Richard Powers Read Free Page B

too. He had his accented Ella and she her deep-palette Ellington. They never missed a Saturday Metropolitan broadcast. But every Sunday morning, the radio trawled for jazz while David made foot-wide mushroom and tomato omelettes. In the Strom’s singing school, upstart tunes took their place in a thousand-year parade of harmony and invention. Cut-time, finger-snapping euphoria gave those nights of Palestrina all the more drive. For Palestrina, too, once overthrew the unsuspecting world.
    Every time the Stroms filled their lungs, they continued that long conversation of pitches in time. In old music, they made sense. Singing, they were no one’s outcasts. Each night that they made that full-voiced sound—the sound that drove David Strom and Delia Daley together in this life—they headed upriver into a sooner saner place.
    Delia and David never let a month go by without a round of their favorite public flirtation: Crazed Quotations. The wife settled on the piano bench, a child pressed against each thigh. She’d sit, telegraphing nothing, her wavy black hair a perfect cowl. Her long russet fingers pressed down on several keys at once, freeing a simple melody—say Dvorák’s slow, reedy spiritual “From the New World.” The husband then had two repeats to find a response. The children watched in suspense as Delia’s tune unfolded, to see if Da could beat the clock and add a countersubject before their mother reached the double bar. If he failed, his children got to taunt him in mock German and his wife named the forfeit of her choice.
    He rarely failed. By the time Dvorák’s stolen folk song looped back around, the fellow found a way to make Schubert’s Trout swim upstream against it. The ball bounced back to Delia’s court. She had one stanza to come up with another quote to fit the now-changed frame. It took her only a little meandering to get “Swanee River” flowing down around the Trout.
    The game allowed liberties. Themes could slow to a near standstill, their modulations delayed until the right moment. Or tunes could blast by so fast, their changes collapsed to passing tones. The lines might split into long chorale preludes, sprinkled with accidentals, or the phrase come home to a different cadence, just so long as the change preserved the sense of the melody. As for the words, they could be the originals, madrigal fa-las , or scraps of advertising doggerel, so long as each singer, at some point in the evening’s game, threaded in their traditional nonsense question, “But where will they build their nest?”
    The game produced the wildest mixed marriages, love matches that even the heaven of half-breeds looked sidelong at. Her Brahms Alto Rhapsody bickered with his growled Dixieland. Cherubini crashed into Cole Porter. Debussy, Tallis, and Mendelssohn shacked up in unholy ménages à trois. After a few rounds, the game got out of hand and the clotted chords collapsed under their own weight. Call and response ended in hilarious spinouts, with the one who flew off the carousel accusing the other of unfair harmonic tampering.
    During such a game of Crazed Quotations, on a cold December night in 1950, David and Delia Strom got their first look at just what they’d brought into this world. The soprano started with a fat, slow pitch: Haydn’s German Dance no. 1 in D. On top of that, the bass cobbled up a precarious Verdi “La donna è mobile.” The effect was so joyfully deranged that the two, on nothing more than a shared grin, let the monstrosity air for another go-round. But during the reprise, something rose up out of the tangle, a phrase that neither parent owned. The first pitch shone so clear and centered, it took a moment for the adults to hear it wasn’t some phantom sympathetic resonance. They looked at each other in alarm, then down at the oldest child, Jonah, who launched into a pitch-perfect rendition of Josquin’s Absalon, fili mi .
    The Stroms had sight-read the piece months before and put