The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  “You have already seen how!” he said. And she had.

  She sung to her firstborn in the womb. She made up whole operas of nonsense syllables. At night, she and David sang part-songs at the spinet that her parents had given them. She pressed her midsection against the vibrating wood, letting the harmonies spread in waves through her.

  David put his ear to her roundness and listened for whole minutes at a time. “Already busy in there!” He heard frequencies beyond the ear, making time’s transforming calculations. “Tenor,” he predicted.

  “Lord, I hope so. They get all the best parts.”

  In their bed, under the gray wool blanket, in such darkness that not even God could spy them out, she told him her fears. She spoke to her husband of permanent doubt, that daily, ingrained wariness so thick in her she couldn’t even see it. She spoke of turning away from baiting, of smiling at concealed slight, of never knowing, of the drain of having to stand, every minute of her life, for everything but herself. Her dread, as she named it, was more swollen than her belly. “How can we hope to raise them?”

  “Wife. My beautiful woman. No one knows how to raise children. Yet people seem to have done this from the very beginning of the race.”

  “No. I mean, what will they be?” And then, what won’t they?

  “I don’t understand.” Of course not. How could he?

  “Bird or fish?”

  He nodded and opened his arms to her. And because there was nowhere else now, she let herself be held.

  “Do we really get to say?” he asked. She laughed into his collarbone. “The child will have four choices.” She jerked back to arm’s length, looking at him, astonished. “I mean, this is just mathematics! They can be A and not B. They can be B and not A. They can be A and B. Or they can be neither A nor B.”

  Three more choices than this child would ever get. Choice and race were mortal opposites, more distant than Delia and the man she’d married. Another mathematics came upon her: Their child would be a different race from at least one parent. Whether they had a choice or not.

  Delia went back to Philadelphia for the birth. Her father’s house was ample, and her mother’s experience ampler still. Her husband followed, the moment his university duties permitted. Luck brought David there in time for the delivery, at the end of January 1941, in the hospital where William practiced, three-quarters of a mile from the better hospital where Delia had once worked.

  “He’s so light,” the awed mother whispered when they let her hold her baby.

  “He’ll darken up,” Nettie Ellen told her. “You wait and see.” But her firstborn never did what he was supposed to do.

  David wrote his parents the news, as he had after the wedding. He told them all about their new daughter-in-law and grandson, or almost all. He looked forward to the day they would all at last meet. Then he dispatched the letter into the growing void. Fortress Holland had fallen. Rotterdam, where his parents had fled, was leveled. He wrote to Bremer, his father’s old headmaster in Essen, asking everything in coded phrases, using no names. But he heard nothing in return, from any quarter.

  The Nazis took the Continent, from Norway to the Pyrenees. France and the Low Countries were gone. Every week, silence fell across a new theater—Hungary, the Balkans, North Africa. At last, word came—a scribbled note from Bremer, smuggled past the censors, through Spain:

  I’ve lost track of them, David—Max and Rachael. They’re back in Germany, if they’re anywhere. An NSB neighbor in Schiedam, where they had gone into hiding, turned them in for Arbeiteinsatz. Nor can I reach your sister; she and her Vihar may have escaped. But wherever they’ve gone, it’s only a matter of time … This is the end, David. It doesn’t matter what you say you are. You’ll all be rounded up and simplified. Not one left, and you don’t even get your moment of Masada.

  David showed his wife the note—everything he’d long suspected. Each now held a part of the other’s destruction. In that stripping away—Your family, gone—they became each other.

  And the boy, in turn, became his parents’ reason for being. Terrified by the uncountable minute threats in every gust of wind, warming his milk to within half of a half degree, they weekly learned that children survive even their parents’ best intentions.

  “He’s here already,” Delia marveled. “Already a little man! A whole self all figured out, no matter what our plans. This whole baby act is just to humor us. Isn’t it? Yes, it is, isn’t it?”

  The baby gurgled in the face of all his parents’ fears. They took him back to Philly when he was three months old. The boy performed for his grandparents, babbling on pitch, reducing his grandfather to a heap of proud anxiety. The old family practitioner paced and fretted. “Watch! Watch out for his head!”

  “You ought to be thinking about getting him baptized,” Nettie Ellen said. “He’s getting awful big awful fast. Oh, yes you are!”

  Delia answered simply, the result of weeks of practice. “He can get baptized when he’s older, Mama. If he wants.”

  Nettie raised her hand, fending off strange denominations. “How you going to raise him up, then? You going to raise him Jewish?”

  “No, Mama. We’re not.”

  Nettie Ellen held her grandson to her shoulder and looked around, ready to run with him. “He’s got to hear something about God.”

  Delia smiled across the room at her husband. “Oh, he hears about God almost every night running” She didn’t add, In Lydian, Dorian, German, and Latin.

  The doctor deferred the question that Delia knew was coming. She fended him off by pure will, until she was ready with an answer. Delaying until that day when her new family’s strange mathematics invented a fifth choice.

  DECEMBER 1964

  We’re all four home for Christmas, Ruth’s second winter vacation since starting college. This is a third of a century ago. The sixties have just started turning fab. The Billboard charts are overrun by shaggy Anglo-Saxons in Edwardian suits who’ve just discovered all the taboo chords that black Americans worked their way through decades ago. A black poet dances his way to the world heavyweight title. Ruth gives me a fan magazine devoted to this poet boxer for Christmas, and she laughs insanely when I open it. After, she gives me my real present: a picture-book history of the blues. I give her a black pullover that she asked for and that she won’t take off for the next two days, even to go to sleep.

  She runs her fingers through my hair. “Why do you comb it down like that?” she asks.

  “Comb?” Jonah snickers.

  I don’t know what to say. “That’s the way it grows.”

  “You should pick it out. You’d look much better.”

  Jonah scoffs. “You got another job for him lined up?”

  Something has blown up between the two of them. I blame it on the times. The hatless boy president is dead—all his delays and explanations spattered across the back of a top-down convertible. Our father is still mourning the man a year on. The man’s successor has signed civil rights into law, but way too late to head off the first of the long, hot summers to come.

  Harlem starts it, and my sister is there. Five months back, a white policeman killed a Negro boy two years younger than Ruth, fewer than a dozen blocks from where our family once lived. CORE organized a protest, and a group of undergrads from NYU Uptown turned out, Ruthie, my new collegiate activist sister, among them. They started to march up Lenox, the model of peaceful demonstration. But something went wrong when the leading protesters met the police rear guard. The march came apart and madness was everywhere, before Ruth or anyone else knew what was happening.

  The way she tells it to us, over Christmas dinner, it took just seconds for the street to scatter in screams. The crowd cracked open. Ruth tried to run back to the parked busses, but in the chaos, she got turned around. “Somebody shoved me. I bounced off this policeman—totally panicked—who was slipping around on the sidewalk, clubbing everything that moved. He came down with his baton, smashed me right here.” She shows m
e, grabbing my upper arm.

  More terrified than hurt, she plunged into a sea of twenty-year-olds, all running for their lives. Somehow, she ran through bedlam and found her way home. Even five months afterward, she can’t say how. One more Harlem child dead, and hundreds of marchers wounded. For two days and nights, the streets overflowed. Then the fire spread to Bedford-Stuyvesant and, down the following weeks of a bad summer, to Jersey City and Philadelphia. All of this has come to pass just a year after a quarter of a million people—Da and Ruth lost among them—descended on the Mall to hear the greatest act of improvised oratory in history. “‘I have a dream,’” my sister says, shaking her head. “More like a nightmare, if you ask me.”

  After the riot died out to nothing, Ruth took her smashed upper arm back to University Heights, where she promptly changed her major from history to prelaw. “Only law can leverage what’s coming, Joey.” History could no longer predict what was happening to her.

  History, today, is just the four of us. Da paces in his study. Jonah lies on the floor playing with a new sliding puzzle Da has given him for Christmas. I sit on the couch next to Ruth, who has been gearing up toward some question all day. “What do you remember about Mama?” she asks me at last, still trying to fix my hair. Like requesting an old dance number. What do you remember? She really wants to know, although she’s already decided.

  Jonah and I have scheduled this break in our barnstorming—eighteen stops in every drafty auditorium across the Pacific Northwest—to try to reconnect with our family. It’s been months since I’ve sat and talked to Ruth. She’s lived through a riot, changed her major, taken to dressing exclusively in tight, dark clothes. She’s exploding with ideas she’s picked up at school. She’s reading books by famous social theorists I’ve never even heard of. She’s passed me by in every way but musically. She feels like my unknown, exotic, well-traveled cousin. Once she was almost my age. Now she’s amused by my doddering senility.

  “About Mama?” I answer. Mama’s old trick: Always repeat the question. It buys you time. “You know. Nothing you wouldn’t recognize.”

  Ruth stops fiddling with my hair. She picks up the blues book, my present from her, and flips through it. “I mean from before my time.”

  “You should ask the man.” I point my thumb at our father, who paces with excitement in an oval between the sterile dining room and his chaosinfested study in a state of quantum perturbation. Ruth just rolls her eyes. She’s right: Da is already unreachable, halfway back to whatever dimension Mama now occupies. He knows every message our mother’s memory might have for us, but he can’t give them to us. Now and then as he paces, he calls out a few private syllables of insight for no one, then collapses at his desk to jot down a stream of hostage symbols. Recently, his age-old enigma has thickened. Fitch and Cronin, two Princeton-based acquaintances of his working over in Brookhaven, have just shattered the past: Temporal symmetry is violated at the subatomic level. The world’s equations are not cleanly reversible. Da paces about the first floor of this new, alien house in a wide, closed loop, shaking his head, singing, “Ah, sweet mystery of life!” The tune has started to grate on our collective nerves.

  It’s just the four of us now, in a house belonging to no one. The old home in Hamilton Heights is banished to some planet of memory none of us can reach. Our father has bought this place, just over the Washington Bridge, in Fort Lee, New Jersey, on the colossal miscalculation that we children might take this transplanted nest to heart. He can’t see us anymore. This neighborhood makes all three of his offspring look like a foreign exchange program. Ruth, in particular, looks like a UN delegate from one of those newly decolonized countries no one’s heard of.

  Even this holiday reunion is a sad fabrication. Ruth has found a wreath and a few lights, but no one had the heart to decorate. The first night of Hanukkah descended into TV dinners. For Christmas, we order take-out Chinese. The day’s angel messengers are off on some other hillside, miles up the Palisades, announcing the mysterious birth to those flock-watching shepherds who’ve managed to remain more easily taken in by good news.

  This is the last time we’ll be together like this. Every time is something’s last, but even I can feel this holiday’s scattering. Ruth sits on the couch, nursing her arm, the bruise still tender almost half a year on. Something I can’t name has been happening to her while she’s been away at college. Something happening all across the country, and already it’s moving too fast for me to see. The country’s clock has slowed to a stop, and mine races on. Mama always said I was born antique. “This one’s born ancient,” she once whispered to Da, after she thought I was asleep. “And he’s going to get older and older every time humanity turns him around.”

  Now I’ve become Ruth’s grandfather. She looks at me, begging for memories only I am aged enough to reach. I’m her only reliable link to a room that time’s sliding walls have sealed her off from. She’s changed while we’ve been touring. Never again Ruthie, Root. She has on tight black jeans and that black V-necked pullover, her fine curly hair combed out unsuccessfully on her head, as if she’s swum halfway across some fast-running stream of fashion before panicking and swimming back. Her body has turned perfect since the last time I saw her. I look away now when she leans toward me, asking, “What were we all like, when I was small?”

  “You could sight-sing before you could see. You were the best, Ruth. You could sound like anyone.”

  We’ve not sung together, as a family, this entire vacation. It’s all any of us have thought about, but no one’s brought it up. Jonah and I practice daily, but that doesn’t count. The only other notes are Da’s, his million looped refrains of “Ah, Sweet Mystery”: “Ah, sweet mystery … of life … At last I’ve found you!” To which we kids add no harmonies.

  “Joey, you dope!” Ruth’s accent has drifted over the river toward Brooklyn, as if other people have brought her up. Which they have, I guess. “I don’t need to know about me!”

  The two of us look to Jonah, the only one truly old enough for solid data. He lies on the floor, toying with the sliding puzzle, humming to himself the glimpse of arpeggiated paradise from the end of Fauré’s Requiem. Jonah’s eyebrows go up at our aimed silence—Hmm?—as if he hasn’t heard us. He has registered every word. “Altos!” he explodes. “Vee need more altos!” Time-honored mockery of Da, from our earliest years. The accent is so good that even Da himself stops pacing around the dining room to smile at us from out of what was once his body.

  “Altos!” I come in, a dutiful imitation. “Ven, voman, you are going to make me some altos?”

  Ruth, the real mimic, grins at the canonic gag. But she adds no line of her own. Ruth, the alto, hasn’t sung a note since she went away to school. She pinches up her cheeks in frustration. “No! No, you stupid crackers.” She slaps the sofa with an open palm. She grabs my forearm, leans in, and bites it. “What do you remember about Mama?”

  This is my sister’s only holiday question—my sister, who was barely ten when the world she wants to know about came to its early end. She was the first to discover the blaze, where all our photos burned. Now every memory she has has drifted, unreliable, except for her memory of the fire itself. She thinks Jonah and I still have entry rights. But she’s not even wrong. Our sister wants back in to a place with no dimension, no place of entry, not even the one she asks us to invent for her now.

  I wait for Jonah to answer. Ruth prods him with her toe. But he’s gone back to humming Fauré’s sickly sweet burial Mass and sliding around his puzzle squares. It falls to me, in this life, to make sure no one I love goes unanswered. This Christmas, more than ever, that is a losing proposition. I need to start looking for a better job. “You want stories from before you were born?”

  “Before. After. I’m not in a position to be picky.” My sister talks to her hands, which dethread a tasseled pillow that she picked out for Da as a gift. It’s gold and burgundy, nothing she’d let near her own apartment. “God’s sake, Joey! Give me whate
ver you have!” Her voice is a jagged alto gasp. “Mama’s blurring on me. I can’t hold her.”

  The things I know for sure, my sister doesn’t need. The things she needs from me, I’m unsure of. I root through the jumbled shoe box of the past, all my own snapshots burned. A midday shadow falls across the couch, between us. Mama’s here. I can see her: that face I once mistook for my own reflection, its mouth the idea of mouths, its eyes, all eyes. But she has blurred on me, too. I’m no longer certain of her features. With nothing to check against, I can’t be sure what I’ve done to her. “She looked like you, Ruth. A slightly taller, fuller you.”

  Jonah just grunts. Ruth looks down, upset and skeptical. “What did she sound like?”

  The timbre of her voice is in the bones of my skull. It’s packed so close, I can’t get to it. The sound is second nature, but to try to describe it would be worse than a cheap recording. Not this; not that. I can’t say what my mother sounded like, any more than I can hear myself sing. Not even Jonah could reproduce her.

  “She … I don’t know. She used to call us ‘JoJo.’ The two of us.” I kick my motionless brother. “Like we were one child with two bodies.”

  “I remember.” Ruth squirms in place. This isn’t what she wants.

  “She was a fantastic teacher. She used to praise and correct us in the same breath. ‘JoJo, that’s wonderful. That sounded just about perfect. Try it a few more times, and I bet that octave leap will be right there.’”

  Jonah just nods. He has never been big on comprimario roles. When he’s not center stage these days, he doesn’t bother coming onstage at all.

  “Did she have students?”

  “All the time. Talented adults, coming back to music. Teens and older kids, from around the neighborhood.”

  “Black or white?” All my sister asks is what the world asks her. It’s the only question of any interest, over in the Bronx, at NYU Uptown. In the twitchy streets of Harlem. The old neighborhood.