Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

As for his own vocal reputation, even Jonah’s detractors knew they had to go after him with both barrels if they were foolish enough to go gunning. I overheard students in the back rows of the darkened auditorium declaring his sound too pure, too effortless, too light, claiming it lacked that muscular edge of the best concert tenors. No doubt on winter nights after we headed home, the Sammy’s crowd slammed him with worse. But as long as we sat with the others over phosphates, they treated him with a resigned shake of the head. They’d go through an afternoon’s list of finest, brightest, clearest. “Then there’s Strom,” O’Malley would say. “A species unto himself.”

We sat at Sammy’s one afternoon, just before I passed out of prep and began degree work. Talk turned to Jonah, who was just then working up his first go at Schubert, the Miller’s Beautiful Daughter, an assault on white womanhood that drew O’Malley’s awe. “Strom here’s our ticket to fame. We might as well admit it. The boy’s going all the way. Ride his coattails we shall, if he’ll but let us. If not, we’ll watch him ascend from afar. Laugh not! See how the conquering he-he-he-he-hero comes!”

My brother put his wadded-up straw wrapper in his nose and blew it out at the speaker.

“You think I jest?” O’Malley carried on. “Barring accident, our boy here’s going to become the world’s most famous half-breed. Our illustrious school’s next Leontyne Price.”

The country’s most thrilling new voice, after half a decade, had just been granted her stage debut, in San Francisco. The school was abuzz with its newest headliner alum. But at O’Malley’s invocation of the name, the booth at the back of Sammy’s lurched, their laughter like wet firewood. Jonah arched his eyebrows. He opened his mouth, and out came absurd falsetto. “Gotta brush up my spinto, don’t you know, honey.” A silent hiccup passed through the group. Then fresh, forced hilarity.

I didn’t talk to him for the longest time, heading home. He heard my silence and met it head-on. We were halfway to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine before either of us said anything.

“Half-breed, Jonah?”

He didn’t even shrug. “What we are, Mule. What I am anyway. You be what you want to be.”

Juilliard’s highest talent thought of themselves as color-blind, that plea bargain that high culture employs to get all charges against it dropped. I didn’t yet know, at fifteen, everything that color-blind stood for. At Juilliard, color was still too successfully contained to pose much threat. With a few crazy exceptions like the lovable Strom boys, the Negro’s scene was elsewhere. Race was a southern crisis. O’Malley treated us to his pitch-perfect Governor Faubus: “What in God’s name is happening in the United States of America?” My brother’s friends rose to righteous indignation over every crime against humanity, each one, like the folk song, five hundred miles from home.

“People, people,” O’Malley challenged. “Who am I?” He covered one ear with a cupped hand, tucked his chin into his sternum, and sang in mock Russian at the absolute nadir of his range. It took us a few beats to recognize “Ol’ Man River.” O’Malley’s test glance never lasted more than a quaver. One of this country’s greatest men was living under government-conducted house arrest, forced to sing to European audiences over a telephone, and here was O’Malley going into a whole routine mocking him. Robeson speaking in best Rutgers Phi Beta Kappa accent: “Mr. Hammerstein the Second, sir. Far be it from me to criticize, but your lyrics seem to partake of a few errors in subject-verb agreement.”

The vein in my brother’s temple flickered as he considered flipping the booth over and never coming back. Not over race; over Robeson. No one was allowed to touch such a voice. For a moment, he looked set to send this group to hell and return to the solitude of real music. Instead, as everyone’s eyes fought to stay off him, Jonah just laughed. Harsh, but participating. All other moves were a losing game.

Race was just a bagatelle. The curators of proper singing saved their real firepower for the clearer, more present danger: class. It took me years to decode the Sammy’s scoring system. I’m not sure Jonah ever cracked it. I remember him challenging a unanimous decision that bewildered me, as well. “Just a minute. You’re saying you’d rather hire Paula Squires to sing Mélisande than hire Ginger Kittle to sing Mimi?”

The chorus was merciless. “Perhaps if La Ginger agreed to a wee change of name…” “You have to love her diphthongs, though. That aeyah of hers? At least you can be sure it’ll play in Peoria.” “And those synthetic blends she wears? Every time she climbs above a B-flat, I expect her blouse to spontaneously combust.” “Miss Kittle embodies the Mimi of her generation. Always radiantly dead by act four.”

Jonah shook his head. “Have you all gone completely deaf? So she could use some finish. But Kittle has Squires beat hands down.”

“Maybe if she kept her hands down…”

“But Paula Squires?”

“Jonah, my boy. You’ll figure it out as you ripen, don’t you know.”

Ripening came over us both. I spent my days in a perpetual state of arousal I mistook for anticipation. Everything curved or cupped, any tone from lemon to cocoa excited me. The vibrations of the piano, seeping up my leg from the pedal, could set me off. Sparks would start in an innocent glow, one warm word from anything female, and cascade into elaborate rescue fantasies, ultimate sacrifice followed by happy death, the only possible reward. I’d restrain myself for a week or two, channeling all pure things — the middle movement of the Emperor, my mother hugging us on a windy Eighth Avenue, Malalai Gilani, our family evenings of counterpoint a decade before. Even as I fought temptation, I knew I’d eventually succumb. I waited in patient irritation to be alone in the apartment. The revulsion of the slide only intensified it. Each time I gave in to pleasure, I’d feel as if I’d sentenced Mama to death again, betrayed every good thing she’d ever praised or predicted for me. Each time, I swore to renew myself.

Maybe Jonah did better with lust — another rush to add to the rushes that drove him. Maybe he found some willing nymph to touch him when and where he needed. I didn’t know. He no longer reported his body’s developments to me, though he did still share his latest enthusiasms. “Mule, you have to see this girl. Like nothing you’ve ever seen. Marguerite! Carmen!” But the objects of his desire were always plainness incarnate. I thought he must be mocking me. Any beauty he saw in them lay beyond the visible spectrum. “Well? Isn’t she the greatest thing you’ve ever laid eyes on?” I always managed a vigorous nod.

His body was a seismograph. Even sitting in an auditorium chair became a free exercise routine. He settled on altos. Whenever one passed within a hundred feet, his head rose up on his neck like a U-boat periscope. For the first time in his life, singing acquired an ulterior motive. He sang like a greyhound who’d slipped the leash, running around Morningside, peeing on any hydrant that would hold still for his mark.

I hated him for betraying Kimberly. I knew it was crazy. There I was, in the middle of my own solitary hormone storm, rubbing off to the image of everything that moved. But I wanted my brother to preserve the memory of our past, and that included the albino wraith. Here in New York, Boylston’s sheltered, fake Italianate courtyard seemed a cheap operetta set. I’d spent my childhood like one of those polio-stricken kids in photo magazines, trapped in an iron lung, kept alive by artifice and invention. All that exploded with our leaking furnace. I needed something from our stripped-away past to survive, if only that anemic ghost.