Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

History, today, is just the four of us. Da paces in his study. Jonah lies on the floor playing with a new sliding puzzle Da has given him for Christmas. I sit on the couch next to Ruth, who has been gearing up toward some question all day. “What do you remember about Mama?” she asks me at last, still trying to fix my hair. Like requesting an old dance number. What do you remember? She really wants to know, although she’s already decided.

Jonah and I have scheduled this break in our barnstorming — eighteen stops in every drafty auditorium across the Pacific Northwest — to try to reconnect with our family. It’s been months since I’ve sat and talked to Ruth. She’s lived through a riot, changed her major, taken to dressing exclusively in tight, dark clothes. She’s exploding with ideas she’s picked up at school. She’s reading books by famous social theorists I’ve never even heard of. She’s passed me by in every way but musically. She feels like my unknown, exotic, well-traveled cousin. Once she was almost my age. Now she’s amused by my doddering senility.

“About Mama?” I answer. Mama’s old trick: Always repeat the question. It buys you time. “You know. Nothing you wouldn’t recognize.”

Ruth stops fiddling with my hair. She picks up the blues book, my present from her, and flips through it. “I mean from before my time.”

“You should ask the man.” I point my thumb at our father, who paces with excitement in an oval between the sterile dining room and his chaos-infested study in a state of quantum perturbation. Ruth just rolls her eyes. She’s right: Da is already unreachable, halfway back to whatever dimension Mama now occupies. He knows every message our mother’s memory might have for us, but he can’t give them to us. Now and then as he paces, he calls out a few private syllables of insight for no one, then collapses at his desk to jot down a stream of hostage symbols. Recently, his age-old enigma has thickened. Fitch and Cronin, two Princeton-based acquaintances of his working over in Brookhaven, have just shattered the past: Temporal symmetry is violated at the subatomic level. The world’s equations are not cleanly reversible. Da paces about the first floor of this new, alien house in a wide, closed loop, shaking his head, singing, “Ah, sweet mystery of life!” The tune has started to grate on our collective nerves.

It’s just the four of us now, in a house belonging to no one. The old home in Hamilton Heights is banished to some planet of memory none of us can reach. Our father has bought this place, just over the Washington Bridge, in Fort Lee, New Jersey, on the colossal miscalculation that we children might take this transplanted nest to heart. He can’t see us anymore. This neighborhood makes all three of his offspring look like a foreign exchange program. Ruth, in particular, looks like a UN delegate from one of those newly decolonized countries no one’s heard of.

Even this holiday reunion is a sad fabrication. Ruth has found a wreath and a few lights, but no one had the heart to decorate. The first night of Hanukkah descended into TV dinners. For Christmas, we order take-out Chinese. The day’s angel messengers are off on some other hillside, miles up the Palisades, announcing the mysterious birth to those flock-watching shepherds who’ve managed to remain more easily taken in by good news.

This is the last time we’ll be together like this. Every time is something’s last, but even I can feel this holiday’s scattering. Ruth sits on the couch, nursing her arm, the bruise still tender almost half a year on. Something I can’t name has been happening to her while she’s been away at college. Something happening all across the country, and already it’s moving too fast for me to see. The country’s clock has slowed to a stop, and mine races on. Mama always said I was born antique. “This one’s born ancient,” she once whispered to Da, after she thought I was asleep. “And he’s going to get older and older every time humanity turns him around.”

Now I’ve become Ruth’s grandfather. She looks at me, begging for memories only I am aged enough to reach. I’m her only reliable link to a room that time’s sliding walls have sealed her off from. She’s changed while we’ve been touring. Never again Ruthie, Root. She has on tight black jeans and that black V-necked pullover, her fine curly hair combed out unsuccessfully on her head, as if she’s swum halfway across some fast-running stream of fashion before panicking and swimming back. Her body has turned perfect since the last time I saw her. I look away now when she leans toward me, asking, “What were we all like, when I was small?”

“You could sight-sing before you could see. You were the best, Ruth. You could sound like anyone.”

We’ve not sung together, as a family, this entire vacation. It’s all any of us have thought about, but no one’s brought it up. Jonah and I practice daily, but that doesn’t count. The only other notes are Da’s, his million looped refrains of “Ah, Sweet Mystery”: “Ah, sweet mystery…of life… At last I’ve found you!” To which we kids add no harmonies.

“Joey, you dope!” Ruth’s accent has drifted over the river toward Brooklyn, as if other people have brought her up. Which they have, I guess. “I don’t need to know about me!”

The two of us look to Jonah, the only one truly old enough for solid data. He lies on the floor, toying with the sliding puzzle, humming to himself the glimpse of arpeggiated paradise from the end of Fauré’s Requiem. Jonah’s eyebrows go up at our aimed silence— Hmm? — as if he hasn’t heard us. He has registered every word. “Altos!” he explodes. “Vee need more altos!” Time-honored mockery of Da, from our earliest years. The accent is so good that even Da himself stops pacing around the dining room to smile at us from out of what was once his body.

“Altos!” I come in, a dutiful imitation. “Ven, voman, you are going to make me some altos?”

Ruth, the real mimic, grins at the canonic gag. But she adds no line of her own. Ruth, the alto, hasn’t sung a note since she went away to school. She pinches up her cheeks in frustration. “No! No, you stupid crackers.” She slaps the sofa with an open palm. She grabs my forearm, leans in, and bites it. “What do you remember about Mama?”

This is my sister’s only holiday question — my sister, who was barely ten when the world she wants to know about came to its early end. She was the first to discover the blaze, where all our photos burned. Now every memory she has has drifted, unreliable, except for her memory of the fire itself. She thinks Jonah and I still have entry rights. But she’s not even wrong. Our sister wants back in to a place with no dimension, no place of entry, not even the one she asks us to invent for her now.

I wait for Jonah to answer. Ruth prods him with her toe. But he’s gone back to humming Fauré’s sickly sweet burial Mass and sliding around his puzzle squares. It falls to me, in this life, to make sure no one I love goes unanswered. This Christmas, more than ever, that is a losing proposition. I need to start looking for a better job. “You want stories from before you were born?”

“Before. After. I’m not in a position to be picky.” My sister talks to her hands, which dethread a tasseled pillow that she picked out for Da as a gift. It’s gold and burgundy, nothing she’d let near her own apartment. “God’s sake, Joey! Give me whatever you have!” Her voice is a jagged alto gasp. “Mama’s blurring on me. I can’t hold her.”

The things I know for sure, my sister doesn’t need. The things she needs from me, I’m unsure of. I root through the jumbled shoe box of the past, all my own snapshots burned. A midday shadow falls across the couch, between us. Mama’s here. I can see her: that face I once mistook for my own reflection, its mouth the idea of mouths, its eyes, all eyes. But she has blurred on me, too. I’m no longer certain of her features. With nothing to check against, I can’t be sure what I’ve done to her. “She looked like you, Ruth. A slightly taller, fuller you.”