Michael was glancing at tech magazines—PC World and Wired. Noah urged him to choose something from the Young Readers shelf. “You must read books sometimes.”
“Not anymore.”
His world-weary tone made Noah laugh. “Since, what, since you turned eleven?”
For an answer, the boy held up his phone.
“Oh, come on! When I was a kid I spent my whole allowance on books.”
“Because no internet.”
“There won’t be Wi-Fi on the plane,” Noah warned him.
“How come?”
He pointed upward. “Thirty thousand feet in the air.”
He insisted on buying the kid an expensive, shiny compendium of facts called Incrrrrrrrrrrrredible! At the last minute, at the checkout, he added a hardback notebook with a pirate cover for the journal Michael was supposed to be keeping.
Noah bought a box of sushi and sashimi for himself, and chicken nuggets and fries for Michael. “No soda,” he added, too late.
“It comes with,” the young woman said.
Michael was filling up a huge waxed cup at the Coke tap.
At their gate, he sat with bass-heavy music leaking from his headphones.
“Would that be rap?” Noah asked him.
“Huh?”
He gestured for the boy to take out the earbuds.
Instead Michael pressed pause.
“The genre, the style. Is rap the right word for it? Or hip-hop?”
“Don’t even try.” Michael turned his music back on.
The young bearded man on Noah’s other side was immersed in the Bible. Good News, debossed in gold on black leatherette. Noah found himself thinking of Schrödinger’s cat again.
He tapped Michael on the shoulder.
The boy flinched and took out one earbud only. Rapid-fire, furiously articulated words spilled from it.
“Do you like jokes?”
“I guess.”
“So a doctor tells a patient, ‘I have good news and bad news.’”
“Uh-huh?”
“The patient wants to know the good news. The doctor says, ‘They’re naming a disease after you!’”
A pause. “That’s not funny.”
“No?”
“Maybe when you’re seventy-nine,” Michael conceded.
“Gallows humor, you mean—oldies laughing about death because we’re on the brink of it?”
The boy shrugged. “What got her—your wife?”
Noah could suddenly smell it, the antiseptic tang of the oncologist’s office. “Cancer.”
“Ironic.”
“Yes, she found that funny.” Her old enemy, yanking her down to punish her for the battles she’d won.
“Why does it say doctor?”
“Where?”
“On your ticket,” Michael said, pointing.
He examined his boarding pass: Dr. Noah Selvaggio. “Oh, it’s a courtesy title, because I have a PhD, what’s called a doctoral degree. Meaning, I studied for years and years.”
“Doing explosions and shit, in your lab?”
Noah was starting to take the vulgarity in stride. “Regrettably few.” In recent decades explosions had been frowned on by the health-and-safety folks.
“She had you whipped, right?”
“Joan?” He chuckled. “At organic chemistry, at least, correct.” It was a pity she’d never met this kid; she’d have got a kick out of him.
“You’re the bad guys?”
Noah frowned. “Joan and I?” He guessed again. “University professors?”
“Chemistry-ists.”
“You mean chemists. What makes you say that?”
“Dunno. Mad scientists? Poisoners and meth cooks and people who make…” The boy’s eyes shifted to the gate agent behind the desk. He mouthed bombs, and mimed one going off.
“Well, hang on now. I admit we’ve had a few sketchy guys on our team.” Alfred Nobel sprang to mind—founder of prizes to erase the nickname (Merchant of Death) he’d won by inventing dynamite. Or what about Haber, whose ammonia fertilizers had saved multitudes from starvation, but who’d overseen the very chemical weapons that would be used to murder millions of Jews, including his own relatives? Haber’s Rule—Noah still knew it by heart: For any given poisonous gas, C x t = k, where C is the concentration, t is the time of breathing, and k is a constant. Doubling the concentration allows the time to be halved for the same effect. He shuddered. Once you started poking into the details, it was hard to work out a karmic equation for any individual’s effect on the world, not just the geniuses. “The thing is, Michael, virtually any compound can be used to harm or help. Chemistry just means finding out what the universe is made of, every speck of air or drop of your blood.”
Noah realized that he’d lost the kid’s attention several sentences back, and that their flight to Paris was boarding.
So they lined up and inched forward again. A man ahead of them offered his chunky smartwatch to be scanned instead of a boarding pass; Michael watched with what Noah assumed to be envious awe. O brave new world. But it wasn’t Noah’s world.
On the other hand, once you started thinking that way, you might as well turn up your toes.
Go on, give him the window, Joan prompted as they shuffled down the long tube onto the plane.
“You should have the view, as it’s your first time.” Noah waved Michael ahead into the window seat. This left him with the middle, which he particularly disliked. Of course, it was dark now: no view but the runway lights. Michael was trying to take a picture of them out the porthole window.
Over the intercom, a flight attendant said, “It is easier to pack coats around bags than bags around coats.” Then she repeated it in French, which made it sound even more like a zen koan.
“Shall I pop your hat up in the overhead compartment for you, sir?” her male colleague asked Noah.
“No thanks.”
“You don’t want it getting crushed on the floor.”
Was there now some rule against wearing hats in an airplane? “I won’t be putting it on the floor.” Noah set his fedora on his lap.
“You sure?”
Repressively: “It’s an heirloom.”
“What’s an air loom?” Michael’s eyes were already glued to a car-chase game on his seat-back screen.
“Something inherited. A precious antique.”
“That old hat?”
On Noah’s right, in the aisle seat, was a woman in her fifties or sixties who seemed to have dropped off to sleep already. He should have remembered to use the bathroom at the gate; he didn’t want to disturb her. Destination weather: 4°, said his screen. Which sounded on the cool side, but that was Paris; the South of France should be a lot milder. Visibility: unlimited.
“They do have Wi-Fi.” Michael tapped the icon.
“Really?” Noah leaned over to peer at the details. “Nineteen dollars—they’ve got to be kidding!”
“Oh, I thought it was free.”
Noah felt a little bad, but not bad enough to pay $19. “The movies are free. Watch one after takeoff.”
“Why only after takeoff?”
“Spread out your pleasures, young man. It’s a seven-and-a-half-hour flight.”
Hat gently propped against his chest, Noah opened Père Sonne: A Life’s Work.
The study seemed soundly researched, but irritating to Noah in the way academic analyses of one’s relatives naturally would be. Max Harstad (professor of visual communication at a university in Texas) had dried and pressed Noah’s genial, eccentric pépère into a historical figure, someone impelled only by his art. The family members came up only as specks of ordinariness blown in the face of high ambition. Margot—Noah had jumped ahead to the turn of the century, when she was born—was the special case: the artist’s beloved only child, model, equipment porter (she dragged his tripod, light meter, and cameras through the cobbled streets of Nice on a little cart), studio and business manager, secretary, and archivist. His irreplaceable he
lpmeet, especially from the age of twenty-nine, after her mother, Isabelle, had died. When her father’s eyes were tired, in the evenings, Margot had played piano: Chopin, Debussy, Satie. (Those sweetly melancholy ripples, the soundtrack to Noah’s childhood.)
He was hoping for hard information about Margot’s war years; details about some of the locations and individuals in her mysterious envelope of slapdash photos. But he soon realized that Harstad was leaving out anything that didn’t inform the great man’s great work; there was no mention of the fall that had damaged Margot’s knee, for instance. She always seemed to be busy nursing her father and cooking, as well as answering his mountains of correspondence and helping him conceive, plan, take, develop, and print his photographs. The only other claims on her time that Harstad mentioned were doing the flowers at church—funny how these pious rituals were kept up, even in times of war—and somehow scrounging each day’s food, as famine closed in on Nice that final summer.
On Père Sonne’s art, Harstad was more interesting. For instance, Harstad pointed out that many sneered at the “Objection” series for what they saw as a myopic turning inward, a cowardly choice of the aesthetic over the political, but the fact was, taking photographs in the street was outlawed during the war; the old man could have been arrested and had his equipment smashed if he hadn’t turned to working indoors instead. Also, there were strong precedents for a preoccupation with the close-up still life: Ansel Adams with his pebbles and water droplets, Albert Renger-Patzsch’s girders and eyeglasses. Wasn’t it fair enough to say, even while tanks were rolling in, “I care about this drainpipe”? Père Sonne’s last series, by enshrining the lowly and the particular, could be understood to enact a symbolic, furious objection to Nazism.
Hm, that’s stretching a point, Noah thought. Hadn’t his pépère resolutely stayed out of politics through both the First and Second World Wars? Head pulled in, a turtle in his shell; while all hell broke loose in the streets outside, he’d held his grip on what had always mattered most to him: his work. Apart from writing the occasional mildly phrased letter in support of an arrested artist, Père Sonne had never risked drawing down on himself the attention of successive military regimes.
To explain this, Professor Harstad quoted Matisse (a contemporary and acquaintance of Père Sonne’s in Nice) to the effect that an artist should close his doors to everyone, especially toward the end, and not waste a single hour. And Père Sonne was not unusual, in fact was typical of the French, in hanging back. Harstad cited a recent study showing that although so many had claimed afterward to have been involved in the Resistance, only around two percent—mostly students and immigrants—had actually committed themselves. Perhaps another eight percent had taken timid steps, such as reading underground newspapers. It seemed as if most French had been attentistes (wait-and-see-ers), even as their puppet government at Vichy was rounding up undesirables to send to Hitler’s death camps.
Well, Noah couldn’t throw stones; his times had been less testing. He’d been a little too old to be drafted for Vietnam, so his life had been spent cocooned in labs and classrooms. And after all, didn’t his kind manage to ignore today’s awful wrongs? Read the paper, shook their heads regretfully, sipped their lattes.
Noah noticed out of the corner of his eye that Michael was taking a picture of his own shadow, in profile, on his tray table, one hand held up in what Noah feared might be a gang sign. (But perhaps the kids all posed like that nowadays?)
“Shadow selfies,” he said, nodding. “Photographers have been doing those for more than a hundred years.”
“No way!”
Noah riffled through A Life’s Work till he found the images he was looking for, the charming “Perspective” series. “Look at this one of my mother in 1907.” A girl dancing on what looked like a cliff—unless the angles were exaggerating the height of the overhang? “See the shadow of my grandpa’s tripod?” He put his fingertip to the spot. Its placement on the stones hinted that Père Sonne was waiting below Margot. Watching, cold-blooded—very much the artist, at that moment, rather than the father? But also, Noah hoped, near enough to catch the little girl if she slipped off the cliff.
Michael squinted at it. “Maybe he just messed up, letting the shadow show.”
Noah shook his head. “Every shot was so hard to take, back then—especially outside, because you had to get the sun behind you and use the smallest possible fixed-focus lens. Besides, he was trained as a painter, lots of them were, and painters have always found jokey ways to include themselves in the picture.”
The next shot showed a slightly older Margot squeezed into a cleft in rough rock. It could have been a harsh desert landscape, or another planet even, rather than the French Riviera, and the girl a prisoner. But her slight smile suggested this was a game. “You have to realize how ahead of his time the man was. Most portraits were taken in studios, all stiff and fuddy-duddy against backdrops, with props.” Noah thought of the awful murals at Amber’s prison. “But Père Sonne realized it was brighter outside so he could use a shorter exposure time, and that let his subjects, the people he was photographing, behave more naturally.”
Noah turned the page. The girl Margot squatting this time, a tree looming over her like some hungry giant…but the windowsill hinted that this was just a garden shrub. Probably the Personnets’ house in the hills above Nice? (Noah had searched for it online; it had been demolished and replaced with a center for thalassothérapie, which seemed to involve being rubbed with products expensively derived from the sea.)
“Can you find my mother in this one?” he asked. Taken from way above the stony beach of the Baie des Anges, when the shadows of the palm trees were long: dawn, or possibly dusk.
An impatient click of the tongue; Michael poked the page.
“That’s right.” A black blob that turned out to be a hat with its shadow; a small child, foreshortened, dragging a bucket and spade as if girding herself for the long day’s work of play ahead…or maybe tired from the day that was done.
In the next picture she seemed to be hanging in pure light, a blur of girl in a striped bathing suit, released from gravity, swallowed up by the sparkle of the glittering waves. Had Père Sonne tucked himself under another overhang from which he’d coaxed his daughter to leap past his lens into the sea?
“She looks kind of fun.”
“My mom? Oh, she was,” Noah assured him. He tried to marshal evidence. “She did tricks—licked her own nose.”
Michael nodded. “I have a friend that does that.”
Who, Noah almost corrected him. “About one in ten people can,” he said instead. “Doctors call it Gorlin sign.”
“Did you get it?”
“Inherit it from Margot?” He shook his head and demonstrated: his tongue tip was a good inch below his nose. “Yeah, she was a force—always lively, even though she had health problems.” Energetic, a taker of showers rather than long baths. (She’d had their tub in New York ripped out. Noah, raised without one, could never see the appeal of sitting around in your own floating scum.) “She taught piano till she was in her eighties, refused to go easy on herself. Like your grandma, it sounds like?”
Michael ignored that. “How come she’s always a kid in these pics?”
“Well, Père Sonne ended the series when she was twelve.” Was it puberty that had drawn the line—had he wanted to show a girl’s freedom, untrammeled by womanhood? (It occurred to Noah that his grandfather had almost never photographed Isabelle during their long, fond marriage.) Or could it have been Margot who’d rebelled against being his subject? But no, it didn’t sound to Noah as if she’d ever said no to her papa.
Here she was in a snowstorm—sandstorm?—barely visible in the terrible shower and whirl of it; eyes screwed up, laughing or crying or both. Nice had no sand and rarely any snow, so what was this stuff?
The notes explained that it was flour, flung into the air at a Corso Illuminé. “This was her at a nighttime procession. It’ll be Carnival time
when we’re in Nice.”
A flicker of interest from Michael. “A fun fair, like Coney Island?”
“Well, festive, yes, but it’s more about dressing up and parades of crazy floats, not roller coasters. They’ve been partying in Nice every February since 1294.”
But the boy’s attention had switched away from the photos already, back to his screen.
As they thundered down the runway, Noah tried to recall his own maiden flight, New York to L.A., in…what year was it? Fernande had been a toddler in their mother’s lap, so no later than about 1948. If he didn’t remember the journey, that was probably because it had gone by in a flash, unlike his solitary transatlantic crossing on the ship. In California they’d eaten oranges straight off the tree, bursting radiant in the mouth, though Marc had insisted they couldn’t hold a candle to the clementines of the South of France.
The screens were taken up with a safety video now. Ignoring it, Michael opened Incrrrrrrrrrrrredible!, which featured colorful photographs and jagged captions, mostly about mysterious accidents, it seemed to Noah. The Bermuda Triangle, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a seven-year-old kid who survived going over Niagara Falls… Perhaps not the best choice of reading material for a first time on a plane?
The plane gathered speed. “Don’t be nervous,” Noah said. “I remember I used to think how unlikely it was for a great metal capsule to stay up in the air.”
Michael gave him a scornful look.
How little Noah knew of what made this generation—this particular kid—nervous. “Did you know, it’s safer and easier to take off if the wind is blowing against us?”
“That makes no sense.”
“With a headwind there’s more airflow over the wings, which helps lift the plane at a lower takeoff speed.” Noah mimed it with his fingers.
“Bullshit.” Michael kept shaking his head.
“Science,” Noah countered.
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