Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

She reads the violence as her father steps into the room. She thinks at first, This bomb, this matter of morality he comes to discuss with David. But something nearer has happened. He doesn’t lean down to embrace the boys or carry them. He barely lets them cling to his legs before he brushes past down the corridor, radiating fury.

She’s seen this before, more times than she cares to remember. Seen it first when she was no older than Joseph. In her boys’ faces, the seed of that poison tree: What did we do? The question she herself could never answer. Now it’s her boys’ turn to suffer the inheritance she can’t keep them from.

Her father nears her, and she tries to hug him. He pecks her on the chin. She feels him struggle, with that last scrap of dignity so powerful in him, to bite down this rage and swallow it whole, a cyanide capsule they give to agents caught behind enemy lines. She knows he won’t be able to. He’ll wrestle and fail, no less spectacularly than the world has failed him. Meanwhile, she cannot ask, can’t do anything but play along, a show of cheer while waiting for all hell to break.

It takes until after dinner. The meal itself — turkey, broccoli, and creamed corn — is polite, if strained. David doesn’t notice, or he’s shrewder than Delia ever supposed. He asks about the sulfa-drug conference and William answers in Western Union. William tries instead to rehash the mess at Potsdam and Truman’s doomed slum-revitalization program. David can only grin, hopeless on both scores. Delia feels them both fighting to stay off Japan, the atom shadow, the dawn of the new cosmic age. The case this night’s meeting was meant to hear.

After the apple compote, her sons drift from the table to the spinet, that wedding gift from Dr. Daley, far and away their favorite toy. They tinker with octave scales. “Play me a nice old-time song,” Dr. Daley tells them. “Can you do that? You boys play a little tune for your grandpap?”

The two boys — four and three — smash down onto the bench and play a Bach chorale: “O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort.” Jonah gets the melody, of course. Joseph holds down the bass. This is how it goes: two boys discovering the secret of harmony, delighting in passing dissonance, tumbling over the jumble of moving lines, romping through the transformed scale. “O Eternity, you thunderous word! You sword boring into the soul! Beginning minus ending, Eternity, time without time, take me whenever it pleases you!” Nobody in this room knows the words. It’s notes only in here tonight. The boys weave their runs, butt wrists, kick each other’s shins where they dangle in the air, lean away in the swell of progressions, come back playfully on the smallest slowing, home. The music is in them. Just in them, this opening chrysanthemum of chords. It makes them happy, each juggling lines utterly separate that nevertheless fall one inside the other. Breathing in this perfect solution to a day that belongs to no one.

Some night, a life will arise that has no memory of where it came from, no thought of anything that has happened on the way here. No theft, no slavery, no murder. Something will be won then, and much will be lost, in the death of time. But this night is not yet that night. William Daley looks on these small boys, doing their chorale tumbling act. In that look lies every chord that music doesn’t speak. He shakes his head in wide, fact-denying arcs. The boys think he’s pleased, maybe even amazed, as every adult who has ever heard them has been. They lower themselves off the bench and toddle off to other discoveries. William turns to his daughter and stares at her, the way he once stared at his son Charles for playing coon songs on the parlor upright back home. The look sinks into her: accomplice, accuser. Anything you want. Wasn’t that the creed? The equal of any owner. The owner of all you would equal. Dr. Daley’s head shakes to a terrible stop. “What are you going to do with them?” He might mean anything. Anything you want.

Delia rises and starts to clear the table. “David and I have decided to school them at home.” She’s almost in the kitchen by sentence’s end.

“Is that so?”

“We’ve thought about it, Daddy.” She swings back to the table. “Where can they get a better education? David knows everything there is to know about science and math.” She waves toward her husband, who bows his head. “I can teach them music and art.”

“You going to give them history?” In the whip crack of his voice, there’s all the history he means. His fingers clamp around his water glass to keep his daughter from stealing it from him. “Where are they going to learn who they are?”

She slips back into her seat without a sound. She wraps herself in this role, the way Mr. Lugati trained her to do onstage. We work hard during countless rehearsals, so we can be inside ourselves, free for that one performance. She reaches down to find that column of breath. “Same place I learned, Daddy. Same place you learned.”

His eyes flash gunmetal. “You know where I learned who I am? Where I learned?” He turns toward David, who learned elsewhere. And that, Delia sees, is his unforgivable crime. “You asked about the conference? You wanted to know how the conference went?”

David just blinks. No longer sulfa drugs. No more antibiotics.

“I wish I could tell you. You see, I missed the better part of it. Detained downstairs in the lobby, first by the hotel dick, and later by a small but efficient police escort. A slight misunderstanding. You see, I couldn’t, in fact, be Dr. William Daley of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, because Dr. Daley is a real medical doctor with genuine credentials, while I’m just a nigger busting his woolly head into a civilized meeting of medical professionals.”

“Daddy. We don’t use that word in this house.”

“You don’t? Your boys are going to have to learn it, between their pretty four-part hymns. Full dictionary definition. Count on it. Home school!”

Her walls are in flames. “Daddy, you… I don’t understand you. You raised me…”

“That’s right, miss. I raised you. Let’s agree on that.”

She sees her lightness in the almond of his eyes. Has he forgotten? Does he think she has gone over, over to something as invented as the one laid down upon them?

“‘You are a singer,’” she says. “‘You lift yourself up. You make yourself so damn good that they have to hear you.’”

His palms flash outward. Look! “You’ve been out of school for half a decade. Where’s your career?”

She falls back from him, smashed in the face.

“She has been very busy,” David answers. “She is a wife and a mother of two. With one more coming.”

“How has your career been? Family obligations haven’t kept you from tenure.”

“Daddy.”The scale of the warning, in the back of Delia’s throat, startles even her.

He won’t be humbled, not again this day. He wheels on her. “I’ll tell you where your career is. It’s waiting out back of the concert hall, in the alley. The Coloreds Only entrance. Which just happens to be boarded up for the foreseeable future.”

“I haven’t really taken any auditions.”

“What do you mean, ‘haven’t really’? Either you haven’t or you have.”

“I’ll do more after the boys are older.”

“How long does a voice last?”

So many accusations come at her at once that she loses count. Smartest baby ever born, either side of the line, and she hasn’t become a lawyer, run for Congress, become even a mediocre concert artist. Hasn’t moved the race down the line. All she has done is raise two small boys, and that, apparently, not well.

Her father drops into deep bass, a tone she’s never heard him use. The sound silts up with her mama’s yellow clay-bed Carolina, a place he’s not been, aside from one unwilling visit, for more than fifteen years. Forget tobacco, forget cotton: land too bleak for anything but the most pitiful beans and peanuts. Land too poor to pay its own rent. His voice comes out a note-perfect mock of his own battered-down father-in-law, the one Delia met just three awkward times in this life. Only the voice isn’t mocking. “Those people ain’t never gonna let you sing.”