The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  “The way we’re going!”

  Then that little boy was here. And now another on the way. The more of them they become, the safer they’ll be. David is just as awed by her pregnancy the second time around. Both of them—amazed by her moods and cravings. She grows imperious, placid, animist, alert to every creak in the floorboards. She wants only to curl up with her firstborn against her, her second inside her, her husband standing watch over the apartment as over a dark, soft underground den.

  How different expecting is this second time. Jonah kicked and roared in the womb at all hours. This one makes no trouble. The first time, the two adults were alone. Now they have this walking, talking golden thing to keep them company and comment their astonishment. “Mama big. Make new Jonah. Baby come.”

  David is a wonder with the baffled boy. They sit together on the front room rug in the late afternoon, building cities out of oatmeal boxes and food cans, explaining to each other how things work. She can watch them forever. The boy has his father’s eyes, his father’s mouth, his father’s puzzled amusement. David can understand even Jonah’s most cryptic, pre-earthly thoughts. He holds the child entranced with two wooden clothespins and a piece of string. But when her boy is restless or scared, loose in too large a place, nothing will do but curling into his mother, ear against her chest while she sings.

  The war has come to them at last. Pearl Harbor is almost an anticlimax, she and David have been waiting for it for so long. That cataclysm, too, neatly divides these births. Delia must remind herself daily that they’ve joined the world catastrophe, so little has changed in her life since the President made his declaration. Her country is at war with her husband’s, although he’s given up his citizenship and taken hers. David, sworn in with a roomful of grinning immigrants, with their freshly scrubbed knowledge of executive, legislative, and judicial. David insisting she teach him all the words to the unsingable national anthem, words that make her blush, even as she tries to explain them. David, the logician, struggling for a gloss on the self-evident Declaration of Independence. “But would that not mean … ?” She has to warn him not to try to argue the matter with the citizenship judge.

  They decide to speak only English to the children. They say it’s to prevent confusion. There will be time for other lessons later. What other choice for now? Her brother Charlie enlists. Her father and Michael would, too, in a heartbeat, if the army were taking old men and children. She anguishes nightly that David might be drafted. They wouldn’t send him against Germany, but they could ship him to the Pacific. They’re taking men with even worse eyesight.

  “Don’t worry, treasure,” he says.

  It maddens her. “Don’t you tell me not to worry. They’ll take everyone. It’s bad enough having a brother sent to North Carolina. I’m not losing you.”

  “Don’t worry. They will not take me.”

  The way he says it hushes her. Some privilege of rank. Surely university professors won’t be exempt. His colleagues, the ones who come by for music evenings, men who shuttle among a dozen universities as if they all worked for the same employer, sharing nothing but wild, broken English, a love of mysteries, and a hatred for Hitler: Won’t they go, along with everyone?

  “They’re needed here,” David tells her.

  How can that be? He has always told her that there’s no work more worthless, more abstract than his. Except, perhaps, music.

  The last three weeks of Delia’s second pregnancy leave her lumbering to the finish. Her voice drops to tenor. She stops her lessons and gives up even her church choir jobs. She can’t sit, lie, or stand. She can’t hold her child on her lap. She’s huge. “My wife,” David teases, “she goes from a Webern bagatelle to a Bruckner symphony.” Delia tries to smile, but she has no spare skin left.

  Thank God he’s there when it happens. The contractions start at 2:00 A.M. on June 16, and by the time David gets her to the hospital a dozen blocks away, she almost delivers in the lobby. It’s a boy, another beautiful boy. “Looks like his mother,” the nurse remarks.

  “Looks like his brother,” says the mother, still in that far place.

  “We have four of us,” the father repeats. His voice is dazed. “We are a quartet.”

  Once again, the state puts “Colored” on the birth certificate. “How about ‘Mixed’ this time?” she asks. “Just to be fair to all the parties?” But Mixed isn’t a category.

  “Discrete and not continuous.” Her husband the physicist. “And the two are not symmetrical?”

  “No,” she answers. “They are not.”

  This perplexes her husband. “Whiteness is recessive. Black is dominant.”

  She laughs. “I wouldn’t put it quite like that.”

  “But look. Whiteness is lost. They are the exception category. The sogenannt pure case. Black is everything that isn’t white. It’s whites who decide this, yes?”

  Whites, she hears her brother Charlie telling her, decide everything.

  “So the white race should see this is a losing idea, over time? They write themselves out of the books, even at a fraction of one percent every year!”

  She’s too exhausted, too sedated, too ecstatic to have this conversation. Her baby’s her baby. His own case. Race: Joseph. Nationality: Joseph. Weight, length, sex: nothing but her baby, her new JoJo.

  But the hospital also gets the eye color wrong. She tells them to fix it: green, for her son’s safety. Just in case the error comes back to haunt him in later years. But they won’t. They can’t see the green. Leaf and bark are to them all the same color.

  The baby comes home for Jonah to inspect. Older brother’s disappointment is infinite. This new creature doesn’t want to do anything but sleep and suckle, suckle and sleep. Total perversity, and what enrages the seventeen-month-old most is that both parents are entirely duped by the act. They are both careful to take turns with Jonah, while relieving each other with the new baby.

  It’s as Delia wants. Everything she can imagine wanting. If they could freeze time right here. Humming to each child, listening to them hum. Plunking out the basic melody of days.

  This one does darken up a little, as her mother again predicts. More than his brother, but stopping right around cream with a little coffee. Even before he can walk, he’s a helper. He doesn’t want to put his mother out, even to feed him. It wrecks her to watch. Even before he can talk, he does everything anyone asks him.

  They pack up the children every few months and take them to Philly. It’s not enough for her parents. “They’re different little men every time I get to see them,” Nettie Ellen chides. The twins dress the boys up and take them, one each, around the block, showing them off to any neighbor who’s fool enough to stop. Even Dr. Daley—his own Michael barely out of short pants—turns into a foolish old grandfather, cooing and calling to his descendants.

  Delia and David time a visit to coincide with Charlie’s first leave since his transfer. Her brother bursts into the assembled room in uniform, to a collective gasp. He has gone down to Montford Point a second-class citizen and come back a marine. Marine in training anyway. Fifty-first Defense Battalion. He makes the choice not out of any romantic, boyish attachment to that branch of the service. Just because, until a few months ago, they said he couldn’t. Dr. Daley rises to shake his son’s hand. They stand a moment, clasped, and break off wordlessly.

  “My Lord, My Lord!” Nettie Ellen fingers the uniform.

  “That’s the one,” Charlie says. “The one and only. Same old threads they said we’d never wear. Yes in-deedy. You’re looking at a walking, talking incarnation of Mr. Frankie Dee’s Executive Order Eight-eight-oh-two!”

  “Watch your mouth,” his mother says. “I didn’t raise you up to badmouth the President.”

  “No, Mama.” Pure contrition, with a wink for Delia. “You did not.”

  The twins swoon over him. “You’re so fine.” “So divine.” “You are the one.” “Fancy as they come!”

  “Notice how surprised my sisters
sound,” Charcoal tells David.

  Only he’s not Charcoal anymore. This man has disowned the boy who left home. He’s passed by David in age now, by an easy decade. Aged overnight by sights even Philadelphia has never seen. Over dinner, he entertains them with tales from the hell of basic training. “Then they dropped us down in the middle of a swamp at night. Two days, with nothing but a pocketknife and a piece of flint.” William Daley eyes his son with fierce regard, an esteem bordering on rivalry. Little Michael dies of envy by agonized degrees.

  “You look up your aunt and uncles yet?”

  “Not yet, Mama. They don’t let us off base much. But I Will.”

  After dinner, he steps out back with his sister to sit on the stoop and smoke a cigarette.

  “Marines teach you that, too?” she asks.

  “Taught me how to bring it home anyway.” His face is grim. Like it used to be when white people crossed the street rather than pass alongside them.

  “So what is it, Char? What aren’t you telling them?”

  He flashes her a look, ready to deny everything if she can’t pin him. But she can. He stubs out the butt against the concrete walk. “It’s a joke, Dee. A sick, bad joke. We’re at war already, and we haven’t even left the parade ground.”

  She bobs her firstborn on her knee. Little Joey’s safe inside with his grandmother and aunts. She cups Jonah’s ear against his uncle’s anger, deflecting and protecting. She watches Charlie put out his cigarette, her hopes for the goals of this good war stubbed out with it.

  He sucks in empty air. “You think Philadelphia’s fucked up? North Carolina makes this place look like Brotherly Love. How did Mama’s family survive it down there all these years? Can’t get a lunch anywhere outside the base. Can’t even go onto Lejeune, even in full dress, without a white man taking me in with him. White general comes over to Montford Point to address the first Negro marines in history? Ends up telling us, right to our faces, how shocked he is to see a bunch of darkie upstarts wearing his heretofore-unspoiled uniform.”

  Charles takes off his cap and rubs his close-cropped skull. “You want to see my enlistment contract? It’s stamped COLORED, in big block letters. Case you might miss the fact. Know what that’s all about? Means the President can make them take us, but he can’t force them to make us real marines. Guess what they have planned for the Fifty-first? We’re going to be stewards. Ship us out to the Pacific so we can be the damn Pullman porters for the white battalions. The enemy will be firing at us. And we’ll be hiding behind oil drums and shooting back at them with baked beans.”

  Little Jonah breaks free from Delia’s grip and makes a dash for a gray squirrel. The squirrel heads up a tree. So the child, baffled and empty-handed, breaks for wider freedom in the fenced-in yard. Charlie studies his nephew, a level gaze. The child is small distraction. “Even with all the shit we’ve always been through up here? With everything we’ve lived through, I’d never have believed this. Life in this country is a waking nightmare. Hitler’s got nothing on the United States, Dee. I’m not even sure that everyone on this side of the ocean really wants to take the moth-erfucker down.”

  “Oh, hush up, Charlie.” He does, but only because she’s his big sister. “Don’t talk crazy.” She wants to give him something, some countering truth. But they’re both too old now for reassurance. “It’s the same fight, Char.” And who knows? Maybe it is. “You’re in it. You’re fighting. One war.”

  A grin breaks out on Charlie’s face, nothing to do with her. “Speaking of war. Your little Brown Bomber there takes out any more of Mama’s roses, we’re all dead.” Before she can move a step toward Jonah, Charlie whistles. The piercing, pure tone stops Jonah in his tracks. “Hey, soldier. Fall in. Report for duty!” The boy smiles, gives his head a slow, sly shake. Charles Daley, Fifty-first Battalion, U.S. Marine Corps, nods back. “Kid’s awfully light, ain’t he?”

  They don’t get out to Philly as often as they should. She marks the weeks by her boys’ bursts of growth. She tries to slow the changes in them but can’t. Her mother’s right: different little men, each time they rise to breakfast. David, too: scariest of all. Changing faster than she can figure out. It’s not that he’s cold, only preoccupied. Every human in the world, he tells her, runs on his own clock. Some an hour or two behind, some as much as years ahead. “You,” she tells him, one of the sources of her love, “you are your own Greenwich.”

  Now he’s running out ahead of her—not much; maybe five minutes, ten—just enough for her to miss him. She looks for the reason in herself. Her body has changed a little, after the boys. But it can’t be that; in those moments when they still catch each other, his palm against the small of her back, his nose still buried, astonished, in her neck, his clock returns to hers, entraining, lingering in their sweet after-the-fact. She worries it might be the boys, somehow, their constant need. But he’s as devoted to them as ever, reading Jonah endless repetitions of nursery dimeter, entertaining Joey all Sunday long with a pocket mirror’s dancing sunbeam.

  He travels too much. She has memorized the Broadway Limited schedule to Chicago. His beloved Mr. Fermi has set up a lab there, at the university. David makes so many trips, he might as well be on salary.

  “Are we moving out?” she asks. Trying to be good, trying to be a wife, managing only to sound doleful.

  “Not if you do not wish.” Which somehow frightens her even more. She’s never been one to let her imagination run away from her. But it doesn’t have to run; it has so much free time now, it can cover any distance in a leisurely stroll.

  David is called out to Chicago the evening before Jonah’s second birthday. The news astonishes her. “How can you miss this?” The most acid she’s shown him since they married.

  He hangs his head. “I told them. I tried to change. Fourteen people need me there on this day.”

  “What fourteen people?”

  He doesn’t say. He won’t talk about what’s happening. He leaves her to her worst guesses. He holds out his palms. “My Delia. It’s tomorrow already, on the other side of the dateline.” So they have a leap-ahead birthday party, complete with newspaper hats and an orchestra of combs and wax paper. The children are thrilled; the adults guarded and miserable.

  She sits alone with the boys the next day. They plunk on the piano, Joey on her lap, reaching for the keys, Jonah next to her on the bench, hitting the tonic to match her right hand’s “Happy Birthday.” She bobbles more notes than her boy does. She knows what it is. It’s something white. No man in this world will choose to stay with somebody dark if he doesn’t have to. She falls asleep that night to this thought, and the same certainty shoves her up from sleep at 3:00 A.M. It’s a white woman. Maybe not lust. Just familiarity. Something that just happens to him, comfortable, known. After almost three years, he’s discovered that his wife’s blackness is more than circumstance. The distance doesn’t close up just by naming.

  Or maybe it’s not even a woman. Maybe just white doings, white flight. Things she doesn’t understand, things white life has always locked her out of. What has that world ever done but run from her? Why should this man be any different? He has seen some blemish in her, some crudeness that confirms the law. She has been a fool to think they could jump the broom, jump across blood on anything so feeble and handcuffed as love.

  These thoughts nest in her at that weird hour, the time of night when even knowing that a thought is pure craziness doesn’t help banish it. The fear is under her skin, crippling her. Even feeling that crippledness proves that the two of them shouldn’t be together, should never have tried. But her boys: her JoJo. They prove something, too, just the look of them: proof beyond any earthly proof. She rises to watch them in their beds. Their simple act of breathing in their sleep gets her through until morning.

  By daylight, she vows to wait until her husband brings it up himself. Anything less would be unfaithful. He’ll tell her. And yet, he hasn’t. They vowed when they married that no lies would ever come between them.
Now she makes this smaller vow, only to let him break the larger one.

  “What is it?” she asks, cornering him. He’s barely off the train. “Tell me what’s going on out there.”

  “Wife.” He sits her down. “I have a secret.”

  “Well, you better let me in on it, or you’ll be sharing your secret with Saint Peter.”

  He curls his forehead, trying to decode her. “By law and by oath, I’m not permitted to share this. Not even with your Saint Peter.”

  Where I come ƒrom, I’m your oath. In my country, we save each other ƒrom the law.

  He hears her, in her silence. He tells her what she already knows. “War work. Work of the highest possible security.”

  “David,” she says, near flattened. “I know what you study. How could your work be of even the least … ?”

  He’s laughing before she frames the thought. “Yes! Useless. My specialty, absolutely useless. But they don’t use me for my specialty. They use me to help with the next related idea.”

  Everything, related. It’s how he even has a job to begin with. His legendary ability to solve others’ problems, to sit in the lunchroom and scrawl on the backs of napkins the clues his stumped colleagues have been seeking for months.

  “Let me guess. The army’s making you build a time bomb.” His face’s startle is worse than any 3:00 A.M. fear. “Oh my God.” She covers her mouth. “It can’t be.” Ready to laugh, if he’ll let her.

  He doesn’t. Then the law is just the two of them. He tells her the secret he can’t tell anyone. He leaves no evidence, draws no pictures. But he tells her. Yes, it’s a white thing. But it isn’t his. He has been brought into it, along with hundreds of others. A monster thing, a time-ending thing, built in secret places, here and out west.

  “I don’t do much. Just mathematics.”

  “Do the Germans know about this?”

  He tells her about his old friends from Leipzig, Heisenberg and the others, the ones who didn’t emigrate. “Physics”—he shrugs—“is German.”

  He must travel, whenever they need him. No question. It could end the war. It could bring Charlie home, and all the others. Keep her boys from harm.