He does the probabilities in his head: two random walks, at staggered starts. The odds of finding her are best if he stays within a narrow radius of this spot. For this is where they returned the boy, back in time, back before the war, back when love between him and his wife was still impossible.
This is where his daughter finds him, thirty minutes later. He’s the easiest mark on the Mall to find: a white, scattered man tacking at random across an ebbing sea of brown. She’d have found him ages ago, but for her certainty that even the brilliant scientist would eventually stumble onto the obvious. She strides up to him, shaking her head: helpless, hopeless.
He’s wild at the sight of her. “I knew I’d find you here!” He trembles in the face of explanation. “Where were you? Who have you been with? Did you speak with anyone?”
His need is so great, she can’t even rebuke him. “For God’s sake, Da. I’ve been sitting on the bus, waiting for you. They’re going to leave without us.”
She drags him back as fast as his legs can manage. Only once does he stop and cast a glance behind them. No revelation. Nothing to see. A man on roller skates in a sagging red sash. Volunteer crews sweeping up the litter. He feels the past’s signal dim and slip away from him: free at last.
SPRING 1940 – WINTER 1941
David Strom married Delia Daley in Philadelphia on April 9, 1940. As the two exchanged vows in the dingy Seventh Ward courthouse, the Nazis swarmed over Denmark and Norway.
The ceremony was small and apologetic. The twins wore matching tan crocheted vests over light burgundy dresses. Charles put on his Sunday best. Michael’s limbs stuck an inch too far out of the blue suit that had fit him at Christmas, just four months ago. Dr. Daley’s majestic black tux showed up the groom, who nevertheless outdid himself in double-breasted gray. The bride’s mother wore the shining green silk dress she wanted to be buried in. The bride was radiant in white.
Whatever else she thought about this marriage, Nettie Ellen had assumed it would take place in Bethel Covenant, where she and William had married. The church she’d raised her children in. The church where Delia learned to sing.
“They won’t do it,” Delia said.
“Reverend Fredrick? ’Course he’ll do it. That man baptized you.”
“Yes, Mama. But he didn’t baptize David.”
Nettie Ellen considered this technicality. “He can do that first, then take care of the two of you after.”
“My mother wants you to convert.” Delia groaned the eleventh-hour warning while holding her fiancé in the dark of his tiny Washington Heights apartment. She tried to laugh it off, and failed. “So we can marry in her church.”
His answer, when it came, unmade her. “Once, I almost made a religious conversion. When I was a boy. My father taught mathematics in a special high school. My mother made clothing, at our home. Before the world war, they were lucky to work at all. But under Weimar, for a little while, times were better to the Jews. Rathenau became foreign minister. Israelites were burning new paths.”
“Blazing.”
“Yes. Then times were not so good again. People said the Jew lost the war for Germany. ‘Sold it down’: Do you say it so? How else could Germany lose such a conflict? Even my father was becoming anti-Jew. He had no patience for the old ways. Everything was reason and formula. His family was German, for two hundred years. For a long time already, they had been students of fact and reason, not the shul. Then, when I turned eleven, anti-Jews forced Rathenau’s auto off the road and filled him with bullets. They even bombed the auto to be certain.”
Delia gripped him tighter about the wrists. He returned her grip: all he had in this life, except ideas.
“After that, the way is blocked for most Jewish people, even the non-Jew Jews, like my father. They can only advance in jobs without interest or value. Like theoretical physics! And even here, the paths are often closed. My father wanted every chance for our future. My sister became an office worker. He hoped for me to finish Gymnasium. Even such a dream was tempting the gods to strike us. I finished Gymnasium two years early, but here I am: still in school. And Max Strom, who was finished with Judaism forever, and his Rebecca, they are …”
He lapsed into a dark place, hiding in a neutral country. Delia followed him, knowing the way from long remembering.
“So it always has been, for us! A funny thing, though. When I was still young? My father said, Go: convert. Advance. Become something. I read your Gospels. I found much truth in them. ‘Do not gather up treasures in this world, but gather them up in the next.’ These words moved me deeply. But they left me in a paradox.”
She shook her head, up against his chest. “I don’t understand.”
“If I want to get ahead, I must become a Christian. But if I use Christianity to get ahead, I lose my soul!”
She laughed a little with him, against him. “Light gain makes heavy loss.”
“Light? This is what you say?” He sat up and scribbled the phrase into his dog-eared notebook, along with a diagram. To show his father someday, on the other side of light.
She watched him, fascinated. “The notebook industry’s going to explode after you marry me, Mr. Strom.”
“You are Christian?” he asked. “You believe in the Gospels?”
No one had ever asked her point-blank. It had never struck her to ask herself. “I believe … there must be something bigger and better than us.”
“Yes!” His whole face celebrated. “Yes. This is what I believe.”
“But you don’t call it God.”
His eyes worshiped her. “It’s bigger than my name. Better.”
She felt his forehead with the back of her hand, teased up his eyelids with her finger, and gazed in. “I thought mathematics ruled everything for your people.”
“My people? My people! Yes, surely. But what rules mathematics?”
Later, just before she left to spend the night at her cousin’s on 136th and Lenox, he asked, “How will we raise our children?”
Nothing would ever be a given again. From now on: slow, tentative, experimental, at best an hour ahead of what they knew for certain. The bird and the fish could fall in love. Building the nest would go on forever. Every answer seemed a death. At last, she said, “We can raise them to choose.”
He nodded. “I can become a Christian.”
“Why?” She straightened his glasses and pushed his limp forelock back on top of his head. “So we can marry in a church? That’s light gain if ever there was one!”
“Not for the church. For your mother.”
It sounded to her more than the Gospels. She wanted to say, You out-Christian the Christians. But in that year, the compliment would have damned him. “No. Let’s get married by a justice. We’ll get the earth part straightened out first. Plenty of time for heaven later.”
They married in a courtroom as his Europe burned. He wasn’t sure how many Stroms might have come, even if he could have found them. Years ago, while he was at university, his sister, Hannah, had married a Bulgarian intellectual. Their mother had to be dragged to the wedding. An atheist socialist Slav: The man’s not anything! Where will they live? Who will they be?
The Daleys turned out for them in force, all the way out to Delia’s cousins. The courtroom filled with a forced merriment that the justice, an old Spanish exile darker than Delia, scowled at. Was the couple sure? he asked. But that’s what he had to ask everyone. And everyone, the judge’s sagging, defeated shoulders attested, was always sure.
Three of Strom’s Columbia physics colleagues—all Central European émigrés who shared Strom’s passion for music—came out together. “To console your unfortunate bride.” The happy, napkin-scribbling wizard had helped each of them with some intractable problem in multiple dimensions, and they owed him. A day in Philadelphia was almost a vacation. But seeing them arrive, Strom wept in gratitude. They sat in the back of the court during the lightning ceremony, sparring with one another in something like Greek, hushing only when the
justice glared.
Franco Lugati, Delia’s teacher, was the only other white, if Jews and scientific Gypsies were granted that category. He even went back to the Daleys’ home for the reception. For his gift to the newlyweds, he brought a chamber group—oboe, bassoon, two violins, viola, and continue—to accompany him in Bach’s wedding aria, “O Du angenehmes Paar.” The blessed pair were far too keyed up to hear the music. Dr. Daley stood at attention in front of the instrumentalists, guarding them. The players left in a rush, one quick glass of punch after the final cadence. Lugati, mixing excuses with blessings, departed soon after.
Once the musicians left, the real music began. The twins launched into a semirehearsed burlesque of their sister’s chosen art, complete with lavish costume changes, their parody so broad even David Strom figured out when to laugh. Then, knowing their father could hardly forbid it in such a crowd, they laid down a shimmering, sulky, piano twelve-bar while Michael improvised on the sorrows of matrimony and the end of freedom. Charles ran upstairs and returned with his tenor sax. By then, Delia Daley Strom was too blissful to pretend to moan. She even shoved her sisters on down to the lower lines and did some freewheeling, high-note riffing of her own.
A hum began from somewhere in the gathered group. Nobody in particular started it and everybody in general moved it along. Strom caught a few words—bits and pieces from the Song of Songs, overhauled in a place as far from Canaan as this world got. But into this, the world’s earliest wedding song, there came words he’d never heard. “Brother, are you here to help her? Give me your hand and pray. Sister, are you here to help him? Give me your hand and pray.”
Without consultation, the knot of wedding well-wishers became a chorus, a five-part soul swell edged with a remembering minor seventh that even in happiness would never go away. For the first time in his life, Strom felt surrounded by a nimbus of comfort. Before the tune ended, the song worked itself up into a wave of pure pulse, repeat on repeat, every ornament beyond duplication.
Throughout the singing, Strom’s colleagues huddled on the Daley sofa, their side plates of rolled meats teetering on their laps. “You are being rude,” David told them. “This is a wedding. Kommen Sie. Go right now, and talk to the others before I throw you all out on your ear.”
But they turned to him in wonder, recounting fresh stories of the Berkeley cyclotron and its brand-new assay—traces of an element that took matter beyond nature’s terminus, uranium. Strom’s new wife had to come drag him out of the heated speculation and back into his own party.
Dr. Daley, his eyes on the knot of whites, overheard the news. “You gentlemen are saying that we’ve succeeded in transmuting matter? Mankind is finally making new elements?”
Yes, the Europeans told him. Everything had been rewritten. The human race had entered on a whole new day of creation. They made a space for the doctor on the sofa, drawing him diagrams, sketching tables of atomic weights and numbers. And so the room divided, not white against black, not native-born against newcomer, not even woman against man, but singers versus sculptors, with no one knowing which art was more dangerous or which had more power, at last, to reverse the world’s hurt.
The food ran out and the guests started to disperse. A peace settled on the remaining party, peace shattered only when Nettie Ellen let out a toe-curling shout. She vanished into her kitchen pantry, bringing back an elaborately decorated broom. “We were supposed to do this as soon as you two entered this house!”
She formed the guests into a ring, making even the groom’s Promethean friends flesh out the circumference. She grabbed her husband. “You make yourself useful for a change.” She shoved the broom into his arms.
Everyone laughed except the astonished bride. The broom—a loose handmade straw scimitar—was braided through with flowers and ribbons of all colors, the handiwork of Lorene and Lucille, under their mother’s guidance. On the ribbons hung dozens of magic charms: infant Delia’s spoon, a lock of her ten-year-old hair, the ring she wore throughout grade school, a picture of her pushing twin baby buggies, a tin eighth note, the curled-up program of her first church recital. The broom bore a few bits of her husband, too: the hands from a broken wristwatch fixed at three o’clock, a single Columbia University cuff link gotten off him by conjure, and a tiny plate Star of David just like the one he’d never worn, picked up in a secondhand shop in Southwark.
Dr. Daley began the invocation, his throat a wide, cold river. “Every couple needs their friends and family if they’re to make it through together to the end of the day. This couple …” He waited in silence for his voice to return. “This couple will need everyone they have.”
While the doctor spoke, husband and wife were made to grasp the broom handle and sweep through the circle’s arc. They spun around twice, touching all the hours of a full day. The bristles of the decorated broom summoned each person present to witness.
“A couple can’t be just a couple if they want to stay a couple.”
Someone in the circle said, “Go ahead.”
“A couple has to be less than two and greater than two, both at the same time.”
“That’s right,” Nettie Ellen said, the broom coming around to her.
“This is the strange mathematics—this is the non-Euclidean geometry of love!”
David Strom looked up at his father-in-law, his grin pulling in his ears. Delia, too, appraised her father, her head hanging like a screen door that had lost its spring. Her doctor father, the man of reason, was a closet preacher.
“These two could be put away for what they’re doing. But not in this state!”
“No sir!”
“And not in the state where they choose to live.”
“State of grace,” someone called.
“Bless and keep,” William Daley ended, so quietly that neither newlywed realized he’d finished. The freshly minted husband was made to lay the broom down lengthwise in front of his bride. On the count of three, they leapt over and landed together on the far side.
All sound gave way to laughter and applause. “What does it mean?” the groom asked.
The bride’s mother answered. “It means you’re all swept out. It means the house you’re moving into is clean, top to bottom. All the bad past that ever happened to you—swept away by this broom!”
Her daughter shook her head, for the first time in her life, truly disobedient. Her eyes were wet and hunted, pleading no. “It means … It means we couldn’t, we couldn’t even …”
David Strom stared at the floor, the bangle-woven stick of straw. His bride’s words came clear to him. Centuries outside the law, barred from the sight of God, stripped of even this most given human right: to marry. He stared down at the floor, this court, this church, this broom, this makeshift promise witnessed and sealed in the eyes of those who were also denied, this secret, illegal agreement, this unbreakable clause stronger than any signed contract, more durable than the most public pact, a vow to match in hardness the swept soul …
The last of the guests vanished, leaving only their wishes. Then the Daley children grew shy and sullen, the size of their sister’s deed only then dawning on them. Dr. Daley and Nettie Ellen sat the couple down on the front room settee and drew, from nowhere, a decorated envelope. Delia opened it. Inside was a Brownie print of a spinet.
“We’re having it shipped to you,” Dr. Daley said. And his daughter broke down, sobbing.
They took their leave in a series of sober hugs. Together, the new couple left their parents’ house, David carrying their luggage and Delia clutching the broom. In a rented car, they drove back to New York. They could go nowhere for their honeymoon but his bachelor’s apartment. No place on the map would take them in. But in their shared horizon that first night, their gladness outfell Niagara.
They moved through marriage with careful bewilderment—a little allegro duet of solicitude. Shared life was nothing either could have predicted. It fascinated them, all their assumptions so comically wrong. They watched each other
at table, over the dishes, in the bathroom, the bedroom, the apartment’s entryway, all custom upended. They laughed sometimes, sometimes incredulous, now and then standing back in belated revelation. In the better part of love’s rough negotiation, they got lucky, for what was ironclad rule to one was often, to. the other, a matter of no difference at all.
Learning each other was steady work, but no harder than the work of being. Misunderstandings seemed always to leave the harmed one strong enough to comfort the harmer. The disgust pressing in on them from outdoors only drew tighter the shelter they made. Singing, they spoke the same language. In music, they always found their pitch. None of their circle of musical acquaintances ever heard them speak harshly to each other. And yet, they never called each other anything but their given names. Simple recognition: the best of available love. They could be silly with each other, full of sass and mock laments. But their deepest endearments were not words.
Two months into their joined life, they were evicted from their apartment. They’d waited for the blow. Delia sailed forth in her finest flare-shouldered blue dress, threading the blocks around City College, looking for a place that would let them live. She carried on searching, farther north, through neighborhoods of ambiguous boundaries. Her husband had glimpsed something. “The bird and the fish will build their nest from nothing!” And for a little longer, the thought comforted her.
The nest appeared by magic. A woman Delia met while singing in a poorly paid choir steered them toward that saint of all mixed species, Mrs. Washington, and her Jersey freestone house in Hamilton Heights. Grateful Delia fell at the woman’s feet, offering free service—floors stained, walls replastered—until the day that even their delighted landlady couldn’t, in good faith, allow her to labor anymore.
For months, they lived in a blessed, stilled present. Then Delia came back from the doctor’s with a terrified smile. “Three of us, David. How?”