Richard Powers (40 page)

But Nettie Ellen is standing in front of the stove, as she was before dinner, when Charlie drove her to tears. Now her face is dry. She holds a towel, although the dishes are done. She looks down into a space in front of her, one that Delia, too, can see. She seems not to hear her daughter enter. When she speaks, it’s to the pit in front of her. “You two seem strong together. Like nobody can hurt you. Like you already lived through a bunch more days than you have.”

Her mother has stumbled onto her incredible truth. The man’s alien notions, his curved space and slow-running time, that Easter afternoon on the Mall have somehow given them time enough to find each other. The bird can love the fish for no other reason than their shared bewilderment, turning in the blue.

“That’s the crazy thing, Mama. That’s what I can’t figure out. More days than we…”

“That’s good,” Nettie says, wheeling around to face the sink. “You’re gonna need all the preparation time you can get.”

If she means it as a reprimand, it still can’t match the pain Delia has already sown. She wants to hug her mother for this blessing, however backhanded. But the blessing has damaged them both enough already.

Her mother looks up, fixing Delia’s eye. From ten years away and another city, the daughter is saying, She’s so small. Thin as a bar of soap at the end of the wash week. “You know what the Bible says.”

Nettie Ellen works her mouth to citation. “You know…” But nothing more comes from her moving lips than a whole “cleave” and half an “unto.”

Not for the last time, they trade things too hard for speaking. Delia takes the idle dish towel from her mother’s hands and returns it to the rack. She turns her mother’s shoulders, and together they head out front to reclaim the male strangeness assigned to them. They don’t link arms as they might have, once.

But still, they walk together. Delia makes no effort to prepare her mother, for that would insult them all.

All must watch the others fly past, each to his own clock.

They find the men turning from contest to outright pact. William and David hunch toward each other, hands on knees, like they’re pitching pennies out in the alley. They’ve formed an alliance in the face of the universe’s fundamental law. Neither looks up as the women enter. The doctor of medicine still scowls, but a scowl wrestling with the angel of insight. “So you’re saying that my now happens before your now?”

“I am saying that the whole idea of ‘now’ cannot travel from my frame of reference to yours. We cannot talk of ‘instantaneous.’”

Nettie shoots her girl a frightened look: Is the man speaking English? Delia just shrugs: the vast futility of the male race. She settles down into that time-crafted dismissal, one that rejoins her to her head-shaking mother while all the while drawing her closer to her betrothed-to-be.

“In case you gentlemen have failed to notice, it’s getting late.” Nettie Ellen shakes her finger at the window, the undeniable outside. Telling time by darkness: nothing to it.

“This is what you call our legendary hospitality.” William winks at David.

Strom scrambles to his feet. “I must go!”

Nettie Ellen throws up her hands. “Now that’s just the opposite of what I’m telling you. I’m saying, You sure you want to be jumping on a train at this hour?”

Delia watches her mother struggle mightily to be spontaneous. The offer she’d make without thinking, in any world but this, crawls up in her throat and sticks. Nor is Delia wholly ready for her mother to extend it. To lodge the man under the same roof as her parents… She stands at attention, wincing. Her foreigner, too, waits politely, trying to brake from the speed of thought, to slow the moment enough to see what’s happening. The three hosts stand nodding at their guest, each waiting for the other to say, There’s a spare bed in the downstairs room.

They stand forever. Then forever stops. Michael and Charles burst into the room, too excited to speak.

The little one gets the words out first. “The Germans have invaded Poland. Tanks, planes—”

“It’s true,” Charles says. “It’s all over the radio.”

All eyes turn to the German in their midst. But his search out the woman who has brought him here. Delia sees it, faster than the light from his face can reach her: a fear that leaves him her dependent. Everything this man’s culture touches, it sets alight. His science and music struggle to take in this war they’ve let happen while away in their playful, free flights. And in a single blitzkrieg, all that the man has ever cared for burns.

She sees, in that flash, what this news means. And she never stops to question. His family is dead, his country unreachable. He has no people, no place, no home now but her. No other nation but their sovereign state of two.

My Brother as Otello

Carolina asks, “What exactly are you boys?” And our answer drops on us, overnight: America’s Next Voice. Not current; just next. Not fame, exactly, but never again the freedom of obscurity.

We don’t get out of Durham without a deck of business cards, people who want us to call them. Ruth says, “So look at my brothers. Does this mean the two of you are big-time?” Jonah ignores the question.

But her words are the most professional pressure I’ll ever feel.

Jonah’s in the catbird seat: People in big cities all across the country ask him to come sing, sometimes even offering to pay enough to cover expenses. All at once, he has a future to decide. But first, he must find a new teacher. He’s thumbed his nose at Juilliard, pulled off his parting snub by winning a nationwide competition against countless older and more experienced singers, all without any vocal coach. But even Jonah isn’t crazy enough to imagine he can move much further on his own. In his line, people keep studying until they die. And maybe even night school, after that.

His new prize credential gives him a shot at working with the town’s better tenors. He toys with the idea of Tucker, Baum, Peerce. But he rejects them all. As far as he’s concerned, his greatest asset is his tone, that pointed silver arrow. He’s afraid the famous males will turn him grotesque, wreck his growing sound.

He wants to stay clear, fast, light. He wants to try the recital route, honing his chops in various halls, returning to his deferred dream of opera when he figures out how to fatten up while keeping the purity intact.

He picks a woman teacher. He picks her for all sorts of reasons, not least her aggressive strawberry hair.

Her face is a boat’s prow, cutting through rough seas. Her skin is a curtain of light.

“Why not, Joey? I need a teacher who can give me what I don’t have yet.”

The thing he needs, the thing Lisette Soer can give him, is dramatic instruction. A lyric soprano sought after in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, she’s not yet in permanent orbit. But the rockets are firing. She’s just a few years younger than Mama was when she died. Just a dozen years older than Jonah.

If her voice can’t match the leading divas, she has begun to land those roles whose sexiness is usually confined to insistent program notes. She’s more an actress who can sing than a singer trying to act. She walks across a room like a statue turning flesh. Jonah comes back from his first lesson, raising his fists underhand to his eyes, growling with bliss. He finds, in his new redheaded trainer, the intensity he’s after.

Someone who can teach him all he needs to know about the stage.

Miss Soer approves her new student’s general plan. “Experience is all,” she tells him. “Go out and play every stage you can. East Lansing. Carbondale. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. All the places where culture is auctioned piecemeal on the spot market. Let them see you naked. Learn your grief and fear in situ, and what you don’t get under your belt on the road, your teacher will feed you upon your return.”

She tells him straight out: “Leave home.” He passes the command on to me, as if he’s invented it. You can’t expect to sing yourself forward while still rooming with your family. Can’t get to the future while living in the past. The arrow of growth points one merciless way.

She’d do away with me, too, I’m sure. But Lisette stops short of planting that idea in Jonah. Together, they decide I’m to leave with him, find a place where we can grow into our promise. Ruth sits in the kitchen, pulling her pigtails. “It’s stupid, Joey. Move downtown when you can live here free?” Da just nods, like we’ve deported him, and he’s seen it coming all along. “Is it because I bring my friends home sometimes?” Ruth asks. “Are you trying to get away from me?”

“How about our studio?” I ask Jonah. But it’s way too small to live in. “How about a larger unit in that building?”

“Bad location,” he says. “Everything’s happening in the Village.” And that’s where we find our new quarters. The Village is pure theater, the greatest practice in what Madame Soer, in her favorite refrain, calls “living at maximum need.”

Maximum need is Lisette’s most teachable skill. She keeps it deep in her body. Her voice is a beam that cuts through the thickest orchestral fog. But voice alone can’t account for her success. The dancer’s body doesn’t hurt. She oozes anticipation, even in trouser roles, her blazing hair balled up under a powdered peruke, charged, prehensile, ambiguous. Her most casual stroll across the set is satin hypnosis. Even her fidgets are a leopard’s. This is what she means to give my brother: a tension to gird up his muscle-free tone.

At Jonah’s third lesson, she walks out on him. He’s left perched over the black music stand, trying to guess his sin. He waits for twenty minutes, but she never returns. He comes back to our new one-bedroom down on Bleecker in a cloud of wronged innocence. All weekend long, it’s my job to tell him, “It’s just a misunderstanding. Maybe she’s ill.” Jonah lies in bed, tensing his abdomen. He’s deeper inside the shock of his body than I’ve ever seen him.

Lisette floats into the next lesson, beatific. She crosses the room and kisses him on the forehead, in neither forgiveness nor apology. Just life in its inexplicable fullness, and “Can we take the Gounod from your second entrance, please?” He lies in bed that night in another riot of feeling, working his muscles in long-unexercised directions.

Singing, Soer tells him, is no more than pulling the right strings at the right time. But acting —that’s participating in the single, continuous, million-year catastrophe of the human race. Say, for argument, that the gods have conspired against you. There you are, alone, front and center, on the bare stage, in front of five hundred concertgoers who dare you to prove something to them. Hitting the notes is nothing. Holding a high, clear C for four measures can only go so far toward changing anyone’s weltanschauung. “Go where the grief is real,” she tells him. Her right hand claws at her collarbone in remembered horror. Is there a place yet, in your young life, where you’ve known it?

He knows the place already, its permanent address. Better than she can know. He has spent years trying to escape every memory of it. But now, under Lisette, he learns to revisit it at will, to turn the fire against itself and fashion it into its only answer. Under the woman’s fingers, his voice lays itself open. She readies him for the Naumburg, for Paris, for whatever awards he might care to shoot for.

She introduces us to the agent Milton Weisman, an old-school impresario who signed his first talent before the First World War and who still works on, if only as the least offensive alternative to death. He demands to see us in his cluttered warren on Thirty-fourth. The eight-by-ten glossies Lisette takes of Jonah are not good enough; he wants to see us in the flesh. I’ve lived my whole life under the illusion that music is about sound. But Milton Weisman knows better. He needs a face-to-face before he can begin to book us.

Mr. Weisman is wearing a double-breasted pinstripe suit with shoulder pads, almost Prohibition era. He ushers us into the office, asking, “You boys want a root beer? Ginger ale?” Jonah and I wear black lightweight jackets and narrow ties that would seem conservative to anyone our age, but which, to Mr.

Weisman, brand us as beatniks or worse. Lisette Soer wears some diaphanous Diaghilev fantasy of Mogul India. One of her lovers, we think, is Herbert Gember, the hot costume designer at City Center, though the affair may be a mere convenience match. She’s one of those opera personalities who must dress down when they’re onstage.

We chat with Mr. Weisman about his client lists from the golden age. He’s worked with half a dozen front-rank tenors. Jonah wants to know about these men: what they ate, how much they slept, whether they talked at all the morning before a concert. He looks for a secret formula, that little extra leverage.

Mr. Weisman can vamp on the topic for as long as he has listeners. All I want to know is whether these famous men were kind, whether they cared for their families, whether they seemed happy. The words never come up.

While talking, Milton Weisman roams his decrepit office, fiddling with the blinds, edging around us from all angles. He rarely looks us in the face, but even his sidelong glances find their mark. The old booking agent gauges how we’ll look under the footlights, drawing up his map’s out-of-bounds lines: Chicago, sure . Louisville, perhaps . Memphis, no chance .

After half an hour, he shakes our hands and says he can find us work. This puzzles me; we already have offers coming in. But Lisette is ecstatic. All the way back downtown, she keeps pinching Jonah’s cheek.

“You know what this means? That man is a force. People listen to him.” She stops short of saying, He’ll make your career.

They send us on recital barnstorming tours. “Lieder,” Lisette insists, “is harder than opera. You must turn emotions loose upon your audience, with no props but sound. All your gestures take on handcuffs. As the words fill your throat, you must feel your body moving, even though it can’t. You must model the invisible movement, so your audience will see it.”

This is the incantation she sends us out with, and it works. Audiences in our off-circuit towns respond more like sports fans than the usual stiff-necked classical crowds. They come backstage. They want to know us, to tell us the tragedies that have wrecked their lives. The attention works on Jonah. I have to watch him more closely now as we play. Even in pieces we’ve drilled down into our marrow, he’s likely to lace passages with a surprise slight caesura or rubato, nothing the careful ear would register, unless I fail to be there with him.