Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“I thought you told Da she’s coming back. You said two weeks.”

“I meant two weeks in Da years.” He shook his head in a controlled fury. The rage of confirmation. “Our own little sister. She’s resented us for years. She hates everything about us. Everything she thinks we stand for.” Jonah paced in place, trying to breathe normally. He shook his shoulders and shot his clenched fist into the air. “Power to the purple. Light brown is beautiful.”

“She’s a good deal more than light.” Before he could shut me down, I rushed on. “Poor Rootie.”

Jonah looked at me, rejected. Then he put his fingers to the bridge of his nose and nodded. “Poor all of us.”

We went to Jersey to see Da as soon as we were back in the city. We went for dinner, which he insisted on making. I’d never seen the man so shaken. Whatever reason Ruth gave for quitting school and cutting Da off without a forwarding address had destroyed him. Da’s hands shook as he passed the plates to put out on the table. He slumped about the kitchen, apologizing for being. He tried to make the tomato and chicken stew that Mama had loved to make. Da’s smelled like a damp terry-cloth towel.

Jonah cued up a stack of Italian tenors to accompany dinner. When that distraction didn’t work, he did his best to set the topics. But Da wanted to talk about Ruth. He was a total mess. “She says I am responsible.”

“For what?”

Da just waved my question into the ether.

Jonah lectured at us both. “Let her go where she needs to go. Get out of her way, and she’ll stop blaming you. That’s all she wants. Remember how Mama raised us? ‘Be whatever you want to be.’” I could hear how betrayed he was.

“That is not what your sister wants. She has told me to my face that your mother died…because she married me.”

I slammed my fork down on my plate, splattering the stew. “Good God. How can she even…”

Da went on, talking to no one. “Have I been in terrible error all this time? Did your mother and I do wrong by making you children?”

Jonah tried to laugh. “Frankly, Da? Yes. Some other set of parents should have made us.”

Da said only, “Maybe. Maybe.”

We blasted through what was left of dinner. Jonah and I made short work of the dish cleanup while Da stood by, waving his arms. We talked a little about upcoming concerts. Jonah told Da he was planning to do a Met audition early in the spring. First I’d heard. But then, he’d gotten used to his accompanist reading his mind.

Ruth came up again only as we readied to leave. “Tell us when you hear from her,” Jonah said. He tried not to sound too eager. “Trust me. She’ll surface. People don’t just cut off their own flesh and blood.” He must have heard what he was saying. But Jonah never even flinched. His acting skill now matched his singing. My brother was ready for any audition he cared to take.

As we got our coats, Da broke down. “Boys. My boys.” The word, after all his years in this land, still rhymed with choice. “Please stay here tonight. There is so much room in this place. It must be too late to take the train.”

I checked my watch. Quarter past nine. Jonah was for going. I was for staying. We had two programs to perfect by next week, without enough hours to perfect them. But I wasn’t budging, and Jonah wouldn’t go by himself. Da put Jonah on the living room’s foldout sofa and me on a bedroll on the floor of his study. He didn’t want either of us staying in Ruth’s room. You never knew when the girl might come home in the middle of the night.

I woke at no hour. Someone had broken into the house. In my half state, I heard the police searching down a tip they’d received about illegal fugitives hiding in the neighborhood. Then it sounded like a conversation, hushed voices in the hours before dawn, planning the day. Then I thought the radio was on, tuned to some lightly accented FM announcer. The accent was my father’s, and I was awake. Da was talking to someone on the other side of the wall, in the kitchen, ten steps away from me. Amber seeped in under the crack of my room’s door. For a moment, Jonah and I were spying on our parents where they whispered together in the old kitchen in Hamilton Heights, the night Jonah’s first boarding school application had been rejected for unstated reasons. Now my father whispered with his firstborn son, while I did the eavesdropping, alone. I pictured Da and Jonah, head-to-head across the breakfast table. I couldn’t figure it: My brother never woke up in the mornings without vast external encouragement. I checked the window: still hours from morning. They weren’t just waking; they hadn’t yet fallen asleep. By some secret signal, they’d arranged to stay up after I went down, to discuss in private things not meant for me.

I listened. Da was explaining himself. “How has it become greater than family?” I lay in the dark, listening for Jonah’s reply, but there was none. After a pause, Da spoke again. “It cannot be bigger than family. It cannot become bigger than time. I could have told her what we saw. Should I have told her about the child?” I had no idea what he was talking about. Again, I waited for Jonah to answer, and again he didn’t. He’d grown completely helpless without me.

There was a sound, eerie and grating. At three o’clock in the morning, even “Happy Birthday” sounds terrifying. It took me a few rasps to decide: Da was laughing. Then it wasn’t laughter. Our father was breaking down, and still Jonah said nothing. My hearing swelled until I realized: Jonah wasn’t there. One padded set of footsteps, one clinking spoon against a single teacup, one muffled course of breathing. Da was alone, in his kitchen, in the middle of the night — one of how many nights running? — talking to himself.

He said, “I did not foresee this. I never saw this would come.” Then he said, “Have we made a mistake? Maybe we have understood all wrong?”

I froze in my bedroll. There was only one person he could be talking to. Someone who couldn’t answer. I fought down the urge to fling the door open. Anything out there would have killed me. All I could do was lie still in my makeshift bed, afraid even to breathe, straining to hear what answer he might receive. After a while, I heard my father change. He seemed, through the door, to grow lighter. He said, “Yes, that’s so.” In a voice awful with peace, he added, “Yes, I could not forget that.” I heard him stand and move from the table to the sink. He set the dishes onto the porcelain. He stood there for some time, no doubt gazing out the darkened window above the sink. A groan escaped him. “But our little girl!” He didn’t wait for an answer now, but padded out of the kitchen and down the hallway, to his room.

I never fell back asleep. I dressed at last with dawn and went out into the transformed kitchen. There, in the sink, were two of everything: two cups, two saucers, two spoons.

The whole bus ride back to the city, I sat next to Jonah, needing to ask if he’d heard, not wanting to ask, in the event that he hadn’t. Our father talked to a phantom. He set out a coffee cup for her. Perhaps he talked to her all the time, nightly, when we weren’t there, as if they both still had full days to compare. So long as neither Jonah nor I said anything, I might have invented everything. When we got off at Port Authority, Jonah said, “He’ll never hear from her again.” Only when he added, “She might as well be dead” did I realize he meant Ruth.

I figured that she would have to call us. Whatever Ruth imagined that Da had done to her, he’d done to us, as well. Only now did I see how out of touch we had drifted the last three years, while Jonah and I were on the road. I called so infrequently, usually just birthdays and holidays. I’d always been able to reach Ruth, even if I rarely did. I could not believe that she really wanted to hurt any of us. But with each day out of touch, I began to see how badly I’d refused her, just by living as I lived.