by Jane Smiley
But Andrew was unmoved by the war. Even though the entire knitting circle thought that the Germans had paid members of the IWW to get onto the island and blow up that magazine as a warning, he thought that the powder in the magazine had heated up overnight, and a rush of air into the building in the morning had set it off. Nor was he daunted, in his daily walks to the observatory, by what they saw around them—ash and rubble, death and burned-out buildings from the explosion, but also new buildings meant for the war effort seeming to shoot out of the ground. However, he allowed her to lock their doors, which they had never done.
Andrew did wonder aloud about Pete—he regretted not having him around as a sounding board for his expanded theories of the universe. Margaret had nothing to say about Pete. Like everything else, thinking of him reminded her only that fresh waves of men were getting shot every day, for either fighting or defending, spying or deserting.
Dora’s pieces began to appear, the first entitled “My Woman Lorry Driver,” about a trip she took between London and Southampton with a twenty-year-old girl who was transporting cabbages. Dora then got from England to France, made her way from Calais to Bordeaux, then over to Pau, Marseilles, and Genoa. She skirted the front lines, though not the war. Her tone was adventurous rather than fearful, and each time Margaret read one of Dora’s pieces, she thought that her wish—her attempt—to keep Dora away from the war had been worse than futile and worse, even, than selfish. Surely Dora and Pete had known exactly what she was doing and laughed at her for trying to trim their adventurous lives to the dull pattern of her own. Her embarrassment lingered even when the dispatches from Italy began to sound worried—“Portrait of a Family That Has Lost Five Sons (Savona, Italy),” “A Russian Speaker Is Silenced by Doubt (Lucca, Italy),” “Children on the Beach (Portofino, Italy),” and “Opinionated in Parma.” The pieces conformed to a pattern: Dora would set out to find a loaf of bread or to enjoy a patch of fine weather or to meet a long-lost friend, and she would encounter someone—in one case, children playing with a battered ball, whose father had been killed in the war and whose mother had disappeared a week before. Dora talked to them and gave them money, but when she returned with a local priest who promised to help, the children had vanished. The opinionated young woman in Parma was German. Her opinions concerned the catalogue of crimes committed against the Germans by the French, the English, the Russians, and the Americans. Dora quoted her without comment. She lingered in Parma for three weeks, then went east to Bologna, and farther east to Padua. She kept moving toward the war, recording the hardships that she saw, but with that same idle, wandering tone. In a piece called “Three Nights in the Mountains,” she was driving from Padua to Perugia when her car broke down. She saw no one but deer, hawks, and a wildcat for three days. The village she walked to was abandoned. Then two men came along in a wagon. There was also “Hidden Treasures of Ravenna,” in which she reflected on someone named Theodoric, who had previously conquered Italy from the north and was buried there. In “I Am Grazed by a Bullet,” she related how the sleeve of her jacket was torn by a bullet outside of Trieste, which everyone seemed to be fleeing. But by the time the Italians lost the battle of Caporetto, Dora’s dispatch was from Rome, and after that two weeks went by and she was in Spain, far from the fighting (“Toro!”)—her Trieste experience seemed to have aroused a belated sense of caution. Beatrice wrote that the Bells did not read her articles, and put her letters away in a box, unopened. Bit by bit, Margaret forgave herself for trying to save Dora. Like everything else from before the war, she thought, the idea of “saving” things seemed the rankest delusion.
There was no word of Pete at all.
The two screens had been wrapped in blankets and tied with twine.
One day, she laid the first one on the rug and untied the wrappings. The screen consisted of four panels, each about two feet wide, depicting a mountainous scene. To the left and to the right, rugged slopes rose in the foreground, steeper than anything she had seen even in the Sierras. In the middle of the scene, more distant peaks were still more jagged, and on those slopes, several stunted pine trees were bunched together. The mountains were painted in a vaporous dark ink, so as to seem especially threatening, and the farthest ridges were partly hidden by clouds. A river flowed through a U-shaped cleft in the mountains, and in the river floated a long narrow boat with a rounded prow, carrying a man in a kimono. Her eye was drawn straight to the tiny face of the man, who was sitting quietly, looking upward, not, it seemed, in fear, but in curiosity and interest. The water flowed, the clouds drifted, the trees huddled, but the man seemed undaunted by his surroundings.
The second screen was smaller—only about four feet tall—also four panels, entirely painted on gold. The largest object was a black tree with rough bark, twisted and bending to the left. Willowlike fronds of leaves seemed to toss in a breeze. Turf, or perhaps moss, spread in irregular dark-green patches around the trunk of the tree, and colorful birds flew in and out among the blowing leaves, or perched on rocks sunk into the moss. Above the tree, golden clouds billowed in the golden sky. To the left, clouds of red flowers on long, frondlike stems also tossed about, and the branches and leaves of some other variety of tree, something like a plane tree, spread across the golden horizon. She stood this screen up beside the first one and stared from one to the other, taking in both effects—the startling and the soothing. She found herself breathing deeply, as if she could inhale their atmosphere or fragrance. She sat there for hours, it seemed, but possibly little more than a single hour. When Andrew came in, he stepped in front of her and surveyed the two, then said, “My dear, so this is what they look like. He offered them to me.”
“To buy?”
“Why, of course, my dear. As an investment. But my mind was on other things, and the subject dropped, as I remember.”
“They are beautiful.”
“But not for display, my dear, in such humble surroundings as ours. I see that.”
This seemed true. He helped her wrap them up again, and put them away. At supper, he said, “It has crossed my mind to wonder what we shall do with them.”
So, Margaret thought, Andrew thinks Pete is dead, too.
Her daily round consisted of typing, cooking, knitting scarves, packing boxes, and discussing with the other naval wives the ins and outs of the million things that they did not understand, including what to think of the dead whose names they knew, among all of the dead whose names they did not know.
On the first anniversary of the U.S.’s entrance into the war, it seemed to Margaret to have lasted much longer than a year. The island was never silent at any time of the day or night. One thing happened that was amusing even to the knitting ladies—when the Secretary of the Navy had issued an edict saying that there could be no sales of liquor within five miles of a naval base, liquor and beer left town by the wagonload, and there was a funeral for “John Barleycorn” that passed down Sonoma Street. The corpse was a coffin-load of empty whiskey bottles. She remembered this because it was on this very day when Andrew commented on a disease outbreak in Kansas. “Strange thing, my dear. Very sudden, and it’s not as if Fort Riley is at a crossroads. The Katy doesn’t even pass through there.” He shook his head; she felt her habitual inner clang of alarm, and then, in mid-May, he said, “Now, here, this Fort Riley thing, remember that, my dear? Very like this flu they’ve had in Spain.” He wrote a column about it for the Examiner, but it was bumped from the paper by the Battle of the Marne. Things were so busy that she forgot about her fortieth birthday until three days after the date.
He went to the Base Commandant about it—one morning, he merely walked down their street and knocked on the Commandant’s front door. The Commandant was in, and Andrew told him about what he considered to be the Fort Riley/Spain connection, though what that could be Margaret didn’t understand. When Andrew got home half an hour later, all he said was “He listened.” Then he went into his study and closed the door.
The news was about the
Allies’ advancing from one French city to another, and “the Bolsheviki” in Russia, who had slaughtered the Tsar and his family—nothing about the Spanish flu. But Andrew found out that the receiving ship at the Commonwealth Pier in Boston was overflowing with very ill sailors. Only a few days after that, Andrew heard that dozens were falling ill at Fort Devens, also in Massachusetts. He walked back up the street. Boston was far away. But, then, Kansas was far from Spain, too, and Spain was far from Boston. It was a mystery, but Andrew was determined that its mysteriousness would not lull the Commandant into apathy, even though the man had plenty of other matters to deal with. In early September, Andrew wrote about the Massachusetts outbreak in his Examiner column; the next day, the mayor declared that the influenza would never come to San Francisco and that to suggest that it would was irresponsible in the extreme. Andrew did not flinch, but said to her, “My dear, they may all hope that the influenza will not come, but I will nevertheless be vindicated.”
The first case appeared toward the end of September. In two weeks, the base hospital was full. Cases cropped up in Vallejo. The Commandant issued face masks to everyone, and Andrew insisted she use one. About a week later, Margaret was standing on their walk, surveying her flowers, when she saw Evie Marquardt, who lived one door down from the Pritchards, come out of her house to the porch and sink to her knees. Margaret didn’t know what to do, but then she pulled up her mask and went and helped Evie back into the house and onto her sofa. When she came home, Andrew made her wash her skin and hair with lye soap and leave her dress on the back stoop. He sent a passing sailor to the hospital to report Mrs. Marquardt’s illness, and about an hour later, they came to get Evie in the ambulance wagon. She survived. Tales abounded—four women playing cards until midnight, three of them dead by morning. Roger Mattock, on the hospital ship, took water and food to all of the patients, but never got sick. Everyone on a certain block in Vallejo came down with it, except the ladies living at the brothel. Then the Commandant himself was near death, but he survived; Captain Asch, home on leave from China, never got ill but was killed by a motor truck late at night. It seemed death was all around them, especially every time Margaret was delegated to write the notification letter to the family of a victim.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Smith,
The United States Navy regrets to inform you that your son, Evan Walter Smith, seaman third class, has succumbed to the Spanish flu during the recent outbreak. He reported to sick bay at 11:30 on the morning of October 6, 1918. The progress of the illness was rapid, and he succumbed to a catarrh of the lungs during the evening of October 8. Owing to the highly contagious nature of the disease, all victims at the naval base have been buried in the cemetery on the island. A service was held for your son and the other victims who died on October 8 in the nondenominational chapel on October 9. We regret that they have had to take these summary measures owing to the virulence of the disease. Your son’s effects have been disinfected, and will be shipped to you in a separate parcel. All inquiries may be addressed to me, George McCracken, Commandant of the Base.
I am yours, regretfully
And Margaret, in her turn, lived in fear of letters. Beatrice’s son Lawrence succumbed, but Beatrice and Robert lived. Elizabeth, Lucy May, and Eloise never came down with it, but Mercer almost died. Dora lived, though she was in Cairo and Jerusalem. The Lears lived, but Hubert, in the navy off Jutland, died and was buried at sea. The sailor who washed their windows lived; his friend died. Mrs. Wareham and her daughter Cassandra lived, but Angus and his wife and child died. Mrs. Kimura lived, though she continued to visit every sort of patient, according to Mrs. Wareham. Naoko lived.
On Armistice Day, everyone Margaret knew or heard of was exhausted or changed by the Great War except for Andrew. In between the bookends of Andrew’s two vindications, the powder-magazine explosion and the Spanish flu, every day had had its frightening news or its dire thought. The lesson of every incident was that forces were at work beyond their comprehension, and also that there were more people than one had ever imagined busily wrestling with those forces. Margaret didn’t know where all these people came from. When the papers gave the toll of the dead on the European and Eastern fronts, it was almost impossible to believe that so many humans could have presented themselves to the bullet or the bomb, or, indeed, the poison gas, and yet there were still more left behind, and it was the same with the epidemic—the numbers of those who died were astonishing except in comparison with the numbers who survived. Like everyone she knew or read about, she agreed with the title of one of Dora’s pieces, this one sent from Cairo, “My Life Didn’t Prepare Me for This.” Dora was writing about the mysteries of the Khan el-Khalili bazaar. Margaret was thinking about everything in the whole world.
ANDREW decided that, given the end of the war and his responsibilities writing his science column for the Examiner, Margaret should double her typing time—two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, but not while he was sleeping, “as the tap-tap-tapping has a uniquely disturbing effect on my sleep, my dear.” Margaret pointed out that she had other activities to occupy her time, but the only one that he would acknowledge was cleaning, which she should do quietly while he was sleeping. One night at the dinner table, she declared that she had her own projects, and Andrew said, with a rare flash of anger, “My dear, we both must put away idleness for the sake of the greater interests that draw us forward and outward. Am I enlisting you in a cause? Indeed, I am. I have a forum, and I am obligated to use it. Must I remind you …?” He let this part die away, but she knew what he meant.
Soon she saw that he had still another project in mind.
You could buy a car for almost any amount of money, from five hundred dollars for a roadster with two seats, to six thousand or so for a limousine. For several months, Andrew took the ferry to San Francisco and explored the cars available while she typed her pages. At first he was drawn to the Locomobile. But they were expensive, and in the end he chose the Franklin five-passenger, which he said cost only fifty dollars more than the Franklin Roadster, though it was much bigger. Andrew thought this pricing practice was a sign of the intelligence of Mr. Franklin, who “can see that the real cost of the automobile is in the engine and the manufacturing process. The point of pricing is to draw customers of all types, not to penalize those who need a smaller or larger chassis.” He felt that if Mr. Franklin were to become acquainted with him, he would appreciate Andrew (and would, no doubt, agree with his views about Dr. Einstein). But he did not plan to learn to drive the car. That was to be her job, like the typing.
Right about this time, the knitting group began to buzz with the news that Mrs. Tillotson had sued her husband for divorce, and Margaret said one thing: “Is it because she has to drive the car?” The ladies looked at her quizzically, and Mrs. Gess laughed out loud, as if she had made a successful joke, but the divorce had nothing to do with cars—it had to do with adultery. Mr. Tillotson had a mistress in Oakland, with a child. He had bought the woman a house, and it was the house that was the last straw for Mrs. Tillotson. The ladies then discussed what might make them divorce their husbands. Mrs. Jones said that you couldn’t get a divorce for just anything—adultery was one thing; the others were conviction for a felony, fraud, drunkenness, “really bad beatings,” or if the fellow ran away. All the ladies shook their heads as if they had never heard of such things. Mrs. Gess said, “Well, Henrietta Tillotson is brazen enough to do it.” Margaret couldn’t decide if her tone was admiring or disapproving, but she thought, yes, only Henrietta—she did have a surface, a kind of glaze, that was bold and worldly. The woman had always reminded her more of Andrew than even of Dora or Mrs. Bell. Mrs. Tillotson stopped coming to the knitting group.
But how she was to learn to drive she did not quite know. She explained her dilemma to Mrs. Wareham, Naoko, and Cassandra over tea one afternoon, without voicing her profound resentment of the whole thing. Naoko said, “My mother and I can teach you. My mother got rid of the horse and boug
ht a Dodge Brothers Roadster for her rounds. Father won’t go in it, but I ride with her all the time. We’ve driven to Napa and Benicia and once to Fairfield. Joe and Lester drive it, too.”
Margaret said, “I hardly know your mother. Would she mind?”
“She loves driving,” said Naoko. “I think she would enjoy it.”
Naoko was not the girl she had been. Perhaps she was close to thirty now and still unmarried—her father did not want her to marry an American man, and she did not care for any of the Japanese men they knew. Naoko’s opinion was that her brothers would marry, and when they did, would those wives take care of Mr. and Mrs. Kimura? Naoko doubted it very much. And so she was as free as a Japanese woman could be only in America, with indulgent parents, no husband, and no mother-in-law. “It’s not as if she can’t see the nose on her face,” said Mrs. Wareham.
“Doesn’t she want children?”
“Do you? Does anyone now?”
