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that they’ve got breath trouble, but they’ve got so little time to be boys that nobody does anything about it. So everybody pretends the “reedy” quality is pretty terrific and makes them sound like little angels. She, though, she didn’t buy it. “All they sound like to me is brats that can’t sing. But you might be the one now to show what a boy might sound like if he sang instead of wheezed. Of course, it may not turn out like that. You may sound like some pip-squeak imitation of an operatic tenor. There’s such a thing as letting a wild Irish rose be a wild Irish rose, and not trying to make an American beauty out of it. Still, I’d like to try. At least you have a voice. It has every fault there is, from escapement to tremolo to four or five other things. It’s like a stream of warm honey that shatters in midair. But we may be able to coax it to flow, clear down to the waffle, and if we do, I’ll eat it with a little silver spoon... Kiss me now, and we’ll start.”
    How we started was to take a streetcar down to a five-and-ten and come back with a red balloon. We worked on it quite a while. She’d have me blow it up and squeeze the neck with one hand and press the air out with the other, then wet the neck and hold it tighter or looser, while I pressed the air out harder or easier. Then she’d make me notice how the higher the pressure the higher the whine of the air going out the neck. After a while I got it through my head that pitch is a matter of tension and pressure. Then we had to go over the way it worked in my throat and my lungs, and she drew a lot of pictures of how I was put together inside, with vocal cords and windpipe and lungs and diaphragm and abdominal muscles, all with exact shape and names, so I can remember them yet. Then I had to get it through my head that pressure from the abdominal muscles, exerted on the relaxing diaphragm, is transmitted to the cords, which are under tension, and that pressure and tension had to balance. If there was too much pressure on the diaphragm and too little tension in the cords, there was escapement, and if it was the other way around there was clutch, or hard throat. In the beginning it surprised me how little she let me sing. Pretty soon, though, there was some of that, and I had to learn to forget what it sounded like, to me inside my head, “as you didn’t buy a ticket, alas,” and get my mind on what it felt like, “as that’s what’ll determine what it sounds like to the customers, who after all are the ones we’re trying to please.” The only one I was trying to please was her, and to me it felt thin, but she seemed satisfied. And then one day I didn’t know if it sounded thin or thick, but only that it felt solid in my belly and like bubbles in my throat, and her eyes began to shine. “Felt good, didn’t it?”
    “Yeah, felt easy.”
    “Rest, and we’ll work it higher.”
    The first song I got was the Mozart Alleluja. Now you’ll hear that Mozart is the delicate tracery that Jack Frost puts on the window pane, that every picture is different and the number of them infinite, that even the crystals have their own design and that it’s never once repeated, that it’s the greatest musical talent we ever had, that it’s genius. Just the same, it’s ice. And yet, the first time I sang that number in church, I could feel the congregation catch its breath, and see women all over the church take out their handkerchiefs and hold them to their eyes. When I got through, Miss Eleanor had found what she’d been looking for. A boy, if he’s taught, has something that a tenor hasn’t got and a soprano hasn’t got and that all of them haven’t got. I guess it’s what a bud has, before it’s a flower.
    From then on, I showed speed. Before I knew it I had four or five operatic arias, some songs and ballads, enough to put on a show with whenever I got booked. That was all the time, at the Masonic Temple, at the Rotary Club, at the reception