I bought some recordings by the Kampen Ensemble, which I had to special-order. I listened to them in secret when Teresa wasn’t home, hiding them, like porno, where she’d never come across them, even by accident. The crumhorn-infested disks had an alien charm, like coming across an elaborate piece of wrought iron in a dusty store, something that meant life or death to some farmer once but which now had no function in the whole known world. Nothing in the thickets of complex counterpoint remotely resembled a hummable tune. The singers pared their voices back to dry points and reined in their phrases until nothing wavered or swelled. Everything we’d most loved in music was only hinted at, waiting to be born. I couldn’t hear what electrified Jonah. He was a master chef who’d perfected the secret of nuanced sauces renouncing the kitchen and taking to nuts and berries. It seemed a cheap escape. But then, I was a second-rate, fifteen-hour-a-week piano teacher and abortive composer, living off a factory worker’s good graces. In Atlantic City.
Alone during the day, I took the contraband records out and listened. The third time through the earliest Kampen Ensemble disk, an old Orlando Lassus song separated itself from the other chansons. “Bonjour mon coeur.” I’d known the tune from before it had been written. “Hello my heart, hello my sweet life, my eye, my dear friend.” And in the piece, I heard myself, at my first hearing. I backed down that narrow air shaft the wrong way, before our years of touring, before Juilliard’s prison practice rooms, before Boylston’s chamber choir, down below our earliest family evenings, each of us on an independent part. “Hello my completely beautiful, my sweet spring, my new flower.” In the song’s first four notes, I stood outside that stone room where I’d heard that tune for the first time. I’m seven; my brother is eight. My father has just taken us to the northern tip of the island, a medieval cloister, where singers unravel their amazing instant. “My sparrow, my turtle dove. Good morning, my gentle rebel.” And afterward, my brother declares, “When I grow up? When I’m an adult? I want to do what those people do.”
I didn’t know then who “those people” were. I didn’t know now. I knew only that we weren’t them. Hearing the song, I was filled with an urge to return to the Cloisters, a place I hadn’t been for decades. Standing in that place might spring some memory, take me back to where we were headed, help me find what was happening to Jonah. I asked Ter if she’d like to go to the city. Her eyes shone like hard candy.
“You kidding me? Manhattan? Just you and me?”
“And six and a half million potential mass murderers.”
“New York, New York. My man and me, loose in the city!” It had been some time, it seemed, since we’d taken a holiday. I’d dragged her underground, into the inner keep of my isolation, and she had followed, for music’s sake. But there was no safety, it had turned out, even in solitude. Especially there. “NYC! We’re going to start at Bloomie’s and head south. And we’re not going to stop until we find you a suit.”
“I have a suit.”
“A modern suit. A nice concert suit, with a nice flare and without any safety pins holding it together.”
“Why in the world would I need a suit?” Teresa shrank from my words, and the light went out. “I need to get shoes first,” I said, and she returned a little.
I suggested that after we’d shopped, we might head up to see the Cloisters. Teresa thought the place was a sporting arena. Her eyebrows bounced when I told her. “I didn’t know you were Catholic!”
“I didn’t, either.”
We spent the morning shopping in public, a compendium of my largest private hells. Teresa dealt with all slights as she always did, pretending that everything shy of direct aggression wasn’t happening. “What are pianists wearing onstage these days? What’s in style for concert attire this year?”
“Not this,” was all I could say.
Her frustration mounted. Anxious about making it to Washington Heights, I agreed to a hopeless, brown, double-breasted thing of no use except to further drain savings. “You sure? This is good, you think? You’ll be a babe slayer in it, anywhere you play. I’ll tell you that much, buster.”
We left the suit for alterations, giving me another week to bail out of the purchase and lose no more than the deposit. We took the Uptown A. All the while, hanging on her strap, Teresa sang Ellington and Strayhorn in my ear, like the most shameless out-of-town tourist. Feeling the bored smirks of every passenger in the car, I harmonized sotto voce.
They’d rearranged the Cloisters in the years since I’d been — moved the stones, shrunk them down, simplified the vaults and capitals. Teresa couldn’t figure out the ersatz medieval grab bag. “You mean this guy just went around buying up monasteries all over the place?”
“The ways of white folk are beyond understanding.”
“Joseph. Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“You know what. How do you buy a monastery anyway?”
“Huh. How do you sell one?”
“I mean, buy a Spanish, get a Portuguese half price?” I squeezed her until she glinted. “And then they just put them all back together like some big jigsaw? Buy me one of these, Joseph. Nice row of columns. Wouldn’t these look great in the backyard?”
“We’d need a backyard first.”
“You’re on. I’d settle for one of those. Can I get that in writing?”
She loved the Unicorn Tapestries, and she cried for the beast in captivity. “Einhorn,” I said out loud.
“Say what?”
“Nothing.”
This was my outing; Teresa couldn’t understand why I wasn’t enjoying these extraterrestrial artifacts. I ran through the rooms, blasting past the exhibits with less attention than Jonah and I had given them a quarter century earlier. I stepped into the cold stone room where we had heard our singers that day, and I saw my brother leap up from the chair to touch the pretty lady who had come to sing for us. Beyond that, no messenger. We abandoned the time hole after an hour. Teresa was elated; I felt more listless than I had since hearing from Jonah. He’d moved on to a world whose key I couldn’t find.
“Let’s walk.” Teresa nodded, happy with any idea I put to her. We cut through Fort Tryon Park. I looked for two boys, seven and eight, amid the crowds lining the paths, but I couldn’t find us among so many like-colored decoys, all speaking Spanish. The wave of Dominicans had begun, one that would, in another decade, recolonize the island’s tip as a million Puerto Ricans had once colonized Brooklyn and East Harlem throughout my childhood. The aging Jews were still there, those who’d refused to move south to a city of Cuban escapees. Strangers who’d have greeted my father on sight pulled back from me in fear. Written already, in their faces: The lease had expired on this, their neighborhood.
“There’s a bakery around here,” I said to my Polish Catholic honky shiksa. “Right around here someplace.”
But I was turned around. We dragged up and down streets, stumbled upon the concrete steps — completely changed — doubled back along our path until Ter had had enough. “Why don’t you just ask somebody?”
Approach a stranger: The idea would never have occurred to me. We asked a deliveryman. “Frisch’s Bakery?” I might as well have been speaking Provençal. “In your dreams, maybe.” Finally, one promenading woman wearing a silver suit dress and a turquoise and smoky quartz bracelet stopped, more out of alarm than pity. She was out for a stroll in her finest attire, as if the city hadn’t gone to hell in a hackney all around her since the war. It surprised her that I spoke intelligible English. She could have been my aunt. The fact would have killed her on the spot.