“I started it first,” DeJarnette said about his campaign for the law. He spoke these proud words when, on the eve of World War II, less than two months before Germany’s invasion of Poland, he addressed a crowd of dignitaries, among them Virginia’s governor, who had gathered on the grounds of his asylum to pay tribute to his achievements. DeJarnette’s statute had set a national precedent: it had been tested and found constitutional by the United States Supreme Court in 1927. The approving justices were led by former president William Howard Taft, who served as chief justice after his presidency, and, following the enthusiastic decision written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., around half of the states in the country enacted similar laws—and carried them out.
But pleased as he was with his accomplishment, in 1934 DeJarnette lamented, in a major Virginia newspaper, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.” And he stated, a few years later, “Germany in six years has sterilized about 80,000 of her unfit while the United States, with approximately twice the population, has only sterilized about 27,869.” He added that, to make the score worse, the United States had been at it longer.
The second law that DeJarnette helped persuade the Virginia legislature to adopt back in 1924 was the Racial Integrity Act. The Sterilization Act and the Racial Integrity Act were twin statutes, passed on the same day. The Racial Integrity Act classified all Virginians as either white or colored, and pioneered what was called “the one-drop rule.” Until then, a person with one-eighth black ancestry was considered white. Now even a drop of black blood put a person in the “colored” category. The only mixture to be tolerated was a minor fraction of Indian heritage—up to one-sixteenth. This was termed “the Pocahontas exception,” necessary because a number of elite Virginians traced their families back to the legendary union of the Indian princess with the British tobacco planter John Rolfe in the first years of the Jamestown settlement. The law prohibited marriage or sex between white and colored, with a punishment of up to five years in prison; the statute was meant to protect the biological strength of the white race from being diluted.
With Hitler six weeks from marching into Poland, with Hitler preparing to exterminate six million Jews and millions more undesirables, DeJarnette, at the ceremony in his honor, extolled the area of Virginia where he stood. Here, he said, “the setting sun” leaves “a trail of gorgeous colors,” and here the “people are homogeneous.” The governor praised DeJarnette’s “splendid character” and announced, “I want to record the appreciation of all the people of Virginia.” One of the state’s former governors, who’d gone on to the U.S. Senate, sent a telegram from Washington, DC, hailing DeJarnette’s “outstanding service” and “high patriotism.”
Three decades later, in a case brought by a Virginia couple, Mildred and Richard Loving, a black wife and a white husband who avoided prison by exiling themselves from the state, the Supreme Court overturned the Racial Integrity Act. And the Sterilization Act was repealed in 1979, forced sterilizations having been performed less and less since the late fifties. Yet DeJarnette’s name blessed the newly constructed facility where Ryan, in 1998, taking his shackled steps, was deposited inside the front doors.
* * *
Begin at the end and relearn the aria in reverse.
“Ror…terror…di terror,” he pronounced, alone in his hotel room, obeying Matheson’s instruction that he start with the final syllable, then add a segment of a word, and add again.
The room was fancy but compressed, the furniture too bulky for the space. Even the boxy lampshade on the bed table claimed too much of the scarce air between the walls, and the dimensions of the bed demanded that Ryan shrink himself to maneuver around it.
“Constitutionally unable,” Summers had told him. “I am constitutionally unable to rehearse it full of mistakes.” The words, loud in Ryan’s head, contained a severe distaste; their tone was all aversion. And though he reminded himself that the sentence was aimed at only one of his arias, it seemed to cover all his singing. It seemed to apply to Ryan himself. I am unrehearsable. I am offensive. I am unfixable.
“No di terror…brano di terror…gombrano di terror…ingombrano di terror.”
He made his own rule: If you mess up, you begin all over. He listened for his own failures and kept his recorder on as well, the machine vigilant, unforgiving when he touched the play button. “Ve…larve…di larve…no di larve…brano di larve…”
My thoughts are overwhelmed by ghosts…
Repeatedly the recording sent him back to the last syllable; repeatedly he began climbing again from the base of the mountain—the exercise was like scaling a peak, reaching one-quarter of the way, one-third of the way, before being tossed down. He decided to allow himself a quick nap; he’d heard that sleep helped with the transfer from short-term memory to long-term. He shut his eyes. A few minutes later he was upright, squeezing his body toward the mirror.
He stood with his face close to the glass, taking a break from pronunciation and focusing on his voice. Matheson had suggested watching himself sing as a way to help tinker with the sources of his sound in the areas just behind and farther back from his facial bones. He stared at his lips, at his nose, at the surfaces surrounding them. But the anatomy of resonance was bewildering and mostly hidden, and how to control the anatomy was a riddle. And he wasn’t sure, at this late point in the contest, that he should be tinkering with anything so vital as the color of his notes or how they carried. Hadn’t she said “You have a wonderful rich voice”?
He sang and scrutinized his reflection and had no clue about which of his shortcomings to attack. Summers’s “constitutionally unable” chased him back to his woeful pronunciation. “Par…crepar…a crepar…va a crepar…” He slogged backward from the closing syllable of his second aria, “La calunnia,” slogged aloud and then inaudibly, merely moving his lips, afraid because if he didn’t make sound he couldn’t hear his mistakes but more afraid that all the restarts from the ends of the arias, all the spoken vowels and consonants, in addition to all the day’s singing, had worn away at his voice, stressing and inflaming the two delicate flaps of mucous membrane that were his vocal cords.
“I’m concerned with how hoarse you sound,” Summers said when they met the next day. “Let’s be careful about singing over the hoarseness. Shall we work just a bit on the Scottish opera? You know we never say the name of that opera inside a theater. It’s considered bad luck.” The conductor seemed kinder today; his tone wasn’t so brittle.
Ryan sang the first few passages before Summers interrupted. “Exactly,” the conductor praised, then corrected, “It’s important to be both really legato and really defined.” Each syllable and each note needed to be both fluidly connected and keenly distinct, the musical lines unbroken yet the clarity of language uncompromised. Summers had said “exactly,” but Ryan heard the message: he hadn’t gotten things exactly at all.
At least his pronunciation was improved. They progressed to “La calunnia,” and it seemed that Ryan had solved his problems with Italian well enough to escape the conductor’s distaste, that Summers judged him ready to concentrate on more sophisticated things, on artistry.
Then Summers cut him off. “Really roll the r’s.” And once the pronunciation pointers began, they became a barrage. “The last syllable on ‘cannone’ is eh, not e…It’s ‘temp-o-rale,’ not ‘temp-a-rale’…It’s ‘tum-u-lto.’”
“‘Tumolto.’”
“‘Tumulto.’”
“‘Tumolto.’”
“‘Tumulto.’”
“‘Tumulto.’”
“There you go. Good. ‘Tumulto.’”
“‘Tumolto.’”
“No. You had it a second ago. Once more…I know you’ll get it. You’ve come a long way since yesterday. No more singing for today. You’ve worn yourself out trying to be good. Now take it easy. Find yourself a humidifier and a glass of wine.”
* * *
Ryan’s father appeared at the security booth, at the waist-high gate
of scratched wood through which the greatest singers in the world had passed on their way to their dressing rooms. Over the years of Ryan’s growing up, the two decades since Cecil and Valerie split apart, the two decades during which Ryan had seen him a handful of times, he had put on a substantial belly. He had ballooned. His face was all flesh. Yet standing there at the gate, he seemed somehow ghostly.
He had divorced his second wife and was with a woman in Bakersfield. She worked at a car dealership and had treated him to his hotel room in New York. When he came to the gate, and when Ryan emerged from within the Met and asked the security guard to let his father in, they’d already had a reunion moment. They’d shared a meal at a diner upon Cecil’s arrival in New York, a meal perhaps stunted in its conversation. When I asked Ryan how it had gone, he couldn’t recall much that was said, just that his father told him he was proud and told him that his relatives sent good wishes.
Now they met for a tour of the opera house that Ryan wanted to give. Cecil’s full name was Cecil Speedo Green, and off and on since childhood, sometimes over his mother’s vehement protests, Ryan had asked people to call him by the middle name that his father had bestowed. There was a family story about Cecil slipping out through his mother’s birth canal with shocking velocity. In turn, Cecil had given Ryan the middle name, for two reasons: as a second-best alternative to naming him Cecil, which Valerie wouldn’t permit, and because, as a bodybuilder at the time, he liked to flex in the brand’s minimal swimsuits. Ryan had often asked people to use the name, as though, if he honored his father by doing this, Cecil would reciprocate and become a constant in his life, as though the name would conjure him, make him materialize, make him remain.
Now, at the Met, Cecil carried a coat over his arm and wore a sauce-stained sweatshirt. He’d realized a long-held dream to some degree. He’d found work as a cook in a chain restaurant, and then, some years ago, he’d taken over the barbecuing at a Bakersfield ribs joint, a few tables in a strip mall storefront, with his smoker, his grill, sitting in the mall parking lot. But despite the mound of his belly and the stains, there was something incorporeal about him. The sight of him seemed to make clear that he would swiftly be out of sight again.
“Hi, Daddy,” Ryan said, his voice saturated with hope and restrained by trepidation.
He led Cecil into one of the Met’s private corridors but turned into the public spaces, wanting his father to see and be swept away by what was most grand. They stepped along the scarlet carpeting and beneath the chandeliers; they passed the gold-framed portraits of opera’s historic basses and sopranos. None of it seemed to make much of an impression. The Met seemed to strike his father as baffling, or maybe just dull; in his slightly high-pitched, raspy voice, he remarked mostly, simply, on its size.
“It was,” Ryan said afterward, “like showing all this to a child.”
* * *
In some ways, Verdi surpasses Shakespeare. As the composer refashioned Macbeth, he wrote music that swells, at certain points, beyond what the playwright could achieve through his poetry, and Banquo’s aria, the foreboding he feels and protectiveness he communicates to his child, is one of those moments. From the opening measures, even before Banquo’s first line, “Watch your step, oh my son,” the orchestra’s introduction, the low quivering that builds and builds, evokes an inarticulable danger, something more than the specific villainy lurking nearby, something elemental and amorphous, covert and universal.
In the play, Banquo describes the moonless and ominous night.
There’s husbandry in heaven;
Their candles are all out.…
A heavy summons lies like lead upon me
But in the opera, the libretto’s words—stripped down, simpler—are only a fraction of the emotional equation. Adding the languages of music, adding the interactions of sung and played notes, Verdi, who worshipped Shakespeare, infused unutterable meaning into the word “darkness.” The score creates a medium capable of bypassing the intellect and burrowing deeper than the rational, a medium of immediacy rather than interpretation, a piece of art made to evince a palpable, unnameable anarchy and peril.
With the concert forty-eight hours away, the finalists assembled in a Met rehearsal space to practice their pieces with the orchestra. The singers sat in a row while the musicians drifted in and tuned up. Fragments of old sets leaned against the walls: a door topped with a ruffle of thatch, a painting whose canvas was torn. To Ryan’s left, Deanna readied herself, stretching her voice high; to his right, a bass-baritone bellowed. Ryan made hooting sounds, like a demented owl.
Philippe was beckoned first to run through his arias. Without a discernible flicker of uneasiness, he stood before the orchestra. When Summers interrupted and asked not Philippe but some of the musicians to adjust their cadence, when Summers led a section of the orchestra through a series of recalibrations, the singer didn’t remain still. While the musicians pulled themselves into line with the conductor’s baton, Philippe danced, spinning, giving a quick performance blending Astaire and Baryshnikov. As soon as the orchestra had learned the corrections, he resumed singing so well that, when he had finished and taken his seat a few chairs down from Ryan, a Met coach asked him to write out the embellishments he’d sung above Handel’s score. Then Michelle sang about the frailty of passion with such beauty and pain that a clarinetist rapped on the back of an empty chair in front of him, applauding.
Ryan wasn’t prepared for Verdi. He wasn’t prepared for the danger Verdi could generate through an orchestra, especially one as sizable and skilled as the Met’s. He’d never been to a performance of Macbeth, only listened to his aria on YouTube. He’d only sung it with a piano. Right away, the low quivering crescendo of strings, of violins and violas and cellos and basses, caught him by surprise. He felt a dense forest close around him. He began:
Studia il passo
Summers wagged his baton in Ryan’s direction. “No,” the conductor said. “You’re coming in a little too soon.” The wag was brief, but the reproof of the baton was plain and public. No one else had been stopped in this way.
“Breathe with me,” Summers said. He took an exaggerated breath just before Ryan was supposed to enter, so that Ryan could watch him, inhale with him, slow himself, and join the orchestra on the proper beat. It was a crutch no true singer would need.
* * *
Along the halls, the linoleum floors were so clean that they glared. The cops had left, and now others led Ryan through a series of heavy doors that unlocked with the swipe of a card and opened with a piercing beep that sounded like an alarm. They took him deeper and deeper into the facility. They deposited him in a cell. The cinder block walls were tight, and the tall ceiling made the room—they called it a room—feel like the bottom of a narrow pit.
There was a bed: a plywood platform with a mattress that was too small for the platform, leaving a border of bare wood exposed. The mattress was thin; its plastic crinkled. A hulking unit of empty shelves and cubbies towered at the foot of the bed. It looked too high and too heavy, as though it might pitch away from the cinder block at any moment, all its weight falling, slamming. There was a window, but it was covered with a plate of plexiglass bolted to the wall. The window blind was locked behind the plexiglass. The blind was down and couldn’t be raised.
Outside his cell door were the cells of other boys, then a common area, then the cells of the girls—twelve kids to a pod in all, four pods in the facility. The kids floated through the communal area, some in street clothes, in jeans and sneakers, others in gray sweatpants and socks. The long windows of the staff office, panes of plexiglass that looked out on the unit’s communal zone, rattled. During his first hours, Ryan heard the shuddering again and again from his cell; it sounded as if the windows of the office were about to splinter and give way. Whoever it was kept at his pounding.
The shrieking began during his first evening. It rose from one of two special cells off the communal section. He tried to tell himself that he would never win
d up there. He was not that bad, not that crazy, not that evil.
But his mother, his own mother, had put him here, he thought; she had decided that abandoning him to this was the only thing she could do. She had done nothing in court to stop the judge from locking him up here. His mother, the cops, the law, everyone believed this was where he belonged.
* * *
The facility, in its new building when Ryan arrived, faced its old location on the opposite hill. Over there, the pair of defunct buildings, elaborate and crumbling, stood in an overgrown field behind a Walmart. The two pillars framing the entrance of the new building were short, their red masonry a vague effort to be upbeat. The eight Georgian columns of the old complex were overbearingly tall; the buildings sprawled across the hillside, dormered windows looming. The columns were cracked and a second-story balcony was collapsing.
That was where Ryan would have been sent until recently. “Huge corridors with archways leading from one section to another. Bars on the windows,” a woman told me. She’d been taken to the old center, in cuffs and shackles, a few years before Ryan’s time. She’d been a teenager then, and now she was one of the fortunate ones: those who’d gone on to adulthoods lived not in halfway houses or prison cells or psychiatric wards. The threshold for “fortunate” wasn’t high. You had to have fallen low to be locked in the center. Either the state’s psychiatric system had decided that it couldn’t handle you anywhere else, or the juvenile criminal system had decided more or less the same thing and sent you there from detention or incarceration. Though Ryan hadn’t been involved with either system before, his attempted attack on his mother and his “killing plan,” so graphically depicted, had alarmed the authorities enough to put him in this facility of last resort.
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