The Time of Our Singing

December 1964

We’re all four home for Christmas, Ruth’s second winter vacation since starting college. This is a third of a century ago. The sixties have just started turning fab. The Billboard charts are overrun by shaggy Anglo-Saxons in Edwardian suits who’ve just discovered all the taboo chords that black Americans worked their way through decades ago. A black poet dances his way to the world heavyweight title. Ruth gives me a fan magazine devoted to this poet boxer for Christmas, and she laughs insanely when I open it. After, she gives me my real present: a picture-book history of the blues. I give her a black pullover that she asked for and that she won’t take off for the next two days, even to go to sleep.

She runs her fingers through my hair. “Why do you comb it down like that?” she asks.

“Comb?” Jonah snickers.

I don’t know what to say. “That’s the way it grows.”

“You should pick it out. You’d look much better.”

Jonah scoffs. “You got another job for him lined up?”

Something has blown up between the two of them. I blame it on the times. The hatless boy president is dead — all his delays and explanations spattered across the back of a top-down convertible. Our father is still mourning the man a year on. The man’s successor has signed civil rights into law, but way too late to head off the first of the long, hot summers to come.

Harlem starts it, and my sister is there. Five months back, a white policeman killed a Negro boy two years younger than Ruth, fewer than a dozen blocks from where our family once lived. CORE organized a protest, and a group of undergrads from NYU Uptown turned out, Ruthie, my new collegiate activist sister, among them. They started to march up Lenox, the model of peaceful demonstration. But something went wrong when the leading protesters met the police rear guard. The march came apart and madness was everywhere, before Ruth or anyone else knew what was happening.

The way she tells it to us, over Christmas dinner, it took just seconds for the street to scatter in screams. The crowd cracked open. Ruth tried to run back to the parked busses, but in the chaos, she got turned around. “Somebody shoved me. I bounced off this policeman — totally panicked — who was slipping around on the sidewalk, clubbing everything that moved. He came down with his baton, smashed me right here.” She shows me, grabbing my upper arm.

More terrified than hurt, she plunged into a sea of twenty-year-olds, all running for their lives. Somehow, she ran through bedlam and found her way home. Even five months afterward, she can’t say how. One more Harlem child dead, and hundreds of marchers wounded. For two days and nights, the streets overflowed. Then the fire spread to Bedford-Stuyvesant and, down the following weeks of a bad summer, to Jersey City and Philadelphia. All of this has come to pass just a year after a quarter of a million people — Da and Ruth lost among them — descended on the Mall to hear the greatest act of improvised oratory in history. “‘I have a dream,’” my sister says, shaking her head. “More like a nightmare, if you ask me.”

After the riot died out to nothing, Ruth took her smashed upper arm back to University Heights, where she promptly changed her major from history to prelaw. “Only law can leverage what’s coming, Joey.” History could no longer predict what was happening to her.

History, today, is just the four of us. Da paces in his study. Jonah lies on the floor playing with a new sliding puzzle Da has given him for Christmas. I sit on the couch next to Ruth, who has been gearing up toward some question all day. “What do you remember about Mama?” she asks me at last, still trying to fix my hair. Like requesting an old dance number. What do you remember? She really wants to know, although she’s already decided.

Jonah and I have scheduled this break in our barnstorming — eighteen stops in every drafty auditorium across the Pacific Northwest — to try to reconnect with our family. It’s been months since I’ve sat and talked to Ruth. She’s lived through a riot, changed her major, taken to dressing exclusively in tight, dark clothes. She’s exploding with ideas she’s picked up at school. She’s reading books by famous social theorists I’ve never even heard of. She’s passed me by in every way but musically. She feels like my unknown, exotic, well-traveled cousin. Once she was almost my age. Now she’s amused by my doddering senility.

“About Mama?” I answer. Mama’s old trick: Always repeat the question. It buys you time. “You know. Nothing you wouldn’t recognize.”

Ruth stops fiddling with my hair. She picks up the blues book, my present from her, and flips through it. “I mean from before my time.”

“You should ask the man.” I point my thumb at our father, who paces with excitement in an oval between the sterile dining room and his chaos-infested study in a state of quantum perturbation. Ruth just rolls her eyes. She’s right: Da is already unreachable, halfway back to whatever dimension Mama now occupies. He knows every message our mother’s memory might have for us, but he can’t give them to us. Now and then as he paces, he calls out a few private syllables of insight for no one, then collapses at his desk to jot down a stream of hostage symbols. Recently, his age-old enigma has thickened. Fitch and Cronin, two Princeton-based acquaintances of his working over in Brookhaven, have just shattered the past: Temporal symmetry is violated at the subatomic level. The world’s equations are not cleanly reversible. Da paces about the first floor of this new, alien house in a wide, closed loop, shaking his head, singing, “Ah, sweet mystery of life!” The tune has started to grate on our collective nerves.

It’s just the four of us now, in a house belonging to no one. The old home in Hamilton Heights is banished to some planet of memory none of us can reach. Our father has bought this place, just over the Washington Bridge, in Fort Lee, New Jersey, on the colossal miscalculation that we children might take this transplanted nest to heart. He can’t see us anymore. This neighborhood makes all three of his offspring look like a foreign exchange program. Ruth, in particular, looks like a UN delegate from one of those newly decolonized countries no one’s heard of.

Even this holiday reunion is a sad fabrication. Ruth has found a wreath and a few lights, but no one had the heart to decorate. The first night of Hanukkah descended into TV dinners. For Christmas, we order take-out Chinese. The day’s angel messengers are off on some other hillside, miles up the Palisades, announcing the mysterious birth to those flock-watching shepherds who’ve managed to remain more easily taken in by good news.

This is the last time we’ll be together like this. Every time is something’s last, but even I can feel this holiday’s scattering. Ruth sits on the couch, nursing her arm, the bruise still tender almost half a year on. Something I can’t name has been happening to her while she’s been away at college. Something happening all across the country, and already it’s moving too fast for me to see. The country’s clock has slowed to a stop, and mine races on. Mama always said I was born antique. “This one’s born ancient,” she once whispered to Da, after she thought I was asleep. “And he’s going to get older and older every time humanity turns him around.”

Now I’ve become Ruth’s grandfather. She looks at me, begging for memories only I am aged enough to reach. I’m her only reliable link to a room that time’s sliding walls have sealed her off from. She’s changed while we’ve been touring. Never again Ruthie, Root. She has on tight black jeans and that black V-necked pullover, her fine curly hair combed out unsuccessfully on her head, as if she’s swum halfway across some fast-running stream of fashion before panicking and swimming back. Her body has turned perfect since the last time I saw her. I look away now when she leans toward me, asking, “What were we all like, when I was small?”

“You could sight-sing before you could see. You were the best, Ruth. You could sound like anyone.”

We’ve not sung together, as a family, this entire vacation. It’s all any of us have thought about, but no one’s brought it up. Jonah and I practice daily, but that doesn’t count. The only other notes are Da’s, his million looped refrains of “Ah, Sweet Mystery”: “Ah, sweet mystery…of life… At last I’ve found you!” To which we kids add no harmonies.

“Joey, you dope!” Ruth’s accent has drifted over the river toward Brooklyn, as if other people have brought her up. Which they have, I guess. “I don’t need to know about me!”

The two of us look to Jonah, the only one truly old enough for solid data. He lies on the floor, toying with the sliding puzzle, humming to himself the glimpse of arpeggiated paradise from the end of Fauré’s Requiem. Jonah’s eyebrows go up at our aimed silence— Hmm? — as if he hasn’t heard us. He has registered every word. “Altos!” he explodes. “Vee need more altos!” Time-honored mockery of Da, from our earliest years. The accent is so good that even Da himself stops pacing around the dining room to smile at us from out of what was once his body.

“Altos!” I come in, a dutiful imitation. “Ven, voman, you are going to make me some altos?”

Ruth, the real mimic, grins at the canonic gag. But she adds no line of her own. Ruth, the alto, hasn’t sung a note since she went away to school. She pinches up her cheeks in frustration. “No! No, you stupid crackers.” She slaps the sofa with an open palm. She grabs my forearm, leans in, and bites it. “What do you remember about Mama?”

This is my sister’s only holiday question — my sister, who was barely ten when the world she wants to know about came to its early end. She was the first to discover the blaze, where all our photos burned. Now every memory she has has drifted, unreliable, except for her memory of the fire itself. She thinks Jonah and I still have entry rights. But she’s not even wrong. Our sister wants back in to a place with no dimension, no place of entry, not even the one she asks us to invent for her now.

I wait for Jonah to answer. Ruth prods him with her toe. But he’s gone back to humming Fauré’s sickly sweet burial Mass and sliding around his puzzle squares. It falls to me, in this life, to make sure no one I love goes unanswered. This Christmas, more than ever, that is a losing proposition. I need to start looking for a better job. “You want stories from before you were born?”

“Before. After. I’m not in a position to be picky.” My sister talks to her hands, which dethread a tasseled pillow that she picked out for Da as a gift. It’s gold and burgundy, nothing she’d let near her own apartment. “God’s sake, Joey! Give me whatever you have!” Her voice is a jagged alto gasp. “Mama’s blurring on me. I can’t hold her.”

The things I know for sure, my sister doesn’t need. The things she needs from me, I’m unsure of. I root through the jumbled shoe box of the past, all my own snapshots burned. A midday shadow falls across the couch, between us. Mama’s here. I can see her: that face I once mistook for my own reflection, its mouth the idea of mouths, its eyes, all eyes. But she has blurred on me, too. I’m no longer certain of her features. With nothing to check against, I can’t be sure what I’ve done to her. “She looked like you, Ruth. A slightly taller, fuller you.”

Jonah just grunts. Ruth looks down, upset and skeptical. “What did she sound like?”

The timbre of her voice is in the bones of my skull. It’s packed so close, I can’t get to it. The sound is second nature, but to try to describe it would be worse than a cheap recording. Not this; not that. I can’t say what my mother sounded like, any more than I can hear myself sing. Not even Jonah could reproduce her.

“She… I don’t know. She used to call us ‘JoJo.’ The two of us.” I kick my motionless brother. “Like we were one child with two bodies.”

“I remember.” Ruth squirms in place. This isn’t what she wants.

“She was a fantastic teacher. She used to praise and correct us in the same breath. ‘JoJo, that’s wonderful. That sounded just about perfect. Try it a few more times, and I bet that octave leap will be right there.’”

Jonah just nods. He has never been big on comprimario roles. When he’s not center stage these days, he doesn’t bother coming onstage at all.

“Did she have students?”

“All the time. Talented adults, coming back to music. Teens and older kids, from around the neighborhood.”

“Black or white?” All my sister asks is what the world asks her. It’s the only question of any interest, over in the Bronx, at NYU Uptown. In the twitchy streets of Harlem. The old neighborhood.

I turn on the sofa, sidesaddle, to look out the front bay window. No whiter street. I imagine myself a child of this neighborhood, a suburban boy, biking through its manicured blocks, tossing a pigskin across its tracts, party to a fantastic mass evasion. Our parents couldn’t have lived here if they’d wanted. I couldn’t have walked down these streets as a boy and lived. Even now, for this briefest family visit, some neighbor is already on the phone to the police. Tonight, if I walk around the block, they’ll stop me for questioning.

It strikes me how rarely Jonah and I left our house, even in the city. We stayed home, huddled over the piano, radio, and record player. Mama had to force us out. I count up how many of our childhood tormentors were black, how many white, how many as ambiguous as we were. We covered most bases. “Both, I think. Mostly black?”

I glance at Jonah, the only real authority. That one-year difference between us was almost an eon back then. Jonah sets down his puzzle and, in a deep gospel bass, intones, “Red and yellow, black and white, they are equal in His sight. Jesus loves the little students of this world.”

Ruth laughs, despite herself. She leans over him and slugs him in his softening underbelly. “You’re a complete asshole. You do know that?”

It’s supposed to be playful. He looks up at her impassively. I blunder forward, before there’s an incident. “She was still taking lessons herself, you know. At Columbia, when we were little. She even studied for a little while with Lotte Lehmann.”

“Is that supposed to be something special?”

I fall back, mouth open. “Lotte Lehmann?” All I can think to say. A name I know better than my own blood relatives. “You don’t…”

“Naw,” Jonah says, standing and stretching. “Nothing special. Just some famous diva bitch.”

Ruth’s ignoring him. It’s the most productive thing she can do with him these days. “What made Mama get interested in classical? Can you think of any reason why she would choose…” Ruth circles the question, unwilling to go to war over something she’s not sure she can win. “How good was she, anyway?”

I want to say, How dare you ask? “Don’t you know? You must have heard her just about every night for a decade!” The words come out harsher than I mean them. Ruth takes them across the face. I start again, softer. “She was…” The voice against which I measure every other. The sound that my sound strove for. A richness not even Jonah has learned to produce, one that came from giving up everything. “Her voice was warm. High and clear, but full-blooded. Never a hint of a slavishness.” I hear the word before I can suppress it.

“Sun coming up on a field of lavender,” Jonah says. And I remember why I’ll always do anything for him.

It almost satisfies Ruth. But she nurses a bigger demon, one that only gets hungrier when the smaller ones are fed. “What was she like?”

Even Jonah looks up, hearing the edge in her voice. I know just what Ruth wants one of us to say. But I can’t give her the Mama she needs. “When we were little, she used to walk us around, each of my feet on top of hers. Each step we took was a beat of a favorite tune. As if the song she sang was the motor of this enormous walking machine.”

My sister’s face is a spoiled watercolor. “I remember. ‘I’m Tram-pin ’. I’m Tram-pin’.’”

“She cut out little stars from silver paper and stuck them up on our bedroom ceiling, in the shapes of constellations. She got us growing potatoes and lima beans in water glasses. She was a perpetual sparrow-rescuer. We had an eyedropper always filled with sterilized milk, ready for every maimed creature between Broadway and Amsterdam.”

“She used to beat us boys with nail-studded planks,” Jonah confides. “She’d softened a good deal by the time you came along.”

“That’s not true,” I say. “Never anything longer than carpet tacks.”

Ruth throws up her arms in disgust and stands up to leave. I hold her and bring her back down. She sits, with a little persuading. There’s no place else for miles around for her to go.

I stroke her bruised arm. “She’d fret for two days if the subway attendant looked at her the wrong way while she was putting her dime in the turnstile. But she was tougher than Jesus. She could hold her breath longer than she could hold a grudge. She loved having people over. At least to sing.”

None of this is any use to Ruth. “How black was she?” she asks at last. She studies my face for any cheating, a pitiless external examiner.

Blackis now the going term. Ruth started using it not long after hearing the young John Lewis at the March on Washington. Negro is for gradualists, appeasers, and Baptist ministers. Black means business, and it’s taken hold, after what’s happened this year in Harlem, Jersey City, and Philadelphia. The country keeps changing the problem’s name every few years, like a liar elaborating his excuse. I’m not sure what the word for mulatto is at the moment. It’ll be something new a year or so from now.

I don’t even glance at Jonah. I know his answer. “How black?” One drop, I want to tell her. That’s the going rule. No scale, no fractions, no how much. Not something this country lets you have degrees of. The only shade Americans see: One spurned size fits all. Ruth’s known as much since the age of ten. But now she’s decided there’s more to know. Another scale, one that measures degree. I meet her gaze. “What exactly are you asking?”

“What do you think I’m asking? Don’t be a fool, Joe.”

“Fool?”I pull my arm off her. “You can sit here asking these questions about your own mother, and you call me …”

Ruth turns her head. Her neck is the shade of beautiful polished walnut. She waves her hand, casting a fishing rod. “Okay, I’m sorry.” She won’t fight me. I’m the peacemaker, the conciliator, the crossover, the thing she won’t, yet, call me. I reach out and take her slender fingers. She turns to fix me, shaking her head a little, hurt, puzzled, needing me to be with her on this. Like, her look says, you were once.

Jonah stops his humming, but his words are almost chanted. “You mean did she talk Gullah before you were born? Did she cook chitlins and pone?”

She doesn’t even turn to look at him. “Who asked you, Tuxedo Boy? Do you have a hang-up with this? Does my asking about this make you uptight?”

Hang-up, uptight: the terms of the hour. My sister is, as ever, ahead of her time. Or at least ahead of me. A part of me, the white, simplifying part, wants to keep Da from hearing us. But I won’t hush her; I won’t drop my voice. We died when Mama did; no one left to protect.

A supplicant hang of my sister’s head, and I’m her brother again. Ruth needs from me what no one else in the world can give. From those few extra years I lived with our mother, she thinks I might know the secret of what black is. She knows Jonah won’t hand it over. But me: She imagines I can show her how to slip into it, like an old chemise of Mama’s Ruth has found hanging in a closet of her dreams. My refusal to tell her is simple perversity.

“What can I tell you, Ruth? Her father was a doctor. One of a couple dozen in all of Philadelphia. More broadly educated than Da. Her family was better off than his. You know what they lived with, Ruth. What’s the secret membership? What else do you want me to say?”

I’m telling her, saying already, by all I can’t say. Very black. Blacker than her mule sons can enter into. Black inflicted and black held on to. Black by memory and invention. The daily defensive backing off and smiling, twenty generations of remembered violence that doubled you over even when you thought you weren’t doubled. Black in the way that is the sole property of high yellow. The day never passed when she didn’t store it up, when she didn’t have to touch its protecting core. But every bit as light in skin, hair, features, and all things visible as her mixed-race daughter, who hates herself for not being simpler.

“Black, Ruth. She was black.”

“Black’s all right,” Jonah says. “Some of my best genes are black.”

Ruth says nothing. She’s turning over the possibility: The truth is too monochrome and stupid to make it out. She makes some massive reverse Middle Passage, getting no closer to that coming future our parents imagined than this starter bungalow in the suburban desert of New Jersey, where none of us can live.

“You don’t know, Joey. A year and a half, back and forth across the Harlem River from University Heights… I sit there in those classes full of crew-cut white business majors, all set to carry their fiancées back home to Levittown. The nice ones look at me like I’m neutered, and the cretins come on to me like I’m some kind of exotic barnyard lust machine. Or they want to know why I talk the way I do. They ask me if I’m adopted. If I’m Persian, Pakistani, Indonesian. Or they’re afraid to ask, afraid to offend me.”

“Tell them you’re a Moor,” Jonah said. “Works every time.”

She’s looking at me, her eyes welling, like I can help save her. Save her from America, or at least from her oldest brother. “Nobody at school knows what to make of me. Gangs of those Irish-Italian-Swede dumpling girls talk to me slowly, through foot-long smiles, swearing how close they’ve always been to their domestic help. But at the Afro Pride meetings, there’s always some sister grumbling out loud about infiltration by funny-featured, white-talking spies.” She nods her head, quizzing me: Right? Right? Whatever our parents taught us to recognize in ourselves must have been wrong.

This is what she’s learning at school. Every day, she braves a neighborhood that’s fleeing from her and her nonexistent kind. Last year’s residents are halfway to White Plains by now. The university has tried to salvage the uptown campus, hiring Marcel Breuer to stamp it with pedigreed European high modernism. But all the slabs of brutal concrete, grafted onto McKim, Mead & White’s Italianate arcades, only make it obvious to everyone that the game is over. Soon University Heights will sell its buildings to a “transitioning” community college for pennies on the dollar.

And my sister knows she’s to blame. I put my hand on her shoulder, the safe top knob of the collarbone. Five inches up from where that policeman grazed her. “Ruthie. Don’t let them beat you up. You aren’t the one, you know.”

“Don’t patronize me, Joey. What would you know about it?”

“Joey?” Jonah says. “Joey’s an authority. He wrote the damn book. Gray Like Me. ”

Ruth just snorts. My sister thinks I’m over the line, right up there as light as Jonah, just because I trot out onstage with him night after night, to the applause of near-blind octogenarians. It doesn’t occur to her that Jonah makes me look darker than I’ve ever made her.

“What would I know about it? Nothing, Ruth. Totally ignorant.”

“Well, where the hell were the two of you, then, while I was growing up? You could have run interference for me. You could have told me what…”

I can’t answer. More time has passed than I can account for.

“Ron yoor own race,” Jonah says. “Ron yoor own race.” I jerk up and shush him, hoping Da hasn’t heard him go this far. My family is coming undone, faster than it did that first time. Ruth’s words swing in the air in front of us. She’s past the first accusation and is on to a new one, below skin, up against bone. Where were we when she was growing up? Off somewhere, singing. Who said we should spend our childhoods away? Why can’t I remember her between the ages of eight and eighteen? This woman disappears into no place I recognize. Worse by far than the one I lived through. The identical place, changed by the run of a mere few years.

My sister opens her throat, but nothing comes out. She tries again. At last, the rasp catches. “Jesus Christ. It gets so old.”

“It was old when Mama was young.”

“What were they thinking?”

Jonah says, “I’m not sure thinking is the operative word.”

I inhale. “They wanted us to grow up believing…” But that’s not quite right. “They thought they could raise us beyond…”

The bile in her throat spits out in an acid laugh. “ Beyond?They got that one right, didn’t they?”

My eyebrows work away on nothing. “I must have been seven before I saw how different Da’s and Mama’s tones were.”

“You, Joey, are beyond beyond.” My sister shakes her head, mourning me. But around her eyes, the folds of recognition.

“They wanted us to be what happens next. To transcend. They didn’t want us to see race. Didn’t even want us to use the word.”

“ Dadidn’t,” Ruth says.

Jonah’s gone back to his slider puzzle, to Fauré. It makes Ruth cover her ears and shriek. When she stops, I say, “They were very big on the future. They thought the thing was never going to get here unless we leapt into it with both feet.”

“We leapt into something all right.” Ruth wrinkles her nose. “Soft, warm, foul-smelling? Is that the future we’re talking?”

“Parents have done worse,” I say.

“What did she do with her blackness? After she married. After she had us three.”

This blackness, a misplaced trinket — a ring of keys, a scribbled note. Jonah hears what I do. “It’s probably still around here somewhere.”

Ruth presses her head. “Well, you two seem to have set it down somewhere you can’t find.”

My fault, everything I can’t deliver to her. But she’s my sister, every drop, and there’s nowhere she can go without my finding her. I circle around the one thing, that fact I ought to tell her, even though she may read it totally wrong. Yet whatever Ruth might make of it, I have to give it over. For it’s already hers.

“It’s true. She used to laugh more, early on. Dance around. Like there was music all the time, even when there wasn’t.”

Ruth bobs her head, taking my concession, for which she gives thanks. Neither of us owns this woman’s memory. But as Ruth’s head bobs its short, shallow dips, I see pure Mama. She enters into our mother without knowing it, reincarnating her, body for body, nod for nod. She moves the way Mama used to move on those nights when our family sang, five lines flying in all directions.

Then Ruth holds still. “What happened to her?” Her voice falls off to nothing. For a beat, I misunderstand. This is the question I’ve dreamed of asking her, a hundred times a year since our mother’s death. Dreamed of asking Ruth, the one who had to look on it, up close, with a ten-year-old’s eyes, seeing the evidence, watching the house while Mama burned alive. Then I come back. She means: What happened to her, before what happened to her?

“I think…” Two notes in, I have to stop. Breathing has always been my downfall. Jonah can go for huge phrases and never break for air. I’m already gasping after a measure and a half of moderato. “I think it wore her down. Hammered from all sides, every waking minute, even when nobody said anything out loud. Her crime was worse than being black. Destroying the barriers, marrying: the worst any two people can do. This woman spit on her once, as we were coming out of the elevator to the dentist’s. Mama tried to make us think it was an accident. Can you imagine?”

“I think it was an accident, Joey,” Jonah says. “I think the woman was trying to hit you.”

“She gets spit on, and she has to keep us from thinking there’s anything wrong. Wore her out finally. More shit than even she could survive.”

“Joey said ‘shi-it,’” Ruth calls out, singsong. The best Christmas present I could give her. And her burst of delight: the best she could give me, or ever again will.

“Her face changed, when we were older. What would you call it, Jonah? Punch-drunk. Like she’d never imagined it could be so hard. She couldn’t even take us into a clothes store to outfit us for school without a security guard cornering us. No right course left, except to send us away.”

Ruth’s own face glows at the notion, as if these horrors vindicate her. She leans back on the sofa, her body relaxing into confirmation. She savors the record of our mother’s blackness, the first description of that shade where Ruth can go join her. She turns her full brown eyes on me. “How many sisters and brothers did she have? All together.”

I look at Jonah. His hands go up and his eyebrows down, Pagliaccio-style, a burlesque of innocent ignorance.

“Where do they live?”

Jonah’s on his feet. His muscle-twitch walk leads him into the kitchen for what’s left of our sesame chicken Christmas dinner. Ruth turns at his sudden departure, and I see it for a second in her face: Don’t leave me. What have I done?

“Most of them still in Philadelphia, I guess. She took us to see her mother once. Right after the war. We met in a diner. We weren’t supposed to be there. That’s all I can remember.”

Jonah comes back from the kitchen, his mouth full of chicken scooped straight out of the white cardboard delivery carton. Ruth won’t even glance at him. She speaks only to me, now. “Was that the only time?”

“Her brother was there at her funeral. You remember.”

“For God’s sake. Look at us! How can we not know our own grandparents?”

Her pitch shatters Jonah’s Buddha smile. I say, “You’d have to ask Da.”

“I’ve asked him for ten years. I ask him once every three months, and he never does anything more than grin at me. I’ve asked him every damn way I know how, and get nothing but detached, evasive crap. ‘You’ve met your grandparents already. You’ll meet them again.’ The man’s out there beyond the Crab Nebula. If the three of us disappeared for twenty years, he wouldn’t even notice until the day we showed up again. The man doesn’t care what’s happened to us or where we’re headed. He’s lost in scientific mumbo-jumbo. ‘Time isn’t a flow. Nows don’t succeed one another; they simply are.’ What kind of arrogant, intellectual, self-satisfied…”

Jonah sets down the carton of sesame chicken. Maybe he needs both hands to talk to her. Maybe he’s just finished eating. “Hey, Rootie.” Her turn to flinch at a taboo word. “Hey, squirrel.” Jonah, too, somehow believes all nows simply are. He sits down on the couch again, on Ruth’s other side. He shoves her right shoulder, an old team sport where he and I, our little sister between us, volley her body back and forth like a metronome. The game once occupied the three of us for endless stretches: a slow increase of speeds, Jonah calling out tempi, me keeping the beat, Ruthie giggling in the life-sized accelerando until we hit a crazed “Prestissimo!” Jonah pushes her now, and, caught off guard, Ruth gives a little. So I shove back, but even with this first nudge, we feel her stiffen. She isn’t playing anymore. It takes Jonah halfway to andante to give the game up for lost. I see his face, too, flash an even briefer fear: I’ll hurt you before I’ll let you refuse me.

Ruth lays an open palm on each of us, a last secret handshake of non-belonging. As little as we look or feel like siblings now, she must take us in, the only ones on this earth her exact internal shade. She pats me on the shoulder: nothing in writing, just the quick attempt to get past all this. The pat turns into a riff, one beat per syllable — the whiff of the irrepressible dotted Motown she’s been listening to exclusively these days. “How did she start fooling with music that, music that…”

“That didn’t belong to her?” Jonah’s voice floats a lazy challenge. He’s ready to go at it if she is.

“Yeah.” That showdown courage born in terror. “Yeah. That wasn’t hers.”

“Whose is it? Who owns it, girl?”

“White German intellectual Jewish guys. Like you and Da.”

Our father, back in his office, thinks we’re calling him. He calls back in mock long-suffering, “Yes? What is it this time?”

Jonah appraises Ruth, almost shaking. A Brahms vibrato. “You could chant before you could speak. You read music before you could read. You think that because somebody dragged our great-great-great-grandfather onto a European ship against his will, a thousand years of written music is off-limits?”

Ruth holds out her palms. “Fine. Cool it.”

“What music do you think she should have—”

“I said cool it. Shut the—” She breaks off. She won’t go to the brink with him. Not this vacation. Not this year. “Just tell me.” She looks away from Jonah and, by elimination, toward me. “Why did she stop singing?”

I start. “What are you talking about? She never stopped singing!”

“If she got that far in, if she was as good as you two say, if she trained… If she went through all that grief, why did she stop halfway? Why didn’t she have a career?”

“She did have a career,” Jonah says.

“Churches. Weddings.” The words issue from my sister’s mouth, dismissals. I want to tell her, If those mean nothing, you’ll never know the woman. “I’m talking about a real career. Recitals. Like the two of you have.”

“I suppose that was our fault. We kids came along and put an end to recitals.” I feel it for the first time: We curtailed her. “I’m not sure she ever felt the loss. ‘The praise is in the doing.’ That’s what she used to say.”

“What are you saying? Of course she would have felt the loss.” But before Ruth can ramp up, Da staggers out of his study, grinning, a pale, paunchy vacationer at one of those Catskills resorts, who has just shoved a perfect game of shuffleboard. His once-creased pair of black slacks, maroon argyles, gray loafers, brown belt, light blue shirt, white tee, and rust-colored cardigan mimic the clothes Mama bought for him fifteen years ago. Great loops of yarn unravel from the sweater around the indifferently patched edges. He has made himself a home in a world without other comfort. He lurches toward us, pure excitement, expecting — no, knowing — that his children will share his pleasure in this new revelation. He doesn’t make many errors in calculation. But when Da misses, he misses big.

His hands speak. Mirth spills from him, a jowled elf of empiricism. He tries out on us, his last three contacts with the outside world, the latest, most outrageous shaggy-dog story his physics has yet concocted. “It’s incredible!” His outrage and delight are children of the same mixed marriage. The silverware is mounting a sprawling performance of Faust. His eyes moisten with the thought of this latest bizarre twist to the quantum world. “Nature is not invariant with regard to time. The mirror of time has broken!”

Jonah raises both hands. “We didn’t do it, Daddy-o. We didn’t break nothing.”

Da nods and shakes his head at the same time. He takes off his glasses, daubing his eyes. He’s like a bachelor suffering the toasts of his friends the evening before his wedding. “You can’t believe this.” He holds out both palms to keep the invisible forces of nature from rushing him to the punch line. “The electrically neutral kaon.”

Jonah pinches his smirk between thumb and index finger. “Ah, yes! The Electrically Neutral Kaon. The latest British beat group, right?”

“Yes, of course! A rock group!” Our father waves his hands in front of him, canceling all jokes. He removes his glasses again and starts over. “This kaon flips between particle and antiparticle in a way that should be reversible in time. But it isn’t.” As the terminology gets more technical, the accent thickens. “Imagine! A strange particle, an antistrange particle, that can somehow tell forward from backward. The only thing in the universe that knows the difference between past and future!”

“The only thing in your universe.”

“Ruth? Again, please?”

“Everything in my universe knows the difference between past and future. Except you.”

Da nods, humoring her. “Let me explain this to you.”

Ruth is on her feet. She’s Mama, only a shade darker. Faster. “Let me explain this to you. I’m sick of this total self-absorption.”

Da looks at Jonah, his lay-world touchstone. “What’s eating her?” The slang, wrapped in his Teutonic accent, sounds like a big-band leader in a Beatle wig.

“Ruthie wants to know if she’s a Schwarze, a half Schwarze, an anti- Schwarze, or what?”

“Fucker.”

Da doesn’t hear, or pretends not to. Particles decay, irreversibly, all over my father’s face. But he remains a study in rapid calculation. He looks at his daughter, too late, and sees. “What’s this about, sweetheart?”

She’s desperate, begging, full of tears. “Why did you marry a black woman?”

Their eyes lock. He denies this sneak attack. “I did not marry a black woman. I married your mother.”

“I don’t know who you think you married. But my mother was black.”

“You mother is who she is. First. Herself, before anything.”

Ruth recoils from his present tense. She would rush into his arms for safety. “Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.”

Da wheels, danger on all sides. This is not the route down which his mind inclines. His face works up an objection: “I’m not a white man; I’m a Jew.” The hands illustrate, start to rise like a flock of meanings. But he’s smart enough to strangle them in flight. His words inch over this landscape, looking for cover. “Abraham married a black concubine. Joseph…” He points at me as if I were my namesake’s keeper. “Joseph married an Egyptian priestess. Moses said the stranger who comes to live with you, who takes up as your family, will become as one who is born in your own country. Solomon, for God’s sake! Solomon married Pharaoh’s daughter.”

I don’t know this man. Whole vanished generations, ancestors whose existence I’ve never imagined rise up from their pebble-strewn graves. My father, the protector of no doctrine, the believer in nothing but causality, turns before my eyes into an interpreter of the Torah. I can’t bear Ruth’s silence. I blurt out, “Goodman. Goodman and… Schwerner.” I surprise myself, remembering the names, even though they died just last summer — Freedom Summer, when Jonah and I were performing in Wisconsin.

“What about them?” Ruth challenges.

“Two white men. Two Jews, like Da. Like us. Two men who didn’t have the luxury…you’re talking about.”

“You wouldn’t know anything about luxury, would you, Joey? These men were no older than you two. Your age, out there on the front line. Chaney died for being black. Those other two were in the line of fire.”

My throat would make sounds, but I can’t shape them.

“The Jews can’t help us,” Ruth says. “It’s not their fight.” Her voice betrays the universe she needs from Da. The one he can’t give her.

“Not our fight? Not our fight?” Our father teeters on the edge of the irreversible. “If one drop makes a Schwarze, then…we’re all Schwarzen.”

“Not all of us.” My sister falls away. She is ten again. Breaking. “Not all of us, Da. Not you.”

This is how my family spends Christmas of 1964. I would say our last, but the word means nothing. For every last breaks forward into a next. And even last things last forever.

My Brother as Faust

Fame caught Jonah when he was twenty-four. It felt as if he’d been singing lifetimes. In fact, he was still a child, by every measure but skill.

The skill had solidified, each one of his teachers handing him some piece of foundation. Jonah’s trick was to keep the skill as fresh as that moment fifteen years before, when he startled our parents by joining their quotations game. He walked out onstage bemused, in front of growing audiences who’d heard through the musical mill that something remarkable was happening. He looked around the hall as if about to ask directions from the nearest usher. My hands touched the keys, and he opened up, amazed.

And somehow Jonah would convince each audience that he, too, was discovering the purity of his tone that very night. His face lit up, ambushed by this wondrous accident. The room would draw in a collective breath, witnesses at the birth. He ran a kind of devout, aesthetic con game, all in the higher service of the notes. I can fly! He pulled off the stunt four dozen times in the course of a year, and every time, it took my breath away.

His fast passages hung motionless in flight, every note audible: one of those stop-action photographs — a bullet halfway through the width of a playing card, or a corona of milk after the droplet hits. He had more power now, but his pitches were still so focused, they could pierce cloth. He found the mystery of tone that all his teachers had carried on about, each one meaning something different. His sound was secure. He never faltered, never made you feel you needed to stave off disaster with your own concentration. Even at the top of his range, he floated for measures without strain. His warmth passed into your ears like a whispered confidence, a friend you’d forgotten you had.

Maybe splendor is nothing but convention. Maybe the corroded soul can still mimic a saint. Who knows how we hear care or decode comfort? But all these things were Jonah’s when he sang, even when he sang in languages he didn’t speak. Singing, he owned what his speaking voice disowned. For the space of an hour, over the run of three octaves, my brother constructed grace.

In February of 1965, three black men gunned down Malcolm X a few blocks from where Da fed us Mandelbrot and taught us the secret of time. We performed the night of his murder, in Rochester, New York. While thousands marched from Selma to Montgomery, we were driving from East Lansing to Dayton. The night Rochester exploded, we sang in St. Louis. When Jacksonville burned, we played Baltimore.

Every one of those nights, Jonah used Da’s secret of time. Leave the earth at unthinkable speed and you can jump into another’s future. His beauty in that year came from freezing out everything that wasn’t beautiful. While he sang, nothing else mattered.

I could have lived that life forever — college towns paying on arts subsidies, midsized cities building cultural capital by bringing in obscure first-rung talent at third-rung prices. It was enough for me. With sound pouring out of us, night after night, I had no other needs. But Jonah wanted more. Onstage, he could sing:

Ah me, how scanty is my store!

Yet, for myself, I’d ne’er repine,

Tho’ of the flocks that whiten o’er

Yon plain one lamb were only mine.

But offstage, his eyes caught every glimmer in professional music. Careers were taking off all around him. Teenage André Watts soloed with Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. “Jesus, Mule. What does he have that you don’t?”

“Fire, edge, passion, speed, beauty, power. Aside from that, I play just like him.”

“He’s a halfie, too. Hungarian mother. Tell me you couldn’t pace him. You can do everything that guy does.”

Except soar.But Jonah was one of those people who assumed everyone could soar who chose to step off the cliff.

Grace Bumbry led his list of career obsessions, especially after Die schwarze Venus scandal broke at Bayreuth. We heard her interviewed for German television about the hubbub. “Jesus, Mule. She speaks better German than both of us put together.” Jonah hung a stunning photo of her on his closet door. “At last, an opera star as sexy as the roles she plays. Carnegie at twenty-five. Met debut at twenty-eight. I’ve got four years, Joey. Four years, or I’m history.”

But that fabulous woman was miles from anyone who attracted Jonah in real life. She was the polar opposite of the woman whose memory he drew on every recital night to drive his harsher passages into dissonance. Since his break with Lisette, we were off the party circuit, working as we hadn’t worked since being named America’s Next Voice. Jonah was pulling himself inward, culling, smoothing, focusing, building a revenge by the only means he had.

For all his hunger, Jonah was smart enough never to push Mr. Weisman. Our agent knew more about the music business than the two of us ever would. He knew how to start a rumor, feeding it week after week. Our bookings multiplied. We sang in cities I thought would never let us sing. We sang in Memphis, as far south as we’d yet gone. I was sure we’d be canceled, all the way up to the moment we walked out onstage. I kept looking into the hall, waiting for my eyes to adjust, to see the audience’s hue. They were the same color they always were.

Memphis blurred into Kansas City, the Quad Cities, St. Louis. We walked down to Beale Street, where the baby Blues was left out howling in the rain. The street felt self-conscious and short — two blocks of music bars looking like a theme park, the Colonial Williamsburg of the one true American art.

Like America, we had to be discovered again and again. Mr. Weisman, a patient conductor building a long crescendo, edged us back to our hometown for a cleverly orchestrated theatrical revelation. Over months, he laid the groundwork for our breakthrough. He booked us into Town Hall for early June. We paid expenses ourselves. Ticket sales wouldn’t defray more than a portion of costs. We scraped up what remained of Mama’s insurance legacy and gave it to the hall managers. Not enough remained for more than perfunctory advertising. Jonah wore the thin, crazed smile of a gambler as he handed over our check. “One blown entrance and we’ll have to look for real jobs.”

We blew no entrances. The Schubert had gone better out west, and the Wolf never reached the intensity it had on his greatest nights. But his Town Hall concert stood above anything Jonah had achieved. Right before the curtain, my brain spun with adrenaline. But Jonah never looked so calm, so expansive as when desperation was on him. To me, the stage lights of Town Hall felt like interrogation lamps. Jonah walked into them beaming, scouting the auditorium like an adventuring boy.

We’d gone back and forth over the program, waffling between safety and danger. We started with “The Erl-King.” We needed something certain to open with, and we’d done that piece so many times, it could have galloped along by itself after throwing both of us. Then, with Goethe as a bridge, we went with Wolf’s three Harfenspieler settings, every pitch in those complex textures a dare to disaster. Then we did three of the Brahms opus 6.

“What’s the link?” I asked during the planning.

“What do you mean, ‘What’s the link?’ Wolf hated Brahms’s guts. They’re joined at the hip.”

That was connection enough for him. In fact, Jonah mapped out the whole recital as an enormous arc of death and transfiguration. Part one was our retreat from the world into aesthetic solitude. Part two was a full-blooded race back into the mess of living. His Brahms brought down the first curtain with that last word on nineteenth-century beauty. We led the audience back from intermission by resurrecting “Wachet auf.” Jonah had the idea that this old chorale prelude — always performed with a wall of singers — would make the perfect solo. The tune’s sailing self-evidence was my brother’s birthright. “Zion hear the watchman singing.”

In his inner ear, Jonah heard the watchman call so slowly, it sounded like a bell buoy in the night. At his tempo, those four pitches topping the opening triad turned into the universe’s background radiation. Most listeners never know how much harder it is to make a soft sound than a loud one. The breakneck tear will always upstage the legato sustain, but the latter is harder to pull off. Slowed to stopping, Bach’s huge, expanding hover held more terror for me than any other piece in our concert. Jonah wanted my prelude to unfold so gradually that the audience would forget about his chorale lines until his next shocking entrance. We passed our parts back and forth, swapping figure and ground. His nine stark phrases flowed over my intervening elaborations like ice sheets across a forgotten continent.

From glacial Bach, we jumped off into our trio of Charles Ives show-stealers. We did them in flat-out New World roughness. He turned the last, “Majority,” into a hooting lark. By the time the audience rolled back off their heels, they were too deep into raucous Americana to be alienated. Jonah pegged the persona of the pieces so perfectly, we actually drew laughs and whistles as we pulled up at the end of the bygone parade.

Then we sprinted to the finish and sent them home humming. He wanted to do a crossover, partly to show he could and partly to do at least one number we’d never done in public. “Good for our moral character. Gotta keep you fresh, Giuseppe.” The two of us arranged “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” sprinkling it with all the crazed quotations we could remember our parents singing as counterpoint to the hackneyed song. Our gimmick was a steady accelerando, slow enough to seem wayward at first, but winding up, by the last verse, with Jonah riding through the syncopations so fast, he wrapped his lips around the syllables only by miracle. Out of pure nervousness, I goosed it even more than we meant to. But Jonah shot me a dazed smile of thanks during the applause.

We closed with “Balm in Gilead.” The audience wanted him to finish with some aerial tenor feat, strange, difficult, and dazzling. He gave them the simplest tune he’d ever sing, pitched smack in the fattest part of his range. The choice mystified me. Mama had sung the song when we were young, but no more often than she sang a million others. Only at the concert did I figure it out. He’d picked the song for Ruth. But Ruth wasn’t there. Da was front and center, next to the patient Mrs. Samuels. Ruth’s seat next to them was empty, and only I knew how much her absence rattled him. “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.” He sang tentatively, testing to see if it were still true. By verse two, the verdict seemed a toss-up. He ended in a place beyond judgment, his singing itself the only thing close to a proof of that promise.

The softest possible ending, the simplest kind of start. The house erupted before my last chord died away. We hadn’t planned an encore; Jonah refused to tempt fate. So it wasn’t until the applause died down and we were alone on the brutal stage that Jonah whispered, “Dowland?” I nodded without registering. Thank God he also chose to announce the choice to the house, so I could hear. And time stood still again, as it did each time my brother said so.

Without doubt, Jonah’s was one of the strangest New York debuts ever. I’d have called it courageous had I thought he knew what he was risking. He simply picked what he liked to sing.

I saw Lisette Soer in the back of the hall as we took our bows. It’s impossible to make out faces when the lights are trained on yours. But it was her. She wasn’t applauding. She was holding one hand over her mouth and with the other, on her breast, flashing an awed victory. If Jonah saw her, he made no sign.

Backstage was giddy. I’d stumbled into a documentary film about myself. Every year of our lives was present in cross section. At one point, I stood pumping the hand of a stranger who praised me at length before I registered him as Mr. Bateman, my longtime piano teacher at Juilliard. Jonah did worse: A middle-aged woman cornered him, repeating, “You don’t know who I am, do you? You don’t recognize me!” Jonah stalled, wagging and grinning, until the woman started to warble. Her shot voice hinted at a vanished glory, ruined by nothing but accumulated days. She burbled up the line “Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten.” We rush with faint but earnest footsteps. Jonah still didn’t remember the name Lois Helmer, even as her voice’s imprint came rushing back to him. He remembered that first public performance but couldn’t remember the boy who had sung it. The joy, the trust, the total ignorance: Nothing visible remained, from this distance. All he had left were the lines of that great duet. So the two of them stood and sang through the first four entrances from memory, under the noise of the buzzing, embarrassed crowd, one voice headed toward gravel, the other sailing past the furthest point that the first had reached in her prime.

A thin man with sparse but luxurious goatee wandered around on the edges of the gathering, standing out among the sea of dark suits in his tight black jeans and a headache-inducing green-and-blue paisley shirt. In a lull, he crossed the room toward me, smirking behind the facial hair. “Strom Two. What’s on, brother?”

“My God. Thad West!” He felt like some supporting opera buffa figure squirreling off the stage to greet me in my aisle seat. I clutched him by his elbows, which hung cool and loose. “Jesus, Thad. What the hell are you doing here?”

“Had to come hear you cats play. You two stomped. Have to tell you. Really stomped.”

“Where are you living?”

“You know. Here and there. Mount Morris Park.”

It flashed through me: He meant in it. “You’re living in New York? And you’ve never… What are you doing with yourself?”

“Oh. Making music. What else?”

“Really? What are you playing?”

He laid some names on me I’d never heard. He mentioned some clubs, gave me addresses. I didn’t know how to respond. I stood staring at my old childhood roommate. Adulthood sat on me like a toad. “We’ll come listen soon.” In some other, better-executed life.

“That’s right. Come soon. We’ll blow you something cool.”

“Has Jonah seen you yet? Does he know you’re here?” I looked around the room and spotted him, surrounded by old Juilliard classmates already working him.

“I’ll catch up to the master when he’s not so mobbed.” He didn’t say it cruelly, but I was getting my lie back. Thad still loved my brother. But plainly, he no longer cared for him.

I felt myself grinning too much. “So where the hell is Earl when we need him?”

“Earl’s in Nam, man.”

“ Vietnam?”

“No, man. The other one.”

I couldn’t grasp it. Earl the irreverent, the invincible, caught up in something so stupidly real. “They drafted him?”

“Oh, no. Earl enlisted. Wanted to see the world. He’s seeing it now, I guess.”

The joy of smacking facefirst into my own past ground to a standstill. “Thad, Thad, Thad. I’m going to come hear what you’ve got going.”

He smiled, unfooled. Then, from nowhere, he said, “You remember that thing they painted on our door? The red fingernail polish?” Buried in childhood, and yet the drawing was still there, after a decade, defacing the door we shared. “Remember? Nigel.” I didn’t even have to nod my head. “That your first time, for something like that?”

I shrugged and flipped my palms. Every time’s the first. It was still a thrill to him, that anonymous assault. A badge of honor. Downtrodden by association. Thad didn’t have a clue. He didn’t want the everyday human idiocy. He wanted some darker, more soulful suffering, some grand affliction to redeem his fatuous Ohio past. Now he had that, living in Mount Morris Park, blowing cool, scraping by. The only thing was, he could have his fill and walk away anytime.

Thad gestured around the room at all the old folks in suits. He shook his head. “Look at you, Strom Two. What the fuck, huh? What would Nigel say?”

I looked down at the shine of my Italian shoes. I wanted him to be proud of me. He wanted me to be my color. He, too, wanted me to leave Town Hall to its owners.

“Do me a favor, Strom Two?” He looked around the room, smiling through the side of his mouth. “Keep this scene hopping, will you? Shit’s dying on the vine.”

“Hopping.”

“That’s right.” Thad slapped my proffered hand and vanished.

Jonah and I made it home after 3:00A.M., worthless and still wired. There was nothing left to do but try to sleep and hope there’d be a newspaper notice. Not even necessarily a good one. Just some acknowledgment that something had taken place. Jonah might have sung the stars down from heaven, but if the house critic had been suffering from reflux, the lifeline unrolling in front of us would have unraveled. My job that next day was to venture outside and buy every newspaper I could find. Jonah’s was to lie in bed and come up with how we were supposed to make a living now. He kept returning to the idea of night watchmen.

He was still planning when I threw the crumpled-up Times on top of his prostrate form. “ Wachet auf, you bastard. Arts section, page four. Howard Silverman.”

“Silverman?” He sounded frightened. No, he’d claim later. Only groggy. He tore through the pages and found the short review. “‘A near-perfect voice, and Mr. Strom’s ‘near’ is no cause for regret.’” He looked at me over the newsprint. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I think it’s supposed to be positive.”

It sounded, in fact, as if the man were writing with an eye toward the blurb on Jonah’s first recording. “‘While wrapped in consummate technique, this young man’s sound has something deeper and more useful in it than mere perfection.’” Jonah’s eyes glinted with total larceny. “Holy shit.”

“Keep reading. It gets better.”

Silverman went on to note our buckshot programming, calling the second half “a breath of New World fresh air, and a convincing rejection of today’s too-predictable approach to the art song.” He threw in the obligatory cavils — something about occasional eccentric phrasing, something about losing a little velvet in the fast passages. The core reservation came just before the end. According to Silverman, the youthful magic needed more real-world run-ins, more headfirst tangles with experience to ripen into full emotional complexity. “‘Mr. Strom is young, and his slightly callow loveliness wants maturing. Lovers of voice will wait eagerly to see if the freshness of this remarkable sonority can survive the deepening of years.’”

Then Jonah hit the windup. “‘That said, Mr. Strom’s painterly highlights, his crisp articulation, and his brilliant, if dark, purity already stand up well alongside the best of contemporary European lieder singers his age. Predictions are always risky, but it is not difficult to imagine Mr. Strom becoming one of the finest Negro recitalists this country has ever produced.’”

Jonah dropped the pages to the bed.

“Let it go,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter. The rest of the article is a total love letter. He’s handed you a career on a platter!”

He tried to wrap his head around the generous insult: “Predictions are always risky.” He worked each word, turning the promise of the phrase into menace. My brother had never tried to pass, but it staggered him to discover that he couldn’t. I braced for Jonah’s contempt, knowing it would spill over in my direction.

But he was lost to contempt, working on that word, that one fat adjective hanging there in the paper of record, describing something, something as real as lyric, or spinto, or tenor. He was balancing the slap-down qualification against finest ever. Finest this country has ever produced. He wavered between tenses, feeling, for the first time, what it meant to kick open doors that kept closing, no matter how many legends had already passed through. Feeling what it meant to be driven out of the self-made self, forced to be an emblem, a giver of pride, a betrayer of the cause. Feeling what it meant to be a fixed category, no matter how he sung.

“Da and Mama should have named me Heinrich.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference.”

He’d been “niggered” before, more brutally. But not from a major music critic in the country’s leading paper. He lay in bed in his red-and-green-plaid bathrobe, covered in newspaper, shaking his head. Then perplexity turned to rage. “Of all the condescending… Who does this bastard think—”

“Jonah! The thing is a triumph. Howard Silverman’s talking you up in the New York Times.”

He stopped, surprised by my force. He went back to staring up at the ceiling, at all the people who’d never get through even that separately labeled door. He saw our mother coming home from her conservatory audition. The finest recitalist he’d ever know. He rolled his head through a weary arc. He looked at me, doing that performer’s trick with his hazel eyes. They don’t get close enough to check your eye color when they come to burn down your house. “You’re one of those big-smile, Satchmo gradualists, aren’t you?”

“You’re the one who wanted to close with the damn spiritual.”

There was an awful pause while we searched for the tempo. He could have killed me by saying nothing. For a long time, he did. When he spoke, it was with full Dowland flourish. “Don’t argue with me, human. I’m one of the finest Negro recitalists this country will ever produce.”

“‘Has ever produced.’ Big difference. Ask your father.” We both resorted to jittery giggles. “Finish the article. The condescending bastard saved you a big finale.”

Jonah worked through the last sentences aloud with his studied diction. “‘If this exciting young tenor has a limit, it is perhaps only that of size. All the other fundamentals are in place, and his every note rings with exhilarating freedom.’”

Exactly the kind of hedged praise critics loved to deal in. Who knew what it was supposed to mean? It was more than enough to launch a career with.

“I’m the Negro Aksel Schiotz. I’m going to be the Negro Fischer-Dieskau.”

“Fischer-Dieskau’s a baritone.”

“That’s okay. I’m liberal. Some of my best friends are baritones.”

“But would you want your sister to marry one?”

Jonah appraised me. “Know who you are? You’re the Negro Franz Rupp.” He swiped up the article and poured through it again. “Hey. He doesn’t even mention the accompaniment.”

“Good thing. If you have to mention the accompaniment, there’s something wrong.”

“Mule! I owe you so much. I wouldn’t even have been out there if…” He considered the thought and didn’t complete it. “How can I repay you? What do you want? My Red Ball Jets? My old seventy-eights? All yours. Everything.”

“How about you get dressed and buy me breakfast. Okay, make it lunch.”

He crawled out of bed, doffed the robe, and padded around the uncurtained room, showing off his welterweight body to every passerby. As he threw on briefs, chinos, and a golf shirt, he asked, “How come Ruth wasn’t there?”

“Jonah. I don’t know. Why don’t you call her?”

He shook his head. Didn’t think he should have to. Didn’t want to know. Couldn’t afford the answer. He sat back down on the unmade bed. “Dark purity: C’est moi. Only question is: Who’s going to be the white Jonah Strom?”

“Put your shoes on. Let’s go.”

He never got his shoes on, and we never went. While he was puttering, the phone started to ring. The Times was detonating in a million kitchens, reaching every acquaintance we’d ever made. Jonah fielded the first thrilled congratulations. The second wave rolled in as soon as he hung up. The third call came before he could recross the room. It was Mr. Weisman. He’d received a recording offer. The Harmondial label wanted our recital pressed into vinyl, exactly as we’d performed it.

Jonah called out the details to me as Mr. Weisman gave them. My brother hooted at the invitation, ready to sign and do the recording that afternoon. Mr. Weisman advised against it. He suggested that we do two more years of concertizing, make a few high-profile appearances, then try for a longer-term arrangement with a better recording company. He mentioned RCA Victor as within the realm of possibility. That slowed Jonah for a moment.

But Jonah was zooming away from earth at speeds old Mr. Weisman couldn’t gauge. He was set on jumping into other people’s futures, and recording gave him the chance. To turn the moment permanent, spread the dying now out lengthwise into forever: Jonah didn’t care who was offering. Harmondial was a young, small company, two strikes against it in Mr. Weisman’s book, but a selling point for my brother. He and they could break into the game together. At twenty-four, Jonah was still immortal. He could crash and resurrect as often as he liked, drawing on endless time and talent.

“You only start once,” Mr. Weisman kept saying. But Jonah could make no sense of the warning. Harmondial’s bid went beyond anything Jonah imagined. None of Mr. Weisman’s objections could change Jonah’s sense that the offer had no downside. It was a giveaway, a lottery prize that cost him nothing to try.

We flew to Los Angeles to record. Harmondial used their California studio mostly for their catalog of pop and light classics. Jonah said it would give him exactly the presence he wanted. We flew out at the beginning of August, two kings in coach, giggling like criminals all the way across the continent.

We crossed L.A. in a waking daze, driving around Hollywood and Westwood in a rented Ford Mustang. Kids were everywhere, glued to their transistors as if to news of an alien invasion. The invasion, in fact, was already in its advanced stages. We’d missed the signs, back east in our barnstorming. Now we cruised down Ventura, paralyzed latecomers to an epidemic. The sound was everywhere, past our ability to take in.

“Jesus, Joey! It’s worse than cholera. Worse than communism. The absolute triumph of the three-chord song!” Jonah trolled the car radio dial for the same tunes we could hear beating from every corner, in a hurry to sample the thrill so long kept at bay. Some of the songs were venturing far beyond tonic, subdominant, and dominant. Those songs were the ones that scared him. Those were the ones he couldn’t get enough of.

He made me drive, piloting me around town to the hits of 1965. Stop! In the name of love. Turn! Turn! Turn! Over and Over! And when he got us completely lost: Help! I need somebody. Help! By the time we found the studio for the first session, Jonah was riffing on tunes he’d absorbed on a single hearing. All we need is music, sweet music. In Chicago. New Orleans. New York City. They’re dancin’ in the streets. The sound engineers heard him and went nuts. They made him do level checks by singing My baby don’t care in every cranny of his register, from up above countertenor to down below baritone.

“What the hell are you doing singing Schubert?” one of them asked. “With power like that, you could be making real dough.”

Jonah didn’t tell them the twelve-hundred-dollar Harmondial advance felt like a small fortune. And nobody pointed out the problem: he made the Supremes’ “I Hear a Symphony” sound, well, symphonic: a one-off novelty act, my brother, the one-hit wonder of precision-pitched, breath-supported R & B lieder, the single-handed Motown Mo-tet.

We stuck to Schubert, and by the fourth take, the sound engineers changed their tune. In Jonah’s throat, all these dead tunes were once again someone’s popular song. Something in his voice on those tracks insists, We are still young. Something in that near hour of songs, recorded over the course of days, says the centuries are just passing tones on their way back home.

I can hear it on the record, still. My mother’s voice is there inside his, but my father’s is, too. There is no starting point. We trace back forever, accident on accident, through every country taken from us. But we end everywhere, always. Stand still and gaze: This is the message in that sound, rushing backward from the finish line it has reached.

When he heard his first takes, my brother couldn’t stop snickering. “Listen to that! It’s just like a real record. Let’s do it again. Forever.”

Jonah could hear things on the tape the engineers couldn’t. We spent two increasingly tense days battling between cost and inaudible perfection. The producers would be knocked out by the first several takes, each of which left Jonah wincing. They told us about how they could splice in a measure to fix a lapse. Jonah was outraged. “That’s like pasting eagle feathers on your average slob and calling him an angel.”

Jonah learned to seduce the microphone and compensate for its brutalities. Under the pressure of compromise, our takes took on the edge of live performance. In the baffled, soundproofed room, Jonah grew incandescent. He sang, posting his voice forward to people hundreds of years from now.

The third night, after we got the Wolf within a few vibrations of how it sounded in his mind, we sat down with the Harmondial publicist. The girl was fresh from summer camp. “I’m so glad you two are brothers!”

I flopped around like a fish on the dock. Jonah said, “We are, too.”

“The brothers thing is good. People like brothers.” I thought she might ask, Have you always been brothers? How did you come to be brothers? She asked, instead, “How did you get interested in classical music?”

We went mute. How did you learn how to breathe? It hit me. The story this girl already imagined would go into press releases and liner notes, unhindered by any data we gave her. Even if we told her about our evenings of family singing, she wouldn’t hear. Jonah left it to me to create some facsimile. “Our parents discovered our musical ability when we were young. They sent us to a private music school up in Boston.”

“Private school?” The fact flustered our publicist.

“A preconservatory boarding school. Yes.”

“Did you…get scholarships?”

“Partial ones,” Jonah said. “We washed dishes and made beds to pay the rest of our way. Everyone was very generous toward us.” I snorted. Jonah shot me an offended look, and the poor girl was lost.

“Was the music you learned at school…a lot different from the music you grew up on?”

Jonah couldn’t help himself. “Well, the tempi dragged at Boylston sometimes. It wasn’t the school’s fault. Some of those kids were coming from musically backward homes. Things got a little better once we were at Juilliard.”

She scribbled into a canary yellow legal pad. We could have told her anything, and Jonah pretty much did. “Did you have any role models? I mean, as far as singing…classical music?”

“Paul Robeson,” Jonah answered. The girl scribbled the name. “Not for his voice so much. His voice was…okay, I guess. We liked his politics.”

She seemed surprised to hear that a famous singer could have politics. Mr. Weisman was right. This wasn’t RCA Victor. You only start once. I watched Jonah’s answers drop into the permanent record, where they would last as long as the sounds we’d just laid down.

The girl asked for publicity photos. We gave her the portfolio, complete with clippings. “So many reviews!” She picked the photo I knew she would, the one emphasizing the novelty that Harmondial had just bought. Something to distinguish their catalog from all the other burgeoning record labels: a brother act, black but comely. She looked for just the right pose of comfort and assurance, the one that said, Not all Negroes want to trash everything you stand for. Some of them even serve as culture’s willing foot soldiers.

In the car, heading to the hotel, Jonah sang, “I wish they all could be California girls.”

“God only knows what she wishes we were.” We both knew, now, just which sentence in the Times had sealed this offer. The upstart record label wanted this up-and-coming Negro voice, the next untapped niche. Civil rights meant ever larger, integrated markets. The same thinking had just led Billboard to combine their R & B list with their rock and roll. Everyone would finally sing and listen to everything, and Harmondial would capitalize on the massive crossover.

We finished recording on a Wednesday night, two days later. The producer wanted Dowland to be the record’s last track. I picked the studio’s backup piano, a rare combination of covered sound and stiff action that helped me fake the frets of a lute. Today, you’d never get away with piano anymore. A third of a century ago, authenticity was still anything you made it. Time stands still. But never the same way for long.

Jonah’s first take felt flawless. But the engineer working the board was so entranced with his first-time taste of timelessness that he failed to see his meters clipping. Take two was leaden, Jonah’s revenge for the first’s destruction. The next five takes went belly-up. We’d reached the end of a difficult week. He asked for ten minutes. I stood up to take a walk down the hallway outside the recording booth, to give my brother a moment alone.

“Joey,” he called. “Don’t leave me.” Like I was abandoning him to oblivion. He wanted me to sit but not say anything. He’d fallen into a panic at sending a message out beyond his own death. We sat in silence for five minutes, and five stretched to ten: the last year that we lived in that would leave us still for so long. The engineers returned, chattering about the recent Gemini flight. I sat down, Jonah opened his mouth, and out came the sound that predicted everything that would still happen to him.

“Time stands still with gazing on her face.” As my brother sang, a few minutes’ drive from the studio, a white motorcycle policeman stopped a black driver — a man our sister’s age — and made him take a sobriety test. Avalon and 116th: a neighborhood of single-story houses and two-story apartment blocks. The night was hot, and the residents sat outdoors. While Jonah put stillness’s finish on that opening mi, re, do, a crowd gathered around the arrest. Fifty milling spectators swelled to three hundred as the policeman’s backup appeared on the scene.

The young man’s mother arrived and started scolding her son. The crowd, the police, the man, his mother, his brother all closed on one another. More police, more pull, the crowd restive with history, and the night turning warm. There was a scuffle, the simplest kind of beginning. A club in the face that lands in the face of everyone looking on.

The crowd grew to a thousand, and the police radioed for more help. This was around 7:30, as we were listening to the tape: “Stand still and gaze for minutes, hours, and years to her give place.” The producer was crying and cursing Jonah for laughing at him.

Over on Avalon, all music stopped. Someone spit on the officers as they hauled the man, his mother, and his brother off to jail. Two patrolmen waded into the crowd, guns in the air, to arrest this next wave of offenders. By 7:40, as Jonah and I stood on the hot sidewalk in front of the studio, the police were pulling away under a hail of stones.

We chanced onto the news on the car radio as we left the studio. Reports of the gathering riot broke into the Top 40 countdown. Jonah looked at me, connecting. “Let’s have a look.”

“A look? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Come on. From a distance. It’s over by now anyway.” I was driving. Something in him made me. He pointed me south, navigating by a combination of news report and acute hearing. He got us on South Broadway, then over onto eastbound Imperial Highway. He made me pull over and then got out. He stood there on the pavement, just listening. “Joey. You hear that?” I heard only traffic, the usual background of shouts and sirens, routine urban insanity. But my brother heard whole bands of the spectrum I couldn’t, just as all week long he’d heard sounds on our tapes hidden to the rest of us. “ Listen!Are you deaf?”

He packed us back in the car and steered us northeast. We hooked right, where madness materialized in front of us. Crowds of people lined the streets of the tinderbox neighborhood, just waiting for the match. We crept another block east. I pulled over and checked the map, as if the outbreak might be marked there. The Mustang was a death trap, as stupid a car as we could have chosen to drive. Straight through our windshield, down the street, a mass condensed, drifting from block to block, stopping cars by force and stoning them, the only alternative to justice. The streets were the same as most in L.A. — white-walled arroyos of small one-family dwellings. Only, down this one, a creature lumbered out of some filmic dream. The laws of physics bent the air around us. It was like watching a flock of starlings twist and blot the sun. Like watching a funnel cloud dissolve the house across the way.

The crowd hit a pebble in its path and veered. Jonah was hypnotized by the movement, thrilled. They were going after any moving cars, pelting them with stones. At any minute, they’d smell the last notes of Dowland still clinging to us, and charge. I should have turned the car around and fled. But this drifting, methodical mob was so far beyond the rules of ordinary life that I sat paralyzed, waiting to see what happened. The crowd was like stirred bees. They surged and attacked a police outpost. The officers broke and scattered from the advance. No one gave orders, but the mass moved as if under single command. The forward edge swung west, toward us. I came out of my spell and turned the car around hard, cutting across the bewildered trickle of traffic.

“What are you doing?” Jonah yelled. “Where do you think you’re going?” For the first time in my life, I ignored him. Somehow, I got us back on the northbound Harbor Freeway. Our hotel, back near View Park, felt more unreal than the trance we’d just witnessed. Neither of us slept.

The morning papers were filled with the story. But the thing they reported was not the thing we’d seen. The official accounts were stunted, deluding, clinging to the unreal. The radio performed feats of heroic denial. Everyone in the hotel was buzzing. The streets that Thursday morning wore a bright, forced cheer that barely masked the rush of expectation. Even as the city tried to talk itself down, it braced for the night to come.

We checked in with the studio at noon for last-minute touch-ups. But all was well: Yesterday’s takes sounded even better in the light of day. I blessed our luck; Jonah couldn’t have recorded the piece again, not after the previous night. Even the Harmondial people saw how shaken he was. No one could assimilate the news. The engineers joked nervously with us, as if we might turn, in front of them, from Elizabethan troubadors to looters. By four o’clock that afternoon, the producers sent us off with hugs and great predictions for our debut release. We were all set to head back to LAX for an evening flight. We had a couple of hours.

“Joey?” His voice was more spooked by itself than anything. “I need another look.”

“Another… Oh, no, Jonah. Please. Don’t be crazy.”

“Just a detour on the way to the airport. Joey, I can’t get it out of my head. What did we see last night? Like nothing I’ve ever come close to in my life.”

“That doesn’t mean we have to get close to it again. We were lucky to get out without incident.”

“Without incident?”

I hung my head. “I mean to us. The rest — what were we supposed…?” But Jonah wasn’t interested in my defense. He was already going after the missing bit in his education, the thing that no teacher had yet given him. He felt the years still ahead trying to signal him. He needed to go back, to hear. He no longer trusted anything but the sense that would finally kill him.

Jonah drove, a concession to my rage at him. We reached the previous night’s neighborhood just after five o’clock. The blocks off the expressway should have satisfied him. The streets sparkled with smashed shop windows, a carpet of fake diamonds. Here and there, the soot of extinguished fires coated the stucco and concrete. Knots of teens edged up and down the sidewalks. The only visible whites were armed and uniformed. Jonah pulled the Mustang into a deserted lot. He shut off the engine and opened his door. I made no objection; you can’t object to what you don’t believe is happening.

He didn’t even look at me. “Come on, brother.” He was out through the other end of the scrap-strewn lot before I could yell at him. I locked my door — ridiculous to the end — and raced to catch up. The crowd had swelled again to thousands, double the night before. Already that ranging group mind was taking over. The police were lost, worse even than the newspaper accounts. You could see it in their faces: We’ve given them so much; why are they doing this? Their strategy was to set up a perimeter, contain the violence to the immediate neighborhoods, and wait for the National Guard. Jonah scouted the police border, finding a gap in it between a package store and a burned breakfast dive. After twenty-four years of hiding indoors, my brother chose that night to come outside.

We passed down the alley, through the break in the police cordon. The street cutting just in front of us flowed with running hallucination. Three cars, rolled over onto their carapaces, poured blackened flames into the air. Firemen fought to get close enough to douse the fireballs, but the crowd beat them back with rocks and stood over the blazes, tending them.

No one scored out the chaos. It just unfolded around us in a horizon-wide ballet. Three dozen people materialized in front of us to trash a greengrocer’s. Their bodies worked at the task, neither excited nor functional. They cohered around the job, a band of tight improvisers handing one another supplies — hammers, axes, gas cans — as if passing so many relay-race batons. The cadence was eerie, a slow, resistant, underwater, paced rage, workmanlike, as if the plans for apocalypse had been perfected over generations.

Jonah yelled over the deafening sirens. “Pure madness, Mule. Dancing in the streets!” His face shimmered, at last up close to whatever he’d been looking for. Two thousand rioters swept past. Four steps ahead of me, Jonah slowed to a walk. All I could think, with hell erupting all around, was, He’s too light to be here. He was a frail, vulnerable boy, listening wide-eyed to the Valkyries riding through our radio.

Jonah hovered, turning to inspect the flames that shot up fifteen feet to his left. His hands cupped unconsciously, lifting from his sides, beckoning to the roving packs, cuing their entrances and attacks. He was conducting. Beating time, phrasing the chaos the same way he always did when listening to the music that most moved him. I came alongside him; he was humming. At his command, a drone rose up behind us, pitched but variable, matching his throb, a hybrid of rhythm and melody. The sound multiplied through the spreading human mass. I’ll remember that sound until I die.

The police concentrated their power on making sure the violence didn’t spill over into white neighborhoods. The firemen were getting the worst of it. They gave up extinguishing the overturned cars and focused on containing the burning commercial buildings. The blast of hoses and the hissing crowd fused into a single chorus. Jonah watched, deep in some interpretation I couldn’t make out. The stress intoxicated him. Total collapse: lives ricocheting past us, handmade explosions going off, all the rules of reason worse than flaccid.

He stopped in front of a pawnshop, where half a dozen children were slamming a mesh garbage can through the plate-glass door. They threw and ran back, walked up, threw, and ran back again. The entrance fell in a hail of shards. One by one, the looters disappeared into the cave. Jonah stood still, waiting for revelation. After a sickening moment, the excavators returned, carrying a television, a stereo, a brass floor lamp, new hats for all, and two handguns. Three centuries’ worth of reparations.

I stuck to myself, two shops away. Jonah was out ahead of me, twenty feet from the door. He stood with his feet spread, leaning into the chaos. He watched the actors run out of the store, as if all history depended on their grabbing these denied goods, here at the denouement. From out of the synchronized dream, one of the newly armed boys saw my brother staring. He ran toward Jonah, waving his snub-nosed gun like a Ping-Pong paddle. My body turned worthless, fifty yards, a continent away. I tried to yell but couldn’t find my throat. The boy shouted as he ran. His words broke in the air into harsh, incoherent rivets. His scattering friends turned to meet the challenge. The other armed boy began waving his own gun at Jonah. It weighed down his arm, too heavy for him, a bad prop.

“What you want here?” The first boy reached Jonah, who stood dead, his arms lifted from his sides. “Get the fuck out. Ain’t no place for white.” The boy waved the barrel side to side, charming a snake. His hands shook. Jonah just stood the way he did onstage, draped on the crook of an imaginary grand piano, ready to launch into a huge song cycle. Winterreise. He stood as though I was right behind him, at the keyboard.

The second boy was on them in an instant. He fell out of orbit, slamming into Jonah’s flank and knocking him to the pavement. My brother crumpled in pain, then lay still on the concrete, his arm scraped open.

“Motherfucker hurt you?” the second boy shouted at the first. Both boys stood over him, aiming, shaking, jumping. “Back to the Hills, motherfucker. Back to Bel Air!” As if that were where even death would send this intruder.

I found my voice. “He’s black. The man’s a black man.” I was too far away. They couldn’t hear me over the riot. My voice cracked and broke. I never did have much projection. “The man’s my brother.”

The two armed boys stared up at me. One aimed his gun in my direction. “This? This ain’t no brother.”

“The man’s a black man.”

Jonah, picking his moment, as if the largest part of him really did want to die, relaxed his head onto the pavement. He looked up into the smoking sky. His lips began to work. He might have been pleading with them, praying. No sound came out of him but a weird monotone moan.

I knew then that one of the shaking boys would shoot him. Murder here would be nothing: one more randomness at time’s end. Jonah worked his lips, moaning, preparing his finish. But that burst of monotone, coming from that body stretched out on the pavement, unnerved his assailants. The two teens backed away from the voodoo wail. Behind them, their friends with the television and stereo screamed for them to scatter. The Man was here, and shooting. The two gunmen looked over at me, down at Jonah, even up in the air at the stream of funereal smoke that my brother sung to. Still staring, they turned and ran.

I fell to my knees on the pavement beside him, sobbing and pulling at his ripped shirt. He nodded. My relief flooded over into rage. “What the hell are we doing here? We gotta get out. Now.” It took all I had to keep from kicking Jonah in the ribs, where he lay.

He looked up at me, in shock. “What?” Blood seeped up his sleeve and down his arm. The scraped-open skin filled with cinders. “What? Practice, Joey. Rehearsal.” He snickered, wincing.

I sat him up, still shouting at him. I wrapped his arm in a piece of shirt. “Jesus Christ. They were going to kill you.”

“I saw.” His jaw was trembling, out of control. “Right there. But you told them, didn’t you?” His throat closed and his breathing shut down. He laughed and tried to apologize. But a choking fit prevented him.

I got him to his feet and made him walk. Two hundred yards to our left, a line of police advanced against a makeshift emplacement of stone-throwers. I took Jonah to the right, doubling back west past Albion, where we’d entered the inferno. The air was a kiln, and the concrete under our feet melted into tar. Jonah’s breathing worsened. We had to slow. He pulled up at a corner and put out his hand, reassuring me, staving off suffocation. “Keep walking; keep moving.”

I leaned him up against a wall so he could catch his breath and slow his heart. While we stood, Jonah bending forward and me holding him, a light-skinned middle-aged man walked past and brushed our backs. I spun around and saw the gray-haired man walk placidly away, carrying a can of house paint and a brush. On Jonah’s bare back, and on the tails of my shirt, he left a spotty brown stripe. The man disappeared into the crowd, leaving his brand on anything that held still long enough.

Jonah could see my shirt but not his back. “Me, too? He got me good?”

“Yes. He got you.”

His breathing eased. “We’re all set then, Mule. Passport stamped. Visa. Safe passage.” He started up again, humming. I took his good arm and walked him on. He felt even more wobbly than reality. We headed west along 112th Street, to safety. But we’d never be safe again. From two blocks away, I saw the police perimeter we’d crossed on our way in. It had thickened. A line of officers three deep fought back the rushing stone-throwers. Burning bottles arced upward and fell to earth in splashes of flame. Watts was trying to spread the pain to Westmont, Inglewood, Culver City. Someplace where the fires had something expensive to burn.

“Come on, Mule.” He sounded drunk. “Keep going. We’ll talk our way through.” By then, he could barely form a sentence. I knew what the police would do if we got even close. Nobody was getting out across this line. The whole township was ringed by a thousand policemen, herding it at gunpoint. Behind the police wall was the National Guard. And behind the Guard, the Fortieth Armored Division. We were sealed off, trapped inside the permanent pen. My brother was too light to survive inside, and I was too dark to get us out.

I dragged Jonah south, along a weed-shot alley that dead-ended in a street running diagonally along a railroad track. Scattered gunshot echoed off the flanking buildings, spattering from all directions at once, unreal, like cap pistols fired off into garbage cans. I steered us southwest, then realized we were running straight toward Imperial Highway. We came out in the middle of bedlam.

A band of rioters had broken through the police salient and were fanning into the streets beyond. Retaliating, the police waded into a group of bystanders and beat whomever they could reach, tearing them up like dogs catching squirrels. People thrown to the sidewalk and slammed into walls, guns popping off, glass shattering, and the crowd, everywhere routed, shrieking and running.

Jonah fell back, choking, into a covered doorway. He leaned forward to ease the pressure in his chest. His left arm nursed his damaged right. He pointed in awe at my leg. I looked down. My right trouser was torn and blood oozed from my shin. We stood there, bodies whipping past like planets in broken orbit, close enough to touch.

A scream broke toward us. One white policeman, swinging a night-stick, chased two middle-aged, bloodied blacks, who cut in the direction of our door before seeing us and swerving. The slow-heeled cop stood mired for a second before spotting us. I saw how we looked to him: my gouged leg, Jonah doubled over, half-shirtless, his arm scraped open, both of us panting, marked with a brown stripe of paint. He charged us, stick raised. I put up my hands to break the blow. Jonah, choking, delirious, fell back on instinct. He swung upright and shouted a kind of high B. The pitched cry brought the cop up short. His voice saved us from having our faces beaten in.

The cop scrambled backward, one hand feeling for his gun. I got my brother’s hands into the air. More stunned than we were, the cop handcuffed us together. He marched us two blocks to a police van, prodding us with his stick, still in control, keeping us out in front of him, his captives. Jonah regained his voice. “Wait until your sister hears this. She’s gonna love us all over again. Old times.”

The officer jabbed us on. He was still wondering why he hadn’t clubbed us senseless. Still trying to figure out why the voice had stopped him.

We were taken by van with a dozen others to an auxiliary jail in Athens. All the ordinary facilities were filled. Arrests poured in by the thousands. All of black L.A. was locked up, but the riots kept flowing. We sat all night in a narrow cell with twenty men. Jonah loved it. He stopped complaining about the throb in his arm. He listened to every inflection, every seditious word as if this were rehearsal for some new dramatic role.

Talk in the cell was a grim mix of threat and predictions. The most articulate of the group were testifying. “They can’t stop this anymore. They know they can’t. We’ve won already, even if they lock us all away and destroy the key. They had to call out the army, man. They need the army for us. The whole world knows now. And they’ll never forget.”

We were held until late the following afternoon, when our officer showed up and admitted that all we’d done was cower in a doorway. Half of those still held had done no worse. Our story checked out — the record company, the rented car, Juilliard, our agent, America’s Next Voice — everything except the reason why we’d been at the scene of a riot in the first place. We must have been inciting, part of a conspiracy of educated, radical, near-white blacks filtering into the tinderbox and encouraging it to set itself alight. The way the police went at us, we’d done something far worse than looting, arson, and assault combined. We had everything — advantage, opportunity, trust. We were the future’s hope, and we’d betrayed it. Our crime was sight-seeing, coming by to watch while the city went up in flames. The booking officers verbally abused us, pushed us around a little, and threatened to hold us for trial. But finally, they discharged us in disgust.

The law couldn’t waste its breath on us. By Friday evening, it was clear that Thursday night had been just a prelude. Friday was the real fire. The violence started early and built without respite the entire day. By Friday night, Los Angeles descended into the maelstrom.

We heard it on the radio on the way to LAX. Nothing that night was flying in or out, for fear of getting shot out of the sky. We sat glazed in front of the reports, watching the blaze spread. Nothing in Southeast Asia could match it. The firefight moved out of Watts into the southeast city. Snipers fired on police. Police shot at civilians. Police shot themselves and blamed the mob. Six hundred buildings were gutted; two hundred burned to the ground. Dozens of people died of gun wounds, burns, and collapsing walls. Thousands of National Guardsmen swept through the streets, shoulder-to-shoulder, sowing still more anarchy. Jonah listened to the reports, his lips like lead.

We stayed in the airport all night, sleeping less than we had in our cell. We didn’t fly back to New York until late Saturday night, by which time thirteen thousand Guardsmen roamed the streets of Los Angeles. The rebellion would roll on for another two days.

On the long flight, Jonah played with the gash on his arm. He stared at the back of the seat in front of him and shivered. We were over Iowa when I finally found the nerve to ask him. “When you were lying there on the ground? Your lips were moving.”

He waited for me to finish, but I already had. “You want to know what I was singing?” He looked around. He leaned in and whispered, “You can’t know. The whole score was right there in front of me. I was looking up into it. It sounded good, Joey. Real good. Like nothing I’ve ever heard.”

His voice never again sounded as it had before that night. I have the recordings to confirm me.

Summer 1941—Fall 1944

She’s known the song her whole life. But Delia Daley never heard the full voice of human hatred until she married this man. Until she bore her first child. Only then does the chorus of righteousness pour down on her, slamming her family for their little daily crime of love.

She’s guilty of the greatest foolishness, and for that she must be punished. Yet she will wake startled in the middle of the night, wondering whom she has injured so badly that they must come after her. What future unforgiving accusers? Every time she tallies up her sins, it comes to this: to think that recognizing means more than its opposite. To think that race is still in motion. That we stand for nothing but what our children might do. That time makes us someone else, a little more free.

Time, she finds, does nothing of the kind. Time always loses out to history. Every wound ever suffered has only lain covered, festering. Some girlish, unenslaved part of her imagined their marriage might cure the world. Instead, it compounds the crime by assaulting all injured parties. She and David say only that family is bigger than guilt. And for this, guilt must rise up and punish them.

Great spaces of life have always been closed to her. But the spaces remaining were larger than she could fill. Now even her simplest needs become unmeetable. She’d like to walk down the street with her husband without having to play his hired help. She’d like to be able to hold his arm in public. She’d like to watch a movie together or go for dinner without being hustled out. She’d like to sling her baby on her shoulder, take him shopping, and for once not bring the store to a standstill. She’d like to come home without venom all over her. It will not happen in her lifetime. But it must happen in her son’s. Rage buckles down in her each time she leaves the house. Only motherhood is large enough to contain it.

Once, she thought bigotry an aberration. Now that she ties her life to a white’s, she sees it for the species’s baseline. All hatred comes down to the protection of property values. One drop: just another safeguard of ownership. Possession, nine-tenths of the law.

Negroes, of course, make room for them. Her family, her aunt in Harlem, the church circuit, her friends from college. That saint Mrs. Washington, who keeps a roof over their heads. Nobody’s exactly thrilled with the arrangement, of course. But if whiteness depends on those who can’t belong, blackness is forever about those who must be taken in. Her boy is nothing special. Three-quarters of her race has white blood. Age-old rights of the plantation: the disclaiming owner, the disowning father. The difference this time is just that her child’s father sticks around.

Not every white they must deal with is certified hopeless. Her husband’s band of émigré colleagues see her as no more irrelevant than any wife. They’ve witnessed more suspect matches, couples more wildly crossed. Those musicians among them will show up at her house at the mention of a soiree, ready to make music in any key. With them, she can relax. They no longer appraise her, waiting to see how long she can walk on her hind legs without wobbling. But then, these men are not quite of this world. They live down in the interstices of the atom, or up among the sweep of galaxies. People are to them irreducible complications. Most of these men have fled their own homes. By and large, they’re big on being allowed to live. Every other one a refugee: Poles, Czechs, Danes, Russians, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians. More Hungarians than Delia knew existed. A big self-knit international nation of the dispossessed, the bulk of them Jewish. Where else could this hapless group live except where her David does — in the borderless state that recognizes no passports, the country of particles and numbers?

There’s Mr. Rabi, who hired David and who David says will turn Columbia into a commuter suburb of Stockholm. There are Mr. Bethe, Mr. Pauli, Mr. Von Neumann — a trio of mad foreigners. And Mr. Leo Szillard, who may truly be crazy, who doesn’t work anywhere, but lives out of a suitcase at the King’s Crown, the hotel where David stayed when he first arrived. Mr. Teller, with his eyebrow thicket, who plays Bach so beautifully, he must be good. Mr. Fermi and his wife, the dark, beautiful Laura, who got lost on their way back to fascist Italy after picking up his Nobel in Sweden and wound up in New York, at Columbia, another of her husband’s revered colleagues.

Delia dreaded these men for months, hated even meeting them. She’d shake their hands and mumble stupid, earthbound things as they sized her up, and she’d struggle hopelessly to make out what they mumbled back. At the first musical gathering she and David hosted, Delia spent the evening in the kitchen, hiding out with the door closed, inventing labors, while these men talked shop in terms her mama would have consigned to the devil. She banged around with pots and pans — the hired kitchen help — until a quartet of them burst in, wine and cracker crumbs all over their jackets, saying, “Come. The music is starting.”

Now she only pities them, the ones who apologize for moving through the room, the ones — like that Mr. Wigner from Princeton — whose every movement is humbled by mysteries they can’t penetrate. It’s as David tells her, sometimes, while their flanks press against each other’s in the dark: “The deeper you look, the more God’s plan recedes. At the edge of human measurements, infinite strangeness.” Pitching tent in a place so strange must blunt a man’s tribalism.

The foreign scientists are easy around her, an ease born in ignorance as much as anything. They aren’t pinned underneath the weight of that old crime that cripples the country they now inhabit. They don’t look at her and flinch by reflex. They don’t need to defend themselves to her. They share, a little, her tacit exile. Yet, even these upended Europeans carry the disease. Empirical skeptics one and all, they still run their built-in statistics, invisible but sight-driven, that universal assumption, so deep that they don’t even know it’s assumed. The fact is, every one of them is shocked the first time they hear her sing.

And what if they’re right? Right to look on her as on a trout sprouting wings. Twenty generations, and the difference goes real. This is the soul-destroyer, the one no one gets around. Not a day goes by that she doesn’t have to account for the tunes she chooses.

Her husband can’t begin to understand. She feels that now, her distance from him. She’d never have married him but for the lost boy, the hidden future they fell into together at the stray boy’s words, that day in Washington. She knew what it would cost this man to take on her citizenship, to share her birthright. She could not hope to preserve him from whiteness’s revenge. So it stuns her, night after night, to rediscover: The harder that the offended orders press them, the closer they huddle.

He loves her so simply, so free from belief and prior category. She has known unconditional love — her parents’ fierce care, more dogged in the wake of where they’ve been, grittier in the face of where she’s going. With David, she just is. She likes the woman he sees when he looks at her — a favorite winter constellation, the steady alignment of stars he always knows how to find.

She loves his amazement at her, his mindful explorations and grateful surprise. His tenderness matured in the cask of being. The awe of his fingers tracing her round, resistant belly when it contained the capsule of their union. Around him, she feels a bashful calm, the lightness of a tinker’s plaything. When they lie next to each other, the boy in his crib at the foot of their bed, their shyness multiplied by this drop-in company, this humming third party, they are not anything. Nowhere but here. Their tune together is constant modulation, distant keys always falling back to do.

In the daily hard work of getting along, he holds his own. Not much of a housekeeper, his hygiene more random than his irregular verbs. His habits madden her. He can leave a quart of ice cream on the counter and be shocked, two hours later, to find it sticking to his soles. But he laughs readily. And for a man of theory, he’s remarkably patient. For a man: as kind as memory is long.

It helps that he’s older than she, more able to tell real worry from its many free riders. It saves them, a hundred times a month, that he has so little fixed investment in how things ought to be done. Their surprise divergences at every hour delight him. He picks up a favorite phrase from her, the one she exclaimed the first time she saw him write the number seven. Few weeks go by — watching her cook a stew or pay a bill or hang a picture — when he won’t need to say, “Would you look at that!”

Any less joint astonishment and they’d never have reached their first Labor Day. Melting pot New York puts them through a blast furnace; five minutes out on the sidewalk threatens to melt them down to slag. But indoors, all ore belongs to them. They can sing any tune going, and, more often than not, make any two of them fit together. They’ve come to love the same composers, along routes so different that each confirms the other’s divergence. Their chords take their beauty from the surrounding dissonance.

They made love for the first time just before they married. It surprised her, after all those months of nerve-racking abstinence, their dizzy, stifled necking. His choice — God knows, she wasn’t waiting for any ring. Once she’d committed, she was in with all limbs. All those nights, when she visited in New York and he sent her back to her aunt’s, she’d go away thinking, Can he really be that otherworldly? Or is he holding out for me?

And then, the week before the wedding, they never broke off. David whispering while he touched her beyond the highest limits of his prior touch, “Next week, we promise to the state. Tonight, I make my promise to just you.” When they were finished and she lay coiled back up inside herself, wondering whether it was all that she’d expected, unable to remember just what that had been, he smiled, so full of confusion that she thought for one awful eternity something was wrong.

He waved his hand behind him, at yesterday. “I feel a little boy sitting on my shoulder. He’s heavy. Like an old man. He wants me to go somewhere!”

“Where?” she asked, touching his lips.

“The way we’re going!”

Then that little boy was here. And now another on the way. The more of them they become, the safer they’ll be. David is just as awed by her pregnancy the second time around. Both of them — amazed by her moods and cravings. She grows imperious, placid, animist, alert to every creak in the floorboards. She wants only to curl up with her firstborn against her, her second inside her, her husband standing watch over the apartment as over a dark, soft underground den.

How different expecting is this second time. Jonah kicked and roared in the womb at all hours. This one makes no trouble. The first time, the two adults were alone. Now they have this walking, talking golden thing to keep them company and comment their astonishment. “Mama big. Make new Jonah. Baby come.”

David is a wonder with the baffled boy. They sit together on the front room rug in the late afternoon, building cities out of oatmeal boxes and food cans, explaining to each other how things work. She can watch them forever. The boy has his father’s eyes, his father’s mouth, his father’s puzzled amusement. David can understand even Jonah’s most cryptic, pre-earthly thoughts. He holds the child entranced with two wooden clothespins and a piece of string. But when her boy is restless or scared, loose in too large a place, nothing will do but curling into his mother, ear against her chest while she sings.

The war has come to them at last. Pearl Harbor is almost an anticlimax, she and David have been waiting for it for so long. That cataclysm, too, neatly divides these births. Delia must remind herself daily that they’ve joined the world catastrophe, so little has changed in her life since the President made his declaration. Her country is at war with her husband’s, although he’s given up his citizenship and taken hers. David, sworn in with a roomful of grinning immigrants, with their freshly scrubbed knowledge of executive, legislative, and judicial. David insisting she teach him all the words to the unsingable national anthem, words that make her blush, even as she tries to explain them. David, the logician, struggling for a gloss on the self-evident Declaration of Independence. “But would that not mean…?” She has to warn him not to try to argue the matter with the citizenship judge.

They decide to speak only English to the children. They say it’s to prevent confusion. There will be time for other lessons later. What other choice for now? Her brother Charlie enlists. Her father and Michael would, too, in a heartbeat, if the army were taking old men and children. She anguishes nightly that David might be drafted. They wouldn’t send him against Germany, but they could ship him to the Pacific. They’re taking men with even worse eyesight.

“Don’t worry, treasure,” he says.

It maddens her. “Don’t you tell me not to worry. They’ll take everyone. It’s bad enough having a brother sent to North Carolina. I’m not losing you.”

“Don’t worry. They will not take me.”

The way he says it hushes her. Some privilege of rank. Surely university professors won’t be exempt. His colleagues, the ones who come by for music evenings, men who shuttle among a dozen universities as if they all worked for the same employer, sharing nothing but wild, broken English, a love of mysteries, and a hatred for Hitler: Won’t they go, along with everyone?

“They’re needed here,” David tells her.

How can that be? He has always told her that there’s no work more worthless, more abstract than his. Except, perhaps, music.

The last three weeks of Delia’s second pregnancy leave her lumbering to the finish. Her voice drops to tenor. She stops her lessons and gives up even her church choir jobs. She can’t sit, lie, or stand. She can’t hold her child on her lap. She’s huge. “My wife,” David teases, “she goes from a Webern bagatelle to a Bruckner symphony.” Delia tries to smile, but she has no spare skin left.

Thank God he’s there when it happens. The contractions start at 2:00A.M. on June 16, and by the time David gets her to the hospital a dozen blocks away, she almost delivers in the lobby. It’s a boy, another beautiful boy. “Looks like his mother,” the nurse remarks.

“Looks like his brother,” says the mother, still in that far place.

“We have four of us,” the father repeats. His voice is dazed. “We are a quartet.”

Once again, the state puts “Colored” on the birth certificate. “How about ‘Mixed’ this time?” she asks. “Just to be fair to all the parties?” But Mixed isn’t a category.

“Discrete and not continuous.” Her husband the physicist. “And the two are not symmetrical?”

“No,” she answers. “They are not.”

This perplexes her husband. “Whiteness is recessive. Black is dominant.”

She laughs. “I wouldn’t put it quite like that.”

“But look. Whiteness is lost. They are the exception category. The sogenannt pure case. Black is everything that isn’t white. It’s whites who decide this, yes?”

Whites,she hears her brother Charlie telling her, decide everything.

“So the white race should see this is a losing idea, over time? They write themselves out of the books, even at a fraction of one percent every year!”

She’s too exhausted, too sedated, too ecstatic to have this conversation. Her baby’s her baby. His own case. Race: Joseph. Nationality: Joseph. Weight, length, sex: nothing but her baby, her new JoJo.

But the hospital also gets the eye color wrong. She tells them to fix it: green, for her son’s safety. Just in case the error comes back to haunt him in later years. But they won’t. They can’t see the green. Leaf and bark are to them all the same color.

The baby comes home for Jonah to inspect. Older brother’s disappointment is infinite. This new creature doesn’t want to do anything but sleep and suckle, suckle and sleep. Total perversity, and what enrages the seventeen-month-old most is that both parents are entirely duped by the act. They are both careful to take turns with Jonah, while relieving each other with the new baby.

It’s as Delia wants. Everything she can imagine wanting. If they could freeze time right here. Humming to each child, listening to them hum. Plunking out the basic melody of days.

This one does darken up a little, as her mother again predicts. More than his brother, but stopping right around cream with a little coffee. Even before he can walk, he’s a helper. He doesn’t want to put his mother out, even to feed him. It wrecks her to watch. Even before he can talk, he does everything anyone asks him.

They pack up the children every few months and take them to Philly. It’s not enough for her parents. “They’re different little men every time I get to see them,” Nettie Ellen chides. The twins dress the boys up and take them, one each, around the block, showing them off to any neighbor who’s fool enough to stop. Even Dr. Daley — his own Michael barely out of short pants — turns into a foolish old grandfather, cooing and calling to his descendants.

Delia and David time a visit to coincide with Charlie’s first leave since his transfer. Her brother bursts into the assembled room in uniform, to a collective gasp. He has gone down to Montford Point a second-class citizen and come back a marine. Marine in training anyway. Fifty-first Defense Battalion. He makes the choice not out of any romantic, boyish attachment to that branch of the service. Just because, until a few months ago, they said he couldn’t. Dr. Daley rises to shake his son’s hand. They stand a moment, clasped, and break off wordlessly.

“My Lord, My Lord!” Nettie Ellen fingers the uniform.

“That’s the one,” Charlie says. “The one and only. Same old threads they said we’d never wear. Yes in- deedy. You’re looking at a walking, talking incarnation of Mr. Frankie Dee’s Executive Order Eight-eight-oh-two!”

“Watch your mouth,” his mother says. “I didn’t raise you up to bad-mouth the President.”

“No, Mama.” Pure contrition, with a wink for Delia. “You did not.”

The twins swoon over him. “You’re so fine.” “So divine.” “You are the one.” “Fancy as they come!”

“Notice how surprised my sisters sound,” Charcoal tells David.

Only he’s not Charcoal anymore. This man has disowned the boy who left home. He’s passed by David in age now, by an easy decade. Aged overnight by sights even Philadelphia has never seen. Over dinner, he entertains them with tales from the hell of basic training. “Then they dropped us down in the middle of a swamp at night. Two days, with nothing but a pocketknife and a piece of flint.” William Daley eyes his son with fierce regard, an esteem bordering on rivalry. Little Michael dies of envy by agonized degrees.

“You look up your aunt and uncles yet?”

“Not yet, Mama. They don’t let us off base much. But I will.”

After dinner, he steps out back with his sister to sit on the stoop and smoke a cigarette.

“Marines teach you that, too?” she asks.

“Taught me how to bring it home anyway.” His face is grim. Like it used to be when white people crossed the street rather than pass alongside them.

“So what is it, Char? What aren’t you telling them?”

He flashes her a look, ready to deny everything if she can’t pin him. But she can. He stubs out the butt against the concrete walk. “It’s a joke, Dee. A sick, bad joke. We’re at war already, and we haven’t even left the parade ground.”

She bobs her firstborn on her knee. Little Joey’s safe inside with his grandmother and aunts. She cups Jonah’s ear against his uncle’s anger, deflecting and protecting. She watches Charlie put out his cigarette, her hopes for the goals of this good war stubbed out with it.

He sucks in empty air. “You think Philadelphia’s fucked up? North Carolina makes this place look like Brotherly Love. How did Mama’s family survive it down there all these years? Can’t get a lunch anywhere outside the base. Can’t even go onto Lejeune, even in full dress, without a white man taking me in with him. White general comes over to Montford Point to address the first Negro marines in history? Ends up telling us, right to our faces, how shocked he is to see a bunch of darkie upstarts wearing his heretofore-unspoiled uniform.”

Charles takes off his cap and rubs his close-cropped skull. “You want to see my enlistment contract? It’s stamped COLORED, in big block letters. Case you might miss the fact. Know what that’s all about? Means the President can make them take us, but he can’t force them to make us real marines. Guess what they have planned for the Fifty-first? We’re going to be stewards. Ship us out to the Pacific so we can be the damn Pullman porters for the white battalions. The enemy will be firing at us. And we’ll be hiding behind oil drums and shooting back at them with baked beans.”

Little Jonah breaks free from Delia’s grip and makes a dash for a gray squirrel. The squirrel heads up a tree. So the child, baffled and empty-handed, breaks for wider freedom in the fenced-in yard. Charlie studies his nephew, a level gaze. The child is small distraction. “Even with all the shit we’ve always been through up here? With everything we’ve lived through, I’d never have believed this. Life in this country is a waking nightmare. Hitler’s got nothing on the United States, Dee. I’m not even sure that everyone on this side of the ocean really wants to take the motherfucker down.”

“Oh, hush up, Charlie.” He does, but only because she’s his big sister.

“Don’t talk crazy.” She wants to give him something, some countering truth. But they’re both too old now for reassurance. “It’s the same fight, Char.” And who knows? Maybe it is. “You’re in it. You’re fighting. One war.”

A grin breaks out on Charlie’s face, nothing to do with her. “Speaking of war. Your little Brown Bomber there takes out any more of Mama’s roses, we’re all dead.” Before she can move a step toward Jonah, Charlie whistles. The piercing, pure tone stops Jonah in his tracks. “Hey, soldier. Fall in. Report for duty!” The boy smiles, gives his head a slow, sly shake. Charles Daley, Fifty-first Battalion, U.S. Marine Corps, nods back. “Kid’s awfully light, ain’t he?”

They don’t get out to Philly as often as they should. She marks the weeks by her boys’ bursts of growth. She tries to slow the changes in them but can’t. Her mother’s right: different little men, each time they rise to breakfast. David, too: scariest of all. Changing faster than she can figure out. It’s not that he’s cold, only preoccupied. Every human in the world, he tells her, runs on his own clock. Some an hour or two behind, some as much as years ahead. “You,” she tells him, one of the sources of her love, “you are your own Greenwich.”

Now he’s running out ahead of her — not much; maybe five minutes, ten — just enough for her to miss him. She looks for the reason in herself. Her body has changed a little, after the boys. But it can’t be that; in those moments when they still catch each other, his palm against the small of her back, his nose still buried, astonished, in her neck, his clock returns to hers, entraining, lingering in their sweet after-the-fact. She worries it might be the boys, somehow, their constant need. But he’s as devoted to them as ever, reading Jonah endless repetitions of nursery dimeter, entertaining Joey all Sunday long with a pocket mirror’s dancing sunbeam.

He travels too much. She has memorized the Broadway Limited schedule to Chicago. His beloved Mr. Fermi has set up a lab there, at the university. David makes so many trips, he might as well be on salary.

“Are we moving out?” she asks. Trying to be good, trying to be a wife, managing only to sound doleful.

“Not if you do not wish.” Which somehow frightens her even more. She’s never been one to let her imagination run away from her. But it doesn’t have to run; it has so much free time now, it can cover any distance in a leisurely stroll.

David is called out to Chicago the evening before Jonah’s second birthday. The news astonishes her. “How can you miss this?” The most acid she’s shown him since they married.

He hangs his head. “I told them. I tried to change. Fourteen people need me there on this day.”

“What fourteen people?”

He doesn’t say. He won’t talk about what’s happening. He leaves her to her worst guesses. He holds out his palms. “My Delia. It’s tomorrow already, on the other side of the dateline.” So they have a leap-ahead birthday party, complete with newspaper hats and an orchestra of combs and wax paper. The children are thrilled; the adults guarded and miserable.

She sits alone with the boys the next day. They plunk on the piano, Joey on her lap, reaching for the keys, Jonah next to her on the bench, hitting the tonic to match her right hand’s “Happy Birthday.” She bobbles more notes than her boy does. She knows what it is. It’s something white. No man in this world will choose to stay with somebody dark if he doesn’t have to. She falls asleep that night to this thought, and the same certainty shoves her up from sleep at 3:00A.M. It’s a white woman. Maybe not lust. Just familiarity. Something that just happens to him, comfortable, known. After almost three years, he’s discovered that his wife’s blackness is more than circumstance. The distance doesn’t close up just by naming.

Or maybe it’s not even a woman. Maybe just white doings, white flight. Things she doesn’t understand, things white life has always locked her out of. What has that world ever done but run from her? Why should this man be any different? He has seen some blemish in her, some crudeness that confirms the law. She has been a fool to think they could jump the broom, jump across blood on anything so feeble and handcuffed as love.

These thoughts nest in her at that weird hour, the time of night when even knowing that a thought is pure craziness doesn’t help banish it. The fear is under her skin, crippling her. Even feeling that crippledness proves that the two of them shouldn’t be together, should never have tried. But her boys: her JoJo. They prove something, too, just the look of them: proof beyond any earthly proof. She rises to watch them in their beds. Their simple act of breathing in their sleep gets her through until morning.

By daylight, she vows to wait until her husband brings it up himself. Anything less would be unfaithful. He’ll tell her. And yet, he hasn’t. They vowed when they married that no lies would ever come between them. Now she makes this smaller vow, only to let him break the larger one.

“What is it?” she asks, cornering him. He’s barely off the train. “Tell me what’s going on out there.”

“Wife.” He sits her down. “I have a secret.”

“Well, you better let me in on it, or you’ll be sharing your secret with Saint Peter.”

He curls his forehead, trying to decode her. “By law and by oath, I’m not permitted to share this. Not even with your Saint Peter.”

Where I come from, I’m your oath. In my country, we save each other from the law.

He hears her, in her silence. He tells her what she already knows. “War work. Work of the highest possible security.”

“David,” she says, near flattened. “I know what you study. How could your work be of even the least…?”

He’s laughing before she frames the thought. “Yes! Useless. My specialty, absolutely useless. But they don’t use me for my specialty. They use me to help with the next related idea.”

Everything, related. It’s how he even has a job to begin with. His legendary ability to solve others’ problems, to sit in the lunchroom and scrawl on the backs of napkins the clues his stumped colleagues have been seeking for months.

“Let me guess. The army’s making you build a time bomb.” His face’s startle is worse than any 3:00A.M. fear. “Oh my God.” She covers her mouth. “It can’t be.” Ready to laugh, if he’ll let her.

He doesn’t. Then the law is just the two of them. He tells her the secret he can’t tell anyone. He leaves no evidence, draws no pictures. But he tells her. Yes, it’s a white thing. But it isn’t his. He has been brought into it, along with hundreds of others. A monster thing, a time-ending thing, built in secret places, here and out west.

“I don’t do much. Just mathematics.”

“Do the Germans know about this?”

He tells her about his old friends from Leipzig, Heisenberg and the others, the ones who didn’t emigrate. “Physics”—he shrugs—“is German.”

He must travel, whenever they need him. No question. It could end the war. It could bring Charlie home, and all the others. Keep her boys from harm.

“Now I am your prisoner. Because I’ve told you this. Anytime you want to have me…” He draws a finger across his throat and makes a slurping noise. She stops his hand. Don’t even joke. He sits with her a little longer, neither of them going anywhere.

“Someday?” he says. “You must tell me something back. Something you can not tell anyone.”

“I already have.”

Joey turns one. This time, David’s home. The whole family sits down at the piano bench to explore “Happy Birthday,” one hand from each player, with the birthday boy joining in and squealing in delight.

David is in and out of town the whole summer, gone that first night of August, when police shoot a Negro soldier in uniform over at the Braddock Hotel. Delia has the radio tuned to classical music — the station she uses to put the boys to bed. They don’t go down easily in this wilting heat. They need a fan, the music, and an open window to pacify them. She’s asleep herself, well past 11:00P.M., when a knock at the door awakens her. She stumbles upright and throws on a robe. The knock grows frantic and a voice spasms on the other side. She pads toward the door in terror, calling out, “Who is it?” Her brain scrabbles up from out of sleep, fleeing some country under occupation. The door starts to open and she screams. The boys wake; Joey begins to cry. “David?” she yells in the dark. “David? Is that you?”

Her heart revives when she makes out Mrs. Washington, their landlady, even more panicked than Delia. “Oh, Lord, Mrs. Strom. It’s all over. The city’s on fire!”

Delia calms the woman and brings her into the parlor. But Mrs. Washington won’t sit. If the world is ending, she wants to be vertical. By now, the boys are up and clamped to their mother, wailing. This has some blessing, as it forces Mrs. Washington to compose herself and help comfort them. But whispering, as if to keep it from the boys, she tells Delia, “They’re coming this way. I know it. They’re going to go after the nice houses. Come tear down what we got.”

No use asking who. Even a sensible answer would be insane. The laws outside have broken down. That’s all they are allowed to know. Delia goes to the front window and pulls back the curtains. A few people mill in the street, shocked, in robes and dressing gowns. Delia starts to pull on a few hurried clothes. Mrs. Washington shouts, “Don’t you go out there! Don’t you leave us.” The boys scramble up, ready to protect her. But another child calls her outdoors, a quieter, more frightened sound. Someone in trouble, a girl whose voice she knows but can’t yet recognize. One voice out of the anarchy, calling her by name, pulling her from safety, and she has no choice.

Delia steps out, just down to the sidewalk, the same few steps she takes every day. But everything outside the freestone house is wrong. She walks into a wall of heated air, a chorus of sirens going off at all distances, wailing in spectral waves like wounded animals. She looks eastward down the street at a pale orange halo pasted against the sky. A plume rises behind it, toward the south. She hears a murmur like surf, and when her ears attenuate, the sound turns into people shouting.

Large buildings are on fire. The glow comes from the direction of Sydenham Hospital. Police, fire, and air raid sirens all blare, the first real wartime sounds she’s heard these last twenty months. Harlem’s going up, giving back a taste of everything it’s ever gotten. She asks anyone who stops to answer, but no one knows. Or everyone does, only no two accounts are the same. The police have killed a soldier who was defending his mother, shot him dead in the back. A group of armed defenders have the Twenty-eighth Precinct surrounded. It’s a thousand people. Three thousand. Ten. A gun battle on 136th. A crowd overturning cars, crumpling them with baseball bats. The destruction is moving southward, street by street. No — north. The burning is headed her way.

She watches as the crowd down her block starts schooling. Even on this street, so far untouched, clumps of mesmerized bystanders turn in tight, frightened circles. Some younger men trot in the direction of the flames, their years of pressed rage now turning them diamond. Others flee toward some dissolving city, west of here. Most stand still, all faith betrayed. The night is a cauldron, the air like fired brick in her mouth, the taste of torched buildings. She spins and looks at their row, sees their house burned to the ground. The image is so real, she knows it has already happened. She adds her voice to the shriek-filled air and runs, not stopping until she’s back inside, the door bolted, her curtains drawn.

“Away from the windows,” she tells the children. Her calmness astounds her. “Come on, everyone. Let’s sit in the kitchen. It’ll be nicer there.”

“They’re coming this way,” Mrs. Washington cries. “They’re going to come up here and get the nice places. That’s what they’re after.”

“Hush. It’s miles away. We’re safe here.” She nurses the lie even as she serves it up. The thing she has seen — her house torched and gutted — is as real in her now as any fixed past. They shouldn’t be cowering here, in this death trap, waiting for the end to come find them. But where else can they go? Harlem is burning.

The boys aren’t frightened anymore. The night’s a game, a bright breaking of rules. They want lemonade. They want shaved ice. She gets them whatever they ask for. She and Jonah show Mrs. Washington how they sing “My country, ’tis of thee” in two-part harmony, with little Joseph keeping time on an overturned quart pot.

A quick listen in the front room confirms her fears: The night’s cries are coming nearer. She swears at David for choosing this night to be so far away. She couldn’t reach him now, even if she knew how. Then she remembers, and blesses their luck. His presence here tonight would finish them all.

“Nothing’s ever gonna change for us.” Mrs. Washington speaks like praying. “This is how it’s always gonna be.”

“Please, Mrs. Washington. Not in front of the boys.”

But the boys have curled up, each on his own oval rag rug, cushioned islands on the hardwood sea. Delia keeps vigil, ready to rush them out the back if the crowd reaches their door. All night long, she hears someone out there in the cauldron calling for her. This is how the four of them sit, the tide of violence lapping at the corner of their street, cresting in a fury of helplessness before subsiding just before dawn.

Morning breaks, silent. The fury of last night has spent itself to change exactly nothing. Delia rises to her feet, bewildered. She walks out to the front room, which is still, astonishingly, there. But she saw it. The house was gone, and now it’s still here, and she doesn’t know how to get from that one certainty back to this other.

Mrs. Washington draws Delia to her in a wild departing hug. “Bless you. I was dying of fright, and you were here. I’ll never forget what you did for me.”

“Yes,” Delia answers, still dazed. Then: “No! I did nothing.” That’s what must have saved them. Holding still, waiting for judgment to pass over.

When David returns, two nights later, she tries to tell him. “Were you frightened?” he asks. The weight of foreign words hobbles him so badly, he doesn’t even try for the thing he needs to know.

“We just sat there, the four of us, waiting. I knew what was going to happen. It all felt decided. Already done. And then…”

“Then it did not happen.”

“Then it did not happen.” She gives a soft shake of the head, refusing the evidence. “The house is still here.”

“Still here. And all of us, still, too.” He takes her in his arms, but their bafflement grows. He asks, “What has caused this riot?” She tells him: a hotel arrest. A soldier trying to keep the police from arresting a woman. “Six people dead? Many buildings burned? All this from one arrest?”

“David.” She closes her eyes, exhausted. “You can’t know. You simply cannot know.”

She sees this sting him across the face: a judgment. A rebuke. He tries to follow her — the rational scientist. But he can’t. Can’t know the pressure, millions of lives sharpened to a point, the blade that skewers you every time you try to move. He can’t even start to do the math. It’s something you come into, centuries before you’re born. To a white: a drunken woman breaking the law. But to those that the law effaces: the one standing, irrevocable death sentence.

David takes off his glasses and wipes them. “You say I cannot know. But will our boys?”

Two days after the riot, the boys have already forgotten. But something in them will remember hiding in the kitchen one night while still too young to know anything. Will they know the riot the way she knows, the way their father cannot? “Yes. They’ll have to. The largest part of them will know.” As if it had parts, this knowledge.

David looks up at her, pleading for admission. His sons will not be his. Every census will divide them. Every numbering. She watches the world take his slave children away from him to a live burial, an unmarked grave. We do not own ourselves. Always, others run us. His lips press together, bloodless. “Madness. The whole species.” She sits through this diagnosis in silence. Her man is in agony. The agony of his family, lost in bombed Rotterdam. The agony of his family, hiding in the dark in burning Harlem, while he is gone. “Nothing ever changes. The past will run us forever. No forgiveness. We never escape.”

These words scare her worse than that night’s sirens. It will end her, a blanket condemnation coming from this man, who so needs to believe that time will redeem everyone. And still, she can’t contradict him. Can’t offer him any hideout from forever. She sees the mathematician struggle with the crazed logic that assigns him: colored there, white here. The bird and the fish can build their nest. But the place they build in will blow out from underneath it.

“Perhaps they do not have four choices after all. These boys of ours.”

She touches his arm. “Nobody gets even one.”

“Belonging will kill us.”

She hides her head from him and cries. He places one hand on her nape, her shoulders, and feels the boulder there. His hand works softly, like water on that rock. Perhaps if humans had the time of erosion. If they could live at the speed of stones. He talks as he rubs her. She doesn’t look up.

“My father was finished with all of this. ‘Our people. The chosen. The children of God.’ And everyone else: not. Five thousand years was enough. A Jew was not geography, not nation, not language, not even culture. Only common ancestors. He could not be the same as a Jew in Russia or Spain or Palestine, who is different from him in every way that can be different except for being ‘our people.’ He even convinced my mother, whose grandparents died in the pogroms. But here is the funny thing.” Her lips contract involuntarily under his rubbing fingertips. She knows; she knows. He doesn’t need to say. “The funny thing…”

His parents are chosen anyway.

She lifts her head to him. She needs to see if he’s still there. “We can be our people.” Renewing their first vow. All its break and remaking. “Just us.”

“What do we tell these boys?”

She is bound to him. Will do anything to lift up the man, his solitary race of one. Anything, including lie. So she signs on to her downfall: love. She puts her hand on his nape, sealing the symmetry he began. “We tell them about the future.” The only place bearable.

A groan breaks out of him. “Which one?”

“The one we saw.”

Then he remembers. He takes hold again on nothing, a tree on a rock face, rooted in a spoonful of soil. “Yes. There.” The future that has led them here. The one they make possible. His life’s work must find them such junctures, such turnings. What dimensions don’t yet exist will come into being, bent open by their traveling through them. They can map it slowly, their best-case future. Month by month, child by child. Their sons will be the first ones. Children of the coming age. Charter citizens of the postrace place, both races, no races, race itself: blending unblended, like notes stacked up in a chord.

America, too, must jump into its own nonexistent future. Nazi transcendence — the latest flare-up of white culture’s world order — forces the country into a general housecleaning. The Tuskegee Airmen, the 758th Tank, the Fifty-first and Fifty-second Marine Corps divisions, and scores of other Negro units are shipped out to all the choke points of the global front. Whatever future this war leaves intact, it will never again be yesterday’s tomorrow.

Delia gets a letter from Charles in January of 1944. He’s been assigned to the Seacoast Artillery Group.

We’re starting our first major offensive — a drive across fortified enemy concentrations in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Should we succeed in forming a beachhead and breaking out, we plan to sweep through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona — dangerous territory — and press on to establish a forward perimeter in San Diego. From there, we’ll ship out and meet the Japanese, who ought to be a cakewalk in comparison to the folks down this way.

He sends another note in mid-February, from Camp Elliott, California:

Greetings from Tara West… We’ve a ninety-mm gun crew here who can hit a towed target in less than a minute. Show me the white crew that can do better. But last night, when the brass decided to throw us an open-air movie, that same crew, along with the whole Fifty-first, was sent to the back, behind thousands of white boys, who, I suppose, had to keep themselves between us and Norma Shearer so there wouldn’t be any race mingling. (Nothing personal, sister.) Well, we particular marines didn’t much feel like heading back. We wound up getting thrown out all together. The place turned into a free-for-all, with a couple dozen good-sized bucks ending up behind bars. We ship out tomorrow on the Meteor, not an hour too soon, as far as I’m concerned. I’m so ready to leave these shores and try my luck in the savage, uncivilized islands that I can’t begin to tell you. Keep an eye on the home front, Dee. I mean, watch out for it.

Delia talks to David, in bed that night, before his next trip out west. “Hurry up with that work of yours.” The one quick jump into the future that will save everyone she cares for. The idea forms in her, in that place before idea. She must protect her boys from the present, preserve their unlabeled joy, refuse to say what they are, teach them to sing through every invented limit the human mind ever cowered behind.

So it feels like a message from space — one night in midyear, spring cracking the crust of a winter grown unbearable, as she bathes Joey in the bassinet and David listens to the New York Philharmonic in the over-stuffed chair, his arm around Jonah — when a piece for full orchestra called Manhattan Nocturne seeps through the crystal set into their rented home. The piece is lovely, sonorous, and tinged with anachronism. Singable. She hums along by the end, buzzing the primary theme into a giggling Joey’s belly as if her baby boy’s body were a kazoo.

She notices the music without really noticing. But the polished announcer’s words afterward hit her like an omen. The composer is a thirteen-year-old girl named Phillipa Duke Schuyler. And if that wasn’t impossible enough, the girl is of mixed race. Delia almost puts a safety pin through her boy, and even then, Joey suffers her. She thinks she misheard, until David wanders slack-jawed into the room. His eyes fill with frightened vindication. “One hundred piano compositions before her twelfth year!”

Delia looks at her husband, feeling as if they’ve escaped the prison that the laws of a dozen American states would still sentence them to. The girl has an IQ of 185. Played the piano at three and began the concert circuit by the age of eleven. Their boys have an advance scout in this newfound land. The continent exists already, and it’s inhabited.

The girl’s father is a journalist, her mother a Texas farmer’s daughter. The father has written a meticulous account of his prodigy in the Courier, which Delia tracks down. The principles are simple. Raw milk, wheat germ, and codliver oil. Intensive education — a two-parent home schooling scheme of around-the-clock instruction. But the real secret is that old western farming trick of hybrid vigor. The basics of agricultural breeding. Twinrace children — that genius girl proves it — represent a new strain of crossed traits more robust than either of their parental lines. Mr. George Schuyler goes on to claim even more. Sturdy crossbred children are this country’s only hope, the only way out of centuries of division that will otherwise grow wider with the run of time. Just writing as much would land Mr. Schuyler behind bars in Mississippi, according to a law no older than his daughter. But the words reach Delia like food falling from the desert sky.

Raw milk and wheat germ, mixed blood, daily doses of music, and the girl has become an angel. Her Manhattan Nocturne for one hundred instruments awes wartime America. Mayor La Guardia even declares a Phillipa Duke Schuyler Day. The sound of the past vanishes at the little girl’s playing. Delia buys copies of all her available sheet music. She leaves the Five Little Piano Pieces, composed at age seven, out on the music rack. Her boys stare, rapt, at the picture of little Phillipa on the cover, seeing something in her that will take them decades to recognize. The pieces are among the first the boys learn — the foundation stone of the new Strom schoolhouse.

Others have been this way: It makes all the difference in the merciless world. Home lessons begin in earnest. The boys leap through every little melody she sets them. David rolls around on the floor with them, playing games with blocks that only an older, sadder child would suspect to be the basis of set theory. David and Delia even try the wheat germ and codliver oil, but the boys aren’t taking.

“Kein Problem,”David says. “We don’t need one hundred and eighty-five IQ.”

“True. Anything over one hundred and fifty will do just fine.” In fact, it begins to dawn on Delia that every child who learns to walk and talk has the genius of whole galaxies engineered in them, before hate begins to dull them down.

It thrives, this school of four, without anyone thinking school. Outside their house, life sends them a sign, confirming their leap of faith. The Supreme Court deals a blow to all-white elections. The Allies land in France and push eastward. The endless war will end, and melting pot America will be the force that ends it. The only question is how soon. No day will be soon enough. For four years, they’ve had no word of David’s parents. His sister and her husband have disappeared, too, most likely lost in Bulgaria when it went under. Month after month, Delia props up her man, telling him in every possible way that silence proves nothing. But finally, gradually, it does. All the messages escaping that continent converge on the same conclusion.

She feels him protecting her in turn. He already knows where his family must be, in the absence of opposing evidence. But he won’t say as much to Delia. “You’re right. Everything must remain possible.” Until it isn’t.

Her husband turns his private grief toward a response unthinkably large. As the Americans break out across the French bocage, David tenses. He hints at his fear to her, all the while trying to honor the government oaths he has sworn. She knows his anxiety. Some crossed trip wire on the map — the Meuse, the Rhine — will bring forth a pillar of elemental German fire. German physics. Some world-sized quantum experiment: two futures, either one of which must birth an outcome that will swallow the other forever.

The fall turns bitter. The Allied advance reaches Belgium. The Brits and Canadians crack open Antwerp to Allied shipping, and still they suffer no cosmic retaliation. Not a hint that Heisenberg is even close. The evidence builds that the greatest scientific power on earth — David’s world-changing colleagues from Leipzig and Göttingen — have taken a wrong turn somewhere.

But any moment can alter every other. Rumors collapse back into fact the moment they are released. Some days, Delia feels her husband turning fatalistic, with nothing to do but shrink and wait, the passive inheritor of events too long in the making for him to influence them. On others, the urge to act possesses him, bending him almost double in further, more obscure efforts. These are the moments when Delia most loves him, his need for her so great, he can’t even see it. What comfort can she give him, trapped in salvation’s footrace? She gives him here, now, the sheltered fortress of their rented home.

One night, the air still heavy with heat and the boys tossing in sleep on the sofa in front of the steel-caged floor fan, the phone rings. It’s a rare enough event in any week, and so startling at this hour that Delia almost sears her scalp with the pressing comb. David answers. “Yes? Who? Operator. Ah! Hello, William.”

She’s on her feet. Her father, who hates the telephone. Who believes the instrument is driving people schizophrenic. Who makes his wife place all his calls. Who doesn’t believe in long distance. She crosses to David in two steps, hand out for the receiver, while her husband lapses into mumbled German. She takes the phone, and far away, tinny in her ear, her father tells her Charlie is dead. Killed in the Pacific. “On a coral atoll.” Her father wanders. “Eniwetok.” As if the name might keep her from screaming. “They were garrisoning the air base.”

“How?” Her voice isn’t hers. Her breath presses, and the smallest thought takes forever. She imagines death from the air, the enemy singling out her brother, his darkness a target against the white sand of paradise.

Her father’s voice waits for a collection that’s more like collapse. “You may not want…”

“Daddy,” she moans.

“They were unloading a gun battery off a ship. A restraining cable broke. The snap caught him…”

She doesn’t stop him, but she doesn’t hear. She races ahead with management. Undo by doing. “Mama. How is Mama?”

“I’ve had to sedate her. She’ll never forgive me.”

“The children?”

“Michael is…proud. He thinks it was combat. The girls don’t understand what it means, yet.”

The girls? The girls don’t? Yet?As she clings to that word understand, she closes down. Blood beats into her face and her eyes break open. Sobs come out of her that couldn’t have been in. She feels David take the phone, make some hurried arrangements, and hang up. Then she’s being comforted, held up by the ghost white arms of this man who’ll never be more to her than almost recognizable, a stranger to her blood, the father of her children.

They go to Philadelphia. All four of them take the train that once smuggled her to New York, hidden from everyone but Charlie. Delia stands in the front of the house, under the tree Char fell out of at eight, the fall that left him with the bent nose and jutting collarbone. Her mother comes out of the house to meet her. She’s falling already, twenty feet before they reach, and Delia must catch her. Nettie Ellen holds her hand to her mouth, stilling a thousand shaking prayers. “He can’t be done yet. Too much more he’s still got to do.”

The doctor stands behind Nettie, blinded by daylight, his hair gone white overnight. They retreat into the house, Dr. Daley propping his wife, Delia holding her little one, and the white man leading his subdued but adventuring oldest boy. Michael is inside, wearing a jacket emblazoned with the Marine Corps insignia that his brother smuggled him from North Carolina. Lucille and Lorene bicker softly on the couch, barely lifting their heads as their sister enters.

Her brother Charlie, stopped forever. No more bitter-laugh letters, no more razz, no more improvised Charcoal show, no more rounds of sounding or toasting, no more fate-dismissing shrug. The new silence of this house closes in on Delia, swallowing all their sound.

There’s no body for a burial. What’s left of Charlie rots on a Pacific atoll. “They won’t send it back,” Dr. Daley tells Delia, out of the others’ earshot. “They’re going to leave him in a sandy hole with a six-inch salt-water table. Shark food. My country. I was here before the Pilgrims, and they won’t send me my boy back.” He points at the gold star Nettie Ellen has mounted in the front window. “They did, however, pay for that.”

That night, they hold a makeshift service. No one but family. The net around them is large and strong. Many have been by already, feeding, helping out, talking and holding quiet. But tonight, there is just kin, the only people that boy never had a choice but to trust. Their grief knows no cure but memory. Each of them has something to recall. Some stories need only two words to play out again in front of all of them. Michael gets his brother’s old sax and shows off the riffs he has stolen just by watching. Dr. Daley sits at the piano, tries a left-hand stride like the ones he used to chide his son for pounding out. For six full bars, he finds the swell. Then, hearing what his fingers want to do, he crumbles.

Mostly, they sing — wide, spectral, full-chorded things, the intervals cutting through generations. Sorrow songs. Songs about abiding and getting away and crossing over. Then the tunes that seem more wedding than funeral, thanking the dead boy for yesterday, for a joy it will kill them to ratify. The family finds their lines, one each, with no one assigning. Even Nettie Ellen, whose speech has shut down, finds the harmonies slated to her, keeping time — the beat of deliverance — with a hand on her thigh. Bound to go. Bound to go. I can’t stay behind.

Jonah sits rapt on his mother’s lap, mouth open, trying to join in. Joey fusses, and David picks him up and carries him outside, into the yard. That’s best, Delia decides. God help her, but it’s easier that way. More Canaan, more comfort, without having to make the perpetual explanations. Without having to look at the color that Charlie used to say was too light for pain.

“Folks will want to come. They’re making a mountain of food.” Nettie Ellen’s barest request to her daughter: Stay a few days. We need to keep together now, sing that boy home. Just stay — the old racial certainty, comfort to be had only here, in the safety of we. All other places betray us. But hearing those wordless words, Delia can’t bear it. Not another day. Belonging crushes her shoulders so she can’t even stand. Run by histories laid down centuries before her own past had the chance to write itself. She’ll suffocate here, in her mother’s dining room, with its scent of wood soap and molasses, work and sacrifice, belief and resignation, and, now, dead children. She needs to fly, back home, back to the project of her family, back to the freedom her nation of four has invented. Get free tonight. Tomorrow is too late.

She starts to tell her mother she must go. But the woman hears her before Delia can speak a word. A low keening tears from Nettie’s throat, a flood of whatever comes before words, whatever thicker thing words are made from. Her mother sobs rhythm, her narrow chest a drum. The river of loss dam-bursts out of her, up from a world Delia knows only in shadow, bits of ground-up ancestry refusing to be shed, a tongue not yet English, older than Carolina, older than the annihilating middle passage of this life that cages them all. Delia’s mother comes through, the way she has never once let herself come through in any church. Comes through to the beginning, and this death is already there.

Then she is in Delia’s arms, the daughter flailing to give comfort. Awful turnaround, nature running backward. Her mother’s mother now. The younger children look on, terrified at this twist. Even William’s face pleads with his daughter to undo what has been done. Her whole family turns toward Delia, searching, until she sees. They’re grieving the death that hasn’t happened yet, alongside the one that has. Five faces beg Delia to reverse the thing she has set in motion. Her mother gasps for breath in her arms. English returns, but thick and low, scrabbling for syllables, cursing her native tongue. “Why did that boy die? All they’ll ever want from us is dying.”

Dr. Daley covers his face with one great fist. His children swing round upon him, and he looks up, horribly visible. He finds some refusal in him that stands in for dignity. He rises to his feet and heads from the room. “Daddy,” Delia calls. “Daddy?” He will not turn.

The back door slams. Then the front opens. David and her baby, her second compensation, return. Her mother asks again. “Tell me a reason. Give me just one.”

David surveys the faltering family. Joseph, too: the solemn child just turning, staring. Delia sees knowledge rise into her husband’s face, that look she must carry around on hers, every waking hour. This isn’t yours. You’re not welcome here. He looks to her for the slightest guide. Her eyes flick up, toward the back door. This colorless man, this man she somehow married, this man who can understand nothing here, understands her. He gives the child to the twins and slips off, the way her father left, Delia fighting the urge to call him back.

She hums to her mother, cradling her head, as if all her years of receiving the same were simply training to give it back. She says nothing, speaking in the old, discarded accent that comes back so easily. She reminds her mother of heaven, courage, and other foolishness, of plans beyond anything so small as a human ever being able to second-guess. But her thoughts are on the men. As soon as she can, she signals Lorene to go check. Her little sister comes back, nodding. Delia wrinkles her brow but gets no more clarification from the girl than a puzzled grimace.

Delia stands and cranes, trying to see out the back hall window. Nothing. She makes some pretense — checking the cooling pies — to duck out to the kitchen. She looks through the bowed screen, the one her own mother spent years glancing through, keeping track on her children at play outdoors. Delia approaches the screen and peers sideways down the steep wooden stoop.

Both men sit motionless on the ground, their backs to the thick red maple. Now and then, their mouths move, forming words too soft to hear across the yard. One speaks and the other, after a long interval, answers. David punctuates his words with hand sweeps, illustrating on the air some halting geometry of thought. Her father’s face folds up in struggle. His muscles dart through all the feints of a cornered animal: first rage, then barricade, then playing dead.

Her husband’s face, too, pulls up lame, looking for some gloss it can’t reach. But the hands keep moving, tracing their equations in space, drawing their only conclusion. The fingers form closed loops, lines lying inside themselves, running back along their point of origin. Her father nods — near-motionless head bobs. Not agreement, not acceptance. Just acknowledgment, bending like the top of the maple as it fits the day’s breeze. His face slackens. She could call it calm, from where she stands, this far away, behind the gauze of the screen door.

They stay the night. That much, Delia gives her mother, who gave her everything. Who gave Charlie everything, and wound up paid by a gold star in her front window. But when people start arriving the next morning — the hunched aunts and uncles; neighbors with pans of crisp, pungent fowl; Dr. Daley’s lifelong patients; those patients’ children, many older than Charlie — when every soul who ever knew the boy and half of those who couldn’t have told him from his nickname wander into the Daley living room, assembling like the choir of some suppressed sect, Delia gathers her boys and bolts. She’s an impostor here, an intruder at her own brother’s wake. She won’t inflict that on the others, too charitable to name what has already happened to their little Dee.

This day, Nettie Ellen doesn’t weep. Doesn’t even protest her daughter’s desertion except to say to her, just before the Stroms head for the station, “You are what’s left of him, now.” She kisses her grandchildren, and watches them leave, stone-still, waiting for the next blow.

Dr. Daley pecks Delia good-bye and shakes the hands of his sobered grandsons. To David, he says, “I’ve thought about what you told me.” He pauses a long time, stuck between doubt and need. “It’s madness, of course.” David nods and smiles, his glasses sliding down the cantilevered bridge of his nose. That’s enough for the doctor. He does not press for reason, but only adds, “Thank you.”

The four of them are on the train, the boys running down the aisle, delighted again, released from death, when Delia asks David. The whole car stares at them, as it always does, disguising their curiosity or telegraphing their disgust. Only Delia’s lightness keeps the threatened purebreds baffled enough to let her family pass home safely. Her thoughts have no time for these outsiders. Her father’s parting words to David obsess her. Madness. It’s madness, of course. Part of her wants to let it go, allow her father and husband to have at least this one secret between them. But more of her needs whatever broken comfort they’ve traded. Her father has never suffered consolation gladly. But this one seemed to give him room. She contains herself the whole ride. Then, as the train pulls into Penn Station, Delia hears herself ask, from high up in the atmosphere, “David? Yesterday?” She can’t face her husband, too shockingly close on the seat beside her. “When you were talking to my father? I saw you. The two of you, through the back door. Sitting under that red tree.”

“Yes,” he says. She hates him for not volunteering, not reading her mind, not answering without making her spell out her need.

“What were you talking about?” She feels his head turn toward her. But still she can’t look.

“We talked about why my people had to be stopped.”

She swings round. “ Yourpeople?” He only nods. She’ll die. Follow her brother. Become nothing.

“Yes. He asked me why I was not…fighting in the army.”

“My God. Did you tell him?”

Her husband spreads his hands upward. Saying, How could I? Saying, Forgive me: yes.

The train slumps to a halt. She gathers her boys, the whole car still turning covertly to check if her children are really hers. Her Jonah pranks and sings, struggling to escape his mother’s hand and dash out the train door onto the platform. But her Joey looks up at her, searching for reassurance, as if the trip to Philadelphia, his dead uncle, has just come home. His eyes lock on hers, darting diagonally, early into old age, nodding at her, the same huge motionless nod her father succumbed to only yesterday.

She must know. She waits until they’re standing on the platform, an island of four in a swarming sea. “David? Was there more?”

He studies her as they follow the departing passengers. More. There’s always more. “I told him what… my peoplethink.” He twists the words, through the corner of his mouth. She thinks he has turned on her, gone cruel. He shepherds the boys through the crowd, out onto the street and their next public humiliation, talking as he walks. “I told him what Einstein says. Minkowski. ‘Jewish physics.’ Time backward and time forward: Both are always. The universe does not make a difference between the two. Only we do.”

She grabs his elbow, pulling until he stops. People flow past them. She doesn’t hear their curses. She hears only what she heard the day they met — the message from that long-ago future she’s forgotten.

“It’s true,” her husband says. “I told him that the past goes on. I told him that your brother still is.”