The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  “Schmuel,” my father said, a tempo, from the doorway.

  “Wonder Schmuel Ness?”

  “Yes, sure. Why not? This Ness family has many secrets in the cabinet.”

  “Da. Come on. Where did we come from?”

  “Your mother and I found you in the freezer case at the A & P. Who knows how long you were in there. This Mr. Ness claimed to own, but he never produced the ownership papers.”

  “Please, Da. Truth.”

  Not a word our father ever violated. “You were born out of your mother’s belly.”

  This inanity reduced the two of us to helpless laughter. My mother lifted her arms in the air. I can see her muscles tighten, even now, twice as old as she was then. Arms up, she said, “Here we go.”

  My father sat down. “We must go there, soon or late.”

  But we didn’t go anywhere. Jonah lost interest. His laugh staled and he stared off into space, grimacing. He accepted the deranged idea—whatever they wanted to tell him. He put his arm on Mama’s forearm. “That’s okay. I don’t care where we came from. Just so long as we all came from the same place.”

  The first music school to hear my brother loved him. I knew this would happen before it did, no matter what my father said about predicting the future. The school, one of the city’s two top conservatory prep programs, was down in midtown, on the East Side. I remember Jonah, in a burgundy blazer too large for him, asking Mama, “How come you don’t want to come?”

  “Oh, Jo! Of course I want to go with you. But who’s going to stay home and take care of Baby Ruth?”

  “She can come with us,” Jonah said, already knowing who couldn’t go where.

  Mama didn’t answer. She hugged us in the foyer. “Bye, JoJo.” Her one name for the two of us. “Do good things for me.”

  We three men bundled into the first cab that would take us, then headed down to the school. There, my brother disappeared into a crowd of kids, coming back to find us in the auditorium just before he sang. “Joey, you’re not going to believe this.” His face all eager horror. “There’s a bunch of kids back there, and they look like Ming the Merciless is chewing their butts.” He tried to laugh. “This big guy, an eighth grader at least, is spitting his guts out in the washbasin.” His eyes wandered out beyond the orbit of newly discovered Pluto. No one had ever told him music was worth getting sick over.

  Twenty bars into my brother’s a cappella rendition of “Down by the Salley Gardens,” the judges were sold. Afterward, in the stale green hallway, two of them even approached my father to talk up the program. While the adults went over details, Jonah dragged me backstage to the warm-up room where the older kid had puked. We could still smell it, lining the drain, sweet and acrid, halfway between food and feces.

  Official word came two weeks later. Our parents gave the long typed envelope to Jonah, for the thrill of opening it himself. But when my brother foundered on the first two sentences, Da took the letter. “‘We regret to say, despite the merits of this voice, we cannot offer a place this fall. The program is overenrolled, and the strains on the faculty make it impossible …’”

  Da let out a little bark of dismay and glanced at Mama. I’d seen them shoot the look between them, out together in public. By ten, I knew what it meant, but I kept that fact secret from them. Our parents stared at each other, each working to deflect the other’s dismay.

  “A singer does not get every part,” Da told Jonah. Mama just looked down, her half of the oldest music lesson there was.

  Da made inquiries, through a colleague in the Music Department at Columbia. He came home in a mix of weariness and amazement. He tried to tell Mama. Mama listened, but never stopped working on the lamb stew she was making for dinner. My brother and I crouched down, hiding on either side of the kitchen doorway, listening in like foreign spies. Grown men had been electrocuted for less.

  “They have a new director,” Da said.

  Mama snorted. “New director, pushing through some old policies.” She shook her head, knowing everything the world had to teach. She sounded different. Poorer, somehow. Older. Rural.

  “It is not what you are thinking.”

  “Not—”

  “Not your contribution. Mine!” He almost laughed, but his throat wouldn’t let him.

  Da sat at the kitchen table. A sound came out of him, horrid with wear, one he’d never have let go of had he known we were listening. It cracked into something almost a giggle. “A music program without Jews! Madman! How can you have classical music without Jews?”

  “Easy. Same way you had baseball without coloreds.”

  Something had happened to my father’s voice, too. Some ancient thickening. “Madness. They might as well refuse a child for being able to read notes.”

  Mama set the knife down. One wrist worked to hold the hair back out of her eyes. The other held her elbow in a fist. “We fought that war for nothing. Worse than nothing. We should never have bothered.”

  “What is left for such a place?” A shout came out of Da. Jonah and I both flinched, as if he’d hit us. “What kind of chorus do they think they put together?”

  That night my father, who’d never checked “Jewish” on any form in his life, whose life was devoted to proving the universe needed no religion but math, made us sing all the Phrygian folk tunes he could remember from a life of dedicated forgetting. He took over the keyboard from my mother, his fingers finding that plaintive modal sorrow hidden in the chords. We sang in that secret language Da dropped into sometimes, in streets north of ours, English’s near cousin from a far village, those slant words I could almost recognize. Even in quickstep, those scales, glancing with flat seconds and sixths, turned love songs to a pretty face into shoulder shrugs at blind history. My father became a lithe, nasal clarinet, and the rest of us followed. Even Ruth picked up the chant, with her eerie instant mimicry.

  Our parents resumed the search for a proper school. Mama was militant now. She only wanted to keep her firstborn nearby, in or around New York, as close to home as possible. And only music and this newfound urgency could have let him go that far. Da, the empiricist, steeled himself against all considerations but the school’s worth. Between them, they made the awful compromise: a boarding preconservatory up in Boston, Boylston Academy.

  The school was growing famous on the strengths of its director, the great Hungarian baritone Janos Reményi. My parents read about the place in the Times, where the man had declared this country’s early voice training to be a travesty. This was exactly what a nation struggling under the mantle of postwar cultural leadership most feared hearing about itself, and it rewarded its accuser with generous support. Da and Mama must have thought a Hungarian wouldn’t care where we’d come from. The choice seemed almost safe.

  This time, we traveled together to the tryout, our whole family. We drove up in a beautiful rented Hudson with the fender worked right into the body. My mother rode in the backseat with me and Ruth. She always rode in the back whenever we traveled together, and Da always drove. They told us it had to do with Ruthie’s safety. Jonah told me it was so that the police wouldn’t stop us.

  For his trial, Jonah prepared Mahler’s “Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht?” from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Mama accompanied him, working up the piano reduction for weeks in advance, until it glistened. She wore a pleated black silk dress with draped shoulders, which made her look even taller and thinner than she was. She was the most beautiful woman the judges could ever hope to look upon. János Reményi himself was one of the three auditioners. My father pointed him out as we entered the hall.

  “Him?” Jonah said. “He doesn’t look Hungarian!”

  “What do Hungarians look like?”

  Jonah shrugged. “Balder, maybe?”

  Only a handful of singers tried out that day, those who’d made it through the rigorous screening. Mr. Reményi called the name Strom from a checklist. Mama and Jonah walked down the aisle to the stage. A woman intercepted them before they could reach the s
teps. She asked Mama where the accompanist was. My mother sucked in her breath and smiled. “I’m accompanying.” She sounded tired, but trained.

  The exchange must have flustered her. Up onstage, she set out of the gate at a tempo faster than they’d ever taken the piece in their thousand run-throughs at home. I’d heard the piece so many times, I could have sung it in reverse. But at the tempo Mama set, I’d have missed the entrance. Jonah, of course, came in perfectly. He’d only been waiting for the thrill of that moment to take the song aloft.

  I saw the judges share a look when Jonah hit his first rising figure. But they let him finish. The song vanished into history in under two minutes. In my brother’s mouth, the tune turned into impish myth. It spoke of a world without weight or effort. The Boy’s Magic Horn, sung at last by a boy still under the spell.

  One of the judges started to clap, but a look from Reményi froze her in midtwitch. The director scribbled some notes, took off his glasses, lifted his eyebrows, and gazed at my brother. “Mr. Strom.” I looked at my father, confused. His eyes fixed on Reményi. “Can you tell me what this song means?”

  Da leaned forward and began thumping his head against the seat in front of him. Mama, onstage, folded her hands across her beautiful black dress and studied her lap. In Jonah’s singing voice, my parents felt utter confidence. But spoken words were not their son’s forte.

  Jonah stood ready to help this Hungarian out with any troubles he was having. He looked up at the stage lights, cribbing the answer there. “Uh … Who thought up this little song?” He gave an embarrassed sigh, passing the buck to the poet.

  “Yes, yes. That’s the title. Now what do the words mean?”

  My brother brightened. “Oh! Okay. Let’s see.” My father’s head banging accelerated. Six-year-old Ruthie, on his other side, squirmed and started to hum. Da shushed her, something he never did. “There’s this house up in the mountains,” Jonah explained. “And a girl at the window.”

  “What kind of girl?”

  “German?”

  All three judges cleared their throats.

  “A sweet girl,” Reményi said. “A darling girl. Go on.”

  “She doesn’t live there. She has this mouth? And it’s magic? It brings dead people back to life.” The idea played in his eyes: ghouls, soul-suckers, zombies. “And then there are these three geese, who carry this song around in their beaks …”

  “That’s enough.” Reményi turned to my mother. “You see? Not a song for young boys.”

  “But it is,” my father blurted from back in the hall.

  Reményi turned around, but his look, in the dark room, went right through us. He turned back to Mama. “This is a song for a mature voice. He should not be singing this. He can’t do it well, and it might even do his vocal cords harm.”

  My mother hunched over the piano bench, under the weight of her compounded mistakes. She’d thought to delight the great man with her son’s brightness, and the great man had snuffed out her little lamp. She wanted to crawl into the piano and slice herself to ribbons on the thinnest, highest strings.

  “Maybe in twenty years, we will learn Mahler properly. The child and I. If we’re both still alive.”

  My father coughed in relief. Mama, onstage, straightened up again and decided to live. Root started chattering, and I couldn’t hush her. My brother picked at his elbow onstage, seeming to have missed the whole drama.

  Out in the corridor, Jonah bounded up to me. “Maybe the guy just doesn’t like music.” A tide of sympathy rose in his eyes. He wanted to work with the man, to show him the pleasures of sound.

  We wandered around the school’s compound, its mock-Italian palazzo wedged between the Back Bay and the Fens. Da talked to a couple of the students, including one German-speaking son of a diplomat. All swore devotion to the academy and its vocal program. Some of the better older voices were already placing in competitions here and in Europe.

  Jonah dragged me around the building, poking into the crannies, oblivious to the head-turning we all caused. Our mother walked about the grounds in lead shoes, as if to her own funeral. Every new proof that this was the right next step in her son’s life added a decade to hers.

  Da and Mama conferred with the school officials while Jonah and I entertained Ruth, letting her throw bread crumbs at the sparrows and pebbles at the marauding squirrels. Our parents returned, flustered by something Jonah and I didn’t ask about. Together, the five of us headed toward the rented Hudson for the long drive home. But a voice called to us as we made our way down the front walk.

  “Excuse me, please.” Maestro Reményi stood in the academy’s entrance. “May I have a moment?” He looked right past Da, as he had at the auditions. “You are the boy’s mother?” He studied Mama’s face and then Jonah’s, searching for the key to a mystery larger than Mahler. Mama nodded, holding the great man’s stare. János Reményi shook his head, a slow processing of the evidence. “Brava, madame.”

  Those two words were the great musical reward of my mother’s life. For fifteen seconds, she tasted the triumph she had sacrificed by marrying my father and raising us. All the way home, in the gathering dark, with Jonah up in the front, humming to himself, she predicted, “You’re going to learn whole worlds from this man.”

  Jonah got into the Boylston Academy of Music with a full scholarship. But back in the shelter of Hamilton Heights, he began to balk. “There’s so much more you can still teach me,” he told Mama, going for the kill. “I can concentrate better here, without all the other children.”

  Mama chanted to him in her history teacher’s voice. “JoJo honey. You have a skill. A special gift. Maybe only one out of thousands of boys—”

  “Fewer,” Da said, doing the calculation.

  “Only one in a million can even dream of doing what you’ll do.”

  “Who cares?” Jonah said.

  He knew he’d crossed a line. Mama held him in place, lifting his chin. She could have killed him with a word. “Every living soul.”

  “You have a duty,” Da explained, his consonants crisping. “You must grow that gift and give it back to creation.”

  “What about Joey? He plays piano better than I do. He’s a faster sight-singer.” Tattletale-style: He hit me first. “You can’t send me without Joey. I don’t want to go to any school he’s not gonna go to.”

  “Don’t say ‘gonna,’” Mama said. She must have known the real terror. “You go blaze a trail. Before you know it, he’ll follow you.”

  Too late, our parents saw they’d let us spend too much time indoors. Home school was their controlled experiment, and it had produced two hothouse flowers. They spoke to each other at night, in low voices, undressing for the night behind their bedroom door, thinking we couldn’t hear.

  “Maybe we too much protected them?” Da’s voice couldn’t find the path it wanted.

  “You can’t leave a child like that loose in a place like this.” The old agreement, the thing that bound them together, the endless work of raising an endangered soul.

  “But even so. Maybe we should have … They don’t have one real friend for the two of them.”

  My mother’s voice lifted a register. “They know other boys. They like the likable ones.” But I could hear it in her, wishing things otherwise. Somehow, we’d failed to make their plan work. I wanted to go tell them about the hurled brick shards, the words we’d learned, the threats against us, all the things we’d sheltered our parents from. Yellow boy. Half-breed. I heard Mama, at her vanity, drop her tortoise brushes and stifle a sob.

  And I heard Da shelter her, apologizing. “They have each other. They will meet others, like them. They will make friends, when they find them.”

  An oboist acquaintance of Da’s in the Columbia Math Department had long pestered Da to let us sing for the campus Lutherans. And for just as long, our parents had turned the man down. Mama took us to neighborhood churches, where our voices joined hers in the general roof raising. But beyond that, they’d kept u
s safe from the compromised world of public performance. “My boys are singers,” she said, “not trained seals.” This always made Jonah bark and clap the backs of his paws.

  Now our parents thought the Lutherans might prepare Jonah for his bigger step that fall. Church recitals could inoculate us against the more virulent outside. Our first forays down into Morningside Heights for choir rehearsal felt like overland expeditions. Da, Jonah, and I headed down on Thursday nights on the Seventh Avenue local, coming back up in a cab, my brother and I fighting to ride in the front with the cabbie and practice our fake Italian. At the first rehearsals, everyone stared. But Jonah was a sensation. The choir director held up practice, manufacturing excuses just to listen to my brother sing a passage alone.

  The choir contained several talented amateurs, cultivated academics who lived for the twice-a-week chance to immerse themselves in lost chords. A few powerful voices and even a couple of pros, there as a public service, also kicked back into the kitty. For two weeks, we sang innocuous anthems in the northern Protestant tradition. But even that young, Jonah and I scorned the cheesy, predictable modulations. Back in Hamilton Heights, we’d torture the lyrics—“My redeemer Lumpy; yes, my Jesus Lumpy.” But on Sundays, we were stalwart, singing even the most banal melody as if salvation demanded it.

  One of the group’s real altos, a pro named Lois Helmer, had designs on my brother from the moment his voice cut through that musty choir loft. She treated him like the child she’d sacrificed to pursue her modest concert career. She heard in Jonah’s bell tones a way to grab the prize her career had so far denied her.

  Miss Helmer had a set of pipes more piercing than that church’s organ. But she must have been of an age—101, by Jonah’s dead reckoning—when the pipes would soon start rusting. Before her sound leaked out and silence took over, she meant to nail a favorite piece that, to her ears, had never received a decent hearing in this world. In Jonah’s sonar soprano, she found at last the instrument of her delivery.

  I couldn’t know it then, but Miss Helmer was a good two decades ahead of her time. Long before the explosion of recording gave birth to Early Music, she and a few other narrow voices in a wide-vibrato sea began insisting that, for music before 1750, precision came before “warmth.” At that time, big was the vogue in everything. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, still mounted its annual zeppelin-sized, cast-of-thousands performances of the Bach Passions, devotional music in the atomic age, where mass released a lumbering spiritual energy. Miss Helmer, in contrast, felt that, with complex polyphony, God might actually like to hear the pitches. The sparer the line, the greater the lift. For energy was also proportionate to lightness squared.