Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Lisette doesn’t talk through these performances, the way Jonah and I used to, listening in the dark. She forbids speech while the music plays, and for some minutes afterward. She restricts all commentary to squeezes of his upper arm, her long, lyric fingernails sinking into his flesh proportionate to the power and pure drama of the moment, relived through electricity’s séance medium.

She knows whole lifetimes of music, having lived several already in her third of a century. She builds up my brother’s sound without much changing it. But the change she works on Jonah is dramatic. She opens his throat, fills his vowels with color, and smoothes them across his range. She’s the first teacher to teach him the shape of his own tongue and lips. The first to teach him that too much perfection will kill you. But her chief lesson is far harsher. Miss Soer teaches my brother hunger.

I hear it before I see it. He’s restless down in the Village. Things don’t happen fast enough. Beat is dead. The jazz scene, he declares, is falling into retreads. He exhausts his fascination with the classical avant-garde. “Those jokers haven’t produced anything truly new since Henry Cowell.” Cage and the Zen crowd just bore him, and even quadrupling the boredom doesn’t help. When we aren’t on the road, he prowls the streets, listening for other voices, breaking into other rooms.

The hunger she sows shows up onstage. We’re in Camden, Maine, singing on a makeshift stage that shakes a little with every pound of the nearby surf. He’s singing “When I am one and twenty,” pressing into it as if diction alone could turn the peat lyric to diamond. He wants something from the words, the pitches, the audience, me. Lisette has taught him the rule that keeps all drama from going mawkish. At the top of the phrase, at the song’s maximum need, pull back. Don’t get big and messy; draw yourself inward around the unbearable, until it glows with the smallest light.

His hunger focuses. He starts to read again — Mann, Hesse — those works János Reményi made him read, decades before Jonah could hope to understand them. Even now, he’s years too young to make them out. But he totes them under his arm to lessons, thinking they’ll please Soer. They horrify her. She finds them repugnant, Germanic. She wants him on Dumas, Hugo at the very least.

“Did you know Dumas was a black man?” This is news to Jonah. He wonders why she feels the need to tell him.

He must see what’s coming. The white iceberg must condense for him soon, even out of his whiter fog. But I keep still; the woman is doing too much for us. I’m learning volumes from her, secondhand — whole worlds about music, and even more about the musical world.

We’re at a stand-up pizza place on Houston, pretending to be students, enjoying the night, how it fuzzes into that passing crowd. “Mule? You ever sleep with anyone in college?”

He sounds for a moment like an ancient wife confronting her husband at the end of the day with a suspicion that’s too old to be anxious about anymore, now that everything is past mattering.

“Aside from the actresses, Gypsies, consumptives, and courtesans with hearts of gold?”

He jerks up and stares, then flips me the finger. “I mean for real. Not your diseased imagination.”

“Oh. For real.” I wonder if I even wanted to, with anyone real. My one moment of love — the woman in the navy blue dress followed for twenty blocks — was free of any such compromising risk. “You think I could even have thought about it without your knowing?”

His lips twitch a little, and he hides them behind a wedge of pizza. He chews and swallows. “You ever almost?”

I pretend to deliberate, blood racing. “No.”

“How about since?”

“No.” Haven’t left your sight. “But since we’re on the subject—”

“How many…men do you think she has?” Only one she in our lives now. He doesn’t really want me to count them, and I don’t.

The shortness of breath he suffered during our preparation for the America’s Next Voices competition returns. It happens before a Sunday afternoon recital in Boston, the first time we’ve been back since Boylston. Ten minutes before we go on, he starts wheezing so badly, he almost passes out. I tell the house manager to cancel and call a doctor. Jonah objects, although it almost suffocates him. We go on, twenty minutes late. As performances go, it’s ragged. But Jonah sings at maximum need. The audience flocks backstage afterward. There’s no sign of Reményi, any Boylston teachers, or our once friends.

Back in the city, Lisette forces him to get a checkup. She even offers to loan him the money for it. I bless the woman for making him do what I can’t. Nothing wrong, the doctor says. “Nothing wrong, Mule,” Jonah repeats, eyes darting around the waiting room, as if the walls were closing in.

I’m better with his panic attacks now that I’m sure they pass. Calmer, I can bring him out faster. He manages them, almost seeming to time them to avoid total disaster: early in the afternoon before a concert, or at the reception just following one.

We play eight venues in January of 1963 alone: big cities looking for new blood, midsized cities pretending to be big cities, small cities looking for affordable culture, small towns that, through historical accident, hold on to their European roots. Maybe their grandfathers once bought standing-room tickets at the Stadtschauplatz, or loved the free Rathaus affairs on public holidays. So the descendants preserve the forms after all context has washed away, the way people turn massive old radio consoles into knickknack cabinets.

We don’t even know about Project Confrontation until we see it on a lobby television in a two-star hotel in Minneapolis. A police commissioner named Bull Conner releases fire hoses and attack-trained German shepherds on protesters for singing “Marching to Freedom Land” without a license. Most of the marchers are years younger than we are. Jonah looks on from Minneapolis, humming to himself, “Way down south in Birmingham, I mean south in Alabam,” not even hearing.

The country on television isn’t ours. The streets on film are mobbed, as in some jackboot-crushed Eastern European uprising. Police club fallen kids, dragging them off in paddy wagons. Bodies roll in the spray, pounded into clumps against brick walls by vicious water jets. Everywhere is spray and chaos, limbs gashed and beaten, two white policemen smashing a boy in the face with billy clubs, until the hourly wage Minneapolis bellhop, black, is told by management to turn the channel, and Jonah and I head off to a last-minute auditorium test prior to charming the Twin Cities.

Tonight, we do another encore. Jonah whispers it to me as we take a curtain call. “Go Down, Moses,” in D minor. He doesn’t even have the sheet music this time. We don’t need it. An old friend of mine has taught me how to improvise, to pull notes out of the air that serve as well as any written down. Jonah doesn’t quite know the words, but he finds them, too. He sings them at the same moment as the children in their cells down in Birmingham jail sing, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round…”

The audience, too, has seen Birmingham, served up by Cronkite, earlier that evening. They know what’s happening way down in Egypt land. They hush when Jonah finishes, hard, luminous, and piano. But they aren’t sure how to see this mix, this cause creeping into the confines of beauty. Even supportive applause seems wrong.

Our bookings increase, and so do the protests. They tear through hundreds of cities north and south, even passing through the towns we tour. Yet we always miss the marches, blowing through a day before, two days after. We polish our new encore and add it to the standing repertoire. Jonah doesn’t tell Lisette.