Rehearsals in the fall are tighter: the camp has done its magic. We sit in ordered rows, we sing that way as well, chords offered like gleaming chains. Cathedral ceilings are references to Noah’s ark, I have just learned. The idea being that he founded his church by upturning the boat: when we look up, it’s supposed to be like looking at the prow of a boat above us. I think of this often, as I look at the bowed ceiling. This boat, I say to myself, is turning over.
Today is warm, and our rehearsal is going well. The choir has recently auditioned new members, and now we sit, forty, in broken arcs around our director. New money has provided music stands, nice folding chairs with padded seats. You’re real pros now, Big Eric announces in one break. In another, he points to Little Eric and says, Now, and Little Eric gets up and leaves the room. I have a surprise, Big Eric says. Eric is helping me with it.
Little Eric returns, a miniature monk. Muslin tunic, burgundy overtunic. Rope belt. The shoes are obscured by the hem, which falls to the floor. He smiles at us and raises his hands palm-up in mock propriety. Big Eric walks around to stand beside my seat. If he were Friar Tuck, Big Eric says to me, Robin Hood would not be so busy rescuing Maid Marian.
This, Big Eric says to the room, gesturing to Little Eric, is the way we will dress for the Italian pieces. I’m having the costumes ordered, and you will all be fitted for them afterward. Also, please welcome Freddy Moran, a new soprano. Freddy stands from where he is seated in the row in front of me.
Unable to join us for the summer, he is a new soprano with a clear light voice and all the other details of Big Eric’s favorites: long blond hair, straight, cut in a Viking mop, with a short sturdy frame and then the surprise, brown eyes, long lashes. The sort mascara means to replicate. He doesn’t look particularly Irish except perhaps this last part, the eyelashes. Zach’s mother, Mrs. Guietz, calls them sooty eyes. Merle and Peter have them also.
Big Eric then makes his announcement about Tosca and reads off the boys to be included. Little Eric and Zach are a bit old for this and so weren’t included, Big Eric concludes, and he laughs as he says this and puts his hand on Little Eric’s shoulder.
Little Eric, mouth firm, continues to stand in the tunic beside him.
In the rehearsals that follow, we learn to wear the robes. How to stand for hours without fainting under the hot lights, and sing: breathe from the diaphragm, tilt the head forward slightly to project sound from the throat out through the forehead, keep the knees bent slightly; feet under the shoulders, and the fingers of your hands rest on your thighs, your pointer finger pointed at your foot, along the seam of your slacks. We go to Biddeford to meet the opera cast where the director tells us stories of past Toscas, past choruses: one director told the boys to follow her wherever she went on the stage, and so when she dives to her death, the boys followed her, jumping also, all landing in the orchestra pit trampoline installed for the stunt. In another, the diva dove and bounced back up. In another, she missed the pad, crashing into orchestra members and breaking a collarbone.
I combine the stories gradually over the rehearsals, until in my mind I see us all following Tosca, jumping with her and bouncing back up, all of us in the air together, broken.
My mother picks me up today from rehearsal. She has come after a teacher conference at school, where my teacher team, Mrs. Strauss and Mr. Christie, ask if everything is all right at home. My mother assures them everything is.
They say you don’t have friends, she says to me. She drives the slow rush-hour traffic across the bridge back to Cape Elizabeth, the brake lights of the cars ahead of us flashing between bright and dull red in the early night. This week my father is in Sweden. I imagine him surrounded by blond people, the overwhelming numbers, him a shiny black-haired speck at the center. My blond mother. Sweden looks like a country of my mother. When he told me he was going, I thought ot Big Eric’s books. If my father had ever seen anything like them.
They parent me in a team, these two, my mother teaches me about people, my father about science. These subjects each teach me patience about the other. My mother and I sit quietly in the car as we consider this evaluation of me. All of my friends are in the choir, I say to her, finally, and she nods as she takes me home.
16
The plaster saw takes the cast off in a minute. Beneath, my arm is a scaly white thing, the dark hairs stand out starkly. How’s that feel, the doctor says. Smiling. Rose-colored fat man, big black-framed glasses.
Fine, I say. I stretch it forward. Fine. And this is not a lie. The hand looks like it belongs to a monster. I think of my mother’s rose cuttings, covered up for a month, until the branch, in desperation, grows new roots to live. This hand, it looks like it is ready to grow a whole new boy off itself.
Out in the waiting room, my mother stands as I come out the door. There’s my little tree climber, she says. In the car, on the way home, the sunlight yawns through the trees, more faraway fire. Soon the clocks will go forward, the nights shrink close like turtleneck collars.
17
You, as the chorus, Big Eric tells the opera choir, are supposed to be innocent choirboys, and yet you all are supposed to act as if you are passionately in love with Floria Tosca. And you are both.
Saturday mornings belong to Opera now: the eight of us meet in the church room alone to rehearse, and soon, we will rehearse with the rest of the cast and orchestra. While my little brother and sister watch the Smurfs, I learn songs about vengeance, love, and slow death. Today Big Eric is explaining to us the role we have in the opera. The coffee he has brought bitters the room’s air while we all drink hot tea with lemon to clear and tone our throats. Again, it reassures me less to know the history here. The story, though, is a good one: Tosca, the lover of a handsome painter, Cavaradossi, betrays him in order to protect him from his torturer. Tosca can save her lover by giving herself to the torturer, and she says she will in exchange for a mock execution. He comes to her and she instead, impulsively, stabs him to death with his dinner knife, in his chambers. She then visits her lover in prison, assures him of his safety, rushes to his side after the firing squad, only to find he really is dead. The torturer’s murder is discovered, and his police come for Tosca, who then flings herself from a parapet to her death.
Operas, Big Eric announces, as he walks the room in long paces, are mainly about betrayals in love. Squalid light surrounds him from the stained-glass windows as he says this. His rcund bald head gleams, recently polished, he tells us, and from above the ears, the remaining hair, vigorous, grows long, to meet his mustache and beard.
After, he comes up to me. How did you like Fire from Heaven, he asks me. He twists his hands over each other in a way I’ve never seen before and only read about. He’s the only person I know who rubs his hands.
It’s fine, I say. I liked it. Big Eric had urged me to go read this novel, and I checked it out from the library. When I got home with it, I realized why he wanted me to read it. The novel is about Alexander the Great, who has an affair with his older, adult teacher, when he is still a teenager.
He smiles. Beautiful, right? You should read the The Persian Boy, next. About his eunuch lover.
I will, I say.
Every now and then, I think of Ralph, dead Ralph. He wings in, hovers over the rehearsal chapel, paler than ever before because he is slowly fading away. I know it is not a proper haunting because no one else sees him. We sang for him at a memorial service, held for him in a country church up by the camp. It was a choral service, which is to say, we sang a selection of things, and then there were remembrances and a sung prayer.