Richard Powers (49 page)

Jonah and I have scheduled this break in our barnstorming—eighteen stops in every drafty auditorium across the Pacific Northwest—to try to reconnect with our family. It’s been months since I’ve sat and talked to Ruth. She’s lived through a riot, changed her major, taken to dressing exclusively in tight, dark clothes. She’s exploding with ideas she’s picked up at school. She’s reading books by famous social theorists I’ve never even heard of. She’s passed me by in every way but musically. She feels like my unknown, exotic, well-traveled cousin. Once she was almost my age. Now she’s amused by my doddering senility.

“About Mama?” I answer. Mama’s old trick: Always repeat the question. It buys you time. “You know.

Nothing you wouldn’t recognize.”

Ruth stops fiddling with my hair. She picks up the blues book, my present from her, and flips through it.

“I mean from before my time.”

“You should ask the man.” I point my thumb at our father, who paces with excitement in an oval between the sterile dining room and his chaos-infested study in a state of quantum perturbation. Ruth just rolls her eyes. She’s right: Da is already unreachable, halfway back to whatever dimension Mama now occupies.

He knows every message our mother’s memory might have for us, but he can’t give them to us. Now and then as he paces, he calls out a few private syllables of insight for no one, then collapses at his desk to jot down a stream of hostage symbols. Recently, his age-old enigma has thickened. Fitch and Cronin, two Princeton-based acquaintances of his working over in Brookhaven, have just shattered the past: Temporal symmetry is violated at the subatomic level. The world’s equations are not cleanly reversible.

Da paces about the first floor of this new, alien house in a wide, closed loop, shaking his head, singing,

“Ah, sweet mystery of life!” The tune has started to grate on our collective nerves.

It’s just the four of us now, in a house belonging to no one. The old home in Hamilton Heights is banished to some planet of memory none of us can reach. Our father has bought this place, just over the Washington Bridge, in Fort Lee, New Jersey, on the colossal miscalculation that we children might take this transplanted nest to heart. He can’t see us anymore. This neighborhood makes all three of his offspring look like a foreign exchange program. Ruth, in particular, looks like a UN delegate from one of those newly decolonized countries no one’s heard of.

Even this holiday reunion is a sad fabrication. Ruth has found a wreath and a few lights, but no one had the heart to decorate. The first night of Hanukkah descended into TV dinners. For Christmas, we order take-out Chinese. The day’s angel messengers are off on some other hillside, miles up the Palisades, announcing the mysterious birth to those flock-watching shepherds who’ve managed to remain more easily taken in by good news.

This is the last time we’ll be together like this. Every time is something’s last, but even I can feel this holiday’s scattering. Ruth sits on the couch, nursing her arm, the bruise still tender almost half a year on.

Something I can’t name has been happening to her while she’s been away at college. Something happening all across the country, and already it’s moving too fast for me to see. The country’s clock has slowed to a stop, and mine races on. Mama always said I was born antique. “This one’s born ancient,”

she once whispered to Da, after she thought I was asleep. “And he’s going to get older and older every time humanity turns him around.”

Now I’ve become Ruth’s grandfather. She looks at me, begging for memories only I am aged enough to reach. I’m her only reliable link to a room that time’s sliding walls have sealed her off from. She’s changed while we’ve been touring. Never again Ruthie, Root. She has on tight black jeans and that black V-necked pullover, her fine curly hair combed out unsuccessfully on her head, as if she’s swum halfway across some fast-running stream of fashion before panicking and swimming back. Her body has turned perfect since the last time I saw her. I look away now when she leans toward me, asking, “What were we all like, when I was small?”

“You could sight-sing before you could see. You were the best, Ruth. You could sound like anyone.”

We’ve not sung together, as a family, this entire vacation. It’s all any of us have thought about, but no one’s brought it up. Jonah and I practice daily, but that doesn’t count. The only other notes are Da’s, his million looped refrains of “Ah, Sweet Mystery”: “Ah, sweet mystery…of life… At last I’ve found you!”

To which we kids add no harmonies.

“Joey, you dope!” Ruth’s accent has drifted over the river toward Brooklyn, as if other people have brought her up. Which they have, I guess. “I don’t need to know about me!”

The two of us look to Jonah, the only one truly old enough for solid data. He lies on the floor, toying with the sliding puzzle, humming to himself the glimpse of arpeggiated paradise from the end of Fauré’s Requiem . Jonah’s eyebrows go up at our aimed silence— Hmm?—as if he hasn’t heard us. He has registered every word. “Altos!” he explodes. “Vee need more altos!” Time-honored mockery of Da, from our earliest years. The accent is so good that even Da himself stops pacing around the dining room to smile at us from out of what was once his body.

“Altos!” I come in, a dutiful imitation. “Ven, voman, you are going to make me some altos?”

Ruth, the real mimic, grins at the canonic gag. But she adds no line of her own. Ruth, the alto, hasn’t sung a note since she went away to school. She pinches up her cheeks in frustration. “No! No, you stupid crackers.” She slaps the sofa with an open palm. She grabs my forearm, leans in, and bites it. “What do you remember about Mama ?”

This is my sister’s only holiday question—my sister, who was barely ten when the world she wants to know about came to its early end. She was the first to discover the blaze, where all our photos burned.

Now every memory she has has drifted, unreliable, except for her memory of the fire itself. She thinks Jonah and I still have entry rights. But she’s not even wrong. Our sister wants back in to a place with no dimension, no place of entry, not even the one she asks us to invent for her now.

I wait for Jonah to answer. Ruth prods him with her toe. But he’s gone back to humming Fauré’s sickly sweet burial Mass and sliding around his puzzle squares. It falls to me, in this life, to make sure no one I love goes unanswered. This Christmas, more than ever, that is a losing proposition. I need to start looking for a better job. “You want stories from before you were born?”

“Before. After. I’m not in a position to be picky.” My sister talks to her hands, which dethread a tasseled pillow that she picked out for Da as a gift. It’s gold and burgundy, nothing she’d let near her own apartment. “God’s sake, Joey! Give me whatever you have!” Her voice is a jagged alto gasp. “Mama’s blurring on me. I can’t hold her.”

The things I know for sure, my sister doesn’t need. The things she needs from me, I’m unsure of. I root through the jumbled shoe box of the past, all my own snapshots burned. A midday shadow falls across the couch, between us. Mama’s here. I can see her: that face I once mistook for my own reflection, its mouth the idea of mouths, its eyes, all eyes. But she has blurred on me, too. I’m no longer certain of her features. With nothing to check against, I can’t be sure what I’ve done to her. “She looked like you, Ruth. A slightly taller, fuller you.”

Jonah just grunts. Ruth looks down, upset and skeptical. “What did she sound like?”

The timbre of her voice is in the bones of my skull. It’s packed so close, I can’t get to it. The sound is second nature, but to try to describe it would be worse than a cheap recording. Not this; not that. I can’t say what my mother sounded like, any more than I can hear myself sing. Not even Jonah could reproduce her.

“She… I don’t know. She used to call us ‘JoJo.’ The two of us.” I kick my motionless brother. “Like we were one child with two bodies.”

“I remember.” Ruth squirms in place. This isn’t what she wants.

“She was a fantastic teacher. She used to praise and correct us in the same breath. ‘JoJo, that’s wonderful. That sounded just about perfect. Try it a few more times, and I bet that octave leap will be right there.’”

Jonah just nods. He has never been big on comprimario roles. When he’s not center stage these days, he doesn’t bother coming onstage at all.

“Did she have students?”

“All the time. Talented adults, coming back to music. Teens and older kids, from around the neighborhood.”

“Black or white?” All my sister asks is what the world asks her. It’s the only question of any interest, over in the Bronx, at NYU Uptown. In the twitchy streets of Harlem. The old neighborhood.

I turn on the sofa, sidesaddle, to look out the front bay window. No whiter street. I imagine myself a child of this neighborhood, a suburban boy, biking through its manicured blocks, tossing a pigskin across its tracts, party to a fantastic mass evasion. Our parents couldn’t have lived here if they’d wanted. I couldn’t have walked down these streets as a boy and lived. Even now, for this briefest family visit, some neighbor is already on the phone to the police. Tonight, if I walk around the block, they’ll stop me for questioning.

It strikes me how rarely Jonah and I left our house, even in the city. We stayed home, huddled over the piano, radio, and record player. Mama had to force us out. I count up how many of our childhood tormentors were black, how many white, how many as ambiguous as we were. We covered most bases.

“Both, I think. Mostly black?”

I glance at Jonah, the only real authority. That one-year difference between us was almost an eon back then. Jonah sets down his puzzle and, in a deep gospel bass, intones, “Red and yellow, black and white, they are equal in His sight. Jesus loves the little students of this world.”

Ruth laughs, despite herself. She leans over him and slugs him in his softening underbelly. “You’re a complete asshole. You do know that?”

It’s supposed to be playful. He looks up at her impassively. I blunder forward, before there’s an incident.

“She was still taking lessons herself, you know. At Columbia, when we were little. She even studied for a little while with Lotte Lehmann.”

“Is that supposed to be something special?”

I fall back, mouth open. “Lotte Lehmann?” All I can think to say. A name I know better than my own blood relatives. “You don’t…”

“Naw,” Jonah says, standing and stretching. “Nothing special. Just some famous diva bitch.”

Ruth’s ignoring him. It’s the most productive thing she can do with him these days. “What made Mama get interested in classical? Can you think of any reason why she would choose…” Ruth circles the question, unwilling to go to war over something she’s not sure she can win. “How good was she, anyway?”

I want to say, How dare you ask? “Don’t you know? You must have heard her just about every night for a decade!” The words come out harsher than I mean them. Ruth takes them across the face. I start again, softer. “She was…” The voice against which I measure every other. The sound that my sound strove for.

A richness not even Jonah has learned to produce, one that came from giving up everything. “Her voice was warm. High and clear, but full-blooded. Never a hint of a slavishness.” I hear the word before I can suppress it.

“Sun coming up on a field of lavender,” Jonah says. And I remember why I’ll always do anything for him.

It almost satisfies Ruth. But she nurses a bigger demon, one that only gets hungrier when the smaller ones are fed. “What was she like ?”

Even Jonah looks up, hearing the edge in her voice. I know just what Ruth wants one of us to say. But I can’t give her the Mama she needs. “When we were little, she used to walk us around, each of my feet on top of hers. Each step we took was a beat of a favorite tune. As if the song she sang was the motor of this enormous walking machine.”

My sister’s face is a spoiled watercolor. “I remember. ‘I’m Tram-pin ’. I’m Tram-pin’ .’”

“She cut out little stars from silver paper and stuck them up on our bedroom ceiling, in the shapes of constellations. She got us growing potatoes and lima beans in water glasses. She was a perpetual sparrow-rescuer. We had an eyedropper always filled with sterilized milk, ready for every maimed creature between Broadway and Amsterdam.”

“She used to beat us boys with nail-studded planks,” Jonah confides. “She’d softened a good deal by the time you came along.”

“That’s not true,” I say. “Never anything longer than carpet tacks.”

Ruth throws up her arms in disgust and stands up to leave. I hold her and bring her back down. She sits, with a little persuading. There’s no place else for miles around for her to go.

I stroke her bruised arm. “She’d fret for two days if the subway attendant looked at her the wrong way while she was putting her dime in the turnstile. But she was tougher than Jesus. She could hold her breath longer than she could hold a grudge. She loved having people over. At least to sing.”

None of this is any use to Ruth. “How black was she?” she asks at last. She studies my face for any cheating, a pitiless external examiner.

Blackis now the going term. Ruth started using it not long after hearing the young John Lewis at the March on Washington. Negro is for gradualists, appeasers, and Baptist ministers. Black means business, and it’s taken hold, after what’s happened this year in Harlem, Jersey City, and Philadelphia. The country keeps changing the problem’s name every few years, like a liar elaborating his excuse. I’m not sure what the word for mulatto is at the moment. It’ll be something new a year or so from now.

I don’t even glance at Jonah. I know his answer. “How black?” One drop, I want to tell her. That’s the going rule. No scale, no fractions, no how much . Not something this country lets you have degrees of.

The only shade Americans see: One spurned size fits all. Ruth’s known as much since the age of ten. But now she’s decided there’s more to know. Another scale, one that measures degree. I meet her gaze.

“What exactly are you asking?”

“What do you think I’m asking? Don’t be a fool, Joe.”