Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Jonah refused to consider returning to Boston. “I’ll never go back. Not for all the private lessons in the world.” Da only shrugged in acquiescence. So, of course, I didn’t go back, either. The possibility of my returning alone never even arose.

Da resumed his classes at Columbia, after what must have seemed an eternity to him. Jonah raged to me. “That’s it? Everything’s normal again? He just waltzes back to work, like nothing’s changed?”

But I could tell by the way Da’s shoulders ground now when he walked how badly everything had. He had nothing left but work. And from the moment Mama died, even his work altered. Time, that block of standing evers, that reversible dependent variable, had turned on him. He no longer knew how much was left. From the moment of the fire until his own death, he gave himself up to finding time and breaking it.

We lived in that cramped borrowed apartment until its owner finally had to ask for it back. Then we evacuated, without much plan, to another, slightly larger one, also in Morningside Heights. We were as close to invisible there as we could get, on a street that teetered right on the color line. Or not on the line, but in the many moving ripples. For the university stood like a huge rock in the surf of changing blocks, the churning populations beyond math’s ability to calculate. With the insurance, Da bought new furniture, bright blue dishes that Mama would have liked, and a replacement spinet. He even started rebuilding our sheet-music library, but the project was hopeless. Even among the four of us, we couldn’t remember all the music we’d owned.

Ruthie changed schools — to one, like her, that split down the middle, almost half and half. She made new friends, new nationalities every week. But she never brought them home. She was ashamed of her men, the three of us living like there was no tomorrow and even less a yesterday.

At first, Da came home most afternoons. But his need to lose himself in work soon outweighed his need to work through our loss. The equations swallowed him. There was a woman, Mrs. Samuels, who came by to keep house and watch after Ruth when she got home at 3:30. Mrs. Samuels’s only instrument was the chord organ. So there were no lessons. Da must have paid her well for the time she put in, but she did it, I think, out of love. She would have liked to be his children’s friend.

Jonah spent most days scribbling into his notebooks. Sometimes he wrote words, other times, notes on ledger lines. He wrote a long letter on all different kinds of paper and posted it abroad, to Italy, with lots of exotic airmail stamps. “So she can’t say she didn’t know how to reach me,” he said. The letters I wrote, I kept in my head, with no other place to send them.

When he wasn’t scribbling, Jonah listened to the Dodgers, “Dragnet,” “The FBI in Peace and War,” all the shows of delayed boyhood. He even had a favorite big-band station, when he really needed to keep himself from thinking. He let me listen to the Saturday Met broadcasts, following along while pretending not to.

When Ruthie came home from school in midafternoon, I read to her or took her out to a safe corner of the park. I hadn’t spent more than a few weeks with my sister in two years. She was a stranger, a wound-up little girl who spoke to herself and who cried herself to sleep because we couldn’t fix her hair the way Mama did. We tried. We got it just the way we all remembered it, except Ruth.

Some days, I’d sit with her at the piano, the way Mama used to sit with me. Ruth learned anything I gave her faster than I’d learned the works myself. But her fingerings were never the same twice. “Try to be consistent,” I said.

“Why?” She lost all patience for the instrument, and most days we ended up fighting. “It’s dumb, Joey.”

“What’s dumb?”

“The music’s dumb.” And she’d rip off a parody Mozart sonatina, brilliant in its improvised burlesque. She mocked it, sneering through the keys, the music we were brought up on. The music that killed her mother.

“What’s so dumb about it?”

“It’s ofay.”

“What’s ofay?” I asked Jonah that night, when Ruth couldn’t hear.

My brother was never at a loss for more than an eighth note. “It’s French. It means up to date. Means you know how things are done.”

I asked Da. His face turned stern. “Where did you hear this?”

“Around.” Evading my own father. Everything honest in our home had died the day our mother did.

My father removed his glasses. He was blind without them. Blinking, helpless, a flounder on ice. “Do they still say that?”

“Sometimes,” I bluffed.

“It’s not good. It’s pork Latin.”

I burst out laughing. He should have slapped me. “Pig Latin.”

“Pig Latin, then. For white people.” Oe-fay. Foe.

I didn’t confront Ruth. But we didn’t go back to Mozart, either. My sister was not quite eleven, at least a year from childhood’s end. But she’d already changed. It took those many weeks together for me to see that little Root had vanished along with Mama.

“What do you want to learn?” I asked her. “I can teach you anything.” The offer came out of my unlimited ignorance. Had I the first idea of the ways of playing — swings and jolts, bends and bops, slaps and tickles, restless, headlong fence rushes, resilient hybrid strains, the twists of tonality, the quotes, thefts, arrests, and reparations, all the modes and scales torn out of the mere two that my music stuck with — had I even once considered the bottomless invention all around me, I’d have been unable to teach my little sister a C major chord in root position.

“I don’t know, Joey.” Ruth’s left skittered up and down, walking a bass at a trotter’s pace. “What did Mama like to play?”

It had only been months. She couldn’t have forgotten already. She couldn’t think memory was lying to her.

“She liked it all, Ruth. You know that.”

“I mean, other than…you know — before you all took up with…”

For my part, I practiced at least four hours every day and soon went back to formal lessons. Music was no longer a game, nor would it ever be pure pleasure again. But it was all I knew. One of my mother’s students, Mr. Green, took me on. Every few weeks, he’d give me a new movement from another Beethoven sonata and get out of my way. Each week, I’d try not to outgrow him too quickly.

I learned to cook. Otherwise, we might have all gotten rickets, scurvy — last century’s diseases, still rampant just a few blocks north and east. I read somewhere that potatoes and spinach, served with a little ground beef, had all the nutrition a body needed. All Mama’s recipes, written in pen on three-by-fives that she kept in her green metal box on the kitchen sill, had burned. Nothing I ever made did more than apologize to the feasts that once had poured out of her oven. But my audience knew it was this or oatmeal.

The month our mother died, Rosa Parks refused to move back. While I was cooking for my family and my little sister was walking to her integrated school, fifty thousand people in Montgomery laid down their year-long walking siege. The movement had started. The country I’d been born in was edging toward showdown. But I never heard a word. Da must have followed the story in detail. But he never brought the subject up in all his dinner-table ramblings.

Jonah spent his days in feverish passivity. He listened to the radio. He took walks or, on days when he went to campus with our father, sat motionless at the music library at Columbia. He was trying to race backward, just by standing still. A decade later, he’d tell an interviewer that these were the months that turned him into an adult singer. “I learned more about how to sing by keeping silent for half a year than I ever learned from any teacher, before or after.” Except the teacher from whom he learned even silence.