Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“Do you?” she shouts. She shoos them away, then clamps her temples to keep her head from spilling open.

She picks Strom up at the station. They can’t linger; Nettie Ellen wants them to come right home or call if there’s trouble. There will be trouble from now until death. The first taxi driver flips them the finger. The second drives off without a word. The third, a Negro, loses no chance to roll his eyes at Delia in the rearview mirror. David doesn’t notice. As it has every other hour for the last four months, Delia’s nerve fails her.

She tries to warn him in the cab about what’s waiting at home. She starts several times. Each attempt sounds more disloyal than the last. “My family…they’re a bit unusual.”

“Don’t worry,” he assures. “Life is unusual.” He squeezes her hand, down below the seat, where the cabbie can’t see. He whistles a tune for her ears only, one he knows she’ll recognize without asking. Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas: “Fear no danger to ensue; the hero loves as well as you.” The tune cheers her and she smiles, until she remembers how that story ends.

When they get to Catherine Street, her family has turned into saints. Her father greets the guest a little verbosely but ushers him into the foyer. Her brothers stick their hands out to shake, bobbing awkwardly, but without minstrelsy or goose-stepping. Only the twins seem remote. They glare at their sister, betrayed. They pictured some other white man, Tarzan maybe, that Flash Gordon, or even Dick Tracy. Anything but this grinning, four-eyed Dagwood Bumstead with the bumper already sprouting around his middle.

Nettie Ellen flashes about like heat lightning, getting the man’s coat, seating him on the good front room sofa, charming the feet from out beneath him. “So this is the man we been hearing so much about. Finally get to meet you, sir! Ain’t that a dandy tie you got on! How you liking it here? It’s a big country, don’t you think? Now, I’d like nothing better than to sit and chat, but we got a beautiful roast waiting in the oven just two rooms beyond, and if I don’t go keep my eye on it, we’ll all be eating cinders tonight!”

Nettie Ellen laughs, and David Strom laughs a dotted eighth note after her. Something in that delay and in the game look he flashes Delia tips her off: He can’t understand a word her mother says.

Fortunately, her father overcompensates. Where Nettie Ellen’s speech steals richly back home, William’s crisps. He makes a magnanimous show of sitting his daughter down on the sofa next to David. Then he takes the armchair facing them.

“So tell me, Professor Strom. How do you find life in the Apple?”

Now the visitor understands every word. But putting them together produces only a bizarre image of decomposing fruit. Delia fumbles for a shame-free way to play interpreter. But her father follows up before she can.

“My daughter tells me you’re close to Sugar? These are hungry times for the Children of Ham.”

David Strom determines the general dietary topic, but beyond that, nicht. He shoots Delia a look of happy befuddlement. But she’s lost in her own surprise at her father breaking the ancient law. Every dinner conversation her family sits down to brushes against the topic, but no outsider must ever be allowed to hear. Now here he is, leading with the private theme. Delia sits mute, waiting for the smoke to lift, by which point rescuing her guest will be impossible.

“Desperate in all neighborhoods, I understand. But our kind have again been chosen to bear the brunt. One out of every two of our own on relief. Now don’t misunderstand me.” There isn’t, Delia knows, a chance in hell of that. “I’m not a Communist. I’m closer to Mr. Randolph on these issues. But when half of one’s people can’t put food on the table, one begins to heed the rioters, wouldn’t you say? Where exactly are you living, Mr. Strom?”

David brightens. “New York City. I like it there, very much.”

William shoots a look at his daughter. Delia considers excusing herself to go take her own life. Her father surveys the extent of the wreck. It’s easier to abandon ship and start fresh on another vessel. “What do your people back home make of this so-called nonaggression pact?”

“I don’t… I’m not sure what you…”

“The one between Mr. Hitler and Mr. Stalin.”

Strom’s face darkens, and he and Dr. Daley are both, briefly, on the same band. After race and politics, Delia decides, they’ll move on to the third great arena: sports. She gives the two least athletic men she knows a total of five minutes to get onto the last Olympics, in Berlin. They reach it in three. Each for his own reasons is ready to kiss the ground Jesse Owens flies over. She begins to hope, against all reason, that the two men might make enough common ground between them for her to live in.

Her mother calls her from the kitchen. Delia hears at once the premeditated plot in it. “Taste this glaze,” Nettie Ellen tells her. “I just don’t know what it’s missing!”

After a breadline of rejected suggestions, mother allows daughter to convince her that the glaze is missing nothing at all. Nettie then lets Delia return to the front room, to whatever carnage of cross-examination that remains. But if the men have been probing delicacies that required her absence, it doesn’t show. Her father is asking the man she, well, call it loves, “Have you ever read Ulysses, by James Joyce?”

The scientist answers, “I think that writer was Homerus?”

Delia wheels and heads back into the kitchen. The sooner food is on the table, the faster the torture will end. On the way back to her mother’s kingdom, the thought occurs to her. Those monuments of white culture that her father assaults are not pilgrim stations, but pillboxes, strategic emplacements in a prolonged battle against an invading foreign power that doesn’t have the first notion of what’s being contested.

She rounds the corner of the kitchen into fresh disasters. Her mother stands by the stove, crying. Charles waves Delia over to inspect the damage. As Delia draws near, her brother turns on her. “How come you didn’t think about this before?”

“Think of what?”

Nettie Ellen raps the wooden spoon against the rim of the cook pot. “Nobody told me. Nobody told me not to.”

“Now, Mama,” Charles rides her. “You know the Jewish people don’t eat pork. That’s all over the Bible.”

“Not my Bible.” Whatever provocations she has stirred into this recipe, this one wasn’t planned.

“You should have told her,” Charles scolds his sister. “How come you didn’t tell her?”

Delia stands crumbling. She knows nothing of this man she’s dragged here. He doesn’t eat pork: Can that be? That weekly sustenance, a poison to him. What others? The man she brings home is all alleys and cellars, strange smells and closeted, robed rituals barred to her, rites that will keep her always on the far side of knowing, skullcaps and curls, silver engravings hung up in door frames, backward-flowing letters, five thousand years of formulas passed from father to son, codes and cabalas whose chief historical goal is to scare and exclude her. How much can she change her life? How much does she want to? The bird and the fish can fall in love, but they share no word remotely like nest.

Then she hears his voice from the other room: David. Her David. We are not born familiar. At best, familiar waits for us down the run of years. Familiar is what he can become to her only through life. But familiar to herself, already, looking on him.

There will be strangeness. They’ll hit places far more alien, gaps they cannot close. But this, at least, is not a fatal one. She rubs her mother’s back, between those thin-winged shoulder blades. “It’s all right, Mama.” Covert, and open, deliberate and secret sabotage: all of it, all right. The meat sauce will test the man harder than the meat source. Yet the meal is still a gift, steeped in all the flavors of indigestible difference. “It’s all right,” she repeats, soothing, petting. “A lot of people in his line of work? They’ll put anything in their mouths.”