Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

In the afternoon, when Jonah and Joey raced home from forced excursions to that strip of playground adjoining St. Luke’s, they’d find their mother at the spinet with baby Ruth, turning the cramped drawing room into a campsite on the shores of Jordan. Half an hour of trios dissolved into bouts of ritual bickering between the boys over who got first dibs with their mother, alone. The winner set to an hour of glorious piano duets, while the moment’s loser took little Root upstairs for read-alouds or card games without real rules.

Lessons with Delia passed in minutes for the praise-heaped student, while stretching out forever for the one waiting in line. When the excluded boy started calling out finger faults from upstairs, Delia turned those catcalls, too, into a game. She’d have the boys name chords or sustain intervals from the top of the stairs. She’d get them singing rounds—“By the Waters of Babylon”—from opposite ends of the house, each boy weaving his own line around the distant other. When they hit the limits of their boy’s patience, she’d bring them together, one singing, the other playing, with little Root inventing spectral toddler harmonies that strove to join this family’s secret language.

The sounds her boys made pleased Delia so much, it scared them. “Oh, my JoJo! What voices! I want you to sing at my wedding.”

“But you’re already married,” Joey, the younger boy, cried. “To Da!”

“I know, honey. Can’t I still want you to sing at my wedding?”

They loved it too well, music. The boys shrugged off sandlot sports, radio dummies and detectives, tentacled creatures from the tenth dimension, and neighborhood reenactments of the slaughter at Okinawa and Bastogne, preferring to flank their mother at the spinet. Even in those narrow hours before their father returned, when Delia stopped their private lessons to prepare dinner, she had to force-march the boys out of the house to take another dose of torture at the hands of boys more cruelly competent in boyhood, boys who rained down on the two Stroms the full brutality of collective bafflement.

Both sides in the neighborhood’s standing war went after these stragglers, with words, fists, stones — even, once, a softball bat square in the back. When the neighborhood children weren’t using the boys for horseshoe stakes or home plate, they made an example of the freakish Stroms. They sneered at Joey’s softness, covered Jonah’s offending face in caked mud. The Strom boys had little taste for these daily refresher courses in difference. Often, they never made it to the playground at all, but hid themselves in the alley half a block away, calming each other by humming in thirds and fifths until enough time had passed and they could race back home.

Dinners were a chaos of talk and tease, the nightly extension of the years-long Strom-Daley courtship. Delia banned her husband from the stove when she worked. She found the man’s pot-dipping an outrage against God and nature. She kept him at bay until her latest inspired offering — chicken casserole with candied carrots, or a roast with yams, small miracles prepared in those moments between her other full-time jobs — was ready for the stage. David’s task was to accompany the meal with the latest bizarre developments from the imaginary job he held down. Professor of phantom mechanics, Delia teased. Da, more excitable than all his children, laid into the wildest of details: his acquaintance Kurt Gödel’s discovery of loopy timelike lines hiding in Einstein’s field equations. Or Hoyle, Bondi, and Gold’s hunch that new galaxies poured through the gaps between old ones, like weeds splitting the universe’s crumbling concrete. To the listening boys, the world was ripe with German-speaking refugees, safely abroad in their various democracies, busy overthrowing space and time.

Delia shook her head at the nonsense that passed for conversation in her home. Little Ruth mimicked her giggle. But the preteen boys outdid each other with questions. Did the universe care which way time flowed? Did hours fall like water? Was there only one kind of time? Did it ever change speeds? If time made loops, could the future curl into the past? Their father was better than a science-crazed comic book, Astounding Stories, Forbidden Tales. He came from a stranger place, and the pictures he drew were even more fantastic.

After dinner, they came together in tunes. Rossini while washing the dishes, W. C. Handy while drying. They crawled through loopy timelike holes in the evening, five lines braiding in space, each one curling back on the other, spinning in place. They’d do workhorse Bach chorales, taking their pitches from Jonah, the boy with the magic ear. Or they’d crowd around the spinet, tackling madrigals, poking the keyboard now and then to check an interval. Once, they divvied up parts and made it through a whole Gilbert and Sullivan in one evening. Evenings would never be so long again.

On such nights, the children seemed almost designed for their parents’ express entertainment. Delia’s soprano lit across the upper register like lightning on a western sky. David’s bass made up with German musicality what it lacked in beauty. Husband anchored wife for any flight she cared to make. But each knew what the marriage needed, and together they used the boys shamelessly to hold down the inner lines. All the while, baby Ruth crawled among them, hitching melodic rides, standing on her toes to peek at the pages her family studied. In this way, a third child came to read music without anyone teaching her.

Delia sang with her whole body. That’s how she’d learned, even in Philadelphia, from generations on generations of Carolina churchgoing mothers. Her chest swelled when she let loose, like the bellows of a glory-filled pump organ. A deaf man might have held his hands to her shoulders and felt each pitch resonating, singed into his fingers as if by a tuning fork. In the years since their marriage in 1940, David Strom had learned this freedom from his American wife. The secular German Jew bobbed to inner rhythms, davening as freely as his great-grandfather cantors once had.

Song held the children enthralled, as tied to these musical evenings as their neighbors were to radios. Singing was their team sport, their Tiddlywinks, their Chutes and Ladders. To see their parents dance — driven by hidden forces like creatures in a folk ballad — was the first awful mystery of childhood. The Strom children joined in, swaying back and forth to Mozart’s “Ave verum corpus” the way they did to “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

Surely the parents heard what was happening to music at that hour. They must have felt the manic pulse — half the world’s GNP, looking for its ruder theme song. Swing had long since played Carnegie, that brash razz already housebroken. Down in the blistering bebop clubs, Gillespie and Parker were nightly warping the space-time continuum. A cracker kid in a designated white house in a black neighborhood off in fly-bitten Mississippi was about to let loose the secret beat of race music, forever blowing away the enriched-flour, box-stepping public. No one alive then could have missed the changes, not even two people as willfully against the grain as that refugee physicist and the Philadelphian doctor’s daughter, his trained-voice wife. They raided the present, too. He had his accented Ella and she her deep-palette Ellington. They never missed a Saturday Metropolitan broadcast. But every Sunday morning, the radio trawled for jazz while David made foot-wide mushroom and tomato omelettes. In the Strom’s singing school, upstart tunes took their place in a thousand-year parade of harmony and invention. Cut-time, finger-snapping euphoria gave those nights of Palestrina all the more drive. For Palestrina, too, once overthrew the unsuspecting world.