Richard Powers (45 page)

“Relax. There’s nothing to worry about. Drink up. Enjoy yourself.”

“Lisette. You’re not going through this by yourself. I can take care of the child while you enter your prime. Then I’ll be hitting my own stride while you…”

“While I what? Say what you were going to say, little boy. While I go into my decline?”

“You’ve told me yourself: There’re no limits to the career I might have. I’m a good bet, Lisette. I can keep you comfortable.”

“You’ll protect me—is that what you’re saying? You’ll take care of me and watch out for my poor little offspring when I’m old?”

“I know you think I’m still a child. But someday, we’ll be the same age.”

“Someday you’ll be the age I am now. And you’ll hear how young you sound.”

“Marry me, Lisette. I can be a good husband. I can be a good father to this child.”

“Husband? Father?” She gags on his words.

A trio of riotous high voices approaches them, all talking at once. “What do we have here? Private lessons? Tête-à-tête? You two look like you’re about to go do something illegal.”

Lisette breezes off, turning the trio into a quartet. I cross to Jonah. “Let’s get out of here.”

His head wobbles. But he’s not ready to go yet. He stalks her through the crowded apartment, clumsy, upwind, spooking the prey every time before he can close in on her. I stand on the edge of the gathering, drowning in the general hilarity. There’s no saving him. He catches her at last, by accident, when she turns in the wrong direction. He takes her by the upper arm. “We can do this any way you want. But I told you, Lisette. I’m not leaving you to deal with this yourself.”

“And I told you, Mr. Strom. Everything’s fine. There’s no problem. Do you understand me? No problem! ”

I’m no longer the only one listening. Nearby conversations fall quiet. Lisette makes a comic show of patting Jonah’s head, to chuckles all around. Jonah does his best to grin. As soon as we can do so without disgrace, we run. He swears at her all the way home.

He wants to call her first thing the next day. I make him wait three hours, until 9:00A .M. She tells him again, over the phone: There is no problem. She has to say it a few times and ways for him to understand. No problem: no baby.

He takes longer to hang up the phone than Mahler takes to resolve a chord. He calls my name, although I’m standing right there. “Joey. I don’t understand.”

“False alarm. You both should be relieved.”

“That’s not it. She’d have said that.”

I’m not slow. Just stupid. “She lost it.” I hear the words. Lost it, in her carelessness.

“When? Thirty minutes before the party? That’s what gave her the halo glow?” He wants me to shut up, to never say anything again. But silence will drive him mad. “She’s going to get somebody to do it, Joey.

If she’s not on her way to do it right now. She loves my people. But she’d rather kill my baby than—”

“Jonah. Look. Even if it is yours—”

“It’s mine.”

“Even if… You still don’t know that she…”

He knows everything. Knows where we’ve lived our whole lives.

Da calls to tell us what we missed down in Washington. “The whole world at once, walking down Independence Avenue!” Jonah listens to every detail, indifferent, frantic for distraction.

Time confirms Lisette Soer. No problem: no baby. “Taken care of,” Jonah tells me. Something in him has been taken care of, too. The gap in their ages closes, faster than he predicted to her. He sits on the piano bench, chin on his knees, fetal. But older than she is.

“She didn’t want to lose her peak career years,” I say. Every word makes him hate me. “She didn’t want hormones wrecking her voice.” Didn’t want a baby. Didn’t want a husband twelve years younger. Didn’t want a husband. Didn’t want him.

He nods, rejecting my every sop. “She doesn’t want black. She doesn’t want a kid with lips. Why take chances with your life? Once black is in the blood, it’s Russian roulette.”

At night, he smashes things. He hurls a plate of spaghetti I’ve made out the window. It shatters in the street, almost hitting a pedestrian. Now that we need a road trip, we have no bookings. Not that he could sing. The top of his range drops two full steps. He goes out alone and returns reeking of reefer. I chat with him until bedtime about nothing. Jonah, his slack face unrecognizable, sits and giggles. I jabber to a man who can’t talk back, all the while terrified that the smoke he’s inhaling has already ravaged those vocal cords.

A week later, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham explodes. We see it on the television, then in the two newspapers we buy the next day. The church is a spew of brick and slag, glass and twisted metal. I’m standing on the scorched, frozen sidewalk outside our house that day eight years ago, while the car waits, trying to recognize my life. I stare at this new photo, swallowing down the taste that rises into my throat, half memory, half prediction.

The bombers have waited for the church’s annual Youth Sunday. The explosion rips out the church basement, where the children practice their parts in the special ceremony. Four girls are killed, three fourteen-year-olds and one eleven-year-old. My brother can’t stop staring at their photos, running his fingers over their beaming faces until he smears the newsprint. He’s a boy of ten, singing a euphoric duet for a church so pleased to have a little Negro singing Bach for them. He’s seeing his own little girl a decade from now, the one just taken away from him. Seeing these four dead girls: Denise, Cynthia, Carole, and Addie Mae.

Seven bombings in six months. Bloody battles roll through the streets of Birmingham, like something the United States ordinarily exports abroad. The Reverend Connie Lynch tells the world, “If there’s four less niggers tonight, then I say ‘Good for whoever planted the bomb!’” Two more black children are killed, a thirteen-year-old shot by a pair of Eagle Scouts and a sixteen-year-old murdered by a state trooper.

The nation I lived in is dead. The president speaks of law and order, justice and tranquillity. He calls on white and Negro to set aside passion and prejudice. Two months later, he, too, is dead. Malcolm says: The chickens have come home to roost.

Lisette Soer calls my brother but gets me. She wants to know why he’s missed three lessons. She wants him to call her back. The first time, I tell her Jonah’s laid up with a virus. She sends him daisies. The second time, I tell her he’s gone to Europe and won’t be back for a long time. My brother sits ten feet away, barely able to nod. Miss Soer takes the news with stunned rage. Lisa Sawyer, the brewer’s daughter from Milwaukee, calls me a lying monkey.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I tell her. But by now, this monkey has a fair idea.

August 1963

They gather at the base of the Washington Monument. People pour in from wherever there is still hope of a coming country. They rumble up from the fields of Georgia on broken-down grain trucks. They ride down in one hundred busses an hour, streaming through the Baltimore tunnel. They drive over in long silver cars from the Middle Atlantic suburbs. They converge on two dozen chartered trains from Pittsburgh and Detroit. They fly in from Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Dallas. An eighty-two-year-old man bicycles from Ohio; another, half his age, from South Dakota. One man takes a week to roller-skate the eight hundred miles from Chicago, sporting a bright sash readingFREEDOM .

By midmorning, the crowd tops a quarter of a million: students, small businessmen, preachers, doctors, barbers, salesclerks, UAW members, management trainees, New York intellectuals, Kansas farmers, Gulf shrimpers. A “celebrity plane” airlifts in a load of movie stars—Harry Belafonte, James Garner, Diahann Carroll, Marlon Brando. Longtime Freedom Riders, veterans of Birmingham, Montgomery, and Albany, join forces with timid first-timers, souls who want another nation but didn’t know, until today, how to make it. They come pushing baby strollers and wheelchairs, waving flags and banners. They come straight from board meetings and fresh out of prison. They come for a quarter million reasons. They come for a single thing.

The march route runs from Washington’s needle to Lincoln’s steps. But as always, the course will take the long way around. Somewhere down Constitution are jobs; somewhere down Independence is freedom. Even that winding route is the work of fragile compromise. Six separate groups suspend their differences, joining their needs, if only for this last high-water mark.

The night before, the president signs orders to mobilize the army in case of riot. By early morning, the waves of people overflow any dam the undermanned crowd-control officers can erect. The march launches itself, unled, and its leaders must be wedged into the unstoppable stream after the fact, by a band of marshals. There’s agitation, picketing, a twenty-four-hour vigil outside the Justice Department.

But not a single drop of blood falls for all the violence of four hundred years.

Television cameras in the crow’s nest of the Washington obelisk pan across a half a mile of people spilling down both sides of the reflecting pool. In that half mile, every imaginable hue: anger, hope, pain, newfound power, and, above all, impatience.

Music breaks out across the Mall—ramshackle high school marching bands, church choirs, family gospel groups, pickup combos scatting stoic euphoria, a funeral jubilation the size of the Eastern Seaboard.

Song echoes from staggered amplifiers across the open spaces, bouncing off civic buildings. A bastard mix of performers work the staging area—Odetta and Baez, Josh White and Dylan, the Freedom Singers of SNCC and Albany fame. But the surge of music that carries the marchers toward the Emancipator is all self-made. Pitched words eddy and mount: We shall overcome. We shall not be moved. Strangers who’ve never laid eyes on one another until this minute launch into tight harmonies without a cue. The one thing we did right was the day we began to fight. The song spins out its own rising counterpoints. The only chain we can stand is the chain of hand in hand. All past collapses into now. Woke up this morning with my mind on freedom. Hallelujah.

David Strom hears the swelling chorus in a dream. The sound bends him back upon his past self, the day that first took him here, the day that made this one. That prior day is here completed, brought forward to this moment, the one it was already signaling a quarter century before. Time is not a trace that moves through a collection of moments. Time is a moment that collects all moving traces.

His daughter walks beside him, eighteen, just two years younger than her mother was then. The message of that earlier day travels forward to her, too. But she will need more time, another bending, before it will reach her. His daughter walks two steps ahead of him, pretending that this pale face tagging along behind her is nothing she knows. He humiliates her, just by being. He trots and stumbles to keep up with her, but she only walks faster. “Ruth,” he calls her. “You must wait up for your old man.” But she can’t. She must disown the day he carries. She needs to deny him, if she’s to have any chance of signaling to her later self or remembering her way into the future she will make, the next time here.

He can’t see why he so shames her. He’s far from the only white here. Whites turn out by the tens of thousands. He moves through the gathering, the same one that he saw massing at the end of Virginia Avenue that day he came down from Georgetown, only far larger. The crowd has more than tripled since that first outing. Strom looks west and sees himself, a young man, fresh with twenty-eight-year-old immigrant ignorance, about to collapse into his own destiny. Which way did she come that day, his Ruth’s mother? He looks to the northeast, piecing back the woman’s vanished coordinates as she rushed from her Philadelphia train. Barely older than this girl who walks ahead of him, recalling herself toward some menacing, misread future, the life that life held out for her. “Impossible,” she told him several times.

She knew already. Impossible.

The crowd pushes forward, like that first crowd. He shouldn’t think first. Strom stands at the curb as this parade passes. Then shortcutting across the hidden radius of time, the same parade circles past him again. There will be another march, one that will, in time, turn this later day earlier again. The crowd will surge on, downstream, and he’ll rejoin it there.

They sing, “We shall not be moved.” He knows the tune, if not the words. But the words, too, he remembers from somewhere as soon as he hears them. The words arose before any melody at all. Just like a tree that’s standing by the water. We. We shall not. We shall not be moved.

Rhythm, Strom hears, is a closed, timelike loop. The chorus dies and lifts up again, above the heads of its participants. It circles and reenters, canonic, the same each time, each time embroidered into a new original. Just like a tree. A tree standing by the water. He quickens his pace past the meter of the song.

He gains on the moving march, draws abreast of his daughter. She is her mother’s profile, only more so: the same bronze in a brighter light. He looks on the girl, and the shock of memory knocks him forward.

Every remembrance, a prophecy in reverse. His Ruth moves her lips, singing along, her own inner line.

Time stays; we flow.

He sees it at last, after a quarter century: This is why the woman sang that day. Why she stood next to him, voicing under her breath. Why he leaned in to hear what sound those moving lips were making. “Are you a professional?” he asked. And she answered, “Noch nicht.” Not yet. Moving her lips while another woman sang: This was the thing that made him talk to her, when all the world would have prevented their ever trading a word. The thing that made them try a life together. That makes this later girl, their flesh and blood, walking alongside him, pretending she isn’t, move her lips in silent song.

For two years now, she has sung nothing with him. Since her brothers left, she’s refused all duets. She, the quickest of them all, the girl who read notes before she could read words. Once, he and her mother couldn’t put this one to bed if any voice anywhere north of Fifty-ninth Street was still singing. Now, if she sings at all, it’s away from the house, with friends who teach her other tunes, out of her father’s hearing.