In life’s opening few years, everything you hear, you hear for the first time. After a while, the ear fills in, and hearing turns back from the future and into the past. What you’ve yet to hear is outstripped by what you already have. The beauty of Jonah’s voice lay in its running backward. With every new phrase that came out of him, old notes lifted off of his listeners and they grew younger.
People actually turned up to hear his degree recital. He insisted I accompany him. We worked for weeks on the pieces, mostly mainstream nineteenth-century German lieder. He mocked the melodramatic crowd-pleasers we had to do: “Aural Novocain.” At our dress rehearsal, we scrambled to put the last desperate touches to the “Will-o’-the-Wisp” from Schubert’s Winterreise. I was halfway into the second verse, the almost nihilistic
Bin gewohnt das Irregehen,
’s fürhrt ja jeder Weg zum Ziel:
Uns’re Freuden, uns’re Leiden,
Alles eines Irrlichts Spiel!
All our joys and sorrows a will-o’-the-wisp, when I heard Jonah singing:
Pepsi-Cola hits the spot-ta,
Twice as much for a nickel, too.
Twelve full ounces, that’s a lot-ta,
Pepsi-Cola’s the drink for you!
I slammed down the lid and shouted over the last words. “Damn it, Jonah. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
He saw my face, and couldn’t stop cackling. “Joey, it’s a fucking school recital. We can’t let them bust our nuts with it.”
I was sure he’d repeat the stunt in recital, if not deliberately, then by practiced accident. But he sang the words as written, an old man twice Da’s age, who knew from bitter experience that every path leads to the same sea and every urgent joy and sorrow are just phantom lights on the far side of an uncrossable channel. He passed the recital, with honors.
The Sammy’s crowd threw him a little bash a few days after our performance. My brother still hung with that crowd, for whatever sense of freedom they gave him. I’d fallen away, out of disgust. I preferred running through the coda of my current Beethoven sonata another thousand times to hearing my competitors evaluated even once more.
But Jonah wanted me to put in an appearance at this celebration. When I arrived, Brian O’Malley was holding forth, the way he had for most of our college career. His routine turned toward race at my entrance, as it often did when I was around. Proof of O’Malley’s enlightenment. For our amusement, he launched a burlesque of the shit-kicker soda jerks behind the Woolworth counter in Greensboro: “Seein’ as how y’all are gonna be settin’ here a spell, you want somethin’ cold to drink? Y’all will have to drink it outside, of course, but you can come on back in soon as you’re done!”
I stared out the window with a deflecting smile, doing my best to outlast this humor. Across the street, a woman stepped from behind a delivery truck and passed uptown. She was wearing a navy blue midcalf-length dress with wide, pointed shoulders, decades out of date. Her hair was a wren’s nest of soft black thread. I had only a glimpse of her face. She was a tone I’d given up on ever finding. Seeing her like this, at large, heading north, free to be anything, I knew she’d been put there for me to discover.
I tripped getting up, wrecking O’Malley’s punch line. I faked some excuse and bolted. Outside, I found her again. She was sailing uptown, a beautiful navy blue cutter against the afternoon current. I followed her up Broadway, where she made a right on LaSalle. She turned again up Amsterdam, a hundred yards ahead of me. I tried to close, but she walked so fast, I worried that she was fleeing me.
Still chasing her up toward City College, I felt myself start to dissolve. I looked on myself from above, a teenager chasing a total stranger. Each step added to my abasement. What drove me wasn’t lust, but some need simpler than I’d felt in my life. A woman whom I knew better than I knew myself had been walking around Claremont, the blocks around my school, looking for me. She couldn’t have known I was sitting in a nearby coffee shop, the captive of fools. She’d given up trying to find me. It was up to me to redeem myself.
The buildings alongside me closed into a tunnel. I could no longer feel the air against my skin. I urged myself on, from miles above myself in space. I was my own marionette, the central character in my own life, a story whose plot had just revealed itself to me. I hadn’t felt so focused, so alive, since earliest childhood’s music evenings. Everything was well. All lines would finally resolve and reach cadence. Every person on this packed street had some note to hand the chord.
All the while, my tow bobbed in front of me, her walk tailored and purposeful. So long as I kept her in sight, I had no other needs. I drew close enough to make out her neck underneath that perfect fall of hair. For a moment, in the thinning afternoon light, I panicked. Her skin shifted, as if by some trick of protective coloration. The tinted glass window at Sammy’s had misled me. My sense of recognition vanished. Then she turned and looked my way. So much certainty filled me that I almost called out. Her face inhabited that place I thought I lived in alone.
She bore right and I followed, so focused, I forgot to notice the cross street. Runners in the middle of a turf war tensed as I slid past them. Two heavyset men glared at me from their doorway lookout. All eyes up and down the block picked me out as an intruder. Ahead, that navy blue coat moved deeper into this injured neighborhood like a ghost over a battlefield.
She veered twice more, and I kept to her trail. Some nearby motion distracted me. When I looked back ahead, the navy-dressed woman was gone. She disappeared into a doorway that I searched for but couldn’t find. I stood on the corner, stupidly waiting for destiny to return and claim me. People pushed past, impatient and indifferent. Busses disgorged their contents a hundred feet away. The neighborhood turned malevolent, smelling my fear and sensing I had no right to be here. The intersection closed in around me, and I bolted.
The streets I fled back down felt more hostile than the ones I’d come up. I turned west too early, on a street that, after a block, veered diagonally through the grid, back uptown. I stopped, turned, took a few steps, and turned back again, confused. I clipped along the edge of a long, scorched parkway. My body took over, and I sprinted back toward what I hoped was Amsterdam.
All at once, I wasn’t in New York. I felt myself in a herd of people not from around these parts, moving too slowly for 1960. I can’t say how long I stood there. The question had no measure. I was out on the streets of a city I didn’t recognize, in a crowd of people who weren’t mine, on a day I shared with no one around me.
I cursed myself for losing everything. The woman still felt so present that I felt sure I’d find her again, as soon as I was supposed to. I knew her neighborhood, where she walked, how she moved. My finding her could not have been a one-off chance. I was eighteen years old. And I’d waited until that moment to fall in love with an image even more fleeting than music.
Jonah lit into me when I got home. “What the fuck do you think you were doing back there?” It took me a while to remember: the scene at Sammy’s. Jonah was merciless. “What was that all about? Were you deliberately trying to humiliate me with those people?” He needed an answer. I had none.
“Jonah. Listen. I just saw the woman I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.”
“Oh?” All those classes in dramatic presence. “Your whole life? Starting when?”
“I’m serious.”
“Of course you are. Little Joe is no kidder. You will be sure to let the woman know, right?”
I went to Sammy’s the next day, and every afternoon at that hour for two weeks. I suffered through the worst that high culture had to offer. Jonah thought I was doing penance, and he doled out little verbal awards. But I was keeping my vigil, as regular and necessary as sleeping or eating. She’d have to be back. She couldn’t have been dangled in front of me, only to disappear for good. That afternoon, or the next, by month’s end at the latest …
When she didn’t appear again, I grew edgy. Impatience became confusi
on. Confusion turned desperate without any help from me. After a week, I tried to retrace my route north, through blocks I couldn’t resurrect. I stopped going to Sammy’s, stopped doing anything except sitting in a practice room, paralyzed, the last holdout case of polio, brought on by a glimpse of this girl, whose name I had no chance in hell of discovering.
After a month of seeing me like that, Jonah began to believe me. One night, from nowhere, he asked, “What did she look like?”
I shook my head. “You’d know her. You’d know her the minute you saw her.”
This is how the dream of the 1950s ended for me, before I could wake myself from it. Around us, in New York and farther, the whole key signature changed from one measure to the next, as if that swap of digits really meant something. The year the decade changed, I turned adult. Revolutions sprang up everywhere, except inside my brother and me. At the flick of that invented calendar switch, the world went from black and white to colored. And by some law of conserving physics, Jonah, Ruth, and I went from colored to black and white.
The bald general gave way to the thick-haired, hatless boy. The superpowers edged toward the nuclear brink, each one willing to go down without blinking. The arms race moved into space. Black students moved into white establishments. I spent less time inside my practice room fallout shelter and more hours above ground, waiting for the perfect-toned, navy-dressed woman to come claim me before the world went up in mushroom clouds.
The nation—the white part anyway—sang along with Mitch, following a ball that bounced across the lyrics at the bottom of the television screen. People really did this. Maybe not New Yorkers, but out over the Hudson, to all points west: the entire country, singing out loud in front of the TV, a chorus of millions of living rooms in one vast, last, if isolated, sing-along, where nobody could hear one another, but where, for a final moment, everyone kept to something like the same key.
Lenny Bruce played Carnegie Hall, performing my brother’s all-time favorite routine. Jonah bought the record, his first comedy disk, listening to the shtick until the vinyl wore out. He studied the inflections with his perfect ear, cackling at the cadences no matter how many times he listened:
I’m going to give you a choice, your own free will, of marrying a black woman or a white woman, two chicks about the same ages, same economic levels … whatever marriage means to you—kissing, and hugging and sleeping together in a single bed on hot nights … fifteen years … kissing and hugging that black, black woman, or kissing and hugging that white, white woman … Make your choice, because, see, the white woman is Kate Smith. And the black woman is Lena Horne.
Jonah played it for me, joining in on the punch line. “You dig, jig? The whole thing’s not really about race after all. It’s about ugliness! So let’s go string up all the ugly people, huh?” But Jonah repeated the routine only in private performance. For the better part of thirty years—and the worse part, too—he never recalled the joke for anyone but me.
Down in the Village, music was having quintuplets. From the insidious Seeburg jukebox at Sammy’s, from little trickles of radio on our way to the Met broadcasts, and from wilder dispatches in the streets all around us, we finally heard. Something had been happening, for years. At last, Jonah wanted a listen. We went downtown, sat in on two progressive jazz sets, had the tops of our heads taken off, then headed back home. Jonah waved the whole scene away. Then, a month later, he wanted to go back.
We fell into a semiweekly ritual, sneaking into the hot spots I wasn’t legally old enough to enter. The bouncer saw that hungry musician’s gaze and looked the other way. We’d hit the Village Gate one week, the Vanguard the next. While the jazz giants gathered at the Gate, the folkies took up across the street at the Bitter End: two furious scenes that couldn’t have been further apart in every way except distance. The mindwarping Vanguard sound had rumbled around for years, old inland blues swelling, flowing, coming back east to get cool and urbane. The older club regulars told us we’d already missed the peak. They claimed that the real gods had already passed from the face of the land, and that 1960 was already nothing but an echo. But to Jonah and me, here was the air of a planet newer than Schoenberg, with an atmosphere far more breathable.
I couldn’t hear it then, the re-creation in our recreation. That sound had filled the house once, pouring out of the radio on Sunday mornings. We had never eaten one of Da’s elaborate experimental omelettes except to jazz. It was never really ours, not like the stuff we sang every other day. Never home to us; more like a wild two-week summer rental on the Strip. But our parents had listened. Only Jonah and I had fallen away. We didn’t feel our prowling around the Village as a return. We thought we’d stumbled onto a place we’d never been.
Da didn’t want us staying downtown all night. He’d lost track of us, vanishing into his work, coming up for air only to blunder through parenting. He surfaced long enough to say that he wanted us home by midnight, too early to hear the stuff that the regulars talked about in hushed tones. Those sets never got started until early morning. The heavy players were still going—zipped up and cooking on fuels I’d never heard of—by the time Jonah and I dragged back into the conservatory the next morning. We could have skipped Da’s curfew anytime without his noticing. But for whatever reasons, we obeyed this law, staying out to the last possible minute the clock allowed, Jonah going through a beer or two while helping himself to my seltzers. By the time we headed back uptown, we’d be reeling like the worst of hard-core drunks, Jonah pale with the darkness, the smoke, the wonder of it, as pale as any Semitic fellow traveler. And all anxious explanations.
“They’re stealing the wild stuff from the thirties avant-garde. Paris, you know. Berlin.” It reassured him, somehow. But from what I’d read, the Europeans had stolen their best bits from New Orleans and Chicago. Music, that vampire, floating around for centuries, undead, wasn’t at all picky about whose jugular it sucked. Any old blood line would do, any transfusion that kept it kicking for another year.
I loved how the jazzers prowled around the streets with their horns, looking for the next quick place to unpack, scouting for like-minded cats, with no other long-range program except to sit back and blow. Their engine was pure self-delight, self-invention. Their sound had no motive, no beginning, no end, no goal but the notes, and even those they looked at only in order to look past. All a body really wanted was to play.
We caught Coltrane one night, tearing the roof off what felt like someone’s living room in a street shorter than a Tinkertoy, on a stage the size of a cheese Danish. He’d been standing in a nearby alley, leaning on the end of his tenor case, when the drummer and pianist of that night’s session went to have a smoke. They waylaid ’Trane, or he had nothing better to do. Sources varied. In any case, Jonah and I sat with our ears in that giant upturned bell, hearing the cups clapping his tone holes, listening to a game of Crazed Quotations beyond our ability to follow.
For all my grounding in theory and harmony, I couldn’t hear a third of what that pickup quartet did that night. But here was music as it had been, once, in the beginning, when my family first gave it to me. Music for the sheer making. Music for a while.
I loved to watch Jonah when the best of the Village’s singers adventured onstage. He favored the sets of a southern woman named Simone who’d started out studying piano at Juilliard with Carl Friedburg. Her voice was harsh, but she took it into unknown places. His other goddess was another dark woman, from Mama’s Philly, who could scat wilder than a Paganini pizz. Jonah sat like a spaniel at a rabbit farm, leaning forward, mouth open, body ready to bolt onstage and join the fray. I had to keep a hand on his collar sometimes. Thank God I did, for on the long ride home—the two of us, north of Fifty-ninth, breaking into the obligatory “Take the A Train”—I heard how gelded his whole concert-hall, full-voiced precision would have sounded on any stage south of Fourteenth.
His keepers at Juilliard didn’t know about his after-hours flirtations with the island’s lower regions. Afte
r his senior recital, the school prepared to grant my brother their degree. His teachers split over what he should do next. Agnese wanted him to enter the graduate program, attacca, without pausing for breath. Grau, who loved my brother more ruthlessly, wanted him out in the world, getting a taste of the brutal arena of auditions, the quickest way to toughen that voice that still held on to an unnatural innocence.
The Rome-Berlin axis compromised on a trip to Europe. They conveyed their plans to Jonah. If Jonah put up a token sum, they could arrange a scholarship, free accommodation, and a superlative teacher in Milan. Italy was the voice’s home, the hajj every singer made, the dream world with which Kimberly Monera had once fed Jonah’s childish imagination. He’d had four years of the language and could say things like “To love one another eternally—that is the curse coursing through our blood!” and “Even the gods’ indifference will not delay me” with all the ease of a native speaker. There was no question: He would have to make the pilgrimage to vocal music’s promised land. The only question was when.
My brother had gone to Juilliard purely as an alternative to grief. And now he started planning for Milan only as an alternative to hanging around Claremont forever. Da was sure this was the proper next step. “My boy, I wish I were traveling with you.” Ruthie used her baby-sitting money to buy a set of conversational Italian records so she could jabber with him at breakfast in the weeks before his departure. But after a few go-rounds with Jonah correcting her pronunciation, she broke off the attempt and condemned the records to our piles of opera LPs.
Jonah was booked to leave just after graduation. The night before commencement, he came into the kitchen to help me wash dishes. He seemed transfigured, lighter than he’d been in weeks. I thought it was his approaching departure.
“Mule, you go. I’m sitting tight for a while.” I laughed. “Serious.” My mouth sagged, waiting for him to come clean. “Serious, Joey. I’m not going. You know why. You know everything, brother. The last few years have been perfect hell, haven’t they? For both of us. You knew that all along, while I waltzed around, pretending …”
The Time of Our Singing Page 26
