Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“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 Overture.”

For someone with miraculous throat muscles, he was a clumsy child. He never felt comfortable piloting a bike, even on wide boulevards. When school forced us onto a softball diamond, I’d stand helplessly in left field, trying to pin grounders without risking my fingers, while Jonah drifted in deep right, watching fly balls plop back to earth around his ankles. He did like to listen to games on the radio; his classmates managed to hook him on that much anyway. He often had a game going while he vocalized. “Helps me hold my line in chorus, when everyone else is bouncing all over the place.” When the National Anthem played, he added crazy, Stravinsky-style harmonies.

Those easy heirs of culture, charmed boys who’d never even spoken to another race, were willing to reach out to us, so long as the terms of exchange were theirs. We offered our classmates the desperate mainstream hope that everything they most feared — the armies of not-them just down the Orange Line, the separate civilization that sneered at every word out of their mouths — might turn out to be just like them after all, ready to be converted to willing Vienna choirboys, given a good education and half a happy chance. We were singing prodigies, color-blind cultural ambassadors. Heirs of a long past, carriers of the eternal future. Not even teenagers. What could we know?

He refused to glance at football. “Gladiators and lions. Why do people like watching other people get killed?” But he was the biggest killer of all. He loved board games and cards, any chance to vanquish someone. During marathon sessions of Monopoly, he thumbscrewed with a zeal that would have made Carnegie blush. He wouldn’t finish us off, but kept lending us more money, at interest, just for the pleasure of taking more away. He got so good at checkers, no one would play with him. I could always find him in the basement practice rooms, voweling up and down endless chromatic scales while dealing himself hands of Klondike on the top of an upright piano.

There was a girl. The week I arrived, he pointed out Kimberly Monera. “What do you think?” he asked with a scorn so audible that it begged me to add my contempt. She was an anemic girl, frighteningly pale. I’d never seen her like, except for pink-eyed pet mice. “She looks like cake frosting,” I said. I made the crack just cruel enough to please him.

Kimberly Monera dressed like the sickly child of Belle Epoch nobility. She favored crème de menthe and terra-cotta. Anything darker made her hair turn into cotton wool. She walked with a stack of invisible dictionaries perched on her head. She seemed to feel naked going out in public without a wide-brimmed hat. I remember tiny buttons on a pair of gloves, but surely I must have made those up.

Her father was Frederico Monera, the vigorous opera conductor and even more vigorous composer. He was always shuttling about from Milan to Berlin to the eastern United States. Her mother, Maria Cerri, had been one of the Continent’s better Butterflies before Monera captured her for breeding purposes. The girl’s enrollment at Boylston lent the school a luster that benefited everyone. But Kimberly Monera suffered for her status. She could not even be considered as a pariah. The normal, threatened midsection of the student body found her too bizarre even to laugh at. Kimberly walked the school’s halls effacing herself, getting out of everyone’s way before they had even come within six yards of her. I loved her for that perpetual flinch of hers alone. My brother must have had very different reasons.

She sang with a rare sense of what music meant. But her voice was spoiled by too much premature cultivation. She did this fake coloratura thing that, in a girl her size and age, sounded simply freakish. Everything about her was the opposite of that easy joy our parents bred in us. For the longest time, I was afraid that her voice alone might drive Jonah away.

One Sunday afternoon, I came across the two of them on the front stoop of the main entrance. My brother and a pale girl sitting on the steps: a picture as faded as any other fifties color photo. Kimberly Monera seemed a scoop of Neapolitan ice cream. I wanted to slip a piece of cardboard underneath her, so her taffeta wouldn’t melt on the concrete.

I watched, appalled, as this outcast girl sat naming the Verdi operas for Jonah, all twenty-seven, from Oberto to Falstaff. She even knew their dates of composition. In her mouth, the list seemed the purpose of all civilization. Her accent, as she rolled the syllables across her tongue, sounded more Italian to me than anything we’d ever heard on recordings. I thought at first that she must have been showing off. But my brother had put her up to it. In fact, she had at first denied knowing anything about Verdi at all, letting my brother expound, smiling at his botched details, until it became clear to her that, with Jonah, her knowledge might not be the liability it was with the rest of the student world. Then she let loose with both barrels.

As Kimberly Monera went into her recitation, Jonah craned around and shot me a look: We two were backwoods amateurs. We knew nothing. Our tame home schooling had left us hopelessly unprepared for the world of international power artistry. I hadn’t seen him so awed by a discovery since our parents gave us the record player. Kimberly’s mastery of the repertoire put Jonah on highest alert. He grilled the poor girl all afternoon, yanking her down by her bleached hand whenever she tried to get up to go. Saddest of all, Kimberly Monera sat still for his worst treatment. Here was the best boy soprano in the school, the boy whom Boylston’s director called by first name. What it must have meant to her, just this one little scrap of selfish kindness.

I sat two steps above them, looking down on their exchange of hostages. They both wanted me there, looking out, ready to bark a warning if any well-adjusted kid approached. When her feats of verbal erudition trickled out, the three of us played Name That Tune. For the first time, somebody our age beat us. Jonah and I had to dig deep into the recesses of our family evenings to come up with something the pastel Monera couldn’t peg within two measures. Even when she hadn’t heard a piece, she could almost always zone in on its origin and figure out its maker.

The skill broke my heart and maddened my brother. “No fair just guessing if you don’t know for sure.”

“It’s not just guessing,” she said. But ready to give the skill up for his sake.

He slapped his hand down on the stoop, somewhere between outrage and delight. “I could do that, too, if my parents were world-famous musicians.”

I stared at him, aghast. He couldn’t know what he was saying. I reached down to touch his shoulder, stop him before he said worse. His words violated nature — like trees growing downward or fires underwater. Something terrible would happen to us, some hell released by his disloyalty. A Studebaker would roll up over the sidewalk and wipe us out where we sat playing.