Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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