Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Only in opera do angels need skin. Only in opera and imagination. Among the fourteen singers in that angel umbrella is Hänsel’s brother, helping to weave a halo of safety around those twinned innocents. I am the darkest, nuisance angel, as wrong in my flowing white robes as my brother in his lederhosen. I can’t see my own face, yet I know how it must play. I can see its wrongness in the eyes of the seraph host: burlesque intruder, guardian of a forsaken tribe.

The boy we angels circle to protect curls up under this shield as if it is a universal grant of childhood: a walk in the woods, guarded by a chorus that takes up this wayward duet and propagates it, with rich, full harmonies, even while he and his Gretel lie in the thrilled simulation of sleep. The forest and its stolen berries are his; he and this girl can lose themselves in darkness, every night, with impunity. But there is hell to pay, in the final act. The mother from act one, the harsh mezzo, scarred by poverty and driven to punish her dancing children by turning them out of the cottage, comes back, in double casting, as the child-eating witch.

Clever Hans does all he can to keep our own blood parents from coming to see our operatic debut. He means to protect them from the twists of this production. Maybe he’s ashamed of his look, his role. “It’s not that great,” he tells them. “More for children, really.” But our parents wouldn’t miss this premiere for the world. Of course they must come see what their offspring have gotten themselves into. Da brings the foldout camera. Mama dresses up majestically in cobalt dress and her favorite feathered hat with veil. She does something to her face, almost like her own stage makeup. She smells like babies.

The edible cottage, the night they come, gleams as it has rarely done: a profusion of sugared offerings, a child’s glimpse of heaven. But with his parents in the house tonight, little Hans loses his appetite. He sees their silhouettes even over the glare of the footlights, this couple who can’t touch each other in public. He sees his real sister, nappy-headed, shocked by this candy beauty, wide-eyed under the forest’s curse, reaching out her hand in appetite or self-defense.

Hänsel’s real-life mother must sit still and watch the story transform all mothers into witches. His father must hold still and watch this German-singing Hexe try to trap his dusky child and force him into the order-making oven. The boy looks for comfort to his Gretel, but her dirndl-wrapped waist seems tonight a circlet of public shame. Yet he must stay by her, his stage sister, his albino woods mate, however much his agitation throws poor Kimberly off. When his distress at last overwhelms the girl and she comes in a major third below her note, clever Hans is there to hum her back to pitch.

When all the enchanted gingerbread children are freed again from their fixed, repeating nightmare, when the witch fries in her own device and the now-pious family reunites over her cremains, the curse of the role lifts from him. For the first time, he takes his bows capless, his curly russet hair bared for all to see. Something darkens in his face, his eyes. But he bows to fair enthusiasm, accepting the weight of this liberal love.

I look for my brother afterward. He is a pillar of indignation, racing through the boys’ dressing room. He tears away from the backstage admirers. He doesn’t wait for me to catch up. My brother Hänsel explodes out of the lobby, into the cove of our parents, his arms waving apologies, full of corrections, explanations: take-backs, do-overs. But our mother, crouched over, takes us both in her arms. “Oh my boys. My JoJo!” My father’s compensating smiles assure the passersby there’s no need to intervene. “Oh my talents! I want you to sing at my wedding. You’re going to sing at my wedding.” She can’t stop hugging us. This is her concert triumph, though not the one she trained for. “Oh my boys, my JoJo! You were both so beautiful!”

In Trutina

At the next summer recess, Jonah told Da they didn’t need to come up to Boston to take us back to New York. He said we wanted to take the train home. We were old enough; it would be easier and cheaper, he claimed. God only knows how the request played with our parents, or what they heard in it. All I remember is how thrilled Mama was when we stepped out onto the platform at Grand Central. She kept spinning me around in the waiting room, sizing me up, like something had happened to me that I couldn’t see.

Rootie wanted up on my shoulders. But she was growing faster than I was, too big to carry more than a few steps. “How come you’re getting weaker, Joey? The world is beating on you?” I laughed at her, and she got angry. “Serious! That’s what Mama says. She wants to know how many ways the world is going to beat on you.”

I searched my parents for an explanation, but they were fussing over Jonah, consoling him over the World’s Best Opera Plots clothbound edition he’d forgotten on the train.

“Don’t laugh at me.” Rootie pouted. “Or I’ll fire you as my brother.”

We sang together that summer, for the first time in half a year. We’d all gotten better, Ruth most dramatically. She held down moving lines, following along on the staff, getting rhythms and pitches together on only a couple of tries. She had succeeded in cracking the musical hieroglyphics earlier than any of us. She seemed different to me now, a kind of charmed creature. She rolled about, cackling at her luck in having her brothers around again. But she no longer needed us, nor thought to tell me the million discoveries she’d made in my absence. I felt shy around her. A year apart had made us forget how to be siblings. She performed for me, miming anyone I could name, from Da’s craziest ancient colleagues to her beloved Vee, our landlady. She could turn around and hood herself with her hands, and, when she turned back, have aged her face a century. “Don’t do that!” Mama shuddered. “It’s just not natural!” So Rootie did it more. It made me laugh every time.

The reunited Strom family quintet resurrected all their favorite bits of near-forgotten repertoire. With Ruth a real member now, we polished up the Byrd Mass for Five Voices, hanging on to the suspensions in the frail Agnus Dei, as if to keep it forever from the perjury of having to resolve. All my family wanted was to get each of our plates up in the air and spinning at the same time. We took our tempi from Jonah now. He had a dozen explanations why a piece should go faster or slower, places where it should broaden or swell. He dismissed the composer’s written indications. “Who cares what some poor sucker hundreds of years ago thought the piece meant? Why listen to him, just because he wrote the thing?” Da agreed: The notes were there to serve the evening’s needs, and not the other way around. At Jonah’s insistence, we made dirges of jigs and jigs of dirges, for no better reason than the pulse in his own inner ear.

He made us sing several of Kimberly’s treasures. My parents were game for any excursion, however otherworldly, so long as it somehow swung. But Jonah was not happy with simply dictating the night’s program. He wanted to conduct. He corrected Da’s technique, corrections that came straight out of János’s mouth. Da just laughed him off and continued manufacturing pleasure the best way he knew.

One evening toward summer’s end, just before Jonah and I returned to Boylston, he stopped Mama in midphrase. “You could get a smoother tone and have less trouble with the passaggio if you kept your head still.”

Mama set her sheet music down on the spinet and just stared at him. Movement was why we’d always sung. Singing meant being free to dance. What other point? My mother just looked at my brother, and he tried to hold her gaze. Little Root whimpered, flapping her sheet music back and forth and shaking like a dervish to distract attention. My father’s face drained, as if his son had just spouted a slur.