The Syme Papers (45 page)

In the morning, I awoke to an unfamiliar prospect. The view had
been white on my first day there, and the window ice to the touch.
Now I flung it open upon a warm green sea. The ground rose before
me in abundant grass and lost itself in the straggling beginnings of 
a wood. An uneven brown path ran through it and offered the most
delicious promise of a leafy and secret exploration. I knew right well
that the woods gave way to another road, and that the path led
directly to the schoolhouse. But the image of that brown string lost
in a green ball grew fixed in my mind as the symbol of enchanted
prospects.

We did not stay long. I believe Tom feared Sam would settle
there, and, as soon as he could manage it, he planned our departure.
I may as well say here that Sam and I came to rely completely on
Tom’s directions in the next few months. We slept where he told us
and followed where he walked and stopped when he found time to
stop. We were as ignorant of our destination as sailors of their cap
tain’s course and worried as little about it. The land around us
changed almost as often as the sea around a ship, but rather than
whistling for a wind, we called for Curiosity, and under its impetus
sailed towards the humble treasure of
…
a list of names and
promised subscriptions to the magazine. Our only fixed harbour
was a lecture at the City Hall in Philadelphia which Tom, by a
stroke of fortune, had arranged for Sam. ‘That is our Trafalgar,’
Tom said. ‘We can gather five hundred subscriptions in a day.’ For
the rest, we trusted ourselves to his guidance and relied on our own
companionship. After another busy afternoon spent packing (under
Tom’s watchful eye and jealous hand), we reduced our belongings at
last to a manageable burden. Tom told us we were leaving on the
morrow, and soon after a rather quiet supper, we turned to our beds.

Tom woke me early and I stumbled downstairs to the kitchen.
‘Have a bite for the long day,’ he said, tearing a piece of old bread
and dipping it in a jug of milk. ‘Sam won’t be roused.’

Anne joined us at breakfast in a white gown and sat in straight-backed silence while we ate. She had been out of sorts since we came,
complained of the headache and sleepless nights. Edward said it was
all puritanical starvation and nerves; regardless of the cause, she
looked half a ghost, pinched and gaunt, and I guessed the effort it cost
her to see her son off without worrying him. I had no talk in me, my
head stuffed full of sleep and my tongue dull and dry; ate as carelessly
as I breathed and could barely keep my head from the table.

‘Sam was always a grand sleeper,’ Anne remarked at last. ‘That
used to give me some hopes for
–
for his happiness.’

I stared at her in puzzlement as Tom left to wake Sam (again!)
and collect our things. To my surprise, Anne shifted to his chair
beside me and began to talk. I thought that she would remind me
once more of her suspicions of Tom, and I prepared myself this time
to be loyal But instead she turned to a source, I suppose, of still
greater doubt
–
her son – in the private troubled fashion of the
sickbed, when the sufferer, afflicted by some preoccupation, believes
that if only this particular worry could be relieved, sleep and health
would return.

‘He was always blind as a mole,’ she said, biting colour into her
lips. ‘Not in the eyes, you see, but in the head and the heart. I don’t
mean that he wasn’t a very loving boy. Have you ever seen a baby
mole? Sam caught one once and brought it to the garden. He called
it Breadroll and used to spend hours watching him nose through the
grass. Did you know moles have fingers, Phidy? His little hands
were already strong as spades, and he dug up whatever fell in his
path: rocks and clumps of earth. If he could not dig himself clear he
pushed his head against whatever stood in his way, until it rolled
him on his back. Then he lay flat wriggling until he wriggled to his
feet again and set off in a new direction and ran into another stone
or tree. He never got far.’

Too tired to answer or comfort her, I only nodded, nodded; and
soon after, Tom and Sam joined us. ‘We will miss the Post,’ cried
Tom, and Sam embraced his mother. The two stood equal in each
other’s arms, only her hair was longer and fell down Sam’s shoulders
in a grey heap. Tom called again and I kissed her hand and we left,
walking in the first sun of the summer morning. ‘My father lies a-
bed’ was all Sam said, concealing the bitterness he felt. We scram
bled on to the New York Post bound for Middletown. I was too
sleepy to talk and full of such joy, like a cup delicately brimmed, that
does not wish to stir for fear of running over.

O
F COURSE, THE REJECTIONS DID NOT END THERE.
I kept banging at the door (when I did not run from, flinch from it), and others came, of great variety. Never believe that ‘no’s look all alike, for they contain such mixtures of ‘maybe’s and ‘never’s that no two resemble each other exactly. Indeed, I grew adept at picturing the men (and occasional women) behind the missives, at desks both ancient and modern pushed up against university windows across the country, the clutter of their papers further cluttered by the clutter of my papers, Müller’s papers,
Syme’s
papers (such a broad, thin snowfall of Syme on academic cities, so vast a winter, which swept even to Canada at times!), not to mention the memoranda of our reviewers.

There were the clipped tones of the grey-haired Brahmin from the old-school presses, of universities Harvard and Yale and Princeton. ‘Dear Dr Pitt,’ they wrote impeccably on heavy paper with the mark soaked through, ‘Thank you for your letter of October 23 and for submitting your manuscript to my consideration. I found it interesting; not interesting enough, I’m afraid.’ Then they signed their paper bullets in little squibs (their
marks)
that seemed to indicate both that in a humble fashion they believed themselves to be only servants in the cause of
Lux
and
Veritas,
and that, servants though they were, they shouldn’t wish to know Doug Pitt, son of a scaffolder from San Diego, if they passed him in the street (an eventuality they did not consider likely, seeing that Pitt lived in the wilds of Texas).

There were the Californian rejections, most improbable of all from the presses of Santa Cruz and San Jose and Santa Clara (and, dare I confess, San Diego), effusive and frothy and full of sound and favour, signifying nothing. ‘How greatly’, they said, ‘we enjoyed this history of Dr Syme, found it persuasive and elegant
and rich, at once scholarly and captivating, timeless and urgently topical, a work both vital to its own academic tradition and more broadly relevant – just the sort of thing, in short, the editors at the press of Santa [Cruz, Clara, etc.] would love to take on! Which makes it all the more painful for us to inform you that we must at this moment regretfully decline your piece for publication …’

Then came the ladies, massively, impeccably coiffed, preserved as if in the jelly of an early and enduring middle age. They lived in New York and treasured their independence; they worked for the presses of Columbia and NYU, even, among the lower breeds, for CCNY; and lived in squalid little studios on the Upper East Side, with a high-rise view of the other squalid little studios on the Upper East Side. They adored their windswept, concrete, factory-style balconies, and planted potted oases against the reinforced glass walls, and sat, just at the edge of the sliding door, as far as they dared, when the sun came out and the thin metropolitan air was warm enough to breathe, and they told themselves smugly, fearfully, guiltily that they were enjoying ‘a minute’s peace’, and how happy they were to live alone. They began always in breathless apologies of one kind or another and concluded always in ruthless apologies, and said very little in between.

There were the ‘standard’ rejections, of course, endlessly duplicated and hastily signed, which proved, on a wider sampling (which, I confess, I … undertook), not to be standard at all, containing … multitudes of indifference. The ones with ticks pleased me most, suggesting as they did that a simple slip of the hand (so much easier than a painful editorial overhaul) could shift my work from the category ‘Unsuitable at this Time’ to ‘Submitted for Further Evaluation’, even (though I scarcely dreamed of this) to ‘Accepted for Publication’. (The ticks, I should say, never hesitated, never missed their mark.) There were the uniformly intimate, which began Dear ___ and then jiggled my first name some inch above the line, till Doug became muddled in the date and could never untangle itself. These tended to make a great show of suggesting what I knew and didn’t know about my work in particular and the field in general. ‘As
you are probably aware,’ they began, and I could almost hear the Doug in their tone of voice, ‘times in academic publishing are hard, particularly in the remoter fields of historical science …’ But they concluded soothingly, hopefully. ‘Having said this, we are sure there are presses who might feel differently [though only, I suppose, in the free spaces of their ___] and we wish you the best of luck elsewhere …’

The worst, I believe, were those who simply returned my own introductory letter, as if, in all honesty, Doug, it contained within it the seeds of its own rejection. To this they appended, in blue felt-tip raided no doubt from their children’s school satchels, such sentiments squeezed above the return address as ‘I greatly respect your personal journey, Doug, but alas …’ The best were those that managed to get my name wrong; these never quite hit home, they seemed to apply to a Slavic, more dangerous man, taller perhaps, and more heavily haired, the favourite of my aliases being ‘Dr Duglo Pi’, a name by which I insisted my family address me for an entire blissfully mysterious and suggestively nefarious week, until Ben twisted the syllables into Dr Du Gloppy, at which point I put a stop to the business altogether.

And then there were the good ones, the ones that meant well by Pitt. Written by just the sort of people who (I hoped) would follow Pitt’s thought; and who did, to a point, then stopped short. Observed here or there, an inconsistency, a gap, little stumbling places I had known of some time, but managed, in the homely familiarity of my own mind, to overstep whenever I crossed them, and forget, as soon as I passed them by. These
sympathetic
rebuffs (are there such things?) argued in the end (and most damningly of all) what I suspected by then to be true: that I had offered a quest without a grail, a chase without a beast; that until I could prove not only the
fact
of Syme’s conception but the
details
of the idea that persuaded Alfred Wegener (a copy of the
New
Platonist
itself?), until I could do
that,
Syme would never step out of the hole into which he had fallen, and Pitt could never climb out of it on his back.

These, I need hardly say, I hated the most.

Susie, for her part, could not bear it.

She used to wake early for class, wriggle and sigh in bed, then sit up demonstrably and sigh again. ‘A hug,’ she said to a lump of somnolent Pitt, which, once provided, led satisfied Susie to seek the little black bright-buttoned tablet (known to our curious age as the ‘remote control’) Pitt had discarded at the side of the bed before sleeping. This usually involved some substantial discomfort to Pitt – a quantity of misplaced knees and elbows, of bruised ribs, but Pitt slept on doughtily, until Miss Susie triumphed at last. Then a quick buzz and the breakfast news brightened our bedroom (and woke Pitt) with a
television
morning, dawning sunny with couches and loud with sipped coffee, while Pitt pressed the pillow to his head and tried to sleep again.

Then a succession of pops and sighs – the tiny bubbles of sound Susie blows at all times, so that she crackles with life as a log with fire, stirring and shifting and announcing each stir and shift: as she rises from bed; as she seeks her slippers; as she finds them; as she wraps her cold, goose-pimpled, air-conditioned limbs in a dressing-gown; as she binds the cord about her plump pale waist; as she stops in front of the TV (a little colour box propped on the window ledge beside the AC unit) and allows herself only a ‘second’s peace’; as she stomps out of the door, to prepare the boys’ breakfast and her own, while the TV buzzes on to an empty room, empty of everything except for Pitt, except for Pitt trying to sleep.

‘Susie!’ – a cry rings out, from Pitt’s sleep-clogged lungs.

‘Damn you!’ – a mutter, from the same source.

Then the noise of Miss Susie waking the boys, equivalent cries, equivalent mutters, like father, like sons.

Then footsteps, rustle of dressing, touch of make-up against the eyelashes and lips (dreamily, daintily imagined by a happy half-sleeping husband, or a half-happy unsleeping husband, depending). Then a pause, of steps, beside the bed, beside the head of Pitt within the bed. A brisk, a disappointed, an uninspired ‘good morning’. A moment’s wifely pity – a button pressed – the buzz of the television dwindling, dwindling into the centre of the tube, swallowed by grey reflecting glass once more. Footsteps. Door slam. Silence.

Silence.

Almost sleep.

Sleep. A moment or two – a quarter-hour. (At the most.)

Then the dull flap and thud of the mail upon my feet – upon the feather-bed over my feet.

The morning rejections.

Susie and the boys were gone when I arose, showered and shaved, naked and pink in the steaming bathroom, wiping from time to time the fogged glass with my squeaky palm. ‘Our joy is a country of one,’ Phidy said; and he was right, for how much of my life passes in snatched pleasures, Pitt does not like to say. But our grief is a country of one, too; and I sagged lonely between the cushions of the couch, coffee in hand, among the papers, and read over the almost endless flotsam of denials, both equivocal and unequivocal, that the tide of Susie tossed upon my feet each morning; interested denials and uninterested denials; formal and informal denials, in plain and pedantic English; refusing publication, refusing publication, refusing publication.

Thus uplifted, I walked to work.

The work itself, the teaching itself, went swimmingly enough, with this proviso: that it is
difficult
to
swim
in
puddles.
I taught two classes: first, a standard history of science from Plato to Planck, in which I managed to attract (quite remarkably) the fewest students to enrol among any of the three lecturers engaged to teach the subject (among them Bunyon, who considered it a mark of proletarian pride to assume the most basic duties of his faculty, mostly, I believe, because it is the only subject he had truly mastered, broad and shallow enough for him to escape drowning). Second, a seminar of my own devising based largely upon my doctoral thesis, which proposed and comprehensively proved the notion that Newton’s alchemical and astrological speculations ran not only side by side but
hand
in
hand
with the mathematical and physical advances that made him famous – so true it is that the army of reason marches upon its
imagination,
as Napoleon’s battalions are said to have marched upon their
stomachs.

‘Newton & Nonsense’, I called it: an enquiry into Newton’s
unorthodox conjectures. I had two students. The tenure committee was due to meet in the spring. I had only a few months left to make my mark.

Susie had supper on the table when I came home. I left the rejections open for her to see beside the telephone, but they were never touched when I got back (after a snooze stretched out on the piebald carpeting of my office, among the coffee stains and the cigarette stubbings, left over from the days of academic smoking). She was a wonder of organization, and beside our bedroom window had erected an
antique
discovery of mine (from a year when my gifts brought peace): the pine partitioned despatch box of an old telegraph office, discovered in Fredericksburg, a pigeon-holed wall-hanging of a hundred little cubicles, in which she filed (each hole neatly labelled) the bulk of her (I should say,
our,
for they were in fact mostly
mine)
significant papers, from tax returns, to jury summonses, to job applications, to school reports. But she would not touch my rejections, nor slip the cover-notes in the little box marked
Rej
above the slot for
Rel
(which contained a great many pamphlets on mixed marriages, and their results, the decline of faith in modern Judaism, etc., etc., and other paper pills to poison our marriage). The rejections she left to me.

The gift, by the by, had only just smoothed over a most
dilu
vian
row, occasioned by the disappearance, or, rather, the reappearance of a little, apparently harmless, slip (six pages long, front and back) of a job application – for the position of History Lecturer, with a Special Interest in the Sciences, at Fordham University, located in the Bronx, New York. The date of application had, as dates will (a physical fact of which I could not persuade her), passed by, and no bickering or regret could push the time back, regardless of how much she desired a return to ‘the City’, as she said, nor how much I disliked such prospects, considering the presence there of both her mother and grandmother, not to mention the significant dip in position, from Texas to Fordham, the move would occasion.

Susie discovered this little packet – the long lines untouched, my name in white, my previous salaries a nought, my education a
wide snowfall of blanks – propping up the shortened leg of my bedside table. She said, stooping to retrieve the crumpled wadge, ‘How you can live in such mess, I don’t know.’ She said, ‘You wouldn’t find something like this at
my
end of the room.’ She said, ‘Honestly, Pitt, what’s this doing down there,’ and yanked the bundle, black with dirt and deeply indented, out from under the foot, causing last night’s glass of dusty water to wobble and spill and drip steadily on to the mock-Eames bedside table.

‘Because it wobbles,’ I said, ‘otherwise.’

Then she began to read. (This is a great fault in Susie, that she reads things better left unread, like bills, and warranties, and leases, and mortgages, and Christmas cards, etc. There are some games that can only be lost by playing – and the challenge of the daily mail is one of these, as I have told her, again and again.)

‘What’s this?’ she said. ‘What’s this?’

‘And then my water, if it is water,’ I added, by way of explanation, ‘spills; or tea, if it is tea.’

Susie turns aside too readily from my explanations; she seeks the truth herself; discovers a different version of events from mine (to which she has scarcely attended) and complains. (There are always different versions of
events,
which is why the word carries such an uncertain weight in the world’s vocabulary. ‘Eventually’ suggests only that at some stage, in the future, a thing will probably come to pass, most likely when everyone has ceased to care about it one way or another. The Germans, an exact and subtle race, have whittled away at even this much conviction; and their word
‘eventuell’
means only that something may or may not occur, depending on contingencies, an assertion undoubtedly correct.)