There were no Symes in the phonebook, and I expected none; the enduring convalescence of his later life produced, as I had supposed, no heir. And ‘Syme’ itself is an uncommonly uncommon name, for such an ordinary conjunction of the alphabet. It is the ‘y’, I believe, that bears such rare distinction. Of Jenkinses and Jenkynses (the strange ‘y’ notwithstanding) there proved to be a greater selection, five or six perhaps of the latter, though I knew my man at once: the Reverend Thomas, of 17 Kendal Place. ‘Called to the Church by family tradition‚’ Phidy wrote of Jebediah – a tradition which, I hoped, had survived these hundred and thirty-odd years since Tom died and I came to look for his descendant. Odd how deeply this living instance of the familiar name moved me, to a recollection of those passionate and solitary two years I spent attempting to restore Syme’s withered glory, when I had leave, in his phrase, ‘to go over even old ground with a fresh hand, a clear head, and a curious heart’.
I ignored the telephone number along the dotted line, determined to venture everything upon the luck and courage of the moment. ‘These’, I said, returning the heavy tome to the snuffling waitress, ‘are wonderful – historical – records. If I could begin’, I declared to her, to brighten her middling afternoon, ‘my career from scratch, I should choose to study that rich ground on which genealogy and geography overlap. In short, phonebooks and graveyards – scenes of the heartbreaking juxtaposition of name and place. Now, my dear girl – might I trouble you for a map?’
Borne on the flood of forgotten high spirits, I soon discovered Kendal Place, at the southern tip of Highland Park, a broad green neighbourhood of bluish clapboard houses set amid unfenced lawns. Sagging inflatable baby-pools, dirty with green water, lay in the front yards, next to kicked-over tricycles and flat footballs; minivans and Volvos gleamed in the open drives. Kendal Place itself proved to be a short, kerbless dead-end, running into a green bank of wood, which fell to a creek littered with orange peels, candy wrappers and beer-cans. A yellow truck had pulled in front of number seventeen. The Jenkynses were home, it seemed; and moving home, as the phrase is. A long white couch sat, implausibly and imperturbably, in the front yard; two small boys perched upon it, stretching their legs straight out, too short to touch the ground. They stared disconsolately at the clutter in the front yard – television sets, two; a refrigerator on its back; several boxes in various states of disrepair; a tumble of books spilling out of one; a glass case, empty, it seemed, antique, beside the sofa; loose heaps of clothes – waiting, as boys do, for the world to bear them along wherever it would.
I supposed the Reverend Thomas to be that exasperated gentleman, at his wits’ end – he seemed, to be fair, quite comfortable there, and accustomed to it – standing on the doorstep and directing a traffic of box and bag from house to truck. He was an affable, fattening young man, fair-haired, dressed in a plaid shirt and a pair of outgrown corduroys that exposed, above the slackening tube-socks, an inch of honey-coloured ankle. No one listened to him – not wife, not labourer, as they dismantled, in Phidy’s phrase, their
home on the river until a houseful of things had shrunk squarely into three large wooden boxes and two trunks, my own among them. Afterwards, Sam perched on top of one of the boxes with dirty hands and dusty knees and remarked in a rare flight of whimsy, It is like sitting on top of a year – a very small year.’
The Reverend Thomas, however, had accumulated a greater quantity of years, it seemed, than Syme had – or an equal number of larger years, perhaps. In any case, they refused to fit in a yellow Leviathan of a rental truck, never mind a few boxes and trunks. So I approached him gently, gingerly, with all the deference at my disposal. ‘Reverend Jenkyns, sir!’ I cried, running across the yard. ‘Thomas Jenkyns, I believe – a minute of your time‚’ huffing as I strode to take his hand.
Phidy’s description, I discovered on a closer view, of Tom’s beloved cousin had come to life before me. The Reverend Thomas seemed the Word itself made flesh (several generations along the line):
James greeted us mopping a wet brow with a wet handkerchief, and extending a newly dried hand. A fine light sweat still pricked from the skin … He was a kindly, sweating man. His hair was always moist and his hand always damp. He ran to fat, too, like Jeb; but James’s spreading waist seemed accretions of hesitant contentment, too polite to form actions or words. He was still a young man, though he would not be long.
I knew at once that I had found my man, so sure a stamp is genealogy (pity my poor boys).
‘Of course, of course‚’ he said, with the faintest echo of slow Virginia in his voice. Take a minute. Take as much as you like. I’ll tell you a secret, Mr –’
‘Doctor. Doug Pitt, from the University of – of …’
Tom spared my shame, stooped to my ear and whispered, ‘No one heeds me, anyway. Pull up a chair – a temporary blessing of moving house – somewhere to sit in the front yard.’ He lay back heavily in a leather armchair, lifting his eyes to the heavens, and arching his neck till the knuckles of it cracked. ‘Oh‚’ he sighed. Pitt sat at the edge of a kitchen stool – Tom was a man who took his own pleasures, and expected the rest of the world to do the same. ‘If my wife asks‚’ he said, ‘this is parish business. Now, what can I do for you?’
A great deal, as it turned out. I feared at first a certain hacking might be required, to get my question across – and launched at once (abandoning metaphor and misgiving at once) upon the high seas of my old passion, hoping to carry him along:
And before I could say yea or nay I had begun the whole mad thing from the first. Would you credit it, the half-forgotten thoughts – ideas I had believed long rusted and out of use – flew from my lips as bright as the day they were coined, made of such shadowy stuff time could not touch them? Sam himself could not have explained them better, his words had such a renaissance in my heart, I almost wept, an old foolish man, at the recollections they aroused.
Only the Reverend Thomas cut me off at once. ‘Oh God‚’ he said, smiting his hefty flanks and sitting up. ‘You’ve come about Syme, haven’t you? Edith‚’ he called out, loud and idly at once. ‘A fella’s come about Syme!’
‘Does it happen all the time?’
Heavens, no. Only my father always said some day somebody would.’
It took a good half-hour to dig up the relevant box. By some mischance, the thing had gone first into the back of the truck; but Reverend Thomas, on an ancestral quest, clambered into the hold and only blinked smiling when the movers told him angrily it couldn’t be got at. The piano had to be shifted. The piano couldn’t be shifted. The piano was shifted, at last; and the precious wooden crate – a grapefruit box, filled with papers, home once of Florida’s finest – scraped along the steel bottom into the clouded sunshine again, into the clutch of Pitt’s greedy fingers and the gaze of his greedier eyes. I hauled it back to the leather armchair in the grass, heaved it down at my feet, and dried my sweating paws upon my jeans, before tenderly lifting the first sheet to my lap. I almost wept, in Phidy’s phrase, at the recollections they aroused.
The great thing, of course, would be to find a copy of that elusive rag, the New Platonist itself – final proof of Syme’s genius, of his place in the wonderful evolution of thought that led to Wegener’s breakthrough at last. But I have spent a lifetime holding back the highest joys until the end, to sharpen the sweet appetite – and did so now, working meticulously through the heap of papers (letters, fliers, journals, books, etc.) before me, as the dark sun spun slowly round the heavens, and first the clutter of the house behind me and then the jumble of the yard around me emptied into the back of that yellow truck. (Pitt never begins with ‘the great thing’.) I discovered, of course:
a gross of fascinating but irrelevant detail – love-notes (passed between Tom and Kitty), then bankers’ bills, household receipts, even recipes (for shepherd’s pie), from the period following their ‘translation to conjugal bliss’;
a leaven of familiar material – a draft of the
note Tom sent to Phidy at his final parting, scribbled over with some tender and some bitter emendations;
and a spice of novelties, including the heartbreakingly hopeful letter (fluttering out of the old Reverend Jenkyns’s Bible), which I quoted earlier and out of sequence, from Tom to his father, introducing that
German gentleman, a certain Dr Müller, and once a protégé of the great Werner himself [, who] has arrived, to look into the question of Syme’s theories, and adapt them it may be to the service and renown of his own country.
(This I folded and tucked on the sly into my left sock against the flat of my calf, and rolled the jeans down over it.)
But when the sun set in black and yellow through the trees, and two men lifted the sofa (empty of boys) into the back of the truck; when the yard lay green about me again, undecorated by the sitting room; when Granma had come to gather boys and Edith to supper, as the household was shifted several neighbourhoods south to Church Hill, and only the Reverend Thomas remained, insisting as he did on overseeing the men, hoping in fact to catch the baseball on the radio; when I had lifted the last sermon from the heap – William Jenkyns’s eulogy, as it happens, ‘upon the death of a Mr Seaborn’ (Syme himself), which caused such a ‘stir among the American clergy in 1850, occasioning a flurry of correspondence and a distinctly chilly ecclesiastical air’ – and no revolutionary ‘journal of the new American science’ lay beneath, I was forced (in some relief) to confess that my quest had died once again, stillborn, at its rebirth.
Fitting, it seemed, to read over old William Jenkyns’s eulogy of Sam, before the men claimed and pinched the leather armchair from my bottom, and left me alone with my thoughts in northeast Richmond:
I read Mr Seaborn’s account of those Remarkable Journeys with amusement, and a pleasing modicum of instruction. And the Great Dig, my own son’s particular Holy Grail, and on which Syme himself spent the best of his life and indeed a portion of the last and worst, I believe, summoning a lost enthusiasm for the project only a month before his death, in the pursuit of which, as I had warned him before, he forgot to keep his eye on the dinner-plate, and died of a general weakness and agitation – the attempt to burrow one’s way into the heart of the matter, or, rather, the matter of the earth’s heart, with great drenching and plowing, and tunneling, and occasional Explosions – the great dig, as I say, has a noble ring to it, though I have always thought of it as the Big Dig, which, I cannot deny, sounds less well …
I had just come to that bit, scarce heeded before now, regarding the lost enthusiasm summoned a month before his death, ‘in the pursuit of which … he forgot to keep his eye on the dinner-plate’, when the Reverend Thomas tutted at my ear and sat in the grass at my feet.
How are you getting along?’ he said, rubbing his brow with the flat of his palm to relieve a tickle or itch from the sweat of the air. ‘I’ll need those, of course‚’ he apologized, ‘Grandfather’s papers, you know, somewhere along the line. Going now‚’ he added. ‘Only –’ he began, struck by a sudden thought. ‘Edith would be thrilled, I’ll say that much. I can’t say I’d mind, either – it gets to be a bit of a burden, all this history – don’t you think? – and you never know why, or what it was all about in the first place. The papers are straightforward enough, and sometimes I borrow something for a sermon – keep it in the family way, you see, I like that. But then there’s the matter of the second-best bed. You wouldn’t want to take it off our hands, by any chance? The glass would likely break in the truck regardless – of course, it’s nothing but bits to begin with, and I never could see the point. The case is fine enough – a Jenkyns made it. It’s just the junk inside. Filled with clay-dust when I got it, so we cleaned it up – not that it helped, the rest is clay-dust, too. I see you’re staring, Professor. The second-best bed’s just what we call it – you know, the short straw of an inheritance. (That’s me all round, I’m afraid.) Here – I’ll get it.’
He roused himself from the grass with his hand on his knee, sighing, and made his way to the truck. Rummaged briefly and returned, carrying a small, wooden, glass-panelled box in one arm, filled with grey fragments of some kind. ‘Well‚’ he said, setting it down at my feet. ‘That’s it. Take it or leave it. (I’m afraid to say, we need the armchair now.)’
I could not leave it, quite; I am not so heartless or hopeless, after all.
*
It took me some time (half an hour, perhaps, sitting beside it in the close, hot car) to realize what I’d got. My hands were thick and clumsy, filled with blood and sticky, as I lifted the first shard from the case and laid it across my lap. Clay, delicate, fragment perhaps from some kind of shell, curving, as it did, gently inwards. Very brittle, dusty to the touch, and carefully rounded at the edges, along which a smattering of numbers and letters (and occasional words) had been scratched by a sharp point. It seemed curiously familiar, as if I had seen it before, or suspected something like it. And then the words came back to me:
Tom picked up the broom again and formed a small heap from the broken shards of the globe in the centre of the floor, which resembled nothing so much as the remains of a great grey egg, from which the chick had escaped.
And I remembered, if not the letter, then the matter of the story that followed:
‘Stop at once‚’ [Sam cried, as Tom moved to dispose the fragments out the window]. ‘What act of ignorance – of wanton waste and destruction – are you about to commit? Answer me, Tom. Indeed, there is no fool like a happy fool; and all you can do is stand there, grinning idly. Give that to me directly.’ And he snatched the parcel from Tom’s hand, and spread it over the flagstones before the hearth, adding the small piece in his palm to the suddenly precious collection. ‘It is not enough’, he continued, bitterly, ‘that my experiments are botched – by his clumsiness – my studies interrupted by his circus antics – but that his ignorance – his really rather astonishing ignorance – don’t you agree, sir? – must be watched, constantly, like a young dog – lest it foul this or that on its way.’
And yet the ignorant dog had kept them safe so many years, and bequeathed them, an awkward burden, like the second-best bed of Shakespeare’s will, from generation to generation of puzzled Jenkynses. I knew then, with such certainty as proves delightful in itself, like a bell rung clearly, that I had scattered across my lap those ‘clay fragments of the world’ that had moved Sam to such anger and curiosity a hundred and eighty years before. Pitt, after all, was familiar with such ruins himself; having kept, as brittle paperweight, the clay fragment of his own disaster, which scarred his son – ‘that inimitable shape, a slight protrusion from a ragged triangle, unevenly split’ – to remind him of Texas, and the danger of his enthusiasms.
It struck me suddenly why the shapes seemed so familiar. Some tender, meticulous hand had smoothed them into recognition. (Could I doubt that it was Syme’s?) Here, a top-heavy piece of clay stood on a single toe, the belly hollowed into the form of Africa; there, a delicate finger stretched forth from the main, where Florida jutted into the Atlantic; the breast of South America puffed sharp and proud into some imagined sea; the western coast of Greenland softened to a long bay. Was this strange loving duty of precision to those shattered fragments of the world ‘the lost enthusiasm’ that occupied his final month, ‘in the pursuit of which … he forgot to keep his eye on the dinner-plate’? And then, of course, foolish Pitt, the numbers tallied at last in my thoughts, and my fingers found their echoes in one another. The proud breast of South America (3), sought comfort in the belly of Africa (3Ø). The broad shoulder of Africa (2ß), let Florida (2µ) tickle it with a gentle finger, running along. I got out of the car and squatted, in the low heat of dusk, against the kerb; spread the fragments across the leather seat in the dull light of the car door. Slowly the pieces of the world came together. Only consider, Pitt! I thought, the implications of the experiment as a whole: a molten, spinning core enveloped in a hardened, fragmented shell, splitting apart. And there, across the end of Africa,
the back of Australia and the foot of India (nestled together), he had scratched the faintest of bold triumphs: ‘THIS WAS TO BE SHOWN’.
Ten (long!) years before, I had written:
For Syme, that moment, had had the thought – the shadow of a door fell on him from a house yet to be built. ‘Fragments’ drifted at last over the sea of his speculation into those famous ‘segments of the earth’s crust which float on the revolving core’, to which Wegener himself alluded in that careful introduction to his ground-breaking work On the Origin of Continents and Oceans. Syme for an instant suspected the truth: the outside sphere was the only one that mattered; it had cracked and pushed the continents with it.
And just before his death, Syme discovered this fragmented evidence of his ground-breaking suspicion – first aired, I still maintain, in the final, suggestively titled article of the New Platonist (‘Speculations: a curious coincidence’), which fell into Wegener’s hands at last, from the lap of a no-good uncle. ‘And Syme’s suspicion’, as I once declared (how proudly!), ‘grew into Wegener’s half-certainty, which Wegener gave his life to prove utterly certain. I have no doubt of this any more; I would stake my reputation on it, my academic career. I have staked my reputation on it and my academic career.’
*
You may suppose for yourself the fantasies I constructed from thin air on the rest of the journey from Richmond to New York. Such conferences I chaired and such papers I published! The branch of Syme Studies I opened at NYU, a department of the History Faculty devoted entirely to ‘errors of science, redeemed by their place in history’. The word Symist itself became a commonplace of modern discourse, signifying a certain honour attached to solitary speculation and solitary speculators, distinct and distinguished from the grey mass of ordinary thought and ordinary thinkers – coined eventually in the mintage of the Oxford English Dictionary, proving once again my old suspicion that we can only be right alone. I drove deep through the night, in that vast landscape of the mind’s eye presented by the unchanging unrolling of the highway under the road lights, until the summer storm broke over Philadelphia, and I turned at last to a cheap bed to sleep it off.
The Syme Papers Page 65
