Private Life

by Jane Smiley

  Lelie was incensed at the time wasted. All Margaret said was “Goodness”—her surprise was that the publisher thought anyone at all was interested in any way.

  For a day or two, Andrew and Len stormed about the new house, decrying the blindness of the publisher, but then they reconciled themselves. Now, as a result of the imminent publication of Len’s book (he got busy with cutting and, newly emboldened, informed Andrew in no uncertain terms that he and only he, Len, was in charge of the final product), Andrew had to get his own volumes into shape, so that the books could be published at the same time and thus fulfill Andrew’s dreams for a “one-two punch.” Her typing time went up to five hours every day. At first she could barely stand it, and when she sat down at the typewriter, she felt a trembling, physical rage as she put her fingers on the keys. She thought of a sailor she had heard of on the island who learned to type very fast by putting a brown paper sack over his head, and then got so that he could only type with the sack over his head, and as she thought of this man, she was able to begin her typing. There were no teas with Dora at the Palace, no more trips to Tanforan.

  The goal, Andrew said, was to get an absolutely clean thought, an uninterrupted idea of some six hundred pages (two volumes) that would unfold itself like a column of smoke rising into the clouds. The ideal would be that he would write and she would type from page one to page six hundred in one long session, but, of course, humanity was not made for ideals. The lower needs of humanity would always break up ideals with food and sleep and distraction. However, they did start at the beginning and go straight to the end, and Andrew did his best to remain on the subject. It took three months. In the last half of this period, Andrew simply dictated, usually from memory, and she took his dictation, invaded again by the universe, so thoroughly invaded after a while that the rest of her thoughts and memories and yearnings were scoured away. She cooked; she typed; she slept. They finished in the same week that Len sent off his manuscript to Kansas City. She dozed for three days.

  But Andrew and Len needed no time to recuperate. They endlessly discussed the optimum season for publishing their books. They imagined themselves taking a cross-country trip and doing a set of joint lectures on the Chautauqua circuit, except that, for the most part, Chautauquas had fallen by the wayside. They envisioned a set of radio addresses, in which they would alternate lecturing with conversation about Andrew’s great ideas—“an educational revolution” was the term they used. However, they found they had no access to the radio. They had worked for so many years on their books, and now that the nation was preoccupied with the aftermath of the Crash, fewer people than ever cared about the universe. They lamented what might have been if they had worked more quickly, if they had known then what they knew now, but, ultimately, they decided that the power of their ideas would carry the day.

  All this time, Andrew talked a lot about his death, as if that, perhaps, were the one key to his ideas’ prevailing. He was sixty-four now, and his father had died at fifty-four. Andrew had no sense of how quickly he might pass on—preferably of natural causes. Now that his book was to come out, the sooner the better was fine with him. He chatted over supper about the possibility of dying at just the right time with perfect equanimity, and also, Margaret thought, with no concept of what it would actually be like not to exist.

  Dora was visiting for one of these suppers. She sat across from Andrew over the roasted chicken and talked first about a woman she had met who had given birth to her child by the side of the Lincoln Highway, just near Reno, and then set the baby in the middle of the road, “as the most merciful thing” she could think of, “since there was six others plus that one,” then about Eleanor Roosevelt, while Andrew fell silent only to resume, as soon as Dora was finished talking, his catalogue of overlooked geniuses who died in despair. That evening, his favorite was Johannes Kepler. “His mother was tried for witchcraft,” he said. Dora stared at him. “Of course, Kepler was a sociable man. One had to be, in those days.” When he got up to go to his study, it occurred to Margaret to betray him, to betray him utterly, by taking Dora for a walk and asking for help. She could describe this feeling she had, that her marriage had become an intolerable torture, that the sight of his head ducking slightly as he went through doorways of the new house was repellent to her, that she felt warm, humid air press against her when he entered the room, that his voice made her want to scream, that she thought he was a fool and even a madman, and that she was going mad herself, that, from the outside, every marriage looked as bad to her, because she knew every house she passed was a claustrophobic cell where at least one of the partners never learned anything, but did the same things over and over, like an infernal machine, and the other partner had no recourse of any kind, no way out, no one to talk to about it, not even any way to look at it all that gave relief. The doorways of the new house were very high. It was mere habit to duck his head for them. She almost said it, but she could not.

  Later that night, in bed, she wondered why she had simply gotten up from her seat with a smile and begun taking dishes off the table while Dora told her about a man she had met named Nucky Johnson who she was sure had ordered the execution of someone else—Margaret lost track of the rest. How could she so want to talk, and yet so much hate and fear talking? But what would be her recourse? When was it that Mrs. Tillotson had gained her divorce, ten years ago now? More? And what a nightmare that had been—since Henrietta had allowed the adultery to go on for years before he bought the girl the house, the judge had been quite skeptical. And Margaret could still remember what grounds for divorce were—abandonment, drunkenness, beatings, criminal behavior. Mere torment was not among them. In the morning, she walked out of the house before dawn and got into the Franklin. Soon she was heading across the causeway and then south around the bay.

  Perhaps, she thought afterward, if she had used the telephone, it would have shown some doubt on her part about her destiny. Perhaps, she thought, using Andrew’s telephone to call Pete would have been akin to asking Andrew to give Pete a message. And she didn’t know Atherton, had never been there. But she drove as if directed, and when she arrived at Pete’s door, he was standing in front of his house, his hands in his pockets. He recognized the Franklin instantly, of course, and burst out laughing.

  Pete’s house was long and low. The roof hung over the veranda like the roof of a bungalow, sheltering a line of windows and a modest black front door. There were chairs, as if a person could sit there.

  Pete was at the door of the Franklin, opening it, and then he took her hand and helped her out, and then he kissed her, though only on the cheek, as if he were her brother or uncle, the most chaste of kisses, but still, indeed, a kiss. He took her elbow and guided her to the curb, then up the walk. She did feel wobbly, that was true enough, but it never crossed her mind to wonder at the fact that a man who worked miles away, who had calls upon his time and a profusion of associates, would be there to greet her, to take her through the gate to the back garden, to seat her at a neat little table inside a gazebo, and to bring her a cup of lemon tea. By the time he had set the pot in front of her, she was breathless and her hat had come unpinned. She took it off and set it on the chair beside her bag. Then she took off her gloves. Now it seemed to her that she was more or less unclothed.

  But apparently Pete didn’t see it that way. He chatted on, got up, went into the house, brought out a plate of shortbread cookies. She ate one, and the view cleared a bit. The backyard was a large garden—there were several lemon trees with lemons and blossoms, and daylilies along the fence, and a stand of bamboo between his yard and that of the neighbors. The gazebo itself was shaded by two large eucalyptus trees. It became possible to breathe.

  Pete said, “Where is the captain this morning?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Gone over to the island, I expect.” It could be that he did not hear her, her voice was so weak.

  Pete said, “You aren’t used
to this, are you?”

  Margaret said, “Used to what?” But she also shook her head.

  “You keep looking toward the neighbors, as if they might spy on us.”

  “Mightn’t they?”

  “They wouldn’t dare.” He lifted her bare hand and kissed it. She let him hold it. He did, stroking her fingers.

  The interior of the house was clean and spare. The two screens were set to the back of the front room, out of the sunlight. There was another screen in the dining room, mounted on the wall, more modest but striking—in the picture, an old man was carrying something large and bronze, like a vase. Out of it a horse was bursting, its head up, its tail up, its knees tucked in front of its chest. Pete said, “That is a picture of unexpected good luck.” He had not let go of her hand. The picture of the lady with her servant and child was hung across from the horse, much more colorful. There were other paintings, too, but they were European—harsh and bright, with strange shapes standing in for faces and bodies. She said, “Have you gone back to collecting?”

  “Not art.”

  “What, then?”

  “Armaments.”

  She laughed. There, in front of those pictures, while she was still laughing, he took her in that embrace she had seen, that tight thing, that deep, comforting, overwhelming, body-bending, mind-erasing enclosure. The rest, after that, was awkward and irresolute, hateful in the unzipping and the unbuttoning and the chill of his alien bedroom, but that thing that she had been thinking of for years, that was perfect.

  LEN’S book appeared in early January, right after one of the worst Christmases ever, in the midst of bad weather all over the country. Len told them that publication would be accompanied by advertisements in several Missouri papers, including the one in Columbia, and Robert’s paper in Darlington, and one of the St. Louis papers. When these were sent to them, they turned out to be small boxes at the bottom of inside columns. The text of the ads ran, “Who is, perhaps, Missouri’s GREATEST scientific genius? BUY The Genius of Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early and FIND OUT how a HOME GROWN Missouri boy STUNNED the nation and the WORLD! Ask at your local bookstore TODAY!” After that, nothing.

  Crates of Andrew’s volumes arrived from San Francisco about a week later, very many of them, and once again, Andrew hired a young man to send them out, because Len declared in no uncertain terms that he was not a secretary, and that he had already begun his next book, which was about legendary ghosts of California—he had fifty pages and a publisher, this time in Los Angeles. Margaret didn’t know whether this was a greater blow to Andrew’s pride than the absolute silence that greeted his volumes, but the young man they hired did send them out assiduously to every scientific publication in the English-speaking world. There were no reviews, and it became clear, as the winter faded first to spring and then to summer, that Andrew’s New Theory of the Aether had met with either apathy or hostility, and, in the end, what was the difference?

  What Andrew’s theory was, precisely, she could not herself have said, though she partially understood the second half of the second volume, which was that if they could harness the power of the Aether, they would be as gods—space travel, time travel, Alice in Wonderland–like expansion and contraction, the idea of the universe as an idea, the expansion of a single person’s inner life into the size of the universe, all would be possible. In other words, having been left to think and think and think, Andrew had made up his mind that thinking was everything.

  Andrew invited Pete to supper and gave him all the volumes—his book and the biography. Pete came back again, at Andrew’s insistence, and discussed them. He expressed surprise and delight at Andrew’s ideas. He questioned him in some detail. And he was courteous to Margaret in exactly the way that he had always been. Margaret didn’t know if she was hurt or disappointed or relieved. In fact, sitting across from him at the table seemed surprisingly routine. But didn’t she know that he was practiced at exactly this? Hadn’t he let her know that again and again over the years? She sat watching the two of them, not daring to do much more than pass the potatoes and maintain a pleasant expression. That she could do even this seemed astonishingly cool to her, as if she had turned into an entirely different woman—Dora, perhaps.

  Andrew’s position came to be “They have forgotten me. They have simply forgotten me.” He stopped talking about his death, since he was healthier than ever.

  It was when she was about to get on the streetcar in San Francisco that she picked up the Chronicle. On page three of the second section was the headline “The Strange Case of Captain Early.” The feeling she had as she was sitting on that slippery bench seat, as the car tilted upward to climb California Street, was one she didn’t think she had ever before had—something akin to being electrocuted, but not fatally. There was a picture of Andrew standing outside the observatory and a picture of his book, with the caption “An example of wholesale plagiarism?” And there was another picture, of a man she had never seen, who turned out to be Andrew’s old student from Chicago, now a full professor, and possibly the only person to have read the books. His hair was gray, too. The gist of this man’s accusations against Andrew was that where the ideas presented in “Early’s two-volume monstrosity” were not laughable, they were stolen—from him. As evidence for this assertion, the writer of the article took two passages from books by each of them and compared the two side by side. Margaret read them as the streetcar lumbered along, and she judged that they were similar. One was from the first volume of Andrew’s book, and that was slightly less similar. The other, from the second volume, was not word for word, but it was also not more than 15 percent different (she counted the words in both passages). The case, at least from these two examples, was a damning one. But the article was short—about a column. If she wanted to know more, she was directed to an article by this man in The Astronomical Journal to which Andrew had renewed his subscription in anticipation of his “one-two punch.” There had also been, according to the Chronicle, a piece about this in the New York Times. The Astronomical Journal article, which she was sure was somewhere in her house, she had not seen. Had Andrew? It was impossible to tell. She read over the bit from the second volume again and put the paper in her bag.

  On the way home that evening on the ferry, she could not help reconsidering the two passages. She decided, or possibly remembered, that the second passage was one that Andrew had dictated directly to her, without any sort of notes, just striding about the front room with his hands clasped behind his back (except for when he was smoothing down his mustache), holding forth. It was an odd way to commit plagiarism, except for one thing—Andrew’s overcapacious memory. The terrible difficulty of writing the book had always been trimming and paring and pruning, not engendering. He had tried in every conceivable way over the years to clarify and straighten out the jungly growth of his ideas. He had written from notes. He had cut bits and pieces from early drafts. He had thrown away drafts and started over. He had made outlines and stuck to them. But the burden of his mind was that it would invent, it would proliferate, it would swarm and multiply. And it was horribly retentive. Andrew saw this as a sign of his own genius, as no doubt his mother had. That was the way it was when they were growing up—if you could memorize one poem, that was good; two was better, and four was best. Andrew said that he had excelled at memorizing and could still recite poems or speeches he had learned before he was ten years old. She saw it perfectly—even while he threw off the constraints of what he had already written and rewritten many times, he still thought in those very words that he had already composed, just as a high-speed locomotive races down the track that has been laid for it. For Andrew, plagiarism was not some laborious copying of someone else’s words and ideas, but a wholesale and yet precise assimilation of them—the energy of the ideas as well as the particles of the individual words. As soon as she thought this, she knew that it was true, and that she herself was the only person to understand how it worked. As the ferry crossed the bay, making tha
t peculiar deep groaning noise that was so familiar to her, she thought of him again and again, striding about, talking. And she thought, for the first time in her life, that he must be in agony, must have always been in agony. And once she thought that, she thought that as a kindness she might write to the Chronicle, or to The Astronomical Journal, defending him.

  That night, at supper and after, she watched Andrew, trying to gauge whether he had read the Chronicle piece or The Astronomical Journal piece. She dared not ask, dared not precipitate a discovery. Indeed, could it be like what was said about vermin—if, purely by chance, you saw one article about your husband’s plagiarizing as you were riding the streetcar, was that only the merest fraction of the number that were actually out there? Possibly, unbeknownst to her, he had a file of such articles stuck in a drawer in his study, and he mulled them over every day.

  Over the next few days, she decided that the safest course was to pretend that she hadn’t seen the article.

  But Len had.

  He was at their door, the paper in his hand. As soon as Margaret opened the door, he waved the paper and shouted, “I was up in Eureka! Where’s Captain—”

  “He’s not here. He’s—”

  But Andrew came around the house—he had heard voices from the backyard. He saw that Len had a paper in his hand and said, suspiciously (but these days suspicion of Len, a believer in ghosts, was constant with him), “What’s that?”

  “Well you might ask,” said Len.

  Len turned to walk down the front steps, and Margaret let the door close. She went back into the house, first into the kitchen, and then upstairs. But she could hear much of what they said, because it was a warm day and the windows were open. She heard Len say, “If I had known this, if I had had any idea that such a thing was possible, I would never have devoted my life and my reputation to …” So, she thought, that was how it was going to go. No defense of Andrew by Len, either. She closed the window, and stayed in her room for about an hour. When she came downstairs, Andrew was sitting quietly in a chair, looking out the window, but as soon as he saw her, he said, “I think, my dear, that I will go out for a walk. It is a beautiful day.”