The Time of Our Singing

  “It won’t always be this way. Things are changing, even now. We have to start making the future. It’s not going to come any other way.”

  “Future! We got to make the here and now. We don’t even have that to live in, yet.”

  The daughter looks away, at this room of people without a present. She doesn’t know how, but when she hears her boys sing, when they set out on their tiny adventures of canon and imitation, she finds her here and now, large enough to live in.

  In that awful blood right, exercised so often as she was growing up, her mother reads her mind. “I never cared what music you sang. I never understood it myself. But anything you sang was fine by me, so long as you sang with everything you owned. And never called yourself anything you weren’t. What you going to tell them to call themselves?”

  “Mama. That’s the point. We’re not calling them anything. That way, they’ll never have to call another person—”

  “White? You raising them white?”

  “Don’t be silly. We’re trying to raise them … beyond race.” The only stable and survivable world.

  “‘Beyond’ means white. Only people who can afford ‘beyond.’”

  “Mama, no. We’re raising them …” She looks for the word, and can only find nothing. “We’re raising them what they are. Themselves first.”

  “Ain’t nobody so fine they deserve to put themselves first.”

  “Mama, that’s not what I mean.”

  “Nobody’s so good as that.” Four big beats of silence. Then: “What you going to give them, for everything you take away?”

  Suppose it’s theft. Murder. The children return, saving Delia from answering. All four are rolling in hilarity. The girls pretend to be giant mechanical claws, their shrieking nephews the helpless gum balls. Nettie Ellen brings them into line with one sharp eyebrow.

  “Grandmop,” Jonah says. “Aunties are crazy!”

  She wraps her arms around the boy, petting his halfway hair. “How’re they crazy, child?”

  “They say a lizard’s just a snake with legs. They say singing’s just talking, only speeded up.”

  Their waitress comes to see if the children want to eat. The boys draw her up short. Delia sees the woman eye her boys’ skin tones, telling God knows what explanatory story. The waitress points at Jonah. “This ain’t the one I’m supposed to wait for, is it?”

  Nettie shakes her head. Delia looks down, full of tears.

  The children have their pie. For another fifteen minutes, she, her mother, her sisters, and her children are all there, talking, needing no name for anything but one another. She and her mother fight over the bill. She lets her mother win. They stand on the sidewalk, outside Haggern’s. Delia leans into her sisters, waiting for the invitation—Of course, child!—to come back to the great house just blocks away. Her home. There on the moving street, she waits her awkward eternity.

  “Mama,” Delia begins, her voice as tight as the day of her first professional lesson. “Mama. I need your help with this. Get me back with the man.”

  Nettie Ellen takes her by the elbows, fierce with knowing. “You can get back. You’re not even apart. You two just having a bad hour. ‘This too shall pass,’ the Book says. You just call him up on the telephone and tell him you’re sorry. Tell him you know you’re wrong.”

  Delia stiffens. The condition of belonging: She and her husband, the thing they’ve thought about and chosen, must be surrendered as wrong. She may be wrong, wrong in all she’s decided, wrong in each thing she chooses, but she is right in her right to be. In the only world worth reaching, everyone owns all song. This much her father long ago preached to her, and this much he forces on her now.

  They go their separate ways, Nettie and the twins to the doctor’s house, Delia and the boys to the train. Delia squeezes her sisters before they part. “Stop growing up so fast, now. I want to be able to recognize you, next time I see you.”

  She tries—tries to call her father. She waits another week, hoping seven more days might blunt all conditions. But the phone call gets off to a catastrophic start and goes south from there. Then she, too, is saying horrible things into the phone, things she’s not capable of saying, things whose sole point is to leave her with things worth regretting forever.

  Her time comes. She wants to turn to stone. She wants to lie in bed and never stand again. Only the boys get her through. Only that glance ahead, at company coming. She writes Nettie Ellen another note. Still her mother’s daughter.

  Mama,

  The baby’s coming. It’ll have to be this week or next. I can’t make it past that. This one’s strong. Takes after its grandfather, I guess, and it’s wearing me out. I’d so love if you could help again, like you did with Jonah and Joey. It’d be so good to have a woman to mind the boys. You know how helpless men are, when it counts. David would love it, too. You tell me what we can do to make this possible. It wouldn’t be right, having your new grandchild without you around! All love ever, Dee.

  Every manipulation available. She’s not above anything that redemption might call for. But she’s not ready for the note she gets back.

  Child,

  It was not easy for me to marry your father or have his children. Maybe you never thought that. He and I came from different worlds, different as anything you think you’ve gotten into. But I loved the man and I made him the promise like the Book talks about: “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee, for whither thou goest, I will go. And where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest will I die, and there will I be buried.” There’s nothing I put above this, and don’t ask me to. I understand you have to make the same promise to you and yours. I’m not casting you out, and you know we’re ever waiting to take you back in, when you want and when you need.

  It’s signed “With love, Mrs. William Daley.” By letter’s end, Delia’s whole body convulses. When her husband finds her, the baby has already breached. He needs to call an ambulance, to rush mother and daughter to the hospital. She never tells him about the note, the only truth she ever conceals from him. When they tell her the child’s a girl, she says, “I know.” And when her husband asks, “What should we name her?” she says, “Her name is Ruth.”

  DON GIOVANNI

  Half a dozen places in Atlantic City might have hired me. This was the early 1970s, still the waning heyday of live music, and the music I played offended no one but me. There was a war going on. Not capitalism versus socialism, the United States versus Vietnam, students against their parents, North America versus the rest of the known continents. I mean the war of consonance against dissonance, electric against acoustic, written against improvised, rhythm against melody, shock against decency, long hair against longhair, past against future, rock against folk against jazz against metal against funk against blues against pop against gospel against country, black against white. Everybody had to choose, and music was your flag. Who you were depended on your radio presets. “Whose side,” the song wanted to know. “Whose side are you on?”

  The secret to the music I’d played at the Glimmer Room was that it never committed. My professional survival consisted of playing a music that belonged to no one. Maybe every tune I played could be bloodtyped, aligned with some warring faction. But I played with a strange, normative accent no one could quite place. By the time I’d put a song through the wringer of my self-taught riffing and seasoned it with the scraps of three hundred years of forgotten keyboard works, nobody could quite name it to claim or blame.

  I couldn’t bear to return to playing. The house in Fort Lee sold. I paid the taxes on it and put the balance of Da’s assets in three accounts, one for each of us. My share meant that, for some finite but considerable number of months, I didn’t have to make a living by faking musical pleasure. Teresa encouraged me to languish for as long as I needed. She thought I was in mourning. She thought I only needed time to get my feet on the ground, and for that, she mad
e me the most solid base imaginable. Saint T. cooked and took me outside for walks and warded off with a glance the gatekeepers of pedigree who might otherwise have beaten me to a pasty pulp.

  Those weeks were much like real life, except for my constant flinching. “Sweet?” I said to her in the dark, on my half of her borrowed pillow. We got to the point where she could name that tune in one note. “You have to make up with your father. I can’t take it anymore. It’s on my conscience. You have to. There’s nothing more important.”

  She lay on the bed next to me, silent, hearing what I was afraid to say. We both knew the only way that reconciliation could happen. She’d already written her father off, had already given up her family for a higher ideal. I could almost live with a choice that good. Except that her higher ideal was me.

  She bought me a little Wurlitzer electric piano. It must have cost two years of saltwater taffy savings, and it was only a tenth of the instrument that I had sold for a few hundred dollars after my father died. She showed up at my place the day of delivery, hiding her face in excitement and fear. “I thought you might want something to practice on. And to work with. While you’re … while you aren’t …”

  She couldn’t have hurt me more with a knife to the chest. I stared at the piano in its shipping container, the open casket of a lynching victim. I couldn’t tell her. The little thing was a double amputee. It had only fortyfour keys, half what I needed to believe in it. Even the simplest arrangement would scrape its head on the ceiling. The thing’s action was like a screen door that wouldn’t close. I felt I was playing in winter gloves. It resembled a piano less than the Glimmer Room resembled those concert halls Jonah and I had once played. As I looked at her gift, Teresa sat hunched, a hand to her mouth, afraid to breathe, estranged from her family, her savings account wiped out. We’d all die of unreturnable kindness. Misplaced love supreme.

  “It’s wonderful. I can’t believe it. You shouldn’t have. I don’t deserve this. We have to send it back.” A look came over her like I’d killed her dog. “Of course we’ll keep it. Come on. Let’s sing.” Leaden-fingered, I spun out a few arpeggios and launched into “Honeysuckle Rose.” All she’d hoped for. I could do that much.

  The short, black, crippled handbag of a keyboard became my penance. I came to prefer playing on it over playing a real keyboard, the way a person with a sprained back might come to prefer sleeping on the floor over sleeping on a mattress. I liked playing it without turning the power on. The keys made a muffled, thumping pitch, their sound buried under a bushel. I wanted to shrink down, into a miniature shoebox performance. If I had to play, the smaller the better.

  Teresa wanted nothing from the gift except to please. That’s what destroyed me. She thought I missed playing, that I needed some lifeline to keep me afloat. A woman with her work history should have thrown me out on my ear. But so long as she could help me keep my music alive, she didn’t care if I ever went back to work. We had our piano. For a while, we sang almost every evening, now that my performing didn’t get in the way. For the first time since childhood, I played for no reason but playing. When Jonah and I had toured, we were never alone. We were always answerable, first to the notes on the page and then to the bodies in the auditorium. Even when we rehearsed, twisting around the tune in lockstep, other ears were already listening between us. Teresa and I were all alone. We collided into each other, faltering and finessing our way across a finish line, each deferring to the other. We had no printed notes to prop us or impede us, no listening ear, no living audience to interfere. Nobody to hear but each other.

  She’d get sullen and apologetic when we didn’t swing. She had this little stutter-step thing she’d picked up from Sarah Vaughan, who’d picked it up from Ella Fitzgerald, who’d picked it up from Louis Armstrong, who’d picked it up from the deep recesses of his orphanage’s singing school. I’d follow out the phrases, thinking, She’s never going to make it. It made her nuts every time I’d try to hook up with her hiccups. She was all rhythm and line, the syncopated flight from the rest of her life. I was all harmony and chord, packing each vertical moment with sixths, flatted ninths, more simultaneous notes than the texture would bear. But somehow, we made music together. Our tunes turned their back on the wide outside, willfully ignorant and almost too beautiful, some nights, in pleasing no one but their makers.

  While Teresa was at the factory packing taffy, I read the news or watched daytime television. I no longer practiced, aside from picking up a song or two in the late afternoon, before Teresa came home. I took the time to learn what had happened in the world since the death of Richard Strauss. The television jumbled my viewing days, until I didn’t know how many months had passed. I watched the My Lai trial and the crumbling of peace with honor. I watched Wallace get shot and Nixon get reelected and go to China. I watched the Arabs and Israelis recommence their eternal war, pushing the world to the unthinkable brink. I watched Biafra die and Bangladesh, Gambia, the Bahamas, and Sri Lanka get born. I sat still while a handful of pre-Americans declared their own breakaway, recovered country, which lasted for seventy days. And I felt nothing but anesthetized shame.

  For one brief moment, it was nation time, crowds of people chanting, their voices shaking with the belief that their hour had finally come. Then, just as quickly: no nation. Systematically, the U.S. government buried Black Power. Newton and Seale, Cleaver and Carmichael: The movement’s leaders were jailed or driven from the country. Scenes from Attica leaked out, an inferno deep enough to match any nation’s. George Jackson was killed by prison guards in San Quentin. He was exactly Emmett Till’s age, my brother’s age. The official report said he was leading an armed revolt. Fellow inmates said he was set up and murdered. SNCC was broken up for parts and the Panthers destroyed by COINTELPRO. Somewhere out there, my fugitive sister and Robert were hiding, among the other twice-defeated, all those who worked to steal their country back and were destroyed in the process.

  When I could not dose myself with current events, I flipped through sitcoms, game shows, and soaps. Nothing Jonah and I were guilty of in all our performing years could match, in sheer flight from the present’s nightmare, the best of contemporary culture. Armstrong died, and then Ellington. The heartbeat of what should have been my country’s music changed. The thing that replaced it, the official sound track for all seasons that overgrew every cultural niche like kudzu claiming an abandoned vehicle, declared that rhythm consisted of slamming down hard on beats two and four and harmony meant adding a daring seventh now and then to one of two combating chords. There was no place in earshot I wanted to live. It was impossible even to think about performing in front of other people, ever again.

  “Have you ever thought about composing?” Teresa asked one night as we were drying dinner dishes.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I can get a job.”

  “Joseph, that’s not what I’m asking. I just thought that maybe, with all this time, you might have something …”

  Something inside me, worth writing down. It hit me—why I was afraid to get another nightclub job. I was afraid that Wilson Hart might really show up someday, wherever I was noodling, and ask to see the portfolio of pieces I’d promised him to write. You and me, Mix. They’re gonna hear our sounds, before we’re done with this place. I was destined to disappoint everyone I loved, everyone who thought there might be something in me worth composing.

  Terrie’s patience with me was more deadly than any racial assault. I went out the next day and bought a box of pencils and a sheaf of twenty-inch cream-stock music paper. I bought paper with grand staff systems, paper with treble staffs and piano systems, paper with unmarked, unjoined staffs—anything that looked remotely serious. I had no idea what I was doing. I stacked up the blank scores on the electric piano and lined up the pencils in neat rows, each one sharpened to a lethal weapon. Teresa’s barely suppressed excitement at my fortress of composition supplies hurt me more than my father’s death.

  All day long while I waited, jittery
, for Teresa to come home, I pretended to write music. Fragments of phrases crawled in clumps here and there across the cream stock, like spiders making nests in the corners of abandoned summer homes. I’d jot down a strain, motif by motif. Sometimes the strains would collide together into near melodies, every articulation literally spelled out. Sometimes they stayed nothing more than a series of tetrachords without rhythmic values or bar lines. I was writing for no ensemble, no instrument at all, not even piano and voice. My imagined audience was spread all over the map, and I could not tell if I was writing pop songs or thorny, academic abstraction. I never erased a, note. If a phrase hit a wall, I’d simply start over again somewhere else, on an unused staff. When a page filled up, I’d flip it over and fill the back. Then I’d start another.

  These were the longest days of my life, longer by far than my days in a Juilliard practice room, longer, even, than the days I’d spent at the side of my father’s hospital bed. I worked it out at one point: I was writing down about 140 notes an hour—two and a third triads every three minutes. Sometimes the act of filling in a single note head could absorb me for half an afternoon.

  My bits of graphite scratching remained stubbornly wooden. The puppet refused to sit up and speak. But now and again, at enormous intervals, always when I’d lost track of myself and forgotten what I was after, the edge of something truly musical would shake loose. I’d feel myself racing ahead of myself, out beyond the phrase, into the next arc of a line whose accidentals were there even before my pencil could fix them. My whole body would rally, drawn up into the forward motion, throwing off the leadenness I’d felt for years, without feeling. I’d flood with more ideas than I could hold, and I had to force my pencil into a panicky shorthand just to keep up. For the length of this rush of notes, I owned music’s twelve tones and could make them say what life had only ever hinted at.