Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

He needed to show that more galaxies rotated in one direction than in the other. He sought a basic asymmetry, more counterclockwise galaxies than clockwise. He assembled vast catalogs of astronomical photos and was hard at work making measurements with a pencil and protractor, estimating rotational axes and compiling his data into huge tables. The work was a footrace he needed to win. Each day, he did a little more, on a little less strength.

I asked him why he was so desperate to know. “Oh. I think this to be the case, already. But to have the mathematical basis: That would be wonderful!”

I asked him as meekly as I could. “Why would that be so wonderful?” What need could anyone have for something so blindingly remote? I don’t know if he heard my note — my resentment at his living and dying by another clock in another system’s gravitational field, my anger at his listening for sounds that run on ahead of time, too far for human ears to hear. His obsession should have been harmless enough. It didn’t enslave or exploit anyone’s misery. But neither did it lift that misery or set a single soul free. Now that I had something to measure against, I knew my father to be the single whitest man in the world. How Mama could have thought to marry him and how the two of them imagined they could make a life together anywhere in this country would be secrets he’d take to the grave.

When Teresa and I went up to Da’s, we’d end up playing cribbage in the front room while he sat in his study making desperate calculations. I apologized to my Polish saint in a thousand oblique ways, for hours at a shot.

“It doesn’t matter, Joseph. It’s so good for me, just to see where you grew up.”

“How many times have I told you where I grew up? I’d rather have grown up in hell than here.”

Too late, she rushed to fix her mistake. “Can we go over to the city? See your old…” And halfway in, she realized she’d made bad worse. We went back to cribbage, a game she taught me, one she used to play with her mother. The saddest, whitest, most inscrutable game the human mind ever invented.

One night, we sat together under the globe of a lamp, looking over the pictures that had survived the accident of my family. There were half a dozen from before the fire. They’d been pinned to a board in my father’s office at the university for a quarter of a century. Now they’d come home, but to no home anyone in the pictures would have recognized. One photo showed a couple holding a baby. A thickset man, his close-cropped hair already receding, stood next to a thin woman in a print dress, hair pulled back in a bun. The woman held a lump wrapped in a fuzzy blanket. Teresa hovered her nail above the infant packet. “You?”

I shrugged. “Jonah, probably.”

A delicate pause. “Who are these two?”

I couldn’t tell her. I had some memory of the man, but even that might have come mostly from this photograph. “My grandparents.” Then, inspired stupidity: “My mother’s parents.”

In time, my father grew too sick to work. He still perched with his star charts and his tables of numbers, head bowed over the snaking Greek equations. But he could no longer force through the calculations. This puzzled more than hurt him. The medications had him in a place beyond pain. Or maybe he was confused by the facts’ inability to keep pace with theory.

“Well?” I asked. “Does the universe have a preferred spin?”

“I don’t know.” His voice trailed the same wake of disbelief as if he’d discovered he’d never existed. “It seems to express no preference for rotation in any direction over the other.”

Toward the end, he wanted to sing. We hadn’t for years. I couldn’t even say exactly when we’d stopped. Mama died. Jonah turned professional. Ruth quit her angelic voice in something like disgust. So family music ended. Then one day in the first midwinter of this new, alien decade, my dying father wanted to make up for lost time. He turned up a sheaf of madrigals, produced from the towering mounds of his office scribbles. “Come. We sing.” He made us each take a part.

I looked at Teresa, who looked around for a place to kill herself. “Teresa doesn’t read music, Da.”

He smiled: We’d have our little joke. Then his smile died in comprehension. “How can this be? You have said she sings with you?”

“She does. She…learns everything by ear. By heart.”

“Really?” He delighted in the idea, as if the possibility had only just occurred to him. One of those deathbed revelations over nothing. “Really? This is fine! We will learn this song for you, by heart.”

I didn’t want to sing trios with the terrified and the dying. I, too, had lost some basic faith in sound. The three of us could not possibly give Da what he needed — a glimpse of a world gone unreachable. Music had always been his celebration of the unlikelihood of escape, his Kaddish for those who’d suffered the fate meant for him. “How about T. and I sing something for you? Straight from the Glimmer Room, Atlantic City!”

“This would be even better.” His voice fell away, almost inaudible.

I don’t know how, but Saint Teresa rose to the awful moment. She, at least, still believed in music. I played on the piano that had sat for years in Fort Lee, untouched. And the white Catholic truck driver’s daughter from the saltwater taffy factory sang like a siren. I came out of my fog to meet her. We started on “Satin Doll,” as far from the Monteverdi that Da had picked out as distance allowed. And yet, as the satin doll maker himself once said, there were only two kinds of music. This was the good kind.

By then, Da’s face was ashen and the laugh in his eyes was glaze. But when Teresa and I hit our groove, somewhere around the second verse, he lit up one last time. For my father, music had always been the joy of a made universe — composed, elaborate, complex: various arcs of a solar system spinning in space at once, each one traced by the voice of a near relation. But the pleasure that bound him to his wife had been spontaneous treasure hunting. They both went to their graves swearing that any two melodies could fit together, given the right twists of tempo and turns of key. And that insistence, it struck me, as Teresa and I careened down the tune Ellington put down, lay as close to jazz as it did to the thousand years of written-out melodies their game drew on.

As my pale taffy girl sailed over the melody, sounding more sweetly sustained than I’d ever heard her, I tapped into some underground stream and drew up broken shards, motives from Machaut to Bernstein, and slipped them into my accompaniment. Teresa must have heard the sounds turning strange beneath her. But she sailed right over them. Who knows how many of the quotes Da made out? The tunes were in there; they fit. That’s all that mattered. And for the seven and a half minutes my woman and I made the song last, my family, too, was there inside our sound.

Baby, shall we go out skippin’?Take your freedom on the road once, before you die. The tune said yes, said name your ecstasy. Even a written-out melody had to be made up again, on the spot, each time you read it. The swinging little skip of a theme had been sung every imaginable way, a million times and more before this woman and I ever heard it. But Teresa sang it for my father in a way he’d never yet heard. There was only this onetime meeting between us and the pitches. These notes, at least, knew who my people were, all those lives lived out between the making up and the writing down. We are all native speakers. Sing where you are, even as it goes. Sing all the things that this life denied you. No one owns even one note. Nothing trumps time. Sing your own comfort, the song said, for no one else will sing it for you. Speaks Latin, that satin doll.