Maybe she dies never questioning. Thinking the size of her boy’s skill has forced her hand. Believing in the obligation of beauty, a willing victim of high culture. Maybe she dies not knowing how there is no better school than hers. For here’s her boy, her eldest, stealing the keys of music, that music denied her. I see the look my parents trade then, pricing the experiment they’ve been running. Calculating the cost of their union.
What of Ruthie’s gift, had Mama lived? My sister, at four, is the fastest of all of us, latching onto the most elaborate melody, holding it high and clear, whatever the changing intervals around her. Soon, she is a genius mimic, doing Da, doing Mama, destroying in pitch-perfect parody her brothers’ walk and talk. Wheezing like the postman. Stuttering sententiously like our parents’ favorite radio sage. Doddering like the aged corner grocer until Mama, gasping through tears, begs her for mercy. This is not parroting, but something more uncanny. Root seems to know things about human invention that her handful of years can’t have taught her. She lives in the skin of the people she replicates.
But my sister is a lifetime younger than we are. Three years between us: time enough to split us beyond recognition. Each of us is a fluke of our one thin moment. Four and a half years from this night, Mama will be where no years can touch her.
Her death cuts us all loose in time. Now I’m almost twice my mother’s age. I’ve come through some warping wormhole, twisting back to see what she looked like, reflected in the light of her family. Her face stands still with gazing on all that it won’t live to see. Now it is as old, as young, as all other things that have stopped.
With nothing to check my memory, I can trust nothing. Memory is like vocal preparation. The note must center in the mind before the voice can land on it. The sound from the mouth has been sent out long beforehand. Already she opens to me in that look, one that takes years to reach me: her terror at hearing her prodigy son. This is the memory I send on ahead, my clue to the woman, when all other clues are long gone. She trades the look with my father, seeing what they’ve made, a secret, terrible acknowledgment: Our child is a different race from either of us.
I get my own look from her, to set alongside that one. Just once, and so fleeting that it’s over before she launches it. But unmistakable: It comes three days before I leave to join my brother in Boston. I’m taking what both of us know is our last private lesson together. We’ve been working through the Anna Magdalena notebook. Most of the pieces are already too easy for me, although I never say so. Even great players still play these, we tell each other. It’s a family notebook, Mama says, something Bach made to build his wife a home in music. It’s a family album, like the Polaroids my parents keep of the years we’ve been through. Postcards savored and kept safe.
Da is at the university. Ruth is on the floor, ten feet from the piano, working on her clothespin-family dollhouse. Mama and I flip pages in the album. We’re supposed to be doing social studies — the developing nations — but we’re playing hooky, with time so short. There’s no one to scold us. We play through a pack of easy dances, stretching them, jazzing them, as light as rain in the desert, turning to dust before it hits the roofs.
We turn to the arias, the part of the notebook we love best. With them, one of us can sing and the other play. We do number 37, “Willst du dein Herz mir schenken.” Mama sings, already a creature from another world. But I can’t hear that from here, the only world where I’ve ever lived. I start in on number 25, but before we can get three measures into it, Mama stops. I do, too, to see what’s wrong, but she waves frantically for me to keep playing. Rootie the mimic is towering above her clothespin family, standing as she’s seen Mama do a thousand times, posed in front of a room full of listening people, Mama herself, at one-third size. Little Root’s voice enacts an adulthood already in her. She takes over from my mother “Bist du bei mir,” singing it for her, to her, as her.
My seven-year-old sister has learned the stream of German words phonetically, just from hearing Mama sing it two or three times. Ruth can’t understand a word she sings in her father’s language. But she sings knowing where every word heads toward. She sings the song Mama and Da played in my grandparents’ parlor on his first visit there. Ach, wie vergnügt wär’ so mein Ende. Ah, how pleasant will my end be.
I play it through, and Rootie sails smoothly into harbor. Mama holds herself, her hands knotted in front of her, motionless, conducting. At the end of the song, my mother stares at me, dumbstruck. She begs me, the only other soul within earshot, for an explanation. Then she moves to Ruth, stroking and marveling, cooing and combing in thrilled disbelief. “Oh, my girl, my girl. Can you do everything?”
But for an instant, she sounds me. Da isn’t here; I’m her only available man. Maybe it’s me — the me who sees her now, half a century on — whom she seeks out. Her eyes strike down with prophecy. She searches me for explanations of what’s to come. She hears it in Ruth’s song: what’s waiting for her. In her panicked advance look, she makes me promise her things I can’t deliver. Her look swears me to a vow: I must take care of everyone, all her song-blasted family, when I’m the only one who remembers this glimpse of how things must go. Watch over this girl. Watch over your brother. Watch over that hopeless foreign man who can’t watch over anything smaller than a galaxy. She looks right at me, forward across the years, at my later self, grown, broken, the only person who stands between her and final knowing. She hears effect before cause, response before call: her own daughter singing to her, the one tune that will do for her funeral.
She packs me off to Boston to join my brother. On the day of my real departure, she’s all pained smiles. She never mentions the moment again, even in her eyes. I’m left to think I must have invented it.
But I was there for the rehearsal. And there again, with Ruth, in concert. And still here, brought back to do the encore, although my every performance was able to save exactly no one. Half a century past my mother’s death, I hear that cadence she caught that day. She doesn’t anticipate what will happen to her so much as she remembers it. For if prophecy is just the sound of memory rejoining the fixed record, memory must already hold all prophecies yet to come home.
Meistersinger
He met me at Zaventem Airport, Brussels, like a limo driver looking for his fare, holding up a hand-lettered sign readingPAUL ROBESON. The grand tour of Europe’s capitals had done little for his sense of humor.
In fact, I was glad for the cue. I might have missed him in the crowd without his waving the stupid sign for all countries to see. He had a beard, a little goatee midway between Du Bois and Malcolm. He’d grown his hair almost to his shoulders, and it was straighter than I could have imagined. He’d gotten bigger, for want of a better word, although his weight hadn’t changed from his days at Juilliard. The sea green shiny jacket and steel gray trousers added to the performance. He seemed more pallid. But then, he’d been living in a country where the sun canceled appearances more often than a hypochondriac diva. He looked like Christ should have been depicted these last two thousand years: not a Scandinavian in a toga, but a scruffy Semite clinging to the edge of northeast Africa, the oldest contested border between colliding continents.
He was more excited to see me than I expected. He waved the placard in the air, doing a little allemande. I dropped my bags at his feet and snatched the sign out of his hand. “Mule, Mule.” He hugged me, rug-burning my scalp with the butt of his hand. “We’re back, brother.” I was giving him something. I didn’t know what. He grabbed the larger of my suitcases, groaning as he deadlifted.
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