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‘An astonishing performance’ New York Times

‘Formidable . . . rewarding’ Sunday Times

‘An epic novel of modern America that weaves ideas of race, music and science into a mysterious but satisfying tapestry . . . Endlessly fascinating’ Independent

‘There is no contemporary American writer quite like Richard Powers . . . It is rare to find a novel as intellectually and emotionally engaging as this’ Guardian

‘Formidable . . . Rewarding’ Sunday Times

‘Exhilarating . . . Astonishing’ Literary Review

‘A great hurtle of a book, telling several powerful stories at once . . . Strangely subtle and moving . . . An astonishing performance . . . Prodigious, illuminating and exhilarating’ New York Times

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Powers has published fourteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory and his subsequent novel, Bewilderment, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.

ALSO BY RICHARD POWERS

Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

Prisoner’s Dilemma

The Gold Bug Variations

Operation Wandering Soul

Galatea 2.2

Gain

Plowing the Dark

The Echo Maker

Generosity: An Enhancement Orfeo

The Overstory

Bewilderment

Playground

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First published in the US by Farrar Straus & Giroux 2002

First published in the UK by William Heinemann 2003

Published in Vintage 2004

Published in Penguin Books 2025 001

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DECEMBER 1961

In some empty hall, my brother is still sing ing. His voice hasn’t dampened yet. Not altogether. The rooms where he sang still hold an impression, their walls dimpled with his sound, awaiting some future phonog raph capable of replaying them.

My brother Jonah stands ﬁxed, leaning against a piano. He’s just twenty.The sixtieshave only begun. The country still dozes in its last pretended innocence. No one has heard of Jonah Strom but our family, what’s left of it. We’vecome to Durham, Nor th Carolina, the old music building at Duke. He has made it to the ﬁnals of a national vocal competition he’ll later deny ever having entered. Jonah stands alone, just r ight of center stage My brother tower s in place, listing a little, bac king up intothe crook of the g rand piano, his only safety. He curls forward, the scroll on a reticent cello.Left handsteadies him against the piano edge,whiler ight hand cups in front of him, holdingsome letter, now oddly lost. He g r ins at the odds against being here, breathes in, and sings.

One moment, the Erl-King is hunched on my brother’s shoulder, whisper ing a blessed death. In the next, a trapdoor opens up in the air and my brother is elsewhere, teasing out Dowland of all things, a bit of ravishing sass for this stunned lieder crowd, who can’t g rasp the web that slips over them:

Time stands still with gazing on her face, Stand still and gaze for minutes, hours, and year s to her g ive place All other things shall c hange, but she remains the same, Till heavens c hanged have their cour se and time hath lost his name.

Two stanzas, and his tune is done. Silence hangs over the hall. It dr ifts above the seats like a balloon across the hor izon. For two downbeats, even breathing is a cr ime. Then there’s no sur viving this sur pr ise except by applauding it away. The noisy g ratitude of hands star ts time up again, sending thedar t to its target and my brother on to the things that will ﬁnish him.

This is how I see him, although he’ll live another third of a century. This is the momentwhen the world fir st finds him out, the night I hear where his voice is headed.I’m up onstage, too, at the battered Steinway with its caramel action. I accompany him, trying to keep up, trying not to listen to that siren voice that says, Stop your fingers, crash your boat on the reef of keys, and die in peace.

Though I make no fatal fumbles, that night is not my proudest as a musician. After the concer t, I’ll ask my brother again to let me go, to ﬁnd an accompanist who candohim justice. And again he’ll refuse. “I already have one, Joey.”

I’m there, up onstage with him. But at the same time, I’m down in the hall, in the place I always sit at concer ts: eight rows bac k, just inside the left aisle I sit where I can see my own ﬁnger s moving, where I can study my brother’s face—close enough to see everything, but far enough to sur vive seeing.

Stage fr ight ought to paralyze us. Bac kstage is a single bleeding ulcer. Perfor mer s who’ve spent their whole youth training for this moment now preparetospend their old age explaining why it didn’t go as planned. The hall ﬁlls with venom and envy, families who’ve traveled hundreds of miles to see their lives’ pr ide reduced to r unner-up. My brother alone is fearless. He has already paid. This public contest has nothing to do with music. Music means those year s of har monizing together, still in the shell of our family, before that shell broke open and bur ned. Jonah glides through the bac kstage fr ight, the dressing rooms full of well-bred nausea, on a cloud, as though through a dress rehear sal for a perfor mance already canceled. Onstage,against this sea of panic, his calm electr iﬁes. The drape of his hand on the piano’s blac k enamel ravishes his listener s, the essence of his sound before he even makes one.

I see him on this night of his ﬁrst open tr iumph, from four decades on. He stillhas that softness around his eyes that later life will crac k and line. His jaw quakes a little on Dowland’s quar ter notes, but the notes do not. He drops his head toward his r ight shoulder as he lifts to the high C,

shr inking from his entranced listener s. The face shudder s, a look only I can see, from my perc h behind the piano. The broken-r idged br idge of his nose, his br uised brown lips, the two bumps of bone r iding his eyes: almost my own face, but keener, a year older, a shade lighter. That breakaway shade: the public record of our family’s pr ivate cr ime.

My brother sings to save the good and make the wic ked take their own lives. At twenty, he’s already intimate with both. This is thesource of his resonance, the sound that holds his audience stilled for a few stopped seconds before they can br ing themselves to clap. In the soar of that voice, they hear the r ift it ﬂoats over.

The year is a snowy blac k-and-white signal coming in on rabbit ear s. The world of our c hildhood—the A-rationing, radio-fed world pitc hed in that final war against evil—falls away into a Kodak tableau. A man has flown in space. Astronomer s pic k up pulses from starlike objects. Across the globe, the United States draws to an inside straight. Berlin’s tinderbox is ready to flash at any moment. Southeast Asia smolders, nothing but a curl of smoke coming from the banana leaves. At home, a rash of babies piles up behind the viewing glass of mater nity hospitals from Bar Harbor to San Diego Our hatless boy president plays touc h football on the White House lawn. The continent is awash in spies, beatniks, and major appliances. Montgomery hits the fifth year of an impasse that won’t occur to me until five more have passed. And seven hundred unsuspecting people in Durham, Nor th Carolina, disappear, lulled into the g ranite mountainside opened by Jonah’s sound.

Until this night, no one has heard my brother sing but us. Now the word is out. In the applause, I watc h that r ust red face waver behind his smile’s hasty bar r icade. He looks around for an offstage shadow to duc k bac k into, but it’s too late. He breaks into leaky g r ins and, with one practiced bow, accepts his doom.

They br ing us bac k twice; Jonah has to drag me out the second time Then the judges call out the winners in eac h range—three, two, one—as if Duke were Cape Canaveral, this music contest another Mercury launc h, and Amer ica’s Next Voice another Shepard or Gr issom. We stand in the wings, the other tenor s for ming a r ing around Jonah, already hating him and heaping him with praise. I ﬁght the urge to work this g roup, to assure them my brother is not special, that eac h perfor mer has sung as well as anyone. The others sneak glances at Jonah, studying his unstudied posture. They go over the strategy, for next time: the panac he of Sc huber t.

Then the left hook of Dowland, str iving for that ﬂoating sustain above the high A. The thing they can never standfar bac k enough to see has already swallowed my brother whole.

My brother hangs bac k against the ﬂy ropes in his concer t blac k, appraising the c hoicer sopranos. Stands still and gazes He sings to them, pr ivate encores in his mind. Everyone knows he’s won, and Jonah str uggles to make it mean nothing. The judges call his name. Invisible people c heer and whistle. He is their victory for democracy, and wor se. Jonah tur ns to me, drawing out the moment. “Joey. Brother. There’s got to be a more honest way to make a living.” He breaks another r ule by dragg ing me onstage with him to collect the trophy. And his ﬁr st public conquest r ushes to join the past.

Afterward, we move through asea of small delights and epic disappointments. Cong ratulating lines for m up around the winner s. In our s, a woman hunc hed with age touc hes Jonah’s shoulder, her eyes damp. My brother amazes me, extending his perfor mance, as if he’s really the ethereal creature she mistakes him for. “Sing forever,” she says, until her caretaker whisks her off. A few well-wisher s behind her, a ramrod retired colonel twitc hes.His faceisa hostilemuddle, duped in a way he can’t dope out. Ifeel the man’s r ighteousness, well before he reac hes us, the rage we repeatedly provoke in his people simply by appear ing in public. He waits out his momentinthe queue, his anger’s fuse shor tening with this line. Reac hing the front, he c harges. I know what he’ll say before he gets it out. He studies my brother’s face like a thwar ted anthropolog ist. “What exactly are you boys?”

The question we g rew up on. The question no Strom ever ﬁgured out how to read, let alone answer. As often as I’ve heard it, I still seize up. Jonah and I don’t even bother to exc hange looks. We’re old hands at annihilation. I make some motions, ready to smooth over the misunderstanding But the man bac ks me off with a look that c hases me from adolescence for good.

Jonah has his answer; I have mine. But he’s the one in the spotlight. My brother inhales, as if we ’ re still onstage,the smallest g race note of breath that would lead me intothe downbeat. For a semiquaver, he’s about to launc h into “Fremd bin ich eingezogen.” Instead, he pitc hes his reply, buffo-style, up into comic head tones:

“I am my mammy’s ae bair n, Wi’ unco folk I weary, Sir . . . ”

His ﬁr st full nightofadulthood, but still a c hild, g iddy with just being named Amer ica’s Next Voice. His unaccompanied encore tur ns heads all around us. Jonah ignores them all. It’s 1961. We’reinamajor univer sity town. You can’t str ing a guy up for high spir its. They haven’t str ung up anyone for high spir its in these par ts for at least half a dozen year s. My brother laughs through the Bur ns couplet, thinking to leave the colonel sheepish with eight bar s of good-natured c heek. The man goes livid. He tenses and puc ker s, ready to wrestle Jonah to the g round. But the eager line of admirer s moves him along, out the stage door, toward what the prophetic look spreading across my brother’s face already knows will be a paralyzing stroke.

At the end of the conga line, our father and sister wait. This is how I see them, too, from the far side of a life. Still our s, still a family. Da g r ins like the lost immig rant he is. A quar ter century in this country, and he still walks around like he’s expecting to be detained. “You pronounciate Ger man like a Polac k. Who the hell taught you your vowels? A disg race. Eine Schande!”

Jonah caps a hand over our father’s mouth. “Shh. Da. For Chr ist’s sake Remind me never to take you out in public ‘Polac k’ is an ethnic slur.”

“ ‘Polac k’? You’re crazy. That’s what they’re called, bub.”

“Yeah, bub.” Ruth, our mimic, nails him. Even at sixteen, she’s passed for the man more than once, over the phone. “What the hell else you going to call people from Polac kia?”

The crowd ﬂinc hes again, that look that pretends not to. We’re a moving violation of everything in their creed. But out here in classically trained public, they keep that major-key smile. They push on to the other winner s, leaving us, for alast moment, once again our own safe nation. Father and eldest son reel about on the remnants of Sc huber t still bang ing about the emptied hall. They lean on eac h other’s shoulder s “Tr ust me, ” the older one tells the younger. “I’ve known a few Polac ks in my day. I almost mar r ied one. ”

“I could have been a Polac k?”

“A near Polac k. Acounterfactual Polac k.”

“A Polac k in one of many alter nate univer ses?”

They babble to eac h other, the shor thand jokes of his profession. Clowning for the one none of us will name this night, the one to whom we offer every note of our contest prize. Ruth stands in the stage footlights, almost aubur n, but otherwise the sole keeper of our mother’s fea-

tures in this world. My mother, the woman my father almost didn’t mar ry, a woman more and longer Amer ican than anyone in this hall tonight.

“You did good, too, Joey,” my little sister makes sure to tell me. “You know. Perfect and all.” I hug her for her lie, and she glows under my g rasp, a ready jewel. We wander bac k to Da and Jonah. Assembled again: the sur viving four-ﬁfths of the Strom family c horale.

But Da and Jonah don’t need either of us accompanists. Da has hold of the Erl-King motif, and Jonah thumps along, his three-and-a-half-octave voice dropping into bass to whac k at his imitation piano’s left hand. He hums the way he wanted me to play it. The way it ought to be played, in heaven’sheadlinerser ies Ruth and I draw near, despite our selves, to add the inner lines. People smile as they pass, in pity or shame, some imagined difference. But Jonah is the evening’s r ising star, momentar ily beyond scor n.

The audience this night will claim they heard him. They’ll tell their c hildren how that c hasm opened up, howthe floor dropped out of the old Duke concer t hall and left them hang ing in the vacuum theythought it was music’s job to fill. But the person they’ll recall won’t be my brother They’ll tell of sitting up in their seats at the fir st sound of that transmuting voice. But the voice they’ll remember won’t be his.

His g rowing band of listener s will c hase Jonah’s perfor mances, pr ize his tic kets, follow his career even intothose last, decoupled year s. Connoisseur s will searc h down his records, mistaking the voice on the disk for his. My brother’s sound could never be recorded. He had a thing against the per manent, a hatred of being ﬁxed that’s audible in every note he ever laid down. He was Or pheus in rever se: Look forward, and all that you love will disappear.

It’s 1961. Jonah Strom, Amer ica’s Next Voice, is twenty. This is how I see him, for ty year s on, eight year s older now than my older brother will ever be. The hall has emptied; my brother still sings. He sings through to the double bar, the tempo falling to nothing as it passes through the fermata’s blac kness, a boy sing ing to a mother who can no longer hear him. That voice was so pure, it could make heads of state repent. But it sang knowing just what shape rode along behind it. And if any voice could have sent a message bac k to war n the past and cor rect the unmade future, it would have been my brother’s

But no one ever really knew that voice except his family, sing ing together on those postwar winter nights, with music their last line of defense against the outside and the encroac hing cold. They lived in half of a threestory Jer sey freestone house that had weathered over half a century to a c hocolate brown, tuc ked up in the nor thwest cor ner of Manhattan, a neglected enclave of mixed, mottled bloc ks where Hamilton Heights shaded off into Washington Heights. They rented, the immig rant David Strom never tr usting the future enough to own anything that wouldn’t ﬁt into a waiting suitcase. Even his appointment in the Physics Depar tment at Columbia seemed a thing so ﬁne, it would cer tainly be taken away by anti-Semitism, anti-intellectualism, rising randomness, or the inevitable retur n of the Nazis That he could afford to rent half a house at all, even in this tidal-pool neighborhood, str uc k David as beyond luc k, g iven the life he’d already owned.

To Delia, his Philadelphian wife, renting seemed as perennially strange as her husband’s pallid theor ies. She’d never lived anywhere but the home her parents owned. Yet Delia Daley Strom, too, knew that the world’s relentless pur iﬁer s would come after their happiness through any open c hink. So she propped up her refugee husband and tur ned their rented half of the freestone intoa for tress. And for pure safety, nothing beat music. Eac h of the three c hildren shared the same ﬁr st memory: their parents, sing ing. Music was their lease, their deed, their eminent domain. Let eac h voice defeat silence through its own vocation. And the Stroms defeated silence after their own fashion, eac h evening, together, in g reat gulps of free-playing c hords.

Rambling scraps of song star ted even before the c hildren were awake. Strains of Barber from the bathroom collided with Car men coming out of the kitc hen. Breakfast found them all humming against one another in polytonal rowdiness. Even once the day’s home sc hooling star ted—Delia teac hing the reading and wr iting, David doing the ar ithmetic before heading down to Mor ningside to lecture on General Relativity—song drove the lessons.Meter markings taught fractions. Every poem had its tune.

In the after noon, when Jonah and Joey raced home from forced excur sions to that str ip of playg round adjoining St. Luke’s, they’d ﬁnd their mother at the spinet with baby Ruth, tur ning the cramped drawing room

into a campsite on the shores of Jordan. Half an hour of tr ios dissolved into bouts of r itual bic ker ing between the boys over who got ﬁr st dibs with their mother, alone. The winner set to an hour of glorious piano duets, while the moment’s loser took little Root upstairs for read-alouds or card games without real r ules.

Lessons with Delia passed in minutes for the praise-heaped student, while stretc hing out forever for the one waiting in line. When the excluded boy star ted calling out ﬁnger faults from upstair s, Delia tur ned those catcalls, too, into a game. She’d have the boys name c hords or sustain inter vals from the top of the stairs. She’d get them sing ing rounds— “By the Water s of Babylon”—from opposite ends of the house, eac h boy weaving his own line around the distant other When they hit the limits of their boy’s patience, she’d br ing them together, one sing ing, the other playing, with little Root inventing spectral toddler har monies that strove to join this family’s secret language.

The sounds her boys made pleased Deliasomuc h, it scared them. “Oh, my JoJo! What voices! I want you to sing at my wedding.”

“But you’re already mar r ied,” Joey, the younger boy, cr ied. “To Da!”

“I know, honey Can’t I still want you to sing at my wedding?”

They loved it too well, music. The boys shr ugged off sandlot spor ts, radio dummies and detectives, tentacled creatures from the tenth dimension, and neighborhood reenactments of the slaughter at Okinawa and Bastogne, prefer r ing to ﬂank their mother at the spinet. Even in those nar row hour s before their father retur ned, when Delia stopped their pr ivate lessons to prepare dinner,she had to force-marc h the boys out of the house to takeanother dose of tor ture at the hands of boys more cr uelly competent in boyhood, boys who rained down on the two Stroms the full br utality of collective bafﬂement.

Both sides in the neighborhood’s standing war went after these straggler s, with words, ﬁsts, stones—even, once,asoftball bat square in the bac k. When the neighborhood c hildren weren’t using the boys for hor seshoe stakes or home plate, theymade an example of the freakish Stroms. They sneered at Joey’s softness, covered Jonah’s offending face in caked mud. The Strom boys had little taste for these daily refresher cour ses in difference. Often, they never made it to the playg round at all, but hid themselves in the alley half a bloc k away, calming eac h other by humming in thirds and ﬁfths until enough time had passed and they could race bac k home.

Dinner s were a c haos of talk and tease, the nightly extension of the year s-long Strom-Daley cour tship. Delia banned her husband from the stove when she worked. She found the man’s pot-dipping an outrage against God and nature. She kept him at bay until her latest inspired offer ing—c hic ken casserole with candied car rots, or a roast with yams, small miracles prepared in those moments between her other full-time jobs—was ready for the stage. David’s task was to accompany the meal with the latest bizar re developments from the imag inary job he held down. Professor of phantom mec hanics, Delia teased. Da, more excitable than all his c hildren,laid intothe wildest of details: his acquaintance Kur t Gödel’s discovery of loopy timelike lines hiding in Einstein’s ﬁeld equations Or Hoyle, Bondi, and Gold’s hunc h that newgalaxies poured through the gaps between old ones, like weeds splitting the univer se’s cr umbling concrete. To the listening boys, the world was r ipe with Ger man-speaking refugees, safely abroad in their var ious democracies, busy over throwing space and time.

Delia shook her head at the nonsense that passed for conver sation in her home Little Ruth mimic ked her g iggle But the preteen boys outdid eac h other with questions. Did the univer se care whic h way time ﬂowed? Did hour s fall like water? Was there only one kind of time? Did it ever c hange speeds? If time made loops, could the future curl into the past? Their father was better than ascience-crazed com ic book, Astounding Stor ies, Forbidden Tales. He came from a stranger place, and the pictures he drew were even more fantastic.

After dinner, they came together in tunes Rossini while washing the dishes, W. C. Handy while drying. They crawled through loopy timelike holes in the evening, ﬁve lines braiding in space, eac h one curling bac k on the other, spinning in place. They’d do workhor se Bac h c horales, taking their pitc hes from Jonah, the boy with the mag ic ear. Or they’d crowd around the spinet, tac kling madr igals, poking the keyboard now and then to c hec k an inter val. Once, they divvied up par ts and made it through a whole Gilber t and Sullivan in one evening. Evenings would never be so long again.

On suc h nights, the c hildren seemed almost designedfor their parents’ express enter tainment. Delia’s soprano lit across the upper reg ister like lightning on a wester n sky David’sbassmade up with Ger man musicality what it lac ked in beauty. Husband anc hored wife for any ﬂight she cared to make. But eac h knew what the mar r iage needed, and together

they used the boys shamelessly to hold down the inner lines. All the while, baby Ruth crawled among them, hitc hing melodic r ides, standing on her toes to peek at the pages her family studied. In this way, a third c hild came to read music without anyone teac hing her.

Delia sang with herwhole body. That’s how she’d lear ned, even in Philadelphia, from generations on generations of Carolina c hurc hgoing mother s. Her c hest swelled when she let loose, like the bellows of a glory-ﬁlled pump organ. Adeaf man might have held his hands to her shoulder s and felt eac h pitc h resonating, singed into his ﬁngers as if by a tuning fork. In the year s since their mar r iage in 1940, David Strom had lear ned this freedom from his Amer ican wife.The secular Ger man Jew bobbed to inner rhythms, davening as freely as his g reat-g randfather cantor s once had.

Song held the c hildren enthralled, as tied to these musical evenings as their neighbor s were to radios. Sing ing was their team spor t, their Tiddlywinks, their Chutes and Ladders. To see their parents dance—dr iven by hidden forces like creatures in a folk ballad—was the ﬁr st awful mystery of c hildhood. The Strom c hildren joined in, swaying bac k and for th to Mozar t’s “Ave ver um cor pus” the way they did to “Zip-a-Dee-DooDah.”

Surely the parents heard what was happening to music at that hour. They must have felt the manic pulse—half the world’s GNP, looking for its r uder theme song. Swing had long since played Car neg ie, that brash razz already housebroken. Down in the blister ing bebop clubs, Gillespie and Parker were nightly war ping the space-time continuum. A cracker kid in a designated white house in ablac k neighborhood off in fly-bitten Mississippi was about to let loose the secret beat of race music, forever blowing away the enr ic hed-flour, box-stepping public. No one alive then could have missed the c hanges, not even twopeople as willfully against the g rain as that refugee physicist and the Philadelphian doctor’s daughter, his trained-voice wife. They raided the present, too. He had his accented Ella and she her deep-palette Ellington. They never missed a Saturday Metropolitan broadcast. But every Sunday mor ning, the radio trawled for jazz whileDavid made foot-wide mushroom and tomato omelettes. In the Strom’s sing ing sc hool, upstar ttunes took their place in a thousand-year parade of har mony and invention. Cut-time, fingersnapping euphor ia gave those nights of Palestr ina all the more dr ive. For Palestr ina, too, once over threw the unsuspecting world.

Every time the Stroms ﬁlled their lungs, they continued that long conver sation of pitc hes in time. In old music, they made sense. Sing ing, they were no one’s outcasts. Eac h night that they made that full-voiced sound—the sound that drove David Strom and Delia Daley together in this life—they headed upr iver into a sooner saner place.

Delia and David never let a month go by without a round of their favor ite public flir tation: Crazed Quotations.The wifesettled on the piano benc h, a c hild pressed against eac h thigh. She’d sit, teleg raphing nothing, her wavy blac k hair a perfect cowl. Her long r usset finger s pressed down on several keys at once, freeing a simple melody—say Dvorˇák’s slow, reedy spir itual “From the New World.” The husband then had two repeats to find a response The c hildren watc hed in suspense as Delia’s tune unfolded, to see if Da could beat the cloc k and add a counter subject before their mother reac hed the double bar. If he failed, his c hildren got to taunt him in moc k Ger man and his wife named the forfeit of her choice.

He rarely failed. By the time Dvorˇák’s stolen folk song looped back around, the fellow found a way to make Sc huber t’s Trout swim upstream against it.The ball bounced bac k to Delia’s cour t. She had one stanza to come up with another quote to ﬁt the now-c hanged frame It took her onlya little meander ing to get “Swanee River” ﬂowing down around the Trout.

The game allowed liber ties.Themes could slow to a near standstill, their modulations delayed until the r ight moment. Or tunes could blast by so fast, their changes collapsed to passing tones. The lines might split into long c horale preludes, spr inkled with accidentals, or the phrase come home to a different cadence, just so long as the c hange preser ved the sense of the melody. As for the words, they could be the or ig inals, madr igal fa-las, or scraps of adver tising doggerel, so long as eac h singer, at some point in the evening’s game, threaded in their traditional nonsense question, “But where will they build their nest?”

The game produced the wildest mixed mar r iages, love matc hes that even the heaven of half-breeds looked sidelong at. Her Brahms Alto Rhapsody bic kered with his g rowled Dixieland. Cher ubini crashed into Cole Por ter. Debussy, Tallis, and Mendelssohn shac ked up in unholy ménages à trois. After a few rounds, the game got out of handand the clotted c hords collapsed under their own weight. Call and response ended in hilar ious spinouts, with the one who ﬂew off the carousel accusing the other of unfair har monic tamper ing.

Dur ing suc h a game of Crazed Quotations, on acold December night in 1950, David and Delia Strom got their fir st look at just what they’d brought into this world. The soprano star ted with a fat, slowpitc h: Haydn’s Ger man Dance no. 1 in D. On top of that, the bass cobbled up a precar ious Verdi “La donna è mobile.” The effect was so joyfully deranged that the two, on nothing more than a shared g r in, let the monstrosity air for another go-round. But dur ing the repr ise, something rose up out of the tangle, a phrase that neither parent owned. The fir st pitc h shone so clear and centered,ittook amoment for the adults to hear it wasn’t some phantom sympathetic resonance. They looked at eac h other in alar m, then down at the oldest c hild, Jonah, who launc hed into a pitc h-perfect rendition of Josquin’s Absalon, fili mi

The Stroms had sight-read the piece months before and put it away as too hard for the c hildren. That the boy remembered it was already a wonder. When Jonah eng ineered the melody to fit the two already in motion, David Strom felt as he had on fir st hear ing that boys’ c hoir soar above the double c hor us opening Bac h’s Saint Matthew Passion. Both parents stopped in midphrase, star ing at the boy. The c hild, mor tified, stared bac k

“What’s wrong? Did I do something bad?” The child was not yet ten. This was when David and Delia Strom ﬁr st knew that their ﬁr stbor n would soon be taken from them.

Jonah shared the tr ic k with his little brother. Joseph began adding his own crazed quotes a month later. The family took to ad-libbing hybr id quar tets. Little Ruth wailed, wanting to play. “Oh, sweet!” her mother said. “Don’t cry. You’ll get airbor ne faster than anyone. Fly across the sky before too long.” She gave Ruth simple tr inkets—the Texaco radio jingle or “You Are My Sunshine”—while the rest made Joplin rags and bits of Puccini ar ias lie down together around them in peaceable kingdoms. They sang together almost every night, over the mufﬂed trafﬁc of distant Amsterdam Avenue. It was all either parent had with whic h to remind them of the homes each had lost. No one heard them except their landlady, Ver na Washington, a stately, c hildless widow who lived in the brownstone’s other half and who liked to press her ear to their shared wall, eavesdropping on that high-wire joy.

The Stroms sang with a skill built into the body, a ﬁxed trait, the soul’s eye color. Husband and wife eac h supplied musical genes: his mathematician’s feel for ratio and rhythm, her vocal ar tist’s pitc h likeahoming pi-

geon and shading like a hummingbird’s wings. Neither boy suspected it was at all odd for a nine-year-old to sight-sing as easily as he breathed. They helped the strands of sound unfold as easily as their lost ﬁr st cousins might climb a tree. All a voice had to do was open and release, take its tones out for a spin down to River side Park, the way their father walked them sometimes on sunny weekends: up, down, shar p, ﬂat, long, shor t, East Side, West Side, all around the town. Jonah and Joseph had only to look at pr inted c hords, their note heads stac ked up like tiny totem poles, to hear the inter vals.

Visitor s did come by the house, but always to make music. The quintet became ac hamber c hoir every other month, padded with Delia’s pr ivate sing ing students or her fellow soloists from the local c hurc h circuit.

Moonlighting str ing player s from the Physics Depar tments at Columbia and City College tur ned the Strom home intoalittleVienna. One noisy night, a white-maned old New Jer sey violinist in a moth-eaten sweater, who spoke Ger man with David and fr ightened Ruth with incomprehensible jokes, heard Jonah sing. Afterward, he scolded Delia Strom until she cr ied. “This c hild has a g ift. You don’t hear how big. You are too close. It’s unforg ivable that you do nothing for him.” The old physicist insisted they g ive the boy the strongest musical education available. Not just a good pr ivate teac her but an immer sion that would c hallenge this eer ie talent to become everything it was. The g reat man threatened to take up a collection, if money was the problem.

The problem wasn’t money. David objected: No musical education could beat the one Jonah was already receiving from his mother. Delia refused to sur render the boy to a teac her who might fail to understand his special circumstance.The Strom family c horale had its pr ivate reasons for protecting itsangelic high voice. Yet they didn’t dare oppose a man who’d rooted out the bizar re secret of time, bur ied since time’s beg inning. Einstein was Einstein, however Gypsy-like his violin playing His words shamed the Stroms intoaccepting the inevitable. As the new decade opened onto the long-promised world of tomor row, Jonah’s parents began searc hing for a music sc hool that could br ing that fr ightening talent into its own.

Meanwhile, days of instr uction that the c hildren swallowed whole wentonsegueing into evenings of par t-songs and improvised games of musical tag Delia bought a sewing mac hine–sized phonog raph for the boys’ bedroom. The brother s fell asleep eac h night to state-of-the-ar t

long-playing 33 1⁄3 r pm records of Car uso, Gigli, and Gobbi. Tiny, tinny, c halk-colored voices stole intothe boys’ room through that electr ic portal, coaxing, Fur ther, wider, clearer—like this.

And while he dr ifted off to sleep one night on this chor us of coaxing ghosts, Jonah told his brother what would happen. He knew what their parents were doing He predicted exactly what would become of him. He’d be sent away for doing, beautifully, what his family had most wanted him to do. Cast out forever, just for sing ing.

MY BR OT HER ’ SF A C E

My brother’s face was a sc hool of ﬁshes. His g r in was not one thing, but a hundred dar ting ones. I have a photog raph—one of the few from my c hildhood that escaped incineration. In it,the two of us open Chr istmas presents on the nubby ﬂoral-pr int sofa that sat in our front room. His eyes look everywhere at once: at his own present, a three-segment expanding telescope; at mine, a metronome; at Rootie, who clutc hes his knee, wanting to see for her self; at our photog raphing father deep in his act of stopping time; at Mama, just past the picture’s frame; at a future audience, looking, from a century on, at this sheltered Chr istmas crèc he, long after all of us are dead.

My brother’s afraid he’s missing something. Afraid Santa switc hed the g ifts’ name tags. Afraid my present might be sweeter than his. His one hand reac hes out to Ruth, who threatens to fall and crack her head on the walnut coffee table. His other hand ﬂies upward to comb down his front curl—the hair our mother forever loved to br ush—so the camera won’t capture it stic king up for all eter nity like a homemade ﬁshing lure. His smile assures our father that he’s doing his best to make this an excellent picture. His eyes dar t off in pity for our mother, forever excluded from this scene.

The photo is one of the ﬁr st Polaroids. Our father loved ingenious inventions, and our mother loved anything thatcould ﬁx memory. The blac k-and-white tones have gone g rainy, the look the late for ties now have. I can’t tr ust the shades of my brother’s photog raphed skin to see just how other s might have read him then. My mother was light for her family, and my father, the palest Eurosemitic. Jonah fell r ight between them. His hair is already more wavy than curly, and just too dark for car-

rot. His eyes are hazel; that muc h never c hanged. His nose is nar row, his c heeks the width of apaperbac k book. What my brother most resembles is a blood-drained, luminous Arab.

His face is the key of E, the key for beautiful, the face most known to me in the whole world. It looks like one of my father’s scientiﬁc sketc hes, built of an open oval, with tr usting half almonds inlaid for eyes: a face that forever says face to me, ﬂashing its seduction of pleasure, mildly surpr ised, itsskinpulled smooth on the rounded bone. I loved that face. It seemed ever to me like mine, released.

Already he shows the wary distr ust, the testing of innocence. The features will nar row as the months move on. The lips draw and the eyebrows batten down. The half-pear nose thins at the br idge; the puffs of c heekbone deﬂate. But even in middle age, his forehead still sometimes cleared like this and the lips rose up, ready to joke even with his killer s. I got an expandable telescope for Chr istmas. How about you?

One night afterprayer s he asked our mother, “Where do we come from?” He couldn’t have been ten yet, and was troubled by Ruth, scared by howdifferent she looked from the two of us. Even I already wor r ied him. Maybe the nur ses at the mater nity hospital had been as careless as Santa. He’d reac hed the age when the tonal gap between Mama and Da grew too wide for him to call it c hance. He gathered the weight of the evidence, and it bent him double. I lay in my bed, ﬂush against his, cramming in a few more panels of Science Comics, star r ing Cosmic Car son, beforelights-out. But Istopped to hear Mama’s answer to the question I’d never thought to ask.

“Where did you come from? You kids?” Whenever aquestioncaught her on the c hin, Mama repeated it. It bought her ten seconds. When things tur ned ser ious, her voice g rew piano,and settled intothat caramel, mezzo reg ister. She shifted on the edge of his mattress, where she sat caressing him. “Why, I’m glad you asked me that. You were all three brought to us by the Brother of Wonder.”

My brother’s face twisted, dubious. “Who’s that?”

“Who . . . ? How did you get so cur ious? You get that from me or from your father? The Brother of Wonder is named Hap. Mr. Hap E. Ness.”

“What does the E stand for?” Jonah demanded, trying to catc h her out.

“What does the E stand for? Why, don’t you know that? Ebenezer ” Presto: “What’s Wonder’s middle name?”

“Sc hmuel,” my father said, a tempo, from the doorway.

“Wonder Schmuel Ness?”

“Yes, sure. Why not? This Ness family has many secrets in the cabinet.”

“Da. Come on. Where did we come from?”

“Your mother and Ifound you in the freezer case at the A & P Who knows how long you were in there. This Mr. Ness claimed to own, but he never produced the owner ship paper s. ”

“Please, Da. Tr uth.”

Not a word our father ever violated. “You were bor n out of your mother’s belly.”

This inanity reduced the twoofustohelpless laughter.Mymother lifted her ar ms in the air. I can see her muscles tighten, even now, twice as old as she was then. Ar ms up, she said, “Here we go. ”

My father sat down. “We must go there, soon or late.”

But we didn’t go anywhere. Jonah lost interest. His laugh staled and he stared off into space, g r imacing. He accepted the deranged idea— whatever they wanted to tell him. He put his ar m on Mama’s forear m. “That’s okay. I don’t care where we came from. Just so long as we all came from the same place.”

The ﬁr st music sc hool to hear my brother loved him. Iknew this would happen before it did, no matter what my father said about predicting the future. The sc hool, one of the city’s twotop conser vatory prep prog rams, was down in midtown, on the East Side I remember Jonah, in a burgundy blazer too large for him, asking Mama, “How come you don’t want to come?”

“Oh, Jo! Of cour se I want to go with you. But who’s going to stay home and take care of Baby Ruth?”

“She can come with us, ” Jonah said, already knowing who couldn’t go where.

Mama didn’t answer. She hugged us in the foyer. “Bye, JoJo.” Her one name for the two of us. “Do good things for me. ”

We three men bundled into the ﬁr st cab that would take us, then headed down to the sc hool. There, my brother disappeared into a crowd of kids, coming back to ﬁnd us in the auditorium just before he sang “Joey, you’re not going to believe this.” His face all eager horror. “There’s a bunc h of kids bac k there, and they look like Ming the Merciless is c hew-

ing their butts.” He tr ied to laugh. “This big guy, an eighth g rader at least, is spitting his guts out in the washbasin.” His eyes wandered out beyond the orbit of newly discovered Pluto. No one had ever told him music was wor th getting sic k over.

Twenty bar s into my brother’sacappella rendition of “Down by the Salley Gardens,” the judges were sold. Afterward, in the stale g reen hallway, two of them even approac hed my father to talk up the prog ram. While the adults went over details, Jonah dragged me bac kstage to the war m-up room where the older kid had puked. We could stillsmellit, lining the drain, sweet and acr id, halfway between food and feces.

Ofﬁcial word came two weeks later. Our parents gave the long typed envelope to Jonah, for the thr illofopening it himself. But when my brother foundered on the ﬁr st twosentences,Datook the letter. “ ‘We reg ret to say, despite the mer its of this voice, we cannot offer aplace this fall. The prog ram is overenrolled, and the strains on the faculty make it impossible . . . ’ ”

Da let out a little bark of dismay and glanced at Mama. I’d seen them shoot the look between them, out together in public By ten, I knew whatitmeant, but I kept that fact secret from them. Our parents stared at eac h other, eac h working to deﬂect the other’s dismay.

“A singer does not get every par t,” Da told Jonah. Mama just looked down, her half of the oldest music lesson there was.

Da made inquir ies, through acolleague in the Music Depar tment at Columbia. He came home in a mix of wear iness and amazement. He tr ied to tell Mama. Mama listened, but never stopped working on the lamb stew she was making for dinner. My brother and I crouc hed down, hiding on either side of the kitchen doorway, listening in like foreign spies. Grown men had been electrocuted for less.

“They have a new director,” Da said.

Mama snor ted. “New director, pushing through some old policies ” She shook her head, knowing everything the world had to teac h. She sounded different. Poorer, somehow. Older. Rural.

“It is not what you are thinking.”

“Not—”

“Not your contr ibution. Mine!” He almost laughed, but his throat wouldn’t let him.

Da sat at the kitc hen table. A sound came out of him, hor r id with wear, one he’d never have let go of had he known we were listening. It

crac ked into something almost a g iggle. “A music prog ram without Jews! Madman! How can you have classical music without Jews?”

“Easy. Same way you had baseball without coloreds.”

Something had happened to my father’s voice, too. Some ancient thic kening. “Madness. They might as well refuse a c hild for being able to read notes ”

Mama set the knife down. One wr ist worked to hold the hair bac k out of her eyes. The other held her elbow in a ﬁst. “We fought that war for nothing. Wor se than nothing. We should never have bothered.”

“What is left for suc haplace?” Ashout came outofDa. Jonah and I both ﬂinc hed, as if he’d hit us. “What kind of c hor us do they think they put together?”

That night my father, who’d never c hec ked “Jewish” on any for m in his life, whose life was devoted to proving the univer se needed no relig ion but math, made us sing all the Phryg ian folk tunes he could remember from alifeofdedicated forgetting. He took over the keyboard from my mother, his finger s finding that plaintive modal sor row hidden in the c hords We sang in that secret language Da dropped intosometimes, in streets nor th of our s, English’s near cousin from a far village, those slant words I could almost recognize. Even in quic kstep, those scales, glancing with flat seconds and sixths, tur ned love songs to a pretty face into shoulder shr ugs at blind history. My father became alithe, nasal clar inet, and the rest of us followed. Even Ruth pic ked up the c hant, with her eer ie instant mimicry.

Our parents resumed the searc h for a proper sc hool. Mama was militant now. She only wanted to keep her ﬁr stbor n nearby, in or around New York, as close to home as possible. And only music and this newfound urgency could have let him go that far. Da, the empir icist, steeled himself against all considerations but the sc hool’s wor th. Between them, they made the awful compromise: a boarding preconser vatory up in Boston, Boylston Academy.

The sc hool was g rowing famous on the strengths of its director, the g reat Hungar ian bar itone János Reményi. My parents read about the place in the Times, where the man had declared this country’s early voice training to be atravesty. This was exactly what a nation str uggling under the mantle of postwar cultural leader ship most feared hear ing about itself, and it rewarded itsaccuserwithgenerous suppor t. Da and Mama must have thought a Hungar ian wouldn’t care where we’d come from. The c hoice seemed almost safe.

This time, we traveled together to the tryout, our whole family. We drove up in a beautiful rented Hudson with the fender worked r ight into the body. My mother rode in the bac kseat with me and Ruth. She always rode in the bac k whenever we traveled together, and Da always drove. Theytold us it had to do with Ruthie’s safety. Jonah told me it was so that the police wouldn’t stop us

For his tr ial, Jonah prepared Mahler’s “Wer hat dies Liedlein erdac ht?” from Des Knaben Wunderhor n. Mama accompanied him, working up the piano reduction for weeks in advance, until it glistened. She wore a pleated blac k silk dress with draped shoulder s, whic hmadeher look even taller and thinner than she was. She was the most beautiful woman the judges could ever hope to look upon. János Reményi himself was one of the three auditioner s. My father pointed him out as we entered the hall.

“Him?” Jonah said. “He doesn’t look Hungar ian!”

“What do Hungar ians look like?”

Jonah shr ugged. “Balder, maybe?”

Only a handful of singer s tr ied out that day, those who’d made it through the r igorous screening Mr Reményi called the name Strom from a c hec klist. Mama and Jonah walked down the aisle to the stage A woman intercepted them before they could reac h the steps. She asked Mama where the accompanist was. My mother suc ked in her breath and smiled. “I’m accompanying.” She sounded tired, but trained.

The exc hange must have ﬂustered her. Up onstage, she set out of the gate at a tempo faster than they’d ever taken the piece in their thousand r un-throughs at home. I’dheard thepiece so many times, I could have sung it in rever se. But at the tempo Mama set, I’d have missed the entrance. Jonah, of cour se, came in perfectly. He’d only been waiting for the thr ill of that moment to take the song aloft.

I saw the judges share a look when Jonah hit his fir st r ising figure. But they let him finish. The song vanished into history in under two minutes In my brother’s mouth, the tune tur ned into impish myth. It spoke of a world without weight or effor t. The Boy’s Magic Hor n, sung at last by a boy still under thespell.

One of the judges star ted to clap, but a look from Reményi froze her in midtwitc h. The director scr ibbled some notes, took off his glasses, lifted his eyebrows, and gazed at my brother “Mr Strom ” I looked at my father, confused. His eyes ﬁxed on Reményi. “Can you tell me what this song means?”

Da leaned forward and began thumpinghis head against the seat in

front of him. Mama, onstage, folded her hands across her beautiful blac k dress and studied her lap. In Jonah’s sing ing voice, my parents felt utter conﬁdence. But spoken words were not their son ’ s for te.

Jonah stood ready to help this Hungar ian out with any troubles he was having. He looked up at the stage lights, cr ibbing the answer there. “Uh ...Who thought up this little song?”Hegave an embar rassed sigh, passing the buc k to the poet.

“Yes, yes. That’s the title. Now what do the words mean?”

My brother br ightened. “Oh! Okay. Let’s see. ” My father’s head banging accelerated. Six-year-old Ruthie, on his other side, squir med and star ted to hum. Da shushed her, something he never did. “There’s this house up in the mountains,” Jonah explained. “And a g irl at the window ”

“What kind of g irl?”

“Ger man?”

All three judges cleared their throats.

“A sweet g irl,” Reményi said. “A darling g irl. Go on. ”

“She doesn’t live there. She has this mouth? Andit’s mag ic? It br ings dead people bac k to life ” The idea played in his eyes:ghouls,soulsuc ker s, zombies. “And then there are these three geese, who car ry this song around in their beaks . . . ”

“That’s enough.” Reményi tur ned to my mother. “You see? Not a song for young boys.”

“But it is, ” my father blur ted from bac kinthe hall.

Reményi tur ned around, but his look, in the dark room, went r ight through us He tur ned bac k to Mama. “This is a song for a mature voice He should not be sing ing this. He can’t do it well, and it might even do his vocal cords har m. ”

My motherhunc hed over the piano benc h, under the weight of her compounded mistakes. She’dthought to delight the g reat man with her son ’ s br ightness, and the g reat man had snuffed out her little lamp. She wanted to crawl into the piano and slice herself to r ibbons on the thinnest, highest str ings.

“Maybe in twenty year s, we will lear n Mahler properly. The c hild and I. If we ’ re both still alive.”

My father coughed in relief. Mama, onstage, straightened up again and decided to live Root star ted c hatter ing, and I couldn’t hush her My brother pic ked at his elbow onstage, seeming to have missed the whole drama.

Out in the cor r idor, Jonah bounded up to me. “Maybe the guy just doesn’t like music.” A tide of sympathy rose in his eyes. He wanted to work with the man, to show him the pleasures of sound.

We wandered around the sc hool’scompound, itsmoc k-Italian palazzo wedged between the Bac k Bay and the Fens. Da talked to acoupleofthe students, including one Ger man-speaking son of a diplomat. All swore devotion to the academy and its vocal prog ram. Some of the better older voices were alreadyplacing in competitions here and in Europe.

Jonah dragged me around the building, poking into the crannies, oblivious to the head-tur ning we all caused. Our mother walked about the g rounds in lead shoes, as if to her own funeral. Every new proof that this was the r ight next step in her son ’ s life added a decade to hers

Da and Mama confer red with the sc hool officials while Jonah and I enter tained Ruth, letting her throw bread cr umbs at the spar rows and pebbles at the marauding squir rels. Our parents retur ned, flustered by something Jonah and I didn’t ask about. Together, the five of us headed toward the rented Hudson for the long drive home. But a voice called to us as we made our way down the front walk.

“Excuse me, please.” Maestro Reményi stood in the academy’s entrance. “May I have a moment?” He looked r ight past Da, as he had at the auditions. “You are the boy’s mother?” He studied Mama’s face and then Jonah’s, searc hing for the key to a mystery larger than Mahler. Mama nodded, holding the g reat man’s stare. János Reményi shook his head, a slow processing of theevidence. “Brava, madame.”

Those two words were the g reat musical reward of my mother’s life For ﬁfteen seconds, she tasted the triumph she had sacr iﬁced by mar rying my father and raising us. All the way home, in the gather ing dark, with Jonah up in the front, humming to himself, she predicted, “You’re going to lear n whole worlds from this man. ”

Jonah got into the Boylston Academy of Music with a full sc holar ship. But bac k in the shelter of Hamilton Heights, he began to balk. “There’s so muc h more you can still teac h me, ” he told Mama, going for the kill. “I can concentrate better here, without all the other c hildren.”

Mama c hanted to him in her history teac her’s voice. “JoJo honey. You have askill. Aspecialg ift. Maybe only one out of thousands of boys—”

“Fewer,” Da said, doing the calculation.

“Only one in a million can even dream of doing what you’ll do ”

“Who cares?” Jonah said.

He knew he’d crossed a line. Mama held him in place, lifting his c hin. She could have killed him with a word. “Every living soul.”

“You have a duty,” Da explained, his consonants cr isping. “You must g row that g ift and g ive it bac k to creation.”

“What about Joey? He plays piano better than Ido. He’s a faster sightsinger ” Tattletale-style: He hit me ﬁrst. “You can’t send me without Joey I don’t want to go to any sc hool he’s not gonna go to.”

“Don’t say ‘gonna,’ ” Mama said. She must have known the real ter ror. “You go blaze a trail. Before you know it, he’ll follow you. ”

Too late, our parents saw they’d let us spend too muc h time indoor s. Home sc hool was their controlled exper iment,and it had produced two hothouse ﬂower s They spoke to eac h other at night, in low voices, undressing for the night behind their bedroom door, thinking we couldn’t hear.

“Maybe we too muc h protected them?” Da’s voice couldn’t ﬁnd the path it wanted.

“You can’t leave a c hild like that loose in a place like this.” The old ag reement, the thing that bound them together, the endless work of raising an endangered soul.

“But even so. Maybe we should have . . . They don’t have one real fr iend for the twoofthem.”

My mother’s voice lifted a reg ister. “They know other boys. They like the likable ones. ” But I could hear it in her, wishing things otherwise. Somehow, we’d failed to make their plan work. I wanted to go tell them about the hurled br ic k shards, the words we’d lear ned, the threats against us, all the things we’d sheltered our parents from. Yellow boy. Halfbreed. I heard Mama, at her vanity, drop her tor toise br ushes and stiﬂe a sob.

And I heard Da shelter her, apologizing. “They have each other. They will meet others, like them. They will make friends, when they ﬁnd them.”

An oboist acquaintance of Da’sinthe Columbia Math Depar tment had long pestered Da to let us sing for the campus Lutherans. And for just as long, our parents had tur ned the man down. Mama took us to neighborhood c hurc hes, where our voices joined her s in the general roof raising. But beyond that, they’d kept us safe from the compromised world of public perfor mance. “My boys are singer s, ” she said, “not trained seals.” This always made Jonah bark and clap the bac ks of his paws.

Now our parents thought the Lutherans might prepare Jonah for his

bigger step that fall. Churc h recitals could inoculate us against the more vir ulent outside. Our fir st forays down into Mor ningside Heights for c hoir rehear sal felt like overland expeditions. Da, Jonah, and I headed down on Thur sday nights on the Seventh Avenue local, coming bac k up in a cab, my brother and I fighting to r ide in the front with the cabbie and practice our fake Italian. At the fir st rehear sals, everyone stared But Jonah was a sensation. The c hoir director held up practice, manufacturing excuses just to listen to my brother sing a passage alone.

The c hoir contained several talented amateur s, cultivated academics who lived for the twice-a-week c hance to immer se themselves in lost c hords. A few powerful voices and even a couple of pros, there as a public ser vice, also kic ked bac k into the kitty For two weeks, we sang innocuous anthems in thenor ther n Protestant tradition. But even that young, Jonah and I scor ned the c heesy, predictable modulations. Bac k in Hamilton Heights, we’d tor ture the lyr ics—“My redeemer Lumpy; yes, my Jesus Lumpy.” But on Sundays, we were stalwar t, sing ing even the most banal melody as if salvation demanded it.

One of the g roup’s real altos, a pro named Lois Helmer, had designs on my brother from the moment his voice cut through that musty c hoir loft. She treated him like the c hild she’d sacr iﬁced to pur sue her modest concer t career. She heard in Jonah’s bell tones a way to g rab the pr ize her career had so far denied her.

Miss Helmer had a set of pipes more piercing than that c hurc h’s organ. But she must have been of an age—101, by Jonah’s dead rec koning—when thepipes would soon star t r usting. Before her sound leaked out and silence took over, she meant to nail a favor ite piece that, to her ear s, had never received a decent hear ing in this world. In Jonah’s sonar soprano, she found at last the instr ument of herdelivery.

I couldn’t knowitthen,but Miss Helmer was a good two decades ahead of her time Long before the explosion of recording gave bir th to Early Music, she and a few other nar row voices in awide-vibrato sea began insisting that, for music before 1750, precision came before “ war mth.” At that time, big was the vogue in everything. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, still mounted itsannual zeppelin-sized, cast-of-thousands perfor mances of the Bac h Passions, devotional music in the atomic age, where mass released a lumber ing spir itual energy. Miss Helmer, in contrast, felt that, with complex polyphony, God might actually like to hear the pitc hes. The sparer the line, the g reater the lift. For energy was also propor tionate to lightness squared.

All her life, she’d wanted to take that br illiant duet from Cantata 78 out for a test spin, proof that small was beautiful and light was all. But she’d never found a woman soprano whose vibrato warbled less than a quar ter tone. Then she heard the ethereal boy, maybe the ﬁr st since Bac h’s Thomassc hule in Leipzig able to do justice to the euphoria. She approac hed Mr Peir son, the c hoir director, a bloodless respecter of andante who thought he could reac h the calmer patc hes of Lutheran purgatory if he only respected all the dynamics and offended no listener. Mr. Peir son balked, capitulating only when Lois Helmer threatened to remove her assets to the Episcopalians. Mr. Peir son sur rendered the podium for the occasion, and Lois Helmer lost no time hunting up a skilled cellist to hold down the spr ing ing Violone line

Miss Helmer had another wild idea: music and its words ought to ag ree. Sc hweitzer hadbeen onto this for decades, pushingfor word painting in Bac h as early as the year that Einstein—the violinist who bent my brother’s life—dismantled univer sal time.But in practice, Bac h’s music, no matter the text, stood coated in that same caramel glow that masked old master paintings, the golden dusk that museumgoer s took for spir ituality but whic h was, in fact, just g rime

Miss Helmer’s Bac h would do what its words said. If the duet began “Wir eilen mitschwachen, doch emsigen Schr itten” “We r ush with faint but ear nest footsteps”—then the damn thing would r ush. She harassed the continuo player s until they brought the songuptoher mental tempo, a third faster than the piece had ever been perfor med. She swore at the bewildered player s dur ing rehear sal, and Jonah relished every cur se.

He, of cour se, stood ready to blast through the piece at the speed of delight. When Jonah sang, even in rehear sal, making his noise for people who weren’t like us, I felt ashamed, like we were betraying the family secret. He matc hed this woman phrase for phrase, a mynah latc hing onto his trainer’s every tr ic k, their free-play imitation ﬁnally converg ing in perfect sync hrony, as if both had found a way to catc h up to their own eer ie ec hoes and rejoin.

On the Sunday of their perfor mance, Jonah and I clung to the c hoir loft’s rail, eac h in a blac k blazer and a red bow tie that had taken all Da’s knowledge of low-deg ree topology to tie. We stood on high and watc hed the cong regation mill about the pews like ir idescent bugs under a lifted garden stone Da, Mom, and Ruth came late and sat way in the bac k, where they couldn’t bother anyone else by being seen.

The anthem followed the Gospel. Most weeks, the moment passed, a sample swatc h of spir itual wallpaper that the customer s of g race ﬁngered and set down. But that week, the bobbing cello obbligato launc hed suc h spr ing that even those already dozing sat up in their pews, alar med by pleasure.

Out of the eight jauntybar s, the sopranolifts, an over night crocus, homesteading the winter-beaten lawn. The tune is propelled by the simplest tr ic k: Stable do comes in on an unstable upbeat, while the downbeat squids away on the scale’s unstable re. With this slight push, the song stumbles forward until it climbs up into itself from below, tag-team wrestling with its own alto double. Then, in scr ipted improvisation, the two spr ung lines duc k down the same inevitable, sur pr ise path, mottled with minor patc hes and sudden br ight light. The entwined lines outgrow their bounds, spilling over into their successor s, joy on the loose, ingenuity reac hing anywhere it needs to go.

Eight bar s of cello, and Jonah’s voice sailed out from the bac k of the c hurc h. He sang as easily as the rest of the world c hatted. His voice cut through the Cold War gloom and fell without war ning on the mor ning ser vice. Then Lois entered, spur red on to matc h the boy’s pinpoint clarity, sing ing with a br illiance she hadn’t owned since her own conﬁr mation. We r ush with faint but ear nest footsteps. Ach, höre. Ah, hear!

But where were we r ushing? That mystery, at age nine, lay beyond my ability to solve. Rushing to aid this Jesu. But then we lifted our voices to ask for his help. As far as I could hear, the song rever sed itself, as split as my brother, unable to say who helped whom. Someone must have botc hed the English translation, and Icouldn’t follow the or ig inal. Mama spoke only voice-student Ger man, and Da, who’d escaped just before the war, never bothered to teac h us more of his language than we sang together around the piano.

But the Ger man was lost in that beam of light that hung above the cong regation. My brother’s voice washed over the well-heeled pews, and year s of pale, nor ther n cultivation dissolved in the sound. People tur ned to look, despite Jesus’ order to believe without seeing. Lois and my brother sailed along in loc kstep, their ﬁnely lathed or naments taken up into the hear t of the twisting tune. They leapfrogged and doubled eac h other, a melanc holy mention of the sick and wayward before br ightening toward home,whileall the while moving the idea of home three more modulations deeper into unspinning space. Zu dir. Zu dir. Zu dir. Even Mr.

Peir son fought to keep his lower lip from quiver ing. After the ﬁr st stanza, he stopped trying.

When the cello did its ﬁnal da capo and the high-voiced tandemtoboggan took its last banked tur n, the song wound up where all songs do: perfected in silence. A few str ic ken listener s even committed that wor st of Lutheransins and clapped in churc h Communion, that day, was an anticlimax.

In the c haos after the ser vice, I searc hed out my brother. Lois Helmer was kissing him. He stared me down, cutting off even a snic ker. He abided Miss Helmer, who hugged him to her, then let him go. She seemed completed. Already dead.

Our family scooted out to the street, doing its traditional disappearing act. But the crowd found my brother. Stranger s came up and pressed him to them. One old man—out for his lastSunday on God’s ear th—ﬁxed Jonah with aknowing stare and held on to his hand for dear life. “That was the most beautiful Handel Iever heard.”

We escaped and cac kled as we ran. Two ladies snagged us in midﬂight. They had something momentous to say, some secret they weren’t supposed to tell, but, like g irls our age, they couldn’t help themselves. “Young man,”the taller one said. “We just want you to know what an honor it is for us to have . . . a voice like your s in the ser vice of our c hurc h.” Like yours. Some sinful Easter egg we were supposed to discover. “And I just can’t tell you . . . ” The words caught in her throat. Her fr iend put a white-gloved hand on her ar m to encourage her. “I just can’t tell you how muc h it means to me, per sonally, to have a little Neg ro boy sing ing like that. In our c hurc h. For us. ”

Her voice broke with pr ide, and her eyes watered. My brother and I traded smirks. Jonah smiled at the ladies, forg iving their ignorance. “Oh, ma’am, we ’ re not real Neg roes. But our mother is!”

Now the adults passed a look between them. The gloved one patted Jonah’s amber-colored head. They stepped away and faced eac h other, brows up, clutc hing eac h other’s elbows, searc hing for the r ight way to break the news to us. But at that moment, our father, fed up with crowds and Chr istians, even academic ones, came bac k into the nave to ﬁsh us out.

“Come on, you two Your old man is dying of hunger ” He’d pic ked up the line from “Baby Snooks” or “The Aldr ic h Family,” those radio ser ials about assimilated life that held him in suc h inter planetary awe. “You have to get your old Da bac k uptown, to his dinner, before anything happens.”

The ladies fell bac k from this ghost. Their known world cr umpled faster than they could rebuild it. I looked away, taking on their shame. Da waved apology to Jonah’s admirer s. Their hard-won campaign of liberal tolerance crashed down around them in one imper tinent ﬂip of the physicist’s wr ist.

On Broadway, the fir st three cabs we flagged wouldn’t take us In the cab, Mama couldn’tstop humming Bac h’s exultant little tune. We boys sat on either side of her, with Ruth on her lap and Da up front. She wore a blac k silk dress pr inted with little lambs so small, they might have been polka dots. Coc ked on her head was a cupped potsherd hat—“your mother’s yar mulke,”Dacalled it—with apiece of blac k net she pulled down like a half veil in front of her face She looked more beautiful than any movie star, with all the beauty Joan Fontaine never quite pulled off. Sing ing in a cab on Broadway, sur rounded by her tr iumphant family, she was blac k, still young, and, for five minutes, free.

But my brother was elsewhere. “Mama,” he asked. “You are a Neg ro, r ight? And Da’s . . . some kind of Jewish guy. What exactly does that make me, Joey, and Root?”

My mother stopped sing ing I wanted to slug my brother and didn’t know why. Mama looked off into whatever place lay beyond sound. Da, too, shifted. They’d been waiting for the question, and every other one that would follow, down the year s to come. “You must r un your own race, ” our father pronounced. I felt he was casting us out into coldest space.

Ruth, on our mother’s lap, laughed in the face of the glorious day. “Joey’s a Nee-g ro. And Jonah’s a Gro-nee.”

Mama looked at her little g irl with a crooked little smile. She lifted her veil and held Ruthietoher. She r ubbed her nose into her daughter’s belly, humming the Bac h. With two g reat bear ar ms, she drew our heads into the embrace “You’re whatever you are, inside Whatever you need to be. Let every boy ser ve God in his own fashion.”

She wasn’t telling us everything. Jonah heard it, too. “But what are we? For real, I mean. We got to be something, r ight?”

“Have.” She sighed. “We have to be something.”

“Well?” My brother ﬁddled to free his shoulder s. “What something?”

She released us “You two boys ” The words came out of the side of her mouth, slower than that mor ning’s glacial ser mon. “You two boys are one of a kind.”

The cabbie must have been blac k. He took us all the way home.

This was all our parents said about the matter, until the end of summer. We went bac k to the local c hurc h circuit with our mother, where our s were just a par t of the deep, concer ted voice. August tr ic kled out, and Jonah readied to leave home. Our evenings of song tapered off. The c hords we made were no longer cr isp, and no one had the hear t for counter point.

Sometimes at night, through our parents’ door, we heard Mama weeping at her mir ror, and Da trying for all the world to answer. Jonah did his best to comfor t them both. He told them Boston would be good for him. He’d come bac k sing ing so well, they’d be glad they’d sent him away. He said he’d be happy. He told them everything they wanted to hear, in a voice that must have destroyed them.

EASTER , 1 939

This day, a nation tur ns out for its own wake.The air is raw, but scr ubbed by last night’s rain. Sunday r ises, red and protestant, over the Potomac. Light’s paler synonyms scratc h at the capital’s monuments, edg ing the bloc ks of the Federal Tr iangle, tur ning sandstone to marble, marble to g ranite, g ranite to slate, settling down on the Tidal Basin like water seeking its level. The palette of this dawn is pure Ashcan Sc hool. Early mor ning coats every cor nice with magentas that deepen as the hour s unfold. But memory will forever replay this day in blac k and white, the slow voice-over pan of Movietone

Laborer s dr ift across a Mall littered with scraps of funny paper s scatter ing on the Apr il wind. Sawhor ses and police cones corral the lawless expanse of public space. Federal work teams—split by race—ﬁnish ratc heting together a g randstand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A handful of organizer s gazes over the reﬂecting pool, swapping bets about the size of the crowd that will tur n out for this funeral tur ned jubilee. The crowds about to descend on them in three hour s will swamp their most outrageous guesses.

Knots of thecur ious gather to witness these last-minute preparations. Accounts have been ﬂying for some time now word of this forbidden concer t. Amer ican Dream and Amer ican Reality square off, their long trajector ies arcing toward midair collision. The ancient ship of state, gone too long without a hull scrape, g roaned at anc hor last night in the

Washington Navy Yard, upr iver on the Anacostia, and now entire neighborhoods of the city, this Easter mor ning, 1939—in crowds already assembling to the east of Scott Circle and nor th of Q Street, all the way up into the Maryland suburbs; whole communities still in c hurc h, calling out their response to this year ’ s recounting of theancient Resur rection fable—beg in to wonder whether today might witness the leaky old brig’s merc y scuttling, a full-ﬂedged bur ial at sea.

“How long?” the c hurc h songs ask. “How long until that Day?” As late as last Fr iday, no tune dared more than soon, no singer thought sooner than never. Yet this mor ning, by some overlooked miracle, the stone has rolled away, Rome’s imper ial elite lie sprawled about the tomb, and the messenger angel ﬂoats front and center, beating its wings over the Jefferson Memor ial, saying now, sing ing release in the key of C.

Over on Pennsylvania Avenue, pink c hildren in vests and pinafores hunt for Easter eggs on the White House lawn. Inside the Oval Office, the silver-tongued president and his speec hwr iter s conspire on the next fireside c hat to a country still hoping to evade the flames. Eac h new pater nal radio address stores up more strained reassurances “Br utality,” the old man tells his fireside family, “is a nightmare that must waken to democracy.” A loving-enough lie, perhaps even believable, to those who’ve never strolled nor thward up Four teenth Street. But Roosevelt’s address on the widening crisis goes hunting, this Easter, for an audience. Today, the nation’s radios tune to a different perfor mance, a wider frequenc y. Today, Radio Amer ica broadcasts a new song.

Democrac y is not on the prog ram this after noon. Freedom will not r ing from Constitution Hall. The Daughter s of the Amer ican Revolution have seen to that. The DAR have shut their house to Mar ian Ander son, the country’s g reatest contralto, recently retur ned from a tr iumphal tour of Europe, the sensation of Austr ia and the toast of the Norweg ian king. Sibelius embraced her, declar ing, “My roof is too low for you!” Even Berlin booked her for multiple engagements, until her European manager confessed to the author ities that no, Miss Ander son was not 100 percent Aryan. The g reat Sol Hurok has taken her into his fold of inter national star s, sure he can replicate, at home, the wonder of the jaded Old World. Last year, he booked Miss Ander son on a seventy-concer t U.S. tour, the most g r ueling ever perfor med by a recital singer. This same alto has just been bar red from the capital’s best stage

Who can say what revolution the DAR staves off, sandbagged behind

its blinding-white Roman por tico? “Booked through the end of winter,” the prog ramming director tells Hurok. “Spr ing, as well.” The agency’s associates call in another booking, for a different ar tist, this one 100 percent Aryan. They get a c hoice of half a dozen slots.

Hurok tells the newspaper s, though this story is hardly news. It’s the country’slongest-r unning ser ial feature The press asks the Daughter s for comment. Is this per manent policy, or some vague stopgap? The DAR answer s that, by tradition, cer tain of the city’s concer t halls are reser ved for perfor mances by Miss Ander son ’ s people. Constitution Hall is not one. It’s not DAR polic y to defy community standards. Should sentiment c hange, Miss Ander son might sing there. Sometime in the future. Or shor tly thereafter

The Daily Worker has a ﬁeld day. Ar tists vent their outrage—Heifetz, Flagstad, Far rar, Stokowski. But Amer ica ignores these foreign inter ventions. Thousands of petition signatures produce nothing. Then the real bombshell falls. Eleanor Roosevelt, Fir st Mother of all Fir st Daughter s, resigns herDAR member ship. The president’s wife rejects her roots over night, declar ing that no ancestor of her s ever fought to found this republic. The story makes headlines here and in capitals abroad. Miss Ander son plunges, attacca, from liederinto high opera. But her alto remains the sole calm in themiddle of anational outcry. She tells the press she knows less about the situation than any of them. Her poise is a gentle puff, yet breath enough to fan old cinders into ﬂame.

On seg regation, the presidenc y has held silent since Reconstr uction. Now a classical vocal recital becomes the battleﬁeld for this administration’s public stand. High culture signs on to battle not just another affront to the downtrodden Neg ro but a slander against Sc huber t and Brahms. The Fir st Lady, for mer social worker, is fur ious. Long an Ander son fan, she had the alto sing acommandperfor mance three year s earlier. Now the woman who sang at the White House can’t use the rented stage. Eleanor’s ad hoc Protest Committee looks for an alter nate venue, but the Board of Education denies them Central High Sc hool. Central High, unavailable to Var iety’ s third-biggest perfor mer of the year. “If a precedent of this sor t is established, the board will lose the respect andconﬁdence of the people and br ing about its destr uction.”

Walter White, NAACP president, heads to the Capitol with the only possible solution, one large enough to tur n catastrophe to work. Harold Ic kes, secretary of the inter ior, ag rees to the idea in a hear tbeat. The sec-

retary has at his command the perfect venue. Its acoustics are awful and the seating wor se. But oh, the capacity! Miss Anderson will sing outdoor s, from the foot of the Emancipator. There’s no hiding place down here.

Word of the plan goes out, and hate mail pour s in. Makeshift crosses of Japanese c her ry pop up likedaffodils in the White House lawn. Still, there’s no weighing the human soul except singly. The Texas c hapter of the Daughter s wires in an order for two hundred seats. But Ic kes and Eleanor have saved their tr ump card. The tic kets for this cobbled-up Sunday concer t will go for free. Free is an admission pr ice the nation understands, one that guarantees a house to make the DAR blanc h. Even those who don’t know a meno from a molto, who couldn’t pic k Aida from Otello out of a c hor us line, plan to spend this Easter on the Mall.

Tens of thousands makethe pilg r image, eac h one for pr ivate motives. Lover s of free-ﬂying danger. Those who’d have paid for tunes to witness this Europe-stealing phenomenon. Devotees who wor shiped this woman’s throat before the force of destiny slipped into it. People who simply want to see a face like their s up there on the marble steps, standing up to the wor st the white world can throw at it and g iving it all bac k in glory.

Over in Philadelphia, at Union Baptist, that temple tower ing over Fitzwater and Mar tin, this is the hour of deliverance, a cong regation’s paybac k, though they’ve never sought the slightest reward. On this g reat gettin’-up mor ning, the pastor works Miss Ander son into his Easter sermon for the special early ser vice.Hespeaks of the sound of alifethat keeps on r ising, breaking out of the g rave, no matter how hard the farﬂung empire might want it dead and bur ied. The g reat crescent banks of polished pews lean in to the message and ring it with amens. The c hildren’s c hoir lets loose a noise more joyful than any it’s made since little Mar ian’s heyday, and the sound r ises up to roost in the arcing car ved rafter s.

The gospel is good, and the c hurc h empties its wor shiper s like the contents of that old tomb. In Sunday finest, the g reat floc k mills on the c hurc h porc h, waiting for the busses, trading excitement, remember ing the student recitals and the benefit concer ts, the dimes pooled: Educate Our Mar ian, the pure voice of her people’s future

The busses ﬁll with song rolling across all reg isters, r ic h suspensions br idg ing the wilder ness and Canaan. They sing sear ing anthems, tear off

gospel hand-clapper s, and layinto stolid four-par t hymns. They sing a ﬁeld full of spir ituals, including their Mar ian’s favor ite: “Trampin’.” “I’m trampin’, I’mtrampin’, trying to make heaven my home.” The more pragmatic sing, “trying to make a heaven of my home.” Only this once, among the endlessear thly sc hisms, the two inimical per suasions lie down alongside eac h other, separate par ts in the same c hor us

Delia Daley’s adopted par ish heads for the promised land without her. In her agony of one, Delia feels them leaving, abandoning her on the wrong side of those par ting water s. She’s even had to miss the special sunr ise ser vice, saddled with her mor ning shift at the hospital, whic h she cannot slip. She stands at the nur ses’ station, still begg ing for a c har itable cr umb, just an hour, half an hour’s merc y The br ic k-complexioned Feena Sundstrom doesn’t even blink at her. “Everyone, Miss Daley, would like Easter Sunday off, our patients included.”

She consider s leaving early anyway, but the Swedish Stor m Trooper is already set to ﬁre her just for looking sideways. Without the money coming in from her hospital hour s, Delia can wave the last year of her voice training good-bye She’d have to beg from her father again, just to have enough to g raduate, something the man would no doubt almost love She’s had to listen to the speech every semester for the last four year s. “Allow me to remind you of a little matter of economic reality. You’ve heard about this par ty the high and mighty have dreamed up, a little thing called the Depression? Half ourpeople, workless. It’s wiped out almost every Neg ro this country hasn’t already wiped out. You want to lear n to sing? Take a look at what we folk have to sing about.”

When she told her father she wouldn’t be heading to Washington with Union Baptist, the doctor all but beamed. When she added that she’d be going later, by train, at extra expense, he tur ned bac k into Old Testament patr iarc h. “How is this indulgent excursion supposed to contribute to your making a living? Is that more of your mag ic of high ar t?”

No good telling him she makes ends meet. Miss Ander son makes a better living than ninety-nine hundredths of we folk, not to mention almost every white man alive. Her father would only repeat what he’s said endlessly since she entered sc hool: The world of classical music makes professional boxing look like an ice-cream social. Gladiator combat unto death. Only the r uthless sur vive.

Yet DeliaDaley has sur vived—her own brand of r uthless Ruthless toward her self, toward her bodily strength, her available hour s. A four-

year, around-the-cloc k marathon, through every wall, and she’s ready to keep r unning, as long as she has to. Full-time at the hospital, twice that at sc hool. Let her father see the power of high ar t.

But today ar t’s power falter s, threatens to fall. The predawn shift is wor se than murder, with nowhere to appeal. The feeble and inﬁr m—always with us, as Jesus says, but somehow more numerous than usual, this Easter—lie waiting in their own waste for her to come clean them. She twice needs help in moving patients to get to thesoiled linen. Then the Br ic k Nightingale makes her do second ﬂoor west’s bathrooms, just because the woman knows what today is. Feena the Fascist stands over her the whole while, sighing about colored people’s time. “You people are so slow getting in and so damn fast getting out.”

To augment the agony, three separate patients yell at her for clear ing their breakfasts away before they’ve ﬁnish pec king at their vulcanized eggs. So Delia is almost a full, unpaid hour late getting out, counting the ten minutes of Feena’s repr imand. She r uns home to wash and throw on a decent dress before r ushing to the train, whose fare will set her bac k a week’s wor th of hospital-subsidized lunches

At home, her wor st nightmare settles in for a double feature Her mother insists she sit down for Easter dinner. “You have a bite of my holiday ham and get something green and ﬁlling in you. Specially if you’re taking atr ip.”

“Mama. Please. Just this once. I’m going to miss her. I have to make the early train, or she’ll be done singing before I even—”

“Nonsense.” Her father dismisses her. “You won’t be late for anything. What time is she supposed to star t? When has a singer of our race ever star ted a concer t at the adver tised hour?” He repeats the same litany eac h week when he takes her to Union Baptist for choir. His mir th is a r unning testament to howbitterly she has dashed his hopes.

Blac k’s not even half the battle She, William Daley’s ﬁr stbor n— cleverest baby ever bir thed, either side of the line—has been his dream for ac hievement beyond even the unlikely heights he’s scaled in this life. She should go to medical sc hool. He did. Pediatr ician, inter nist, maybe. Do anything, if she weren’t so headstrong. Pass him up. Go to law sc hool, ﬁr st blac k woman ever. Force them to take her, on pure skill. Run for Cong ress, Lord help him.

Congress, Daddy?

Why not? Look at our neighbor, Crystal Bird Faucet. Rewr iting all the rules—

and she makes you look like Ivory soap. Washington’s next. Has to happen someday. Who’s going to move it down the line, if not the best? And the best, he insisted, was her. Somebody’s got to be the ﬁr st. Why not his little g irl? Make history. What’s history, anyway,except uncanting thecan’t?

This is the measureless conﬁdence that has led her astray. His fault, her sing ing Stroked too muc h while g rowing up Be anything Do anything. Dare them to stop you. When she found her voice: You sound like the angels raised from the dead, if they still bothered with the likes of us down here. A sound like that could ﬁx the broken world. How could she help but be misled?

But when he lear ned she meant to make sing ing her life, his tune c hanged keys Singing’s just a consolation pr ize. Just a pretty tr inket, to be put away for the day when we have some decent clothes. No one’s ever freed anybody with a song.

In her father’s house, standing over her mother’s linen table, Delia feels the creases in her shoulder s. She gazes at her little brother and sister s spreading the holiday plates. Poor souls will have the ﬁght of their lives just making it to adulthood.Just as muc h pressure from inside as from out.

Her mother catc hes her looking. “It’sEaster,” Nettie Ellen says. “Where else you going to eat, if not with your family? You’re supposed to set some example fortheseyoung ones. They’re g rowing up lawless, Dee. They think they can r un around and do it all, no r ules, just like you. ”

“I have r ules, Mother Nothing but r ules ” She doesn’t push. She knows her mother’s real ter ror. The doctor’sboundlessness will do his offspr ing in. There’s a lesson outside this house, a tr uth too long and large to do muc h about. He should be readying his c hildren,temper ing their illusions, not settingthem up for the kill.

Lawless Delia sits to dinner. She almost c hokes, wolﬁng down a hunk of sugar-glazed ham. “It’s good, Mama. Delicious. The g reens, the beets: Everything’s perfect. Best year ever. I have to go. ”

“Hush. It’s Easter. You don’t have to leave for awhileyet. It’sawhole concer t. You don’t need to hear every song. There’s your favor ite mince pie, still coming.”

“My favor ite train to Washington’s coming before that.”

“Long gone, ” brother Charles sings, twelve-bar, in a good tenor wail, new as of last year. “Long gone. That train that’s gonna save ya? Long

gone. ” Mic hael joins in thetaunts, warbling his parody of a classical diva. Lucille star ts to cry, sure, despite all reassurances, that Delia’s putting her self in danger, traveling to Washington allby her self. Lorene follows suit, because she always ﬁnishes anything her twin star ts.

The doctor gets that look, the glareofdomestic tranquillity. “Who is this woman to you, that you have to cur tail Easter dinner with your family in order to—”

“Daddy, you hypocr ite.” She wipes her mouth on her napkin and stares him down. He knows who this woman is better than anyone. He knows what Philadelphia’s daughter has single-handedly accomplished. He’s the one who told Delia, year s ago, opened her eyes: The woman’s our vanguard. Our last, best hope of getting the white world’s attention. You want to go to singing school? There’s your ﬁrst, best teacher.

“Hypocr ite?” Her father stops in midforkful. She’s over stepped, one shade of will too deep. The doctor will r ise up, a pillar of r ighteousness, and forbid her to go. But she holds his eyes; no other way out. Then the side of his mouth skews into a smirk. “Who taught you those big twodollar words, baby? Don’t you ever forget who taught you them!”

Delia walks to the head of the table and pec ks him high up on his balding crown. Through puc kered lips, she hums “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” just loudly enough for him to hear. She hugs her scowling mother and then she’s gone, off to the station on another musical pilg r image. She has made them for year s, ever since the c hance broadcast that c hanged her life. Made the tr ips to Colorado Street, Miss Ander son ’ s g irlhood home, and to her second house on Mar tin Street. Walked around the halls of South Philly High, conjur ing up the g irl whowalked them. Passed for Baptist, to her agnostic father’s dismay and her A.M.E. mother’s hor ror, just to attend, eac h week, the c hurc h of her idol, the woman who taught her what she might do with her life.

A framed magazine photo of that regal face has stared down from Delia’s desk these last two year s, a silent reminder of all that sound can do. She heard it in that deep r iver of song flowing from her radio’s speaker, five year s ago, and again in that shaft of light she basked in during Miss Ander son ’ s too-br ief Philadelphiarecital last year. She has shaped her own mezzo around that voice, fixed in her memory. Today she’ll see again, in the flesh, the owner of those sounds Mar ian Ander son doesn’t even need to perfor m, for this tr ip to D.C. to pay off. All she needs to do is be.

Delia Daley subvocalizes on the train, shaping the lines in her mind. “The sound doesn’t star t in the throat,” Lugati c hides her every week. “The sound star ts in the thought.” She thinks the notes of Schuber t’s “Ave Mar ia,” that Ander son standard, promised on the prog ram for this day. They say the arc hbishop of Salzburg made her sing the Sc huber t twice. They say when she sang for a room of Europe’s best musicians a spir itual no one in the room could hope to have g rasped, they g rasped her anyway. And not a per son dared applaud when her last note faded.

How must it feel, tone r iding free on a column of breath, banking on the spir it’sslightest whim? Open throat, placement—all the tec hniques Lugati, her patient teac her, has har ped upon these last year s—will not teac h her as muc h as this one train tr ip Miss Ander son is her freedom. Anything her race cares to do, it will.

She steps off the train intoacapital huddling under blustery Apr il. She half-expects the c her ry trees to g reet her r ight inside Union Station. The coffered bar rel vault arc hes over her, a fading neoclassical cathedral to transpor tation that she steps through, making her self small, invisible. She moves through the crowd with tight, effacing steps, waiting for someone to c hallenge herr ight to be here.

Washington: every for tunate Philadelphia sc hoolg irl’s ﬁeld tr ip, but it has taken Delia until twenty to see the point of visiting. She heads out of the station and bear s southwest. She nods toward Howard, her father’s sc hool, where he suggested she go make something of her self. The Capitol r ises up on her left, more unreal in life than in the thousands of silver images she g rew up suspecting The building that now stands open to her color again, after a generation, bends the very air around it. She can’t stop looking. She walks into the waking spr ing, the r iver of moving bodies, g iggling even as she hushes her self up.

The whole city is a postcard panorama. Like being inside a white hand-me-down g rade sc hool civics text. Today, at least, the monumentﬂanked boulevards ﬂow with people of all races. The g roup from Union Baptist told her to look for them up front on the left, near the steps of the Lincoln Memor ial. She has only to hook r ight, on Constitution Avenue, to see how naïve those plans were. There’ll be no rendezvous today. To the west, a crowd gather s, too dense and ecstatic to penetrate.

Delia Daley looks out over the car pet of people, more people than she knew existed. Her father is r ight: The world is vicious, too huge to care about even its own sur vival. Her steps slow as she slips in behind the

mile-long crowd. All in front of her, the decades-long Great Mig ration comes home. She feels the danger, r ight down her spine. A crowd this size could trample her without anyone noticing. But the pr ize lies at the other end of this gliding cr ush. She breathes in, forcing herdiaphragm down—suppor t, appoggio!—and plunges in.

She expected something else, a lieder-loving concer t crowd, only a little larger. The prog ram today is hardly the Cotton Club. It isn’t even Rudy Vallee. Since when have Italian ar tsongs pulled in suc h ar mies? She dr ifts across a bar r icaded Four teenth Street at the crowd’s stately pace, falling under the outline of the Washington Monument, the world’s largest sundial, a shadow too long to read. Then she’s inside the whale’s belly, and all she can hear is the huge beating hear t of the beac hed creature.

Something here, a thing more than music, is kic king in the womb. Something no one could have named two months ago now r ises up, suc king in its ﬁr st stunned breaths. Just past Delia in the press of bodies, a g irl the color of her brother Charles—a high sc hooler, though from the look of her, high sc hool is a vanished dream—spins around, ﬂashing, to catc h the eye of anyone who’ll look at her, a look of delivery that has waited lifetimes.

Delia pushes deeper into the sea, her throat, like a pennant, unfurling. Her larynx drops, the release Lugati has been hounding her these last ten months to find. The loc k opens and a feeling descends on her—confirmation of her c hosen life. Fear falls away, old leg c hains she didn’t even know she was wear ing She’s on her appointed trac k, she and her people Eac h will find her only way forward. She wants to kic k bac k and call out, as so many around her are already doing,white people within ear shot or no. This is not a concer t. It’s a revival meeting, a national baptism, the r iverbanks flooded with waves of expectation.

Inside this crowd, she feels the best kind of invisible. The slatecolored combed-silk dress that ser ves so well for Philadelphia concer ts is all wrong here, too sleek by half, her hemline missing low by a full two inc hes.But no one marksher except with pleasure. She passes people fresh off mule-drawn tobacco-far m car ts, other s whose por tfolios are padded with bloc ks of General Motor s. To her r ight, a convention of overalls gather s together, huddled against the public A stooped couple in blac k for mal wear fresh from its Ar mistice Day outing br ush past her, eager to push up close enough to catc h a glimpse of the dais. Delia takes in

the topcoats, capes, raglans, peler ines, the whole gamut from ratty to elegant, the nec klines cowled, draped, squared, and bateaued, allr ubbing eager shoulder s.

Her lips for m the words, and her windpipe mimes the pitches: Every valley, exalted. A balding man about ten feet away from her, ghost white, with the Cumberland Gap between his two front teeth, perc hing inside a thin g ray suit, starc hed blue shir t, and tie pr inted with Washington landmarks, hear s her sing aloud what she has only imag ined. “Bless you, sister!” the ghost mansays. She just bows her head and lets her self be blessed.

The crowd condenses. It’s standing room only, flowing the length of the reflecting pool and down West Potomac Park. The floor of this c hurc h is g rass. The columns of this nave are budding trees. The vault above, an Easter sky. The deeper Delia wades in toward the spec k of g rand piano, the stic kpin cor sage of microphones whereher idol will stand, the thic ker this celebration. The press of massed desire lifts and deposits her, helpless, a hundred yards upstream, facing the Tidal Basin. Sc hoolbook c her ry trees swim up to fill her eyes, their blossoms mad. They wave the dazzle of their pollen bait and, in this snowstor m of petals, fuse with every Easter when they ever unfolded their promissory color.

And what color is this floc king people? She’s forgotten even to gauge. She never steps out in a public place without carefully averag ing the color around her,the measure of her relative safety. But this crowd waver s like a hor izon-long bolt of cr ushed velvet. Its tone c hanges with every tur n of light and tiltofher head. Amixed crowd, the fir st she’s ever walked in, Amer ican, larger than her country can hope to sur vive, out to celebrate the centur ies-overdue death of reserved seating, of nigger heaven. Both people are here in abundance, eac h using the other, eac h waiting for the sounds that will fill their own patent lac k. No one can be bar red from this endless g round floor.

Far to the nor thwest, a mile toward Foggy Bottom, a man walks toward her. Twenty-eight, but his ﬂeshy face looks ten year s older. His nec k is a pivot, his eyes behindtheir blac k hor n-r ims steadily measur ing the life all around him. Just his being alive to measure this unlikeliness deﬁes all odds.

He walks from Georgetown, where two old fr iends from his Berlin days put him up, spar ing him from looking for a room, an act of practical politics that would have defeated him. He has come down by train last

night from New York, wherehehas lived this past year, sheltered by Columbia. Yesterday, David Strom was out in Flushing Meadows, getting an advance peek at the World of Tomor row. Today, he woke up in Georgetown’s parade of yesterday. But now there is only and ever now, every inﬁnitesimal in the delta of his step asubtended, theoretical forever.

He’s here by George Gamow’s invitation, to talkat George Washington Univer sity on possible inter pretations of Milne and Dirac’s dual time scales: probably imag inary, he concludes, but as stagger ingly beautiful as tr uth. He was down three months before, for the Conference on Theoretical Physics, where Bohr told the assembled luminar ies about the existence of ﬁssion. Now David Strom retur ns, to add his pr ivate notes to the g rowing stoc kpile of inﬁnitely strange things

But he makes the tr ip for a more pressing reason: to hear again the only Amer ican singer who can r ival the g reatest Europeans in tear ing open the fabr ic of space-time. Everything else—the visit with his Georgetown fr iends, the talk at George Washington, the tour of the Library of Cong ress—is excuse. His thoughts tunnel bac kward. His eac h step toward the Mall peels bac k the four last year s, exhuming the day when he ﬁr st heard this phenomenon. That sound still hangs in his mind, as if he were reading it off the conductor’s score: 1935, the Wiener Konzer thaus, the concer t where Toscanini proclaimed that a voice like this woman’s came around only once every hundred year s. Strom doesn’t know the maestro’s timescale, but Toscanini’s “hundred year s” is shor t by any measure. The alto sang Bac h—“Komm, süsser Tod.” “Come, Sweet Death.” By the time she reac hed the second strophe, Strom was ready.

Today is Easter, the day Chr istians say death died. To date, Strom has seen littleevidence suppor ting the theory. Death, he feels reasonably confident, is poised to make an impressive comebac k. For reasons Strom cannot g rasp, the angel has passed over him three times already Even the most confir med deter minist must call it capr ice. Fir st, following his mentor, Hansc her, down to Vienna after the Civil Ser vice Restoration Act, escaping Berlin just before the Reic hstag er upted in flames. Then getting the habilitation. Making a splash at the Basel conference on quantum inter pretations, and winning an invitation to visit Bohr in Copenhagen just months before Vienna dismissed its Jews—practicing or otherwise—from the faculty Escaping with the letter of recommendation from Hansc her, the shor test, most effusive that man ever wrote:

“David Strom is a physicist.” At last secur ing asylum in the States, a mere year ago, on the strength of a single theoretical paper, whose conﬁr mation came adecadebefore it might have, hastened by a cosmolog ical conﬂuence that happens once every other lifetime. Three times, according to David’s own count, saved by a luc k even blinder than theory.

It all seems proof of a temporal r ift no theory can mend. Four year s ago, he was happily attending European concer ts, as if Europe still heard some ﬁxed key. Nothing sounds the sameonthis repeat listen, old music in a newfound land. In between that theme and its recapitulation, only a har rowing development section, jagged, atonal, unlistenable. His parents in hiding near Rotterdam. His sister, Hannah, and her husband, Vihar, trying to reac h his countr y’s capital, Soﬁa. And David himself, a resident alien in the land of milk and honey.

Time may tur n out to be quantized, as discontinuous as the notes in a melody. It may be passed bac k and for th, car r ied along by subatomic c hronons as discreet as the fabr ic of matter. Tac hyons, restr icted to speeds faster than light—fantasies allowed by Einstein’s most r igorous prohibitions—may bombard this life with word of everything that awaits it, but life below the speed of light can’t see them to read them David Strom shouldn’t be here, free, alive. But he is. Is here, walking across Washington, to hear a goddess sing, live, in the open air.

Strom tur ns onto Virg inia and sees the throng. He has never been so close to suc h number s. He has seen them bac k in Europe only on newsreels—the crazedWorld Cup ﬁnals, the mobs that tur ned out three year s ago to watc h Hitler refuse to g ive out gold medals to the non-Aryan Übermensch. This crowd is more sweeping, more blissfully anarc hic. Music alone cannot account for this. Suc h a movement canonly come from some vaster libretto. Until this instant, Strom has no idea what concer t he walks into.Hefailstog raspthe issue until he cor ner s and looks on it. This eye-level wall of ﬂesh knoc ks the wind from him. The shimmer of tens of thousands of bodies, humanity broken down to atoms, an electrostatic n-body problem beyond any mathematics’ ability to solve, panics him with its g roundless physics, and he tur ns to r un. He heads bac k up Virg inia toward the safety of Georgetown. But he can’t erase more than a few dozen meter s of his path when he hear s that voice up inside his ear s. Komm, süsser Tod. He stops on the sidewalk and listens What’s the wor st that oblivion might do to him? What better sound to br ing on the end?

He tur ns bac k toward this roiling crowd, using the ter ror in his c hest

the way a seasoned perfor mer would. Breathing through his mouth, he slips into the c hur ning surf. The ﬁst in his c hest relaxes into eddies of pleasure. No one stops him or asks for identiﬁcation. No one knows he is foreign, Ger man, Jewish. No one cares that he’s here at all. Ein Fremder unter lauter Fremden.

Sunlight breaks free for a minute, to shine on ear th’s most mutable country. David Strom wander slost inside asocial realist drawing, hemmed in by a cr usade he can’t identify, waiting again, this year, for the myth to tur n real. Where else in the world have so many for so long believed that so muc h good is so close to happening? But today, these New Worlder s may be r ight. He shakes his head, working his way toward the makeshift stage Prophec y may yet come tr ue, if there’s anyone left to receive it. Already, Europe has slid bac k into the ﬂames. Already, the smokestac ks are hard at work. But that is tomor row’s ﬁre. Today has another glowaltogether, and its heat and light draw Strom forward.

He bobs in sync with the bodies around him, searc hing for a good sight line.Monuments hem this huge hall in—State Depar tment, Federal Reser ve—white lintels and pillar s, the hallmarks of indifferent power. He is not the only one star ing at them. It str ikes Strom, in Amer ica only a year, that he might come to say my country more easily than half of those he passes, people who arr ived here twelve generations ago, on someone else’s travel plan.

A hundred thousand dr ifting feet batter the Apr il g round into a cattle trail.Hepasses apreac her waving a pigskin-bound Bible, three small c hildren standing on an orange crate, a squad of blue and brass police as dazed as the swar m they patrol, and three dark-suited, broad-shouldered men in felt hats, menacing gangster s compromised only by the beaten-up bic ycles theypush alongside them.

A shout comes from the forward ranks. Strom’s head jerks up. But the cr isis has passed by the time its wake reac hes him. Sound travels so slowly, it might as well be stopped, compared to the now of light. Miss Ander son is on the platfor m, her Finnish accompanist beside her. The dignitar ies pac king the cobbled-up bleac her s r ise for her entrance. Half a dozen senator s, scores of cong ressmen including one solitary Neg ro, three or four cabinet member s, and ajustice of the Supreme Cour t eac h applaud her, all for pr ivate reasons

The secretary of the inter ior addresses the brace of microphones. The crowd near Strom stir s with pr ide and impatience. “There are those”—

the statesman’s voice bangs around the vast amphitheater, launc hing three or four copies of itself before dying—“too timid or too indifferent”— only the ec ho shows how immense a cathedral they stand in—“to lift up the light ...that Jeffer son and Lincoln car r ied aloft . . . ”

God in Heaven, let the woman sing In the bur st of idiom he heard on the train coming down, Clam up and take it on the lam. Where Strom comes from, the whole point of singing is to render human c hatter ir relevant. But the secretary politic ks on. Strom inc hes toward the Memor ial, the wall of people in front of him solid yet somehow always leaving a little space to ﬁll.

Then Miss Ander son stands, amodest queen, her long fur coat protecting her against the April air Her hair is a mar velous scallop shell, open against both c heeks. She’s more otherworldly than Strom remember s. She stands serene, already beyond life’s pull. Yet her serenity shiver s. Strom makes it out, over the heads of these thousands. He has seen that waver ing before, up near the pit of the Vienna Staatsoper, or through opera glasses, from the student leaning posts in the halls of Hamburg and Berlin. But so unlikely is the tremor in suc h a monument that Strom can’t at ﬁr st g ive it a name.

He tur ns and looks out across the crowd, following her glance. Humanity spreads so far over the Mall that her sound will take whole hear tbeats to reac h the far thest ranks. The number sundo him, an audienceas boundless as the ways that led it here. Strom looks bac k to the singer, alone up on her Calvary of steps, and names it, the ripple that envelops her The voice of the century is afraid

The fear coming over her isn’t stage fr ight. She has dr illed too long over the cour se of her life to doubther skill. Her throat will car ry her ﬂawlessly, even through this ordeal. The music will be perfect. But how will it be heard? Bodies stretc h in front of her, spir it ar mies, rolling out of sight. They bend along the length of the reﬂecting pool, thic k as far bac k as the Washington Monument. And from this hopeful host there pour s a need so g reat, it will bury her. She’s trapped at the bottom of an ocean of hope, gasping for air.

From the day it took shape, she resisted this g randstand perfor mance. But history leaves her no c hoice. Once the world made her an emblem, she lost the luxury of standing for her self. She has never been a c hampion of the cause, except through the life she daily lives. The cause has sought her out, transposing all her keys.

The one conser vatory she long ago applied to tur ned her away without audition. Their sole ar tistic judgment: “We don’t take colored.” Not a week passes when she doesn’t shoc k listener s by taking owner ship of Strauss or Saint-Saëns. She has trained since the age of six to build a voice that can withstand the descr iption “colored contralto.” Now all Amer ica tur ns out to hear her, by vir tue of this ban. Now color will forever be the theme of her peak moment, the reason she’ll be remembered when her sound is gone. She has no counter to this fate but her sound itself. Her throat drops, her trembling lips open, and she readies a voice that is steeped in color, the only thing wor th sing ing.

But in the time it takes her mouth to for m that fir st pitc h, her eyes scan this audience, unable to find its end. She sees it the way the newsreels will: 75,000 concer tgoer s, the largest crowd to hit Washington since Lindbergh, the largest audience ever to hear a solo recital. Millions will listen over radio. Tens of millions morewill hear, through recordings and film. For mer daughter s and stepdaughter s of the republic. Those bor n another’s proper ty, and those who owned them. Every clan, eac h flying their homemade flags, all who have ear s will hear

NA TION LE ARNS LE SSON IN T OLERANCE , the newsreels will say But nations can’t lear n lessons. Whatever tolerance g races this day will not sur vive the spr ing.

In the eter nity that launches her first note, she feels this ar my of lives push toward her. Everyone who ever drew her on to sing is here attending. Roland Hayes is in this crowd somewhere. Harry Burleigh, Sissieretta Jones, Elizabeth Taylor-Greenfield—all the ghosts of her go-befores come back to walk the Mall again, this br isk Easter. Blind Tom is here, the sightless slave who ear ned a for tune for his owners, playing by ear,for staggered audiences, thepiano’s hardest reper toire. Joplin is here, the Fisk and Hampton jubilees, Waller, Rainey, King Oliver and Empress Bessie, whole holy choirs of gospel evangelists, jug banders and gutbucketers, hollerers and field callers—all the nameless geniuses her ancestors have bir thed.

Her family is there, up close, whereshe can see them. Her mother stares up at Lincoln, the threatening, mute titan, appalled by the weight her daughter must car ry for the collected country, now and forever. Her father sits even closer, inside her, in the shape of her vocal cords, whic h still hold that man’s mellow bass, silenced before she really knew him. She hear s him sing ing “Asleep in the Deep” while dressing for work, always the ﬁr st line, endlessly caressing, never manag ing to get all the way to the phrase’s end.

The size of the crowd, its g ravity, splinter s her measure ’ s ﬁr st beat. Common timegoes cut, alleg ro to andante to largo. Her racing brain subdivides the notes in her ﬁr st number’s introduction, eighth note tur ns into quar ter, quar ter becomes half, half whole, and whole expands without limit. She hear s her self inhale and the pic kup spreads into standstill. As she for ms the note’s forward envelope, time stops and pins her, motionless.

The tune that the minuscule g rand piano str ikes up opens a hole in front of her. She can look through and see the coming year s as if scanning a railroad timetable. Down this nar row str ip of federal land she witnesses the long tour ahead. This day c hanges nothing.She’ll sit outside the Bir mingham, Alabama, train station four year s from now, waiting for her Ger man refugee accompanist to br ing her a sandwic h, while Ger man pr isoner s from Nor th Afr ica occupy the waiting room she can’t enter. She’ll be g iven the keys to Atlantic City, where she’ll perfor m to sold-out houses but won’t be able to book a room in town. She’ll sing at the opening of Young Mr Lincoln, in Spr ingﬁeld, Illinois, bar red from the Lincoln Hotel. Allcoming humiliations are her s to know, now and always, hovering above this ador ing, immeasurable crowd as the piano homes in on her cue.

The Daught er s will repent their er ror, but repentance will come too late. No later justice can erase this day. She must live through it for all time, standing out here in the open, sing ing in a coat, for free. Her voice will be linked to this monument. She’ll be forever an emblem, despite her self, and not for the music she has made her own.

These faces—four score thousand of them—tilt up to seek hers out, Easter’sforgetting bulbs seeking the feeble sun. Those who until this after noon were sunk in hopeless hope: too many of them, swar ming the shores of Jordan, to get over in one go. Their ranks car ry on swelling, even as she traces their far thest edge. In the convex mir ror of 75,000 pair s of eyes she sees her self, dwarfed under monstrous columns, a small dark suppliant between the kneesofawhite stone g iant.The frame is familiar, a destiny she remember s from before she lived it. A quar ter century on, she’ll stand here again, sing ing her par t in a gather ing three times this size.And still the same hopeless hope will ﬂood up to meet her, still the same wound that will not heal.

Down one world line she sees her self cr ushed to death, twenty minutes from now, when the audience surges forward, 75,000 awakened

lives trying to get a few steps closer to salvation. Those who’ve spent a life condemned to the balcony will push toward a stage that is now all their s, release dr iving them toward themselves, toward a voice wholly free, until they trample her. She sees the concer t veer toward catastrophe, the mass accident of need. Then, down another of this day’s branc hing paths, she watc hes Walter White stand and come forward to the microphones, where he pleads with the crowd for calm. His voice tur ns the mass bac k into its par ts, until they are all just one plus one plus one, able to do no wor se to her than love.

Oceans past this crowd, larger ones gather. Six hour s ahead, six zones east of her, night already falls. In the town squares, vegetable markets, and old theater quar ter s where she has perfor med, inside the Schauplatzen that wouldn’t engage her, voices build. She looks on the world’s only available future, and the coming cer tainty swallows her. She will not sing. She cannot. She’ll hangonthe opening of thisﬁr st pitc h, undone. Her c hoices close down, one after the other, until the only path left is to tur n and r un. She casts a panic ked look bac k, toward the Potomac br idge, across the r iver into Virg inia, the only escape But there’s no hiding place No hiding place down here

A g irl’s spinto soprano inside her strikes up its best warding-off tune. When you see the world on ﬁre, fare ye well, fare ye well. She uses the timehonored perfor mer ’ s cure. She need only focus on one face, shr ink the mass down to one per son,one soulwho is with her. The song will follow. Deep in the crowd, a quar ter of a mile forward, she ﬁnds her mark, the one she’ll sing to. A g irl, an earlier her, Mar ian on the day that she left Philadelphia. That soul looks bac k, her self already sing ing, sotto voce. The g irl calms her. In the frozen fer mata before her downbeat, she reviews the prog ram she must complete. “Gospel Train,” and “Trampin’,” and “My Soul Is Anc hored in the Lord.” But before that, Sc huber t’s “Ave Mar ia.” And before the Sc huber t, “O mio Fer nando ” Of this whole g rab bag of tunes, she’ll remember sing ing exactly none.Itwillbeasifsome ghost placeholder walks away with the exper ience and she comes away with nothing. She’ll read of her delivery muc h later, lear ning through the clippings how eac h song went, long after the fact, after the deed is done and gone.

But even before the coming amnesia, she must make it through “Amer ica.” Time thaws The piano star ts up again, unrolling the last of those simple bloc k c hords, asequenceunder the skin of anyone bor n in

these par ts, a perfect cadence, as familiar as breathing. All she can hear as the br ief lead-instar ts up again a tempo is the sound of her own lungs. For one br ief beat that stretc hes out as far as the ﬁlled horizon, she forgets the words. Their overlear ned familiar ity bloc ks them from coming. Like forgetting your name. Forgetting the number s from one to ten. Too known to remember

Again, thecrowd surges forward, a g reat wave needing only to sweep over and drown her. This time, she lets them. She may forget. But time reorder sall. Alightness r ises, a way point in this gather ing sea of dark, the darkness that belong ing itself has made. For a moment, here, now, stretc hing down the length of the reﬂecting pool, bending along an arc from the shaft of the Washington Monument to the base of the Lincoln Memor ial, curling down the banks to the Potomac behind her, a state takes shape, ad hoc, improvised, revolutionary, free—a notion, a nation that, for a few measures, in song at least, is everything it claims to be. This is the place her voice creates. The one in the words that come bac k to her at last. That sweet, elusive thee. Of thee I sing.

MY BR OT HER AS THE STUD ENT PRINCE

Jonah moved up to the Boylston Academy of Music in the fall of 1952. Before he left, he entr usted me with our family’s happiness. I stayed home that year, the harder posting, washing all the dinner dishes to spare my mother, playing with Ruth, faking happy under standing of my father’s scr ibbled dinner-table Minkowski diag rams. Mama took on more pr ivate students and talked of going bac k to sc hool her self. We still sang together, but not as often. When we did, we stayed away from new reper toire. It didn’t seem r ight. Mama, especially, didn’t want to lear n anything Jonah couldn’t lear n with us.

Jonah retur ned to Hamilton Heights three times that year, star ting with Chr istmas vacation. To our parents, he must have seemed muc h the same boy, as if he’d never left. Mama wanted to swallow him whole, even as he came up the front steps. She g rabbed him in the doorway and smothered him in hugs, and Jonah suffered them. “Tell us everything,” she said when she let him up for air “What’s life like up there?” Even I, standing behind her in the foyer, heard her guarded tone, the bracing.

But Jonah knew what she needed. “It’s okay, I guess. They teac h you a hunk of things. Not as muc h as here, though.”

Mama breathed again, and swept him into a room steeped in g inger cookie smells. “Give them time, c hild. They’ll get better.” She and my father exc hanged all clears, a secret look Jonah and I both saw.

His few days at home were our happiest all year.Mama madehim seared potatoes with ham, and Ruth showered him with weeks’ wor th of crayon-scr ibbled por traits from memory He was the retur ning hero We had all our old reper toire to catc h up with. When we sang, it was hard for the rest of us not to stop and listen for changes in his voice.

Over Chr istmas, we read through the ﬁr st par t of the Messiah. At his spr ing break, we did par t two. I saw Jonah studying Da while he wandered through the text. Even Da noticed him stealing glances. “What? Do you think I can’t be a Chr istian, too, for the length of this piece? Did you know stutterer s never stutter when they sing? Did they not teac h you that, away at your sc hool?”

Jonah insisted I join him at Boylston. Mama said the choice was mine; no one wanted anything from me that I didn’t. At age ten, c hoosing felt like death. With Jonah gone, I had Mama’s lessons almost to myself, sharing her only with Ruthie.Mypiano skills were exploding. The record player and the collection of Italian tenor s were all mine In tr ios, I got to sing the top line. I was the r ising star in our evenings of Crazed Quotations. Besides, I was sure I wouldn’t pass the Boylston auditions. Mama laughed at my doubts. “How will you know unless you try?” Failing, at least, would take things out of my hands and remove the constant sense—so many times my own body weight—that whatever I c hose to do, I’d let someone down.

I sang above myself at the tr ials. Also, the judges probably listened very generously, wanting to keep my brother with the sc hool. Maybe they thought I’d g row to resemble him, g iven a few year softraining. Whatever the reasons, Igot in. They even offered my parents some sc holar ship money, not as muc h as they’d offered for Jonah, of cour se I broke the news of my decision to Mama and Da as gently as I could. They seemed delighted. When they c heered me, I bur st intotear s. Mama swept me up into her. “Oh, honey. I’m just happy my JoJo is going to be together. You two can protect eac h other, when you’re three hundred miles away. ” An honest-enough hope, I guess. But she should have known. They must have thought that home sc hooling would be our best, ﬁr st for tress and preparation. But already, in New York, even before Jonah left, we’d begun to see the cracks in their cur r iculum. Six bloc ks from our house in Hamilton Heights, every neighborhood supplementary ex-

ercise made alie of our home lessons. The world was not a madr igal. The world was a howl. But from the earliest age, Jonah and I hid our br uises from our parents, glossed over our extracur r icular tests, and sang as if music were all the ar mor we’d ever need.

“It’s better up at Boylston,” Jonah promised me, at night, behind the closed bedroom door, where we imag ined our parents couldn’t hear “Up there, they beat the shit out of the kids who can’t sing.” To hear him talk, we’d stumbled onto the lower slopes of paradise, and perfect pitc h was the key to the kingdom. “A hundred kids who love complicated, moving par ts.” Some par t of me knew it was a bait and switc h, that he wouldn’t need me with him if the place were as he said. But my parents seemed to need me less, and here was my brother, c hanting, Come away.

“You two boys,” Mama said, trying to smile good-bye. “You two boys are one of a kind.”

Nothing he told me prepared me for the place. Boylston was a last bastion of European culture, the culture that had just bur ned itself alive again, ten year s before. It modeled itself on acathedral c hoir sc hool, with ties to the conser vatory across the Fens The c hildren lived in a ﬁve-story building around a central cour tyard that, like Mr s Gardner’s pr ivate fantasy just down the cur ving Fenway, wanted to be an Italian palazzo when it g rew up.

Everything about Boylston was white. The minute my tr unk was installed in the younger boys’ dor mitory, I saw how I looked to those who stood gawking at my ar r ival. My new roommates didn’t ﬂinc h; most had just spent a year around my brother. But my brother’s honey-wheat color did not prepare them for my muddy milk. They stood shar ing a knowledge of me, the whole gleaming limestone wall of them, as I walked into the long hospital-style dor mer under the ar m of my father. I didn’t know whatwhiteness was—how concentrated, howstolid and self-assuming— until I unpac ked in that room, a dozen boys watc hing to see what fetishes would come out of my luggage. Only when Da said farewell to us and headed for South Station did I see where my brother had been living. And only when I scrambled from the dor mitory to rejoin Jonah did I see what his year away, in this mythical place, had really done to him. For a year, alone and unprotected, he had thrown the entire student body into the panic of infection. As he walked down those halls, sheepish now, in my seeing how it was, I could make out the limp from those ﬁr st twelvemonths that I hadn’t seen at home. He never talked to me about

those months by himself, not even year s later. But then, I never brought myself to ask. He wanted me to see only this: The other smeantnothing to us, and never would. He had found his voice. He needed nothing else.

My brother took me on atour of the building’s myster ies—the walnut-stained hallways with their molder ing loc ker s, the dumbwaiter shafts, the c horal rehear sal rooms with their ghostly ec hoes, the loose electr ical faceplate through whic hone could peer intoapitc h-darkness he swore was the seventh g rade g irls’ dor mitory. He saved his coup for last. In solemn caution, we ascended to a secret entrance he’d discovered in hour s of solo play. We came out on a rooftop overlooking the Victory Garden plots, those home-front mobilizations that outlived the war that spawned them. My brother drew himself up into his best Sarastro “Joseph Strom, because of your skill and blameless actions, we elect you an Equal and allow you to join us at all our meetings in the Sanctuary. You may enter!”

I cr ushed him by asking, “Where?” The castle of fair welcome tur ned out to be a drywalled janitor’s closet. We piled in, two boys too many, and huddled in an urgent meeting that at once ran out of agenda. There we sat, Equals in the Sanctuar y, until we had to emerge again and join the uninitiated masses.

In the dining hall that ﬁr st week, a sunny-headed new boy blur ted out, “You two have blac k blood? I’m not supposed to eat with anyone with blac k blood.”

Jonah pressed a pic kle fork into his ﬁnger. He held out the bleeding tip, g iving it a twist suggesting r ituals that Sunny-Head didn’t want to know about. “Eat with that,”hesaid, spreading the stain across the poor boy’snapkin. It caused asensation. When the proctor came, the whole awed table swore it was an accident.

I couldn’t make sense of this place. Not these boys’ exc hangeable names, not their slac k-jawed distaste or their limp flax looks, not the labyr inth of this c hild-filled building, not the bizar re, c hief fact of my new existence: My brother—the most solitary, self-sufficient boy alive—had lear ned to sur vive the company of other s.

I’d gone up to Boston thinking I was rescuing Jonah. He’d led our parents to believe he was thr illed up here, and our parents needed to believe him. I knew otherwise, and sacr iﬁced myself to keep him from solitary misery. It took me only days before I saw the tr uth: My brother had spent this last year planning to rescue me.

I wenttobed those nights as guilty as I’d ever felt. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t planned this act of betrayal; I’dstill committedit. Yet after a few weeks, I began to suspect that there were wor se places than Boylston to be in exile. I roamed the building and the Fens, took my place at emergenc y meetings of Sanctuary Equals, and in time came to feel myself more exempted from society than excluded. In the passage of those ﬁnal c hildhood days, I lear ned where I stood in the world.

Da and Mama had raised us to tr ust tones more than we tr usted words. I had g rown up imag ining par t-songs to be my family’s pr ivate r itual. But here, in this ﬁve-story Par nassus in the crook of the Charles, Jonah and Ifound our selves, for the ﬁr st time, in the company of other classically trained c hildren I had to str uggle to keep up with my classmates, racing to acquire all the phrases they already knew how to say in our common secret tongue.

The Boylston students had better reasons than racial contamination to hate my brother. They’d come from all over the country, singled out for a musical skill thatset them apar t and gave them identity. Then Jonah came and made their wildest ﬂights fall to ear th and thump about, wounded. Most of them probably wanted to hold a pillow over his soprano mouth, up in that long c hoirboy’s ward where the middle boys slept. Stop his lungs until his freakish capacity for breath ran out. But my brother had a way of lifting off, sur pr ised at his own sound, that made even his enemies feel theyought to be his accomplices.

They feared what they thought was his fearlessness. No one else was so indifferent to consequence, so unable to distinguish between resentment and esteem.Hemaster minded a rooftop scat sing of Haydn’s Creation that drew a sidewalk crowd and would have resulted in his repr imand had the impromptu concer t not been joyously wr itten up in the Globe. Dur ing breaks in c horal rehear sal, he’d str ike up a minor-modal “Star-Spangled Banner” or organize ademented “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” with eac h new staggered voice enter ing a half step above the last. Mad dissonance was his favor ite stunt, training his ear to hold its pitch in harder inter vals to come.

He and the boys who could keep up with him argued for hour s over the mer its of var ious tenor s. Jonah c hampioned Car uso over all living c hallenger s As far as my brother was concer ned, vocal skill had been deter iorating since the golden age, just before we were bor n. The other boys argued until they gave up on him, calling him per ver se, insane, or wor se.

János Reményi, Boylston’s director, imag ined that he disguised his favor itism. But not a c hild was fooled. Jonah was the only student Reményi ever called by ﬁr st name. Jonah came to dominate the sc hool’s monthly public recitals. Reményi always passed the plump solos around democratically in rehear sal, but for perfor mances, he usually contr ived some ar tistic reason why the piece had to be done by a voice of exactly Jonah’s color.

Any number of these c hildren might have taken my brother out to the playg round and held him upside down from the monkey bar s until his lungs slipped out his throat. And if Jonah’s voice had been merely extraordinary, they might have.But finally, the sunlight’s blaze doesn’t threaten the yellow of a flower We only resent what we can still hope to be. His sound put him beyond his classmates’ hatred, and they listened, frozen in thepresence of this outlandish thing, holding still as this firebird came forag ing at their bac kyard feeder.

When Jonah sang, a sadness colonized János Reményi’s face. Gr ief ﬁlled the man as if he was eager for it. In Jonah, Reményi heard everything his younger self had almost been. At the sound of my brother’s voice, the room ﬁlled with possibility, eac h of his listener s remember ing all those places their paths would never reac h.

In time,the other students accepted me as Jonah’s brother. But they never lost thatlook of disbelief. Idon’t know what bothered them more: my darker tone, my curlier, more ambiguous features, or my stubbor nly ear thbound voice. I did manage to make small stir s of my own. I could sight-read r ings around any student up to the eighth g rade. And I had a feel for har mony, lear ned from long after noons at the keyboard with Mama, whic h won me a kind of g r udg ing sanctuary. Although accredited, the sc hool gave little attention to subjects other than the perfor ming ar ts. Most of what I took that year I’d already lear ned, in g reater depth, from my parents But I had to sit through the old mater ial all over again. The cloc k in the room where I suffered through sentence diag ramming tor tured me. Only when its second hand swept through a whole circumference would the recalcitrant minute hand, with a g ranular thud, snap ahead asingle tic k mark toward salvation. In that inter val before the lurc h, motion froze and all c hange died away Boredom fossilized time in amber The minute hand hung on the edge of its stagger, refusing to move, despite all the mental force I pushed with. The hour of English g rammar spread to paper thinness and worldwide width, until I had lived out the next sixty year s of my life in detail

and memor ized the faces of my g randc hildren, all in the instance before Miss Bitner could get to the end of her sentence’s ever-dividing diag ram.

Without our father to tur n the world into a puzzle, Jonah and I fell away from all mental playg rounds but music. After a few months, we were str uggling to solve the teaser s that used to be our routine dinnertime fare Our science teac her, Mr Wigg ins, knew about our father’s work, and he treated us with scary and undeser ved respect. I had to work for two, keeping Jonah on top of his assignments while completing my own, just to protect the family name.

The Boylston students would have crowned my brother king had he looked just slightly more likethem. The elite member s of the junior division tr ied to interest Jonah in Sinatra. They played up that crooner’s illicit pleasure, huddled up together, listening in secret, out of ear shot of the faculty. Jonah, after ﬂashing one quick smile at the insouciant bobbysoxer anthems, cluc ked in disgust. “Who on ear th would get something from suc h a song? You call that a c hord prog ression? Ican tell you what this melody’s going to be before it even star ts!”

“But whatabout that voice? Top-drawer, huh?”

“The man must gargle with cough syr up ”

The transg ressing suburban c hoirboys stopped in mid ﬁnger snap. One of the older kids snarled. “What’s your problem, buddy? I like the way this makes me feel.”

“The har monies are c heap and silly.”

“But the band. The ar rangements. The rhythm . . . ”

“The ar rangements sound like they were wr itten in a ﬁreworks factory. The rhythm? Well, it’s jumpy. I’ll g ive you that muc h.”

Thus spake the twelve-year-old, as cer tain as death. The older boys tr ied Jonah on Ear tha Kitt. “Isn’t she a Neg ro?” I asked.

“Get out of here. What’s your problem?” They all glared me down, Jonah among them. “You think everyone’s a Neg ro ”

They tr ied him on singer s even hipper than Sinatra. They tr ied him on rhythm and blues, hillbilly, wailing ballads. But every crowd-pleaser suffered verdicts just as swift and expedient. Jonah covered his ear s in pain. “The dr um sets hur t my ear s. It’s wor se than the cannons that the Pops ﬁres off for the 1812 Over ture.”

For someone with miraculous throat muscles, he was a clumsy c hild. He never felt comfor table piloting a bike, even on wide boulevards When sc hool forced us onto asoftball diamond, I’d stand helplessly in left ﬁeld, trying to pin g rounder s without r isking my ﬁnger s, while Jonah

dr ifted in deep r ight, watc hing ﬂy balls plop bac k to ear th around his ankles.Hedid liketolistentogames on the radio;his classmates managed to hook him on that muc h anyway. He often had a game going while he vocalized. “Helps me hold my line in c hor us, when everyone else is bouncing all over the place.” When the National Anthem played, he added crazy, Stravinsky-style har monies

Those easy heir s of culture, c har med boys who’d never even spoken to another race, were willing to reac h out to us, so long as the ter ms of exc hange were their s. We offered our classmates the desperate mainstream hope that everything they most feared—the ar mies of not-them just down the Orange Line, the separate civilization that sneered at every word out of their mouths—might tur nout to be just like them after all, ready to be conver ted to willing Vienna c hoirboys, g iven a good education and half a happy c hance. We were sing ing prodig ies, color-blind cultural ambassador s. Heir s of a long past, car r ier s of the eter nal future. Not even teenager s. What could we know?

He refused to glance at football. “Gladiator s and lions. Why do people like watc hing other people get killed?” But he was the biggest killer of all. He loved board games and cards, any c hance to vanquish someone During marathon sessions of Monopoly, he thumbscrewed with a zeal that would have made Car neg ie blush. He wouldn’t ﬁnish us off, but kept lending us more money, at interest, just for the pleasure of taking more away. He got so good at c hec ker s, no one would play with him. I could always ﬁnd him in the basement practice rooms, voweling up and down endless c hromatic scales while dealing himself hands of Klondike on the top of an upr ight piano.

There was a g irl. The week I ar r ived, he pointedout Kimberly Monera. “What do you think?” he asked with a scor n so audible that it begged me to add my contempt. She was an anemic g irl, fr ighteningly pale I’d never seen her like, except for pink-eyed pet mice “She looks like cake frosting,” I said. I made the crac k just cr uel enough to please him.

Kimberly Monera dressed like the sic kly c hild of Belle Epoc h nobility. She favored crème de menthe and ter ra-cotta. Anything darker made her hair tur n into cotton wool. She walked with a stac k of invisible dictionaries perc hed on her head. She seemed to feel naked going out in public without awide-br immed hat. I remember tiny buttons on a pair of gloves, but surely I must have made those up.

Her father was Freder ico Monera, the vigorous opera conductor and

even more vigorous composer. He was always shuttlingabout from Milan to Berlin to the easter n United States. Her mother, Mar ia Cer r i, had been one of the Continent’s better Butterflies before Monera captured her for breeding pur poses. The g irl’s enrollment at Boylston lent the sc hool a luster that benefited everyone. But Kimberly Monera suffered for her status She could not even be considered as a par iah. The nor mal, threatened midsection of the student body found her too bizar re even to laugh at. Kimberly walked the sc hool’s halls effacing her self, getting out of everyone’s way before they had even come within six yards of her. I loved her for that per petual flinc h of her s alone. My brother must have had very different reasons.

She sang with a rare sense of what music meant. But her voice was spoiled by too muc h premature cultivation. She did this fake coloratura thing that, in a g irl her size and age, sounded simply freakish. Everything about her was the opposite of that easy joy our parents bred in us. For the longest time, I was afraid that her voice alone might dr ive Jonah away.

One Sunday after noon, I came across the twoofthem on the front stoop of the main entrance My brother and a pale g irl sitting on the steps: a picture as faded as any other ﬁfties color photo Kimberly Monera seemed ascoop of Neapolitan icecream. I wanted to slip a piece of cardboard under neath her, so her taffeta wouldn’t melt on the concrete.

I watc hed, appalled, as this outcast girl sat naming the Verdi operas for Jonah, all twenty-seven, from Ober to to Falstaff. She even knew their dates of composition. In her mouth, the list seemed the purpose of all civilization. Her accent, as she rolled the syllables across her tongue, sounded more Italian to me than anything we’d ever heard on recordings. I thought at ﬁr st that she must have been showing off. But my brother had put her up to it. In fact, she had at ﬁr st denied knowing anything about Verdi at all, letting my brother expound, smiling at his botc hed details, until it became clear to her that, with Jonah, her knowledge might not be the liability it was with the rest of the student world. Then she let loose with both bar rels.

As Kimberly Monera went into her recitation, Jonah craned around and shot me a look: We two were bac kwoods amateur s. We knew nothing. Our tame home sc hooling had left us hopelessly unprepared for the world of inter national power ar tistry I hadn’t seen him so awed by a discovery since our parents gave us the record player Kimberly’s mastery of the reper toire put Jonah on highest aler t. He g r illed the poor g irl all af-

ter noon, yanking her down by her bleac hed hand whenever she tr ied to get up to go.Saddest of all, Kimberly Monera sat still for his wor st treatment. Here was the best boysoprano in the sc hool, the boy whom Boylston’s director called by ﬁr st name. What it must have meant to her, just this one little scrap of selﬁsh kindness.

I sat two steps above them, looking down on their exc hange of hostages. They both wanted me there, looking out, ready to bark a war ning if any well-adjusted kid approac hed. When her feats of verbal er udition tr ic kled out, the three of us played Name That Tune. For the ﬁr st time, somebody our age beat us. Jonah and I had to dig deep into the recesses of our family evenings to come up with something the pastel Monera couldn’tpeg within two measures Even when she hadn’t heard a piece, she could almost always zone in on its orig in and ﬁgure out its maker.

The skill broke my hear t and maddened my brother. “No fair just guessing if you don’t know for sure. ”

“It’s not just guessing,” she said. But ready to g ive the skill up for his sake

He slapped his hand down on the stoop, somewhere between outrage and delight. “I could do that, too, if my parents were world-famous musicians.”

I stared at him, aghast. He couldn’t know what he was saying. I reac hed down to touc h his shoulder, stop him before he said wor se. His words violated nature—like trees g rowing downward or ﬁres underwater Something ter r ible would happen to us, some hell released by his disloyalty. A Studebaker would roll up over the sidewalk and wipe us out where we sat playing.

But his punishment was limited to Kimberly Monera’s lower lip. It trembled in place, blanc hed, bloodless, an ear thwor m on ice. I wanted to reac h down and hold it still. Jonah, oblivious, pressed her. He would not stop shor t of the secret to her sorcery. “How can you tell who wrote a piece if you’ve never even heard it?”

Her face rallied. I saw her thinking that she might still be of use to him. “Well, ﬁr st, you let the style tell you when it was wr itten.”

Her words were like a ship breac hing the hor izon. The idea had never really occur red to Jonah. Etc hed into the ﬂow of notes, stac ked up in the banks of har mony, every composer left a cor ner stone date. My brother traced his hand along the iron balustrade that ﬂanked the concrete steps.

The scatter ing of his naïveté staggered him. Music itself, like its own rhythms, played out in time. A piece was what it was only because of all the pieces wr itten before and after it. Every song sang the moment that brought it into being. Music talked endlessly to itself.

We’d never have lear ned this fact from our parents, even after a lifetime of har monizing Our father knew more than any living per son about the secret of time, except how to liveinit. His time did not travel; it was a bloc k of per sisting nows. To him, the thousand year s of Wester n music might as well all have been wr itten that mor ning. Mama shared the belief; maybe it was why they’d ended up together. Our parents’ Crazed Quotations game played on the notion that every moment’s tune had all history’s music box for its counter point. On any evening in Hamilton Heights, we could jump from organum to atonality without any hint of all the centur ies that had died ﬁery deaths between them. Our parents brought us up to love pulse without beg inning or end. But now, this pastel, melting ice-cream g irl threw a switc h and star ted sound moving.

Jonah was nothing if not a quic k study. That one after noon, sitting on the concrete steps of the Boylston Academy in c hinos and a red ﬂannel shir t alongside the pale Kimberly in her pressed taffeta elegance taught him as muc h about music as had his whole ﬁr st year at sc hool. In an instant, he lear ned the meaning of those time signatures that we already knew by ear. Jonah g rabbed all the g irl’s offer ings, and still he made her trot out more. She kept it up for him as long as she could. Kimberly’s g rasp of theory would have been impressiveinsomeoneyear s older. She had names for things, names my brother needed and whic h Boylston dr ibbled out too slowly. He wanted to wr ing the g irl’s every scrap of music out of her.

When she sang tunes for us to guess, my brother was merciless. “Sing naturally. How are we supposed to tell what you’re sing ing, when your vibrato’s a whole step wide? It’s like you swallowed an outboard motor ”

Her jaw did its ter r ifying tremolo. “I am sing ing naturally. You’re not listening naturally!”

I str uggled to my feet, ready to bolt bac k into the building. Already, I loved this antique g irl, but my brother owned me. I saw nothing in this trade for me but an early death. Ihad no stomac h for waiting around until disaster bloomed. But one glance from my brother cut my legs out from under me He g rabbed Kimberly by both shoulder s and launc hed his best Car uso, as Canio in I Pagliacci, r ight down to the crazed stage laugh. She couldn’t help but snifﬂe bac k a smile.

“Ah, Chimera! We were just kidding, weren’t we, Joey?” My head hummed with nodding so fast .

Kimberly br ightened at the spontaneous nic kname. Her face cleared as fast as a Beethoven stor m breaking on a single-c hord modulation. She would forg ive him everything, always. Already, he knew it.

“Chimera. You like that?”

She smiled so slighty,itcould yieldeasilytodenial.Ididn’t know what a c himera was. Neither did Jonah or Kimberly.

“Fine. That’s what everyone will call you from now on. ”

“No!” She panic ked. “Not everyone. ”

“Just Joey and me?”

She nodded again, smaller I never called her that name Not once My brother was its sole propr ietor.

Kimberly Monera tur ned and squinted at us, alittledr unk on her new title. “Are the two of you Moor s?” One mythic creature to another.

Jonah c hec ked with me. I held up my weaponless palms. “Depends,” he said, “on what the hell that is.”

“I’m not sure I think they lived in Spain and moved to Venice ”

Jonah pinc hed his face and looked at me. His index ﬁnger drew rapid little circles around his ear, that year ’ s sign for those strange geometr ies of thought our fellow classmates called “mental.”

“They’re a darker people,” she explained. “Like Otello.”

“It’s almost dinner time,” I said.

Jonah bent inward. “Chimera? I’ve wanted to askyou something forever Are you an albino?”

She tur ned a ghastly shade of salmon.

“You know what they are?” my brother went on. “They’re a lighter people.”

Kimberly drained of what little color Italy had g ranted her. “My mother was like this, too. But she got darker!” Her voice, repeating the line her parents had fed her from bir th, already knew the lie would never come tr ue. Her body retur ned to spooky convulsions, andonce more, my brother ﬁshed her out from the ﬁres he’d lit under her.

When at last we stood to retur n to the building, Kimberly Monera paused in midstep, her hand in the air. “Someday, you’ll know everything I know about music, and more ” The prophec ymade her infinitely sad, as if she were already there, at the end of their lives’ inter section, sacr ificed to Jonah’s voracious g rowth, the fir st of many women who’d go to their g raves hollowed out by love for my brother.