Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Weeks went by and we heard nothing. It occurred to me that she must have gotten into trouble. There was something in the papers every day. People were constantly getting arrested for making speeches, holding rallies, printing pamphlets — all the things Ruth excelled at and had so taken to since starting college. I had nightmares that she was being held in an underground cell where the guards wouldn’t let me see her because the name I gave them didn’t match the one they had on the list.

Jonah took his Met audition. I was to play for him, quavering piano reductions of pit orchestra tutti. I felt like an Italian organ-grinder. “Let me get this straight. I’m supposed to help you put me out of a job?”

“I get a contract with these people, Mule, and we’ll make an honest man out of you.”

“Tell me again why you want to do this?” His voice was about light, air, and upper altitudes, not about power, mass, and histrionics. He sang lieder as if Apollo were whispering into his ear on the fly. Opera seemed perverse. Like forcing a magnificent racehorse into armor for a joust. Not to mention that he hadn’t studied it in years.

“Why? You’re kidding, right? It’s Everest, Mule.”

By which he meant high, white, and cold. Then again, it was steady work. We’d been breaking hearts on the recital circuit for years, and we’d run through all our mother’s insurance legacy. Maybe he was right. Maybe it was time to make a living.

Jonah must have imagined he’d be singing for Mr. Bing himself. Sir Rudolph, however, had other things on his plate the day Jonah did his fire walk. But alerted by Peter Grau, Jonah’s old teacher, the casting people did give him a special listen. Jonah spent the better part of an afternoon passed from one merciless set of ears to another, singing in spaces in the bowels of the new Lincoln Center that ranged from gym-squeaky to bone-dead. Sometimes I played for him. Sometimes he sang a cappella. They ran him through a gamut of sight-singing. Sitting at the keys, I knew that if I played well, my reward would be never to accompany my brother again.

I played well. But not as well as my brother sang. That afternoon, he sounded as if he’d been sandbagging for all our last six months on the road. He did more to seduce these judges than he’d done for full houses in Seattle and San Francisco. He sailed up to the roundest sounds he knew how to make. The jaded New York set squirmed, trying to pretend there wasn’t something special going on. People kept asking where he’d sung, what roles, under whom. Everyone was dumbstruck with his answer. “You’ve never soloed in a choral work? Never sung in front of an orchestra?”

It probably would have been shrewd to stretch the truth a little. But Jonah couldn’t help it. “Not since childhood,” he admitted.

They gave him da Ponte Mozart. He romped through it on a lark. They gave him meaty Puccini breast-beaters. He aired them out. They didn’t know how to position him. They passed him up to a senior casting director, Crispin Linwell. Linwell studied my brother like a man regarding a rack of magazines, the heels of his black leather boots apart, horn-rim glasses pushed up on his forehead, the arms of a cardigan tied around his neck. He made Jonah sing the opening strains of “Auf Ewigkeit,” from Parsifal, cutting him off after a few bars. He sent his aides upstairs on a raiding mission to steal a favorite soprano, Gina Hills, out of a closed rehearsal. The woman came into the room cursing roundly. Crispin Linwell waved her down. “My dear, we need you for a noble experiment.”

Miss Hills calmed a little when she learned that the experiment involved the first love duet from act two of Tristan. She wanted Isolde, and thought this trial was hers. Linwell insisted on playing the piano reduction. He set them a smoldering tempo, then let the two of them loose.

My brother, of course, had often looked at the score. He’d known the scene by ear for a decade. But he’d never sung a single note of it anywhere outside of lessons and our apartment shower. Worse, it had been ages since he’d sung anything with anyone. When Mr. Linwell announced his experiment, I knew the jig was up. Jonah would be exposed as just another pretty voice, unable to work and play with others. Another over-reaching recitalist, stumbling in his bid to make it onto the big stage.

After about two minutes, it dawned on Miss Hills that she was playing a love scene with a black man. Realization rippled through her with the floating chords. I saw the uncertainty turn into revulsion as she scrambled to figure out why she’d been set up for this ambush. She flubbed an entrance, and we lived through an awful moment when I was sure she was going to run screaming from the room. Only the thought of her career held her in place.

Then the old musical philter did its trick again. Something came up out of my brother’s mouth, something I’d never heard him do. Eight measures later, Gina Hills was smitten in midphrase. She wasn’t a homely woman, but she was built like an opera singer. Her face was like her voice: best sampled from the middle of the house. My brother somehow turned her into Venus. He invested her with his full power, and she took it. The traction of his phrases drew her into his orbit. They started out on opposite sides of the piano, fifteen feet from each other. Four minutes in, they locked gazes and began dancing around each other. She wouldn’t touch him, but reached out as if to. He wouldn’t close that last gap between them that their duet so completely destroyed. The wonder of flaunting in broad daylight in front of a handful of listeners the last great taboo only stoked her sound.

Jonah started out with the score in front of him. But as they surged through the scene, he needed it less and less, singing over the top of the lowered page, finally jettisoning it altogether. Gina Hills hit the top of a sustained phrase, her face filling with blood. Jonah kept building, wave on wave, until the knot of listeners disappeared and this couple stood alone, naked and lifted, turning need into the most sublime delay available to the human body. This was 1967, the year the Supreme Court made it legal, even in that third of the country where it was still forbidden, for Jonah to marry a woman of this Isolde’s color, a woman of our father’s race.

Linwell rolled out with a gliss, stood up at the keys, and waved his fingers. “Yikes. All right, people. Air raid’s over. Back to your normal lives.” He snagged Gina Hills, who, in some private game of musical chairs, once the music stopped, refused to look at my brother. Linwell pinched her shoulders. “You were on some other planet, love.” Miss Hills looked up, glowing and crestfallen. She’d wanted the role more than she wanted love. Then, for ten minutes, she’d inhabited it, the ancient tale of chemically induced disaster. She wobbled, still under the drug’s residue. Linwell could have promised her an opening night in the next season, and she’d still have left that rehearsal room subdued.

When the room cleared, Linwell turned to us. His English eyes narrowed at me and wondered whether he could get away with asking me to wait in the hall. But he let me ride, then turned to absorb my brother. “What are we going to do with you?” Jonah had a notion or two. But he kept them hidden. Linwell shook his head and examined his clipboard of notes from the afternoon. I could see him making the calculation: Was it still too soon? Would ever be too soon, on such a country’s stage?

He set down the scribbles and looked my brother in the eye. “I’ve heard about you, of course.” It felt like a police shakedown. Don’t lie to us, boy. We know you’re up to something. “I thought you sang lieder. Not even that. I heard you did Dowland.” He couldn’t mask his distaste.