Private Life (41 page)

recognized the implications of this. She glanced at Helen, who was twisting her

handkerchief in her lap. Len, Margaret discerned from the tilt of his chin, had no idea of

the intelligence that was passing among the women in the room.

She said to Mrs. Branch, as if changing the subject and making small talk, "How

long have you been in Vallejo?"

"About a year. I'll say this, it's dull here, but too many people at the same time."

This was an idle remark, meant to cover her discomfort while she came up with a

response to what she was figuring out. Helen coughed. Mrs. Branch said to her, "Well,

you better get out to the scullery, miss. There's potatoes that need peeling."

Helen got up to leave the room--Len watched her out of the corner of his eye. She

was an unlucky girl, Margaret thought, but not as unlucky as she might be, married to

Len. Mrs. Branch said, "We hardly know a soul in town, really. I'm so busy with the

boarders--"

"I think Vallejo's an interesting town. Lots of odd little shops to look at ..."

"If you can get out."

"Well, if you do ..." She took a bit of notepaper out of her bag and wrote Mrs.

Kimura's name on it. Len watched her. She said, "This is a shop I like." She pressed the

note into Mrs. Branch's hand. There was nothing else to say, so she and Len stood up.

With each step out of the boarding house, Len got perkier, and by the time they

were sitting in the Franklin, he seemed almost giddy. She said, "You'll be finding another

room after this, I imagine."

"Why should I? I like my room there, and it's cheap."

"Don't you think it would be the kinder thing to do?" She paused. "And your wife

must miss you."

"Maybe."

He hummed a little tune as they drove back across the causeway.

She dropped Len off at the house and drove to the pond. She expected her spirits

to lift at the sight of the coot chicks, who were getting quite large. She wondered when

they were going to start learning to fly, for she had seen no signs of that.

The mist was heavier than it had been in town, and she didn't have a blanket to sit

upon, so she simply walked toward the pond and then around it. One parent and four

chicks were foraging along the edge, two of the chicks alternately walking and swimming

in the shallows. Another chick was out in the middle, swimming in circles. She could not

find the other chicks and the other adult. She walked around the pond until almost dark,

looking as best she could into the shadows of cattails and damp grasses. A couple of

times, she heard noises, as if some animal were rustling about in there, but she couldn't

see anything. By the time she left, Margaret could only make out the adult and three of

the chicks. As she drove home, she wondered if she had actually counted five chicks. She

was no longer ready to say that she had.

Len was gone for the evening. Andrew, for once, was sitting in the front room,

not even reading a book. When she walked in the door, he stood up and came over to her.

She was shivering and looked around for her shawl. He loomed over her. "My dear,

where have you been? You're all wet!"

"I was up at the pond, looking at the coots."

"Every time I want you, it seems you are gone."

"Does it? I thought you and Len were very busy." She slid out from under his

shadow, but he followed her.

She envisioned the pond as if from above--a large target with bull's-eyes

swimming about, getting bigger by the day. Andrew went on: "We are busy because our

assault on ignorance, on the willful ignorance of my fellow scientists, is two-pronged. We

must take them by storm, as we have not succeeded simply by being straightforward. My

own preference would not be, I assure you, to have my name and accomplishments

trumpeted about the way young Leonard proposes to do, but, as much as I need to present

my ideas, I also need an advocate to set them in context."

"Is Len your best possible advocate, Andrew?"

"I have seen several pages of his writing, my dear, and it struck me as quite lucid

and sufficiently detailed."

"But he's a veterinarian. He doesn't have a reputation in your field." She pushed

these responses out, hardly noticing what she was saying, she was so cold and disinclined

to have this conversation.

"He's quite as intelligent, though an autodidact, as some of, many of, those who

purport to have degrees and monetary support. The substance of the ideas will carry the

book."

"He isn't attached to any institution." She didn't think a bobcat would venture into

the water, and the coots did stay in or close to the water. The nest she had seen was not

ten feet from the water. A fox, though, or a coyote might swim. Foxes had been known to

swim for prey. Even so, the real danger would be from hawks or eagles.

"That is a concern, I don't disagree with you. But he is my repository now! I have

given myself over to him in a way I might not have done if ..."

It was a terrible thing, the way the hawks and eagles allowed those infinitesimal

just-hatched chicks to grow and put on bulk so that they would be worth eating. "If

what?" she said, suddenly sounding exasperated even to herself. "I need my sh--"

"If I hadn't been so drawn in by his flattery. I admit that--that--"

The nest of the Canada geese recurred to her, now as an omen, the one egg broken

in pieces and the nest ripped, flattened. She had thought the coots more careful, more

deserving of survival, because they had built their nest in a secret spot.

"--that--that I am, or perhaps I seem, egotistical to some." He paused now, and

looked at her, waiting for her to contradict this assertion. But she did not. "But it doesn't

seem like ego, my dear, from the inside. I don't know what it does seem like, really." He

said this in a pleading tone.

She had no reply, except that when he said "egotistical to some," she could not

help thinking, "Egotistical to everyone." Everyone. Everyone. She felt the word rise to

her lips and her whole body shift from cold to hot with the temptation to tell him the truth

for once. She stepped away from him again, and he followed her again. She thought of

her mother and Mrs. Early. The one so busy, the other so elegant. They had known what

marriage was like. They had known what
Andrew
was like. That they had colluded in

bringing this very moment about made her tremble with something unspeakable.

He stared at her. She was standing almost in the corner, and she had no idea what

he wanted from her. He said, "I feel about Leonard that his mind is just a little common,

you see. When we drive to my talks, he tells me all about the girls he has come to know

in Vallejo, several girls, I can't keep their names straight, but he thinks that I will be

impressed by such conquests. How can he think that, I ask you, having interviewed me

for all these months, having listened to me reveal my, my thoughts to him about all those

things that happened in Chicago and Berlin? How can he think that of me?"

She had a passing revelation that what Len Scanlan lingered in California for was

nothing so simple as money or scientific innovation, but she said, "What happened in

Chicago, Andrew?"

He blinked, and she realized that she had spat this out. Her hands were trembling,

too. She grasped the left one with the right one. It seemed to her that if he said the word

"universe," she really would scream. The universe, of course, was the very thing that

circled around those chicks, vast and senseless.

Apparently, he decided to ignore this question, but his tone was conciliatory. "It's

just that even in my new book, which you have so kindly typed over and over, I get lost

in the versions. Did I say this already? Have I cut that? What is the best way of

formulating a thought?" Then his voice rose and he put his hands in his hair. "The ideas

simply come as a torrent! I can't describe it. When I spent time in Washington and

Chicago, it was nearly--It was insupportable. I would be thinking one thing, and almost

have it, almost understand it, some small thing, and then a thought, or even a word,

dropped by a colleague, and that thing I was thinking simply lost shape utterly. It was a

terrifying and frustrating feeling, I can't describe--"

What this conversation felt like, it occurred to her, was the ringing of many bells,

their mouths yawning, their clappers hammering relentlessly. But finally, after a very

long moment, she managed to say, "Andrew, you are sixty-one years old. You must have

accepted that you have to accommodate--"

"Possibly that is what other men do, but I can't do that!"

"But what difference, in the end ..." She trailed off, having said the most hurtful

thing, but Andrew didn't register it. He exclaimed, "And I have! I have settled for less! I

have settled for nothing! Can you not see that?"

What Margaret saw was that he would dispatch Len back to the East if she were

to say anything right then about Helen Branch, or her own suspicions concerning Len's

independent activities. All she had to do was confirm his doubts. Even a look might be

enough. But she didn't say any word at all, didn't look at him.

Andrew said, "You will tell me that it's best to make of it what we can."

She remained silent, eyes down.

Now he sighed. Then, "If Leonard has been given me as the instrument, so be it."

So he was transformed once again. He said, "So many have died thinking their

work had come to nought. Galileo. All of them, really." She lifted her eyes, no longer in

danger. He smoothed down his mustache and then, almost jaunty, turned toward his

study. He patted her arm. "Well, good night, my dear."

Margaret emerged from her corner and fell into her chair.

Later, she heard him leave for the observatory.

When she next got to the pond, she realized at once that the slaughter had

progressed. In an hour of looking about, she saw only three of the chicks, two rather large

and one smaller. The three went about together, pecking up leaves and seeds and insects,

swimming, tramping along the edge of the water. They still had their fluff, or most of it;

had neither molted to actual feathers nor learned, as far as she could tell, to fly. It was

tormenting to her that everything she noticed about them endeared them to her, and yet

proved to her that they were doomed.

Two days later, there was one left. The next day, that one was gone. She did weep

tears. She did. She also took Mr. Kimura's picture off the wall and put it in a closet.

ON the way home from a talk in Salinas, Andrew and Len stopped at the

racetrack and visited Pete at his stall. Len found the denizens of the racetrack "low," but

Andrew was reminded of times he had enjoyed with his mother at Saratoga and

somewhere in Europe. The visit made him jovial for a day or two, and he kept saying,

"My dear, you should visit him. He asked for you. You would enjoy the equines a great

deal." And again, "The air is quite bracing there, my dear. It would do you good." And

again, "A change is always revivifying."

Margaret felt herself resist until he said, "And why don't you take those screens of

his back to him? The scroll, too."

She said, "Surely he doesn't want to keep them in a horse stall at the racetrack."

"Then, my dear, he will find a place for them or sell them."

She loaded the artworks in the back of the Franklin and dropped Andrew and Len

at the train station so they could go to Santa Barbara for Andrew's talk at the Club of

Fifty. The Club of Fifty was giving them first-class tickets, overnight accommodations at

the recently opened Biltmore in Montecito, and a fee of four hundred dollars. Andrew

was very excited, and both of them had been looking forward to the date for two and a

half months. His topic was to be "Are New Ideas in Science Inherently Different from

Old Ones?" That answer, of course, was "no." His audience would be uniformly old, so

he expected them to be receptive.

She circumnavigated the bay west of Oakland, then cut across by means of the

Dumbarton Bridge, where she was stopped for quite a while when it lifted to allow a ship

to pass, but the lifting itself was rather an interesting sight, and so she didn't mind. What

was funny to her was how archaic the Franklin looked among all the other cars, but it was

still beautiful, and it ran perfectly.

She drove through the gates at Tanforan, and heads turned and men in fedoras

with cigars poking out of their faces and little books and pencils in their hands smiled at

her. It was just after eight, and horses were still training. As Pete had told Andrew, there

was as yet no racing. Most of the horses wore blankets over their haunches, and their

riders leaned into themselves, keeping one hand on the reins and putting the other in their

armpits. They all had their caps pulled down over their ears, breath pluming out of their

mouths. The horses' shoes rang on the cold ground. Piles of soiled bedding seemed to

smoke between the barns. And the fragrance did please her.

She found Pete walking from the track behind three of his animals. When he saw

her, he said, "Goodness me, an apparition!" He kissed her on the cheek before he looked

around, then he said, "Where is Andrew?"