Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“They let Miss Anderson sing.”

“Sure. They let her sing, up at the Big House, on Novelty Night. Do a little dance, too, if she likes. Entertainment! Dogs on bicycles. Just make sure she gets back down to the darkie quarters when the act is over.”

Delia sits, hands frozen on the half-cleared table. Some street gangster has taken over her daddy, the man who worked his private way through Ulysses, who corresponds with university presidents, who demanded David’s explanation of Special Relativity. The man who has spent his adult life easing the sick. Stripped of his clinic, separated from his wife, taken from the neighborhood where he has for years been a healing god, fingered in a hotel lobby and held like some petty crook or dope fiend. What the world sees will always destroy what he rushes to show it. There is no counter but that collapse that, in time, takes everyone. Identity.

Dr. Daley walks over to the spinet. He plays the boys’ chorale from memory. He gets the first four bars, more or less as the backwoods cantor wrote them. It shocks Delia how good he is. He plays like one who has lost his native tongue. But he plays. She has never heard him play much of anything but snippets of Joplin. “That baby’s crying seemed to be,/Somewhere near the Sacred Tree.” A little broken boogie-woogie at Charlie’s memorial. Now this. By ear. Nothing but ear.

William’s hands pull away from the saw-toothed Lutheran chords as if the piano lid just bit them. “You know what I hear when I hear that music? I hear, ‘Cursed be Canaan.’ I hear ‘White — all right: Brown — hang around: Black — get back.’”

His daughter raises her blasted eyes to his. She tries for piano. Soft is harder than loud, as Lugati always said. “I’m sorry they were idiots at the conference, Daddy.” More reason, she wants to add, to beat them at what’s theirs.

“Mount Sinai. Not idiots. Best there is.” His eyes test the extremes of punishment not yet visited on him. Stripped so easily, he knows no bottom. Held and humiliated for an hour: It cost him nothing. Laughable. Dust yourself off and walk away. But if that, why not locked up in the coat check, chained to the shoe-shine stand in Penn Station, kept illiterate, driven out of the polling place, beaten up for turning down the wrong alley, or hung from a ready sumac? Even the most stubborn self in time will be identified.

From under his prayer shawl of silence, David speaks. “I have been thinking. What has been done to you today. This is an error of statistics.”

William bolts up. “What do you mean?”

“These are men who will not calculate while flying.”

Dr. Daley stares at the man. He turns to his daughter, dumbfounded. Her lips pucker. “On the fly.”

“Yes. On the flight. They are taking shortcuts in the steps of their deductions. They do not see the case, but only make bets on the basis of what they think likelihood tells them. Category. This is how thought proceeds. We cannot alter that. But we must change their categories.”

“Likelihood be hanged. This is nothing but animal hatred. Two species. That’s what they see. That’s what they’re intent on making. And damn us all, that’s what we’re going to be. They couldn’t see my clothes. They couldn’t hear my speech. I was quoting whole chapters from the seventh edition of the mother fucking Merck Manual…”

“My father told me it happens.” Her voice spinto, sailing on the shakes. She needs only ride this out. “My father taught me to live through it. To make a me too big to take away.”

“And what will you tell your children?”

Jonah chooses this moment to reenter the room. And where he strays, Joey isn’t far behind. Two preschoolers wandering in the woods, the pointless thicket of adulthood. William Daley clasps his eldest grandson’s shoulders. In this room’s light, the boy’s beige throws him. Somewhere between hang around and all right. A bent harmonica note, neither sharp nor natural. Between: like a rheostat, the slow turn of a radio dial receiving, for the slightest subtended turn, two stations at once. Like a coin landing freakishly on its edge, before the laws of likelihood condemn it to fall on one face or the other. He looks at this boy and sees a creature from the next world. Something comes back to him, an unusable aphorism he found while wasting his time trespassing in Emerson: “Every man contemplates an angel in his future self.”

“Joseph,” he says.

“Jonah.” The boy giggles.

The doctor swings around on his daughter. “Why in the name of hell did you call them the same thing?” Back to the boy, he says, “Jonah. Sing me something.”

Little Jonah starts out on a long, mournful canon. “By the waters, the waters of Babylon. We laid down and wept, and wept, for thee, Zion.” God knows what he thinks the syllables mean. Little Joey, a year younger, hears the round and waits, nailing his entrance, as he does with his parents night after night. But tonight, neither parent chimes in, and the canon trickles off after only two entrances.

“Sing me another,” Papap commands. And the boys, happy to oblige, start up another round: “Dona nobis pacem.” William holds his finger up, cuts them off before the three words are out. “What about our music?” He looks at the boys. But it’s their mother who answers.

“When was it ever ours, Daddy?” Ours: the black aristocracy, the Talented Tenth. The most despised people of the most despised people on earth.

He falls into oratory. “Before the Pilgrims,” he says, still regarding his grandchildren. “We were here, making our sounds.”

“I mean, when was it yours? Ours. Around the house. What music did we ever make our own? I had Mama’s church tunes, everything that came out of the A.M.E. hymnal. And I had your set of Teach Yourself the Classics 78’s. I used to sneak off with Charlie to listen to the wild sounds from New York and Chicago. All the stuff you never let us tune the radio to. ‘Best way to have yourself treated like a savage is to sound like one.’ I knew the music that scared you and the music that you felt you had to learn. But aside from a few turn-of-the-century rags you used to play when you thought nobody was listening — oh, I loved it when you played those! — I didn’t even know what music you liked. I didn’t even know you could…” She points toward the spinet, the smoking gun.

“You want these boys to sing? You want these boys to love… This boy.” He points to the darker one. His hand chops the air, fighting off the creep of prophecy. He can’t bear to look on his pronouncement. “This boy is going to be stopped, a quarter century from now. Going into some concert hall. Told there’s some mistake. He wants the stage on the other side of town. Not his music, going on inside. Complex, cultivated stuff. He wouldn’t understand.”

“Dein, was du geliebt, was du gestritten.”The words issue from nowhere, no person. “What you have loved, what you have fought for, that is yours.”

Dr. Daley swings around to face the challenge. There was a time when he’d have asked where the words came from. Now he says, “Who let you think so?”

Delia rises, as on the day of Resurrection. She glides over the floor to her father. Before he can pull away from her, she’s behind him, one hand draping onto the coiled mass of shoulder, one hand painting the patterned patch of baldness at the crest of his majestic skull. “What do you love, Daddy? What music do you love?”

“What music? Do I love?”

She nods, head jittering, teeth bared through her tears. Humming the first few bars of anything under her breath. Ready to be his little girl again at his first word.

“What music?” He thinks so long, he exhausts the catalog. “I sincerely wish that were the issue.” He lets himself be stroked, though only in distraction. “You’ve dropped your babies right down in between, haven’t you? Dead halfway. No-man’s-land.”