The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  I come home one day, my upper-right canine knocked out by a boy three years older. I don’t tell my mother. It would only hurt her. When she sees my new gap, she shouts. “You’re getting so big, JoJo. So big so fast.” But the new tooth is weeks coming in. I smile at her, every chance I get. Once, she looks away, crying in what I think is shame at her gapmouthed boy, grinning his obliging toothlessness. I’ll take fifty years learning to read her.

  Why do we need to go out at all? This is what we boys want to know. Why can’t we stay in and read, listen to the radio, pitch pennies or skip rope in the cellar for exercise, like Joe Louis does? My parents can read each other’s minds. They always give the same answer to these questions. They practice in advance. They know when the other has already built up a boy’s will or countered a boy’s won’t.

  “This family’s not fair,” Jonah says. “Not a real democracy!”

  “Yes, it is,” Da tells him. Or maybe Mama. “Only, big people get two votes.”

  They complete each other’s sentences and finish each other’s half-sung phrases. Sometimes, humming out loud over breakfast or housecleaning, they land on the same downbeat of the same tune, a piece neither has sung for weeks. Spontaneous unison. At the same tempo, in the same key.

  I ask Da, “Where do we really come from, Germany or Philadelphia? What language did we speak before we learned English?”

  He studies me to see what I’m really asking. “We come from Africa,” he says. “We come from Europe. We come from Asia, where Russia really is. We come from the Middle East, where the earliest people came from.”

  That’s when Mama chides him. “Maybe that was their summer home, sugar.”

  I know ten names: Max, William, Rebecca, Nettie, Hannah, Charles, Michael, Vihar, Lucille, Lorene. I see family pictures, but not many. On bad nights, when Ruth is ill or something has broken between Mama and Da, I send these names messages.

  Jonah asks, “What color was Adam?” He smirks, knowing he’s breaking the law.

  Mama looks at him sideways. But Da brightens. “This is a very good question! On how many issues do science and religion give exactly the same answer? All of the peoples on earth must have the same ancestors. If only memory were a little stronger.”

  “Or a little weaker,” Mama says.

  “Think of it! Arising once, in one place.”

  “Except for those Neanderthal stallions jumping the fence.”

  Da blushes, and we boys laugh, too, no clue except the general silliness. “Before that, I mean. The first seed.”

  Mama shrugs. “Maybe that one blew in the window. From outdoors.”

  “Yes,” Da says, a little startled. “Probably you are right!” Mama laughs, nudging him in scandal. “No, truly! This is more likely than native-grown. Given the earth’s youth, the size of all outdoors!”

  Mama shakes her head, her mouth bunched up on one side. “Well, children. Your father and I have decided. Adam and Eve were little and green.”

  We boys laugh. Our parents have gone mad. Speaking total nonsense. We can’t understand a word. But Jonah understands something I don’t. He’s faster, with a long head start. “Martians?”

  My mother nods gravely, our great secret: “All of us, Martians.”

  All the world’s people: We get them in geography, history. Tens of thousands of tribes, and not one of them ours. “We have no people,” I tell my parents one night before bed. I want them to know. Protect them, after the fact.

  “We are our people,” Da says. Every month he writes letters to Europe. Searching. He’s been doing that for years.

  Mama adds, “You’re out front of everyone. You three just wait long enough, everybody’s going to be your people.” We cobble up a national anthem out of stolen parts.

  “Do we believe in God?” I ask.

  And they say, “Let each boy believe in his own fashion.” Or something like that, just as unhelpful, just as impossible.

  My mother sings at churches. Sometimes she takes us with her, but Da, never. The music is something she knows and we don’t. “Where does it come from?” Jonah asks.

  “Same place all music does.”

  Already, Jonah isn’t buying. “Where’s it going?”

  “Ah!” she says. “Back toward do.”

  We stand next to her in the pews, hands to the flat of her hips, feeling the vibrations coming through her dress, the deep fundamentals that surface from her with such clear power that people can’t help but turn around and stare at the source. We go to churches where everyone pretends not to look. We go to churches where the sound is ecstatic, cheered and clapped every which way, picked up and rolled into a dozen unplanned codas. We go to a place where the thundering, swaying, bliss-swelling choir sends a heavy woman in front of us into convulsions. She leans over, and I think she’s pretending to be sick. I laugh, and then I stop. Her body switchbacks side to side, first in time to the music, then cut time, then triple double. Her arms work like a sprinter’s, and her breasts fly out like counterweights to her heaving. A girl, maybe her daughter, holds her and sways with her, still singing to the music that mounts up from the choir. “Day is coming. Day is coming. When the walls will all come down.” The woman next to her, a perfect stranger, fans her with a handkerchief, saying, “That’s right; that’s all right now,” not even looking. Just following the mountain of music.

  Maybe she’s dying. My mother sees my first-time terror. “She’s all right, JoJo. Just coming through.”

  “Through to where?”

  My mother shrugs. “To where she was before she came here.”

  Every church we visit has its own sound. My mother sings them all, running beyond the roll of the notes. Shining like that far horizon, where all notes go. What you love more than your own life must finally belong to you. What you come to know, better than you know your own way home, is yours.

  At night, we sing. Then music envelops us. It offers us its limited safety, here on our street, however long a way it has come. It never occurs to me that the sound isn’t ours, that it’s the last twitch of someone else’s old, abandoned dream. Each piece we do springs into being right here, the night we make it. Its country is this spinet; its government, my mother’s fingers; its people, our throats.

  Mama and Da can sing right off the page, songs they’ve never seen before, and still sound like they’ve known them from birth. We sing a song from England: “Come Again, Sweet Love Doth Now Invite.” Soon we all climb up that scale together—“to see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die”—building step by step until we pull back at the peak, the “die” at the top of the phrase just a plaything sound we fondle, tuning to one another. Five phrases, sparkling, innocent, replaying the courtiers’ party game from the day of this tune’s making, that festive beauty, financed by the slave trade.

  Jonah loves the song. He wants more by the same maker. We sing another: “Time Stands Still.” It takes me until this moment, this one, setting these words down half a century on, to find my way back, to come through to this song. To see the day and place we were signaling all those times we took the song on the road. To hear the forecast in that read-through. For prophecy just remembers in advance what the past has long been saying. All we ever do is fulfill the beginning.

  “Time stands still with gazing on her face.” I gaze and time stands. My mother’s face, soft in the light of this song. We sing a five-part arrangement, which Jonah makes us take so slowly that each note hangs in the air, a broken pillar with vines growing over it. That’s all he wants: to stop the melody’s forward motion and collapse it into a single chord.

  He doesn’t want us to finish. But when we do, for one last little specious now, he’s in bliss, the bliss underneath the chord. “You like the old ones?” Da asks. Jonah nods, although he hasn’t once thought that any of these tunes might be older than another. They’re all the same age as our parents: one day younger than creation.

  “How old is that song?” I ask.

  Our father’s ey
es sweep upward. “Seventy-seven and three-quarters Rooties.”

  My sister howls with pleasure. She waves her hands in the air. “No, no!” She puts her palm on her chin, her index on her cheek, her elbow in her other hand, mocking the posture of thought. Already she’s eerie, copying postures and poses, donning their worldliness as if she understands them. “I think it’s … yes!” Her finger shoots into the air, her head bobbing eureka. “Seventy-six and three-quarters Rooties! Not counting the first Rootie.”

  “How many Mamas?”

  Da doesn’t even have to think. “Just over eleven.”

  Mama’s offended. She pushes away his attempt to hug her. “Almost twelve.”

  I don’t understand. “How old is Mama?”

  “Eight and a half hundredths of this song.”

  “How many yous?”

  “Ah! This is a different question. I’ve never told you how old is your old man?” He has, a million times. He’s zero, no years old at all. Born in 1911, in Strasbourg, then Germany, now France, on what was then March 10, but during the hours that were lost forever when Alsace capitulated and at last adjusted its clocks to Greenwich. This is the fable of his birth, the mystery of his existence. This is how a young boy’s life was snared by time.

  “Not even nine of him,” Mama taunts. “Your old man is an old man. Only nine of your father’s great long lives, and you’re back to Dowland!”

  My parents are different ages.

  “Nay,” my father says. “One may not divide by zero!”

  I don’t ask how many Jonahs, how many Joes.

  “Enough foolishness.” Mama is the queen supreme of all American Stroms, now and forever. “Who let all this math in the house? Let’s get on with the counting.”

  Stand still and gaze for minutes, hours, and years to her give place. Our father discovers how time is not a string, but a series of knots. This is how we sing. Not straight through, but turning back on ourselves, harmonizing with bits we’ve already sung through, accompanying those nights we haven’t yet sung. This is the night, or might as well be, when Jonah cracks the secret language of harmony and breaks into our parents’ game of improvised quotations. Mama starts with Haydn; Da layers on a crazed glaze of Verdi. The bird and the fish, out house hunting, lacing the nest with everything that fits. Then Jonah, out of nowhere, adding his pitch-perfect rendition of Josquin’s Absalon, fili mi. And for that feat, at so tender an age, he wins from my parents a look more frightened than any look that strangers have ever painted us with.

  And later, when Einstein comes by the house for music night, playing his violin with the other physicist musicians, he needs give only the slightest push to shame my parents into sending their boy away. “This child has a gift. You don’t hear how big. You are too close. It’s unforgivable that you do nothing for him.”

  The nothing my mother has given him is her own life. The unforgivable thing she’s guilty of: the steady rhythm of love. “The child has a gift.” And who does the great white-maned man think has given it to him? Every day, a school for that gift, costing no less than everything. She gives up her own gift, her own growth, her own vindication. But this is blackness, too: a world of white, declaring your efforts never enough, your sounds insufficient. Telling you to send the boy off, sell him into safety, let him fly away, give him over to mastery, lift him over that river any way you can. Never telling you what land you send him to, there on the far side.

  Maybe she dies never questioning. Thinking the size of her boy’s skill has forced her hand. Believing in the obligation of beauty, a willing victim of high culture. Maybe she dies not knowing how there is no better school than hers. For here’s her boy, her eldest, stealing the keys of music, that music denied her. I see the look my parents trade then, pricing the experiment they’ve been running. Calculating the cost of their union.

  What of Ruthie’s gift, had Mama lived? My sister, at four, is the fastest of all of us, latching onto the most elaborate melody, holding it high and clear, whatever the changing intervals around her. Soon, she is a genius mimic, doing Da, doing Mama, destroying in pitch-perfect parody her brothers’ walk and talk. Wheezing like the postman. Stuttering sententiously like our parents’ favorite radio sage. Doddering like the aged corner grocer until Mama, gasping through tears, begs her for mercy. This is not parroting, but something more uncanny. Root seems to know things about human invention that her handful of years can’t have taught her. She lives in the skin of the people she replicates.

  But my sister is a lifetime younger than we are. Three years between us: time enough to split us beyond recognition. Each of us is a fluke of our one thin moment. Four and a half years from this night, Mama will be where no years can touch her.

  Her death cuts us all loose in time. Now I’m almost twice my mother’s age. I’ve come through some warping wormhole, twisting back to see what she looked like, reflected in the light of her family. Her face stands still with gazing on all that it won’t live to see. Now it is as old, as young, as all other things that have stopped.

  With nothing to check my memory, I can trust nothing. Memory is like vocal preparation. The note must center in the mind before the voice can land on it. The sound from the mouth has been sent out long beforehand. Already she opens to me in that look, one that takes years to reach me: her terror at hearing her prodigy son. This is the memory I send on ahead, my clue to the woman, when all other clues are long gone. She trades the look with my father, seeing what they’ve made, a secret, terrible acknowledgment: Our child is a different race from either of us.

  I get my own look from her, to set alongside that one. Just once, and so fleeting that it’s over before she launches it. But unmistakable: It comes three days before I leave to join my brother in Boston. I’m taking what both of us know is our last private lesson together. We’ve been working through the Anna Magdalena notebook. Most of the pieces are already too easy for me, although I never say so. Even great players still play these, we tell each other. It’s a family notebook, Mama says, something Bach made to build his wife a home in music. It’s a family album, like the Polaroids my parents keep of the years we’ve been through. Postcards savored and kept safe.

  Da is at the university. Ruth is on the floor, ten feet from the piano, working on her clothespin-family dollhouse. Mama and I flip pages in the album: We’re supposed to be doing social studies—the developing nations—but we’re playing hooky, with time so short. There’s no one to scold us. We play through a pack of easy dances, stretching them, jazzing them, as light as rain in the desert, turning to dust before it hits the roofs.

  We turn to the arias, the part of the notebook we love best. With them, one of us can sing and the other play. We do number 37, “Willst du dein Herz mir schenken.” Mama sings, already a creature from another world. But I can’t hear that from here, the only world where I’ve ever lived. I start in on number 25, but before we can get three measures into it, Mama stops. I do, too, to see what’s wrong, but she waves frantically for me to keep playing. Rootie the mimic is towering above her clothespin family, standing as she’s seen Mama do a thousand times, posed in front of a room full of listening people, Mama herself, at one-third size. Little Root’s voice enacts an adulthood already in her. She takes over from my mother “Bist du bei mir,” singing it for her, to her, as her.

  My seven-year-old sister has learned the stream of German words phonetically, just from hearing Mama sing it two or three times. Ruth can’t understand a word she sings in her father’s language. But she sings knowing where every word heads toward. She sings the song Mama and Da played in my grandparents’ parlor on his first visit there. Ach, wie vergnügt wär’ so mein Ende. Ah, how pleasant would my end be.

  I play it through, and Rootie sails smoothly into harbor. Mama holds herself, her hands knotted in front of her, motionless, conducting. At the end of the song, my mother stares at me, dumbstruck. She begs me, the only other soul within earshot, for an explanation. Then she moves to Ruth, stroking
and marveling, cooing and combing in thrilled disbelief. “Oh, my girl, my girl. Can you do everything?”

  But for an instant, she sounds me. Da isn’t here; I’m her only available man. Maybe it’s me—the me who sees her now, half a century on—whom she seeks out. Her eyes strike down with prophecy. She searches me for explanations of what’s to come. She hears it in Ruth’s song: what’s waiting for her. In her panicked advance look, she makes me promise her things I can’t deliver. Her look swears me to a vow: I must take care of everyone, all her song-blasted family, when I’m the only one who remembers this glimpse of how things must go. Watch over this girl. Watch over your brother. Watch over that hopeless, foreign man who can’t watch over anything smaller than a galaxy. She looks right at me, forward across the years, at my later self, grown, broken, the only person who stands between her and final knowing. She hears effect before cause, response before call: her own daughter singing to her, the one tune that will do for her funeral.

  She packs me off to Boston to join my brother. On the day of my real departure, she’s all pained smiles. She never mentions the moment again, even in her eyes. I’m left to think I must have invented it.

  But I was there for the rehearsal. And there again, with Ruth, in concert. And still here, brought back to do the encore, although my every performance was able to save exactly no one. Half a century past my mother’s death, I hear that cadence she caught that day. She doesn’t anticipate what will happen to her so much as she remembers it. For if prophecy is just the sound of memory rejoining the fixed record, memory must already hold all prophecies yet to come home.

  MEISTERSINGER

  He met me at Zaventem Airport, Brussels, like a limo driver looking for his fare, holding up a hand-lettered sign reading PAUL ROBESON. The grand tour of Europe’s capitals had done little for his sense of humor.