Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

My mother’s student, a bass-baritone named Mr. Winter, told how she’d been refused by the school where she first wanted to study. “Not a lesson went by for me when I didn’t bless those sorry bastards for putting Mrs. Strom on another path. But if I were a federal judge, I’d sentence them to one afternoon. Just one. Listening to the sounds that woman could make.”

It came my father’s turn to speak. No one expected him to, but he insisted. He stood, his suit flying outward in all directions. I tried to straighten him up a little as he rose, which sent a nervous laugh through the whole congregation. I wanted to die. I’d have given all our lives for hers, and come out ahead.

My father walked up behind the podium. He bowed his head. He smiled out across the audience, a pale beam aimed at other galaxies. He took off his glasses and wiped them with his handkerchief, the way he always did when overcome. As always, he succeeded only in smearing around his eyebrow grease. For a moment, he blinked, sightless, a bloated, poached whitefish lost in this sea of real color. How could my mother have seen past such a skin?

Da slid his glasses back on, and became our Da again. The thickness of his spectacles made him cock his head. The raised side of his face went up in a horrible grin. He held out his right hand and shook it in the air, about to start one of his lectures on relativity by telling a funny story about clocks on moving trains or twins on rocket ships traveling near the speed of light. He shook his hand again, and his mouth fell open, preparing the first word. A dry clicking came out of his throat. His voice spread across thousands of staggered attacks, all the part-songs he’d ever started with her. He floundered on the upbeat.

At last, the first word cleared the hurdle of his larynx. “There is an old Jewish proverb.” This wasn’t my father. My father was out standing in the face of some terrible bare wind. “A proverb that goes, ‘The bird and the fish can fall in love…’”

The jaw dropped and the clicking came on again — dry reeds on a riverbank scraping one another. He held still for so long, even my embarrassment, in that dry clicking, scattered, along with the room’s every discomfort, into silence. My father lifted up his chin again and smiled. Then, with a crumpled apology, he sat down.

We sang: the only part of the day that might have pleased her. Mr. Winter delivered “Lord God of Abraham,” from Mendelssohn’s Elijah. The best of my mother’s amateur women took a run at the Schubert “Ave Maria,” Miss Anderson’s hallmark, so loved by my mother that she herself had not sung it since girlhood. The student singer couldn’t control any note above her second E. Grief tore up her vibrato, and yet, she’d never again come so close to a perfect rendering.

One by one, then in groups, the voices my mother once sang with took their turn singing without her. They littered the room with fragments of Aida. They sang Russian art songs whose words were a wash of phonetic watercolor. They sang spirituals, the only folk music that always harmonized itself out to four, five, even six abandoned and abiding parts. They stood and sang spontaneous bits of gospel, all the available scraps of improvised salvation.

For the briefest, thinnest moment, I heard it again, the game of Crazed Quotations — my parents’ eternal courtship ritual and their children’s first singing school. Only here, the counterpoint slowed and drew itself into a single thread. Deep turned to wide, chords to lines. Yet something of that old melodic piling up remained. And the something that remained was my mother. She’d come from more places than even her hybrid children could get to, and each one of those clashing places sang its signature tune. Once, those competing strains had fought to pass through the ear all at once. Now they gave up and took turns, polite, at last, in death, each making way for the other, lengthwise down the testament of time.

My father didn’t try to sing. He was too smart for that. But he didn’t stay silent, either. He’d written out a three-minute quodlibet, a record of our old evenings together, nights that had seemed endless, once, but had more than ended. Into those three minutes, he packed every quote that fit the seed harmonic progression. He could not, in any conceivable universe, have composed the piece in the few days since her death. Yet if he’d written out the piece in advance, it could only have been with this occasion in mind.

He’d scored it for five voices, as if we were still the singers. He might as well have written an aria for Mama herself to perform. An ad hoc quintet of her friends and students stood in for us, while we sat in the mute audience. On short notice, they worked a miracle. They reassembled Da’s crazed pastiche, giving it the virtuosity of an airy good-bye. Had they heard the thing for what it was, they’d never have gotten through it: our family’s nightly musical offering, thanks for a gift we thought would always be ours.

Da performed a feat of musical reconstruction. All our old quotation games had died and burned, as sure as every family album. Yet here was one intact again, exactly the collage we’d sung one night, in everything but the particulars. Da somehow recovered that name, too familiar to retrieve. He was the transcriber, but he could never have composed this piece alone. She was there in counterpoint, laying down line on line. Note by note, he pulled her back from the grave. Her “Balm in Gilead” careened into his Cherubini. Her Brahms Alto Rhapsody bickered with his growled klezmer. Debussy, Tallis, Basie: For the length of that collage, they made a sovereign state where no law prevented that shacking up, such unholy harmonies. This was the only composition Da ever wrote down, his one answer to the murderous question of where the fish and the bird might build their impossible nest.

My brother and I were slated to go on after Da’s piece. I stole a look at Jonah as the group headed toward the work’s surprise, inevitable home. His face was a nest of wasps. He didn’t want to stand and perform in front of this audience. Didn’t want to sing for them. Not now, not ever. But we had to.

The piano in that rented room played damp and wayward. My brother’s voice was wrecked with refusal. He’d chosen a song he could no longer sing, one pitched up a childhood above his highest note. I’d tried every way possible to talk him out of the choice. But Jonah wouldn’t be moved. He wanted to do that Mahler he and Mama had once auditioned together. “Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht?” Who thought up this little song?

This was the way he wanted to remember her. Two years after their joint performance had gotten him into the academy, Jonah had asked that she not come pick him up at the holidays. Now the source of all his love and shame had died before he could release her from that banishment. He’d carry this fact with him for the rest of his life. Not even singing would be able to expel it.

Two nights earlier, he’d come up with the monstrous idea of singing the whole song in falsetto, up in the original soprano of The Boy’s Magic Horn, like some grotesque countertenor straining for the unreachable return. I made him hear the absurdity. We took it down an octave, and except for that jarring dissonance — the innocent words sung in his exiled range — we got through it. The mourners must have found the tribute inexplicable. What did this darling girl in her mountain house have to do with the matter-of-fact, irreverent black woman from Philadelphia, burned alive before the age of forty? But the girl in the song was Mama. Who could declare how her sons saw her? Death mixes all the races. Now more than ever, she was that girl, looking out forever on the original green meadow.

Our house had burned and our mother was dead. But we had no body to prove it. I wasn’t old enough to believe, without the evidence of seeing. To me, all these people had gathered to sing, rehearsing for some future first anniversary of the missing one’s return. Who thought up this little song? Only when the hidden mountain girl took my mother’s face did she at last appear to me. And only in my father’s tortured, fairy-tale language could wund rhyme with gesund: