Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  And there in front of him was that magnificent, elusive item that had lasted longer and done more to give a significance and sense of purpose to Mays’s days than any material interest, the object that had buzzed memory’s reed, that had seemed the one mysterious motive in an otherwise smothering routine of security. He could see the very woman, not fifty feet in front of him. She looked smaller in person.

  Having Alison next to him for the last half hour had kept him temporarily free from the recursive loop of speculation. Conversation had kept him honest, absorbed. But when the curtain went up, there was no more hiding. As in a fundamentalist’s view of the Last Judgment, his vanity, compulsions, and peccadilloes had all been permanently recorded, mechanically reproduced—not, as the too-literal had it, on celluloid but in the fleshy record of an actress’s body—and he would be forced to watch every incriminating nuance.

  In all his fantasies about finding the distant woman, Mays had never given the redhead a voice. Speeches, yes; long, well-rehearsed conversations. But he had never created a quality of voice to go with the words. Now here she was, speaking. In fact, as the introvert from Amherst, almost all she did was speak. She went stage right to a prop desk, sat, and spoke as she mimed writing letters. She went stage left and gazed through a prop window, speaking a description of an imaginary scene. She stepped forward in front of the proscenium and spoke both parts of a mock dialogue. Mays felt at a loss to explain how a contemporary audience could watch a contemporary actress play a historical figure miming a dialogue for the benefit of an imagined future audience.

  Kimberly Greene’s round, professional periods rolled into every nook of the hall, and Hearing, the most abstract of senses, was the agent of Mays’s shame. There was no more imagined antique figure, limping upstream against the parade. By speaking, Greene had unfolded herself as Greene.

  Not that Mays heard much of what the woman actually said. He jerked out of his thoughts long enough to hear Miss Dickinson threaten to “pull society up by its roots and plant it in another place.” He stayed attentive through the start of another quatrain:

  I never saw a moor,

  I never saw the sea,

  but drifted in attention after these two lines.

  As he watched this striking figure go through her stage act, he felt himself coming down with the stomach flu, symptoms of a bad conscience: he had forgotten to do something, or had done something he’d vowed not to. He was unwilling to let go, altogether, of the antique image despite the physical evidence of Ms. Greene. Hoping to clear his head and settle his stomach, he jabbed out impulsively and took Alison’s hand. She started at his touch, but did not object.

  Kimberly Greene’s performance formula was simple and elegant. She appeared in the rough guise of an important, though sometimes little-known, female personality of the last hundred years. She’d speak a pastiche of the figure’s written and reported words, starting and ending vigorously, encouraging the audience by her delivery to imagine that they were unobtrusive observers at the event.

  Finishing each characterization, she would disappear from the darkened stage, replaced in the interlude by period music and photographs projected onto a back screen. Then she would reappear center stage in another role. The women replaced one another in gradual, chronological order. Aside from the technical considerations of projecting the photographs—images charged with the politics and privations of the century—the production was remarkably subdued. It made no attempt to outseduce film or TV. The show employed few props, hardly any set, modest changes of lighting, and no theatrical tricks.

  In place of the thrill of being a spectator at an extravaganza, the audience at this chamber piece had only the lurid satisfaction of eavesdropping, of being a near-participant at an intimate affair. Most professional and amateur critics could not understand how such an understated show remained running while vastly more entertaining and lavish spectacles opened and closed a week later. The show was closer to dry essay than good drama. Its success could only be attributed to the phenomenon of Kimberly Greene.

  Mays, for one, felt as if he were back in school. When Emily Dickinson disappeared and returned as Susan B. Anthony, he felt the old, cold, creeping anxiety of accountability. At the end of the last act, the ushers would collect all the programs and administer a multiple-choice exam on each character’s contribution to history. He’d have to sit through repeated showings until he scored a 90 percent or better.

  It had been some time since Peter had learned anything aside from the variations on a theme he came across at work. At twenty-one, Mays decided that he no longer had time to learn anything new except what he absolutely needed to survive. But as any eighty-year-old can attest, that amounts to little more than how to cross the street without being hit by a car. Now he regretted his practical economy. He suspected that the only way he could rid himself of his fixation with the redhead wraith and appease his stomach (only temporarily abated by his latching onto Alison’s hand) was to commit to memory the least action of these women moving across the stage.

  By intermission, they had had, besides Dickinson and Anthony, Mrs. Pankhurst, Gertrude Stein, Emily Davison (the suffragette photographed throwing herself under the King’s horse at Epsom, having said, “The cause needs a tragedy”), Marie Curie, Isadora Duncan, and Edith Cavell. This last dramatization took place entirely in a Belgian cell in 1915 as Nurse Cavell waited to be shot by the Germans (fusillé par les Allemands). By the time she mimed being led away, Greene-Cavell managed to say, “Patriotism is not enough.” And Mays had arrived at an idea that would not leave him alone.

  The precision of Greene’s performance, its antique perfection, led Mays to three distinct notions. First, the entr’acte photographs—anarchists in coffins, colonials in Africa, dreadnoughts in drydock, revolutionaries in St. Petersburg, rioters in Chicago, doughboys in Flanders—allowed only one clear interpretation. The theme of the infant century was violence. But second, for whatever the last hundred years had done poorly, it had also begun—perhaps too slowly and fitfully—the restoration of half the race. His third idea, still in embryo, derived from Nurse Cavell’s speech. He had far to go before he could articulate it so neatly, but it ran something like: no existence independent of others.

  Greene’s last vignette before intermission was her most virtuosic. Entering the stage as a youthful Sarah Bernhardt, she elicited a general gasp of appreciation for her now-unrestrained good looks and grace. The Bernhardt incarnation was drenched in sex and sensuality and self-possession, the animal beauty of a panther or constrictor. A voice that melted the house lights and a posture of arrogant, uncaring hedonism and high art added further to the figure’s naked appeal. The Bernhardt did not ask for so much as demand adoration, and the house gave it to her without a murmur. And fifty feet away, Mays at last saw the image that had compelled him from eight stories up.

  But these were only surface charms. Not until mid-monologue—nonstop trivial vanities and theatrical mots—did the Bernhardt legend begin to fill up the rented seats of the arena. For by some trick of posture, facial expression, or vocal inflection, Greene managed to devastate Madame Sarah with age, stiffen her joints, gravel her voice, crease her features until the audience grew nostalgic for the young creature with the golden lilt.

  She spoke with glowing courage about the amputation of her leg, thereafter hopping about the stage with the most agonizing effort. Mays, taken in, looked for the severed and stashed limb. Then she was once again performing for the troops at the front, as she had seventy years before. And again, politics and violence gave way to the spell of a once-strawberry mop of hair.

  She did not play a death scene, and made no allusion to dying words. She merely spoke again, on the darkening stage, her self-proclaimed and often repeated motto: “Quand même”—even though, or, in spite of everything.

  When the house lights came up for intermission, Alison was in a state of extreme agitation.

  —This is great. This is exactly what I was tr
ying to say.

  Mays could not remember her saying anything. But as he looked over at Miss Stark, he found he had not even remembered very well what she looked like, during that hour in the dark. Her face seemed somehow altered. Mays heard his mother telling him not to stare, or at least to be more subtle about it.

  In her eagerness to get his attention, Alison was using their still-paired hands as a sort of mace to club Mays in the thigh. Suddenly aware of the familiarity—she did not even know this man—she extricated her hand and exploded in a beet-cheeked laugh.

  —These women really got their hands dirty, didn’t they? They had the goods and they went to work. But Liberal Arts just does not give you the goods. I mean . . . in my opinion . . . ever since Sputnik . . . technology . . .

  She trailed off in ever-increasing nostalgic intonations, proving to herself the impossibility of her own ignorance. To Mays’s mind, it was just as well that such a genuinely likable person should be stymied by an imagined obstacle than to realize, as he had, that even armed to the teeth with technical know-how, a person no longer had any possibility for consequential action of the sort Alison wanted, the sort they had just witnessed in biography. But he did nothing to argue this point with her. If she asked him again about his line of work, he’d claim a secret government post he was not at liberty to divulge.

  —But this is really great. It’s not just a show. You don’t just look at it, you . . . Where did you hear about this? Or is it your standard place to bring pickups on the first date?

  Mays laughed appreciatively over the pickup irony, thinking how just a few hours before this woman had accosted him and drafted him into the role of fiancé. He knew that Alison, too, at that minute was thinking about the old fellow, Krakow. Could he fill them in with the details on Nurse Cavell, or was that before his time? Mays, who knew exactly how many minutes it took to edit a paragraph of technical text, was totally incapable of gauging time in any clump larger than two-week pay periods.

  —A friend recommended it to me. The one I ate with at your restaurant.

  —“My restaurant”? I’m not guilty. You mean the Leopold-and-Loeb character who cut out and left you holding the bill?

  —Well, it was his money.

  —So you claim. A broker, right?

  —How can you tell?

  —They’re always stalking something. Can’t keep their eyes off the scope for ten minutes. They rely heavily on peripheral vision, and they all slouch, probably from carrying around Opportunity Loss.

  —What’s that?

  —It’s what keeps The Trading Floor in business. You buy a hundred shares of a stock. It goes up a point. To most anybody, that’s a hundred bucks you can go blow on the Vineyard. But to a broker, it represents two hundred dollars Opportunity Loss, since you might have bought three hundred shares. The more you make, the more you’re in the hole.

  —How does that keep your . . . The Trading Floor in business?

  —They like to watch the tape as they eat. What fun is dinner if you can’t take a beating during it? Keep tabs on the Opportunity Loss. The more they don’t make, the more satisfaction these guys get. But that’s a male problem, isn’t it? You like the virtue that comes with suffering. All you fellows try to come home and find your wife—how to say this delicately—diddling some stranger.

  Mays blushed for both of them. One look at her eyelids confirmed that if “diddling” meant what he thought it did, it might just be pleasant with her. Alison talked in opera buffa style, which undercut any misanthropy she faked. She liked to talk. He very much liked to listen to her. Even her denouncements took on a quality of admiration and reverence. She belonged to the narrow class to whom no thing was separable from the complexity of the whole and all things were cause for surprise.

  —You’re a great one to knock ambition, after going on about work and contribution and all.

  —Two different things. Brokers are after lucre, which is only about getting, consumption. The other—going back to school to study science and all—that’s about making things. Use. Production.

  Mays had trouble with this one. Production and consumption came to the same marketplace, and he could not see the virtue of one over the other. His mind was elsewhere—on Nurse Cavell, on Sarah Bernhardt, and not least of all Kimberly Greene, who he wished had not turned out to be so substantial. His mind was on patriotism not being enough, politics not being enough, producing, consuming, all amounting to little in the climate of endless violence.

  He sat and waited for the second act, thinking that if he kept still and patient long enough someone would take pity on his obstinacy and grant him the poorest of revelations: reveal what he had chased in the window phantom, what he had thought to have seen in the distant Ms. Greene, why he was jeopardizing his sense of proportion on a vague feeling of ill ease. Reveal, too, the person next to him. They took hands again as the house lights dimmed.

  The program announced that Greene would open the second act with Jane Addams. To settle the house, the piped music started up again—a George M. Cohan strain. Once again, projected photographs set the milieu: a view of Old Chicago, the street-poor, food lines, immigrants packed on New York’s entry docks, two men boxing bare-fisted, signs offering jobs to anyone neither Irish nor Negro. Then, in a heavy attempt at contrast, the images changed abruptly to a montage of the turn of the century’s very rich: Vanderbilts at dinner with a retinue of twenty, the banker Morgan, the summer-cottage mansions at Newport, a Park Avenue hostess walking on a lump of ermine.

  The last entry in this Billionaire’s Banquet was an unassuming newspaper photo, doubtless chosen for its caption: One of World’s Richest and an Heir? The famous figure of Henry Ford appeared with his arm around the shoulder of a young man. The audience, to a person, let this image go by and settled into preparation for Jane Addams. Mays alone shot bolt upright. For the figure draped by Mr. Ford’s arm, identified by the press as a potential beneficiary, was him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I Dwell in Possibility

  There is no [independent] mode of existence. Every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way in which it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.

  —Alfred North Whitehead

  On the evening of the office Christmas party, I’d left my boss’s house much later than planned. Fat, slow snow was general over the South Shore. Despite having drunk nothing stronger than eggnog all afternoon, I was in good spirits over having, just this once, overcome the old-maidish qualities I’d been nursing since twenty that ordinarily turned my holidays into civil-defense drills.

  If I had not been pressured into making a token appearance at the party, I would never have met Mrs. Schreck, so distinct are the first and second shifts in American business. Besides the clues that could at last move me forward toward the recovery of the photo and the oceanic sense of that lost day in Detroit, Mrs. Schreck had given me two hours of her life, talking at length on memory, the Great War, the experience of immigration. She was older than my grandmother and almost without English, but nevertheless I developed, in a matter of hours, an affection for her that I normally reserve for lifelong friends. On the train back to the city, riding north in the darkening snow, I thought again about how for months I’d gone after Zander, while Sander was there in my own office each evening, fifteen minutes after I’d gone.

  On returning home that evening, I made a resolution to stay late at least two nights a week, pursuing my friendship with Mrs. Schreck to see what else I could learn from her. But as with those well-meaning and avowed resolutions I had made the day of the Rivera murals, I broke the resolution almost at once. My feeling of well-being, my urge to see more of Mrs. Schreck, did not last through the next morning. Rather, for the next several working days, I left a few minutes early, just so I would not meet her. After hearing the painfully pidgined stories—a childhood spent within earshot of the trenches, a family decimated by the system of national states, a second catastrophe and decimation, and the long
trip to another country on a Ship of Fools—after hearing this history opened up to me, I did not want to see her in scrub uniform under the fluorescent lights of our common office. I could not connect one world to the other, and I did not want to see the two occupy the same place.

  Perhaps I confused or hurt Mrs. Schreck by this retreat after so warm a first meeting. I quieted my conscience by insisting that we had made no plans to meet again in the future, and that I was sparing her, too, the shame of appearing in the dress of the present. The continued appearance of the sorry bonbons and, on the last working day of the year, according to Dutch custom, the chocolate letter P, my last initial, left me miserable. But still, I left early.

  Her facts about the photograph—her privileged knowledge that could fill the gaps in my research, her personal experience that could at last cause my reading to coalesce—frightened me as much as the thought of seeing her under fluorescent light. Not that my curiosity had lessened. Every day as I rooted in the sock drawer, plowed the drifts on my way to work, or heated some instant item for dinner, I thought of the names she had given me and how they might flesh out and complete my image of 1914 and of the photograph. As familiar as I had become with the second-floor rear of the public library where they kept History, I could now, in twenty minutes, go straight to a print of those three farmers. The idea terrified me.

  To begin with, I was afraid that Mrs. Schreck’s information would lead me to a photo identical to but different from the one that had compelled me so long before. I had dwelled on the one in my memory so long that it was sure to have altered, to have taken on an authority of its own. I did not relish proving how undependable my memory was. Besides, Mrs. Schreck’s personal involvement with the picture led me to believe that I had been vain in thinking of it as “my photo” and “my farmers.” I was an egoist who dabbled amateurishly in the politics of another time—the life and death of ten million—strictly because it was more entertaining than the workaday. Finally, I was afraid to arrive at the final object of all my effort and, by succeeding, end what had been my only diversion.