by Sarah Smith
“Every moment is too much.”
Daugherty got up and stood by the window. He turned around. “I hate to say this to a man like you, Charlie, and I hope you don’t mistake me. I got to have more than counting teeth. I got to have measurements. I got to have drawings of how the teeth looked.”
He could save her yet, if she could be saved. Charlie’s heart banged in his chest, but regular, steady. “You will have measurements,” Charlie said. Lies like that were honorable in comparison. “You’ll have drawings of the teeth and of how far the skull sutures had closed.”
The two men looked at each other for a moment, Daugherty sizing Charlie up. “You had ’em today, you just forgot to bring ‘em.”
“You will have them,” Charlie said a little stiffly. “Today, if you’ll come to the Clinic the end of this afternoon.”
“They’re dated yesterday. Just like that note.”
“You will see they are dated,” Charlie said.
“OK. I’ll get Reisden out of here.”
Gilbert reads Dante; Reisden makes a discovery
The lab notes from Maurice O’Brien and Louis arrived in the morning mail, a big envelope a half-inch thick. Reisden took the envelope outside onto the porch and dragged two of the porch chairs next to each other, spreading out the notes on one. And for an hour he was only who he had been, in the lab again among Louis’ scribbles—sketches of the Statue of Liberty as a pig, of O’Brien as a pig—and O’Brien’s neat, lucid, beautifully reported lab work.
About eleven-thirty Gilbert came out on the porch, whispered that Harry was up, and added, did Richard want to go for a walk with him? “Harry’s rather sad,” Gilbert said in a low voice, “and I believe Perdita has been waiting around to see him. Perhaps we would be—more than was quite needed, for a while.”
Gilbert had brought a book. Reisden put his papers back into the envelope and took it with him. The two men cut through the woods until they came to the end of the iron bridge that William Knight had built. The cut of the Littie Spruce lay before them, a long streambed of tumbled rocks cut deep into the green star moss of its banks. Gilbert peered down into the confusion of rocks, at the glitter of water ten or twelve feet below, and stepped back quickly. The water was so low that they could barely feel the mist rising from it, but it still raced over the bottom of the cut. The air was cool. Gilbert gave one of the sandwiches he had brought to Richard, then sat down underneath the trees, but Richard sat by the edge of the cut, dangerously close, with one foot over the edge. Not eating, throwing rocks down into the water and reading his papers.
Gilbert bit his tongue and didn’t tell Richard to get back. Gilbert chewed his sandwich, twenty times each bite, and thought: I have made Harry my heir and been faithful to Richard. And Harry has been so unhappy that he cannot trust Perdita as he ought. And even Richard says that I should choose Harry over him. But Gilbert had no choice, he had never had one; and so he had to wait here, while Harry and Perdita made up their quarrel, or not, between them: between the boy Gilbert had never been able to make his son, and the girl who was effortlessly his daughter. And Richard, who would not marry her, sat on the edge of the cut and threw flints over the edge and looked white and tired.
Gilbert got out his book, opened it, and closed it again. Richard, Gilbert thought, don’t end up like me. If it doesn’t work out between Harry and Perdita, speak to her.
But he only asked what Richard was reading.
“Notes from chemical experiments.” Richard came over and sat down beside him: away from the edge, thank Heaven. He showed them to Gilbert. formulae and foreign languages, and a sketch of a pear with a mustache.
“Gilbert, I want you to do something for Perdita.”
“Anything, Richard; what shall I do?"
“When she and Harry get married, insist she take her lessons in New York. If she wants to.”
“What, go down once a week, go away from Harry?”
“Harry can breathe unassisted for a day. Supposing that she is a musician, I want someone to give her the train fere and the lesson money.”
“I can’t come between a man and his wife.”
“You can,” Reisden said dryly, “better than she can herself.” There was no use thinking of her, but she was there, mixed up with Louis’ notes and the lab. “What are you reading, Gilbert? Read to me.”
Gilbert began slowly:
Like he who sees in dreams, and in the light
Feels yet the passion of the glory seen,
But keeps no memory of all his sight,
My vision is departed—
Reisden smiled. “Dante? Not the right thing.”
“Richard,” Gilbert said in a rush, “you love Perdita as much as I do, I think. What is best for her?”
Reisden shook his head. “The music. That’s all I know.”
“But Harry—?”
“I can’t speak about Harry.”
And so Gilbert returned to his book, and read silently the last cantos of Dante’s Paradise, read about the Light that one can never turn one’s eyes from, because the Good that is the object of the will is all collected in it; read about that Light Eternal which is alone Itself, not to be seen with light alone or with thinking, but in a lightning flash, in the granting of a wish; and all the time he mourned, because Perdita might not marry Harry, and if she did it might not be the best thing for her. The sun moved through the sky, drawn in its wheel by the Love that moves the sun and other stars; and the shadows of the pine trees moved over the star moss, and over the white dust and fragments that were all that was left of Jay French.
Reisden sat with Louis’ and O’Brien’s lab notes across his knee, reading and comparing. Perdita would make up her quarrel with Harry. Reisden had created a woman he wanted to save, a musician; but he was trying to save himself. She had helped him as much as she should. Because I won’t tell, her voice said; she was bright fragments, impressions and memories, a girl with apple blossoms falling on her hair, a girl at a piano. Now, from here on, he was on his own.
He read. O’Brien had got what they considered to be anomalous results in measuring the energy produced at one stage of the recovery reaction. And, since anomalous results shouldn’t be replicable, he had done the same thing again, and got them again. Did Reisden have any idea why he should have got this amount of free energy? Reisden studied the data, then went back and reread all the summer’s lab notes slowly. And then two pieces of the lab notes came together in his head with something Peter Miller had said about coenzymes, and then more, and five years of his own experiments with them, so that he sat back and said aloud, “No, it goes this way,” and grabbed for a pencil and began to work out the empirical equations on the margins and the backs of O’Brien’s typewritten sheets, having for one moment the whole wheel of life together in his head; and it moved, and it changed, and he knew, not all, but a little more, why his hands moved.
When he finished, the shadows had changed and grown longer, and under the trees it was hot, golden, and very quiet. He read over his notes once and then again, made two corrections in them, and stretched, leaning back against the rough bark of one of the pines, more exhausted than he had ever been but complete, whole. One moment of such completion makes a life. Gilbert Knight was still sitting on the ground with his closed book in his lap, looking at him as uncomprehendingly as a squirrel. Reisden smiled at him. “Did you know that—” But the chemistry of muscle motion is a difficult music, and not everyone hears it or needs to.
“I’ve got to call New York,” he said.
