Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Solitude passed through my mother’s mind. In her hush, even Jonah wavered. But his chance to recant was lost in silence. My mother just studied him, wondering what species she had brought into the world. At last, she laughed, through a crook in her lips that wouldn’t seal. “ Passaggio?What do you know about passaggio? A boy whose voice hasn’t even broken yet!”

He had no idea what the word meant. Just another arcane trinket he’d stolen from the Monera girl. Mama looked out at him across the plain of estrangement he’d made, staring at her foreign offspring until Jonah wilted and bowed his head. Then she reached out and buffed his almond hair. When she spoke again, her voice was low and haunted. “You sing your song, child. And I’ll sing mine.”

All our heads moved through the next madrigal, Jonah’s most vigorous of all. But we never danced again with the same abandon. Never again without self-consciousness, now that we knew what we looked like to the conservatory world.

In August, back at Boylston, the headmaster decreed that I should bunk with Jonah and two older midwestern boys. By rule, the younger grades slept in long wards on the building’s top floor, while the smaller dorms below were reserved for the senior students. But we two had brought havoc into this orderly musical Eden. The parents of one classmate had already removed their boy from school, and two others threatened the same action if their children were forced to sleep in the same room with us. This was the year Brown allegedly beat the Topeka Board of Education. We didn’t have much of a social studies track at that school.

For whatever reasons, Boylston kept us on. Maybe it was the size of Jonah’s talent. Maybe they figured how much they stood to gain down the years, if they survived the gamble. No one ever told Jonah and me that we were putting the place to the test. No one had to. Our whole lives were a violation. As far back as we were anything, that’s who we were.

They put us in a cinder-block cubicle with Earl Huber and Thad West, two freshmen keener on rule busting than we ever were. Neither of those two would have wound up anywhere near such a school without strategizing and savvy stage-door parents. Thad’s and Earl’s parents gave the nod to their boys’ new roommates: We would at least keep their sons close to the spotlight. To Thad and Earl themselves, the Strom boys were golden outsiders, mud in the eye of apostolic Boylston, their ticket to open rebellion.

Our new room was a shoe box, but to me, it felt like a virgin continent. Twin pine bunk beds left only enough space for two half-sized writing desks, two chairs, and two cedar closets with two inset drawers each. The day we moved in, Thad and Earl stretched in their stacked bunks like ecstatic convicts, waiting for their black bunk mates to arrive. From the first words out of my mouth, I perpetually disappointed them.

They both came from one of those midsized C cities in Ohio. They were mythic creatures to me, like Assyrians or Samaritans: boys from magazine ads and radio dramas, sandy, groomed, and straight, speaking with flat tractor drones that cut in straight lines all the way to the horizon. Their half of the room overflowed with die-cast P-47 Thunderbolts, bottle cap collections, Buckeye pennants, and a Vargas girl who could flip over and become Bob Feller the instant there was a knock at the door.

Jonah’s and my side of the cell had only a wall shelf of pocket scores and an illustrated set of the Lives of the Great Composers pamphlets. “That’s it?” Earl said. “You cats call that home decorating?” Shamed, we hung up a photo that Da had given us, a blurry black-and-white print from the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, showing the North American nebula. For official housewarming and back-to-school music, Thad set his record player belting away on the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth. They were bad influences on us in every way but the one they wanted. Jonah picked up a red pen, and on the matting below the cloud of stars, he scribbled the full harmonization of the chorale. We checked the score. He made just two mistakes in the inner lines.

Earl and Thad dreamed of becoming jazz musicians, driven as much by a need to spite their folks as by their twitching love of rhythm. They thought of themselves as fifth columnists, deep behind enemy classical lines. “Swear it,” Earl always said. “If I ever start humming anything French? Mercy-killing time.”

Earl and Thad talked in what they took for state-of-the-art Village slang, passed through so many rounds of Telephone, it always came out sounding more greenhorn than Greenwich. “You’re the puma’s snarl, Strom One,” Earl would tell Jonah. “Absolutely top Guatemalan yellow-fingered fruit, at the moment. But you’re about to go over Niagara any minute, cool cat. Then we’re gonna hear you wail.”

“That’s right,” Thad punctuated.

“What do you think, Strom Two?” Earl never looked at me when he talked. It took me much of that first September to realize who Strom Two was. Earl would lie back on his bunk, playing his thighs like a trap set, patting the air for the cymbals, hissing an uncanny imitation of brushes, his tongue pressed against his front teeth. “Huh, baby? You think our man’s going to survive the Big Drop?” Earl reveled in his status as the school’s lowest voice, beating all comers by two full tones. “Look around. How many of last year’s thirteenies are still with us? Few and proud, my friends. Few and proud.”

“That’s right,” added Thad in his recently minted tenor, ever on cue.

Jonah shook his head. “You two are so full of hot air, you’re going to hit a power line and explode.”

“That’s right, too,” Thad conceded.

Jonah loved our roommates, the simple adolescent doting on difference that atrophies the instant that contact ends. He scoffed at their rube-hipster predictions. But he knew better than anyone that his vocal fall was coming. His voice stayed clean and crack-free through puberty’s first guerrilla uprisings, with no sign of the looming catastrophe. But his coming break was his constant terror. He stayed out of the sun, refused to exercise, ate only pears and oatmeal in minuscule portions, inventing new remedies daily in a desperate attempt to stop the unstoppable flow.

One night, he woke me up out of a dead sleep. In the derangement beyond midnight, I thought someone had died.

“Joey, wake up.” He spoke in a leaky whisper, to keep from rousing Earl and Thad. He wouldn’t stop shaking my shoulder. Something hideous had torn into our lives. “Joey. You’re not going to believe this. I’ve got two little hairs growing out of my nuts!”

He took me to the bathroom to show me the development. More than the hairs, I remember his terror. “It’s happening, Joey.” His voice was hushed, near-petrified. He had only these few moments to get out his last clear words before he turned werewolf.

“Maybe you should pluck them?”

He shook his head. “It’s no good. I’ve read about that. They’ll just grow back faster.” He looked at me, pleading. “Who knows how many days I have left?”

We both knew the truth. A boy’s voice before it breaks promises very little about what it will sound like after. The most spectacular caterpillar alive might host a moth. Magnificent tenors sometimes rose up out of hopeless croakers. But consummate boy sopranos often ended up average. János Reményi’s controversial program made boys sing right through the change, insisting on constant, coached use, all the way down to the settling point. I tried to assure him. “They’ll keep you another year at least, no matter what.”

Jonah just shook his head at me, condemned. He didn’t want to live anywhere beneath perfection.

Each day I’d quiz him with a glance, and each day he’d just shrug, resigned. He went on singing, reaching his zenith even as his light was already going out. Whenever Jonah opened his mouth, the faculty within earshot sighed, knowing the end had to be near.