties.

I had been so certain since those days when little sister and I lived in our magical worlds that I would have the New York penthouse, I would be rich and famous. It wasn’t just desire, it was inevitability. But never became truth. And slowly, in my twenties, thirties, forties, the inevitable transmogrified through the alchemy of real world survival and disappointment into an increasingly doubtful outcome, a possibility ever more remote, and I grew more and more wretched of spirit, life itself was all elegy, a mourning for what I’d missed out on.

What I wanted.

By age fifty, I was finished. I was all fail. I stopped singing. I stopped listening to music. I left the situation in which I felt trapped, unseen, ill-used, and in doing so left behind my collection of Streisand albums, original cast recordings, sheet music, play manuscripts, boxes of photos and clippings from shows I’d been in or directed or written, the leather chair and ottoman I’d wanted my entire life and finally gotten in my forties, half my books and all of my bookshelves, my aunt’s Encyclopaedia Brittanica, the semi-complete set of Spode china I’d lucked upon in a going out of business junk shop, my aunt’s double boiler (by mistake), my collection of Interview, New York Native, XY, House & Garden, Details, VMan, and Architectural Digest magazines.

And my dog.

And my younger sister.

Those are stories I cannot yet bring myself to tell. But this, what I’m about to tell, the tale of my Algonquin cutlery, it is both truth and metaphor. My aunt spent her life convincing herself that the dreams and ambitions she’d given up at the behest of others would have been unachievable anyway, that she was not enough, that she should content herself knowing she was fulfilling the role of caretaking daughter, doting aunt, always available to bake the cakes and be on the set-up and clean-up crews for all the church sales and festivals, to watch her brothers’ children so brothers and wives could get away, to be grateful that she got to go to New York every time a niece or nephew turned twelve, trips sponsored by the father she cared for at home until the day he died, but trips thought of by the nieces and nephews as her gift to them as they worked toward Catholic confession and confirmation, and each time, she felt guilt that it was really a gift for her, as if she didn’t deserve it, couldn’t have it unless it was wrapped in a service to others.

Of her eight nieces and nephews, I was her favorite. My father had been her favorite brother, and when he died my mother was seven months pregnant with my younger sister, I was seventeen months old, there were four older siblings under the age of fourteen, and my aunt transferred her devotion to my father to me. I loved reading, as did she. I loved theatre, as did she. And I think she saw herself in me and was determined I should not ever believe I was not enough, that I should always believe I could do or be anything I wished, dreamed, desired.

As she got older, old, the whelks of resentment and anger and sorrow which had formed during all the years of never having tried to — been allowed to try to — live the life she wanted, began to seep through. Visiting her was hard and sad and scary; if a woman who had dedicated her life to the needs and happiness of others could end up nearly blind, mostly alone, never having had a love of her own, and so full of fury, what chance had I — selfish and the cause of so much pain for my family, so undesirable to the men I wanted — of any sort of happy ending?

On one of those visits she said to me, “Don’t wait like I did. Do it now. Go to New York. Stay at the Algonquin. Just for you. Just you. Don’t let the world and people who say they love you take away your life before you ever live it.”

And so, when she died and I found she’d left me the proceeds from a small life insurance policy, I made plans for my next birthday to visit New York, stay at the Algonquin, and fit as many shows into the trip as I could. For myself. By myself. And the cost of the trip was nothing compared to the price I paid for having dared to do something on my own, just for me, for doing what I wanted.

That first trip, I’d told the hotel staff when I made the reservation that it was my birthday and, thanks to my recently deceased aunt, I was fulfilling my lifelong dream of staying at the Algonquin Hotel. When I arrived there was a fruit and candy basket in my room, welcoming me and wishing me a happy birthday. I felt a kind of happiness and belonging on that trip, in that room, in that city, on my own, that I’d never experienced before; I’d imagined it many times, but by then, had stopped believing I would ever know it.

Every morning I’d order a room service pot of coffee, which felt both decadent and sophisticated — the sort of thing little sister and I used to pretend to do when we were playing rich and famous living in a penthouse suite — while I’d read the complimentary New York Times. I’d soon head out to wander the city until time for whatever show I was seeing that day, and as I’d walk down the hallway to the elevator, I would stop wherever a tray, emptied of its contents, had been left outside a door, waiting for the staff to pick it up, and I’d pilfer the silverware which was embossed with the word Algonquin.

By the time I left the Algonquin and city, I had flatware for four.

And the nagging feeling that the real me existed in a parallel universe, and was happily living the life I dreamed of, in Manhattan, shed of all shadows of Clampett and Kettle, surrounded by people who supported his ambitions, believed in his talents, and wanted what was best for him even if it didn’t play into their agendas.

I didn’t have that. But, I had flatware for four from the Algonquin. Once I returned home, I used it every day, in the same way I had subscriptions to New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Sunday New York Times, Laphams Quarterly, and The Paris Review. I could not have the life I wanted, so I collected shards, symbols, totems of it that were within my reach. And tried to convince myself I wanted the life I was having.

And though they knew, those “they” about whom I won’t write, that I was unhappy, whenever they would ask, “What do you want?” It wasn’t a question. It was an accusation and a warning.

And one day I opened the silverware drawer and the Algonquin pieces were gone.

What do you want?

I want to go back, or, I want to find the Charlie from the parallel universe. That Charlie, he heard Miss Sally from Romper Room call his name. That Charlie, he would have realized when he was an adolescent how very much his mother loved him, and he her, rather than not discovering the depth and beauty of that relationship until he was in his forties. That Charlie, he would have believed enough in his aunt’s belief in him to find the courage to really make a go of New York, to believe he could sing and act, or write, or anything well enough to make a go and get a penthouse. That Charlie, he would have looked in the mirror and seen someone worth loving.

But I can’t go back. Parallel Charlie doesn’t exist in any way that makes my life easier to live. Instead, I am the Charlie who spent years of life energy on people who’d cruelly disappear the Algonquin from his life. The Charlie who, on his last visit to the Algonquin — after it had been bought by the Marriott corporation which despoiled and pillaged its lobby and history — was told that despite his entire stay being prepaid, he couldn’t check in because he didn’t have a credit card. On his birthday. The Charlie who listened to his aunt enough to avoid her mistake about waiting to go to the Algonquin, but not enough to avoid her mistake about never finding love. She loved Edna St. Vincent Millay.

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
Edna St. Vincent Millay

About 4400 words ago I said I’d get to the wrong answer I gave, but, before I do, know this: It was given because I feared hearing that summer song again, a siren song, the likes of which once lured, tempted, and seduced me into fantasy after fantasy I’d projected onto whatever sailor had lain, close at hand (or mouth, or ….) for those little whiles. I have accustomed myself to winter. To silence.

It was uncomfortable when the beautiful boy8, having showered, then sat, naked, cuddling with me, I in my sweat pants and T-shirt, and then he started to get hard again, said he'd better go, he needed to get up early in the morning for work. As he pulled on the three T-shirts -- he was that kind of thin -- he'd worn, and I realized I had no idea what the names or logos on any of them meant or stood for. Bands? Video games? Were they still called video games? He'd said in his Grindr profile he was a "gaymer" -- which I'd hoped meant he had an avatar and screen name in some pixelated fantasy realm, and not that he was a gerontophile who got off on manipulating the emotions of ancient gay men (gayncients?)9 -- but whatever the graphics stood for, I wasn't going to ask; first rule of trick club: Don't ask questions beyond, "Are you clean?"10 And, too, T-shirts aside, he was fully hard and hadn't yet put on his underwear. He wanted me to ask him to stay.

He was the kind of beautiful I had spent my teens and early twenties dreaming about, lusting after. And never once had I gotten close. Now, here he was, this beauty who’d — for some reason — pursued me relentlessly for over a month. He wanted to trade names and phone numbers and life stories, to be more than another unremembered lad.

The last time I listened to a siren song, the last time a beauty had stayed a night, had begun thirty years ago, and its verses, choruses, reprises, ended in a funeral dirge, that story, that eleven o’clock number, the kind I’d been practicing since seeing CAROUSEL at age six, that lamentation, that elegy, his threnody was the end of us both.

And here this boy in his multiple t-shirts, his American Eagle underwear in his hand, boasting his tumescence, his eagerness to play at love, he interrupts my mourning to ask me, then:

“What do you want?”

To have been recognized for and made a living from my singing. To have lost forty pounds before he’d seen me naked. A bigger dick. A trust fund. Straight, white teeth. A Tony Award. A literary agent and book contract. To have been accepted into the North Carolina School for the Arts when I was 16. To be able to smoke with no ill effects. To not have, when 25, lifted the bed frame which first screwed up a disk in my back which has periodically made it impossible for me to stand up straight and walk without pain. To not be destined to spend my declining years with third appliance box on the left under the bridge for an address. For my sister, aunt, mother, Barbara Cook, Joan Didion, and Stephen Sondheim to be still alive and healthy.

None of which I answered. Nor did I say what he wanted me to say; “Stay.” No, instead I answered:

“To have met you thirty-five years ago.”

And he answered, “I wasn’t born.”

And he walked over and kissed me. And I returned it, and wanted and wanted and wanted and wanted. And so stopped. Sent him on his way.

He, who had messaged and snapchatted and sexted and come at me and at me and at me until I agreed to meet, he who had always been the one initiating the connecting, the joining, did not message or snap or sext for a week, every day of which I became more and more aware that I was feeling something I did not want to feel.

Lilacs blossom just as sweet
Now my heart is shattered.
If I bowled it down the street,
Who's to say it mattered?
If there's one that rode away
What would I be missing?
Lips that taste of tears, they say,
Are the best for kissing.

Eyes that watch the morning star
Seem a little brighter;
Arms held out to darkness are
Usually whiter.
Shall I bar the strolling guest,
Bind my brow with willow,
When, they say, the empty breast
Is the softer pillow?

That a heart falls tinkling down,
Never think it ceases.
Every likely lad in town
Gathers up the pieces.
If there's one gone whistling by
Would I let it grieve me?
Let him wonder if I lie;
Let him half believe me.

Threnody, Dorothy Parker, 1926

And fool that I am, I messaged him. And he answered.

“Hey, I’m sorry. I’ve started talking to someone else.”

What do you want?

To not have ended up a banal gayncient cliche, a knock-off Tennessee Williams character, Blanche DuBois, my tragic history of Allan Greys, and, too, the one-offs and hook-ups with Mitch, but always, foolish, longing for Stanley.

Every day I use my Algonquin fork, knife, spoon. I stole a second set in my fifties. On that same larcenous trip I proposed to a Russian hooker. I saw AMERICAN PSYCHO, THE MUSICAL. I went to the opening night party of a Broadway play and was in the VIP section. I pretended I was having the life I wanted.

What do I want?

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
  What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
  Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
  Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
    Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
          And leaden-eyed despairs,
  Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
    Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
  To toil me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
  As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
  Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
    Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
          In the next valley-glades:
  Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
    Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats, Stanzas 3 & 8

I think, perhaps, tonight when I finally force myself into bed, having never been seen by Miss Sally, nor dollar-dialed, nor Broadway headlined, maybe I will sing a few songs for myself. There is no one any more, no one left to ask, to hear, or to sing to.

Here We Are, Going

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