Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

I touched his ravaged shoulder through his flimsy hospital gown. My palm said, You can stop. You don’t need to do this. Da felt the touch prodding him on.

“Your mother was silent. Watching everything break open. Her father and I were talking enough for all humanity. He…called me a member of the killer race. I…used my family. My parents and sister, in the ovens. I used them as proof. Of something. The hatred I took in, for being something I never was.”

“I understand, Da.” I would have said anything to close that box back up.

“When William left that night, he said we forced him. He said we didn’t want you two to know your Philadelphia family. ‘If they’re not going to be black, these boys, they can’t have their black family.’ This made your mother furious. She said unfortunate things. Everything her father had ever taught her, everything he believed… But this, we never said. We never said you would not be black. Only that you would be who you were: a process, first. More important than a thing. He called this idea ‘the lie of whiteness.’”

“A quarter of a century? You don’t cut off all contact because of a single night. Angry words. Every family has anger. Every family says things it wishes it hadn’t.”

“Your mother and I, the two of us, we knew what would come. Your future had already talked to us. Your future made us! And made us choose. We thought we knew what things would come to you. But your Papap…” He darkened. Messages missing, disappearing, unopened, unsent. “Your Papap did not see these.”

There was a thing stronger than family, wilder than love, worse than reason. Big enough to shred them all and leave them for dead. All my life, that thing had pinned me. Its nurses wouldn’t let me into this hospital room, couldn’t accept I was this dying man’s son. And still I didn’t know what this thing wanted from us, or how it had grown so real. “So that’s it, Da? One night’s craziness caused a permanent break? For this one night, we — Mama never saw her own family again?”

“Well, you know, it’s a funny thing. I didn’t see that night would be a break. Neither did William. For a long time, I thought he would come to us, that we were right and he would come to agree, in time. But he must have been waiting for us, too. Then, in that waiting, righteousness took us over.” He closed his eyes and thought. “And shame. It was ourselves we didn’t know how to find. Ourselves we didn’t have the heart to go meet again. This is the force of belonging. After that, after your mother died…” I put my hand on him again. But he’d already been convicted. “After your mother died, I couldn’t any longer. The last chance had closed up. I was too ashamed even to ask that big man’s forgiveness. I sent them the news, of course. But I thought… I was afraid she died because of me.”

I would have cried out, Impossible, except his own daughter had said as much. He looked at me, pleading. I could not exonerate or condemn. But there was something I might do. “Da? I could…find them. Now. Tell them.”

“Tell them what?” Then he heard what I was asking. His head went back into his pillow. Everything he knew about time made him believe that only perception divided the future from the past. His eyes flickered, as if our family were already here, in this green cinder-block room, all false world lines redrawn. Then his lips spasmed, his brows and cheeks collapsed on each other, and his face blanched, condemning itself. He shook his head. And with that shake, he slipped the last dragline with which life held him.

He went fast after that. He passed in and out of consciousness. We didn’t say much more to each other, beyond logistics. He called out two mornings later, in blinding pain: “Something is wrong. We have made a terrible mistake. We have chopped up our house for firewood.” His eyes still looked at me, but they sat so deep with animal incomprehension, they no longer knew me. Disease and the morphine drip split him between them. The maze of muscles around his eyes showed him hearing all sorts of sounds, the most glorious music. But he couldn’t get over the wall, where the sound came from. The eyes pleaded without focus, asking if I remembered. In his face was the horrified suspicion that he’d made it all up.

I remembered the day he took us to Washington Heights for the magic substance, Mandelbrot. The day he told us that every moving object in the universe had its own clock. One look at his face showed how uncoupled our clocks had become. In the five seconds I spent taking that glance, decades sheared off into his silent bay. In my few breaths, he had time to audition the entire available repertoire. Or maybe, as I raced, my clock buzzing around in front of him, his own had already stopped, stranding him on the upbeat of some permanent open-air concert on the mind’s Mall.

And then, one last time, time started up again. I was sitting by his bed flipping through a six-month-old copy of Health and Fitness that the hospital scattered around its rooms like warrants. I thought today might be the day. But I had thought that for the last three mornings running. It had been forever since Da had said anything. I talked to him as if he were still there, knowing my words had to sound like spinning galaxies. I sat with the magazine spread on the rolling meal table, reading about living with rosacea. I had one ear on him, waiting for any change in his breathing. It felt exactly like the years I’d spent accompanying Jonah, bent over my score, listening for the silent indicator that the piece was about to head off into uncharted waters.

Then it did. Da leaned forward off his canted bed and opened his eyes. He coughed up something that took me some seconds to identify. “Where’s my darling?” I waited, paralyzed. The shudder would wear him out, break him again. But then, harsher, more terrified, he burst out, “ Wo ist sie?Where is my treasure?”

I stood to calm him, lower him back to the pillow. “It’s okay, Da. Everything’s all right. I’m here. It’s Joseph.”

He flashed in anger. My father, who was never angry at me in his entire life. “Is she safe?” His voice belonged to someone else. “You must tell me.”

I stood at the crash of two lives, not knowing which to answer. “Da. She’s not here anymore. She…died.” Even now, I couldn’t say burned.

“Died?” His voice suggested some misunderstanding, probably simple, he couldn’t puzzle out.

“Yes. It’s okay.”

“Died?” And then his whole body bucked in electroshock. “Died? My God, no! My God! It can’t be. Everything—” He flailed at the IV tubes and made to swing his feet out of bed. I was around the bed faster than he could move, pinning him. He shouted, “She can’t be. Das ist unmöglich. When? How?”

I held his wasted one hundred pounds back against the bed. “In a fire. When our house burned. Fifteen years ago.”

“Oh!” He grabbed my arm. His whole body relaxed in gratitude. “Oh! God be thanked.” He settled back, satisfied.

“Jesus Christ. Da? What are you saying?”

He closed his eyes and a smile played on his lips. He clawed the air until his hand found mine. “I mean my Ruth.” He slipped back against the bed. “How is she?” The words exhausted him.

“She’s good, Da. I saw her not long ago.”

“Really?” Pleasure battled with irritation. “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

“She’s married. Her husband’s name is Robert. Robert Rider. He’s…” A big man. An enormous man. “Grosszügig.”

Da nodded. “This much, I have already thought. Where is she now?”

“Da. I’m not sure.”

“She’s not in trouble?”

“Nothing serious.” My concert days were over, but I’d learned to improvise.