Richard Powers (52 page)

In his inner ear, Jonah heard the watchman call so slowly, it sounded like a bell buoy in the night. At his tempo, those four pitches topping the opening triad turned into the universe’s background radiation. Most listeners never know how much harder it is to make a soft sound than a loud one. The breakneck tear will always upstage the legato sustain, but the latter is harder to pull off. Slowed to stopping, Bach’s huge, expanding hover held more terror for me than any other piece in our concert. Jonah wanted my prelude to unfold so gradually that the audience would forget about his chorale lines until his next shocking entrance. We passed our parts back and forth, swapping figure and ground. His nine stark phrases flowed over my intervening elaborations like ice sheets across a forgotten continent.

From glacial Bach, we jumped off into our trio of Charles Ives show-stealers. We did them in flat-out New World roughness. He turned the last, “Majority,” into a hooting lark. By the time the audience rolled back off their heels, they were too deep into raucous Americana to be alienated. Jonah pegged the persona of the pieces so perfectly, we actually drew laughs and whistles as we pulled up at the end of the bygone parade.

Then we sprinted to the finish and sent them home humming. He wanted to do a crossover, partly to show he could and partly to do at least one number we’d never done in public. “Good for our moral character. Gotta keep you fresh, Giuseppe.” The two of us arranged “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” sprinkling it with all the crazed quotations we could remember our parents singing as counterpoint to the hackneyed song. Our gimmick was a steady accelerando, slow enough to seem wayward at first, but winding up, by the last verse, with Jonah riding through the syncopations so fast, he wrapped his lips around the syllables only by miracle. Out of pure nervousness, I goosed it even more than we meant to. But Jonah shot me a dazed smile of thanks during the applause.

We closed with “Balm in Gilead.” The audience wanted him to finish with some aerial tenor feat, strange, difficult, and dazzling. He gave them the simplest tune he’d ever sing, pitched smack in the fattest part of his range. The choice mystified me. Mama had sung the song when we were young, but no more often than she sang a million others. Only at the concert did I figure it out. He’d picked the song for Ruth. But Ruth wasn’t there. Da was front and center, next to the patient Mrs. Samuels. Ruth’s seat next to them was empty, and only I knew how much her absence rattled him. “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.” He sang tentatively, testing to see if it were still true. By verse two, the verdict seemed a toss-up. He ended in a place beyond judgment, his singing itself the only thing close to a proof of that promise.

The softest possible ending, the simplest kind of start. The house erupted before my last chord died away. We hadn’t planned an encore; Jonah refused to tempt fate. So it wasn’t until the applause died down and we were alone on the brutal stage that Jonah whispered, “Dowland?” I nodded without registering. Thank God he also chose to announce the choice to the house, so I could hear. And time stood still again, as it did each time my brother said so.

Without doubt, Jonah’s was one of the strangest New York debuts ever. I’d have called it courageous had I thought he knew what he was risking. He simply picked what he liked to sing.

I saw Lisette Soer in the back of the hall as we took our bows. It’s impossible to make out faces when the lights are trained on yours. But it was her. She wasn’t applauding. She was holding one hand over her mouth and with the other, on her breast, flashing an awed victory. If Jonah saw her, he made no sign.

Backstage was giddy. I’d stumbled into a documentary film about myself. Every year of our lives was present in cross section. At one point, I stood pumping the hand of a stranger who praised me at length before I registered him as Mr. Bateman, my longtime piano teacher at Juilliard. Jonah did worse: A middle-aged woman cornered him, repeating, “You don’t know who I am, do you? You don’t recognize me!” Jonah stalled, wagging and grinning, until the woman started to warble. Her shot voice hinted at a vanished glory, ruined by nothing but accumulated days. She burbled up the line “Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten.” We rush with faint but earnest footsteps. Jonah still didn’t remember the name Lois Helmer, even as her voice’s imprint came rushing back to him. He remembered that first public performance but couldn’t remember the boy who had sung it. The joy, the trust, the total ignorance: Nothing visible remained, from this distance. All he had left were the lines of that great duet.

So the two of them stood and sang through the first four entrances from memory, under the noise of the buzzing, embarrassed crowd, one voice headed toward gravel, the other sailing past the furthest point that the first had reached in her prime.

A thin man with sparse but luxurious goatee wandered around on the edges of the gathering, standing out among the sea of dark suits in his tight black jeans and a headache-inducing green-and-blue paisley shirt.

In a lull, he crossed the room toward me, smirking behind the facial hair. “Strom Two. What’s on, brother?”

“My God. Thad West!” He felt like some supporting opera buffa figure squirreling off the stage to greet me in my aisle seat. I clutched him by his elbows, which hung cool and loose. “Jesus, Thad. What the hell are you doing here?”

“Had to come hear you cats play. You two stomped. Have to tell you. Really stomped.”

“Where are you living?”

“You know. Here and there. Mount Morris Park.”

It flashed through me: He meant in it. “You’re living in New York? And you’ve never… What are you doing with yourself?”

“Oh. Making music. What else?”

“Really? What are you playing?”

He laid some names on me I’d never heard. He mentioned some clubs, gave me addresses. I didn’t know how to respond. I stood staring at my old childhood roommate. Adulthood sat on me like a toad.

“We’ll come listen soon.” In some other, better-executed life.

“That’s right. Come soon. We’ll blow you something cool.”

“Has Jonah seen you yet? Does he know you’re here?” I looked around the room and spotted him, surrounded by old Juilliard classmates already working him.

“I’ll catch up to the master when he’s not so mobbed.” He didn’t say it cruelly, but I was getting my lie back. Thad still loved my brother. But plainly, he no longer cared for him.

I felt myself grinning too much. “So where the hell is Earl when we need him?”

“Earl’s in Nam, man.”

“ Vietnam?”

“No, man. The other one.”

I couldn’t grasp it. Earl the irreverent, the invincible, caught up in something so stupidly real. “They drafted him?”

“Oh, no. Earl enlisted. Wanted to see the world. He’s seeing it now, I guess.”

The joy of smacking facefirst into my own past ground to a standstill. “Thad, Thad, Thad. I’m going to come hear what you’ve got going.”

He smiled, unfooled. Then, from nowhere, he said, “You remember that thing they painted on our door?

The red fingernail polish?” Buried in childhood, and yet the drawing was still there, after a decade, defacing the door we shared. “Remember? Nigel .” I didn’t even have to nod my head. “That your first time, for something like that?”

I shrugged and flipped my palms. Every time’s the first. It was still a thrill to him, that anonymous assault.

A badge of honor. Downtrodden by association. Thad didn’t have a clue. He didn’t want the everyday human idiocy. He wanted some darker, more soulful suffering, some grand affliction to redeem his fatuous Ohio past. Now he had that, living in Mount Morris Park, blowing cool, scraping by. The only thing was, he could have his fill and walk away anytime.

Thad gestured around the room at all the old folks in suits. He shook his head. “Look at you, Strom Two. What the fuck, huh? What would Nigel say?”

I looked down at the shine of my Italian shoes. I wanted him to be proud of me. He wanted me to be my color. He, too, wanted me to leave Town Hall to its owners.

“Do me a favor, Strom Two?” He looked around the room, smiling through the side of his mouth. “Keep this scene hopping, will you? Shit’s dying on the vine.”

“Hopping.”

“That’s right.” Thad slapped my proffered hand and vanished.

Jonah and I made it home after 3:00A .M., worthless and still wired. There was nothing left to do but try to sleep and hope there’d be a newspaper notice. Not even necessarily a good one. Just some acknowledgment that something had taken place. Jonah might have sung the stars down from heaven, but if the house critic had been suffering from reflux, the lifeline unrolling in front of us would have unraveled.

My job that next day was to venture outside and buy every newspaper I could find. Jonah’s was to lie in bed and come up with how we were supposed to make a living now. He kept returning to the idea of night watchmen.

He was still planning when I threw the crumpled-up Times on top of his prostrate form. “ Wachet auf, you bastard. Arts section, page four. Howard Silverman.”

“Silverman?” He sounded frightened. No , he’d claim later. Only groggy. He tore through the pages and found the short review. “‘A near-perfect voice, and Mr. Strom’s ‘near’ is no cause for regret.’” He looked at me over the newsprint. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I think it’s supposed to be positive.”

It sounded, in fact, as if the man were writing with an eye toward the blurb on Jonah’s first recording.

“‘While wrapped in consummate technique, this young man’s sound has something deeper and more useful in it than mere perfection.’” Jonah’s eyes glinted with total larceny. “Holy shit.”

“Keep reading. It gets better.”

Silverman went on to note our buckshot programming, calling the second half “a breath of New World fresh air, and a convincing rejection of today’s too-predictable approach to the art song.” He threw in the obligatory cavils—something about occasional eccentric phrasing, something about losing a little velvet in the fast passages. The core reservation came just before the end. According to Silverman, the youthful magic needed more real-world run-ins, more headfirst tangles with experience to ripen into full emotional complexity. “‘Mr. Strom is young, and his slightly callow loveliness wants maturing. Lovers of voice will wait eagerly to see if the freshness of this remarkable sonority can survive the deepening of years.’”

Then Jonah hit the windup. “‘That said, Mr. Strom’s painterly highlights, his crisp articulation, and his brilliant, if dark, purity already stand up well alongside the best of contemporary European lieder singers his age. Predictions are always risky, but it is not difficult to imagine Mr. Strom becoming one of the finest Negro recitalists this country has ever produced.’”

Jonah dropped the pages to the bed.

“Let it go,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter. The rest of the article is a total love letter. He’s handed you a career on a platter!”

He tried to wrap his head around the generous insult: “Predictions are always risky.” He worked each word, turning the promise of the phrase into menace. My brother had never tried to pass, but it staggered him to discover that he couldn’t. I braced for Jonah’s contempt, knowing it would spill over in my direction.

But he was lost to contempt, working on that word, that one fat adjective hanging there in the paper of record, describing something, something as real as lyric , or spinto , or tenor . He was balancing the slap-down qualification against finest ever . Finest this country has ever produced. He wavered between tenses, feeling, for the first time, what it meant to kick open doors that kept closing, no matter how many legends had already passed through. Feeling what it meant to be driven out of the self-made self, forced to be an emblem, a giver of pride, a betrayer of the cause. Feeling what it meant to be a fixed category, no matter how he sung.

“Da and Mama should have named me Heinrich.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference.”

He’d been “niggered” before, more brutally. But not from a major music critic in the country’s leading paper. He lay in bed in his red-and-green-plaid bathrobe, covered in newspaper, shaking his head. Then perplexity turned to rage. “Of all the condescending… Who does this bastard think—”

“Jonah! The thing is a triumph. Howard Silverman’s talking you up in the New York Times .”

He stopped, surprised by my force. He went back to staring up at the ceiling, at all the people who’d never get through even that separately labeled door. He saw our mother coming home from her conservatory audition. The finest recitalist he’d ever know. He rolled his head through a weary arc. He looked at me, doing that performer’s trick with his hazel eyes. They don’t get close enough to check your eye color when they come to burn down your house. “You’re one of those big-smile, Satchmo gradualists, aren’t you?”

“You’re the one who wanted to close with the damn spiritual.”

There was an awful pause while we searched for the tempo. He could have killed me by saying nothing.

For a long time, he did. When he spoke, it was with full Dowland flourish. “Don’t argue with me, human.

I’m one of the finest Negro recitalists this country will ever produce.”

“‘Has ever produced.’ Big difference. Ask your father.” We both resorted to jittery giggles. “Finish the article. The condescending bastard saved you a big finale.”

Jonah worked through the last sentences aloud with his studied diction. “‘If this exciting young tenor has a limit, it is perhaps only that of size. All the other fundamentals are in place, and his every note rings with exhilarating freedom.’”

Exactly the kind of hedged praise critics loved to deal in. Who knew what it was supposed to mean? It was more than enough to launch a career with.

“I’m the Negro Aksel Schiotz. I’m going to be the Negro Fischer-Dieskau.”

“Fischer-Dieskau’s a baritone.”

“That’s okay. I’m liberal. Some of my best friends are baritones.”

“But would you want your sister to marry one?”

Jonah appraised me. “Know who you are? You’re the Negro Franz Rupp.” He swiped up the article and poured through it again. “Hey. He doesn’t even mention the accompaniment.”