Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

While talking, Milton Weisman roams his decrepit office, fiddling with the blinds, edging around us from all angles. He rarely looks us in the face, but even his sidelong glances find their mark. The old booking agent gauges how we’ll look under the footlights, drawing up his map’s out-of-bounds lines: Chicago, sure. Louisville, perhaps. Memphis, no chance.

After half an hour, he shakes our hands and says he can find us work. This puzzles me; we already have offers coming in. But Lisette is ecstatic. All the way back downtown, she keeps pinching Jonah’s cheek. “You know what this means? That man is a force. People listen to him.” She stops short of saying, He’ll make your career.

They send us on recital barnstorming tours. “Lieder,” Lisette insists, “is harder than opera. You must turn emotions loose upon your audience, with no props but sound. All your gestures take on handcuffs. As the words fill your throat, you must feel your body moving, even though it can’t. You must model the invisible movement, so your audience will see it.”

This is the incantation she sends us out with, and it works. Audiences in our off-circuit towns respond more like sports fans than the usual stiff-necked classical crowds. They come backstage. They want to know us, to tell us the tragedies that have wrecked their lives. The attention works on Jonah. I have to watch him more closely now as we play. Even in pieces we’ve drilled down into our marrow, he’s likely to lace passages with a surprise slight caesura or rubato, nothing the careful ear would register, unless I fail to be there with him.

Mr. Weisman has a knack for getting us in and out of towns without incident. Sometimes, in bigger places, he finds local cultural lights who actually compete to have us under their roofs. In smaller towns, we get good at picking hotels that won’t hassle well-groomed young men with collegiate accents. Jonah handles the check-ins, and I wait offstage. When we sense a problem, we beat a quick retreat, someplace a little farther from the concert halls where we do our Schumann Dichterliebe to ovations.

We’re playing Tucson, Arizona — a pink adobe hall whose balcony might as well be cathouse rooms above a saloon — the night we hear about James Meredith trying to enter Ole Miss. The army rolls in again, that part of the army not already engaged in propping up the earth’s collapsing dictators. Twenty-three thousand troops, hundreds of people injured, and two people killed, all to get one man enrolled in college.

We’re in the dressing room — cinder blocks actually painted green — when Jonah hands me a sheet of music and says, “Scratch the Ives. Here’s our encore.” Never doubting there’ll be an encore. Never doubting I can play the substitute from sight. In fact, compared to the tricky, polytonal Ives — a piece that satisfies Jonah’s hunger for the avant-garde while giving the audience a nostalgic scrap of “Turkey in the Straw”—this new piece is trivial.

“You’re kidding,” I say.

“What? You don’t know the tune?”

I know the tune, of course. I’ve even seen this arrangement: the great Harry Burleigh setting of “Oh Wasn’t Dat a Wide Ribber?” Jonah must have been carrying it around in his valise for just such an emergency. The setting is straightforward, and very pianistic. It stays close to the familiar melody, but it’s laced through with inspired passing tones that trick the song into a different country. One look, and I could play the thing without looking.

“I know the damn tune, Jonah. I just don’t know what the hell you plan to do with it.”

“I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. Right now.” He takes the sheet back and peppers it with markings.

“We’re not going out there and doing this thing cold.”

“It’s Tucson, Arizona, brother. Wyatt Earp. The O.K. Corral.” He pronounces the word chorale. He goes on marking the score. “The Wild West. We can’t be caught actually practicing stuff.”

I take back the sheet, now filled with his scribbles. I look at the markings and see the day’s headlines all over them. “You coming clean, Jonah?” Cheap shot. He’s never tried to hide anything. Never anything other than he was: a swarthy, vaguely Semitic, loose-curled, mixed-race kid who happens to sing European art songs. I’m sick of myself as soon as the words leave my mouth. It’s the stress of touring, the sleepless haul down from Denver the night before. He needs an accompanist who likes performing, who actually enjoys trying to get halls full of strangers to love him.

But Jonah just smirks. “I wouldn’t exactly say clean, Mule. It’s only an encore.”

I know what he wants without his having to talk me through. After the standing ovation and our second curtain call, my brother glances at me as we come out of the bow: You ready? I play from the music, afraid to tempt fate, but also letting the audience know this isn’t the standard order of business. I know what Jonah wants: all those sweet dissonances brought out into blithe daylight. He wants me to lean into the shadings that hide in this cheerful expansiveness, to throw the upbeat tune into full relief. Maybe even toss in some clashes of my own. He wants the tune bright, cheery, major, and flooded with jarring disaster.

The place we make tonight is too small for Lisette Soer to enter, too small and hard and shining for anyone but me and my brother even to see. Shout, shout: Satan’s about. One more river to cross. Shut your door and keep him out. One more river to cross. There’s this man Meredith trying to go to school, and there’s the U.S. Army, and people dead, same as last year, same as next. We’ll never reach ourselves. One more river; one more wartime Jordan. And one more after that.

No one in the audience suspects the source he sings from. The things that are happening abroad tonight all happen over in someone else’s state. Satan is nigh, but nobody sees him. One more river to cross. Yet the crowd hears the song: something brutally American after all the undecipherable Italian and German fare we’ve served up at this evening’s concert. Baking out here in the hundred-degree desert, with even the ocotillo and saguaro dying of drought and the streams all dry for so long that there’s six feet of bramble in their beds, the audience takes this ancient headline home, to their stucco haciendas and transplanted Kentucky bluegrass lawns, their city carved out of neighboring reservations, twice-stolen land. And as they lie there, the cultural artifact keeps them awake. One more river to cross.

Jonah’s singing does nothing for Mississippi. Nothing to help make an America, or unmake one. Meredith probably would have hated our version. But the spiritual does do one invisible thing, for an infinitely smaller nation. “How did it sound?” Jonah asks me in the wings.

And I tell him. “Wide.”

He feeds Lisette Soer the story when we get home. Her face turns the color of her hair when she learns we changed the program without consulting her. She softens, though still miffed, when she learns the details. There are powers that even Method acting won’t dare tap. Powers she knows not to tamper with.

They grow dependent on each other, my brother and Madame Soer, joined in a way Jonah hasn’t been with any teacher since Reményi. Close in a way he hasn’t been with anyone since the fire. She asks him to sing in an open master class, along with four promising females. She wants to keep him out in front of other aggressive East Coast ears. They listen to old recordings together, great dead tenors — Fleta, Lindi — late into the evening, until one of her famous competing consorts comes by and sends the boy home.

They listen on a stereo fifty times more expensive than the one our parents bought us years ago. My brother comes home after these listening excursions, shaking his head in wonder. “Mule, we never even heard those bastards. You won’t believe what they’re really doing!”