The Time of Our Singing

My Brother as Loge

I listen to Jonah’s recording, and the year comes back intact. Comes back, as if that year had hurtled off somewhere while I stood still. The needle has only to touch down onto that circle of black vinyl and he’s standing in front of me. Aside from the scratches and pops, the scattered flyspecks in amber that accumulate over years of listening, we’re back on that day we laid the tracks down, two boys on the verge of the big time, the night before Watts exploded.

Da liked to say you can send a message “down into time.” But you can’t send one back up. He never explained to me how you could send any message, in any direction, and expect it to reach its mark. For even if the message arrives intact, everything it speaks about will have already changed.

My brother’s debut recording, Lifted Voice — a title he hated — was released, to several favorable and even a few excited reviews. Purists found the recital miscellany more suited to a midcareer singer than to a first-timer. Some reviewers called the sampler approach “light,” saying Jonah should have done a whole lieder cycle or a single-composer collection. This boy’s attempt to show he could sing anything somehow overreached. Yet for most reviewers, the reach took hold.

The record jacket showed a late brooding landscape by Caspar David Friedrich. The back of the jacket had our black-and-white head shots and a midrange shot of Jonah onstage in concert dress. A silver medallion on the front bore a quote from Howard Silverman’s Times review of the Town Hall recital: “This young man’s sound has something deeper and more useful in it than mere perfection… His every note rings with exhilarating freedom.”

The disk sold quietly. Harmondial was pleased, banking on long-term return on investment. They considered Jonah a buy and hold. We two were stunned that anyone bothered to listen to the thing. “Jesus, Joey! Thousands of people have added us to their record collections, and we don’t even know them. My picture could be pressing up against Geraldine Farrar’s kisser somewhere, even as we speak.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“One of her early pub photos. A nice little Cho-Cho-San.”

“And somewhere else, you’re pressing up against the tip of Kirsten Flagstad’s spear point.”

Jonah imagined that, having made a good recording, we had only to sit back and wait for the jobs to pour in. Mr. Weisman did book us more regularly into bigger cities, and we could just about live now on what we made. But week to week, our life was still the same university concert series and festival-dredging it had been before the record appeared.

I drop the needle onto the first track — Schubert’s “Erl-King,” a Marian Anderson standard — and I circle back into that closed loop. The record spins; the piano gallop resumes. Jonah and I send out the song’s surging message, unchanged. But the people to whom we thought to send it are gone.

The same president who passed the Civil Rights Act forced through Congress a blank check for widening the war in Asia. Jonah and I carried around our draft cards, nothing if not law-abiding. But the shadow of the call passed over us. We slipped through the minefield, exiting out the far side, too old to be tapped. The summer after our record, Chicago erupted. Three days later, Cleveland followed. It was high July again, just as it had been when we’d laid down the tracks. And once again, the bewildered reporters tried to blame the heat. Civil rights was heading north. The chickens, as Malcolm had said, were coming home to roost. Violence accompanied us, nightly, on our hotel televisions. I stared at the collective hallucination, knowing I was somehow the author of it. Every time I put our record on the turntable to hear what we two had done, another city burned.

“They’ll have to declare nationwide martial law.” The idea seemed to appeal to Jonah. This was the man who’d lain on the sidewalk of Watts, moving his lips to some ethereal score, waiting to be shot. High Fidelity had just run a feature, “Ten Singers Under Thirty Who Will Change the Way You Listen to Lieder,” naming him to their number-three spot. My brother’s country was just fine. Martial law might even help stabilize our bookings.

I looked out from the upper stories of antiseptic hotel rooms onto a carousel of cities whose names bled into one another, watching for the next new trickles of smoke. The music that year was still in denial—“I’m a Believer”; “Good Vibrations”; “We Can Work It Out.” Only this time, tens of millions of twenty-year-olds who had been lied to since birth were out in the streets saying no, singing power, shouting burn. I drop the needle down on the tracks of our Wolf songs and hear for the first time where the two of us were. My brother and I, alone, were heading back into that burning building that the rest of the country was racing to evacuate.

We called Da from San Francisco just before the High Holidays. Not that he ever kept track. Long distance, back then, was still a three-minute civil defense drill, saved for funerals and machine-gunned best wishes. Jonah got on and did a prestissimo recap of our recent concerts. Then I got on and greeted Da with the first few lines of the Kol Nidre in Hebrew, which I’d just learned phonetically out of a book. My accent was so bad, he couldn’t understand me. I asked to talk to Ruth. Da said nothing. I thought he still didn’t understand my English. So I asked again.

“Your sister has broken with me.”

“She what? What are you talking about, Da?”

“She has moved away. Sie hat uns verlassen. Sie ist weg. ”

“When did this happen?”

“Just now.” To Da, that might have meant anything.

“Where’d she go?” Jonah, standing nearby, quizzed me with a look.

Da didn’t have the faintest idea.

“Did something happen? Have the two of you…?”

“There was a fight.” I found myself praying he wouldn’t give me details. “The whole country is rebellion. Everything has become revolution. So of course, it’s finally come your sister’s and my turn.”

“Can’t you get her address from the university? You’re her father. They’ll have to tell you.”

Shame filled his voice. “She has dropped out of school.” More grief than when he told us, that December day at Boylston eleven years before, that our mother was dead. The first death still fit into his cosmology. This new disaster pushed him over into a place no theories could accommodate. His daughter had disowned him. She had torn loose in some astral discontinuity Da couldn’t comprehend, even as it broke over him.

“Da? What…what happened? What did you do?”

“We had a fight. Your sister thinks… We had a fight about your mother.”

I looked at Jonah, helpless. He held out his hand to take the phone. I gripped the receiver, ready to take it to my grave.

“I am the evil one.” Da’s voice broke. He’d seen the future, and his children were it. But this disaster had somehow hijacked his vision. “I am the enemy. There is nothing I can do.” All our lives he’d told us, “Run your own race.” Now he knew just how worthless that advice had always been. No one had their own race. No one’s race was theirs to run. “I killed your mother. I ruined the three of you.”

I could hear my own blood coursing in my ears. Ruth had told our father this. Worse: He’d reached the same conclusion. I felt my lips moving. Any objection I could make would only confirm him. At last I managed to say, “Don’t be crazy, Da.”

“How did we come here?” he answered.

I handed Jonah the phone and went to the hotel window. Down in the square below, in the gathering dusk, two street people argued. Jonah talked on to Da for several sentences. “She’ll show up. She’ll be back. Give her two weeks, tops.” After a little gap of listening, he added, “You, too.” Then the call was over.

Jonah didn’t want to talk about it. So for a long time, we didn’t. He wanted to rehearse. I sounded like shit pushed through a sieve. At last, he smiled at me and gave up. “Joey. Cool it. It’s not the end of the world.”

“No. Just of our family.”

Something in him said his family had ended years ago. “Mule. It’s done. It’s not your fault. What are you going to do about it now? Ruth has been working up to this for years. She’s just been waiting for the moment when she could punish us all for being who we are. Bust us for all the things we’ve done to her. Haven’t done. Whatever.”

“I thought you told Da she’s coming back. You said two weeks.”

“I meant two weeks in Da years.” He shook his head in a controlled fury. The rage of confirmation. “Our own little sister. She’s resented us for years. She hates everything about us. Everything she thinks we stand for.” Jonah paced in place, trying to breathe normally. He shook his shoulders and shot his clenched fist into the air. “Power to the purple. Light brown is beautiful.”

“She’s a good deal more than light.” Before he could shut me down, I rushed on. “Poor Rootie.”

Jonah looked at me, rejected. Then he put his fingers to the bridge of his nose and nodded. “Poor all of us.”

We went to Jersey to see Da as soon as we were back in the city. We went for dinner, which he insisted on making. I’d never seen the man so shaken. Whatever reason Ruth gave for quitting school and cutting Da off without a forwarding address had destroyed him. Da’s hands shook as he passed the plates to put out on the table. He slumped about the kitchen, apologizing for being. He tried to make the tomato and chicken stew that Mama had loved to make. Da’s smelled like a damp terry-cloth towel.

Jonah cued up a stack of Italian tenors to accompany dinner. When that distraction didn’t work, he did his best to set the topics. But Da wanted to talk about Ruth. He was a total mess. “She says I am responsible.”

“For what?”

Da just waved my question into the ether.

Jonah lectured at us both. “Let her go where she needs to go. Get out of her way, and she’ll stop blaming you. That’s all she wants. Remember how Mama raised us? ‘Be whatever you want to be.’” I could hear how betrayed he was.

“That is not what your sister wants. She has told me to my face that your mother died…because she married me.”

I slammed my fork down on my plate, splattering the stew. “Good God. How can she even…”

Da went on, talking to no one. “Have I been in terrible error all this time? Did your mother and I do wrong by making you children?”

Jonah tried to laugh. “Frankly, Da? Yes. Some other set of parents should have made us.”

Da said only, “Maybe. Maybe.”

We blasted through what was left of dinner. Jonah and I made short work of the dish cleanup while Da stood by, waving his arms. We talked a little about upcoming concerts. Jonah told Da he was planning to do a Met audition early in the spring. First I’d heard. But then, he’d gotten used to his accompanist reading his mind.

Ruth came up again only as we readied to leave. “Tell us when you hear from her,” Jonah said. He tried not to sound too eager. “Trust me. She’ll surface. People don’t just cut off their own flesh and blood.” He must have heard what he was saying. But Jonah never even flinched. His acting skill now matched his singing. My brother was ready for any audition he cared to take.

As we got our coats, Da broke down. “Boys. My boys.” The word, after all his years in this land, still rhymed with choice. “Please stay here tonight. There is so much room in this place. It must be too late to take the train.”

I checked my watch. Quarter past nine. Jonah was for going. I was for staying. We had two programs to perfect by next week, without enough hours to perfect them. But I wasn’t budging, and Jonah wouldn’t go by himself. Da put Jonah on the living room’s foldout sofa and me on a bedroll on the floor of his study. He didn’t want either of us staying in Ruth’s room. You never knew when the girl might come home in the middle of the night.

I woke at no hour. Someone had broken into the house. In my half state, I heard the police searching down a tip they’d received about illegal fugitives hiding in the neighborhood. Then it sounded like a conversation, hushed voices in the hours before dawn, planning the day. Then I thought the radio was on, tuned to some lightly accented FM announcer. The accent was my father’s, and I was awake. Da was talking to someone on the other side of the wall, in the kitchen, ten steps away from me. Amber seeped in under the crack of my room’s door. For a moment, Jonah and I were spying on our parents where they whispered together in the old kitchen in Hamilton Heights, the night Jonah’s first boarding school application had been rejected for unstated reasons. Now my father whispered with his firstborn son, while I did the eavesdropping, alone. I pictured Da and Jonah, head-to-head across the breakfast table. I couldn’t figure it: My brother never woke up in the mornings without vast external encouragement. I checked the window: still hours from morning. They weren’t just waking; they hadn’t yet fallen asleep. By some secret signal, they’d arranged to stay up after I went down, to discuss in private things not meant for me.

I listened. Da was explaining himself. “How has it become greater than family?” I lay in the dark, listening for Jonah’s reply, but there was none. After a pause, Da spoke again. “It cannot be bigger than family. It cannot become bigger than time. I could have told her what we saw. Should I have told her about the child?” I had no idea what he was talking about. Again, I waited for Jonah to answer, and again he didn’t. He’d grown completely helpless without me.

There was a sound, eerie and grating. At three o’clock in the morning, even “Happy Birthday” sounds terrifying. It took me a few rasps to decide: Da was laughing. Then it wasn’t laughter. Our father was breaking down, and still Jonah said nothing. My hearing swelled until I realized: Jonah wasn’t there. One padded set of footsteps, one clinking spoon against a single teacup, one muffled course of breathing. Da was alone, in his kitchen, in the middle of the night — one of how many nights running? — talking to himself.

He said, “I did not foresee this. I never saw this would come.” Then he said, “Have we made a mistake? Maybe we have understood all wrong?”

I froze in my bedroll. There was only one person he could be talking to. Someone who couldn’t answer. I fought down the urge to fling the door open. Anything out there would have killed me. All I could do was lie still in my makeshift bed, afraid even to breathe, straining to hear what answer he might receive. After a while, I heard my father change. He seemed, through the door, to grow lighter. He said, “Yes, that’s so.” In a voice awful with peace, he added, “Yes, I could not forget that.” I heard him stand and move from the table to the sink. He set the dishes onto the porcelain. He stood there for some time, no doubt gazing out the darkened window above the sink. A groan escaped him. “But our little girl!” He didn’t wait for an answer now, but padded out of the kitchen and down the hallway, to his room.

I never fell back asleep. I dressed at last with dawn and went out into the transformed kitchen. There, in the sink, were two of everything: two cups, two saucers, two spoons.

The whole bus ride back to the city, I sat next to Jonah, needing to ask if he’d heard, not wanting to ask, in the event that he hadn’t. Our father talked to a phantom. He set out a coffee cup for her. Perhaps he talked to her all the time, nightly, when we weren’t there, as if they both still had full days to compare. So long as neither Jonah nor I said anything, I might have invented everything. When we got off at Port Authority, Jonah said, “He’ll never hear from her again.” Only when he added, “She might as well be dead” did I realize he meant Ruth.

I figured that she would have to call us. Whatever Ruth imagined that Da had done to her, he’d done to us, as well. Only now did I see how out of touch we had drifted the last three years, while Jonah and I were on the road. I called so infrequently, usually just birthdays and holidays. I’d always been able to reach Ruth, even if I rarely did. I could not believe that she really wanted to hurt any of us. But with each day out of touch, I began to see how badly I’d refused her, just by living as I lived.

Weeks went by and we heard nothing. It occurred to me that she must have gotten into trouble. There was something in the papers every day. People were constantly getting arrested for making speeches, holding rallies, printing pamphlets — all the things Ruth excelled at and had so taken to since starting college. I had nightmares that she was being held in an underground cell where the guards wouldn’t let me see her because the name I gave them didn’t match the one they had on the list.

Jonah took his Met audition. I was to play for him, quavering piano reductions of pit orchestra tutti. I felt like an Italian organ-grinder. “Let me get this straight. I’m supposed to help you put me out of a job?”

“I get a contract with these people, Mule, and we’ll make an honest man out of you.”

“Tell me again why you want to do this?” His voice was about light, air, and upper altitudes, not about power, mass, and histrionics. He sang lieder as if Apollo were whispering into his ear on the fly. Opera seemed perverse. Like forcing a magnificent racehorse into armor for a joust. Not to mention that he hadn’t studied it in years.

“Why? You’re kidding, right? It’s Everest, Mule.”

By which he meant high, white, and cold. Then again, it was steady work. We’d been breaking hearts on the recital circuit for years, and we’d run through all our mother’s insurance legacy. Maybe he was right. Maybe it was time to make a living.

Jonah must have imagined he’d be singing for Mr. Bing himself. Sir Rudolph, however, had other things on his plate the day Jonah did his fire walk. But alerted by Peter Grau, Jonah’s old teacher, the casting people did give him a special listen. Jonah spent the better part of an afternoon passed from one merciless set of ears to another, singing in spaces in the bowels of the new Lincoln Center that ranged from gym-squeaky to bone-dead. Sometimes I played for him. Sometimes he sang a cappella. They ran him through a gamut of sight-singing. Sitting at the keys, I knew that if I played well, my reward would be never to accompany my brother again.

I played well. But not as well as my brother sang. That afternoon, he sounded as if he’d been sandbagging for all our last six months on the road. He did more to seduce these judges than he’d done for full houses in Seattle and San Francisco. He sailed up to the roundest sounds he knew how to make. The jaded New York set squirmed, trying to pretend there wasn’t something special going on. People kept asking where he’d sung, what roles, under whom. Everyone was dumbstruck with his answer. “You’ve never soloed in a choral work? Never sung in front of an orchestra?”

It probably would have been shrewd to stretch the truth a little. But Jonah couldn’t help it. “Not since childhood,” he admitted.

They gave him da Ponte Mozart. He romped through it on a lark. They gave him meaty Puccini breast-beaters. He aired them out. They didn’t know how to position him. They passed him up to a senior casting director, Crispin Linwell. Linwell studied my brother like a man regarding a rack of magazines, the heels of his black leather boots apart, horn-rim glasses pushed up on his forehead, the arms of a cardigan tied around his neck. He made Jonah sing the opening strains of “Auf Ewigkeit,” from Parsifal, cutting him off after a few bars. He sent his aides upstairs on a raiding mission to steal a favorite soprano, Gina Hills, out of a closed rehearsal. The woman came into the room cursing roundly. Crispin Linwell waved her down. “My dear, we need you for a noble experiment.”

Miss Hills calmed a little when she learned that the experiment involved the first love duet from act two of Tristan. She wanted Isolde, and thought this trial was hers. Linwell insisted on playing the piano reduction. He set them a smoldering tempo, then let the two of them loose.

My brother, of course, had often looked at the score. He’d known the scene by ear for a decade. But he’d never sung a single note of it anywhere outside of lessons and our apartment shower. Worse, it had been ages since he’d sung anything with anyone. When Mr. Linwell announced his experiment, I knew the jig was up. Jonah would be exposed as just another pretty voice, unable to work and play with others. Another over-reaching recitalist, stumbling in his bid to make it onto the big stage.

After about two minutes, it dawned on Miss Hills that she was playing a love scene with a black man. Realization rippled through her with the floating chords. I saw the uncertainty turn into revulsion as she scrambled to figure out why she’d been set up for this ambush. She flubbed an entrance, and we lived through an awful moment when I was sure she was going to run screaming from the room. Only the thought of her career held her in place.

Then the old musical philter did its trick again. Something came up out of my brother’s mouth, something I’d never heard him do. Eight measures later, Gina Hills was smitten in midphrase. She wasn’t a homely woman, but she was built like an opera singer. Her face was like her voice: best sampled from the middle of the house. My brother somehow turned her into Venus. He invested her with his full power, and she took it. The traction of his phrases drew her into his orbit. They started out on opposite sides of the piano, fifteen feet from each other. Four minutes in, they locked gazes and began dancing around each other. She wouldn’t touch him, but reached out as if to. He wouldn’t close that last gap between them that their duet so completely destroyed. The wonder of flaunting in broad daylight in front of a handful of listeners the last great taboo only stoked her sound.

Jonah started out with the score in front of him. But as they surged through the scene, he needed it less and less, singing over the top of the lowered page, finally jettisoning it altogether. Gina Hills hit the top of a sustained phrase, her face filling with blood. Jonah kept building, wave on wave, until the knot of listeners disappeared and this couple stood alone, naked and lifted, turning need into the most sublime delay available to the human body. This was 1967, the year the Supreme Court made it legal, even in that third of the country where it was still forbidden, for Jonah to marry a woman of this Isolde’s color, a woman of our father’s race.

Linwell rolled out with a gliss, stood up at the keys, and waved his fingers. “Yikes. All right, people. Air raid’s over. Back to your normal lives.” He snagged Gina Hills, who, in some private game of musical chairs, once the music stopped, refused to look at my brother. Linwell pinched her shoulders. “You were on some other planet, love.” Miss Hills looked up, glowing and crestfallen. She’d wanted the role more than she wanted love. Then, for ten minutes, she’d inhabited it, the ancient tale of chemically induced disaster. She wobbled, still under the drug’s residue. Linwell could have promised her an opening night in the next season, and she’d still have left that rehearsal room subdued.

When the room cleared, Linwell turned to us. His English eyes narrowed at me and wondered whether he could get away with asking me to wait in the hall. But he let me ride, then turned to absorb my brother. “What are we going to do with you?” Jonah had a notion or two. But he kept them hidden. Linwell shook his head and examined his clipboard of notes from the afternoon. I could see him making the calculation: Was it still too soon? Would ever be too soon, on such a country’s stage?

He set down the scribbles and looked my brother in the eye. “I’ve heard about you, of course.” It felt like a police shakedown. Don’t lie to us, boy. We know you’re up to something. “I thought you sang lieder. Not even that. I heard you did Dowland.” He couldn’t mask his distaste.

“I do,” Jonah said. Just that: I. I was dispatched to whatever family would have me.

Linwell sat silent, fighting embarrassment. “Would you…” he began, seeking out some sordid favor. “Would you mind…” He gestured toward the piano. It took me a moment. He didn’t believe us. He wanted proof.

Jonah and I took up our battle stations so routinely, I almost slipped and bowed out of sheer habit. Jonah made the massive turn without even thinking about it. He looked at me, inhaled, lifted imperceptibly, and on the downbeat we were there, tied together, on “Time Stands Still.” We finished into the silence that the music named. I patted the piano lid and looked at Crispin Linwell. His eyes were wet. This man, who hadn’t listened to music for pleasure for longer than I’d been alive, remembered, for three minutes, where he came from.

“Why would anyone want to give that up?”

Jonah blinked, deciding how real the question was. He’d have smiled right through, but Mr. Linwell waited for an answer. Someone doing what he was born to do, someone who could bring down a little corner of eternity onto earth wanted to throw it all over for pumped-up, gaudy spectacle. I could think of no reason big enough, except one. You boys can be anything you want to be.

Jonah leaned against the piano and drew his hand along the back of his neck. His eyebrows played with the question, still innocent. “Oh, you know.” I winced and dug down into the piano stool. “It’s more fun to sing with other people.” He slipped down into a basso profundo. “Ahm-a tarred of livin’ alone.”

Crispin Linwell didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile. He only shook his head. “Be careful what you wish for.” He pulled his glasses from his forehead and tapped the tip of his pen on the clipboard’s clip, a rapid motor rhythm. His whole body drew up in his chair and professionalized. “We can find something for you. You will sing with us. With…other people. Your agent’s number’s on the vita?… Fine. Tell him to expect a call.” He shook our hands and dismissed us. But before we could go, Linwell stopped Jonah with one hand to the shoulder. I knew what he was going to say before he said it. I’d heard it often, impossible lifetimes ago, although, back then, always in the plural. “You are one of a kind.”

Out on Broadway, in the late-winter air, Jonah whooped like a banshee. “‘One of a kind,’ Mule. ‘Expect a call.’”

“I’m happy for you,” I told him.

We expected the call through the whole spring. Mr. Weisman called with festivals, competitions, and concert series — Wolf Trap, Blossom, Aspen — but nothing from the Met. When Jonah bugged Mr. Weisman to nudge someone over in Linwell’s office, our agent just laughed. “The wheels of opera grind exceeding slow, and not all that fine. You’ll hear when you hear. Meanwhile, find something more useful to worry about.”

Weisman did call with word from Harmondial in early summer. On slow but steady sales of the first recording, they were turning a profit. The record had gone into a fourth reprinting. There’d be a royalty check, not enough to pay for phone bills, but cash all the same. Harmondial wanted to talk about a follow-up. Two days after Jonah agreed in principle to a new contract over the phone, central Newark burned down. That industrious city just a handful of minutes by the PATH train from where we lived: gutted, as bad as the Hanoi neighborhoods Johnson had been targeting. It was July. Central Detroit followed the week after. Forty-one people dead and fourteen square miles of the city in cinders.

I went to Jonah in a panic. “We can’t do this record. Tell them we’re out.”

“Mule! You nuts? Our public needs us.” He shook me by the shoulders, a slapstick attack. “What are you worried about? You’re not losing your nerve, are you? Not afraid of a little eternity? So what if people will be listening to you after your death? We can fix anything, on tape.”

“That’s not it.”

“What is it, then?”

“Tell them we can’t. Tell them we need to just…wait awhile.”

He laughed me off. “Can’t, Joey. It’s all agreed to. Verbal contract. You’re legally bound and gagged already. You don’t own yourself no more, brother.”

“Did I ever?” It didn’t often happen that he looked away first.

Around the time Jonah began preparing for the second record, we started getting hang-up calls. He’d answer the phone, thinking it was Weisman or Harmondial or even Crispin Linwell. But the moment Jonah said hello, the line would go dead. He had as many theories as there were walk-ons in Aida. He even thought it might be Gina Hills. I was home alone one afternoon in August when the phone rang. Jonah was out vocalizing in a practice room at NYU downtown. I answered, and a voice more familiar than my own asked, “Are you alone?”

“Ruthie! Oh, God, Ruthie, where are you?”

“Easy, Joey. I’m all right. I’m just fine. Is he there? Can you talk?”

“Who, Jonah? He’s out. What’s wrong? Why are you doing this to us?”

“Doing? Oh, Joey. If you don’t know by now…” She fought for control of her voice. I don’t know which of us was worse off. “Joey, how are you? You okay?”

“I’m good. We’re all good. Da and Jonah. Everything’s…moving along. Except for worrying about you, Ruth. We’ve been sick to death—”

“Stop it. Don’t make me hang up on you.” I heard her holding the mouthpiece away, fighting sobs. She came back. “I’d like to see you.” She asked to meet at a bar on the northwest corner of Union Square. “Just you, Joey. I swear, if you bring anyone else with you, I’ll run.”

I left a note for Jonah, saying I wouldn’t be back for dinner. I scrambled over to Union Square and hunted down the place she’d named. Ruth was there, sitting in a back booth. I’d have fallen all over her, but she wasn’t alone. She had brought a bodyguard. She sat on the same side of the booth as a man a couple of years older than Jonah and several shades darker. He had a two-inch picked-out Afro and wore a denim vest, paisley shirt, and a silver neck chain with a little fist clenched around a dangling peace symbol.

“Joseph.” My sister fought for a breezy neutral. “This is Robert. Robert Rider.”

“Nice to meet you.”

Robert Rider lifted his gaze, half a nod. “Same here,” he said through a hard smile. I reached out to shake his hand, but his fingers wrapped up around my thumb, forcing mine to do the same.

I slung into the booth across from them. Ruth looked different. She had on a bright green minidress and boots. I tried to remember how she was dressed when I saw her last. I wore the tan dress shirt and black slacks I’d been wearing for two years. There was something odd about her hair. I nodded what I hoped was approval. “You’ve changed. What did you do?”

She snorted. “Thanks, Joey. It’s not what I did. It’s what I’m not doing. No more hot iron. No more relaxants. No more nothing but what I got.”

Next to her, Robert grinned. “That’s right, baby. Nappy and happy.” She leaned into the man, touched her palm to his.

A waitress came by to see what I wanted. She was black, pretty, and about twenty. She and my sister had already made friends. “My brother,” Ruth said. The waitress laughed, as if that could only be a joke. I ordered a ginger ale, and the waitress laughed again.

“You look great, Ruth.” I didn’t know what else to say. She did. She looked good and strong. She just didn’t look like my sister.

“Don’t sound so surprised.” I could tell by her glance: I looked pale. She wasn’t going to say anything.

“Are you all right? Where are you living? How are you making ends meet?”

Ruth stared at me, twisting her mouth and shaking her head. “Am I all right? How am I making ends meet? Oh, Joey. I’m not the one you should be worried about. There are twenty million people in this country whose lives aren’t worth your monthly take-home.” She glanced at the man next to her. Robert Rider nodded.

“I don’t take home…” I let it drop. I saw myself, a double agent. My sister wanted to talk to me. I could hear in her voice the new worlds opening up all around her. She wanted to give them to me. I had to listen with enough approval and enthusiasm to keep her going, trick her out of her current address, and take it back to my father and brother.

She turned to Robert, who was studying the beer in front of him. “Joey here plays a mean Grieg. If blacks could vote, they’d want to elect him their cultural ambassador.”

Robert hid his curled lips behind his lifted glass.

“Are you still in the city, Ruth?” I waved out the plate-glass window. “Have you moved downtown?”

“Oh, we live all over the place.” I glanced at Robert. But that “we” seemed to mean more than just the two of them. “Town to town. Just like you and Jonah. Maybe not quite as deluxe.” I felt myself grinning too much. “Joey stays in hotels,” Ruth told Robert. “They ever have trouble finding a room for you, Joey? They ever have to send you to some other establishment?”

I said nothing. I didn’t know what I’d done to her, except live. Above her challenge stare, Ruth’s cheeks wavered. “So how’s tricks, Joseph? You doing okay?” She hadn’t come to fight. She’d come because she needed me.

“I’m fine. Aside from missing you.”

She looked away, anywhere but at me. Her face twitched all over. Robert handed her a large black leather satchel. Ruth rooted through the bag and took out a manila envelope. She placed it on the booth in front of me. “Robert has been helping me look into the fire.”

Bizarre angles played out in me. My sister had joined a religious cult. She was mixing in something illegal. But as I reached out for the envelope, I knew what fire. Inside the envelope was a sheaf of xerographic copies of dozen-year-old documents. While I examined them, Ruth held her breath. Something was on trial here — me, the two of them, the nation, the entire compounding past. I read as best as I could, unable to concentrate with those eyes appraising me.

“We’ve been staring at this our whole lives. I know you’ve thought the same thing, many times. But it wasn’t until I met Robert, and I told him all about Mama… It’s so obvious, Joey. So obvious, I had to have it pointed out to me.”

I handled the copies, police reports of our gutted house in Hamilton Heights, the house we grew up in. The prose sank into leaden detail: measurements, times, charred inventories. I read over the destruction of my life as written by a committee of public servants. The ten-year-old girl who’d bitten the restraining fireman’s hand while trying to break free and rescue her mother could not have survived one paragraph without outside support. I skimmed the last two pages and looked up. Ruth was staring at me, hopeful, afraid. “You see? You get what this means?”

She swirled the pages and found the one she was after. She turned it toward me, fixing the indictment with her fingernail. In so many stories about mixed-race people in fiction, their fingernails always identify them as really black. Ruth’s fingernail hung on the word accelerants. Presence of trace accelerants throughout the foundation level.

“You know what those are?”

“Oily rags. Half-empty gas cans. The kind of stuff Mrs. Washington kept in her basement.”

She wavered and glanced at Robert. She rallied. “Things deliberately planted to speed the rate of burn.”

Robert nodded. “Somebody accelerating.”

“Where… How do you…” I looked back down, reading furiously. “Nothing here says anything like that.”

Robert bit into his words. “Now that’s a fact.”

“Accelerants mean arson,” Ruth said.

I sat there shaking my head. “It doesn’t say that anywhere. This report doesn’t even—”

A one-note, mirthless laugh from Robert cut me off. I was a hopeless naïf. Worse: a classical musician. With brothers like me, the fire would have stayed an accident forever, just like the authorities wanted it to.

“And if it’s arson…” Ruth was waiting for me to follow her. But her eyes knew this was a losing proposition.

Robert focused on a grim horizon. “If it’s arson, it’s murder.”

I looked down at the smudged photocopies for some fact to steady me. “Ruth. Listen to what you’re saying. There’s no way. It’s insane.”

“It’s at least that,” Ruth agreed. Robert Rider sat still.

Then the fire that took my mother rose up through my spinal fuse and burst in my brain. The floor softened beneath me. I reached out and braced my hands against the booth, a block chord spread across the keys but making no sound. My decade-old nightmares of Mama’s suffocation flooded back, in full, adult daylight. I couldn’t let myself think the thought. The thought I was thinking.

I looked up at Ruth. Her face smeared. She saw my animal panic. “Oh, Da didn’t have anything to do with it.” Her voice held some fraction of pity, behind the disgust. “The man’s not clever enough to know what started the fire. But he’s responsible for her death, just as if he had.”

The craziness of her words brought me back. “Ruth. You’ve lost your mind.” She stared at me with something ready to protect itself at any cost. I dropped my eyes down to the nonexistent evidence. “If the police report found evidence of arson, why didn’t they say it was arson?”

“Why bother?” Ruth looked out over the crowded room. “Nobody was hurt. Just a black woman.”

“Then why bother even to mention the accelerants in the report?”

Ruth just shrugged and stared into nothing. But Robert leaned forward. “You have to know how these people work. They put in the barest minimum of fact, so they can’t get busted if it ever comes back to them. But they’re never going to put down one single word that might turn the thing into a case. Not if they don’t have to.”

“I just don’t understand. How could it have been deliberate? Who could have wanted…”

Ruth held her head. “White man married to a black woman? Six million people in New York were holding that bomb.”

“Ruth! There was no bomb. The furnace exploded.”

“The fire was helped along by something somebody put there.”

There had been violence. Steady, lifelong. Words, muffled threats, shoves, spit: all the confusions I’d seen in childhood and refused to name. But not this level of madness. “Listen. If this was an attack against a mixed-race couple, then it was an attack on Da, as well. Who’s to say the attacker was…”

“Joey. Joey.” Ruth’s eyes filled with liquid. She grieved for me. “Why are you hiding from this? Don’t you see what they have done to us?”

Robert lowered the edge of his enormous hand to the table. “If the police had had a black suspect for this thing, the man would have fried six weeks after the crime.”

I looked up at this stranger. How long had they been working on this theory together? Where had they gotten these photocopies? My sister had said more about her mother’s death to this outsider than she’d ever shared with me. I sat rubbing water droplets off the outside of my glass. We’d been born in the same place, within a few years of one another, of the same parents. Now my sister lived in another country.

“Da collected on Mama’s life insurance.” I studied her as I spoke. I only now realized how criminal we’d been toward her. Most of that insurance money went into launching Jonah and me into performing orbit. Ruth had gotten only a fraction, for college tuition. And now she’d quit school. “If the insurance company had even a shred of evidence to make them doubt…”

Ruth looked at Robert, their proof wobbling. I’d wanted only to relieve her. I’d done just the opposite. Robert shrugged. “I’m sure the insurance company looked into it, as far as they were able to. They couldn’t prove fraud. Once that wasn’t the issue, they couldn’t be bothered with how the woman died.”

“Ruth. Listen to me. You know that Da would never have let this go by without an investigation. Not if there had been the smallest thing to go after. Any suggestion at all.”

Ruth stared back. I was failing her, attacking. But she still needed me for something I couldn’t understand. “The man is a white man. He has no concept of such things. He needed it to be an accident. Otherwise, her death is on his conscience.”

And Ruth: she needed the opposite. Mama murdered, and by someone we’d never know. Someone who might not even have known us. It was the only explanation that left her anyplace in the world to live. I lifted up the sheaf of copies, their body of evidence. “What are you planning to do with this?”

They looked at each other, too tired to enlighten me. Ruth shook her head and lowered it. Robert grimaced. “Black person’s never going to get a case like this looked into.”

I had the bizarre sensation they wanted me to get Da — some white person — to press the case. “What on earth do you want from me?” I heard the words leave my mouth and could not take them back.

Ruth pressed her clenched fingers against her lips. “Don’t worry, Joey. We don’t want anything from you.” Robert shifted in the booth. He looked down on the bench between them as if he’d dropped something. I felt a surge of admiration for the man, based on nothing but his willingness to be here. “We just thought you’d want to know how your mother…” Ruth’s voice turned liquid. She took the copies away from me and slid them back into her satchel.

“We have to tell Jonah.”

Some mix of hope and hatred rose in my sister’s eyes. “Why? So he can call me crazy, just like his little brother did?” Her lip trembled, and she bit it in, just to make it stop.

“He has a better head for… He’ll want to know what you think about this.”

“Why?” Ruth said again, her tone now pure self-defense. “I’ve been trying to tell him something like this for years. I can’t say shit to him without him busting my ass. The man despises me.”

Her mouth crumpled like a rear-ended car. Her eyes welled over and one glinting thread started down the walnut of her left cheek. I reached over and took her hand. It didn’t pull away. “He doesn’t despise you, Ruth. He thinks you don’t—”

“Last time I saw him?” She flipped her hand up toward her new hair. “He said I looked like a doo-wop backup singer. Said I sounded like Che Guevara’s diary. He just laughed in my face.”

“He was probably laughing in pleasure. You know Jonah…” I wasn’t halfway through the sentence when it hit me. “Hold on. You mean you’ve seen him recently?” She looked away. “He never told me… You never said anything!” I took my hand away from hers. She scrambled for it back.

“Joey! It was only five minutes. It was a bleeding disaster. I couldn’t say anything to him. He started shouting me down before I even—”

“One of you two might have told me. I thought something had happened to you. I thought you might be in trouble, hurt…”

She hung her head. “I’m sorry.”

I looked at her. The little girl who’d sung “Bist du bei mir” at her mother’s funeral. “Ruth. Ruth.” Another syllable and I was finished.

She didn’t look at me, but rooted around in her satchel for her wallet. Pay and run. Then she stopped and blurted, “Joey, come with us.”

My eyes widened and my right hand pointed downward: Now? I turned to Robert. His face set into that look: If not now, when? The fire — their theory about it, our argument — was just a passing item on a more sweeping agenda. “Come… Where are you going?”

Ruth laughed, a good alto laugh, from the gut. She wiped her eyes dry. “All sorts of places, brother. You name it, we’re headed there.”

A grin like the sun broke across Robert’s face. “It’s all happening. Anything we work hard enough at.”

I kept still. I was just happy, for a second, to have my sister back.

“We need you, Joey. You’re smart, competent, educated. People are dying, in Chicago, down in Mississippi. My God, over in Bed-Stuy. People dying by miles, because they refuse to die by inches anymore.”

“What are you…?”

“We’re working for the day, brother. It’s easy. We’re everywhere.”

“Are you with some kind of organization?”

Ruth and Robert traded glances. They made an instant negotiation, appraising my file and deciding on discretion. Robert may have made the call, but my sister agreed. Why should they trust me, after all? My side was clear. Ruth reached across the table and took my elbow. “Joey, you could do so much. So much for people like us. Why are you…?” She glanced at Robert. He wasn’t going to help her. I blessed the man for refusing, at least, to judge me. “You’re stuck in time, brother. Look at what you’re peddling. Look who’s buying. You don’t even see. How can you play that jewelried shit while your own people can’t even get a job, let alone protection under the law? You’re playing right into the power-hoarding, supremacist…” She checked her volume. “Is this the world you want to live in? Wouldn’t you rather work for what’s coming?”

I felt a million years old. “What’s coming, Ruth?”

“Don’t you feel it?” Ruth waved at the plate-glass window behind me — the world of 1967. I had to keep from turning around to look. “Everything’s shaking loose. It’s all coming down. New sounds, everywhere.”

I heard Jonah singing, in a funky falsetto, “Dancin’ in the Streets.” I raised my head. “We play a lot of new music, you know. Your brother is very progressive.”

Ruth’s laugh was brittle. “It’s over, Joey. The world you’ve given your life to has played out.”

I looked down at my hands. I’d been playing some piece on the tabletop. As soon as I noticed my hands, they stopped. “What do you suggest I do instead?”

Ruth looked at Robert. Again, the warning flash. “There’s more work to do than I can begin to tell you.”

An awfulness came over me. I didn’t even want to look at the evidence. “You two aren’t involved in anything criminal, are you?” I’d lost her already. I had nothing more to lose.

My sister’s smile tightened. She shook her head, but not in denial. Robert took a chance far bigger than mine. “Criminal? Question doesn’t mean anything. You see, the law has been aimed against us for so long. When the law is corrupt, you no longer need to treat it like the law.”

“Who decides this? Who decides when the law—”

“We do. The people. You and me.”

“I’m just a piano player.”

“You’re anything you want to be, man.”

I backed into the corner of the booth. “And who are you, man?”

Robert looked at me, ambushed, reeling. I’d gone for anger; I got pain. I heard my sister say, “Robert’s my husband.”

For a long time, I could produce no answer. At last I said, “Congratulations.” All chance of feeling glad for them was lost. I’d have played at their wedding, all night long, anything they wanted. All I could do now was accept the news. “That’s great. How long?” Ruth didn’t answer. Neither did her husband. The three of us twisted in place, each sentenced to a private hell. “When were you going to tell me?”

“We just told you, Joe.”

“How long have we been sitting here?”

Ruth wouldn’t look at me. Robert met my eyes and murmured, “Actually, we weren’t going to tell you at all.”

My back slammed into the booth. “ Why?What have I done to you?”

Ruth swung her face toward me. Her look said, What have you done for me? But she saw me, and broke. “It isn’t you, Joey. We didn’t want the news…to get back.”

“Get back? You mean to Da?”

“Him. And…your brother.”

“Ruth. Why? Why are you doing this to them?”

She folded into the man and put her arm around him. He hugged her back. My brother-in-law. Her protection against my words. Against all that the rest of us had done to bust her ass. “They’ve taken their stand. I’m not their business anymore.”

Everything in the declaration sounded forced and wrong. From across the booth, my sister’s marriage — I could hardly think the thing — seemed doomed before it started. “They’ll want to know. They’ll be happy for you.” I didn’t even sound feeble.

“They’d find some way to insult me and my husband both. I wouldn’t give them the pleasure. Don’t you dare tell them. Not even that you saw me.”

“Ruth. What’s happened? What’s gotten into you?”

“Nothing’s got into me, brother. Everything was in me already. From birth.” She put her arm out on the table for me to examine. Physical proof.

“How can you treat Da like this, Ruth? The man’s your father. What has he ever—”

She tapped her satchel, the manila folder. “He knew. The man knew all about these reports, a month after it happened.”

“Ruth, you don’t know for—”

“He never said a word to us. Not then. Not when we got older. Everything was always just an accident. Just fate. He and his so-called housekeeper—”

“Mrs. Samuels? What does Mrs. Samuels have—”

“The two of them, raising us like three sweet little white kids. See No Race, Hear No Race, Sing No Race. The whole, daily, humiliating, endless…” Her body started to shake. Robert Rider, her husband, rested his hand on her back, and she collapsed. She curled into his open hands. Robert just sat there, patiently petting her burst of uncoiling hair. I wanted to reach across the table and take her hand. But it was no longer my place to offer comfort.

“That was their answer, Ruth. Move the world forward. Shortcut into the future, in one generation. One jump — beyond tribes.”

“That’s not a place,” she hissed. “That’s not a future.” I waited for her to finish the thought. She already had.

“If Da thought for one minute that someone…” I wasn’t sure what I meant to say. “Whatever he told us or didn’t tell us about the fire, I’m sure he was just trying to honor her memory.”

Ruth put her palms out to stop my words. She’d had enough of me and my kind. She pulled away from her husband’s petting, ran her hands through her globe of hair, and blotted both eyes with a wadded napkin. When she took the napkin from her face, she was composed again. Ready for all the world’s work her parents had failed to tell her about. She grabbed her satchel and rose, speaking more to her wristwatch than to me. “You’ve got to give the man up, Joey.”

“The man? Give him up?”

“He’s done nothing but exploit you. From the beginning of time.”

“Da? Exploit me?”

“Not Da!” Her mouth twisted with agony. She wouldn’t say his name.

“Jonah?” I waved toward her satchel, the evidence. “Jonah doesn’t know anything about this. He can’t reject your theory if you never even—”

“Jonah,” she enunciated like a Met radio announcer, “doesn’t know much about anything beneath his perch.” Robert chuckled. I would have, too. Little Rootie had always been the perfect mimic.

“He’s doing what he can. What he does best in the world.”

“Being white, you mean?” She waved me off before I could counter. “You don’t have to defend him, Joey. Really, you don’t. So he’s got a secret. I ain’t gonna tell no one!”

“We could use a voice like that.” The way Robert said this made me guess: She’d slipped him into a concert. He’d heard his new brother-in-law sing, and the memory of that sound left even him a little ashen. “Whole world’s on fire. We could use everyone.”

“He’d end up using us,” Ruth said. She hated him. I couldn’t even admit it long enough to ask why. “Well, brother?” She pulled out her wallet and rooted for some dollars. I wondered what she was doing for money. I didn’t even know what my new brother-in-law did for a living. “You’ve heard all the evidence. The facts of what really happened to us. Make your own choice.”

“Ruth. What choice? You make this sound like some kind of cosmic showdown.” She tilted her head at me and lifted her eyebrows. “What choice am I supposed to make? I can play the piano, or I can help you save our people?”

“You can make a difference. Or not.”

“For God’s sake. You won’t even tell me where you’re living. You won’t even tell me what you’re involved in. Are you running guns or something? Bombing buildings?”

Robert’s massive hand came across the table and landed on my wrist. But softly, certain. Too graceful to frighten. He’d have made a magnificent cellist. “Look. Your sister and I have joined the Party.”

“The Party? The Communist party?”

Ruth chuckled. She pressed her palms into her cheeks. “Hopeless. The boy is hopeless.”

A Morse code smile flicked across Robert’s face. “Panthers.” He leaned forward. “We’re helping set up a New York chapter.”

Ruth was right. I was the white man’s nigger. Just the sound of the word scared me. I sat for a while, turning the name over in my head until it disintegrated. “Where’s the black leather jacket?”

“Left it at home.” Robert grinned, released my wrist, and waved outside. “I thought it was going to rain.”

Had she grown radical out of love, or fallen for the man out of politics? “You going to shoot at people?” I asked my little sister.

I meant it as a nervous joke. Ruth answered, “They’re shooting at us.” I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t even breathe without betraying some blood relation.

My sister saw my agony. She stiffened, ready to go to war. But her husband shifted between us, softening. “Land, bread, education, justice, and peace. That’s all we’re talking.”

“And the right to carry loaded weapons in public.”

Ruth laughed. “Joey! You’ve been reading the newspapers. White newspapers, of course. But still.”

Robert nodded. “We’re fighting that bill, yeah. We have to. Police want us empty-handed. Whites want us to be the only ones without arms. Then they can keep doing anything they damn please to us.” It sounded like madness to me. As terminally mad as the streets of Watts. And yet, aside from that one nightmare evening, I knew my life to be a far crazier, far more sheltered dream. “A man has a right to defend himself,” my brother-in-law was saying. “So long as the police go on killing us at will, I’m holding out for that right. They’ve got the choice: the Whited States of America or the Ignited States.”

His words were empty of theater. The sound died in the room’s background chatter. I saw what Ruth responded to in the man. I, too, needed his approval, and I didn’t even know him. Ruth pulled at her husband. “Come on, Robert. Joey’s busy. Too busy for the facts. Too busy for what’s coming.”

“Ruth!” I pressed my fists into my eyes. “You’ll kill me. What does any of this have to do with…?” I waved at her satchel.

“With how your mother died? I thought it might help you decide whose son you are. That’s all.”

My mammy’s own bairn.I spoke slowly, trying to find the beat. “My mother married my father. They raised us as they thought right. She died in a fire.” The fire didn’t kill her.

“Your mother died in what was more than likely an act of racial hatred. Every day, someone somewhere dies the way she did.”

“Your mother…” And I couldn’t anymore. Neither of us owned her. She was lost to us both. I looked at Ruth for a last moment. “Mama sang a mean Grieg.”

She didn’t reply. A look crossed her face. I saw it clearly, but I couldn’t read it. She threw too much money down on the table and the two of them left. I wanted to stand up and follow them, at least for a street or two. But I was stuck to the booth, worthless, without belief.

I didn’t tell Jonah I saw her. If he guessed, he never said as much. I never asked about his seeing her. I never even hinted at the meeting to Da. My loyalty to Ruth was greater than anything I owed either man, if only because I’d betrayed her so badly already. Each time I spoke to my father now, I saw a sheaf of photocopied police reports hidden away in his memory’s files. Did he know what they contained? Could he say what they meant? I couldn’t even form the questions in my head, let alone ask him. But Da sounded different to me now, filtered through all the things he’d never told me, whether they were his to tell me or not.

The year has become an operatic blur. Three astronauts burned alive on the launchpad. A South African surgeon put one man’s living heart in another man’s body. Israel ran through the assembled might of the Arab armies in six days, and even my anti-Zionist father feared something biblical in the lightning victory.

A play where a turn-of-the-century black boxer kissed his white wife onstage scandalized audiences worse than the real-life boxer had, half a century before. Tracy and Hepburn struggled with the prospect of a black son-in-law. A black man took his place on the Supreme Court, and I wondered if my sister’s husband took any pleasure in the event. Marshall’s appointment seemed, even to me, too little too late. Seventy separate riots spread through more than a dozen cities over the course of the year. The country turned upon itself, twisting on two simple words: Black Power.

Jonah, surprisingly, loved the phrase. He loved the disarray it sowed in the ranks of those good Americans, just minding their own business. He thought of it as guerrilla theater, just as aesthetically unsettling as the best of Webern or Berg. He walked about the apartment brandishing a dark tan golf-gloved fist over his head, shouting, “Mulatto Power! Mulatto Power!” for no one’s benefit but mine.

And still the year’s music beat on, cheerful, love-crazed, sun-drenched for a day. White music went black, stealing funk’s righteous refusal. The Motown sound migrated even to cities whose cores had not recently burned down. At the same time, Monterey sent pop into places even my brother couldn’t ridicule. Jonah brought home the first rock album he ever paid real money for. The Beatles, in high-camp Edwardian military band regalia peeked out from the cover with a cast of dozens, including effigies of their former selves. “You have to hear this.” Jonah parked me under two cantaloupe halves of padded earphones and made me listen to the last cut, its slow, cacophonous orchestral climb to a forte major triad that spread into eternity. “Where do you think they got that idea? Ligeti? Penderecki? Pop ripping off the classics again, just like Tin Pan Alley used to do Rachmaninoff.”

He made me listen to the whole record, pushing his favorite bits. From English music hall to raga, from sonata quotes to sinkholes of sounds that hadn’t happened yet. “Trippy, huh?” I’d no idea where he learned the word.

The year split into vapor trails as tangled as those cloud-chamber traceries Da studied. Fashion went mad. Safari dresses, cossack blouses, aviator coats, Victorian velvet, silver metallic vinyl space-age miniskirts, Nehru jackets, combat boots with fishnet stockings, culottes with capes: a grandiose splintering into all years and places but this one. Fifty thousand people took to the Mall to protest the war, and three-quarters of a million strolled down Fifth Avenue in New York supporting it. Coltrane died and the U.S. government officially recognized the blues by sending Junior Wells on a goodwill tour to Africa. Che Guevara and George Lincoln Rockwell both died violent deaths. Jonah and I lived our days between flower children and nurse slayers, decolonization and defoliants, Twiggy and Tiny Tim, Hair and The Naked Ape.

We’d be in some hotel room in Montreal or Dallas, watching the news, trying not to drop off the face of the earth, and some story would come on, a space shot or a riot, a love-in or mass strangling, an emperor’s self-coronation or Third World insurgency, and Jonah would shake his head. “Who needs opera, Mule? No wonder the damn thing’s dying. How can opera go head-to-head against this circus?”

We watched that year’s performance race through its acts, all the while waiting for the Met to call, the call that would be Jonah’s delivery and my death sentence. “They’re nervous that I’ve never really sung over an orchestra.” He decided to plump the vita with whatever symphonic solo appearances he could land. He told a bewildered Mr. Weisman to find him anything, with any body of instrumentalists. “I’ve got volume. You know that.”

“This isn’t about your volume, son.” Mr. Weisman, whose fifty-year-old daughter had just died of breast cancer, had taken to calling us his sons. “This is about positioning you. Making people hear what it is you do.”

“I’ll do whatever the audience wants. Why do they need a brand? Can’t they just listen?”

He couldn’t understand the lead time on finding orchestral jobs. “It takes two years to do anything! Jesus, Joey. A read-through, a dress rehearsal, and a performance. Keep the thing fresh.”

He picked up a substitution for a flu-stricken tenor who’d been slated to sing Das Lied von der Erde at Interlochen. The conductor couldn’t find anyone else willing to step in on such short notice. Jonah mastered the treacherously craggy tenor songs in under five weeks. “I was born singing this stuff, Joey.” I sat in the audience with the rest of the weeping public. Da came out for the debut. He sat and listened to his son sail drunkenly on the silent winds of outer space and make a mockery of human misery: Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod. Dark is life, is death. A voice that knew nothing but its own fire veered about in wild precision, fueled by a skill equal to the music’s extremes: Was geht mich denn der Frühling an? Laßt mich betrunken sein! — What can springtime mean to me? Let me be drunken!

People who’d never heard of Jonah’s lieder performances suddenly discovered him. The audience clapped as if they wanted him to come out and do Symphony of a Thousand as an encore. The Detroit Free Press ran that review calling him a “planet-scouting angel.” In truth, they were right. He didn’t live here. His voice was on a long, sweeping search for any part of this backwater galaxy where it might put down for an eon or two.

Just before Chicago and our Orchestra Hall debut, the disastrous piece in Harper’s appeared, calling him a flunky of the white culture game. Jonah thought his career was over. Orchestra Hall would rescind the engagement when they found out. He couldn’t stop reading me the passage that fingered him: “‘Yet there are amazingly talented young black men out there still trying to play the white culture game, even while their brothers are dying in the streets.’ That’s me, boy. Big time back-stabber. Cut you and leave you for dead, if I need to.”

Orchestra Hall didn’t rescind. Despite our preconcert argument about our parents and Emmett Till, and despite a suffocation fit only an hour before the performance, Jonah hit the stage singing — the songs of Schumann, Wolf, and Brahms — and came away to raves.

The Harper’s accusation chewed him up. He’d been passing, and it had never even occurred to him. All those boys his age, ground down, locked out, threatened, beaten, killed, while he’d been granted the safe passage of lightness. All those men, locked up, held down, digging civilization’s ditches, taking the blows, while he was up onstage spinning florid doilies, making time stand still. He’d read the article and cock his head: could it really be?

He canceled two weeks of engagements, claiming the flu. Truth was, he was afraid to show his face in public. He no longer knew what that face looked like to his audience. Not that he’d ever much cared how others saw him. Music was that place where look fell away and sightless sound was all. But here was someone insisting the opposite: Music was just what we put on, after we put on ourselves. How a piece sounded to its listeners had everything to do with who was up there making the sounds.

After a while, Jonah’s horror at the Harper’s piece turned to fascination. It amazed him to think that the article’s writer considered him worth slandering. The attention promoted him to a level of interest he’d never commanded, a player in a drama bigger than any he’d ever starred in. Amazingly talented black man playing the white culture game. Even winning. He turned the formula over and over. Then, in the kind of modulation he excelled in, he threw a little switch in himself. After days of chafing against the label, Jonah decided to revel in it.

He returned to the concert circuit, now blessed by the condemnation. And when the calls from Mr. Weisman came in, with significant symphonic and choral solo offers among them, Jonah’s about-face seemed borne out. People smelled an opera, and they wanted tickets. Harper’s was going to make him notorious.

“Thank the Lord God Almighty for the revolution, Mule. The movement’s opening doors. Providing for our people. Gonna get us a call from the President Lincoln Center.” He rubbed my close-cropped head the way I always hated. “Huh, bro? Culture works. Uplift and elevation. Even the black man’s Al Jolson gotta eat.”

He took to reading the magazine accusation over the telephone to anyone who’d listen. “Where’s your sister when we need her?”

He knew better than I did. “She’s seen it. I’ll bet you anything.”

“You think?” He sounded pleased.

I saw him wondering how to get the article to Lisette Soer, to János Reményi, even to Kimberly Monera, who, in another lifetime, once asked if he was a Moor. I waited for notoriety to change his sound. I couldn’t see how he could get up onstage, week after week, so twisted up, and still manufacture that silk perfection. He sang Beethoven’s Ninth, again at short notice, with the Quad Cities Symphony. When the chorale came — that discredited dream of universal brotherhood, the same notes he’d once scribbled, by ear, underneath the photo of the North American nebula we’d hung on our bedroom wall — I half-expected him to open his mouth and turn hideous, to bray a quarter tone sharp, tremulous and imperial, like those pompous Teutonic goose-honk voices we used to ridicule when we were boys.

Just the reverse. He gave himself over to the classical’s full corruption. Only death, beauty, and artistic pretense were real. Limbered, his notes floated up into a clerestory treading in light. He entered completely into that blackballing country club, the heaven of high art.

For the second recording, he got it into his head to do a cycle of English songs — Elgar, Delius, Vaughan Williams, Stanford, Drake. Harmondial talked him out of it. The aura of decadent sweetness that clung to his voice left the tunes sounding freakishly pure, like some choirboy who’d gone through every part of puberty except the crucial one.

The label wanted something darker, to capitalize on Jonah’s controversy. They settled on Schubert’s Winterreise. That was a piece for grown men, to sing when the singer had traveled far enough to describe the journey in full. But no sooner did they suggest the idea than Jonah took it up and sealed it.

This time, we did the taping in New York. Jonah wanted a harder, more exposed finish. He’d sung many of the individual songs at one time or another. Now he assembled them into a plan that still takes my breath away. Instead of starting out the journey in innocence and ending in bitter passion, he began in a wry romp and ended far off, stripped bare, gazing motionless over the lip of the grave.

Even now, I can’t listen to the thing straight through. In five days at the end of his twenty-sixth year, my brother jumped into his own future. He posted the message of 1967 forward to a year when he would no longer be able to read it. With total clairvoyance, he sang about where we were headed, things he couldn’t have known as he sang them, things I wouldn’t recognize even now except for his explanation waiting for me, telegraphed from an unfinished past.

This time out, Jonah had two more years of control. He knew exactly what he needed each note to do within the larger phrase. He heard in his head the precise inflection of each song in the cycle, every nuance. He was a relentless mechanical engineer, bridging life’s winter trip, cabling up the starting block with the finish post in a few sweeping suspension swags and joining the whole into one coherent span. His voice was surer, better worked. We were singing in our own town, heading home each night to a certain bed, before the uncertainties of the next day’s takes. He adored the studio, the sterile glass cubicle sealing him off from outside danger. He loved to sit up in the control booth, listening to himself sing over the monitors, hearing the magnificent stranger he’d been just minutes before.

He spoke about it during one long break. “You remember that Sputnik signal, ten years ago? What’s this going to sound like, after I’m dead?”

The day we lived in was sealed. The message of where we were going would never reach us. His tone was so expansive, it felt like the moment to ask. “Did you ever think there was anything strange about the fire?” A dozen years after the fact, and I still couldn’t name it.

But he needed no more. “Strange? Something unexplained?” He ran both hands backward against his scalp. His dark hair was long enough now to furrow. “Everything’s unexplained, Joey. There are no pointless accidents, if that’s what you mean.”

I’d lived two decades thinking that skill, discipline, and playing by the rules would bring me safely in. I was the last of us to see it: Safety belonged to those who owned it. Jonah sat sipping springwater with a little lemon. I had wrapped my hands in hot towels, bandaged, as if just injured. I hunched forward, groping for some light in Jonah’s eyes. We’d drifted too far to rely on the old boyhood telepathy anymore. Onstage, still, yes; but in another year or two, we’d understand nothing in each other but music. That afternoon, one last time, he thought my thoughts, as if they were his.

“I used to think about it every night. Joey, I always wanted to ask you.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know. I thought if I asked you, I might make it real.” He massaged his neck, exploring under the ears, scooping up into the chin, working, from the outside, the cords that he lived by. His throat was tan, a color that hid the way he’d come. No one could say, by that one cue alone, just what time had done to him. “Does it matter, Joey? One way or the other?”

My hands spasmed, scattering the hot towels. “Does it what? Jesus. Of course it matters.” Nothing else did. Murder or accident? Everything we’d thought we were, everything my life meant hung on that fact.

My brother stuck his fingers into the lemon water and rubbed a trickle into his neck. “Look. Here’s what I think. I’ve thought about this for twelve years.” His voice was gaunt, from somewhere that had never known song. “You want to know what happened. You think that knowing what happened will tell you…what? What the world’s going to do to you. You think that if your mother was killed, if your mother really died by chance… Say it wasn’t some random furnace. Say it had human help. That answers something? That’s not even the start of what you need to know. Why were they after her? Because she was black? Because she was uppity, sang the wrong stuff? Because she crossed the line, married your father? Because she wouldn’t keep her head down? Because she sent her mutant children to private school? Was it a scare tactic, intimidation gone wrong? Did they even know she was home? Maybe they wanted Da. Maybe they were trying for us. Somebody helping to return the country to its original purity. You want to know whether it was a crazy person, some neighborhood committee, some clan from some other neighborhood, twenty blocks north or south. Then you want to know why your father never…”

He stopped for a breath, but not because he needed one. He could have sailed on forever on that fountain of air.

“Or say it was the furnace, all by itself. Nobody helping it along, nobody’s historical mission. Why that furnace? Why were we living in that house, and not some other? Don’t they inspect those things, in the good neighborhoods? How would she have died if she’d been living over on some burned-out block between Seventh and Lenox? They’re dying of tetanus up there. They’re dying of flu. Illiteracy. Dying in the backseats of cars when the hospital won’t take them. A woman like Mama dies in this country, at her age — it’s somebody’s fault. What do you need to know? Listen, Joey. Would it change the way you live if they told you all the answers, beyond doubt?”

I thought of Ruth. I had no answer for Jonah. But he had one for me.

“You don’t need to know if someone burned her alive. All you need to know is whether someone wanted to. And you know the answer to that one already. You’ve known that one since — what, six? So somebody did what everyone’s thought of doing. Or maybe not. Maybe she died a raceless woman’s death. Maybe furnaces explode. You don’t know, you can’t know, and you’re never going to know. That’s what being black in this country means. You’ll never know anything. When they give you your change and won’t put it in your hand? When they cross the street a block down from you? Maybe they just had to cross the street. All you know for sure is that everyone hates you, hates you for catching them in a lie about everything they’ve ever thought of themselves.”

He did that head-rolling shoulder heave singers do to loosen themselves. Ready to return to recording, get on with his life. “I got Da talking once. God knows where you were, Joey. I can’t keep track of you all the time. Before they were married, apparently, he listed four possibilities for us, like a logic problem: A, B, both A and B, neither A nor B. He didn’t like the fixed categories. No element of time. What did he know about us? No more than we know about him. Neither of them liked race trumping everything. Wasn’t that how history screwed us in the first place? They both thought family should trump race. That’s who they were. That’s why they raised us how they did. Noble experiment. Four choices, all of them fixed. But even fixed things have to move.”

He stood and put his arms over his head, bent them back behind him and touched his shoulder blades, the sockets of his pruned wings. When I listen to that second disk now, this is how I see him. A glow in his eyes, about to launch into some tune that will mean the end of self.

“But you know what, Mule? They don’t. Don’t move. White won’t move, and black can’t. Well, white moves when black buys a place in the neighborhood. But beyond that, race is like the pyramids. Older than history and built to outlast it. You know what? Even thinking there are four choices is a joke. In this country, choice isn’t even on the menu.”

“Ruth’s married a Panther.” This, too, he somehow already knew. Maybe she’d told him when they’d met. All he did was nod. I carried on, stung. “Robert Rider. She’s joined, too.”

“Good for her. We all need to find our art.”

I flinched at the word. “She has the police reports. No, I mean for the fire. She and her husband… They’re sure. They say if the — if Mama had been white…”

“Sure of what? Sure of everything we already knew. Sure of what killed her? You’ll never know. That’s blackness, Mule. Never knowing. That’s how you know who you really are.” He did a horrible little minstrel-show shuffle. Years ago, I might have tried to talk him down, to bring him back from himself. Now I just looked away.

“If Mama and Da both wanted family more than…” The bile backed up my throat. “Why the hell don’t we even have our family?”

“Who? You mean Mama’s?” He held still, scanning the past. He alone was old enough to remember our grandparents. “Same reason Ruth took off, I guess.”

“Not the same reason.”

Jonah smiled at my open treason. His folded hands, steeple-style, touched his lips. “There was an argument. You remember. I told you, Mule. We can’t know. Didn’t I tell you? Race trumps family. It’s bigger than anything. Bigger than husband and wife. Bigger than brother and sister…” Bigger than objects in the sky. Bigger than knowing. And still there was one thing so small, it could slip past race without notice. Jonah put his arm around my shoulder. “Come on, brother. We’ve got work to do.”

We went back into the studio and recorded “The Crow” in one take — the only time in the entire recording session we hit a song perfectly on a single try. Jonah listened to the master tape again and again, probing for the smallest flaw. But he could find none.

A crow was with me

As I made my way from town.

Back and forth, all the way to now

It has flown around my head.

Crow, you strange creature,

Won’t you leave me be?

Are you waiting for prey here, soon?

Do you mean to seize my corpse?

Well, there isn’t much farther

To go upon this journey.

Crow, let me finally see

A faith that lasts to the grave.

He kept his laser-guided pitches, but all the while his voice dissolved the notes, sliding into them with a whiff of Billie Holiday wandering across the remains of a lynching. He sang the words into their final mystery.

The night we finished taping, we shook hands with the technicians and stepped out into the strangeness of our hometown. Midtown was a blaze of fossil fuel. We walked down Sixth Avenue through the thirties, mixing into the brittle after-hours crowd. A siren cut through the air from ten blocks away. I grabbed Jonah. I practically jumped on him.

“Just a cop, Joey. Nabbing some second-shift robber.”

My chest was wound up tighter than Schubert’s organ-grinder. I’d been conditioned. I was waiting for the return loop, for some part of the city to ignite. I knew what happened whenever we laid down his voice into permanence. We walked all the way from the studios to the Village. New York had as many alarms that night as any. I flinched at every one, until my brother’s amusement turned into disgust. By the time we hit Chelsea, we were quarreling.

“So Watts was my fault? This is what you think?”

“That’s not what I said. That’s not what I think.”

At Fourth Street, he gave up on me and took off alone. I went to the apartment and waited up for him all night. He didn’t show until the next day. When he did, the topic was off-limits. I wasn’t to ask him anything of consequence, ever again. Nor did he ever ask how I knew about Ruth. She, too, was now off-limits. All the things we couldn’t talk about left me endless time to replay the things I’d told him. I convinced myself I hadn’t betrayed Ruth. She wanted me to tell. She’d sworn me to secrecy the way Jesus banned his disciples from telling anyone he was going around working miracles.

Every time the Panther Party made the news, I had the sick feeling she or Robert was going to be a footnote casualty. Huey Newton, the Party’s founder, was arrested for killing a police officer in Oakland. Ruth had about as much connection to the man as I had to President Johnson. But I dragged through two weeks, feeling as if she’d somehow helped to pull the trigger. A man has a right to defend himself. So long as the police go on killing us at will. Part of a state government building up in Albany collapsed, the result of building-code violations. No one was hurt, and there was no sign of tampering. But jumpy politicians tried to tie the collapse to a shrill call for rights put out by the New York Panther chapter, the group Robert and Ruth Rider were helping to organize.

The world had never made much sense to me, much less my life. But now it was Meyerbeer without subtitles. My sister would write me. She and her husband, after a tour of the militant battlefield, would remember themselves. They’d go and work for Dr. King. So I fantasized, most days, without ever daring to believe. But other days, performing fey hundred-year-old music for well-off folks who loved hearing two Negroes staying out of trouble, I thought Ruth must be waiting for a letter from me.

Mr. Weisman called Jonah a month after we’d finished recording. He had an offer from the Met. Jonah took the news over the phone, as if he’d known all along it was coming. “Great.” He might have just been offered half off on his next dry-cleaning bill. “What are they thinking about?”

Weisman told him. Jonah repeated the offer out loud, for me to hear. “Poisson, in Adriana Lecouvreur?” I shrugged, clueless. The opera was some vehicle for stupendous sopranos. Diva Drivel, we’d always called the genre. Neither of us had ever bothered to listen to it. “What’s the part?” Jonah called into the phone, his voice rising.

The part, Mr. Weisman told him, didn’t matter. My brother, at twenty-seven, would be singing on the same stage with Renata Tebaldi. He, a lieder singer with almost no orchestral experience, had wanted to break into opera. And the world of opera was willing to let him try.

Jonah got off the phone and interrogated me. I was worthless. We pulled the World’s Greatest Opera Librettos off the shelf. We ran out to the Magic Flute record shop and grabbed a remastered 1940s budget recording with a distinguished cast and listened to the whole thing at one go. The music ended. “You call that a role?”

I didn’t know how to handle him. “Other people have to break in, you know.”

“Other people can’t do what I do.”

“They start elsewhere. You could be singing out in Santa Fe. You could be singing at the Lyric in Chicago, or at the Boston Opera, or San Francisco.”

“Plenty of folks start in New York.”

“City Opera, then. The point is, you’ve never sung opera. And you want to break in at the top. You’re not going to star first time out.”

“Don’t need to star. Just don’t want to hold spears.”

“So take this one and make it shine. If they notice you, they’ll offer—”

He shook his head. “You’ll never understand, will you? There is no future in chickenshit deference. The collective thing. Start a little fish, end a little fish, only eaten. They see you servile, and that’s how they’ll see you forever. Who owns you, Joey? The chickenshit collective will, unless you refuse. That’s all they want: to decide who you are and what kind of threat you represent to the pecking order as they maintain it. The minute you let someone own you, you might as well go and off yourself. Your life— yourlife — is the only thing you ever get to decide.”

He told Mr. Weisman to tell the Met that Poisson was not, in his opinion, the right vehicle for his operatic debut. “A fucking insult,” he said to the dignified, old-world Mr. Weisman in his pinstripe zoot suit on the other end of the line. Jonah hung up. “They’re afraid my voice is too pure. They’re afraid I can’t fill a hall with my little lieder instrument. What does that sound like to you, Joey? I’ll tell you. My voice is too light, and I’m too dark. Poisson. Fuck them.”

Something in me lifted at the decision. Nobody turned down the Met and got another chance. We could go on doing the only thing we’d ever done. Somehow, we could make touring and festivals and contests pay. The Naumburg competition was coming up; he could win that one, if he had half a mind to. Something else would break for us. I’d wash dishes on the side, if need be.

But Jonah was right. The Met got back to him, and faster than even he could have imagined. His gamble seemed to pay off, to pique the interest of the musical powers. They returned with a vastly upped ante. He could have his vehicle after all. They wanted him for a grandiose center-stage showstopper. The Met offered him the lead in a brand-new opera by Gunther Schuller called The Visitation.

We’d once met Schuller, in Boston, when we were children. Years later, Jonah went through a third-stream phase, his enthusiasm actually lasting several weeks. An opera by the man was bound to be riveting. A North American premiere amounted to more self-creation than even Jonah could ask for. As gambles went, this one had his number.

“You must have pulled a real Svengali number on that Linwell,” Mr. Weisman said when he called with the offer. “What in the world did you sing for him anyway?”

“What’s the opera about?”

The libretto, Weisman explained, was spun off from a Kafka fable, transplanted to the underside of the contemporary United States.

“And the part?”

But Mr. Weisman didn’t know anything about the part. He didn’t even know the name of the character. Perhaps Jonah didn’t understand: This was the lead, in a premiere of a new piece by a major composer, a piece that had electrified Hamburg audiences for a whole year.

What was with all the questions? A singer could sing rings around Gabriel, score triumph after triumph at midsized opera houses, be sleeping with Saint Cecilia herself, and would still have to count such an offer as the lucky break of a lifetime.

But Jonah wanted to see a score before committing. It seemed a reasonable precaution. After years of struggling with borderline stage fright, I was reduced to terror even thinking about Jonah taking on something this size in front of that many people. Some part of me hoped that by asking for a score, he’d irritate the producers so much that they’d withdraw the offer. For that matter, the country itself might fall apart before the score actually arrived.

But the United States hung on for another few weeks, and Jonah got his copy of The Visitation to peruse. We spent a marvelous two days reading through it. I’ll have that pleasure to answer for, at day’s end. God forgive me, but I always enjoyed sight-singing. Jonah was a wonder to watch, breezing all the parts as I plunked out a two-hand reduction. The score had everything: serialism, polytonality, jazz — a wild grab bag of sounds, purely American. “Crazed Quotations,” Jonah said at one point, the two of us sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the piano bench. “Just like the folks used to play.”

And its story, Kafka aside, was pure American, as well. A young sensualist university student is arrested and forced to stand a surreal trial for mysterious crimes he has no knowledge of committing. He’s found guilty and then lynched. The man is never named. Throughout the score, he’s identified only as “the Negro.”

We read our way through, realization hitting early. Neither of us felt much need to talk about it. He’d probably made up his mind before the end of the first act. But we read all the way through without Jonah making any sign. I didn’t know which way to hope. When we got through the last system of staves, he announced, “Well, Mule, that’s that.”

“It’s good music,” I said.

“Oh, the music’s wonderful. A few real showcase moments.”

“It…might be important.” I don’t know why I bothered saying anything.

“ Important, Mule?” He circled for the kill. “Important musically? Or important socially?” He gave the word a pitch that wasn’t quite contempt. Contempt would have betrayed too much interest.

“It’s timely.”

“ Timely?What the hell’s that supposed to mean, Mule?”

“It’s about civil rights.”

“Is it? I knew it had to be about something.”

“It’s sexy.” The only word that gave him pause.

“There is that.” He teetered, as if considering asking Mr. Weisman to find out whom he’d be playing opposite. Then all compromise crumbled, and he was whole again. “No way. No way in creation.”

“Jonah,” I said to slow him. But he was flying.

“Professional suicide. Maybe the Europeans ate this thing up. But it’s going to bomb here. It’s going to end up looking just…”

“Suicide? Your chance to sing in front of thousands of people? To be reviewed across the entire country? Jonah, people know how to separate the performer from the piece. If they don’t like the show…”

“They won’t. I know what they’re going to say already. It’s not what people pay good money to see. Art can’t beat this country at its own game. Art shouldn’t even try.”

I didn’t ask what art should try to do. I kept wondering about Ruth, what she’d say about her brother playing the Negro, how it would sound to her, compared to yet more criminal Schubert. Nothing Jonah might sing would ever have a bearing on the cause. I wondered what music the Panthers listened to, in their cars, out on the hot street, in their beds at night. No doubt Ruth and Robert, like my brother, knew exactly what art shouldn’t do.

“It could be something,” I told him. “Something good. You could make…a difference.”

Air burst out of his mouth. “A difference? A difference to what?” I bowed my head. “No, really, Joey. A difference to who? You think there’s a single operagoer who’s going to think differently about herself because of music? They’re not listening to themselves, Joey. They’re listening to the performance. Connoisseurs about everything that’s not them. That’s where this piece falls flat. It’s too good. It’s too serious. It gives the audience too much credit.”

“So you’re saying if they offered you Rodolpho or Alfredo—”

“Or Tristan. Yes. That’s what I’m saying. Let me sing what I’ve given my life to learning.”

“Rodolpho? When have you given one hour—”

“Let me sing the things I could sing better than anyone in this world. The roles any other tenor of my caliber would be given. Who am I hurting by doing that?”

“Who are you hurting by taking this part?”

“Which part? The Negro? ”

“There’s a difference, Jonah.”

“No doubt. Between what and what?”

“Between…chickenshit deference and artistic cooperation. Between deciding your own life and making the world follow your own rules.” I was going to humiliate myself in front of him, all to get him to take a role I didn’t even want him to take. “Jonah, it’s okay. Okay to be a part of something. To choose to be one thing or the other. To come home, somewhere. Belong.”

“Belong? Belong with all the other Negro leads? A leading light unto my people, maybe? An exemplar?” His voice was horrible. He could sing anything now. Any role or register.

“To be something other than yourself.”

He nodded, but not in agreement. I wasn’t to talk until he’d decided the best way to annihilate me. “Why is the Met offering me this part? I mean this part?”

You’ll never know. That’s what being the Negro means.I dug in. “Because you can sing it.”

“I’m sure they have several dozen limber leads in their stables who can sing it. Men with operatic experience. Why not use them? They do Otello in blackface, don’t they?”

I heard a tiny, translucent, almost blue little girl ask, Are you two Moors? She never existed. We’d invented her. “Would you take Otello if they offered it?” They’d have to darken Jonah’s face, too, just to make him believable.

“I refuse to be typecast before I’ve sung a single role.”

“Everyone’s typecast, Jonah. Everyone. That’s how the human brain works. Name a singer who doesn’t stand for some… No one is just himself.”

“I don’t mind being a Negro. I refuse to be a Negro tenor.” He reached down to the keyboard and felt out four measures of what sounded like Coltrane. He could have played piano like a king, if he hadn’t sung so well.

“I don’t get you.”

“I won’t be the Caruso of black America. The Sidney Poitier of opera.”

“You don’t want to be mixed-race.” I was sitting with him at the top of the subway stairs in Kenmore Square, Boston. “That’s what you mean.”

“I don’t want to be any race.”

“That—” I was going to say, That’s your parents’ fault. “That is something nobody but a purebred white person could want to get away with.”

“‘Purebred white person’?” He laughed. “Purebred white person. Is that like a well-modulated soprano?” He prowled around the cage of our front room. It might have been a concrete cubicle in the Bronx Zoo, a mat of straw, a watering trough. He scraped his fingers back and forth in the mortar lines between the wall bricks. He might have rasped them raw if I hadn’t grabbed his wrist. He slunk back to the piano bench. The instant his mass touched wood, he was up again. “Joey. I’ve been an absolute idiot. Where are all the men?”

“What men?”

“Exactly. I mean, we have Price, Arroyo, Dobbs, Verrett, Bumbry — all these black women pouring out of every state in the union. Where the hell are the men?”

“George Shirley? William Warfield?” It sounded like clutching at straws, even to me.

“Warfield. Case in point. Brilliant voice, and opera’s basically locked the man out. Start out singing Porgy, and that’s all anybody’s going to be able to hear you do.”

“It’s not in the culture. Black man wants to be an opera singer? I mean, really.”

“It’s not in the culture for the women, either. And they’ve come up from nowhere — from Georgia, Mississippi, One hundred eleventh Street. They’re stealing the show, out of all proportion…”

“There’s the whole diva thing. That doesn’t work for men. Think of you at Juilliard. The recital stuff was fine. But nobody there was helping you over into the opera theater.”

“Exactly, exactly. Exactly my point. And why? The door’s kicked in, and the Man’s finally dealing with the whole thing, and there they are up onstage, this white guy and this black woman, kissing and cooing and, well, that’s kind of yummy, in a nice old-fashioned, time-honored plantation way. Same old domination by another name. Then there’s this big black man and this white woman, and what the hell? Who let this happen? Blow the whistle, wave the play dead. It all comes down to who’s doing the fucking and who’s getting—”

“Jonah.” All I could do was blink at him. “What difference does it make? Why do you need this role? You already have a career. More career than most singers of any color even dream of.”

He broke out of his pacing and stood behind me. He rested his hands on my shoulders. It felt like the last time he’d ever do that. “What do I have, Joey? Maybe fifteen years of prime voice left?” The figure shocked me, a crazy exaggeration. Then I did the math. “I just thought it might be good to go make some noise with other people. A little harmony, while I’m still in form.”

He turned down the offer to play the Negro. He was the one who said no, in the full knowledge that no one ever got a third try. But then, saying yes might have left him even more enslaved. This way, he kept at least one of his hands on what he thought was the rudder.

He was right about everything. The Met, their first choice gone, ended up not producing The Visitation. The opera did come to town, with the premiere cast that had triumphed with it in Hamburg the year before. Just as Jonah predicted, the New York critics slaughtered it. They accused the libretto of irrelevance at best and of stilted falseness at worst. If one wanted civil rights, one should read the papers or hop a bus down south. One came to the opera, on the other hand, for the passion and drama of the tragic self. The tickets were too expensive for anything else.

The first American staging of The Visitation went west, to the San Francisco Opera. They mounted their premiere with a tenor named Simon Estes in the leading role. They performed the expressionist drama just across the Bay from where Huey Newton and the police had had their shoot-out. Every staging of a work is a new universe. San Francisco was farther from New York than Kafka was from civil rights. The West Coast critics adored the show, and it launched Mr. Estes, several shades darker than my brother, on his distinguished, singular career.

Not that Jonah’s career stood still. Only time did that. Our second record came out, and for weeks afterward, I waited, flinching. I didn’t give a damn about critics or sales: I wanted the whole thing to sink without notice. Jonah heard me holding my breath and just laughed. “What is it, Joey? What evils have we unleashed on the world this time?”

A month went by, and nothing happened. No earthquake from our own trivial tremor. The Kerner Commission released its report on the violence across the country: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black and one white, separate and unequal.” But this time, even the cities where our record sold well remained quiet.

Gramophonemagazine reviewed the new LP, proclaiming that a man so young and callow had no earthly right to sing Schubert’s wintry trip “until he’s within earshot of that season.” The reviewer was that great judge of vocal talent, Crispin Linwell. Linwell’s review was so dreamily brutal that it touched off what passed, in classical musical circles, for a street brawl. The controversy fed on itself, and the record got written up in more big-city dailies than I thought possible. A few outraged protectors of world culture hid behind the Linwell name and dismissed Jonah’s effort as at best premature and at worst impudent. A few other writers, themselves too young to know what they were wading into, found Jonah’s youthful rethinking of the cycle as thrilling as it was spooky. One reviewer, reviewing the battle as much as the recording, pointed out that Jonah Strom was only a few years younger than Schubert was when he wrote the thing. When these reviewers talked about the singing at all, they tossed around the word perfection as if it were a mild reprimand.

The first to mention race was a writer in the Village Voice. The proper way to serve up Schubert was hardly that paper’s stock-in-trade. The reviewer admitted up front to being a jazzer who could listen to lieder only under the influence of artificial enhancement. But Schubert, the writer said, wasn’t the issue. The issue was that the white cultural establishment was trying to skewer a gifted young black singer not because he was too young to sing the masters but because he was too uppity. The reviewer proceeded to list half a dozen European and American white singers who’d tackled the work to acclaim at ages even younger than Jonah’s.

I showed the piece to Jonah, expecting rage. But when he got to the end, he just cackled. “Is it him? It has to be. The smart-aleck style? The bit about being able to listen to lieder only while stoned?” I hadn’t even checked the byline. Jonah handed me back the issue. “T. West! Who else could it be? Thaddy boy. That white Negro bastard.”

“Should we call him? I’ve a number for him from…awhile ago.” Old broken promise. But Jonah shook his head, reticent, almost scared.

T. West’s accusation blew our little winter’s journey wide open. Crispin Linwell was all over himself in a Gramophone response, hotly denying that race had anything to do with the way any classical performance is received. He’d worked with tens of black artists and even hired one or two. The papers that ran follow-up squibs generally made the same claim: Race simply wasn’t an issue in the concert scene. Talent was all. The monuments of classical music were color-blind, never troubling with such ephemera. Anyone who wanted to could worship at the altar.

“That’s what your father and mother believed,” Jonah said, and kept reading.

An editorial in the Chicago Defender thanked the white cultural establishment for being so color-blind: “And it must be so, for the cultural elites to be able to look out on classical music audiences and declare that race is not an issue when dealing with eternal verities. But then, nobody can see much color when the lights are down so low.” Even this editorial didn’t talk about Jonah’s singing, except to declare it, for whatever the phrase meant, “a constant astonishment.”

For weeks, our record sold as well as if it had been released on a major label. We got letters telling us to stick to jig music. We got letters — militant, enthusiastic — from faceless, raceless listeners who told us to keep reviving the dead stuff, forever. But by then, who knew what music anyone was hearing in our sounds? I hated the notoriety, and still thought that once the fuss blew over, we could return to the realm of simple performance. Right up to the last, I imagined such a place existed.

But the Linwell flap also seemed to break our curse. I’d been braced for riots, our repeat punishment for trying to stop time again. This precious little tempest, played out in small-circulation magazines catering to a dying art, was all the riot our recording would touch off this time. I was a slung-assed fool. I felt the size of my vanity, the old animistic belief that the world lived or died by what cracks I stepped on.

Then King was killed. He died on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, a few blocks south of Beale Street, the day after he went up to the mountaintop. That voice for reconciliation met its only allowable end. He’d been leading a strike by garbage workers and now he was over. How long? Not long. I heard the news on FM radio while cleaning the apartment. The dazed announcer broke in on the highlights from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. He forgot to fade the music down, instead just clipping it off and tearing into the garbled news. He didn’t seem to know what to do next. Going back to Donizetti was impossible, even though it was one of Dr. King’s favorites. The silence grew so long, it made me wonder if the station had gone off the air. In fact, the announcer had simply walked away, into the station’s record library, to root around for the right eulogy. For whatever private reason, he settled on William Billings’s crude, haunted originary wail, “David’s Lamentation”: “Would to God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son.”

I shut the radio off and went out. It was already evening. I turned, by instinct, uptown. The streets seemed so matter-of-fact, so unchanged, though most of the passersby must already have known. I walked at random, looking for Jonah, hurrying to tell him.

The firebombs started in Memphis, an hour after the shooting. By the end of the week, 125 cities were at war. The fires in Washington burned worse than they had since 1812. The Battle of Fourteenth Street required thirteen thousand federal troops to suppress it. The city set a curfew and declared martial law. Chicago’s mayor ordered his forces to “shoot to kill.” The governor of Maryland announced a lasting state of emergency as a quarter of Baltimore burned. In Kansas City, police lobbed gas canisters into a crowd enraged by the decision to keep schools open through Dr. King’s funeral. Nashville, Oakland, Cincinnati, Trenton: uprising everywhere.

Four straight summers of violence: The revolution had come. And Jonah and I stood by watching, as if from mezzanine boxes at a matinee performance of Verdi’s Requiem. Our concerts in Pittsburgh and Boston were canceled and never rescheduled, casualties in a conflict where music wasn’t even the smallest thing at stake. How could a little song and dance compete against the country’s supreme art form?

For some months, our life had looked increasingly unreal. Now I lost all sense of what real was supposed to look like. Jonah knew. “Here we go. All out in the open now. Straight-up tribalism — everything anyone wants. Something solid to believe in. We’ve been killing one another over imaginary membership for a million years. Why change this late in the day?”

My brother’s take on the human species had never been complicated. Now it was simplifying down to a single perfect point. People would rather die in invented safety than live in invigorating fear. He’d seen enough. Jonah turned his back on the whole time frame of earthly politics, and I could no longer call him back. Every passing day only confirmed him. None of us knew how to live here, at the rate of life we were given.

The two of us were running up to an engagement in Storrs, Connecticut, in a borrowed Impala — just a shade too pale to be pulled over and frisked — when Jonah, in the passenger seat, leaned toward me and confided, “I know why they killed him.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“They killed him because he was coming out both barrels against Vietnam.”

“Viet — That’s insane.”

He waved his hand in front of the dash, the whole panorama of interstate. Danger on all sides. “His attacks, last year. ‘America’s the world’s greatest purveyor of violence.’ Sending out blacks to kill yellows. Come on. You show me the person in power who’s going to let some darkie preacher shut down a game like that.”

I checked my speed. “You’re saying the government… The CIA…” I felt like a fool just pronouncing the letters.

Jonah shrugged. He didn’t care which acronym had pulled the trigger. “They need the war, Joey. It’s like housecleaning. Forces of good. Making the world safe. Onward, upward, oneward.”

The skin on my neck turned to scales. He’d gone the way of the country at large. My brother, always grandiose, had taken that last little baby step upstream. But something in me relaxed at his words. If he’d arrived here, too, then there was no conflict. Ruth could come back. I could tell her what had happened to him. We could be together, the three of us again, as we had never been. No enemies, aside from everyone. I’d believe whatever the two of them told me.

I had no strong feelings about the war, except to avoid it. Now this spillover was killing people across 125 cities. On every long car ride now, Jonah spun through the dial, searching for counterculture songs. He’d weave a Dies Irae cantus firmus around the melodies, that same gift for counterpoint that had stunned my parents during our music evenings and made them think they had a duty to send him away to boarding school. The fatal facility that stunted his life. And when the three or four predictable funk or folk guitar chords failed to accommodate the harmonies he spun, he’d curse the tone-deaf arrangements and threaten to firebomb the nearest record store.

The war took us over. Everything became a referendum on it. Love-fests, pot parties, sit-ins, draft-card bonfires, Upper West Side benefits that threw together militant radicals and shameless philanthropists: Everything became the war. My brother sat next to me on an upholstered Chevy seat, weaving counterpoint around the words, “There’s something happening here.” The old order was taking its last twilight gasp; some spiraling hope was breathing its first. My brother hummed along, obbligato, above “Stop, hey: What’s that sound?” But no one could say what that sound was or just what future it was trying to buy.

The war took Phillipa Schuyler. That wonderous little girl, the daughter of hybrid vigor, the celebrated heroine of Phillipa Duke Schuyler Day, whose Five Little Piano Pieces were among the first keyboard works Jonah and I ever learned, died in Da Nang. The musical prodigy burned to death in a helicopter crash in a war zone, on her way back from Hue. Her country had loved the girl for the shortest moment, until she passed through puberty and lost her status as a freak of nature. When precocity failed her, all those whom hybrid vigor threatened with extinction turned the full force of purebred unity against her. She fled to Europe, playing to acclaim from crowned families and heads of state. She toured internationally as Felipa Monterro, racially, nationally, and historically ambiguous. She published five books and wrote articles in several languages. She became a correspondent. And she fell from the sky and died on a bungled humanitarian mission to rescue schoolchildren whose village was about to be overrun. She was thirty-seven.

The news devastated Jonah. He’d loved the girl, on nothing more than her sheet music and our parents’ accounts. He’d imagined she’d hear of him someday, that they would meet, that anything might happen between them. I, too, had always thought so.

“Just us now, Mule,” he told me. Just us, and the tens of thousands just like us, whom we’d never come across.

From Hue and Da Nang — hamlets no atlas of ours carried — the war came home. At Columbia, what started as an SDS-led demonstration ended with a unit of twenty-year-olds taking over the president’s office in Low Library, where they set up an autonomous people’s republic. Across that postage stamp of campus where our father worked, the latest American revolution played out in microcosm. Half a dozen buildings were occupied, besieged, and sacked over the course of a war that lasted longer than the latest one between the Arabs and Israel.

Da had no lab to worry about losing. He’d always carried his science around with him in his head. But even this much he failed to protect. He didn’t even know about the battle for Morningside Heights until two days in, when he strolled across the south end of the Campus Walk and noticed a disturbance in the distance. Good empiricist, he investigated. Within minutes, he was enveloped in bedlam. The thousand police President Kirk had summoned to drive the protesters from campus were achieving their only possible result: tear gas, stones, clubs, and bodies flying in all directions. Da saw an officer laying into the legs of a prostrate student and ran up to stop the beating. He took a club in the face and went down. He was lucky the jittery policeman didn’t shoot him.

His cheekbone collapsed into the back of his face and had to be rebuilt. I had no way of reaching Ruth, nor did I know whether she’d care. Jonah and I went to see Da in the hospital after the surgery. In the hall to his room, a nurse blocked our path until we convinced her we were the man’s sons. We couldn’t be his sons, she thought. We weren’t the same color. Maybe she thought we were the thugs who’d put him here, come back to finish the job.

Da still bobbed under the anesthetic. He looked through the gauze wrappings holding in his face. He seemed to recognize us and tried to sit up in the hospital bed to sing. He flipped a weak hand up to his mummified head and droned, “Hat jede Sache so fremd eine Miene, so falsch ein Gesicht!” Hugo Wolf’s “Homesickness,” a song Jonah used to sing, before the words meant anything. Everything had so strange a countenance, so false a face.

Jonah saluted. “How’s our cheekless wonder? You feeling better? What do the docs say?”

The question set Da to singing again, Mahler this time:

Ich hab’ erst heut’ den Doktor gefragt,

Der hat mir’s in’s Gesicht gesagt:

“Ich weiss wohl, was dir ist, was dir 1st:

Ein Narr bist du gewiß!”

Nun weiss ich, wie mir ist!

Only today I asked the doctor,

And he told me to my face:

“I know exactly what’s wrong with you:

You are surely a fool!”

Now I know what’s wrong with me!

He sounded like a flock of geese rushing south. The performance went right through my intestines. Jonah cackled like a crazy man. “Da! Cut it out. Quit with the jaw movements. You’ll collapse your face again.”

“Come. We sing. We make a little trio. Where are the altos? We need altos.”

Jonah only egged him on. After a while, Da settled down. He craned up and said, “My boychiks,” as if we’d just arrived. He couldn’t rotate his head without shattering. We sat by his bedside for as long as Jonah’s attention permitted. Da perked up again as we got ready to leave. “Where are you going?”

“Home, Da. We have to practice.”

“Good. There’s a cold soup in the refrigerator. Chicken from Mrs. Samuels. And Mandelbrot in the bread box, for you boys. You boys like that.”

We looked at each other. I tried to stop him, but Jonah blurted, “Not that home.”

Da just blinked at us through his bandages and waved away our jokes. “Tell your mother I’m just fine.”

Outside, on the street, Jonah preempted me. “He’s still doped up. Who knows what they have him on?”

“Jonah.”

“Look.” His voice swung out at me. “If he loses his job, we can start worrying about him.” We walked in silence toward the subway. At last he added, “I mean, it’s hardly the kind of job where craziness is a liability.”

We performed in Columbus, at Ohio State, a pocketbook auditorium paneled in dark wood. There couldn’t have been more than three hundred people in attendance, half of them at student prices, scoping out the object of controversy. We’d have lost money on coming out if we hadn’t had bookings in Dayton and Cleveland, too. Jonah must have felt something, some sense of what was already racing to happen to him. There, in that random hall, in front of an audience that didn’t know what hit them, for an hour and ten minutes, he sang like nothing living.

Once, when I was a child, before Mama died, I dreamt I was standing on the front stoop of the house in Hamilton Heights. I leaned forward without stepping and lifted off the stoop, surprised that I could fly. I’d always been able to, only I’d forgotten. All I needed to do was lean forward and let it happen. Flying was as easy as breathing, easier than walking through the neighborhood where my parents put me down. That was how Jonah sang that night in the middle of distant, dislodged Ohio. He landed on the most reticent pitches from a fixed point in the air above, like a kingfisher catching silver. He hit attacks and came off every release without a waver. Each note’s edges tapered or sustained according to innermost need. His line bent iridescent, a hummingbird turning at will and hovering motionless, by the beat of its wings, even fusing air and flying backward. His sound spread to its full span, huge as a raptor, all taloned precision, without a trace of force or tremor. His ornaments were as articulate as switches and his held notes swelled like the sea trapped in a shell.

Technique no longer dictated what sound he could or couldn’t make. The full palette of human song was his. Every protection racket he’d lived through gave him something to sing about, something to escape. He’d always been able to hit the notes. Now he knew what the notes meant. In his mouth, hope hung, fear cowered, joy let loose, anger bit into itself, memory recalled. The rage of 1968 fueled him and fell away, amazed by the place he made of it.

His sound said, Stop everything. The votes are in. Nothing but listening matters. I had to force myself to keep playing. I stumbled, pulled along in his wake. To do him justice, to match what I heard, my fingers turned extraordinary evidence. For the shortest while, I, too, could say everything about where we’d come from. Playing like that, I didn’t love Jonah because he was my brother. I loved him — would lay down my life for him, already had — because, for a few unchanging moments onstage, backing up into the crook of the piano, he was free. He shed who he was, what he wanted, the sorry wrapper of the self. His sound traveled into sublime indifference. And for a while, he brought back a full working description for anyone to hear.

That’s how the music came out of him. Silk slid across obsidian. The tiniest working hinge in a carved ivory triptych the size of a walnut. A blind man, lost at a street corner in a winter city. The disk of affronted moon, snagged in the branches of a cloudless night. He leaned into the notes, unable to suppress his own thrill in the power of making. And when he finished, when his hands dropped down flush to his thighs and the bulge of muscle above his collarbone — that cue I always watched like the tip of a conductor’s baton — at last went slack, I forgot to lift my foot off the sustain. Instead of closing the envelope, I let the vibrations of that last chord keep traveling and, like the sign of his words on the air, float on to their natural death. The house couldn’t decide if the music had ended. Those three hundred midwestern ticket holders refused to break in on the thing they’d just witnessed or destroy it with anything so banal as applause.

The audience wouldn’t clap. Nothing like it had ever happened to us. Jonah stood in the growing vacuum. I can’t trust my sense of time; my brain still ran that tempo where thirty-second notes laze through the ear like blimps at an air show. But the silence was complete, soaking up even the constant coughs and chair creaks that litter every concert. It grew until the moment for turning it into ovation was lost. By silent agreement, the audience held still.

After a lifetime — maybe ten full seconds — Jonah relaxed and walked offstage. He walked right past me on the piano bench without looking my way. After another frozen eternity, I walked off after him. I found him in the stage wing, fiddling with the sash ropes that ran up into the theater’s fly tower. My look asked, What happened out there? His answered, Who cares?

The spell over the audience chose that moment to break. They should have gone home in their chosen silence, but they didn’t have the will. The clapping began, halting and stunted. But making up for the late start, it turned into a riot. Bourgeois normalcy was saved for another evening. Jonah resisted going back and taking a bow. He’d had enough of Columbus. I had to shove him out, then wait a step and follow along behind him, smiling. They brought us back four times, and would have gone five except that Jonah refused. The third curtain call was the point when we always trotted out an encore bonbon. That night made an encore impossible. We never even looked at each other. He dragged me out to the loading dock before anyone could come backstage to congratulate us.

We headed to our campus guest room at a trot. Five years ago, we might have giggled in triumph the whole way. But that night, we were grim with transcendence. We got to the student guest house in silence. The all-reaching creature became my brother again. He undid his tie and took off his burgundy cummerbund even before we entered the elevator to our room. In the room, he lost himself in gin and tonics and televised jabber. For a while, he’d hovered above the noise of being. Then he nose-dived back in.

The world we returned to likewise fell apart. I could no longer tell cause from effect, before from after. Robert Kennedy was shot. Who knew why? The war — some war. Chickens roosting. Impossible to keep track of what futures were being decided or what scores were being settled. Thereafter, all crucial decisions would be made by sniper. Paris boiled over, then Prague, Peking, even Moscow. In Mexico City, two of the world’s fastest men raised their black fists in the air on the Olympic medal stands in a silent, world-traveling scream.

Toward the end of summer came Chicago. The city hadn’t yet recovered from “shoot to kill.” We were supposed to perform at a summer festival up at Ravinia, on the eighteenth of August. Jonah, on a hunch, canceled. Maybe it was the hippies’ threat to lace the city water supply with LSD. We stayed in New York and watched the show on television. The presidential nomination turned into a bloodbath. It ended as every recent battle for our souls had: with an airlift of six thousand troops equipped with every weapon from flamethrower to bazooka. “Democracy in action,” Jonah kept repeating to the flickering screen. “Power of the vote.” Filled with his own helplessness, he watched the country descend into the hell of its choice.

In October, he bailed. He came to me waving an invitation to a monthlong music residency in Magdeburg starting before Christmas and running past New Year’s. “You gotta love this, Joey. The one-thousandth anniversary of the establishment of the archbishopric. The town is gung ho on reviving their one brief moment at the center of civilization.”

“Magdeburg? You can’t go.”

“What do you mean ‘can’t go,’ bro?”

“Magdeburg is in East Germany.”

He shrugged. “Is it?”

I may have used the term Iron Curtain. It was a long time ago.

“So what’s the big deal? I’m an invited guest. It’s a special occasion. Practically a state function. Their foreign service or whatever it’s called will get me a visa.”

“It’s not about getting in over there. It’s about getting back in over here.”

“And why, exactly, would anyone want to?”

“I’m serious, Jonah. Aid and comfort to the enemy. They’ll hassle you over this for the rest of your life. Look what they did to Robeson.”

“I’m serious, too, Joey. If there’s a problem coming back, I don’t want to.” I couldn’t bear to look at him. I turned away, but he spun a little impish pirouette to keep his face in front of mine. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Mule. This country’s totally fucked up. Why would anyone want to live here if he didn’t have to? What choices do I have? I can stick around and tote bales, and if I stay out of trouble long enough, they’ll let me be a certified black artist. Or I can go to Europe and sing.”

I grabbed his flailing wrists. “Sit down. Just. Sit. You’re making me nuts.” I took his shoulders and shoved him down on the piano bench. I chopped at him with my index finger — performers’ obedience school. “Europe is fine. Musicians…like us have been going that route forever. Germany? Why not, for a little while? But go to Hamburg, Jonah. Go to Munich, if you have to go.”

“Munich hasn’t offered to pay my way and put me up with a healthy honorarium.”

“Magdeburg’s doing all that?”

“Joey. It’s Germany. Deine Vorfahren, Junge! They invented music. It’s their life’s blood. They’d do anything for it. It’s like…like firearms over here.”

“They’re using you. Cold War propaganda. You’re going to be their showpiece for how America treats its—”

He laughed out loud and doused his hands into the keyboard for a Prokofievian parody of the “Internationale.” “That’s me, Joey. Traitor to my country. Me and Commander Bucher.” He looked up at me, both corners of his mouth pulled back. “Grow up, man! Like the United States hasn’t been using us our whole lives?”

The United States had offered him the lead in a premiere of a new Met opera. Yet he could be an artist only if he’d wear the alien badge. Music was supposed to be cosmopolitan — free travel across all borders. But it could get him into the last Stalinist state more easily than it could get him into midtown. I looked at him, begging, a black accompanist, an Uncle Tom in white tie and tails, willing to be used and abused by anyone, most of all my brother, if we could only go on living as if music were ours.

He rubbed my head, sure that we’d always bond over that ritual humiliation. “Come with me, Joey. Come on. Telemann’s birthplace. We’ll have a blast.” Jonah detested Telemann. The man’s greatest claim to fame is turning down a job they then had to give to Bach. “You wouldn’t know it from our bookings in this country in recent months, but we two do have a salable skill. People will pay good money to hear us do what we do. It’s state-subsidized over there. Why shouldn’t you and I get in on a little of that action? Rightful descendants, huh?”

“What are you thinking? Jonah?”

“What? I’m not thinking anything. I’m saying let’s have an adventure. We know the language. We can amaze the natives. I’m not getting laid anytime soon. You’re not getting laid, are you, Mule? Let’s go see what the Fräuleins are up to these days.” He examined me long enough to see what his words were doing. It never occurred to him I might say no. He changed keys, modulating faster and further afield than late Strauss.

“Come on, Joey. Salzburg. Bayreuth. Potsdam. Vienna. Wherever you want to go. We can head up to Leipzig. Make a pilgrimage to the Thomaskirche.”

He sounded desperate. I couldn’t figure out why. If he was so sure of Europe’s embrace, why did he need me? And what did he mean to do with me once the requests started pouring in for concert work, solos with orchestras, and even — the grand prize he’d set himself — opera? I held up my palm. “What does Da say?”

“Da?” His syllable came out a laugh. He hadn’t even thought to tell our father. Our father, the least political man who’d ever lived, a man who’d once lived a hundred kilometers from Magdeburg. Our Da, who vowed never to set foot in his native country again. I couldn’t go. Our father might need me. Our sister might want to get in touch. No one would be here to take care of things if I let my brother drag me away for months. Jonah had no plan, and he didn’t need one. He didn’t really need anything except, for reasons that escaped me, me.

I weighed how much he expected me to throw away. When I didn’t step forward with a ready yes, it seemed to confuse him. His look of friendly conscription rippled with panic, then narrowed to a single accusing question: “How about it?”

“Jonah.” Under the pressure of his gaze, I slipped out and looked down on the two of us. “Haven’t you jerked me around enough?”

For a second, he didn’t hear me. Then all he could hear was betrayal. “Sure, Mule. Suit yourself.” He grabbed his cap and corduroy jacket and left the apartment. I didn’t see him for two days. He came back just in time for our next gig. And three weeks after that, he was packed and ready to go.

He had his visa, and an open ticket. “When are you coming back?” I asked.

He shrugged. “We’ll see what comes down.” We never shook hands, and we didn’t now. “Watch your back, Mule. Keep away from the Chopin.” He didn’t add, Decide your own life. He’d do that for me, as always. All he said on that score was, “So long. Write if you get work.”

August 1945

Delia’s on the A when she sees the headline. Not by law a Jim Crow car, but the law’s just a tagalong. Car color changes with the blocks above ground. Safety, comfort, ease — the cold comforts of neighborhood chosen and enforced. Choice and its opposite shade off, one into the other, so fluidly these last days of the war. She has come to know, close up, the blurred edge between the two — things forced upon her until they seem elected; things chosen so fiercely, they feel compelled.

Tuesday morning. David is home with the boys. She runs out, just for a minute, to buy an ice bag for the little one. He has fallen down the front steps and hurt his ankle. Not one cry from him after the first. But the ankle is a swollen dark stain, thicker now than her wrist, and the poor child needs the comfort only cold can bring.

She rides two stops, to the pharmacy she knows will serve her. They know her there — Mrs. Strom, mother of small boys. Two stops — five minutes. But she reads the headline in a flash, no time at all. Three fat lines run across the length of the page. They’re not as large as the headlines last May, declaring an end to Europe’s Armageddon. But they come off the page in a more silent burst.

A deep sable man sits next to her, poring over the words, shaking his head, willing them to change. The night has brought a “rain of ruin.” One bomb lands with the force of twenty thousand tons of TNT. Two thousand B-29’s. She tries to imagine a ton of TNT. Two tons. Twenty — something like the weight of this subway car. Now ten times that. Then ten times, and ten times that again.

The gaze of the man next to her freezes on the headline. His eyes keep scanning back and forth, the lines of text forcing his head through a stiff, refusing no. He struggles, not with the words, but with the ideas they pretend to stand for. Words don’t exist yet for what these words brush up against. She reads in secret, looking over his shaking shoulders.NEW AGE USHERED. His gaze remains unchanged.IMPENETRABLE CLOUD OF DUST HIDES CITY. Delia thinks: This city.SCIENTISTS AWESTRUCK AT BLINDING FLASH.SECRECY ON WEAPON SO GREAT THAT NOT EVEN WORKERS KNEW OF THEIR PRODUCT.

They heard last night on the radio. Confirmation of what her household long ago knew. But the story goes real for her now, seeing the words in print, in this Negro subway car. TheDAY OF ATOMIC ENERGY begins for this unchanged underground train. The jet-black man next to her shakes his head, mourning tens of thousands of dead brown skins, while for the rest of the car, life passes for what it had passed for the day before. A woman across from her in a red silk hat checks her lips in a compact mirror. The boy in a smashed fedora to her left studies his Racing Form. A little girl, ten, out of school for the summer vacation, skips up the aisle, finding a shiny dime some unfortunate has dropped.

She shouts at the whole car, in her skull. Don’t you see? It’s over. This means the war is over. But the war isn’t over, not for any of them. Never will be. Just one more story on a weary, turning page.JET PLANE EXPLOSION KILLS MAJOR BONG.KYUSHU CITY RAZED.CHINESE WIN MORE OF “INVASION COAST.” One more numbing war report, after a lifetime of war.

NOT EVEN WORKERS KNEW. How do the reporters presume to know that, a day after the blast? She knew. She’s known for almost a month, since the secret desert testing.SCIENTISTS AWESTRUCK AT BLINDING FLASH. She knows just how awed the scientists are, lit by the flash of the work they’ve done. In the cloud enveloping her, Delia Strom almost misses her stop. She dashes through the train doors as they start to close. She wanders up to the surface, then into her familiar pharmacy. A moment ago, she was filled with purpose. But when the clerk asks her what she wants, she can’t remember. Something for her hurt child. The smallest imaginable hurt, and its even smaller comfort.

Something the shade of melted clay. Tough gray rubber and hard white cap. She grips it to her all the ride back. The bottle is a skinned lapdog, half as large as her little one, and twice as resilient. At home, she covers his wounded foot with it. The day is so hot already, they’ve made his invalid’s bed right inside the window casement, his little swollen foot practically hanging out the screens. Her Joey can’t understand why his mama wants to inflict him with freezing cold. But he suffers the torture with a smile meant to absolve her.

Her husband, the awestruck scientist, finds her in the kitchen, laying furiously into the bottom of the saucepan with copper cleaner. “Everything is good?”

She drops the scouring pad and grips the lip of the sink. She’s pregnant again, in her fifth month, past the early spells of bodily revolt. This is a different dizziness. “Everything,” she says, “is what it is.”

Two years ago, when Charlie was still alive, when it might have kept her flesh and blood from harm, she wanted this bomb. Now she only wants her husband back, the world she knows. Those hundred thousand brown bodies. How many of them children, as small or smaller than her JoJo? Hundreds of men involved: scientists, engineers, administrators. He can’t have contributed anything. Nothing the others wouldn’t have figured out on their own. He’s never told her just what part he worked on. Even now, she can’t ask.

At night, in bed, she wants to whisper, Did you know? Of course he knew. But what her David knows, she can only guess at. He’s never done anything but play with the world, that bright hypnotic bauble. Like Newton, he says: gathering pretty shells on the beach. His life’s work, chosen because it is more useless than philosophy. Avoiding trouble, evading detection, expelled anyway. Jews and politics do not mix. She remembers his interview with that national academic honor society: “Are you a practicing Jew?” How he almost lied, on principle, just to force them out of hiding. And how they rejected him anyway, claiming, “We don’t accept people who renounce their given faiths.”

She watches as he undresses, hanging his rumpled trousers on a chair, exposing his shocking whiteness, a strangeness even greater than she’d suspected before they married. Stranger, even, than the strangeness of men. This white, this man, this unpracticing Jew, this German shares her room with her. But the room they share is stranger than either of them.

He can’t have contributed much to this bomb. You can’t turn an atom into twenty thousand tons of TNT on anything so imaginary as time. He’s explained it to her, his accidental expertise, his spin-off ability to imagine what goes on inside the smallest matter’s core. Still she can’t see his connection. His colleagues have kept him around — through Columbia, Chicago, New Mexico, all those epic train rides — as nothing but their puzzle-solving, happy mascot. The one who helps others find what they’re after.

Four months before, he became the least-published member of his department ever to make permanent faculty. His colleagues bent the rules, granting him tenure largely for the one paper he published while still in Europe, the one his friends say will keep his name around for years. She has tried to read it, slipping down its pages as down a glass mountain. Then, only two more papers since his arrival, and those got written only because he was bedridden with glandular fever. The American work simply never materialized. The stream of follow-on discoveries exists only in his mind.

Still, the department has given him security for life, if only for selfish reasons. Even those who believe David’s own lifework will forever come to nothing have never profited more from any other colleague. First, there are the students. The shy ones, the ones with no English, even when it’s their native tongue. The ones who go out in public as if climbing the scaffold. The ones who wear the same white short-sleeved shirts and cotton pants, even in the dead of winter. They adore the man and crowd his lectures. They’d lay down their lives for him. Already they land sterling jobs — Stanford, Michigan, Cornell — their work fueled by tricks of insight derived from their beloved teacher.

“What’s your secret?” she asked him once. She, with students of her own.

David shrugged. “The ones without talent can’t be taught. The ones with talent need not to be taught.”

The department might have kept him on for his teaching alone. But there’s more — far more. He wanders the halls of the building with a fountain pen and a pocket score of Solomon tucked under his arm, waiting for offices to open at the sound of his step and pull him in. Or he’ll sit in the coffee room, scanning his score, humming to himself until some stumped colleague slumps down next to him and bemoans the latest obstinate equation. Then, for the price of a cup of coffee, he leads them to answers, scribbling out the groundwork on a paper napkin. Not that he ever solves the problem. His mastery of any but his own small corner of time is dusty at best. He has no great skill at formulas, although he loves that game of estimation they all call “Fermi problems”: How far does one crow fly in the course of a lifetime? How long would it take to eat all the bowls of cereal made from a hundred-acre cornfield? How many notes did Beethoven write in his life? Whenever he pesters her with such questions, she replies: “Far.” “A heap of days.” “Just enough for us to listen to.”

But for the price of a cup of coffee, he gives them something invisible. They leave clutching the magic napkin, staring at the scribbles before they fade, sure that they could have seen the way forward themselves, given a little more time. But this way is faster, cleaner, lighter. No one can say exactly what David does. Nothing rigorous. He just displaces them. Moves them around the sealed space until they find the hidden door. He scribbles on the white napkin, relying more on pictures than equations. His colleagues complain that he doesn’t really use reason. They accuse him of jumping ahead in time to that point where the researcher has already solved his problem, then coming back with some rough description of solutions yet to come.

His pictures are the flattened traces he brings back from later worlds: imps climbing up and down staircases. Snaking queues of moviegoers waiting to enter a theater by two separate doors. Zigzag arrows with heads and tails hooking up in tangled skeins: the experimental, extended notation. Those whose work he helps dislodge must then pester him, needing to know how he always finds, in single lightning flashes, the angle that aligns.

“You must learn to listen,” he says. If particles, forces, and fields obey the curve that binds the flow of numbers, then they must sound like harmonies in time. “You think with your eyes; this is your problem. No one can see four independent variables mapping out a surface in five or more dimensions. But the tuned ear can hear chords.”

His colleagues dismiss this talk as mere metaphor. They think he’s hiding something, storing up his secret method until it delivers the one blinding insight he’s after. Or perhaps he’s in it for the endless free cups of coffee.

Delia, though, believes him, and knows how it is. Her husband hears his way forward. Melodies, intervals, rhythms, durations: the music of the spheres. Others bring him their deadlocks — particles spinning backward, phantom apparitions in two places at once, gravities collapsing on themselves. Even as they describe the hopeless mysteries, her David hears the rich counterpoint coded in the composer’s score. This, she sees, lying in bed watching him undress, is how he helped them build their bomb. He did no real work except to free up the thoughts of men who made the design. All of them boys, caught up in pure performance. The permanent urge to find and catch.

Her husband undoes the collar of his shirt and struggles out of its sleeves. The flaps of fabric go slack onto their haphazard hanger. She will turn his closet right again after he leaves for school in the morning. He moves across the room in T-shirt and boxers, this night’s peace in his eyes. The war is over, or it will be soon. Work can begin again, free from nuisance politics, the showdown of power, the assorted evils that he, a secular Jew in love with knowing, would never have chosen to mix in. Life can resume, safe at least, if never again the way it was before such safety. This is her husband, padding over the floorboards to their August bed, across a distance harder to guess than any Fermi problem.

She wants to ask, Is this what you thought? One cog in the largest engineering project ever. Nothing. She wants to ask him exactly what he did, what subsection of this invention he made possible. But he closes the distance to her before she finds the nerve. He bends his weight onto the bed, and just as every night, their two adjacent hues shock each other into being. His eyes drop to the greater mystery. He puts his hand on her thickened middle, the third life they’ve started there. He says something soft she can’t catch, neither English nor German, but in a language far older than both, an earliest benediction.

It’s August, too hot for the slightest touch. He rubs her with a little alcohol on a cotton rag that they keep on the bed stand. For a minute, she is cool. “You have not felt sick today?”

Because she does not lie to him, she says to the road-map ceiling, “A little. But it wasn’t the baby.”

He shoots her a look. Does he know? Always the same question. And no one can give her an answer that won’t, itself, go forever begging. He looks away from her ripened belly. He swings his feet onto the bed. He lifts the undershirt above his head, bares the chest she can’t quite learn. He lies back on the mattress, his shoulders pressed down into the sheet and his hips lifted, like a wrestler bucking free of a pin. In one smooth motion, he draws his boxers down his legs. A final fish wiggle and he’s naked, his undershorts a soft missile arcing onto the chair. How many nights has she seen him undress? More than the miles a crow lives to fly. How many more will be given to her? Fewer than the notes in a Beethoven allegro.

She lies in bed, six inches from a man who has helped — what? Begin a new age. Helped his awe-blind friends think the unthinkable and place it squarely into this world. She might ask him, and gain only his confusion. She can come no closer than flush alongside him. Every human a separate race. Each one of us a self no one can enter. How has this man found his way to this bed? How has she? Here they are, a little more than five years on in their marriage, and already there’s no hope of saying. Even less chance of saying where another five years will leave them. She casts herself — her solitary, sole race — forward another five years into this new age. Then fifty more, and further. She sees herself blocked, breaking out, becoming something new. She feels what this unknowable man next to her so often insists: “Everything the laws of the universe do not prohibit must finally happen.”

He lies naked along her nakedness. He on top of the flat sheet, she half under. She can’t sleep, however hot the night, without some cover. A hundred thousand people gone in one airborne flash, and she needs a sheet to sleep. She, too, wanted this device. She, too, asked him to hurry. An evil large enough to end the larger evil. Now the war is over, and life — whatever they might yet make of it — begins again. Now peace must rise to the horrors war has left. Now the world must become one people. If not one, then billions.

The one person who is her husband lies back in his own body. He slips his palms behind his neck, elbows protruding into a ship’s prow, his face the figurehead. In profile, he grows strange, another species. Would he have taken on this marriage had he known what the days would bring? Their endless battle just to step out of the house, walk down the block, go shopping. The times they must pretend to be strangers, slight acquaintances, employer and servant. The passive attacks and murmured violence he came to this country to escape. The low-grade war no blinding flash will ever end.

She should never have let him, knowing what he didn’t. How much she’s dragged him into. How much she’s made impossible. And yet, the children: as inevitable as God. Now that they live, they had to, all along. Her two little men, her JoJo, who could never not be. And this new third life on the way, sleeping in her, soft and round as an Indian mound: already a story that always was. She and this man are here only to ensure these three.

Her husband turns to her. “What will we do for schooling?”

He reads her mind, as he has once a day since the mind-reading day they met. She needs no other proof that this war is theirs, the one they were meant for. School will kill them. The daily bruise of their lessons will make grade-standard schoolyard assaults look like ice-cream socials. Her JoJo, like those magazine illusions: paper white against one crowd, lamp black against the other. Already, they belong nowhere. Their oldest has perfect pitch. She’s tested it already: infallible. He seems to be training his brother in the same. They play together, paint, hold their lines in complex rounds. They love themselves, love both their parents, see no shades between. All this will die in school’s brutal curriculum.

“We could school them at home.” Writing her mind, reading his.

“We could school them ourselves. You and I, the two put together.”

“Yes.” She shushes him. “Between the two of us, we can teach them a great deal.”

He lies back quiet, content in their plans. Maybe that is whiteness, manness. Safe within himself, even on a day like this day. Even with all that has happened to his own family. In a minute, his contentment leads to what it always does. His night to start tonight: He hums a tune. She can’t say what it is. Her mind is not naming yet, but keeps inside the phrase. Something Russian: the steppes; onion domes. A world as far away from hers as this world permits her. And by the time his slow Volga tune comes into its second measure, she’s there with the descant.

This is how they play, night after night, more regular than sex, and just as warming. One begins; the other harmonizes. Finds some accompaniment, even when she has never heard the tune, when it comes down out of the attic from some musty culture no one would claim to own. The secret’s in the intervals, finding a line half free of the melody, yet already inside it. Music from a single note, set loose to run in unfolding meter.

Humming in bed: softer than love, so as not to wake their two sleeping children. This third, as close as her abdomen, won’t mind hearing. She sings, tuning with a man who has as little sense of her past as she has of these haunted Czarist chords. His whole family has vanished, leaving behind no hard fact to mourn. He’s left his handprints on a bomb that takes a hundred thousand lives. It’s August, too hot for the lightest touch. But when they fade and settle down to sleep, no angels watching over them out of the newly stripped skies, his fingers brush against the small of her back and hers reach out behind him to rest, for the next half hour anyway, upon the familiar strangeness of his thigh.

Her father writes David a long letter, started the day after the second bomb and finished three weeks later. “Dear David.” How their letters always begin: “Dear William.” “Dear David.”

This incredible news explains everything you couldn’t tell me over the last two years. I’ve come to appreciate what you must have carried inside you, and I thank you for giving me as much of a sense of this as you were able.

With the rest of America, I give praise to whatever power there is that this chapter in human history is at last over. Believe me, I know how much longer it might have dragged on had science not succeeded in producing this “cosmic bomb.” If nothing else, I thank you for Michael’s sake. But so much else about this development eludes me that I feel I must write you for clarification.

Delia watches her husband read, blinking the way he does when baffled by words.

I have no trouble in accepting the first explosion. It seems to me politically necessary, scientifically triumphant, and morally expedient. But this second blast is little more than barbaric. What civilized people could defend such action? We have taken tens of thousands more lives, without even giving that country a chance to absorb the fact of what hit it. And for what? Merely, it seems, to project a final superiority, the same world dominance I thought we were fighting this war to end…

David Strom gapes at his accuser’s daughter. “I don’t understand. He means I’m to answer for this?” He hands the paper to his wife, who speeds through it. “I am not the one to talk about this bomb. Yes, I’ve done work for the OSRD. So did half of our scientists. More than half! I did a little thinking about neutron absorption. A little later, I helped people to figure a problem surrounding the implosion. I did more work on electronic countermeasures that were never developed than I did for this device.”

Delia reaches out and grazes her husband’s arm. What can her touch feel like to him? His words relieve her a little, suggest the answers beyond her asking. But here: this letter, a sheet between them. Her father’s question has weighed on her for weeks. And her husband, she sees, has not yet asked it of himself. David takes the page back from her, resuming his penance at the pace of the foreign reader:

This country must know what it’s in danger of pursuing. Surely it sees how this act will look to history. Would this country have been willing to drop this bomb on Germany, on the country of your beloved Bach and Beethoven? Would we have used it to annihilate a European capital? Or was this mass civilian death meant, from the beginning, to be used only against the darker races?

Too much for David. “Yes,” he shouts. She has never heard this strain in him. “Surely. Of course I would use this against Germany. Think what Germany has used against everyone who is my relation! We have bombed all the German cities, by daylight and by nighttime. Flattened all the cathedrals. We were racing to make this final bomb before Heisenberg. Alle Deutschen… ”

She nods and cups his elbow. Her father, too, cheered David’s war work, what little David could tell him. The doctor, too, urged all speed to ring in the American future as quickly as possible. But her father was backing a thing invisible to him.

Know that I don’t blame you, but only need to ask you these few matters. You have seen up close what I can only speculate about. I had in mind a different victor, a different peace, one that would put an end to supremacy forever. We were fighting against fascism, genocide, all the evils of power. Now we’ve leveled two cities of bewildered brown civilians… You may not understand my racializing these blasts. Maybe you’d have to spend a month in my clinic or a year in the neighborhoods near mine to know what I wanted this war to defeat. I’d hoped for something better from this country. If this is how we choose to end this conflict, what hope can we have for peacetime?

No doubt this extraordinary turn of events looks different to you, David. That’s why I’m writing. If you could show me what I’ve failed to understand, I’d be much obliged.

Meanwhile, rest assured that I do not consider you to be supremacy, power, barbarity, Europe, history, or anything else but my son-in-law, whom I trust is taking care of my girl and those astonishing grandsons of mine. May Labor Day find you all well. I look forward to hearing back from you. Ever, William.

David finishes and says nothing. He’s listening; this much she must always love in him. Holding out for a hint of harmony. Waiting to hear the music that will answer for him. “I can get on a train.” His voice is a frayed rope. “Go out to Philadelphia and see him.”

“Don’t talk crazy,” she tells him, trying for comfort and missing by a wide margin.

“But I must speak with him. We must try to understand this, face-to-face. How can I do this thing, through writing, when nothing of what I must say is in my language?”

She takes him in her arms. “The doctor can come pay us a house call if he wants to talk. When was the last time we had him out here? He can come see his boys and have a listen to this little bun in the oven. You men can drink brandy and decide how best to fix civilization’s future.”

“I don’t drink brandy. You know this.” She has to laugh at the droop in him. But he does not lift at her laughing.

Her idea is inspired. She floats an open invitation just as Dr. Daley debates whether to attend the big postwar conference on the latest developments in sulfa drugs and antibiotics hosted by Mount Sinai and Columbia. Mixing pleasure and business appeals to the doctor’s efficiency. He arrives at the house on a September evening. Jonah and Joseph are on their feet and flying to the door at his knock. They sing “Papap” at the top of their voices, primed all day for the man’s arrival. Delia peers down the corridor as they bang into each other, each reaching for the handle to let their grandfather in. Joseph still favors his twisted ankle. Or maybe she imagines it. She has her hands full with basting bulb and ladle, but she towels clean in a moment and is off to the door, two steps behind her boys.

She reads the violence as her father steps into the room. She thinks at first, This bomb, this matter of morality he comes to discuss with David. But something nearer has happened. He doesn’t lean down to embrace the boys or carry them. He barely lets them cling to his legs before he brushes past down the corridor, radiating fury.

She’s seen this before, more times than she cares to remember. Seen it first when she was no older than Joseph. In her boys’ faces, the seed of that poison tree: What did we do? The question she herself could never answer. Now it’s her boys’ turn to suffer the inheritance she can’t keep them from.

Her father nears her, and she tries to hug him. He pecks her on the chin. She feels him struggle, with that last scrap of dignity so powerful in him, to bite down this rage and swallow it whole, a cyanide capsule they give to agents caught behind enemy lines. She knows he won’t be able to. He’ll wrestle and fail, no less spectacularly than the world has failed him. Meanwhile, she cannot ask, can’t do anything but play along, a show of cheer while waiting for all hell to break.

It takes until after dinner. The meal itself — turkey, broccoli, and creamed corn — is polite, if strained. David doesn’t notice, or he’s shrewder than Delia ever supposed. He asks about the sulfa-drug conference and William answers in Western Union. William tries instead to rehash the mess at Potsdam and Truman’s doomed slum-revitalization program. David can only grin, hopeless on both scores. Delia feels them both fighting to stay off Japan, the atom shadow, the dawn of the new cosmic age. The case this night’s meeting was meant to hear.

After the apple compote, her sons drift from the table to the spinet, that wedding gift from Dr. Daley, far and away their favorite toy. They tinker with octave scales. “Play me a nice old-time song,” Dr. Daley tells them. “Can you do that? You boys play a little tune for your grandpap?”

The two boys — four and three — smash down onto the bench and play a Bach chorale: “O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort.” Jonah gets the melody, of course. Joseph holds down the bass. This is how it goes: two boys discovering the secret of harmony, delighting in passing dissonance, tumbling over the jumble of moving lines, romping through the transformed scale. “O Eternity, you thunderous word! You sword boring into the soul! Beginning minus ending, Eternity, time without time, take me whenever it pleases you!” Nobody in this room knows the words. It’s notes only in here tonight. The boys weave their runs, butt wrists, kick each other’s shins where they dangle in the air, lean away in the swell of progressions, come back playfully on the smallest slowing, home. The music is in them. Just in them, this opening chrysanthemum of chords. It makes them happy, each juggling lines utterly separate that nevertheless fall one inside the other. Breathing in this perfect solution to a day that belongs to no one.

Some night, a life will arise that has no memory of where it came from, no thought of anything that has happened on the way here. No theft, no slavery, no murder. Something will be won then, and much will be lost, in the death of time. But this night is not yet that night. William Daley looks on these small boys, doing their chorale tumbling act. In that look lies every chord that music doesn’t speak. He shakes his head in wide, fact-denying arcs. The boys think he’s pleased, maybe even amazed, as every adult who has ever heard them has been. They lower themselves off the bench and toddle off to other discoveries. William turns to his daughter and stares at her, the way he once stared at his son Charles for playing coon songs on the parlor upright back home. The look sinks into her: accomplice, accuser. Anything you want. Wasn’t that the creed? The equal of any owner. The owner of all you would equal. Dr. Daley’s head shakes to a terrible stop. “What are you going to do with them?” He might mean anything. Anything you want.

Delia rises and starts to clear the table. “David and I have decided to school them at home.” She’s almost in the kitchen by sentence’s end.

“Is that so?”

“We’ve thought about it, Daddy.” She swings back to the table. “Where can they get a better education? David knows everything there is to know about science and math.” She waves toward her husband, who bows his head. “I can teach them music and art.”

“You going to give them history?” In the whip crack of his voice, there’s all the history he means. His fingers clamp around his water glass to keep his daughter from stealing it from him. “Where are they going to learn who they are?”

She slips back into her seat without a sound. She wraps herself in this role, the way Mr. Lugati trained her to do onstage. We work hard during countless rehearsals, so we can be inside ourselves, free for that one performance. She reaches down to find that column of breath. “Same place I learned, Daddy. Same place you learned.”

His eyes flash gunmetal. “You know where I learned who I am? Where I learned?” He turns toward David, who learned elsewhere. And that, Delia sees, is his unforgivable crime. “You asked about the conference? You wanted to know how the conference went?”

David just blinks. No longer sulfa drugs. No more antibiotics.

“I wish I could tell you. You see, I missed the better part of it. Detained downstairs in the lobby, first by the hotel dick, and later by a small but efficient police escort. A slight misunderstanding. You see, I couldn’t, in fact, be Dr. William Daley of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, because Dr. Daley is a real medical doctor with genuine credentials, while I’m just a nigger busting his woolly head into a civilized meeting of medical professionals.”

“Daddy. We don’t use that word in this house.”

“You don’t? Your boys are going to have to learn it, between their pretty four-part hymns. Full dictionary definition. Count on it. Home school!”

Her walls are in flames. “Daddy, you… I don’t understand you. You raised me…”

“That’s right, miss. I raised you. Let’s agree on that.”

She sees her lightness in the almond of his eyes. Has he forgotten? Does he think she has gone over, over to something as invented as the one laid down upon them?

“‘You are a singer,’” she says. “‘You lift yourself up. You make yourself so damn good that they have to hear you.’”

His palms flash outward. Look! “You’ve been out of school for half a decade. Where’s your career?”

She falls back from him, smashed in the face.

“She has been very busy,” David answers. “She is a wife and a mother of two. With one more coming.”

“How has your career been? Family obligations haven’t kept you from tenure.”

“Daddy.”The scale of the warning, in the back of Delia’s throat, startles even her.

He won’t be humbled, not again this day. He wheels on her. “I’ll tell you where your career is. It’s waiting out back of the concert hall, in the alley. The Coloreds Only entrance. Which just happens to be boarded up for the foreseeable future.”

“I haven’t really taken any auditions.”

“What do you mean, ‘haven’t really’? Either you haven’t or you have.”

“I’ll do more after the boys are older.”

“How long does a voice last?”

So many accusations come at her at once that she loses count. Smartest baby ever born, either side of the line, and she hasn’t become a lawyer, run for Congress, become even a mediocre concert artist. Hasn’t moved the race down the line. All she has done is raise two small boys, and that, apparently, not well.

Her father drops into deep bass, a tone she’s never heard him use. The sound silts up with her mama’s yellow clay-bed Carolina, a place he’s not been, aside from one unwilling visit, for more than fifteen years. Forget tobacco, forget cotton: land too bleak for anything but the most pitiful beans and peanuts. Land too poor to pay its own rent. His voice comes out a note-perfect mock of his own battered-down father-in-law, the one Delia met just three awkward times in this life. Only the voice isn’t mocking. “Those people ain’t never gonna let you sing.”

“They let Miss Anderson sing.”

“Sure. They let her sing, up at the Big House, on Novelty Night. Do a little dance, too, if she likes. Entertainment! Dogs on bicycles. Just make sure she gets back down to the darkie quarters when the act is over.”

Delia sits, hands frozen on the half-cleared table. Some street gangster has taken over her daddy, the man who worked his private way through Ulysses, who corresponds with university presidents, who demanded David’s explanation of Special Relativity. The man who has spent his adult life easing the sick. Stripped of his clinic, separated from his wife, taken from the neighborhood where he has for years been a healing god, fingered in a hotel lobby and held like some petty crook or dope fiend. What the world sees will always destroy what he rushes to show it. There is no counter but that collapse that, in time, takes everyone. Identity.

Dr. Daley walks over to the spinet. He plays the boys’ chorale from memory. He gets the first four bars, more or less as the backwoods cantor wrote them. It shocks Delia how good he is. He plays like one who has lost his native tongue. But he plays. She has never heard him play much of anything but snippets of Joplin. “That baby’s crying seemed to be,/Somewhere near the Sacred Tree.” A little broken boogie-woogie at Charlie’s memorial. Now this. By ear. Nothing but ear.

William’s hands pull away from the saw-toothed Lutheran chords as if the piano lid just bit them. “You know what I hear when I hear that music? I hear, ‘Cursed be Canaan.’ I hear ‘White — all right: Brown — hang around: Black — get back.’”

His daughter raises her blasted eyes to his. She tries for piano. Soft is harder than loud, as Lugati always said. “I’m sorry they were idiots at the conference, Daddy.” More reason, she wants to add, to beat them at what’s theirs.

“Mount Sinai. Not idiots. Best there is.” His eyes test the extremes of punishment not yet visited on him. Stripped so easily, he knows no bottom. Held and humiliated for an hour: It cost him nothing. Laughable. Dust yourself off and walk away. But if that, why not locked up in the coat check, chained to the shoe-shine stand in Penn Station, kept illiterate, driven out of the polling place, beaten up for turning down the wrong alley, or hung from a ready sumac? Even the most stubborn self in time will be identified.

From under his prayer shawl of silence, David speaks. “I have been thinking. What has been done to you today. This is an error of statistics.”

William bolts up. “What do you mean?”

“These are men who will not calculate while flying.”

Dr. Daley stares at the man. He turns to his daughter, dumbfounded. Her lips pucker. “On the fly.”

“Yes. On the flight. They are taking shortcuts in the steps of their deductions. They do not see the case, but only make bets on the basis of what they think likelihood tells them. Category. This is how thought proceeds. We cannot alter that. But we must change their categories.”

“Likelihood be hanged. This is nothing but animal hatred. Two species. That’s what they see. That’s what they’re intent on making. And damn us all, that’s what we’re going to be. They couldn’t see my clothes. They couldn’t hear my speech. I was quoting whole chapters from the seventh edition of the mother fucking Merck Manual…”

“My father told me it happens.” Her voice spinto, sailing on the shakes. She needs only ride this out. “My father taught me to live through it. To make a me too big to take away.”

“And what will you tell your children?”

Jonah chooses this moment to reenter the room. And where he strays, Joey isn’t far behind. Two preschoolers wandering in the woods, the pointless thicket of adulthood. William Daley clasps his eldest grandson’s shoulders. In this room’s light, the boy’s beige throws him. Somewhere between hang around and all right. A bent harmonica note, neither sharp nor natural. Between: like a rheostat, the slow turn of a radio dial receiving, for the slightest subtended turn, two stations at once. Like a coin landing freakishly on its edge, before the laws of likelihood condemn it to fall on one face or the other. He looks at this boy and sees a creature from the next world. Something comes back to him, an unusable aphorism he found while wasting his time trespassing in Emerson: “Every man contemplates an angel in his future self.”

“Joseph,” he says.

“Jonah.” The boy giggles.

The doctor swings around on his daughter. “Why in the name of hell did you call them the same thing?” Back to the boy, he says, “Jonah. Sing me something.”

Little Jonah starts out on a long, mournful canon. “By the waters, the waters of Babylon. We laid down and wept, and wept, for thee, Zion.” God knows what he thinks the syllables mean. Little Joey, a year younger, hears the round and waits, nailing his entrance, as he does with his parents night after night. But tonight, neither parent chimes in, and the canon trickles off after only two entrances.

“Sing me another,” Papap commands. And the boys, happy to oblige, start up another round: “Dona nobis pacem.” William holds his finger up, cuts them off before the three words are out. “What about our music?” He looks at the boys. But it’s their mother who answers.

“When was it ever ours, Daddy?” Ours: the black aristocracy, the Talented Tenth. The most despised people of the most despised people on earth.

He falls into oratory. “Before the Pilgrims,” he says, still regarding his grandchildren. “We were here, making our sounds.”

“I mean, when was it yours? Ours. Around the house. What music did we ever make our own? I had Mama’s church tunes, everything that came out of the A.M.E. hymnal. And I had your set of Teach Yourself the Classics 78’s. I used to sneak off with Charlie to listen to the wild sounds from New York and Chicago. All the stuff you never let us tune the radio to. ‘Best way to have yourself treated like a savage is to sound like one.’ I knew the music that scared you and the music that you felt you had to learn. But aside from a few turn-of-the-century rags you used to play when you thought nobody was listening — oh, I loved it when you played those! — I didn’t even know what music you liked. I didn’t even know you could…” She points toward the spinet, the smoking gun.

“You want these boys to sing? You want these boys to love… This boy.” He points to the darker one. His hand chops the air, fighting off the creep of prophecy. He can’t bear to look on his pronouncement. “This boy is going to be stopped, a quarter century from now. Going into some concert hall. Told there’s some mistake. He wants the stage on the other side of town. Not his music, going on inside. Complex, cultivated stuff. He wouldn’t understand.”

“Dein, was du geliebt, was du gestritten.”The words issue from nowhere, no person. “What you have loved, what you have fought for, that is yours.”

Dr. Daley swings around to face the challenge. There was a time when he’d have asked where the words came from. Now he says, “Who let you think so?”

Delia rises, as on the day of Resurrection. She glides over the floor to her father. Before he can pull away from her, she’s behind him, one hand draping onto the coiled mass of shoulder, one hand painting the patterned patch of baldness at the crest of his majestic skull. “What do you love, Daddy? What music do you love?”

“What music? Do I love?”

She nods, head jittering, teeth bared through her tears. Humming the first few bars of anything under her breath. Ready to be his little girl again at his first word.

“What music?” He thinks so long, he exhausts the catalog. “I sincerely wish that were the issue.” He lets himself be stroked, though only in distraction. “You’ve dropped your babies right down in between, haven’t you? Dead halfway. No-man’s-land.”

She stands bathed in unearthly calm. “We were already between, Daddy. We were always between.”

“Not always.”

And then her mistake: “Everybody’s between something. Everybody’s halfway.” She fancies she speaks the words in something like her mother’s voice.

But her father turns on her with a force that startles her fingers off him. He hisses at her, soft and civilized. “No, my little halfway opera singer. Everyone is not. Some people aren’t even what they are. You think that just because their father is a white man, the world will—”

“A white man?” Jonah giggles. “A man can’t be white! You mean like a ghost?”

William Daley stares at Delia, stopped in place. His face hangs broken, waiting for explanation. But frozen by that pianissimo, by what her words have done, she can say nothing.

The boy is enjoying himself. “How can a man be white? That’s silly.”

“Sing something for your Papap,” their mother says. “Sing ‘This Little Light of Mine.’”

“What are you teaching them?” The voice comes up at her out of the ground. A voice that puts an end to song. The voice of God rising up to ask Adam and Eve just what they thought they were hiding. Her mind snaps free to race ahead into its own answer. Adam and Eve, it hits her: Those two must have been a mixed-race couple. How else? What other scheme could have populated the whole world?

“We’ve thought about this, Daddy.”

“You’ve thought about this. And what has your thought led you to think?”

David shakes himself from the undergrowth. He leans forward to give their reasons. But Delia holds out a palm to stop him. Make yourself the equal, the owner of this explanation. “We’ve decided to raise the children beyond race.”

Her father turns, shakes his ears, deafened. Something pitiless infects his head. “Again?”

“One quarter of a century from now,” David begins. Both Negroes ignore him.

“We’ve made a choice.” Every word sounds, even to Delia, overmeasured. “We don’t name them. They’ll do that for themselves.” Anything they want. “We’re going to raise them for when everybody will be past color.”

“‘Past color’?” The doctor sounds out the words, saying them out loud the way he repeats his patients’ symptoms. “You mean you’re going to raise them white.”

The boys have lost interest, if they ever had any. They wander back to the piano to try another chorale. Delia hushes them. “Not right now, JoJo. Why don’t you two go play in your room?”

She has never before told them to stop making music. Jonah starts plunking the keys at high speed, double, quadruple time, racing through the entire chorale before the prohibition can take effect. His brother looks on, horrified. Delia sweeps to the bench, lifts up the lawbreaker, swings him like the bob of a pendulum, then lowers him to the floor and starts him scampering toward the boys’ room. She grazes his bottom for good measure, and the offender howls down the hallway, his little brother crying behind him in sympathy, limping in remembered pain.

Past color.My mother speaks these words to my grandfather in late September of 1945. I’m three years old. What can I hope to remember? My brother lies on his belly in our room’s doorway, spying on adulthood down the hall. He’s thinking about just one thing: how to get back to that piano and make some noise. How to recover the throne of sound that alone rights the world and sets him at the center of love.

My parents and grandfather crouch in a globe of light in the middle of edgeless shadow. They should know this, how small their circle, how big the surrounding dark. But something drives them on, something that isn’t them but says it is. Something they need wants them so completely that they turn on one another to avoid losing it. I see them down the hall, a ball of burning sulfur in a borderless dark bowl.

Mama says, We have to get there, somehow. Somebody has to jump.

Papap says, Beyond color? You know what beyond color means? We’re already there. Beyond color means hide the black man. Wipe him out. Means everybody play the one annihilating game white’s been playing since—

The world is ending. Jonah and I know this already, and we know almost nothing. My brother will run out into the middle of them, seduce them back home with a song. But even Jonah has fallen under the spell of revenge. His wrong is private, and deeper than the world’s. Scolded unfairly while playing.

Papap says, What do you think they’ll learn the minute they set foot out of your house?

Mama says, Everybody’s going to be mixed. No one’s going to be anything.

Papap says, There is no mixed.

Da says, Not yet.

Papap says, Never will be. It’s one thing or the other. And they can’t be the one, not in this world. It’s the other, girl. You know that. What’s your problem?

Mama says, People have to move. What world do you want to live in? Things have to break down, go someplace else.

Papap says, They’ve been breaking down black from day one. Sending it someplace else.

Mama says, White, too. White is going to change.

Papap says, White? Break down? Never, short of gunpoint.

Mama says, They will; they’ll have to.

And Papap answers her: Never. Never. What happened this morning is all the future any of us is ever going to get.

Then the real storm. I can’t remember how it comes on, any more than I can remember myself. They’ve been talking a long time. Jonah falls asleep on the floor in the doorway to our room. I can’t, of course, not with the grown-ups so badly wrong. Papap is pacing the dining room, a giant in a cage. He slams the walls with his palm. Beyond color, beyond your own mother. Beyond your sisters and brothers, beyond me!

Mama, dead still. That’s not what it means, Daddy. That’s not what we’re doing.

Whatare you doing? What does it say on the birth certificate? You think you can override that?

More words I can’t hear, can’t get, can’t remember. Something heated, between the two men. Worse than anger. Words sharpened to a point small enough to break the skin. And then my grandfather stands in the apartment’s doorway. The door is open on September there in front of them, a gaping, heatless nothing. Never, he starts. And where can he go from there? Your choice, not mine. Beyond me, he says. And Mama says something, and Da says something, and Papap says, How dare you? And then he’s gone.

I remember only my parents turning from the slammed door, both of them shaking. I see them seeing me, standing in the doorway with my ice bag. Holding it up for whoever might need it.

Mama is ill for a long time afterward. She’s big with another baby. I watch her eat, hypnotized. She sees me see her, knows what I’m thinking, and tries to smile. She decides to have a baby, then starts eating for two. And the baby is down there in her stomach, grabbing half the food.

Something has left our lives and I don’t know what. I think the baby will bring it back in. That’s why they wanted to have it. To get Mama’s happiness back, and fix what has broken.

I ask what the baby will be. What do you mean? they ask. You mean a boy or a girl? They say nobody can know what the baby is going to be yet. I ask, Isn’t it something already?

It is. They laugh. But we can’t get to it. We have to wait. Wait and see what’s coming.

We wait until October, then November, strange territories with stranger names. I’m as miserable as I’ve ever been. Isn’t it here yet? Isn’t it ever going to come?

Perhaps tomorrow,they say. We have to wait until tomorrow.

And several times a day, I ask, Is it tomorrow yet?

For weeks, it’s never tomorrow. Then overnight, it’s yesterday. All yesterday, too far back to reach. And my father is dying on a bed in Mount Sinai Hospital. The only thing I need to know from him is what happened that night. But he’s too sick, too medicated, too full of gravity — and then, too free — to remember.