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‘gonna,’” Mama said. She must have known the real terror. “You go blaze a trail. Before you know it, he’ll follow you.”
    Too late, our parents saw they’d let us spend too much time indoors. Home school was their controlled experiment, and it had produced two hothouse flowers. They spoke to each other at night, in low voices, undressing for the night behind their bedroom door, thinking we couldn’t hear.
    “Maybe we too much protected them?” Da’s voice couldn’t find the path it wanted.
    “You can’t leave a child like that loose in a place like this.” The old agreement, the thing that bound them together, the endless work of raising an endangered soul.
    “But even so. Maybe we should have… They don’t have one real friend for the two of them.”
    My mother’s voice lifted a register. “They know other boys. They like the likable ones.” But I could hear it in her, wishing things otherwise. Somehow, we’d failed to make their plan work. I wanted to go tell them about the hurled brick shards, the words we’d learned, the threats against us, all the things we’d sheltered our parents from. Yellow boy. Half-breed. I heard Mama, at her vanity, drop her tortoise brushes and stifle a sob.
    And I heard Da shelter her, apologizing. “They have each other. They will meet others, like them. They will make friends, when they find them.”
    An oboist acquaintance of Da’s in the Columbia Math Department had long pestered Da to let us sing for the campus Lutherans. And for just as long, our parents had turned the man down. Mama took us to neighborhood churches, where our voices joined hers in the general roof raising. But beyond that, they’d kept us safe from the compromised world of public performance. “My boys are singers,” she said, “not trained seals.” This always made Jonah bark and clap the backs of his paws.
    Now our parents thought the Lutherans might prepare Jonah for his bigger step that fall. Church recitals could inoculate us against the more virulent outside. Our first forays down into Morningside Heights for choir rehearsal felt like overland expeditions. Da, Jonah, and I headed down on Thursday nights on the Seventh Avenue local, coming back up in a cab, my brother and I fighting to ride in the front with the cabbie and practice our fake Italian. At the first rehearsals, everyone stared. But Jonah was a sensation.
    The choir director held up practice, manufacturing excuses just to listen to my brother sing a passage alone.
    The choir contained several talented amateurs, cultivated academics who lived for the twice-a-week chance to immerse themselves in lost chords. A few powerful voices and even a couple of pros, there as a public service, also kicked back into the kitty. For two weeks, we sang innocuous anthems in the northern Protestant tradition. But even that young, Jonah and I scorned the cheesy, predictable modulations. Back in Hamilton Heights, we’d torture the lyrics—“My redeemer Lumpy; yes, my Jesus Lumpy.” But on Sundays, we were stalwart, singing even the most banal melody as if salvation demanded it.
    One of the group’s real altos, a pro named Lois Helmer, had designs on my brother from the moment his voice cut through that musty choir loft. She treated him like the child she’d sacrificed to pursue her modest concert career. She heard in Jonah’s bell tones a way to grab the prize her career had so far denied her.
    Miss Helmer had a set of pipes more piercing than that church’s organ. But she must have been of an age—101, by Jonah’s dead reckoning—when the pipes would soon start rusting. Before her sound leaked out and silence took over, she meant to nail a favorite piece that, to her ears, had never received a decent hearing in this world. In Jonah’s sonar soprano, she found at last the instrument of her delivery.
    I couldn’t know it then, but Miss Helmer was a good two decades ahead of her time. Long before the explosion of recording gave