The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

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 naivete 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 Kim
berly.

  “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.

  Mama fussed over us all vacation. Rootie crawled all over us, talking, trying, before we left again, to tell us her last four months of adventures. She copied me, the way I walked, the foolish new learning in my voice. Da wanted to know everything Boylston had taught me, everything I’d done while away. I tried to mention everything, and still it felt like lying by omission.

  When we returned to Boston, we knew at least what country we returned to. But if we two were tinged with Moorish contamination, the famous conductor’s daughter was infected with something almost as bad. She represented everything wrong with albinohood the world over. She was the Empire gone hemophiliac and feeble-minded. She disgusted even her precocious schoolmates. All the operas of Verdi, in chronological order, at thirteen: Even music’s fiercest student had to call it freakish.

  My brother loved that freak in her. Kimberly Monera confirmed his suspicion: Life was stranger than any libretto about it. That winter after we returned, she showed him how to read a full orchestral score, how to keep separate each threading cross section of sound. On Valentine’s Day, she gave him his first pocket edition, a shy, secret offering wrapped in gold foil: Brahms’s German Requiem. He kept it on the nightstand beside his bed. At night, after lights-out, he’d run his fingers over the printed staves, trying to read their strains of raised ink.

  “It’s all decided,” Jonah told me on a cold March evening, three-quarters of the way through my first year at Boylston. Our parents had just stopped János Reményi from letting Menotti audition Jonah for Amahl in the opera’s NBC television broadcast, thinking they could still preserve a halfway normal life for their wholly abnormal child. “We have it all worked out.” He pulled from his wallet a picture Kimberly had given him: a tiny pinafored girl in front of La Scala. Proof irreversible of a lifetime pact. “Chimera and I are getting married. Just as soon as she’s old enough not to need her father’s permission.”

  After that, I never looked at Kimberly Monera without shame. I tried not to look at her at all. When I did, she always looked away. I couldn’t love her anymore, or hope hopelessly that the world or any of us might be other than we were. But I felt a trickle of pride at our new, secret affinity. She now belonged to our little nation. One day, she’d sing with our family. We’d take her home to Mama and Da, where we’d show her, by easy example, how to relax into a tune.

  Jonah and Kimberly performed their engagement with that deadly permanence available only to first-time adolescents. Their pact implicated us all in espionage. No one could know but we three, and the secret lent us a giddy gravity. But after Jonah informed me of their engagement, he and Kimberly had even less contact than the little they’d had before. He returned to our rooftop fort, Kimberly to her solitary study of scores. The school did its best to erase them both. Their great secret engagement went underground. She was his betrothed, and that was that. For once two just-teens declare their undying love, what else is left for them to do?

  MY BROTHER AS HÄNSEL

  Did the boy soprano think he, too, was white? He didn’t have that name yet, nor the notion. Belonging, membership: What need had Jonah Strom for things that had no need of him? His self required no larger sea to drain into, no wider basin. He was the boy with the magic voice, free to climb and sail, changing as light, always imagining that the glow of his gift offered him full diplomatic rights of passage. Race was no place he could recognize, no useful index, no compass point. His people were his family, his caste, himself. Shining, ambiguous Jonah Strom, the first of all the coming world’s would-be nations of one.

  “Geh weg von mir, geh weg von mir. Ich bin der stolze Hans!” He alone can’t see the figure he cuts, out there onstage, in the Dacron Alpine costume—permanent-press lederhosen and long socks, topped by a green felt elf’s cap—some Radcliffe costume designer’s fantasy of pre-Holocaust Grimm. A honey-amber southern Egyptian kid, a just-disembarking Puerto Rican plunked down into this Rhenish masterpiece of arrested childhood. Black Jewish Gypsy child with russet coiled hair, upstage left in a plywood hut as picture-perfect as it’s supposed to be poverty-stricken, singing, “Arbeiten? Brr. Wo denkst du hin?” But when he sings: when clever Hänsel sings! Then no one sees any seams, so lost are they in the seamless sound.

  He can see his own arms and legs sticking out of the Schwarzwald fantasy costume. But he can’t glimpse the full-dress discord the audience must sort out. The costume fe
els good; the suspenders pull his shorts up into his crotch. The rub of the fabric as he dances fuses with the pull of his Gretel, alongside him, patiently teaching him the steps. His opposite these performance nights is Kimberly Monera, my brother’s first concentrate of desire. “Mit den Füsschen tapp tapp tapp.” The pull of her blondness draws him on. “Mit den Händchen klapp klapp klapp. Einmal hin, einmal her, rund herum, es ist nicht schwer!”

  His sister-partner’s hold on him, the warmth that fuels his air supply courses through him in all three acts, a breadth underpinning his breath. Blinder Eifer: blind thrill in doses so large, they carry him through all the chance catastrophes of performance. He feeds off his sister’s instruction, the seed that will form his lifelong taste for the small and light. When his Gretel, sweet dancing teacher, stammers in a moment of stray stage bewilderment, he’s there to feed her back the courage she has lent him.

  Any blondness might have done. But it’s with the Chimera that he lies down in this night forest, the warded circle where the spell first takes hold. She is his Waldkönigin, the queen of his woods, whose pale hand he holds, the one who comforts him on the dark stage of self-blinding childhood.

  There is an evil in the woods. This is what the oblivious parents must discover with each new performance, after they send their unwitting children into the cursed place to make their own sighting. Eine Knusperhexe, baker of children, operator of her own child-ready ovens, hides in the copse, awaiting discovery. This is the doom the pair’s stage parents send them to, night after night, pretending to knowledge only after the fact.

  Children, children? the forest asks. Are you not afraid? Some nights, when the cuckoo teases them with echoes from infinite space, clever Hansel can feel the alarm pulsing from his Gretel’s flanks. The down on her arms dampens with fear, a fear more delicious than the rest of his life will ever succeed in recovering. The boy takes her fright through his fingertips, just touching her moistened arm hair. Her terror draws him inward, like a lens. How close they must huddle against each other, lost under these trees, their basket of berries eaten, darkness falling in their childish neglect, and no way on but under. She looks away from him, eyes forward, into the hall’s blackness, breathing hard, straining in her dirndl skirt and flower-embroidered white top, waiting again this evening for the wondrous pain, each new shape these accidental brushings take.