When she and Ryan had finished most of the move, when she had screwed a light bulb into the fixture above the stoop and flipped on the switch as an announcement that this was now a home, she drove him back to their old town, where he would spend the night with a friend while she cleared the last things from the mobile home and did some arranging in the new house. It was after dark when she returned. It took her a few moments to recognize what was wrong. The stoop light was out, the bulb smashed and the fixture pried from the wall, dangling by wires. Above the air conditioner, which she’d mounted in a side window earlier that day, the glass was shattered and gaping.
She got into her car and locked the doors, called the cops, and waited. They arrived and escorted her into the house. She saw the spots of blood where someone had cut himself trying to steal the air conditioner or trying to open the window and get himself inside. A shard of cement, hurled through the glass, lay on her floor. More than one squad car appeared, and the cops questioned neighbors who were now looking on from their porches, from their yards. The police came back to her; they said there had been no witnesses. They asked if she had another bulb.
As one of them worked on rigging the fixture back onto the wall, something overtook her; she sprang down the two steps and into the middle of the street. “Nobody saw nothing? Nobody got nothing to say? You maggots,” she yelled up the block, in the direction of the railroad bridge. “You maggot butts. Nobody couldn’t call the police?”
A cop moved close. The bulb blazed again, reaching across the pavement. He nodded toward the house opposite hers. “They don’t want that light on,” he told her.
The dilapidated house across the street, she and Ryan learned over the next days, was the headquarters of a drug trade that went well beyond the two-bit dealing they were used to living with. This was a thriving business, with a moneyman always stationed under a tree at their end of the block, taking cash from the cars that streamed through, and a dispenser posted under another tree at the far end, handing out whatever had been paid for. In plastic garden chairs, henchmen and hangers-on spent their hours under the branches. A supervisor strolled up and back, governing in red sneakers, red jacket, red cap. Car speakers reached annihilating volumes. Ryan’s bedroom window, with blinds he kept down, faced the street.
Years before, Valerie, with Ryan in tow, had begun attending a fledgling church in this town, a twenty-minute drive from the trailer park. The church’s flock was led by an elfin pastor, a Nigerian. He favored sharply pressed khakis and pin-striped shirts when he wasn’t conducting services. In the pulpit, he wore only white. Pastor Ola considered himself a missionary, sent from Africa to rescue souls in America, and over the years that Valerie had known him, his congregation had grown. The church was about to move from rented rooms to a strip mall storefront next to a Domino’s Pizza. Valerie told Pastor Ola her fears about her new neighborhood, her street, her house. “I don’t know what might be in there,” she said.
Ola mobilized his wife and several congregants, and the prayer team bunched into the kitchen and then clustered around the stoop. “We thank you for providing this place, Father; we thank you in the name of Jesus,” Ola prayed loudly, wearing large eyeglasses above his thin mustache. “It’s a new place, Father; it’s a different place from the trailer where they were. The community, O Father, is not the best of communities. And we petition you, O Father. We petition you to send your ministering angel to this mother and her son, Father, to shield this house, Father, so if they shoot, Father, the bullets will go this way and that in Jesus’s name and miss this house, Father. Send your security; make this house a house of refuge. Father, provide this mother what she needs to raise up her son. We pray in Jesus’s name that destiny will come forth in this young man, Father. We pray that he will be all you have designed him to be. We pray, Father, that even as people listen to him speak and sing, Father, and hear him sounding different, Father, that it will be to his advantage, Father, and no weapon formed against him will prosper.”
* * *
The neighborhood used their side yard as a cut-through. One afternoon, in the space alongside the clapboard wall, Valerie put her body in front of one of the dealers.
“May I help you?”
He indicated that he was headed to the next street.
She let him know about the difference between private and public property.
He asked if she was serious.
She said that she was, and the dealer retreated, to the laughter of his colleagues on their chairs. They taunted him; he tested her again. But after a second standoff and another spray of laughter, a new map was drawn in the minds of the community: the route to the parallel street involved walking to the corner. The lady who’d called the cops and screamed down the block on her first night was too crazy to educate.
But the map didn’t always matter. Ryan was out one evening and Valerie was home with a niece of hers when gunfire erupted alongside the house and behind it, bullets striking just above Valerie’s bedroom window while she and the girl pasted themselves to the floor. She phoned 911. The cops came, arrested no one. That was the way it went when she called, and she called frequently—to report the dealing, the thudding music, the cars idling constantly on her side of the street.
The dealers didn’t appreciate the attention. They surrounded Ryan on the street. “You calling them? Your mamma calling?”
He had begun to think of the area not as a valley but as a crevasse, the people there having plunged to the base of an unclimbable chasm. No one in that chasm was going to come to his rescue as the group encircled him; no cop car was just going to happen by. “Half of them were in their twenties. The tallest one was six six, no shirt on, in my face about snitching. It was broad daylight, but people on the block were pretending nothing was happening. These guys were getting ready to beat the living shit out of me. You grow up in places like that, you know there’s no one going to stop it when someone gets jumped.”
But his mother, ever vigilant in their new neighborhood, charged out the front door and off the stoop. “Don’t you know I come from New York? Don’t you know I’ll get half of New York on your maggot butts?”
Slowly, a kind of three-way equilibrium was established. Valerie persisted with the police, clinging to the trust that if she called enough times, eventually the law would shut the dealers down; the police drifted through, their sympathy on that first evening, when they had reattached her fixture and replaced her bulb, amounting to nothing; and the dealers did some policing of their own. One night someone knocked on her door. Alone in the house, she peered through a window: the man at her door wore only his underwear. He seemed to be a customer of theirs, an addict who’d lost his bearings. He banged at the door again and again, and railed, “I know you’re in there.” She yelled at him that she was calling the cops, and he warned her not to, and kicked and slammed and threatened, and went quiet. From the window, she watched the dealers drag him into the street and stomp him with their Timberlands until he lay still and bloody, and was loaded into an EMT truck.
The first half of Ryan’s days were spent at a new school. In the halls and on the bus that brought him there, the kids announced that he was a snitch, because of his mother’s campaign. For the same reason, they declared that he hated black people. On the bus one morning, he studied a score.
“What’s this shit?” Someone took the music from his lap.
“It’s opera.”
“Opera? Opera? You singing opera? You singing white people music?”
From the rear benches, an impromptu chorus emitted operatic trills.
“You trying to be white?”
The chorus sang out in screeches.
“Yeah, opera. We knew you was white.”
* * *
He endured the mornings by daydreaming of the afternoons. Sometimes, at the piano, Mr. Brown stomped his polished shoes, ecstatic over the improvements Ryan was making after all their sessions together. “That’s your voice!” he cried out. “That�
��s your voice!”
It wasn’t that layered tones were flowing endlessly from Ryan’s body. It wasn’t that he could create enchanting vocal hues throughout an aria or even just produce every note in a piece without tipping sharp or slipping flat. But there were measures, runs, passages when the notes were immaculate and the hues were lush. In his senior year, he won the lead male role in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, which the school did in English. His character, the count’s valet, worried that his true love might be ravaged by the count. Pacing the stage and vowing to thwart his master, Ryan was captivating, his voice fluctuating between a guileful lilt and vengeful, barrel-like depths.
That year, Mr. Brown and Mr. Fischer helped to make Ryan an audition video, so he could try to get into conservatories. “Hello, my name is Ryan Green,” he said into the camera, “and I’ll be singing ‘Riding to Town.’” The song was an early twentieth-century poem by the black writer Paul Laurence Dunbar set to music by the black organist and composer Thomas Kerr. As Mr. Brown played the introductory chords on the piano and Mr. Fischer aimed the camera at Ryan, he blinked and blinked. His forehead creased into furrows. He exhaled visibly, licked his lips, looked to his side and down at the floor.
When labor is light
And the morning is fair
The song was composed to be cheerful, even rollicking; Ryan’s expression was stoic. His arms hung immobile at his sides. He hit some notes with verve and sustained them with burnish; other notes brought strain to his voice and to his face. He finished and waited through Mr. Brown’s final measures with a look of half-concealed dejection.
Yet the passages that he’d sung well were enough. Through the lobbying of Mr. Fischer and Mr. Brown, he was accepted at the University of Hartford’s conservatory, up in Connecticut, and offered a scholarship. It wasn’t a first-rank music school, but it was a place where the faculty might be willing to invest their time in him, to do at the next level at least something of what Mr. Brown had done for the past three years.
Fischer sent him off with trepidation. He feared that although Ryan had done excellently in The Marriage of Figaro, his handicaps were too severe. He feared that his voice sounded unshaped by conservatory standards, that his comprehension of the technicalities of music was much too crude, and that he lacked any realistic sense of just how much work would be required to lift his singing to even a low professional level, that, without Mr. Brown to drill and correct and scold and coddle him, he would founder.
Ryan packed his bags without much concern. Fear was what he felt walking the two blocks from his house to the corner store for a carton of milk. He assumed nothing about his chances of making it as a musician. He hadn’t forgotten his words after Carmen, but in his mind he had adjusted their meaning. He had realized how rare it was for a singer to reach the Met stage, and he had relinquished the ambition of singing there in a role as big as the toreador; that was an idle dream, not a goal, not even a wish. Maybe, he thought, if all progressed perfectly year by year, through the conservatory and through the decade or two after that, he could somehow be chosen for the Met’s chorus. Maybe. For now, he knew only that he was going to a university—the word itself sounded dazzling—and that he was making it out of the crevasse.
* * *
“That’s your voice!” Mr. Brown had cried. But while he had drawn out glimmers of what was unique in Ryan, he kept an essential part of himself buried. The ardent religion he’d grown up with, the quest for God’s love that saturated the music at Shiloh, the urgent gospel singing that he criticized but had been filled by—he kept these interred within him in order to worship at a church that welcomed him as he was. The Unitarians did not expect him to deny half of himself, the sexual and romantic half, in order to pray in their sanctuary. They didn’t take Leviticus as truth, not at all.
Yet death, as Leviticus foretold, did seem to search him out. HIV spread through him while Ryan was up in Hartford; then AIDS; sores crept over his body. His hands cramped and stiffened; his fingers slowed and faltered on the keys. His accompaniment couldn’t buoy his students as it once had, couldn’t keep them afloat, aloft. “Fischer,” he told his boss, “I just can’t.”
For Wyatt, his cousin, he had a question. Back in high school, when he’d confided in her, she’d pledged that his being gay would make no difference in their friendship, and it hadn’t. Now he needed to know—because she was so committed to the church where she worshipped, because she was such a woman of faith—what she thought God must think.
“Robert, why would you ask me that question?”
But he asked again.
“You grew up Christian,” she answered him. “Your daddy’s a deacon. Your momma was a Sunday school teacher. You grew up knowing God. I’m not going to browbeat you, but I’m not going to sugarcoat. Sin is sin.” She cited the verses. “Robert, I want to see you go to heaven.”
Shortly before he died, he went with her, one Sunday morning, to her church. The sanctuary was modern, streamlined, expansive. Atop a few steps, on a low platform, the pulpit was made of plexiglass. Black faces packed the white-painted room. Behind the preacher, the choir dominated the altar, the women in red blouses and the men in black suits; speakers were mounted on the walls and ceiling throughout the sanctuary, surrounding the parishioners; and lyrics were projected on the walls on both sides of the altar, emphasizing that here, music was almost everything.
In her long crimson tunic, the pastor spoke that morning on the Lord’s love and the Lord’s commands. God gives His love despite what His believers have done, she taught, but God demands far more of his faithful than what they are doing. The instant the sermon ended, it was underscored and overtaken by song. Gospel music engulfed the room, louder and louder as the choir and congregants responded to the pastor’s rapture and encouragement: “Tear the roof off! Sing the songs of Zion!”
Hands were outstretched with palms upturned, beckoning God’s love to settle in the soft flesh. Heads were tilted back in singing or bowed forward, soliciting forgiveness. Ushers hurried up and down the aisles, bearing yellow boxes of tissues for those in tears. “Based on our past performance, based on what we deserve,” the pastor injected, “God has been so gracious, so good! And when people say God is too loving to send us to hell—they’re right! We send ourselves to hell by refusing His word!”
The house held a special guest that morning, a backup singer to a rhythm and blues legend. She prayed at the church when she wasn’t traveling, and that Sunday she climbed the carpeted steps to the altar’s platform and turned to face the congregation with the choir behind her. Her singing was nowhere near Robert Brown’s ideal; it was anything but classical in style, anything but operatic. Her voice was throaty. She bellowed and half howled the names “God” and “Jesus” with a religious aching so deep it sounded as much animal as human. She hit high, raspy notes that turned the effort to beseech Jesus in heaven into something acutely real. Then, swooping down octaves, her singing became a thrum of overwhelming need.
Brown was weeping. When the singing was over, in the hush that poured through the sanctuary, the pastor made her call. “All of you who have strayed, all of you who want to redirect your life to the Lord, I want you to come to the altar.”
Brown walked toward the steps. At the base of the platform, he let his neck fall, let his head fall, lifted his hands.
“You have strayed, but you are returning!”
A church elder set his palm gently on Brown’s forehead.
TWELVE
AFTER RYAN’S VICTORY in the finals, Valerie and Cecil stood beside each other, quietly, near the plate glass windows that overlooked the fountain with its lavish display of shooting water, the breadth of the plaza around the pool, the city beyond. They didn’t have anything to say to each other. Even after Cecil took Adrian to California, there hadn’t been much contact between her and Cecil; their conversations had been, at best, barbed. Now they watched their son—vibrant, aglow with sweat, taller than anyone in the crowd, br
oader than anyone in the crowd, the height and mass of him magnetic—being swarmed by opera devotees, by gray-haired couples, a young woman in a black pencil skirt, people handing him their cards, a woman in leather pants holding out her Met program to be signed. Valerie and Cecil stood a short distance from him, separated by the well-wishers and by the other singers and their families. She wore a dark dress, he a black suit and purple tie. Their bodies were still, and their faces, except for the glitteriness of Cecil’s eyes, were almost impassive, as if they were statues—statues who’d been hugged tightly by Ryan as soon as he’d stepped off the elevator that carried him up from the level of the stage, statues who’d been released from their stillness and silence by his hug, brought to life, to exuberant, beaming life, for a moment.
Now they seemed to be gazing at him across a sea, watching him on a far-off island.
* * *
Not long after that, though, he was in a borrowed car, driving with his father next to him. They were headed up into the mountains of Colorado, toward a town of casinos called Central City, where Ryan would be performing. This trip with his father was one of the two best things that happened because of the contest.
The other was an invitation to audition for the Met’s own development program for young singers. The Lindemann Program was a rarified incubator; a few artists were chosen each year for the two or three years of training. In total, there were around ten singers in the program at any given time. They received a comfortable stipend, free voice lessons and artistic coaching from the best teachers in the country, and minor roles in Met productions. Winning the contest did not lead automatically to the chance to audition. Winning the contest meant a check for fifteen thousand dollars, which, for Ryan, meant the opportunity to pay down a portion of the money he’d needed to borrow, beyond his scholarships, in order to finance his musical education after Governor’s, at the University of Hartford and then in graduate school at Florida State, another second- or third-rank conservatory. And winning the contest was a credential and an affirmation that might translate into invitations from lesser development programs with lesser companies than the Met; into exploratory, noncommittal meetings with managers; into medium-size roles at summer festivals or with regional companies; and into the thought that aiming for a sustained professional career at some modest level was no longer as irrational as it had been before the competition.
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