Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

We were singing in late July of 1984, in the Palais des Papes at the Avignon Festival, when my family found me. Word came from our arts management in Brussels, who’d gotten it in a telegram from Milton Weisman, our old agent. Mr. Weisman would die the next year, never having owned a fax machine or heard of E-mail. Milton Weisman: the last man in the developed world to send telegrams.

The telegram was stuffed inside an envelope and sent by overnight courier to our hotel in Provence. I picked it up at the front desk with my room key, figuring it was some contract I’d forgotten to sign. I didn’t read it until I was in my room.

Bad news from home. Your brother has been killed. Call your wife as soon as this reaches you. My regrets. Forgive this messenger. Ever. Milton.

I read it again, and wound up even further from sense. For the sickest interval, it was really Jonah, dead in some freak alternate world just now collapsing into mine, replacing the one I’d foolishly held faith with. Then it wasn’t Jonah, but some brother I’d never known. Then it wasn’t even me, my brother, my wife, but a split-off Strom family trapped behind soundproof glass, rapping on it in silent horror.

I went down the hall to Jonah and Celeste’s room. My hands were shaking so badly, I had to knock twice. Jonah opened the door and read my face at once. All I could do was shove the words into his hands. I followed him into his room. Jonah put the telegram on his bed, still looking at it. He raised his palms. “The man is a lot older than when we worked with him. That must be it.”

“‘Forgive this messenger’?”

Jonah nodded, conceding a point I didn’t even know I’d made. “So call.”

“Call who? My wife?” But I knew who Milton Weisman meant. He was from another time, a moral man whose names for things were as dated as the music he represented. He’d neglected to give any phone number. He figured I’d remember.

I sat on Jonah’s hotel bed for minutes, eyes closed, a receiver in hand, a parody of prayer, trying to remember the number in Atlantic City I once knew as automatically as I knew the changes to “Honeysuckle Rose.” Memory required forgetting everything, especially the hope of recall. At last my fingers dialed, the numbers still in my muscles, the way pieces of piano music still lived in my fingers long after I’d forgotten all about them. A pitched jangle at the other end announced the States. Colors that were submerged in me surfaced at that sound. I sat savoring them — Coltrane, high-fat ice cream, the Times on a Sunday, the sound of a Middle Atlantic drawl. I was like a wino window-shopping outside a package store.

The number had been disconnected. An operator with a Spanish accent gave me another. I dialed the new number, my courage beginning to falter. Then she picked up. For a moment, I’d called to tell her I’d be late for breakfast. Muscle memory, too, the thing that doesn’t stop until our muscles do. I heard myself ask, “Teresa?” A second later, before she could say anything, I heard myself ask again. My voice bounced back in maddening delay, the time it took for the word to make the loop from Europe to outer space to America back up to the communications satellite and down to Europe’s surface again. Canon at unison.

She needed no other sound. She struggled to say the syllables of my name, not quite managing. At last she got out a comic, choked “Joey!” The nickname she rarely called me, out of too much love. She laughed, and that sound, too, quickly broke up and weeded over.

“Teresa. Ter. I got the strangest message. From Milton Weisman…” I could barely talk, distracted by the echo of my own voice bouncing back like crazed, imitative counterpoint against my own words.

“Joseph, I know. I told him to write you. I’m so sorry. It’s so horrible.”

Her words were pure dissonance. I couldn’t find the key. I had to force myself to wait, so our words wouldn’t collide in the satellite echo. “What is? His cable made no…”

She drew up short. I heard her turn like a massive freighter, doubling back to fish me out of the water. “It’s your sister. She called me. She called me. She must have remembered my name from…” From when I had never introduced them. The idea of hearing at last from a woman Teresa had wanted to love broke her down into time-lapse crying.

“Ruth?” At that syllable, Jonah jerked up in the chair where he listened. He stood and leaned toward me. I held him off with a palm. “What’s happened? Is she…?”

“Her husband,” Teresa cried. “It’s so awful. They say he was… He didn’t make it, Joseph. He isn’t… He never…”

Robert. My wave of relief— Ruth alive — snapped back in horror: Robert dead. The whiplash shut me down, and I couldn’t breathe. Teresa started talking again before I started hearing. She laid out a thing I’d need explained to me over and over again. Even now. She went on in detail, details impossible for her to know and useless to my understanding.

I must have cut her off. “Is there a way I can reach her?”

“Yes.” Excited, ashamed. Part of the family at last. “She gave me a number, in case… Just a minute.” And in the seconds it took Teresa to find her address book, I lived all the lives that mine had beaten out of me. I sat holding the line, stopped. Robert Rider was dead. My sister’s husband — killed. Ruth, from nowhere, wanted me to know. She had tracked me back to the woman who would always know how to find me, the woman who faithful Joseph was sure to stay with forever. But I’d sentenced that woman to oblivion years ago.

In the seconds while I waited for Teresa to come back, she became infinitely vulnerable to me, infinitely good. I’d hurt her beyond imagining, and here she was, glad for the chance to help me in my hour. All good things were scattering. Death fed faster, the more it took. We get nothing; a handful of weeks. The best we have is broken up or thrown stupidly away. Teresa came back on the line and read me a number. I wrote it down, blindly. I’d forgotten how many digits an American phone number had. Teresa corrected my mistakes in dictation, and we were done.

“I love you,” I told her. And got back silence. Of all the things I thought she might say, this wasn’t one. “Teresa?”

“I… I’m so sorry, Joseph. I never met them. I wish I had. But I’m as sorry as if he’d been…” When she started again, it was forced natural. “Did you know I got married?” I couldn’t even exclaim. “Yep, married! To Jim Miesner. I’m not sure you two ever met.” The bullet-headed man she used to come to my bar with, before me. “And I’ve got the most beautiful little girl! Her name is Danuta. I wish you could meet her.”

“How? How old is she?”

She paused. Not the pause of satellites. “Five. Well, closer to six.” Her silence was defensive. But we all have the right to make what we need. “I… I’m back with my family. With my father. You were right about all of that.”

I got off the phone, polite to the point of numb. I wobbled to my feet. Jonah was looking at me, waiting. “It’s Robert.”

“Robert.”

“Robert Rider. Your brother-in-law. He was shot by a policeman over a month ago. There was an arrest. Some struggle. I…didn’t get all the details.”

Jonah’s shoulders tensed. What details? Death settled all the details. In his face, I read the extent of his banishment. Ruth had tried to contact me. The calls, the messages, all for me alone. She’d never once tried to reach him. “How is she?”

“Teresa didn’t know.”

“I meant Teresa.” He flicked his fingers toward his chest: Give it here. I didn’t know what he wanted until I looked down and saw the telephone number crumpled in my palm. I handed it over. “Area code two-one-five. Where is that?”