The Kingdom of Ohio (10 page)

THE GREAT TRAP

THE MORE WE STUDY, THE MORE WE DISCOVER OUR IGNORANCE.

It was Shelley who wrote this, and although I never felt much kinship with that poet, I think he got this right. During these last decades I've lost count of the hours that I spent reading history, studying the why and how of the things that took place before and after our time together. And none of it, really, explains what happened in those moments.

I picture you standing beside me in the dining room of a great house. The growing fear in your face, the way you wouldn't meet my eyes but stared instead at the polished parquet floor. The stifling tension between us and my sense that you were about to speak, just before the butler entered with the silver coffee service on a tray . . .

Even while these memories draw me in, they're also painful to relive. Maybe that's why it feels easier, some days, to lose myself in daydreams about a more distant past.

Recently, in the public library, I found a book containing a portrait of Henri Latoledan by the Italian painter Cipriotto.
²⁵
It depicts a swarthy man with wide cheekbones and unruly black hair; wearing a velvet doublet and a short cape, he stares out of the painting with impenetrable eyes, seeming equally impatient with the artist recording his likeness and the viewer regarding it.

Studying this image (after I smuggled the book home from the library—easy enough with a baggy coat and a bit of senile mumbling), I tried to imagine what it must have been like, for those first settlers who arrived in the wilderness that would become the Kingdom of Ohio. Sitting in my apartment (the room silent except for the avocado-colored fridge wheezing in one corner), I picture how they would have staggered to the edge of the lake that was their destination. The last of their wagons had shattered an axle in the woods days ago, and their possessions were piled on rough wooden platforms that they dragged behind them.

While the women kindle campfires and unload sacks of flour and haunches of dried meat, the men hang sheets of canvas from the trees to form canopies, groaning as they lift their arms, their shoulders and palms locked from hours of gripping the sledges' weight. It is evening, fireflies dancing beneath the dark branches and out over the water.

When he has seen that all the motions of making camp are under way, Henri Latoledan steps away from the labor to visit his wife. He finds her seated in her tent, perched on a clothes chest and being fanned by her young chambermaid. Henri eyes the girl's ripe curves before extending a hand toward his wife.

She rises and they walk together in silence away from the half-built camp, to a point where the small waves of the lake lap a pebbled beach. A wall of oak and beech trees, ancient and immense, stands guard like a motionless army drawn up at the water's edge, extending unbroken into the distance. A pale three-quarter moon has begun to climb in the sky, and the chirping of crickets fills the air. The hem of her long dress trails in the dirt and catches on twigs. In a moment of emotion, Henri takes her hand.

“There,” he tells her, gesturing toward the forest. “Even as I told you it would be. One day soon a castle for you will rise here, and a new village.”

“But Henri. But really . . .” She shakes her head, wondering as she has done every day since their departure whether this might be an elaborate nightmare, sent by God as some kind of test. They stand silently, side by side in their mud-stained velvet, surveying the horizon. Then he turns.

“Now I must see to the camp.” He leads her back to her tent and checks the progress of the settlers—of his people, as he has already affectionately come to think of them: a motley band of brave or foolish souls from the village in France, a few more adventurers from the seaport in Marseilles, and a knot of silent Aca dian trappers whom he persuaded to join the expedition in Montreal. In all, some fifty men and women in the trackless wilderness. Henri is not even certain they have arrived at the place described on the deed and crude map in his saddlebag—but it does not matter, he reminds himself. Here, anything is possible.

The encampment is going up well, he notes. Already the evening meal is cooking, the perishable baggage stowed away. A boy who worked as the fishmonger's assistant in the old village has set baited lines in the lake and his valet is tending to the horses. Heft ing an ax, Henri sets to work chopping limbs from a fallen tree for firewood. Splinters cling to his beard and the front of his ruined doublet. One of his blisters bursts, dribbling pale fluid.

He thinks that he has never been happier.

The former town barber passes by, carrying his basin and shears, and Henri calls out to him.

“Tell me, what do you think of our new home?”

The barber shakes his ponderous head, grinning nervously. “It doesn't look like France, my lord.”

“No, it doesn't. Here, give me your bowl.” Henri snatches the shaving basin and places it over his head, rapping the dented brass with his knuckles. “To protect myself from the wood chips,” he explains. The barber watches, wide-eyed. Noticing this look, Henri laughs.

“Take good care of it, my lord,” the barber says reproachfully. “I'll wager there's not another like it for six hundred miles. And even in America men will need their beards shaved and their hair cut.” He glances affectionately at his scissors.

“Not America.” Henri shakes his head and leans on the ax, looking out over the water. “This is something else. . . .”

 

 

At home in my apartment I imagine these scenes while cars zoom by on the freeway overpass that arcs a dozen feet outside my window, making the glass rattle with each truck that goes by. Sitting in my armchair below the shadow of a wilting potted fern, I push aside the plastic trays from my microwaved dinner and watch as night falls over the city. Overhead, only a handful of pale stars are visible through the haze. And I'm struck by the thought that Henri Latoledan (and young Peter Force, and you) would have glanced up at these same points of light, and how maybe this is all that binds us together now: these lonely fires in the sky, a million light-years away.

 

 

 

 

“AND WHAT is this you're trying to do here?”

Cheri-Anne turns from the window of the Ohio mansion, to find her tutor tapping the sheaf of papers that she handed him ten minutes ago. She leans across the desk to study the line of equations he indicates with his silver pen.

“That . . . oh.” Seeing the mistake, she crosses out an exponent and rewrites it outside the parenthesis. “It should be like this. You see?”

“Hmm.” He glances up and meets her eyes with a blue stare of somewhat unsettling intensity. She looks away. “I thought so.” He smiles indulgently at her before resuming his study of the formulae.

Cheri-Anne gazes out the window again. The sunlit room where she takes her lessons is on the second floor of the house, and has a view over the garden to the shimmer of the great lake in the distance. Yellow spring light, the color of parchment paper, tints the harp on its stand in one corner, the shelves of books, the desk by the windows where they sit.

Covertly she glances at her instructor and wonders how long he will last. When Mr. Coulter had been hired to replace his predecessor, she had been delighted—more, she admits ruefully now, by his looks than by his qualifications. Increasingly, though, she finds herself chafing at the glacial pace of study that he insists upon. Outside, the small white triangles of sails glide silently over the horizon of the lake.

Mr. Coulter clears his throat, picks up his glasses, polishes them, and affixes them to his perfectly straight nose. “Well.” He shuffles the pages of her work and takes the glasses off again. “I understand the math, but my dear girl”—he chuckles—“honestly, I can't make head or tail of what you're trying to do. These equations simply don't work.”

“Yes, exactly!” She realizes that her voice is too loud and lowers it. “You see? They're both true
and
false—or rather, it seems impossible to demonstrate they are either.”

He nods patiently. “Yes, but obviously they're false. The problem is just in the way that you've written your maths.”

“But—” She struggles to find a way of explaining this most recent inspiration that kept her awake and sitting at her desk all through the previous night, filled with racing thoughts until dawn. “It seems to me there is some paradox about the numbers themselves in this proof. As if ”—she struggles for an analogy—“as if I were to tell you: ‘The next sentence is true. This sentence is false.' You see? There is a fundamental inconsistency. And here”—she points at the paper—“given this class of recursive formulae, there must also be a set of recursive signs for which . . .” She gazes at him, hoping she has conveyed some inkling of the beautiful, self-annihilating, logical perfection she imagines.

“That's simply gibberish. My dear girl, mathematics is not about word games.” He frowns and runs a hand through his blond hair. “You simply can't do this sort of thing. Now, then.” He hands the papers back to her and turns his attention to the primer they have been working from.

She accepts the thin sheaf and holds it protectively against her chest, studying the movement of Mr. Coulter's hand and feeling her cheeks prick with red. Maybe he is right, she thinks; maybe she is only fooling herself with these ideas. After all, who would seriously listen to the wild daydreams of a seventeen-year-old girl from the provincial Midwest? Still, she tells herself, she will send a letter to Professor Riemann anyway—more as a gesture of defiance against the invisible walls around her than in hope of a response, as all her previous letters to Göttingen have gone unanswered.

“Now, then,” he continues, “why don't we try a few more interpolations?”

She exhales a shaky breath. “We've already done the interpolations.” Her voice sounds sulky in her own ears, a petulant child. With an effort she reins in her emotions. “Perhaps we might try something new?”

“Now, now, Miss Toledo.” The tutor smiles indulgently. “You still make mistakes, and you know that practice makes perfect. Perhaps next week we can try some more advanced material.”

 

 

Finally he leaves and she stands with a sigh, wishing that she could loosen her corset. Her neck and shoulders hurt. She paces in circles around the room until the maid arrives with a plate of finger sandwiches and tea, her usual refreshment between lessons.

“Cook told me you'll be having a new gown for the ball next Friday,” the maid chirps, bright-eyed. “Is it true?”

“Yes. I will.” She pictures the monstrosity of taffeta and ruffles the tailor insisted upon, wincing inwardly. Trying to make her look like a fancy layer-cake that some tedious, well-bred young man from a Boston family will bite down upon. And that is all I am to them, she thinks with a surge of anger and something like desperation: a well-trained confection of ribbons. Even to her father, with all his vague romantic ideals—an ornament to be polished and bartered, for the continuance of the Toledo dynasty.

“And it's true there's lace up the sleeves, brought all the way from France?” the maid burbles.

“Yes. It is true.”

“It sounds lovely,” the servant girl sighs, pouring the tea. And when she has departed, Cheri-Anne stands motionless beside the desk, where steam from the lavender bone-china cup rises to disappear in a shimmer of air, distorting a tiny patch of the yellow afternoon world outside the windows.

Sipping her tea, she thinks about the equations dismissed by Mr. Coulter. What she imagines with these formulae and the paradox they demonstrate, about some fundamental
imperfection
within mathematics itself—the right phrase coming to her now, belatedly—has a feeling of simple, fierce rightness that brings a nearly physical stab of longing. She absently lets one hand wander over her breasts, down to her thighs, the touch like a stranger's through the layers of dress, petticoats, and corset. If only, she thinks—but then doesn't know how the sentence should, or could, end.

On the mantelpiece, the gilt ormolu clock chimes and she opens her eyes. In a few minutes her harp teacher, Mrs. Hammond, will arrive. She looks out the window again and feels an abrupt and overpowering sense of frustration at the confining elegance of the music room around her, the impossible gulf between herself and the white sails in the distance, the smallness of her life.

She puts down the teacup, hot liquid sloshing over the saucer. The walls and ceiling close in on her, pushing the breath from her body. She pictures a series of disconnected, violent images—the murder of Mrs. Hammond, the metronome's needle quivering in the shrewish old harp teacher's eye socket. The maid screaming in terror, servants running from the mansion as it is engulfed in flames—

Squeezing her eyes shut, she searches for calm. None of this matters, she tells herself. This place is only temporary, a passing obstacle between herself and the world where she belongs: Paris, London, New York, the cities where great ideas are explored in famous laboratories.

But when she tries to picture Paris, she finds that her memories of the few days she spent in that city have grown faded from overuse, like the faces of coins fingered into vague impressions. The size of its gray buildings and boulevards, the glimpse of a cathedral through the curtains of a moving carriage.

She has not left Ohio since she returned from Europe two years ago, kept at home by her father's inept and clinging protectiveness. From below, she hears the butler, Nonce, open the front door and Mrs. Hammond's shrill greeting. Not much longer, she thinks. She opens her eyes, plastering a smile on her face in preparation for the harp teacher's arrival. And she imagines herself far away from here, stepping off a train in New York, onto the stage of real life.