The Time of Our Singing

  As for his own vocal reputation, even Jonah’s detractors knew they had to go after him with both barrels if they were foolish enough to go gunning. I overheard students in the back rows of the darkened auditorium declaring his sound too pure, too effortless, too light, claiming it lacked that muscular edge of the best concert tenors. No doubt on winter nights after we headed home, the Sammy’s crowd slammed him with worse. But as long as we sat with the others over phosphates, they treated him with a resigned shake of the head. They’d go through an afternoon’s list of finest, brightest, clearest. “Then there’s Strom,” O’Malley would say. “A species unto himself.”

  We sat at Sammy’s one afternoon, just before I passed out of prep and began degree work. Talk turned to Jonah, who was just then working up his first go at Schubert, the Miller’s Beautiful Daughter, an assault on white womanhood that drew O’Malley’s awe. “Strom here’s our ticket to fame. We might as well admit it. The boy’s going all the way. Ride his coattails we shall, if he’ll but let us. If not, we’ll watch him ascend from afar. Laugh not! See how the conquering he-he-he-he-hero comes!”

  My brother put his wadded-up straw wrapper in his nose and blew it out at the speaker.

  “You think I jest?” O’Malley carried on. “Barring accident, our boy here’s going to become the world’s most famous half-breed. Our illustrious school’s next Leontyne Price.”

  The country’s most thrilling new voice, after half a decade, had just been granted her stage debut, in San Francisco. The school was abuzz with its newest headliner alum. But at O’Malley’s invocation of the name, the booth at the back of Sammy’s lurched, their laughter like wet firewood. Jonah arched his eyebrows. He opened his mouth, and out came absurd falsetto. “Gotta brush up my spinto, don’t you know, honey.” A silent hiccup passed through the group. Then fresh, forced hilarity.

  I didn’t talk to him for the longest time, heading home. He heard my silence and met it head-on. We were halfway to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine before either of us said anything.

  “Half-breed, Jonah?”

  He didn’t even shrug. “What we are, Mule. What I am anyway. You be what you want to be.”

  Juilliard’s highest talent thought of themselves as color-blind, that plea bargain that high culture employs to get all charges against it dropped. I didn’t yet know, at fifteen, everything that color-blind stood for. At Juilliard, color was still too successfully contained to pose much threat. With a few crazy exceptions like the lovable Strom boys, the Negro’s scene was elsewhere. Race was a southern crisis. O’Malley treated us to his pitch-perfect Governor Faubus: “What in God’s name is happening in the United States of America?” My brother’s friends rose to righteous indignation over every crime against humanity, each one, like the folk song, five hundred miles from home.

  “People, people,” O’Malley challenged. “Who am I?” He covered one ear with a cupped hand, tucked his chin into his sternum, and sang in mock Russian at the absolute nadir of his range. It took us a few beats to recognize “Ol’ Man River.” O’Malley’s test glance never lasted more than a quaver. One of this country’s greatest men was living under government-conducted house arrest, forced to sing to European audiences over a telephone, and here was O’Malley going into a whole routine mocking him. Robeson speaking in best Rutgers Phi Beta Kappa accent: “Mr. Hammerstein the Second, sir. Far be it from me to criticize, but your lyrics seem to partake of a few errors in subject-verb agreement.”

  The vein in my brother’s temple flickered as he considered flipping the booth over and never coming back. Not over race; over Robeson. No one was allowed to touch such a voice. For a moment, he looked set to send this group to hell and return to the solitude of real music. Instead, as everyone’s eyes fought to stay off him, Jonah just laughed. Harsh, but participating. All other moves were a losing game.

  Race was just a bagatelle. The curators of proper singing saved their real firepower for the clearer, more present danger: class. It took me years to decode the Sammy’s scoring system. I’m not sure Jonah ever cracked it. I remember him challenging a unanimous decision that bewildered me, as well. “Just a minute. You’re saying you’d rather hire Paula Squires to sing Mélisande than hire Ginger Kittle to sing Mimi?”

  The chorus was merciless. “Perhaps if La Ginger agreed to a wee change of name …” “You have to love her diphthongs, though. That aeyah of hers? At least you can be sure it’ll play in Peoria.” “And those synthetic blends she wears? Every time she climbs above a B-flat, I expect her blouse to spontaneously combust.” “Miss Kittle embodies the Mimi of her generation. Always radiantly dead by act four.”

  Jonah shook his head. “Have you all gone completely deaf? So she could use some finish. But Kittle has Squires beat hands down.”

  “Maybe if she kept her hands down …”

  “But Paula Squires?”

  “Jonah, my boy. You’ll figure it out as you ripen, don’t you know.”

  Ripening came over us both. I spent my days in a perpetual state of arousal I mistook for anticipation. Everything curved or cupped, any tone from lemon to cocoa excited me. The vibrations of the piano, seeping up my leg from the pedal, could set me off. Sparks would start in an innocent glow, one warm word from anything female, and cascade into elaborate rescue fantasies, ultimate sacrifice followed by happy death, the only possible reward. I’d restrain myself for a week or two, channeling all pure things—the middle movement of the Emperor, my mother hugging us on a windy Eighth Avenue, Malalai Gilani, our family evenings of counterpoint a decade before. Even as I fought temptation, I knew I’d eventually succumb. I waited in patient irritation to be alone in the apartment. The revulsion of the slide only intensified it. Each time I gave in to pleasure, I’d feel as if I’d sentenced Mama to death again, betrayed every good thing she’d ever praised or predicted for me. Each time, I swore to renew myself.

  Maybe Jonah did better with lust—another rush to add to the rushes that drove him. Maybe he found some willing nymph to touch him when and where he needed. I didn’t know. He no longer reported his body’s developments to me, though he did still share his latest enthusiasms. “Mule, you have to see this girl. Like nothing you’ve ever seen. Marguerite ! Carmen!” But the objects of his desire were always plainness incarnate. I thought he must be mocking me. Any beauty he saw in them lay beyond the visible spectrum. “Well? Isn’t she the greatest thing you’ve ever laid eyes on?” I always managed a vigorous nod.

  His body was a seismograph. Even sitting in an auditorium chair became a free exercise routine. He settled on altos. Whenever one passed within a hundred feet, his head rose up on his neck like a U-boat periscope. For the first time in his life, singing acquired an ulterior motive. He sang like a greyhound who’d slipped the leash, running around Morningside, peeing on any hydrant that would hold still for his mark.

  I hated him for betraying Kimberly. I knew it was crazy. There I was, in the middle of my own solitary hormone storm, rubbing off to the image of everything that moved. But I wanted my brother to preserve the memory of our past, and that included the albino wraith. Here in New York, Boylston’s sheltered, fake Italianate courtyard seemed a cheap operetta set. I’d spent my childhood like one of those polio-stricken kids in photo magazines, trapped in an iron lung, kept alive by artifice and invention. All that exploded with our leaking furnace. I needed something from our stripped-away past to survive, if only that anemic ghost.

  Jonah flirted with every vocalist at Juilliard. And every flirtee, safe in the absurdity of his appetite, flirted back. His voice could turn the yellowest head. To a twenty-year-old elite female in the late 1950s, he offered all the thrill of transgression, all the more exciting by being harmless, of course. Unthinkable.

  I found something to praise in his every new drab goddess, raising the same enthusiasm I mustered for his recitals, whose repertoire now baffled me. The simple trip from tonic to dominant and back now bored Jonah. Only the most jagged music still promise
d him a real workout. Tritones and the devil’s other intervals, weird new notational systems, polyrhythm, microtones: He only wanted to keep growing, a thing the world rarely forgave.

  Jonah fell deeper into the avant-garde, a group the mainstream singers called “the Serial Killers.” The Killers wore the badge proudly, worshiping at the shrine of their imported saint of rigor, Schoenberg, canonized the instant he died at UCLA, of all places, a few years before. They declared everything outside the twelve-tone row to be mere ornament, a fate worse than beautiful.

  The Serial Killers talked idly about going to see the first full staging of Moses und Aron at the Zurich Stadttheater. When that pipe dream fell through, they vowed to do their own read-through. Jonah was Aaron, the silver-tongued spokesman for his speech-impaired brother. He wasn’t yet twenty, but already he could pick up, in quick study, the thorniest music. He grasped the complex systems the same way he’d learned preadolescence’s simple diatonic pleasures. He made atonality sound as light as Offenbach.

  Jonah talked Da out of the apartment for the performance. “Moses und Aron? Stories of the patriarchs? I raise my children to be good God-fearing atheists, and this is the thanks?” But the read-through delighted Da. All night long, he nodded at the revival of a story he never thought to pass along to us. He beamed at his son’s otherworldly ability to hold his pitch amid a cacophony of signs and wonders.

  I never understood Schoenberg. I don’t mean just that unfinished opera libretto, the unsolvable enigma of divine will. I mean the music. I couldn’t feel it. Da wasn’t much better. He ribbed Jonah all the way home. “Do you know what Stravinsky said at the first Pierrot?”

  “I know the story, Da.”

  “‘I wish that woman would stop talking so I can hear the music!’ Hey. You should laugh, boychik. It’s funny.”

  “I laughed the first time, Da. A hundred years ago.

  “Ruth didn’t come to the read-through.” Jonah, forced casual.

  “She is starting on the funny age,” Da explained.

  Jonah snorted. “When does the funny age start?”

  “Right around 1905,” I said.

  “I embarrass her. She’s ashamed of me. Doesn’t want to see her brother in greasepaint. A stooge of the elite.”

  His voice had a note I’d never heard. Da waved off his injury. “The girl is just twelve years.” But Jonah was right. Ruth stayed home increasingly now, whenever she could, preferring her girlfriends to her family. She had her ear pointed elsewhere—other voices, other tunes.

  Not long after the Schoenberg, Da, Jonah, and I chanced to catch a radio news broadcast of a faint signal from outer space. The signal came back from the first human thing to escape the earth’s surface. I thought of that star map, Jonah’s and my only decoration, at Boylston, in the sealed room of our childhood. We sat with one another around the family radio, listening to the regular beep, the first word from out there, the future.

  Jonah heard just the opposite. His ears were tuned to further frequencies, the groundbreaking past that all signals were rushing to join. “Joey. You hear that? Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet. It’s happening, little brother. And in our lifetime! ‘I feel the air of another planet.’”

  “‘Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten.’”Da spoke to himself, remembering, in a distant orbit.

  That ethereal, beeping metronome drew Ruthie from her room, where she now hid out. “A signal from space?” My sister’s face filled with awful hope. One hand flew up to the side of her eyes, blocking her peripheral sight. I knew what possibilities she was turning over. “That’s coming from somewhere else?”

  Da smiled. “The first space satellite.”

  Ruth waved, impatient with his denseness. “But someone is out there? Sending …”

  Da formed the corrections to his corrections. “No, Kind. Only us. Alone, and talking to ourselves.”

  Ruth retreated to her room. I tried to follow, but she closed her door on me.

  Those cycling beeps from outer space confirmed Jonah’s iconoclasm. He studied new notation systems at night, asking my help in decoding their hieroglyphs, even as his teachers gave him Belle Epoch salon songs. In the future that his progressive music was making, all objects bathed in the same blinding light. When the time came, he’d be free, released to deep orbit, signaling the earth from out of the endless vacuum.

  I heard him at school, sailing up his aerial chromatic scales, a few practice rooms down from mine. My own practice hours were more plodding. Mr. Bateman gave me Grieg’s Lyric Pieces. Each time I played for my teacher, he’d nudge my fingers, wrists, elbows. I felt my body extending the piano, those tripping hammers replayed at large in my more intricate muscle.

  I worked through the Lyric Pieces, one every two weeks, a dozen bars every afternoon. I’d repeat the phrase until the notes dissolved under me, the way a word turns back to meaningless purity when chanted long enough. I’d split twelve bars into six, then shatter it down to one. One bar, halting, rethreading, retaking, now soft, now mezzo, now note for staggered note. I’d experiment with the attacks, making my hand a rod and striking each machine-coupled note. I’d relax and roll a chord as if it were written out arpeggio. I’d repeat the drill, depressing the keys so slowly, they didn’t sound, playing the whole passage with only releases. I’d lean on the bass or feel my hands, like an apprentice conjurer extracting hidden interior harmonies from the fray.

  The game was leverage, control. Speed and span, how to crack open the intervals, widen them from on high, raise the body’s focus from finger into arm, lengthen the arm like a hawk on the wing. I’d coat the line in rubato or tie every note into a legato flow. I’d round the phrase or clip it, then pedal the envelope and let it ring. I’d turn the baby grand into a two-manual harpsichord. Play, stop, lift, rewind, repeat, stop, lift, back a line, back a phrase, back two bars, half a bar, the turn, the transition, the note, the thinnest edge of attack. My brain sank into states of perfect tedium laced with intense thrill. I was a plant extracting petals from sunlight, water wearing away a continent’s coast.

  I’d chink away for hours, moving my spine less than four inches in either direction. Then I’d stand, pace around my cubicle like a zoo wolf spinning in his pen, head down the hall, and stick my head under the arc from the drinking fountain. The halls filled with glorious racket. All around me, bursts of broken-off melody bled together like an Ives symphony. Crusts of Chopin collided with fractured Bach invention. Ostinato Stravinsky attached itself to Scarlatti fragments. Earnest, industrial-grade laboring here and there delivered strains more gorgeous than anything I’d ever heard in concert, snippets so beautiful they plunged me into depression when they broke off in midphrase. Down this monastic clubhouse hall came a mass version of my parents’ old Crazed Quotation game: hymns pressing up against honky-tonk; high Romantic philters elbowing rigid fugues; funerals, weddings, baptisms, sobs, whispers, shouts: everyone at this party talking at once, beyond any ear’s ability to unravel.

  I’d return to my cage for another two hours of dismantling and rebuilding. My body threatened to collapse and my brain tried to slip into a permanent coma. The drill was maddening, dulling, grueling, thankless, exhilarating, addictive, consuming, consummate. It felt like love, like a refiner’s fire. I was a child at the beach with a sieve, improving the infinite expanse of sand. In the focus of my will, the sheer hammering repetition, I could burn off all of the world’s impurities, everything ugly and extraneous, and leave behind nothing but a burnished rightness, suspended in space. I closed in with microscopic steps on something I couldn’t see, something clean and unchanging, pure form and purer pleasure, a delivering memory, music, some glimpse of a still-unmade me.

  But even such a focused blaze couldn’t burn off the teenage body that fueled it. I’d sit rolling the stone up the hill for half an hour before admitting the stone was rolling back over me. When every key press felt like mud, I’d hunt down someone else to distract—Jonah, or, more often, Wilson Hart.
br />   When he wasn’t off in his mind’s dusty Spain, Will, too, spent his days in a practice room. But he never practiced as much as he should. He had that splendid muscular bass, overflowing the resonators of his chest and head. But it slipped in and out of control as he drew it through scales. His low-range power alone might have landed him a teaching job at a college like the one he had left to come to Juilliard. At his best, he might have held any stage on either side of the Mason-Dixon. But he only hit his best around half the time.

  Will’s vice was his wanting to make music, not just be someone else’s messenger boy. He’d start to air out those magnificent pipes of his, but the piano in the practice room corner proved too much temptation. I ambushed him one day, working at the thing that was not his work. He sat at the keyboard, the indicting evidence of a new score spread around him. “You should be in the composition program. You know that?”

  Something in my joke went wrong. “Yes, I do.” Then, forgiving me my ignorance, his fingers broke into a quotation of the Rodrigo guitar concerto’s middle movement, a tune sad enough to deflect my stupidity. He scooted over on the bench. “Sit down. We’re going to make something happen.”

  I sat to his left and awaited instructions. None came. Will went on teasing out the Spaniard’s phrase, all there was to know about abandonment. His hands found their marks on nothing but foreknowledge. I sat still for a few measures until a nod from Will pointed out the obvious. I was supposed to fill out the lower lines, on nothing but the same.

  I’m cursed with a near-perfect musical memory. One listen, plus my sense of the rules of harmony, and I can find my way to just about any lost chord. I’d only heard the Rodrigo once before, when Will played it for me. But the thing was still in me, intact. Under Will’s melodic promptings, I recovered the spirit, if not the full letter, of the thing.