Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Every time the Stroms filled their lungs, they continued that long conversation of pitches in time. In old music, they made sense. Singing, they were no one’s outcasts. Each night that they made that full-voiced sound — the sound that drove David Strom and Delia Daley together in this life — they headed upriver into a sooner saner place.

Delia and David never let a month go by without a round of their favorite public flirtation: Crazed Quotations. The wife settled on the piano bench, a child pressed against each thigh. She’d sit, telegraphing nothing, her wavy black hair a perfect cowl. Her long russet fingers pressed down on several keys at once, freeing a simple melody — say Dvorák’s slow, reedy spiritual “From the New World.” The husband then had two repeats to find a response. The children watched in suspense as Delia’s tune unfolded, to see if Da could beat the clock and add a countersubject before their mother reached the double bar. If he failed, his children got to taunt him in mock German and his wife named the forfeit of her choice.

He rarely failed. By the time Dvorák’s stolen folk song looped back around, the fellow found a way to make Schubert’s Trout swim upstream against it. The ball bounced back to Delia’s court. She had one stanza to come up with another quote to fit the now-changed frame. It took her only a little meandering to get “Swanee River” flowing down around the Trout.

The game allowed liberties. Themes could slow to a near standstill, their modulations delayed until the right moment. Or tunes could blast by so fast, their changes collapsed to passing tones. The lines might split into long chorale preludes, sprinkled with accidentals, or the phrase come home to a different cadence, just so long as the change preserved the sense of the melody. As for the words, they could be the originals, madrigal fa-las, or scraps of advertising doggerel, so long as each singer, at some point in the evening’s game, threaded in their traditional nonsense question, “But where will they build their nest?”

The game produced the wildest mixed marriages, love matches that even the heaven of half-breeds looked sidelong at. Her Brahms Alto Rhapsody bickered with his growled Dixieland. Cherubini crashed into Cole Porter. Debussy, Tallis, and Mendelssohn shacked up in unholy ménages à trois. After a few rounds, the game got out of hand and the clotted chords collapsed under their own weight. Call and response ended in hilarious spinouts, with the one who flew off the carousel accusing the other of unfair harmonic tampering.

During such a game of Crazed Quotations, on a cold December night in 1950, David and Delia Strom got their first look at just what they’d brought into this world. The soprano started with a fat, slow pitch: Haydn’s German Dance no. 1 in D. On top of that, the bass cobbled up a precarious Verdi “La donna è mobile.” The effect was so joyfully deranged that the two, on nothing more than a shared grin, let the monstrosity air for another go-round. But during the reprise, something rose up out of the tangle, a phrase that neither parent owned. The first pitch shone so clear and centered, it took a moment for the adults to hear it wasn’t some phantom sympathetic resonance. They looked at each other in alarm, then down at the oldest child, Jonah, who launched into a pitch-perfect rendition of Josquin’s Absalon, fili mi.

The Stroms had sight-read the piece months before and put it away as too hard for the children. That the boy remembered it was already a wonder. When Jonah engineered the melody to fit the two already in motion, David Strom felt as he had on first hearing that boys’ choir soar above the double chorus opening Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion. Both parents stopped in midphrase, staring at the boy. The child, mortified, stared back.

“What’s wrong? Did I do something bad?” The child was not yet ten. This was when David and Delia Strom first knew that their firstborn would soon be taken from them.

Jonah shared the trick with his little brother. Joseph began adding his own crazed quotes a month later. The family took to ad-libbing hybrid quartets. Little Ruth wailed, wanting to play. “Oh, sweet!” her mother said. “Don’t cry. You’ll get airborne faster than anyone. Fly across the sky before too long.” She gave Ruth simple trinkets — the Texaco radio jingle or “You Are My Sunshine”—while the rest made Joplin rags and bits of Puccini arias lie down together around them in peaceable kingdoms.

They sang together almost every night, over the muffled traffic of distant Amsterdam Avenue. It was all either parent had with which to remind them of the homes each had lost. No one heard them except their landlady, Verna Washington, a stately, childless widow who lived in the brownstone’s other half and who liked to press her ear to their shared wall, eavesdropping on that high-wire joy.

The Stroms sang with a skill built into the body, a fixed trait, the soul’s eye color. Husband and wife each supplied musical genes: his mathematician’s feel for ratio and rhythm, her vocal artist’s pitch like a homing pigeon and shading like a hummingbird’s wings. Neither boy suspected it was at all odd for a nine-year-old to sight-sing as easily as he breathed. They helped the strands of sound unfold as easily as their lost first cousins might climb a tree. All a voice had to do was open and release, take its tones out for a spin down to Riverside Park, the way their father walked them sometimes on sunny weekends: up, down, sharp, flat, long, short, East Side, West Side, all around the town. Jonah and Joseph had only to look at printed chords, their note heads stacked up like tiny totem poles, to hear the intervals.

Visitors did come by the house, but always to make music. The quintet became a chamber choir every other month, padded with Delia’s private singing students or her fellow soloists from the local church circuit. Moonlighting string players from the Physics Departments at Columbia and City College turned the Strom home into a little Vienna. One noisy night, a white-maned old New Jersey violinist in a moth-eaten sweater, who spoke German with David and frightened Ruth with incomprehensible jokes, heard Jonah sing. Afterward, he scolded Delia Strom until she cried. “This child has a gift. You don’t hear how big. You are too close. It’s unforgivable that you do nothing for him.” The old physicist insisted they give the boy the strongest musical education available. Not just a good private teacher but an immersion that would challenge this eerie talent to become everything it was. The great man threatened to take up a collection, if money was the problem.

The problem wasn’t money. David objected: No musical education could beat the one Jonah was already receiving from his mother. Delia refused to surrender the boy to a teacher who might fail to understand his special circumstance. The Strom family chorale had its private reasons for protecting its angelic high voice. Yet they didn’t dare oppose a man who’d rooted out the bizarre secret of time, buried since time’s beginning. Einstein was Einstein, however Gypsy-like his violin playing. His words shamed the Stroms into accepting the inevitable. As the new decade opened onto the long-promised world of tomorrow, Jonah’s parents began searching for a music school that could bring that frightening talent into its own.

Meanwhile, days of instruction that the children swallowed whole went on segueing into evenings of part-songs and improvised games of musical tag. Delia bought a sewing machine — sized phonograph for the boys’ bedroom. The brothers fell asleep each night to state-of-the-art long-playing 331/3rpm records of Caruso, Gigli, and Gobbi. Tiny, tinny, chalk-colored voices stole into the boys’ room through that electric portal, coaxing, Further, wider, clearer — like this.