by Jane Smiley
Margaret thought of Dora and Pete—her one and only matchmaking project—and then of all those letters she had written to bereaved mothers. Mrs. Wareham, no doubt, thought of her son, Angus. They sighed simultaneously. Alexander, if he had not died in this very house, would have had other chances to die. It was impossible not to be a realist.
The Kimuras’ shop was still spic-and-span and jammed with many unidentifiable (at least to Margaret) packets, tins, and bottles. Mr. Kimura, who looked much the same also, only more precisely and dryly himself, welcomed her with a bow, and then went through the curtain to the back. Mrs. Kimura came out in her Japanese manner—though she was dressed in American clothes, her hands were folded together and her head dipped politely forward. Margaret bowed to her and then to her husband. The two women left the shop. Once again, though, as they walked toward where the car was kept, the midwife straightened up and her steps got longer; she looked around, too, as you would in a place like this, where there were people of all ages, types, and nationalities, doing all sorts of business. Margaret had to walk a little faster to keep up with her. By the time they were in the motorcar, driving toward the edge of town, Mrs. Kimura bore very little similarity to the woman in the shop. Looking at her, Margaret got her first inkling of the possibilities of driving an automobile.
But she also saw, as soon as she was seated behind the circle of wood that was the wheel, that realizing those possibilities was not going to be easy. A person had two hands and two feet. A car had three pedals and four levers, not to mention the steering wheel, and, unlike a horse, a car did not even begin to look where it was going. If it went. The hardest part for her was something called the “clutch,” which seemed to have its own ideas about how far in you pushed it with your foot. The problem with this clutch was that when it popped out the car’s motor died, and there you were, having to go through all those steps to start it up again. The clutch was under the left foot. Margaret had never before realized that her left foot was rather stupid. What it was most like, in its way, was sewing on a sewing machine operated by a foot pedal, but, then, she had always operated the foot pedal with her right foot.
Mrs. Kimura was sympathetic and good-natured, even after Margaret had stalled the engine what seemed like a dozen times. All Mrs. Kimura did was smile and say, “You must be pleased this is Dodge car, not Ford car. Very difficult, Ford car. No starter. You get out every time. But even though this car four year old, it has starter.” Margaret thought going to the front of the car every time she killed the motor would be a lot of exercise.
At last, she managed to drive in a lurching loop around the pasture, arrive at her starting place, go forward again for a little bit, and then stop and turn the car off without feeling it more or less collapse underneath her. Mrs. Kimura came around to her side, and Margaret moved over. Mrs. Kimura took the wheel, and patted her on the wrist. She said, “We have plenty time.” They drove smoothly back to the garage and put the car away—that was all. No one received it, groomed it, fed it. Mrs. Kimura turned it off with a tiny key called a “magneto” key, and they walked away from it.
Her freedom, on her driving days, was complete. She took the ferry to Vallejo, moseyed toward the Kimuras’ shop, ate a bite, went into a few shops, and sensed Andrew diminishing in size to a distant point, as did the typewriter. Nor did he object to her being out for most of the day—they both knew that practice was essential. Soon she was bringing all sorts of gifts to the Kimuras, oranges and flowers and boxes of divinity. The gifts were accepted graciously, of course, and she therefore felt that she had to outdo herself, and so, one day, on the last day, she rustled Pete’s old hand scroll out of the closet. She had never looked at it, and she thought perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Kimura would enjoy opening it with her.
She drove all through the streets of Vallejo that day, a fragrant, sunny spring day, a break from eight or nine days of fog and drizzle. She stopped and started, paused, turned left and right, used her clutch with amazing smoothness—amazing to her. Mrs. Kimura sat quietly, smiling pleasantly and occasionally waving to people they passed. They were back at the shop by about three, and instead of bowing, shaking Mrs. Kimura’s hand, and departing, she bowed and opened her bag. She said, “I wish to show you what Pete Krizenko left in my keeping, and to learn from you and Mr. Kimura all about it.”
When she saw what Margaret had, Mrs. Kimura hurried into the back of the shop. She said something Margaret could hear in Japanese, and Mr. Kimura appeared at once. Margaret offered him the scroll. He took it gently, and led her into the back. There was a long table there, and he set the scroll down. Mrs. Kimura picked up the flower arrangement that was on the table and took it into the front room.
Margaret had imagined that the scroll would be some sort of wide picture, like the screens (which she had looked at once again since the first time), but it was, rather, a tall picture, about twenty inches wide and about four feet high. As Mr. Kimura unrolled it, from top to bottom, nothing appeared except some gray coloring, shaped like the slope of a mountain seen through the mist—hardly a shape at all, and yet present. Then there was a light-colored, sharp outline that turned into a wide-brimmed hat. At last there was a face, and bright color—a blue collar, a green sash. When the picture was entirely flat, Mr. Kimura grinned. The picture was of three figures—a tall woman (the one wearing the hat), who was looking down at a child, whose hand she was holding; behind them was another figure, short and leaning to the side, which could have been either male or female—no doubt a servant. The servant was also looking at the child, who was looking up at the woman, presumably his mother. The servant was dressed in a rich bronze color, the child in a softer tan that echoed the color of the mother’s hat. From their posture, it seemed as though the three were walking against a heavy breeze. At the bottom of the picture, she could see that they were treading through wavelets or puddles, carefully picked out in thin black curving lines—an everyday scene, two adults and a child making their way on a stormy day, but marvelously arresting.
Mr. Kimura said something in Japanese, and Mrs. Kimura said to her, “Is noble lady with son and servant. We have always honored Mr. Pete for discernment, but we never see picture before. Is very fine one.” She bowed as if the picture reflected well on her. Margaret bowed back.
They conversed some more; then Mrs. Kimura said, “Might be hundred years old, according to fashion of lady, and worth much money.”
Then again, “Mr. Kimura sorry that ignorance prohibits him from recognizing artist even though name here.” She pointed to an ideogram.
They looked at the picture for a few more minutes, and then carefully rolled it up again, wrapping it. Now that she knew what it was, Margaret was rather frightened at having brought it out. She glanced out the window at the sky. All of these Japanese pictures seemed too fragile—merely paper. But some of them were hundreds of years old.
When she had put her picture away in her bag, Mr. Kimura went to a cabinet and brought out a picture of his own and opened it on the table. It was entirely different from Pete’s, and yet also arresting and mysterious. Mrs. Kimura said, “Is not painting, but woodblock print. Is by Utagawa Hiroshige.” She pointed to a column of writing in the lower right corner.
It was a small picture, possibly a foot high or a little more, and not ten inches wide—the size of an illustration in a book—a moonlit scene. In the dim distance, to the right, a pine-tree-covered hill rose out of a flat plain. The whole upper half of the picture was made up of a sky, the tiny stars picked out in varying intensities (this was a picture she thought that Andrew would like). In the foreground, to the left, was a sizable leafless tree. Looking at the branches, Margaret realized that the ground was covered with moonlit snow. Mr. Kimura waved his hand over the figures bunched at the base of the tree, and Mrs. Kimura said, “Foxes under moon.” The foxes were pale yellow, their bodies merely outlined. There were fifteen or twenty of them, looking to the right, clearly on the alert for something. Though they did not look like
any foxes she had ever seen, they had the demeanor of foxes.
What was remarkable to her about the print, like the painting, was the feel of the weather—so chill and still. Only the foxes, picked out by the light of the invisible moon, were animated. Mrs. Kimura said, “Utagawa Hiroshige very famous in Japan.”
Margaret regarded the picture. The odd thing was that, even though she wanted it, or something like it, and even though Andrew had plenty of money, and even though she had learned to drive the car, and even though she went to San Francisco every couple of weeks, she could not imagine how to get such a thing for her own, such a grand and comforting thing.
THE FRANKLIN was a soothing sage green with black fenders, a tan top, and a black leather interior seat—indeed, the seat was thickly padded and sewn with deep tucks, like a luxurious sofa. The steering wheel was some rich golden wood. The front end of the car swept downward, giving it a birdlike quality. The top folded forward or back, as one wished. The man they bought it from parked it on the street in front of their little house, and Margaret watched through the front window as Andrew promenaded out of the house, marched down to the street, and then stopped and put his hands in the pockets of his navy-blue captain’s jacket with the stripes on the sleeve. He pushed back his cap and lifted his chin and stared into the engine. Then he paraded around the car once or twice, opened up the hood, and stared at the air-cooled engine. If people stopped to look (and they did—navy men were always interested in machinery), he would tell them more about the air-cooled engine than they wanted to know—that it dispensed entirely with the problems of water-cooling, and that this famous person and that famous person would own only a Franklin. Margaret was ready to drive it—and she did drive it one time, over the causeway that now made Vallejo more accessible but had not replaced the ferry, and around the streets of Vallejo, to Mrs. Wareham’s and then to the Kimuras’, just to show them. But it took a week for Andrew to get in.
Then they did get in, Margaret in the driver’s seat and Andrew enormous beside her. She let out the clutch and stepped on the starter, and they rolled away from the curb to the sound of the wheel spokes knocking. After that she saw him more in the car than in the house, and at closer quarters. It surprised her that he would leave his work, but it seemed that the feeling of rolling along, of being looked at and admired, of having to say nothing while knowing that the Franklin was saying something for him, was a feeling he could not get enough of. And then he was invited to give a speech, and instead of turning down the offer because he had too much writing to do, he went. She drove him all the way to Fairfield. His speech was not about the universe at all, but about the bubonic plague—his vindication with regard to the influenza gave him a great fondness for diseases of all kinds, so he read up on every infection in the news. He chose the bubonic plague as more dramatic than the influenza—the Yunnan outbreak in China in the 1850s and, once a war broke out there and thousands of people fled southward, outbreaks in Canton, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Bombay, Calcutta, and then on to Africa. Perhaps, Andrew exclaimed, perhaps the members of the audience recalled the plague outbreaks of 1899 in Egypt, or South Africa, or Hawaii, or, indeed, in San Francisco? San Francisco was the only city in America to host an outbreak of the plague. Did they remember (a few heads in the audience nodded) the first outbreak in 1900 and the second five years later, just before the earthquake? Did they shiver, as he did, not only at the gruesome symptoms, but also at what might have happened after the earthquake if Dr. Blue (a navy man) had not acted with such wisdom and dispatch? Of course they did! And did they know that, even as he was speaking to them here in Fairfield, the California countryside was full of plague-carrying rats that were crawling with fleas? Sixty thousand had died in Canton, a hundred thousand in Hong Kong alone! Where was the plague now? Who could say, except that it seemed to be in Russia, or, as they called it now, “the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” (he said this with a snort).
The audience could hardly sit in their seats.
He went on to diphtheria, scarlet fever, cholera, typhus—describing symptoms and outbreaks, giving advice (washing hands, boiling drinking water, properly disposing of sewage and garbage). “We know how to stop these grave ills in their tracks, how to conquer them or keep them at bay! But we have to be alert! We have to attend to rather than ignore the living conditions of our fellow citizens, and the hygiene of our friends and family members!”
The talk was a sensation.
Through the fall and into the spring, he gave a version of this speech in Vallejo, Napa, Dixon, Benicia, as far south as Atherton and San Jose, as far north as Calistoga. They drove to all of these places, and Margaret was startled by the variety of the California landscape. Groups asked him back, and he returned, joyfully, with a presentation about the universe.
From his talk about the universe, you would have assumed that that fellow in Europe—what was his name?—Einstein, who was getting so much play in the papers (but really, as she looked around at the audience, more people looked blank at the name than otherwise), was a mere fabulist. For these lectures, Andrew carried a small thick book with a red leather cover, and right in the middle of the lecture, he would hold the book above his head and exclaim the word “Gravity!,” then let go of the book, which would land with a smack on the stage. Then he would say, “The Earth has gravity! Gravity is a force. If the Earth did not have gravity, then this book would not drop to the boards here, but would floooooat on the air. And the book!”—he would pick up the book—“the book has gravity, too! The book is drawing the Earth to itself, just as the Earth is drawing the book to itself! The sun exerts this force! The moon exerts this force! You exert this force! I exert this force!” Then he would turn, with his arms raised in a sweeping gesture, and say, “Do you see any hills on this stage? Do you see any slopes that might cause this book to sl-l-l-ide down toward the stage?” Long pause, a few shaking heads. “Do you?”
Some man always shouted, “No!”
“So gravity cannot be a slope, created by curvature. There is no curvature here. Remember this—you can’t have one thing in one part of space and another thing in another part! You can’t say that the universe is curved but this stage”—he stomped his feet—“isn’t, so gravity works one way in one place and another way in another place. Gravity is a force!”
In a talk of an hour (including questions—he was great at answering questions), he demolished Einstein in about ten minutes and spent the rest of the time explaining what the universe was really like. After these talks, men buttonholed Andrew and gave him their own theories, while women patted Margaret on the hand and said, “So brilliant! How fortunate you are to be married to such an interesting man!”
When, much to Margaret’s surprise, Einstein made a well-publicized trip to America, and then, according to Andrew, “went about hawking his crazy opinions everywhere,” Andrew wasn’t as offended as she expected him to be. He just shook his head, and said, “The ignorant and the enthusiastic are impressed, my dear, but see here—no invitation from Harvard, and Princeton has only let him in the back door. I am sure he expected much more, given his connections. My strategy must be to go on as I have begun and put my faith in the inherent good sense of our countrymen.” The only other time he said anything about it was one day in the summer, after reading one of his long-delayed papers from the East. “Here. You see, Patne agrees with me. He maintains that Einstein partook of our American generosity, but now has spurned us. No great loss. No great loss indeed.” At lectures, Margaret noticed that, while Andrew stuck to his usual script, his tone when discussing the fellow was more heavily and openly amused. When Einstein won the Nobel Prize at the end of that year for “The Photoelectric Effect” and not for his “silly theories,” Andrew felt he had been vindicated. He mentioned the prize in one lecture, in Oakland. He said, in response to a question about it, “You see, he might have been an excellent scientist if he had focused his ideas. It is a very sad thing when an intelligent man compounds the demons
trable with the ridiculous.”
At the same time, he dedicated himself to his correspondence. Many of his columns grew out of questions readers wrote in to him: How does ice form on a window? Does whiskey serve to disinfect the body? Did he foresee any imminent earthquakes? The scientific ignorance of the average newspaper reader came as an appalling shock to him, but only redoubled his sense that his newspaper and public-speaking work were important. He composed many more columns than the Examiner published—even without a war, the pages of the paper were filled, unaccountably to Andrew, with many other things besides science.
Little did these small-town lecture and Chautauqua committees who were directed to Andrew by the Examiner know that he would have gladly spoken to them for free. He took what they offered, and some of them were flush and offered as much as a hundred dollars. As she drove along the narrow gravel roads, grateful that they had a Franklin, so easy and reliable (Franklins were some of the first cars to drive coast to coast, Andrew told her), it hardly seemed possible that they would be stranded somewhere and left to die of exposure, and they weren’t. When they got back to Vallejo, she felt, simultaneously, that they had done a very brave thing and a very easy thing.
But even as the lectures were his form of altruism, his absence from the book worried him. Each day, she typed up what he had written the day before—some two or three thousand words—and then he would go over it the next day and the next, changing his ideas and metaphorical illustrations. After he went over it, she retyped it and he went over it again. To have such flexibility—to go into print again and again—was a glory to him. Margaret typed forty and then sixty and then eighty words per minute, just like knitting row after row of garter stitch, and she really had no idea what she was typing. Her time was her own only when he was making his drawings of the universe, such as his drawing of the Aether—six-pointed shapes like stars with elongated arms that touched at the tips—but he liked her to stay within earshot. More than once, while he was drawing, he got up and came into the front room, where she might be reading a book. He noted her presence and nodded, then went back into his study. There was a chafing quality to his constant attention, and the days of Dora, when Margaret had thought nothing of leaving on the ferry whenever she wished, seemed gone without a trace, but what was her argument against his—the book was all-important! The lives of human beings were a kind of futile chaos, a chaos that preyed upon him every single day. To wrest a good idea, the right idea, from this chaos was a man’s highest purpose and first obligation. Didn’t she agree with that? He was nearly sixty, and though he was in exceptional health—