Richard Powers (20 page)

For a long time after, I woke up an hour after falling asleep, hearing scratching at the door.

Something in János almost seemed to like the fact that his star pupil wasn’t white. The dissonance only added to his thrill at presenting to the world something so rare and novel. Like most champions of Western culture, Reményi pretended race didn’t really exist—giants, dwarves, and Valkyries aside. He could grasp the obscurity of Parsifal more easily than he could imagine what humiliations our mother had lived through, just to sing European music at all. János Reményi had no more idea of his adopted country than did the rest of the white Boylston faculty. He thought music—his music—belonged to all races, all times, all places. It spoke to all people and soothed all souls. This was the same man who’d sung Wotan right up until 1938, never glimpsing the coming twilight of the gods.

He clung to this imperial idea: One trained the singular voice only by releasing the universal spirit. From the ruins of this bombed-out creed, Reményi drilled my brother. But in the fall of 1955, my brother’s spirit began to grow in ways his teacher would have strangled in the cradle had he been able to see them.

When Jonah’s voice broke, the wall between him and Kimberly Monera gave way. After his transposition to tenor, the baffling What now? dividing the two prepubes came tumbling down, answered.

One summer had changed Kimberly, too, beyond recognition. She came back to school radiant. She’d spent the break in Spoleto, her father’s summer base. There, she’d somehow learned to sing. The freakish albino, in act two, had gone swan.

She returned with a shape so changed, it must have frightened even her. Her body, a narrow, backward thing the previous spring, now tapered with newfound power. I sat behind her in music history, wondering why her mother didn’t buy her larger clothes. Under that surprised binding, the new surface of her skin readied itself for use. Through the lime or columbine of her taut blouses, I stared for eternities at the little bandage of her bra, the three raised welts of its metal hooks, miracles of engineering. Whenever she crossed her nylon legs, I heard fingers sliding up and down a violin’s strings.

Around her, Jonah grew protective, gallant, stupid. The solitary solidarity of our rooftop club dissolved forever. Earl and Thad tried to lure him into games of Truth or Dare. But loyal to his Chimera and overnight wise, Jonah said nothing. And still, nothing was all we needed to reach the wildest conclusions.

Thad rode him, his grin of vicarious delight glowing in the dark. “What the hell have you been up to, Strom One?”

“Nothing. Just practicing.” The feathers of the canary all over his chin, even as he wiped it with a quick backhand.

“ Practicing, Strom One? I dig.”

Jonah snickered. “Practicing singing.”

“First base?” Earl could rise from a coma, ready to shoot the breeze all night long.

“First base ?” The question outraged Thad. “Huber, you gone cat. Does this look like a man left stranded on lowly bag one? First base on a hardline drive. Takes second on a wild pitch. Throwing error into short center sends him…”

“You’ve all lost your minds.” Jonah caught my eye, a back-off warning. “You’re all flipping nuts.”

“That’s cool,” Earl decided.

Jonah disappeared on us, all Halloween evening. He didn’t come back until after midnight. I don’t know how he slipped the evening head count without getting caught. Long after curfew, he scratched the door to be let in. He was dizzy but mum. Earl Huber berated him. “Don’t get the girl in trouble, Strom.”

Jonah held his stare. “You don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

Thad intervened. “Strom One, man, we’re your loyal subjects and vassals. We’ll do your bidding for all time. I’m begging you. What’s it like?”

My brother stopped pulling off his blue-black school trousers. “What’s what like?”

“Strom, man. Don’t do this. You’re killing us.”

“It’s…like nothing you can know.”

Thad lay back in bed, kicking the air and howling.

My brother held up a silencing hand. “It’s like total, continuous… It’s like Wagner.”

Not a name we’d dared bring up before coming here.

“Thank God ,” Thad shouted. “I’m not missing anything, then. I hate that shit.”

“It’s like beating off on somebody,” Earl explained, “who happens to be beating off on you.”

Jonah went so dark, his color became definitive. If he was doing anything wrong to her, I’d kill him.

Close my fingers around his golden throat and stop his sound for good.

Whatever they were doing in their few moments by themselves, their trysts made Kimberly glow. Even Thad West noticed her transfiguration. “Is this some kind of light operetta, Strom One? I mean, what the hell? Look at her. She didn’t look like that before Halloween.”

Jonah wouldn’t be baited. The Chimera was no longer a fit topic for our running commentary. He and his chosen one made themselves invisible, moving in a secret subplot, awaiting the sunlit modulation to E

major that would turn them from outlaws to inheritors.

Then a teacher surprised them, seated on the grass behind the trellises at the Rose Garden in the Fens.

They were parked over a score—Massenet’s Werther . But their exact condition at the moment of discovery became a matter of endless speculation. Students came up to me for days to settle their raging bets.

Following the scandal, Kimberly relapsed into her congenital anemia, sure the two of them would both be thrown out of school. But even the faculty couldn’t imagine the two of them actually committing such transgression. They escaped without reprimand.

Kimberly was so scared, she dashed off a preemptive note to her father, then in Salzburg, explaining her side of things. The great man laughed it off. “ Sempre libera,” he told her, jotting a few notes of the aria on a scribbled staff in the letter’s margin. “Pick your mates of the moment wisely, and make them value whatever small favors you choose to bestow. ‘Di gioia in gioia, sempre lieta!’ ” She showed Jonah the letter, swearing him to solemn secrecy. Jonah told me, because I didn’t count.

János reprimanded my brother for his extracurricular Massenet. The dressing-down was dry and lofty; Jonah probably didn’t even know how sharp it was meant to be. Reményi began taking Jonah along with him on conducting engagements around the city. He wanted my brother occupied at all times.

Not long after the Rose Garden incident, my trial came. Thad West pushed me into it. “That Malalai Gilani has the swoons for you, Strom Two.”

“That’s right, hep cat,” faithful Earl added. “She does.”

Their words were an accusation, a police raid on innocent bystanders. “I didn’t do anything. I’ve never even said hello to her.”

“Oh, you’re doing something to her, Strom Two. This much, we know as a matter of factation.”

I knew nothing about the girl except the obvious. She was the darkest child in school, darker than Jonah and I combined. I never knew where she came from—one of those mythical countries between the Suez and Cathay. The whole school wanted us paired: two troubling ethnics, safely canceling each other out.

The girl had a solid alto, clear as a carillon in winter. She could count like mad, always entering on time, even in tricky twentieth-century work. She had the kind of voice that stocked decent ensembles. And she’d noticed me. I lay in bed mornings, crippled with responsibility.

From the moment our roommates opened my eyes, mutual knowledge sprang up between Malalai Gilani and me. In choral rehearsals, on performance tours, in the one large class I shared with her, a pact hardened between us without our exchanging more than a single, deniable glance. But with that one look, I signed my name to a contract, in blood.

The day I sat down next to her in the cafeteria, driven by my peers, she seemed not to notice. The first words she spoke to me were, “You don’t have to.” The girl was fourteen. It bound me to her with worse than chains.

We never did things together. She didn’t do anything with anyone. Once, on our way to a performance in Brookline, we shared a seat on the school’s bus. But we took so much abuse on that short ride, we never repeated the mistake. We didn’t talk. She seemed not to trust English much, except in movies and songs. It was weeks before—brief and damp—we even brushed hands. Yet we were a pair, by every accepted measure.

Once, she looked at me, apologizing. “I’m not really African, you know.”

“Me neither,” I said. Easier to misunderstand. All the school wanted was that we not trouble them.

I asked where she came from. She wouldn’t say. She never asked me—not about my home, my family, my hair, nor how I came to be at Boylston. She didn’t need to. She knew already, better than I.

She read about the strangest things—the House of Windsor, Maureen Connolly, the Seven Sisters. She loved fashion magazines, homemaking magazines, movie magazines. She studied them furtively, with an astonished head tilt, puzzling out the artifacts of a fabled civilization. She knew all about the Kitchen of the Future. She loved how Gary Cooper started to tremble a little in High Noon . She suggested I might look good if I grew my hair out a little and slicked it down.

Ava Gardner fascinated her. “She’s part Negro,” Malalai explained. This was when Hollywood could stage a mixed-race musical, but not with a mixed cast. My father believed that time didn’t pass. He must have been right.

Thad and Earl were relentless. “What does she want from you, Strom Two?”

“Want?”

“You know. Have you discussed the terms? What she expects?”

“What are you talking about? She just kind of blushes when we pass in the hall.”

“Uh-oh,” Thad said. “Commitment.”

“Mortgage time,” Earl agreed, giving the syllables a bebop syncopation.

“You better get yourself a good job, Strom Two. Support and all.”

Just before Thanksgiving, I bought a bracelet for Malalai Gilani in a drugstore on Massachusetts Avenue.

I studied the options, taking hours to settle on a simple silver chain. The price—four dollars and eleven cents—was more than I’d paid for anything in my life except my beloved pocket scores and a set of the five Beethoven piano concertos.

My hands shook so badly as I paid for the bracelet, the cashier laughed. “It’s okay, dear. I’ll forget you bought it as soon as you’re out the door.” Half a century later, I still hear her.

I put off giving Malalai the gift. I needed to tell my brother first. Just broaching the topic of Malalai Gilani seemed disloyal. I waited until an evening when Thad and Earl were off listening to jazz in the common room. Jonah and I were alone in our cell. “Have you bought anything for Kimberly for Christmas?”

Jonah snapped to. “Christmas? What month is this? Jesus, Joey. Don’t scare me like that.”

“I just bought a bracelet…for Malalai.” I looked up and awaited my punishment. No one else could understand the size of my betrayal.

“Malalai?” I saw my face falling, reflected in his. He shrugged. “What’d you get her?”

I handed over the square white egg of a jewelry case. He looked in, controlling his face. “That’s fine, Joey. She’ll have to like that.”

“You think so? It’s not too…?”

“It’s perfect. It’s her. Just don’t let anyone see you give it to her.”

It took me days to make the presentation. I carried the thing around in my pocket, my leaden penance. I ran into her in the courtyard, long before the holidays, but far and away the best chance I was going to get. My throat rode up into my skull. Stage fright hit me, worse than anything the stage could produce. “I bought you…this.”

She received my trembling gift, her face pinched between pleasure and pain. “No one ever gave me anything like this before.”

“Like what? You haven’t opened it.”

Malalai opened the box, the hush of her pleasure horrible. An animal cry escaped her lips at the flash of silver. “It’s so beautiful, Joseph.” The first time she spoke my name. I flipped between pride and annihilation. She held the bracelet up. “Oh!” she said. And I knew I’d bungled things.

I grabbed the trinket. It looked flawless, just as it had in the drugstore.

“There’s nothing on it.” Her eyes shot downward, my lightning education in intimacy. “This is an ID

bracelet. They usually have names.”

The very idea of engraving had never occurred to me. The clerk had said nothing. My brother had said nothing. I was a pitiful idiot. “I… I wanted to see whether you liked it. Before I put your name on it.”

She smiled, flinching at my words. “Not my name.” The magazines must have told her. She knew more about my country’s ways than I ever would. My name was to be chained to her wrist from now until the day all scripture was overthrown. And I’d done nothing. Nothing wrong.

Malalai placed the flashing bracelet around her near-black wrist. She played with the bare faceplate, its purpose now so obvious, even to me.

“I’ll get it engraved.” I could borrow cash from Jonah. At least enough to spell out J-O-E.

She shook her head. “I like it this way, Joseph. It’s nice.”

She wore the blank bracelet like a prize. It gave the girls more to mock her with: unengraved ID jewelry.

Malalai must have thought I didn’t want anyone seeing her wearing my name. But the bracelet was already more connection than she’d ever hoped for, in such a place. Little changed between us. We managed to sit near each other during one school assembly and a special holiday meal. She was happy with our silent link. When we did talk, all I could talk about was concert music. She loved music as well as the next Boylston student. But it didn’t grip her like movies or magazines or the Kitchen of the Future.

She grasped it long before I did: Classical music wouldn’t make you American. Just the opposite.

It slipped out one day, after one of her quiet confidences—something about how wonderful she found the 1950 Nash Rambler convertible. I laughed at her. “How did you ever land in a place like Boylston?”

Her hand strayed to her mouth, effacing and erasing. But she couldn’t make my question disappear or mean anything but attack. She didn’t cry; she got away from me before sinking to that. Still, she managed to avoid me for the rest of that school term. I helped with that. In late December, before the vacation, she sent me the white mausoleum box back, with the blank bracelet in its tomb. Also a record, Music of Central Asia , with a note: “This was going to be for you.”