Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“You’re not Jewish?”

This is what makes him tell me, at last. He falls back on the bond bigger than any secret link the two of them could grow. “Tell me she’s evil, Mule. Tell me the woman’s no damn good.”

I do. And he ignores me.

“She’s going to stab me,” he says. “I’m going to blunder around for half an hour in act four, spewing blood from my gut.”

“Just be sure you do it with breath support.” I don’t know what else to give him. His eyes fill. He tries to laugh and flip me the bird at the same time. We go back to practicing. Somebody else’s music. Some other people.

The effect on his voice is electrifying. He can harrow now, leave you for dead. His passage work is as clean as ever. But his phrases push into new, awful places. On tour, he sings the same numbers as ever, each time stumbling on some further climax. He no longer settles weightless onto Brahms’s long, dark suspensions from above. He severs them, leaving them helpless, in midair.

We perform “The Floral Bandit”—a piece of time-marking fluff before the intermission. One night, camped out in a small campus hall in the guts of Ohio, we drop through a hole in the stage and lay open the song’s veins. I’m still pressing the keys. Sounds must still be exiting the instrument, but I can’t hear them. There’s only Jonah, that fleshed-out voice drawing remorse out of lifelong repeat offenders. His pitches float in the ether, hovering at sound’s motionless center.

“What the hell was that?” I ask afterward, hiding in the wings from the applause. He only shakes his head, stumbles back out onstage, and takes another bow.

Those reviewers who a year ago faulted his cold precision now proclaim his passion. Sometimes the notices mention me: “a synchrony that could only exist between blood relations.” But often they write as if Jonah could sing lieder to a ballpark organ. “Emotional, profound,” the Hartford Courant says, “giving a precocious insight into the depths and heights in each of us.” All this, Lisette does for him. No teacher ever gives him more.

But his education isn’t finished yet. She moves his lessons back to the studio, saving the apartment for special invitations. The invitations come syncopated now. He may go dancing, but she calls the tune. Still, she goes on dancing with him. Something in him still wakens her. She needs him to help her remember what only feels like, what always was. The force of his desperation is what so moves her.

She still touches him while he sings, still locates muscles he didn’t know he had. She dangles new parts in front of him: Don Carlos, Pelléas, juicy tenor roles men ten years older are afraid to tackle. One afternoon, she tells him, “We need to find you someone.”

“Someone for what?”

“Someone for you, Jonie.”

His voice deserts him. “You mean another teacher?”

She mews back in her throat, puts a hand on his. “You’ll probably teach her a few things.”

“I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

“Oh, caro! Don’t worry.” She leans in toward his ear and whispers. “Whatever you learn from her, you’ll come show me.”

He’s worthless for a week. It takes me until noon to get him out of bed, then another two hours to get him to the breakfast table. I have to call Mr. Weisman with two cancellations. I tell him Jonah has a bronchial infection. Weisman is furious.

Soer calls. I almost refuse to put her through. But Jonah knows even before I can say two words to her. He’s on his feet and bowling me over for the receiver. He’s dressed and at the door in minutes.

“We need to rehearse,” I say. “We’re in Pittsburgh next week.”

“We are rehearsing. What do you think I’m doing?”

When he comes back, after midnight, he’s ready to kill giants again. When we do rehearse, the next day, his voice sounds strong enough to heal the sin-sick world.

But the world doesn’t want healing. In June, while fishing for the Philharmonic radio broadcast, we hear Kennedy make a belated speech for civil rights. Four hours later, the NAACP’s Mississippi field secretary is shot in the back and killed in front of his home by a waiting gunman. He’d been working on a voting drive. The killer goes free. The state’s governor enters the courtroom during the trial and shakes the man’s hand.

This time, Jonah and I sing no special encores. “Tell me what we’re supposed to do, Mule. Name it and I’ll sing it.” I don’t know what we’re supposed to do. We go on doing what we’ve trained for. Holst and Brahms.

Jonah and Lisette fight over his auditioning for opera roles. The money from our mother’s insurance, which supplements our meager concert fees and helps pay our rent, is running out. Jonah grows restless with nineteenth-century German lieder recitals.

“Not yet, caro. You’re getting there. Right now, you have the perfect lieder sound.”

“But it’s getting fuller, fleshier. You said so yourself.”

“You’re building an audience out there. Getting good notices. Take your time. Enjoy it. You only begin life once.”

“My voice is in bloom.”

“And it will be for another thirty years, with care. You’re almost ready.”

“I’m ready now. So ready, I can’t tell you. I need to audition. I don’t care where. I can land some stage part.”

“You’re not singing ‘some stage part.’ Not while I’m your teacher. When you make your debut, you’ll do it right.”

“You’re afraid I might land a plum, aren’t you?”

“You are a plum, chum. Jonie? Train for the day.”

He chafes, but he does as she tells him. He trusts this woman, after everything. “She’s my only real friend,” he tells me.

“I see,” I say.

The two of us, constantly in transit, parading in front of rooms of people, are at the mercy of her slightest shift. Jonah’s old Juilliard cronies — those who have stayed in town, those who haven’t trickled into education or insurance — try to drag him up to Sammy’s for reunions. Brian O’Malley, singing in choruses at City Center, still presides. Jonah is that circle’s only remaining lottery ticket to real fame. But they feel the change in him as well, the darkening. We see no one else close to us aside from Da and Ruth, only rooms full of admiring strangers. Our only calls are from Mr. Weisman and Lisette Soer.

We do socialize with strangers. Lisette drags us to parties — massively cultured affairs where whole social solar systems of spinning planets spread through the rooms, orbits that range from the day’s reigning sun at the center to the furthermost icy asteroids. Jonah and I are usually banished out somewhere between Neptune and Pluto. At one, a guest addresses us in blundering Spanish, assuming we’re two self-improving Puerto Ricans.

We’re dressing for one of these pointless parties, a reception for The Ballad of Baby Doe, when I balk. “What the hell are we going to another one of these for, Jonah? Three hours, minimum. That’s three hours we could be learning new rep.”

“Mule, jobs come from these things.”

“Jobs come from people who hear us perform.”

“These parties are crawling with the most powerful musical people in this country.” He could be Lisette talking. “They need to see us up close.”

“Why?”

“To make sure we’re not savages. They don’t want us sneaking up behind Western civilization and mugging it at gunpoint.”

“I’m a whole lot darker up close, you know.”

My brother, in black jacket, fiddles with his tie. He smoothes down his lapels and inspects the results. He turns and glides my way until his face hovers inches from mine. He peers at me, inspecting the problem. “Huh! Would you look at that! How come you never told me this, Joey?”