Richard Powers (37 page)

He stops pacing and sinks into the red Moroccan chair. He fixes her in his eyes, as if she’s a malingering patient. “Not…? Tell that to the whites. And you’ll have to, young lady. Every minute of your life. In ways you can’t begin to imagine.”

She tries to hold his gaze, but his unmasks her. She must look away or burn. Defeating hers, his eyes take on four hundred years of violence coming from all directions.

“Not about race? What is this about?”

She wants to say love . Two people, neither of them asking for this. Neither of them knowing what to do or how to make a home wide enough for the fear they now must live in.

He turns his face away from her, toward his books. He throws open the agenda on his desk and takes his pen, as if to sign a final severance. His hand hovers, then slams down on the blotter. He swings around to face her again. His voice drops, its menace multiplied by an awful, collaborator’s confidence.

“What is this about, then? You tell me, seeing as how you’re the expert. What do you imagine you’re trying to prove ?”

Whatever she might prove, he has already refuted. Still, he stares at her, blameless confusion, begging her to restore him. Have you no pride? All these years, have I taught you nothing?

“A colored girl,” she says, giving up on placement, projection, support, her sound collapsing. “A colored girl growing up, going to college, learning what she wants, taking what she needs, being anything she cares to be, changing the laws of this country.” Her voice falls to nothing. But it does not break. “Who’s going to stop her? What’s wrong with that?”

His words come back, in her voice. He hears what it costs her, to risk this echo. A spine in this girl he never put there. He falls still, a captive audience. Up in the front row, watching his life in review, events strange but familiar, scripted yet open. Her voice hangs in the air. How much music that voice might make. How much work that music might do. His shoulders fall. The clamp of history slips loose. He doesn’t stoop to forgiveness, any more than whiteness will ever forgive him for remembering. “Nothing,”

he says, and looks away. “Nothing’s wrong with that.”

The worst isn’t over; nothing of this nightmare will ever be over . The weight will ever be on her, of proof and its opposites. But still, she’ll live. Her flesh will keep her. Blood will not disown. So much gratitude tries to escape her all at once that it comes out liquid, in her sobs. Her mouth moves in wordless, frozen thanks, and she breaks down under that burden, belonging.

He offers her a handkerchief but no shoulder. The threat is all around them, still. Only the immediate crisis has passed. When her crying fades, he asks, “What does this man do?”

She snorts. She can’t help it. “Daddy, I wish I knew.”

The rage flashes back. “Am I to understand the man is some kind of trash-picker? Or an Ivy League playboy who’s never had to work an hour in his life?”

Her snickers die in childbirth. “No, Daddy. He’s a professor at Columbia University. A scientist. He makes a living studying time.” She fights to keep her face straight, free of those self-swallowing curves her David claims inhabit even the straightest lines. “He works on the General Theory of Relativity.”

Her cultivated father registers the same kind of disbelief she felt on hearing this was one of the world’s accredited professions. Doubt and awe, old half-blood brothers, mix in Dr. Daley’s face. The secrets that obsess him are as subtle as the ones he would ignore. “I thought only half a dozen men in the world are able to understand that.”

“Oh, probably.” She fights to hide her hope. There will be a meeting. Her father, the autodidact, has a few questions to ask the authority. “However many there are, David’s one of them.”

“David?” Her father wrestles with the physics. The optics. For generations now, it’s been their secret scale, the pull that led him to her mother. Light as you can, right on up to the invisible edge, but never over. Over is unthinkable betrayal, even though loyalty never asked questions along the graded way. His eyes consider: Suppose it were anyone else but him, laying down the law, preventing such a match.

Anyone else declaring that the upper echelons of whiteness, its mental mysteries, were off-limits to his offspring. Then he’d die for her right to this foreign man, clearly unfit to hold his daughter’s hand. “What does his family say?” Brittle, flinching from the answer, the eternal beating down.

“About what?” she bluffs. But she drops her eyes.

The man doesn’t know where his family is. They’ve fled from Rhineland to Zeeland, buying, at most, months. He has written to Europe several times, getting no satisfactory reply. The news of David’s choice of mate will reach his family, if at all, as news from another galaxy—freezing, airless, irrelevant.

“He’s a Jew, Daddy.”

The fact operates upon her father. “Does your mother know?”

Delia moans low. “A Jewish atheist foreigner.”

“Covering all your bases, aren’t you? Where in hell did you meet this man?”

This is what she’d like to remember. One moment, she was singing along to herself, passive oracle to the goddess Miss Anderson, and the next, she and the German had known each other for decades. No: There’d been a moment between those two, one of his geometrical figments she can’t wrap her head around—finite but infinitely dividable.

Something happened to her, to her country, as the contralto sang it into being. The continuous carpet of crowd absorbed her, one pulsing, breath-holding creature made up of 75,000 single cells, fused by that voice. The man stood next to her the whole time, and she never saw him. Hadn’t seen any separate spot of pigment in this mile-long swath until this one grazed her on the shoulder.

Are you a professional?

Delia thought he was speaking in German. The inflection, the unmistakable cadence of that language that had been her special torment these last three years.

Professionell…The first word she ever spoke to him.

Her pronunciation must have passed, for he responded, Sängerin?

She beamed. Not yet. Looking down, fumbling for the words: Noch nicht.

But you would like to be? In the future?

She caught up to his words. How… Oh, help me. You could hear me? The whole time?

He tried not to, then let himself smile. Not…the whole time. I couldn’t hear “O mio Fernando.” Noch nicht, vorläufig.

I was singing out loud?

He pushed out his chin: Never let the world worry you. Sotto voce. I had to bend to hear.

My God! All these people around!

Very few could hear.

Why on earth didn’t you hush me up?

He shrugged, feeling the peace only music can give. Miss Anderson…sounds like paradise. But she was far away, and you…were right here.

He introduced himself. So great was her undying shame, she introduced herself in turn. No one in the dispersing crowd stopped to look twice at them. The thousands who swept past were still lost in the sound that had joined them. Discrete humanity had not yet sedimented back out of solution.

The press of people forced them to move. She waved good-bye to the most intimate conversation with a white she’d ever had. But this man, David Strom, fell in alongside her in the flow. She heard him say, I have heard Miss Anderson sing already. In Vienna, some few years ago.

You heard her?In her excitement, Delia forgot she’d just enjoyed that unforgettable pleasure herself.

With a burst so easy that it still mystified her, they were talking voice. Was Flagstad as good a Sieglinde as the magazines claimed? Who was his favorite Norma, his choice for Manon? She sounded like the most shameless striver, but something even worse drove her. Her questions opened parentheses faster than he could close them. If one could only buy two new recordings this year, which should they be?

How big a voice did a woman need in order to fill, say, La Scala? Had he ever heard the legendary Farrar?

The man chided her. Farrar stopped singing in 1922. I am a little younger than you must see.

She stopped to examine his face. He wasn’t her father’s age at all, but at most ten years older than she.

He had on a gray suit, white shirt, and a narrow burgundy tie, poorly tied. He held his gray-blue felt hat, crushed down to a porkpie. Brown socks and shoes, poor soul. He might have thrown on the whole concoction in the dark. Not handsome, by any race’s measure. His rounded forehead crested a little, in the planning stage of balding’s evacuation, and the bridge of his nose rode up too high, as if broken.

His eyes, too wide, left him looking permanently baffled. She combed her own hair with two fingers and brushed a quick palm check across her cheeks. The muscles in her lips tensed, the way that always annoyed Mr. Lugati, her teacher. Inside those too-wide eyes, the man looked out, seeing her. Her : nothing larger. No sign but herself. She, at most ten years younger than he.

She let the man see. The need to flee had run off somewhere, giving up on her. She’d dropped her guard somewhere back in the crowd, ceased watching out for herself in this public place. Miss Anderson’s fault. Sotto voce, the man had said. But clearly not sotto enough. Singing out loud, of all imaginable crimes. Still in his gaze, taking too long to get it out, she articulated, Verzeihen Sie mir.

Could there be whites who might not, after all, hate her on sight for the ungivable forgiveness they needed from her? Clearly this man knew nothing of her country, except what it felt like to be here. Here, on the Mall, this Easter, not for history, not to see what came from centuries of making heaven of the readiest hell. Just here to hear Miss Anderson, the voice he’d heard in Vienna, a voice one is lucky to hear once every hundred years.

He looked again, and she lost herself. What marker could his map hold for her? His gaze seemed free of anything but itself. She felt herself unbound in it. He saw her only here, in the rolling, open territory Miss Anderson had sung no more than an hour ago. My country. Sweet land.

The square mile of federal land around them thinned out. The nation of listeners slipped unwillingly back home, as they, too, would now have to. But the German had a hundred questions for her first. What was the best way to broaden the notes at the top of the range? Who were the best present-day American vocal composers? What exactly was this “Gospel Train,” and did it stop anywhere nearby?

She asked if he were a musician. Perhaps, in another lifetime. She asked what he did in this one. He told her, and she broke out giggling. Absurd, making a living studying something so obvious, something one could do so precious little about.

They moved up the long reflecting pool in silent agreement, toward the monument, where the crowd still pressed in on that spot so recently graced. They chattered of Vienna and Philadelphia, as if they’d been sent their long, separate ways so each could scout out all the concerts the other couldn’t get to. She made a note to remember this coda to a day she’d never be in danger of forgetting. Their talk didn’t turn awkward until they reached the monument, their invented destination, the edge of their shared world.

She looked at the man again. She felt her look returned, emptied of history. Thank you for talking music, she said. It’s not often…

It’s less than not often,he agreed.

Wiedersehen,she said. Lebewohl.

Yes,he answered. Good-bye.

Then they saw the child. A lost boy, no older than eleven, keening, sprinting back and forth around the edge of the indifferent crowd, making the panicked forays of the lost. He ran to one side, calling out incoherent names and scouring the faces of those adults drifting past him. Then, terror rising, he ran back to search again in the opposite direction.

A colored boy. One of hers, she thought, and wondered if this German gentleman thought the same. But it was David Strom who called to the child. Something is wrong?

The child glanced up. At the white face, the clipped German sound, the boy bolted, looking back over his shoulder at his motionless pursuers. Just as instinctively, Delia called out, That’s all right, now. We ain’t gonna hurt you. She fell through some hole into her mother’s family’s Carolina past, on no stronger prompting than the curve of the boy’s forehead. The boy might have been from South Chicago, Detroit, Harlem, Collingwood, Canada—the last terminal on the Underground Railroad. He might have been far better off than she. But that was how she called to him.

The boy stopped and looked at her, squinting. He stepped closer, a skittish, starving creature eyeing the food-baited trap. His suspicious fascination appraised the white man next to her. He looked at Delia.

You come from around here?

His accent startled her; it came from no place she could identify. Not far, Delia answered, pointing vaguely. David Strom proved his intelligence by keeping silent. How ’bout you?

The boy’s voice turned wild at the words. Delia thought she heard California , but between the unlikeness and the boy’s sobs, she wasn’t sure.

Everything’s going to be all right. We’re gonna help you find your people.

The boy brightened. My brother’s lost, he told her.

Delia sneaked a look at David Strom. She fought down her own cheek muscles. But on the scientist’s face, no stray amusement. No trace of anything but problem solving. And in that moment, she decided: She might share nothing else with this man in the rest of invented existence, except for trust.

I know he is, honey,she said. But we’re gonna help you find him.

It took some time to talk the boy down. But at last, his blanket panic began to lift. He was able to tell them, without too many contradictions, how disaster had struck. But the open lines of the place and the dispersing crowd mazed him. We were over there! he shouted. But when they drew close, joy broke down. This not it.

Delia kept him talking, damping his terror. She took his hand, and the boy, in the fickleness of childhood, took it as if he’d held it all his life. What’s your name? she asked.

Ode.

Jody?

Ode.

Really!She tried not to sound too surprised.

It means I was born on the road.

Where does it come from?