Sing for Your Life

by Daniel Bergner

  But her vigilance took more positive forms as well. During Black History Month, she demanded that the boys write essays. The African American past, she felt, was barely taught in the Virginia schools: slavery was treated as something to be forgotten, and more recent history as nothing worthy of study. She made Ryan and Adrian choose prominent African Americans, learn about their lives, describe their accomplishments. She made them read the essays aloud. “I’d check: did it have a beginning and a body and all that? And I’d ask them questions. I had to know: were they doing enough research? They had to be telling me something.”

  A semblance of order crept into their lives. They were able to move from the Yorktown complex with the junkies and johns to a tight two-bedroom in a better cluster of clapboard buildings, backing on an access road and a strip mall. After his two-year banishment to Mrs. Hughes’s room of unmanageables, Ryan was in regular classrooms. Month by month, he navigated sixth grade without disaster. But the boys fought constantly now within the close walls of the apartment, their bodies large, Adrian taking after his father, short but thick and sculpted, adding inches in width when his height stalled, bench-pressing almost three hundred pounds, and Ryan, at twelve, standing five seven, just beginning to spike toward the six five he would eventually reach, his size, for his age, at the top of the graphs when he was measured and weighed. Heat, aggression, venom rose between them compulsively.

  Still, the boys usually submitted to Valerie’s punishments for their fighting. Sometimes she sentenced them to afternoons and evenings, a long stretch of them, in their room. Rage tended to subside, replaced by Ryan’s admiration. Adrian’s art continued to cast a spell. With Adrian schooling him, they created a comic book together: Tarzan rescuing the animals of the jungle, who were facing an onslaught of aliens.

  Ryan watched his brother make scrolls. Adrian had announced his intention to become a paleontologist, and he would draw a dinosaur species, then fill the page with a host of information, from genus to diet, then roll the sheet of paper and tie it with a string. He fashioned dozens of these documents, a trove. Their cylindrical shape held an aura of antiquity. The idea came to Adrian from time spent in a library years earlier, when he had read Greek myths and stumbled upon Greek philosophers. He had caught a glimpse of their lives. “Aristotle, Sophortes, all those guys,” he told me when I tracked him down at the edge of a town in the California desert. “I wanted to be—what’s the word? Wise. I wanted to be wise.”

  The scrolls were his attempt. They accumulated in the room, repositories of his learning. And their antiquated look bore both boys away, toward a remote century.

  * * *

  Yet Valerie was only intermittently in control, of her sons, of herself. She took courses at a community college but lost her job doing upkeep at the complex in Newport News. She told Ryan that he had ruined her life, that she hated him. She yelled about his allergic reaction to the vaccine long ago, telling him that she’d had to quit the Air Force so she could care for him while he recovered. He had robbed her of the best job she’d ever had. He had robbed her of her Air Force career. She told him, as she struck him, that she wished he had never been born.

  During her flare-ups, she whipped him with a belt, hit him in the stomach with closed fists, knocked him down, and kicked him, according to state records—though years later, with me, he said that he did not remember the kicking; the rest, yes, but not that; it was too painful to believe that she would assault him in this particular way, so animalistic, so blind.

  Between the flare-ups, he lay, at night, under a winter blanket no matter how hot the evening. He insisted on falling asleep like this. He insisted on pulling the blanket up to his neck. It didn’t help. Screaming and sweating, he woke often in the middle of the night, terrified by dreams he could never describe.

  * * *

  Then, one May afternoon, at the end of his sixth grade year, when he was twelve, something occurred, some catalyst. Another fight with his brother? Over something they’d found along the access road behind their apartment or in a patch of woods nearby? A piece of broken equipment they each claimed? Or was the catalyst something else entirely, some infraction involving only Ryan? Everyone’s memories were vague about this, blurred by what followed.

  Valerie hit Ryan and dispatched him alone to the boys’ bedroom. The door stayed shut. When he emerged quietly, without her permission, and when she glanced up and saw him, he held a weapon, a knife, she recalled.

  He recounted: “I grabbed a weapon, whatever it was, a knife, I have no idea, I don’t think it was a knife, and I was approaching my mom with it. I stared her down. I wanted to make her pay, hurt her for making me feel the way I felt. The worst you could possibly feel. I wanted her to fear me as much as I feared her, as much as I felt her wrath. I hated my life. And she was looking afraid. She asked me, ‘What are you going to do with that?’ I don’t know if I actually wanted to kill her. Can a child really want to kill someone? I was past the breaking point. I was boiling over. I was incoherent. I wanted her to disappear. Disappear. She threw me against the wall and disarmed me. I didn’t give up. I was fighting, and she grabbed me by the neck.”

  * * *

  She subdued him for long enough to notice what he’d set on the floor, in the open doorway of the bedroom. It was a drawing. In a frenzy, he’d been working on it before he stepped out of the room, outlining the bodies and faces, adding detail, deepening colors, putting to use everything his brother had taught him, hovering over the paper, his mind and hands racing, making the picture come to life. The family in the drawing was easy to identify: the mother, the two boys. “My killing plan,” he would call the picture in the coming days, to those who questioned him. One of the boys held a knife; there was blood streaked everywhere; two heads were severed. Right after struggling with him, pinning him to the wall, and grabbing the weapon he held, Valerie saw the drawing and phoned the police.

  “Clawing, yelling, crying, screaming. They had me on the couch, and they were trying to get handcuffs on me, and I was fighting, fighting the cops. Kicking. They were men, but I was jabbing out with my legs. ‘No, no, no, no.’ Till one of them got a hold on me. I couldn’t kick. They got the cuffs on me behind my back. They lifted me into the air, my feet were off the floor. Lifted me out the door. I was still fighting, trying to get back inside. They carried me down the flights of stairs to the car. They put me in the back. Then one of them must have been taking my mom’s statement upstairs. I was in the back of that car, thinking, This is real. I was begging, yelling, thinking if I apologized they wouldn’t take me. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’”

  They drove away with him, along a river, up a hill. They took him inside a building, took him to an area with no windows. From a low ceiling, a few fluorescent bulbs cast the only light. The cell—seven feet by five—was a structure of black corner poles and crisscrossing black metal, like a heavy version of cyclone fencing. He was locked in alone. He was a kid who slept with his blanket tugged up around his chin. Now he was a kid spending the night in a cage.

  SEVEN

  HE TUNNELED THROUGH one of the subterranean levels of the Met. Beams dropped low from the ceiling of the corridor. Foam pads covered the beams haphazardly, protection for those who forgot to duck. Ryan bent under, straightened, made his way forward, bent again. Busts of Wagner and some other figure sat on pedestals in a dim corner along the passageway. Maybe they’d once decorated a public part of the theater, or been bought for that purpose, but now, with their stern features, they lurked in the gloom like specters.

  He found the room number he’d been given. The chamber just fit a baby grand and a desk, and he squeezed in, shutting the door behind him. This was where he’d been sent after his session with Summers. Nichols, the motherly, rotund director of the contest, had called one of the Met coaches. “We have a situation,” she’d said.

  In his mind, he’d been directed to this room to deal with a problem, a handicap, a disability—his egregi
ous Italian—that was mixed up with bigger troubles. It was entangled not only with his struggle to pronounce any of opera’s foreign languages; and not only with a fact he kept to himself, that he hadn’t completely translated and comprehended his arias word for word, as he knew every singer was supposed to do; but also with the scars that had come with deciding to speak grammatical English. That choice and its consequences were not so far in the past as to be unfelt, not at all. They were still present. “When you come from a certain demographic,” he said, “it’s frowned upon to talk properly. People around me called me an Oreo. They said these ridiculous things.” The word “ridiculous” lingered as he related this, an effort to make light of the ridicule.

  The coach who awaited him wore a gray sweater and a thin, airy scarf. Carrie-Ann Matheson, who was in her thirties, spent most of her working hours in this studio, three floors underground; if she used her lunch hour to practice the piano on her own, she didn’t see natural light all day. It was a monk’s existence—which she felt fortunate to be living. With each opera the Met put on, stars descended to ready themselves with a coach like her in a closet like this. “I’ve had the greatest singers in the world in here working. How lucky is that? To be sitting on this bench and to have Bryn Terfel come and sit next to me? Singers have more energy than just about any other kind of artist. And to connect to them musically, to hook into that energy, you have to understand what’s deep inside them. To have Anna Netrebko sitting here? To have Jonas Kaufmann standing here? To have that incredible energy in this room?”

  Matheson, like many of the Met coaches, was a pianist and had never been a singer. Instead, she was trained as a guide to singers on everything from cadence to characterization. Often, though, in the course of her day, she did have to sing. Untrained and ungifted, she ran through duets with the most renowned tenors and sopranos, so they could shade their interpretations and settle into their roles; she sang with rising mezzos and baritones in order to demonstrate a better way to phrase a passage; and, when she was assigned to be the rehearsal pianist for an upcoming Met performance, and when the lead soprano felt a worrisome tingle in her throat, Matheson sang the part on the Met stage, sang out, from behind her piano, so the cast could go on with its preparations. “You have to get over any sense of shame about the voice. You have to get over that hesitation that people have. It’s a bonus if you have a not-horrendous vocal quality, but there are coaches who have horrible voices. Jonas Kaufmann knows I’m not Renée Fleming. And I’m not secretly wishing for Jonas to say, ‘You should really have been.’ When I have to sing, I’ll sing in a range that’s okay for me and then drop down an octave when things get too high. If I tried to produce that high note, it would be very unpleasant.”

  With Ryan, she listened to him attempt the two arias that Summers had declared at least potentially acceptable, and she tried to figure out where to begin. “A few simple ideas will have a big effect with you,” she said as she sat at the piano with Ryan towering over her. But her thoughts weren’t few, and to him, they didn’t feel simple. “You have a wonderful rich voice, but can you move the sound toward the front of your face? You want the energy going out and up.” And all the while, as she gave instruction on the mysterious physiology of vocal technique, she tried to adjust his pronunciation, measure after measure.

  “‘Tenebre.’” She spoke the word, meaning darkness, in Banquo’s song. “Think about the vowel. Think about e, e, e.” The studio became an echo chamber. “Can you lengthen each vowel? And on ‘petto,’ there is a silence before the double t. Can you hear it? It’s ‘pe-tto.’” The hush lasted a sliver of an instant; it was hardly audible; yet, she said, it was vital. “It’s the same with ‘sospetto.’”

  She asked him to try it.

  He did, and she asked him again. And again.

  She shifted two measures forward. “‘Come.’ It’s almost all vowel. The consonant, the m—your lips barely touch on it before you’re gone.” The m she manufactured seemed to defy physics. Her lips didn’t seem to contact each other at all. It was something like the sight of a hummingbird suspended on invisible wings.

  He mimicked her, his version like a stork’s flapping.

  With their hour running out, she turned to “La calunnia.” The aria was partly about the evil potency of language, so it was all the more important that he get the language right.

  “Not ‘callllunia.’ ‘Calunnia.’ A lot less l, a little more n.”

  She went on. “‘Un’auretta.’ Just listen to that pause before the pair of t’s.”

  “Leggermente. Listen. Relax. We don’t want to tie you up in knots.”

  “Sotto voce.”

  Her bits of advice, cheerfully given, piled up in his head, collided, crowded one another out.

  “You’re singing ‘fiori,’ which is flowers, but it’s ‘fuori’—‘dalla bocca fuori’—which means coming out of the mouth.”

  “Yes, Miss Carrie-Ann,” he said. But behind his smile he was hardening, closing off, going blank.

  “What I’d like you to do tonight is recite these arias in reverse. Start with the last word, the last syllable, and go syllabically backward. One syllable, two, three. Add a syllable each time.”

  This would be the best way, she said, to cleanse his brain, to fix the failures of his lips and tongue.

  * * *

  Out of the cage. Into another police car. Into a courtroom with an American eagle and a Virginia flag. There, a mental health counselor testified. She’d met with Ryan before the court hearing, interviewing him and filling out forms. In court, she gave her evaluation to the judge. “Presenting problems include homicidal ideation.” She introduced the picture he’d made. Valerie was there in the courtroom. She didn’t protest when the judge sent him away.

  With his wrists in cuffs and legs in shackles, cops took him on another drive. Trees enclosed the road. The drive was long, its end unknown, and the longer it lasted the more the world changed, the low-lying landscape of his home replaced by the hills and thick forest the police car carried him into. Branches formed an archway; it was near sunset, and the car sped through a tunnel of dark green.

  Then the car slowed drastically and crept up a knoll. There was a slanted field. A sign warned outsiders away. They wound higher, turning into a circular driveway. From there, in his cuffs and shackles, he was led between brick pillars and inside.

  * * *

  Ryan had been delivered to a facility of forty-eight cells and several chambers for solitary confinement: the DeJarnette Center, named for Dr. Joseph DeJarnette, a crusader in the American eugenics movement of the first half of the twentieth century, a proponent of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, an open admirer of Nazi accomplishments, and the director, for four decades into the nineteen forties, of the state’s main insane asylum. He had also been a poet.

  Oh, why do we allow these people

  To breed back to the monkey’s nest,

  To increase our country’s burdens

  When we should only breed the best?

  Oh, you wise men take up the burden,

  And make this your loudest creed,

  Sterilize the misfits promptly—

  All not fit to breed!

  Then our race will be strengthened and bettered,

  And our men and our women be blest,

  Not apish, repulsive and foolish,

  For the best will breed the best.

  At the time that Ryan was escorted inside, the center had recently been rebuilt: a modern structure at the knoll’s crest. The old facility stood boarded up on another hill close by, across a thoroughfare that ran through the town in the Shenandoah Valley, near the West Virginia border. But the center had retained DeJarnette’s name. It seemed he was still deemed worthy of honor in the late nineteen nineties, much as he had been celebrated in the years leading up to World War II, and much as he had been venerated in the mid–nineteen seventies, when the original facility had been baptized the DeJarnette Center for Human Development.
The state was attached to this man and his legacy.

  DeJarnette, who died in 1957, had a square jaw and a bald, squarish skull. He liked to describe himself as “a country boy” who’d begun his professional life “carrying all he had in one hand in a dollar suitcase.” But he grew to be one of the most influential men in Virginia, and in 1924 he pushed the legislature to pass two historic laws.

  The Sterilization Act authorized the forced sterilization of “mental defectives,” as the bill put it—the psychologically ill, the habitually criminal, the intellectually weak, the epileptic, the sexually promiscuous, those prone to pauperism—in order to “prevent the propagation of their kind” and eliminate the inevitable hereditary “menace” and public financial burden posed by their offspring. But beyond the social benefits of safety and fiscal prudence, there was a greater goal: to purge the white race of its unwanted genetic strains and, in this way, to ensure white supremacy. This legislation of DeJarnette’s was part of the complicated history of the eugenics movement, a history not limited to Virginia or the South. The movement had gained early momentum in Britain, with Winston Churchill among its supporters, and by 1910, north of New York City, it had established an American research center whose data was soon influential when Congress, with few dissenters, all but barred immigrants who didn’t have Nordic blood.

  DeJarnette’s Sterilization Act wasn’t aimed directly at blacks. The majority of the thousands of Virginians who had sterilization inflicted on them were white—like the indigent hillbilly families rounded up by sheriffs and brought to DeJarnette’s asylum, where he oversaw the surgeries of children as well as adults. He most likely believed, as plenty of American social Darwinists did in his time, that the Negro race was biologically so inferior—inherently given to such self-destructive behavior and so susceptible to disease—that it would run gradually toward extinction in the United States, where it couldn’t possibly compete for survival with whites. In the meantime, though, the Sterilization Act was a method of improving on white superiority.