Richard Powers (84 page)

Sometimes at night, stirred by our closeness in the dark, she brought it up in whispers. She painted a fantasy for me, a house, a sovereign state of our own with its own flag and national anthem, perhaps a growing populace. I never objected, and in the dark, she took my willing listening as assent.

With the future in limbo between us, my ability to make music do anything fell almost to zero. The world away from the keyboard was even worse. Running the vacuum for half an hour exhausted me. A trip to the grocery store swelled into an expedition to scale Everest. Maybe we ought to marry, I thought.

Marry and move to someplace survivable. But I didn’t know how. If Teresa just took care of everything, handled all the mechanics, told me when it was over…

Inert, I figured that the odds of my dying before having to act on anything like an implied promise would eventually grow overwhelming. I was over thirty, the age beyond which no one was to be trusted. Teresa closed in on the same landmark, the age beyond which an unmarried woman probably never would be. It should have seemed natural to me. It was what I’d grown up knowing: a spouse of each color. But a quarter of a century had beaten the natural out of me. All my family’s lessons had reduced to one: No one marries outside their race and lives.

Teresa thought of me as half white. We sang together, and never had a problem. She thought she recognized me. She saw me working away, trying to write white music. Everything I kept from her allowed her to go on thinking as much. Once she asked about my father’s family. She wanted something to attach to. “Where are they from?”

“Germany.”

“I know that, goof. Where in Germany?”

I didn’t have a good answer. “They lived in Essen, until the war. My…father was from Strasbourg, originally.”

“Originally?”

I laughed. “Well, originally, I guess they all came from Canaan.”

“Where?” All I could do was touch her hair. “Well, where are they all now?” Not a hesitation. She was that pure.

“Gone.”

She worked on this. Her own people had cut her off, but she knew where everyone was. She still sent cards on every cousin’s birthday, even if the rate of return had dropped near zero. “Gone?” Then it hit her, and she needed no more clarifying.

She asked about Mama’s people. I told what I knew. Doctor grandfather and his wife and children in Philadelphia “When can I meet them, Joe?” No one called me Joe. “I’d be happy to go with you, anytime.” I couldn’t even tell her. We weren’t even close enough to be different species.

I saw what I was doing to her only by accident. Once a week, I still went through her collection and learned a track for her. After dinner, I sat down at the Wurlitzer, fiddled around on arpeggios, then launched into an introduction. Her game was to figure out the tune and be ready to sing on the first verse’s downbeat. She always was, her face alight, as if I’d just handed her a wrapped gift. One night in April of 1975, we ripped through a try at “There’s a Rainbow Round My Shoulder,” a song I’d never come across until that afternoon. Terrie got as far as

Hallelujah, how the folks will stare,

When they see the diamond solitaire,

That my little sugar baby is gonna wear!

Yes, sir!

She broke off, a mangle of laughing and crying. She came and threw her arms around my shoulders, and for another few measures, I goofed around on five straitjacketed notes. “Oh, my Joe-bird. We’ve got to do it. Got to make it legal!”

I looked at her and said, like some 1930s hepcat, “Whatever my little sugar baby wants. Who am I to break the law?” She seemed as happy at these words as if we’d gone and done the deed already. Just the intent seemed enough.

Two weeks later, rooting through her records in search of another captive, I glimpsed a sheet of fancy rag paper sticking out from a stack of books on her writing desk. The color caught my eye, and I excavated it, a handmade wedding invitation. Across its middle, there bent a great rainbow arc. Along the top ran the hand-lettered message: “There’s a rainbow round my shoulder.” Inside the arc, she’d penned, “And it fits me like a glove.” Below, in a file of straight lines, Teresa had written, “TIME,”

“DATE,” and “PLACE,” all of which she’d left trustingly blank, pending happy consultation with me.

Under these, she’d written, “Come help us celebrate the union of Teresa Maria Elisabeth Clara Wierzbicki and Joseph Strom.” At the very bottom, in a jaunty hand, she’d added, “Hallelujah, we’re in love!”

The thing sunk into my chest up to the hilt. She wanted people there, a public declaration. I might somehow have managed to slip off to a justice of the peace, provided we never actually told anyone. But a wedding, with invitations: impossible. To whom could she have thought we’d send invitations? My family was dead and hers had disowned her. We shared no friends in common, none who would come to such a party. I pictured her scenario: walking down the aisle of some religious structure, part Catholic, part A.M.E., part synagogue, her Polish factory workers and my Black Panther connections eyeing one another across the median. The two of us, in front of a room of people, cutting into a three-tiered wedding cake. Hallelujah, how the folks would stare.

I buried the unfinished project back under her books, just as I’d found it. I never said anything. But she knew. Something in the way I behaved toward her, too brightly affectionate. I kept bracing for the presentation, the finished invitation. Here: I made this for you. But the moment never came. Teresa’s handmade celebration disappeared from the stack on her desk into some solitary hope chest she never opened for anyone.

That’s when I gave up all pretense of composition. I boxed up my sheaf of pencil-scratched music stock and consigned it to storage.

I heard from Jonah again, not long after. He never made it to Scandinavia. “Dear Bro,” his letter started.

“Big doings here. I’ve found my calling.” As if singing with the London Symphony Orchestra and l’Orchestre philharmonique de Radio-France had been a wrong number.

I was in Strasbourg, doing the bounding tenor bit to the millionth rendition of the almighty NINTH this season, a truly gimmicky performance in the new “Capital of Europe,” with soloists, conductor, and musicians from two dozen countries. Not sure who I was supposed to represent. We were thundering around the back stretch when, all of a sudden, the grotesqueness of the situation finally dawned on me.

All my life, I’ve been this dutiful trooper for late-day cultural imperialism. Alle Menschen werden Brüder : Christ on a bloody crutch. Gimme a break. What planet does that guy live on? Not ours; not the Planet of the Apes.

I got through the piece all right, but afterward, I developed this profound allergic reaction to everything past 1750. I canceled three engagements, all big, blowsy nineteenth-century puff pieces. I managed to stumble through a large-forces staging of The Creation down in Lyon without tossing my cookies, but it was nip and tuck… When I got back to Paris, I happened by chance to catch this group from Flanders, a dozen singers, performing at the Cluny. I’ve never heard anything like it. Like landing after a long, rough flight and having your ears pop. In all those big-hall, 150-performer things, I’d forgotten what singing was supposed to be about… A thousand years of written-out scores, Joey. And we’ve only ever bothered with the last century and a half. We’re living in this one little wing of a rambling mansion… A thousand years! You have any idea how big a place that is?

Big enough for my brother to disappear into at last.

It’s taken me a while to purge my voice of all the tacky tricks and show-time shit I’ve been stroked for these last few years. But I’m finally clean. I’ve followed this group, the Kampen Ensemble, up to Ghent, and at last I have a worthy teacher again, after a long, lonely spell in the desert: Geert Kampen—a real master, and one of the most musical souls I’ve ever met. I’m just another reed in his little collegium, and we’re hardly the only group plunging into this stuff. Suddenly, the past is the coming thing. There’s a whole school up in the Netherlands, and one’s even starting back in Paris. Something’s happening. A whole wave of people reinventing early music. I mean the earliest. Just wait, Mule. This movement will hit the States in a few years. You guys are always behind the times, even when it comes to being behind the times! And once it hits, you’ll see: Nostalgia will never be the same again…

I’ve learned not to speak French in the Flanders shops, though German doesn’t go over a whole lot better. Even English doesn’t entirely convince people I’m not a Turkish “guest” laborer here to take coal-mining jobs away from the natives. I am, however, never safer than when the words are sung. I did manage to salvage the best of Paris and carry her up to civilization with me. Her name is Celeste Marin.

She knows all about you, and we’re both waiting for you to get your ass out here so you can meet my new woman and hear my new voice. Better hurry. Not even the past can last forever.

I read the letter with mounting panic. Halfway through, I wanted to send him a telegram. My brother had achieved a level of success that almost justified the botched experiment our parents made of us. And on the verge of real recognition, he’d taken it into his head to walk away again, into some cult. My own disaster of a life lost its last shot at redemption. So long as I’d sacrificed myself to launch Jonah, I hadn’t entirely wasted myself. But if he bagged everything, then I was truly lost. I started to write him, but I couldn’t. I had nothing to say except Don’t do it. Don’t throw away your chance. Don’t trash your calling. Don’t mock Beethoven. For God’s sake, don’t move to Belgium. Above all, don’t marry a Frenchwoman.

I bought some recordings by the Kampen Ensemble, which I had to special-order. I listened to them in secret when Teresa wasn’t home, hiding them, like porno, where she’d never come across them, even by accident. The crumhorn-infested disks had an alien charm, like coming across an elaborate piece of wrought iron in a dusty store, something that meant life or death to some farmer once but which now had no function in the whole known world. Nothing in the thickets of complex counterpoint remotely resembled a hummable tune. The singers pared their voices back to dry points and reined in their phrases until nothing wavered or swelled. Everything we’d most loved in music was only hinted at, waiting to be born. I couldn’t hear what electrified Jonah. He was a master chef who’d perfected the secret of nuanced sauces renouncing the kitchen and taking to nuts and berries. It seemed a cheap escape. But then, I was a second-rate, fifteen-hour-a-week piano teacher and abortive composer, living off a factory worker’s good graces. In Atlantic City.

Alone during the day, I took the contraband records out and listened. The third time through the earliest Kampen Ensemble disk, an old Orlando Lassus song separated itself from the other chansons. “Bonjour mon coeur.” I’d known the tune from before it had been written. “Hello my heart, hello my sweet life, my eye, my dear friend.” And in the piece, I heard myself, at my first hearing. I backed down that narrow air shaft the wrong way, before our years of touring, before Juilliard’s prison practice rooms, before Boylston’s chamber choir, down below our earliest family evenings, each of us on an independent part.

“Hello my completely beautiful, my sweet spring, my new flower.” In the song’s first four notes, I stood outside that stone room where I’d heard that tune for the first time. I’m seven; my brother is eight. My father has just taken us to the northern tip of the island, a medieval cloister, where singers unravel their amazing instant. “My sparrow, my turtle dove. Good morning, my gentle rebel.” And afterward, my brother declares, “When I grow up? When I’m an adult? I want to do what those people do.”

I didn’t know then who “those people” were. I didn’t know now. I knew only that we weren’t them.

Hearing the song, I was filled with an urge to return to the Cloisters, a place I hadn’t been for decades.

Standing in that place might spring some memory, take me back to where we were headed, help me find what was happening to Jonah. I asked Ter if she’d like to go to the city. Her eyes shone like hard candy.

“You kidding me? Manhattan? Just you and me?”

“And six and a half million potential mass murderers.”

“New York, New York. My man and me, loose in the city!” It had been some time, it seemed, since we’d taken a holiday. I’d dragged her underground, into the inner keep of my isolation, and she had followed, for music’s sake. But there was no safety, it had turned out, even in solitude. Especially there.

“NYC! We’re going to start at Bloomie’s and head south. And we’re not going to stop until we find you a suit.”

“I have a suit.”

“A modern suit. A nice concert suit, with a nice flare and without any safety pins holding it together.”

“Why in the world would I need a suit?” Teresa shrank from my words, and the light went out. “I need to get shoes first,” I said, and she returned a little.

I suggested that after we’d shopped, we might head up to see the Cloisters. Teresa thought the place was a sporting arena. Her eyebrows bounced when I told her. “I didn’t know you were Catholic!”

“I didn’t, either.”

We spent the morning shopping in public, a compendium of my largest private hells. Teresa dealt with all slights as she always did, pretending that everything shy of direct aggression wasn’t happening. “What are pianists wearing onstage these days? What’s in style for concert attire this year?”

“Not this,” was all I could say.

Her frustration mounted. Anxious about making it to Washington Heights, I agreed to a hopeless, brown, double-breasted thing of no use except to further drain savings. “You sure? This is good, you think?

You’ll be a babe slayer in it, anywhere you play. I’ll tell you that much, buster.”

We left the suit for alterations, giving me another week to bail out of the purchase and lose no more than the deposit. We took the Uptown A. All the while, hanging on her strap, Teresa sang Ellington and Strayhorn in my ear, like the most shameless out-of-town tourist. Feeling the bored smirks of every passenger in the car, I harmonized sotto voce.