The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  Late in December, he signed us out at the front office, saying we were heading to the Fine Arts Museum to see a European photography exhibition. The day was chill. He wore his green corduroy coat and a blackfurred Russian cap that came down over his eyes. I can’t remember what I wore. All I remember is the bitter cold. He walked alongside of me, saying nothing. We ended up in Kenmore Square. He sat me down on the curb at the T-stop entrance. The cold from the subway steps seeped up through my pants, and my underwear held the frost against my skin.

  Jonah felt nothing. Jonah was on fire. “You know what this is about, Joey, don’t you? You know why they’re keeping her away from me?” You know. I knew. “The only question is … the only question is: Did she decide?”

  But I knew that one, too. She’d been his. They’d learned scores together, unfolding each other. Nothing had changed except that they’d been caught in a supply closet. “Jonah. She knew … who you are. For as long as she’s known you. She had eyes to see.”

  “A Moor, you mean? Could see I was a Moor?”

  I couldn’t tell who he was attacking: Kimberly, me, or himself. “I’m just saying. It’s not like … she didn’t know.” The ice I sat on burned me.

  “Her father didn’t know. So long as her father assumed the Boylston Academy of Music’s prizewinner was a harmless little white boy, he was just fine with her little puppy crush. Told her to enjoy herself. Sempre . . .”

  He sounded old. Knowledge, like some disease, had come over him in the night, while I was sleeping. I put my arm on his shoulder. He did not feel it, and I took it off. I didn’t know anymore how he felt about my touching him. Every sure thing was lost in the nightmare of growth. “Jonah. You don’t know. You can’t be sure that’s what it was.”

  “Of course that’s what it is. What else could it be?”

  “Her father didn’t want her … didn’t want the two of you …” I couldn’t bring myself to say what her father hadn’t wanted. I hadn’t wanted it, either.

  “He wrote her a teasing letter. Told her to live life to the fullest.”

  “Maybe he thought … Maybe he didn’t really know how …” I wanted to say how far.

  “Joey. Stupidity’s over.”

  I looked away, at the forked intersection, the newspaper shill’s stand pitched against the subway railing, the diner across Beacon Street with its tawdry Christmas tinsel strung across the plate window. It had begun to snow. Maybe it had been snowing for a while.

  “She left too fast for it to be anything else. Only one thing in the world makes people that crazy. Janos must have called Monera up. Told him the score. World-famous conductor can’t have his prize girl running around with a little brown half-breed.”

  My brother had always been my private freedom, my basement-level safety of willful unconcern. People and their blindness had been put on this earth strictly for his amusement. He’d always declared how others would see him. Every ambiguous slight, every veiled lynching had rolled off him until this one. Now the fever was in my brother’s face: the prick of our childhood’s vaccine, gone inflamed.

  “Look at us, Joey!” His tone issued from a throat that had closed long before his had even opened. “What are we doing here? Couple of freaks. You know what we should have been?”

  His words scattered me under the feet of the crowds that kept disgorging from the subway. We were homeless. We’d taken up living on this curb, no warmth, no sheltering inside to return to. Everything I knew to be certain was dissolving as fast as the fat flakes of snow landing on my brother’s face.

  “We should have been real Negroes. Really black.” His lips were frozen; his words were a runny egg. “Pitch-black. Black as the sharps and flats. Black as that guy over there.” His thumb flicked up a little trigger, and his finger targeted a man cutting diagonally across Brookline. I grabbed his hand. He turned and smiled. “Don’t you think so, Joe? We should have been simple, straight-up. Black as Ethiopia in a power outage.” He looked around, picking a fight with all of indifferent Kenmore Square. “We’d know where we stood, anyway. Our self-serving little rich kid friends would have stoned us to death. Janos wouldn’t even have taken me into his fucking school. Nobody would’ve bothered using me. I wouldn’t have to sing.”

  “Jonah!” I held my head and groaned. “What are you saying? They wouldn’t expect a black person to sing?”

  Jonah laughed like a crazy man. “See what you mean. Not without dancing. And not the shit they make me sing now.”

  “Shit, Jonah? Shit?” Everything we loved, everything we’d grown up on.

  Jonah only chuckled. He raised his palms, the innocent victim. “You know what I’m saying. We wouldn’t be … where we are.”

  We sat in our unreal lean-to, curled against the crowd. Snow accumulated in drifts around our feet. My mind raced. I had to keep us here. Classical music was all I knew how to do. “Real black … very black people sing what we sing.”

  “Sure they do, Joey.”

  “Look at Robeson.”

  “You look at Robeson, Joey. I’ve had enough of looking.”

  “What about Marian Anderson?” The woman our parents claimed had brought them together. “She’s just cracked the Met. The door’s open now. By the time we’re …”

  Jonah shrugged. “Greatest alto of the twentieth century. And they throw her a little second-scene bone, fifteen years past her prime.”

  I plunged ahead, down a path I couldn’t make out. “What about Dorothy Maynor? Mattiwilda Dobbs?”

  “You done?”

  “There’s more. Lots more.”

  “How many is lots?”

  “Plenty,” I said, drowning. “Camilla Williams. Jules Bledsoe. Robert McFerrin.” I didn’t need to name them. He, too, had them all memorized. Everyone who’d ever given us something to go on.

  “Keep going.”

  “Jonah. Black people are breaking into classical music all the time. That woman who just played Tosca on national television.”

  “Price.” He couldn’t help smiling in pleasure. “What about her?” He flung his arms at me. “Look at us. Two halves of nothing. Halfway to nowhere. You and me, Joey. Out here in the middle of …” His hand swept the angular plaza, the people hurrying through the snow. “We’d have been better off. Nobody’s going to want what they can’t even—”

  “She wanted you.” I couldn’t bring myself to say the bloodless girl’s name. “She knew who you were. She knew that you … weren’t white.”

  “Did she? Did she? She’s twenty-five jumps ahead of me, then.”

  “Don’t torture yourself, Jonah. You don’t know. They might have taken her out of school for any—”

  “She would have written.” Furious at my trust, my blindness. “Joey. You know how they got the word mulatto?”

  I was a long time answering. “You think I’m stupid, don’t you? You think I’m a tagalong idiot.” I tried to stand, but couldn’t. My legs were a statue’s. My butt was frozen to the curb. When I managed to rock forward and rise, his hand held me down. His face was full of wonder at realizing how much I’d stored up for years, in silence.

  “I don’t think anything of the sort, Joseph. I just think your parents brought you up in a dream.”

  “Funny. I was just thinking that about your parents. So tell me. Where’d the word come from?” The one I hated, whatever its origin.

  “It’s Spanish for ‘mule.’ Know why we’re called that?”

  “Cross between a horse and a … whatever.”

  “City boy.” He reached out to pull my hat down over my eyes. “They call us mules because we can’t reproduce ourselves. Think of it. No matter who you marry—”

  “You’d never have married her, Jonah. It was just a game. Neither of you ever believed you were going to … Just a little operetta the two of you were dabbling in.” Yet their ending, written by another.

  I’d never talked back to him before. I sat still and waited for death. But he didn’t even hear me. He started u
p again, resigned. “You and me, Mule. The two of us: one of a kind.” What she’d always called us, our mother. Our secret bond of pride, all the years of growing up. “Couple of damn bears on roller skates is what we are.”

  A pair of ankles appeared to my left. I looked up at a policeman, staring down at us. His badge name looked Italian. He was as dark as either of us. Darkness was never really the issue.

  The dark Italian scowled. “You boys are blocking traffic.”

  Jonah looked up at the man, all earnest attention, just waiting for the lift of his baton to stand and deliver an aria.

  “You hear me?”

  I nodded dumbly, for all of us.

  “Then get the hell out of here, pronto. Before I cuff and print you.”

  Jonah did a three-point round-off, pushing back up to his feet. “I can’t move,” I bleated. I’d frozen into place. I’d have to go on sitting, freezing to death, like some doomed Jack London hero.

  “You hear me?” the officer said. “You deaf?” Darker than olive. Maybe he had a secret Turkish ancestor hiding out in the family tree foliage. He grabbed me by one shoulder and dragged me to my feet. He twisted my arm so roughly that, had I been my own grandson, I’d have had grounds for a lawsuit.

  Jonah raved at the policeman. “I’m a mulatto bel canto castrato with a legato smorzato.” I pushed him away. He pushed back, leaning toward the cop and waving his finger. “That’s my obbligato motto, Otto.”

  “So gesundheit, already.” The man turned away from Jonah without a thought. He’d seen crazier. Every working hour: the sinkhole of human illness, on every block of his repeating beat. He threatened us vaguely with the back of his hand. “Get lost, hoodlums.” We hobbled off, my limbs still stiff with the season. From a hundred yards, he yelled, “Merry Christmas.” Anxious to thank him for his lenience, I returned the greeting.

  One of my legs was cement. I called out to Jonah to slow down. We walked back along Yawkey Way, past the ballpark. Sometimes, in the early fall, from our room in the conservatory, we could hear the shouts of the desperate stands. Now the Fenway sat abandoned, a nuisance winter slum.

  Jonah walked two steps ahead of me, hands in his pockets. His words formed frozen vapor puffs on the air. “I’m worried about her, Joey. Her parents … Her father might have …”

  I wanted to tell him. But I was his brother, before anything.

  By the time we got back to the conservatory, the snow had crusted us both in white. The roads lapping the Fens had that low, gray, angled, cloudy light of civil defense drills. Cars padded along at half speed on the strewn wadding. We couldn’t even see the school until we were in it.

  We stepped back into hushed excitement. Students backed away from us in the corridor where we entered. For a moment, we were that sterile cross-species my brother had said we were. A boy we didn’t know addressed us. “You’re in trouble. They’re looking all over for you.”

  “Who?” Jonah challenged. But the boy just shrugged and pointed toward the office. His eyes shone a little at the thought of the angel-voiced Jonah Strom taking a fall.

  We shook the crust of white from us and headed for the office. I wanted to run; the faster we owned up, the lighter the sentence might be. But nothing could move Jonah from his usual hallway pace. In the office, even the adults shied from us. We’d somehow gone beyond them on our short walk, traveled to a place they weren’t ready to reach.

  The assistant head laid into us. “Where have you been? We’ve torn the whole school apart looking for you.”

  “We signed out,” Jonah said.

  Our scolder was distraught beyond the scale of our offense. “Your father’s waiting for you. He’s upstairs in your room.”

  A look passes between us, pinning us where we stand. A look we’ll exchange forever. We take the stairs in a sprint, two at a step. My brother shoots up ahead, landing after landing, still in full breath when I’m already sucking air. He could stop and let loose a high A for fifteen seconds, without strain.

  I reach the summit, gasping. My brother already dashes down the hall. I follow Jonah into our room in time to hear him ask Da, “What’s going on? What are you doing here?” He has his theories, already. He sounds more thrilled than winded.

  The man sitting on Earl Huber’s bed is not our father. This man is bent, shrunken, more bag man than mathematical physicist. His skin is drained. Under his clashing cardigan, his chest heaves. The face swings up to me, some shrill claim at blood relations. But this is not a face I’ve ever had to meet. Behind the tortoiseshell glasses, under the cubed forehead, the muscles fall slack. Our father thinks he’s smiling at us. A beseeching smile, gone begging. A smile that expands and settles in me, driving me from childhood.

  “How are you boys? How are you two?” The German accent has thickened to a gruel, the how broadening to who. I thank God that we’re alone, no boys from the C cities in Ohio to explain things to.

  “Da?” Jonah asks. “What’s wrong? Everything okay?”

  “Okay?” our father echoes. Empirical reductionist. Okay has no measurement. Okay is a meter stick that shrinks with the speed of the measurer. He inhales. His jaw flops open to form a word. But the puff of consonant clutches on his throat’s thin ledge, a suicide wanting to jump, wanting to be coaxed back in. “There was ein Feuer. An explosion. Everything … burned. She’s …” All the words he auditions and rejects hang in the air between us. And my father still smiles, as if he might somehow be able to accept what he can’t even name.

  “What’s happened to her?” Jonah shouts. “Where did you hear this?”

  My father turns to his eldest son. He tilts his head like the puzzled mutt hearing his master’s voice coming out of the gramophone. He reaches out a hand to pierce the confusion. The hand, too small for anything, drops back into his lap. He’s still smiling: Everything everywhere already is. He nods his head. “Your mother is dead.”

  “Oh,” my brother says. And an instant too late, his relief turns to horror.

  APRIL – MAY 1939

  She was back in Philly on the 2:00 A.M. train. That very same night. No time at all for anything to have happened while she was in D.C. Yet she slipped back into the sleeping house like a criminal, bearing a secret wider than the Potomac. And she was still up, after four hours of feigned sleep, dragging out of bed to make her morning classes, and, after that, her job at the hospital, if she lived that long.

  Her mother met her in the kitchen, the question on her lips, although all Philadelphia already knew the answer. So many radios had tuned to last night’s broadcast, it was a miracle the city hadn’t fished the wavelength dry. Every listener had hung on the sound of her own private Marian, singing from the steps of that most public Mall.

  “How was your concert?” Nettie Ellen asked, as if Delia herself had been the singer. Something in the woman knew, as sure as history: If her daughter hadn’t performed the night before, she was clearly performing up a storm that Monday morning.

  “Oh, Mama. The biggest recital in the history of singing. The whole country was there—a dozen times more people than turned out for Jesus’s loaves and fishes thing. And Miss Anderson fed everybody on even less than he did.”

  “Uh-huh. Good, then?” Nettie Ellen had heard every note of the shattering performance, cramped over the living room crystal receiver, that voice sailing up crisp and clear over the crackles of static. She, too, had swallowed down the bruise rising in her throat, the burning bile taste of hope—hope again, such foolishness, after all the corpses that had lined the way to that day. She’d read, before her daughter was out of bed, this morning’s headlines, lobbed by Monday’s paperboy over the porch into the burning bush: AMERICA THRILLS TO COLORED VOICE. Nettie hadn’t time for America. She was up to her wrists in baking powder, flicking the bits of egg-wetted flour around in the stoneware mixing bowl. She beat at the recipe with a force her daughter couldn’t fail to read. Nothing short of Judgment Day justified a grown woman coming home at 2:00 A.M., waltzing in like th
e whole world had turned itself inside out and hollering lawless.

  But the lawless girl had gone strange to her, docile and awed. “Mama. Mama. I don’t have time for biscuits.” Nettie just glared, and Delia set about, helpless, to help make them. In her sleep-starved daze, Delia even got the children up and pointed them toward their school clothes while her mother kneaded and punished the recalcitrant dough.

  The mystery rose up between them, too thick for naming over biscuits and gravy. Not that Nettie Ellen needed any names spelled out. Seventy-five thousand lovers of fancy singing all gathered in a single place, and of course her Delia was going to cross paths with one who’d keep her out until all hours of creation. Clear as the features on her face: The girl was love’s zombie. Sighing like a chicken on an open fire. Setting the table in a dream, laying out the silverware as if spreading flowers on a grave.

  Nettie Ellen had been waiting some time for this, braced for the spell that would turn her oldest child into another creature. She knew it would eventually settle in, as rapidly as spring-one minute, the lawn ratty and bare; the next, rolling in banks of aconite the color of condensed sun. It would as ever be the last, great test of selfless mothering: how to lay all her care down and let her own flesh and blood grow strange to her.

  From the start, Nettie had vowed to rise to that last parental sacrifice before her girl forced her. But she hadn’t foreseen this pure foolishness, her own daughter turning shy on her, as if Nettie hadn’t spent years attending to the girl’s body—sick, naked, and needy—as if a girl’s mother didn’t already know all about the need flesh was made for. Silly timidity, the mother had expected. But this, her daughter’s frightened, inward flowering, was past all understanding.

  Charles and Michael burst into the kitchen, filled with that good night’s sleep Delia would never again enjoy. They launched their industrious breakfast torments, warbling at her, throwing their noses and pinkies in the air. Big sister just cupped their closely cropped heads to her, one in each palm, and gazed at them, as if memorizing their faces before stepping off remembrance’s dock into oblivion. It scared them witless, and the boys took their chairs without another word.