Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“He wrote her a teasing letter. Told her to live life to the fullest.”

“Maybe he thought… Maybe he didn’t really know how…” I wanted to say how far.

“Joey. Stupidity’s over.”

I looked away, at the forked intersection, the newspaper shill’s stand pitched against the subway railing, the diner across Beacon Street with its tawdry Christmas tinsel strung across the plate window. It had begun to snow. Maybe it had been snowing for a while.

“She left too fast for it to be anything else. Only one thing in the world makes people that crazy. János must have called Monera up. Told him the score. World-famous conductor can’t have his prize girl running around with a little brown half-breed.”

My brother had always been my private freedom, my basement-level safety of willful unconcern. People and their blindness had been put on this earth strictly for his amusement. He’d always declared how others would see him. Every ambiguous slight, every veiled lynching had rolled off him until this one. Now the fever was in my brother’s face: the prick of our childhood’s vaccine, gone inflamed.

“Look at us, Joey!” His tone issued from a throat that had closed long before his had even opened. “What are we doing here? Couple of freaks. You know what we should have been?”

His words scattered me under the feet of the crowds that kept disgorging from the subway. We were homeless. We’d taken up living on this curb, no warmth, no sheltering inside to return to. Everything I knew to be certain was dissolving as fast as the fat flakes of snow landing on my brother’s face.

“We should have been real Negroes. Really black.” His lips were frozen; his words were a runny egg. “Pitch-black. Black as the sharps and flats. Black as that guy over there.” His thumb flicked up a little trigger, and his finger targeted a man cutting diagonally across Brookline. I grabbed his hand. He turned and smiled. “Don’t you think so, Joe? We should have been simple, straight-up. Black as Ethiopia in a power outage.” He looked around, picking a fight with all of indifferent Kenmore Square. “We’d know where we stood, anyway. Our self-serving little rich kid friends would have stoned us to death. János wouldn’t even have taken me into his fucking school. Nobody would’ve bothered using me. I wouldn’t have to sing.”

“Jonah!” I held my head and groaned. “What are you saying? They wouldn’t expect a black person to sing?”

Jonah laughed like a crazy man. “See what you mean. Not without dancing. And not the shit they make me sing now.”

“Shit, Jonah? Shit? ” Everything we loved, everything we’d grown up on.

Jonah only chuckled. He raised his palms, the innocent victim. “You know what I’m saying. We wouldn’t be…where we are.”

We sat in our unreal lean-to, curled against the crowd. Snow accumulated in drifts around our feet. My mind raced. I had to keep us here. Classical music was all I knew how to do. “Real black…very black people sing what we sing.”

“Sure they do, Joey.”

“Look at Robeson.”

“You look at Robeson, Joey. I’ve had enough of looking.”

“What about Marian Anderson?” The woman our parents claimed had brought them together. “She’s just cracked the Met. The door’s open now. By the time we’re…”

Jonah shrugged. “Greatest alto of the twentieth century. And they throw her a little second-scene bone, fifteen years past her prime.”

I plunged ahead, down a path I couldn’t make out. “What about Dorothy Maynor? Mattiwilda Dobbs?”

“You done?”

“There’s more. Lots more.”

“How many is lots?”

“Plenty,” I said, drowning. “Camilla Williams. Jules Bledsoe. Robert McFerrin.” I didn’t need to name them. He, too, had them all memorized. Everyone who’d ever given us something to go on.

“Keep going.”

“Jonah. Black people are breaking into classical music all the time. That woman who just played Tosca on national television.”

“Price.” He couldn’t help smiling in pleasure. “What about her?” He flung his arms at me. “Look at us. Two halves of nothing. Halfway to nowhere. You and me, Joey. Out here in the middle of…” His hand swept the angular plaza, the people hurrying through the snow. “We’d have been better off. Nobody’s going to want what they can’t even—”

“She wanted you.” I couldn’t bring myself to say the bloodless girl’s name. “She knew who you were. She knew that you…weren’t white.”

“Did she? Did she? She’s twenty-five jumps ahead of me, then.”

“Don’t torture yourself, Jonah. You don’t know. They might have taken her out of school for any—”

“She would have written.” Furious at my trust, my blindness. “Joey. You know how they got the word mulatto?”

I was a long time answering. “You think I’m stupid, don’t you? You think I’m a tagalong idiot.” I tried to stand, but couldn’t. My legs were a statue’s. My butt was frozen to the curb. When I managed to rock forward and rise, his hand held me down. His face was full of wonder at realizing how much I’d stored up for years, in silence.

“I don’t think anything of the sort, Joseph. I just think your parents brought you up in a dream.”

“Funny. I was just thinking that about your parents. So tell me. Where’d the word come from?” The one I hated, whatever its origin.

“It’s Spanish for ‘mule.’ Know why we’re called that?”

“Cross between a horse and a…whatever.”

“City boy.” He reached out to pull my hat down over my eyes. “They call us mules because we can’t reproduce ourselves. Think of it. No matter who you marry—”

“You’d never have married her, Jonah. It was just a game. Neither of you ever believed you were going to… Just a little operetta the two of you were dabbling in.” Yet their ending, written by another.

I’d never talked back to him before. I sat still and waited for death. But he didn’t even hear me. He started up again, resigned. “You and me, Mule. The two of us: one of a kind.” What she’d always called us, our mother. Our secret bond of pride, all the years of growing up. “Couple of damn bears on roller skates is what we are.”

A pair of ankles appeared to my left. I looked up at a policeman, staring down at us. His badge name looked Italian. He was as dark as either of us. Darkness was never really the issue.

The dark Italian scowled. “You boys are blocking traffic.”

Jonah looked up at the man, all earnest attention, just waiting for the lift of his baton to stand and deliver an aria.

“You hear me?”

I nodded dumbly, for all of us.

“Then get the hell out of here, pronto. Before I cuff and print you.”

Jonah did a three-point round-off, pushing back up to his feet. “I can’t move,” I bleated. I’d frozen into place. I’d have to go on sitting, freezing to death, like some doomed Jack London hero.

“You hear me?” the officer said. “You deaf?” Darker than olive. Maybe he had a secret Turkish ancestor hiding out in the family tree foliage. He grabbed me by one shoulder and dragged me to my feet. He twisted my arm so roughly that, had I been my own grandson, I’d have had grounds for a lawsuit.

Jonah raved at the policeman. “I’m a mulatto bel canto castrato with a legato smorzato.” I pushed him away. He pushed back, leaning toward the cop and waving his finger. “That’s my obbligato motto, Otto.”

“So gesundheit, already.” The man turned away from Jonah without a thought. He’d seen crazier. Every working hour: the sinkhole of human illness, on every block of his repeating beat. He threatened us vaguely with the back of his hand. “Get lost, hoodlums.” We hobbled off, my limbs still stiff with the season. From a hundred yards, he yelled, “Merry Christmas.” Anxious to thank him for his lenience, I returned the greeting.