Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.
In her 75th post, Helena recalls meeting a famous opera singer as a young girl. Enjoy!
Anna Maria Alberghetti, Sullivan County
Anna Maria Alberghetti, the opera singer, turned up in our bunk on the last day of camp like something out of a dream. Why she had come on that day, I still can’t imagine. We were all packing, sweaty, in a place that was becoming no place. She was a star. Anna Maria Alberghetti shone the way stars shine, throwing light.
I have seen this in other famous people I’ve encountered in ordinary settings. I once found myself six inches from Christie Brinkley, the model, in a corner drug store at the greeting card rack, in Halesite, the harbor town at the tip of Huntington, on Long Island where Jim and I lived for a time. It was the gold coast, the place where the Vanderbilts and the Livingstons, the Marshall Fields and the Astors built their mansions. Christie Brinkly and Billy Joel now lived in one of them.
We were not five minutes from the building where Arthur Dove the painter had his studio, part of the group of painters around Steiglitz and O’Keefe. This was star territory. There was an old row of white-washed stucco art studios that hugged the road along the harbor, an inlet of Long Island Sound. It was now an art school. I always wondered whose studios they had been—Dove’s, John Marin’s, Georgia’s? Or painters whose names I don’t know. Our son studied figure drawing there, Halesite, for Nathan Hale, his remarkable words cast in brass at the foot of a statue in his likeness: I regret that I have but one life to give for my country… Christie was looking for a card. I knew it was she, and I remember that same kind of light—she was illuminated. There is something real about being a star.
Anna Maria was a friend of one of the counselors in our bunk, though I can’t remember which one. We were all milling around dazed, in chaos, jamming everything we owned into our black metal camp trunks, blankets, clothes, teddy bears, sitting on them, the metal snapping under our weight, to push closed the clasps and swing up the locks. Suddenly, she was there, a goddess standing at the wall of cubbies. I see now that she was uncertain, in a kind of retreat behind one of the four-by-four wood columns that supported the beams of our disheveled bunk. Maybe she wondered what she was doing there, too. Partly shadowed, partly lit, a flash behind that post of a fresh white seersucker dress in the sandy, muddy camp world we were dismantling. Cap-sleeves, starched cotton, maybe there were circles raised in the weave, button-down front, an angled collar. Her shoes were white patent leather, strappy and sharp with medium heels. She had deep brown, curly, cap-cut hair and she was beautiful, throwing rays of light like the Virgin Mary. It was a strange bardo between the camp that had become home and the places we were going back to, so far away in the city. It was fertile, a vacuum, a land where an apparition could appear. Dark-haired, dark-eyed Anna Maria Albergetti, her makeup perfect, suddenly shining in Bunk Twelve.
Her friend, my counselor, introduced her to us. I think I knew her name. She performed on television. The counselor asked if she would sing for us, and asked if we would like to hear her sing.
Now she stepped forward from the cubby wall and leaned against the four-by-four as if it were a Roman column, a stage set. She bent up one leg and rested her white sandal against the column. She was someone from another order. Still, I can see now that she was unsure.
Then there was only her voice, singing in Italian, filling the bunk, soaring out over girls’ camp, to boys’ camp, to the rec hall, maybe down the hill and over Sackett Lake. There was something terrible about it. I did not think her voice beautiful. It was a scream, a cry, there in the place we were leaving. It was an expression of NO! It is not possible we are leaving there, leaving camp, a world that had its own time, time that transcended ordinary time, time that would never come to an end.
Opera is an unnatural sound. No one can sing that way without a life devoted to their breath, their mouth, their tongue. Their vocal chords, their stomach. Their body becoming an instrument, not a violin or a saxophone, but a voice. No one can simply hear what’s in that height a voice so developed is scaling. It would take me years to hear opera; it would take listening to Maria Callas.
But I heard my mother’s voice. Untrained, she somehow sang opera. My mother’s voice was more beautiful than Anna Maria Alberghetti’s voice that last day of camp. It was extraordinarily deep with feeling, filling the house when my mother sang with the running water of the kitchen sink to the dishes she washed. Everyone in my family could sing. We all sang around the house. My father, show tunes, and he whistled. My sister and I sang songs we learned in the glee club at school, and beautiful Irish and English Ayres my sister, Jo, taught to me. She somehow knew them. It was from my sister that I learned to harmonize. I still find myself singing my parts, and sometimes hers, remembering the feeling of singing in harmony with her, hearing her voice, recalling her instructions.
Anna Maria Alberghetti’s voice must have been beautiful that day, though the scene could have been part of a Fellini movie. She sang an aria to a group of startled ten-year-olds; I still can’t understand why. Maybe our counselor just wanted to expose us to culture, and Anna Maria was there with her, dressed to the nines, for some reason only time knows.
And I remember the moment, her glowing, lovely figure resting against that four-by-four post, her eyes looking into the distance, then seeking each of us, then looking heavenward as she sang.
It was so out of the ordinary that it woke me to a bigger life—the thing memory is sometimes made of.
Have you met any famous people? Do you have such a memory from your childhood, and have you written about it? What did you think of Helena’s latest column? Share with us in the comments.
Related reading: Helena Writes
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