Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

My first thought, God help me, was, Make it where? I closed the distance and put my hands on her shoulders. She threw them off. As quickly as her tears came, they stopped. “Okay. Okay. No crisis. Just another husbandless single sister mother. Millions of us.”

“How many of you got brothers?”

Ruth squeezed my arm, a frantic tourniquet. “You don’t know, Joey. You can’t begin.” She felt me flinch, and grabbed on tighter. “I don’t mean that. I mean what’s happened to us, since you took off. The bottom’s dropped out of the whole country. Like living through a lifelong air raid. For a boy, a little boy?” Her shudder passed through me. I’d never feel safe again. “You haven’t noticed it, in him? You really haven’t noticed?”

“Kwame? No. Well, he dresses…a little like a criminal.”

She barked in pained amusement and smacked the air. “All the kids do now. And half the adults, too.”

“And I’ve noticed he hates policemen.”

“That’s just common sense. Survival benefit.”

We stood still outside our grandfather’s house. I looked in and saw him at the window, pulling back a white curtain to look at us. Dr. Daley: the family practitioner under siege in the neighborhood he’d once served. He motioned violently for us to come in. Ruth nodded and held up a finger, bargaining for thirty seconds. Seeing no immediate emergency, he let the curtain fall and retreated.

Ruth leaned toward me. “Kwame’s not like Robert. He has Robert’s healthy resentment. But Robert always had a counterplan. He was always working on an answer. One more public education drive, one more demonstration. Kwame’s got the rage, but not a single answer for it. Robert used to keep him in line by challenging him. Used to say, ‘Best thing to do when you’re feeling mad is make something of yourself that’s not them.’ When Kwame explodes, I do what Robert used to do. I sit him down with a sheet of paper and colored pencils. Or park him in front of a box of paint. Kwame can make — oh! The wildest things. But since… The last few times I tried to sit him down…”

Then the boy appeared at the window, watching us. Through the glass, even with his headphones and their pounding pulse, he heard us talking about him. Fury and apathy fought for a controlling interest in his eyes. My sister looked back at her son, smiling at him through her panic. But what can you hide from a child who has already seen death? She turned and grabbed me just below the collar. “How much are we talking about, Joey? My portion of…the savings?”

Ruth’s third of the inheritance had been sitting in balanced investments, compounding for more years than her son had lived. It couldn’t match that boy’s compounded experience, but it was a usable sum. I gave her an estimate. Her face did its own skeptical calculation. “We have some, too, Robert and I. And Papap keeps offering — the piece Mama never got. We could get matching funds. There are sources — not many, but they’re there. It’s all Robert wanted. His last sustained plan before… He worked so hard on it, I can see the blueprints.”

I was afraid to ask her to make sense. She started up again, steering me toward the door. “Joseph Strom. How would you like to give your nephew music lessons?”

I pressed back, feeling her hand’s resistance. “Ruth. Don’t even joke. What could I possibly… He’d eat me alive.”

She laughed and shook her head, dragging me on toward the door. “Oh, Kwame’s nothing, baby. Wait until you get a classroom full of ten-year-olds! Wait until little Robert comes up through the ranks.”

That’s how I returned to Oakland with my sister and her sons. It was as easy as falling. As soon as Ruth described Robert’s school to me, I knew I’d been looking for a reason to keep me from returning to Europe. Something big enough to put up against the salvage of the past. Nothing else had claim over my life. My single problem lay in breaking the news to Jonah.

We called him from Philadelphia just before we left. I had trouble finding him at home, in Ghent. When he heard my voice, Jonah made it sound as if he’d been waiting for weeks at the side of the phone. “Damn it, Mule. I’ve been dying by inches here. What’s happening?”

“Why didn’t you just call if you wanted to hear from us?”

“That wouldn’t exactly be hearing from you, would it?”

“I’m going to California. Ruth’s building a school.”

“And you are going to…”

“Fucker. I’m going to teach for her.”

He thought a moment before saying anything. Or maybe it was the transatlantic lag. “I see. You’re quitting the group. You’re going to kill Voces Antiquae?” With the bull market in early music not even starting to peak, superlative, vibrato-free voices were springing up all over. I’d always been the ensemble’s weak link, the amateur latecomer. This was my brother’s chance to replace me with a real bass, a trained one, someone who could do justice to the others and lift them to that last level of international renown that had vaguely eluded us. He didn’t have to mourn the loss of my voice. He needed only to let me know how completely I’d betrayed him.

“Well, we had our run, didn’t we?” His was the voice of the future past. He sounded light-years away, anxious to get off the phone and start auditioning my replacements. “So how is your sister?”

“You want to talk to her?”

From the kitchen counter, where she’d been pretending not to listen, Ruth shook her head. Jonah said, “I don’t know, Joey. Does she want to talk with me?”

Ruth cursed me under her breath as I handed her the phone. She took the receiver as if it were a bone club. Her sound was small and flat. “JoJo.” After a while: “Long time. You old yet?” She listened, dead. Then she sat up, defending. “Don’t start this. Just…don’t.” After another pause, she said, “No, Jonah. That’s what you should do. That’s what you should fucking do.”

She lapsed into another listening silence, then handed the phone to Papap. He shouted into it. “Hallo. Hallo? Dieses ist mein Enkel?”

The words ripped me. They did worse to Ruth. She came over to me and whispered, so Europe couldn’t hear. “You sure about this? You had work. Maybe you belong over there.”

She just wanted noise from me. She couldn’t bear the sounds of that other conversation. We talked in a drone, drowning out Papap and listening in by helpless turns. He and Jonah talked for three or four minutes, nothing, everything — collapsing decades into a few hundred words. Papap grilled Jonah about Europe, Solidarity, Gorbachev. God only knows what answers Jonah invented. “When are you coming home?” Papap asked. Ruth tried to talk over the words, as if that would erase them. But that’s the thing about sounds: Even when they all happen at once, none of them cancels out the others. They just keep stacking up, beyond any chord’s ability to hold.

There was a silence, out of which Papap suddenly charged, enraged. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Behind the times. Come back and listen. Every song and dance in this country has gone brown.” Ruth and I quit our deaf show. She stared at me, but before I could even shrug, our grandfather was sailing. “You think you’re a traitor out there? You’re nothing but an advance scout. A double agent… Well, call it that, too, if you like. Name an immortal piece that wouldn’t sound better sung by the hired help. That little world you’ve been scouting is going to be overrun with black, once we show the least little bit of interest. Sie werden noch besser sein als im Basketball. ”

Ruth quizzed me with a look. I felt myself giggling bitterly. “Just like basketball,” I translated. “Only better.”