Sometimes the song must end

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

My mother used to sing. Every morning I'd come downstairs and there she'd be standing at the kitchen sink, singing some tune, even if it were winter and dark and the coffee hadn't yet perked. She'd hum as she put on her makeup and sing softly as she dressed, and in the car she would always turn up the radio and sing along with Peggy Lee. She cleaned the house to music, the record player at full volume, as she belted out tunes from "Gypsy" or "Annie Get Your Gun."

Walking home from school some days, I would hear music and my mother singing long before I opened the front door. It made me happy to hear, because singing made her happy. My father used to tell her she sounded like Rosemary Clooney. I thought she was more like Doris Day. My father and I were her biggest fans.

Before she married, she won first prize, $10 in a talent show in a theater in Somerville. It was 1946. She gave $5 to her mother and used the other $ 5 to buy my father a pair of shoes. It was a family joke. Your father never had new shoes before I met him, she used to say.

I saw her perform only once on stage, at Randolph High. I was 10 years old and there she was, my mother, transfigured somehow, no longer just my mother but something more. The auditorium was dark, the stage was bright, and she was stage left, wearing a shimmery pink dress, singing in a voice I'd heard a million times but that this night I seemed to be hearing for the first time. "Gonna take a sentimental journey, gonna set my heart at ease. Gonna take a sentimental journey, to renew old memories," she sang to a man who wasn't my father. And the room was still, no whispers, no coughs, just my mother's sweet, thin voice filling the space.

"I never knew you had such a beautiful voice, Dot," neighbors and friends said after the show.

I have a recording she made for my father for their 10th anniversary. It's scratchy and tinny but it's her voice and her sound and when I play it on the old Victrola, I can conjure up the past. I see her in a bare studio standing alone. And I hear her as she sounded then, shy at first, then losing herself in the song: "Why this feeling, why this glow, why the thrill when you say hello? It's a strange and tender magic, you do. Mr Wonderful, that's you."

She never sang after her accident. She never played her music any more. For 17 years the records gathered dust. They sat in her living room and she sat in her kitchen. Singing had been like breathing to my mother, essential to life. She couldn't imagine not singing. But then one day she couldn't sing, and then when she could, she didn't.

My mother was not a professional singer. A singer was not who she was expected to be. She simply loved to sing. But when she couldn't and then didn't, something inside her, some joy that was sparked by song, shriveled and died.

I think of this because of the news that Julie Andrews has had throat surgery and may never be able to sing again. And I think how I know that life is unfair, how I'm reminded of this every day, but how sometimes, even now, the unfairness still surprises.

The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, not just lives but talent, too. It happens. Musicians' fingers grow stiff, athletes grow old, healthy people grow sick, singers grow throat nodules. Julie Andrews may be able to do "some singing," her producer said. But somehow,"some singing" doesn't feel big enough. Yet it has to be.

That's the challenge, I guess, to "watch the things you gave your life to broken, and stoop and build them up with worn-out tools." I hope Julie Andrews continues to sing. I hope she doesn't quit because as much as she brings life to music, it is music that brings life to her.