“Well, they do eat fries with their mussels. But they sight-read like nobody’s business. I want you to come see for yourself.”
“Whenever. You got a ticket for me?”
“Yep. When can you leave?” We hit one of those big rallentando measures, the kind we used to take so effortlessly together, in late Romantic lieder. Mutual mind reading, under the gun, two moving targets. We still had it. “Need you, Mule.”
“Have you any idea what you’re asking? You haven’t a clue. It’s been years since I’ve played anything real.” I glanced up, too late, at Teresa, who was fussing with the coffeemaker. Her face was broken. “Anything classical, I mean.”
“No, bro. You don’t know what I’m asking. There’re pianists on every street corner here, selling little ivory-coated pencils to make ends meet. That, or they’re on the National Arts Register dole. I wouldn’t be calling if all I needed was a damn piano player.”
“Jonah. Just tell me. Make it fast and painless.”
“I’m forming an a cappella group. I have two high voices that’ll make you want to take your own life. Gothic and Renaissance polyphony. Nothing later than 1610.”
I couldn’t stop laughing. “And you want me to — what? Keep your books for you?”
“Oh, no. We’ll hire a real crook to do that. You, we need for the bass.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. You know the last time I sang seriously? The last voice lesson I had was sophomore year in college.”
“Exactly. Everyone else I’ve listened to has been ruined by training. You, at least, won’t have anything to unlearn. I’ll give you lessons.”
“Jonah. You know I can’t sing.”
“Not asking you to sing, Mule. Just asking you to be the bass.”
He went through the arguments. He was after an entirely new style, so old that it had passed out of collective memory. Nobody knew how to sing this stuff yet; they were all improvising. Power was dead — vibrato, size, fire, lacquered glow, all the arsenal of tricks for filling a big concert hall or soaring above an orchestra had to be killed off. And in their evacuated place, he needed lightness, clarity, pitch, angels on pins.
“Imperialism’s over, Mule. We’re going back to a world before domination. We’re learning to sing like ancient instruments. Organs of God’s thoughts.”
“You’re not going spiritual on me, are you?”
He laughed and sang, “Gimme that old-time religion.” But he sang in a high, clear conductus style, something from the Notre Dame school, eight hundred years ago. “It’s good enough for me.”
“You’re mad,” I said.
“Joey, this is about blending. Merging. Giving up the self. Breathing as a group. All the things we used to think music was, when we were kids. Making five voices sound as if they’re a single vibrating soul. So I’m out here thinking: Of everyone I know in the world, who reads me the best? Who do I share the most genetic material with? Whose throat is closest to mine? Who has more musical feeling in his little finger than anyone else has in their whole—”
“Don’t patronize me, Jonah.”
“Don’t argue with your elders and wisers. Trust me on this, Mule. Have I ever not known what I’m doing?” I had to laugh. “I mean, recently.”
He talked logistics. What he wanted to sing; how to best lift this new, unborn group into orbit. “Is it viable?” I asked.
“Viable? You mean can we make a living?”
“Yes. That’s what I mean.”
“How much money did you say we ended up with, from Da?”
I might have known: funded, our whole lives, by our parents’ deaths. “Jonah. How can I?”
“Joey. How can’t you? I need you. Need you in on this. If this thing happens without you, it’s meaningless.”
When I hung up, I saw Teresa cowering in the corner, an old white lady whose home had just been broken into by a dark young man. She waited for me to explain what was happening. I couldn’t. Even if I’d known.
“You’re going to him, aren’t you? You’re going over there.” I tried to say something. It started as an objection and ended up a shrug. “Fuck you,” Saint Teresa said. My honeysuckle rose. “Go on. Get out. You never wanted me. You never wanted to make any of this happen.” She leaned forward, her head darting, looking for a weapon. Teresa shrieked at me, full voice, for all the world to hear. If our neighbors called the police, I’d spend the rest of my thirties in jail. “From the beginning, I’ve made myself over for you, for anything that might…” She broke down. I couldn’t take one step toward her. When her head came up, her words were brittle and dead. “And all along, you were just waiting for him to call with some better offer.”
Conviction entered her, the true fire of performance. She ran to the shelf that carried her hundreds of LPs, and with the kind of strength mothers tap into when they lift automobiles off their pinned children, she tore the shelf out of the wall and filled the room that had been ours with a trash heap of song.
November 1945—August 1953
>
Rootie comes. “It’s a miracle,” Da says. That much is obvious, even to me. First she’s pale and milky, like a potato without the skin. In a few weeks, she’s brown, like a potato with the skin back on. Nothing is one color for very long. First, Root is smaller than the smallest violin, but soon she’s too big for me to lift easily. Just like Mama was big before Ruth came, and now she’s back to small again.
I ask Mama if Root will be in our school. Mama says she already is. Mama says everybody’s in school, always. “You?” I giggle at the idea, embarrassed. “Are you still in school?” She smiles and shakes her head, like she’s saying no. But she’s not. She’s saying the saddest yes I’ve ever heard.
Jonah’s faster than I am in lessons, but Mama says when we’re alone that that’s because he had a head start. I try harder, but that only makes my brother try harder, too, just enough to stay ahead and beat me. Every day, we do something we’ve never seen before. Sometimes even Mama’s new to it. Little Rootie just lies there and laughs at us. Da’s away teaching physics to grown-ups because everyone’s always in school. When Da comes home, we play at more school, right through dinner and into the evening, when, to close each day, we sing together.
But even before the singing at day’s end, we have songs. Songs about animals and plants, the presidents, states and capitals. Rhythm and meter games about fractions; chords and intervals for our times tables. Experiments with vibrating strings teach us science. We learn birds by their calls, and countries by their national anthems. For every year that we study in history, Mama has the music. We learn a little German, French, and Italian through snippets of aria. A tune for everything, and everything a tune.
We go to the museums or the park, collecting leaves and insects. We take tests — sheets of questions on smudgy newsprint that Mama says the state needs in order to see if we’re learning as much as other boys. Jonah and I race through, trying to get the most questions done the fastest. Mama sings to us—“The race is not to the swift”—and makes us go back over.
Life would be practice for paradise if it were only this. But it isn’t. When the other boys on our street come home from their schools, Mama sends us out—“at least one hour”—to play. The boys always find something wrong with us, and our punishments are always new. They blindfolded us and hit us with sticks. They use us as home plate. Jonah’s not big enough to try to refuse. We hide in secret alley spots, inventing stories to tell Mama on our return, spending the hour singing funny, dissonant rounds, rounds so soft that our torturers can’t hear.
Mama has an answer for the world. When we’re out together, at the dentist’s office, in the grocery store, or on the subway train, and someone says something or shoots us the evil eye, she tells us, “They don’t know who we are. They think we’re somebody else. People are floating in a leaky boat,” Mama says. “Afraid they’re going under.” Our mother has an answer for that fear. “Sing better,” she says. “Sing more.”