Richard Powers (57 page)

Or maybe it’s not even a woman. Maybe just white doings, white flight. Things she doesn’t understand, things white life has always locked her out of. What has that world ever done but run from her? Why should this man be any different? He has seen some blemish in her, some crudeness that confirms the law.

She has been a fool to think they could jump the broom, jump across blood on anything so feeble and handcuffed as love.

These thoughts nest in her at that weird hour, the time of night when even knowing that a thought is pure craziness doesn’t help banish it. The fear is under her skin, crippling her. Even feeling that crippledness proves that the two of them shouldn’t be together, should never have tried. But her boys: her JoJo. They prove something, too, just the look of them: proof beyond any earthly proof. She rises to watch them in their beds. Their simple act of breathing in their sleep gets her through until morning.

By daylight, she vows to wait until her husband brings it up himself. Anything less would be unfaithful.

He’ll tell her. And yet, he hasn’t. They vowed when they married that no lies would ever come between them. Now she makes this smaller vow, only to let him break the larger one.

“What is it?” she asks, cornering him. He’s barely off the train. “Tell me what’s going on out there.”

“Wife.” He sits her down. “I have a secret.”

“Well, you better let me in on it, or you’ll be sharing your secret with Saint Peter.”

He curls his forehead, trying to decode her. “By law and by oath, I’m not permitted to share this. Not even with your Saint Peter.”

Where I come from, I’m your oath. In my country, we save each other from the law.

He hears her, in her silence. He tells her what she already knows. “War work. Work of the highest possible security.”

“David,” she says, near flattened. “I know what you study. How could your work be of even the least…?”

He’s laughing before she frames the thought. “Yes! Useless. My specialty, absolutely useless. But they don’t use me for my specialty. They use me to help with the next related idea.”

Everything, related. It’s how he even has a job to begin with. His legendary ability to solve others’

problems, to sit in the lunchroom and scrawl on the backs of napkins the clues his stumped colleagues have been seeking for months.

“Let me guess. The army’s making you build a time bomb.” His face’s startle is worse than any 3:00A .M

. fear. “Oh my God.” She covers her mouth. “It can’t be.” Ready to laugh, if he’ll let her.

He doesn’t. Then the law is just the two of them. He tells her the secret he can’t tell anyone. He leaves no evidence, draws no pictures. But he tells her. Yes, it’s a white thing. But it isn’t his. He has been brought into it, along with hundreds of others. A monster thing, a time-ending thing, built in secret places, here and out west.

“I don’t do much. Just mathematics.”

“Do the Germans know about this?”

He tells her about his old friends from Leipzig, Heisenberg and the others, the ones who didn’t emigrate.

“Physics”—he shrugs—“is German.”

He must travel, whenever they need him. No question. It could end the war. It could bring Charlie home, and all the others. Keep her boys from harm.

“Now I am your prisoner. Because I’ve told you this. Anytime you want to have me…” He draws a finger across his throat and makes a slurping noise. She stops his hand. Don’t even joke. He sits with her a little longer, neither of them going anywhere.

“Someday?” he says. “You must tell me something back. Something you can not tell anyone.”

“I already have.”

Joey turns one. This time, David’s home. The whole family sits down at the piano bench to explore

“Happy Birthday,” one hand from each player, with the birthday boy joining in and squealing in delight.

David is in and out of town the whole summer, gone that first night of August, when police shoot a Negro soldier in uniform over at the Braddock Hotel. Delia has the radio tuned to classical music—the station she uses to put the boys to bed. They don’t go down easily in this wilting heat. They need a fan, the music, and an open window to pacify them. She’s asleep herself, well past 11:00P .M., when a knock at the door awakens her. She stumbles upright and throws on a robe. The knock grows frantic and a voice spasms on the other side. She pads toward the door in terror, calling out, “Who is it?” Her brain scrabbles up from out of sleep, fleeing some country under occupation. The door starts to open and she screams. The boys wake; Joey begins to cry. “David?” she yells in the dark. “David? Is that you?”

Her heart revives when she makes out Mrs. Washington, their landlady, even more panicked than Delia.

“Oh, Lord, Mrs. Strom. It’s all over. The city’s on fire!”

Delia calms the woman and brings her into the parlor. But Mrs. Washington won’t sit. If the world is ending, she wants to be vertical. By now, the boys are up and clamped to their mother, wailing. This has some blessing, as it forces Mrs. Washington to compose herself and help comfort them. But whispering, as if to keep it from the boys, she tells Delia, “They’re coming this way. I know it. They’re going to go after the nice houses. Come tear down what we got.”

No use asking who. Even a sensible answer would be insane. The laws outside have broken down.

That’s all they are allowed to know. Delia goes to the front window and pulls back the curtains. A few people mill in the street, shocked, in robes and dressing gowns. Delia starts to pull on a few hurried clothes. Mrs. Washington shouts, “Don’t you go out there! Don’t you leave us.” The boys scramble up, ready to protect her. But another child calls her outdoors, a quieter, more frightened sound. Someone in trouble, a girl whose voice she knows but can’t yet recognize. One voice out of the anarchy, calling her by name, pulling her from safety, and she has no choice.

Delia steps out, just down to the sidewalk, the same few steps she takes every day. But everything outside the freestone house is wrong. She walks into a wall of heated air, a chorus of sirens going off at all distances, wailing in spectral waves like wounded animals. She looks eastward down the street at a pale orange halo pasted against the sky. A plume rises behind it, toward the south. She hears a murmur like surf, and when her ears attenuate, the sound turns into people shouting.

Large buildings are on fire. The glow comes from the direction of Sydenham Hospital. Police, fire, and air raid sirens all blare, the first real wartime sounds she’s heard these last twenty months. Harlem’s going up, giving back a taste of everything it’s ever gotten. She asks anyone who stops to answer, but no one knows. Or everyone does, only no two accounts are the same. The police have killed a soldier who was defending his mother, shot him dead in the back. A group of armed defenders have the Twenty-eighth Precinct surrounded. It’s a thousand people. Three thousand. Ten. A gun battle on 136th. A crowd overturning cars, crumpling them with baseball bats. The destruction is moving southward, street by street. No—north. The burning is headed her way.

She watches as the crowd down her block starts schooling. Even on this street, so far untouched, clumps of mesmerized bystanders turn in tight, frightened circles. Some younger men trot in the direction of the flames, their years of pressed rage now turning them diamond. Others flee toward some dissolving city, west of here. Most stand still, all faith betrayed. The night is a cauldron, the air like fired brick in her mouth, the taste of torched buildings. She spins and looks at their row, sees their house burned to the ground. The image is so real, she knows it has already happened. She adds her voice to the shriek-filled air and runs, not stopping until she’s back inside, the door bolted, her curtains drawn.

“Away from the windows,” she tells the children. Her calmness astounds her. “Come on, everyone. Let’s sit in the kitchen. It’ll be nicer there.”

“They’re coming this way,” Mrs. Washington cries. “They’re going to come up here and get the nice places. That’s what they’re after.”

“Hush. It’s miles away. We’re safe here.” She nurses the lie even as she serves it up. The thing she has seen—her house torched and gutted—is as real in her now as any fixed past. They shouldn’t be cowering here, in this death trap, waiting for the end to come find them. But where else can they go?

Harlem is burning.

The boys aren’t frightened anymore. The night’s a game, a bright breaking of rules. They want lemonade.

They want shaved ice. She gets them whatever they ask for. She and Jonah show Mrs. Washington how they sing “My country, ’tis of thee” in two-part harmony, with little Joseph keeping time on an overturned quart pot.

A quick listen in the front room confirms her fears: The night’s cries are coming nearer. She swears at David for choosing this night to be so far away. She couldn’t reach him now, even if she knew how. Then she remembers, and blesses their luck. His presence here tonight would finish them all.

“Nothing’s ever gonna change for us.” Mrs. Washington speaks like praying. “This is how it’s always gonna be.”

“Please, Mrs. Washington. Not in front of the boys.”

But the boys have curled up, each on his own oval rag rug, cushioned islands on the hardwood sea. Delia keeps vigil, ready to rush them out the back if the crowd reaches their door. All night long, she hears someone out there in the cauldron calling for her. This is how the four of them sit, the tide of violence lapping at the corner of their street, cresting in a fury of helplessness before subsiding just before dawn.

Morning breaks, silent. The fury of last night has spent itself to change exactly nothing. Delia rises to her feet, bewildered. She walks out to the front room, which is still, astonishingly, there. But she saw it. The house was gone, and now it’s still here, and she doesn’t know how to get from that one certainty back to this other.

Mrs. Washington draws Delia to her in a wild departing hug. “Bless you. I was dying of fright, and you were here. I’ll never forget what you did for me.”

“Yes,” Delia answers, still dazed. Then: “No! I did nothing.” That’s what must have saved them. Holding still, waiting for judgment to pass over.

When David returns, two nights later, she tries to tell him. “Were you frightened?” he asks. The weight of foreign words hobbles him so badly, he doesn’t even try for the thing he needs to know.

“We just sat there, the four of us, waiting. I knew what was going to happen. It all felt decided. Already done. And then…”

“Then it did not happen.”

“Then it did not happen.” She gives a soft shake of the head, refusing the evidence. “The house is still here.”

“Still here. And all of us, still, too.” He takes her in his arms, but their bafflement grows. He asks, “What has caused this riot?” She tells him: a hotel arrest. A soldier trying to keep the police from arresting a woman. “Six people dead? Many buildings burned? All this from one arrest?”

“David.” She closes her eyes, exhausted. “You can’t know. You simply cannot know.”

She sees this sting him across the face: a judgment. A rebuke. He tries to follow her—the rational scientist. But he can’t. Can’t know the pressure, millions of lives sharpened to a point, the blade that skewers you every time you try to move. He can’t even start to do the math. It’s something you come into, centuries before you’re born. To a white: a drunken woman breaking the law. But to those that the law effaces: the one standing, irrevocable death sentence.

David takes off his glasses and wipes them. “You say I cannot know. But will our boys?”

Two days after the riot, the boys have already forgotten. But something in them will remember hiding in the kitchen one night while still too young to know anything. Will they know the riot the way she knows, the way their father cannot? “Yes. They’ll have to. The largest part of them will know.” As if it had parts, this knowledge.

David looks up at her, pleading for admission. His sons will not be his. Every census will divide them.

Every numbering. She watches the world take his slave children away from him to a live burial, an unmarked grave. We do not own ourselves. Always, others run us. His lips press together, bloodless.

“Madness. The whole species.” She sits through this diagnosis in silence. Her man is in agony. The agony of his family, lost in bombed Rotterdam. The agony of his family, hiding in the dark in burning Harlem, while he is gone. “Nothing ever changes. The past will run us forever. No forgiveness. We never escape.”

These words scare her worse than that night’s sirens. It will end her, a blanket condemnation coming from this man, who so needs to believe that time will redeem everyone. And still, she can’t contradict him. Can’t offer him any hideout from forever. She sees the mathematician struggle with the crazed logic that assigns him: colored there, white here. The bird and the fish can build their nest. But the place they build in will blow out from underneath it.

“Perhaps they do not have four choices after all. These boys of ours.”

She touches his arm. “Nobody gets even one.”

“Belonging will kill us.”

She hides her head from him and cries. He places one hand on her nape, her shoulders, and feels the boulder there. His hand works softly, like water on that rock. Perhaps if humans had the time of erosion.

If they could live at the speed of stones. He talks as he rubs her. She doesn’t look up.

“My father was finished with all of this. ‘Our people. The chosen. The children of God.’ And everyone else: not. Five thousand years was enough. A Jew was not geography, not nation, not language, not even culture. Only common ancestors. He could not be the same as a Jew in Russia or Spain or Palestine, who is different from him in every way that can be different except for being ‘our people.’ He even convinced my mother, whose grandparents died in the pogroms. But here is the funny thing.” Her lips contract involuntarily under his rubbing fingertips. She knows; she knows. He doesn’t need to say. “The funny thing…”

His parents are chosen anyway.

She lifts her head to him. She needs to see if he’s still there. “We can be our people.” Renewing their first vow. All its break and remaking. “Just us.”