Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  If opened to full, the house’s plumbing went into bronchial seizures. Mays’s mother slept fitfully upstairs after the emotional scene a short while before, and he did not want to wake her. At her son’s insistence, she had exposed the worst scar tissue of the family’s last four generations, and now needed the recuperative power of dreams to heal once more.

  To avoid the poltergeist of pipes, Mays reached back into the flotsam of memory and recollected an old childhood trick. Lying back in the porcelain, he applied a light tangent pressure to the HOT with his left big toe. This loosened a washer gasket rotted these twenty years, trickling hot water out of the pipe housing and down the tile wall. Draped on the other foot, a terrycloth face rag intercepted the stream and directed it down Mays’s leg into the tub. If he loosened the drain plug a shade, the whole system achieved dynamic equilibrium: out with the cold, in with the stew. The system was technically perfect, and if his mother had not stuck rubber daisies on the tub bottom following John Glenn’s 1960s shower accident, daisies that left a corsage on Mays’s back after prolonged soaking, he would have stayed in for good, slowly ossifying, fingers pruning in the hard water of the Midwest.

  The tub had always been Mays’s palace of simplification. Slack in the pellucid water, he would dwell on his recent traumas, replaying them from every possible camera angle, stretching misery over ceramic tile, steaming it clean in the tub vapor. Memory and hot water scrubbed his self-image clean. He never soaped himself but only soaked, avoiding the sullying intervention of his germladen hands.

  But this bath, even helped by the oblivion of 2 A.M., could not settle the conversation he and his mother had just had, no matter how often he replayed it and waited. For however skilled he and a hot tub were at smoothing his own biography, they could do nothing to the inherited biographies of the Mays family tree.

  A product of immigration—the American nonclass—Mays had never paid more than lip service to his ancestors. He felt only distantly related to his parents, more like a ward of the state. And he knew nothing of more distant progenitors. That evening, for the first time, his mother sowed the macabre suggestion that he actually shared genes with strangers. He was indebted to people he had never even heard of. The effect resembled those dreams in which he discovered unknown rooms in the old house.

  The letter from Ford to Mr. Langerson and the photograph of the three turn-of-the-century dandies on a muddy road, one of them Mays, brought on a violent reaction from his mother. She heaved, hyperventilated, and repeated, “I didn’t know.” Didn’t know of the stuff’s existence? She had put it there. Didn’t know that this was what her son was after? Even her fifth-grade education sufficed to draw that connection. Didn’t know that Ford had provided for her grandfather’s descendants? She had only to read the letter.

  Recovering from her fit, she launched, over her ruined game of solitaire, involved excuses why she had never before told him of family history.

  —For your sake, Petje, most of what happened back then was awful. You can’t imagine how their lives went; you’ve had it easy. And why not? Why raise the old devils? The children have got to cast off the old burdens.

  Mays, making the evolutionary step from tub to dry land, recalled that she pronounced “burden” as “burthen.” Had that been the form in her day? He had only a vague notion of the speed and degree of language change. Shakespeare was Greek; his mother came up with corkers: somewhere along the line, English had arrived at the telegraphic perfection of Micro Monthly News.

  Toweling dry, he considered that mores, too, had evolved some before reaching their present finality of perfection. The details that his mother withheld for his sake—that his great-grandfather had deserted family and country and that his grandfather had been born out of wedlock—instead of shaming Peter, delighted him. But beyond the color, outside his mother’s outdated moral concerns, lay the real trauma of family history.

  He padded on shriveled feet into his old room and closed the door to put an extra barrier between his own sound and his mother. He had an unshakable desire to call Alison. He had long ago concluded that desires could only be lessened by giving in to them. First, however, he pulled on briefs and a pair of pants. Four generations of phone use had not bred from his family line the belief that one ought not to place a call in the buff.

  To further deaden the rotary pulse dialer, one that got its thunder from the surrounding silence, he put the phone in the bottom drawer of his now hopelessly boy-sized dresser, wedging it in boy-sweaters his mother still kept in the shrine. He threaded the receiver out through the crack and closed the drawer until snug against his upper arm. He dialed blindly, feeling for the holes, amazed that the number Alison had given him the night before should already be in his fingers. He tried to check by counting the clicks of the released wheel, but he could not hear fast enough. After half a ring, a frightened voice at the other end demanded:

  —Yellow?

  —Alison?

  —Who is it? Who’s dead?

  Peter suddenly realized that it was after two in the morning—three, East Coast—too late to call anyone, let alone a relative stranger. But it had been a night of relative strangers and strange relatives.

  —I think I am.

  During an audible silence, Mays recalled that carbon monoxide was supposed to be painless. When she spoke, Alison sounded as naturally affectionate as on their night out.

  —Oh, it’s my date. Come over to play?

  —That might be tricky; I’m in Illinois.

  —Illinois? Jimminy. For the benefit of our listening audience, I am now crossing myself.

  Mays heard a fumbling as she held the phone to her chest. He found fallen-away Catholics infinitely appealing.

  —Listen, Alison. I’m calling to see what you think about marriage.

  —As a concept?

  —As an institution.

  —Not as amusing as other arrangements we might invent. Why?

  —Well, it’s just that . . . I mean . . . I’m about to come into some cash and I could use a tax dodge.

  —Hank came through for you, huh?

  —In a manner of speaking.

  —Well, I’ll take it under advisement and get back to you. In the meantime, have you considered municipal bonds?

  Under her flippancies, Alison betrayed a genuine interest in the detective game. Mays, in a voice too steady to be natural, explained the treasures excavated from the east eave, and his mother’s subsequent explanation. His great-grandfather—a shady figure in family folklore—had somehow ingratiated himself with Ford. To reciprocate, Ford did what he did best: set up a trust fund for the fellow and descendants.

  —Let me guess: a twenty-five-dollar Series E savings bond.

  —Close. Five hundred dollars cash. The price of a Model T, accumulating at more than nine percent since 1916.

  —When do you dine with the Vanderbilts? What does that work out to?

  —Perhaps the figure of a quarter million dollars means something to you.

  —You’re kidding. Jesus. You know, you could have called me at full rates then.

  —Sorry.

  —A quarter . . . ? You’re kidding. Say, how did you do the math for that?

  —Compounding? One of the few things I remember from calculus.

  A suck of breath at the other end informed Mays that this woman, who had barely flinched at a sum that would have endeared him to anyone else, would forever hold him in reverence because he knew some math.

  —So it was you in that photo.

  Mays corrected her:

  —My great-grandfather.

  —Hows-a-come nobody in your family ever drew on this little nest egg?

  —For one, they, like you, failed to grasp the miracle of compound interest. And two, my mother and grandfather disowned the old guy as a family scandal. They agreed to sweep him under the rug. Fortunately, my mother could not bring herself to throw out the only two documents of the man’s existence.

  —Still, a quart
er million sitting in an attic smacks of the implausible.

  —There were other terms. The principal could not be touched for thirty years. That knocks out the great-aunts and uncles from the legacy. Then, it could be milked only by a blood descendant who shared the same profession as great-grandfather’s at the time of his meeting Ford.

  —Which was?

  —Journalist.

  —And you are . . . ?

  —A quarter million richer.

  —A writer? You know calculus, and you became a writer? Jesus. Some folks just flush their lives down the toilets.

  —Well, it is technical writing, if you’d like me any better for it. So how are things by you?

  —In the forty-eight hours since we were together, you mean? Etsy-ketsy. Wages, tips, salaries. The usual.

  —How’s my buddy, the old guy? What’s his name? Herr Krakow.

  Silence at the other end told Mays he had stepped on something.

  —Why do you ask?

  Alison’s voice had turned metallic.

  —Look, it was only a lark, to make you laugh.

  Only partially reassured, Alison described how Arkady had noticeably deteriorated over the last two days.

  —Not to blame it on you, but he keeps asking after you.

  —What’s so awful about that?

  —He wants to know how our son is. His and mine, he means—you. Wait; it gets worse. He speaks to me almost exclusively in funny languages. He slips back in time, every five minutes another year. He’s stuck in the twenties at present, currently under the impression that the restaurant is a Viennese coffeehouse. He goes around asking the brokers what they think of his lovely young wife.

  —Meaning you? He has lost it.

  —Don’t joke, assuming you’re joking. Peter, do you suppose he’s dying? That he’s going systematically backward through his life until he unwinds it all?

  Mays, unable to recall any formulas from calculus that explained this nonlinear regression, did as he did for all urgent questions: he kept silent. Alison had to pick up the slack.

  —So, what are you going to do with your pile?

  —Bequeath the Peter Mays Traveling Scholarship for Technical Education. Is “bequeath” a word?

  —Sounds like a book title. Drop everything after “Education,” though. How does one apply?

  —Just sign the papers.

  They had talked for almost an hour. Peter made a note to leave his mother a check for the toll call—not that she’d ever cash it. Their banter bred like mink; they could not bring the call to an end, could not give up the pleasure of reminding one another that someone outside themselves existed. It was Mays’s only pleasure of late. He finally got around to saying good night by way of saying good morning.

  —Sure you don’t want to come over?

  Alison gave the invitation such a lazy, curled-up tone, as if long distance were the same as adjacent theater seats, that Mays had an overpowering urge to drop everything for another close-up of this woman who treated Edwardian dress, the banalities of The Trading Floor, an obscenely late phone call, the mystery of calculus, the disclosure of an enormous windfall, and concern for a fellow come unstuck in time as equal elements in a huge, improbable, improvised experiment.

  Mays felt briefly the old suspicion that Alison played a part in a labyrinthine conspiracy leading him to his windfall. But he at once concluded that if there were a conspiracy, he was the culprit, not she. As they said good-bye and he opened the drawer to replace the phone in its cradle, dullness came over him.

  The anaesthesia he felt on hanging up seemed the dominant condition of his times, a condition that could not be escaped. A person might say, “I am drugged,” but, being drugged, will not want to detoxify. For his generation, so Mays thought, like morphined patients, knew of their loss of feeling without by definition being able to feel it. For them, memory without catharsis, history without recognition.

  In Bernhardt, in Veterans’ Day, he had sought something long denied him: an experience, a sorrow, an antianaesthetic emetic. And he had come up with only a fortune—another soporific legacy that seemed to be the final reward of all searches. The silence of his boyhood room in his mother’s house closed around him until he felt the lateness of the hour, sitting bowlegged in front of the phone as a cultist in front of a shrine, still moist from the bath.

  He could hear Alison’s voice distinctly, although modified by the present silence. She alone seemed untouched by the general anaesthesia of the present, the terror of occupation. Bullock had his puts and calls, his late-night lawn mowing; Delaney had his vaudeville and his mania; Brink, her expertise; Moseley, his compulsive privacy; Kimberly Greene and Arkady Krakow bowed out to nostalgia. Alison alone found time for a broader curiosity.

  But she had one rub—her admiration and ambition for technical expertise. Mays wondered why this rankled him. Had the camera, car, and computer induced the general anaesthesia of the times, or were they the by-products? Perhaps in going from A to B sitting down, one lost the experience of travel. Yet she had to come of mechanical age—come to terms with the terms. There was no value in innocence or avoidance. But he wondered if even her congenital affection, her easy way with feeling could survive a good dose of technical know-how.

  Too tired to feel fatigue, he swept the papers of the Ford file off the dresser and collapsed in bed. He gave the 1916 letter to Theo Langerson only a perfunctory rereading and a grunt before he sent it sailing down to the floor. Nothing there but the facts. If the folks in Motor City would accept the trade press as journalism, he could stop by anytime and pick up his fortune.

  Already the prospect seemed unreal. He looked again at the old piece of newsprint foisted on him by Kimberly Greene—the Heir photo. He had examined it too often for it to be of much interest any longer. The shock of seeing himself embraced by one of the century’s most influential men had worn off. The sight of his own face in the guise of his great-grandfather’s put him off, with its smirking surprise, its lack of presence of mind in the face of the documenter’s flashpan. The young man looked like a child caught with its hand in the epochal cookie jar—a ringer in the archive of history.

  Peter found Ford’s face more interesting—shrewd, deranged, the face of a visionary or lunatic intent on teaching a billion human beings the laws of celestial thermodynamics. What was this dangerous fellow doing in Europe? Shouldn’t he be stateside, minding the first fully automated plant or keeping the home fires burning?

  Both the caption and the letter alluded to some service rendered by the unknown boy, a service providing the only check to a substantial setback that Ford had received in Europe. What could the world’s leading industrialist have suffered that a sprout of a journalist could in any way mitigate?

  Although curious, Mays felt these questions touched the main issue only tangentially, an issue that grew fuzzier the longer he stayed with it. He threw aside the article and picked up the last item in the impromptu dossier. At the last analysis, he came face to camera plane with the image of three farmers on their way to a dance. He could derive no greater clue to the mystery of the regeneration of experience than his physiognomic resemblance to one of these boys, boys in the deliberate surprise of a day long ago, irretrievably lost, preserved by the treachery of the lens.

  Because it had been stuffed in an envelope and hidden in the east eave, no one had seen the print for decades. Was this the original print, the one first pulled from the photographer’s negative? Were the heavy creases in the print the work of one of the subjects? The question made no sense. A print was by nature only a print, entirely interchangeable with any other print, antique or contemporary. As a commercial object, it had no verifiable bill of lading. The thing served as a portal to alternate places only through its content, the record of light passing through the lens.

  This image content captured Mays, and he stared at it until it went through the hazy deformation of things stared at too long. He blinked, looked away, then tried again. Wit
h no clear idea of what he looked for in the picture, Peter nevertheless felt compelled by its detail. The tilt of hats and canes, the minute facial blemishes, the fold of the coat cloth, the hair combed and uncombed, the draped cigarette, the worn shoes, all invited Mays to speculate on the scenario, to invent a fiction behind this documented incident stretching out over the years in both directions, without beginning or end.

  The first several times that Mays examined the scene, the left hand of the center figure—the one resembling Mays, the Theo Langerson fellow—puzzled him. Thumb and forefinger closed in a ring, forming an imperial affectation out of keeping with the figure’s face and bearing. After prolonged staring, Peter saw, or thought he saw, a new detail that made sense of the shape. A faint line, perhaps only a flaw in the negative, outlined a black object—handkerchief or pair of gloves—that dissolved into the protective coloration of the lead boy’s coat.

  The new interpretation made sense of the area: the hand did not form a ring of negative space, but instead closed around something actual. Yet the photo lacked definition precise enough to reveal whether the new way of seeing the area corresponded with the reality of that day. Perhaps that question, as with the authenticity of the print, had no meaning.

  Mays held the creased yellowed paper in his hands, trying to precipitate a memory. He didn’t know if what he tried to remember came from his own past, from the three boys’, or from only ten minutes before, when he had had a small insight. With an equally sketchy notion of what he tried to recover—whether animal, vegetable, or mineral; a place; an idea; or just the ability to experience without irony or acute self-consciousness—he stood little chance of success. He redoubled his efforts to locate the remarkable in the picture, but the intensity of his effort chased off recollection the way a swipe at a falling sheet of paper only succeeds in blowing the sheet farther away. What he was after would have to settle down unchased. At some point that he did not mark, the violent act of memory gave way to sleep.