Space

by James A. Michener

  “But you must remember that we also got a couple of rather good men this way. Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt among others. And best of all, George Washington, whom we so desperately needed. Every one of those men was elected not for his capacity, but because the public perceived him as a military hero. This nation will always be eager to believe that a military man is more intelligent than he really is. Now it’s your husband’s turn.”

  “Is he a bright, good man? I no longer know how to judge.”

  [124] “He’s a football player,” Stidham said. “A fine, strong, honest football player. And if he had been something different, we might have lost the Battle of Leyte Gulf and sacrificed an additional half a million young men.”

  “Will he be a decent senator? After such a despicable start?”

  “Norman has a fighting chance to be a fine senator, but I expect he’ll turn out to be only average. Never a distinction, never a scandal. That was the best I could get out of Ulysses Gantling. I’ll be satisfied if we do as well with Norman.” He hesitated, trying to strike a balance concerning his fragile daughter. “It’s you I’m afraid of, Elinor. I suspect you’ll make a very poor senator’s wife.”

  “So do I,” she cried, running to her father’s chair, and kneeling beside him. When her convulsive sobs quieted, she whispered, “It’s never been Norman I’ve been afraid of. It’s always been me. I’m not suited for this job. I simply am not.”

  “What makes you think I was suited to be an officer in France? A pathetic farce, really. Or Gantling’s campaign manager? I very nearly lost him that first election. We do what we have to do, Elinor. And now I think it’s time for you to appear on the podium with your husband. He’s fighting for one of the premier jobs in the world and he deserves your help.”

  At the climactic rally in Benton, five nights before the primary, she sat on the stage beside her husband and, at Finnerty’s insistence, even said a few words. But when the three sailors appeared in their freshly pressed uniforms, with ribbons neat and medals polished, she wanted to throw up.

  Rachel Lindquist believed that one test of a woman was how she organized space: “Whether it controls you, or you control it.”

  When her roommate at Wellesley had asked what she meant by this, she had said forthrightly, “A kitchen at home. Do the plates and forks command it in disarray, or do you instruct the ugly things where they belong and see to it that they keep their place?”

  “What’s the great virtue in that?” asked her roomie, a slovenly girl from Virginia, pouting.

  [125] “Because it establishes who’s boss, that’s why. Because when the space is ordered, you’re free to live creatively.”

  “Are you lecturing me?” the fluffy girl asked.

  “This room proves to me that you allow space to dominate you. Everything is in chaos. Your clothes spread everywhere.”

  In the weeping spell that followed, the roommate announced her intention of quitting the room and finding another girl to bunk with, and Rachel encouraged her to do so. The upshot was a visit to the dean, who listened to the roommate’s weepy recitation of accusations, smiled and said consolingly, “Betty-Anne, I agree with you. You’ll be much happier with a girl more like yourself.”

  The change was approved and each girl was happier. Rachel, of course, had to room alone for several months, but in that time she instituted a system of beautiful orderliness, so that later, when a Jewish girl from Scarsdale moved in with her own neat clothes, things progressed with no strain.

  Rachel Lindquist’s father was a member of one of those hard-working, gifted Swedish families that settled in Worcester, west of Boston, in the late years of the past century. Her grandfather had invented a process whereby Carborundum particles could be attached to fabric, producing an excellent abrasive for use in manufacturing, but since he was unusually cautious in financial affairs, he missed his opportunity to convert his small operation into a massive corporation the way some of the other Worcester Swedes did, but his four patents were so original and so carefully protected that he and his descendants did collect gratifying royalties from the big combines.

  Rachel was carefully educated in a private school near Worcester and then at Wellesley, where, after her unfortunate experience with her first roommate, she had an unbroken chain of successes. Her parents expected their only daughter to excel in her classes, which she did, and the friends who had known her in the lower schools were sure that her lovely blond hair and elegant figure would ensure a good marriage.

  She was repeatedly invited to dances at Harvard and Amherst, and in her junior year, 1941, she met a senior at Yale named Stuart. A graduate of Groton, he [126] represented one of the fine milling families of New Hampshire, and it was assumed by everyone, especially her parents, “That Rachel was safely settled.”

  That was before Pearl Harbor. Toward the middle of December, when the world seemed to be falling apart, she attended a political seminar at MIT and there met Stanley Mott, a young professor from Georgia Tech. He was so alert, so vividly interested in what aviation could do for the world that she was immediately attracted to him, and at the end of the three-day session, with Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini on the agenda daily, she realized that she was intended for something in life more exciting than young Mr. Stuart of Groton and Yale, and New Hampshire milling.

  Her parents were distraught: “Who is this Professor Nobody?”

  “He teaches at Georgia Tech.” She might as well have said that he came from Arkansas.

  “An illiterate plantation owner, I suppose,” Mrs. Lindquist said. Although she belonged to only a minor branch of Boston’s great Saltonstall family, she felt a burning obligation to protect the superiority of that revered name. “He’s the son of the Methodist minister in Newton.”

  “I didn’t know there were Methodist ministers in New England ... in the better suburbs, that is.”

  “Graduated with honors from the local high school, one of the best in the country, and he won a science foundation something or other. A full scholarship.”

  “If he’s as good as you say, why in the world would he have elected Georgia? If he was really first class, that is?”

  “I wondered about that, too,” Rachel confessed. “If he’s as bright as he seems ... I mean, the men with him said he was a genius in aviation. Why wouldn’t he have gone to a real university? Like Harvard or MIT?”

  The question was so perplexing that Mr. Lindquist launched a chain of telephone calls, to bankers, lawyers, educators, and the police of Newton. He learned that Stanley Mott came from a standard lower-class family of good reputation, that he had been a wizard in science at Newton and had ranked high in all national test scores. He had gone to Georgia Tech because he was interested in engineering as a practical science and had done at least as well in his classes as Rachel had done in hers, but as Mr. [127] Lindquist observed: “No one in his right mind would equate Georgia Tech marks with those from Wellesley.”

  “How did he ever become a professor?” Mrs. Lindquist asked, and her husband explained that he wasn’t a real professor, only an assistant: “He has no more than a master’s degree, you know. Something to do with aviation.”

  “Did he get his master’s at MIT?” his wife asked.

  “Louisiana State, I’m afraid.”

  “He seems always to shy away from the first-class schools.”

  The Lindquists were displeased when their daughter wanted to invite Professor Mott to Worcester, and were relieved when he reported that he could not come: “I’ve got to give and grade my exams. And the Army Air Corps has been talking with me.”

  They did not see him until May of 1942, for he was kept busy teaching crash courses for the military, and when he did come north he was ten pounds underweight and rather haggard. He did not create a good impression, for he was distressingly nervous: “The Air Corps has been badgering me.”

  “Are you to be a pilot?” Mr. Lindquist asked.

  “No. I can’t fathom what it is they
’re after.”

  “Would you prefer the Air Corps to the Navy?” Mr. Lindquist, as a courtesy to his daughter, felt obliged to keep the conversation moving, even though he understood few of the answers. This Mott was a rather tedious young man, not at all like that Stuart chap from Yale, but he could talk coherently, which was more than some of Rachel’s young callers were able to do.

  “You must be proud to know the Air Corps wants you,” he said.

  “That signifies little, Mr. Lindquist. There are so few of us trained in aviation engineering.”

  Rachel was obviously attracted to him, and when she insisted upon taking the train all the way to Atlanta to see the Georgia Tech graduation, her parents awakened with a shock to the fact she intended to marry him.

  “At least bring him back to Worcester for a proper wedding,” Mrs. Lindquist pleaded.

  “It’s only reasonable,” Mr. Lindquist added. “His people would be just as eager as we are.”

  “He doesn’t have people,” Rachel said. “Only his mother.”

  [128] “Was she deserted?”

  “Widowed.”

  Under pressure, the young people consented to a formal wedding in Worcester, but it was a rather drab wartime affair. Mrs. Mott came out from Boston, ill-at-ease and barely presentable. Two of the real Saltonstalls graced the party and many of the Swedish establishment, but the bright young men and women who would normally have added radiance to such a wedding were absent, the men in training camps, the women dashing about the country to keep up with them. And as soon as the Motts were married, Stanley had to report to Wright Field in Ohio-attached to the Air Force, but with civilian status.

  In true military fashion, he was assigned not to aviation work but to an advanced study group endeavoring to deduce what the German scientists at the secret Baltic base of Peenemünde were up to. His work was classified top secret, which meant that he could tell his wife nothing.

  Rachel understood. She had been attracted to Stanley by his obvious brilliance, and the more she saw of him during their catch-as-catch-can courtship and marriage, the more she appreciated the solid qualities of his mind. Whatever he was free to tell her, she understood, and sometimes his silences were more instructive than what he said.

  She had one more year to go on her Wellesley degree and was reassured when he encouraged her to complete it, no matter what the hardships. Like him, she rushed normal procedures, taking a criminally heavy program right through the academic year and into the summer as well. As soon as she graduated, she hurried to Dayton, where she took a job helping in a day nursery filled with children whose mothers were doing manual labor at the air base. When the older woman who attempted to run the vastly enlarged nursery collapsed from overwork, Rachel took complete charge, and even when she informed Stanley that she was pregnant, they both agreed that she should continue her work.

  It was now that she exhibited her devotion to the principle she had expounded at college: The test of a woman is how she organizes space. In the Mott rooms at the motel she established a place for everything and rigorously discarded any object that was not essential; as a consequence, [129] the Motts lived in constructive order, whereas most of the other young couples, many from places like Vassar and Harvard, lived in chaos.

  She applied the same rule to her personal appearance. She had thick blond hair which she wore drawn back in a severe Grecian style. She was pleased with the effect this created, for it framed her placid Swedish beauty handsomely and worked well with the simple clothes she preferred. She brought with her four conservative suits, all light in color to match her complexion, and four blouses with no frills.

  She felt it indecent ever to live without art; at college she had had an expensive record player but no stacks of popular single records, like the other girls. She told Stanley: “I’ve always felt that eight or ten really good complete albums were enough.” She abhorred anything later than Beethoven and would allow him only his Seventh Symphony and Razumovsky quartets: “There’s great vulgarity in Beethoven.” She had a gorgeous piano concerto by Mozart and one of his lilting violin concertos. But mostly she liked Bach and Vivaldi, holding that composers like Schubert, Schumann and Stravinsky were violent exhibitionists. When she found a composition she liked, she played it constantly, but it was always something like the Brandenburg Concertos.

  In their early marriage, when her records all sounded alike to Stanley, he said, “One of the fellows in graduate school had a marvelous record. Ravel’s Bolero.”

  “Oh my God!” she said.

  In art it was also less-equals-more. Stanley, having had several good civilization courses at Georgia, wanted to spend part of his first paycheck for a nicely colored photograph of the Cumaean Sibyl by Michelangelo: “The professor explained how elegantly it fitted the architecture of the Sistine Chapel.” He drew an illustration of the converging areas.

  Rachel took one look at the obscene reproduction, a horrible affair of improper colors and forced foreshortening, and refused him permission to bring it into their limited quarters: “Art must command. It must fill its area on its own terms. It must say something fresh to you every day.” For two weeks she studied all the reproductions in the Dayton area, finding nothing that satisfied her.

  [130] “What’s the big deal?” Stanley asked.

  “It’s all Monks Fishing,” she said.

  He did not understand, but wanted to, so even though he was fatigued from the demanding work on rocketry and atomic energy, the devices the Germans were working on at Peenemünde, he asked if he could accompany her on her next visit to the reprint galleries, and it was on such a trip that she explained Monks Fishing.

  “Have you ever noticed that in really bad novels, when the author wants to present an artist, it’s always an architect? Why do you suppose that is? Because to the average readers a poet would be insufferable. To them a novelist is a man who lies about the house doing nothing. A painter is a mess. But an architect wears a nice suit. He can be shown drawing in a clean office. And when he goes out to supervise the builders he can wear tweeds and smoke a pipe. Best of all, you can see the end product. And it’s useful. You can imagine offices in it and electric light companies. Architects are the salvation of the middle class.”

  “What in the world does this have to do with Monks Fishing?”

  “Because in painting it’s the same way. You want a cheap copy of Michelangelo because you know the original’s in the Sistine Chapel, and that makes it acceptable. Well, rich Americans and Europeans who travel all over and want to buy a work of art always buy Monks Fishing.”

  She took him to a store she had located which specialized in such art, and there she showed him some fifteen big, expensive, colorful reproductions of paintings by unknown French and Italian commercial artists. In one a group of monks in colorful robes sit about a long table, dozing disrespectfully while a cardinal in bright red tells an interminable story. This was titled “The Boring Story.” In the next the monks watch admiringly as the cardinal in red drinks a substantial draught from a beautifully painted goblet. This was titled “The Toast.” The third, fourth and through the thirteenth showed the same monks at the same table reacting in various amusing ways to the cardinal, or sometimes two cardinals.

  Masterpiece number fourteen was what Stanley Mott had been awaiting. It showed four monks beside a river, two drinking from a bottle which they pass from hand to hand, one snoozing under a tree while the bob on his [131] fishing, line indicates that he has caught an unattended fish, and one fishing with no results. It was called “Monks Fishing.” Number fifteen carried the same title but showed one of the monks having fallen into the stream while trying to land a rather large fish.

  “Don’t ever buy Monks Fishing, Stanley.” In another store she showed him the one painting she had been able to approve. It was a Piet Mondrian, all clear and crisp and beautifully organized, with a few simple lines and highly effective colors.

  As soon as he saw it he realized that this was
a portrait of his wife. The simplicity matched her overall appearance. The few black lines represented her sparse attitude toward decoration. The perfectly adapted coloring of the enclosed spaces was the coloring of her blond hair, her flawless complexion, her subdued suits. The Mondrian was Vivaldi translated into visual imagery.

  It was too austere: “I sort of hoped we’d get a Van Gogh Sunflowers ... or maybe-”

  “Don’t tell me,” she interrupted. “You wanted an Orozco.”

  “Is he the Mexican? Yes, one of the professors at Georgia Tech had a marvelous copy of women bandits during the Mexican revolution.”

  “Orozco would be big in Georgia,” she said, but as soon as the words left her lips she was apologetic. “I don’t mean that, Stanley. Really I don’t.”

  She rummaged through the reproductions till she found a copy of the Van Gogh and a very garish attempt at the Orozco bandoleras. “Don’t you see, Stanley? These are unutterably trite. If we had them on the wall a week, we’d grow tired of them.”

  “I looked at those women through a whole semester. They stood right behind the professor’s head, and I still like them.”

  “Later on you won’t,” she said, and since she would be paying for the framing with her own money, he encouraged her to buy the Mondrian. In their cramped quarters it proved to be exactly right, and when the orderliness of the Brandenburg Concertos marched through the room, the picture seemed destined for that space, with these two people, and this music.

  Rachel allowed only one aspect of her life to deviate from this norm: in her bedroom, where no one but her [132] husband could see, she kept a collection of seven wonderfully carved wooden figures of human beings, each about nine inches tall. There was one group of two related figures, a mother combing the hair of her daughter, and one of three, an elderly couple dancing while a grouchy lean man played his accordion, and two superb single figures, a farmer mowing with a stubby scythe and a woman looking at the sky. Six of the figures stood forth in plain, untouched wood; the lanky accordionist wore a colored cloth cap and played a blue accordion.