by Lydia Netzer
What is my emotional connection to the dead person that was my mother? Irene wanted to know.
She picked up her own keys and drove to her favorite bridge for the first time since her return to Toledo. Maybe standing on the bridge, in the quiet space before the fall, everything would make sense.
*
Toledo’s Anthony Wayne Bridge is blue and white and wide. Two tall towers are draped with huge suspension cables, and the bridge rises in a high arc over the Maumee River. It is ninety years old. In Pittsburgh, Irene had spent many moments on the George Westinghouse Bridge, an arch bridge made of concrete, staring down at where the train tracks crossed the brown water of Turtle Creek.
Now Irene parked her car in a back corner of the Owens Corning lot and walked up the bridge’s long ramp toward the river. Cars went whizzing past her, decelerating as they left the bridge, and Irene felt her body relax a bit. On the Anthony Wayne Bridge, there is a tall cyclone fence along the walkway. This fence is too high to climb without attracting attention and curves inward at the top for extra safety. Irene always found it funny that when you get farther along and the bridge is over water, this fence just stops. Between the two towers, you can lean over the railing as far as you like. If you lean far enough, you can fall right in. It is as if the people who define the safety regulations for bridges did not consider the idea that a person would ever go near the railing of a bridge over water, that they would only be in danger of spilling off a bridge over land.
Irene knew that Bernice had killed herself—maybe not through a tumble down some stairs, but through an intentional consumption of a poisonous amount of alcohol, over days, hours, or years. She knew the impulse that led her mother down to death. Or did she? Where did it start? With the fire? With the birth of her daughter? What was the moment that led to the rest of her life, and how could Irene steer past that moment, guide herself to safety?
Suicide has an event horizon, Irene thought. Death does not. Death can take you quickly, and you are gone, but suicide has a slow approach. It takes years sometimes, or it takes a whole lifetime. But there must be some pivotal moment, a moment that goes by as quickly as any other in your life. A point of no return: the trigger is pulled, the body tips forward or backward off the bridge, the chair is kicked. After this moment has passed, you keep on living, but it’s a different kind of life. A life in which nothing you decide or think or do can change what is happening. Time stretches, as you pass through it. Some say you see your life pass before your eyes. That would take a long time. Longer than the four seconds it takes to fall from a bridge and be crushed on the water’s surface. But because of the special behavior of light and time around the singularity of a death, there is enough time. There is unlimited time. And then you are dead.
If you crossed the event horizon of an actual black hole, and your friend was standing safely outside the event horizon, watching you, it would be the same. You pass an invisible threshold. You cannot tell when you are beyond hope. There’s no signpost. You might be saying something, like, “I can’t handle this pain anymore. I want to die.” To you, traveling toward the singularity, the words would come out like normal, and you would hear them coming out of your mouth one after the other, a perfectly rational explanation for what you were doing. But to your friend, outside the accretion disk, the words would come at increasingly perplexing intervals. The gaps between the words would stretch and stretch, until years passed between “I” and “want” and then decades until “to,” and maybe your friend would age and sicken and die herself before the word “die” managed to reach her. At which point she would have already found out what you wanted to do.
Some physicists had written about how a person entering a black hole might experience the entire future history of the universe, wrapped around that endless last moment of life. Irene just wanted to know … when did her mother begin to want to die?
“I see you falling,” Irene’s mother had told her. “I see you falling to your death. It’s happening, almost every time I close my eyes.” This was when she had forbidden Irene to travel by air, insisted Irene drive everywhere, never visit Europe. They had been to South America by boat. “Airplanes are not for you,” her mother said. “Trust me.” And while Irene had nodded and complied, she had privately thought it was all part of the same bullshit. And yet when your mother tells you you are going to die, and how, can she really be ignored? What kind of mother tells her daughter this, and then dies falling down the stairs?
I don’t miss you at all, Irene thought to her mother. Whenever I start to think I’m missing you, I remind myself that it is nonsense.
Irene passed the first high tower, and a jogger went huffing past her, going toward the center of the bridge. She slowed and watched him go, and then she went up there herself, stood in the middle, where the suspension cables dip down to the bridge’s deck. From here you can hoist yourself up onto the main cable, and using the guide wires you can walk your way up it right to the top of the tower. Most jumpers think they have to climb these cables to get high enough to die, but Irene knew that this was not the case. You could die just as well from the drop at the center of the bridge. Everyone knew that climbers didn’t really jump, and real jumpers didn’t climb. Irene stood there at the center of the bridge, listening to the cars hissing past behind her. A whiff of the harbor reached her nose as she leaned on the railing, her body pressing out into the air, probing for the transition between standing and falling, the point at which impact becomes inevitable.
She looked down at the shallow water on the west side of the river, where a pair of fishermen had managed to upend their boat. They struggled with it, sinking into the sand, trying to get it right.
10
The Max Planck Memorial Ballroom was sponsored by the Hamburg Plancks, in honor of their progenitor’s contribution to the world of science. It inhabited its own gorgeous building at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, and on this night it was lit up like the Horsehead Nebula on the Fourth of July. Chandeliers sparkled in the lobby, leaded glass windows glittered up and down the façade, and a stunning brass astrolabe decorated the lobby, surrounded by cocktail waitresses spinning in a bright, bubbling orbit. The night of the annual welcome banquet was truly a night of a thousand stars, and the party was thrown in honor of the glamorous new acquisitions the institute could boast about in brochures and the incoming students, who dreamed of becoming such celebrated guests.
George and Kate Oakenshield emerged from his wagon, and George tossed the keys to the valet along with a twenty-dollar bill. He wore gray jeans, a white shirt he’d already opened at the throat, and a gray striped tie he’d already untied. When he got out of his car, a couple of undergraduates fluttered to the sidewalk and then shyly hid under a tree as he came around the vehicle, collected Kate Oakenshield on his arm, and strode into the building. No, he was not the star of the evening, nor was he even any longer the brilliant ingenue. He needed a breakthrough, and he needed it soon. But he still commanded a modicum of respect among the gentlemen, and the ladies still found he brought color to their cheeks. Kate drifted along beside him, in a droopy and romantic lemon chiffon.
Inside the lobby, George immediately spotted Father Oakenshield, wearing a clerical collar and pacing thoughtfully up and down one wall.
He called, “Mr. Oakenshield!”
Kate corrected him quietly and immediately. “Father.”
“OK,” said George aside to her. “But he doesn’t have a parish. He’s never preached a sermon. Father of what? Why does he wear that outfit?”
Kate said, “Father of me.”
They reached him. George and Father Oakenshield shook hands. Father Oakenshield maintained a certain ascetic distance from his surroundings. His face was pinched and disapproving, his aspect removed. His eyebrows said he was aghast. His hands spread apart, as if to say, “What can I do? Here I am. I participate.” He had served his prison sentence and emerged unapologetic, and since Kate had turned eighteen, he was allowed to
be near her again, by her choice.
“George, how are you?” he said, and then he turned and warbled something to Kate.
She warbled something back. She wouldn’t speak in English when her father was around. Her voice sounded to George like a wood thrush at dusk. Vaguely chorded, pretty, but incomprehensible.
“Well, that’s just great,” said George, as if to a passing waiter. “Great evening. OK!”
George saw his mother and father coming in the door from outside. Sally wore a stylish camel-colored evening gown and the soft stretchy wrap she’d gotten in Panama last year. Her hair was blown back and restrained, her diamond earrings flashing. George’s father walked a step behind her, and off to her side. He had been stuffed into a tuxedo and had a hunted air. His hands floated around, unanchored. George saw Sally take him firmly by the arm and propel him toward the ballroom entrance.
“Hey, hey, Mom,” he called. George interrupted their progress and called them over to join him, Kate, and Father Oakenshield.
“Dad! Here we are.”
He clapped his father on both biceps, convivially. He kissed Sally on the cheek.
“Mom, you look beautiful. Dad, thanks for coming. You look … in attendance.”
“Well,” said his father, “your mother said I can’t eat in the house anymore if I don’t start behaving like a human being.”
At this, Dean stretched his arms out as if to demonstrate that he had, in fact, taken the shape of a human man. When he smiled, George thought he was being very charming. He dropped an exaggerated wink on Kate. Sally beamed at George, unperturbed.
“Good job, Dad,” said George. “Dad, Mom, you know Kate. And this is Father Oakenshield.”
“Ah, yes, the jailer!” Sally said. “Well met, Father. How is the tallest tower, now the princess has flown away?”
Father Oakenshield gazed scornfully at Sally, and licked his lips.
“I don’t expect you to understand my daughter,” said Father Oakenshield, taking Kate’s hand away from Sally.
“Her I understand just fine,” said Sally, taking Kate’s hand back with firmness. “It’s you I’d like to beat with a stick, buddy.”
“You and I will have to accept our differences, Sally, if our children are going to marry.”
Sally balked.
“Who said anything about marrying?” she asked.
“I have seen it in her computations,” said her father. “A new candor. A new simplicity. She is in love.”
Sally pinched George on the arm. “What, with HIM?”
“George understands her,” Father Oakenshield elaborated. “I always knew she would marry a mathematician. No one else could appreciate the subtleties of her training.”
“Bullshit,” said Sally, not quietly.
“Mom,” George began.
“Yeah, I give it six months,” she said. “Here’s a clue, Padre. He only seduced your little chickadee because he thought he couldn’t do it. Now that it’s done, it’s done, you know what I mean?”
“Not done,” George interjected. He shook his head at Kate’s father. “Not done in any sense of the word. Not done. Did not do.”
“I do not see what you mean in the slightest,” Oakenshield said to Sally. And then, without warning, Sally pulled back her smooth, toned arm and punched Father Oakenshield right in the nose.
*
Inside the ballroom, wall sconces shed a warm glow on a rich red carpet, black wood trim, and round tables spread with bright white clothes, dappled with glittering cutlery and crystal plates. The parquet floor was inlaid with deep hardwoods, glorious chandeliers blossomed from the carved ceiling, and paneled walls were hung with oil paintings of popular constellations. A podium at the front of the room was flanked by two tables, and rows of chairs faced the podium. At the back of the room the caterers’ tables were set up with hors d’oeuvres. Among other things, there was a chocolate fountain and a champagne pyramid, ready to be filled.
Academics milled around, finding their places with their wives, their children, their grandchildren in some cases. Dean and Sally, Kate and George, and Father Oakenshield were supposed to sit together at a table, according to cards on the plates, but Father Oakenshield lingered behind, leaving one seat open at their table. When a large man entered the ballroom, clearly late and looking for a place to sit, George saw an opportunity to remove Father Oakenshield from his mother’s arm’s length, and motioned the man to come and sit with them at their table.
“Belion,” said the big man. He shook hands with George and sat down daintily on a folding chair. He looked like an elephant on a Victorian footstool. Sally’s eyes widened and she placed a hand on his arm, taking to him immediately.
“Hello,” she said, in hushed tones, for the program was beginning on the dais.
“Belion,” said Belion, and stuck out his hand.
“Well, don’t you look dashing and debonair?”
“I wore a tuxedo,” said Belion, to explain. His tuxedo was immaculate, and his hair was neatly brushed.
“My husband, Dean,” said Sally, pointing to George’s father, “and my son, George.”
Belion nodded blithely, and Sally turned to George.
“You’ve got to get rid of that girl, son. It’s just getting ridiculous.”
“Now, Mother.” George adopted a calming tone. “I told you last year what the astrologer down on Bancroft said. Brown hair, astronomer, Toledo. There are only so many, you know.”
“But that’s so limiting. Only astronomers?”
“Mother, come now. You don’t want to go against the psychic, do you? Against fate?”
“No,” said Sally wryly. “No, I wouldn’t want to go against her.”
“There you are,” said George, patting her arm. “You know best.”
At the front of the ballroom, the scientists and guests were taking their places at the head table. The microphone had been checked, a glass of water had been installed near it, and now as the others were seated, Dr. Bryant stepped up to the podium. The lights in the ballroom got a bit dimmer, except for those trained on the stage. The chandeliers above the assembled crowd twinkled warmly but were muted now, their false candlesticks playing in hushed light against their brass ligatures. George pinched his forehead between both his thumbs and exhaled.
“Good evening,” said Dr. Bryant. “Welcome to our favorite annual event. Welcome to our new faculty and their families, welcome to our patrons, our friends, to my colleagues, to the future of astronomy.”
Everyone applauded. George applauded. Oakenshield, in the back, dabbed his nose with a cloth napkin. The waiters surrounded the tables and ladled bisque into bowls, the top layer of flatware and cutlery assembled before all the diners. Sally picked up her spoon and expertly dipped it into the soup, delivering it neatly to her lower lip. Belion dandled his spoon in his soup bowl, pushing a cheese crouton around. George trained his eyes on the floor, suddenly feeling dizzy. If he looked at his soup a wave of nausea might surprise him into puking in it. There on the carpet was a rich pattern of curling vines and leaves, a baroque array of ornaments in large circular arrangements. And cherubs.
And then the cherubs were moving.
Dr. Bryant continued, “Our work, here at the institute, and around the world in other ivory towers, or rather aluminum domes, often goes unnoticed, except when we have enough beautiful pictures to warrant a coffee table publication, or when Hollywood decides to make two asteroid movies in the space of a summer.”
There was a polite chuckle. Dean coughed out a loud laugh, but no one looked over. George was watching the rug very carefully now, his brow furrowed. The cherubs that had been so still, clinging to vines along the very predictable columns woven into the rug, had swung down off the vines and were clambering over the columns and other greenery—woven into the rug in muted tones of gold—and headed toward the head table and the dais.
“We know, as scientists, as mathematicians, that recognition will be interspersed with long intervals
of quiet, solitude, in the shadow of the world’s attention. We all need the courage to be ignored.”
The audience nodded, spooned up their soup.
“Of course, we also hope, on behalf of ourselves, our students, and the institute itself, to draw the world’s eye back to astronomy on occasion. Not because the world is about to end, of course, but because we have unlocked another secret, another mystery.”
Dr. Bryant waved affectionately toward the new faculty on his right. George looked up, squinting, and when he looked back down at the rug, the cherubs had all congregated in front of the microphone and were now pointing excitedly at it, as if to say, “Look, George!”
“Perhaps one of these, the new additions to the TIA family of scientists and scholars, could be the next one to put the stars back on the front page.”
Applause sounded in the room. The rug cherubs clapped and turned somersaults. Several marble gargoyles from around the edge of the ceiling now appeared to creep across to where Dr. Bryant was standing and aligned themselves behind him in a bunch. Were they muttering to each other? Were they nodding? Were the columns painted into the walls now hiding flocks of naiads who were peeking around at George, giggling, tugging at each other, and gesturing to him?
“Now without any more pontification on my part,” he went on, clearing his throat, “Let me introduce our featured speaker this evening, one of our new fellows … joining us from Carnegie Mellon University, with a brand new Ph.D. in computational astrophysics and a two-page spread in USA Today coming out tomorrow, covering her groundbreaking research in the genesis of black holes, Dr. Irene Sparks.”