Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Nowhere I’d ever lived. He gestured toward the phone. I shook my head. I needed time. Time to put together all the time that had just come apart.

We sang that night. With what concentration I had, I braced for catastrophe. But somehow we survived, dragged along by overpractice. We took the slowest Josquin in history. Those in the audience who weren’t scandalized or bored to death fell through the auditorium floor and descended into the cracks between space. Whatever the final verdict, no one would ever hear its like again.

I lay in bed that night thinking of Ruth. Our sister had been way out ahead of us. She’d jumped into the future long before Jonah or I had admitted to the present. She’d seen what was coming down. She was riding the nightmare before her older brothers had awakened from the dream. I’d always imagined that Ruth’s suffering came from being too light to merit race’s worst injuries. That night, in a crowded hotel in Avignon where most guests assumed I was from Morocco, I finally saw. Race’s worst injuries are color-blind.

Something kept Jonah up, too. It wasn’t the Josquin. At 3:00A.M., I heard him pacing in the hall outside my door, wondering whether to knock. I called to him, and he walked in as if keeping an appointment. “Pennsylvania,” he said. I just blinked in the dark. “Area code two-one-five. Eastern Pennsylvania.” I tried to fit the information to my sister. Da’s last hallucination had her moving to California. That’s where I’d always imagined her. Jonah didn’t sit. He stood at the window and pulled back the drape. On the horizon, the Palais des Papes glowed like a monstrous Gothic illuminated manuscript. “I’ve been thinking.” He made the words stretch from last afternoon all the way back several years. “She must be right. Ruth must be right. I mean, about…the fire. No other way.”

He looked out the window, on all the violence he’d so long and beautifully denied. Jonah had met Robert only through me. The details of Robert’s death were to us still as obscure as God. But this death confirmed the central fact of our lives, the one we’d forever kept as abstract as the art we gave ourselves to. We’d lived as if murder weren’t constant in the place we came from. We hid in the concert hall, sanctuary from the world’s real sound. But thirty years ago — a lifetime — long before we knew how to read the story, stray hatred scattered us. As Jonah said the words, the fact turned obvious. And just as obvious: Some part of me had always believed.

He stood for a long time, saying nothing. Nor could I say anything to him. But Jonah was my brother. We had, at one time or another, played everything together. Alone of all things, we knew each other. He’d taught me, and I him: All music lived and died inside the rests. Sometime around four o’clock, he said, “Call her.” He’d been keeping his eye on the clock, on the time differences, for the very last moment it would be decent to call.

I jacked myself out of bed, threw on a robe, and sat again with a phone in my hands. I tried to pass the receiver to him, but he refused. He wasn’t the one she’d called. I dialed the number, methodical as scales. Again, the jangle of an American ring, followed by its transatlantic echo. Between each ring, I rejected a thousand opening words. Rootie. Root. Ms. Strom. Mrs. Rider. Laughing, grieving, begging her forgiveness. Nothing felt real. Ruth. It’s Joseph. Your brother.

Then the click of the receiver lifting on that other continent, the sound of a voice that killed all preparation. Instead of my sister, an old man. “Hello?” he challenged. A man who sounded a hundred years old. I froze in his voice, worse than stage fright. “Hello? Who’s there? Who is this?” On the line, in the room behind him, younger voices asked if there was something wrong.

Paths collapsed upon themselves. “Dr. Daley?” I asked. When he grunted, I said, “This is your grandson.”

During the call to Philadelphia, Jonah hovered at my elbow. But he wouldn’t take the phone when I handed it to him. Speech without pitches terrified him. He wanted me between him and where we came from. My grandfather put Ruth on the line. She tried to tell me what had happened to Robert, but she couldn’t begin. Her voice was past anger, past warmth, past memory. Past everything but shock. The month since her husband’s death had done nothing to help her back. Nor would years.

She got out two numb sentences. Then she gave me back to our grandfather. William Daley couldn’t quite grasp which of Ruth’s brothers I was. I said I’d very much like to meet him. “Young man, I turned ninety six weeks ago. If you want to meet me, you’d best catch the next flight out.”

I told Jonah I wanted to go. The idea of returning twisted Jonah’s face, half temptation, half disgust. “You can’t fix anything, Joey. You know that? You can’t fix what’s already happened.” But he pushed me away with his free hand while he pulled with the other. “No, of course. Go. One of us has to. It’s Ruth. She’s back.” He seemed to think I might at least fix the things that hadn’t happened yet.

I bought an open ticket. Ruth was back. But she’d never really left. We were the ones who’d gone away.

My uncle Michael met me at Philadelphia International. He wasn’t hard to pick out of the crowd. All I had to do was look. He picked me out, too, as soon as I came through the passenger chute. What could be easier? Bewildered, middle-aged, mixed-race boy gazing all over the place in excitement and shame. I moved toward him, holding my two carry-ons in front of me as if they were delinquent children. My uncle came up to me, as shaky as I was, but empty-handed. After a second’s hesitation, he took my shoulders with the strangest, most wonderful grace. Don’t know you. Don’t know why. But I will.

It amused him, how awkward two total strangers could be. We were total foreigners, connected by blood in another life. “You remember me?” Dazed, I did. I’d last seen him for all of four minutes, when I was thirteen, a third of a century ago, at my mother’s funeral. Even more remarkable: He remembered me. “You’ve changed. You’ve gotten…” He snapped his fingers, jogging his memory.

“Older?” I suggested. He clapped his hands and pointed at me: Bingo.

He took one of the bags and we walked the long concourse to the parking lot. He asked about the flight, Europe, and my brother. I asked about Ruth — alive; Dr. Daley — also, remarkably. Michael told me of his wife and children, his lot in life. He was a personnel officer at Penn. “Only do this chauffeur job in my after hours, when vanished relations come back from the dead.” He looked me up and down, in the wonder of genetic recognition. We looked more like each other than either of us could accept. He seemed to be deciding whether his own nephew could really be white.

His car was the Hindenburg. Years in a small foreign country will do that to a person’s sense of scale. Michael started the engine, and a burst of exuberance blared out of the dashboard. It was only two beats, but at a volume I’d forgotten, from a rhythm section wider than oppression is long. It had been forever since I’d heard anything like it. In something short of embarrassment, Michael leaned forward and snapped off the stream.

“Please. Don’t shut it off for me.”

“Just old R & B. My feel-good. My church. What I listen to when I’m alone.”

“It sounded like a dream.”

“You’d think a man well into his fifties would have outgrown that.”

“Not until we die.”

“Amen. And not even then.”

“I used to play that stuff.” He looked at me in disbelief. “In Atlantic City. Only, you know, solo piano. Tip glass on the music rack. Liberace Covers Motown. The old Eastern European émigrés who came down for holidays couldn’t get enough.”