The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  “Jonah. You have to go. It’s all arranged. They’ve put themselves out for your sake.”

  “Help a colored boy see the Vatican.”

  “Jonah. Don’t do this. Don’t throw this away.”

  “What am I throwing away? They’re throwing me away, damn it. Everybody has plans for me but me. Imagine what I’d be after six months of Europe. Their charity case. Their trademarked act. Indebted to my sponsors forever. Sorry. Can’t do it, Joey.”

  He looked away, avoiding my eye. A muscle in his cheek twitched at a hundred beats a minute. For the first time in his life, my brother was afraid. Maybe not of failing: Failing would have been a relief. Afraid of who he’d be, if the problem of who he was was solved for him.

  His teachers were furious. They had pulled strings for him, and he was walking away from their protective benefice. Agnese wasn’t accustomed to having his generosity trashed. He threw my brother out of his studio and refused to talk to him. Grau, the longer-term architect, sat him down, hostage for a few more minutes, and made him say just what he wanted to do instead.

  Jonah threw his palms in the air. He was just that age, emerged adult, with adolescence’s pupa still clinging to him. “I thought I might sing a little?”

  Grau laughed. “And what have you been doing for the last four years?”

  “I mean … sing for humans.”

  The laugh went sharper. “Humans, as opposed to teachers?”

  “Humans as opposed to, you know, people who are paid to listen?”

  Mr. Grau smiled to himself. He folded his hands in front of his face and said with theatrical neutrality, “By all means, go and find your humans.” Neither blessing nor curse. Just: Go see.

  Da was more confused than I’d ever seen him. He kept shaking his head, waiting for reality to clear itself up. Then the disappointment set in. “If you want to stay in this apartment after graduating, then you must look for work.” Jonah had no idea what such a thing might mean. He typed up a ridiculous resume and peddled it to a few low-skill employers—midtown department stores, uptown restaurants, even Columbia Operations and Maintenance. He managed to list just enough of his cultural attainments to sabotage any interest.

  He decided to go out for auditions. But no ordinary tryout would do. He combed the music trade press, hunting down the perfect coming-out opportunity. He found a contest tailor-made to showcase him. He came to me with the listing. “This is the one we’re doing, Mule.”

  He held the paper under my nose. America’s Next Voices: a national competition for singers with no prior professional recognition. The thing carried a jewel of a prize. Trying for it seemed reasonable enough. The first round was months away, just before I was slated to do my own senior recital.

  “I’m with you, brother. Just let me know when you want to get started.”

  “When? No time like now.”

  Then I knew what plans he had for me. “Jonah.” I put my palms out to slow him. “My lessons. My recital.” My degree. My life.

  “Come on, Mule. We’ve already worked up the whole program, for my recital. You’re the only player who knows me, who can read my mind.”

  “Who’s going to coach us?”

  Jonah got that manic twinkle he usually saved for the stage. “No coach. You’re going to be my coach, Joey. Who else is going to do that blood-brother thing? Who else can I depend on to be absolutely merciless? Think of the stakes. If we come from nowhere and walk away with this?”

  “Jonah. I have to graduate.”

  “Jesus. What do you take me for? I’m not going to thwart your education, for Christ’s sake. You’re a growing boy.”

  I never did graduate. But I suppose, technically, Jonah never thwarted my education.

  He told Da we needed a place to rehearse. “What’s wrong with here? It’s just your sister and me. We know all about you.”

  “Exactly, Da.”

  “What’s wrong with your home? Home is where you always made your music, since you were little.”

  “We’re not little anymore, Da.” Da looked at me as if I’d changed sides.

  Jonah outdid me. “This isn’t home, Da.” Home had burned.

  “Why don’t you rehearse at school?”

  Jonah hadn’t told Da the details of his break with Juilliard. “We need privacy, Da. We have to nail this contest.”

  “This is just another audition, my boys. You’ve taken these before.”

  But it wasn’t just an audition. It was our entry into the deadly horse race of professional music. Jonah didn’t mean merely to enter this contest. He meant to walk away with it.

  Da understood nothing, except what Jonah said he needed. He sat us down at the kitchen table after Ruth went to bed. “A little money came to us when your mother …” He showed us some papers. Jonah made some pretense of decoding them. “This is not a fortune I’m speaking about. But enough to start you. This is what your mother would want, what she always believed for you. But you must know: When this sum is gone, no more comes along after it. You must be sure you’re doing what you need with it.”

  Certainty was always Jonah’s vice of choice. He found a studio ten blocks from our apartment, on the edge of Harlem. At considerable expense, he rented a piano and had it moved in. It suited me: The room sat just a few blocks from where I’d seen the woman I was going to spend my future with. During our breaks, I could go stand on the corner where she’d disappeared and wait for her to materialize again.

  Not that Jonah planned many breaks. He figured that once we set up the space, we’d pretty much camp out there. He picked up a half-sized refrigerator and a couple of old Boy Scout sleeping bags secondhand from some real boys. He planned to work straight through until the first rounds of the competition, that fall.

  I had my own lessons, with Mr. Bateman. To Jonah, my continuing to study with the same teacher proved I wasn’t learning anything. It came down to a choice: Jonah or school. Mr. Bateman was the best teacher I’d ever have. But Jonah was my brother, and the greatest musical talent I had any chance of working with. If he couldn’t bring Mama back alive, what hope had I?

  I applied for a leave of absence. I told Mr. Bateman it was a family emergency. He signed off without any question. Wilson Hart was the only one I leveled with. My friend just shook his head at the plan. “He know what sacrifice he’s asking you to make?”

  “I think he sees it as an opportunity.”

  It took all the man’s judgment not to judge me, not to say what he should have. “More like a gamble, far as I can see.”

  Worse than a gamble. But so was singing. Will and I both knew one thing: With this much riding on one throw of the die, I wouldn’t be coming back to school, whatever the outcome.

  “You listen here, Mix. Most men?” Wilson Hart reached out and cupped my chin. I let him raise my head. His fingers grazed my Adam’s apple. I wondered whether a blind person could tell race by touch. “Most men would kill for a brother like you.”

  He made me sit and play, while I was still in the neighborhood. Who knew when I’d be back through? We played through a four-hands version of the chamber fantasy he was working on, an eerily consonant, sepiatoned piece full of tunes I should have recognized but didn’t. Jonah would have called the piece reactionary. But Jonah didn’t have to know.

  This time, Will gave me the upper lines. I watched my friend’s face during the rests. We broke off where the piece did, at the introduction of a surprise new theme, a broad-willed subject that wasn’t exactly “Motherless Child” but might have descended from it, somewhere down the orphaned generations. The song broke away under our fingers, unfinished. We hung in space over the keys, listening, after the fact, to all the things it had sounded like while we were too engaged to hear.

  After a silence as noisy as any, I started playing again. I revived the first theme from his exposition. I made a point of refusing the page. After the motive unfolded, I couldn’t have used the page if I’d tried. Will Hart’s tune went down my arm, th
rough my wrist, into my hand, and out my fingertips. Then it took off, with me just within earshot behind it. I heard a sharp intake of breath beside me on the piano bench as I did a number on his number. Then that breath came out a deep bass laugh, one that traveled down Will’s own fingers to freedom. Will ran alongside and hopped on the freight I’d hijacked, shaking his head in amazement at discovering where I’d been spending my weekends.

  His surprise subsided, and we flew along side by side. We commenced poking our souls into time signatures the tune on the page had been too shy to try out. Will howled at the change I showed since our last outing. He wanted to stop and razz me, but our hands wouldn’t let him. I dangled dares in front of him, calls whose responses he couldn’t help but pick up and flip back at me. He tested me, too, drawing me deeper into the shade of each idea I launched. Where I couldn’t equal his inventions, I at least embroidered them with curls of counterpoint ripped off from my etudes, handfuls of bloom to fit the vase he handed me.

  He laid down a solid floor with his chords, on which I did my best to spin lines that had never before existed. For a while, for at least as long as our four hands kept moving, the music for writing down and the music for letting loose found a way to share a nest.

  I be-bopped us into a three-point landing, stealing a great alto sax riff I’d heard unleashed one night at the Gate. Will was laughing so hard at my full-body, adult baptism that his left hand had to hunt around for the tonic. We needed only a trap-set release, which we jumped up and performed in unison on the piano lid.

  “Don’t sue me, Wilson,” I said when we’d caught our breath. “I didn’t see no copyright symbol anywhere on your score.”

  “Where in God’s creation you learn to do that, Mix?”

  “Oh, you know. Here and there. Around.”

  “Get away! On out of here!” He waved me out of his sight. As if only the throwaway gesture guaranteed I’d be back. From a distance, he called, “And don’t forget: You promised me.” I looked back, a blank. Forgotten already. He mimed a scribbling motion. Composing. “Get that all down on a score someday.”

  By summer’s end, Jonah had us on a regimen. We left the apartment every morning by the time Ruthie went to school, and returned too late to say good night to her. She complained about our being away, and Jonah laughed at her. Every so often, he sent me home to tell Da we were staying overnight, to hammer out some resistant passage.

  We found our rhythm. Jonah’s appetite for work outstripped the available hours. “The man wants something,” I baited him. “He’s hungry.”

  “What else are we supposed to do all day long?”

  “You’ve never worked this hard in your life.”

  “I like working for myself, Joey. More future in it.”

  We went deep underground, where music must always go. We went down into places untouched by anyone. We put in such strange, extended hours that the days began to dissolve. Jonah wouldn’t let me wear a watch. He banished any ticker with more memory than a metronome. No radio, records, newspapers, or word from the outside. Only the growing list of notes we made on a canary yellow legal pad, the curl of the sun’s slatted shadow across the floorboards, the frequent sirens, and the muffled battering from the apartments below proved that the seasons still moved.

  Harlem wrapped around us. The street outside drowned out our noise with its indifferent survival cries. Sometimes neighbors thumped on the walls or pounded on the door to get us to quit. Then we switched to pianissimo. For longer than the metronome could say, we were dead to the world.

  Jonah obsessed on placement, those minute locations of tone that the tiny rented room made audible. He cleared out the uncertainties at each end of his range. We spoke to each other in bursts of pitches, shaping, bending, imitating. Before my eyes, Jonah pushed into an agility in his upper notes that rivaled the precision of my keys.

  We were too young to travel alone. Overtrained by any measure, neither of us really knew anything. Great singers sing their whole lives and still want a teacher to hear and herd them. But here was Jonah, who’d barely sung in public, training for the first crucial contest of his life, with no one to correct him but me.

  We grated on each other’s nerves. He wanted me to be his harshest critic, but if I faulted his execution, he’d hiss. “Listen to the piano player, will you!” Three days later, he’d be doing what I suggested, as if it had just occurred to him. If I dropped a clunker or struggled with a passage, he assumed a patience so long-suffering that I’d start seizing up on the simplest dotted figure.

  Sometimes I couldn’t count to four the same way twice. But now and then, I held up a mirror to his interpretation or brought out some interior ripple he’d never heard. Then Jonah walked behind me at the bench and wrapped his arms around my shoulders in an anaconda squeeze. “Who else but you, brother? Who else could give me everything you do?”

  The hours passed, motionless in their expanse. Some days, we seemed to go for weeks before darkness sent us home. Other days vanished in half an hour. In the evenings, both of us punchy with exertion, Jonah grew expansive. “Look at us, Joseph. At home on our own forty acres. And the pair of mules is free.”

  We weren’t the only ones singing. Just the only ones locked up, singing to ourselves. Above our “Erl-King” and Dowland, tunes broke in on us from all directions. Don’t forget who’s walking you home. Who’s coming for you, now, when you’re all alone. Soft and clear like moonlight through the pines. Dry and light, like you like your wine. Darlin’, please. Only you. Something you know, and something you do. Come on, baby, let’s do the twist. Take me by my little hand and go like this. Takes more than a robin to make the winter go. You got what it takes, Lord, don’t I know. Come on, baby, now, I’m needing you. Just an old sweet song, the whole night through.

  I listened to these tunes on the sly, even as Jonah launched his own bottomless columns of air. Each note that bled into our apartment exposed us. We were some extinct, flightless bird, or that living fossil fish hauled up from the primordial deeps off Madagascar. Da had told us that once we burned the insurance money, there’d be no more. Cash, like time, flowed in one direction: away. If we barreled into this contest and stumbled, we were finished. If we came up empty, we’d have to face the music. The same music everyone else now sang.

  Ours was worse than the wildest juvenile fantasy, the ten-year-old on a glass-strewn empty lot behind the condemned tenement, practicing his major-league swing. Worse than a preteen crooner singing into the mike stand hidden in a sawed-off parking meter, the next Sam Cooke, his friends the next Drifters or Platters. Jonah couldn’t distinguish between long shot and shoo-in. Singing was what he did best in this life. Singing outdid the best the world had to give, better than any drug, any sedative. It was in his body. His baseline blood chemistry pumped it out like insulin. Doing something else was never an option. The pleasure of flight was too great in him.

  Our preparation was pure tedium, worse than any I’d ever spent. Sometimes I sat silent, stock-still for twenty minutes as Jonah tamped out a dimple in an appoggiatura. Sometimes I stepped outside, killing time on the corner or walking a few blocks, hoping to stumble upon the woman with the wide navy blue shoulders. Then Jonah would come out after me to haul me back, furious at my desertion.

  Sometimes he crawled down a well of despondence and wouldn’t come out, certain that every note coming out of him sounded like dried dung. He’d try singing into a corner. He’d lie flat on his back on the wooden floor, singing to the ceiling. Anything to get his two hundred singing muscle groups to agree. He’d lie there after I stopped playing, crushed under an ocean of atmosphere. “Mule. Help. Remind me.”

  “‘You two boys can be anything you want:’”

  He started to suffer from occasional shortness of breath. He: Aeolus’s walking pair of lungs. In the middle of an E-flat major scale, his throat clamped shut as if he were in severe anaphylaxis. It took me three beats to realize he wasn’t goofing around. I broke off on a leading
tone and was on my feet, walking him around the room, rubbing his back, soliciting. “Should I get help? Should I call a doctor?” But we had no phone, and no doctor to call.

  He put out his arm and beat time like the conductor of a volunteer community orchestra. “I’m fine.” His voice came from under the polar ice caps. Two more spins around the room and he was breathing again. He walked over to the piano and built a little cadence to resolve my broken-off leading tone. “What on earth was that?” I asked. But he refused to talk about what had happened.

  It struck again ten days later. Both times, he came back quickly from the attacks, his voice clearer than ever. Some film had lifted from it, one I didn’t notice until brightness peeled it away. I even had the guilty thought, if we could only time this …

  One evening, walking home, he stopped and grabbed my arm. He stood there on a rough corner of 122nd, his mouth forming a thought, just waiting to be mugged. “You know? Joseph. There’s nothing in the world—nothing …”

  “Like a dame?”

  “Whiter than singing Schubert in front of five impotent, constipated judges.”

  “Shh. Jesus! You’ll get us killed.”

  “Nothing whiter in creation.”

  “How do you know they’re constipated?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Jonah.”

  “Name one.”

  “How about five impotent, constipated judges judging singers of Schubert?”

  “Okay. Name another.”

  I was eager to keep moving, placate the street. But Jonah was deep in a kind of interrogation I’d never seen in him. “You know the funniest part of this? If we win …”

  “When we win …” One of us had to be him.

  “Think how much darker we’ll seem, to the judges. To everybody but us. If we walk away with their prize.”