Word: mistresses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...conductor reprimanded her: "Don't interrupt me when I'm speaking to somebody else." Beverly said: "I'll go you one better. I won't sing when you're conducting," and stomped offstage. During the preparations for her La Scala appearance, she climaxed an argument with the wardrobe mistress by snatching a pair of scissors and snipping a costume into pieces. The onlooking cast and chorus burst into applause, an Italian tribute to a flare of real temperament...
What the reader learns is this: six boys are born in the same summer in a village in the American Southwest. One dies young; five live to manhood. They separate, though bound together by their origin and by a mistress shared serially. No one is named. Each is referred to by his profession: the actor, the poet, the musician, the painter. That is four; the last, the curator of these memories, is a teacher of English...
Various clues-the single mistress, the lack of names and characterization, the fact that each of the four artists withers or dies after reaching renown-suggest what the author is up to. Goatish carnality is occasionally his medium, but he is writing about the mysterious web of past-present, the great arcs of possibility that bemuse a boy and, broken, haunt a man. His six characters are the mislaid and scattered pieces of one, the teacher who dreamed of painting, wrote a little, had a talent for music...
...little, apricot colored house overlooking the town of San Basilio. She intends to research a study of the near medieval lives of contemporary southern Italian women, but she soon gets far more than she asks for. Her friend Marina, a schoolteacher, turns out to have been the secret mistress of the previous occupant of the apricot house: Marco Santoro, a gifted teacher and that anomaly in San Basilio, "a hopeful...
...servants in Shakespearean plays. With much of Iago's ability for skillful management of others (but with none of his strange twist of heart) she soothes Desdemona and chaperones her to bed with the kind of understated stage-presence that suggests a well-concealed understanding of how her mistress is to be handled. And Marie Kohler's Desdemona is more dutifully opposed than passively resigned to Othello's creeping suspicion--a refreshing variation on the usually-wilting Desdemona...