The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  The contest rules were mailed weeks in advance. There would be a scale exercise supplied by the judges and a sight-singing exercise of average difficulty. Beyond that, we had to prepare three pieces of varying character, from which the judges would ask for one. Jonah ended up assembling what anyone else would have considered an eccentric lineup. First, we brushed up a Dallapicolla song on a text by Machado; Jonah still lived for the twelve-tone idiom, and he imagined the judges would fall in love at their first whiff. Then, we tamed the Erl-King, Jonah turning that old warhorse into Pegasus. And lastly, we polished Dowland’s “Time Stands Still” until it vaporized. He knew that few, if any, of the other contestants would reach that far back. With that simple song, he planned to bring stones to life and change lives into mute stones.

  The local round for the contest was held at the Manhattan School of Music. We walked across the island that day, Jonah muttering stern encouragements to me. The thing was a cattle call, a fair number of first-timers unrolling their showstopper from Guys and Dolls. Thankfully, the Juilliard faculty had all been shipped out to judge rounds in Jersey and Connecticut.

  We were six weeks overprepared. For the first time in his life, Jonah held back onstage. He was almost marking, compared to the full voice he’d given rehearsals. Still, we made it through to the citywide round. His sight-singing alone almost guaranteed it. It would have taken a catastrophe for us to have been scratched from that preliminary screening. But as soon as we were alone, I lit into him.

  “What were you thinking? We’ve been at this for months, and that’s the worst I’ve ever heard you do that stuff.”

  “Last-minute decision, Joey. We don’t want to stand out too much at this point. That just increases the odds of some judge going on a leveling vendetta.” He’d learned much at the conservatory.

  “Give me a little advance warning next time you go changing the game plan.”

  “Thousand pardons, Mule. You played like a dream. Come on! We’re in round two, aren’t we?”

  We had two weeks for adjustments and made two months’ worth. We’d heard good singers at round one, including the best of our Juilliard acquaintances and a few impressive unknowns from upper Manhattan. Most had half a dozen more years of experience than Jonah. Aside from a voice that could make lifelong fugitives surrender themselves, all we had was unbroken time.

  In Queens for the citywide round, he almost disqualified us. Jonah, drunk on more ability than a twenty-year-old should be allowed, sang through the allotted time. We gave them Dallapicolla, which impressed but did not delight. Then one of the judges asked for a verse of the Dowland, to clear the palate before they dismissed us. We discharged the first verse, but when we reached the double bar, Jonah, shooting me a larcenous glance, pressed on through the end of the song. That tune’s second verse scans like a battered reverse translation, impossible to phrase inside the melody that works so brilliantly with the first stanza. But in Jonah’s astonished tone, the words swung open like a political prison after its illegal regime falls.

  We’d clearly violated contest protocol. The judges could have thrown us off the stage, but after an initial murmur, they sat still. When we finished, you could hear the silence hurt them. Had there been a third verse, they’d have suffered it.

  They waved us through to the regionals. Many of our Juilliard acquaintances didn’t go forward, even some whose voices could have cured anyone’s need for beauty. Contests, like snapshots, don’t always show their subjects in the best light. They slice time into too thin cross sections. You practice ten hours a day, month after month, in the hopes that a few seconds onstage go something like they did in a year of rehearsal. It rarely did. We happened to sound good, in that vanishing slice of time. We were the judges’ chosen ones, at least for another few days. Back in our rented studio, we allotted two minutes for a postmortem.

  “Why do you suppose they love us, Joey? Can we really sound that much better than the others? Or are the judges just grateful we’re the kind of Negroes who won’t beat the shit out of them on the street?”

  I ground out a bit of our Dowland, strewn with Parker. “They don’t really know that for sure, do they?”

  “You are right, brother. Just because we can do ‘The Erl-King’ doesn’t mean we aren’t out to rape their loved ones. You never know.”

  You never knew what was being given you and what taken away. You never knew who the thoroughbreds were seeing when they looked at you. Even I didn’t know anymore who I saw when I saw the two of us.

  “So there’re these three guys on death row,” Jonah said, edging us back into the repertoire. “An avant-garde Italian, a Romantic German, and an Elizabethan Englishman …”

  For the regionals, we traveled to Washington. We’d reached the stage where even a loss would be bankable. Jonah was the youngest singer left in the running. But Jonah had his eyes on a single distant prize. And the America’s Next Voices competition was just a hostage in that vaster campaign.

  The semifinals were held at the auditorium at Georgetown. We stayed in a cheap hotel a good hike to the northeast. Any hotel at all was still a novelty. The clerk at the check-in asked whether we wanted the afternoon rate.

  That evening, without a word to each other, we rolled out and found ourselves near the Mall. We’d heard our family’s founding legend so often in so many ways that we had to see the place where our parents had met. The same place, only later: We still believed, despite a lifetime of our father’s lessons, that where and when were independent variables.

  I never imagined that a spot so filled with landmarks could feel so empty. Hundreds of people walked out on the nation’s front lawn, even at that hour. Yet it looked deserted. I’d imagined crowds—tens of thousands. But this green openness felt evacuated, a civil defense drill. We crossed the long rectangle, neither of us saying much, both looking for something we couldn’t find: The thing that had caused our parents to keep seeing each other, after that day when they should have gone their separate ways.

  We played the next day, for more ghosts than there were healthy bodies in the audience. For the first time in my life, my arms locked in stage fright. I knew the disease had always been there, waiting like an aneurysm, terror ticking toward its debut. It chose that moment to step out. The two of us, in black tie, walked to center stage, a dozen football fields from the wings. We bowed our shallow, synchronized dips, like two water-drinking toy birds. I went to the keyboard and Jonah took up his post, grazing the crook of the piano. I looked out on the audience, who were clapping curiously on the strength of our rumor. Suddenly, I couldn’t hear anything. Not even an echo.

  I sat down in front of the empty music rack—I always played from memory. I rubbed my knuckles for emergency circulation. The judges asked for “The Erl-King.” A dozen other composers besides Schubert have set Goethe’s fake medieval ballad, and all their settings are dead. Only this one has stumbled onto forever.

  We set out on our customary gallop. Once Jonah and I had rehearsed a tempo, we rarely varied more than two beats a minute. You could have set anyone’s Swiss watch to us, except maybe that of the Bern patent clerk who got us into this. Perfect pitch served Jonah well over the years. But perfect meter had been even more useful. We took off running in the all-stakes darkness:

  Who rides so late through a night so wild?

  It is a father, holding his child …

  Midway through that second line, I seized up with memory lapse. I hit a rock, and my body went on sailing so far away, I couldn’t even see it land. The rich, definitive harmonies under my fingers spun out in a horrible Tristan chord. I stopped, leaving my brother galloping along in the dead of night over a yawning expanse of nothing.

  When he realized I wouldn’t be coming back anytime in this lifetime, Jonah reined in, although, in his air-bound scamper, he briefly considered bolting a cappella through the rest of the piece. The hall reeled from the shock of his voice and its violent silencing. Jonah never turned from the crook of the piano t
o look at me. He glanced at his shoes, a rude joke playing across his face. He took a crisp step forward and said, “We’re going to take this again, from the top. Once more with feeling!”

  The house tittered, with spatters of mortified applause. Even then, Jonah didn’t turn to see if I’d recovered. He placed his right hand back upon the piano, just as before we were thrown. Then he inhaled and floated back into place, past certain that I’d join him. His sureness crucified me. The landscape beneath my fingers turned to bog. When the keys firmed, I watched them snap into a crazy chorus line, gapped where they shouldn’t have been.

  Nothing of the piece remained. Not the key signature, the melody, the first note, nor the name. It had to be one of three songs, but which three, I had no clue. All I could grab onto was my forgetting. Panic cheered me on, every hint of the notes I needed skidding off, a floater just to the right of my chasing eye.

  I saw the hall empty out, a big vaudevillian hook extending from stage left to extract us. I sat and unlearned every piece I’d ever memorized, the film running backward, reversing Juilliard, undoing Boylston, wiping out Hamilton Heights, until I touched bottom at my very first memory: the sound of my mother singing.

  Then, my mother’s voice grew into my brother. Jonah was aloft again. All I had to do was sit quietly and listen. I must have been playing along, racing the wild late night, because I heard the piano there, underneath. But I was pure audience. Under my oblivious fingers, the line galloped as it never had. The cause lost, Jonah sang with death incarnate sitting on his shoulder, the ride that much wilder because of the heart-stopping stumble. We hit that state performers live for: unforgiving eternity, nothing between the notes and the instant past they rushed toward.

  Rivers didn’t turn in their course to track his sound. Animals didn’t fall dead or stones come to life. The sound that came out of him made no difference in the known world. But something in that hall’s listeners did stop, flushed out of hiding, exposed for two beats, naked in a draft of daylight, before bolting again for cover.

  Afterward, a judge broke the confidentiality rules and told Jonah they’d written us off. “Then you came out for round two and annihilated them.” That was his word: annihilated. The more deadly music was, the better.

  I gave him my ultimatum on the train back north, heading home with an engraved plaque and a date for the national finals, in Durham, at Christmas. We sat side by side, without touching. Jonah’s hands fidgeted with freed energy, conducting a silent symphony into the dark.

  “Get rid of me, Jonah.”

  “Are you mad? You’re my rabbit’s foot. My shrunken-headed voodoo doll.” He reached over to rub my hair, his good-luck charm, one degree nappier than his. He knew I hated that.

  “We got a break we shouldn’t have. I was finished. Total amnesia. I could be lying there still.”

  “Ach. I knew you’d recover.”

  “You knew more than I did.”

  “I always do, Joey.”

  “I’m dragging you down. Even when I’m on the mark, I’m just ballast.”

  “Ballast is good. Keeps ships steady.”

  “You need someone who’s your equal.”

  “I have that.”

  He talked me back to myself, just like rehearsal: over and over, the same passages, smoothing, interrogating, dismantling, reassembling. But in my shame, I needed to torch everything and elevate quitting to something noble.

  Desperate, Jonah fought dirty. “We’re in the finals. All the marbles. December. There’s no chance in hell I can find someone …”

  “I’ll play for the finals. God help me, I’ll do whatever I can do for you. But after that …”

  “After that, we’ll talk.”

  My brother is standing, as alone as birth, just to the right of center stage in the old music building at Duke, Durham, North Carolina. He towers in place, listing a little bit toward starboard, backing up into the crook of the grand piano, his only safety. He curls forward, the scroll on a reticent cello. His left hand steadies against the piano while his right cups itself in front of him, holding some now-lost letter. He grins at the impossibility of being here, breathes in, and sings.

  These few minutes are the sole point of our long self-burial. We’ve spent our adolescence underground just for this, this winning, dragging the prize back up to the light of day. The sweet release comes out of his mouth as if he has just found it. But under his breath—that fountain of air on which this prize floats like a ball on a plume—his skill is burnished to the hardest finish. His sound is automatic, autonomic, so honed, we could walk away and leave it out here onstage alone: music perfect to the point of absentee, exuberant, flexing all the musculature of joy, without the slightest visible effort.

  This is how I see my brother, forever. He is twenty; it’s December 1961. One moment, the Erl-King is hunched on my brother’s shoulder, breathing the promise of a blessed deliverance. In the next, some trapdoor opens in the warp of the air and my brother is elsewhere, teasing out Dowland of all things, a bit of ravishing sass for this stunned lieder crowd, who can’t grasp the web that slips over them. He touches his tongue to his hard palate, presses on the cylinder of air behind it until his tongue tips over his front teeth with a dwarf explosion, that fine-point puff of tuh that expands, pulling the vowel behind it, spreading like a slowed-film cloud, to ta to tahee to time to transcend the ear’s entire horizon, until the line becomes all it describes:

  Time stands still with gazing on her face,

  Stand still and gaze for minutes, hours, and years to her give place.

  All other things shall change, but she remains the same,

  Till heavens changed have their course and time hath lost his name.

  He sings that gaze, the one the heart tried to hang on to but couldn’t. His eyes shine with the light of those who’ve freed themselves to do what they need. Those who see shine back, fixed at this moment, arrested, innocent. As he sings, Elizabeth’s ships sail out to sudden new continents. As he sings, Freedom Riders one state away are rounded up and jailed. But in this hall, time stands still, afraid to do so much as breathe.

  Jonah wins. Half a dozen years too young to walk away with a prize this size, my brother leaps into the inheritance he’s always known was his. In the chaos afterward, the other singers hating him, the remembering audience still in the throes, wanting just to stand near him, he seems complete. He can’t notice our sister well enough to feel the scope of her misery here, at this last public concert of his that she will ever attend. He and my father dance a little dance around the near past, their growing awkwardness. Da faults Jonah’s German, calls him a Polack. Says he almost was one, in another life.

  “I could have been a Polack?” my brother asks.

  “You are a near Polack. A counterfactual Polack.”

  “A Polack in one of many alternate universes?”

  My sister and I try to hush them. But my brother is past hushing, past even hearing the likes of us. For a moment, he has everything that singing can give him. When we’re out of earshot, I beg him again to ditch me, to get an accompanist worthy of him. And again he refuses.

  An old gentleman of the landed, tobaccoed countryside interrogates us. I smell hostility on his affronted breath. “What exactly are you boys?” And my brother sings to him, smart-mouthing, the prize in hand granting him liberty to ignore how the world sees him:

  “I am my mammy’s ae bairn,

  Wi’ unco folk I weary, Sir …”

  The word he sings in mockery draws me back, down into that ending we passed through only moments before. We’re onstage again, centered in that stillness he brings on simply by chanting about it. At the keyboard, I force my fingers to their marks, imitating the flourishes of a Renaissance lute. I concentrate, try not to listen, keeping off the reef he has arranged for me. But I stray close enough to that stilled spot to hear what prize my brother means to win. All music is just a means to him, toward that one end. In the timeless time it takes him to rea
ch the cadence, the song starts to work. She rises up behind him, following, just as the gods promised. But in the thrill of his tune’s victory, Jonah forgets the ban, and looks back. And in his joy-cracked face as he turns around, I see him watch as Mama disappears.

  NOT EXACTLY ONE OF US

  Nettie Ellen takes the news in silence, as she does everything that the white world has inflicted since the captivity. Not a hateful silence, just a dead one. ’Nother sorrow coming. ’Nother piece of flesh stripped away.

  All the questions she climbed up into the attic to ask her daughter mean nothing now. She doesn’t sharpen her silence for the kill. But it does the job, blunt, just as well. She sits motionless. And motionless, outside of time.

  Her daughter, too late, repents this thing she never asked to feel. But love outlasts repentance, three falls out of five. Something scrabbles in Delia Daley, wanting the old, first absolution. Mama, don’t leave me. I’m still your girl. She knows that also is a lie: a lie, most of all, about who’s leaving whom.

  Delia, too, keeps still. But in that standing stillness, she reaches out to cover her mother’s arm. The arm feels nothing but added weight. Her mother looks out on this new trial she should never have had to look on. Here it is, the old master of the lash, the one they’d almost outlived, coming round and letting himself in the side entrance.

  The woman, Nettie, looks up at the flesh of her flesh. She can’t ask that the cup be taken away, now it’s already spilled down the front of her best Sunday dress. Can’t even ask why Delia’s done what she’s done. Her girl has already wrecked herself with explanations. When Nettie Ellen can talk again, all she says is, “You best go tell your father.”

  The doctor rises up righteous at the news. He paces and wheels, the danger there in the room with them, spitting distance from where his daughter struggles to tell him. “What kind of self-satisfying … What in the name of God Almighty do you think you’re doing?”