Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“A singer does not get every part,” Da told Jonah. Mama just looked down, her half of the oldest music lesson there was.

Da made inquiries, through a colleague in the Music Department at Columbia. He came home in a mix of weariness and amazement. He tried to tell Mama. Mama listened, but never stopped working on the lamb stew she was making for dinner. My brother and I crouched down, hiding on either side of the kitchen doorway, listening in like foreign spies. Grown men had been electrocuted for less.

“They have a new director,” Da said.

Mama snorted. “New director, pushing through some old policies.” She shook her head, knowing everything the world had to teach. She sounded different. Poorer, somehow. Older. Rural.

“It is not what you are thinking.”

“Not—”

“Not your contribution. Mine!” He almost laughed, but his throat wouldn’t let him.

Da sat at the kitchen table. A sound came out of him, horrid with wear, one he’d never have let go of had he known we were listening. It cracked into something almost a giggle. “A music program without Jews! Madman! How can you have classical music without Jews?”

“Easy. Same way you had baseball without coloreds.”

Something had happened to my father’s voice, too. Some ancient thickening. “Madness. They might as well refuse a child for being able to read notes.”

Mama set the knife down. One wrist worked to hold the hair back out of her eyes. The other held her elbow in a fist. “We fought that war for nothing. Worse than nothing. We should never have bothered.”

“What is left for such a place?” A shout came out of Da. Jonah and I both flinched, as if he’d hit us. “What kind of chorus do they think they put together?”

That night my father, who’d never checked “Jewish” on any form in his life, whose life was devoted to proving the universe needed no religion but math, made us sing all the Phrygian folk tunes he could remember from a life of dedicated forgetting. He took over the keyboard from my mother, his fingers finding that plaintive modal sorrow hidden in the chords. We sang in that secret language Da dropped into sometimes, in streets north of ours, English’s near cousin from a far village, those slant words I could almost recognize. Even in quickstep, those scales, glancing with flat seconds and sixths, turned love songs to a pretty face into shoulder shrugs at blind history. My father became a lithe, nasal clarinet, and the rest of us followed. Even Ruth picked up the chant, with her eerie instant mimicry.

Our parents resumed the search for a proper school. Mama was militant now. She only wanted to keep her firstborn nearby, in or around New York, as close to home as possible. And only music and this newfound urgency could have let him go that far. Da, the empiricist, steeled himself against all considerations but the school’s worth. Between them, they made the awful compromise: a boarding preconservatory up in Boston, Boylston Academy.

The school was growing famous on the strengths of its director, the great Hungarian baritone János Reményi. My parents read about the place in the Times, where the man had declared this country’s early voice training to be a travesty. This was exactly what a nation struggling under the mantle of postwar cultural leadership most feared hearing about itself, and it rewarded its accuser with generous support. Da and Mama must have thought a Hungarian wouldn’t care where we’d come from. The choice seemed almost safe.

This time, we traveled together to the tryout, our whole family. We drove up in a beautiful rented Hudson with the fender worked right into the body. My mother rode in the backseat with me and Ruth. She always rode in the back whenever we traveled together, and Da always drove. They told us it had to do with Ruthie’s safety. Jonah told me it was so that the police wouldn’t stop us.

For his trial, Jonah prepared Mahler’s “Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht?” from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Mama accompanied him, working up the piano reduction for weeks in advance, until it glistened. She wore a pleated black silk dress with draped shoulders, which made her look even taller and thinner than she was. She was the most beautiful woman the judges could ever hope to look upon. János Reményi himself was one of the three auditioners. My father pointed him out as we entered the hall.

“Him?” Jonah said. “He doesn’t look Hungarian!”

“What do Hungarians look like?”

Jonah shrugged. “Balder, maybe?”

Only a handful of singers tried out that day, those who’d made it through the rigorous screening. Mr. Reményi called the name Strom from a checklist. Mama and Jonah walked down the aisle to the stage. A woman intercepted them before they could reach the steps. She asked Mama where the accompanist was. My mother sucked in her breath and smiled. “I’m accompanying.” She sounded tired, but trained.

The exchange must have flustered her. Up onstage, she set out of the gate at a tempo faster than they’d ever taken the piece in their thousand run-throughs at home. I’d heard the piece so many times, I could have sung it in reverse. But at the tempo Mama set, I’d have missed the entrance. Jonah, of course, came in perfectly. He’d only been waiting for the thrill of that moment to take the song aloft.

I saw the judges share a look when Jonah hit his first rising figure. But they let him finish. The song vanished into history in under two minutes. In my brother’s mouth, the tune turned into impish myth. It spoke of a world without weight or effort. The Boy’s Magic Horn, sung at last by a boy still under the spell.

One of the judges started to clap, but a look from Reményi froze her in midtwitch. The director scribbled some notes, took off his glasses, lifted his eyebrows, and gazed at my brother. “Mr. Strom.” I looked at my father, confused. His eyes fixed on Reményi. “Can you tell me what this song means?”

Da leaned forward and began thumping his head against the seat in front of him. Mama, onstage, folded her hands across her beautiful black dress and studied her lap. In Jonah’s singing voice, my parents felt utter confidence. But spoken words were not their son’s forte.

Jonah stood ready to help this Hungarian out with any troubles he was having. He looked up at the stage lights, cribbing the answer there. “Uh… Who thought up this little song?” He gave an embarrassed sigh, passing the buck to the poet.

“Yes, yes. That’s the title. Now what do the words mean?”

My brother brightened. “Oh! Okay. Let’s see.” My father’s head banging accelerated. Six-year-old Ruthie, on his other side, squirmed and started to hum. Da shushed her, something he never did. “There’s this house up in the mountains,” Jonah explained. “And a girl at the window.”

“What kind of girl?”

“German?”

All three judges cleared their throats.

“A sweet girl,” Reményi said. “A darling girl. Go on.”

“She doesn’t live there. She has this mouth? And it’s magic? It brings dead people back to life.” The idea played in his eyes: ghouls, soul-suckers, zombies. “And then there are these three geese, who carry this song around in their beaks…”

“That’s enough.” Reményi turned to my mother. “You see? Not a song for young boys.”

“But it is,” my father blurted from back in the hall.

Reményi turned around, but his look, in the dark room, went right through us. He turned back to Mama. “This is a song for a mature voice. He should not be singing this. He can’t do it well, and it might even do his vocal cords harm.”

My mother hunched over the piano bench, under the weight of her compounded mistakes. She’d thought to delight the great man with her son’s brightness, and the great man had snuffed out her little lamp. She wanted to crawl into the piano and slice herself to ribbons on the thinnest, highest strings.