Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Michael coughed so hard, I thought I’d have to take the wheel.

“People are strange.”

He whistled. “You got that. Stranger than anyone.” He flipped the radio back on, although he doused the volume. We listened together, each according to his needs. By the time we hit the heart of town, we were harmonizing. Michael did this outrageous full-pipe falsetto, and I hit the changes in the bass. He smiled at my passing tones. Theory can help get you through a shortfall of soul — at least in the easy keys.

We turned off the highway onto local streets. The size of the most modest apartment block amazed me after years in hunchbacked Ghent. We neared his boyhood house. Michael grew morose. “Rough times. Trickle down shakes the last few golden drops on inner Philly. Every cheap scrap of manufacture has headed offshore. Then it’s our fault for doing crack.”

I was at sea. I couldn’t even ask for definitions.

Michael looked out the window, seeing his old neighborhood through my eyes. His face was racked with betrayal. “You would have loved this street. So fine once. No way you can even recognize it now. We’ve been trying to get the doctor out of here for the last five years. He’s not moving. Insists on dying inside that monstrosity. Riding out the decline and fall until the house collapses around him or his body gives up, whichever comes first. ‘What would happen to Mama if we sold the house to strangers?’”

“Mama?” My grandmother. Nettie Ellen Daley. “Isn’t she…”

“Oh, yeah. Completely. Two years ago. The doctor hasn’t quite come into possession of the fact yet. A real ass-buster, I have to tell you. My sisters and me, coming all the way in here, five times a week. We go through caretakers like chocolate through a dog.”

His street indeed reeled from the present. Even the most stately old houses had died intestate. We slowed and turned into the driveway of an ample house bucking the tide around it. Michael flipped off the radio as we hit the driveway mouth. He caught me smiling at the gesture. “Old habit.”

“Not his music of choice?”

“Don’t get him started on it.”

We were still yards from the house. “His hearing’s really that good?”

“My Jesus, yes. You got it from somewhere, didn’t you?”

The shock of that thought was still banging around in me when a figure drifted out onto the lawn to meet us. A full, fluid, statuesque woman, one shade paler than I remembered her. I was out of the car without feeling myself leave. Michael stayed behind the wheel, giving us our minute. She had her head down as I closed the distance. She wouldn’t look at me. Then I put my arms around my sister.

Ruth wouldn’t hold still for the embrace. But she gave me more than I’d hoped, and I held her longer than I had all my life. Three full seconds: It was enough. She pulled free to look at me. She wore red robes and a green-and-black headdress that even I knew was supposed to invoke Africa. “Ruth. Let me look at you. Where’ve you been?”

“In hell. Here. This country. How about you, Joseph?” Her eyes were deep and broken. Something was wrong with her arms. She hadn’t seen me for even longer than I hadn’t seen her.

“I’ve missed you.” Almost chant.

“Why come back now, Joey? Black men are killed every week. Why did you wait until it was…?”

For you, Ruth. I came back for you. Nothing else big enough to bring me.

A young boy, maybe a fifth grader, materialized on the lawn beside us. I didn’t see him come up, and the sudden apparition scared me. He was dark, closer to Michael than to Ruth or me. Michael got out of the car and I turned to him. Happy for the deflection, I waved toward the boy. “Yours?”

Michael laughed. “You’re stuck on the escalator, man. You’re in a time hole. My oldest daughter has one of her own almost this old!”

“Mine,” Ruth said.

“Not yours,” the boy told her.

My sister sighed. “Kwame. This is Joseph. Your uncle.” The boy looked as if we were collaborating to cheat him out of his inheritance. He didn’t say, Not my uncle. He didn’t have to. Ruth sighed again. “Oakland. That’s where we’ve been. Oakland.” The word went up my spine like prophecy. “Community organizing. Working.”

“Then the cops killed my dad,” Kwame said.

I put my hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off. Ruth put her hand where mine had been, and he suffered it, but believing nothing. Ruth steered her child toward the house, and we men followed.

My mother’s father waited just inside the door. His close-cropped hair was Niagara white. The air around him, like the high-tide mark on a beach, still registered how large a man he’d been. He wore a steel gray suit. Everyone had dressed for this occasion except me. He tilted his head back to get me in the bottom pane of his bifocals. “Jonah Strom.”

“Joseph,” I said, holding out my hand.

My objection angered him. “I still don’t see why she had to give you boys the same name. Never mind. Es freut mich, Herr Strom. ” He took my hand, even as I shrank. “Heißen Sie willkommen zu unserem Haus.”

I stood there gaping. Uncle Michael chuckled as he dragged my bags upstairs. “Don’t let him fool you. He’s been practicing for the last three days.”

“He can make hotel reservations and change your currency for you, too,” Ruth said.

Dr. Daley threatened to break forth in Sturm und Drang. “Sie nehmen keine Rücksicht auf andere.” Something more than three days’ practice.

Ruth put her arm around him. “It’s okay, Papap. He’s not an other. He’s one of us.”

From the hall to my right came crying. A startling sound: the wail of a creature wholly dependent on the unknown. Ruth moved toward the cry almost before I heard it. She slipped into the distant room, murmuring as if to herself. When she came back, she held a dozen-pound squirming infant trying to fling itself free to safety or death.

“Also mine,” Ruth said. “This is little Robert. Five months. Robert, this is your uncle Joey. Haven’t told you about him yet.”

Michael set me up in an upstairs room. “This was my brother’s. We’re moving Kwame into the twins’ old room.” I was violating a sanctuary. But there was no place else to go. “Sleep,” my uncle told me. “You probably need it.” And then he left for his own home.

Ruth came by to check on me. She held little Robert, who every so often stabbed out with his arm to prove my existence. My sister talked to him steadily, sometimes words, sometimes just pitched phonemes. She stopped only to ask, “You good?”

“I am now.”

She shook her head, looking at her baby but talking to me. “Can I get you anything?”

“You call him Papap.”

Little Robert stared at me. His mother wouldn’t. “I do. Kwame, too. We’ve called him that for years.” Then she turned: You have a problem with that? “That’s what he said you used to call him.”

“Ruth?”

“Not now, Joey. Maybe tomorrow. Okay?”

Then she went slack, some tendon cut. She hunched over, as if the baby had swelled to tremendous weight. She lowered herself to the foot of the bed. I sat next to her and put my arm on her back. I couldn’t tell if she wanted it there or not. She began to heave, her muscles lifting and falling in rhythm. Her shaking was tight and small, softer than winter branches scraping a roof. Only when little Robert began to cry, too, did she pull herself up into words.

“It’s so old, Joey. So old.” Her calm was forced. She might have meant anything. Every human nausea was older than she could say.

“The license plate was hanging down. He was driving back on Campbell on a Thursday night. Not even that late — nine-thirty-five. Not even in an especially bad neighborhood. Coming home from a council meeting. He was trying to get a shelter built. The man worked all the time. I was home with Kwame and…” She lifted little Robert, her face twisted. I pressed her shoulders: tomorrow would be fine. Or never.