Richard Powers (21 page)

The school performed our string of annual holiday concerts. These were, for Boylston, what exams were for ordinary schools. Jonah and Kimberly headlined the recitals with prominent solos. I rowed in the galleys. János Reményi took us on tour to area schools—Cambridge, Newton, Watertown, even Southie and Roxbury. Kids our age sat in darkened school gyms, as stunned by our music as they might have been by a band of organ-grinding, hat-tipping monkeys. One or two of the local principals seemed to want to make some special mention of Jonah, some object lesson in tolerance or opportunity in the speeches they delivered after the music ended. But our last name, combined with Jonah’s inexplicable coloring, left them fumbling and mum.

Before our show in Charlestown—the first time any of us had been to the wrong side of Boston Harbor—the chorus was milling in our usual preconcert jitters, when János came looking for me. I thought he wanted to reprimand me for the two notes I’d dropped at the Watertown concert, the day before. I was all set to assure Mr. Reményi that the inexcusable wouldn’t happen again.

But Reményi cared nothing about my performance. “Where is your brother?”

He scowled when I said I had no idea. Kimberly Monera was missing, too. János blasted away as quickly as he’d blown in, his face clenched the way it was when he conducted triple fortes. He darted off, determined to stop catastrophe before it started. But that required speeds János could never reach.

More versions of my brother’s disgrace exist than there are operatic treatments of Dumas. János found his star pupil and the great conductor’s daughter back behind the stage flats, fumbling underneath each other’s clothes. He hauled them out of a supply closet, in the late throes of heavy petting. They were locked in a back dressing room, naked, about to do it standing up.

Of it , I guessed only the barest, mangled logistics, inferred from offstage goings-on in Puccini matinees.

When Jonah reappeared, one look warned me off ever trying to ask. I knew only that all three principals fled the scene in one of those explosive third-act trios: János enraged, Kimberly broken, and my brother humiliated.

“That bastard,” Jonah whispered, four feet from the thrilled knot of our buzzing schoolmates. I died at the sound of the word in his mouth. “I’ll finish him.”

He never told me what the man said, and I never asked. I didn’t even know my brother’s crime. All I knew was that I’d failed him. All life long, we’d kept each other safe from everyone. Now I was on the outside, too.

The Charlestown concert didn’t live in anyone’s musical memory. Yet the student audience might have mistaken our sound for joy. János beamed and bowed, and with that easy harvest of his hands, he made the chorus do the same. Kimberly somehow pulled off her solo. When Jonah rose to take the flourishes we’d heard him do a hundred wondrous times, it shot through my head, the slow-motion preview given those about to have an accident: He was going to take revenge. All he had to do was hold his breath.

Nonviolent resistance. That little ritard he loved to take prior to plunging in, the slight pause awakening his audience that even our conductor knew to back off from, spread wide. Silence—the motor drive of nothingness underneath all rhythm—threatened to last forever, a spell of sleep cast over the entire kingdom of listeners.

In panic at Jonah’s stunt, my brain began dividing and subdividing the beats. János just waited out the endless hesitation, hands poised in the air, refusing even to blanch. Jonah neither caught his eye nor looked away. He stayed inside his perfect silence, hung on the stopped, forward edge of nowhere.

Then, sound. The web tore, and my brother was singing. Familiar melody drew me back from the end of the world. No one in the audience felt anything but heightened suspense. János was there, alongside Jonah, bringing the chorus in from my brother’s silent cadenza right on the downbeat.

By the end of the piece—one of those myopic medleys of English folk tunes that spelled, for 1950s America, the height of holiday nostalgia—the whole choir caught fire. Jonah’s spark of defiance awoke their showmanship, and the final chord brought down the house.

János wrapped his arm around his prodigy’s shoulders and embraced him in front of everyone, the boy’s protector, the idea of any falling-out between them as silly as the bogeyman.

Jonah smiled and bowed, suffering his master’s hug. But as he turned from the applauding audience, his eyes sought mine. He locked me in a look past mistaking: You heard how close I was. Easiest thing in the world, someday.

In the postconcert bedlam, I tracked him down. Charlestown kids were coming up to him to see if he was real, to touch his hair, befriend him. And Jonah was cutting them dead. He grabbed my wrist. “Have you seen her?”

“Who?” I said. With a click of disgust, he was gone. I chased after him, through the assembly. He kept racing out to the waiting academy busses and darting back into the school building, like a fireman trying for a medal or seeking his own immolation. One of the Boylston students finally told us he’d seen Kimberly hustled off in János’s car.

Jonah looked for her back at school. He was still looking when the night proctor came through, declaring lights-out. Jonah lay in the dark, cursing János, cursing Boylston, words I’d never heard before out of him or anyone. He thrashed until I thought we were going to have to restrain him with the bedsheets.

“This is going to kill her,” he kept saying. “She’ll die of shame.”

“She’ll live,” Thad called across the blackened room. “She’ll want to finish what you two were doing.”

The jazzers reveled in the drama. Jonah’s scandal was the scene. It was now. Opera for the new age—all juke, jive, and gone. Nigel and the blonde. What more show could anyone want?

In the morning, Jonah was a twitching nerve. “She’s gone to hurt herself. The adults haven’t even noticed she’s missing!”

“Hurt herself? How?”

“Joey,” he moaned. “You’re hopeless.”

She turned up the next afternoon. We were in the cafeteria when she came in. Jonah was a wreck, ready to spring toward her, his boyhood’s north. All eyes in the school were on them. Kimberly never even glanced toward our table as she cut through the room. She sat as far from us as the room allowed.

My brother couldn’t stand it. He crossed to her table, indifferent to all consequence. She flinched, cowering from him, when he was still yards away. He sat down and tried to talk. But whatever they’d been to each other two days before had passed into another libretto.

He stormed back across the cafeteria. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, more to himself than to me. He fled upstairs. I scrambled behind. “I’ll kill the bastard. I swear it.” His threat was an operatic prop, a collapsible tin knife. But from my seat up in the second balcony, I was already gasping as the silvery thing disappeared to the hilt in his mentor’s chest.

My brother didn’t kill János Reményi. Nor did János mention the incident again. Disaster had been averted, decency preserved, my brother cuffed. Reményi just went on assigning more phrasing exercises from Concone.

Jonah went after Kimberly. He tracked her down late one afternoon, curled up in a stuffed chair in the sophomore lounge, reading E.T.A. Hoffmann. She tensed to run when she saw him, but his urgency held her. He sat down beside her and asked her a question in the smallest possible voice. “Do you remember our promise?”

She squeezed her eyes shut and breathed from the base of her gut, the way János had worked on them both to breathe. “Jonah. We’re just children.”

And at that moment, they no longer were.

He’d have thrown away all his skill to get it back: the childish secret engagement, the shared listening and sight-singing, huddling over scores, planning their joint world tour. But she’d closed up to him, because of something the adults told her. Something she’d never considered. She listened to him once more, but only as penance. She even let him take her marble hand in his, although she wouldn’t squeeze back. For the pale, white European Chimera, all the sweetness of first-time love, all their shared discoveries were dirtied with maturity.

“What are you saying?” he asked her. “That we can’t be with each other? We can’t talk, touch one another?”

She wouldn’t say. And he wouldn’t hear what she wouldn’t say.

He tormented her. “If we’re wrong, then music is wrong. Art is wrong. Everything you love is wrong.”

His words would kill her before they convinced her. Something had broken in Kimberly. Something sullied the secret duet they’d perfected in front of an empty hall. Two weeks before, she’d imagined herself opening in her life’s debut. Now she saw the piece from the back of the auditorium, the way the public saw, and she panned her own performance.

Jonah wandered the school like some favored family pet punished for doing the trick he’d been trained to do. His movements grew slow and deliberate, as if what he settled on here, in his first dress rehearsal, would seal the rest of his life. If this could be taken from him, then nothing was really his. Least of all music.

By week’s end, Kimberly Monera was gone. She’d gathered her belongings and vanished. Her parents withdrew her from Boylston in the middle of the school year, the last days of fall term. My brother told me, in a crazed falsetto giggle. “She’s gone, Joey. For good.”

He stayed awake for three days, thinking that at any minute he’d hear from her. Then he concluded that she must have already written, that the school’s storm troopers were destroying her letters before they reached him. He turned over the nonexistent evidence so many times, it atomized under his touch. His explanations grew florid with appoggiaturas. I was supposed to listen to every ornament.

“János must have told her some lie about me. The school must have written her father. Who knows what slander they told him, Joey? It’s a conspiracy. The maestros and the masters had to get together and hustle her away before I poisoned her.” Jonah even tortured himself with the possibility that Kimberly herself had asked to be withdrawn. He disappeared into a cloud of theories. I brought him every scrap of thirdhand gossip I could gather. He waved away all my offerings as useless. Yet the more worthless I became, the more he wanted me around, a mute audience for his ever more elaborate speculations.

Late in December, he signed us out at the front office, saying we were heading to the Fine Arts Museum to see a European photography exhibition. The day was chill. He wore his green corduroy coat and a black-furred Russian cap that came down over his eyes. I can’t remember what I wore. All I remember is the bitter cold. He walked alongside of me, saying nothing. We ended up in Kenmore Square. He sat me down on the curb at the T-stop entrance. The cold from the subway steps seeped up through my pants, and my underwear held the frost against my skin.

Jonah felt nothing. Jonah was on fire. “You know what this is about, Joey, don’t you? You know why they’re keeping her away from me?” You know. I knew. “The only question is…the only question is: Did she decide?”

But I knew that one, too. She’d been his. They’d learned scores together, unfolding each other. Nothing had changed except that they’d been caught in a supply closet. “Jonah. She knew…who you are. For as long as she’s known you. She had eyes to see.”

“A Moor, you mean? Could see I was a Moor?”

I couldn’t tell who he was attacking: Kimberly, me, or himself. “I’m just saying. It’s not like…she didn’t know.” The ice I sat on burned me.

“Her father didn’t know. So long as her father assumed the Boylston Academy of Music’s prizewinner was a harmless little white boy, he was just fine with her little puppy crush. Told her to enjoy herself.

Sempre… ”

He sounded old. Knowledge, like some disease, had come over him in the night, while I was sleeping. I put my arm on his shoulder. He did not feel it, and I took it off. I didn’t know anymore how he felt about my touching him. Every sure thing was lost in the nightmare of growth. “Jonah. You don’t know. You can’t be sure that’s what it was.”

“Of course that’s what it is. What else could it be?”

“Her father didn’t want her…didn’t want the two of you…” I couldn’t bring myself to say what her father hadn’t wanted. I hadn’t wanted it, either.

“He wrote her a teasing letter. Told her to live life to the fullest.”

“Maybe he thought… Maybe he didn’t really know how…” I wanted to say how far .

“Joey. Stupidity’s over.”

I looked away, at the forked intersection, the newspaper shill’s stand pitched against the subway railing, the diner across Beacon Street with its tawdry Christmas tinsel strung across the plate window. It had begun to snow. Maybe it had been snowing for a while.

“She left too fast for it to be anything else. Only one thing in the world makes people that crazy. János must have called Monera up. Told him the score. World-famous conductor can’t have his prize girl running around with a little brown half-breed.”

My brother had always been my private freedom, my basement-level safety of willful unconcern. People and their blindness had been put on this earth strictly for his amusement. He’d always declared how others would see him. Every ambiguous slight, every veiled lynching had rolled off him until this one. Now the fever was in my brother’s face: the prick of our childhood’s vaccine, gone inflamed.

“Look at us, Joey!” His tone issued from a throat that had closed long before his had even opened.

“What are we doing here? Couple of freaks. You know what we should have been?”

His words scattered me under the feet of the crowds that kept disgorging from the subway. We were homeless. We’d taken up living on this curb, no warmth, no sheltering inside to return to. Everything I knew to be certain was dissolving as fast as the fat flakes of snow landing on my brother’s face.

“We should have been real Negroes. Really black.” His lips were frozen; his words were a runny egg.

“Pitch-black. Black as the sharps and flats. Black as that guy over there.” His thumb flicked up a little trigger, and his finger targeted a man cutting diagonally across Brookline. I grabbed his hand. He turned and smiled. “Don’t you think so, Joe? We should have been simple, straight-up. Black as Ethiopia in a power outage.” He looked around, picking a fight with all of indifferent Kenmore Square. “We’d know where we stood, anyway. Our self-serving little rich kid friends would have stoned us to death. János wouldn’t even have taken me into his fucking school. Nobody would’ve bothered using me. I wouldn’t have to sing.”