When the country declared war he was nearly thirty years old. Because his sight and hearing were poor he was not enlisted to fight. For a while he was a military engineer, and his facility for numbers and mathematical theory took him to Washington. He became a secret part of the dour devoted days of the country, secret even unto himself. He had been working three months on a special project when he requested an interview with the project director. He did not receive it till after a seven-week period of infuriating his supervisors by insisting that what he had to say was for the ears of the director and no one else. Late one sweltering September Friday he was ushered into the director’s office. He was seated in a chair before the director’s desk by a window that looked out to the sun setting behind a pool of water and a monument. He was there alone for ten minutes when a man he had never seen before came into the room and sat behind the desk, folding his hands on top of it. Mr. Lake, the man said. Are you really the director? John Michael asked. Yes, the man said, I really am. He waited, and John Michael cleared his throat and pushed his heavy glasses with his invisible-moon eyes up the bridge of his nose. He began slowly, trying to sound as sane as possible. Like everyone else, he said to the director, I do not know the exact nature of this project. However, I thought I might have information that would be helpful. The director waited as John Michael continued. There is a number, he said slowly, that we have never known. It is a number between nine and ten; not nine and a half, not nine and nine tenths, not the asteroids of ten or nine’s missing moon, but a world of a number unto itself. I discovered this number some time ago and have tried in the years since to calculate an equation that proves the number, beyond the primary equation that led me to discover it. I have to tell you that I have so far failed to develop such a proof. I must also tell you, however, that l have been unable to disprove this number. Moreover, if one hypothetically presumes the existence of such a number, heretofore unforeseen possibilities come within our grasp. He stopped to see if the director was having a reaction to this; the director was not. John Michael sighed and produced a sheaf of papers which he offered the director, who took them. The director glanced over the first several and then laid them on his desk. He looked at his hands a while and then up at John Michael. He asked John Michael why it was nobody else had ever found this number, and John Michael said, Because it isn’t to be found over there; and he pointed east. It is rather, he said, to be found out there, and he pointed out the window to the sun setting behind the pool of water and the monument. I know it’s out there, said the young man, because I’ve heard it. It’s across the river. The Potomac, you mean? the director said. John Michael shook his head. The Hudson, you mean? the director said. Of course not, the young man answered in disbelief. The river, he said: it’s across the river. The director, after watching him a while, asked if he’d told anyone else about this number, and John Michael said no, and then the director said, Of course there is no such number, Mr. Lake. We have all the numbers already. We know all the numbers, we found them hundreds of years ago. If that’s so, answered the young man across the table, then tell me why the Old World came to the New; and the director smiled a little, quizzically, and dismissed the young man. Thank you for your interest, he said formally; he did not return John Michael’s papers. John Michael continued to work for the project another month, when he was transferred to an accounting bureau in the Pentagon where he added numbers of tanks and divided them by numbers of platoons. On the seventh day of August in the year 1945 he was released from service and returned to Chicago, where his father was dying.
My father sold the paper during the war, and when the war ended he sold the house, which was too big for him and too small for his memories. He got a room in the city. I set up residence with him. I didn’t have much and I think he was happy I was there. I got a job in the payroll department of a business down on Clark Street. Pop asked when I was going to find a woman and marry and I told him I had no plans. Leigh had been dead over ten years. Pop reprimanded me if I stopped at a bar on the way home. I never drank much but it was always too much for him. “You’ve been hanging out at the speakeasies again,” he said. “It’s legal now, Pop,” I’d point out, “it’s been legal a long time. They’re not speakeasies anymore.” His eyes would look hurt. “Take it easy with that stuff, son,” he’d say. The doctors didn’t give him long, a year or two.
Of course he fooled them: he was around another five. But he wasted away the last half of it, becoming more dispirited and living just for the arrogance of it. “I don’t know where I am anymore,” he’d say, reading the newspapers. One day not long before the end, some government men came to see me. They asked allusive questions, referring vaguely to this or that. My involvement with the war project was of some interest. They asked about Leigh and the people we knew. “She knew them,” I said, “I knew her. What is this any way?” I finally told them I would explain anything they wanted to know about me but not about anyone else. They told me I knew some things that could help my country, and I said I didn’t know anything about Leigh that would help my country. You don’t know that, they said. You just said I did know it, I answered. Do I know it or don’t I know it? We know, they said, what it is you know and what it is you don’t. I’m not a political person, I said. Everyone’s a political person, they said. I finally told them, You want to arrest me, then arrest me; l haven’t done anything except fall in love with a girl who’s been dead ten years. Is that a crime? Could be, they said.
They didn’t arrest me. I continued with my job and put some money away; some nights I would go to a bar and listen to a baseball game on the radio. My father got smaller and smaller until he was smaller than I. That was what I couldn’t stand, that he was smaller than I. He read the newspapers over and over about congressional committees and counterfeit confessions, nothing but committees and confessions. “Something’s wrong,” he said in confusion, shaking his head, “it’s different.” Forget the papers, I said. One night I tried to wake him and could not; I called the doctor. I sat with him two days and at the end of the second day he woke, desperate eyes in his small white face searching the ceiling. Pop, I called to him. “Something’s wrong,” he whispered. “It’s different.” Pop, I said. He dug his fingers into my arm and lunged for his last breath. “My God,” he cried, “where did my dreams go?”
In the autumn of 1951 a small dark American who styled himself John Lake arrived in the seaport of Penzance on the far southwestern tip of England. This was a time when the tide of GIs that had flooded the island during the second world war had long since ebbed; the summer flux of tourists was gone as well. After disembarking Lake made his way up past the civic promenade and took a room at the Blue Plate Inn on the northern edge of town. A Mrs. Easton ran the inn. For two pounds a week Lake received room and board. In defiance of a proud national reputation for disastrous cuisine, Mrs. Easton cooked well enough. After several weeks Lake applied for a job loading crates down at the docks; it was a position for which he was singularly without qualification. The man in shipping explained this to the American with quiet tact. At a year or two shy of forty, Lake was rather old for such a job when he had never done any physical work in his life; he was also overeducated, something the man in shipping could deduce without knowing anything of Lake at all. Eventually Lake found himself attending to the company books. He had dreaded this inevitability, wanting nothing to do with numbers; but the numbers found him.
Mrs. Easton’s daughter Anne Bradshaw came to the inn each day to work in the kitchen. She lived on the other side of town, which in the case of Penzance meant a twenty-minute walk, in a small cottage with her own seven-year-old daughter. She had moved into the cottage twelve years before as a girl of nineteen, with her husband, Thomas Bradshaw from London, who had met her while vacationing on the coast. The husband did not come back from the war. Now Anne earned money cooking for her mother and running errands for people in town. Several times in the passing years she had considered selling the cottage, but she cl
ung to those things of an earlier life which she still could hold onto. It was odd to be barely thirty years old and to have had an “earlier” life, but in many ways this was true of England in general and the Old World it belonged to. Anne had dusky yellow hair and a weary generous smile, and she noticed the new American in town on the stairs of the inn as she was leaving to take some weekly groceries up the road to the only other American left in the area, an old man who lived out on the moors.
Lake had a good view of this road from his window, which was on the third floor of the inn and looked out to the north and the expanse that stretched from Land’s End on the left to the Bodmin moor a couple of hours in the distance to the right. At first he thought he would rather have a view of the sea, on the other side of the building. But the guest room downstairs had such a view, and after a week or two he became drawn to the desolation of the moors, their chrome light dribbling over the heath. In the flash of the storms the land disappeared altogether, leaving the window a square of rain. After a couple of months of walking the coastline Lake exhausted his attraction to the bay and the ships and the castle of St. Michael’s Mount; but the moors, which on the face of them offered much less to see, never bored him. It’s true that for a long time he went out into them to listen; the wild brush and hidden ponds seethed with their own life and, he might have thought, their own sound. It’s true that he thought he might hear some kind of music there. When he didn’t he thought he was disappointed, until he realized that what he mistook for disappointment was immense relief. That he loathed himself for such a surrender seemed a small price to pay.
As I understand it, my great-grandfather and -grandmother came here once, about a year before Victoria became queen. My great-grandfather, Edwin Lake, was married to another woman. My great-grandmother, Jane Shear, was the daughter of a peddler. The affair between the two lasted three minutes and took place in the alley behind a sweat shop off King’s Road, and it wasn’t nearly enough for her; she pursued him as he vacationed with his family in Southampton and, the story goes, was walking up the street to his hotel one morning when he saw her through the dining room window. He set down his tea, patted his mouth with his napkin, and excused himself from breakfast; his wife asked if he felt well. Quite well, he told her. He explained he would return in a few moments. He walked from the dining room, out the back door of the hotel, and to the train station. He took a train to Exeter. By now of course he knew everything was over, he had already passed the point of no return. He had made the mistake of toying with a girl who did not understand that passion was a country where there were definite borders. She did not see the borders; she crossed borders as though crossing an empty avenue at midnight. In Exeter he contemplated his ruin for several days until Jane Shear showed up there as well; then he took another train. This time he crossed the Tamar River from Devon into Cornwall; he crossed, then, into the final no-man’s-land of the Old World, he went as far as the Old World could go. She followed without a second thought. I have had the miserable misfortune, my great-grandfather thought ruefully to himself, to make love to a woman who will pursue her passion to the edge of her world and perhaps beyond. At Land’s End he jumped into the sea. She might well have followed except that while her passion was such as to transcend borders and worlds, her maternal instinct was not; she watched pregnantly from the rocks of Land’s End and turned around, going back to London where she bore a son, giving him the name of his father. The son in turn would go to America and bear three sons, Bart, Dirk, and Jack Mick, names that were in spirit rather the antithesis of Edwin. Thus my great-grandfather and great-grandmother lived in a country they each called passion but which was in fact two different countries; each crossed into the country of the other without knowing it. When they did not honor each other’s borders, they believed each other to have committed treason; for each, treason was the same crime by a different law.
Lake had casually noticed Anne many times before he saw the similarity with Leigh in appearance. In fact the Englishwoman seemed almost softer to him, though he decided later it was the person who was softer rather than the face. As he watched her wandering up toward the inn through the streets of the town that tumbled back down the hillside, the wind of the bay lifted her hair in a way that the wind off Lake Michigan would lift the hair of a judge’s daughter. On the other hand, Leigh was now of so long ago he couldn’t completely trust the memory this new woman resembled. In every other way Anne was utterly different. Sometimes Lake could barely hear her when she spoke to him, and she flushed slightly and looked anxious around the corners of her smile. Her heart was different, bound in a tourniquet and fighting to live.
Rather dully, he took even longer to understand her interest in him, since she wasn’t the kind to express it directly. By now the long sexual death to which he’d committed himself almost twenty years before was no matter of steely will but willful resignation; for a while he hadn’t realized it was happening. A year passed after Leigh’s death before it occurred to him he hadn’t had another woman since; but the resolution of this abstinence became apparent not with Leigh’s death, not with his mother’s death, not with any other death at all but rather with the night on the banks of the river when he heard the sound of his own number and followed the small footsteps to the water’s edge. With his retreat he put something of himself behind for good; in Cornwall he had re treated out of his world altogether.
He didn’t know what she saw in him, a small dark man with heavy glasses. Perhaps she wasn’t sure herself, unless it was the pain of his retreat and that he was a man who had sealed himself off from any more loss. She didn’t need another man who flung himself into the thick of things. She was insightful enough to know that what some were unimaginative enough to call passivity might be a wounded stoicism, a life bound in a tourniquet and fighting to live. Then also maybe she was a little like Leigh after all, though drawn to his Indianness not for its exoticism but for the rooted depth of it. Anyway, she wasn’t one to flirt. But every way she could find to pass the inn wherever she was going, she did; and one day, forwardly, she brought him lunch down at his office on the docks. It was roast beef and potatoes and a fruit cobbler, with a pint of ale. “It’s so English,” he said smiling at her, spreading it out over the desk. “Imagine,” she laughed.
I worked four days a week with the other three off. Sometimes I’d go with her onto the moors on Saturdays when she took old man Cale his weekly groceries. Her daughter would stay behind at the inn with her grandmother; the little girl was the very image of Anne. I tried not to think of her as yet another bit of Leigh; I tried not to think of them as Leigh in different stages, the little one innocent and new, Anne older and sadder. Of course Anne was not really an older sadder Leigh: if Leigh were still alive Anne would be eight or ten years younger. I knew that. I knew they weren’t the same at all. I knew Anne was a better woman than Leigh in a hundred ways I hadn’t even seen. She laughed without calculation. She was kind to the old people in town. She did more for more people than a hundred of Leigh’s revolutions. She seemed a part of the moors, she was like the moors, exhaling silence and sending forth the inner light of her. On the way to the old man’s house we’d find ourselves caught in the sudden storms of the country, where it is the land that seems to rain on the sky rather than the other way around.
The old man lived in a stone house that had been built a hundred years before by a farmer who grazed cattle on wild moorish grasses. Some in Penzance speculated that maybe the old man grazed on wild moorish grasses too. He was going on seventy but looked eighty-five: stooped and utterly white, with a long beard, like a troll that lived beneath a bridge. He didn’t say much when we came with the groceries, just nodded to Anne, but we heard him talking up a storm when we left. He obviously believed the only person who understood what he said was himself and no one would have contradicted it. He had been in the house alone nearly thirty years, since the day in 1923 when I was probably standing in the dirt road waiting for Pop and Bart to retu
rn from out west and the old man, then about my age now, was washing up on the beach near Land’s End where there’s barely any beach at all. They found him caught in a thicket of trees bashing back and forth against the coast, not a few trees but a whole woods of them, as though someone had sailed the forest to shore, guiding it from the highest perch. Though they found him alone, they said he constantly called through a fevered night for a nameless girl with a deathless face.
Lake and Anne borrowed a car one Saturday and, at her suggestion, drove out to the tip of England. Also at her suggestion, they took the old man with them. “He’s a fellow American, after all,” she said, “you two can have a grand talk.” Lake answered that the old man seemed to have his grandest talks with himself, to which Anne replied, “Then you may each have your own grand talk.”
In fact the two men did have an interesting talk, but only after an hour of riding in silence, when they got out of the car and slowly made their way to the edge of the rocks that over looked the blue sea, not far from where the old man had been found among his tangle of trees on the beach three decades before. Clearing his throat and expecting nothing, Lake said to the old man, “I was born in America as well, you know.” For a moment he thought he hadn’t been heard.
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