Private Life

by Jane Smiley

  “Oh, goodness,” he said, startled, “of course not.” He went around the back end of the car.

  Len’s boarding house was on Carolina Street in Vallejo, up a steep hill. It was a nice enough bungalow-style house, large but a bit rundown, weeds beginning to claim parts of the front yard. The landlady was a Mrs. Branch, and the daughter, who looked about nineteen or twenty, was named Helen. She reminded Margaret a bit of herself at the same age. Mrs. Branch opened the door at their first knock. “You’re Mrs. Early, then?”

  “I am.”

  “Leonard works for your husband? I told Helen not to trust him, but she wouldn’t listen, same as always.”

  “Len works with my husband, not for him. Len has his own project.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Mrs. Branch backed up reluctantly and allowed them in. Helen led them into the parlor. A couple of boarders could be heard scurrying up the stairs, and then running about the landing. She and Len sat down without being invited. Helen pushed her hair out of her face. The girl’s skin was bad, but if she wore a pleasant expression, she could be attractive, Margaret thought, and a moment later, when the girl looked at Len, the look on her face did get more pleasant.

  Margaret said, “I understand, Mrs. Branch, that Len hasn’t been entirely forthcoming about his situation.”

  The woman’s visage darkened.

  “He does have something to tell you.”

  “What might that be?” said Mrs. Branch.

  “Well, I’m married already, that’s what,” said Len. Helen gave a little gasp. Len glanced at her and went on, “And I never forget it, so I didn’t make any promises, no matter what Helen has been telling you. I did kiss the girl, for which I apologize. But …” He trailed off. It occurred to Margaret not to believe him, but she chose to ignore that impulse.

  “Isn’t that a fine kettle of fish,” said Mrs. Branch.

  They all looked at Helen, whose eyes widened as her cheeks reddened.

  Margaret understood right then that the girl was with child, though she didn’t know what gave her that impression. She decided to ignore this intuition, too—whether Len was lying to her or Helen was lying to her mother was something she, at least, would never know. Len looked pettily triumphant, as if to say, Try and catch me.

  “Is he married?” Mrs. Branch spoke pointedly to Margaret.

  “Here’s a picture of my wife,” said Len. He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a photograph. It showed him without his mustache, standing beside a round-faced young woman in a black hat. He had his arm about her waist. She wore a gardenia in her lapel. “We’ve been married for seven years.”

  He turned it over. On the back were the words “Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Scanlan, just married, May 4, 1921.” The ink was a bit faded.

  “Have you got any children?” said Mrs. Branch.

  “I’m sorry to say that we haven’t been that fortunate,” said Len. His manner was utterly guileless, as if this fact was not quite Mrs. Branch’s business but he was willing to answer. Now a bit of alarm began to replace the indignation in Mrs. Branch’s face as she recognized the implications of this. She glanced at Helen, who was twisting her handkerchief in her lap. Len, Margaret discerned from the tilt of his chin, had no idea of the intelligence that was passing among the women in the room.

  She said to Mrs. Branch, as if changing the subject and making small talk, “How long have you been in Vallejo?”

  “About a year. I’ll say this, it’s dull here, but too many people at the same time.” This was an idle remark, meant to cover her discomfort while she came up with a response to what she was figuring out. Helen coughed. Mrs. Branch said to her, “Well, you better get out to the scullery, miss. There’s potatoes that need peeling.”

  Helen got up to leave the room—Len watched her out of the corner of his eye. She was an unlucky girl, Margaret thought, but not as unlucky as she might be, married to Len. Mrs. Branch said, “We hardly know a soul in town, really. I’m so busy with the boarders—”

  “I think Vallejo’s an interesting town. Lots of odd little shops to look at …”

  “If you can get out.”

  “Well, if you do …” She took a bit of notepaper out of her bag and wrote Mrs. Kimura’s name on it. Len watched her. She said, “This is a shop I like.” She pressed the note into Mrs. Branch’s hand. There was nothing else to say, so she and Len stood up.

  With each step out of the boarding house, Len got perkier, and by the time they were sitting in the Franklin, he seemed almost giddy. She said, “You’ll be finding another room after this, I imagine.”

  “Why should I? I like my room there, and it’s cheap.”

  “Don’t you think it would be the kinder thing to do?” She paused. “And your wife must miss you.”

  “Maybe.”

  He hummed a little tune as they drove back across the causeway.

  She dropped Len off at the house and drove to the pond. She expected her spirits to lift at the sight of the coot chicks, who were getting quite large. She wondered when they were going to start learning to fly, for she had seen no signs of that.

  The mist was heavier than it had been in town, and she didn’t have a blanket to sit upon, so she simply walked toward the pond and then around it. One parent and four chicks were foraging along the edge, two of the chicks alternately walking and swimming in the shallows. Another chick was out in the middle, swimming in circles. She could not find the other chicks and the other adult. She walked around the pond until almost dark, looking as best she could into the shadows of cattails and damp grasses. A couple of times, she heard noises, as if some animal were rustling about in there, but she couldn’t see anything. By the time she left, Margaret could only make out the adult and three of the chicks. As she drove home, she wondered if she had actually counted five chicks. She was no longer ready to say that she had.

  Len was gone for the evening. Andrew, for once, was sitting in the front room, not even reading a book. When she walked in the door, he stood up and came over to her. She was shivering and looked around for her shawl. He loomed over her. “My dear, where have you been? You’re all wet!”

  “I was up at the pond, looking at the coots.”

  “Every time I want you, it seems you are gone.”

  “Does it? I thought you and Len were very busy.” She slid out from under his shadow, but he followed her.

  She envisioned the pond as if from above—a large target with bull’s-eyes swimming about, getting bigger by the day. Andrew went on: “We are busy because our assault on ignorance, on the willful ignorance of my fellow scientists, is two-pronged. We must take them by storm, as we have not succeeded simply by being straightforward. My own preference would not be, I assure you, to have my name and accomplishments trumpeted about the way young Leonard proposes to do, but, as much as I need to present my ideas, I also need an advocate to set them in context.”

  “Is Len your best possible advocate, Andrew?”

  “I have seen several pages of his writing, my dear, and it struck me as quite lucid and sufficiently detailed.”

  “But he’s a veterinarian. He doesn’t have a reputation in your field.” She pushed these responses out, hardly noticing what she was saying, she was so cold and disinclined to have this conversation.

  “He’s quite as intelligent, though an autodidact, as some of, many of, those who purport to have degrees and monetary support. The substance of the ideas will carry the book.”

  “He isn’t attached to any institution.” She didn’t think a bobcat would venture into the water, and the coots did stay in or close to the water. The nest she had seen was not ten feet from the water. A fox, though, or a coyote might swim. Foxes had been known to swim for prey. Even so, the real danger would be from hawks or eagles.

  “That is a concern, I don’t disagree with you. But he is my repository now! I have given myself over to him in a way I might not have done if …”

  It was a terrible thing, the
way the hawks and eagles allowed those infinitesimal just-hatched chicks to grow and put on bulk so that they would be worth eating. “If what?” she said, suddenly sounding exasperated even to herself. “I need my sh—”

  “If I hadn’t been so drawn in by his flattery. I admit that—that—”

  The nest of the Canada geese recurred to her, now as an omen, the one egg broken in pieces and the nest ripped, flattened. She had thought the coots more careful, more deserving of survival, because they had built their nest in a secret spot.

  “—that—that I am, or perhaps I seem, egotistical to some.” He paused now, and looked at her, waiting for her to contradict this assertion. But she did not. “But it doesn’t seem like ego, my dear, from the inside. I don’t know what it does seem like, really.” He said this in a pleading tone.

  She had no reply, except that when he said “egotistical to some,” she could not help thinking, “Egotistical to everyone.” Everyone. Everyone. She felt the word rise to her lips and her whole body shift from cold to hot with the temptation to tell him the truth for once. She stepped away from him again, and he followed her again. She thought of her mother and Mrs. Early. The one so busy, the other so elegant. They had known what marriage was like. They had known what Andrew was like. That they had colluded in bringing this very moment about made her tremble with something unspeakable.

  He stared at her. She was standing almost in the corner, and she had no idea what he wanted from her. He said, “I feel about Leonard that his mind is just a little common, you see. When we drive to my talks, he tells me all about the girls he has come to know in Vallejo, several girls, I can’t keep their names straight, but he thinks that I will be impressed by such conquests. How can he think that, I ask you, having interviewed me for all these months, having listened to me reveal my, my thoughts to him about all those things that happened in Chicago and Berlin? How can he think that of me?”

  She had a passing revelation that what Len Scanlan lingered in California for was nothing so simple as money or scientific innovation, but she said, “What happened in Chicago, Andrew?”

  He blinked, and she realized that she had spat this out. Her hands were trembling, too. She grasped the left one with the right one. It seemed to her that if he said the word “universe,” she really would scream. The universe, of course, was the very thing that circled around those chicks, vast and senseless.

  Apparently, he decided to ignore this question, but his tone was conciliatory. “It’s just that even in my new book, which you have so kindly typed over and over, I get lost in the versions. Did I say this already? Have I cut that? What is the best way of formulating a thought?” Then his voice rose and he put his hands in his hair. “The ideas simply come as a torrent! I can’t describe it. When I spent time in Washington and Chicago, it was nearly—It was insupportable. I would be thinking one thing, and almost have it, almost understand it, some small thing, and then a thought, or even a word, dropped by a colleague, and that thing I was thinking simply lost shape utterly. It was a terrifying and frustrating feeling, I can’t describe—”

  What this conversation felt like, it occurred to her, was the ringing of many bells, their mouths yawning, their clappers hammering relentlessly. But finally, after a very long moment, she managed to say, “Andrew, you are sixty-one years old. You must have accepted that you have to accommodate—”

  “Possibly that is what other men do, but I can’t do that!”

  “But what difference, in the end …” She trailed off, having said the most hurtful thing, but Andrew didn’t register it. He exclaimed, “And I have! I have settled for less! I have settled for nothing! Can you not see that?”

  What Margaret saw was that he would dispatch Len back to the East if she were to say anything right then about Helen Branch, or her own suspicions concerning Len’s independent activities. All she had to do was confirm his doubts. Even a look might be enough. But she didn’t say any word at all, didn’t look at him.

  Andrew said, “You will tell me that it’s best to make of it what we can.”

  She remained silent, eyes down.

  Now he sighed. Then, “If Leonard has been given me as the instrument, so be it.”

  So he was transformed once again. He said, “So many have died thinking their work had come to nought. Galileo. All of them, really.” She lifted her eyes, no longer in danger. He smoothed down his mustache and then, almost jaunty, turned toward his study. He patted her arm. “Well, good night, my dear.”

  Margaret emerged from her corner and fell into her chair.

  Later, she heard him leave for the observatory.

  When she next got to the pond, she realized at once that the slaughter had progressed. In an hour of looking about, she saw only three of the chicks, two rather large and one smaller. The three went about together, pecking up leaves and seeds and insects, swimming, tramping along the edge of the water. They still had their fluff, or most of it; had neither molted to actual feathers nor learned, as far as she could tell, to fly. It was tormenting to her that everything she noticed about them endeared them to her, and yet proved to her that they were doomed.

  Two days later, there was one left. The next day, that one was gone. She did weep tears. She did. She also took Mr. Kimura’s picture off the wall and put it in a closet.

  ON the way home from a talk in Salinas, Andrew and Len stopped at the racetrack and visited Pete at his stall. Len found the denizens of the racetrack “low,” but Andrew was reminded of times he had enjoyed with his mother at Saratoga and somewhere in Europe. The visit made him jovial for a day or two, and he kept saying, “My dear, you should visit him. He asked for you. You would enjoy the equines a great deal.” And again, “The air is quite bracing there, my dear. It would do you good.” And again, “A change is always revivifying.”

  Margaret felt herself resist until he said, “And why don’t you take those screens of his back to him? The scroll, too.”

  She said, “Surely he doesn’t want to keep them in a horse stall at the racetrack.”

  “Then, my dear, he will find a place for them or sell them.”

  She loaded the artworks in the back of the Franklin and dropped Andrew and Len at the train station so they could go to Santa Barbara for Andrew’s talk at the Club of Fifty. The Club of Fifty was giving them first-class tickets, overnight accommodations at the recently opened Biltmore in Montecito, and a fee of four hundred dollars. Andrew was very excited, and both of them had been looking forward to the date for two and a half months. His topic was to be “Are New Ideas in Science Inherently Different from Old Ones?” That answer, of course, was “no.” His audience would be uniformly old, so he expected them to be receptive.

  She circumnavigated the bay west of Oakland, then cut across by means of the Dumbarton Bridge, where she was stopped for quite a while when it lifted to allow a ship to pass, but the lifting itself was rather an interesting sight, and so she didn’t mind. What was funny to her was how archaic the Franklin looked among all the other cars, but it was still beautiful, and it ran perfectly.

  She drove through the gates at Tanforan, and heads turned and men in fedoras with cigars poking out of their faces and little books and pencils in their hands smiled at her. It was just after eight, and horses were still training. As Pete had told Andrew, there was as yet no racing. Most of the horses wore blankets over their haunches, and their riders leaned into themselves, keeping one hand on the reins and putting the other in their armpits. They all had their caps pulled down over their ears, breath pluming out of their mouths. The horses’ shoes rang on the cold ground. Piles of soiled bedding seemed to smoke between the barns. And the fragrance did please her.

  She found Pete walking from the track behind three of his animals. When he saw her, he said, “Goodness me, an apparition!” He kissed her on the cheek before he looked around, then he said, “Where is Andrew?”

  “On the way to Santa Barbara with Len. I have your screens.”

  “I thou
ght you might.” He peeked in the window, then said, “Andrew has been warning me of their return.” He didn’t look disappointed.

  “Show me a horse.”

  “My pleasure!” He was perfectly turned out, even in his horse-keeping clothes. He waited as she parked the Franklin, and then two of the grooms took the artworks and carried them away. He led her down the barn aisle. Grooms and trainers touched the bills of their caps and dipped their heads to her in a friendly manner. There was no sign of the crooked Australian. After she had appreciated how the horses arched their necks over the tops of the stall doors and put their noses out for lumps of sugar, Pete had his own four stripped of their blankets and led out for her appreciation. There were two bays, a chestnut, and a gray.

  “This one is by Fair Play, goes back to Bend Or on both sides. Dam’s by Tetratema, that’s where he gets the gray color. This filly is by a nice French horse named Rose Prince, dam’s by Son-in-Law. That’s a very prepotent sire. All …”

  She could make nothing of this patter, but it fell gloriously on the ear. When his voice ceased, she said, “You sound very expert.”

  “That’s the first step.”

  “How is it you acquired these horses but live in a stall?”

  “Unpaid bills, darling. The owners’ unpaid bills,” said Pete. “Chestnut is my nicest one, four wins already.”

  “Might I pet one of them?”

  He pointed to the gray. “He’s a friendly sort. I’m sure he would like it. Good racehorses often bite, but he never does—more’s the pity for my pocketbook.”

  She stepped up to the horse, and he pressed his nose into her outstretched palm while she stroked along the roots of his mane. After a moment, she took off her glove. His coat was dappled and fluffy, perfectly clean. She put her cheek against his neck and took a deep breath.

  Pete’s stall quarters were neatly tricked out, with a cot and cases and trunks, and prints hanging on the walls, and a curled-up whip with a long lash, and a mirror in a gilt frame. She said, “You don’t live here.”