Richard Powers (53 page)

“Good thing. If you have to mention the accompaniment, there’s something wrong.”

“Mule! I owe you so much. I wouldn’t even have been out there if…” He considered the thought and didn’t complete it. “How can I repay you? What do you want? My Red Ball Jets? My old seventy-eights? All yours. Everything.”

“How about you get dressed and buy me breakfast. Okay, make it lunch.”

He crawled out of bed, doffed the robe, and padded around the uncurtained room, showing off his welterweight body to every passerby. As he threw on briefs, chinos, and a golf shirt, he asked, “How come Ruth wasn’t there?”

“Jonah. I don’t know. Why don’t you call her?”

He shook his head. Didn’t think he should have to. Didn’t want to know. Couldn’t afford the answer. He sat back down on the unmade bed. “Dark purity: C’est moi. Only question is: Who’s going to be the white Jonah Strom?”

“Put your shoes on. Let’s go.”

He never got his shoes on, and we never went. While he was puttering, the phone started to ring. The Times was detonating in a million kitchens, reaching every acquaintance we’d ever made. Jonah fielded the first thrilled congratulations. The second wave rolled in as soon as he hung up. The third call came before he could recross the room. It was Mr. Weisman. He’d received a recording offer. The Harmondial label wanted our recital pressed into vinyl, exactly as we’d performed it.

Jonah called out the details to me as Mr. Weisman gave them. My brother hooted at the invitation, ready to sign and do the recording that afternoon. Mr. Weisman advised against it. He suggested that we do two more years of concertizing, make a few high-profile appearances, then try for a longer-term arrangement with a better recording company. He mentioned RCA Victor as within the realm of possibility. That slowed Jonah for a moment.

But Jonah was zooming away from earth at speeds old Mr. Weisman couldn’t gauge. He was set on jumping into other people’s futures, and recording gave him the chance. To turn the moment permanent, spread the dying now out lengthwise into forever: Jonah didn’t care who was offering. Harmondial was a young, small company, two strikes against it in Mr. Weisman’s book, but a selling point for my brother.

He and they could break into the game together. At twenty-four, Jonah was still immortal. He could crash and resurrect as often as he liked, drawing on endless time and talent.

“You only start once,” Mr. Weisman kept saying. But Jonah could make no sense of the warning.

Harmondial’s bid went beyond anything Jonah imagined. None of Mr. Weisman’s objections could change Jonah’s sense that the offer had no downside. It was a giveaway, a lottery prize that cost him nothing to try.

We flew to Los Angeles to record. Harmondial used their California studio mostly for their catalog of pop and light classics. Jonah said it would give him exactly the presence he wanted. We flew out at the beginning of August, two kings in coach, giggling like criminals all the way across the continent.

We crossed L.A. in a waking daze, driving around Hollywood and Westwood in a rented Ford Mustang. Kids were everywhere, glued to their transistors as if to news of an alien invasion. The invasion, in fact, was already in its advanced stages. We’d missed the signs, back east in our barnstorming. Now we cruised down Ventura, paralyzed latecomers to an epidemic. The sound was everywhere, past our ability to take in.

“Jesus, Joey! It’s worse than cholera. Worse than communism. The absolute triumph of the three-chord song!” Jonah trolled the car radio dial for the same tunes we could hear beating from every corner, in a hurry to sample the thrill so long kept at bay. Some of the songs were venturing far beyond tonic, subdominant, and dominant. Those songs were the ones that scared him. Those were the ones he couldn’t get enough of.

He made me drive, piloting me around town to the hits of 1965. Stop! In the name of love. Turn! Turn!

Turn! Over and Over! And when he got us completely lost: Help! I need somebody. Help! By the time we found the studio for the first session, Jonah was riffing on tunes he’d absorbed on a single hearing. All we need is music, sweet music. In Chicago. New Orleans. New York City. They’re dancin’ in the streets. The sound engineers heard him and went nuts. They made him do level checks by singing My baby don’t care in every cranny of his register, from up above countertenor to down below baritone.

“What the hell are you doing singing Schubert?” one of them asked. “With power like that, you could be making real dough.”

Jonah didn’t tell them the twelve-hundred-dollar Harmondial advance felt like a small fortune. And nobody pointed out the problem: he made the Supremes’ “I Hear a Symphony” sound, well, symphonic: a one-off novelty act, my brother, the one-hit wonder of precision-pitched, breath-supported R & B

lieder, the single-handed Motown Mo-tet.

We stuck to Schubert, and by the fourth take, the sound engineers changed their tune. In Jonah’s throat, all these dead tunes were once again someone’s popular song. Something in his voice on those tracks insists, We are still young. Something in that near hour of songs, recorded over the course of days, says the centuries are just passing tones on their way back home.

I can hear it on the record, still. My mother’s voice is there inside his, but my father’s is, too. There is no starting point. We trace back forever, accident on accident, through every country taken from us. But we end everywhere, always. Stand still and gaze: This is the message in that sound, rushing backward from the finish line it has reached.

When he heard his first takes, my brother couldn’t stop snickering. “Listen to that! It’s just like a real record. Let’s do it again. Forever.”

Jonah could hear things on the tape the engineers couldn’t. We spent two increasingly tense days battling between cost and inaudible perfection. The producers would be knocked out by the first several takes, each of which left Jonah wincing. They told us about how they could splice in a measure to fix a lapse.

Jonah was outraged. “That’s like pasting eagle feathers on your average slob and calling him an angel.”

Jonah learned to seduce the microphone and compensate for its brutalities. Under the pressure of compromise, our takes took on the edge of live performance. In the baffled, soundproofed room, Jonah grew incandescent. He sang, posting his voice forward to people hundreds of years from now.

The third night, after we got the Wolf within a few vibrations of how it sounded in his mind, we sat down with the Harmondial publicist. The girl was fresh from summer camp. “I’m so glad you two are brothers!”

I flopped around like a fish on the dock. Jonah said, “We are, too.”

“The brothers thing is good. People like brothers.” I thought she might ask, Have you always been brothers? How did you come to be brothers? She asked, instead, “How did you get interested in classical music?”

We went mute. How did you learn how to breathe? It hit me. The story this girl already imagined would go into press releases and liner notes, unhindered by any data we gave her. Even if we told her about our evenings of family singing, she wouldn’t hear. Jonah left it to me to create some facsimile. “Our parents discovered our musical ability when we were young. They sent us to a private music school up in Boston.”

“Private school?” The fact flustered our publicist.

“A preconservatory boarding school. Yes.”

“Did you…get scholarships?”

“Partial ones,” Jonah said. “We washed dishes and made beds to pay the rest of our way. Everyone was very generous toward us.” I snorted. Jonah shot me an offended look, and the poor girl was lost.

“Was the music you learned at school…a lot different from the music you grew up on?”

Jonah couldn’t help himself. “Well, the tempi dragged at Boylston sometimes. It wasn’t the school’s fault.

Some of those kids were coming from musically backward homes. Things got a little better once we were at Juilliard.”

She scribbled into a canary yellow legal pad. We could have told her anything, and Jonah pretty much did. “Did you have any role models? I mean, as far as singing…classical music?”

“Paul Robeson,” Jonah answered. The girl scribbled the name. “Not for his voice so much. His voice was…okay, I guess. We liked his politics.”

She seemed surprised to hear that a famous singer could have politics. Mr. Weisman was right. This wasn’t RCA Victor. You only start once. I watched Jonah’s answers drop into the permanent record, where they would last as long as the sounds we’d just laid down.

The girl asked for publicity photos. We gave her the portfolio, complete with clippings. “So many reviews!” She picked the photo I knew she would, the one emphasizing the novelty that Harmondial had just bought. Something to distinguish their catalog from all the other burgeoning record labels: a brother act, black but comely. She looked for just the right pose of comfort and assurance, the one that said, Not all Negroes want to trash everything you stand for. Some of them even serve as culture’s willing foot soldiers.

In the car, heading to the hotel, Jonah sang, “I wish they all could be California girls.”

“God only knows what she wishes we were.” We both knew, now, just which sentence in the Times had sealed this offer. The upstart record label wanted this up-and-coming Negro voice, the next untapped niche. Civil rights meant ever larger, integrated markets. The same thinking had just led Billboard to combine their R & B list with their rock and roll. Everyone would finally sing and listen to everything, and Harmondial would capitalize on the massive crossover.

We finished recording on a Wednesday night, two days later. The producer wanted Dowland to be the record’s last track. I picked the studio’s backup piano, a rare combination of covered sound and stiff action that helped me fake the frets of a lute. Today, you’d never get away with piano anymore. A third of a century ago, authenticity was still anything you made it. Time stands still. But never the same way for long.

Jonah’s first take felt flawless. But the engineer working the board was so entranced with his first-time taste of timelessness that he failed to see his meters clipping. Take two was leaden, Jonah’s revenge for the first’s destruction. The next five takes went belly-up. We’d reached the end of a difficult week. He asked for ten minutes. I stood up to take a walk down the hallway outside the recording booth, to give my brother a moment alone.

“Joey,” he called. “Don’t leave me.” Like I was abandoning him to oblivion. He wanted me to sit but not say anything. He’d fallen into a panic at sending a message out beyond his own death. We sat in silence for five minutes, and five stretched to ten: the last year that we lived in that would leave us still for so long.

The engineers returned, chattering about the recent Gemini flight. I sat down, Jonah opened his mouth, and out came the sound that predicted everything that would still happen to him.

“Time stands still with gazing on her face.” As my brother sang, a few minutes’ drive from the studio, a white motorcycle policeman stopped a black driver—a man our sister’s age—and made him take a sobriety test. Avalon and 116th: a neighborhood of single-story houses and two-story apartment blocks.

The night was hot, and the residents sat outdoors. While Jonah put stillness’s finish on that opening mi, re, do , a crowd gathered around the arrest. Fifty milling spectators swelled to three hundred as the policeman’s backup appeared on the scene.

The young man’s mother arrived and started scolding her son. The crowd, the police, the man, his mother, his brother all closed on one another. More police, more pull, the crowd restive with history, and the night turning warm. There was a scuffle, the simplest kind of beginning. A club in the face that lands in the face of everyone looking on.

The crowd grew to a thousand, and the police radioed for more help. This was around 7:30, as we were listening to the tape: “Stand still and gaze for minutes, hours, and years to her give place.” The producer was crying and cursing Jonah for laughing at him.

Over on Avalon, all music stopped. Someone spit on the officers as they hauled the man, his mother, and his brother off to jail. Two patrolmen waded into the crowd, guns in the air, to arrest this next wave of offenders. By 7:40, as Jonah and I stood on the hot sidewalk in front of the studio, the police were pulling away under a hail of stones.

We chanced onto the news on the car radio as we left the studio. Reports of the gathering riot broke into the Top 40 countdown. Jonah looked at me, connecting. “Let’s have a look.”

“A look? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Come on. From a distance. It’s over by now anyway.” I was driving. Something in him made me. He pointed me south, navigating by a combination of news report and acute hearing. He got us on South Broadway, then over onto eastbound Imperial Highway. He made me pull over and then got out. He stood there on the pavement, just listening. “Joey. You hear that?” I heard only traffic, the usual background of shouts and sirens, routine urban insanity. But my brother heard whole bands of the spectrum I couldn’t, just as all week long he’d heard sounds on our tapes hidden to the rest of us. “

Listen!Are you deaf?”

He packed us back in the car and steered us northeast. We hooked right, where madness materialized in front of us. Crowds of people lined the streets of the tinderbox neighborhood, just waiting for the match.

We crept another block east. I pulled over and checked the map, as if the outbreak might be marked there. The Mustang was a death trap, as stupid a car as we could have chosen to drive. Straight through our windshield, down the street, a mass condensed, drifting from block to block, stopping cars by force and stoning them, the only alternative to justice. The streets were the same as most in L.A.—white-walled arroyos of small one-family dwellings. Only, down this one, a creature lumbered out of some filmic dream. The laws of physics bent the air around us. It was like watching a flock of starlings twist and blot the sun. Like watching a funnel cloud dissolve the house across the way.

The crowd hit a pebble in its path and veered. Jonah was hypnotized by the movement, thrilled. They were going after any moving cars, pelting them with stones. At any minute, they’d smell the last notes of Dowland still clinging to us, and charge. I should have turned the car around and fled. But this drifting, methodical mob was so far beyond the rules of ordinary life that I sat paralyzed, waiting to see what happened. The crowd was like stirred bees. They surged and attacked a police outpost. The officers broke and scattered from the advance. No one gave orders, but the mass moved as if under single command. The forward edge swung west, toward us. I came out of my spell and turned the car around hard, cutting across the bewildered trickle of traffic.