Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

The flush started in her abdomen and spread in waves. The burning rushed up to her cheeks, her eyelids, the fluting of her ears. Futile good manners, pointless self-preservation fought down the urge to do violence to this violation. Down the hall, the soprano ahead of her struggled through her set piece. At the desk, the soprano after her handed over her papers. Delia kept beaming at this man, this squat, enormous, impenetrable power. She smiled, still trying to win him over, all the while tucking her head in shame.

The dean, too, heard the evidence, teeming all around them. “You’re welcome, of course, to…to sing for us anyway. If you…like.”

She bit down the urge to damn him and his kind for all time. “Yes. Yes. I’d like to sing. For you.”

Her executioner led her down the corridor. She followed, stumbling and numb. She drew one covert finger along the paneled walls that she’d dreamed of. She would never touch them again in this life. Her ankles softened; she reached out to steady herself. She looked down on her body from above, her whole torso shaking. She lay in a deep snowbank under the January night, her body shivering, stupidly failing to realize she was already dead. Everything she’d worked for was lost. And she’d just agreed to give her destroyers one more chance to mock her.

As they reached the room appointed for her pointless, rigged hearing, her shaking undid her. Four white faces stared at her from behind a long table cluttered with papers, faces like clocks, each a passive mask of polite confusion. The dean was saying something to her. She couldn’t hear him. Her sight shrank to a cloud no more than a foot across. She fumbled for the piece she’d prepared and couldn’t remember it.

Then the sound came. Her voice faltered back to its first authority. Her singing stopped her auditioners, hushed their rustling. She slipped in pitch. She heard herself lose the consistent tone that had been hers in every rehearsal. Yet it tore out of her, her life’s performance. She sang beyond their power to disgrace, and forced recall upon her judges. This song; this one.

The Verdi aria sounded, for once, like the indictment it was, the condemnation hiding under its crazed hymn to pleasure. When she finished, the judges answered with silence. They went through their charade, giving her an aria from Handel’s Acis and Galatea to sight-sing: “As When the Dove Laments Her Love.” Delia nailed it perfectly, still hoping to reverse reality, smiling through to the double bar.

At last, Dean Grosbeck spoke. “Thank you, Miss Daley. Is there anything else you’d like to add?”

Emptied, she had no encore. “I’ve Been ’Buked” rose up into her mouth, but she bit down on it. No revenge but refusal. When she left the audition room, all the soprano positions still filled, she saw the eyes of one of her examiners, a frail white woman her mother’s age, spilling over, wet with music and shame.

She stumbled back across town, home. Her father sat in his study, reading in his red Moroccan leather chair.

“They turned me down before I even opened my mouth.”

Across her father’s face, every impotent recourse moved like a crew of migrant field hands: the blocked petitions, the denied lawsuits, the humiliating retries — next year, the year after, killed by the same standing refrain. He rose from his chair and approached her. He took her shoulders and looked into her, the last lesson of childhood, fired to a hard finish in that old furnace they now shared.

“You’re a singer. You build yourself up. You make yourself so damn good, they can’t help but hear you.”

Delia had stood through the afternoon’s ordeal. Now in her father’s caring gaze, she fell. “How, Daddy? Where?” And she broke down in that finishing fire.

He helped her find a music school that would hear her. One at least competent. He came to her admission audition and stood by, gripping the air, as she passed, with a scholarship. He staked her the balance of her tuition, although she kept her job, to pay for those extra lessons he couldn’t understand. He went to her every recital and was on his feet clapping before the last held tonic could decay. But both father and daughter knew, without ever admitting as much to each other, that she would never, now, be schooled at the upper level of her skills, let alone the lower reaches of her dreams.

A Tempo

Clever Hänsel’s voice has broken and won’t ever be put back together. “Breaking,” Da tells him, “is the arrow of time. It is how we can know which way the melody is running. Breaking is what turns yesterday into tomorrow. Soprano before; tenor after. Deep physical principle!”

This is our Da’s faith. All other things may change, but time remains the same. “Growing disorder: This is how we must tell time. Lunch is not only never free; it gets, every day, a little more expensive. This is the only sure rule in our cosmos. Every other fact, you will one day exchange. But bet against the Second Law, and you are doomed. The name isn’t strong enough. Not second anything. Not a law of nature. It is nature.”

He raises us to believe this. “Things fall down and get more broken. More mixed. Mixing tells us which way we point in time. This is not a consequence of matter or space. It’s the thing that gives time and space their shape.” Who knows what the man means? He’s his own independent country. All we know is: No one breaks the Second Law and lives. Like don’t take candy from strangers. Like look both ways before you cross the street. Like loose lips sink ships, a law I will never quite get until long after all my ships have sailed.

And yet our father’s unshakable faith is flawed. His science hides an embarrassment that absorbs him day and night, as if he’s God’s bookkeeper and can’t sleep until the columns balance. “At the heart of this beautiful system, a little heart attack. Eine Schande. Help me, my boychik!” But I can do nothing for him. The discrepancy drives him a little crazier every day. This scandal is his arrow, and shows him which way he runs.

I catch him working on it one evening, when I’m home for Christmas. He’s in his cave, perched over a sheaf of paper marked off into a grid of blue squares. Drawings all over, like a comic book. “What are you working on?”

“Working?” He always takes a moment to surface. “I’m not working on anything. This damn thing is working on me!” He likes to say that word, when Mama can’t hear. “You know what is the meaning of ‘paradox’? This is the biggest damn paradox human beings have ever built.” I feel guilty, responsible. “Mechanics, which I believe absolutely, says time can flow either way. But thermodynamics, which I believe even absolutlier…” He clucks his tongue and waves a finger in the air, a traffic cop. “Einstein wants to kill the clock. Quantum needs it. How can both these fine theories be right? Right now — whatever now means! — they don’t even mean the same thing by time. It looks bad, Yoseph. You can imagine. A big family fight in public. The dirty little secret of physics. Nobody talks about it, but everybody knows!”

He hangs his head in shame, leaning over his blue graph paper. Clowning for me, but suffering all the same. The world is full of snares. The Russians have the bomb. We’re at war with China. Jews are executed as spies. Universities refuse my father as a conference speaker. His marriage makes him a criminal in two-thirds of the United States. But this is the crisis in my Da’s Zeitgeist: this flaw, this blot on the whole clan of scientists, on all of creation, whose housekeeping they do. It turns him around in time.

Our family, too, is turned around. Jonah’s voice has fallen an octave. It lies broken at the bottom of a well. Mine teeters on the verge of the same fall. We’re home again, on what must be my second summer recess. Da’s in a deep, jovial gloom. My little sister sits in his study with him, sharing his excited misery, his graph paper, his drawing tools, her hands stroking her chin, her face pretending to think. Mama teases him, which tears me up, given Da’s obvious distress. Something in his proofs has gone horribly wrong.