Private Life

by Jane Smiley

  She said again, “But there hasn’t been a thing about it in the paper.”

  “Precisely, my dear. Who is there to report it? Some missionaries and a reporter from England, but the Japanese control the mails and the cables, and very little has gotten out.”

  “How do you know about it?”

  “Surely you remember that our former home across the causeway is a beehive of information and gossip? This man has a cousin on a ship who has heard things, and this other man has an aunt who is with the Presbyterian Mission in Shanghai, and this other man has a friend who works in the Japanese Embassy in Washington. A picture of events can be shadowed in.”

  “Mrs. Kimura has heard nothing about this. She hears from Joe, and Joe was terribly upset about that boat in China, and went to the embassy and gave the equivalent of two weeks’ pay of his own money. His friends went with him. They had no link to America at all, except through him.”

  “I’m not entirely sure, my dear, that the populace in the home islands knows what the army has done in China.”

  “You’re telling me that terrible crimes have been committed by the Japanese in China in a more or less wholesale way and no one knows about it other than you?” She tried to make her voice sound genuinely questioning, not merely skeptical. Andrew seemed fooled by her attempt. He said, “A massacre, my dear, and more than that, more than, let’s say, thousands of people lined up and shot. I am not sure exactly what the term would be. Perhaps ‘extermination.’” He sighed.

  The word lingered in the air. Perhaps in order to chase it off, she said, “And the police also told me you’ve seen Einstein.”

  “Yes, indeed. Twice now.” He seemed happy to talk about it. “He’s surprisingly short. He wears glasses, and his suit was rumpled, but of good twill.” He coughed and went on. “He does wear nice shoes. His feet are small. Looked to me like he has his shoes made in England. And his hair isn’t as wild as it looks in pictures.”

  She said, “You noticed his shoes? Were you staring at him?”

  “I am a naturally observant person.”

  “I’ve never seen him in glasses in the newspaper.”

  “That surprised me, too. He looks older than he is.”

  “He must be sixty.”

  “Looks seventy if a day.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t Einstein.”

  “Maybe, indeed.”

  She ventured, “Why do you think he’s here?”

  “I had thought, the first time, that he was here to see me, and I was prepared to extend the olive branch, I must say. But I’m more suspicious now. I’m glad I did not reveal myself to him the first time, as I had thought to do.”

  She got up without saying anything and began to clear the dishes from the table. How to proceed was a mystery to her. He was evidently delusional, about both the Japanese and Einstein, but also, she thought, harmless. She took the dishes to the kitchen and set them beside the sink. When she came back into the dining room, fortifying herself with thoughts of Mrs. Wareham’s very earnest instructions, she sat down, not across from Andrew, but beside him, and she put her hand on his knee. She leaned forward and said, “Andrew, I’m sure that those whom you contacted will read your letters with utmost interest and respect, and I hope that what you’ve concluded shows them what they must do. But at the same time, the policemen here today told me that you have been waving down automobiles, and then getting in and telling the drivers that they must take you here and there.”

  “Young people don’t mind—”

  “Maybe not, but if these young people are young girls, I am absolutely certain that their parents would object to you”—what was the phrase here?—“diverting them from their regular business. If you want to get around, you have to use the streetcar, or I will drive you myself.”

  “My dear, what I need to do is not always systematic or well organized. I am led here and there by my investigations.”

  “But your investigations seem to be over.”

  “In part.”

  “The police made it clear to me.” Here she caught his gaze and held it. “You must not impose yourself upon any women. You must not. Doing so after the police have asked you to stop could seriously compromise your reputation in Vallejo and on the island.”

  He looked genuinely startled, and said, “I hadn’t thought of that. I was only—”

  “Yes, Andrew, I’m sure that you were only thinking of the next step in your investigation, but it looks different to others.”

  “People know I am enthusiastic.”

  “They do, but not everyone knows you in town the way they did on the island.”

  This he seemed to accept.

  The next day, she went to the police station and talked to Officer Kelley’s superior. She explained that her husband saw himself as a sort of detective, and that he wasn’t meaning harm to anyone, and was, in fact, incapable of committing any sort of harm. The policeman seemed to agree with her, and he agreed that, since Captain Early was such a recognizable figure about town, the police would treat him more or less as a nuisance—keeping an eye upon him and sometimes guiding him in one direction or another, but not threatening him.

  THE next time she had tea with Dora, Margaret told her the story—lightly, as if it were funny. Dora said, “Einstein does travel a lot.”

  “Why would he come to Vallejo?”

  Dora shrugged.

  Margaret said, “When Andrew’s in the house, I can’t wait for him to leave.”

  “He is very large, darling.”

  “Whenever something comes in the mail, even to me, he asks me who it’s from, and then asks me if he can read it. When the telephone rings, he rushes to answer it, just to see who it is. And when we have a knitting circle, the first thing he asks afterward is whether anyone said anything about him.”

  “You daren’t tell him that they didn’t say a word?”

  Margaret smiled. “I don’t know what I dare tell him, other than ‘They all asked after you.’ But I don’t know what to do with him. He doesn’t know what to do with himself!”

  “He’s a grown man,” said Dora. “He’ll think of something.”

  Dora was being sent back to Europe over her own protestations. It was not, she told Margaret, that she was too old, it was that the events in Europe were too large, and as large as they looked from her perch on Sutter Street, they would be that much larger once she got to New York, and overwhelming once she got to London. But in fact she was too old, Margaret thought. She said, “Your usual snooping?”

  “I don’t snoop. I interview. People want to answer my questions, and I write down what they say.”

  “But you describe them. You say, ‘He looks directly at me, but his left eye tracks toward the donkeys on the hillside.’”

  Dora laughed. “That’s not snooping. Snooping is reading their mail and listening to gossip about them.”

  “You’ve done a little of that.”

  “Well, I did, during my high-society period, but when someone looks at you surreptitiously while she’s telling a juicy story about someone else, or just happens to leave her diary open at a certain page when she knows you might be alone in the room, you do what is expected of you. I haven’t gone into high society in ten years.”

  “So why go back to Europe?”

  “Believe me, I don’t want to go. In 1916, I couldn’t imagine anything more exciting than to have your ship attacked by a U-boat and write your last dispatch and stuff it in a bottle while you were drowning, knowing that an editor from the New York Herald would inevitably find it and put it on the front page.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I know that it will be hard to find hot water for a nice bath, and there will be a constant stream of people in every city who will deserve to eat more than I deserve a new hat, and that friends from long ago who were once truly simpatico will now be disgorging the most impossible sentiments about Anglo-Saxon purity or the rights of Italians to a ‘mare italiano’ or whatever they call it.
” It seemed to Margaret that Dora must be thinking of a particular person, but she didn’t say anything. Dora leaned back and said, “My mother would say at last I am receiving my just deserts. You know, she used to say, ‘Now, Margaret saw a hanging as a child and promptly forgot everything about it, as she should have. Dora never saw that hanging, and so she has always gone looking for one.’”

  “I never heard that.” Then Margaret said, “The truth is, I’ve never seen anything! I didn’t even see that hanging, as far as memory serves. I should have just gone to Europe, and now it’s too late.”

  “I should have taken you with me years ago, but now is not the time.” Dora’s tone was sympathetic, but idle, as careless of what she had enjoyed as of what Margaret had not enjoyed.

  “Andrew wouldn’t have stood for that, as there was typing to do. I have been such a fool!”

  Dora’s eyebrows lifted at this flash of anger, but she didn’t respond other than to say, “He would have gotten used to it.”

  “I wish you’d said that fifteen years ago.”

  That night, in her bed, Margaret lay awake thinking of her conversation with Dora, how she had strayed into indiscretions that she had resisted for years, and how it had felt. There was the surprise that nothing she had said surprised Dora, and then there was the other surprise, that what she had said was still so emphatic, in spite of the equanimity she thought she had attained. No, she was almost sixty and she had not been to London or Paris or Rome, and there was no going there now. Yes, she was balanced, as she had gotten into the habit of congratulating herself for being. But, she saw, she was balanced on a very narrow perch.

  POSSIBLY, over the years, she had hosted some ladies’ circle or another two or three thousand times. Sewing, knitting, collecting toys and clothing for poor children, raising funds for soldiers, planning Christmas programs and Thanksgiving dinners and Easter-egg hunts. In every case, if Andrew was in the house, he would come to the doorway, bow to the ladies, greet the ones he knew by name, and then excuse himself to go off to other business more worthy of his attention. On this particular day, he came into the dining room with his hat already on and his jacket over his arm. He nodded to Mrs. Hermann and Mrs. Roberts. He greeted Mrs. Tillotson and Mrs. Jones, and Miss Jones, who was Mrs. Jones’s unmarried sister-in-law. Margaret said goodbye to him with a wave and dealt out the cards, one down, one up. She heard him open the front door, and then she heard the front door close. As she was dealing the next round of cards to those who wanted them, though, he appeared again in the doorway. The ladies placed their bets. She dealt out a card to Mrs. Jones and one to Mrs. Roberts. Mrs. Roberts said, “I’m busted,” and Mrs. Jones took the pot. Andrew said, “I thought you ladies were knitting, my dear.”

  Mrs. Jones said, “We’ve knitted enough mufflers to stock I. Magnin.”

  “You’re playing blackjack?”

  “Yes, Andrew.”

  To everyone in general he said, rather proudly, “My mother played blackjack all through my childhood. She called it ‘vingt-et-un.’”

  “Did you play with her?” said Miss Jones, evidently surprised that such a huge, gruff, gray-mustached man as Andrew had had a childhood.

  “For a while there, we played every day. My father made a sketch of us one night. We were so intent upon the game that we didn’t realize he was even in the room.”

  “How old were you, Captain Early?” said Mrs. Roberts.

  “Oh, about seven, I guess. She started playing cooncan with me when I was five to keep me occupied, because I was a terribly restless child. I liked blackjack better.”

  Margaret shifted in her chair, ready for him to leave.

  “What was cooncan?” asked Miss Jones.

  “A type of rummy,” said Andrew.

  “You should play with us,” said Miss Jones, and, lo and behold, he sat down with a thump in a chair and pulled it up to the table. Margaret felt disappointment set in, like a flu.

  Miss Jones continued, “You should write your memoirs, Captain Early. I’m sure they’re very interesting.”

  “Do you think so, Miss Jones? I don’t need to do that. A young man once wrote my biography.” He smiled in a dignified manner, and spread himself a bit.

  Margaret was relieved that, before he could offer the girl a copy, Mrs. Roberts, on the other side of Andrew, gave a squeak that drew his attention. Mrs. Roberts was a retiring soul who played without any strategy at all, and her stack of chips was already noticeably smaller than everyone else’s. Andrew glanced at her, and must have seen her hole card, because when she took a hit and was busted, he leaned over and whispered in her ear. She turned and said, “I don’t know a thing about that, but you may show me, if you would like.”

  He sat with them then for about two hours, whispering first to one lady and then to another and another, until they stopped for tea, when he put on his hat and went out.

  That night, over supper, he said, “Your lady friends have a deplorable feel for strategy. I wonder if Mrs. Roberts even knows that there are fifty-two cards in the deck.”

  “Possibly not. She only comes for the gossip.”

  “She is being robbed blind.”

  “Andrew, if she loses two dollars, it’s a bad day. The stakes are low. Think of it as the price she has to pay for an afternoon’s sociability.”

  “When are these ladies coming again?”

  “They agreed on Monday.” She saw that it was inevitable, but also that it kept him off the streets. That part was a relief.

  On Monday morning, he put a leaf in the table, and over the course of the next few weeks, he installed himself as their tutor. His method was to help first one lady and then another with basic strategy. After that, he told them a bit about card counting, and then the higher mathematics of probability. He pitted the ladies against one another. Mrs. Roberts stopped losing all the time, and Miss Jones began losing a little more often. Margaret saw, possibly for the first time, just the palest shadow of Mrs. Early in the son who was now older than his mother had ever been. She was not as uncomfortable as she had expected to be—it was interesting to see him in the midst of so many ladies. He had a manner, stiff but gallant, right out of 1895.

  In these games, Andrew never expounded upon any of his theories about the universe or the Panay, nor did he talk much in general—he was too busy whispering to his designated pupil to hold forth to the rest of them. Margaret felt fond of him, in a distant way.

  Having succeeded with the cards, and still mindful of Mrs. Wareham’s urging, she furnished him with a dog. Andrew was not opposed to a dog. For her, the idea of owning a dog had died with Alexander—at first it seemed like too much of a substitute child, and then it became a habit they had not developed. But one day she went to the pound, and she adopted Stella, whose previous owner had been transferred by the navy to South America. The animal was a terrier mix, housebroken. She walked nicely on a leash, and did not jump onto the furniture unless invited. Margaret was in the kitchen with the dog when Andrew came in. Stella walked over to him, sat down in front of him, and looked up into his face. Margaret said, “Her name is Stella.”

  He said, “Is it, indeed?” Of course her name was Stella—no other dog could be adopted by an astronomer. That evening, he invited Stella onto the sofa, and she sat quietly while he petted her on the head. That night, he made a bed for her in the corner of his bedroom by folding an old quilt, and the first thing Margaret heard in the morning, before she was quite awake and when it was still very gloomy with fog and darkness, was the sound of the kitchen door opening and closing. She sat up and went to the window. Down below, in the backyard, she could just make out Andrew, with Stella at his heels, opening the back gate and heading out for a walk.

  Such a charming, bright-eyed, and well-behaved dog imparted her own respectability to Andrew. It was the perfect solution—he walked all over town and people engaged him in conversation, about Stella or about dogs in general. In his usual fashion, he exerted himself, and in short order,
he had taught Stella to shake hands, sit up on her hind legs, roll over, jump a stick, and balance a piece of bread on her nose, then toss it in the air and catch it. When children stopped him to pet her, he took pieces of bread out of his pocket and showed off her tricks.

  Then he took up movies, although she could have counted on one hand the number of movies they had seen. He had never liked silent movies; he had sat through Charlie Chaplin in The Circus without cracking a smile. As they went home, he said, “Tell me, my dear, why does he wear those shoes and turn his feet out in that way? Does he suffer from the aftereffects of some childhood illness?”

  “No, Andrew, it’s supposed to be funny.”

  “But funny in what way? Incongruous? Mechanical? Simply silly or ridiculous? I would have liked to enjoy it, I must say.”

  “You’ve enjoyed vaudeville. It’s like that.”

  “But it goes on so long you can’t stand it anymore. At a vaudeville show, at least if you didn’t like the act, you knew it would soon give way to another.”

  After the talkies came in, he could not tolerate scenes of the sort where the two actors were driving in a car and a film of the passing landscape was playing behind them. He would say, aloud in the theater, “We saw that tree five seconds ago.” However, after his interest in blackjack waned, Andrew discovered pictures. He was amazed that, while he had been ignoring them, they had become more sophisticated. The first one he came home and told her about was Gunga Din, which was playing at the Orpheum in downtown Vallejo. He had lots of questions: Who was this fellow Cary Grant? Was this movie based on Kipling’s poem, and if so, how could you base a movie on a poem? Didn’t the Khyber Pass look rather like the Sierras?

  She said that Cary Grant was a big star, as was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (Andrew’s response to this was “Why is that, my dear?”), that you could base a movie on anything, and that probably the film was made in the Sierras rather than in the real Khyber Pass.