Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Everyone laughed except the astonished bride. The broom — a loose handmade straw scimitar — was braided through with flowers and ribbons of all colors, the handiwork of Lorene and Lucille, under their mother’s guidance. On the ribbons hung dozens of magic charms: infant Delia’s spoon, a lock of her ten-year-old hair, the ring she wore throughout grade school, a picture of her pushing twin baby buggies, a tin eighth note, the curled-up program of her first church recital. The broom bore a few bits of her husband, too: the hands from a broken wristwatch fixed at three o’clock, a single Columbia University cuff link gotten off him by conjure, and a tiny plate Star of David just like the one he’d never worn, picked up in a secondhand shop in Southwark.

Dr. Daley began the invocation, his throat a wide, cold river. “Every couple needs their friends and family if they’re to make it through together to the end of the day. This couple…” He waited in silence for his voice to return. “This couple will need everyone they have.”

While the doctor spoke, husband and wife were made to grasp the broom handle and sweep through the circle’s arc. They spun around twice, touching all the hours of a full day. The bristles of the decorated broom summoned each person present to witness.

“A couple can’t be just a couple if they want to stay a couple.”

Someone in the circle said, “Go ahead.”

“A couple has to be less than two and greater than two, both at the same time.”

“That’s right,” Nettie Ellen said, the broom coming around to her.

“This is the strange mathematics — this is the non-Euclidean geometry of love!”

David Strom looked up at his father-in-law, his grin pulling in his ears. Delia, too, appraised her father, her head hanging like a screen door that had lost its spring. Her doctor father, the man of reason, was a closet preacher.

“These two could be put away for what they’re doing. But not in this state!”

“No sir!”

“And not in the state where they choose to live.”

“State of grace,” someone called.

“Bless and keep,” William Daley ended, so quietly that neither newlywed realized he’d finished. The freshly minted husband was made to lay the broom down lengthwise in front of his bride. On the count of three, they leapt over and landed together on the far side.

All sound gave way to laughter and applause. “What does it mean?” the groom asked.

The bride’s mother answered. “It means you’re all swept out. It means the house you’re moving into is clean, top to bottom. All the bad past that ever happened to you — swept away by this broom!”

Her daughter shook her head, for the first time in her life, truly disobedient. Her eyes were wet and hunted, pleading no. “It means… It means we couldn’t, we couldn’t even…”

David Strom stared at the floor, the bangle-woven stick of straw. His bride’s words came clear to him. Centuries outside the law, barred from the sight of God, stripped of even this most given human right: to marry. He stared down at the floor, this court, this church, this broom, this makeshift promise witnessed and sealed in the eyes of those who were also denied, this secret, illegal agreement, this unbreakable clause stronger than any signed contract, more durable than the most public pact, a vow to match in hardness the swept soul…

The last of the guests vanished, leaving only their wishes. Then the Daley children grew shy and sullen, the size of their sister’s deed only then dawning on them. Dr. Daley and Nettie Ellen sat the couple down on the front room settee and drew, from nowhere, a decorated envelope. Delia opened it. Inside was a Brownie print of a spinet.

“We’re having it shipped to you,” Dr. Daley said. And his daughter broke down, sobbing.

They took their leave in a series of sober hugs. Together, the new couple left their parents’ house, David carrying their luggage and Delia clutching the broom. In a rented car, they drove back to New York. They could go nowhere for their honeymoon but his bachelor’s apartment. No place on the map would take them in. But in their shared horizon that first night, their gladness outfell Niagara.

They moved through marriage with careful bewilderment — a little allegro duet of solicitude. Shared life was nothing either could have predicted. It fascinated them, all their assumptions so comically wrong. They watched each other at table, over the dishes, in the bathroom, the bedroom, the apartment’s entryway, all custom upended. They laughed sometimes, sometimes incredulous, now and then standing back in belated revelation. In the better part of love’s rough negotiation, they got lucky, for what was ironclad rule to one was often, to the other, a matter of no difference at all.

Learning each other was steady work, but no harder than the work of being. Misunderstandings seemed always to leave the harmed one strong enough to comfort the harmer. The disgust pressing in on them from outdoors only drew tighter the shelter they made. Singing, they spoke the same language. In music, they always found their pitch. None of their circle of musical acquaintances ever heard them speak harshly to each other. And yet, they never called each other anything but their given names. Simple recognition: the best of available love. They could be silly with each other, full of sass and mock laments. But their deepest endearments were not words.

Two months into their joined life, they were evicted from their apartment. They’d waited for the blow. Delia sailed forth in her finest flare-shouldered blue dress, threading the blocks around City College, looking for a place that would let them live. She carried on searching, farther north, through neighborhoods of ambiguous boundaries. Her husband had glimpsed something. “The bird and the fish will build their nest from nothing!” And for a little longer, the thought comforted her.

The nest appeared by magic. A woman Delia met while singing in a poorly paid choir steered them toward that saint of all mixed species, Mrs. Washington, and her Jersey freestone house in Hamilton Heights. Grateful Delia fell at the woman’s feet, offering free service — floors stained, walls replastered — until the day that even their delighted landlady couldn’t, in good faith, allow her to labor anymore.

For months, they lived in a blessed, stilled present. Then Delia came back from the doctor’s with a terrified smile. “Three of us, David. How?”

“You have already seen how!” he said. And she had.

She sung to her firstborn in the womb. She made up whole operas of nonsense syllables. At night, she and David sang part-songs at the spinet that her parents had given them. She pressed her midsection against the vibrating wood, letting the harmonies spread in waves through her.

David put his ear to her roundness and listened for whole minutes at a time. “Already busy in there!” He heard frequencies beyond the ear, making time’s transforming calculations. “Tenor,” he predicted.

“Lord, I hope so. They get all the best parts.”

In their bed, under the gray wool blanket, in such darkness that not even God could spy them out, she told him her fears. She spoke to her husband of permanent doubt, that daily, ingrained wariness so thick in her she couldn’t even see it. She spoke of turning away from baiting, of smiling at concealed slight, of never knowing, of the drain of having to stand, every minute of her life, for everything but herself. Her dread, as she named it, was more swollen than her belly. “How can we hope to raise them?”

“Wife. My beautiful woman. No one knows how to raise children. Yet people seem to have done this from the very beginning of the race.”

“No. I mean, what will they be?” And then, what won’t they?