Private Life

by Jane Smiley

  Margaret had been to many a funeral over the years. She had found, at least back in Missouri, that a funeral was much like a wedding, in that the display was as important as the occasion. Everyone knew with a funeral, as with a wedding, that there would be considerable gossip afterward about the real nature of the deceased and what the funeral showed about the family—the neighbors could get inside the house and look around while the family members were distracted. But it was not like this at the memorial services for the earthquake victims. At these memorial services, people reflected, not upon just deserts, but upon miracles and tricks of fate, the perfect example of this being the memorial service for Mrs. Devlin, where her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter sat in the first row, between her father and her aunt. The weather was beautiful, and the windows were open to the sounds of birds singing in the trees outside. Prayers were said. Eulogies were made. Father Nicoll didn’t tell the story, but everyone knew what there was to know: Mr. Devlin, in his hasty trip to the city on the day of the quake, had had no luck, but later, there Mrs. Devlin was, in the middle of Beale Street, probably felled by bricks—her body was found next to a collapsed house. She was identified by the contents of her shopping bag, which lay underneath the body, unburned. The child, Emma, turned up in Folsom Street, many blocks away—almost to Ninth. She was shoeless, and her hair had been singed, but she was otherwise unhurt, walking about, crying. Had she been carried there by some kind person, then abandoned? Had she walked there? Every possibility seemed equally unlikely, and yet here she was, and she had no way of telling what had happened to her. How she was found was equally unlikely—two drunks, wandering from saloon to saloon in search of liquor, picked her up and took her with them. At their second or third stop, Mr. Devlin’s cousin, who was a sailor on Lieutenant Freeman’s ship, happened to be in that saloon, rounding up the drunken populace. He didn’t recognize Emma, but she recognized him. The cousin was detailed to take a ferry and bring her home. It was the very next ferry to arrive after the one carrying a distraught and hopeless Mr. Devlin. Emma’s father was wandering about the wharf, not knowing what to do next, when his cousin came running up to him and told him that Emma was found. The operation of larger forces, it seemed to Margaret as she sat at the memorial service, stripped them for the time being of their own pettiness, in a way that the steady and predictable stream of deaths she’d grown up with had never done. She had made a few friends at the memorial services and joined a knitting circle; then she met two other women who liked to read books.

  Andrew did not accompany her to the memorial services, but he did reproduce his gunshot experiment with Hubert Lear, and he bought a camera and made some plates of the results. Then he sent it off to The Astronomical Journal with dispatch, as if he had never hesitated. Both Margaret and Andrew knew he was doing it for his mother, but they didn’t speak about it. After that, he devoted himself to investigating the earthquake—he went to Benicia, he went all over Vallejo, he went up to Napa and overland to Santa Rosa. He went back to San Francisco and down to Oakland. He corresponded with men in San Jose and Santa Cruz and Sacramento. He gathered every fact and observation he could: How had the chimney fallen? Which bricks had toppled, which bricks had remained in place, which part of the road had sunk, and how far and what was the angle of the shear? He wanted to see every single thing that the earthquake had done, every change that it had wrought. He read all the papers and all the reports, but in fact he was not as interested in the casualties as he was in the killer itself, in its exact portrait. He walked right up to survivors and asked questions, not about how the survivor was feeling, but about what, exactly, fell off the shelf and what did not, and how wide the shelf was, and what it was made of. Which wall collapsed and which did not? What time, to the best of your estimation, did the fire reach your block, and where were you standing when you first noticed it, and were you looking toward Second Street or toward Harrison Street—that is, do you think the fire was coming straight toward you or doubling back upon itself? After the building collapsed, could you actually hear people screaming, and if so, for how long would you say the screaming lasted? There was a ghoulishness in the questions he asked (others did, too), but people wanted to answer, no matter what they had lost.

  Later, Margaret thought that, in measuring this bit of subsidence and the cracks in that tower, and in estimating forces and keeping copious detailed notes, as he knew so well how to do (“Testimony of Mary Griffin, aged 27, who was residing at 306 Mission Street at the time of the quake. Miss Griffin was asleep in her bed on the first floor, in the northeast corner of the house”), Andrew performed the kindest act of his life. And he carried his camera about with him. He photographed mudflats and rock faces and brick walls, usually with some easily recognizable object in the photo for scale. During these investigations, he did not talk much about his mother, but he did exclaim, from time to time, that now he understood what the earth had done, almost moment by moment. When the final report about the earthquake came out two years after the earthquake, Andrew put his copy on the shelf just below his mother’s photograph, two thick volumes, her monument (more so, Margaret thought, than the stone his brothers had erected in the graveyard, beside the grave of their father). But even the longest book, she now understood, was the merest reduction of any experience, or any life.

  ONE DAY, after this work was finished, Andrew said, “My dear, do you ever think about the moon?” They were eating supper.

  “You mean, about the craters?”

  After the article had come out in The Astronomical Journal, he had written a more popular one for the Examiner. As a contributor to the investigation of the earthquake, he was given quite a bit of space to explain his theory. And there was also a picture of Hubert Lear with his shotgun, sitting nonchalantly on a high branch of a tree, with Andrew looking up at him from below. The article was a local success, and Mrs. Lear framed it and hung it beside her front door.

  “No, no, no,” he said. “Not that. Do you ever think about how the moon came to be just where it is?”

  “Where it is in the sky?”

  “More or less, but of course it’s not in the sky. It’s in space.”

  She had forgotten this. She considered him actually quite patient with her continuing, and apparently obdurate, astronomical ignorance.

  “I gather that you don’t ever wonder about how the moon came to be just where it is.”

  “I may have wondered that at some point, but I’m used to it now.”

  Andrew laughed.

  “So, how did the moon get to be where it is now?”

  “Well, you see, that’s a question that is not so easy to answer, my dear. In fact, when I myself asked my astronomy professor that question in college, he told me that it wasn’t worth asking.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because most people think that it can’t be answered.”

  She said, “It does seem like it should be answered.”

  “Yes, it does.” But he fell silent, and it appeared that he didn’t have the answer after all.

  A few nights later, she was reading and decided to go to bed. She turned out the lamp above her chair. The room went dark, and the light through the window silvered over her book and her lap. She looked up, and there was the moon, just rising, large and round and friendly. She stood up and went to the door of Andrew’s study. When he called out, “Come in!” she opened the door and said, “All right, where did the moon come from?”

  He grinned and said, “What do you think of this idea—that, long, long ago, the Earth was not solid but was, instead, fluid and molten, hotter than red hot, more like a cauldron of molten iron without the cauldron?”

  She thought about this. She said, “What would keep it all together if there were no cauldron?”

  “A combination of gravity and centripetal force.”

  She imagined she understood this.

  Then he said, “You know, the moon and the Earth don’t remain the same distance apart. The moon ge
ts farther away.”

  “It does?”

  “A little bit every day, a very little bit. It’s the effect of gravitation. The Earth’s rotation is being slowed down by the moon, and so days are getting longer, while the moon is getting farther away from the Earth, and so it has to go farther to get around the Earth, and so the months are also getting longer. But, interestingly, the days are getting longer faster than the months are getting longer. A man I knew in Europe has shown this—George Darwin. He’s the son of Charles Darwin.”

  She pretended that she didn’t recognize the name.

  “Eventually, a day and a month will be the same length, fifty-five days, and then all the forces will be in balance, and, supposedly, things will stay that way. Personally, I don’t believe that, but—” He shrugged, stood up, and came around the desk. He was excited. “But, my dear, you are wondering what this means about the origin of the moon.”

  “Of course.” Margaret had learned that there were many things that Andrew wondered about that would not cross the mind of anyone else. It was his greatest talent, wondering about things. He was two men, really. When he was wondering, he was a likable, congenial, and sociable person. When he had stopped wondering and was convinced that he knew the answer, he became stubborn and stern.

  He guided her to the window. The moon certainly looked farther away now—not as huge and bright, but more its remote, normal self. “Darwin would say that we have entered the theater in the middle of the opera. If we had come in toward the beginning, the moon would be moving faster, it would be much closer and would fill the sky.”

  Margaret tried to imagine this while Andrew slipped his arm around her waist.

  He said, “If the Earth was so hot it was molten, and it was spinning so fast that a day lasted five hours or so, then what shape might it have been?”

  “Kind of an oval?”

  “Yes, indeed, more on the order of a cucumber, a very hot, liquid, fiery cucumber. And what might happen?”

  “An end might break off?”

  He nodded.

  “And that would be the moon?”

  “Darwin said so.”

  She could tell by the way he pronounced “Darwin” that Early didn’t say so. She said, “Why would only one end break off? Why not both?”

  Now he kissed her on the forehead. “A very good question, my dear, and a perfect example of what is wrong with that theory. The fact is, the cucumber would not have been the final shape. The final shape of the rotating molten Earth would have been a pear. But,” he exclaimed, “no one has ever figured out a way to make that pear go fast enough to split off the moon, and they never will. Guess what has happened in the last ten years.”

  “What?”

  “These ideas have been shot all to hell!” He laughed triumphantly. “Because the molten rock in the spinning cauldron isn’t simple at all! It is not just iron and lead and gold and platinum and I don’t know what all, mixed together and cooling down and solidifying bit by bit; there’s something else in there.”

  “What is that?” Margaret actually felt herself get a little excited.

  “There’s uranium and there’s radium.”

  “What are those?”

  “Those are unstable elements that, even when they are just sitting there in the middle of the rock face, are giving off electrons and changing, moment by moment, into something else. All uranium, for example, will someday be lead.” He gave her a satisfied look, then said, “All lead, they might then conclude, was at one time uranium.”

  “What does that mean about the moon?”

  “Well, the moon has had a lot longer time to get into its present orbit than most men have thought. Billions of years rather than millions or hundreds of millions. Something else entirely could have happened. Time is of the essence, my dear, not so much when times are short, but very much when times are long, longer than anyone in the history of mankind has ever conceived of.” He said this in a ringing voice, hugging her to him. She waited a moment, then said, “So—how did the moon get to be where it is?”

  “The Earth captured it!”

  “Has the Earth ever captured anything else?”

  “Possibly. I don’t know yet.”

  “Oh.” It seemed as plausible that the Earth could capture something as it did that a person could claim a stray dog. Mutual attractions, she thought, were mutual attractions, whether you called them “gravity” or “affinity.”

  “I often think that I was born to think about the moon. The moon is that large object in the room that everyone stumbles over and no one thinks about.”

  He was jolly. He guided her into their bedchamber.

  On his side of the bed lay a couple of books by an Englishman named Havelock Ellis, The Sexual Impulse in Women and then another one, Sexual Selection in Man. By happy coincidence, Dr. Ellis had also written a book entitled A Study of British Genius. Andrew kept the first two books to himself, but he read parts of this third book aloud to Margaret over supper, and in deference to the information in all of these books, he had shortened his hours at the observatory.

  Andrew felt that, although he had not suffered from a delicate childhood, he fit perfectly into Dr. Ellis’s model. “Delicate children were the ones who died in Missouri,” which illustrated the equally exciting idea of natural selection. It was one thing to be a hereditary genius like his colleague George Darwin, coddled and cultivated from childhood in the easy circumstances of bourgeois English life, but to be a hereditary genius from a world where the easiest thing for any child to do was to succumb was all the more reason to value one’s own genius.

  The genius book revealed that genius could be inherited from either the father or the mother, which got Andrew fired up about their future child. According to Andrew’s reading of Dr. Ellis, any child of theirs had a perfectly acceptable chance of being a genius. Indeed, if he and she had both been geniuses, it was all too possible that the physical and mental drawbacks of too much genius would outweigh the double inherited dose. Margaret asked him which of his own parents was the genius. All things considered, Andrew felt that it had been his mother, though it could also be true that her talents of method, application, and organization (and poker playing, Margaret thought) had been uniquely capable of meshing with those of his father, who had often played a game of sums with the boys in which he added up numbers they furnished him in rapid-fire shouting matches. His father was good at picking up languages. He could talk to the Germans in German and the French in French and the Spanish in Spanish. His father’s various talents hadn’t been well developed by education, according to Andrew, but “Look at my brothers and me. Only one tall poppy!” That was the right ratio, in the opinion of Havelock Ellis. Therefore, Andrew and Margaret were ideally matched—her lack of genius (“but there is a perfect balance between your womanly nature and your entirely acceptable level of intellect, my dear”) was exactly the leavening their hypothetical son would require. Or sons. If the ratio in Andrew’s own family was four to one, then that was probably a fairly representative ratio.

  However, Dr. Ellis had led to no more interludes of marital relations until the moon intervened. The moon was a great facilitator of marital relations, since Andrew was so excited about his new theory that he was almost always in a good and affectionate mood. And so it was not long after their conversation about the Earth’s capturing the moon that Margaret found herself pregnant again. Mrs. Lear was thrilled. Margaret was thrilled. Andrew was thrilled. He thought that the naval base was the perfect place to rear a squadron of boy geniuses—like the Lear boys, only more thoughtful and quieter, not only rolling firecrackers out of black powder and old newspapers but also reading books.

  The first pregnancy, short as it was, had prepared her, and this one seemed all the more normal for that experience. She was not ill or uncomfortable; the days didn’t slow to a soporific crawl. She pursued her rounds of cooking and shopping and walking and taking the ferry to San Francisco once a month. Andrew was busy in his
office, turning his moon ideas into a book. It really was astonishing how the city had resurrected itself, though of course she never passed any of the streets she associated with Mrs. Early or the fire—Market, Third, Mission, Van Ness—without thinking about the two ladies so intensely that they seemed to inhabit the whole city at once. If, against Andrew’s wishes, she produced a girl, she intended to name her Anna.

  Soon enough, her condition was visible, and, more important, the child had quickened within, and as she felt every movement—first a fluttering, subsequently more strenuous but undifferentiated activity, then precisely identifiable kicks and punches—she allowed herself to make pictures in her mind, as well as baby clothes. In fact, she felt something that she didn’t know how to talk about, especially to the very practical Mrs. Lear—a sense of awakening. As the child grew in her body and in her mind, there were other things that awakened with it. She dreamed of her brother Lawrence, holding her hand and preventing her from stepping in front of a trotting horse pulling a cart, but she didn’t know if such a thing had ever happened. She dreamed that her father was in the next room, trying to talk to her, but she could barely make out his words, no matter how hard she tried. Scenes that Lavinia had described to her, of her father gaily roughhousing with her brothers, recurred to her vividly, as if she had seen them, though she could not have. This awakening was almost painful, considering, as her mother had always told her, that what was given could be snatched away—would be snatched away—but she let it happen. It came to seem the necessary prerequisite for giving birth.

  Mrs. Lear made her go to a doctor in Vallejo. He was a young man, about her age, from Chicago, and his name was Dr. Bernstein. “He’s a Jew, then,” said Andrew.