Richard Powers (38 page)

He shrugged. My uncle.

They walked back along the reflecting pool. Distance played tricks on Ode, revising his geography every fifty paces as the landscape curved away from him. But every minute the three of them walked, his fear subsided by an hour. The white man fascinated him. Ode kept stealing glances at David Strom, and Delia added theft to theft. She watched the child struggle to fit the man. Each time the German spoke, the boy fell off, bewildered.

Where’re you from?he demanded.

New York,Strom said.

Ode lit up. New York? My mama’s from New York. You know my mama?

I haven’t been there long,Strom apologized.

Delia hid in a coloratura coughing fit. Ode grinned, willing to be the butt of her delight. He looked up at the white man. You don’t have to take that from her, you know. Something he’d heard some adult say once.

Strom smiled back shyly. Oh, but I do!

Without thinking, the boy took the man’s hand in his free one. They walked along, two agitated adults flanking a frightened child.

Ode jabbered to them so nervously, Delia had to hush him to keep him on the search. She couldn’t make out more than half the boy’s panicked argot. They tacked back and forth across the Mall, a skiff becalmed.

I would like very much to see you again,David Strom said over Ode’s head. His voice shook with a fear all its own. Through the child’s arms, Delia felt the man tremble, making his own winter.

He didn’t know. He couldn’t. Forgive me, she said. Unforgivable: twice since meeting him. It’s impossible.

They walked beneath the flanking trees that formed a colonnade of pillars in this roofless church along a nave too wide to span. Her impossible thickened in the air around them. Each step harder than the last.

She couldn’t tell him. She didn’t care to prove the impossibility, either now or later.

Whatever the word meant to a physicist, the physicist did not say. David Strom pointed toward the boxlike monument. The crowd clinging to the spot of Miss Anderson’s miracle had thinned. That is where we need to go. Where we can see everyone, and they us. Underneath the statue of that man.

Delia laughed again, the weight now suffocating her. Ode laughed along, at the foreigner. You don’t know who Lincoln is? The boy twisted his head clear sideways. Where you been all your life?

Ah,Strom said, assembling all American history.

Lincoln was a nigger-hater,the boy told them.

Strom glanced at Delia Daley. Ein Rassist? Delia nodded and shook her head, all at once. The German looked up at the monument, confused. Why would any country want to immortalize…?

That’s right, a racist.

He was not!Delia scolded. Who ever taught you that?

Everybody knows it.

What are you talking about? He freed the slaves.

He never did!

Delia looked at the white man, who fought to understand. The hand-joined trio kept walking toward that monument, the nearest available one. They skirted the day’s makeshift stage and stepped up to the mass of marble. That is when they must have fallen through the side of time, some trick of physics the scientist set in motion, one of those laboratory black arts a conservatory student could never hope to know. Time dilated and took them with it. They climbed up as close to the enormous seated statue as the remaining crowd permitted. They built a scouting outpost on the white stone steps, fixing the boy up high, where he could look out, conspicuous, on the whole visible world.

There they fell into the gravity of that “impossible,” a force not even time could escape. Delia didn’t feel her clock alter. They talked—minutes, hours, years—though no longer about music. They talked around the impossible, in improvised code, to keep the boy from understanding. But the boy understood, better than they. The boy and the man sat on the marble steps, discussing the planets, the stars, laws of the expanding universe. The sight of the two hunched forms undid her. And when the lost boy jumped up and called out, the sound of his voice restarting time, whole lifetimes had rolled away.

The boy saw his brother before his brother saw him. Then Ode was running, this day’s message, undeniable. Delia and David called to the boy, but he was safe now, beyond them. They drifted to the edge of the monument, craning to see the child reclaim his own and losing the reunion in the crowd. They stood on the white steps, abandoned, without thanks or reassurance that all would be well.

The two of them, then, alone. She couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t bear to see if his face confirmed that fluid future they’d just come through. Already the place closed to her, and she had no heart to find it again. She felt him studying her, and she looked away.

It’s getting late,Delia said. I’ve got to get back, or I’m going to catch a licking.

That is not good?

No. Not good in the least.She shot a look at her watch. Oh my God. It’s not possible!

She shook her watch, held it to her ear to hear the movement that escaped her. They hadn’t been with the child for more than fifteen minutes, from finding to reunion. She’d thought it hours. Felt them in her body. Just on the steps of the memorial alone, they’d been far longer.

Yes,he said from a great distance. It does that, sometimes.

How?She looked up at him, despite herself. Yes: He’d been there, too. The trace of that long passage.

She saw it in him, still. Independent proof.

He turned up his palms. We physicists talk about time dilation. Curving. Dirac even suggests two different scales for time. But this one —he bowed his head, the fragile freight— is more a question for the psychologists.

My God. I can’t believe it.

He laughed a little, but just as baffled. Since it is earlier than you thought? Maybe we could find a coffee shop to sit?

I’m sorry. That is the first of the impossibles.

They walked down the last few steps, each harder than the last, driven together out of the vanished place.

Forgive me,she said a third and final time. I have to get home.

Where is home? Your nest?

At this word, its reference to where they’d been, she went hot again. Home is where I have to go back to.

Home is where she has to bring him now, if she is to survive.

That they’ve made it even this far is its own miracle. She can’t explain to her father what she can’t explain to herself. Where in damnation did she meet this man? Where indeed.

“I met him at…a voice recital, Daddy.”

“And how did you manage to miss the obvious?”

She plays dumb. “We love all the same things.” This, too, a lie made of literal truth.

“Oh? Whose things are these?”

“Music, Daddy. Nobody owns it.”

“No? And are you going to eat music when you’re hungry?”

“He’s a professor at one of the best—”

“Music’s going to protect you when they start throwing stones? You are going to sing when the world strings you up?”

She bows her head. The world’s hatred is nothing. But this man’s slightest scorn will kill her.

Her father rests his weight against the arms of the red leather chair. His right hand explores the first patch of pattern baldness on his close-sheered crown. He sinks back in the chair. She knows this expansiveness, his last stage of resistance when there’s nothing to do against bitterness but name it. He regards her, a dullness worse than any anger he might show.

She hurts him, irreversibly, a hurt more damaging than hate. Defeat plays in the folds of his faraway eyes.

She hurts him worse than the famed Philadelphia conservatory once hurt her. Worst of all, she’s used his own words against him, coming into her own.

William Daley holds his hand in front of his face and twirls it: front, back. Front, back. He forms a loop of fingers, almost praying. “You think your physicist music lover is going to be comfortable walking into a Negro home?”

Her physicist music lover has never been comfortable anywhere inside the earth’s gravitational field. “He doesn’t see race, Daddy.”

“Then he needs an optometrist. I’m a family doctor. I don’t do eyes.” He rises and leaves the room. The first time he’s ever walked out on her.

She sets up the dinner for three weeks on. Three weeks: long enough for all involved to catch up with the present. On the evening of the meeting, her parents move about the house stricken and stiff. They’re both dressed hours before David Strom’s scheduled arrival.

“He…he doesn’t take much care in his clothes,” Delia tries to tell them. But it makes no difference. Over her Sunday finest, Nettie Ellen lashes two aprons, front and back. She heads into the kitchen, where all day she has perfected food from the Alexander ancestral recipe trove: pig and greens and pungent dark sauces from old Carolina days.

Brother Michael crinkles his nose. “What are you making ? This supposed to be Jewish food?”

In truth, it’s such a meal as William Daley rarely lets on his table. But today, the Philadelphia doctor is right there in the kitchen, spicing and steeping alongside his helpmeet. And for once, the woman doesn’t shoo the man away.

Charles checks the saucepots. “Man’s getting both barrels, huh?”

His mother swats at him and misses. Charles puts his arm around his sister’s shoulders, half comfort, half torture. “You don’t mind if I play a little banjo before we eat?”

“Yeah,” Michael cheers. “We need the Charcoal show!”

Delia swats and hits. “We need the Charcoal show like we need the plague. And you call him Charcoal while Mr. Strom is here, I’ll tie you up and put you in the cedar chest.”

“How come he can’t call me Charcoal? That’s my name, lady.”

Nettie Ellen points the wooden spoon at her eldest son. “Your name’s what’s printed on your birth certificate!”

“Tell him, Mama.” Delia swipes again at Michael, who stands just out of arm’s reach, mouthing, Charcoal,Char- coal.She steps toward him, threatening.

Michael tears away. “ Achtung, Achtung.The Germans are coming!”

Lucille and Lorene follow Delia around from room to room. “Is he tall? What’s his hair like? He speak English?”

“Do you?” she shouts. She shoos them away, then clamps her temples to keep her head from spilling open.

She picks Strom up at the station. They can’t linger; Nettie Ellen wants them to come right home or call if there’s trouble. There will be trouble from now until death. The first taxi driver flips them the finger. The second drives off without a word. The third, a Negro, loses no chance to roll his eyes at Delia in the rearview mirror. David doesn’t notice. As it has every other hour for the last four months, Delia’s nerve fails her.

She tries to warn him in the cab about what’s waiting at home. She starts several times. Each attempt sounds more disloyal than the last. “My family…they’re a bit unusual.”

“Don’t worry,” he assures. “Life is unusual.” He squeezes her hand, down below the seat, where the cabbie can’t see. He whistles a tune for her ears only, one he knows she’ll recognize without asking.

Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas : “Fear no danger to ensue; the hero loves as well as you.” The tune cheers her and she smiles, until she remembers how that story ends.

When they get to Catherine Street, her family has turned into saints. Her father greets the guest a little verbosely but ushers him into the foyer. Her brothers stick their hands out to shake, bobbing awkwardly, but without minstrelsy or goose-stepping. Only the twins seem remote. They glare at their sister, betrayed. They pictured some other white man, Tarzan maybe, that Flash Gordon, or even Dick Tracy.

Anything but this grinning, four-eyed Dagwood Bumstead with the bumper already sprouting around his middle.

Nettie Ellen flashes about like heat lightning, getting the man’s coat, seating him on the good front room sofa, charming the feet from out beneath him. “So this is the man we been hearing so much about. Finally get to meet you, sir! Ain’t that a dandy tie you got on! How you liking it here? It’s a big country, don’t you think? Now, I’d like nothing better than to sit and chat, but we got a beautiful roast waiting in the oven just two rooms beyond, and if I don’t go keep my eye on it, we’ll all be eating cinders tonight!”

Nettie Ellen laughs, and David Strom laughs a dotted eighth note after her. Something in that delay and in the game look he flashes Delia tips her off: He can’t understand a word her mother says.

Fortunately, her father overcompensates. Where Nettie Ellen’s speech steals richly back home, William’s crisps. He makes a magnanimous show of sitting his daughter down on the sofa next to David. Then he takes the armchair facing them.

“So tell me, Professor Strom. How do you find life in the Apple?”

Now the visitor understands every word. But putting them together produces only a bizarre image of decomposing fruit. Delia fumbles for a shame-free way to play interpreter. But her father follows up before she can.

“My daughter tells me you’re close to Sugar? These are hungry times for the Children of Ham.”

David Strom determines the general dietary topic, but beyond that, nicht . He shoots Delia a look of happy befuddlement. But she’s lost in her own surprise at her father breaking the ancient law. Every dinner conversation her family sits down to brushes against the topic, but no outsider must ever be allowed to hear. Now here he is, leading with the private theme. Delia sits mute, waiting for the smoke to lift, by which point rescuing her guest will be impossible.

“Desperate in all neighborhoods, I understand. But our kind have again been chosen to bear the brunt.

One out of every two of our own on relief. Now don’t misunderstand me.” There isn’t, Delia knows, a chance in hell of that. “I’m not a Communist. I’m closer to Mr. Randolph on these issues. But when half of one’s people can’t put food on the table, one begins to heed the rioters, wouldn’t you say? Where exactly are you living, Mr. Strom?”

David brightens. “New York City. I like it there, very much.”

William shoots a look at his daughter. Delia considers excusing herself to go take her own life. Her father surveys the extent of the wreck. It’s easier to abandon ship and start fresh on another vessel. “What do your people back home make of this so-called nonaggression pact?”