The Time of Our Singing

  “Let’s walk.” Teresa nodded, happy with any idea I put to her. We cut through Fort Tryon Park. I looked for two boys, seven and eight, amid the crowds lining the paths, but I couldn’t find us among so many like-colored decoys, all speaking Spanish. The wave of Dominicans had begun, one that would, in another decade, recolonize the island’s tip as a million Puerto Ricans had once colonized Brooklyn and East Harlem throughout my childhood. The aging Jews were still there, those who’d refused to move south to a city of Cuban escapees. Strangers who’d have greeted my father on sight pulled back from me in fear. Written already, in their faces: The lease had expired on this, their neighborhood.

  “There’s a bakery around here,” I said to my Polish Catholic honky shiksa. “Right around here someplace.”

  But I was turned around. We dragged up and down streets, stumbled upon the concrete steps—completely changed—doubled back, along our path until Ter had had enough. “Why don’t you just ask somebody?”

  Approach a stranger: The idea would never have occurred to me. We asked a deliveryman. “Frisch’s Bakery?” I might as well have been speaking Provençal. “In your dreams, maybe.” Finally, one promenading woman wearing a silver suit dress and a turquoise and smoky quartz bracelet stopped, more out of alarm than pity. She was out for a stroll in her finest attire, as if the city hadn’t gone to hell in a hackney all around her since the war. It surprised her that I spoke intelligible English. She could have been my aunt. The fact would have killed her on the spot.

  “Frisch’s? Frisch’s up on Overlook?”

  “Yes, that’s it! That’s the one.” Edging away, palms up, harmless.

  My Tante snorted. “You’re going to need more than good directions. It closed down ages ago. Ten years, if you’re lucky. What are you looking for, dear?” Her voice bent down with burden, her penance for coming to this mixed land.

  Teresa, too, turned to me. Yes, what are you looking for?

  I spoke my humiliation. “Mandelbrot.”

  “Mandelbrot!” She examined me to see how I could have discovered this secret password. “Why didn’t you say so, dear? Frisch’s, you don’t need. Down to the next street, make a left. Halfway up the block on your left.”

  I thanked her again, in zeal proportional to how worthless her information was to me. I cupped Teresa by the shoulder and dragged her off toward the street Tante had indicated.

  “What’s Mandelbrot, Joseph?” In her mouth, the word turned to enriched flour.

  “Almond bread.” Lost in translation.

  “Almond bread! You like almond bread? You never told me. I could have made you …” Teresa, her face contorted, struggled with the indictment. if you’d only told me, brought the affair home and put her into bed with us.

  We found the bakery. Nothing resembling Frisch’s. The thing they sold as Mandelbrot might as well have been cinnamon toast. We sat on a bench and picked at it, our day in the city ending. I looked up the street at a man combing through a wire-mesh trash can. Tomorrow was just that light on the horizon, rushing to catch up with yesterday. This was the street Da had brought us along, telling us how all the universe’s clocks kept different times. The same bench, though same seemed meaningless.

  We’d eaten nothing all day. But Teresa picked at her almond bread as at some stale Communion wafer. She tore off hunks and tossed them to the pigeons, then cursed the birds for swarming her. I sat next to her, waylaid in my own life. The boys and their father passed us while we sat on this bench, but they didn’t yet know how to see us. There was no place I could get to from this where and when. I rose to go, but I couldn’t walk. Teresa was clamped onto me, holding me in place. “Joseph. My Joe. We have to make it legal.”

  “It?” Trying to smash all clocks.

  “Us.”

  I sat back down. I studied the man working the trash can, who was unfolding a shiny packet of aluminum foil. “Ter, we’re good. Aren’t you happy?” She looked down. “Why do you always say ‘make it legal’? You afraid of being arrested? You want some contract in case you need to sue me?”

  “Fuck the law. I don’t give a shit about the law.” She was crying, forcing her words through closed teeth. “You keep saying okay, but nothing happens. It’s like your music. You say you want to, but you don’t. I keep waiting for you. It’s like you’re just killing time with me. You think you’re going to find somebody better who you’ll really want to marry, really want to make—”

  “No. Absolutely not. I will never, never find anyone else who … is better to me than you.”

  “Really, Joseph? Really? Then why not prove it?”

  “What do we have to prove? Is love about proving?” Yes, I thought, even as I asked. That’s exactly what love is. Teresa leaned her head over her knees and began to sob. I stroked her back in big sweeping ovals, like a child practicing his cursive O’s. I learned to write from Mama, but I couldn’t remember her ever teaching me. I rubbed Ter’s back as she heaved, feeling my hand from some distant, insulated place.

  A man in a black suit and crushed porkpie hat, older than the century, shuffled by. At the sound of danger, his shuffle accelerated to a crawl. Then, seeing that our tragedy wouldn’t hurt him, he stopped. “Is she sick, the girl?”

  “She’s fine. It’s just … Leid.” He nodded, squinting, and said something in Da’s language I didn’t catch. All I heard was the brutal reprimand. His shuffle ramped up again, but he stopped and looked back every twenty paces. Checking whether to call the Polizei.

  I knew Teresa’s need for marriage, the one she couldn’t speak. If she married, her family might relent and retrieve her. If we stayed as we were, we’d confirm their worst slander. She’d be forever living in sin with a freeloading black who didn’t even care enough to give her a ring.

  But marriage was impossible. It was wrong in a way I couldn’t begin to say. My brother and sister made it impossible. My father and mother. Marriage meant belonging, recognizing, finding zero, coming home. The bird and the fish could fall in love, but the here and now would scatter every thieved twig they might assemble. I don’t know what race Teresa thought I belonged to, but it wasn’t hers. Race trumped love as surely as it colonized the loving mind. There was no middle place to stand. My parents had tried, and the results were my life. Nothing I felt the need to reproduce.

  I was back in a cold December in Kenmore Square in Boston. My brother, slapped down for kissing a girl of another caste, the first wrong turn of his life, was telling me that we were the only race that couldn’t reproduce ourselves. I’d thought him crazy. Now it seemed obvious. Of all the music Teresa and I might raise our children on, there wasn’t a single tune that could be theirs, unquestioning, unquestioned, sung the way they breathed. Teresa thought she’d gone beyond race. She thought that she’d paid already. She had no idea. I had no way of telling her. “Teresa. Ter. How can we?”

  I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say. But Teresa was. She flung her head up. “‘How can we?’ How can we?” Her words were terrible, drugged. I thought she might be cracking up. I looked around, scouting for the nearest public phone. “How can we sit here?” Her enraged red face swung back and forth, a refusal so violent, it begged for restraint. Her words slurred crazily. “How can we live together? Talk to each other?” She half-stood, then slammed down again. She turned away from me, suffocating, her lips twisting without sound. Her arms were in front of her, tearing in disgust at the air. I wrote big, cursive, reassuring O’s into her back until, in a fury, she wheeled around and flung my hand at me. I didn’t dare move. Toward or away—equal disasters. My head was blank, pitchless, colorless. If she’d had a knife, the woman would have used it. Then Teresa calmed. That’s what time is. Da explained it to me once. Time is how we know which way the world runs: ever downward, from crazed to numb.

  We went back to Atlantic City together, obeying some force one notch down from choice. We resumed living together in a kind of suspended motion of dead people. The battered wedding plans never arose
again, except in our thoughts, every minute we were in each other’s presence. Time did its randomizing run. Two more months down the further slope, my brother called. Teresa picked it up. By that electric pause after she said hello, I knew it was him. Her receiver hand started to shake, excited: Yes, it was Teresa, yes, that Teresa, and yes, she knew who he was—all about him, where he was—and yes, his brother was there, and yes, no, yes, and she giggled, completely seduced by whatever little halfhearted sweet talk he worked on her. She handed the phone to me, soft as she hadn’t been since we took our death holiday in the city.

  “She’s got a pretty voice, Mule. You sing with her?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What’s the top of her range?”

  “How you doing, Jonah?”

  “You sure she’s Polish? She doesn’t sound Polish. What’s she look like?”

  “What do you think? How’s Celeste?”

  “Not taking to Belgium too well, I’m afraid. She thinks they’re all savages here.”

  “Are they?”

  “Well, they do eat fries with their mussels. But they sight-read like nobody’s business. I want you to come see for yourself.”

  “Whenever. You got a ticket for me?”

  “Yep. When can you leave?” We hit one of those big rallentando measures, the kind we used to take so effortlessly together, in late Romantic lieder. Mutual mind reading, under the gun, two moving targets. We still had it. “Need you, Mule.”

  “Have you any idea what you’re asking? You haven’t a clue. It’s been years since I’ve played anything real.” I glanced up, too late, at Teresa, who was fussing with the coffeemaker. Her face was broken. “Anything classical, I mean.”

  “No, bro. You don’t know what I’m asking. There’re pianists on every street corner here, selling little ivory-coated pencils to make ends meet. That, or they’re on the National Arts Register dole. I wouldn’t be calling if all I needed was a damn piano player.”

  “Jonah. Just tell me. Make it fast and painless.”

  “I’m forming an a cappella group. I have two high voices that’ll make you want to take your own life Gothic and Renaissance polyphony. Nothing later than 1610.”

  I couldn’t stop laughing. “And you want me to—what? Keep your books for you?”

  “Oh, no. We’ll hire a real crook to do that. You, we need for the bass.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. You know the last time I sang seriously? The last voice lesson I had was sophomore year in college.”

  “Exactly. Everyone else I’ve listened to has been ruined by training. You, at least, won’t have anything to unlearn. I’ll give you lessons.”

  “Jonah. You know I can’t sing.”

  “Not asking you to sing, Mule. Just asking you to be the bass.”

  He went through the arguments. He was after an entirely new style, so old that it had passed out of collective memory. Nobody knew how to sing this stuff yet; they were all improvising. Power was dead—vibrato, size, fire, lacquered glow, all the arsenal of tricks for filling a big concert hall or soaring above an orchestra had to be killed off. And in their evacuated place, he needed lightness, clarity, pitch, angels on pins.

  “Imperialism’s over, Mule. We’re going back to a world before domination. We’re learning to sing like ancient instruments. Organs of God’s thoughts.”

  “You’re not going spiritual on me, are you?”

  He laughed and sang, “Gimme that old-time religion.” But he sang in a high, clear conductus style, something from the Notre Dame school, eight hundred years ago. “It’s good enough for me.”

  “You’re mad,” I said.

  “Joey, this is about blending. Merging. Giving up the self. Breathing as a group. All the things we used to think music was, when we were kids. Making five voices sound as if they’re a single vibrating soul. So I’m out here thinking: Of everyone I know in the world, who reads me the best? Who do I share the most genetic material with? Whose throat is closest to mine? Who has more musical feeling in his little finger than anyone else has in their whole—”

  “Don’t patronize me, Jonah.”

  “Don’t argue with your elders and wisers. Trust me on this, Mule. Have I ever not known what I’m doing?” I had to laugh. “I mean, recently.”

  He talked logistics. What he wanted to sing; how to best lift this new, unborn group into orbit. “Is it viable?” I asked.

  “Viable? You mean can we make a living?”

  “Yes. That’s what I mean.”

  “How much money did you say we ended up with, from Da?”

  I might have known: funded, our whole lives, by our parents’ deaths. “Jonah. How can I?”

  “Joey. How can’t you? I need you. Need you in on this. If this thing happens without you, it’s meaningless.”

  When I hung up, I saw Teresa cowering in the corner, an old white lady whose home had just been broken into by a dark young man. She waited for me to explain what was happening. I couldn’t. Even if I’d known.

  “You’re going to him, aren’t you? You’re going over there.” I tried to say something. It started as an objection and ended up a shrug. “Fuck you,” Saint Teresa said. My honeysuckle rose. “Go on. Get out. You never wanted me. You never wanted to make any of this happen.” She leaned forward, her head darting, looking for a weapon. Teresa shrieked at me, full voice, for all the world to hear. If our neighbors called the police, I’d spend the rest of my thirties in jail. “From the beginning, I’ve made myself over for you, for anything that might …” She broke down. I couldn’t take one step toward her. When her head came up, her words were brittle and dead. “And all along, you were just waiting for him to call with some better offer.”

  Conviction entered her, the true fire of performance. She ran to the shelf that carried her hundreds of LPs, and with the kind of strength mothers tap into when they lift automobiles off their pinned children, she tore the shelf out of the wall and filled the room that had been ours with a trash heap of song.

  NOVEMBER 1945 – AUGUST 1953

  Rootie comes. “It’s a miracle,” Da says. That much is obvious, even to me. First she’s pale and milky, like a potato without the skin. In a few weeks, she’s brown, like a potato with the skin back on. Nothing is one color for very long. First, Root is smaller than the smallest violin, but soon she’s too big for me to lift easily. Just like Mama was big before Ruth came, and now she’s back to small again.

  I ask Mama if Root will be in our school. Mama says she already is. Mama says everybody’s in school, always. “You?” I giggle at the idea, embarrassed. “Are you still in school?” She smiles and shakes her head, like she’s saying no. But she’s not. She’s saying the saddest yes I’ve ever heard.

  Jonah’s faster than I am in lessons, but Mama says when we’re alone that that’s because he had a head start. I try harder, but that only makes my brother try harder, too, just enough to stay ahead and beat me. Every day, we do something we’ve never seen before. Sometimes even Mama’s new to it. Little Rootie just lies there and laughs at us. Da’s away teaching physics to grown-ups because everyone’s always in school. When Da comes home, we play at more school, right through dinner and into the evening, when, to close each day, we sing together.

  But even before the singing at day’s end, we have songs. Songs about animals and plants, the presidents, states and capitals. Rhythm and meter games about fractions; chords and intervals for our times tables. Experiments with vibrating strings teach us science. We learn birds by their calls, and countries by their national anthems. For every year that we study in history, Mama has the music. We learn a little German, French, and Italian through snippets of aria. A tune for everything, and everything a tune.

  We go to the museums or the park, collecting leaves and insects. We take tests—sheets of questions on smudgy newsprint that Mama says the state needs in order to see if we’re learning as much as other boys. Jonah and I race through, trying to get the most questi
ons done the fastest. Mama sings to us—“The race is not to the swift”—and makes us go back over.

  Life would be practice for paradise if it were only this. But it isn’t. When the other boys on our street come home from their schools, Mama sends us out—“at least one hour”—to play. The boys always find something wrong with us, and our punishments are always new. They blindfolded us and hit us with sticks. They use us as home plate. Jonah’s not big enough to try to refuse. We hide in secret alley spots, inventing stories to tell Mama on our return, spending the hour singing funny, dissonant rounds, rounds so soft that our torturers can’t hear.

  Mama has an answer for the world. When we’re out together, at the dentist’s office, in the grocery store, or on the subway train, and someone says something or shoots us the evil eye, she tells us, “They don’t know who we are. They think we’re somebody else. People are floating in a leaky boat,” Mama says. “Afraid they’re going under.” Our mother has an answer for that fear. “Sing better,” she says. “Sing more.”

  “People hate us,” I tell her.

  “Not you, JoJo. They hate themselves.”

  “We’re different,” I explain.

  “Maybe they’re not scared of different. Maybe they’re scared of same. If we turn out to be too much like them, who can they be?” I think about this, but she doesn’t really expect an answer. She cups us both by the crowns of our heads. “People who attack you with can’t are afraid you already can.”

  “Why? How can that hurt them?”

  “They think all good things are like property. If you have more, they must have less. But you know, JoJo? Everybody can make more beauty, anytime they need.”

  Months later: “What do we do if they attack?”

  “You’ve got a weapon stronger than anyone’s.” She doesn’t even have to say it anymore, she’s said it so often. The power of your own song. I don’t correct her. I no longer tell her that I don’t know what that means.