She sweeps the boy into her arms, sobbing. It scares the child more than what has just happened. Now his brother’s up, too, tugging her leg and telling her everything will be okay. David, the equation solver, stands behind her, looking through the door’s glass for any moving shadow out on the street. She turns to him. He holds one hand on the knob, ready to chase down the street after her father. But he doesn’t move.
Neither boy asks where their Papap is. It could be tomorrow for them already. It could be next week. Papap here; Papap gone. They are still trapped in the eternal now. But they see her crying. They’ve heard the hostility, even without understanding. Already she’s losing them to this larger thing, the invention that will take them. Already they’ve been identified. Already the split, the separate entrance, the splintering calculus.
“Nothing,” David says, looking through the pane. She doesn’t know what he means. Her father has left her with this man, this bleached man with the accent, who helped to build that final blinding-white weapon. “There is nothing. Come. We all go to bed. Troubles will wait for tomorrow. Darüber können wir uns morgen noch Sorgen machen. ”
Hitler’s language. She never once thought that thought, all during the war. She stayed alongside him, singing lieder — German tunes, German words — for four long years, afraid of being heard and turned in by the neighbors. But still, she kept their part-song vigil, safeguarding that sound against its many mobilized uses. They both cheered this war: war against pedigreed supremacy, against the final nightmare of purity. Whatever the Allies killed in Berlin was to have died here, too. But nothing has died back home. Nothing but her willful ignorance. Her father has walked out on her. Walked out on her for forgetting a war one hundred times longer and more destructive, the piecemeal annihilation of a people. Walked out on her for walking out. You’ve thrown in your lot. Chosen your side. But she has chosen nothing, nothing but a desire to be through with war and to live the peace she and hers have already paid for so many times over.
There is no peace. Troubles will wait for tomorrow. Tomorrow— tomorrow, already — they’re too ashamed even to look each other in the eye. David goes to work, and what exactly that work is, she can only guess. He leaves her alone with the boys, as her father has left her alone with the family she has made. Alone with two children, from whom she must hide all the doubt in creation. She reads to them from someone else’s books. She plays with them — die-metal trucks and dowel houses that come from someone else’s construction dreams. In the afternoon, they sing together, the boys outdoing each other in naming and making the notes. If her father is right, then all the wrongness of the world is right. If her father is right, she must begin to tell her children: This is not yours, nor this, nor this, nor this … She can’t sacrifice her boys to that preemptive lynching, not today or ever. But if her father is right, she must ready them. If he’s right, then all of history is right, permanent, inescapable.
But her father’s resolution only stiffens hers. She won’t surrender anything. Yes, of course: She’ll give them warmth, welcome, riffing, the congregating joy of call and response, a dip in that river, deep enough to sport in all their lives. She must give them the riches that are theirs by birth. Negro. American. Of course they must know the long, deadly way those terms have come. But she refuses to give them self by negation. Not the old defeating message that they’ve already been decided. All she can give them is choice. Free as anyone, free to own, to attach themselves to any tune that catches their inner ear.
But maybe her father is right. Maybe it’s only their lightness that gives them even the slightest leeway. Maybe choice is just another lie. There is a freedom she wouldn’t wish on anyone. She takes her boys outside, west, toward the river, down to the nearest strip of green in all this stone, the three of them out in the open air for all to appraise. She sees their triad of tones through the parkgoers’ gazes. Her body flinches, as always, under the assault. She hears what her neighbors call this freedom she would give. Striving. Passing. Turning. But what of her boys’ other family, that lineage she knows nothing about, cleaned out, solved, finally, by this world that stands no complications? Isn’t that family every bit as much theirs?
In the park, her boys climb on a set of concrete stairs as if it’s the greatest playground ever built. Each step is a pitch they cry out as they pounce on. They turn the staircase into a pedal organ, chasing up the scale, hopping in thirds, stepping out simple tunes. Two other children, white, see their ecstasy and join, hurtling up and down the flights, screaming their own wild pitches until their parents come shepherd them away, their averted glances apologizing to Delia for the universal mistake of childhood.
The incident does nothing to lessen her JoJo’s joy. Their manic pitchclimbing continues unabated. She can tell them now or wait for simplifying whiteness to inform them later. This is the choice that leaves her no choice. She knows what’s safest, the best defense against the power that will otherwise lynch them. The first attack, the first hate-whispered syllable will name them. They’ll suffer worse than their mother ever suffered, pay most for being unidentifiable. But something in Delia needs to believe: A boy learns by heart the first song he hears. And the first song — the first — belongs to no one. She can give them a tune stronger than belonging. Thicker than identity. A singular song, a self better than any available armor. Teach them to sing the way they breathe, the songs of all their ancestries.
When David comes home, she recognizes him again. The two of them: theirs. Her whole body shakes with relief, as if she’s stepped out of neck-high burial in a snowbank. She lurches down the front hall to grab him. Surely, if two people love the same thing, they must love each other a little. He takes her in his arms at the door, even before he takes off his hat. “This is not forever,” he says. “We will all be back, once more in the same place.” But they can’t be back, because they never have been. Not in the same place. Never even once.
After dinner and singing, radio and reading to the boys, they lie in bed. They talk into the night, softly to each other, after the boys fall asleep. Her JoJo can hear anyway. The words of this conversation go straight into dreams that will vex them for the rest of their lives.
“He’s angry with me,” David says. “Yet I feel I’ve done nothing wrong. Only what my country has asked of me. What everyone would have done.”
This angers her. It makes her Daddy wrong. Some man should apologize, even if he’s the injured party. Because he has been injured. For a moment, she hates them both, for neither saving her. “He’s angry with me,” she whispers back. But she doesn’t say why. That, too, is a loss of faith. Thinking David would never understand.
“We can call him tomorrow. Explain that it has all been a confusion. A Missverständnis.”
“It isn’t,” she hisses. “That isn’t what it was.” She feels her husband’s body tense in the first edge of anger against her, her opposition. Is no one above this need to be redeemed?
“What is it, then?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. All I know is that I’m sick of it. I want it to be over.”
His hand slides sideways across the sheet and finds hers. He thinks she means last night’s argument. This private war. “It will be over. It must be. How can something so angry last forever?”
He thinks she means Rassenhass. “It already has.”