Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

The back door slams. Then the front opens. David and her baby, her second compensation, return. Her mother asks again. “Tell me a reason. Give me just one.”

David surveys the faltering family. Joseph, too: the solemn child just turning, staring. Delia sees knowledge rise into her husband’s face, that look she must carry around on hers, every waking hour. This isn’t yours. You’re not welcome here. He looks to her for the slightest guide. Her eyes flick up, toward the back door. This colorless man, this man she somehow married, this man who can understand nothing here, understands her. He gives the child to the twins and slips off, the way her father left, Delia fighting the urge to call him back.

She hums to her mother, cradling her head, as if all her years of receiving the same were simply training to give it back. She says nothing, speaking in the old, discarded accent that comes back so easily. She reminds her mother of heaven, courage, and other foolishness, of plans beyond anything so small as a human ever being able to second-guess. But her thoughts are on the men. As soon as she can, she signals Lorene to go check. Her little sister comes back, nodding. Delia wrinkles her brow but gets no more clarification from the girl than a puzzled grimace.

Delia stands and cranes, trying to see out the back hall window. Nothing. She makes some pretense — checking the cooling pies — to duck out to the kitchen. She looks through the bowed screen, the one her own mother spent years glancing through, keeping track on her children at play outdoors. Delia approaches the screen and peers sideways down the steep wooden stoop.

Both men sit motionless on the ground, their backs to the thick red maple. Now and then, their mouths move, forming words too soft to hear across the yard. One speaks and the other, after a long interval, answers. David punctuates his words with hand sweeps, illustrating on the air some halting geometry of thought. Her father’s face folds up in struggle. His muscles dart through all the feints of a cornered animal: first rage, then barricade, then playing dead.

Her husband’s face, too, pulls up lame, looking for some gloss it can’t reach. But the hands keep moving, tracing their equations in space, drawing their only conclusion. The fingers form closed loops, lines lying inside themselves, running back along their point of origin. Her father nods — near-motionless head bobs. Not agreement, not acceptance. Just acknowledgment, bending like the top of the maple as it fits the day’s breeze. His face slackens. She could call it calm, from where she stands, this far away, behind the gauze of the screen door.

They stay the night. That much, Delia gives her mother, who gave her everything. Who gave Charlie everything, and wound up paid by a gold star in her front window. But when people start arriving the next morning — the hunched aunts and uncles; neighbors with pans of crisp, pungent fowl; Dr. Daley’s lifelong patients; those patients’ children, many older than Charlie — when every soul who ever knew the boy and half of those who couldn’t have told him from his nickname wander into the Daley living room, assembling like the choir of some suppressed sect, Delia gathers her boys and bolts. She’s an impostor here, an intruder at her own brother’s wake. She won’t inflict that on the others, too charitable to name what has already happened to their little Dee.

This day, Nettie Ellen doesn’t weep. Doesn’t even protest her daughter’s desertion except to say to her, just before the Stroms head for the station, “You are what’s left of him, now.” She kisses her grandchildren, and watches them leave, stone-still, waiting for the next blow.

Dr. Daley pecks Delia good-bye and shakes the hands of his sobered grandsons. To David, he says, “I’ve thought about what you told me.” He pauses a long time, stuck between doubt and need. “It’s madness, of course.” David nods and smiles, his glasses sliding down the cantilevered bridge of his nose. That’s enough for the doctor. He does not press for reason, but only adds, “Thank you.”

The four of them are on the train, the boys running down the aisle, delighted again, released from death, when Delia asks David. The whole car stares at them, as it always does, disguising their curiosity or telegraphing their disgust. Only Delia’s lightness keeps the threatened purebreds baffled enough to let her family pass home safely. Her thoughts have no time for these outsiders. Her father’s parting words to David obsess her. Madness. It’s madness, of course. Part of her wants to let it go, allow her father and husband to have at least this one secret between them. But more of her needs whatever broken comfort they’ve traded. Her father has never suffered consolation gladly. But this one seemed to give him room. She contains herself the whole ride. Then, as the train pulls into Penn Station, Delia hears herself ask, from high up in the atmosphere, “David? Yesterday?” She can’t face her husband, too shockingly close on the seat beside her. “When you were talking to my father? I saw you. The two of you, through the back door. Sitting under that red tree.”

“Yes,” he says. She hates him for not volunteering, not reading her mind, not answering without making her spell out her need.

“What were you talking about?” She feels his head turn toward her. But still she can’t look.

“We talked about why my people had to be stopped.”

She swings round. “ Yourpeople?” He only nods. She’ll die. Follow her brother. Become nothing.

“Yes. He asked me why I was not…fighting in the army.”

“My God. Did you tell him?”

Her husband spreads his hands upward. Saying, How could I? Saying, Forgive me: yes.

The train slumps to a halt. She gathers her boys, the whole car still turning covertly to check if her children are really hers. Her Jonah pranks and sings, struggling to escape his mother’s hand and dash out the train door onto the platform. But her Joey looks up at her, searching for reassurance, as if the trip to Philadelphia, his dead uncle, has just come home. His eyes lock on hers, darting diagonally, early into old age, nodding at her, the same huge motionless nod her father succumbed to only yesterday.

She must know. She waits until they’re standing on the platform, an island of four in a swarming sea. “David? Was there more?”

He studies her as they follow the departing passengers. More. There’s always more. “I told him what… my peoplethink.” He twists the words, through the corner of his mouth. She thinks he has turned on her, gone cruel. He shepherds the boys through the crowd, out onto the street and their next public humiliation, talking as he walks. “I told him what Einstein says. Minkowski. ‘Jewish physics.’ Time backward and time forward: Both are always. The universe does not make a difference between the two. Only we do.”

She grabs his elbow, pulling until he stops. People flow past them. She doesn’t hear their curses. She hears only what she heard the day they met — the message from that long-ago future she’s forgotten.

“It’s true,” her husband says. “I told him that the past goes on. I told him that your brother still is.”

I listen to Jonah’s recording, and the year comes back intact. Comes back, as if that year had hurtled off somewhere while I stood still. The needle has only to touch down onto that circle of black vinyl and he’s standing in front of me. Aside from the scratches and pops, the scattered flyspecks in amber that accumulate over years of listening, we’re back on that day we laid the tracks down, two boys on the verge of the big time, the night before Watts exploded.

Da liked to say you can send a message “down into time.” But you can’t send one back up. He never explained to me how you could send any message, in any direction, and expect it to reach its mark. For even if the message arrives intact, everything it speaks about will have already changed.