A Version of Victory

by Tom Sheehan

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

Mr. Barbanti must have known something else, been aware of some secret of the ages, because he blurted out, “Quick, son, before it is gone. Before the words go away.” Had he been witness himself to such an outburst before? Had such a dream been realized in his presence, or by him, in that old Italy of his, the Italy rich with the glorious tenors, for now he had been in the presence of another magnificent voice?

And I knew exactly what was going to happen, as it happened before, five years before and five years before that ... Victor fled. Out the door of the Barbanti house he flew, down the street we saw him go, as if he was at Manning Bowl and the goal line was all of 80 yards away. Flew, he did, into a kind of reclusion where the upstart evening might somehow be put in a proper place of mind, if such a place existed for him. I doubt that it ever did, for on the following day he’d have no memory of the happening. There would be no note left hanging for him to hear — he was tone deaf to begin with — no single article of his delivery, no reception remembered. A song would come and go, and every five years of his lifetime, as I had come to measure them.

It was his destiny, his fate, his mystery. I was the chosen observer.

The huge smile slowly leaving his face, wonder beset by awe and deepest curiosity, Mr. Barbanti said, “What happened here? Did I really hear what I just heard? Tell me what I heard. Please, somebody, explain it to me. My God, where did Victor go? Why did he go? Something is terribly wrong here or terribly right, but it’s all amazing. What have we seen, or heard? I am not alone in this, am I? Did you not all hear it?” He stood beside his deep, comfortable chair, a man up from his throne, caught up in wonder a young man had freed in his house. “Mamma mia,” he said again, “Blessed Mother.”

He seemed happier than he might have ever been in his whole life.

His wife and daughters were still speechless in the kitchen. Not a glass tinkled during the whole song, or yet. Not a clatter of a pan, though Angelina, the 14-year old, said boldly in her eyes she had fallen in love at the moment. “Yes, Papa,” she said, “like The Gloria.”

Still standing, amazement yet written all over his expression, he pointed at me and said, “He’s your closest pal, Tom, right? What do you know?” Unwavering, steady as a post, he waited an answer, his eyes beginning to get red, and a story on his face.

I tried to explain it to him, and to all the others, though mysteries like this, or miracles, were things I did not handle well myself. “I first saw it happen in kindergarten. Victor, never having joined in a song that I can remember, suddenly one day stood up from a circle of little green chairs we sat in and began to sing a song called, I think, My Dog Blue. It was beautiful, so beautiful, that for three or four weeks the teacher, inviting the principal and the music director into her classroom, tried to get Victor to sing the song again. It never came back to him. He never knew a word of the song, even though he tried. It just would not come back to him from wherever it had come from in the first place.” I paused, trying to remember some feeling I had back then. “They pushed hard at it, all of them. One of them finally must have said, ‘Maybe we push him too hard. Let’s sit back and see what happens.’ It just went away after a while.”

From the kitchen, a dish towel still in her hands, Angelina said, “Nothing ever happened after that? Once I heard about a boy in the Armitage School, in West Cliftondale, who sang a song at recess that brought the neighbors right out of their houses, and the teachers from inside the school all tumbled into the schoolyard to hear the boy sing one song. I don’t know what that song was, or the boy’s name, but I’ll bet it was Victor.” Her eyes flashed their new-found joys again, as if she was laying claim on Victor forevermore.

“Were you there, Tom?” Mr. Barbanti said. “Did you hear that one too? What was it, the name of the song he sang that time? Do you know what’s going on with him?”

“I was there,” I said. “That time he sang a troubadour’s song, in Old Irish, I guess. I don’t think anybody in the schoolyard knew any of the words, but later on I heard that Mr. Dineen, the retired mailman sitting on his porch across the street from the schoolyard, was crying all the time, sitting in his old chair, his chin resting on his hands on the porch railing, just crying his eyes out. And they said he had been here for more than fifty years.”

Mr. Barbanti said, “That’s his piece of the miracle of this young man of ours, Tom. I wish I could have been there to hear that one. So, the Maestro doesn’t own him outright, does he? What a pity. Nor La Scala herself. What comes after this? How will you know where to be, if you go to different schools, take jobs in a different places, how will you be at his side? You are fated, I assume, to be the only one to be in all his outbreaks, if I can call them that.” The weight of him was deep into his chair, but he was uncomfortable once more, his face still shining with glistening curiosity, searching out causes and explanations.

He stood again, preparing to put a demand into the air. “You keep me advised on what happens to that pal of yours. Make sure you tell me. If you ever get a clue on the next time, tell me.” The king had spoken beside his throne, the echoes undoubtedly ringing yet in his ears.

Thus, I departed under oath that night to keep him informed of his personal La Scala tenor, if and when I would still be privy to such an undertaking, my calendar marked for five years hence.

We left his house that night, the season over on the weekend, and never went back; Phil hurt his back in an accident a few months later and never played ball again. We drifted apart after that, except for Victor and me. And five years to the day, in church one Sunday morning...

At the altar the priest said, “Please be advised that Peggy has had a bad cold and is just recovering. Help her out if you can.” His eyebrows were part of the announcement.

The procession started down the main aisle, Peggy singing. Obviously her recovery was not complete. She sang terribly, a dissonance creating a stir in the church, not approaching a sense of music. The priest flinched at the altar at her feeble attempts. And Peggy, unable to let go, tried to continue.

“Oh, what is this?” Victor said to himself, as he sat beside me and something happened in his gut, at the back of his head, coming like an incomplete statement. He didn’t know what it was, something breaking loose, coming apart, gaining its own force.

Again, I knew.

Then, in a crowning moment of some distant demand, he was jump-started like an old Ford or Chevie rescued from inertness; loose wires connected, a nerve touched into reality, a collection of breath taken in, and a stampede of energy loosed. One vein must have leaped across another vein. A nerve, twisted in the mix, lost its old harmony of things, its natural order, and found another setting. The new torrent came from a place he did not know in his body or in his psyche.

Victor stood up to help Peggy through the song. It was a revered hymn, one usually solemn and suddenly brought to heavenly acceptance, as Victor, my old pal Victor, began to sing, a most remarkable tenor, sonorous and golden-toned, operatic, like Pavarotti or Domingo or Carreras or blind Andrea Bocelli, a tenor the church had never heard. The priest cried at the beauty of the song. Peggy’s mouth stuck open, an “Oh” caught up in awe. Every person in the church turned to look at Victor in the back row singing in that glorious tenor voice, everything freed from the fateful ignition, the magnificent torrent loosed from him.

It is five years later as I write this. I am in the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington. Victor and I joined the army two years ago. I went to Afghanistan; Victor, to Iraq.

Accidentally, the pain in my legs determining my mindset, I just looked at the calendar. It’s been five years since I heard my dear friend sing one of his songs.

The silence is deafening.