by Jane Langton
Leonard looked respectfully at the painted tribesmen and the imposing figure of a bearded white man. He had seen the picture before. It celebrated some important moment in anthropological history.
Struck by an idea, he turned to her. “Oh, ma’am, I don’t suppose you have a room for rent?”
Her rosy face fell, and she shook her head sadly. “Oh, dear me, no. I’m terribly sorry.”
And Leonard had murmured, “Well, never mind,” and thanked her, and opened the front door and closed it behind him and started down the porch steps.
But then she had opened the door and called after him, “Well, of course there’s the attic!”
A stellar dodecahedron is placed in the centre and is enclosed by a translucent sphere like a soap bubble. This symbol of order and beauty reflects the chaos in the shape of a heterogeneous collection of all sorts of useless, broken and crumpled objects.
M. C. Escher
4
So Leonard had moved happily into the attic, and at once the pleasant regular pattern of life in Mrs. Winthrop’s house had begun. The attic radiators shuddered, the wiring sizzled land sparked and the bathroom should have been removed to a museum, but he was grateful to be Mrs. Winthrop’s tenant. He didn’t mind the ancient plumbing. In fact he delighted in the Escher-like pattern of the water glugging slowly down the drain of the venerable bathtub. Did it swirl the other way in the southern hemisphere? Did the rotation of the earth create pairs of spirals twisting oppositely above and below the equator, glugging left or right down a billion different drains?
Nor did he mind the shabbiness of the large house and the dishevelment of the neglected garden. Undoubtedly Mrs. Winthrop’s property was an eyesore to the neighbors, whose large houses were smartly painted, whose gardens sported ecstasies of trellised fencing, frolicsome teahouses and peekaboo garden gates. No truckload of bark mulch had ever been dumped in her back yard, no carpet-lengths of grass unrolled across her weedy lawn.
He guessed that Mrs. Winthrop’s dignity was bound up with her house, but it was clear that the loving identity between them had nothing to do with contemporary fashions in remodelling or the design of formal gardens.
Leonard knew little about his elderly landlady except that she was the widow of that famous old anthropologist Zachariah Winthrop. It was clear, too, that her devotion to her husband’s memory was untiring, although he had been dead for years.
The house was large. Leonard and Mrs. Winthrop lived apart. His attic had once been the servants’ quarters, and it was therefore entirely separate. His back stairway plunged straight down to the rear door. His friends could come and go without encountering the mistress of 24 Sibley Road.
One of his friends, unfortunately, was that nutty woman Judy Plumrose, who had bounced noisily up the back stairs, flung open the attic door and cried, “Oo, what have we here?” And moved right in.
It had taken him three weeks of argument and a messy confrontation before she moved out again, before peace descended once more on Leonard’s eyrie at the top of the house.
The contrast between before-Judy and after-Judy reminded him of an Escher print—but then everything reminded Leonard of an Escher print. This one was Order and Chaos.
Judy had been the broken things around the edge of the picture—the bits of string, the broken bottle, the crumpled piece of paper—while the beautiful order that had returned to his life was the starry crystal in the center.
The crystal in the center—Leonard prepared his lectures, he went to and from his classes and spent many hours at his desk working on his paper for the Mineralogical Society of America, Antisymmetry in the Prints of M. C. Escher—but he had come to feel more and more enclosed in a kind of crystalline perfection, as though the screen of his computer were itself a crystal and so was his shoddy neglected attic at the top of Mrs. Winthrop’s house. The peaked roof with its projecting gables was like the semi-regular polyhedrons crowning the towers of Escher’s famous lithograph, The Waterfall.
He was a crystal living inside a crystal. Everything in Leonard’s life seemed regulated by the fundamental operations of crystallography—translation, rotation and reflection—the three rules that had so fascinated M. C. Escher. On Leonard’s desk the books were at right angles to his notebook and parallel to his pens and pencils. The eraser is out of line. Turn it a few degrees.
Now, however, after yesterday’s tour of the Escher exhibition, his perfectly regulated life had been smashed for a second time by the woman in the green coat.
Leonard groaned, pushed aside his stack of pages and rubbed his bristling chin. He needed a shave. Scraping back his chair, he walked into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror.
What had she thought of this ugly face? Obviously not much. Leonard turned roughly away from the mirror and went back to his desk. He would write her a letter.
Of course it was impossible, because he didn’t know her last name nor where she lived.
Perhaps, he thought, taking up an envelope, she dwelt in Escher space, behind the door of the mill where the water went both up and down, or at the top of the upsidedown staircase, or in the bellchamber of the cathedral that rose from the sea.
Dreamily he invented a fantastic postal destination—
Ms. Frieda X
The Chessboard Town
If undeliverable at this address please forward to—
The Tower of Babel
or try—
The Intersected City
Writing a letter to a woman without an earthly address was like writing to John Keats. What mailman would deliver it?
Dear Frieda, wrote Leonard, beginning anyway.
But when he went out of the house half an hour later, it was not to mail his impossible letter. He was heading for the laundromat on Huron Av with a bundle of dirty clothes. From there he could walk to work.
Without a thought for his landlady Leonard ran downstairs and turned his back on her kitchen door with its tacked-up paper sign, Mrs. Zachariah Winthrop.
As he ambled toward the street he was not aware that she was looking out at him from behind the curtain of her dining room window. Whenever Mrs. Winthrop heard Leonard’s footsteps on the stairs she hoped he would knock and come in, but he never did.
Even on the first of the month when the rent was due, he merely slipped the check under the door.
5
You’re going to like this, Homer. You’re really going to like the Peabody Museum.”
“Well, of course I will. I told you, I’ve been here before.”
“But did you see the glass flowers? I mean, did you really look at the glass flowers?”
Homer pulled the door open and said sarcastically, “I assume the rays of light from the glass flowers managed to stagger up to my eyes.”
Mary dodged ahead of him into the entrance hall. “It’s just that I really want you to see how good it will be, living so close to all this wonderful stuff. And it will be so convenient to visit Barbara in her nursing home without driving for half an hour.”
“Barbara? Oh, right, your old school friend.” Glumly Homer followed his wife up the stairs to the third floor. Gloomily he inspected the cases of botanical specimens miraculously crafted in glass. “Right, right, I saw all these things before.”
Mary took his arm and propelled him into the next room. “Hey, I don’t remember this. Look, Homer, it’s full of crystals.”
Homer looked around doubtfully. The exhibition space for Harvard’s collection of mineralogical and crystallogical specimens was very large.
They had the room almost to themselves. There was only one other visitor.
A gray-haired man in a checkered scarf stood in front of one of the vertical cases, scribbling in a notebook. Turning, he saw them and spoke up. “Start over here. This is the beginning.”
Obediently they joined him, and he explained, “These are the native elements.”
Homer stared at the immense gold nugget. “Native elements?”
“From the periodic table of elements. Gold, silver, copper and so on.” He nodded and moved away.
Mary was charmed. “It’s like M. C. Escher,” she murmured. “This whole room. I wish he could have seen it.”
At once the man in the checkered scarf came hurrying back. “Escher? Right, you’re right. But perhaps he did see it. He was here in Cambridge several times.”
“Really?” said Homer, beaming. “You’re another Escher enthusiast?”
Leonard laughed. “An enthusiast? Good god, I’m an Escher freak from way back.” He held out his hand and introduced himself. “Leonard Sheldrake. I’m a crystallographer. I use his stuff in the courses I teach.”
“No kidding,” said Homer. “Well, we teach here too. Homer and Mary Kelly, bunch of courses in American Lit. Educational meatgrinder.”
“Not the Homer Kelly? You’re the big detective?”
Homer was hugely pleased, but he said, “Aw shucks.”
Mary gently changed the subject. “You see, we just discovered Escher. There’s an exhibition on Huron Avenue. We saw it yesterday.”
“Yesterday! Well, my god, I was there yesterday too. I live just around the corner.” Leonard Sheldrake paused and stared at them, and his face turned red. “You didn’t happen to see a woman in a green coat?”
“A green coat?” Mary shook her head. “I don’t think so. Did you, Homer?”
Homer wasn’t listening. “That crazy Escher. Those upside-down, inside-out staircases, those Moebius strips, those little men going up and down forever.”
“No,” said Mary. “I’m afraid we didn’t see her. I’m sorry.”
Leonard shrugged his shoulders, and Homer eagerly blundered on. “Crystals? What did Escher have to do with crystals?”
Recovering, Leonard explained. “You may have seen them in his pictures—tetrahedrons, octahedrons, dodecahedrons, and so on. But the ones we crystallographers care about are the prints that show the regular divisions of the plane—fishes and birds fitting together, swans going one way and fitting exactly with swans going the other way. He was crazy about that.”
They moved on to the next group of crystals, an array of minerals identified as SULFIDES. “Yes, I remember prints like that,” said Mary, staring at the crisscrossing sticks of stibnite. “I didn’t think they were very interesting. Clever, but surely it isn’t difficult to fit birds and fishes together?”
“Oh, but it’s the way they’re fitted together.” To Mary’s astonishment, Leonard Sheldrake was waxing enthusiastic. So of course was Homer. Soon the two of them were moving excitedly from case to case while Leonard talked about lattices and grids, glide reflections and sixfold rotations, vertical translations and the interdiffusion of atoms. His arms whirled in the air, making airy shapes, chopping off the corners of a cube to make an octahedron.
Mary followed along gratefully, half listening, half admiring the translucent green chunk of fluonte from Namibia, the giant spray of gypsum crystals from Mexico, the amethyst-packed caves of a geode from Brazil.
Parting at last, Leonard said, “I’m going back there tomorrow. To the Escher exhibition, I mean. Would you like to join me? Then I could explain about—”
Mary and Homer agreed at once, and Leonard went away smiling.
It had occurred to him that Frieda might have visited the gallery yesterday because she lived nearby. In that case she might come again. He vowed to drop in every day and ask about the woman in the green coat.
He had forgotten that there had been two women in green coats. He did not wonder about the other.
Long before there were people on the earth, crystals were already growing in the earth’s crust.
M. C. Escher
6
In her condominium apartment in Watertown a dreaming woman woke up, opened her eyes, then closed them again. She did not want to get up and face her sixty-third birthday.
It was too horrible. No one must know.
But the fact of her birthday was not the first thing she thought of on waking. As usual, it was her loss, the memory of the terrible thing that had been done to her. She had borne her grudge for twelve long years. She would bear it for the rest of her life.
And she intended to live a long, long time.
For a few minutes longer she would rest in the delicious comfort of her bed. Feeling slightly tired of lying on her right side, she rolled over and sank into the downy softness of the pillow on her left side. She did not consciously know it, she did not say it to herself, but it was her greatest joy.
But, oh God, it was time to get up, she must get up.
It took an act of courage to lift her head from the bosomy comfort of the pillow. With a wrench she pushed back the tender blankets and struggled to sit up. Then she turned slowly until her legs were over the side.
There she sat for a moment, her head drooping, while the room tipped and whirled. Dizzily she gazed at the middle of the whirl where her breasts rose white and round under the lace of her nightgown.
The sight of her two prize possessions gave her courage. When the walls and windows stopped rocking, she pushed her fists down on the mattress and heaved herself upright.
For the first few steps she supported herself by grasping the doorframe. Then at last she could make her stumbling way to the bathroom.
She felt better after breakfast, perfectly able to walk without stooping or faltering, almost like a young woman again. Now she could do her exercises, although she detested them.
Drooping, she let her upper body fall. Hanging for a moment with her fingers touching her toes, she thought once more about the terrible thing that had been done to her. Rising again she threw her hands over her head, then let them fall and touch her toes.
For five long minutes she carried on—bending, falling, touching, rising, reaching, bending, falling, touching, rising, reaching, bending, falling—falling, falling, falling, remembering her grudge.
It was the engine that drove her.
She was certainly insane, the old woman, but in a particular way. Her madness was a fixation on too few things, not the healthy jumble of daily life but an alternation of obsessed attention from one thing to a second thing, then back to the first thing, then a manic return to the second thing, and once again back to the first—a loop that ran around and around and met itself, ceaselessly and without end.
7
For Eloise Winthrop also, getting out of bed in the morning was an act of courage.
The widow of the great Zachariah Winthrop was some-times times so cramped and stiff, she doubted her strength to walk to the cemetery to visit Zach’s grave.
But she too had a ruling passion. Her entire life was dedicated to her husband’s memory. She must not be too tired. She must go. Zach would be expecting her. If she didn’t come, he would be so disappointed.
Of course if anyone had asked Mrs. Winthrop about the metaphysical, philosophical, cosmological and theological reasons for her conviction that she was still somehow comfortably in touch with her late husband, she would have been unable to reply. Oh, she knew perfectly well in the soft fissures of her brain that it was impossible. But she was not consulting her brain.
Eloise had never been a clever woman. It was her heart, she told herself, that had guided her in all things. Zach had understood her perfectly. He had never asked for witty conversation, he had never expected her to understand anything about social anthropology. He had loved her, Eloise knew, for herself.
It was wonderful the way he had not simply vanished, like someone who has gone away and will never come back. He was very near. He had merely crossed the bridge to the other side.
Today Eloise decided to wait until after lunch to go to the cemetery. She always felt perkier after lunch. But when she heard Leonard hurry down the back stairs she pulled herself together, snatched up the Boston Globe and pulled open the door to the back hall, hoping to catch him for a cheery greeting, perhaps a comment about the lovely day.
But her tenant was already t
urning out of the driveway on his bicycle and spinning away around the corner.
Ah, well. Eloise tucked the Globe under her arm and set off, her big sneakers tramping solidly along the sidewalk. She wasn’t even fazed by the terrible intersection of Brattle Street with Fresh Pond Parkway. When the light said WALK, she walked. The furious traffic, every fuming motorist and impatient truckdriver, had to wait while she made her slow way across.
And of course the walk was good for her old bones. Mount Auburn was so close—just a short stroll down Brattle Street to the great Egyptian gate, and then along the dear familiar ways to Zach’s neighborhood on Willow Avenue.
Spring had come at last. Daffodils were blooming along all the paths in the cemetery, and everything was green. She could spread her blanket on the grass and feel Zach’s presence at her side.
Eloise loved this pleasant bower. There were kindly neighbors all around, and they seemed to lean so near. Most had been old when they passed on, but some had been young, like the daughters of Thomas and Maria Curtis, two dear young women who had died in childbirth, Ellen Elizabeth and Ann Maria.
James Curtis was young too—lost at sea on his passage from London to Charleston, South Carolina, Dec. 9, 1845, aged 25 years.
Willow Avenue made a loop with a little neck of land in the middle. Here there was a lovely Grecian temple for the Lowell family, and a truly magnificent monument like a sofa crowned with an urn. The oddest monument was a tall triangle with the simple inscription MOUNTFORT. It was like a trumpet blast or a noble name in a Shakespeare play.
The weather was so warm, the spring day so enchanting, Mrs. Winthrop decided to go exploring, because one always came upon the most delightful people.
On Trefoil Path, for instance, she would find Joshua Stetson’s gravestone with its lovely angel. It always amused Eloise to imagine that he had been buried in a ten-gallon hat.
