Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

The morphine washed back over him. He drifted, and I thought he fell asleep. But after a moment, he said, “California. Maybe she is in California.”

“Maybe, Da. Maybe California.”

He nodded, calmed. “I’ve thought so.” When he opened his eyes again, they were salt. “She disowned me. She said her struggle is not mine.” Acid filled his face, as if what was coming might still destroy everything that had already been. He worked to breathe. I sat calming him, as I used to calm Jonah when his attacks were on him. “When you see her, you must tell her. Tell her…” He fought for clarity, waiting for that message from the past to catch up with him. Then he closed his eyes and smiled. “Tell her there is another wavelength everyplace you point your telescope.”

Three times, he made me promise to tell her. That night, without talking again, my father died. It was something like a hemiola, a change in meter. A sudden, unprepared cross into a new key. In every piece of music worth playing, some moment gathers, moving its chords forward, casting ahead for one quick tightening of the air around it to the endless organizing silence beyond the double bar.

Da died. There was no death rattle, no relaxing of the bowels. I told him he could go. Instead of taking that next small step into his local future, he doubled back and forever rejoined where he’d already been. I called the nurses. And then my own line bent on, away from his, into an unknown place.

I thought death would be different this time, knowing in advance. It was. It was steeper. Mama never had a chance to disappear, she was gone so instantly. But she didn’t really die for me until the man who chatted with her in the kitchen in the middle of the night fifteen years after her death joined her. Da was gone, taking with him all my connection to her, to us. When he stopped, so did my past. Everything was fixed now, beyond growing. The bird and the fish can fall in love, but their only working nest will be the grave.

I turned helpless in the face of the hundreds of tasks death requires. The hospital helped; they’d seen this before, apparently. Da had told me nothing of what he wanted. He’d made no preparations for the inevitable. Jonah and Ruth were nowhere. Cremation seemed simplest. It had done for Mama. That was the easiest of the choices. At the moment when I most needed to be out of this world, up in the star map, among the rotating galaxies, I was dragged back to make countless decisions about things I couldn’t care about. Everyone needed signatures: the university, the state, the federal government, the bank, the neighborhood — all those anxious poolings that Da had gotten through his life largely by ignoring.

Teresa held me together, phoning from Atlantic City. She came up for one long weekend. She seemed to grow surer and more capable as I fell apart. Everything she did was one more thing I didn’t have to. “You’re doing fine, Joseph. All the right things.” She supplied a steady source of practical advice to the heir of a family that had always been practicality’s sworn enemy. She stayed alongside me for the million deaths by decision that surviving requires.

After I’d made all the most irreversible choices my father’s death demanded, Jonah called. His voice was full of buzz and echoing delay. “Joey. I just got your message. I’ve been away. I’m…not with that old management anymore.”

“Jesus, Jonah. Where the fuck have you been?”

“Don’t swear at me, Joey. I’m down in Italy. I’ve been singing at La Scala.”

The only news that could redeem Da’s death: My brother had followed through on the thing our parents raised us for. “La Scala. Serious? Singing what?”

“It…it doesn’t matter, Joey. Nothing. Tell me about Da.”

It hit me only then. Jonah didn’t know. I thought the news would be in him, like migration in a bird. He should have known the instant it happened. “He died. A week ago last Wednesday.”

For a long time, there was only breathing and transatlantic static. In silence as long as a funeral song, Jonah replayed the life. “Joey. Oh God. Forgive me.” As if his being away had made this happen.

I heard him over the line, his breath shortening, on the edge of a full-fledged choking attack. He was trying to figure out how to stop what had already happened. When he could talk again, he wanted details, all the nonevents of Da’s last days. He demanded to know everything our father had said. Anything Da might have left behind, something to send him. I had nothing. “He did…he made me promise to give Ruth a message.”

“What?”

“He said, ‘There’s another wavelength everyplace you point your telescope.’”

“What the hell does that mean, Joey?”

“He…something he was working on, I think. He stayed busy. It helped a little.”

“Why Ruth? What possible interest…” She’d betrayed him again, by stealing Da’s last message from him.

“Jonah. I have no clue. Between the medications and the disease, he was gone a long while before he left.”

“Is Ruth there?”

I told him that I’d heard nothing from her since her surprise visit. He listened, saying nothing.

“What did you do with the body?” As if it were evidence I had to dispose of.

I told him all the decisions I’d made. Jonah said nothing. His silence rebuked me. “What did you want me to do? You turn your back on us. You leave me to go through this alone while you—”

“Joey. Joey. You did just fine. You did perfect.” Grief came out of him in staccato sobs. Almost laughs, really. Something had gotten away from him, an absence he’d regret forever. “You want me to come back?” His words slurred together. “You want me to?”

“No, Jonah.” I wanted him to, more than anything. But not because I asked.

“I could be there by next week.”

“No point. Everything’s done. Over.”

“You don’t need help with things? What will you do with the house?” The Jersey home Da thought we might, in some other universe, share.

“The will says that’s up to a majority of his children.”

He struggled with something. “What do you want to do?”

“Sell.”

“Of course. At any price.”

Da was huge between us. Our father wanted me to ask. Somewhere, he wanted to know. “What were you singing at La Scala?”

Silence flooded the line. He thought it too soon to come back to this life. But I was Jonah’s only link now. Me and Ruth, whom neither of us could reach.

“Joey? You’ll never believe this. I sang under Monera.”

The name came from so far away, I was sure it, too, had to be dead. “Jesus Christ. Did he know who you were?”

“Some dusky American tenor.”

“Did you ask him about…”

“I didn’t have to. I saw her. She came backstage opening night.” He paused, racing himself. “She’s…old. Adult. And married. To a Tunisian businessman working out of Naples. He looks just like me. Only darker.”

I was his accompanist again, waiting out the caesura, holding on to its nothingness until his inhale started us up again.

“She apologized. In English, which her husband doesn’t speak. ‘You deserved a note.’ How old were we, Joey? Fourteen? The year Mama… The day Da…” Only a lifetime’s training kept his voice his. “Real blacks die of gunshot wounds, right? Overdoses. Malnutrition. Lead poisoning. What do halfies die of, Joey? Nobody dies of numbness, do they?”

“What happens now? You going to do more opera?” Something in me had to keep track. Some part of me still had to tell Da.

“Mule?” He was traveling out beyond my reach, at a speed that collapsed all measure. “Opera is nothing to do with what we thought. Absolutely nothing. I had to see it down in Italy, the place it came from. With the native speakers, the owners. Opera’s somebody else’s childhood. Somebody else’s nightmare. I think I’ll head to Paris for a while.”