Richard Powers (92 page)

Jonah’s shoulders tensed. What details? Death settled all the details. In his face, I read the extent of his banishment. Ruth had tried to contact me. The calls, the messages, all for me alone. She’d never once tried to reach him. “How is she?”

“Teresa didn’t know.”

“I meant Teresa.” He flicked his fingers toward his chest: Give it here. I didn’t know what he wanted until I looked down and saw the telephone number crumpled in my palm. I handed it over. “Area code two-one-five. Where is that?”

Nowhere I’d ever lived. He gestured toward the phone. I shook my head. I needed time. Time to put together all the time that had just come apart.

We sang that night. With what concentration I had, I braced for catastrophe. But somehow we survived, dragged along by overpractice. We took the slowest Josquin in history. Those in the audience who weren’t scandalized or bored to death fell through the auditorium floor and descended into the cracks between space. Whatever the final verdict, no one would ever hear its like again.

I lay in bed that night thinking of Ruth. Our sister had been way out ahead of us. She’d jumped into the future long before Jonah or I had admitted to the present. She’d seen what was coming down. She was riding the nightmare before her older brothers had awakened from the dream. I’d always imagined that Ruth’s suffering came from being too light to merit race’s worst injuries. That night, in a crowded hotel in Avignon where most guests assumed I was from Morocco, I finally saw. Race’s worst injuries are color-blind.

Something kept Jonah up, too. It wasn’t the Josquin. At 3:00A .M., I heard him pacing in the hall outside my door, wondering whether to knock. I called to him, and he walked in as if keeping an appointment.

“Pennsylvania,” he said. I just blinked in the dark. “Area code two-one-five. Eastern Pennsylvania.” I tried to fit the information to my sister. Da’s last hallucination had her moving to California. That’s where I’d always imagined her. Jonah didn’t sit. He stood at the window and pulled back the drape. On the horizon, the Palais des Papes glowed like a monstrous Gothic illuminated manuscript. “I’ve been thinking.” He made the words stretch from last afternoon all the way back several years. “She must be right. Ruth must be right. I mean, about…the fire. No other way.”

He looked out the window, on all the violence he’d so long and beautifully denied. Jonah had met Robert only through me. The details of Robert’s death were to us still as obscure as God. But this death confirmed the central fact of our lives, the one we’d forever kept as abstract as the art we gave ourselves to. We’d lived as if murder weren’t constant in the place we came from. We hid in the concert hall, sanctuary from the world’s real sound. But thirty years ago—a lifetime—long before we knew how to read the story, stray hatred scattered us. As Jonah said the words, the fact turned obvious. And just as obvious: Some part of me had always believed.

He stood for a long time, saying nothing. Nor could I say anything to him. But Jonah was my brother. We had, at one time or another, played everything together. Alone of all things, we knew each other. He’d taught me, and I him: All music lived and died inside the rests. Sometime around four o’clock, he said,

“Call her.” He’d been keeping his eye on the clock, on the time differences, for the very last moment it would be decent to call.

I jacked myself out of bed, threw on a robe, and sat again with a phone in my hands. I tried to pass the receiver to him, but he refused. He wasn’t the one she’d called. I dialed the number, methodical as scales. Again, the jangle of an American ring, followed by its transatlantic echo. Between each ring, I rejected a thousand opening words. Rootie. Root. Ms. Strom. Mrs. Rider. Laughing, grieving, begging her forgiveness. Nothing felt real. Ruth. It’s Joseph. Your brother.

Then the click of the receiver lifting on that other continent, the sound of a voice that killed all preparation. Instead of my sister, an old man. “Hello?” he challenged. A man who sounded a hundred years old. I froze in his voice, worse than stage fright. “Hello? Who’s there? Who is this?” On the line, in the room behind him, younger voices asked if there was something wrong.

Paths collapsed upon themselves. “Dr. Daley?” I asked. When he grunted, I said, “This is your grandson.”

The Visitation

During the call to Philadelphia, Jonah hovered at my elbow. But he wouldn’t take the phone when I handed it to him. Speech without pitches terrified him. He wanted me between him and where we came from. My grandfather put Ruth on the line. She tried to tell me what had happened to Robert, but she couldn’t begin. Her voice was past anger, past warmth, past memory. Past everything but shock. The month since her husband’s death had done nothing to help her back. Nor would years.

She got out two numb sentences. Then she gave me back to our grandfather. William Daley couldn’t quite grasp which of Ruth’s brothers I was. I said I’d very much like to meet him. “Young man, I turned ninety six weeks ago. If you want to meet me, you’d best catch the next flight out.”

I told Jonah I wanted to go. The idea of returning twisted Jonah’s face, half temptation, half disgust. “You can’t fix anything, Joey. You know that? You can’t fix what’s already happened.” But he pushed me away with his free hand while he pulled with the other. “No, of course. Go. One of us has to. It’s Ruth.

She’s back.” He seemed to think I might at least fix the things that hadn’t happened yet.

I bought an open ticket. Ruth was back. But she’d never really left. We were the ones who’d gone away.

My uncle Michael met me at Philadelphia International. He wasn’t hard to pick out of the crowd. All I had to do was look. He picked me out, too, as soon as I came through the passenger chute. What could be easier? Bewildered, middle-aged, mixed-race boy gazing all over the place in excitement and shame. I moved toward him, holding my two carry-ons in front of me as if they were delinquent children. My uncle came up to me, as shaky as I was, but empty-handed. After a second’s hesitation, he took my shoulders with the strangest, most wonderful grace. Don’t know you. Don’t know why. But I will.

It amused him, how awkward two total strangers could be. We were total foreigners, connected by blood in another life. “You remember me?” Dazed, I did. I’d last seen him for all of four minutes, when I was thirteen, a third of a century ago, at my mother’s funeral. Even more remarkable: He remembered me. “You’ve changed. You’ve gotten…” He snapped his fingers, jogging his memory.

“Older?” I suggested. He clapped his hands and pointed at me: Bingo.

He took one of the bags and we walked the long concourse to the parking lot. He asked about the flight, Europe, and my brother. I asked about Ruth—alive; Dr. Daley—also, remarkably. Michael told me of his wife and children, his lot in life. He was a personnel officer at Penn. “Only do this chauffeur job in my after hours, when vanished relations come back from the dead.” He looked me up and down, in the wonder of genetic recognition. We looked more like each other than either of us could accept. He seemed to be deciding whether his own nephew could really be white.

His car was the Hindenburg . Years in a small foreign country will do that to a person’s sense of scale.

Michael started the engine, and a burst of exuberance blared out of the dashboard. It was only two beats, but at a volume I’d forgotten, from a rhythm section wider than oppression is long. It had been forever since I’d heard anything like it. In something short of embarrassment, Michael leaned forward and snapped off the stream.

“Please. Don’t shut it off for me.”

“Just old R & B. My feel-good. My church. What I listen to when I’m alone.”

“It sounded like a dream.”

“You’d think a man well into his fifties would have outgrown that.”

“Not until we die.”

“Amen. And not even then.”

“I used to play that stuff.” He looked at me in disbelief. “In Atlantic City. Only, you know, solo piano.

Tip glass on the music rack. Liberace Covers Motown. The old Eastern European émigrés who came down for holidays couldn’t get enough.”

Michael coughed so hard, I thought I’d have to take the wheel.

“People are strange.”

He whistled. “You got that. Stranger than anyone.” He flipped the radio back on, although he doused the volume. We listened together, each according to his needs. By the time we hit the heart of town, we were harmonizing. Michael did this outrageous full-pipe falsetto, and I hit the changes in the bass. He smiled at my passing tones. Theory can help get you through a shortfall of soul—at least in the easy keys.

We turned off the highway onto local streets. The size of the most modest apartment block amazed me after years in hunchbacked Ghent. We neared his boyhood house. Michael grew morose. “Rough times.

Trickle down shakes the last few golden drops on inner Philly. Every cheap scrap of manufacture has headed offshore. Then it’s our fault for doing crack.”

I was at sea. I couldn’t even ask for definitions.

Michael looked out the window, seeing his old neighborhood through my eyes. His face was racked with betrayal. “You would have loved this street. So fine once. No way you can even recognize it now.

We’ve been trying to get the doctor out of here for the last five years. He’s not moving. Insists on dying inside that monstrosity. Riding out the decline and fall until the house collapses around him or his body gives up, whichever comes first. ‘What would happen to Mama if we sold the house to strangers?’”

“Mama?” My grandmother. Nettie Ellen Daley. “Isn’t she…”

“Oh, yeah. Completely. Two years ago. The doctor hasn’t quite come into possession of the fact yet. A real ass-buster, I have to tell you. My sisters and me, coming all the way in here, five times a week. We go through caretakers like chocolate through a dog.”

His street indeed reeled from the present. Even the most stately old houses had died intestate. We slowed and turned into the driveway of an ample house bucking the tide around it. Michael flipped off the radio as we hit the driveway mouth. He caught me smiling at the gesture. “Old habit.”

“Not his music of choice?”

“Don’t get him started on it.”

We were still yards from the house. “His hearing’s really that good?”

“My Jesus, yes. You got it from somewhere, didn’t you?”

The shock of that thought was still banging around in me when a figure drifted out onto the lawn to meet us. A full, fluid, statuesque woman, one shade paler than I remembered her. I was out of the car without feeling myself leave. Michael stayed behind the wheel, giving us our minute. She had her head down as I closed the distance. She wouldn’t look at me. Then I put my arms around my sister.

Ruth wouldn’t hold still for the embrace. But she gave me more than I’d hoped, and I held her longer than I had all my life. Three full seconds: It was enough. She pulled free to look at me. She wore red robes and a green-and-black headdress that even I knew was supposed to invoke Africa. “Ruth. Let me look at you. Where’ve you been?”

“In hell. Here. This country. How about you, Joseph?” Her eyes were deep and broken. Something was wrong with her arms. She hadn’t seen me for even longer than I hadn’t seen her.

“I’ve missed you.” Almost chant.

“Why come back now, Joey? Black men are killed every week. Why did you wait until it was…?”

For you, Ruth. I came back for you. Nothing else big enough to bring me.

A young boy, maybe a fifth grader, materialized on the lawn beside us. I didn’t see him come up, and the sudden apparition scared me. He was dark, closer to Michael than to Ruth or me. Michael got out of the car and I turned to him. Happy for the deflection, I waved toward the boy. “Yours?”

Michael laughed. “You’re stuck on the escalator, man. You’re in a time hole. My oldest daughter has one of her own almost this old!”

“Mine,” Ruth said.

“Not yours,” the boy told her.

My sister sighed. “Kwame. This is Joseph. Your uncle.” The boy looked as if we were collaborating to cheat him out of his inheritance. He didn’t say, Not my uncle. He didn’t have to. Ruth sighed again.

“Oakland. That’s where we’ve been. Oakland.” The word went up my spine like prophecy. “Community organizing. Working.”

“Then the cops killed my dad,” Kwame said.

I put my hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off. Ruth put her hand where mine had been, and he suffered it, but believing nothing. Ruth steered her child toward the house, and we men followed.

My mother’s father waited just inside the door. His close-cropped hair was Niagara white. The air around him, like the high-tide mark on a beach, still registered how large a man he’d been. He wore a steel gray suit. Everyone had dressed for this occasion except me. He tilted his head back to get me in the bottom pane of his bifocals. “Jonah Strom.”

“Joseph,” I said, holding out my hand.

My objection angered him. “I still don’t see why she had to give you boys the same name. Never mind.

Es freut mich, Herr Strom. ” He took my hand, even as I shrank. “Heißen Sie willkommen zu unserem Haus.”

I stood there gaping. Uncle Michael chuckled as he dragged my bags upstairs. “Don’t let him fool you.

He’s been practicing for the last three days.”

“He can make hotel reservations and change your currency for you, too,” Ruth said.

Dr. Daley threatened to break forth in Sturm und Drang. “Sie nehmen keine Rücksicht auf andere.”

Something more than three days’ practice.

Ruth put her arm around him. “It’s okay, Papap. He’s not an other. He’s one of us.”

From the hall to my right came crying. A startling sound: the wail of a creature wholly dependent on the unknown. Ruth moved toward the cry almost before I heard it. She slipped into the distant room, murmuring as if to herself. When she came back, she held a dozen-pound squirming infant trying to fling itself free to safety or death.

“Also mine,” Ruth said. “This is little Robert. Five months. Robert, this is your uncle Joey. Haven’t told you about him yet.”

Michael set me up in an upstairs room. “This was my brother’s. We’re moving Kwame into the twins’