Like a limping drunk in an otherwise orderly procession, the rogue voice unsteadied the chorus, seeded doubt as to the cadence, and when coming across the melody, grabbed it the way a drowning man snatches at a log to tug it about in fits and starts. The other singers were stoical in distress. They frog-marched the renegade, moving the verse along in lockstep until they could breathe relief at the end of the refrain. It would be difficult to throw out the wanton warbler, as he was a member of the household; but these were cataclysmic circumstances warranting an individual sacrifice for the common good. The bumbling duck was unceremoniously jettisoned from the vocalists' soaring flock. He took his exclusion badly, not from obstinacy or affected arrogance, but because of enthusiasm betrayed. He panicked at the sudden stifling of an unbridled ardour which made him drown the family choir with booming notes so false that they knocked askew the rest, and made some of the other singers wonder if he harboured undisclosed intentions, like a fox trying to stand on one leg amongst cranes. He was wilful; he loved to sing; yet he caterwauled so awfully that his listeners cringed.

 

 

 

 

   He went for voice lessons, at what became for him very great personal expense. The class was quite professional, consisting in a selection of the operatically trained, the musically inclined, and one strange, ridiculous squawk. The first time he rose to sound out intervals tapped at the piano, his larynx knotted; his trachea constricted; and nothing gave forth from his mouth but a protruding tongue. The maestro cast a look of quizzical concern, and begged him please not to collapse on the piano. If the students were brought to chuckles by his initial troubles, they screeched, choked back tears, fell off chairs at the sight of him later, grunting with his head beneath the piano's flap so as to approach his ears to the strings. The position, insisted the professor, was excellent for the diaphragm.

   Several sessions later, the teacher evaluated with solemn eyes his student, then declared that the lad was not tone-deaf, as his voice modulated with changing pitch and therefore could be trained, but the labours required would be nothing less than stupendous. Was the student willing to undertake a task of such monumental scale? He was, and in the years that followed, clawed his way to a modicum of competence entirely by the force of indomitable effort. He joined a choir, and from loose and rolling ballast at the beginning of each new piece, through a thousand private repetitions became harmony's anchor. His vast capacity for work earned him his fellow musicians' admiration, as well as the director's hearty appreciation. There came an evening when his family sat in the audience to watch him perform in an opera, and saw him step out on the crowded stage for a two-phrase solo. He never had more than a place in the chorus, never was given more than a few individual lines to sing, yet maintained his status as an artist through assiduity, application, and after a time, unerring familiarity with the music.

 

  Ten years after the start of his lessons, with a world of striving behind him, he walked alone in the countryside, chanting arpeggios by a frozen pond. Uncharmed, a few birds took flight at the sound while a squirrel dodged behind a tree. The singer increased his volume, dismissed control, and lofted his notes to echo as from a bell. He carried his emotions on a rush out of himself, and with his voice quavering between a warble and a howl, heard a distant answer. It might have been the wind, or a far off hound, perhaps was only sonic return from a hill. No matter, he joined the duet, put into it all he had, and after an hour finally gave it up out of absolute, exquisite emptiness.

   He abandoned singing after that, but stayed with the opera company, filling waiters' roles front stage and soloists' glasses back stage. He had taken his voice as far as it could go; and if it had not reached beauty, it had touched that place where any separation between what he sang and what he felt was minute, unimportant, and transparent almost to nonentity.

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