Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

And while he drifted off to sleep one night on this chorus of coaxing ghosts, Jonah told his brother what would happen. He knew what their parents were doing. He predicted exactly what would become of him. He’d be sent away for doing, beautifully, what his family had most wanted him to do. Cast out forever, just for singing.

My Brother’s Face

My brother’s face was a school of fishes. His grin was not one thing, but a hundred darting ones. I have a photograph — one of the few from my childhood that escaped incineration. In it, the two of us open Christmas presents on the nubby floral-print sofa that sat in our front room. His eyes look everywhere at once: at his own present, a three-segment expanding telescope; at mine, a metronome; at Rootie, who clutches his knee, wanting to see for herself; at our photographing father deep in his act of stopping time; at Mama, just past the picture’s frame; at a future audience, looking, from a century on, at this sheltered Christmas crèche, long after all of us are dead.

My brother’s afraid he’s missing something. Afraid Santa switched the gifts’ name tags. Afraid my present might be sweeter than his. His one hand reaches out to Ruth, who threatens to fall and crack her head on the walnut coffee table. His other hand flies upward to comb down his front curl — the hair our mother forever loved to brush — so the camera won’t capture it sticking up for all eternity like a homemade fishing lure. His smile assures our father that he’s doing his best to make this an excellent picture. His eyes dart off in pity for our mother, forever excluded from this scene.

The photo is one of the first Polaroids. Our father loved ingenious inventions, and our mother loved anything that could fix memory. The black-and-white tones have gone grainy, the look the late forties now have. I can’t trust the shades of my brother’s photographed skin to see just how others might have read him then. My mother was light for her family, and my father, the palest Eurosemitic. Jonah fell right between them. His hair is already more wavy than curly, and just too dark for carrot. His eyes are hazel; that much never changed. His nose is narrow, his cheeks the width of a paperback book. What my brother most resembles is a blood-drained, luminous Arab.

His face is the key of E, the key for beautiful, the face most known to me in the whole world. It looks like one of my father’s scientific sketches, built of an open oval, with trusting half almonds inlaid for eyes: a face that forever says face to me, flashing its seduction of pleasure, mildly surprised, its skin pulled smooth on the rounded bone. I loved that face. It seemed ever to me like mine, released.

Already he shows the wary distrust, the testing of innocence. The features will narrow as the months move on. The lips draw and the eyebrows batten down. The half-pear nose thins at the bridge; the puffs of cheekbone deflate. But even in middle age, his forehead still sometimes cleared like this and the lips rose up, ready to joke even with his killers. I got an expandable telescope for Christmas. How about you?

One night after prayers he asked our mother, “Where do we come from?” He couldn’t have been ten yet, and was troubled by Ruth, scared by how different she looked from the two of us. Even I already worried him. Maybe the nurses at the maternity hospital had been as careless as Santa. He’d reached the age when the tonal gap between Mama and Da grew too wide for him to call it chance. He gathered the weight of the evidence, and it bent him double. I lay in my bed, flush against his, cramming in a few more panels of Science Comics, starring Cosmic Carson, before lights-out. But I stopped to hear Mama’s answer to the question I’d never thought to ask.

“Where did you come from? You kids?” Whenever a question caught her on the chin, Mama repeated it. It bought her ten seconds. When things turned serious, her voice grew piano, and settled into that caramel, mezzo register. She shifted on the edge of his mattress, where she sat caressing him. “Why, I’m glad you asked me that. You were all three brought to us by the Brother of Wonder.”

My brother’s face twisted, dubious. “Who’s that?”

“Who…? How did you get so curious? You get that from me or from your father? The Brother of Wonder is named Hap. Mr. Hap E. Ness.”

“What does the E stand for?” Jonah demanded, trying to catch her out.

“What does the E stand for? Why, don’t you know that? Ebenezer.”

Presto: “What’s Wonder’s middle name?”

“Schmuel,” my father said, a tempo, from the doorway.

“Wonder Schmuel Ness?”

“Yes, sure. Why not? This Ness family has many secrets in the cabinet.”

“Da. Come on. Where did we come from?”

“Your mother and I found you in the freezer case at the A & P. Who knows how long you were in there. This Mr. Ness claimed to own, but he never produced the ownership papers.”

“Please, Da. Truth.”

Not a word our father ever violated. “You were born out of your mother’s belly.”

This inanity reduced the two of us to helpless laughter. My mother lifted her arms in the air. I can see her muscles tighten, even now, twice as old as she was then. Arms up, she said, “Here we go.”

My father sat down. “We must go there, soon or late.”

But we didn’t go anywhere. Jonah lost interest. His laugh staled and he stared off into space, grimacing. He accepted the deranged idea — whatever they wanted to tell him. He put his arm on Mama’s forearm. “That’s okay. I don’t care where we came from. Just so long as we all came from the same place.”

The first music school to hear my brother loved him. I knew this would happen before it did, no matter what my father said about predicting the future. The school, one of the city’s two top conservatory prep programs, was down in midtown, on the East Side. I remember Jonah, in a burgundy blazer too large for him, asking Mama, “How come you don’t want to come?”

“Oh, Jo! Of course I want to go with you. But who’s going to stay home and take care of Baby Ruth?”

“She can come with us,” Jonah said, already knowing who couldn’t go where.

Mama didn’t answer. She hugged us in the foyer. “Bye, JoJo.” Her one name for the two of us. “Do good things for me.”

We three men bundled into the first cab that would take us, then headed down to the school. There, my brother disappeared into a crowd of kids, coming back to find us in the auditorium just before he sang. “Joey, you’re not going to believe this.” His face all eager horror. “There’s a bunch of kids back there, and they look like Ming the Merciless is chewing their butts.” He tried to laugh. “This big guy, an eighth grader at least, is spitting his guts out in the washbasin.” His eyes wandered out beyond the orbit of newly discovered Pluto. No one had ever told him music was worth getting sick over.

Twenty bars into my brother’s a cappella rendition of “Down by the Salley Gardens,” the judges were sold. Afterward, in the stale green hallway, two of them even approached my father to talk up the program. While the adults went over details, Jonah dragged me backstage to the warm-up room where the older kid had puked. We could still smell it, lining the drain, sweet and acrid, halfway between food and feces.

Official word came two weeks later. Our parents gave the long typed envelope to Jonah, for the thrill of opening it himself. But when my brother foundered on the first two sentences, Da took the letter. “‘We regret to say, despite the merits of this voice, we cannot offer a place this fall. The program is overenrolled, and the strains on the faculty make it impossible…’”

Da let out a little bark of dismay and glanced at Mama. I’d seen them shoot the look between them, out together in public. By ten, I knew what it meant, but I kept that fact secret from them. Our parents stared at each other, each working to deflect the other’s dismay.