Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

The end came at the Berkshire Festival. Serge Koussevitzky had died a few years before, and one of the conductor’s lifelong friends now invited the Boylston Academy to sing in a massive memorial concert. To honor the dead champion of new music, Reményi had us do a few excerpts from Orff’s Carmina Burana. Back in that era, the heyday of show-trial morality, making young students sing the lyrics of debauched medieval monks might have gotten him deported. But Boylston had for years been a bastion of Orff’s teaching techniques. And no one, Reményi insisted, was better suited to sing Orff’s hymns to Fortuna than those whose fates were still being formed. Reményi hired several Cambridge instrumentalists and supplemental adult voices, and we were off to Tanglewood.

I made the cut for the touring chorus. I figured they picked me to keep Jonah happy. Reményi’s casting was masterful. He gave the drunken abbot of Cockaigne to Earl Huber, who sang it with the swagger of a Buckeye turned Beat poet. He assigned the song about the girl in the tight red dress who looks like the bud of a rose to Suzanne Palter, a seventh grader from Batesville, Virginia, who kept a Bible under her pillow so she could kiss it each night after lights-out. Latin was Latin, and Suzanne sang the shameless come-on with such robust chastity that even Reményi’s cheeks colored.

For Jonah, János reserved the simplicity of “In trutina,” that summa of ambiguous wavering:

In trutina mentis dubia

fluctuant contraria

lascivus amor et pudicitia.

Sed eligo quod video,

collum iugo prebeo;

ad iugum tamen suave transeo.

In the uncertain balance of my mind

lewd love and modesty

flow against each other.

But I can choose what I see,

and I submit my neck to the yoke;

to the delightful yoke, I yield.

In rehearsal, János coaxed Jonah up into a nimbus of sound. He took the song at half the speed it should have gone. Jonah floated into the phrase, hovering above the orchestra like a fixated kingfisher. This was two years before Sputnik, but the slow, lathelike turn he gave the line emanated from deep space. Any singer will tell you: The softer the sound, the harder to make. Holding back is more difficult than holding forth. But somehow, from the earliest age, my brother knew how to make a smallness larger than most singers’ big. And he took his shattering piano gift to “In trutina.”

Jonah hit his mark in every rehearsal except the first dress, when the ringer instrumentalists, who hadn’t been warned, stumbled with listening. The rest of the chorus knew that if we could get as far as Jonah’s number, we’d live. “In trutina” was the one sure spot in our overly ambitious program, the perfect, near-still climax that only music could give.

For the memorial, the Berkshires overflowed with more famous musicians than any of us had ever seen. Most of the Boston Symphony was there, as well as several composers and soloists whom Koussevitzky — via one rigged-up honorarium or another — had kept from starvation. Before the concert, Earl Huber ran over and tackled Jonah. “It’s Stravinsky! Stravinsky’s here!” But the man he pointed out looked more like the guy our parents paid to fix pipe leaks than the century’s greatest composer.

Even the hard-core pros who performed alongside us were rattled by the caliber of the audience. Jonah stayed by me, in the wings, before we went on. He never understood nerves. It scared him to see it in me. He himself never felt safer than when he had his mouth open with notes coming out. But there on the stage at the Berkshire Festival, he learned about disaster.

Reményi launched “In trutina” at the expansive tempo he’d always taken it in rehearsal. Jonah started into his line as if it had only just then occurred to him. He ended the first stanza on a crest of wonder — lust and lewdness struggling in the balance.

His voice chose that moment to break in one crashing wave. None of us heard even a squeak in tone in his first stanza. But as he prepared to sing “Sed eligo quod video,” the next pitch wasn’t there. Without a thought, he hit the words an octave lower, with only the slightest waver. He finished out the first stanza a soprano and came back in the second a fledgling tenor.

The effect was electrifying. For those few in the audience who knew Latin, the lyric found a depth it would never have again in any performance. Afterward, a few musicians even asked Reményi how he’d dreamed up the masterstroke.

Never again that high D, my brother’s hallmark, out beyond the planet’s pull. Never again the chaste mount up into airless altitudes, the ease of ignorance, the first tart rush of ecstasy, the ring of dazed bliss, as if he just that moment had discovered what climax might be and how he might bring himself to it anytime he liked. On the long bus ride back to Boston in the dark, Jonah said to me, “Well, thank God that’s finally over.” For the longest time, I thought he meant the concert.

Late 1843—Early 1935

Delia Daley was light. In the gaze of this country: not quite. America says “light” to mean “dark, with a twist.” By all accounts, her mother was even lighter. No Daley ever spoke of where their family’s lightness came from. It came from the usual place. Three-quarters of all American Negroes have white blood — and very few of them as a matter of choice. So it was with Delia’s mother, Nettie Ellen Alexander, Dr. William Daley’s radiant conjugal trophy, his high-toned lifelong prize. He met her down in Southwark, the part of town where his family, too, had originally lived. “Originally” stretched the matter some. But the Daleys had lived there far enough back, in the scale of memory, for the place to shade off into something like origins.

William himself was the great-grandson of a freed house slave, James. James’s owner, the Jackson, Mississippi, heiress Elizabeth Daley, after the death of her millionaire husband in 1843, was leveled by a revelation only a notch below the persecutor Saul’s on the road to Damascus. Picking herself up after the blow, Elizabeth discovered that she’d turned Quaker. She learned the truth firsthand from the Society of Friends: Owning human beings would do to her soul, in the hereafter, everything it did so roundly to the bodies of her property in the recalcitrant here and now.

Elizabeth Daley set about dispersing her husband’s plantation holdings as ferociously as he’d gathered them. She gave the bulk of the man’s fortune to those scores of involuntary stakeholders whose work had, in fact, made the fortune for him. All the freed Daley slaves but one took their windfall profit shares and headed for Cape Mesurado — Christopolis, Monrovia — that diaspora in a diaspora, care of the American Colonization Society. African resettlement promised to solve all problems — holders’ and slaves’ alike — by exporting them to the Kru and Malinke, whose lands became the ante for cascading displacement.

The lone Daley house slave to stay behind was light. Almost as light as his former owner. James Daley was not a traveling soul. He suspected that near-black in Liberia would be no softer a fate than near-white in his inflicted, only home. So he chose the shorter voyage, accompanying Elizabeth to Philadelphia, William Penn’s damaged experiment in brotherly love.

Elizabeth signed over to James a modest annuity. In almost every way, she treated him as her son, the sweetest available spite on the spirit of the man’s father. James must have inherited the family business sense, for he turned his fair share of the Daley capital into a working grubstake. James would never have abandoned Elizabeth, except for her constant imploring that he do so. She insisted he learn a trade. He apprenticed at a Negro barbering shop that catered to whites, not far from the heart of the old town. The work was overlong and underpaid, but James found it ludicrously lucrative, given his employment history. Elizabeth wept when he finished his training. She died shortly after James set up his own shop, cutting the hair of well-off whites down in the Silk Stocking district.