Teresa held me together, phoning from Atlantic City. She came up for one long weekend. She seemed to grow surer and more capable as I fell apart. Everything she did was one more thing I didn’t have to. “You’re doing fine, Joseph. All the right things.” She supplied a steady source of practical advice to the heir of a family that had always been practicality’s sworn enemy. She stayed alongside me for the million deaths by decision that surviving requires.
After I’d made all the most irreversible choices my father’s death demanded, Jonah called. His voice was full of buzz and echoing delay. “Joey. I just got your message. I’ve been away. I’m…not with that old management anymore.”
“Jesus, Jonah. Where the fuck have you been?”
“Don’t swear at me, Joey. I’m down in Italy. I’ve been singing at La Scala.”
The only news that could redeem Da’s death: My brother had followed through on the thing our parents raised us for. “La Scala. Serious? Singing what?”
“It…it doesn’t matter, Joey. Nothing. Tell me about Da.”
It hit me only then. Jonah didn’t know. I thought the news would be in him, like migration in a bird. He should have known the instant it happened. “He died. A week ago last Wednesday.”
For a long time, there was only breathing and transatlantic static. In silence as long as a funeral song, Jonah replayed the life. “Joey. Oh God. Forgive me.” As if his being away had made this happen.
I heard him over the line, his breath shortening, on the edge of a full-fledged choking attack. He was trying to figure out how to stop what had already happened. When he could talk again, he wanted details, all the nonevents of Da’s last days. He demanded to know everything our father had said. Anything Da might have left behind, something to send him. I had nothing. “He did…he made me promise to give Ruth a message.”
“What?”
“He said, ‘There’s another wavelength everyplace you point your telescope.’”
“What the hell does that mean, Joey?”
“He…something he was working on, I think. He stayed busy. It helped a little.”
“Why Ruth? What possible interest…” She’d betrayed him again, by stealing Da’s last message from him.
“Jonah. I have no clue. Between the medications and the disease, he was gone a long while before he left.”
“Is Ruth there?”
I told him that I’d heard nothing from her since her surprise visit. He listened, saying nothing.
“What did you do with the body?” As if it were evidence I had to dispose of.
I told him all the decisions I’d made. Jonah said nothing. His silence rebuked me. “What did you want me to do? You turn your back on us. You leave me to go through this alone while you—”
“Joey. Joey. You did just fine. You did perfect.” Grief came out of him in staccato sobs. Almost laughs, really. Something had gotten away from him, an absence he’d regret forever. “You want me to come back?” His words slurred together. “You want me to?”
“No, Jonah.” I wanted him to, more than anything. But not because I asked.
“I could be there by next week.”
“No point. Everything’s done. Over.”
“You don’t need help with things? What will you do with the house?” The Jersey home Da thought we might, in some other universe, share.
“The will says that’s up to a majority of his children.”
He struggled with something. “What do you want to do?”
“Sell.”
“Of course. At any price.”
Da was huge between us. Our father wanted me to ask. Somewhere, he wanted to know. “What were you singing at La Scala?”
Silence flooded the line. He thought it too soon to come back to this life. But I was Jonah’s only link now. Me and Ruth, whom neither of us could reach.
“Joey? You’ll never believe this. I sang under Monera.”
The name came from so far away, I was sure it, too, had to be dead. “Jesus Christ. Did he know who you were?”
“Some dusky American tenor.”
“Did you ask him about…”
“I didn’t have to. I saw her. She came backstage opening night.” He paused, racing himself. “She’s…old. Adult. And married. To a Tunisian businessman working out of Naples. He looks just like me. Only darker.”
I was his accompanist again, waiting out the caesura, holding on to its nothingness until his inhale started us up again.
“She apologized. In English, which her husband doesn’t speak. ‘You deserved a note.’ How old were we, Joey? Fourteen? The year Mama… The day Da…” Only a lifetime’s training kept his voice his. “Real blacks die of gunshot wounds, right? Overdoses. Malnutrition. Lead poisoning. What do halfies die of, Joey? Nobody dies of numbness, do they?”
“What happens now? You going to do more opera?” Something in me had to keep track. Some part of me still had to tell Da.
“Mule?” He was traveling out beyond my reach, at a speed that collapsed all measure. “Opera is nothing to do with what we thought. Absolutely nothing. I had to see it down in Italy, the place it came from. With the native speakers, the owners. Opera’s somebody else’s childhood. Somebody else’s nightmare. I think I’ll head to Paris for a while.”
“France?”French was his worst singing language. He’d always mocked the place. “To do what? Go back to lieder?” I worked to keep my voice neutral. Like an ex-wife encouraging her husband to go out dating again.
“I’m tired of it, Joey. Tired of singing alone. Unless you… Where am I going to find another accompanist with telepathy?”
I couldn’t tell if he was asking or rejecting me. “What are you going to do, then?” I saw him singing Maurice Chevalier songs in the Metro, a felt hat catching the centimes.
“There has to be life beyond opera and lieder. Didn’t your mother ever tell you? Let every boy serve God in his own fashion.”
“What’s yours?” Each answer seemed more murderous than the last.
“Wish I knew. It has to be out there.” He fell silent again, ashamed of surviving. I felt him working up again to ask me to come out and join him. But I never got the chance to turn him down. When he spoke again, it was to more than me. “Joey? Have him a little memorial service. Just us? Play something good for him. Something from the old days.”
“We already did.”
I felt it go through him, the stab of freedom he’d gone after. “You sure you don’t want me to come back?”
“You don’t need to.” I gave him that much.
“Joey, forgive me.”
I gave him that, too.
It took me several days to grasp that I didn’t have to go in to the hospital anymore. There was nothing to do but close up Da’s house. I came up for air, browsed the papers, caught up on what had happened while I was away in death’s waiting room. The National Guard had killed some college students. The FBI was arresting priests for helping people burn their draft cards. Hoover issued a nationwide warning against “extremist all-Negro hate-type organizations.” He meant my sister and her husband, all the criminal elements that undermined my country.
I wanted out of Fort Lee as fast as possible. First, I had to go through the house and its contents. The few family keepsakes of value I put into rented storage. The man’s wardrobe, unchanged since 1955, I packed off to the Salvation Army. I sold the piano Da had bought for me, along with the few valuable pieces of furniture, and put the cash in a certificate of deposit for Ruth and Robert Rider.
I looked in my father’s jumbled files for an address for my mother’s family. I found one in his lists of contacts, that wad of three-by-five cards he kept bound with a thick rubber band. The card, in my father’s handwriting, was younger than it looked. It was thumbed-up, dog-eared, and smudged enough to be a faked antique. At the top, on the double red line, in caps, ran the name DALEY. Below it was a Philadelphia street address. There was no telephone number.