Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Charles and Michael burst into the kitchen, filled with that good night’s sleep Delia would never again enjoy. They launched their industrious breakfast torments, warbling at her, throwing their noses and pinkies in the air. Big sister just cupped their closely cropped heads to her, one in each palm, and gazed at them, as if memorizing their faces before stepping off remembrance’s dock into oblivion. It scared them witless, and the boys took their chairs without another word.

Lucille and Lorene made their grand entrance, twinned displays of bows and shoe polish. Toward her little sisters’ prim show, too, Delia turned bravely weepy. Over the ranks of plates and glasses, all Nettie’s children bowed their heads in grace. Delia took her turn with the words: “Thank you God for all good things.” The syllables rumbled through the kitchen, each a lumbering boxcar in foreboding’s freight. All through her daughter’s breakfast prayer, Nettie’s lips worked away, moving to her own unheard incantation. One concert, and her girl would be forever strange to her? But even before her Delia had had anything to hide, the girl had always refused to be cornered.

Thanks given, Nettie raised her head and appraised her zombie saint. And over the steaming mounds of biscuit, some phantom movement caught her eye. The motion lasted only the barest second, if it moved at all. A whole family seemed to sit around the half table, lit in the lightning flash before her sight settled. A brace of faces, strangers to her, yet familiar as the ones who sat to this breakfast, this one. These spirit faces were not hers to name or know, yet somehow they seemed to belong, at one remove. Two or three, at first. Then, while Nettie turned her head to take them in, the faces multiplied. Before the glimpse dimmed and went out: more than she could count. More than could fit in her overflowing kitchen.

My line.The notion hit her with the force of foregone proof. My grandchildren, come back to see me. But something as thick and impenetrable as years held them clouded and soundproof, the far side of unreachable.

“Mama?” something called, and she fell back into now. “Mama?” That infant’s first question, wanting no answer but Here I am. Her hands felt splotchy, weak with heat. The saucer below her trembling cup filled with a liquid the color of skin. She was spilling, shaking like the old woman she’d just been, only an instant before.

“Eat up now,” she said, ignoring her eldest’s alarm. Delia had been dishing out her own bright doses of fear all morning. It wouldn’t hurt her to take a little. “Eat up, all of you. The world ain’t going to hold up school, just so y’all can dawdle.”

The children scattered at the sound of their father’s descent. The doctor appeared, resplendent in serge, his shirt’s iron whiteness shining out from underneath his suit like a bolt of ancient raiment. In his rich bronze voice, a tessitura that every time thrilled Delia to despair— And the trumpet shall sound! — he announced, “Seems she came through for us. Our Miss Anderson.”

“She was perfect, Daddy. She sounded like God singing to Himself, the evening before the very first day.”

“Hush,” Nettie said. “Don’t you go blaspheming.”

William just nodded. “Good concert, then? Everything we could have hoped for?”

Hope had been so far outstripped, it now seemed too meek a preparation. “Good concert.” Delia giggled and shook her head. “Good concert.” She was far away, as far as the concert houses of Europe. Vienna. Berlin. Farther. “I think it changed my life.”

The doctor’s beam clouded to a scowl. He took his seat at the table’s head, where a place setting materialized by magic in front of him. “What do you mean, ‘think,’ girl? If it changed your life, wouldn’t you know it?”

“Oh, she knows it all right.” Nettie Ellen fired her salvo from the sink, scraping at the child-savaged plates, her back to them both. Dr. Daley swept a look from wife to child. Delia could only shrug and hide in whatever scrap of protective foliage her parents deigned to leave to her.

The doctor devoured his breakfast. The steam off the brown-capped biscuit crusts, the thick smell of the gravy’s suet roux pleased him. He spread the newspaper around him, his fixed routine. His face stayed impassive as he scoured the momentous headline. He commenced filleting both the gravy-strewn biscuits and the news into clean, digestible portions. He partitioned and consumed the account of the epochal concert with the same appetite he applied to Hitler’s reinterpretation of the Munich Pact and insistence on Danzig. He dismantled the first section of the paper, flattening each sheet back with care, and scanned the stories through the final paragraph.

“It seems our nation’s capital wasn’t prepared for what hit it last night.” He spoke to no one, or to everyone in earshot. “Is this performance the start of something, do you think?” He looked up at his daughter. Delia looked down, too fast. “Let’s imagine, for a moment, they finally heard?”

Delia caught her father’s eye. She stood waiting for the question. But it seemed he’d already asked it. She tried to nod, just a fraction of an inch, as if she followed him.

He shook his head and set to restoring the paper’s front section to mint condition. “Who can say what it will finally take? Nothing else has worked. Why not try a little old-time singing? Though it’s not like we haven’t been doing a heap of that all along.”

At the doctor’s pronouncement, Nettie Ellen, still at sinkside, began humming to herself, her husband’s cue to get along with the earning of the daily bread. On his way out, William cast his daughter one more look: concession, congratulation, as if the triumph of the night before had been hers.

The doctor decamped to his clinic and the day’s first patients. That left just the oldest game going: mother and daughter, mutely reading each other, evading, trading, knowing before knowing. Nettie washed, and Delia stood by, drying. The proper cleanup. Air drying left streaks. You had to get to the dishes right away, with a towel and two elbows.

They finished. Both stayed in place, fussing and straightening. “I have to go,” Delia said. “I’ll be late for class.”

“Nobody’s keeping you.”

Delia shoved her towel back on the rack. Her hands said, Be that way, then. She broke for the doorway, and made it as far as the stove. “Mama. Oh, Mama.” Relief was easier, words were more obvious than she’d thought possible.

Her mother crossed the tiles to her, reached out one hand, and fixed the wave of hair that fell down across Delia’s face. Hair whose curl looked different now to each of them.

“Mama? How long before… How soon did you know?”

Her mother reached up to fix Delia’s heaving shoulders. “You take your time, child. The longer the making, the better the baking.”

“Yes, Mama. I know. But how fast? Was there one clear thing that…made you realize?”

The daughter tried on a slant, scared smile. At that look, her mother saw her kitchen fill up again with invaders. Grandchildren. Great-grandchildren, relentless and multiplying, underfoot. They schooled around Nettie Ellen Daley, at once the oldest American woman still standing upright.

“How I felt about your father? Child. I’m still figuring out what I got going on with that man.”

Delia fought for breath. She’d done nothing wrong. Nothing had happened. Nothing that meant anything. She was turning herself into a mad mooncalf for no reason. Giving herself pointless fits, over pure invention. Yet in the last night’s rareness, the press of that record-setting crowd, up too close to history, something had turned in her. Some ancient law had split apart. Drunk on the godlike Miss Anderson, the voice of the century, a feather floating on a column of air, Delia made a separate journey, traveled down into the briefest crack in the side of sound. A widening in the day had opened up in front of her, pulling her and her German stranger into it. They’d traveled together down into long time, along a hall without dimension, to a place so far off, it couldn’t even really be called the future, yet.