I played well. But not as well as my brother sang. That afternoon, he sounded as if he’d been sandbagging for all our last six months on the road. He did more to seduce these judges than he’d done for full houses in Seattle and San Francisco. He sailed up to the roundest sounds he knew how to make. The jaded New York set squirmed, trying to pretend there wasn’t something special going on. People kept asking where he’d sung, what roles, under whom. Everyone was dumbstruck with his answer. “You’ve never soloed in a choral work? Never sung in front of an orchestra?”
It probably would have been shrewd to stretch the truth a little. But Jonah couldn’t help it. “Not since childhood,” he admitted.
They gave him da Ponte Mozart. He romped through it on a lark. They gave him meaty Puccini breast-beaters. He aired them out. They didn’t know how to position him. They passed him up to a senior casting director, Crispin Linwell. Linwell studied my brother like a man regarding a rack of magazines, the heels of his black leather boots apart, horn-rim glasses pushed up on his forehead, the arms of a cardigan tied around his neck. He made Jonah sing the opening strains of “Auf Ewigkeit,” from Parsifal, cutting him off after a few bars. He sent his aides upstairs on a raiding mission to steal a favorite soprano, Gina Hills, out of a closed rehearsal. The woman came into the room cursing roundly. Crispin Linwell waved her down. “My dear, we need you for a noble experiment.”
Miss Hills calmed a little when she learned that the experiment involved the first love duet from act two of Tristan. She wanted Isolde, and thought this trial was hers. Linwell insisted on playing the piano reduction. He set them a smoldering tempo, then let the two of them loose.
My brother, of course, had often looked at the score. He’d known the scene by ear for a decade. But he’d never sung a single note of it anywhere outside of lessons and our apartment shower. Worse, it had been ages since he’d sung anything with anyone. When Mr. Linwell announced his experiment, I knew the jig was up. Jonah would be exposed as just another pretty voice, unable to work and play with others. Another over-reaching recitalist, stumbling in his bid to make it onto the big stage.
After about two minutes, it dawned on Miss Hills that she was playing a love scene with a black man. Realization rippled through her with the floating chords. I saw the uncertainty turn into revulsion as she scrambled to figure out why she’d been set up for this ambush. She flubbed an entrance, and we lived through an awful moment when I was sure she was going to run screaming from the room. Only the thought of her career held her in place.
Then the old musical philter did its trick again. Something came up out of my brother’s mouth, something I’d never heard him do. Eight measures later, Gina Hills was smitten in midphrase. She wasn’t a homely woman, but she was built like an opera singer. Her face was like her voice: best sampled from the middle of the house. My brother somehow turned her into Venus. He invested her with his full power, and she took it. The traction of his phrases drew her into his orbit. They started out on opposite sides of the piano, fifteen feet from each other. Four minutes in, they locked gazes and began dancing around each other. She wouldn’t touch him, but reached out as if to. He wouldn’t close that last gap between them that their duet so completely destroyed. The wonder of flaunting in broad daylight in front of a handful of listeners the last great taboo only stoked her sound.
Jonah started out with the score in front of him. But as they surged through the scene, he needed it less and less, singing over the top of the lowered page, finally jettisoning it altogether. Gina Hills hit the top of a sustained phrase, her face filling with blood. Jonah kept building, wave on wave, until the knot of listeners disappeared and this couple stood alone, naked and lifted, turning need into the most sublime delay available to the human body. This was 1967, the year the Supreme Court made it legal, even in that third of the country where it was still forbidden, for Jonah to marry a woman of this Isolde’s color, a woman of our father’s race.
Linwell rolled out with a gliss, stood up at the keys, and waved his fingers. “Yikes. All right, people. Air raid’s over. Back to your normal lives.” He snagged Gina Hills, who, in some private game of musical chairs, once the music stopped, refused to look at my brother. Linwell pinched her shoulders. “You were on some other planet, love.” Miss Hills looked up, glowing and crestfallen. She’d wanted the role more than she wanted love. Then, for ten minutes, she’d inhabited it, the ancient tale of chemically induced disaster. She wobbled, still under the drug’s residue. Linwell could have promised her an opening night in the next season, and she’d still have left that rehearsal room subdued.
When the room cleared, Linwell turned to us. His English eyes narrowed at me and wondered whether he could get away with asking me to wait in the hall. But he let me ride, then turned to absorb my brother. “What are we going to do with you?” Jonah had a notion or two. But he kept them hidden. Linwell shook his head and examined his clipboard of notes from the afternoon. I could see him making the calculation: Was it still too soon? Would ever be too soon, on such a country’s stage?
He set down the scribbles and looked my brother in the eye. “I’ve heard about you, of course.” It felt like a police shakedown. Don’t lie to us, boy. We know you’re up to something. “I thought you sang lieder. Not even that. I heard you did Dowland.” He couldn’t mask his distaste.
“I do,” Jonah said. Just that: I. I was dispatched to whatever family would have me.
Linwell sat silent, fighting embarrassment. “Would you…” he began, seeking out some sordid favor. “Would you mind…” He gestured toward the piano. It took me a moment. He didn’t believe us. He wanted proof.
Jonah and I took up our battle stations so routinely, I almost slipped and bowed out of sheer habit. Jonah made the massive turn without even thinking about it. He looked at me, inhaled, lifted imperceptibly, and on the downbeat we were there, tied together, on “Time Stands Still.” We finished into the silence that the music named. I patted the piano lid and looked at Crispin Linwell. His eyes were wet. This man, who hadn’t listened to music for pleasure for longer than I’d been alive, remembered, for three minutes, where he came from.
“Why would anyone want to give that up?”
Jonah blinked, deciding how real the question was. He’d have smiled right through, but Mr. Linwell waited for an answer. Someone doing what he was born to do, someone who could bring down a little corner of eternity onto earth wanted to throw it all over for pumped-up, gaudy spectacle. I could think of no reason big enough, except one. You boys can be anything you want to be.
Jonah leaned against the piano and drew his hand along the back of his neck. His eyebrows played with the question, still innocent. “Oh, you know.” I winced and dug down into the piano stool. “It’s more fun to sing with other people.” He slipped down into a basso profundo. “Ahm-a tarred of livin’ alone.”
Crispin Linwell didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile. He only shook his head. “Be careful what you wish for.” He pulled his glasses from his forehead and tapped the tip of his pen on the clipboard’s clip, a rapid motor rhythm. His whole body drew up in his chair and professionalized. “We can find something for you. You will sing with us. With…other people. Your agent’s number’s on the vita?… Fine. Tell him to expect a call.” He shook our hands and dismissed us. But before we could go, Linwell stopped Jonah with one hand to the shoulder. I knew what he was going to say before he said it. I’d heard it often, impossible lifetimes ago, although, back then, always in the plural. “You are one of a kind.”