The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  He knows the place already, its permanent address. Better than she can know. He has spent years trying to escape every memory of it. But now, under Lisette, he learns to revisit it at will, to turn the fire against itself and fashion it into its only answer. Under the woman’s fingers, his voice lays itself open. She readies him for the Naumburg, for Paris, for whatever awards he might care to shoot for.

  She introduces us to the agent Milton Weisman, an old-school impresario who signed his first talent before the First World War and who still works on, if only as the least offensive alternative to death. He demands to see us in his cluttered warren on Thirty-fourth. The eight-by-ten glossies Lisette takes of Jonah are not good enough; he wants to see us in the flesh. I’ve lived my whole life under the illusion that music is about sound. But Milton Weisman knows better. He needs a face-to-face before he can begin to book us.

  Mr. Weisman is wearing a double-breasted pinstripe suit with shoulder pads, almost Prohibition era. He ushers us into the office, asking, “You boys want a root beer? Ginger ale?” Jonah and I wear black lightweight jackets and narrow ties that would seem conservative to anyone our age, but which, to Mr. Weisman, brand us as beatniks or worse. Lisette Soer wears some diaphanous Diaghilev fantasy of Mogul India. One of her lovers, we think, is Herbert Gember, the hot costume designer at City Center, though the affair may be a mere convenience match. She’s one of those opera personalities who must dress down when they’re onstage.

  We chat with Mr. Weisman about his client lists from the golden age. He’s worked with half a dozen front-rank tenors. Jonah wants to know about these men: what they ate, how much they slept, whether they talked at all the morning before a concert. He looks for a secret formula, that little extra leverage. Mr. Weisman can vamp on the topic for as long as he has listeners. All I want to know is whether these famous men were kind, whether they cared for their families, whether they seemed happy. The words never come up.

  While talking, Milton Weisman roams his decrepit office, fiddling with the blinds, edging around us from all angles. He rarely looks us in the face, but even his sidelong glances find their mark. The old booking agent gauges how we’ll look under the footlights, drawing up his map’s out-of-bounds lines: Chicago, sure. Louisville, perhaps. Memphis, no chance.

  After half an hour, he shakes our hands and says he can find us work. This puzzles me; we already have offers coming in. But Lisette is ecstatic. All the way back downtown, she keeps pinching Jonah’s cheek. “You know what this means? That man is a force. People listen to him.” She stops short of saying, He’ll make your career.

  They send us on recital barnstorming tours. “Lieder,” Lisette insists, “is harder than opera. You must turn emotions loose upon your audience, with no props but sound. All your gestures take on handcuffs. As the words fill your throat, you must feel your body moving, even though it can’t. You must model the invisible movement, so your audience will see it.”

  This is the incantation she sends us out with, and it works. Audiences in our off-circuit towns respond more like sports fans than the usual stiff-necked classical crowds. They come backstage. They want to know us, to tell us the tragedies that have wrecked their lives. The attention works on Jonah. I have to watch him more closely now as we play. Even in pieces we’ve drilled down into our marrow, he’s likely to lace passages with a surprise slight caesura or rubato, nothing the careful ear would register, unless I fail to be there with him.

  Mr. Weisman has a knack for getting us in and out of towns without incident. Sometimes, in bigger places, he finds local cultural lights who actually compete to have us under their roofs. In smaller towns, we get good at picking hotels that won’t hassle well-groomed young men with collegiate accents. Jonah handles the check-ins, and I wait offstage. When we sense a problem, we beat a quick retreat, someplace a little farther from the concert halls where we do our Schumann Dichterliebe to ovations.

  We’re playing Tucson, Arizona—a pink adobe hall whose balcony might as well be cathouse rooms above a saloon—the night we hear about James Meredith trying to enter Ole Miss. The army rolls in again, that part of the army not already engaged in propping up the earth’s collapsing dictators. Twenty-three thousand troops, hundreds of people injured, and two people killed, all to get one man enrolled in college.

  We’re in the dressing room—cinder blocks actually painted green—when Jonah hands me a sheet of music and says, “Scratch the Ives. Here’s our encore.” Never doubting there’ll be an encore. Never doubting I can play the substitute from sight. In fact, compared to the tricky, polytonal Ives—a piece that satisfies Jonah’s hunger for the avant-garde while giving the audience a nostalgic scrap of “Turkey in the Straw”—this new piece is trivial.

  “You’re kidding,” I say.

  “What? You don’t know the tune?”

  I know the tune, of course. I’ve even seen this arrangement: the great Harry Burleigh setting of “Oh Wasn’t Dat a Wide Ribber?” Jonah must have been carrying it around in his valise for just such an emergency. The setting is straightforward, and very pianistic. It stays close to the familiar melody, but it’s laced through with inspired passing tones that trick the song into a different country. One look, and I could play the thing without looking.

  “I know the damn tune, Jonah. I just don’t know what the hell you plan to do with it.”

  “I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. Right now.” He takes the sheet back and peppers it with markings.

  “We’re not going out there and doing this thing cold.”

  “It’s Tucson, Arizona, brother. Wyatt Earp. The O.K. Corral.” He pronounces the word chorale. He goes on marking the score. “The Wild West. We can’t be caught actually practicing stuff.”

  I take back the sheet, now filled with his scribbles. I look at the markings and see the day’s headlines all over them. “You coming clean, Jonah?” Cheap shot. He’s never tried to hide anything. Never anything other than he was: a swarthy, vaguely Semitic, loose-curled, mixed-race kid who happens to sing European art songs. I’m sick of myself as soon as the words leave my mouth. It’s the stress of touring, the sleepless haul down from Denver the night before. He needs an accompanist who likes performing, who actually enjoys trying to get halls full of strangers to love him.

  But Jonah just smirks. “I wouldn’t exactly say clean, Mule. It’s only an encore.”

  I know what he wants without his having to talk me through. After the standing ovation and our second curtain call, my brother glances at me as we come out of the bow: You ready? I play from the music, afraid to tempt fate, but also letting the audience know this isn’t the standard order of business. I know what Jonah wants: all those sweet dissonances brought out into blithe daylight. He wants me to lean into the shadings that hide in this cheerful expansiveness, to throw the upbeat tune into full relief. Maybe even toss in some clashes of my own. He wants the tune bright, cheery, major, and flooded with jarring disaster.

  The place we make tonight is too small for Lisette Soer to enter, too small and hard and shining for anyone but me and my brother even to see. Shout, shout: Satan’s about. One more river to cross. Shut your door and keep him out. One more river to cross. There’s this man Meredith trying to go to school, and there’s the U.S. Army, and people dead, same as last year, same as next. We’ll never reach ourselves. One more river; one more wartime Jordan. And one more after that.

  No one in the audience suspects the source he sings from. The things that are happening abroad tonight all happen over in someone else’s state. Satan is nigh, but nobody sees him. One more river to cross. Yet the crowd hears the song: something brutally American after all the undecipherable Italian and German fare we’ve served up at this evening’s concert. Baking out here in the hundred-degree desert, with even the ocotillo and saguaro dying of drought and the streams all dry for so long that there’s six feet of bramble in their beds, the audience takes this ancient headline home, to their stucco haciendas and transplanted Kentucky
bluegrass lawns, their city carved out of neighboring reservations, twice-stolen land. And as they lie there, the cultural artifact keeps them awake. One more river to cross.

  Jonah’s singing does nothing for Mississippi. Nothing to help make an America, or unmake one. Meredith probably would have hated our version. But the spiritual does do one invisible thing, for an infinitely smaller nation. “How did it sound?” Jonah asks me in the wings.

  And I tell him. “Wide.”

  He feeds Lisette Soer the story when we get home. Her face turns the color of her hair when she learns we changed the program without consulting her. She softens, though still miffed, when she learns the details. There are powers that even Method acting won’t dare tap. Powers she knows not to tamper with.

  They grow dependent on each other, my brother and Madame Soer, joined in a way Jonah hasn’t been with any teacher since Reményi. Close in a way he hasn’t been with anyone since the fire. She asks him to sing in an open master class, along with four promising females. She wants to keep him out in front of other aggressive East Coast ears. They listen to old recordings together, great dead tenors—Fleta, Lindi—late into the evening, until one of her famous competing consorts comes by and sends the boy home.

  They listen on a stereo fifty times more expensive than the one our parents bought us years ago. My brother comes home after these listening excursions, shaking his head in wonder. “Mule, we never even heard those bastards. You won’t believe what they’re really doing!”

  Lisette doesn’t talk through these performances, the way Jonah and I used to, listening in the dark. She forbids speech while the music plays, and for some minutes afterward. She restricts all commentary to squeezes of his upper arm, her long, lyric fingernails sinking into his flesh proportionate to the power and pure drama of the moment, relived through electricity’s seance medium.

  She knows whole lifetimes of music, having lived several already in her third of a century. She builds up my brother’s sound without much changing it. But the change she works on Jonah is dramatic. She opens his throat, fills his vowels with color, and smoothes them across his range. She’s the first teacher to teach him the shape of his own tongue and lips. The first to teach him that too much perfection will kill you. But her chief lesson is far harsher. Miss Soer teaches my brother hunger.

  I hear it before I see it. He’s restless down in the Village. Things don’t happen fast enough. Beat is dead. The jazz scene, he declares, is falling into retreads. He exhausts his fascination with the classical avant-garde. “Those jokers haven’t produced anything truly new since Henry Cowell.” Cage and the Zen crowd just bore him, and even quadrupling the boredom doesn’t help. When we aren’t on the road, he prowls the streets, listening for other voices, breaking into other rooms.

  The hunger she sows shows up onstage. We’re in Camden, Maine, singing on a makeshift stage that shakes a little with every pound of the nearby surf. He’s singing “When I am one and twenty,” pressing into it as if diction alone could turn the peat lyric to diamond. He wants something from the words, the pitches, the audience, me. Lisette has taught him the rule that keeps all drama from going mawkish. At the top of the phrase, at the song’s maximum need, pull back. Don’t get big and messy; draw yourself inward around the unbearable, until it glows with the smallest light.

  His hunger focuses. He starts to read again—Mann, Hesse—those works János Reményi made him read, decades before Jonah could hope to understand them. Even now, he’s years too young to make them out. But he totes them under his arm to lessons, thinking they’ll please Soer. They horrify her. She finds them repugnant, Germanic. She wants him on Dumas, Hugo at the very least.

  “Did you know Dumas was a black man?” This is news to Jonah. He wonders why she feels the need to tell him.

  He must see what’s coming. The white iceberg must condense for him soon, even out of his whiter fog. But I keep still; the woman is doing too much for us. I’m learning volumes from her, secondhand—whole worlds about music, and even more about the musical world.

  We’re at a stand-up pizza place on Houston, pretending to be students, enjoying the night, how it fuzzes into that passing crowd. “Mule? You ever sleep with anyone in college?”

  He sounds for a moment like an ancient. wife confronting her husband at the end of the day with a suspicion that’s too old to be anxious about anymore, now that everything is past mattering.

  “Aside from the actresses, Gypsies, consumptives, and courtesans with hearts of gold?”

  He jerks up and stares, then flips me the finger. “I mean for real. Not your diseased imagination.”

  “Oh. For real.” I wonder if I even wanted to, with anyone real. My one moment of love—the woman in the navy blue dress followed for twenty blocks—was free of any such compromising risk. “You think I could even have thought about it without your knowing?”

  His lips twitch a little, and he hides them behind a wedge of pizza. He chews and swallows. “You ever almost?”

  I pretend to deliberate, blood racing. “No.”

  “How about since?”

  “No.” Haven’t left your sight. “But since we’re on the subject—”

  “How many … men do you think she has?” Only one she in our lives now. He doesn’t really want me to count them, and I don’t.

  The shortness of breath he suffered during our preparation for the America’s Next Voices competition returns. It happens before a Sunday afternoon recital in Boston, the first time we’ve been back since Boylston. Ten minutes before we go on, he starts wheezing so badly, he almost passes out. I tell the house manager to cancel and call a doctor. Jonah objects, although it almost suffocates him. We go on, twenty minutes late. As performances go, it’s ragged. But Jonah sings at maximum need. The audience flocks backstage afterward. There’s no sign of Reményi, any Boylston teachers, or our once friends.

  Back in the city, Lisette forces him to get a checkup. She even offers to loan him the money for it. I bless the woman for making him do what I can’t. Nothing wrong, the doctor says. “Nothing wrong, Mule,” Jonah repeats, eyes darting around the waiting room, as if the walls were closing in.

  I’m better with his panic attacks now that I’m sure they pass. Calmer, I can bring him out faster. He manages them, almost seeming to time them to avoid total disaster: early in the afternoon before a concert, or at the reception just following one.

  We play eight venues in January of 1963 alone: big cities looking for new blood, midsized cities pretending to be big cities, small cities looking for affordable culture, small towns that, through historical accident, hold on to their European roots. Maybe their grandfathers once bought standing-room tickets at the Stadtschauplatz, or loved the free Rathaus affairs on public holidays. So the descendants preserve the forms after all context has washed away, the way people turn massive old radio consoles into knickknack cabinets.

  We don’t even know about Project Confrontation until we see it on a lobby television in a two-star hotel in Minneapolis. A police commissioner named Bull Conner releases fire hoses and attack-trained German shepherds on protesters for singing “Marching to Freedom Land” without a license. Most of the marchers are years younger than we are. Jonah looks on from Minneapolis, humming to himself, “Way down south in Birmingham, I mean south in Alabam,” not even hearing.

  The country on television isn’t ours. The streets on film are mobbed, as in some jackboot-crushed Eastern European uprising. Police club fallen kids, dragging them off in paddy wagons. Bodies roll in the spray, pounded into clumps against brick walls by vicious water jets. Everywhere is spray and chaos, limbs gashed and beaten, two white policemen smashing a boy in the face with billy clubs, until the hourly wage Minneapolis bellhop, black, is told by management to turn the channel, and Jonah and I head off to a last-minute auditorium test prior to charming the Twin Cities.

  Tonight, we do another encore. Jonah whispers it to me as we take a curtain call. “Go Down, Moses,” in D minor.
He doesn’t even have the sheet music this time. We don’t need it. An old friend of mine has taught me how to improvise, to pull notes out of the air that serve as well as any written down. Jonah doesn’t quite know the words, but he finds them, too. He sings them at the same moment as the children in their cells down in Birmingham jail sing, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round …”

  The audience, too, has seen Birmingham, served up by Cronkite, earlier that evening. They know what’s happening way down in Egypt land. They hush when Jonah finishes, hard, luminous, and piano. But they aren’t sure how to see this mix, this cause creeping into the confines of beauty. Even supportive applause seems wrong.

  Our bookings increase, and so do the protests. They tear through hundreds of cities north and south, even passing through the towns we tour. Yet we always miss the marches, blowing through a day before, two days after. We polish our new encore and add it to the standing repertoire. Jonah doesn’t tell Lisette.

  She’s increasingly eager to groom our public look. “Jonie”—and yes, he stands for it—“you’re getting noticed. You’re earning a name for lightness. You have to watch out for anything lugubrious. Find work that lets you sail.” She squelches attempts to sing anything written later than 1930. She arms him with an arsenal of shiny pellets, each one finished in two minutes. She feeds him Fauré. She goes through a Delius kick—“Maude” and “A Late Lark.” He sings them, like appearing onstage in pastel tights.

  Lisette sands down the cheats he’s developed to hide his thinner notes. She pushes him to get a single burnished arc out of all three of his voice’s regions. No one has ever heard in him what she hears. No one has ever dared him on as she does. At his lessons, she sings back to him. When she sets him aside and takes up the notes, it’s like brass after bronze. His instrument is more magnificent than the one she’s been dealt. But her presence blows my brother’s away. She merely has to think the notes; they fall from her in the effortless afterthought of inner recall. Her singing draws him to his fate. Even I can’t turn away.