The Time of Our Singing

  She feels him protecting her in turn. He already knows where his family must be, in the absence of opposing evidence. But he won’t say as much to Delia. “You’re right. Everything must remain possible.” Until it isn’t.

  Her husband turns his private grief toward a response unthinkably large. As the Americans break out across the French bocage, David tenses. He hints at his fear to her, all the while trying to honor the government oaths he has sworn. She knows his anxiety. Some crossed trip wire on the map—the Meuse, the Rhine—will bring forth a pillar of elemental German fire. German physics. Some world-sized quantum experiment: two futures, either one of which must birth an outcome that will swallow the other forever.

  The fall turns bitter. The Allied advance reaches Belgium. The Brits and Canadians crack open Antwerp to Allied shipping, and still they suffer no cosmic retaliation. Not a hint that Heisenberg is even close. The evidence builds that the greatest scientific power on earth—David’s world-changing colleagues from Leipzig and Göttingen—have taken a wrong turn somewhere.

  But any moment can alter every other. Rumors collapse back into fact the moment they are released. Some days, Delia feels her husband turning fatalistic, with nothing to do but shrink and wait, the passive inheritor of events too long in the making for him to influence them. On others, the urge to act possesses him, bending him almost double in further, more obscure efforts. These are the moments when Delia most loves him, his need for her so great, he can’t even see it. What comfort can she give him, trapped in salvation’s footrace? She gives him here, now, the sheltered fortress of their rented home.

  One night, the air still heavy with heat and the boys tossing in sleep on the sofa in front of the steel-caged floor fan, the phone rings. It’s a rare enough event in any week, and so startling at this hour that Delia almost sears her scalp with the pressing comb. David answers. “Yes? Who? Operator. Ah! Hello, William.”

  She’s on her feet. Her father, who hates the telephone. Who believes the instrument is driving people schizophrenic. Who makes his wife place all his calls. Who doesn’t believe in long distance. She crosses to David in two steps, hand out for the receiver, while her husband lapses into mumbled German. She takes the phone, and far away, tinny in her ear, her father tells her Charlie is dead. Killed in the Pacific. “On a coral atoll.” Her father wanders. “Eniwetok.” As if the name might keep her from screaming. “They were garrisoning the air base.”

  “How?” Her voice isn’t hers. Her breath presses, and the smallest thought takes forever. She imagines death from the air, the enemy singling out her brother, his darkness a target against the white sand of paradise.

  Her father’s voice waits for a collection that’s more like collapse. “You may not want …”

  “Daddy,” she moans.

  “They were unloading a gun battery off a ship. A restraining cable broke. The snap caught him …”

  She doesn’t stop him, but she doesn’t hear. She races ahead with management. Undo by doing. “Mama. How is Mama?”

  “I’ve had to sedate her. She’ll never forgive me.”

  “The children?”

  “Michael is … proud. He thinks it was combat. The girls don’t understand what it means, yet.”

  The girls? The girls don’t? Yet? As she clings to that word understand, she closes down. Blood beats into her face and her eyes break open. Sobs come out of her that couldn’t have been in. She feels David take the phone, make some hurried arrangements, and hang up. Then she’s being comforted, held up by the ghost white arms of this man who’ll never be more to her than almost recognizable, a stranger to her blood, the father of her children.

  They go to Philadelphia. All four of them take the train that once smuggled her to New York, hidden from everyone but Charlie. Delia stands in the front of the house, under the tree Char fell out of at eight, the fall that left him with the bent nose and jutting collarbone. Her mother comes out of the house to meet her. She’s falling already, twenty feet before they reach, and Delia must catch her. Nettie Ellen holds her hand to her mouth, stilling a thousand shaking prayers. “He can’t be done yet. Too much more he’s still got to do.”

  The doctor stands behind Nettie, blinded by daylight, his hair gone white overnight. They retreat into the house, Dr. Daley propping his wife, Delia holding her little one, and the white man leading his subdued but adventuring oldest boy. Michael is inside, wearing a jacket emblazoned with the Marine Corps insignia that his brother smuggled him from North Carolina. Lucille and Lorene bicker softly on the couch, barely lifting their heads as their sister enters.

  Her brother Charlie, stopped forever. No more bitter-laugh letters, no more razz, no more improvised Charcoal show, no more rounds of sounding or toasting, no more fate-dismissing shrug. The new silence of this house closes in on Delia, swallowing all their sound.

  There’s no body for a burial. What’s left of Charlie rots on a Pacific atoll. “They won’t send it back,” Dr. Daley tells Delia, out of the others’ earshot. “They’re going to leave him in a sandy hole with a six-inch saltwater table. Shark food. My country. I was here before the Pilgrims, and they won’t send me my boy back.” He points at the gold star Nettie Ellen has mounted in the front window. “They did, however, pay for that.”

  That night, they hold a makeshift service. No one but family. The net around them is large and strong. Many have been by already, feeding, helping out, talking and holding quiet. But tonight, there is just kin, the only people that boy never had a choice but to trust. Their grief knows no cure but memory. Each of them has something to recall. Some stories need only two words to play out again in front of all of them. Michael gets his brother’s old sax and shows off the riffs he has stolen just by watching. Dr. Daley sits at the piano, tries a left-hand stride like the ones he used to chide his son for pounding out. For six full bars, he finds the swell. Then, hearing what his fingers want to do, he crumbles.

  Mostly, they sing—wide, spectral, full-chorded things, the intervals cutting through generations. Sorrow songs. Songs about abiding and getting away and crossing over. Then the tunes that seem more wedding than funeral, thanking the dead boy for yesterday, for a joy it will kill them to ratify. The family finds their lines, one each, with no one assigning. Even Nettie Ellen, whose speech has shut down, finds the harmonies slated to her, keeping time—the beat of deliverance—with a hand on her thigh. Bound to go. Bound to go. I can’t stay behind.

  Jonah sits rapt on his mother’s lap, mouth open, trying to join in. Joey fusses, and David picks him up and carries him outside, into the yard. That’s best, Delia decides. God help her, but it’s easier that way. More Canaan, more comfort, without having to make the perpetual explanations. Without having to look at the color that Charlie used to say was too light for pain.

  “Folks will want to come. They’re making a mountain of food.” Nettie Ellen’s barest request to her daughter: Stay a few days. We need to keep together now, sing that boy home. Just stay—the old racial certainty, comfort to be had only here, in the safety of we. All other places betray us. But hearing those wordless words, Delia can’t bear it. Not another day. Belonging crushes her shoulders so she can’t even stand. Run by histories laid down centuries before her own past had the chance to write itself. She’ll suffocate here, in her mother’s dining room, with its scent of wood soap and molasses, work and sacrifice, belief and resignation, and, now, dead children. She needs to fly, back home, back to the project of her family, back to the freedom her nation of four has invented. Get free tonight. Tomorrow is too late.

  She starts to tell her mother she must go. But the woman hears her before Delia can speak a word. A low keening tears from Nettie’s throat, a flood of whatever comes before words, whatever thicker thing words are made from. Her mother sobs rhythm, her narrow chest a drum. The river of loss dam-bursts out of her, up from a world Delia knows only in shadow, bits of ground-up ancestry refusing to be shed, a tongue not yet English, older than Carolina, older than
the annihilating middle passage of this life that cages them all. Delia’s mother comes through, the way she has never once let herself come through in any church. Comes through to the beginning, and this death is already there.

  Then she is in Delia’s arms, the daughter flailing to give comfort. Awful turnaround, nature running backward. Her mother’s mother now. The younger children look on, terrified at this twist. Even William’s face pleads with his daughter to undo what has been done. Her whole family turns toward Delia, searching, until she sees. They’re grieving the death that hasn’t happened yet, alongside the one that has. Five faces beg Delia to reverse the thing she has set in motion. Her mother gasps for breath in her arms. English returns, but thick and low, scrabbling for syllables, cursing her native tongue. “Why did that boy die? All they’ll ever want from us is dying.”

  Dr. Daley covers his face with one great fist. His children swing round upon him, and he looks up, horribly visible. He finds some refusal in him that stands in for dignity. He rises to his feet and heads from the room. “Daddy,” Delia calls. “Daddy?” He will not turn.

  The back door slams. Then the front opens. David and her baby, her second compensation, return. Her mother asks again. “Tell me a reason. Give me just one.”

  David surveys the faltering family. Joseph, too: the solemn child just turning, staring. Delia sees knowledge rise into her husband’s face, that look she must carry around on hers, every waking hour. This isn’t yours. You’re not welcome here. He looks to her for the slightest guide. Her eyes flick up, toward the back door. This colorless man, this man she somehow married, this man who can understand nothing here, understands her. He gives the child to the twins and slips off, the way her father left, Delia fighting the urge to call him back.

  She hums to her mother, cradling her head, as if all her years of receiving the same were simply training to give it back. She says nothing, speaking in the old, discarded accent that comes back so easily. She reminds her mother of heaven, courage, and other foolishness, of plans beyond anything so small as a human ever being able to second-guess. But her thoughts are on the men. As soon as she can, she signals Lorene to go check. Her little sister comes back, nodding. Delia wrinkles her brow but gets no more clarification from the girl than a puzzled grimace.

  Delia stands and cranes, trying to see out the back hall window. Nothing. She makes some pretense—checking the cooling pies—to duck out to the kitchen. She looks through the bowed screen, the one her own mother spent years glancing through, keeping track on her children at play outdoors. Delia approaches the screen and peers sideways down the steep wooden stoop.

  Both men sit motionless on the ground, their backs to the thick red maple. Now and then, their mouths move, forming words too soft to hear across the yard. One speaks and the other, after a long interval, answers. David punctuates his words with hand sweeps, illustrating on the air some halting geometry of thought. Her father’s face folds up in struggle. His muscles dart through all the feints of a cornered animal: first rage, then barricade, then playing dead.

  Her husband’s face, too, pulls up lame, looking for some gloss it can’t reach. But the hands keep moving, tracing their equations in space, drawing their only conclusion. The fingers form closed loops, lines lying inside themselves, running back along their point of origin. Her father nods—near-motionless head bobs. Not agreement, not acceptance. Just acknowledgment, bending like the top of the maple as it fits the day’s breeze. His face slackens. She could call it calm, from where she stands, this far away, behind the gauze of the screen door.

  They stay the night. That much, Delia gives her mother, who gave her everything. Who gave Charlie everything, and wound up paid by a gold star in her front window. But when people start arriving the next morning—the hunched aunts and uncles; neighbors with pans of crisp, pungent fowl; Dr. Daley’s lifelong patients; those patients’ children, many older than Charlie—when every soul who ever knew the boy and half of those who couldn’t have told him from his nickname wander into the Daley living room, assembling like the choir of some suppressed sect, Delia gathers her boys and bolts. She’s an impostor here, an intruder at her own brother’s wake. She won’t inflict that on the others, too charitable to name what has already happened to their little Dee.

  This day, Nettie Ellen doesn’t weep. Doesn’t even protest her daughter’s desertion except to say to her, just before the Stroms head for the station, “You are what’s left of him, now.” She kisses her grandchildren, and watches them leave, stone-still, waiting for the next blow.

  Dr. Daley pecks Delia good-bye and shakes the hands of his sobered grandsons. To David, he says, “I’ve thought about what you told me.” He pauses a long time, stuck between doubt and need. “It’s madness, of course.” David nods and smiles, his glasses sliding down the cantilevered bridge of his nose. That’s enough for the doctor. He does not press for reason, but only adds, “Thank you.”

  The four of them are on the train, the boys running down the aisle, delighted again, released from death, when Delia asks David. The whole car stares at them, as it always does, disguising their curiosity or telegraphing their disgust. Only Delia’s lightness keeps the threatened purebreds baffled enough to let her family pass home safely. Her thoughts have no time for these outsiders. Her father’s parting words to David obsess her. Madness. It’s madness, of course. Part of her wants to let it go, allow her father and husband to have at least this one secret between them. But more of her needs whatever broken comfort they’ve traded. Her father has never suffered consolation gladly. But this one seemed to give him room. She contains herself the whole ride. Then, as the train pulls into Penn Station, Delia hears herself ask, from high up in the atmosphere, “David? Yesterday?” She can’t face her husband, too shockingly close on the seat beside her. “When you were talking to my father? I saw you. The two of you, through the back door. Sitting under that red tree.”

  “Yes,” he says. She hates him for not volunteering, not reading her mind, not answering without making her spell out her need.

  “What were you talking about?” She feels his head turn toward her. But still she can’t look.

  “We talked about why my people had to be stopped.”

  She swings round. “Your people?” He only nods. She’ll die. Follow her brother. Become nothing.

  “Yes. He asked me why I was not … fighting in the army.”

  “My God. Did you tell him?”

  Her husband spreads his hands upward. Saying, How could I? Saying, Forgive me: yes.

  The train slumps to a halt. She gathers her boys, the whole car still turning covertly to check if her children are really hers. Her Jonah pranks and sings, struggling to escape his mother’s hand and dash out the train door onto the platform. But her Joey looks up at her, searching for reassurance, as if the trip to Philadelphia, his dead uncle, has just come home. His eyes lock on hers, darting diagonally, early into old age, nodding at her, the same huge motionless nod her father succumbed to only yesterday.

  She must know. She waits until they’re standing on the platform, an island of four in a swarming sea. “David? Was there more?”

  He studies her as they follow the departing passengers. More. There’s always more. “I told him what … my people think.” He twists the words, through the corner of his mouth. She thinks he has turned on her, gone cruel. He shepherds the boys through the crowd, out onto the street and their next public humiliation, talking as he walks. “I told him what Einstein says. Minkowski. ‘Jewish physics.’ Time backward and time forward: Both are always. The universe does not make a difference between the two. Only we do.”

  She grabs his elbow, pulling until he stops. People flow past them. She doesn’t hear their curses. She hears only what she heard the day they met—the message from that long-ago future she’s forgotten.

  “It’s true,” her husband says. “I told him that the past goes on. I told him that your brother still is.”

  MY BROTHER AS LOG
E

  I listen to Jonah’s recording, and the year comes back intact. Comes back, as if that year had hurtled off somewhere while I stood still. The needle has only to touch down onto that circle of black vinyl and he’s standing in front of me. Aside from the scratches and pops, the scattered flyspecks in amber that accumulate over years of listening, we’re back on that day we laid the tracks down, two boys on the verge of the big time, the night before Watts exploded.

  Da liked to say you can send a message “down into time.” But you can’t send one back up. He never explained to me how you could send any message, in any direction, and expect it to reach its mark. For even if the message arrives intact, everything it speaks about will have already changed.

  My brother’s debut recording, Lifted Voice—a title he hated—was released, to several favorable and even a few excited reviews. Purists found the recital miscellany more suited to a midcareer singer than to a first-timer. Some reviewers called the sampler approach “light,” saying Jonah should have done a whole lieder cycle or a single-composer collection. This boy’s attempt to show he could sing anything somehow overreached. Yet for most reviewers, the reach took hold.

  The record jacket showed a late brooding landscape by Caspar David Friedrich. The back of the jacket had our black-and-white head shots and a midrange shot of Jonah onstage in concert dress. A silver medallion on the front bore a quote from Howard Silverman’s Times review of the Town Hall recital: “This young man’s sound has something deeper and more useful in it than mere perfection … His every note rings with exhilarating freedom.”