Ruth lays an open palm on each of us, a last secret handshake of nonbelonging. As little as we look or feel like siblings now, she must take us in, the only ones on this earth her exact internal shade. She pats me on the shoulder: nothing in writing, just the quick attempt to get past all this. The pat turns into a riff, one beat per syllable—the whiff of the irrepressible dotted Motown she’s been listening to exclusively these days. “How did she start fooling with music that, music that …”
“That didn’t belong to her?” Jonah’s voice floats a lazy challenge. He’s ready to go at it if she is.
“Yeah.” That showdown courage born in terror. “Yeah. That wasn’t hers.”
“Whose is it? Who owns it, girl?”
“White German intellectual Jewish guys. Like you and Da.”
Our father, back in his office, thinks we’re calling him. He calls back in mock long-suffering, “Yes? What is it this time?”
Jonah appraises Ruth, almost shaking. A Brahms vibrato. “You could chant before you could speaks. You read music before you could read. You think that because somebody dragged our great-great-great-grandfather onto a European ship against his will, a thousand years of written music is off-limits?”
Ruth holds out her palms. “Fine. Cool it.”
“What music do you think she should have—”
“I said cool it. Shut the—” She breaks off. She won’t go to the brink with him. Not this vacation. Not this year. “Just tell me.” She looks away from Jonah and, by elimination, toward me. “Why did she stop singing?”
I start. “What are you talking about? She never stopped singing!”
“If she got that far in, if she was as good as you two say, if she trained … If she went through all that grief, why did she stop halfway? Why didn’t she have a career?”
“She did have a career,” Jonah says.
“Churches. Weddings.” The words issue from my sister’s mouth, dismissals. I want to tell her, If those mean nothing, you’ll never know the woman. “I’m talking about a real career. Recitals. Like the two of you have.”
“I suppose that was our fault. We kids came along and put an end to recitals.” I feel it for the first time: We curtailed her. “I’m not sure she ever felt the loss. ‘The praise is in the doing.’ That’s what she used to say.”
“What are you saying? Of course she would have felt the loss.” But before Ruth can ramp up, Da staggers out of his study, grinning, a pale, paunchy vacationer at one of those Catskills resorts, who has just shoved a perfect game of shuffleboard. His once-creased pair of black slacks, maroon argyles, gray loafers, brown belt, light blue shirt, white tee, and rust-colored cardigan mimic the clothes Mama bought for him fifteen years ago. Great loops of yarn unravel from the sweater around the indifferently patched edges. He has made himself a home in a world without other comfort. He lurches toward us, pure excitement, expecting—no, knowing—that his children will share his pleasure in this new revelation. He doesn’t make many errors in calculation. But when Da misses, he misses big.
His hands speak. Mirth spills from him, a jowled elf of empiricism. He tries out on us, his last three contacts with the outside world, the latest, most outrageous shaggy-dog story his physics has yet concocted. “It’s incredible!” His outrage and delight are children of the same mixed marriage. The silverware is mounting a sprawling performance of Faust. His eyes moisten with the thought of this latest bizarre twist to the quantum world. “Nature is not invariant with regard to time. The mirror of time has broken!”
Jonah raises both hands. “We didn’t do it, Daddy-o. We didn’t break nothing.”
Da nods and shakes his head at the same time. He takes off his glasses, daubing his eyes. He’s like a bachelor suffering the toasts of his friends the evening before his wedding. “You can’t believe this.” He holds out both palms to keep the invisible forces of nature from rushing him to the punch line. “The electrically neutral kaon.”
Jonah pinches his smirk between thumb and index finger. “Ah, yes! The Electrically Neutral Kaon. The latest British beat group, right?”
“Yes, of course! A rock group!” Our father waves his hands in front of him, canceling all jokes. He removes his glasses again and starts over. “This kaon flips between particle and antiparticle in a way that should be reversible in time. But it isn’t.” As the terminology gets more technical, the accent thickens. “Imagine! A strange particle, an antistrange particle, that can somehow tell forward from backward. The only thing in the universe that knows the difference between past and future!”
“The only thing in your universe.”
“Ruth? Again, please?”
“Everything in my universe knows the difference between past and future. Except you.”
Da nods, humoring her. “Let me explain this to you.”
Ruth is on her feet. She’s Mama, only a shade darker. Faster. “Let me explain this to you. I’m sick of this total self-absorption.”
Da looks at Jonah, his lay-world touchstone. “What’s eating her?” The slang, wrapped in his Teutonic accent, sounds like a big-band leader in a Beatle wig.
“Ruthie wants to know if she’s a Schwarze, a half Schwarze, an anti-Schwarze , or what?”
“Fucker.”
Da doesn’t hear, or pretends not to. Particles decay, irreversibly, all over my father’s face. But he remains a study in rapid calculation. He looks at his daughter, too late, and sees. “What’s this about, sweetheart?”
She’s desperate, begging, full of tears. “Why did you marry a black woman?”
Their eyes lock. He denies this sneak attack. “I did not marry a black woman. I married your mother.”
“I don’t know who you think you married. But my mother was black.”
“You mother is who she is. First. Herself, before anything.”
Ruth recoils from his present tense. She would rush into his arms for safety. “Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.”
Da wheels, danger on all sides. This is not the route down which his mind inclines. His face works up an objection: “I’m not a white man; I’m a Jew.” The hands illustrate, start to rise like a flock of meanings. But he’s smart enough to strangle them in flight. His words inch over this landscape, looking for cover. “Abraham married a black concubine. Joseph …” He points at me as if I were my namesake’s keeper. “Joseph married an Egyptian priestess. Moses said the stranger who comes to live with you, who takes up as your family, will become as one who is born in your own country. Solomon, for God’s sake! Solomon married Pharaoh’s daughter.”
I don’t know this man. Whole vanished generations, ancestors whose existence I’ve never imagined rise up from their pebble-strewn graves. My father, the protector of no doctrine, the believer in nothing but causality, turns before my eyes into an interpreter of the Torah. I can’t bear Ruth’s silence. I blurt out, “Goodman. Goodman and … Schwerner.” I surprise myself, remembering the names, even though they died just last summer—Freedom Summer, when Jonah and I were performing in Wisconsin.
“What about them?” Ruth challenges.
“Two white men. Two Jews, like Da. Like us. Two men who didn’t have the luxury … you’re talking about.”
“You wouldn’t know anything about luxury, would you, Joey? These men were no older than you two. Your age, out there on the front line. Chaney died for being black. Those other two were in the line of fire.”
My throat would make sounds, but I can’t shape them.
“The Jews can’t help us,” Ruth says. “It’s not their fight.” Her voice betrays the universe she needs from Da. The one he can’t give her.
“Not our fight? Not our fight?” Our father teeters on the edge of the irreversible. “If one drop makes a Schwarze, then … we’re all Schwarzen.”
“Not all of us.” My sister falls away. She is ten again. Breaking. “Not all of us, Da. Not you.”
This is how my family spends Christmas of 1964. I would say our last, b
ut the word means nothing. For every last breaks forward into a next. And even last things last forever.
MY BROTHER AS FAUST
Fame caught Jonah when he was twenty-four. It felt as if he’d been singing lifetimes. In fact, he was still a child, by every measure but skill.
The skill had solidified, each one of his teachers handing him some piece of foundation. Jonah’s trick was to keep the skill as fresh as that moment fifteen years before, when he startled our parents by joining their quotations game. He walked out onstage bemused, in front of growing audiences who’d heard through the musical mill that something remarkable was happening. He looked around the hall as if about to ask directions from the nearest usher. My hands touched the keys, and he opened up, amazed.
And somehow Jonah would convince each audience that he, too, was discovering the purity of his tone that very night. His face lit up, ambushed by this wondrous accident. The room would draw in a collective breath, witnesses at the birth. He ran a kind of devout, aesthetic con game, all in the higher service of the notes. I can fly! He pulled off the stunt four dozen times in the course of a year, and every time, it took my breath away.
His fast passages hung motionless in flight, every note audible: one of those stop-action photographs—a bullet halfway through the width of a playing card, or a corona of milk after the droplet hits. He had more power now, but his pitches were still so focused, they could pierce cloth. He found the mystery of tone that all his teachers had carried on about, each one meaning something different. His sound was secure. He never faltered, never made you feel you needed to stave off disaster with your own concentration. Even at the top of his range, he floated for measures without strain. His warmth passed into your ears like a whispered confidence, a friend you’d forgotten you had.
Maybe splendor is nothing but convention. Maybe the corroded soul can still mimic a saint. Who knows how we hear care or decode comfort? But all these things were Jonah’s when he sang, even when he sang in languages he didn’t speak. Singing, he owned what his speaking voice disowned. For the space of an hour, over the run of three octaves, my brother constructed grace.
In February of 1965, three black men gunned down Malcolm X a few blocks from where Da fed us Mandelbrot and taught us the secret of time. We performed the night of his murder, in Rochester, New York. While thousands marched from Selma to Montgomery, we were driving from East Lansing to Dayton. The night Rochester exploded, we sang in St. Louis. When Jacksonville burned, we played Baltimore.
Every one of those nights, Jonah used Da’s secret of time. Leave the earth at unthinkable speed and you can jump into another’s future. His beauty in that year came from freezing out everything that wasn’t beautiful. While he sang, nothing else mattered.
I could have lived that life forever—college towns paying on arts subsidies, midsized cities building cultural capital by bringing in obscure first-rung talent at third-rung prices. It was enough for me. With sound pouring out of us, night after night, I had no other needs. But Jonah wanted more. Onstage, he could sing:
Ah me, how scanty is my store!
Yet, for myself, I’d ne’er repine,
Tho’ of the flocks that whiten o’er
Yon plain one lamb were only mine.
But offstage, his eyes caught every glimmer in professional music. Careers were taking off all around him. Teenage André Watts soloed with Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. “Jesus, Mule. What does he have that you don’t?”
“Fire, edge, passion, speed, beauty, power. Aside from that, I play just like him.”
“He’s a halfie, too. Hungarian mother. Tell me you couldn’t pace him. You can do everything that guy does.”
Except soar. But Jonah was one of those people who assumed everyone could soar who chose to step off the cliff.
Grace Bumbry led his list of career obsessions, especially after Die shwarze Venus scandal broke at Bayreuth. We heard her interviewed for German television about the hubbub. “Jesus, Mule. She speaks better German than both of us put together.” Jonah hung a stunning photo of her on his closet door. “At last, an opera star as sexy as the roles she plays. Carnegie at twenty-five. Met debut at twenty-eight. I’ve got four years, Joey. Four years, or I’m history.”
But that fabulous woman was miles from anyone who attracted Jonah in real life. She was the polar opposite of the woman whose memory he drew on every recital night to drive his harsher passages into dissonance. Since his break with Lisette, we were off the party circuit, working as we hadn’t worked since being named America’s Next Voice. Jonah was pulling himself inward, culling, smoothing, focusing, building a revenge by the only means he had.
For all his hunger, Jonah was smart enough never to push Mr. Weisman. Our agent knew more about the music business than the two of us ever would. He knew how to start a rumor, feeding it week after week. Our bookings multiplied. We sang in cities I thought would never let us sing. We sang in Memphis, as far south as we’d yet gone. I was sure we’d be canceled, all the way up to the moment we walked out onstage. I kept looking into the hall, waiting for my eyes to adjust, to see the audience’s hue. They were the same color they always were.
Memphis blurred into Kansas City, the Quad Cities, St. Louis. We walked down to Beale Street, where the baby Blues was left out howling in the rain. The street felt self-conscious and short—two blocks of music bars looking like a theme park, the Colonial Williamsburg of the one true American art.
Like America, we had to be discovered again and again. Mr. Weisman, a patient conductor building a long crescendo, edged us back to our hometown for a cleverly orchestrated theatrical revelation. Over months, he laid the groundwork for our breakthrough. He booked us into Town Hall for early June. We paid expenses ourselves. Ticket sales wouldn’t defray more than a portion of costs. We scraped up what remained of Mama’s insurance legacy and gave it to the hall managers. Not enough remained for more than perfunctory advertising. Jonah wore the thin, crazed smile of a gambler as he handed over our check. “One blown entrance and we’ll have to look for real jobs.”
We blew no entrances. The Schubert had gone better out west, and the Wolf never reached the intensity it had on his greatest nights. But his Town Hall concert stood above anything Jonah had achieved. Right before the curtain, my brain spun with adrenaline. But Jonah never looked so calm, so expansive as when desperation was on him. To me, the stage lights of Town Hall felt like interrogation lamps. Jonah walked into them beaming, scouting the auditorium like an adventuring boy.
We’d gone back and forth over the program, waffling between safety and danger. We started with “The Erl-King.” We needed something certain to open with, and we’d done that piece so many times, it could have galloped along by itself after throwing both of us. Then, with Goethe as a bridge, we went with Wolf’s three Harfenspieler settings, every pitch in those complex textures a dare to disaster. Then we did three of the Brahms opus 6.
“What’s the link?” I asked during the planning.
“What do you mean, ‘What’s the link?’ Wolf hated Brahms’s guts. They’re joined at the hip.”
That was connection enough for him. In fact, Jonah mapped out the whole recital as an enormous arc of death and transfiguration. Part one was our retreat from the world into aesthetic solitude. Part two was a full-blooded race back into the mess of living. His Brahms brought down the first curtain with that last word on nineteenth-century beauty. We led the audience back from intermission by resurrecting “Wachet auf.” Jonah had the idea that this old chorale prelude—always performed with a wall of singers—would make the perfect solo. The tune’s sailing self-evidence was my brother’s birthright. “Zion hear the watchman singing.”
In his inner ear, Jonah heard the watchman call so slowly, it sounded like a bell buoy in the night. At his tempo, those four pitches topping the opening triad turned into the universe’s background radiation. Most listeners never know how much harder it is to make a soft sound than a loud one. The b
reakneck tear will always upstage the legato sustain, but the latter is harder to pull off. Slowed to stopping, Bach’s huge, expanding hover held more terror for me than any other piece in our concert. Jonah wanted my prelude to unfold so gradually that the audience would forget about his chorale lines until his next shocking entrance. We passed our parts back and forth, swapping figure and ground. His nine stark phrases flowed over my intervening elaborations like ice sheets across a forgotten continent.
From glacial Bach, we jumped off into our trio of Charles Ives showstealers. We did them in flat-out New World roughness. He turned the last, “Majority,” into a hooting lark. By the time the audience rolled back off their heels, they were too deep into raucous Americana to be alienated. Jonah pegged the persona of the pieces so perfectly, we actually drew laughs and whistles as we pulled up at the end of the bygone parade.
Then we sprinted to the finish and sent them home humming. He wanted to do a crossover, partly to show he could and partly to do at least one number we’d never done in public. “Good for our moral character. Gotta keep you fresh, Giuseppe.” The two of us arranged “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” sprinkling it with all the crazed quotations we could remember our parents singing as counterpoint to the hackneyed song. Our gimmick was a steady accelerando, slow enough to seem wayward at first, but winding up, by the last verse, with Jonah riding through the syncopations so fast, he wrapped his lips around the syllables only by miracle. Out of pure nervousness, I goosed it even more than we meant to. But Jonah shot me a dazed smile of thanks during the applause.