Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“My Lord, My Lord!” Nettie Ellen fingers the uniform.

“That’s the one,” Charlie says. “The one and only. Same old threads they said we’d never wear. Yes in- deedy. You’re looking at a walking, talking incarnation of Mr. Frankie Dee’s Executive Order Eight-eight-oh-two!”

“Watch your mouth,” his mother says. “I didn’t raise you up to bad-mouth the President.”

“No, Mama.” Pure contrition, with a wink for Delia. “You did not.”

The twins swoon over him. “You’re so fine.” “So divine.” “You are the one.” “Fancy as they come!”

“Notice how surprised my sisters sound,” Charcoal tells David.

Only he’s not Charcoal anymore. This man has disowned the boy who left home. He’s passed by David in age now, by an easy decade. Aged overnight by sights even Philadelphia has never seen. Over dinner, he entertains them with tales from the hell of basic training. “Then they dropped us down in the middle of a swamp at night. Two days, with nothing but a pocketknife and a piece of flint.” William Daley eyes his son with fierce regard, an esteem bordering on rivalry. Little Michael dies of envy by agonized degrees.

“You look up your aunt and uncles yet?”

“Not yet, Mama. They don’t let us off base much. But I will.”

After dinner, he steps out back with his sister to sit on the stoop and smoke a cigarette.

“Marines teach you that, too?” she asks.

“Taught me how to bring it home anyway.” His face is grim. Like it used to be when white people crossed the street rather than pass alongside them.

“So what is it, Char? What aren’t you telling them?”

He flashes her a look, ready to deny everything if she can’t pin him. But she can. He stubs out the butt against the concrete walk. “It’s a joke, Dee. A sick, bad joke. We’re at war already, and we haven’t even left the parade ground.”

She bobs her firstborn on her knee. Little Joey’s safe inside with his grandmother and aunts. She cups Jonah’s ear against his uncle’s anger, deflecting and protecting. She watches Charlie put out his cigarette, her hopes for the goals of this good war stubbed out with it.

He sucks in empty air. “You think Philadelphia’s fucked up? North Carolina makes this place look like Brotherly Love. How did Mama’s family survive it down there all these years? Can’t get a lunch anywhere outside the base. Can’t even go onto Lejeune, even in full dress, without a white man taking me in with him. White general comes over to Montford Point to address the first Negro marines in history? Ends up telling us, right to our faces, how shocked he is to see a bunch of darkie upstarts wearing his heretofore-unspoiled uniform.”

Charles takes off his cap and rubs his close-cropped skull. “You want to see my enlistment contract? It’s stamped COLORED, in big block letters. Case you might miss the fact. Know what that’s all about? Means the President can make them take us, but he can’t force them to make us real marines. Guess what they have planned for the Fifty-first? We’re going to be stewards. Ship us out to the Pacific so we can be the damn Pullman porters for the white battalions. The enemy will be firing at us. And we’ll be hiding behind oil drums and shooting back at them with baked beans.”

Little Jonah breaks free from Delia’s grip and makes a dash for a gray squirrel. The squirrel heads up a tree. So the child, baffled and empty-handed, breaks for wider freedom in the fenced-in yard. Charlie studies his nephew, a level gaze. The child is small distraction. “Even with all the shit we’ve always been through up here? With everything we’ve lived through, I’d never have believed this. Life in this country is a waking nightmare. Hitler’s got nothing on the United States, Dee. I’m not even sure that everyone on this side of the ocean really wants to take the motherfucker down.”

“Oh, hush up, Charlie.” He does, but only because she’s his big sister.

“Don’t talk crazy.” She wants to give him something, some countering truth. But they’re both too old now for reassurance. “It’s the same fight, Char.” And who knows? Maybe it is. “You’re in it. You’re fighting. One war.”

A grin breaks out on Charlie’s face, nothing to do with her. “Speaking of war. Your little Brown Bomber there takes out any more of Mama’s roses, we’re all dead.” Before she can move a step toward Jonah, Charlie whistles. The piercing, pure tone stops Jonah in his tracks. “Hey, soldier. Fall in. Report for duty!” The boy smiles, gives his head a slow, sly shake. Charles Daley, Fifty-first Battalion, U.S. Marine Corps, nods back. “Kid’s awfully light, ain’t he?”

They don’t get out to Philly as often as they should. She marks the weeks by her boys’ bursts of growth. She tries to slow the changes in them but can’t. Her mother’s right: different little men, each time they rise to breakfast. David, too: scariest of all. Changing faster than she can figure out. It’s not that he’s cold, only preoccupied. Every human in the world, he tells her, runs on his own clock. Some an hour or two behind, some as much as years ahead. “You,” she tells him, one of the sources of her love, “you are your own Greenwich.”

Now he’s running out ahead of her — not much; maybe five minutes, ten — just enough for her to miss him. She looks for the reason in herself. Her body has changed a little, after the boys. But it can’t be that; in those moments when they still catch each other, his palm against the small of her back, his nose still buried, astonished, in her neck, his clock returns to hers, entraining, lingering in their sweet after-the-fact. She worries it might be the boys, somehow, their constant need. But he’s as devoted to them as ever, reading Jonah endless repetitions of nursery dimeter, entertaining Joey all Sunday long with a pocket mirror’s dancing sunbeam.

He travels too much. She has memorized the Broadway Limited schedule to Chicago. His beloved Mr. Fermi has set up a lab there, at the university. David makes so many trips, he might as well be on salary.

“Are we moving out?” she asks. Trying to be good, trying to be a wife, managing only to sound doleful.

“Not if you do not wish.” Which somehow frightens her even more. She’s never been one to let her imagination run away from her. But it doesn’t have to run; it has so much free time now, it can cover any distance in a leisurely stroll.

David is called out to Chicago the evening before Jonah’s second birthday. The news astonishes her. “How can you miss this?” The most acid she’s shown him since they married.

He hangs his head. “I told them. I tried to change. Fourteen people need me there on this day.”

“What fourteen people?”

He doesn’t say. He won’t talk about what’s happening. He leaves her to her worst guesses. He holds out his palms. “My Delia. It’s tomorrow already, on the other side of the dateline.” So they have a leap-ahead birthday party, complete with newspaper hats and an orchestra of combs and wax paper. The children are thrilled; the adults guarded and miserable.

She sits alone with the boys the next day. They plunk on the piano, Joey on her lap, reaching for the keys, Jonah next to her on the bench, hitting the tonic to match her right hand’s “Happy Birthday.” She bobbles more notes than her boy does. She knows what it is. It’s something white. No man in this world will choose to stay with somebody dark if he doesn’t have to. She falls asleep that night to this thought, and the same certainty shoves her up from sleep at 3:00A.M. It’s a white woman. Maybe not lust. Just familiarity. Something that just happens to him, comfortable, known. After almost three years, he’s discovered that his wife’s blackness is more than circumstance. The distance doesn’t close up just by naming.