Private Life

by Jane Smiley

  It took her two hours to get back to Dora’s apartment, but she was not exactly frightened, she was too invisible for that, even as she stopped and waited at a Western Union office, sent Andrew a telegram saying she was fine and would be staying another night. Once inside Dora’s place, she stood at the window, watching. It never occurred to her to worry about Dora—later, this confidence struck her as strange, but at the time, as she looked out the window, the havoc seemed to swirl below her, not touching her. It was Dora herself who brought it home and woke her up.

  For something had taken off her hat—she had been standing that close. The flash and boom of the explosion, a rippling effect in the air, and then her hat flying off her head, followed by the screaming, the bodies, the dead, the wounded, the plunging horses, the running, pushing, pummeling people—she had hardly been able to keep her feet in the crush. But she had stayed there for an hour or more, her eyes peeled, and then slipped away to the Examiner building to write and file her story.

  Margaret said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t with you.”

  “I didn’t want you with me, and I was right. What took off my hat was a lead weight of some kind that was packed into the bomb. It might have killed you. I was short enough to survive.” Her tone was businesslike and direct.

  After this, they were silent for a long period, sitting in the dark. Still Margaret wasn’t afraid in a way that she recognized—now awake, she was thrilled in a physical sense, as if all her muscles had been suddenly struck and they were resonating. That bun she’d bought had frightened her more than the bomb, somehow. It was as if the bomb had fulfilled the prediction of the bun.

  Dora said, “It was Mike Boda, not Sasha Berkman.”

  “What?”

  “Did you see Pete last night? When he came over?”

  “Maybe; I was very sleepy.”

  “He was upset, because he’d heard that Sasha Berkman is around. He shot Frick, remember that? But he’s not a bomb-maker. I’m sure it was the Italians.”

  “You said the Italians are harmless.”

  “Our Italians are harmless. The Italians from Chicago are not harmless.”

  A long time after that, it occurred to Margaret to ask whether Pete knew Sasha Berkman—Sasha Berkman was a notorious anarchist. Dora said, “They are not friends by any means.” Margaret saw again that Dora’s life opened out like a funnel. She and Beatrice and Robert sat safely at the narrow tip, while people she would not have dared to know resided in the perilous and possibly malevolent distance. Still, she felt calm enough.

  When the time came to retire, Dora insisted Margaret take the bed in the bedroom. She said, “I’m much too wrought up to be that far into the apartment. I might have to go out in the street and walk about a bit.”

  But she didn’t go out. Margaret lay on her back and listened, a light cotton blanket pulled up to her chin. A clock struck one, and then another, more distant clock struck, and then she was dreaming of a crowd, of seeing a multitude of shoes and being unable to lift her head to look at the faces. One pair of shoes was her own, and another pair, a larger pair, kept pace with hers. They were walking through flattened grass and wild clover. Her voice asked where the bomb was, but no voice answered hers. It was the legs of the horses that made her nervous—she could only see them up to their knees. She asked again where the bomb was, but, though a hand pushed her from behind, no voice spoke. Now there was a dog, white with a black tail, and she reached out to touch it. The dog fell down and there was a gasp, as if all the people around her were watching the dog, and then she woke up.

  The door had opened—she could see the glimmer of the gaslights from the hall, and, silhouetted in that light, a figure, or, rather (as she woke up more thoroughly), two figures made one, and then she heard Pete’s voice as he said, “I told you not to go!”

  Whatever Dora said in reply was muffled by his shoulder, because Margaret saw that he was holding her in a profound embrace, not even kissing her, but attempting to press her right into himself, as if in terror rather than in passion. Margaret sat up and leaned forward to get a better view, not abashed in the slightest, only as curious as she had ever been about anything. Dora seemed to rest in that embrace. Pete’s hand came up and smoothed her hair. Then there was a sound, and Margaret realized that it was the sound of Dora weeping. Pete breathed out, “Ah, ah, ah.” Margaret lay back down and turned away from the doorway. Moments passed, and then minutes. The sounds subsided, then the door was closed, footsteps crossed the room, and the sofa creaked. Sometime after that, Margaret fell back to sleep. When she got up at what seemed to be dawn, she could see Dora stretched out on the sofa, a pillow under her head, asleep. Pete was not there.

  ANDREW began talking about how he should have written the book more clearly, he should have cut a lot of details—the big picture could have been easier for people to grasp. What if they were getting bogged down in chapter two or three, when the real meat of his theory was in chapter six and, especially, seven? And he should have put the equations in an appendix—he hadn’t even thought of that, but it was the obvious thing. He could have written a sort of two-tiered book, with a text for “intelligent but nonspecialist” readers in one, larger typeface, and another text—essentially, an ongoing parade of footnotes, but linked, in a smaller typeface, for the ones who could truly understand what he was getting at (“as few as they may be”). Why had he been so impatient to get it printed? Another year of work would have enabled him to refine his theory, to demonstrate it more clearly, and the war over there might have ended, too, leaving room in the newspapers for a grand conception with long-term implications.

  The book had been too advanced for a publisher, he accepted that, but the printer he’d used had kept throwing samples before him, tempting him to spend more and more money, taking advantage of his vanity. It wasn’t the money wasted, because, thanks to investments, he was pulling money out of the air, but what would a scientist think when this heavy, deluxe publication arrived in the mail? It didn’t look scientific. He had thought, another vanity, that his name alone would carry some weight, and maybe it did, but there was something about the book, he saw now, that was a kind of faux pas. And his haste in printing the thing had been matched by his haste in sending out copies, and now …

  By October, he was literally tearing his hair and wringing his hands. He haunted their house, but then he began to range more widely—over to the observatory, then the Officers’ Club, then into Vallejo. On one of these days, after she had cleaned the kitchen, she picked up one of the books and looked at it herself.

  She managed to glean the gist of his argument, though it took considerable perseverance, many cups of tea, and a walk down the block to clear her head. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t recognize anything—that moon-capture theory was there, set into the millions of years and millions and billions of what you would call cubic miles of space. What she understood seemed plausible. First there was gravity, which was a force exerted between masses, its strength dependent on their size. Then there was motion—those masses hurtling here and there, though not by any means quickly enough for someone such as herself to detect their movements with the naked eye. To gravity and motion, you added in the uneven population of space, empty here, full of galaxies there. When you combined that unevenness with the gravity and the motion, it was obvious (Andrew claimed) that the populous places were going to get more populous and the emptier places were going to get still emptier, because in the populous places, masses would come together and forces would get stronger and stronger until everything clumped together, and why not, given how long it was going to be? In the end, everything would clump together into one big mass, and then, within that mass, everything would change as the mass got hotter and hotter, and then the mass itself would get smaller but denser, and nothing could stop this from happening. The logical end to this process would be the disappearance of all mass, for once the mass had advanced to its logical conclusion, which was a dot that weighed as much as everyt
hing in the universe, the empty part would disappear also, though what constituted “disappearance” in this case she could not have told you. No doubt the problem was that words could not convey actual events, and, indeed, actual events were hardly imaginable. If you did find yourself, as she did, imagining something, then what you were imagining was wrong. But poor Andrew was more or less stuck with using words to describe their doom.

  Except that, according to Andrew, his own researches showed that the universe, as big as it was, contained no empty space. This reminded her of something that Sherlock Holmes often did, which was to give the obvious solution, and then give the real solution, which relied on the one factor that only Holmes had discerned. The real story about the universe was that, although it appeared that gravitational force, mass, and motion would eventually produce collapse, the universe was actually filled with Something. Newton himself had known that the universe was filled with Something, and for convenience’s sake, this Something was called Ether, or, to distinguish it from the chemical ether, Aether. This Something was the substance of the universe, some kind of thing that exerted a repulsive force insofar as it counteracted the tendency of the traveling masses to clump together in accordance with gravity and therefore eventually to contract to the size of a dot or a pinprick or an invisible point. The balance of these two processes (the Something filling the universe and pushing things away from one another, and gravity pulling things toward one another) resulted in a more or less even continuum of contracting and expanding. This process, Andrew seemed to be saying, was what was called Eternity.

  She felt his presence while she was reading. When she was finished reading, she held the blue heavy book in her hand and contemplated it, not, now, as a miraculous object, but as evidence. There were people she knew who never once in their lives pondered the nature of the universe. Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, all of that was enough for them. Andrew was from her town. What in the world had set him on this path? A teacher? A book? Whatever it was, it was in some sense an argument against education—wouldn’t he have been happier with smaller thoughts? As an investor, he was a whiz. As an observer of nature, such as after the earthquake, or out in the marshes, he was exact and careful. He could draw a bird or a flower or a diagram of a sewing machine. But day after day, year after year, he thought only of the universe, which he could not see.

  Through the winter, Andrew pounded about the island on great walks which led him past the post office, and so he had to go in to see if some stray item of mail had been put, belatedly, into his box. When Science or some other journal came into the house, he tossed it on the table unread, and then circled around it for the rest of the day, eventually picking it up, leafing through it, and tossing it on the table again, with more vehemence. These magazines he didn’t allow to stack up, as he had before—he threw them away in disgust after one perusal. His rage and dissatisfaction seemed to fill the place even when he was quiet. Margaret didn’t dare engage him in discussion of these matters, because it seemed dangerous to her to give him a direction for venting his anger. She imagined him on his walks, his feelings flying out into the open air and exploding harmlessly, far from human habitation. Or, since the island was, if possible, even noisier than usual, she imagined his feelings diminished and subsumed in the general racket.

  She distracted him, instead, with a safer topic—the war news. Did he really think, in December, that the Germans wanted peace? Was Wilson’s letter about this sincere, in Andrew’s opinion? Had his travels in Germany taken him to this area they were now calling “the Hindenburg Line”? And she did distract him: Andrew exclaimed that this line represented something about the Germans—it was mysteriously east of where many German outposts had been—but then the mystery was solved (vindicating him once again) when the Germans destroyed everything to the west of the line, stitched the blasted territory with land mines, and retreated into their impregnable fortress.

  But, whatever the news, it did not keep his mind off Einstein for very long. He threw the scientific journals away, then retrieved them from the trash pile, read them, and saw that Einstein’s silly theory was gaining adherents in spite of the war. He thought, though bitterly, that he had to write another book, a better one, refining and clarifying his theory, and incorporating the improvements to it that he had come up with. He stormed about the house (and the island), lamenting the injustice of having to write another book.

  And his mood began to lift. On the one hand, he told her, he could easily let himself continue to indulge in vain regrets about how he should have written the book differently, or how he had been, in his enthusiasm, premature. On the other hand, he could revise his work, which would take two or three years but result in something more persuasive. Really, he said, he could see it quite clearly, and it was certainly true that every bitter pill contained within itself the sweet grain of a larger renewal. How often did he compare his situation to that of C—— now? The very five-inch telescope that he had looked upon with such chagrin the day he arrived on the island was now precious to him, while certainly C——, who then seemed so fortunate, must now feel enslaved by his monster. If he just explained himself a little more clearly, he would win in the end. Margaret found herself offering to type for him two hours every day—it seemed a small thing, a way of assuaging, or directing, or deflecting the energy coursing through the house. She had learned to do it, and it was easy for her—not that different from knitting.

  WITHIN two days of the Zimmermann telegram, in which Germany tried to enlist Mexico against the U.S., and California turned out to be, at least in Margaret’s imagination, very close to the front lines, Dora received permission to go to Europe—first England, then France, then who knew? Her column was to be called “In Another Part of the World.” Margaret was shocked. For the entire autumn, Dora had talked to Margaret admiringly about Pete, and though she hadn’t actually spoken the word “wedding” or the word “marriage,” there was an intensity to her feelings for him—he had brought her an orchid in a pot made of a coconut, he had taken her to the Cliff House for oysters. Remember the way he had accompanied her to Fresno to interview that man in jail named Osmond Jacobs who had a powder burn on his cheek the day after the bombing and anarchist connections? At the jail, Pete had helped her conduct the interview in French.

  When they came to the island for two suppers, they sat close together and finished each other’s sentences. He took her to meet the editor of a famous poetry magazine, and the two women gossiped like old friends about Ezra Pound. Pete promised to introduce Dora to Emma Goldman, and Dora talked about writing a book.

  But then she had her ticket—on the Norfolk, through the Panama Canal, thence to Southampton. She was to leave in ten days.

  DORA made one last trip to the island, by herself. With her she brought some things of Pete’s—a scroll and two screens, all wrapped in various layers of silk and paper. Pete had disappeared. Dora said she didn’t know where to, but Margaret suspected that she did. Margaret was reluctant to take the artworks, because she was sure they were valuable, and Quarters P was a monument to disarray. But evidently she had to—there was nowhere else for them as safe as the island. More important, Dora herself looked to Margaret petite and easily damaged, all the while laughing and excited for her new adventures. And then, on the very Monday after she set sail, a letter arrived for Andrew from an editor at the Examiner, inviting him to serve as science correspondent for the paper. The editor said that he had heard that Andrew was “one of the foremost astronomers in the world” and “entirely up to date on every new scientific development” and “one of the smartest men in California” and “a prolific writer.” He would be paid a penny a word.

  It was a shock, but once war was declared, shocks came every day—one day they heard that the Germans blew up one of their own ships as it was being boarded by marines. Within a few days after that, San Francisco Bay was being blockaded against enemy ships, a destroyer was attacked off Long Island, Field Marsh
al Haig, the British commander, was advancing first one mile and then another against the Hindenburg Line, and killing thousands of civilians while doing so. But even so, for the first while, Margaret could not help seeing the whole thing as the wreck of her own life and her own plans—she thought about Dora every day while she was out with the other naval wives who lived on the island, gathering provisions or charitable contributions, while she was sorting clothing and medical supplies to be sent to Europe, while she listened to herself talking about harvests and factories as she had never done before (although she could hardly imagine what it was they were talking about—wheat, barley, oats, workers, bosses, pig iron, output).

  AND then spies blew up a powder magazine over by the bay one morning around breakfast time. The explosion was a body-shaking roar followed by a brilliant swoosh as that building and several others around it went up in flames. Margaret grabbed the edges of the table, the dishes jumped, her glass of water fell over, and Andrew’s cup of coffee rattled in its saucer. It was much more frightening than the earthquake had been, or the small explosion that had welcomed her to the island so many years before.

  Andrew leapt from the breakfast table and left the house. Margaret went out more slowly, first to the stoop, and then to the walk. Everyone on the island was outside, either running toward or staring at the biggest fire any of them had ever seen. She got her shawl and bag without giving Dora, or Pete, or their “marriage” a thought, and ran to the hospital. Her friends were there—they didn’t know what they could do, but they thought something would present itself, if only fetching and carrying. At the hospital, she heard all the rumors—about the marine who had been knocked cold on patrol three nights before by an intruder, and about the men who had been seen around the island, and about how there were Germans all over the place whom the navy itself had charge of, and who was watching them? Five people were killed, including two children, and dozens injured. In the days after that, Margaret had her typing done by nine in the morning, and then went straight to the hospital. She hardly thought any longer of what now seemed like the utterly vanished life of not being at war.