The Time of Our Singing

  We never rehearsed. She knew all her songs by heart, and I knew all her songs from her. I could anticipate what she was going to do, and on those rare occasions when her nervous enthusiasm tipped us over, our craft was easily righted. We weren’t talking Scriabin, after all. But Teresa tapped into a musical ecstasy Scriabin only hinted at. Her whole body took up the pulse. With my chords solid beneath her, she let go—sexy, sultry, loose on a first-time spree. She had a lower register, a growl almost androgynous. The audience ate her up, and each night that she sang, at least a couple men in the darkened house would have given years for one taste more.

  She was on the floor one night, singing Smokey Robinson’s “You Really Got a Hold on Me” as if it were a controlled substance. We’d found the groove, sailing along in the full soul of the thing, when our hull scraped on some reef, forcing me to look up. Teresa was back on the beat almost instantly; no one had heard her bobble but her accompanist. She stiffened through the rest of the song. I traced her weird vibe to an older man who’d entered in midstanza and sat down in the back of the room, a man whose rifle-bore gaze Teresa studiously avoided.

  He wasn’t the mallet-headed escort I’d first seen her with. But he was another white man, one whose massive claim on her was obvious, even to the piano player. Teresa sang, “I don’t like you, but I love you.” I tagged along underneath, resolving stray dissonances, wondering whether her bridling was meant for me or this other fellow, a man I’d never seen before and felt no need to see again. “You really got a hold on me.” Every demon music was supposed to banish, all the things that held her took hold in the melody. She limped through to the end, almost whispering the last phrase, afraid to look up. When she did, the man was standing. He seemed to lean over and spit, though nothing come out of his mouth. Then he made for the door.

  Teresa turned to me and called out. I couldn’t hear her, over her panic and the applause. She called again: “‘Ain’t Misbehavin’.’” The only time she ever spoke to me in command. I started up the tune, my fingers in a forced march. But it was too late. The man was gone. Teresa, having ordered the melody, gagged it down. She sang her way through to the end. But the innocence in the song came out of her mouth twisted.

  She waited for me afterward, as if nothing had happened. I suppose nothing had. But it ate at me, and when she asked in her shy, frightened way whether I wanted to go home with her, I answered, “I don’t think you want me to.”

  She looked as if I’d just blackened her eye. “Why are you saying that?”

  “I think you’d rather be by yourself.”

  She didn’t ask for a reason, but went away in silence. That only enraged me. She came back to the club a few nights later, but I avoided her during breaks and never asked her up to sing. She stayed away for a week. I dug in and waited for her to call. When she didn’t, I told myself that that was that. We never know. Nobody knows the first thing about anyone else.

  She was waiting for me outside the club when I went to work the next week. She was in her candy-factory clothes. I saw her from a block away, time enough to prepare for the downbeat. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?”

  “Joseph. We have to talk.”

  “Do we?”

  Suddenly, I was that thug who’d assaulted us on the freezing beach the winter before. She narrowed herself to the smallest slit and threw her words at me. “You smug little son of a bitch.” She grabbed and pushed me. Then she buckled against the front wall of the club, sobbing.

  I refused to touch her. It pretty much killed me, but I held to myself. I’d have given her anything, and still, she refused to tell me. Righteousness had me by the throat. I waited for her to catch her breath. “Is there something you want to say to me?”

  This started her gasping again. “About what, Joseph? About what?”

  “I’ve never asked anything from you, Teresa. You have unfinished business in your life? The least you can do is have the decency to tell me about it.”

  “‘Unfinished …’”

  She wouldn’t own up. I felt betrayed—by her, by the rules of decency, by her pretty singing, by that bending rainbow landscape of her body. “Want to tell me about the guy?”

  “Guy?” Her confusion was complete. Then her face broke and rose. “Joseph! Oh, my Joe. I thought you knew. I thought …”

  “What? Thought what? Why didn’t you at least say something? Or is that part of the great unspeakable secret?”

  “I thought … I didn’t want to make it …” She hung her head in shame. For all of us, I suppose. “That was my father.”

  I looped back. “Your father came to hear you?”

  “Us,” she croaked. “Hear us.” And he’d left in disgust before she could lure him back with his favorite song. I worked through the recap in silence. Her father, who made her listen every Sunday to a music he now hated her for falling in love with. Her lover, whom she mistook for a native speaker. My own Sunday music, which would only have thickened the man’s invisible spit. Spit meant for me, but hitting his daughter.

  I fell against the brick of the Glimmer Club, next to her. “Did you—have you talked to him since?”

  She couldn’t even shake her head. “Mom won’t put him on when I call. She’ll barely talk to me herself. I went by the house, and they—he came to the door and put on the burglar chain.”

  She broke down. I led her inside the empty club, where I could take her into a back room and put my arm around her without being arrested. Mr. Silber heard his prize nightingale crying, and he rushed about trying to make her a cup of weak tea.

  “You can’t let this happen.” I stroked her hair, without conviction. “Family’s bigger than … this. You have to patch things up. Nothing’s worth a split this big.”

  She looked at me through the red, raw wet of her face. Horror spread there, spilled wine. She clamped a tourniquet around my upper arm and buried herself in my chest. I felt I’d just killed a child while driving and would spend the rest of my life with memory as my penance.

  Teresa never used it against me, but I was all she had. Me and the saltwater taffy factory. My visits to her apartment now had a tinge of volunteer work. We ran out of things to say to each other, but Teresa never noticed. She could smile and say nothing for longer than I knew how to reply.

  I grew obsessed with her father. I slipped little questions about him into our dinner conversations. It irritated her, but I couldn’t keep from fishing. Where did he work? He was an appliance repairman in town. Where had he grown up? Saddle Brook and Newark. What did he vote? Lifelong straight Democratic, just like my parents. I could never get to what I needed to know before she clammed up.

  We ran out of things to do together, even in the few hours when we were both off work. I suggested we practice a little. I could give her some pointers. She leapt at the idea. She couldn’t get enough. She wanted to hear everything I knew about breath support, open throat, covering—all the scraps I’d picked up from Jonah over the years. “Real singing. Famous singing.” She had the same appetite for these professional secrets as her girlfriends at the factory had for Princes Charles and Rainier.

  I told her what I knew. But everything I taught her made her worse. She’d sung just fine when she met me. Better than fine: beautifully. She turned every tune vulnerable. She knew what each song needed. She charmed without knowing—freshness, clarity, her inadvertent sexiness, that jumpy rhythm that took hold of her body and wouldn’t let her go until the finish. But now, armed with the lessons I gave her, she began to make a stagy, polished, domed tone that sounded freakish. I’d cost her her father. I was costing her her voice. I’d probably cost her whatever friends she’d had before seeing me. We never spent time with anyone but ourselves. Teresa wasn’t sleeping through the night anymore, and she only ate the barest minimum she could get away with. I was killing the woman. And I’d never asked her for a thing.

  “I want to put more time into my singing,” she said. “Maybe I should, you know, cut back on my work ho
urs?”

  My fault entirely. I should have known enough to stay away. Two months after her father had spit on the floor of the Glimmer Room, I found her sitting on her sofa in tears. “They’ve changed the locks. My parents.”

  Something clicked. The song she’d shouted for as the man was leaving: her daddy’s favorite. The song she lip-synched to, the one I’d first fallen for: both written by the same duo. The songs of her Sunday-morning liturgy, preached by her old man. “What did he call you? Your father. What was his pet name for you?”

  She wouldn’t answer. She didn’t have to, goodness knows.

  We settled into a narrowed routine, simple enough for both of us. She surrendered her own place to our comfort. I grew careful of what I said. I told her her meat loaf with tomato sauce was the best thing I’d ever tasted, and paid the price for several weeks running. I happened to say robin’s-egg blue was my favorite color, and found her the next Saturday, repainting the kitchen. We rarely went to my apartment. So far as I can remember, we never spent the night there. She abandoned, without asking, all the places I wouldn’t take her to. I knew it was shame; I didn’t know of what. I did love her.

  I was alone in my apartment one afternoon in the summer of 1970. There was a knock at the door, rare enough in any season. I opened, off balance, and took a full three seconds to recognize my sister and Robert, her husband, my brother-in-law, with whom I’d spent all of forty minutes in this life, three years before. I stood staring, somewhere between fear and joy, until Ruth cleared her throat. “Joey, can you let us in?”

  I fell over myself welcoming them. I squeezed her until Ruth begged for mercy. I kept saying, “I can’t believe it.” Ruth kept answering, “Believe it, brother.”

  Robert asked, “Believe what?” His voice’s agitation could not keep out the amusement.

  “How did you find me?” I thought she must have been in touch with Da. They were talking again. No one else could have told her where I was.

  “Find you?” Ruth shot Robert a sad grin. She put her hand on my head, as if I had a fever. “Finding’s the easy part, Joey. It’s losing you that has been my lifelong problem.”

  I still didn’t know what I’d done to her. I didn’t care. She was back in my life. My sister was here. “When did you hit town? Where are you living these days?”

  Their silence gave me an awful moment. Ruth gazed around my tiny cell of an apartment, terrified of something she was sure would pop out of the nearest cupboard. “Living? These days? Funny you should ask.”

  Robert sat on my rickety kitchen folding chair, one ankle on the other knee. “Would it be possible to put up here? With you. Just for a day or two.”

  They had no bags. “Of course. Anything. Always.”

  I didn’t press them for information, and they didn’t volunteer. Whatever was after them was only fifty yards behind, down the street, across the highway. I saw them look at each other and keep mum. They weren’t about to make me accessory to anything. “Sit. Damn, it’s good to see you. Here, sit. Can I get you a drink?”

  My sister pinned my wrists like a loving nurse, grinning and stilling me. “Joey, it’s just us.”

  Robert, the man my sister had tied her life to, a giant I didn’t know from Adam, fixed me with his X-ray eyes. He seemed to me everything I wasn’t: solid, substantial, centered, dedicated, dignified. His aura filled the room. “So how’s the gig?”

  I hung my head. “It’s music. I’m taking requests. How about you?”

  “Huh.” He put his hands on his head, catching up to himself. “Us, too. We’re taking requests, too.”

  “I read that Huey’s free,” I said.

  From where she stood fiddling with the kitchen curtains, Ruth shouted. “Joey! Where did you find time to read that? I thought you were busy with your nightclub act.”

  She must have been near the club. Seen the posters. “Enlightened owners. They let me look at the papers on my breaks.”

  “Huey’s free. True.” Robert squinted at me, guessing my weight. “But everything the man has tried to do—the whole movement—is coming apart.”

  “Robert,” Ruth warned.

  “What’s the difference? The shit’s public knowledge.”

  I’d followed the stories, if only for their sake. The gun battle at UCLA. Hampton and Clark, the two Chicago Panther organizers, killed in their sleep in an illegal police raid. Connecticut trying Bobby Seale for killing a police informant. The FBI waging all-out war. Hundreds of members killed, jailed, or fleeing the country. Eldridge Cleaver in Cuba. I’d thought for a long time that Ruth and Robert, like Jonah, might have gone abroad. Seeing them cowering here, I wished they had.

  “You know about the New York roundup?” The force of Robert’s gaze terrified me.

  “I read … The papers said …” I’d been unable to take the official reports in. Twenty-one Panthers arrested, charged with an elaborate plan to blow up a suite of civic buildings and kill scores of police. The group that my sister and her husband had helped to organize.

  “The papers, man. You got to decide whether you’re with the papers or with the people.” He jutted his head, besieged, a rhetorical boy, a thousand years old, sick to death of the disaster this country had made of everything human. I wasn’t with the papers. I wasn’t with the people. I wasn’t even with myself. I wanted to be with my sister.

  “I’m starving,” Ruth said.

  It seemed a godsend, something I might help with. “There’s an Italian place just down the street.”

  Robert and Ruth looked at me, embarrassed at my density. Robert reached into his pocket and drew out four crumpled dollar bills. “Could you bring us something back? Doesn’t matter what, so long as it’s hot.”

  I waved him off. “Back in a minute with the best bowl of steamers you ever tasted.”

  His gratitude ruined me. “Owe you one, brother.”

  I took the word all the way down to the ocean and back. When I returned, I caught them arguing. They stopped the instant my key hit the lock. “Now this is what you call shellfish,” I said, sounding stupid even to myself. But Ruth was filled with thanks. She kissed, then bit, my hand. The two of them dug in. It had been some time. I waited until they’d gotten their fill. Then I tried to draw Robert out a little. Juilliard dropout, commencing his belated education.

  Robert indulged me. We talked about all that had happened since I’d seen them last, the running battle of the last three years. I held out for the ghost of nonviolent resistance. Robert didn’t laugh at me, but he refused to encourage the hope. “A small group has all the rest of us locked up down in the hold, and they’re standing over the hatches with guns. The longer they do that, the harder they need to.”

  My sister waved her hands in the air. “It’s not just the people with the power. It’s the second-generation immigrants, locked down in the hold with us. First word they learn when they set foot in this country is nigger. People who have nothing, turning against one another. Pure Kapo system.”

  I listened, just listened, unable to add a word. When the clams were gone, we hit a lull.

  “Joey,” Ruth said. “You’re sleeping with someone.”

  “How did you know?” I scanned the apartment for giveaways: pictures, notes, extra toothbrush. There were none.

  “You seem good. Healthy.” It seemed to relieve Ruth. I loved Teresa more in the moment my sister spoke those words than I had since she had first sung with me. “She white?”

  Robert stood and flexed. “Okay, now. Time out. Give the man some peace.”

  “What? It’s a legitimate question. Man’s driving a shiny new vehicle. You ask him the make and model.”

  Robert caught my eye. “It’s all right, brother. I’m sleeping with a German chick.”

  “If I find her, husband, I’ll kill the both of you dead.”

  “Her father’s disowned her,” I said. “Teresa’s father, I mean.” It sounded like a bagatelle, next to whatever Robert and Ruth were facing.

 
Robert rubbed his globe of Afro. “Bad deal. We’ll see about making her an honorary.”

  “Teresa.” Ruth’s smile tried to stay polite. “When do we get to meet her?” My sister wanted to meet me somewhere. Find a place alongside this world, big enough for both of us to move in.

  “Anytime. Tonight.”

  “Maybe next visit,” Robert said. “This one ain’t exactly meet and greet.”

  His words yanked them out of my story world, and the two of them were fugitives again. We sat silently, listening to signals in the traffic outside. At last, Ruth said, “It’s not that we don’t trust you, Joey.”

  “I understand,” I lied. I understood only their pacing, their animal panic.

  Robert spoke into the tips of his folded hands. “The less we say, the easier for you.” He might have been a university professor.

  Ruth leaned back and sighed. My little sister, now decades older than I was, and pulling away at an accelerating pace. “So how’s the Negro Caruso?” She clenched when she spoke.

  “What can I say? He’s singing. Somewhere in Europe. Germany, last I heard.”

  She nodded, wanting more, not wanting to ask. “Probably where he belongs.”

  Her husband stood and peeked through the kitchen curtains. “I’d go there myself, around about now.”

  “Oh would you?”

  “In a heartbeat.”

  The idea amused Ruth. She cooed at him in German, every pet name Da ever used on Mama.

  “I have to go work,” I said. “Daily bread and all.” I stuck my paws out and wiggled them, singing, without thinking, “Honeysuckle Rose.”