“I stank, I know that, but my singing, good or bad, is irrelevant.”
“Oh, you weren’t the worst offender. Far from it. You’re learning to fake the notes you can’t reach very ably. But what is the point, Daniel? In a word.”
“In a word, hope.”
“Well then, in a few words.”
“What was the cantata about? Death. The fact that that is what’s in store for all of us, and that there’s no way round it, and we all know there’s no way round it.”
“Your Mr. Van Dyke maintains differently.”
“And so did you, just by being there. That’s the point. Everyone has doubts. Everyone despairs. But when you’re there in church, surrounded by all those other people, it’s hard not to believe that some of them don’t believe something. And by our being there we’re helping them believe it.”
“But what if all of them are thinking the same as us? What if none of them are bamboozled and are just offering their moral support to others, who similarly aren’t bamboozled?”
“It’s a matter of degree. Even I’m bamboozled, as you say, a little. Even you are, if not in church, then when you’re listening to music, and even more when you’re writing your own. What’s the difference, ultimately, between Bunny Honeybunny’s song and Bach’s saying, ‘Come, sweet hour of death, for my soul is fed with honey from the mouth of the lion’?”
“The chief difference is that Bach’s is immeasurably greater music. But I should say another difference is that my tongue is firmly in my cheek concerning the philosophic views of honeybunnies.”
“Your tongue isn’t entirely in your cheek, though, and perhaps Bach’s isn’t completely out of his. He has ambiguous moments.”
“But he knows, he says, that his Redeemer liveth. ‘Ich weiss,’ sagt Bach, ‘dass mein Erloser lebt.’ And I know that mine doesn’t.”
“So you say.”
“And what do you say, Daniel Weinreb?”
“More or less the same as you, I suppose. But I sing something else.”
It was the night before Christmas, and the night before the night before Daniel was to appear in the Off-Broadway première of Honeybunny Time. Dreams, it seems, really do come true. But he was not happy, and it was hard to explain to Boa, who was the underlying cause of this unhappiness, why this should be so. There she sat, propped up in her little cot, a Christmas angel complete with a halo and a pair of wings from Mrs. Galamian’s stock of costumes for the first-act dream-ballet that had been scrapped during the last week of rehearsals. Yet the problem was easily stated. He was broke, and while his prospects had never been brighter, his income had rarely been less. He’d had to leave the Metastasio two months ago, time enough to exhaust the little money he’d put away to tide him through an emergency. But this was the one emergency he hadn’t reckoned with — success. Rey and Tauber were both adament as to receiving their full cuts. Daniel had done the arithmetic, and even if Honeybunny Time didn’t just fizzle right out, Daniel’s net earnings from it would still fall short of what was required at the heady rate of some three hundred dollars a month. And if the show were a smash, he wouldn’t do any better, since he’d had to sign over his interest in the book for the chance to play Bunny. That, as Irwin Tauber had explained, was show business. But try and explain that to a corpse.
“Boa,” he said, touching one of the nylon wings. But he didn’t know where to go from there. To talk to her at all was an admission of faith, and he didn’t want to believe, anymore, that she might be alive, and listening, and biding her time. If she were, it was cruel of her not to return. If she weren’t, if she’d left this world forever, as she’d left this husk of herself, this disposable container, then there could be no harm in his ceasing to care for it as well. “Boa, I’m not giving up another fifteen years. And I’m not going to peddle my ass again. I suppose I could ask Freddie Carshalton to loan me something, but I’m not going to. Or Shelly Gaines, who probably doesn’t have it to spare. What I am going to do is I’m going to call your father. If that’s wrong, then I’ll just have to bear the guilt. Okay?”
The halo glinted.
“If you want to come back later, you’ll have to come back to him. Maybe that’s what you’ve been waiting for. Am I right?”
He leaned forward, careful not to touch the tube that snaked into her left nostril, and kissed the lips that were legally dead. Then he got up and went out into the hall and down the hall to Mrs. Schiff’s office, where the telephone was.
In all these years he’d never forgotten the phone number for Worry.
An operator answered at the third ring. He said he wanted to speak to Grandison Whiting. The operator asked his name. He said only that it was a personal call. The operator said she would give him Mr. Whiting’s secretary.
Then a new voice said, “Miss Weinreb speaking.”
Daniel was too taken aback to reply.
“Hello?”
“Hello,” he echoed, forgetting to use the deeper voice with which he’d addressed the operator. “Miss Weinreb?”
Which Miss Weinreb? he wondered. His secretary!
“I’m afraid Mr. Whiting isn’t available at the moment. I’m his secretary. Can I take a message?”
In the other room Daniel could hear the telephone ringing. But it couldn’t be the telephone. It must be the doorbell. In which case Mrs. Schiff would answer it.
“Which Miss Weinreb would that be?” he asked cautiously. “Cecelia Weinreb?”
“This is Aurelia.” She sounded miffed. “Who is this, please?”
“It’s a personal call. For Mr. Whiting. It concerns his daughter.”
There was a long silence. Then Aurelia said, “Which daughter?” Hearing her dawning surmise, he became uneasy.
At that moment Mrs. Schiff burst into the office. In one hand she held the halo from Boa’s head. He knew, just by looking, what she was going to tell him. He replaced the phone in its cradle.
It hadn’t been the doorbell.
“It’s Boa,” he said. “She’s come back.”
Mrs. Schiff nodded.
Boa was alive.
Mrs. Schiff put the halo down on top of the desk, where it rocked unsteadily. Her hands were shaking. “You’d better go see her, Daniel. And I’ll phone for a doctor.”
19
A week after it opened at the Cherry Lane, Honeybunny Time was transferred uptown to the St. James Theater, right across the street from the Metastasio, and Daniel was a star. His name, his own name, the name of Daniel Weinreb, was spelled out on the marquee in winking lights. His face, dark as molasses, could be seen on posters all over the city. His songs were on the radio day and night. He was rich and he was famous. Time featured him on its cover, rabbit ears and all, under a 36-point rainbow-shaped and hued headline asking, portentously: BEL CANTO — IS THAT ALL THERE IS? Inside, in an exclusive article, Mrs. Schiff told something like the story of his life.
It was not his doing. Or perhaps it was. The phonecall to Worry had been automatically recorded and traced by Whiting’s security system. At his sister’s suggestion, the voice-prints of the call were compared with those of tapes Daniel had made with Boa in days gone by.
The police appeared at the door of Mrs. Schiff’s apartment at the very moment the curtain was going up on Honeybunny Time. Mrs. Schiff, presciently indisposed, was on hand to receive them. Boa had already been taken off to a clinic to recuperate from the effects of her fifteen-year-long coma and so was spared the first onslaught. When the police had finally been persuaded that only Daniel could supply them with the name of the clinic and had been dispatched to the Cherry Lane, Mrs. Schiff, seeing that the cat was, in any case, out of the bag, decided to cash in her chips. With Irwin Tauber’s help she got through to the editor-in-chief of Time, and before Daniel had sung the closing reprise of “Honeybunnies Go to Heaven,” she had struck a deal, giving Time exclusive rights to her own 4,000-word version of the “Romance of Daniel Weinreb.” There was no way, after that, that Honeybunny Time wasn’t going to be a hit.