Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

All her life, she’d wanted to take that brilliant duet from Cantata 78 out for a test spin, proof that small was beautiful and light was all. But she’d never found a woman soprano whose vibrato warbled less than a quarter tone. Then she heard the ethereal boy, maybe the first since Bach’s Thomasschule in Leipzig able to do justice to the euphoria. She approached Mr. Peirson, the choir director, a bloodless respecter of andante who thought he could reach the calmer patches of Lutheran purgatory if he only respected all the dynamics and offended no listener. Mr. Peirson balked, capitulating only when Lois Helmer threatened to remove her assets to the Episcopalians. Mr. Peirson surrendered the podium for the occasion, and Lois Helmer lost no time hunting up a skilled cellist to hold down the springing Violone line.

Miss Helmer had another wild idea: music and its words ought to agree. Schweitzer had been onto this for decades, pushing for word painting in Bach as early as the year that Einstein — the violinist who bent my brother’s life — dismantled universal time. But in practice, Bach’s music, no matter the text, stood coated in that same caramel glow that masked old master paintings, the golden dusk that museumgoers took for spirituality but which was, in fact, just grime.

Miss Helmer’s Bach would do what its words said. If the duet began “Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten” —“We rush with faint but earnest footsteps”—then the damn thing would rush. She harassed the continuo players until they brought the song up to her mental tempo, a third faster than the piece had ever been performed. She swore at the bewildered players during rehearsal, and Jonah relished every curse.

He, of course, stood ready to blast through the piece at the speed of delight. When Jonah sang, even in rehearsal, making his noise for people who weren’t like us, I felt ashamed, like we were betraying the family secret. He matched this woman phrase for phrase, a mynah latching onto his trainer’s every trick, their free-play imitation finally converging in perfect synchrony, as if both had found a way to catch up to their own eerie echoes and rejoin.

On the Sunday of their performance, Jonah and I clung to the choir loft’s rail, each in a black blazer and a red bow tie that had taken all Da’s knowledge of low-degree topology to tie. We stood on high and watched the congregation mill about the pews like iridescent bugs under a lifted garden stone. Da, Mom, and Ruth came late and sat way in the back, where they couldn’t bother anyone else by being seen.

The anthem followed the Gospel. Most weeks, the moment passed, a sample swatch of spiritual wallpaper that the customers of grace fingered and set down. But that week, the bobbing cello obbligato launched such spring that even those already dozing sat up in their pews, alarmed by pleasure.

Out of the eight jaunty bars, the soprano lifts, an overnight crocus, homesteading the winter-beaten lawn. The tune is propelled by the simplest trick: Stable do comes in on an unstable upbeat, while the downbeat squids away on the scale’s unstable re. With this slight push, the song stumbles forward until it climbs up into itself from below, tag-team wrestling with its own alto double. Then, in scripted improvisation, the two sprung lines duck down the same inevitable, surprise path, mottled with minor patches and sudden bright light. The entwined lines outgrow their bounds, spilling over into their successors, joy on the loose, ingenuity reaching anywhere it needs to go.

Eight bars of cello, and Jonah’s voice sailed out from the back of the church. He sang as easily as the rest of the world chatted. His voice cut through the Cold War gloom and fell without warning on the morning service. Then Lois entered, spurred on to match the boy’s pinpoint clarity, singing with a brilliance she hadn’t owned since her own confirmation. We rush with faint but earnest footsteps. Ach, höre. Ah, hear!

But where were we rushing? That mystery, at age nine, lay beyond my ability to solve. Rushing to aid this Jesu. But then we lifted our voices to ask for his help. As far as I could hear, the song reversed itself, as split as my brother, unable to say who helped whom. Someone must have botched the English translation, and I couldn’t follow the original. Mama spoke only voice-student German, and Da, who’d escaped just before the war, never bothered to teach us more of his language than we sang together around the piano.

But the German was lost in that beam of light that hung above the congregation. My brother’s voice washed over the well-heeled pews, and years of pale, northern cultivation dissolved in the sound. People turned to look, despite Jesus’ order to believe without seeing. Lois and my brother sailed along in lockstep, their finely lathed ornaments taken up into the heart of the twisting tune. They leapfrogged and doubled each other, a melancholy mention of the sick and wayward before brightening toward home, while all the while moving the idea of home three more modulations deeper into unspinning space. Zu dir. Zu dir. Zu dir. Even Mr. Peirson fought to keep his lower lip from quivering. After the first stanza, he stopped trying.

When the cello did its final da capo and the high-voiced tandem toboggan took its last banked turn, the song wound up where all songs do: perfected in silence. A few stricken listeners even committed that worst of Lutheran sins and clapped in church. Communion, that day, was an anticlimax.

In the chaos after the service, I searched out my brother. Lois Helmer was kissing him. He stared me down, cutting off even a snicker. He abided Miss Helmer, who hugged him to her, then let him go. She seemed completed. Already dead.

Our family scooted out to the street, doing its traditional disappearing act. But the crowd found my brother. Strangers came up and pressed him to them. One old man — out for his last Sunday on God’s earth — fixed Jonah with a knowing stare and held on to his hand for dear life. “That was the most beautiful Handel I ever heard.”

We escaped and cackled as we ran. Two ladies snagged us in midflight. They had something momentous to say, some secret they weren’t supposed to tell, but, like girls our age, they couldn’t help themselves. “Young man,” the taller one said. “We just want you to know what an honor it is for us to have…a voice like yours in the service of our church.” Like yours. Some sinful Easter egg we were supposed to discover. “And I just can’t tell you…” The words caught in her throat. Her friend put a white-gloved hand on her arm to encourage her. “I just can’t tell you how much it means to me, personally, to have a little Negro boy singing like that. In our church. For us.”

Her voice broke with pride, and her eyes watered. My brother and I traded smirks. Jonah smiled at the ladies, forgiving their ignorance. “Oh, ma’am, we’re not real Negroes. But our mother is!”

Now the adults passed a look between them. The gloved one patted Jonah’s amber-colored head. They stepped away and faced each other, brows up, clutching each other’s elbows, searching for the right way to break the news to us. But at that moment, our father, fed up with crowds and Christians, even academic ones, came back into the nave to fish us out.

“Come on, you two. Your old man is dying of hunger.” He’d picked up the line from “Baby Snooks” or “The Aldrich Family,” those radio serials about assimilated life that held him in such interplanetary awe. “You have to get your old Da back uptown, to his dinner, before anything happens.”

The ladies fell back from this ghost. Their known world crumpled faster than they could rebuild it. I looked away, taking on their shame. Da waved apology to Jonah’s admirers. Their hard-won campaign of liberal tolerance crashed down around them in one impertinent flip of the physicist’s wrist.