Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

My Brother as the Student Prince

Jonah moved up to the Boylston Academy of Music in the fall of 1952. Before he left, he entrusted me with our family’s happiness. I stayed home that year, the harder posting, washing all the dinner dishes to spare my mother, playing with Ruth, faking happy understanding of my father’s scribbled dinner-table Minkowski diagrams. Mama took on more private students and talked of going back to school herself. We still sang together, but not as often. When we did, we stayed away from new repertoire. It didn’t seem right. Mama, especially, didn’t want to learn anything Jonah couldn’t learn with us.

Jonah returned to Hamilton Heights three times that year, starting with Christmas vacation. To our parents, he must have seemed much the same boy, as if he’d never left. Mama wanted to swallow him whole, even as he came up the front steps. She grabbed him in the doorway and smothered him in hugs, and Jonah suffered them. “Tell us everything,” she said when she let him up for air. “What’s life like up there?” Even I, standing behind her in the foyer, heard her guarded tone, the bracing.

But Jonah knew what she needed. “It’s okay, I guess. They teach you a hunk of things. Not as much as here, though.”

Mama breathed again, and swept him into a room steeped in ginger cookie smells. “Give them time, child. They’ll get better.” She and my father exchanged all clears, a secret look Jonah and I both saw.

His few days at home were our happiest all year. Mama made him seared potatoes with ham, and Ruth showered him with weeks’ worth of crayon-scribbled portraits from memory. He was the returning hero. 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.