Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“I don’t take home…” I let it drop. I saw myself, a double agent. My sister wanted to talk to me. I could hear in her voice the new worlds opening up all around her. She wanted to give them to me. I had to listen with enough approval and enthusiasm to keep her going, trick her out of her current address, and take it back to my father and brother.

She turned to Robert, who was studying the beer in front of him. “Joey here plays a mean Grieg. If blacks could vote, they’d want to elect him their cultural ambassador.”

Robert hid his curled lips behind his lifted glass.

“Are you still in the city, Ruth?” I waved out the plate-glass window. “Have you moved downtown?”

“Oh, we live all over the place.” I glanced at Robert. But that “we” seemed to mean more than just the two of them. “Town to town. Just like you and Jonah. Maybe not quite as deluxe.” I felt myself grinning too much. “Joey stays in hotels,” Ruth told Robert. “They ever have trouble finding a room for you, Joey? They ever have to send you to some other establishment?”

I said nothing. I didn’t know what I’d done to her, except live. Above her challenge stare, Ruth’s cheeks wavered. “So how’s tricks, Joseph? You doing okay?” She hadn’t come to fight. She’d come because she needed me.

“I’m fine. Aside from missing you.”

She looked away, anywhere but at me. Her face twitched all over. Robert handed her a large black leather satchel. Ruth rooted through the bag and took out a manila envelope. She placed it on the booth in front of me. “Robert has been helping me look into the fire.”

Bizarre angles played out in me. My sister had joined a religious cult. She was mixing in something illegal. But as I reached out for the envelope, I knew what fire. Inside the envelope was a sheaf of xerographic copies of dozen-year-old documents. While I examined them, Ruth held her breath. Something was on trial here — me, the two of them, the nation, the entire compounding past. I read as best as I could, unable to concentrate with those eyes appraising me.

“We’ve been staring at this our whole lives. I know you’ve thought the same thing, many times. But it wasn’t until I met Robert, and I told him all about Mama… It’s so obvious, Joey. So obvious, I had to have it pointed out to me.”

I handled the copies, police reports of our gutted house in Hamilton Heights, the house we grew up in. The prose sank into leaden detail: measurements, times, charred inventories. I read over the destruction of my life as written by a committee of public servants. The ten-year-old girl who’d bitten the restraining fireman’s hand while trying to break free and rescue her mother could not have survived one paragraph without outside support. I skimmed the last two pages and looked up. Ruth was staring at me, hopeful, afraid. “You see? You get what this means?”

She swirled the pages and found the one she was after. She turned it toward me, fixing the indictment with her fingernail. In so many stories about mixed-race people in fiction, their fingernails always identify them as really black. Ruth’s fingernail hung on the word accelerants. Presence of trace accelerants throughout the foundation level.

“You know what those are?”

“Oily rags. Half-empty gas cans. The kind of stuff Mrs. Washington kept in her basement.”

She wavered and glanced at Robert. She rallied. “Things deliberately planted to speed the rate of burn.”

Robert nodded. “Somebody accelerating.”

“Where… How do you…” I looked back down, reading furiously. “Nothing here says anything like that.”

Robert bit into his words. “Now that’s a fact.”

“Accelerants mean arson,” Ruth said.

I sat there shaking my head. “It doesn’t say that anywhere. This report doesn’t even—”

A one-note, mirthless laugh from Robert cut me off. I was a hopeless naïf. Worse: a classical musician. With brothers like me, the fire would have stayed an accident forever, just like the authorities wanted it to.

“And if it’s arson…” Ruth was waiting for me to follow her. But her eyes knew this was a losing proposition.

Robert focused on a grim horizon. “If it’s arson, it’s murder.”

I looked down at the smudged photocopies for some fact to steady me. “Ruth. Listen to what you’re saying. There’s no way. It’s insane.”

“It’s at least that,” Ruth agreed. Robert Rider sat still.

Then the fire that took my mother rose up through my spinal fuse and burst in my brain. The floor softened beneath me. I reached out and braced my hands against the booth, a block chord spread across the keys but making no sound. My decade-old nightmares of Mama’s suffocation flooded back, in full, adult daylight. I couldn’t let myself think the thought. The thought I was thinking.

I looked up at Ruth. Her face smeared. She saw my animal panic. “Oh, Da didn’t have anything to do with it.” Her voice held some fraction of pity, behind the disgust. “The man’s not clever enough to know what started the fire. But he’s responsible for her death, just as if he had.”

The craziness of her words brought me back. “Ruth. You’ve lost your mind.” She stared at me with something ready to protect itself at any cost. I dropped my eyes down to the nonexistent evidence. “If the police report found evidence of arson, why didn’t they say it was arson?”

“Why bother?” Ruth looked out over the crowded room. “Nobody was hurt. Just a black woman.”

“Then why bother even to mention the accelerants in the report?”

Ruth just shrugged and stared into nothing. But Robert leaned forward. “You have to know how these people work. They put in the barest minimum of fact, so they can’t get busted if it ever comes back to them. But they’re never going to put down one single word that might turn the thing into a case. Not if they don’t have to.”

“I just don’t understand. How could it have been deliberate? Who could have wanted…”

Ruth held her head. “White man married to a black woman? Six million people in New York were holding that bomb.”

“Ruth! There was no bomb. The furnace exploded.”

“The fire was helped along by something somebody put there.”

There had been violence. Steady, lifelong. Words, muffled threats, shoves, spit: all the confusions I’d seen in childhood and refused to name. But not this level of madness. “Listen. If this was an attack against a mixed-race couple, then it was an attack on Da, as well. Who’s to say the attacker was…”

“Joey. Joey.” Ruth’s eyes filled with liquid. She grieved for me. “Why are you hiding from this? Don’t you see what they have done to us?”

Robert lowered the edge of his enormous hand to the table. “If the police had had a black suspect for this thing, the man would have fried six weeks after the crime.”

I looked up at this stranger. How long had they been working on this theory together? Where had they gotten these photocopies? My sister had said more about her mother’s death to this outsider than she’d ever shared with me. I sat rubbing water droplets off the outside of my glass. We’d been born in the same place, within a few years of one another, of the same parents. Now my sister lived in another country.

“Da collected on Mama’s life insurance.” I studied her as I spoke. I only now realized how criminal we’d been toward her. Most of that insurance money went into launching Jonah and me into performing orbit. Ruth had gotten only a fraction, for college tuition. And now she’d quit school. “If the insurance company had even a shred of evidence to make them doubt…”

Ruth looked at Robert, their proof wobbling. I’d wanted only to relieve her. I’d done just the opposite. Robert shrugged. “I’m sure the insurance company looked into it, as far as they were able to. They couldn’t prove fraud. Once that wasn’t the issue, they couldn’t be bothered with how the woman died.”