Richard Powers (10 page)

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.

But his punishment was limited to Kimberly Monera’s lower lip. It trembled in place, blanched, bloodless, an earthworm on ice. I wanted to reach down and hold it still. Jonah, oblivious, pressed her.

He would not stop short of the secret to her sorcery. “How can you tell who wrote a piece if you’ve never even heard it?”

Her face rallied. I saw her thinking that she might still be of use to him. “Well, first, you let the style tell you when it was written.”

Her words were like a ship breaching the horizon. The idea had never really occurred to Jonah. Etched into the flow of notes, stacked up in the banks of harmony, every composer left a cornerstone date. My brother traced his hand along the iron balustrade that flanked the concrete steps. The scattering of his naïveté staggered him. Music itself, like its own rhythms, played out in time. A piece was what it was only because of all the pieces written before and after it. Every song sang the moment that brought it into being. Music talked endlessly to itself.

We’d never have learned this fact from our parents, even after a lifetime of harmonizing. Our father knew more than any living person about the secret of time, except how to live in it. His time did not travel; it was a block of persisting nows. To him, the thousand years of Western music might as well all have been written that morning. Mama shared the belief; maybe it was why they’d ended up together. Our parents’

Crazed Quotations game played on the notion that every moment’s tune had all history’s music box for its counterpoint. On any evening in Hamilton Heights, we could jump from organum to atonality without any hint of all the centuries that had died fiery deaths between them. Our parents brought us up to love pulse without beginning or end. But now, this pastel, melting ice-cream girl threw a switch and started sound moving.

Jonah was nothing if not a quick study. That one afternoon, sitting on the concrete steps of the Boylston Academy in chinos and a red flannel shirt alongside the pale Kimberly in her pressed taffeta elegance taught him as much about music as had his whole first year at school. In an instant, he learned the meaning of those time signatures that we already knew by ear. Jonah grabbed all the girl’s offerings, and still he made her trot out more. She kept it up for him as long as she could. Kimberly’s grasp of theory would have been impressive in someone years older. She had names for things, names my brother needed and which Boylston dribbled out too slowly. He wanted to wring the girl’s every scrap of music out of her.

When she sang tunes for us to guess, my brother was merciless. “Sing naturally. How are we supposed to tell what you’re singing, when your vibrato’s a whole step wide? It’s like you swallowed an outboard motor.”

Her jaw did its terrifying tremolo. “I am singing naturally. You’re not listening naturally!”

I struggled to my feet, ready to bolt back into the building. Already, I loved this antique girl, but my brother owned me. I saw nothing in this trade for me but an early death. I had no stomach for waiting around until disaster bloomed. But one glance from my brother cut my legs out from under me. He grabbed Kimberly by both shoulders and launched his best Caruso, as Canio in I Pagliacci , right down to the crazed stage laugh. She couldn’t help but sniffle back a smile.

“Ah, Chimera! We were just kidding, weren’t we, Joey?” My head hummed with nodding so fast.

Kimberly brightened at the spontaneous nickname. Her face cleared as fast as a Beethoven storm breaking on a single-chord modulation. She would forgive him everything, always. Already, he knew it.

“Chimera. You like that?”

She smiled so slighty, it could yield easily to denial. I didn’t know what a chimera was. Neither did Jonah or Kimberly.

“Fine. That’s what everyone will call you from now on.”

“No!” She panicked. “Not everyone.”

“Just Joey and me?”

She nodded again, smaller. I never called her that name. Not once. My brother was its sole proprietor.

Kimberly Monera turned and squinted at us, a little drunk on her new title. “Are the two of you Moors?”

One mythic creature to another.

Jonah checked with me. I held up my weaponless palms. “Depends,” he said, “on what the hell that is.”

“I’m not sure. I think they lived in Spain and moved to Venice.”

Jonah pinched his face and looked at me. His index finger drew rapid little circles around his ear, that year’s sign for those strange geometries of thought our fellow classmates called “mental.”

“They’re a darker people,” she explained. “Like Otello.”

“It’s almost dinnertime,” I said.

Jonah bent inward. “Chimera? I’ve wanted to ask you something forever. Are you an albino?”

She turned a ghastly shade of salmon.

“You know what they are?” my brother went on. “They’re a lighter people.”

Kimberly drained of what little color Italy had granted her. “My mother was like this, too. But she got darker!” Her voice, repeating the line her parents had fed her from birth, already knew the lie would never come true. Her body returned to spooky convulsions, and once more, my brother fished her out from the fires he’d lit under her.

When at last we stood to return to the building, Kimberly Monera paused in midstep, her hand in the air.

“Someday, you’ll know everything I know about music, and more.” The prophecy made her infinitely sad, as if she were already there, at the end of their lives’ intersection, sacrificed to Jonah’s voracious growth, the first of many women who’d go to their graves hollowed out by love for my brother.

“Nah,” he said. “By the time Joey and I catch up, you’ll be way down the line.”

They became strange comrades, on nothing but understanding. Our city of children hated even the tacit bond between them. Boyhood, by law, didn’t fraternize with the otherworldly camp of girls, except for hasty, unavoidable negotiations with a sister or singing partner. The school’s best voice, whatever his suspect blood, was not allowed to consort with the princess of furtive oddity. Jonah’s classmates were sure he was secretly mocking her, setting her up for the public kill. When the expected ritual humiliation failed to materialize, the middle form boys tried to shame him back to decency. “You working for the SPCA?”

My brother just smiled. His own isolation ran too deep for him to understand what he risked. Total indifference accounted for half his boy soprano’s spectacular soar. When there was no audience anywhere worth pleasing except music itself, a voice could go anywhere.

We were Kimberly’s Moors, a standing offense to everyone at Boylston. He got a scribbled note: “Find a darkie girl.” We laughed at the scrap of paper together, and threw it away.

When our parents picked us up at Christmas in another shiny rental—my mother, as always, riding in the back to prevent arrest or worse—Jackie Lartz came up to fetch us in the thinned-out Junior Common Room. “Your father and your maid and her little kid are here to pick you up.” His voice had that edge of childhood: half challenge, half bashful correct me . I’ve spent a lifetime trying to figure out why I didn’t.

Why I said nothing. My brother’s reasons went with him to the grave. Whatever safety we were after, whatever confusions we avoided, we left for vacation far more thoroughly schooled than we’d arrived.