Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

I’d known for a long time, but it took me years to admit. War. Total, continuous, unsolvable. Everything you did or said or loved took sides. The Southie busses were only news for a quarter of a minute. Four measures of andante. Then Mr. Brinkley went on to the next story — the crisis in the space program. It seemed humankind had walked on the moon half a dozen times and brought back several hundred pounds of rock, and now it didn’t know what else to do with itself or where else in the universe it wanted to go.

I lay next to Teresa that night, feeling the length of her tense with me. She needed to say something, but she couldn’t even locate the fact inside herself. In that silence, we belonged to different races. I didn’t know what race I belonged to. Only that it wasn’t Ter’s.

“God should have made more continents,” I said. “And made them a lot smaller. The whole world, like the South Pacific.”

Teresa had no idea what I was talking about. She didn’t sleep that night. I know — I was awake to hear her. But when we asked each other the next morning, we both said we’d slept fine. I stopped watching the news with her. We went back to singing and playing cribbage, working at the factory and plagiarizing the world’s great tunes.

Another year collapsed, and I heard nothing from my sister. Wherever she and Robert were hiding, it was nowhere near my America. If they’d risen again in the already-amnesiac seventies under assumed names, they did not risk notifying me. Somewhere during those missing months while I’d watched TV, I’d turned thirty. I’d celebrated Jonah’s the year before that, sending him a little cassette of Teresa and me performing a Wesley Wilson song, “Old Age Is Creeping Up on You,” with Teresa doing a scary Pigmeat Pete and me supplying a little Catjuice Charlie in the response. If Jonah ever got the tape, I never heard. Maybe he thought it was in bad taste.

He did write. Not often, and never satisfactorily, but he did let me know what was happening. I got the story in bits and pieces, in clippings, reviews, letters, and bootleg recordings. I even heard accounts from envious old school friends who’d stayed in the classical ghetto. My brother was making his way, stepping into the world he knew would eventually belong to him. He was one of the new wave’s newer voices, a breath of fresh revision from an unexpected quarter, a rising star in five different countries.

He lived in Paris now, where no one questioned his right to interpret any piece of vocal music that fell within his copious range. No one challenged his cultural rights except, of course, on national grounds. The reputation that had plagued him in the States — that his voice was too clean, too light — melted away in Europe. There, they heard only his limber soar. They handed him a beautifully furnished future to move into. They called him “effortless,” Europe’s highest compliment. They said he was the concert tenor the 1970s had been waiting for. They meant that as a compliment, too.

Now that he had no bad rap of lightness to overcome, Jonah often soloed with orchestras. The reviews adored how he could make even the most complex, thickly layered twentieth-century textures feel airy and audible. He soloed under the same conductors whose recordings we’d grown up on. He performed Hindemith’s Das Unaufhörliche with Haitink and the Concertgebouw. He did the tenor solo in Szymanowski’s Third Symphony— The Song of the Night — with Warsaw, standing in for the ailing Józef Meissner, who let the understudy do the role only twice before racing back to reclaim it. The French critics, suckers for discovery, praised the still-little-known piece as “voluptuous” and the increasingly visible singer as “floating, ethereal, and almost unbearably beautiful.”

But Jonah’s new signature piece was A Child of Our Time, Michael Tippett’s haunted wartime oratorio, the present’s answer to Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion. Only Tippett’s protagonist was not the Son of God, but a boy abandoned by all divinity. A Jewish boy, hiding in Paris, enraged by the Nazi persecution of his mother, kills a German officer and touches off a pogrom. In place of Bach’s Protestant chorales, Tippett sought something more universal, more able to cross all musical borders. His material reached him by chance, on a wartime radio broadcast: the Hall Johnson Choir performing Negro spirituals.

Here was the hybrid piece Jonah was born to sing. How the Europeans connected him to the music — what they heard or saw — I can’t imagine. But over the course of a few years, my brother sang the massive work with four conductors and three orchestras — two British and one Belgian. He recorded the piece in 1975 with Birmingham. It made his name, everywhere except in his own country. In the wads of newspaper clippings he sent me, often with not even a note, he was depicted as a still-young voice pushing outward, threatening to become a secular angel.

He’d called me from Paris, back in 1972, in tears at the news of Jackie Robinson’s death. “Dead, Mule. Rickey threw the poor bastard into the cauldron and wouldn’t let him do anything but hit the ball. ‘I want a man who’s brave enough not to fight back.’ What shit is that, Joey? A lose-lose situation, and the man won.” I couldn’t tell why he was calling. My brother knew nothing about baseball. My brother hated America. “Who’s hot now, Mule?”

“You mean singers?”

“Ballplayers, you bastard.”

I hadn’t a clue. The Yankee broadcasts were hardly on my daily diet.

Jonah sighed, his breath echoing down the transatlantic delay. “Mule? It’s a funny thing. I had to move here to learn how hopeless I am. This whole City of Light crap? Total fabrication. One of the most smugly racist towns I’ve ever lived in. New York makes this place look like Selma. They want to see a birth certificate before they’ll sell me cheese. I got beaten up by this guy down in the Thirteenth. Really beaten. Don’t worry, bro. I’m talking six months ago. Went at me with fists. Broke a molar. I’m sitting there slapping him like some gonad-clipped castrato, thinking, But they don’t have a Negro problem here! I’m thinking Josephine Baker, Richard Wright, Jimmy Baldwin. I’m telling this guy, ‘Your people love my people.’ Turns out — the accent, the heavy tan — he thought I was Algerian. Punishing me for the revolution. Jesus, Mule. By the time we’re dead, we’ll have paid for every sin on earth except our own.”

Riffing for me. But who else would buy this performance? Paris was no better or worse than any capital. What crushed him was the loss of his would-be hideout. He’d dreamed of total self-reinvention, a home that would grant him a permanent reentry visa. No place on any implicated continent would ever give him that.

“I don’t know how much longer I can live here, Joey.”

“Where would you go?”

“I’m thinking maybe Denmark? They love me in Scandinavia.”

“Jonah. They love you in France. I’ve never seen such notices.”

“I’m only sending the good ones.”

“Are you sure that leaving Paris is smart, professionally? How will I reach you?”

“Easy, fella. I’ll be in touch.”

“Do you need cash? Your share…your account with the money from the house…”

“I’m flush. Let it ride. Play the market or something.”

“It’s in your name.”

“Great. So long as I don’t change my name, I’m in business.” He made a quick accelerando—“Miss you, man”—and hung up before I could miss him back.

The longer I composed, the more fraudulent I became. My notes were going nowhere but backward. Even I couldn’t abuse Teresa’s arts grant forever. Unfit for any honest work, I advertised for piano students. I worked forever on the ad: “Juilliard-trained”—I never claimed to have graduated —“concert pianist, good with beginners…” It amazed me to think how the words concert pianist still conjured something in this country, long after concerts ceased to draw.