Richard Powers (64 page)

After a while, Jonah’s horror at the Harper’s piece turned to fascination. It amazed him to think that the article’s writer considered him worth slandering. The attention promoted him to a level of interest he’d never commanded, a player in a drama bigger than any he’d ever starred in. Amazingly talented black man playing the white culture game. Even winning . He turned the formula over and over. Then, in the kind of modulation he excelled in, he threw a little switch in himself. After days of chafing against the label, Jonah decided to revel in it.

He returned to the concert circuit, now blessed by the condemnation. And when the calls from Mr.

Weisman came in, with significant symphonic and choral solo offers among them, Jonah’s about-face seemed borne out. People smelled an opera, and they wanted tickets. Harper’s was going to make him notorious.

“Thank the Lord God Almighty for the revolution, Mule. The movement’s opening doors. Providing for our people. Gonna get us a call from the President Lincoln Center.” He rubbed my close-cropped head the way I always hated. “Huh, bro? Culture works. Uplift and elevation. Even the black man’s Al Jolson gotta eat.”

He took to reading the magazine accusation over the telephone to anyone who’d listen. “Where’s your sister when we need her?”

He knew better than I did. “She’s seen it. I’ll bet you anything.”

“You think?” He sounded pleased.

I saw him wondering how to get the article to Lisette Soer, to János Reményi, even to Kimberly Monera, who, in another lifetime, once asked if he was a Moor. I waited for notoriety to change his sound. I couldn’t see how he could get up onstage, week after week, so twisted up, and still manufacture that silk perfection. He sang Beethoven’s Ninth, again at short notice, with the Quad Cities Symphony. When the chorale came—that discredited dream of universal brotherhood, the same notes he’d once scribbled, by ear, underneath the photo of the North American nebula we’d hung on our bedroom wall—I half-expected him to open his mouth and turn hideous, to bray a quarter tone sharp, tremulous and imperial, like those pompous Teutonic goose-honk voices we used to ridicule when we were boys.

Just the reverse. He gave himself over to the classical’s full corruption. Only death, beauty, and artistic pretense were real. Limbered, his notes floated up into a clerestory treading in light. He entered completely into that blackballing country club, the heaven of high art.

For the second recording, he got it into his head to do a cycle of English songs—Elgar, Delius, Vaughan Williams, Stanford, Drake. Harmondial talked him out of it. The aura of decadent sweetness that clung to his voice left the tunes sounding freakishly pure, like some choirboy who’d gone through every part of puberty except the crucial one.

The label wanted something darker, to capitalize on Jonah’s controversy. They settled on Schubert’s Winterreise . That was a piece for grown men, to sing when the singer had traveled far enough to describe the journey in full. But no sooner did they suggest the idea than Jonah took it up and sealed it.

This time, we did the taping in New York. Jonah wanted a harder, more exposed finish. He’d sung many of the individual songs at one time or another. Now he assembled them into a plan that still takes my breath away. Instead of starting out the journey in innocence and ending in bitter passion, he began in a wry romp and ended far off, stripped bare, gazing motionless over the lip of the grave.

Even now, I can’t listen to the thing straight through. In five days at the end of his twenty-sixth year, my brother jumped into his own future. He posted the message of 1967 forward to a year when he would no longer be able to read it. With total clairvoyance, he sang about where we were headed, things he couldn’t have known as he sang them, things I wouldn’t recognize even now except for his explanation waiting for me, telegraphed from an unfinished past.

This time out, Jonah had two more years of control. He knew exactly what he needed each note to do within the larger phrase. He heard in his head the precise inflection of each song in the cycle, every nuance. He was a relentless mechanical engineer, bridging life’s winter trip, cabling up the starting block with the finish post in a few sweeping suspension swags and joining the whole into one coherent span. His voice was surer, better worked. We were singing in our own town, heading home each night to a certain bed, before the uncertainties of the next day’s takes. He adored the studio, the sterile glass cubicle sealing him off from outside danger. He loved to sit up in the control booth, listening to himself sing over the monitors, hearing the magnificent stranger he’d been just minutes before.

He spoke about it during one long break. “You remember that Sputnik signal, ten years ago? What’s this going to sound like, after I’m dead?”

The day we lived in was sealed. The message of where we were going would never reach us. His tone was so expansive, it felt like the moment to ask. “Did you ever think there was anything strange about the fire?” A dozen years after the fact, and I still couldn’t name it.

But he needed no more. “Strange? Something unexplained?” He ran both hands backward against his scalp. His dark hair was long enough now to furrow. “Everything’s unexplained, Joey. There are no pointless accidents, if that’s what you mean.”

I’d lived two decades thinking that skill, discipline, and playing by the rules would bring me safely in. I was the last of us to see it: Safety belonged to those who owned it. Jonah sat sipping springwater with a little lemon. I had wrapped my hands in hot towels, bandaged, as if just injured. I hunched forward, groping for some light in Jonah’s eyes. We’d drifted too far to rely on the old boyhood telepathy anymore. Onstage, still, yes; but in another year or two, we’d understand nothing in each other but music.

That afternoon, one last time, he thought my thoughts, as if they were his.

“I used to think about it every night. Joey, I always wanted to ask you.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know. I thought if I asked you, I might make it real.” He massaged his neck, exploring under the ears, scooping up into the chin, working, from the outside, the cords that he lived by. His throat was tan, a color that hid the way he’d come. No one could say, by that one cue alone, just what time had done to him. “Does it matter, Joey? One way or the other?”

My hands spasmed, scattering the hot towels. “Does it what ? Jesus. Of course it matters.” Nothing else did. Murder or accident? Everything we’d thought we were, everything my life meant hung on that fact.

My brother stuck his fingers into the lemon water and rubbed a trickle into his neck. “Look. Here’s what I think. I’ve thought about this for twelve years.” His voice was gaunt, from somewhere that had never known song. “You want to know what happened. You think that knowing what happened will tell you…what? What the world’s going to do to you. You think that if your mother was killed, if your mother really died by chance… Say it wasn’t some random furnace. Say it had human help. That answers something? That’s not even the start of what you need to know. Why were they after her?

Because she was black? Because she was uppity, sang the wrong stuff? Because she crossed the line, married your father? Because she wouldn’t keep her head down? Because she sent her mutant children to private school? Was it a scare tactic, intimidation gone wrong? Did they even know she was home?

Maybe they wanted Da. Maybe they were trying for us. Somebody helping to return the country to its original purity. You want to know whether it was a crazy person, some neighborhood committee, some clan from some other neighborhood, twenty blocks north or south. Then you want to know why your father never…”

He stopped for a breath, but not because he needed one. He could have sailed on forever on that fountain of air.

“Or say it was the furnace, all by itself. Nobody helping it along, nobody’s historical mission. Why that furnace? Why were we living in that house, and not some other? Don’t they inspect those things, in the good neighborhoods? How would she have died if she’d been living over on some burned-out block between Seventh and Lenox? They’re dying of tetanus up there. They’re dying of flu. Illiteracy. Dying in the backseats of cars when the hospital won’t take them. A woman like Mama dies in this country, at her age—it’s somebody’s fault. What do you need to know? Listen, Joey. Would it change the way you live if they told you all the answers, beyond doubt?”

I thought of Ruth. I had no answer for Jonah. But he had one for me.

“You don’t need to know if someone burned her alive. All you need to know is whether someone wanted to. And you know the answer to that one already. You’ve known that one since—what, six? So somebody did what everyone’s thought of doing. Or maybe not. Maybe she died a raceless woman’s death. Maybe furnaces explode. You don’t know, you can’t know, and you’re never going to know.

That’s what being black in this country means. You’ll never know anything. When they give you your change and won’t put it in your hand? When they cross the street a block down from you? Maybe they just had to cross the street. All you know for sure is that everyone hates you, hates you for catching them in a lie about everything they’ve ever thought of themselves.”

He did that head-rolling shoulder heave singers do to loosen themselves. Ready to return to recording, get on with his life. “I got Da talking once. God knows where you were, Joey. I can’t keep track of you all the time. Before they were married, apparently, he listed four possibilities for us, like a logic problem: A, B, both A and B, neither A nor B. He didn’t like the fixed categories. No element of time . What did he know about us? No more than we know about him. Neither of them liked race trumping everything.

Wasn’t that how history screwed us in the first place? They both thought family should trump race. That’s who they were. That’s why they raised us how they did. Noble experiment. Four choices, all of them fixed. But even fixed things have to move.”

He stood and put his arms over his head, bent them back behind him and touched his shoulder blades, the sockets of his pruned wings. When I listen to that second disk now, this is how I see him. A glow in his eyes, about to launch into some tune that will mean the end of self.

“But you know what, Mule? They don’t. Don’t move. White won’t move, and black can’t. Well, white moves when black buys a place in the neighborhood. But beyond that, race is like the pyramids. Older than history and built to outlast it. You know what? Even thinking there are four choices is a joke. In this country, choice isn’t even on the menu.”

“Ruth’s married a Panther.” This, too, he somehow already knew. Maybe she’d told him when they’d met. All he did was nod. I carried on, stung. “Robert Rider. She’s joined, too.”

“Good for her. We all need to find our art.”

I flinched at the word. “She has the police reports. No, I mean for the fire. She and her husband…

They’re sure. They say if the—if Mama had been white…”

“Sure of what? Sure of everything we already knew. Sure of what killed her? You’ll never know. That’s blackness, Mule. Never knowing. That’s how you know who you really are.” He did a horrible little minstrel-show shuffle. Years ago, I might have tried to talk him down, to bring him back from himself.

Now I just looked away.

“If Mama and Da both wanted family more than…” The bile backed up my throat. “Why the hell don’t we even have our family?”

“Who? You mean Mama’s?” He held still, scanning the past. He alone was old enough to remember our grandparents. “Same reason Ruth took off, I guess.”

“Not the same reason.”

Jonah smiled at my open treason. His folded hands, steeple-style, touched his lips. “There was an argument. You remember. I told you, Mule. We can’t know. Didn’t I tell you? Race trumps family. It’s bigger than anything. Bigger than husband and wife. Bigger than brother and sister…” Bigger than objects in the sky. Bigger than knowing. And still there was one thing so small, it could slip past race without notice. Jonah put his arm around my shoulder. “Come on, brother. We’ve got work to do.”

We went back into the studio and recorded “The Crow” in one take—the only time in the entire recording session we hit a song perfectly on a single try. Jonah listened to the master tape again and again, probing for the smallest flaw. But he could find none.

A crow was with me

As I made my way from town.

Back and forth, all the way to now

It has flown around my head.

Crow, you strange creature,

Won’t you leave me be?

Are you waiting for prey here, soon?

Do you mean to seize my corpse?

Well, there isn’t much farther

To go upon this journey.

Crow, let me finally see

A faith that lasts to the grave.

He kept his laser-guided pitches, but all the while his voice dissolved the notes, sliding into them with a whiff of Billie Holiday wandering across the remains of a lynching. He sang the words into their final mystery.

The night we finished taping, we shook hands with the technicians and stepped out into the strangeness of our hometown. Midtown was a blaze of fossil fuel. We walked down Sixth Avenue through the thirties, mixing into the brittle after-hours crowd. A siren cut through the air from ten blocks away. I grabbed Jonah. I practically jumped on him.

“Just a cop, Joey. Nabbing some second-shift robber.”

My chest was wound up tighter than Schubert’s organ-grinder. I’d been conditioned. I was waiting for the return loop, for some part of the city to ignite. I knew what happened whenever we laid down his voice into permanence. We walked all the way from the studios to the Village. New York had as many alarms that night as any. I flinched at every one, until my brother’s amusement turned into disgust. By the time we hit Chelsea, we were quarreling.

“So Watts was my fault? This is what you think?”

“That’s not what I said. That’s not what I think.”

At Fourth Street, he gave up on me and took off alone. I went to the apartment and waited up for him all night. He didn’t show until the next day. When he did, the topic was off-limits. I wasn’t to ask him anything of consequence, ever again. Nor did he ever ask how I knew about Ruth. She, too, was now off-limits. All the things we couldn’t talk about left me endless time to replay the things I’d told him. I convinced myself I hadn’t betrayed Ruth. She wanted me to tell. She’d sworn me to secrecy the way Jesus banned his disciples from telling anyone he was going around working miracles.