The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  Delia objects. “We’ll wash the dishes, Mama. You made the meal, you give yourself a rest.”

  “Nonsense. Let everybody serve God in their own fashion.”

  She’ll not hear otherwise. So the two music makers sit, each, in their fashion, love-havers. They split the bench between them, careful not to touch each other. They play from Nettie’s hymnal: “He Leadeth Me,” the antique psalm, thunked out four-hand, SATB, straight from the page until David gets hold of the idiom. Little by little, warming to the old inheritance, Delia edges him down to the lower confines of the keyboard, absorbing first the tenor, then the bass, then all sorts of lines Strom didn’t realize were hiding in there. She lets loose, heading upward, stoking and embellishing, working into a swell that she knows, even as she strays into full-out gospel, is its own test: Are you sure? She probes to see just how he sees her, and yes, she checks to see if he can carry the chords for her while she spreads and flies.

  Her father wanders through the room, pretending to be looking for things. At one point, Delia swears she hears him humming along. Maybe it could work after all, this act of total madness. Maybe they could make an America more American than the one the country has for centuries lied to itself about being.

  Her mother comes into the parlor from the kitchen, dish towel in her hands, two aprons again flanking her Sunday-best dress. “Now that sounds just beautiful.” Delia hears, I know that sound. Now that is still my daughter.

  When they lead “He Leadeth Me” into all the pastures it will willingly go, they negotiate a final cadence and turn to inspect each other. David Strom beams like a lighthouse, and she knows he would ask her, right then and there, to share all time with him, were it not for the warning her face beams back.

  “Do you have this one?” he asks. And sparsely but musically, he lays down the outlines of a song she learned her freshman year, a tune simple enough to be among the hardest things she’s ever tried. His fingers clip through the chords, realizing only the simplest figured bass.

  “You know this, too?” she asks. Then ashamed to hear herself. What membership is strong enough to keep them from having this same tune? All ownership is theft, and melody above all.

  He stumbles through to the end of the first phrase. Without signal, they’re back at the beginning. She lands from above, square upon the first note, knowing he’s there underneath her. She sings with no chest at all. His fingers on the keys grow accurate, in her light. She imitates those pure resonators, a perfect tube of brass or wood. Her vibrato narrows to a point, thin enough to thread the eye of heaven. She floats in an aerial piano, motionless above the moving line:

  Bist du bei mir, geh’ ich mit Freuden

  zum Sterben und zu meiner Ruh’.

  Ach, wie vergnügt wär’so mein Ende,

  es drückten deine lieben Hände

  mir die getreuen Augen zu!

  If you are with me, I’ll go gladly to my death and to my rest. Together, they come back to tonic, dropping into held silence, the last element of any score. But before the quiet dies a natural death, a third voice punctures it. Brother Charlie sits on the arm of the sofa, his own makeshift balcony, shaking his head in admiration.

  “Ain’t that the same song the whites used to sing, right after spending the day whipping us?”

  “Hush up,” Delia says, “or I’m gonna whip you.”

  “How far you planning to drift, sister Dee?”

  “I’m not drifting, brother. I’m rowing, hard as I know how.”

  Charlie nods. “When you get to the far shore, you think they’re going to fish you out?”

  “Nobody needs to fish me out. I’m going to hit land and keep on moving.”

  “Till you get to safety?”

  “Not safety we’re talking about, Char.”

  “Uh-uh. Mind your mama, now. Don’t call me Char.”

  “Is this serious?” David says, two steps behind, by every measurable measure. “People used to sing this song while … Can this be so? This song was written …”

  “Don’t pay the man any attention.” First time she’s ever called her brother a man.

  Her father returns, saving them all from themselves. “Dr. Strom?” Dr. Daley says. “Would you mind answering an amateur’s questions? I almost hate asking …” Delia spins from one threat to the other. Her father hates asking like the rabbit hates the brier patch. “But I can’t wrap my thinking around this one little thing.”

  Delia braces. Now it will come: the mighty blow of Things as They Are, blasting the dream she and this stranger have been hiding in. Not even love can survive the facts. She holds still and waits. How foolish to think the angel might pass over them, to imagine they could escape this, her father’s one little question. The question is out there, running through the streets of the Seventh Ward, over in Harlem, across the Black Belt that rings South Chicago. The question the workless half of her race, annihilated at every turn, wants to ask. The question no person of David’s race can answer or even hear. She hangs her head and mouths the words, knowing them already—the one little thing her father can’t wrap his thinking around.

  “Suppose I’m flying past you near the speed of light …”

  Delia’s head jerks upright. Her father has gone mad. Both of them: madder than anything in this country’s whole toxic drugstore could make them. David Strom leans forward, for the first time this evening, in his element. “Yes.” He grins. “Go on. I follow.”

  “Then according to relative motion, you are flying past me at the same speed.”

  “Yes,” Strom says with all the delight he just gave their playing. Here at last is something he can talk about. “Yes, this is exactly correct!”

  “But that’s what I can’t understand. If both of us are moving, then we both think the other’s time slows down, relative to ours.”

  “This is good!” David’s glee is spontaneous. “You have made a study of this matter!”

  William Daley’s teeth clench. His eyes test the other’s for condescension, a level gaze that would expose all patronage. But here is only pleasure, mind pushing through loneliness to a surprise meeting.

  “Your time is slower than mine. Mine is slower than yours. It makes a joke out of reason.”

  “Yes.” The man actually giggles. “That, too, is true! But only because our reason was created at very slow speeds.”

  “It smacks of utter nonsense.” Dr. Daley stops short of saying useless parasitism or Jewish plot. But his outrage is more than public. Which one of us is right? Which one of us really ages faster?”

  “Ah!” David nods. “I understand. This is now a different question.”

  Delia listens to the closest thing she’ll ever hear to a teatime chat in the monkey house. The light-speed slowing of time is easier to believe than these two men. The room goes liquid. She must key on either the speech or the speakers, though both are hopeless. Her father has indeed made a thorough study, but the man she drags home will never know why. And yet David, too, is locked in a contest she can’t understand. His work feels stranger to her, in this moment, than the most closed tribal ritual. It smells of unguents and incense. It sits like a prayer shawl pulled around the man’s shoulders.

  She studies the white one, then the black. Their animated battle is too much for her. Her father’s disbelief knows no bounds. “The laws of physics are the same,” the foreigner insists, “in any uniformly moving system.” Her father sits still, forgoing reason, trying to embrace the impossible.

  They strike a truce of mutual awe, a truce that alarms Delia more than open warfare. Forgotten by them both, she retreats to the remaining domain of common sense. Maybe she’s lost her citizenship there, as well. Maybe her mother will bar her entry.

  But Nettie Ellen is standing in front of the stove, as she was before dinner, when Charlie drove her to tears. Now her face is dry. She holds a towel, although the dishes are done. She looks down into a space in front of her, one that Delia, too, can see. She seems not to hear her da
ughter enter. When she speaks, it’s to the pit in front of her. “You two seem strong together. Like nobody can hurt you. Like you already lived through a bunch more days than you have.”

  Her mother has stumbled onto her incredible truth. The man’s alien notions, his curved space and slow-running time, that Easter afternoon on the Mall have somehow given them time enough to find each other. The bird can love the fish for no other reason than their shared bewilderment, turning in the blue.

  “That’s the crazy thing, Mama. That’s what I can’t figure out. More days than we …”

  “That’s good,” Nettie says, wheeling around to face the sink. “You’re gonna need all the preparation time you can get.”

  If she means it as a reprimand, it still can’t match the pain Delia has already sown. She wants to hug her mother for this blessing, however backhanded. But the blessing has damaged them both enough already.

  Her mother looks up, fixing Delia’s eye. From ten years away and another city, the daughter is saying, She’s so small. Thin as a bar of soap at the end of the wash week. “You know what the Bible says.” Nettie Ellen works her mouth to citation. “You know …” But nothing more comes from her moving lips than a whole “cleave” and half an “unto.”

  Not for the last time, they trade things too hard for speaking. Delia takes the idle dish towel from her mother’s hands and returns it to the rack. She turns her mother’s shoulders, and together they head out front to reclaim the male strangeness assigned to them. They don’t link arms as they might have, once. But still, they walk together. Delia makes no effort to prepare her mother, for that would insult them all. All must watch the others fly past, each to his own clock.

  They find the men turning from contest to outright pact. William and David hunch toward each other, hands on knees, like they’re pitching pennies out in the alley. They’ve formed an alliance in the face of the universe’s fundamental law. Neither looks up as the women enter. The doctor of medicine still scowls, but a scowl wrestling with the angel of insight. “So you’re saying that my now happens before your now?”

  “I am saying that the whole idea of ‘now’ cannot travel from my frame of reference to yours. We cannot talk of ‘instantaneous.’”

  Nettie shoots her girl a frightened look: Is the man speaking English? Delia just shrugs: the vast futility of the male race. She settles down into that time-crafted dismissal, one that rejoins her to her head-shaking mother while all the while drawing her closer to her betrothed-to-be.

  “In case you gentlemen have failed to notice, it’s getting late.” Nettie Ellen shakes her finger at the window, the undeniable outside. Telling time by darkness: nothing to it.

  “This is what you call our legendary hospitality.” William winks at David.

  Strom scrambles to his feet. “I must go!”

  Nettie Ellen throws up her hands. “Now that’s just the opposite of what I’m telling you. I’m saying, You sure you want to be jumping on a train at this hour?”

  Delia watches her mother struggle mightily to be spontaneous. The offer she’d make without thinking, in any world but this, crawls up in her throat and sticks. Nor is Delia wholly ready for her mother to extend it. To lodge the man under the same roof as her parents … She stands at attention, wincing. Her foreigner, too, waits politely, trying to brake from the speed of thought, to slow the moment enough to see what’s happening. The three hosts stand nodding at their guest, each waiting for the other to say, There’s a spare bed in the downstairs room.

  They stand forever. Then forever stops. Michael and Charles burst into the room, too excited to speak. The little one gets the words out first. “The Germans have invaded Poland. Tanks, planes—”

  “It’s true,” Charles says. “It’s all over the radio.”

  All eyes turn to the German in their midst. But his search out the woman who has brought him here. Delia sees it, faster than the light from his face can reach her: a fear that leaves him her dependent. Everything this man’s culture touches, it sets alight. His science and music struggle to take in this war they’ve let happen while away in their playful, free flights. And in a single blitzkrieg, all that the man has ever cared for burns.

  She sees, in that flash, what this news means. And she never stops to question. His family is dead, his country unreachable. He has no people, no place, no home now but her. No other nation but their sovereign state of two.

  MY BROTHER AS OTELLO

  Carolina asks, “What exactly are you boys?” And our answer drops on us, overnight: America’s Next Voice. Not current; just next. Not fame, exactly, but never again the freedom of obscurity.

  We don’t get out of Durham without a deck of business cards, people who want us to call them. Ruth says, “So look at my brothers. Does this mean the two of you are big-time?” Jonah ignores the question. But her words are the most professional pressure I’ll ever feel.

  Jonah’s in the catbird seat: People in big cities all across the country ask him to come sing, sometimes even offering to pay enough to cover expenses. All at once, he has a future to decide. But first, he must find a new teacher. He’s thumbed his nose at Juilliard, pulled off his parting snub by winning a nationwide competition against countless older and more experienced singers, all without any vocal coach. But even Jonah isn’t crazy enough to imagine he can move much further on his own. In his line, people keep studying until they die. And maybe even night school, after that.

  His new prize credential gives him a shot at working with the town’s better tenors. He toys with the idea of Tucker, Baum, Peerce. But he rejects them all. As far as he’s concerned, his greatest asset is his tone, that pointed silver arrow. He’s afraid the famous males will turn him grotesque, wreck his growing sound. He wants to stay clear, fast, light. He wants to try the recital route, honing his chops in various halls, returning to his deferred dream of opera when he figures out how to fatten up while keeping the purity intact.

  He picks a woman teacher. He picks her for all sorts of reasons, not least her aggressive strawberry hair. Her face is a boat’s prow, cutting through rough seas. Her skin is a curtain of light.

  “Why not, Joey? I need a teacher who can give me what I don’t have yet.”

  The thing he needs, the thing Lisette Soer can give him, is dramatic instruction. A lyric soprano sought after in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, she’s not yet in permanent orbit. But the rockets are firing. She’s just a few years younger than Mama was when she died. Just a dozen years older than Jonah.

  If her voice can’t match the leading divas, she has begun to land those roles whose sexiness is usually confined to insistent program notes. She’s more an actress who can sing than a singer trying to act. She walks across a room like a statue turning flesh. Jonah comes back from his first lesson, raising his fists underhand to his eyes, growling with bliss. He finds, in his new redheaded trainer, the intensity he’s after. Someone who can teach him all he needs to know about the stage.

  Miss Soer approves her new student’s general plan. “Experience is all,” she tells him. “Go out and play every stage you can. East Lansing. Carbondale. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. All the places where culture is auctioned piecemeal on the spot market. Let them see you naked. Learn your grief and fear in situ, and what you don’t get under your belt on the road, your teacher will feed you upon your return.”

  She tells him straight out: “Leave home.” He passes the command on to me, as if he’s invented it. You can’t expect to sing yourself forward while still rooming with your family. Can’t get to the future while living in the past. The arrow of growth points one merciless way.

  She’d do away with me, too, I’m sure. But Lisette stops short of planting that idea in Jonah. Together, they decide I’m to leave with him, find a place where we can grow into our promise. Ruth sits in the kitchen, pulling her pigtails. “It’s stupid, Joey. Move downtown when you can live here free?” Da just nods, like we’ve deported him, and he’s seen it coming all along
. “Is it because I bring my friends home sometimes?” Ruth asks. “Are you trying to get away from me?”

  “How about our studio?” I ask Jonah. But it’s way too small to live in. “How about a larger unit in that building?”

  “Bad location,” he says. “Everything’s happening in the Village.” And that’s where we find our new quarters. The Village is pure theater, the greatest practice in what Madame Soer, in her favorite refrain, calls “living at maximum need.”

  Maximum need is Lisette’s most teachable skill. She keeps it deep in her body. Her voice is a beam that cuts through the thickest orchestral fog. But voice alone can’t account for her success. The dancer’s body doesn’t hurt. She oozes anticipation, even in trouser roles, her blazing hair balled up under a powdered peruke, charged, prehensile, ambiguous. Her most casual stroll across the set is satin hypnosis. Even her fidgets are a leopard’s. This is what she means to give my brother: a tension to gird up his muscle-free tone.

  At Jonah’s third lesson, she walks out on him. He’s left perched over the black music stand, trying to guess his sin. He waits for twenty minutes, but she never returns. He comes back to our new one-bedroom down on Bleecker in a cloud of wronged innocence. All weekend long, it’s my job to tell him, “It’s just a misunderstanding. Maybe she’s ill.” Jonah lies in bed, tensing his abdomen. He’s deeper inside the shock of his body than I’ve ever seen him.

  Lisette floats into the next lesson, beatific. She crosses the room and kisses him on the forehead, in neither forgiveness nor apology. Just life in its inexplicable fullness, and “Can we take the Gounod from your second entrance, please?” He lies in bed that night in another riot of feeling, working his muscles in long-unexercised directions.

  Singing, Soer tells him, is no more than pulling the right strings at the right time. But acting—that’s participating in the single, continuous, million-year catastrophe of the human race. Say, for argument, that the gods have conspired against you. There you are, alone, front and center, on the bare stage, in front of five hundred concertgoers who dare you to prove something to them. Hitting the notes is nothing. Holding a high, clear C for four measures can only go so far toward changing anyone’s weltanschauung. “Go where the grief is real,” she tells him. Her right hand claws at her collarbone in remembered horror. Is there a place yet, in your young life, where you’ve known it?