Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“I don’t understand.” Of course not. How could he?

“Bird or fish?”

He nodded and opened his arms to her. And because there was nowhere else now, she let herself be held.

“Do we really get to say?” he asked. She laughed into his collarbone. “The child will have four choices.” She jerked back to arm’s length, looking at him, astonished. “I mean, this is just mathematics! They can be A and not B. They can be B and not A. They can be A and B. Or they can be neither A nor B.”

Three more choices than this child would ever get. Choice and race were mortal opposites, more distant than Delia and the man she’d married. Another mathematics came upon her: Their child would be a different race from at least one parent. Whether they had a choice or not.

Delia went back to Philadelphia for the birth. Her father’s house was ample, and her mother’s experience ampler still. Her husband followed, the moment his university duties permitted. Luck brought David there in time for the delivery, at the end of January 1941, in the hospital where William practiced, three-quarters of a mile from the better hospital where Delia had once worked.

“He’s so light,” the awed mother whispered when they let her hold her baby.

“He’ll darken up,” Nettie Ellen told her. “You wait and see.” But her firstborn never did what he was supposed to do.

David wrote his parents the news, as he had after the wedding. He told them all about their new daughter-in-law and grandson, or almost all. He looked forward to the day they would all at last meet. Then he dispatched the letter into the growing void. Fortress Holland had fallen. Rotterdam, where his parents had fled, was leveled. He wrote to Bremer, his father’s old headmaster in Essen, asking everything in coded phrases, using no names. But he heard nothing in return, from any quarter.

The Nazis took the Continent, from Norway to the Pyrenees. France and the Low Countries were gone. Every week, silence fell across a new theater — Hungary, the Balkans, North Africa. At last, word came — a scribbled note from Bremer, smuggled past the censors, through Spain:

I’ve lost track of them, David — Max and Rachael. They’re back in Germany, if they’re anywhere. An NSB neighbor in Schiedam, where they had gone into hiding, turned them in for Arbeiteinsatz. Nor can I reach your sister; she and her Vihar may have escaped. But wherever they’ve gone, it’s only a matter of time… This is the end, David. It doesn’t matter what you say you are. You’ll all be rounded up and simplified. Not one left, and you don’t even get your moment of Masada.

David showed his wife the note — everything he’d long suspected. Each now held a part of the other’s destruction. In that stripping away— Your family, gone — they became each other.

And the boy, in turn, became his parents’ reason for being. Terrified by the uncountable minute threats in every gust of wind, warming his milk to within half of a half degree, they weekly learned that children survive even their parents’ best intentions.

“He’s here already,” Delia marveled. “Already a little man! A whole self all figured out, no matter what our plans. This whole baby act is just to humor us. Isn’t it? Yes, it is, isn’t it?”

The baby gurgled in the face of all his parents’ fears. They took him back to Philly when he was three months old. The boy performed for his grandparents, babbling on pitch, reducing his grandfather to a heap of proud anxiety. The old family practitioner paced and fretted. “Watch! Watch out for his head!”

“You ought to be thinking about getting him baptized,” Nettie Ellen said. “He’s getting awful big awful fast. Oh, yes you are!”

Delia answered simply, the result of weeks of practice. “He can get baptized when he’s older, Mama. If he wants.”

Nettie raised her hand, fending off strange denominations. “How you going to raise him up, then? You going to raise him Jewish?”

“No, Mama. We’re not.”

Nettie Ellen held her grandson to her shoulder and looked around, ready to run with him. “He’s got to hear something about God.”

Delia smiled across the room at her husband. “Oh, he hears about God almost every night running.” She didn’t add, In Lydian, Dorian, German, and Latin.

The doctor deferred the question that Delia knew was coming. She fended him off by pure will, until she was ready with an answer. Delaying until that day when her new family’s strange mathematics invented a fifth choice.

We’re all four home for Christmas, Ruth’s second winter vacation since starting college. This is a third of a century ago. The sixties have just started turning fab. The Billboard charts are overrun by shaggy Anglo-Saxons in Edwardian suits who’ve just discovered all the taboo chords that black Americans worked their way through decades ago. A black poet dances his way to the world heavyweight title. Ruth gives me a fan magazine devoted to this poet boxer for Christmas, and she laughs insanely when I open it. After, she gives me my real present: a picture-book history of the blues. I give her a black pullover that she asked for and that she won’t take off for the next two days, even to go to sleep.

She runs her fingers through my hair. “Why do you comb it down like that?” she asks.

“Comb?” Jonah snickers.

I don’t know what to say. “That’s the way it grows.”

“You should pick it out. You’d look much better.”

Jonah scoffs. “You got another job for him lined up?”

Something has blown up between the two of them. I blame it on the times. The hatless boy president is dead — all his delays and explanations spattered across the back of a top-down convertible. Our father is still mourning the man a year on. The man’s successor has signed civil rights into law, but way too late to head off the first of the long, hot summers to come.

Harlem starts it, and my sister is there. Five months back, a white policeman killed a Negro boy two years younger than Ruth, fewer than a dozen blocks from where our family once lived. CORE organized a protest, and a group of undergrads from NYU Uptown turned out, Ruthie, my new collegiate activist sister, among them. They started to march up Lenox, the model of peaceful demonstration. But something went wrong when the leading protesters met the police rear guard. The march came apart and madness was everywhere, before Ruth or anyone else knew what was happening.

The way she tells it to us, over Christmas dinner, it took just seconds for the street to scatter in screams. The crowd cracked open. Ruth tried to run back to the parked busses, but in the chaos, she got turned around. “Somebody shoved me. I bounced off this policeman — totally panicked — who was slipping around on the sidewalk, clubbing everything that moved. He came down with his baton, smashed me right here.” She shows me, grabbing my upper arm.

More terrified than hurt, she plunged into a sea of twenty-year-olds, all running for their lives. Somehow, she ran through bedlam and found her way home. Even five months afterward, she can’t say how. One more Harlem child dead, and hundreds of marchers wounded. For two days and nights, the streets overflowed. Then the fire spread to Bedford-Stuyvesant and, down the following weeks of a bad summer, to Jersey City and Philadelphia. All of this has come to pass just a year after a quarter of a million people — Da and Ruth lost among them — descended on the Mall to hear the greatest act of improvised oratory in history. “‘I have a dream,’” my sister says, shaking her head. “More like a nightmare, if you ask me.”

After the riot died out to nothing, Ruth took her smashed upper arm back to University Heights, where she promptly changed her major from history to prelaw. “Only law can leverage what’s coming, Joey.” History could no longer predict what was happening to her.