The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  Lucille and Lorene made their grand entrance, twinned displays of bows and shoe polish. Toward her little sisters’ prim show, too, Delia turned bravely weepy. Over the ranks of plates and glasses, all Nettie’s children bowed their heads in grace. Delia took her turn with the words: “Thank you God for all good things.” The syllables rumbled through the kitchen, each a lumbering boxcar in foreboding’s freight. All through her daughter’s breakfast prayer, Nettie’s lips worked away, moving to her own unheard incantation. One concert, and her girl would be forever strange to her? But even before her Delia had had anything to hide, the girl had always refused to be cornered.

  Thanks given, Nettie raised her head and appraised her zombie saint. And over the steaming mounds of biscuit, some phantom movement caught her eye. The motion lasted only the barest second, if it moved at all. A whole family seemed to sit around the half table, lit in the lightning flash before her sight settled. A brace of faces, strangers to her, yet familiar as the ones who sat to this breakfast, this one. These spirit faces were not hers to name or know, yet somehow they seemed to belong, at one remove. Two or three, at first. Then, while Nettie turned her head to take them in, the faces multiplied. Before the glimpse dimmed and went out: more than she could count. More than could fit in her overflowing kitchen.

  My line. The notion hit her with the force of foregone proof. My grandchildren, come back to see me. But something as thick and impenetrable as years held them clouded and soundproof, the far side of unreachable.

  “Mama?” something called, and she fell back into now. “Mama?” That infant’s first question, wanting no answer but Here I am. Her hands felt splotchy, weak with heat. The saucer below her trembling cup filled with a liquid the color of skin. She was spilling, shaking like the old woman she’d just been, only an instant before.

  “Eat up now,” she said, ignoring her eldest’s alarm. Delia had been dishing out her own bright doses of fear all morning. It wouldn’t hurt her to take a little. “Eat up, all of you. The world ain’t going to hold up school, just so y’all can dawdle.”

  The children scattered at the sound of their father’s descent. The doctor appeared, resplendent in serge, his shirt’s iron whiteness shining out from underneath his suit like a bolt of ancient raiment. In his rich bronze voice, a tessitura that every time thrilled Delia to despair—And the trumpet shall sound!—he announced, “Seems she came through for us. Our Miss Anderson.”

  “She was perfect, Daddy. She sounded like God singing to Himself, the evening before the very first day.”

  “Hush,” Nettie said. “Don’t you go blaspheming.”

  William just nodded. “Good concert, then? Everything we could have hoped for?”

  Hope had been so far outstripped, it now seemed too meek a preparation. “Good concert.” Delia giggled and shook her head. “Good concert.” She was far away, as far as the concert houses of Europe. Vienna. Berlin. Farther. “I think it changed my life.”

  The doctor’s beam clouded to a scowl. He took his seat at the table’s head, where a place setting materialized by magic in front of him. “What do you mean, ‘think,’ girl? If it changed your life, wouldn’t you know it?”

  “Oh, she knows it all right.” Nettie Ellen fired her salvo from the sink, scraping at the child-savaged plates, her back to them both. Dr. Daley swept a look from wife to child. Delia could only shrug and hide in whatever scrap of protective foliage her parents deigned to leave to her.

  The doctor devoured his breakfast. The steam off the brown-capped biscuit crusts, the thick smell of the gravy’s suet roux pleased him. He spread the newspaper around him, his fixed routine. His face stayed impassive as he scoured the momentous headline. He commenced filleting both the gravy-strewn biscuits and the news into clean, digestible portions. He partitioned and consumed the account of the epochal concert with the same appetite he applied to Hitler’s reinterpretation of the Munich Pact and insistence on Danzig. He dismantled the first section of the paper, flattening each sheet back with care, and scanned the stories through the final paragraph.

  “It seems our nation’s capital wasn’t prepared for what hit it last night.” He spoke to no one, or to everyone in earshot. “Is this performance the start of something, do you think?” He looked up at his daughter. Delia looked down, too fast. “Let’s imagine, for a moment, they finally heard?”

  Delia caught her father’s eye. She stood waiting for the question. But it seemed he’d already asked it. She tried to nod, just a fraction of an inch, as if she followed him.

  He shook his head and set to restoring the paper’s front section to mint condition. “Who can say what it will finally take? Nothing else has worked. Why not try a little old-time singing? Though it’s not like we haven’t been doing a heap of that all along.”

  At the doctor’s pronouncement, Nettie Ellen, still at sinkside, began humming to herself, her husband’s cue to get along with the earning of the daily bread. On his way out, William cast his daughter one more look: concession, congratulation, as if the triumph of the night before had been hers.

  The doctor decamped to his clinic and the day’s first patients. That left just the oldest game going: mother and daughter, mutely reading each other, evading, trading, knowing before knowing. Nettie washed, and Delia stood by, drying. The proper cleanup. Air drying left streaks. You had to get to the dishes right away, with a towel and two elbows.

  They finished. Both stayed in place, fussing and straightening. “I have to go,” Delia said. “I’ll be late for class.”

  “Nobody’s keeping you.”

  Delia shoved her towel back on the rack. Her hands said, Be that way, then. She broke for the doorway, and made it as far as the stove. “Mama. Oh, Mama.” Relief was easier, words were more obvious than she’d thought possible.

  Her mother crossed the tiles to her, reached out one hand, and fixed the wave of hair that fell down across Delia’s face. Hair whose curl looked different now to each of them.

  “Mama? How long before … How soon did you know?”

  Her mother reached up to fix Delia’s heaving shoulders. “You take your time, child. The longer the making, the better the baking.”

  “Yes, Mama. I know. But how fast? Was there one clear thing that … made you realize?”

  The daughter tried on a slant, scared smile. At that look, her mother saw her kitchen fill up again with invaders. Grandchildren. Great-grandchildren, relentless and multiplying, underfoot. They schooled around Nettie Ellen Daley, at once the oldest American woman still standing upright.

  “How I felt about your father? Child. I’m still figuring out what I got going on with that man.”

  Delia fought for breath. She’d done nothing wrong. Nothing had happened. Nothing that meant anything. She was turning herself into a mad mooncalf for no reason. Giving herself pointless fits, over pure invention. Yet in the last night’s rareness, the press of that record-setting crowd, up too close to history, something had turned in her. Some ancient law had split apart. Drunk on the godlike Miss Anderson, the voice of the century, a feather floating on a column of air, Delia made a separate journey, traveled down into the briefest crack in the side of sound. A widening in the day had opened up in front of her, pulling her and her German stranger into it. They’d traveled together down into long time, along a hall without dimension, to a place so far off, it couldn’t even really be called the future, yet.

  Now, in her mother’s kitchen, it shamed her to think how she must have invented the whole trip. Nothing had happened. She’d traveled nowhere. And yet, the man had traveled to that nowhere with her. She couldn’t have invented that. His eyes, as they said good-bye, already remembered the place in detail.

  By that afternoon’s bed-making shift at the hospital, Delia managed to put the dream behind her. By the next day’s vocal lesson, she’d put it so far behind her, it was staring her in the face again. Lugati was going on about support, appoggio, that abdominal combination of tightening and relaxing too co
mplicated for any but a medical student to follow. “A singer has only so much mileage in her,” Lugati said. “If you drive yourself wrong, you’ll spend your voice in ten years. Used right, your equipment can last as long as you do.”

  At those words, the German was there again, alongside her. Together, as they’d been in Washington, on the Mall. Using each other right. Lasting as long as they needed to.

  By week’s end, Delia had a letter from him. He asked if he might come to Philadelphia. She wrote back a dozen different answers, mailing only one. She met him out in front of Independence Hall—neutral territory. As in Washington, they lost themselves in a mixed, indifferent crowd.

  Strangers turned to look. But none of them stranger than he. Again, that unreachable future opened up in front of them through a crack in the air. Again, they drew near to enter it. The wilder her feelings, the more she doubted. The man’s visit was brief, lucky, mad. But anything more than one illicit afternoon outside Independence Hall would be impossible. Surely he saw that.

  “When can we do this again?” he asked.

  “We can’t,” she answered, squeezing his arm like a hank of emergency rope.

  When he left, she felt empty again, criminal. It encouraged her, how quickly his accent fell away in her ear, how hard it was to re-create him in silence. His alien face grew amber, less pallid, when dissolved in her memory. She wouldn’t see him again. Her life would return to her, simple, obvious, and pointed toward its goal.

  She went to meet him in New York. She told her parents she had an audition—the first lie of any size she’d ever told them. Inside a month, she was telling larger. Her secret grew, even with poison waterings. She’d have to confess, or lose herself to duplicity. She had to make this wrong thing good again, as good as she sometimes imagined it was when they were together, alone, the sole curators of that long, dimensionless passage, the first visitors to that world they’d somehow shortcut to, diagonally, across the field of time. He knew all her music. He loved how she sang. She was herself with him.

  She tried to tell her mother. Shame and disbelief prevented her. Once or twice, she started, then fled down another topic. Any words she tried to give it turned it evil. Like perfect fruit, it went rancid when exposed to the air. After some weeks, Delia stopped looking her mother in the eye. The lie spread into her daily doings, tainting routines that had nothing at all to do with the man. Her most innocent comings and goings slipped under the growing cloak of concealment. Even her little brothers and sisters began shying away from her.

  Her mother kept still and waited for her to return. Delia could feel her, patient, kind, horribly wise, trusting to her gut, where motherhood lived. And in her trust, driving her daughter away.

  Her mother stayed good, until goodness began to strangle them both. Then Nettie went upstairs one evening, to the little attic room that served as Delia’s provisional studio. Delia stood in her posture of forced comfort, working a chunk of chromatic scale across the higher of the two passage points in her voice. She stopped at the knock on the door. Her mother stood, hands cupped as if around a coffee cup or a prayer book. Neither of them spoke for a quarter minute.

  “You keep on singing. I’ll just make myself hid and listen.”

  She hunched over, already old, her shoulders weighted down into an unanswered question mark by a hundred years of unanswered need.

  “Mama” was all the girl could say.

  Nettie Ellen stepped into the attic and sat. “Let me guess. He’s poor.”

  Delia’s private prize rushed upward, flushed out of the underbrush. She flared up, the righteousness of the guilty. Then anger dissolved in tears, easing into a relief she hadn’t felt in weeks. She could talk to her mother. All distances might close again, in words.

  “No, Mama. He’s … not exactly poor. It’s … worse than that.”

  “He’s not a churchgoing man.”

  Delia bowed her head. The bare floor filled with sea for drowning in. “No.” Her head made one slow, leaden swing. “No. He isn’t.”

  “Well, that’s not the end of the world.” Nettie Ellen clicked in the back of her throat. The sound of all things that needed enduring. “You know we’ve always had our problems with your father on that count, and he sure don’t seem about to jump up and reform anytime soon.”

  Nettie smiled at her daughter, mocking her own long-suffering. But she got no smile in return. Delia stood mute, her whole body begging, Ask me some more. Please, please, keep asking.

  “He’s not from around here, is he? Where’s he from, then?”

  The animal scare in her mother’s eyes killed any chance Delia had of cleaving to the truth. “New York,” she said, and slumped still lower.

  “New York!” A glow of foolish hope in her mother celebrated the reprieve. “Thank the Lord. New York’s nothing. We can walk to New York, girl. I thought you were going to say Mississippi.”

  Delia forced herself to laugh, heaping lie on lie.

  Her mother heard the note at once. Her mother’s golden ear, the one Delia had inherited. “Have pity on me. You got to tell. No way I’m going to guess. What could be so wrong with the man? He have three legs or something? Been married five times already? He don’t speak English?”

  A giggle tore from Delia, hollow and horrible. “Well. There is that.”

  Nettie Ellen’s neck jerked back. “He don’t? Well, what’s he speak, then?”

  Then a look. A wide-eyed, overdue dawning. Sorrow, fear, incredulity, pride: all the colors of the rainbow, bent out of the white light of incomprehension. The question she’d climbed up into this attic studio to ask died on her lips. Do you love him at least? no longer had any bearing.

  “You’re saying he’s not one of us?”

  The full force of that mad simplicity. Hundreds of years lifted off Delia. Centuries of evil and worse, waiting for their answer. She felt the long-sought appoggio well up under her breath. History was a bad dream that the living were obliged to shake. The world—right use—could start from now.

  “That’s right, Mama. He’s not … entirely one of us.”

  In the centuries that sprang up between them, neither, anymore, was she.

  BIST DU BEI MIR

  We went back home with Da. I say “home,” but the place was gone. We stood in front of the gutted building, staring at the rime of frost that coated our blackened freestone. I stood in a mound of rubble, looking for the place I’d grown up in.

  I kept thinking that we were one street too far south. The fire had charred the two entrances on either side of ours. Our building looked like the target of a stray artillery shell. Wood, brick, stone, and metal—things that couldn’t have come out of our house—lay heaped up in a twisted mass. But everyone—our neighbors, our invalid landlady, Mrs. Washington, even Mrs. Washington’s Jack Russell terrier—had gotten out alive. Every living creature but my mother.

  We stood in front of the ruin so long, we were in danger of freezing. I couldn’t look away. I looked for the little spinet we’d always sung around, but nothing in that pile of slag remotely resembled it. Jonah and I huddled together, stamping, our breath steam. We stood until the cold and the pointlessness grew worse than our need. At last, Da turned us away from the sight for good.

  Ruth didn’t come with us for that last look. She’d already had hers. Rootie had been the first, coming home to a house in flames. Her local grade school’s bus, unable to turn into our barricaded street, let her off at the corner. She didn’t know until she walked into the mob of firemen just whose house was burning. The men had to drag the screaming ten-year-old girl away from the blaze. She bit one of them on the hand, drawing blood, trying to fight free.

  She screamed at me, too, as soon as we saw her. “I tried to find her, Joey. I tried to go in. They wouldn’t let me. They let her die. I watched them.”

  “Hush, Kind. Your mother was already dead a long time by the time you came even close.” Da meant it as consolation, I’m sure.

  “She was
burning up,” Ruthie said. “She was on fire.” My sister had become another life. The oldest child on earth. Air rasped in and out of her. She started at something none of us could see. I put my arm on her and she didn’t even register.

  “Shh. No one could be inside a flame like that and still feel.” Da had lived too long in the world of measurement; To him, even a ten-year-old girl wanted only the truth.

  “I heard her,” Ruthie said, though not to any of us. “They trapped me. They wouldn’t let me reach her.”

  “The Heizkörper exploded,” Da explained.

  “The what? The hot body?”

  “The boiling,” Da said. “The heating.” He’d forgotten how to speak the language. Any language.

  “The furnace,” I translated.

  “There had been a leak, most likely. The furnace exploded. This is why she could not get away from this fire, even though it came on her in the middle of the day.”

  This was the theory that best fit all evidence. For weeks, in my dreams, things exploded. And in full daylight, too. Things I couldn’t name or outrun.

  We moved into a tiny apartment down in Morningside Heights that a colleague loaned my father for the length of our emergency. We lived like refugees, dependent on the gifts of others. Even our classmates from Boylston sent us boxes of castoffs, not knowing what else to do.

  My father arranged a memorial service. This was the first and last complex social act he ever managed to pull off without our mother’s help. There was no casket for viewing, no body left for burial. My mother had already been cremated, on someone else’s orders. All of our pictures of her had burned, alongside her. Friends contributed what keepsakes they had, to make a remembrance table. They propped them up on a sideboard by the hall door: clippings, concert programs, church bulletins—more mementos of my mother than I’d ever see again.