The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  All her life, she’d wanted to take that brilliant duet from Cantata 78 out for a test spin, proof that small was beautiful and light was all. But she’d never found a woman soprano whose vibrato warbled less than a quarter tone. Then she heard the ethereal boy, maybe the first since Bach’s Thomasschule in Leipzig able to do justice to the euphoria. She approached Mr. Peirson, the choir director, a bloodless respecter of andante who thought he could reach the calmer patches of Lutheran purgatory if he only respected all the dynamics and offended no listener. Mr. Peirson balked, capitulating only when Lois Helmer threatened to remove her assets to the Episcopalians. Mr. Peirson surrendered the podium for the occasion, and Lois Helmer lost no time hunting up a skilled cellist to hold down the springing Violone line.

  Miss Helmer had another wild idea: music and its words ought to agree. Schweitzer had been onto this for decades, pushing for word painting in Bach as early as the year that Einstein—the violinist who bent my brother’s life—dismantled universal time. But in practice, Bach’s music, no matter the text, stood coated in that same caramel glow that masked old master paintings, the golden dusk that museumgoers took for spirituality but which was, in fact, just grime.

  Miss Helmer’s Bach would do what its words said. If the duet began “Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten”—“We rush with faint but earnest footsteps”—then the damn thing would rush. She harassed the continuo players until they brought the song up to her mental tempo, a third faster than the piece had ever been performed. She swore at the bewildered players during rehearsal, and Jonah relished every curse.

  He, of course, stood ready to blast through the piece at the speed of delight. When Jonah sang, even in rehearsal, making his noise for people who weren’t like us, I felt ashamed, like we were betraying the family secret. He matched this woman phrase for phrase, a mynah latching onto his trainer’s every trick, their free-play imitation finally converging in perfect synchrony, as if both had found a way to catch up to their own eerie echoes and rejoin.

  On the Sunday of their performance, Jonah and I clung to the choir loft’s rail, each in a black blazer and a red bow tie that had taken all Da’s knowledge of low-degree topology to tie. We stood on high and watched the congregation mill about the pews like iridescent bugs under a lifted garden stone. Da, Mom, and Ruth came late and sat way in the back, where they couldn’t bother anyone else by being seen.

  The anthem followed the Gospel. Most weeks, the moment passed, a sample swatch of spiritual wallpaper that the customers of grace fingered and set down. But that week, the bobbing cello obbligato launched such spring that even those already dozing sat up in their pews, alarmed by pleasure.

  Out of the eight jaunty bars, the soprano lifts, an overnight crocus, homesteading the winter-beaten lawn. The tune is propelled by the simplest trick: Stable do comes in on an unstable upbeat, while the downbeat squids away on the scale’s unstable re. With this slight push, the song stumbles forward until it climbs up into itself from below, tag-team wrestling with its own alto double. Then, in scripted improvisation, the two sprung lines duck down the same inevitable, surprise path, mottled with minor patches and sudden bright light. The entwined lines outgrow their bounds, spilling over into their successors, joy on the loose, ingenuity reaching anywhere it needs to go.

  Eight bars of cello, and Jonah’s voice sailed out from the back of the church. He sang as easily as the rest of the world chatted. His voice cut through the Cold War gloom and fell without warning on the morning service. Then Lois entered, spurred on to match the boy’s pinpoint clarity, singing with a brilliance she hadn’t owned since her own confirmation. We rush with faint but earnest footsteps. Ach, höre. Ah, hear!

  But where were we rushing? That mystery, at age nine, lay beyond my ability to solve. Rushing to aid this Jesu. But then we lifted our voices to ask for his help. As far as I could hear, the song reversed itself, as split as my brother, unable to say who helped whom. Someone must have botched the English translation, and I couldn’t follow the original. Mama spoke only voice-student German, and Da, who’d escaped just before the war, never bothered to teach us more of his language than we sang together around the piano.

  But the German was lost in that beam of light that hung above the congregation. My brother’s voice washed over the well-heeled pews, and years of pale, northern cultivation dissolved in the sound. People turned to look, despite Jesus’ order to believe without seeing. Lois and my brother sailed along in lockstep, their finely lathed ornaments taken up into the heart of the twisting tune. They leapfrogged and doubled each other, a melancholy mention of the sick and wayward before brightening toward home, while all the while moving the idea of home three more modulations deeper into unspinning space. Zu dir. Zu dir. Zu dir. Even Mr. Peirson fought to keep his lower lip from quivering. After the first stanza, he stopped trying.

  When the cello did its final da capo and the high-voiced tandem toboggan took its last banked turn, the song wound up where all songs do: perfected in silence. A few stricken listeners even committed that worst of Lutheran sins and clapped in church. Communion, that day, was an anticlimax.

  In the chaos after the service, I searched out my brother. Lois Helmer was kissing him. He stared me down, cutting off even a snicker. He abided Miss Helmer, who hugged him to her, then let him go. She seemed completed. Already dead.

  Our family scooted out to the street, doing its traditional disappearing act. But the crowd found my brother. Strangers came up and pressed him to them. One old man—out for his last Sunday on God’s earth—fixed Jonah with a knowing stare and held on to his hand for dear life. “That was the most beautiful Handel I ever heard.”

  We escaped and cackled as we ran. Two ladies snagged us in midflight. They had something momentous to say, some secret they weren’t supposed to tell, but, like girls our age, they couldn’t help themselves. “Young man,” the taller one said. “We just want you to know what an honor it is for us to have … a voice like yours in the service of our church.” Like yours. Some sinful Easter egg we were supposed to discover. “And I just can’t tell you …” The words caught in her throat. Her friend put a white-gloved hand on her arm to encourage her. “I just can’t tell you how much it means to me, personally, to have a little Negro boy singing like that. In our church. For us.”

  Her voice broke with pride, and her eyes watered. My brother and I traded smirks. Jonah smiled at the ladies, forgiving their ignorance. “Oh, ma’am, we’re not real Negroes. But our mother is!”

  Now the adults passed a look between them. The gloved one patted Jonah’s amber-colored head. They stepped away and faced each other, brows up, clutching each other’s elbows, searching for the right way to break the news to us. But at that moment, our father, fed up with crowds and Christians, even academic ones, came back into the nave to fish us out.

  “Come on, you two. Your old man is dying of hunger.” He’d picked up the line from “Baby Snooks” or “The Aldrich Family,” those radio serials about assimilated life that held him in such interplanetary awe. “You have to get your old Da back uptown, to his dinner, before anything happens.”

  The ladies fell back from this ghost. Their known world crumpled faster than they could rebuild it. I looked away, taking on their shame. Da waved apology to Jonah’s admirers. Their hard-won campaign of liberal tolerance crashed down around them in one impertinent flip of the physicist’s wrist.

  On Broadway, the first three cabs we flagged wouldn’t take us. In the cab, Mama couldn’t stop humming Bach’s exultant little tune. We boys sat on either side of her, with Ruth on her lap and Da up front. She wore a black silk dress printed with little lambs so small, they might have been polka dots. Cocked on her head was a cupped potsherd hat—“your mother’s yarmulke,” Da called it—with a piece of black net she pulled down like a half veil in front of her face. She looked more beautiful than any movie star, with all the beauty Joan Fontaine never quite pulled off. Singing in a cab on Broadway, surrounde
d by her triumphant family, she was black, still young, and, for five minutes, free.

  But my brother was elsewhere. “Mama,” he asked. “You are a Negro, right? And Da’s … some kind of Jewish guy. What exactly does that make me, Joey, and Root?”

  My mother stopped singing. I wanted to slug my brother and didn’t know why. Mama looked off into whatever place lay beyond sound. Da, too, shifted. They’d been waiting for the question, and every other one that would follow, down the years to come. “You must run your own race,” our father pronounced. I felt he was casting us out into coldest space.

  Ruth, on our mother’s lap, laughed in the face of the glorious day. “Joey’s a Nee-gro. And Jonah’s a Gro-nee.”

  Mama looked at her little girl with a crooked little smile. She lifted her veil and held Ruthie to her. She rubbed her nose into her daughter’s belly, humming the Bach. With two great bear arms, she drew our heads into the embrace. “You’re whatever you are, inside. Whatever you need to be. Let every boy serve God in his own fashion.”

  She wasn’t telling us everything. Jonah heard it, too. “But what are we? For real, I mean. We got to be something, right?”

  “Have.” She sighed. “We have to be something.”

  “Well?” My brother fiddled to free his shoulders. “What something?”

  She released us. “You two boys.” The words came out of the side of her mouth, slower than that morning’s glacial sermon. “You two boys are one of a kind.”

  The cabbie must have been black. He took us all the way home.

  This was all our parents said about the matter, until the end of summer. We went back to the local church circuit with our mother, where ours were just a part of the deep, concerted voice. August trickled out, and Jonah readied to leave home. Our evenings of song tapered off. The chords we made were no longer crisp, and no one had the heart for counterpoint.

  Sometimes at night, through our parents’ door, we heard Mama weeping at her mirror, and Da trying for all the world to answer. Jonah did his best to comfort them both. He told them Boston would be good for him. He’d come back singing so well, they’d be glad they’d sent him away. He said he’d be happy. He told them everything they wanted to hear, in a voice that must have destroyed them.

  EASTER, 1939

  This day, a nation turns out for its own wake. The air is raw, but scrubbed by last night’s rain. Sunday rises, red and protestant, over the Potomac. Light’s paler synonyms scratch at the capital’s monuments, edging the blocks of the Federal Triangle, turning sandstone to marble, marble to granite, granite to slate, settling down on the Tidal Basin like water seeking its level. The palette of this dawn is pure Ashcan School. Early morning coats every cornice with magentas that deepen as the hours unfold. But memory will forever replay this day in black and white, the slow voice-over pan of Movietone.

  Laborers drift across a Mall littered with scraps of funny papers scattering on the April wind. Sawhorses and police cones corral the lawless expanse of public space. Federal work teams—split by race—finish ratcheting together a grandstand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A handful of organizers gazes over the reflecting pool, swapping bets about the size of the crowd that will turn out for this funeral turned jubilee. The crowds about to descend on them in three hours will swamp their most outrageous guesses.

  Knots of the curious gather to witness these last-minute preparations. Accounts have been flying for some time now—word of this forbidden concert. American Dream and American Reality square off, their long trajectories arcing toward midair collision. The ancient ship of state, gone too long without a hull scrape, groaned at anchor last night in the Washington Navy Yard, upriver on the Anacostia, and now entire neighborhoods of the city, this Easter morning, 1939—in crowds already assembling to the east of Scott Circle and north of Q Street, all the way up into the Maryland suburbs; whole communities still in church, calling out their response to this year’s recounting of the ancient Resurrection fable—begin to wonder whether today might witness the leaky old brig’s mercy scuttling, a full-fledged burial at sea.

  “How long?” the church songs ask. “How long until that Day?” As late as last Friday, no tune dared more than soon, no singer thought sooner than never. Yet this morning, by some overlooked miracle, the stone has rolled away, Rome’s imperial elite lie sprawled about the tomb, and the messenger angel floats front and center, beating its wings over the Jefferson Memorial, saying now, singing release in the key of C.

  Over on Pennsylvania Avenue, pink children in vests and pinafores hunt for Easter eggs on the White House lawn. Inside the Oval Office, the silver-tongued president and his speechwriters conspire on the next fireside chat to a country still hoping to evade the flames. Each new paternal radio address stores up more strained reassurances. “Brutality,” the old man tells his fireside family, “is a nightmare that must waken to democracy.” A loving-enough lie, perhaps even believable, to those who’ve never strolled northward up Fourteenth Street. But Roosevelt’s address on the widening crisis goes hunting, this Easter, for an audience. Today, the nation’s radios tune to a different performance, a wider frequency. Today, Radio America broadcasts a new song.

  Democracy is not on the program this afternoon. Freedom will not ring from Constitution Hall. The Daughters of the American Revolution have seen to that. The DAR have shut their house to Marian Anderson, the country’s greatest contralto, recently returned from a triumphal tour of Europe, the sensation of Austria and the toast of the Norwegian king. Sibelius embraced her, declaring, “My roof is too low for you!” Even Berlin booked her for multiple engagements, until her European manager confessed to the authorities that no, Miss Anderson was not 100 percent Aryan. The great Sol Hurok has taken her into his fold of international stars, sure he can replicate, at home, the wonder of the jaded Old World. Last year, he booked Miss Anderson on a seventy-concert U.S. tour, the most grueling ever performed by a recital singer. This same alto has just been barred from the capital’s best stage.

  Who can say what revolution the DAR staves off, sandbagged behind its blinding-white Roman portico? “Booked through the end of winter,” the programming director tells Hurok. “Spring, as well.” The agency’s associates call in another booking, for a different artist, this one 100 percent Aryan. They get a choice of half a dozen slots.

  Hurok tells the newspapers, though this story is hardly news. It’s the country’s longest-running serial feature. The press asks the Daughters for comment. Is this permanent policy, or some vague stopgap? The DAR answers that, by tradition, certain of the city’s concert halls are reserved for performances by Miss Anderson’s people. Constitution Hall is not one. It’s not DAR policy to defy community standards. Should sentiment change, Miss Anderson might sing there. Sometime in the future. Or shortly thereafter.

  The Daily Worker has a field day. Artists vent their outrage—Heifetz, Flagstad, Farrar, Stokowski. But America ignores these foreign interventions. Thousands of petition signatures produce nothing. Then the real bombshell falls. Eleanor Roosevelt, First Mother of all First Daughters, resigns her DAR membership. The president’s wife rejects her roots overnight, declaring that no ancestor of hers ever fought to found this republic. The story makes headlines here and in capitals abroad. Miss Anderson plunges, attacca, from lieder into high opera. But her alto remains the sole calm in the middle of a national outcry. She tells the press she knows less about the situation than any of them. Her poise is a gentle puff, yet breath enough to fan old cinders into flame.

  On segregation, the presidency has held silent since Reconstruction. Now a classical vocal recital becomes the battlefield for this administration’s public stand. High culture signs on to battle not just another affront to the downtrodden Negro but a slander against Schubert and Brahms. The First Lady, former social worker, is furious. Long an Anderson fan, she had the alto sing a command performance three years earlier. Now the woman who sang at the White House can’t use the rented stage. Eleanor’s ad hoc
Protest Committee looks for an alternate venue, but the Board of Education denies them Central High School. Central High, unavailable to Variety’s third-biggest performer of the year. “If a precedent of this sort is established, the board will lose the respect and confidence of the people and bring about its destruction.”

  Walter White, NAACP president, heads to the Capitol with the only possible solution, one large enough to turn catastrophe to work. Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior, agrees to the idea in a heartbeat. The secretary has at his command the perfect venue. Its acoustics are awful and the seating worse. But oh, the capacity! Miss Anderson will sing outdoors, from the foot of the Emancipator. There’s no hiding place down here.

  Word of the plan goes out, and hate mail pours in. Makeshift crosses of Japanese cherry pop up like daffodils in the White House lawn. Still, there’s no weighing the human soul except singly. The Texas chapter of the Daughters wires in an order for two hundred seats. But Ickes and Eleanor have saved their trump card. The tickets for this cobbled-up Sunday concert will go for free. Free is an admission price the nation understands, one that guarantees a house to make the DAR blanch. Even those who don’t know a meno from a molto, who couldn’t pick Aida from Otello out of a chorus line, plan to spend this Easter on the Mall.