The Time of Our Singing

My Brother as Aeneas

To my ear, his laugh at fourteen had no bitter highlights yet. I’d swear he was still happy up in Boston, in the walled courtyard of our music school. Happy, or at least busy, proving he could get people of any hue to fall in love with him. And needing to seduce János Reményi before anyone. The Hungarian’s approval meant more to Jonah during high school than even Da’s or Mama’s. And my brother must have meant a good deal to Reményi, as well. Once Jonah’s voice broke, it became János’s chief pastime in life to turn the virginal soprano into a sterling tenor.

Most adolescent males pass through months when their voices go off on spontaneous excursions, flopping like a fireman’s hose with no one strong enough to hold it steady. Jonah entered this vocal purgatory. He struggled to settle into his new register and win back control over his hormone-thickened vocal cords. But in remarkably short order, one could hear the light sparkle of boyish ore coming through the cauldron of adolescence smelted down to a bright lump of gold.

Reményi’s own career was now a relic, except for the occasional nostalgic gala. Throughout the thirties, he’d been a Bayreuth regular, doing the three consecutive evenings of Wotan without a waver. He was a celebrated CEO of Valhalla and tyrannical abuser of oppressed dwarves. But after the Sudetenland crisis, he stopped traveling to Germany. Later, he always refused direct questions about that decision, and the musical press inferred a self-sacrificing choice. In truth, 1938 was way late for acts of political courage.

Throughout the war, Reményi worked in Budapest, singing roles in safe pieces like Ferenc Erkel’s Bánk Bán and Dohnányi’s Tower of the Voivod. When the country’s concert houses were bombed, he turned to teaching. He tried to return to opera, traveling through a decimated Italy, but his temperament — too stolid for bel canto and too brooding for buffa — got him molested in the Neapolitan and Milanese press. He stayed in Central Europe long enough to see Allied infantrymen of all races parading through Bayreuth in pillaged Valkyrie helmets and Brunhild gowns, even draped in his old Wotan costumes. Arranging a hasty evacuation to the States in the tidal wave of the late forties, he launched Boylston Academy, scoring points with wealthy Americans by playing on their cultural inferiority. His banquet speeches raised thousands of dollars for the school by suggesting that, in the world’s cultural Olympics, vocal music was an event where the USA couldn’t even take home a bronze.

At Boylston, Reményi was in his element, Wotan all over again. The students all fixed on him: János asked me to audition for the spring chamber choir. János complimented me today on my C major scale. None of us would have dared call the man anything but sir to his face. But in the safety of cafeteria talk, we were all on a first-name basis.

He gave lessons in the most opulent studio, tucked away in the recesses of the second story. He covered his floors with silk carpets from Tabriz and hung the walls with Anatolian kilims, to make sure that no student could count on any free resonance. Throughout lessons, he sat behind a Biedermeier desk in a wing-backed chair. If he needed to make a musical point, he strode over to the corner where two Bechsteins curled up in each other’s curves.

During my lessons, he shuffled papers and signed forms. I’d finish an étude, and he’d work on for a few minutes before noticing. Coming up for air, he’d command, “Go on, go on,” as if I’d stopped out of truculence. He cared only for those whose voices might lead to careers. I did not interest him except as the key to my brother’s well-being. Perhaps he saw in me a clinical riddle: How could the same genes produce both brilliance and mere adequacy? He’d wonder for a moment, wave me on, and return to his paperwork.

Jonah’s were the only lessons with Reményi to exceed the alloted fifty minutes. My brother would disappear into Reményi’s lair and not come out for hours. I’d go nuts with worry. Reményi’s studio had a pane of metal-threaded glass cut into the door, a school policy since an incident involving an ex — faculty member and a fifteen-year-old early bloomer. On my toes at the right distance down the hall, I could make out a thin slice of proceedings without being detected.

The teacher on the other side of that wire-meshed glass was no one I recognized. János, up on his feet, hands cupped, arms waving, mouth working on a stream of staccato triplets, was conducting the entire Met pit orchestra. Jonah imitated him, his chest out like a war hero. Through the glass, I looked in on a life-sized puppet-theater staging of Papageno and Papagena’s duet.

Ecstatic János coached my brother’s voice down into its new range. He showed the teenager how to open up his instrument and let that new power take up residence. Everything Jonah lost in pitch, he stood to gain many times over in color and sweep. The break was like one of those chance renovations, where crumbling plaster reveals glorious marble beneath it. The crushing innocence of his old high notes, the ones that made listeners want to take their own lives in shame, gave way to the richer highlights of adult awakening.

There would be years of sweat and woodshedding. But of all János’s maturing students, Jonah, he said, had the least to unlearn. The Hungarian claimed he’d caught the boy while music was in him, before anyone could trample him. The truth is: We and music are not unified. Nothing in our animal past calls for anything so gratuitous as song. We must put it on, wrap it around us like the dark, cold firmament. Some part of Jonah’s sonority came from his great lungs, the softness of his larynx, the fluting of his vocal cords, his skull’s chambered resonance. But the heart of his gift was learned. And only one violating couple could have taught him so deeply as they did.

Jonah might have flourished under almost any teacher. Once away from our family’s charmed evenings of motets, he became a sponge, using people for whatever he could steal from them while reserving, even in happy compliance, the right to second-guess anything anyone fed him. Jonah stole the best of everyone — Reményi’s experience, Kimberly Monera’s precocity, Thad’s and Earl’s hipster avant-gardism, my feel for harmony — until all of these became his own annexed domain. But in the story he invented for himself, Jonah made this journey alone, whoever his passing sponsors might have been.

The teenager’s voice stepped out from the boy’s wreckage. Within months, János could hear the hint of adult wonders to come. This boy’s raw material — shaped by early immersion — pointed toward places beyond those Reményi himself had reached. The only question was how far beyond his own ability any teacher could teach. So long as Jonah stayed dutiful, all was well. His lessons with Reményi progressed, the master’s one hand flinging my brother outward, the other, unconsciously, holding him back.

Jonah humored his teacher’s enthusiasms and even returned them. I’d hop past the room on my toes, catching glimpses of them in arcane training rituals, exercises coming out of a teacher I never saw do anything more vigorous than shuffle papers. There was János, dropping to his knees to pantomime the falling larynx, turning his hands in precision catcher’s mitts for Jonah’s pitches to hit, shaping his arms into tubes through which Jonah threaded his thirty-second-long pianissimi.

The Boylston master was a monster about tone. Only Jonah had any idea what the man meant by the word. Once, during social studies class, fifty yards down the hall from where my brother worked in Reményi’s lair, I heard the man bellow, “For God’s sake! Let the tone ride upon your breath like a ball on a fountain of water.” More curse than command. My fellow social studies students turned to me in sympathy, their heads hung, as if Jonah’s fall chastened us all. Then we heard a sustained high forte such as no teenager had ever produced. The Hungarian bellowed, even louder, “Yes! That’s it!”

Even in rapture, the man was guarded. Most often, he affected cool neutrality. His pedagogical method was both archaic and iconoclastic. He fed my brother buffets of scales out of Concone and tortuous workouts from García: triplets, four-note scales, arpeggios. He made him sing fast, wordy passages while biting down on two fingers. Jonah never took the tongue for granted again. János made him do legato melismata as machine-gun sforzando. Jonah had to land each tone dead on its mark or start the whole sequence over. Teacher and student joined together to birth up chunks of sensation, lost to the sheer sense-heightened pleasure of the chase.

Our Wotan believed no student could master vocal technique except as part of a greater cultural mastery. He told us as much, at our winter assembly, 1955. “Singing is heightened speech, in a language beyond human languages. But if you want to speak in the words of the cosmos, you must train on earthly words. To prepare yourself to perform the Missa Solemnis or the Mass in B Minor — those summae of Western art — you must start to read all the European poetry and philosophy you can lay your hands on.” Reményi’s transcendental humanism lit up our skies like a nova. We couldn’t know that, like a nova, the star throwing off the blaze was already dead.

János Reményi’s Grand Masonic approach hurt Jonah less than other artificial technique-building programs might have. For all his shouting about tone, Reményi knew he could do nothing better for my brother’s voice than release it. The boy was the older man’s golem, his American Adam, his Enlightenment-haunted tabula rasa, a seed perfectible under greenhouse conditions. Europe had just offed itself again, its rococo opera houses gutted in high culture’s final flare-up. But in this charmed monastic backwater, whose leading novitiate surpassed anything Reményi had worked with in the Old World, the aging bass-baritone saw his chance for one more shot at Erhabenheit, no matter his disciple’s skin tone.

This was the year János implemented the school’s first vocal competition. He made Jonah compete in the senior division. He chose my brother’s piece — Handel’s “Süsse Stille”—and tried to choose his accompanist, as well. But Jonah refused to perform without me. By the time the first round ended, even those gladiators who’d gone into the arena with the fiercest ambitions pleaded no contest.

A week later, someone painted our bedroom door. A premeditated midnight raid: No other way the painters could have done it. The art was a grotesque portrait, thick liver lips and Brillo hair, a bastard son the Kilroy family sent guilty child support. The artists must have spooked themselves with their voodoo, because the caption beneath the picture only got as far as an N, an I, and a jagged G. The medium was red fingernail polish.

Thad discovered the portrait on his return from breakfast. “Holy Shetland sheepdogs.”

Earl managed an awed “Whoa!”

Jonah and I saw the thing at the same time. Jonah recovered faster. He laughed maniacally. “What do you think, fellas? Realism? Impressionism? Cubism?”

He and Thad hunted down some finger paint and added a beret, a pair of shades, and a hand-rolled cigarette hanging out of the ample lips. They named their beatnik Nigel. Nothing could have thrilled our roommates more: tarred with the same rouge brush, with a little property damage thrown in to boot.

Stony adults came to remove the door from its hinges and replace it with a virgin one. Jonah put on a show of disappointment. “Nigel’s deserting us. Nigel’s graduating.”

“Nigel’s gonna blow this peanut stand,” Thad added. “Nigel’s gonna go make the real scene.” The scene our roommates dreamed of making.

For a long time after, I woke up an hour after falling asleep, hearing scratching at the door.

Something in János almost seemed to like the fact that his star pupil wasn’t white. The dissonance only added to his thrill at presenting to the world something so rare and novel. Like most champions of Western culture, Reményi pretended race didn’t really exist — giants, dwarves, and Valkyries aside. He could grasp the obscurity of Parsifal more easily than he could imagine what humiliations our mother had lived through, just to sing European music at all. János Reményi had no more idea of his adopted country than did the rest of the white Boylston faculty. He thought music — his music — belonged to all races, all times, all places. It spoke to all people and soothed all souls. This was the same man who’d sung Wotan right up until 1938, never glimpsing the coming twilight of the gods.

He clung to this imperial idea: One trained the singular voice only by releasing the universal spirit. From the ruins of this bombed-out creed, Reményi drilled my brother. But in the fall of 1955, my brother’s spirit began to grow in ways his teacher would have strangled in the cradle had he been able to see them.

When Jonah’s voice broke, the wall between him and Kimberly Monera gave way. After his transposition to tenor, the baffling What now? dividing the two prepubes came tumbling down, answered. One summer had changed Kimberly, too, beyond recognition. She came back to school radiant. She’d spent the break in Spoleto, her father’s summer base. There, she’d somehow learned to sing. The freakish albino, in act two, had gone swan.

She returned with a shape so changed, it must have frightened even her. Her body, a narrow, backward thing the previous spring, now tapered with newfound power. I sat behind her in music history, wondering why her mother didn’t buy her larger clothes. Under that surprised binding, the new surface of her skin readied itself for use. Through the lime or columbine of her taut blouses, I stared for eternities at the little bandage of her bra, the three raised welts of its metal hooks, miracles of engineering. Whenever she crossed her nylon legs, I heard fingers sliding up and down a violin’s strings.

Around her, Jonah grew protective, gallant, stupid. The solitary solidarity of our rooftop club dissolved forever. Earl and Thad tried to lure him into games of Truth or Dare. But loyal to his Chimera and overnight wise, Jonah said nothing. And still, nothing was all we needed to reach the wildest conclusions.

Thad rode him, his grin of vicarious delight glowing in the dark. “What the hell have you been up to, Strom One?”

“Nothing. Just practicing.” The feathers of the canary all over his chin, even as he wiped it with a quick backhand.

“ Practicing, Strom One? I dig.”

Jonah snickered. “Practicing singing.”

“First base?” Earl could rise from a coma, ready to shoot the breeze all night long.

“First base?” The question outraged Thad. “Huber, you gone cat. Does this look like a man left stranded on lowly bag one? First base on a hardline drive. Takes second on a wild pitch. Throwing error into short center sends him…”

“You’ve all lost your minds.” Jonah caught my eye, a back-off warning. “You’re all flipping nuts.”

“That’s cool,” Earl decided.

Jonah disappeared on us, all Halloween evening. He didn’t come back until after midnight. I don’t know how he slipped the evening head count without getting caught. Long after curfew, he scratched the door to be let in. He was dizzy but mum. Earl Huber berated him. “Don’t get the girl in trouble, Strom.”

Jonah held his stare. “You don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

Thad intervened. “Strom One, man, we’re your loyal subjects and vassals. We’ll do your bidding for all time. I’m begging you. What’s it like?”

My brother stopped pulling off his blue-black school trousers. “What’s what like?”

“Strom, man. Don’t do this. You’re killing us.”

“It’s…like nothing you can know.”

Thad lay back in bed, kicking the air and howling.

My brother held up a silencing hand. “It’s like total, continuous… It’s like Wagner.”

Not a name we’d dared bring up before coming here.

“Thank God,” Thad shouted. “I’m not missing anything, then. I hate that shit.”

“It’s like beating off on somebody,” Earl explained, “who happens to be beating off on you.”

Jonah went so dark, his color became definitive. If he was doing anything wrong to her, I’d kill him. Close my fingers around his golden throat and stop his sound for good.

Whatever they were doing in their few moments by themselves, their trysts made Kimberly glow. Even Thad West noticed her transfiguration. “Is this some kind of light operetta, Strom One? I mean, what the hell? Look at her. She didn’t look like that before Halloween.”

Jonah wouldn’t be baited. The Chimera was no longer a fit topic for our running commentary. He and his chosen one made themselves invisible, moving in a secret subplot, awaiting the sunlit modulation to E major that would turn them from outlaws to inheritors.

Then a teacher surprised them, seated on the grass behind the trellises at the Rose Garden in the Fens. They were parked over a score — Massenet’s Werther. But their exact condition at the moment of discovery became a matter of endless speculation. Students came up to me for days to settle their raging bets.

Following the scandal, Kimberly relapsed into her congenital anemia, sure the two of them would both be thrown out of school. But even the faculty couldn’t imagine the two of them actually committing such transgression. They escaped without reprimand.

Kimberly was so scared, she dashed off a preemptive note to her father, then in Salzburg, explaining her side of things. The great man laughed it off. “ Sempre libera,” he told her, jotting a few notes of the aria on a scribbled staff in the letter’s margin. “Pick your mates of the moment wisely, and make them value whatever small favors you choose to bestow. ‘Di gioia in gioia, sempre lieta!’ ” She showed Jonah the letter, swearing him to solemn secrecy. Jonah told me, because I didn’t count.

János reprimanded my brother for his extracurricular Massenet. The dressing-down was dry and lofty; Jonah probably didn’t even know how sharp it was meant to be. Reményi began taking Jonah along with him on conducting engagements around the city. He wanted my brother occupied at all times.

Not long after the Rose Garden incident, my trial came. Thad West pushed me into it. “That Malalai Gilani has the swoons for you, Strom Two.”

“That’s right, hep cat,” faithful Earl added. “She does.”

Their words were an accusation, a police raid on innocent bystanders. “I didn’t do anything. I’ve never even said hello to her.”

“Oh, you’re doing something to her, Strom Two. This much, we know as a matter of factation.”

I knew nothing about the girl except the obvious. She was the darkest child in school, darker than Jonah and I combined. I never knew where she came from — one of those mythical countries between the Suez and Cathay. The whole school wanted us paired: two troubling ethnics, safely canceling each other out.

The girl had a solid alto, clear as a carillon in winter. She could count like mad, always entering on time, even in tricky twentieth-century work. She had the kind of voice that stocked decent ensembles. And she’d noticed me. I lay in bed mornings, crippled with responsibility.

From the moment our roommates opened my eyes, mutual knowledge sprang up between Malalai Gilani and me. In choral rehearsals, on performance tours, in the one large class I shared with her, a pact hardened between us without our exchanging more than a single, deniable glance. But with that one look, I signed my name to a contract, in blood.

The day I sat down next to her in the cafeteria, driven by my peers, she seemed not to notice. The first words she spoke to me were, “You don’t have to.” The girl was fourteen. It bound me to her with worse than chains.

We never did things together. She didn’t do anything with anyone. Once, on our way to a performance in Brookline, we shared a seat on the school’s bus. But we took so much abuse on that short ride, we never repeated the mistake. We didn’t talk. She seemed not to trust English much, except in movies and songs. It was weeks before — brief and damp — we even brushed hands. Yet we were a pair, by every accepted measure.

Once, she looked at me, apologizing. “I’m not really African, you know.”

“Me neither,” I said. Easier to misunderstand. All the school wanted was that we not trouble them.

I asked where she came from. She wouldn’t say. She never asked me — not about my home, my family, my hair, nor how I came to be at Boylston. She didn’t need to. She knew already, better than I.

She read about the strangest things — the House of Windsor, Maureen Connolly, the Seven Sisters. She loved fashion magazines, homemaking magazines, movie magazines. She studied them furtively, with an astonished head tilt, puzzling out the artifacts of a fabled civilization. She knew all about the Kitchen of the Future. She loved how Gary Cooper started to tremble a little in High Noon. She suggested I might look good if I grew my hair out a little and slicked it down.

Ava Gardner fascinated her. “She’s part Negro,” Malalai explained. This was when Hollywood could stage a mixed-race musical, but not with a mixed cast. My father believed that time didn’t pass. He must have been right.

Thad and Earl were relentless. “What does she want from you, Strom Two?”

“Want?”

“You know. Have you discussed the terms? What she expects?”

“What are you talking about? She just kind of blushes when we pass in the hall.”

“Uh-oh,” Thad said. “Commitment.”

“Mortgage time,” Earl agreed, giving the syllables a bebop syncopation.

“You better get yourself a good job, Strom Two. Support and all.”

Just before Thanksgiving, I bought a bracelet for Malalai Gilani in a drugstore on Massachusetts Avenue. I studied the options, taking hours to settle on a simple silver chain. The price — four dollars and eleven cents — was more than I’d paid for anything in my life except my beloved pocket scores and a set of the five Beethoven piano concertos.

My hands shook so badly as I paid for the bracelet, the cashier laughed. “It’s okay, dear. I’ll forget you bought it as soon as you’re out the door.” Half a century later, I still hear her.

I put off giving Malalai the gift. I needed to tell my brother first. Just broaching the topic of Malalai Gilani seemed disloyal. I waited until an evening when Thad and Earl were off listening to jazz in the common room. Jonah and I were alone in our cell. “Have you bought anything for Kimberly for Christmas?”

Jonah snapped to. “Christmas? What month is this? Jesus, Joey. Don’t scare me like that.”

“I just bought a bracelet…for Malalai.” I looked up and awaited my punishment. No one else could understand the size of my betrayal.

“Malalai?” I saw my face falling, reflected in his. He shrugged. “What’d you get her?”

I handed over the square white egg of a jewelry case. He looked in, controlling his face. “That’s fine, Joey. She’ll have to like that.”

“You think so? It’s not too…?”

“It’s perfect. It’s her. Just don’t let anyone see you give it to her.”

It took me days to make the presentation. I carried the thing around in my pocket, my leaden penance. I ran into her in the courtyard, long before the holidays, but far and away the best chance I was going to get. My throat rode up into my skull. Stage fright hit me, worse than anything the stage could produce. “I bought you…this.”

She received my trembling gift, her face pinched between pleasure and pain. “No one ever gave me anything like this before.”

“Like what? You haven’t opened it.”

Malalai opened the box, the hush of her pleasure horrible. An animal cry escaped her lips at the flash of silver. “It’s so beautiful, Joseph.” The first time she spoke my name. I flipped between pride and annihilation. She held the bracelet up. “Oh!” she said. And I knew I’d bungled things.

I grabbed the trinket. It looked flawless, just as it had in the drugstore.

“There’s nothing on it.” Her eyes shot downward, my lightning education in intimacy. “This is an ID bracelet. They usually have names.”

The very idea of engraving had never occurred to me. The clerk had said nothing. My brother had said nothing. I was a pitiful idiot. “I… I wanted to see whether you liked it. Before I put your name on it.”

She smiled, flinching at my words. “Not my name.” The magazines must have told her. She knew more about my country’s ways than I ever would. My name was to be chained to her wrist from now until the day all scripture was overthrown. And I’d done nothing. Nothing wrong.

Malalai placed the flashing bracelet around her near-black wrist. She played with the bare faceplate, its purpose now so obvious, even to me.

“I’ll get it engraved.” I could borrow cash from Jonah. At least enough to spell out J-O-E.

She shook her head. “I like it this way, Joseph. It’s nice.”

She wore the blank bracelet like a prize. It gave the girls more to mock her with: unengraved ID jewelry. Malalai must have thought I didn’t want anyone seeing her wearing my name. But the bracelet was already more connection than she’d ever hoped for, in such a place. Little changed between us. We managed to sit near each other during one school assembly and a special holiday meal. She was happy with our silent link. When we did talk, all I could talk about was concert music. She loved music as well as the next Boylston student. But it didn’t grip her like movies or magazines or the Kitchen of the Future. She grasped it long before I did: Classical music wouldn’t make you American. Just the opposite.

It slipped out one day, after one of her quiet confidences — something about how wonderful she found the 1950 Nash Rambler convertible. I laughed at her. “How did you ever land in a place like Boylston?”

Her hand strayed to her mouth, effacing and erasing. But she couldn’t make my question disappear or mean anything but attack. She didn’t cry; she got away from me before sinking to that. Still, she managed to avoid me for the rest of that school term. I helped with that. In late December, before the vacation, she sent me the white mausoleum box back, with the blank bracelet in its tomb. Also a record, Music of Central Asia, with a note: “This was going to be for you.”

The school performed our string of annual holiday concerts. These were, for Boylston, what exams were for ordinary schools. Jonah and Kimberly headlined the recitals with prominent solos. I rowed in the galleys. János Reményi took us on tour to area schools — Cambridge, Newton, Watertown, even Southie and Roxbury. Kids our age sat in darkened school gyms, as stunned by our music as they might have been by a band of organ-grinding, hat-tipping monkeys. One or two of the local principals seemed to want to make some special mention of Jonah, some object lesson in tolerance or opportunity in the speeches they delivered after the music ended. But our last name, combined with Jonah’s inexplicable coloring, left them fumbling and mum.

Before our show in Charlestown — the first time any of us had been to the wrong side of Boston Harbor — the chorus was milling in our usual preconcert jitters, when János came looking for me. I thought he wanted to reprimand me for the two notes I’d dropped at the Watertown concert, the day before. I was all set to assure Mr. Reményi that the inexcusable wouldn’t happen again.

But Reményi cared nothing about my performance. “Where is your brother?”

He scowled when I said I had no idea. Kimberly Monera was missing, too. János blasted away as quickly as he’d blown in, his face clenched the way it was when he conducted triple fortes. He darted off, determined to stop catastrophe before it started. But that required speeds János could never reach.

More versions of my brother’s disgrace exist than there are operatic treatments of Dumas. János found his star pupil and the great conductor’s daughter back behind the stage flats, fumbling underneath each other’s clothes. He hauled them out of a supply closet, in the late throes of heavy petting. They were locked in a back dressing room, naked, about to do it standing up.

Of it, I guessed only the barest, mangled logistics, inferred from offstage goings-on in Puccini matinees. When Jonah reappeared, one look warned me off ever trying to ask. I knew only that all three principals fled the scene in one of those explosive third-act trios: János enraged, Kimberly broken, and my brother humiliated.

“That bastard,” Jonah whispered, four feet from the thrilled knot of our buzzing schoolmates. I died at the sound of the word in his mouth. “I’ll finish him.”

He never told me what the man said, and I never asked. I didn’t even know my brother’s crime. All I knew was that I’d failed him. All life long, we’d kept each other safe from everyone. Now I was on the outside, too.

The Charlestown concert didn’t live in anyone’s musical memory. Yet the student audience might have mistaken our sound for joy. János beamed and bowed, and with that easy harvest of his hands, he made the chorus do the same. Kimberly somehow pulled off her solo. When Jonah rose to take the flourishes we’d heard him do a hundred wondrous times, it shot through my head, the slow-motion preview given those about to have an accident: He was going to take revenge. All he had to do was hold his breath. Nonviolent resistance. That little ritard he loved to take prior to plunging in, the slight pause awakening his audience that even our conductor knew to back off from, spread wide. Silence — the motor drive of nothingness underneath all rhythm — threatened to last forever, a spell of sleep cast over the entire kingdom of listeners.

In panic at Jonah’s stunt, my brain began dividing and subdividing the beats. János just waited out the endless hesitation, hands poised in the air, refusing even to blanch. Jonah neither caught his eye nor looked away. He stayed inside his perfect silence, hung on the stopped, forward edge of nowhere.

Then, sound. The web tore, and my brother was singing. Familiar melody drew me back from the end of the world. No one in the audience felt anything but heightened suspense. János was there, alongside Jonah, bringing the chorus in from my brother’s silent cadenza right on the downbeat.

By the end of the piece — one of those myopic medleys of English folk tunes that spelled, for 1950s America, the height of holiday nostalgia — the whole choir caught fire. Jonah’s spark of defiance awoke their showmanship, and the final chord brought down the house.

János wrapped his arm around his prodigy’s shoulders and embraced him in front of everyone, the boy’s protector, the idea of any falling-out between them as silly as the bogeyman.

Jonah smiled and bowed, suffering his master’s hug. But as he turned from the applauding audience, his eyes sought mine. He locked me in a look past mistaking: You heard how close I was. Easiest thing in the world, someday.

In the postconcert bedlam, I tracked him down. Charlestown kids were coming up to him to see if he was real, to touch his hair, befriend him. And Jonah was cutting them dead. He grabbed my wrist. “Have you seen her?”

“Who?” I said. With a click of disgust, he was gone. I chased after him, through the assembly. He kept racing out to the waiting academy busses and darting back into the school building, like a fireman trying for a medal or seeking his own immolation. One of the Boylston students finally told us he’d seen Kimberly hustled off in János’s car.

Jonah looked for her back at school. He was still looking when the night proctor came through, declaring lights-out. Jonah lay in the dark, cursing János, cursing Boylston, words I’d never heard before out of him or anyone. He thrashed until I thought we were going to have to restrain him with the bedsheets.

“This is going to kill her,” he kept saying. “She’ll die of shame.”

“She’ll live,” Thad called across the blackened room. “She’ll want to finish what you two were doing.” The jazzers reveled in the drama. Jonah’s scandal was the scene. It was now. Opera for the new age — all juke, jive, and gone. Nigel and the blonde. What more show could anyone want?

In the morning, Jonah was a twitching nerve. “She’s gone to hurt herself. The adults haven’t even noticed she’s missing!”

“Hurt herself? How?”

“Joey,” he moaned. “You’re hopeless.”

She turned up the next afternoon. We were in the cafeteria when she came in. Jonah was a wreck, ready to spring toward her, his boyhood’s north. All eyes in the school were on them. Kimberly never even glanced toward our table as she cut through the room. She sat as far from us as the room allowed.

My brother couldn’t stand it. He crossed to her table, indifferent to all consequence. She flinched, cowering from him, when he was still yards away. He sat down and tried to talk. But whatever they’d been to each other two days before had passed into another libretto.

He stormed back across the cafeteria. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, more to himself than to me. He fled upstairs. I scrambled behind. “I’ll kill the bastard. I swear it.” His threat was an operatic prop, a collapsible tin knife. But from my seat up in the second balcony, I was already gasping as the silvery thing disappeared to the hilt in his mentor’s chest.

My brother didn’t kill János Reményi. Nor did János mention the incident again. Disaster had been averted, decency preserved, my brother cuffed. Reményi just went on assigning more phrasing exercises from Concone.

Jonah went after Kimberly. He tracked her down late one afternoon, curled up in a stuffed chair in the sophomore lounge, reading E.T.A. Hoffmann. She tensed to run when she saw him, but his urgency held her. He sat down beside her and asked her a question in the smallest possible voice. “Do you remember our promise?”

She squeezed her eyes shut and breathed from the base of her gut, the way János had worked on them both to breathe. “Jonah. We’re just children.”

And at that moment, they no longer were.

He’d have thrown away all his skill to get it back: the childish secret engagement, the shared listening and sight-singing, huddling over scores, planning their joint world tour. But she’d closed up to him, because of something the adults told her. Something she’d never considered. She listened to him once more, but only as penance. She even let him take her marble hand in his, although she wouldn’t squeeze back. For the pale, white European Chimera, all the sweetness of first-time love, all their shared discoveries were dirtied with maturity.

“What are you saying?” he asked her. “That we can’t be with each other? We can’t talk, touch one another?”

She wouldn’t say. And he wouldn’t hear what she wouldn’t say.

He tormented her. “If we’re wrong, then music is wrong. Art is wrong. Everything you love is wrong.”

His words would kill her before they convinced her. Something had broken in Kimberly. Something sullied the secret duet they’d perfected in front of an empty hall. Two weeks before, she’d imagined herself opening in her life’s debut. Now she saw the piece from the back of the auditorium, the way the public saw, and she panned her own performance.

Jonah wandered the school like some favored family pet punished for doing the trick he’d been trained to do. His movements grew slow and deliberate, as if what he settled on here, in his first dress rehearsal, would seal the rest of his life. If this could be taken from him, then nothing was really his. Least of all music.

By week’s end, Kimberly Monera was gone. She’d gathered her belongings and vanished. Her parents withdrew her from Boylston in the middle of the school year, the last days of fall term. My brother told me, in a crazed falsetto giggle. “She’s gone, Joey. For good.”

He stayed awake for three days, thinking that at any minute he’d hear from her. Then he concluded that she must have already written, that the school’s storm troopers were destroying her letters before they reached him. He turned over the nonexistent evidence so many times, it atomized under his touch. His explanations grew florid with appoggiaturas. I was supposed to listen to every ornament.

“János must have told her some lie about me. The school must have written her father. Who knows what slander they told him, Joey? It’s a conspiracy. The maestros and the masters had to get together and hustle her away before I poisoned her.” Jonah even tortured himself with the possibility that Kimberly herself had asked to be withdrawn. He disappeared into a cloud of theories. I brought him every scrap of thirdhand gossip I could gather. He waved away all my offerings as useless. Yet the more worthless I became, the more he wanted me around, a mute audience for his ever more elaborate speculations.

Late in December, he signed us out at the front office, saying we were heading to the Fine Arts Museum to see a European photography exhibition. The day was chill. He wore his green corduroy coat and a black-furred Russian cap that came down over his eyes. I can’t remember what I wore. All I remember is the bitter cold. He walked alongside of me, saying nothing. We ended up in Kenmore Square. He sat me down on the curb at the T-stop entrance. The cold from the subway steps seeped up through my pants, and my underwear held the frost against my skin.

Jonah felt nothing. Jonah was on fire. “You know what this is about, Joey, don’t you? You know why they’re keeping her away from me?” You know. I knew. “The only question is…the only question is: Did she decide?”

But I knew that one, too. She’d been his. They’d learned scores together, unfolding each other. Nothing had changed except that they’d been caught in a supply closet. “Jonah. She knew…who you are. For as long as she’s known you. She had eyes to see.”

“A Moor, you mean? Could see I was a Moor?”

I couldn’t tell who he was attacking: Kimberly, me, or himself. “I’m just saying. It’s not like…she didn’t know.” The ice I sat on burned me.

“Her father didn’t know. So long as her father assumed the Boylston Academy of Music’s prizewinner was a harmless little white boy, he was just fine with her little puppy crush. Told her to enjoy herself. Sempre… ”

He sounded old. Knowledge, like some disease, had come over him in the night, while I was sleeping. I put my arm on his shoulder. He did not feel it, and I took it off. I didn’t know anymore how he felt about my touching him. Every sure thing was lost in the nightmare of growth. “Jonah. You don’t know. You can’t be sure that’s what it was.”

“Of course that’s what it is. What else could it be?”

“Her father didn’t want her…didn’t want the two of you…” I couldn’t bring myself to say what her father hadn’t wanted. I hadn’t wanted it, either.

“He wrote her a teasing letter. Told her to live life to the fullest.”

“Maybe he thought… Maybe he didn’t really know how…” I wanted to say how far.

“Joey. Stupidity’s over.”

I looked away, at the forked intersection, the newspaper shill’s stand pitched against the subway railing, the diner across Beacon Street with its tawdry Christmas tinsel strung across the plate window. It had begun to snow. Maybe it had been snowing for a while.

“She left too fast for it to be anything else. Only one thing in the world makes people that crazy. János must have called Monera up. Told him the score. World-famous conductor can’t have his prize girl running around with a little brown half-breed.”

My brother had always been my private freedom, my basement-level safety of willful unconcern. People and their blindness had been put on this earth strictly for his amusement. He’d always declared how others would see him. Every ambiguous slight, every veiled lynching had rolled off him until this one. Now the fever was in my brother’s face: the prick of our childhood’s vaccine, gone inflamed.

“Look at us, Joey!” His tone issued from a throat that had closed long before his had even opened. “What are we doing here? Couple of freaks. You know what we should have been?”

His words scattered me under the feet of the crowds that kept disgorging from the subway. We were homeless. We’d taken up living on this curb, no warmth, no sheltering inside to return to. Everything I knew to be certain was dissolving as fast as the fat flakes of snow landing on my brother’s face.

“We should have been real Negroes. Really black.” His lips were frozen; his words were a runny egg. “Pitch-black. Black as the sharps and flats. Black as that guy over there.” His thumb flicked up a little trigger, and his finger targeted a man cutting diagonally across Brookline. I grabbed his hand. He turned and smiled. “Don’t you think so, Joe? We should have been simple, straight-up. Black as Ethiopia in a power outage.” He looked around, picking a fight with all of indifferent Kenmore Square. “We’d know where we stood, anyway. Our self-serving little rich kid friends would have stoned us to death. János wouldn’t even have taken me into his fucking school. Nobody would’ve bothered using me. I wouldn’t have to sing.”

“Jonah!” I held my head and groaned. “What are you saying? They wouldn’t expect a black person to sing?”

Jonah laughed like a crazy man. “See what you mean. Not without dancing. And not the shit they make me sing now.”

“Shit, Jonah? Shit? ” Everything we loved, everything we’d grown up on.

Jonah only chuckled. He raised his palms, the innocent victim. “You know what I’m saying. We wouldn’t be…where we are.”

We sat in our unreal lean-to, curled against the crowd. Snow accumulated in drifts around our feet. My mind raced. I had to keep us here. Classical music was all I knew how to do. “Real black…very black people sing what we sing.”

“Sure they do, Joey.”

“Look at Robeson.”

“You look at Robeson, Joey. I’ve had enough of looking.”

“What about Marian Anderson?” The woman our parents claimed had brought them together. “She’s just cracked the Met. The door’s open now. By the time we’re…”

Jonah shrugged. “Greatest alto of the twentieth century. And they throw her a little second-scene bone, fifteen years past her prime.”

I plunged ahead, down a path I couldn’t make out. “What about Dorothy Maynor? Mattiwilda Dobbs?”

“You done?”

“There’s more. Lots more.”

“How many is lots?”

“Plenty,” I said, drowning. “Camilla Williams. Jules Bledsoe. Robert McFerrin.” I didn’t need to name them. He, too, had them all memorized. Everyone who’d ever given us something to go on.

“Keep going.”

“Jonah. Black people are breaking into classical music all the time. That woman who just played Tosca on national television.”

“Price.” He couldn’t help smiling in pleasure. “What about her?” He flung his arms at me. “Look at us. Two halves of nothing. Halfway to nowhere. You and me, Joey. Out here in the middle of…” His hand swept the angular plaza, the people hurrying through the snow. “We’d have been better off. Nobody’s going to want what they can’t even—”

“She wanted you.” I couldn’t bring myself to say the bloodless girl’s name. “She knew who you were. She knew that you…weren’t white.”

“Did she? Did she? She’s twenty-five jumps ahead of me, then.”

“Don’t torture yourself, Jonah. You don’t know. They might have taken her out of school for any—”

“She would have written.” Furious at my trust, my blindness. “Joey. You know how they got the word mulatto?”

I was a long time answering. “You think I’m stupid, don’t you? You think I’m a tagalong idiot.” I tried to stand, but couldn’t. My legs were a statue’s. My butt was frozen to the curb. When I managed to rock forward and rise, his hand held me down. His face was full of wonder at realizing how much I’d stored up for years, in silence.

“I don’t think anything of the sort, Joseph. I just think your parents brought you up in a dream.”

“Funny. I was just thinking that about your parents. So tell me. Where’d the word come from?” The one I hated, whatever its origin.

“It’s Spanish for ‘mule.’ Know why we’re called that?”

“Cross between a horse and a…whatever.”

“City boy.” He reached out to pull my hat down over my eyes. “They call us mules because we can’t reproduce ourselves. Think of it. No matter who you marry—”

“You’d never have married her, Jonah. It was just a game. Neither of you ever believed you were going to… Just a little operetta the two of you were dabbling in.” Yet their ending, written by another.

I’d never talked back to him before. I sat still and waited for death. But he didn’t even hear me. He started up again, resigned. “You and me, Mule. The two of us: one of a kind.” What she’d always called us, our mother. Our secret bond of pride, all the years of growing up. “Couple of damn bears on roller skates is what we are.”

A pair of ankles appeared to my left. I looked up at a policeman, staring down at us. His badge name looked Italian. He was as dark as either of us. Darkness was never really the issue.

The dark Italian scowled. “You boys are blocking traffic.”

Jonah looked up at the man, all earnest attention, just waiting for the lift of his baton to stand and deliver an aria.

“You hear me?”

I nodded dumbly, for all of us.

“Then get the hell out of here, pronto. Before I cuff and print you.”

Jonah did a three-point round-off, pushing back up to his feet. “I can’t move,” I bleated. I’d frozen into place. I’d have to go on sitting, freezing to death, like some doomed Jack London hero.

“You hear me?” the officer said. “You deaf?” Darker than olive. Maybe he had a secret Turkish ancestor hiding out in the family tree foliage. He grabbed me by one shoulder and dragged me to my feet. He twisted my arm so roughly that, had I been my own grandson, I’d have had grounds for a lawsuit.

Jonah raved at the policeman. “I’m a mulatto bel canto castrato with a legato smorzato.” I pushed him away. He pushed back, leaning toward the cop and waving his finger. “That’s my obbligato motto, Otto.”

“So gesundheit, already.” The man turned away from Jonah without a thought. He’d seen crazier. Every working hour: the sinkhole of human illness, on every block of his repeating beat. He threatened us vaguely with the back of his hand. “Get lost, hoodlums.” We hobbled off, my limbs still stiff with the season. From a hundred yards, he yelled, “Merry Christmas.” Anxious to thank him for his lenience, I returned the greeting.

One of my legs was cement. I called out to Jonah to slow down. We walked back along Yawkey Way, past the ballpark. Sometimes, in the early fall, from our room in the conservatory, we could hear the shouts of the desperate stands. Now the Fenway sat abandoned, a nuisance winter slum.

Jonah walked two steps ahead of me, hands in his pockets. His words formed frozen vapor puffs on the air. “I’m worried about her, Joey. Her parents… Her father might have…”

I wanted to tell him. But I was his brother, before anything.

By the time we got back to the conservatory, the snow had crusted us both in white. The roads lapping the Fens had that low, gray, angled, cloudy light of civil defense drills. Cars padded along at half speed on the strewn wadding. We couldn’t even see the school until we were in it.

We stepped back into hushed excitement. Students backed away from us in the corridor where we entered. For a moment, we were that sterile cross-species my brother had said we were. A boy we didn’t know addressed us. “You’re in trouble. They’re looking all over for you.”

“Who?” Jonah challenged. But the boy just shrugged and pointed toward the office. His eyes shone a little at the thought of the angel-voiced Jonah Strom taking a fall.

We shook the crust of white from us and headed for the office. I wanted to run; the faster we owned up, the lighter the sentence might be. But nothing could move Jonah from his usual hallway pace. In the office, even the adults shied from us. We’d somehow gone beyond them on our short walk, traveled to a place they weren’t ready to reach.

The assistant head laid into us. “Where have you been? We’ve torn the whole school apart looking for you.”

“We signed out,” Jonah said.

Our scolder was distraught beyond the scale of our offense. “Your father’s waiting for you. He’s upstairs in your room.”

A look passes between us, pinning us where we stand. A look we’ll exchange forever. We take the stairs in a sprint, two at a step. My brother shoots up ahead, landing after landing, still in full breath when I’m already sucking air. He could stop and let loose a high A for fifteen seconds, without strain.

I reach the summit, gasping. My brother already dashes down the hall. I follow Jonah into our room in time to hear him ask Da, “What’s going on? What are you doing here?” He has his theories, already. He sounds more thrilled than winded.

The man sitting on Earl Huber’s bed is not our father. This man is bent, shrunken, more bag man than mathematical physicist. His skin is drained. Under his clashing cardigan, his chest heaves. The face swings up to me, some shrill claim at blood relations. But this is not a face I’ve ever had to meet. Behind the tortoiseshell glasses, under the cubed forehead, the muscles fall slack. Our father thinks he’s smiling at us. A beseeching smile, gone begging. A smile that expands and settles in me, driving me from childhood.

“How are you boys? How are you two?” The German accent has thickened to a gruel, the how broadening to who. I thank God that we’re alone, no boys from the C cities in Ohio to explain things to.

“Da?” Jonah asks. “What’s wrong? Everything okay?”

“Okay?” our father echoes. Empirical reductionist. Okay has no measurement. Okay is a meter stick that shrinks with the speed of the measurer. He inhales. His jaw flops open to form a word. But the puff of consonant clutches on his throat’s thin ledge, a suicide wanting to jump, wanting to be coaxed back in. “There was ein Feuer. An explosion. Everything…burned. She’s…” All the words he auditions and rejects hang in the air between us. And my father still smiles, as if he might somehow be able to accept what he can’t even name.

“What’s happened to her?” Jonah shouts. “Where did you hear this?”

My father turns to his eldest son. He tilts his head like the puzzled mutt hearing his master’s voice coming out of the gramophone. He reaches out a hand to pierce the confusion. The hand, too small for anything, drops back into his lap. He’s still smiling: Everything everywhere already is. He nods his head. “Your mother is dead.”

“Oh,” my brother says. And an instant too late, his relief turns to horror.

April — May 1939

She was back in Philly on the 2:00A.M. train. That very same night. No time at all for anything to have happened while she was in D.C. Yet she slipped back into the sleeping house like a criminal, bearing a secret wider than the Potomac. And she was still up, after four hours of feigned sleep, dragging out of bed to make her morning classes, and, after that, her job at the hospital, if she lived that long.

Her mother met her in the kitchen, the question on her lips, although all Philadelphia already knew the answer. So many radios had tuned to last night’s broadcast, it was a miracle the city hadn’t fished the wavelength dry. Every listener had hung on the sound of her own private Marian, singing from the steps of that most public Mall.

“How was your concert?” Nettie Ellen asked, as if Delia herself had been the singer. Something in the woman knew, as sure as history: If her daughter hadn’t performed the night before, she was clearly performing up a storm that Monday morning.

“Oh, Mama. The biggest recital in the history of singing. The whole country was there — a dozen times more people than turned out for Jesus’s loaves and fishes thing. And Miss Anderson fed everybody on even less than he did.”

“Uh-huh. Good, then?” Nettie Ellen had heard every note of the shattering performance, cramped over the living room crystal receiver, that voice sailing up crisp and clear over the crackles of static. She, too, had swallowed down the bruise rising in her throat, the burning bile taste of hope — hope again, such foolishness, after all the corpses that had lined the way to that day. She’d read, before her daughter was out of bed, this morning’s headlines, lobbed by Monday’s paperboy over the porch into the burning bush: AMERICA THRILLS TO COLORED VOICE. Nettie hadn’t time for America. She was up to her wrists in baking powder, flicking the bits of egg-wetted flour around in the stoneware mixing bowl. She beat at the recipe with a force her daughter couldn’t fail to read. Nothing short of Judgment Day justified a grown woman coming home at 2:00A.M., waltzing in like the whole world had turned itself inside out and hollering lawless.

But the lawless girl had gone strange to her, docile and awed. “Mama. Mama. I don’t have time for biscuits.” Nettie just glared, and Delia set about, helpless, to help make them. In her sleep-starved daze, Delia even got the children up and pointed them toward their school clothes while her mother kneaded and punished the recalcitrant dough.

The mystery rose up between them, too thick for naming over biscuits and gravy. Not that Nettie Ellen needed any names spelled out. Seventy-five thousand lovers of fancy singing all gathered in a single place, and of course her Delia was going to cross paths with one who’d keep her out until all hours of creation. Clear as the features on her face: The girl was love’s zombie. Sighing like a chicken on an open fire. Setting the table in a dream, laying out the silverware as if spreading flowers on a grave.

Nettie Ellen had been waiting some time for this, braced for the spell that would turn her oldest child into another creature. She knew it would eventually settle in, as rapidly as spring — one minute, the lawn ratty and bare; the next, rolling in banks of aconite the color of condensed sun. It would as ever be the last, great test of selfless mothering: how to lay all her care down and let her own flesh and blood grow strange to her.

From the start, Nettie had vowed to rise to that last parental sacrifice before her girl forced her. But she hadn’t foreseen this pure foolishness, her own daughter turning shy on her, as if Nettie hadn’t spent years attending to the girl’s body — sick, naked, and needy — as if a girl’s mother didn’t already know all about the need flesh was made for. Silly timidity, the mother had expected. But this, her daughter’s frightened, inward flowering, was past all understanding.

Charles and Michael burst into the kitchen, filled with that good night’s sleep Delia would never again enjoy. They launched their industrious breakfast torments, warbling at her, throwing their noses and pinkies in the air. Big sister just cupped their closely cropped heads to her, one in each palm, and gazed at them, as if memorizing their faces before stepping off remembrance’s dock into oblivion. It scared them witless, and the boys took their chairs without another word.

Lucille and Lorene made their grand entrance, twinned displays of bows and shoe polish. Toward her little sisters’ prim show, too, Delia turned bravely weepy. Over the ranks of plates and glasses, all Nettie’s children bowed their heads in grace. Delia took her turn with the words: “Thank you God for all good things.” The syllables rumbled through the kitchen, each a lumbering boxcar in foreboding’s freight. All through her daughter’s breakfast prayer, Nettie’s lips worked away, moving to her own unheard incantation. One concert, and her girl would be forever strange to her? But even before her Delia had had anything to hide, the girl had always refused to be cornered.

Thanks given, Nettie raised her head and appraised her zombie saint. And over the steaming mounds of biscuit, some phantom movement caught her eye. The motion lasted only the barest second, if it moved at all. A whole family seemed to sit around the half table, lit in the lightning flash before her sight settled. A brace of faces, strangers to her, yet familiar as the ones who sat to this breakfast, this one. These spirit faces were not hers to name or know, yet somehow they seemed to belong, at one remove. Two or three, at first. Then, while Nettie turned her head to take them in, the faces multiplied. Before the glimpse dimmed and went out: more than she could count. More than could fit in her overflowing kitchen.

My line.The notion hit her with the force of foregone proof. My grandchildren, come back to see me. But something as thick and impenetrable as years held them clouded and soundproof, the far side of unreachable.

“Mama?” something called, and she fell back into now. “Mama?” That infant’s first question, wanting no answer but Here I am. Her hands felt splotchy, weak with heat. The saucer below her trembling cup filled with a liquid the color of skin. She was spilling, shaking like the old woman she’d just been, only an instant before.

“Eat up now,” she said, ignoring her eldest’s alarm. Delia had been dishing out her own bright doses of fear all morning. It wouldn’t hurt her to take a little. “Eat up, all of you. The world ain’t going to hold up school, just so y’all can dawdle.”

The children scattered at the sound of their father’s descent. The doctor appeared, resplendent in serge, his shirt’s iron whiteness shining out from underneath his suit like a bolt of ancient raiment. In his rich bronze voice, a tessitura that every time thrilled Delia to despair— And the trumpet shall sound! — he announced, “Seems she came through for us. Our Miss Anderson.”

“She was perfect, Daddy. She sounded like God singing to Himself, the evening before the very first day.”

“Hush,” Nettie said. “Don’t you go blaspheming.”

William just nodded. “Good concert, then? Everything we could have hoped for?”

Hope had been so far outstripped, it now seemed too meek a preparation. “Good concert.” Delia giggled and shook her head. “Good concert.” She was far away, as far as the concert houses of Europe. Vienna. Berlin. Farther. “I think it changed my life.”

The doctor’s beam clouded to a scowl. He took his seat at the table’s head, where a place setting materialized by magic in front of him. “What do you mean, ‘think,’ girl? If it changed your life, wouldn’t you know it?”

“Oh, she knows it all right.” Nettie Ellen fired her salvo from the sink, scraping at the child-savaged plates, her back to them both. Dr. Daley swept a look from wife to child. Delia could only shrug and hide in whatever scrap of protective foliage her parents deigned to leave to her.

The doctor devoured his breakfast. The steam off the brown-capped biscuit crusts, the thick smell of the gravy’s suet roux pleased him. He spread the newspaper around him, his fixed routine. His face stayed impassive as he scoured the momentous headline. He commenced filleting both the gravy-strewn biscuits and the news into clean, digestible portions. He partitioned and consumed the account of the epochal concert with the same appetite he applied to Hitler’s reinterpretation of the Munich Pact and insistence on Danzig. He dismantled the first section of the paper, flattening each sheet back with care, and scanned the stories through the final paragraph.

“It seems our nation’s capital wasn’t prepared for what hit it last night.” He spoke to no one, or to everyone in earshot. “Is this performance the start of something, do you think?” He looked up at his daughter. Delia looked down, too fast. “Let’s imagine, for a moment, they finally heard?”

Delia caught her father’s eye. She stood waiting for the question. But it seemed he’d already asked it. She tried to nod, just a fraction of an inch, as if she followed him.

He shook his head and set to restoring the paper’s front section to mint condition. “Who can say what it will finally take? Nothing else has worked. Why not try a little old-time singing? Though it’s not like we haven’t been doing a heap of that all along.”

At the doctor’s pronouncement, Nettie Ellen, still at sinkside, began humming to herself, her husband’s cue to get along with the earning of the daily bread. On his way out, William cast his daughter one more look: concession, congratulation, as if the triumph of the night before had been hers.

The doctor decamped to his clinic and the day’s first patients. That left just the oldest game going: mother and daughter, mutely reading each other, evading, trading, knowing before knowing. Nettie washed, and Delia stood by, drying. The proper cleanup. Air drying left streaks. You had to get to the dishes right away, with a towel and two elbows.

They finished. Both stayed in place, fussing and straightening. “I have to go,” Delia said. “I’ll be late for class.”

“Nobody’s keeping you.”

Delia shoved her towel back on the rack. Her hands said, Be that way, then. She broke for the doorway, and made it as far as the stove. “Mama. Oh, Mama.” Relief was easier, words were more obvious than she’d thought possible.

Her mother crossed the tiles to her, reached out one hand, and fixed the wave of hair that fell down across Delia’s face. Hair whose curl looked different now to each of them.

“Mama? How long before… How soon did you know?”

Her mother reached up to fix Delia’s heaving shoulders. “You take your time, child. The longer the making, the better the baking.”

“Yes, Mama. I know. But how fast? Was there one clear thing that…made you realize?”

The daughter tried on a slant, scared smile. At that look, her mother saw her kitchen fill up again with invaders. Grandchildren. Great-grandchildren, relentless and multiplying, underfoot. They schooled around Nettie Ellen Daley, at once the oldest American woman still standing upright.

“How I felt about your father? Child. I’m still figuring out what I got going on with that man.”

Delia fought for breath. She’d done nothing wrong. Nothing had happened. Nothing that meant anything. She was turning herself into a mad mooncalf for no reason. Giving herself pointless fits, over pure invention. Yet in the last night’s rareness, the press of that record-setting crowd, up too close to history, something had turned in her. Some ancient law had split apart. Drunk on the godlike Miss Anderson, the voice of the century, a feather floating on a column of air, Delia made a separate journey, traveled down into the briefest crack in the side of sound. A widening in the day had opened up in front of her, pulling her and her German stranger into it. They’d traveled together down into long time, along a hall without dimension, to a place so far off, it couldn’t even really be called the future, yet.

Now, in her mother’s kitchen, it shamed her to think how she must have invented the whole trip. Nothing had happened. She’d traveled nowhere. And yet, the man had traveled to that nowhere with her. She couldn’t have invented that. His eyes, as they said good-bye, already remembered the place in detail.

By that afternoon’s bed-making shift at the hospital, Delia managed to put the dream behind her. By the next day’s vocal lesson, she’d put it so far behind her, it was staring her in the face again. Lugati was going on about support, appoggio, that abdominal combination of tightening and relaxing too complicated for any but a medical student to follow. “A singer has only so much mileage in her,” Lugati said. “If you drive yourself wrong, you’ll spend your voice in ten years. Used right, your equipment can last as long as you do.”

At those words, the German was there again, alongside her. Together, as they’d been in Washington, on the Mall. Using each other right. Lasting as long as they needed to.

By week’s end, Delia had a letter from him. He asked if he might come to Philadelphia. She wrote back a dozen different answers, mailing only one. She met him out in front of Independence Hall — neutral territory. As in Washington, they lost themselves in a mixed, indifferent crowd.

Strangers turned to look. But none of them stranger than he. Again, that unreachable future opened up in front of them through a crack in the air. Again, they drew near to enter it. The wilder her feelings, the more she doubted. The man’s visit was brief, lucky, mad. But anything more than one illicit afternoon outside Independence Hall would be impossible. Surely he saw that.

“When can we do this again?” he asked.

“We can’t,” she answered, squeezing his arm like a hank of emergency rope.

When he left, she felt empty again, criminal. It encouraged her, how quickly his accent fell away in her ear, how hard it was to re-create him in silence. His alien face grew amber, less pallid, when dissolved in her memory. She wouldn’t see him again. Her life would return to her, simple, obvious, and pointed toward its goal.

She went to meet him in New York. She told her parents she had an audition — the first lie of any size she’d ever told them. Inside a month, she was telling larger. Her secret grew, even with poison waterings. She’d have to confess, or lose herself to duplicity. She had to make this wrong thing good again, as good as she sometimes imagined it was when they were together, alone, the sole curators of that long, dimensionless passage, the first visitors to that world they’d somehow shortcut to, diagonally, across the field of time. He knew all her music. He loved how she sang. She was herself with him.

She tried to tell her mother. Shame and disbelief prevented her. Once or twice, she started, then fled down another topic. Any words she tried to give it turned it evil. Like perfect fruit, it went rancid when exposed to the air. After some weeks, Delia stopped looking her mother in the eye. The lie spread into her daily doings, tainting routines that had nothing at all to do with the man. Her most innocent comings and goings slipped under the growing cloak of concealment. Even her little brothers and sisters began shying away from her.

Her mother kept still and waited for her to return. Delia could feel her, patient, kind, horribly wise, trusting to her gut, where motherhood lived. And in her trust, driving her daughter away.

Her mother stayed good, until goodness began to strangle them both. Then Nettie went upstairs one evening, to the little attic room that served as Delia’s provisional studio. Delia stood in her posture of forced comfort, working a chunk of chromatic scale across the higher of the two passage points in her voice. She stopped at the knock on the door. Her mother stood, hands cupped as if around a coffee cup or a prayer book. Neither of them spoke for a quarter minute.

“You keep on singing. I’ll just make myself hid and listen.”

She hunched over, already old, her shoulders weighted down into an unanswered question mark by a hundred years of unanswered need.

“Mama” was all the girl could say.

Nettie Ellen stepped into the attic and sat. “Let me guess. He’s poor.”

Delia’s private prize rushed upward, flushed out of the underbrush. She flared up, the righteousness of the guilty. Then anger dissolved in tears, easing into a relief she hadn’t felt in weeks. She could talk to her mother. All distances might close again, in words.

“No, Mama. He’s…not exactly poor. It’s…worse than that.”

“He’s not a churchgoing man.”

Delia bowed her head. The bare floor filled with sea for drowning in. “No.” Her head made one slow, leaden swing. “No. He isn’t.”

“Well, that’s not the end of the world.” Nettie Ellen clicked in the back of her throat. The sound of all things that needed enduring. “You know we’ve always had our problems with your father on that count, and he sure don’t seem about to jump up and reform anytime soon.”

Nettie smiled at her daughter, mocking her own long-suffering. But she got no smile in return. Delia stood mute, her whole body begging, Ask me some more. Please, please, keep asking.

“He’s not from around here, is he? Where’s he from, then?”

The animal scare in her mother’s eyes killed any chance Delia had of cleaving to the truth. “New York,” she said, and slumped still lower.

“New York!” A glow of foolish hope in her mother celebrated the reprieve. “Thank the Lord. New York’s nothing. We can walk to New York, girl. I thought you were going to say Mississippi.”

Delia forced herself to laugh, heaping lie on lie.

Her mother heard the note at once. Her mother’s golden ear, the one Delia had inherited. “Have pity on me. You got to tell. No way I’m going to guess. What could be so wrong with the man? He have three legs or something? Been married five times already? He don’t speak English?”

A giggle tore from Delia, hollow and horrible. “Well. There is that.”

Nettie Ellen’s neck jerked back. “He don’t? Well, what’s he speak, then?”

Then a look. A wide-eyed, overdue dawning. Sorrow, fear, incredulity, pride: all the colors of the rainbow, bent out of the white light of incomprehension. The question she’d climbed up into this attic studio to ask died on her lips. Do you love him at least? no longer had any bearing.

“You’re saying he’s not one of us?”

The full force of that mad simplicity. Hundreds of years lifted off Delia. Centuries of evil and worse, waiting for their answer. She felt the long-sought appoggio well up under her breath. History was a bad dream that the living were obliged to shake. The world — right use — could start from now.

“That’s right, Mama. He’s not…entirely one of us.”

In the centuries that sprang up between them, neither, anymore, was she.

Bist Du Bei Mir

We went back home with Da. I say “home,” but the place was gone. We stood in front of the gutted building, staring at the rime of frost that coated our blackened freestone. I stood in a mound of rubble, looking for the place I’d grown up in.

I kept thinking that we were one street too far south. The fire had charred the two entrances on either side of ours. Our building looked like the target of a stray artillery shell. Wood, brick, stone, and metal — things that couldn’t have come out of our house — lay heaped up in a twisted mass. But everyone — our neighbors, our invalid landlady, Mrs. Washington, even Mrs. Washington’s Jack Russell terrier — had gotten out alive. Every living creature but my mother.

We stood in front of the ruin so long, we were in danger of freezing. I couldn’t look away. I looked for the little spinet we’d always sung around, but nothing in that pile of slag remotely resembled it. Jonah and I huddled together, stamping, our breath steam. We stood until the cold and the pointlessness grew worse than our need. At last, Da turned us away from the sight for good.

Ruth didn’t come with us for that last look. She’d already had hers. Rootie had been the first, coming home to a house in flames. Her local grade school’s bus, unable to turn into our barricaded street, let her off at the corner. She didn’t know until she walked into the mob of firemen just whose house was burning. The men had to drag the screaming ten-year-old girl away from the blaze. She bit one of them on the hand, drawing blood, trying to fight free.

She screamed at me, too, as soon as we saw her. “I tried to find her, Joey. I tried to go in. They wouldn’t let me. They let her die. I watched them.”

“Hush, Kind. Your mother was already dead a long time by the time you came even close.” Da meant it as consolation, I’m sure.

“She was burning up,” Ruthie said. “She was on fire.” My sister had become another life. The oldest child on earth. Air rasped in and out of her. She started at something none of us could see. I put my arm on her and she didn’t even register.

“Shh. No one could be inside a flame like that and still feel.” Da had lived too long in the world of measurement. To him, even a ten-year-old girl wanted only the truth.

“I heard her,” Ruthie said, though not to any of us. “They trapped me. They wouldn’t let me reach her.”

“The Heizkörper exploded,” Da explained.

“The what? The hot body?”

“The boiling,” Da said. “The heating.” He’d forgotten how to speak the language. Any language.

“The furnace,” I translated.

“There had been a leak, most likely. The furnace exploded. This is why she could not get away from this fire, even though it came on her in the middle of the day.”

This was the theory that best fit all evidence. For weeks, in my dreams, things exploded. And in full daylight, too. Things I couldn’t name or outrun.

We moved into a tiny apartment down in Morningside Heights that a colleague loaned my father for the length of our emergency. We lived like refugees, dependent on the gifts of others. Even our classmates from Boylston sent us boxes of castoffs, not knowing what else to do.

My father arranged a memorial service. This was the first and last complex social act he ever managed to pull off without our mother’s help. There was no casket for viewing, no body left for burial. My mother had already been cremated, on someone else’s orders. All of our pictures of her had burned, alongside her. Friends contributed what keepsakes they had, to make a remembrance table. They propped them up on a sideboard by the hall door: clippings, concert programs, church bulletins — more mementos of my mother than I’d ever see again.

I didn’t think the little rented hall would fill. But people kept coming until they couldn’t get in. Even my father had underestimated, and he needed to call in more folding chairs. It stunned me to discover my mother had known so many people, let alone could bring them out on a bleak midwinter Sunday afternoon. “Jonah?” I kept asking under my breath. “Jonah? Where did all these people come from?” He looked and shook his head.

Some of the gathering turned out for my father’s sake. I recognized several of his colleagues from the university. Here and there, black yarmulkes clung to the crowns of balding skulls. Even Da briefly wore one. Others in the crowd came for Ruth, kids she went to school with, neighbor children we never really knew but whom Ruth had befriended. But most of the room turned out to send off my mother: her students, her fellow church circuit singers, her improbable assortment of friends. In my child’s mind, I’d always thought of Mama as an exile, barred from a country that should have been hers. But she’d furnished exile and thrown it open wide enough to make a life in.

From up front in the room, mourning’s showcase row, I turned around to sneak a look at her crowd. I scanned the range of colors. Every hue I’d ever seen sat somewhere in that room. The faces behind me shone in all gradations, shades split and glinting like the shards of a light-splashed mosaic. Each one insisted on its own species. Flesh casts slanted off everywhere, this way mahogany, that way walnut or pine. Clumps of bronze and copper, pools of peach, ivory, and pearl. Now and then, some extreme: bleached paste from out of the flour bin of a Danish pastry kitchen, or a midnight cinder from down in the engine room of history’s ocean liner. But in the spectrum’s bulging middle, all imaginable traces and tinges of brown packed onto folding chairs against one another in the crowded room. They gave themselves up by contrast, taupe turning evidence on ambers, tan showing up tawny, pinks and gingers and teaks giving the lie to every available name ever laid over them. All ratios of honey to tea, coffee to cream — fawn, fox, ebony, buff, beige, bay: I couldn’t begin to tell brown from brown. Brown like pine needles. Brown like cured tobacco. Tones that might have been indistinguishable by daylight — chestnut, sorrel, roan — pulled away from the tones they sat next to under the low lamps of those close quarters.

Africa, Asia, Europe, and America had slammed into one another, and these splintered tints were the shards of that impact. Once, there were as many shades of flesh as there were isolated corners of the earth. Now there were many times that many. How many gradations did anyone see? This polytonal, polychordal piece played for a stone-deaf audience who heard only tonic and dominant, and were pretty shaky even picking out those two. But all the pitches in the chromatic scale had turned out for my mother, and many of the microtones between.

This was my stolen, forbidden look back. Next to me, Jonah kept craning his neck, twisting in his chair, scanning the audience for someone. At last, Da told him, as sharply as he ever spoke to us, “Stop, now. Sit still.”

“Where’s Mama’s family?” Jonah’s voice reverted to soprano. A field of welts marked his face where he’d tried to shave. “Is that them? Are they here? They have to come for this, don’t they?”

Da hushed him again, lapsing into German. His words floated out without bearing, spreading across all the places he’d ever lived. He spoke rapidly, forgetting that his sons had a different mother tongue. I made out something about how the people in Philadelphia would have their own service, so everyone could attend without having to make the journey. Jonah didn’t catch any more than I did.

My father wore the same style of double-breasted gray suit already years out of date when he’d gotten married in one. He studied his knees with the same baffled smile with which he’d told us our mother was dead. Ruth sat next to Da, tugging at the sleeves of her dress’s black velvet, whispering to herself, her hair a tent of snarls.

A well-meaning but bewildered minister told my mother’s life story, which he didn’t know from Eve’s. Then friends stepped in to salvage the wreck the eulogy made of her. They told stories about her girlhood, a mystery to me. They named her parents and gave them a past. They brought to life her brothers and sisters, and recalled their three-story house in Philadelphia, a family fortress I pictured as an older, wooden version of our brownstone, which had burned down around her. The speakers seemed almost ready to fight over what they had most loved in her. One said grace; another said humor. Another said her foolish belief that the worst in us was fixable. No one said what they wanted. No mention of being spit on in elevators, no threatening letters, no daily humiliations. No talk of fire, no explosion, no being melted alive. People in the audience called out aid at every pause, joining the refrains like those congregations my mother once sang for. I sat up front, nodding at each testimonial, smiling when I thought I was supposed to smile. I would have spared them all, told every speaker to sit down, said that they didn’t have to say anything, if it had been in my power.

My mother’s student, a bass-baritone named Mr. Winter, told how she’d been refused by the school where she first wanted to study. “Not a lesson went by for me when I didn’t bless those sorry bastards for putting Mrs. Strom on another path. But if I were a federal judge, I’d sentence them to one afternoon. Just one. Listening to the sounds that woman could make.”

It came my father’s turn to speak. No one expected him to, but he insisted. He stood, his suit flying outward in all directions. I tried to straighten him up a little as he rose, which sent a nervous laugh through the whole congregation. I wanted to die. I’d have given all our lives for hers, and come out ahead.

My father walked up behind the podium. He bowed his head. He smiled out across the audience, a pale beam aimed at other galaxies. He took off his glasses and wiped them with his handkerchief, the way he always did when overcome. As always, he succeeded only in smearing around his eyebrow grease. For a moment, he blinked, sightless, a bloated, poached whitefish lost in this sea of real color. How could my mother have seen past such a skin?

Da slid his glasses back on, and became our Da again. The thickness of his spectacles made him cock his head. The raised side of his face went up in a horrible grin. He held out his right hand and shook it in the air, about to start one of his lectures on relativity by telling a funny story about clocks on moving trains or twins on rocket ships traveling near the speed of light. He shook his hand again, and his mouth fell open, preparing the first word. A dry clicking came out of his throat. His voice spread across thousands of staggered attacks, all the part-songs he’d ever started with her. He floundered on the upbeat.

At last, the first word cleared the hurdle of his larynx. “There is an old Jewish proverb.” This wasn’t my father. My father was out standing in the face of some terrible bare wind. “A proverb that goes, ‘The bird and the fish can fall in love…’”

The jaw dropped and the clicking came on again — dry reeds on a riverbank scraping one another. He held still for so long, even my embarrassment, in that dry clicking, scattered, along with the room’s every discomfort, into silence. My father lifted up his chin again and smiled. Then, with a crumpled apology, he sat down.

We sang: the only part of the day that might have pleased her. Mr. Winter delivered “Lord God of Abraham,” from Mendelssohn’s Elijah. The best of my mother’s amateur women took a run at the Schubert “Ave Maria,” Miss Anderson’s hallmark, so loved by my mother that she herself had not sung it since girlhood. The student singer couldn’t control any note above her second E. Grief tore up her vibrato, and yet, she’d never again come so close to a perfect rendering.

One by one, then in groups, the voices my mother once sang with took their turn singing without her. They littered the room with fragments of Aida. They sang Russian art songs whose words were a wash of phonetic watercolor. They sang spirituals, the only folk music that always harmonized itself out to four, five, even six abandoned and abiding parts. They stood and sang spontaneous bits of gospel, all the available scraps of improvised salvation.

For the briefest, thinnest moment, I heard it again, the game of Crazed Quotations — my parents’ eternal courtship ritual and their children’s first singing school. Only here, the counterpoint slowed and drew itself into a single thread. Deep turned to wide, chords to lines. Yet something of that old melodic piling up remained. And the something that remained was my mother. She’d come from more places than even her hybrid children could get to, and each one of those clashing places sang its signature tune. Once, those competing strains had fought to pass through the ear all at once. Now they gave up and took turns, polite, at last, in death, each making way for the other, lengthwise down the testament of time.

My father didn’t try to sing. He was too smart for that. But he didn’t stay silent, either. He’d written out a three-minute quodlibet, a record of our old evenings together, nights that had seemed endless, once, but had more than ended. Into those three minutes, he packed every quote that fit the seed harmonic progression. He could not, in any conceivable universe, have composed the piece in the few days since her death. Yet if he’d written out the piece in advance, it could only have been with this occasion in mind.

He’d scored it for five voices, as if we were still the singers. He might as well have written an aria for Mama herself to perform. An ad hoc quintet of her friends and students stood in for us, while we sat in the mute audience. On short notice, they worked a miracle. They reassembled Da’s crazed pastiche, giving it the virtuosity of an airy good-bye. Had they heard the thing for what it was, they’d never have gotten through it: our family’s nightly musical offering, thanks for a gift we thought would always be ours.

Da performed a feat of musical reconstruction. All our old quotation games had died and burned, as sure as every family album. Yet here was one intact again, exactly the collage we’d sung one night, in everything but the particulars. Da somehow recovered that name, too familiar to retrieve. He was the transcriber, but he could never have composed this piece alone. She was there in counterpoint, laying down line on line. Note by note, he pulled her back from the grave. Her “Balm in Gilead” careened into his Cherubini. Her Brahms Alto Rhapsody bickered with his growled klezmer. Debussy, Tallis, Basie: For the length of that collage, they made a sovereign state where no law prevented that shacking up, such unholy harmonies. This was the only composition Da ever wrote down, his one answer to the murderous question of where the fish and the bird might build their impossible nest.

My brother and I were slated to go on after Da’s piece. I stole a look at Jonah as the group headed toward the work’s surprise, inevitable home. His face was a nest of wasps. He didn’t want to stand and perform in front of this audience. Didn’t want to sing for them. Not now, not ever. But we had to.

The piano in that rented room played damp and wayward. My brother’s voice was wrecked with refusal. He’d chosen a song he could no longer sing, one pitched up a childhood above his highest note. I’d tried every way possible to talk him out of the choice. But Jonah wouldn’t be moved. He wanted to do that Mahler he and Mama had once auditioned together. “Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht?” Who thought up this little song?

This was the way he wanted to remember her. Two years after their joint performance had gotten him into the academy, Jonah had asked that she not come pick him up at the holidays. Now the source of all his love and shame had died before he could release her from that banishment. He’d carry this fact with him for the rest of his life. Not even singing would be able to expel it.

Two nights earlier, he’d come up with the monstrous idea of singing the whole song in falsetto, up in the original soprano of The Boy’s Magic Horn, like some grotesque countertenor straining for the unreachable return. I made him hear the absurdity. We took it down an octave, and except for that jarring dissonance — the innocent words sung in his exiled range — we got through it. The mourners must have found the tribute inexplicable. What did this darling girl in her mountain house have to do with the matter-of-fact, irreverent black woman from Philadelphia, burned alive before the age of forty? But the girl in the song was Mama. Who could declare how her sons saw her? Death mixes all the races. Now more than ever, she was that girl, looking out forever on the original green meadow.

Our house had burned and our mother was dead. But we had no body to prove it. I wasn’t old enough to believe, without the evidence of seeing. To me, all these people had gathered to sing, rehearsing for some future first anniversary of the missing one’s return. Who thought up this little song? Only when the hidden mountain girl took my mother’s face did she at last appear to me. And only in my father’s tortured, fairy-tale language could wund rhyme with gesund:

My heart is sore.

Come, Treasure, and heal it!

Your black-brown eyes

Have wounded me.

Your rosy mouth

Makes hearts healthy,

Makes boys wise,

Makes the dead live…

Who, then, thought up this pretty little song?

Three geese carried it over the water,

Two gray and one white.

And for those who can’t sing this little song,

These geese will whistle it.

I pressed the keys that her fingers once had pressed, in the same order she’d once pressed them. Jonah whistled his way through the tune, inventing it in midflight. I stayed with him, beat for beat. The extra octave in his thickened cords disappeared. He sang the way others only thought to themselves. His voice came to the notes like a bee to a flower, amazed by the precision of its own flight: light, true, unthinking, doomed. Everything was over in a minute and a half.

Your voice is so beautiful. I want you to sing at my wedding.She never knew how much the joke terrified me. So I’m married already. That can’t stop me from wanting you to sing at my wedding! Maybe even being dead would not stop her wanting. Maybe this was the wedding she wanted us to sing for.

Her brown-black eyes might have made us healthy, might have made us wise. Might have raised us all from the dead, had she not died first. Who can say why she loved that pretty little song? It wasn’t hers. It was some other world’s. This life wouldn’t let her sing it. Mama’s three geese — two gray and one white — carried the song back over the water for her, to the place where she never got to live.

I played once more that day, a final accompaniment to finish out the service. Throughout all the speeches and songs, Rootie sat on the wooden chair next to Da, picking at her stocking knees, peeling her shoe soles, her wayward hands daring her mother to come from out of the burning house and slap them. For nights after the fire, Ruth had gone to bed wailing and awakened in screams. She’d choke on her spittle, demanding to know where Mama was. She wouldn’t stop weeping until I told her no one knew. After a week, my sister settled into a hard, safe cyst, turning her secret over and over. The world was lying to her. For unknown reasons, no one would tell her what had really happened. The grown-ups were setting her a task, a test for which she was completely on her own.

Even at the memorial, Ruth was already working on that mystery. She sat in her chair, twisting her hem into ribbons, turning over the evidence. Daytime, at home, and everyone escaped but one. Ruth knew Mama. Mama would never have been caught like that. All during the remembrances, Rootie kept up a steady subvocal dialogue, quizzing and tea-partying with her now-vaporized dolls. Now and then, she scribbled into the palm of her hand with her index finger, indelible notes to herself on her ready skin, all the things she must never forget. I leaned down to hear what she was whispering to herself. In the smallest voice, she was repeating, “I’ll make them find you.”

However unforgivable, we saved my sister for last. Ruth was our mother’s best memory, the thing most like Mama in the world. At ten, she’d already begun to show the voice Mama had. Ruth had all the goods — a pitch that matched Jonah’s, Mama’s richness, a feel for phrase beyond anything I could produce. She might have gone beyond us all in music, given a different world.

She sang that learner’s song, by Bach and not by Bach, the simplest tune in the world, too simple for Bach himself to have written it without help. The tune appeared in Bach’s wife’s notebook, the place where she scribbled down all her lessons. Ruth had learned it from Mama, without a lesson at all.

Bist du bei mir, geh’ ich mit Freuden

zum Sterben und zu meiner Ruh’.

Ach, wie vergnügt wär’ so mein Ende,

es drückten deine lieben Hände

mir die getreuen Augen zu!

If you are with me, I’ll go gladly

to my death and to my rest.

Ah, how pleasant will my end be,

with your dear hands pressing

Shut my faithful eyes!

Root sang as if she and I were the only two souls left alive. Her sound was small but as clear as a music box. I kept off the sustain pedal, sounding each chord almost tentatively, not with the press of my fingers but with the release. Her held lines floated above my stepwise modulations like moonlight on a lost, small craft. I tried not to listen, except to stay inside the throw of her beam.

The simplest tune in the world, as simple and strange as breathing. Who knows what the room heard? I’m not even sure Rootie understood the words. They may have been meant originally for God. But that’s not where Ruth sent them.

We sat down to a silent room. Ruth never again sang in her father’s language, never again performed her mother’s beloved European music in public. Never again, until she had to.

The room sang itself out with “On That Great Gettin’ Up Morning.” The song wasn’t listed in the program, but it came off almost as if by plan. My mother’s friends let loose with the sunniest syncopated major. One exchange of glances was enough to set the send-off tempo. Voices with voices, rich, rolling, knowing we’d never have any other account but this. The ad libs grew dizzy, and I checked Jonah to see if we might add some ornaments to the fray. He just looked at me, swollen, and said, “Take it away, if you want.”

Afterward, the group visited over little square-cut sandwiches, tucking into the food with an appetite that made me hate them all. The few children in attendance sniffed out Ruth, who couldn’t bring herself either to play or stand off. Jonah and I held up the wall, just watching people smile and enjoy one another. When anyone came by to say how sorry they were, Jonah thanked them mechanically and I told them it wasn’t their fault.

A man came up to us. I hadn’t seen him during the service. He seemed as negligent with age as any adult. He was in his early thirties, ten years older than was decent in anyone. He seemed to me the perfect color, just the cinnamon side of clove. He walked up to us, shy, certain, curious, his eyes rimmed with red. “You boys cook,” he said. His voice struggled. “You boys really hum.”

He couldn’t smile. He kept looking around the room, ready to bolt. I couldn’t understand how someone I didn’t know could feel such grief for my mother.

“Is that good or bad?” Jonah asked.

“Real good. Good as it gets. You remember I told you that.” He bent down, his blood-streaked eyes at our level. He stared at us, himself remembering. “You,” he accused Jonah, index finger out. “You sound like her. But you.” His hand swung around in a slow quarter circle. “You are like her. And I’m not talking shade.”

The man straightened up and peered down on us. I felt Jonah turn fierce, even before I heard him. “How would you know? Do you even know us?”

The man held up his disarmed palms. They looked like mine. His palms would have looked no different had he been white.

“Hey, hey. Keep cool, cat.” He sounded like what Thad and Earl would have died to be able to imitate. “I just know is how I know.”

Jonah heard it, too. “You were close to her or something?”

The man only looked at us, his head sliding from side to side. We amazed him, and I couldn’t say how. He couldn’t accept our being, but he found it wonderful, even comic. He put his hands on each of our heads. I let him. Jonah shook free.

The man backed off, still shaking his head, filled with sad wonder. “You two really hum. Remember that.” He looked around the room again, afraid of being caught, or maybe wanting to be. “You say hello to that Da of yours. From Michael, okay?” Then he turned from the sorrowing party and left.

We found our father drawing Feynman diagrams on the back of a napkin for two of his Columbia colleagues. They were arguing about the reversibility in time of elementary colliding particles. It seemed obscene, that they should be talking about anything other than death or Mama. Maybe, for Da, they were talking about both.

Jonah broke up the session. “Who’s Michael, Da?”

Our father turned away from his colleagues, a blank across his face. We were simply the next people intent on getting him to solve a problem for them. “Michael?” Failing to recognize the name of this new elementary particle. He looked at us, registered who we were. Something engaged. He grew frightened and excited, all at once. “Here?” Jonah nodded. “A tall man? About a hundred and ninety centimeters?” We looked at each other, frightened. Jonah shrugged. “A fine-looking man? Narrow face? One of his ears does this?”

Da flipped down his right ear flap to mimic the fold we’d both noticed. He never mentioned the cinnamon. First thing anyone else would want to know. Our father never even asked.

“Yes?” he asked. “This is him?” Still happy, still scared. He looked about the room, matching Michael’s own furtive look. “Where is he?”

Jonah shrugged again. “He’s gone.”

“Gone?” Da’s face drained as pale as the day he came up to Boston to tell us about Mama. “Away?”

I nodded at the imbecile question. Something had gone wrong, and it was Jonah’s and my fault. I nodded, trying to right things. But Da never even saw me. Our father was never at home in his body. The thing was squat and his soul was slender. When he moved, he slumped along next to himself like an overpacked suitcase. But at least this once, he ran. He moved through the rooms so quickly, the surrounding conversations were sucked up into his wake. Jonah and I scrambled to chase after him.

Da ran outside, on the street, ready to dash on through the passersby. He got as far as the first cross street. I watched him from half a block back. He didn’t belong in this neighborhood. He fell off the edge even of this street’s broad spectrum.

The buzz of conversation kept spilling from the little rented hall behind us. Da turned and rejoined us, beaten. The three of us went back in. The hum hushed at our entrance. Da looked around at the gathering, still trying to smile.

Jonah asked, “He was somebody we know or something?”

“He said I look like Mama.” I sounded like a child.

“You both look like your mother.” Da refused to look at us. “All three of you.” He took off his glasses and pressed his eyes. He slipped his glasses back on. The smile, the grin of disbelief, the slow shake of the head left him. “My boys.” He wanted to add, My JoJo, but couldn’t. “My boys. That was your uncle.”

Spring 1949

I’m seven years old when our father tells me the secret of time. We’re halfway up the steps from 189th Street, climbing toward the next way camp along our route, a place called Frisch’s Bakery on Overlook Terrace. Pick a Sunday near Easter in the spring of 1949.

My brother Jonah is eight. He climbs the stairway like a tank, two stairs to my labored one. In this year, Jonah’s hips still come up near my sternum. He climbs as if he wants to leave me in his distant past. He probably would if Da didn’t hold us together, one boy in each whitened hand.

Our father has worked on time since time began. He was working on it even before my brother was born. I can’t get enough of the idea: Jonah nothing, not even a speck of dust, and my father already at work, not even missing us, not even knowing that company is coming.

But now, this year, we’re here with him. We make this long pilgrimage to Frisch’s together, stopping to catch our breath. “To catch up with ourselves,” Da says. Jonah has already caught up with whoever he is, tugging at the leash of our father’s arm, smelling adventure just up this stone-paved hill. I’m winded and need the rest. All this is half a century ago. The day has brittled in the interim, like a box of old postcards from Yellowstone and Yosemite laid open in a spring-cleaning purge. Anything I remember now must be half invention.

We pass people who recognize my father from when he used to live here. “Before I met your mother.” The sound of this frightens me. My father greets some of them by name. He says hello as if he just saw these strangers the day before. These people — older than the moon and stars — are cool to him, distant in a way Da doesn’t see. They flick us a look, and we are all the explanation they need. Already I’m used to seeing all that Da won’t notice.

Our Da watches his old neighbors walk along Bennett Avenue in stunned persistence. The war is four years over. But even now, Da seems unable to figure how we’ve all been spared. Spring 1949, he and his boys, moored halfway up the steps to Overlook. He shakes his head, knowing something none of his former Washington Heights neighbors would ever believe, now or in a lifetime of Sundays. Everyone is dead. All those names no more than myths to me — Bubbie and Zadie and Tante — everyone we never knew. All of them gone. But all still here, in the shake of our Da’s head.

“My boys.” Da says the word to rhyme with voice. He smiles, lamenting what he must say. “ Nowis nothing but a very clever lie.” We should never have believed in it, he says. Two twins have dismantled the old illusion. Somehow the twins have our names, although twins are the last thing my brother and I are. “One twin, call him Jonah, leaves the earth forty years before, traveling in a rocket near the speed of light. Joey, the other twin, stays home on earth. Jonah comes back, and this you cannot guess: The twin brothers aren’t the same age anymore! Their times have run at different speeds. Joey, the boy who stays at home, he is old enough now to be his brother’s grandfather. But our Jonah, the rocket boy: This one has jumped into his brother’s future, without ever leaving his own present. I tell you: This is, every word, true.”

Da nods, and I see he is serious. This is the secret of time that no one can guess, that no one can accept, except that they have to. “Every twin has his own tempo. The universe has as many metronomes as it has moving things.”

The day in question must be fine, because I no longer feel it. Perfect weather disappears, in time. Even back now, the world already seems outdated. The war is over; everyone who isn’t dead is free to do anything. At eight and seven, my brother and I wait for the stream of breakthroughs that will revive the planet and make us feel finally at home. Mechanical stairs, to lift us up to Overlook without moving. Visual telephones on your wrist. Floating buildings. Pellets that change into any food you want — just add water. Dial-up music, everywhere on demand. This brick and iron city is something I’ll remember in old age, with the same head-wagging smile of bewilderment my father resorts to, here in this foreign country, in this false now.

I see my impatience mirrored in Jonah’s eyes. This whole place is backward, outmoded. There aren’t even rocket ships yet, except for the one those twins use to split time in two. We know what they’ll look like already, and what planets we’ll take them to. The only thing we don’t know is how long it’ll take until they finally arrive.

I look at Da and wonder if he’ll live to see them, these speed-of-light ships he tells us about. Our father is obscenely old. He has just turned thirty-eight. I can’t imagine what fluke has let him live so long. God must have heard about his work, all the different-speed clocks, and given our Da a clock with a mainspring all its own.

We reach the stairs’ crest, the sidewalk on Overlook Terrace. We bear left, toward Frisch’s Bakery, past a steel mesh trash can I remember better than yesterday. In front of that can, there’s a dead bird. We can’t be sure what kind, because it’s coated in a chocolate swarm of ants. We walk along, past that paint-scabbed bench where, one night a quarter of a century later, back in a Washington Heights I’ll no longer recognize, I’ll tell the kindest soul I’ll ever meet that I can’t marry her. Today, an old man — maybe twenty — owns the bench. He slings one arm over the backrest and points his shoulders toward eternity. He has on a banded hat and thick, pilling suit. I look at the man, and remember him. He looks back at us, jumping from boys to father and back, his eyes confused — the confusion we produce everywhere but home. Before he turns to deliver some hostile greeting, Jonah yanks Da guide-dog style across the street, toward Frisch’s, and further explanation.

With each step that he pulls away from me, Jonah’s clock slows down. But if his clock slows, it only makes him more impatient. Jonah races and slows; Da dawdles and speeds up. He’s still talking, as if we can follow him. “Light, you see, always flies around you at the same speed. Whether you run toward it or away. So some measure must shrink, to make that speed stand still. This means you cannot say when a thing happens without saying where, in what frame of motion.”

This is how he talks. He has gone a little crazy. This is how we know it’s Da. He can look down this length of Sunday street and see no single thing at rest. Every moving point is the center of some hurtling universe. Yardsticks shrink; weight gets heavier; time flies out the window. He pokes along at his own pace. I try to keep our three hands linked. But there’s too much difference. Jonah flies and Da drags, and soon Da’s time will run so fast, we’ll lose him to the past. He doesn’t really need us. He doesn’t need any audience at all. He’s with Bubbie and Zadie, with his sister and her husband, working on a way to bring them back.

I try to make him laugh, humor him. “The faster you go, the slower your time?”

But Da just hikes up his face, approving my silliness.

A car races past, faster than Jonah. “That car’s clock is wrong? Too slow?”

Our father chuckles, a loving-enough dismissal. He doesn’t say, The difference, at low speeds, is insignificant. The difference, for him, is monumental. “Not too slow. Slower than yours. But fast enough for himself!”

I don’t have a clock. But I don’t bother reminding him. He’ll give me one for Christmas, later this year. And he will warn me, so gravely that I can’t tell if he’s joking or not, never to set it backward.

“The driver of that car,” he says, although the car is long gone, “gets older slower than you.”

“So if we all drove around fast…” I begin. My father watches me work through it, his face all encouragement. “We’d live longer?”

“Longer, by who?”

He’s asking me. Really asking. But the question must be a trick. Already I’m searching for the trick answer.

“Remember that for us, in our frame, our own clocks slow down not at all!” He speaks as if he knows I won’t catch up to this message for years. I’m the receiver and messenger all in one, expected to carry the message to myself, somewhere far from now. “We cannot jump into our own futures,” he tells the future me. “Only into someone else’s.”

I look down the street onto this slurry of moving times, and it’s too crazy. Clocks and yardsticks softer than taffy. Time all fractured and oozing, sliding at different rates, like an excitable choir that cannot set a tempo. If now is really so fluid and mad, how can we even meet here, Da and I, long enough to talk?

Jonah’s gone, disappearing into the doorway of what must be Frisch’s. I have a daymare, seeing myself round the corner and enter the shop, fifty years old, a hundred, even older than Da, but not knowing how old I’ve become until Jonah looks at me in horror.

“The faster you go, the stranger measurement gets.” Da sings the words. He rocks his head while he walks, like a conductor. “Close to the speed of light, very strange indeed. Because light still passes you at light speed!” He whips his hand through the now-warped air.

“If you speeded up past the speed of light…” I start, happy at the thought of going back.

“You cannot go past the speed of light.” His voice stings with displeasure. I’ve done some wrong, offended him. My face crumples. But Da doesn’t notice. He’s off somewhere, measuring with a yardstick that shrinks to zero.

Jonah waits for us in Frisch’s. He’s caused a clamor that falls silent as soon as we enter. In the bakery, Da turns foreign. He and Mr. Frisch speak in a language not quite German, one I follow only in ghostly outline.

“Why are they numbered?” I whisper.

“Numbered?” Da, the numbers man, asks. I tap his arm to show him where. Da hushes me, which he never does. “ Sha.You ask me again, this time next year.”

But he’s just said that there is no this time next year.

Mr. Frisch asks me something I can’t understand.

“The boy doesn’t speak,” Da says. Although I speak fine.

“Doesn’t speak! How can they not speak? I don’t care what they are. What they look like. How are you raising these boys?”

“We are raising the best we can.”

“Professor. We’re disappearing,” the baker says. “They want us everywhere gone. They almost have succeeded in this. Our people need every life. Doesn’t speak!”

We leave, nodding and waving, making our peace with Mr. Frisch, Da carrying our magic foreign substance, Mandelbrot, under his arm. This is a food Mama can’t make. Only Frisch’s sells the exact Mandelbrot that Da used to eat before he came to the United States. To Jonah and me, it looks like a good, sweet bread, but hardly worth the long trip north. To Da, it’s from another dimension. A time machine.

We hoard our treasure in a bag of greasy paper, hauling it up to Fort Tryon. My father can barely contain himself. He snitches two pieces by the time we sit on the benches lining the park’s snaking path. We sit by ourselves. Other people sit, too, but never next to us. Da doesn’t notice this. He’s busy. His face, when he puts the magic substance in his mouth, is like light racing itself to a standstill.

“This is it,” he shouts, crumbs flying outward like new galaxies being born. “This is the same Mandel bread I’m eating when I’m your age.”

The idea of my father at my age makes me feel ill.

“The same one!” Pleasure stops my father from saying more. Mandelbrot, that rare substance only available in Germany, Austria, and Frisch’s Bakery on Overlook, goes into his mouth and transforms him. “Oh. Oh! When I was you…” Da begins, but memory overwhelms him. He puts a hand on his stomach, closes his eyes, and shakes his head in grateful disbelief. I see a small child, me, devouring the bread just now entering his mouth. The same one.

Da is still that child, the one I’m already ceasing to be. His mind races at such a speed, his clock has all but stopped. Not a day goes by when he doesn’t ask us twice as many questions as we can answer. It’s exhausting. Could time be matter, sideways? Might it have joints, like the grooves in a brick wall? Might there come a time when water will flow uphill? With thoughts like that, he could easily dissolve like a lump of sugar in the hot tea of his own ideas.

“Every moving person has his own clock?” I ask knowing the answer. But the question keeps him seated. It keeps him eating the Mandelbrot, for the moment, out of danger.

Da nods, and the motion makes his next bite miss his mouth.

“And nobody sees their own clock running funny?”

He shakes his head. “Nobody’s clock is running funny. When you speed past another, they think your clock runs slow.” He draws a corkscrew sign for crazy in the air. The sign most others would draw for him.

“Both people think the other is slow?” The thought is too outrageous even to dismiss.

Jonah loves the idea. He giggles and juggles three wadded-up dough balls of Mandel bread, a little solar system. Da applauds, scattering crumbs in all directions. Every pigeon in the five boroughs is on us in a pack. Jonah lets loose a high B, the delighted screech of childhood. The pigeons scatter.

If Da is serious, the universe is impossible. Every chunk hurtling loose, all its measures liquid and private. I take my father’s arm. The ground squishes under my feet like pudding. I’ll have nightmares for weeks — drooping people zooming up and contracting before my eyes, pleading incoherently like those caramel voices from our record player as Jonah and I drop nickels on the turntable. I feel myself going nuts, and all because of my father’s pet experiment: Can you free a mind to think in relative time, before it has set into absolutes?

“But if everybody’s on their own clock…?” My voice scatters. My courage, too, like the pigeons from my brother’s screech. “What time is it, really?” I sound like my own frightened child, a small flood-tossed boy who can’t get past his first timeless question: Is it tomorrow yet?

Da beams. “Ah, you have it, boychik. I knew you would. There is no single now, now. And there never was!”

As if to prove the ridiculous claim, he walks us up the last little neck of island to a hidden valley in the Heights. Behind a rim of trees is an ancient monastery. “The Cloisters,” Da says. Behind that, the even older river, which he doesn’t bother naming. We push through a hole in the side of the air and go back six hundred years.

“Here is the fifteenth century. But if we turn here, we go into the fourteenth.” Da points to the centuries, like places. I’m turned around, like Mama sometimes gets when we go down into the subway and wind up on the wrong platform. If the past is older than the present, then the future must be younger. And we must all go backward with each passing year.

“This building is not a real building. It is a nice big…hmm?” Da jumbles his hands together, looking for the word. “A mixed-up puzzle picture. Bits and pieces, from places with all different ages. Cut up in the Old World and shipped off to the New for rebuilding. Brought together into one museum, like a little index. A versammel ed word book of our past!”

He says “our,” but that’s the salad he makes of English. We always have to figure what his words really are. This is not our past. No American, I know, has ever set foot here, except by getting lost. It seems to me that every spot on earth must be a diorama, like the kind Jonah and I make with Mama: Apollo giving Orpheus his first lyre, or Handel sitting at his desk and writing the Messiah in twenty-one days. Each spot its own now, its own never.

“It collects, here, five different abbeys from France,” Da says. He names them, and the names pass into the empty future.

“How did they get the buildings over here?” I ask.

My brother shoves me. “Stone by stone, dummy.”

“How did they get them?”Da is gleeful. “Rich Americans stole them!”

A guard glares at us, and Jonah and I hustle Da down the walkway to safety. We turn into a courtyard of arches that shelters a garden. It reminds me of a place, the school I’ll live in, years from now. Holding up each arch are two stone columns. Each column sprouts a crown of stone vines, strange snakelike ropes and coils, ancient creatures in the undergrowth. Some of these figures do things small boys shouldn’t see and adults don’t. Jonah and I race, high-speed heel-toe, around the courtyard, giggling at the taboo messages sent by stone carvers seven hundred years dead. Around us are scores of brutal paintings on wood. We’re in some stone-carved children’s tale, the world’s rough boyhood.

Da reins us in with a palm to each of our shoulders, keeps us from knocking over Europe’s priceless baby pictures. How many museums we’ll dash or drag through — Modern Art, Indian, Jewish, Met, Cooper-Hewitt, Hall of Fame for Great Americans — how many exhibits we’ll absorb, rapt, obedient, or bored, on our way to meeting our future selves. But for some reason, this museum grabs Jonah even more than the giant toboggan of dinosaur bones down on Eighty-first. He stands in front of a suit of armor, ready to take it on in personal combat. I don’t know what he sees — some kings and catapults fantasy, knights slaying dragons, a boy’s bedtime tale. He’s giggling, ready to move into some secret wing hidden in time that no one has yet discovered.

Da steers us on. I’ll always obey that hand. We enter a room, dark, gray, and cold, the stone heart of some fantastic castle, cut out and transplanted to this place, hidden at the tip of our island. “Will you see this picture?” Da asks. He points to a wall-sized curtain of heavy cloth, a huge green rug filled with flowers. I look for a picture in the monster thing. There are millions of them, hiding in the vegetation.

“What is there? What do you see?” Da waits, happy, for my answer. “An Einhorn, yes? What does English name him?”

“Unicorn,” Jonah says. The word is everywhere, on all the signs. Da doesn’t read them.

“Unicorn? Uni-corn!” The word delights him.

The beast is huge and white, filling the entire frame. Da cocks back and looks. He stares at a point through the unicorn, behind the tapestry, beyond the wall it hangs on. He takes his glasses off and leans in. He mutters something in German I can’t make out. He asks, “What is this picture of?”

Jonah is looking, too. But he’s not as desperate to answer as I am. My eye runs a loop-the-loop. The wall carpet is too big to take in whole. I can’t put the parts together, can’t even see them all from my eye level. The unicorn sits in a makeshift prison, a round three-rung fence it could step over politely if it wanted. A fancy green belt hangs around his neck, something Mama might put on for church. The thing I think is a fountain is really the unicorn’s tail. A dancing midair ghost turns out to be the beast’s beard. He sits or he lies or he rears up; I can’t figure it out. His horn looks as long as his entire body. Behind him is a tree with letters floating in it— Aand D, or A and a backward E. Maybe these are the unicorn’s initials.

Then I see it: the chain. One end of the chain is clamped to the tree, and the other is fastened to the unicorn’s collar. The collar is a cuff, and the unicorn is caught, a prisoner, forever. All over his body are wounds, stab marks I didn’t see at first. Spurts of cloth blood pour out of his side.

“He’s captured. The humans got him. He’s a slave.” I tell Da what the picture is, but he’s not satisfied.

“Yes, yes. He’s trapped. They have him in their craft. But what is the picture of?”

I feel my face starting to cry. I stamp my feet, but a look from Jonah stops me in my steps. “I don’t know. What do you mean? What are you trying to say?”

“Look up close.” He nudges me. I step. “Step closer.”

“Da!” I want to cry again. “The guard will get me.”

“The guard will not get you. You are not the guard’s slave! If this guard tries to get you, I will get this guard!”

I step as close as I dare, ready at any second to be caught and sentenced. All three of us will be chained forever, imprisoned in old gray stone.

“Good, so, my Yoseph. What is the picture of?” I still don’t know the answer, let alone the question. So Da tells me. “Knots, boychik. The picture is of knots, no less than every picture we live in. Little knots, tied in the clothing of time.”

He doesn’t mean clothing, I’m almost sure. But for a moment, I see what he sees. Every now, made from every motion on earth, is a little tied colored thread. And if you can find a place to see it from, all the threads combine, tied in time, into a picture, bound and bleeding in a garden.

Jonah loses interest in Da’s lessons. Clocks, knots, time, Einhorns: My brother is past all of it, already leaping clean into his own future. He wanders into another room, where Da and I must track him down. He fidgets in front of a golden music stand in the shape of an eagle. On the stand is a book, and in the book, antique music. It looks nothing like the music I’ve known how to read for as long as I’ve known how to read words. It’s unlike any music we’ve ever seen. It has no bars, and not enough lines per stave. Jonah works at the notes, humming away furiously. But he can make nothing that sounds like a tune. “I can’t get it. It’s totally crazy.”

Da lets the two of us puzzle awhile before giving us the key. Or not the key, since this is music before there were such things. He gives us the secret of pitches in time. The click of counting, back when the world beat to another pulse. The shape of duration, before measures existed.

The three of us stand in this cold stone room, chanting. I don’t know the word for it yet, but I can do it as easily as breathing. We huddle in this pastiche of jumbled-up monasteries, this American treasure-grab, trapped inside a knot in the cloth of time as snarled as a fraying sweater, a Jew and his two light black sons, singing “Veni, veni,” Europe’s wake-up tune, sung to itself before it woke up and took over the globe. We chant softly but audibly, even as people filter into the room around us. I feel their disapproval. We are too free, in this museum of good breeding. But I don’t care what they think of us, so long as this thread of music continues to unravel and the three of us keep drawing it outward, around ourselves.

When we get to the end of the parchment, we stop and look. People are sitting in banks of wooden chairs that have been set up for a concert. Some of them turn to glare at us. But Da beams, rubbing our tufts of hair. “My boys! You know how to make it, now. The language of time.”

He leads us to the front of the block of chairs, where we sit. This is the reason we’ve come. The magic Mandelbrot was just a stopping point, fuel to get us here. All along, we’ve been heading toward this free concert, this stolen and rebuilt ruin of history.

Sunday, spring 1949. The world is older than I ever imagined. Yet each year that it has ever lived through hides out somewhere in an arch-lined courtyard. This room smells of moss and mold, lacquers and shellacs, things stored too long in linty pockets, brittle paper returning to reeds. I don’t share this room’s when, even though I sit in it. Only by some miracle that Da doesn’t explain to me can I see it at all. Every spot on earth has its own clock. Some have reached the future already. Some not yet. Each place grows younger at its own pace. There is no now, nor ever will be.

Now that a concert is coming, my brother stops jittering. He ages as I watch, and soon he’s sitting stiller, straighter, more eager than any adult. But he jumps up from his chair and claps like crazy the minute the singers walk out. The singers are all in black. Their stage is so small, they crowd in almost on top of us. Jonah leans forward in gladness to touch one of the women, and the singer touches him back. The whole audience laughs along with her, until Da’s arm settles Jonah back into the seat.

Silence falls, erasing all separateness. Then the silence gives way to its only answer. This is the first public concert I will remember ever hearing. Nothing I’ve already lived through prepares me for it. It runs through and rearranges me. I sit at the center of a globe of sound pointing me toward myself.

It doesn’t occur to me, at the age of seven, that a person might luck upon such a song only once a lifetime, if ever. I know how to tell sharp from flat, right singing from wrong. But I haven’t yet heard enough to tell ordinary beauty from once-only visits. I will look for this group throughout my life — on vinyl, then tape, then laser pit. I’ll go to performances in hope of resurrection and come away empty. I’ll search for these singers my whole life, and never come any closer than suspect memory.

I could track the group’s name down, in the museum’s records for that Sunday concert fifty years ago, twenty years before the idea of reviving the first thousand years of European music had occurred to more than a curatorial few. I could look all the singers up: Every year we pass through is hidden away, if not in a cloistered scriptorium somewhere, then in a bank of steel filing cabinets and silicon chips. But anything I’d find would only kill that day. For what I thought I heard that day, there are no names. Who knows how good those singers really were? For me, they filled the sky.

There is a sound like the burning sun. A sound like the surf of blood pumping through my ears. The women start by themselves, their note as spreading and dimensionless as my father says the present is. Keee, the letter-box slots of their mouths release — just the syllable of glee little Ruth made before we persuaded her to learn to talk. The sound of a simple creature, startling itself with praise before settling in for the night. They sing together, bound at the core for one last moment before everything breaks open and is born.

Then reee. The note splits into its own accompaniment. The taller woman seems to descend, just by holding her pitch while the smaller woman next to her rises. Rises a major third, that first interval any child any color anywhere learns to sing. Four lips curve upon the vowel, a pocket of air older than the author who set it there.

I know in my body what notes come next, even though I have nothing, yet, to call them. The high voice rises a perfect fifth, lifting off from the lower note’s bed. The lines move like my chest, soft cartilage, my ribs straying away from one another, on aaay, into a higher brightness, then collapsing back to fuse in unison.

I hear these two lines bending space as they speed away from each other, hurling outward, each standing still while the other moves. Long, short-short, long, long: They circle and return, like a blowing branch submitting again to its shadow. They near their starting pitch from opposite sides, the shared spot where they must impossibly meet back up. But just before they synchronize to see where they’ve been, just as they touch their lips to this recovered home, the men’s lines come from nowhere, pair off, and repeat the splitting game, a perfect fourth below.

More lines splinter, copy, and set off on their own. Aaay-laay. Aaay-laay-eee! Six voices now, repeating and reworking, each peeling off on its own agenda, syncopated, staggered, yet each with an eye on the other, midair acrobats, not one of them wavering, no one crashing against the host of moving targets. This stripped-down simple singsong blooms like a firework peony. Everywhere in the awakened air, in a shower of staggered entrances, I hear the first phrase, keyed up, melted down, and rebuilt. Harmonies pile up, disintegrate, and reassemble elsewhere, each melody praising God in its own fashion, and everywhere combining to something that sounds to me like freedom.

All around me in this room, listeners fly back into their pasts. I won’t see, until I’m much older, how they’re airlifted back before the Berlin crisis, nestled in their beds before the A-bomb, hiding as yet uninventoried from the numbering authorities, back before everyone has died, back before the unicorn lay chained in its pen of flowers, back before that now that never was, even with so many listeners needing to flee it. But I’m not brought back. Just the opposite. This music flings me forward, toward the speed of light, shrinking and slowing until I stop at that very spot where all my future selves put down.

It has been years now since I’ve been to the northern end of Manhattan. I say now, though my father taught me long ago, when my mind was still dilatable, not to be taken in by such things. Frisch’s Bakery has disappeared, deported, replaced by a video-rental store with a game-cartridge sideline, or one of those neighborhood stalls sealed up behind an accordion grate for longer than anyone remembers. Last time I visited, half a decade ago, the neighborhood streets were still in upheaval — this time from Jewish to Dominican — the turning tide of immigration, forever advancing on a shore it can never reach. Forty thousand islanders were settling in to their new, desperate nation, with Fort Tryon up on the colony’s old Heights protecting them from well-off Jersey and the ravaged Bronx.

And underneath the fortress, at the island’s very tip: that imitation, changeless garden. I’ve been up to the Cloisters only once since Jonah sang there in the late sixties. The image sickens me: a hodgepodge of bottom-dollar Romanesque and Gothic fragments, assembled paradise, a stone’s throw from forty thousand Dominicans trying to survive New York’s inferno. The ancient pasteup job must feel even more ancient now that the world has descended into endless youth. It must still draw its audience, the bewildered and dying, those who slip through their shell-shocked urban nightmare for a glimpse of a world before the crash of continents, when art still imagined us as one.

We’re walking back toward 191st Street, and the subway home. I don’t know how we got from the Cloisters here. A piece is missing, frames clipped from the final cut. The concert has ended, but the sound goes on growing in my ears. It happens again, just as it did in the piece itself. No sooner do the clear, high voices bring in the melody than the low foundations pick it up and multiply.

We walk back a different way than we came. For a moment, I’m panicked. Then I’m just amazed that south followed by east can so perfectly undo north followed by west. Jonah laughs at me, but Da doesn’t. He finds it amazing, too. “Space is commutative. It does not matter in what order you take the axes. Why this should be, I have no good reason!”

We pass a building that has gone wrong. “What is this, Da?” I’m glad Jonah asks. I’m frightened to.

Da stops and looks. “This is a shul. A synagogue. Like the one I took you to on a Hundred and—”

Da will not notice. But this is not like the one he took us to. I try to read the words scrawled across its front door, but they’ve been scrubbed almost invisible. Da won’t help me sound out the missing ones. All he’ll say is, “Christian Front. Who could believe such people can come back now?”

“Da said now,” I tease, and Jonah picks up the taunt. But Da only gives us the crooked edge of his grin. He takes our hands, one each, and walks on. He studies the sidewalk where we step, as if the cracks he always swears are safe might be more dangerous than he thought.

We’re a block away when he says, “Hitler called it a Jewish plot.”

“What?” Jonah asks. “What’s a plot?”

“Relativity.”

“What’s relativity?” I say.

“Boychik! What we’re just talking about! All those different-running clocks.”

For me, a lifetime has intervened. But I want to keep him talking, forever, if possible. So I ask, “Why?”

“What why?” he answers.

“Da! Why, what you just said.” Just does not mean just, to my father, the professor of liquid time. “Why did Hitler say the clocks were Jewish?”

“Because they were!” His eyes glint with laughing pride, which they almost never show. “The Jews were the only people who figured out that everything we think is true about time and space isn’t! The Jews were everywhere, looking at what the world really looks like. Hitler hated that. He hated anyone smarter than he was.”

“Da was plotting against Hitler!” Jonah shouts. Da shushes him.

I can’t tell yet — I can’t tell anymore — whether Da is serious. I can’t even tell what he’s talking about, except for the Hitler part. Hitler, I know. On those torturing afternoons when Jonah and I are banished from the house and made to play with the neighborhood boys, it’s always the war — Normandy, Bastogne, crossing the Rhine. The world war lives on in small boys, still happily vicious, four years after the adults give it up. Somebody has to be Hitler, and that somebody’s always the Strom boys. One of us must be Uncle Adolf, and the other his demented officers. We two make the best Hitler, because we talk funny, die well, and lie so still for so long, it scares everyone. We lie still until the day our playmates recreate the fall of Berlin by setting us on fire. After that, for a long time, we get to stay home.

We walk along Overlook, my father bobbing his head at all the passersby. Twenty blocks and sixteen years away — depending on your clock — is the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X will die. Already, a million lifelines lead there. Already, that murder is happening — on this block, the next, a mile away, more distant prisons. The strands of the killing tighten for decades, and my own threads weave around them.

We duck down the subway steps to the rank center of the earth, the scent of vomit, newsprint, cigarette stubs, and pee. Da is talking again, about mirrors and beams of light and people at the ends of oncoming trains, trains that could take us to Berlin in seconds. There’s a scuffle down on the platform. Da leads us away to safety, talking all the while.

“I had been already born for four years,” he says, “four whole years before anyone saw space-time as one single thing. I already lived four whole years before anyone saw gravity could bend time! It took the Jews!” The family he’s told us so little about. All dead.

Years pass. More than thirty of them. I’m in a train station in Frankfurt. We’re touring with Voces Antiquae. Jonah asks me to buy him some nuts at the snack stand. “Almonds.” It surprises me that, half-German, I’ve never learned so common a word. Then it surprises me worse: I have. I’ve known the magic substance my whole life. The stuff’s everywhere, as common and cheap as years.

If there is no single now, then there can’t have ever been a single then. Still, there is this Sunday, the spring of 1949. I’m seven. Everyone I love is still alive, except for the ones who died before I met them. We sit together on the hard subway seats, Jonah and I, with Da between us.

“Did you take pleasure, my boys?” He rhymes the word with choice. “Did you enjoy?”

“Da?” I’ve never heard Jonah so dreamy, so distant. He’s on a rocket ship, leaving this poor backward planet behind. But when he comes back, the world has aged away and he alone remains. “Da? When I grow up?” Not really asking permission. Just making sure to let us know well in advance. “When I’m an adult?” He waves back behind us, toward the Cloisters, falling away from us as fast as we fall forward. “I want to do what those people do.”

My father’s answer startles me, though not so much there and then. From here, half a century on, I can’t make it out. His every blood relation but us is murdered, killed for spreading relativity’s plot. He, too, should be dead, but he’s still here. A dozen years an immigrant, and in no time, he’s become pure American. “You two,” he tells us, grinning, his lone answer. “You two will be anyone you want.”