Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

But month after month, his hands panicked, afraid to close around so fine a thing. What if he were wrong? What if the lady’s spark shot out indiscriminately, on everyone? What if the warmth Nettie showed him was more amusement than desire? That seed of gladness she set in him certainly felt like proof. But surely this woman transfixed every derelict buck that her twin beams trained upon.

Around her, William rose up into highest seriousness. He adored her with a gravity that bordered on mourning. Dignity, he imagined, was the one gift he could give her that no other man would think to offer. He alone in all Philly knew the worth of this woman, this pearl’s rare price. His visits were reverential, his face creased with veneration.

Nettie thought the man a glowering rain cloud, but without the thunder or lightning. She suffered through a four-month courtship as sterile as any physician’s clinic. He dragged her to lectures and museums, always adding his own elevating commentary. He walked her over every acre of Fairmont Park, both sides of the river, hobbling her with self-betterment until she begged him to take up cribbage, at which she gleefully commenced whipping him.

But William knew this cribbage queen for something really regal. He found dignity even in the way shehorselaughed through a Bill Foster single-reeler picture. He described his practice to her, the work he did and hoped to do, the healthier future that modern medicine could bring to the hard-pressed folk of Southwark and Society Hill, once the poor and ignorant quit fearing it and let it in the door.

Worship needs a chapel, and William’s was Nettie’s parents’ parlor. The room spilled over with chintz and cut-glass bowls and wing-back chairs that sprouted so many antimacassars, William finally took the hint and cut back on his own hair slicker. At his visits, Nettie’s parents vanished into the back, leaving only a younger son chaperon for William to buy off with root-beer sticks or licorice. Then the room became their theater, their lecture room, their spiritual Oldsmobile, William holding forth, the solemn docent, while Nettie Ellen grinned at the man’s talk as if it meant something.

He was lecturing one evening on Dr. James Herrick’s recent clinical description of sickle-cell anemia — yet another scourge that plagued the black man with excess enthusiasm — when Nettie at last leaned across the backgammon board that served as their lone barrier and said to the good doctor, “Ain’t you never gonna make a grab for me?” Her voice filled with simple practicality; the night was cold, and Nettie’s parents were saving on the heat again. What good was a courter who wouldn’t even keep you warm?

The doctor hung stunned in space, his mouth imitating his tie’s opal stickpin. William Daley, uplift’s agent, sat paralyzed with bafflement. So the woman did what the situation called for, leaning over even deeper and attaching the M of her upper lip to his astonished O.

Once Nettie taught the fellow what he was after, the stroll of their courtship stepped up to a canter. Dr. William Daley and Nettie Ellen Alexander were married within the year. Afterward, the lecture load was more evenly divided between them. She nudged his speeches forward with strategic encouragements. The scope and variety of her instruction never failed to amaze the doctor.

William prized his magnificent specimen even more after landing her. His new wife furnished the house on Catherine Street, with its solid bay-windowed turret, and she installed herself at the house’s center, a genius of efficiency. At the end of the European war, she began to keep the books. With selfless efficiency, she set to work populating the household. She lost her beautiful firstborn, James, gave him up too quickly to God, who, after the Armistice, for His unknowable reasons, spread influenza around the world, settling into the Daleys’ neighborhood with a special vigor.

Husband and wife battened down against the loss, cleaving to each other. But James’s death claimed a piece of each of them. Nettie grew, if not harder, more guarded. Then strong-lunged Delia came, her mother’s consolation, every wail of those stunned lungs a cause for joy. After a long and anxious gap, interpreted so differently by William and Nettie that they stopped talking about it, there came the rash of young ones: Charles, Michael, and at last the twins, Lucille and Lorene.

Over her husband’s objections, Nettie had the children properly churched. She dressed and dragged them to Sunday school each week. Long before she married, she knew that William’s freethinking would now and then burst out in some fresh foolishness about belief that she’d have to maneuver around. She’d raise no child an ignorant, self-ruling savage. Mother and brood went and celebrated, while the doctor stayed home and worked. On holidays, even he had to scrub and attend. He stood among the believers, singing lustily, even speaking the Creed, although he coughed at all references to the deity.

Nettie served as receptionist to William’s patients, those endless processions of the ailing and infirm who passed through his office. A thriving man’s wife, and light: The combination wasn’t likely to endear her to the hard-pressed surrounding neighborhoods. But the woman had only to open her mouth and let one honeyed word trickle out for those around her to be caught.

She baked for her husband’s patients. She made the rounds with him through that besieged community, administering her own doses of the listening cure at the sides of sickbeds in four adjacent districts. She kept the man attached to his patients, engaged and understandable. She remembered all their names for him. “You do what Dr. Daley tells you,” she told them behind his back. “But go on ahead and mix up this little poultice, too. The Lord knows it can’t kill you, and it might just help.” As the doctor’s reputation grew, he credited his constant efforts to keep up with the latest medical developments. But in this careful diagnosis, he was a minority of one.

She worshiped her man and also worked him. Both came to the same thing. “I marvel at you, William C. Daley,” she declared, bringing a bromide to his office late one night. “What kind of studying you laying into now? Human Nature and Conduct. The Varieties of Religious Experience. The Such-and-So-ology of Everyday Life. James Joyce, Useless. Whoo-my. Fine black ship out there in all that cold white ice. Be careful you don’t hit something and go down with all hands.”

He rose up, a pillar of righteousness. “I am not black, any more than you are. The sole of my shoe is black. The coal we pay too much for every month is black. Look at me, woman. Look at yourself. Look at any brother of ours in the whole outcast race. You see black?”

“I see all sorts of carrying on. That’s what I see.”

“It’s the other side that makes us black. The other side wants to know what it feels like to be a problem.” For among all the treacherous white ice, he’d also read that light, mixed man, Du Bois. “Black’s what the world wants us to be. How can we even see ourselves to be ourselves?”

She waved him away. As always when they talked such things, Nettie just shook her head at his notions. “You’re whatever you want to be, I suppose. And whatever that is, Dr. Daley, you’re my one of a kind.”

In the long crescendo that stoked the twenties into a roar, everything Dr. Daley touched arose and walked. The clinic’s success spread by word of mouth. New patients appeared in such numbers that he took to seeing them, against Nettie’s wishes, on Sundays. He lucked into the perfect moment to refinance the house. Even with five children, even waiving every other indigent patient’s payment, he found himself adding to his capital. His school debts and start-up costs melted away. He bought government bonds. His helpmate kept the books and ran the house with the old Alexander frugality. As his lone indulgence, William picked up a Chrysler Six hot off the line.