Private Life

by Jane Smiley

  “You’re fifty-five.”

  He looked at her but didn’t answer.

  She said, “I just think it’s—Most people make themselves out to be younger than they are.”

  He went back into his office before she ever finished her remark.

  ELIZABETH wrote her that Lucy May was proposing to travel to California, to Los Angeles, to visit some of Mercer Hart’s relations, and wanted very dearly to visit Margaret on the island before going south.

  The Lucy May that Margaret picked up at the railway station was someone she would not have recognized—tall, dark, nervous, eager. As soon as she saw the girl, Margaret understood why Elizabeth had written her three letters in three days, unable to stop detailing her worries about the long train trip, and ordering Margaret to send her a telegram as soon as Lucy May arrived. They went to the telegraph office.

  Andrew came out of the house when they drove up, and peered at Lucy May. As they entered the front door, he said, “Can you type, miss?”

  Lucy May shook her head and said, “Uncle Andrew, I can’t do anything useful.”

  Andrew took her at her word and more or less overlooked her thereafter, but Margaret was wooed and won. The girl’s clothes were beautiful—Margaret couldn’t resist admiring them as she unpacked them and hung them in the wardrobe of the spare room. Lucy May watched her, not helping, but talking away (“Mother said to tell you everything, which I do plan to do, Aunt Margaret”). She was so lively and grateful for what Margaret provided that providing was a treat.

  But Andrew filled the house. When Lucy May’s gaze roved over the piles of books and papers and journals, Margaret’s did, too. When Lucy May removed a stack of drafts from a chair to sit down, or pushed the typewriter aside, or bumped into a box of “the first volume,” as Andrew now called it, Margaret registered the clutter and winced. They had to go out, simply because the Franklin was comfortable and clean. They drove around Vallejo and Napa, down as far as Oakland and Danville. Listening to Lucy gave Margaret a view of the life she had not had, set right beside the life she had had.

  “All three of those boys are wild as can be, especially Elliott, who was in the war. Lawrence was the only steady one, Mama says.”

  Margaret said, “He was a darling boy.”

  “Father was offered a job in Philadelphia. Ellie and I wanted to go, too, just for a change, but Mama wouldn’t hear of it, even though St. Louis is so hot she has to lie in the back parlor with a wet rag on her forehead to get through the afternoon.”

  Margaret said, “Oh, people have always prided themselves on living in St. Louis.”

  “I think you were lucky to get out. We could at least move farther west—all my friends live past Gore now. No one lives where we do.”

  Lucy May found old age astonishing, having never been sent on charitable errands to witness it, as Margaret had been. “Everyone at Mr. Bell’s funeral was ancient, including Mrs. Bell. She has a nurse. All they talk about is cats. Everyone tells her what her old cats are doing as if they were still alive.

  “Didn’t you know? Uncle Robert is bald as a rock. Not even eyebrows.

  “Everyone says that you are a saint, Aunt Margaret. A pure saint. And you seem like the youngest to me. Aunt Beatrice is so fat, she doesn’t go anywhere. She can’t fit into Uncle Robert’s automobile.” She said it again: “I think you had a lucky escape.”

  Margaret said, “But I miss all of them. I never got to know you until right now.” Lucy May could not resist a tiny shrug, as if these were small prices to pay.

  One morning, over breakfast, she sipped her coffee and asked, “Did you really see them hang Jesse James the day Mama was born?”

  Margaret said, “Jesse James was shot in the head over by the Kansas border.”

  “But you did see a hanging?”

  She said, “I don’t know. I just don’t remember. Your grandmother thought that was one of my signal virtues.”

  “Aunt Margaret! You must remember something.”

  Margaret thought about it as she drove them toward Napa for a picnic later in the day. The picture that came into her mind was muddy ground, flattened grass, and white clover. The restless murmur of a crowd and the creaking of wagons. An old-time Missouri voice saying, “Why, he’s just a boy!” She said, “I think that hanging comes into my mind sometimes, but I don’t know if what I think I remember is maybe something I read.” She drove for another minute, then said, “I think his name was Claghorne.” And she did—that was a name she knew but hadn’t heard in decades. “I guess he robbed banks, or shot someone while robbing a bank. I don’t know. I’ll bet he was no older than you are now.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Oh, I was five. Less than.”

  “What was Uncle Lawrence like?”

  “He was a quiet boy. He liked books and bugs. That was why everyone was so astounded that he took me to the hanging. I’m sure Ben was there, too. He went everywhere there might be trouble.”

  “Do you remember when Ben died?”

  “I remember when they carried him home. Beatrice and I were playing in the front room, and Mama looked out the window and gasped, and then she called out to our girl, Lily, and told her to take us upstairs. I remember how his feet looked as they were coming through the door, and then Lily stepped in front of me. I didn’t see after that. Your mother must have been two.”

  “Oh, Aunt Margaret! I don’t know how Gran stood it.”

  “But when you were born, Lucy May, your mother hired a nurse named Agatha from down around Rolla, and I gaped at what she told me, just the way you’re doing now.”

  “I can’t imagine it.” As Margaret glanced at her niece staring out the window, she realized that what she couldn’t imagine, though she had lived it, was never having gone back there, never having had the will to insist to Andrew that his work could be put off for a month or two, that a change of scene would be good for him. Then she realized that her mother had known that very thing—that Margaret’s will could never match Andrew’s—and, further, that her mother had accepted that as part of the price to be paid.

  Margaret took Lucy May to Mrs. Wareham’s boarding house, now called the Warrington Hotel, where the girl chatted with Mrs. Wareham and Cassandra and Naoko as if she had known them all her life.

  On the ferry to San Francisco, they met Mrs. Kimura, who was going to Japantown. Because it was Lucy May’s second-to-last day, Margaret had been planning to take her to Gump’s and the White House and buy her an outfit for Los Angeles, but Lucy May chattered with Mrs. Kimura as if she were the child of Dora Bell, and they ended up on the cable car, heading out Geary Street. Eavesdropping, Margaret learned that both Joe and Lester would be moving to San Francisco—more opportunity as well as more to do. And Lester was already working at the Pacific Trading Company and living in a boarding house on Laguna Street, while Joe was finishing school in Vallejo and deciding whether to apprentice himself to a dentist on Sutter Street or to try to get more schooling. Mrs. Kimura herself came to Japantown two or three times every month. She was a member of two community-improvement societies and a church, but Mr. Kimura preferred to stay home and work in his garden. “How wonderful,” said Lucy May. “How interesting!”

  Margaret smiled to herself.

  Margaret glanced about as tactfully as possible while Mrs. Kimura greeted several people. Most of the shops were the sort you would expect anywhere—cleaners, tailors, grocers, hotels—but full of Japanese people, the way the shops in Vallejo were not. The hotels, too, looked like hotels everywhere, except for the Japanese characters on the signs, above or below the English ones. Only the restaurants were decorated to look exotic. Lucy May peered in doors and windows—Margaret was glad that Mrs. Kimura did not seem embarrassed by the girl’s curiosity. They went into a bookstore, a larger one than any in Vallejo (and Margaret had been to them all); the books were in Japanese. The only thing she could do with them was heft them in her hands and flip through, feeling the paper, but this tu
rned out to be a pleasure, for the paper had a softer feel and rougher texture than the paper she was used to. The people in the bookstore watched her and Lucy May with curious politeness. Each time she put a book back on the shelf and picked out another one, they seemed to be wondering what on earth she could be looking for. In the meantime, Mrs. Kimura retrieved the proprietor from his office, and very soon he took Lucy May into a separate room, where he kept portfolios of prints. Margaret followed them.

  After some discussion in Japanese with Mrs. Kimura, the man found two folders, then brought them over and laid them on a table beside a large window.

  He opened the first one. The colors were brilliant and flat—curving fish, ferocious-looking men, women in brightly patterned kimonos, monsters, uplifted swords, corners of houses or doorways leading outdoors, with mountains or water in the background.

  “Scene from drama or story,” said Mrs. Kimura. “I like. Woman leaving house. Her child reaching for her. She halfway out door. But look.” She pointed to the upper left-hand corner, where the translucent wall of the house was depicted. “Here is shadow of head. As she leave house, she change into fox.” It was striking and clever, but it made Margaret uneasy. The proprietor kept turning, Lucy kept looking. There was a man with red stripes painted over his face, a cat sitting in a window, a stooped old man with a bare chest carrying a pack on his back.

  The second portfolio was truly strange, and Mrs. Kimura said to her, “I do not think you like these, but Mr. Obata very proud of them.”

  Mr. Obata bowed toward her, and opened the portfolio. The first was of a viper of some sort, coiling itself down from a box, around what looked like a cup. Mr. Obata said something, and Mrs. Kimura said, “This is malicious gift—some nice present on top of box, and poisonous snake hidden inside.”

  Margaret said, “The snake is very realistic.”

  Lucy May reached out and traced the outline of the snake’s head with her fingernail, then said, “When I was a child, my grandmother told me a story where the bones of all the animals slaughtered on a farm rise up and dance, then chase the farmer into the woods.”

  Margaret said, “My mother did tell that story.”

  Mrs. Kimura related this to the proprietor, and they smiled.

  He closed the folder and glanced speculatively about the room. After a moment, he set another folder on the table, and opened the cover. The top print was in shades of green, orange, and yellow. It depicted three men passing a waterfall, which boomed over the whole left side of the picture. The men were very small figures, their faces hidden by wide hats as they looked up at the cascade. They stood on a bridge. Dark-blue water ran beneath them in a foaming torrent.

  “This Hokusai,” said Mrs. Kimura. “Very famous, and has made many, many prints. Some people say style show madness.”

  “I love that one,” said Lucy May.

  Margaret paid fifty dollars, about as much as she had spent on all of her clothing in the previous year. The proprietor of the bookshop wrapped it in heavy paper and Margaret handed it to Lucy May, who hugged her and kissed her on both cheeks, and then kissed the package. Then they went to a restaurant and drank tea and ate bowls of soup, noodles with pieces of shrimp and chicken in broth. Lucy May could not get over how delicious it was. When they left Mrs. Kimura in Japantown and got on the cable car to go back to the ferry building, Lucy May kissed Mrs. Kimura and embraced her, and Margaret didn’t know how she was going to give up the girl when she left on the next part of her journey, and it was true—though she managed to put Lucy May on the train south with some dignity, as the train pulled out she found herself calling, “Come back! Don’t forget to come back!” in a way that made the other people on the platform turn and look at her. That was why she returned to Japantown a week later and bought the snake print—thirty-two dollars. She didn’t exactly like it, but she found herself staring at it, tracing the outline of the snake with her fingernail as Lucy May had done. It depicted, she thought, something that she had never seen in a picture before—that moment just before the recipient of the gift realizes the evil intentions of the sender.

  ANDREW’S generosity in allowing her to spend so much time with Lucy May was much on his mind after the girl left. It seemed to Margaret as though she was typing or mailing things or cooking almost all of the day now, and into the evening. He even resented her weekly knitting group, but she put her foot down when he suggested once that she skip it. Her only breathing space was that, every morning after breakfast, she took the Franklin across the causeway for the newspapers, which took about forty-five minutes. Sometimes she found herself typing letters to the editors of these papers, especially the New York Times, and one morning, Andrew discovered that one of his letters was published. He had responded to a piece about a fellow named Dr. Harlow Shapley, whom the Times declared to have “newly revised estimates of the size of the universe upward by a thousand times.” Andrew’s letter contained a list of estimates of the diameter of the universe—including two million light-years by Herschel and four and a half million light-years by himself. Nothing about that young fellow Shapley was new, according to Andrew. “That’s the thing that sticks in my craw the most,” he exclaimed to her.

  A similar letter to Science had been rejected, further proof of the conspiracy against him, but now, he felt, he had impressed a higher authority (with a much larger circulation). He said, “One scientist after another betrays the great ones to embrace the new and unproven. Who in our day can stand up with Herschel? Or Newton? And yet there’s this insane rush to throw them over the side and try anything that is new. My dear, it has fallen to me to keep the lights burning as best I can. I appreciate how very much you contribute to that essential effort.”

  After that, a reporter from the Times came to the island and asked him about earthquakes. Earthquakes were caused by ocean water leaking downward into clefts in the ocean floor, the clefts in turn caused by the creation of new ranges of mountains under the sea. Since the earth was solid iron, Andrew had not worked out the mechanism by which new mountain ranges were being formed in the Pacific, but the evidence was incontrovertible that something literally earth-shaking was going on—now, with the telegraph, Andrew told the young man, reports of earthquakes came in all the time.

  He went on to Einstein (Margaret peeked from the kitchen into the front room, and saw the reporter sitting in a chair like a rabbit in a trap, Andrew patrolling the front door). Up to now, Andrew had seen Einstein’s German nationality as the telling flaw in his theory, but certain scientists at the observatory in Pasadena (he refused to name it aloud) declared that part of this relativity theory had been proved by their observations, and he—Einstein!—was allied with that very cabal who had always rejected Andrew’s work and had spent so much of their time industriously demeaning and denying the truths of his own theories and had worked against him after he exposed their incompetence in the early days of their careers. That light from a star curved exactly in a certain direction and to a certain degree when it passed the sun during an eclipse was absurd, and their certainty about these findings (“They say that these results don’t ever have to be tested again! Where is science there?”) was enough to have him charging around the room in a fury. The Times reporter kept putting his hat on and having to take it off again.

  When, a few days later, Andrew was quoted in a sidebar to a rather short article about these findings, he fired off a lengthy letter of elaboration.

  For a few weeks, there was a modest flurry of correspondence about the issue. Some doctor from somewhere wrote in, attacking the very idea of relativity—Andrew was miffed that the mail from California was so slow as to prevent his letter from getting there first. Then came a “French fellow with a ridiculous name” who planned to combine relativity and Newtonian theory, who was interviewed by the Times correspondent in France. At last, Andrew’s letter appeared, decisively and finally refuting Einstein on the grounds that (a) those in Germany who knew Einstein best didn’t have one good thing t
o say about his theory, (b) Einstein himself didn’t consider it proved, (c) you couldn’t have a proper theory which didn’t explain centrifugal force, a force as strong as “five million million steel cables each a foot thick,” and (d) no account was made of the Aether, which could not simply be ignored!

  As a corollary to this letter in the Times, he wrote a special column for the Examiner headlined “The Universe Is Filled with Aether and I Have Seen It.” The paper gave him almost an entire page for this column, and he included careful drawings of particles of Aether—delicate six-pointed starlike motes, lightly touching at the tips of every arm.

  Andrew’s tone in his letter to the Times was very forceful (Andrew might have said “heroic”) and, Margaret thought, a little condescending here and there, but understandably so, given his barely contained exasperation that these issues had to be gone over again and again. Einstein’s theory was “the Gorgon’s head, always having to be cut off again.”

  They were sitting at the table a week or so later when he opened the paper, not intending to read it while they were eating, precisely, but only to glance at it a bit, as he always did at supper. But of course, fatal to a tranquil meal, his gaze went directly to his own name, and traveled voraciously down the column of print even as his hand holding his fork holding his morsel of boiled potato was raised toward his mouth. His eyes got wide, and he grunted twice, and then groaned. He set his fork on his plate, read the column again, stood up from the table with the paper in his hand, and walked out of the house. She didn’t see him until the next day—he slept at the observatory. When he did come home, at about 10 a.m., the only thing he said to her before going into his study was a despondent “Even when Einstein agrees with me, they attack.”