“It’s true,” his Latin teacher told me, “that he was not a great contestant. But he was an avid contestant.”
Ryan made another decision. His school was integrated, about half white, but divided. “All the black kids hung out with the black kids, all the white kids with the whites. And I tried to hang around with the white kids—the white nerds. They were the ones who were the most different from what I knew. I was going to get as far as I could from what I was accustomed to. I wanted to be part of their world, the white world. I attached myself.”
* * *
Jared Poulter was scrawny and taciturn, a hermit, and Ryan befriended him in the way that the garrulous can befriend the nearly silent, leaving the reclusive little room to retreat. One afternoon, Ryan invited himself over to Jared’s house, in a white neighborhood about two miles from the school and, it seemed to Ryan, in a different universe from the trailer park. “They came in the kitchen door,” Jared’s mother said. “In walks this black kid in a neighborhood where you don’t see any black kids. Jared kind of pointed over his shoulder with his thumb and mumbled, ‘This is Speedo.’” Ryan was much taller than his new friend; in the kitchen doorway, his face rose behind Jared’s head. “And Ryan stepped up and said, ‘How do you do, Mrs. Poulter.’ He always addressed us that way—Mr. and Mrs. Poulter. Jared was shy, and here’s his new friend, forthcoming and making eye contact.”
The Poulters were from Ohio, the father an engineer in the Coast Guard, and the mother a nurse at a hospital. “Get on the back roads here,” the father said, “and there’s a lot of Confederate flags. They’ll tell you it’s heritage, not race. But I don’t know. Back in Ohio there was surely racism, but it was covert. Here it’s public; if you’re white you assume any other white shares your opinion. ‘Too many niggers there,’ they’ll say about a certain town. Or ‘The wind’s blowing the wrong way,’ if it’s coming from a direction where black people live.”
“I was frightened for him,” the mother remembered. “Because at that time the sheriff and the deputies here were all white. I was worried that when he was out walking on one of these roads around here, they might take him off to jail. Or he’d say the wrong thing and they might give him a beating.”
But Ryan wasn’t concerned about the dangers: “I was too excited to be going to Jared’s house.” The risks were outweighed by the wish for white friendships—and for a connection to what was, for him, affluence. The Poulters became a second family. He loved their house and everything outside and within it. “There was a huge yard with a fire pit. They had a garage and a huge living room, and the kitchen was beautiful—it was so big.”
Jared’s father liked to have a home improvement project under way at all times. Ryan tagged along on trips to buy supplies; he helped to build a new fence. Amazed that a person could do such things, he looked on and took what roles he was given as the father put up a wall, installed a cabinet, laid a tile floor, mounted a sconce.
“We would cut and chop in the kitchen for Jared’s mom,” he said. “She made seafood ravioli. She made lamb. She cooked these things I’d never had before.” She cooked on appliances that seemed to gleam miraculously.
In the yard, behind the screened-in back porch the family had built, a truck dumped a delivery of firewood, and the father taught Ryan to swing an ax. They split the thick logs and carried the quarters inside and set them aflame in the fireplace that was surrounded by a special type of textured white brick. The family gathered there, Jared and his younger brother and sister, the parents, Ryan. “They were tight-knit,” he said. “I have this memory of Jared telling me, ‘I think you like my family more than I do.’ And it was probably true. There came a time when he was more in his room on his computer, and I was with the rest of them. I was like the misfit stepson. We would watch television together, history shows. They were always educating themselves, always reading books. They were very intelligent. I idolized that. They would pick programs about World War I or World War II, or National Geographic shows, and discuss them. But we joked a lot, too. Later on, when I started dating, a girlfriend of mine visited me at their house, and after that Mr. Poulter would ask me, ‘How’s that new girl going?’ He’d ask me, ‘When are you going to find a girlfriend for Jared?’”
Ryan enlisted Jared’s little brother to type his papers—his own typing was excruciatingly slow. He joined the family at the edge of the sloped yard, where they ignited more of the wood Ryan had chopped; they fed great quantities into the fire pit, watching the blaze leap and bend as they sat on an old tire and a few lawn chairs. He slept over. Regularly his feet dangled off the top bunk of Jared’s bunk bed.
“My mom would get so upset. ‘You don’t like what I have? What I’m doing for you isn’t good enough?’”
The Poulters bought a four-wheeler, and not only did they let Ryan drive it, they forgave him when, halfway around on his first lap, he crashed into the side of the house. And the Poulters rigged up potato guns. He’d never seen anything like it. Beside the fire pit, he stuffed a potato down into the barrel and, wary of this strange weapon, blasted the potato into the sky. It soared over the field of corn that lay behind the Poulters’ yard. Exultant, he watched the others stuff and fire, waiting his turn, giddy over their shots and ecstatic over his own: the explosions, the velocity of the potatoes through the air, the distance they traveled above the stalks. They descended only when they were almost gone from view.
“Roman Candles. Bottle Rockets. Screaming Eagles. Helicopters. I don’t think he had ever set off fireworks,” the father recalled. “When we did that together, he lit up. There was pure joy. He would get the fuse going and step back, and it was ten shots right in a row. Two hundred feet high. Straight over the corn.”
Valerie phoned the Poulters’ house and ordered Ryan home when he stayed away for days on end—away from the trailer park, away from his mother, who seemed to cast a spell over him. Outside her presence, he was changing, he could feel it. The evil in him was decreasing. The craziness was creeping backward, shrinking. He could banish the memories of his own voice: “I am uncalmable.…I’m going to kill you if you’re not careful.…I don’t give a fuck anymore.…Look at how many people they need to control me.…I’m going to rip your fucking face off.…I’m going to—” He could come close to trusting himself.
But near her, within the narrow rectangle of the trailer home, he felt the evil resurging, the craziness crouching and ready to take control of him. He struggled against the force she exerted, the way she unchanged him.
He couldn’t understand the power she had to weaken him, to leave him helpless against the past. It wasn’t that she wanted him to disintegrate, to lose hold. He knew that. She was proud of the person he was piecing together. She was hawkeyed about his schoolwork, warned him when he slipped. She posted his grades on the refrigerator door. Yet her presence was some sort of poison. She had found work with a real estate agency, pushing rental units, and she was back in community college, close to graduating. But she always seemed to be flailing, and the bitterness she exuded, the discipline she began to delegate to a new boyfriend, the listless air of the trailer park, the semivagrancy of the people there—all of it infected him in a way he felt he could not defeat.
He returned home from the Poulters at her demand. But as quickly as he could, he took his place again at their dinner table. He watched a military history program in the nook with the window bench and the matching green recliners, and fell asleep on Jared’s top bunk. His mother told him not to come home. She told him she meant what she said. Since he didn’t appreciate what she had to offer, he’d better not set foot inside her door.
“He was on the kitchen phone with his mom every night,” the father said, “begging her to take him back.”
“We tried to give him his privacy, but we could hear,” the mother added. “He was pleading with her, working to get in her good graces. ‘Please, Mommy, let me come home.’ He was in tears.”
Valerie relented after two weeks.
He was more cautious after that. But he left a particular remnant of himself in the Poulters’ house after every visit, as if to hold his spot there. “Whenever he had a snack—and Ryan loved to eat—he took napkins and twisted them up,” the father said. “White paper napkins, in a shape like a ghost. Half the time he seemed to have a napkin in his hands. We’d be sitting there talking, and he’d be winding them up. Or we’d be out, and we’d come home after Ryan had been over with Jared, and lots of food would be gone and the napkins would be all over the house.”
“We never knew why,” the mother said. “I don’t think he was aware of it.”
“I never mentioned it to him,” the father said. “I was always picking them up. On the chairs. Everywhere. Twisted-up little ghosts.”
* * *
Ryan and Adrian were together less and less, though Ryan followed his brother into organized football. Adrian played out of desire; Ryan played in emulation and with less talent. They both had size, Ryan’s in height and nascent heft, Adrian squat and chiseled, his body not only a salute to his father but a reaction to the asthma he had developed: he refused to be sick.
On the field, Adrian turned himself into a weapon. He played linebacker and was on the special teams; his positions gave him a kind of extra license. “I always wanted to be like the Hulk,” he said, talking about the superhero whose herculean strength doubled and quadrupled as his anger rose. “Stronger, faster, hit like a brick. It was too easy. Having armor on my body—it made me feel indestructible, like I could take out kids like no tomorrow. So I became more violent. I sent kids to the hospital.”
“He was smelling himself, as we say,” Valerie remembered about Adrian during the time they lived in the trailer park. “Acting up and smelling himself and trying to be my senior. One evening I told him to do the dishes. He said something nasty to me, and I threw my slipper at him. He was mouthing off really bad. He told me, ‘From now on, I’m not your son. From now on, in this house, I’m the devil.’ We tussled. I picked up a pool cue and started swinging at him.”
She struck him across the back. He shoved her into a wall and threw two punches. His fists landed a few inches from her face. They crushed two holes into the wall.
He hurried from the trailer park but was soon in a police car, and soon in a group home, where one of the teens ran a drug ring, with the other kids as his salespeople and some of the staff as partners. After a few months, Cecil arrived to take custody. Valerie wasn’t having Adrian back.
Ryan hadn’t been home when Adrian put his fists through the wall. He was left with the ragged holes and his brother’s absence; he didn’t get to say good-bye. Gradually his mother explained what had happened. She told him that his father had flown in from California and proceeded straight to the group home. So Ryan understood. He understood that his father had traveled across the country and made no effort to see him, that he’d claimed Adrian and gone.
TEN
AT SCHOOL, RYAN’S football coach steered him toward chorus class for an easy credit, and the chorus teacher prodded all her students to audition for the Governor’s School for the Arts, a selective program that took kids for the second half of each school day and trained them in one of various disciplines—classical voice, orchestra, theater, visual arts. Ryan was an eighth grader with little interest in singing. Valerie made Sunday church mandatory, but joining the kids’ choir never crossed his mind. Though he had sung—quietly, privately—pop hits at the center, as a way to float beyond his cell, at fourteen he didn’t feel drawn to singing of any kind, and he harbored no thoughts that his voice held any talent whatsoever.
He knew nothing about classical music, let alone about opera; but if he didn’t audition, he believed, he might not get credit for chorus. He already knew most of the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner”—he guessed this would serve well enough. He just needed one other piece. The chorus teacher handed him a CD and made him memorize the lyrics of a short eighteenth-century love song, “Caro mio ben.”
The Governor’s School, in Norfolk, took students from all over the southeastern section of the state, and it was required to accept a baseline number from each area. Some districts were easier to get in from, all the more so in classical music.
“We went to the various areas to audition the kids,” Alan Fischer said, thinking back to hearing Ryan. Fischer, the chairman of the vocal music department at Governor’s, had a trim white beard and prominent dark eyebrows and a rim of gray hair. He’d had some minor success as an operatic tenor, singing secondary roles with regional companies and giving recitals on cruise ships, before coming to Governor’s. For the auditions, he brought along Robert Brown, a pianist and voice teacher with a thunderous bass and a dramatic presence. Brown was six four, with an additional inch of box-cut Afro. When they stood beside each other, Fischer’s pale scalp was on a level with Brown’s chin. Brown accompanied the kids and helped with the judging.
“And at some point before we heard Ryan,” Fischer recounted, “Leon came in and told Robert and me, ‘There’s a young man who’s going to be singing for you. Bette taught him. He’s a nice kid.’”
Bette was Mrs. Hughes. Leon was her husband, an administrator in the Virginia school system who’d lately been assigned to be the principal at Governor’s, though he had no artistic talent of his own. He sported a hairdo that outdid his wife’s tight blond curls. His ringlets were dyed a brilliant gold, his nose was large, and his smile was larger. His body was spritely. He looked like a fairy-tale figure who flitted here and there, blessing those in need. Ryan had known him during his years in Mrs. Hughes’s class, because the class had gone on outings to the Hugheses’ house and even once to the Hugheses’ beach house in North Carolina, with a side trip to the Wright Brothers National Memorial and the hill where the brothers flew their double-winged aircraft.
Mrs. Hughes recalled, “Leon came home that evening and said, ‘You’ll never guess who auditioned for Governor’s today.’ And I said, ‘Who?’ And he told me. I laughed. I said, ‘In art?’ Because Ryan could draw. But Leon said, ‘No, in opera.’ I just about fainted. It was impossible to picture.”
Alan Fischer said, “Leon must have seen Ryan’s name on the list. So he poked his head in and told us, ‘Give this kid a chance. Just give him a listen.’ He didn’t say more than that. But as soon as he left us, I glanced over at Robert and said, ‘You know we’re going to have to take this kid.’”
Ryan stepped into the audition room and, a cappella, made his way through “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Fischer asked what else he had.
“‘Caro mio ben,’” Ryan answered, and, unaccompanied, launched in.
Fischer interrupted, commanded him to stop. He told Ryan that he needed to sing with accompaniment. From the piano, Brown asked if he knew when to come in.
He didn’t.
Brown asked if he knew how to read music.
He didn’t.
Brown motioned for him to stand at his shoulder and told him he would point to the note when he was supposed to start singing.
As the moment arrived, Brown’s finger jabbed the page. Ryan stayed on the melody, but his voice—it was a tenor at the time, before it changed—sounded indifferent to Fischer’s ears.
“It was an extreme case of serendipity,” Fischer explained about Ryan’s getting in. “If you want to talk about luck or the forces of the cosmos lining up, it couldn’t have been more so than in his case. He was fortunate to come from where he came from. That gave him a chance. Had he been from another area he probably wouldn’t have made it. And he was a boy, and we needed boys in the opera program. And there was Leon to consider. But there was nothing remarkable about Ryan’s voice when he auditioned. He could carry a tune—that was it. That may be hard to conceive after hearing him win the Met competition. But there was nothing.”
* * *
When Mr. Hughes phoned to say that he’d been accepted, Ryan was dumbfounded. He understood that it was an honor, and right away his disinterest about a
uditioning turned into anticipation about going. He had hardly any sense of what he would be learning; he was eager for whatever demands the teachers would make. Then September came, and with it an onslaught. The clefs and accidentals, the measures and signatures and dynamics of a score were totally strange and inscrutable to him; they might as well have been Chinese calligraphy. Ear training was like an exercise in trying to hear a dog whistle—he could no more identify a note played by his teacher on the piano than a human could register the special sounds that dogs obeyed. Was that a G? An F? An A? An E-natural? And what did it mean for a note to be natural? And what was a tonic? And a musical interval? And a chord progression? And timbre?
Valerie’s mother, who liked to wear her long gray hair in a style vaguely resembling Thomas Jefferson’s wig, had moved into the mobile home because her health was deteriorating. Ryan went to his regular school in the mornings, then rode a bus for forty-five minutes to Norfolk, attempted to learn music throughout the afternoons, and, if he didn’t head straight for the Poulters’ house, returned home at the end of the day. There his grandmother awaited him. She had dementia.
He loved that she still called him Boo-Bear. Some of his fondest memories were of being at her house in Florida, when he was four or five. He and Adrian had watched pro wrestling with her on TV. Now, though, whenever he walked in the door, he didn’t know if she would see him as a stranger or call him Adrian. Usually as he crossed into her sight line she grasped that he was her grandson and which grandson he was. But at random times she identified him as someone—it wasn’t clear who; maybe it was Ryan himself—who had come to attack her.
Not everything changed with her illness; it didn’t seem to impair her recognition of her favorite wrestlers. Her mind cleared for the epic battles of the WWF. As the strobes pulsed, as the announcers bellowed, as the wrestlers strutted and preened and sprang off the ropes to pummel and lariat and pin each other, she sat transfixed in front of the TV, cheering for her titans. “You got ’im! You got ’im!” Her silvery hair caught the TV’s glow.
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