Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“Maybe in twenty years, we will learn Mahler properly. The child and I. If we’re both still alive.”

My father coughed in relief. Mama, onstage, straightened up again and decided to live. Root started chattering, and I couldn’t hush her. My brother picked at his elbow onstage, seeming to have missed the whole drama.

Out in the corridor, Jonah bounded up to me. “Maybe the guy just doesn’t like music.” A tide of sympathy rose in his eyes. He wanted to work with the man, to show him the pleasures of sound.

We wandered around the school’s compound, its mock-Italian palazzo wedged between the Back Bay and the Fens. Da talked to a couple of the students, including one German-speaking son of a diplomat. All swore devotion to the academy and its vocal program. Some of the better older voices were already placing in competitions here and in Europe.

Jonah dragged me around the building, poking into the crannies, oblivious to the head-turning we all caused. Our mother walked about the grounds in lead shoes, as if to her own funeral. Every new proof that this was the right next step in her son’s life added a decade to hers.

Da and Mama conferred with the school officials while Jonah and I entertained Ruth, letting her throw bread crumbs at the sparrows and pebbles at the marauding squirrels. Our parents returned, flustered by something Jonah and I didn’t ask about. Together, the five of us headed toward the rented Hudson for the long drive home. But a voice called to us as we made our way down the front walk.

“Excuse me, please.” Maestro Reményi stood in the academy’s entrance. “May I have a moment?” He looked right past Da, as he had at the auditions. “You are the boy’s mother?” He studied Mama’s face and then Jonah’s, searching for the key to a mystery larger than Mahler. Mama nodded, holding the great man’s stare. János Reményi shook his head, a slow processing of the evidence. “Brava, madame.”

Those two words were the great musical reward of my mother’s life. For fifteen seconds, she tasted the triumph she had sacrificed by marrying my father and raising us. All the way home, in the gathering dark, with Jonah up in the front, humming to himself, she predicted, “You’re going to learn whole worlds from this man.”

Jonah got into the Boylston Academy of Music with a full scholarship. But back in the shelter of Hamilton Heights, he began to balk. “There’s so much more you can still teach me,” he told Mama, going for the kill. “I can concentrate better here, without all the other children.”

Mama chanted to him in her history teacher’s voice. “JoJo honey. You have a skill. A special gift. Maybe only one out of thousands of boys—”

“Fewer,” Da said, doing the calculation.

“Only one in a million can even dream of doing what you’ll do.”

“Who cares?” Jonah said.

He knew he’d crossed a line. Mama held him in place, lifting his chin. She could have killed him with a word. “Every living soul.”

“You have a duty,” Da explained, his consonants crisping. “You must grow that gift and give it back to creation.”

“What about Joey? He plays piano better than I do. He’s a faster sight-singer.” Tattletale-style: He hit me first. “You can’t send me without Joey. I don’t want to go to any school he’s not gonna go to.”

“Don’t say ‘gonna,’” Mama said. She must have known the real terror. “You go blaze a trail. Before you know it, he’ll follow you.”

Too late, our parents saw they’d let us spend too much time indoors. Home school was their controlled experiment, and it had produced two hothouse flowers. They spoke to each other at night, in low voices, undressing for the night behind their bedroom door, thinking we couldn’t hear.

“Maybe we too much protected them?” Da’s voice couldn’t find the path it wanted.

“You can’t leave a child like that loose in a place like this.” The old agreement, the thing that bound them together, the endless work of raising an endangered soul.

“But even so. Maybe we should have… They don’t have one real friend for the two of them.”

My mother’s voice lifted a register. “They know other boys. They like the likable ones.” But I could hear it in her, wishing things otherwise. Somehow, we’d failed to make their plan work. I wanted to go tell them about the hurled brick shards, the words we’d learned, the threats against us, all the things we’d sheltered our parents from. Yellow boy. Half-breed. I heard Mama, at her vanity, drop her tortoise brushes and stifle a sob.

And I heard Da shelter her, apologizing. “They have each other. They will meet others, like them. They will make friends, when they find them.”

An oboist acquaintance of Da’s in the Columbia Math Department had long pestered Da to let us sing for the campus Lutherans. And for just as long, our parents had turned the man down. Mama took us to neighborhood churches, where our voices joined hers in the general roof raising. But beyond that, they’d kept us safe from the compromised world of public performance. “My boys are singers,” she said, “not trained seals.” This always made Jonah bark and clap the backs of his paws.

Now our parents thought the Lutherans might prepare Jonah for his bigger step that fall. Church recitals could inoculate us against the more virulent outside. Our first forays down into Morningside Heights for choir rehearsal felt like overland expeditions. Da, Jonah, and I headed down on Thursday nights on the Seventh Avenue local, coming back up in a cab, my brother and I fighting to ride in the front with the cabbie and practice our fake Italian. At the first rehearsals, everyone stared. But Jonah was a sensation. The choir director held up practice, manufacturing excuses just to listen to my brother sing a passage alone.

The choir contained several talented amateurs, cultivated academics who lived for the twice-a-week chance to immerse themselves in lost chords. A few powerful voices and even a couple of pros, there as a public service, also kicked back into the kitty. For two weeks, we sang innocuous anthems in the northern Protestant tradition. But even that young, Jonah and I scorned the cheesy, predictable modulations. Back in Hamilton Heights, we’d torture the lyrics—“My redeemer Lumpy; yes, my Jesus Lumpy.” But on Sundays, we were stalwart, singing even the most banal melody as if salvation demanded it.

One of the group’s real altos, a pro named Lois Helmer, had designs on my brother from the moment his voice cut through that musty choir loft. She treated him like the child she’d sacrificed to pursue her modest concert career. She heard in Jonah’s bell tones a way to grab the prize her career had so far denied her.

Miss Helmer had a set of pipes more piercing than that church’s organ. But she must have been of an age—101, by Jonah’s dead reckoning — when the pipes would soon start rusting. Before her sound leaked out and silence took over, she meant to nail a favorite piece that, to her ears, had never received a decent hearing in this world. In Jonah’s sonar soprano, she found at last the instrument of her delivery.

I couldn’t know it then, but Miss Helmer was a good two decades ahead of her time. Long before the explosion of recording gave birth to Early Music, she and a few other narrow voices in a wide-vibrato sea began insisting that, for music before 1750, precision came before “warmth.” At that time, big was the vogue in everything. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, still mounted its annual zeppelin-sized, cast-of-thousands performances of the Bach Passions, devotional music in the atomic age, where mass released a lumbering spiritual energy. Miss Helmer, in contrast, felt that, with complex polyphony, God might actually like to hear the pitches. The sparer the line, the greater the lift. For energy was also proportionate to lightness squared.