Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

He lapsed into a dark place, hiding in a neutral country. Delia followed him, knowing the way from long remembering.

“So it always has been, for us! A funny thing, though. When I was still young? My father said, Go: convert. Advance. Become something. I read your Gospels. I found much truth in them. ‘Do not gather up treasures in this world, but gather them up in the next.’ These words moved me deeply. But they left me in a paradox.”

She shook her head, up against his chest. “I don’t understand.”

“If I want to get ahead, I must become a Christian. But if I use Christianity to get ahead, I lose my soul!”

She laughed a little with him, against him. “Light gain makes heavy loss.”

“ Light?This is what you say?” He sat up and scribbled the phrase into his dog-eared notebook, along with a diagram. To show his father someday, on the other side of light.

She watched him, fascinated. “The notebook industry’s going to explode after you marry me, Mr. Strom.”

“You are Christian?” he asked. “You believe in the Gospels?”

No one had ever asked her point-blank. It had never struck her to ask herself. “I believe…there must be something bigger and better than us.”

“Yes!” His whole face celebrated. “Yes. This is what I believe.”

“But you don’t call it God.”

His eyes worshiped her. “It’s bigger than my name. Better.”

She felt his forehead with the back of her hand, teased up his eyelids with her finger, and gazed in. “I thought mathematics ruled everything for your people.”

“My people? My people! Yes, surely. But what rules mathematics?”

Later, just before she left to spend the night at her cousin’s on 136th and Lenox, he asked, “How will we raise our children?”

Nothing would ever be a given again. From now on: slow, tentative, experimental, at best an hour ahead of what they knew for certain. The bird and the fish could fall in love. Building the nest would go on forever. Every answer seemed a death. At last, she said, “We can raise them to choose.”

He nodded. “I can become a Christian.”

“Why?” She straightened his glasses and pushed his limp forelock back on top of his head. “So we can marry in a church? That’s light gain if ever there was one!”

“Not for the church. For your mother.”

It sounded to her more than the Gospels. She wanted to say, You out-Christian the Christians. But in that year, the compliment would have damned him. “No. Let’s get married by a justice. We’ll get the earth part straightened out first. Plenty of time for heaven later.”

They married in a courtroom as his Europe burned. He wasn’t sure how many Stroms might have come, even if he could have found them. Years ago, while he was at university, his sister, Hannah, had married a Bulgarian intellectual. Their mother had to be dragged to the wedding. An atheist socialist Slav: The man’s not anything! Where will they live? Who will they be?

The Daleys turned out for them in force, all the way out to Delia’s cousins. The courtroom filled with a forced merriment that the justice, an old Spanish exile darker than Delia, scowled at. Was the couple sure? he asked. But that’s what he had to ask everyone. And everyone, the judge’s sagging, defeated shoulders attested, was always sure.

Three of Strom’s Columbia physics colleagues — all Central European émigrés who shared Strom’s passion for music — came out together. “To console your unfortunate bride.” The happy, napkin-scribbling wizard had helped each of them with some intractable problem in multiple dimensions, and they owed him. A day in Philadelphia was almost a vacation. But seeing them arrive, Strom wept in gratitude. They sat in the back of the court during the lightning ceremony, sparring with one another in something like Greek, hushing only when the justice glared.

Franco Lugati, Delia’s teacher, was the only other white, if Jews and scientific Gypsies were granted that category. He even went back to the Daleys’ home for the reception. For his gift to the newlyweds, he brought a chamber group — oboe, bassoon, two violins, viola, and continuo — to accompany him in Bach’s wedding aria, “O Du angenehmes Paar.” The blessed pair were far too keyed up to hear the music. Dr. Daley stood at attention in front of the instrumentalists, guarding them. The players left in a rush, one quick glass of punch after the final cadence. Lugati, mixing excuses with blessings, departed soon after.

Once the musicians left, the real music began. The twins launched into a semirehearsed burlesque of their sister’s chosen art, complete with lavish costume changes, their parody so broad even David Strom figured out when to laugh. Then, knowing their father could hardly forbid it in such a crowd, they laid down a shimmering, sulky, piano twelve-bar while Michael improvised on the sorrows of matrimony and the end of freedom. Charles ran upstairs and returned with his tenor sax. By then, Delia Daley Strom was too blissful to pretend to moan. She even shoved her sisters on down to the lower lines and did some freewheeling, high-note riffing of her own.

A hum began from somewhere in the gathered group. Nobody in particular started it and everybody in general moved it along. Strom caught a few words — bits and pieces from the Song of Songs, overhauled in a place as far from Canaan as this world got. But into this, the world’s earliest wedding song, there came words he’d never heard. “Brother, are you here to help her? Give me your hand and pray. Sister, are you here to help him? Give me your hand and pray.”

Without consultation, the knot of wedding well-wishers became a chorus, a five-part soul swell edged with a remembering minor seventh that even in happiness would never go away. For the first time in his life, Strom felt surrounded by a nimbus of comfort. Before the tune ended, the song worked itself up into a wave of pure pulse, repeat on repeat, every ornament beyond duplication.

Throughout the singing, Strom’s colleagues huddled on the Daley sofa, their side plates of rolled meats teetering on their laps. “You are being rude,” David told them. “This is a wedding. Kommen Sie. Go right now, and talk to the others before I throw you all out on your ear.”

But they turned to him in wonder, recounting fresh stories of the Berkeley cyclotron and its brand-new assay — traces of an element that took matter beyond nature’s terminus, uranium. Strom’s new wife had to come drag him out of the heated speculation and back into his own party.

Dr. Daley, his eyes on the knot of whites, overheard the news. “You gentlemen are saying that we’ve succeeded in transmuting matter? Mankind is finally making new elements?”

Yes, the Europeans told him. Everything had been rewritten. The human race had entered on a whole new day of creation. They made a space for the doctor on the sofa, drawing him diagrams, sketching tables of atomic weights and numbers. And so the room divided, not white against black, not native-born against newcomer, not even woman against man, but singers versus sculptors, with no one knowing which art was more dangerous or which had more power, at last, to reverse the world’s hurt.

The food ran out and the guests started to disperse. A peace settled on the remaining party, peace shattered only when Nettie Ellen let out a toe-curling shout. She vanished into her kitchen pantry, bringing back an elaborately decorated broom. “We were supposed to do this as soon as you two entered this house!”

She formed the guests into a ring, making even the groom’s Promethean friends flesh out the circumference. She grabbed her husband. “You make yourself useful for a change.” She shoved the broom into his arms.