Richard Powers (3 page)

He rarely failed. By the time Dvorák’s stolen folk song looped back around, the fellow found a way to make Schubert’s Trout swim upstream against it. The ball bounced back to Delia’s court. She had one stanza to come up with another quote to fit the now-changed frame. It took her only a little meandering to get “Swanee River” flowing down around the Trout.

The game allowed liberties. Themes could slow to a near standstill, their modulations delayed until the right moment. Or tunes could blast by so fast, their changes collapsed to passing tones. The lines might split into long chorale preludes, sprinkled with accidentals, or the phrase come home to a different cadence, just so long as the change preserved the sense of the melody. As for the words, they could be the originals, madrigal fa-las , or scraps of advertising doggerel, so long as each singer, at some point in the evening’s game, threaded in their traditional nonsense question, “But where will they build their nest?”

The game produced the wildest mixed marriages, love matches that even the heaven of half-breeds looked sidelong at. Her Brahms Alto Rhapsody bickered with his growled Dixieland. Cherubini crashed into Cole Porter. Debussy, Tallis, and Mendelssohn shacked up in unholy ménages à trois. After a few rounds, the game got out of hand and the clotted chords collapsed under their own weight. Call and response ended in hilarious spinouts, with the one who flew off the carousel accusing the other of unfair harmonic tampering.

During such a game of Crazed Quotations, on a cold December night in 1950, David and Delia Strom got their first look at just what they’d brought into this world. The soprano started with a fat, slow pitch: Haydn’s German Dance no. 1 in D. On top of that, the bass cobbled up a precarious Verdi “La donna è mobile.” The effect was so joyfully deranged that the two, on nothing more than a shared grin, let the monstrosity air for another go-round. But during the reprise, something rose up out of the tangle, a phrase that neither parent owned. The first pitch shone so clear and centered, it took a moment for the adults to hear it wasn’t some phantom sympathetic resonance. They looked at each other in alarm, then down at the oldest child, Jonah, who launched into a pitch-perfect rendition of Josquin’s Absalon, fili mi .

The Stroms had sight-read the piece months before and put it away as too hard for the children. That the boy remembered it was already a wonder. When Jonah engineered the melody to fit the two already in motion, David Strom felt as he had on first hearing that boys’ choir soar above the double chorus opening Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion . Both parents stopped in midphrase, staring at the boy. The child, mortified, stared back.

“What’s wrong? Did I do something bad?” The child was not yet ten. This was when David and Delia Strom first knew that their firstborn would soon be taken from them.

Jonah shared the trick with his little brother. Joseph began adding his own crazed quotes a month later.

The family took to ad-libbing hybrid quartets. Little Ruth wailed, wanting to play. “Oh, sweet!” her mother said. “Don’t cry. You’ll get airborne faster than anyone. Fly across the sky before too long.” She gave Ruth simple trinkets—the Texaco radio jingle or “You Are My Sunshine”—while the rest made Joplin rags and bits of Puccini arias lie down together around them in peaceable kingdoms.

They sang together almost every night, over the muffled traffic of distant Amsterdam Avenue. It was all either parent had with which to remind them of the homes each had lost. No one heard them except their landlady, Verna Washington, a stately, childless widow who lived in the brownstone’s other half and who liked to press her ear to their shared wall, eavesdropping on that high-wire joy.

The Stroms sang with a skill built into the body, a fixed trait, the soul’s eye color. Husband and wife each supplied musical genes: his mathematician’s feel for ratio and rhythm, her vocal artist’s pitch like a homing pigeon and shading like a hummingbird’s wings. Neither boy suspected it was at all odd for a nine-year-old to sight-sing as easily as he breathed. They helped the strands of sound unfold as easily as their lost first cousins might climb a tree. All a voice had to do was open and release, take its tones out for a spin down to Riverside Park, the way their father walked them sometimes on sunny weekends: up, down, sharp, flat, long, short, East Side, West Side, all around the town. Jonah and Joseph had only to look at printed chords, their note heads stacked up like tiny totem poles, to hear the intervals.

Visitors did come by the house, but always to make music. The quintet became a chamber choir every other month, padded with Delia’s private singing students or her fellow soloists from the local church circuit. Moonlighting string players from the Physics Departments at Columbia and City College turned the Strom home into a little Vienna. One noisy night, a white-maned old New Jersey violinist in a moth-eaten sweater, who spoke German with David and frightened Ruth with incomprehensible jokes, heard Jonah sing. Afterward, he scolded Delia Strom until she cried. “This child has a gift. You don’t hear how big. You are too close. It’s unforgivable that you do nothing for him.” The old physicist insisted they give the boy the strongest musical education available. Not just a good private teacher but an immersion that would challenge this eerie talent to become everything it was. The great man threatened to take up a collection, if money was the problem.

The problem wasn’t money. David objected: No musical education could beat the one Jonah was already receiving from his mother. Delia refused to surrender the boy to a teacher who might fail to understand his special circumstance. The Strom family chorale had its private reasons for protecting its angelic high voice. Yet they didn’t dare oppose a man who’d rooted out the bizarre secret of time, buried since time’s beginning. Einstein was Einstein, however Gypsy-like his violin playing. His words shamed the Stroms into accepting the inevitable. As the new decade opened onto the long-promised world of tomorrow, Jonah’s parents began searching for a music school that could bring that frightening talent into its own.

Meanwhile, days of instruction that the children swallowed whole went on segueing into evenings of part-songs and improvised games of musical tag. Delia bought a sewing machine–sized phonograph for the boys’ bedroom. The brothers fell asleep each night to state-of-the-art long-playing 331/ rpm records 3

of Caruso, Gigli, and Gobbi. Tiny, tinny, chalk-colored voices stole into the boys’ room through that electric portal, coaxing, Further, wider, clearer—like this.

And while he drifted off to sleep one night on this chorus of coaxing ghosts, Jonah told his brother what would happen. He knew what their parents were doing. He predicted exactly what would become of him. He’d be sent away for doing, beautifully, what his family had most wanted him to do. Cast out forever, just for singing.

My Brother’s Face

My brother’s face was a school of fishes. His grin was not one thing, but a hundred darting ones. I have a photograph—one of the few from my childhood that escaped incineration. In it, the two of us open Christmas presents on the nubby floral-print sofa that sat in our front room. His eyes look everywhere at once: at his own present, a three-segment expanding telescope; at mine, a metronome; at Rootie, who clutches his knee, wanting to see for herself; at our photographing father deep in his act of stopping time; at Mama, just past the picture’s frame; at a future audience, looking, from a century on, at this sheltered Christmas crèche, long after all of us are dead.

My brother’s afraid he’s missing something. Afraid Santa switched the gifts’ name tags. Afraid my present might be sweeter than his. His one hand reaches out to Ruth, who threatens to fall and crack her head on the walnut coffee table. His other hand flies upward to comb down his front curl—the hair our mother forever loved to brush—so the camera won’t capture it sticking up for all eternity like a homemade fishing lure. His smile assures our father that he’s doing his best to make this an excellent picture. His eyes dart off in pity for our mother, forever excluded from this scene.

The photo is one of the first Polaroids. Our father loved ingenious inventions, and our mother loved anything that could fix memory. The black-and-white tones have gone grainy, the look the late forties now have. I can’t trust the shades of my brother’s photographed skin to see just how others might have read him then. My mother was light for her family, and my father, the palest Eurosemitic. Jonah fell right between them. His hair is already more wavy than curly, and just too dark for carrot. His eyes are hazel; that much never changed. His nose is narrow, his cheeks the width of a paperback book. What my brother most resembles is a blood-drained, luminous Arab.

His face is the key of E, the key for beautiful , the face most known to me in the whole world. It looks like one of my father’s scientific sketches, built of an open oval, with trusting half almonds inlaid for eyes: a face that forever says face to me, flashing its seduction of pleasure, mildly surprised, its skin pulled smooth on the rounded bone. I loved that face. It seemed ever to me like mine, released.

Already he shows the wary distrust, the testing of innocence. The features will narrow as the months move on. The lips draw and the eyebrows batten down. The half-pear nose thins at the bridge; the puffs of cheekbone deflate. But even in middle age, his forehead still sometimes cleared like this and the lips rose up, ready to joke even with his killers. I got an expandable telescope for Christmas. How about you?

One night after prayers he asked our mother, “Where do we come from?” He couldn’t have been ten yet, and was troubled by Ruth, scared by how different she looked from the two of us. Even I already worried him. Maybe the nurses at the maternity hospital had been as careless as Santa. He’d reached the age when the tonal gap between Mama and Da grew too wide for him to call it chance. He gathered the weight of the evidence, and it bent him double. I lay in my bed, flush against his, cramming in a few more panels of Science Comics , starring Cosmic Carson, before lights-out. But I stopped to hear Mama’s answer to the question I’d never thought to ask.

“Where did you come from? You kids?” Whenever a question caught her on the chin, Mama repeated it.

It bought her ten seconds. When things turned serious, her voice grew piano, and settled into that caramel, mezzo register. She shifted on the edge of his mattress, where she sat caressing him. “Why, I’m glad you asked me that. You were all three brought to us by the Brother of Wonder.”

My brother’s face twisted, dubious. “Who’s that?”

“Who…? How did you get so curious? You get that from me or from your father? The Brother of Wonder is named Hap. Mr. Hap E. Ness.”

“What does the E stand for?” Jonah demanded, trying to catch her out.

“What does the E stand for? Why, don’t you know that? Ebenezer.”

Presto: “What’s Wonder’s middle name?”

“Schmuel,” my father said, a tempo, from the doorway.

“Wonder Schmuel Ness?”

“Yes, sure. Why not? This Ness family has many secrets in the cabinet.”

“Da. Come on. Where did we come from?”

“Your mother and I found you in the freezer case at the A & P. Who knows how long you were in there.

This Mr. Ness claimed to own, but he never produced the ownership papers.”

“Please, Da. Truth.”

Not a word our father ever violated. “You were born out of your mother’s belly.”

This inanity reduced the two of us to helpless laughter. My mother lifted her arms in the air. I can see her muscles tighten, even now, twice as old as she was then. Arms up, she said, “Here we go.”

My father sat down. “We must go there, soon or late.”

But we didn’t go anywhere. Jonah lost interest. His laugh staled and he stared off into space, grimacing.

He accepted the deranged idea—whatever they wanted to tell him. He put his arm on Mama’s forearm.

“That’s okay. I don’t care where we came from. Just so long as we all came from the same place.”

The first music school to hear my brother loved him. I knew this would happen before it did, no matter what my father said about predicting the future. The school, one of the city’s two top conservatory prep programs, was down in midtown, on the East Side. I remember Jonah, in a burgundy blazer too large for him, asking Mama, “How come you don’t want to come?”

“Oh, Jo! Of course I want to go with you. But who’s going to stay home and take care of Baby Ruth?”

“She can come with us,” Jonah said, already knowing who couldn’t go where.

Mama didn’t answer. She hugged us in the foyer. “Bye, JoJo.” Her one name for the two of us. “Do good things for me.”

We three men bundled into the first cab that would take us, then headed down to the school. There, my brother disappeared into a crowd of kids, coming back to find us in the auditorium just before he sang.

“Joey, you’re not going to believe this.” His face all eager horror. “There’s a bunch of kids back there, and they look like Ming the Merciless is chewing their butts.” He tried to laugh. “This big guy, an eighth grader at least, is spitting his guts out in the washbasin.” His eyes wandered out beyond the orbit of newly discovered Pluto. No one had ever told him music was worth getting sick over.

Twenty bars into my brother’s a cappella rendition of “Down by the Salley Gardens,” the judges were sold. Afterward, in the stale green hallway, two of them even approached my father to talk up the program. While the adults went over details, Jonah dragged me backstage to the warm-up room where the older kid had puked. We could still smell it, lining the drain, sweet and acrid, halfway between food and feces.

Official word came two weeks later. Our parents gave the long typed envelope to Jonah, for the thrill of opening it himself. But when my brother foundered on the first two sentences, Da took the letter. “‘We regret to say, despite the merits of this voice, we cannot offer a place this fall. The program is overenrolled, and the strains on the faculty make it impossible…’”

Da let out a little bark of dismay and glanced at Mama. I’d seen them shoot the look between them, out together in public. By ten, I knew what it meant, but I kept that fact secret from them. Our parents stared at each other, each working to deflect the other’s dismay.