The Time of Our Singing

My Brother as Otello

Carolina asks, “What exactly are you boys?” And our answer drops on us, overnight: America’s Next Voice. Not current; just next. Not fame, exactly, but never again the freedom of obscurity.

We don’t get out of Durham without a deck of business cards, people who want us to call them. Ruth says, “So look at my brothers. Does this mean the two of you are big-time?” Jonah ignores the question. But her words are the most professional pressure I’ll ever feel.

Jonah’s in the catbird seat: People in big cities all across the country ask him to come sing, sometimes even offering to pay enough to cover expenses. All at once, he has a future to decide. But first, he must find a new teacher. He’s thumbed his nose at Juilliard, pulled off his parting snub by winning a nationwide competition against countless older and more experienced singers, all without any vocal coach. But even Jonah isn’t crazy enough to imagine he can move much further on his own. In his line, people keep studying until they die. And maybe even night school, after that.

His new prize credential gives him a shot at working with the town’s better tenors. He toys with the idea of Tucker, Baum, Peerce. But he rejects them all. As far as he’s concerned, his greatest asset is his tone, that pointed silver arrow. He’s afraid the famous males will turn him grotesque, wreck his growing sound. He wants to stay clear, fast, light. He wants to try the recital route, honing his chops in various halls, returning to his deferred dream of opera when he figures out how to fatten up while keeping the purity intact.

He picks a woman teacher. He picks her for all sorts of reasons, not least her aggressive strawberry hair. Her face is a boat’s prow, cutting through rough seas. Her skin is a curtain of light.

“Why not, Joey? I need a teacher who can give me what I don’t have yet.”

The thing he needs, the thing Lisette Soer can give him, is dramatic instruction. A lyric soprano sought after in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, she’s not yet in permanent orbit. But the rockets are firing. She’s just a few years younger than Mama was when she died. Just a dozen years older than Jonah.

If her voice can’t match the leading divas, she has begun to land those roles whose sexiness is usually confined to insistent program notes. She’s more an actress who can sing than a singer trying to act. She walks across a room like a statue turning flesh. Jonah comes back from his first lesson, raising his fists underhand to his eyes, growling with bliss. He finds, in his new redheaded trainer, the intensity he’s after. Someone who can teach him all he needs to know about the stage.

Miss Soer approves her new student’s general plan. “Experience is all,” she tells him. “Go out and play every stage you can. East Lansing. Carbondale. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. All the places where culture is auctioned piecemeal on the spot market. Let them see you naked. Learn your grief and fear in situ, and what you don’t get under your belt on the road, your teacher will feed you upon your return.”

She tells him straight out: “Leave home.” He passes the command on to me, as if he’s invented it. You can’t expect to sing yourself forward while still rooming with your family. Can’t get to the future while living in the past. The arrow of growth points one merciless way.

She’d do away with me, too, I’m sure. But Lisette stops short of planting that idea in Jonah. Together, they decide I’m to leave with him, find a place where we can grow into our promise. Ruth sits in the kitchen, pulling her pigtails. “It’s stupid, Joey. Move downtown when you can live here free?” Da just nods, like we’ve deported him, and he’s seen it coming all along. “Is it because I bring my friends home sometimes?” Ruth asks. “Are you trying to get away from me?”

“How about our studio?” I ask Jonah. But it’s way too small to live in. “How about a larger unit in that building?”

“Bad location,” he says. “Everything’s happening in the Village.” And that’s where we find our new quarters. The Village is pure theater, the greatest practice in what Madame Soer, in her favorite refrain, calls “living at maximum need.”

Maximum need is Lisette’s most teachable skill. She keeps it deep in her body. Her voice is a beam that cuts through the thickest orchestral fog. But voice alone can’t account for her success. The dancer’s body doesn’t hurt. She oozes anticipation, even in trouser roles, her blazing hair balled up under a powdered peruke, charged, prehensile, ambiguous. Her most casual stroll across the set is satin hypnosis. Even her fidgets are a leopard’s. This is what she means to give my brother: a tension to gird up his muscle-free tone.

At Jonah’s third lesson, she walks out on him. He’s left perched over the black music stand, trying to guess his sin. He waits for twenty minutes, but she never returns. He comes back to our new one-bedroom down on Bleecker in a cloud of wronged innocence. All weekend long, it’s my job to tell him, “It’s just a misunderstanding. Maybe she’s ill.” Jonah lies in bed, tensing his abdomen. He’s deeper inside the shock of his body than I’ve ever seen him.

Lisette floats into the next lesson, beatific. She crosses the room and kisses him on the forehead, in neither forgiveness nor apology. Just life in its inexplicable fullness, and “Can we take the Gounod from your second entrance, please?” He lies in bed that night in another riot of feeling, working his muscles in long-unexercised directions.

Singing, Soer tells him, is no more than pulling the right strings at the right time. But acting — that’s participating in the single, continuous, million-year catastrophe of the human race. Say, for argument, that the gods have conspired against you. There you are, alone, front and center, on the bare stage, in front of five hundred concertgoers who dare you to prove something to them. Hitting the notes is nothing. Holding a high, clear C for four measures can only go so far toward changing anyone’s weltanschauung. “Go where the grief is real,” she tells him. Her right hand claws at her collarbone in remembered horror. Is there a place yet, in your young life, where you’ve known it?

He knows the place already, its permanent address. Better than she can know. He has spent years trying to escape every memory of it. But now, under Lisette, he learns to revisit it at will, to turn the fire against itself and fashion it into its only answer. Under the woman’s fingers, his voice lays itself open. She readies him for the Naumburg, for Paris, for whatever awards he might care to shoot for.

She introduces us to the agent Milton Weisman, an old-school impresario who signed his first talent before the First World War and who still works on, if only as the least offensive alternative to death. He demands to see us in his cluttered warren on Thirty-fourth. The eight-by-ten glossies Lisette takes of Jonah are not good enough; he wants to see us in the flesh. I’ve lived my whole life under the illusion that music is about sound. But Milton Weisman knows better. He needs a face-to-face before he can begin to book us.

Mr. Weisman is wearing a double-breasted pinstripe suit with shoulder pads, almost Prohibition era. He ushers us into the office, asking, “You boys want a root beer? Ginger ale?” Jonah and I wear black lightweight jackets and narrow ties that would seem conservative to anyone our age, but which, to Mr. Weisman, brand us as beatniks or worse. Lisette Soer wears some diaphanous Diaghilev fantasy of Mogul India. One of her lovers, we think, is Herbert Gember, the hot costume designer at City Center, though the affair may be a mere convenience match. She’s one of those opera personalities who must dress down when they’re onstage.

We chat with Mr. Weisman about his client lists from the golden age. He’s worked with half a dozen front-rank tenors. Jonah wants to know about these men: what they ate, how much they slept, whether they talked at all the morning before a concert. He looks for a secret formula, that little extra leverage. Mr. Weisman can vamp on the topic for as long as he has listeners. All I want to know is whether these famous men were kind, whether they cared for their families, whether they seemed happy. The words never come up.

While talking, Milton Weisman roams his decrepit office, fiddling with the blinds, edging around us from all angles. He rarely looks us in the face, but even his sidelong glances find their mark. The old booking agent gauges how we’ll look under the footlights, drawing up his map’s out-of-bounds lines: Chicago, sure. Louisville, perhaps. Memphis, no chance.

After half an hour, he shakes our hands and says he can find us work. This puzzles me; we already have offers coming in. But Lisette is ecstatic. All the way back downtown, she keeps pinching Jonah’s cheek. “You know what this means? That man is a force. People listen to him.” She stops short of saying, He’ll make your career.

They send us on recital barnstorming tours. “Lieder,” Lisette insists, “is harder than opera. You must turn emotions loose upon your audience, with no props but sound. All your gestures take on handcuffs. As the words fill your throat, you must feel your body moving, even though it can’t. You must model the invisible movement, so your audience will see it.”

This is the incantation she sends us out with, and it works. Audiences in our off-circuit towns respond more like sports fans than the usual stiff-necked classical crowds. They come backstage. They want to know us, to tell us the tragedies that have wrecked their lives. The attention works on Jonah. I have to watch him more closely now as we play. Even in pieces we’ve drilled down into our marrow, he’s likely to lace passages with a surprise slight caesura or rubato, nothing the careful ear would register, unless I fail to be there with him.

Mr. Weisman has a knack for getting us in and out of towns without incident. Sometimes, in bigger places, he finds local cultural lights who actually compete to have us under their roofs. In smaller towns, we get good at picking hotels that won’t hassle well-groomed young men with collegiate accents. Jonah handles the check-ins, and I wait offstage. When we sense a problem, we beat a quick retreat, someplace a little farther from the concert halls where we do our Schumann Dichterliebe to ovations.

We’re playing Tucson, Arizona — a pink adobe hall whose balcony might as well be cathouse rooms above a saloon — the night we hear about James Meredith trying to enter Ole Miss. The army rolls in again, that part of the army not already engaged in propping up the earth’s collapsing dictators. Twenty-three thousand troops, hundreds of people injured, and two people killed, all to get one man enrolled in college.

We’re in the dressing room — cinder blocks actually painted green — when Jonah hands me a sheet of music and says, “Scratch the Ives. Here’s our encore.” Never doubting there’ll be an encore. Never doubting I can play the substitute from sight. In fact, compared to the tricky, polytonal Ives — a piece that satisfies Jonah’s hunger for the avant-garde while giving the audience a nostalgic scrap of “Turkey in the Straw”—this new piece is trivial.

“You’re kidding,” I say.

“What? You don’t know the tune?”

I know the tune, of course. I’ve even seen this arrangement: the great Harry Burleigh setting of “Oh Wasn’t Dat a Wide Ribber?” Jonah must have been carrying it around in his valise for just such an emergency. The setting is straightforward, and very pianistic. It stays close to the familiar melody, but it’s laced through with inspired passing tones that trick the song into a different country. One look, and I could play the thing without looking.

“I know the damn tune, Jonah. I just don’t know what the hell you plan to do with it.”

“I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. Right now.” He takes the sheet back and peppers it with markings.

“We’re not going out there and doing this thing cold.”

“It’s Tucson, Arizona, brother. Wyatt Earp. The O.K. Corral.” He pronounces the word chorale. He goes on marking the score. “The Wild West. We can’t be caught actually practicing stuff.”

I take back the sheet, now filled with his scribbles. I look at the markings and see the day’s headlines all over them. “You coming clean, Jonah?” Cheap shot. He’s never tried to hide anything. Never anything other than he was: a swarthy, vaguely Semitic, loose-curled, mixed-race kid who happens to sing European art songs. I’m sick of myself as soon as the words leave my mouth. It’s the stress of touring, the sleepless haul down from Denver the night before. He needs an accompanist who likes performing, who actually enjoys trying to get halls full of strangers to love him.

But Jonah just smirks. “I wouldn’t exactly say clean, Mule. It’s only an encore.”

I know what he wants without his having to talk me through. After the standing ovation and our second curtain call, my brother glances at me as we come out of the bow: You ready? I play from the music, afraid to tempt fate, but also letting the audience know this isn’t the standard order of business. I know what Jonah wants: all those sweet dissonances brought out into blithe daylight. He wants me to lean into the shadings that hide in this cheerful expansiveness, to throw the upbeat tune into full relief. Maybe even toss in some clashes of my own. He wants the tune bright, cheery, major, and flooded with jarring disaster.

The place we make tonight is too small for Lisette Soer to enter, too small and hard and shining for anyone but me and my brother even to see. Shout, shout: Satan’s about. One more river to cross. Shut your door and keep him out. One more river to cross. There’s this man Meredith trying to go to school, and there’s the U.S. Army, and people dead, same as last year, same as next. We’ll never reach ourselves. One more river; one more wartime Jordan. And one more after that.

No one in the audience suspects the source he sings from. The things that are happening abroad tonight all happen over in someone else’s state. Satan is nigh, but nobody sees him. One more river to cross. Yet the crowd hears the song: something brutally American after all the undecipherable Italian and German fare we’ve served up at this evening’s concert. Baking out here in the hundred-degree desert, with even the ocotillo and saguaro dying of drought and the streams all dry for so long that there’s six feet of bramble in their beds, the audience takes this ancient headline home, to their stucco haciendas and transplanted Kentucky bluegrass lawns, their city carved out of neighboring reservations, twice-stolen land. And as they lie there, the cultural artifact keeps them awake. One more river to cross.

Jonah’s singing does nothing for Mississippi. Nothing to help make an America, or unmake one. Meredith probably would have hated our version. But the spiritual does do one invisible thing, for an infinitely smaller nation. “How did it sound?” Jonah asks me in the wings.

And I tell him. “Wide.”

He feeds Lisette Soer the story when we get home. Her face turns the color of her hair when she learns we changed the program without consulting her. She softens, though still miffed, when she learns the details. There are powers that even Method acting won’t dare tap. Powers she knows not to tamper with.

They grow dependent on each other, my brother and Madame Soer, joined in a way Jonah hasn’t been with any teacher since Reményi. Close in a way he hasn’t been with anyone since the fire. She asks him to sing in an open master class, along with four promising females. She wants to keep him out in front of other aggressive East Coast ears. They listen to old recordings together, great dead tenors — Fleta, Lindi — late into the evening, until one of her famous competing consorts comes by and sends the boy home.

They listen on a stereo fifty times more expensive than the one our parents bought us years ago. My brother comes home after these listening excursions, shaking his head in wonder. “Mule, we never even heard those bastards. You won’t believe what they’re really doing!”

Lisette doesn’t talk through these performances, the way Jonah and I used to, listening in the dark. She forbids speech while the music plays, and for some minutes afterward. She restricts all commentary to squeezes of his upper arm, her long, lyric fingernails sinking into his flesh proportionate to the power and pure drama of the moment, relived through electricity’s séance medium.

She knows whole lifetimes of music, having lived several already in her third of a century. She builds up my brother’s sound without much changing it. But the change she works on Jonah is dramatic. She opens his throat, fills his vowels with color, and smoothes them across his range. She’s the first teacher to teach him the shape of his own tongue and lips. The first to teach him that too much perfection will kill you. But her chief lesson is far harsher. Miss Soer teaches my brother hunger.

I hear it before I see it. He’s restless down in the Village. Things don’t happen fast enough. Beat is dead. The jazz scene, he declares, is falling into retreads. He exhausts his fascination with the classical avant-garde. “Those jokers haven’t produced anything truly new since Henry Cowell.” Cage and the Zen crowd just bore him, and even quadrupling the boredom doesn’t help. When we aren’t on the road, he prowls the streets, listening for other voices, breaking into other rooms.

The hunger she sows shows up onstage. We’re in Camden, Maine, singing on a makeshift stage that shakes a little with every pound of the nearby surf. He’s singing “When I am one and twenty,” pressing into it as if diction alone could turn the peat lyric to diamond. He wants something from the words, the pitches, the audience, me. Lisette has taught him the rule that keeps all drama from going mawkish. At the top of the phrase, at the song’s maximum need, pull back. Don’t get big and messy; draw yourself inward around the unbearable, until it glows with the smallest light.

His hunger focuses. He starts to read again — Mann, Hesse — those works János Reményi made him read, decades before Jonah could hope to understand them. Even now, he’s years too young to make them out. But he totes them under his arm to lessons, thinking they’ll please Soer. They horrify her. She finds them repugnant, Germanic. She wants him on Dumas, Hugo at the very least.

“Did you know Dumas was a black man?” This is news to Jonah. He wonders why she feels the need to tell him.

He must see what’s coming. The white iceberg must condense for him soon, even out of his whiter fog. But I keep still; the woman is doing too much for us. I’m learning volumes from her, secondhand — whole worlds about music, and even more about the musical world.

We’re at a stand-up pizza place on Houston, pretending to be students, enjoying the night, how it fuzzes into that passing crowd. “Mule? You ever sleep with anyone in college?”

He sounds for a moment like an ancient wife confronting her husband at the end of the day with a suspicion that’s too old to be anxious about anymore, now that everything is past mattering.

“Aside from the actresses, Gypsies, consumptives, and courtesans with hearts of gold?”

He jerks up and stares, then flips me the finger. “I mean for real. Not your diseased imagination.”

“Oh. For real.” I wonder if I even wanted to, with anyone real. My one moment of love — the woman in the navy blue dress followed for twenty blocks — was free of any such compromising risk. “You think I could even have thought about it without your knowing?”

His lips twitch a little, and he hides them behind a wedge of pizza. He chews and swallows. “You ever almost?”

I pretend to deliberate, blood racing. “No.”

“How about since?”

“No.” Haven’t left your sight. “But since we’re on the subject—”

“How many…men do you think she has?” Only one she in our lives now. He doesn’t really want me to count them, and I don’t.

The shortness of breath he suffered during our preparation for the America’s Next Voices competition returns. It happens before a Sunday afternoon recital in Boston, the first time we’ve been back since Boylston. Ten minutes before we go on, he starts wheezing so badly, he almost passes out. I tell the house manager to cancel and call a doctor. Jonah objects, although it almost suffocates him. We go on, twenty minutes late. As performances go, it’s ragged. But Jonah sings at maximum need. The audience flocks backstage afterward. There’s no sign of Reményi, any Boylston teachers, or our once friends.

Back in the city, Lisette forces him to get a checkup. She even offers to loan him the money for it. I bless the woman for making him do what I can’t. Nothing wrong, the doctor says. “Nothing wrong, Mule,” Jonah repeats, eyes darting around the waiting room, as if the walls were closing in.

I’m better with his panic attacks now that I’m sure they pass. Calmer, I can bring him out faster. He manages them, almost seeming to time them to avoid total disaster: early in the afternoon before a concert, or at the reception just following one.

We play eight venues in January of 1963 alone: big cities looking for new blood, midsized cities pretending to be big cities, small cities looking for affordable culture, small towns that, through historical accident, hold on to their European roots. Maybe their grandfathers once bought standing-room tickets at the Stadtschauplatz, or loved the free Rathaus affairs on public holidays. So the descendants preserve the forms after all context has washed away, the way people turn massive old radio consoles into knickknack cabinets.

We don’t even know about Project Confrontation until we see it on a lobby television in a two-star hotel in Minneapolis. A police commissioner named Bull Conner releases fire hoses and attack-trained German shepherds on protesters for singing “Marching to Freedom Land” without a license. Most of the marchers are years younger than we are. Jonah looks on from Minneapolis, humming to himself, “Way down south in Birmingham, I mean south in Alabam,” not even hearing.

The country on television isn’t ours. The streets on film are mobbed, as in some jackboot-crushed Eastern European uprising. Police club fallen kids, dragging them off in paddy wagons. Bodies roll in the spray, pounded into clumps against brick walls by vicious water jets. Everywhere is spray and chaos, limbs gashed and beaten, two white policemen smashing a boy in the face with billy clubs, until the hourly wage Minneapolis bellhop, black, is told by management to turn the channel, and Jonah and I head off to a last-minute auditorium test prior to charming the Twin Cities.

Tonight, we do another encore. Jonah whispers it to me as we take a curtain call. “Go Down, Moses,” in D minor. He doesn’t even have the sheet music this time. We don’t need it. An old friend of mine has taught me how to improvise, to pull notes out of the air that serve as well as any written down. Jonah doesn’t quite know the words, but he finds them, too. He sings them at the same moment as the children in their cells down in Birmingham jail sing, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round…”

The audience, too, has seen Birmingham, served up by Cronkite, earlier that evening. They know what’s happening way down in Egypt land. They hush when Jonah finishes, hard, luminous, and piano. But they aren’t sure how to see this mix, this cause creeping into the confines of beauty. Even supportive applause seems wrong.

Our bookings increase, and so do the protests. They tear through hundreds of cities north and south, even passing through the towns we tour. Yet we always miss the marches, blowing through a day before, two days after. We polish our new encore and add it to the standing repertoire. Jonah doesn’t tell Lisette.

She’s increasingly eager to groom our public look. “Jonie”—and yes, he stands for it—“you’re getting noticed. You’re earning a name for lightness. You have to watch out for anything lugubrious. Find work that lets you sail.” She squelches attempts to sing anything written later than 1930. She arms him with an arsenal of shiny pellets, each one finished in two minutes. She feeds him Fauré. She goes through a Delius kick—“Maude” and “A Late Lark.” He sings them, like appearing onstage in pastel tights.

Lisette sands down the cheats he’s developed to hide his thinner notes. She pushes him to get a single burnished arc out of all three of his voice’s regions. No one has ever heard in him what she hears. No one has ever dared him on as she does. At his lessons, she sings back to him. When she sets him aside and takes up the notes, it’s like brass after bronze. His instrument is more magnificent than the one she’s been dealt. But her presence blows my brother’s away. She merely has to think the notes; they fall from her in the effortless afterthought of inner recall. Her singing draws him to his fate. Even I can’t turn away.

She huddles up to him as he sings, pressing on his sides, patting his flank, resting her cool palms against his neck. It’s a loving cruelty, torturing him with touch. But this is how they learn best now, locked in a constant clinch, passing information through the siphon of skin.

“Grow huge,” she tells him. “Not in mass; not even in volume.” He must learn to place not just his sound but his very soul into the dark back corners of the most cavernous halls. One day, she’ll have him storm the arenas of drama and demand a hearing. Until then, he must perfect the high, clear force of lieder, a different matter altogether.

She wants us to hear how opera is really done, in the trenches, under fire. She gives us two tickets for her coming performance — Fiordiligi in Così, for Mr. Bing. “Mozart?” Jonah teases her. “What nationality was he again?”

She tucks him under the chin the way Maria Theresa once coddled the boy composer. “He sure as hell wasn’t German, darling. He loved those Italian libretti, you’ll notice. And he’d have lived in Paris forever, by choice.”

Her coolness betrays how much is at stake. A role in Così, at the Met. She seems, at most, a little harried. “Lives don’t come down to one moment,” she claims. We know she’s lying.

She gives us the golden tickets and shoos us away. “Have a good time, boys. I’ll be the one in the big wig and white petticoats.”

We wear our concert clothes for the event. It’s overkill, but it preempts trouble at the door. We head down to Broadway and Thirty-ninth, hoping to slip in without a scene. The seats Lisette gives us are magnificent, a few rows back from the block she gives her family. Jonah waits for the curtain, biting his cuticles until they bleed. He’s in agony, worse than anything he’s ever felt before going onstage himself. Here at eye level, he can see what his teacher cannot, up there behind the blinding lights.

“You feel that?” he asks. I nod, thinking he means the electricity. “They want her blood. They want her to fall to pieces.”

It’s crazy. We’re talking a midsized role in Mozart’s “problem” opera, the one nobody quite gets. Disaster will, at worst, send her back to San Francisco for a few seasons. Triumph will, at best, win her another chance to prove herself to Bing.

“That’s paranoid, Jonah. Why would anyone want her to fail?”

“What do you mean? For the excitement. The drama missing in their own lives. Look around. These people would love a good wipeout. Now that would be real opera.”

As soon as the curtain rises, Jonah stops worrying about whether his teacher’s going to die and starts worrying about whether she’s going to stay faithful to her feckless lover. He’s lost from the overture’s first theme. Doesn’t she love her officer? Why doesn’t his departure destroy her? How can she fail to see through these turbaned Albanians, gotten up like fifty-cent Turks?

In the intermission, he’s ruined for talk. He has it in for Despina and Alphonso. Only sheer, faithful concentration can hold their devious plot at bay. But all around us, the audience is deep in appraisal. They weigh the orchestra, the conductor, the leads, Mozart — deciding who should live and who needs to die for humanity’s sins. I know enough not to cough, lest they train the fire hoses on me. The matron next to me ruffles through her program. “Who is that gorgeous thing playing the faithful one?”

Her cadaverous escort coughs. “You mean Soer? She’s been around. Up-and-comer. Second lead sort of thing. Could go all the way.”

“She’s good, don’t you think?” I look to Jonah, but he’s busy fending off the first act’s dangers, guarding his teacher’s chastity. “The note doesn’t say where she’s from. Is she French or something?”

The cadaver just snorts. “Lisa Sawyer. Hails from Milwaukee, where, I understand, her father makes what passes for beer. Emphasis on passes.” He flips through his own program, frowning. “Hmm. They don’t mention that?”

The woman raps his shoulder. “Nasty. Is that her real color?”

“‘Does she or doesn’t she?’ Apparently, only half of the city knows for sure.”

She slaps him on the wrist with her rolled-up program.

Jonah comes out of his trance. “What do you think of the tempi?” I ask. He corrects them all, from memory.

The curtain rises on the second act, plunging us back into life or death. Jonah grips the armrest throughout Lisette’s second big aria, anticipating the octave-and-a-half swoops, sure she’s going to give in and get laid by this pseudo-Albanian, her sister’s fiancé, her betrothed’s most trusted friend. Everybody does it. Does she love this other man? Why is her fall so much sweeter than her earlier sworn chastity? His whole body sighs with her thrilling debasement.

Lisette doesn’t always soar. Some of the highs lack support, and her rapid, dipping passages take cover. Still, she’s supernatural. She inhabits the stage, never having lived anywhere but in this story, never experiencing any time but this one renewing night. Fiordiligi has waited patiently for just such a supple body to reawaken in after long hibernation. Never has a singer taken such shameless physical pleasure in a role. Lisette is wayward, consumed, consummated by the unlikely luck of this part. By her “Per pietà,” Jonah is lost, and even I forgive her anything.

“She is fun to watch,” the cadaverous man concedes in the extended applause. “A real piece. Piece of work, that is.” His consort smacks him again, this time with her knuckles.

From the “toast” quartet through the fumbling denouement, Lisette glows, divinely human. She radiates the social, unable to exist except through the grace of those out front, in this hall, from the pit to the upper balcony. She needs society, feeds off others, and yet her art lives in the most sealed of vacuums. The struggle of 1963 is nothing to her, not even unreal. This might be the Burgtheater, Vienna, 1790: a dress rehearsal in paradise, the morning after the last revolution.

Tonight, she is the privileged world’s darling. Applause brings the cast out again and again. Sheaves of roses float up to her onstage, more than for Dorabella and Despina combined. During her bows, she finds us and locks our eyes: You see now? Living maximum need? An old trick, a staple for those who live by an audience’s love: She knows how to gaze so that everyone in the house feels singled out.

We don’t even consider the receiving line. Lisette Soer is the toast of New York tonight, until tomorrow replaces her. She wouldn’t even recognize us in the adoring fray. The couple alongside me declines, as well. But they’re still talking about her as they file out ahead of us, on their way to whatever postopener postmortem their people retire to.

In the lobby, Jonah’s voice veers. “She’ll have her pick tonight, won’t she, Mule?” He doesn’t want an answer. He only wants me to get him home, down to Bleecker. “Let’s take a cab.”

“Sure,” I say. But I steer him to the subway.

When Jonah goes to his Wednesday lesson, she rages at him. “I give you tickets to opening night, the biggest role of my career, and you don’t care enough to come backstage to tell me what you think? Go on. Get out of here. Just get out!” She slams her studio door on him and will not open it.

He comes back home in agony. He sits me down and dictates a review of her performance, note by note, muscle by electrifying muscle. His letter is a masterpiece of exacting musicology. Its observations surpass anything that newspaper reviewers can even hear. His judgments are so closely grounded in musical specifics, they take on the air of universal truth.

“I was afraid to come see you afterward,” he has me write. “I just wanted to feel your transcendence a little longer, before rushing it back to earth.”

She writes him back. “Your letter is going into my first-rank scrapbook, next to the note from Bernstein. You are right: We must sustain the aura as long as we can. I wish I could have done so, with you. Would my greatest student accept a special lesson as my apology?”

Dignity has never meant much to Jonah. Now it’s not even an impediment. “Tell me she’s evil, Mule.” We’re trying to practice. His concentration is shot. He’ll wander off and mark pitches for several measures, before remembering what we’re doing. I’ve learned to play through his vacancies. But when he talks, I stop. “Tell me the woman’s no damn good.”

“She’s not evil. Just manipulative. She knows everything there is about…performing. But she doesn’t know much about people.”

“What do you mean by that?” He sounds hurt, ready to charge out of his corner swinging at the sound of the bell.

“She wants you to adore her. She’ll do everything in her power to keep you on your knees in front of her.”

He studies me over the music rack. His face is a mask. Another thing she’s taught him: Never telegraph emotions. “What the fuck do you know about anything?”

“Nothing, Jonah. I don’t know anything.”

I stare at the keyboard, he at me. We sit for a long time, a fair rendition of John Cage’s 4’33”. I only wish we had a tape recorder; our first take would have been a wrap. I won’t speak first. I think he’s staring me down. Then I realize he’s just elsewhere. At last, he murmurs, “Wouldn’t mind being on my knees in front of her, come to think.”

I hammer out a little Scriabin, an on-the-fly Poem of Ecstasy. He doesn’t need the program notes. His head bobs up and down, his grin private. “Know what the problem is, Mule?”

“What’s the problem, Jonah?”

“The problem, since you asked, is she’s manipulative.”

I start a slow, seductive “Dance of the Seven Veils,” ready to throw on an overcoat at the first wrinkle in his brow.

“I know, I know. I have to get a handle on my life. Otherwise…” He raps the music stand, our shattered rehearsal. “Otherwise, we might never be able to perform Schubert in good faith again!” He giggles like a lunatic. For an awful moment, I think I’m going to have to call Da, or Bellevue. My alarm only makes him worse. “Yeah, I’m a goner,” he says when he comes back. “I’ve got to get the woman out of my blood.”

“There is a way. Call her bluff.”

“Oh.” Pianissimo. “Turns out…it’s not a bluff.” He mitts my shoulder, contrite now, inspecting the damage. “I’m sorry, Mule. I wanted to tell you. I tried a while back. I didn’t know how.”

“Are you… How long?”

“I don’t know. Weeks? Look. I said I’m sorry. Don’t try, Mule. You can’t make me sorrier than I already am.”

But I’m not angry. Not even betrayed. I’m cut free, lost in the inconceivable. My brother has learned how to act. He wanted to tell me. Tried but couldn’t. He’s slept with a thing fresh out of a sinister fairy tale, nearer our mother’s age than ours. I’ve been denying everything: his finicky distraction, our growing tension over the last weeks. He gives me the details, the ones I should have guessed weeks ago. Most of them float by in my disbelief.

The first time, it’s just like part of his lessons. She’s showing him Holst’s “Floral Bandit,” as always, with her hands. Pushing here, rounding there. Let every muscle serve the needs of the words. Well, the words are musty and suspect at best. She knows he doesn’t buy them. “Mr. Strom.” She pinches his flank, an aggressive sneer on her lips. “If you don’t believe the song, what right do you have to ask a roomful of people to believe you? Yes, I know. It’s sentimental rubbish, already archaic when the man wrote the words five thousand years ago. But what if they weren’t? What if the sun rose and set around this poetry?”

“That’s what you call this?”

“You don’t get it.” She stands six inches in front of him, grabs his armpits, and shakes him like a terrified mother might shake a child who has just survived death. “And you won’t be more than a pretty-throated boy until you do. Your personal taste means nothing. What you think of this frilly twaddle doesn’t count. You must make yourself someone else’s instrument. Someone with different needs and fears. If you’re trapped in yourself, screw art. If you can’t be someone more than yourself, don’t even think about walking out onstage.”

She draws him closer, placing both palms on his breasts. She has done so before, but never so tenderly as now. “Music is something we aren’t. It comes from outside and must go back there. Your job is notness.” She shoves him, then yanks him back by the shirt as he reels. “It’s why we bother to sing at all. Ninety-nine point nine nine nine”—she brutalizes his chest with each digit—“percent of everything that has ever happened, happened to someone who isn’t you and who’s centuries dead. But everything lives again in you, if you can clear enough room to carry it.” She jabs him in the sternum, and he catches her hand. “Ah!” she says, delighted, twisting back against his grip. “Ah! Want to fight me?”

He drops her wrist, surprised.

“Aw! Not this time?” She takes up his hand again, lifts her eyes, looks about the room, distracted. “‘Have you seen her? What is her name?’”

He thinks she has gone mad, another weak-gened Ophelia wracked up on the fey waywardness of Western high culture. Then he places the words: the damn Floral Bandit. The pathetic, pale, wilted thief of spring.

She closes his hand into her soft cushion. The scent of jasmine is her sweat. She snares his gaze. Her eyes, incredible, are jade against the amber of her hair, green as the words of the song she now degrades him with. “‘Who is this lady? What is she? The Sylvia all our swains adore?’” She smiles up at him, on her toes, drawing one finger down the cliff of his throat. She pinches his chin jut, swings his hand in hers like a little girl, the innocent, anemic girl he once was bound to.

This is a slaver’s game. This art only works by denying the desperate. But he feels her breath on him and stays as silent as the condemned. She puts that denying finger on his lips: “‘For human tongue would strive in vain to speak the buds uncrumpling in it.’”

Laugh lines light up every corner of her. She draws up level to his face. He hears her add, “Do you want me?” She’ll deny ever saying this, though there are no words in the poem he might have mistaken for them.

This is her lesson in making songs real. And what happens next is just another. When he folds into her, he thinks it’s his own daring. She’ll draw away, outraged. She doesn’t draw away. Her mouth is waiting, an old familiar. He holds his skin on hers, moist-to-moist. Any taste of her would seem forever, and he gets twice that. When they stop, he turns his head away. She draws his face around, forces him to look. It’s her. Still her. Still smiling. See?

He’s too small for his shock. He can look at her. All her laugh lines look back, cheering his victory, daring him, asking him, How much would you like to see? All yours, for the gazing and grazing. If his fear were any less, his joy would kill him. The lessons move to her daybed, an antique Viennese unfolding fern whose function in her studio he has always dreamed about. She shows him how to unwrap her. All the while, she babbles senseless things, half-sung phonemes, droplets of words from the damn poem. “‘For no one knows her range nor can guess half the phrases from her fiddle.’”

She is more perfect than he imagined her in his best renditions. As fair as that first anemic girl he never got to see. Her flanks surprise him, the cup of breasts, the dimpling high up on the back of her thighs. She needs to be examined in her studio’s full sun. He feels callow, his slender arms, his tawny, hairless chest, his boyish explosiveness in her hands. No sooner does she take him, body swaying, an impulse gurgle in her throat, than he flows all over her. Even this, she marvels at, and her delight dissolves his shame. “Next time,” she promises. “Next lesson!” She presses his lips, shushes and dresses him, for she has another student coming. This lady who ’fore ev’ry man, breaks off her music in the middle.

She invites him to her apartment, an evening appointment he must clear with no one but me. He wants to tell me but doesn’t. That’s music. That’s his job. To be someone else, someone not him. If you can’t be someone more than yourself, don’t even think about walking out onstage. Her lair is filled with musical conjuring. The walls are covered with documents — her Paris triumph, a Verdi manuscript page, a photo of Gian Carlo Menotti with his arm around her young waist. The furnishings feel like some museum Da might long ago have dragged him to. She shows him the eighteenth-century virginal with painted underlid and plinks out a gentle, deceptive cadence.

He feels these chords’ coy come-on and reaches for her there as she stands plinking. She recoils, hands up. “You haven’t even sung for me!” Her head tilts back, chin challenging. “How do I know what you’re worth?”

He sings the Holst again. But now he sings as if his life hangs on these words. She rewards him by seeming to reward herself. Something in him that she wants: It works on him, like her creed of maximum need.

She’s his first. It stuns me. For years, I’ve imagined him enjoying a string of casual throwaways. But he’s been saving himself, faithful to this woman in advance of meeting her. They get better, lesson by lesson. They work at it, from the first burst of open throat down to the smallest details of support. They get so good, they must study more. She shows him goodness he never expected: all of life in front of him. They find out places that never were. She turns into his maker, his keeper, his ladder. Teaching him how to touch her, she tenses and subvocalizes, tenders into his hand, sforzando, as if she’s waited all her life to be performed only like this.

His first: She can’t remember what that landmark means. She’s too far down the path of experience. She’s refined all her pleasures already. All her surprise discoveries, long ago lost in perfecting. Or rather, this boy helps her remember — that ambush in his face, sweating, glowing above hers. His body lowers onto hers and freezes, overwhelmed by this prize. His freed gratitude returns her, once more, to that moment when everything might still turn out other than you think. Other than what it has so solidly become.

“Do you hear?” she asks him one night before dressing and sending him home. “Do you hear how big this is making you?”

He snickers, a child. “I didn’t know you could hear it.”

She spanks him. “I mean your voice. We’re growing it.”

He twists between the impossible and the unbearable. Too much; too little: the few minutes of play she restricts him to after every coaching session. His eyes can’t adjust to her. Her arctic whiteness blinds him. He is her puppy, sniffing her thighs, inhaling her hair’s jasmine until she giggles—“Quit tickling!”—and swats him away. His hands explore her skin’s unlikelihood: the rise of her foot, the gather behind her knee, the sag beneath her buttocks, the plates of her shoulder blades jutting from the continent of her back. He can’t stop verifying every inch of her. She takes to dimming the lights, a small shield from the glare of his gaze.

In the half dark, he places his arm along hers. Hers shows him what he looks like to her. And yet his wrist differs from the back of hers less than brother from sister. Where the bruises of their hips come together in the dark, no difference at all. Except for the difference in their passages here.

She sees him measuring, and rolls over on top of him in her joy. “You! How can I show you?” She’s childlike with him. She licks him down like a kitten, working distractedly, as if he won’t notice or isn’t there. Then she tenses, shudders, going off again. She does so easily now, needing little more than the feel of him. She lies with her face in the pillow, talking, her words effaced. Impossible to say what audience she speaks to. He hears her say, “I love your people.”

He freezes. He wants to say, Say that again? But he doesn’t dare.

She talks into the gag, muffled, drunk, liking the words’ blur. His arm, a whipped cord upon the back of her neck, loosens again in her stream of nonsense. She flips over, ready to play some more, one palm on his slight bare chest, staying him. “How can I keep you this way?”

“Potions,” he tells her. “Spells and elixirs.”

“Can you take me home with you someday?” His hand, straying between her legs, stiffens again. “Not as… Nobody would have to… I am your teacher, after all.” He pulls his hand away like a wire off a battery. The current goes dead. She doesn’t notice or admit. “You have a place that we…can’t get to. So rich, so full. I’d just like to sit and savor it awhile.”

What place? What riches? What you? He makes her out in a glint of lamplight: a famine tourist. A slumming succubus, feeding on her victim’s victimhood. He reels from her, but not hard enough to break free. In the moment he pulls away, he feels how cold and airless any escape would be. Where could he go if he stood up now, dressed, walked out of this apartment with its baroque furnishings? Her sickness is also opera’s, the world he has trained for. What other place would even take him in?

He is, to this woman, some thrilling brown thing, an adventure denied her. He can’t tell her how wrong her reading is. The people she loves are not his people. He hates her already for loving any people at all in him but him. But he fails to rise to his hate, to be the nation of one he knows himself to be.

He waits for another night, when she’s naked and satisfied, in his arms. “You said you might want to come home with me someday?”

She turns around, grazes his lips. She can’t remember. Then: Oh. That home. She says nothing. She’s graduated to studying for a different role, some remote Asian beauty, some frail chinoiserie.

“We can. If you want.”

“My Jonie.” His pulse pounds. “Where’s home?”

“Uptown,” he answers vaguely. She nods, knowing. He feels her working up to ask his neighborhood. What rich brown streets might he lead her into? “It’s…only my father now. And I should tell you. He’s — not from around here.”

“Really?” Her enthusiasm revives.

“He’s German.”

The news catches her across the face. Even the actress can’t recover fast enough. “Is he? What city?”

He feels himself losing her, like an audience that comes for Canteloube and gets Shostakovich. She asks what brought his father here. “The Nazis,” he says. Now she’s a lacquered mask.

“You’re not Jewish?”

This is what makes him tell me, at last. He falls back on the bond bigger than any secret link the two of them could grow. “Tell me she’s evil, Mule. Tell me the woman’s no damn good.”

I do. And he ignores me.

“She’s going to stab me,” he says. “I’m going to blunder around for half an hour in act four, spewing blood from my gut.”

“Just be sure you do it with breath support.” I don’t know what else to give him. His eyes fill. He tries to laugh and flip me the bird at the same time. We go back to practicing. Somebody else’s music. Some other people.

The effect on his voice is electrifying. He can harrow now, leave you for dead. His passage work is as clean as ever. But his phrases push into new, awful places. On tour, he sings the same numbers as ever, each time stumbling on some further climax. He no longer settles weightless onto Brahms’s long, dark suspensions from above. He severs them, leaving them helpless, in midair.

We perform “The Floral Bandit”—a piece of time-marking fluff before the intermission. One night, camped out in a small campus hall in the guts of Ohio, we drop through a hole in the stage and lay open the song’s veins. I’m still pressing the keys. Sounds must still be exiting the instrument, but I can’t hear them. There’s only Jonah, that fleshed-out voice drawing remorse out of lifelong repeat offenders. His pitches float in the ether, hovering at sound’s motionless center.

“What the hell was that?” I ask afterward, hiding in the wings from the applause. He only shakes his head, stumbles back out onstage, and takes another bow.

Those reviewers who a year ago faulted his cold precision now proclaim his passion. Sometimes the notices mention me: “a synchrony that could only exist between blood relations.” But often they write as if Jonah could sing lieder to a ballpark organ. “Emotional, profound,” the Hartford Courant says, “giving a precocious insight into the depths and heights in each of us.” All this, Lisette does for him. No teacher ever gives him more.

But his education isn’t finished yet. She moves his lessons back to the studio, saving the apartment for special invitations. The invitations come syncopated now. He may go dancing, but she calls the tune. Still, she goes on dancing with him. Something in him still wakens her. She needs him to help her remember what only feels like, what always was. The force of his desperation is what so moves her.

She still touches him while he sings, still locates muscles he didn’t know he had. She dangles new parts in front of him: Don Carlos, Pelléas, juicy tenor roles men ten years older are afraid to tackle. One afternoon, she tells him, “We need to find you someone.”

“Someone for what?”

“Someone for you, Jonie.”

His voice deserts him. “You mean another teacher?”

She mews back in her throat, puts a hand on his. “You’ll probably teach her a few things.”

“I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

“Oh, caro! Don’t worry.” She leans in toward his ear and whispers. “Whatever you learn from her, you’ll come show me.”

He’s worthless for a week. It takes me until noon to get him out of bed, then another two hours to get him to the breakfast table. I have to call Mr. Weisman with two cancellations. I tell him Jonah has a bronchial infection. Weisman is furious.

Soer calls. I almost refuse to put her through. But Jonah knows even before I can say two words to her. He’s on his feet and bowling me over for the receiver. He’s dressed and at the door in minutes.

“We need to rehearse,” I say. “We’re in Pittsburgh next week.”

“We are rehearsing. What do you think I’m doing?”

When he comes back, after midnight, he’s ready to kill giants again. When we do rehearse, the next day, his voice sounds strong enough to heal the sin-sick world.

But the world doesn’t want healing. In June, while fishing for the Philharmonic radio broadcast, we hear Kennedy make a belated speech for civil rights. Four hours later, the NAACP’s Mississippi field secretary is shot in the back and killed in front of his home by a waiting gunman. He’d been working on a voting drive. The killer goes free. The state’s governor enters the courtroom during the trial and shakes the man’s hand.

This time, Jonah and I sing no special encores. “Tell me what we’re supposed to do, Mule. Name it and I’ll sing it.” I don’t know what we’re supposed to do. We go on doing what we’ve trained for. Holst and Brahms.

Jonah and Lisette fight over his auditioning for opera roles. The money from our mother’s insurance, which supplements our meager concert fees and helps pay our rent, is running out. Jonah grows restless with nineteenth-century German lieder recitals.

“Not yet, caro. You’re getting there. Right now, you have the perfect lieder sound.”

“But it’s getting fuller, fleshier. You said so yourself.”

“You’re building an audience out there. Getting good notices. Take your time. Enjoy it. You only begin life once.”

“My voice is in bloom.”

“And it will be for another thirty years, with care. You’re almost ready.”

“I’m ready now. So ready, I can’t tell you. I need to audition. I don’t care where. I can land some stage part.”

“You’re not singing ‘some stage part.’ Not while I’m your teacher. When you make your debut, you’ll do it right.”

“You’re afraid I might land a plum, aren’t you?”

“You are a plum, chum. Jonie? Train for the day.”

He chafes, but he does as she tells him. He trusts this woman, after everything. “She’s my only real friend,” he tells me.

“I see,” I say.

The two of us, constantly in transit, parading in front of rooms of people, are at the mercy of her slightest shift. Jonah’s old Juilliard cronies — those who have stayed in town, those who haven’t trickled into education or insurance — try to drag him up to Sammy’s for reunions. Brian O’Malley, singing in choruses at City Center, still presides. Jonah is that circle’s only remaining lottery ticket to real fame. But they feel the change in him as well, the darkening. We see no one else close to us aside from Da and Ruth, only rooms full of admiring strangers. Our only calls are from Mr. Weisman and Lisette Soer.

We do socialize with strangers. Lisette drags us to parties — massively cultured affairs where whole social solar systems of spinning planets spread through the rooms, orbits that range from the day’s reigning sun at the center to the furthermost icy asteroids. Jonah and I are usually banished out somewhere between Neptune and Pluto. At one, a guest addresses us in blundering Spanish, assuming we’re two self-improving Puerto Ricans.

We’re dressing for one of these pointless parties, a reception for The Ballad of Baby Doe, when I balk. “What the hell are we going to another one of these for, Jonah? Three hours, minimum. That’s three hours we could be learning new rep.”

“Mule, jobs come from these things.”

“Jobs come from people who hear us perform.”

“These parties are crawling with the most powerful musical people in this country.” He could be Lisette talking. “They need to see us up close.”

“Why?”

“To make sure we’re not savages. They don’t want us sneaking up behind Western civilization and mugging it at gunpoint.”

“I’m a whole lot darker up close, you know.”

My brother, in black jacket, fiddles with his tie. He smoothes down his lapels and inspects the results. He turns and glides my way until his face hovers inches from mine. He peers at me, inspecting the problem. “Huh! Would you look at that! How come you never told me this, Joey?”

“You’ve got a lot of confidence in folks with a bad track record.”

“Come on, brother. We’re uplift. We’re moral advancement. The coming fashion.”

“Don’t want to be the coming fashion, Jonah.”

He cranes his neck back. “What do you want?”

“I just want to play the music I know how to play.”

“Come on, Joey.” He grabs my strip of tie out of my hand, wraps it around my neck, and begins tying. “We’ll tell them you’re my chauffeur or something.”

At one evening gathering in late June, I’m standing in a corner, smiling preemptively, counting the rests until Jonah’s ready to leave. Over the burr of the conversation, like a radio station bleeding through static, something hits me. The party’s sound track switches in my head from ground to figure. The jazz coming through our host’s expensive speakers is state-of-the-art Village, the innovations Jonah and I so recently learned to follow.

I listen, the melody slipping me, like a name too familiar to recover. I close my eyes and surrender to this agonizing sense of known unknown. I’m sure I’ve heard the piece, tracing in advance its every modulation, but just as sure it’s nothing I could have heard before. I drift to the turntable. The prospect of cheating kills all chance of naming that tune.

A tall guy in green jacket and plastic horn-rims, skinny and pale even by these parties’ standards, stands by the hi-fi equipment, nodding in time to the music. “What is this?” I surprise us both with my urgency.

“Ah! That’s my man Miles.”

“Davis?” The trumpeter who dropped out of Juilliard ten years before we started and who went on to turn bebop cool. The man who, just a few years earlier, was beaten by police and jailed for standing outside a club where he was slated to play. A man so dark, I’d cross the street if I saw him coming.

“Who else?” Green Jacket says.

“Friend of yours?” First-name basis. A fair assumption, at this party of music’s elite.

But the face behind the horn-rims turns hostile. “I dig the music, man. You have problems with that?”

I back off, palms up, looking around for my big brother. Who does this skinny, pale guy think he is? Even I could beat him senseless. My rage builds, knowing all it can do is back off. This punk owes me an apology, one he expects me to offer him. But all the while, it eats at me: more grating than my humiliation by this white Negro. The music. I need to know how I know it. I’ve heard lots of Miles Davis, but never this. Yet these scorched chord clusters, modal, atavistic, play through my head as if I wrote them. Then it dawns on me: transcription. The piece is not for trumpet; it’s for guitar. It isn’t Miles I recognize. It’s Rodrigo.

I take the record sleeve from the pale guy’s hands. My excitement keeps him from taking a punch at me. I fumble with the cardboard, wondering if two independent people can stumble on the same fact independently, like those souls wandering in the scientific wilderness Da used to tell us about over dinner. The sleeve calls the music Sketches of Spain. I’m the last man on earth to hear of it: a Juilliard School dropout’s treatment of Aranjuez. Music has to sit around for at least a hundred years before I get it. It feels to me at least that long since Wilson Hart and I sat down to see what was hiding in this tune, more than a century since we played four-hand and I learned to improvise.

Will was right about the Reconquista, right about the uses this tune could be put through. Yet everything about these trumpet-led sketches is different from what Will and I made that day — everything but the theme. The lines play back and forth from Andalusia to the Sahara and southward, all cultures picking one another’s pockets, not to mention the pockets of those who only stand and listen.

I listen, in tears, not caring if this white Negro sees me. I hear the loneliest man I’ll ever meet, transcribed from his world into another, loving a music that had no home, huddled in a practice room writing orchestral suites he knew would be the ridicule of any group he showed them to. And he showed them to me. A man who made me promise to write down the tune inside me. And to date, I’ve written down not a single note — exactly what’s in me.

I hear the fact in every reworked Spanish note: I failed to become my friend’s friend. I don’t know why. I haven’t tried to contact him since our good-bye, and I know I won’t, not even when we go home tonight, my heart full of the man. I don’t know why. I know exactly why. That’s okay, brother Joe. Let every soul praise God in his own fashion. This is my way: lieder recitals in Hartford and Pittsburgh, and Upper East Side dress-up balls full of the musical elite. The cardboard record sleeve shakes in my hands. Andalusia via East St. Louis washes out of the speakers, the trumpet discovering its inevitable line, and all I can do is stand here, shaking my head, sobbing. “It’s okay,” I tell Green Jacket, his glare turned to fear. “It’s cool. There isn’t a horse alive that’s purebred.”

We see Da and Ruth at least once a week, up in Morningside, for Friday dinner, if we’re not on the road performing. Ruth’s growing up fast, under the care of our father and his fifty-year-old housekeeper, Mrs. Samuels, against whom Ruthie now wages continuous war. She has a pack of girlfriends I can’t keep straight, who’ve tried to fix her hopelessly hybrid hair into a slightly limp globe and who dress her up in a shiny, vinyl way that Mrs. Samuels calls “criminal.”

Ruth’s all set to go to college in the fall, over at NYU Uptown, in University Heights, where she’s planning to study history. “History?” Jonah asks, surprised. “What possible use is there in studying that?”

“Not all of us can be as useful as you are, Jonah,” she mimics in her best FM announcer style.

We meet most of her inner circle one night, when they come by to drag Ruth to the movies, three black-dressing girls. The lightest of them makes Ruthie look vaguely Latina. They can barely contain their mirth at me and Jonah, and they start shrieking the moment Ruth follows them out the apartment and pulls the door shut. Ruth grows tighter with them until, over Da’s objections, the weekend outings become regular and she’s rarely there anymore when Jonah and I do make it uptown for Friday dinner. Over the course of the summer, we manage a full reunion only three times. But all four of us, and Mrs. Samuels, too, are sitting eating together in the same room in early August when Da announces, “We are going to Washington!”

Jonah is eating latke off the tip of his knife. “Who do you mean ‘we,’ Da?”

“We. Us. This whole family. Everyone.”

“First I’ve heard.”

“What’s in Washington?” I ask.

“Lots of white marble,” Ruth answers.

“There will be a great objection movement.”

Jonah and I exchange shrugs. Mrs. Samuels clucks. “You boys haven’t heard about the march? Where have you been keeping yourselves?”

Turns out everyone has been alerted but us. “Jesus, you two. There are leaflets all over town!” Ruthie shows off a little metal button, which cost her twenty-five cents and which is funding the enterprise. She’s bought one for each of us. I put mine on. Jonah does coin tricks with his.

Da holds up ten fingers. “The one-hundred-year marking of the Emancipation.”

“Which freed no one, of course,” our sister says. Da lets his gaze fall.

Jonah raises his eyebrows and scans the table. “Someone? Anyone? Please.”

Ruthie volunteers. “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Mr. A. Philip Randolph has organized—”

“I see,” Jonah says. “And might anyone here know exactly when this manifestation is planned?”

Da lights up again. “We go down on the twenty-eighth. You come stay here the night before, so we can catch the early bus they are sending down from Columbia.”

Jonah flicks me a look. Mine confirms his. “Can’t make it, Da.”

Our father, the solver of cosmic puzzles, looks more confused than I’ve ever seen him. “What do you mean?”

“They’re busy,” Ruth sneers.

“We’re booked,” Jonah says.

“You have a concert? There’s no concert for August twenty-eighth on the list you gave to me.”

“Not a concert, really. Just a musical obligation.”

Da scowls. He looks like the famous bust of Beethoven, only angrier. “What kind of an obligation?”

Jonah doesn’t say. I could break rank, say I have no obligation. I’ll march for jobs and freedom. The instant lasts so long, all my crossed loyalties turn murderous. Then it passes, and I lose my chance of saying anything.

“You should give up this musical obligation. You should go with us for this March on Washington.”

“Why?” Jonah asks. “I don’t get it.”

“What’s not to get?” Ruthie says. “Everybody’s going.”

“This is civil rights,” Da tells him. “This concerns you.”

“Me?” Jonah points at his chest. “How?” Trying to force Da to say what he has never, in our lives, come out and said.

“This march is the right thing to do. I am going. Your sister is going.” Ruth fiddles with her twenty-five-cent Freedom March button, incriminated.

“Da!” Jonah says. I stand and start stacking dirty plates. “Are you getting political on us in your old age?”

Da looks past us, a quarter of a century. “This is not political.”

“And your father isn’t old,” Mrs. Samuels says.

Ruth glares at the woman. “What’s wrong with politics?”

A week after the disastrous dinner, Jonah comes back late from Lisette Soer’s. Something has happened. He stands in our doorway, wavering. At first, I think he’s told her we aren’t going to her little gathering after all, that we have to go to Washington with our family for a march that concerns us. Perhaps they’ve fought over this, even broken. I want to support him, to tell him how good he has always been. As good as his voice. Maybe even better. But his stare stops me.

“Well.” His voice sounds shaky and untrained. “It’s happened. She’s having a kid.”

I think, She’s seduced someone even younger than he is. Then I figure it out. “She’s pregnant?” Jonah doesn’t even acknowledge. I’m just distraction while he scans the apartment for a surface that will hold his weight. “Are you sure that you’re…”

He stops me with his eyebrows. “You trying to save my good name, Mule?”

I make him lime juice in hot water and sit on the floor across from him. It’s not what I think.

“A baby, Mule. Can you imagine!” He sounds like the boy who once scribbled the “Ode to Joy” under a photo filled with stars. “I told her, ‘The perfect thing about marrying me is that I can pass for the father, whatever color the kid is.’” His eyes gleam as if he’s onstage. His nostrils flare with that crazed intensity she has taught him. “You can’t say that about everybody, Joey!” He snickers and drops the cup. It shatters, and he laughs even harder. I clean up the mess while Jonah keeps talking. “She’s gone insane. Off her nut. She just kept screaming, ‘Do you know what this will do to my voice?’”

He calls her repeatedly over the next few days but gets no answer. “She’s doing Così again. I’m going to go wait for her afterward.”

“Jonah. Don’t be crazy. A black guy waiting out on the street by the Met stage door? We don’t have the bail money.”

I talk him into waiting for her soiree, that intimate gathering of one hundred of her closest friends that keeps us from marching on Washington with Da and Ruth. By the time we arrive at the Verdian nightmare, things are in full swing. Lisette moves around the room in a violet strapless sheath that hangs to her by animal magic. She looks as if she’s never been touched by man. She flits from guest to guest, spreading license and joy — all but belting out the aria that will fatally break her weakened heart.

I know with one look into the room. We should never have come. We slink to the drinks table, keeping together. A black man in black-tie regalia stands behind the table. He takes our orders, all three of us avoiding eyes. Jonah’s glance keeps darting out to his walking secret, waiting for a chance to corner her. She hits a lull in her rounds, and, cutting through the room’s cocktail haze, he materializes at her side. Her hands go out to push on his chest, but I can’t read the gesture. The room is riddled with conversation on all sides: a dozen manic topics crawling over one another. But raised on counterpoint and drifting near, I pick his tenor line out of the chorus of noise.

“Are you okay?”

“Brilliant. Why do you ask?”

“Do you think you should be—”

“That’s Regina Resnik over there. Isn’t she lovely? I’m so glad she’s gone over to mezzo. It so suits her. Come with me, boy. I’ll introduce you.”

“Lisette. Stop it. I’ll kill you. I swear it.”

“Ooh. Where’d you learn all that fire?”

They lean against the wall, each aping casual. Both whisper, but even the whispers of a trained voice carry. He grips her wrist. On the wall behind Lisette hangs a photo of her as Dido, singing “When I Am Laid in Earth.” “Talk to me,” he orders.

“Relax. There’s nothing to worry about. Drink up. Enjoy yourself.”

“Lisette. You’re not going through this by yourself. I can take care of the child while you enter your prime. Then I’ll be hitting my own stride while you…”

“While I what? Say what you were going to say, little boy. While I go into my decline?”

“You’ve told me yourself: There’re no limits to the career I might have. I’m a good bet, Lisette. I can keep you comfortable.”

“You’ll protect me — is that what you’re saying? You’ll take care of me and watch out for my poor little offspring when I’m old?”

“I know you think I’m still a child. But someday, we’ll be the same age.”

“Someday you’ll be the age I am now. And you’ll hear how young you sound.”

“Marry me, Lisette. I can be a good husband. I can be a good father to this child.”

“Husband? Father?” She gags on his words.

A trio of riotous high voices approaches them, all talking at once. “What do we have here? Private lessons? Tête-à-tête? You two look like you’re about to go do something illegal.”

Lisette breezes off, turning the trio into a quartet. I cross to Jonah. “Let’s get out of here.”

His head wobbles. But he’s not ready to go yet. He stalks her through the crowded apartment, clumsy, upwind, spooking the prey every time before he can close in on her. I stand on the edge of the gathering, drowning in the general hilarity. There’s no saving him. He catches her at last, by accident, when she turns in the wrong direction. He takes her by the upper arm. “We can do this any way you want. But I told you, Lisette. I’m not leaving you to deal with this yourself.”

“And I told you, Mr. Strom. Everything’s fine. There’s no problem. Do you understand me? No problem! ”

I’m no longer the only one listening. Nearby conversations fall quiet. Lisette makes a comic show of patting Jonah’s head, to chuckles all around. Jonah does his best to grin. As soon as we can do so without disgrace, we run. He swears at her all the way home.

He wants to call her first thing the next day. I make him wait three hours, until 9:00A.M. She tells him again, over the phone: There is no problem. She has to say it a few times and ways for him to understand. No problem: no baby.

He takes longer to hang up the phone than Mahler takes to resolve a chord. He calls my name, although I’m standing right there. “Joey. I don’t understand.”

“False alarm. You both should be relieved.”

“That’s not it. She’d have said that.”

I’m not slow. Just stupid. “She lost it.” I hear the words. Lost it, in her carelessness.

“When? Thirty minutes before the party? That’s what gave her the halo glow?” He wants me to shut up, to never say anything again. But silence will drive him mad. “She’s going to get somebody to do it, Joey. If she’s not on her way to do it right now. She loves my people. But she’d rather kill my baby than—”

“Jonah. Look. Even if it is yours—”

“It’s mine.”

“Even if… You still don’t know that she…”

He knows everything. Knows where we’ve lived our whole lives.

Da calls to tell us what we missed down in Washington. “The whole world at once, walking down Independence Avenue!” Jonah listens to every detail, indifferent, frantic for distraction.

Time confirms Lisette Soer. No problem: no baby. “Taken care of,” Jonah tells me. Something in him has been taken care of, too. The gap in their ages closes, faster than he predicted to her. He sits on the piano bench, chin on his knees, fetal. But older than she is.

“She didn’t want to lose her peak career years,” I say. Every word makes him hate me. “She didn’t want hormones wrecking her voice.” Didn’t want a baby. Didn’t want a husband twelve years younger. Didn’t want a husband. Didn’t want him.

He nods, rejecting my every sop. “She doesn’t want black. She doesn’t want a kid with lips. Why take chances with your life? Once black is in the blood, it’s Russian roulette.”

At night, he smashes things. He hurls a plate of spaghetti I’ve made out the window. It shatters in the street, almost hitting a pedestrian. Now that we need a road trip, we have no bookings. Not that he could sing. The top of his range drops two full steps. He goes out alone and returns reeking of reefer. I chat with him until bedtime about nothing. Jonah, his slack face unrecognizable, sits and giggles. I jabber to a man who can’t talk back, all the while terrified that the smoke he’s inhaling has already ravaged those vocal cords.

A week later, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham explodes. We see it on the television, then in the two newspapers we buy the next day. The church is a spew of brick and slag, glass and twisted metal. I’m standing on the scorched, frozen sidewalk outside our house that day eight years ago, while the car waits, trying to recognize my life. I stare at this new photo, swallowing down the taste that rises into my throat, half memory, half prediction.

The bombers have waited for the church’s annual Youth Sunday. The explosion rips out the church basement, where the children practice their parts in the special ceremony. Four girls are killed, three fourteen-year-olds and one eleven-year-old. My brother can’t stop staring at their photos, running his fingers over their beaming faces until he smears the newsprint. He’s a boy of ten, singing a euphoric duet for a church so pleased to have a little Negro singing Bach for them. He’s seeing his own little girl a decade from now, the one just taken away from him. Seeing these four dead girls: Denise, Cynthia, Carole, and Addie Mae.

Seven bombings in six months. Bloody battles roll through the streets of Birmingham, like something the United States ordinarily exports abroad. The Reverend Connie Lynch tells the world, “If there’s four less niggers tonight, then I say ‘Good for whoever planted the bomb!’” Two more black children are killed, a thirteen-year-old shot by a pair of Eagle Scouts and a sixteen-year-old murdered by a state trooper.

The nation I lived in is dead. The president speaks of law and order, justice and tranquillity. He calls on white and Negro to set aside passion and prejudice. Two months later, he, too, is dead. Malcolm says: The chickens have come home to roost.

Lisette Soer calls my brother but gets me. She wants to know why he’s missed three lessons. She wants him to call her back. The first time, I tell her Jonah’s laid up with a virus. She sends him daisies. The second time, I tell her he’s gone to Europe and won’t be back for a long time. My brother sits ten feet away, barely able to nod. Miss Soer takes the news with stunned rage. Lisa Sawyer, the brewer’s daughter from Milwaukee, calls me a lying monkey.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I tell her. But by now, this monkey has a fair idea.