Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Then Ruth holds still. “What happened to her?” Her voice falls off to nothing. For a beat, I misunderstand. This is the question I’ve dreamed of asking her, a hundred times a year since our mother’s death. Dreamed of asking Ruth, the one who had to look on it, up close, with a ten-year-old’s eyes, seeing the evidence, watching the house while Mama burned alive. Then I come back. She means: What happened to her, before what happened to her?

“I think…” Two notes in, I have to stop. Breathing has always been my downfall. Jonah can go for huge phrases and never break for air. I’m already gasping after a measure and a half of moderato. “I think it wore her down. Hammered from all sides, every waking minute, even when nobody said anything out loud. Her crime was worse than being black. Destroying the barriers, marrying: the worst any two people can do. This woman spit on her once, as we were coming out of the elevator to the dentist’s. Mama tried to make us think it was an accident. Can you imagine?”

“I think it was an accident, Joey,” Jonah says. “I think the woman was trying to hit you.”

“She gets spit on, and she has to keep us from thinking there’s anything wrong. Wore her out finally. More shit than even she could survive.”

“Joey said ‘shi-it,’” Ruth calls out, singsong. The best Christmas present I could give her. And her burst of delight: the best she could give me, or ever again will.

“Her face changed, when we were older. What would you call it, Jonah? Punch-drunk. Like she’d never imagined it could be so hard. She couldn’t even take us into a clothes store to outfit us for school without a security guard cornering us. No right course left, except to send us away.”

Ruth’s own face glows at the notion, as if these horrors vindicate her. She leans back on the sofa, her body relaxing into confirmation. She savors the record of our mother’s blackness, the first description of that shade where Ruth can go join her. She turns her full brown eyes on me. “How many sisters and brothers did she have? All together.”

I look at Jonah. His hands go up and his eyebrows down, Pagliaccio-style, a burlesque of innocent ignorance.

“Where do they live?”

Jonah’s on his feet. His muscle-twitch walk leads him into the kitchen for what’s left of our sesame chicken Christmas dinner. Ruth turns at his sudden departure, and I see it for a second in her face: Don’t leave me. What have I done?

“Most of them still in Philadelphia, I guess. She took us to see her mother once. Right after the war. We met in a diner. We weren’t supposed to be there. That’s all I can remember.”

Jonah comes back from the kitchen, his mouth full of chicken scooped straight out of the white cardboard delivery carton. Ruth won’t even glance at him. She speaks only to me, now. “Was that the only time?”

“Her brother was there at her funeral. You remember.”

“For God’s sake. Look at us! How can we not know our own grandparents?”

Her pitch shatters Jonah’s Buddha smile. I say, “You’d have to ask Da.”

“I’ve asked him for ten years. I ask him once every three months, and he never does anything more than grin at me. I’ve asked him every damn way I know how, and get nothing but detached, evasive crap. ‘You’ve met your grandparents already. You’ll meet them again.’ The man’s out there beyond the Crab Nebula. If the three of us disappeared for twenty years, he wouldn’t even notice until the day we showed up again. The man doesn’t care what’s happened to us or where we’re headed. He’s lost in scientific mumbo-jumbo. ‘Time isn’t a flow. Nows don’t succeed one another; they simply are.’ What kind of arrogant, intellectual, self-satisfied…”

Jonah sets down the carton of sesame chicken. Maybe he needs both hands to talk to her. Maybe he’s just finished eating. “Hey, Rootie.” Her turn to flinch at a taboo word. “Hey, squirrel.” Jonah, too, somehow believes all nows simply are. He sits down on the couch again, on Ruth’s other side. He shoves her right shoulder, an old team sport where he and I, our little sister between us, volley her body back and forth like a metronome. The game once occupied the three of us for endless stretches: a slow increase of speeds, Jonah calling out tempi, me keeping the beat, Ruthie giggling in the life-sized accelerando until we hit a crazed “Prestissimo!” Jonah pushes her now, and, caught off guard, Ruth gives a little. So I shove back, but even with this first nudge, we feel her stiffen. She isn’t playing anymore. It takes Jonah halfway to andante to give the game up for lost. I see his face, too, flash an even briefer fear: I’ll hurt you before I’ll let you refuse me.

Ruth lays an open palm on each of us, a last secret handshake of non-belonging. As little as we look or feel like siblings now, she must take us in, the only ones on this earth her exact internal shade. She pats me on the shoulder: nothing in writing, just the quick attempt to get past all this. The pat turns into a riff, one beat per syllable — the whiff of the irrepressible dotted Motown she’s been listening to exclusively these days. “How did she start fooling with music that, music that…”

“That didn’t belong to her?” Jonah’s voice floats a lazy challenge. He’s ready to go at it if she is.

“Yeah.” That showdown courage born in terror. “Yeah. That wasn’t hers.”

“Whose is it? Who owns it, girl?”

“White German intellectual Jewish guys. Like you and Da.”

Our father, back in his office, thinks we’re calling him. He calls back in mock long-suffering, “Yes? What is it this time?”

Jonah appraises Ruth, almost shaking. A Brahms vibrato. “You could chant before you could speak. You read music before you could read. You think that because somebody dragged our great-great-great-grandfather onto a European ship against his will, a thousand years of written music is off-limits?”

Ruth holds out her palms. “Fine. Cool it.”

“What music do you think she should have—”

“I said cool it. Shut the—” She breaks off. She won’t go to the brink with him. Not this vacation. Not this year. “Just tell me.” She looks away from Jonah and, by elimination, toward me. “Why did she stop singing?”

I start. “What are you talking about? She never stopped singing!”

“If she got that far in, if she was as good as you two say, if she trained… If she went through all that grief, why did she stop halfway? Why didn’t she have a career?”

“She did have a career,” Jonah says.

“Churches. Weddings.” The words issue from my sister’s mouth, dismissals. I want to tell her, If those mean nothing, you’ll never know the woman. “I’m talking about a real career. Recitals. Like the two of you have.”

“I suppose that was our fault. We kids came along and put an end to recitals.” I feel it for the first time: We curtailed her. “I’m not sure she ever felt the loss. ‘The praise is in the doing.’ That’s what she used to say.”

“What are you saying? Of course she would have felt the loss.” But before Ruth can ramp up, Da staggers out of his study, grinning, a pale, paunchy vacationer at one of those Catskills resorts, who has just shoved a perfect game of shuffleboard. His once-creased pair of black slacks, maroon argyles, gray loafers, brown belt, light blue shirt, white tee, and rust-colored cardigan mimic the clothes Mama bought for him fifteen years ago. Great loops of yarn unravel from the sweater around the indifferently patched edges. He has made himself a home in a world without other comfort. He lurches toward us, pure excitement, expecting — no, knowing — that his children will share his pleasure in this new revelation. He doesn’t make many errors in calculation. But when Da misses, he misses big.