Richard Powers (96 page)

One would have to be dead already to survive such inheritance. We passed a row of century-old houses, now carved up into rented rooms. Ruth hummed under her breath. I couldn’t make out the tune. When the tune changed to words, she seemed to speak to someone across the street. “Look, Joey. It’s easy.

The easiest question in the world. If they come and start rounding us up, which line are you going to get into?”

“No question. Not even a choice.”

“But they’ve been rounding us up, Joey.” She spread her hands around the neighborhood. “They’re rounding us up now. They’ll keep rounding us up, for as long as there’s a calendar.”

I tried to follow her. When she spoke next, it reeled me back from Da’s deep-space catalog.

“You should have married that white girl, Joey. I’m sure she was nice.”

“Is. Is nice. But I’m not.”

“Incompatible?” I looked at her. Her mouth twisted into a crook of empathy.

“Incompatible.”

“Take two people.”

I waited. Then I realized this was the entire recipe. “Two people. Exactly.”

“Mama and Da would have had to divorce. If she’d lived.”

“You think?” The stories we told about their story no longer mattered to them.

“Of course. Look at the statistics.”

“Numbers never lie,” I said, in our old German accent.

She winced and grinned at the same time. Hybrid vigor. “Robert and I were incompatible. But it worked.”

“What about his parents?”

Ruth looked at me, seeing ghosts. “You never knew? Your own brother-in-law?” Blaming, taking the blame. “I never told you? Of course not; when could I have? Robert was raised in a foster home. White folks. Only in it for the aid checks.”

We covered two blocks. We were hit up twice for cash, once to help get a car out of hock to drive a wife to the hospital and once to tide a man over until an accident at his bank could be ironed out in court.

Both times, my sister made me give them five dollars.

“They’re just going to buy booze or dope with it,” I said.

“Yeah? And what world-fixing were you getting up to with it?”

Every third yard was a pachyderm’s graveyard of shopping carts, washing machines, and stripped Impalas whose last highway would be four cinder blocks. A cluster of kids Kwame’s age worked a basketball in an empty lot, dribbling between the larger shards of glass, using oil drums for their picks and rolls, and chucking the ball at a rim that seemed made from an old TV antenna. Every square foot of concrete was garlanded in tendrils of graffiti, the elaborate signatures of those who were prevented from putting their names on anything else. The block housed more poverty per yard than even my sister could identify with. The furnaces of progress were busy burning all the fuel they could find.

Whatever dream my brother and I had been raised on was dead. Incredible to me: the 1980s . Uplift had fallen deeper than the place where it had started, back before hopes were raised.

My years in Europe opened my eyes to the place stamped on my passport. Three months before, with Voces, I’d toured the Adriatic, singing an old Latin monastic text: “Teach me to love what I cannot hope to know; teach me to know what I cannot hope to be.” Here I was, walking through a ruined Philadelphia with my sister, begging to be what I couldn’t know, trying to know what I couldn’t love. All song that didn’t hear this massacre was a lie.

My sister saw her own landscape. “We need control of our own neighborhoods. It wouldn’t solve things, of course. But it would be a start.”

Always another start. And a start after that. “Ruth?” I was willing to look at any misery around me, except my sister. “How long are you planning to stay around here?”

“You still on white people’s time, aren’t you?” I spun around, stiffening. Then I felt her arm slipping through mine. “Funny thing? My Oakland? It looks a lot like this.”

“You could move.”

She shook her head at me. “No, I couldn’t, Joey. It’s where all his work went. It’s where…he died.”

We walked in silence, turning the last corner to Papap’s house again. Ruth stopped and blurted, “How am I supposed to do this, Joey? A ten-year-old on his way to hell and another little half-year-old with a murdered father.”

“What are you saying? Kwame’s in trouble?”

She shook her head. “You’ll go to your grave a classical musician, won’t you? A black boy in trouble.

Imagine.” I pulled away from her, and she exploded, throwing her hands in the air. She brought them back down over her face, like falling ash. “I can’t. I can’t. I’ll never make it.”

My first thought, God help me, was, Make it where? I closed the distance and put my hands on her shoulders. She threw them off. As quickly as her tears came, they stopped. “Okay. Okay. No crisis. Just another husbandless single sister mother. Millions of us.”

“How many of you got brothers?”

Ruth squeezed my arm, a frantic tourniquet. “You don’t know, Joey. You can’t begin.” She felt me flinch, and grabbed on tighter. “I don’t mean that. I mean what’s happened to us, since you took off. The bottom’s dropped out of the whole country. Like living through a lifelong air raid. For a boy, a little boy?” Her shudder passed through me. I’d never feel safe again. “You haven’t noticed it, in him? You really haven’t noticed?”

“Kwame? No. Well, he dresses…a little like a criminal.”

She barked in pained amusement and smacked the air. “All the kids do now. And half the adults, too.”

“And I’ve noticed he hates policemen.”

“That’s just common sense. Survival benefit.”

We stood still outside our grandfather’s house. I looked in and saw him at the window, pulling back a white curtain to look at us. Dr. Daley: the family practitioner under siege in the neighborhood he’d once served. He motioned violently for us to come in. Ruth nodded and held up a finger, bargaining for thirty seconds. Seeing no immediate emergency, he let the curtain fall and retreated.

Ruth leaned toward me. “Kwame’s not like Robert. He has Robert’s healthy resentment. But Robert always had a counterplan. He was always working on an answer. One more public education drive, one more demonstration. Kwame’s got the rage, but not a single answer for it. Robert used to keep him in line by challenging him. Used to say, ‘Best thing to do when you’re feeling mad is make something of yourself that’s not them.’ When Kwame explodes, I do what Robert used to do. I sit him down with a sheet of paper and colored pencils. Or park him in front of a box of paint. Kwame can make—oh! The wildest things. But since… The last few times I tried to sit him down…”

Then the boy appeared at the window, watching us. Through the glass, even with his headphones and their pounding pulse, he heard us talking about him. Fury and apathy fought for a controlling interest in his eyes. My sister looked back at her son, smiling at him through her panic. But what can you hide from a child who has already seen death? She turned and grabbed me just below the collar. “How much are we talking about, Joey? My portion of…the savings?”

Ruth’s third of the inheritance had been sitting in balanced investments, compounding for more years than her son had lived. It couldn’t match that boy’s compounded experience, but it was a usable sum. I gave her an estimate. Her face did its own skeptical calculation. “We have some, too, Robert and I. And Papap keeps offering—the piece Mama never got. We could get matching funds. There are sources—not many, but they’re there. It’s all Robert wanted. His last sustained plan before… He worked so hard on it, I can see the blueprints.”

I was afraid to ask her to make sense. She started up again, steering me toward the door. “Joseph Strom. How would you like to give your nephew music lessons?”

I pressed back, feeling her hand’s resistance. “Ruth. Don’t even joke. What could I possibly… He’d eat me alive.”

She laughed and shook her head, dragging me on toward the door. “Oh, Kwame’s nothing, baby. Wait until you get a classroom full of ten-year-olds! Wait until little Robert comes up through the ranks.”

That’s how I returned to Oakland with my sister and her sons. It was as easy as falling. As soon as Ruth described Robert’s school to me, I knew I’d been looking for a reason to keep me from returning to Europe. Something big enough to put up against the salvage of the past. Nothing else had claim over my life. My single problem lay in breaking the news to Jonah.

We called him from Philadelphia just before we left. I had trouble finding him at home, in Ghent. When he heard my voice, Jonah made it sound as if he’d been waiting for weeks at the side of the phone. “Damn it, Mule. I’ve been dying by inches here. What’s happening?”

“Why didn’t you just call if you wanted to hear from us?”

“That wouldn’t exactly be hearing from you, would it?”

“I’m going to California. Ruth’s building a school.”

“And you are going to…”

“Fucker. I’m going to teach for her.”

He thought a moment before saying anything. Or maybe it was the transatlantic lag. “I see. You’re quitting the group. You’re going to kill Voces Antiquae?” With the bull market in early music not even starting to peak, superlative, vibrato-free voices were springing up all over. I’d always been the ensemble’s weak link, the amateur latecomer. This was my brother’s chance to replace me with a real bass, a trained one, someone who could do justice to the others and lift them to that last level of international renown that had vaguely eluded us. He didn’t have to mourn the loss of my voice. He needed only to let me know how completely I’d betrayed him.

“Well, we had our run, didn’t we?” His was the voice of the future past. He sounded light-years away, anxious to get off the phone and start auditioning my replacements. “So how is your sister?”

“You want to talk to her?”

From the kitchen counter, where she’d been pretending not to listen, Ruth shook her head. Jonah said, “I don’t know, Joey. Does she want to talk with me?”

Ruth cursed me under her breath as I handed her the phone. She took the receiver as if it were a bone club. Her sound was small and flat. “JoJo.” After a while: “Long time. You old yet?” She listened, dead.

Then she sat up, defending. “Don’t start this. Just…don’t.” After another pause, she said, “No, Jonah.

That’s what you should do. That’s what you should fucking do.”

She lapsed into another listening silence, then handed the phone to Papap. He shouted into it. “Hallo.

Hallo? Dieses ist mein Enkel?”

The words ripped me. They did worse to Ruth. She came over to me and whispered, so Europe couldn’t hear. “You sure about this? You had work. Maybe you belong over there.”

She just wanted noise from me. She couldn’t bear the sounds of that other conversation. We talked in a drone, drowning out Papap and listening in by helpless turns. He and Jonah talked for three or four minutes, nothing, everything—collapsing decades into a few hundred words. Papap grilled Jonah about Europe, Solidarity, Gorbachev. God only knows what answers Jonah invented. “When are you coming home?” Papap asked. Ruth tried to talk over the words, as if that would erase them. But that’s the thing about sounds: Even when they all happen at once, none of them cancels out the others. They just keep stacking up, beyond any chord’s ability to hold.

There was a silence, out of which Papap suddenly charged, enraged. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Behind the times. Come back and listen. Every song and dance in this country has gone brown.” Ruth and I quit our deaf show. She stared at me, but before I could even shrug, our grandfather was sailing. “You think you’re a traitor out there? You’re nothing but an advance scout. A double agent… Well, call it that, too, if you like. Name an immortal piece that wouldn’t sound better sung by the hired help. That little world you’ve been scouting is going to be overrun with black, once we show the least little bit of interest. Sie werden noch besser sein als im Basketball. ”

Ruth quizzed me with a look. I felt myself giggling bitterly. “Just like basketball,” I translated. “Only better.”

They improvised their good-byes and my grandfather hung up. “Interesting man, your brother. He didn’t know that the Soviet Union had a new leader.” He chuckled, his shoulders jarring loose from his body.

“I’m not entirely sure he’d heard of basketball, either.”

“What did he say to you?” I asked Ruth.

“He said I should travel. Get my mind off the past.”

The whole family showed for our departure. My uncle Michael, my aunts Lucille and Lorene, most of their kids and grandkids—I still didn’t know all their names. They gathered the night before we left, to send us out. We sang. What else was there? Delia Banks was there, her sound as wide as a flowering chestnut and as delicate as sweet williams. She didn’t solo, except for an aerial twelve bars. Tunes fell in line, jumbling up and overlapping, talking to one another, taking themselves as their only topic. The Daley game, too, was Crazed Quotations, drawn from another well, the water colder and more bracing. Where do you think your mother got it from? The send-off had no sadness. We’d meet back here next year and the year after, we and all our dead, as our dead had been meeting here without us every prior year. And if not here, then that flatted-seventh somewhere else.

Late that night, after the last cousin left, Papap came into his dead son’s room, the room that for weeks I’d inhabited. He held a stiff, shiny square of paper. He sat in his boy’s ancient chair, next to where I stretched out. I scrambled to my feet, and he waved me back down.

“Your sister got most of the keepsakes. I gave what I had to her years ago. I didn’t know you’d be showing up. But I found these for you.” A Polaroid of my brother and me opening Christmas presents, a photo Da had taken and given to the Daleys. And an older Brownie photo of a woman who could only be my mother. I couldn’t stop looking. I took it in in long gasps, a suffocating man needing air. It was the first fresh look I’d had of her since the fire. In the tiny black-and-white print, a young woman—far younger than I was now—of uncertain tone but clearly African features looked back through the lens, smiling weakly, seeing on the exposing film everything that would happen to her. She wore a dress of midcalf length with wide, pointed shoulders, the height of fashion in the years before my birth.