by Nova Jacobs
Hazel approached cautiously, her voice coming out in a croak. “Uncle Philip?”
He turned, eyes crimson, and blinked at her. His earlier blank expression was gone, and Hazel found herself shocked by the raw feeling on his typically composed face. He pulled her into a warm embrace. “You stayed,” he said, his voice raspy in her ear. “Jane and I know you didn’t have to.”
As he pulled away, Hazel quickly stuttered something about how sorry she was, what a shock, what a lovely, lovely person Sybil had been. She was barely aware of what she was saying but wondered at the same time if she might segue into inquiring about his father’s work, find out if he knew what Isaac had been working on before he died. Ridiculous, of course. Listen, I know your daughter’s dead and all, but I could use your help destroying your father’s mathematics.
Philip thanked her for her kind words and turned back to the window. The child was now struggling up the slide’s wooden ladder. After several seconds, Philip said, “Do you know how many steps run down that canyonside, Hazel?”
It was an odd question, but she knew the answer. “Two hundred fifty-seven, isn’t it?” There were multiple sets of staircases tucked between property lines that allowed for shortcuts up the west end of Beachwood Canyon. Isaac had liked to notify the guests who took these stairs not only of the number of steps they had just climbed but also that 257 is a prime number—one of the so-called Fermat primes, exceedingly rare.
Philip nodded. “I have yet to find someone who can’t answer that question. My father apparently drilled it into all of us. And do you know the number of steps on the hillside, leading from the road to the house?”
He was referring to the steps down which his daughter had tumbled.
“No, I don’t.”
“Twenty-nine.”
Hazel combed her memory for the significance of that number but could find nothing.
“Sybil was twenty-nine,” he said. “The age she’ll be forever now, I suppose.”
Hazel searched for something comforting to say, but he continued: “This knee-jerk mathematization of the world, of course, when applied to everything, is deeply stupid. Isn’t it funny that I seem to be realizing this only now? You know, when I was young and bruised quite easily—actual bruises, I mean, purple and green—I can remember being forced to play this or that sport in school, and for days afterward I would count up the accumulated spots on my arms and legs. At the time, it seemed a way of turning something unpleasant into a useful activity. You know, sort of tricking oneself out of feeling awful? I think I was even proud of this impulse, but now . . .” He laughed. “It’s merely a not-so-subtle illustration of a terrible family pastime. Let’s all ignore the blatant fact staring at us down the gun barrel of being alive—I mean pain, because it’s all pain—and just break it down into its component parts, shall we? We may as well be practicing numerology.”
Philip turned and smiled down on her, his eyes even redder than before. He blinked rapidly, as if trying to loosen something from his eyes. “Sorry, don’t mean to speechify, it’s just—” Before she could tell her uncle it was all right, that she was, in fact, glad they were talking (flattered, really, that he would reveal such thoughts to her), his gaze darted past her to the other end of the living room, where the twins had begun a ragtime duet on the piano. They had clearly taken lessons, but they had no sense of rhythm, and the resulting commotion was jarring. “Excuse me, will you?” With a quick squeeze of her shoulder, Philip left to ask his sons to select a piece more appropriate for the occasion.
A second later, Fritz Dornbach was standing in Philip’s place. He looked tired and bloated, possibly fending off a hangover. “Unspeakable thing, isn’t it?” He looked out the window at the same child, who was now battling an exasperating amount of friction on her way down the slide.
Hazel nodded. “Terrible.”
Silas and Sidney began to pick their way through Chopin’s funeral dirge.
“I have this vague recollection,” Fritz said, “that you wanted to talk to me about something on Halloween.”
“Oh, did I?” Hazel was starting to feel embarrassed at all her clumsy attempts to gather information. “I don’t remember. I was drinking quite a bit.”
“I know the feeling,” he said, suddenly patting his jacket pockets. “I have something for you, you know.” He located a folded piece of paper, one of those old-fashioned slips for jotting down messages. “Frankly, I’m a little tired of this guy tying up the phone lines.”
Hazel unfolded the note.
Urgent
For: Hazel Severy
From: Prof. L. F. Richardson
Message: George C. Page Museum Theater @ 3 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 14. Please come alone.
“Professor Richardson?”
“You know him?”
Hazel now wished she hadn’t shredded that earlier note. “Did he leave his number?”
“No, he was way more interested in getting your cell number, which we didn’t give him.”
Hazel’s head began to ache.
“Fritz?”
“Hmm?”
“How did Richardson know I’d be in town?”
“Oh, well, he was very persuasive, and he did say he was a good friend of Isaac’s. Did I forget to mention that? He also had some kind of accent, in case that’s relevant.” Fritz coughed. “Page Museum . . . Isn’t that the tar pits?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe I should go with you, in case he tries to push you into a bog.”
Hazel frowned and dropped her voice to a near whisper. “I maybe remember what I wanted to ask you on Halloween.” The truth was that she didn’t know until it came out of her mouth: “How do you think Isaac died?”
Fritz’s expression changed to one of surprise. He let a few seconds go by before answering, “Maybe he was very sad, and none of us could see it. That can happen, but . . .” He frowned. “There was always more going on with Isaac than he let on. Don’t you agree, Hazel?”
* * *
That night, back at her brother’s house, after a quick search on his computer, she found the only professor by the name of Richardson with whom her grandfather might have been acquainted: Lewis Fry Richardson. From what Hazel could gather, he was quite famous and had several fan pages of the nerdy, poorly designed variety. He was an English mathematician-meteorologist and a pioneer of mathematical weather prediction, an ambitious field with as-yet-lackluster results. Richardson was also an early pioneer of chaos theory, along with meteorologist Edward Lorenz, the latter of whom coined the ubiquitous term butterfly effect to refer to minuscule events having far-flung consequences. (An insect twitches in China; weeks later, a man’s hat blows off in Bermuda.) Yes, this was exactly the kind of person her grandfather would have befriended, and exactly the kind of man who would be interested in Isaac’s most recent work, save for one detail: Lewis Fry Richardson had been dead for sixty years.
– 16 –
The Leave
Dear Professor Severy,
Please accept my sincerest condolences on the loss of your daughter. Though I never had the pleasure of meeting Sybil, I have no doubt that she was as remarkable a person as her father and grandfather. True brilliance, after all, is a hereditary monarchy—as I think someone brilliant once said.
I cannot imagine the extent of your pain, but please know that you and your family are in my thoughts. Perhaps you find my concern somewhat odd considering that we have not, in fact, properly met, and that our most recent meeting was suspended. But I had a great fondness for your father, and that fondness extends to the entire Severy family.
Do not hesitate to let my office know if there is anything I can do to be of service to you during this very sad time. I say this without any hope of gain, but simply as an unlikely friend.
Sympathies,
P. Booth Lyons
The note irritated Philip more each time he read it. It had been written on fine letterhead, with the precision of one clearly devoted to the
art of cursive. As his eyes passed over the lines, he could almost picture Nellie taking dictation at her desk, her boss pacing in front of her with all the self-importance of a big-game hunter, the dough of his neck rising over his oxford collar. “I had great affection for your father—no, strike that—fondness for your father. Did you get that, Ms. Stone?”
“You know nothing about my family,” Philip muttered, crushing the paper and tossing it onto a growing pile of cardstock on the far end of the dining room table. It was obvious that Lyons wouldn’t stop until he got whatever he was after, but Philip no longer cared. On the near end of the table, among languishing flowers, sat a growing heap of envelopes. Most remained, and would remain, unopened. Sympathy cards were all necessarily alike, a form letter in which modifications were allowed only for proper names and flattering adjectives. And while Isaac’s condolence cards had been filled with an assortment of descriptors—brilliant, towering, generous, funny, kind—it seemed that Sybil’s were all variations on a theme: lovely, luminous, glowing, exquisite, enchanting. P. Booth Lyons had been the only one to suggest that Philip’s daughter had been anything other than an ordinary girl in an extraordinary body; that she had been, in fact, remarkable.
Since Sybil’s death a week before, Philip and Jane had scanned their mental horizons for someone to blame. But the only candidate they could come up with was Philip’s paternal grandfather for having bought the Hollywoodland plot back in the 1950s and then installing a precipitous flight of concrete steps down which a parasomniac could fall and break her neck. Philip decided not to dwell on the irony of his grandfather having been a successful structural engineer at JPL.
The police, of course, had thoroughly interrogated Jack, more out of routine than any serious suspicion, but the investigative follow-up stalled when Jack had a psychotic break after Sybil’s funeral and had to be hospitalized.
Drew, who had yet to be told of her mother’s death, had been transferred to Philip and Jane’s care until her father could be released from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. But because neither of them was in any kind of emotional place to take care of a small child, Jane’s sister, Faye, was flown in from Phoenix to live with them indefinitely. She immediately transformed herself into a substitute housewife and therapist, alternating her time looking after Drew and comforting her grieving sister, all the while making endless pots of tea and trays of baked goods. Faye repeatedly soothed the little girl with the fib “Mommy and Daddy needed to go home for a little while, but they’ll be back for you.” If Jack wasn’t better soon, Philip and Jane would have to correct this lie themselves. They would also have to look into enrolling Drew in a local kindergarten or, more suitably, the first grade.
But Drew being Drew, she besieged everyone around her with questions. “Am I being punished?” “Was it because I ate the poisonous plant?” “Was I very bad?” she asked repeatedly. Faye assured her that it wasn’t her fault and that her parents loved her, but Drew remained unconvinced. Yesterday, the day of the funeral, she had stopped asking questions altogether, and now sat mutely on the couch with her Audubon guide open in her lap. That morning, Philip had caught her whispering an alphabetized list of birds—cattle egret, cave swallow, cedar waxwing, cerulean warbler, chestnut-backed chickadee—but mostly she was silent and still, leaving the couch only when it was time to eat or go to bed. Philip understood, of course. He and his wife had been operating on a variation of this same routine all week.
Silas and Sidney were taking a brief hiatus from their practice for the SoCal Junior Tennis Open. (Even though only Sidney had qualified for the finals, the twins practiced as an inseparable unit.) Being the teenagers they were, they moped around the house for days, supremely confused about their feelings. The two had wept openly upon hearing that their grandfather had died, but their older sister’s death had thrown them into a dumbfounded silence. They went to school as usual and in the evenings quietly eyed their racquets, wondering when propriety would allow them to snatch them up again and flee to the nearest court.
Jane had gone into the blackest of depressions, the kind from which she could send back only the crudest messages—“My girl . . . my little girl”—and allude to wanting her own life to end. Not in a serious way, she insisted, but in the way a mother who loses a child will entertain. Faye responded by forcing her sister out of the house for a daily run in Eaton Canyon, leaving Drew with the twins. “One has to keep up one’s interests,” Faye told her, “even if the interest is gone.” Philip had to admit that for all his sister-in-law’s general obtuseness and materialism, she was a godsend, and he didn’t know how he’d cope without her. His wife had completely shut down, and his ability to communicate with her had gone with it.
Philip was pushing a pile of cards into a wastepaper basket when he let the can fall to the floor. He couldn’t stand the sight of another flower or card. He needed to get out of the house. Now. They both did. He abandoned the mess, grabbed his car keys, and headed to the garden to find Jane. Maybe without her sister circling, he could get her to talk to him. Maybe they could find a way at last to be of some small comfort to each other.
* * *
An hour later, they were cresting a ridge overlooking the heart of Eaton Canyon when Jane turned to him: “If she were our only child, I think that would be it for me.” They stopped just feet away from a sheer drop of eighty feet. Philip slid his arms around his wife and held her, though not tightly enough to betray his alarm at the proximity of the edge.
“Do you think people know how they’re going to die?” she asked.
Not being in the mood for morose speculation, he hesitated.
“I mean we’re all going to die,” she continued. “It’s already predetermined; we just don’t know how it’s going to happen. But maybe our subconscious is able to catch a glimpse of it somehow. Like that mathematician, the code breaker for the Allies, what’s-his-name—”
“Turing.”
“Right. Do you think every time Alan Turing looked at an apple, there was a shiver of recognition?”
Turing, after breaking Nazi Germany’s Enigma code during the war, had been harassed by the British government for being gay—or at least for not bothering to hide it. When given the choice of a prison sentence or chemical castration, he chose the latter, presumably because prison would have hampered the possibility of yet a third option, one he chose to exercise in his home laboratory one day with only his appetite and a cyanide-laced apple. In this case, Jane was likely right. Philip could imagine Turing having watched the poisoned-apple scene from Disney’s Snow White—the mathematician’s favorite movie—and experiencing a moment of intense recognition, as if remembering an event that had already happened.
“Isn’t it amazing,” she continued, “how he could be so unhappy, yet considerate enough to make it look like an accident? So he could spare his poor mother the heartache? I would do the same for you and the twins: give you the gift of plausible deniability.”
“Can we not do this, please?”
“For Godsake, allow me my morbid fantasy, would you?”
Philip was quiet for a moment. He stared out at the canyon, where the late-afternoon sun turned the rock a fierce orange. “Well, we’re not recreational chemists, for one thing,” he said finally. “The poisoned apple worked only because it was semicredible that he spilled cyanide on his lunch.”
“All right, so where’s our semicredible accident?”
“I don’t know. I think I feel a shiver of recognition every time I look at your sister’s lasagna.”
In his desperation for levity, Philip had wanted to make her laugh, but the attempt misfired. She pulled away, wicking the moisture from her eyes with the ends of her sleeves.
“I don’t understand,” she choked. “How can you be so cool? Where’s your breakdown?”
“I have to stay sane for you. You want me to go to pieces like Jack? End up in the psych ward at Cedars?”
“At least I’d have company.”
“Wh
at do you want me to say, Jane? Our child is dead, and I’m heartbroken. I cry every day. I’ve taken leave from work.”
“I guess the meaning of the universe is just going to have to take a back seat to the death of your daughter—your very unremarkable daughter.”
Philip didn’t know how to respond to this. Where had she gotten that word, unremarkable? It had been confined to his head, yet somehow Jane had intuited it.
She turned back to the precipice. The sun hit the side of her face, throwing it into a frightening motif of shadow and fire-orange. It was at that moment that he saw his wife’s grief turn to rage, toward the world and toward him.
* * *
It was true that Philip had taken an immediate leave from Caltech for the rest of the term; his colleagues had insisted. Professor Kato agreed to take on Philip’s graduate seminar and supersymmetry class, while Kuchek temporarily absorbed Philip’s graduate advisees. Still, the next morning, Philip got up and went to school, if only to sit in his office and stare at neglected equations on his blackboard, or walk a purposeless route through campus, even at the risk of running into people who would wonder why he wasn’t at home. But he could feel Jane’s anger becoming dark and heavy, and being of no use or solace to her, he didn’t know what else to do with himself.
Late fall was Philip’s favorite time of year on campus, and despite his misery, he could still appreciate the season. People back east liked to insist that Southern California didn’t really have seasons and that autumn in particular failed to have any real meaning. There was some truth in this, but Philip enjoyed the subtle indicators that the Northern Hemisphere was tipping away from the sun. Besides the sweaters and light jackets that appeared in November, the olive trees slowly surrendered their crop to the pavement, and the few campus oaks changed color in revolt against the prevailing evergreenery.
That morning, as he passed the Sloan Laboratory of Mathematics and Physics, Enid Elderberg—spiky grapefruit-colored hair, stud in her nose—waved to him from the steps, a pair of file boxes balanced in one arm. Philip found Elderberg’s fashion sense a transparent stab at making pure mathematics look hip, but then he’d heard she was quite brilliant, so why the hell not.
