The Time of Our Singing

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.

Ruth was their peace baby, born three months after the eternal war ended. From birth, she had that soul that thought all things were put here for her to love. She loved the mailman with all her heart for his daily generosities. She wanted to invite him to her fourth birthday party, and she cried until they promised to ask him. She loved their landlady, Mrs. Washington, for giving them a house to live in. She loved Mrs. Washington’s terrier as she might have loved God’s angel. She sang to total strangers on the street. She thought everyone did.

At eight, an older boy in the park called her a nigger. She ran back to her mother on her bench, asked what it meant. “Oh honey!” Delia told her. “It means that boy is all confused.”

She ran back to the boy. “How come you’re all confused?”

“Nigger,” the boy mumbled. “Monkey girl.”

Ruth, the peace baby, child of certainty, scolded him in delight. “I’m not a monkey girl! This is a monkey girl.” And she improvised for him a chimp dance, something out of her own Carnival of the Animals, cupping her lips and aping primate joy. The boy broke into a nervous laugh, standing there entranced, ready to be wrong, ready to join in until his own mother came and yanked him away.

“Is Joey a nigger?” Ruth asked on their way home. “Is Jonah?” In her mind, she’d formed three categories. And hers was the smallest and most dangerous.

“Nobody’s a nigger,” Delia answered, stripping the loving girl of all defenses.

Ruth made friends while her parents weren’t looking. She found them at the mixed school David and Delia sent her to, their belated admission of how little good they’d done the boys through home schooling. Ruth brought them home before her mother died, friends of all shades. Sometimes they even came back, after the shock of the first visit. And through these friends, she learned all those melodies her parents had failed to teach her, the melodies that drove her into David’s study one night, asking, “What am I?”

“You’re my girl,” he told her.

“No, Da. What am I?”

“You are smart and good at whatever you do.”

“No. I mean, if you’re white and Mama is black…”

The answer he gave her then: also wrong. “You are lucky. You are both.” Wrong about so many things.

Ruth just looked at him, a shame bordering on scorn. “That’s what Mama said, too.” Like she’d never be able to trust either of them again.

Their children were supposed to be the first beyond all this, the first to jump clean into the future that this fossil hate so badly needs to recall. But their children do not jump clean. The strength of the past’s signal won’t let them. Strom and his wife, so lost in time, guessed wrong — too early, too hopeful by decades. In every future that his Delia’s lips mouthed on that day, she dies too soon and leaves her daughter hearing only how wrong their music was. But they are right, Strom must still believe, about how the double bar will sound. Right that the world will someday hear what its cadence must be. Like a tree by the water. His girl’s lips move silently. Two hundred meters and twenty-four years away, off where his Ruth can’t hear, her mother’s silent lips answer back.

The crowd moves them on. He and Ruth float down this living river, silting out in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Everything horribly the same: same day, same statue, same thrilled hope signing the air, same brutal truth waiting just off the Mall. More posters, more banners, more protests. People have more words now for what they don’t have. The sound of these thousands of voices billows, eerie and reverberant, the song of a continent that didn’t exist when he was here last. But this is the same human carpet stretching over the curve of the horizon. Strom gauges where he and his daughter stand. He figures where he and his wife were. Dead reckoning, distances at sea.

The mass elation overwhelms him. His sight blurs and his knees start to give, a middle-aged man, faint with heat and excitement. He stumbles for his daughter. She props him up, as anxious about him as she is humiliated. He points a finger at the ground. “We were here. Your mother and I.”

She knows the lore: how Strom met Daley, how she came to be. She hushes him, smiles sheepishly at the circle around them. No one cares. Half a million eyes are on the speaker’s stand, a quarter mile away.

“Here,” he repeats. “Right here.” She stares at the ground. His certainty shakes her.

A flurry on the podium, and the singing falls hushed. Only when the tunes stop can they hear how many melodies were running at once. The PA’s rumble takes a full second to pass over them. The crowd comes to order, fusing into a city-sized camp meeting. One by one, speakers take the stand, each a different shade, each telling this otherworldly crowd where they’re heading. The first counsels compromise; the second scorches with fact. The measureless congregation calls out “Go on, tell it, now!” Cameras and microphones capture chapter and verse. Even ABC cuts away from its scheduled soap operas to give the nation its first full look at itself.

Ruth slumps and straightens during the speeches. Her body registers changes in pressure Strom struggles to interpret. She twitches through the white preachers’ catch-up bandwagoning. She comes alive for John Lewis, the SNCC spokesman, five years older than she, hurling his indictments down the length of the reflecting pool. He speaks of living in constant fear, a police state, and Ruth applauds. He asks, “What does the government do?” and she joins the piercing response: “Nothing!” He speaks of immoral compromise, of evil and evil’s only answer: revolution. The mile of people carry him onward, and Strom’s daughter is with them, cheering.

Fear of suffocation comes back over Strom. If this crowd turns angry, he’s dead. As dead as his own parents and sister, killed for being on the wrong side of a crowd. Dead as his wife, who died for making a life with him. Dead as he will be anyway, when the signal of the past at last remembers him.

The sun turns brutal and the speeches turn long. Someone — it must be Randolph — introduces the women of the movement. An older woman on the dais gets up to sing, and Strom lifts up through his own skull. Still he looks, and still he chides himself for believing the hallucination. There is some resemblance, but only enough to tease the credulity of an old man. The differences are greater. The sheer age, for one: This woman is a generation older than the one he confuses her with.

Then the past swamps him, like pavement swimming up to slam a falling man. “My God. Oh my God. It is her.”

His daughter jerks up at his voice. “Who? What are you talking about?”

“There. This one, up there. That is her.” The hat is bigger, the dress more colorful, the body weighed down by twenty-four more years. But the sound is the same, at its core.

“ Who, Daddy?”

“The woman who married your mother and me.”

A pained laugh comes out of Ruth, and they fall silent in the music. The girl hears only an old woman, no voice left, years past her prime, warbling “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” Banal tune, with even sadder lyrics. Ruth sees what she saw when they taught her the song in third grade: solar system — sized hands cupped around the globe as if it were a prize cat’s-eye. What color, those hands? If he ever had the planet cradled, the better part of it has long ago slipped through his cumbersome fingers. The wind and the rain. The moon and stars. You and me, sister. For eight years, ever since she stood screaming to break free from death’s fireman grip, Ruth has known what this old lady hasn’t yet admitted.

Strom is lost in other songs—“O mio Fernando.” “Ave Maria.” “America.” The voice one hears only once a century — what Toscanini said of her, in Vienna, back in another universe, before that sick metropolis was leveled. And he was right. For it has been a century since Strom heard this voice, if it has been an hour. And even longer since he’s had someone to listen with.

The moment passes, father and daughter frozen in separate forevers, waiting for the song to end. Ruth looks over at her father, her face curdled by catching up to the past. This is the woman, the mighty myth she was raised on. Strom feels her disappointment. He holds still in this coda to his wife’s shortened tune. He shouldn’t have lived long enough to hear this voice again, when his Delia cannot.

More singers follow, with harder memories. Mahalia Jackson releases a mighty “I’ve Been ’Buked,” her unaccompanied voice rolling across the mile of people, parting the reflecting pool like the Red Sea. Then come more speakers. And more after that. The day will never end, nor ever come again. The crowd chafes at the moment, a promise unfilled. Too many speeches, and Ruth dozes. In her dream, she meets her mother in a teeming train station. People crash into them, keep them from reaching each other. Ruth’s children have disappeared somewhere in the crowded hall. Her mother scolds her: Never take your eyes off the little ones. But Delia sings the scold, up high in her range, in a ghostly accent.

Then the song turns back to speech, and the accent turns to German. Someone is shaking her, and that someone is her father. “You must wake up. You must hear this. This is history.” She looks up at him in rage, for once again taking her mother away. Then she swims awake. She hears a swelling baritone, a voice she has heard before, but never like this. We also have come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now.

Now: the reason why her father wakes her. But the thought nags at her between the rolling baritone thunder: Her father couldn’t have known the words were coming until after he shook her awake. Then she forgets, posting the question to a later her. Something happens in the crowd, some alchemy worked by the sheer force of this voice. The words bend back three full times in staggered echoes. Her father is right: history. Already she cannot separate these words from all the times she’ll hear them down the years to come.

The preacher starts to ad-lib, stitching together Amos and Isaiah with snippets of Psalms that Ruth remembers from old anthem settings her family once sang together. Unearned suffering will redeem. She’d dearly like to believe him. One day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation… She sees herself with children of her own, and still no nation.

Every valley exalted. Every hill laid low.God help her: She can’t keep from hearing Handel. Her parents’ fault; a birthmark stain. She could sing the whole text from memory. The rough made plain…and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.

With this faith we will transform the jangling discords of our nation into a symphony.She lifts her eyes and looks out — brown on brown, all the way to the edges of sight. A massive music, beyond all doubt, but nothing like a symphony. Ruth looks back at her father beside her. His white skin looks sick to her, alien. The thinning gray hair, tangled by the wind, is nothing of hers. The words of this speech roll down his cheeks like waters. She can’t remember her father ever crying, not even at her mother’s funeral. Back then, he was only bewildered smiles, his theory of timeless time. Now he weeps for these words, this abstract hope, so desperate and obvious, so far past realizing. And she hates him for waiting so long. For refusing to look at her.

Strom feels his daughter’s eyes on him, but he will not turn. So long as he doesn’t turn his face square on that face, his Delia is still more than half there, at the concert they once shared. When the preacher starts in on those words, the words the voice of the century sang that first day, Strom is waiting for them. He knows in advance the moment when they must start, and when they do, it’s because he wills them.

He’s known the tune forever. British imperial hymnody. Beethoven wrote a set of variations. Half a dozen European countries have their own flag-waving versions, his fallen Germany included. Yet he’d never heard the American words before that day. He did not, then, get them, but he gets them now, after a quarter century in this place. Land where my fathers died. A million times more this preaching man’s land than Strom’s. But handed out to Strom in New York Harbor, with less question.

Let freedom ring.From the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. From the mighty mountains of New York, the heightening Alleghenies, the snow-capped Rockies, the peaks of California. From Stone Mountain, Lookout Mountain, every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside.

The words spark like the first day of creation. Now they might join to do it: Now this crowd could roll down this green fairway, an unstoppable army, and take their Capitol, their Court, their White House by soul force. But they are too joyous now for force, too lifted up.

Free at last, the speeches end. Then the crowd, too, is free. Free to go back to their rotting cities and caged lives. The mass disperses, as it did that earlier day. Strom is afraid to move off the spot, knowing that the edge of revelation must still be there, nearby, waiting for him to cross it. The crowd curls past, annoyed at these two snags of flotsam in the stream. Ruth smolders at the man. His reverie maddens her. She sees him missing the evidence. The Black-Jewish alliance is crumbling all around them. It won’t even survive the bus ride home.

Ruth starts walking, alone. She has been alone too long. Her brothers are too busy to bother with the present. Her father too trapped by the past. She strides off, sure of her bearing, nursing a phrase from the baritone preacher’s speech: “this marvelous new militancy.” It feels to her the only useful future, the only one where she won’t be forever alone. She heads back to the lot where the Columbia busses dropped them off. Even her father will know to come find her there.

David Strom stands dissolved, populating every spot in this public openness. Here’s where his woman freezes in shame, learning she’s been singing out loud. Here’s where she asks if he’s ever heard the legendary Farrar. Here’s where she begs his forgiveness, and where they say good-bye forever. Here’s where they find the lost boy. There, up there, is where she explains how it’s all impossible, their seeing each other again. A mistake, to think any story ever finishes.

When he looks up to locate his daughter, she’s gone. His body goes cold. He has expected this. A sick fascination grips him, and the fifty-two-year-old begins to trot, bolting several steps one direction, then banking away toward another. He’s more panicked by the pattern than by the prospect of any real danger to her. She’s safer on this Mall with these marchers than she is in New York, walking home from school. She’s eighteen; the capital is crawling with police. And yet, he knows the threat is infinite, as large as time. She’s gone: nowhere, anywhere. He turns on the straightaway along the front of the monument, running, calling, propelled by prophecy.

He jogs to the spot where they found the lost boy. His girl isn’t there. He retraces their steps — not his and Ruth’s, but his, Delia’s, and the child’s. He moves toward the giant statue. He looks up at Lincoln, the figure he didn’t recognize then, the one who the boy said never freed the slaves. Every speaker at this rally confirms him. Strom gets as close to the steps of the monument as the press of bodies allows. She must be there. She isn’t. She’s been and gone. She’ll swing past a minute from now. Ten minutes. How can any two paths ever intersect in time? The field is too great and our wakes too small.

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 continuo — 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?”

“You have already seen how!” he said. And she had.

She sung to her firstborn in the womb. She made up whole operas of nonsense syllables. At night, she and David sang part-songs at the spinet that her parents had given them. She pressed her midsection against the vibrating wood, letting the harmonies spread in waves through her.

David put his ear to her roundness and listened for whole minutes at a time. “Already busy in there!” He heard frequencies beyond the ear, making time’s transforming calculations. “Tenor,” he predicted.

“Lord, I hope so. They get all the best parts.”

In their bed, under the gray wool blanket, in such darkness that not even God could spy them out, she told him her fears. She spoke to her husband of permanent doubt, that daily, ingrained wariness so thick in her she couldn’t even see it. She spoke of turning away from baiting, of smiling at concealed slight, of never knowing, of the drain of having to stand, every minute of her life, for everything but herself. Her dread, as she named it, was more swollen than her belly. “How can we hope to raise them?”

“Wife. My beautiful woman. No one knows how to raise children. Yet people seem to have done this from the very beginning of the race.”

“No. I mean, what will they be?” And then, what won’t they?

“I don’t understand.” Of course not. How could he?

“Bird or fish?”

He nodded and opened his arms to her. And because there was nowhere else now, she let herself be held.

“Do we really get to say?” he asked. She laughed into his collarbone. “The child will have four choices.” She jerked back to arm’s length, looking at him, astonished. “I mean, this is just mathematics! They can be A and not B. They can be B and not A. They can be A and B. Or they can be neither A nor B.”

Three more choices than this child would ever get. Choice and race were mortal opposites, more distant than Delia and the man she’d married. Another mathematics came upon her: Their child would be a different race from at least one parent. Whether they had a choice or not.

Delia went back to Philadelphia for the birth. Her father’s house was ample, and her mother’s experience ampler still. Her husband followed, the moment his university duties permitted. Luck brought David there in time for the delivery, at the end of January 1941, in the hospital where William practiced, three-quarters of a mile from the better hospital where Delia had once worked.

“He’s so light,” the awed mother whispered when they let her hold her baby.

“He’ll darken up,” Nettie Ellen told her. “You wait and see.” But her firstborn never did what he was supposed to do.

David wrote his parents the news, as he had after the wedding. He told them all about their new daughter-in-law and grandson, or almost all. He looked forward to the day they would all at last meet. Then he dispatched the letter into the growing void. Fortress Holland had fallen. Rotterdam, where his parents had fled, was leveled. He wrote to Bremer, his father’s old headmaster in Essen, asking everything in coded phrases, using no names. But he heard nothing in return, from any quarter.

The Nazis took the Continent, from Norway to the Pyrenees. France and the Low Countries were gone. Every week, silence fell across a new theater — Hungary, the Balkans, North Africa. At last, word came — a scribbled note from Bremer, smuggled past the censors, through Spain:

I’ve lost track of them, David — Max and Rachael. They’re back in Germany, if they’re anywhere. An NSB neighbor in Schiedam, where they had gone into hiding, turned them in for Arbeiteinsatz. Nor can I reach your sister; she and her Vihar may have escaped. But wherever they’ve gone, it’s only a matter of time… This is the end, David. It doesn’t matter what you say you are. You’ll all be rounded up and simplified. Not one left, and you don’t even get your moment of Masada.

David showed his wife the note — everything he’d long suspected. Each now held a part of the other’s destruction. In that stripping away— Your family, gone — they became each other.

And the boy, in turn, became his parents’ reason for being. Terrified by the uncountable minute threats in every gust of wind, warming his milk to within half of a half degree, they weekly learned that children survive even their parents’ best intentions.

“He’s here already,” Delia marveled. “Already a little man! A whole self all figured out, no matter what our plans. This whole baby act is just to humor us. Isn’t it? Yes, it is, isn’t it?”

The baby gurgled in the face of all his parents’ fears. They took him back to Philly when he was three months old. The boy performed for his grandparents, babbling on pitch, reducing his grandfather to a heap of proud anxiety. The old family practitioner paced and fretted. “Watch! Watch out for his head!”

“You ought to be thinking about getting him baptized,” Nettie Ellen said. “He’s getting awful big awful fast. Oh, yes you are!”

Delia answered simply, the result of weeks of practice. “He can get baptized when he’s older, Mama. If he wants.”

Nettie raised her hand, fending off strange denominations. “How you going to raise him up, then? You going to raise him Jewish?”

“No, Mama. We’re not.”

Nettie Ellen held her grandson to her shoulder and looked around, ready to run with him. “He’s got to hear something about God.”

Delia smiled across the room at her husband. “Oh, he hears about God almost every night running.” She didn’t add, In Lydian, Dorian, German, and Latin.

The doctor deferred the question that Delia knew was coming. She fended him off by pure will, until she was ready with an answer. Delaying until that day when her new family’s strange mathematics invented a fifth choice.