“Ahhhh,” I said. I gargled the sound. My eyes were pressed shut. The other kids sat there quietly.
“Try again,” she instructed.
I really went for it. “AHHHHH!” She pressed my tongue down with her wooden stick, and when she did I felt the tug of the back of my tongue where it met my throat, and how even that hurt. Tears escaped the corners of my eyes and ran along my hairline, into my ears.
“Hm,” said the nurse. “Okay, you can close.”
I opened my eyes.
“Nothing there,” she told me. “Tonsils normal, perfectly clear. Maybe just get a little more sleep?”
I walked the brick path back to class.
My throat was always worst first thing in the morning, when, it seemed to me, the act of lying down all night had allowed the raw skin to adhere to itself. By the afternoon it was modestly improved, and by evening I could join my choirs in rehearsals that met in the chapel after supper. I had gained places in the full school choir, which was not terribly selective, and in the Madrigal Singers, which was more so. Years of childhood choir paid off in my inclusion in a group with a proper musician for a conductor and other students whose voices were remarkable. (At least three of the kids I sang with went on to careers as vocalists.) Our director, Mr. Fletcher, modeled our sound on the old madrigals of the Anglican tradition. We often sang a cappella—mostly motets and Ave Marias, in four parts. As with English church music, the girls’ voices—sopranos and altos—were meant to be piercing but steady, without vibrato, so that we sounded like the little boys for whom our parts were written, purity of tone representing purity of heart. There was one chorister, Nina, whose father was director of liturgical music at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York, who could make these sounds just by opening her mouth. The rest of us had to direct our voices up into our heads, behind our noses, to focus the tone and remove any hush or wobble or wisp of air. “I want you to feel your cheekbones vibrate,” said Fletch, who was forever sweeping his hands up, open-palmed, trying to raise the sound from our chests. He would swish in his robes right up to the choir rail and press a finger good-naturedly in the spot between our eyebrows. “It’s right there.”
Then Dr. Schmidt, hopelessly underutilized at the piano bench, would pick out a chord in four notes, and we’d summon all of our energy into that delicate place at the heart of our faces, as though we were trying to illuminate.
I did not have a good singing voice, but I had a good ear. What was particularly wonderful for altos was how we came in, usually after the sopranos, to complicate the sound—this was true for tenors too. It was harder to hit and hold the soprano notes, but their line was almost always the easier one, the melody. There was no harmony without us. We rehearsed in a small choir room off the transept that felt, with its wooden paneling and wooden pews, warm and unified, as if carved from a single source. Beyond us the enormous chapel lay dim and vacant, and above us the bell tower rose up. When I read, in class, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, with its “bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” I gasped. I knew the carved pews. I saw the loss. I recognized the feeling of being a bird, lower and throatier, darting among the soprano line.
Maybe, I considered, I was just losing my mind. Maybe I was going crazy and imagining that something was wrong with my body. It was a hysterical reaction. Quite dramatic. Very me, in a way. The sort of thing you’d expect from a kid already on Prozac.
When I sang, I took myself up and out of my own throat. I hit the right notes. The sound we made together was often beautiful, and I belonged.
A few days after I saw the nurse who saw nothing, I woke up tasting blood. I sat up in bed, back to the frozen windows, and forced myself to swallow. I felt the tug as clots pulled away, and I felt myself swallow them. Then the blood ran free. It was warm, deep in my throat.
I went back to the infirmary. Things were becoming impossible: running on the soccer field, in air just above freezing; swallowing anything solid; singing without crying.
This time they sent me to see an ear-nose-and-throat doctor in Concord, a proper physician. I took a taxi from the infirmary into town and back again, with a referral page clutched in my hand and a scarf wrapped tight around my neck. I have no memory of this visit, except that it explains why, for as long as I could remember, I had the word otolaryngologist available in my mind. According to the physician’s report, the clinician in Concord was able to numb my throat and look past my tonsils to see that the hypopharyngeal space, where the esophagus meets the trachea, was badly abscessed. But that’s all the notes show. He did not take swabs to culture. He did not test me for any diseases, sexually transmitted or otherwise. He did not ask me if anything had entered or wounded my throat. There’s no mention of a proper diagnostic process at all.
The diagnosis recorded on my St. Paul’s infirmary referral form was “aphthous ulcers.” Canker sores. Remarkable, given that I had not a single sore in my mouth. It was recommended that I gargle with a tonic of Kaopectate, Benadryl, and Maalox to soothe the throat and counter inflammation. Follow-up as needed.
Drinking Maalox didn’t help, because two days later I was back at the infirmary, feverish, swollen-necked, still unable to eat. I had lost almost ten pounds. My mother was calling
