I told her what I knew. But everything I taught her made her worse. She’d sung just fine when she met me. Better than fine: beautifully. She turned every tune vulnerable. She knew what each song needed. She charmed without knowing — freshness, clarity, her inadvertent sexiness, that jumpy rhythm that took hold of her body and wouldn’t let her go until the finish. But now, armed with the lessons I gave her, she began to make a stagy, polished, domed tone that sounded freakish. I’d cost her her father. I was costing her her voice. I’d probably cost her whatever friends she’d had before seeing me. We never spent time with anyone but ourselves. Teresa wasn’t sleeping through the night anymore, and she only ate the barest minimum she could get away with. I was killing the woman. And I’d never asked her for a thing.
“I want to put more time into my singing,” she said. “Maybe I should, you know, cut back on my work hours?”
My fault entirely. I should have known enough to stay away. Two months after her father had spit on the floor of the Glimmer Room, I found her sitting on her sofa in tears. “They’ve changed the locks. My parents.”
Something clicked. The song she’d shouted for as the man was leaving: her daddy’s favorite. The song she lip-synched to, the one I’d first fallen for: both written by the same duo. The songs of her Sunday-morning liturgy, preached by her old man. “What did he call you? Your father. What was his pet name for you?”
She wouldn’t answer. She didn’t have to, goodness knows.
We settled into a narrowed routine, simple enough for both of us. She surrendered her own place to our comfort. I grew careful of what I said. I told her her meat loaf with tomato sauce was the best thing I’d ever tasted, and paid the price for several weeks running. I happened to say robin’s-egg blue was my favorite color, and found her the next Saturday, repainting the kitchen. We rarely went to my apartment. So far as I can remember, we never spent the night there. She abandoned, without asking, all the places I wouldn’t take her to. I knew it was shame; I didn’t know of what. I did love her.
I was alone in my apartment one afternoon in the summer of 1970. There was a knock at the door, rare enough in any season. I opened, off balance, and took a full three seconds to recognize my sister and Robert, her husband, my brother-in-law, with whom I’d spent all of forty minutes in this life, three years before. I stood staring, somewhere between fear and joy, until Ruth cleared her throat. “Joey, can you let us in?”
I fell over myself welcoming them. I squeezed her until Ruth begged for mercy. I kept saying, “I can’t believe it.” Ruth kept answering, “Believe it, brother.”
Robert asked, “Believe what?” His voice’s agitation could not keep out the amusement.
“How did you find me?” I thought she must have been in touch with Da. They were talking again. No one else could have told her where I was.
“Find you?” Ruth shot Robert a sad grin. She put her hand on my head, as if I had a fever. “Finding’s the easy part, Joey. It’s losing you that has been my lifelong problem.”
I still didn’t know what I’d done to her. I didn’t care. She was back in my life. My sister was here. “When did you hit town? Where are you living these days?”
Their silence gave me an awful moment. Ruth gazed around my tiny cell of an apartment, terrified of something she was sure would pop out of the nearest cupboard. “Living? These days? Funny you should ask.”
Robert sat on my rickety kitchen folding chair, one ankle on the other knee. “Would it be possible to put up here? With you. Just for a day or two.”
They had no bags. “Of course. Anything. Always.”
I didn’t press them for information, and they didn’t volunteer. Whatever was after them was only fifty yards behind, down the street, across the highway. I saw them look at each other and keep mum. They weren’t about to make me accessory to anything. “Sit. Damn, it’s good to see you. Here, sit. Can I get you a drink?”
My sister pinned my wrists like a loving nurse, grinning and stilling me. “Joey, it’s just us.”
Robert, the man my sister had tied her life to, a giant I didn’t know from Adam, fixed me with his X-ray eyes. He seemed to me everything I wasn’t: solid, substantial, centered, dedicated, dignified. His aura filled the room. “So how’s the gig?”
I hung my head. “It’s music. I’m taking requests. How about you?”
“Huh.” He put his hands on his head, catching up to himself. “Us, too. We’re taking requests, too.”
“I read that Huey’s free,” I said.
From where she stood fiddling with the kitchen curtains, Ruth shouted. “Joey! Where did you find time to read that? I thought you were busy with your nightclub act.”
She must have been near the club. Seen the posters. “Enlightened owners. They let me look at the papers on my breaks.”
“Huey’s free. True.” Robert squinted at me, guessing my weight. “But everything the man has tried to do — the whole movement — is coming apart.”
“Robert,” Ruth warned.
“What’s the difference? The shit’s public knowledge.”
I’d followed the stories, if only for their sake. The gun battle at UCLA. Hampton and Clark, the two Chicago Panther organizers, killed in their sleep in an illegal police raid. Connecticut trying Bobby Seale for killing a police informant. The FBI waging all-out war. Hundreds of members killed, jailed, or fleeing the country. Eldridge Cleaver in Cuba. I’d thought for a long time that Ruth and Robert, like Jonah, might have gone abroad. Seeing them cowering here, I wished they had.
“You know about the New York roundup?” The force of Robert’s gaze terrified me.
“I read… The papers said…” I’d been unable to take the official reports in. Twenty-one Panthers arrested, charged with an elaborate plan to blow up a suite of civic buildings and kill scores of police. The group that my sister and her husband had helped to organize.
“The papers, man. You got to decide whether you’re with the papers or with the people.” He jutted his head, besieged, a rhetorical boy, a thousand years old, sick to death of the disaster this country had made of everything human. I wasn’t with the papers. I wasn’t with the people. I wasn’t even with myself. I wanted to be with my sister.
“I’m starving,” Ruth said.
It seemed a godsend, something I might help with. “There’s an Italian place just down the street.”
Robert and Ruth looked at me, embarrassed at my density. Robert reached into his pocket and drew out four crumpled dollar bills. “Could you bring us something back? Doesn’t matter what, so long as it’s hot.”
I waved him off. “Back in a minute with the best bowl of steamers you ever tasted.”
His gratitude ruined me. “Owe you one, brother.”
I took the word all the way down to the ocean and back. When I returned, I caught them arguing. They stopped the instant my key hit the lock. “Now this is what you call shellfish,” I said, sounding stupid even to myself. But Ruth was filled with thanks. She kissed, then bit, my hand. The two of them dug in. It had been some time. I waited until they’d gotten their fill. Then I tried to draw Robert out a little. Juilliard dropout, commencing his belated education.
Robert indulged me. We talked about all that had happened since I’d seen them last, the running battle of the last three years. I held out for the ghost of nonviolent resistance. Robert didn’t laugh at me, but he refused to encourage the hope. “A small group has all the rest of us locked up down in the hold, and they’re standing over the hatches with guns. The longer they do that, the harder they need to.”