Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

She let the man see. The need to flee had run off somewhere, giving up on her. She’d dropped her guard somewhere back in the crowd, ceased watching out for herself in this public place. Miss Anderson’s fault. Sotto voce, the man had said. But clearly not sotto enough. Singing out loud, of all imaginable crimes. Still in his gaze, taking too long to get it out, she articulated, Verzeihen Sie mir.

Could there be whites who might not, after all, hate her on sight for the ungivable forgiveness they needed from her? Clearly this man knew nothing of her country, except what it felt like to be here. Here, on the Mall, this Easter, not for history, not to see what came from centuries of making heaven of the readiest hell. Just here to hear Miss Anderson, the voice he’d heard in Vienna, a voice one is lucky to hear once every hundred years.

He looked again, and she lost herself. What marker could his map hold for her? His gaze seemed free of anything but itself. She felt herself unbound in it. He saw her only here, in the rolling, open territory Miss Anderson had sung no more than an hour ago. My country. Sweet land.

The square mile of federal land around them thinned out. The nation of listeners slipped unwillingly back home, as they, too, would now have to. But the German had a hundred questions for her first. What was the best way to broaden the notes at the top of the range? Who were the best present-day American vocal composers? What exactly was this “Gospel Train,” and did it stop anywhere nearby?

She asked if he were a musician. Perhaps, in another lifetime. She asked what he did in this one. He told her, and she broke out giggling. Absurd, making a living studying something so obvious, something one could do so precious little about.

They moved up the long reflecting pool in silent agreement, toward the monument, where the crowd still pressed in on that spot so recently graced. They chattered of Vienna and Philadelphia, as if they’d been sent their long, separate ways so each could scout out all the concerts the other couldn’t get to. She made a note to remember this coda to a day she’d never be in danger of forgetting. Their talk didn’t turn awkward until they reached the monument, their invented destination, the edge of their shared world.

She looked at the man again. She felt her look returned, emptied of history. Thank you for talking music, she said. It’s not often…

It’s less than not often,he agreed.

Wiedersehen,she said. Lebewohl.

Yes,he answered. Good-bye.

Then they saw the child. A lost boy, no older than eleven, keening, sprinting back and forth around the edge of the indifferent crowd, making the panicked forays of the lost. He ran to one side, calling out incoherent names and scouring the faces of those adults drifting past him. Then, terror rising, he ran back to search again in the opposite direction.

A colored boy. One of hers, she thought, and wondered if this German gentleman thought the same. But it was David Strom who called to the child. Something is wrong?

The child glanced up. At the white face, the clipped German sound, the boy bolted, looking back over his shoulder at his motionless pursuers. Just as instinctively, Delia called out, That’s all right, now. We ain’t gonna hurt you. She fell through some hole into her mother’s family’s Carolina past, on no stronger prompting than the curve of the boy’s forehead. The boy might have been from South Chicago, Detroit, Harlem, Collingwood, Canada — the last terminal on the Underground Railroad. He might have been far better off than she. But that was how she called to him.

The boy stopped and looked at her, squinting. He stepped closer, a skittish, starving creature eyeing the food-baited trap. His suspicious fascination appraised the white man next to her. He looked at Delia. You come from around here?

His accent startled her; it came from no place she could identify. Not far, Delia answered, pointing vaguely. David Strom proved his intelligence by keeping silent. How ’bout you?

The boy’s voice turned wild at the words. Delia thought she heard California, but between the unlikeness and the boy’s sobs, she wasn’t sure.

Everything’s going to be all right. We’re gonna help you find your people.

The boy brightened. My brother’s lost, he told her.

Delia sneaked a look at David Strom. She fought down her own cheek muscles. But on the scientist’s face, no stray amusement. No trace of anything but problem solving. And in that moment, she decided: She might share nothing else with this man in the rest of invented existence, except for trust.

I know he is, honey,she said. But we’re gonna help you find him.

It took some time to talk the boy down. But at last, his blanket panic began to lift. He was able to tell them, without too many contradictions, how disaster had struck. But the open lines of the place and the dispersing crowd mazed him. We were over there! he shouted. But when they drew close, joy broke down. This not it.

Delia kept him talking, damping his terror. She took his hand, and the boy, in the fickleness of childhood, took it as if he’d held it all his life. What’s your name? she asked.

Ode.

Jody?

Ode.

Really!She tried not to sound too surprised.

It means I was born on the road.

Where does it come from?

He shrugged. My uncle.

They walked back along the reflecting pool. Distance played tricks on Ode, revising his geography every fifty paces as the landscape curved away from him. But every minute the three of them walked, his fear subsided by an hour. The white man fascinated him. Ode kept stealing glances at David Strom, and Delia added theft to theft. She watched the child struggle to fit the man. Each time the German spoke, the boy fell off, bewildered.

Where’re you from?he demanded.

New York,Strom said.

Ode lit up. New York? My mama’s from New York. You know my mama?

I haven’t been there long,Strom apologized.

Delia hid in a coloratura coughing fit. Ode grinned, willing to be the butt of her delight. He looked up at the white man. You don’t have to take that from her, you know. Something he’d heard some adult say once.

Strom smiled back shyly. Oh, but I do!

Without thinking, the boy took the man’s hand in his free one. They walked along, two agitated adults flanking a frightened child.

Ode jabbered to them so nervously, Delia had to hush him to keep him on the search. She couldn’t make out more than half the boy’s panicked argot. They tacked back and forth across the Mall, a skiff becalmed.

I would like very much to see you again,David Strom said over Ode’s head. His voice shook with a fear all its own. Through the child’s arms, Delia felt the man tremble, making his own winter.

He didn’t know. He couldn’t. Forgive me, she said. Unforgivable: twice since meeting him. It’s impossible.

They walked beneath the flanking trees that formed a colonnade of pillars in this roofless church along a nave too wide to span. Her impossible thickened in the air around them. Each step harder than the last. She couldn’t tell him. She didn’t care to prove the impossibility, either now or later.

Whatever the word meant to a physicist, the physicist did not say. David Strom pointed toward the boxlike monument. The crowd clinging to the spot of Miss Anderson’s miracle had thinned. That is where we need to go. Where we can see everyone, and they us. Underneath the statue of that man.

Delia laughed again, the weight now suffocating her. Ode laughed along, at the foreigner. You don’t know who Lincoln is? The boy twisted his head clear sideways. Where you been all your life?

Ah,Strom said, assembling all American history.

Lincoln was a nigger-hater,the boy told them.