Richard Powers (2 page)

“‘Polack’? You’re crazy. That’s what they’re called, bub.”

“Yeah, bub.” Ruth, our mimic, nails him. Even at sixteen, she’s passed for the man more than once, over the phone. “What the hell else you going to call people from Polackia?”

The crowd flinches again, that look that pretends not to. We’re a moving violation of everything in their creed. But out here in classically trained public, they keep that major-key smile. They push on to the other winners, leaving us, for a last moment, once again our own safe nation. Father and eldest son reel about on the remnants of Schubert still banging about the emptied hall. They lean on each other’s shoulders. “Trust me,” the older one tells the younger. “I’ve known a few Polacks in my day. I almost married one.”

“I could have been a Polack?”

“A near Polack. A counterfactual Polack.”

“A Polack in one of many alternate universes?”

They babble to each other, the shorthand jokes of his profession. Clowning for the one none of us will name this night, the one to whom we offer every note of our contest prize. Ruth stands in the stage footlights, almost auburn, but otherwise the sole keeper of our mother’s features in this world. My mother, the woman my father almost didn’t marry, a woman more and longer American than anyone in this hall tonight.

“You did good, too, Joey,” my little sister makes sure to tell me. “You know. Perfect and all.” I hug her for her lie, and she glows under my grasp, a ready jewel. We wander back to Da and Jonah. Assembled again: the surviving four-fifths of the Strom family chorale.

But Da and Jonah don’t need either of us accompanists. Da has hold of the Erl-King motif, and Jonah thumps along, his three-and-a-half-octave voice dropping into bass to whack at his imitation piano’s left hand. He hums the way he wanted me to play it. The way it ought to be played, in heaven’s headliner series. Ruth and I draw near, despite ourselves, to add the inner lines. People smile as they pass, in pity or shame, some imagined difference. But Jonah is the evening’s rising star, momentarily beyond scorn.

The audience this night will claim they heard him. They’ll tell their children how that chasm opened up, how the floor dropped out of the old Duke concert hall and left them hanging in the vacuum they thought it was music’s job to fill. But the person they’ll recall won’t be my brother. They’ll tell of sitting up in their seats at the first sound of that transmuting voice. But the voice they’ll remember won’t be his.

His growing band of listeners will chase Jonah’s performances, prize his tickets, follow his career even into those last, decoupled years. Connoisseurs will search down his records, mistaking the voice on the disk for his. My brother’s sound could never be recorded. He had a thing against the permanent, a hatred of being fixed that’s audible in every note he ever laid down. He was Orpheus in reverse: Look forward , and all that you love will disappear.

It’s 1961. Jonah Strom, America’s Next Voice, is twenty. This is how I see him, forty years on, eight years older now than my older brother will ever be. The hall has emptied; my brother still sings. He sings through to the double bar, the tempo falling to nothing as it passes through the fermata’s blackness, a boy singing to a mother who can no longer hear him.

That voice was so pure, it could make heads of state repent. But it sang knowing just what shape rode along behind it. And if any voice could have sent a message back to warn the past and correct the unmade future, it would have been my brother’s.

Winter, Around 1950

But no one ever really knew that voice except his family, singing together on those postwar winter nights, with music their last line of defense against the outside and the encroaching cold. They lived in half of a three-story Jersey freestone house that had weathered over half a century to a chocolate brown, tucked up in the northwest corner of Manhattan, a neglected enclave of mixed, mottled blocks where Hamilton Heights shaded off into Washington Heights. They rented, the immigrant David Strom never trusting the future enough to own anything that wouldn’t fit into a waiting suitcase. Even his appointment in the Physics Department at Columbia seemed a thing so fine, it would certainly be taken away by anti-Semitism, anti-intellectualism, rising randomness, or the inevitable return of the Nazis. That he could afford to rent half a house at all, even in this tidal-pool neighborhood, struck David as beyond luck, given the life he’d already owned.

To Delia, his Philadelphian wife, renting seemed as perennially strange as her husband’s pallid theories.

She’d never lived anywhere but the home her parents owned. Yet Delia Daley Strom, too, knew that the world’s relentless purifiers would come after their happiness through any open chink. So she propped up her refugee husband and turned their rented half of the freestone into a fortress. And for pure safety, nothing beat music. Each of the three children shared the same first memory: their parents, singing. Music was their lease, their deed, their eminent domain. Let each voice defeat silence through its own vocation.

And the Stroms defeated silence after their own fashion, each evening, together, in great gulps of free-playing chords.

Rambling scraps of song started even before the children were awake. Strains of Barber from the bathroom collided with Carmen coming out of the kitchen. Breakfast found them all humming against one another in polytonal rowdiness. Even once the day’s home schooling started—Delia teaching the reading and writing, David doing the arithmetic before heading down to Morningside to lecture on General Relativity—song drove the lessons. Meter markings taught fractions. Every poem had its tune.

In the afternoon, when Jonah and Joey raced home from forced excursions to that strip of playground adjoining St. Luke’s, they’d find their mother at the spinet with baby Ruth, turning the cramped drawing room into a campsite on the shores of Jordan. Half an hour of trios dissolved into bouts of ritual bickering between the boys over who got first dibs with their mother, alone. The winner set to an hour of glorious piano duets, while the moment’s loser took little Root upstairs for read-alouds or card games without real rules.

Lessons with Delia passed in minutes for the praise-heaped student, while stretching out forever for the one waiting in line. When the excluded boy started calling out finger faults from upstairs, Delia turned those catcalls, too, into a game. She’d have the boys name chords or sustain intervals from the top of the stairs. She’d get them singing rounds—“By the Waters of Babylon”—from opposite ends of the house, each boy weaving his own line around the distant other. When they hit the limits of their boy’s patience, she’d bring them together, one singing, the other playing, with little Root inventing spectral toddler harmonies that strove to join this family’s secret language.

The sounds her boys made pleased Delia so much, it scared them. “Oh, my JoJo! What voices! I want you to sing at my wedding.”

“But you’re already married,” Joey, the younger boy, cried. “To Da!”

“I know, honey. Can’t I still want you to sing at my wedding?”

They loved it too well, music. The boys shrugged off sandlot sports, radio dummies and detectives, tentacled creatures from the tenth dimension, and neighborhood reenactments of the slaughter at Okinawa and Bastogne, preferring to flank their mother at the spinet. Even in those narrow hours before their father returned, when Delia stopped their private lessons to prepare dinner, she had to force-march the boys out of the house to take another dose of torture at the hands of boys more cruelly competent in boyhood, boys who rained down on the two Stroms the full brutality of collective bafflement.

Both sides in the neighborhood’s standing war went after these stragglers, with words, fists, stones—even, once, a softball bat square in the back. When the neighborhood children weren’t using the boys for horseshoe stakes or home plate, they made an example of the freakish Stroms. They sneered at Joey’s softness, covered Jonah’s offending face in caked mud. The Strom boys had little taste for these daily refresher courses in difference. Often, they never made it to the playground at all, but hid themselves in the alley half a block away, calming each other by humming in thirds and fifths until enough time had passed and they could race back home.

Dinners were a chaos of talk and tease, the nightly extension of the years-long Strom-Daley courtship.

Delia banned her husband from the stove when she worked. She found the man’s pot-dipping an outrage against God and nature. She kept him at bay until her latest inspired offering—chicken casserole with candied carrots, or a roast with yams, small miracles prepared in those moments between her other full-time jobs—was ready for the stage. David’s task was to accompany the meal with the latest bizarre developments from the imaginary job he held down. Professor of phantom mechanics, Delia teased. Da, more excitable than all his children, laid into the wildest of details: his acquaintance Kurt Gödel’s discovery of loopy timelike lines hiding in Einstein’s field equations. Or Hoyle, Bondi, and Gold’s hunch that new galaxies poured through the gaps between old ones, like weeds splitting the universe’s crumbling concrete. To the listening boys, the world was ripe with German-speaking refugees, safely abroad in their various democracies, busy overthrowing space and time.

Delia shook her head at the nonsense that passed for conversation in her home. Little Ruth mimicked her giggle. But the preteen boys outdid each other with questions. Did the universe care which way time flowed? Did hours fall like water? Was there only one kind of time? Did it ever change speeds? If time made loops, could the future curl into the past? Their father was better than a science-crazed comic book, Astounding Stories , Forbidden Tales . He came from a stranger place, and the pictures he drew were even more fantastic.

After dinner, they came together in tunes. Rossini while washing the dishes, W. C. Handy while drying.

They crawled through loopy timelike holes in the evening, five lines braiding in space, each one curling back on the other, spinning in place. They’d do workhorse Bach chorales, taking their pitches from Jonah, the boy with the magic ear. Or they’d crowd around the spinet, tackling madrigals, poking the keyboard now and then to check an interval. Once, they divvied up parts and made it through a whole Gilbert and Sullivan in one evening. Evenings would never be so long again.

On such nights, the children seemed almost designed for their parents’ express entertainment. Delia’s soprano lit across the upper register like lightning on a western sky. David’s bass made up with German musicality what it lacked in beauty. Husband anchored wife for any flight she cared to make. But each knew what the marriage needed, and together they used the boys shamelessly to hold down the inner lines. All the while, baby Ruth crawled among them, hitching melodic rides, standing on her toes to peek at the pages her family studied. In this way, a third child came to read music without anyone teaching her.

Delia sang with her whole body. That’s how she’d learned, even in Philadelphia, from generations on generations of Carolina churchgoing mothers. Her chest swelled when she let loose, like the bellows of a glory-filled pump organ. A deaf man might have held his hands to her shoulders and felt each pitch resonating, singed into his fingers as if by a tuning fork. In the years since their marriage in 1940, David Strom had learned this freedom from his American wife. The secular German Jew bobbed to inner rhythms, davening as freely as his great-grandfather cantors once had.

Song held the children enthralled, as tied to these musical evenings as their neighbors were to radios.

Singing was their team sport, their Tiddlywinks, their Chutes and Ladders. To see their parents dance

—driven by hidden forces like creatures in a folk ballad—was the first awful mystery of childhood. The Strom children joined in, swaying back and forth to Mozart’s “Ave verum corpus” the way they did to

“Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

Surely the parents heard what was happening to music at that hour. They must have felt the manic pulse—half the world’s GNP, looking for its ruder theme song. Swing had long since played Carnegie, that brash razz already housebroken. Down in the blistering bebop clubs, Gillespie and Parker were nightly warping the space-time continuum. A cracker kid in a designated white house in a black neighborhood off in fly-bitten Mississippi was about to let loose the secret beat of race music, forever blowing away the enriched-flour, box-stepping public. No one alive then could have missed the changes, not even two people as willfully against the grain as that refugee physicist and the Philadelphian doctor’s daughter, his trained-voice wife. They raided the present, too. He had his accented Ella and she her deep-palette Ellington. They never missed a Saturday Metropolitan broadcast. But every Sunday morning, the radio trawled for jazz while David made foot-wide mushroom and tomato omelettes. In the Strom’s singing school, upstart tunes took their place in a thousand-year parade of harmony and invention. Cut-time, finger-snapping euphoria gave those nights of Palestrina all the more drive. For Palestrina, too, once overthrew the unsuspecting world.

Every time the Stroms filled their lungs, they continued that long conversation of pitches in time. In old music, they made sense. Singing, they were no one’s outcasts. Each night that they made that full-voiced sound—the sound that drove David Strom and Delia Daley together in this life—they headed upriver into a sooner saner place.

Delia and David never let a month go by without a round of their favorite public flirtation: Crazed Quotations. The wife settled on the piano bench, a child pressed against each thigh. She’d sit, telegraphing nothing, her wavy black hair a perfect cowl. Her long russet fingers pressed down on several keys at once, freeing a simple melody—say Dvorák’s slow, reedy spiritual “From the New World.” The husband then had two repeats to find a response. The children watched in suspense as Delia’s tune unfolded, to see if Da could beat the clock and add a countersubject before their mother reached the double bar. If he failed, his children got to taunt him in mock German and his wife named the forfeit of her choice.