Private Life

by Jane Smiley

  A few days later, he went to see a movie about Jesse James. In this one, he liked “the fellow Henry Fronda,” but, he said, “how do they not know that Jesse and Frank’s mother wasn’t killed? She lived to be eighty-five years old! And they had them robbing trains. They robbed banks. That was the point.” He couldn’t see how a movie that was so inaccurate could have been allowed to reach the screen. She said, “Andrew, did you talk to anyone during the movie?”

  “Well, I did tell a few people around me that the story was all wrong.”

  He had brought Stella into the theater, but, he said, the proprietor didn’t seem to mind even when she barked twice at the horses on the screen.

  The local movies changed too infrequently—he hit upon the idea of taking the ferry to San Francisco. Soon he was going there four times a week. Stella went with him every time. Often he would watch the double feature, which meant that he left on the morning ferry and didn’t return until fairly late. If he especially liked a picture, he would take Margaret to see it when it came to Vallejo. He came to have his preferred subjects—anything about St. Louis or Missouri (St. Louis Blues; I’m from Missouri, in which a man takes his prize mule to London; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), anything about the universe (Buck Rogers), anything about the West (Stagecoach). He did not like movies about scientists (The Story of Dr. Jenner). The first one he took her to (“for old times’ sake, my dear”) was The Hound of the Baskervilles, which she enjoyed very much.

  Pete had become one of the outer planets, dim and blue like Neptune, visible with effort, but not exerting much force. His stability in this orbit, Margaret knew, depended on her remaining stable in her corner of space as well. But in the midst of Andrew’s fervor, she had a letter from Dora that she wanted to show Pete, about how Dora wanted to get back to St. Louis and Missouri—not the St. Louis of today, which was, she said, an “outpost of Hyde Park and in the business of being told what to do,” but the St. Louis of their youth, when “every man and woman went his or her own way, and the patterns they made as they crossed paths were as graceful and efficient as the migration routes of birds.” Apparently, this was her new idea—that they should take wild birds as their models. “All summer long, every goose and duck eats and eats and eats, until his breast is glistening with fat and his liver is distended, only to foregather with his fellows and fly south, filling the sky with intention, but intention of a voluntary sort—no goose is ordered to fly, no goose is given a uniform, or chained to his or her fellow geese.” Human society, by contrast, was akin to prison life. There were those in prison who knew it; everyone else was in prison and did not know it. Margaret thought it was a very strange letter. With Andrew spending several days a week in San Francisco, she told him, she was going to go along and have tea with Pete at the Palace Hotel.

  “That will take two hours,” said Andrew.

  “At least.”

  “Can’t stand that. Waste of time.”

  “You don’t have to come. Though I imagine Pete will be disappointed.”

  “Can you get him to go for a walk instead? Nice day.”

  “I think he would rather have tea. You go to the picture, and join us afterward.”

  “Well, give him this, then. He’ll like it.” He handed her the notes he had written up about card counting in blackjack and gin rummy.

  She wore her best hat, but that was all—no new dress, only a touch of lipstick, no powder. Pete was wearing a houndstooth jacket with a nipped waist, a rose-colored ascot, a silk-shantung shirt, and spectator shoes with rose-colored socks. After he kissed her on both cheeks and she took in his fragrance, he handed her a box with a gardenia in it. Her heart did not flutter. She was sufficiently immune now—she could appreciate these courtesies without putting any stock in them. He perused the menu and ordered for her.

  When she took Dora’s letter out of her bag, Pete smiled, then said, “Dora is no longer speaking to me.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because, when I saw her before she left, I would not agree that Americans are by nature incorruptible.”

  “I can’t imagine her saying such a thing.”

  “She kept telling me that it is Americans who are truly free, and there must be absolute freedom and noninterference of any kind by such things as governments or benevolent people with benevolent schemes. And when I said that then the top dogs would simply accrue as much for themselves as they possibly could, in the style of Ivan the Terrible, she insisted that Americans would not, and could not, do such a thing.”

  “And you said?”

  “And I said, ‘Name one.’ And she couldn’t, and so she got quite annoyed with me, and told me that she intended to write a book that would show me the errors of my thinking.”

  “All of this seems so unlike Dora.” But she was thinking how comfortable she was, exactly as if she and Pete were old and wise friends.

  He shrugged. He said, “Dora fled her enemies at home, did she not?”

  Margaret thought of Mrs. Bell and nodded.

  “Compared with that, she felt she could handle anything.”

  “And she has handled everything!” Margaret exclaimed.

  Pete shook his head. “The Europeans are in a pickle, and Dora is observant.”

  She said, “You are a fatalist,” meaning to express her admiration. “It can’t be that bad.”

  “Perhaps I’m a Darwinian. Each horror leaves survivors. Greater horrors leave fewer survivors, but those who do survive seem to assimilate the horror, and once they do, their imaginations are piqued. ‘What could be worse?’ they say, aghast, and then they think, Well, what could be worse? They start coming up with things, and there, in a nutshell, you have Russian history. Why shouldn’t this be the history of the West, too? After all, Russians believe we are the saviors of the world, and whatever we do first, others will do subsequently.”

  “I thought that was Americans.”

  Pete laughed.

  After their tea, she went to I. Magnin and walked about, looking at styles and catching her breath.

  On the ferry, Andrew quizzed her: Did she really think Pete had lived the simple life of an Irish horse-trainer at the racetrack? How did she think he was occupying his time now? Was he traveling? Did they talk about Russia? Wasn’t it odd that they’d known him for so long and yet they knew nothing, really, about him? She said, almost irritably, “If you’re so curious, you should have joined us.”

  “Perhaps I will, next time.” He didn’t say anything about the double feature, so Margaret decided the pictures must not have been very good. Stella slept in her lap on the ferry, and Margaret wondered if she was ill—to be so tired after spending an afternoon in a movie theater.

  The summer progressed: Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Beau Geste, and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (which was more suspenseful than The Hound of the Baskervilles), but Andrew also seemed to enjoy Blondie Takes a Vacation, Each Dawn I Die, Stanley and Livingstone, and even The Five Little Peppers. She told him that his tastes were getting quite eclectic. In the fall, after they saw a matinee called The Day the Bookies Wept, which had a horse in it, if not much else that was good, he went into his study for the first time in months, and when it came time to take Stella for her walk, he called through the door and asked her to do it. It was a pleasant day at the end of September, and she enjoyed it, though she could not help thinking of Dora. Since the invasion of Poland, England and most of Europe were at war, at least officially. The island was in an uproar, but their corner of Vallejo was quiet. Andrew didn’t take as much interest in the war as she expected him to. He still read two or three papers, still went to the Warrington for his cup of coffee, still saw some movies, and still took Stella for most of her walks, but more and more he was preoccupied with whatever he was writing in his study—perhaps his memoirs. He was occupied, that was the important thing.

  Or it was until the next day, when she suddenly took a fright and went into his office for a look around. He had gone to see Drums Al
ong the Mohawk in a double feature with Blondie Brings Up Baby. But she recognized stacks she had known since they moved into this house, untouched and certainly unmoved. There were pens and blotters lying around, and pads of paper, but she could find no new material. She left things alone and relaxed again, certain that it was news of the war that was making her nervous.

  • • •

  THE day the black car drove up, she was out looking at her rosebuds. It was a pleasant afternoon, one of the first of the spring, and she was thinking of nothing more important than ham for supper. A man got out and walked up to the door—a short man, but upright, with an official look about him, as if he had been told what to wear (dark gray suit, dress shirt, black shoes, hat). He noticed her, but until he had gotten no answer at her front door, he didn’t acknowledge her. When she said “Hello?” he said, “Mrs. Early?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you Margaret Early, Mrs. Andrew Early, the wife of Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early?”

  “Yes.”

  This was a very gloomy way to begin the week, she thought, the old dread creeping upon her.

  He said, “Mrs. Early, my name is Marvin Keene, and I would like to talk to you.” As he said this, he took her elbow and guided her toward her front steps.

  She said, “Captain Early isn’t here, he’s—”

  “Captain Early is in San Francisco, ma’am. We know where he is.”

  “We?”

  “Step inside the house, please, ma’am. Thank you.” He took off his hat. “The FBI knows where Captain Early is. He is currently at the Orpheum Theater, but earlier today he was walking across the Golden Gate Bridge. Do you mind if we sit down?”

  As they sat down, he showed her a card in his wallet. He was indeed from the FBI.

  “He was walking across the Golden Gate Bridge?”

  Agent Keene squirmed on the sofa as he put the card away, then smiled.

  “Yes, ma’am. He often walks across the bridge. At first, people seeing him on the bridge thought he was a jumper, but most jumpers don’t take the dog with them. No, ma’am, not a jumper.”

  She asked Agent Keene if he wanted a cup of tea or a glass of water, just to put off the rest of this conversation. He took the glass of water. He seemed friendly. She hazarded, “Has my husband been buttonholing people or—or soliciting rides in automobiles?”

  He said, “No, ma’am.” Then, “Mrs. Early, do you remember the Panay incident?”

  “That was more than two years ago.”

  “Sometime after the Panay incident, a handwritten letter crossed my desk which proposed an analysis of the incident that coincided in several particulars with my own analysis of the incident. These were, namely, that the Japanese knowingly attacked the American boat in order to distract and hamper Western observation of and aid to Chinese soldiers and civilians who were to be made examples of to the rest of the Chinese people.” His tone was dry and direct.

  “Andrew said that, but there wasn’t anything in the paper that agreed with him.”

  “The paper doesn’t report everything, ma’am.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And the Japanese were extremely successful at suppressing reports. I would say that, whatever we suspected, it wasn’t until a year later that we got a fuller picture. But your husband’s letter, which arrived in my office well before that, did in many ways anticipate the full picture. Did he ever talk to you about it?”

  “Yes. Are you saying he was right all along?”

  “Do you have any other reason to think he was mistaken?”

  She wondered how she was going to answer this for a moment, then said, “Well, he says that he sees Einstein on the streets of Vallejo, over on Capitol Street. If you have reason to believe that Einstein comes to Vallejo, then you can draw your own conclusions.”

  “Captain Early is a physicist?”

  “He’s an astronomer who became a physicist. He has an interest in all types of science, and he used to have a column in the Examiner.” She gave Agent Keene a long look. Finally, she said, “His ideas are now considered eccentric or old-fashioned. But he had a following in his day.” Of only one, perhaps.

  “How do you think that he came up with his information about the Panay incident?”

  “He walked all over town and all over the island, and he got people to talk about it, and apparently they had information through gossip. This is a naval town, and a crowded one. People talk, even when they’re told not to. The police came around and told me he was bothering people.”

  “That’s all?”

  “It’s all they told me about.”

  Now it was Agent Keene’s turn to stare at her, turning his half-empty glass in his hand. Finally, she said, “All I can tell you, Agent Keene, is that my husband has spent his whole life observing things and then putting two and two together. There are some people who would say that he doesn’t come up with four very often, but he can’t stop himself from putting two and two together.” Her eye alighted on the snake emerging from the gift, and she thought for half a second of Lucy May, now mother of three. She said, “Maybe he was lucky.”

  “A stopped clock is right twice a day?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Yes, but what?”

  “That’s not true in the navy.”

  Agent Keene laughed.

  She said, “Should I mention to my husband that you’ve been here? That he has, uh, been vindicated?”

  “Are you in the habit of confiding in Captain Early?”

  “Not. Everything.”

  “Then I would suggest that you maintain your usual habits. We aren’t investigating Captain Early. His putting of two and two together has been interesting, however.”

  “If that report crossed your desk so long ago, why are you visiting me now?”

  “A lot of reports cross my desk, Mrs. Early. When it came to my attention that the man who sent that letter was the same man who has been repeatedly seen on the Golden Gate Bridge, I thought the coincidence was interesting enough to follow up on.”

  She thought about Andrew crossing the bridge, and, no doubt, crisscrossing San Francisco, pursuing some hobbyhorse. She said, “Do you want to be inundated with material?”

  “We are inundated with material.”

  “My husband sees every vindication as a spur to greater efforts. How can I put this?” She pursed her lips. “Every atom is a star. Every hunch threatens to explode into a universe.”

  “I think I understand your meaning. We won’t encourage him.”

  “Even though he’s been vindicated?”

  “Even though he’s been vindicated.”

  “I think that’s the best way.”

  She walked Agent Keene to the door, and watched him get in his car. The weather had turned cloudy, and it was raining by the time Andrew and Stella got home. Over supper, she made Andrew tell her the plot of the movie, with the leads and some of the bit players. He talked fluently, and seemed to have seen it. And enjoyed it, too.

  NAOKO telephoned her one morning and said that her father expected to live about a week, and that he wanted to wish his friends farewell. Margaret had never known Mr. Kimura’s exact age, but she supposed that he was older than Andrew. She hadn’t seen any of the Kimuras for quite some time, though the rabbit by the door and the coots above the side table in the dining room fooled her into thinking that the artist was present in her house.

  She said, “Dying?”

  “I wouldn’t have said that he is dying. He seems healthy enough, but he always said that he wouldn’t live to see another war, and I think he is making good on his vow.”

  Margaret hesitated, but then she said, “Naoko, do you mean that he is committing suicide?”

  “No, that he is omitting to recover from a bout of pneumonia. He won’t let my mother try any remedies, and his breathing is getting worse.”

  “That must be terrifying for him.”

  “Maybe it will be at the end. But he’s a stubb
orn man. I doubt he will change his mind.”

  “When would he like to see me?”

  “This afternoon, if that is no trouble for you.”

  “Of course it’s no trouble.”

  Over lunch, Andrew seemed surprised when she told him where she was going. He took a couple of spoonfuls of his soup and then a bite of bread and said, “I didn’t know you were that close to Mr. Kimura. He doesn’t even speak English, does he?”

  “I’m not close to him at all, but I love the rabbit. And he painted the coots for me.” She could see the picture through the kitchen doorway, from her seat at the table.

  “And he wants you at his deathbed.”

  “I don’t think they’re calling it his deathbed right now. He might recover spontaneously, but I’m sure he’s almost eighty, or even past eighty.”

  “I’m seventy-three.”

  She ignored this and was surprised when he offered to walk to the shop with her. She took the shears out and cut a nice bouquet of her roses, all white buds, more than a dozen. It was a fragrant bouquet, but she worried all the way to the Kimuras’ (about twenty minutes) that perhaps it was too showy and mundane for them. Andrew walked at his normal pace; she made an effort to keep up. They left Stella locked in the kitchen, and all the way down the first block, they could hear her barking reminders that they had forgotten something. When they arrived at the shop, Andrew declared that he was going to do some errands, and “leave you to your friends, my dear.” This was fine with Margaret, for she had imagined that Andrew would be awkward in every way—too big, too loud, too aware of himself. She watched him stride away down the street, and entered the door of the shop.

  In spite of what she said to Andrew, she had been imagining some deathbed scene out of a Victorian novel—Mr. Kimura as Little Eva, for example—but it was not at all like that. There were several other guests, including Mrs. Wareham. Mr. Chang, it turned out, had a small restaurant three doors down. Mr. Lloyd sold stationery and art supplies on Napa Street, where Mr. Kimura had long purchased what he needed for his paintings. Miss Wolfe had a bookstore, and because she was close to Chinatown, she stocked a few books in Chinese and Japanese (as well as French, German, and Italian). She was an ample woman about Margaret’s age.