I didn’t have a good answer. “They lived in Essen, until the war. My…father was from Strasbourg, originally.”
“Originally?”
I laughed. “Well, originally, I guess they all came from Canaan.”
“Where?” All I could do was touch her hair. “Well, where are they all now?” Not a hesitation. She was that pure.
“Gone.”
She worked on this. Her own people had cut her off, but she knew where everyone was. She still sent cards on every cousin’s birthday, even if the rate of return had dropped near zero. “Gone?” Then it hit her, and she needed no more clarifying.
She asked about Mama’s people. I told what I knew. Doctor grandfather and his wife and children in Philadelphia “When can I meet them, Joe?” No one called me Joe. “I’d be happy to go with you, anytime.” I couldn’t even tell her. We weren’t even close enough to be different species.
I saw what I was doing to her only by accident. Once a week, I still went through her collection and learned a track for her. After dinner, I sat down at the Wurlitzer, fiddled around on arpeggios, then launched into an introduction. Her game was to figure out the tune and be ready to sing on the first verse’s downbeat. She always was, her face alight, as if I’d just handed her a wrapped gift. One night in April of 1975, we ripped through a try at “There’s a Rainbow Round My Shoulder,” a song I’d never come across until that afternoon. Terrie got as far as
Hallelujah, how the folks will stare,
When they see the diamond solitaire,
That my little sugar baby is gonna wear!
Yes, sir!
She broke off, a mangle of laughing and crying. She came and threw her arms around my shoulders, and for another few measures, I goofed around on five straitjacketed notes. “Oh, my Joe-bird. We’ve got to do it. Got to make it legal!”
I looked at her and said, like some 1930s hepcat, “Whatever my little sugar baby wants. Who am I to break the law?” She seemed as happy at these words as if we’d gone and done the deed already. Just the intent seemed enough.
Two weeks later, rooting through her records in search of another captive, I glimpsed a sheet of fancy rag paper sticking out from a stack of books on her writing desk. The color caught my eye, and I excavated it, a handmade wedding invitation. Across its middle, there bent a great rainbow arc. Along the top ran the hand-lettered message: “There’s a rainbow round my shoulder.” Inside the arc, she’d penned, “And it fits me like a glove.” Below, in a file of straight lines, Teresa had written, “TIME,” “DATE,” and “PLACE,” all of which she’d left trustingly blank, pending happy consultation with me. Under these, she’d written, “Come help us celebrate the union of Teresa Maria Elisabeth Clara Wierzbicki and Joseph Strom.” At the very bottom, in a jaunty hand, she’d added, “Hallelujah, we’re in love!”
The thing sunk into my chest up to the hilt. She wanted people there, a public declaration. I might somehow have managed to slip off to a justice of the peace, provided we never actually told anyone. But a wedding, with invitations: impossible. To whom could she have thought we’d send invitations? My family was dead and hers had disowned her. We shared no friends in common, none who would come to such a party. I pictured her scenario: walking down the aisle of some religious structure, part Catholic, part A.M.E., part synagogue, her Polish factory workers and my Black Panther connections eyeing one another across the median. The two of us, in front of a room of people, cutting into a three-tiered wedding cake. Hallelujah, how the folks would stare.
I buried the unfinished project back under her books, just as I’d found it. I never said anything. But she knew. Something in the way I behaved toward her, too brightly affectionate. I kept bracing for the presentation, the finished invitation. Here: I made this for you. But the moment never came. Teresa’s handmade celebration disappeared from the stack on her desk into some solitary hope chest she never opened for anyone.
That’s when I gave up all pretense of composition. I boxed up my sheaf of pencil-scratched music stock and consigned it to storage.
I heard from Jonah again, not long after. He never made it to Scandinavia. “Dear Bro,” his letter started. “Big doings here. I’ve found my calling.” As if singing with the London Symphony Orchestra and l’Orchestre philharmonique de Radio-France had been a wrong number.
I was in Strasbourg, doing the bounding tenor bit to the millionth rendition of the almighty NINTH this season, a truly gimmicky performance in the new “Capital of Europe,” with soloists, conductor, and musicians from two dozen countries. Not sure who I was supposed to represent. We were thundering around the back stretch when, all of a sudden, the grotesqueness of the situation finally dawned on me. All my life, I’ve been this dutiful trooper for late-day cultural imperialism. Alle Menschen werden Brüder: Christ on a bloody crutch. Gimme a break. What planet does that guy live on? Not ours; not the Planet of the Apes.
I got through the piece all right, but afterward, I developed this profound allergic reaction to everything past 1750. I canceled three engagements, all big, blowsy nineteenth-century puff pieces. I managed to stumble through a large-forces staging of The Creation down in Lyon without tossing my cookies, but it was nip and tuck… When I got back to Paris, I happened by chance to catch this group from Flanders, a dozen singers, performing at the Cluny. I’ve never heard anything like it. Like landing after a long, rough flight and having your ears pop. In all those big-hall, 150-performer things, I’d forgotten what singing was supposed to be about… A thousand years of written-out scores, Joey. And we’ve only ever bothered with the last century and a half. We’re living in this one little wing of a rambling mansion… A thousand years! You have any idea how big a place that is?
Big enough for my brother to disappear into at last.
It’s taken me a while to purge my voice of all the tacky tricks and show-time shit I’ve been stroked for these last few years. But I’m finally clean. I’ve followed this group, the Kampen Ensemble, up to Ghent, and at last I have a worthy teacher again, after a long, lonely spell in the desert: Geert Kampen — a real master, and one of the most musical souls I’ve ever met. I’m just another reed in his little collegium, and we’re hardly the only group plunging into this stuff. Suddenly, the past is the coming thing. There’s a whole school up in the Netherlands, and one’s even starting back in Paris. Something’s happening. A whole wave of people reinventing early music. I mean the earliest. Just wait, Mule. This movement will hit the States in a few years. You guys are always behind the times, even when it comes to being behind the times! And once it hits, you’ll see: Nostalgia will never be the same again…
I’ve learned not to speak French in the Flanders shops, though German doesn’t go over a whole lot better. Even English doesn’t entirely convince people I’m not a Turkish “guest” laborer here to take coal-mining jobs away from the natives. I am, however, never safer than when the words are sung. I did manage to salvage the best of Paris and carry her up to civilization with me. Her name is Celeste Marin. She knows all about you, and we’re both waiting for you to get your ass out here so you can meet my new woman and hear my new voice. Better hurry. Not even the past can last forever.
I read the letter with mounting panic. Halfway through, I wanted to send him a telegram. My brother had achieved a level of success that almost justified the botched experiment our parents made of us. And on the verge of real recognition, he’d taken it into his head to walk away again, into some cult. My own disaster of a life lost its last shot at redemption. So long as I’d sacrificed myself to launch Jonah, I hadn’t entirely wasted myself. But if he bagged everything, then I was truly lost. I started to write him, but I couldn’t. I had nothing to say except Don’t do it. Don’t throw away your chance. Don’t trash your calling. Don’t mock Beethoven. For God’s sake, don’t move to Belgium. Above all, don’t marry a Frenchwoman.