Wed. 20 — He wants to ruin my voice.
Fri. — Il passaggio is abandoned. Il passaggio is all but silent.
Il passaggio is another word for limbo.
sat. — I was late this morning. Couldn’t get to sleep last night and couldn’t wake up this morning. Herr K worse than usual as a result.
Monday March 25 — It seems Il passaggio is inhabited after all. Haunted is more like it. Full of ghostly sighs and groans.
2:00 am — I dreamt of Pete. He was wearing Mumma’s apron and Daddy’s pit boots and he was crying and wanting me to hug him. There is no such thing. The lights are on now. No such thing as Pete.
I want to go home. I want to see my daddy.
Kathleen, grow up.
3:30 am — don’t write it down
I can’t stop crying.
What if there’s someone outside my door?
Oh God. If I think about it, my door will open.
“Let nothing disturb you; nothing frighten you. All things are passing.” Saint Teresa, ora pro nobis.
thurs. 28 — Giles made me drink a special tea so I could sleep last night. It worked. Has she been spying on me?
fri. — One heck of a middle C today. Felt like I was gorging on a chocolate éclair. Kaiser none too pleased — after all, I’m a soprano. Sopranos don’t sing in chocolate.
sat. — Today I cried. he told me to sing the C-major scale, my first time allowed to put more than two notes together at a time. But still no consonants, just “ah”. I felt like I was climbing stone steps in the dark and when I got a glimpse of light towards the top I started crying but I finished the ruddy scale.
APRIL FOOL’S DAY — Today Herr Knibs gives me that bloodless vulture eye and — no, he’s more amphibian, he’s probably covered in dry scales (scales, ha ha!) from collar to cuffs and dines furtively on furry creatures thrice daily. I can just see the squirming lump making its way down his narrow throat. Does he regurgitate bones every evening? Well today he says to me, “I vill accept you as a shtudent, Miss Pipah.” Why didn’t I say the perfect icy thing? I said — and I am being completely honest here, so I’ll tell you — I said, “Thank you, sir.” May I be struck dead.
Wed. — Daddy sent me a book today and Mercedes and Frances sent me salt-water taffy! I never thought I’d miss my little elves so much. I wish Daddy would put them in a special crate and mail them to me like kittens for a day or two.
Thurs. — “La voix mixte”: In every head tone, the resonance of the chest. In every chest tone, the rarity of the head. Ascend directly to heaven.
Fri. — Giles asked me to sing something for her this afternoon and I had to say, “I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to sing anything but scales and arpeggios.” The Kaiser says he can tell if I’ve been singing “ditties” on the sly. It’s like I’m committing adultery with my voice or something, he’s disgusting.
Mon. — He’s making me wear my hair in a scalp-tight bun. What does he think I am, a ballerina?
Tues. — I have had an epiphany. I now know what people mean when they say you have to suffer for your art. I always thought they meant rehearsing till you drop, performing when you’re not in the mood, starving until you get discovered and I always thought, “Great, I can’t wait to suffer” but that’s not it at all. The real suffering is this teacher trying to kill me with boredom by marching me up and down every scale known to man. Fine. I will beat him at his own game. I have begun repeating the entire morning’s lesson three times every day.
Wed. — “Your vocal range is a freak of nature, Miss Piper, no more or less impressive than Mount Everest. It remains to be seen whether or not you have the stamina and skill to scale it.” Scale!
Thurs. — I love the buildings. They’re called skyscrapers. They’re the closest thing to an ocean here. But it’s an ocean that goes straight up, not flat out. They say that the body of water stretching away to the east of Manhattan is the ocean but it isn’t. Not my ocean, anyway. It’s weird because back home I just took it for granted, my grey-green sea. Now I have a granite ocean. It gives me the same happy-sad feeling I need sometimes. When I look straight up at the buildings I can feel alone in a good way. Not in that horrible way of no one knows me.
fri — This is not a city. This is a world with whole countries in it. You could go mad here if you were the type of person who thought you were sane in the first place. I have found something past the granite ocean. It’s a whole amazing world. You can walk for an hour and never hear a word of English, you can eat in five different countries in five blocks, you can hear music everywhere. Why am I studying, why do I want to be caged on a stage when the real singers are out here, singing about fish, hollering out rhythm across wheelbarrows full of fruit to the timpany of tin pan alley, a chorus of trams, horseshoes, knives and live animals, this is where the opera is. The Met is a mausoleum. The music room is a funeral parlour. God I don’t want to wind up in a museum.
Mon. — There are places in Central Park that are better left unexplored and I won’t scandalize you by telling you why.
Tues. April 16 — Coney Island! Ate only pink things. Threw up. It was worth it.
Wednesday — Start at the South St. docks. Halifax times twenty. They better hope it never blows up. I see horses being winched up by their bellies in slings onto ships. They’ve been conscripted. That’s what most of the ships are for. New York feeds the war. New York goes to the whole world and the whole world comes to New York. I love seeing huge crates with Chinese writing swing through the air and pile up on the dock alongside every other language known to man. I’d like to spend a whole day just watching the men and the cargo but I can’t linger too long ’cause of all the tough customers wondering what a nice girl like me is doing… etc. What would they do if I said, “Hey pal, I think you’re beautiful, you move like Nijinsky, you’re my idea of a Greek god, in overalls.” But I’m not allowed to say anything at all because they’d think I was asking for it. Men get to chat to strangers and learn all kinds of things. Women get to take a book out of the library. When I am a famous singer, I will talk to whomever I please.
On foot up through the Bowery, the Italian quarter — kids, carts, food, women in black, good-looking guys but don’t let them see you looking, opera verismo — Greenwich Village, ladies and gentlemen, Tenderloin — get hungry here, buy a pretzel, have lunch in Hell’s Kitchen — really! Why do they call it that? Seems perfectly nice, in fact you can have a free lunch at Devlin’s Saloon Bar. It’s true, a sign said “Ladies Entrance” so I entered and there were a whole bunch of women with red faces and gristly elbows and all you have to do is pay a nickel for a beer that comes with a hot heaping plate. Up Broadway a bit tipsy — not used to beer — the golden mile, Union Square, Madison Square, Herald Square, past the Met — genuflect — promenade through Times Square, Columbus Circle, buy popcorn for the pigeons to keep them in the statue business (where they perform a valuable civic service by keeping the glorious past in perspective), into the Park, zigzag through that immense chunk of countryside smack in the middle of the greatest show on earth, past the Pond, the Lake, the Castle, skip the Reservoir it’s too big and too small, promise to go to the Metropolitan Museum next time, Haarlem Meer (sit down and decide I’ve walked far enough), out onto Central Park North, up Lenox thirty-seven blocks to the Haarlem River. It’s night.