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A woman’s absolutely thrilling voice repeated: “Me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me!”

Then the man said: “No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no!”

And the woman answered: “No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no!”

And then the man sang just a line from a song—it was a song from My Fair Lady, the one that goes, “All I want is a room somewhere …”

And the woman sang: “Far away from the cold night air …”

And together they sang: “With one enormous chair …”

And the woman took it by herself: “Oh, wouldn’t it be lov-er-ly!”

“Me-me-me-me-me-me-me-me!” said the man again; now, a piano was involved—just one key.

Their voices, even in this silly exercise, were the most wonderful voices Owen Meany and I had heard; even when she sang “No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no!” the woman’s voice was much more beautiful than my mother’s.

I was glad that Owen and I had to wait, because it gave me time to be grateful for at least this part of our discovery: that Mr. McSwiney really was a voice and singing teacher, and that he seemed to have a perfectly wonderful voice—and that he had a pupil with an even better voice than my mother’s … this at least meant that something I thought I knew about my mother was true. The shock of our discovery in Jerrold’s needed time to sink in.

It did not strike me that my mother’s lie about the red dress was a devastating sort of untruth; even that she had been an actual singer—an actual performer!—didn’t strike me as such an awful thing for her to have hidden from me, or even from Dan (if she’d kept Dan in the dark, too). What struck me was my memory of how easily and gracefully she had told that little lie about the store burning down, how she had fretted so convincingly about the red dress. Quite probably, it occurred to me, she had been a better liar than a singer. And if she’d lied about the dress—and had never told anyone in her life in Gravesend about “The Lady in Red”—what else had she lied about?

In addition to not knowing who my father was, what else didn’t I know?

Owen Meany, who thought much more quickly than I did, put it very simply; he whispered, so that he wouldn’t disturb Mr. McSwiney’s lesson. “NOW YOU DON’T KNOW WHO YOUR MOTHER IS, EITHER,” Owen said.

Following the exit of a small, flamboyantly dressed woman from Mr. McSwiney’s apartment, Owen and I were admitted to the teacher’s untidy hovel; the disappointingly small size of the departing singer’s bosom was a contradiction to the power we had heard in her voice—but we were impressed by the air of professional disorder that greeted us in Graham McSwiney’s studio. There was no door on the cubicle bathroom, in which the bathtub appeared to be hastily, even comically placed; it was detached from the plumbing and full of the elbow joints of pipes and their fittings—a plumbing project was clearly in progress there; and progressing at no great pace.

There was no wall (or the wall had been taken down) between the cubicle kitchen and the living room, and there were no doors on the kitchen cabinets, which revealed little besides coffee cups and mugs—suggesting that Mr. McSwiney either restricted himself to an all-caffeine diet or that he took his meals elsewhere. And there was no bed in the living room—the only real room in the tiny, crowded apartment—suggesting that the couch, which was covered with sheet music, concealed a foldaway bed. But the placement of the sheet music had the look of meticulous specificity, and the sheer volume of it argued that the couch was never sat upon—not to mention, unfolded—and this evidence suggested that Mr. McSwiney slept elsewhere, too.

Everywhere, there were mementos—playbills from opera houses and concert halls; newspaper clippings of people singing; and framed citations and medals hung on ribbons, suggesting golden-throat awards of an almost athletic order of recognition. Everywhere, too, were framed, poster-sized drawings of the chest and throat, as clinical in detail as the drawings in Gray’s Anatomy, and as simplistic in their arrangement around the apartment as the educational diagrams in certain doctors’ offices. Beneath these anatomical drawings were the kind of optimistic slogans that gung-ho coaches hang in gyms:

BEGIN WITH THE BREASTBONE!

KEEP UPPER CHEST FILLED WITH AIR

ALL THE TIME!

THE DIAPHRAGM IS A ONE-WAY MUSCLE—

IT CAN ONLY INHALE!

PRACTICE YOUR BREATHING SEPARATELY FROM

YOUR SINGING!

NEVER LIFT YOUR SHOULDERS!

NEVER HOLD YOUR BREATH!

One whole wall was devoted to instructive commands regarding vowels; over the doorway of the bathroom was the single exclamation: Gently! Dominating the apartment, from the center stage of the living room—big and black and perfectly polished, and conceivably worth twice the annual rent on Mr. McSwiney’s place of business—was the piano.

Mr. McSwiney was completely bald. Wild, white tufts of hair sprang from his ears—as if to protect him from the volume of his own huge voice. He was hearty-looking, in his sixties (or even in his seventies), a short, muscular man whose chest descended to his belt—or whose round, hard belly consumed his chest and rested under his chin, like a beer-drinker’s boulder.

“So! Which one of you’s got the voice?” Mr. McSwiney asked us.

“I HAVE!” said Owen Meany.