“Cancer.”
She winced. “What kind?”
“Pancreatic.”
She nodded. “We get that, too.”
“There’s some money. I set it up in an account in your name. It’s worth something by now.”
She struggled. Repugnance versus need: I’d never have imagined the size of either. Her face went hunted. She couldn’t decide what was hers by right and what she’d disowned. “Later, Joseph. Give it time.”
“He left you a message.” I hadn’t considered it for a decade. “Something I was supposed to tell you.”
Ruth cowered, as if I were battering her. I held out my palms. I felt no investment in the matter one way or the other. I only wanted to tell her and be done.
She pressed her palms to her temples, hating me for allowing this to get to her. Her fists balled up in the last counterattack of capitulation. “Let me guess. ‘I know you’re really a good girl. All is forgiven.’”
“He said to tell you there’s another wavelength everyplace you point your telescope.”
“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean? You tell me what in hell I’m supposed to do with that.” She’d wanted another message, one she didn’t know she wanted. This one only left her more brutally orphaned.
“He wasn’t well, Ruth. He was saying all sorts of things by the end. But he made me swear to tell you, if I ever got the chance.”
Da’s last words were too muddled to sustain resentment. She couldn’t war with something so hopeless. “The man never knew how to talk to me.” She let herself cry. “Never on this planet.”
“Ruth. I can’t stop thinking…about Robert.” She coughed up a dead little pellet of irony. You can’t? “Forgive me. Do you mind my asking?”
She shrugged: You can’t ask me anything I haven’t asked myself.
“What did the two of you do, in New York?”
She looked at me, confused. “What did we do?”
“When you came to my place that day in Atlantic City. You were in trouble. Something really wrong. The law was after you.”
Her look fell away, too weary even for disgust. “You’ll never, never get it, will you?” her voice filled with pity. “My brother.”
“You said the police ran Robert’s plates through the police computer. That he…”
My sister breathed in, trying to make room for me. “We ran a shelter program for neighborhood kids. That’s what we did. Made them sing ‘Black Is Beautiful’ over their cornflakes. Everything else was Hoover. He turned us into the number-one threat to American security. Government agents calling us in the middle of the night, threatening to spread our brains across the pavement. Saying they’d send us to prison for the rest of our lives. We were already in prison, Joey. That’s our crime. It was eating their conscience, what they’ve done to us. That’s what we did in New York. And that’s what we kept on doing in Oakland. Until they got Robert and he died in their hospital.”
That was the last white question I ever asked her.
My grandfather’s house was an open territory, untroubled by schedule. There was a purpose to life on Catherine Street, but no fixed pace. The family gathered my second night. My uncle Michael showed up with most of his family: his wife, his two daughters, and my cousins’ children. I met my twin aunts, Lucille and Lorene, their husbands, and several of their children and grandchildren. I was a curiosity: the prodigal, the chameleon. For a moment, everyone needed a peek. But in a family that size, no novelty holds the stage for long. They fussed over me, heard what little I had to say for myself, then went back to fussing over Dr. William, the patriarch, or little Robert, the clan’s latest Benjamin.
Ruth and Robert had been coming here for years, since just after they’d stopped in Atlantic City, looking for a place to hide. “It was the easiest thing in the world to look them up, Joey. You could have done it anytime you wanted.”
The Daleys had a rolling ease, the high spirits of folks in a bomb shelter, holding out on makeshift joy. When three or more of them were in the same room, there was music. When they reached a critical mass, everyone started singing. After a period of negotiated chaos— Get off of my line and get one of your own. What you meanyour line? I’ve been singing that line since before you were born — the Daley tabernacle choir settled into its singular five-and-a-half-part harmony.
I sang along where I could latch on, scatting or faking some pig Latin melisma when I didn’t know the words. My early music bass sat well enough amid the full-throated riches that no one noticed it. No one stood out, and nobody sat out, either. The family made even Dr. Daley take a chorus or two in his nonagenarian growl. They allowed no exempted audience: each to a part, the praise of his choice.
Michael played Charles’s old tenor sax, his brother’s ghost still there in every keypad click. Lucille’s eldest son, William, played bass guitar as if it were as limber as a lute. Almost everyone could lay into the parlor piano, four, six, sometimes eight hands at a time. What did you think? Where did you suppose you got it from? I was lucky to grab some buried interior line, needing all ten fingers to keep up. No one asked me to solo, or to solo any more than anyone else.
The instrument was a minefield. Half a dozen keys, including middle C, buzzed or bleated or no longer rose. “That’s part of the game,” Michael explained. “You got to make a noise while staying out of the potholes.” In the middle of a huge ad hoc chorus, I stopped and saw the keys I was pressing for what they were. The ones my mother had learned on.
So long as the house was full of singing relatives, Ruth seemed as close to peaceful as I’d seen her look since Mama died. During that first barn-burner night, she stretched out on a sofa, a truculent son under one arm, a happy baby sleeping on a cushion, and her slain husband seated next to her. Safe, she let loose with a descant that made me want to stop singing for good. I came and stood by her. She opened her eyes and smiled. “This is why we came back here.”
“Maybe why you came,” Kwame corrected, hearing every word from under his headphones.
“How long have you been here?”
“This visit? Since just after Robert…” She looked around, then cradled her forehead in her palm, rubbing out the nightmare again. “How long has that been anyway?”
My aunts Lucille and Lorene ran the choir at Bethel Covenant, the church where they, their parents, and their children had all gotten married, the church where my mother was baptized and where they’d all learned to sing. To their father’s despair and their mother’s delight, they chose the church over the law, for which they’d trained. Lucille played the organ and piano while Lorene conducted the choir, a good slice of which consisted of their own children. The second Sunday after my arrival, Ruth decided we’d go hear them. “All of us,” she warned her son, grandfather, and brother as one.
Dr. Daley made the most noise. “Let me die in peace, a godless heathen.”
“The man’s right,” Kwame said. “We gonna fight. Heathen of the world, unite.”
“I never went for your mother. I never went for your grandmother.”
“You’ll go for me,” Ruth said.
“Well, I’m going to sit with this young man here, and we’re going to talk about Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him this atheist Jew had sung more Catholic settings in the last five years than most of the pious attend in a lifetime.
I wasn’t the lightest person in church. Not even in our half of the pews. Bethel Covenant proclaimed the gospeclass="underline" Color’s in the equation, but it’s not the only variable. Ruth caught me staring at one redheaded choir girl, pale as a Pre-Raphaelite model. “Oh, she’s black, brother.”
“How do you know?”