Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

When all the plates were in the air and spinning, we cracked open some tunes. My kids knew the drill. They had been through it often enough to bring it to elementary school perfection. I conducted from the piano, waving my finger in the air, landing on a girl in a mint jumper, her hair in cornrows, grinning, already picked before I even knew I was picking her.

“What are you thinking about when you wake up?” I tossed the question above the trance of cycling pulses. This girl, my beacon Nicole, was ready for it.

Breakfast is on, and

I’m gonna eat like a Queen!

Mayhem reigned, but the rhythm held. She soloed, then settled into a cycle of her own. We took her pitch as home and set up camp. I pointed to another favorite in the front row, lanky, eager Judson, his tapping cross-trainers the size of his chest. “What did you think about last night, falling asleep?” Judson already knew.

Man, I was running,

through a long silver tunnel,

faster than anyone.

The two of them spun around each other, finding their entrances, nudging their pitches and syncopations to fit. I took a few more in that pitch center. “Where’s your safest place in the world?”

There’s a spot on a hill

at the end of my street

where I can look out

over everything.

“What did you see on the way to school? When are you best? Who you going to be this time next year?” I brought them in, clipping a phrase, drawing another out, speeding or slowing them as needed to get the roux to set. Half a dozen singers hung on to one another in midair, constantly changing, unchanged. I hushed them into a diminuendo, then started up five more. I played out the new starting pitch, then built a group at the dominant. Your five favorite words. The dream Saturday afternoon. Your name if your name wasn’t yours. I waved them into an alternation: one-five, five-one.

Then came the leap into changes. I thumped a key and pointed, and three singers transposed their phrase to that new place in the scale. They still knew, at age eight: a pitch for every place we have to go.

My choir started smirking, but not on account of my conducting. The singers’ mouths gaped, huge as fish in an aquarium, at something over my shoulder. Keeping time, I turned, to see Jonah standing in the classroom door, his own mouth open, a lesson in how to make a throat wide enough for rapture. I couldn’t stop to greet him; my hands were full of notes. He gestured me to turn back around and keep afloat that feather on the breath of God.

I hushed the first two groups and took them both aside, readying a third to travel into the relative minor. The most scared you’ve ever been. Five words you’d rather die than hear. I traced my finger in the air, searching for someone to sing The heaviest weight pressing on you, and landed on Robert. He took only two beats. He, too, was waiting for me.

My Daddy is dead

and my brother’s in prison.

When is the zero of change, the spot in time when time begins? Not the big bang, or even the little one. Not when you learn to count your first tune. Not that first now that twists back on itself. All moments start from the one when you see how they all must end.

Robert drew his thread, looping it over and over, into the elementary pulse. A cloud passed over the choir, but our song already anticipated that change in the light. I now had all the chords I needed to get anywhere pitches could go. I brought the lines in and out, swelled and hushed, slowed, then sped, chopped and extended, plucking out a solo and pasting together quartets, moving the whole freely from one key to another.

My Daddy is dead.

And I was running.

To that spot on a hill.

Where breakfast is on and I can look out,

but my brother’s in prison.

They knew already how to make it go. They ceased to care about the strange adult or even notice him. We stayed in the swell, working our favorite rondo form, coming back, whenever we strayed too far, to a full choral shout of “I’m still standing.” I pulled out every stop, everything every student of mine had ever taught me about how music runs. It shamed me that I needed so badly to impress him. As if joy ever needed justifying, or could justify anything. And my shame stoked me to lift all my voices higher.

We rose as far as we ever had. We flowed back into ourselves, and I stirred the waters for one more full flood before returning to sea level. But as we crested one last time, I heard a ringing like a bell. Its attack was something only weather made. I hadn’t conducted it; it came from outside my students’ ranges, but nestled into their outlined harmonies, notes so sustained they were almost stopped. It took me an instant, forever, to place: my brother singing Dowland. The tune came from a life ago. The words from yesterday:

Bird and fish can fall in love.

I turned around to see, but Jonah waved me back again. He came alongside the end of the choir’s back row. The resonance he released rang like a gong. But my kids knew a good thing when they made one. I kept conducting, and they kept coming back in. I stole a look at Jonah. He lifted an eyebrow at me like he used to do, back in the day. And we were off.

Everywhere I brought my class, he found a way to follow. This time, I made him read my mind. Accompany me. Scraps of will-o’-the-wisp, poet love, songs of the death of children, the Dies Irae, old broken have-mercies: He fit them into the running chorus, changed by everything they harmonized. He gave them game. He sang in that high, clear, inevitable blade of light his whole lifetime had gone into perfecting. Even the children felt the power. Always the same seven words, scatting where he needed, as if born to it.

We circled on a giant updraft, drifting through the keys. His voice, joined to the voices of my children, was like a lamp in the night. We could have stayed up there for years, except for one accident. When he slipped into the classroom, Jonah failed to close the door. So every chant of “I’m still standing”— a little bit louder now; a little bit softer now — washed down the hall, the free property of anyone who heard. I didn’t realize we were disturbing the peace until the chorus joined in behind me.

A sober instructor of social studies came by to hush us up but then stayed on to sing. The woman who taught first grade math got everyone clapping. Kids pressed into the room until it was strictly SRO. Not one of them audience. The bigger the chorus grew, the faster it drew. Then our mountain of sound fell away for a measure, and not on my cue. I knew by the next upbeat what it had to be. I saw her in the doorway, even before I turned around: the school’s director.

I can’t tell what Ruth heard. Her face showed nothing. But there were her singing kids, small for the last time, and there was her brother, singing for her for the first time since we were small. Every stacked sound stayed whole in the changing chord. Then there was one more obbligato line. Who knew where the tune came from? She made it up. Improvised. The words, though, were given her:

But where will they build their nest?

Ruth’s voice went through me like death. Refusal, lament: the only answer to his holdout hope. I felt as I had when I’d heard her sing back in Philadelphia. Infinitely bereft. Her voice was lovely enough, even in ruin, to prove how the dream of music was never more than that.

One by one, I brought the lines back home. The cycles of rhythm came to rest, the pulse unwove, and the room erupted, applauding itself. Kids broke loose in all directions, a spontaneous uprising that declared the rest of the hour a national holiday. A ring formed around Jonah. “How’d you do that?” Judson grilled him. By way of answer, Jonah let loose with a bolt of Monteverdi.