Auditions

My aunt ran the children's choir in Kroměříž for twenty-six years, and every September she took everyone, the ones who could and the ones who'd only been sent, forty small mouths in the parish hall in their outdoor shoes, because, she said, you can't hear who a child is from a form. By Christmas it was twenty-two. Nobody was ever told to leave. They just stopped coming, the ones who never found the others, who sang into the room the way you'd shout across a field, and she let them go with a biscuit and a quiet word to the mother. I used to think she was keeping the pretty voices. She wasn't. Half the ones who stayed were wrong in some way you could name: Jirka sang a quarter-tone under everybody for six years, the Novák twins breathed in the middle of words, and there was a girl so low the basses turned around to look. What they had was ears. They leaned. They'd hold a note a little longer to find out where the rest of us had gone, then pull toward it, the way you shift your weight on a tram before you know you're doing it. She told me once the test was never sameness. It was whether you came back changed by the people standing next to you. Jirka never got the pitch. He got the timing, which she said was rarer, and at the midnight Mass, when the organ dropped out on the last verse and twenty-two voices had to carry it alone across the cold nave, I could hear him, slightly flat, exactly on time, holding the door for everyone who was still coming in.