We closed with “Balm in Gilead.” The audience wanted him to finish with some aerial tenor feat, strange, difficult, and dazzling. He gave them the simplest tune he’d ever sing, pitched smack in the fattest part of his range. The choice mystified me. Mama had sung the song when we were young, but no more often than she sang a million others. Only at the concert did I figure it out. He’d picked the song for Ruth. But Ruth wasn’t there. Da was front and center, next to the patient Mrs. Samuels. Ruth’s seat next to them was empty, and only I knew how much her absence rattled him. “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.” He sang tentatively, testing to see if it were still true. By verse two, the verdict seemed a toss-up. He ended in a place beyond judgment, his singing itself the only thing close to a proof of that promise.
The softest possible ending, the simplest kind of start. The house erupted before my last chord died away. We hadn’t planned an encore; Jonah refused to tempt fate. So it wasn’t until the applause died down and we were alone on the brutal stage that Jonah whispered, “Dowland?” I nodded without registering. Thank God he also chose to announce the choice to the house, so I could hear. And time stood still again, as it did each time my brother said so.
Without doubt, Jonah’s was one of the strangest New York debuts ever. I’d have called it courageous had I thought he knew what he was risking. He simply picked what he liked to sing.
I saw Lisette Soer in the back of the hall as we took our bows. It’s impossible to make out faces when the lights are trained on yours. But it was her. She wasn’t applauding. She was holding one hand over her mouth and with the other, on her breast, flashing an awed victory. If Jonah saw her, he made no sign.
Backstage was giddy. I’d stumbled into a documentary film about myself. Every year of our lives was present in cross section. At one point, I stood pumping the hand of a stranger who praised me at length before I registered him as Mr. Bateman, my longtime piano teacher at Juilliard. Jonah did worse: A middle-aged woman cornered him, repeating, “You don’t know who I am, do you? You don’t recognize me!” Jonah stalled, wagging and grinning, until the woman started to warble. Her shot voice hinted at a vanished glory, ruined by nothing but accumulated days. She burbled up the line “Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten.” We rush with faint but earnest footsteps. Jonah still didn’t remember the name Lois Helmer, even as her voice’s imprint came rushing back to him. He remembered that first public performance but couldn’t remember the boy who had sung it. The joy, the trust, the total ignorance: Nothing visible remained, from this distance. All he had left were the lines of that great duet. So the two of them stood and sang through the first four entrances from memory, under the noise of the buzzing, embarrassed crowd, one voice headed toward gravel, the other sailing past the furthest point that the first had reached in her prime.
A thin man with sparse but luxurious goatee wandered around on the edges of the gathering, standing out among the sea of dark suits in his tight black jeans and a headache-inducing green-and-blue paisley shirt. In a lull, he crossed the room toward me, smirking behind the facial hair. “Strom Two. What’s on, brother?”
“My God. Thad West!” He felt like some supporting opera buffa figure squirreling off the stage to greet me in my aisle seat. I clutched him by his elbows, which hung cool and loose. “Jesus, Thad. What the hell are you doing here?”
“Had to come hear you cats play. You two stomped. Have to tell you. Really stomped.”
“Where are you living?”
“You know. Here and there. Mount Morris Park.”
It flashed through me: He meant in it. “You’re living in New York? And you’ve never … What are you doing with yourself?”
“Oh. Making music. What else?”
“Really? What are you playing?”
He laid some names on me I’d never heard. He mentioned some clubs, gave me addresses. I didn’t know how to respond. I stood staring at my old childhood roommate. Adulthood sat on me like a toad. “We’ll come listen soon.” In some other, better-executed life.
“That’s right. Come soon. We’ll blow you something cool.”
“Has Jonah seen you yet? Does he know you’re here?” I looked around the room and spotted him, surrounded by old Juilliard classmates already working him.
“I’ll catch up to the master when he’s not so mobbed.” He didn’t say it cruelly, but I was getting my lie back. Thad still loved my brother. But plainly, he no longer cared for him.
I felt myself grinning too much. “So where the hell is Earl when we need him?”
“Earl’s in Nam, man.”
“Vietnam?”
“No, man. The other one.”
I couldn’t grasp it. Earl the irreverent, the invincible, caught up in something so stupidly real. “They drafted him?”
“Oh, no. Earl enlisted. Wanted to see the world. He’s seeing it now, I guess.
The joy of smacking facefirst into my own past ground to a standstill. “Thad, Thad, Thad. I’m going to come hear what you’ve got going.”
He smiled, unfooled. Then, from nowhere, he said, “You remember that thing they painted on our door? The red fingernail polish?” Buried in childhood, and yet the drawing was still there, after a decade, defacing the door we shared. “Remember? Nigel.” I didn’t even have to nod my head. “That your first time, for something like that?”
I shrugged and flipped my palms. Every time’s the first. It was still a thrill to him, that anonymous assault. A badge of honor. Downtrodden by association. Thad didn’t have a clue. He didn’t want the everyday human idiocy. He wanted some darker, more soulful suffering, some grand affliction to redeem his fatuous Ohio past. Now he had that, living in Mount Morris Park, blowing cool, scraping by. The only thing was, he could have his fill and walk away anytime.
Thad gestured around the room at all the old folks in suits. He shook his head. “Look at you, Strom Two. What the fuck, huh? What would Nigel say?”
I looked down at the shine of my Italian shoes. I wanted him to be proud of me. He wanted me to be my color. He, too, wanted me to leave Town Hall to its owners.
“Do me a favor, Strom Two?” He looked around the room, smiling through the side of his mouth. “Keep this scene hopping, will you? Shit’s dying on the vine.”
“Hopping.”
“That’s right.” Thad slapped my proffered hand and vanished.
Jonah and I made it home after 3:00 A.M., worthless and still wired. There was nothing left to do but try to sleep and hope there’d be a newspaper notice. Not even necessarily a good one. Just some acknowledgment that something had taken place. Jonah might have sung the stars down from heaven, but if the house critic had been suffering from reflux, the lifeline unrolling in front of us would have unraveled. My job that next day was to venture outside and buy every newspaper I could find. Jonah’s was to lie in bed and come up with how we were supposed to make a living now. He kept returning to the idea of night watchmen.
He was still planning when I threw the crumpled-up Times on top of his prostrate form. “Wachet auf, you bastard. Arts section, page four. Howard Silverman.”
“Silverman?” He sounded frightened. No, he’d claim later. Only groggy. He tore through the pages and found the short review. “‘A near-perfect voice, and Mr. Strom’s ‘near’ is no cause for regret.’” He looked at me over the newsprint. “What the hell does that mean?”
“I think it’s supposed to be positive.”
It sounded, in fact, as if the man were writing with an eye toward the blurb on Jonah’s first recording. “‘While wrapped in consummate technique, this young man’s sound has something deeper and more useful in it than mere perfection.’” Jonah’s eyes glinted with total larceny. “Holy shit.”
“Keep reading. It gets better.”
Silverman went on to note our buckshot programming, calling the second half “a breath of New World fresh air, and a convincing rejection of today’s too-predictable approach to the art son
g.” He threw in the obligatory cavils—something about occasional eccentric phrasing, something about losing a little velvet in the fast passages. The core reservation came just before the end. According to Silverman, the youthful magic needed more real-world run-ins, more headfirst tangles with experience to ripen into full emotional complexity. “‘Mr. Strom is young, and his slightly callow loveliness wants maturing. Lovers of voice will wait eagerly to see if the freshness of this remarkable sonority can survive the deepening of years.’”
Then Jonah hit the windup. “‘That said, Mr. Strom’s painterly highlights, his crisp articulation, and his brilliant, if dark, purity already stand up well alongside the best of contemporary European lieder singers his age. Predictions are always risky, but it is not difficult to imagine Mr. Strom becoming one of the finest Negro recitalists this country has ever produced.’”
Jonah dropped the pages to the bed.
“Let it go,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter. The rest of the article is a total love letter. He’s handed you a career on a platter!”
He tried to wrap his head around the generous insult: “Predictions are always risky.” He worked each word, turning the promise of the phrase into menace. My brother had never tried to pass, but it staggered him to discover that he couldn’t. I braced for Jonah’s contempt, knowing it would spill over in my direction.
But he was lost to contempt, working on that word, that one fat adjective hanging there in the paper of record, describing something, something as real as lyric, or spinto, or tenor. He was balancing the slap-down qualification against finest ever. Finest this country has ever produced. He wavered between tenses, feeling, for the first time, what it meant to kick open doors that kept closing, no matter how many legends had already passed through. Feeling what it meant to be driven out of the self-made self, forced to be an emblem, a giver of pride, a betrayer of the cause. Feeling what it meant to be a fixed category, no matter how he sung.
“Da and Mama should have named me Heinrich.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference.”
He’d been “niggered” before, more brutally. But not from a major music critic in the country’s leading paper. He lay in bed in his red-and-green-plaid bathrobe, covered in newspaper, shaking his head. Then perplexity turned to rage. “Of all the condescending … Who does this bastard think—”
“Jonah! The thing is a triumph. Howard Silverman’s talking you up in the New York Times.”
He stopped, surprised by my force. He went back to staring up at the ceiling, at all the people who’d never get through even that separately labeled door. He saw our mother coming home from her conservatory audition. The finest recitalist he’d ever know. He rolled his head through a weary arc. He looked at me, doing that performer’s trick with his hazel eyes. They don’t get close enough to check your eye color when they come to burn down your house. “You’re one of those big-smile, Satchmo gradualists, aren’t you?”
“You’re the one who wanted to close with the damn spiritual.”
There was an awful pause while we searched for the tempo. He could have killed me by saying nothing. For a long time, he did. When he spoke, it was with full Dowland flourish. “Don’t argue with me, human. I’m one of the finest Negro recitalists this country will ever produce.”
“‘Has ever produced.’ Big difference. Ask your father.” We both resorted to jittery giggles. “Finish the article. The condescending bastard saved you a big finale.”
Jonah worked through the last sentences aloud with his studied diction. “‘If this exciting young tenor has a limit, it is perhaps only that of size. All the other fundamentals are in place, and his every note rings with exhilarating freedom.’”
Exactly the kind of hedged praise critics loved to deal in. Who knew what it was supposed to mean? It was more than enough to launch a career with.
“I’m the Negro Aksel Schiotz. I’m going to be the Negro Fischer-Dieskau.”
“Fischer-Dieskau’s a baritone.”
“That’s okay. I’m liberal. Some of my best friends are baritones.”
“But would you want your sister to marry one?”
Jonah appraised me. “Know who you are? You’re the Negro Franz Rupp.” He swiped up the article and poured through it again. “Hey. He doesn’t even mention the accompaniment.”
“Good thing. If you have to mention the accompaniment, there’s something wrong.”
“Mule! I owe you so much. I wouldn’t even have been out there if …” He considered the thought and didn’t complete it. “How can I repay you? What do you want? My Red Ball Jets? My old seventy-eights? All yours. Everything.”
“How about you get dressed and buy me breakfast. Okay, make it lunch.”
He crawled out of bed, doffed the robe, and padded around the uncurtained room, showing off his welterweight body to every passerby. As he threw on briefs, chinos, and a golf shirt, he asked, “How come Ruth wasn’t there?”
“Jonah. I don’t know. Why don’t you call her?”
He shook his head. Didn’t think he should have to. Didn’t want to know. Couldn’t afford the answer. He sat back down on the unmade bed. “Dark purity: C’est moi. Only question is: Who’s going to be the white Jonah Strom?”
“Put your shoes on. Let’s go.”
He never got his shoes on, and we never went. While he was puttering, the phone started to ring. The Times was detonating in a million kitchens, reaching every acquaintance we’d ever made. Jonah fielded the first thrilled congratulations. The second wave rolled in as soon as he hung up. The third call came before he could recross the room. It was Mr. Weisman. He’d received a recording offer. The Harmondial label wanted our recital pressed into vinyl, exactly as we’d performed it.
Jonah called out the details to me as Mr. Weisman gave them. My brother hooted at the invitation, ready to sign and do the recording that afternoon. Mr. Weisman advised against it. He suggested that we do two more years of concertizing, make a few high-profile appearances, then try for a longer-term arrangement with a better recording company. He mentioned RCA Victor as within the realm of possibility. That slowed Jonah for a moment.
But Jonah was zooming away from earth at speeds old Mr. Weisman couldn’t gauge. He was set on jumping into other people’s futures, and recording gave him the chance. To turn the moment permanent, spread the dying now out lengthwise into forever: Jonah didn’t care who was offering. Harmondial was a young, small company, two strikes against it in Mr. Weisman’s book, but a selling point for my brother. He and they could break into the game together. At twenty-four, Jonah was still immortal. He could crash and resurrect as often as he liked, drawing on endless time and talent.
“You only start once,” Mr. Weisman kept saying. But Jonah could make no sense of the warning. Harmondial’s bid went beyond anything Jonah imagined. None of Mr. Weisman’s objections could change Jonah’s sense that the offer had no downside. It was a giveaway, a lottery prize that cost him nothing to try.
We flew to Los Angeles to record. Harmondial used their California studio mostly for their catalog of pop and light classics. Jonah said it would give him exactly the presence he wanted. We flew out at the beginning of August, two kings in coach, giggling like criminals all the way across the continent.
We crossed L.A. in a waking daze, driving around Hollywood and Westwood in a rented Ford Mustang. Kids were everywhere, glued to their transistors as if to news of an alien invasion. The invasion, in fact, was already in its advanced stages. We’d missed the signs, back east in our barnstorming. Now we cruised down Ventura, paralyzed latecomers to an epidemic. The sound was everywhere, past our ability to take in.
“Jesus, Joey! It’s worse than cholera. Worse than communism. The absolute triumph of the three-chord song!” Jonah trolled the car radio dial for the same tunes we could hear beating from every corner, in a hurry to sample the thrill so long kept at bay. Some of the songs were venturing far beyond tonic, subdominant, and dominant. Those songs
were the ones that scared him. Those were the ones he couldn’t get enough of.
He made me drive, piloting me around town to the hits of 1965. Stop! In the name of love. Turn! Turn! Turn! Over and Over! And when he got us completely lost: Help! I need somebody. Help! By the time we found the studio for the first session, Jonah was riffing on tunes he’d absorbed on a single hearing. All we need is music, sweet music. In Chicago. New Orleans. New York City. They’re dancin’ in the streets. The sound engineers heard him and went nuts. They made him do level checks by singing My baby don’t care in every cranny of his register, from up above countertenor to down below baritone.
“What the hell are you doing singing Schubert?” one of them asked. “With power like that, you could be making real dough.”
Jonah didn’t tell them the twelve-hundred-dollar Harmondial advance felt like a small fortune. And nobody pointed out the problem: he made the Supremes’ “I Hear a Symphony” sound, well, symphonic: a one-off novelty act, my brother, the one-hit wonder of precision-pitched, breath-supported R & B lieder, the single-handed Motown Mo-tet.
We stuck to Schubert, and by the fourth take, the sound engineers changed their tune. In Jonah’s throat, all these dead tunes were once again someone’s popular song. Something in his voice on those tracks insists, We are still young. Something in that near hour of songs, recorded over the course of days, says the centuries are just passing tones on their way back home.
I can hear it on the record, still. My mother’s voice is there inside his, but my father’s is, too. There is no starting point. We trace back forever, accident on accident, through every country taken from us. But we end everywhere, always. Stand still and gaze: This is the message in that sound, rushing backward from the finish line it has reached.
When he heard his first takes, my brother couldn’t stop snickering. “Listen to that! It’s just like a real record. Let’s do it again. Forever.”
Jonah could hear things on the tape the engineers couldn’t. We spent two increasingly tense days battling between cost and inaudible perfection. The producers would be knocked out by the first several takes, each of which left Jonah wincing. They told us about how they could splice in a measure to fix a lapse. Jonah was outraged. “That’s like pasting eagle feathers on your average slob and calling him an angel.”