Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“What? Thought what? Why didn’t you at least say something? Or is that part of the great unspeakable secret?”

“I thought… I didn’t want to make it…” She hung her head in shame. For all of us, I suppose. “That was my father.”

I looped back. “Your father came to hear you?”

“Us,” she croaked. “Hear us.” And he’d left in disgust before she could lure him back with his favorite song. I worked through the recap in silence. Her father, who made her listen every Sunday to a music he now hated her for falling in love with. Her lover, whom she mistook for a native speaker. My own Sunday music, which would only have thickened the man’s invisible spit. Spit meant for me, but hitting his daughter.

I fell against the brick of the Glimmer Club, next to her. “Did you — have you talked to him since?”

She couldn’t even shake her head. “Mom won’t put him on when I call. She’ll barely talk to me herself. I went by the house, and they — he came to the door and put on the burglar chain.”

She broke down. I led her inside the empty club, where I could take her into a back room and put my arm around her without being arrested. Mr. Silber heard his prize nightingale crying, and he rushed about trying to make her a cup of weak tea.

“You can’t let this happen.” I stroked her hair, without conviction. “Family’s bigger than…this. You have to patch things up. Nothing’s worth a split this big.”

She looked at me through the red, raw wet of her face. Horror spread there, spilled wine. She clamped a tourniquet around my upper arm and buried herself in my chest. I felt I’d just killed a child while driving and would spend the rest of my life with memory as my penance.

Teresa never used it against me, but I was all she had. Me and the saltwater taffy factory. My visits to her apartment now had a tinge of volunteer work. We ran out of things to say to each other, but Teresa never noticed. She could smile and say nothing for longer than I knew how to reply.

I grew obsessed with her father. I slipped little questions about him into our dinner conversations. It irritated her, but I couldn’t keep from fishing. Where did he work? He was an appliance repairman in town. Where had he grown up? Saddle Brook and Newark. What did he vote? Lifelong straight Democratic, just like my parents. I could never get to what I needed to know before she clammed up.

We ran out of things to do together, even in the few hours when we were both off work. I suggested we practice a little. I could give her some pointers. She leapt at the idea. She couldn’t get enough. She wanted to hear everything I knew about breath support, open throat, covering — all the scraps I’d picked up from Jonah over the years. “Real singing. Famous singing.” She had the same appetite for these professional secrets as her girlfriends at the factory had for Princes Charles and Rainier.

I told her what I knew. But everything I taught her made her worse. She’d sung just fine when she met me. Better than fine: beautifully. She turned every tune vulnerable. She knew what each song needed. She charmed without knowing — freshness, clarity, her inadvertent sexiness, that jumpy rhythm that took hold of her body and wouldn’t let her go until the finish. But now, armed with the lessons I gave her, she began to make a stagy, polished, domed tone that sounded freakish. I’d cost her her father. I was costing her her voice. I’d probably cost her whatever friends she’d had before seeing me. We never spent time with anyone but ourselves. Teresa wasn’t sleeping through the night anymore, and she only ate the barest minimum she could get away with. I was killing the woman. And I’d never asked her for a thing.

“I want to put more time into my singing,” she said. “Maybe I should, you know, cut back on my work hours?”

My fault entirely. I should have known enough to stay away. Two months after her father had spit on the floor of the Glimmer Room, I found her sitting on her sofa in tears. “They’ve changed the locks. My parents.”

Something clicked. The song she’d shouted for as the man was leaving: her daddy’s favorite. The song she lip-synched to, the one I’d first fallen for: both written by the same duo. The songs of her Sunday-morning liturgy, preached by her old man. “What did he call you? Your father. What was his pet name for you?”

She wouldn’t answer. She didn’t have to, goodness knows.

We settled into a narrowed routine, simple enough for both of us. She surrendered her own place to our comfort. I grew careful of what I said. I told her her meat loaf with tomato sauce was the best thing I’d ever tasted, and paid the price for several weeks running. I happened to say robin’s-egg blue was my favorite color, and found her the next Saturday, repainting the kitchen. We rarely went to my apartment. So far as I can remember, we never spent the night there. She abandoned, without asking, all the places I wouldn’t take her to. I knew it was shame; I didn’t know of what. I did love her.

I was alone in my apartment one afternoon in the summer of 1970. There was a knock at the door, rare enough in any season. I opened, off balance, and took a full three seconds to recognize my sister and Robert, her husband, my brother-in-law, with whom I’d spent all of forty minutes in this life, three years before. I stood staring, somewhere between fear and joy, until Ruth cleared her throat. “Joey, can you let us in?”

I fell over myself welcoming them. I squeezed her until Ruth begged for mercy. I kept saying, “I can’t believe it.” Ruth kept answering, “Believe it, brother.”

Robert asked, “Believe what?” His voice’s agitation could not keep out the amusement.

“How did you find me?” I thought she must have been in touch with Da. They were talking again. No one else could have told her where I was.

“Find you?” Ruth shot Robert a sad grin. She put her hand on my head, as if I had a fever. “Finding’s the easy part, Joey. It’s losing you that has been my lifelong problem.”

I still didn’t know what I’d done to her. I didn’t care. She was back in my life. My sister was here. “When did you hit town? Where are you living these days?”

Their silence gave me an awful moment. Ruth gazed around my tiny cell of an apartment, terrified of something she was sure would pop out of the nearest cupboard. “Living? These days? Funny you should ask.”

Robert sat on my rickety kitchen folding chair, one ankle on the other knee. “Would it be possible to put up here? With you. Just for a day or two.”

They had no bags. “Of course. Anything. Always.”

I didn’t press them for information, and they didn’t volunteer. Whatever was after them was only fifty yards behind, down the street, across the highway. I saw them look at each other and keep mum. They weren’t about to make me accessory to anything. “Sit. Damn, it’s good to see you. Here, sit. Can I get you a drink?”

My sister pinned my wrists like a loving nurse, grinning and stilling me. “Joey, it’s just us.”

Robert, the man my sister had tied her life to, a giant I didn’t know from Adam, fixed me with his X-ray eyes. He seemed to me everything I wasn’t: solid, substantial, centered, dedicated, dignified. His aura filled the room. “So how’s the gig?”

I hung my head. “It’s music. I’m taking requests. How about you?”

“Huh.” He put his hands on his head, catching up to himself. “Us, too. We’re taking requests, too.”

“I read that Huey’s free,” I said.

From where she stood fiddling with the kitchen curtains, Ruth shouted. “Joey! Where did you find time to read that? I thought you were busy with your nightclub act.”

She must have been near the club. Seen the posters. “Enlightened owners. They let me look at the papers on my breaks.”