Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Ruth didn’t come with us for that last look. She’d already had hers. Rootie had been the first, coming home to a house in flames. Her local grade school’s bus, unable to turn into our barricaded street, let her off at the corner. She didn’t know until she walked into the mob of firemen just whose house was burning. The men had to drag the screaming ten-year-old girl away from the blaze. She bit one of them on the hand, drawing blood, trying to fight free.

She screamed at me, too, as soon as we saw her. “I tried to find her, Joey. I tried to go in. They wouldn’t let me. They let her die. I watched them.”

“Hush, Kind. Your mother was already dead a long time by the time you came even close.” Da meant it as consolation, I’m sure.

“She was burning up,” Ruthie said. “She was on fire.” My sister had become another life. The oldest child on earth. Air rasped in and out of her. She started at something none of us could see. I put my arm on her and she didn’t even register.

“Shh. No one could be inside a flame like that and still feel.” Da had lived too long in the world of measurement. To him, even a ten-year-old girl wanted only the truth.

“I heard her,” Ruthie said, though not to any of us. “They trapped me. They wouldn’t let me reach her.”

“The Heizkörper exploded,” Da explained.

“The what? The hot body?”

“The boiling,” Da said. “The heating.” He’d forgotten how to speak the language. Any language.

“The furnace,” I translated.

“There had been a leak, most likely. The furnace exploded. This is why she could not get away from this fire, even though it came on her in the middle of the day.”

This was the theory that best fit all evidence. For weeks, in my dreams, things exploded. And in full daylight, too. Things I couldn’t name or outrun.

We moved into a tiny apartment down in Morningside Heights that a colleague loaned my father for the length of our emergency. We lived like refugees, dependent on the gifts of others. Even our classmates from Boylston sent us boxes of castoffs, not knowing what else to do.

My father arranged a memorial service. This was the first and last complex social act he ever managed to pull off without our mother’s help. There was no casket for viewing, no body left for burial. My mother had already been cremated, on someone else’s orders. All of our pictures of her had burned, alongside her. Friends contributed what keepsakes they had, to make a remembrance table. They propped them up on a sideboard by the hall door: clippings, concert programs, church bulletins — more mementos of my mother than I’d ever see again.

I didn’t think the little rented hall would fill. But people kept coming until they couldn’t get in. Even my father had underestimated, and he needed to call in more folding chairs. It stunned me to discover my mother had known so many people, let alone could bring them out on a bleak midwinter Sunday afternoon. “Jonah?” I kept asking under my breath. “Jonah? Where did all these people come from?” He looked and shook his head.

Some of the gathering turned out for my father’s sake. I recognized several of his colleagues from the university. Here and there, black yarmulkes clung to the crowns of balding skulls. Even Da briefly wore one. Others in the crowd came for Ruth, kids she went to school with, neighbor children we never really knew but whom Ruth had befriended. But most of the room turned out to send off my mother: her students, her fellow church circuit singers, her improbable assortment of friends. In my child’s mind, I’d always thought of Mama as an exile, barred from a country that should have been hers. But she’d furnished exile and thrown it open wide enough to make a life in.

From up front in the room, mourning’s showcase row, I turned around to sneak a look at her crowd. I scanned the range of colors. Every hue I’d ever seen sat somewhere in that room. The faces behind me shone in all gradations, shades split and glinting like the shards of a light-splashed mosaic. Each one insisted on its own species. Flesh casts slanted off everywhere, this way mahogany, that way walnut or pine. Clumps of bronze and copper, pools of peach, ivory, and pearl. Now and then, some extreme: bleached paste from out of the flour bin of a Danish pastry kitchen, or a midnight cinder from down in the engine room of history’s ocean liner. But in the spectrum’s bulging middle, all imaginable traces and tinges of brown packed onto folding chairs against one another in the crowded room. They gave themselves up by contrast, taupe turning evidence on ambers, tan showing up tawny, pinks and gingers and teaks giving the lie to every available name ever laid over them. All ratios of honey to tea, coffee to cream — fawn, fox, ebony, buff, beige, bay: I couldn’t begin to tell brown from brown. Brown like pine needles. Brown like cured tobacco. Tones that might have been indistinguishable by daylight — chestnut, sorrel, roan — pulled away from the tones they sat next to under the low lamps of those close quarters.

Africa, Asia, Europe, and America had slammed into one another, and these splintered tints were the shards of that impact. Once, there were as many shades of flesh as there were isolated corners of the earth. Now there were many times that many. How many gradations did anyone see? This polytonal, polychordal piece played for a stone-deaf audience who heard only tonic and dominant, and were pretty shaky even picking out those two. But all the pitches in the chromatic scale had turned out for my mother, and many of the microtones between.

This was my stolen, forbidden look back. Next to me, Jonah kept craning his neck, twisting in his chair, scanning the audience for someone. At last, Da told him, as sharply as he ever spoke to us, “Stop, now. Sit still.”

“Where’s Mama’s family?” Jonah’s voice reverted to soprano. A field of welts marked his face where he’d tried to shave. “Is that them? Are they here? They have to come for this, don’t they?”

Da hushed him again, lapsing into German. His words floated out without bearing, spreading across all the places he’d ever lived. He spoke rapidly, forgetting that his sons had a different mother tongue. I made out something about how the people in Philadelphia would have their own service, so everyone could attend without having to make the journey. Jonah didn’t catch any more than I did.

My father wore the same style of double-breasted gray suit already years out of date when he’d gotten married in one. He studied his knees with the same baffled smile with which he’d told us our mother was dead. Ruth sat next to Da, tugging at the sleeves of her dress’s black velvet, whispering to herself, her hair a tent of snarls.

A well-meaning but bewildered minister told my mother’s life story, which he didn’t know from Eve’s. Then friends stepped in to salvage the wreck the eulogy made of her. They told stories about her girlhood, a mystery to me. They named her parents and gave them a past. They brought to life her brothers and sisters, and recalled their three-story house in Philadelphia, a family fortress I pictured as an older, wooden version of our brownstone, which had burned down around her. The speakers seemed almost ready to fight over what they had most loved in her. One said grace; another said humor. Another said her foolish belief that the worst in us was fixable. No one said what they wanted. No mention of being spit on in elevators, no threatening letters, no daily humiliations. No talk of fire, no explosion, no being melted alive. People in the audience called out aid at every pause, joining the refrains like those congregations my mother once sang for. I sat up front, nodding at each testimonial, smiling when I thought I was supposed to smile. I would have spared them all, told every speaker to sit down, said that they didn’t have to say anything, if it had been in my power.