Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“We could school them at home.” Writing her mind, reading his.

“We could school them ourselves. You and I, the two put together.”

“Yes.” She shushes him. “Between the two of us, we can teach them a great deal.”

He lies back quiet, content in their plans. Maybe that is whiteness, manness. Safe within himself, even on a day like this day. Even with all that has happened to his own family. In a minute, his contentment leads to what it always does. His night to start tonight: He hums a tune. She can’t say what it is. Her mind is not naming yet, but keeps inside the phrase. Something Russian: the steppes; onion domes. A world as far away from hers as this world permits her. And by the time his slow Volga tune comes into its second measure, she’s there with the descant.

This is how they play, night after night, more regular than sex, and just as warming. One begins; the other harmonizes. Finds some accompaniment, even when she has never heard the tune, when it comes down out of the attic from some musty culture no one would claim to own. The secret’s in the intervals, finding a line half free of the melody, yet already inside it. Music from a single note, set loose to run in unfolding meter.

Humming in bed: softer than love, so as not to wake their two sleeping children. This third, as close as her abdomen, won’t mind hearing. She sings, tuning with a man who has as little sense of her past as she has of these haunted Czarist chords. His whole family has vanished, leaving behind no hard fact to mourn. He’s left his handprints on a bomb that takes a hundred thousand lives. It’s August, too hot for the lightest touch. But when they fade and settle down to sleep, no angels watching over them out of the newly stripped skies, his fingers brush against the small of her back and hers reach out behind him to rest, for the next half hour anyway, upon the familiar strangeness of his thigh.

Her father writes David a long letter, started the day after the second bomb and finished three weeks later. “Dear David.” How their letters always begin: “Dear William.” “Dear David.”

This incredible news explains everything you couldn’t tell me over the last two years. I’ve come to appreciate what you must have carried inside you, and I thank you for giving me as much of a sense of this as you were able.

With the rest of America, I give praise to whatever power there is that this chapter in human history is at last over. Believe me, I know how much longer it might have dragged on had science not succeeded in producing this “cosmic bomb.” If nothing else, I thank you for Michael’s sake. But so much else about this development eludes me that I feel I must write you for clarification.

Delia watches her husband read, blinking the way he does when baffled by words.

I have no trouble in accepting the first explosion. It seems to me politically necessary, scientifically triumphant, and morally expedient. But this second blast is little more than barbaric. What civilized people could defend such action? We have taken tens of thousands more lives, without even giving that country a chance to absorb the fact of what hit it. And for what? Merely, it seems, to project a final superiority, the same world dominance I thought we were fighting this war to end…

David Strom gapes at his accuser’s daughter. “I don’t understand. He means I’m to answer for this?” He hands the paper to his wife, who speeds through it. “I am not the one to talk about this bomb. Yes, I’ve done work for the OSRD. So did half of our scientists. More than half! I did a little thinking about neutron absorption. A little later, I helped people to figure a problem surrounding the implosion. I did more work on electronic countermeasures that were never developed than I did for this device.”

Delia reaches out and grazes her husband’s arm. What can her touch feel like to him? His words relieve her a little, suggest the answers beyond her asking. But here: this letter, a sheet between them. Her father’s question has weighed on her for weeks. And her husband, she sees, has not yet asked it of himself. David takes the page back from her, resuming his penance at the pace of the foreign reader:

This country must know what it’s in danger of pursuing. Surely it sees how this act will look to history. Would this country have been willing to drop this bomb on Germany, on the country of your beloved Bach and Beethoven? Would we have used it to annihilate a European capital? Or was this mass civilian death meant, from the beginning, to be used only against the darker races?

Too much for David. “Yes,” he shouts. She has never heard this strain in him. “Surely. Of course I would use this against Germany. Think what Germany has used against everyone who is my relation! We have bombed all the German cities, by daylight and by nighttime. Flattened all the cathedrals. We were racing to make this final bomb before Heisenberg. Alle Deutschen… ”

She nods and cups his elbow. Her father, too, cheered David’s war work, what little David could tell him. The doctor, too, urged all speed to ring in the American future as quickly as possible. But her father was backing a thing invisible to him.

Know that I don’t blame you, but only need to ask you these few matters. You have seen up close what I can only speculate about. I had in mind a different victor, a different peace, one that would put an end to supremacy forever. We were fighting against fascism, genocide, all the evils of power. Now we’ve leveled two cities of bewildered brown civilians… You may not understand my racializing these blasts. Maybe you’d have to spend a month in my clinic or a year in the neighborhoods near mine to know what I wanted this war to defeat. I’d hoped for something better from this country. If this is how we choose to end this conflict, what hope can we have for peacetime?

No doubt this extraordinary turn of events looks different to you, David. That’s why I’m writing. If you could show me what I’ve failed to understand, I’d be much obliged.

Meanwhile, rest assured that I do not consider you to be supremacy, power, barbarity, Europe, history, or anything else but my son-in-law, whom I trust is taking care of my girl and those astonishing grandsons of mine. May Labor Day find you all well. I look forward to hearing back from you. Ever, William.

David finishes and says nothing. He’s listening; this much she must always love in him. Holding out for a hint of harmony. Waiting to hear the music that will answer for him. “I can get on a train.” His voice is a frayed rope. “Go out to Philadelphia and see him.”

“Don’t talk crazy,” she tells him, trying for comfort and missing by a wide margin.

“But I must speak with him. We must try to understand this, face-to-face. How can I do this thing, through writing, when nothing of what I must say is in my language?”

She takes him in her arms. “The doctor can come pay us a house call if he wants to talk. When was the last time we had him out here? He can come see his boys and have a listen to this little bun in the oven. You men can drink brandy and decide how best to fix civilization’s future.”

“I don’t drink brandy. You know this.” She has to laugh at the droop in him. But he does not lift at her laughing.

Her idea is inspired. She floats an open invitation just as Dr. Daley debates whether to attend the big postwar conference on the latest developments in sulfa drugs and antibiotics hosted by Mount Sinai and Columbia. Mixing pleasure and business appeals to the doctor’s efficiency. He arrives at the house on a September evening. Jonah and Joseph are on their feet and flying to the door at his knock. They sing “Papap” at the top of their voices, primed all day for the man’s arrival. Delia peers down the corridor as they bang into each other, each reaching for the handle to let their grandfather in. Joseph still favors his twisted ankle. Or maybe she imagines it. She has her hands full with basting bulb and ladle, but she towels clean in a moment and is off to the door, two steps behind her boys.