Richard Powers Read Free

together, in great gulps of free-playing chords.
    Rambling scraps of song started even before the children were awake. Strains of Barber from the bathroom collided with Carmen coming out of the kitchen. Breakfast found them all humming against one another in polytonal rowdiness. Even once the day’s home schooling started—Delia teaching the reading and writing, David doing the arithmetic before heading down to Morningside to lecture on General Relativity—song drove the lessons. Meter markings taught fractions. Every poem had its tune.
    In the afternoon, when Jonah and Joey raced home from forced excursions to that strip of playground adjoining St. Luke’s, they’d find their mother at the spinet with baby Ruth, turning the cramped drawing room into a campsite on the shores of Jordan. Half an hour of trios dissolved into bouts of ritual bickering between the boys over who got first dibs with their mother, alone. The winner set to an hour of glorious piano duets, while the moment’s loser took little Root upstairs for read-alouds or card games without real rules.
    Lessons with Delia passed in minutes for the praise-heaped student, while stretching out forever for the one waiting in line. When the excluded boy started calling out finger faults from upstairs, Delia turned those catcalls, too, into a game. She’d have the boys name chords or sustain intervals from the top of the stairs. She’d get them singing rounds—“By the Waters of Babylon”—from opposite ends of the house, each boy weaving his own line around the distant other. When they hit the limits of their boy’s patience, she’d bring them together, one singing, the other playing, with little Root inventing spectral toddler harmonies that strove to join this family’s secret language.
    The sounds her boys made pleased Delia so much, it scared them. “Oh, my JoJo! What voices! I want you to sing at my wedding.”
    “But you’re already married,” Joey, the younger boy, cried. “To Da!”
    “I know, honey. Can’t I still want you to sing at my wedding?”
    They loved it too well, music. The boys shrugged off sandlot sports, radio dummies and detectives, tentacled creatures from the tenth dimension, and neighborhood reenactments of the slaughter at Okinawa and Bastogne, preferring to flank their mother at the spinet. Even in those narrow hours before their father returned, when Delia stopped their private lessons to prepare dinner, she had to force-march the boys out of the house to take another dose of torture at the hands of boys more cruelly competent in boyhood, boys who rained down on the two Stroms the full brutality of collective bafflement.
    Both sides in the neighborhood’s standing war went after these stragglers, with words, fists, stones—even, once, a softball bat square in the back. When the neighborhood children weren’t using the boys for horseshoe stakes or home plate, they made an example of the freakish Stroms. They sneered at Joey’s softness, covered Jonah’s offending face in caked mud. The Strom boys had little taste for these daily refresher courses in difference. Often, they never made it to the playground at all, but hid themselves in the alley half a block away, calming each other by humming in thirds and fifths until enough time had passed and they could race back home.
    Dinners were a chaos of talk and tease, the nightly extension of the years-long Strom-Daley courtship.
    Delia banned her husband from the stove when she worked. She found the man’s pot-dipping an outrage against God and nature. She kept him at bay until her latest inspired offering—chicken casserole with candied carrots, or a roast with yams, small miracles prepared in those moments between her other full-time jobs—was ready for the stage. David’s task was to accompany the meal with the latest bizarre developments from the imaginary job he held down. Professor of phantom mechanics, Delia teased. Da, more excitable than all his children, laid