Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

He’s known the tune forever. British imperial hymnody. Beethoven wrote a set of variations. Half a dozen European countries have their own flag-waving versions, his fallen Germany included. Yet he’d never heard the American words before that day. He did not, then, get them, but he gets them now, after a quarter century in this place. Land where my fathers died. A million times more this preaching man’s land than Strom’s. But handed out to Strom in New York Harbor, with less question.

Let freedom ring.From the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. From the mighty mountains of New York, the heightening Alleghenies, the snow-capped Rockies, the peaks of California. From Stone Mountain, Lookout Mountain, every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside.

The words spark like the first day of creation. Now they might join to do it: Now this crowd could roll down this green fairway, an unstoppable army, and take their Capitol, their Court, their White House by soul force. But they are too joyous now for force, too lifted up.

Free at last, the speeches end. Then the crowd, too, is free. Free to go back to their rotting cities and caged lives. The mass disperses, as it did that earlier day. Strom is afraid to move off the spot, knowing that the edge of revelation must still be there, nearby, waiting for him to cross it. The crowd curls past, annoyed at these two snags of flotsam in the stream. Ruth smolders at the man. His reverie maddens her. She sees him missing the evidence. The Black-Jewish alliance is crumbling all around them. It won’t even survive the bus ride home.

Ruth starts walking, alone. She has been alone too long. Her brothers are too busy to bother with the present. Her father too trapped by the past. She strides off, sure of her bearing, nursing a phrase from the baritone preacher’s speech: “this marvelous new militancy.” It feels to her the only useful future, the only one where she won’t be forever alone. She heads back to the lot where the Columbia busses dropped them off. Even her father will know to come find her there.

David Strom stands dissolved, populating every spot in this public openness. Here’s where his woman freezes in shame, learning she’s been singing out loud. Here’s where she asks if he’s ever heard the legendary Farrar. Here’s where she begs his forgiveness, and where they say good-bye forever. Here’s where they find the lost boy. There, up there, is where she explains how it’s all impossible, their seeing each other again. A mistake, to think any story ever finishes.

When he looks up to locate his daughter, she’s gone. His body goes cold. He has expected this. A sick fascination grips him, and the fifty-two-year-old begins to trot, bolting several steps one direction, then banking away toward another. He’s more panicked by the pattern than by the prospect of any real danger to her. She’s safer on this Mall with these marchers than she is in New York, walking home from school. She’s eighteen; the capital is crawling with police. And yet, he knows the threat is infinite, as large as time. She’s gone: nowhere, anywhere. He turns on the straightaway along the front of the monument, running, calling, propelled by prophecy.

He jogs to the spot where they found the lost boy. His girl isn’t there. He retraces their steps — not his and Ruth’s, but his, Delia’s, and the child’s. He moves toward the giant statue. He looks up at Lincoln, the figure he didn’t recognize then, the one who the boy said never freed the slaves. Every speaker at this rally confirms him. Strom gets as close to the steps of the monument as the press of bodies allows. She must be there. She isn’t. She’s been and gone. She’ll swing past a minute from now. Ten minutes. How can any two paths ever intersect in time? The field is too great and our wakes too small.

He does the probabilities in his head: two random walks, at staggered starts. The odds of finding her are best if he stays within a narrow radius of this spot. For this is where they returned the boy, back in time, back before the war, back when love between him and his wife was still impossible.

This is where his daughter finds him, thirty minutes later. He’s the easiest mark on the Mall to find: a white, scattered man tacking at random across an ebbing sea of brown. She’d have found him ages ago, but for her certainty that even the brilliant scientist would eventually stumble onto the obvious. She strides up to him, shaking her head: helpless, hopeless.

He’s wild at the sight of her. “I knew I’d find you here!” He trembles in the face of explanation. “Where were you? Who have you been with? Did you speak with anyone?”

His need is so great, she can’t even rebuke him. “For God’s sake, Da. I’ve been sitting on the bus, waiting for you. They’re going to leave without us.”

She drags him back as fast as his legs can manage. Only once does he stop and cast a glance behind them. No revelation. Nothing to see. A man on roller skates in a sagging red sash. Volunteer crews sweeping up the litter. He feels the past’s signal dim and slip away from him: free at last.

Spring 1940—Winter 1941

David Strom married Delia Daley in Philadelphia on April 9, 1940. As the two exchanged vows in the dingy Seventh Ward courthouse, the Nazis swarmed over Denmark and Norway.

The ceremony was small and apologetic. The twins wore matching tan crocheted vests over light burgundy dresses. Charles put on his Sunday best. Michael’s limbs stuck an inch too far out of the blue suit that had fit him at Christmas, just four months ago. Dr. Daley’s majestic black tux showed up the groom, who nevertheless outdid himself in double-breasted gray. The bride’s mother wore the shining green silk dress she wanted to be buried in. The bride was radiant in white.

Whatever else she thought about this marriage, Nettie Ellen had assumed it would take place in Bethel Covenant, where she and William had married. The church she’d raised her children in. The church where Delia learned to sing.

“They won’t do it,” Delia said.

“Reverend Fredrick? ’Course he’ll do it. That man baptized you.”

“Yes, Mama. But he didn’t baptize David.”

Nettie Ellen considered this technicality. “He can do that first, then take care of the two of you after.”

“My mother wants you to convert.” Delia groaned the eleventh-hour warning while holding her fiancé in the dark of his tiny Washington Heights apartment. She tried to laugh it off, and failed. “So we can marry in her church.”

His answer, when it came, unmade her. “Once, I almost made a religious conversion. When I was a boy. My father taught mathematics in a special high school. My mother made clothing, at our home. Before the world war, they were lucky to work at all. But under Weimar, for a little while, times were better to the Jews. Rathenau became foreign minister. Israelites were burning new paths.”

“Blazing.”

“Yes. Then times were not so good again. People said the Jew lost the war for Germany. ‘Sold it down’: Do you say it so? How else could Germany lose such a conflict? Even my father was becoming anti-Jew. He had no patience for the old ways. Everything was reason and formula. His family was German, for two hundred years. For a long time already, they had been students of fact and reason, not the shul. Then, when I turned eleven, anti-Jews forced Rathenau’s auto off the road and filled him with bullets. They even bombed the auto to be certain.”

Delia gripped him tighter about the wrists. He returned her grip: all he had in this life, except ideas.

“After that, the way is blocked for most Jewish people, even the non-Jew Jews, like my father. They can only advance in jobs without interest or value. Like theoretical physics! And even here, the paths are often closed. My father wanted every chance for our future. My sister became an office worker. He hoped for me to finish Gymnasium. Even such a dream was tempting the gods to strike us. I finished Gymnasium two years early, but here I am: still in school. And Max Strom, who was finished with Judaism forever, and his Rebecca, they are…”