The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  I didn’t think the little rented hall would fill. But people kept coming until they couldn’t get in. Even my father had underestimated, and he needed to call in more folding chairs. It stunned me to discover my mother had known so many people, let alone could bring them out on a bleak midwinter Sunday afternoon. “Jonah?” I kept asking under my breath. “Jonah? Where did all these people come from?” He looked and shook his head.

  Some of the gathering turned out for my father’s sake. I recognized several of his colleagues from the university. Here and there, black yarmulkes clung to the crowns of balding skulls. Even Da briefly wore one. Others in the crowd came for Ruth, kids she went to school with, neighbor children we never really knew but whom Ruth had befriended. But most of the room turned out to send off my mother: her students, her fellow church circuit singers, her improbable assortment of friends. In my child’s mind, I’d always thought of Mama as an exile, barred from a country that should have been hers. But she’d furnished exile and thrown it open wide enough to make a life in.

  From up front in the room, mourning’s showcase row, I turned around to sneak a look at her crowd. I scanned the range of colors. Every hue I’d ever seen sat somewhere in that room. The faces behind me shone in all gradations, shades split and glinting like the shards of a lightsplashed mosaic. Each one insisted on its own species. Flesh casts slanted off everywhere, this way mahogany, that way walnut or pine. Clumps of bronze and copper, pools of peach, ivory, and pearl. Now and then, some extreme: bleached paste from out of the flour bin of a Danish pastry kitchen, or a midnight cinder from down in the engine room of history’s ocean liner. But in the spectrum’s bulging middle, all imaginable traces and tinges of brown packed onto folding chairs against one another in the crowded room. They gave themselves up by contrast, taupe turning evidence on ambers, tan showing up tawny, pinks and gingers and teaks giving the lie to every available name ever laid over them. All ratios of honey to tea, coffee to cream—fawn, fox, ebony, buff, beige, bay: I couldn’t begin to tell brown from brown. Brown like pine needles. Brown like cured tobacco. Tones that might have been indistinguishable by daylight—chestnut, sorrel, roan—pulled away from the tones they sat next to under the low lamps of those close quarters.

  Africa, Asia, Europe, and America had slammed into one another, and these splintered tints were the shards of that impact. Once, there were as many shades of flesh as there were isolated corners of the earth. Now there were many times that many. How many gradations did anyone see? This polytonal, polychordal piece played for a stone-deaf audience who heard only tonic and dominant, and were pretty shaky even picking out those two. But all the pitches in the chromatic scale had turned out for my mother, and many of the microtones between.

  This was my stolen, forbidden look back. Next to me, Jonah kept craning his neck, twisting in his chair, scanning the audience for someone. At last, Da told him, as sharply as he ever spoke to us, “Stop, now. Sit still.”

  “Where’s Mama’s family?” Jonah’s voice reverted to soprano. A field of welts marked his face where he’d tried to shave. “Is that them? Are they here? They have to come for this, don’t they?”

  Da hushed him again, lapsing into German. His words floated out without bearing, spreading across all the places he’d ever lived. He spoke rapidly, forgetting that his sons had a different mother tongue. I made out something about how the people in Philadelphia would have their own service, so everyone could attend without having to make the journey. Jonah didn’t catch any more than I did.

  My father wore the same style of double-breasted gray suit already years out of date when he’d gotten married in one. He studied his knees with the same baffled smile with which he’d told us our mother was dead. Ruth sat next to Da, tugging at the sleeves of her dress’s black velvet, whispering to herself, her hair a tent of snarls.

  A well-meaning but bewildered minister told my mother’s life story, which he didn’t know from Eve’s. Then friends stepped in to salvage the wreck the eulogy made of her. They told stories about her girlhood, a mystery to me. They named her parents and gave them a past. They brought to life her brothers and sisters, and recalled their three-story house in Philadelphia, a family fortress I pictured as an older, wooden version of our brownstone, which had burned down around her. The speakers seemed almost ready to fight over what they had most loved in her. One said grace; another said humor. Another said her foolish belief that the worst in us was fixable. No one said what they wanted. No mention of being spit on in elevators, no threatening letters, no daily humiliations. No talk of fire, no explosion, no being melted alive. People in the audience called out aid at every pause, joining the refrains like those congregations my mother once sang for. I sat up front, nodding at each testimonial, smiling when I thought I was supposed to smile. I would have spared them all, told every speaker to sit down, said that they didn’t have to say anything, if it had been in my power.

  My mother’s student, a bass-baritone named Mr. Winter, told how she’d been refused by the school where she first wanted to study. “Not a lesson went by for me when I didn’t bless those sorry bastards for putting Mrs. Strom on another path. But if I were a federal judge, I’d sentence them to one afternoon. Just one. Listening to the sounds that woman could make.”

  It came my father’s turn to speak. No one expected him to, but he insisted. He stood, his suit flying outward in all directions. I tried to straighten him up a little as he rose, which sent a nervous laugh through the whole congregation. I wanted to die. I’d have given all our lives for hers, and come out ahead.

  My father walked up behind the podium. He bowed his head. He smiled out across the audience, a pale beam aimed at other galaxies. He took off his glasses and wiped them with his handkerchief, the way he always did when overcome. As always, he succeeded only in smearing around his eyebrow grease. For a moment, he blinked, sightless, a bloated, poached whitefish lost in this sea of real color. How could my mother have seen past such a skin?

  Da slid his glasses back on, and became our Da again. The thickness of his spectacles made him cock his head. The raised side of his face went up in a horrible grin. He held out his right hand and shook it in the air, about to start one of his lectures on relativity by telling a funny story about clocks on moving trains or twins on rocket ships traveling near the speed of light. He shook his hand again, and his mouth fell open, preparing the first word. A dry clicking came out of his throat. His voice spread across thousands of staggered attacks, all the part-songs he’d ever started with her. He floundered on the upbeat.

  At last, the first word cleared the hurdle of his larynx. “There is an old Jewish proverb.” This wasn’t my father. My father was out standing in the face of some terrible bare wind. “A proverb that goes, ‘The bird and the fish can fall in love …’”

  The jaw dropped and the clicking came on again—dry reeds on a riverbank scraping one another. He held still for so long, even my embarrassment, in that dry clicking, scattered, along with the room’s every discomfort, into silence. My father lifted up his chin again and smiled. Then, with a crumpled apology, he sat down.

  We sang: the only part of the day that might have pleased her. Mr. Winter delivered “Lord God of Abraham,” from Mendelssohn’s Elijah. The best of my mother’s amateur women took a run at the Schubert “Ave Maria,” Miss Anderson’s hallmark, so loved by my mother that she herself had not sung it since girlhood. The student singer couldn’t control any note above her second E. Grief tore up her vibrato, and yet, she’d never again come so close to a perfect rendering.

  One by one, then in groups, the voices my mother once sang with took their turn singing without her. They littered the room with fragments of Aida. They sang Russian art songs whose words were a wash of phonetic watercolor. They sang spirituals, the only folk music that always harmonized itself out to four, five, even six abandoned and abiding parts. They stood and sang spontaneous bits of gospel, all the available scraps of improvised salvation.

/>   For the briefest, thinnest moment, I heard it again, the game of Crazed Quotations—my parents’ eternal courtship ritual and their children’s first singing school. Only here, the counterpoint slowed and drew itself into a single thread. Deep turned to wide, chords to lines. Yet something of that old melodic piling up remained. And the something that remained was my mother. She’d come from more places than even her hybrid children could get to, and each one of those clashing places sang its signature tune. Once, those competing strains had fought to pass through the ear all at once. Now they gave up and took turns, polite, at last, in death, each making way for the other, lengthwise down the testament of time.

  My father didn’t try to sing. He was too smart for that. But he didn’t stay silent, either. He’d written out a three-minute quodlibet, a record of our old evenings together, nights that had seemed endless, once, but had more than ended. Into those three minutes, he packed every quote that fit the seed harmonic progression. He could not, in any conceivable universe, have composed the piece in the few days since her death. Yet if he’d written out the piece in advance, it could only have been with this occasion in mind.

  He’d scored it for five voices, as if we were still the singers. He might as well have written an aria for Mama herself to perform. An ad hoc quintet of her friends and students stood in for us, while we sat in the mute audience. On short notice, they worked a miracle. They reassembled Da’s crazed pastiche, giving it the virtuosity of an airy good-bye. Had they heard the thing for what it was, they’d never have gotten through it: our family’s nightly musical offering, thanks for a gift we thought would always be ours.

  Da performed a feat of musical reconstruction. All our old quotation games had died and burned, as sure as every family album. Yet here was one intact again, exactly the collage we’d sung one night, in everything but the particulars. Da somehow recovered that name, too familiar to retrieve. He was the transcriber, but he could never have composed this piece alone. She was there in counterpoint, laying down line on line. Note by note, he pulled her back from the grave. Her “Balm in Gilead” careened into his Cherubini. Her Brahms Alto Rhapsody bickered with his growled klezmer. Debussy, Tallis, Basie: For the length of that collage, they made a sovereign state where no law prevented that shacking up, such unholy harmonies. This was the only composition Da ever wrote down, his one answer to the murderous question of where the fish and the bird might build their impossible nest.

  My brother and I were slated to go on after Da’s piece. I stole a look at Jonah as the group headed toward the work’s surprise, inevitable home. His face was a nest of wasps. He didn’t want to stand and perform in front of this audience. Didn’t want to sing for them. Not now, not ever. But we had to.

  The piano in that rented room played damp and wayward. My brother’s voice was wrecked with refusal. He’d chosen a song he could no longer sing, one pitched up a childhood above his highest note. I’d tried every way possible to talk him out of the choice. But Jonah wouldn’t be moved. He wanted to do that Mahler he and Mama had once auditioned together. “Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht?” Who thought up this little song?

  This was the way he wanted to remember her. Two years after their joint performance had gotten him into the academy, Jonah had asked that she not come pick him up at the holidays. Now the source of all his love and shame had died before he could release her from that banishment. He’d carry this fact with him for the rest of his life. Not even singing would be able to expel it.

  Two nights earlier, he’d come up with the monstrous idea of singing the whole song in falsetto, up in the original soprano of The Boy’s Magic Horn, like some grotesque countertenor straining for the unreachable return. I made him hear the absurdity. We took it down an octave, and except for that jarring dissonance—the innocent words sung in his exiled range—we got through it. The mourners must have found the tribute inexplicable. What did this darling girl in her mountain house have to do with the matter-of-fact, irreverent black woman from Philadelphia, burned alive before the age of forty? But the girl in the song was Mama. Who could declare how her sons saw her? Death mixes all the races. Now more than ever, she was that girl, looking out forever on the original green meadow.

  Our house had burned and our mother was dead. But we had no body to prove it. I wasn’t old enough to believe, without the evidence of seeing. To me, all these people had gathered to sing, rehearsing for some future first anniversary of the missing one’s return. Who thought up this little song? Only when the hidden mountain girl took my mother’s face did she at last appear to me. And only in my father’s tortured, fairy-tale language could wund rhyme with gesund:

  My heart is sore.

  Come, Treasure, and heal it!

  Your black-brown eyes

  Have wounded me.

  Your rosy mouth

  Makes hearts healthy,

  Makes boys wise,

  Makes the dead live …

  Who, then, thought up this pretty little song?

  Three geese carried it over the water,

  Two gray and one white.

  And for those who can’t sing this little song,

  These geese will whistle it.

  I pressed the keys that her fingers once had pressed, in the same order she’d once pressed them. Jonah whistled his way through the tune, inventing it in midflight. I stayed with him, beat for beat. The extra octave in his thickened cords disappeared. He sang the way others only thought to themselves. His voice came to the notes like a bee to a flower, amazed by the precision of its own flight: light, true, unthinking, doomed. Everything was over in a minute and a half.

  Your voice is so beautiful. I want you to sing at my wedding. She never knew how much the joke terrified me. So I’m married already That can’t stop me from wanting you to sing at my wedding! Maybe even being dead would not stop her wanting. Maybe this was the wedding she wanted us to sing for.

  Her brown-black eyes might have made us healthy, might have made us wise. Might have raised us all from the dead, had she not died first. Who can say why she loved that pretty little song? It wasn’t hers. It was some other world’s. This life wouldn’t let her sing it. Mama’s three geese—two gray and one white—carried the song back over the water for her, to the place where she never got to live.

  I played once more that day, a final accompaniment to finish out the service. Throughout all the speeches and songs, Rootie sat on the wooden chair next to Da, picking at her stocking knees, peeling her shoe soles, her wayward hands daring her mother to come from out of the burning house and slap them. For nights after the fire, Ruth had gone to bed wailing and awakened in screams. She’d choke on her spittle, demanding to know where Mama was. She wouldn’t stop weeping until I told her no one knew. After a week, my sister settled into a hard, safe cyst, turning her secret over and over. The world was lying to her. For unknown reasons, no one would tell her what had really happened. The grown-ups were setting her a task, a test for which she was completely on her own.

  Even at the memorial, Ruth was already working on that mystery. She sat in her chair, twisting her hem into ribbons, turning over the evidence. Daytime, at home, and everyone escaped but one. Ruth knew Mama. Mama would never have been caught like that. All during the remembrances, Rootie kept up a steady subvocal dialogue, quizzing and teapartying with her now-vaporized dolls. Now and then, she scribbled into the palm of her hand with her index finger, indelible notes to herself on her ready skin, all the things she must never forget. I leaned down to hear what she was whispering to herself. In the smallest voice, she was repeating, “I’ll make them find you.”

  However unforgivable, we saved my sister for last. Ruth was our mother’s best memory, the thing most like Mama in. the world. At ten, she’d already begun to show the voice Mama had. Ruth had all the goods—a pitch that matched Jonah’s, Mama’s richness, a feel for phrase beyond anything I could produce. She might have gone beyond us all in music, given a different world.

  She
sang that learner’s song, by Bach and not by Bach, the simplest tune in the world, too simple for Bach himself to have written it without help. The tune appeared in Bach’s wife’s notebook, the place where she scribbled down all her lessons. Ruth had learned it from Mama, without a lesson at all.

  Bist du bei mir, geh’ ich mit Freuden

  zum Sterben und zu meiner Ruh’.

  Ach, wie vergnügt wär’ so mein Ende,

  es drückten deine lieben Hände

  mir die getreuen Augen zu!

  If you are with me, I’ll go gladly

  to my death and to my rest.

  Ah, how pleasant would my end be,

  with your dear hands pressing

  shut my faithful eyes!

  Root sang as if she and I were the only two souls left alive. Her sound was small but as clear as a music box. I kept off the sustain pedal, sounding each chord almost tentatively, not with the press of my fingers but with the release. Her held lines floated above my stepwise modulations like moonlight on a lost, small craft. I tried not to listen, except to stay inside the throw of her beam.

  The simplest tune in the world, as simple and strange as breathing. Who knows what the room heard? I’m not even sure Rootie understood the words. They may have been meant originally for God. But that’s not where Ruth sent them.

  We sat down to a silent room. Ruth never again sang in her father’s language, never again performed her mother’s beloved European music in public. Never again, until she had to.

  The room sang itself out with “On That Great Gettin’ Up Morning.” The song wasn’t listed in the program, but it came off almost as if by plan. My mother’s friends let loose with the sunniest syncopated major. One exchange of glances was enough to set the send-off tempo. Voices with voices, rich, rolling, knowing we’d never have any other account but this. The ad libs grew dizzy, and I checked Jonah to see if we might add some ornaments to the fray. He just looked at me, swollen, and said, “Take it away, if you want.”