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Fwd: I'm
Singing
Tue 10/12/2021 5:13 PM
To: Thomas Cole
Sent from my iPhone
Begin forwarded message:
From: Sally MooneyDate: October 12,
2021 at 12:47:55 PM MST
Subject: I'm Singing
(Brooklyn, 1:10 A. M.)
Someone was singing,
and our hearts,
for one decimal
of time, broke open.
Men stepped in-
to windows,
and women, listening.
For there is
for so few
any pleasure—
for even rich men.
For anyone.
I leaned on a lamppost,
Listening and listening.
I did not dare stir
Until the singer finished.
Rolli Anderson
This. I'm reading the
Metropolitan Diary in the New York Times,
and my heart almost stops. I've been obsessing,
for months now, on this very theme, on how the
singing voice, so beautiful, so fragile, might,
in a moment, if the listener so much as stirs,
stop. Or if someone outright quashes it, some
fear or event intervenes. How much then is lost.
In Tucson, summer waning, I'm thinking of the
sound and then the silence. How it happened and
why, again and again. And then there it is:
"Brooklyn, l:10 A. M."
My mother sang. I heard the story, vaguely, of a
trio: my mother, Jean, the middle child, in the
middle singing alto, her sisters on either side.
Mary must have been a soprano, maybe Edna
harmonized. So little was explained. But I can
envision it, aided by a photo in my mother’s
WASP yearbook, pioneering women aviators,
seeking out pleasure during World War II. There,
my mother stands in the middle, her arms around
the women on either side. Their mouths are open,
singing. She must have been recreating those
moments with her sisters back in Rutland,
prewar. What had they sung? No one spoke of it.
There are no recordings.
But in the fifties, I heard firsthand my
mother’s voice: at bedtime (“Good Night,
Ladies”), from the stationwagon’s front seat
(“Ragtime Cowboy Joe”), and later, sung over her
uke (“There’s Blood on the Saddle”). There was
“Underneath the Bamboo.” There was “Skinny
Marinky Dinky Dink.” There was “Old Black Joe.”
She sang us all the way from Louisville to
Tempe, Arizona, in 1958: “Red River Valley,”and
in honor of our destination that love song to
the West: “Don’t Fence Me In.” My father,
tone-deaf, drove, and let my mother sing. We
kids listened or sang along.
My happiest birthday was my tenth, my first
there in Arizona. By April I had made some
friends and we piled into the stationwagon for
my party out at South Mountain. We climbed on
rocks while my mother stoked the fire for hot
dogs on green sticks in the flames. My father
told ghost stories as the darkness fell. He was
to story what my mother was to song. He built up
the suspense, stoked our fears, and then, at the
story’s climax he paused--then screamed. My
friends fell apart; several cried. But they were
good tears. On the way back, in the dark,
driving through Guadalupe, my mother began to
sing: “They called her frivolous Sal/A peculiar
sort of a gal./With a heart that was mellow/An
all right good fellow/Was my gal, Sal.” My
mother serenaded me in the dark car. I could
hardly believe it, a song sung just for me. And
on Monday, back in school, the new girl was
cool. Everyone wanted to be my friend.
But as my mother told it, Mary was the real
singer. When my mother’s father allowed each
girl a year of college, Mary went to USC, all
the way to LA, to study voice. Then she sang in
a band, fell in love with a bandmate, and, when
he failed to commit to her, married his brother,
Jack. I’m not sure why my mother told us this,
how she dared to trust us with that secret. But
we never told, nor did we ever hear our aunt’s
fabled voice. As my mother once whispered to me,
“Jack doesn’t like her to sing.” Decades later,
both Mary and my mother dead, I will visit Aunt
Edna in Rutland with Kate, my daughter, who at
18, will be there to visit Middlebury, 30 miles
away. One night Edna pulled out a tape of Mary
singing in the band. “Wow,” Kate said. “She’s
good.” But I didn’t know, back when my mother
told me Jack had silenced her, how much had been
lost. Nor did I know men could do that, could
make the singing stop.
Sometime during my highschool years my mother’s
father died. She, I always knew, had been his
favorite, the one he had chosen to be the
family’s boy. He taught her to fish and hunt,
and when he once got sick it was she who manned
his sporting goods store. At only 16, she sold a
fishing rod to Groucho Marx, or so the story
goes. My mother, like her father, was not averse
to bullshit. I remember my mother leaving for
Rutland when his cancer advanced and they knew
there was no hope. When she came home she was
crushed, not only that he was gone but that
there, by his bedside, her mother had forced the
daughters to sing. There was an edge to my
mother’s voice when she told me this, that, her
father dying, her mother had made them perform.
I’m not sure whether it was
embarrassment—singing as the doctors and nurses
came into the room—or whether the command alone
had shattered her, mandating, as it did, the way
to grieve. Maybe song became an adjunct of
sorrow or a harbinger of death. I’ll never know.
But I do know my mother never sang again. Not a
song. Not a single note.
Perhaps I am making too much of this, of the
family curse, these singing women silenced. It
may instead be a hallmark of our culture, not
unique to my family at all. Only a few weeks ago
I was in the car listening to Terry Gross
interview poet laureat Joy Harjo. The
conversation moved from poetry to music. Harjo
had taken up the saxophone at forty. As a child
she had sung, except that her stepfather would
brook no singing in the house. “I used to shut
the door to my room,” Harjo said, then added,
“He wouldn’t let my mother sing either, and she
was a singer/songwriter.” When Gross asked why,
Harjo hazarded a guess: “When you’re singing,
you’re happy. He didn’t want us to be happy.”
After her father died, was my mother never happy
again? I’m sure she was. By stifling her voice
she might have been merely reclaiming her
autonomy. To be forced to sing or forbidden to
sing might result in the same silence.
In the next generation my cousin Jeannie, Aunt
Edna’s daughter, my mother’s namesake, might
have beaten the odds. She sang, really sang.
Whether she stopped at some point, I don’t know.
I only remember the news in 1965 that Jeannie
had been crowned Miss Vermont. My mother loved
not so much this fact but Jeannie’s attitude.
She was miffed that only white suits would be
allowed in the Miss America swimsuit
competition, and she didn’t have one. “I’m not
buying a suit to wear only once,” was Jeannie’s
take on that requirement. “Maybe I can borrow
one,” she ventured. Jeannie, strutting her stuff
in a borrowed suit. It was so “Vermont.” The
night of the pageant we watched on TV, but we
didn’t get to hear Jeannie sing her selection
for the talent competition, “Wouldn’t It Be
Loverly?” She’d not made the cut. We did see
Vonda Kay Van Dyke, our own Miss Arizona, a
ventriloquist, throw her voice, then ultimately
win the whole thing: Miss America, 1965. The
irony can hardly be missed: a female winner
whose talent was appearing silent as she spoke
through another. A female loser, who had belted
out a song, watching from the wings. To this day
I can only imagine the sound of Jeannie’s voice.
As my mother’s daughter (Sally Jean) it is no
surprise that I too loved to sing. Back in
Louisville my father built us a swingset where I
spent hours, swinging and singing in our
backyard. I sang at my kindergarten graduation:
“Old Black Joe,” wildly inappropriate though it
seems now, still to me, at five, the most
beautiful song I had ever heard. Later, when we
drove to Alaska in 1955, I’d beg my father to
drive at night so that I could grab the
stationwagon’s far-back seat where a half-window
slid open to the left, and I could sing into the
night. As my siblings fell asleep and my father
drove, I sang. No one ever told me to quiet
down.
Then, in sixth grade, I discovered chorus where
I learned I was an alto, like my mother, and
would, henceforth, cede the melody to others. I
would learn a strange sequence of notes it took
strength to maintain. There was always the pull
of the song as I knew it; always the fight to
resist its lure. One day the 6th grade
chorus took a bus to Cosner Auditorium to
rehearse for an upcoming concert when, for some
reason, the bus driver slammed on the brakes,
and I went crashing into the seat ahead,
breaking off my front tooth on the seat’s metal
rim. I couldn’t sing that day because the air
rushing onto the tooth caused a terrible pain. I
still carry a token of that event, a cap on my
front left tooth, slightly off-color like some
better-not-told joke. I couldn’t know then that
that accident foreshadowed what would be a
longer hiatus, a six-year span of relinquishing
the stage, not singing but listening from a
theatre chair. But that was still years away.
I still had ahead of me that ultimate
8th grade experience, Mr. Beck’s chorus
class, with boys and girls and a steep
learning-curve: breath control, singing from the
diaphragm, not from the chest. Every few weeks
Mr. Beck would make us sing—solo, acapella—in
front of our peers. Then he’d shuffle us around.
By the end of the semester, I was first-chair
alto, which meant to me only that I’d earned an
A and, a hopeless grade-grubber, I always got
As. It never occurred to me that that
combination, both an A and a first-chair
position, meant I could sing. And so when I
entered Tempe High, I left singing behind. I
didn’t try out for the musicals nor, in college,
for the acapella group, though my roommate did
and made it in. I never missed a show by the
Colbyettes. I still loved singing, even after
I’d sidelined myself.
It must have been the summer after my freshman
or maybe sophomore year in college when, home
for the summer, I encountered my brother Tom
who, out of the blue, said to me, “Sing
something.” “Why?”, I asked. “I want to hear you
sing,” he answered. “Sing what?” “Anything.”
“Why?” Finally, he explained: “Because Mr. Beck
said you were the most gifted voice student he
ever had.” I was shocked, then angry—really mad.
How could he have told my brother, two years
behind me, and not told me? How might my life
have changed, had I known? (“For there is for so
few any pleasure”). How much more pleasure might
I have had? That sin of omission had silenced
me, had consigned me to that cursed group, Mary,
Jean, and Sally makes three—three who sang,
until we didn’t.
The world turns. A new generation takes its
breath. And then there’s Kate. I gave her her
grandmother’s middle name and enough of her
genes to produce blue eyes, bunions, and a
killer voice. As a child Kate sang along with
the radio as I ferried her to play dates and
soccer practice. By middle school she was
harmonizing with whatever song the DJ played.
She sang in the middle-school musical and then,
in highschool, she soloed every year for Black
History month: “You Can’t Take That Away from
Me,” ”Ma Cherie Amour,” “Sophisticated Lady.”
I’d cancel my classes to hear Kate sing. She
wrote her own songs; she sang in coffee shops.
But the memory that sticks is a moment in the
nineties when some combination of song and night
brought my past and the present into line. (How
it happens again and again).
My son, Chris, was home from college, house and
dog-sitting for a friend of mine in her shotgun
Uptown. I, newly divorced, had some evening
function Uptown and dropped Kate with Chris
instead of leaving her at home alone. When I
stopped to pick her up, Kate and Chris were
sitting in the dark on the house’s steps doing
Jethro Tull songs. Kate couldn’t have been more
than eleven. It was early summer, a perfect
deep-South night. I sat on the steps in the dark
and listened to Chris’s guitar and Kate’s clear
child-voice: “Wondering aloud/Will the world
treat us well.” Across the street I sensed
motion. A neighbor was swinging in the porch
swing in the dark, listening too. She was
holding something to her chest. Then I
remembered my friend had told me her neighbor
fostered newborns. In the darkness, the three of
us listened, “We are our own saviors/As we start
both our hearts beating life/Into each other.”
If there had been a lampost I’d have leaned
against it not daring to stir, lest the music
stop. The foster mother and the newborn
heart-to-heart, the lyrics serendipitous, the
darkness recalling that night when I turned ten.
And, now, in Tucson, I’m remembering New
Orleans, 9:10 p. m.
This story doesn’t end well, of course. Kate’s
other brother, Davy, quite innocently told Kate
about “nodes.” These vocal nodules occur when
one mis- or overuses the voice. Julie Andrews
had them. And that was all it took. Kate
obsessed about nodes. She swallowed compulsively
while driving her car. I remember once as we
were listening to some singer, Kate had to
leave. “I can’t stand it,” she told me. “He’s
singing from his throat.” And then, for ten
years, she didn’t sing at all:
Mary, Jean, Sally—and Kate makes four.
The common thread here is family,
and yet…. I see now this is also A Woman’s Tale.
There were males in our family—singing males—and
not one of them agonized over or failed to
recognize his gift. All three of my brothers
played and sang in bands. My son, Davy, the
node-informant, not only sang and played guitar,
but ended up with a Ph.D. and job in Jazz
Studies in a seamless, crisisless segue from
child- to adulthood. For none of them did the
singing ever stop. Did the eighth-grade boy in
the first-chair tenor’s seat require
confirmation by Mr. Beck to know that he could
sing? Or did he swagger into the tryouts for the
highschool musical and land the lead? Could
Mary, when confronted by Jack, have met his gaze
and said, “I’m singing,” as Kamala Harris did,
“I’m speaking,” when Mike Pence tried to cut her
off? What a difference six decades can make—or a
Y chromosome.
2021. We’re vaccinated; the
pandemic’s winding down. So Kate and I venture
out, from Brooklyn and Tucson to Corinth, Texas,
to see family again. One night, after rousing
games of soccer with Andres and Milton—my
grandsons, Kate’s nephews—Kate joins me in the
boys’ room for a bedtime story, one chapter of
Narnia. When it’s over we don’t want to leave,
so Kate suggests a lullaby. I begin the song
that comes to mind because it’s peaceful and
slow, “He Was a Friend of Mine.” On the long,
drawn-out “He-e-e-e-e” Kate joins me with a note
that buttresses, a third above mine. It’s been
so long since I’ve had such pleasure, the
satisfaction of holding it together when that
second note echoes in my ear, of remaining
steadfast. “I-I-I-I stole away and cried.”
“I-I-I-I stole away, and cried.” (Damn, that
girl can sing). We’re really getting into it,
when Andres tells us we’re keeping him awake.
Sometimes it’s okay to make the singing stop.
So this is not a sad
story after all. We’re singing again, and when
you’re singing, you’re happy. After that
ten-year break, Kate recovered from her fear of
nodes and has sung on stage, her own soulful
songs. I figured out that having long forgotten
whatever I was learning so well from Mr. Beck, I
can still enjoy my voice, even though it’s now
more fourth- than first-chair alto. We seem to,
unwittingly, have created a new club: those who
sang, then stopped, then started up again. And I
think in that bedroom, in the dark, for a moment
our hearts broke open. Listening to each other.
Singing.
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