Private Life (31 page)

he'd used had kept throwing samples before him, tempting him to spend more and more

money, taking advantage of his vanity. It wasn't the money wasted, because, thanks to

investments, he was pulling money out of the air, but what would a scientist think when

this heavy, deluxe publication arrived in the mail? It didn't look scientific. He had

thought, another vanity, that his name alone would carry some weight, and maybe it did,

but there was something about the book, he saw now, that was a kind of faux pas. And

his haste in printing the thing had been matched by his haste in sending out copies, and

now ...

By October, he was literally tearing his hair and wringing his hands. He haunted

their house, but then he began to range more widely--over to the observatory, then the

Officers' Club, then into Vallejo. On one of these days, after she had cleaned the kitchen,

she picked up one of the books and looked at it herself.

She managed to glean the gist of his argument, though it took considerable

perseverance, many cups of tea, and a walk down the block to clear her head. It wasn't so

much that she didn't recognize anything--that moon-capture theory was there, set into the

millions of years and millions and billions of what you would call cubic miles of space.

What she understood seemed plausible. First there was gravity, which was a force exerted

between masses, its strength dependent on their size. Then there was motion--those

masses hurtling here and there, though not by any means quickly enough for someone

such as herself to detect their movements with the naked eye. To gravity and motion, you

added in the uneven population of space, empty here, full of galaxies there. When you

combined that unevenness with the gravity and the motion, it was obvious (Andrew

claimed) that the populous places were going to get more populous and the emptier

places were going to get still emptier, because in the populous places, masses would

come together and forces would get stronger and stronger until everything clumped

together, and why not, given how long it was going to be? In the end, everything would

clump together into one big mass, and then, within that mass, everything would change as

the mass got hotter and hotter, and then the mass itself would get smaller but denser, and

nothing could stop this from happening. The logical end to this process would be the

disappearance of all mass, for once the mass had advanced to its logical conclusion,

which was a dot that weighed as much as everything in the universe, the empty part

would disappear also, though what constituted "disappearance" in this case she could not

have told you. No doubt the problem was that words could not convey actual events, and,

indeed, actual events were hardly imaginable. If you did find yourself, as she did,

imagining something, then what you were imagining was wrong. But poor Andrew was

more or less stuck with using words to describe their doom.

Except that, according to Andrew, his own researches showed that the universe,

as big as it was, contained no empty space. This reminded her of something that Sherlock

Holmes often did, which was to give the obvious solution, and then give the real solution,

which relied on the one factor that only Holmes had discerned. The real story about the

universe was that, although it appeared that gravitational force, mass, and motion would

eventually produce collapse, the universe was actually filled with Something. Newton

himself had known that the universe was filled with Something, and for convenience's

sake, this Something was called Ether, or, to distinguish it from the chemical ether,

Aether. This Something was the substance of the universe, some kind of thing that

exerted a repulsive force insofar as it counteracted the tendency of the traveling masses to

clump together in accordance with gravity and therefore eventually to contract to the size

of a dot or a pinprick or an invisible point. The balance of these two processes (the

Something filling the universe and pushing things away from one another, and gravity

pulling things toward one another) resulted in a more or less even continuum of

contracting and expanding. This process, Andrew seemed to be saying, was what was

called Eternity.

She felt his presence while she was reading. When she was finished reading, she

held the blue heavy book in her hand and contemplated it, not, now, as a miraculous

object, but as evidence. There were people she knew who never once in their lives

pondered the nature of the universe. Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark, all

of that was enough for them. Andrew was from her town. What in the world had set him

on this path? A teacher? A book? Whatever it was, it was in some sense an argument

against education--wouldn't he have been happier with smaller thoughts? As an investor,

he was a whiz. As an observer of nature, such as after the earthquake, or out in the

marshes, he was exact and careful. He could draw a bird or a flower or a diagram of a

sewing machine. But day after day, year after year, he thought only of the universe,

which he could not see.

Through the winter, Andrew pounded about the island on great walks which led

him past the post office, and so he had to go in to see if some stray item of mail had been

put, belatedly, into his box. When
Science
or some other journal came into the house, he

tossed it on the table unread, and then circled around it for the rest of the day, eventually

picking it up, leafing through it, and tossing it on the table again, with more vehemence.

These magazines he didn't allow to stack up, as he had before--he threw them away in

disgust after one perusal. His rage and dissatisfaction seemed to fill the place even when

he was quiet. Margaret didn't dare engage him in discussion of these matters, because it

seemed dangerous to her to give him a direction for venting his anger. She imagined him

on his walks, his feelings flying out into the open air and exploding harmlessly, far from

human habitation. Or, since the island was, if possible, even noisier than usual, she

imagined his feelings diminished and subsumed in the general racket.

She distracted him, instead, with a safer topic--the war news. Did he really think,

in December, that the Germans wanted peace? Was Wilson's letter about this sincere, in

Andrew's opinion? Had his travels in Germany taken him to this area they were now

calling "the Hindenburg Line"? And she did distract him: Andrew exclaimed that this line

represented something about the Germans--it was mysteriously east of where many

German outposts had been--but then the mystery was solved (vindicating him once again)

when the Germans destroyed everything to the west of the line, stitched the blasted

territory with land mines, and retreated into their impregnable fortress.

But, whatever the news, it did not keep his mind off Einstein for very long. He

threw the scientific journals away, then retrieved them from the trash pile, read them, and

saw that Einstein's silly theory was gaining adherents in spite of the war. He thought,

though bitterly, that he had to write another book, a better one, refining and clarifying his

theory, and incorporating the improvements to it that he had come up with. He stormed

about the house (and the island), lamenting the injustice of having to write another book.

And his mood began to lift. On the one hand, he told her, he could easily let

himself continue to indulge in vain regrets about how he should have written the book

differently, or how he had been, in his enthusiasm, premature. On the other hand, he

could revise his work, which would take two or three years but result in something more

persuasive. Really, he said, he could see it quite clearly, and it was certainly true that

every bitter pill contained within itself the sweet grain of a larger renewal. How often did

he compare his situation to that of C----now? The very five-inch telescope that he had

looked upon with such chagrin the day he arrived on the island was now precious to him,

while certainly C----, who then seemed so fortunate, must now feel enslaved by his

monster. If he just explained himself a little more clearly, he would win in the end.

Margaret found herself offering to type for him two hours every day--it seemed a small

thing, a way of assuaging, or directing, or deflecting the energy coursing through the

house. She had learned to do it, and it was easy for her--not that different from knitting.

WITHIN two days of the Zimmermann telegram, in which Germany tried to enlist

Mexico against the U.S., and California turned out to be, at least in Margaret's

imagination, very close to the front lines, Dora received permission to go to Europe--first

England, then France, then who knew? Her column was to be called "In Another Part of

the World." Margaret was shocked. For the entire autumn, Dora had talked to Margaret

admiringly about Pete, and though she hadn't actually spoken the word "wedding" or the

word "marriage," there was an intensity to her feelings for him--he had brought her an

orchid in a pot made of a coconut, he had taken her to the Cliff House for oysters.

Remember the way he had accompanied her to Fresno to interview that man in jail named

Osmond Jacobs who had a powder burn on his cheek the day after the bombing and

anarchist connections? At the jail, Pete had helped her conduct the interview in French.

When they came to the island for two suppers, they sat close together and finished

each other's sentences. He took her to meet the editor of a famous poetry magazine, and

the two women gossiped like old friends about Ezra Pound. Pete promised to introduce

Dora to Emma Goldman, and Dora talked about writing a book.

But then she had her ticket--on the
Norfolk
, through the Panama Canal, thence to

Southampton. She was to leave in ten days.

DORA made one last trip to the island, by herself. With her she brought some

things of Pete's--a scroll and two screens, all wrapped in various layers of silk and paper.

Pete had disappeared. Dora said she didn't know where to, but Margaret suspected that

she did. Margaret was reluctant to take the artworks, because she was sure they were

valuable, and Quarters P was a monument to disarray. But evidently she had to--there

was nowhere else for them as safe as the island. More important, Dora herself looked to

Margaret petite and easily damaged, all the while laughing and excited for her new

adventures. And then, on the very Monday after she set sail, a letter arrived for Andrew

from an editor at the
Examiner
, inviting him to serve as science correspondent for the

paper. The editor said that he had heard that Andrew was "one of the foremost

astronomers in the world" and "entirely up to date on every new scientific development"

and "one of the smartest men in California" and "a prolific writer." He would be paid a

penny a word.

It was a shock, but once war was declared, shocks came every day--one day they

heard that the Germans blew up one of their own ships as it was being boarded by

marines. Within a few days after that, San Francisco Bay was being blockaded against

enemy ships, a destroyer was attacked off Long Island, Field Marshal Haig, the British

commander, was advancing first one mile and then another against the Hindenburg Line,

and killing thousands of civilians while doing so. But even so, for the first while,

Margaret could not help seeing the whole thing as the wreck of her own life and her own

plans--she thought about Dora every day while she was out with the other naval wives

who lived on the island, gathering provisions or charitable contributions, while she was

sorting clothing and medical supplies to be sent to Europe, while she listened to herself

talking about harvests and factories as she had never done before (although she could

hardly imagine what it was they were talking about--wheat, barley, oats, workers, bosses,

pig iron, output).

AND then spies blew up a powder magazine over by the bay one morning around

breakfast time. The explosion was a body-shaking roar followed by a brilliant swoosh as

that building and several others around it went up in flames. Margaret grabbed the edges

of the table, the dishes jumped, her glass of water fell over, and Andrew's cup of coffee

rattled in its saucer. It was much more frightening than the earthquake had been, or the

small explosion that had welcomed her to the island so many years before.

Andrew leapt from the breakfast table and left the house. Margaret went out more

slowly, first to the stoop, and then to the walk. Everyone on the island was outside, either

running toward or staring at the biggest fire any of them had ever seen. She got her shawl

and bag without giving Dora, or Pete, or their "marriage" a thought, and ran to the

hospital. Her friends were there--they didn't know what they could do, but they thought

something would present itself, if only fetching and carrying. At the hospital, she heard

all the rumors--about the marine who had been knocked cold on patrol three nights before

by an intruder, and about the men who had been seen around the island, and about how

there were Germans all over the place whom the navy itself had charge of, and who was