He dropped the mike and tore off the headphones, bellowing himself, “No!” He leaped straight ahead into the wall of bushes and trees, clawing aside the branches and screaming, “No,” ripping the tape recorder off himself as he went, the branches and twigs scratching at his face and his arms, poking at his eyes and gouging into the skin of his arms and hands, seeing for a long moment only the greens and browns of the bushes he was tearing through.
They had been too scared of his own cry to run. When he broke through the brush, he saw them huddled against a tree and when he turned toward them Danny actually cowered, raising his arm to ward off a blow. He could still hear the screams, off to his right, where he could see something small and gray-brown thrashing convulsively in a clump of ferns. It was a groundhog.
They had shot a groundhog, which was now lying on its back, its paws fiercely punching the air above it and screaming. The arrow had gone in at one shoulder and about one inch of the steel tip had pushed its way through the thick part of the animal’s body to emerge just below the other leg. Blood was coming out of its mouth and splattering the ferns, which joined in the thrashing.
He picked up a branch about the size of a baseball bat and took careful aim. He brought the branch out and down in one sweeping arc into the animal’s head. It actually made a dent in the head and felt like hitting a rolled-up rug except that a rolled-up rug is the same all the way through, and this animal was made up of a thin layer of fur and skin laid over the bare skull whose brittleness had tried to protect the soft, vulnerable organ of the brain but had failed under the impact of the wood David had slammed into it with all his weight.
The animal lay still. The ferns, in another moment, were also still, and the screaming had stopped. The groundhog was quiet. The clearing was silent. The forest continued to produce the general background noise of leaves and branches moving against one another in the breezes. He turned to face the children, but they were not there anymore.
As he came in from the bright sunlight, he heard the TV going. Monster-movie music, complete with crashing thunder and driving rain. François had come back from Nova Scotia two days before, and David was starting to feel a little pissed to see a pattern developing—sitting around the house all day watching the boob tube instead of being outdoors doing something wholesome—swimming or tennis or whatever. All this incredible weather going to waste.
There was something strange about that music, but before he could figure out what it was he was inside the TV room, which was empty. The set was on, but it was a quiz show, whose host smiled maniacally as quiz-show music enveloped him in its hectic brasses. The blaring stopped abruptly as the screen cut to a young woman in a tennis dress sitting in front of the mirror of a dressing table. She was talking about Tampax and David could still hear the monster-movie music and the thunder. It was coming from over his head, upstairs. Snippets of Wagner and Richard Strauss.
He switched off the set and walked upstairs, thinking, Why can’t they just listen to Billy Joel or Blue Oyster Cult, like normal kids? When he looked into Danny’s room it was empty too, and he remembered for one panicky moment that the front door had been standing wide open when he came in. What if someone had come in while the kids were in here by themselves?
The door to Danny’s closet stood a little ajar, and the music was coming from there.
“Danny?” he called out. “François?”
A large pile of clothes was lying rumpled on the guest bed. He moved into the room and went to the closet. He pulled open the door. In the back wall of the closet, three feet in front of him, was another door, also ajar, that he had never known was there. The music floated out through the opening on a wave of thunder that actually drowned out his call: “Danny? François?”
When he opened the door, he saw a steep flight of stairs going up into a dimness that was now filled with the pulsations and electronic screechings of the music. A flash like lightning suddenly etched the whole ceiling above the stairwell into blinding, momentary being. Underneath the music was a steady hum, and with it some other noises, like some sort of machine, repeating themselves at regular intervals. The noises were something small, like a sewing machine, and then over that steady humming there were these other regular clunks and bumps. Now the thunder rolled down the stairs into him, actually jolting him.
As he climbed the stairs, more and more of the room came into view above the stairwell, the joists of the ceiling and the studs of the walls lit by flashes of lightning. Whatever was making that humming mechanical noise was something that was spread out, that took up the whole area, something that must have been on top of the tables he now saw set up on sawhorses, the tables set together with their edges flush so that they made a sort of second floor up there, about waist high. A flash of lightning lit up with painful clarity the model trains and tracks and towns and mountains that covered these tables.
From behind him Danny’s voice cried, “Hi, Dad!”
He turned, and there, in the dimness of the room, behind some sort of panel, were Danny and François.
“What the hell?” David said.
Danny said something he could not hear. The boy was smiling. Now he turned toward François. The music softened for a moment and David heard him say, “Turn it down for a minute,” and abruptly the level of the music dropped to almost nothing.
David could feel his own face go wide in a smile as he asked, gesturing to take in the whole room, “What is this?”
“Isn’t it neat!” Danny said. He said something else, but at that moment an enormous clap of thunder stunned David from behind. Danny turned to François and made a scissors motion with his fingers. François reached over to a switch on the panel. Silence, except for the hums and clicks of the trains as they toiled along their tracks, even their speed scaled down to size.
“What is this?” David was saying. “Whose is this? Has this been here all along?”
“Isn’t it incredible! François showed it to me. We’re not breaking anything. François knows how to work it.”
Just then François turned up a rheostat and the lights came up and the room grew into visibility all around him. David was surprised to see how small it really was. Every available inch of space was taken up by the model railroad, whose tracks spread out in all directions, going even beyond the room, into the sort of crawl space between the roof of the house and the ceilings of the various rooms. Five or six different trains must have been going at once, some of them puffing smoke, others sleek modern diesels with immense long lines of cars stretched out behind them around curves and into and out of tunnels, into the mountains and around the beams that supported the roof. Along the tracks billboards advertised whiskey and cigarettes, as well as a movie version (“All of Its Thundering Power Comes to the Screen!”) of R. Charles Mortimer, Jr.’s “Beloved Best-Seller, Gens and Justice: The Law in Early Roman Civilization.” Forests of individual trees covered vast stretches of the land. In the mountains a logging camp was in full operation; a log sluice filled with running water was carrying scale-model logs to a pond where they were loaded onto flatcars. Behind a beam David saw a quarry, and off in a far corner of the crawl space above the ceiling of his own bedroom a factory was working, some of its windows lit, some of its chimneys emitting wispy puffs of smoke. Against the far wall the wide gray Hudson flowed. The sharp smell he had noticed was creosote. Even the ties of the railroad tracks had been brushed with creosote. Near the control panel was a town with a depot and a post office, houses with backyards with real laundry hanging from the clotheslines. Coming Home was playing at the local movie theater. The hoops on the backboards in the playground of the school had real nets on them. And in this entire world they were the only three people.
François had known about it all along, but it had been more than a year since he had been up here. He used to come up here with the Mortimer boy “all the time” before, before that happened. He had learned how to work the panel then, although he still forgot a switch open someplace an
d derailed a train from time to time.
Mr. Mortimer and his son had designed and built it. It had thirty-six different engines, and a railroad yard (“over there”) where the engines could be made up into trains out of the hundreds and hundreds of cars. They had also installed six tape decks in the little control booth and about twenty-four speakers either against the roof or under the table the trains ran on. Four different projectors and several batteries of strobe lights took care of the lighting effects. It could do the electrical storm, and it could do a sunset and a dawn. It could also do a sort of psychedelic light show or a 1920s flickering train movie, or it could just do train music.
“Did the boy write the music?”
“Yeah. He didn’t have to go to school or anything. He was smarter than all the teachers. He made up the music on his synthesizer downstairs. Some days he wouldn’t do anything all day long but make up music on that thing. He would set it up so that you couldn’t even hear it; the music would go straight from the machine, through the wires and into the tape.”
It was pretty schlocky music, David thought, sort of a cross between Ferde Grofé and Miklos Rózsa, but for twelve years old! Of course it could also have been tongue-in-cheek. He looked at Danny, who was sitting there just shaking his head. He saw David looking at him, and said, “Hey, Dad, did you see this?”
It was a house at the edge of the woods. It had what appeared to be a whole collection of roofs, all covered with something like tinfoil, all sloping at different angles. Looking through the window of the TV room, David saw a scale-model TV set, which must have had a tiny blue bulb in it: its eerie light filled the little room.
“This is incredible,” David said.
“Look at this,” Danny said, and pushed a button on the control panel. The entire top story of the house lifted up on a shaft that came up through the center of the model, revealing the rooms of the first floor—the dining room, set for a formal dinner with several goblets at each place setting, the kitchen with the badly installed dishwasher. On the windowsill and on the floor below it were tiny dots representing the bees.
He looked at Danny, who was saying, “That isn’t even what I wanted to show you. I pushed the wrong button.”
Now the first floor of the house rose up on the shaft and closed against the bottom of the raised second story. In the cellar of the house was an exact replica of the studio. The tape reels could be moved with your fingers. The synthesizer stood in its appropriate corner. On the top shelf of the storage unit was a tiny black binder.
David looked up at Danny, shaking his head. Danny had an enormous grin on his face. He pushed another button and David saw the two stories of the house lower themselves with a click over the cellar. But the roof stayed where it was, allowing him to see into the bedrooms, the upstairs bathroom, even the closets. There was the secret door in the back of the closet in Danny’s room, there were the steps that led up to the secret room where the trains were.
He looked at Danny, realizing that his own mouth was open. His son was loving this, sitting in the little booth with his hands on the controls. The boy pointed at the house, and David looked again. Now the roofs all rose a little higher while the walls that had connected them with the second floor lowered themselves. He was looking into the room he was standing in, the train set spread out on all the tables, the tracks running far beyond the room itself into the spaces above the ceilings of the other rooms, the tracks sometimes running past miles of forest. On the far side of the room was the wide gray Hudson. Near the control panel was a white house at the edge of the woods.
On the floor inside the little control booth, under the built-in bench the boys were sitting on, was a cardboard box. Danny was much too excited, but François remembered to ask David if he would like to “work the panel.” The only way to get into the control booth was to crawl under the table, and that was when David saw the box.
“What’s this?” he asked. But neither of the boys had noticed it. Inside the cardboard carton marked “Bose” were several dozen boxed reels of tape, a tall, stiff-bound notebook marked “Ledger” on the spine, half filled with irregularly dated journal entries, some in French and German and some in what looked like a homemade shorthand, and various rubber-banded bundles of papers and letters, including one batch of letters from an attorney in Harrisburg. From the papers in the box, the poems he had found in the studio, the house itself and François and his dad, David was able to reconstitute the whole story.
R. Charles Mortimer, Jr., inherited his father’s prudence and single-mindedness. R. Charles Mortimer had been born in Orono, Maine, and studied physics at Bowdoin College, and then at M.I.T. He did not like Cambridge, and missed his family painfully while he was there, but he had been told that M.I.T. was the place to go if you wanted to insure yourself a good job, and so he stayed and persevered. Physics to him, as he plied his slide rule in his dormitory room or in the library, was a soaring music that bathed the entire universe and every piece thereof in its splendor. It explained, it predicted, it controlled. It was all vast principles and immutable laws, which even as they dispelled mystery, grew in elegance and in scope until they had become mysterious themselves. Like a music that flowed, enfolding the room in a glow and creating a room, an architecture of its own, physics erected a structure as massive and delicate as a cathedral.
When he completed his degree, he took a job with an engineering firm in New York City. He had never been to New York before and did not like it when he got there—it was so big and dirty, and the people were even more brusque than in Cambridge—but it was a bird in the hand. The salary was a handsome one and he could begin immediately to repay his father the cost of his education, as he had agreed. It was the first job he was offered, and it was the only company for which he ever worked. After he had settled his obligation to his father, he began to allow himself small pleasures, like accepting the invitations to go to Staten Island on picnics with the family who lived across the hall, whose eldest daughter he eventually married.
In his work he quickly calculated stresses and tolerances to seven or eight decimal places, and this efficient, meticulous thoroughness was not lost on his employers, who gladly advanced him in salary and rank over the years; the advances brought with them, as his wife suggested, moves to larger apartments, and eventually to a house near Stony Brook, in whose study he sat most evenings after dinner, painting miniatures with the aid of a magnifying glass set in a metal stand that he had designed himself and then had fabricated at a machine shop which a co-worker had told him about. He brought the same attention to detail, the same quiet assumption—that error-free work was within the unhurried grasp of everyone—to his dealings with people. Errors, either of commission or omission, were not heinous sins, but simply part of the process one got through, patiently. You corrected them and went ahead. If someone else made them you pointed them out, and if he made them again you replaced him, though that equation too sometimes worked out differently, when, for the sake of economy, it was necessary to tolerate a measure of inefficiency.
It was not long before he found himself doing less and less engineering, which he had never liked—it was all plodding routine, worked out according to recipes, with the air conditioner for accompaniment—and more overseeing of the work of the others—draftsmen, and eventually even senior engineers—which he also did not enjoy. He learned their names because it was necessary.
The one time his son saw his office was from a suite in a hotel on the downtown side of Fifty-third Street. He was sitting in one room of this suite, waiting to be interviewed in the adjoining room for his first (and only) appointment as Assistant Professor of History. The other candidate for the position lacked poise. Before the interview, R. Charles Mortimer, Jr., had walked up Seventh Avenue knowing that this was where his father worked, and feeling a thrill of secret knowledge as he passed the doorway that bore the address of his father’s building. It wasn’t that he had disobeyed his father; rather, he had done and was continuing to
do something that did not bear out his father’s expectations or assumptions, and so there was a thrill of the vaguely forbidden, or at least disapproved-of, to the simple fact of his walking up this sidewalk, like these other people and yet unlike them. He had in his mind an image of his father some forty-three stories above him, working and perhaps thinking of the street outside and below the windows of his office. But his father’s conception of that street did not include himself walking there, walking there “looking for a job.”
His father had assumed that he would enter a profession, and that it would be a profession that rewarded endeavor and competence adequately. He had listened to his son with a vague distaste when the lad had come into his study to tell him that he did not want to practice law but to study it, especially its origins and its development in history. Mr. Mortimer was still holding his fine-pointed brush. He looked from his son’s face to the picture he was rendering in miniature, a photomicrograph of zinc, whose magnified image swam in the lens in front of him as he moved his head. I made a mistake, he thought.
“This is a mistake,” he said.
“It’s what I want to do,” his son said.
“Nothing can be done.”
The decision had changed forever the quality of the distance between them. R. Charles Mortimer, Jr., now looked out the window into the office in the building across the street and two stories down. His father was standing in front of a drafting table. A man in shirt sleeves was standing next to him looking down at the same drawing. The man was talking, and from time to time he pointed to something in the drawing. His father moved only once, pointing with his pencil at a corner of the drawing, which the man rolled up and took away. That was what his father “did.” When people asked him what his father did—kids at school or at college, or the woman whom he had already asked to marry him (after he had gotten established)—he told them he was an engineer or that he worked for an engineering firm. This is what it meant. Just then Professor Hartpence opened the door and asked him to come in.
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