The Time of Our Singing

Songs of a Wayfarer

Jonah left the United States at the end of 1968. No high-art gossip column reported the departure. At the moment when almost every other black singer, performer, artist, or writer cheered the birth of nationhood, my brother abandoned the country. He wrote from Magdeburg. “They love me here, Joey.” He might have been Robeson, on his first visit to the Soviet Union. Everything there made a mockery of everything here. “The East Germans look at me and see a singer. I never understood that stare Americans always gave me, until I got away from it. Nice to know what it feels like, for a while, to be something other than hue-man.”

The Magdeburg Festival sounded like high-art boot camp. “Living conditions are a bit Spartan. My room reminds me of our dorm at Boylston; only here, I don’t have to pick up your shit.” This from a man whose laundry I did every year we lived together. “Food consists of your more recalcitrant vegetables boiled within an inch of their lives. Making up for all hardships, however, is a steady stream of music-loving women. Now that’s what I call a culture.”

He marveled at the scope of the musical gathering, all the world-class singers the celebration brought together. Several clearly put the fear of God in him. But he seemed to come alive on the challenge of ensemble singing. He was a kid who’d shot backyard hoops his whole childhood, finally playing full-court ball. He reveled in the thrill of reading a dozen other musicians at once and fusing with these perfect strangers.

The European reporters demanded to know why they’d never heard of him before. He didn’t dissuade them from publishing reports of American racism. He had offers to sing in a dozen cities, including Prague and Vienna. “Vienna, Mule. Think of the possibilities. More work than a short-order cook in Lauderdale during spring break. You simply have to come. That’s my last word on the matter.”

His letter took weeks catching up to me, because I’d moved. I couldn’t afford to keep our Village apartment alone. I briefly put up with Da in Fort Lee, to his delight and daily surprise each evening when he came back to Jersey and found me still there. I heard him wandering the house in the middle of the night, chatting away with Mama, who seemed a better conversationalist than his son would ever be.

I couldn’t stay in that house. I didn’t mind my father’s nightly chat with a dead woman. But the alarm I set off in my father’s prim neighborhood was too much for me. The police gave me a week before they decided I couldn’t be the man’s gardener. The first time they detained and searched me, I had no ID and only the most implausible story: unemployed Juilliard dropout classical pianist, the black son of a white German physicist who taught at Columbia. Even after they finally agreed to call Da down to the station to check out my story, it took all night to free me. The second time, two weeks later, I was ready for them with a wallet full of documentation. But they wouldn’t even let me make a phone call. They kept me overnight and let me go at nine the next morning, without explanation or apology.

I stopped leaving the house. For two months, I stayed home and practiced. I put the word out with everyone I knew that Jonah was gone. I was doing nothing, and would play with anyone for any kind of pay. I heard Jonah saying, You undersell yourself. Make them hear you.

Logically, I should have kept doing what I’d spent my life training to do. But that meant taking care of my brother. Jonah and I had lived for years in self-perfecting isolation. Now, as perfect as I had any hope of getting, I lacked the connections that any musician needed to survive.

I played a handful of exploratory tryouts. I’d arrange to meet some sterling mezzo or baritone in an uptown rehearsal space. When I showed up, the singer would recoil in reflex embarrassment: Some mistake. They’d fall all over themselves going over the score with me, practically trying to show me where middle C was.

It’s hard to play well when you feel like a fish on stilts. And it’s hard to sing when jarred out of your center. Most of the time, the trials ended in mutual praise and embarrassed handshakes. I played for a sumptuous soprano, a von Stade look-alike who liked what I did for her. She said no accompanist had ever given her such secured freedom. But I felt her struggling with all the overhead of traveling about the country with a black man, and frankly, I didn’t much want the overhead of traveling around the country with her. We parted enthusiastically. She went on to a modest but rewarding career and I went home to cold noodles and more études.

I played for Brian Barlowe, three years before anyone ever heard of him. He sounded like the Roman soldier at the foot of the cross. He had that same confidence Jonah once had, the utter certainty that the world would love him for what he could do. Only Brian Barlowe’s confidence was better placed than Jonah’s. I’d take Jonah’s voice over his in a heartbeat, at each man’s prime. But Barlowe belonged already. His audiences needed to think about nothing but the confirming sounds pouring out of him. Listeners came away from a Barlowe recital surer than ever of their birthright to beauty.

We played together on three separate days over the course of a month. Brian was nothing if not careful, and he intended to choreograph his march into fame with absolute precision. I showed up each time, stupid with needing to show him that I could read his mind and make even him better than he was. But by the time Barlowe was convinced of my playing — and what’s more, seeing that I could supply a transgressive frisson that would electrify his act — by the time he offered me a chance he was sure I’d leap at, my heart was no longer in it. The gratification of following Brian Barlowe around the world to the pinnacle of fame could not match the pleasure of handing the man back his scores and turning him down.

It dawned on me: I could accompany no one but my brother. When I played for others, for those who made music without the danger of having it taken away, the song never lifted off the page. With Jonah, a recital was always grand larceny. With the children of Europe, it was a revolving charge account. The joy of making noise was gone, even if the cold thrill of notes remained intact.

I sprouted two massive ganglions, one on each wrist: two cysts, like insect galls, as harsh as stigmata. Playing became unbearable. I tried every postural adjustment, even hunching over the keyboard on a low stool, but nothing helped. I thought I might never make music again. For weeks, I did nothing but eat, sleep, and nurse my wrists. I looked through the paper at the end of each week, scouting the want ads. I thought of becoming a night watchman in some high-rise business suite. I’d stroll around a graveyard of abandoned offices with a flashlight once an hour, and sit the rest of the time at a shabby wooden desk, pouring over a stack of Norton pocket scores.

I needed to get out of New York. By luck, I learned they were looking for barroom pianists for the season down in Atlantic City. Being dark would almost be an asset. I went down to a club that was advertising, a place called the Glimmer Room. The bar was something stuck in the La Brea tar pits — a complete sinkhole in time. Nothing had changed in the place since Eisenhower. The walls were full of signed black-and-white pub shots of comedians I’d never heard of.

I did a five-minute audition for a man named Saul Silber. My wrists still bothered me, and I hadn’t improvised since my days in a Juilliard practice room with Wilson Hart. But Mr. Silber wasn’t looking for Count Basie. The crowds had been ebbing in the Glimmer Room ever since the transistor. Woodstock was a wooden stake in its heart. The place was dying even faster than the city itself. Mr. Silber didn’t understand why. He just wanted to staunch the bleeding any way possible.

He was a cauliflower of a man. “Play me what the kids are listening to these days.” He might have been my father’s more assimilated uncle. He had the accent — the ghostly highlights of Yiddish filtered through Brooklyn — that Da’s kids might have preserved, had Da stuck with his people and had different kids. “Something out of sight, why don’t you start me with.”

I waited for him to name a tune, but he just waved me to go, his fisted cigar a conductor’s baton. I sunk into a beefy “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” a tune I’d heard on the radio driving down. Since my brother had abandoned me for another country, I was safe in liking it. I savored the descending chromatic left hand, pumping it out in soulful octaves. Two strains in, Mr. Silber grimaced and waved his hands for a time-out.

“Naw, naw. Play me that pretty one. The one with the string quartet.” He hummed the first three notes of “Yesterday,” with a schmaltz three years too late or thirty too soon. I’d heard the tune thousands of times. But I’d never played it. I sat there in the Glimmer Room at the height of my musicianship. I could have reproduced any movement of any Mozart concerto on first hearing, had there been any I hadn’t already heard. The problem with pop tunes was that, in those rare moments when I did recreate them at the piano, as a break from more études, I tended to embellish the chord sequences. “Yesterday” came out half Baroque figured bass and half ballpark organ. I covered my uncertainty in a flurry of passing tones. Mr. Silber must have thought it was jazz. He broke into a show biz smile as I hit the final cadence. “I can give you one hundred ten dollars a week, plus tips, and all the half-price ginger ale you can drink.”

It felt like a lot of money, compared to washing dishes. I didn’t even negotiate. I signed a contract without consulting anyone. I was too ashamed to run it past Milton Weisman, who, in a just world, should have had his cut.

I rented an efficiency a short walk from the Glimmer Room. I got my things from the Village apartment out of storage, sending the piano to my father’s. He now had two keyboards and no one to play either of them. I set up our old radio next to my bed and tuned it to an AM countdown station. With my first two weeks’ salary, I bought a trash can full of LPs — not a single track older than 1960. And with that, I commenced my education in real culture.

I played from eight at night until three in the morning, with a ten-minute break every hour. My sets for the first few weeks were shaky. Mr. Silber got on me for playing too much Tin Pan Alley. “Enough with the old people’s music. Nix the Gershwin. Gershwin’s for people dying of shuffleboard injuries up at the Nevele. We want the new stuff, the mod stuff.” The man did a little dance step he mistook for the frug. Had I been able to do a deafening “Purple Haze,” I would have, just to make Mr. Silber beg for a little Irving Berlin.

I learned more melodies in one month than I’d ever learn again. I could listen to an album of funk, folk, or fusion all afternoon and perform a reasonable facsimile that evening. My problem was never the notes. My problem was how to keep my performances as free and rangy as the originals. Up until midnight, I sounded pathetically trim. But I counted on late-night fatigue to kick in and help me find the groove. The tunes I played into the early-morning hours strained toward rules of harmony they didn’t quite grasp. I let them yearn, rough, aching, and tone-deaf.

It took me months in the Glimmer Room to realize that what most people wanted from music was not transcendence but simple companionship, a tune just as bound by gravity as its listeners were, cheerful under its crushing leadenness. What we want, finally, from friends is that they have no more clue than we do. Of all tunes, only the happily amnesiac live forever in the hearts of their hearers.

Every hour I was off duty, I listened to the radio. I had two lifetimes to make up for. With my brother on the other side of the world, I moved through my days, humming all the hooks. Once I overcame my body’s clock and learned the secret of the graveyard shift, I could play deep into the night, unafraid of ever being heard. Sometimes the keyboard felt like one of those cardboard foldouts that teachers in poor school districts use in group music lessons. Even on slow nights, the Glimmer Room was so choked with clinking glasses, catcalls, wolf whistles, hoarse laughter, cigarette-thickened coughs, waitresses calling drink orders out to the bar, air-conditioning kicking on and off, and the fused buzz of lubricated shaggy-dog stories that no one could hear me even if, out of some drunken nostalgia, they were actually trying to. I was just part of the general background radiation. That’s what Mr. Silber was after. He didn’t even want me using the short stick on the baby grand’s lid. Hunched over the keys, I sometimes doubted that any sound came out of the instrument at all.

Even so, I felt guilty if I played a song the same way from one night to the next. You never knew what someone might hear by accident. I reinvented every fake-book trick of barroom pianists all the way back to slave days. A dry-ice version of “Misty.” A slightly dyspeptic “I Feel Good.” A “Love Child” agreeing to drop the paternity suit.

The Glimmer Room was white, as white as the dying resort town of Atlantic City pretended to be. But with the rest of dying whiteness, it wanted not to be. For the length of one dress-up evening anyway, the Glimmer Room’s cash customers wanted out from under their long sickness, the rectitude that had kept their spines straight and their rights preserved for generations. They wanted a night out. They saw me and longed for the blues that had evacuated the jook joints fifteen years earlier. Unable to hear half the notes over the din, they thought they could make out the strains of real soul.

I played what I imagined they wanted. All I had to draw on was an out-of-tune baby grand and an incomplete Juilliard education. But the thing about music is that its tool kit is so small. Everything comes from everywhere. No two songs are further apart than half cousins by incest. A raised third or an augmented fifth, an added flat ninth, a little short-leg syncopation, an off-the-beat eighth note, and any tune could pass over the line. Music at night in a noisy bar didn’t stop at two colors; it had more shades than would fit into the wildest paint box. If the Supremes could do the Anna Magdalena Bach notebook, even I could do the Supremes.

Tucked away in the corner of the Glimmer with a music-stand light, a tumbler of ginger ale, and a tip glass seeded with a few impudent dollar bills, I’d lose myself for weeks at a time. My wrists healed, and I filled with anonymous comfort. The great enemy was 2:00A.M., when I’d hit a wall, my brain bleeding and my fingers numb. I’d be in the middle of a tune by some suburban quintet who thought they’d invented the submediant, when I’d completely lose my way. My fingers persisted after I forgot where the tune was going, and free association would lead me into half-remembered Czerny études. For lack of material, I’d put the strains of unrequited love through augmentation and diminution, stretti and inversions, as if they’d escaped from The Well-Tempered Clavier. I fished up old Schubert songs from my Jonah days and dressed them up like Top 40 hits, padding out the set until quitting time. Then I’d go home to my efficiency and sleep until afternoon.

When I got too strange in my tonal mixings, Saul Silber rode me back into the corral. “Play what the kids want to hear.” “Kids” meant prosperous couples in their late thirties, looking for aura out in Pageant City. “Play the chocolate stuff. The mahogany stuff.” Silber ordered music the way an interior designer bought books for nouveau riche libraries: by the size and color of the spines.

The mahogany stuff was richer than I could do justice to. But sometimes, as the place was closing up and the last few lushes downed one more round, I launched one of Mr. Silber’s requests and lost myself altogether. I’d layer it with improbable counterpoint until I was back in the unburned apartment of my childhood, my mother and father making all tunes and times lie down with one another. I’d feel myself sitting on the bench alongside Wilson Hart, in a practice room at Juilliard, tracing hidden bloodlines. Then one night, as my fingers were about to secede from my hand and find their way back at last to that source of all improvisation, the escaping slave, I looked up and saw him, sitting by himself, the first black man to enter the Glimmer Room other than to wash dishes or play piano.

He was bigger than when I’d seen him last, almost a decade before. His face was fuller and sadder, but by the look of his clothes, he’d done all right for himself. He wore a slight, sad grin, all alone in this place in listening to every note I made. The sight of the man so stunned me, I stopped playing in midchord and let out a whoop, in key. I lifted off the piano bench. Wilson Hart, the man who’d taught me to improvise, had somehow tracked me down, even to this godforsaken place, had found me where I couldn’t even find myself.

My fingers started up again, stuttering with shame. I’d made him a promise once, in a Juilliard practice room, to write down all the notes inside me. To compose something, music for the page. And here I was, a hack with a tip jar on my music rack, playing in a time-warp lounge, decomposing. But Wilson Hart had traced me here. He’d come by to listen, as if no time at all had passed since we’d last sat down to improvise together. All those notes were still in me somewhere, intact. Everything I’d ever lost would come back to me, starting with this man I’d never thanked for all he’d shown me. I wouldn’t lose the second chance.

My hands, flushed off the keys, landed back on the suspended chord and bent it open. I’d been strolling through a kicked-back “When a Man Loves a Woman,” mostly because I could make it last for fifteen minutes, the perfect antidote to the Nancy Sinatra navel lint a drunk had requested and then walked out on. When my hands landed back on the tune, they took possession, laying it out on a silver platter for my old friend. I was Bach at Potsdam, Parker at Birdland: there was nothing I couldn’t do with this simple chord sequence. I wove in every countersubject from Wilson’s and my shared past. I threw Rodrigo into the hopper, Wilson’s beloved William Grant Still, even bits of Wilson’s own compositions he had worked on so methodically in the years I knew him. I spun out references only he would place. For a few measures, keeping that ostinato figure as regular as a heartbeat—“when a man loves a woman, down deep in his soul”—I could have made any melody at all fit that one and complete it.

Across the dim room, the full figure of Wilson himself ate up my playing. His smile lost its sadness. His great arms clasped his table, and for a moment I thought he was going to lift it up in the air and twirl it in tempo. He recognized every message I threaded into the mix. I brought the thing into a hilarious homestretch, ending with a fat plagal cadence, a big old amen that left my old friend shaking his head in pleasure. In the Glimmer Room’s darkness, his eyes asked, Now how’d you learn to play like that?

I bounded up from the bench and made for him. It wasn’t time for my break, but Mr. Silber was free to replace me with the mod-chart crawler of his choice. Wilson’s head shake swelled as I came near, and as I closed the distance, I felt how much I’d missed his deep charity toward the species — the only man I’d ever felt completely comfortable with. He smiled in more quizzical surprise as I approached, a smile that only broke when he saw mine crack and fall. In the light of his table’s candle, Wilson Hart vanished and became someone from Lahore or Bombay — some land I’d never laid eyes on. I stopped ten feet from him, my past broken in front of me. “I–I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

“But I am someone else,” the fellow protested with a bewildered, unplaceable accent. “And you play like no one else!”

“Forgive me.” I retreated to the safety of my piano. Of course it wasn’t Wilson Hart. Wilson Hart would never have entered a club like this, even by accident. He’d have been stopped before reaching the door. I fell back on the bench and launched into a brutal, humiliated “Something.” When I dared to look up again at song’s end, the stranger was gone.

Maybe because they’d never heard any quotations quite as crazed, or maybe under the mistaken impression that I was inventing something, a small circle of patrons actually started to listen. They’d sit at tables close to the piano and lean forward when I played. I thought at first that there was something wrong. I’d gotten used to sending my phrases off into the farthest reaches of space. Now, somehow, word had gone out. I wasn’t sure I liked having an audience. All this avid listening reminded me too much of the world I’d come from. It disconcerted me.

Mr. Silber took me aside before I went on one night, toward the end of the summer. The season was ending, and I’d done nothing to prepare for winter. I felt incapable of moving out of Atlantic City. I was unable even to think of looking for work again. Returning to the music I’d betrayed was impossible. I suffered from a massive fatigue, many times bigger than my body. For the first time since birth, it felt simpler not to be alive at all. Mr. Silber held me by one shoulder and examined me. “Boy,” he said, or maybe “My boy.” He used them both. “You’ve got something.” He tried for some tone of approval that wouldn’t tip his hand. “I know we only contracted for the high season, but if you’re not going anywhere, we could probably keep using you.”

I wasn’t going anywhere. This year or ever. All I wanted was to be used.

“With your playing, we can bring in listeners year-round.”

“I’m running out of ideas,” I warned him. “I’m out of touch.”

“You know that stuff you’ve been playing? The crazy stuff? Your music? Just keep letting it flow. Wherever the spirit moves you! Make it up as you go along; then don’t change a single note. Now, I’ll have to cut you to one hundred, during the off-peak season, of course.” But in a preemptive move, lest I head down the road to play at the Shimmer Room, he promised that the ginger ale would, forever onward, be complimentary.

The summer ended and the tourists disappeared. The town turned harder, inward. But Mr. Silber had guessed right: Enough people kept coming to the Glimmer Room to subsidize live music. I placed the faces of repeat offenders. Atlantic City residents: The concept seemed too sad to consider, though I now was one myself. Sometimes the regulars approached me during breaks. They’d speak in short, stressed words as if I couldn’t quite follow their tongue. As if I were in and out of heroin-recovery programs. I’d do my best to accommodate, keeping my voice low and my answers peppered with mangled Brooklyn street slang. Mumbling always works wonders — an authenticity all its own.

One woman started showing up every weekend night. I noticed her the first time she came in, on the arm of a mallet-headed man four inches shorter than she was. I’d stopped noticing the striking women after a few months, but this one got me. She had that bruised hothouse flower look that always caught Jonah’s eye. I wanted to run and find him, lure him back to America with a full report of this chess-piece creature. Her face was small and flawless, the color of spun sugar, trimmed by high cheeks and a magazine nose, with unnervingly straight glossy black hair that fell in a pert Prince Valiant helmet. She dressed against the times, in dated colors, with a taste for white blouses and hunter green skirts above dark stockings and granny boots.

She looked out of herself, as through a picture frame. Maybe she’d come to Atlantic City to take part in one of the beauty pageants and just stayed on. Maybe she was some third-generation clammer’s daughter, or the scion of a ruined gambling family. I guessed something different every night. I felt myself grow happy when she walked in. Nothing more. Just a good warm sense of playing the way I liked to, as if the best set of the night could now begin. I was happy, too, when the mallet-headed man stopped showing. I didn’t like how he steered her, using the small of her back as the wheel. Call it racism, but I didn’t like someone who looked like him liking my music.

She’d sit at a tiny two-person table almost in the crook of the piano. The hostesses saved it for her. She’d sit and nurse an amaretto stone sour for hours. Men came by and mashed on her, sitting across the little table, their backs to me. But she always got them to leave within fifteen minutes. She wanted to sit by herself. Not alone, but with the tunes. I’d noticed it for weeks. Even when she stared into space, her straight black hair blocking her profile, I could still see it. She sang along. On almost every song I played, no matter how deep I buried the melody, she found and unearthed it. She even knew the second verses.

I tested her, taking her out for spins without her ever knowing. Her repertoire was huge, bigger than mine. I was learning the tunes, often as late as the afternoon I came in to work. This velvet-haired woman knew them all already. When I slipped in a jazzed-up, transmogrified Schubert or Schumann — imposters passing, for an evening, in that smoke-filled room — she’d sit and listen, cocking her head, puzzled that there could be a pretty tune she’d never heard. I studied her for the covers she liked, the ones that made that linen-colored face go Christmas. She whispered almost gravely to “Incense and Peppermints.” But to “The Shoop Shoop Song,” she positively squirmed in place. “Monday, Monday” left her subdued, while “Another Saturday Night” got her hopping. It took me a while to figure out the key. But once I did, the pattern rarely failed. Her musical passion obeyed the simplest rule in the world: She wanted to shim-sham-shimmy with the black and tan.

Once I figured out her songs of choice, I favored her with them. Without our exchanging a glance — for she had a heart-stopping ability always to be staring at some distant place whenever I looked up — I made her know I was playing for her. I ran whole musical commentaries to her evening, playing “Respect” when guys tried to pick her up, “Shop Around” when I caught her checking out the men, “I Second That Emotion,” early in the morning as she stifled a yawn. She loved when I dipped back into the thirties and forties — Horne, Holiday, all the contraband material Mr. Silber put on the forbidden list. She sat icy and statuesque, mouthing tunes from the year I was born. She herself couldn’t have dated to a minute before the stroke of 1950. But the further back in time I reached, the more she delighted in the journey.

I stumbled onto her signature tune by trial and error. I’d played to her for about three months, maybe twenty visits all told. The two of us hadn’t shared anything beyond one or two accidental, instantly impounded smiles. Yet I knew, if only because she’d rarely left mine, that I’d been in her thoughts for weeks. We had some destiny and were only sniffing around it, deciding how to draw near.

I’d been trying to put my left-hand strength to work by imitating Fats Waller, with limited success. Mr. Silber relaxed a little on the old stuff in the winter, when the clientele themselves turned nostalgic. I could get away with a few each night without reprimand. I lacked only Jonah to resuscitate those great lyrics by Andy Razaf, the prince of Malagasy, to turn my little fireside glow into barn burners. I sang them myself, under my breath, or watched them form on the lips of that white chess queen with the jet helmet hair. “Oh what did I do to be so black and blue?” Working through that glorious catalog, I came to “Honeysuckle Rose.” My arrangement was so filled out with nectar, pistils, and stamens that Mr. Silber wouldn’t have made out the tune, even if he’d been listening by mistake. But the effect on my private audience of one was electric. How she’d come to own the song, I couldn’t imagine. But at the first chords, she turned into the sultriest of silent sirens. The tune went right into her, and she couldn’t help herself. As I headed into the break, she chose that moment to smile right at me, cheeks tipped a little wickedly, lips announcing, Don’t need sugar; you just have to touch my cup.

Yours?my eyebrows asked. She smiled, half coy and wholly terrified. Yes, mine.

I asked her, with a head flick, to get up and sing. I hit a right-hand riff that freed my left to crook an index finger at her. She pointed to herself, and I nodded gravely. She pointed to the floor, that odd reflex gesture: Now? I nodded again, graver still: When else? I kept the harmonies vamping, circling around the leading tone, filling for the two measures it took her to work up the courage and get to her feet. I’m not sure what she was worried about. She was wearing a long, straight burgundy slip dress that clung to her greedily, and she moved like a colt discovering her legs. She stepped into the piano curve and swung into a sweet, clear, sturdy alto. “Every honeybee fills with jealousy.” Confection, goodness knows. My honeysuckle rose.

One or two cocktail loungers, surprised by the sound of a singing voice, spattered applause when she finished. She gave a quick flushed bow and looked about to free herself from the snare. I stood up and stuck my hand out at her before she could bolt. “I’m Joseph Strom.”

“Oh! I know!”

“You do? Well, I don’t.”

“Excuse me?” Her speaking voice shocked me: a honking Jersey nasal that completely disappeared when she sang.

“I don’t know. Who you are, I mean.”

She smelled of something sweet I couldn’t place. She blushed the color of hibiscus, twirling her hair’s razor blackness around a shaking finger. And Teresa Wierzbicki told me her name.

Winter had set in meanly by then; the town was dead. But we began taking walks together along the ocean, as if it were the height of spring. She’d grown up near town and worked days at the saltwater taffy factory, the thing, after shellfish, that had birthed this place. Taffy was her twenty-four-hour perfume. She got out of work at five, we’d meet at six, walk until seven, and I’d go in to work at eight. Without any planning, it became our twice-weekly routine. I could lose myself in listening to her, or watching her walk. She walked sideways, staring at me as if I might disappear, moving with a clumsy fur-lined wonder.

I tried to take her to dinner a couple of times, but she seemed not to eat. She was shy when talking to me. “I hate my speaking voice,” she apologized to the sand under her feet. “You talk. I love it when you talk.” Mostly, Teresa wanted to breeze up and down the windy, deserted shore, scrawny and underdressed, leaning into the wind, humming constantly, and I, colder and more conspicuous than I can remember being in my entire life.

I was afraid to be seen with her. This town was not New York, and walking on the beach was asking for trouble. In season, I’d have been lynched, Teresa would have been thrown back on solo beachcombing, and Mr. Silber would have had to close up shop. Off season, there were fewer people around to care. And still, we drew enough venom-filled look-aways to stock the Garden State Snake Farm for years to come. This was what my parents had lived with every day of their lives. Nothing in me could have loved strongly enough to survive it.

The one time we were actually accosted, by a spreading middle-aged man who looked as if he had little more left to fear from the threat of mongrelization, Teresa let loose with such a torrent of invective — something about Christ on the cross, gonads, and a meat hook — that even I wanted to turn and run. At her yells, the man backed away, arms in the air. We walked away from the spot, mock-casual. I was stunned into silence, until Teresa giggled.

“Where on earth did you learn how to do that?”

“My mother used to be a nun,” she explained.

But she was an innocent. She could have crawled up underneath the Pope’s cassock and I still would have thought so. We didn’t touch. She was frightened of me. I thought I knew why. But I didn’t, and it took me weeks to realize. I was beyond her, a star in the inverted punch bowl of her firmament. My name appeared in Glimmer Room advertisements in the newspaper. Lots of people in town knew who I was and even heard me play. Most of all, I was a real musician, reading notes and everything, able to play, after one listen, songs just the way they appeared on the radio.

Terrie couldn’t read music. But she was as musical a person as I’ve ever met. She listened to the lightest three-minute chart climber with an ache most people reserve for thoughts of their own death. One diminished chord in the right place could crack her ribs open and force her soul into the air. Music seeped up through the ground into her feet. Deprived for any length of time, she grew listless. Even the most insipid trip from tonic to dominant and back home could perk her up again.

She sucked every calorie out of a song. God knows, she had to get her nutrition somewhere. She lived off chord changes and the fumes from her candy factory. She cooked for me at her apartment on weekends, spending all Sunday with the kitchen radio on, whipping up heavy cream soups or seafood pastas. She made a linguini with white clam sauce like they served in Atlantis before it went under. Then she’d sit down at the shaky brown cardboard card table across from me, a candle between us, my plate heaped high, and hers with a sprig or two that she’d play air hockey with until it vaporized.

Each time I visited her, I had to get used to the smell all over again. The scent of saltwater taffy, all the confections she made on the assembly line, clung to her furniture and walls. When the concentrated sweetness choked me, I’d push for another walk along the freezing boardwalk. We took long rides in her Dodge, down to Cape May and up to Asbury Park. We used the car as a mobile radio platform. The Dodge had an AM with five plastic Chiclet stumps that, when shoved hard, forced the dial’s red plastic needle to jump to the five main frequencies of her pleasure. She loved to hold the steering wheel with her right hand while reaching over — cross-handed, as in some tricky Scarlatti sonata — to find the perfect sound track for any given stretch of road: C and W, R and R, R & B, or, most frequently, decades-old smoky jazz. She could listen to anything soulful and find it good. And in her clear, if fragile, voice, she could make the most derivative tune please me.

Her record collection dwarfed the one Jonah and I had assembled since childhood. It was, like her driving, all over the road. She used some inscrutable organizational scheme I struggled for several visits to figure out. When I at last broke down and asked, she laughed, ashamed. “They’re by happiness.”

I looked again. “How happy the music is?”

She shook her head. “How happy they make me.”

“Really?” She nodded, defensive. “Do they move up and down?” I looked again, and they became a giant Billboard chart tracking the inside of this woman’s mind.

“Sure. Every time I take them out and play them, they go back in another slot.”

I’d seen her do it but had never noticed. I laughed, then hated myself the instant I saw what my laugh did to her face. “But how can you ever find anything?”

She looked at me as if I were mad. “I know how much I like a thing, Joseph.”

She did. I watched her. She never hesitated, either finding or replacing.

I scouted her spectrum of happiness one Sunday evening while Teresa busied herself glazing a ham in her kitchen. The rule I’d noticed in the Glimmer Room spread out before me. Petula Clark was consigned to the far left-hand purgatory, while Sarah Vaughan sat ascendant all the way to the right. This woman had little use for shiny, new, and light. The finish she wanted was smoky and deep, the longer cured the better.

I fell into dark thoughts. I was a fraud infiltrating that apartment while the misled woman labored over a ham for me. I hadn’t considered what game we two were playing, how much she had assumed about me even before we brushed hands. I saw the person she must have mistaken me for all these weeks, the thinnest imposter, and I knew what would happen when she discovered who I really was.

I checked the records at the favored end of her collection, the peak of her pantheon: music being made just blocks from my home while I was growing up on Byrd and Brahms, heavy doses of the Strom Experiment. She loved all the music I’d only brushed up against in those few months when Jonah had gotten restless and we’d knocked around the Village jazz clubs, looking for easy transgression. Teresa thought the music was mine, by blood, down in my fingers, when all I did was steal it off records, as late as the afternoon I came into the club to play it. My sense of deception was so great and my sense of self so weightless that when she came into the front room with her arms full of Sunday dinner, I blurted out, “You like black music.”

She set the hot dishes down on the makeshift dining table. “What do you mean?”

“Black music. You like it better…you prefer it to…” To your own music, was all I could think to say. How came it yours?

Teresa looked at me with a look I’d never seen on her face, the one I’d gotten from shopkeepers, ticket takers, and strangers since I’d turned thirteen, a look that knew, the moment the revolution came, that I would steal back from it all it had stolen from me over centuries. She walked over to where I stood and studied her collection in a way that she never had. She stood shaking her head, fixed by the right-hand side of her records, the tops of her privately owned pops. “But everybody loves those singers. It’s not that they’re black. It’s that they’re the best.”

I was so agitated at dinner, I couldn’t swallow. The two of us faced each other across that card table, each pushing our pink pork pucks around on our plates. I couldn’t ask what I wanted to. But I couldn’t bear silence. “How did you get onto the oldies? I mean, Cab Calloway? Alberta Hunter? Haven’t you heard the word, girl? Don’t you know you can’t trust anyone over thirty?”

She brightened, grateful to be asked an easy one. “Oh! That’s my father.” She spoke the word with that chiding care we give those who’ve committed the gross error in judgment of becoming our parents. “Every Sunday morning of my life. The week wasn’t finished until he spun his favorite records. I used to hate it. When I was twelve, I’d run from the house screaming. But I guess we finally love what we know best, huh?”

“What happened to him?”

“Who?”

“You said ‘spun.’”

“Oh. My father?” She looked down at her food-spattered plate. “He’s still spinning.”

So was I. Teresa could feel how keyed up I was. I’ll forever say that about her. She could hear me, even when I wasn’t playing. “Would you like to go for a ride?” she asked.

“Sure. Why not? Unless you’d rather listen to something here?”

We were off a beat. “Listen to what?”

“Anything. You choose.”

She went to the spread of records and wavered. I’d changed her rankings for her, forever. She went to the right and pulled out an Ella Fitzgerald covering Gershwin, Carmichael, and Berlin, pilfering back from the pilferers. Teresa dropped the scratching needle down upon a voice scatting away as if everyone in creation would get his own back on reckoning day. She swayed a little to the beat, lip-synching, as always. She closed her eyes and put her hands on her hips, her own dancing partner. Now and then, an involuntary pianissimo came out of her, trying to find a way back to its own scattered innocence.

She hummed to herself, drifting to her tattered brick-colored sofa. After a song, I went and sat with her. It surprised her. She held still. She’d never said a word about our not touching. I think she would have stayed with me forever, even at that unspoken arm’s length, staying off at whatever distance she thought I needed and not one step farther. She let out a skyful of breath. “Ah, Sunday.”

“Maybe Monday,” I sang.

Teresa segued: “Maybe not.” She turned toward me, pulling her feet up on the sofa underneath her. She looked down at her thighs, a little askew, the color of fine bone china. Her lips moved silently, as they had for so long in the darkness of the club, keeping me company each night. The warmth of the recording came from out of her soundless mouth. Still, I’m sure to meet him one day, maybe Tuesday will be my good news day. My right hand lowered itself onto her leg and began accompanying. I closed my eyes and improvised. I moved from chords to free imitation, careful to keep to a decent range, between her knee and hiked-up hemline.

Teresa held her breath and became my instrument. I hit each note as squarely as if it were real. She heard my free flight in her skin. I could feel her feeling my fingers’ tone clusters. Around We’ll build a little home for two, I built an obbligato line so right, I was surprised it wasn’t in the original. At from which I’ll never roam, I roamed a little, beyond the deniable, up into the hemline octave. On the last two lines, Teresa joined in with a reedy harmony, one she’d sung a hundred times to herself, in this place, maybe even with someone else, before I came around.

When the song finished, I rested my hand on her leg, the silent keys. I couldn’t feel my fingers to remove them. Her muscles twitched in cheerful terror. I could feel my own pulse pounding through my palm. Teresa stood. My fossil hand slid off her. “I have something for you.” She walked across the room to her trinket-covered hutch. From behind a carved Indian elephant, she fished an envelope. It might have been sitting there for weeks. She brought it back to me and set it in my hands. On its white face, it bore the name Joseph, scribbled in childlike balloon letters. My hands shook as I opened it, the way they used to after crucial concerts with Jonah. I struggled to remove the contents without tearing. Teresa sat next to me, reached out, and ran the back of her hand against my neck. Like slipping on a new silk tie.

I worked at that envelope until I thought she’d take it from my hands and open it for me. I got the card out at last. Ter had made the thing herself, a cartoon of two tigers warily chasing each other around what looked like a palm tree. Inside, the same childlike scribble read “I will if you will.”

It might have sat unopened on the hutch forever, waiting, for all time, for my hand to graze hers, even by accident. But it was ready the moment I did. The hidden patience of her hand-drawn prediction broke over me and I sat on her sofa, crying. She led me to her bed and put me in those sheets that smelled of saltwater taffy. She slipped from her clothes and stood open to me. I could not stop looking. I sat high up on a rock bluff, looking out on a surprise, twisting river valley. I’d thought she was cream, muslin, porcelain. But her body — her slender, sloping, undulating body — was all the colors there were. I moved over her, tracing with my fingers, my face up close to every inch of terrain, the light cerulean of her veins below her neck, the terra-cotta of her breasts’ tips, the pea green smear of a bruise just above her hip. I gorged myself with looking at the spreading rainbow of her, until, shy again in the face of my pleasure, she leaned over and doused the light.

All that night, she brought me back to myself. I was in bed with a woman. I’d never before heard the whole tune, beginning to end. But I knew enough bars to fake it. I felt the muscles just under her thighs hunch up in surprise under my hand. Our skins pushed up against each other, shocked by the contrast, even in the dark. She hummed, her mouth to my belly; I couldn’t make out the song. Her mouth opened in awe when I went into her. Her throat kept timeless time, and every one of her murmurs was pitched.

Afterward, she held on to me, her discovery. “The way you play. I knew it. Just by the way you play.”

“You have to hear my brother,” I told her, half-asleep. “He’s the real once-in-a-lifetime musician.”

I fell unconscious and slept the sleep of the dead, Teresa’s hands still thawing out the crevasses of my back. When I woke, she hovered over me like Psyche, a glass of orange juice in her hands. The room was blazing. She was fully dressed, in her candy-factory clothes. My honeysuckle rose. I made space for her on the bed’s edge. “I’m almost late. The key’s in the music box on my dresser if you need it.”

I took her hand as she stood. “I have to tell you something.”

“Shh. I know.”

“My father is white.”

It wasn’t what she expected. But her surprise vanished quickly enough to surprise me. She rolled her eyes. Solidarity of the oppressed. “Tell me about it. So’s mine.” She leaned back down and kissed me on the mouth. I could feel her lips, wondering how mine felt to her.

“Are you coming tonight?” I asked.

“That depends. You playing the good stuff?”

“If you’re singing.”

“Oh,” she said, heading out the door. “I’ll sing anything.”

I dressed and made the bed, pulling the sheets over our still-fresh stains. I walked around her apartment, happily criminal, just looking at this new world. I stared at her collections, taking my own private tour of a distant ethnographic museum. Her life: ceramic frogs, a clock in the shape of the sun, purple bath soaps and sponges, slippers with crossed eyes stitched into their tops, a book on the picturesque barns of Ohio, inscribed “Happy Birthday from Aunt Gin and Uncle Dan. Don’t forget you promised to visit soon!” Each of us is alien to every other. Race does nothing but make the fact visible.

I opened her closet and gazed at all her clothes. A line of slips hung on hooks against one wall, black and white sheathes whose edges I’d seen sticking out under her dresses, clinging to and imitating her. I went into the kitchen and sliced last night’s ham for breakfast. I ate it cold, afraid to dirty her pans. I’d been here often, but never alone. I knew what the police would do if some law-abiding neighbor tipped them off to me. Just being here by myself in this alien woman’s rooms was a life sentence. Safety meant leaving. But I had no place to go except back to my life.

I went to her record collection, the safest ground in this booby-trapped place. There wasn’t a piece of classical music on her shelves except the hepped-up thefts of tunes long out of copyright. I started from the tops of her charts, looking for a song to play her at the club that night, something I might learn just for her. I slipped on a disk of Monk’s and knew that everything on it was beyond my meager fake technique. Oscar Peterson: I laughed after four measures, exhilarated and demoralized. I played an Armstrong Hot Seven recording that Teresa had worn almost smooth. Everything I thought I knew about the man and his music vanished in a river of sound. I sampled people I knew only by reputation: Robert Johnson, Sidney Bechet, Charles Mingus. I stood surrounded in the wall-wide, rapturous choruses of Thomas A. Dorsey. I broke into Teresa’s cache of blues: Howlin’ Wolf, Ma Rainy. Junior Wells’s harmonica cut me into thin strips and passed me through the reeds. Up at the very top of the collection were all her master women spell-casters. Carter, McRae, Vaughan, Fitzgerald: In each one, I heard Teresa twirling and wailing, losing herself in imitative ecstasy every night that she came home from the factory, singing her real image into being, alone in the dark.

I listened for hours. I switched tracks so fast, they piled up on top of one another. The whole claustrophobic classical catalog could not surpass this outpouring for breadth, depth, or heights. A massed hallelujah chorus poured out of Teresa’s speakers, a torrent flowing over every riverbank the country could invent to hold it. This wasn’t a music. It was millions. All these songs, talking to one another, all insinging and outsinging, back and forth at the party to end all celebration, into the wee hours of a suppressed national never. This was the house at the end of the long night, inviting, warm, resourceful, and subversive. And I was standing on the stoop, locked out, too late to bluff my way through the party’s doors, listening to the sound roll through the windows and light the streets in all directions. I heard the play of voices through the shutters from the back alley. I eavesdropped shamelessly, not caring if I got arrested, caught in a sound that, even at this muffled distance, was more vital and urgent and jammed to therapeutic capacity with pleasure than any I’d ever make.

In that voyeur’s elation, a single-word song on a 193 °Cab Calloway and His Orchestra recording stopped me cold. I read the title twice, fumbled the disk out of its jacket, put it on the player, and managed to bring the needle down on the cut without gouging the vinyl. There was Calloway, doing what sounded like a bad Al Jolson imitation, wailing away on a song called “Yaller”:

Black folk, white folk, I’m learning a lot,

You know what I am, I know what I’m not,

Ain’t even black,

I ain’t even white, I ain’t like the day and I ain’t like the night.

Feeling mean, so in-between, I’m just a High Yaller…

I listened through three times, learning the song as if I’d written it. I don’t know what possessed me, but I played it that night at the Glimmer Club, after Teresa arrived. Hope is never more stupid than when it’s within striking distance. She took her seat, up close to the piano, glowing with our new secret. She looked heart-stopping in a short brown tube dress I’d seen in her closet. I slipped the song late into the last set, when nobody was left to hear but her. I watched her face, knowing in advance what I’d get. Those lips that mouthed along with every other tune that evening, lips that had hummed wordlessly as we made love, held still and bloodless throughout my rendition.

She didn’t wait for me at the end of that set. But she showed up the following night, so tentative and apologetic, I wanted to die. I went back with her to her apartment, although we had just a few hours before she needed to leave for work. We lay with each other again, but the song was stillborn between us. When I looked over the record collection after she left the next morning, the Calloway was gone.

We fell into a tradition. Every night she came to the bar, I’d get her up to sing for at least one song. At first, it made Mr. Silber crazy. “You don’t think I have money to pay for two performers in the same evening?” I assured him he was getting the thing all my father’s colleagues swore was impossible in our little neck of the universe: something for nothing. When Mr. Silber saw how much this thrill-nervous girl’s clear old torch songs pleased the audience, he spun doughnuts. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he took to announcing, “please welcome the Glimmer Room Musical Duet!”

We never rehearsed. She knew all her songs by heart, and I knew all her songs from her. I could anticipate what she was going to do, and on those rare occasions when her nervous enthusiasm tipped us over, our craft was easily righted. We weren’t talking Scriabin, after all. But Teresa tapped into a musical ecstasy Scriabin only hinted at. Her whole body took up the pulse. With my chords solid beneath her, she let go — sexy, sultry, loose on a first-time spree. She had a lower register, a growl almost androgynous. The audience ate her up, and each night that she sang, at least a couple men in the darkened house would have given years for one taste more.

She was on the floor one night, singing Smokey Robinson’s “You Really Got a Hold on Me” as if it were a controlled substance. We’d found the groove, sailing along in the full soul of the thing, when our hull scraped on some reef, forcing me to look up. Teresa was back on the beat almost instantly; no one had heard her bobble but her accompanist. She stiffened through the rest of the song. I traced her weird vibe to an older man who’d entered in midstanza and sat down in the back of the room, a man whose rifle-bore gaze Teresa studiously avoided.

He wasn’t the mallet-headed escort I’d first seen her with. But he was another white man, one whose massive claim on her was obvious, even to the piano player. Teresa sang, “I don’t like you, but I love you.” I tagged along underneath, resolving stray dissonances, wondering whether her bridling was meant for me or this other fellow, a man I’d never seen before and felt no need to see again. “You really got a hold on me.” Every demon music was supposed to banish, all the things that held her took hold in the melody. She limped through to the end, almost whispering the last phrase, afraid to look up. When she did, the man was standing. He seemed to lean over and spit, though nothing come out of his mouth. Then he made for the door.

Teresa turned to me and called out. I couldn’t hear her, over her panic and the applause. She called again: “‘Ain’t Misbehavin’.’” The only time she ever spoke to me in command. I started up the tune, my fingers in a forced march. But it was too late. The man was gone. Teresa, having ordered the melody, gagged it down. She sang her way through to the end. But the innocence in the song came out of her mouth twisted.

She waited for me afterward, as if nothing had happened. I suppose nothing had. But it ate at me, and when she asked in her shy, frightened way whether I wanted to go home with her, I answered, “I don’t think you want me to.”

She looked as if I’d just blackened her eye. “Why are you saying that?”

“I think you’d rather be by yourself.”

She didn’t ask for a reason, but went away in silence. That only enraged me. She came back to the club a few nights later, but I avoided her during breaks and never asked her up to sing. She stayed away for a week. I dug in and waited for her to call. When she didn’t, I told myself that that was that. We never know. Nobody knows the first thing about anyone else.

She was waiting for me outside the club when I went to work the next week. She was in her candy-factory clothes. I saw her from a block away, time enough to prepare for the downbeat. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?”

“Joseph. We have to talk.”

“Do we?”

Suddenly, I was that thug who’d assaulted us on the freezing beach the winter before. She narrowed herself to the smallest slit and threw her words at me. “You smug little son of a bitch.” She grabbed and pushed me. Then she buckled against the front wall of the club, sobbing.

I refused to touch her. It pretty much killed me, but I held to myself. I’d have given her anything, and still, she refused to tell me. Righteousness had me by the throat. I waited for her to catch her breath. “Is there something you want to say to me?”

This started her gasping again. “About what, Joseph? About what?”

“I’ve never asked anything from you, Teresa. You have unfinished business in your life? The least you can do is have the decency to tell me about it.”

“‘Unfinished…’”

She wouldn’t own up. I felt betrayed — by her, by the rules of decency, by her pretty singing, by that bending rainbow landscape of her body. “Want to tell me about the guy?”

“Guy?” Her confusion was complete. Then her face broke and rose. “Joseph! Oh, my Joe. I thought you knew. I thought…”

“What? Thought what? Why didn’t you at least say something? Or is that part of the great unspeakable secret?”

“I thought… I didn’t want to make it…” She hung her head in shame. For all of us, I suppose. “That was my father.”

I looped back. “Your father came to hear you?”

“Us,” she croaked. “Hear us.” And he’d left in disgust before she could lure him back with his favorite song. I worked through the recap in silence. Her father, who made her listen every Sunday to a music he now hated her for falling in love with. Her lover, whom she mistook for a native speaker. My own Sunday music, which would only have thickened the man’s invisible spit. Spit meant for me, but hitting his daughter.

I fell against the brick of the Glimmer Club, next to her. “Did you — have you talked to him since?”

She couldn’t even shake her head. “Mom won’t put him on when I call. She’ll barely talk to me herself. I went by the house, and they — he came to the door and put on the burglar chain.”

She broke down. I led her inside the empty club, where I could take her into a back room and put my arm around her without being arrested. Mr. Silber heard his prize nightingale crying, and he rushed about trying to make her a cup of weak tea.

“You can’t let this happen.” I stroked her hair, without conviction. “Family’s bigger than…this. You have to patch things up. Nothing’s worth a split this big.”

She looked at me through the red, raw wet of her face. Horror spread there, spilled wine. She clamped a tourniquet around my upper arm and buried herself in my chest. I felt I’d just killed a child while driving and would spend the rest of my life with memory as my penance.

Teresa never used it against me, but I was all she had. Me and the saltwater taffy factory. My visits to her apartment now had a tinge of volunteer work. We ran out of things to say to each other, but Teresa never noticed. She could smile and say nothing for longer than I knew how to reply.

I grew obsessed with her father. I slipped little questions about him into our dinner conversations. It irritated her, but I couldn’t keep from fishing. Where did he work? He was an appliance repairman in town. Where had he grown up? Saddle Brook and Newark. What did he vote? Lifelong straight Democratic, just like my parents. I could never get to what I needed to know before she clammed up.

We ran out of things to do together, even in the few hours when we were both off work. I suggested we practice a little. I could give her some pointers. She leapt at the idea. She couldn’t get enough. She wanted to hear everything I knew about breath support, open throat, covering — all the scraps I’d picked up from Jonah over the years. “Real singing. Famous singing.” She had the same appetite for these professional secrets as her girlfriends at the factory had for Princes Charles and Rainier.

I told her what I knew. But everything I taught her made her worse. She’d sung just fine when she met me. Better than fine: beautifully. She turned every tune vulnerable. She knew what each song needed. She charmed without knowing — freshness, clarity, her inadvertent sexiness, that jumpy rhythm that took hold of her body and wouldn’t let her go until the finish. But now, armed with the lessons I gave her, she began to make a stagy, polished, domed tone that sounded freakish. I’d cost her her father. I was costing her her voice. I’d probably cost her whatever friends she’d had before seeing me. We never spent time with anyone but ourselves. Teresa wasn’t sleeping through the night anymore, and she only ate the barest minimum she could get away with. I was killing the woman. And I’d never asked her for a thing.

“I want to put more time into my singing,” she said. “Maybe I should, you know, cut back on my work hours?”

My fault entirely. I should have known enough to stay away. Two months after her father had spit on the floor of the Glimmer Room, I found her sitting on her sofa in tears. “They’ve changed the locks. My parents.”

Something clicked. The song she’d shouted for as the man was leaving: her daddy’s favorite. The song she lip-synched to, the one I’d first fallen for: both written by the same duo. The songs of her Sunday-morning liturgy, preached by her old man. “What did he call you? Your father. What was his pet name for you?”

She wouldn’t answer. She didn’t have to, goodness knows.

We settled into a narrowed routine, simple enough for both of us. She surrendered her own place to our comfort. I grew careful of what I said. I told her her meat loaf with tomato sauce was the best thing I’d ever tasted, and paid the price for several weeks running. I happened to say robin’s-egg blue was my favorite color, and found her the next Saturday, repainting the kitchen. We rarely went to my apartment. So far as I can remember, we never spent the night there. She abandoned, without asking, all the places I wouldn’t take her to. I knew it was shame; I didn’t know of what. I did love her.

I was alone in my apartment one afternoon in the summer of 1970. There was a knock at the door, rare enough in any season. I opened, off balance, and took a full three seconds to recognize my sister and Robert, her husband, my brother-in-law, with whom I’d spent all of forty minutes in this life, three years before. I stood staring, somewhere between fear and joy, until Ruth cleared her throat. “Joey, can you let us in?”

I fell over myself welcoming them. I squeezed her until Ruth begged for mercy. I kept saying, “I can’t believe it.” Ruth kept answering, “Believe it, brother.”

Robert asked, “Believe what?” His voice’s agitation could not keep out the amusement.

“How did you find me?” I thought she must have been in touch with Da. They were talking again. No one else could have told her where I was.

“Find you?” Ruth shot Robert a sad grin. She put her hand on my head, as if I had a fever. “Finding’s the easy part, Joey. It’s losing you that has been my lifelong problem.”

I still didn’t know what I’d done to her. I didn’t care. She was back in my life. My sister was here. “When did you hit town? Where are you living these days?”

Their silence gave me an awful moment. Ruth gazed around my tiny cell of an apartment, terrified of something she was sure would pop out of the nearest cupboard. “Living? These days? Funny you should ask.”

Robert sat on my rickety kitchen folding chair, one ankle on the other knee. “Would it be possible to put up here? With you. Just for a day or two.”

They had no bags. “Of course. Anything. Always.”

I didn’t press them for information, and they didn’t volunteer. Whatever was after them was only fifty yards behind, down the street, across the highway. I saw them look at each other and keep mum. They weren’t about to make me accessory to anything. “Sit. Damn, it’s good to see you. Here, sit. Can I get you a drink?”

My sister pinned my wrists like a loving nurse, grinning and stilling me. “Joey, it’s just us.”

Robert, the man my sister had tied her life to, a giant I didn’t know from Adam, fixed me with his X-ray eyes. He seemed to me everything I wasn’t: solid, substantial, centered, dedicated, dignified. His aura filled the room. “So how’s the gig?”

I hung my head. “It’s music. I’m taking requests. How about you?”

“Huh.” He put his hands on his head, catching up to himself. “Us, too. We’re taking requests, too.”

“I read that Huey’s free,” I said.

From where she stood fiddling with the kitchen curtains, Ruth shouted. “Joey! Where did you find time to read that? I thought you were busy with your nightclub act.”

She must have been near the club. Seen the posters. “Enlightened owners. They let me look at the papers on my breaks.”

“Huey’s free. True.” Robert squinted at me, guessing my weight. “But everything the man has tried to do — the whole movement — is coming apart.”

“Robert,” Ruth warned.

“What’s the difference? The shit’s public knowledge.”

I’d followed the stories, if only for their sake. The gun battle at UCLA. Hampton and Clark, the two Chicago Panther organizers, killed in their sleep in an illegal police raid. Connecticut trying Bobby Seale for killing a police informant. The FBI waging all-out war. Hundreds of members killed, jailed, or fleeing the country. Eldridge Cleaver in Cuba. I’d thought for a long time that Ruth and Robert, like Jonah, might have gone abroad. Seeing them cowering here, I wished they had.

“You know about the New York roundup?” The force of Robert’s gaze terrified me.

“I read… The papers said…” I’d been unable to take the official reports in. Twenty-one Panthers arrested, charged with an elaborate plan to blow up a suite of civic buildings and kill scores of police. The group that my sister and her husband had helped to organize.

“The papers, man. You got to decide whether you’re with the papers or with the people.” He jutted his head, besieged, a rhetorical boy, a thousand years old, sick to death of the disaster this country had made of everything human. I wasn’t with the papers. I wasn’t with the people. I wasn’t even with myself. I wanted to be with my sister.

“I’m starving,” Ruth said.

It seemed a godsend, something I might help with. “There’s an Italian place just down the street.”

Robert and Ruth looked at me, embarrassed at my density. Robert reached into his pocket and drew out four crumpled dollar bills. “Could you bring us something back? Doesn’t matter what, so long as it’s hot.”

I waved him off. “Back in a minute with the best bowl of steamers you ever tasted.”

His gratitude ruined me. “Owe you one, brother.”

I took the word all the way down to the ocean and back. When I returned, I caught them arguing. They stopped the instant my key hit the lock. “Now this is what you call shellfish,” I said, sounding stupid even to myself. But Ruth was filled with thanks. She kissed, then bit, my hand. The two of them dug in. It had been some time. I waited until they’d gotten their fill. Then I tried to draw Robert out a little. Juilliard dropout, commencing his belated education.

Robert indulged me. We talked about all that had happened since I’d seen them last, the running battle of the last three years. I held out for the ghost of nonviolent resistance. Robert didn’t laugh at me, but he refused to encourage the hope. “A small group has all the rest of us locked up down in the hold, and they’re standing over the hatches with guns. The longer they do that, the harder they need to.”

My sister waved her hands in the air. “It’s not just the people with the power. It’s the second-generation immigrants, locked down in the hold with us. First word they learn when they set foot in this country is nigger. People who have nothing, turning against one another. Pure Kapo system.”

I listened, just listened, unable to add a word. When the clams were gone, we hit a lull.

“Joey,” Ruth said. “You’re sleeping with someone.”

“How did you know?” I scanned the apartment for giveaways: pictures, notes, extra toothbrush. There were none.

“You seem good. Healthy.” It seemed to relieve Ruth. I loved Teresa more in the moment my sister spoke those words than I had since she had first sung with me. “She white?”

Robert stood and flexed. “Okay, now. Time out. Give the man some peace.”

“What? It’s a legitimate question. Man’s driving a shiny new vehicle. You ask him the make and model.”

Robert caught my eye. “It’s all right, brother. I’m sleeping with a German chick.”

“If I find her, husband, I’ll kill the both of you dead.”

“Her father’s disowned her,” I said. “Teresa’s father, I mean.” It sounded like a bagatelle, next to whatever Robert and Ruth were facing.

Robert rubbed his globe of Afro. “Bad deal. We’ll see about making her an honorary.”

“Teresa.” Ruth’s smile tried to stay polite. “When do we get to meet her?” My sister wanted to meet me somewhere. Find a place alongside this world, big enough for both of us to move in.

“Anytime. Tonight.”

“Maybe next visit,” Robert said. “This one ain’t exactly meet and greet.”

His words yanked them out of my story world, and the two of them were fugitives again. We sat silently, listening to signals in the traffic outside. At last, Ruth said, “It’s not that we don’t trust you, Joey.”

“I understand,” I lied. I understood only their pacing, their animal panic.

Robert spoke into the tips of his folded hands. “The less we say, the easier for you.” He might have been a university professor.

Ruth leaned back and sighed. My little sister, now decades older than I was, and pulling away at an accelerating pace. “So how’s the Negro Caruso?” She clenched when she spoke.

“What can I say? He’s singing. Somewhere in Europe. Germany, last I heard.”

She nodded, wanting more, not wanting to ask. “Probably where he belongs.”

Her husband stood and peeked through the kitchen curtains. “I’d go there myself, around about now.”

“Oh would you?”

“In a heartbeat.”

The idea amused Ruth. She cooed at him in German, every pet name Da ever used on Mama.

“I have to go work,” I said. “Daily bread and all.” I stuck my paws out and wiggled them, singing, without thinking, “Honeysuckle Rose.”

“Wish I could hear you play that,” Ruth said.

“I bet you do.”

“Little Joey Strom, learning what side his bread is buttered on.”

I studied her, the bruises of her two brown eyes. “Don’t be ashamed of me, Ruth.”

“Shame?” Her face crumpled. The house was on fire again, and she was standing out on the frozen sidewalk, biting the fireman. “Shame? Don’t you be ashamed of me!”

“Of you! How could… You’re out there working…giving yourself to things I wouldn’t even have known about except for you.”

My sister clamped tight on the muscles in her cheeks. I thought for a moment she might lose herself. But the spasm passed and she came back. This time, she didn’t offer me a place in the movement or suggest that the desperate world might need even someone like me. But she did reach out one pink palm and place it on my chest. “So what do you play?”

“Name your tune, and I’ll fake it.”

Her smile bent her ears. “Joey’s a Negro.”

“Only in Atlantic City.”

“Half Atlantic City’s black,” Robert said. “They just don’t know it yet.”

“You have to hear this man of mine. All America’s African. Come on, sugar. Give him the spiel.”

Robert smiled at her word choice. “Tomorrow. Tonight, I got to get some sleep. My brain’s fried.”

“Take my bed, you two. I’ll stay with Teresa.”

“Teresa.” My sister laughed. “Teresa what?” I had to spell Wierzbicki for her. Ruth laughed again. “Does your father know you’re balling a Catholic?”

I came home from Teresa’s the next day. I stopped at the store and stocked up on beer, chicken, fresh-baked bread, news magazines — all the amenities I never kept around. But when I let myself into the apartment, it was empty. A half sheet of my torn music paper filled with my sister’s handwriting sat on the kitchen table.

Joey,

We had to go. Believe me, it’s safer this way. They’re hounding us down, and you don’t want in any deeper than you already are, just by being brother to this sister. You were a lifesaver to put us up. And it was good to see you haven’t been completely broken. Yet! Robert says you’re a good man, and I’m learning not to argue with my husband, because, honey, he never lets me win.

Take care of yourself and we’ll do the same. Who knows? We all might live long enough to share more clams.

Blood’s blood, huh, blood?

You’d better pitch this note when you’re done with it.

She didn’t sign it. But at the bottom, as an afterthought, she’d added, “Work on your brother for us, will you?”

As I held the note, it burned into me. I didn’t throw it away when I was done. I left it out on the front table. Blood is blood. If any law-enforcement agents broke into my apartment, I wanted the words somewhere easy to find. I refused to think about what those two had done, what would-be crime, what trouble they’d fallen into. We’d been born illegal. Just demanding that the law change was a crime. All I could do was wait to hear from them, whenever and wherever they surfaced. It wouldn’t be soon.

I never told Teresa about the visit. I’d never have managed to introduce them. I’d have bounced between them, sheltering one from the other, the way Jonah once tried to deceive both his voice teachers. I’d never be whole. My parts didn’t fit. I didn’t want them to.

Right after the visit — soon enough for my knot-tying brain to imagine a link — Da forwarded a letter from Jonah, the first I’d heard from him since Magdeburg. The luster of communism had worn off. He’d made his way through East Germany—“Did the Leipzig pilgrimage without you, Mule”—performed concerted music in Berlin—“No lieder, though; who’s loyal to you?”—then went back west to do Das Lied von der Erde in Cologne. He then crossed over into Holland and walked away with a plum prize at the ’sHertogenbosch competition.

Not sure what happens next. The world seems to be my oyster at present, or at least my Zeeland mussel. Nobody has restricted my voice to any category short of music, although I confess I’m only understanding about 40 percent of anything anyone says, so they may be calling me the Prince of Darkness, as far as I know. I’m telling you, Mule, you’re a prisoner in the States. Still a slave, a century after the fact. You can’t even know what you’re under until you’re out from under it. You want to feel what it means to be without leg irons for the first time in your life? Come on over, before the global spread of American culture turns us into darkies, even out here.

He gave the address of a management firm in Amsterdam where he could always be reached. “Always” had a rather narrow range for my brother.

Tucked into the note he forwarded from Jonah, Da included one from himself. He hadn’t been down from the city to hear me play, and I’d discouraged him from thinking about coming. He had no sense of the stuff I played each night — the surfing anthems, the thinly veiled drug celebrations, the love songs to automobiles, hair dryers, and other motorized devices. In Da’s mind, I was a concert pianist who made a living performing. His letter to me was short and fact-filled. He was advancing in his work, the problem he’d worried for three decades. “Where Mach meets the quantum, it must be timeless!” Crazy things were happening in physics again, the crazy things he’d predicted thirty years before. Multiple splintering universes. Wormholes. Nothing, of course, about the crazy things bringing this world down around his ears.

In the last paragraph of the note, almost an afterthought, to pad the letter out to respectable length, he added, “I am going to the hospital in two days for exploratory surgery. You aren’t to worry. My symptoms are too unpleasant to describe on paper. The doctors just need to see what’s going on inside, and for that, they need to crack me open!”

I got the packet the day after the surgery. I called home, but no one was there. He’d listed no other contact, not even the hospital where he was to be operated on. I called Mrs. Samuels, who gave me a hospital number. I knew from her voice that she was trying not to be the one to break the news. I went to Mr. Silber and asked for two days off.

“Who’s supposed to play for my guests? You want me, maybe, to be the jazzman? You want me to pretend I can play like Satchmo Paige?”

I didn’t tell Mr. Silber about my father. My father’s in the hospital would mean Big black buck dying of complications from type II diabetes. If I told him pancreatic cancer, he’d want to know details. I couldn’t go through that with Mr. Silber. Your father, a Jew? I couldn’t force kinship on this man.

I did tell Teresa. She wanted to go with me, even on that first trip. “You don’t need to,” I told her. “But I might need you down the line.” I didn’t need to ask her to pace herself. She knew how long time was. She’d spent her own life waiting it out.

At the hospital, I suffered the usual farce. His son? The surgeon at Mount Sinai didn’t bother disguising his shock. His disbelief had started long before, at the moment of incision. “This cancer has been working a long time. Years, perhaps.” That sounded about right. “I can’t see how anyone could have lived with this for so long and only now—”

“He’s a scientist,” I explained. “He’s not from around here.”

I found Da sitting up in bed, apologetic smile welcoming me. “You didn’t need to come all this way!” He waved his palm at me, dismissing all diagnoses. “You have a life to lead! You have your job, out in Ocean City! Who’s going to make music for your listeners?”

I spent two days with him. I returned the following week, this time with Teresa. She was a saint. She made half a dozen trips with me over the next four months. For that alone, I should have married her. Crisis brought out her art. She handled everything — all the routine realities I used to handle for Jonah when we toured and that I couldn’t handle now. She didn’t have to go with me. Didn’t have to stand at my side and watch me watch my father disappear. I’d already cost her hers. It only crippled me worse, her insisting so gladly on helping me lose mine.

Da delighted in her. He loved the idea of my having found someone, this shining someone in particular. At first, our visits made him feel guilty. But he grew to depend on them. Da went home from the hospital, and Mrs. Samuels moved into the Fort Lee house, as she had in spirit many years before. Whenever Teresa and I showed up there, she made herself scarce. I never knew the woman. Perhaps my father and Mrs. Samuels might have gotten married, had any of his children given them the least encouragement. But I didn’t want a white stepmother. And Da, too, could never have jumped off the world line that he’d drawn himself. How could he have explained to his second wife that he still held nightly conversations with his first?

Terrie and I sat with him as he went down. He must have felt the vigil as a sentence. I waited until I couldn’t delay in good faith anymore. Then I wrote Jonah, care of the management agency in Amsterdam. I couldn’t say “dying” in the letter, but I said as strongly as I could that Jonah might want to come home. With the letter chasing him around the stages of Europe, I figured it might be weeks before we’d hear. I had no way to contact Ruth, or any sense of how she might receive the news.

Da enjoyed our company, as far as it went. The fact is, we didn’t spend much time together when Teresa and I visited. He grew furious with preoccupation, in the homestretch. He continued to work all the way to the end, more fiercely than I can remember him ever working. Science was his way of lengthening his shortened days. He worked until he was so drugged with palliative medication, he didn’t even know he was working anymore. He tried to explain to me what was at stake. Some weeks, he seemed desperate. He needed to prove that the universe had a preferred rotation. I couldn’t even wrap my head around what such a thing might mean.

He needed to show that more galaxies rotated in one direction than in the other. He sought a basic asymmetry, more counterclockwise galaxies than clockwise. He assembled vast catalogs of astronomical photos and was hard at work making measurements with a pencil and protractor, estimating rotational axes and compiling his data into huge tables. The work was a footrace he needed to win. Each day, he did a little more, on a little less strength.

I asked him why he was so desperate to know. “Oh. I think this to be the case, already. But to have the mathematical basis: That would be wonderful!”

I asked him as meekly as I could. “Why would that be so wonderful?” What need could anyone have for something so blindingly remote? I don’t know if he heard my note — my resentment at his living and dying by another clock in another system’s gravitational field, my anger at his listening for sounds that run on ahead of time, too far for human ears to hear. His obsession should have been harmless enough. It didn’t enslave or exploit anyone’s misery. But neither did it lift that misery or set a single soul free. Now that I had something to measure against, I knew my father to be the single whitest man in the world. How Mama could have thought to marry him and how the two of them imagined they could make a life together anywhere in this country would be secrets he’d take to the grave.

When Teresa and I went up to Da’s, we’d end up playing cribbage in the front room while he sat in his study making desperate calculations. I apologized to my Polish saint in a thousand oblique ways, for hours at a shot.

“It doesn’t matter, Joseph. It’s so good for me, just to see where you grew up.”

“How many times have I told you where I grew up? I’d rather have grown up in hell than here.”

Too late, she rushed to fix her mistake. “Can we go over to the city? See your old…” And halfway in, she realized she’d made bad worse. We went back to cribbage, a game she taught me, one she used to play with her mother. The saddest, whitest, most inscrutable game the human mind ever invented.

One night, we sat together under the globe of a lamp, looking over the pictures that had survived the accident of my family. There were half a dozen from before the fire. They’d been pinned to a board in my father’s office at the university for a quarter of a century. Now they’d come home, but to no home anyone in the pictures would have recognized. One photo showed a couple holding a baby. A thickset man, his close-cropped hair already receding, stood next to a thin woman in a print dress, hair pulled back in a bun. The woman held a lump wrapped in a fuzzy blanket. Teresa hovered her nail above the infant packet. “You?”

I shrugged. “Jonah, probably.”

A delicate pause. “Who are these two?”

I couldn’t tell her. I had some memory of the man, but even that might have come mostly from this photograph. “My grandparents.” Then, inspired stupidity: “My mother’s parents.”

In time, my father grew too sick to work. He still perched with his star charts and his tables of numbers, head bowed over the snaking Greek equations. But he could no longer force through the calculations. This puzzled more than hurt him. The medications had him in a place beyond pain. Or maybe he was confused by the facts’ inability to keep pace with theory.

“Well?” I asked. “Does the universe have a preferred spin?”

“I don’t know.” His voice trailed the same wake of disbelief as if he’d discovered he’d never existed. “It seems to express no preference for rotation in any direction over the other.”

Toward the end, he wanted to sing. We hadn’t for years. I couldn’t even say exactly when we’d stopped. Mama died. Jonah turned professional. Ruth quit her angelic voice in something like disgust. So family music ended. Then one day in the first midwinter of this new, alien decade, my dying father wanted to make up for lost time. He turned up a sheaf of madrigals, produced from the towering mounds of his office scribbles. “Come. We sing.” He made us each take a part.

I looked at Teresa, who looked around for a place to kill herself. “Teresa doesn’t read music, Da.”

He smiled: We’d have our little joke. Then his smile died in comprehension. “How can this be? You have said she sings with you?”

“She does. She…learns everything by ear. By heart.”

“Really?” He delighted in the idea, as if the possibility had only just occurred to him. One of those deathbed revelations over nothing. “Really? This is fine! We will learn this song for you, by heart.”

I didn’t want to sing trios with the terrified and the dying. I, too, had lost some basic faith in sound. The three of us could not possibly give Da what he needed — a glimpse of a world gone unreachable. Music had always been his celebration of the unlikelihood of escape, his Kaddish for those who’d suffered the fate meant for him. “How about T. and I sing something for you? Straight from the Glimmer Room, Atlantic City!”

“This would be even better.” His voice fell away, almost inaudible.

I don’t know how, but Saint Teresa rose to the awful moment. She, at least, still believed in music. I played on the piano that had sat for years in Fort Lee, untouched. And the white Catholic truck driver’s daughter from the saltwater taffy factory sang like a siren. I came out of my fog to meet her. We started on “Satin Doll,” as far from the Monteverdi that Da had picked out as distance allowed. And yet, as the satin doll maker himself once said, there were only two kinds of music. This was the good kind.

By then, Da’s face was ashen and the laugh in his eyes was glaze. But when Teresa and I hit our groove, somewhere around the second verse, he lit up one last time. For my father, music had always been the joy of a made universe — composed, elaborate, complex: various arcs of a solar system spinning in space at once, each one traced by the voice of a near relation. But the pleasure that bound him to his wife had been spontaneous treasure hunting. They both went to their graves swearing that any two melodies could fit together, given the right twists of tempo and turns of key. And that insistence, it struck me, as Teresa and I careened down the tune Ellington put down, lay as close to jazz as it did to the thousand years of written-out melodies their game drew on.

As my pale taffy girl sailed over the melody, sounding more sweetly sustained than I’d ever heard her, I tapped into some underground stream and drew up broken shards, motives from Machaut to Bernstein, and slipped them into my accompaniment. Teresa must have heard the sounds turning strange beneath her. But she sailed right over them. Who knows how many of the quotes Da made out? The tunes were in there; they fit. That’s all that mattered. And for the seven and a half minutes my woman and I made the song last, my family, too, was there inside our sound.

Baby, shall we go out skippin’?Take your freedom on the road once, before you die. The tune said yes, said name your ecstasy. Even a written-out melody had to be made up again, on the spot, each time you read it. The swinging little skip of a theme had been sung every imaginable way, a million times and more before this woman and I ever heard it. But Teresa sang it for my father in a way he’d never yet heard. There was only this onetime meeting between us and the pitches. These notes, at least, knew who my people were, all those lives lived out between the making up and the writing down. We are all native speakers. Sing where you are, even as it goes. Sing all the things that this life denied you. No one owns even one note. Nothing trumps time. Sing your own comfort, the song said, for no one else will sing it for you. Speaks Latin, that satin doll.

In the best world, Da would have been making music, rather than just taking it in. But in extremis, my father made a decent audience. He didn’t move much, except at the core. His face opened up. When we hit the bridge, he seemed ready to rejoin all the spinning points of light in his galaxy catalog. We finished, Teresa and I grinning as we nailed the cadence. We’d gone outside ourselves, into the tune. Da rocked for two or three more measures, to a pulse we living aren’t given to hear. “Your mother loved that song.”

That seemed impossible to me. I couldn’t get back there. I wasn’t even sure my father had recognized the tune.

Da worsened, and still I heard nothing from Jonah. I had a hundred theories a day, each less generous than the last. Toward New Year’s, Da asked if I knew where Jonah was. “I think he’s singing Mahler in Cologne.” The nearer death was, the more freely I lied. I made it sound as if the concert were taking place that week. My father once told us there was no now, now.

“In Köln, you say? Yes, of course.”

“Da? Why ‘of course’?”

He looked at me strangely. “This is where his family comes from.”

“Really?” Teresa said. “You have family in Germany? We should go visit!”

I put my arm around her, killing all her dreams with gentleness. I never knew she wanted to travel. It had never come up between us.

Da himself was traveling, backward, faster than light. “My father’s family. Centuries in the Rhineland. My mother’s family were immigrants, you know.”

I didn’t. There was no end to what I didn’t know.

“They came from the east. I don’t even know what this region would be called now. The Ukraine, somewhere? Things…were not good for them there. So!” He squeezed a little laugh, as brittle as any that had ever come out of him. “So: Sie bewegen nach Deutschland. ”

And his three children were the end of the line. This, too, had been his choice: to preserve the past by merging it into some other path. The size of what I’d lost broke over me. “You should have taught us, Da. At least about our relatives.”

His eyes flickered a little, at the chance that his every equation had been wrong. His glance crusted over with his own colossal betrayal. Then, in the nearness of death, he found himself again. He patted my arm. “I introduce you. You’ll like them.”

No doctor prepared me for his rate of fall. Da had asked me once, centuries ago, “What is the speed of time?” Now I knew: never a steady one second per second. My father’s life popped the clutch. Within a few days, he went from hobbling around home to one last tubular metal bed at Mount Sinai Hospital. I dashed off another note to Amsterdam: “If you’re going to come, come now.” I sent Teresa back to Atlantic City, over her objections. She had to keep her job; I’d already cost her everything else. There were things I still needed from Da, things that could happen only inside the circle of that smallest race: one father and son.

I put it to him one afternoon, when the morphine drip held him still in the middle ground between composed and improvised, between evasion and vanishing. By then, he must have realized I would be the only one of his children to be with him here on this last stop.

“Da?” I sat by his bed in a molded-plastic chair, both of us inspecting the lime green cinder-block wall six feet away. “That night? The one when you and…my grandfather…”

He nodded — not to cut me off, but to spare me saying it out loud. His face screwed up into something worse than cancer. A lifetime of refusing to talk about it, and now his mouth pulled open and closed, like a trout in the well of a boat, gasping under this sudden sea of atmosphere. He worked so hard to find the first syllable, I almost told him to rest and forget. But the need was on us both now. Worse than the need to seal a last closeness. My father had lost me my mother’s family, and never said why. The effort he went through then, in his last bed, was worse than any salvage could justify. I sat there, an impassive jury, waiting to see how he’d hang himself.

“I…loved your grandfather. He was such an enormous man. No? Grosszügig. Noble. His mind wanted to take in everything. He would have been a perfect physicist.” For a beat, my father’s ravaged face found pleasure. “He cared for me, I think. More than just for the husband of his daughter. We spoke often, of many things, in New York, in Philadelphia. He was so fierce, always ready to fight for your mother’s right to be happy, anywhere in the world. When we first told him your brother was on the way, he groaned. ‘You are making me a grandfather before my time!’ We took you babies to Philadelphia, for holidays. Everything was welcome. Yes, of course, there were problems with — what? — Übersetzung.”

“Translation.”

“Yes. Of course. My English is going. Problems with translation. But he knew me. He recognized me.”

“And you recognized him?”

“What he didn’t know about me, I didn’t know, either! Maybe he was right. Yes. Maybe.” My father fell into a reverie. I thought he wanted to sleep. I should have made him, but I kept still. “He challenged my war work. You know, I solved problems during the war. I helped with those weapons.”

I nodded. We’d never talked about it. But I knew.

“He challenged. He said those bombings were as racial as Hitler. I said I didn’t work on the bombings. I did not have anything to do with those decisions. I said such use wasn’t about white and dark. He said everything — the whole world — was about white against dark. Only, the white didn’t know this. I said I wasn’t white; I was a Jew. He couldn’t understand this. I tried to tell him the hatred I got in this country, that I never talked about to anyone. We told him that you children would not be white against dark. Your grandfather was a huge mind. A powerful man. But he said we were doing wrong, raising you children. He said we were performing a… Sünde.”

“Sin. You were sinning.”

“Sin. Ein Zeitwort? ”

“Well, it’s a noun, too.”

“That we were sinning, bringing you boys up as if there would be no white versus dark. As if we were already there, present in our own future.”

I closed my eyes. My father’s was not a future the human race would ever stumble into. If my grandfather, if my own father… The words tore out of me before I thought them. “It didn’t have to be all or nothing, Da. You could have at least told us… We could at least have been…”

“You see. In this country, in this place? Everything is already all or nothing. One or the other. Nothing may be both. Of this, your mother and I, too, are guilty.”

“We could at least have talked about this. As a family. Our whole lives.”

“Yes, of course. But whose words? This is what your grandfather…what William wanted to know. We tried to talk about it, as a family, that night. But once those things were said, once we went to that place…”

He went to that place all over again. Pain that cancer had not succeeded in putting in his face, memory now did. I was a boy again, cowering in my open bedroom doorway, hearing my world, my father’s, my mother’s all cave in.

“He said there was a struggle. A struggle we were — what? ‘Turning our backs on.’ Your mother and I said no; we were that struggle. This: making you children free, free to define. Free of everything.”

“Your mother and I” no longer sounded like a whole. And “Free of everything,” a kind of death sentence.

My father lay propped in his bed, the kind of motorized bed that can be set to every position except comfortable. He spoke through narrowed mouth, his eyes closed, from a place I’d banished him to. “Horrible things, we said, that night. Terrible things. We played ‘Who owns pain?’ ‘Who has suffered the greater wrong?’ I told him the Negro had never been killed in the numbers of the Jews. He said they had. This I didn’t understand. He said no killing could be worse than slavery. Centuries of it. The Jews had never been enslaved, he said. In one heartbeat, I was a Zionist. They were, I said; they were enslaved. Too long ago to count, he said. How long ago counts? I asked. Yes, how long ago? When is the past over? Maybe never. But what did this have to do with the two of us — this man and me? Nothing. We were to live now, in the present. But we just couldn’t reach there.”

I touched his ravaged shoulder through his flimsy hospital gown. My palm said, You can stop. You don’t need to do this. Da felt the touch prodding him on.

“Your mother was silent. Watching everything break open. Her father and I were talking enough for all humanity. He…called me a member of the killer race. I…used my family. My parents and sister, in the ovens. I used them as proof. Of something. The hatred I took in, for being something I never was.”

“I understand, Da.” I would have said anything to close that box back up.

“When William left that night, he said we forced him. He said we didn’t want you two to know your Philadelphia family. ‘If they’re not going to be black, these boys, they can’t have their black family.’ This made your mother furious. She said unfortunate things. Everything her father had ever taught her, everything he believed… But this, we never said. We never said you would not be black. Only that you would be who you were: a process, first. More important than a thing. He called this idea ‘the lie of whiteness.’”

“A quarter of a century? You don’t cut off all contact because of a single night. Angry words. Every family has anger. Every family says things it wishes it hadn’t.”

“Your mother and I, the two of us, we knew what would come. Your future had already talked to us. Your future made us! And made us choose. We thought we knew what things would come to you. But your Papap…” He darkened. Messages missing, disappearing, unopened, unsent. “Your Papap did not see these.”

There was a thing stronger than family, wilder than love, worse than reason. Big enough to shred them all and leave them for dead. All my life, that thing had pinned me. Its nurses wouldn’t let me into this hospital room, couldn’t accept I was this dying man’s son. And still I didn’t know what this thing wanted from us, or how it had grown so real. “So that’s it, Da? One night’s craziness caused a permanent break? For this one night, we — Mama never saw her own family again?”

“Well, you know, it’s a funny thing. I didn’t see that night would be a break. Neither did William. For a long time, I thought he would come to us, that we were right and he would come to agree, in time. But he must have been waiting for us, too. Then, in that waiting, righteousness took us over.” He closed his eyes and thought. “And shame. It was ourselves we didn’t know how to find. Ourselves we didn’t have the heart to go meet again. This is the force of belonging. After that, after your mother died…” I put my hand on him again. But he’d already been convicted. “After your mother died, I couldn’t any longer. The last chance had closed up. I was too ashamed even to ask that big man’s forgiveness. I sent them the news, of course. But I thought… I was afraid she died because of me.”

I would have cried out, Impossible, except his own daughter had said as much. He looked at me, pleading. I could not exonerate or condemn. But there was something I might do. “Da? I could…find them. Now. Tell them.”

“Tell them what?” Then he heard what I was asking. His head went back into his pillow. Everything he knew about time made him believe that only perception divided the future from the past. His eyes flickered, as if our family were already here, in this green cinder-block room, all false world lines redrawn. Then his lips spasmed, his brows and cheeks collapsed on each other, and his face blanched, condemning itself. He shook his head. And with that shake, he slipped the last dragline with which life held him.

He went fast after that. He passed in and out of consciousness. We didn’t say much more to each other, beyond logistics. He called out two mornings later, in blinding pain: “Something is wrong. We have made a terrible mistake. We have chopped up our house for firewood.” His eyes still looked at me, but they sat so deep with animal incomprehension, they no longer knew me. Disease and the morphine drip split him between them. The maze of muscles around his eyes showed him hearing all sorts of sounds, the most glorious music. But he couldn’t get over the wall, where the sound came from. The eyes pleaded without focus, asking if I remembered. In his face was the horrified suspicion that he’d made it all up.

I remembered the day he took us to Washington Heights for the magic substance, Mandelbrot. The day he told us that every moving object in the universe had its own clock. One look at his face showed how uncoupled our clocks had become. In the five seconds I spent taking that glance, decades sheared off into his silent bay. In my few breaths, he had time to audition the entire available repertoire. Or maybe, as I raced, my clock buzzing around in front of him, his own had already stopped, stranding him on the upbeat of some permanent open-air concert on the mind’s Mall.

And then, one last time, time started up again. I was sitting by his bed flipping through a six-month-old copy of Health and Fitness that the hospital scattered around its rooms like warrants. I thought today might be the day. But I had thought that for the last three mornings running. It had been forever since Da had said anything. I talked to him as if he were still there, knowing my words had to sound like spinning galaxies. I sat with the magazine spread on the rolling meal table, reading about living with rosacea. I had one ear on him, waiting for any change in his breathing. It felt exactly like the years I’d spent accompanying Jonah, bent over my score, listening for the silent indicator that the piece was about to head off into uncharted waters.

Then it did. Da leaned forward off his canted bed and opened his eyes. He coughed up something that took me some seconds to identify. “Where’s my darling?” I waited, paralyzed. The shudder would wear him out, break him again. But then, harsher, more terrified, he burst out, “ Wo ist sie?Where is my treasure?”

I stood to calm him, lower him back to the pillow. “It’s okay, Da. Everything’s all right. I’m here. It’s Joseph.”

He flashed in anger. My father, who was never angry at me in his entire life. “Is she safe?” His voice belonged to someone else. “You must tell me.”

I stood at the crash of two lives, not knowing which to answer. “Da. She’s not here anymore. She…died.” Even now, I couldn’t say burned.

“Died?” His voice suggested some misunderstanding, probably simple, he couldn’t puzzle out.

“Yes. It’s okay.”

“Died?” And then his whole body bucked in electroshock. “Died? My God, no! My God! It can’t be. Everything—” He flailed at the IV tubes and made to swing his feet out of bed. I was around the bed faster than he could move, pinning him. He shouted, “She can’t be. Das ist unmöglich. When? How?”

I held his wasted one hundred pounds back against the bed. “In a fire. When our house burned. Fifteen years ago.”

“Oh!” He grabbed my arm. His whole body relaxed in gratitude. “Oh! God be thanked.” He settled back, satisfied.

“Jesus Christ. Da? What are you saying?”

He closed his eyes and a smile played on his lips. He clawed the air until his hand found mine. “I mean my Ruth.” He slipped back against the bed. “How is she?” The words exhausted him.

“She’s good, Da. I saw her not long ago.”

“Really?” Pleasure battled with irritation. “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

“She’s married. Her husband’s name is Robert. Robert Rider. He’s…” A big man. An enormous man. “Grosszügig.”

Da nodded. “This much, I have already thought. Where is she now?”

“Da. I’m not sure.”

“She’s not in trouble?”

“Nothing serious.” My concert days were over, but I’d learned to improvise.

The morphine washed back over him. He drifted, and I thought he fell asleep. But after a moment, he said, “California. Maybe she is in California.”

“Maybe, Da. Maybe California.”

He nodded, calmed. “I’ve thought so.” When he opened his eyes again, they were salt. “She disowned me. She said her struggle is not mine.” Acid filled his face, as if what was coming might still destroy everything that had already been. He worked to breathe. I sat calming him, as I used to calm Jonah when his attacks were on him. “When you see her, you must tell her. Tell her…” He fought for clarity, waiting for that message from the past to catch up with him. Then he closed his eyes and smiled. “Tell her there is another wavelength everyplace you point your telescope.”

Three times, he made me promise to tell her. That night, without talking again, my father died. It was something like a hemiola, a change in meter. A sudden, unprepared cross into a new key. In every piece of music worth playing, some moment gathers, moving its chords forward, casting ahead for one quick tightening of the air around it to the endless organizing silence beyond the double bar.

Da died. There was no death rattle, no relaxing of the bowels. I told him he could go. Instead of taking that next small step into his local future, he doubled back and forever rejoined where he’d already been. I called the nurses. And then my own line bent on, away from his, into an unknown place.

I thought death would be different this time, knowing in advance. It was. It was steeper. Mama never had a chance to disappear, she was gone so instantly. But she didn’t really die for me until the man who chatted with her in the kitchen in the middle of the night fifteen years after her death joined her. Da was gone, taking with him all my connection to her, to us. When he stopped, so did my past. Everything was fixed now, beyond growing. The bird and the fish can fall in love, but their only working nest will be the grave.

I turned helpless in the face of the hundreds of tasks death requires. The hospital helped; they’d seen this before, apparently. Da had told me nothing of what he wanted. He’d made no preparations for the inevitable. Jonah and Ruth were nowhere. Cremation seemed simplest. It had done for Mama. That was the easiest of the choices. At the moment when I most needed to be out of this world, up in the star map, among the rotating galaxies, I was dragged back to make countless decisions about things I couldn’t care about. Everyone needed signatures: the university, the state, the federal government, the bank, the neighborhood — all those anxious poolings that Da had gotten through his life largely by ignoring.

Teresa held me together, phoning from Atlantic City. She came up for one long weekend. She seemed to grow surer and more capable as I fell apart. Everything she did was one more thing I didn’t have to. “You’re doing fine, Joseph. All the right things.” She supplied a steady source of practical advice to the heir of a family that had always been practicality’s sworn enemy. She stayed alongside me for the million deaths by decision that surviving requires.

After I’d made all the most irreversible choices my father’s death demanded, Jonah called. His voice was full of buzz and echoing delay. “Joey. I just got your message. I’ve been away. I’m…not with that old management anymore.”

“Jesus, Jonah. Where the fuck have you been?”

“Don’t swear at me, Joey. I’m down in Italy. I’ve been singing at La Scala.”

The only news that could redeem Da’s death: My brother had followed through on the thing our parents raised us for. “La Scala. Serious? Singing what?”

“It…it doesn’t matter, Joey. Nothing. Tell me about Da.”

It hit me only then. Jonah didn’t know. I thought the news would be in him, like migration in a bird. He should have known the instant it happened. “He died. A week ago last Wednesday.”

For a long time, there was only breathing and transatlantic static. In silence as long as a funeral song, Jonah replayed the life. “Joey. Oh God. Forgive me.” As if his being away had made this happen.

I heard him over the line, his breath shortening, on the edge of a full-fledged choking attack. He was trying to figure out how to stop what had already happened. When he could talk again, he wanted details, all the nonevents of Da’s last days. He demanded to know everything our father had said. Anything Da might have left behind, something to send him. I had nothing. “He did…he made me promise to give Ruth a message.”

“What?”

“He said, ‘There’s another wavelength everyplace you point your telescope.’”

“What the hell does that mean, Joey?”

“He…something he was working on, I think. He stayed busy. It helped a little.”

“Why Ruth? What possible interest…” She’d betrayed him again, by stealing Da’s last message from him.

“Jonah. I have no clue. Between the medications and the disease, he was gone a long while before he left.”

“Is Ruth there?”

I told him that I’d heard nothing from her since her surprise visit. He listened, saying nothing.

“What did you do with the body?” As if it were evidence I had to dispose of.

I told him all the decisions I’d made. Jonah said nothing. His silence rebuked me. “What did you want me to do? You turn your back on us. You leave me to go through this alone while you—”

“Joey. Joey. You did just fine. You did perfect.” Grief came out of him in staccato sobs. Almost laughs, really. Something had gotten away from him, an absence he’d regret forever. “You want me to come back?” His words slurred together. “You want me to?”

“No, Jonah.” I wanted him to, more than anything. But not because I asked.

“I could be there by next week.”

“No point. Everything’s done. Over.”

“You don’t need help with things? What will you do with the house?” The Jersey home Da thought we might, in some other universe, share.

“The will says that’s up to a majority of his children.”

He struggled with something. “What do you want to do?”

“Sell.”

“Of course. At any price.”

Da was huge between us. Our father wanted me to ask. Somewhere, he wanted to know. “What were you singing at La Scala?”

Silence flooded the line. He thought it too soon to come back to this life. But I was Jonah’s only link now. Me and Ruth, whom neither of us could reach.

“Joey? You’ll never believe this. I sang under Monera.”

The name came from so far away, I was sure it, too, had to be dead. “Jesus Christ. Did he know who you were?”

“Some dusky American tenor.”

“Did you ask him about…”

“I didn’t have to. I saw her. She came backstage opening night.” He paused, racing himself. “She’s…old. Adult. And married. To a Tunisian businessman working out of Naples. He looks just like me. Only darker.”

I was his accompanist again, waiting out the caesura, holding on to its nothingness until his inhale started us up again.

“She apologized. In English, which her husband doesn’t speak. ‘You deserved a note.’ How old were we, Joey? Fourteen? The year Mama… The day Da…” Only a lifetime’s training kept his voice his. “Real blacks die of gunshot wounds, right? Overdoses. Malnutrition. Lead poisoning. What do halfies die of, Joey? Nobody dies of numbness, do they?”

“What happens now? You going to do more opera?” Something in me had to keep track. Some part of me still had to tell Da.

“Mule?” He was traveling out beyond my reach, at a speed that collapsed all measure. “Opera is nothing to do with what we thought. Absolutely nothing. I had to see it down in Italy, the place it came from. With the native speakers, the owners. Opera’s somebody else’s childhood. Somebody else’s nightmare. I think I’ll head to Paris for a while.”

“France?”French was his worst singing language. He’d always mocked the place. “To do what? Go back to lieder?” I worked to keep my voice neutral. Like an ex-wife encouraging her husband to go out dating again.

“I’m tired of it, Joey. Tired of singing alone. Unless you… Where am I going to find another accompanist with telepathy?”

I couldn’t tell if he was asking or rejecting me. “What are you going to do, then?” I saw him singing Maurice Chevalier songs in the Metro, a felt hat catching the centimes.

“There has to be life beyond opera and lieder. Didn’t your mother ever tell you? Let every boy serve God in his own fashion.”

“What’s yours?” Each answer seemed more murderous than the last.

“Wish I knew. It has to be out there.” He fell silent again, ashamed of surviving. I felt him working up again to ask me to come out and join him. But I never got the chance to turn him down. When he spoke again, it was to more than me. “Joey? Have him a little memorial service. Just us? Play something good for him. Something from the old days.”

“We already did.”

I felt it go through him, the stab of freedom he’d gone after. “You sure you don’t want me to come back?”

“You don’t need to.” I gave him that much.

“Joey, forgive me.”

I gave him that, too.

It took me several days to grasp that I didn’t have to go in to the hospital anymore. There was nothing to do but close up Da’s house. I came up for air, browsed the papers, caught up on what had happened while I was away in death’s waiting room. The National Guard had killed some college students. The FBI was arresting priests for helping people burn their draft cards. Hoover issued a nationwide warning against “extremist all-Negro hate-type organizations.” He meant my sister and her husband, all the criminal elements that undermined my country.

I wanted out of Fort Lee as fast as possible. First, I had to go through the house and its contents. The few family keepsakes of value I put into rented storage. The man’s wardrobe, unchanged since 1955, I packed off to the Salvation Army. I sold the piano Da had bought for me, along with the few valuable pieces of furniture, and put the cash in a certificate of deposit for Ruth and Robert Rider.

I looked in my father’s jumbled files for an address for my mother’s family. I found one in his lists of contacts, that wad of three-by-five cards he kept bound with a thick rubber band. The card, in my father’s handwriting, was younger than it looked. It was thumbed-up, dog-eared, and smudged enough to be a faked antique. At the top, on the double red line, in caps, ran the name DALEY. Below it was a Philadelphia street address. There was no telephone number.

I pulled the card out of the rubber-banded pack and left it out on the kitchen counter. I looked at it a hundred times a day for three days. One call to directory assistance, and within two minutes, I could be talking to my unknown relatives. Hello, this is your grandson. This is your nephew. Your cousin. They’d ask me, And where do you live? What do you do? How come you sound like you do? Where could I go from there? I couldn’t use Da’s death as an excuse for making contact. Their own daughter had died, and that hadn’t brought us back together. Every time I looked at the address, I felt the distance compound down all the years of my life. The gap had widened so far, I couldn’t even find my side of it. The rift was too big to do anything but preserve.

My father’s contact file had no card with the name STROM on the top. It had shocked me, while he was dying, to hear him even speak of his family. There was no one on his side to give this news. You can jump into the future, he often told us, all the while we were growing up. But you can’t send a message back into your own past. All I could do with Da’s death was file it away, a message to some later self who’d know what to do with it.

Toward the rest of the house’s goods, I was merciless. Nothing even made me flinch until I hit my father’s professional papers. I knew nothing about my father’s last work, aside from his needing to prove that the universe favored a direction of spin. After several days of poring over the toppling paper towers in his study, I knew I’d never be able to cope on my own. Unlike music, his physics had some real-world meaning, however abstract that meaning had become. He’d published nothing of consequence for years. But I was terrified that the handwritten scrawl and the tables of figures scattered around his study might hide some scrap of worth.

I called Jens Erichson, Da’s closest friend at Columbia, a high-energy physicist who happened to be an amateur singer. He was Da’s rough contemporary, the colleague in the best position to appraise all my father’s piles of Greek scribbling from his final months. He greeted me warmly over the phone. “Mr. Joseph! Yes, of course I remember you, from years ago, before your mother… I sometimes came up to your house, for musical evenings.” He was delighted to learn I’d become a musician. I spared him the messy details.

I couldn’t stop apologizing. “I shouldn’t saddle you with this. You have your own work.”

“Nonsense. If the will made no provisions for professional executor, it’s because David assumed I’d be there. This is nothing. Heaven knows, he solved enough problems for the rest of us over the years.”

We set up a time for him to come by. I took him into the study. An involuntary sigh escaped his lips when he saw what was waiting. He hadn’t imagined what he’d signed on for. We spent two days, like archaeologists, boxing up and labeling the papers. The work required gloves, a whisk broom, a field camera. Dr. Erichson took the boxes with him back to the university, over my conscience-stricken stream of gratitude. I put the house on the market and returned to Atlantic City.

I checked in with the Glimmer Room. I wasn’t surprised to learn that Mr. Silber no longer needed my services. He’d hired another piano player, a sandy blond guy from White Plains named Billy Land, who learned to play on a Hammond B3 and who could play all of Jim Morrison and the Doors in at least three different keys, sometimes all three at once. Everyone had what they needed. I was free at last. I thought about asking Teresa to see about getting me a job at the saltwater taffy plant.

Dr. Erichson called me after three weeks. “There are some portions of interest in the papers. With your permission, I’ll pass those along to the interested parties. The other ninety percent…” He struggled with how to lay it out for me. “Did your father ever mention to you the concept of preferred galactic rotation?”

“Many times.”

“He got this concept from Kurt Gödel, down in Princeton.” The fellow refugee my father had called the greatest logician since Aristotle. “The work goes back a quarter century. Gödel found equations compatible with Einstein’s General-Field Theory. I don’t know quite how to say this. They allow time to coil up upon itself.”

Something from my childhood pushed up above water. Old dinner-table conversations, from a prior life. “Closed timelike loops.”

Dr. Erichson sounded both surprised and embarrassed. “He told you about them?”

“Years ago.”

“Well he came back to them, at the end. The mathematics is in place. It’s peculiar, but simple. Once the conditions are identified, the extraction of the looping solutions is straightforward. At the limits of gravitation, General Relativity permits at least the mathematical possibility of a violation in causality.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Your father was exploring curves in time. On such a curve, events can move continuously into their own local future while turning back onto their own past.”

“Time travel.”

Dr. Erichson chuckled. “All travel is time travel. But yes. That seems to be what he was after.”

“Is this idea real? Or is it just numbers?”

“Your father believed that any equations permitted by physics are, in some sense of the word, real.”

All things that are possible must exist. He’d said so all his life. That was his creed, his freedom. It was the thing, alongside music, that most moved him. Perhaps it was music to him. Whatever the numbers permitted must happen, somewhen. I didn’t know how to ask. “These loops are real? Physics really allows them?”

“If any physics allows the violation of causality, that physics is wrong. Every scientist I know believes this. It’s the law on which all others are based. Yet as far as General Relativity is concerned, these equations would indeed apply, given a universe where the galaxies had a favored rotation. If this is the case, General Relativity needs repairing.”

The star charts. The endless tables. “What did he find out? What did he…conclude?”

“Well. I can’t afford to put real time into this. At a glance, it seems he hadn’t yet detected any preference.”

Another direction of rotation everyplace you looked. “But if he had?”

“Well, the equations exist. Time would close back upon itself. We could live our lives always. Folding onto ourselves, forever.”

“If he didn’t find a preferred rotation, does it mean there is none?”

“That, I can’t answer. I haven’t the time for this problem that your father did. Forgive me.”

“But if you were a betting man?”

He thought slowly, about something we weren’t designed to wrap our thoughts around, at any speed. “Even with a closed timelike loop…” He belonged to my father’s people: the people who needed to get things right. “Even then, you could travel back into a given past only if you’d been there already.”

I formed an image for his words, but it became something else even as I fondled it. My father had needed some way to get back to my mother, to send her a message, to deflect and correct all that had happened to us. But in Dr. Erichson’s universe, the future was as unfixable as the past was fixed.

“No time travel?”

“Not in any way that might help you.”

“What happens is forever?”

“This seems to be the case.”

“But it’s possible to change what hasn’t happened yet?”

He thought for a long time. Then: “I’m not even sure what such a question means.”

Autumn 1945

She turns to see her JoJo, the little one, standing in his doorway, holding his ice bag up to the incurable sprain. The slammed front door still shudders with her father. Delia Strom turns from it, reeling, and there is her little boy, crippled already by selflessness, watching the thing that will grind him underfoot. He just stands there, offering, terrified, ready to give away everything. Sacrificed to something bigger than family. Something that trumps even blood.

She sweeps the boy into her arms, sobbing. It scares the child more than what has just happened. Now his brother’s up, too, tugging her leg and telling her everything will be okay. David, the equation solver, stands behind her, looking through the door’s glass for any moving shadow out on the street. She turns to him. He holds one hand on the knob, ready to chase down the street after her father. But he doesn’t move.

Neither boy asks where their Papap is. It could be tomorrow for them already. It could be next week. Papap here; Papap gone. They are still trapped in the eternal now. But they see her crying. They’ve heard the hostility, even without understanding. Already she’s losing them to this larger thing, the invention that will take them. Already they’ve been identified. Already the split, the separate entrance, the splintering calculus.

“Nothing,” David says, looking through the pane. She doesn’t know what he means. Her father has left her with this man, this bleached man with the accent, who helped to build that final blinding-white weapon. “There is nothing. Come. We all go to bed. Troubles will wait for tomorrow. Darüber können wir uns morgen noch Sorgen machen. ”

Hitler’s language. She never once thought that thought, all during the war. She stayed alongside him, singing lieder — German tunes, German words — for four long years, afraid of being heard and turned in by the neighbors. But still, she kept their part-song vigil, safeguarding that sound against its many mobilized uses. They both cheered this war: war against pedigreed supremacy, against the final nightmare of purity. Whatever the Allies killed in Berlin was to have died here, too. But nothing has died back home. Nothing but her willful ignorance. Her father has walked out on her. Walked out on her for forgetting a war one hundred times longer and more destructive, the piecemeal annihilation of a people. Walked out on her for walking out. You’ve thrown in your lot. Chosen your side. But she has chosen nothing, nothing but a desire to be through with war and to live the peace she and hers have already paid for so many times over.

There is no peace. Troubles will wait for tomorrow. Tomorrow— tomorrow, already — they’re too ashamed even to look each other in the eye. David goes to work, and what exactly that work is, she can only guess. He leaves her alone with the boys, as her father has left her alone with the family she has made. Alone with two children, from whom she must hide all the doubt in creation. She reads to them from someone else’s books. She plays with them — die-metal trucks and dowel houses that come from someone else’s construction dreams. In the afternoon, they sing together, the boys outdoing each other in naming and making the notes. If her father is right, then all the wrongness of the world is right. If her father is right, she must begin to tell her children: This is not yours, nor this, nor this, nor this … She can’t sacrifice her boys to that preemptive lynching, not today or ever. But if her father is right, she must ready them. If he’s right, then all of history is right, permanent, inescapable.

But her father’s resolution only stiffens hers. She won’t surrender anything. Yes, of course: She’ll give them warmth, welcome, riffing, the congregating joy of call and response, a dip in that river, deep enough to sport in all their lives. She must give them the riches that are theirs by birth. Negro. American. Of course they must know the long, deadly way those terms have come. But she refuses to give them self by negation. Not the old defeating message that they’ve already been decided. All she can give them is choice. Free as anyone, free to own, to attach themselves to any tune that catches their inner ear.

But maybe her father is right. Maybe it’s only their lightness that gives them even the slightest leeway. Maybe choice is just another lie. There is a freedom she wouldn’t wish on anyone. She takes her boys outside, west, toward the river, down to the nearest strip of green in all this stone, the three of them out in the open air for all to appraise. She sees their triad of tones through the parkgoers’ gazes. Her body flinches, as always, under the assault. She hears what her neighbors call this freedom she would give. Striving. Passing. Turning. But what of her boys’ other family, that lineage she knows nothing about, cleaned out, solved, finally, by this world that stands no complications? Isn’t that family every bit as much theirs?

In the park, her boys climb on a set of concrete stairs as if it’s the greatest playground ever built. Each step is a pitch they cry out as they pounce on. They turn the staircase into a pedal organ, chasing up the scale, hopping in thirds, stepping out simple tunes. Two other children, white, see their ecstasy and join, hurtling up and down the flights, screaming their own wild pitches until their parents come shepherd them away, their averted glances apologizing to Delia for the universal mistake of childhood.

The incident does nothing to lessen her JoJo’s joy. Their manic pitchclimbing continues unabated. She can tell them now or wait for simplifying whiteness to inform them later. This is the choice that leaves her no choice. She knows what’s safest, the best defense against the power that will otherwise lynch them. The first attack, the first hate-whispered syllable will name them. They’ll suffer worse than their mother ever suffered, pay most for being unidentifiable. But something in Delia needs to believe: A boy learns by heart the first song he hears. And the first song — the first — belongs to no one. She can give them a tune stronger than belonging. Thicker than identity. A singular song, a self better than any available armor. Teach them to sing the way they breathe, the songs of all their ancestries.

When David comes home, she recognizes him again. The two of them: theirs. Her whole body shakes with relief, as if she’s stepped out of neck-high burial in a snowbank. She lurches down the front hall to grab him. Surely, if two people love the same thing, they must love each other a little. He takes her in his arms at the door, even before he takes off his hat. “This is not forever,” he says. “We will all be back, once more in the same place.” But they can’t be back, because they never have been. Not in the same place. Never even once.

After dinner and singing, radio and reading to the boys, they lie in bed. They talk into the night, softly to each other, after the boys fall asleep. Her JoJo can hear anyway. The words of this conversation go straight into dreams that will vex them for the rest of their lives.

“He’s angry with me,” David says. “Yet I feel I’ve done nothing wrong. Only what my country has asked of me. What everyone would have done.”

This angers her. It makes her Daddy wrong. Some man should apologize, even if he’s the injured party. Because he has been injured. For a moment, she hates them both, for neither saving her. “He’s angry with me,” she whispers back. But she doesn’t say why. That, too, is a loss of faith. Thinking David would never understand.

“We can call him tomorrow. Explain that it has all been a confusion. A Missverständnis.”

“It isn’t,” she hisses. “That isn’t what it was.” She feels her husband’s body tense in the first edge of anger against her, her opposition. Is no one above this need to be redeemed?

“What is it, then?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. All I know is that I’m sick of it. I want it to be over.”

His hand slides sideways across the sheet and finds hers. He thinks she means last night’s argument. This private war. “It will be over. It must be. How can something so angry last forever?”

He thinks she means Rassenhass. “It already has.”

He listens to her. If nothing else, this. “You want it to be over. But how should it end? How should the world best be? I mean, one thousand years from now? Ten thousand? What is the right place? The place we must try to reach?”

She’s never really had to say, not to herself, let alone anyone other. Every perfect place she starts to name already has a piece of evil slithering through it. She wants to stop talking, to roll over and sleep. She has no answer. But he asks her. This is the conversation, the terms of the contract they must improvise.

“The right place…the place I want… Nobody owns anybody. Nobody has claim on anything. Nobody’s anybody. Nobody’s anything but their own.”

She squeezes shut her eyes. The only place that calms her a little. The only place she can live. The only sane landing place. If it’s the right place for a thousand years from now, why not for her boys? For patience means submission, and waiting is never.

“This is where we go live, then. We call your father tomorrow.”

“He won’t…get it.”

“We call. We talk to him.”

What ignorance. Her father’s right: right about all things. She’s the one trying to get away, trying to trick the truth. She has no right to call and talk to him. All she has a right to is lasting reprimand.

“Remember what we saw,” David says. “Remember what’s coming.”

She can’t decide now whether what they saw even belonged to this world. No: It’s too soon for this life, too far out ahead of anything their children can reach. Something in this place needs race. Some ground-floor tribalism, something in a soul that won’t be safe or sound in anything smaller or larger. The day violence gets them, the day her boys meet those centuries of murder, on that day, they will hate her for not giving them the caste this caste-crazed country finally demands. But until that day, she’ll give them — however illusory or doomed — self. And let the image stand in for the thing.

She will not cut them off from their own. “We call tomorrow,” she says. But tomorrow comes and goes without a call. Shame blocks them, guilty memories. She can’t bear those words again, those accusations cutting her to the quick. She has no answer but this deliberate theft, this criminal leap ahead, this shortcut across one thousand years.

The baby’s coming. “The baby’s coming”: This is her Joseph’s universal cure, his answer to all things. The child has taken ownership of the mystery, this new life from nowhere. He wants Delia to eat more, to make the baby come faster. He wants to know what day the baby will arrive, and when this day will become that one.

Three weeks go by, with no contact from Philadelphia. Then a month. The same fire-forged pride that allowed her father to survive this country now turns to the task of surviving her. She can’t bear it, not with the new baby on the way. Something horrible is happening, fueled by love, something she can’t put right in herself, in her father, a fear as wild as the fear of losing oneself, going under.

She crumples and gives in. She writes a letter to her mother. It’s the child’s first trick, playing on her weaker parent. The letter smacks of cowardice. She types it without a return address, so her daddy won’t throw it out unopened. She mails it from New Jersey, laundering the postmark. She lies from the very first sentence: says she doesn’t know what happened, doesn’t understand. She tells her mama she needs to talk, to work out a way to patch things up. “Anywhere. I’ll come to Philadelphia. It doesn’t have to be the house. Anyplace we can talk.”

She gets a note back. It’s little more than an address — Haggern’s, a sandwich shop on the edge of the old neighborhood, a short-order grill where her mother used to take her when they went shopping — along with a date and time. “You’re right. The house is not a good idea just now.”

The sentence destroys Delia. She’s a wreck until she steps on the train to Philly. She’s showing now, huge with her new one. She needs to get right with her folks before she delivers. Though she’s not due for weeks, this heaviness feels like she could give birth any second. She takes the boys with her on the train — too long to leave them with Mrs. Washington. Her mother will want to see them. They’ll make the meeting easier.

She’s sitting at Haggern’s a quarter hour before she needs to be. It surprises her when her mother walks in with the twins. They’ve just been shopping. It presses on Delia’s chest harder than she can understand. Her mother looks furtive, conspiratorial. But the thrill of seeing her grandsons smoothes out her crumpled face.

Lucille and Lorene: Can it have been that long? Just months, but there’s something new to them, suddenly adult, an earnest show of long skirts and pleated blouses, a new weight in their step. “How’d you girls get grown up so fast? Turn around. Turn round; let me look at you! Where’d you find those shapes overnight?”

Her sisters look at Delia as if she has declared against them. Daddy has said something. But they eye her swollen belly as well, their envy, fear, and hope all rolled into one. Nettie Ellen slings into the booth across from Delia and the boys. She reaches across, taking their pale heads into her searching hands. But even as she fondles them, she murmurs to her daughter, “What in heaven’s name you say to that man?”

“Mama, it’s not like that.”

“What’s it like, then?”

Delia feels weary and older than the earth. Silted, slow, and winding like a switchback river. But wronged, too. Betrayed by her bedrock trust. Hurt by ones who know her hurt. That horrific night: David and her father trading accusations: an Olympics of suffering. The moral leverage of pain. Two men who couldn’t hear their nearness. They’re the ones who ought to be sitting in this booth, across from each other. Not this old fallback alliance, mothers against men. Delia tries for her mother’s eye, just a little flicker to show that the alliance still holds. “He doesn’t like the way I’m rearing up my young.”

“He don’t like you scrubbing these leopards spotless.”

“Mama,” she pleads. Her eyes dart downward.

“Girls? Take your nephews over to that gum-ball game at Lowie’s.” She fishes in her pocketbook for two nickels for her grandsons to feed the mechanical gum-ball claw. The same prehistoric Saturday ritual she and Delia shared.

Delia scurries in her purse to beat her mother. “Here. Here, now. Take these.”

The twins don’t want anyone’s coins. “We’re not children,” Lucille says.

Lorene echoes her. “Come on, Mama. We know what’s happening.”

Nettie Ellen touches the teen conspiratorially. “Don’t I know that, child! It’s your nephews, need a little expert tending.”

The secret appeal overwhelms them. They sweep the boys up the way they used to during the war, when they’d push the infants around the block in strollers. They show their sister up, proving how fierce love ought to be. Then Delia and her mother are alone. Alone as on that day, up in her attic practice room, when Delia first spoke about the man she’d fallen for. How fine her mother had been, after the first shock. How solid and broad, this woman, whom time gives no reason to feel anything but eternal distrust. How good they’ve all been, her family. A blackness big enough to absorb all strains.

“I’m so tired, Mama.”

“Tired? What you tired of?” The warning audible: I was tired before you were born. I didn’t raise you to give in to tired.

“I’m tired of racial thinking, Mama.” The bird and the fish can fall in love. But there’s no possible nest but no nest.

A deep bronze waitress comes by to take their order. Nettie Ellen orders what she always orders at Haggern’s, since time began. Coffee, no cream, and a piece of blueberry pie. Delia orders a chocolate doughnut and a small milk. She doesn’t want it and can’t eat it. But she has to order it. Every time they’ve ever come here, she has. The waitress slides off, and Nettie Ellen’s eyes follow. “You tired of being colored. That’s what you’re tired of.”

Delia tries on the accusation like a gown. A prison uniform. Something in stripes. “I’m tired of everybody thinking they know what colored means.”

Her mother looks around the shop. A teenage boy in white slacks, shirt, and a little dress-infantry paper hat mans the grill. Two old waitresses with stovepipe legs carry fries from the counter to the wooden tables. A young couple slumps over a shared soda in the booth across the way. “Who’s telling you that? Nobody here’s going to tell you what colored means. Only the o-fay do that.”

Her mother speaks that forbidden word. Once, at twelve, Delia had her mouth washed out with soap for using it. Something has broken down: the rules, or her mother. “My boys are…different.”

“Look around you, girl. Everybody here’s different. Different’s the commonest thing going.”

“I’ve got to give them the freedom to be—”

Her mother pinches up her face. “Don’t you dare talk to me about freedom. Your brother died in the war — for that word. A black man, fighting to give folks in other countries a freedom he wouldn’t ever’ve had in his own, even if he came back here alive.”

“Lots of people died in the war, Mama. White people. Black people. Yellow people.” Her boys’ other family.

“Your husband didn’t. Your husband—” She stops, unable to slander the father of her grandchildren.

“Mama. It’s not what you think.”

Her mother searches her. “Oh, don’t I know that. Nothin’s ever what I think.”

“It’s not one thing against the other. We’re not taking anything away. Just giving. Giving them space, choice, the right to make a life anywhere along—”

“This why you married a white man? So you could make babies light enough to do what they wouldn’t let you do?”

Delia knows why she married a white man. Knows the exact moment she was bound to him. But never in a million years could she explain to her mother what happened that day on the Mall, the future she saw.

Her mother stares out Haggern’s window at the passersby. “You could have stayed with us, sung every week for God and the people who need to hear Him. Why you need a fancy concert hall, where nobody gets to move or join in? There are more places to sing with us than you could have sung in a lifetime. More places to sing down here than there are in heaven.”

The kind of praise…the music I’ve studied…Every answer Delia thinks of breaks under its own weight. She’s saved by the waitress, who arrives with their orders. Steam still rises from Nettie Ellen’s slice of pie. The waitress slides it over. “Look here! This pie was hiding deep in the oven. Thinking itself too grand to come out and get eaten.”

“You try it yet?” Nettie Ellen asks.

“Ha! This place look like they treat me that good?”

“You go on have yourself a slice; tell them to put it on my bill. Go on!”

“Bless you, ma’am, but I gotta watch my figure. My man likes me all skinnied down. ‘Like a bar of soap at the end of the washing month.’”

“My man always trying to get me to fill out.”

“Gimme some of that. He got a son?”

“One.” Two, once. “But you’re going to have to wait another couple years before that particular pie comes out of the oven.”

“You come get me.” The waitress waves them both away, along with all the world’s foolishness. “I’ll be here.”

Delia will die of exile. She lived here once. Her boys never will. Never the leveling sass of a nation that sees through every pretension. One with more places to sing than even heaven. “Colored’s got to get bigger, Mama.” Something her daddy told her all her life.

“Colored, bigger? Colored’s got no room to get bigger. Colored’s been smashed down to the biggest little thing that can be, without disappearing. White’s got to get bigger. White’s never had room for nobody but itself.”

They pick at their snacks in silence. If only the children would come back. Prove to them both that nothing has changed. Still your boys. Still your grandchildren.

“White’s just one color. Black’s everything else. You gonna raise them to have a choice? That choice don’t belong to you. It don’t even belong to them. Everybody else is gonna make it for them!” Nettie Ellen puts down her fork. She’s in her daughter’s eye. “My own mother. My own mother. Had a father was white.”

The words rock Delia. Not the fact, which she long ago gathered, in the cracks of the family history. But her mother’s saying so, here, out loud. She shuts her eyes. In such pain, they could travel anywhere. “What…what was he like, Mama?”

“Like? We never laid eyes on that man. Never showed his face a day to any one of us. Never even helped pay part of her child’s way. Could have been anyone. Could have been your own man’s grandfather.”

Delia coughs a low, horrible gurgle. “No, Mama. David’s grandfather…was never anywhere near Carolina.”

“Don’t you mouth me. Don’t you backtalk.”

“No, Mama.”

“Here’s the thing I never understood. If white is so God-awful almighty, how come fifteen of their great-great-grandparents can’t even equal one of ours?”

Delia can’t help test a smile. “That’s just what I’m saying, Mama. Jonah and Joey, half their world… Don’t they come just as much from—”

“You hear anything from the man’s parents?”

David has written a hundred letters, probed scores of vaults: Rotterdam, Westerbork, Essen, Cologne, Sofia, all the systematic German records of the abyss. “Nothing yet, Mama. We’re still searching.”

Both women bow their heads. “White folks killed their grandparents. You can’t lie to them about that. You get them ready. That’s all your father’s saying, child.”

“It won’t always be this way. Things are changing, even now. We have to start making the future. It’s not going to come any other way.”

“Future! We got to make the here and now. We don’t even have that to live in, yet.”

The daughter looks away, at this room of people without a present. She doesn’t know how, but when she hears her boys sing, when they set out on their tiny adventures of canon and imitation, she finds her here and now, large enough to live in.

In that awful blood right, exercised so often as she was growing up, her mother reads her mind. “I never cared what music you sang. I never understood it myself. But anything you sang was fine by me, so long as you sang with everything you owned. And never called yourself anything you weren’t. What you going to tell them to call themselves?”

“Mama. That’s the point. We’re not calling them anything. That way, they’ll never have to call another person—”

“White? You raising them white?”

“Don’t be silly. We’re trying to raise them…beyond race.” The only stable and survivable world.

“‘Beyond’ means white. Only people who can afford ‘beyond.’”

“Mama, no. We’re raising them…” She looks for the word, and can only find nothing. “We’re raising them what they are. Themselves first.”

“Ain’t nobody so fine they deserve to put themselves first.”

“Mama, that’s not what I mean.”

“Nobody’s so good as that.” Four big beats of silence. Then: “What you going to give them, for everything you take away?”

Suppose it’s theft. Murder. The children return, saving Delia from answering. All four are rolling in hilarity. The girls pretend to be giant mechanical claws, their shrieking nephews the helpless gum balls. Nettie Ellen brings them into line with one sharp eyebrow.

“Grandmop,” Jonah says. “Aunties are crazy!”

She wraps her arms around the boy, petting his halfway hair. “How’re they crazy, child?”

“They say a lizard’s just a snake with legs. They say singing’s just talking, only speeded up.”

Their waitress comes to see if the children want to eat. The boys draw her up short. Delia sees the woman eye her boys’ skin tones, telling God knows what explanatory story. The waitress points at Jonah. “This ain’t the one I’m supposed to wait for, is it?”

Nettie shakes her head. Delia looks down, full of tears.

The children have their pie. For another fifteen minutes, she, her mother, her sisters, and her children are all there, talking, needing no name for anything but one another. She and her mother fight over the bill. She lets her mother win. They stand on the sidewalk, outside Haggern’s. Delia leans into her sisters, waiting for the invitation— Of course, child! — to come back to the great house just blocks away. Her home. There on the moving street, she waits her awkward eternity.

“Mama,” Delia begins, her voice as tight as the day of her first professional lesson. “Mama. I need your help with this. Get me back with the man.”

Nettie Ellen takes her by the elbows, fierce with knowing. “You can get back. You’re not even apart. You two just having a bad hour. ‘This too shall pass,’ the Book says. You just call him up on the telephone and tell him you’re sorry. Tell him you know you’re wrong.”

Delia stiffens. The condition of belonging: She and her husband, the thing they’ve thought about and chosen, must be surrendered as wrong. She may be wrong, wrong in all she’s decided, wrong in each thing she chooses, but she is right in her right to be. In the only world worth reaching, everyone owns all song. This much her father long ago preached to her, and this much he forces on her now.

They go their separate ways, Nettie and the twins to the doctor’s house, Delia and the boys to the train. Delia squeezes her sisters before they part. “Stop growing up so fast, now. I want to be able to recognize you, next time I see you.”

She tries — tries to call her father. She waits another week, hoping seven more days might blunt all conditions. But the phone call gets off to a catastrophic start and goes south from there. Then she, too, is saying horrible things into the phone, things she’s not capable of saying, things whose sole point is to leave her with things worth regretting forever.

Her time comes. She wants to turn to stone. She wants to lie in bed and never stand again. Only the boys get her through. Only that glance ahead, at company coming. She writes Nettie Ellen another note. Still her mother’s daughter.

Mama,

The baby’s coming. It’ll have to be this week or next. I can’t make it past that. This one’s strong. Takes after its grandfather, I guess, and it’s wearing me out. I’d so love if you could help again, like you did with Jonah and Joey. It’d be so good to have a woman to mind the boys. You know how helpless men are, when it counts. David would love it, too. You tell me what we can do to make this possible. It wouldn’t be right, having your new grandchild without you around! All love ever, Dee.

Every manipulation available. She’s not above anything that redemption might call for. But she’s not ready for the note she gets back.

Child

It was not easy for me to marry your father or have his children. Maybe you never thought that. He and I came from different worlds, different as anything you think you’ve gotten into. But I loved the man and I made him the promise like the Book talks about: “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee, for whither thou goest, I will go. And where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest will I die, and there will I be buried.” There’s nothing I put above this, and don’t ask me to. I understand you have to make the same promise to you and yours. I’m not casting you out, and you know we’re ever waiting to take you back in, when you want and when you need.

It’s signed “With love, Mrs. William Daley.” By letter’s end, Delia’s whole body convulses. When her husband finds her, the baby has already breached. He needs to call an ambulance, to rush mother and daughter to the hospital. She never tells him about the note, the only truth she ever conceals from him. When they tell her the child’s a girl, she says, “I know.” And when her husband asks, “What should we name her?” she says, “Her name is Ruth.”

Don Giovanni

Half a dozen places in Atlantic City might have hired me. This was the early 1970s, still the waning heyday of live music, and the music I played offended no one but me. There was a war going on. Not capitalism versus socialism, the United States versus Vietnam, students against their parents, North America versus the rest of the known continents. I mean the war of consonance against dissonance, electric against acoustic, written against improvised, rhythm against melody, shock against decency, long hair against longhair, past against future, rock against folk against jazz against metal against funk against blues against pop against gospel against country, black against white. Everybody had to choose, and music was your flag. Who you were depended on your radio presets. “Whose side,” the song wanted to know. “Whose side are you on?”

The secret to the music I’d played at the Glimmer Room was that it never committed. My professional survival consisted of playing a music that belonged to no one. Maybe every tune I played could be blood-typed, aligned with some warring faction. But I played with a strange, nonnative accent no one could quite place. By the time I’d put a song through the wringer of my self-taught riffing and seasoned it with the scraps of three hundred years of forgotten keyboard works, nobody could quite name it to claim or blame.

I couldn’t bear to return to playing. The house in Fort Lee sold. I paid the taxes on it and put the balance of Da’s assets in three accounts, one for each of us. My share meant that, for some finite but considerable number of months, I didn’t have to make a living by faking musical pleasure. Teresa encouraged me to languish for as long as I needed. She thought I was in mourning. She thought I only needed time to get my feet on the ground, and for that, she made me the most solid base imaginable. Saint T. cooked and took me outside for walks and warded off with a glance the gatekeepers of pedigree who might otherwise have beaten me to a pasty pulp.

Those weeks were much like real life, except for my constant flinching. “Sweet?” I said to her in the dark, on my half of her borrowed pillow. We got to the point where she could name that tune in one note. “You have to make up with your father. I can’t take it anymore. It’s on my conscience. You have to. There’s nothing more important.”

She lay on the bed next to me, silent, hearing what I was afraid to say. We both knew the only way that reconciliation could happen. She’d already written her father off, had already given up her family for a higher ideal. I could almost live with a choice that good. Except that her higher ideal was me.

She bought me a little Wurlitzer electric piano. It must have cost two years of saltwater taffy savings, and it was only a tenth of the instrument that I had sold for a few hundred dollars after my father died. She showed up at my place the day of delivery, hiding her face in excitement and fear. “I thought you might want something to practice on. And to work with. While you’re…while you aren’t…”

She couldn’t have hurt me more with a knife to the chest. I stared at the piano in its shipping container, the open casket of a lynching victim. I couldn’t tell her. The little thing was a double amputee. It had only forty-four keys, half what I needed to believe in it. Even the simplest arrangement would scrape its head on the ceiling. The thing’s action was like a screen door that wouldn’t close. I felt I was playing in winter gloves. It resembled a piano less than the Glimmer Room resembled those concert halls Jonah and I had once played. As I looked at her gift, Teresa sat hunched, a hand to her mouth, afraid to breathe, estranged from her family, her savings account wiped out. We’d all die of unreturnable kindness. Misplaced love supreme.

“It’s wonderful. I can’t believe it. You shouldn’t have. I don’t deserve this. We have to send it back.” A look came over her like I’d killed her dog. “Of course we’ll keep it. Come on. Let’s sing.” Leaden-fingered, I spun out a few arpeggios and launched into “Honeysuckle Rose.” All she’d hoped for. I could do that much.

The short, black, crippled handbag of a keyboard became my penance. I came to prefer playing on it over playing a real keyboard, the way a person with a sprained back might come to prefer sleeping on the floor over sleeping on a mattress. I liked playing it without turning the power on. The keys made a muffled, thumping pitch, their sound buried under a bushel. I wanted to shrink down, into a miniature shoebox performance. If I had to play, the smaller the better.

Teresa wanted nothing from the gift except to please. That’s what destroyed me. She thought I missed playing, that I needed some lifeline to keep me afloat. A woman with her work history should have thrown me out on my ear. But so long as she could help me keep my music alive, she didn’t care if I ever went back to work. We had our piano. For a while, we sang almost every evening, now that my performing didn’t get in the way. For the first time since childhood, I played for no reason but playing. When Jonah and I had toured, we were never alone. We were always answerable, first to the notes on the page and then to the bodies in the auditorium. Even when we rehearsed, twisting around the tune in lockstep, other ears were already listening between us. Teresa and I were all alone. We collided into each other, faltering and finessing our way across a finish line, each deferring to the other. We had no printed notes to prop us or impede us, no listening ear, no living audience to interfere. Nobody to hear but each other.

She’d get sullen and apologetic when we didn’t swing. She had this little stutter-step thing she’d picked up from Sarah Vaughan, who’d picked it up from Ella Fitzgerald, who’d picked it up from Louis Armstrong, who’d picked it up from the deep recesses of his orphanage’s singing school. I’d follow out the phrases, thinking, She’s never going to make it. It made her nuts every time I’d try to hook up with her hiccups. She was all rhythm and line, the syncopated flight from the rest of her life. I was all harmony and chord, packing each vertical moment with sixths, flatted ninths, more simultaneous notes than the texture would bear. But somehow, we made music together. Our tunes turned their back on the wide outside, willfully ignorant and almost too beautiful, some nights, in pleasing no one but their makers.

While Teresa was at the factory packing taffy, I read the news or watched daytime television. I no longer practiced, aside from picking up a song or two in the late afternoon, before Teresa came home. I took the time to learn what had happened in the world since the death of Richard Strauss. The television jumbled my viewing days, until I didn’t know how many months had passed. I watched the My Lai trial and the crumbling of peace with honor. I watched Wallace get shot and Nixon get reelected and go to China. I watched the Arabs and Israelis recommence their eternal war, pushing the world to the unthinkable brink. I watched Biafra die and Bangladesh, Gambia, the Bahamas, and Sri Lanka get born. I sat still while a handful of pre-Americans declared their own breakaway, recovered country, which lasted for seventy days. And I felt nothing but anesthetized shame.

For one brief moment, it was nation time, crowds of people chanting, their voices shaking with the belief that their hour had finally come. Then, just as quickly: no nation. Systematically, the U.S. government buried Black Power. Newton and Seale, Cleaver and Carmichael: The movement’s leaders were jailed or driven from the country. Scenes from Attica leaked out, an inferno deep enough to match any nation’s. George Jackson was killed by prison guards in San Quentin. He was exactly Emmett Till’s age, my brother’s age. The official report said he was leading an armed revolt. Fellow inmates said he was set up and murdered. SNCC was broken up for parts and the Panthers destroyed by COINTELPRO. Somewhere out there, my fugitive sister and Robert were hiding, among the other twice-defeated, all those who worked to steal their country back and were destroyed in the process.

When I could not dose myself with current events, I flipped through sitcoms, game shows, and soaps. Nothing Jonah and I were guilty of in all our performing years could match, in sheer flight from the present’s nightmare, the best of contemporary culture. Armstrong died, and then Ellington. The heartbeat of what should have been my country’s music changed. The thing that replaced it, the official sound track for all seasons that overgrew every cultural niche like kudzu claiming an abandoned vehicle, declared that rhythm consisted of slamming down hard on beats two and four and harmony meant adding a daring seventh now and then to one of two combating chords. There was no place in earshot I wanted to live. It was impossible even to think about performing in front of other people, ever again.

“Have you ever thought about composing?” Teresa asked one night as we were drying dinner dishes.

“I’m okay,” I said. “I can get a job.”

“Joseph, that’s not what I’m asking. I just thought that maybe, with all this time, you might have something…”

Something inside me, worth writing down. It hit me — why I was afraid to get another nightclub job. I was afraid that Wilson Hart might really show up someday, wherever I was noodling, and ask to see the portfolio of pieces I’d promised him to write. You and me, Mix. They’re gonna hear our sounds, before we’re done with this place. I was destined to disappoint everyone I loved, everyone who thought there might be something in me worth composing.

Terrie’s patience with me was more deadly than any racial assault. I went out the next day and bought a box of pencils and a sheaf of twenty-inch cream-stock music paper. I bought paper with grand staff systems, paper with treble staffs and piano systems, paper with unmarked, unjoined staffs — anything that looked remotely serious. I had no idea what I was doing. I stacked up the blank scores on the electric piano and lined up the pencils in neat rows, each one sharpened to a lethal weapon. Teresa’s barely suppressed excitement at my fortress of composition supplies hurt me more than my father’s death.

All day long while I waited, jittery, for Teresa to come home, I pretended to write music. Fragments of phrases crawled in clumps here and there across the cream stock, like spiders making nests in the corners of abandoned summer homes. I’d jot down a strain, motif by motif. Sometimes the strains would collide together into near melodies, every articulation literally spelled out. Sometimes they stayed nothing more than a series of tetrachords without rhythmic values or bar lines. I was writing for no ensemble, no instrument at all, not even piano and voice. My imagined audience was spread all over the map, and I could not tell if I was writing pop songs or thorny, academic abstraction. I never erased a note. If a phrase hit a wall, I’d simply start over again somewhere else, on an unused staff. When a page filled up, I’d flip it over and fill the back. Then I’d start another.

These were the longest days of my life, longer by far than my days in a Juilliard practice room, longer, even, than the days I’d spent at the side of my father’s hospital bed. I worked it out at one point: I was writing down about 140 notes an hour — two and a third triads every three minutes. Sometimes the act of filling in a single note head could absorb me for half an afternoon.

My bits of graphite scratching remained stubbornly wooden. The puppet refused to sit up and speak. But now and again, at enormous intervals, always when I’d lost track of myself and forgotten what I was after, the edge of something truly musical would shake loose. I’d feel myself racing ahead of myself, out beyond the phrase, into the next arc of a line whose accidentals were there even before my pencil could fix them. My whole body would rally, drawn up into the forward motion, throwing off the leadenness I’d felt for years, without feeling. I’d flood with more ideas than I could hold, and I had to force my pencil into a panicky shorthand just to keep up. For the length of this rush of notes, I owned music’s twelve tones and could make them say what life had only ever hinted at.

But then I’d make the mistake of going back and playing these self-propelling themes out loud. After a few chords, I’d begin to hear. Everything that I wrote down came from somewhere else. With a rhythm slightly bobbed or taken out, a pitch swapped or altered here and there, my melodies simply stole from ones that had used and discarded me sometime in the past. All I did was dress them up and hide them in progressive dissonance. A Schütz chorus we sang at home, pieces from Mama’s funeral, the first Schumann Dichterliebe, the one that Jonah loved, split ambiguously between major and relative minor, never to resolve: There wasn’t an original idea in me. All I could do — and that, only without knowing — was revive the motives that had hijacked my life.

When Teresa finally did come home after work, she’d try clumsily to mask her thrill at my growing stack of penciled-up pages. She still couldn’t read music very well, and there wasn’t much music there for her to read. Sometimes, even before she’d changed out of her briny factory clothes, she’d stand at the piano and ask, “Play a little for me, Joseph.” I’d play a bit, knowing she’d never hear the rip-offs hidden in it. My scribbles made Teresa so happy. Her $120 weekly wage was barely enough to support her on her own. But she gladly floated me, and would go on doing so forever, all in the belief that I was making new music for the world.

Our shared fantasy of two-part harmony would start up again each night, tiding us over until the next morning. Sometimes the two of us could find nothing better to do together than watch television. Dramas about white people suffering the hardships of rural life, miles from civilization, years ago. Comedies about working-class bigots and the lovably hateful things they said. Epic sporting conflicts whose outcomes I can’t remember. The national fare of the 1970s.

Teresa didn’t like watching the news, but I pushed. Eventually, she caved in and let us watch David Brinkley over dinner. My sense that the world was ending slowly died out, leaving me with the sense that it already had. I fell into the most powerful of addictions: the need to witness huge things happening at a distance. I had the zeal of a late-day convert, my whole sheltered life to make up for. Here were storm and stress, all the violent, focused disclosures of art, on a scale that left the music I was fiddling with flat and pointless.

We were watching one night when I found myself staring down Massachusetts Avenue, past the drugstore where I’d once bought an ID bracelet for Malalai Gilani and failed to get it inscribed. My path up to that very evening seemed, for a moment, to be the piece I was so desperate to write, the one I’d set down in memory during all those hours in the practice rooms at Boylston. Teresa was the woman Malalai had grown into, or Malalai the girl I’d thought Teresa had been. Of course the bracelet wasn’t inscribed; it had been waiting for my adulthood to inscribe it.

The camera panned down Mass. Ave., the tunnel of my life unfolding on Teresa’s eleven-inch television screen. Then by some nonsensical cut meant to deceive those who’d never lived there, the camera jumped impossibly from the Fens to Southie, the other side of Roxbury. Children were getting off a bus. The voice of invisible network television authority declared, “Children bussed to their first day of school were met with…” But the sound track meant nothing. We had only to look: rocks and flying sticks, a fury-twisted mob. Teresa clamped down on my arm as children outside the arriving busses gave a delighted, drunken first-day welcome: “Hey, nigger! Hey, nigger!”

It read like some primordial, inbred scene that was supposed to have died out in the swampy South, back before my childhood’s end. I forgot what year we were in. This year. This one. Teresa’s eyes stared straight ahead, afraid to look at me, afraid to look away. “Joseph,” she said, more to herself than me. “Joe?” As if I could be her explanation. A white girl from Atlantic City, watching this scene. A girl whose father had for years told her where all the trouble came from. And in her look, I saw what I looked like to her. She wanted the news story to end and knew it couldn’t. She wanted me to say something. Wanted to pass over, as if nothing needed saying.

I pointed at the screen, still excited by the sight of my old neighborhood. “That’s where I went to school. The Boylston Academy of Music. Six blocks up that street and make a left.”

I’d known for a long time, but it took me years to admit. War. Total, continuous, unsolvable. Everything you did or said or loved took sides. The Southie busses were only news for a quarter of a minute. Four measures of andante. Then Mr. Brinkley went on to the next story — the crisis in the space program. It seemed humankind had walked on the moon half a dozen times and brought back several hundred pounds of rock, and now it didn’t know what else to do with itself or where else in the universe it wanted to go.

I lay next to Teresa that night, feeling the length of her tense with me. She needed to say something, but she couldn’t even locate the fact inside herself. In that silence, we belonged to different races. I didn’t know what race I belonged to. Only that it wasn’t Ter’s.

“God should have made more continents,” I said. “And made them a lot smaller. The whole world, like the South Pacific.”

Teresa had no idea what I was talking about. She didn’t sleep that night. I know — I was awake to hear her. But when we asked each other the next morning, we both said we’d slept fine. I stopped watching the news with her. We went back to singing and playing cribbage, working at the factory and plagiarizing the world’s great tunes.

Another year collapsed, and I heard nothing from my sister. Wherever she and Robert were hiding, it was nowhere near my America. If they’d risen again in the already-amnesiac seventies under assumed names, they did not risk notifying me. Somewhere during those missing months while I’d watched TV, I’d turned thirty. I’d celebrated Jonah’s the year before that, sending him a little cassette of Teresa and me performing a Wesley Wilson song, “Old Age Is Creeping Up on You,” with Teresa doing a scary Pigmeat Pete and me supplying a little Catjuice Charlie in the response. If Jonah ever got the tape, I never heard. Maybe he thought it was in bad taste.

He did write. Not often, and never satisfactorily, but he did let me know what was happening. I got the story in bits and pieces, in clippings, reviews, letters, and bootleg recordings. I even heard accounts from envious old school friends who’d stayed in the classical ghetto. My brother was making his way, stepping into the world he knew would eventually belong to him. He was one of the new wave’s newer voices, a breath of fresh revision from an unexpected quarter, a rising star in five different countries.

He lived in Paris now, where no one questioned his right to interpret any piece of vocal music that fell within his copious range. No one challenged his cultural rights except, of course, on national grounds. The reputation that had plagued him in the States — that his voice was too clean, too light — melted away in Europe. There, they heard only his limber soar. They handed him a beautifully furnished future to move into. They called him “effortless,” Europe’s highest compliment. They said he was the concert tenor the 1970s had been waiting for. They meant that as a compliment, too.

Now that he had no bad rap of lightness to overcome, Jonah often soloed with orchestras. The reviews adored how he could make even the most complex, thickly layered twentieth-century textures feel airy and audible. He soloed under the same conductors whose recordings we’d grown up on. He performed Hindemith’s Das Unaufhörliche with Haitink and the Concertgebouw. He did the tenor solo in Szymanowski’s Third Symphony— The Song of the Night — with Warsaw, standing in for the ailing Józef Meissner, who let the understudy do the role only twice before racing back to reclaim it. The French critics, suckers for discovery, praised the still-little-known piece as “voluptuous” and the increasingly visible singer as “floating, ethereal, and almost unbearably beautiful.”

But Jonah’s new signature piece was A Child of Our Time, Michael Tippett’s haunted wartime oratorio, the present’s answer to Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion. Only Tippett’s protagonist was not the Son of God, but a boy abandoned by all divinity. A Jewish boy, hiding in Paris, enraged by the Nazi persecution of his mother, kills a German officer and touches off a pogrom. In place of Bach’s Protestant chorales, Tippett sought something more universal, more able to cross all musical borders. His material reached him by chance, on a wartime radio broadcast: the Hall Johnson Choir performing Negro spirituals.

Here was the hybrid piece Jonah was born to sing. How the Europeans connected him to the music — what they heard or saw — I can’t imagine. But over the course of a few years, my brother sang the massive work with four conductors and three orchestras — two British and one Belgian. He recorded the piece in 1975 with Birmingham. It made his name, everywhere except in his own country. In the wads of newspaper clippings he sent me, often with not even a note, he was depicted as a still-young voice pushing outward, threatening to become a secular angel.

He’d called me from Paris, back in 1972, in tears at the news of Jackie Robinson’s death. “Dead, Mule. Rickey threw the poor bastard into the cauldron and wouldn’t let him do anything but hit the ball. ‘I want a man who’s brave enough not to fight back.’ What shit is that, Joey? A lose-lose situation, and the man won.” I couldn’t tell why he was calling. My brother knew nothing about baseball. My brother hated America. “Who’s hot now, Mule?”

“You mean singers?”

“Ballplayers, you bastard.”

I hadn’t a clue. The Yankee broadcasts were hardly on my daily diet.

Jonah sighed, his breath echoing down the transatlantic delay. “Mule? It’s a funny thing. I had to move here to learn how hopeless I am. This whole City of Light crap? Total fabrication. One of the most smugly racist towns I’ve ever lived in. New York makes this place look like Selma. They want to see a birth certificate before they’ll sell me cheese. I got beaten up by this guy down in the Thirteenth. Really beaten. Don’t worry, bro. I’m talking six months ago. Went at me with fists. Broke a molar. I’m sitting there slapping him like some gonad-clipped castrato, thinking, But they don’t have a Negro problem here! I’m thinking Josephine Baker, Richard Wright, Jimmy Baldwin. I’m telling this guy, ‘Your people love my people.’ Turns out — the accent, the heavy tan — he thought I was Algerian. Punishing me for the revolution. Jesus, Mule. By the time we’re dead, we’ll have paid for every sin on earth except our own.”

Riffing for me. But who else would buy this performance? Paris was no better or worse than any capital. What crushed him was the loss of his would-be hideout. He’d dreamed of total self-reinvention, a home that would grant him a permanent reentry visa. No place on any implicated continent would ever give him that.

“I don’t know how much longer I can live here, Joey.”

“Where would you go?”

“I’m thinking maybe Denmark? They love me in Scandinavia.”

“Jonah. They love you in France. I’ve never seen such notices.”

“I’m only sending the good ones.”

“Are you sure that leaving Paris is smart, professionally? How will I reach you?”

“Easy, fella. I’ll be in touch.”

“Do you need cash? Your share…your account with the money from the house…”

“I’m flush. Let it ride. Play the market or something.”

“It’s in your name.”

“Great. So long as I don’t change my name, I’m in business.” He made a quick accelerando—“Miss you, man”—and hung up before I could miss him back.

The longer I composed, the more fraudulent I became. My notes were going nowhere but backward. Even I couldn’t abuse Teresa’s arts grant forever. Unfit for any honest work, I advertised for piano students. I worked forever on the ad: “Juilliard-trained”—I never claimed to have graduated —“concert pianist, good with beginners…” It amazed me to think how the words concert pianist still conjured something in this country, long after concerts ceased to draw.

Sometimes parents jerked when they met the man behind the ad. They let their child take a token lesson. Then they apologized, explaining that their child really wanted to study the cornet. It never bothered me. I wouldn’t have studied piano with me, either. I couldn’t see why anyone wanted to study piano anymore anyway. In another few years, we’d all be replaced with Moog synthesizers. To the electronic future, the best musicians already proclaimed, Those of us already dead salute you.

But somehow, I managed to draw students. Some of them even seemed to enjoy playing. I got eight-year-old working-class kids who hummed over the keys. I got middle-aged recidivists who simply wanted to play the “Minute Waltz” again in something under a hundred seconds, before they died. I taught natural talents who got by on an hour of practice a week and earnest acolytes who’d go to their graves trying to play those lines that taunted them in their sleep, floating just out of reach of their fingers. Not one of my students would end up onstage except at their school’s talent show. They or their parents were still victims of that discredited belief that equated playing a little piano with being a little more free. I tried to fit the student to the path, to have each one pick his or her own way through the centuries of overflowing repertoire. One little middle-class Mayflower descendant caught fire with his father’s old John Thompson method, striving to play every poky folk tune at flat-out prestissimo. The daughter of two Hungarian escapees who came over in the wake of ’56 giggled her way through Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, screwing up her face at the gentle dissonances in the contrary motion, hearing some dim echo that wasn’t, any longer, even racial memory. I had no blacks. The black students of Atlantic City studied in some other classroom.

I worked to make the dying notes come alive. I had my students play at glacial speeds, doubling the tempo every four bars. I sat next to them on the piano bench, playing the left hand while they played the right. Then we switched and started over again. I told them this was an exercise in developing two brains, the clean split of thought needed for independent equal-handedness. I tried to make them see that every piece of music was an infant uprising that stumbled onto democracy or died on the page.

I taught one girl, a high school junior, named Cindy Hang. She wouldn’t tell me her real first name, her birth name, although I asked her several times. She said she was Chinese — the answer of easiest resort. Her father, a loan officer from Trenton who’d adopted her, along with a younger Cambodian boy, said Hmong. Her English was a soft-pedaled mezzo piano, although her grammar already ran rings around her native-born classmates. She spoke as little as possible, and when she could get away with it, not at all. She’d come to the piano late, starting only four years before, at thirteen. But she played like a crippled cherub.

Something in her technique startled me. Out of pure greed, I gave her ridiculous pieces — Busoni, Rubenstein — show pieces and schmaltz I had no stomach for. I knew they’d come back in a few weeks, pulsing as I’d never heard them. Like the Bible translated into the clicks and hums of whales: incomprehensible, alien, but still recognizable. Her fingers invented from scratch the idea of harmonic structure. She listened with them, a safecracker feeling the tumblers through gloves. She stroked the keys as if apologizing to them in advance. But even her lightest touch had the force of a refugee displaced by organized violence.

Every lesson with Cindy Hang left me feeling criminal. “I’ve got nothing to teach her,” I told Teresa. Saying even that much was a mistake.

“Oh, I bet there’s all sorts of things you can teach her.”

Her voice fell into a note it never sounded. But I refused to be baited. “Anything I teach her will destroy what she does. She has the most amazing touch.”

“Touch?” Like I’d hit her.

“Ter. Sweetie. The girl is only seventeen.”

“Exactly.” Her voice clutched tight to nothing.

Things got worse. After Cindy’s lessons, I felt Teresa straining for the ordinary. She’d ask, “How’d it go?” And I’d answer just as casually, “Not bad.” I had a lengthy mental list of pieces I couldn’t assign the girl— Liebesträume, the Moonlight, “Prelude to a Kiss,” any Fantasie. All the while, Cindy Hang worked harder and played more dazedly, no doubt wondering why the better she performed, the more remote her teacher became.

I had felt no desire for the child until Teresa suggested it. Then, in the smallest, deniable increments, she grew to consume me. I’d meet her nightly in my dreams, the two of us thrown together in some mass wartime deportation, reading each other’s needs without the weight of earthbound speech. I dressed her in navy blue, a midcalf dress with wide shoulders, now four decades out of date. Everything was right, except the hair, which curled in my dreams. I’d put my ear to that brown ravine beneath her clavicle, the one I saw in waking, while she sat upright on the bench, playing for me. When I touched my ear to her skin, the blood coursing underneath it sounded like chant.

Cindy Hang’s skin was perfect — that nonaligned brown belonging to half the human race. I loved the girl for her vulnerability, her total bewilderment at where she’d landed, the tentative attempts at recovery in her fingers’ every probe. I loved how she sounded, as if she’d come from another planet — something this planet would never house. I told myself for weeks there was no problem. But I wanted something from Cindy Hang, something I didn’t even know I wanted until Teresa’s jealousy pointed it out to me.

We played together, Mozart’s D Major Sonata for piano four hands, Köchel 381. I assigned the piece just to allow me to sit by her on the piano bench. There are only four profound measures in the piece; the rest is mostly note spinning. But I looked forward to it as to nothing else in my life. It brought me back da capo, to where I’d started. We played the middle movement together, a little slower than it should go. She took the upper part and I supported her. My lines were full and broad. Hers were the lightest exploration, like a bird foraging. I felt I was striding through a crowded fairgrounds with a happy child on my shoulders.

One lesson, we played it perfectly. Under our fingers, the modest little piece completed what it was meant to do in this life. We finished playing, my pupil and I both aware of what we’d just done. Cindy kept still on the bench next to me, head down, looking at the keys, waiting for me to touch her. When I didn’t, she looked up, her mouth a crooked smile, desperate to please. “We can try it again? From the beginning?”

I called her father. I told him that Cindy was extremely talented, “a real musician,” but that she’d outgrown everything I was able to teach her. I could help him find someone who’d move her forward. In fact, I felt secretly sure any other teacher would kill all that was strangest and most luminous in her playing. That scumbled virtuosity of the nonnative speaker wouldn’t survive her first real lesson. But whatever another teacher might do to her was better than what I would, if she studied with me another week.

Cindy’s father was too confused to object. “Would you like to talk to her? Explain this to her yourself?”

I must have said something absurd, because I can’t remember it. I got off the line without talking to her. For months afterward, I said nothing to Teresa. My telling her would only confirm her fears. When I told her at last, she was truly miserable, all the misery that only truth can bring. She dragged around for two weeks, trying to fix things. “Maybe you should give up teaching, Joseph. You haven’t worked on your own music since you started.”

I stopped dreaming of Cindy Hang, except for that strange, surgical otherworldliness of her playing. In her hands, the long lines of Europe became something they’d never recognized in themselves. I never heard the likes of her sound again. Alone of all my students, the girl might have learned to make music at will. But the way she played would have had to die, on the way to any real stage.

Banishing Cindy brought Terrie and me closer for a while, if only in shared guilt. Teresa had given up more to live with me than I could ever repay. I carried that fact around with me like a prison record. I grew daily more certain that she couldn’t afford to be with me. She wanted to devote herself to someone who’d devoted himself to the thing she loved most in all the world. She wanted to marry a musician. It was that simple. She wanted me to marry her. She thought that signing the papers, making it official, would destroy our perpetual anxiety and bring down all walls. He’s my husband, she could explain to the venomous cashiers, to the men who followed us down the street, threatening, to the police cars tracking our public movements. He’s my husband, she’d say, and they’d have no comeback.

Sometimes at night, stirred by our closeness in the dark, she brought it up in whispers. She painted a fantasy for me, a house, a sovereign state of our own with its own flag and national anthem, perhaps a growing populace. I never objected, and in the dark, she took my willing listening as assent.

With the future in limbo between us, my ability to make music do anything fell almost to zero. The world away from the keyboard was even worse. Running the vacuum for half an hour exhausted me. A trip to the grocery store swelled into an expedition to scale Everest. Maybe we ought to marry, I thought. Marry and move to someplace survivable. But I didn’t know how. If Teresa just took care of everything, handled all the mechanics, told me when it was over…

Inert, I figured that the odds of my dying before having to act on anything like an implied promise would eventually grow overwhelming. I was over thirty, the age beyond which no one was to be trusted. Teresa closed in on the same landmark, the age beyond which an unmarried woman probably never would be. It should have seemed natural to me. It was what I’d grown up knowing: a spouse of each color. But a quarter of a century had beaten the natural out of me. All my family’s lessons had reduced to one: No one marries outside their race and lives.

Teresa thought of me as half white. We sang together, and never had a problem. She thought she recognized me. She saw me working away, trying to write white music. Everything I kept from her allowed her to go on thinking as much. Once she asked about my father’s family. She wanted something to attach to. “Where are they from?”

“Germany.”

“I know that, goof. Where in Germany?”

I didn’t have a good answer. “They lived in Essen, until the war. My…father was from Strasbourg, originally.”

“Originally?”

I laughed. “Well, originally, I guess they all came from Canaan.”

“Where?” All I could do was touch her hair. “Well, where are they all now?” Not a hesitation. She was that pure.

“Gone.”

She worked on this. Her own people had cut her off, but she knew where everyone was. She still sent cards on every cousin’s birthday, even if the rate of return had dropped near zero. “Gone?” Then it hit her, and she needed no more clarifying.

She asked about Mama’s people. I told what I knew. Doctor grandfather and his wife and children in Philadelphia “When can I meet them, Joe?” No one called me Joe. “I’d be happy to go with you, anytime.” I couldn’t even tell her. We weren’t even close enough to be different species.

I saw what I was doing to her only by accident. Once a week, I still went through her collection and learned a track for her. After dinner, I sat down at the Wurlitzer, fiddled around on arpeggios, then launched into an introduction. Her game was to figure out the tune and be ready to sing on the first verse’s downbeat. She always was, her face alight, as if I’d just handed her a wrapped gift. One night in April of 1975, we ripped through a try at “There’s a Rainbow Round My Shoulder,” a song I’d never come across until that afternoon. Terrie got as far as

Hallelujah, how the folks will stare,

When they see the diamond solitaire,

That my little sugar baby is gonna wear!

Yes, sir!

She broke off, a mangle of laughing and crying. She came and threw her arms around my shoulders, and for another few measures, I goofed around on five straitjacketed notes. “Oh, my Joe-bird. We’ve got to do it. Got to make it legal!”

I looked at her and said, like some 1930s hepcat, “Whatever my little sugar baby wants. Who am I to break the law?” She seemed as happy at these words as if we’d gone and done the deed already. Just the intent seemed enough.

Two weeks later, rooting through her records in search of another captive, I glimpsed a sheet of fancy rag paper sticking out from a stack of books on her writing desk. The color caught my eye, and I excavated it, a handmade wedding invitation. Across its middle, there bent a great rainbow arc. Along the top ran the hand-lettered message: “There’s a rainbow round my shoulder.” Inside the arc, she’d penned, “And it fits me like a glove.” Below, in a file of straight lines, Teresa had written, “TIME,” “DATE,” and “PLACE,” all of which she’d left trustingly blank, pending happy consultation with me. Under these, she’d written, “Come help us celebrate the union of Teresa Maria Elisabeth Clara Wierzbicki and Joseph Strom.” At the very bottom, in a jaunty hand, she’d added, “Hallelujah, we’re in love!”

The thing sunk into my chest up to the hilt. She wanted people there, a public declaration. I might somehow have managed to slip off to a justice of the peace, provided we never actually told anyone. But a wedding, with invitations: impossible. To whom could she have thought we’d send invitations? My family was dead and hers had disowned her. We shared no friends in common, none who would come to such a party. I pictured her scenario: walking down the aisle of some religious structure, part Catholic, part A.M.E., part synagogue, her Polish factory workers and my Black Panther connections eyeing one another across the median. The two of us, in front of a room of people, cutting into a three-tiered wedding cake. Hallelujah, how the folks would stare.

I buried the unfinished project back under her books, just as I’d found it. I never said anything. But she knew. Something in the way I behaved toward her, too brightly affectionate. I kept bracing for the presentation, the finished invitation. Here: I made this for you. But the moment never came. Teresa’s handmade celebration disappeared from the stack on her desk into some solitary hope chest she never opened for anyone.

That’s when I gave up all pretense of composition. I boxed up my sheaf of pencil-scratched music stock and consigned it to storage.

I heard from Jonah again, not long after. He never made it to Scandinavia. “Dear Bro,” his letter started. “Big doings here. I’ve found my calling.” As if singing with the London Symphony Orchestra and l’Orchestre philharmonique de Radio-France had been a wrong number.

I was in Strasbourg, doing the bounding tenor bit to the millionth rendition of the almighty NINTH this season, a truly gimmicky performance in the new “Capital of Europe,” with soloists, conductor, and musicians from two dozen countries. Not sure who I was supposed to represent. We were thundering around the back stretch when, all of a sudden, the grotesqueness of the situation finally dawned on me. All my life, I’ve been this dutiful trooper for late-day cultural imperialism. Alle Menschen werden Brüder: Christ on a bloody crutch. Gimme a break. What planet does that guy live on? Not ours; not the Planet of the Apes.

I got through the piece all right, but afterward, I developed this profound allergic reaction to everything past 1750. I canceled three engagements, all big, blowsy nineteenth-century puff pieces. I managed to stumble through a large-forces staging of The Creation down in Lyon without tossing my cookies, but it was nip and tuck… When I got back to Paris, I happened by chance to catch this group from Flanders, a dozen singers, performing at the Cluny. I’ve never heard anything like it. Like landing after a long, rough flight and having your ears pop. In all those big-hall, 150-performer things, I’d forgotten what singing was supposed to be about… A thousand years of written-out scores, Joey. And we’ve only ever bothered with the last century and a half. We’re living in this one little wing of a rambling mansion… A thousand years! You have any idea how big a place that is?

Big enough for my brother to disappear into at last.

It’s taken me a while to purge my voice of all the tacky tricks and show-time shit I’ve been stroked for these last few years. But I’m finally clean. I’ve followed this group, the Kampen Ensemble, up to Ghent, and at last I have a worthy teacher again, after a long, lonely spell in the desert: Geert Kampen — a real master, and one of the most musical souls I’ve ever met. I’m just another reed in his little collegium, and we’re hardly the only group plunging into this stuff. Suddenly, the past is the coming thing. There’s a whole school up in the Netherlands, and one’s even starting back in Paris. Something’s happening. A whole wave of people reinventing early music. I mean the earliest. Just wait, Mule. This movement will hit the States in a few years. You guys are always behind the times, even when it comes to being behind the times! And once it hits, you’ll see: Nostalgia will never be the same again…

I’ve learned not to speak French in the Flanders shops, though German doesn’t go over a whole lot better. Even English doesn’t entirely convince people I’m not a Turkish “guest” laborer here to take coal-mining jobs away from the natives. I am, however, never safer than when the words are sung. I did manage to salvage the best of Paris and carry her up to civilization with me. Her name is Celeste Marin. She knows all about you, and we’re both waiting for you to get your ass out here so you can meet my new woman and hear my new voice. Better hurry. Not even the past can last forever.

I read the letter with mounting panic. Halfway through, I wanted to send him a telegram. My brother had achieved a level of success that almost justified the botched experiment our parents made of us. And on the verge of real recognition, he’d taken it into his head to walk away again, into some cult. My own disaster of a life lost its last shot at redemption. So long as I’d sacrificed myself to launch Jonah, I hadn’t entirely wasted myself. But if he bagged everything, then I was truly lost. I started to write him, but I couldn’t. I had nothing to say except Don’t do it. Don’t throw away your chance. Don’t trash your calling. Don’t mock Beethoven. For God’s sake, don’t move to Belgium. Above all, don’t marry a Frenchwoman.

I bought some recordings by the Kampen Ensemble, which I had to special-order. I listened to them in secret when Teresa wasn’t home, hiding them, like porno, where she’d never come across them, even by accident. The crumhorn-infested disks had an alien charm, like coming across an elaborate piece of wrought iron in a dusty store, something that meant life or death to some farmer once but which now had no function in the whole known world. Nothing in the thickets of complex counterpoint remotely resembled a hummable tune. The singers pared their voices back to dry points and reined in their phrases until nothing wavered or swelled. Everything we’d most loved in music was only hinted at, waiting to be born. I couldn’t hear what electrified Jonah. He was a master chef who’d perfected the secret of nuanced sauces renouncing the kitchen and taking to nuts and berries. It seemed a cheap escape. But then, I was a second-rate, fifteen-hour-a-week piano teacher and abortive composer, living off a factory worker’s good graces. In Atlantic City.

Alone during the day, I took the contraband records out and listened. The third time through the earliest Kampen Ensemble disk, an old Orlando Lassus song separated itself from the other chansons. “Bonjour mon coeur.” I’d known the tune from before it had been written. “Hello my heart, hello my sweet life, my eye, my dear friend.” And in the piece, I heard myself, at my first hearing. I backed down that narrow air shaft the wrong way, before our years of touring, before Juilliard’s prison practice rooms, before Boylston’s chamber choir, down below our earliest family evenings, each of us on an independent part. “Hello my completely beautiful, my sweet spring, my new flower.” In the song’s first four notes, I stood outside that stone room where I’d heard that tune for the first time. I’m seven; my brother is eight. My father has just taken us to the northern tip of the island, a medieval cloister, where singers unravel their amazing instant. “My sparrow, my turtle dove. Good morning, my gentle rebel.” And afterward, my brother declares, “When I grow up? When I’m an adult? I want to do what those people do.”

I didn’t know then who “those people” were. I didn’t know now. I knew only that we weren’t them. Hearing the song, I was filled with an urge to return to the Cloisters, a place I hadn’t been for decades. Standing in that place might spring some memory, take me back to where we were headed, help me find what was happening to Jonah. I asked Ter if she’d like to go to the city. Her eyes shone like hard candy.

“You kidding me? Manhattan? Just you and me?”

“And six and a half million potential mass murderers.”

“New York, New York. My man and me, loose in the city!” It had been some time, it seemed, since we’d taken a holiday. I’d dragged her underground, into the inner keep of my isolation, and she had followed, for music’s sake. But there was no safety, it had turned out, even in solitude. Especially there. “NYC! We’re going to start at Bloomie’s and head south. And we’re not going to stop until we find you a suit.”

“I have a suit.”

“A modern suit. A nice concert suit, with a nice flare and without any safety pins holding it together.”

“Why in the world would I need a suit?” Teresa shrank from my words, and the light went out. “I need to get shoes first,” I said, and she returned a little.

I suggested that after we’d shopped, we might head up to see the Cloisters. Teresa thought the place was a sporting arena. Her eyebrows bounced when I told her. “I didn’t know you were Catholic!”

“I didn’t, either.”

We spent the morning shopping in public, a compendium of my largest private hells. Teresa dealt with all slights as she always did, pretending that everything shy of direct aggression wasn’t happening. “What are pianists wearing onstage these days? What’s in style for concert attire this year?”

“Not this,” was all I could say.

Her frustration mounted. Anxious about making it to Washington Heights, I agreed to a hopeless, brown, double-breasted thing of no use except to further drain savings. “You sure? This is good, you think? You’ll be a babe slayer in it, anywhere you play. I’ll tell you that much, buster.”

We left the suit for alterations, giving me another week to bail out of the purchase and lose no more than the deposit. We took the Uptown A. All the while, hanging on her strap, Teresa sang Ellington and Strayhorn in my ear, like the most shameless out-of-town tourist. Feeling the bored smirks of every passenger in the car, I harmonized sotto voce.

They’d rearranged the Cloisters in the years since I’d been — moved the stones, shrunk them down, simplified the vaults and capitals. Teresa couldn’t figure out the ersatz medieval grab bag. “You mean this guy just went around buying up monasteries all over the place?”

“The ways of white folk are beyond understanding.”

“Joseph. Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“You know what. How do you buy a monastery anyway?”

“Huh. How do you sell one?”

“I mean, buy a Spanish, get a Portuguese half price?” I squeezed her until she glinted. “And then they just put them all back together like some big jigsaw? Buy me one of these, Joseph. Nice row of columns. Wouldn’t these look great in the backyard?”

“We’d need a backyard first.”

“You’re on. I’d settle for one of those. Can I get that in writing?”

She loved the Unicorn Tapestries, and she cried for the beast in captivity. “Einhorn,” I said out loud.

“Say what?”

“Nothing.”

This was my outing; Teresa couldn’t understand why I wasn’t enjoying these extraterrestrial artifacts. I ran through the rooms, blasting past the exhibits with less attention than Jonah and I had given them a quarter century earlier. I stepped into the cold stone room where we had heard our singers that day, and I saw my brother leap up from the chair to touch the pretty lady who had come to sing for us. Beyond that, no messenger. We abandoned the time hole after an hour. Teresa was elated; I felt more listless than I had since hearing from Jonah. He’d moved on to a world whose key I couldn’t find.

“Let’s walk.” Teresa nodded, happy with any idea I put to her. We cut through Fort Tryon Park. I looked for two boys, seven and eight, amid the crowds lining the paths, but I couldn’t find us among so many like-colored decoys, all speaking Spanish. The wave of Dominicans had begun, one that would, in another decade, recolonize the island’s tip as a million Puerto Ricans had once colonized Brooklyn and East Harlem throughout my childhood. The aging Jews were still there, those who’d refused to move south to a city of Cuban escapees. Strangers who’d have greeted my father on sight pulled back from me in fear. Written already, in their faces: The lease had expired on this, their neighborhood.

“There’s a bakery around here,” I said to my Polish Catholic honky shiksa. “Right around here someplace.”

But I was turned around. We dragged up and down streets, stumbled upon the concrete steps — completely changed — doubled back along our path until Ter had had enough. “Why don’t you just ask somebody?”

Approach a stranger: The idea would never have occurred to me. We asked a deliveryman. “Frisch’s Bakery?” I might as well have been speaking Provençal. “In your dreams, maybe.” Finally, one promenading woman wearing a silver suit dress and a turquoise and smoky quartz bracelet stopped, more out of alarm than pity. She was out for a stroll in her finest attire, as if the city hadn’t gone to hell in a hackney all around her since the war. It surprised her that I spoke intelligible English. She could have been my aunt. The fact would have killed her on the spot.

“Frisch’s? Frisch’s up on Overlook?”

“Yes, that’s it! That’s the one.” Edging away, palms up, harmless.

My Tante snorted. “You’re going to need more than good directions. It closed down ages ago. Ten years, if you’re lucky. What are you looking for, dear?” Her voice bent down with burden, her penance for coming to this mixed land.

Teresa, too, turned to me. Yes, what are you looking for?

I spoke my humiliation. “Mandelbrot.”

“Mandelbrot!”She examined me to see how I could have discovered this secret password. “Why didn’t you say so, dear? Frisch’s, you don’t need. Down to the next street, make a left. Halfway up the block on your left.”

I thanked her again, in zeal proportional to how worthless her information was to me. I cupped Teresa by the shoulder and dragged her off toward the street Tante had indicated.

“What’s Mandelbrot, Joseph?” In her mouth, the word turned to enriched flour.

“Almond bread.” Lost in translation.

“Almond bread! You like almond bread? You never told me. I could have made you…” Teresa, her face contorted, struggled with the indictment. If you’d only told me, brought the affair home and put her into bed with us.

We found the bakery. Nothing resembling Frisch’s. The thing they sold as Mandelbrot might as well have been cinnamon toast. We sat on a bench and picked at it, our day in the city ending. I looked up the street at a man combing through a wire-mesh trash can. Tomorrow was just that light on the horizon, rushing to catch up with yesterday. This was the street Da had brought us along, telling us how all the universe’s clocks kept different times. The same bench, though same seemed meaningless.

We’d eaten nothing all day. But Teresa picked at her almond bread as at some stale Communion wafer. She tore off hunks and tossed them to the pigeons, then cursed the birds for swarming her. I sat next to her, waylaid in my own life. The boys and their father passed us while we sat on this bench, but they didn’t yet know how to see us. There was no place I could get to from this where and when. I rose to go, but I couldn’t walk. Teresa was clamped onto me, holding me in place. “Joseph. My Joe. We have to make it legal.”

“It?” Trying to smash all clocks.

“Us.”

I sat back down. I studied the man working the trash can, who was unfolding a shiny packet of aluminum foil. “Ter, we’re good. Aren’t you happy?” She looked down. “Why do you always say ‘make it legal’? You afraid of being arrested? You want some contract in case you need to sue me?”

“Fuck the law. I don’t give a shit about the law.” She was crying, forcing her words through closed teeth. “You keep saying okay, but nothing happens. It’s like your music. You say you want to, but you don’t. I keep waiting for you. It’s like you’re just killing time with me. You think you’re going to find somebody better who you’ll really want to marry, really want to make—”

“No. Absolutely not. I will never, never find anyone else who…is better to me than you.”

“Really, Joseph? Really? Then why not prove it?”

“What do we have to prove? Is love about proving?” Yes, I thought, even as I asked. That’s exactly what love is. Teresa leaned her head over her knees and began to sob. I stroked her back in big sweeping ovals, like a child practicing his cursive O ’s. I learned to write from Mama, but I couldn’t remember her ever teaching me. I rubbed Ter’s back as she heaved, feeling my hand from some distant, insulated place.

A man in a black suit and crushed porkpie hat, older than the century, shuffled by. At the sound of danger, his shuffle accelerated to a crawl. Then, seeing that our tragedy wouldn’t hurt him, he stopped. “Is she sick, the girl?”

“She’s fine. It’s just… Leid.” He nodded, squinting, and said something in Da’s language I didn’t catch. All I heard was the brutal reprimand. His shuffle ramped up again, but he stopped and looked back every twenty paces. Checking whether to call the Polizei.

I knew Teresa’s need for marriage, the one she couldn’t speak. If she married, her family might relent and retrieve her. If we stayed as we were, we’d confirm their worst slander. She’d be forever living in sin with a freeloading black who didn’t even care enough to give her a ring.

But marriage was impossible. It was wrong in a way I couldn’t begin to say. My brother and sister made it impossible. My father and mother. Marriage meant belonging, recognizing, finding zero, coming home. The bird and the fish could fall in love, but the here and now would scatter every thieved twig they might assemble. I don’t know what race Teresa thought I belonged to, but it wasn’t hers. Race trumped love as surely as it colonized the loving mind. There was no middle place to stand. My parents had tried, and the results were my life. Nothing I felt the need to reproduce.

I was back in a cold December in Kenmore Square in Boston. My brother, slapped down for kissing a girl of another caste, the first wrong turn of his life, was telling me that we were the only race that couldn’t reproduce ourselves. I’d thought him crazy. Now it seemed obvious. Of all the music Teresa and I might raise our children on, there wasn’t a single tune that could be theirs, unquestioning, unquestioned, sung the way they breathed. Teresa thought she’d gone beyond race. She thought that she’d paid already. She had no idea. I had no way of telling her. “Teresa. Ter. How can we?”

I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say. But Teresa was. She flung her head up. “‘How can we?’ How can we? ” Her words were terrible, drugged. I thought she might be cracking up. I looked around, scouting for the nearest public phone. “How can we sit here?” Her enraged red face swung back and forth, a refusal so violent, it begged for restraint. Her words slurred crazily. “How can we live together? Talk to each other?” She half-stood, then slammed down again. She turned away from me, suffocating, her lips twisting without sound. Her arms were in front of her, tearing in disgust at the air. I wrote big, cursive, reassuring O ’s into her back until, in a fury, she wheeled around and flung my hand at me. I didn’t dare move. Toward or away — equal disasters. My head was blank, pitchless, colorless. If she’d had a knife, the woman would have used it. Then Teresa calmed. That’s what time is. Da explained it to me once. Time is how we know which way the world runs: ever downward, from crazed to numb.

We went back to Atlantic City together, obeying some force one notch down from choice. We resumed living together in a kind of suspended motion of dead people. The battered wedding plans never arose again, except in our thoughts, every minute we were in each other’s presence. Time did its randomizing run. Two more months down the further slope, my brother called. Teresa picked it up. By that electric pause after she said hello, I knew it was him. Her receiver hand started to shake, excited: Yes, it was Teresa, yes, that Teresa, and yes, she knew who he was — all about him, where he was — and yes, his brother was there, and yes, no, yes, and she giggled, completely seduced by whatever little halfhearted sweet talk he worked on her. She handed the phone to me, soft as she hadn’t been since we took our death holiday in the city.

“She’s got a pretty voice, Mule. You sing with her?”

“Something like that.”

“What’s the top of her range?”

“How you doing, Jonah?”

“You sure she’s Polish? She doesn’t sound Polish. What’s she look like?”

“What do you think? How’s Celeste?”

“Not taking to Belgium too well, I’m afraid. She thinks they’re all savages here.”

“Are they?”

“Well, they do eat fries with their mussels. But they sight-read like nobody’s business. I want you to come see for yourself.”

“Whenever. You got a ticket for me?”

“Yep. When can you leave?” We hit one of those big rallentando measures, the kind we used to take so effortlessly together, in late Romantic lieder. Mutual mind reading, under the gun, two moving targets. We still had it. “Need you, Mule.”

“Have you any idea what you’re asking? You haven’t a clue. It’s been years since I’ve played anything real.” I glanced up, too late, at Teresa, who was fussing with the coffeemaker. Her face was broken. “Anything classical, I mean.”

“No, bro. You don’t know what I’m asking. There’re pianists on every street corner here, selling little ivory-coated pencils to make ends meet. That, or they’re on the National Arts Register dole. I wouldn’t be calling if all I needed was a damn piano player.”

“Jonah. Just tell me. Make it fast and painless.”

“I’m forming an a cappella group. I have two high voices that’ll make you want to take your own life. Gothic and Renaissance polyphony. Nothing later than 1610.”

I couldn’t stop laughing. “And you want me to — what? Keep your books for you?”

“Oh, no. We’ll hire a real crook to do that. You, we need for the bass.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. You know the last time I sang seriously? The last voice lesson I had was sophomore year in college.”

“Exactly. Everyone else I’ve listened to has been ruined by training. You, at least, won’t have anything to unlearn. I’ll give you lessons.”

“Jonah. You know I can’t sing.”

“Not asking you to sing, Mule. Just asking you to be the bass.”

He went through the arguments. He was after an entirely new style, so old that it had passed out of collective memory. Nobody knew how to sing this stuff yet; they were all improvising. Power was dead — vibrato, size, fire, lacquered glow, all the arsenal of tricks for filling a big concert hall or soaring above an orchestra had to be killed off. And in their evacuated place, he needed lightness, clarity, pitch, angels on pins.

“Imperialism’s over, Mule. We’re going back to a world before domination. We’re learning to sing like ancient instruments. Organs of God’s thoughts.”

“You’re not going spiritual on me, are you?”

He laughed and sang, “Gimme that old-time religion.” But he sang in a high, clear conductus style, something from the Notre Dame school, eight hundred years ago. “It’s good enough for me.”

“You’re mad,” I said.

“Joey, this is about blending. Merging. Giving up the self. Breathing as a group. All the things we used to think music was, when we were kids. Making five voices sound as if they’re a single vibrating soul. So I’m out here thinking: Of everyone I know in the world, who reads me the best? Who do I share the most genetic material with? Whose throat is closest to mine? Who has more musical feeling in his little finger than anyone else has in their whole—”

“Don’t patronize me, Jonah.”

“Don’t argue with your elders and wisers. Trust me on this, Mule. Have I ever not known what I’m doing?” I had to laugh. “I mean, recently.”

He talked logistics. What he wanted to sing; how to best lift this new, unborn group into orbit. “Is it viable?” I asked.

“Viable? You mean can we make a living?”

“Yes. That’s what I mean.”

“How much money did you say we ended up with, from Da?”

I might have known: funded, our whole lives, by our parents’ deaths. “Jonah. How can I?”

“Joey. How can’t you? I need you. Need you in on this. If this thing happens without you, it’s meaningless.”

When I hung up, I saw Teresa cowering in the corner, an old white lady whose home had just been broken into by a dark young man. She waited for me to explain what was happening. I couldn’t. Even if I’d known.

“You’re going to him, aren’t you? You’re going over there.” I tried to say something. It started as an objection and ended up a shrug. “Fuck you,” Saint Teresa said. My honeysuckle rose. “Go on. Get out. You never wanted me. You never wanted to make any of this happen.” She leaned forward, her head darting, looking for a weapon. Teresa shrieked at me, full voice, for all the world to hear. If our neighbors called the police, I’d spend the rest of my thirties in jail. “From the beginning, I’ve made myself over for you, for anything that might…” She broke down. I couldn’t take one step toward her. When her head came up, her words were brittle and dead. “And all along, you were just waiting for him to call with some better offer.”

Conviction entered her, the true fire of performance. She ran to the shelf that carried her hundreds of LPs, and with the kind of strength mothers tap into when they lift automobiles off their pinned children, she tore the shelf out of the wall and filled the room that had been ours with a trash heap of song.