Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

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.”