Richard Powers (7 page)

Delia walks to the head of the table and pecks him high up on his balding crown. Through puckered lips, she hums “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” just loudly enough for him to hear. She hugs her scowling mother and then she’s gone, off to the station on another musical pilgrimage. She has made them for years, ever since the chance broadcast that changed her life. Made the trips to Colorado Street, Miss Anderson’s girlhood home, and to her second house on Martin Street. Walked around the halls of South Philly High, conjuring up the girl who walked them. Passed for Baptist, to her agnostic father’s dismay and her A.M.E. mother’s horror, just to attend, each week, the church of her idol, the woman who taught her what she might do with her life.

A framed magazine photo of that regal face has stared down from Delia’s desk these last two years, a silent reminder of all that sound can do. She heard it in that deep river of song flowing from her radio’s speaker, five years ago, and again in that shaft of light she basked in during Miss Anderson’s too-brief Philadelphia recital last year. She has shaped her own mezzo around that voice, fixed in her memory.

Today she’ll see again, in the flesh, the owner of those sounds. Marian Anderson doesn’t even need to perform, for this trip to D.C. to pay off. All she needs to do is be .

Delia Daley subvocalizes on the train, shaping the lines in her mind. “The sound doesn’t start in the throat,” Lugati chides her every week. “The sound starts in the thought.” She thinks the notes of Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” that Anderson standard, promised on the program for this day. They say the archbishop of Salzburg made her sing the Schubert twice. They say when she sang for a room of Europe’s best musicians a spiritual no one in the room could hope to have grasped, they grasped her anyway. And not a person dared applaud when her last note faded.

How must it feel, tone riding free on a column of breath, banking on the spirit’s slightest whim? Open throat, placement—all the techniques Lugati, her patient teacher, has harped upon these last years—will not teach her as much as this one train trip. Miss Anderson is her freedom. Anything her race cares to do, it will.

She steps off the train into a capital huddling under blustery April. She half-expects the cherry trees to greet her right inside Union Station. The coffered barrel vault arches over her, a fading neoclassical cathedral to transportation that she steps through, making herself small, invisible. She moves through the crowd with tight, effacing steps, waiting for someone to challenge her right to be here.

Washington: every fortunate Philadelphia schoolgirl’s field trip, but it has taken Delia until twenty to see the point of visiting. She heads out of the station and bears southwest. She nods toward Howard, her father’s school, where he suggested she go make something of herself. The Capitol rises up on her left, more unreal in life than in the thousands of silver images she grew up suspecting. The building that now stands open to her color again, after a generation, bends the very air around it. She can’t stop looking.

She walks into the waking spring, the river of moving bodies, giggling even as she hushes herself up.

The whole city is a postcard panorama. Like being inside a white hand-me-down grade school civics text. Today, at least, the monument-flanked boulevards flow with people of all races. The group from Union Baptist told her to look for them up front on the left, near the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. She has only to hook right, on Constitution Avenue, to see how naïve those plans were. There’ll be no rendezvous today. To the west, a crowd gathers, too dense and ecstatic to penetrate.

Delia Daley looks out over the carpet of people, more people than she knew existed. Her father is right: The world is vicious, too huge to care about even its own survival. Her steps slow as she slips in behind the mile-long crowd. All in front of her, the decades-long Great Migration comes home. She feels the danger, right down her spine. A crowd this size could trample her without anyone noticing. But the prize lies at the other end of this gliding crush. She breathes in, forcing her diaphragm down— support, appoggio!—and plunges in.

She expected something else, a lieder-loving concert crowd, only a little larger. The program today is hardly the Cotton Club. It isn’t even Rudy Vallee. Since when have Italian art songs pulled in such armies? She drifts across a barricaded Fourteenth Street at the crowd’s stately pace, falling under the outline of the Washington Monument, the world’s largest sundial, a shadow too long to read. Then she’s inside the whale’s belly, and all she can hear is the huge beating heart of the beached creature.

Something here, a thing more than music, is kicking in the womb. Something no one could have named two months ago now rises up, sucking in its first stunned breaths. Just past Delia in the press of bodies, a girl the color of her brother Charles—a high schooler, though from the look of her, high school is a vanished dream—spins around, flashing, to catch the eye of anyone who’ll look at her, a look of delivery that has waited lifetimes.

Delia pushes deeper into the sea, her throat, like a pennant, unfurling. Her larynx drops, the release Lugati has been hounding her these last ten months to find. The lock opens and a feeling descends on her—confirmation of her chosen life. Fear falls away, old leg chains she didn’t even know she was wearing. She’s on her appointed track, she and her people. Each will find her only way forward. She wants to kick back and call out, as so many around her are already doing, white people within earshot or no. This is not a concert. It’s a revival meeting, a national baptism, the riverbanks flooded with waves of expectation.

Inside this crowd, she feels the best kind of invisible. The slate-colored combed-silk dress that serves so well for Philadelphia concerts is all wrong here, too sleek by half, her hemline missing low by a full two inches. But no one marks her except with pleasure. She passes people fresh off mule-drawn tobacco-farm carts, others whose portfolios are padded with blocks of General Motors. To her right, a convention of overalls gathers together, huddled against the public. A stooped couple in black formal wear fresh from its Armistice Day outing brush past her, eager to push up close enough to catch a glimpse of the dais. Delia takes in the topcoats, capes, raglans, pelerines, the whole gamut from ratty to elegant, the necklines cowled, draped, squared, and bateaued, all rubbing eager shoulders.

Her lips form the words, and her windpipe mimes the pitches: Every valley, exalted. A balding man about ten feet away from her, ghost white, with the Cumberland Gap between his two front teeth, perching inside a thin gray suit, starched blue shirt, and tie printed with Washington landmarks, hears her sing aloud what she has only imagined. “Bless you, sister!” the ghost man says. She just bows her head and lets herself be blessed.

The crowd condenses. It’s standing room only, flowing the length of the reflecting pool and down West Potomac Park. The floor of this church is grass. The columns of this nave are budding trees. The vault above, an Easter sky. The deeper Delia wades in toward the speck of grand piano, the stickpin corsage of microphones where her idol will stand, the thicker this celebration. The press of massed desire lifts and deposits her, helpless, a hundred yards upstream, facing the Tidal Basin. Schoolbook cherry trees swim up to fill her eyes, their blossoms mad. They wave the dazzle of their pollen bait and, in this snowstorm of petals, fuse with every Easter when they ever unfolded their promissory color.

And what color is this flocking people? She’s forgotten even to gauge. She never steps out in a public place without carefully averaging the color around her, the measure of her relative safety. But this crowd wavers like a horizon-long bolt of crushed velvet. Its tone changes with every turn of light and tilt of her head. A mixed crowd, the first she’s ever walked in, American, larger than her country can hope to survive, out to celebrate the centuries-overdue death of reserved seating , of nigger heaven . Both people are here in abundance, each using the other, each waiting for the sounds that will fill their own patent lack.

No one can be barred from this endless ground floor.

Far to the northwest, a mile toward Foggy Bottom, a man walks toward her. Twenty-eight, but his fleshy face looks ten years older. His neck is a pivot, his eyes behind their black horn-rims steadily measuring the life all around him. Just his being alive to measure this unlikeliness defies all odds.

He walks from Georgetown, where two old friends from his Berlin days put him up, sparing him from looking for a room, an act of practical politics that would have defeated him. He has come down by train last night from New York, where he has lived this past year, sheltered by Columbia. Yesterday, David Strom was out in Flushing Meadows, getting an advance peek at the World of Tomorrow. Today, he woke up in Georgetown’s parade of yesterday. But now there is only and ever now , every infinitesimal in the delta of his step a subtended, theoretical forever.

He’s here by George Gamow’s invitation, to talk at George Washington University on possible interpretations of Milne and Dirac’s dual time scales: probably imaginary, he concludes, but as staggeringly beautiful as truth. He was down three months before, for the Conference on Theoretical Physics, where Bohr told the assembled luminaries about the existence of fission. Now David Strom returns, to add his private notes to the growing stockpile of infinitely strange things.

But he makes the trip for a more pressing reason: to hear again the only American singer who can rival the greatest Europeans in tearing open the fabric of space-time. Everything else—the visit with his Georgetown friends, the talk at George Washington, the tour of the Library of Congress—is excuse. His thoughts tunnel backward. His each step toward the Mall peels back the four last years, exhuming the day when he first heard this phenomenon. That sound still hangs in his mind, as if he were reading it off the conductor’s score: 1935, the Wiener Konzerthaus, the concert where Toscanini proclaimed that a voice like this woman’s came around only once every hundred years. Strom doesn’t know the maestro’s timescale, but Toscanini’s “hundred years” is short by any measure. The alto sang Bach—“Komm, süsser Tod.” “Come, Sweet Death.” By the time she reached the second strophe, Strom was ready.

Today is Easter, the day Christians say death died. To date, Strom has seen little evidence supporting the theory. Death, he feels reasonably confident, is poised to make an impressive comeback. For reasons Strom cannot grasp, the angel has passed over him three times already. Even the most confirmed determinist must call it caprice. First, following his mentor, Hanscher, down to Vienna after the Civil Service Restoration Act, escaping Berlin just before the Reichstag erupted in flames. Then getting the habilitation. Making a splash at the Basel conference on quantum interpretations, and winning an invitation to visit Bohr in Copenhagen just months before Vienna dismissed its Jews—practicing or otherwise—from the faculty. Escaping with the letter of recommendation from Hanscher, the shortest, most effusive that man ever wrote: “David Strom is a physicist.” At last securing asylum in the States, a mere year ago, on the strength of a single theoretical paper, whose confirmation came a decade before it might have, hastened by a cosmological confluence that happens once every other lifetime. Three times, according to David’s own count, saved by a luck even blinder than theory.

It all seems proof of a temporal rift no theory can mend. Four years ago, he was happily attending European concerts, as if Europe still heard some fixed key. Nothing sounds the same on this repeat listen, old music in a newfound land. In between that theme and its recapitulation, only a harrowing development section, jagged, atonal, unlistenable. His parents in hiding near Rotterdam. His sister, Hannah, and her husband, Vihar, trying to reach his country’s capital, Sofia. And David himself, a resident alien in the land of milk and honey.

Time may turn out to be quantized, as discontinuous as the notes in a melody. It may be passed back and forth, carried along by subatomic chronons as discreet as the fabric of matter. Tachyons, restricted to speeds faster than light—fantasies allowed by Einstein’s most rigorous prohibitions—may bombard this life with word of everything that awaits it, but life below the speed of light can’t see them to read them.

David Strom shouldn’t be here, free, alive. But he is. Is here, walking across Washington, to hear a goddess sing, live, in the open air.

Strom turns onto Virginia and sees the throng. He has never been so close to such numbers. He has seen them back in Europe only on newsreels—the crazed World Cup finals, the mobs that turned out three years ago to watch Hitler refuse to give out gold medals to the non-Aryan Über-mensch . This crowd is more sweeping, more blissfully anarchic. Music alone cannot account for this. Such a movement can only come from some vaster libretto. Until this instant, Strom has no idea what concert he walks into. He fails to grasp the issue until he corners and looks on it.

This eye-level wall of flesh knocks the wind from him. The shimmer of tens of thousands of bodies, humanity broken down to atoms, an electrostatic n -body problem beyond any mathematics’ ability to solve, panics him with its groundless physics, and he turns to run. He heads back up Virginia toward the safety of Georgetown. But he can’t erase more than a few dozen meters of his path when he hears that voice up inside his ears. Komm, süsser Tod. He stops on the sidewalk and listens. What’s the worst that oblivion might do to him? What better sound to bring on the end?

He turns back toward this roiling crowd, using the terror in his chest the way a seasoned performer would. Breathing through his mouth, he slips into the churning surf. The fist in his chest relaxes into eddies of pleasure. No one stops him or asks for identification. No one knows he is foreign, German, Jewish.

No one cares that he’s here at all. Ein Fremder unter lauter Fremden.

Sunlight breaks free for a minute, to shine on earth’s most mutable country. David Strom wanders lost inside a social realist drawing, hemmed in by a crusade he can’t identify, waiting again, this year, for the myth to turn real. Where else in the world have so many for so long believed that so much good is so close to happening? But today, these New Worlders may be right. He shakes his head, working his way toward the makeshift stage. Prophecy may yet come true, if there’s anyone left to receive it. Already, Europe has slid back into the flames. Already, the smokestacks are hard at work. But that is tomorrow’s fire. Today has another glow altogether, and its heat and light draw Strom forward.