The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  He broke out of his pacing and stood behind me. He rested his hands on my shoulders. It felt like the last time he’d ever do that. “What do I have, Joey? Maybe fifteen years of prime voice left?” The figure shocked me, a crazy exaggeration. Then I did the math. “I just thought it might be good to go make some noise with other people. A little harmony, while I’m still in form.”

  He turned down the offer to play the Negro. He was the one who said no, in the full knowledge that no one ever got a third try. But then, saying yes might have left him even more enslaved. This way, he kept at least one of his hands on what he thought was the rudder.

  He was right about everything. The Met, their first choice gone, ended up not producing The Visitation. The opera did come to town, with the premiere cast that had triumphed with it in Hamburg the year before. Just as Jonah predicted, the New York critics slaughtered it. They accused the libretto of irrelevance at best and of stilted falseness at worst. If one wanted civil rights, one should read the papers or hop a bus down south. One came to the opera, on the other hand, for the passion and drama of the tragic self. The tickets were too expensive for anything else.

  The first American staging of The Visitation went west, to the San Francisco Opera. They mounted their premiere with a tenor named Simon Estes in the leading role. They performed the expressionist drama just across the Bay from where Huey Newton and the police had had their shoot-out. Every staging of a work is a new universe. San Francisco was farther from New York than Kafka was from civil rights. The West Coast critics adored the show, and it launched Mr. Estes, several shades darker than my brother, on his distinguished, singular career.

  Not that Jonah’s career stood still. Only time did that. Our second record came out, and for weeks afterward, I waited, flinching. I didn’t give a damn about critics or sales: I wanted the whole thing to sink without notice. Jonah heard me holding my breath and just laughed. “What is it, Joey? What evils have we unleashed on the world this time?”

  A month went by, and nothing happened. No earthquake from our own trivial tremor. The Kerner Commission released its report on the violence across the country: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black and one white, separate and unequal.” But this time, even the cities where our record sold well remained quiet.

  Gramophone magazine reviewed the new LP, proclaiming that a man so young and callow had no earthly right to sing Schubert’s wintry trip “until he’s within earshot of that season.” The reviewer was that great judge of vocal talent, Crispin Linwell. Linwell’s review was so dreamily brutal that it touched off what passed, in classical musical circles, for a street brawl. The controversy fed on itself, and the record got written up in more big-city dailies than I thought possible. A few outraged protectors of world culture hid behind the Linwell name and dismissed Jonah’s effort as at best premature and at worst impudent. A few other writers, themselves too young to know what they were wading into, found Jonah’s youthful rethinking of the cycle as thrilling as it was spooky. One reviewer, reviewing the battle as much as the recording, pointed out that Jonah Strom was only a few years younger than Schubert was when he wrote the thing. When these reviewers talked about the singing at all, they tossed around the word perfection as if it were a mild reprimand.

  The first to mention race was a writer in the Village Voice. The proper way to serve up Schubert was hardly that paper’s stock-in-trade. The reviewer admitted up front to being a jazzer who could listen to lieder only under the influence of artificial enhancement. But Schubert, the writer said, wasn’t the issue. The issue was that the white cultural establishment was trying to skewer a gifted young black singer not because he was too young to sing the masters but because he was too uppity. The reviewer proceeded to list half a dozen European and American white singers who’d tackled the work to acclaim at ages even younger than Jonah’s.

  I showed the piece to Jonah, expecting rage. But when he got to the end, he just cackled. “Is it him? It has to be. The smart-aleck style? The bit about being able to listen to lieder only while stoned?” I hadn’t even checked the byline. Jonah handed me back the issue. “T. West! Who else could it be? Thaddy boy. That white Negro bastard.”

  “Should we call him? I’ve a number for him from … awhile ago.” Old broken promise. But Jonah shook his head, reticent, almost scared.

  T. West’s accusation blew our little winter’s journey wide open. Crispin Linwell was all over himself in a Gramophone response, hotly denying that race had anything to do with the way any classical performance is received. He’d worked with tens of black artists and even hired one or two. The papers that ran follow-up squibs generally made the same claim: Race simply wasn’t an issue in the concert scene. Talent was all. The monuments of classical music were color-blind, never troubling with such ephemera. Anyone who wanted to could worship at the altar.

  “That’s what your father and mother believed,” Jonah said, and kept reading.

  An editorial in the Chicago Defender thanked the white cultural establishment for being so color-blind: “And it must be so, for the cultural elites to be able to look out on classical music audiences and declare that race is not an issue when dealing with eternal verities. But then, nobody can see much color when the lights are down so low.” Even this editorial didn’t talk about Jonah’s singing, except to declare it, for whatever the phrase meant, “a constant astonishment.”

  For weeks, our record sold as well as if it had been released on a major label. We got letters telling us to stick to jig music. We got letters—militant, enthusiastic—from faceless, raceless listeners who told us to keep reviving the dead stuff, forever. But by then, who knew what music anyone was hearing in our sounds? I hated the notoriety, and still thought that once the fuss blew over, we could return to the realm of simple performance. Right up to the last, I imagined such a place existed.

  But the Linwell flap also seemed to break our curse. I’d been braced for riots, our repeat punishment for trying to stop time again. This precious little tempest, played out in small-circulation magazines catering to a dying art, was all the riot our recording would touch off this time. I was a slung-assed fool. I felt the size of my vanity, the old animistic belief that the world lived or died by what cracks I stepped on.

  Then King was killed. He died on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, a few blocks south of Beale Street, the day after he went up to the mountaintop. That voice for reconciliation met its only allowable end. He’d been leading a strike by garbage workers and now he was over. How long? Not long. I heard the news on FM radio while cleaning the apartment. The dazed announcer broke in on the highlights from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. He forgot to fade the music down, instead just clipping it off and tearing into the garbled news. He didn’t seem to know what to do next. Going back to Donizetti was impossible, even though it was one of Dr. King’s favorites. The silence grew so long, it made me wonder if the station had gone off the air. In fact, the announcer had simply walked away, into the station’s record library, to root around for the right eulogy. For whatever private reason, he settled on William Billings’s crude, haunted originary wail, “David’s Lamentation”: “Would to God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son.”

  I shut the radio off and went out. It was already evening. I turned, by instinct, uptown. The streets seemed so matter-of-fact, so unchanged, though most of the passersby must already have known. I walked at random, looking for Jonah, hurrying to tell him.

  The firebombs started in Memphis, an hour after the shooting. By the end of the week, 125 cities were at war. The fires in Washington burned worse than they had since 1812. The Battle of Fourteenth Street required thirteen thousand federal troops to suppress it. The city set a curfew and declared martial law. Chicago’s mayor ordered his forces to “shoot to kill.” The governor of Maryland announced a lasting state of emergency as a quarter of Baltimore burned. In Kansas City, police lobbed gas canisters into a crowd enraged by the decision to
keep schools open through Dr. King’s funeral. Nashville, Oakland, Cincinnati, Trenton: uprising everywhere.

  Four straight summers of violence: The revolution had come. And Jonah and I stood by watching, as if from mezzanine boxes at a matinee performance of Verdi’s Requiem. Our concerts in Pittsburgh and Boston were canceled and never rescheduled, casualties in a conflict where music wasn’t even the smallest thing at stake. How could a little song and dance compete against the country’s supreme art form?

  For some months, our life had looked increasingly unreal. Now I lost all sense of what real was supposed to look like. Jonah knew. “Here we go. All out in the open now. Straight-up tribalism—everything anyone wants. Something solid to believe in. We’ve been killing one another over imaginary membership for a million years. Why change this late in the day?”

  My brother’s take on the human species had never been complicated. Now it was simplifying down to a single perfect point. People would rather die in invented safety than live in invigorating fear. He’d seen enough. Jonah turned his back on the whole time frame of earthly politics, and I could no longer call him back. Every passing day only confirmed him. None of us knew how to live here, at the rate of life we were given.

  The two of us were running up to an engagement in Storrs, Connecticut, in a borrowed Impala—just a shade too pale to be pulled over and frisked—when Jonah, in the passenger seat, leaned toward me and confided, “I know why they killed him.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “They killed him because he was coming out both barrels against Vietnam.”

  “Viet—That’s insane.”

  He waved his hand in front of the dash, the whole panorama of interstate. Danger on all sides. “His attacks, last year. ‘America’s the world’s greatest purveyor of violence.’ Sending out blacks to kill yellows. Come on. You show me the person in power who’s going to let some darkie preacher shut down a game like that.”

  I checked my speed. “You’re saying the government … The CIA …” I felt like a fool just pronouncing the letters.

  Jonah shrugged. He didn’t care which acronym had pulled the trigger. “They need the war, Joey. It’s like housecleaning. Forces of good. Making the world safe. Onward, upward, oneward.”

  The skin on my neck turned to scales. He’d gone the way of the country at large. My brother, always grandiose, had taken that last little baby step upstream. But something in me relaxed at his words. If he’d arrived here, too, then there was no conflict. Ruth could come back. I could tell her what had happened to him. We could be together, the three of us again, as we had never been. No enemies, aside from everyone. I’d believe whatever the two of them told me.

  I had no strong feelings about the war, except to avoid it. Now this spillover was killing people across 125 cities. On every long car ride now, Jonah spun through the dial, searching for counterculture songs. He’d weave a Dies Irae cantus firmus around the melodies, that same gift for counterpoint that had stunned my parents during our music evenings and made them think they had a duty to send him away to boarding school. The fatal facility that stunted his life. And when the three or four predictable funk or folk guitar chords failed to accommodate the harmonies he spun, he’d curse the tone-deaf arrangements and threaten to firebomb the nearest record store.

  The war took us over. Everything became a referendum on it. Lovefests, pot parties, sit-ins, draft-card bonfires, Upper West Side benefits that threw together militant radicals and shameless philanthropists: Everything became the war. My brother sat next to me on an upholstered Chevy seat, weaving counterpoint around the words, “There’s something happening here.” The old order was taking its last twilight gasp; some spiraling hope was breathing its first. My brother hummed along, obbligato, above “Stop, hey: What’s that sound?” But no one could say what that sound was or just what future it was trying to buy.

  The war took Phillipa Schuyler. That wonderous little girl, the daughter of hybrid vigor, the celebrated heroine of Phillipa Duke Schuyler Day, whose Five Little Piano Pieces were among the first keyboard works Jonah and I ever learned, died in Da Nang. The musical prodigy burned to death in a helicopter crash in a war zone, on her way back from Hue. Her country had loved the girl for the shortest moment, until she passed through puberty and lost her status as a freak of nature. When precocity failed her, all those whom hybrid vigor threatened with extinction turned the full force of purebred unity against her. She fled to Europe, playing to acclaim from crowned families and heads of state. She toured internationally as Felipa Monterro, racially, nationally, and historically ambiguous. She published five books and wrote articles in several languages. She became a correspondent. And she fell from the sky and died on a bungled humanitarian mission to rescue schoolchildren whose village was about to be overrun. She was thirty-seven.

  The news devastated Jonah. He’d loved the girl, on nothing more than her sheet music and our parents’ accounts. He’d imagined she’d hear of him someday, that they would meet, that anything might happen between them. I, too, had always thought so.

  “Just us now, Mule,” he told me. Just us, and the tens of thousands just like us, whom we’d never come across.

  From Hue and Da Nang—hamlets no atlas of ours carried—the war came home. At Columbia, what started as an SDS-led demonstration ended with a unit of twenty-year-olds taking over the president’s office in Low Library, where they set up an autonomous people’s republic. Across that postage stamp of campus where our father worked, the latest American revolution played out in microcosm. Half a dozen buildings were occupied, besieged, and sacked over the course of a war that lasted longer than the latest one between the Arabs and Israel.

  Da had no lab to worry about losing. He’d always carried his science around with him in his head. But even this much he failed to protect. He didn’t even know about the battle for Morningside Heights until two days in, when he strolled across the south end of the Campus Walk and noticed a disturbance in the distance. Good empiricist, he investigated. Within minutes, he was enveloped in bedlam. The thousand police President Kirk had summoned to drive the protesters from campus were achieving their only possible result: tear gas, stones, clubs, and bodies flying in all directions. Da saw an officer laying into the legs of a prostrate student and ran up to stop the beating. He took a club in the face and went down. He was lucky the jittery policeman didn’t shoot him.

  His cheekbone collapsed into the back of his face and had to be rebuilt. I had no way of reaching Ruth, nor did I know whether she’d care. Jonah and I went to see Da in the hospital after the surgery. In the hall to his room, a nurse blocked our path until we convinced her we were the man’s sons. We couldn’t be his sons, she thought. We weren’t the same color. Maybe she thought we were the thugs who’d put him here, come back to finish the job.

  Da still bobbed under the anesthetic. He looked through the gauze wrappings holding in his face. He seemed to recognize us and tried to sit up in the hospital bed to sing. He flipped a weak hand up to his mummified head and droned, “Hat jede Sache so fremd eine Miene, so falsch ein Gesicht!” Hugo Wolf’s “Homesickness,” a song Jonah used to sing, before the words meant anything. Everything had so strange a countenance; so false a face.

  Jonah saluted. “How’s our cheekless wonder? You feeling better? What do the docs say?”

  The question set Da to singing again, Mahler this time:

  Ich hab’ erst heut’ den Doktor gefragt, Only today I asked the doctor,

  Der hat mir’s in’s Gesicht gesagt: And he told me to my face:

  “Ich weiss wohl, was dir ist, was dir ist: “I know exactly what’s wrong with you:

  Ein Narr bist du gewiβ!” You are surely a fool!”

  Nun weiss ich, wie mir ist! Now I know what’s wrong with me!

  He sounded like a flock of geese rushing south. The performance went right through my intestines. Jonah cackled like a crazy man. “Da! Cut it out. Quit with the jaw movements. You’ll collapse your
face again.”

  “Come. We sing. We make a little trio. Where are the altos? We need altos.”

  Jonah only egged him on. After a while, Da settled down. He craned up and said, “My boychiks,” as if we’d just arrived. He couldn’t rotate his head without shattering. We sat by his bedside for as long as Jonah’s attention permitted. Da perked up again as we got ready to leave. “Where are you going?”

  “Home, Da. We have to practice.”

  “Good. There’s a cold soup in the refrigerator. Chicken from Mrs. Samuels. And Mandelbrot in the bread box, for you boys. You boys like that.”

  We looked at each other. I tried to stop him, but Jonah blurted, “Not that home.”

  Da just blinked at us through his bandages and waved away our jokes. “Tell your mother I’m just fine.”

  Outside, on the street, Jonah preempted me. “He’s still doped up. Who knows what they have him on?”

  “Jonah.”

  “Look.” His voice swung out at me. “If he loses his job, we can start worrying about him.” We walked in silence toward the subway. At last he added, “I mean, it’s hardly the kind of job where craziness is a liability.”

  We performed in Columbus, at Ohio State, a pocketbook auditorium paneled in dark wood. There couldn’t have been more than three hundred people in attendance, half of them at student prices, scoping out the object of controversy. We’d have lost money on coming out if we hadn’t had bookings in Dayton and Cleveland, too. Jonah must have felt something, some sense of what was already racing to happen to him. There, in that random hall, in front of an audience that didn’t know what hit them, for an hour and ten minutes, he sang like nothing living.

  Once, when I was a child, before Mama died, I dreamt I was standing on the front stoop of the house in Hamilton Heights. I leaned forward without stepping and lifted off the stoop, surprised that I could fly. I’d always been able to, only I’d forgotten. All I needed to do was lean forward and let it happen. Flying was as easy as breathing, easier than walking through the neighborhood where my parents put me down. That was how Jonah sang that night in the middle of distant, dislodged Ohio. He landed on the most reticent pitches from a fixed point in the air above, like a kingfisher catching silver. He hit attacks and came off every release without a waver. Each note’s edges tapered or sustained according to innermost need. His line bent iridescent, a hummingbird turning at will and hovering motionless, by the beat of its wings, even fusing air and flying backward. His sound spread to its full span, huge as a raptor, all taloned precision, without a trace of force or tremor. His ornaments were as articulate as switches and his held notes swelled like the sea trapped in a shell.