Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

The whole city is a postcard panorama. Like being inside a white hand-me-down grade school civics text. Today, at least, the monument-flanked boulevards flow with people of all races. The group from Union Baptist told her to look for them up front on the left, near the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. She has only to hook right, on Constitution Avenue, to see how naïve those plans were. There’ll be no rendezvous today. To the west, a crowd gathers, too dense and ecstatic to penetrate.

Delia Daley looks out over the carpet of people, more people than she knew existed. Her father is right: The world is vicious, too huge to care about even its own survival. Her steps slow as she slips in behind the mile-long crowd. All in front of her, the decades-long Great Migration comes home. She feels the danger, right down her spine. A crowd this size could trample her without anyone noticing. But the prize lies at the other end of this gliding crush. She breathes in, forcing her diaphragm down— support, appoggio! — and plunges in.

She expected something else, a lieder-loving concert crowd, only a little larger. The program today is hardly the Cotton Club. It isn’t even Rudy Vallee. Since when have Italian art songs pulled in such armies? She drifts across a barricaded Fourteenth Street at the crowd’s stately pace, falling under the outline of the Washington Monument, the world’s largest sundial, a shadow too long to read. Then she’s inside the whale’s belly, and all she can hear is the huge beating heart of the beached creature.

Something here, a thing more than music, is kicking in the womb. Something no one could have named two months ago now rises up, sucking in its first stunned breaths. Just past Delia in the press of bodies, a girl the color of her brother Charles — a high schooler, though from the look of her, high school is a vanished dream — spins around, flashing, to catch the eye of anyone who’ll look at her, a look of delivery that has waited lifetimes.

Delia pushes deeper into the sea, her throat, like a pennant, unfurling. Her larynx drops, the release Lugati has been hounding her these last ten months to find. The lock opens and a feeling descends on her — confirmation of her chosen life. Fear falls away, old leg chains she didn’t even know she was wearing. She’s on her appointed track, she and her people. Each will find her only way forward. She wants to kick back and call out, as so many around her are already doing, white people within earshot or no. This is not a concert. It’s a revival meeting, a national baptism, the riverbanks flooded with waves of expectation.

Inside this crowd, she feels the best kind of invisible. The slate-colored combed-silk dress that serves so well for Philadelphia concerts is all wrong here, too sleek by half, her hemline missing low by a full two inches. But no one marks her except with pleasure. She passes people fresh off mule-drawn tobacco-farm carts, others whose portfolios are padded with blocks of General Motors. To her right, a convention of overalls gathers together, huddled against the public. A stooped couple in black formal wear fresh from its Armistice Day outing brush past her, eager to push up close enough to catch a glimpse of the dais. Delia takes in the topcoats, capes, raglans, pelerines, the whole gamut from ratty to elegant, the necklines cowled, draped, squared, and bateaued, all rubbing eager shoulders.

Her lips form the words, and her windpipe mimes the pitches: Every valley, exalted. A balding man about ten feet away from her, ghost white, with the Cumberland Gap between his two front teeth, perching inside a thin gray suit, starched blue shirt, and tie printed with Washington landmarks, hears her sing aloud what she has only imagined. “Bless you, sister!” the ghost man says. She just bows her head and lets herself be blessed.

The crowd condenses. It’s standing room only, flowing the length of the reflecting pool and down West Potomac Park. The floor of this church is grass. The columns of this nave are budding trees. The vault above, an Easter sky. The deeper Delia wades in toward the speck of grand piano, the stickpin corsage of microphones where her idol will stand, the thicker this celebration. The press of massed desire lifts and deposits her, helpless, a hundred yards upstream, facing the Tidal Basin. Schoolbook cherry trees swim up to fill her eyes, their blossoms mad. They wave the dazzle of their pollen bait and, in this snowstorm of petals, fuse with every Easter when they ever unfolded their promissory color.

And what color is this flocking people? She’s forgotten even to gauge. She never steps out in a public place without carefully averaging the color around her, the measure of her relative safety. But this crowd wavers like a horizon-long bolt of crushed velvet. Its tone changes with every turn of light and tilt of her head. A mixed crowd, the first she’s ever walked in, American, larger than her country can hope to survive, out to celebrate the centuries-overdue death of reserved seating, of nigger heaven. Both people are here in abundance, each using the other, each waiting for the sounds that will fill their own patent lack. No one can be barred from this endless ground floor.

Far to the northwest, a mile toward Foggy Bottom, a man walks toward her. Twenty-eight, but his fleshy face looks ten years older. His neck is a pivot, his eyes behind their black horn-rims steadily measuring the life all around him. Just his being alive to measure this unlikeliness defies all odds.

He walks from Georgetown, where two old friends from his Berlin days put him up, sparing him from looking for a room, an act of practical politics that would have defeated him. He has come down by train last night from New York, where he has lived this past year, sheltered by Columbia. Yesterday, David Strom was out in Flushing Meadows, getting an advance peek at the World of Tomorrow. Today, he woke up in Georgetown’s parade of yesterday. But now there is only and ever now, every infinitesimal in the delta of his step a subtended, theoretical forever.

He’s here by George Gamow’s invitation, to talk at George Washington University on possible interpretations of Milne and Dirac’s dual time scales: probably imaginary, he concludes, but as staggeringly beautiful as truth. He was down three months before, for the Conference on Theoretical Physics, where Bohr told the assembled luminaries about the existence of fission. Now David Strom returns, to add his private notes to the growing stockpile of infinitely strange things.

But he makes the trip for a more pressing reason: to hear again the only American singer who can rival the greatest Europeans in tearing open the fabric of space-time. Everything else — the visit with his Georgetown friends, the talk at George Washington, the tour of the Library of Congress — is excuse. His thoughts tunnel backward. His each step toward the Mall peels back the four last years, exhuming the day when he first heard this phenomenon. That sound still hangs in his mind, as if he were reading it off the conductor’s score: 1935, the Wiener Konzerthaus, the concert where Toscanini proclaimed that a voice like this woman’s came around only once every hundred years. Strom doesn’t know the maestro’s timescale, but Toscanini’s “hundred years” is short by any measure. The alto sang Bach—“Komm, süsser Tod.” “Come, Sweet Death.” By the time she reached the second strophe, Strom was ready.

Today is Easter, the day Christians say death died. To date, Strom has seen little evidence supporting the theory. Death, he feels reasonably confident, is poised to make an impressive comeback. For reasons Strom cannot grasp, the angel has passed over him three times already. Even the most confirmed determinist must call it caprice. First, following his mentor, Hanscher, down to Vienna after the Civil Service Restoration Act, escaping Berlin just before the Reichstag erupted in flames. Then getting the habilitation. Making a splash at the Basel conference on quantum interpretations, and winning an invitation to visit Bohr in Copenhagen just months before Vienna dismissed its Jews — practicing or otherwise — from the faculty. Escaping with the letter of recommendation from Hanscher, the shortest, most effusive that man ever wrote: “David Strom is a physicist.” At last securing asylum in the States, a mere year ago, on the strength of a single theoretical paper, whose confirmation came a decade before it might have, hastened by a cosmological confluence that happens once every other lifetime. Three times, according to David’s own count, saved by a luck even blinder than theory.