Green Glowing Skull. Gavin Corbett

      ‘You’re young in my book. It’s unusual for someone of your age to be interested in the old-style tenor singing. Your soul may creak but, I tell you, it’s exciting for my ears to hear a virgin voice like yours. You should revel in the light voice that you have, your spry and tinkling tone; do not be after some character that you do not possess. You would be ideal for a project I have in mind. I and the man you met in the club last night, Clive, wish to form an Irish tenor trio and we are on the lookout for a third person. We will play the front parlours and concert venues of this city, whose people’s appetite for Irish ballads and art songs and the singing styles of John McCormack and Joseph “The Silver Tenor” White I believe is dormant but has not disappeared.’

      Rickard was still brooding over the ‘young’ comment.

      ‘Mind you,’ the old man went on, looking Rickard up and down, ‘young though you are, it’s not as if you’ll be attracting the attention of the ladies. Your thighs are swollen like upturned bowling skittles and you have hips like a hula hoop and your face looks like it’s been split with a hatchet and has gradually fused back together after many setbacks in a humid region of the world.’

      It was an easy decision to make in the end. If Denny Kennedy-Logan could continue to offend him, Rickard would not feel so bad about spending time with the old man and not his parents. The next evening, finding him in the drawing room at the clubhouse again, Rickard said he would join his trio.

3

      They began practising every night in the drawing room, in front of the fire and often in the company of others. In a typical session they talked about programmes for future concerts and considered the suitability of certain songs for future audiences. In Denny’s experience the Anglo audiences did not respond well to ‘Come Out Ye Black and Tans’, and neither did the black audiences; the Jewish audiences did not like the songs that laboured the point about Jesus. Early on Denny suggested that they include in their repertoire arias, bel canto, lieder, zarzuela excerpts and late-eighteenth-century pleasure-garden songs, but this idea was dropped owing to Rickard and Clive’s lack of training in and ignorance of these styles. A good deal of the evenings was spent in reminiscing. Denny and Clive were capable and guilty of great nostalgia. Clive remembered the village and hinterland of his youth, and the Dublin he later escaped to; Denny talked about Dublin – which he called ‘Dovelin’, with three syllables – as it could have been: a Hanseatic outpost, with terraces of tall Billy-gabled houses. But the real Dublin was not so bad, he said; it was where he had learnt to sing, and learnt all the songs that meant the most to him, and it was the city of his father and mother, and the city that gave birth to them: the floral Victorian city; and of the generations preceding them: the stout Georgian city; and of a less-easy-to-define lineage. (Twice in three weeks Rickard listened to Denny tell the story of when, as a young man of seventeen, he was invited to ‘Glena’ by the marsh, the home of John McCormack, to view the body of the tenor-count in repose, and how grand he looked in that cucumber- and lily-scented room in his dark blue papal uniform and his lilac sash, with a medal pinned to his breast and a ceremonial sword by his side, and that surely in such resplendence he had graduated to the ranks of the most exalted heralds.) They spoke of the entertainment that was had in the Theatre Royal on Hawkins Street. Clive bemoaned the day that establishment was razed (which he remembered well, because he’d been there the day that it happened, and he remembered not just the wrecking ball and the clouds of dust but the lament of many voices that came to his mind: Jimmy O’Dea and Maureen Potter and Noel Purcell crying for Dublin in the rare aul’ days and the big American variety stars who had graced the Royal stage down the years and under it all Tommy Dando’s organ playing a dirge). Denny dismissed that version of the Royal as ‘a seedy penny gaff’, and Clive as ‘an old blow-in’, and preferred to talk of the previous Royal on the site, the building that burnt down in 1880, where his great-grandfather had seen Pauline Viardot in Don Giovanni.

      They spoke, both of them, about Ireland with such ardour and colour that it was as if Ireland were the only country that mattered to them and all their years in America amounted to nothing. But the Ireland that they spoke about was not one that Rickard recognised wholly from reality. It was an Ireland, perhaps, with ‘Dovelin’ as its capital; one that he knew only from the romantic Irish songs they practised. It was the Ireland of Airs of Erin. It was Hibernia herself. It was the Ireland that glowed brightly in the minds of a certain class of dreamer in about the 1840s – Thomas Davis and Gavan Duffy and the Young Irelanders.

      It was a dream Ireland, yes, they both admitted, finally and without any provocation; but it was an Ireland that they once had been prepared to fight and die for to make real, just like those Young Irelanders.

      ‘Well, maybe not you, Clive!’ said Denny. ‘You were only in the movement because the Davy Langans was the only club in New York that would have you!’

      ‘Who were the Davy Langans?’ said Rickard. ‘Militant Irish republicans?’

      ‘Militant Irish patriots,’ said Denny, and stressed again: ‘Militant Irish patriots. It wasn’t from Marx or Thomas Paine that we drew our credo. It was from “Bright Fields of Angelica”. We were after a dream country, oh to be sure, unbound and unburdened by any social realities, or any of the other realities.’

      ‘It was there in the constitution all right, all of that,’ said Clive, with a drop of the head. ‘But by the end of it were we anything other than a drinking and gaming club like any of the rest of them? I don’t know.’

      Denny glowered at his companion, causing Clive’s head to drop further and turn away. ‘There you have it! There you have it! As I said: Clive was only in the Langans for want of a roof over his head! There were some of us still in that movement idealists and activists! Some of us to the last meant to take the dream home and rescue Ireland. If only more of you understood what the Davy Langans was for and it might still have been a force today. But it’s all gone now, and a pity. The last branch of it died out in the Cape Colony some ten years ago, I believe. We once had been a very active branch here in New York.’

      ‘Ach,’ said Clive, ‘long ago, long, long ago, before any of us –’

      ‘We died on his watch!’ said Denny, wagging a finger in Clive’s direction. ‘He was both secretary and treasurer when we went under. All North American funding for the movement came through New York. A sudden disappearance of money killed us off! There are questions still unanswered! We died on his watch and he has to live with that!’

      ‘The writing had been on the wall for a long time,’ said Clive, laughing it off. ‘We folded anyhow, and we merged with the Cha Bum Kuns up the street, and the few of us left in the branch were taken in here, at a reduced subscription for a while.’

      ‘“Merged” is a good word for it!’ Denny adjusted himself in his seat. ‘Eaten up! Utterly subsumed! By golly, if they’d known there were some of us would have borne arms for a cause would they have taken us in so fast?!’

      ***

      It was difficult to sing through all the many interruptions. There was one pesky club member, a man from an old Dutch family, who took enjoyment from bursting into the room. Usually this man had been enjoying wine somewhere else on site.

      ‘Here they are again!’ he boomed in one evening. ‘Oh, they’ll love you, the hussies! You’ll have them lining up outside the stage door at the Carnegie Hall.’

      ‘Go away now!’ said Denny. ‘I won’t have this, or any excuses that my friends make for you.’

      This particular interruption on this night moved Denny to make a vow:

      ‘From tomorrow we take our rehearsals to my apartment. What do you say, men? The environment here is not conducive. I think it is time to strike out on our own.’

      He pointed to the ceiling. It was a chequerboard, of orange and blue panels.

      ‘East Prussian orange amber and Dominican blue amber. The soapstone beside us was shipped