Richard Powers (48 page)

“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?

“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.

December 1964

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.

History, today, is just the four of us. Da paces in his study. Jonah lies on the floor playing with a new sliding puzzle Da has given him for Christmas. I sit on the couch next to Ruth, who has been gearing up toward some question all day. “What do you remember about Mama?” she asks me at last, still trying to fix my hair. Like requesting an old dance number. What do you remember? She really wants to know, although she’s already decided.