Choir Boy Read online

  “Can Berry come?” Wilson asked.

  They conferred. Then nodded. “But he can’t talk,” Jee said. Choir Boy 24

  They led Berry and Wilson to a balcony overlooking the main library. Books on the history of religion and mythology lived in their own alcove, and a couple of study tables perched by the railing. Lisa sat behind one table. She didn’t stand or speak when the girls herded Berry and Wilson to seats facing hers. Jee, Becky, and Julie pulled up chairs facing the boys.

  “Wilson,” said Julie. “We’re here to consider your desire to become Lisa’s boyfriend. We’ll accept that your proposal is in good faith and you understand what this involves.” “Lisa, what’s the deal here?” Wilson said.

  Julie leaned across the table, red-dyed hair flopping. “You’ll talk to me if you have something to say. Now why don’t you tell us why you deserve to date Lisa?”

  Wilson looked at Berry. Berry widened his eyes. Wilson snorted. Julie smacked gum. Becky twisted her hair around a pencil and then let go, breeding friz. Lisa stared at her hands. Berry scanned the spines of the religion texts. Berry felt trapped in this tiny balcony that smelled of paste. He felt crowded, the way he often did when he was alone with kids his own age.

  “Well,” Wilson said. “I really like Lisa. I think I could be good for her.”

  Julie and Becky shared amused looks.

  “Yes, but what about compatibility? Are you mature enough?”

  “I’m the same age as her,” Wilson said. “We go to the same school. I see her at church.”

  “You may be the same age, but everybody knows girls mature faster than boys,” said Jee. “Lisa needs someone older who can treat her special and lend her his jacket on cold nights and shit. Someone who doesn’t still sing soprano, you get me.”

  “I have a jacket,” Wilson said.

  “We’re just thinking of what’s best for Lisa,” said Becky. “We like you, Wilson. If it was up to me, I’d say go for it.”

  “And let’s not even drag in the alky dad,” said Julie. “I heard he does body slams at poetry slams.” The other girls gave Julie a “low blow” look.

  Wilson rose and slunk away. Berry stepped around the girls, snagged a couple of theology books, and ran after Wilson. He caught up with Wilson halfway across the quad.

  “Tell me I’m better off,” Wilson ordered Berry,

  Berry obeyed.

  “Lying fuck,” Wilson peeped.

  “Girls can be mean,” Berry said. “Boys are so much easier to cope with.”

  Something smacked Berry in the back of the head. A rocket launcher valentine. He went down on the joints of his palms, flashes in his eyes. The flying object fell near him, and through the raver glaze Berry saw a hymnal. It fell open to “Come Down, O Love Divine,” one of Berry’s favorite hymns. Another hymnal careened past Wilson’s head. “You throw for shit,” Wilson said.

  “Hey Berry, think fast,” shouted Teddy.

  Berry rolled just in time to save his ribs from a falling lectern. Its golden eagle head plowed into the turf. Then a ring of boys stood over him. “Hey, Berry. No hard feelings. Llere, let me help you up,” Teddy said. He held out a hand and pulled Berry to his feet. Then he kicked Berry’s legs out from under him. This happened a couple of times. Berry rolled away and stood without help. He noticed Wilson walking away alone. “I gotta catch up with Wilson,” Berry said.

  “Not now. It’s almost time for Evensong, and we need your help,” Teddy said. “We gotta distract Canon Moosehead. You’re the most distracting person we know.” Berry almost sat back down on the grass.

  Berry caught up with Canon Moosehead in the cafeteria drinking coffee. “Hey,” Berry said. “I had this book to show you. It’s about Christianity without Jesus.” He motioned the Canon over to the table nearest the window, where he’d spread out The Sea of Faith.

  “Can’t you bring it over here?” the Canon asked. Berry shook his head.

  “The light’s better over here.” Berry stood by the book at the window. Then the Canon reluctantly walked over, but brought his coffee mug with him. Berry told Canon all about the book’s author, a minister who didn’t believe in God. “He says God is just an idea we invented to, uh, explain why we need morals.” Berry used up all his words. He mumbled something else.

  Berry stopped mid-sentence. A hymnal flew past the window. Smoke streamed behind it, and crimson flame rose from its pages. It was probably the same hymnal that had left an anthill on the back of Berry’s head. “What the . . . What was that?” the Canon barked.

  “Um, I think it was the Hymnal 1982,” Berry said. “The Hymnal 1940 has a darker cover.”

  The Canon ran outside, leaving his coffee. Teddy and Marc sprinted in. “You suck at distracting people,” Marc told Berry. He poured blue pills on the table. “How many? Three or four?”

  “Just hurry,” Teddy said.

  Marc crushed four pills under a salt shaker. He swept the results into the Canon’s coffee and stirred. Then he and Teddy ran away, leaving Berry with his book.

  Canon Moosehead returned a moment later. He had soot on his shoes and hands. “Your fellow choristers aren’t studying theology,” he said. He swigged. “The amount we pay to rent this school, you’d think they’d supply decent coffee,” he snarled. He chugged some more. “Anyway. What was it?”

  “Does Christianity need God?”

  “Saying that God’s only purpose is to inspire ethics is putting the buggy before the mule,” the Canon said. He guzzled coffee. “Ethics exist for the same reason you and I wear robes and prance: to bring people to God. When people start thinking of God in terms of Thou Shalt Not or Thou Must, they get turned off.” He raised the mug. “My aim is to turn them on,” last sip, “to God by being more relevant to the twenty-first century. Does that help?”

  “I think so,” Berry said. “Morality and cassocks, means to an end.”

  The choir didn’t have enough hymnals to go around. Guess whose hymnal had been hurled, set on fire, slingshot across the quad, and stomped? Berry stared down at the crumbled parchment-colored pages, half of which no longer held notes. His head throbbed and his vision blotched.

  “You shouldn’t have abused your hymnal,” Mr. Allen told Berry.

  Rehearsal ended after a thousand Benjamin Britten run-throughs, and Evensong came. Canon Moosehead wore his least flashy robe, a stark black hooded cope that matched the carpet in the Peterman chapel. The Canon walked easily and smiled at everyone.

  “He looks normal,” Teddy whispered. “How do we know if it worked?”

  “Wait,” Marc said. “And see.”

  The choir sang hymns and a short Byrd piece. Then Canon Moosehead got up and looked around at the assembled boys and girls. Most of the girls had skipped the robes and wore miniskirts. Julie and Becky, on either side of the big aisle, crossed their legs and dangled their platforms in the middle of the chapel.

  “Welcome to another Choir Camp,” Canon Moosehead said. “I can see you’ve been taking advantage of your time here to get in to all sorts of mischief. But the real reason we’re here is to bring honor to the Cathedral of St. Luke’s. When I look around at all your impertinent young bodies, I remember when ...” The Canon’s eyes traveled around the chapel. He paused. His eyes lingered in the aisle. They swept the boys and girls again. As the Canon met her eyes, Julie winked. The Canon tried to speak again, and it came out “But—but—you must—” Then he moved strategically behind the lectern that had nearly maimed Berry. He took a deep breath. “But we must harness, we must bind, I mean capture ... we must use that wellspring of youthful, of . . . of . . . energy and make it service . .. uh, a greater purpose.” He took a deep breath. “In the name of the Father, etc.” Canon Moosehead sat in a hurry and kept his legs crossed.

  “Shortest damn sermon he ever gave,” Marc said afterwards. “Recruiting Julie and Becky to show some skin was a great touch. And next time, back at the cathedral, we get the altar boys to help. They bring him coffee all the time.”
“Next time?” Berry said. “Wasn’t once enough?”

  “Not when it was that cool,” Marc said.

  Canon Moosehead didn’t show up at dinner. The next morning, he left early and drove back to the city alone.

  Wilson didn’t talk to Berry the next day. Berry wandered alone when he wasn’t in rehearsals. He felt almost as lonely and empty as he had all summer. He felt like he was falling naked from an airplane in the desert. Even if he survived the fall, the ground offered nothing.

  The last evening of camp, Saturday, the choir had a big bonfire out in a field near campus. Someone played hip hop on a boombox, and the kids roasted marshmallows and hot dogs. Nobody sang. Berry sat too close to the fire, so his cheeks smarted and the back of his neck tickled. Wilson came and sat next to Berry. “Hey,” Wilson said. “Our last summer. ”

  Berry nodded. “This time next year, we’ll all sound like dirt roads. We’ll be into skateboards or pro wrestling or something. All our skills, gone to shit.” He couldn’t explain, but he knew Wilson knew: sugar turning to chalk, the ground slipping away. Berry’s eyes stung from smoke exposure, or tears seeping out. He knew the others could never see it, or he’d be smacked into next year.

  “That’s nature’s plan,” Wilson said. “Personally I’m glad I get puberty before I die.”

  Teddy came and sat on the other side of Berry. “Hey,” he said. “No matter what, we’ve kicked some major booty together. And we’ll always know we were in the coolest treble section on the fuckin’ planet. We mixed blood on that tampon, and that makes us brothers.”

  Berry was so preoccupied with sucking any tears back in through his eyes that he couldn’t reply, only nod. Through his not-crying blur, he noticed a glistening in the other boys’ eyes, too, but it was probably just a trick of the fire.

  3.

  Back to school. New pair of jeans. Black binder with an easy-peel label. Brand new groove. Hey kids, you’re upperclassmen now. Just remember, with hallway privileges come maturity and respect.

  Every eighth grader seemed to have doubled in height over the summer except for Berry. He walked among evil giants and watched his back in the boys’ room, where classmates pushed his head in the toilets. The other choirboys who went to Orlac Junior High pretended not to know Berry there.

  Last year, Berry’s class was divided into two sections, the Swans and the Geese. The Swans were the smarter kids, but you weren’t supposed to say so. This year, the names were gone, but the sections remained. Now, if you tested too low on a standardized test, you copped an “intervention.” The scratch-bubble failures who received “interventions” turned out to be exactly the same kids as the Geese.

  Berry’s mom had lobbied hard to get him accepted as a Swan, and Berry had gone along because the Swans hit less hard. But even though Berry read years ahead in English, he’d scored puny in math and science. In the end, the school had put Berry into the Swans (or “intervention’’-free group) for half the day. This hadn’t helped him make friends, but he hadn’t expected to.

  Berry nicknamed this year’s teachers Toad and Rat, maybe because he’d read Wind in the Willows over the summer. Toad taught the Geese in a haze that reminded Berry of the year Marco had gotten hooked on muscle relaxants. It took Ms. Hawthorne ten minutes to explain how the sun radiated energy. Meanwhile Rat, who taught the Swans, was a lively man with sharp features. He carried a buzzer that rasped every time one of the Swans broke grammar. Berry hated both teachers and didn’t see much advantage in Swanhood. For a week, his mom had driven him around pointing at people on the street and saying either “Swan” or “Goose.” A man in a suit with a cell phone was a Swan, said Judy. The newspaper seller and the guy rooting in the garbage were both Geese. Berry had almost died when Judy had marched him through the mall pointing and barking, “Goose, Goose, Swan, Swan, Goose.”

  Berry had turned to a middle-aged woman in a velvet coat (a Swan) and muttered, “It’s a game.”

  Judy had spun and bugged. “It’s not a game. If this is a game to you, then you’ve already lost, like your father.” Judy took paralegal classes when she wasn’t working as a company librarian.

  Berry’s existence as a half-Swan half-Goose misfit might have seemed okay if he’d found the Swans anything like his image of those birds. But the real-life Swans seemed as evil as the Geese, only with nicer clothes. Berry sometimes wished he went to Quaker Day with Wilson and Lisa. Berry held his breath every moment in those airless halls.

  He let it out on Wednesday. He ran out of Goose class before the bell sounded and was on the school steps before it choked. Then he waited twenty minutes for the bus to St. Luke’s for midweek rehearsals. The gravel alley and choir room were empty. Canon Moosehead had managed to ban choirboys from local shops and restaurants on rehearsal days.

  Berry was about to give up and find a place to read when Teddy came out of the cathedral’s office building. “Hey,” he told Berry. “We’re down in the Twelve Step room, it’s our new hangout. We’re all beating up on the new kid, Jackie.” Berry nodded. They headed for the church office basement, down one flight of stairs to some offices, the soup kitchen, and the Twelve Step room, a hole coated with cigarette ash, coffee- and piss-stains. The carpet looked like a lice condo, but the boys wrestled on it every day anyway. A couple of couches and some folding chairs faced the huge board outlining the twelve steps. One cartoon showed the Higher Power holding hands with a strung-out man. A single fluorescent light and a sliver of window at ceiling level lit the room, which smelled of chemicals and animals.

  “Altar boys gonna spike Canon Moosehead’s coffee on Sunday,” Teddy said on the stairs. “Same pills, same dosage.” By the bottom stair, Berry and Teddy could hear violence from the dark hallway’s last door.

  As soon as Berry and Teddy walked into the Twelve Step room, the banging noise stopped. A pile of boys looked up at them. The wriggling mass almost reached Berry’s shoulders. A tiny head poked from the bottom of the pile. Pale eyes stared out of Jackie’s pie face. “Please,” he chirped. “I’ve had enough. Please. When do I learn about Orlando Gibbons?”

  • • •

  Sermon by Canon Simon Moosehead

  Ninth Sunday of Pentecost

  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable ... So. It’s no accident Paul compares the Church to the bride of Christ. This passage riles many feminists understandably in fact because it speaks of wives submitting to their husbands as the church submits to Christ. To some extent, this is Paul reflecting the values of his day. Marriage as an institution has evolved since then, and so has the church. Society no longer expects wives to kneel before their husbands and . . . and ... I mean . . .

  Well. Isaiah says God’s church will have a name that is closer than son or daughter, and many scholars believe that name is wife. Now, our church isn’t a frowsy hausfrau in muumuu and mules, the way some people seem to think. She doesn’t spend her time playing bridge and lugging children around the bargain aisle at Target where the kids undoubtedly grasp at everything Nerf or Nintendo no matter how many times they’re told to keep their mitts inside the shopping cart kiddie seat. Oh no. Today’s church has a gym membership and takes care of herself, and so instead of spending all her time on child care she’s busy creating a life of spiritual and material abundance that’s the best gift one spouse can hope to share with another, along with a firm toned supple body . . . uh by which of course I mean a newly restored bell tower once we reach our financial goals. Where was I?

  Marriage. Yes. God created wedlock to domesticate our urges. Paul says the wife has no power over her own body, but the husband’s. And likewise, the husband doesn’t have any power over his own body, except for what his wife shares. In other words, we’re all weak in the flesh, and can easily be tempted to, to . . . and Paul says that those who aren’t married should stay celibate, but that it’s better to marry than to burn ... to burn. To burn, and what’s interesting here is there’s this parallel involving the church
being the bride of Christ. Because these days it’s easy to channel our spiritual urges into secular things, New Age trinketry, politics, what have you, and what Paul’s saying is there’s the proper receptacle . . . receptacle . . . Pm sorry, lost my place.

  We’re all burning, searing with the desire for spiritual fulfillment, it’s eating us alive, we’re plankton in its mouth, and yet we don’t go to the one place that God has ordained for us to achieve satisfaction, spiritually speaking, instead we wander the streets in a twilight sweat feeding on our own spiritual hunger until we wind up in some dark hotel room with our ecumenical undergarments hanging off the minibar and the backs of our necks slick with some substance that is not the blood of the Lamb and, and what Pm trying to say here is that my notes are totally out of order. So as you honor the bonds, the bonds of marriage, Pm saying you should treat your membership in the church as a sacred bondage, I mean channel your spiritual desires into the fold. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

  • • •

  You can control every move your body makes but not your body itself.

  Berry practiced sitting and standing, breathing and projecting every second he wasn’t doing anything else. You can practice breathing in the shower, in class, on the bus, while your parents argue beside you, even in your sleep after enough practice. You can carry it with you. He would breathe in pure song vapor and Mr. Allen would scrub away the dead-skin dissonance and replace it with bell sounds. Berry might imagine himself naked from the outside in, and Mr. Allen’s eyes probing his lungs for bad breaths. Every time he raised his voice he worried he’d get nodes on his vocal chords, which were like burns or poison ivy on the surface of your voice. The least scream could tear you down.

  Berry had recently had a kidney stone, but he hadn’t understood what it was except that a pointy object put pressure on his willie from the inside and he hadn’t put it there, until Marco explained that Berry had to pee really hard to get it out. Lord let me know mine end.

  Berry felt that same jagged clog, only in his chest, when he imagined that the bellows inside it would gnarl. Every time his voice wavered or his throat felt uncomfortable, Berry worried he was starting to change. He drank lots of water and did voice exercises every day. But he still feared his voice and his self-esteem could shatter at any time.