Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Even in rapture, the man was guarded. Most often, he affected cool neutrality. His pedagogical method was both archaic and iconoclastic. He fed my brother buffets of scales out of Concone and tortuous workouts from García: triplets, four-note scales, arpeggios. He made him sing fast, wordy passages while biting down on two fingers. Jonah never took the tongue for granted again. János made him do legato melismata as machine-gun sforzando. Jonah had to land each tone dead on its mark or start the whole sequence over. Teacher and student joined together to birth up chunks of sensation, lost to the sheer sense-heightened pleasure of the chase.

Our Wotan believed no student could master vocal technique except as part of a greater cultural mastery. He told us as much, at our winter assembly, 1955. “Singing is heightened speech, in a language beyond human languages. But if you want to speak in the words of the cosmos, you must train on earthly words. To prepare yourself to perform the Missa Solemnis or the Mass in B Minor — those summae of Western art — you must start to read all the European poetry and philosophy you can lay your hands on.” Reményi’s transcendental humanism lit up our skies like a nova. We couldn’t know that, like a nova, the star throwing off the blaze was already dead.

János Reményi’s Grand Masonic approach hurt Jonah less than other artificial technique-building programs might have. For all his shouting about tone, Reményi knew he could do nothing better for my brother’s voice than release it. The boy was the older man’s golem, his American Adam, his Enlightenment-haunted tabula rasa, a seed perfectible under greenhouse conditions. Europe had just offed itself again, its rococo opera houses gutted in high culture’s final flare-up. But in this charmed monastic backwater, whose leading novitiate surpassed anything Reményi had worked with in the Old World, the aging bass-baritone saw his chance for one more shot at Erhabenheit, no matter his disciple’s skin tone.

This was the year János implemented the school’s first vocal competition. He made Jonah compete in the senior division. He chose my brother’s piece — Handel’s “Süsse Stille”—and tried to choose his accompanist, as well. But Jonah refused to perform without me. By the time the first round ended, even those gladiators who’d gone into the arena with the fiercest ambitions pleaded no contest.

A week later, someone painted our bedroom door. A premeditated midnight raid: No other way the painters could have done it. The art was a grotesque portrait, thick liver lips and Brillo hair, a bastard son the Kilroy family sent guilty child support. The artists must have spooked themselves with their voodoo, because the caption beneath the picture only got as far as an N, an I, and a jagged G. The medium was red fingernail polish.

Thad discovered the portrait on his return from breakfast. “Holy Shetland sheepdogs.”

Earl managed an awed “Whoa!”

Jonah and I saw the thing at the same time. Jonah recovered faster. He laughed maniacally. “What do you think, fellas? Realism? Impressionism? Cubism?”

He and Thad hunted down some finger paint and added a beret, a pair of shades, and a hand-rolled cigarette hanging out of the ample lips. They named their beatnik Nigel. Nothing could have thrilled our roommates more: tarred with the same rouge brush, with a little property damage thrown in to boot.

Stony adults came to remove the door from its hinges and replace it with a virgin one. Jonah put on a show of disappointment. “Nigel’s deserting us. Nigel’s graduating.”

“Nigel’s gonna blow this peanut stand,” Thad added. “Nigel’s gonna go make the real scene.” The scene our roommates dreamed of making.

For a long time after, I woke up an hour after falling asleep, hearing scratching at the door.

Something in János almost seemed to like the fact that his star pupil wasn’t white. The dissonance only added to his thrill at presenting to the world something so rare and novel. Like most champions of Western culture, Reményi pretended race didn’t really exist — giants, dwarves, and Valkyries aside. He could grasp the obscurity of Parsifal more easily than he could imagine what humiliations our mother had lived through, just to sing European music at all. János Reményi had no more idea of his adopted country than did the rest of the white Boylston faculty. He thought music — his music — belonged to all races, all times, all places. It spoke to all people and soothed all souls. This was the same man who’d sung Wotan right up until 1938, never glimpsing the coming twilight of the gods.

He clung to this imperial idea: One trained the singular voice only by releasing the universal spirit. From the ruins of this bombed-out creed, Reményi drilled my brother. But in the fall of 1955, my brother’s spirit began to grow in ways his teacher would have strangled in the cradle had he been able to see them.

When Jonah’s voice broke, the wall between him and Kimberly Monera gave way. After his transposition to tenor, the baffling What now? dividing the two prepubes came tumbling down, answered. One summer had changed Kimberly, too, beyond recognition. She came back to school radiant. She’d spent the break in Spoleto, her father’s summer base. There, she’d somehow learned to sing. The freakish albino, in act two, had gone swan.

She returned with a shape so changed, it must have frightened even her. Her body, a narrow, backward thing the previous spring, now tapered with newfound power. I sat behind her in music history, wondering why her mother didn’t buy her larger clothes. Under that surprised binding, the new surface of her skin readied itself for use. Through the lime or columbine of her taut blouses, I stared for eternities at the little bandage of her bra, the three raised welts of its metal hooks, miracles of engineering. Whenever she crossed her nylon legs, I heard fingers sliding up and down a violin’s strings.

Around her, Jonah grew protective, gallant, stupid. The solitary solidarity of our rooftop club dissolved forever. Earl and Thad tried to lure him into games of Truth or Dare. But loyal to his Chimera and overnight wise, Jonah said nothing. And still, nothing was all we needed to reach the wildest conclusions.

Thad rode him, his grin of vicarious delight glowing in the dark. “What the hell have you been up to, Strom One?”

“Nothing. Just practicing.” The feathers of the canary all over his chin, even as he wiped it with a quick backhand.

“ Practicing, Strom One? I dig.”

Jonah snickered. “Practicing singing.”

“First base?” Earl could rise from a coma, ready to shoot the breeze all night long.

“First base?” The question outraged Thad. “Huber, you gone cat. Does this look like a man left stranded on lowly bag one? First base on a hardline drive. Takes second on a wild pitch. Throwing error into short center sends him…”

“You’ve all lost your minds.” Jonah caught my eye, a back-off warning. “You’re all flipping nuts.”

“That’s cool,” Earl decided.

Jonah disappeared on us, all Halloween evening. He didn’t come back until after midnight. I don’t know how he slipped the evening head count without getting caught. Long after curfew, he scratched the door to be let in. He was dizzy but mum. Earl Huber berated him. “Don’t get the girl in trouble, Strom.”

Jonah held his stare. “You don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

Thad intervened. “Strom One, man, we’re your loyal subjects and vassals. We’ll do your bidding for all time. I’m begging you. What’s it like?”

My brother stopped pulling off his blue-black school trousers. “What’s what like?”

“Strom, man. Don’t do this. You’re killing us.”