Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

One of my legs was cement. I called out to Jonah to slow down. We walked back along Yawkey Way, past the ballpark. Sometimes, in the early fall, from our room in the conservatory, we could hear the shouts of the desperate stands. Now the Fenway sat abandoned, a nuisance winter slum.

Jonah walked two steps ahead of me, hands in his pockets. His words formed frozen vapor puffs on the air. “I’m worried about her, Joey. Her parents… Her father might have…”

I wanted to tell him. But I was his brother, before anything.

By the time we got back to the conservatory, the snow had crusted us both in white. The roads lapping the Fens had that low, gray, angled, cloudy light of civil defense drills. Cars padded along at half speed on the strewn wadding. We couldn’t even see the school until we were in it.

We stepped back into hushed excitement. Students backed away from us in the corridor where we entered. For a moment, we were that sterile cross-species my brother had said we were. A boy we didn’t know addressed us. “You’re in trouble. They’re looking all over for you.”

“Who?” Jonah challenged. But the boy just shrugged and pointed toward the office. His eyes shone a little at the thought of the angel-voiced Jonah Strom taking a fall.

We shook the crust of white from us and headed for the office. I wanted to run; the faster we owned up, the lighter the sentence might be. But nothing could move Jonah from his usual hallway pace. In the office, even the adults shied from us. We’d somehow gone beyond them on our short walk, traveled to a place they weren’t ready to reach.

The assistant head laid into us. “Where have you been? We’ve torn the whole school apart looking for you.”

“We signed out,” Jonah said.

Our scolder was distraught beyond the scale of our offense. “Your father’s waiting for you. He’s upstairs in your room.”

A look passes between us, pinning us where we stand. A look we’ll exchange forever. We take the stairs in a sprint, two at a step. My brother shoots up ahead, landing after landing, still in full breath when I’m already sucking air. He could stop and let loose a high A for fifteen seconds, without strain.

I reach the summit, gasping. My brother already dashes down the hall. I follow Jonah into our room in time to hear him ask Da, “What’s going on? What are you doing here?” He has his theories, already. He sounds more thrilled than winded.

The man sitting on Earl Huber’s bed is not our father. This man is bent, shrunken, more bag man than mathematical physicist. His skin is drained. Under his clashing cardigan, his chest heaves. The face swings up to me, some shrill claim at blood relations. But this is not a face I’ve ever had to meet. Behind the tortoiseshell glasses, under the cubed forehead, the muscles fall slack. Our father thinks he’s smiling at us. A beseeching smile, gone begging. A smile that expands and settles in me, driving me from childhood.

“How are you boys? How are you two?” The German accent has thickened to a gruel, the how broadening to who. I thank God that we’re alone, no boys from the C cities in Ohio to explain things to.

“Da?” Jonah asks. “What’s wrong? Everything okay?”

“Okay?” our father echoes. Empirical reductionist. Okay has no measurement. Okay is a meter stick that shrinks with the speed of the measurer. He inhales. His jaw flops open to form a word. But the puff of consonant clutches on his throat’s thin ledge, a suicide wanting to jump, wanting to be coaxed back in. “There was ein Feuer. An explosion. Everything…burned. She’s…” All the words he auditions and rejects hang in the air between us. And my father still smiles, as if he might somehow be able to accept what he can’t even name.

“What’s happened to her?” Jonah shouts. “Where did you hear this?”

My father turns to his eldest son. He tilts his head like the puzzled mutt hearing his master’s voice coming out of the gramophone. He reaches out a hand to pierce the confusion. The hand, too small for anything, drops back into his lap. He’s still smiling: Everything everywhere already is. He nods his head. “Your mother is dead.”

“Oh,” my brother says. And an instant too late, his relief turns to horror.

April — May 1939

She was back in Philly on the 2:00A.M. train. That very same night. No time at all for anything to have happened while she was in D.C. Yet she slipped back into the sleeping house like a criminal, bearing a secret wider than the Potomac. And she was still up, after four hours of feigned sleep, dragging out of bed to make her morning classes, and, after that, her job at the hospital, if she lived that long.

Her mother met her in the kitchen, the question on her lips, although all Philadelphia already knew the answer. So many radios had tuned to last night’s broadcast, it was a miracle the city hadn’t fished the wavelength dry. Every listener had hung on the sound of her own private Marian, singing from the steps of that most public Mall.

“How was your concert?” Nettie Ellen asked, as if Delia herself had been the singer. Something in the woman knew, as sure as history: If her daughter hadn’t performed the night before, she was clearly performing up a storm that Monday morning.

“Oh, Mama. The biggest recital in the history of singing. The whole country was there — a dozen times more people than turned out for Jesus’s loaves and fishes thing. And Miss Anderson fed everybody on even less than he did.”

“Uh-huh. Good, then?” Nettie Ellen had heard every note of the shattering performance, cramped over the living room crystal receiver, that voice sailing up crisp and clear over the crackles of static. She, too, had swallowed down the bruise rising in her throat, the burning bile taste of hope — hope again, such foolishness, after all the corpses that had lined the way to that day. She’d read, before her daughter was out of bed, this morning’s headlines, lobbed by Monday’s paperboy over the porch into the burning bush: AMERICA THRILLS TO COLORED VOICE. Nettie hadn’t time for America. She was up to her wrists in baking powder, flicking the bits of egg-wetted flour around in the stoneware mixing bowl. She beat at the recipe with a force her daughter couldn’t fail to read. Nothing short of Judgment Day justified a grown woman coming home at 2:00A.M., waltzing in like the whole world had turned itself inside out and hollering lawless.

But the lawless girl had gone strange to her, docile and awed. “Mama. Mama. I don’t have time for biscuits.” Nettie just glared, and Delia set about, helpless, to help make them. In her sleep-starved daze, Delia even got the children up and pointed them toward their school clothes while her mother kneaded and punished the recalcitrant dough.

The mystery rose up between them, too thick for naming over biscuits and gravy. Not that Nettie Ellen needed any names spelled out. Seventy-five thousand lovers of fancy singing all gathered in a single place, and of course her Delia was going to cross paths with one who’d keep her out until all hours of creation. Clear as the features on her face: The girl was love’s zombie. Sighing like a chicken on an open fire. Setting the table in a dream, laying out the silverware as if spreading flowers on a grave.

Nettie Ellen had been waiting some time for this, braced for the spell that would turn her oldest child into another creature. She knew it would eventually settle in, as rapidly as spring — one minute, the lawn ratty and bare; the next, rolling in banks of aconite the color of condensed sun. It would as ever be the last, great test of selfless mothering: how to lay all her care down and let her own flesh and blood grow strange to her.

From the start, Nettie had vowed to rise to that last parental sacrifice before her girl forced her. But she hadn’t foreseen this pure foolishness, her own daughter turning shy on her, as if Nettie hadn’t spent years attending to the girl’s body — sick, naked, and needy — as if a girl’s mother didn’t already know all about the need flesh was made for. Silly timidity, the mother had expected. But this, her daughter’s frightened, inward flowering, was past all understanding.