“Wish I could hear you play that,” Ruth said.
“I bet you do.”
“Little Joey Strom, learning what side his bread is buttered on.”
I studied her, the bruises of her two brown eyes. “Don’t be ashamed of me, Ruth.”
“Shame?” Her face crumpled. The house was on fire again, and she was standing out on the frozen sidewalk, biting the fireman. “Shame? Don’t you be ashamed of me!”
“Of you! How could … You’re out there working … giving yourself to things I wouldn’t even have known about except for you.”
My sister clamped tight on the muscles in her cheeks. I thought for a moment she might lose herself. But the spasm passed and she came back. This time, she didn’t offer me a place in the movement or suggest that the desperate world might need even someone like me. But she did reach out one pink palm and place it on my chest. “So what do you play?”
“Name your tune, and I’ll fake it.”
Her smile bent her ears. “Joey’s a Negro.”
“Only in Atlantic City.”
“Half Atlantic City’s black,” Robert said. “They just don’t know it yet.”
“You have to hear this man of mine. All America’s African. Come on, sugar. Give him the spiel.”
Robert smiled at her word choice. “Tomorrow. Tonight, I got to get some sleep. My brain’s fried.”
“Take my bed, you two. I’ll stay with Teresa.”
“Teresa.” My sister laughed. “Teresa what?” I had to spell Wierzbicki for her. Ruth laughed again. “Does your father know you’re balling a Catholic?”
I came home from Teresa’s the next day. I stopped at the store and stocked up on beer, chicken, fresh-baked bread, news magazines—all the amenities I never kept around. But when I let myself into the apartment, it was empty. A half sheet of my torn music paper filled with my sister’s handwriting sat on the kitchen table.
Joey,
We had to go. Believe me, it’s safer this way. They’re hounding us down, and you don’t want in any deeper than you already are, just by being brother to this sister. You were a lifesaver to put us up. And it was good to see you haven’t been completely broken. Yet! Robert says you’re a good man, and I’m learning not to argue with my husband, because, honey, he never lets me win.
Take care of yourself and we’ll do the same. Who knows? We all might live long enough to share more clams.
Blood’s blood, huh, blood?
You’d better pitch this note when you’re done with it.
She didn’t sign it. But at the bottom, as an afterthought, she’d added, “Work on your brother for us, will you?”
As I held the note, it burned into me. I didn’t throw it away when I was done. I left it out on the front table. Blood is blood. If any law-enforcement agents broke into my apartment, I wanted the words somewhere easy to find. I refused to think about what those two had done, what would-be crime, what trouble they’d fallen into. We’d been born illegal. Just demanding that the law change was a crime. All I could do was wait to hear from them, whenever and wherever they surfaced. It wouldn’t be soon.
I never told Teresa about the visit. I’d never have managed to introduce them. I’d have bounced between them, sheltering one from the other, the way Jonah once tried to deceive both his voice teachers. I’d never be whole. My parts didn’t fit. I didn’t want them to.
Right after the visit—soon enough for my knot-tying brain to imagine a link—Da forwarded a letter from Jonah, the first I’d heard from him since Magdeburg. The luster of communism had worn off. He’d made his way through East Germany—“Did the Leipzig pilgrimage without you, Mule”—performed concerted music in Berlin—“No lieder, though; who’s loyal to you?”—then went back west to do Das Lied von der Erde in Cologne. He then crossed over into Holland and walked away with a plum prize at the ’sHertogenbosch competition.
Not sure what happens next. The world seems to be my oyster at present, or at least my Zeeland mussel. Nobody has restricted my voice to any category short of music, although I confess I’m only understanding about 40 percent of anything anyone says, so they may be calling me the Prince of Darkness, as far as I know. I’m telling you, Mule, you’re a prisoner in the States. Still a slave, a century after the fact. You can’t even know what you’re under until you’re out from under it. You want to feel what it means to be without leg irons for the first time in your life? Come on over, before the global spread of American culture turns us into darkies, even out here.
He gave the address of a management firm in Amsterdam where he could always be reached. “Always” had a rather narrow range for my brother.
Tucked into the note he forwarded from Jonah, Da included one from himself. He hadn’t been down from the city to hear me play, and I’d discouraged him from thinking about coming. He had no sense of the stuff I played each night—the surfing anthems, the thinly veiled drug celebrations, the love songs to automobiles, hair dryers, and other motorized devices. In Da’s mind, I was a concert pianist who made a living performing. His letter to me was short and fact-filled. He was advancing in his work, the problem he’d worried for three decades. “Where Mach meets the quantum, it must be timeless!” Crazy things were happening in physics again, the crazy things he’d predicted thirty years before. Multiple splintering universes. Wormholes. Nothing, of course, about the crazy things bringing this world down around his ears.
In the last paragraph of the note, almost an afterthought, to pad the letter out to respectable length, he added, “I am going to the hospital in two days for exploratory surgery. You aren’t to worry. My symptoms are too unpleasant to describe on paper. The doctors just need to see what’s going on inside, and for that, they need to crack me open!”
I got the packet the day after the surgery. I called home, but no one was there. He’d listed no other contact, not even the hospital where he was to be operated on. I called Mrs. Samuels, who gave me a hospital number. I knew from her voice that she was trying not to be the one to break the news. I went to Mr. Silber and asked for two days off.
“Who’s supposed to play for my guests? You want me, maybe, to be the jazzman? You want me to pretend I can play like Satchmo Paige?”
I didn’t tell Mr. Silber about my father. My father’s in the hospital would mean Big black buck dying of complications from type ll diabetes. If I told him pancreatic cancer, he’d want to know details. I couldn’t go through that with Mr. Silber. Your father, a Jew? I couldn’t force kinship on this man.
I did tell Teresa. She wanted to go with me, even on that first trip. “You don’t need to,” I told her. “But I might need you down the line.” I didn’t need to ask her to pace herself. She knew how long time was. She’d spent her own life waiting it out.
At the hospital, I suffered the usual farce. His son? The surgeon at Mount Sinai didn’t bother disguising his shock. His disbelief had started long before, at the moment of incision. “This cancer has been working a long time. Years, perhaps.” That sounded about right. “I can’t see how anyone could have lived with this for so long and only now—”
“He’s a scientist,” I explained. “He’s not from around here.”
I found Da sitting up in bed, apologetic smile welcoming me. “You didn’t need to come all this way!” He waved his palm at me, dismissing all diagnoses. “You have a life to lead! You have your job, out in Ocean City! Who’s going to make music for your listeners?”
I spent two days with him. I returned the following week, this time with Teresa. She was a saint. She made half a dozen trips with me over the next four months. For that alone, I should have married her. Crisis brought out her art. She handled everything—all the routine realities I used to handle for Jonah when we toured and that I couldn’t handle now. She didn’t have to go with me. Didn’t have to stand at my side and watch me watch my father disappear. I’d already cost her hers. It only crippled me worse, her insisting so gladly on helping me lose mine.
Da delighted in her. He loved the idea of my having found someone, this shining someone in particular. At first, our visits made him feel guilty. But he grew to depend on them. Da went home from the hospital, and Mrs. Samuels moved into the Fort Lee house, as she had in spirit many years before. Whenever Teresa and I showed up there, she made herself scarce. I never knew the woman. Perhaps my father and Mrs. Samuels might have gotten married, had any of his children given them the least encouragement. But I didn’t want a white stepmother. And Da, too, could never have jumped off the world line that he’d drawn himself. How could he have explained to his second wife that he still held nightly conversations with his first?
Terrie and I sat with him as he went down. He must have felt the vigil as a sentence. I waited until I couldn’t delay in good faith anymore. Then I wrote Jonah, care of the management agency in Amsterdam. I couldn’t say “dying” in the letter, but I said as strongly as I could that Jonah might want to come home. With the letter chasing him around the stages of Europe, I figured it might be weeks before we’d hear. I had no way to contact Ruth, or any sense of how she might receive the news.
Da enjoyed our company, as far as it went. The fact is, we didn’t spend much time together when Teresa and I visited. He grew furious with preoccupation, in the homestretch. He continued to work all the way to the end, more fiercely than I can remember him ever working. Science was his way of lengthening his shortened days. He worked until he was so drugged with palliative medication, he didn’t even know he was working anymore. He tried to explain to me what was at stake. Some weeks, he seemed desperate. He needed to prove that the universe had a preferred rotation. I couldn’t even wrap my head around what such a thing might mean.
He needed to show that more galaxies rotated in one direction than in the other. He sought a basic asymmetry, more counterclockwise galaxies than clockwise. He assembled vast catalogs of astronomical photos and was hard at work making measurements with a pencil and protractor, estimating rotational axes and compiling his data into huge tables. The work was a footrace he needed to win. Each day, he did a little more, on a little less strength.
I asked him why he was so desperate to know. “Oh. I think this to be the case, already. But to have the mathematical basis: That would be wonderful!”
I asked him as meekly as I could. “Why would that be so wonderful?” What need could anyone have for something so blindingly remote? I don’t know if he heard my note—my resentment at his living and dying by another clock in another system’s gravitational field, my anger at his listening for sounds that run on ahead of time, too far for human ears to hear. His obsession should have been harmless enough. It didn’t enslave or exploit anyone’s misery. But neither did it lift that misery or set a single soul free. Now that I had something to measure against, I knew my father to be the single whitest man in the world. How Mama could have thought to marry him and how the two of them imagined they could make a life together anywhere in this country would be secrets he’d take to the grave.
When Teresa and I went up to Da’s, we’d end up playing cribbage in the front room while he sat in his study making desperate calculations. I apologized to my Polish saint in a thousand oblique ways, for hours at a shot.
“It doesn’t matter, Joseph. It’s so good for me, just to see where you grew up.”
“How many times have I told you where I grew up? I’d rather have grown up in hell than here.”
Too late, she rushed to fix her mistake. “Can we go over to the city? See your old …” And halfway in, she realized she’d made bad worse. We went back to cribbage, a game she taught me, one she used to play with her mother. The saddest, whitest, most inscrutable game the human mind ever invented.
One night, we sat together under the globe of a lamp, looking over the pictures that had survived the accident of my family. There were half a dozen from before the fire. They’d been pinned to a board in my father’s office at the university for a quarter of a century. Now they’d come home, but to no home anyone in the pictures would have recognized. One photo showed a couple holding a baby. A thickset man, his close-cropped hair already receding, stood next to a thin woman in a print dress, hair pulled back in a bun. The woman held a lump wrapped in a fuzzy blanket. Teresa hovered her nail above the infant packet. “You?”
I shrugged. “Jonah, probably.”
A delicate pause. “Who are these two?”
I couldn’t tell her. I had some memory of the man, but even that might have come mostly from this photograph. “My grandparents.” Then, inspired stupidity: “My mother’s parents.”
In time, my father grew too sick to work. He still perched with his star charts and his tables of numbers, head bowed over the snaking Greek equations. But he could no longer force through the calculations. This puzzled more than hurt him. The medications had him in a place beyond pain. Or maybe he was confused by the facts’ inability to keep pace with theory.
“Well?” I asked. “Does the universe have a preferred spin?”
“I don’t know.” His voice trailed the same wake of disbelief as if he’d discovered he’d never existed. “It seems to express no preference for rotation in any direction over the other.”
Toward the end, he wanted to sing. We hadn’t for years. I couldn’t even say exactly when we’d stopped. Mama died. Jonah turned professional. Ruth quit her angelic voice in something like disgust. So family music ended. Then one day in the first midwinter of this new, alien decade, my dying father wanted to make up for lost time. He turned up a sheaf of madrigals, produced from the towering mounds of his office scribbles. “Come. We sing.” He made us each take a part.
I looked at Teresa, who looked around for a place to kill herself. “Teresa doesn’t read music, Da.”
He smiled: We’d have our little joke. Then his smile died in comprehension. “How can this be? You have said she sings with you?”
“She does. She … learns everything by ear. By heart.”
“Really?” He delighted in the idea, as if the possibility had only just occurred to him. One of those deathbed revelations over nothing. “Really? This is fine! We will learn this song for you, by heart.”
I didn’t want to sing trios with the terrified and the dying. I, too, had lost some basic faith in sound. The three of us could not possibly give Da what he needed—a glimpse of a world gone unreachable. Music had always been his celebration of the unlikelihood of escape, his Kaddish for those who’d suffered the fate meant for him. “How about T. and I sing something for you? Straight from the Glimmer Room, Atlantic City!”
“This would be even better.” His voice fell away, almost inaudible.
I don’t know how, but Saint Teresa rose to the awful moment. She, at least, still believed in music. I played on the piano that had sat for years in Fort Lee, untouched. And the white Catholic truck driver’s daughter from the saltwater taffy factory sang like a siren. I came out of my fog to meet her. We started on “Satin Doll,” as far from the Monteverdi that Da had picked out as distance allowed. And yet, as the satin doll maker himself once said, there were only two kinds of music. This was the good kind.
By then, Da’s face was ashen and the laugh in his eyes was glaze. But when Teresa and I hit our groove, somewhere around the second verse, he lit up one last time. For my father, music had always been the joy of a made universe—composed, elaborate, complex: various arcs of a solar system spinning in space at once, each one traced by the voice of a near relation. But the pleasure that bound him to his wife had been spontaneous treasure hunting. They both went to their graves swearing that any two melodies could fit together, given the right twists of tempo and turns of key. And that insistence, it struck me, as Teresa and I careened down the tune Ellington put down, lay as close to jazz as it did to the thousand years of written-out melodies their game drew on.
As my pale taffy girl sailed over the melody, sounding more sweetly sustained than I’d ever heard her, I tapped into some underground stream and drew up broke
n shards, motives from Machaut to Bernstein, and slipped them into my accompaniment. Teresa must have heard the sounds turning strange beneath her. But she sailed right over them. Who knows how many of the quotes Da made out? The tunes were in there; they fit. That’s all that mattered. And for the seven and a half minutes my woman and I made the song last, my family, too, was there inside our sound.
Baby, shall we go out skippin’? Take your freedom on the road once, before you die. The tune said yes, said name your ecstasy. Even a written-out melody had to be made up again, on the spot, each time you read it. The swinging little skip of a theme had been sung every imaginable way, a million times and more before this woman and I ever heard it. But Teresa sang it for my father in a way he’d never yet heard. There was only this onetime meeting between us and the pitches. These notes, at least, knew who my people were, all those lives lived out between the making up and the writing down. We are all native speakers. Sing where you are, even as it goes. Sing all the things that this life denied you. No one owns even one note. Nothing trumps time. Sing your own comfort, the song said, for no one else will sing it for you. Speaks Latin, that satin doll.
In the best world, Da would have been making music, rather than just taking it in. But in extremis, my father made a decent audience. He didn’t move much, except at the core. His face opened up. When we hit the bridge, he seemed ready to rejoin all the spinning points of light in his galaxy catalog. We finished, Teresa and I grinning as we nailed the cadence. We’d gone outside ourselves, into the tune. Da rocked for two or three more measures, to a pulse we living aren’t given to hear. “Your mother loved that song.”
That seemed impossible to me. I couldn’t get back there. I wasn’t even sure my father had recognized the tune.
Da worsened, and still I heard nothing from Jonah. I had a hundred theories a day, each less generous than the last. Toward New Year’s, Da asked if I knew where Jonah was. “I think he’s singing Mahler in Cologne.” The nearer death was, the more freely I lied. I made it sound as if the concert were taking place that week. My father once told us there was no now, now.
The Time of Our Singing Page 60
