How I Found My Voice

Noel Vasquez / Getty Images In a personal essay, the acclaimed singer recalls the origins of her childhood stutter, the lengths she went to overcome it, and the boy who made it all OK.

There was a summer when I spent a lot of time in the fruit trees. The orchard near the play barn and beyond the copper beach, accommodated apples: Cortlands, a few McIntosh and a few other exotic types I never knew the names of. Then, outside the naturally irregular circle of apple trees, there were two very large cherry trees. The trunks of the cherry trees were thicker and the bark darker and greyer than the apple tree trunks. The branches took sharper turns. They were rougher on the skin and not as easy to climb. But once scaled, the prizes were more thrilling than even the tartest of the perfectly worm-forgotten Mac.

Part of the fun was to savor a deep, sweet, dark purple cherry, twist off the top, ignore it to its fate and then aim the pit, with glee, at a target below, often a sibling. Then, with barely a breath in between, sample another one, less than ripe, bitter in fact, and after a displeasing bite, hurl it disdainfully, in all its sour disappointment at the ground (or a sibling) in the process of learning selectivity and marksmanship.

There is nothing more humiliating for a stutterer than to have their word or sentence finished for them. I didn’t have names for these fears.

This was the summer of Helen Gaspard. She was my brother’s governess and our in-house playwright and director. We learned the lines often sitting in these trees, shouting down cues to each other and filling ourselves with the fruits of the orchards. Some days we would bring milk bottles re-filled with orange juice. But we lived in those trees. Lucy and Joey, my sisters, and Jeanie and Mary Seligman, my cousins. My brother was a very small boy and the only boy of the tribe. He ran around in light blue corduroy pants below, baby yelling us to drop him a cherry or he’d just sing and babble the way little boys whose sisters are dangling from tree limbs will. Drunk with the juices, we laughed and knew nothing of the world that seems far too close and shattering to me now.

We were the children of the orchard: the future theater actors of the Connecticut night. Being the two younger ones, Jeanie, my black-eyed, rosy-cheeked cousin and I had the lesser parts in the plays. We were just young enough to believe Joey (the eldest) when she told us that even though we only had a line or two, they were pivotal lines and without them, there would be no plot. In the play The Monkey’s Paw, I merely had to knock at the door. Joey bossed me around a lot and one of the ways of doing that was to get her way through flattering me. I, who knew nothing about plays and what was important or unimportant.

Even from "offstage" I was led to believe I was the star of the show. During the curtain calls, the audience who were obviously in the little joke, applauded as if I were Sarah Bernhardt. One could surely grow up with a distorted view of fame.