The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  Not long after the Rose Garden incident, my trial came. Thad West pushed me into it. “That Malalai Gilani has the swoons for you, Strom Two.”

  “That’s right, hep cat,” faithful Earl added. “She does.”

  Their words were an accusation, a police raid on innocent bystanders. “I didn’t do anything. I’ve never even said hello to her.”

  “Oh, you’re doing something to her, Strom Two. This much, we know as a matter of factation.”

  I knew nothing about the girl except the obvious. She was the darkest child in school, darker than Jonah and I combined. I never knew where she came from—one of those mythical countries between the Suez and Cathay. The whole school wanted us paired: two troubling ethnics, safely canceling each other out.

  The girl had a solid alto, clear as a carillon in winter. She could count like mad, always entering on time, even in tricky twentieth-century work. She had the kind of voice that stocked decent ensembles. And she’d noticed me. I lay in bed mornings, crippled with responsibility.

  From the moment our roommates opened my eyes, mutual knowledge sprang up between Malalai Gilani and me. In choral rehearsals, on performance tours, in the one large class I shared with her, a pact hardened between us without our exchanging more than a single, deniable glance. But with that one look, I signed my name to a contract, in blood.

  The day I sat down next to her in the cafeteria, driven by my peers, she seemed not to notice. The first words she spoke to me were, “You don’t have to.” The girl was fourteen. It bound me to her with worse than chains.

  We never did things together. She didn’t do anything with anyone. Once, on our way to a performance in Brookline, we shared a seat on the school’s bus. But we took so much abuse on that short ride, we never repeated the mistake. We didn’t talk. She seemed not to trust English much, except in movies and songs. It was weeks before—brief and damp—we even brushed hands. Yet we were a pair, by every accepted measure.

  Once, she looked at me, apologizing. “I’m not really African, you know.”

  “Me neither,” I said. Easier to misunderstand. All the school wanted was that we not trouble them.

  I asked where she came from. She wouldn’t say. She never asked me—not about my home, my family, my hair, nor how I came to be at Boylston. She didn’t need to. She knew already, better than I.

  She read about the strangest things—the House of Windsor, Maureen Connolly, the Seven Sisters. She loved fashion magazines, homemaking magazines, movie magazines. She studied them furtively, with an astonished head tilt, puzzling out the artifacts of a fabled civilization. She knew all about the Kitchen of the Future. She loved how Gary Cooper started to tremble a little in High Noon. She suggested I might look good if I grew my hair out a little and slicked it down.

  Ava Gardner fascinated her. “She’s part Negro,” Malalai explained. This was when Hollywood could stage a mixed-race musical, but not with a mixed cast. My father believed that time didn’t pass. He must have been right.

  Thad and Earl were relentless. “What does she want from you, Strom Two?”

  “Want?”

  “You know. Have you discussed the terms? What she expects?”

  “What are you talking about? She just kind of blushes when we pass in the hall.”

  “Uh-oh,” Thad said. “Commitment.”

  “Mortgage time,” Earl agreed, giving the syllables a bebop syncopation.

  “You better get yourself a good job, Strom Two. Support and all.”

  Just before Thanksgiving, I bought a bracelet for Malalai Gilani in a drugstore on Massachusetts Avenue. I studied the options, taking hours to settle on a simple silver chain. The price—four dollars and eleven cents—was more than I’d paid for anything in my life except my beloved pocket scores and a set of the five Beethoven piano concertos.

  My hands shook so badly as I paid for the bracelet, the cashier laughed. “It’s okay, dear. I’ll forget you bought it as soon as you’re out the door.” Half a century later, I still hear her.

  I put off giving Malalai the gift. I needed to tell my brother first. Just broaching the topic of Malalai Gilani seemed disloyal. I waited until an evening when Thad and Earl were off listening to jazz in the common room. Jonah and I were alone in our cell. “Have you bought anything for Kimberly for Christmas?”

  Jonah snapped to. “Christmas? What month is this? Jesus, Joey. Don’t scare me like that.”

  “I just bought a bracelet … for Malalai.” I looked up and awaited my punishment. No one else could understand the size of my betrayal.

  “Malalai?” I saw my face falling, reflected in his. He shrugged. “What’d you get her?”

  I handed over the square white egg of a jewelry case. He looked in, controlling his face. “That’s fine, Joey. She’ll have to like that.”

  “You think so? It’s not too … ?”

  “It’s perfect. It’s her. Just don’t let anyone see you give it to her.”

  It took me days to make the presentation. I carried the thing around in my pocket, my leaden penance. I ran into her in the courtyard, long before the holidays, but far and away the best chance I was going to get. My throat rode up into my skull. Stage fright hit me, worse than anything the stage could produce. “I bought you … this.”

  She received my trembling gift, her face pinched between pleasure and pain. “No one ever gave me anything like this before.”

  “Like what? You haven’t opened it.”

  Malalai opened the box, the hush of her pleasure horrible. An animal cry escaped her lips at the flash of silver. “It’s so beautiful, Joseph.” The first time she spoke my name. I flipped between pride and annihilation. She held the bracelet up. “Oh!” she said. And I knew I’d bungled things.

  I grabbed the trinket. It looked flawless, just as it had in the drugstore.

  “There’s nothing on it.” Her eyes shot downward, my lightning education in intimacy. “This is an ID bracelet. They usually have names.”

  The very idea of engraving had never occurred to me. The clerk had said nothing. My brother had said nothing. I was a pitiful idiot. “I … I wanted to see whether you liked it. Before I put your name on it.”

  She smiled, flinching at my words. “Not my name.” The magazines must have told her. She knew more about my country’s ways than I ever would. My name was to be chained to her wrist from now until the day all scripture was overthrown. And I’d done nothing. Nothing wrong.

  Malalai placed the flashing bracelet around her near-black wrist. She played with the bare faceplate, its purpose now so obvious, even to me.

  “I’ll get it engraved.” I could borrow cash from Jonah. At least enough to spell out J-O-E.

  She shook her head. “I like it this way, Joseph. It’s nice.”

  She wore the blank bracelet like a prize. It gave the girls more to mock her with: unengraved ID jewelry. Malalai must have thought I didn’t want anyone seeing her wearing my name. But the bracelet was already more connection than she’d ever hoped for, in such a place. Little changed between us. We managed to sit near each other during one school assembly and a special holiday meal. She was happy with our silent link. When we did talk, all I could talk about was concert music. She loved music as well as the next Boylston student. But it didn’t grip her like movies or magazines or the Kitchen of the Future. She grasped it long before I did: Classical music wouldn’t make you American. Just the opposite.

  It slipped out one day, after one of her quiet confidences—something about how wonderful she found the 1950 Nash Rambler convertible. I laughed at her. “How did you ever land in a place like Boylston?”

  Her hand strayed to her mouth, effacing and erasing. But she couldn’t make my question disappear or mean anything but attack. She didn’t cry; she got away from me before sinking to that. Still, she managed to avoid me for the rest of that school term. I helped with that. In late December, before the vacation, she sent me the white mausoleum box back, with the blank bracelet in its
tomb. Also a record, Music of Central Asia, with a note: “This was going to be for you.”

  The school performed our string of annual holiday concerts. These were, for Boylston, what exams were for ordinary schools. Jonah and Kimberly headlined the recitals with prominent solos. I rowed in the galleys. János Reményi took us on tour to area schools—Cambridge, Newton, Watertown, even Southie and Roxbury. Kids our age sat in darkened school gyms, as stunned by our music as they might have been by a band of organ-grinding, hat-tipping monkeys. One or two of the local principals seemed to want to make some special mention of Jonah, some object lesson in tolerance or opportunity in the speeches they delivered after the music ended. But our last name, combined with Jonah’s inexplicable coloring, left them fumbling and mum.

  Before our show in Charlestown—the first time any of us had been to the wrong side of Boston Harbor—the chorus was milling in our usual preconcert jitters, when János came looking for me. I thought he wanted to reprimand me for the two notes I’d dropped at the Watertown concert, the day before. I was all set to assure Mr. Reményi that the inexcusable wouldn’t happen again.

  But Reményi cared nothing about my performance. “Where is your brother?”

  He scowled when I said I had no idea. Kimberly Monera was missing, too. János blasted away as quickly as he’d blown in, his face clenched the way it was when he conducted triple fortes. He darted off, determined to stop catastrophe before it started. But that required speeds János could never reach.

  More versions of my brother’s disgrace exist than there are operatic treatments of Dumas. János found his star pupil and the great conductor’s daughter back behind the stage flats, fumbling underneath each other’s clothes. He hauled them out of a supply closet, in the late throes of heavy petting. They were locked in a back dressing room, naked, about to do it standing up.

  Of it, I guessed only the barest, mangled logistics, inferred from offstage goings-on in Puccini matinees. When Jonah reappeared, one look warned me off ever trying to ask. I knew only that all three principals fled the scene in one of those explosive third-act trios: János enraged, Kimberly broken, and my brother humiliated.

  “That bastard,” Jonah whispered, four feet from the thrilled knot of our buzzing schoolmates. I died at the sound of the word in his mouth. “I’ll finish him.”

  He never told me what the man said, and I never asked. I didn’t even know my brother’s crime. All I knew was that I’d failed him. All life long, we’d kept each other safe from everyone. Now I was on the outside, too.

  The Charlestown concert didn’t live in anyone’s musical memory. Yet the student audience might have mistaken our sound for joy. János beamed and bowed, and with that easy harvest of his hands, he made the chorus do the same. Kimberly somehow pulled off her solo. When Jonah rose to take the flourishes we’d heard him do a hundred wondrous times, it shot through my head, the slow-motion preview given those about to have an accident: He was going to take revenge. All he had to do was hold his breath. Nonviolent resistance. That little ritard he loved to take prior to plunging in, the slight pause awakening his audience that even our conductor knew to back off from, spread wide. Silence—the motor drive of nothingness underneath all rhythm—threatened to last forever, a spell of sleep cast over the entire kingdom of listeners.

  In panic at Jonah’s stunt, my brain began dividing and subdividing the beats. János just waited out the endless hesitation, hands poised in the air, refusing even to blanch. Jonah neither caught his eye nor looked away. He stayed inside his perfect silence, hung on the stopped, forward edge of nowhere.

  Then, sound. The web tore, and my brother was singing. Familiar melody drew me back from the end of the world. No one in the audience felt anything but heightened suspense. János was there, alongside Jonah, bringing the chorus in from my brother’s silent cadenza right on the downbeat.

  By the end of the piece—one of those myopic medleys of English folk tunes that spelled, for 1950s America, the height of holiday nostalgia—the whole choir caught fire. Jonah’s spark of defiance awoke their showmanship, and the final chord brought down the house.

  János wrapped his arm around his prodigy’s shoulders and embraced him in front of everyone, the boy’s protector, the idea of any falling-out between them as silly as the bogeyman.

  Jonah smiled and bowed, suffering his master’s hug. But as he turned from the applauding audience, his eyes sought mine. He locked me in a look past mistaking: You heard how close I was. Easiest thing in the world, someday.

  In the postconcert bedlam, I tracked him down. Charlestown kids were coming up to him to see if he was real, to touch his hair, befriend him. And Jonah was cutting them dead. He grabbed my wrist. “Have you seen her?”

  “Who?” I said. With a click of disgust, he was gone. I chased after him, through the assembly. He kept racing out to the waiting academy busses and darting back into the school building, like a fireman trying for a medal or seeking his own immolation. One of the Boylston students finally told us he’d seen Kimberly hustled off in János’s car.

  Jonah looked for her back at school. He was still looking when the night proctor came through, declaring lights-out. Jonah lay in the dark, cursing János, cursing Boylston, words I’d never heard before out of him or anyone. He thrashed until I thought we were going to have to restrain him with the bedsheets.

  “This is going to kill her,” he kept saying. “She’ll die of shame.”

  “She’ll live,” Thad called across the blackened room. “She’ll want to finish what you two were doing.” The jazzers reveled in the drama. Jonah’s scandal was the scene. It was now. Opera for the new age—all juke, jive, and gone. Nigel and the blonde. What more show could anyone want?

  In the morning, Jonah was a twitching nerve. “She’s gone to hurt herself. The adults haven’t even noticed she’s missing!”

  “Hurt herself? How?”

  “Joey,” he moaned. “You’re hopeless.”

  She turned up the next afternoon. We were in the cafeteria when she came in. Jonah was a wreck, ready to spring toward her, his boyhood’s north. All eyes in the school were on them. Kimberly never even glanced toward our table as she cut through the room. She sat as far from us as the room allowed.

  My brother couldn’t stand it. He crossed to her table, indifferent to all consequence. She flinched, cowering from him, when he was still yards away. He sat down and tried to talk. But whatever they’d been to each other two days before had passed into another libretto.

  He stormed back across the cafeteria. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, more to himself than to me. He fled upstairs. I scrambled behind. “I’ll kill the bastard. I swear it.” His threat was an operatic prop, a collapsible tin knife. But from my seat up in the second balcony, I was already gasping as the silvery thing disappeared to the hilt in his mentor’s chest.

  My brother didn’t kill János Reményi. Nor did János mention the incident again. Disaster had been averted, decency preserved, my brother cuffed. Reményi just went on assigning more phrasing exercises from Concone.

  Jonah went after Kimberly. He tracked her down late one afternoon, curled up in a stuffed chair in the sophomore lounge, reading E.T.A. Hoffmann. She tensed to run when she saw him, but his urgency held her. He sat down beside her and asked her a question in the smallest possible voice. “Do you remember our promise?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut and breathed from the base of her gut, the way János had worked on them both to breathe. “Jonah. We’re just children.”

  And at that moment, they no longer were.

  He’d have thrown away all his skill to get it back: the childish secret engagement, the shared listening and sight-singing, huddling over scores, planning their joint world tour. But she’d closed up to him, because of something the adults told her. Something she’d never considered. She listened to him once more, but only as penance. She even let him take her marble hand in his, although she wouldn’t squeeze back. For the pale
, white European Chimera, all the sweetness of first-time love, all their shared discoveries were dirtied with maturity.

  “What are you saying?” he asked her. “That we can’t be with each other? We can’t talk, touch one another?”

  She wouldn’t say. And he wouldn’t hear what she wouldn’t say.

  He tormented her. “If we’re wrong, then music is wrong. Art is wrong. Everything you love is wrong.”

  His words would kill her before they convinced her. Something had broken in Kimberly. Something sullied the secret duet they’d perfected in front of an empty hall. Two weeks before, she’d imagined herself opening in her life’s debut. Now she saw the piece from the back of the auditorium, the way the public saw, and she panned her own performance.

  Jonah wandered the school like some favored family pet punished for doing the trick he’d been trained to do. His movements grew slow and deliberate, as if what he settled on here, in his first dress rehearsal, would seal the rest of his life. If this could be taken from him, then nothing was really his. Least of all music.

  By week’s end, Kimberly Monera was gone. She’d gathered her belongings and vanished. Her parents withdrew her from Boylston in the middle of the school year, the last days of fall term. My brother told me, in a crazed falsetto giggle. “She’s gone, Joey. For good.”

  He stayed awake for three days, thinking that at any minute he’d hear from her. Then he concluded that she must have already written, that the school’s storm troopers were destroying her letters before they reached him. He turned over the nonexistent evidence so many times, it atomized under his touch. His explanations grew florid with appoggiaturas. I was supposed to listen to every ornament.

  “János must have told her some lie about me. The school must have written her father. Who knows what slander they told him, Joey? It’s a conspiracy. The maestros and the masters had to get together and hustle her away before I poisoned her.” Jonah even tortured himself with the possibility that Kimberly herself had asked to be withdrawn. He disappeared into a cloud of theories. I brought him every scrap of thirdhand gossip I could gather. He waved away all my offerings as useless. Yet the more worthless I became, the more he wanted me around, a mute audience for his ever more elaborate speculations.