Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Mama adds, “You’re out front of everyone. You three just wait long enough, everybody’s going to be your people.” We cobble up a national anthem out of stolen parts.

“Do we believe in God?” I ask.

And they say, “Let each boy believe in his own fashion.” Or something like that, just as unhelpful, just as impossible.

My mother sings at churches. Sometimes she takes us with her, but Da, never. The music is something she knows and we don’t. “Where does it come from?” Jonah asks.

“Same place all music does.”

Already, Jonah isn’t buying. “Where’s it going?”

“Ah!” she says. “Back toward do.”

We stand next to her in the pews, hands to the flat of her hips, feeling the vibrations coming through her dress, the deep fundamentals that surface from her with such clear power that people can’t help but turn around and stare at the source. We go to churches where everyone pretends not to look. We go to churches where the sound is ecstatic, cheered and clapped every which way, picked up and rolled into a dozen unplanned codas. We go to a place where the thundering, swaying, bliss-swelling choir sends a heavy woman in front of us into convulsions. She leans over, and I think she’s pretending to be sick. I laugh, and then I stop. Her body switchbacks side to side, first in time to the music, then cut time, then triple double. Her arms work like a sprinter’s, and her breasts fly out like counterweights to her heaving. A girl, maybe her daughter, holds her and sways with her, still singing to the music that mounts up from the choir. “Day is coming. Day is coming. When the walls will all come down.” The woman next to her, a perfect stranger, fans her with a handkerchief, saying, “That’s right; that’s all right now,” not even looking. Just following the mountain of music.

Maybe she’s dying. My mother sees my first-time terror. “She’s all right, JoJo. Just coming through.”

“Through to where?”

My mother shrugs. “To where she was before she came here.”

Every church we visit has its own sound. My mother sings them all, running beyond the roll of the notes. Shining like that far horizon, where all notes go. What you love more than your own life must finally belong to you. What you come to know, better than you know your own way home, is yours.

At night, we sing. Then music envelops us. It offers us its limited safety, here on our street, however long a way it has come. It never occurs to me that the sound isn’t ours, that it’s the last twitch of someone else’s old, abandoned dream. Each piece we do springs into being right here, the night we make it. Its country is this spinet; its government, my mother’s fingers; its people, our throats.

Mama and Da can sing right off the page, songs they’ve never seen before, and still sound like they’ve known them from birth. We sing a song from England: “Come Again, Sweet Love Doth Now Invite.” Soon we all climb up that scale together—“to see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die”—building step by step until we pull back at the peak, the “die” at the top of the phrase just a plaything sound we fondle, tuning to one another. Five phrases, sparkling, innocent, replaying the courtiers’ party game from the day of this tune’s making, that festive beauty, financed by the slave trade.

Jonah loves the song. He wants more by the same maker. We sing another: “Time Stands Still.” It takes me until this moment, this one, setting these words down half a century on, to find my way back, to come through to this song. To see the day and place we were signaling all those times we took the song on the road. To hear the forecast in that read-through. For prophecy just remembers in advance what the past has long been saying. All we ever do is fulfill the beginning.

“Time stands still with gazing on her face.” I gaze and time stands. My mother’s face, soft in the light of this song. We sing a five-part arrangement, which Jonah makes us take so slowly that each note hangs in the air, a broken pillar with vines growing over it. That’s all he wants: to stop the melody’s forward motion and collapse it into a single chord.

He doesn’t want us to finish. But when we do, for one last little specious now, he’s in bliss, the bliss underneath the chord. “You like the old ones?” Da asks. Jonah nods, although he hasn’t once thought that any of these tunes might be older than another. They’re all the same age as our parents: one day younger than creation.

“How old is that song?” I ask.

Our father’s eyes sweep upward. “Seventy-seven and three-quarters Rooties.”

My sister howls with pleasure. She waves her hands in the air. “No, no!” She puts her palm on her chin, her index on her cheek, her elbow in her other hand, mocking the posture of thought. Already she’s eerie, copying postures and poses, donning their worldliness as if she understands them. “I think it’s…yes!” Her finger shoots into the air, her head bobbing eureka. “Seventy-six and three-quarters Rooties! Not counting the first Rootie.”

“How many Mamas?”

Da doesn’t even have to think. “Just over eleven.”

Mama’s offended. She pushes away his attempt to hug her. “Almost twelve.”

I don’t understand. “How old is Mama?”

“Eight and a half hundredths of this song.”

“How many yous?”

“Ah! This is a different question. I’ve never told you how old is your old man?” He has, a million times. He’s zero, no years old at all. Born in 1911, in Strasbourg, then Germany, now France, on what was then March 10, but during the hours that were lost forever when Alsace capitulated and at last adjusted its clocks to Greenwich. This is the fable of his birth, the mystery of his existence. This is how a young boy’s life was snared by time.

“Not even nine of him,” Mama taunts. “Your old man is an old man. Only nine of your father’s great long lives, and you’re back to Dowland!”

My parents are different ages.

“Nay,” my father says. “One may not divide by zero!”

I don’t ask how many Jonahs, how many Joes.

“Enough foolishness.” Mama is the queen supreme of all American Stroms, now and forever. “Who let all this math in the house? Let’s get on with the counting.”

Stand still and gaze for minutes, hours, and years to her give place.Our father discovers how time is not a string, but a series of knots. This is how we sing. Not straight through, but turning back on ourselves, harmonizing with bits we’ve already sung through, accompanying those nights we haven’t yet sung. This is the night, or might as well be, when Jonah cracks the secret language of harmony and breaks into our parents’ game of improvised quotations. Mama starts with Haydn; Da layers on a crazed glaze of Verdi. The bird and the fish, out house hunting, lacing the nest with everything that fits. Then Jonah, out of nowhere, adding his pitch-perfect rendition of Josquin’s Absalon, fili mi. And for that feat, at so tender an age, he wins from my parents a look more frightened than any look that strangers have ever painted us with.

And later, when Einstein comes by the house for music night, playing his violin with the other physicist musicians, he needs give only the slightest push to shame my parents into sending their boy away. “This child has a gift. You don’t hear how big. You are too close. It’s unforgivable that you do nothing for him.”

The nothing my mother has given him is her own life. The unforgivable thing she’s guilty of: the steady rhythm of love. “The child has a gift.” And who does the great white-maned man think has given it to him? Every day, a school for that gift, costing no less than everything. She gives up her own gift, her own growth, her own vindication. But this is blackness, too: a world of white, declaring your efforts never enough, your sounds insufficient. Telling you to send the boy off, sell him into safety, let him fly away, give him over to mastery, lift him over that river any way you can. Never telling you what land you send him to, there on the far side.