Fidelity

By Xlibris US

Fidelity is a vivid description of a mans conflict between marriage and work against the backdrop of grand opera. Mark Feldman has a supportive wife, who wants him to succeed in his new career as vice president of development for the Chicago Grand Opera, but as she witnesses his passion become dangerously intense under the influence of the mesmerizing visionary, Gloria Winthrop, she loses faith in him and returns to New York to restore the career she has forsaken. Marks own fidelity to marriage is tested as he must choose between a brilliant career and a durable marriage. This core conflict is set again the seductive, glamorous world of grand opera.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503525900

Book preview

1

S o, Mr. Feldman, what is it about grand opera that most appeals to you?

Everything. Singers who stretch themselves to their limits without microphones or tricks or gimmicks. The pageantry. The sets. The choreography. The large canvas as a backdrop to the most intimate story. But, first and last, it has to be the music—the glorious music.

Was that the answer she was searching for? Or was it too effusive? I waited, then added: When it works –in Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, or Wagner— it’s magical.

And where did all this passion come from?

My father. He was once a promising tenor.

And?

Life got in the way.

Because of marriage? Children?

I nodded, reluctant to share the truth with this formidable woman. I was in the conference room of The Chicago Grand Opera, interviewing for the position of development director. My inquisitor was Gloria Winthrop, creator of this company that was scarcely twenty years old but already enjoying a national ranking second only to the New York Met. She was flanked by a nondescript, plumpish secretary, Susan Rogers, and a garrulous press agent, Arnie Schwartz, who had just published Subscriptions—the Solution to Theatrical Success. Across from the three of them sat the relaxed, self-confident chairman of the board, a large commanding presence, Gerald Freedman, who smiled at me with approval like a benign, older friend, and telegraphed that he had already cast his vote in my favor. All eyes turned to Winthrop, the leader who clearly was the one who would determine my fate.

I had read extensively about her accomplishments, and she came across as advertised— a tall, strong, handsome, inscrutable figure of fifty, with a dark, perfectly groomed coiffure that framed penetrating green eyes. She wore a black sheath with a simple but elegant silver necklace and matching earrings. She was intimidating. She was regal. She was clearly someone you did not mess with.

How did your father introduce you to opera?

"He played Caruso records all the time— Rodolpho in La Boheme, Alfredo in La Traviata, all the tenor roles. He sang Ridi, Pagliacci so often I had the lines memorized by the time I was ten—they still echo in my mind. He was a vice president at Sears, but he never lost his passion for opera."

Instantly I regretted my words, for fear they would invite personal questions— the tortured life of my father wasn’t something I wanted scrutinized. Fortunately, the irrepressible Arnie Schwartz rescued me. He was a short, round-faced, ebullient optimist, a man in constant motion even when he was sitting still, a balding Falstaffian figure who turns every subject into a story about himself and punctuates his sentences with at least three exclamation points.

I know the folks at NYU, he boasted, reviewing my resume. Norm Pearson is a good friend of mine—we’ve known each other for years. It must have been a great experience working with him.

It was, I lied. Norm taught me to be a fundraiser.

What I didn’t say was that Norm Pearson had also kept me under his thumb for twenty years, taking me for granted and appropriating my ideas without ever acknowledging them. An opportunistic mentor, he was a major reason I’d taken a leave of absence from the development office to study for an MBA in Arts Management—and why I was now applying for this job.

Norm thinks the world of you. What made you want an MBA?

"I felt the need to know more about finance, marketing, and accounting—you know, the practicalities behind the glamor of performing arts. I was about to return to the development office when I saw your ad in Opera News."

And there you have it, the chairman beamed, impatiently, as though the case were now closed. Clearly he was a leader accustomed to making rapid decisions, based on first impressions. Do you know much about us?

I’ve read about your growth for years— the risk taking, the attraction of singers from Italy, the young artist’s program, the effectiveness of your subscription model.

Pandering, I checked myself. Be careful. But the truth was that I had admired Gloria Winthrop’s aggressive leadership from my conservative office at NYU and wanted to serve her. I was ready to hitch my wagon to her soaring star.

And you feel prepared to be director of development at a major opera company?

Oh, yes—yes. It draws on all my experiences. After years with newspaper advertising and university fundraising, I’ve come to realize I want music to be central to my professional life.

It won’t be tough to leave New York? he smiled. NYU? The Met? The theater? The symphony? Even the Knicks and Yankees?

Not in a New York minute. They all have their counterparts in Chicago, don’t they?

Not the Yankees, that’s for sure. We have the Cubs, of course, our perennial losers. The rest are counterparts, I suppose, on a smaller scale. But remember what that notorious New Yorker said about Chicago: it is ‘the second city’ … . And your wife? Does she agree with you?

Absolutely. Brenda’s on board. She’s always been on board for me. She was good enough to support our family while I took my MBA. I returned his genial smile, trying to appear transparent but having the creepy feeling that he saw directly through me. Brenda was on board, that was true, but there were inevitable complications I couldn’t minimize. She would have to abandon a successful career of twenty years and leave a city she loved for one she did not know at all. Chicago could have been buried in a foreign country for all we knew. I would have a demanding job, at least, and it would lift me (I hoped) out of professional mediocrity; but the move would be no small adjustment for her. Guilt shadowed the edges of my eagerness, which I couldn’t betray to this committee, even though I had the sense that both Gloria Winthrop and Gerald Freedman had my number. I earned my degree by the sweat of my frau, I answered, glibly. She teaches English in high school. She’ll find a job.

Ho, ho, Freedman mocked me silently. He knew that it wasn’t going to be quite so simple.

Children?

One girl, who’s finishing her Ph.D. at Columbia and teaching at CCNY. She’s self-sufficient already. We’re empty nesters— and free.

Free? he grinned.

Our only daughter, Myra, was twenty-four and on her own already, but Brenda would be wrenching herself from a tenured position at New Utrecht High School in eastern Brooklyn where she was admired by her principal, colleagues, and students. She really didn’t want to leave that job or New York. She loved the classroom, especially the hyper-charged advanced placement youngsters who demanded all her time and hovered round her in the theater for student productions, preparing to mount one play or another—she was their drama coach as well as their favorite English teacher. Both of us were provincial New Yorkers, devotees of theater, the museums and galleries and concerts and, most of all, the opera, always the opera— at first City Opera, then, when we could afford it, the Met. Once again, I was asking her to bend to my career. She was a trouper, my Brenda, always prepared to do whatever was best for me, and she assured me she would attend to all the pesky domestic details while I focused on this job—assuming that I got it. But I knew that selflessness could go only so far— I’d have to find some way to make this transition as easy as possible for her. As a fleeting thought, I often wondered what would happen if our roles were reversed. Would I be willing to give up everything for her?

Gloria Winthrop sniffed impatiently, as if she were reading my mind and assuring me that these were details, mere details, unimportant in comparison to this attractive position she was offering. We could always visit New York, after all—it was only two hours away.

It sounds as though you’re ready to go.

Rarin’ to go.

The search was by no means over, she warned me. They had to interview other finalists, but they would be making a decision within the next two weeks. When she stood and shook my hand firmly goodbye, she was indeed a commanding presence, five ten and broad shouldered, a good two inches taller than I was, with eyes that were fixed on mine like a laser and wondering, I suppose, if I could find the funds to relieve her of lingering, perpetual debt. She had the reputation of being a grand dame whose vision always exceeded her budget, and there were rumors of risk taking and overreach that had spread throughout the opera world. She asked Susan Rogers, her administrative assistant, to introduce me to some of the staff and show me round her large, impressive palace, especially the auditorium where a rehearsal of Simon Boccanegra was in progress. Giovanni Marcuso, the celebrated Italian conductor from Florence who had served as Winthrop’s artistic conscience for the past fifteen years (without ever having the justified title of artistic director), was working with Piero Cappuccilli and Martina Arroyo, both of whom were on the stage, dressed in jeans and sweat shirts. Opening night was several weeks away. As Rogers and I stood in the back of the darkened hall and listened to them, their voices caressed the magic of Verdi’s music, phrase after glorious phrase. I let the sound flow through me, thinking and believing that no music compares to the human voice when it’s blessed with this kind of talent.

I felt confident about the interview— too confident, probably. I was Norm Pearson’s associate director, second in command of a large development office at NYU, and had enough experience to feel confident about succeeding as the head of a smaller operation; but there is a vast difference between being an associate director, making recommendations, and being the one responsible for ultimate decisions; I might have felt thwarted by Pearson’s control, but never having been in charge fed my anxiety and made me wonder whether I really had what it takes in a city where I knew no one and in the field of opera where I had only been a spectator. I wanted to believe that I could satisfy the outsize ambition of Gloria Winthrop as well as my own, but just below my bravado rippled waves of fear and insecurity—I had never been tested as the head of a development office. With the arrogance of a striver who loses his inhibitions on the cusp of middle age, I had the instinct I could satisfy her. I wanted this job so badly I could taste it. I wanted it more than any job I had ever applied for, more than any I’d ever held. Susan Rogers certainly was in my corner. She escorted me from office to office and made introductions to the box office personnel, the marketing team, and the handymen, chattering on as though we were already bosom buddies. It was clear that she knew every aspect of the company, every nook and cranny of the building, and every ambitious goal that Gloria Winthrop envisioned. Personnel depended on her, for she had the answer to all their pragmatic questions, and they knew she spoke for their leader. Gloria would like that … . Gloria would approve of that … . Let me check with Gloria before you move ahead. With admiration and no irony whatsoever, they spoke of Susan Rogers as Gloria Winthrop’s anchor to reality.

At the end of my tour was Brian Ferguson, the forlorn aging director of development I hoped to replace, and his subordinates, who were curious about his possible successor. Ferguson had been with the company from its origins in 1954 and had struggled constantly to raise the funds to cover annual deficits; but he and his small staff couldn’t keep up with Winthrop’s fast pace and elaborate productions— by now he had lost her confidence. A tired veteran, out of breath, and ready for sunsets in Sarasota, he looked like someone you might want to know— in retirement.

You’re coming at the right time, Susan assured me. Gloria’s launching a renaissance that will end with a celebration of the bicentennial two years from now. She just commissioned Krzsytov Penderecki to do an original opera. Have you ever heard of Penderecki? No. Well, you will. It’s more than Brian can handle. It’s more than Brian wants to handle.

Penderecki, she told me, was a Polish composer who taught at Yale and had made his reputation with Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima and St. Luke’s Passion, sacred music I wasn’t familiar with. This opera, his first, was based on Milton’s Paradise Lost. My unspoken reaction was that the idea was nutty. Why would you ask a composer of Polish descent, who had written only religious music, to create an opera honoring an American bicentennial with a British epic? Why not Show Boat or Porgy and Bess? Something accessible. Something American. This was snobbery pretending to be avant-garde. Pure, unadulterated snobbery— an aspect of opera I disliked and that Brenda hated.

It should open up all sorts of new possibilities for fundraising, Susan braved on, with a skeptical smile that suggested Paradise Lost was not her idea. Brian will keep score from Sarasota, won’t you, Brian?

He stroked his little white beard, thoughtfully, but you could see that he was already walking the beach near his winter condo on Long Boat Key.

Susan tapped her watch. It was twelve o’clock and time for my luncheon with Gerald Freedman.

The Chicago Club squats heavily on Michigan Avenue at Van Buren, adjacent to the weather-beaten dark gray Fine Arts fortress and the landmark Auditorium Building created by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler in 1889. Two blocks north are Symphony Center and the Art Institute, icons of culture for the metropolis. Across the expansive Avenue stretch Grant Park, Buckingham Fountain, and Lake Michigan in all their midwestern glory, an attractive postcard for tourists and natives alike. We are in the center of cultural Chicago—commerce glitters a mile north across the river where emporia like Wrigley’s, Tiffanys, and Nieman Marcus sell everything you could possibly desire. South of the club is the Hilton Hotel, where the neighborhood becomes a little dicey, and still further south, of course, broods the dark shadow of Richard Wright’s Native Son and Gwendolyn Brooks’ Bronxville, a world that never appears on the radar of the Chicago Grand Opera on Wacker Drive. West is the famous Loop, where business conducts itself and where executives leave their offices promptly at noon for lunch at one of the sanctuaries—the Union League, The University Club, The Standard Club, and of course this Chicago Club, a formidable dowager from the turn of the last century when Chicago was emerging as the most American of American cities. Bigger. Better. Business.

It was all a little overwhelming for a kid from East Flatbush, with a self-sufficient, self-effacing high school teacher for a wife and a modest home, an ordinary career, a daughter launched, and a mid-life crisis pending. Why, I wondered, would the Chicago Grand Opera have any interest in the likes of me? And why, at the age of forty-eight, should I be so worried that I might be rejected?

Once you were inside the Chicago Club you walked up a circular staircase bordered by gold banisters that led to a second floor with sparkling rooms frozen in time and featuring historic furnishings and important paintings by American artists on the walls and composite photographs of staid, successful, responsible, former presidents of the club, including Gerald Freedman there in the lower right-hand corner: a handsome, self-assured executive—the first Jew to be president, as he laughingly told me, largely because I don’t look like a Jew. I felt an instant identification with this fellow landsman, even though I had forsaken any connection with Judaism since my inauspicious bar mitzvah; in some primordial way, we understood each other’s shared inheritance.

Silent staff members in dark suits stood at attention nearby, poised to be of instant service. I must admit that despite my cynical, defensive New York attitude toward the very rich and Chicago itself, I was awed by the splendor of it all, like a boy in a candy shop for the first time. For a few years out of college I had an entry-level job in advertising at The Brooklyn Eagle and was squeezed into a postage stamp of an office before the paper ceased publication in 1955; then I grew into a series of nondescript offices at NYU as I rose to become an associate director of development. The splendor of the opera house and the richness of this Chicago Club were over the top for me. As I followed the maitre d’ and the towering, self-confident Gerald Freedman to his corner table in this affluent, understated dining room, I watched him move with the assurance of a multi-millionaire, a man who was comfortable in his own skin and who greeted fellow royalty as old, familiar friends—he knew everyone by first name and introduced each one to me, murmuring that these were the titans who could be among my most promising donors.

I came to opera through my wife Sara, he confessed, defensively, as if viewing the art form as not quite a manly pursuit—or as if he shared the Count’s opinion in Capriccio that opera is an absurd thing.

His wife Sara had been a close friend of Gloria Winthrop since their days at the Friends School and she had always admired her ambition. Gloria was an actress first, then a singer, and finally an impresario. She was an intense girl in a hurry and went directly from high school to Julliard to study acting and voice, then left for lessons in Milan before graduating and learned romance languages along the way. Everyone knew that Gloria Winthrop was destined for success. She cultivated friendships with Italian would-be divas and soon realized she could never compete with the best of them; but she was addicted and determined to have a life in opera. After her return to Chicago in the early fifties she joined two friends, a knowledgeable conductor and a wealthy lawyer, to create the Chicago Grand Opera. Why not? Why not be grand? Why not feature stars if you can’t be one yourself? Of course, her father’s fifty thousand dollars didn’t hurt the burgeoning enterprise—he was a highly successful attorney and opened the doors of Chicago philanthropy to her. Don Giovanni and Carmen formed the first abbreviated season, followed by seven operas in the second year. Soon she edged out her two male colleagues and took total control of the company; Gerald Freedman wasn’t quite prepared to divulge that sinister coup, but I learned about it later when I realized I would have to swallow the dark side of Gloria Winthrop that I had heard about. She had a reputation throughout the opera world of taking no prisoners as she rose in her meteoric career. She used subordinates and disposed of them when they no longer served her purpose. Sara Freedman watched Gloria’s startling debut and helped to form the first Women’s Board for her. It didn’t take long to persuade her husband to join the Board of Trustees.

I wanted to help, primarily to please Sara, but also because I like driven, compulsive entrepreneurs, especially when they’re women. In those early years Gloria could do no wrong. She had more energy and charisma than I’d ever seen in anyone, male or female, and every idea sounded better than the last. She brought underpaid Italian singers over before the season started in Milan, for example, and paid them more than Rudolph Bing at the Met, who had an ironclad rule that no one should earn more than Enrico Caruso. Well, Gloria broke that rule and made her name in the process. Imagine! Little Chicago Grand Opera confronting the New York Met. David and Goliath. She attracted young sopranos for their American debuts—Simionato, Callas, Tebaldi. She was absolutely fearless. I thought she was an extraordinary leader. I still do.

Freedman himself had signed on for three more years as chairman, he assured me, and was trying to stabilize the company financially before he stepped down.

I don’t want any of our candidates to be deceived, he said bluntly, staring at me. "Behind Gloria’s success and irresistible confidence, we’ve got the potential to be extraordinary—or to fall off a fiscal cliff. We can’t go on with a budget that the trustees are expected to subsidize every year. Now she has grandiose plans for the bicentennial. She’s commissioned an opera based on Milton’s Paradise Lost by some avant garde Polish composer none of us have heard of—Krsytov Penderecki. Have you heard of him?"

Not until this morning.

"Well, what the hell, I go along to get along. I’m only a businessman who happens to be chairman of the board. But I don’t want you to be deceived. This is a great opportunity for a fundraiser, although you have to come in with your eyes wide open. We’ve got to create a solid financial basis for the company— a cash reserve for experiments like Paradise Lost, maybe even a single underwriter who loves forgotten epics by unread poets, and an endowment for the future. He leaned forward for emphasis. The next few years will be exciting, but they won’t be easy. Now, he concluded, good-naturedly, breaking out with the laughter of compromise, if Gloria had chosen Porgy and Bess, as I suggested, I might have considered sponsoring it myself."

As we left the crowded room and walked down the golden staircase to the lobby, he explained that almost everyone at this Club was a rock-ribbed Republican. I’m the odd man out— a Jewish Democrat out of the Depression who worshiped Roosevelt. I even voted for McGovern. I’m a fish out of water.

I was hanging on to his every word, looking for a sign of approval and convinced that as chairman of the board he had more influence over my fate than he was willing to admit. It’s been a pleasure being with you, Mr. Feldman. You had a good interview, that’s for sure. I’m impressed, but we’ll both have to see what Gloria decides.

Thanks for lunch, I said, bidding him good-bye and hoping it wouldn’t be farewell. Thanks for your time … . and your support.

My heart was racing ahead of my mind as I sat nervously in the cab that crawled through town, past skyscrapers and landmarks like the Auditorium, Monandock, the Rookery and Sears Tower. The Nigerian driver was held back by snarling traffic, but he pressed westward toward the Kennedy Expressway on the way to O’Hare, the busiest airport in the country and the hub of America itself. The city was still an architectural wonder and the streets were laid out in a grid that the architect and city planner, Daniel Burnham, had once envisioned for Chicago. Make no little plans, he’d rhapsodized more than half a century before. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work. Were these pieties just romantic rhetoric or would I be able to personify their promise? Who knew? In a moment of panic, once again, a part of me feared I was way over my head and utterly inadequate before all this power and prestige and wealth. But my rejuvenated self now felt that I’d always been suppressed and had never become the man my father wanted me to be, the embodiment of all that he wanted to be himself.

Suddenly —can you imagine?— he was sitting beside me in the cab, glowing with pride at my interview, a benevolent broken man.

You were all that I hoped you’d be in that interview, he seemed to say. If these Chicagoans in search of a Croesus for their opera company decide to appoint you, who knows what you might become?

Yes, I thought, who does know? My heart was racing once more. This job is not beyond me. I’ve never really tested myself, ever, and I’m only halfway through with life.

He nodded in agreement, then vanished into the smoky sun that was lowering itself in western skies.

2

I n the air, the plane was breaking through threatening clouds, reaching for a clear blue sky. I was eager to share the day with Brenda and knew that she was waiting nervously to discover what the rest of our lives might become. This potential job would be the greatest challenge to our twenty-five year marriage —never had I asked anything so fundamental of her— and the test of a childless life together.

She had driven me to LaGuardia at six that morning for an early flight, positive as always, assuring me that she would take care of her own retirement and the sale of the house as well as all the other details of closing out a New York life that both of us were addicted to. I shouldn’t worry or feel guilty about her. I must focus on the interview, for this was the career opportunity of a lifetime and a chance to escape from the development department of NYU—all work for twenty years, no praise, and a boss I didn’t respect. First get this job, she kept urging me. I’ll take care of the rest.

I was exhausted and tried to sleep, but I was in the mood for memories. My mind traveled back to that late afternoon in November of 1938, when I was meandering home through the streets of East Flatbush after a Bar Mitzvah lesson, a twelve-year old carefree kid who only wondered how the Dodgers had done that day. In front of my house, I watched my Irish and Italian buddies playing punch ball, the street sport of choice. They urged me to join them with one of the new Spauldings from the stash I kept in my basement. I was a two-sewer punch ball star on East 32nd Street, the Jewish anomaly who was desired by each of these teams—I felt wanted, needed, lauded, accepted. Punch ball and stickball and softball and baseball and basketball and later football were what really counted in my Brooklyn childhood.

Kristallnacht had just occurred, and my father, the son of immigrants, was worried about its effect on family members still in Germany. He was not a religious Jew, but he did cherish his culture and kept forecasting its doom in the hands of barbaric Nazis. For me Kristallnacht seemed very far away, despite my father’s harangues about the vandalism and anti-Semitism and the isolationism at home. What did I know about anything beyond East 32nd Street? I was a dreamy kid who lived in a bubble and scarcely understood my father’s fury as he blasted the radio to my mother’s dismay and then had persistent quarrels with her about the loss of his job at Sears and his gambling and his philandering. My older sister understood it all and was desperate to be out of that hothouse and on her own. I was too self-absorbed to process what was happening and considered all the bickering as background noise.

My house was morbidly silent that balmy afternoon, except for the tortured sound of Ridi Pagliacci that was driven by a blunt, stubborn, worn-out phonograph needle playing, it seemed, to no one. Was my father already home from his pedestrian job as a supplier of auto parts and had he forgotten to turn off his favorite aria? Was my depressed mother still asleep in her bedroom? Was my conscientious sister away at Brooklyn College on the path to becoming an elementary school teacher? I turned off the scratchy machine and listened to its echo linger in the anxious air. Cautiously I stepped through empty rooms to the basement where my athletic equipment lay hidden. The wooden steps creaked the way they do in ghost stories— darkness loomed ominously, and it scared me. There in our unfinished basement, amidst an old ironing board and a clothesline that held drying rags, was my mother’s cramped corner. Beside it sprawled my athletic equipment, my worn basketball, my baseball glove, my Louisville slugger with Joe DiMaggio’s inscription on it, and my rubber Spauldings purchased from an allowance that was meant for other more practical things. And there, presiding over all of this domestic clutter, was my father, who must have come home unexpectedly and was now swaying gently from a tattered rope, hanging a foot above an overturned step stool. His eyes were wide open and bulging, his parted lips defined by a forlorn smile of apology and regret, as though he had hoped to utter one last word of advice to me, his protégé, his future. We stared at each other, and for a moment I thought his lips were about to move in defense of what he had done.

In the week that followed, the women wailed like a Greek chorus, and my nervous, terrified mother, who had been utterly dependent upon him, was inconsolable during shiva and afterwards. She cursed him to her older sister, indifferent it seemed to the fact that I was listening to every word from my bedroom. He’s abandoned me, she cried, he’s abandoned all of us, and she underscored his decline in all of its gory details. Just two years before he’d been fired as vice president of sales at the local Sears store for having called his superior an incompetent and stupid fool. Jobless and self-destructive for months, he gambled, he womanized, he left her to care for their children, he was utterly irresponsible. Finally he found work selling auto supplies to dealers far away from home. What a come down! she cried. "From vice president to salesman in a matter of months! And what am I to do now? What am I prepared to do?" His final act was one of cowardice she could never forgive. And such a gifted man he was, so cultured, so gregarious, so full of life. He’d abandoned her with a daughter who hadn’t