The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  “‘Past color’?” The doctor sounds out the words, saying them out loud the way he repeats his patients’ symptoms. “You mean you’re going to raise them white.”

  The boys have lost interest, if they ever had any. They wander back to the piano to try another chorale. Delia hushes them. “Not right now, JoJo. Why don’t you two go play in your room?”

  She has never before told them to stop making music. Jonah starts plunking the keys at high speed, double, quadruple time, racing through the entire chorale before the prohibition can take effect. His brother looks on, horrified. Delia sweeps to the bench, lifts up the lawbreaker, swings him like the bob of a pendulum, then lowers him to the floor and starts him scampering toward the boys’ room. She grazes his bottom for good measure, and the offender howls down the hallway, his little brother crying behind him in sympathy, limping in remembered pain.

  Past color. My mother speaks these words to my grandfather in late September of 1945. I’m three years old. What can I hope to remember? My brother lies on his belly in our room’s doorway, spying on adulthood down the hall. He’s thinking about just one thing: how to get back to that piano and make some noise. How to recover the throne of sound that alone rights the world and sets him at the center of love.

  My parents and grandfather crouch in a globe of light in the middle of edgeless shadow. They should know this, how small their circle, how big the surrounding dark. But something drives them on, something that isn’t them but says it is. Something they need wants them so completely that they turn on one another to avoid losing it. I see them down the hall, a ball of burning sulfur in a borderless dark bowl.

  Mama says, We have to get there, somehow. Somebody has to jump.

  Papap says, Beyond color? You know what beyond color means? We’re already there. Beyond color means hide the black man. Wipe him out. Means everybody play the one annihilating game white’s been playing since—

  The world is ending. Jonah and I know this already, and we know almost nothing. My brother will run out into the middle of them, seduce them back home with a song. But even Jonah has fallen under the spell of revenge. His wrong is private, and deeper than the world’s. Scolded unfairly while playing.

  Papap says, What do you think they’ll learn the minute they set foot out of your house?

  Mama says, Everybody’s going to be mixed. No one’s going to be anything.

  Papap says, There is no mixed.

  Da says, Not yet.

  Papap says, Never will be. It’s one thing or the other. And they can’t be the one, not in this world. It’s the other, girl. You know that. What’s your problem?

  Mama says, People have to move. What world do you want to live in? Things have to break down, go someplace else.

  Papap says, They’ve been breaking down black from day one. Sending it someplace else.

  Mama says, White, too. White is going to change.

  Papap says, White? Break down? Never, short of gunpoint.

  Mama says, They will; they’ll have to.

  And Papap answers her: Never. Never. What happened this morning is all the future any of us is ever going to get.

  Then the real storm. I can’t remember how it comes on, any more than I can remember myself. They’ve been talking a long time. Jonah falls asleep on the floor in the doorway to our room. I can’t, of course, not with the grown-ups so badly wrong. Papap is pacing the dining room, a giant in a cage. He slams the walls with his palm. Beyond color, beyond your own mother. Beyond your sisters and brothers, beyond me!

  Mama, dead still. That’s not what it means, Daddy. That’s not what we’re doing.

  What are you doing? What does it say on the birth certificate? You think you can override that?.

  More words I can’t hear, can’t get, can’t remember. Something heated, between the two men. Worse than anger. Words sharpened to a point small enough to break the skin. And then my grandfather stands in the apartment’s doorway. The door is open on September there in front of them, a gaping, heatless nothing. Never, he starts. And where can he go from there? Your choice, not mine. Beyond me, he says. And Mama says something, and Da says something, and Papap says, How dare you? And then he’s gone.

  I remember only my parents turning from the slammed door, both of them shaking. I see them seeing me, standing in the doorway with my ice bag. Holding it up for whoever might need it.

  Mama is ill for a long time afterward. She’s big with another baby. I watch her eat, hypnotized. She sees me see her, knows what I’m thinking, and tries to smile. She decides to have a baby, then starts eating for two. And the baby is down there in her stomach, grabbing half the food.

  Something has left our lives and I don’t know what. I think the baby will bring it back in. That’s why they wanted to have it. To get Mama’s happiness back, and fix what has broken.

  I ask what the baby will be. What do you mean? they ask. You mean a boy or a girl? They say nobody can know what the baby is going to be yet. I ask, Isn’t it something already?

  It is. They laugh. But we can’t get to it. We have to wait. Wait and see what’s coming.

  We wait until October, then November, strange territories with stranger names. I’m as miserable as I’ve ever been. Isn’t it here yet? Isn’t it ever going to come?

  Perhaps tomorrow, they say. We have to wait until tomorrow.

  And several times a day, I ask, Is it tomorrow yet?

  For weeks, it’s never tomorrow. Then overnight, it’s yesterday. All yesterday, too far back to reach. And my father is dying on a bed in Mount Sinai Hospital. The only thing I need to know from him is what happened that night. But he’s too sick, too medicated, too full of gravity—and then, too free—to remember.

  SONGS OF A WAYFARER

  Jonah left the United States at the end of 1968. No high-art gossip column reported the departure. At the moment when almost every other black singer, performer, artist, or writer cheered the birth of nationhood, my brother abandoned the country. He wrote from Magdeburg. “They love me here, Joey.” He might have been Robeson, on his first visit to the Soviet Union. Everything there made a mockery of everything here. “The East Germans look at me and see a singer. I never understood that stare Americans always gave me, until I got away from it. Nice to know what it feels like, for a while, to be something other than hue-man.”

  The Magdeburg Festival sounded like high-art boot camp. “Living conditions are a bit Spartan. My room reminds me of our dorm at Boylston; only here, I don’t have to pick up your shit.” This from a man whose laundry I did every year we lived together. “Food consists of your more recalcitrant vegetables boiled within an inch of their lives. Making up for all hardships, however, is a steady stream of music-loving women. Now that’s what I call a culture.”

  He marveled at the scope of the musical gathering, all the world-class singers the celebration brought together. Several clearly put the fear of God in him. But he seemed to come alive on the challenge of ensemble singing. He was a kid who’d shot backyard hoops his whole childhood, finally playing full-court ball. He reveled in the thrill of reading a dozen other musicians at once and fusing with these perfect strangers.

  The European reporters demanded to know why they’d never heard of him before. He didn’t dissuade them from publishing reports of American racism. He had offers to sing in a dozen cities, including Prague and Vienna. “Vienna, Mule. Think of the possibilities. More work than a short-order cook in Lauderdale during spring break. You simply have to come. That’s my last word on the matter.”

  His letter took weeks catching up to me, because I’d moved. I couldn’t afford to keep our Village apartment alone. I briefly put up with Da in Fort Lee, to his delight and daily surprise each evening when he came back to Jersey and found me still there. I heard him wandering the house in the middle of the night, chatting away with Mama, who seemed a better conversationalist than his son would ever be.

  I couldn’t stay in that house. I didn’t mind my father’s
nightly. chat with a dead woman. But the alarm I set off in my father’s prim neighborhood was too much for me. The police gave me a week before they decided I couldn’t be the man’s gardener. The first time they detained and searched me, I had no ID and only the most implausible story: unemployed Juilliard dropout classical pianist, the black son of a white German physicist who taught at Columbia. Even after they finally agreed to call Da down to the station to check out my story, it took all night to free me. The second time, two weeks later, I was ready for them with a wallet full of documentation. But they wouldn’t even let me make a phone call. They kept me overnight and let me go at nine the next morning, without explanation or apology.

  I stopped leaving the house. For two months, I stayed home and practiced. I put the word out with everyone I knew that Jonah was gone. I was doing nothing, and would play with anyone for any kind of pay. I heard Jonah saying, You undersell yourself. Make them hear you.

  Logically, I should have kept doing what I’d spent my life training to do. But that meant taking care of my brother. Jonah and I had lived for years in self-perfecting isolation. Now, as perfect as I had any hope of getting, I lacked the connections that any musician needed to survive.

  I played a handful of exploratory tryouts. I’d arrange to meet some sterling mezzo or baritone in an uptown rehearsal space. When I showed up, the singer would recoil in reflex embarrassment: Some mistake. They’d fall all over themselves going over the score with me, practically trying to show me where middle C was.

  It’s hard to play well when you feel like a fish on stilts. And it’s hard to sing when jarred out of your center. Most of the time, the trials ended in mutual praise and embarrassed handshakes. I played for a sumptuous soprano, a von Stade look-alike who liked what I did for her. She said no accompanist had ever given her such secured freedom. But I felt her struggling with all the overhead of traveling about the country with a black man, and frankly, I didn’t much want the overhead of traveling around the country with her. We parted enthusiastically. She went on to a modest but rewarding career and I went home to cold noodles and more études.

  I played for Brian Barlowe, three years before anyone ever heard of him. He sounded like the Roman soldier at the foot of the cross. He had that same confidence Jonah once had, the utter certainty that the world would love him for what he could do. Only Brian Barlowe’s confidence was better placed than Jonah’s. I’d take Jonah’s voice over his in a heartbeat, at each man’s prime. But Barlowe belonged already. His audiences needed to think about nothing but the confirming sounds pouring out of him. Listeners came away from a Barlowe recital surer than ever of their birthright to beauty.

  We played together on three separate days over the course of a month. Brian was nothing if not careful, and he intended to choreograph his march into fame with absolute precision. I showed up each time, stupid with needing to show him that I could read his mind and make even him better than he was. But by the time Barlowe was convinced of my playing—and what’s more, seeing that I could supply a transgressive frisson that would electrify his act—by the time he offered me a chance he was sure I’d leap at, my heart was no longer in it. The gratification of following Brian Barlowe around the world to the pinnacle of fame could not match the pleasure of handing the man back his scores and turning him down.

  It dawned on me: I could accompany no one but my brother. When I played for others, for those who made music without the danger of having it taken away, the song never lifted off the page. With Jonah, a recital was always grand larceny. With the children of Europe, it was a revolving charge account. The joy of making noise was gone, even if the cold thrill of notes remained intact.

  I sprouted two massive ganglions, one on each wrist: two cysts, like insect galls, as harsh as stigmata. Playing became unbearable. I tried every postural adjustment, even hunching over the keyboard on a low stool, but nothing helped. I thought I might never make music again. For weeks, I did nothing but eat, sleep, and nurse my wrists. I looked through the paper at the end of each week, scouting the want ads. I thought of becoming a night watchman in some high-rise business suite. I’d stroll around a graveyard of abandoned offices with a flashlight once an hour, and sit the rest of the time at a shabby wooden desk, pouring over a stack of Norton pocket scores.

  I needed to get out of New York. By luck, I learned they were looking for barroom pianists for the season down in Atlantic City. Being dark would almost be an asset. I went down to a club that was advertising, a place called the Glimmer Room. The bar was something stuck in the La Brea tar pits—a complete sinkhole in time. Nothing had changed in the place since Eisenhower. The walls were full of signed black-and-white pub shots of comedians I’d never heard of.

  I did a five-minute audition for a man named Saul Silber. My wrists still bothered me, and I hadn’t improvised since my days in a Juilliard practice room with Wilson Hart. But Mr. Silber wasn’t looking for Count Basie. The crowds had been ebbing in the Glimmer Room ever since the transistor. Woodstock was a wooden stake in its heart. The place was dying even faster than the city itself. Mr. Silber didn’t understand why. He just wanted to staunch the bleeding any way possible.

  He was a cauliflower of a man. “Play me what the kids are listening to these days.” He might have been my father’s more assimilated uncle. He had the accent—the ghostly highlights of Yiddish filtered through Brooklyn—that Da’s kids might have preserved, had Da stuck with his people and had different kids. “Something out of sight, why don’t you start me with.”

  I waited for him to name a tune, but he just waved me to go, his fisted cigar a conductor’s baton. I sunk into a beefy “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” a tune I’d heard on the radio driving down. Since my brother had abandoned me for another country, I was safe in liking it. I savored the descending chromatic left hand, pumping it out in soulful octaves. Two strains in, Mr. Silber grimaced and waved his hands for a time-out.

  “Naw, naw. Play me that pretty one. The one with the string quartet.” He hummed the first three notes of “Yesterday,” with a schmaltz three years too late or thirty too soon. I’d heard the tune thousands of times. But I’d never played it. I sat there in the Glimmer Room at the height of my musicianship. I could have reproduced any movement of any Mozart concerto on first hearing, had there been any I hadn’t already heard. The problem with pop tunes was that, in those rare moments when I did re-create them at the piano, as a break from more études, I tended to embellish the chord sequences. “Yesterday” came out half Baroque figured bass and half ballpark organ. I covered my uncertainty in a flurry of passing tones. Mr. Silber must have thought it was jazz. He broke into a show biz smile as I hit the final cadence. “I can give you one hundred ten dollars a week, plus tips, and all the half-price ginger ale you can drink.”

  It felt like a lot of money, compared to washing dishes. I didn’t even negotiate. I signed a contract without consulting anyone. I was too ashamed to run it past Milton Weisman, who, in a just world, should have had his cut.

  I rented an efficiency a short walk from the Glimmer Room. I got my things from the Village apartment out of storage, sending the piano to my father’s. He now had two keyboards and no one to play either of them. I set up our old radio next to my bed and tuned it to an AM countdown station. With my first two weeks’ salary, I bought a trash can full of LPs—not a single track older than 1960. And with that, I commenced my education in real culture.

  I played from eight at night until three in the morning, with a ten-minute break every hour. My sets for the first few weeks were shaky. Mr. Silber got on me for playing too much Tin Pan Alley. “Enough with the old people’s music. Nix the Gershwin. Gershwin’s for people dying of shuffleboard injuries up at the Nevele. We want the new stuff, the mod stuff.” The man did a little dance step he mistook for the frug. Had I been able to do a deafening “Purple Haze,” I would have, just to make Mr. Silber beg for a little Irving Berlin.

  I learned more melodies in one month
than I’d ever learn again. I could listen to an album of funk, folk, or fusion all afternoon and perform a reasonable facsimile that evening. My problem was never the notes. My problem was how to keep my performances as free and rangy as the originals. Up until midnight, I sounded pathetically trim. But I counted on late-night fatigue to kick in and help me find the groove. The tunes I played into the early-morning hours strained toward rules of harmony they didn’t quite grasp. I let them yearn, rough, aching, and tone-deaf.

  It took me months in the Glimmer Room to realize that what most people wanted from music was not transcendence but simple companionship, a tune just as bound by gravity as its listeners were, cheerful under its crushing leadenness. What we want, finally, from friends is that they have no more clue than we do. Of all tunes, only the happily amnesiac live forever in the hearts of their hearers.

  Every hour I was off duty, I listened to the radio. I had two lifetimes to make up for. With my brother on the other side of the world, I moved through my days, humming all the hooks. Once I overcame my body’s clock and learned the secret of the graveyard shift, I could play deep into the night, unafraid of ever being heard. Sometimes the keyboard felt like one of those cardboard foldouts that teachers in poor school districts use in group music lessons. Even on slow nights, the Glimmer Room was so choked with clinking glasses, catcalls, wolf whistles, hoarse laughter, cigarette-thickened coughs, waitresses calling drink orders out to the bar, air-conditioning kicking on and off, and the fused buzz of lubricated shaggy-dog stories that no one could hear me even if, out of some drunken nostalgia, they were actually trying to. I was just part of the general background radiation. That’s what Mr. Silber was after. He didn’t even want me using the short stick on the baby grand’s lid. Hunched over the keys, I sometimes doubted that any sound came out of the instrument at all.

  Even so, I felt guilty if I played a song the same way from one night to the next. You never knew what someone might hear by accident. I reinvented every fake-book trick of barroom pianists all the way back to slave days. A dry-ice version of “Misty.” A slightly dyspeptic “I Feel Good.” A “Love Child” agreeing to drop the paternity suit.