The Time of Our Singing
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 handjoined 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 closesheered 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, Char-coal, 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.
&n
bsp; 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?”
“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.”