Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

I stopped dreaming of Cindy Hang, except for that strange, surgical otherworldliness of her playing. In her hands, the long lines of Europe became something they’d never recognized in themselves. I never heard the likes of her sound again. Alone of all my students, the girl might have learned to make music at will. But the way she played would have had to die, on the way to any real stage.

Banishing Cindy brought Terrie and me closer for a while, if only in shared guilt. Teresa had given up more to live with me than I could ever repay. I carried that fact around with me like a prison record. I grew daily more certain that she couldn’t afford to be with me. She wanted to devote herself to someone who’d devoted himself to the thing she loved most in all the world. She wanted to marry a musician. It was that simple. She wanted me to marry her. She thought that signing the papers, making it official, would destroy our perpetual anxiety and bring down all walls. He’s my husband, she could explain to the venomous cashiers, to the men who followed us down the street, threatening, to the police cars tracking our public movements. He’s my husband, she’d say, and they’d have no comeback.

Sometimes at night, stirred by our closeness in the dark, she brought it up in whispers. She painted a fantasy for me, a house, a sovereign state of our own with its own flag and national anthem, perhaps a growing populace. I never objected, and in the dark, she took my willing listening as assent.

With the future in limbo between us, my ability to make music do anything fell almost to zero. The world away from the keyboard was even worse. Running the vacuum for half an hour exhausted me. A trip to the grocery store swelled into an expedition to scale Everest. Maybe we ought to marry, I thought. Marry and move to someplace survivable. But I didn’t know how. If Teresa just took care of everything, handled all the mechanics, told me when it was over…

Inert, I figured that the odds of my dying before having to act on anything like an implied promise would eventually grow overwhelming. I was over thirty, the age beyond which no one was to be trusted. Teresa closed in on the same landmark, the age beyond which an unmarried woman probably never would be. It should have seemed natural to me. It was what I’d grown up knowing: a spouse of each color. But a quarter of a century had beaten the natural out of me. All my family’s lessons had reduced to one: No one marries outside their race and lives.

Teresa thought of me as half white. We sang together, and never had a problem. She thought she recognized me. She saw me working away, trying to write white music. Everything I kept from her allowed her to go on thinking as much. Once she asked about my father’s family. She wanted something to attach to. “Where are they from?”

“Germany.”

“I know that, goof. Where in Germany?”

I didn’t have a good answer. “They lived in Essen, until the war. My…father was from Strasbourg, originally.”

“Originally?”

I laughed. “Well, originally, I guess they all came from Canaan.”

“Where?” All I could do was touch her hair. “Well, where are they all now?” Not a hesitation. She was that pure.

“Gone.”

She worked on this. Her own people had cut her off, but she knew where everyone was. She still sent cards on every cousin’s birthday, even if the rate of return had dropped near zero. “Gone?” Then it hit her, and she needed no more clarifying.

She asked about Mama’s people. I told what I knew. Doctor grandfather and his wife and children in Philadelphia “When can I meet them, Joe?” No one called me Joe. “I’d be happy to go with you, anytime.” I couldn’t even tell her. We weren’t even close enough to be different species.

I saw what I was doing to her only by accident. Once a week, I still went through her collection and learned a track for her. After dinner, I sat down at the Wurlitzer, fiddled around on arpeggios, then launched into an introduction. Her game was to figure out the tune and be ready to sing on the first verse’s downbeat. She always was, her face alight, as if I’d just handed her a wrapped gift. One night in April of 1975, we ripped through a try at “There’s a Rainbow Round My Shoulder,” a song I’d never come across until that afternoon. Terrie got as far as

Hallelujah, how the folks will stare,

When they see the diamond solitaire,

That my little sugar baby is gonna wear!

Yes, sir!

She broke off, a mangle of laughing and crying. She came and threw her arms around my shoulders, and for another few measures, I goofed around on five straitjacketed notes. “Oh, my Joe-bird. We’ve got to do it. Got to make it legal!”

I looked at her and said, like some 1930s hepcat, “Whatever my little sugar baby wants. Who am I to break the law?” She seemed as happy at these words as if we’d gone and done the deed already. Just the intent seemed enough.

Two weeks later, rooting through her records in search of another captive, I glimpsed a sheet of fancy rag paper sticking out from a stack of books on her writing desk. The color caught my eye, and I excavated it, a handmade wedding invitation. Across its middle, there bent a great rainbow arc. Along the top ran the hand-lettered message: “There’s a rainbow round my shoulder.” Inside the arc, she’d penned, “And it fits me like a glove.” Below, in a file of straight lines, Teresa had written, “TIME,” “DATE,” and “PLACE,” all of which she’d left trustingly blank, pending happy consultation with me. Under these, she’d written, “Come help us celebrate the union of Teresa Maria Elisabeth Clara Wierzbicki and Joseph Strom.” At the very bottom, in a jaunty hand, she’d added, “Hallelujah, we’re in love!”

The thing sunk into my chest up to the hilt. She wanted people there, a public declaration. I might somehow have managed to slip off to a justice of the peace, provided we never actually told anyone. But a wedding, with invitations: impossible. To whom could she have thought we’d send invitations? My family was dead and hers had disowned her. We shared no friends in common, none who would come to such a party. I pictured her scenario: walking down the aisle of some religious structure, part Catholic, part A.M.E., part synagogue, her Polish factory workers and my Black Panther connections eyeing one another across the median. The two of us, in front of a room of people, cutting into a three-tiered wedding cake. Hallelujah, how the folks would stare.

I buried the unfinished project back under her books, just as I’d found it. I never said anything. But she knew. Something in the way I behaved toward her, too brightly affectionate. I kept bracing for the presentation, the finished invitation. Here: I made this for you. But the moment never came. Teresa’s handmade celebration disappeared from the stack on her desk into some solitary hope chest she never opened for anyone.

That’s when I gave up all pretense of composition. I boxed up my sheaf of pencil-scratched music stock and consigned it to storage.

I heard from Jonah again, not long after. He never made it to Scandinavia. “Dear Bro,” his letter started. “Big doings here. I’ve found my calling.” As if singing with the London Symphony Orchestra and l’Orchestre philharmonique de Radio-France had been a wrong number.

I was in Strasbourg, doing the bounding tenor bit to the millionth rendition of the almighty NINTH this season, a truly gimmicky performance in the new “Capital of Europe,” with soloists, conductor, and musicians from two dozen countries. Not sure who I was supposed to represent. We were thundering around the back stretch when, all of a sudden, the grotesqueness of the situation finally dawned on me. All my life, I’ve been this dutiful trooper for late-day cultural imperialism. Alle Menschen werden Brüder: Christ on a bloody crutch. Gimme a break. What planet does that guy live on? Not ours; not the Planet of the Apes.