Richard Powers (39 page)

“I don’t… I’m not sure what you…”

“The one between Mr. Hitler and Mr. Stalin.”

Strom’s face darkens, and he and Dr. Daley are both, briefly, on the same band. After race and politics, Delia decides, they’ll move on to the third great arena: sports. She gives the two least athletic men she knows a total of five minutes to get onto the last Olympics, in Berlin. They reach it in three. Each for his own reasons is ready to kiss the ground Jesse Owens flies over. She begins to hope, against all reason, that the two men might make enough common ground between them for her to live in.

Her mother calls her from the kitchen. Delia hears at once the premeditated plot in it. “Taste this glaze,”

Nettie Ellen tells her. “I just don’t know what it’s missing!”

After a breadline of rejected suggestions, mother allows daughter to convince her that the glaze is missing nothing at all. Nettie then lets Delia return to the front room, to whatever carnage of cross-examination that remains. But if the men have been probing delicacies that required her absence, it doesn’t show. Her father is asking the man she, well, call it loves , “Have you ever read Ulysses , by James Joyce?”

The scientist answers, “I think that writer was Homerus?”

Delia wheels and heads back into the kitchen. The sooner food is on the table, the faster the torture will end. On the way back to her mother’s kingdom, the thought occurs to her. Those monuments of white culture that her father assaults are not pilgrim stations, but pillboxes, strategic emplacements in a prolonged battle against an invading foreign power that doesn’t have the first notion of what’s being contested.

She rounds the corner of the kitchen into fresh disasters. Her mother stands by the stove, crying. Charles waves Delia over to inspect the damage. As Delia draws near, her brother turns on her. “How come you didn’t think about this before?”

“Think of what?”

Nettie Ellen raps the wooden spoon against the rim of the cook pot. “Nobody told me. Nobody told me not to.”

“Now, Mama,” Charles rides her. “You know the Jewish people don’t eat pork. That’s all over the Bible.”

“Not my Bible.” Whatever provocations she has stirred into this recipe, this one wasn’t planned.

“You should have told her,” Charles scolds his sister. “How come you didn’t tell her?”

Delia stands crumbling. She knows nothing of this man she’s dragged here. He doesn’t eat pork: Can that be? That weekly sustenance, a poison to him. What others? The man she brings home is all alleys and cellars, strange smells and closeted, robed rituals barred to her, rites that will keep her always on the far side of knowing, skullcaps and curls, silver engravings hung up in door frames, backward-flowing letters, five thousand years of formulas passed from father to son, codes and cabalas whose chief historical goal is to scare and exclude her. How much can she change her life? How much does she want to? The bird and the fish can fall in love, but they share no word remotely like nest .

Then she hears his voice from the other room: David . Her David. We are not born familiar. At best, familiar waits for us down the run of years. Familiar is what he can become to her only through life. But familiar to herself, already, looking on him.

There will be strangeness. They’ll hit places far more alien, gaps they cannot close. But this, at least, is not a fatal one. She rubs her mother’s back, between those thin-winged shoulder blades. “It’s all right, Mama.” Covert, and open, deliberate and secret sabotage: all of it, all right. The meat sauce will test the man harder than the meat source. Yet the meal is still a gift, steeped in all the flavors of indigestible difference. “It’s all right,” she repeats, soothing, petting. “A lot of people in his line of work? They’ll put anything in their mouths.”

This much will always translate: This much, they’ll each always recognize. She and the man both—nations inside nations. They may share nothing else but this, and music. But already, it’s enough. Already they’ve tried on the idea together. And that act of pretending becomes a fact all its own, too late to retract: a nation inside a nation inside a nation.

David is a wonder at dinner. Too quickly, he learns enough of the local dialect to follow each Daley, or at least seem to. Already he can tell her father’s send-ups from his oracular insights. He holds Charles captive with the tale of his flight from Vienna. He fascinates the twins, who scowl happily at how he works his knife and fork, keeping hold on both pieces, sawing and scooping at the same time, never letting go. He eats with enough zeal to overcome her mother’s first wave of wariness.

“This is amazing,” David says, pointing to the pork with his knife. “I’ve never tasted anything like it!”

Delia almost spits her mouthful across the table. She gags, hands in the air. David is first on his feet to whap her on the back and save her. The simple act of contact, even in emergency, stuns everyone. He touched her. But David Strom is first, too, back to the sacrament of food, as if no one at this table has almost choked to death.

Delia lasts out the meal. From afar, she makes out the music of her family’s speech, a thing she’s never heard, from inside it. Tonight, the words of that seven-member celebration are subdued, stopped down, toned up. She hears them in their hiding, all the sheltering clan construction in a place that would prefer you dead. Her blackness sits on her like a tight slip, something she’s never noticed, so wrapped in it is she. What can she look like to this man?

And still the meal goes better than she could hope. Ease would be too much to ask. But at least there’s no bloodshed. Everyone’s best efforts wreck Delia to look on. She would never be able to survive these two split worlds colliding were it not for the memory of the lost boy, their Ode. Without the mercy of those words traded on the monument’s steps, that glimpse of long time, this meal together would kill her.

After dinner, David entertains Michael with coin tricks. He shows the boy how to hang a spoon from his nose. He improvises a Cartesian diver, a spectacle that enthralls even Charles and the twins.

Nettie Ellen does her best: all that her religion asks of her. “You are a musician, too, Mr. Strom?”

“Oh, no! Not a real one. Just a—hmm?—a love-haver.”

“An amateur,” Delia says. “And he’s a good piece more than that.”

The amateur objects. “I can’t match your daughter. She is the real one.”

Nettie shakes her head, a puzzlement as deep as the one she was born into. “Well, we don’t have that piano sitting over there for nothing. You two sit down and make some music for us while me and the girls do the washing up.”

Delia objects. “We’ll wash the dishes, Mama. You made the meal, you give yourself a rest.”

“Nonsense. Let everybody serve God in their own fashion.”

She’ll not hear otherwise. So the two music makers sit, each, in their fashion, love-havers. They split the bench between them, careful not to touch each other. They play from Nettie’s hymnal: “He Leadeth Me,”

the antique psalm, thunked out four-hand, SATB, straight from the page until David gets hold of the idiom. Little by little, warming to the old inheritance, Delia edges him down to the lower confines of the keyboard, absorbing first the tenor, then the bass, then all sorts of lines Strom didn’t realize were hiding in there. She lets loose, heading upward, stoking and embellishing, working into a swell that she knows, even as she strays into full-out gospel, is its own test: Are you sure? She probes to see just how he sees her, and yes, she checks to see if he can carry the chords for her while she spreads and flies.

Her father wanders through the room, pretending to be looking for things. At one point, Delia swears she hears him humming along. Maybe it could work after all, this act of total madness. Maybe they could make an America more American than the one the country has for centuries lied to itself about being.

Her mother comes into the parlor from the kitchen, dish towel in her hands, two aprons again flanking her Sunday-best dress. “Now that sounds just beautiful.” Delia hears, I know that sound. Now that is still my daughter.

When they lead “He Leadeth Me” into all the pastures it will willingly go, they negotiate a final cadence and turn to inspect each other. David Strom beams like a lighthouse, and she knows he would ask her, right then and there, to share all time with him, were it not for the warning her face beams back.

“Do you have this one?” he asks. And sparsely but musically, he lays down the outlines of a song she learned her freshman year, a tune simple enough to be among the hardest things she’s ever tried. His fingers clip through the chords, realizing only the simplest figured bass.

“You know this, too?” she asks. Then ashamed to hear herself. What membership is strong enough to keep them from having this same tune? All ownership is theft, and melody above all.

He stumbles through to the end of the first phrase. Without signal, they’re back at the beginning. She lands from above, square upon the first note, knowing he’s there underneath her. She sings with no chest at all. His fingers on the keys grow accurate, in her light. She imitates those pure resonators, a perfect tube of brass or wood. Her vibrato narrows to a point, thin enough to thread the eye of heaven. She floats in an aerial piano, motionless above the moving line: Bist du bei mir, geh’ ich mit Freuden

zum Sterben und zu meiner Ruh’.

Ach, wie vergnügt wär’ so mein Ende,

es drückten deine lieben Hände

mir die getreuen Augen zu!

If you are with me, I’ll go gladly to my death and to my rest. Together, they come back to tonic, dropping into held silence, the last element of any score. But before the quiet dies a natural death, a third voice punctures it. Brother Charlie sits on the arm of the sofa, his own makeshift balcony, shaking his head in admiration.

“Ain’t that the same song the whites used to sing, right after spending the day whipping us?”

“Hush up,” Delia says, “or I’m gonna whip you .”

“How far you planning to drift, sister Dee?”

“I’m not drifting, brother. I’m rowing, hard as I know how.”

Charlie nods. “When you get to the far shore, you think they’re going to fish you out?”

“Nobody needs to fish me out. I’m going to hit land and keep on moving.”

“Till you get to safety?”

“Not safety we’re talking about, Char.”

“Uh-uh. Mind your mama, now. Don’t call me Char.”

“Is this serious?” David says, two steps behind, by every measurable measure. “People used to sing this song while… Can this be so? This song was written…”

“Don’t pay the man any attention.” First time she’s ever called her brother a man.

Her father returns, saving them all from themselves. “Dr. Strom?” Dr. Daley says. “Would you mind answering an amateur’s questions? I almost hate asking…” Delia spins from one threat to the other. Her father hates asking like the rabbit hates the brier patch. “But I can’t wrap my thinking around this one little thing.”

Delia braces. Now it will come: the mighty blow of Things as They Are, blasting the dream she and this stranger have been hiding in. Not even love can survive the facts. She holds still and waits. How foolish to think the angel might pass over them, to imagine they could escape this, her father’s one little question.

The question is out there, running through the streets of the Seventh Ward, over in Harlem, across the Black Belt that rings South Chicago. The question the workless half of her race, annihilated at every turn, wants to ask. The question no person of David’s race can answer or even hear. She hangs her head and mouths the words, knowing them already—the one little thing her father can’t wrap his thinking around.

“Suppose I’m flying past you near the speed of light…”

Delia’s head jerks upright. Her father has gone mad. Both of them: madder than anything in this country’s whole toxic drugstore could make them. David Strom leans forward, for the first time this evening, in his element. “Yes.” He grins. “Go on. I follow.”

“Then according to relative motion, you are flying past me at the same speed.”

“Yes,” Strom says with all the delight he just gave their playing. Here at last is something he can talk about. “Yes, this is exactly correct!”

“But that’s what I can’t understand. If both of us are moving, then we both think the other’s time slows down, relative to ours.”

“This is good!” David’s glee is spontaneous. “You have made a study of this matter!”

William Daley’s teeth clench. His eyes test the other’s for condescension, a level gaze that would expose all patronage. But here is only pleasure, mind pushing through loneliness to a surprise meeting.

“Your time is slower than mine. Mine is slower than yours. It makes a joke out of reason.”

“Yes.” The man actually giggles. “That, too, is true! But only because our reason was created at very slow speeds.”

“It smacks of utter nonsense.” Dr. Daley stops short of saying useless parasitism or Jewish plot . But his outrage is more than public. “Which one of us is right? Which one of us really ages faster?”

“Ah!” David nods. “I understand. This is now a different question.”

Delia listens to the closest thing she’ll ever hear to a teatime chat in the monkey house. The light-speed slowing of time is easier to believe than these two men. The room goes liquid. She must key on either the speech or the speakers, though both are hopeless. Her father has indeed made a thorough study, but the man she drags home will never know why. And yet David, too, is locked in a contest she can’t understand. His work feels stranger to her, in this moment, than the most closed tribal ritual. It smells of unguents and incense. It sits like a prayer shawl pulled around the man’s shoulders.

She studies the white one, then the black. Their animated battle is too much for her. Her father’s disbelief knows no bounds. “The laws of physics are the same,” the foreigner insists, “in any uniformly moving system.” Her father sits still, forgoing reason, trying to embrace the impossible.

They strike a truce of mutual awe, a truce that alarms Delia more than open warfare. Forgotten by them both, she retreats to the remaining domain of common sense. Maybe she’s lost her citizenship there, as well. Maybe her mother will bar her entry.