“…the man who paid you to leave,” Patricia Hale said, her voice breaking, “and I think he has been ashamed of it for forty seven years.” We stood in the quiet study off the ballroom, with the party murmuring behind the door, a string quartet playing something soft and a champagne glass chiming somewhere. I was seventy two, in my red dress and my red lipstick, holding her telephone with a hand that would not stay still. On the screen was a girl of twenty five with a microphone, wearing sequins, and beside her stood a famous man with a guitar. The girl was me. The handwriting on the back of the photograph was not.
I had been Loretta Vance then, a singer at a small club called the Blue Flamingo, with a voice people said was a gift. In the summer of 1977, the famous musician Teddy Marlowe heard me sing and promised to take me on tour. I remembered the night so clearly. I remembered a man in a brown suit, who said he was Teddy manager, bringing me a cashier check and a bus ticket to Ohio. He told me Teddy had changed his mind. I cried in the bus station. I never sang professionally again. I met my husband two years later and told no one why.
Patricia sat down heavily in a leather chair. “My husband is Walter Hale,” she said. “Before he built his company, he was Teddy business manager. I found the photograph last week, in a locked drawer, with a letter he never mailed. Loretta, I am so sorry. He wrote that Teddy wanted to sign you to a record deal, but Walter was jealous of the attention, and afraid of losing his own position. So he paid you to go away, and told Teddy you had left for a better offer.” She pressed her fingers against her mouth. “Forty seven years. My son is about to marry your daughter.”
A red lipstick, an engagement party, and a photograph hidden in a drawer for nearly fifty years.
I should have been furious, and perhaps I was, a little, somewhere beneath the surface. But mostly I was just tired. I thought of all the nights I had hummed along to the radio while washing dishes. I thought of my husband Frank, who had passed three years earlier and who had always said I should have been on a stage. I thought of the way I had hidden that part of myself, for decades, as if it were something to be ashamed of. “Patricia,” I said slowly, “does Teddy know? Is he still alive?” She nodded. “He is eighty four, in Nashville. I have his number.”
I called him that evening, from the quiet of my bedroom, with my heart hammering. The line rang four times. Then a gravelly voice said, “Marlowe.” I said, “Teddy, this is Loretta Vance. From the Blue Flamingo.” There was a very long silence. I could hear a television somewhere behind him. When he spoke again, his voice had gone thick. “Lori,” he said. “Good Lord. I looked for you for ten years. I called every club in Ohio. They told me you had married and moved away. I thought you did not want me to find you.” I closed my eyes. “I never knew,” I whispered.
We talked for two hours, like old friends who had gone to different countries. He told me about the tours, the records, the divorces, the long decades of lonely hotel rooms. I told him about Frank, and our daughter Jennifer, and the garden I kept behind the house. Near the end, he said, very softly, “Lori, do you still sing?” I laughed. “In the shower,” I said. “And in the car, when no one is listening.” He was quiet. Then he said, “I have a show in Columbus next month. I would like you to sing one song with me. Just one. Will you do it?”
Jennifer found out the next morning. She came to my kitchen with her arms folded and her hair pulled back, and I told her everything, from the cashier check to the bus station to the phone call. She sat down at the table and stared at the red lipstick I had left beside my coffee cup. “Mom,” she said, in a small voice. “I told you that you were too old to wear it.” I took her hand. “You did,” I said. “But I wore it anyway.” Her eyes filled, and she began to laugh and cry together. “I am so sorry,” she said. “Mom, I did not know who you were.”
The show in Columbus was held in a restored theater with red velvet seats and a gilded ceiling. I stood in the wings in a new dress, a deep crimson silk Jennifer had chosen herself, with my favorite lipstick and my hands clasped tight. Teddy walked out first, leaning on a cane, and the audience rose to cheer him. Then he turned and held out his hand. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “forty seven years ago, I met the finest singer I ever heard. Tonight, she is finally going to sing with me.” I walked into the light. My knees trembled. Then the first note found me, and everything else fell away.
I sang “Moon River,” the same song I had sung that summer at the Blue Flamingo. My voice was lower now, rougher, with a little crack in it, but it was mine, and it was true. When the last note faded, there was a silence so complete I could hear the velvet sigh, and then the whole theater roared. Jennifer was standing in the third row with Tyler and Patricia, all of them crying and clapping. Even Walter Hale was there, gray faced, in the back of the balcony. He lifted a hand to me, once, in a small gesture of apology. I nodded. It was enough.
Teddy and I are not a love story. We are something better, perhaps: two old friends who got a second chance at one song. I sing with him twice a year now, in small theaters, and I have started a choir at my church for women over sixty. We practice on Thursday evenings. Every one of them wears red lipstick, because I asked them to, and because Jennifer bought a whole box. At the wedding in June, she walked down the aisle in white, and I wore crimson, and she squeezed my hand and whispered, “Mom, you look beautiful.”