Richard Powers (58 page)

“What do we tell these boys?”

She is bound to him. Will do anything to lift up the man, his solitary race of one. Anything, including lie.

So she signs on to her downfall: love. She puts her hand on his nape, sealing the symmetry he began.

“We tell them about the future.” The only place bearable.

A groan breaks out of him. “Which one?”

“The one we saw.”

Then he remembers. He takes hold again on nothing, a tree on a rock face, rooted in a spoonful of soil.

“Yes. There.” The future that has led them here. The one they make possible. His life’s work must find them such junctures, such turnings. What dimensions don’t yet exist will come into being, bent open by their traveling through them. They can map it slowly, their best-case future. Month by month, child by child. Their sons will be the first ones. Children of the coming age. Charter citizens of the postrace place, both races, no races, race itself: blending unblended, like notes stacked up in a chord.

America, too, must jump into its own nonexistent future. Nazi transcendence—the latest flare-up of white culture’s world order—forces the country into a general housecleaning. The Tuskegee Airmen, the 758th Tank, the Fifty-first and Fifty-second Marine Corps divisions, and scores of other Negro units are shipped out to all the choke points of the global front. Whatever future this war leaves intact, it will never again be yesterday’s tomorrow.

Delia gets a letter from Charles in January of 1944. He’s been assigned to the Seacoast Artillery Group.

We’re starting our first major offensive—a drive across fortified enemy concentrations in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Should we succeed in forming a beachhead and breaking out, we plan to sweep through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona—dangerous territory—and press on to establish a forward perimeter in San Diego. From there, we’ll ship out and meet the Japanese, who ought to be a cakewalk in comparison to the folks down this way.

He sends another note in mid-February, from Camp Elliott, California: Greetings from Tara West… We’ve a ninety-mm gun crew here who can hit a towed target in less than a minute. Show me the white crew that can do better. But last night, when the brass decided to throw us an open-air movie, that same crew, along with the whole Fifty-first, was sent to the back, behind thousands of white boys, who, I suppose, had to keep themselves between us and Norma Shearer so there wouldn’t be any race mingling. (Nothing personal, sister.) Well, we particular marines didn’t much feel like heading back. We wound up getting thrown out all together. The place turned into a free-for-all, with a couple dozen good-sized bucks ending up behind bars. We ship out tomorrow on the Meteor , not an hour too soon, as far as I’m concerned. I’m so ready to leave these shores and try my luck in the savage, uncivilized islands that I can’t begin to tell you. Keep an eye on the home front, Dee. I mean, watch out for it.

Delia talks to David, in bed that night, before his next trip out west. “Hurry up with that work of yours.”

The one quick jump into the future that will save everyone she cares for. The idea forms in her, in that place before idea. She must protect her boys from the present, preserve their unlabeled joy, refuse to say what they are, teach them to sing through every invented limit the human mind ever cowered behind.

So it feels like a message from space—one night in midyear, spring cracking the crust of a winter grown unbearable, as she bathes Joey in the bassinet and David listens to the New York Philharmonic in the over-stuffed chair, his arm around Jonah—when a piece for full orchestra called Manhattan Nocturne seeps through the crystal set into their rented home. The piece is lovely, sonorous, and tinged with anachronism. Singable. She hums along by the end, buzzing the primary theme into a giggling Joey’s belly as if her baby boy’s body were a kazoo.

She notices the music without really noticing. But the polished announcer’s words afterward hit her like an omen. The composer is a thirteen-year-old girl named Phillipa Duke Schuyler. And if that wasn’t impossible enough, the girl is of mixed race. Delia almost puts a safety pin through her boy, and even then, Joey suffers her. She thinks she misheard, until David wanders slack-jawed into the room. His eyes fill with frightened vindication. “One hundred piano compositions before her twelfth year!”

Delia looks at her husband, feeling as if they’ve escaped the prison that the laws of a dozen American states would still sentence them to. The girl has an IQ of 185. Played the piano at three and began the concert circuit by the age of eleven. Their boys have an advance scout in this newfound land. The continent exists already, and it’s inhabited.

The girl’s father is a journalist, her mother a Texas farmer’s daughter. The father has written a meticulous account of his prodigy in the Courier , which Delia tracks down. The principles are simple. Raw milk, wheat germ, and codliver oil. Intensive education—a two-parent home schooling scheme of around-the-clock instruction. But the real secret is that old western farming trick of hybrid vigor. The basics of agricultural breeding. Twinrace children—that genius girl proves it—represent a new strain of crossed traits more robust than either of their parental lines. Mr. George Schuyler goes on to claim even more. Sturdy crossbred children are this country’s only hope, the only way out of centuries of division that will otherwise grow wider with the run of time. Just writing as much would land Mr. Schuyler behind bars in Mississippi, according to a law no older than his daughter. But the words reach Delia like food falling from the desert sky.

Raw milk and wheat germ, mixed blood, daily doses of music, and the girl has become an angel. Her Manhattan Nocturne for one hundred instruments awes wartime America. Mayor La Guardia even declares a Phillipa Duke Schuyler Day. The sound of the past vanishes at the little girl’s playing. Delia buys copies of all her available sheet music. She leaves the Five Little Piano Pieces , composed at age seven, out on the music rack. Her boys stare, rapt, at the picture of little Phillipa on the cover, seeing something in her that will take them decades to recognize. The pieces are among the first the boys learn—the foundation stone of the new Strom schoolhouse.

Others have been this way: It makes all the difference in the merciless world. Home lessons begin in earnest. The boys leap through every little melody she sets them. David rolls around on the floor with them, playing games with blocks that only an older, sadder child would suspect to be the basis of set theory. David and Delia even try the wheat germ and codliver oil, but the boys aren’t taking.

“Kein Problem,”David says. “We don’t need one hundred and eighty-five IQ.”

“True. Anything over one hundred and fifty will do just fine.” In fact, it begins to dawn on Delia that every child who learns to walk and talk has the genius of whole galaxies engineered in them, before hate begins to dull them down.

It thrives, this school of four, without anyone thinking school . Outside their house, life sends them a sign, confirming their leap of faith. The Supreme Court deals a blow to all-white elections. The Allies land in France and push eastward. The endless war will end, and melting pot America will be the force that ends it. The only question is how soon. No day will be soon enough. For four years, they’ve had no word of David’s parents. His sister and her husband have disappeared, too, most likely lost in Bulgaria when it went under. Month after month, Delia props up her man, telling him in every possible way that silence proves nothing. But finally, gradually, it does. All the messages escaping that continent converge on the same conclusion.

She feels him protecting her in turn. He already knows where his family must be, in the absence of opposing evidence. But he won’t say as much to Delia. “You’re right. Everything must remain possible.”

Until it isn’t.

Her husband turns his private grief toward a response unthinkably large. As the Americans break out across the French bocage , David tenses. He hints at his fear to her, all the while trying to honor the government oaths he has sworn. She knows his anxiety. Some crossed trip wire on the map—the Meuse, the Rhine—will bring forth a pillar of elemental German fire. German physics. Some world-sized quantum experiment: two futures, either one of which must birth an outcome that will swallow the other forever.

The fall turns bitter. The Allied advance reaches Belgium. The Brits and Canadians crack open Antwerp to Allied shipping, and still they suffer no cosmic retaliation. Not a hint that Heisenberg is even close. The evidence builds that the greatest scientific power on earth—David’s world-changing colleagues from Leipzig and Göttingen—have taken a wrong turn somewhere.

But any moment can alter every other. Rumors collapse back into fact the moment they are released.

Some days, Delia feels her husband turning fatalistic, with nothing to do but shrink and wait, the passive inheritor of events too long in the making for him to influence them. On others, the urge to act possesses him, bending him almost double in further, more obscure efforts. These are the moments when Delia most loves him, his need for her so great, he can’t even see it. What comfort can she give him, trapped in salvation’s footrace? She gives him here, now , the sheltered fortress of their rented home.

One night, the air still heavy with heat and the boys tossing in sleep on the sofa in front of the steel-caged floor fan, the phone rings. It’s a rare enough event in any week, and so startling at this hour that Delia almost sears her scalp with the pressing comb. David answers. “Yes? Who? Operator. Ah! Hello, William.”

She’s on her feet. Her father, who hates the telephone. Who believes the instrument is driving people schizophrenic. Who makes his wife place all his calls. Who doesn’t believe in long distance. She crosses to David in two steps, hand out for the receiver, while her husband lapses into mumbled German. She takes the phone, and far away, tinny in her ear, her father tells her Charlie is dead. Killed in the Pacific.

“On a coral atoll.” Her father wanders. “Eniwetok.” As if the name might keep her from screaming.

“They were garrisoning the air base.”

“How?” Her voice isn’t hers. Her breath presses, and the smallest thought takes forever. She imagines death from the air, the enemy singling out her brother, his darkness a target against the white sand of paradise.

Her father’s voice waits for a collection that’s more like collapse. “You may not want…”

“Daddy,” she moans.

“They were unloading a gun battery off a ship. A restraining cable broke. The snap caught him…”

She doesn’t stop him, but she doesn’t hear. She races ahead with management. Undo by doing. “Mama.

How is Mama?”

“I’ve had to sedate her. She’ll never forgive me.”

“The children?”

“Michael is…proud. He thinks it was combat. The girls don’t understand what it means, yet.”

The girls? The girls don’t? Yet?As she clings to that word understand , she closes down. Blood beats into her face and her eyes break open. Sobs come out of her that couldn’t have been in. She feels David take the phone, make some hurried arrangements, and hang up. Then she’s being comforted, held up by the ghost white arms of this man who’ll never be more to her than almost recognizable, a stranger to her blood, the father of her children.

They go to Philadelphia. All four of them take the train that once smuggled her to New York, hidden from everyone but Charlie. Delia stands in the front of the house, under the tree Char fell out of at eight, the fall that left him with the bent nose and jutting collarbone. Her mother comes out of the house to meet her. She’s falling already, twenty feet before they reach, and Delia must catch her. Nettie Ellen holds her hand to her mouth, stilling a thousand shaking prayers. “He can’t be done yet. Too much more he’s still got to do.”

The doctor stands behind Nettie, blinded by daylight, his hair gone white overnight. They retreat into the house, Dr. Daley propping his wife, Delia holding her little one, and the white man leading his subdued but adventuring oldest boy. Michael is inside, wearing a jacket emblazoned with the Marine Corps insignia that his brother smuggled him from North Carolina. Lucille and Lorene bicker softly on the couch, barely lifting their heads as their sister enters.

Her brother Charlie, stopped forever. No more bitter-laugh letters, no more razz, no more improvised Charcoal show, no more rounds of sounding or toasting, no more fate-dismissing shrug. The new silence of this house closes in on Delia, swallowing all their sound.

There’s no body for a burial. What’s left of Charlie rots on a Pacific atoll. “They won’t send it back,” Dr.

Daley tells Delia, out of the others’ earshot. “They’re going to leave him in a sandy hole with a six-inch salt-water table. Shark food. My country. I was here before the Pilgrims, and they won’t send me my boy back.” He points at the gold star Nettie Ellen has mounted in the front window. “They did, however, pay for that.”

That night, they hold a makeshift service. No one but family. The net around them is large and strong.

Many have been by already, feeding, helping out, talking and holding quiet. But tonight, there is just kin, the only people that boy never had a choice but to trust. Their grief knows no cure but memory. Each of them has something to recall. Some stories need only two words to play out again in front of all of them.

Michael gets his brother’s old sax and shows off the riffs he has stolen just by watching. Dr. Daley sits at the piano, tries a left-hand stride like the ones he used to chide his son for pounding out. For six full bars, he finds the swell. Then, hearing what his fingers want to do, he crumbles.

Mostly, they sing—wide, spectral, full-chorded things, the intervals cutting through generations. Sorrow songs. Songs about abiding and getting away and crossing over. Then the tunes that seem more wedding than funeral, thanking the dead boy for yesterday, for a joy it will kill them to ratify. The family finds their lines, one each, with no one assigning. Even Nettie Ellen, whose speech has shut down, finds the harmonies slated to her, keeping time—the beat of deliverance—with a hand on her thigh. Bound to go.