Mr. A

by Richard Krause

Before the musicians were elevated to their present status, before athletes started their own bands and sang, there was Mr. A who paved the way. Our Glee Club received national recognition; orphan boys who sang for more than their supper, for the clothes on their backs and the shelter over their heads. They sang the praises of philanthropy, of their benefactor. They sang the praises of being clean cut, of having sparkling white teeth, of being well-dressed and good-looking in handsome blazers and contrasting pants. They represented the school at its best. Forty smiling boys out of Central Pennsylvania radiated all over the state and gradually due to Mr. A into the surrounding states.

With songs like “Friends Are Like Gems, but More Precious,” “We Meet Again Tonight, Boys,” and “He Got the Whole World in His Hands,” they captured and enshrined the values of an era. The optimism, the uncomplicated responsibility towards society, and most of all the desire to pay back the benefactor by expressing one’s own talents. The members were often the school athletes and presidents of the class, so that being a member of the Glee Club attracted everyone.

Tryouts were a tense, serious affair. Mr. A had his pets and those whose personalities were least affected by the circumstances that brought them to the orphanage. Mr. A was a father figure, but more. He was a person who had access to the good spirits of an era, the 1950s, ranging from clean bouncy lyrics to the solemn hymns out of West Point or Annapolis, and war songs tempered with the social cheeriness of musicals. Everything during that period was swept into the mainstream, the DA haircuts, the crew cuts, the collars worn up, the short-sleeved shirts rolled up, the religious medals knotted around the neck, all that was undone or neutralized by the Glee Club.

Mothers and sisters swooned over the boys’ performances with their strong white teeth and most of all their constant smiles that Mr. A brought out with his own beaming smile, for the music infused his whole body and fed off the youth and vitality of the boys that produced a vast echo chamber between Mr. A and the boys; sometimes it was as if they were singing in some giant monastery or catacomb, so deeply did the music resonate back and forth. The antiphonal arrangements had sections singing off each other, but always coming back to Mr. A and his expansive smile beneath his black rimmed glasses and outstretched arms. He was a smallish man with black wavy hair and the birdlike face of a raptor. Though the smile quickly erased any harshness. He was in his world, a world that he had created out of the fears, the insecurities of orphan boys, boosting their flagging spirits and infusing more life into them than anyone would have thought possible considering the boys’ background. Mr. A tapped into the sadness and adolescent need to overcome the broken homes, the lost parents, with both solemn songs and songs of merriment.

The lighting was carefully controlled for religious music, for the battle hymns, for the jocular musicals, all reached down inside the disassembled pieces of broken lives and made a singing unit that at first traveled all over the state and won awards.

It wasn’t until years later that I went back to the school during an alumni weekend and saw Mr. A leading the alma mater at a football game. There he was, still in his black framed glasses in the early 1970s, his hair silver gray now, leading school songs he had provided the lyrics for. But what I saw stunned me. Rarely had I come upon anyone as mannered, as artificially masculine, and as I thought back out of the past came a succession of silvery visions.

Arms and legs and heads grew from the mannered movements of Mr. A and out of his own silver hair, like embracing snakes they had mesmerized me all those years ago like the tableau vivant of Christ’s last supper. Judas perpetually on his feet over the other apostles preparing to exit. The traitor in their midst.

There was something in me captured by the geműtlichkeit, the feeling of holiness, of absolute joy, that this man was born for; that I had found a place, but one that I was nevertheless because of these good spirits always a stranger to, despite the Glee Club songs and the grey and red blazers, the charcoal and navy blue pants and colorful ties, despite being swept along; something left me as cold as an unserviceable radiator, something silver that lingered unwarmed in my mind until the football game in the early Seventies.

There in Mr. A’s hair the bodies appeared, the arms and legs, the assembly he prepared for the alumni and parents one year where the strongest, most virile, and the most delicately feminine boys, the most perfect physical specimens in the school under Mr. A’s direction were depicted in a series of tableaus. Most wore jockey shorts and had painted their bodies silver, like out of some futuristic movie, or harkening back to the Greek statuary of ancient times. Others wore leotards that defined every muscle, every bulge of their body, giving the impression of complete nakedness.

They went into a series of poses, one after another, static mimes, tableau vivants, acrobatically making pyramids with their bodies in a stunning display of silent poses. The bulging triceps and biceps, the swollen pectorals, and engorged trapezius muscles on the most beautiful athletes in the school with handsome faces, all seemed represented there, and the broadest shoulders that tapered to small waists, and the interlocking grip they had on each other conveyed a power and static grace that made the viewers shrink with admiration.

At the time I was considerably less than a hundred pounds, but for years the silver poses remained like visions of Greek gods, the tableau of so many naked silver bodies in every arrangement imaginable, Stacked atop each other, passing a football, hitting a home run, sliding into home plate, stepping across a goal line unmolested. And the archers, the Greek discus and hammer throwers, all were admired for five frozen minutes as the young women in the audience gasped for breath at every muscle stretched taut, then engorged, that had all of us both excited and ashamed riveted to our auditorium seats.

Only years later as I sat in the stands did I realize what that paean to the male body was in the mannered gestures of this little man with silver hair. It was a praise of youth capturing in every conceivable posture the tension of a thigh, the proud twist of a chin, the distended veins in the neck, the reach of the biceps and triceps; it was as if the most beautiful athletes in the school had been trapped in time, and feminized almost in a parade of silvery flesh. Out of Mr. A’s hair came all this and under every conceivable light, cold blue, rose, sultry yellows, and delicate purples shading into a pale brown, before white light highlighted the exposure.

In that dark auditorium that night every mind seemed dimmed to the consequences of those powerful male bodies. Only years later would these thoughts emerge with Mr. A standing there a year or two before he would retire, unscathed by anything that would impugn his reputation for having paraded so gaudily these young bodies that he had such privileged access to.

Or is all this speculation over the fact that I being tone deaf was not chosen for Glee Club? Of course, Mr. A never married. He did provide a place for some boys to stay the night at his apartment, though.