Richard Powers (81 page)

Delia knows why she married a white man. Knows the exact moment she was bound to him. But never in a million years could she explain to her mother what happened that day on the Mall, the future she saw.

Her mother stares out Haggern’s window at the passersby. “You could have stayed with us, sung every week for God and the people who need to hear Him. Why you need a fancy concert hall, where nobody gets to move or join in? There are more places to sing with us than you could have sung in a lifetime.

More places to sing down here than there are in heaven.”

The kind of praise…the music I’ve studied…Every answer Delia thinks of breaks under its own weight.

She’s saved by the waitress, who arrives with their orders. Steam still rises from Nettie Ellen’s slice of pie. The waitress slides it over. “Look here! This pie was hiding deep in the oven. Thinking itself too grand to come out and get eaten.”

“You try it yet?” Nettie Ellen asks.

“Ha! This place look like they treat me that good?”

“You go on have yourself a slice; tell them to put it on my bill. Go on!”

“Bless you, ma’am, but I gotta watch my figure. My man likes me all skinnied down. ‘Like a bar of soap at the end of the washing month.’”

“My man always trying to get me to fill out.”

“Gimme some of that. He got a son?”

“One.” Two, once. “But you’re going to have to wait another couple years before that particular pie comes out of the oven.”

“You come get me.” The waitress waves them both away, along with all the world’s foolishness. “I’ll be here.”

Delia will die of exile. She lived here once. Her boys never will. Never the leveling sass of a nation that sees through every pretension. One with more places to sing than even heaven. “Colored’s got to get bigger, Mama.” Something her daddy told her all her life.

“Colored, bigger? Colored’s got no room to get bigger. Colored’s been smashed down to the biggest little thing that can be, without disappearing. White’s got to get bigger. White’s never had room for nobody but itself.”

They pick at their snacks in silence. If only the children would come back. Prove to them both that nothing has changed. Still your boys. Still your grandchildren.

“White’s just one color. Black’s everything else. You gonna raise them to have a choice? That choice don’t belong to you. It don’t even belong to them. Everybody else is gonna make it for them!” Nettie Ellen puts down her fork. She’s in her daughter’s eye. “My own mother. My own mother. Had a father was white.”

The words rock Delia. Not the fact, which she long ago gathered, in the cracks of the family history. But her mother’s saying so, here, out loud. She shuts her eyes. In such pain, they could travel anywhere.

“What…what was he like, Mama?”

“Like? We never laid eyes on that man. Never showed his face a day to any one of us. Never even helped pay part of her child’s way. Could have been anyone. Could have been your own man’s grandfather.”

Delia coughs a low, horrible gurgle. “No, Mama. David’s grandfather…was never anywhere near Carolina.”

“Don’t you mouth me. Don’t you backtalk.”

“No, Mama.”

“Here’s the thing I never understood. If white is so God-awful almighty, how come fifteen of their great-great-grandparents can’t even equal one of ours?”

Delia can’t help test a smile. “That’s just what I’m saying, Mama. Jonah and Joey, half their world…

Don’t they come just as much from—”

“You hear anything from the man’s parents?”

David has written a hundred letters, probed scores of vaults: Rotterdam, Westerbork, Essen, Cologne, Sofia, all the systematic German records of the abyss. “Nothing yet, Mama. We’re still searching.”

Both women bow their heads. “White folks killed their grandparents. You can’t lie to them about that.

You get them ready. That’s all your father’s saying, child.”

“It won’t always be this way. Things are changing, even now. We have to start making the future. It’s not going to come any other way.”

“Future! We got to make the here and now. We don’t even have that to live in, yet.”

The daughter looks away, at this room of people without a present. She doesn’t know how, but when she hears her boys sing, when they set out on their tiny adventures of canon and imitation, she finds her here and now, large enough to live in.

In that awful blood right, exercised so often as she was growing up, her mother reads her mind. “I never cared what music you sang. I never understood it myself. But anything you sang was fine by me, so long as you sang with everything you owned. And never called yourself anything you weren’t. What you going to tell them to call themselves?”

“Mama. That’s the point. We’re not calling them anything. That way, they’ll never have to call another person—”

“White? You raising them white?”

“Don’t be silly. We’re trying to raise them…beyond race.” The only stable and survivable world.

“‘Beyond’ means white. Only people who can afford ‘beyond.’”

“Mama, no. We’re raising them…” She looks for the word, and can only find nothing . “We’re raising them what they are. Themselves first.”

“Ain’t nobody so fine they deserve to put themselves first.”

“Mama, that’s not what I mean.”

“Nobody’s so good as that.” Four big beats of silence. Then: “What you going to give them, for everything you take away?”

Suppose it’s theft. Murder. The children return, saving Delia from answering. All four are rolling in hilarity. The girls pretend to be giant mechanical claws, their shrieking nephews the helpless gum balls.

Nettie Ellen brings them into line with one sharp eyebrow.

“Grandmop,” Jonah says. “Aunties are crazy!”

She wraps her arms around the boy, petting his halfway hair. “How’re they crazy, child?”

“They say a lizard’s just a snake with legs. They say singing’s just talking, only speeded up.”

Their waitress comes to see if the children want to eat. The boys draw her up short. Delia sees the woman eye her boys’ skin tones, telling God knows what explanatory story. The waitress points at Jonah. “This ain’t the one I’m supposed to wait for, is it?”

Nettie shakes her head. Delia looks down, full of tears.

The children have their pie. For another fifteen minutes, she, her mother, her sisters, and her children are all there, talking, needing no name for anything but one another. She and her mother fight over the bill.

She lets her mother win. They stand on the sidewalk, outside Haggern’s. Delia leans into her sisters, waiting for the invitation— Of course, child!—to come back to the great house just blocks away. Her home. There on the moving street, she waits her awkward eternity.

“Mama,” Delia begins, her voice as tight as the day of her first professional lesson. “Mama. I need your help with this. Get me back with the man.”

Nettie Ellen takes her by the elbows, fierce with knowing. “You can get back. You’re not even apart.

You two just having a bad hour. ‘This too shall pass,’ the Book says. You just call him up on the telephone and tell him you’re sorry. Tell him you know you’re wrong.”

Delia stiffens. The condition of belonging: She and her husband, the thing they’ve thought about and chosen, must be surrendered as wrong. She may be wrong, wrong in all she’s decided, wrong in each thing she chooses, but she is right in her right to be. In the only world worth reaching, everyone owns all song. This much her father long ago preached to her, and this much he forces on her now.

They go their separate ways, Nettie and the twins to the doctor’s house, Delia and the boys to the train.

Delia squeezes her sisters before they part. “Stop growing up so fast, now. I want to be able to recognize you, next time I see you.”

She tries—tries to call her father. She waits another week, hoping seven more days might blunt all conditions. But the phone call gets off to a catastrophic start and goes south from there. Then she, too, is saying horrible things into the phone, things she’s not capable of saying, things whose sole point is to leave her with things worth regretting forever.

Her time comes. She wants to turn to stone. She wants to lie in bed and never stand again. Only the boys get her through. Only that glance ahead, at company coming. She writes Nettie Ellen another note. Still her mother’s daughter.

Mama,

The baby’s coming. It’ll have to be this week or next. I can’t make it past that. This one’s strong. Takes after its grandfather, I guess, and it’s wearing me out. I’d so love if you could help again, like you did with Jonah and Joey. It’d be so good to have a woman to mind the boys. You know how helpless men are, when it counts. David would love it, too. You tell me what we can do to make this possible. It wouldn’t be right, having your new grandchild without you around! All love ever, Dee.

Every manipulation available. She’s not above anything that redemption might call for. But she’s not ready for the note she gets back.

Child

It was not easy for me to marry your father or have his children. Maybe you never thought that. He and I came from different worlds, different as anything you think you’ve gotten into. But I loved the man and I made him the promise like the Book talks about: “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee, for whither thou goest, I will go. And where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest will I die, and there will I be buried.” There’s nothing I put above this, and don’t ask me to. I understand you have to make the same promise to you and yours.

I’m not casting you out, and you know we’re ever waiting to take you back in, when you want and when you need.

It’s signed “With love, Mrs. William Daley.” By letter’s end, Delia’s whole body convulses. When her husband finds her, the baby has already breached. He needs to call an ambulance, to rush mother and daughter to the hospital. She never tells him about the note, the only truth she ever conceals from him.

When they tell her the child’s a girl, she says, “I know.” And when her husband asks, “What should we name her?” she says, “Her name is Ruth.”

Don Giovanni

Half a dozen places in Atlantic City might have hired me. This was the early 1970s, still the waning heyday of live music, and the music I played offended no one but me. There was a war going on. Not capitalism versus socialism, the United States versus Vietnam, students against their parents, North America versus the rest of the known continents. I mean the war of consonance against dissonance, electric against acoustic, written against improvised, rhythm against melody, shock against decency, long hair against longhair, past against future, rock against folk against jazz against metal against funk against blues against pop against gospel against country, black against white. Everybody had to choose, and music was your flag. Who you were depended on your radio presets. “Whose side,” the song wanted to know. “Whose side are you on?”

The secret to the music I’d played at the Glimmer Room was that it never committed. My professional survival consisted of playing a music that belonged to no one. Maybe every tune I played could be blood-typed, aligned with some warring faction. But I played with a strange, nonnative accent no one could quite place. By the time I’d put a song through the wringer of my self-taught riffing and seasoned it with the scraps of three hundred years of forgotten keyboard works, nobody could quite name it to claim or blame.

I couldn’t bear to return to playing. The house in Fort Lee sold. I paid the taxes on it and put the balance of Da’s assets in three accounts, one for each of us. My share meant that, for some finite but considerable number of months, I didn’t have to make a living by faking musical pleasure. Teresa encouraged me to languish for as long as I needed. She thought I was in mourning. She thought I only needed time to get my feet on the ground, and for that, she made me the most solid base imaginable.

Saint T. cooked and took me outside for walks and warded off with a glance the gatekeepers of pedigree who might otherwise have beaten me to a pasty pulp.

Those weeks were much like real life, except for my constant flinching. “Sweet?” I said to her in the dark, on my half of her borrowed pillow. We got to the point where she could name that tune in one note. “You have to make up with your father. I can’t take it anymore. It’s on my conscience. You have to. There’s nothing more important.”

She lay on the bed next to me, silent, hearing what I was afraid to say. We both knew the only way that reconciliation could happen. She’d already written her father off, had already given up her family for a higher ideal. I could almost live with a choice that good. Except that her higher ideal was me.

She bought me a little Wurlitzer electric piano. It must have cost two years of saltwater taffy savings, and it was only a tenth of the instrument that I had sold for a few hundred dollars after my father died. She showed up at my place the day of delivery, hiding her face in excitement and fear. “I thought you might want something to practice on. And to work with. While you’re…while you aren’t…”

She couldn’t have hurt me more with a knife to the chest. I stared at the piano in its shipping container, the open casket of a lynching victim. I couldn’t tell her. The little thing was a double amputee. It had only forty-four keys, half what I needed to believe in it. Even the simplest arrangement would scrape its head on the ceiling. The thing’s action was like a screen door that wouldn’t close. I felt I was playing in winter gloves. It resembled a piano less than the Glimmer Room resembled those concert halls Jonah and I had once played. As I looked at her gift, Teresa sat hunched, a hand to her mouth, afraid to breathe, estranged from her family, her savings account wiped out. We’d all die of unreturnable kindness.

Misplaced love supreme.

“It’s wonderful. I can’t believe it. You shouldn’t have. I don’t deserve this. We have to send it back.” A look came over her like I’d killed her dog. “Of course we’ll keep it. Come on. Let’s sing.”

Leaden-fingered, I spun out a few arpeggios and launched into “Honeysuckle Rose.” All she’d hoped for. I could do that much.