Choir Boy Read online

  “That was painful to watch,” Wilson said.

  “He wanted to toss me out a window,” Berry said. “Good thing he couldn’t get away with it.”

  “He’s seen choirboys come and go,” Wilson said. “He doesn’t need a window.”

  They walked down the main stairs of the cathedral office building, ringed with pictures of bishops. Back in the alleyway, they looked around but didn’t see the other choirboys. “I can’t believe about George,” Berry said.

  “It happened so fast,” Wilson said. “Usually they crack before they croak.”

  Teddy and some of the other choirboys clustered around the closed door to the choir room. Teddy had his ear against the thick wood panel. “Mr. Allen’s in there with George,” Teddy told Berry and Wilson. “Some flaying going on after that performance.”

  “What’s the worst he can do?” Berry asked. He thought George must already be suffering enough as it was.

  “Yo, Mr. Allen can flay with a look,” Marc said. He pulled his ear away from the door just before it opened.

  George and Mr. Allen walked out together. George looked both crushed and relieved. Mr. Allen looked resigned to a friend’s death. The boys parted to let Mr. Allen pass, but he stopped in front of the group and said, “George’s voice has broken. Happened faster than expected—but there’s no way to put off the inevitable. George will move to the men’s section and sing alto from now on.” Then Mr. Allen walked out into the parking lot to see if any homeless people had peed on his car today.

  “A man,” George said through phlegm. “I’m a man now.” Everybody looked at him as if he were an alien.

  Berry poured his punch all over the tie Marco had given him. He glanced down at the spreading stain on tie and white shirt. “Shit.” He pointed the mess out to Wilson, who was too busy watching Lisa Gartner walk past.

  “There are still things to look forward to,” Wilson said without taking his eyes off Lisa. Her church skirts formed lacunae around her slender legs, almost down to her sandals. Wilson’s gaze followed her until she reached her mother’s car. “So like happy birthday.”

  “Thanks,” Berry said. He sipped punch dregs and thought about manhood.

  2.

  The station wagon loaded with ruckus crawled up the winding mountain roads. The boys in the back seat heckled the driver, a bass named Maurice, to speed up. They made revving noises and called Maurice “feather foot.” A large man with a pointy beard, Maurice turned up his Puccini tape to drown the commotion. He’d given up on drawing his choirboy crew into a game of “name that anthem” with a different tape.

  In the Dodge’s “way back,” Berry hunched between backpacks and gym bags. He watched the road twist downward and tried to forget his soul-shriveling summer. The full choir had just sung together for the first time in six weeks, to thank the congregation for raising money to send it to camp. Every August, the choir rented the Peterman School, three hours from the city. The choir had use of Peterman’s dorms, soccer fields, swimming pool, and most importantly, chapel for a week.

  Berry pretended he was a prisoner of war, his will broken by torture. He’d spent the summer break alone, since Marco and Judy couldn’t afford to send him to any other camps. Berry’d had the whole summer to contemplate George’s voice-dive. He’d wandered his parents’ crumbling neighborhood, kicking garbage and singing to himself. Every day, he’d done vocal exercises and monitored every notch in the scale for blemishes. Treble voices die from the middle and the decay spreads both ways. The bottom of the upper “head voice” range is the first to go. Promoting George to alto only showcased how bad his mid-treble had gotten, since that was the peak of the alto range.

  That summer had scorched away Berry’s hope. Berry had looked at his life to come and had seen boredom and revulsion. Marco had broken the television in May, and Berry’s allowance could handle only one or two movies a month. So he’d read any books he could find at the library or in his parents’ bookshelves. He’d listened endlessly to the same dozen or so used CDs: Choral Fugue State, Blissed Out Boys Sing Britten, etc.

  And he’d locked his door. He’d ignored his mom saying things like, “The only reason you don’t physically abuse me is it would require concentration.” And his dad saying, “Your animal guide told me to burn all your pantyhose.” Berry had gotten so strung out he’d considered getting a job. Somewhere in the middle of that awful asphalt-cracking, benzine-scented, sandmouthed permanent headache of a summer, Berry had come across the phrase in a book: “Boredom is a valid reason to kill yourself.” He knew it was true.

  On the road to Choir Camp, Berry forgot the summer’s details. What stayed was bleakness he couldn’t investigate. It was tarmac-flat pain with a choral soundtrack, two months without ritual, companionship, or the sung word in person.

  The road leveled and forest became meadow. Finally, Maurice pulled up in front of the Peterman School with a sigh. Berry jumped out of the back of the station wagon and lay on the grass comparing the country sky with the city sky. All around Berry, pebble pathways sliced the tree-specked grass into triangles and rhomboids. It felt good to bust out of the POW cage. The country sky looked bluer and wider.

  The buildings reached with pillar hands and brick legs to embrace Berry.

  Teddy and pals started an Ultimate Frisbee game on the biggest grassy space. Some of the girls went for a nature walk. The men cracked beers. The choir had an hour and a half before Mr. Allen drilled it on Hindemuth and Handel.

  Wilson sat next to Berry on the grass. “I want to go to a high school like this,” he said. “Seems like a good place to spend my last few years.”

  “What made you decide on seventeen?” Berry snared one fat cloud with his eyes and held it.

  “It’s an estimate. I’m all shroudy, like mortality is my jockstrap. Seventeen is the oldest I can imagine living to. It sucks: I get one year when I can drive. I’ll probably be stuck with mom’s ten-year-old Geo. I want to die behind the wheel of a black Monte Carlo like Dale Earnhardt.”

  Lisa Gartner passed. Death and cars fled Wilson’s mind. So thin she wafted instead of walking, she was all long brown hair and linen. She hadn’t joined the other girls on their nature walk.

  Berry waved at Lisa. Wilson just stared. “Hey, you guys. How’s it going?” she said.

  “Good to be back,” Berry said. “I hate summer break. Wilson was just telling me which car he’d like to die driving. How about you?”

  “Some miracle flying car, decades from now.” “Optimist,” Berry said.

  After dinner, the choir had another chance to explore the Peterman campus before bedtime. Berry wanted to be rested for rehearsals, which would start at eight AM and continue all day when the choir wasn’t playing or swimming.

  One change from the previous Choir Camp became obvious the first night. George had become an authority figure. He paid a special visit to the room whose bunks Teddy, Berry, Marc, and Randy occupied. “Okay, you fuckin’ worms. Last year, you just had those pushovers Maurice and Tony watching you. Tony’s only a tenor, for fuck’s sake, and Maurice thinks Puccini is some macho shit. This year it’s gonna be different. You’ve got me to deal with. I know all your little tricks and schemes because I planned most of them last year. This year, no bra-huntin’ on the girls’ floor, no midnight rock climbing, no skinny dipping in the pool or anywhere else. And no talking after lights out. Is that clear?”

  Nobody said anything.

  “Next year, you’ll all be in my shoes, or most likely not in the choir at all,” George reminded the four of them, then killed their lights.

  Teddy yawned. “Won’t be as much of a prick as you.” The next day everyone swam after morning rehearsals. Lisa refused to swim, so Wilson stayed out of the pool too. They sat in folding chairs, her in tennis clothes and him in swimwear like everyone else. She never explained, and people stopped asking. Wilson brought her Cokes and chips, and even used his body to block splashes. Randy and Marc tried to drown Maurice, who clutch
ed a beach ball from their game of keepaway. “Somebody else get on his head,” Marc shouted. “We can’t keep him down by ourselves!” Wilson courted Lisa hard because she was too popular to talk to him at the Quaker day school they both attended in the burbs. “She’s the hot favorite for student body president this year,” Wilson explained to Berry in the boys’ locker room after swimming. “If I don’t get bouncy with her at camp, I’ll be stymie boy at school for sure.”

  “I never talk to popular people,” Berry said. “That makes it easy.”

  As soon as Berry had his clothes on, Teddy, Marc, and Randy grabbed his arms and legs. They jogged him back to the pool and tossed him in. They laughed. Berry sloshed. Three times he climbed out, and each time they plunged him back in. Finally he stayed in the water until they left.

  Berry still got dry and dressed for the next rehearsal. Mr. Allen hauled them through Herbert Howells’s “Like As The Hart,” full of melancholy quavers. Berry had always hated this piece, but now it made sense. The parched deer wanders the desert or dry glade. If the deer found water, it would throw itself in up to its neck and soak, inside and out. Howells’s piece never finds water, it just fades in the desert.

  After dinner the second day, Wilson and Berry joined the cool boys for cigarettes. They sat on an old porch out back of the big brick building with the auditorium and cafeteria, watching the evening sun on the football field. “We shouldn’t really be smoking these,” said Wilson between drags. “They fuck your voice.”

  “Yeah,” said Teddy. “We bad. Paranoia self-destroya.” All five boys on that porch were some flavor of thirteen. Wilson was thirteen and a third, Teddy nearly fourteen.

  “So I say blow off rehearsals tomorrow and head into town,” said Randy. “We need porn and booze. Bet Teddy here looks old enough. The used bookstore off the main strip sells porn to anyone.”

  Shock singed the roof of Berry’s mouth worse than tobacco. “How can you skip rehearsals at Choir Camp?”

  Marc laughed. “Hey, it’s our last summer here as boys. You want to spend it singing?”

  Berry snuffed his unsmoked cigarette and wandered off. He ran into Lisa in the least well lit part of campus. The darkness in that spot felt different than city or suburb darkness. It ate faces and colors in a way gloom around malls or convenience stores couldn’t.

  “You enjoying camp?” Berry asked.

  “I guess. The girls’ choir is kind of a joke. You guys rehearse till you drop. We learn a few chants.”

  “So you get to hang around campus more. Play sports. Go swimming.” He realized his mistake. “Oh, sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Hey, you read a lot. Ever hear of Roland Montreux?” She spelled the last name.

  “No. Why?”

  “No reason. Just curious.”

  That night, George came to the room Berry shared with the cool kids while they huddled and listened to Outkast. “I know what you’re planning. Everything you’re thinking,” George told them.

  “Mind reader, huh.” Randy clucked.

  “Thinking of ways to fuck with Canon Moosehead. He arrives in a couple days,” said Marc.

  “Oh,” said George. “Oh. In that case, I’m in. I thought you were up to something bad.”

  The guys brainstormed late. They sent two of the younger boys out for sodas. Marc shot down lame ideas like whoopee cushions, exploding crucifixes or Tabasco communion wafers. “Fuck this,” George said. “Shoulda known you guys would have boy ideas. This needs Man Thought.” “Wait. I got it,” said Marc. “I brought something with me on the off chance. Stole it from my dad.” He rummaged his gym bag until he found an amber pill bottle. He handed it to George. “This too boyish for ya?”

  “Fuckin’ A.” George squinted at the label. He scratched his buzz cut. “What you bring this for?”

  “Come in handy.”

  “What is it, G?” Teddy asked.

  “See for yourself.” George tossed the bottle to Teddy. He read the label and laughed so hard he blew snot. He swatted his bunk bed in two/four time.

  Wilson crawled on the bed and looked over Teddy’s shoulder. “Viagra. Food of the limp-dick gods.”

  “So like, we slip two or three or four of those into his coffee an hour before he officiates at Wednesday’s Evensong. Then we watch the fun,” said Marc.

  “I thought you already had to be turned on for that stuff to work,” George said.

  “Dunno,” Marc said. “My cousin’s boyfriend got paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident. She says it’s rocket fuel, even if he still doesn’t feel much. Besides, just makes it more interesting if he takes it and it works.”

  Every boy and George swore secrecy. They used a thumb tack to prick each finger and rubbed it on the same stolen tampon. “Nobody better have AIDS or Pma kick your ass,” Teddy said. Then George went back to menacing his former comrades with whoopass if they screwed around. Wilson and the other boys went back to their rooms.

  The next morning, four boys missed rehearsals. “Prolly got caught in traffic,” Mr. Allen joked. But when Teddy, Marc, Randy, and Wilson turned up at lunch, Maurice grabbed Teddy’s collar with a huge hand. “Get your shit. We’re going back to the city.” Maurice and George made a big show of herding the four boys to Maurice’s station wagon until they promised not to blow off any more rehearsals.

  That afternoon, Berry joined Lisa and Wilson poolside. They all wore bathing suits, even Lisa. They ignored the chlorine smell and pool violence. “So, like, which is worse: losing real innocence or just losing the look of innocence?” Berry asked.

  Nobody answered for a while.

  “Depends,” Lisa said. “There’s, you know, more than one kind of innocence.”

  “Innocent people don’t see themselves as innocent,” Wilson said. “But people who look innocent know it. So maybe losing an innocent mask is way worse than losing the real thing.”

  “I’ve never been innocent,” Lisa said. Neither had the two boys.

  “Think fast! ” Teddy and Marc cannonballed at once into the pool right in front of the three dry holdouts. Wilson tried to block the tsunami for Lisa, but too late. Soggy spots appeared on her top.

  “Shit!” Wilson yelled. “I’m sorry—those assholes—I tried—”

  “It’s okay,” Lisa said. “I’m waterproof.”

  “Real mature,” a black-eyed girl named Julie told Marc when he surfaced across the pool. Her face shone beneath her sky-blue bathing cap. “Real clever.” Marc looked away from her.

  The girls gave Lisa a towel and led her off to the girls locker room to clean up. Berry and Wilson didn’t see her for the rest of the day.

  Afternoon rehearsal came. Mr. Allen almost whispered, as if he stood on a mountainside that speech might dislodge.

  He understood all about using surges and ebbs in volume for effect. He made the choir point its feet and extend its necks to hear. Wilson and the cool kids trembled most of all.

  “And I saw anew. My soul doth magnify. Let all mortal flesh. Before him stand the. I give you anew. For we like sheep,” Mr. Allen breathed.

  The choirboys giggled at that last sentence fragment, as Mr. Allen knew they would. His eyes seared them until they shut up. Silence wrapped the chapel in a marble-and-glass towel.

  “None of those phrases says much without the stuff at the end,” said Mr. Allen. “They all lead up to something important. When I flounder my hands around, I’m trying to make you people think about phrasing. It’s the difference between hitting notes and musicianship.” Berry had heard this lesson before, but the low voice and Mr. Allen’s expression said rage. It made Berry want to giggle or beg forgiveness. He felt terror on either side.

  “For now—you guys have a little power,” Mr. Allen said after a long silence. “I’ve got a week to teach you how to harness it and make it count. For once, we have time for stuff besides learning notes. But if you people just want to goof off, please let me know so I can go back to town early. I have other things to do with my life.
”

  Nobody spoke. Berry knew Mr. Allen was just proving he really could play the choir like an instrument. And it didn’t matter. Berry still would have thrown himself in front of a runaway grand piano for Mr. Allen, and so would anyone else in the room.

  “Frisbee!” Canon Moosehead’s voice echoed around the quad on Wednesday. Berry sat under a tree memorizing a Thomas Weelkes anthem. Most of the other boys played Ultimate in the next quad. The Canon’s voice cracked like leather on wood, “The church raised $7,432 to send you boys here, money that could have gone to the Bell Tower Fund, and now you’re playing Frisbee! Aren’t you supposed to be singing?” Berry walked to the quad just in time to see the boys, who’d rehearsed all morning, point at their mouths and mime laryngitis. “And why aren’t there any girls playing? We won’t have that sort of patriarchal crap with Frisbee, even if we allow it in your choir,” said the Canon. The boys just made fake sign language.

  Over lunch, the Canon sat at the biggest table and lectured about the importance of gender-neutral prayers and the cathedral’s relationship with the city. Marc sat at the next table and made barfing signs as the Canon explained he didn’t oppose the Hungry Souls kitchen on principle. “Attracting those sort of people to the neighborhood only encourages urban blight, which is a greater harm than hunger.” Then Canon Moosehead asked Mr. Allen what sensitivity training the choir received. “Every one of these doll-faced boys is a rapist in waiting,” Canon Moosehead told the hall. “As a feminist, Pd like this male-dominated institution brought into the new millennium.”

  Marc tapped the pill bottle in his khaki shorts pocket, so it made a maraca noise that only the people nearest could hear.

  Wednesday afternoon, three girls jumped Wilson on his way to the pool. “We need to talk to you,” said Julie. The other two, Jee and Becky, jerked their heads at the school library. They wore matching tank tops, scrunchies, and sandals.