Jonah loves the song. He wants more by the same maker. We sing another: “Time Stands Still.” It takes me until this moment, this one, setting these words down half a century on, to find my way back, to come through to this song. To see the day and place we were signaling all those times we took the song on the road. To hear the forecast in that read-through. For prophecy just remembers in advance what the past has long been saying. All we ever do is fulfill the beginning.
“Time stands still with gazing on her face.” I gaze and time stands. My mother’s face, soft in the light of this song. We sing a five-part arrangement, which Jonah makes us take so slowly that each note hangs in the air, a broken pillar with vines growing over it. That’s all he wants: to stop the melody’s forward motion and collapse it into a single chord.
He doesn’t want us to finish. But when we do, for one last little specious now, he’s in bliss, the bliss underneath the chord. “You like the old ones?” Da asks. Jonah nods, although he hasn’t once thought that any of these tunes might be older than another. They’re all the same age as our parents: one day younger than creation.
“How old is that song?” I ask.
Our father’s eyes sweep upward. “Seventy-seven and three-quarters Rooties.”
My sister howls with pleasure. She waves her hands in the air. “No, no!” She puts her palm on her chin, her index on her cheek, her elbow in her other hand, mocking the posture of thought. Already she’s eerie, copying postures and poses, donning their worldliness as if she understands them. “I think it’s…yes!” Her finger shoots into the air, her head bobbing eureka. “Seventy-six and three-quarters Rooties! Not counting the first Rootie.”
“How many Mamas?”
Da doesn’t even have to think. “Just over eleven.”
Mama’s offended. She pushes away his attempt to hug her. “Almost twelve.”
I don’t understand. “How old is Mama?”
“Eight and a half hundredths of this song.”
“How many yous?”
“Ah! This is a different question. I’ve never told you how old is your old man?” He has, a million times. He’s zero, no years old at all. Born in 1911, in Strasbourg, then Germany, now France, on what was then March 10, but during the hours that were lost forever when Alsace capitulated and at last adjusted its clocks to Greenwich. This is the fable of his birth, the mystery of his existence. This is how a young boy’s life was snared by time.
“Not even nine of him,” Mama taunts. “Your old man is an old man. Only nine of your father’s great long lives, and you’re back to Dowland!”
My parents are different ages.
“Nay,” my father says. “One may not divide by zero!”
I don’t ask how many Jonahs, how many Joes.
“Enough foolishness.” Mama is the queen supreme of all American Stroms, now and forever. “Who let all this math in the house? Let’s get on with the counting.”
Stand still and gaze for minutes, hours, and years to her give place.Our father discovers how time is not a string, but a series of knots. This is how we sing. Not straight through, but turning back on ourselves, harmonizing with bits we’ve already sung through, accompanying those nights we haven’t yet sung. This is the night, or might as well be, when Jonah cracks the secret language of harmony and breaks into our parents’ game of improvised quotations. Mama starts with Haydn; Da layers on a crazed glaze of Verdi. The bird and the fish, out house hunting, lacing the nest with everything that fits. Then Jonah, out of nowhere, adding his pitch-perfect rendition of Josquin’s Absalon, fili mi. And for that feat, at so tender an age, he wins from my parents a look more frightened than any look that strangers have ever painted us with.
And later, when Einstein comes by the house for music night, playing his violin with the other physicist musicians, he needs give only the slightest push to shame my parents into sending their boy away. “This child has a gift. You don’t hear how big. You are too close. It’s unforgivable that you do nothing for him.”
The nothing my mother has given him is her own life. The unforgivable thing she’s guilty of: the steady rhythm of love. “The child has a gift.” And who does the great white-maned man think has given it to him? Every day, a school for that gift, costing no less than everything. She gives up her own gift, her own growth, her own vindication. But this is blackness, too: a world of white, declaring your efforts never enough, your sounds insufficient. Telling you to send the boy off, sell him into safety, let him fly away, give him over to mastery, lift him over that river any way you can. Never telling you what land you send him to, there on the far side.
Maybe she dies never questioning. Thinking the size of her boy’s skill has forced her hand. Believing in the obligation of beauty, a willing victim of high culture. Maybe she dies not knowing how there is no better school than hers. For here’s her boy, her eldest, stealing the keys of music, that music denied her. I see the look my parents trade then, pricing the experiment they’ve been running. Calculating the cost of their union.
What of Ruthie’s gift, had Mama lived? My sister, at four, is the fastest of all of us, latching onto the most elaborate melody, holding it high and clear, whatever the changing intervals around her. Soon, she is a genius mimic, doing Da, doing Mama, destroying in pitch-perfect parody her brothers’ walk and talk. Wheezing like the postman. Stuttering sententiously like our parents’ favorite radio sage. Doddering like the aged corner grocer until Mama, gasping through tears, begs her for mercy. This is not parroting, but something more uncanny. Root seems to know things about human invention that her handful of years can’t have taught her. She lives in the skin of the people she replicates.
But my sister is a lifetime younger than we are. Three years between us: time enough to split us beyond recognition. Each of us is a fluke of our one thin moment. Four and a half years from this night, Mama will be where no years can touch her.
Her death cuts us all loose in time. Now I’m almost twice my mother’s age. I’ve come through some warping wormhole, twisting back to see what she looked like, reflected in the light of her family. Her face stands still with gazing on all that it won’t live to see. Now it is as old, as young, as all other things that have stopped.
With nothing to check my memory, I can trust nothing. Memory is like vocal preparation. The note must center in the mind before the voice can land on it. The sound from the mouth has been sent out long beforehand. Already she opens to me in that look, one that takes years to reach me: her terror at hearing her prodigy son. This is the memory I send on ahead, my clue to the woman, when all other clues are long gone. She trades the look with my father, seeing what they’ve made, a secret, terrible acknowledgment: Our child is a different race from either of us.
I get my own look from her, to set alongside that one. Just once, and so fleeting that it’s over before she launches it. But unmistakable: It comes three days before I leave to join my brother in Boston. I’m taking what both of us know is our last private lesson together. We’ve been working through the Anna Magdalena notebook. Most of the pieces are already too easy for me, although I never say so. Even great players still play these, we tell each other. It’s a family notebook, Mama says, something Bach made to build his wife a home in music. It’s a family album, like the Polaroids my parents keep of the years we’ve been through. Postcards savored and kept safe.
Da is at the university. Ruth is on the floor, ten feet from the piano, working on her clothespin-family dollhouse. Mama and I flip pages in the album. We’re supposed to be doing social studies — the developing nations — but we’re playing hooky, with time so short. There’s no one to scold us. We play through a pack of easy dances, stretching them, jazzing them, as light as rain in the desert, turning to dust before it hits the roofs.