The Time of Our Singing

  “This aunt of yours. I knew thousands of your aunts. I was with them.” She breathed in and opened her eyes again. “But now I am here. Here to tell you so.”

  Every muscle in her face was ours. We couldn’t stop pushing for some proof of kinship: town names, what we knew of our grandmother’s Russian roots, anything to find the connection. She smiled and shook her head. The shake was Da’s. And in that one tremor, I knew him. Jewish grief. Grief so great, he never had an answer for kinship but to keep it from us.

  Her English was weak, and she shuddered at German. What little Russian we had came from Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev. But her words were clear as silence: You are one of us, always. Not by law, but the law is a technicality. You could convert. Rejoin. Relearn, even for the first time. “You know,” she told us, by way of good-bye, “if you want family? You are sharing family with half this audience.”

  We were singing in late July of 1984, in the Palais des Papes at the Avignon Festival, when my family found me. Word came from our arts management in Brussels, who’d gotten it in a telegram from Milton Weisman, our old agent. Mr. Weisman would die the next year, never having owned a fax machine or heard of E-mail. Milton Weisman: the last man in the developed world to send telegrams.

  The telegram was stuffed inside an envelope and sent by overnight courier to our hotel in Provence. I picked it up at the front desk with my room key, figuring it was some contract I’d forgotten to sign. I didn’t read it until I was in my room.

  Bad news from home. Your brother has been killed. Call your wife as soon as this reaches you: My regrets. Forgive this messenger. Ever. Milton.

  I read it again, and wound up even further from sense. For the sickest interval, it was really Jonah, dead in some freak alternate world just now collapsing into mine, replacing the one I’d foolishly held faith with. Then it wasn’t Jonah, but some brother I’d never known. Then it wasn’t even me, my brother, my wife, but a split-off Strom family trapped behind soundproof glass, rapping on it in silent horror.

  I went down the hall to Jonah and Celeste’s room. My hands were shaking so badly, I had to knock twice. Jonah opened the door and read my face at once. All I could do was shove the words into his hands. I followed him into his room. Jonah put the telegram on his bed, still looking at it. He raised his palms. “The man is a lot older than when we worked with him. That must be it.”

  “‘Forgive this messenger’?”

  Jonah nodded, conceding a point I didn’t even know I’d made. “So call.”

  “Call who? My wife?” But I knew who Milton Weisman meant. He was from another time, a moral man whose names for things were as dated as the music he represented. He’d neglected to give any phone number. He figured I’d remember.

  I sat on Jonah’s hotel bed for minutes, eyes closed, a receiver in hand, a parody of prayer, trying to remember the number in Atlantic City I once knew as automatically as I knew the changes to “Honeysuckle Rose.” Memory required forgetting everything, especially the hope of recall. At last my fingers dialed, the numbers still in my muscles, the way pieces of piano music still lived in my fingers long after I’d forgotten all about them. A pitched jangle at the other end announced the States. Colors that were submerged in me surfaced at that sound. I sat savoring them—Coltrane, high-fat ice cream, the Times on a Sunday, the sound of a Middle Atlantic drawl. I was like a wino window-shopping outside a package store.

  The number had been disconnected. An operator with a Spanish accent gave me another. I dialed the new number, my courage beginning to falter. Then she picked up. For a moment, I’d called to tell her I’d be late for breakfast. Muscle memory, too, the thing that doesn’t stop until our muscles do. I heard myself ask, “Teresa?” A second later, before she could say anything, I heard myself ask again. My voice bounced back in maddening delay, the time it took for the word to make the loop from Europe to outer space to America back up to the communications satellite and down to Europe’s surface again. Canon at unison.

  She needed no other sound. She struggled to say the syllables of my name, not quite managing. At last she got out a comic, choked “Jo-ey!” The nickname she rarely called me, out of too much love. She laughed, and that sound, too, quickly broke up and weeded over.

  “Teresa. Ter. I got the strangest message. From Milton Weisman …” I could barely talk, distracted by the echo of my own voice bouncing back like crazed, imitative counterpoint against my own words.

  “Joseph, I know. I told him to write you. I’m so sorry. It’s so horrible.”

  Her words were pure dissonance. I couldn’t find the key. I had to force myself to wait, so our words wouldn’t collide in the satellite echo. “What is? His cable made no …”

  She drew up short. I heard her turn like a massive freighter, doubling back to fish me out of the water. “It’s your sister. She called me. She called me. She must have remembered my name from …” From when I had never introduced them. The idea of hearing at last from a woman Teresa had wanted to love broke her down into time-lapse crying.

  “Ruth?” At that syllable, Jonah jerked up in the chair where he listened. He stood and leaned toward me. I held him off with a palm. “What’s happened? Is she … ?”

  “Her husband,” Teresa cried. “It’s so awful. They say he was … He didn’t make it, Joseph. He isn’t … He never …”

  Robert. My wave of relief—Ruth alive—snapped back in horror: Robert dead. The whiplash shut me down, and I couldn’t breathe. Teresa started talking again before I started hearing. She laid out a thing I’d need explained to me over and over again. Even now. She went on in detail, details impossible for her to know and useless to my understanding.

  I must have cut her off. “Is there a way I can reach her?”

  “Yes.” Excited, ashamed. Part of the family at last. “She gave me a number, in case … Just a minute.” And in the seconds it took Teresa to find her address book, I lived all the lives that mine had beaten out of me. I sat holding the line, stopped. Robert Rider was dead. My sister’s husband—killed. Ruth, from nowhere, wanted me to know. She had tracked me back to the woman who would always know how to find me, the woman who faithful Joseph was sure to stay with forever. But I’d sentenced that woman to oblivion years ago.

  In the seconds while I waited for Teresa to come back, she became infinitely vulnerable to me, infinitely good. I’d hurt her beyond imagining, and here she was, glad for the chance to help me in my hour. All good things were scattering. Death fed faster, the more it took. We get nothing; a handful of weeks. The best we have is broken up or thrown stupidly away. Teresa came back on the line and read me a number. I wrote it down, blindly. I’d forgotten how many digits an American phone number had. Teresa corrected my mistakes in dictation, and we were done.

  “I love you,” I told her. And got back silence. Of all the things I thought she might say, this wasn’t one. “Teresa?”

  “I … I’m so sorry, Joseph. I never met them. I wish I had. But I’m as sorry. as if he’d been …” When she started again, it was forced natural. “Did you know I got married?” I couldn’t even exclaim. “Yep, married! To Jim Miesner. I’m not sure you two ever met.” The bullet-headed man she used to come to my bar with, before me. “And I’ve got the most beautiful little girl! Her name is Danuta. I wish you could meet her.”

  “How? How old is she?”

  She paused. Not the pause of satellites. “Five. Well, closer to six.” Her silence was defensive. But we all have the right to make what we need. “I … I’m back with my family. With my father. You were right about all of that.”

  I got off the phone, polite to the point of numb. I wobbled to my feet. Jonah was looking at me, waiting. “It’s Robert.”

  “Robert.”

  “Robert Rider. Your brother-in-law. He was shot by a policeman over a month ago. There was an arrest. Some struggle. I … didn’t get all the details.”

  Jonah’s shoulders tensed. What details? Death settled all the details. In his face
, I read the extent of his banishment. Ruth had tried to contact me. The calls, the messages, all for me alone. She’d never once tried to reach him. “How is she?”

  “Teresa didn’t know.”

  “I meant Teresa.” He flicked his fingers toward his chest: Give it here. I didn’t know what he wanted until I looked down and saw the telephone number crumpled in my palm. I handed it over. “Area code two-one-five. Where is that?”

  Nowhere I’d ever lived. He gestured toward the phone. I shook my head. I needed time. Time to put together all the time that had just come apart.

  We sang that night. With what concentration I had, I braced for catastrophe. But somehow we survived, dragged along by overpractice. We took the slowest Josquin in history. Those in the audience who weren’t scandalized or bored to death fell through the auditorium floor and descended into the cracks between space. Whatever the final verdict, no one would ever hear its like again.

  I lay in bed that night thinking of Ruth. Our sister had been way out ahead of us. She’d jumped into the future long before Jonah or I had admitted to the present. She’d seen what was coming down. She was riding the nightmare before her older brothers had awakened from the dream. I’d always imagined that Ruth’s suffering came from being too light to merit race’s worst injuries. That night, in a crowded hotel in Avignon where most guests assumed I was from Morocco, I finally saw. Race’s worst injuries are color-blind.

  Something kept Jonah up, too. It wasn’t the Josquin. At 3:00 A.M., I heard him pacing in the hall outside my door, wondering whether to knock. I called to him, and he walked in as if keeping an appointment. “Pennsylvania,” he said. I just blinked in the dark. “Area code two-one-five. Eastern Pennsylvania.” I tried to fit the information to my sister. Da’s last hallucination had her moving to California. That’s where I’d always imagined her. Jonah didn’t sit. He stood at the window and pulled back the drape. On the horizon, the Palais des Papes glowed like a monstrous Gothic illuminated manuscript. “I’ve been thinking.” He made the words stretch from last afternoon all the way back several years. “She must be right. Ruth must be right. I mean, about … the fire. No other way.”

  He looked out the window, on all the violence he’d so long and beautifully denied. Jonah had met Robert only through me. The details of Robert’s death were to us still as obscure as God. But this death confirmed the central fact of our lives, the one we’d forever kept as abstract as the art we gave ourselves to. We’d lived as if murder weren’t constant in the place we came from. We hid in the concert hall, sanctuary from the world’s real sound. But thirty years ago—a lifetime—long before we knew how to read the story, stray hatred scattered us. As Jonah said the words, the fact turned obvious. And just as obvious: Some part of me had always believed.

  He stood for a long time, saying nothing. Nor could I say anything to him. But Jonah was my brother. We had, at one time or another, played everything together. Alone of all things, we knew each other. He’d taught me, and I him: All music lived and died inside the rests. Sometime around four o’clock, he said, “Call her.” He’d been keeping his eye on the clock, on the time differences, for the very last moment it would be decent to call.

  I jacked myself out of bed, threw on a robe, and sat again with a phone in my hands. I tried to pass the receiver to him, but he refused. He wasn’t the one she’d called. I dialed the number, methodical as scales. Again, the jangle of an American ring, followed by its transatlantic echo. Between each ring, I rejected a thousand opening words. Rootie. Root. Ms. Strom. Mrs. Rider. Laughing, grieving, begging her forgiveness. Nothing felt real. Ruth. It’s Joseph. Your brother.

  Then the click of the receiver lifting on that other continent, the sound of a voice that killed all preparation. Instead of my sister, an old man. “Hello?” he challenged. A man who sounded a hundred years old. I froze in his voice, worse than stage fright. “Hello? Who’s there? Who is this?” On the line, in the room behind him, younger voices asked if there was something wrong.

  Paths collapsed upon themselves. “Dr. Daley?” I asked. When he grunted, I said, “This is your grandson.”

  THE VISITATION

  During the call to Philadelphia, Jonah hovered at my elbow. But he wouldn’t take the phone when I handed it to him. Speech without pitches terrified him. He wanted me between him and where we came from. My grandfather put Ruth on the line. She tried to tell me what had happened to Robert, but she couldn’t begin. Her voice was past anger, past warmth, past memory. Past everything but shock. The month since her husband’s death had done nothing to help her back. Nor would years.

  She got out two numb sentences. Then she gave me back to our grandfather. William Daley couldn’t quite grasp which of Ruth’s brothers I was. I said I’d very much like to meet him. “Young man, I turned ninety six weeks ago. If you want to meet me, you’d best catch the next flight out.”

  I told Jonah I wanted to go. The idea of returning twisted Jonah’s face, half temptation, half disgust. “You can’t fix anything, Joey. You know that? You can’t fix what’s already happened.” But he pushed me away with his free hand while he pulled with the other. “No, of course. Go. One of us has to. It’s Ruth. She’s back.” He seemed to think I might at least fix the things that hadn’t happened yet.

  I bought an open ticket. Ruth was back. But she’d never really left. We were the ones who’d gone away.

  My uncle Michael met me at Philadelphia International. He wasn’t hard to pick out of the crowd. All I had to do was look. He picked me out, too, as soon as I came through the passenger chute. What could be easier? Bewildered, middle-aged, mixed-race boy gazing all over the place in excitement and shame. I moved toward him, holding my two carry-ons in front of me as if they were delinquent children. My uncle came up to me, as shaky as I was, but empty-handed. After a second’s hesitation, he took my shoulders with the strangest, most wonderful grace. Don’t know you. Don’t know why. But I will.

  It amused him, how awkward two total strangers could be. We were total foreigners, connected by blood in another life. “You remember me?” Dazed, I did. I’d last seen him for all of four minutes, when I was thirteen, a third of a century ago, at my mother’s funeral. Even more remarkable: He remembered me. “You’ve changed. You’ve gotten …” He snapped his fingers, jogging his memory.

  “Older?” I suggested. He clapped his hands and pointed at me: Bingo.

  He took one of the bags and we walked the long concourse to the parking lot. He asked about the flight, Europe, and my brother. I asked about Ruth—alive; Dr. Daley—also, remarkably. Michael told me of his wife and children, his lot in life. He was a personnel officer at Penn. “Only do this chauffeur job in my after hours, when vanished relations come back from the dead.” He looked me up and down, in the wonder of genetic recognition. We looked more like each other than either of us could accept. He seemed to be deciding whether his own nephew could really be white.

  His car was the Hindenburg. Years in a small foreign country will do that to a person’s sense of scale. Michael started the engine, and a burst of exuberance blared out of the dashboard. It was only two beats, but at a volume I’d forgotten, from a rhythm section wider than oppression is long. It had been forever since I’d heard anything like it. In something short of embarrassment, Michael leaned forward and snapped off the stream.

  “Please. Don’t shut it off for me.”

  “Just old R & B. My feel-good. My church. What I listen to when I’m alone.”

  “It sounded like a dream.”

  “You’d think a man well into his fifties would have outgrown that.”

  “Not until we die.”

  “Amen. And not even then.”

  “I used to play that stuff.” He looked at me in disbelief. “In Atlantic City. Only, you know, solo piano. Tip glass on the music rack. Liberace Covers Motown. The old Eastern European émigrés who came down for holidays couldn’t get enough.”

  Michael coughed so hard, I thought I’d
have to take the wheel.

  “People are strange.”

  He whistled. “You got that. Stranger than anyone.” He flipped the radio back on, although he doused the volume. We listened together, each according to his needs. By the time we hit the heart of town, we were harmonizing. Michael did this outrageous full-pipe falsetto, and I hit the changes in the bass. He smiled at my passing tones. Theory can help get you through a shortfall of soul—at least in the easy keys.

  We turned off the highway onto local streets. The size of the most modest apartment block amazed me after years in hunchbacked Ghent. We neared his boyhood house. Michael grew morose. “Rough times. Trickle down shakes the last few golden drops on inner Philly. Every cheap scrap of manufacture has headed offshore. Then it’s our fault for doing crack.”

  I was at sea. I couldn’t even ask for definitions.

  Michael looked out the window, seeing his old neighborhood through my eyes. His face was racked with betrayal. “You would have loved this street. So fine once. No way you can even recognize it now. We’ve been trying to get the doctor out of here for the last five years. He’s not moving. Insists on dying inside that monstrosity. Riding out the decline and fall until the house collapses around him or his body gives up, whichever comes first. ‘What would happen to Mama if we sold the house to strangers?’”

  “Mama?” My grandmother. Nettie Ellen Daley. “Isn’t she …”

  “Oh, yeah. Completely. Two years ago. The doctor hasn’t quite come into possession of the fact yet. A real ass-buster, I have to tell you. My sisters and me, coming all the way in here, five times a week. We go through caretakers like chocolate through a dog.”

  His street indeed reeled from the present. Even the most stately old houses had died intestate. We slowed and turned into the driveway of an ample house bucking the tide around it. Michael flipped off the radio as we hit the driveway mouth. He caught me smiling at the gesture. “Old habit.”