Richard Powers (34 page)

Da didn’t want us staying downtown all night. He’d lost track of us, vanishing into his work, coming up for air only to blunder through parenting. He surfaced long enough to say that he wanted us home by midnight, too early to hear the stuff that the regulars talked about in hushed tones. Those sets never got started until early morning. The heavy players were still going—zipped up and cooking on fuels I’d never heard of—by the time Jonah and I dragged back into the conservatory the next morning. We could have skipped Da’s curfew anytime without his noticing. But for whatever reasons, we obeyed this law, staying out to the last possible minute the clock allowed, Jonah going through a beer or two while helping himself to my seltzers. By the time we headed back uptown, we’d be reeling like the worst of hard-core drunks, Jonah pale with the darkness, the smoke, the wonder of it, as pale as any Semitic fellow traveler. And all anxious explanations.

“They’re stealing the wild stuff from the thirties avant-garde. Paris, you know. Berlin.” It reassured him, somehow. But from what I’d read, the Europeans had stolen their best bits from New Orleans and Chicago. Music, that vampire, floating around for centuries, undead, wasn’t at all picky about whose jugular it sucked. Any old blood line would do, any transfusion that kept it kicking for another year.

I loved how the jazzers prowled around the streets with their horns, looking for the next quick place to unpack, scouting for like-minded cats, with no other long-range program except to sit back and blow.

Their engine was pure self-delight, self-invention. Their sound had no motive, no beginning, no end, no goal but the notes, and even those they looked at only in order to look past. All a body really wanted was to play.

We caught Coltrane one night, tearing the roof off what felt like someone’s living room in a street shorter than a Tinkertoy, on a stage the size of a cheese Danish. He’d been standing in a nearby alley, leaning on the end of his tenor case, when the drummer and pianist of that night’s session went to have a smoke.

They waylaid ’Trane, or he had nothing better to do. Sources varied. In any case, Jonah and I sat with our ears in that giant upturned bell, hearing the cups clapping his tone holes, listening to a game of Crazed Quotations beyond our ability to follow.

For all my grounding in theory and harmony, I couldn’t hear a third of what that pickup quartet did that night. But here was music as it had been, once, in the beginning, when my family first gave it to me. Music for the sheer making. Music for a while.

I loved to watch Jonah when the best of the Village’s singers adventured onstage. He favored the sets of a southern woman named Simone who’d started out studying piano at Juilliard with Carl Friedburg. Her voice was harsh, but she took it into unknown places. His other goddess was another dark woman, from Mama’s Philly, who could scat wilder than a Paganini pizz. Jonah sat like a spaniel at a rabbit farm, leaning forward, mouth open, body ready to bolt onstage and join the fray. I had to keep a hand on his collar sometimes. Thank God I did, for on the long ride home—the two of us, north of Fifty-ninth, breaking into the obligatory “Take the A Train”—I heard how gelded his whole concert-hall, full-voiced precision would have sounded on any stage south of Fourteenth.

His keepers at Juilliard didn’t know about his after-hours flirtations with the island’s lower regions. After his senior recital, the school prepared to grant my brother their degree. His teachers split over what he should do next. Agnese wanted him to enter the graduate program, attacca, without pausing for breath.

Grau, who loved my brother more ruthlessly, wanted him out in the world, getting a taste of the brutal arena of auditions, the quickest way to toughen that voice that still held on to an unnatural innocence.

The Rome-Berlin axis compromised on a trip to Europe. They conveyed their plans to Jonah. If Jonah put up a token sum, they could arrange a scholarship, free accommodation, and a superlative teacher in Milan. Italy was the voice’s home, the hajj every singer made, the dream world with which Kimberly Monera had once fed Jonah’s childish imagination. He’d had four years of the language and could say things like “To love one another eternally—that is the curse coursing through our blood!” and “Even the gods’ indifference will not delay me” with all the ease of a native speaker. There was no question: He would have to make the pilgrimage to vocal music’s promised land. The only question was when.

My brother had gone to Juilliard purely as an alternative to grief. And now he started planning for Milan only as an alternative to hanging around Claremont forever. Da was sure this was the proper next step.

“My boy, I wish I were traveling with you.” Ruthie used her baby-sitting money to buy a set of conversational Italian records so she could jabber with him at breakfast in the weeks before his departure. But after a few go-rounds with Jonah correcting her pronunciation, she broke off the attempt and condemned the records to our piles of opera LPs.

Jonah was booked to leave just after graduation. The night before commencement, he came into the kitchen to help me wash dishes. He seemed transfigured, lighter than he’d been in weeks. I thought it was his approaching departure.

“Mule, you go. I’m sitting tight for a while.” I laughed. “Serious.” My mouth sagged, waiting for him to come clean. “Serious, Joey. I’m not going. You know why. You know everything, brother. The last few years have been perfect hell, haven’t they? For both of us. You knew that all along, while I waltzed around, pretending…”

“Jonah. You have to go. It’s all arranged. They’ve put themselves out for your sake.”

“Help a colored boy see the Vatican.”

“Jonah. Don’t do this. Don’t throw this away.”

“What am I throwing away? They’re throwing me away, damn it. Everybody has plans for me but me.

Imagine what I’d be after six months of Europe. Their charity case. Their trademarked act. Indebted to my sponsors forever. Sorry. Can’t do it, Joey.”

He looked away, avoiding my eye. A muscle in his cheek twitched at a hundred beats a minute. For the first time in his life, my brother was afraid. Maybe not of failing: Failing would have been a relief. Afraid of who he’d be, if the problem of who he was was solved for him.

His teachers were furious. They had pulled strings for him, and he was walking away from their protective benefice. Agnese wasn’t accustomed to having his generosity trashed. He threw my brother out of his studio and refused to talk to him. Grau, the longer-term architect, sat him down, hostage for a few more minutes, and made him say just what he wanted to do instead.

Jonah threw his palms in the air. He was just that age, emerged adult, with adolescence’s pupa still clinging to him. “I thought I might sing a little?”

Grau laughed. “And what have you been doing for the last four years?”

“I mean…sing for humans.”

The laugh went sharper. “Humans, as opposed to teachers?”

“Humans as opposed to, you know, people who are paid to listen?”

Mr. Grau smiled to himself. He folded his hands in front of his face and said with theatrical neutrality, “By all means, go and find your humans.” Neither blessing nor curse. Just: Go see.

Da was more confused than I’d ever seen him. He kept shaking his head, waiting for reality to clear itself up. Then the disappointment set in. “If you want to stay in this apartment after graduating, then you must look for work.” Jonah had no idea what such a thing might mean. He typed up a ridiculous résumé and peddled it to a few low-skill employers—midtown department stores, uptown restaurants, even Columbia Operations and Maintenance. He managed to list just enough of his cultural attainments to sabotage any interest.

He decided to go out for auditions. But no ordinary tryout would do. He combed the music trade press, hunting down the perfect coming-out opportunity. He found a contest tailor-made to showcase him. He came to me with the listing. “This is the one we’re doing, Mule.”

He held the paper under my nose. America’s Next Voices: a national competition for singers with no prior professional recognition. The thing carried a jewel of a prize. Trying for it seemed reasonable enough. The first round was months away, just before I was slated to do my own senior recital.

“I’m with you, brother. Just let me know when you want to get started.”

“When? No time like now.”

Then I knew what plans he had for me. “Jonah.” I put my palms out to slow him. “My lessons. My recital.” My degree. My life.

“Come on, Mule. We’ve already worked up the whole program, for my recital. You’re the only player who knows me, who can read my mind.”

“Who’s going to coach us?”

Jonah got that manic twinkle he usually saved for the stage. “No coach. You’re going to be my coach, Joey. Who else is going to do that blood-brother thing? Who else can I depend on to be absolutely merciless? Think of the stakes. If we come from nowhere and walk away with this?”

“Jonah. I have to graduate.”

“Jesus. What do you take me for? I’m not going to thwart your education, for Christ’s sake. You’re a growing boy.”

I never did graduate. But I suppose, technically, Jonah never thwarted my education.

He told Da we needed a place to rehearse. “What’s wrong with here? It’s just your sister and me. We know all about you.”

“Exactly, Da.”

“What’s wrong with your home? Home is where you always made your music, since you were little.”

“We’re not little anymore, Da.” Da looked at me as if I’d changed sides.

Jonah outdid me. “This isn’t home, Da.” Home had burned.

“Why don’t you rehearse at school?”

Jonah hadn’t told Da the details of his break with Juilliard. “We need privacy, Da. We have to nail this contest.”

“This is just another audition, my boys. You’ve taken these before.”

But it wasn’t just an audition. It was our entry into the deadly horse race of professional music. Jonah didn’t mean merely to enter this contest. He meant to walk away with it.

Da understood nothing, except what Jonah said he needed. He sat us down at the kitchen table after Ruth went to bed. “A little money came to us when your mother…” He showed us some papers. Jonah made some pretense of decoding them. “This is not a fortune I’m speaking about. But enough to start you. This is what your mother would want, what she always believed for you. But you must know: When this sum is gone, no more comes along after it. You must be sure you’re doing what you need with it.”

Certainty was always Jonah’s vice of choice. He found a studio ten blocks from our apartment, on the edge of Harlem. At considerable expense, he rented a piano and had it moved in. It suited me: The room sat just a few blocks from where I’d seen the woman I was going to spend my future with. During our breaks, I could go stand on the corner where she’d disappeared and wait for her to materialize again.

Not that Jonah planned many breaks. He figured that once we set up the space, we’d pretty much camp out there. He picked up a half-sized refrigerator and a couple of old Boy Scout sleeping bags secondhand from some real boys. He planned to work straight through until the first rounds of the competition, that fall.

I had my own lessons, with Mr. Bateman. To Jonah, my continuing to study with the same teacher proved I wasn’t learning anything. It came down to a choice: Jonah or school. Mr. Bateman was the best teacher I’d ever have. But Jonah was my brother, and the greatest musical talent I had any chance of working with. If he couldn’t bring Mama back alive, what hope had I?

I applied for a leave of absence. I told Mr. Bateman it was a family emergency. He signed off without any question. Wilson Hart was the only one I leveled with. My friend just shook his head at the plan. “He know what sacrifice he’s asking you to make?”

“I think he sees it as an opportunity.”

It took all the man’s judgment not to judge me, not to say what he should have. “More like a gamble, far as I can see.”

Worse than a gamble. But so was singing. Will and I both knew one thing: With this much riding on one throw of the die, I wouldn’t be coming back to school, whatever the outcome.

“You listen here, Mix. Most men?” Wilson Hart reached out and cupped my chin. I let him raise my head. His fingers grazed my Adam’s apple. I wondered whether a blind person could tell race by touch.

“Most men would kill for a brother like you.”

He made me sit and play, while I was still in the neighborhood. Who knew when I’d be back through?

We played through a four-hands version of the chamber fantasy he was working on, an eerily consonant, sepia-toned piece full of tunes I should have recognized but didn’t. Jonah would have called the piece reactionary. But Jonah didn’t have to know.

This time, Will gave me the upper lines. I watched my friend’s face during the rests. We broke off where the piece did, at the introduction of a surprise new theme, a broad-willed subject that wasn’t exactly

“Motherless Child” but might have descended from it, somewhere down the orphaned generations. The song broke away under our fingers, unfinished. We hung in space over the keys, listening, after the fact, to all the things it had sounded like while we were too engaged to hear.

After a silence as noisy as any, I started playing again. I revived the first theme from his exposition. I made a point of refusing the page. After the motive unfolded, I couldn’t have used the page if I’d tried.

Will Hart’s tune went down my arm, through my wrist, into my hand, and out my fingertips. Then it took off, with me just within earshot behind it. I heard a sharp intake of breath beside me on the piano bench as I did a number on his number. Then that breath came out a deep bass laugh, one that traveled down Will’s own fingers to freedom. Will ran alongside and hopped on the freight I’d hijacked, shaking his head in amazement at discovering where I’d been spending my weekends.

His surprise subsided, and we flew along side by side. We commenced poking our souls into time signatures the tune on the page had been too shy to try out. Will howled at the change I showed since our last outing. He wanted to stop and razz me, but our hands wouldn’t let him. I dangled dares in front of him, calls whose responses he couldn’t help but pick up and flip back at me. He tested me, too, drawing me deeper into the shade of each idea I launched. Where I couldn’t equal his inventions, I at least embroidered them with curls of counterpoint ripped off from my études, handfuls of bloom to fit the vase he handed me.