Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

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

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

“Where?” she asked, touching his lips.

“The way we’re going!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t worry, treasure,” he says.

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

“Don’t worry. They will not take me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” she answers. “They are not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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