Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

My brother’s debut recording, Lifted Voice — a title he hated — was released, to several favorable and even a few excited reviews. Purists found the recital miscellany more suited to a midcareer singer than to a first-timer. Some reviewers called the sampler approach “light,” saying Jonah should have done a whole lieder cycle or a single-composer collection. This boy’s attempt to show he could sing anything somehow overreached. Yet for most reviewers, the reach took hold.

The record jacket showed a late brooding landscape by Caspar David Friedrich. The back of the jacket had our black-and-white head shots and a midrange shot of Jonah onstage in concert dress. A silver medallion on the front bore a quote from Howard Silverman’s Times review of the Town Hall recital: “This young man’s sound has something deeper and more useful in it than mere perfection… His every note rings with exhilarating freedom.”

The disk sold quietly. Harmondial was pleased, banking on long-term return on investment. They considered Jonah a buy and hold. We two were stunned that anyone bothered to listen to the thing. “Jesus, Joey! Thousands of people have added us to their record collections, and we don’t even know them. My picture could be pressing up against Geraldine Farrar’s kisser somewhere, even as we speak.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“One of her early pub photos. A nice little Cho-Cho-San.”

“And somewhere else, you’re pressing up against the tip of Kirsten Flagstad’s spear point.”

Jonah imagined that, having made a good recording, we had only to sit back and wait for the jobs to pour in. Mr. Weisman did book us more regularly into bigger cities, and we could just about live now on what we made. But week to week, our life was still the same university concert series and festival-dredging it had been before the record appeared.

I drop the needle onto the first track — Schubert’s “Erl-King,” a Marian Anderson standard — and I circle back into that closed loop. The record spins; the piano gallop resumes. Jonah and I send out the song’s surging message, unchanged. But the people to whom we thought to send it are gone.

The same president who passed the Civil Rights Act forced through Congress a blank check for widening the war in Asia. Jonah and I carried around our draft cards, nothing if not law-abiding. But the shadow of the call passed over us. We slipped through the minefield, exiting out the far side, too old to be tapped. The summer after our record, Chicago erupted. Three days later, Cleveland followed. It was high July again, just as it had been when we’d laid down the tracks. And once again, the bewildered reporters tried to blame the heat. Civil rights was heading north. The chickens, as Malcolm had said, were coming home to roost. Violence accompanied us, nightly, on our hotel televisions. I stared at the collective hallucination, knowing I was somehow the author of it. Every time I put our record on the turntable to hear what we two had done, another city burned.

“They’ll have to declare nationwide martial law.” The idea seemed to appeal to Jonah. This was the man who’d lain on the sidewalk of Watts, moving his lips to some ethereal score, waiting to be shot. High Fidelity had just run a feature, “Ten Singers Under Thirty Who Will Change the Way You Listen to Lieder,” naming him to their number-three spot. My brother’s country was just fine. Martial law might even help stabilize our bookings.

I looked out from the upper stories of antiseptic hotel rooms onto a carousel of cities whose names bled into one another, watching for the next new trickles of smoke. The music that year was still in denial—“I’m a Believer”; “Good Vibrations”; “We Can Work It Out.” Only this time, tens of millions of twenty-year-olds who had been lied to since birth were out in the streets saying no, singing power, shouting burn. I drop the needle down on the tracks of our Wolf songs and hear for the first time where the two of us were. My brother and I, alone, were heading back into that burning building that the rest of the country was racing to evacuate.

We called Da from San Francisco just before the High Holidays. Not that he ever kept track. Long distance, back then, was still a three-minute civil defense drill, saved for funerals and machine-gunned best wishes. Jonah got on and did a prestissimo recap of our recent concerts. Then I got on and greeted Da with the first few lines of the Kol Nidre in Hebrew, which I’d just learned phonetically out of a book. My accent was so bad, he couldn’t understand me. I asked to talk to Ruth. Da said nothing. I thought he still didn’t understand my English. So I asked again.

“Your sister has broken with me.”

“She what? What are you talking about, Da?”

“She has moved away. Sie hat uns verlassen. Sie ist weg. ”

“When did this happen?”

“Just now.” To Da, that might have meant anything.

“Where’d she go?” Jonah, standing nearby, quizzed me with a look.

Da didn’t have the faintest idea.

“Did something happen? Have the two of you…?”

“There was a fight.” I found myself praying he wouldn’t give me details. “The whole country is rebellion. Everything has become revolution. So of course, it’s finally come your sister’s and my turn.”

“Can’t you get her address from the university? You’re her father. They’ll have to tell you.”

Shame filled his voice. “She has dropped out of school.” More grief than when he told us, that December day at Boylston eleven years before, that our mother was dead. The first death still fit into his cosmology. This new disaster pushed him over into a place no theories could accommodate. His daughter had disowned him. She had torn loose in some astral discontinuity Da couldn’t comprehend, even as it broke over him.

“Da? What…what happened? What did you do?”

“We had a fight. Your sister thinks… We had a fight about your mother.”

I looked at Jonah, helpless. He held out his hand to take the phone. I gripped the receiver, ready to take it to my grave.

“I am the evil one.” Da’s voice broke. He’d seen the future, and his children were it. But this disaster had somehow hijacked his vision. “I am the enemy. There is nothing I can do.” All our lives he’d told us, “Run your own race.” Now he knew just how worthless that advice had always been. No one had their own race. No one’s race was theirs to run. “I killed your mother. I ruined the three of you.”

I could hear my own blood coursing in my ears. Ruth had told our father this. Worse: He’d reached the same conclusion. I felt my lips moving. Any objection I could make would only confirm him. At last I managed to say, “Don’t be crazy, Da.”

“How did we come here?” he answered.

I handed Jonah the phone and went to the hotel window. Down in the square below, in the gathering dusk, two street people argued. Jonah talked on to Da for several sentences. “She’ll show up. She’ll be back. Give her two weeks, tops.” After a little gap of listening, he added, “You, too.” Then the call was over.

Jonah didn’t want to talk about it. So for a long time, we didn’t. He wanted to rehearse. I sounded like shit pushed through a sieve. At last, he smiled at me and gave up. “Joey. Cool it. It’s not the end of the world.”

“No. Just of our family.”

Something in him said his family had ended years ago. “Mule. It’s done. It’s not your fault. What are you going to do about it now? Ruth has been working up to this for years. She’s just been waiting for the moment when she could punish us all for being who we are. Bust us for all the things we’ve done to her. Haven’t done. Whatever.”