Richard Powers (77 page)

When Teresa and I went up to Da’s, we’d end up playing cribbage in the front room while he sat in his study making desperate calculations. I apologized to my Polish saint in a thousand oblique ways, for hours at a shot.

“It doesn’t matter, Joseph. It’s so good for me, just to see where you grew up.”

“How many times have I told you where I grew up? I’d rather have grown up in hell than here.”

Too late, she rushed to fix her mistake. “Can we go over to the city? See your old…” And halfway in, she realized she’d made bad worse. We went back to cribbage, a game she taught me, one she used to play with her mother. The saddest, whitest, most inscrutable game the human mind ever invented.

One night, we sat together under the globe of a lamp, looking over the pictures that had survived the accident of my family. There were half a dozen from before the fire. They’d been pinned to a board in my father’s office at the university for a quarter of a century. Now they’d come home, but to no home anyone in the pictures would have recognized. One photo showed a couple holding a baby. A thickset man, his close-cropped hair already receding, stood next to a thin woman in a print dress, hair pulled back in a bun. The woman held a lump wrapped in a fuzzy blanket. Teresa hovered her nail above the infant packet. “You?”

I shrugged. “Jonah, probably.”

A delicate pause. “Who are these two?”

I couldn’t tell her. I had some memory of the man, but even that might have come mostly from this photograph. “My grandparents.” Then, inspired stupidity: “My mother’s parents.”

In time, my father grew too sick to work. He still perched with his star charts and his tables of numbers, head bowed over the snaking Greek equations. But he could no longer force through the calculations.

This puzzled more than hurt him. The medications had him in a place beyond pain. Or maybe he was confused by the facts’ inability to keep pace with theory.

“Well?” I asked. “Does the universe have a preferred spin?”

“I don’t know.” His voice trailed the same wake of disbelief as if he’d discovered he’d never existed. “It seems to express no preference for rotation in any direction over the other.”

Toward the end, he wanted to sing. We hadn’t for years. I couldn’t even say exactly when we’d stopped. Mama died. Jonah turned professional. Ruth quit her angelic voice in something like disgust. So family music ended. Then one day in the first midwinter of this new, alien decade, my dying father wanted to make up for lost time. He turned up a sheaf of madrigals, produced from the towering mounds of his office scribbles. “Come. We sing.” He made us each take a part.

I looked at Teresa, who looked around for a place to kill herself. “Teresa doesn’t read music, Da.”

He smiled: We’d have our little joke. Then his smile died in comprehension. “How can this be? You have said she sings with you?”

“She does. She…learns everything by ear. By heart.”

“Really?” He delighted in the idea, as if the possibility had only just occurred to him. One of those deathbed revelations over nothing. “Really? This is fine! We will learn this song for you, by heart.”

I didn’t want to sing trios with the terrified and the dying. I, too, had lost some basic faith in sound. The three of us could not possibly give Da what he needed—a glimpse of a world gone unreachable. Music had always been his celebration of the unlikelihood of escape, his Kaddish for those who’d suffered the fate meant for him. “How about T. and I sing something for you? Straight from the Glimmer Room, Atlantic City!”

“This would be even better.” His voice fell away, almost inaudible.

I don’t know how, but Saint Teresa rose to the awful moment. She, at least, still believed in music. I played on the piano that had sat for years in Fort Lee, untouched. And the white Catholic truck driver’s daughter from the saltwater taffy factory sang like a siren. I came out of my fog to meet her. We started on “Satin Doll,” as far from the Monteverdi that Da had picked out as distance allowed. And yet, as the satin doll maker himself once said, there were only two kinds of music. This was the good kind.

By then, Da’s face was ashen and the laugh in his eyes was glaze. But when Teresa and I hit our groove, somewhere around the second verse, he lit up one last time. For my father, music had always been the joy of a made universe—composed, elaborate, complex: various arcs of a solar system spinning in space at once, each one traced by the voice of a near relation. But the pleasure that bound him to his wife had been spontaneous treasure hunting. They both went to their graves swearing that any two melodies could fit together, given the right twists of tempo and turns of key. And that insistence, it struck me, as Teresa and I careened down the tune Ellington put down, lay as close to jazz as it did to the thousand years of written-out melodies their game drew on.

As my pale taffy girl sailed over the melody, sounding more sweetly sustained than I’d ever heard her, I tapped into some underground stream and drew up broken shards, motives from Machaut to Bernstein, and slipped them into my accompaniment. Teresa must have heard the sounds turning strange beneath her. But she sailed right over them. Who knows how many of the quotes Da made out? The tunes were in there; they fit. That’s all that mattered. And for the seven and a half minutes my woman and I made the song last, my family, too, was there inside our sound.

Baby, shall we go out skippin’?Take your freedom on the road once, before you die. The tune said yes, said name your ecstasy. Even a written-out melody had to be made up again, on the spot, each time you read it. The swinging little skip of a theme had been sung every imaginable way, a million times and more before this woman and I ever heard it. But Teresa sang it for my father in a way he’d never yet heard.

There was only this onetime meeting between us and the pitches. These notes, at least, knew who my people were, all those lives lived out between the making up and the writing down. We are all native speakers. Sing where you are, even as it goes. Sing all the things that this life denied you. No one owns even one note. Nothing trumps time. Sing your own comfort, the song said, for no one else will sing it for you. Speaks Latin, that satin doll.

In the best world, Da would have been making music, rather than just taking it in. But in extremis, my father made a decent audience. He didn’t move much, except at the core. His face opened up. When we hit the bridge, he seemed ready to rejoin all the spinning points of light in his galaxy catalog. We finished, Teresa and I grinning as we nailed the cadence. We’d gone outside ourselves, into the tune. Da rocked for two or three more measures, to a pulse we living aren’t given to hear. “Your mother loved that song.”

That seemed impossible to me. I couldn’t get back there. I wasn’t even sure my father had recognized the tune.

Da worsened, and still I heard nothing from Jonah. I had a hundred theories a day, each less generous than the last. Toward New Year’s, Da asked if I knew where Jonah was. “I think he’s singing Mahler in Cologne.” The nearer death was, the more freely I lied. I made it sound as if the concert were taking place that week. My father once told us there was no now, now.

“In Köln, you say? Yes, of course.”

“Da? Why ‘of course’?”

He looked at me strangely. “This is where his family comes from.”

“Really?” Teresa said. “You have family in Germany? We should go visit!”

I put my arm around her, killing all her dreams with gentleness. I never knew she wanted to travel. It had never come up between us.

Da himself was traveling, backward, faster than light. “My father’s family. Centuries in the Rhineland. My mother’s family were immigrants, you know.”

I didn’t. There was no end to what I didn’t know.

“They came from the east. I don’t even know what this region would be called now. The Ukraine, somewhere? Things…were not good for them there. So!” He squeezed a little laugh, as brittle as any that had ever come out of him. “So: Sie bewegen nach Deutschland. ”

And his three children were the end of the line. This, too, had been his choice: to preserve the past by merging it into some other path. The size of what I’d lost broke over me. “You should have taught us, Da. At least about our relatives.”

His eyes flickered a little, at the chance that his every equation had been wrong. His glance crusted over with his own colossal betrayal. Then, in the nearness of death, he found himself again. He patted my arm.

“I introduce you. You’ll like them.”

No doctor prepared me for his rate of fall. Da had asked me once, centuries ago, “What is the speed of time?” Now I knew: never a steady one second per second. My father’s life popped the clutch. Within a few days, he went from hobbling around home to one last tubular metal bed at Mount Sinai Hospital. I dashed off another note to Amsterdam: “If you’re going to come, come now.” I sent Teresa back to Atlantic City, over her objections. She had to keep her job; I’d already cost her everything else. There were things I still needed from Da, things that could happen only inside the circle of that smallest race: one father and son.

I put it to him one afternoon, when the morphine drip held him still in the middle ground between composed and improvised, between evasion and vanishing. By then, he must have realized I would be the only one of his children to be with him here on this last stop.

“Da?” I sat by his bed in a molded-plastic chair, both of us inspecting the lime green cinder-block wall six feet away. “That night? The one when you and…my grandfather…”

He nodded—not to cut me off, but to spare me saying it out loud. His face screwed up into something worse than cancer. A lifetime of refusing to talk about it, and now his mouth pulled open and closed, like a trout in the well of a boat, gasping under this sudden sea of atmosphere. He worked so hard to find the first syllable, I almost told him to rest and forget. But the need was on us both now. Worse than the need to seal a last closeness. My father had lost me my mother’s family, and never said why. The effort he went through then, in his last bed, was worse than any salvage could justify. I sat there, an impassive jury, waiting to see how he’d hang himself.

“I…loved your grandfather. He was such an enormous man. No? Grosszügig. Noble. His mind wanted to take in everything. He would have been a perfect physicist.” For a beat, my father’s ravaged face found pleasure. “He cared for me, I think. More than just for the husband of his daughter. We spoke often, of many things, in New York, in Philadelphia. He was so fierce, always ready to fight for your mother’s right to be happy, anywhere in the world. When we first told him your brother was on the way, he groaned. ‘You are making me a grandfather before my time!’ We took you babies to Philadelphia, for holidays. Everything was welcome. Yes, of course, there were problems with—what?— Übersetzung.”

“Translation.”

“Yes. Of course. My English is going. Problems with translation. But he knew me. He recognized me.”

“And you recognized him?”

“What he didn’t know about me, I didn’t know, either! Maybe he was right. Yes. Maybe.” My father fell into a reverie. I thought he wanted to sleep. I should have made him, but I kept still. “He challenged my war work. You know, I solved problems during the war. I helped with those weapons.”

I nodded. We’d never talked about it. But I knew.

“He challenged. He said those bombings were as racial as Hitler. I said I didn’t work on the bombings. I did not have anything to do with those decisions. I said such use wasn’t about white and dark. He said everything—the whole world—was about white against dark. Only, the white didn’t know this. I said I wasn’t white; I was a Jew. He couldn’t understand this. I tried to tell him the hatred I got in this country, that I never talked about to anyone. We told him that you children would not be white against dark. Your grandfather was a huge mind. A powerful man. But he said we were doing wrong, raising you children.

He said we were performing a… Sünde.”

“Sin. You were sinning.”

“Sin. Ein Zeitwort? ”

“Well, it’s a noun, too.”

“That we were sinning, bringing you boys up as if there would be no white versus dark. As if we were already there, present in our own future.”

I closed my eyes. My father’s was not a future the human race would ever stumble into. If my grandfather, if my own father… The words tore out of me before I thought them. “It didn’t have to be all or nothing, Da. You could have at least told us… We could at least have been…”

“You see. In this country, in this place? Everything is already all or nothing. One or the other. Nothing may be both. Of this, your mother and I, too, are guilty.”

“We could at least have talked about this. As a family. Our whole lives.”

“Yes, of course. But whose words? This is what your grandfather…what William wanted to know. We tried to talk about it, as a family, that night. But once those things were said, once we went to that place…”

He went to that place all over again. Pain that cancer had not succeeded in putting in his face, memory now did. I was a boy again, cowering in my open bedroom doorway, hearing my world, my father’s, my mother’s all cave in.

“He said there was a struggle. A struggle we were—what? ‘Turning our backs on.’ Your mother and I said no; we were that struggle. This: making you children free, free to define. Free of everything.”

“Your mother and I” no longer sounded like a whole. And “Free of everything,” a kind of death sentence.

My father lay propped in his bed, the kind of motorized bed that can be set to every position except comfortable. He spoke through narrowed mouth, his eyes closed, from a place I’d banished him to.

“Horrible things, we said, that night. Terrible things. We played ‘Who owns pain?’ ‘Who has suffered the greater wrong?’ I told him the Negro had never been killed in the numbers of the Jews. He said they had

. This I didn’t understand. He said no killing could be worse than slavery. Centuries of it. The Jews had never been enslaved, he said. In one heartbeat, I was a Zionist. They were, I said; they were enslaved.

Too long ago to count, he said. How long ago counts? I asked. Yes, how long ago? When is the past over? Maybe never. But what did this have to do with the two of us—this man and me? Nothing. We were to live now, in the present. But we just couldn’t reach there.”