Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Da couldn’t let us stay home forever. “Come on, my boys. The world is not gone, yet. If you don’t want to study physics with me, then you must choose some other school.”

This was the last must Jonah ever listened to. “What the hell, Mule. Robinson’s going to retire. They’ve taken “The Shadow” off the air. We might as well go back to the slammer.”

He settled on Juilliard — the next-closest thing in the world to staying home. At Juilliard, we could almost vanish again, into the one thing we knew how to do. Da got Jonah a vocal coach from the Columbia Music Department, and Jonah started woodshedding again a month before auditions. Maybe he was right about how much he’d learned through silence. Juilliard took him into the prep program without probation.

At the premier performance school in the country, not even a singer of Jonah’s caliber had any leverage. He could hardly make his acceptance contingent on mine. The pressure of my own admission lay wholly on me. “Not going if you don’t,” Jonah said just before I had to play. I’m sure he meant it as emotional support.

I took my audition, my brother’s future pressing down on my shoulders and almost forcing my face into the keys. I hiccupped through the first movement of opus 27, no. 1, my runs turning to rancid butter. I could hear myself condemning my brother and me to a lifetime of lassitude in my father’s suffocating apartment. After I played, I went to the toilet off the rehearsal room and threw up, just like the boys Jonah once marveled at, years before. Our musical education had been more rapid and comprehensive than our parents could have anticipated. I’m glad Mama hadn’t lived to see where I’d landed.

My acceptance came attached with two sheets of red-inked faultfinding. The last comment on the list was a double-underlined word: “Posture!” Jonah never let me forget it. He barked the word with a German accent each time we sat at dinner. Walking along the street, he’d grab and force my shoulders back. “Posture, Herr Strom! Do! Not! Slump!” He never guessed that the weight slumping me over was him.

Branded with my red-inked acceptance, I followed my brother into the Juilliard prep division. If Boylston was music’s provincial outpost, Juilliard was its Rome. Walking down one hallway, I lived through three hundred years of Western concert music trickling through the doors in fantastic cacophony. Jonah and I were children again, the lowest rungs on a ladder of experience that stretched away from us, out of sight.

From the building on Claremont, we were an easy stroll from home. We didn’t have to live with anyone, a reprieve that gave me unspeakable relief. In that independent nation of music, we were no one’s problem, no one’s scandal, no one’s trailblazer. No one much looked at us at all. Sight counted for nothing there. There, everyone was all ears.

Our fellow students put the fear of God in us. Jonah may have learned more about singing from seven months of silence than he did from any teacher after our mother. But he learned more about the world of professional music making from two weeks in its North American capital than he’d ever cared to know. The academic side of our education was even more perfunctory than it had been in Boston. That suited us. We were there for one thing. The only thing either of us had any heart left to do.

Jonah didn’t stay long in the prep division. As soon as they could, his teachers hustled him upstairs. He was far from the youngest to start college there. The school was rotten with prodigies, some who’d completed the program by sixteen, the age Jonah entered it. But he was surely the least prepared to enter adulthood early.

He started the year of Little Rock, three years after Brown became the reputed law of the land. Jonah studied the same news pictures I did: nine kids threading through the 101st Airborne paratroopers, just to go learn about Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis, while we sashayed in the front door of our conservatory to learn about sonata-allegro form. I sneaked into the school library each day to see the newspapers. Kids our age, marching to school through riots, just one step ahead of getting strung up by the rabid crowd, skipping up the army-lined stairs along the gauntlet of bayonet-fixed M1’s of their all-white protectors following their own gunpoint orders. Army helicopters landing on the school football field, establishing a perimeter. Governor Faubus invoking the National Guard, canceling the court orders, squaring off against the federal forces, taking the insurrection to television: “We are now a country under occupation.” And General Walker answering, “The sooner the resistance ceases, the sooner normalcy will return to the school area.” The whole country stood ready to resume civil war a hundred years on, over nine kids my age, while I struggled with Chopin études and Jonah breezed through Britten.

The conservatory was my country. Arkansas was no more than a distant nightmare. I don’t know what Jonah thought about Little Rock. We spoke of it only once, sitting in front of Da’s first black-and-white television, watching a news clip while waiting for a thriller that didn’t last past the following summer. On screen, a thin, white, bulldog crew-cut teen nosed up to a beautiful girl in sunglasses and whispered a muted threat. Jonah, next to me in the dark, said, “He touches her and he pays.”

We, in our new world, lived like princes. Every afternoon had another free recital, the highest caliber of pleasure performed for mostly empty houses. Every few weeks — as often as we could talk Da into letting us stay out — we could have a symphony or even an opera for a student pittance.

I studied and practiced, needing eight more hours in each day. I had my first run at repertoire so mythic, I almost rebelled at stroking the notes. With my teacher, George Bateman, I went back and relearned opus 27, no. 1, this time properly. The Well-Tempered Clavier was my daily bread. I read my way through a chunk of book one, keeping to safe tempi on the tricky fugues.

Mr. Bateman was an accomplished accompanist. He still performed often and canceled as many lessons as he kept. He moved through my lessons in a state of distraction. But he could hear like hell’s watchdog, and he did with two fingers of his left hand what I couldn’t do with my entire right. His crumbs of praise fed me for weeks.

He tucked his criticisms so deeply amid that praise that I often missed their bite. I played Chopin’s Mazurka in A Minor for him. Its trick is that little dotted rhythm — how to make it lilt without listing. I got through the first repeat without incident. Then I made that turn into C, the burst of relative major — the most predictable surprise brightening on earth. Mr. Bateman, eyes closed, maybe even dozing, jumped forward. “Stop!”

I jerked my hands off the keys, a dog whacked with the newspaper he has been trained to fetch.

“What did you just do, there?” I was afraid to look up. When I did, Mr. Bateman was waving. “Do that again!” I did, crippled with self-consciousness. “No, no,” he said, each rejection oddly supportive. “Play it the way you did the first time.”

I played it exactly as I always played it. Each time, Mr. Bateman’s face rose and fell in whole storm systems. Finally, he lit up. “That’s it! That’s beautiful! Who taught you that?” He waved his arms around his head, happily warding off a swarm of fact. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Just keep doing it, no matter what else I tell you to do!”

For days afterward, I wondered if I might not, after all, have a gift I didn’t suspect. I knew what Mr. Bateman was trying to do: move me from fingers to feeling, from mechanics to mind. He called a little Schumann fantasy piece I played “brilliant,” and all that afternoon, I thought I could change worlds. I wanted to tell Mama what Mr. Bateman had said, as soon as I got home. Then, remembering, the pleasure of accomplishment turned to a bitterness deeper than I’d felt at her death. Nothing made sense. My crippled tune dragged through more unprepared keys than I knew how to survive. I was the most contemptible teenager alive, to feel such elation, so soon after elation should have ended for good. To go on shamelessly growing, while Mama would not.