"Richard Powers - The Time Of Our Singing" - читать интересную книгу автора (Powers Richard)

knew what the marriage needed, and together they used the boys shamelessly to hold down the inner
lines. All the while, baby Ruth crawled among them, hitching melodic rides, standing on her toes to peek
at the pages her family studied. In this way, a third child came to read music without anyone teaching her.

Delia sang with her whole body. That’s how she’d learned, even in Philadelphia, from generations on
generations of Carolina churchgoing mothers. Her chest swelled when she let loose, like the bellows of a
glory-filled pump organ. A deaf man might have held his hands to her shoulders and felt each pitch
resonating, singed into his fingers as if by a tuning fork. In the years since their marriage in 1940, David
Strom had learned this freedom from his American wife. The secular German Jew bobbed to inner
rhythms, davening as freely as his great-grandfather cantors once had.

Song held the children enthralled, as tied to these musical evenings as their neighbors were to radios.
Singing was their team sport, their Tiddlywinks, their Chutes and Ladders. To see their parents dance
—driven by hidden forces like creatures in a folk ballad—was the first awful mystery of childhood. The
Strom children joined in, swaying back and forth to Mozart’s “Ave verum corpus” the way they did to
“Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

Surely the parents heard what was happening to music at that hour. They must have felt the manic
pulse—half the world’s GNP, looking for its ruder theme song. Swing had long since played Carnegie,
that brash razz already housebroken. Down in the blistering bebop clubs, Gillespie and Parker were
nightly warping the space-time continuum. A cracker kid in a designated white house in a black
neighborhood off in fly-bitten Mississippi was about to let loose the secret beat of race music, forever
blowing away the enriched-flour, box-stepping public. No one alive then could have missed the changes,
not even two people as willfully against the grain as that refugee physicist and the Philadelphian doctor’s
daughter, his trained-voice wife. They raided the present, 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.