“Feel like some damn down-and-outer in a story, finds a genie, gets three wishes, maybe you better forget I said anything.”
“No. No, it’s O.K. I’ll make a transparency, we’ll put some light through it, see what we’ve got. Did you want to just go back here, to—looks like about 1890, fact I think I remember that studio in Chicago—or we could send it back even earlier, or . . .”
Merle let it hang there so gently that Lew had scarcely any idea his mind had been read. “What you were saying about sending these pictures off onto different tracks . . . other possibilities . . .”
“That’s that constant-term recalibration, or C.T.R., drives Roswell out of the shop and down to the nearest speakeasy, got no patience with that part of it. We’re still learning about it, but it seems to be built into the nature of silver somehow. Back when I was still a junior alchemist, passing through What Cheer, Iowa, met up with this old-school spagyrist name of Doddling, who showed me how to get silver to grow just like a tree. Tree of Diana, he called it, goddess of the Moon and all. Damnedest thing. Take some silver, amalgamate it with quicksilver, put it in with just the right amount and strength of nitric acid, wait. Damn if pretty soon it won’t start to put out branches, just like a tree only faster, and after a while even leaves.”
“Branches,” said Lew.
“Right before your eyes—or lens, ’cause you do need some magnification. Doddling said it’s because silver is alive. Has its own forks in the road, choices to make just like the rest of us.
“This’ll be silent, remember. You won’t hear her.”
Maybe not . . . but maybe . . .
Amid a technical environment so corrupted by less-than-elevated motives, usually mercenary, for “setting forth against the Enemy Wind” (as early epics of time-travel described it), there must now and then appear one compassionate time-machine story, time travel in the name of love, with no expectation of success, let alone reward.
Now, as if the terrible flood of time had been leapt across in a timeless instant, no more trouble than being switched over to a different track . . . Troth continued to live, in some way more tangible than memory or sorrow, eternally young, while they were still courting, before they fell prey to Time, all in a cascade unstoppable as a spring thaw, what he not that slowly at all understood to be accelerated views of her face and body, of hair lengthening to prodigal fair masses to be then pinned up, and released, and re-piled again and again, woman upon woman settling into the lamplit ends of days full of care, the gingham redoubts of matronhood, the rougings, redefinings, emergences and disguises, dimples and lines and bone realities, each year’s face tumbling upon the next in a breathtaking fall. . . .
“But . . . I don’t understand. . . . Do you mean that time the streetcar crashed? Or the winter when I had the fever?” Speaking quietly, with downcast eyes, as if all but stupefied by whatever she had come here out of, almost too young for the woman he remembered, innocent as yet of her immortality. The light seemed to have gathered preferentially about her face and golden hair. He imagined himself reaching out to her through dust-crowded shafts of light, not optical so much as temporal light, whatever it was being carried by Time’s Æther, cruelly assembled in massless barriers between them. She might not know anymore who he was, what they had been through together. Was that her voice he’d heard? Could she see him from wherever in the mathematical mists she’d journeyed to?
Merle looked up from the controls, touched an invisible hatbrim. “It looks like one of them wonders of science. But having been down your stretch of track myself, I just wish it could be more, ’s all.”
AND AT THE END of the working day, when all sources of light seemed to have withdrawn as far as they were going to, making shadows as long as they would be and Roswell was off to a circuit of friendly speakeasies, as was his habit most every night, Merle cranked up the Integroscope one more time and took one of the photos he’d kept of Dally, taken when she was about twelve years old, back at Little Hellkite in the San Juans, standing out by the pipeline in the snow, not just smiling for the camera but laughing out loud at something Merle had since tried to remember but couldn’t. Maybe someplace hanging in the invisible air was a snowball he’d just thrown at her.
Though it was usually enough to stay in their past together, before she’d left, tonight he decided to bring it all the way up to the present day, on through a high-speed blur of all her time since Telluride and New York and Venice and the War, up to this very evening, except over there in Paris it was morning, and she was just leaving her rooms and going to the train station and riding out to a stop in some banlieue where hundreds of feet into the sky abruptly towered the antenna of a million-watt wireless transmitter, some already-forgotten artifact of the War, where he thought he recognized a Béthenod-Latour alternator and beneath the tower a little studio with geraniums at the windows where Dally drank coffee and ate a brioche and sat by a control board while an operator with one of those pointed French mustaches found the coördinates for Los Angeles, and somehow Merle now, tumbling, trembling in a rush of certitude, was on his feet and across the shop, fiddling with the radio receiver, its tubes blooming in an indigo haze, finding the band and frequency, and all at once the image of her silent lips on the wall smoothly glided into synchronization, and her picture was speaking. A distant grown woman’s voice propagating through the night Æther clear as if she was in the room. He gazed at her, shaking his head slowly, and she returned the gaze, smiling, speaking without hurry, as if somehow she could see him, too.
Five
Rue du Départ
“ . . . he would have asked you for my hand,” Dally was saying, “being that sort of kid, but we couldn’t have reached you even if we knew where you were. . . .”
It would’ve felt like throwing a bottle in the ocean, except that she knew Merle was there. Even with a fair idea of the odds that he wasn’t, given the War and the ocean and the North American continent and a radio spectrum that seemed to expand every time she looked. Somehow the beams emerging far above her were finding their way straight to him, straight and true.
René was smoking Gauloises one after another, studying her through the smoke. He had some unformed notion of her as a spiritual medium, talking to the dead. Clearly an unauthorized use of the equipment, but to tell the truth it was new, and some of it was army parts, and it all tended to drift a bit. These extra unlogged transmissions—and Mademoiselle Rideout must not imagine that she was the only one in Paris so occupied—afforded a way to make introductions, allow the components to clash and partially cancel and learn one another’s expectations, seek average values, adapt, slip in to some groove leading to smooth teamwork, power wisely deployed and signals faithfully sent across.
When she was done Dally walked away waving au ’voir with an awkward twirl of her hand behind her, the radio tower in powerful and immediate ascent, like its cousin the Eiffel Tower drastically out of scale with the rest of its neighborhood, and with her head slightly bowed returned to the Métro station. She had no business in this neighborhood beyond calling after Merle across the dimensions. She began to hum the Reynaldo Hahn tune from Ciboulette about the suburbanizing of passion, which everybody was humming this season, “C’est pas Paris, c’est sa banlieue.”
By the time she was back in Montparnasse, she was whistling “J’ai Deux Amants” from the latest Sacha Guitry production.
“’Jour, Dally,” called a pretty young woman in trousers.
“’Jour, Jarri.”
A group of Americans paused to stare.
“Scyuzay mwah, but ain’t you that La Jarretière?”
“Oh, yes, before the . . . War? I used to dance under that name.”
“But they say she died—”
“A-and real horribly, too . . .”
The young woman sniffed. “Grand Guignol. They came to see blood. We used the . . . raspberry syrup. My own life was getting complicated . . . death and rebirth as someone else seemed, just the ticket.
They needed a succès de scandale, and I didn’t mind. A young beauty destroyed before her time, something the eternally-adolescent male mind could tickle itself with. Mon Dieu!” she sang, “que les hommes sont bêtes!” in on the tail end of which Dally joined, singing the harmony.
There was a lively musical-comedy scene here in postwar Paris, and after a while Dally had drifted into its, well, banlieue. She currently had a small part in Fossettes l’Enflammeuse, an operetta of the period by Jean-Raoul Oeuillade—about a type, pretty familiar by now, of hell-raising adolescent seductress or baby vamp who drinks, smokes, uses cocaine, so forth—and staged in New York by famed impresario R. Wilshire Vibe, as Dimples, though Dally had taken the time to learn a spot-on impression of the star, Solange St.-Emilion, belting out Fossettes’ first big number—
Casse-cou! C’est moi!
Ce’p’ti’ j’m’en fou’-la-là!
Casse-cou, mari, tes femmes aussi—
Tous les autres, n’importe quoi!
Dally climbed to her flat just off the rue du Départ and went in the kitchen and made coffee. She had just told Merle the whole story of her life since she’d left him at Telluride, and what a sorry spectacle. . . . She should have been thinking about Merle, but instead for some reason it was Kit now who was on her mind.
Beside the window were shelves with a set of terra-cotta bowls and plates from a shop in Torino, a wedding present she and Kit had given to themselves. The first time she had laid eyes on them, she’d felt immediate contentment. They were glazed in some truly cheerful shade of green—no, more than that, as if the color came from ground-up crystals sensitive to radio waves, able to call back Kit’s voice singing “It won’t be a stylish marriage . . .” while she thought, This is who we are. We don’t have to go worrying about more, and then, out loud, “Well thank heaven you can cook.”
They were married in 1915, and went to live in Torino, where Kit got a job working on the Italian bomber aircraft. And then a year or two later came the disaster up at Caporetto, when it looked like the Austrians would just sweep down out of those mountains and keep rolling all the way to Venice. And by then they could neither of them remember why they’d got married, or stayed married, and it was no comfort that nearly everybody else they knew was going through the same kind of misery. They blamed it on the War, of course, and that was true as far as it went. But . . . well, Dally had also gone a little crazy, and did some stupid things. One day she was at the plant when a small phalanx of men in dark suits came out of a metal door, and she recognized one of them as Clive Crouchmas.
Like many before her, Dally had a low tolerance—blamelessly low, considering—for complexos and the work it took to put up with them. And she knew that Clive’s demands would be as minimal as a girl could ask. Conjugal bliss? Flings with other men? no problems for Clive. There was that awkward business of his having once tried to shop her into white slavery, but both understood that it was perhaps his one moment of genuine blind passion, everybody deserves at least one of those, doesn’t he, and at the end of the day Clive was grateful for it, and Dally was semi-sweetly amused.
It wasn’t only that Clive had grown older but that in the high-stakes gaming of the life he’d chosen, he had somehow come away with fewer chips, not the night’s biggest loser but far short of what he might once have believed was his entitlement. So she wasn’t about to wish him too all-out of a disaster.
While his wife got back together with somebody she shouldn’t have, Kit was either at the plant or up in the air, and next thing either of them knew, the War was over, Dally was in Paris, and Kit was out in western Ukraine someplace, off on some grand search after she didn’t know what. She did know there was fighting still going on out there. He kept sending letters, with different stamps and postmarks each time, and now and then it sounded like he wanted to come back, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted him to or not.
This kitchen table was no place to be sitting in the middle of the day. She grabbed a few francs from under one of the green dishes and went out again, just as an airplane flew overhead, muttering serenely to itself. A few blocks to the boulevard and her local café, L’Hémisphère, where she’d discovered that if she only sat at a table outside, before long her life, selections from her life, would repeat themselves in slightly different form, featuring exactly the people she “needed” to see again—as if the notorious café were one of those favored spots that Eastern mystics talked about. Though it might be that the others “needed” to see her as well, sometimes they only passed like ghosts, and looked right at her, and didn’t recognize her.
In those days a large American population was forever passing through Paris, changing addresses or lying about them. Some might’ve been ghosts from the War with unfinished business in the city. But most were the American young, untouched, children with spending money but no idea of what it would or wouldn’t buy, come toddling as if down the dark willow-lined approach to some sort of Club Europa of the maimed and gassed and fever-racked, whose members had been initiated by way of war, starvation, and Spanish influenza. Blessedly, there was no telephone at L’Hémisphère, because the owner believed that the instrument was another sort of plague, which would spread through and eventually destroy Montparnasse. Where again would it be possible to leave your note with Octave the barman with such total faith in his character? As soon as the Americans found out there was no telephone, they tended to move on toward the corner of boulevard Raspail and the more famous Dôme, Rotonde, Coupole, and Select.
Sitting here behind a cup of coffee, Dally was able to brood freely about her past, fully confident that in all this rippling interwovenness of desires wise and foolish she would be interrupted at just the right moment, before it got too mopish.
BACK WHEN THEY ARRIVED in Torino, Kit had taken one look and felt right at home. “Can you believe this place? Not a crooked street far’s you can see.”
Might as well be Denver. The mountains were close, and there was hydro-electric power everywhere. “Well full fuckin circle,” is what he muttered to himself, “ain’t it.”
Kit went to the address Viktor Mulciber had given him in Constantinople and was hired on the spot, and soon was turning his vectorist skills to matters of wing loading, lateral and longitudinal stability, so forth. . . . He ran into one or two familiar faces from Dr. Prandtl’s shop at Göttingen, who’d fled Germany out of pacifistic dread at what was coming and comforted themselves that Italian warplanes would only be used against Austria, which was responsible for the War anyway. He was welcomed with a ceremonial shower of beer and the solemn instruction, “Every wing section you’ll come across looks just like a circle after a Zhukovsky transformation. Airfoil design’s shameful secret. Tell no one.”
Based nearby was a small squadriglia of Bleriot monoplanes, veterans of the Italo-Turkish War, in which they had mostly flown reconnaissance over Cyrenaica, with a few proudly displaying bullet holes from the tribesmen’s rifle fire. Kit quickly became friendly with the ground crew, who didn’t object if he took one up now and then.
One day he and Dally had been having an adult exchange of views about the time she was spending with Clive Crouchmas. Kit had met this bird and didn’t like him, though absent a working time machine he didn’t see any real way he could deny Dally her past. One more wartime sacrifice, he guessed.
“Come on up with me Dal.” His voice suddenly shifting, though just how she couldn’t’ve said.
“Are you crazy?”
“I mean it. I can fix it easy—smuggle you on the ship, time you learned how to fly anyway, you might even get to like it.” There was a look of entreaty on his face she failed to register, an unprotected moment she would understand when it was too late.
“The Austrians shoot people down, Kit.”
“Not us. Not you and me.”
Later she would also recall feeling both sorry for and angry at all his wishful stupidity, and wondered if she’d have done better to lean to the side of pity, even if in the long
run pity would only have corroded them sure, more than the rages and constant fights, which at least had some life to them. This time she just shrugged and went into the other room to get dolled up once again for a “dinner engagement” with Crouchmas, at the Cambio, most likely, she thought.
Kit stalked away into town and took refuge as usual at a riverfront bar in I Murazzi, near the Po bridge. His friend Renzo was there already, drinking some vermouth concoction.
On the ground Renzo always struck folks as a little phlegmatic, maybe clinically depressed, not much to say, slept a lot—but in the presence of any sort of airplane he was observed to perk up markedly. As soon as they were taxiing he was all smiles and animation, and by the time the wheels left the ground, his personality had undergone an all but polar shift. He had run through a brisk turnover of bombardieri, few of whom lasted more than one mission, many reduced to nervous wrecks long before any targets were even sighted. “I tell you the trouble with just leaning out and looking around for something to drop a bomb on—you don’t get the accuracy, plus it isn’t going fast enough when it hits, you want as much kinetic energy as possible, vero?”
Kit squinted. “You’re talking about—”
“Una picchiata!”
“What’s that?”
“A very steep dive, not like when you go down in a spin, here you’d be controlling it all the way—release the bomb as close to target as you can get, then pull up sharply again to get out of the way of the explosion. Think you could figure how to modify mia bella Caproni for that?”
“A ‘nosedive’? that’s insane Renzo, too much stress in all the wrong places, the bracing would snap, control surfaces couldn’t take it, the wings would fall off, the engine would either stall or explode—”
Against the Day Page 139