Private Life (43 page)

"Where don't you want to be the most?"

"Missouri."

"That's the safest place, maybe."

"Well, yes, darling. It's unprecedented."

When Dora probed Margaret, Margaret talked about the house--not up a steep hill,

anyway--about the charitable work the ladies on the island were doing. Dora kept

smiling, then said, "I love your life. When I would think about you in Europe, it was

always such a comforting thought: Andrew like a big moving pillar, stalking down the

street, never deviating from the path he had set, and you buzzing around him, his very

own human being."

"Dora!"

"Oh, I wasn't thinking that you were enslaved or anything." She peeped at

Margaret from under the brim of her hat. "Or, rather, while there are those women's rights

advocates who think that marriage is a form of contract slavery at best, I wasn't thinking

of you in that way. The thought just always made me give thanks for soundness and

stability and the knowledge that, somewhere in the world, things were going on as they

always do."

Margaret merely said, "You do talk like a woman who never got married."

She meant to be saying one thing, but Dora thought she was saying another. She

tossed her head. "Don't you know? I was so short and plain and wayward, no amount of

money could purchase me a husband."

"You haven't lived in St. Louis in thirty years. I'm sure there were candidates."

Dora looked around the tearoom as a hostess might, watching her guests take their

leave. Then she looked at Margaret. She said, "What was the last book you read?"

"So Big
. I'd like to read
Show Boat
."

"Have you heard of
The Well of Loneliness?"

"No."

"Gertrude

Stein?"

"I know that name."

"I'm going to give you a copy of
The Well of Loneliness."

"But what about Pete?"

"I told you that years ago."

"That he asked you for money?"

"Did I say that? Didn't I tell you--"

"What?"

"Darling, he is married. He's always been married. He saw her when he was in

Russia. She's a terrible Bolshie, and he likes to pretend that she's dead, but she isn't dead

at all. I think that's why he changed his name, so she'll think
he
is dead."

"Do they have any children?"

"I don't know. If you ask him, he'll tell you that she strangled them in the cradle. I

suppose that there's always the chance that a child will turn up to haunt him, but he's

covered his tracks pretty well."

"We know him."

"But we don't know anyone else who does, do we?"

"The

Kimuras."

"Secret-keepers

extraordinaire,

n'est-ce pas?"

"I hardly know them, but they're very nice to me."

"They don't gossip, do they?"

"No."

"There you go. Pete is safe with them."

"And with you."

"I don't know enough to be a danger to him--no names."

"But what did he do in the Revolution?"

"What did he tell you?"

"I got the impression that he escorted hapless aristocrats to Paris and rented

apartments for them."

"He did do that. Three times. He was good at that. But that wasn't a full-time job."

"What was a full-time job?"

"Have you heard of Antonov?"

She shook her head.

"Well, there were more factions in Russia than just the Reds and the Whites.

There was a faction called the 'SRs,' who splintered off the Bolsheviks after the October

Revolution, mostly because the peasants didn't like Red grain seizures, and Antonov was

their leader. All of Pete's relatives in Ukraine hated the Bolsheviks because they were city

boys and had no respect for peasants. By 1920, Antonov's supporters were armed to the

teeth. It was quite a popular and well-organized movement, and Antonov was a smart

fellow."

"What

happened?"

"Well, I'm not sure in which order this was, but the Bolsheviks rounded up the

women and children and put them in starvation camps as hostages. In the meantime, they

cleared out the forests where Antonov's army was hiding out, using gas. They just filled

the forests with gas, and the Blacks, as they were called, died in droves."

"We never heard about this."

"Didn't

you?"

"Poison

gas?"

"That's the new way, I'm afraid. Pete says a million died, but I don't know. I'm

sure it seemed like the end of the world. Anyway, Pete was there part of the time, and

part of the time he was beating the bushes for money and guns. But they hadn't foreseen

how ruthless the Bolsheviks were. Pete said to me, 'I knew them all along. I just didn't

know
this
about them.'"

"The

wife?"

"She must have been one of them. It's a wonder to me that he escaped, and,

having escaped, that he can smile at all, but Russians are fatalists first and foremost.

Antonov was killed in '22. After that, Pete was in Europe for a while. I don't think he

dares go back to the Soviet Union, of course."

"Maybe he changed his name because of that."

"Maybe."

Margaret said, "I never believed he was Russian. I finally decided that he was an

Irishman from Chicago pretending to be a Russian. His accent is so ..."

"Fake?"

"Well, nonexistent now. But always uneven."

Dora stirred her tea thoughtfully, then said, "I believe the big parts. Most of the

big parts. I don't mind the other parts. I don't know about the accent. Other people have

said that, too. But he grew up speaking lots of languages, and he's a good mimic. I knew

an actor in England who could speak in fifteen accents, including French, German,

Italian, and Spanish, and if you heard him through a wall, you would think he was five or

six men and women having a conversation."

When the weather was pleasant, she went back to Tanforan with Dora. The banter

between Pete and Dora was the same as it had always been--affectionate but ironical. At

one point, Dora said, "I want to ride one," and would not be denied. Pete said, "No, you

may not, but if you come dressed properly, you may hack the pony." They went on about

this for ten minutes, laughing. Margaret trotted behind them, overlooked. As they left,

though, Pete squeezed her hand, and said, "I'm settled now, you know. I've found a house

in Atherton. Here's the address. I was rather hoping that you could make the time to bring

Andrew." He pressed a square of paper into her hand. It had a telephone number, too.

Andrew was fond of the telephone. He called Len late at night when he changed his

views on things.

LELIE S CANLAN appeared unannounced on a train from the east, and Len

acted as if he were happy to see her. She was no longer quite the pale, retiring thing she

had appeared to be in her wedding picture. She came for supper twice and talked

incessantly--it was really rather remarkable, Margaret thought, that her voice could hold

out. Len, no mean talker himself, remained silent. The woman even out-talked Andrew,

who didn't say a word through dessert. Len had now completed his five-hundred-page

manuscript entitled
The Genius of Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early
. The

publisher was in Kansas City. They planned to print a thousand copies. However, Len,

they said, had to cut the manuscript to fifty thousand words. Andrew said, "They have

told him, 'Folks are interested in Captain Early as a specimen of a certain era, but not
as

interested as all that.'"

Lelie was incensed at the time wasted. All Margaret said was "Goodness"--her

surprise was that the publisher thought anyone at all was interested in any way.

For a day or two, Andrew and Len stormed about the new house, decrying the

blindness of the publisher, but then they reconciled themselves. Now, as a result of the

imminent publication of Len's book (he got busy with cutting and, newly emboldened,

informed Andrew in no uncertain terms that he and only he, Len, was in charge of the

final product), Andrew had to get his own volumes into shape, so that the books could be

published at the same time and thus fulfill Andrew's dreams for a "one-two punch." Her

typing time went up to five hours every day. At first she could barely stand it, and when

she sat down at the typewriter, she felt a trembling, physical rage as she put her fingers

on the keys. She thought of a sailor she had heard of on the island who learned to type

very fast by putting a brown paper sack over his head, and then got so that he could only

type with the sack over his head, and as she thought of this man, she was able to begin

her typing. There were no teas with Dora at the Palace, no more trips to Tanforan.

The goal, Andrew said, was to get an absolutely clean thought, an uninterrupted

idea of some six hundred pages (two volumes) that would unfold itself like a column of

smoke rising into the clouds. The ideal would be that he would write and she would type

from page one to page six hundred in one long session, but, of course, humanity was not

made for ideals. The lower needs of humanity would always break up ideals with food

and sleep and distraction. However, they did start at the beginning and go straight to the

end, and Andrew did his best to remain on the subject. It took three months. In the last

half of this period, Andrew simply dictated, usually from memory, and she took his

dictation, invaded again by the universe, so thoroughly invaded after a while that the rest

of her thoughts and memories and yearnings were scoured away. She cooked; she typed;

she slept. They finished in the same week that Len sent off his manuscript to Kansas City.

She dozed for three days.

But Andrew and Len needed no time to recuperate. They endlessly discussed the

optimum season for publishing their books. They imagined themselves taking a crosscountry trip and doing a set of joint lectures on the Chautauqua circuit, except that, for

the most part, Chautauquas had fallen by the wayside. They envisioned a set of radio

addresses, in which they would alternate lecturing with conversation about Andrew's

great ideas--"an educational revolution" was the term they used. However, they found

they had no access to the radio. They had worked for so many years on their books, and

now that the nation was preoccupied with the aftermath of the Crash, fewer people than

ever cared about the universe. They lamented what might have been if they had worked

more quickly, if they had known then what they knew now, but, ultimately, they decided

that the power of their ideas would carry the day.

All this time, Andrew talked a lot about his death, as if that, perhaps, were the one

key to his ideas' prevailing. He was sixty-four now, and his father had died at fifty-four.

Andrew had no sense of how quickly he might pass on--preferably of natural causes.

Now that his book was to come out, the sooner the better was fine with him. He chatted

over supper about the possibility of dying at just the right time with perfect equanimity,

and also, Margaret thought, with no concept of what it would actually be like not to exist.

Dora was visiting for one of these suppers. She sat across from Andrew over the

roasted chicken and talked first about a woman she had met who had given birth to her

child by the side of the Lincoln Highway, just near Reno, and then set the baby in the

middle of the road, "as the most merciful thing" she could think of, "since there was six

others plus that one," then about Eleanor Roosevelt, while Andrew fell silent only to

resume, as soon as Dora was finished talking, his catalogue of overlooked geniuses who

died in despair. That evening, his favorite was Johannes Kepler. "His mother was tried

for witchcraft," he said. Dora stared at him. "Of course, Kepler was a sociable man. One

had to be, in those days." When he got up to go to his study, it occurred to Margaret to

betray him, to betray him utterly, by taking Dora for a walk and asking for help. She

could describe this feeling she had, that her marriage had become an intolerable torture,

that the sight of his head ducking slightly as he went through doorways of the new house

was repellent to her, that she felt warm, humid air press against her when he entered the

room, that his voice made her want to scream, that she thought he was a fool and even a

madman, and that she was going mad herself, that, from the outside, every marriage

looked as bad to her, because she knew every house she passed was a claustrophobic cell

where at least one of the partners never learned anything, but did the same things over

and over, like an infernal machine, and the other partner had no recourse of any kind, no

way out, no one to talk to about it, not even any way to look at it all that gave relief. The

doorways of the new house were very high. It was mere habit to duck his head for them.

She almost said it, but she could not.

Later that night, in bed, she wondered why she had simply gotten up from her seat

with a smile and begun taking dishes off the table while Dora told her about a man she

had met named Nucky Johnson who she was sure had ordered the execution of someone

else--Margaret lost track of the rest. How could she so want to talk, and yet so much hate

and fear talking? But what would be her recourse? When was it that Mrs. Tillotson had