Private Life

by Jane Smiley

  It took Margaret about thirty seconds to read this letter and understand the gist of it. She also understood its placement in the magazine, prominently positioned in the first section, just where someone would turn to begin reading the articles.

  Andrew had dropped into his chair and was staring at the broken window. Margaret said, “Would you like me to go out and get the typewriter?”

  He said nothing.

  They were silent for a considerable time, while she wondered how to comfort her husband, and whether she should allude to the letters she had read all those years before. But he was red in the face and breathing hard, and she didn’t have the courage for that, so she said, carefully, “An accusation isn’t the same as proof, Andrew. You can defend yourself.”

  “I should not have to defend myself!”

  “No, indeed. But maybe it would be a wise idea.” Then she asked the most pressing question, which she later realized was not a question a wife who was truly in sympathy with her husband would have asked. She said, “Were the data falsified?”

  He stared at her, but she didn’t lower her eyes. The letters. Even though she couldn’t mention them, she tried to keep in mind the straightforward but sympathetic approach that Mrs. Early had mastered.

  “Not falsified, but there were some mistakes.”

  “Did you correct them?”

  By his silence, she knew that he had not corrected them, but had allowed the issue to languish, probably out of pride. He said, “They aren’t important to my theory. My theory doesn’t depend on little mistakes, such as they were. There are plenty of other observations by other astronomers pointing in the same direction. The man was lying in wait to ambush me! He resented me then, even though I overcame my distrust of him and gave him a good reference. I see he’s been harboring this grudge! I treated him perfectly well. I did him favors! Now he has ruined me.”

  “Well, it’s not the first time someone has reacted to perceived favors with resentment, but I doubt that he has ruined you.” That was exactly the sort of thing Mrs. Early would have said, she thought. “But how does this man know you?”

  “He was my graduate student in Chicago. We got along well until he was set against me. By someone else.”

  “By whom?”

  He stared at her, then exclaimed, “Look where they printed the letter! That’s as good as a telegram from the editors that they will never publish my work again, and it’s not just a telegram to me, but a telegram to every astronomer in the world.”

  “I understand that, but I don’t see why you can’t defend yourself.”

  “I should defend myself by going to Michigan and shooting the cur.”

  “Since it’s a five-day trip to Michigan, thank goodness you’re hotheaded rather than cold-blooded.”

  He gave her a little smile, sighed. At this very moment, she remembered her grandfather talking about mules and horses. He had said, “It’s harder to train a mule than a horse. You know why? When a horse sighs, you know he’s giving up, but when a mule sighs, you know he’s coming up with another plan.” Andrew, she thought, had always been more a horse than a mule, but that didn’t mean the mule wasn’t in there. She went outside and got the typewriter. The frame was bent. She carried it into his office, heavy as it was, and set it on the desk, her demeanor as neutral as possible. A few minutes later, he went and got one of the sailors who worked around the base to come over and put a piece of wood over the window. A couple of days after that, another pair of sailors replaced the window while she was in San Francisco.

  He said no more about the article or the letter, and both issues of The Astronomical Journal disappeared from among the papers that were stacked around the house. To others, Margaret thought, Andrew would not have seemed different from his usual self. He still stalked about the island in his brisk, upright fashion, smoothing his mustaches and filling out his uniform, speaking to everyone, and ordering the sailors about. Over meals, he was polite. But he avoided her. He spent all of his time in his study or at the observatory, working on his book, while she stayed in the kitchen or in her room. The effect of this was to make her more cool toward him, rather than less. When Dora urged her to meet at Mrs. Wareham’s or invited her into San Francisco, she was happy to go.

  Dora did not have a house but, rather, a lovely apartment in San Francisco’s Cornell Hotel, with a large parlor, a bedchamber, and a bath, but no kitchen. “I hate a kitchen,” said Dora. She ate only in restaurants, but they could be any sort of restaurant, from the Garden Court at the Palace Hotel to a nameless oyster bar on the wharf. Dora’s friends, who seemed to walk in and out of her apartment at will, and could frequently be found in the mornings, slumped on the sofa or stretched out on the carpet, were not like anyone on the island. The ones who were friendly to Margaret were Mal Cohen, who wrote about crime for the Call, and George Roden, who covered labor news, along with the only other woman writer on the Examiner, Leonora Eliot (born Lena Priskov in Detroit, Michigan), who covered debutantes, society balls, and weddings. Leonora was even more fashionably attired than Dora, but every time Margaret complimented her on an outfit, Leonora would laugh and exclaim that she had gotten it for free—either Gump’s or the White House had given “this thing” to her, or one of her society friends had cast it off. She put her arm across the back of the sofa in a boyish way, and said, “Darling Margaret, you know what I really like? Not polo, by any means, but rowing! The bay is so delightfully dangerous. I got all the way to Alcatraz last weekend, close enough that they drew their guns on me! The wind was blowing so hard I could not shout to them who I was.”

  Margaret said, “You could have been killed!” and Leonora laughed, as if this was a thrilling idea, and said, “The waves were so rough that I almost missed the livestock exposition I had to cover that evening.”

  Margaret said, “Livestock? I thought—”

  “But that’s what they are, these debutante balls. They are selling these girls. And I am terribly tired of champagne. George should exchange jobs with me.” She gestured with her cigarette holder across the room.

  The room was filled with painters and musicians and men with no daily occupation more pressing than finding a good cigar. Dora accompanied these men around the city, into shops and factories and livery stables and warehouses and brothels, or to garden lunches and society parties and masked balls, all the time eavesdropping and asking questions and writing up little pieces under the headline “In Another Part of the City.” When Margaret came home from these visits, she chatted about these people to Andrew across the supper table, even though he was gloomy and preoccupied. She told him how Leonora Eliot had discovered that photos of herself had turned up in a gallery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at the very time when Leonora’s off-and-on suitor, a wealthy San Franciscan named Charles Coudray, happened to be visiting friends there. Coudray recognized Leonora’s shoulder (which had a mole), and bought every print. When he confronted Leonora, she disdainfully returned all of the jewelry he had given her, and cut off communication. Andrew laughed and said, “These are odd specimens you are meeting, my dear.”

  In the fall, Dora had a little article in the Examiner entitled “Behind the Fence.” Margaret read it with some surprise, because they had talked about visiting Naoko’s family, the Kimuras, together, but had never done so. Dora had gone alone, though. In her article, she described the backyard:

  The room seemed to flow outward toward the garden, which was small but intricate. The only flowers your correspondent recognized were some bronze-colored mums, and a trained elderberry shrub that was full of hummingbirds. Otherwise, there was a narrow path through a small thick lawn, and there were thick green shrubs neatly pruned to look like miniature trees. To the right of these was a group of graceful maples, their leaves now red and yellow. These reminded your correspondent suddenly of Missouri, in a way that caught her off-guard and made her throat catch, but truly there was no Missouri about it; possibly she had simply never seen anything like this garden,
so small and perfect, hiding in a backyard in Vallejo.

  The gentleman had started the shop, and planted the earliest parts of the garden as a welcome gift for the lady. He had built the fence with two brothers he knew, carrying in the dirt for the mountain. The rocks were from a hillside near Lincoln, where a friend of his had a vegetable farm. He found the pines not far away, in a stand over toward the coast. The maples came from Japan—a farmer he knew brought the seeds many years ago and planted them in his garden for seedlings. In the winter, when it is dark, the gentleman passes his time practicing calligraphy and poetry.

  The couple have a daughter and two sons, who are at school. The boys were eager to demonstrate to your correspondent how well spoken they are in English.

  Margaret had never imagined that such a quiet place could exist in that part of Vallejo, which was busy and rowdy, day and night. Nor could she envision Naoko making her way from that quiet place through the noisy streets to Mrs. Wareham’s, but that was what the girl did, every day, twice a day. Once again, the curious thing was how strange and forceful the world was, how it battered and clanged and could not be withstood, and yet some individuals withstood it while others did not.

  DORA began referring to one of the men she went about with, a man named Pete.

  “He has plenty of money,” said Dora. “He reads and he collects.”

  Given that Dora had never before taken seriously any of her idle connoisseurs of cigars and whiskey, Margaret was a little surprised. She said, “What does he collect?”

  They were sitting in the Garden Court, having high tea. The feather in Dora’s hat shivered as she breathed, and then bobbed when she sipped her tea. She said, “Whatever there is to collect. He was showing me some netsuke he brought with him from Japan.”

  “What are netsuke?”

  “Tiny little sculptures. Rather like buttons, really. Most of his are made of ivory or jade, but one from the eighteenth century is carved from a tiger’s tooth. It’s carved into the shape of an attacking warrior. He has a valuable collection.”

  “He’s a dealer.”

  “Darling, he’s too impetuous to be a dealer. He likes something, he buys it without thinking of the market.” She smiled brilliantly, as if this were a virtue.

  Margaret leaned forward and caught Dora’s eye, asking, as if she might report this to Mrs. Bell, “How long have you known him, really?”

  Dora touched her mouth with her napkin, then set it in her lap. “Almost a year, to be honest. I met him through Mr. Kimura.”

  “I read that article.”

  “The editor cut most of it. Only flowers and plants. Nothing about, as he would say, ‘all the Japs everywhere.’ He held it for months.”

  “You have been very secretive!”

  “Dear Margaret, you’ve known me since I was sixteen. When haven’t I been very secretive?” She spoke with a satisfied smile. “Can you really be on my mother’s side, waiting for me to get married? You? After all of these years with Andrew?” She stared into Margaret’s face for a minute, no doubt gauging her reaction to this remark, then said, “Anyway, the question of whether Pete is that special Cossack I’d been planning to take home to St. Louis and shock my mother with was answered the first time he asked me to loan him a thousand dollars.”

  “I thought you said he has plenty of money.”

  “He does, but, he tells me, it isn’t always available. Anyway, you know I am much more prudent with my money than I am with my affections.”

  “I didn’t know that.” Margaret tried to make her voice light.

  MARGARET would have thought that, as a Cossack, Pete Krizenko would be a tall man, imposing and physical, but Andrew was taller than he was by a head, and had a fuller mustache, too—Pete favored something trimmer and more English-looking. Apart from his clothes, he was plain-looking—you would not pick him out in a crowd. Dora said he had grown up on horseback, but you couldn’t tell that, either.

  Andrew, so busy with his new book that he wouldn’t leave their house except to go to the observatory, seemed fascinated by Pete—he came out of his study when he heard Dora’s voice, and he took a chair rather than disappearing again. The four of them sat in the front room, drinking a bit of sherry and waiting for Margaret’s baking chicken. Outside the bay window, the fog was so thick that it muffled the sounds of the factory.

  Dora said, “Pete has made four fortunes and lost three of them, haven’t you?”

  Pete made a gesture that indicated to Margaret that he was rather proud of this. He addressed himself to Andrew, as if only a man could understand such adventures. He, his uncle, and his cousin drove a hundred Don horses to Kiev and offered them for sale to the Russian army. “I was sixteen,” said Pete. “They were good horses, and we got a good price on them, because when the Russians made too low a bid my uncle turned them right there, and we headed southwest, as if we were taking them to Romania to sell them to the Turks. They let us go twenty verst. A verst is like a kilometer, in case you didn’t know that, but then they came after us, because we went so fast with so many horses, and all beautiful chestnuts, like honey. They paid a hundred thousand for the lot.”

  “A hundred thousand what?” said Andrew.

  “Call them dollars, I don’t care,” exclaimed Pete, good-naturedly. “They were as good as dollars to me. My uncle took half, and my cousin and I split the other half, and instead of going back with them to the village, I went to St. Petersburg and walked down the Nevsky Prospect and bought some nice clothes from the English Shop there, and I invested my money in a newspaper, and away it went, like a basinful of water running downhill.”

  Dora said, “No one loses money on a newspaper.”

  “Ah, but we were very principled. The editor was twenty-two. I thought he was a very worldly man.” Pete smiled. His accent wasn’t at all like that of Leonora Eliot, or any accent Margaret had heard around Vallejo. It came and went as he spoke.

  “Did he steal from you?” Andrew asked.

  “My goodness, no. He disdained advertisers, and his views were too depressing to attract customers.” Pete threw his head back and laughed. “After that, I lived for a while like Raskolnikov in his room, and it almost drove me to murder, of course, but not quite.”

  Dora winked at her, and then Pete said, “I am a big talker and a show-off. Sometime Dora here will tell you which parts she believes and which parts she does not believe, but I am giving no clues myself!”

  “Fortune number two?” prompted Andrew. Margaret could see he, at least, was believing every word.

  Pete glanced at Dora. “Ah well. I will tell you only this. There was a woman in St. Petersburg named Bibikova. Her first name doesn’t matter, you would not have heard of her, but she was from a well-known noble family. When I was about twenty, she took me up as her pet. Ach! She was a very ugly woman, even with her fortune and her family’s house near the Winter Palace, she had not been able to find a husband, though possibly this was not her fault—everyone knew that her father, who controlled the money, was a miser and carried a pistol in the pocket of his dressing gown. But when her father and her uncle died, leaving her huge estates and houses in Petersburg, you can be sure that the handsomest men in Russia were lining up to marry her, and so she employed me as a spy.”

  Andrew was clearly enjoying himself, and Margaret was struck for a moment by the poignancy of such a thing.

  “She dressed me nicely and sent me to parties to eavesdrop upon the gossip, or to bring up a certain name and then listen to what people said. In Moscow, I pretended to be just in from St. Petersburg, and in St. Petersburg, I pretended to be visiting from Moscow. I followed her suitors home at night, and peered into their windows. I was good at climbing up drainpipes and scrambling over roofs. Or I got their servants drunk, and discovered mistresses and bastards and God knows what. After my reports, she would get rid of one suitor or favor another in a way that seemed quite arbitrary and gave her for one time that experience of being courted. My reward was tha
t every week or so she would take me out, and we would go look at things—pictures, china, silver, horses, carpets, old pieces of furniture, even jewels. If she liked something, and I liked it, too, she bought it for herself, but if there was something I liked that she didn’t like, she bought it for me, and that was my fee for working hard. At the end of a year, she chose a boring fellow from Moscow named Yerchikovsky, who had large estates in the south, and I was dismissed with my treasures and my wardrobe. I sold it all to some fellows from France who knew enough but not too much, and that was my second fortune, four times the size of the first. Now I was homesick, because St. Petersburg is such a damp and gloomy city, so my plan was to go back to the Don and buy more horses, which would have been a sure bet, but I was too young to know any better, and so I …” He shook his head, but good-naturedly. Andrew was so intrigued, he shook his head, too.

  “Do tell them,” said Dora. “This is my favorite, because I would have done exactly the same thing.”

  “I invested in an expedition! Have you heard of Przhevalsky? Nikolai Mikhailovich?”

  “I have! He went to Tibet!” Andrew nearly leapt out of his chair.

  Pete said, “Well, I did not go with the great man himself.”

  Margaret stood up and went into the kitchen to tend to the chicken. A bit later, she heard Andrew’s voice boom out, “Khara Khoto! Khara Khoto is in Mongolia! The Chinese destroyed it in the fourteenth century. There’s no telling what’s there! It’s a lost world, like Troy, or Pompeii!”

  When she returned to announce supper, Pete was saying, “Sinkiang is very interesting. I plan to return. In spite of the mosquitoes.”

  Dora laughed, then said, “I would go there.”

  “Yes, you would,” said Pete. He seemed fond of her. They all got to their feet.

  Once they were sitting down, Andrew pressed, “Now the third fortune.”

  “Ah,” said Pete. “Well, by now I was an old man for those regions. I was twenty-three. Pushkin was already exiled by the Tsar before he was twenty-three. I saw that I had better hurry to make another fortune before infirmities would force my retirement. So—have you ever heard of Omsk?” Margaret went back into the kitchen for the beans. When she came back, Andrew was saying, “The latitude would make it more like one of the Canadian prairie towns. Or Scotland. Scotland is at the latitude of Omsk.” Latitude and longitude were Andrew’s daily fare.