Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Delia gets a letter from Charles in January of 1944. He’s been assigned to the Seacoast Artillery Group.

We’re starting our first major offensive — a drive across fortified enemy concentrations in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Should we succeed in forming a beachhead and breaking out, we plan to sweep through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona — dangerous territory — and press on to establish a forward perimeter in San Diego. From there, we’ll ship out and meet the Japanese, who ought to be a cakewalk in comparison to the folks down this way.

He sends another note in mid-February, from Camp Elliott, California:

Greetings from Tara West… We’ve a ninety-mm gun crew here who can hit a towed target in less than a minute. Show me the white crew that can do better. But last night, when the brass decided to throw us an open-air movie, that same crew, along with the whole Fifty-first, was sent to the back, behind thousands of white boys, who, I suppose, had to keep themselves between us and Norma Shearer so there wouldn’t be any race mingling. (Nothing personal, sister.) Well, we particular marines didn’t much feel like heading back. We wound up getting thrown out all together. The place turned into a free-for-all, with a couple dozen good-sized bucks ending up behind bars. We ship out tomorrow on the Meteor, not an hour too soon, as far as I’m concerned. I’m so ready to leave these shores and try my luck in the savage, uncivilized islands that I can’t begin to tell you. Keep an eye on the home front, Dee. I mean, watch out for it.

Delia talks to David, in bed that night, before his next trip out west. “Hurry up with that work of yours.” The one quick jump into the future that will save everyone she cares for. The idea forms in her, in that place before idea. She must protect her boys from the present, preserve their unlabeled joy, refuse to say what they are, teach them to sing through every invented limit the human mind ever cowered behind.

So it feels like a message from space — one night in midyear, spring cracking the crust of a winter grown unbearable, as she bathes Joey in the bassinet and David listens to the New York Philharmonic in the over-stuffed chair, his arm around Jonah — when a piece for full orchestra called Manhattan Nocturne seeps through the crystal set into their rented home. The piece is lovely, sonorous, and tinged with anachronism. Singable. She hums along by the end, buzzing the primary theme into a giggling Joey’s belly as if her baby boy’s body were a kazoo.

She notices the music without really noticing. But the polished announcer’s words afterward hit her like an omen. The composer is a thirteen-year-old girl named Phillipa Duke Schuyler. And if that wasn’t impossible enough, the girl is of mixed race. Delia almost puts a safety pin through her boy, and even then, Joey suffers her. She thinks she misheard, until David wanders slack-jawed into the room. His eyes fill with frightened vindication. “One hundred piano compositions before her twelfth year!”

Delia looks at her husband, feeling as if they’ve escaped the prison that the laws of a dozen American states would still sentence them to. The girl has an IQ of 185. Played the piano at three and began the concert circuit by the age of eleven. Their boys have an advance scout in this newfound land. The continent exists already, and it’s inhabited.

The girl’s father is a journalist, her mother a Texas farmer’s daughter. The father has written a meticulous account of his prodigy in the Courier, which Delia tracks down. The principles are simple. Raw milk, wheat germ, and codliver oil. Intensive education — a two-parent home schooling scheme of around-the-clock instruction. But the real secret is that old western farming trick of hybrid vigor. The basics of agricultural breeding. Twinrace children — that genius girl proves it — represent a new strain of crossed traits more robust than either of their parental lines. Mr. George Schuyler goes on to claim even more. Sturdy crossbred children are this country’s only hope, the only way out of centuries of division that will otherwise grow wider with the run of time. Just writing as much would land Mr. Schuyler behind bars in Mississippi, according to a law no older than his daughter. But the words reach Delia like food falling from the desert sky.

Raw milk and wheat germ, mixed blood, daily doses of music, and the girl has become an angel. Her Manhattan Nocturne for one hundred instruments awes wartime America. Mayor La Guardia even declares a Phillipa Duke Schuyler Day. The sound of the past vanishes at the little girl’s playing. Delia buys copies of all her available sheet music. She leaves the Five Little Piano Pieces, composed at age seven, out on the music rack. Her boys stare, rapt, at the picture of little Phillipa on the cover, seeing something in her that will take them decades to recognize. The pieces are among the first the boys learn — the foundation stone of the new Strom schoolhouse.

Others have been this way: It makes all the difference in the merciless world. Home lessons begin in earnest. The boys leap through every little melody she sets them. David rolls around on the floor with them, playing games with blocks that only an older, sadder child would suspect to be the basis of set theory. David and Delia even try the wheat germ and codliver oil, but the boys aren’t taking.

“Kein Problem,”David says. “We don’t need one hundred and eighty-five IQ.”

“True. Anything over one hundred and fifty will do just fine.” In fact, it begins to dawn on Delia that every child who learns to walk and talk has the genius of whole galaxies engineered in them, before hate begins to dull them down.

It thrives, this school of four, without anyone thinking school. Outside their house, life sends them a sign, confirming their leap of faith. The Supreme Court deals a blow to all-white elections. The Allies land in France and push eastward. The endless war will end, and melting pot America will be the force that ends it. The only question is how soon. No day will be soon enough. For four years, they’ve had no word of David’s parents. His sister and her husband have disappeared, too, most likely lost in Bulgaria when it went under. Month after month, Delia props up her man, telling him in every possible way that silence proves nothing. But finally, gradually, it does. All the messages escaping that continent converge on the same conclusion.

She feels him protecting her in turn. He already knows where his family must be, in the absence of opposing evidence. But he won’t say as much to Delia. “You’re right. Everything must remain possible.” Until it isn’t.

Her husband turns his private grief toward a response unthinkably large. As the Americans break out across the French bocage, David tenses. He hints at his fear to her, all the while trying to honor the government oaths he has sworn. She knows his anxiety. Some crossed trip wire on the map — the Meuse, the Rhine — will bring forth a pillar of elemental German fire. German physics. Some world-sized quantum experiment: two futures, either one of which must birth an outcome that will swallow the other forever.

The fall turns bitter. The Allied advance reaches Belgium. The Brits and Canadians crack open Antwerp to Allied shipping, and still they suffer no cosmic retaliation. Not a hint that Heisenberg is even close. The evidence builds that the greatest scientific power on earth — David’s world-changing colleagues from Leipzig and Göttingen — have taken a wrong turn somewhere.

But any moment can alter every other. Rumors collapse back into fact the moment they are released. Some days, Delia feels her husband turning fatalistic, with nothing to do but shrink and wait, the passive inheritor of events too long in the making for him to influence them. On others, the urge to act possesses him, bending him almost double in further, more obscure efforts. These are the moments when Delia most loves him, his need for her so great, he can’t even see it. What comfort can she give him, trapped in salvation’s footrace? She gives him here, now, the sheltered fortress of their rented home.