The Voiceover Artist. Dave Reidy

      I HAD NEVER done a studio session. I didn’t have an agent. I’d started speaking again only three years before. But I already thought of myself as a voiceover artist. Five months after croaking the word that broke my lengthy silence, I decided that telling myself I am something more—and then working to make a truth of that lie—gave me my only hope of ever pulling even with my brother.

      In an attempt to nudge my self-conception closer to reality, I volunteered, a couple of weeks after moving (alone) to Chicago in early June 2010, to serve as a lector at St. Asella’s, a church a few blocks from my apartment. I supposed that reading scripture aloud before strangers, with no opportunity for a re-take and no engineer to touch up my mistakes, would help to prepare me for the first time I’d step into a sound booth in a professional studio. And St. Asella’s, in its summertime desperation for able-voiced volunteers, required no audition, only a stand-here-sit-there training session with a weary liturgical minister and a signed (though unenforceable) commitment to lector weekly through Christmas. So it was that I first found myself lifting a Book of Gospels above my head of straight, dull brown hair and following two altar servers down a church’s center aisle to provoke in public the stutter that had prolonged, by many years, the silence I’d chosen as a seven-year-old boy.

      The enormous pipe organ boomed in the church’s choir loft, which was empty except for the organist. Sunday mass at a thriving parish might have featured a cantor, who would lead the assembled in song. It seemed that someone at St. Asella’s had decided to drown out the few singing voices in its anemic congregation. As I walked, I took a waggle: four noiseless, almost imperceptible, lateral shakes of the head where it meets the neck. While rebuilding my voice three years before, I’d discovered that a waggle could ward off the tension that incessantly besieged my vocal folds. In large part because I took waggles whenever I needed them, hiding them, when I could, in a glance at a clock or behind the thoughtful expression of a person solving an equation in his head, I had not suffered a stuttering fit since May 25, 2008—two years, one month and two days before this first attempt at lectoring. I marked the time from my most recent fit as a recovering alcoholic counted the days from her last drink. Why shouldn’t I? Stuttering, like alcoholism, is a disease—my father suffered from both conditions—and neither has a sure-fire cure. And just as the urge to drink might clamor a little louder in a stressful situation, so my stutter’s grip tightens when I become even a little anxious. As I marched toward the front of that church, the prospect of reading aloud in front of people was only the second most upsetting thing on my mind, so my stutter was giving my waggles all they could handle.

      The day before—the last Saturday in June—a pale yellow envelope with a Brooklyn return address had arrived in the mail. Enclosed with a note on heavy, artisanal card stock was a check for $748, the amount I had loaned to Brittany, my (former) girlfriend, to pay for the emergency extraction of her wisdom teeth.

      Brittany and I had made plans to move to Chicago together after we left Southern Illinois University as undistinguished members of the 2010 graduating class. Then, at the end of April, just a month before graduation, Brittany told me that she had changed her mind: she would not be moving with me.

      I had not seen this coming.

      My career prospects—a voiceover artist with a stutter: it doesn’t look promising—were one of about thirty potential reasons Brittany would not join me in relocating from downstate Carbondale to Chicago. But the reasons she gave me that day were about Chicago itself: the cold winters, the city’s distance from her mother’s home in Delaware, and the limited market for rare books, the treasures it was her dream to buy and sell for a living. When I asked where she wanted to go instead, she said she didn’t know. Eventually, I understood that wherever Brittany Case was going, I was not welcome.

      For the better part of a month, I’d been holding out hope that Brittany would find her new city of residence, Brooklyn, as lonely as I’d found Chicago and change her mind again. Unless she’d found a job or sold a very rare book, the check suggested that Brittany had decided it was worth the financial and emotional cost of dipping further into her trust fund—the same fund her father was doing time in a federal penitentiary for having nearly emptied—to sever the final tie between us.

      The note said only, “Hope you’re doing well, Simon. Britt.”

      I had never called her Britt. Not once. The note’s signature hurt more than the check did.

      As I relived this moment from the day before—the moment I realized Brittany was never moving to Chicago—just minutes before I was to read Bible stories to the parishioners of St. Asella’s, I felt the slipknot around my vocal folds drawing tighter.

      At the edge of the sanctuary, I bowed from the waist before the altar, sneaking a waggle on the way down. Then I walked around to the altar’s congregation-facing side and placed the tall, red Book of Gospels on the wooden table. I stepped back to accommodate the heft of Fr. James Dunne, the parish’s pastor and only priest. As he leaned forward to kiss the altar, I passed through the sanctuary and took the seat reserved for the lector, in the front pew on the left-hand side of the center aisle.

      The organist held the final chord of the opening song for several measures and cut it abruptly. Fr. Dunne blessed and greeted the assembled. With my body angled toward the center of the altar, I stole glances at the people around and behind me. Near the front of the dimly lit nave, but not sitting together, were two African-American women dressed in skirt suits and broad-rimmed summer hats. In the front two rows of the narrower pews on the far right side stood six Filipina women of middle age. One of the women held her hands to her chin, the beaded string of a rosary interlaced with her fingers. There were a few older couples whose wealth was visible in their health-club vigor and the quality of their casual weekend clothes. A handful of younger adults, most of them women, sat further back, no closer than the middle rows. I counted five people who looked to be homeless in the last few pews, far behind the Filipinas. Despite the summer heat, one of the homeless women wore a heavy overcoat, and a navy stocking cap pulled low over her eyes. Her cheeks had baked to a deep, brick red in the sun.

      The cover of the weekly bulletin I had scanned at the back of the church noted, alongside a faded illustration of a porcelain-complected, heaven-gazing girl I assumed to be St. Asella, that the parish had been founded in 1907 by a small group of nuns dedicated to serving the local Italian immigrants. If the people of St. Asella’s had once had everything in common, from homeland to employment prospects to holiday traditions, they did not seem to have much in common anymore.

      As Fr. Dunne continued the opening prayer, an aged woman walked slowly up the right side aisle with a four-footed cane in her left hand. At first, I assumed that her gentle, close-lipped smile was a mask intended to conceal the aching pain in her hip or knee, or both. But I understood almost immediately after having it that my first impression was wrong. The woman’s smile, I remember thinking, seemed to emanate from within her, an authentic expression of a grace and self-possession I had never possessed. Her husband—they both wore thin wedding bands of dull gold—trailed her. Taking short, unsteady steps, he careened more than he walked, but covered ground no faster than his wife did. He held her elbow with his right hand until they reached the third-row pew. I guessed that this habit had been modified as age took its toll on the man’s independence. He was still escorting his wife, but she was leading him.

      Also among the assembled were the wraiths that had haunted almost every mass I had ever attended: solitary older men whose loneliness was visible in their wispy, unkempt hair, ill-fitting eyeglasses and ratty windbreakers. I wondered if the men had any family to visit or friends to meet at a diner or corner bar, or if the walk to Sunday mass was their only regular foray out of tiny, dirty apartments. Either way, I wished they had stayed home. They were what I would have been if I had never