Private Life (44 page)

gained her divorce, ten years ago now? More? And what a nightmare that had been--since

Henrietta had allowed the adultery to go on for years before he bought the girl the house,

the judge had been quite skeptical. And Margaret could still remember what grounds for

divorce were--abandonment, drunkenness, beatings, criminal behavior. Mere torment was

not among them. In the morning, she walked out of the house before dawn and got into

the Franklin. Soon she was heading across the causeway and then south around the bay.

Perhaps, she thought afterward, if she had used the telephone, it would have

shown some doubt on her part about her destiny. Perhaps, she thought, using Andrew's

telephone to call Pete would have been akin to asking Andrew to give Pete a message.

And she didn't know Atherton, had never been there. But she drove as if directed, and

when she arrived at Pete's door, he was standing in front of his house, his hands in his

pockets. He recognized the Franklin instantly, of course, and burst out laughing.

Pete's house was long and low. The roof hung over the veranda like the roof of a

bungalow, sheltering a line of windows and a modest black front door. There were chairs,

as if a person could sit there.

Pete was at the door of the Franklin, opening it, and then he took her hand and

helped her out, and then he kissed her, though only on the cheek, as if he were her brother

or uncle, the most chaste of kisses, but still, indeed, a kiss. He took her elbow and guided

her to the curb, then up the walk. She did feel wobbly, that was true enough, but it never

crossed her mind to wonder at the fact that a man who worked miles away, who had calls

upon his time and a profusion of associates, would be there to greet her, to take her

through the gate to the back garden, to seat her at a neat little table inside a gazebo, and to

bring her a cup of lemon tea. By the time he had set the pot in front of her, she was

breathless and her hat had come unpinned. She took it off and set it on the chair beside

her bag. Then she took off her gloves. Now it seemed to her that she was more or less

unclothed.

But apparently Pete didn't see it that way. He chatted on, got up, went into the

house, brought out a plate of shortbread cookies. She ate one, and the view cleared a bit.

The backyard was a large garden--there were several lemon trees with lemons and

blossoms, and daylilies along the fence, and a stand of bamboo between his yard and that

of the neighbors. The gazebo itself was shaded by two large eucalyptus trees. It became

possible to breathe.

Pete said, "Where is the captain this morning?"

"I don't know."

There was a long pause.

"Gone over to the island, I expect." It could be that he did not hear her, her voice

was so weak.

Pete said, "You aren't used to this, are you?"

Margaret said, "Used to what?" But she also shook her head.

"You keep looking toward the neighbors, as if they might spy on us."

"Mightn't

they?"

"They wouldn't dare." He lifted her bare hand and kissed it. She let him hold it.

He did, stroking her fingers.

The interior of the house was clean and spare. The two screens were set to the

back of the front room, out of the sunlight. There was another screen in the dining room,

mounted on the wall, more modest but striking--in the picture, an old man was carrying

something large and bronze, like a vase. Out of it a horse was bursting, its head up, its tail

up, its knees tucked in front of its chest. Pete said, "That is a picture of unexpected good

luck." He had not let go of her hand. The picture of the lady with her servant and child

was hung across from the horse, much more colorful. There were other paintings, too, but

they were European--harsh and bright, with strange shapes standing in for faces and

bodies. She said, "Have you gone back to collecting?"

"Not

art."

"What,

then?"

"Armaments."

She laughed. There, in front of those pictures, while she was still laughing, he

took her in that embrace she had seen, that tight thing, that deep, comforting,

overwhelming, body-bending, mind-erasing enclosure. The rest, after that, was awkward

and irresolute, hateful in the unzipping and the unbuttoning and the chill of his alien

bedroom, but that thing that she had been thinking of for years, that was perfect.

LEN'S book appeared in early January, right after one of the worst Christmases

ever, in the midst of bad weather all over the country. Len told them that publication

would be accompanied by advertisements in several Missouri papers, including the one in

Columbia, and Robert's paper in Darlington, and one of the St. Louis papers. When these

were sent to them, they turned out to be small boxes at the bottom of inside columns. The

text of the ads ran, "Who is, perhaps, Missouri's GREATEST scientific genius? BUY
The

Genius of Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early
and FIND OUT how a HOME

GROWN Missouri boy STUNNED the nation and the WORLD! Ask at your local

bookstore TODAY!" After that, nothing.

Crates of Andrew's volumes arrived from San Francisco about a week later, very

many of them, and once again, Andrew hired a young man to send them out, because Len

declared in no uncertain terms that he was not a secretary, and that he had already begun

his next book, which was about legendary ghosts of California--he had fifty pages and a

publisher, this time in Los Angeles. Margaret didn't know whether this was a greater

blow to Andrew's pride than the absolute silence that greeted his volumes, but the young

man they hired did send them out assiduously to every scientific publication in the

English-speaking world. There were no reviews, and it became clear, as the winter faded

first to spring and then to summer, that Andrew's
New Theory of theAether
had met with

either apathy or hostility, and, in the end, what was the difference?

What Andrew's theory was, precisely, she could not herself have said, though she

partially understood the second half of the second volume, which was that if they could

harness the power of the Aether, they would be as gods--space travel, time travel,
Alice in

Wonderland-
like expansion and contraction, the idea of the universe as an idea, the

expansion of a single person's inner life into the size of the universe, all would be

possible. In other words, having been left to think and think and think, Andrew had made

up his mind that thinking was everything.

Andrew invited Pete to supper and gave him all the volumes--his book and the

biography. Pete came back again, at Andrew's insistence, and discussed them. He

expressed surprise and delight at Andrew's ideas. He questioned him in some detail. And

he was courteous to Margaret in exactly the way that he had always been. Margaret didn't

know if she was hurt or disappointed or relieved. In fact, sitting across from him at the

table seemed surprisingly routine. But didn't she know that he was practiced at exactly

this? Hadn't he let her know that again and again over the years? She sat watching the

two of them, not daring to do much more than pass the potatoes and maintain a pleasant

expression. That she could do even this seemed astonishingly cool to her, as if she had

turned into an entirely different woman--Dora, perhaps.

Andrew's position came to be "They have forgotten me. They have simply

forgotten me." He stopped talking about his death, since he was healthier than ever.

It was when she was about to get on the streetcar in San Francisco that she picked

up the
Chronicle
. On page three of the second section was the headline "The Strange

Case of Captain Early." The feeling she had as she was sitting on that slippery bench seat,

as the car tilted upward to climb California Street, was one she didn't think she had ever

before had--something akin to being electrocuted, but not fatally. There was a picture of

Andrew standing outside the observatory and a picture of his book, with the caption "An

example of wholesale plagiarism?" And there was another picture, of a man she had

never seen, who turned out to be Andrew's old student from Chicago, now a full

professor, and possibly the only person to have read the books. His hair was gray, too.

The gist of this man's accusations against Andrew was that where the ideas presented in

"Early's two-volume monstrosity" were not laughable, they were stolen--from him. As

evidence for this assertion, the writer of the article took two passages from books by each

of them and compared the two side by side. Margaret read them as the streetcar lumbered

along, and she judged that they were similar. One was from the first volume of Andrew's

book, and that was slightly less similar. The other, from the second volume, was not word

for word, but it was also not more than 15 percent different (she counted the words in

both passages). The case, at least from these two examples, was a damning one. But the

article was short--about a column. If she wanted to know more, she was directed to an

article by this man in
The Astronomical Journal
to which Andrew had renewed his

subscription in anticipation of his "one-two punch." There had also been, according to the

Chronicle
, a piece about this in the
New York Times. The Astronomical Journal
article,

which she was sure was somewhere in her house, she had not seen. Had Andrew? It was

impossible to tell. She read over the bit from the second volume again and put the paper

in her bag.

On the way home that evening on the ferry, she could not help reconsidering the

two passages. She decided, or possibly remembered, that the second passage was one that

Andrew had dictated directly to her, without any sort of notes, just striding about the

front room with his hands clasped behind his back (except for when he was smoothing

down his mustache), holding forth. It was an odd way to commit plagiarism, except for

one thing--Andrew's overcapacious memory. The terrible difficulty of writing the book

had always been trimming and paring and pruning, not engendering. He had tried in

every conceivable way over the years to clarify and straighten out the jungly growth of

his ideas. He had written from notes. He had cut bits and pieces from early drafts. He had

thrown away drafts and started over. He had made outlines and stuck to them. But the

burden of his mind was that it
would
invent, it would proliferate, it would swarm and

multiply. And it was horribly retentive. Andrew saw this as a sign of his own genius, as

no doubt his mother had. That was the way it was when they were growing up--if you

could memorize one poem, that was good; two was better, and four was best. Andrew

said that he had excelled at memorizing and could still recite poems or speeches he had

learned before he was ten years old. She saw it perfectly--even while he threw off the

constraints of what he had already written and rewritten many times, he still thought in

those very words that he had already composed, just as a high-speed locomotive races

down the track that has been laid for it. For Andrew, plagiarism was not some laborious

copying of someone else's words and ideas, but a wholesale and yet precise assimilation

of them--the energy of the ideas as well as the particles of the individual words. As soon

as she thought this, she knew that it was true, and that she herself was the only person to

understand how it worked. As the ferry crossed the bay, making that peculiar deep

groaning noise that was so familiar to her, she thought of him again and again, striding

about, talking. And she thought, for the first time in her life, that he must be in agony,

must have always been in agony. And once she thought that, she thought that as a

kindness she might write to the
Chronicle
, or to
The Astronomical Journal
, defending

him.

That night, at supper and after, she watched Andrew, trying to gauge whether he

had read the
Chronicle
piece or
The Astronomical Journal
piece. She dared not ask, dared

not precipitate a discovery. Indeed, could it be like what was said about vermin--if,

purely by chance, you saw one article about your husband's plagiarizing as you were

riding the streetcar, was that only the merest fraction of the number that were actually out

there? Possibly, unbeknownst to her, he had a file of such articles stuck in a drawer in his

study, and he mulled them over every day.

Over the next few days, she decided that the safest course was to pretend that she

hadn't seen the article.

But Len had.

He was at their door, the paper in his hand. As soon as Margaret opened the door,

he waved the paper and shouted, "I was up in Eureka! Where's Captain--"

"He's not here. He's--"

But Andrew came around the house--he had heard voices from the backyard. He

saw that Len had a paper in his hand and said, suspiciously (but these days suspicion of

Len, a believer in ghosts, was constant with him), "What's that?"

"Well you might ask," said Len.

Len turned to walk down the front steps, and Margaret let the door close. She