The Time of Our Singing

My Brother as Orpheus

The fire didn’t kill her, Da said.

“She would have lost awareness a long time before. You must remember the rate of rapid oxidation for so large a blaze.” The fire would have sucked all the air from our house long before the flames touched her. “And then there was the explosion.” The furnace, that time bomb. “She would have been knocked unconscious.” That was why she never got out. The middle of the day, Mama quick and healthy, and no one else killed.

She couldn’t have felt a thing. That’s what Da meant, trying to comfort us. The fire did burn her. It did turn her to char, nothing but ash, bone, and her wedding ring. Da’s consolation was infinitely feebler: The fire didn’t kill her. She was dead already by the time she burned.

Still, he reminded us whenever he thought we needed it. The fire didn’t kill her. Jonah heard: Dead before the firemen even got there. I heard: Death by suffocation, her lungs getting nothing, just as bad as flames. Ruthie heard: Still alive.

For a long time, the four of us did nothing. Time, for us, was another facedown corpse, knocked out in the explosion. We must have spent five months in that little apartment that my father’s colleague loaned us. I didn’t feel the weeks pass, although most days I was sure I’d die of old age before the clock advanced from dinnertime to bed. We never sang, at least not all together. Ruth hummed to herself, scolding her dolls and telling them to shush. Now and then, Da put something on the record player. Jonah and I spent long afternoons listening to the radio. Broadcast seemed somehow less sacrilegious, inflicted on us, rather than chosen.

After a while, Ruth went back to her neighborhood school. She screamed on the first day, refusing to leave the apartment. But we three men stood firm with her. “You have to, Ruthie. It’ll help you feel better.” We should have known that was the last thing she wanted.

Jonah refused to consider returning to Boston. “I’ll never go back. Not for all the private lessons in the world.” Da only shrugged in acquiescence. So, of course, I didn’t go back, either. The possibility of my returning alone never even arose.

Da resumed his classes at Columbia, after what must have seemed an eternity to him. Jonah raged to me. “That’s it? Everything’s normal again? He just waltzes back to work, like nothing’s changed?”

But I could tell by the way Da’s shoulders ground now when he walked how badly everything had. He had nothing left but work. And from the moment Mama died, even his work altered. Time, that block of standing evers, that reversible dependent variable, had turned on him. He no longer knew how much was left. From the moment of the fire until his own death, he gave himself up to finding time and breaking it.

We lived in that cramped borrowed apartment until its owner finally had to ask for it back. Then we evacuated, without much plan, to another, slightly larger one, also in Morningside Heights. We were as close to invisible there as we could get, on a street that teetered right on the color line. Or not on the line, but in the many moving ripples. For the university stood like a huge rock in the surf of changing blocks, the churning populations beyond math’s ability to calculate. With the insurance, Da bought new furniture, bright blue dishes that Mama would have liked, and a replacement spinet. He even started rebuilding our sheet-music library, but the project was hopeless. Even among the four of us, we couldn’t remember all the music we’d owned.

Ruthie changed schools — to one, like her, that split down the middle, almost half and half. She made new friends, new nationalities every week. But she never brought them home. She was ashamed of her men, the three of us living like there was no tomorrow and even less a yesterday.

At first, Da came home most afternoons. But his need to lose himself in work soon outweighed his need to work through our loss. The equations swallowed him. There was a woman, Mrs. Samuels, who came by to keep house and watch after Ruth when she got home at 3:30. Mrs. Samuels’s only instrument was the chord organ. So there were no lessons. Da must have paid her well for the time she put in, but she did it, I think, out of love. She would have liked to be his children’s friend.

Jonah spent most days scribbling into his notebooks. Sometimes he wrote words, other times, notes on ledger lines. He wrote a long letter on all different kinds of paper and posted it abroad, to Italy, with lots of exotic airmail stamps. “So she can’t say she didn’t know how to reach me,” he said. The letters I wrote, I kept in my head, with no other place to send them.

When he wasn’t scribbling, Jonah listened to the Dodgers, “Dragnet,” “The FBI in Peace and War,” all the shows of delayed boyhood. He even had a favorite big-band station, when he really needed to keep himself from thinking. He let me listen to the Saturday Met broadcasts, following along while pretending not to.

When Ruthie came home from school in midafternoon, I read to her or took her out to a safe corner of the park. I hadn’t spent more than a few weeks with my sister in two years. She was a stranger, a wound-up little girl who spoke to herself and who cried herself to sleep because we couldn’t fix her hair the way Mama did. We tried. We got it just the way we all remembered it, except Ruth.

Some days, I’d sit with her at the piano, the way Mama used to sit with me. Ruth learned anything I gave her faster than I’d learned the works myself. But her fingerings were never the same twice. “Try to be consistent,” I said.

“Why?” She lost all patience for the instrument, and most days we ended up fighting. “It’s dumb, Joey.”

“What’s dumb?”

“The music’s dumb.” And she’d rip off a parody Mozart sonatina, brilliant in its improvised burlesque. She mocked it, sneering through the keys, the music we were brought up on. The music that killed her mother.

“What’s so dumb about it?”

“It’s ofay.”

“What’s ofay?” I asked Jonah that night, when Ruth couldn’t hear.

My brother was never at a loss for more than an eighth note. “It’s French. It means up to date. Means you know how things are done.”

I asked Da. His face turned stern. “Where did you hear this?”

“Around.” Evading my own father. Everything honest in our home had died the day our mother did.

My father removed his glasses. He was blind without them. Blinking, helpless, a flounder on ice. “Do they still say that?”

“Sometimes,” I bluffed.

“It’s not good. It’s pork Latin.”

I burst out laughing. He should have slapped me. “Pig Latin.”

“Pig Latin, then. For white people.” Oe-fay. Foe.

I didn’t confront Ruth. But we didn’t go back to Mozart, either. My sister was not quite eleven, at least a year from childhood’s end. But she’d already changed. It took those many weeks together for me to see that little Root had vanished along with Mama.

“What do you want to learn?” I asked her. “I can teach you anything.” The offer came out of my unlimited ignorance. Had I the first idea of the ways of playing — swings and jolts, bends and bops, slaps and tickles, restless, headlong fence rushes, resilient hybrid strains, the twists of tonality, the quotes, thefts, arrests, and reparations, all the modes and scales torn out of the mere two that my music stuck with — had I even once considered the bottomless invention all around me, I’d have been unable to teach my little sister a C major chord in root position.

“I don’t know, Joey.” Ruth’s left skittered up and down, walking a bass at a trotter’s pace. “What did Mama like to play?”

It had only been months. She couldn’t have forgotten already. She couldn’t think memory was lying to her.

“She liked it all, Ruth. You know that.”

“I mean, other than…you know — before you all took up with…”

For my part, I practiced at least four hours every day and soon went back to formal lessons. Music was no longer a game, nor would it ever be pure pleasure again. But it was all I knew. One of my mother’s students, Mr. Green, took me on. Every few weeks, he’d give me a new movement from another Beethoven sonata and get out of my way. Each week, I’d try not to outgrow him too quickly.

I learned to cook. Otherwise, we might have all gotten rickets, scurvy — last century’s diseases, still rampant just a few blocks north and east. I read somewhere that potatoes and spinach, served with a little ground beef, had all the nutrition a body needed. All Mama’s recipes, written in pen on three-by-fives that she kept in her green metal box on the kitchen sill, had burned. Nothing I ever made did more than apologize to the feasts that once had poured out of her oven. But my audience knew it was this or oatmeal.

The month our mother died, Rosa Parks refused to move back. While I was cooking for my family and my little sister was walking to her integrated school, fifty thousand people in Montgomery laid down their year-long walking siege. The movement had started. The country I’d been born in was edging toward showdown. But I never heard a word. Da must have followed the story in detail. But he never brought the subject up in all his dinner-table ramblings.

Jonah spent his days in feverish passivity. He listened to the radio. He took walks or, on days when he went to campus with our father, sat motionless at the music library at Columbia. He was trying to race backward, just by standing still. A decade later, he’d tell an interviewer that these were the months that turned him into an adult singer. “I learned more about how to sing by keeping silent for half a year than I ever learned from any teacher, before or after.” Except the teacher from whom he learned even silence.

Da couldn’t let us stay home forever. “Come on, my boys. The world is not gone, yet. If you don’t want to study physics with me, then you must choose some other school.”

This was the last must Jonah ever listened to. “What the hell, Mule. Robinson’s going to retire. They’ve taken “The Shadow” off the air. We might as well go back to the slammer.”

He settled on Juilliard — the next-closest thing in the world to staying home. At Juilliard, we could almost vanish again, into the one thing we knew how to do. Da got Jonah a vocal coach from the Columbia Music Department, and Jonah started woodshedding again a month before auditions. Maybe he was right about how much he’d learned through silence. Juilliard took him into the prep program without probation.

At the premier performance school in the country, not even a singer of Jonah’s caliber had any leverage. He could hardly make his acceptance contingent on mine. The pressure of my own admission lay wholly on me. “Not going if you don’t,” Jonah said just before I had to play. I’m sure he meant it as emotional support.

I took my audition, my brother’s future pressing down on my shoulders and almost forcing my face into the keys. I hiccupped through the first movement of opus 27, no. 1, my runs turning to rancid butter. I could hear myself condemning my brother and me to a lifetime of lassitude in my father’s suffocating apartment. After I played, I went to the toilet off the rehearsal room and threw up, just like the boys Jonah once marveled at, years before. Our musical education had been more rapid and comprehensive than our parents could have anticipated. I’m glad Mama hadn’t lived to see where I’d landed.

My acceptance came attached with two sheets of red-inked faultfinding. The last comment on the list was a double-underlined word: “Posture!” Jonah never let me forget it. He barked the word with a German accent each time we sat at dinner. Walking along the street, he’d grab and force my shoulders back. “Posture, Herr Strom! Do! Not! Slump!” He never guessed that the weight slumping me over was him.

Branded with my red-inked acceptance, I followed my brother into the Juilliard prep division. If Boylston was music’s provincial outpost, Juilliard was its Rome. Walking down one hallway, I lived through three hundred years of Western concert music trickling through the doors in fantastic cacophony. Jonah and I were children again, the lowest rungs on a ladder of experience that stretched away from us, out of sight.

From the building on Claremont, we were an easy stroll from home. We didn’t have to live with anyone, a reprieve that gave me unspeakable relief. In that independent nation of music, we were no one’s problem, no one’s scandal, no one’s trailblazer. No one much looked at us at all. Sight counted for nothing there. There, everyone was all ears.

Our fellow students put the fear of God in us. Jonah may have learned more about singing from seven months of silence than he did from any teacher after our mother. But he learned more about the world of professional music making from two weeks in its North American capital than he’d ever cared to know. The academic side of our education was even more perfunctory than it had been in Boston. That suited us. We were there for one thing. The only thing either of us had any heart left to do.

Jonah didn’t stay long in the prep division. As soon as they could, his teachers hustled him upstairs. He was far from the youngest to start college there. The school was rotten with prodigies, some who’d completed the program by sixteen, the age Jonah entered it. But he was surely the least prepared to enter adulthood early.

He started the year of Little Rock, three years after Brown became the reputed law of the land. Jonah studied the same news pictures I did: nine kids threading through the 101st Airborne paratroopers, just to go learn about Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis, while we sashayed in the front door of our conservatory to learn about sonata-allegro form. I sneaked into the school library each day to see the newspapers. Kids our age, marching to school through riots, just one step ahead of getting strung up by the rabid crowd, skipping up the army-lined stairs along the gauntlet of bayonet-fixed M1’s of their all-white protectors following their own gunpoint orders. Army helicopters landing on the school football field, establishing a perimeter. Governor Faubus invoking the National Guard, canceling the court orders, squaring off against the federal forces, taking the insurrection to television: “We are now a country under occupation.” And General Walker answering, “The sooner the resistance ceases, the sooner normalcy will return to the school area.” The whole country stood ready to resume civil war a hundred years on, over nine kids my age, while I struggled with Chopin études and Jonah breezed through Britten.

The conservatory was my country. Arkansas was no more than a distant nightmare. I don’t know what Jonah thought about Little Rock. We spoke of it only once, sitting in front of Da’s first black-and-white television, watching a news clip while waiting for a thriller that didn’t last past the following summer. On screen, a thin, white, bulldog crew-cut teen nosed up to a beautiful girl in sunglasses and whispered a muted threat. Jonah, next to me in the dark, said, “He touches her and he pays.”

We, in our new world, lived like princes. Every afternoon had another free recital, the highest caliber of pleasure performed for mostly empty houses. Every few weeks — as often as we could talk Da into letting us stay out — we could have a symphony or even an opera for a student pittance.

I studied and practiced, needing eight more hours in each day. I had my first run at repertoire so mythic, I almost rebelled at stroking the notes. With my teacher, George Bateman, I went back and relearned opus 27, no. 1, this time properly. The Well-Tempered Clavier was my daily bread. I read my way through a chunk of book one, keeping to safe tempi on the tricky fugues.

Mr. Bateman was an accomplished accompanist. He still performed often and canceled as many lessons as he kept. He moved through my lessons in a state of distraction. But he could hear like hell’s watchdog, and he did with two fingers of his left hand what I couldn’t do with my entire right. His crumbs of praise fed me for weeks.

He tucked his criticisms so deeply amid that praise that I often missed their bite. I played Chopin’s Mazurka in A Minor for him. Its trick is that little dotted rhythm — how to make it lilt without listing. I got through the first repeat without incident. Then I made that turn into C, the burst of relative major — the most predictable surprise brightening on earth. Mr. Bateman, eyes closed, maybe even dozing, jumped forward. “Stop!”

I jerked my hands off the keys, a dog whacked with the newspaper he has been trained to fetch.

“What did you just do, there?” I was afraid to look up. When I did, Mr. Bateman was waving. “Do that again!” I did, crippled with self-consciousness. “No, no,” he said, each rejection oddly supportive. “Play it the way you did the first time.”

I played it exactly as I always played it. Each time, Mr. Bateman’s face rose and fell in whole storm systems. Finally, he lit up. “That’s it! That’s beautiful! Who taught you that?” He waved his arms around his head, happily warding off a swarm of fact. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Just keep doing it, no matter what else I tell you to do!”

For days afterward, I wondered if I might not, after all, have a gift I didn’t suspect. I knew what Mr. Bateman was trying to do: move me from fingers to feeling, from mechanics to mind. He called a little Schumann fantasy piece I played “brilliant,” and all that afternoon, I thought I could change worlds. I wanted to tell Mama what Mr. Bateman had said, as soon as I got home. Then, remembering, the pleasure of accomplishment turned to a bitterness deeper than I’d felt at her death. Nothing made sense. My crippled tune dragged through more unprepared keys than I knew how to survive. I was the most contemptible teenager alive, to feel such elation, so soon after elation should have ended for good. To go on shamelessly growing, while Mama would not.

That leaden pointlessness fell away when I practiced. Still, I hated myself for letting it go, even for a minute. I don’t know how Jonah survived. We saw little of each other once he started the college track. He needed me less. Yet when we strolled back through Morningside Heights at the end of a day, he’d recap his hours, irritated that I hadn’t been there to experience it all with him firsthand. On weekends, as we bummed around the music shop on 110th, he could go exultant again over nothing, launching into the horn blare from the third movement of Beethoven’s Fifth, expecting me to be right there, in tempo, a third below him in the second horn, no later than the score’s marked entrance, as if no one had died.

Juilliard was so big, even Jonah shrank in it. The cafés around school babbled like a musical UN. Until Juilliard, we’d only noodled away at little Dittersdorf duets. Now we’d landed somewhere in the middle risers of an international Symphony of a Thousand.

There were even a couple of Negro students. Real ones. The day I saw my first — a wide, preoccupied grad with dark glasses and a sheaf of scores under his arm — I fought the urge to greet him like a long-lost cousin. He caught me out of the corner of his eye and called, “Hey, soldier,” flicking me a two-fingered salute of shared, unlikely membership. White people never knew for certain. They took us for Indian or Puerto Rican. They never looked. Blacks always knew, for the simple reason that I looked back at them.

The second time I saw the man, he stopped. “You’re Jonah Strom.” I corrected him. “Heaven’s sake. There’s two y’all?” He was from the South, and harder to follow than even János Reményi. He was a bass named Wilson Hart. He’d gone to a black college in Georgia, a state I’d never even considered before, where he’d graduated in teacher training. “Only line of work I thought a black concert bass could follow.” A visiting professor had heard him sing and persuaded him to think otherwise. Wilson Hart was not yet convinced.

I could hear, even in his speaking voice, what resonance the man had. But Wilson Hart had a dream that went beyond singing. “Tell you what I’d do, if the world was well?” He opened the portfolio he always carried under his arm and spread the cream-colored pencil-filled staffs in front of me, right there in the corridor. I sounded out the notes, notes this man had written. However derivative and dreamy, they had riches.

He wanted to compose. It filled me with wonder, to my lasting shame. Yes, because he was a member of my mother’s race. But more because he was living, here, talking to me. I stood looking out over my own life. Composing had never occurred to me. New music was every minute streaming into this world, from every quarter. We could do more than channel it. We could write our own.

Wilson Hart looked at me like God’s spy. “They always asking you how a black man got interested in this line?”

“We’re mixed,” I said.

The word came back to me, turned around in his face. “Mixed? You mean like all mixed up?” He saw me die. “That’s okay, brother. Isn’t a horse alive who’s a purebred.”

Wilson Hart became the first friend I ever made all by myself. He’d smile from down long hallways and sit with me in crowded concert halls. “You stop crucifying me with this ‘Mr. Hart’ business, now. Mrs. Hart’s the only one I’m gonna let call me Mr. Hart, once I find her. You, Mr. Mixed, you call me Will.” When he passed me in the corridors, he’d pat his portfolio of freshly penciled music. It was our private conspiracy, this stream of new notes. You and me, Mix. They’re gonna hear our sounds, before we’re done with this place. The thrill of his singling me out to stand with him oppressed me worse than any racism.

Will and Jonah finally met, although I was in no hurry to introduce them. They were like fur and fire. Jonah had exploded with the avant-garde, the making and unmaking of new freedom. The first time Jonah heard the Second Viennese School, he wanted to round the rabble-rousers up and execute them. The second time, he just sneered. By listen three, the smoldering threat to Western civilization started to rise like its star shining in the East. Time’s arrow, for Jonah, now pointed mercilessly forward, toward total serialism or its paradoxical twin, pure chance.

Jonah looked over Wilson Hart’s scores, singing out lines with a voice as forceful as the instruments they were written for. For that treatment alone, Will would have shown him everything he’d ever written. But at the end of a bravura sight-sing, Jonah tossed up his hands. “Will, Will! What’s with all the beauty? You’ll kill us with kindness, man. Single-handedly drag us back into the nineteenth century. What did the nineteenth century ever do for you, except wrap you up in chains?”

I’d sit between them, waiting for the world to end. But they both loved the fight.

“This here’s nothing about the nineteenth century,” Will said, gathering in his wounded troops. “This is your first look at the twenty-first. Y’all just don’t know how to hear it yet.”

“I’ve already heard it. I know all those tunes by heart. Sounds like a Copland ballet.”

“I’d give twice my eyeteeth to write a Copland ballet. Man’s a great composer. Started out messing with that chicken-scratch music of yours. Got tired and gave it up.”

“Copland’s okay, if you dig crowd-pleasers.”

I prayed to Mama’s ghost to come pummel him, as she should have done so often while she was alive.

“And here I was, thinking pleasure was what music’s all about.”

“Look around you, man. The world’s on fire.”

“That’s right. And we’re looking for a nice big ocean to douse it in.”

“You study with Persichetti?”

“Mr. Persichetti studied with Roy Harris, just like our own Mr. Schuman.”

“But Persichetti’s gone past all that. No more recycled folk and jazz. He’s gone on to richer things. So should you. Come on, Wilson! You should be listening to Boulez. Babbitt. Dallapiccola.”

“You think I haven’t wasted hours listening to that? If I want noise, I can stand in the middle of Times Square, get me some. If I want chance, I can play the nags. God told us to build this place up. Make it better, not tear it down and feed it to the dogs.”

“This is building. Listen to Stockhausen. Varèse.”

“If I want police sirens, they’re right outside my apartment every night.”

“Don’t be a slave to melody, man.” Jonah didn’t even hear the word.

“There’s a reason we invented melody, brother Jon. You know the best thing Varèse ever did? Teach William Grant Still to find himself. Now there’s a composer who knew how to sound. You ever ask yourself why no one plays that man’s music? Why you never even heard of a Negro composer until you came nosing around me?”

Jonah shot me conspiratorial grins. I stood between them, band-sawed down the middle.

Will worked on me when Jonah wasn’t around. “I’ve spent years listening to your brother’s deaf gentlemen. Nothing new down that way, Mix. Certainly not the freedom brother Jon hopes to find. You listen to me. That brother of ours gonna come running back to us, ears covered, soon as he tires of the squeaks and bangs.”

Will showed me every new piece that came out of him — dressed-up concert cadences flirting with swing and cool, reverent gospel quotes buried in Dvorák-driven lower brass. He made me swear to him that I’d never forsake melody just because of some bad dream of progress. “Promise me something, Mix. Promise me that someday you will write down all the notes that are inside you.” It seemed a safe-enough vow. I was sure there couldn’t be more than a couple of half-note measures in there, all told.

He had this thing about Spain. I don’t know where it came from. Sancho and the Don on horseback. Low, arid hills. Will was going to travel there as soon as he could pay for the trip. Barring Spain, Mexico, Guatemala — anyplace that sparkled after midnight and slept at the peak of the day.

“Must have lived there once, brother Joe. In another life.” Not that he knew the first thing about the place or spoke a word of Spanish. “My people must have paid that land a little visit once. Lived there for a couple of centuries? The Spaniards are the finest Negroes north of Africa. Germans wouldn’t know what to do with this much soul except lock it up.” His hand flew up to sinning lips. “Pay me no mind, Mix! Every people have their notion of what this world’s after.”

Wilson Hart wanted to bridge Gibraltar, to reunite Africa and Iberia, those twins separated at birth. He heard one coiled in the other, where I never could hear any relation at all. What little I learned about African music at Juilliard confirmed that it was an art apart. But Will Hart never gave up trying to get me to hear the kinship, the rhythm joining such disparate rhythms.

I often found Will in one of the cubicles off of the library, hunched over a 1950s turntable with its stylus arm the size of a monkey’s paw, listening to Albéniz or de Falla. He grabbed me one visit and wouldn’t release me. “Just the pair of ears this piece was calling out for.” He sat me down and made me listen to an entire guitar concerto by a man named Rodrigo.

“Well?” he said as the third movement sailed triumphantly into harbor.

“What do you hear, brother Joe?”

I heard a dusty, tonal archaism, wanting to be older than it could honestly admit to being. It flew in the face of history’s long breakdown of consonance. Its sequences were so formal, I completed them before I heard them. “It sure dances.” The best I could do.

His face fell. He wanted me to hear some thing in particular. “What about the man who made it dance?”

“Besides that he comes from northern North Africa?”

“Go ahead and fun me all you want. But tell me what you know about him, now that he’s told you everything.”

I shrugged. “I give up.”

“Blind from the age of three. You really couldn’t hear?”

I shook my head, reaping his disappointment.

“Only a blind man could make this.” Will placed his right hand on his own closed portfolio. “And if God would let me make something even one-tenth as beautiful, I’d be as glad as a—”

“Will! Don’t. Not even in jest.” I think I frightened him.

I asked Jonah if he’d ever heard the piece. Concerto de Aranjuez. He scoffed before I could finish the title. “Total throwback. Written in 1939! Berg had been dead four years already.” As if the true trailblazers would be ahead of anyone, even in dying. “What’s that Will doing to you, man? He’s going to have you whistling to transistor radio by the time we’re out of this joint. Music and wine, Joseph. The less you know, the sweeter you need them.”

“What do you know about wine?”

“Not a damn thing. But I know what I don’t like.”

Jonah was right. Will Hart lived on the school’s suspect fringe. Juilliard still dwelled in that tiny diamond between London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin. Music meant the big Teutonic B ’s, those names chiseled into the marble pediment, the old imperial dream of coherence that haunted the continent Da had fled. North American concert music — even Will’s adored Copland and Still — was here little more than a European transplant. That this country had a music — spectacularly reinventing itself every three years, the bastard of chanted hymns, spirit hollers, cabin songs, field calls and coded escape plans, funeral rowdiness gathered by way of New Orleans, gutbucketed and jugged, slipped up the river in cotton crates to Memphis and St. Louis, bent into blue intervals that power would never recognize, reconvening north, to be flung out everywhere along Chicago’s railhead as unstoppable rag, and overnight — the longest, darkest overnight of the soul in all improvised history — birthing jazz and its countless half-breed descendants, a whole glittering Savoy ballroom full of offspring scatting and scattering everywhere, dancing the hooves off anything whiteness ever made, American, American, for whatever that meant, a music that had taken over the world while the classical masters were looking the other way — had not yet dawned on these Europe-revering halls.

Jonah’s friends were white, and my friends, aside from Will, were Jonah’s. Not that my brother sought white friends out. He didn’t have to. Dr. Suzuki’s movement was just ten years old; several years would pass before the Asian tsunami hit the States. The handful of Middle Eastern students there had come by way of England and France. Juilliard’s cosmopolitan sea was still more or less a restricted swimming hole.

My brother hung out at Sammy’s, a coffee shop just north of the school. Jonah chose the venue, knowing, as his new friends didn’t, where he could sit with his buddies and still get served. The dive had a state-of the-art Seeburg jukebox, its little claw grabbing the vertical records and slapping them down for a nickel a play. The highbrow student singers claimed to hate the thing, even while guzzling down all the pop culture it served up. After practice hours, half a chorale would hole up at Sammy’s, carrying on in a back booth. Jonah held forth at the singer-infested table, and his friends would always squeeze out a little room for his kid brother.

At Sammy’s, the angelic performers sat for hours playing some variation of the musical ratings game. Who could hit the highest highs? Whose lows were the richest? Who had the cleanest passage points? It was worse than the TV quiz shows they all watched in secret, and just as rigged. The rating judges were never so blatant as to rank one another by number, and they’d only rate singers who weren’t present. But in the constant pegging and scoring, each figured out his own place in the pecking pyramid.

The group’s clown was a deadly eared baritone named Brian O’Malley. With a few tremulous semiquavers, he’d have the others rolling on the linoleum. He could imitate anything, bass through coloratura, without ever needing to tell anyone whom he was mocking. His listeners laughed along, even knowing they’d be next as soon as they were out of earshot. Hands clasped primly in front of his chest, Brian launched into a nightmarish Don Carlos or Lucrezia Borgia, taking a friend’s familiar, small vocal blemish and magnifying it to horrific scale. Afterward, we’d never hear the hapless target the same way again.

O’Malley’s gift mystified me. I asked Jonah one night, from the relative safety of 116th Street. “I don’t get it. If he can reproduce anybody, down to the pimples, why…”

Jonah laughed. “Why can’t he make a voice of his own?” Alone among Juilliard voice students, O’Malley’s voice was featureless beyond parody. “He’s making himself as small a target as possible. He’ll have a career, you know. He’d make a great Fra Melitone. Or a Don Pasquale kind of thing.”

“Not for the voice,” I said, horrified.

“Of course not.”

Jonah could sit for hours and listen to the clique’s ranking games. Their need to evaluate was every bit as great as their need for music. For these athletes in training, the two things were equivalent. Song as competition: fastest, highest, hardest — the soul’s Olympics. Hearing them made me want to lock myself into a practice room and refuse to come out until I’d tamed some snarling Rachmaninoff. But I stuck close to my brother among his friends, the two of us swinging together in the deadly breeze. Jonah picked up their idiom like a native speaker. “Haynes’s middle five notes are just about perfect,” or “Thomas has a girl in every portamento.” His verdicts always had an innocent wonder to them. He never sounded like he was slandering anyone.

As for his own vocal reputation, even Jonah’s detractors knew they had to go after him with both barrels if they were foolish enough to go gunning. I overheard students in the back rows of the darkened auditorium declaring his sound too pure, too effortless, too light, claiming it lacked that muscular edge of the best concert tenors. No doubt on winter nights after we headed home, the Sammy’s crowd slammed him with worse. But as long as we sat with the others over phosphates, they treated him with a resigned shake of the head. They’d go through an afternoon’s list of finest, brightest, clearest. “Then there’s Strom,” O’Malley would say. “A species unto himself.”

We sat at Sammy’s one afternoon, just before I passed out of prep and began degree work. Talk turned to Jonah, who was just then working up his first go at Schubert, the Miller’s Beautiful Daughter, an assault on white womanhood that drew O’Malley’s awe. “Strom here’s our ticket to fame. We might as well admit it. The boy’s going all the way. Ride his coattails we shall, if he’ll but let us. If not, we’ll watch him ascend from afar. Laugh not! See how the conquering he-he-he-he-hero comes!”

My brother put his wadded-up straw wrapper in his nose and blew it out at the speaker.

“You think I jest?” O’Malley carried on. “Barring accident, our boy here’s going to become the world’s most famous half-breed. Our illustrious school’s next Leontyne Price.”

The country’s most thrilling new voice, after half a decade, had just been granted her stage debut, in San Francisco. The school was abuzz with its newest headliner alum. But at O’Malley’s invocation of the name, the booth at the back of Sammy’s lurched, their laughter like wet firewood. Jonah arched his eyebrows. He opened his mouth, and out came absurd falsetto. “Gotta brush up my spinto, don’t you know, honey.” A silent hiccup passed through the group. Then fresh, forced hilarity.

I didn’t talk to him for the longest time, heading home. He heard my silence and met it head-on. We were halfway to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine before either of us said anything.

“Half-breed, Jonah?”

He didn’t even shrug. “What we are, Mule. What I am anyway. You be what you want to be.”

Juilliard’s highest talent thought of themselves as color-blind, that plea bargain that high culture employs to get all charges against it dropped. I didn’t yet know, at fifteen, everything that color-blind stood for. At Juilliard, color was still too successfully contained to pose much threat. With a few crazy exceptions like the lovable Strom boys, the Negro’s scene was elsewhere. Race was a southern crisis. O’Malley treated us to his pitch-perfect Governor Faubus: “What in God’s name is happening in the United States of America?” My brother’s friends rose to righteous indignation over every crime against humanity, each one, like the folk song, five hundred miles from home.

“People, people,” O’Malley challenged. “Who am I?” He covered one ear with a cupped hand, tucked his chin into his sternum, and sang in mock Russian at the absolute nadir of his range. It took us a few beats to recognize “Ol’ Man River.” O’Malley’s test glance never lasted more than a quaver. One of this country’s greatest men was living under government-conducted house arrest, forced to sing to European audiences over a telephone, and here was O’Malley going into a whole routine mocking him. Robeson speaking in best Rutgers Phi Beta Kappa accent: “Mr. Hammerstein the Second, sir. Far be it from me to criticize, but your lyrics seem to partake of a few errors in subject-verb agreement.”

The vein in my brother’s temple flickered as he considered flipping the booth over and never coming back. Not over race; over Robeson. No one was allowed to touch such a voice. For a moment, he looked set to send this group to hell and return to the solitude of real music. Instead, as everyone’s eyes fought to stay off him, Jonah just laughed. Harsh, but participating. All other moves were a losing game.

Race was just a bagatelle. The curators of proper singing saved their real firepower for the clearer, more present danger: class. It took me years to decode the Sammy’s scoring system. I’m not sure Jonah ever cracked it. I remember him challenging a unanimous decision that bewildered me, as well. “Just a minute. You’re saying you’d rather hire Paula Squires to sing Mélisande than hire Ginger Kittle to sing Mimi?”

The chorus was merciless. “Perhaps if La Ginger agreed to a wee change of name…” “You have to love her diphthongs, though. That aeyah of hers? At least you can be sure it’ll play in Peoria.” “And those synthetic blends she wears? Every time she climbs above a B-flat, I expect her blouse to spontaneously combust.” “Miss Kittle embodies the Mimi of her generation. Always radiantly dead by act four.”

Jonah shook his head. “Have you all gone completely deaf? So she could use some finish. But Kittle has Squires beat hands down.”

“Maybe if she kept her hands down…”

“But Paula Squires?”

“Jonah, my boy. You’ll figure it out as you ripen, don’t you know.”

Ripening came over us both. I spent my days in a perpetual state of arousal I mistook for anticipation. Everything curved or cupped, any tone from lemon to cocoa excited me. The vibrations of the piano, seeping up my leg from the pedal, could set me off. Sparks would start in an innocent glow, one warm word from anything female, and cascade into elaborate rescue fantasies, ultimate sacrifice followed by happy death, the only possible reward. I’d restrain myself for a week or two, channeling all pure things — the middle movement of the Emperor, my mother hugging us on a windy Eighth Avenue, Malalai Gilani, our family evenings of counterpoint a decade before. Even as I fought temptation, I knew I’d eventually succumb. I waited in patient irritation to be alone in the apartment. The revulsion of the slide only intensified it. Each time I gave in to pleasure, I’d feel as if I’d sentenced Mama to death again, betrayed every good thing she’d ever praised or predicted for me. Each time, I swore to renew myself.

Maybe Jonah did better with lust — another rush to add to the rushes that drove him. Maybe he found some willing nymph to touch him when and where he needed. I didn’t know. He no longer reported his body’s developments to me, though he did still share his latest enthusiasms. “Mule, you have to see this girl. Like nothing you’ve ever seen. Marguerite! Carmen!” But the objects of his desire were always plainness incarnate. I thought he must be mocking me. Any beauty he saw in them lay beyond the visible spectrum. “Well? Isn’t she the greatest thing you’ve ever laid eyes on?” I always managed a vigorous nod.

His body was a seismograph. Even sitting in an auditorium chair became a free exercise routine. He settled on altos. Whenever one passed within a hundred feet, his head rose up on his neck like a U-boat periscope. For the first time in his life, singing acquired an ulterior motive. He sang like a greyhound who’d slipped the leash, running around Morningside, peeing on any hydrant that would hold still for his mark.

I hated him for betraying Kimberly. I knew it was crazy. There I was, in the middle of my own solitary hormone storm, rubbing off to the image of everything that moved. But I wanted my brother to preserve the memory of our past, and that included the albino wraith. Here in New York, Boylston’s sheltered, fake Italianate courtyard seemed a cheap operetta set. I’d spent my childhood like one of those polio-stricken kids in photo magazines, trapped in an iron lung, kept alive by artifice and invention. All that exploded with our leaking furnace. I needed something from our stripped-away past to survive, if only that anemic ghost.

Jonah flirted with every vocalist at Juilliard. And every flirtee, safe in the absurdity of his appetite, flirted back. His voice could turn the yellowest head. To a twenty-year-old elite female in the late 1950s, he offered all the thrill of transgression, all the more exciting by being harmless, of course. Unthinkable.

I found something to praise in his every new drab goddess, raising the same enthusiasm I mustered for his recitals, whose repertoire now baffled me. The simple trip from tonic to dominant and back now bored Jonah. Only the most jagged music still promised him a real workout. Tritones and the devil’s other intervals, weird new notational systems, polyrhythm, microtones: He only wanted to keep growing, a thing the world rarely forgave.

Jonah fell deeper into the avant-garde, a group the mainstream singers called “the Serial Killers.” The Killers wore the badge proudly, worshiping at the shrine of their imported saint of rigor, Schoenberg, canonized the instant he died at UCLA, of all places, a few years before. They declared everything outside the twelve-tone row to be mere ornament, a fate worse than beautiful.

The Serial Killers talked idly about going to see the first full staging of Moses und Aron at the Zurich Stadttheater. When that pipe dream fell through, they vowed to do their own read-through. Jonah was Aaron, the silver-tongued spokesman for his speech-impaired brother. He wasn’t yet twenty, but already he could pick up, in quick study, the thorniest music. He grasped the complex systems the same way he’d learned preadolescence’s simple diatonic pleasures. He made atonality sound as light as Offenbach.

Jonah talked Da out of the apartment for the performance. “ Moses und Aron?Stories of the patriarchs? I raise my children to be good God-fearing atheists, and this is the thanks?” But the read-through delighted Da. All night long, he nodded at the revival of a story he never thought to pass along to us. He beamed at his son’s otherworldly ability to hold his pitch amid a cacophony of signs and wonders.

I never understood Schoenberg. I don’t mean just that unfinished opera libretto, the unsolvable enigma of divine will. I mean the music. I couldn’t feel it. Da wasn’t much better. He ribbed Jonah all the way home. “Do you know what Stravinsky said at the first Pierrot?”

“I know the story, Da.”

“‘I wish that woman would stop talking so I can hear the music!’ Hey. You should laugh, boychik. It’s funny.”

“I laughed the first time, Da. A hundred years ago.

“Ruth didn’t come to the read-through.” Jonah, forced casual.

“She is starting on the funny age,” Da explained.

Jonah snorted. “When does the funny age start?”

“Right around 1905,” I said.

“I embarrass her. She’s ashamed of me. Doesn’t want to see her brother in greasepaint. A stooge of the elite.”

His voice had a note I’d never heard. Da waved off his injury. “The girl is just twelve years.” But Jonah was right. Ruth stayed home increasingly now, whenever she could, preferring her girlfriends to her family. She had her ear pointed elsewhere — other voices, other tunes.

Not long after the Schoenberg, Da, Jonah, and I chanced to catch a radio news broadcast of a faint signal from outer space. The signal came back from the first human thing to escape the earth’s surface. I thought of that star map, Jonah’s and my only decoration at Boylston, in the sealed room of our childhood. We sat with one another around the family radio, listening to the regular beep, the first word from out there, the future.

Jonah heard just the opposite. His ears were tuned to further frequencies, the groundbreaking past that all signals were rushing to join. “Joey. You hear that? Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet. It’s happening, little brother. And in our lifetime! ‘I feel the air of another planet.’”

“‘Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten.’”Da spoke to himself, remembering, in a distant orbit.

That ethereal, beeping metronome drew Ruthie from her room, where she now hid out. “A signal from space?” My sister’s face filled with awful hope. One hand flew up to the side of her eyes, blocking her peripheral sight. I knew what possibilities she was turning over. “That’s coming from somewhere else?”

Da smiled. “The first space satellite.”

Ruth waved, impatient with his denseness. “But someone is out there? Sending…”

Da formed the corrections to his corrections. “No, Kind. Only us. Alone, and talking to ourselves.”

Ruth retreated to her room. I tried to follow, but she closed her door on me.

Those cycling beeps from outer space confirmed Jonah’s iconoclasm. He studied new notation systems at night, asking my help in decoding their hieroglyphs, even as his teachers gave him Belle Epoch salon songs. In the future that his progressive music was making, all objects bathed in the same blinding light. When the time came, he’d be free, released to deep orbit, signaling the earth from out of the endless vacuum.

I heard him at school, sailing up his aerial chromatic scales, a few practice rooms down from mine. My own practice hours were more plodding. Mr. Bateman gave me Grieg’s Lyric Pieces. Each time I played for my teacher, he’d nudge my fingers, wrists, elbows. I felt my body extending the piano, those tripping hammers replayed at large in my more intricate muscle.

I worked through the Lyric Pieces, one every two weeks, a dozen bars every afternoon. I’d repeat the phrase until the notes dissolved under me, the way a word turns back to meaningless purity when chanted long enough. I’d split twelve bars into six, then shatter it down to one. One bar, halting, rethreading, retaking, now soft, now mezzo, now note for staggered note. I’d experiment with the attacks, making my hand a rod and striking each machine-coupled note. I’d relax and roll a chord as if it were written out arpeggio. I’d repeat the drill, depressing the keys so slowly, they didn’t sound, playing the whole passage with only releases. I’d lean on the bass or feel my hands, like an apprentice conjurer extracting hidden interior harmonies from the fray.

The game was leverage, control. Speed and span, how to crack open the intervals, widen them from on high, raise the body’s focus from finger into arm, lengthen the arm like a hawk on the wing. I’d coat the line in rubato or tie every note into a legato flow. I’d round the phrase or clip it, then pedal the envelope and let it ring. I’d turn the baby grand into a two-manual harpsichord. Play, stop, lift, rewind, repeat, stop, lift, back a line, back a phrase, back two bars, half a bar, the turn, the transition, the note, the thinnest edge of attack. My brain sank into states of perfect tedium laced with intense thrill. I was a plant extracting petals from sunlight, water wearing away a continent’s coast.

I’d chink away for hours, moving my spine less than four inches in either direction. Then I’d stand, pace around my cubicle like a zoo wolf spinning in his pen, head down the hall, and stick my head under the arc from the drinking fountain. The halls filled with glorious racket. All around me, bursts of broken-off melody bled together like an Ives symphony. Crusts of Chopin collided with fractured Bach invention. Ostinato Stravinsky attached itself to Scarlatti fragments. Earnest, industrial-grade laboring here and there delivered strains more gorgeous than anything I’d ever heard in concert, snippets so beautiful they plunged me into depression when they broke off in midphrase. Down this monastic clubhouse hall came a mass version of my parents’ old Crazed Quotation game: hymns pressing up against honky-tonk; high Romantic philters elbowing rigid fugues; funerals, weddings, baptisms, sobs, whispers, shouts: everyone at this party talking at once, beyond any ear’s ability to unravel.

I’d return to my cage for another two hours of dismantling and rebuilding. My body threatened to collapse and my brain tried to slip into a permanent coma. The drill was maddening, dulling, grueling, thankless, exhilarating, addictive, consuming, consummate. It felt like love, like a refiner’s fire. I was a child at the beach with a sieve, improving the infinite expanse of sand. In the focus of my will, the sheer hammering repetition, I could burn off all of the world’s impurities, everything ugly and extraneous, and leave behind nothing but a burnished rightness, suspended in space. I closed in with microscopic steps on something I couldn’t see, something clean and unchanging, pure form and purer pleasure, a delivering memory, music, some glimpse of a still-unmade me.

But even such a focused blaze couldn’t burn off the teenage body that fueled it. I’d sit rolling the stone up the hill for half an hour before admitting the stone was rolling back over me. When every key press felt like mud, I’d hunt down someone else to distract — Jonah, or, more often, Wilson Hart.

When he wasn’t off in his mind’s dusty Spain, Will, too, spent his days in a practice room. But he never practiced as much as he should. He had that splendid muscular bass, overflowing the resonators of his chest and head. But it slipped in and out of control as he drew it through scales. His low-range power alone might have landed him a teaching job at a college like the one he had left to come to Juilliard. At his best, he might have held any stage on either side of the Mason-Dixon. But he only hit his best around half the time.

Will’s vice was his wanting to make music, not just be someone else’s messenger boy. He’d start to air out those magnificent pipes of his, but the piano in the practice room corner proved too much temptation. I ambushed him one day, working at the thing that was not his work. He sat at the keyboard, the indicting evidence of a new score spread around him. “You should be in the composition program. You know that?”

Something in my joke went wrong. “Yes, I do.” Then, forgiving me my ignorance, his fingers broke into a quotation of the Rodrigo guitar concerto’s middle movement, a tune sad enough to deflect my stupidity. He scooted over on the bench. “Sit down. We’re going to make something happen.”

I sat to his left and awaited instructions. None came. Will went on teasing out the Spaniard’s phrase, all there was to know about abandonment. His hands found their marks on nothing but foreknowledge. I sat still for a few measures until a nod from Will pointed out the obvious. I was supposed to fill out the lower lines, on nothing but the same.

I’m cursed with a near-perfect musical memory. One listen, plus my sense of the rules of harmony, and I can find my way to just about any lost chord. I’d only heard the Rodrigo once before, when Will played it for me. But the thing was still in me, intact. Under Will’s melodic promptings, I recovered the spirit, if not the full letter, of the thing.

Will laughed out loud as we fell into line. “Knew you could, brother Joe. Knew you had it in you.” So long as he didn’t expect me to chat back, we were in business. We got through the stray modulations, then started to head back to home and the theme’s recap. Will flicked his head and said, “Here we go, now, Mix.” Before I knew what was happening, his fingers dropped into bottomless places. They untied the long, mournful melody and lifted out the contents hidden inside.

I saw the moves and heard each sound he built: clusters that weren’t in the score, yet might have been, in some world without a Mediterranean. The core of Will’s chords came from Rodrigo. Yet the blind romantic could never have written them. The line that Will unrolled shared its parent melody, but his hands bent the slow troubadour tune into another arc, away from Iberia, down old, forced Atlantic crossings. He challenged that fake antique tune, like some unacknowledged half brother come knocking on your front door one afternoon wearing your nose, your jaw, your eyes. You don’t know me, but… Mixed. All mixed up. Wasn’t a horse alive with a clean pedigree.

My fingers were clubs. I heard each thing Will did before he did it. But I tagged along behind each change, getting there only after Will had already left me in his harmonic wake. I knew the shape of the music he made. You couldn’t live in this country and not breathe it. But I’d never learned the rules, the laws of freedom that kept these improvisations aloft, just out of reach of a clean conservatory death.

I felt myself tracing pitiful clichés. My left hand reached out for the safe cartoon, no closer to Will’s outpouring than a minstrel show to a spiritual. He cracked Iberia open and freed every Moor who had ever strayed into it. I bobbed in the Strait of Gibraltar, looking for a sandbar or a splinter of driftwood. The clash of his intervals traced dark, intricate places. Mine were just gratuitous dissonances. Mistakes.

Will chuckled at me over his improvised waves. “Witness? Can’t I get a witness here?” He figured I’d ease in after a few bars. When I didn’t, he went grim. He slowed, surprised. His disappointment made it harder for me to find the elusive groove.

I gathered myself and dove forward, drawing on every scrap of theory I’d ever squirreled away. I thought my way into the modulations. For a few phrases, I came alive. Will settled into a sequence I grasped, and I quit my little cheater’s stagger-syncopated tagalong and headed out to meet him in the open seas. I pegged his wanderings and we were there together, skimming along in concert a few feet above the swells. I don’t know how long we flew along together — maybe no more than a dozen bars. But we were really there. A rumble in the back of Will’s throat opened up alongside us. Over the blanketing sadness of notes, he laughed a muffled, chamois laugh. “You got it, Mix. Go on, tell me!”

Will nudged me on, moving me out of sight of shoreline, into the coldest currents. His modulations held back, waiting for me to take over. He handed me the rudder. Like that novice pilot who has just shot through the most dangerous shoals and now faces only openness in all directions, I turned from exhilaration into panic. I hung there, treading water, until Will took over again. But he wasn’t done with me yet. He eased out on the line, and I heard, in a burst of thirty-second notes, just how far he’d taken in the boundaries, to keep me alive. Snippets of familiar songs bubbled up to the surface of his bouillabaisse, hints of anthems I recognized by reflex, tunes I knew everything about except for their names. He took us on a giant-step, lightning tour of subterranean America, the rivers just now percolating up into the main stream — the music I’d shied away from all my life, crossing the street to avoid the threat of its oncoming silhouette.

Now and then, Aranjuez itself poked back through his inventions and struggled for sunlight. Everything we’d done — the free-form quotes, the random wandering — was just a huge unlimbering of the harmonic journey hidden in that original material. But the Spain we made was rocked by that same Civil War that Rodrigo had fled to write his piece. Will stacked up the chords, widening his palette of surprise intervals. He was sure I could free myself, find my way forward into a new song by thinking myself back, back to forebears who’d discovered the secret of this flight. Will cut me a path, note by note, sure I could get there with him. His faith in me felt worse than death.

I stumbled and fell back on cheap banalities, slopping up wallpaper sounds like a hack in a Bourbon Street bar, grinding out twelve-bar seventh chords to please the tourists. Every shred of technique I’d ever mastered held me shackled to the block. I was a drain on him. He could do more with his two hands than the two of us could do with four. I fell back on skeletal fills. My riffs thinned out. I pulled back into a long diminuendo and stopped.

Will finished out solo, and with an ingenuity even greater than he’d shown on the voyage out, he brought the key back to tonic and led his fingers home to Aranjuez. He looked at me. “You can’t make it go, on its own? You need it out there in front of you, on the page?” He meant to be kind, but his every word made things worse. My face went hot. I couldn’t look at him. “Don’t make no difference, brother Joe. Some folks need the notes. Other folks don’t even care what the notes are called.”

He stirred the keys again. The chords were fading comments, trickles under his fingers, his latest reflections on the matter.

I wanted to make him stop. “Where did you learn to do that?”

Will smiled, as much at his hands as at me. His fingers crawled over the keys like puppies in a giveaway wicker basket. He was as amazed by their freedom as anyone. “Around, Mix. Same place you’re gonna learn it.”

Same place I could have. Should have.

He let out a train of staccato block chords, a parody of the opening of the Waldstein, my current nemesis. Will Hart was surprised at me. I’d lost my inheritance. If I could do everything Beethoven wanted of me, I ought to be able to please myself. I didn’t even know what such a thing might mean. But I could still hear the sounds he’d just unleashed, rolling in my ears, humbling the material they came from. “Why don’t you…write music like that?”

He stopped and stared. “What you think we two just did?”

“I mean, write it down. Compose it, instead of… I mean, not instead of… Along with?” His academic, written-out music felt almost wilted and window-boxed, compared to the music he’d just grown out of his head. If a person could do what he’d just done, launch raw possibility out of the empty air, why would he waste a minute writing down well-behaved conservatory music that stood little chance of being played even once?

“Some songs are for writing down. Some songs are for freeing from writing.”

“What you just made? That was better than the stuff you made it from.”

He just grimaced at the blasphemy. Nobody was better than that blind Spaniard. He scooted through another elaborate sequence of chords that took me a moment to recognize as a hotted-up, cooled-out circle of fifths. He lifted his hands and offered me the keyboard. I brought my claws toward the keys, knowing, before I closed with them, that it was no good. There was nothing in my digits but Lyric Pieces. Nineteenth-century northern Europe’s airbrushed studio portrait.

“I can’t.” He’d caught me out. Exposed me. My hands fell to the keys but did not press them.

His left hand grabbed my neck as if it were the root of his next wild chord. “That’s okay, brother Joe. Let every soul praise God in his own fashion.”

I jerked at the words. But I was old enough, now, not to ask where he’d learned them. He’d picked them up the same place my mother had: around.

I set aside a few minutes each day, at the end of my practice, when further repetition of the day’s passage would do more harm than good. Ten minutes — a prayer to myself, an exercise in remembering how Wilson Hart made music on the fly, out of emptiness. My fingers began to turn without any notes to propel them. But the hardest printed music came easier for me than the simplest indigo riff.

I told Jonah. “You have to hear Will Hart improvise. Out of this world.” My words damned my friend with understatement. Something in me was protecting both men, hiding out where neither could ask anything more of me.

“Not surprised. How come he doesn’t hang out with the jazzers?”

Jonah couldn’t have heard, then, even if he had come listen. His own musical sea change preoccupied him. He came to me one day, swollen with nonchalance. “They’re setting up lessons for next term. William Schuman wants me to study with Roberto Agnese. Schuman. The president of the school, Mule. I didn’t think he knew undergraduates even existed.”

Agnese, old workhorse tenor, was among the most venerable of the vocal arts faculty. “That’s fantastic, Jonah. You’re on Easy Street.” I had no idea what borough I thought that street ran through.

“Small problem, honorable baby brother. Number-one son also desired as student by Mr. Peter Grau.” Grau, the Met star, who never took more than a few of the most promising graduates.

“You’re joking. How?”

“He came and asked me!” The punch line to a dirty joke. We giggled at the inanity, our old conspiracy of two. “He must imagine I’m still teachable!” My brother, who at seventeen, knew more than he ever afterward would.

“Jesus. What are you going to do?”

“What the hell can I do? It’s not like I can say no to either one.”

“You’re going to study with them both?”

Jonah gave a doomed stage cackle.

He spent a season in hell. He took a lesson each week from each great man, putting in twice the hours, struggling to remember which teacher had asked for what. He kept each one in the dark about his rival. The whole thing played out like some sordid French farce, Jonah dashing from one studio to the other, hiding the evidence, changing his sound depending on the day, swearing fidelity to two contrary approaches. “I’m fine, Mule. Just gotta make it until the end of term. Few more weeks. Then I’ll figure something out.”

“No one can keep this up, Jonah. You’ll break down.”

He glowed. “You think? A nice sanitarium on the top of some snowy mountain?”

His two mentors were each other’s spiritual opposites. Agnese was all touch and feel, the bodily mechanics of sound, his hands perpetually sculpting my brother’s jaw, practically moving his lips, his Neapolitan mass forever exploding in vast semaphores of grief or ecstasy. “The guy squeezes my gut while I’m singing. ‘Come, Strom. Everything comes from low down inside you.’ Pervert. Like I’m in basic training or something.”

Grau, at his antilessons, made the body disappear in a cloud of thought. He’d never dream of touching Jonah. He stood as far away as his studio allowed, speaking in a motionless haze. “Feel your head backward and up. No! Do not push. Think it so. Think the larynx down. Do not move it! Do not use the muscles. The muscles must vanish. You must become a ghost to yourself, full of the power of not doing.”

Musicians speak of bliss, but that’s just to throw the uninitiated off the scent. There is no bliss; there is only control. All the orphic gymnastics that each coach demanded of Jonah pushed down into his nervous system, hitched to the traces of every emotion Jonah had ever felt. Both coaches believed that a given muscle set was the emotion that produced it. The symbol produced the thing, and the ability to reverse create, by muscle movement, the full spectrum of human feeling represented the ultimate artistic power.

His mentors differed violently over how to produce this power. Agnese ran about the studio, flapping his massive wings, shouting, “Move your sound. Above the upper lip. Out in front of the teeth. Put the brain away. Let the pitch correct the vowel. Ah, eh, ee, oh, oo. We must hear joy! Love! Desolation! Ma-je-sty!” Grau stood still, a pillar of transcendence, musing. “Draw in your breath with your thighs. Drop as you rise. Sing on the air, not with it. Conceive the sound before you make it. Start your sound before your throat, in your mind!”

Roberto Agnese gave Jonah his first crack at reading a famous role. He toyed with the experiment, settling on Donizetti’s Elixir of Love — the poor, swarthy Nemorino, in particular the devastating cavatina, that one fat, famous, secret tear stealing down the lead’s cheek in the dark. Jonah took a stab at the part, penciling up his expensive foreign edition with articulations.

Then Peter Grau hit upon assigning him the same role. Jonah came to me in a panic. “There is a Supreme Being, Joey. And He’s after my mulatto ass!”

He didn’t have the cash to spare for a second copy of the music. So each week before each lesson, he’d erase every pencil mark given him by the one teacher and replace them with the carefully archived marks of the other, down to the slightest scribble. He was like a plagiarist, constantly tripping up, begging to be caught. The labor was herculean. Every recopying took him the better part of a night.

Each teacher’s “Furtive Tear ” was the other’s opposite. Agnese wanted it wet, wide, and scooping. Grau wanted it dry as the winter Sahara. Agnese told Jonah to wallop the first note of each phrase and swoop down a fifth to nab the rest of the line in his talons. Grau had him clamp on the attack, then swell from nothing. The Italian wanted the sorrow of all mankind. The German wanted a stoic rejection of human absurdity. Jonah just wanted to escape alive.

They had him going like Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve, the previous year’s multiple-personality Oscar winner. Jonah couldn’t remember who’d ordered what. He got so he could switch interpretations in midnote, given the tiniest tremor in his current teacher’s eyebrow. Then one week, Mr. Grau leaned down to examine my brother’s penciled articulations. “What’s this? Sostenuto, here? Surely I told you no such thing.”

Jonah mumbled something about a friend’s joke, and fell to furious erasing.

“Who would dream of sostenuto at such a moment?”

Jonah shook his head, appalled at such an outrage.

“ Yousurely don’t think that’s the way to do these lines?”

Jonah looked scandalized.

“Well, why not. Go ahead and try it that way.”

Nothing if not limber, my brother did, trying to make it sound as if he hadn’t rehearsed it that way, every other session, for the last three weeks.

“Hmm.” Grau scowled. “Not uninteresting.”

When Agnese stopped him at the same passage and told him — just a crazy whim — to try it staccato, Jonah knew the gigue was up. For a week, both of his teachers raked him with antiphonal silence. My brother apologized to each.

Grau wagged his head. “Whom did you imagine you were fooling?”

Agnese chuckled. “You think this stereophonic ‘Furtive Tear’ was what you Americans call a coincidence?”

My brother didn’t inquire how long they’d seen through his sham. But, as abjectly as possible, he did ask, “Why?”

“Consider it your education in the politics of performance,” Grau said. “Believe us: From here on out, such things will cause you far more tears than any passage in Donizetti.”

So ended my brother’s attempt to two-time the school’s finest. Jonah’s escapade briefly made him the conservatory’s Brando. Outside the school, the cranked-up youth uprising geared up to break open the world. But inside our soundproof practice rooms, tempo violations were still the worst imaginable crime. We simply had no idea where we lived. The Sammy’s crowd traded murky tales of reefer and horse, potent substances that by all accounts made Village jazz musicians schizophrenic and turned the Harlem underclass into killers. They worried the question for hours. “Say it made you play better for a while, and then it killed you. Would you take it, for your art?”

Sex was the much closer transgression. Rumors of hand jobs, even mouth jobs performed in darkened practice rooms for standing-room-only recipients abounded. One slim blond ingenue flutist — everyone’s fetish — had to leave school under circumstances ripe with inventive explanation. The hint of vice filled the halls, a broken scent bottle no amount of ammonia could scrub out. My brother’s friends argued forever about which female vocal students, with their various techniques, would best serve their needs — the fast, high passage-workers, the deep embouchures… We were such children as this country will never produce again. Long past the age when our old Hamilton Heights torturers were being sent off to their first prison terms, Jonah and I held on to a naïveté we mistook for sin. But when the time for real sinning finally came, we had all the advantage of the late starter.

With the settling of his voice, Jonah landed most of the plum parts he set himself after. Two years into the bachelor’s, he was singing with graduate productions. If the part called for weightless precision, all pretense of democratic auditions broke down. He had a flair for the comic — the eighteenth-century page boy whose ditsiness is surpassed only by his heartbreaking zeal. He sang a Bach Evangelist that had half the agnostics in the house ready to convert, at least for an evening. He learned how to act. By nineteen, he’d mastered that devastating sucker punch, the one that lulled audiences into thinking they were watching some other poor bastard’s life, only to zap them at the flick of an invisible switch into realizing just whose story this was.

He performed hungrily. He’d sing anything written since the war. He had his pick of premieres, as few other students wanted to kill themselves learning new, extended techniques for a one-shot deal. But he’d also sing little bits of French fluff he could have ripped through at age six. Up on Claremont, he sang everything from Celtic folk songs to Russian liturgical monody, with Sturm und Drang, buffa, and High Renaissance hankie flirtations littered along the way. He couldn’t distinguish between a funeral mass and a flippant encore. He sang every tune as if it were his swan song. He could make stones weep and guiltless animals die of shame: the Orpheus that Peri, Monteverdi, Glück, Offenbach, Krenek, and Auric had in mind.

In life’s opening few years, everything you hear, you hear for the first time. After a while, the ear fills in, and hearing turns back from the future and into the past. What you’ve yet to hear is outstripped by what you already have. The beauty of Jonah’s voice lay in its running backward. With every new phrase that came out of him, old notes lifted off of his listeners and they grew younger.

People actually turned up to hear his degree recital. He insisted I accompany him. We worked for weeks on the pieces, mostly mainstream nineteenth-century German lieder. He mocked the melodramatic crowd-pleasers we had to do: “Aural Novocain.” At our dress rehearsal, we scrambled to put the last desperate touches to the “Will-o’-the-Wisp” from Schubert’s Winterreise. I was halfway into the second verse, the almost nihilistic

Bin gewohnt das Irregehen,

’s fürhrt ja jeder Weg zum Ziel:

Uns’re Freuden, uns’re Leiden,

Alles eines Irrlichts Spiel!

All our joys and sorrows a will-o’-the-wisp, when I heard Jonah singing:

Pepsi-Cola hits the spot-ta,

Twice as much for a nickel, too.

Twelve full ounces, that’s a lot-ta,

Pepsi-Cola’s the drink for you!

I slammed down the lid and shouted over the last words. “Damn it, Jonah. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

He saw my face, and couldn’t stop cackling. “Joey, it’s a fucking school recital. We can’t let them bust our nuts with it.”

I was sure he’d repeat the stunt in recital, if not deliberately, then by practiced accident. But he sang the words as written, an old man twice Da’s age, who knew from bitter experience that every path leads to the same sea and every urgent joy and sorrow are just phantom lights on the far side of an uncrossable channel. He passed the recital, with honors.

The Sammy’s crowd threw him a little bash a few days after our performance. My brother still hung with that crowd, for whatever sense of freedom they gave him. I’d fallen away, out of disgust. I preferred running through the coda of my current Beethoven sonata another thousand times to hearing my competitors evaluated even once more.

But Jonah wanted me to put in an appearance at this celebration. When I arrived, Brian O’Malley was holding forth, the way he had for most of our college career. His routine turned toward race at my entrance, as it often did when I was around. Proof of O’Malley’s enlightenment. For our amusement, he launched a burlesque of the shit-kicker soda jerks behind the Woolworth counter in Greensboro: “Seein’ as how y’all are gonna be settin’ here a spell, you want somethin’ cold to drink? Y’all will have to drink it outside, of course, but you can come on back in soon as you’re done!”

I stared out the window with a deflecting smile, doing my best to outlast this humor. Across the street, a woman stepped from behind a delivery truck and passed uptown. She was wearing a navy blue midcalf-length dress with wide, pointed shoulders, decades out of date. Her hair was a wren’s nest of soft black thread. I had only a glimpse of her face. She was a tone I’d given up on ever finding. Seeing her like this, at large, heading north, free to be anything, I knew she’d been put there for me to discover.

I tripped getting up, wrecking O’Malley’s punch line. I faked some excuse and bolted. Outside, I found her again. She was sailing uptown, a beautiful navy blue cutter against the afternoon current. I followed her up Broadway, where she made a right on LaSalle. She turned again up Amsterdam, a hundred yards ahead of me. I tried to close, but she walked so fast, I worried that she was fleeing me.

Still chasing her up toward City College, I felt myself start to dissolve. I looked on myself from above, a teenager chasing a total stranger. Each step added to my abasement. What drove me wasn’t lust, but some need simpler than I’d felt in my life. A woman whom I knew better than I knew myself had been walking around Claremont, the blocks around my school, looking for me. She couldn’t have known I was sitting in a nearby coffee shop, the captive of fools. She’d given up trying to find me. It was up to me to redeem myself.

The buildings alongside me closed into a tunnel. I could no longer feel the air against my skin. I urged myself on, from miles above myself in space. I was my own marionette, the central character in my own life, a story whose plot had just revealed itself to me. I hadn’t felt so focused, so alive, since earliest childhood’s music evenings. Everything was well. All lines would finally resolve and reach cadence. Every person on this packed street had some note to hand the chord.

All the while, my tow bobbed in front of me, her walk tailored and purposeful. So long as I kept her in sight, I had no other needs. I drew close enough to make out her neck underneath that perfect fall of hair. For a moment, in the thinning afternoon light, I panicked. Her skin shifted, as if by some trick of protective coloration. The tinted glass window at Sammy’s had misled me. My sense of recognition vanished. Then she turned and looked my way. So much certainty filled me that I almost called out. Her face inhabited that place I thought I lived in alone.

She bore right and I followed, so focused, I forgot to notice the cross street. Runners in the middle of a turf war tensed as I slid past them. Two heavyset men glared at me from their doorway lookout. All eyes up and down the block picked me out as an intruder. Ahead, that navy blue coat moved deeper into this injured neighborhood like a ghost over a battlefield.

She veered twice more, and I kept to her trail. Some nearby motion distracted me. When I looked back ahead, the navy-dressed woman was gone. She disappeared into a doorway that I searched for but couldn’t find. I stood on the corner, stupidly waiting for destiny to return and claim me. People pushed past, impatient and indifferent. Busses disgorged their contents a hundred feet away. The neighborhood turned malevolent, smelling my fear and sensing I had no right to be here. The intersection closed in around me, and I bolted.

The streets I fled back down felt more hostile than the ones I’d come up. I turned west too early, on a street that, after a block, veered diagonally through the grid, back uptown. I stopped, turned, took a few steps, and turned back again, confused. I clipped along the edge of a long, scorched parkway. My body took over, and I sprinted back toward what I hoped was Amsterdam.

All at once, I wasn’t in New York. I felt myself in a herd of people not from around these parts, moving too slowly for 1960. I can’t say how long I stood there. The question had no measure. I was out on the streets of a city I didn’t recognize, in a crowd of people who weren’t mine, on a day I shared with no one around me.

I cursed myself for losing everything. The woman still felt so present that I felt sure I’d find her again, as soon as I was supposed to. I knew her neighborhood, where she walked, how she moved. My finding her could not have been a one-off chance. I was eighteen years old. And I’d waited until that moment to fall in love with an image even more fleeting than music.

Jonah lit into me when I got home. “What the fuck do you think you were doing back there?” It took me a while to remember: the scene at Sammy’s. Jonah was merciless. “What was that all about? Were you deliberately trying to humiliate me with those people?” He needed an answer. I had none.

“Jonah. Listen. I just saw the woman I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.”

“Oh?” All those classes in dramatic presence. “Your whole life? Starting when?”

“I’m serious.”

“Of course you are. Little Joe is no kidder. You will be sure to let the woman know, right?”

I went to Sammy’s the next day, and every afternoon at that hour for two weeks. I suffered through the worst that high culture had to offer. Jonah thought I was doing penance, and he doled out little verbal awards. But I was keeping my vigil, as regular and necessary as sleeping or eating. She’d have to be back. She couldn’t have been dangled in front of me, only to disappear for good. That afternoon, or the next, by month’s end at the latest…

When she didn’t appear again, I grew edgy. Impatience became confusion. Confusion turned desperate without any help from me. After a week, I tried to retrace my route north, through blocks I couldn’t resurrect. I stopped going to Sammy’s, stopped doing anything except sitting in a practice room, paralyzed, the last holdout case of polio, brought on by a glimpse of this girl, whose name I had no chance in hell of discovering.

After a month of seeing me like that, Jonah began to believe me. One night, from nowhere, he asked, “What did she look like?”

I shook my head. “You’d know her. You’d know her the minute you saw her.”

This is how the dream of the 1950s ended for me, before I could wake myself from it. Around us, in New York and farther, the whole key signature changed from one measure to the next, as if that swap of digits really meant something. The year the decade changed, I turned adult. Revolutions sprang up everywhere, except inside my brother and me. At the flick of that invented calendar switch, the world went from black and white to colored. And by some law of conserving physics, Jonah, Ruth, and I went from colored to black and white.

The bald general gave way to the thick-haired, hatless boy. The super-powers edged toward the nuclear brink, each one willing to go down without blinking. The arms race moved into space. Black students moved into white establishments. I spent less time inside my practice room fallout shelter and more hours above ground, waiting for the perfect-toned, navy-dressed woman to come claim me before the world went up in mushroom clouds.

The nation — the white part anyway — sang along with Mitch, following a ball that bounced across the lyrics at the bottom of the television screen. People really did this. Maybe not New Yorkers, but out over the Hudson, to all points west: the entire country, singing out loud in front of the TV, a chorus of millions of living rooms in one vast, last, if isolated, sing-along, where nobody could hear one another, but where, for a final moment, everyone kept to something like the same key.

Lenny Bruce played Carnegie Hall, performing my brother’s all-time favorite routine. Jonah bought the record, his first comedy disk, listening to the shtick until the vinyl wore out. He studied the inflections with his perfect ear, cackling at the cadences no matter how many times he listened:

I’m going to give you a choice, your own free will, of marrying a black woman or a white woman, two chicks about the same ages, same economic levels…whatever marriage means to you — kissing, and hugging and sleeping together in a single bed on hot nights…fifteen years…kissing and hugging that black, black woman, or kissing and hugging that white, white woman… Make your choice, because, see, the white woman is Kate Smith. And the black woman is Lena Horne.

Jonah played it for me, joining in on the punch line. “You dig, jig? The whole thing’s not really about race after all. It’s about ugliness! So let’s go string up all the ugly people, huh?” But Jonah repeated the routine only in private performance. For the better part of thirty years — and the worse part, too — he never recalled the joke for anyone but me.

Down in the Village, music was having quintuplets. From the insidious Seeburg jukebox at Sammy’s, from little trickles of radio on our way to the Met broadcasts, and from wilder dispatches in the streets all around us, we finally heard. Something had been happening, for years. At last, Jonah wanted a listen. We went downtown, sat in on two progressive jazz sets, had the tops of our heads taken off, then headed back home. Jonah waved the whole scene away. Then, a month later, he wanted to go back.

We fell into a semiweekly ritual, sneaking into the hot spots I wasn’t legally old enough to enter. The bouncer saw that hungry musician’s gaze and looked the other way. We’d hit the Village Gate one week, the Vanguard the next. While the jazz giants gathered at the Gate, the folkies took up across the street at the Bitter End: two furious scenes that couldn’t have been further apart in every way except distance. The mind-warping Vanguard sound had rumbled around for years, old inland blues swelling, flowing, coming back east to get cool and urbane. The older club regulars told us we’d already missed the peak. They claimed that the real gods had already passed from the face of the land, and that 1960 was already nothing but an echo. But to Jonah and me, here was the air of a planet newer than Schoenberg, with an atmosphere far more breathable.

I couldn’t hear it then, the re-creation in our recreation. That sound had filled the house once, pouring out of the radio on Sunday mornings. We had never eaten one of Da’s elaborate experimental omelettes except to jazz. It was never really ours, not like the stuff we sang every other day. Never home to us; more like a wild two-week summer rental on the Strip. But our parents had listened. Only Jonah and I had fallen away. We didn’t feel our prowling around the Village as a return. We thought we’d stumbled onto a place we’d never been.

Da didn’t want us staying downtown all night. He’d lost track of us, vanishing into his work, coming up for air only to blunder through parenting. He surfaced long enough to say that he wanted us home by midnight, too early to hear the stuff that the regulars talked about in hushed tones. Those sets never got started until early morning. The heavy players were still going — zipped up and cooking on fuels I’d never heard of — by the time Jonah and I dragged back into the conservatory the next morning. We could have skipped Da’s curfew anytime without his noticing. But for whatever reasons, we obeyed this law, staying out to the last possible minute the clock allowed, Jonah going through a beer or two while helping himself to my seltzers. By the time we headed back uptown, we’d be reeling like the worst of hard-core drunks, Jonah pale with the darkness, the smoke, the wonder of it, as pale as any Semitic fellow traveler. And all anxious explanations.

“They’re stealing the wild stuff from the thirties avant-garde. Paris, you know. Berlin.” It reassured him, somehow. But from what I’d read, the Europeans had stolen their best bits from New Orleans and Chicago. Music, that vampire, floating around for centuries, undead, wasn’t at all picky about whose jugular it sucked. Any old blood line would do, any transfusion that kept it kicking for another year.

I loved how the jazzers prowled around the streets with their horns, looking for the next quick place to unpack, scouting for like-minded cats, with no other long-range program except to sit back and blow. Their engine was pure self-delight, self-invention. Their sound had no motive, no beginning, no end, no goal but the notes, and even those they looked at only in order to look past. All a body really wanted was to play.

We caught Coltrane one night, tearing the roof off what felt like someone’s living room in a street shorter than a Tinkertoy, on a stage the size of a cheese Danish. He’d been standing in a nearby alley, leaning on the end of his tenor case, when the drummer and pianist of that night’s session went to have a smoke. They waylaid ’Trane, or he had nothing better to do. Sources varied. In any case, Jonah and I sat with our ears in that giant upturned bell, hearing the cups clapping his tone holes, listening to a game of Crazed Quotations beyond our ability to follow.

For all my grounding in theory and harmony, I couldn’t hear a third of what that pickup quartet did that night. But here was music as it had been, once, in the beginning, when my family first gave it to me. Music for the sheer making. Music for a while.

I loved to watch Jonah when the best of the Village’s singers adventured onstage. He favored the sets of a southern woman named Simone who’d started out studying piano at Juilliard with Carl Friedburg. Her voice was harsh, but she took it into unknown places. His other goddess was another dark woman, from Mama’s Philly, who could scat wilder than a Paganini pizz. Jonah sat like a spaniel at a rabbit farm, leaning forward, mouth open, body ready to bolt onstage and join the fray. I had to keep a hand on his collar sometimes. Thank God I did, for on the long ride home — the two of us, north of Fifty-ninth, breaking into the obligatory “Take the A Train”—I heard how gelded his whole concert-hall, full-voiced precision would have sounded on any stage south of Fourteenth.

His keepers at Juilliard didn’t know about his after-hours flirtations with the island’s lower regions. After his senior recital, the school prepared to grant my brother their degree. His teachers split over what he should do next. Agnese wanted him to enter the graduate program, attacca, without pausing for breath. Grau, who loved my brother more ruthlessly, wanted him out in the world, getting a taste of the brutal arena of auditions, the quickest way to toughen that voice that still held on to an unnatural innocence.

The Rome-Berlin axis compromised on a trip to Europe. They conveyed their plans to Jonah. If Jonah put up a token sum, they could arrange a scholarship, free accommodation, and a superlative teacher in Milan. Italy was the voice’s home, the hajj every singer made, the dream world with which Kimberly Monera had once fed Jonah’s childish imagination. He’d had four years of the language and could say things like “To love one another eternally — that is the curse coursing through our blood!” and “Even the gods’ indifference will not delay me” with all the ease of a native speaker. There was no question: He would have to make the pilgrimage to vocal music’s promised land. The only question was when.

My brother had gone to Juilliard purely as an alternative to grief. And now he started planning for Milan only as an alternative to hanging around Claremont forever. Da was sure this was the proper next step. “My boy, I wish I were traveling with you.” Ruthie used her baby-sitting money to buy a set of conversational Italian records so she could jabber with him at breakfast in the weeks before his departure. But after a few go-rounds with Jonah correcting her pronunciation, she broke off the attempt and condemned the records to our piles of opera LPs.

Jonah was booked to leave just after graduation. The night before commencement, he came into the kitchen to help me wash dishes. He seemed transfigured, lighter than he’d been in weeks. I thought it was his approaching departure.

“Mule, you go. I’m sitting tight for a while.” I laughed. “Serious.” My mouth sagged, waiting for him to come clean. “Serious, Joey. I’m not going. You know why. You know everything, brother. The last few years have been perfect hell, haven’t they? For both of us. You knew that all along, while I waltzed around, pretending…”

“Jonah. You have to go. It’s all arranged. They’ve put themselves out for your sake.”

“Help a colored boy see the Vatican.”

“Jonah. Don’t do this. Don’t throw this away.”

“What am I throwing away? They’re throwing me away, damn it. Everybody has plans for me but me. Imagine what I’d be after six months of Europe. Their charity case. Their trademarked act. Indebted to my sponsors forever. Sorry. Can’t do it, Joey.”

He looked away, avoiding my eye. A muscle in his cheek twitched at a hundred beats a minute. For the first time in his life, my brother was afraid. Maybe not of failing: Failing would have been a relief. Afraid of who he’d be, if the problem of who he was was solved for him.

His teachers were furious. They had pulled strings for him, and he was walking away from their protective benefice. Agnese wasn’t accustomed to having his generosity trashed. He threw my brother out of his studio and refused to talk to him. Grau, the longer-term architect, sat him down, hostage for a few more minutes, and made him say just what he wanted to do instead.

Jonah threw his palms in the air. He was just that age, emerged adult, with adolescence’s pupa still clinging to him. “I thought I might sing a little?”

Grau laughed. “And what have you been doing for the last four years?”

“I mean…sing for humans.”

The laugh went sharper. “Humans, as opposed to teachers?”

“Humans as opposed to, you know, people who are paid to listen?”

Mr. Grau smiled to himself. He folded his hands in front of his face and said with theatrical neutrality, “By all means, go and find your humans.” Neither blessing nor curse. Just: Go see.

Da was more confused than I’d ever seen him. He kept shaking his head, waiting for reality to clear itself up. Then the disappointment set in. “If you want to stay in this apartment after graduating, then you must look for work.” Jonah had no idea what such a thing might mean. He typed up a ridiculous résumé and peddled it to a few low-skill employers — midtown department stores, uptown restaurants, even Columbia Operations and Maintenance. He managed to list just enough of his cultural attainments to sabotage any interest.

He decided to go out for auditions. But no ordinary tryout would do. He combed the music trade press, hunting down the perfect coming-out opportunity. He found a contest tailor-made to showcase him. He came to me with the listing. “This is the one we’re doing, Mule.”

He held the paper under my nose. America’s Next Voices: a national competition for singers with no prior professional recognition. The thing carried a jewel of a prize. Trying for it seemed reasonable enough. The first round was months away, just before I was slated to do my own senior recital.

“I’m with you, brother. Just let me know when you want to get started.”

“When? No time like now.”

Then I knew what plans he had for me. “Jonah.” I put my palms out to slow him. “My lessons. My recital.” My degree. My life.

“Come on, Mule. We’ve already worked up the whole program, for my recital. You’re the only player who knows me, who can read my mind.”

“Who’s going to coach us?”

Jonah got that manic twinkle he usually saved for the stage. “No coach. You’re going to be my coach, Joey. Who else is going to do that blood-brother thing? Who else can I depend on to be absolutely merciless? Think of the stakes. If we come from nowhere and walk away with this?”

“Jonah. I have to graduate.”

“Jesus. What do you take me for? I’m not going to thwart your education, for Christ’s sake. You’re a growing boy.”

I never did graduate. But I suppose, technically, Jonah never thwarted my education.

He told Da we needed a place to rehearse. “What’s wrong with here? It’s just your sister and me. We know all about you.”

“Exactly, Da.”

“What’s wrong with your home? Home is where you always made your music, since you were little.”

“We’re not little anymore, Da.” Da looked at me as if I’d changed sides.

Jonah outdid me. “This isn’t home, Da.” Home had burned.

“Why don’t you rehearse at school?”

Jonah hadn’t told Da the details of his break with Juilliard. “We need privacy, Da. We have to nail this contest.”

“This is just another audition, my boys. You’ve taken these before.”

But it wasn’t just an audition. It was our entry into the deadly horse race of professional music. Jonah didn’t mean merely to enter this contest. He meant to walk away with it.

Da understood nothing, except what Jonah said he needed. He sat us down at the kitchen table after Ruth went to bed. “A little money came to us when your mother…” He showed us some papers. Jonah made some pretense of decoding them. “This is not a fortune I’m speaking about. But enough to start you. This is what your mother would want, what she always believed for you. But you must know: When this sum is gone, no more comes along after it. You must be sure you’re doing what you need with it.”

Certainty was always Jonah’s vice of choice. He found a studio ten blocks from our apartment, on the edge of Harlem. At considerable expense, he rented a piano and had it moved in. It suited me: The room sat just a few blocks from where I’d seen the woman I was going to spend my future with. During our breaks, I could go stand on the corner where she’d disappeared and wait for her to materialize again.

Not that Jonah planned many breaks. He figured that once we set up the space, we’d pretty much camp out there. He picked up a half-sized refrigerator and a couple of old Boy Scout sleeping bags secondhand from some real boys. He planned to work straight through until the first rounds of the competition, that fall.

I had my own lessons, with Mr. Bateman. To Jonah, my continuing to study with the same teacher proved I wasn’t learning anything. It came down to a choice: Jonah or school. Mr. Bateman was the best teacher I’d ever have. But Jonah was my brother, and the greatest musical talent I had any chance of working with. If he couldn’t bring Mama back alive, what hope had I?

I applied for a leave of absence. I told Mr. Bateman it was a family emergency. He signed off without any question. Wilson Hart was the only one I leveled with. My friend just shook his head at the plan. “He know what sacrifice he’s asking you to make?”

“I think he sees it as an opportunity.”

It took all the man’s judgment not to judge me, not to say what he should have. “More like a gamble, far as I can see.”

Worse than a gamble. But so was singing. Will and I both knew one thing: With this much riding on one throw of the die, I wouldn’t be coming back to school, whatever the outcome.

“You listen here, Mix. Most men?” Wilson Hart reached out and cupped my chin. I let him raise my head. His fingers grazed my Adam’s apple. I wondered whether a blind person could tell race by touch. “Most men would kill for a brother like you.”

He made me sit and play, while I was still in the neighborhood. Who knew when I’d be back through? We played through a four-hands version of the chamber fantasy he was working on, an eerily consonant, sepia-toned piece full of tunes I should have recognized but didn’t. Jonah would have called the piece reactionary. But Jonah didn’t have to know.

This time, Will gave me the upper lines. I watched my friend’s face during the rests. We broke off where the piece did, at the introduction of a surprise new theme, a broad-willed subject that wasn’t exactly “Motherless Child” but might have descended from it, somewhere down the orphaned generations. The song broke away under our fingers, unfinished. We hung in space over the keys, listening, after the fact, to all the things it had sounded like while we were too engaged to hear.

After a silence as noisy as any, I started playing again. I revived the first theme from his exposition. I made a point of refusing the page. After the motive unfolded, I couldn’t have used the page if I’d tried. Will Hart’s tune went down my arm, through my wrist, into my hand, and out my fingertips. Then it took off, with me just within earshot behind it. I heard a sharp intake of breath beside me on the piano bench as I did a number on his number. Then that breath came out a deep bass laugh, one that traveled down Will’s own fingers to freedom. Will ran alongside and hopped on the freight I’d hijacked, shaking his head in amazement at discovering where I’d been spending my weekends.

His surprise subsided, and we flew along side by side. We commenced poking our souls into time signatures the tune on the page had been too shy to try out. Will howled at the change I showed since our last outing. He wanted to stop and razz me, but our hands wouldn’t let him. I dangled dares in front of him, calls whose responses he couldn’t help but pick up and flip back at me. He tested me, too, drawing me deeper into the shade of each idea I launched. Where I couldn’t equal his inventions, I at least embroidered them with curls of counterpoint ripped off from my études, handfuls of bloom to fit the vase he handed me.

He laid down a solid floor with his chords, on which I did my best to spin lines that had never before existed. For a while, for at least as long as our four hands kept moving, the music for writing down and the music for letting loose found a way to share a nest.

I be-bopped us into a three-point landing, stealing a great alto sax riff I’d heard unleashed one night at the Gate. Will was laughing so hard at my full-body, adult baptism that his left hand had to hunt around for the tonic. We needed only a trap-set release, which we jumped up and performed in unison on the piano lid.

“Don’t sue me, Wilson,” I said when we’d caught our breath. “I didn’t see no copyright symbol anywhere on your score.”

“Where in God’s creation you learn to do that, Mix?”

“Oh, you know. Here and there. Around.”

“Get away! On out of here!” He waved me out of his sight. As if only the throwaway gesture guaranteed I’d be back. From a distance, he called, “And don’t forget: You promised me.” I looked back, a blank. Forgotten already. He mimed a scribbling motion. Composing. “Get that all down on a score someday.”

By summer’s end, Jonah had us on a regimen. We left the apartment every morning by the time Ruthie went to school, and returned too late to say good night to her. She complained about our being away, and Jonah laughed at her. Every so often, he sent me home to tell Da we were staying overnight, to hammer out some resistant passage.

We found our rhythm. Jonah’s appetite for work outstripped the available hours. “The man wants something,” I baited him. “He’s hungry.”

“What else are we supposed to do all day long?”

“You’ve never worked this hard in your life.”

“I like working for myself, Joey. More future in it.”

We went deep underground, where music must always go. We went down into places untouched by anyone. We put in such strange, extended hours that the days began to dissolve. Jonah wouldn’t let me wear a watch. He banished any ticker with more memory than a metronome. No radio, records, newspapers, or word from the outside. Only the growing list of notes we made on a canary yellow legal pad, the curl of the sun’s slatted shadow across the floorboards, the frequent sirens, and the muffled battering from the apartments below proved that the seasons still moved.

Harlem wrapped around us. The street outside drowned out our noise with its indifferent survival cries. Sometimes neighbors thumped on the walls or pounded on the door to get us to quit. Then we switched to pianissimo. For longer than the metronome could say, we were dead to the world.

Jonah obsessed on placement, those minute locations of tone that the tiny rented room made audible. He cleared out the uncertainties at each end of his range. We spoke to each other in bursts of pitches, shaping, bending, imitating. Before my eyes, Jonah pushed into an agility in his upper notes that rivaled the precision of my keys.

We were too young to travel alone. Overtrained by any measure, neither of us really knew anything. Great singers sing their whole lives and still want a teacher to hear and herd them. But here was Jonah, who’d barely sung in public, training for the first crucial contest of his life, with no one to correct him but me.

We grated on each other’s nerves. He wanted me to be his harshest critic, but if I faulted his execution, he’d hiss. “Listen to the piano player, will you!” Three days later, he’d be doing what I suggested, as if it had just occurred to him. If I dropped a clunker or struggled with a passage, he assumed a patience so long-suffering that I’d start seizing up on the simplest dotted figure.

Sometimes I couldn’t count to four the same way twice. But now and then, I held up a mirror to his interpretation or brought out some interior ripple he’d never heard. Then Jonah walked behind me at the bench and wrapped his arms around my shoulders in an anaconda squeeze. “Who else but you, brother? Who else could give me everything you do?”

The hours passed, motionless in their expanse. Some days, we seemed to go for weeks before darkness sent us home. Other days vanished in half an hour. In the evenings, both of us punchy with exertion, Jonah grew expansive. “Look at us, Joseph. At home on our own forty acres. And the pair of mules is free.”

We weren’t the only ones singing. Just the only ones locked up, singing to ourselves. Above our “Erl-King” and Dowland, tunes broke in on us from all directions. Don’t forget who’s walking you home. Who’s coming for you, now, when you’re all alone. Soft and clear like moonlight through the pines. Dry and light, like you like your wine. Darlin’, please. Only you. Something you know, and something you do. Come on, baby, let’s do the twist. Take me by my little hand and go like this. Takes more than a robin to make the winter go. You got what it takes, Lord, don’t I know. Come on, baby, now, I’m needing you. Just an old sweet song, the whole night through.

I listened to these tunes on the sly, even as Jonah launched his own bottomless columns of air. Each note that bled into our apartment exposed us. We were some extinct, flightless bird, or that living fossil fish hauled up from the primordial deeps off Madagascar. Da had told us that once we burned the insurance money, there’d be no more. Cash, like time, flowed in one direction: away. If we barreled into this contest and stumbled, we were finished. If we came up empty, we’d have to face the music. The same music everyone else now sang.

Ours was worse than the wildest juvenile fantasy, the ten-year-old on a glass-strewn empty lot behind the condemned tenement, practicing his major-league swing. Worse than a preteen crooner singing into the mike stand hidden in a sawed-off parking meter, the next Sam Cooke, his friends the next Drifters or Platters. Jonah couldn’t distinguish between long shot and shoo-in. Singing was what he did best in this life. Singing outdid the best the world had to give, better than any drug, any sedative. It was in his body. His baseline blood chemistry pumped it out like insulin. Doing something else was never an option. The pleasure of flight was too great in him.

Our preparation was pure tedium, worse than any I’d ever spent. Sometimes I sat silent, stock-still for twenty minutes as Jonah tamped out a dimple in an appoggiatura. Sometimes I stepped outside, killing time on the corner or walking a few blocks, hoping to stumble upon the woman with the wide navy blue shoulders. Then Jonah would come out after me to haul me back, furious at my desertion.

Sometimes he crawled down a well of despondence and wouldn’t come out, certain that every note coming out of him sounded like dried dung. He’d try singing into a corner. He’d lie flat on his back on the wooden floor, singing to the ceiling. Anything to get his two hundred singing muscle groups to agree. He’d lie there after I stopped playing, crushed under an ocean of atmosphere. “Mule. Help. Remind me.”

“‘You two boys can be anything you want.’”

He started to suffer from occasional shortness of breath. He: Aeolus’s walking pair of lungs. In the middle of an E-flat major scale, his throat clamped shut as if he were in severe anaphylaxis. It took me three beats to realize he wasn’t goofing around. I broke off on a leading tone and was on my feet, walking him around the room, rubbing his back, soliciting. “Should I get help? Should I call a doctor?” But we had no phone, and no doctor to call.

He put out his arm and beat time like the conductor of a volunteer community orchestra. “I’m fine.” His voice came from under the polar ice caps. Two more spins around the room and he was breathing again. He walked over to the piano and built a little cadence to resolve my broken-off leading tone. “What on earth was that?” I asked. But he refused to talk about what had happened.

It struck again ten days later. Both times, he came back quickly from the attacks, his voice clearer than ever. Some film had lifted from it, one I didn’t notice until brightness peeled it away. I even had the guilty thought, If we could only time this…

One evening, walking home, he stopped and grabbed my arm. He stood there on a rough corner of 122nd, his mouth forming a thought, just waiting to be mugged. “You know? Joseph. There’s nothing in the world— nothing…”

“Like a dame?”

“Whiter than singing Schubert in front of five impotent, constipated judges.”

“Shh. Jesus! You’ll get us killed.”

“Nothing whiter in creation.”

“How do you know they’re constipated?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Jonah.”

“Name one.”

“How about five impotent, constipated judges judging singers of Schubert?”

“Okay. Name another.”

I was eager to keep moving, placate the street. But Jonah was deep in a kind of interrogation I’d never seen in him. “You know the funniest part of this? If we win…”

“ Whenwe win…” One of us had to be him.

“Think how much darker we’ll seem, to the judges. To everybody but us. If we walk away with their prize.”

The contest rules were mailed weeks in advance. There would be a scale exercise supplied by the judges and a sight-singing exercise of average difficulty. Beyond that, we had to prepare three pieces of varying character, from which the judges would ask for one. Jonah ended up assembling what anyone else would have considered an eccentric lineup. First, we brushed up a Dallapicolla song on a text by Machado; Jonah still lived for the twelve-tone idiom, and he imagined the judges would fall in love at their first whiff. Then, we tamed the Erl-King, Jonah turning that old warhorse into Pegasus. And lastly, we polished Dowland’s “Time Stands Still” until it vaporized. He knew that few, if any, of the other contestants would reach that far back. With that simple song, he planned to bring stones to life and change lives into mute stones.

The local round for the contest was held at the Manhattan School of Music. We walked across the island that day, Jonah muttering stern encouragements to me. The thing was a cattle call, a fair number of first-timers unrolling their showstopper from Guys and Dolls. Thankfully, the Juilliard faculty had all been shipped out to judge rounds in Jersey and Connecticut.

We were six weeks overprepared. For the first time in his life, Jonah held back onstage. He was almost marking, compared to the full voice he’d given rehearsals. Still, we made it through to the citywide round. His sight-singing alone almost guaranteed it. It would have taken a catastrophe for us to have been scratched from that preliminary screening. But as soon as we were alone, I lit into him.

“What were you thinking? We’ve been at this for months, and that’s the worst I’ve ever heard you do that stuff.”

“Last-minute decision, Joey. We don’t want to stand out too much at this point. That just increases the odds of some judge going on a leveling vendetta.” He’d learned much at the conservatory.

“Give me a little advance warning next time you go changing the game plan.”

“Thousand pardons, Mule. You played like a dream. Come on! We’re in round two, aren’t we?”

We had two weeks for adjustments and made two months’ worth. We’d heard good singers at round one, including the best of our Juilliard acquaintances and a few impressive unknowns from upper Manhattan. Most had half a dozen more years of experience than Jonah. Aside from a voice that could make lifelong fugitives surrender themselves, all we had was unbroken time.

In Queens for the citywide round, he almost disqualified us. Jonah, drunk on more ability than a twenty-year-old should be allowed, sang through the allotted time. We gave them Dallapicolla, which impressed but did not delight. Then one of the judges asked for a verse of the Dowland, to clear the palate before they dismissed us. We discharged the first verse, but when we reached the double bar, Jonah, shooting me a larcenous glance, pressed on through the end of the song. That tune’s second verse scans like a battered reverse translation, impossible to phrase inside the melody that works so brilliantly with the first stanza. But in Jonah’s astonished tone, the words swung open like a political prison after its illegal regime falls.

We’d clearly violated contest protocol. The judges could have thrown us off the stage, but after an initial murmur, they sat still. When we finished, you could hear the silence hurt them. Had there been a third verse, they’d have suffered it.

They waved us through to the regionals. Many of our Juilliard acquaintances didn’t go forward, even some whose voices could have cured anyone’s need for beauty. Contests, like snapshots, don’t always show their subjects in the best light. They slice time into too thin cross sections. You practice ten hours a day, month after month, in the hopes that a few seconds onstage go something like they did in a year of rehearsal. It rarely did. We happened to sound good, in that vanishing slice of time. We were the judges’ chosen ones, at least for another few days. Back in our rented studio, we allotted two minutes for a postmortem.

“Why do you suppose they love us, Joey? Can we really sound that much better than the others? Or are the judges just grateful we’re the kind of Negroes who won’t beat the shit out of them on the street?”

I ground out a bit of our Dowland, strewn with Parker. “They don’t really know that for sure, do they?”

“You are right, brother. Just because we can do ‘The Erl-King’ doesn’t mean we aren’t out to rape their loved ones. You never know.”

You never knew what was being given you and what taken away. You never knew who the thoroughbreds were seeing when they looked at you. Even I didn’t know anymore who I saw when I saw the two of us.

“So there’re these three guys on death row,” Jonah said, edging us back into the repertoire. “An avant-garde Italian, a Romantic German, and an Elizabethan Englishman…”

For the regionals, we traveled to Washington. We’d reached the stage where even a loss would be bankable. Jonah was the youngest singer left in the running. But Jonah had his eyes on a single distant prize. And the America’s Next Voices competition was just a hostage in that vaster campaign.

The semifinals were held at the auditorium at Georgetown. We stayed in a cheap hotel a good hike to the northeast. Any hotel at all was still a novelty. The clerk at the check-in asked whether we wanted the afternoon rate.

That evening, without a word to each other, we rolled out and found ourselves near the Mall. We’d heard our family’s founding legend so often in so many ways that we had to see the place where our parents had met. The same place, only later: We still believed, despite a lifetime of our father’s lessons, that where and when were independent variables.

I never imagined that a spot so filled with landmarks could feel so empty. Hundreds of people walked out on the nation’s front lawn, even at that hour. Yet it looked deserted. I’d imagined crowds — tens of thousands. But this green openness felt evacuated, a civil defense drill. We crossed the long rectangle, neither of us saying much, both looking for something we couldn’t find: The thing that had caused our parents to keep seeing each other, after that day when they should have gone their separate ways.

We played the next day, for more ghosts than there were healthy bodies in the audience. For the first time in my life, my arms locked in stage fright. I knew the disease had always been there, waiting like an aneurysm, terror ticking toward its debut. It chose that moment to step out. The two of us, in black tie, walked to center stage, a dozen football fields from the wings. We bowed our shallow, synchronized dips, like two water-drinking toy birds. I went to the keyboard and Jonah took up his post, grazing the crook of the piano. I looked out on the audience, who were clapping curiously on the strength of our rumor. Suddenly, I couldn’t hear anything. Not even an echo.

I sat down in front of the empty music rack — I always played from memory. I rubbed my knuckles for emergency circulation. The judges asked for “The Erl-King.” A dozen other composers besides Schubert have set Goethe’s fake medieval ballad, and all their settings are dead. Only this one has stumbled onto forever.

We set out on our customary gallop. Once Jonah and I had rehearsed a tempo, we rarely varied more than two beats a minute. You could have set anyone’s Swiss watch to us, except maybe that of the Bern patent clerk who got us into this. Perfect pitch served Jonah well over the years. But perfect meter had been even more useful. We took off running in the all-stakes darkness:

Who rides so late through a night so wild?

It is a father, holding his child…

Midway through that second line, I seized up with memory lapse. I hit a rock, and my body went on sailing so far away, I couldn’t even see it land. The rich, definitive harmonies under my fingers spun out in a horrible Tristan chord. I stopped, leaving my brother galloping along in the dead of night over a yawning expanse of nothing.

When he realized I wouldn’t be coming back anytime in this lifetime, Jonah reined in, although, in his air-bound scamper, he briefly considered bolting a cappella through the rest of the piece. The hall reeled from the shock of his voice and its violent silencing. Jonah never turned from the crook of the piano to look at me. He glanced at his shoes, a rude joke playing across his face. He took a crisp step forward and said, “We’re going to take this again, from the top. Once more with feeling!”

The house tittered, with spatters of mortified applause. Even then, Jonah didn’t turn to see if I’d recovered. He placed his right hand back upon the piano, just as before we were thrown. Then he inhaled and floated back into place, past certain that I’d join him. His sureness crucified me. The landscape beneath my fingers turned to bog. When the keys firmed, I watched them snap into a crazy chorus line, gapped where they shouldn’t have been.

Nothing of the piece remained. Not the key signature, the melody, the first note, nor the name. It had to be one of three songs, but which three, I had no clue. All I could grab onto was my forgetting. Panic cheered me on, every hint of the notes I needed skidding off, a floater just to the right of my chasing eye.

I saw the hall empty out, a big vaudevillian hook extending from stage left to extract us. I sat and unlearned every piece I’d ever memorized, the film running backward, reversing Juilliard, undoing Boylston, wiping out Hamilton Heights, until I touched bottom at my very first memory: the sound of my mother singing.

Then, my mother’s voice grew into my brother. Jonah was aloft again. All I had to do was sit quietly and listen. I must have been playing along, racing the wild late night, because I heard the piano there, underneath. But I was pure audience. Under my oblivious fingers, the line galloped as it never had. The cause lost, Jonah sang with death incarnate sitting on his shoulder, the ride that much wilder because of the heart-stopping stumble. We hit that state performers live for: unforgiving eternity, nothing between the notes and the instant past they rushed toward.

Rivers didn’t turn in their course to track his sound. Animals didn’t fall dead or stones come to life. The sound that came out of him made no difference in the known world. But something in that hall’s listeners did stop, flushed out of hiding, exposed for two beats, naked in a draft of daylight, before bolting again for cover.

Afterward, a judge broke the confidentiality rules and told Jonah they’d written us off. “Then you came out for round two and annihilated them.” That was his word: annihilated. The more deadly music was, the better.

I gave him my ultimatum on the train back north, heading home with an engraved plaque and a date for the national finals, in Durham, at Christmas. We sat side by side, without touching. Jonah’s hands fidgeted with freed energy, conducting a silent symphony into the dark.

“Get rid of me, Jonah.”

“Are you mad? You’re my rabbit’s foot. My shrunken-headed voodoo doll.” He reached over to rub my hair, his good-luck charm, one degree nappier than his. He knew I hated that.

“We got a break we shouldn’t have. I was finished. Total amnesia. I could be lying there still.”

“Ach. I knew you’d recover.”

“You knew more than I did.”

“I always do, Joey.”

“I’m dragging you down. Even when I’m on the mark, I’m just ballast.”

“Ballast is good. Keeps ships steady.”

“You need someone who’s your equal.”

“I have that.”

He talked me back to myself, just like rehearsal: over and over, the same passages, smoothing, interrogating, dismantling, reassembling. But in my shame, I needed to torch everything and elevate quitting to something noble.

Desperate, Jonah fought dirty. “We’re in the finals. All the marbles. December. There’s no chance in hell I can find someone…”

“I’ll play for the finals. God help me, I’ll do whatever I can do for you. But after that…”

“After that, we’ll talk.”

My brother is standing, as alone as birth, just to the right of center stage in the old music building at Duke, Durham, North Carolina. He towers in place, listing a little bit toward starboard, backing up into the crook of the grand piano, his only safety. He curls forward, the scroll on a reticent cello. His left hand steadies against the piano while his right cups itself in front of him, holding some now-lost letter. He grins at the impossibility of being here, breathes in, and sings.

These few minutes are the sole point of our long self-burial. We’ve spent our adolescence underground just for this, this winning, dragging the prize back up to the light of day. The sweet release comes out of his mouth as if he has just found it. But under his breath — that fountain of air on which this prize floats like a ball on a plume — his skill is burnished to the hardest finish. His sound is automatic, autonomic, so honed, we could walk away and leave it out here onstage alone: music perfect to the point of absentee, exuberant, flexing all the musculature of joy, without the slightest visible effort.

This is how I see my brother, forever. He is twenty; it’s December 1961. One moment, the Erl-King is hunched on my brother’s shoulder, breathing the promise of a blessed deliverance. In the next, some trapdoor opens in the warp of the air and my brother is elsewhere, teasing out Dowland of all things, a bit of ravishing sass for this stunned lieder crowd, who can’t grasp the web that slips over them. He touches his tongue to his hard palate, presses on the cylinder of air behind it until his tongue tips over his front teeth with a dwarf explosion, that fine-point puff of tuh that expands, pulling the vowel behind it, spreading like a slowed-film cloud, to ta to tahee to time to transcend the ear’s entire horizon, until the line becomes all it describes:

Time stands still with gazing on her face,

Stand still and gaze for minutes, hours, and years to her give place.

All other things shall change, but she remains the same,

Till heavens changed have their course and time hath lost his name.

He sings that gaze, the one the heart tried to hang on to but couldn’t. His eyes shine with the light of those who’ve freed themselves to do what they need. Those who see shine back, fixed at this moment, arrested, innocent. As he sings, Elizabeth’s ships sail out to sudden new continents. As he sings, Freedom Riders one state away are rounded up and jailed. But in this hall, time stands still, afraid to do so much as breathe.

Jonah wins. Half a dozen years too young to walk away with a prize this size, my brother leaps into the inheritance he’s always known was his. In the chaos afterward, the other singers hating him, the remembering audience still in the throes, wanting just to stand near him, he seems complete. He can’t notice our sister well enough to feel the scope of her misery here, at this last public concert of his that she will ever attend. He and my father dance a little dance around the near past, their growing awkwardness. Da faults Jonah’s German, calls him a Polack. Says he almost was one, in another life.

“I could have been a Polack?” my brother asks.

“You are a near Polack. A counterfactual Polack.”

“A Polack in one of many alternate universes?”

My sister and I try to hush them. But my brother is past hushing, past even hearing the likes of us. For a moment, he has everything that singing can give him. When we’re out of earshot, I beg him again to ditch me, to get an accompanist worthy of him. And again he refuses.

An old gentleman of the landed, tobaccoed countryside interrogates us. I smell hostility on his affronted breath. “What exactly are you boys?” And my brother sings to him, smart-mouthing, the prize in hand granting him liberty to ignore how the world sees him:

“I am my mammy’s ae bairn,

Wi’ unco folk I weary, Sir…”

The word he sings in mockery draws me back, down into that ending we passed through only moments before. We’re onstage again, centered in that stillness he brings on simply by chanting about it. At the keyboard, I force my fingers to their marks, imitating the flourishes of a Renaissance lute. I concentrate, try not to listen, keeping off the reef he has arranged for me. But I stray close enough to that stilled spot to hear what prize my brother means to win. All music is just a means to him, toward that one end. In the timeless time it takes him to reach the cadence, the song starts to work. She rises up behind him, following, just as the gods promised. But in the thrill of his tune’s victory, Jonah forgets the ban, and looks back. And in his joy-cracked face as he turns around, I see him watch as Mama disappears.

Not Exactly One of Us

Nettie Ellen takes the news in silence, as she does everything that the white world has inflicted since the captivity. Not a hateful silence, just a dead one. ’Nother sorrow coming. ’Nother piece of flesh stripped away.

All the questions she climbed up into the attic to ask her daughter mean nothing now. She doesn’t sharpen her silence for the kill. But it does the job, blunt, just as well. She sits motionless. And motionless, outside of time.

Her daughter, too late, repents this thing she never asked to feel. But love outlasts repentance, three falls out of five. Something scrabbles in Delia Daley, wanting the old, first absolution. Mama, don’t leave me. I’m still your girl. She knows that also is a lie: a lie, most of all, about who’s leaving whom.

Delia, too, keeps still. But in that standing stillness, she reaches out to cover her mother’s arm. The arm feels nothing but added weight. Her mother looks out on this new trial she should never have had to look on. Here it is, the old master of the lash, the one they’d almost outlived, coming round and letting himself in the side entrance.

The woman, Nettie, looks up at the flesh of her flesh. She can’t ask that the cup be taken away, now it’s already spilled down the front of her best Sunday dress. Can’t even ask why Delia’s done what she’s done. Her girl has already wrecked herself with explanations. When Nettie Ellen can talk again, all she says is, “You best go tell your father.”

The doctor rises up righteous at the news. He paces and wheels, the danger there in the room with them, spitting distance from where his daughter struggles to tell him. “What kind of self-satisfying… What in the name of God Almighty do you think you’re doing?”

“Daddy,” she guns. “You’re getting religion.”

“Don’t get smart with me, daughter. Or you’ll live to regret how smart you are.”

She crumples through the middle, her Yes, sir dying in darkness. Yesterday, she’d have had the man grinning like an imp at her impudence. Today, he’s stone. Stone of her making.

He paces the book-lined study, thinking. She has seen him this way, with patients whose poverty of body and mind turns him from healer to killing messenger. “What ever possessed you to side with those who’ve done your own—”

“Daddy. I’m not siding with anybody.”

He whirls about. “What exactly are you doing?”

She doesn’t know. She’d hoped he might.

“You’re a colored woman. Colored. I don’t care how high-toned you are. I don’t know what the world of that white music has been leading you to—”

“Daddy, you’ve always told me it’s whiteness makes us black. Whiteness that makes us a problem.”

The sole of my shoe isblack. The coal we burn too much of is black.

“Don’t you dare turn my words against me. And don’t you dare pretend you aren’t doing what you’re doing. A public proclamation that none of the eligible, accomplished men of your own race—”

“This isn’t about race.”

He stops pacing and sinks into the red Moroccan chair. He fixes her in his eyes, as if she’s a malingering patient. “Not…? Tell that to the whites. And you’ll have to, young lady. Every minute of your life. In ways you can’t begin to imagine.”

She tries to hold his gaze, but his unmasks her. She must look away or burn. Defeating hers, his eyes take on four hundred years of violence coming from all directions.

“Not about race? What is this about?”

She wants to say love. Two people, neither of them asking for this. Neither of them knowing what to do or how to make a home wide enough for the fear they now must live in.

He turns his face away from her, toward his books. He throws open the agenda on his desk and takes his pen, as if to sign a final severance. His hand hovers, then slams down on the blotter. He swings around to face her again. His voice drops, its menace multiplied by an awful, collaborator’s confidence. “What is this about, then? You tell me, seeing as how you’re the expert. What do you imagine you’re trying to prove?”

Whatever she might prove, he has already refuted. Still, he stares at her, blameless confusion, begging her to restore him. Have you no pride? All these years, have I taught you nothing?

“A colored girl,” she says, giving up on placement, projection, support, her sound collapsing. “A colored girl growing up, going to college, learning what she wants, taking what she needs, being anything she cares to be, changing the laws of this country.” Her voice falls to nothing. But it does not break. “Who’s going to stop her? What’s wrong with that?”

His words come back, in her voice. He hears what it costs her, to risk this echo. A spine in this girl he never put there. He falls still, a captive audience. Up in the front row, watching his life in review, events strange but familiar, scripted yet open. Her voice hangs in the air. How much music that voice might make. How much work that music might do. His shoulders fall. The clamp of history slips loose. He doesn’t stoop to forgiveness, any more than whiteness will ever forgive him for remembering. “Nothing,” he says, and looks away. “Nothing’s wrong with that.”

The worst isn’t over; nothing of this nightmare will ever be over. The weight will ever be on her, of proof and its opposites. But still, she’ll live. Her flesh will keep her. Blood will not disown. So much gratitude tries to escape her all at once that it comes out liquid, in her sobs. Her mouth moves in wordless, frozen thanks, and she breaks down under that burden, belonging.

He offers her a handkerchief but no shoulder. The threat is all around them, still. Only the immediate crisis has passed. When her crying fades, he asks, “What does this man do?”

She snorts. She can’t help it. “Daddy, I wish I knew.”

The rage flashes back. “Am I to understand the man is some kind of trash-picker? Or an Ivy League playboy who’s never had to work an hour in his life?”

Her snickers die in childbirth. “No, Daddy. He’s a professor at Columbia University. A scientist. He makes a living studying time.” She fights to keep her face straight, free of those self-swallowing curves her David claims inhabit even the straightest lines. “He works on the General Theory of Relativity.”

Her cultivated father registers the same kind of disbelief she felt on hearing this was one of the world’s accredited professions. Doubt and awe, old half-blood brothers, mix in Dr. Daley’s face. The secrets that obsess him are as subtle as the ones he would ignore. “I thought only half a dozen men in the world are able to understand that.”

“Oh, probably.” She fights to hide her hope. There will be a meeting. Her father, the autodidact, has a few questions to ask the authority. “However many there are, David’s one of them.”

“David?” Her father wrestles with the physics. The optics. For generations now, it’s been their secret scale, the pull that led him to her mother. Light as you can, right on up to the invisible edge, but never over. Over is unthinkable betrayal, even though loyalty never asked questions along the graded way. His eyes consider: Suppose it were anyone else but him, laying down the law, preventing such a match. Anyone else declaring that the upper echelons of whiteness, its mental mysteries, were off-limits to his offspring. Then he’d die for her right to this foreign man, clearly unfit to hold his daughter’s hand. “What does his family say?” Brittle, flinching from the answer, the eternal beating down.

“About what?” she bluffs. But she drops her eyes.

The man doesn’t know where his family is. They’ve fled from Rhineland to Zeeland, buying, at most, months. He has written to Europe several times, getting no satisfactory reply. The news of David’s choice of mate will reach his family, if at all, as news from another galaxy — freezing, airless, irrelevant.

“He’s a Jew, Daddy.”

The fact operates upon her father. “Does your mother know?”

Delia moans low. “A Jewish atheist foreigner.”

“Covering all your bases, aren’t you? Where in hell did you meet this man?”

This is what she’d like to remember. One moment, she was singing along to herself, passive oracle to the goddess Miss Anderson, and the next, she and the German had known each other for decades. No: There’d been a moment between those two, one of his geometrical figments she can’t wrap her head around — finite but infinitely dividable.

Something happened to her, to her country, as the contralto sang it into being. The continuous carpet of crowd absorbed her, one pulsing, breath-holding creature made up of 75,000 single cells, fused by that voice. The man stood next to her the whole time, and she never saw him. Hadn’t seen any separate spot of pigment in this mile-long swath until this one grazed her on the shoulder.

Are you a professional?

Delia thought he was speaking in German. The inflection, the unmistakable cadence of that language that had been her special torment these last three years.

Professionell…The first word she ever spoke to him.

Her pronunciation must have passed, for he responded, Sängerin?

She beamed. Not yet. Looking down, fumbling for the words: Noch nicht.

But you would like to be? In the future?

She caught up to his words. How… Oh, help me. You could hear me? The whole time?

He tried not to, then let himself smile. Not…the whole time. I couldn’t hear “O mio Fernando.” Noch nicht, vorläufig.

I was singing out loud?

He pushed out his chin: Never let the world worry you. Sotto voce. I had to bend to hear.

My God! All these people around!

Very few could hear.

Why on earth didn’t you hush me up?

He shrugged, feeling the peace only music can give. Miss Anderson…sounds like paradise. But she was far away, and you…were right here.

He introduced himself. So great was her undying shame, she introduced herself in turn. No one in the dispersing crowd stopped to look twice at them. The thousands who swept past were still lost in the sound that had joined them. Discrete humanity had not yet sedimented back out of solution.

The press of people forced them to move. She waved good-bye to the most intimate conversation with a white she’d ever had. But this man, David Strom, fell in alongside her in the flow. She heard him say, I have heard Miss Anderson sing already. In Vienna, some few years ago.

You heard her?In her excitement, Delia forgot she’d just enjoyed that unforgettable pleasure herself. With a burst so easy that it still mystified her, they were talking voice. Was Flagstad as good a Sieglinde as the magazines claimed? Who was his favorite Norma, his choice for Manon? She sounded like the most shameless striver, but something even worse drove her. Her questions opened parentheses faster than he could close them. If one could only buy two new recordings this year, which should they be? How big a voice did a woman need in order to fill, say, La Scala? Had he ever heard the legendary Farrar?

The man chided her. Farrar stopped singing in 1922. I am a little younger than you must see.

She stopped to examine his face. He wasn’t her father’s age at all, but at most ten years older than she. He had on a gray suit, white shirt, and a narrow burgundy tie, poorly tied. He held his gray-blue felt hat, crushed down to a porkpie. Brown socks and shoes, poor soul. He might have thrown on the whole concoction in the dark. Not handsome, by any race’s measure. His rounded forehead crested a little, in the planning stage of balding’s evacuation, and the bridge of his nose rode up too high, as if broken.

His eyes, too wide, left him looking permanently baffled. She combed her own hair with two fingers and brushed a quick palm check across her cheeks. The muscles in her lips tensed, the way that always annoyed Mr. Lugati, her teacher. Inside those too-wide eyes, the man looked out, seeing her. Her: nothing larger. No sign but herself. She, at most ten years younger than he.

She let the man see. The need to flee had run off somewhere, giving up on her. She’d dropped her guard somewhere back in the crowd, ceased watching out for herself in this public place. Miss Anderson’s fault. Sotto voce, the man had said. But clearly not sotto enough. Singing out loud, of all imaginable crimes. Still in his gaze, taking too long to get it out, she articulated, Verzeihen Sie mir.

Could there be whites who might not, after all, hate her on sight for the ungivable forgiveness they needed from her? Clearly this man knew nothing of her country, except what it felt like to be here. Here, on the Mall, this Easter, not for history, not to see what came from centuries of making heaven of the readiest hell. Just here to hear Miss Anderson, the voice he’d heard in Vienna, a voice one is lucky to hear once every hundred years.

He looked again, and she lost herself. What marker could his map hold for her? His gaze seemed free of anything but itself. She felt herself unbound in it. He saw her only here, in the rolling, open territory Miss Anderson had sung no more than an hour ago. My country. Sweet land.

The square mile of federal land around them thinned out. The nation of listeners slipped unwillingly back home, as they, too, would now have to. But the German had a hundred questions for her first. What was the best way to broaden the notes at the top of the range? Who were the best present-day American vocal composers? What exactly was this “Gospel Train,” and did it stop anywhere nearby?

She asked if he were a musician. Perhaps, in another lifetime. She asked what he did in this one. He told her, and she broke out giggling. Absurd, making a living studying something so obvious, something one could do so precious little about.

They moved up the long reflecting pool in silent agreement, toward the monument, where the crowd still pressed in on that spot so recently graced. They chattered of Vienna and Philadelphia, as if they’d been sent their long, separate ways so each could scout out all the concerts the other couldn’t get to. She made a note to remember this coda to a day she’d never be in danger of forgetting. Their talk didn’t turn awkward until they reached the monument, their invented destination, the edge of their shared world.

She looked at the man again. She felt her look returned, emptied of history. Thank you for talking music, she said. It’s not often…

It’s less than not often,he agreed.

Wiedersehen,she said. Lebewohl.

Yes,he answered. Good-bye.

Then they saw the child. A lost boy, no older than eleven, keening, sprinting back and forth around the edge of the indifferent crowd, making the panicked forays of the lost. He ran to one side, calling out incoherent names and scouring the faces of those adults drifting past him. Then, terror rising, he ran back to search again in the opposite direction.

A colored boy. One of hers, she thought, and wondered if this German gentleman thought the same. But it was David Strom who called to the child. Something is wrong?

The child glanced up. At the white face, the clipped German sound, the boy bolted, looking back over his shoulder at his motionless pursuers. Just as instinctively, Delia called out, That’s all right, now. We ain’t gonna hurt you. She fell through some hole into her mother’s family’s Carolina past, on no stronger prompting than the curve of the boy’s forehead. The boy might have been from South Chicago, Detroit, Harlem, Collingwood, Canada — the last terminal on the Underground Railroad. He might have been far better off than she. But that was how she called to him.

The boy stopped and looked at her, squinting. He stepped closer, a skittish, starving creature eyeing the food-baited trap. His suspicious fascination appraised the white man next to her. He looked at Delia. You come from around here?

His accent startled her; it came from no place she could identify. Not far, Delia answered, pointing vaguely. David Strom proved his intelligence by keeping silent. How ’bout you?

The boy’s voice turned wild at the words. Delia thought she heard California, but between the unlikeness and the boy’s sobs, she wasn’t sure.

Everything’s going to be all right. We’re gonna help you find your people.

The boy brightened. My brother’s lost, he told her.

Delia sneaked a look at David Strom. She fought down her own cheek muscles. But on the scientist’s face, no stray amusement. No trace of anything but problem solving. And in that moment, she decided: She might share nothing else with this man in the rest of invented existence, except for trust.

I know he is, honey,she said. But we’re gonna help you find him.

It took some time to talk the boy down. But at last, his blanket panic began to lift. He was able to tell them, without too many contradictions, how disaster had struck. But the open lines of the place and the dispersing crowd mazed him. We were over there! he shouted. But when they drew close, joy broke down. This not it.

Delia kept him talking, damping his terror. She took his hand, and the boy, in the fickleness of childhood, took it as if he’d held it all his life. What’s your name? she asked.

Ode.

Jody?

Ode.

Really!She tried not to sound too surprised.

It means I was born on the road.

Where does it come from?

He shrugged. My uncle.

They walked back along the reflecting pool. Distance played tricks on Ode, revising his geography every fifty paces as the landscape curved away from him. But every minute the three of them walked, his fear subsided by an hour. The white man fascinated him. Ode kept stealing glances at David Strom, and Delia added theft to theft. She watched the child struggle to fit the man. Each time the German spoke, the boy fell off, bewildered.

Where’re you from?he demanded.

New York,Strom said.

Ode lit up. New York? My mama’s from New York. You know my mama?

I haven’t been there long,Strom apologized.

Delia hid in a coloratura coughing fit. Ode grinned, willing to be the butt of her delight. He looked up at the white man. You don’t have to take that from her, you know. Something he’d heard some adult say once.

Strom smiled back shyly. Oh, but I do!

Without thinking, the boy took the man’s hand in his free one. They walked along, two agitated adults flanking a frightened child.

Ode jabbered to them so nervously, Delia had to hush him to keep him on the search. She couldn’t make out more than half the boy’s panicked argot. They tacked back and forth across the Mall, a skiff becalmed.

I would like very much to see you again,David Strom said over Ode’s head. His voice shook with a fear all its own. Through the child’s arms, Delia felt the man tremble, making his own winter.

He didn’t know. He couldn’t. Forgive me, she said. Unforgivable: twice since meeting him. It’s impossible.

They walked beneath the flanking trees that formed a colonnade of pillars in this roofless church along a nave too wide to span. Her impossible thickened in the air around them. Each step harder than the last. She couldn’t tell him. She didn’t care to prove the impossibility, either now or later.

Whatever the word meant to a physicist, the physicist did not say. David Strom pointed toward the boxlike monument. The crowd clinging to the spot of Miss Anderson’s miracle had thinned. That is where we need to go. Where we can see everyone, and they us. Underneath the statue of that man.

Delia laughed again, the weight now suffocating her. Ode laughed along, at the foreigner. You don’t know who Lincoln is? The boy twisted his head clear sideways. Where you been all your life?

Ah,Strom said, assembling all American history.

Lincoln was a nigger-hater,the boy told them.

Strom glanced at Delia Daley. Ein Rassist? Delia nodded and shook her head, all at once. The German looked up at the monument, confused. Why would any country want to immortalize…?

That’s right, a racist.

He was not!Delia scolded. Who ever taught you that?

Everybody knows it.

What are you talking about? He freed the slaves.

He never did!

Delia looked at the white man, who fought to understand. The hand-joined trio kept walking toward that monument, the nearest available one. They skirted the day’s makeshift stage and stepped up to the mass of marble. That is when they must have fallen through the side of time, some trick of physics the scientist set in motion, one of those laboratory black arts a conservatory student could never hope to know. Time dilated and took them with it. They climbed up as close to the enormous seated statue as the remaining crowd permitted. They built a scouting outpost on the white stone steps, fixing the boy up high, where he could look out, conspicuous, on the whole visible world.

There they fell into the gravity of that “impossible,” a force not even time could escape. Delia didn’t feel her clock alter. They talked — minutes, hours, years — though no longer about music. They talked around the impossible, in improvised code, to keep the boy from understanding. But the boy understood, better than they. The boy and the man sat on the marble steps, discussing the planets, the stars, laws of the expanding universe. The sight of the two hunched forms undid her. And when the lost boy jumped up and called out, the sound of his voice restarting time, whole lifetimes had rolled away.

The boy saw his brother before his brother saw him. Then Ode was running, this day’s message, undeniable. Delia and David called to the boy, but he was safe now, beyond them. They drifted to the edge of the monument, craning to see the child reclaim his own and losing the reunion in the crowd. They stood on the white steps, abandoned, without thanks or reassurance that all would be well.

The two of them, then, alone. She couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t bear to see if his face confirmed that fluid future they’d just come through. Already the place closed to her, and she had no heart to find it again. She felt him studying her, and she looked away.

It’s getting late,Delia said. I’ve got to get back, or I’m going to catch a licking.

That is not good?

No. Not good in the least.She shot a look at her watch. Oh my God. It’s not possible!

She shook her watch, held it to her ear to hear the movement that escaped her. They hadn’t been with the child for more than fifteen minutes, from finding to reunion. She’d thought it hours. Felt them in her body. Just on the steps of the memorial alone, they’d been far longer.

Yes,he said from a great distance. It does that, sometimes.

How?She looked up at him, despite herself. Yes: He’d been there, too. The trace of that long passage. She saw it in him, still. Independent proof.

He turned up his palms. We physicists talk about time dilation. Curving. Dirac even suggests two different scales for time. But this one — he bowed his head, the fragile freight— is more a question for the psychologists.

My God. I can’t believe it.

He laughed a little, but just as baffled. Since it is earlier than you thought? Maybe we could find a coffee shop to sit?

I’m sorry. That is the first of the impossibles.

They walked down the last few steps, each harder than the last, driven together out of the vanished place.

Forgive me,she said a third and final time. I have to get home.

Where is home? Your nest?

At this word, its reference to where they’d been, she went hot again. Home is where I have to go back to.

Home is where she has to bring him now, if she is to survive.

That they’ve made it even this far is its own miracle. She can’t explain to her father what she can’t explain to herself. Where in damnation did she meet this man? Where indeed.

“I met him at…a voice recital, Daddy.”

“And how did you manage to miss the obvious?”

She plays dumb. “We love all the same things.” This, too, a lie made of literal truth.

“Oh? Whose things are these?”

“Music, Daddy. Nobody owns it.”

“No? And are you going to eat music when you’re hungry?”

“He’s a professor at one of the best—”

“Music’s going to protect you when they start throwing stones? You are going to sing when the world strings you up?”

She bows her head. The world’s hatred is nothing. But this man’s slightest scorn will kill her.

Her father rests his weight against the arms of the red leather chair. His right hand explores the first patch of pattern baldness on his close-sheered crown. He sinks back in the chair. She knows this expansiveness, his last stage of resistance when there’s nothing to do against bitterness but name it. He regards her, a dullness worse than any anger he might show.

She hurts him, irreversibly, a hurt more damaging than hate. Defeat plays in the folds of his faraway eyes. She hurts him worse than the famed Philadelphia conservatory once hurt her. Worst of all, she’s used his own words against him, coming into her own.

William Daley holds his hand in front of his face and twirls it: front, back. Front, back. He forms a loop of fingers, almost praying. “You think your physicist music lover is going to be comfortable walking into a Negro home?”

Her physicist music lover has never been comfortable anywhere inside the earth’s gravitational field. “He doesn’t see race, Daddy.”

“Then he needs an optometrist. I’m a family doctor. I don’t do eyes.” He rises and leaves the room. The first time he’s ever walked out on her.

She sets up the dinner for three weeks on. Three weeks: long enough for all involved to catch up with the present. On the evening of the meeting, her parents move about the house stricken and stiff. They’re both dressed hours before David Strom’s scheduled arrival.

“He…he doesn’t take much care in his clothes,” Delia tries to tell them. But it makes no difference. Over her Sunday finest, Nettie Ellen lashes two aprons, front and back. She heads into the kitchen, where all day she has perfected food from the Alexander ancestral recipe trove: pig and greens and pungent dark sauces from old Carolina days.

Brother Michael crinkles his nose. “What are you making? This supposed to be Jewish food?”

In truth, it’s such a meal as William Daley rarely lets on his table. But today, the Philadelphia doctor is right there in the kitchen, spicing and steeping alongside his helpmeet. And for once, the woman doesn’t shoo the man away.

Charles checks the saucepots. “Man’s getting both barrels, huh?”

His mother swats at him and misses. Charles puts his arm around his sister’s shoulders, half comfort, half torture. “You don’t mind if I play a little banjo before we eat?”

“Yeah,” Michael cheers. “We need the Charcoal show!”

Delia swats and hits. “We need the Charcoal show like we need the plague. And you call him Charcoal while Mr. Strom is here, I’ll tie you up and put you in the cedar chest.”

“How come he can’t call me Charcoal? That’s my name, lady.”

Nettie Ellen points the wooden spoon at her eldest son. “Your name’s what’s printed on your birth certificate!”

“Tell him, Mama.” Delia swipes again at Michael, who stands just out of arm’s reach, mouthing, Char- coal,Char- coal.She steps toward him, threatening.

Michael tears away. “ Achtung, Achtung.The Germans are coming!”

Lucille and Lorene follow Delia around from room to room. “Is he tall? What’s his hair like? He speak English?”

“Do you?” she shouts. She shoos them away, then clamps her temples to keep her head from spilling open.

She picks Strom up at the station. They can’t linger; Nettie Ellen wants them to come right home or call if there’s trouble. There will be trouble from now until death. The first taxi driver flips them the finger. The second drives off without a word. The third, a Negro, loses no chance to roll his eyes at Delia in the rearview mirror. David doesn’t notice. As it has every other hour for the last four months, Delia’s nerve fails her.

She tries to warn him in the cab about what’s waiting at home. She starts several times. Each attempt sounds more disloyal than the last. “My family…they’re a bit unusual.”

“Don’t worry,” he assures. “Life is unusual.” He squeezes her hand, down below the seat, where the cabbie can’t see. He whistles a tune for her ears only, one he knows she’ll recognize without asking. Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas: “Fear no danger to ensue; the hero loves as well as you.” The tune cheers her and she smiles, until she remembers how that story ends.

When they get to Catherine Street, her family has turned into saints. Her father greets the guest a little verbosely but ushers him into the foyer. Her brothers stick their hands out to shake, bobbing awkwardly, but without minstrelsy or goose-stepping. Only the twins seem remote. They glare at their sister, betrayed. They pictured some other white man, Tarzan maybe, that Flash Gordon, or even Dick Tracy. Anything but this grinning, four-eyed Dagwood Bumstead with the bumper already sprouting around his middle.

Nettie Ellen flashes about like heat lightning, getting the man’s coat, seating him on the good front room sofa, charming the feet from out beneath him. “So this is the man we been hearing so much about. Finally get to meet you, sir! Ain’t that a dandy tie you got on! How you liking it here? It’s a big country, don’t you think? Now, I’d like nothing better than to sit and chat, but we got a beautiful roast waiting in the oven just two rooms beyond, and if I don’t go keep my eye on it, we’ll all be eating cinders tonight!”

Nettie Ellen laughs, and David Strom laughs a dotted eighth note after her. Something in that delay and in the game look he flashes Delia tips her off: He can’t understand a word her mother says.

Fortunately, her father overcompensates. Where Nettie Ellen’s speech steals richly back home, William’s crisps. He makes a magnanimous show of sitting his daughter down on the sofa next to David. Then he takes the armchair facing them.

“So tell me, Professor Strom. How do you find life in the Apple?”

Now the visitor understands every word. But putting them together produces only a bizarre image of decomposing fruit. Delia fumbles for a shame-free way to play interpreter. But her father follows up before she can.

“My daughter tells me you’re close to Sugar? These are hungry times for the Children of Ham.”

David Strom determines the general dietary topic, but beyond that, nicht. He shoots Delia a look of happy befuddlement. But she’s lost in her own surprise at her father breaking the ancient law. Every dinner conversation her family sits down to brushes against the topic, but no outsider must ever be allowed to hear. Now here he is, leading with the private theme. Delia sits mute, waiting for the smoke to lift, by which point rescuing her guest will be impossible.

“Desperate in all neighborhoods, I understand. But our kind have again been chosen to bear the brunt. One out of every two of our own on relief. Now don’t misunderstand me.” There isn’t, Delia knows, a chance in hell of that. “I’m not a Communist. I’m closer to Mr. Randolph on these issues. But when half of one’s people can’t put food on the table, one begins to heed the rioters, wouldn’t you say? Where exactly are you living, Mr. Strom?”

David brightens. “New York City. I like it there, very much.”

William shoots a look at his daughter. Delia considers excusing herself to go take her own life. Her father surveys the extent of the wreck. It’s easier to abandon ship and start fresh on another vessel. “What do your people back home make of this so-called nonaggression pact?”

“I don’t… I’m not sure what you…”

“The one between Mr. Hitler and Mr. Stalin.”

Strom’s face darkens, and he and Dr. Daley are both, briefly, on the same band. After race and politics, Delia decides, they’ll move on to the third great arena: sports. She gives the two least athletic men she knows a total of five minutes to get onto the last Olympics, in Berlin. They reach it in three. Each for his own reasons is ready to kiss the ground Jesse Owens flies over. She begins to hope, against all reason, that the two men might make enough common ground between them for her to live in.

Her mother calls her from the kitchen. Delia hears at once the premeditated plot in it. “Taste this glaze,” Nettie Ellen tells her. “I just don’t know what it’s missing!”

After a breadline of rejected suggestions, mother allows daughter to convince her that the glaze is missing nothing at all. Nettie then lets Delia return to the front room, to whatever carnage of cross-examination that remains. But if the men have been probing delicacies that required her absence, it doesn’t show. Her father is asking the man she, well, call it loves, “Have you ever read Ulysses, by James Joyce?”

The scientist answers, “I think that writer was Homerus?”

Delia wheels and heads back into the kitchen. The sooner food is on the table, the faster the torture will end. On the way back to her mother’s kingdom, the thought occurs to her. Those monuments of white culture that her father assaults are not pilgrim stations, but pillboxes, strategic emplacements in a prolonged battle against an invading foreign power that doesn’t have the first notion of what’s being contested.

She rounds the corner of the kitchen into fresh disasters. Her mother stands by the stove, crying. Charles waves Delia over to inspect the damage. As Delia draws near, her brother turns on her. “How come you didn’t think about this before?”

“Think of what?”

Nettie Ellen raps the wooden spoon against the rim of the cook pot. “Nobody told me. Nobody told me not to.”

“Now, Mama,” Charles rides her. “You know the Jewish people don’t eat pork. That’s all over the Bible.”

“Not my Bible.” Whatever provocations she has stirred into this recipe, this one wasn’t planned.

“You should have told her,” Charles scolds his sister. “How come you didn’t tell her?”

Delia stands crumbling. She knows nothing of this man she’s dragged here. He doesn’t eat pork: Can that be? That weekly sustenance, a poison to him. What others? The man she brings home is all alleys and cellars, strange smells and closeted, robed rituals barred to her, rites that will keep her always on the far side of knowing, skullcaps and curls, silver engravings hung up in door frames, backward-flowing letters, five thousand years of formulas passed from father to son, codes and cabalas whose chief historical goal is to scare and exclude her. How much can she change her life? How much does she want to? The bird and the fish can fall in love, but they share no word remotely like nest.

Then she hears his voice from the other room: David. Her David. We are not born familiar. At best, familiar waits for us down the run of years. Familiar is what he can become to her only through life. But familiar to herself, already, looking on him.

There will be strangeness. They’ll hit places far more alien, gaps they cannot close. But this, at least, is not a fatal one. She rubs her mother’s back, between those thin-winged shoulder blades. “It’s all right, Mama.” Covert, and open, deliberate and secret sabotage: all of it, all right. The meat sauce will test the man harder than the meat source. Yet the meal is still a gift, steeped in all the flavors of indigestible difference. “It’s all right,” she repeats, soothing, petting. “A lot of people in his line of work? They’ll put anything in their mouths.”

This much will always translate: This much, they’ll each always recognize. She and the man both — nations inside nations. They may share nothing else but this, and music. But already, it’s enough. Already they’ve tried on the idea together. And that act of pretending becomes a fact all its own, too late to retract: a nation inside a nation inside a nation.

David is a wonder at dinner. Too quickly, he learns enough of the local dialect to follow each Daley, or at least seem to. Already he can tell her father’s send-ups from his oracular insights. He holds Charles captive with the tale of his flight from Vienna. He fascinates the twins, who scowl happily at how he works his knife and fork, keeping hold on both pieces, sawing and scooping at the same time, never letting go. He eats with enough zeal to overcome her mother’s first wave of wariness.

“This is amazing,” David says, pointing to the pork with his knife. “I’ve never tasted anything like it!”

Delia almost spits her mouthful across the table. She gags, hands in the air. David is first on his feet to whap her on the back and save her. The simple act of contact, even in emergency, stuns everyone. He touched her. But David Strom is first, too, back to the sacrament of food, as if no one at this table has almost choked to death.

Delia lasts out the meal. From afar, she makes out the music of her family’s speech, a thing she’s never heard, from inside it. Tonight, the words of that seven-member celebration are subdued, stopped down, toned up. She hears them in their hiding, all the sheltering clan construction in a place that would prefer you dead. Her blackness sits on her like a tight slip, something she’s never noticed, so wrapped in it is she. What can she look like to this man?

And still the meal goes better than she could hope. Ease would be too much to ask. But at least there’s no bloodshed. Everyone’s best efforts wreck Delia to look on. She would never be able to survive these two split worlds colliding were it not for the memory of the lost boy, their Ode. Without the mercy of those words traded on the monument’s steps, that glimpse of long time, this meal together would kill her.

After dinner, David entertains Michael with coin tricks. He shows the boy how to hang a spoon from his nose. He improvises a Cartesian diver, a spectacle that enthralls even Charles and the twins.

Nettie Ellen does her best: all that her religion asks of her. “You are a musician, too, Mr. Strom?”

“Oh, no! Not a real one. Just a — hmm? — a love-haver.”

“An amateur,” Delia says. “And he’s a good piece more than that.”

The amateur objects. “I can’t match your daughter. She is the real one.”

Nettie shakes her head, a puzzlement as deep as the one she was born into. “Well, we don’t have that piano sitting over there for nothing. You two sit down and make some music for us while me and the girls do the washing up.”

Delia objects. “We’ll wash the dishes, Mama. You made the meal, you give yourself a rest.”

“Nonsense. Let everybody serve God in their own fashion.”

She’ll not hear otherwise. So the two music makers sit, each, in their fashion, love-havers. They split the bench between them, careful not to touch each other. They play from Nettie’s hymnal: “He Leadeth Me,” the antique psalm, thunked out four-hand, SATB, straight from the page until David gets hold of the idiom. Little by little, warming to the old inheritance, Delia edges him down to the lower confines of the keyboard, absorbing first the tenor, then the bass, then all sorts of lines Strom didn’t realize were hiding in there. She lets loose, heading upward, stoking and embellishing, working into a swell that she knows, even as she strays into full-out gospel, is its own test: Are you sure? She probes to see just how he sees her, and yes, she checks to see if he can carry the chords for her while she spreads and flies.

Her father wanders through the room, pretending to be looking for things. At one point, Delia swears she hears him humming along. Maybe it could work after all, this act of total madness. Maybe they could make an America more American than the one the country has for centuries lied to itself about being.

Her mother comes into the parlor from the kitchen, dish towel in her hands, two aprons again flanking her Sunday-best dress. “Now that sounds just beautiful.” Delia hears, I know that sound. Now that is still my daughter.

When they lead “He Leadeth Me” into all the pastures it will willingly go, they negotiate a final cadence and turn to inspect each other. David Strom beams like a lighthouse, and she knows he would ask her, right then and there, to share all time with him, were it not for the warning her face beams back.

“Do you have this one?” he asks. And sparsely but musically, he lays down the outlines of a song she learned her freshman year, a tune simple enough to be among the hardest things she’s ever tried. His fingers clip through the chords, realizing only the simplest figured bass.

“You know this, too?” she asks. Then ashamed to hear herself. What membership is strong enough to keep them from having this same tune? All ownership is theft, and melody above all.

He stumbles through to the end of the first phrase. Without signal, they’re back at the beginning. She lands from above, square upon the first note, knowing he’s there underneath her. She sings with no chest at all. His fingers on the keys grow accurate, in her light. She imitates those pure resonators, a perfect tube of brass or wood. Her vibrato narrows to a point, thin enough to thread the eye of heaven. She floats in an aerial piano, motionless above the moving line:

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. Together, they come back to tonic, dropping into held silence, the last element of any score. But before the quiet dies a natural death, a third voice punctures it. Brother Charlie sits on the arm of the sofa, his own makeshift balcony, shaking his head in admiration.

“Ain’t that the same song the whites used to sing, right after spending the day whipping us?”

“Hush up,” Delia says, “or I’m gonna whip you.”

“How far you planning to drift, sister Dee?”

“I’m not drifting, brother. I’m rowing, hard as I know how.”

Charlie nods. “When you get to the far shore, you think they’re going to fish you out?”

“Nobody needs to fish me out. I’m going to hit land and keep on moving.”

“Till you get to safety?”

“Not safety we’re talking about, Char.”

“Uh-uh. Mind your mama, now. Don’t call me Char.”

“Is this serious?” David says, two steps behind, by every measurable measure. “People used to sing this song while… Can this be so? This song was written…”

“Don’t pay the man any attention.” First time she’s ever called her brother a man.

Her father returns, saving them all from themselves. “Dr. Strom?” Dr. Daley says. “Would you mind answering an amateur’s questions? I almost hate asking…” Delia spins from one threat to the other. Her father hates asking like the rabbit hates the brier patch. “But I can’t wrap my thinking around this one little thing.”

Delia braces. Now it will come: the mighty blow of Things as They Are, blasting the dream she and this stranger have been hiding in. Not even love can survive the facts. She holds still and waits. How foolish to think the angel might pass over them, to imagine they could escape this, her father’s one little question. The question is out there, running through the streets of the Seventh Ward, over in Harlem, across the Black Belt that rings South Chicago. The question the workless half of her race, annihilated at every turn, wants to ask. The question no person of David’s race can answer or even hear. She hangs her head and mouths the words, knowing them already — the one little thing her father can’t wrap his thinking around.

“Suppose I’m flying past you near the speed of light…”

Delia’s head jerks upright. Her father has gone mad. Both of them: madder than anything in this country’s whole toxic drugstore could make them. David Strom leans forward, for the first time this evening, in his element. “Yes.” He grins. “Go on. I follow.”

“Then according to relative motion, you are flying past me at the same speed.”

“Yes,” Strom says with all the delight he just gave their playing. Here at last is something he can talk about. “Yes, this is exactly correct!”

“But that’s what I can’t understand. If both of us are moving, then we both think the other’s time slows down, relative to ours.”

“This is good!” David’s glee is spontaneous. “You have made a study of this matter!”

William Daley’s teeth clench. His eyes test the other’s for condescension, a level gaze that would expose all patronage. But here is only pleasure, mind pushing through loneliness to a surprise meeting.

“Your time is slower than mine. Mine is slower than yours. It makes a joke out of reason.”

“Yes.” The man actually giggles. “That, too, is true! But only because our reason was created at very slow speeds.”

“It smacks of utter nonsense.” Dr. Daley stops short of saying useless parasitism or Jewish plot. But his outrage is more than public. “Which one of us is right? Which one of us really ages faster?”

“Ah!” David nods. “I understand. This is now a different question.”

Delia listens to the closest thing she’ll ever hear to a teatime chat in the monkey house. The light-speed slowing of time is easier to believe than these two men. The room goes liquid. She must key on either the speech or the speakers, though both are hopeless. Her father has indeed made a thorough study, but the man she drags home will never know why. And yet David, too, is locked in a contest she can’t understand. His work feels stranger to her, in this moment, than the most closed tribal ritual. It smells of unguents and incense. It sits like a prayer shawl pulled around the man’s shoulders.

She studies the white one, then the black. Their animated battle is too much for her. Her father’s disbelief knows no bounds. “The laws of physics are the same,” the foreigner insists, “in any uniformly moving system.” Her father sits still, forgoing reason, trying to embrace the impossible.

They strike a truce of mutual awe, a truce that alarms Delia more than open warfare. Forgotten by them both, she retreats to the remaining domain of common sense. Maybe she’s lost her citizenship there, as well. Maybe her mother will bar her entry.

But Nettie Ellen is standing in front of the stove, as she was before dinner, when Charlie drove her to tears. Now her face is dry. She holds a towel, although the dishes are done. She looks down into a space in front of her, one that Delia, too, can see. She seems not to hear her daughter enter. When she speaks, it’s to the pit in front of her. “You two seem strong together. Like nobody can hurt you. Like you already lived through a bunch more days than you have.”

Her mother has stumbled onto her incredible truth. The man’s alien notions, his curved space and slow-running time, that Easter afternoon on the Mall have somehow given them time enough to find each other. The bird can love the fish for no other reason than their shared bewilderment, turning in the blue.

“That’s the crazy thing, Mama. That’s what I can’t figure out. More days than we…”

“That’s good,” Nettie says, wheeling around to face the sink. “You’re gonna need all the preparation time you can get.”

If she means it as a reprimand, it still can’t match the pain Delia has already sown. She wants to hug her mother for this blessing, however backhanded. But the blessing has damaged them both enough already.

Her mother looks up, fixing Delia’s eye. From ten years away and another city, the daughter is saying, She’s so small. Thin as a bar of soap at the end of the wash week. “You know what the Bible says.” Nettie Ellen works her mouth to citation. “You know…” But nothing more comes from her moving lips than a whole “cleave” and half an “unto.”

Not for the last time, they trade things too hard for speaking. Delia takes the idle dish towel from her mother’s hands and returns it to the rack. She turns her mother’s shoulders, and together they head out front to reclaim the male strangeness assigned to them. They don’t link arms as they might have, once. But still, they walk together. Delia makes no effort to prepare her mother, for that would insult them all. All must watch the others fly past, each to his own clock.

They find the men turning from contest to outright pact. William and David hunch toward each other, hands on knees, like they’re pitching pennies out in the alley. They’ve formed an alliance in the face of the universe’s fundamental law. Neither looks up as the women enter. The doctor of medicine still scowls, but a scowl wrestling with the angel of insight. “So you’re saying that my now happens before your now?”

“I am saying that the whole idea of ‘now’ cannot travel from my frame of reference to yours. We cannot talk of ‘instantaneous.’”

Nettie shoots her girl a frightened look: Is the man speaking English? Delia just shrugs: the vast futility of the male race. She settles down into that time-crafted dismissal, one that rejoins her to her head-shaking mother while all the while drawing her closer to her betrothed-to-be.

“In case you gentlemen have failed to notice, it’s getting late.” Nettie Ellen shakes her finger at the window, the undeniable outside. Telling time by darkness: nothing to it.

“This is what you call our legendary hospitality.” William winks at David.

Strom scrambles to his feet. “I must go!”

Nettie Ellen throws up her hands. “Now that’s just the opposite of what I’m telling you. I’m saying, You sure you want to be jumping on a train at this hour?”

Delia watches her mother struggle mightily to be spontaneous. The offer she’d make without thinking, in any world but this, crawls up in her throat and sticks. Nor is Delia wholly ready for her mother to extend it. To lodge the man under the same roof as her parents… She stands at attention, wincing. Her foreigner, too, waits politely, trying to brake from the speed of thought, to slow the moment enough to see what’s happening. The three hosts stand nodding at their guest, each waiting for the other to say, There’s a spare bed in the downstairs room.

They stand forever. Then forever stops. Michael and Charles burst into the room, too excited to speak. The little one gets the words out first. “The Germans have invaded Poland. Tanks, planes—”

“It’s true,” Charles says. “It’s all over the radio.”

All eyes turn to the German in their midst. But his search out the woman who has brought him here. Delia sees it, faster than the light from his face can reach her: a fear that leaves him her dependent. Everything this man’s culture touches, it sets alight. His science and music struggle to take in this war they’ve let happen while away in their playful, free flights. And in a single blitzkrieg, all that the man has ever cared for burns.

She sees, in that flash, what this news means. And she never stops to question. His family is dead, his country unreachable. He has no people, no place, no home now but her. No other nation but their sovereign state of two.