Richard Powers (25 page)

My brother and I were slated to go on after Da’s piece. I stole a look at Jonah as the group headed toward the work’s surprise, inevitable home. His face was a nest of wasps. He didn’t want to stand and perform in front of this audience. Didn’t want to sing for them. Not now, not ever. But we had to.

The piano in that rented room played damp and wayward. My brother’s voice was wrecked with refusal.

He’d chosen a song he could no longer sing, one pitched up a childhood above his highest note. I’d tried every way possible to talk him out of the choice. But Jonah wouldn’t be moved. He wanted to do that Mahler he and Mama had once auditioned together. “Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht?” Who thought up this little song?

This was the way he wanted to remember her. Two years after their joint performance had gotten him into the academy, Jonah had asked that she not come pick him up at the holidays. Now the source of all his love and shame had died before he could release her from that banishment. He’d carry this fact with him for the rest of his life. Not even singing would be able to expel it.

Two nights earlier, he’d come up with the monstrous idea of singing the whole song in falsetto, up in the original soprano of The Boy’s Magic Horn , like some grotesque countertenor straining for the unreachable return. I made him hear the absurdity. We took it down an octave, and except for that jarring dissonance—the innocent words sung in his exiled range—we got through it. The mourners must have found the tribute inexplicable. What did this darling girl in her mountain house have to do with the matter-of-fact, irreverent black woman from Philadelphia, burned alive before the age of forty? But the girl in the song was Mama. Who could declare how her sons saw her? Death mixes all the races. Now more than ever, she was that girl, looking out forever on the original green meadow.

Our house had burned and our mother was dead. But we had no body to prove it. I wasn’t old enough to believe, without the evidence of seeing. To me, all these people had gathered to sing, rehearsing for some future first anniversary of the missing one’s return. Who thought up this little song? Only when the hidden mountain girl took my mother’s face did she at last appear to me. And only in my father’s tortured, fairy-tale language could wund rhyme with gesund : My heart is sore.

Come, Treasure, and heal it!

Your black-brown eyes

Have wounded me.

Your rosy mouth

Makes hearts healthy,

Makes boys wise,

Makes the dead live…

Who, then, thought up this pretty little song?

Three geese carried it over the water,

Two gray and one white.

And for those who can’t sing this little song,

These geese will whistle it.

I pressed the keys that her fingers once had pressed, in the same order she’d once pressed them. Jonah whistled his way through the tune, inventing it in midflight. I stayed with him, beat for beat. The extra octave in his thickened cords disappeared. He sang the way others only thought to themselves. His voice came to the notes like a bee to a flower, amazed by the precision of its own flight: light, true, unthinking, doomed. Everything was over in a minute and a half.

Your voice is so beautiful. I want you to sing at my wedding.She never knew how much the joke terrified me. So I’m married already. That can’t stop me from wanting you to sing at my wedding! Maybe even being dead would not stop her wanting. Maybe this was the wedding she wanted us to sing for.

Her brown-black eyes might have made us healthy, might have made us wise. Might have raised us all from the dead, had she not died first. Who can say why she loved that pretty little song? It wasn’t hers. It was some other world’s. This life wouldn’t let her sing it. Mama’s three geese—two gray and one white—carried the song back over the water for her, to the place where she never got to live.

I played once more that day, a final accompaniment to finish out the service. Throughout all the speeches and songs, Rootie sat on the wooden chair next to Da, picking at her stocking knees, peeling her shoe soles, her wayward hands daring her mother to come from out of the burning house and slap them. For nights after the fire, Ruth had gone to bed wailing and awakened in screams. She’d choke on her spittle, demanding to know where Mama was. She wouldn’t stop weeping until I told her no one knew. After a week, my sister settled into a hard, safe cyst, turning her secret over and over. The world was lying to her. For unknown reasons, no one would tell her what had really happened. The grown-ups were setting her a task, a test for which she was completely on her own.

Even at the memorial, Ruth was already working on that mystery. She sat in her chair, twisting her hem into ribbons, turning over the evidence. Daytime, at home, and everyone escaped but one. Ruth knew Mama. Mama would never have been caught like that. All during the remembrances, Rootie kept up a steady subvocal dialogue, quizzing and tea-partying with her now-vaporized dolls. Now and then, she scribbled into the palm of her hand with her index finger, indelible notes to herself on her ready skin, all the things she must never forget. I leaned down to hear what she was whispering to herself. In the smallest voice, she was repeating, “I’ll make them find you.”

However unforgivable, we saved my sister for last. Ruth was our mother’s best memory, the thing most like Mama in the world. At ten, she’d already begun to show the voice Mama had. Ruth had all the goods—a pitch that matched Jonah’s, Mama’s richness, a feel for phrase beyond anything I could produce. She might have gone beyond us all in music, given a different world.

She sang that learner’s song, by Bach and not by Bach, the simplest tune in the world, too simple for Bach himself to have written it without help. The tune appeared in Bach’s wife’s notebook, the place where she scribbled down all her lessons. Ruth had learned it from Mama, without a lesson at all.

Bist du bei mir, geh’ ich mit Freuden

zum Sterben und zu meiner Ruh’.

Ach, wie vergnügt wär’ so mein Ende,

es drückten deine lieben Hände

mir die getreuen Augen zu!

If you are with me, I’ll go gladly

to my death and to my rest.

Ah, how pleasant will my end be,

with your dear hands pressing

Shut my faithful eyes!

Root sang as if she and I were the only two souls left alive. Her sound was small but as clear as a music box. I kept off the sustain pedal, sounding each chord almost tentatively, not with the press of my fingers but with the release. Her held lines floated above my stepwise modulations like moonlight on a lost, small craft. I tried not to listen, except to stay inside the throw of her beam.

The simplest tune in the world, as simple and strange as breathing. Who knows what the room heard?

I’m not even sure Rootie understood the words. They may have been meant originally for God. But that’s not where Ruth sent them.

We sat down to a silent room. Ruth never again sang in her father’s language, never again performed her mother’s beloved European music in public. Never again, until she had to.

The room sang itself out with “On That Great Gettin’ Up Morning.” The song wasn’t listed in the program, but it came off almost as if by plan. My mother’s friends let loose with the sunniest syncopated major. One exchange of glances was enough to set the send-off tempo. Voices with voices, rich, rolling, knowing we’d never have any other account but this. The ad libs grew dizzy, and I checked Jonah to see if we might add some ornaments to the fray. He just looked at me, swollen, and said, “Take it away, if you want.”

Afterward, the group visited over little square-cut sandwiches, tucking into the food with an appetite that made me hate them all. The few children in attendance sniffed out Ruth, who couldn’t bring herself either to play or stand off. Jonah and I held up the wall, just watching people smile and enjoy one another.

When anyone came by to say how sorry they were, Jonah thanked them mechanically and I told them it wasn’t their fault.

A man came up to us. I hadn’t seen him during the service. He seemed as negligent with age as any adult.

He was in his early thirties, ten years older than was decent in anyone. He seemed to me the perfect color, just the cinnamon side of clove. He walked up to us, shy, certain, curious, his eyes rimmed with red. “You boys cook,” he said. His voice struggled. “You boys really hum.”

He couldn’t smile. He kept looking around the room, ready to bolt. I couldn’t understand how someone I didn’t know could feel such grief for my mother.

“Is that good or bad?” Jonah asked.

“Real good. Good as it gets. You remember I told you that.” He bent down, his blood-streaked eyes at our level. He stared at us, himself remembering. “You,” he accused Jonah, index finger out. “You sound like her. But you.” His hand swung around in a slow quarter circle. “You are like her. And I’m not talking shade.”

The man straightened up and peered down on us. I felt Jonah turn fierce, even before I heard him. “How would you know? Do you even know us?”

The man held up his disarmed palms. They looked like mine. His palms would have looked no different had he been white.

“Hey, hey. Keep cool, cat.” He sounded like what Thad and Earl would have died to be able to imitate.

“I just know is how I know.”

Jonah heard it, too. “You were close to her or something?”

The man only looked at us, his head sliding from side to side. We amazed him, and I couldn’t say how.

He couldn’t accept our being, but he found it wonderful, even comic. He put his hands on each of our heads. I let him. Jonah shook free.

The man backed off, still shaking his head, filled with sad wonder. “You two really hum. Remember that.” He looked around the room again, afraid of being caught, or maybe wanting to be. “You say hello to that Da of yours. From Michael, okay?” Then he turned from the sorrowing party and left.

We found our father drawing Feynman diagrams on the back of a napkin for two of his Columbia colleagues. They were arguing about the reversibility in time of elementary colliding particles. It seemed obscene, that they should be talking about anything other than death or Mama. Maybe, for Da, they were talking about both.

Jonah broke up the session. “Who’s Michael, Da?”

Our father turned away from his colleagues, a blank across his face. We were simply the next people intent on getting him to solve a problem for them. “Michael?” Failing to recognize the name of this new elementary particle. He looked at us, registered who we were. Something engaged. He grew frightened and excited, all at once. “Here?” Jonah nodded. “A tall man? About a hundred and ninety centimeters?”

We looked at each other, frightened. Jonah shrugged. “A fine-looking man? Narrow face? One of his ears does this?”

Da flipped down his right ear flap to mimic the fold we’d both noticed. He never mentioned the cinnamon. First thing anyone else would want to know. Our father never even asked.

“Yes?” he asked. “This is him?” Still happy, still scared. He looked about the room, matching Michael’s own furtive look. “Where is he?”

Jonah shrugged again. “He’s gone.”

“Gone?” Da’s face drained as pale as the day he came up to Boston to tell us about Mama. “Away?”

I nodded at the imbecile question. Something had gone wrong, and it was Jonah’s and my fault. I nodded, trying to right things. But Da never even saw me. Our father was never at home in his body. The thing was squat and his soul was slender. When he moved, he slumped along next to himself like an overpacked suitcase. But at least this once, he ran. He moved through the rooms so quickly, the surrounding conversations were sucked up into his wake. Jonah and I scrambled to chase after him.

Da ran outside, on the street, ready to dash on through the passersby. He got as far as the first cross street. I watched him from half a block back. He didn’t belong in this neighborhood. He fell off the edge even of this street’s broad spectrum.

The buzz of conversation kept spilling from the little rented hall behind us. Da turned and rejoined us, beaten. The three of us went back in. The hum hushed at our entrance. Da looked around at the gathering, still trying to smile.

Jonah asked, “He was somebody we know or something?”

“He said I look like Mama.” I sounded like a child.

“You both look like your mother.” Da refused to look at us. “All three of you.” He took off his glasses and pressed his eyes. He slipped his glasses back on. The smile, the grin of disbelief, the slow shake of the head left him. “My boys.” He wanted to add, My JoJo , but couldn’t. “My boys. That was your uncle.”

Spring 1949

I’m seven years old when our father tells me the secret of time. We’re halfway up the steps from 189th Street, climbing toward the next way camp along our route, a place called Frisch’s Bakery on Overlook Terrace. Pick a Sunday near Easter in the spring of 1949.

My brother Jonah is eight. He climbs the stairway like a tank, two stairs to my labored one. In this year, Jonah’s hips still come up near my sternum. He climbs as if he wants to leave me in his distant past. He probably would if Da didn’t hold us together, one boy in each whitened hand.

Our father has worked on time since time began. He was working on it even before my brother was born. I can’t get enough of the idea: Jonah nothing, not even a speck of dust, and my father already at work, not even missing us, not even knowing that company is coming.

But now, this year, we’re here with him. We make this long pilgrimage to Frisch’s together, stopping to catch our breath. “To catch up with ourselves,” Da says. Jonah has already caught up with whoever he is, tugging at the leash of our father’s arm, smelling adventure just up this stone-paved hill. I’m winded and need the rest. All this is half a century ago. The day has brittled in the interim, like a box of old postcards from Yellowstone and Yosemite laid open in a spring-cleaning purge. Anything I remember now must be half invention.

We pass people who recognize my father from when he used to live here. “Before I met your mother.”

The sound of this frightens me. My father greets some of them by name. He says hello as if he just saw these strangers the day before. These people—older than the moon and stars—are cool to him, distant in a way Da doesn’t see. They flick us a look, and we are all the explanation they need. Already I’m used to seeing all that Da won’t notice.