Richard Powers (9 page)

We had all our old repertoire to catch up with. When we sang, it was hard for the rest of us not to stop and listen for changes in his voice.

Over Christmas, we read through the first part of the Messiah . At his spring break, we did part two. I saw Jonah studying Da while he wandered through the text. Even Da noticed him stealing glances.

“What? Do you think I can’t be a Christian, too, for the length of this piece? Did you know stutterers never stutter when they sing? Did they not teach you that, away at your school?”

Jonah insisted I join him at Boylston. Mama said the choice was mine; no one wanted anything from me that I didn’t. At age ten, choosing felt like death. With Jonah gone, I had Mama’s lessons almost to myself, sharing her only with Ruthie. My piano skills were exploding. The record player and the collection of Italian tenors were all mine. In trios, I got to sing the top line. I was the rising star in our evenings of Crazed Quotations. Besides, I was sure I wouldn’t pass the Boylston auditions. Mama laughed at my doubts. “How will you know unless you try?” Failing, at least, would take things out of my hands and remove the constant sense—so many times my own body weight—that whatever I chose to do, I’d let someone down.

I sang above myself at the trials. Also, the judges probably listened very generously, wanting to keep my brother with the school. Maybe they thought I’d grow to resemble him, given a few years of training.

Whatever the reasons, I got in. They even offered my parents some scholarship money, not as much as they’d offered for Jonah, of course.

I broke the news of my decision to Mama and Da as gently as I could. They seemed delighted. When they cheered me, I burst into tears. Mama swept me up into her. “Oh, honey. I’m just happy my JoJo is going to be together. You two can protect each other, when you’re three hundred miles away.” An honest-enough hope, I guess. But she should have known.

They must have thought that home schooling would be our best, first fortress and preparation. But already, in New York, even before Jonah left, we’d begun to see the cracks in their curriculum. Six blocks from our house in Hamilton Heights, every neighborhood supplementary exercise made a lie of our home lessons. The world was not a madrigal. The world was a howl. But from the earliest age, Jonah and I hid our bruises from our parents, glossed over our extracurricular tests, and sang as if music were all the armor we’d ever need.

“It’s better up at Boylston,” Jonah promised me, at night, behind the closed bedroom door, where we imagined our parents couldn’t hear. “Up there, they beat the shit out of the kids who can’t sing.” To hear him talk, we’d stumbled onto the lower slopes of paradise, and perfect pitch was the key to the kingdom.

“A hundred kids who love complicated, moving parts.” Some part of me knew it was a bait and switch, that he wouldn’t need me with him if the place were as he said. But my parents seemed to need me less, and here was my brother, chanting, Come away.

“You two boys,” Mama said, trying to smile good-bye. “You two boys are one of a kind.”

Nothing he told me prepared me for the place. Boylston was a last bastion of European culture, the culture that had just burned itself alive again, ten years before. It modeled itself on a cathedral choir school, with ties to the conservatory across the Fens. The children lived in a five-story building around a central courtyard that, like Mrs. Gardner’s private fantasy just down the curving Fenway, wanted to be an Italian palazzo when it grew up.

Everything about Boylston was white. The minute my trunk was installed in the younger boys’ dormitory, I saw how I looked to those who stood gawking at my arrival. My new roommates didn’t flinch; most had just spent a year around my brother. But my brother’s honey-wheat color did not prepare them for my muddy milk. They stood sharing a knowledge of me, the whole gleaming limestone wall of them, as I walked into the long hospital-style dormer under the arm of my father. I didn’t know what whiteness was—how concentrated, how stolid and self-assuming—until I unpacked in that room, a dozen boys watching to see what fetishes would come out of my luggage. Only when Da said farewell to us and headed for South Station did I see where my brother had been living.

And only when I scrambled from the dormitory to rejoin Jonah did I see what his year away, in this mythical place, had really done to him. For a year, alone and unprotected, he had thrown the entire student body into the panic of infection. As he walked down those halls, sheepish now, in my seeing how it was, I could make out the limp from those first twelve months that I hadn’t seen at home. He never talked to me about those months by himself, not even years later. But then, I never brought myself to ask.

He wanted me to see only this: The others meant nothing to us, and never would. He had found his voice.

He needed nothing else.

My brother took me on a tour of the building’s mysteries—the walnut-stained hallways with their moldering lockers, the dumbwaiter shafts, the choral rehearsal rooms with their ghostly echoes, the loose electrical faceplate through which one could peer into a pitch-darkness he swore was the seventh grade girls’ dormitory. He saved his coup for last. In solemn caution, we ascended to a secret entrance he’d discovered in hours of solo play. We came out on a rooftop overlooking the Victory Garden plots, those home-front mobilizations that outlived the war that spawned them. My brother drew himself up into his best Sarastro. “Joseph Strom, because of your skill and blameless actions, we elect you an Equal and allow you to join us at all our meetings in the Sanctuary. You may enter!”

I crushed him by asking, “Where?” The castle of fair welcome turned out to be a drywalled janitor’s closet. We piled in, two boys too many, and huddled in an urgent meeting that at once ran out of agenda.

There we sat, Equals in the Sanctuary, until we had to emerge again and join the uninitiated masses.

In the dining hall that first week, a sunny-headed new boy blurted out, “You two have black blood? I’m not supposed to eat with anyone with black blood.”

Jonah pressed a pickle fork into his finger. He held out the bleeding tip, giving it a twist suggesting rituals that Sunny-Head didn’t want to know about. “Eat with that,” he said, spreading the stain across the poor boy’s napkin. It caused a sensation. When the proctor came, the whole awed table swore it was an accident.

I couldn’t make sense of this place. Not these boys’ exchangeable names, not their slack-jawed distaste or their limp flax looks, not the labyrinth of this child-filled building, not the bizarre, chief fact of my new existence: My brother—the most solitary, self-sufficient boy alive—had learned to survive the company of others.

I’d gone up to Boston thinking I was rescuing Jonah. He’d led our parents to believe he was thrilled up here, and our parents needed to believe him. I knew otherwise, and sacrificed myself to keep him from solitary misery. It took me only days before I saw the truth: My brother had spent this last year planning to rescue me.

I went to bed those nights as guilty as I’d ever felt. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t planned this act of betrayal; I’d still committed it. Yet after a few weeks, I began to suspect that there were worse places than Boylston to be in exile. I roamed the building and the Fens, took my place at emergency meetings of Sanctuary Equals, and in time came to feel myself more exempted from society than excluded. In the passage of those final childhood days, I learned where I stood in the world.

Da and Mama had raised us to trust tones more than we trusted words. I had grown up imagining part-songs to be my family’s private ritual. But here, in this five-story Parnassus in the crook of the Charles, Jonah and I found ourselves, for the first time, in the company of other classically trained children. I had to struggle to keep up with my classmates, racing to acquire all the phrases they already knew how to say in our common secret tongue.

The Boylston students had better reasons than racial contamination to hate my brother. They’d come from all over the country, singled out for a musical skill that set them apart and gave them identity. Then Jonah came and made their wildest flights fall to earth and thump about, wounded. Most of them probably wanted to hold a pillow over his soprano mouth, up in that long choirboy’s ward where the middle boys slept. Stop his lungs until his freakish capacity for breath ran out. But my brother had a way of lifting off, surprised at his own sound, that made even his enemies feel they ought to be his accomplices.

They feared what they thought was his fearlessness. No one else was so indifferent to consequence, so unable to distinguish between resentment and esteem. He masterminded a rooftop scat sing of Haydn’s Creation that drew a sidewalk crowd and would have resulted in his reprimand had the impromptu concert not been joyously written up in the Globe . During breaks in choral rehearsal, he’d strike up a minor-modal “Star-Spangled Banner” or organize a demented “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” with each new staggered voice entering a half step above the last. Mad dissonance was his favorite stunt, training his ear to hold its pitch in harder intervals to come.

He and the boys who could keep up with him argued for hours over the merits of various tenors. Jonah championed Caruso over all living challengers. As far as my brother was concerned, vocal skill had been deteriorating since the golden age, just before we were born. The other boys argued until they gave up on him, calling him perverse, insane, or worse.

János Reményi, Boylston’s director, imagined that he disguised his favoritism. But not a child was fooled.

Jonah was the only student Reményi ever called by first name. Jonah came to dominate the school’s monthly public recitals. Reményi always passed the plump solos around democratically in rehearsal, but for performances, he usually contrived some artistic reason why the piece had to be done by a voice of exactly Jonah’s color.

Any number of these children might have taken my brother out to the playground and held him upside down from the monkey bars until his lungs slipped out his throat. And if Jonah’s voice had been merely extraordinary, they might have. But finally, the sunlight’s blaze doesn’t threaten the yellow of a flower.

We only resent what we can still hope to be. His sound put him beyond his classmates’ hatred, and they listened, frozen in the presence of this outlandish thing, holding still as this firebird came foraging at their backyard feeder.

When Jonah sang, a sadness colonized János Reményi’s face. Grief filled the man as if he was eager for it. In Jonah, Reményi heard everything his younger self had almost been. At the sound of my brother’s voice, the room filled with possibility, each of his listeners remembering all those places their paths would never reach.

In time, the other students accepted me as Jonah’s brother. But they never lost that look of disbelief. I don’t know what bothered them more: my darker tone, my curlier, more ambiguous features, or my stubbornly earthbound voice. I did manage to make small stirs of my own. I could sight-read rings around any student up to the eighth grade. And I had a feel for harmony, learned from long afternoons at the keyboard with Mama, which won me a kind of grudging sanctuary.

Although accredited, the school gave little attention to subjects other than the performing arts. Most of what I took that year I’d already learned, in greater depth, from my parents. But I had to sit through the old material all over again. The clock in the room where I suffered through sentence diagramming tortured me. Only when its second hand swept through a whole circumference would the recalcitrant minute hand, with a granular thud, snap ahead a single tick mark toward salvation. In that interval before the lurch, motion froze and all change died away. Boredom fossilized time in amber. The minute hand hung on the edge of its stagger, refusing to move, despite all the mental force I pushed with. The hour of English grammar spread to paper thinness and worldwide width, until I had lived out the next sixty years of my life in detail and memorized the faces of my grandchildren, all in the instance before Miss Bitner could get to the end of her sentence’s ever-dividing diagram.

Without our father to turn the world into a puzzle, Jonah and I fell away from all mental playgrounds but music. After a few months, we were struggling to solve the teasers that used to be our routine dinnertime fare. Our science teacher, Mr. Wiggins, knew about our father’s work, and he treated us with scary and undeserved respect. I had to work for two, keeping Jonah on top of his assignments while completing my own, just to protect the family name.

The Boylston students would have crowned my brother king had he looked just slightly more like them.

The elite members of the junior division tried to interest Jonah in Sinatra. They played up that crooner’s illicit pleasure, huddled up together, listening in secret, out of earshot of the faculty. Jonah, after flashing one quick smile at the insouciant bobby-soxer anthems, clucked in disgust. “Who on earth would get something from such a song? You call that a chord progression? I can tell you what this melody’s going to be before it even starts!”

“But what about that voice? Top-drawer, huh?”

“The man must gargle with cough syrup.”

The transgressing suburban choirboys stopped in mid finger snap. One of the older kids snarled. “What’s your problem, buddy? I like the way this makes me feel.”

“The harmonies are cheap and silly.”

“But the band. The arrangements. The rhythm …”

“The arrangements sound like they were written in a fireworks factory. The rhythm? Well, it’s jumpy. I’ll give you that much.”

Thus spake the twelve-year-old, as certain as death. The older boys tried Jonah on Eartha Kitt. “Isn’t she a Negro?” I asked.

“Get out of here. What’s your problem?” They all glared me down, Jonah among them. “You think everyone’s a Negro.”

They tried him on singers even hipper than Sinatra. They tried him on rhythm and blues, hillbilly, wailing ballads. But every crowd-pleaser suffered verdicts just as swift and expedient. Jonah covered his ears in pain. “The drum sets hurt my ears. It’s worse than the cannons that the Pops fires off for the 1812