by Jane Smiley
Dora herself said nothing about going to Europe. Then she came for a weekend visit to Mrs. Wareham’s. She had infiltrated a Wobbly meeting dressed as a young man and was very pleased with herself. She had worn canvas pants and broken shoes and used a string as a belt and spoken in “low, resentful monosyllables,” saying that she was up from San Jose looking for a job. “But really,” she told Margaret, “I’d heard that Lucy Parsons might be there, and I was hoping to get a word with her.”
The Bells would have shivered in horror at the thought of Dora consorting with International Workers of the World and swooned at the thought of her sitting down with such a famous socialist and strike organizer as Lucy Parsons, but Margaret said, “You might write a book about her.” Lucy Parsons was an old woman and would not be going to Europe.
“Too much time in Chicago,” said Dora. She sighed. “The meeting was all Italian bakery-workers. And I could only understand about half of what they were saying. I was embarrassed at myself.”
Nevertheless, she had written it up for the paper, and the article was appearing Sunday, which was why she was at Mrs. Wareham’s for the weekend.
Margaret said, “I don’t—”
“It’s not as daring as it appears.”
“How do you know?”
“Nothing ever happens, does it? I should have taken you to the meeting. It was all a lot of shouting. Nothing to be afraid of. No one was drunk, so it was safer than a saloon. They want to complain. They should complain.”
“They work themselves up.”
“Or they blow off steam. That’s what I say in my little piece. They’re happier afterward.”
Dora was pleased with everything about her prank, from the way she learned about the meeting (eavesdropping) to her costume and her “acting” to her well-developed memory (she wrote the quotes down afterward, back at her apartment). The indignation about the article would come not from the Wobblies but from the industrialists, who would be upset that she had “defanged” their enemies, made them seem merely rowdy, almost good-natured.
Margaret stayed at Mrs. Wareham’s most of the afternoon, even hauling out her knitting for a bit while Dora read, but she could not think of a way to broach the topic of marriage. It occurred to her that she might enlist Mrs. Wareham, but she knew full well that Mrs. Wareham’s own marriage had not been a happy one, and as much as she loved her son, Angus, she pitied the girl he had married in Hawaii, and now there was a child, and Mrs. Wareham had sent the girl clothes and money. And Mrs. Wareham was not as set in her isolationist opinions as most people were.
Then Pete Krizenko appeared, when she had almost abandoned her plan, knocking at the front door of Quarters P while she was washing up after Andrew’s dinner. The moment she opened the door, she knew that she had no idea how to ascertain his “intentions” or to suggest some “intentions” if he hadn’t conceived any on his own. Dora was thirty-two. Pete was not as old as Andrew, but even by the way he walked into the room with his hat pushed back on his head and his hands in his pockets, she could tell he was long habituated to doing just as he pleased. Her project, she thought right then, was akin to harnessing cats. So what she said was “I’m so glad you’ve come! How can we prevent Dora from going to Europe?” And then she backed away from the door and let him in. Andrew was in his study, but the door stayed closed, because there was always so much uproar from the ship factories at this time of day; he would not know of Pete’s coming unless she summoned him.
Pete sat down. He said, “Do we want her not to go to Europe? Not even to Spain? Things in Spain have never been better.” Again, she noted, his accent could be from anywhere. She wondered if he had practiced it as he was standing outside the door, but then, remembering her purpose, she banished that thought. She said, “She wouldn’t stay in Spain.”
Pete settled back and crossed his legs at the ankles. He was holding his hat in his lap, and now he smoothed the brim. When he smiled, Margaret saw that he was amused at her. Normally, she didn’t mind anyone’s being amused at her, but now she felt a sense of offense take hold. He said, “Perhaps she needs a husband.”
“I thought of that.”
“I thought of that,” said Pete.
“Did you really?”
“Indeed, I did.”
He didn’t add anything. The outcome of that thought was self-evident, wasn’t it?
Margaret tried to gauge from Pete’s demeanor how he felt about what appeared to be the failure of his hopes, then said, “Perhaps you could be more persistent.”
He said, “What about my manly self-regard? Russian men especially—”
“It didn’t seem to me from your stories that you have much manly self-regard.” She shocked herself by saying this, but then said, “I mean to be giving you a compliment, you know.” And she did.
He dipped his head. Compliment accepted, she decided. And then she felt herself relax a bit—not her distrust, but her discomfort. She asked him if he cared for any tea. The stove was still hot. He said, “May I prepare it?”
Margaret pointed to the kitchen.
Pete seemed perfectly at home in her kitchen, and perfectly at home making the tea, but he did it in a way she had not seen before—he boiled the water until it was rolling, then poured some into the teapot. After he had swirled it around inside the pot, he poured it out, and then added loose tea to the empty pot, and let it sit for some seconds. He invited her to look into the pot. She saw the tea leaves relax in the damp warmth into a dark, fragrant pile. Only then did he pour in the water, which, in the meantime, he had brought back to the boil. He looked around, picked up a shawl she had left hanging over the back of a chair, bunched it around the teapot, and cut a lemon into wedges. “Now,” he said, “we have Russian tea. When I visit again, I will bring some salka pastries. They are good with tea and jam. Little buns.”
He handed her the cups and saucers, and himself carried the teapot wrapped in her shawl into the front room.
The tea was dark and strong, and she liked the lemon. But they were no closer to securing Dora’s presence in San Francisco. Margaret’s task, she knew, was to extract information and then promises. Finally, she said, “Did Dora tell you my sister is married to her brother?”
“It is my impression that they have twelve or thirteen children.”
“They have four children. Four boys.”
“Dora does always seem to overestimate the negative effects of any number of children.”
“Beatrice’s boys are quite well behaved for Missouri boys. Not so”—she thought for a moment—“well armed as most.”
Pete laughed.
“It’s my other sister, Elizabeth, who has produced the prodigies.” It was pleasant, after all, Margaret thought, the way Pete’s willingness to be amused had infused her.
The door to Andrew’s study opened, and Andrew came out, papers in one hand and a book in the other. He said, “My dear—” But then he saw Pete, tossed aside the book, and crossed the room in two strides. Pete stood up. They shook hands in a hearty way, and Andrew declared, “The thing is finished!”
He was talking about his manuscript.
Dora was forgotten, because the book he had tossed aside, which he now retrieved from the chair where it had landed, was a sample volume from a printer Andrew had unearthed in Oakland. The binding, green, was an excellent possibility. The title could, for only a small extra payment, be embossed in silver, and the front edge—Andrew stepped to the table and pushed the tea things aside. Margaret picked up her shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders. Later, she took the tea things back to the kitchen.
AFTER all, he chose deep (“navy”) blue embossed covers with a silver title (The Universe Explained, by Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early, Ph.D., United States Navy). The frontispiece was a picture of Andrew taken some years before, when his hair and his mustache were still dark. As Margaret held it in her hands, it seemed to her that it had arisen quite suddenly, popping into her presence as if from another wor
ld. The paper was glossy and the front edge gilded. The typeface, which Andrew chose on his own, was surprisingly appealing—upright and uncompromising, but friendly, just the way Andrew fancied himself to be. The pages of text were interspersed with ink drawings that Andrew had made. He had an elegant hand, as when he drew the impact craters from the shotgun experiment he had done with Hubert Lear. The endpapers were especially rich—swirls of blue and yellow that reminded her of the sky.
A thousand copies were printed. Andrew rented a room to store them, and paid a young man to send them out to every astronomical journal, geological journal, and physics journal in the world, also to twenty-five or so newspapers, from the Times of London to the Sacramento Bee. They were also sent to heads of observatories, and one, of course, to Mr. Akenbourn, in South Africa. One was sent, with Andrew’s compliments, to Oliver Lodge in England, another to Professor Russell at Princeton, another to Lord Rutherford at the University of Manchester. He sent them only to English speakers, and he sent these volumes as gifts, not as supplications. The rest he expected to sell to interested parties.
And that is that, thought Margaret with relief. He had gotten it off his chest.
“I have nothing to prove,” he said to her one day at breakfast.
“Except your theory.” She laughed, though he did not, so she added, “A man who is proposing a whole new way of looking at the universe has something to prove.”
But he shook his head. “My task is to think through my theory as carefully as possible, working it out so that it is complete and self-contained. How can I prove it, with a five-inch telescope? Only those astronomers with expensive equipment can prove it, with mathematicians to back them up.”
It was then that she saw how much he had to prove.
The first response was from Mr. Akenbourn, who congratulated Andrew on the “scope and depth of your analysis, and the pioneering genius of your ideas.” But this letter was enclosed in the same envelope with another in a different handwriting, that of Mr. Akenbourn’s daughter, who said that Mr. Akenbourn had died, but that he had been reading Andrew’s book on his deathbed “and it seemed like he found it enjoyable, Captain Early, though his strength was waning very quickly. But he wanted to write you, and so he did. Yours in memory, Clara Akenbourn Maldon.”
Oliver Lodge sent a card—“Many thanks. Very busy, all best, Lodge”—and Science noted it in the “Books Received” column. Andrew took this as a semi-promise that someone was even then busy reviewing it. It did receive an actual review from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (“Missourian Sees the Big Picture”) and the Des Moines Register (“Universe Like a Giant Net, Says Scientist”), and a few other, smaller papers, one in Australia. The editor of Observatory, which had published Andrew’s letter on Einstein, sent a note—“Thanks for this, looks good.” These acknowledgments dribbled in over the summer, to the swelling tune of Andrew’s regrets.
Pete sent him a note asking for a copy of the book and offering to pay for it (Andrew sent it free, of course), and then, within a gratifyingly short time, Pete visited for the afternoon, just to discuss Andrew’s theories. Andrew took this opportunity to walk Pete over to the observatory and show him the little telescope again. Over supper they talked about a happy subject, investments—Andrew’s had flourished. He bragged a little that he had turned over his inheritance from his mother almost three times (“That’s geometric, not arithmetic, you know”), and after a while Pete brought the conversation back around to the extraordinary way Andrew had managed to mesh “the known with the unknown.” This conversation sustained Andrew’s buoyant mood for days, and reconfirmed his sense of Pete’s unusual talent. (“Not, perhaps, strictly speaking, genius, my dear, he’s a bit too eclectic for that, but a rare understanding, at the very least. And it’s no secret that Russians are easily distracted.”)
DORA was one of several reporters assigned to cover the Preparedness Day parade—projected to be the biggest parade ever in San Francisco, and, everyone thought, a kind of ratification that San Francisco had resurrected itself, surpassed itself. Tens of thousands of people were to march, and fifty bands, ostensibly to show the Europeans where salvation was to be found, but really, Margaret gathered, to celebrate. Dora was assigned to ferret out interesting little moments, characteristic bits of San Francisco life. She persuaded Margaret to stay with her the night before, a Friday, and though she had not planned a party, the apartment was filled with friends and strangers who spilled into the hallway, down the stairs, and out into the park across the street, where Margaret saw Leonora and three women she didn’t know gesturing with their glowing cigarettes in the late twilight.
By midnight, Margaret was sitting on the windowsill in one corner of the apartment, almost behind a drape, yawning, but enjoying the sparkly bustle in the street below, where four inebriates were singing “You Made Me Love You,” and doing the harmonies quite nicely. Then Pete showed up, and he did not look happy. Margaret watched him make his way across the room to Dora, who was standing with Mal Cohen, and say something. Mal’s eyebrows went up and Dora tossed her head, and Pete put his hands in his pockets. The three of them talked fairly earnestly for a while; then Pete wandered around the room. He had not taken off his hat. He spoke to this person and that person. Margaret tried to watch, and to gauge whether he was more interested in any other woman than he was in Dora, but her back kept crumpling against the window frame and her eyes kept closing. Perhaps he came up to her. Perhaps she heard his voice and felt a hand on her shoulder.
In the morning, Dora’s attitude about the parade was slightly more subdued. She was ready to go, but not eager. At one point, she said to Margaret, “Darling, you could watch it perfectly well from here.”
“No, I could not. I couldn’t even see it!” exclaimed Margaret, pinning on her hat in front of Dora’s big glass—bigger than any glass on the entire island, probably. Dora pursed her lips. They went down the staircase and out the front door, and turned toward the Embarcadero.
Margaret thought she was used to bustle, but she had never seen such a crowd before in her life, and it daunted her more than she expected. People were everywhere—on the sidewalks, on the streets, sitting in doorways, leaning out of windows. The parade was to march up Market Street, but it seemed that every street was full. She looked up. Boys were standing on roofs, and more than a few had shinnied up light poles. Hawkers peddled everything from umbrellas, to sardines wrapped in slices of bread, to apricot turnovers. Dora did not even look around as she snaked through the crowd. There were people tuning up their instruments and tightening their drums. Two ladies in uniforms marshaled a bunch of orphans into four straight lines, and two of the girls caught Margaret’s eye as she passed. One of them, with blond braids to her waist, smiled. Margaret gazed at her, wondering how such a pretty girl had ended up at the orphanage.
That was when she lost Dora, who seemed to vanish like a fish through the surface of a pond. Margaret stopped and looked around. But it was impossible to stand, too, so she let the crowd move her along, only offering enough resistance so that she could keep the nearest corner—Battery and Market—in her sights. She and Dora had come down Bush Street, something of a hill—and it occurred to her that if the crowd got worse she could retreat back up the hill and still see at least part of the parade. She took a quarter out of her purse and gave it to a pushcart man. He handed her an appetizing-looking bun, sugar crystals sprinkled on top, but as she took it in her hand she had what could only be called a “turn,” as Lavinia would say. The crowd closed around her and she began gasping. The man who had sold her the bun looked at her oddly, then said, “Hey, lady—” She remembered to do what she had thought to do so long before—she retreated up Bush Street. The effort was successful. Somehow, standing on the hill, seething though it was, calmed her nerves. She ate her bun.
When the flags and the first groups of horsemen came down the street, she could see them perfectly. Shouts went up. The ranks of the horsemen and then the first brass band were i
mpressive—side by side, the trumpets, then the trombones and tubas stretched across the width of Market Street. Onlookers began to jump up and down, shouting and screaming. On the roof of the building across from the bottom of Bush Street, boys seemed to be firing their guns into the air. Margaret backed up a few steps, silly as that was, and looked upward. A bullet shot into the air, she knew, had to come down again. Suddenly, maybe at the sight of the boys on the roof, she remembered her father’s saying that to her brother Ben.
The bomb went off right then. She heard it, faintly, and others around her did, too. Maybe she heard it because she was on the hill rather than down on Market Street. She didn’t know it was a bomb—no one did, until the parade broke up and Market Street emptied. By that time, the news had circulated through the crowd. A bomb had gone off down by the Embarcadero, not far from the ferry building. The Wobblies had done it. They said they were going to and they did. Even as the rumor passed through the crowd and the crowd began to break apart, Margaret felt herself freeze up and disappear—yes, one bomb could be followed by others, but that had nothing to do with her. She climbed Bush Street, and she was hardly conscious of moving, even as she turned down Stockton toward Union Square. Crowds of people seemed to be pouring toward her from the east, and as time went on, their faces got more shocked. But they had nothing to do with her, she had disappeared. She asked two women what had happened, but they couldn’t see or hear her—they didn’t answer. Nevertheless, she came to know that the bomb had gone off on Steuart Street, at the bottom of Market, and there was blood everywhere. The bomb had been filled with lead sash-weights.
