Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Whatever she might prove, he has already refuted. Still, he stares at her, blameless confusion, begging her to restore him. Have you no pride? All these years, have I taught you nothing?

“A colored girl,” she says, giving up on placement, projection, support, her sound collapsing. “A colored girl growing up, going to college, learning what she wants, taking what she needs, being anything she cares to be, changing the laws of this country.” Her voice falls to nothing. But it does not break. “Who’s going to stop her? What’s wrong with that?”

His words come back, in her voice. He hears what it costs her, to risk this echo. A spine in this girl he never put there. He falls still, a captive audience. Up in the front row, watching his life in review, events strange but familiar, scripted yet open. Her voice hangs in the air. How much music that voice might make. How much work that music might do. His shoulders fall. The clamp of history slips loose. He doesn’t stoop to forgiveness, any more than whiteness will ever forgive him for remembering. “Nothing,” he says, and looks away. “Nothing’s wrong with that.”

The worst isn’t over; nothing of this nightmare will ever be over. The weight will ever be on her, of proof and its opposites. But still, she’ll live. Her flesh will keep her. Blood will not disown. So much gratitude tries to escape her all at once that it comes out liquid, in her sobs. Her mouth moves in wordless, frozen thanks, and she breaks down under that burden, belonging.

He offers her a handkerchief but no shoulder. The threat is all around them, still. Only the immediate crisis has passed. When her crying fades, he asks, “What does this man do?”

She snorts. She can’t help it. “Daddy, I wish I knew.”

The rage flashes back. “Am I to understand the man is some kind of trash-picker? Or an Ivy League playboy who’s never had to work an hour in his life?”

Her snickers die in childbirth. “No, Daddy. He’s a professor at Columbia University. A scientist. He makes a living studying time.” She fights to keep her face straight, free of those self-swallowing curves her David claims inhabit even the straightest lines. “He works on the General Theory of Relativity.”

Her cultivated father registers the same kind of disbelief she felt on hearing this was one of the world’s accredited professions. Doubt and awe, old half-blood brothers, mix in Dr. Daley’s face. The secrets that obsess him are as subtle as the ones he would ignore. “I thought only half a dozen men in the world are able to understand that.”

“Oh, probably.” She fights to hide her hope. There will be a meeting. Her father, the autodidact, has a few questions to ask the authority. “However many there are, David’s one of them.”

“David?” Her father wrestles with the physics. The optics. For generations now, it’s been their secret scale, the pull that led him to her mother. Light as you can, right on up to the invisible edge, but never over. Over is unthinkable betrayal, even though loyalty never asked questions along the graded way. His eyes consider: Suppose it were anyone else but him, laying down the law, preventing such a match. Anyone else declaring that the upper echelons of whiteness, its mental mysteries, were off-limits to his offspring. Then he’d die for her right to this foreign man, clearly unfit to hold his daughter’s hand. “What does his family say?” Brittle, flinching from the answer, the eternal beating down.

“About what?” she bluffs. But she drops her eyes.

The man doesn’t know where his family is. They’ve fled from Rhineland to Zeeland, buying, at most, months. He has written to Europe several times, getting no satisfactory reply. The news of David’s choice of mate will reach his family, if at all, as news from another galaxy — freezing, airless, irrelevant.

“He’s a Jew, Daddy.”

The fact operates upon her father. “Does your mother know?”

Delia moans low. “A Jewish atheist foreigner.”

“Covering all your bases, aren’t you? Where in hell did you meet this man?”

This is what she’d like to remember. One moment, she was singing along to herself, passive oracle to the goddess Miss Anderson, and the next, she and the German had known each other for decades. No: There’d been a moment between those two, one of his geometrical figments she can’t wrap her head around — finite but infinitely dividable.

Something happened to her, to her country, as the contralto sang it into being. The continuous carpet of crowd absorbed her, one pulsing, breath-holding creature made up of 75,000 single cells, fused by that voice. The man stood next to her the whole time, and she never saw him. Hadn’t seen any separate spot of pigment in this mile-long swath until this one grazed her on the shoulder.

Are you a professional?

Delia thought he was speaking in German. The inflection, the unmistakable cadence of that language that had been her special torment these last three years.

Professionell…The first word she ever spoke to him.

Her pronunciation must have passed, for he responded, Sängerin?

She beamed. Not yet. Looking down, fumbling for the words: Noch nicht.

But you would like to be? In the future?

She caught up to his words. How… Oh, help me. You could hear me? The whole time?

He tried not to, then let himself smile. Not…the whole time. I couldn’t hear “O mio Fernando.” Noch nicht, vorläufig.

I was singing out loud?

He pushed out his chin: Never let the world worry you. Sotto voce. I had to bend to hear.

My God! All these people around!

Very few could hear.

Why on earth didn’t you hush me up?

He shrugged, feeling the peace only music can give. Miss Anderson…sounds like paradise. But she was far away, and you…were right here.

He introduced himself. So great was her undying shame, she introduced herself in turn. No one in the dispersing crowd stopped to look twice at them. The thousands who swept past were still lost in the sound that had joined them. Discrete humanity had not yet sedimented back out of solution.

The press of people forced them to move. She waved good-bye to the most intimate conversation with a white she’d ever had. But this man, David Strom, fell in alongside her in the flow. She heard him say, I have heard Miss Anderson sing already. In Vienna, some few years ago.

You heard her?In her excitement, Delia forgot she’d just enjoyed that unforgettable pleasure herself. With a burst so easy that it still mystified her, they were talking voice. Was Flagstad as good a Sieglinde as the magazines claimed? Who was his favorite Norma, his choice for Manon? She sounded like the most shameless striver, but something even worse drove her. Her questions opened parentheses faster than he could close them. If one could only buy two new recordings this year, which should they be? How big a voice did a woman need in order to fill, say, La Scala? Had he ever heard the legendary Farrar?

The man chided her. Farrar stopped singing in 1922. I am a little younger than you must see.

She stopped to examine his face. He wasn’t her father’s age at all, but at most ten years older than she. He had on a gray suit, white shirt, and a narrow burgundy tie, poorly tied. He held his gray-blue felt hat, crushed down to a porkpie. Brown socks and shoes, poor soul. He might have thrown on the whole concoction in the dark. Not handsome, by any race’s measure. His rounded forehead crested a little, in the planning stage of balding’s evacuation, and the bridge of his nose rode up too high, as if broken.

His eyes, too wide, left him looking permanently baffled. She combed her own hair with two fingers and brushed a quick palm check across her cheeks. The muscles in her lips tensed, the way that always annoyed Mr. Lugati, her teacher. Inside those too-wide eyes, the man looked out, seeing her. Her: nothing larger. No sign but herself. She, at most ten years younger than he.