Magnetic Field(s)

by Ron Loewinsohn

  The one other imprudent thing he did was to marry Allison before his position at the college was secure, before he had been given tenure, but in the end no harm had come from that. She had introduced herself to him at the tennis club that his mother had insisted he join because it would give him poise and confidence, and so he played tennis. On some of their dates he discovered that he was very passionate in his desires. He thought about these passions guiltily after he got home from these encounters, wondering where such intensities of feeling might lead him. He asked her to marry him in the summer before his junior year at college, and they both settled down into something that felt like a zone of being together that lasted more than seven years. On the first anniversary of their engagement he “almost lost his head” again as he was kissing her good night, and from then on he was more careful on their regular dates and especially watchful when they went out to celebrate their anniversary.

  When he told Allison about the letter informing him of his appointment, she said, “I think we ought to get married this summer.”

  “But I don’t even have a house.”

  “We’ll get an apartment.”

  “But I don’t even know if there are any apartments up there.” He had imagined himself sharing a dorm room with some other new assistant professor, as he had always shared dorm rooms with a different student every year.

  “We’ll go look.” And the next weekend they took the train from Grand Central. Two hours later they were walking along the tree-lined side streets of Rhinebeck looking for FOR RENT signs, and eventually they made arrangements with a German woman who ran a boardinghouse. His father said nothing, but kissed the bride and sent them on a honeymoon to Europe. After that they settled down to being a professor and a professor’s wife, living in two adjoining rooms of Mrs. Rückert’s boardinghouse. It was in those days that he formed the habit of doing his research and writing at the college.

  He learned the students’ names as well as he could, because it was necessary. But as soon as his classroom or class-connected duties were done he would close his office door behind the last student and either open the book at the place marked as it sat on its little stand beside his desk, or put his coat on over his cardigan sweater and walk to his carrel in the library. There, in the cool underground catacomb-like stacks, he would pore over photocopies of papyrus documents and slowly, painstakingly, come to his conclusions.

  Sometimes, from the desk of his carrel two stories underground, he would look down the long, narrow hallway between the stacks, lit only every twenty feet or so by a bulb in a cage that jutted down from the ceiling like the root of a plant. The books themselves were so slender, about a hundred of them would fit on a shelf. It gave him an odd excitement to be here, under the ground, in touch in this way with the lives of other people. Sometimes (but only after he had completed the work he had allotted himself for that day) he would stroll down the aisles stacked from floor to ceiling with shelves of books, touching and randomly taking down books and reading their dedications and acknowledgments: “To my mentor and guide,” “To my students in the seminar on,” “To my ————— colleagues and —————, without whom,” “To my friend, Professor —————,” “To my brother,” “But most of all to my wife, who typed these pages with such painstaking care”; “who compiled the index”; “who brought me cups of coffee all that dark autumn in Reykjavik”; “who brought me lemonade on the terrace of our little pension in Firenze”; “who stroked the cat and stoked the fire.”

  He would get something of this feeling of excitement when he walked down the hall at the college and saw, through the open crack of an office door, the back of one of his colleagues bent over a typewriter. But there the totality of the effect was interfered with by the actual presence of the man, grossly affirming its rights there. Once he walked into Hartpence’s office to ask him something, and to his surprise, though the door was ajar, Hartpence was not there. Then he had something of the feeling he’d had looking out the window across Fifty-third Street and down two stories into his father’s office.

  The dedications and acknowledgments in the library were not the same excitement, but they pointed to the same feeling. They were the effect of something he could know only in this way. When these authors had written them, who had they thought would read them? And where? How could they have imagined him standing here in this underground dim silence, holding the book open to this early page, so near the outside cover of the book and yet so much closer to its living center than the text? The feeling he got then was satisfying, even though he knew that he was at those moments being in a place that stubbornly continued to be empty in spite of his being in it. He had dedicated his own book to his father, and in the acknowledgments had closed by saying, “and especially to my wife, whose loving patience sustained me as I worked.” He had hoped she would not ask him about it, and she did not.

  She played tennis when she could, and when her father died and her mother moved back to Harrisburg with her half of the inheritance, she bought a membership in the local tennis club for the two of them. Then she bought the white house at the edge of the woods. The sets of books were there when they moved in. Allison put a baby grand in the living room and had the kitchen redone. She resumed her piano lessons and started cooking lessons. She also started the women’s chorus, and brought a kind of ferocity into their lovemaking, which was only the latest of the things about his wife that he neither expected nor understood.

  One morning at breakfast she looked at him across the table and said, “I’m pregnant.” He thought her tone was funny, but it was just another of the things about her he did not understand, in a way similar to this thing now going on inside her that was called “being pregnant.” She was now like one of those books or one of those offices when the professor had gone off and left the door open. She was the place of a life that excluded him. At the window a couple of bees were buzzing to get out.

  His son was born and his father died in the same week, and he found himself independently wealthy at a time when he was too preoccupied to take any advantage of that wealth. He continued to work because he always had, and it had never occurred to him to do anything else. The son was a lot to preoccupy him.

  As a baby he did not smile. When he looked at people, especially children, it made them uncomfortable because he never blinked. This is not unusual in babies, but in Mortimer’s son it was combined with a look of such penetration that he made people wonder if this wasn’t something different from “regular alertness.” He looked as if he were simply biding his time till he could learn the language these fools spoke, in order to tell them—without anger or resentment, and only a trace of impatience—what fools they were. He almost never cried. He never went through a babbling stage. He never babbled, and so far as anyone could tell, he never made any mistake. He spoke his first word at six months: “Up,” meaning “Pick me up.” By a year, he was having conversations, and he first read Dr. Seuss, whose books he very quickly left behind, before he was two.

  Nobody was quite sure when he discovered the piano or the woods. Several times Allison heard the piano, but she thought it was Valerie, the student who was sitting him in the afternoons, and Valerie of course thought it was Allison. Then one day Valerie walked into the kitchen just as Allison was coming in the back door wearing her tennis outfit and looking a little sweaty, and the two women chatted for a moment before Allison asked where the boy was. He was in the living room playing the notes of the Liszt he had heard his mother play. He was five then, and within the year he was playing not only better than she but better than Myra Brubaker, who had studied at Juilliard.

  There was never any question of his going to school. By the time he was old enough for the first grade he knew more than the teachers, and by the time he was seven he was composing music, most of it lugubrious, which was not surprising, given the boy’s characteristic manner. He had not smiled as a baby, and did not often smile as a boy. He was not pouty or bad-tempered, just
somewhere else. As often as not it was the woods.

  It began when he was around five that his mother or the sitter would take her eyes off him for a second and he would simply not be there the next time she looked. Panic and lots of calling for him throughout the house and into the green mass of trees and leaves and branches that was the woods, and after half an hour or so they would hear him answering, “Yes?”—calmly, as if he could not fathom or even acknowledge their upset.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Next door.”

  One day Valerie followed him, keeping just out of sight and ducking behind a tree whenever he turned around, till he looked back and called out to her: “It’s O.K. You don’t have to hide.” But when she came up and walked beside him he had no more to say to her than he ever did.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking.”

  “Looking for what?”

  “Oh, things.”

  And just then he found one, and bent down to examine a large, flat orange mushroom growing horizontally out of a fallen log.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  He gave her its Latin name and added, “Poisonous.”

  “Oooh,” she said. “I wouldn’t eat any of them.”

  “It’s beautiful,” he said, “and the good ones are delicious.”

  At other times he would stand very still, his arms held out a little from his body, his head bent forward slightly, cocking it from side to side.

  “What is it?” Valerie asked.

  Without moving his head, his eyes clicked over to give her a look that said he would give her an answer but right now he did not want to break his concentration.

  “The woods,” he said.

  He never stopped walking in the woods, even after he had persuaded his father to let him build the studio down in the cellar. Later his father would go with him on these walks, go everywhere with him, and they would build the railroad room together. But at first when he went “next door” alone he brought back specimens—butterflies and crickets, moths and mayflies, squirrels and chipmunks and once even a groundhog—all dead. He would explain slowly and gravely what they were, their genus and their species and so forth, and how they died and how he had found them. Then he would allow them to be taken away and disposed of.

  He never formed any attachment to these things or to any favorite blankets or stuffed animals or toys or to any imaginary playmates or to any actual playmates. One day, a year or so before the end, he met François on a path in the woods and brought him home to play with the railroad. But Mr. Mortimer suspected that the boy had heard him and his wife talking the night before about their concern that he had no playmates. François was introduced, formally, as the two boys stood in the living room. “This is my friend François. May we go up and play with the train together?”

  Up until then he had divided his time between the studio, the woods, the train room and his own carrel in the stacks of the library at the college—his father had made the arrangements for the carrel. At first he went to the library almost every weekday, always pausing as he went past the chapel to look down into the cellar of the Barstow vault. But later he went only every other day, and finally, toward the last, almost not at all.

  One day R. Charles Mortimer, Jr., looked into his son’s eyes, and the change that came over him from that day forward was remarked on by the entire community. He did not change his manner, which remained restrained and proper, but he began, for the first time in anyone’s certain knowledge, to spend time with another person. Mortimer had never been a hermit, and he and his wife regularly invited his colleagues to dinner or accepted their invitations to dinner. They went to all the required social functions and, generally, blended into the background, where people assumed they enjoyed themselves. They appeared in the audience at concerts and plays, and Mr. Mortimer was always there when the women’s chorus performed. He even played tennis, with a somewhat mechanical style, and was always gracious in defeat, and even, on those occasions, in victory. Mr. Mortimer played tennis because people expected him to play, and invited him to play, so he did, and when the game was over they expected him to behave in a certain way, so he did, although he could never imitate their jocose, bantering manner. But no one had ever known him to choose to spend a lot of time with any other person.

  On the day when Valerie had gone with the boy into the woods where he had shown her the poisonous mushroom, the two of them had come home to find Mr. Mortimer just getting back from the college.

  “We’ve been to the forest!” Valerie told him excitedly.

  “Oh,” Mr. Mortimer said. He looked a little surprised to see his son, as if he had been preoccupied with something. He looked down at the boy, who was still holding Valerie’s hand and looking straight ahead. Mr. Mortimer had never been in the woods himself, but he knew that he was expected now to say something, to ask something of the boy, as if it had been he who had just spoken.

  “And what did you find there?” he asked, looking down at the top of the boy’s head and the bridge of his nose.

  The boy turned up eyes of a blue so pale and transparent they seemed to go on forever. Mr. Mortimer knelt down to look more closely into his son’s face, and the boy said something he recognized as Latin, but did not understand.

  “That’s the Latin name of a poisonous mushroom I found and showed to Valerie,” he said. “It’s a beautiful mottled orange and kills within twenty-four hours. There isn’t any antidote that anyone knows of.” He continued to look into his father’s eyes. And as he looked into his son’s eyes the father changed. There was something in that look that he recognized.

  He knew that Valerie had not suggested going into the woods or she would have said, “I took him into the woods and we found—” Besides, the boy had been disappearing “next door” for several weeks now, as his wife had told him. So he would have gone on his own, and Valerie would have followed, trying to keep out of sight and not doing a very good job of it, certainly not good enough to fool the boy, who would then have invited her to come along. He had nothing to hide. He had invited her into the world of his life, and she had thought she was “watching” him, even after he had shown her what he knew that she did not know. Even now she had said, “We’ve been to the forest,” as if it had been her idea, and the boy was perfectly willing to tolerate what she did, since ultimately it did not concern him in any way. Tolerating this sort of thing made people like Valerie happy, put them at their ease, and then they left you alone more.

  The father knew this, and while he looked into his son’s eyes as the two young people stood and he knelt like this on one knee there in the driveway, and the afternoon sun shone down on them and raised the smell of spilled oil to his nose, he could see the boy walking “alone” into the woods, down that long first path that proceeded through the forest like a straight, wide corridor into its depths. Within a hundred feet this corridor was intersected by another. The boy, as his father saw him from behind, was walking (he had never toddled) straight and upright, with his hands in his pockets, sweeping his head from side to side across the path and the woods on either side. Then he stopped, turned halfway around and called out to Valerie, “It’s O.K. You don’t have to hide.”

  It was a life that had been going on while he was in his carrel at the library, looking down that long silent hall lined with books and lit only intermittently by those bulbs. This was something completely different from the dedications or the acknowledgments, different even from the offices he had looked into when their doors were open a crack or when he had stood in Hartpence’s office alone, unseen, feeling the presence of the woman who had knit this hideous afghan and who had no conception of his standing here in the zone that it helped to create, this room that was a room in someone’s life.

  Finally Mr. Mortimer said, “I would like to see that mushroom. Could you show it to me?”

  “Yes,” the boy said.

  He stood up and then he and his son walked off up the driveway
toward the woods, hearing Valerie say, “I’ll just go then, O.K.?”

  “Certainly,” Mr. Mortimer said.

  From that day on he spent every available moment—when he was not teaching or involved in some other duty connected with his position or working in his carrel in the library—with his son. He did not take the boy to baseball games or to the zoo or the aquarium or to the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty or to the amusement parks in the Berkshires. He only walked with the boy in the woods or to and from the college when they both went to use the library, or he would drive with him into town on one errand or another. They never spoke much, and the only time he ever suggested something—a circus in Poughkeepsie, which he’d seen advertised on a telephone pole outside the butcher shop—the boy said he did not think he would be much interested, and then added, “Thank you.”

  When the boy asked him if they could convert the cellar into a recording and composing studio, he had asked how much it would cost, and the boy had shown him six pages of figures itemizing the cost of every piece of equipment and the store or discount outlet where it could be gotten at that price, and the estimated cost of labor and materials for the conversion process itself. Mr. Mortimer agreed, and they had the construction work done while the family made its annual pilgrimage to Harrisburg, to visit for three weeks with his mother-in-law, who always asked what sorts of sports, athletic things, her grandson was participating in.

  But when the studio was completed and the boy began to spend more and more time in there by himself, wearing headphones and composing, on his various machines and tape recorders and keyboards, music that, to the best of Mr. Mortimer’s knowledge, nobody ever heard, he said to himself, “I made a mistake.” That was when he had begun investigating the advertising brochures for various instruments that could be played “by anyone,” and finally bought the chord organ, thinking that perhaps that way they could all—his wife and the boy and he—play together. Perhaps they would even be able to play some of the pieces the boy said he was writing. He asked his son then, “Can we hear some of the music you’re writing?”