My sister waved her hands in the air. “It’s not just the people with the power. It’s the second-generation immigrants, locked down in the hold with us. First word they learn when they set foot in this country is nigger. People who have nothing, turning against one another. Pure Kapo system.”
I listened, just listened, unable to add a word. When the clams were gone, we hit a lull.
“Joey,” Ruth said. “You’re sleeping with someone.”
“How did you know?” I scanned the apartment for giveaways: pictures, notes, extra toothbrush. There were none.
“You seem good. Healthy.” It seemed to relieve Ruth. I loved Teresa more in the moment my sister spoke those words than I had since she had first sung with me. “She white?”
Robert stood and flexed. “Okay, now. Time out. Give the man some peace.”
“What? It’s a legitimate question. Man’s driving a shiny new vehicle. You ask him the make and model.”
Robert caught my eye. “It’s all right, brother. I’m sleeping with a German chick.”
“If I find her, husband, I’ll kill the both of you dead.”
“Her father’s disowned her,” I said. “Teresa’s father, I mean.” It sounded like a bagatelle, next to whatever Robert and Ruth were facing.
Robert rubbed his globe of Afro. “Bad deal. We’ll see about making her an honorary.”
“Teresa.” Ruth’s smile tried to stay polite. “When do we get to meet her?” My sister wanted to meet me somewhere. Find a place alongside this world, big enough for both of us to move in.
“Anytime. Tonight.”
“Maybe next visit,” Robert said. “This one ain’t exactly meet and greet.”
His words yanked them out of my story world, and the two of them were fugitives again. We sat silently, listening to signals in the traffic outside. At last, Ruth said, “It’s not that we don’t trust you, Joey.”
“I understand,” I lied. I understood only their pacing, their animal panic.
Robert spoke into the tips of his folded hands. “The less we say, the easier for you.” He might have been a university professor.
Ruth leaned back and sighed. My little sister, now decades older than I was, and pulling away at an accelerating pace. “So how’s the Negro Caruso?” She clenched when she spoke.
“What can I say? He’s singing. Somewhere in Europe. Germany, last I heard.”
She nodded, wanting more, not wanting to ask. “Probably where he belongs.”
Her husband stood and peeked through the kitchen curtains. “I’d go there myself, around about now.”
“Oh would you?”
“In a heartbeat.”
The idea amused Ruth. She cooed at him in German, every pet name Da ever used on Mama.
“I have to go work,” I said. “Daily bread and all.” I stuck my paws out and wiggled them, singing, without thinking, “Honeysuckle Rose.”
“Wish I could hear you play that,” Ruth said.
“I bet you do.”
“Little Joey Strom, learning what side his bread is buttered on.”
I studied her, the bruises of her two brown eyes. “Don’t be ashamed of me, Ruth.”
“Shame?” Her face crumpled. The house was on fire again, and she was standing out on the frozen sidewalk, biting the fireman. “Shame? Don’t you be ashamed of me!”
“Of you! How could… You’re out there working…giving yourself to things I wouldn’t even have known about except for you.”
My sister clamped tight on the muscles in her cheeks. I thought for a moment she might lose herself. But the spasm passed and she came back. This time, she didn’t offer me a place in the movement or suggest that the desperate world might need even someone like me. But she did reach out one pink palm and place it on my chest. “So what do you play?”
“Name your tune, and I’ll fake it.”
Her smile bent her ears. “Joey’s a Negro.”
“Only in Atlantic City.”
“Half Atlantic City’s black,” Robert said. “They just don’t know it yet.”
“You have to hear this man of mine. All America’s African. Come on, sugar. Give him the spiel.”
Robert smiled at her word choice. “Tomorrow. Tonight, I got to get some sleep. My brain’s fried.”
“Take my bed, you two. I’ll stay with Teresa.”
“Teresa.” My sister laughed. “Teresa what?” I had to spell Wierzbicki for her. Ruth laughed again. “Does your father know you’re balling a Catholic?”
I came home from Teresa’s the next day. I stopped at the store and stocked up on beer, chicken, fresh-baked bread, news magazines — all the amenities I never kept around. But when I let myself into the apartment, it was empty. A half sheet of my torn music paper filled with my sister’s handwriting sat on the kitchen table.
Joey,
We had to go. Believe me, it’s safer this way. They’re hounding us down, and you don’t want in any deeper than you already are, just by being brother to this sister. You were a lifesaver to put us up. And it was good to see you haven’t been completely broken. Yet! Robert says you’re a good man, and I’m learning not to argue with my husband, because, honey, he never lets me win.
Take care of yourself and we’ll do the same. Who knows? We all might live long enough to share more clams.
Blood’s blood, huh, blood?
You’d better pitch this note when you’re done with it.
She didn’t sign it. But at the bottom, as an afterthought, she’d added, “Work on your brother for us, will you?”
As I held the note, it burned into me. I didn’t throw it away when I was done. I left it out on the front table. Blood is blood. If any law-enforcement agents broke into my apartment, I wanted the words somewhere easy to find. I refused to think about what those two had done, what would-be crime, what trouble they’d fallen into. We’d been born illegal. Just demanding that the law change was a crime. All I could do was wait to hear from them, whenever and wherever they surfaced. It wouldn’t be soon.
I never told Teresa about the visit. I’d never have managed to introduce them. I’d have bounced between them, sheltering one from the other, the way Jonah once tried to deceive both his voice teachers. I’d never be whole. My parts didn’t fit. I didn’t want them to.
Right after the visit — soon enough for my knot-tying brain to imagine a link — Da forwarded a letter from Jonah, the first I’d heard from him since Magdeburg. The luster of communism had worn off. He’d made his way through East Germany—“Did the Leipzig pilgrimage without you, Mule”—performed concerted music in Berlin—“No lieder, though; who’s loyal to you?”—then went back west to do Das Lied von der Erde in Cologne. He then crossed over into Holland and walked away with a plum prize at the ’sHertogenbosch competition.
Not sure what happens next. The world seems to be my oyster at present, or at least my Zeeland mussel. Nobody has restricted my voice to any category short of music, although I confess I’m only understanding about 40 percent of anything anyone says, so they may be calling me the Prince of Darkness, as far as I know. I’m telling you, Mule, you’re a prisoner in the States. Still a slave, a century after the fact. You can’t even know what you’re under until you’re out from under it. You want to feel what it means to be without leg irons for the first time in your life? Come on over, before the global spread of American culture turns us into darkies, even out here.
He gave the address of a management firm in Amsterdam where he could always be reached. “Always” had a rather narrow range for my brother.
Tucked into the note he forwarded from Jonah, Da included one from himself. He hadn’t been down from the city to hear me play, and I’d discouraged him from thinking about coming. He had no sense of the stuff I played each night — the surfing anthems, the thinly veiled drug celebrations, the love songs to automobiles, hair dryers, and other motorized devices. In Da’s mind, I was a concert pianist who made a living performing. His letter to me was short and fact-filled. He was advancing in his work, the problem he’d worried for three decades. “Where Mach meets the quantum, it must be timeless!” Crazy things were happening in physics again, the crazy things he’d predicted thirty years before. Multiple splintering universes. Wormholes. Nothing, of course, about the crazy things bringing this world down around his ears.