Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Now, in her mother’s kitchen, it shamed her to think how she must have invented the whole trip. Nothing had happened. She’d traveled nowhere. And yet, the man had traveled to that nowhere with her. She couldn’t have invented that. His eyes, as they said good-bye, already remembered the place in detail.

By that afternoon’s bed-making shift at the hospital, Delia managed to put the dream behind her. By the next day’s vocal lesson, she’d put it so far behind her, it was staring her in the face again. Lugati was going on about support, appoggio, that abdominal combination of tightening and relaxing too complicated for any but a medical student to follow. “A singer has only so much mileage in her,” Lugati said. “If you drive yourself wrong, you’ll spend your voice in ten years. Used right, your equipment can last as long as you do.”

At those words, the German was there again, alongside her. Together, as they’d been in Washington, on the Mall. Using each other right. Lasting as long as they needed to.

By week’s end, Delia had a letter from him. He asked if he might come to Philadelphia. She wrote back a dozen different answers, mailing only one. She met him out in front of Independence Hall — neutral territory. As in Washington, they lost themselves in a mixed, indifferent crowd.

Strangers turned to look. But none of them stranger than he. Again, that unreachable future opened up in front of them through a crack in the air. Again, they drew near to enter it. The wilder her feelings, the more she doubted. The man’s visit was brief, lucky, mad. But anything more than one illicit afternoon outside Independence Hall would be impossible. Surely he saw that.

“When can we do this again?” he asked.

“We can’t,” she answered, squeezing his arm like a hank of emergency rope.

When he left, she felt empty again, criminal. It encouraged her, how quickly his accent fell away in her ear, how hard it was to re-create him in silence. His alien face grew amber, less pallid, when dissolved in her memory. She wouldn’t see him again. Her life would return to her, simple, obvious, and pointed toward its goal.

She went to meet him in New York. She told her parents she had an audition — the first lie of any size she’d ever told them. Inside a month, she was telling larger. Her secret grew, even with poison waterings. She’d have to confess, or lose herself to duplicity. She had to make this wrong thing good again, as good as she sometimes imagined it was when they were together, alone, the sole curators of that long, dimensionless passage, the first visitors to that world they’d somehow shortcut to, diagonally, across the field of time. He knew all her music. He loved how she sang. She was herself with him.

She tried to tell her mother. Shame and disbelief prevented her. Once or twice, she started, then fled down another topic. Any words she tried to give it turned it evil. Like perfect fruit, it went rancid when exposed to the air. After some weeks, Delia stopped looking her mother in the eye. The lie spread into her daily doings, tainting routines that had nothing at all to do with the man. Her most innocent comings and goings slipped under the growing cloak of concealment. Even her little brothers and sisters began shying away from her.

Her mother kept still and waited for her to return. Delia could feel her, patient, kind, horribly wise, trusting to her gut, where motherhood lived. And in her trust, driving her daughter away.

Her mother stayed good, until goodness began to strangle them both. Then Nettie went upstairs one evening, to the little attic room that served as Delia’s provisional studio. Delia stood in her posture of forced comfort, working a chunk of chromatic scale across the higher of the two passage points in her voice. She stopped at the knock on the door. Her mother stood, hands cupped as if around a coffee cup or a prayer book. Neither of them spoke for a quarter minute.

“You keep on singing. I’ll just make myself hid and listen.”

She hunched over, already old, her shoulders weighted down into an unanswered question mark by a hundred years of unanswered need.

“Mama” was all the girl could say.

Nettie Ellen stepped into the attic and sat. “Let me guess. He’s poor.”

Delia’s private prize rushed upward, flushed out of the underbrush. She flared up, the righteousness of the guilty. Then anger dissolved in tears, easing into a relief she hadn’t felt in weeks. She could talk to her mother. All distances might close again, in words.

“No, Mama. He’s…not exactly poor. It’s…worse than that.”

“He’s not a churchgoing man.”

Delia bowed her head. The bare floor filled with sea for drowning in. “No.” Her head made one slow, leaden swing. “No. He isn’t.”

“Well, that’s not the end of the world.” Nettie Ellen clicked in the back of her throat. The sound of all things that needed enduring. “You know we’ve always had our problems with your father on that count, and he sure don’t seem about to jump up and reform anytime soon.”

Nettie smiled at her daughter, mocking her own long-suffering. But she got no smile in return. Delia stood mute, her whole body begging, Ask me some more. Please, please, keep asking.

“He’s not from around here, is he? Where’s he from, then?”

The animal scare in her mother’s eyes killed any chance Delia had of cleaving to the truth. “New York,” she said, and slumped still lower.

“New York!” A glow of foolish hope in her mother celebrated the reprieve. “Thank the Lord. New York’s nothing. We can walk to New York, girl. I thought you were going to say Mississippi.”

Delia forced herself to laugh, heaping lie on lie.

Her mother heard the note at once. Her mother’s golden ear, the one Delia had inherited. “Have pity on me. You got to tell. No way I’m going to guess. What could be so wrong with the man? He have three legs or something? Been married five times already? He don’t speak English?”

A giggle tore from Delia, hollow and horrible. “Well. There is that.”

Nettie Ellen’s neck jerked back. “He don’t? Well, what’s he speak, then?”

Then a look. A wide-eyed, overdue dawning. Sorrow, fear, incredulity, pride: all the colors of the rainbow, bent out of the white light of incomprehension. The question she’d climbed up into this attic studio to ask died on her lips. Do you love him at least? no longer had any bearing.

“You’re saying he’s not one of us?”

The full force of that mad simplicity. Hundreds of years lifted off Delia. Centuries of evil and worse, waiting for their answer. She felt the long-sought appoggio well up under her breath. History was a bad dream that the living were obliged to shake. The world — right use — could start from now.

“That’s right, Mama. He’s not…entirely one of us.”

In the centuries that sprang up between them, neither, anymore, was she.

Bist Du Bei Mir

We went back home with Da. I say “home,” but the place was gone. We stood in front of the gutted building, staring at the rime of frost that coated our blackened freestone. I stood in a mound of rubble, looking for the place I’d grown up in.

I kept thinking that we were one street too far south. The fire had charred the two entrances on either side of ours. Our building looked like the target of a stray artillery shell. Wood, brick, stone, and metal — things that couldn’t have come out of our house — lay heaped up in a twisted mass. But everyone — our neighbors, our invalid landlady, Mrs. Washington, even Mrs. Washington’s Jack Russell terrier — had gotten out alive. Every living creature but my mother.

We stood in front of the ruin so long, we were in danger of freezing. I couldn’t look away. I looked for the little spinet we’d always sung around, but nothing in that pile of slag remotely resembled it. Jonah and I huddled together, stamping, our breath steam. We stood until the cold and the pointlessness grew worse than our need. At last, Da turned us away from the sight for good.