His instruments were a delicate business. The double-compression piston could not be shifted from the barn, but the Potomac Steamboat Company had agreed to let it to us at a reasonable rate. (This, I need hardly say, over Tom’s vehement objections; but Sam won out in the end; and housed under its roof, among other curious mementoes – sorting like with like, I suppose – those fragments of the world, left over from the disastrous experiment that introduced him to me.) Tom wrapped the other, slighter, more fragile (that is, less broken) contraptions – the glass flu’, for instance – in velvet and then bundled them in linen. ‘Take them to Mrs Simmons for safe-keeping,’ he said, and Sam listened meek as a child even to such intimate advice. Tom loaded our arms with these rare works, till we were stiff and rich as pharaohs in their tombs, and sent us off. ‘I have the papers to attend to,’ he said and sat down at the tavern table to write.
A summer shower had fallen. Sam and I walked in slow swathed steps across the river and through the empty market to Mrs Simmons’ between puddles that sparkled like sequins in the gloaming. ‘I feel I have been an evil omen to you, Sam,’ I said.
‘Nonsense, Phidy, you came at the end of something,’ he answered in what seemed a kindly spirit, ‘and now stand in the middle of it.’
We reached the shop. Sam tapped at the window and Mrs Simmons peered at us through the curtains and then drifted slowly to the door. ‘Maria,’ Sam said as she opened it, and I learned her name for the first time. She had a slow smile that always delighted my heart, for she tried to hide it as if it did not become her. She turned it now on Sam as we walked inside, laden with delicate devices. Maria had a tender hand for such things and set them in cushioned boxes, as sweetly as one would lay a child to sleep. Then she took Sam’s hand in her own, rich as wood with age, and I felt a shock of envy that I had no one to bid me ‘fare well’.
‘You must not take him long, Phidy,’ she said, then added, as I slipped embarrassed towards the door, ‘and I shall miss you.’
I left them to each other’s comforts, but lingered a minute in the dooryard since the rain had come back. I heard Sam say in a tone I did not think he possessed, ‘I do not know – if I have the heart for it, Maria.’ Then rain or no, I set off and found Tom smiling at my solitary return.
Tom was a wonder. He stayed up much of the night writing letters to book clubs and universities and scientific societies and even to churches. I posted a sackful of them in the morning. He arranged an auction that afternoon for some of the furniture and a few bits and bobs Sam did not want to keep. He stuck a broadsheet to the garden gate: ‘The Great Geognosist Opens His Cave!’ A townful of people, curious as to Sam’s ways and the interior of the decayed mansion across the river, wandered through our bare house in a dusty many-legged tide that left nothing untouched. They seemed surprised to find no cauldrons or magic carpets, but a very decent table, some serviceable chairs, and a number of perfectly acceptable pots. Kitty proved to be the most practical creature among us, and managed to collect a heavy purseful from our possessions.
At last the crowds had gone, having stolen what they did not buy. ‘Anything the wizard touched’, I heard one old church-going matron declare, as she slipped a silver spoon in the bosom of her dress, ‘will cure a cold, or send a ghost.’ Kitty and Tom and I sat on the sill of the great bay window (all other perches having flown), with the windows flung wide and the river coursing behind us.
‘The gentleman from the steamboat company is coming tomorrow morning for the keys,’ Tom said, ‘and to settle accounts. The post for Baltimore leaves at noon. It was a foolish house, of course, much too big for us, and given to draughts and damp; but just the sort of thing for Sam to fix upon; and I must say, I won’t miss it the less for being impractical.’ We sat, the three of us, with our legs hung down like boys fishing. Our thoughts seemed empty as the house, our ears followed the hush and rush of the river, and our tongues said nothing.
‘I shall be glad to see the back of you,’ Kitty cried at last, when the silence grew unbearable, ‘fools on a fool’s errand chasing a fool.’ Her words had nowhere to turn and rang strangely against the bare cupboards and swept grate.
‘That is unkind, Kitty,’ Tom answered gently.
‘But true,’ she said more softly and nuzzled her face in the crook of his arm. ‘Do not look at me,’ she muttered in his shirt, ‘I am an ugly creature and will miss you.’
Once more, I left another man to his farewells.
The next day we shifted our quarters to Sam’s childhood home. As the coach turned along the river towards Baltimore and passed the grand old inn (which I did not think to see again), I reflected on the odd fate of a man who takes his leave of no one, as all the company he loves travels with him – barring those that live too far away for farewells. I was glad to have my companions to myself again.
*
Joy surprised me, as the three of us turned up the road to the familiar farmhouse outside Baltimore where Sam grew up. ‘I cannot see it for trees,’ I cried, running ahead of them up the path. Summer was kind to Maryland, transformed it into a green palace with chandeliers of leaves hung from the chestnut trees, and thick emerald carpets strewn about our feet. The countryside rang with the noise of life; bird and insect kept up a hidden beat, like the secret whirring motions of a great clock. The air was heavy with green perfume, and every breath of it filled my blood to my eyes. Somehow I had left my father’s misfortunes behind me in Pactaw and was embarked afresh on my journeys. I took the hand of Mr Syme with real good fellowship.
I was given my old bed in Bubbles’ room and fell asleep that night watching the moon fat against the window. This is a fitting starting-point, I reflected from that misty shore, with a foot each in the waking and the dreaming world. My true partnership in our small band had begun in that house five months before; there could be no better spot from which to set forth.
In the morning, I awoke to an unfamiliar prospect. The view had been white on my first day there, and the window ice to the touch. Now I flung it open upon a warm green sea. The ground rose before me in abundant grass and lost itself in the straggling beginnings of a wood. An uneven brown path ran through it and offered the most delicious promise of a leafy and secret exploration. I knew right well that the woods gave way to another road, and that the path led directly to the schoolhouse. But the image of that brown string lost in a green ball grew fixed in my mind as the symbol of enchanted prospects.
We did not stay long. I believe Tom feared Sam would settle there, and, as soon as he could manage it, he planned our departure. I may as well say here that Sam and I came to rely completely on Tom’s directions in the next few months. We slept where he told us and followed where he walked and stopped when he found time to stop. We were as ignorant of our destination as sailors of their captain’s course and worried as little about it. The land around us changed almost as often as the sea around a ship, but rather than whistling for a wind, we called for Curiosity, and under its impetus sailed towards the humble treasure of … a list of names and promised subscriptions to the magazine. Our only fixed harbour was a lecture at the City Hall in Philadelphia which Tom, by a stroke of fortune, had arranged for Sam. ‘That is our Trafalgar,’ Tom said. ‘We can gather five hundred subscriptions in a day.’ For the rest, we trusted ourselves to his guidance and relied on our own companionship. After another busy afternoon spent packing (under Tom’s watchful eye and jealous hand), we reduced our belongings at last to a manageable burden. Tom told us we were leaving on the morrow, and soon after a rather quiet supper, we turned to our beds.
Tom woke me early and I stumbled downstairs to the kitchen. ‘Have a bite for the long day,’ he said, tearing a piece of old bread and dipping it in a jug of milk. ‘Sam won’t be roused.’
Anne joined us at breakfast in a white gown and sat in straight-backed silence while we ate. She had been out of sorts since we came, complained of the headache and sleepless nights. Edward said it was all puritanical starvation and ne
rves; regardless of the cause, she looked half a ghost, pinched and gaunt, and I guessed the effort it cost her to see her son off without worrying him. I had no talk in me, my head stuffed full of sleep and my tongue dull and dry; ate as carelessly as I breathed and could barely keep my head from the table.
‘Sam was always a grand sleeper,’ Anne remarked at last. ‘That used to give me some hopes for – for his happiness.’
I stared at her in puzzlement as Tom left to wake Sam (again!) and collect our things. To my surprise, Anne shifted to his chair beside me and began to talk. I thought that she would remind me once more of her suspicions of Tom, and I prepared myself this time to be loyal But instead she turned to a source, I suppose, of still greater doubt – her son – in the private troubled fashion of the sickbed, when the sufferer, afflicted by some preoccupation, believes that if only this particular worry could be relieved, sleep and health would return.
‘He was always blind as a mole,’ she said, biting colour into her lips. ‘Not in the eyes, you see, but in the head and the heart. I don’t mean that he wasn’t a very loving boy. Have you ever seen a baby mole? Sam caught one once and brought it to the garden. He called it Breadroll and used to spend hours watching him nose through the grass. Did you know moles have fingers, Phidy? His little hands were already strong as spades, and he dug up whatever fell in his path: rocks and clumps of earth. If he could not dig himself clear he pushed his head against whatever stood in his way, until it rolled him on his back. Then he lay flat wriggling until he wriggled to his feet again and set off in a new direction and ran into another stone or tree. He never got far.’
Too tired to answer or comfort her, I only nodded, nodded; and soon after, Tom and Sam joined us. ‘We will miss the Post,’ cried Tom, and Sam embraced his mother. The two stood equal in each other’s arms, only her hair was longer and fell down Sam’s shoulders in a grey heap. Tom called again and I kissed her hand and we left, walking in the first sun of the summer morning. ‘My father lies a-bed’ was all Sam said, concealing the bitterness he felt. We scrambled on to the New York Post bound for Middletown. I was too sleepy to talk and full of such joy, like a cup delicately brimmed, that does not wish to stir for fear of running over.
OF COURSE, THE REJECTIONS DID NOT END THERE. I kept banging at the door (when I did not run from, flinch from it), and others came, of great variety. Never believe that ‘no’s look all alike, for they contain such mixtures of ‘maybe’s and ‘never’s that no two resemble each other exactly. Indeed, I grew adept at picturing the men (and occasional women) behind the missives, at desks both ancient and modern pushed up against university windows across the country, the clutter of their papers further cluttered by the clutter of my papers, Müller’s papers, Syme’s papers (such a broad, thin snowfall of Syme on academic cities, so vast a winter, which swept even to Canada at times!), not to mention the memoranda of our reviewers.
There were the clipped tones of the grey-haired Brahmin from the old-school presses, of universities Harvard and Yale and Princeton. ‘Dear Dr Pitt,’ they wrote impeccably on heavy paper with the mark soaked through, ‘Thank you for your letter of October 23 and for submitting your manuscript to my consideration. I found it interesting; not interesting enough, I’m afraid.’ Then they signed their paper bullets in little squibs (their marks) that seemed to indicate both that in a humble fashion they believed themselves to be only servants in the cause of Lux and Veritas, and that, servants though they were, they shouldn’t wish to know Doug Pitt, son of a scaffolder from San Diego, if they passed him in the street (an eventuality they did not consider likely, seeing that Pitt lived in the wilds of Texas).
There were the Californian rejections, most improbable of all from the presses of Santa Cruz and San Jose and Santa Clara (and, dare I confess, San Diego), effusive and frothy and full of sound and favour, signifying nothing. ‘How greatly’, they said, ‘we enjoyed this history of Dr Syme, found it persuasive and elegant and rich, at once scholarly and captivating, timeless and urgently topical, a work both vital to its own academic tradition and more broadly relevant – just the sort of thing, in short, the editors at the press of Santa [Cruz, Clara, etc.] would love to take on! Which makes it all the more painful for us to inform you that we must at this moment regretfully decline your piece for publication …’
Then came the ladies, massively, impeccably coiffed, preserved as if in the jelly of an early and enduring middle age. They lived in New York and treasured their independence; they worked for the presses of Columbia and NYU, even, among the lower breeds, for CCNY; and lived in squalid little studios on the Upper East Side, with a high-rise view of the other squalid little studios on the Upper East Side. They adored their windswept, concrete, factory-style balconies, and planted potted oases against the reinforced glass walls, and sat, just at the edge of the sliding door, as far as they dared, when the sun came out and the thin metropolitan air was warm enough to breathe, and they told themselves smugly, fearfully, guiltily that they were enjoying ‘a minute’s peace’, and how happy they were to live alone. They began always in breathless apologies of one kind or another and concluded always in ruthless apologies, and said very little in between.
There were the ‘standard’ rejections, of course, endlessly duplicated and hastily signed, which proved, on a wider sampling (which, I confess, I … undertook), not to be standard at all, containing … multitudes of indifference. The ones with ticks pleased me most, suggesting as they did that a simple slip of the hand (so much easier than a painful editorial overhaul) could shift my work from the category ‘Unsuitable at this Time’ to ‘Submitted for Further Evaluation’, even (though I scarcely dreamed of this) to ‘Accepted for Publication’. (The ticks, I should say, never hesitated, never missed their mark.) There were the uniformly intimate, which began Dear ___ and then jiggled my first name some inch above the line, till Doug became muddled in the date and could never untangle itself. These tended to make a great show of suggesting what I knew and didn’t know about my work in particular and the field in general. ‘As you are probably aware,’ they began, and I could almost hear the Doug in their tone of voice, ‘times in academic publishing are hard, particularly in the remoter fields of historical science …’ But they concluded soothingly, hopefully. ‘Having said this, we are sure there are presses who might feel differently [though only, I suppose, in the free spaces of their ___] and we wish you the best of luck elsewhere …’
The worst, I believe, were those who simply returned my own introductory letter, as if, in all honesty, Doug, it contained within it the seeds of its own rejection. To this they appended, in blue felt-tip raided no doubt from their children’s school satchels, such sentiments squeezed above the return address as ‘I greatly respect your personal journey, Doug, but alas …’ The best were those that managed to get my name wrong; these never quite hit home, they seemed to apply to a Slavic, more dangerous man, taller perhaps, and more heavily haired, the favourite of my aliases being ‘Dr Duglo Pi’, a name by which I insisted my family address me for an entire blissfully mysterious and suggestively nefarious week, until Ben twisted the syllables into Dr Du Gloppy, at which point I put a stop to the business altogether.
And then there were the good ones, the ones that meant well by Pitt. Written by just the sort of people who (I hoped) would follow Pitt’s thought; and who did, to a point, then stopped short. Observed here or there, an inconsistency, a gap, little stumbling places I had known of some time, but managed, in the homely familiarity of my own mind, to overstep whenever I crossed them, and forget, as soon as I passed them by. These sympathetic rebuffs (are there such things?) argued in the end (and most damningly of all) what I suspected by then to be true: that I had offered a quest without a grail, a chase without a beast; that until I could prove not only the fact of Syme’s conception but the details of the idea that persuaded Alfred Wegener (a copy of the New Platonist itself?), until I could do that, Syme would never step out of the hole into which he had fallen,
and Pitt could never climb out of it on his back.
These, I need hardly say, I hated the most.
Susie, for her part, could not bear it.
She used to wake early for class, wriggle and sigh in bed, then sit up demonstrably and sigh again. ‘A hug,’ she said to a lump of somnolent Pitt, which, once provided, led satisfied Susie to seek the little black bright-buttoned tablet (known to our curious age as the ‘remote control’) Pitt had discarded at the side of the bed before sleeping. This usually involved some substantial discomfort to Pitt – a quantity of misplaced knees and elbows, of bruised ribs, but Pitt slept on doughtily, until Miss Susie triumphed at last. Then a quick buzz and the breakfast news brightened our bedroom (and woke Pitt) with a television morning, dawning sunny with couches and loud with sipped coffee, while Pitt pressed the pillow to his head and tried to sleep again.
Then a succession of pops and sighs – the tiny bubbles of sound Susie blows at all times, so that she crackles with life as a log with fire, stirring and shifting and announcing each stir and shift: as she rises from bed; as she seeks her slippers; as she finds them; as she wraps her cold, goose-pimpled, air-conditioned limbs in a dressing-gown; as she binds the cord about her plump pale waist; as she stops in front of the TV (a little colour box propped on the window ledge beside the AC unit) and allows herself only a ‘second’s peace’; as she stomps out of the door, to prepare the boys’ breakfast and her own, while the TV buzzes on to an empty room, empty of everything except for Pitt, except for Pitt trying to sleep.
‘Susie!’ – a cry rings out, from Pitt’s sleep-clogged lungs.
The Syme Papers Page 35
