by Jane Smiley
“I don’t know.” In fact, though he was always informative, Andrew hardly ever said a word about his past, or his feelings. It was as if his feelings were entirely accounted for by what there was to know. Nor did he delve into her feelings, seeming to think that, whatever they were, they were her business.
Another time, Mrs. Lear said to her, “Captain Early has very big feet, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“He’s a tall man.”
“Goodness me, well over six feet—not made for a sailor, my dear, not at all. But do tell me, does he have his boots specially made?”
“I believe so.”
“But where?”
That evening, when Andrew came in, she took a good look at his boots, which were a rich deep brown, and not really like any boots she’d seen in Missouri. She couldn’t believe she had lived with these boots now for two months without noticing them. She asked him. He said, “German Street.”
The next day, when she reported this to Mrs. Lear, the lady’s eyebrows lifted.
“My dear, I’m sure he means Jermyn Street, with a ‘J.’ It’s in London.”
Margaret said, “I should ask him.”
“You could,” said Mrs. Lear, “but I find keeping a sharp eye out is more instructive. Captain Lear hates to be asked questions. My father was just the same way.”
This conversation led her, the next afternoon, into his wardrobe, where she looked at his clothing for some minutes. He had five pairs of boots, four uniforms (he wore a uniform every day to the observatory), a stack of shirts and other linen, five hats in various styles, three summer suits, and three winter suits. He had two dressing gowns, of silk, which he wore about the house in the evening. She didn’t know what was more surprising to her—that she had gone so long without investigating Andrew’s wardrobe, or that its contents were so much finer than the contents of her own.
Spurred by this investigation into Andrew’s wardrobe, she tried another—she looked at all the books in his library, which was a small room at the back of their house, to which the door was always closed. The shelves in their parlor were well stocked with Dickens and Verne and Conan Doyle and Rhoda Broughton. In his office the books were in German, French, English, Dutch, and what looked like Norwegian. She could not make out what any of them were about, even the English ones.
She ate with him, walked with him (it wasn’t just birds he liked, but plants and snakes and rabbits), listened to him sing (he had a pleasant baritone, and sang lively songs in German), and watched him read (which he did, quite often, at meals, apologizing to her for not being able to break a lifelong habit). She cooked for him. He liked bacon fried in a skillet, then pushed to one side so that two eggs could be fried, sunny-side up, in the bacon grease until their edges were crispy and brown but their centers were still warm and a bit runny. At midday, he liked a steak, and in the evening, he liked a soup, especially a pea or bean soup cooked with a ham hock. He liked her to boil up the greens he brought home from walks—telling her they were nutritious and good for the digestion.
But there was nothing he loved more than new information. Their little house was a riot of books and papers. The first ferry of the morning (which arrived before 6 a.m.) brought all the current editions of the San Francisco Call, the Chronicle, and the Examiner. Of course there was the Vallejo paper also, and if you scoured Vallejo, you could get the Sacramento Bee. Dozens of copies of Scientific American sat by the kitchen door, where Andrew left them to go out to the rubbish or not, depending on whether he was offended by articles being run. The copies of Nature, another science journal, more respectable in Andrew’s estimation, sat on a table in the front room for a long time, the stack growing taller and taller, but eventually that stack, too, wound up beside a door, its fate always in the balance, because it, too, ran articles that Andrew disagreed with. In addition, he had many correspondents, and received many letters every day, though not as many as he sent out.
Much of their conversation was about charlatans and idiots who held ridiculous notions. All these notions were much the same to her, since she didn’t hold any scientific ideas at all beyond those of Jules Verne. For example, there was the metric system. Little did she know that, whereas in Missouri and even California people spoke of pints and pounds and rods and bushels and pecks, in France people spoke of grams and meters and centimeters, which were all scientifically related to the circumference of the earth. Germany had been a measurement madhouse before 1870, according to Andrew, with every town measuring its own ells, and the Meile different in Baden from what it was in Bavaria, and that didn’t even begin to take into account the Wegstunde, the Klafter, and the Zoll, which was an inch, more or less. Andrew could not forgive the British Parliament for voting, in a “demented medieval manner,” to decline to put the British Empire on the metric system. Margaret mentioned this to Mrs. Lear, who said, “Oh, my dear. That is marriage. As far as Captain Lear is concerned, the navy is riddled top to bottom with fools who were promoted for no apparent reason. But it could be worse—it could be the Royal Navy!” She laughed. “Better for them to air their complaints than take to drink over them!”
Andrew talked endlessly about the universe.
First, she had to be educated about everything that was known about the universe, such as the rate of acceleration for falling bodies, and laws of thermodynamics. Entropy was a concept that she grasped instantly. When he was explaining it to her, she imagined herself, first, busily cleaning house and cutting up a ham hock for baked beans, then, as a result of entropy, lying on a sofa and reading Rhoda Broughton. She didn’t have too much trouble, either, with Newton’s ideas about gravitation or his three laws of motion, except for the third one. Her life experience seemed to indicate that if you weren’t careful, often the reaction was stronger than the original action, not equal to it. Against Mr. Newton’s “equal and opposite reaction,” she suggested “sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.” Andrew laughed as if she were making a joke when she said this, and kissed her on the cheek.
Once he felt that she had a rudimentary understanding of the universe, he explained to her how he had changed its nature by identifying a multitude of double stars. These were two suns orbiting each other, rather like a couple spinning in the middle of a dance floor. However, he was not swinging her about—together, they were describing the circle. Andrew had found 246 of these doubles, of which 103 were confirmed by others and another thirteen were provisionally accepted. However, the remaining 130 were not accepted by certain men who were temporarily influential in the world of astronomy. The doubters would soon yield. “Herschel figured out that the solar system is moving through space, toward the constellation of Hercules, and it took fifty-four years for him to be proved correct.” Andrew often spoke of Herschel, and with such fondness that it took Margaret several months to understand that Sir William had died in 1822, some forty-five years before Andrew himself was born. Andrew laughed his cheerful rumble. It was Herschel who discovered Uranus, along with the satellites Titania and Oberon; it was he who believed that Earth was not the only inhabited planet; it was he who named the asteroid; it was he who discovered the existence of infrared radiation; it was he who made many of the telescopes in use in England; it was he who would have ratified Andrew’s own discoveries, if only he had lived to see them. Double stars had once, Andrew told her, been hurtling about space as the sun does, solitary, accompanied only by random satellites, but these stars had exerted a pull on each other in passing and captured each other.
Margaret’s letters to Lavinia were long and cheerful. She listed all the new things she was doing and thinking about. Lavinia usually wrote with her own news, but once she said, “Andrew is an unusual man. I, for one, never doubted that you would rise to the occasion. And in even the most ordinary marriages, Margaret, there are plenty of occasions to rise to.”
Andrew did not bother to celebrate Christmas, so Mrs. Lear asked her if he believed in God; she had heard from someone on the base that he did not,
and she had never observed Andrew and Margaret going even to the nondenominational chapel. At supper, Margaret asked him. He said, “Isaac Newton believed in God, my dear. He looked out into the stars, and he saw that they were fixed, and he made up his mind that God had set them there, just where they were, at the beginning of creation. He saw, too, that the stars were so far away from Earth that the average man could not imagine how far. And he could not help seeing that there were more stars in some parts of the sky than in others, and so, eventually, he had to admit that it was going to be fixity or gravity, and you could not have both. If the stars were not uniformly set into the sky, then they had to move toward one another or away, and eventually the universe would change, and, he thought, there might therefore be a universal collapse, as more and more stars gathered together in one spot. And so, because he did not think that God would allow this sort of thing, he decided that, from time to time, God puts the stars back where they should be, as an Almighty should be able to do. Of course, then they must ask the question why God set up the possibility of movement in the first place. Why not just make all the stars equidistant and equally large and dense, so that they don’t move?”
“Why not?” she said.
“Does God want to keep himself occupied?” Andrew took a bite of his ham steak and shrugged. It was a rainy day, and their windows were shrouded with gray, but they could hear the clanging and booming of ships being built a few hundred yards away. Andrew shook his head, then said, “Simply because, not. Because that is a question not to be asked.”
“I asked it.”
“You may ask it, of course, my dear. I don’t mean it is forbidden, as there are no forbidden questions. I simply mean it is not a question that I would ask. I am content to know that the stars do move, and to leave aside, for the moment, the purpose of their movement.”
“So you don’t believe in God?”
“I usually leave that question aside, too, but if you must have me respond to it, and, indeed, must fit your conception of me into the world of the naval base here, where Captain and Mrs. Lear and everyone else believe that God attends to their every thought and action, and judges them day by day, then I would say that, at this point in my life, I have come to understand God as a Being for whom it is my privilege to search, rather than as one for whom it is my obligation to perform.”
They ate quietly for a while. Then Andrew said, “Am I to assume that you yourself believe in God, my dear?”
“My mother always said that the ways of God were not to be understood by mortals, and I do believe that anyone from Missouri can understand her sentiment.”
He nodded. It seemed that, from their different perspectives, Andrew and she agreed on the subject, but when she spoke of this again to Mrs. Lear, Margaret said, “I think he would say that God is different from religion.” Mrs. Lear disagreed with this sentiment, but their friendship was not affected.
One day, he borrowed a shotgun from Hubert Lear, and the two of them went off on a walk to the western part of the island. They were gone all day. When they came back, Andrew was as excited as she had ever seen him—he and Hubert Lear had taken plenty of ammunition, but they had shot no squirrels or rabbits, they had shot only mud. They had shot mud from many angles, including several times when Hubert climbed as far up a tall tree as he could go, carrying the shotgun in a sling and the shells in a separate sling, and from that height (some thirty feet, Andrew thought), Hubert had shot straight down into the mud. After each shot into the mud, Andrew would inspect the holes the shot made, and, he said, “Every single one of them looked like a crater on the moon, and so, my dear, I see that the moon is being bombarded by shot of all sizes, and craters have been formed, and many of them have remained pristine, just as when they were first introduced into the surface.”
He was exceptionally excited by this idea, and had written it up by the next day, but he didn’t send it to a journal that day, or the next day. It was still lying on his desk a week later. When she asked about it, he declared that it wasn’t ready, that it required more thought. One evening, after he had gone to the observatory, she read it and replaced it on the desk, at just the angle he had left it. It was clearly written, and the idea seemed simple to her—beautiful, too, and fun, in its way, with Hubert up the tree shooting into the mud. Anyone, she thought, could appreciate this idea. Still he wouldn’t send it. The papers sat on his desk just as she had left them, week after week.
FROM this, it was but a step to glancing into other papers that were lying around. Andrew saved everything. At first the stacks were daunting, full of numbers and equations and words that she didn’t understand, like “parallax.” But there were others as carelessly left about—for example, an old note from one of his professors to the president of the university in Columbia. It read, “Arrogant scoundrel. Stirs trouble among the students. A monster of self-seeking impudence.” There was no name in the letter, no real indication of whom the professor was referring to, but of course, upon reading it, she searched more assiduously, and soon enough found a packet of letters from Andrew to his mother from those days.
In the first two years, he wrote only about his daily thoughts and occasional pleasures and successes, as a boy away from home would. His tone was affectionate and thoughtful, and Margaret was pleased at what she had found. In the spring of his second year, though, he wrote, “Dearest Mother, I know you will be disappointed in me, but I must report that I have done what it seemed proper for me to do at the time, and although the consequences are not what I would have wished (and I hasten to report this to you, as you will soon hear from others), I do not, as yet, regret my action, but I know that you have frequently counseled me to conduct myself with more caution. I am writing to say that I have failed to heed your advice, and will possibly be sent home from the college.” It emerged in subsequent letters that Andrew had paid three other students to cede to him their allotted hours on the college telescope, a seven-and-a-half-inch model that he was eager to master, and in order to cover this up, he had helped them falsify their observations—letting them (or encouraging them to) copy his observations and present them as their own work. This arrangement had obtained for some three months, until the professor, growing suspicious of one and then another of the three students because of their inability to reproduce the observations they said they had made but didn’t seem to remember, discovered it. Andrew then could not resist pointing out to the professor that the observations were his, and were all of the first order—accurate as well as numerous and “of better quality than the Professor’s own work, which I of course would not have said had I not spoken in haste, but the remark was nevertheless true, and if he had not known it to be true, then he would not have offered to break my jaw for me.” The other students received failing grades, but Andrew had to receive an A—his observations were indeed of the first quality. That professor, however, refused ever to work with Andrew again, because he had been “deceptive.” Margaret guessed that it was this man who had written the original note. She could imagine their confrontation only too easily—Andrew would have loomed over the professor, employed his natural eloquence, said things he should not say, and in a deep and prideful voice. But Margaret was not entirely put off by the incident—she appreciated his honesty and his remorse. And anyway, in the intervening years, he had learned to govern his temper.
But her curiosity was piqued—after some days, she found herself rummaging in his desk again. She brought this up in an oblique way with Mrs. Lear as they enjoyed a bit of winter sunshine while sipping oolong tea on Mrs. Lear’s porch. The boys were at school, and Captain Lear was expected home any day. Mrs. Lear knew what she was getting at as soon as she said the words “private papers.” Mrs. Lear laughed. “Goodness me!” she exclaimed. “Why should a husband’s affairs be private from his wife? He might easily find himself embroiled in more and more difficulties. I’m sure your mother would tell you the same thing. Do you know Mrs. Rudolph? Perhaps not. Captain Rudolph was”—she leaned
forward and lowered her voice—“court-martialed. They lived in the third house down. Dorothy Rudolph kept finding objects about the house, bejeweled daggers and carved jade boxes and such, and she didn’t have the sense to investigate their origins. She didn’t even look into Captain Rudoph’s bank book, just held out her hand once a week for household funds. He was stealing these things! Very strange. She might have stopped him, but she didn’t understand her conjugal responsibilities. My goodness, Margaret! If there are papers to look into or drawers to open, then do it while you have the time.”
And so she opened and looked into.
After Andrew graduated from college at Columbia, some fifty miles from their town, he went away to the University of Berlin, in Germany—everyone in town knew this, because it redounded to the credit of the entire county. Andrew wrote, “But, dearest Mother, if you think more deeply about the matter, you will see that there is nothing for me at an American institution. It almost doesn’t matter what ‘work rumor has done against’ me—the resources your preferred institutions put into mathematics, or astronomy, or even the sciences, altogether, are laughable when not shameful.” And then, from Berlin, he wrote, “They do think I am brilliant, dearest Mother. They do exclaim at how quickly I have picked up the language and the customs. They do admire the precision of my observations, but of course, they are hide-bound in their way, and very German and very Jewish, some of them. They stick together. I am endeavoring to remember, as you say, that all people stick with their own kind. And I am doing as you also bid me: I am NOT voicing everything I think, and I am not letting my temper get the best of me, even late at night, and I AM watching what I drink, because, as you say, it is evident that drink affects ANGLO-SAXONS somewhat differently than it affects GERMANS. Even so, they expected, they now say, to find once they got to know me, that I was ARMED at all times!”
The letters from Germany were not as numerous as those from Columbia—“Darling Mother, my studies so enthrall me that weeks go by without my realizing. Just to illustrate, I said to my friend Mauritz the other day, ‘Isn’t it about time for Easter?’ And he laughed and explained that it was already three weeks since Easter, and had I not noticed that he was away visiting his family in Düsseldorf for five days around that time?”
