Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

But his punishment was limited to Kimberly Monera’s lower lip. It trembled in place, blanched, bloodless, an earthworm on ice. I wanted to reach down and hold it still. Jonah, oblivious, pressed her. He would not stop short of the secret to her sorcery. “How can you tell who wrote a piece if you’ve never even heard it?”

Her face rallied. I saw her thinking that she might still be of use to him. “Well, first, you let the style tell you when it was written.”

Her words were like a ship breaching the horizon. The idea had never really occurred to Jonah. Etched into the flow of notes, stacked up in the banks of harmony, every composer left a cornerstone date. My brother traced his hand along the iron balustrade that flanked the concrete steps. The scattering of his naïveté staggered him. Music itself, like its own rhythms, played out in time. A piece was what it was only because of all the pieces written before and after it. Every song sang the moment that brought it into being. Music talked endlessly to itself.

We’d never have learned this fact from our parents, even after a lifetime of harmonizing. Our father knew more than any living person about the secret of time, except how to live in it. His time did not travel; it was a block of persisting nows. To him, the thousand years of Western music might as well all have been written that morning. Mama shared the belief; maybe it was why they’d ended up together. Our parents’ Crazed Quotations game played on the notion that every moment’s tune had all history’s music box for its counterpoint. On any evening in Hamilton Heights, we could jump from organum to atonality without any hint of all the centuries that had died fiery deaths between them. Our parents brought us up to love pulse without beginning or end. But now, this pastel, melting ice-cream girl threw a switch and started sound moving.

Jonah was nothing if not a quick study. That one afternoon, sitting on the concrete steps of the Boylston Academy in chinos and a red flannel shirt alongside the pale Kimberly in her pressed taffeta elegance taught him as much about music as had his whole first year at school. In an instant, he learned the meaning of those time signatures that we already knew by ear. Jonah grabbed all the girl’s offerings, and still he made her trot out more. She kept it up for him as long as she could. Kimberly’s grasp of theory would have been impressive in someone years older. She had names for things, names my brother needed and which Boylston dribbled out too slowly. He wanted to wring the girl’s every scrap of music out of her.

When she sang tunes for us to guess, my brother was merciless. “Sing naturally. How are we supposed to tell what you’re singing, when your vibrato’s a whole step wide? It’s like you swallowed an outboard motor.”

Her jaw did its terrifying tremolo. “I am singing naturally. You’re not listening naturally!”

I struggled to my feet, ready to bolt back into the building. Already, I loved this antique girl, but my brother owned me. I saw nothing in this trade for me but an early death. I had no stomach for waiting around until disaster bloomed. But one glance from my brother cut my legs out from under me. He grabbed Kimberly by both shoulders and launched his best Caruso, as Canio in I Pagliacci, right down to the crazed stage laugh. She couldn’t help but sniffle back a smile.

“Ah, Chimera! We were just kidding, weren’t we, Joey?” My head hummed with nodding so fast.

Kimberly brightened at the spontaneous nickname. Her face cleared as fast as a Beethoven storm breaking on a single-chord modulation. She would forgive him everything, always. Already, he knew it.

“Chimera. You like that?”

She smiled so slighty, it could yield easily to denial. I didn’t know what a chimera was. Neither did Jonah or Kimberly.

“Fine. That’s what everyone will call you from now on.”

“No!” She panicked. “Not everyone.”

“Just Joey and me?”

She nodded again, smaller. I never called her that name. Not once. My brother was its sole proprietor.

Kimberly Monera turned and squinted at us, a little drunk on her new title. “Are the two of you Moors?” One mythic creature to another.

Jonah checked with me. I held up my weaponless palms. “Depends,” he said, “on what the hell that is.”

“I’m not sure. I think they lived in Spain and moved to Venice.”

Jonah pinched his face and looked at me. His index finger drew rapid little circles around his ear, that year’s sign for those strange geometries of thought our fellow classmates called “mental.”

“They’re a darker people,” she explained. “Like Otello.”

“It’s almost dinnertime,” I said.

Jonah bent inward. “Chimera? I’ve wanted to ask you something forever. Are you an albino?”

She turned a ghastly shade of salmon.

“You know what they are?” my brother went on. “They’re a lighter people.”

Kimberly drained of what little color Italy had granted her. “My mother was like this, too. But she got darker!” Her voice, repeating the line her parents had fed her from birth, already knew the lie would never come true. Her body returned to spooky convulsions, and once more, my brother fished her out from the fires he’d lit under her.

When at last we stood to return to the building, Kimberly Monera paused in midstep, her hand in the air. “Someday, you’ll know everything I know about music, and more.” The prophecy made her infinitely sad, as if she were already there, at the end of their lives’ intersection, sacrificed to Jonah’s voracious growth, the first of many women who’d go to their graves hollowed out by love for my brother.

“Nah,” he said. “By the time Joey and I catch up, you’ll be way down the line.”

They became strange comrades, on nothing but understanding. Our city of children hated even the tacit bond between them. Boyhood, by law, didn’t fraternize with the otherworldly camp of girls, except for hasty, unavoidable negotiations with a sister or singing partner. The school’s best voice, whatever his suspect blood, was not allowed to consort with the princess of furtive oddity. Jonah’s classmates were sure he was secretly mocking her, setting her up for the public kill. When the expected ritual humiliation failed to materialize, the middle form boys tried to shame him back to decency. “You working for the SPCA?”

My brother just smiled. His own isolation ran too deep for him to understand what he risked. Total indifference accounted for half his boy soprano’s spectacular soar. When there was no audience anywhere worth pleasing except music itself, a voice could go anywhere.

We were Kimberly’s Moors, a standing offense to everyone at Boylston. He got a scribbled note: “Find a darkie girl.” We laughed at the scrap of paper together, and threw it away.

When our parents picked us up at Christmas in another shiny rental — my mother, as always, riding in the back to prevent arrest or worse — Jackie Lartz came up to fetch us in the thinned-out Junior Common Room. “Your father and your maid and her little kid are here to pick you up.” His voice had that edge of childhood: half challenge, half bashful correct me. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to figure out why I didn’t. Why I said nothing. My brother’s reasons went with him to the grave. Whatever safety we were after, whatever confusions we avoided, we left for vacation far more thoroughly schooled than we’d arrived.

Mama fussed over us all vacation. Rootie crawled all over us, talking, trying, before we left again, to tell us her last four months of adventures. She copied me, the way I walked, the foolish new learning in my voice. Da wanted to know everything Boylston had taught me, everything I’d done while away. I tried to mention everything, and still it felt like lying by omission.