Private Life

by Jane Smiley

  All Andrew said was “Dr. Scanlan is dedicated to truth in a way that few young men are.”

  Len found himself a boarding house, and he and Andrew quickly worked out a schedule. Andrew worked on his own book or articles in the morning, from eight until about eleven-thirty, handing pages to her, which she was to type. At around one-thirty or two, he walked up the hill to the observatory, where he met Len. He stayed there for three hours or so, then came home and organized his work for the evening. And he came home with an evident sense of well-being, was especially cordial over supper. Once a week, Len left him some pages, on which he noted questions and corrections. As the weeks went by, she began to wonder how many pages the two of them would accumulate. Certainly more rather than fewer. Len did not seem, on the surface, to be of an analytical or critical turn of mind. However, it was none of her business. Len declared that he would certainly find a publisher—two or three were interested already.

  Len also attended a few of Andrew’s talks and took industrious notes in the back of the room, then applauded loudly and once, in her hearing, shouted “Bravo!” No one had ever shouted “Bravo!” before, and Andrew responded with a tiny bow, which caused some of the audience to turn around and crane their necks, and Margaret to blush, but she had all sorts of strange symptoms now, breathlessness, headaches, even a kind of agoraphobia when she got up in the morning and the thought of leaving her room was repellent to her. As well as she knew that she would be fine in the kitchen, and that her own range and sink would look familiar to her, and that her own hands cooking and cleaning would draw her out of this strange mood, even so it took all her strength to put on her clothes and open the door. Andrew seemed to notice nothing.

  And of course there was no help for it, except recalling bits of conversations she had overheard from time to time about marriage. That’s what knitting groups and sewing groups were for, wasn’t it? Commiserating about marriage. But through the years no one had said what she now thought, which was that marriage was relentless, and terrifying, and no wonder that when her father died her mother had risen from her bed and gone to work. Her father had been much like Andrew, hadn’t he? Opinionated and energetic, loud and forbidding. What a dramatic and unnecessary thing to do, to kill yourself because you were a doctor and your son died of complications from the measles. Margaret knew she would always keep this thought to herself, but it was an oddly satisfying thought, and she had a right to think it—she was three years older than her father had been when he shot himself.

  And so, one day when Andrew was due to give a talk in Saratoga, a long drive, she said she had a headache. Andrew and Len came up with the idea that Len would drive the Franklin. Franklins were easy to drive—Len was experienced with a Hudson and a Packard. The Franklin would be a new pleasure for him, Andrew said, air-cooled, the best engineering by far. They went out the door, and a few moments later, she heard the Franklin start up and roll away.

  After they left, she lay there for a while with a cool, damp cloth across her forehead. Really, in spite of his deficiencies, Len Scanlan was a godsend, and it was purely a sign of her advancing age and narrowing imagination that it had taken her so many weeks to realize this. She decided to get up and go for a walk—not to Vallejo, but north, along the coast of the island, which she hadn’t done yet that spring. She put a shawl over her shoulders and went out, not forgetting to unearth Andrew’s old field glasses as she did so.

  The weather was beautiful. Her headache evaporated, but she had to lament her newfound sluggishness. She had hardly gotten away from the base (past the causeway) before she was looking for a place to sit down, unhooking her collar, carrying her shawl over her arm, pushing up her sleeves, wishing she had brought a hat. She sat on a rock for a few minutes, remembering when she could walk across the fields behind her grandfather’s farm and get to Beatrice’s house in town in a little over an hour. She stood up, a bit rested, and walked on. At the next resting spot, a rock set on a slight rise overlooking a small pond just south of the marshes, she saw an amusing display. Two large-bodied black birds with white beaks were making a racket in the water. A mating pair, they looked familiar, though she couldn’t have said what they were. The female was using her large feet to run across the top of the water, flapping her wings and stretching her head far forward, and the male was hot after her, some ten feet to the rear. He did not seem able to catch her, or perhaps he was not interested in catching her. Rather, they seemed to enjoy their noisy game, and to splash as much water into the air as they could. Then she noticed another of these birds not too far away. When the first male saw it, he went straight for it and began making aggressive feints and displays, to which the other male responded in kind. At one point, the two males had a standoff, their necks extended, their heads down, and their eyes on each other, looking for all the world like a pair of dogs. The first male succeeded in chasing the other male away (that one pounded over the surface of the pond, then took off and flew beyond the hill). The pair now proceeded to dine, diving under the water (and staying there for some time), plucking bits of things off the surface, and also stalking about on the edge of the pond, eating grasses and leaves. Margaret liked them. Unlike most birds, they were neither cute nor graceful, and they had no dignity, only energy. She watched them until the air began to grow quite chill and the afternoon light to dim.

  When she described them to Andrew the next day, he said that they were “coots.”

  “Oh, mud hens,” said Len. “Very common birds. Of no value at all, really. Though I’m told the meat isn’t gamy, like duck.”

  “I was just watching them, not planning to hunt them.” But by that time, they weren’t listening, just repeating back and forth how important and successful the talk had been the evening before. Then Len brought up Teddy Roosevelt, whom he admired. Also. He glanced at Andrew. “In his own field, of course.”

  Andrew nodded slowly, as if acknowledging that being president was fine in its way. Then he said, “More recent specimens have not been comparable to him, that is indeed true.”

  Margaret felt a headache coming on and went into the kitchen.

  She began shirking her typing and walking to that pond whenever it was fair weather. The coots were there the first two times, and then they were gone, apparently replaced by a pair of Canada geese, who busily built a nest right on the bank of the pond, out in the open. She went two more times to watch the geese, but they were rather dull in the way that elderly rich people are dull—too great a sense of propriety to do anything interesting. And then their nest was raided and the geese decamped. At the pond, she found, she didn’t mull over the injustices of marriage, and so it was a relief.

  In June, the coots reappeared; they must have been nesting out of sight. That day, it took her a while to understand what she was seeing. One of the coots was swimming about, ducking its head and plucking things off the surface of the water. It was putting these things somewhere, and then Margaret saw something like a dragonfly or a large insect fluttering. When she put the field glasses to her eyes, she saw that the fluttering thing was a very tiny bird, about as big as a walnut, bobbing and swimming in front of the large-bodied black coot, which she now decided was a female. Because the female’s beak was white, she could see fairly distinctly how she held something out to the chick, and either stuck it in the chick’s mouth, or allowed the chick to snatch it from her. Small and young as it was, the chick was an animated swimmer, as at home in the water as its mother. It paddled around in little circles and fluttered its tiny wings and bobbed. Margaret laughed just to look at it.

  The weather was foggy and drizzling the next day, so she stayed home, catching up on her typing, but the day after that, she went to the pond again, and this time the coot had three chicks, all about the same size. Quite often, they would array themselves in front of the female in a half-circle, and she would plop insects into their mouths in turn. If she swam a foot or two in search of more food, they might swim after her. But the funniest thing was t
hat the chicks were very independent, and it was quite usual for one or another of them to swim away entirely, the tiniest wayward infant in the world, industriously leaving all protection behind. At these moments, Margaret couldn’t resist scanning the skies for hawks or an eagle. The female seemed not to notice—she continued to feed whomever she had with her until either that one swam away or the prodigal returned. Sometimes the whole troop walked up onto the shore, and the female yanked bits for them there. They followed her or they didn’t. They were only birds, and just a few days old, but their size and behavior made them seem uniquely endowed with personality to Margaret. A stiff wind and the onset of evening drove her away.

  When she got home that evening, she saw that Andrew and Len had been moving stacks of papers, some of which had been in one place for years. It was not even possible to sit down to supper, because stacks were arrayed around the edge of the table according to some system that she didn’t care to inquire about. She knew that, were she to show the slightest interest, she would be enlisted to do something with the papers, and it would not be to throw them away. It was a nice evening, so they ate out on the porch, from plates on their laps. Andrew said little, and after ten minutes he was back in the house, fishing for something. Then, when she got up in the morning, she saw that he had been at work all night—the wardrobe in the front room was empty, and boxes that had been sitting on the hat shelf were emptied onto the floor. When he heard her in the kitchen, Andrew came out of his room and said, “We have found concrete evidence of the progress of my thinking. It has been most gratifying.” She didn’t say anything. She hardly did say anything these days, and it didn’t seem to matter, which was a relief.

  Eventually, the chicks numbered seven. She walked to the pond three and sometimes four times a week. Andrew and Len never asked her where she was going, but she offered—she said, “Just running up to look at the birds!” They nodded and waved her away. It was so exhilarating that she leapt out of bed in the morning, all her former symptoms gone. Andrew’s work on his own book tapered off—he didn’t even notice what she was not typing, because he and Len were either in his study or up at the observatory most days. And then Andrew accepted a speaking engagement at a Chautauqua at Lake Berryessa. It was understood that Len would drive him and she would stay home. After they left, she fixed herself a lunch to take to the pond. She was humming.

  The chicks had evolved from yellowish dots with a sometimes discernible bit of pink on the tops of their heads to fluffy, awkward, big-footed gray balls with ugly red heads and necks. They were bolder and more irresponsible. Quite often, the male and the female would be feeding three or four chicks on one side of the pond (which was probably fifty yards across), and the others would be on the other side of the pond, swimming energetically, or walking around on the bank. Their constant business made up for all of their awkwardnesses. Not for a coot the sort of graceful languor you saw in many birds, who rode a current of air and saved their energy for something important. To a coot, it seemed, everything was important.

  Every time she mentioned the coots to someone, she was told again that they were common birds; she kept her observations to herself, but that night, alone in the quiet house, she found a sheet of paper and a pencil and attempted to draw what she remembered so clearly from the day. She closed her eyes, summoned the dark, plump figure of the harried parent into her mind, concentrated upon it, and then made a few strokes with the pencil. It was no use; she hadn’t the gift. Just the beak? Just the curve over the back? It seemed as though her pencil was destroying the recollection rather than reproducing it. She looked across the room at the picture of the rabbit and the dragonfly. How quickly Mr. Kimura had given them life and personality! She got up early, knowing exactly what she would do, but then she was rushing about so, in order to make the ferry, that she knocked two stacks of papers off the table, and they slid across the floor. She looked at the clock. Andrew and Len had expected to be back by two. She stacked the papers willy-nilly and set them on the table in a way that more or less resembled the way they had been, then hurried to the ferry dock. At the Kimuras’ shop, Naoko was wiping down the shelves, and she made her proposal. Within a few minutes, they had decided that Mrs. Kimura would drive Mr. Kimura across the causeway and up to the pond, if Margaret would meet them.

  It was only ten-thirty by the time Margaret had done her business, and she was so pleased with herself that she went to Mrs. Wareham’s for a late breakfast.

  The mess she had left behind looked more forbidding when she opened the door on her return. Andrew and Len had clearly been rooting through years of papers, and she had no idea if they had left them organized in any way. After removing her wrap, she began going through the careless stacks she had made, trying to ascertain some principle of order. She thought of Anna Early as soon as she lifted one of the packets of letters, before she had noticed the writing on the topmost envelope, and then she had a turn. She untied the string around them. The letters had that look about them, crisp and cream-colored, the very stationery bespeaking the woman. Margaret put the packet to her nose, and the scent was still there beneath the dust. She felt herself smiling even before she realized that she had never seen these before. She took them into her room and closed the door.

  The first dated from the fall of 1904, right after Andrew had taken her to the world’s fair in St. Louis and then gone back to Washington, D.C. What was that now? Almost thirty years. How strange that was. Mrs. Early wrote:

  Dearest Andrew,

  I must tell you that most of the questions you ask in your letter are ones I cannot answer—not because I choose not to, but because I don’t know how. You have gotten beyond me now, and I am thoroughly saddened and perplexed. I have, in fact, destroyed your letter, since I believe that your ravings in the letter were written in a passing moment, and I do not want to encourage you to ponder these things that cannot be addressed or resolved. You must think of torments like the ones you describe as ghosts or spirits that visit you in the night, but that leave sooner or later. Nor have I brought these questions up with Dr. Jacobs, or even Mrs. Hitchens. To address them, I feel, is to give them more life than they deserve.

  However, I do think it is fair to tell you something. Not long before you were born, at the end of the War, your father was visited by demons that seem to me similar. He was not as old as you—not yet thirty—and, indeed, he was not alone in the mental disturbances he felt. Perhaps the despair of the War was compounded in Missouri by the peculiar events there. I can say now, forty years later, what I could not say then—many who had sympathized with the Cause saw not only that the Cause was lost, but also that it had not been worth the effort and pain that it had cost. Your father came to this conclusion without recourse to my feelings, since, as you know, I never quite sympathized with the Cause to the degree that your father and his brothers did. I sympathized with him, though. And I sympathize with you. A man of character is always in danger. He throws himself wholeheartedly into those things that inspire him, as your father did, who appeared on the surface to concede the battle in Missouri to the Northern-sympathizers, but in fact spent the War endangering himself by gathering and communicating information that he thought could help the Cause (and now you know his secret, son). He would certainly have been shot or hanged if he had been caught. And the great paradox was that he may have regretted in some way that he was not shot or hanged. The Confederacy’s loss was not what played havoc with his sanity—it was what that loss revealed about the motives and intentions of the Confederacy itself. Recognizing that he had endangered himself in every way for such a thing was nearly his undoing. It seemed that all other men chose either the Union or the Confederacy and clung to their choices for the rest of their days. But perhaps to their wives they showed different sentiments. For several months the same sorts of torments as those you describe in your letter possessed your father, although with different origins. But, dear Andrew, I encourage you to think of yourself as requiring a bit of caution.
Let these thoughts that you are having dissipate and vanish, leaving behind no trace.

  Your loving Mother

  The next letter was dated a week later, and was much longer. In part, she wrote:

  On balance, my son, I do not think that isolation is your friend. You seem to be caught in a sort of mental vortex or downward spiral, where one thought leads inevitably to the next, larger, and more melancholy thought. As you go about your round of activities, thinking these thoughts over and over, they become wedded to every bit of the world around you, so that you cannot release yourself from them—if yesterday you stared out the window in despair, today when you look out the window, you are reminded of, and therefore precipitated into, despair. Your mental life is and has always been of a peculiar intensity, dear Andrew. Whatever mechanism works in an average mind like mine works doubly or trebly in a mind such as your own. Maybe you should take a few weeks in Warm Springs, and in every way break your routine and think of other things and meet with other people. Otherwise, I simply don’t know what to tell you, except that I am, as always, your loving Mother