Richard Powers (63 page)

Just fate. He and his so-called housekeeper—”

“Mrs. Samuels? What does Mrs. Samuels have—”

“The two of them, raising us like three sweet little white kids. See No Race, Hear No Race, Sing No Race. The whole, daily, humiliating, endless…” Her body started to shake. Robert Rider, her husband, rested his hand on her back, and she collapsed. She curled into his open hands. Robert just sat there, patiently petting her burst of uncoiling hair. I wanted to reach across the table and take her hand. But it was no longer my place to offer comfort.

“That was their answer, Ruth. Move the world forward. Shortcut into the future, in one generation. One jump—beyond tribes.”

“That’s not a place,” she hissed. “That’s not a future.” I waited for her to finish the thought. She already had.

“If Da thought for one minute that someone…” I wasn’t sure what I meant to say. “Whatever he told us or didn’t tell us about the fire, I’m sure he was just trying to honor her memory.”

Ruth put her palms out to stop my words. She’d had enough of me and my kind. She pulled away from her husband’s petting, ran her hands through her globe of hair, and blotted both eyes with a wadded napkin. When she took the napkin from her face, she was composed again. Ready for all the world’s work her parents had failed to tell her about. She grabbed her satchel and rose, speaking more to her wristwatch than to me. “You’ve got to give the man up, Joey.”

“The man? Give him up?”

“He’s done nothing but exploit you. From the beginning of time.”

“Da? Exploit me?”

“Not Da!” Her mouth twisted with agony. She wouldn’t say his name.

“Jonah?” I waved toward her satchel, the evidence. “Jonah doesn’t know anything about this. He can’t reject your theory if you never even—”

“Jonah,” she enunciated like a Met radio announcer, “doesn’t know much about anything beneath his perch.” Robert chuckled. I would have, too. Little Rootie had always been the perfect mimic.

“He’s doing what he can. What he does best in the world.”

“Being white, you mean?” She waved me off before I could counter. “You don’t have to defend him, Joey. Really, you don’t. So he’s got a secret. I ain’t gonna tell no one!”

“We could use a voice like that.” The way Robert said this made me guess: She’d slipped him into a concert. He’d heard his new brother-in-law sing, and the memory of that sound left even him a little ashen. “Whole world’s on fire. We could use everyone.”

“He’d end up using us,” Ruth said. She hated him. I couldn’t even admit it long enough to ask why.

“Well, brother?” She pulled out her wallet and rooted for some dollars. I wondered what she was doing for money. I didn’t even know what my new brother-in-law did for a living. “You’ve heard all the evidence. The facts of what really happened to us. Make your own choice.”

“Ruth. What choice ? You make this sound like some kind of cosmic showdown.” She tilted her head at me and lifted her eyebrows. “What choice am I supposed to make? I can play the piano, or I can help you save our people?”

“You can make a difference. Or not.”

“For God’s sake. You won’t even tell me where you’re living. You won’t even tell me what you’re involved in. Are you running guns or something? Bombing buildings?”

Robert’s massive hand came across the table and landed on my wrist. But softly, certain. Too graceful to frighten. He’d have made a magnificent cellist. “Look. Your sister and I have joined the Party.”

“The Party? The Communist party?”

Ruth chuckled. She pressed her palms into her cheeks. “Hopeless. The boy is hopeless.”

A Morse code smile flicked across Robert’s face. “Panthers.” He leaned forward. “We’re helping set up a New York chapter.”

Ruth was right. I was the white man’s nigger. Just the sound of the word scared me. I sat for a while, turning the name over in my head until it disintegrated. “Where’s the black leather jacket?”

“Left it at home.” Robert grinned, released my wrist, and waved outside. “I thought it was going to rain.”

Had she grown radical out of love, or fallen for the man out of politics? “You going to shoot at people?” I asked my little sister.

I meant it as a nervous joke. Ruth answered, “They’re shooting at us.” I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t even breathe without betraying some blood relation.

My sister saw my agony. She stiffened, ready to go to war. But her husband shifted between us, softening. “Land, bread, education, justice, and peace. That’s all we’re talking.”

“And the right to carry loaded weapons in public.”

Ruth laughed. “Joey! You’ve been reading the newspapers. White newspapers, of course. But still.”

Robert nodded. “We’re fighting that bill, yeah. We have to. Police want us empty-handed. Whites want us to be the only ones without arms. Then they can keep doing anything they damn please to us.” It sounded like madness to me. As terminally mad as the streets of Watts. And yet, aside from that one nightmare evening, I knew my life to be a far crazier, far more sheltered dream. “A man has a right to defend himself,” my brother-in-law was saying. “So long as the police go on killing us at will, I’m holding out for that right. They’ve got the choice: the Whited States of America or the Ignited States.”

His words were empty of theater. The sound died in the room’s background chatter. I saw what Ruth responded to in the man. I, too, needed his approval, and I didn’t even know him. Ruth pulled at her husband. “Come on, Robert. Joey’s busy. Too busy for the facts. Too busy for what’s coming.”

“Ruth!” I pressed my fists into my eyes. “You’ll kill me. What does any of this have to do with…?” I waved at her satchel.

“With how your mother died? I thought it might help you decide whose son you are. That’s all.”

My mammy’s own bairn.I spoke slowly, trying to find the beat. “My mother married my father. They raised us as they thought right. She died in a fire.” The fire didn’t kill her.

“Your mother died in what was more than likely an act of racial hatred. Every day, someone somewhere dies the way she did.”

“Your mother…” And I couldn’t anymore. Neither of us owned her. She was lost to us both. I looked at Ruth for a last moment. “Mama sang a mean Grieg.”

She didn’t reply. A look crossed her face. I saw it clearly, but I couldn’t read it. She threw too much money down on the table and the two of them left. I wanted to stand up and follow them, at least for a street or two. But I was stuck to the booth, worthless, without belief.

I didn’t tell Jonah I saw her. If he guessed, he never said as much. I never asked about his seeing her. I never even hinted at the meeting to Da. My loyalty to Ruth was greater than anything I owed either man, if only because I’d betrayed her so badly already. Each time I spoke to my father now, I saw a sheaf of photocopied police reports hidden away in his memory’s files. Did he know what they contained? Could he say what they meant? I couldn’t even form the questions in my head, let alone ask him. But Da sounded different to me now, filtered through all the things he’d never told me, whether they were his to tell me or not.

The year has become an operatic blur. Three astronauts burned alive on the launchpad. A South African surgeon put one man’s living heart in another man’s body. Israel ran through the assembled might of the Arab armies in six days, and even my anti-Zionist father feared something biblical in the lightning victory.

A play where a turn-of-the-century black boxer kissed his white wife onstage scandalized audiences worse than the real-life boxer had, half a century before. Tracy and Hepburn struggled with the prospect of a black son-in-law. A black man took his place on the Supreme Court, and I wondered if my sister’s husband took any pleasure in the event. Marshall’s appointment seemed, even to me, too little too late.

Seventy separate riots spread through more than a dozen cities over the course of the year. The country turned upon itself, twisting on two simple words: Black Power .

Jonah, surprisingly, loved the phrase. He loved the disarray it sowed in the ranks of those good Americans, just minding their own business. He thought of it as guerrilla theater, just as aesthetically unsettling as the best of Webern or Berg. He walked about the apartment brandishing a dark tan golf-gloved fist over his head, shouting, “Mulatto Power! Mulatto Power!” for no one’s benefit but mine.

And still the year’s music beat on, cheerful, love-crazed, sun-drenched for a day. White music went black, stealing funk’s righteous refusal. The Motown sound migrated even to cities whose cores had not recently burned down. At the same time, Monterey sent pop into places even my brother couldn’t ridicule. Jonah brought home the first rock album he ever paid real money for. The Beatles, in high-camp Edwardian military band regalia peeked out from the cover with a cast of dozens, including effigies of their former selves. “You have to hear this.” Jonah parked me under two cantaloupe halves of padded earphones and made me listen to the last cut, its slow, cacophonous orchestral climb to a forte major triad that spread into eternity. “Where do you think they got that idea? Ligeti? Penderecki? Pop ripping off the classics again, just like Tin Pan Alley used to do Rachmaninoff.”

He made me listen to the whole record, pushing his favorite bits. From English music hall to raga, from sonata quotes to sinkholes of sounds that hadn’t happened yet. “Trippy, huh?” I’d no idea where he learned the word.

The year split into vapor trails as tangled as those cloud-chamber traceries Da studied. Fashion went mad. Safari dresses, cossack blouses, aviator coats, Victorian velvet, silver metallic vinyl space-age miniskirts, Nehru jackets, combat boots with fishnet stockings, culottes with capes: a grandiose splintering into all years and places but this one. Fifty thousand people took to the Mall to protest the war, and three-quarters of a million strolled down Fifth Avenue in New York supporting it. Coltrane died and the U.S. government officially recognized the blues by sending Junior Wells on a goodwill tour to Africa. Che Guevara and George Lincoln Rockwell both died violent deaths. Jonah and I lived our days between flower children and nurse slayers, decolonization and defoliants, Twiggy and Tiny Tim, Hair and The Naked Ape .

We’d be in some hotel room in Montreal or Dallas, watching the news, trying not to drop off the face of the earth, and some story would come on, a space shot or a riot, a love-in or mass strangling, an emperor’s self-coronation or Third World insurgency, and Jonah would shake his head. “Who needs opera, Mule? No wonder the damn thing’s dying. How can opera go head-to-head against this circus?”

We watched that year’s performance race through its acts, all the while waiting for the Met to call, the call that would be Jonah’s delivery and my death sentence. “They’re nervous that I’ve never really sung over an orchestra.” He decided to plump the vita with whatever symphonic solo appearances he could land. He told a bewildered Mr. Weisman to find him anything, with any body of instrumentalists. “I’ve got volume. You know that.”

“This isn’t about your volume, son.” Mr. Weisman, whose fifty-year-old daughter had just died of breast cancer, had taken to calling us his sons. “This is about positioning you. Making people hear what it is you do.”

“I’ll do whatever the audience wants. Why do they need a brand? Can’t they just listen?”

He couldn’t understand the lead time on finding orchestral jobs. “It takes two years to do anything!

Jesus, Joey. A read-through, a dress rehearsal, and a performance. Keep the thing fresh.”

He picked up a substitution for a flu-stricken tenor who’d been slated to sing Das Lied von der Erde at Interlochen. The conductor couldn’t find anyone else willing to step in on such short notice. Jonah mastered the treacherously craggy tenor songs in under five weeks. “I was born singing this stuff, Joey.” I sat in the audience with the rest of the weeping public. Da came out for the debut. He sat and listened to his son sail drunkenly on the silent winds of outer space and make a mockery of human misery: Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod. Dark is life, is death. A voice that knew nothing but its own fire veered about in wild precision, fueled by a skill equal to the music’s extremes: Was geht mich denn der Frühling an? Laßt mich betrunken sein! —What can springtime mean to me? Let me be drunken!

People who’d never heard of Jonah’s lieder performances suddenly discovered him. The audience clapped as if they wanted him to come out and do Symphony of a Thousand as an encore. The Detroit Free Press ran that review calling him a “planet-scouting angel.” In truth, they were right. He didn’t live here. His voice was on a long, sweeping search for any part of this backwater galaxy where it might put down for an eon or two.

Just before Chicago and our Orchestra Hall debut, the disastrous piece in Harper’s appeared, calling him a flunky of the white culture game. Jonah thought his career was over. Orchestra Hall would rescind the engagement when they found out. He couldn’t stop reading me the passage that fingered him: “‘Yet there are amazingly talented young black men out there still trying to play the white culture game, even while their brothers are dying in the streets.’ That’s me, boy. Big time back-stabber. Cut you and leave you for dead, if I need to.”

Orchestra Hall didn’t rescind. Despite our preconcert argument about our parents and Emmett Till, and despite a suffocation fit only an hour before the performance, Jonah hit the stage singing—the songs of Schumann, Wolf, and Brahms—and came away to raves.

The Harper’s accusation chewed him up. He’d been passing, and it had never even occurred to him. All those boys his age, ground down, locked out, threatened, beaten, killed, while he’d been granted the safe passage of lightness. All those men, locked up, held down, digging civilization’s ditches, taking the blows, while he was up onstage spinning florid doilies, making time stand still. He’d read the article and cock his head: could it really be?

He canceled two weeks of engagements, claiming the flu. Truth was, he was afraid to show his face in public. He no longer knew what that face looked like to his audience. Not that he’d ever much cared how others saw him. Music was that place where look fell away and sightless sound was all. But here was someone insisting the opposite: Music was just what we put on, after we put on ourselves. How a piece sounded to its listeners had everything to do with who was up there making the sounds.