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.”