His Father’s Voice
by G. David Nordley
Illustration by Broeck Steadman
Scott caught himself staring at the bare wood and web-cluttered beams of his late aunt’s attic instead of packing, but he found it hard to concentrate. Ten days ago, Scott hadn’t even known who his biological parents were. Now, his search for his heritage had led to a dusty cardboard box in this dusty attic, filled with faded and broken moments of the long dead hopes of a father and mother he’d never known. Carlo Valdez had been a poor man with a little talent who had tried so hard to be more than a cog in the universal machine, and Theresa Rodriguez a plain girl who had once upon a time seen the light of his father’s soul and been momentarily blinded.
Theresa, it turned out, had died years ago, but her sister Maria had lived in this house they shared, increasingly frail, saving everything for “someone, someday, to make amends.” Scott’s arrival seemed to have completed something for her; he’d known her only a week, but in hours of talk, they’d begun to be friends.
Now Aunt Maria was gone too, her house filled with strangers going through things trying to decide who would get what. Some were so closely related to him that he had the uncanny feeling of looking in a mirror when he talked to them.
Thank goodness it was a loving family; the arguments were all of the “here, you take this, she would have wanted you to have it,”—“No, you take it, it meant so much to you…” variety. Then everyone had been too kind to even speculate that Scott’s surprise appearance might have hastened Aunt Maria’s heart attack.
The pictures in the album weren’t faded, though some of them were black and white. They’d been treated well and, except for the quaint clothes and old cars, looked like they’d just come back from the photo lab. Some pictures were of the people downstairs in their younger days, some of strangers.
But a couple of them included a thin girl with long straight brown hair, thick glasses and buck teeth in an artfully sophisticated pose: his biological mother, Theresa Rodriguez. The house was full of her, too, but as an older, more accomplished woman, in whose eyes and face the world weariness was not affected. There was little of her counterculture years here, a decade-long flight from reality that, Aunt Maria said, really ended only when they heard of Carlo’s death. Scott had two boxes full of Theresa Rodriguez: full of photos, clippings, school papers, and other things that kind people, trying to make up for what they’d done forty years ago, insisted he take.
Also, there was one precious picture, not one of the best, but good enough, of his father in an apron in front of a barber shop. He could see himself in his father; short but wideshouldered and deep-chested. The same pattern of baldness, offset by a neat, well-trimmed moustache. If Carlo Valdez had been nearsighted like his son, he hadn’t worn glasses; or hadn’t been able to afford them. If so, Scott thought, that might explain some of his father’s people problems.
Scott understood all about people problems. The person who had come up with the concept of the “alpha male” would probably have given Scott an “upsilon” or “phi.” He’d been fourteen by the time the school had discovered he was mildly nearsighted; too late for all the unrecognized acquaintances, miscopied assignments, and athletic failures.
With his build, Scott should have been a football player, but he was, as it worked out, an untalented but adequate and diligently informed keyboard musician who supplemented his “maintenance engineer’s” income by fixing electronic and acoustic instruments, playing at weddings, and teaching. His one stroke of luck, a few years back now, had been to help compose and play the keyboard on the pop hit, “Rather be Blue,” that had paid the mortgage and still produced a few hundred a year in royalties. But people in the business had got to know him, shunned him, and he’d had to fall back on janitorial jobs to support himself.
Carlo Valdez had been a barber to make ends meet. But the man had been a singer in his heart and in his spare time; a basso in the Tri-city Lyric Theater and chorus for years, who had even changed the spelling of his first name to sound more Italian.
Then, at the age of fifty-four, with no savings to speak of, after years of romantic failures painfully documented in the bundle of letters, Carlo had made love with the stage-struck Theresa. It happened, the letters revealed, the night after his one and only performance as Don Giovanni as a last minute substitute for the Lyric Theater. A homely, artsy-craftsy girl throwing caution to the wind and an over-the-hill want-to-be had tried, for one night, to be real people. In 1964, the pregnancy had been a major scandal.
“People were so stupid and cruel, back then,” one of his new cousins had said. “Theresa really loved him. He only lived three blocks away, and they’d talk when she came home from school. He would have married her, but your grandfather wouldn’t have any part of that. So he left town, she left town, and you went up for adoption. She found Carlo years later, when she was on her own. She was a secretary, you know, worked for Peabody and Cramer for thirty years.” And a street and commune hippie for ten years before that, but only Maria had told him that. Scott had just nodded. “Yes, she found him. They wrote after that; the letters were in the box.”
“Theresa,” the cousin added, “got that box in the attic after he died; it arrived UPS from his boarding house saying it was all there was left and that Carlo had wanted her to have it. Then she moved in with Maria, and the box came with her. They looked for you, did you know? If you’d only been a few years earlier—”
“I didn’t know,” he’d told them. “I didn’t know.”
He’d lost his concentration again. He looked down from the rafters to the cardboard box. Dust. A photo album. Old letters. Programs from various productions Carlo had been in. Discharge papers—Carlo had been in World War II. Some vinyl phonograph disks, heat warped, cracked, in cardboard dust jackets. Unplayable. Pinza, Callas, Tucker, Tebaldi and what was this? Tri-city Lyric Theater! Excerpts from The Student Prince. The Mikado, The Merry Widow, and Don Giovanni. Don Giovanni? It had been that live performance; Carlo was listed in the title role. Why had they recorded that one? Was it the only night they’d had first-rate recording equipment? Or was it the best?
Impatient with excitement, Scott tried to pull the record from the dust jacket. But it was too warped to slide out easily, and before he thought to simply cut the dust jacket, it broke completely in two under the stress of his pull. He extracted the pieces and looked at the simple inexpensive label.
Scott groaned aloud. Damn! Was there some kind of curse running through his blood that decreed that his kind would get to touch the goal of their dreams once, then have it snatched away? Scott wanted to hit something, slam his hand into it and feel pain. But that would make too much noise, and then he’d have to explain and deal with the sympathy.
He took a deep breath instead and focused his attention on the fine grooves of the broken record; the music, his father’s voice, were still there if he could think of some way to repair a record as broken and warped as the artist’s life. He wrapped the pieces in an old newspaper so they wouldn’t get further scratched, and fitted them gently, reverently, back into the jacket.
There must be something someone could do about that, he thought. Scott’s inheritance, the one good thing in his father’s life. Aunt Maria said Theresa had listened to that record over and over in her last month, dreaming of what might have been as her cancer consumed her drug-numbed body. Theresa had hung on until the turn of the century, but had not woken up on January first, 2002.