A Captured Heart

By Steven McCann

My novel begins one snowy evening in cold snowy Buffalo on a typical American street where a light from the topmost room of an otherwise ordinary home shines into the wintry night with a rare golden glimmer and the miracle of invincible youth. From the garret room in this house young Elan Duclair shares with the silent falling snowflakes a voice destined to carry him from his untutored singing in a church choir and a high school rock band onto the grandest of the world’s opera stages in only a few short years. He journeys through the world of early 1960’s New York, making his way past older temptresses, despotic bosses, unreliable landlords, months of city cab driving, waitering, catering, and dishwashing, selling on Wall Street and a graveyard shift in an ice cream factory where the ten degrees Nordic temperature temporarily damages his vocal cords. Inspired by the pure brilliance of his musical gift, an array of opera coaches and mentors offer friendly guidance and a beautiful young musician offers her heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781543497908

Steven McCann

Steven McCann is the author of novels, novellas, stories, plays and poems, and a 2021 recipient of a City Artist Corps Grant. He was born in 1948, graduated from Spring Valley High School in New York where he excelled in three sports. He enrolled at the University of Kansas, and later at NYU, majored in English and received a BA. His work experience is varied; nightwatchman at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, hotel detective at the Plaza, home renovator and shipping manager. In 2005 he was stricken with paraplegia and has been wheelchair bound since. He lives in New York City and remains passionate about Central Park, the Shakespeare festival, the Met Museum, Lincoln Center, the opera, and the people of New York.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The city of Buffalo had its first snowfall that year on the Sunday following Thanksgiving. A white scrim descended peacefully over the streets and houses just after dinnertime. Children were finishing their homework assignments for the school week ahead and parents were preparing themselves for the arduous task of journeying out the next morning on the snowy streets to hail buses and taxis against the first blasts of winter. Buffalo had dealt with snow, mountains upon mountains of it, before the first dwelling had been built there. Its citizenry rarely complained. A whole industry of trucks, plows and salt spreaders made their living from it. Had there been no snow over the years, there wouldn’t have been a Buffalo. The houses and apartment dwellings huddled against it, their lights peering through the curtain of falling snow like campfires of a triumphal army. On a tree-lined street in the southwest corner of the city one such house glowed brighter than those around it. It was only a single-family two-story structure crowned with a garret apartment on its attic level, not the only dwelling to cast a golden ray into the falling snow drifting down on the other side of its window shades, but the only one to radiate a glowing sound that lit up the snowflakes to a merry dance. A pure young voice escaped the confines of that garret with a dauntlessly free spirit, as if a nightingale had been let loose to defy the winter season. A passing pedestrian might have made out the faint strains of the drinking song in Verdi’s La Traviata.

The garret had only two rooms. A large bedroom furnished with a single twin bed, two chests of drawers, a rolltop desk as old as the turn of the century house itself and a roughly constructed armoire used as a closet took up most of the floor space. A small bathroom in one corner containing a stand-up shower, a sink and toilet took up the rest. Except for the bathroom, which had been constructed five years earlier, the rest of the garret was only partially finished, indicating that the original homeowners had considered adding an apartment to the top floor, but hadn’t followed through with their plans. Plaster surfaces only covered part of the walls, leaving many joists bare. The skim coats had never been painted and had become gray with age. The ceiling remained a web of vaulted Douglas fir rafters turned brown with the passing of some ten decades and rose to a height of twelve feet at the center. But this vaulted spectacle of rafters was what the young man liked best about his room. The thick old timbers may have become in his imagination the netted vault of a cathedral, or perhaps the ceiling over the stage in an opera house.

On the rolltop desk sat a turntable with a vinyl LP playing a recording featuring Joan Sutherland as Violetta and Carlo Bergonzi as Alfredo. In the young man’s hands, he held a booklet with the libretto in Italian alongside an English translation. Standing tall in the center of his room, dressed only in an old sweatshirt pushed up to his elbows, boots and khaki pants, the young man made a striking image, had there been anyone there to see him. He stood two inches over six feet on his lean broad-shouldered frame and his fine young features had an intensity far beyond his twenty years. His dark wavy hair and eyebrows, large blue eyes, strong nose and chin quivered with emotion as he looked ahead to one of the two windows in the room as if instead of mirroring his own figure in the dark window panes, it contained his Violetta. Music filled the small garret, shaking a cobweb in the rafters above where a house spider scurried to safety. Fainter sounds from the turntable blended with the fervent untrained voice of the twenty-year old.

"Libiamo ne lieti calici

Che la bellezza infiora;

E la fuggerol

Fuggerol ora s’inebrii a

Volutta"

(Let’s drink, let’s drink

From the joyful cups

That beauty blossoms.

And may the fleeting

Moments be elated with

Voluptuousness)

In the front parlor on the first floor below, his parents sat watching Walter Cronkite on the evening news. The father, retired from the steel plant in Buffalo fifteen years earlier with compensation for an injured back, was shorter and stouter than his son. Only his strong brow and jawline was reminiscent of his offspring. His eyes were brown, his head completely bald, except for traces of gray on the sides. His shoulders, arms and legs were massively thick, and when he rose to fill his glass with water, the large armchair showed a deep imprint from his heavy frame. But his wife, sitting on the sofa across from him, manifested a stronger resemblance to the singer above. Behind the reading glasses she wore to better see her knitting, her large blue eyes had a soft gentle cast and her arms and crossed legs were long and slender. Her short gray hair hadn’t lost its youthful wave and her fine hands guided the knitting needles with the sensitive touch of an artist.

Neither of these two showed any irritation from the live performance upstairs that intruded on Mr Cronkite. One could only guess peeking in on the scene that they were tolerant loving parents. Besides, the voice filtering down accompanied great opera that they were somewhat familiar with. The mother’s maiden name was Benina Rosetti and her parents had come over from Italy in 1880. Her husband Andre was a descendant of both French Canadian and Iroquois Indians and the surname he bequeathed to his sone was Duclair, with a first name of Elan, a name that means, ‘friendly,’ in Native American. Elan Duclair sang all of Alfredo’s lines throughout the opera, before he descended for some of the leftover apple pie his mother had baked for their Thanksgiving and to say goodnight to his parents.

He turned at the bottom of the staircase and walked through the short entrance hallway to the kitchen where he lifted the remains of the apple pie from the refrigerator and served himself a heaping portion onto a dinner plate. With a tall glass of milk to accompany his snack, and leaving the pie plate soaking in the sink, he moved into the living room and took the empty cushioned armchair across from a parent to his right and one to his left as they continued watching Mr Cronkite on the TV screen next to their son.

There’s still some vanilla ice cream left, Elan. Why don’t you finish it off?

Too fattening, Mom, he replied, before taking a prodigious spoonful of pie.

And what are you in training for? The Australian tennis open? The men’s fashion quarterly? The Olympic swim team tryouts? asked his father without taking his eyes off Cronkite.

He wants to be an opera singer, Andre. You know that.

Of course, I do. I’m well aware of it. Don’t I have ears? But haven’t I seen enough opera singers to know most are stouter than me, including the women. You’re likely to be rejected because they won’t have any costumes small enough for you. And don’t they claim that the extra weight gives their voices heft?

They start out slim, Pop.

Yes, and they start out at forty and sing until they’re seventy. What do you plan to do with the intervening twenty years?

Some start younger, Pop.

Did I tell you, Elan, that your Aunt Betty may stop by tomorrow evening, if the snow isn’t too deep.

I have choir tomorrow night, Mom, at the church.

Can’t you miss one practice, Elan? Aunt Betty hasn’t seen you since Uncle Morris died last July. It would cheer her up to see you. She always tells everyone how handsome you are. You’re a favorite of hers, Elan.

I just can’t, Mom. We’re practicing Vivaldi’s ‘Gloria,’ chorus and a Gregorian chant that Mister Bosner gave me a solo in.

Is he going to get you connected with a voice coach, Son? asked Andre, finally redirecting his eyes toward Elan.

I hope so, Pop.

But didn’t you say he knew someone right here in Buffalo?

Yes, a retired singer. A soprano who once sang in the opera houses of San Francisco and Chicago.

Well, when is he going to make the connection for you?

He hasn’t said yet.

Can’t you ask him?

I don’t want to be pushy, Pop.

Andre gave a loud drawn out sigh.

You have to be pushy, Son. If it’s what you want, then you have to be pushy about it. Sinatra and Bing Crosby broke down doors to get where they are.

They’re not opera singers, Pop.

No, maybe not. But they have enough stashed away in their bank accounts to buy the Metropolitan Opera House and everything that’s in it.

He doesn’t care about money, Andre, said Benina, busy with her knitting needles. Our son is a pure idealist.

All I can say to that is, it’s good he’s still only twenty and has a home to fall back on with homemade apple pie waiting for him. But we won’t survive forever, Elan. Already we’re getting old. You have got to learn some practicality. If you really want to pursue opera, it will take you years and may not pay a penny. You’ll want to meet a steady girl and steady girls will want kids. Kids take money and a roof over their heads.

Mister Furbish at the supermarket wants to groom him as a regional manager.

To travel in and around Buffalo all day, Mom, to the chain of supermarkets he owns.

Elan wiped his mouth with a napkin, after finishing off the rest of the pie.

And why not, Son? You have the use of our Chevy. Your mother and I hardly use it.

I just don’t want to tie myself up to a junior manager job, Pop. I’ve seen enough of them. A constant obsession of price listings, deliveries and sales totals. I’m already doing enough of that now.

Andre gave out another long sigh, but said nothing and turned his gaze to the TV again.

Goodnight, Pop. Goodnight, Mom.

Holding his plate in an outstretched hand, Elan stepped across the room, kissed his father on the forehead and did the same for his mother who put aside her knitting needles to reach up and draw him into an embrace. Then he turned back to the kitchen, washed his spoon and pie plate, before climbing the stairs to his garret. On his way up, he sang a refrain softy to himself.

"Libiamo ne lieti calici che la bellezza

Infiora;

E la fuggerol, fuggerol ora s’inebrii

A volutta!"

The snow stopped around midnight and by morning the city became navigable for the thousands venturing out to school and work. Elan left the house with his parents still sleeping and caught a bus three blocks away that took him a mile distant to his small supermarket near the center of the city. The chill morning air and ice blue sky inspired some notes from last night’s arias, while Elan walked the final block to the entrance of his store. Mr Furbish, owner and manager of five other supermarkets in addition to Elan’s, was already inside the empty store and opened the door for him without any greeting. Elan knew his job by heart and did not require any instruction from Mr Furbish who mounted the stairs to a small balcony overlooking the four aisles, opened a safe and began calculating on an adding machine that sent a steady clicking sound echoing throughout the quiet space. Elan hung up his coat and turned on lights in the bakery and meat departments, at the same time casting a trained eye on goods past their expiration dates that had to be removed onto a cart for early pick-up going to a house of detention across town. He hadn’t spent more than twenty minutes in the store, before its four other employees arrived.

They came with jubilant smiles and greetings, invigorated by the beautiful winter morning just as Elan had been. The first three to enter were almost exactly Elan’s age. Joe Denison, a tall husky fair-haired former high school footballer and Buffalo Sabres fan, managed the meat and poultry section. Thin wiry Eddie Russo stocked shelves with the quickness of a point guard, a position he starred at with a local high school and that he hoped would lead to a belated scholarship at the University of Buffalo. Joan Waller, pretty as a May morning, her blonde hair tied in a ponytail and her shapely figure modestly dressed, managed the bakery counter, always giving a demure smile to Elan whenever he came by. Last to enter came Harold Fisher, the older Black man who impeccably organized the mounds of produce. These four tramped into the store, clumping their boots to dislodge snow, punching their time cards, hanging up their garments and moving to their respective work sections. Within fifteen minutes, by 8AM sharp, the two checkout registers at the front had been supplied with cash and Mr Furbish opened the electric sliding doors for early customers.

Elan’s responsibilities included manning one of the checkout registers until 10AM, when two clerks normally showed up to work both registers. They in turn were relieved by an evening shift arriving at 4PM. From 10AM until 4PM, Elan moved about the store taking stock of the myriad of items and deciding what needed to be reordered. He placed these orders himself, usually around 2PM from the store’s balcony. He also supplied the registers with needed cash from the balcony’s safe and transferred cash back to the safe when the registers got full. Between 2:30 and 3PM, a man from Brinks arrived, stepped up onto the balcony and received a pouch with cash and checks from Elan. Elan supervised window cleaners and the two young boys collecting shopping carts in the parking lot. Whenever there was a spill in one of the aisles and Eddie Russo had his hands full stocking shelves, Elan grabbed a mop and did the cleaning himself.

He had worked there since graduating from high school and his diligence, perfect attendance and trustworthiness were highly regarded by Mr Furbish who remained confident he could lure Elan into a higher paying position managing one of the new supermarkets he planned to build in the coming years. Except for only one shortcoming, Elan was an ideal career candidate. He did not have any college behind him and showed no interest in pursuing night classes towards a degree at the city’s university like his fellow workmates. Time and again, Mr Furbish lectured his best employee.

Mister Duclair, you have brains and common sense. Why aren’t you in night classes like Joan here, or Joe, or Eddie? You don’t want to get passed up in the race for success, do you? The days when a young man could advance with only a high school diploma, like my father who became a successful life insurance salesman, are over. A college degree is like the new union card these days, Mister Duclair. I still have your original application on my files, Sir, and the fact that you were an A student in high school is one of the reasons I’ve promoted you. But you’re getting older now. Another manager will ask if you’ve taken business courses. Where did you go to college? It’s the first thing they’ll ask, Mister Duclair. I’m only saying this for your own good. Don’t let life pass you by. You’ll regret it someday.

Yet at every opportunity, Mr Furbish gave Elan more responsibility. His reminder about college wasn’t the only one Elan received.

UB is offering business and accounting courses at night for the spring semester, Elan. And even some science courses. I thought you might be interested, Joe Denison volunteered as they were leaving the store one day.

Elan believes in doing everything by himself, Joe, chimed in Joan. But he’s smarter than any of us. Why don’t you take Joe’s advice, Elan? The science courses might interest you. I take two night courses myself each semester. If I can do it, Elan, someone as smart as you would breeze through it.

These thoughtful encouragements from people he genuinely liked left Elan with a difficult dilemma. On all sides of him life was nudging him to make choices that were not what he wanted. Yet it was impossible to share his dreams of becoming an opera singer with these people. None of them had ever listened to opera music and the word, ‘opera,’ probably connoted something odd and unmasculine. He couldn’t tell them that he was spending his evenings studying Italian on his own and reading a large book about opera history. Joan Waller, in particular, gave him the greatest anxiety. She had an obvious crush on him and it was clear she would have liked to date him. Her fresh face and healthy young figure, as well as her decency and work ethic, were hard for him to ignore. More than once, he’d struggled to resist lifting the phone to call her. In her innocent way, she’d even showed an interest in his singing.

Are you still with the choir at Saint Brennan’s, Elan? What Mass do you sing at? she asked one day. Although she rarely attended Mass, she went out of her way to journey to St Brennan’s to hear their choir, solely for Elan’s sake.

Choir practice on Monday and Thursday nights and 11AM Mass on Sundays were the highlights of Elan’s week. On this particular Monday following the first snowstorm, and after a hectic day at the supermarket, during which an accident occurred between two cars leaving the lot and a customer collapsed with heart failure in the aisle and had to be given CPR by Joe and Elan before an ambulance arrived, choir practice was even more welcome than usual. Elan reviewed the details of his work shift, the orders he’d placed, the deliveries he’d taken in at the back of the store, and any unusual events, like the heart attack victim, with Larry Cooley, a married thirty-year old father of two boys who replaced Elan on the evening shift as floor manager.

Hustling into his coat and hat while he made his farewells, Elan dashed out the door and ran two blocks to catch a bus home. On choir days his mother fixed him an early dinner and he left home a second time by six o’clock. St Brennan’s, a large stone church on the opposite side of the city, required a transfer from the first bus to a second. It was usually not before 7PM when Elan entered its large wooden doors to climb a side staircase to the choir balcony where his fellow choristers, six women and five men, awaited him.

Hugh Bosner had been choir master at St Brennan’s for twenty-five years. A small spry sixty-year old with a shiny bald head and large protuberant gray eyes behind a pair of spectacles he kept on the end of his nose, Mr Bosner always conducted holding a gold baton. Joel Browning, a short rotund man of similar age in the habit of wearing tartan bowties played the church organ on the balcony beside him. Both of these men maintained a serious mien and there was little joking or time wasted during practices. Elan was the youngest chorister among them, the others middle-aged and married, and in two cases, of retirement age. They made up the finest church choir in the city. When Elan asked a music teacher in high school where he could sing besides the haphazard rock band he belonged to, the teacher directed him to St Brennan’s.

People who aren’t religious, some Protestants even, attend their services just to hear the choir, Elan. And they give lovely concerts during the holidays and at Easter.

Hugh Bosner happily accepted Elan into the choir, after asking him to sing a few bars from the Star-Spangled Banner to test his voice.

A young tenor! Excellent, Young Man! We can use you!

Before he reached his eighteenth birthday that September, Elan became a member of the choir. But even at that early age the thought of singing in an opera had entered his imagination.

Who’s the greatest singer in the entire world, Miss Calvin? he’d asked the same music teacher the year before. Is it Bing Crosby or Sinatra, or Nat King Cole? The guys I sing with in the band think it’s Sam Cooke.

Miss Calvin laughed.

The greatest singers in the world are opera singers, Elan. There’s no comparison. Their voices are stronger, richer, more radiant. Their range is much greater and they evoke greater emotions than pop singers. Opera singers are indisputably the greatest singers in the world.

Without telling his friends in the rock band, he bought an LP of Puccini’s Turandot featuring Richard Tucker and Renata Tebaldi. It made a deep and lasting impression. He quickly lost interest in singing rock music and began to collect opera albums with his spare money. Slowly, as his eighteenth year passed and his job at the supermarket took shape, he started to sing along with the recordings, boldly and fervently. It is difficult for young people to tell others of their dreams, especially when those dreams involve crossing social and cultural boundaries. Elan only let on to his parents and never sang when there was company on the floors below him.

That Monday night the choir practiced Vivaldi’s ‘Gloria,’ followed by the ‘Traditional Catholic Latin Mass of the Angels’ and the Gregorian chant ‘Gloria’ that Elan sang solo in Latin.

"Glo-ri-a in ex-cel-sis De-o!

Et in terra pax ho-mi-ni-bus

Bo-nae vo-lun-ta-tis!"

(Glory in the highest to God.

And on earth peace to men of

Good will.)

His voice echoed through the church as clearly and as resoundingly as the bells of St Marks, filling the vaulted ceiling space over the nave, chancel and transept, and adding a luster to the statues, the colorful Biblical scenes in the stain glass windows, even the very air. Faces of the older choir members broke into smiles and Hugh Bosner’s mouth opened in wonder, while he continued moving his baton for the singer.

Excellent, Elan! Your high notes remained soft, yet strong, and your pitch was perfect. Excellent! he congratulated Elan afterwards.

We have a star tenor, don’t we? offered a smiling Mrs Wachman, one of the older choristers when they were putting on their coats again.

We’ll have to choose more solos to show you off, Elan, said another woman.

Have you sung anywhere else, Elan? asked one of the men.

Not really. Just a silly rock band in high school.

You have a sterling voice and your diction is as perfect as a tuning fork. What kinds of music do you like?

Most kinds, but especially opera, he confessed.

Well, yes! That makes sense! Maybe you’ll be famous someday. Didn’t Richard Tucker start his career in churches and synagogues?

It was the first time he’d ever hinted at his ambitions. Now that he had, though, several of the members who were opera fans themselves engaged him with more questions. Who was his favorite singer? Was it a tenor or a baritone? Did he ever listen to the broadcasts on the radio from New York City? Had he ever considered seriously studying to be an opera singer? Elan held to his modesty and responded shyly, yet he could not resist feeling a surge of pride when they encouraged him to pursue a singing career. That Sunday, with his parents sitting below in a center pew and the entire church filled to capacity, his voice resounded high and low, and to every ear with the vigor and freshness of a waterfall, the softness of a spring breeze and the pitch-perfect notes of a nightingale.

Chapter 2

After choir practice a few weeks later, Elan stayed back to speak with Hugh Bosner when the others departed.

Can I have a word with you, Sir?

Why sure, Elan. Be kind enough to wait five minutes, while I share next month’s schedule with Mister Browning.

The choir master and the organist conferred over some lists that Hugh Bosner had created, but soon the organist tucked them into his briefcase, slipped into his coat and descended the side stairs, leaving the twenty-year old with the privacy he desired.

What is it, Elan? I hope you’re still happy about our work here.

Oh, I am, Sir. But I have an additional request. You had made the comment to me some time ago that you knew of a voice coach, a former opera singer. To be brief, Sir, I’d like to take voice lessons with her. Can you make a contact for me? Tell her you know of a young man who wants to study opera?

Hugh Bosner paused a moment, until a smile lit up his small shiny head and the large eyes that were magnified behind his spectacles.

Opera! Well! You want to try opera, Elan? It’s the grandest of grands. A great, noble ambition. But I myself, even after listening to voices all these years, am unprepared to offer an opinion about what voice is suitable for opera training.

But this voice coach, Sir, the former opera singer? Does she take students?

Hugh Bosner’s smile suddenly clouded over with doubt.

To be honest, Elan, I don’t know if the woman still lives in Buffalo, and if she does, if she still gives lessons. She’s very old, in her late seventies, and from what I remember, she’s no longer in good health. I can make a call, though, and see if she’d be able to help you.

That would be appreciated, Sir. Is there anyone else in this city who could help me, do you think?

I’ll check into it. But Buffalo isn’t exactly an opera mecca. We have the philharmonic as you know, and occasionally they host operatic singers as part of their performances. But these would be people coming into town for a night’s engagement. There’s one city in this country that’s a magnet for all the arts, including opera. It’s not as far away as Paris, or Berlin, or London. It’s right below us. New York City. That’s where your Beverly Sills and your Robert Merrills live. But I have to caution you. Thousands of young people with all kinds of talent flock there. And only a handful make it to the top. You told me once you worked in a supermarket. How is that going?

Well enough, Sir, I guess. I’m an assistant manager.

Of the whole store?

Yes, only for the day shift.

You’re a very bright young man, Elan. In no time you’ll be successful in the food business or some other. Our church and the choir you sing with now is not going to disappear. If you stay in Buffalo, you can enjoy singing with us for years to come. That may satisfy you as an adjunct to a career in business. If you really pursue a future in opera, your life will be different, very different. Perhaps more exciting, but filled with letdowns along the way. I’m trying to impart some wisdom here. We are all, all of us who are blessed with god given talents, presented with choices. At one point I myself could have pursued a career as a conductor. Who can tell? I may have developed into a Toscanini. But instead I chose the safer path. I taught Math at the college level, and as a hobby, if you will, volunteered years ago to conduct this choir. It has given me a taste of the world I once dreamt of.

For a moment Hugh Bosner became lost in reveries, drifting back long ago, perhaps into his years as a student. But seeing that Elan was waiting in suspense for an answer, he recollected himself.

I’ll make some calls, Elan, not only to the former opera singer I once mentioned living here in Buffalo, but other calls, too. I’ll call the Buffalo Philharmonic for you, if you’d like.

That would be wonderful, Sir! Truly wonderful!

Then I’ll do it. Don’t let me hold you up any longer. I’m sure you have a bus to catch.

Good evening, Sir. And thank you!

Two weeks, four choir rehearsals and two church services later, Hugh Bosner renewed their conversation. Elan was putting on his coat and preparing to leave with the other eleven choristers, when the choir master asked him to stay behind for a few minutes. After the other members had descended the stairs, Hugh Bosner removed an envelope from his briefcase and handed it to Elan.

I’ve done my best to follow up for you, Elan. The aging opera singer we spoke of still lives in Buffalo, but has suffered failing health and her family has moved her into an apartment in her daughter’s house. I only spoke to the daughter, who wasn’t at all amenable to asking her mother for any assistance. Next, I tried the philharmonic here in Buffalo with better results. I spoke to a general manager and even shared a few brief words with the maestro. They were very sympathetic. I told them I had a young tenor in my choir with a splendid voice, an excellent young person who wants to study opera, but has no experience, amateur or professional, beyond our choir. Within a week I received this list from them, containing the names of three professional voice coaches, all in Manhattan. They advised me to tell you, if you’re really serious, to call one or all of these people and set up an appointment to travel down to New York for a short audition. You won’t be required to sing a whole aria from one of the famous operas. They’ll simply test your voice, maybe by giving you a sheet of music to sing from, and they’ll offer you a professional opinion. If you have talent in the way of an operatic voice, someone is sure to help you with added voice coaching and exercises for the voice to make it richer and stronger, things that only professional opera people can do. But again, I caution you young man. If they like you, you’ll have to move down to New York City, a world apart from Buffalo. Think it over, Elan.

Elan gave profuse thanks and hurried home through the dark winter evening to his room where he opened the envelope and read the names, addresses and phone numbers of three different Manhattan voice coaches with a short description after each of their life experience in opera. All three were women. All three had been singers early in their careers and had branched off to other facets of opera, before becoming voice coaches. Two had taught in colleges, one still did. Another had been a prompter for the Metropolitan Opera, still another an opera chorus master. For the first time the real world of opera became tangible in black and white. If he chose, he could make calls and enter that world, or he could remain safe in Buffalo.

He waited three more days. His emotions rose and fell so fast and so powerfully that he often lost his breath just thinking about his future. At the supermarket he became distracted and had to work extra hard just to manage the store, without making major mistakes.

Are you feeling well, Elan? asked Joan Waller with deep concern.

Do I look sickly, Joan? Elan responded with forced laughter.

You don’t look like your old self, Elan. Are your parents well?

We’re all fine, Joan. Thanks for asking.

Her concern and the camaraderie he felt in the store only made his decision more difficult. Buffalo was all he knew. The friendly tree-lined streets, the festive eating places where he drove with friends for pizza, huge franks, root beer and fish fries, the Sabres and Bills, and the spirit surrounding them, the Buffalo Philharmonic, there for the asking if he wanted classical music live, the closeness, the old parochial neighborhoods, including UB and the steel plant where his father had made enough for their home and their support; it all crowded into his heart and mind like one large family gathering and he wasn’t sure if he could ever make it back the same way if he took the leap.

But he did. His first call was answered impatiently and somewhat suspiciously by a woman who claimed to be completely booked and unable to find space to see him for at least two months. But the second response came from an upbeat intelligent voice that made him want to run immediately for a train to Manhattan.

Why sure, Young Man! I can fit you into my schedule for a visit. How old did you say you were?

Twenty, Ma’am.

Have you been to college?

No, Ma’am. I took a job in a supermarket and at present I’m an assistant manager in charge of the store during the day shift.

Well, you sound like a very responsible person. And you say you sing in the church choir?

Yes, Ma’am. For two years.

What do you know about opera, Elan?

Only from books that I’ve read about opera history and recordings I’ve bought.

Are your parents opera fans?

Not really. Although they’ve heard some in their lives. I bought the recordings on my own. The first was Turandot with Rickard Tucker and Renata Tebaldi. I loved it. And I began to sing along with them from the top floor of our house.

You sound very enthusiastic. I’d like to meet you. When can you come down for a visit?

I have to give the store owner notice. It will take me a day by train to reach Manhattan and another day to get back. But I’ll immediately give him notice, if you can see me in ten or twelve days.

I certainly can. Call me as soon as you have a definite day and I’ll make time for you.

When he got off the phone, his excitement was so great that he ran into the kitchen, lifted his mother in an embrace and spun her around.

I heard a little of what you were saying inside, Elan. Was that New York you were speaking to?

Yes, Mom! A voice teacher in Manhattan. A former opera singer. I’m going down for an audition! If she likes me, she’ll teach me opera!

My Lord, Elan! Can we talk this over with your father? We’re not going to impede you if it’s what you want, but we need to impart some wisdom. You’re talking about leaving your job here. What will you do in New York, besides taking singing lessons? How will you make a living? We’re not rich, Elan. We can help, but only so much. New York, especially Manhattan, is very pricey. Rents are high. Food is high.

But Mom! I’m young! I’m strong! I want to sing, Mom! I want to try!

Benina paused in thought, before a smile mixed with sadness came over her.

"We only want the best for you, Elan. If you want to sing