Afterward, after the Schubert encore, when it seems we have more than survived, we join hands onstage and walk off to wild applause, two brothers, split at the fork in what, until today, was our identical past.
MY BROTHER AS AENEAS
To my ear, his laugh at fourteen had no bitter highlights yet. I’d swear he was still happy up in Boston, in the walled courtyard of our music school. Happy, or at least busy, proving he could get people of any hue to fall in love with him. And needing to seduce János Reményi before anyone. The Hungarian’s approval meant more to Jonah during high school than even Da’s or Mama’s. And my brother must have meant a good deal to Reményi, as well. Once Jonah’s voice broke, it became János’s chief pastime in life to turn the virginal soprano into a sterling tenor.
Most adolescent males pass through months when their voices go off on spontaneous excursions, flopping like a fireman’s hose with no one strong enough to hold it steady. Jonah entered this vocal purgatory. He struggled to settle into his new register and win back control over his hormone-thickened vocal cords. But in remarkably short order, one could hear the light sparkle of boyish ore coming through the cauldron of adolescence smelted down to a bright lump of gold.
Reményi’s own career was now a relic, except for the occasional nostalgic gala. Throughout the thirties, he’d been a Bayreuth regular, doing the three consecutive evenings of Wotan without a waver. He was a celebrated CEO of Valhalla and tyrannical abuser of oppressed dwarves. But after the Sudetenland crisis, he stopped traveling to Germany. Later, he always refused direct questions about that decision, and the musical press inferred a self-sacrificing choice. In truth, 1938 was way late for acts of political courage.
Throughout the war, Reményi worked in Budapest, singing roles in safe pieces like Ferenc Erkel’s Bánk Bán and Dohnányi’s Tower of the Voivod. When the country’s concert houses were bombed, he turned to teaching. He tried to return to opera, traveling through a decimated Italy, but his temperament—too stolid for bel canto and too brooding for buffa—got him molested in the Neapolitan and Milanese press. He stayed in Central Europe long enough to see Allied infantrymen of all races parading through Bayreuth in pillaged Valkyrie helmets and Brunhild gowns, even draped in his old Wotan costumes. Arranging a hasty evacuation to the States in the tidal wave of the late forties, he launched Boylston Academy, scoring points with wealthy Americans by playing on their cultural inferiority. His banquet speeches raised thousands of dollars for the school by suggesting that, in the world’s cultural Olympics, vocal music was an event where the USA couldn’t even take home a bronze.
At Boylston, Reményi was in his element, Wotan all over again. The students all fixed on him: János asked me to audition for the spring chamber choir. János complimented me today on my C major scale. None of us would have dared call the man anything but sir to his face. But in the safety of cafeteria talk, we were all on a first-name basis.
He gave lessons in the most opulent studio, tucked away in the recesses of the second story. He covered his floors with silk carpets from Tabriz and hung the walls with Anatolian kilims, to make sure that no student could count on any free resonance. Throughout lessons, he sat behind a Biedermeier desk in a wing-backed chair. If he needed to make a musical point, he strode over to the corner where two Bechsteins curled up in each other’s curves.
During my lessons, he shuffled papers and signed forms. I’d finish an étude, and he’d work on for a few minutes before noticing. Coming up for air, he’d command, “Go on, go on,” as if I’d stopped out of truculence. He cared only for those whose voices might lead to careers. I did not interest him except as the key to my brother’s well-being. Perhaps he saw in me a clinical riddle: How could the same genes produce both brilliance and mere adequacy? He’d wonder for a moment, wave me on, and return to his paperwork.
Jonah’s were the only lessons with Reményi to exceed the alloted fifty minutes. My brother would disappear into Reményi’s lair and not come out for hours. I’d go nuts with worry. Reményi’s studio had a pane of metal-threaded glass cut into the door, a school policy since an incident involving an ex—faculty member and a fifteen-year-old early bloomer. On my toes at the right distance down the hall, I could make out a thin slice of proceedings without being detected.
The teacher on the other side of that wire-meshed glass was no one I recognized. János, up on his feet, hands cupped, arms waving, mouth working on a stream of staccato triplets, was conducting the entire Met pit orchestra. Jonah imitated him, his chest out like a war hero. Through the glass, I looked in on a life-sized puppet-theater staging of Papageno and Papagena’s duet.
Ecstatic János coached my brother’s voice down into its new range. He showed the teenager how to open up his instrument and let that new power take up residence. Everything Jonah lost in pitch, he stood to gain many times over in color and sweep. The break was like one of those chance renovations, where crumbling plaster reveals glorious marble beneath it. The crushing innocence of his old high notes, the ones that made listeners want to take their own lives in shame, gave way to the richer highlights of adult awakening.
There would be years of sweat and woodshedding. But of all János’s maturing students, Jonah, he said, had the least to unlearn. The Hungarian claimed he’d caught the boy while music was in him, before anyone could trample him. The truth is: We and music are not unified. Nothing in our animal past calls for anything so gratuitous as song. We must put it on, wrap it around us like the dark, cold firmament. Some part of Jonah’s sonority came from his great lungs, the softness of his larynx, the fluting of his vocal cords, his skull’s chambered resonance. But the heart of his gift was learned. And only one violating couple could have taught him so deeply as they did.
Jonah might have flourished under almost any teacher. Once away from our family’s charmed evenings of motets, he became a sponge, using people for whatever he could steal from them while reserving, even in happy compliance, the right to second-guess anything anyone fed him. Jonah stole the best of everyone—Reményi’s experience, Kimberly Monera’s precocity, Thad’s and Earl’s hipster avant-gardism, my feel for harmony—until all of these became his own annexed domain. But in the story he invented for himself, Jonah made this journey alone, whoever his passing sponsors might have been.
The teenager’s voice stepped out from the boy’s wreckage. Within months, Janos could hear the hint of adult wonders to come. This boy’s raw material—shaped by early immersion—pointed toward places beyond those Reményi himself had reached. The only question was how far beyond his own ability any teacher could teach. So long as Jonah stayed dutiful, all was well. His lessons with Reményi progressed, the master’s one hand flinging my brother outward, the other, unconsciously, holding him back.
Jonah humored his teacher’s enthusiasms and even returned them. I’d hop past the room on my toes, catching glimpses of them in arcane training rituals, exercises coming out of a teacher I never saw do anything more vigorous than shuffle papers. There was Janos, dropping to his knees to pantomime the falling larynx, turning his hands in precision catcher’s mitts for Jonah’s pitches to hit, shaping his arms into tubes through which Jonah threaded his thirty-second-long pianissimi.
The Boylston master was a monster about tone. Only Jonah had any idea what the man meant by the word. Once, during social studies class, fifty yards down the hall from where my brother worked in Reményi’s lair, I heard the man bellow, “For God’s sake! Let the tone ride upon your breath like a ball on a fountain of water.” More curse than command. My fellow social studies students turned to me in sympathy, their heads hung, as if Jonah’s fall chastened us all. Then we heard a sustained high forte such as no teenager had ever produced. The Hungarian bellowed, even louder, “Yes! That’s it!”
Even in rapture, the man was guarded. Most often, he affected cool neutrality. His pedagogical method was both archaic and iconoclastic. He fed my brother buffets of scales out of Concone and tortuous workouts from
Garcia: triplets, four-note scales, arpeggios. He made him sing fast, wordy passages while biting down on two fingers. Jonah never took the tongue for granted again. János made him do legato melismata as machine-gun sforzando. Jonah had to land each tone dead on its mark or start the whole sequence over. Teacher and student joined together to birth up chunks of sensation, lost to the sheer sense-heightened pleasure of the chase.
Our Wotan believed no student could master vocal technique except as part of a greater cultural mastery. He told us as much, at our winter assembly, 1955. “Singing is heightened speech, in a language beyond human languages. But if you want to speak in the words of the cosmos, you must train on earthly words. To prepare yourself to perform the Missa Solemnis or the Mass in B Minor—those summae of Western art—you must start to read all the European poetry and philosophy you can lay your hands on.” Reményi’s transcendental humanism lit up our skies like a nova. We couldn’t know that, like a nova, the star throwing off the blaze was already dead.
János Reményi’s Grand Masonic approach hurt Jonah less than other artificial technique-building programs might have. For all his shouting about tone, Reményi knew he could do nothing better for my brother’s voice than release it. The boy was the older man’s golem, his American Adam, his Enlightenment-haunted tabula rasa, a seed perfectible under greenhouse conditions. Europe had just offed itself again, its rococo opera houses gutted in high culture’s final flare-up. But in this charmed monastic backwater, whose leading novitiate surpassed anything Reményi had worked with in the Old World, the aging bass-baritone saw his chance for one more shot at Erhabenheit, no matter his disciple’s skin tone.
This was the year János implemented the school’s first vocal competition. He made Jonah compete in the senior division. He chose my brother’s piece—Handel’s “Süsse Stille”—and tried to choose his accompanist, as well. But Jonah refused to perform without me. By the time the first round ended, even those gladiators who’d gone into the arena with the fiercest ambitions pleaded no contest.
A week later, someone painted our bedroom door. A premeditated midnight raid: No other way the painters could have done it. The art was a grotesque portrait, thick liver lips and Brillo hair, a bastard son the Kilroy family sent guilty child support. The artists must have spooked themselves with their voodoo, because the caption beneath the picture only got as far as an N, an I, and a jagged G. The medium was red fingernail polish.
Thad discovered the portrait on his return from breakfast. “Holy Shetland sheepdogs.”
Earl managed an awed “Whoa!”
Jonah and I saw the thing at the same time. Jonah recovered faster. He laughed maniacally. “What do you think, fellas? Realism? Impressionism? Cubism?”
He and Thad hunted down some finger paint and added a beret, a pair of shades, and a hand-rolled cigarette hanging out of the ample lips. They named their beatnik Nigel. Nothing could have thrilled our roommates more: tarred with the same rouge brush, with a little property damage thrown in to boot.
Stony adults came to remove the door from its hinges and replace it with a virgin one. Jonah put on a show of disappointment. “Nigel’s deserting us. Nigel’s graduating.”
“Nigel’s gonna blow this peanut stand,” Thad added. “Nigel’s gonna go make the real scene.” The scene our roommates dreamed of making.
For a long time after, I woke up an hour after falling asleep, hearing scratching at the door.
Something in János almost seemed to like the fact that his star pupil wasn’t white. The dissonance only added to his thrill at presenting to the world something so rare and novel. Like most champions of Western culture, Reményi pretended race didn’t really exist—giants, dwarves, and Valkyries aside. He could grasp the obscurity of Parsifal more easily than he could imagine what humiliations our mother had lived through, just to sing European music at all. János Reményi had no more idea of his adopted country than did the rest of the white Boylston faculty. He thought music—his music—belonged to all races, all times, all places. It spoke to all people and soothed all souls. This was the same man who’d sung Wotan right up until 1938, never glimpsing the coming twilight of the gods.
He clung to this imperial idea: One trained the singular voice only by releasing the universal spirit. From the ruins of this bombed-out creed, Reményi drilled my brother. But in the fall of 1955, my brother’s spirit began to grow in ways his teacher would have strangled in the cradle had he been able to see them.
When Jonah’s voice broke, the wall between him and Kimberly Monera gave way. After his transposition to tenor, the baffling What now? dividing the two prepubes came tumbling down, answered. One summer had changed Kimberly, too, beyond recognition. She came back to school radiant. She’d spent the break in Spoleto, her father’s summer base. There, she’d somehow learned to sing. The freakish albino, in act two, had gone swan.
She returned with a shape so changed, it must have frightened even her. Her body, a narrow, backward thing the previous spring, now tapered with newfound power. I sat behind her in music history, wondering why her mother didn’t buy her larger clothes. Under that surprised binding, the new surface of her skin readied itself for use. Through the lime or columbine of her taut blouses, I stared for eternities at the little bandage of her bra, the three raised welts of its metal hooks, miracles of engineering. Whenever she crossed her nylon legs, I heard fingers sliding up and down a violin’s strings.
Around her, Jonah grew protective, gallant, stupid. The solitary solidarity of our rooftop club dissolved forever. Earl and Thad tried to lure him into games of Truth or Dare. But loyal to his Chimera and overnight wise, Jonah said nothing. And still, nothing was all we needed to reach the wildest conclusions.
Thad rode him, his grin of vicarious delight glowing in the dark. “What the hell have you been up to, Strom One?”
“Nothing. Just practicing.” The feathers of the canary all over his chin, even as he wiped it with a quick backhand.
“Practicing, Strom One? I dig.”
Jonah snickered. “Practicing singing.”
“First base?” Earl could rise from a coma, ready to shoot the breeze all night long.
“First base?” The question outraged Thad. “Huber, you gone cat. Does this look like a man left stranded on lowly bag one? First base on a hardline drive. Takes second on a wild pitch. Throwing error into short center sends him …”
“You’ve all lost your minds.” Jonah caught my eye, a back-off warning. “You’re all flipping nuts.”
“That’s cool,” Earl decided.
Jonah disappeared on us, all Halloween evening. He didn’t come back until after midnight. I don’t know how he slipped the evening head count without getting caught. Long after curfew, he scratched the door to be let in. He was dizzy but mum. Earl Huber berated him. “Don’t get the girl in trouble, Strom.”
Jonah held his stare. “You don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
Thad intervened. “Strom One, man, we’re your loyal subjects and vassals. We’ll do your bidding for all time. I’m begging you. What’s it like?”
My brother stopped pulling off his blue-black school trousers. “What’s what like?”
“Strom, man. Don’t do this. You’re killing us.”
“It’s … like nothing you can know.”
Thad lay back in bed, kicking the air and howling.
My brother held up a silencing hand. “It’s like total, continuous … It’s like Wagner.”
Not a name we’d dared bring up before coming here.
“Thank God,” Thad shouted. “I’m not missing anything, then. I hate that shit.”
“It’s like beating off on somebody,” Earl explained, “who happens to be beating off on you.”
Jonah went so dark, his color became definitive. If he was doing anything wrong to her, I’d kill him. Close my fingers around his golden throat and stop his sound for good.
Whatever they were doing in their few mo
ments by themselves, their trysts made Kimberly glow. Even Thad West noticed her transfiguration. “Is this some kind of light operetta, Strom One? I mean, what the hell? Look at her. She didn’t look like that before Halloween.”
Jonah wouldn’t be baited. The Chimera was no longer a fit topic for our running commentary. He and his chosen one made themselves invisible, moving in a secret subplot, awaiting the sunlit modulation to E major that would turn them from outlaws to inheritors.
Then a teacher surprised them, seated on the grass behind the trellises at the Rose Garden in the Fens. They were parked over a score—Massenet’s Werther. But their exact condition at the moment of discovery became a matter of endless speculation. Students came up to me for days to settle their raging bets.
Following the scandal, Kimberly relapsed into her congenital anemia, sure the two of them would both be thrown out of school. But even the faculty couldn’t imagine the two of them actually committing such transgression. They escaped without reprimand.
Kimberly was so scared, she dashed off a preemptive note to her father, then in Salzburg, explaining her side of things. The great man laughed it off. “Sempre libera,” he told her, jotting a few notes of the aria on a scribbled staff in the letter’s margin. “Pick your mates of the moment wisely, and make them value whatever small favors you choose to bestow. ‘Di gioia in gioia, sempre lieta!’” She showed Jonah the letter, swearing him to solemn secrecy. Jonah told me, because I didn’t count.
János reprimanded my brother for his extracurricular Massenet. The dressing-down was dry and lofty; Jonah probably didn’t even know how sharp it was meant to be. Reményi began taking Jonah along with him on conducting engagements around the city. He wanted my brother occupied at all times.