The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  “What why?” he answers.

  “Da! Why, what you just said.” Just does not mean just, to my father, the professor of liquid time. “Why did Hitler say the clocks were Jewish?”

  “Because they were!” His eyes glint with laughing pride, which they almost never show. “The Jews were the only people who figured out that everything we think is true about time and space isn’t! The Jews were everywhere, looking at what the world really looks like. Hitler hated that. He hated anyone smarter than he was.”

  “Da was plotting against Hitler!” Jonah shouts. Da shushes him.

  I can’t tell yet—I can’t tell anymore—whether Da is serious. I can’t even tell what he’s talking about, except for the Hitler part. Hitler, I know. On those torturing afternoons when Jonah and I are banished from the house and made to play with the neighborhood boys, it’s always the war—Normandy, Bastogne, crossing the Rhine. The world war lives on in small boys, still happily vicious, four years after the adults give it up. Somebody has to be Hitler, and that somebody’s always the Strom boys. One of us must be Uncle Adolf, and the other his demented officers. We two make the best Hitler, because we talk funny, die well, and lie so still for so long, it scares everyone. We lie still until the day our playmates re-create the fall of Berlin by setting us on fire. After that, for a long time, we get to stay home.

  We walk along Overlook, my father bobbing his head at all the passersby. Twenty blocks and sixteen years away—depending on your clock—is the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X will die. Already, a million lifelines lead there. Already, that murder is happening—on this block, the next, a mile away, more distant prisons. The strands of the killing tighten for decades, and my own threads weave around them.

  We duck down the subway steps to the rank center of the earth, the scent of vomit, newsprint, cigarette stubs, and pee. Da is talking again, about mirrors and beams of light and people at the ends of oncoming trains, trains that could take us to Berlin in seconds. There’s a scuffle down on the platform. Da leads us away to safety, talking all the while.

  “I had been already born for four years,” he says, “four whole years before anyone saw space-time as one single thing. I already lived four whole years before anyone saw gravity could bend time! It took the Jews!” The family he’s told us so little about. All dead.

  Years pass. More than thirty of them. I’m in a train station in Frankfurt. We’re touring with Voces Antiquae. Jonah asks me to buy him some nuts at the snack stand. “Almonds.” It surprises me that, half-German, I’ve never learned so common a word. Then it surprises me worse: I have. I’ve known the magic substance my whole life. The stuff’s everywhere, as common and cheap as years.

  If there is no single now, then there can’t have ever been a single then. Still, there is this Sunday, the spring of 1949. I’m seven. Everyone I love is still alive, except for the ones who died before I met them. We sit together on the hard subway seats, Jonah and I, with Da between us.

  “Did you take pleasure, my boys?” He rhymes the word with choice. “Did you enjoy?”

  “Da?” I’ve never heard Jonah so dreamy, so distant. He’s on a rocket ship, leaving this poor backward planet behind. But when he comes back, the world has aged away and he alone remains. “Da? When I grow up?” Not really asking permission. Just making sure to let us know well in advance. “When I’m an adult?” He waves back behind us, toward the Cloisters, falling away from us as fast as we fall forward. “I want to do what those people do.”

  My father’s answer startles me, though not so much there and then. From here, half a century on, I can’t make it out. His every blood relation but us is murdered, killed for spreading relativity’s plot. He, too, should be dead, but he’s still here. A dozen years an immigrant, and in no time, he’s become pure American. “You two,” he tells us, grinning, his lone answer. “You two will be anyone you want.”

  MY BROTHER AS ORPHEUS

  The fire didn’t kill her, Da said.

  “She would have lost awareness a long time before. You must remember the rate of rapid oxidation for so large a blaze.” The fire would have sucked all the air from our house long before the flames touched her. “And then there was the explosion.” The furnace, that time bomb. “She would have been knocked unconscious.” That was why she never got out. The middle of the day, Mama quick and healthy, and no one else killed.

  She couldn’t have felt a thing. That’s what Da meant, trying to comfort us. The fire did burn her. It did turn her to char, nothing but ash, bone, and her wedding ring. Da’s consolation was infinitely feebler: The fire didn’t kill her. She was dead already by the time she burned.

  Still, he reminded us whenever he thought we needed it. The fire didn’t kill her. Jonah heard: Dead before the firemen even got there. I heard: Death by suffocation, her lungs getting nothing, just as bad as flames. Ruthie heard: Still alive.

  For a long time, the four of us did nothing. Time, for us, was another facedown corpse, knocked out in the explosion. We must have spent five months in that little apartment that my father’s colleague loaned us. I didn’t feel the weeks pass, although most days I was sure I’d die of old age before the clock advanced from dinnertime to bed. We never sang, at least not all together. Ruth hummed to herself, scolding her dolls and telling them to shush. Now and then, Da put something on the record player. Jonah and I spent long afternoons listening to the radio. Broadcast seemed somehow less sacrilegious, inflicted on us, rather than chosen.

  After a while, Ruth went back to her neighborhood school. She screamed on the first day, refusing to leave the apartment. But we three men stood firm with her. “You have to, Ruthie. It’ll help you feel better.” We should have known that was the last thing she wanted.

  Jonah refused to consider returning to Boston. “I’ll never go back. Not for all the private lessons in the world.” Da only shrugged in acquiescence. So, of course, I didn’t go back, either. The possibility of my returning alone never even arose.

  Da resumed his classes at Columbia, after what must have seemed an eternity to him. Jonah raged to me. “That’s it? Everything’s normal again? He just waltzes back to work, like nothing’s changed?”

  But I could tell by the way Da’s shoulders ground now when he walked how badly everything had. He had nothing left but work. And from the moment Mama died, even his work altered. Time, that block of standing evers, that reversible dependent variable, had turned on him. He no longer knew how much was left. From the moment of the fire until his own death, he gave himself up to finding time and breaking it.

  We lived in that cramped borrowed apartment until its owner finally had to ask for it back. Then we evacuated, without much plan, to another, slightly larger one, also in Morningside Heights. We were as close to invisible there as we could get, on a street that teetered right on the color line. Or not on the line, but in the many moving ripples. For the university stood like a huge rock in the surf of changing blocks, the churning populations beyond math’s ability to calculate. With the insurance, Da bought new furniture, bright blue dishes that Mama would have liked, and a replacement spinet. He even started rebuilding our sheet-music library, but the project was hopeless. Even among the four of us, we couldn’t remember all the music we’d owned.

  Ruthie changed schools—to one, like her, that split down the middle, almost half and half. She made new friends, new nationalities every week. But she never brought them home. She was ashamed of her men, the three of us living like there was no tomorrow and even less a yesterday.

  At first, Da came home most afternoons. But his need to lose himself in work soon outweighed his need to work through our loss. The equations swallowed him. There was a woman, Mrs. Samuels, who came by to keep house and watch after Ruth when she got home at 3:30. Mrs. Samuels’s only instrument was the chord organ. So there were no lessons. Da must have paid her well for the time she put in, but she did it, I think, out of love. She would have liked to be his children’s friend.

&n
bsp; Jonah spent most days scribbling into his notebooks. Sometimes he wrote words, other times, notes on ledger lines. He wrote a long letter on all different kinds of paper and posted it abroad, to Italy, with lots of exotic airmail stamps. “So she can’t say she didn’t know how to reach me,” he said. The letters I wrote, I kept in my head, with no other place to send them.

  When he wasn’t scribbling, Jonah listened to the Dodgers, “Dragnet,” “The FBI in Peace and War,” all the shows of delayed boyhood. He even had a favorite big-band station, when he really needed to keep himself from thinking. He let me listen to the Saturday Met broadcasts, following along while pretending not to.

  When Ruthie came home from school in midafternoon, I read to her or took her out to a safe corner of the park. I hadn’t spent more than a few weeks with my sister in two years. She was a stranger, a wound-up little girl who spoke to herself and who cried herself to sleep because we couldn’t fix her hair the way Mama did. We tried. We got it just the way we all remembered it, except Ruth.

  Some days, I’d sit with her at the piano, the way Mama used to sit with me. Ruth learned anything I gave her faster than I’d learned the works myself. But her fingerings were never the same twice. “Try to be consistent,” I said.

  “Why?” She lost all patience for the instrument, and most days we ended up fighting. “It’s dumb, Joey.”

  “What’s dumb?”

  “The music’s dumb.” And she’d rip off a parody Mozart sonatina, brilliant in its improvised burlesque. She mocked it, sneering through the keys, the music we were brought up on. The music that killed her mother.

  “What’s so dumb about it?”

  “It’s ofay.”

  “What’s ofay?” I asked Jonah that night, when Ruth couldn’t hear.

  My brother was never at a loss for more than an eighth note. “It’s French. It means up to date. Means you know how things are done.”

  I asked Da. His face turned stern. “Where did you hear this?”

  “Around.” Evading my own father. Everything honest in our home had died the day our mother did.

  My father removed his glasses. He was blind without them. Blinking, helpless, a flounder on ice. “Do they still say that?”

  “Sometimes,” I bluffed.

  “It’s not good. It’s pork Latin.”

  I burst out laughing. He should have slapped me. “Pig Latin.”

  “Pig Latin, then. For white people.” Oe-fay. Foe.

  I didn’t confront Ruth. But we didn’t go back to Mozart, either. My sister was not quite eleven, at least a year from childhood’s end. But she’d already changed. It took those many weeks together for me to see that little Root had vanished along with Mama.

  “What do you want to learn?” I asked her. “I can teach you anything.” The offer came out of my unlimited ignorance. Had I the first idea of the ways of playing—swings and jolts, bends and bops, slaps and tickles, restless, headlong fence rushes, resilient hybrid strains, the twists of tonality, the quotes, thefts, arrests, and reparations, all the modes and scales torn out of the mere two that my music stuck with—had I even once considered the bottomless invention all around me, I’d have been unable to teach my little sister a C major chord in root position.

  “I don’t know, Joey.” Ruth’s left skittered up and down, walking a bass at a trotter’s pace. “What did Mama like to play?”

  It had only been months. She couldn’t have forgotten already. She couldn’t think memory was lying to her.

  “She liked it all, Ruth. You know that.”

  “I mean, other than … you know—before you all took up with …”

  For my part, I practiced at least four hours every day and soon went back to formal lessons. Music was no longer a game, nor would it ever be pure pleasure again. But it was all I knew. One of my mother’s students, Mr. Green, took me on. Every few weeks, he’d give me a new movement from another Beethoven sonata and get out of my way. Each week, I’d try not to outgrow him too quickly.

  I learned to cook. Otherwise, we might have all gotten rickets, scurvy—last century’s diseases, still rampant just a few blocks north and east. I read somewhere that potatoes and spinach, served with a little ground beef, had all the nutrition a body needed. All Mama’s recipes, written in pen on three-by-fives that she kept in her green metal box on the kitchen sill, had burned. Nothing I ever made did more than apologize to the feasts that once had poured out of her oven. But my audience knew it was this or oatmeal.

  The month our mother died, Rosa Parks refused to move back. While I was cooking for my family and my little sister was walking to her integrated school, fifty thousand people in Montgomery laid down their yearlong walking siege. The movement had started. The country I’d been born in was edging toward showdown. But I never heard a word. Da must have followed the story in detail. But he never brought the subject up in all his dinner-table ramblings.

  Jonah spent his days in feverish passivity. He listened to the radio. He took walks or, on days when he went to campus with our father, sat motionless at the music library at Columbia. He was trying to race backward, just by standing still. A decade later, he’d tell an interviewer that these were the months that turned him into an adult singer. “I learned more about how to sing by keeping silent for half a year than I ever learned from any teacher, before or after.” Except the teacher from whom he learned even silence.

  Da couldn’t let us stay home forever. “Come on, my boys. The world is not gone, yet. If you don’t want to study physics with me, then you must choose some other school.”

  This was the last must Jonah ever listened to. “What the hell, Mule. Robinson’s going to retire. They’ve taken “The Shadow” off the air. We might as well go back to the slammer.”

  He settled on Juilliard—the next-closest thing in the world to staying home. At Juilliard, we could almost vanish again, into the one thing we knew how to do. Da got Jonah a vocal coach from the Columbia Music Department, and Jonah started woodshedding again a month before auditions. Maybe he was right about how much he’d learned through silence. Juilliard took him into the prep program without probation.

  At the premier performance school in the country, not even a singer of Jonah’s caliber had any leverage. He could hardly make his acceptance contingent on mine. The pressure of my own admission lay wholly on me. “Not going if you don’t,” Jonah said just before I had to play. I’m sure he meant it as emotional support.

  I took my audition, my brother’s future pressing down on my shoulders and almost forcing my face into the keys. I hiccupped through the first movement of opus 27, no. 1, my runs turning to rancid butter. I could hear myself condemning my brother and me to a lifetime of lassitude in my father’s suffocating apartment. After I played, I went to the toilet off the rehearsal room and threw up, just like the boys Jonah once marveled at, years before. Our musical education had been more rapid and comprehensive than our parents could have anticipated. I’m glad Mama hadn’t lived to see where I’d landed.

  My acceptance came attached with two sheets of red-inked faultfinding. The last comment on the list was a double-underlined word: “Posture!” Jonah never let me forget it. He barked the word with a German accent each time we sat at dinner. Walking along the street, he’d grab and force my shoulders back. “Posture, Herr Strom! Do! Not! Slump!” He never guessed that the weight slumping me over was him.

  Branded with my red-inked acceptance, I followed my brother into the Juilliard prep division. If Boylston was music’s provincial outpost, Juilliard was its Rome. Walking down one hallway, I lived through three hundred years of Western concert music trickling through the doors in fantastic cacophony. Jonah and I were children again, the lowest rungs on a ladder of experience that stretched away from us, out of sight.

  From the building on Claremont, we were an easy stroll from home. We didn’t have to live with anyone, a reprieve that gave me unspeakable relief. In that independent nation of music, we were no one’s problem, no o
ne’s scandal, no one’s trailblazer. No one much looked at us at all. Sight counted for nothing there. There, everyone was all ears.

  Our fellow students put the fear of God in us. Jonah may have learned more about singing from seven months of silence than he did from any teacher after our mother. But he learned more about the world of professional music making from two weeks in its North American capital than he’d ever cared to know. The academic side of our education was even more perfunctory than it had been in Boston. That suited us. We were there for one thing. The only thing either of us had any heart left to do.

  Jonah didn’t stay long in the prep division. As soon as they could, his teachers hustled him upstairs. He was far from the youngest to start college there. The school was rotten with prodigies, some who’d completed the program by sixteen, the age Jonah entered it. But he was surely the least prepared to enter adulthood early.

  He started the year of Little Rock, three years after Brown became the reputed law of the land. Jonah studied the same news pictures I did: nine kids threading through the 101 st Airborne paratroopers, just to go learn about Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis, while we sashayed in the front door of our conservatory to learn about sonata-allegro form. I sneaked into the school library each day to see the newspapers. Kids our age, marching to school through riots, just one step ahead of getting strung up by the rabid crowd, skipping up the army-lined stairs along the gauntlet of bayonet-fixed M1’s of their all-white protectors following their own gunpoint orders. Army helicopters landing on the school football field, establishing a perimeter. Governor Faubus invoking the National Guard, canceling the court orders, squaring off against the federal forces, taking the insurrection to television: “We are now a country under occupation.” And General Walker answering, “The sooner the resistance ceases, the sooner normalcy will return to the school area.” The whole country stood ready to resume civil war a hundred years on, over nine kids my age, while I struggled with Chopin études and Jonah breezed through Britten.