The Time of Our Singing

  My brother, of course, had often looked at the score. He’d known the scene by ear for a decade. But he’d never sung a single note of it anywhere outside of lessons and our apartment shower. Worse, it had been ages since he’d sung anything with anyone. When Mr. Linwell announced his experiment, I knew the jig was up. Jonah would be exposed as just another pretty voice, unable to work and play with others. Another overreaching recitalist, stumbling in his bid to make it onto the big stage.

  After about two minutes, it dawned on Miss Hills that she was playing a love scene with a black man. Realization rippled through her with the floating chords. I saw the uncertainty turn into revulsion as she scrambled to figure out why she’d been set up for this ambush. She flubbed an entrance, and we lived through an awful moment when I was sure she was going to run screaming from the room. Only the thought of her career held her in place.

  Then the old musical philter did its trick again. Something came up out of my brother’s mouth, something I’d never heard him do. Eight measures later, Gina Hills was smitten in midphrase. She wasn’t a homely woman, but she was built like an opera singer. Her face was like her voice: best sampled from the middle of the house. My brother somehow turned her into Venus. He invested her with his full power, and she took it. The traction of his phrases drew her into his orbit. They started out on opposite sides of the piano, fifteen feet from each other. Four minutes in, they locked gazes and began dancing around each other. She wouldn’t touch him, but reached out as if to. He wouldn’t close that last gap between them that their duet so completely destroyed. The wonder of flaunting in broad daylight in front of a handful of listeners the last great taboo only stoked her sound.

  Jonah started out with the score in front of him. But as they surged through the scene, he needed it less and less, singing over the top of the lowered page, finally jettisoning it altogether. Gina Hills hit the top of a sustained phrase, her face filling with blood. Jonah kept building, wave on wave, until the knot of listeners disappeared and this couple stood alone, naked and lifted, turning need into the most sublime delay available to the human body. This was 1967, the year the Supreme Court made it legal, even in that third of the country where it was still forbidden, for Jonah to marry a woman of this Isolde’s color, a woman of our father’s race.

  Linwell rolled out with a gliss, stood up at the keys, and waved his fingers. “Yikes. All right, people. Air raid’s over. Back to your normal lives.” He snagged Gina Hills, who, in some private game of musical chairs, once the music stopped, refused to look at my brother. Linwell pinched her shoulders. “You were on some other planet, love.” Miss Hills looked up, glowing and crestfallen. She’d wanted the role more than she wanted love. Then, for ten minutes, she’d inhabited it, the ancient tale of chemically induced disaster. She wobbled, still under the drug’s residue. Linwell could have promised her an opening night in the next season, and she’d still have left that rehearsal room subdued.

  When the room cleared, Linwell turned to us. His English eyes narrowed at me and wondered whether he could get away with asking me to wait in the hall. But he let me ride, then turned to absorb my brother. “What are we going to do with you?” Jonah had a notion or two. But he kept them hidden. Linwell shook his head and examined his clipboard of notes from the afternoon. I could see him making the calculation: Was it still too soon? Would ever be too soon, on such a country’s stage?

  He set down the scribbles and looked my brother in the eye. “I’ve heard about you, of course.” It felt like a police shakedown. Don’t lie to us, boy. We know you’re up to something. “I thought you sang lieder. Not even that. I heard you did Dowland.” He couldn’t mask his distaste.

  “I do,” Jonah said. Just that: I. I was dispatched to whatever family would have me.

  Linwell sat silent, fighting embarrassment. “Would you …” he began, seeking out some sordid favor. “Would you mind …” He gestured toward the piano. It took me a moment. He didn’t believe us. He wanted proof.

  Jonah and I took up our battle stations so routinely, I almost slipped and bowed out of sheer habit. Jonah made the massive turn without even thinking about it. He looked at me, inhaled, lifted imperceptibly, and on the downbeat we were there, tied together, on “Time Stands Still.” We finished into the silence that the music named. I patted the piano lid and looked at Crispin Linwell. His eyes were wet. This man, who hadn’t listened to music for pleasure for longer than I’d been alive, remembered, for three minutes, where he came from.

  “Why would anyone want to give that up?”

  Jonah blinked, deciding how real the question was. He’d have smiled right through, but Mr. Linwell waited for an answer. Someone doing what he was born to do, someone who could bring down a little corner of eternity onto earth wanted to throw it all over for pumped-up, gaudy spectacle. I could think of no reason big enough, except one. You boys can be anything you want to be.

  Jonah leaned against the piano and drew his hand along the back of his neck. His eyebrows played with the question, still innocent. “Oh, you know.” I winced and dug down into the piano stool. “It’s more fun to sing with other people.” He slipped down into a basso profundo. “Ahm-a tarred of livin’ alone.”

  Crispin Linwell didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile. He only shook his head. “Be careful what you wish for.” He pulled his glasses from his forehead and tapped the tip of his pen on the clipboard’s clip, a rapid motor rhythm. His whole body drew up in his chair and professionalized. “We can find something for you. You will sing with us. With … other people. Your agent’s number’s on the vita? … Fine. Tell him to expect a call.” He shook our hands and dismissed us. But before we could go, Linwell stopped Jonah with one hand to the shoulder. I knew what he was going to say before he said it. I’d heard it often, impossible lifetimes ago, although, back then, always in the plural. “You are one of a kind.”

  Out on Broadway, in the late-winter air, Jonah whooped like a banshee. “‘One of a kind,’ Mule. ‘Expect a call.’”

  “I’m happy for you,” I told him.

  We expected the call through the whole spring. Mr. Weisman called with festivals, competitions, and concert series—Wolf Trap, Blossom, Aspen—but nothing from the Met. When Jonah bugged Mr. Weisman to nudge someone over in Linwell’s office, our agent just laughed. “The wheels of opera grind exceeding slow, and not all that fine. You’ll hear when you hear. Meanwhile, find something more useful to worry about.”

  Weisman did call with word from Harmondial in early summer. On slow but steady sales of the first recording, they were turning a profit. The record had gone into a fourth reprinting. There’d be a royalty check, not enough to pay for phone bills, but cash all the same. Harmondial wanted to talk about a follow-up. Two days after Jonah agreed in principle to a new contract over the phone, central Newark burned down. That industrious city just a handful of minutes by the PATH train from where we lived: gutted, as bad as the Hanoi neighborhoods Johnson had been targeting. It was July. Central Detroit followed the week after. Forty-one people dead and fourteen square miles of the city in cinders.

  I went to Jonah in a panic. “We can’t do this record. Tell them we’re out.”

  “Mule! You nuts? Our public needs us.” He shook me by the shoulders, a slapstick attack. “What are you worried about? You’re not losing your nerve, are you? Not afraid of a little eternity? So what if people will be listening to you after your death? We can fix anything, on tape.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “Tell them we can’t. Tell them we need to just … wait awhile.”

  He laughed me off. “Can’t, Joey. It’s all agreed to. Verbal contract. You’re legally bound and gagged already. You don’t own yourself no more, brother.”

  “Did I ever?” It didn’t often happen that he looked away first.

  Around the time Jonah began preparing for the second record, we started getting hang-up calls. He’d answer the phone, think
ing it was Weisman or Harmondial or even Crispin Linwell. But the moment Jonah said hello, the line would go dead. He had as many theories as there were walk-ons in Aida. He even thought it might be Gina Hills. I was home alone one afternoon in August when the phone rang. Jonah was out vocalizing in a practice room at NYU downtown. I answered, and a voice more familiar than my own asked, “Are you alone?”

  “Ruthie! Oh, God, Ruthie, where are you?”

  “Easy, Joey. I’m all right. I’m just fine. Is he there? Can you talk?”

  “Who, Jonah? He’s out. What’s wrong? Why are you doing this to us?”

  “Doing? Oh, Joey. If you don’t know by now …” She fought for control of her voice. I don’t know which of us was worse off. “Joey, how are you? You okay?”

  “I’m good. We’re all good. Da and Jonah. Everything’s … moving along. Except for worrying about you, Ruth. We’ve been sick to death—”

  “Stop it. Don’t make me hang up on you.” I heard her holding the mouthpiece away, fighting sobs. She came back. “I’d like to see you.” She asked to meet at a bar on the northwest corner of Union Square. “Just you, Joey. I swear, if you bring anyone else with you, I’ll run.”

  I left a note for Jonah, saying I wouldn’t be back for dinner. I scrambled over to Union Square and hunted down the place she’d named. Ruth was there, sitting in a back booth. I’d have fallen all over her, but she wasn’t alone. She had brought a bodyguard. She sat on the same side of the booth as a man a couple of years older than Jonah and several shades darker. He had a two-inch picked-out Afro and wore a denim vest, paisley shirt, and a silver neck chain with a little fist clenched around a dangling peace symbol.

  “Joseph.” My sister fought for a breezy neutral. “This is Robert. Robert Rider.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  Robert Rider lifted his gaze, half a nod. “Same here,” he said through a hard smile. I reached out to shake his hand, but his fingers wrapped up around my thumb, forcing mine to do the same.

  I slung into the booth across from them. Ruth looked different. She had on a bright green minidress and boots. I tried to remember how she was dressed when I saw her last. I wore the tan dress shirt and black slacks I’d been wearing for two years. There was something odd about her hair. I nodded what I hoped was approval. “You’ve changed. What did you do?”

  She snorted. “Thanks, Joey. It’s not what I did. It’s what I’m not doing. No more hot iron. No more relaxants. No more nothing but what I got.”

  Next to her, Robert grinned. “That’s right, baby. Nappy and happy.” She leaned into the man, touched her palm to his.

  A waitress came by to see what I wanted. She was black, pretty, and about twenty. She and my sister had already made friends. “My brother,” Ruth said. The waitress laughed, as if that could only be a joke. I ordered a ginger ale, and the waitress laughed again.

  “You look great, Ruth.” I didn’t know what else to say. She did. She looked good and strong. She just didn’t look like my sister.

  “Don’t sound so surprised.” I could tell by her glance: I looked pale. She wasn’t going to say anything.

  “Are you all right? Where are you living? How are you making ends meet?”

  Ruth stared at me, twisting her mouth and shaking her head. “Am I all right? How am I making ends meet? Oh, Joey. I’m not the one you should be worried about. There are twenty million people in this country whose lives aren’t worth your monthly take-home.” She glanced at the man next to her. Robert Rider nodded.

  “I don’t take home …” I let it drop. I saw myself, a double agent. My sister wanted to talk to me. I could hear in her voice the new worlds opening up all around her. She wanted to give them to me. I had to listen with enough approval and enthusiasm to keep her going, trick her out of her current address, and take it back to my father and brother.

  She turned to Robert, who was studying the beer in front of him. “Joey here plays a mean Grieg. If blacks could vote, they’d want to elect him their cultural ambassador.”

  Robert hid his curled lips behind his lifted glass.

  “Are you still in the city, Ruth?” I waved out the plate-glass window. “Have you moved downtown?”

  “Oh, we live all over the place.” I glanced at Robert. But that “we” seemed to mean more than just the two of them. “Town to town. Just like you and Jonah. Maybe not quite as deluxe.” I felt myself grinning too much. “Joey stays in hotels,” Ruth told Robert. “They ever have trouble finding a room for you, Joey? They ever have to send you to some other establishment?”

  I said nothing. I didn’t know what I’d done to her, except live. Above her challenge stare, Ruth’s cheeks wavered. “So how’s tricks, Joseph? You doing okay?” She hadn’t come to fight. She’d come because she needed me.

  “I’m fine. Aside from missing you.”

  She looked away, anywhere but at me. Her face twitched all over. Robert handed her a large black leather satchel. Ruth rooted through the bag and took out a manila envelope. She placed it on the booth in front of me. “Robert has been helping me look into the fire.”

  Bizarre angles played out in me. My sister had joined a religious cult. She was mixing in something illegal. But as I reached out for the envelope, I knew what fire. Inside the envelope was a sheaf of xerographic copies of dozen-year-old documents. While I examined them, Ruth held her breath. Something was on trial here—me, the two of them, the nation, the entire compounding past. I read as best as I could, unable to concentrate with those eyes appraising me.

  “We’ve been staring at this our whole lives. I know you’ve thought the same thing, many times. But it wasn’t until I met Robert, and I told him all about Mama … It’s so obvious, Joey. So obvious, I had to have it pointed out to me.”

  I handled the copies, police reports of our gutted house in Hamilton Heights, the house we grew up in. The prose sank into leaden detail: measurements, times, charred inventories. I read over the destruction of my life as written by a committee of public servants. The ten-year-old girl who’d bitten the restraining fireman’s hand while trying to break free and rescue her mother could not have survived one paragraph without outside support. I skimmed the last two pages and looked up. Ruth was staring at me, hopeful, afraid. “You see? You get what this means?”

  She swirled the pages and found the one she was after. She turned it toward me, fixing the indictment with her fingernail. In so many stories about mixed-race people in fiction, their fingernails always identify them as really black. Ruth’s fingernail hung on the word accelerants. Presence of trace accelerants throughout the foundation level.

  “You know what those are?”

  “Oily rags. Half-empty gas cans. The kind of stuff Mrs. Washington kept in her basement.”

  She wavered and glanced at Robert. She rallied. “Things deliberately planted to speed the rate of burn.”

  Robert nodded. “Somebody accelerating.”

  “Where … How do you …” I looked back down, reading furiously. “Nothing here says anything like that.”

  Robert bit into his words. “Now that’s a fact.”

  “Accelerants mean arson,” Ruth said.

  I sat there shaking my head. “It doesn’t say that anywhere. This report doesn’t even—”

  A one-note, mirthless laugh from Robert cut me off. I was a hopeless naïf. Worse: a classical musician. With brothers like me, the fire would have stayed an accident forever, just like the authorities wanted it to.

  “And if it’s arson …” Ruth was waiting for me to follow her. But her eyes knew this was a losing proposition.

  Robert focused on a grim horizon. “If it’s arson, it’s murder.”

  I looked down at the smudged photocopies for some fact to steady me. “Ruth. Listen to what you’re saying. There’s no way. It’s insane.”

  “It’s at least that,” Ruth agreed. Robert Rider sat still.

  Then the fire that took my mother rose up through my spinal fuse and burst in m
y brain. The floor softened beneath me. I reached out and braced my hands against the booth, a block chord spread across the keys but making no sound. My decade-old nightmares of Mama’s suffocation flooded back, in full, adult daylight. I couldn’t let myself think the thought. The thought I was thinking.

  I looked up at Ruth. Her face smeared. She saw my animal panic. “Oh, Da didn’t have anything to do with it.” Her voice held some fraction of pity, behind the disgust. “The man’s not clever enough to know what started the fire. But he’s responsible for her death, just as if he had.”

  The craziness of her words brought me back. “Ruth. You’ve lost your mind.” She stared at me with something ready to protect itself at any cost. I dropped my eyes down to the nonexistent evidence. “If the police report found evidence of arson, why didn’t they say it was arson?”

  “Why bother?” Ruth looked out over the crowded room. “Nobody was hurt. Just a black woman.”

  “Then why bother even to mention the accelerants in the report?”

  Ruth just shrugged and stared into nothing. But Robert leaned forward. “You have to know how these people work. They put in the barest minimum of fact, so they can’t get busted if it ever comes back to them. But they’re never going to put down one single word that might turn the thing into a case. Not if they don’t have to.”

  “I just don’t understand. How could it have been deliberate? Who could have wanted …”

  Ruth held her head. “White man married to a black woman? Six million people in New York were holding that bomb.”

  “Ruth! There was no bomb. The furnace exploded.”

  “The fire was helped along by something somebody put there.”

  There had been violence. Steady, lifelong. Words, muffled threats, shoves, spit: all the confusions I’d seen in childhood and refused to name. But not this level of madness. “Listen. If this was an attack against a mixed-race couple, then it was an attack on Da, as well. Who’s to say the attacker was …”