The Rags of Time

by Maureen Howard

  “Your version of our birding? What you wrote, down there in the courthouse?”

  She begins her case against him, then turns to the blackboard, of course. Of course there must be a blackboard screwed to the wall. An elaborate problem covers most of its surface. Underneath in the old wooden frame, some joker, or serious student, has carved PYTHAGORAS SUCKS.

  “You left these for me to read as though we can no longer talk.”

  “Lou-Lou.”

  “Don’t Lou-Lou me.”

  “Easy way out, writing it down.”

  Artie comes round the desk, turns his wife to the window. A spectacular Autumn day, the sky wiped new blue. Students denying the chill in flip-flops and shorts litter the steps leading down to the broad campus from Low. The view from this height trumps that from Gottschalk’s office. Homer, Plato, Virgil, the usual suspects inscribed in the limestone cornice of Butler Library catch the late sun.

  “Computation?” she says. “He’s got to be kidding.”

  “Gott doesn’t kid. Demographics, genomes. Think small.”

  “Not what you wanted, not ever.”

  “Just different. I will not contribute. Love that terminal squeak? The Big Bang, first or last, will blast off without me. Fellow’s paper beating me out by a mile may be published too early, pie in the sky, amount to nothing at all.”

  “Then why is it elegant?”

  “You hear me talk solutions—beautiful, stunning. Some friend of Ein stein’s said elegance ought to be left to the tailor, the cobbler. Take Gott, for instance. The proof of his pudding may amount to nothing more than his elegant labels—Gucci, Armani, or so we students suppose.”

  But she wasn’t listening—as she had so often—to the tolerable lectures attempting to make his work real to her. When they lived downtown in the loft, she had followed his every word, or tried to. At the turn of the millennium, Louise understood perfectly why the world would not end in a slippage of time, Y2K snuff the soul out of our computers. With reparation we would move on. Artie had called his return to mathematics the makeup class in whatever the world might be made of, that his scribbled lineup of symbols and numbers were the merest foot soldiers to a general theory of everything, don’t you know? At times he would attempt to draw strings coupling, or make visible the loop-de-loop of quantum frenzy. She never quite got it but took the pencil from his hand, shaded in, crosshatched to get the depth of possible dimensions. Her own work had given way to house and children as though, much like old Gottschalk, she wiped away the rubber crumbs of her art, leaving the smudge of line and perspective unsolved.

  On the South Lawn below, a card table flaps its antiwar poster. No patrons to read the leaflets, sign the petition. Too brisk, too bright a day, the message worn, ineffectual. Long time ago, 1968, that war, the students had stormed the president’s office, but that siege doesn’t come to mind; she just wishes he had not used that gentle folk song in his account of her work. She must tear down her kitchen art. The private notice of her mourning seems foolish today, Art Speak to no listener other than Artie. Once she had drawn the arrow of time for Freeman, a birthday card, and once exhibited a cloudy solution in a bottle of water, half empty, half full, a show playing with uncertainty, the assault of time on the body, that’s all. Time passing as we know it, day by day. Not mere numbers, he had said of the evaporating water in a hand-blown bottle—his judgment kindly, self-effacing. Now as she listened to his babble of knots and loops, she did not try to understand, not this time. Perhaps she was never meant to. From the rising pitch of his voice, she guessed he was going on about proof. What matter whether the conjecture was true or false? Something absurd, how he fell into the swamp of the excluded middle, laughing, still foolin’ around.

  He said: “Oh, Artie,” imitating the caress of her incalculable scolds.

  “Don’t,” she said, “don’t go there.” She held the notebooks to her breast, his new one from Pearl Paint and the old greenie with her bird notations, heard the shuffling of papers into his backpack and the familiar snap of his laptop as he prepared to walk Cyril to school each morning. Closing up shop, but she did not think so, not now, perhaps never. He couldn’t give up playing the numbers. On the way home, they would speak, a few words with a bitter edge to be glossed over. Then they would talk for how many years? They would move, though never far from a classroom, and she would again have a studio. Change of direction might not suit them, not again. They would honor the yearly trip to the farm in Wisconsin. What mattered was here and now, the probable life just outside the city, a garden perhaps, doghouse, sandbox, but never a plastic feeder to fake out the hummingbirds with sugar in a bowl. She would plant red flowers to lure them, though she could not yet name them—cardinal flowers. Our Sylvie would discover her young friends still within range of their starting line, Lower Broadway. He would make light of Lou’s fears. She would endure his mixed metaphors, his puns, the dated phrases of his grandfather, Cyril O’Connor. The difficult pearl buttons at the top of every nightgown would be snipped off for the hope of easy access on nights reclaiming their eager bodies in the loft, skin to skin. Nightclothes came with the children. She wished he had not used that song. It belonged to his mother, to her mother, too. Or perhaps he did not remember the appropriate line: Where have all the young girls gone? Taken husbands every one. Though that was not true, not true of his mother, who left him by accident to an orphan boy life. He switched off the buzzing fluorescent light, the room behind her in semidarkness now. She thought, how unfair: Artie lost, Bertie won. Would they still go to Connecticut for the Christmas goose, the tasteful Boyce glitter, snubs from their spoiled children? She would not speak; the anger was still there, a clutch in her throat that he’d never told her, that he’d written his failure out as though it’s no more than a story. Put words in her mouth. On the way home, she would relent, hand over the notebooks, say good job to his account of their day in the Park, entirely man-made, their birding, her fears. But that would never do, for that’s what she said to the kids—good job—when they showed her their brave efforts with Play-Doh, Legos, with Magic Markers of their refrigerator art.

  The sun at the window was still bright, almost blinding. Squinting, Louise could see a Frisbee fly over the patch of lawn on the campus designated for play, and a tour guide leading prospective students and their parents up the steps into Low, where they would be awed by the dome of the rotunda, for sure a temple of learning. She could hear Artie scrape back the chair from his old desk, funky like Gottschalk’s. As though there for a show at the end of this day, birds flitted from tree to tree on Campus Walk. She would not call them city pigeons. Pale mourning doves, she named them in a coo. Colum-um-bidae. When she turned, her husband was erasing the intricate problem on the blackboard. Chalk dust fell in a haze. Not to steal his words, she waited for him to say it.

  “Clean slate.”

  Daybook, October 25, 2007

  The children, by which we mean grandchildren, have carved a pumpkin for us, lest we forget. He—it’s a he—sits on our front hall table. His snarling smile, jagged teeth, triangulated eyes don’t scare us at all. Part of their pleasure was making the mess. They are scheming, wacky tricks, I presume. We’re stuck in the waiting game. The costume I’ve been wearing these many years, middle-class woman in the last days of the Holocene, surely belongs to someone else, though the plot as it plays out, remains the same. Conception to the grave. The rest is filler.

  In Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich, read just weeks ago, a posturing public servant reviews his life to discover that his ambition has been a burden to his family. As it was to Tolstoy’s, so we are told by Nabokov, spreading the guilt around. Prompted by this confession, I swing toward you on my ergonomic chair. You are at the door of my workroom. I speak of the years you’ve put up with my scribbling.

  Apology dismissed, you suggest we close the little house in the Berks this year, As a precaution.

  Caution on your mind these days. While I have a formal gratitude for
your care, what might happen if I throw it to the wind? I mourn the loss of our wrangling, the way you screen my fancy through reality check. We will miss the view of the garden safe in its blanket of snow. Still, we are in perfect accord.

  Not yet, not in October!

  Settle into your books.

  You closed the flue, discarded the ashes good for the garden.

  Here in the El Dorado the fireplace in our apartment was sealed up before we settled in. A pretentious display of marble. The mantel’s crenellations and brass rosettes refer to some striver’s hope in the wake of the Great Depression. Elegance—now you see it: now you don’t.

  In any case, the little house is closed as a precaution. I’m confined to the safety of our twin towers and the Park, all stories within reach, legends of the season. I mean to say: more than a magician’s trick, though plain as the nose on my face, the decorative dead wood in the fireplace is not seen anymore. The screen to protect us from hot embers, useless. Antique Roadshow stuff—an astrolabe, highboy, cradle, Death of the Virgin , Goya’s Disasters of War (second state).

  Our Sylvie: A Fireside Story

  And God said to Noah, I have determined to make an end of all flesh; For the earth is filled with violence through them; behold I will destroy them with the earth; Make yourself an ark of gopher wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch.

  —Genesis 11:13-15

  Sylvia Neisswonger is strapped into her seat heading east. To her right she sees the image of a plane on a small screen. To her left, bright blue sky stretches above suds of cloud as far as the eye can see. Perhaps that distance can be figured. Martha, her stepdaughter, measures depths of the sea, so why not the distance to beyond? The plane on the screen is trailing a red line as it flies across America, eating up the distance from San Diego to JFK. Sylvie can’t figure how to call this image up. She looks to her seatmate’s screen. He’s a young man, young to her, with a beak of nose on a fleshy face. To Sylvie he looks assembled—floppy ears, receding chin, his body a soft bulk. He has fallen asleep, thumb in the page of an airport thriller, not thrilling enough, though a car bomb in the act of exploding a U.S. Army vehicle is blazoned on Run for Cover. Soldiers in splotched camouflage stand, thank heaven, safely aside. Carts with salty snacks and beverage of choice have been wheeled down the aisle. In the hum of the pressurized cabin, she hears the occasional cough, a shrill cry, perhaps the baby who gave her a grin when infants, the old and infirm were boarded first. She pops the flesh-colored hearing aids out of her ears. The dumb show in the cabin surrounds her.

  Quite deaf, though not infirm, as the guards at the Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla might tell you, tell that every day of her visit, Mrs. Waite, as she is properly known, climbed uphill to have lunch with Martha. They were more than welcoming. “Gallant”: that’s the word she searches out, Perez and Bonfilio not checking the visitor ID that hung round her neck, quick to escort her up the steps, open the door as though the Institute were a first-class hotel, not a temple of science. Perez has three children. His wife’s name is Lola. Bonfilio is studying bookkeeping at night. Calling out loud and strong—Beautiful day, Mrs. Waite. How they did love to chat when she made it to the top of the hill, breathed easy. Waite, her legal name on two documents submitted at the airport in New York, is the name of her stepdaughter, Dr. Waite, Martha. Checking through Security brought back the memory of her first U.S. passport and the name she was born with: von Neisswonger. Yes, her mother, Inga von Neisswonger, had charmed the American consul in Toulouse. The papers he procured were not fraudulent; her passport with the photo of a wistful girl, stunned by the camera, hair braided tight, perfect little snowflakes knit into her Tyrolean sweater.

  My brother Otto had a sweater with the very same snowflakes. Absurd, our father said,—snowflakes never match. Each one has its own crystal network. Pleased with herself for telling Martha that story with its bit of crystallography, for it’s hard to find common ground, always has been, to come upon a moment when she was not the woman with the trace of an accent, with words sought for in plain English. When she was not that intruder—Call me Sylvie—who came all of a sudden years and years ago to an old house in Connecticut to take the place of Martha’s dead mother.

  My brother Otto . . .

  Your brother Otto?

  Yes, older by three years, already at the gymnasium. Always showing off, explaining the workings of the Jacquard loom as though our father would not know a thousand snowflakes, if you like, might be programmed, woven exactly the same.

  Martha said: Most likely not woven, then held forth on the invention of knitting machines, correcting Sylvie not as sharply as Papa Neisswonger had corrected his son. Sylvie understood about the Jacquard loom, that it didn’t knit sweaters. She was ten years old at the time, some years older when her mother told the story, the way Inga told family stories to her new friends in New York, always leaving out the name of her son as though Otto might scratch, a painful burr in her throat. It is quite ridiculous, this loose strand of a childhood sweater that will lead Sylvie where she goes too often this past year, to the stucco villa in Innsbruck with its red-tiled roof, handblown glass in the windows transforming the garden to a shimmering mirage. Shuffling memories, laying out the cards.

  Both von Neisswonger and his son were escorted out the double front door to the purring Mercedes by Nazi officers with thick Berlinerisch accents, Otto clutching his scuffed football like a ruined globe in his hands. Sylvie had once planned to go back to see the house, now a small hotel—how odd it would be to see her room rented for the night, her little bed with its white coverlet transformed to the vast comfort of king-size, the frieze of twined edelweiss painted out. She had once thought to return with Cyril, show her old lover the house on the river Inn, the imperial squares of the city, the Alpine mines her father worked, summer and winter. She will not go now, now that he’s gone, lies with May, his wife of many years, leaving Sylvie the comfort of his family. A wonder how they have sorted themselves out. As she packed for the yearly visit to Martha, My trip to California must do me, said to the neighbors who knew nothing of her abandoned journey to Innsbruck but would look after the house in Connecticut, take in the mail, overwater the plants. The house of Bob Waite, her late husband, she had explained to one of Martha’s pals at the Institute. Late. I have never understood that expression.

  Better late than never, the fellow said, a rude remark now she thinks of it. They were a funny crowd, these men and women who keep track of the wind, who search for holes in the sea, who count time in the millions of years, a time when the waters rose, a time before the Great Flood became a Bible story. Now the deluge was all too real, happening fast in their calculations of melt. A stargazer, declared a crank by these scientists, believed he had found Noah’s Ark, what was left of it, poking up in a satellite picture of Mount Ararat. The waters were now rising, not receding, so what did he hope to salvage, they asked—a blockbuster script? The animals, two by two, cast from the San Diego Zoo? The Titanic in biblical dress? Sylvie had thought to stop their laughter—The ark was sturdy, sealed with pitch—then thought not, for she was their guest, the powdery old lady listening in at the end of the table. Martha took her side. Prehistoric sea creatures found at Yellowstone, so why not? Plucking a hair from Noah’s beard, DNA coaxing—could be Jurassic Park.

  Sylvie believes that as soon as she left each day after lunch, the scholars went back to talking their winds and waves while she braved the freeway in her rented Toyota, found her way back to Martha’s cottage. Still, they seemed to her quite silly, these brilliant seashore observers laughing at last night’s TV, making jokes of the State of the Union. Well, the State of the Union was perilous, they well knew. She did not cut into their play, though it was all too easy to translate White House blather they laughed at to the German propaganda of the Reich. Heimat. Vaterland. Ehre. As for Noah, the one just man, she searched the shelves in the cottage wanting to read what God ordered by way of an ark. Martha
did not own a Bible. Sylvie is certain about the pitch, the viscous caulk Bob Waite applied each Spring to his trawler. The smell was god-awful, impossible to wash the black stuff out of his clothes. Each year when he finished, that thrifty man threw his ruined jeans and work shirt away.

  Far as Sylvie can see, these lunch breaks at the Institute and an occasional barbecue are Martha’s only life beyond the lab. There’s her bicycling team on Sundays and a correspondence with a professor at Woods Hole that seems to have gone beyond ice cores and ocean sediment. Martha, well into middle age, is flustered as she speaks of coming east to present a paper at a conference organized by her—pausing for the appropriate word—her mentor.

  So mentor it is, though Sylvie hopes he is more. She will call Martha when she gets home to Connecticut. Still early in California, her big athletic girl with clipped gray hair will answer on the cell even if she is in the midst of climate calculations or e-mailing her prospective lover of an event some million years ago. What she remembers of Martha’s industry, what she told the scientists at lunch one day, was the story of when this Sylvie was brought to the house on a hill, Bob Waite’s unwelcome surprise. She took his children to the shore, the rim of sand on Long Island Sound, that small puddle, and the girl she did not yet know dug, dug until the water seeped up from China, saving the pebbles and a necklace of slimy seaweed to examine at home. Martha’s future, Sylvie told these men and women plotting the fate of the Pacific coast, was written in the sand.

  And she sleeps as the red line makes its way across New Mexico up to Denver, till chicken or beef, hard to tell, though she recalls cupping her ear to hear the selection. She eats only the bland cookie, sleeps again, and when she wakes, the big screen at the front of the cabin displays a young man with a smirk on his face driving a mountain trail, a treacherous journey, though Sylvie’s seatmate is laughing—the hearty ho-ho of that Mitteleuropa actor in the old movies, jowls shaking in joy or despair. She imagines the thrill of the chase, the tough words of a cop who looks fierce . . . well, not really. Laughter across the aisle as the clown drives off the cliff, a well-known clown, and next thing he is jumping the cables on the set, flubbing his lines for the retake. Oh, they are only making a movie. Sylvie enjoys the pantomime, easily guesses the stuntman’s flirtation with the script girl, then nods off again, a dreamless sleep without fear, without longing—and when she wakes, the little plane on the small screen’s heading toward western Pennsylvania, and the long descent toward New York and home.