Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  He dreamed that since his early childhood he had participated in a research project run by a large public university, a mammothly funded, mammothly staffed venture stretching out over several decades and outlasting its founders. The experiment called for everyone in a certain medium-sized town, including Peter, to appear once every few months throughout their entire lives for a studio portrait. The resulting photos were then edited into an organically growing filmstrip documenting what the decades did to each subject’s changing face.

  Mays woke early, more fatigued than when going under. When she rose to find her son packing and calling for ticket reservations, Mrs. Mays jumped to the conclusion that the family secrets, so carefully hidden for half a century, were driving Peter from the house.

  —Petje, what are you doing? You’ve hardly gotten the moths out of your suitcase. You’ve no cause for shame; you’re the same person as before I told you anything.

  —What? What are you talking about, Moedi?

  —You know, Petje, your grandfather was neither the first or the last of his ilk.

  “Ilk” was one of those rare birds Mrs. Mays culled from the tabloids. Mays tried to figure out what exactly his mother meant to say.

  —You mean collaborationist or bastard?

  Mrs. Mays’s right hand flinched and attached to her collar button. She had long ago stopped crossing herself, to keep Peter from giving her the voodoo lecture. But unable to break an old habit, she contented herself with grabbing her collar button, a brief, atrophied holdover of evolution like the tailbone in humans or front legs in snakes.

  —Everyone in Holland collaborated in some way. You don’t know, Peter. You’ve never lived under occupation.

  Peter felt bad at having upset his mother, and shame at the truth of her words. But he could not answer her; the reservation clerk at the train office had booked him into a holding pattern complete with piped-in music—a soothing, classical piece Peter remembered from his concert days when his object was still the redhead, and the redhead was still a clarinetist. Prehistory, a wasted search, except that now it made waiting for train tickets infinitesimally more interesting.

  The train system had a few years back become seminationalized, meaning it now enjoyed the extortionate rates of a private business and the bankrupt, bureaucratic ineptitude of a government agency. Waiting on the phone listening to phantom concerti could easily burn up more time than the ride back to Boston. Each time he traveled by train, Mays swore he would fly or hitch the distance before boarding another silver liner. Yet he had jumped town without notice and could not expect a job on his return. That made airfare a bit dear. That he would pick up a quarter million on the way had not yet registered with him. The smell of bus seats nauseated him, and he did not have a pair of shoes strong enough to make it across Ohio, so he kept quiet and listened to the tune.

  The clerk reconnected at last, saying Mays could make it to Boston via a Detroit connection the next morning. Mays made a reservation for the Early Riser and went back to packing.

  —Look, Petje, you stay home a little longer. We’ll play some cards; you’ll fix that gutter pipe you’ve been promising. Everything is the same. A few days, and you won’t remember anything about this.

  —It’s not the stories, Moedi, really. I’m not ashamed of my ancestors. None of them did anything that a million others in the century haven’t done.

  —So stay a few days. The place needs you. What do you need for Detroit? Is it the money business in the letter?

  —It’s not the money, exactly. It’s just that there’s so much of it.

  —What, five hundred dollars at nine percent? That hardly covers the train ticket.

  The night before he had tried, violently, to explain to her how much cash was at stake, but it was no good. To his mother, 500 dollars at 9 percent was 545 dollars.

  —I didn’t raise my son to be a fortune hunter.

  —What did you raise your son to be?

  —Don’t start with me, kind, or I’ll finish with you.

  The threat that terrified Mays as a child now never failed to delight him. He liked to hear the old undercurrent of maternal violence creep back into her voice, even though she induced it now mostly through method acting.

  —What will you do to me, Moedi?

  —I’ll break your ribs, honey. I didn’t raise you to grub for money. I raised you to be a good man. A blameless man. Any guff with that?

  The Early Riser made one unscheduled stop on the way to Detroit, somewhere in the desolation of Indiana. The view from the window—endless acres of scrub and stubble—resembled Bikini Atoll. A uniformed party boarded the train, apparently looking for a stowaway criminal. For a sickening interval, Mays worried that he would have to show some identification. As the last remaining individual who refused to use credit, he had only the two shots of his great-grandfather for photo ID. But the unsuccessful officers disembarked as quickly as they had boarded, into the vacant nothingness of harvested fields.

  In Detroit, the train belched Mays into a grandiose but dilapidated train station, now functioning at a fraction of its heyday size. Mays had called the Ford offices the day before and secured an appointment with a Mr. Nichols, a dime-a-dozen PR man, for that afternoon. Then he had booked a connection to Boston on the Technoliner. He had two hours to kill.

  Falling out of the station into downtown traffic, he felt time sitting on him and despaired of killing it on his own. He considered sightseeing: the fabled Renaissance Center, or a view of Canada. These he vetoed: one drab municipality looked like any other. The art museum? He’d sworn off cult objects until he came into his pile. After all, this was Detroit, and Peter could think of nothing more apropos than sitting and watching the cars.

  Mays arrived at Mr. Nichols’s office a good half hour early. The secretarial pool stripped him of his Ford file and forced him to wait in a criminally modularized foyer. There, a band of photos and artifacts rounded the room at eye level, exhibiting the sequential history of Henry Ford: Ford as young farmer, as apprentice mechanic, as an engineer for Edison, his 1892 car, the charter for Ford Motors, the first Tin Lizzie, the automated factory, the five-dollar-a-day bombshell of 1914.

  Mays paused in front of a photo of Henry on the boarding ramp of a ship stenciled Oscar II. The caption read:

  In 1915, Ford formed the ill-fated Peace Ship, attempting to staff it with luminaries and, without official sanction from the United States or any other power, sail it to Europe, fully intending to break the diplomatic deadlock of the First World War.

  WITH A SUDDEN blow, Mays’s own deadlock broke and scattered. Concentrating on the tacitly implied failure of the mission—the ill-advised, ironic, ridiculous, obtuse, commendably absurd attempt to take history into his own hands and act, even if only clownishly—Mays found he could make his chest and throat tighten. The muscular waves thus brought on fed back into the photo, and the escalating surf of emotion would certainly have had to find outlet in some demonstration if a voice calling his name from the inner offices had not thrown oil over it. Mays turned to witness the face of a fellow who could have passed as centerfold for Orthodontia Today. He took hold of Mr. Nichols’s hand and tried to make sense of what he was saying.

  — . . . the expense of your coming to see us here in Detroit. The letter—quite a prize, you know, a signature of value—checks out, in a manner of speaking. Mr. Ford did indeed provide for your great-grandfather’s family, but not in the way you no doubt hope.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The Immigrant’s Essay

  The past tense, which inhabits our lives as it fills the pages of history, can claim significance and urgency only if it insinuates a concurrent present. Given the courage, we live by moments of interference between past and present, moments in which time comes back into phase with itself. It is the only meaning of history. We search the past not for other creatures but for our own lost selves.

  —Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years

  I found Mrs. Sch
reck’s apartment without difficulty, and as I had hoped, she had not yet left for work. She greeted me at the door, warmly but surprised. With maternal efficiency, she whisked me inside, dabbed my nosebleed with a lace handkerchief, and produced two towels from a hidden place.

  —Dry yourself before you end up in the snowman’s morgue.

  She stood, a drill sergeant in attendance, as I removed my layer of snow, indicating that young men don’t understand the urgency of such matters. She had lived at a time when pneumonia, consumption, and tuberculosis were real, when people died from sitting too long by a drafty window.

  If I took my time toweling dry, it was not out of disrespect for Mrs. Schreck’s medicinal theories. When I first put the robin’s-egg-blue antique towel up to my face, a pungent smell greeted me: a painfully enjoyable scent—a mix of pies and spices, mildew, wallpaper paste, human odor, starch—yet one lying outside the reach of its individual smells. It smelled of use—long, continued, loving use.

  I thought that I knew this smell from somewhere in my past, and I tried for a moment to place it. But I soon realized the truth: the smell itself was the memory, and I was anthologizing and sending it to the future. If I were to smell anything faintly resembling this amalgam in the years to come, I would be at once transported to Mrs. Schreck’s foyer, toweling dry, just in from a snowstorm.

  So I lingered with the towels, stretched the process out more than necessary. But each pass under my nose only succeeded in replacing the urgent with the familiar, and at last I surrendered the goods to my hostess. She ushered me through her suite of rooms back to her kitchen, where she began preparing lethal doses of herbal tea. The towel scent proved to be no isolated case: the whole apartment was a temple to aroma: eucalyptus, rosewater, mothballs—more than I can name. I sat at an ancient deal breakfast table. My eyes must have glazed over with the stupor of pilgrims visiting Chartres because the old woman said:

  —I have been living in this place thirty and more years.

  Accents seem arbitrary, independent of how long or willingly the speaker has embraced the new language. A sixty-year-old can erase in six months what a child leaves intact after twenty. Mrs. Schreck’s was surprisingly heavy for so veteran a speaker, although it showed signs of a struggle. Her “have” came out “hep,” while “this place” might have been “dizzy plots.”

  —But the block was so different then. Everything frail, jolly. Ah, but heaven shuts off at sighing. How goes it with you?

  Her “how” was a “who,” her “with” a “mit,” but the combination was expressive.

  —Not too bad. Only I didn’t go in to work today.

  —Good for you. A body’s got to play hooky now and then.

  I had to laugh at “hooky” for enunciation and diction. Delighting in my delight, Mrs. Schreck said the word again: hooky, hooe-e-key. We laughed, and she added, as if narrating:

  —We laughed until we rotted.

  —Yes. Only I didn’t mean to drop by like this, all unexpected. I don’t want to make you late.

  —Maybe I play hooky too. I tell them I can’t make it in the snow. And you did mean to drop by, or why are you here? Drop polite; I’m too old a lady for polite.

  It was true; she, who had survived the worst part of the century, did not need my pleasantries to protect her. The old need honesty, not deference. I looked at her stoic grin, mirrored it, and forgot about apologizing for dropping out of touch after the Christmas party.

  I let my gaze wander around what I could see of the apartment. Here, accumulation of things had taken over. Yet there were none of the common shrines of the propertied—food processors and stereos, or those watchdog carpet runners and antimacassars, where the thing proclaims its value by being above use. Every square foot in the place was stuffed with things so worn down and handled that many had died the death of functionality. Three overstuffed chairs in the adjacent room carried the composite shapes of bodies long since vanished. Her bric-a-brac garnered and identified its old users as clearly as a burnished mirror.

  Normally, technology creates new goods that create the need for themselves, until in a short time consumers cannot do without a good that did not exist a few years before. But Mrs. Schreck’s thing-hoard implied that she had bypassed this assimilation altogether, simply by making no distinction in value between a pinecone picked up on yesterday’s walk and a rare, ancient floor-cabinet radio she now caught me eyeing.

  —The best thing about old radios? They are all of wood. Then, when they break down and refuse to run, you took them to the carpenters, who worked cheaper than the electricians.

  She put her fist to her lips and convulsed lightly over her joke. Her hand wrapped around a lace doily, impossibly old and embroidered in a foreign tongue.

  —Mrs. Schreck, you have some valuable antiques here.

  —Value? They say that if the rich could pay others to do their dying for them, the poor could finally make a decent living.

  She went on to explain that when the old radio worked, its value was in the working. Afterward, when it was dead and long overdue for the heap, she found she had nicked it up too badly to part with it. The cash she could get for it would not compensate for the loss of so perfect a road map of all her accidents and angers along the axis of time. She explained, with a shoulder shrug, that the value of memorabilia—value in general—lay beyond anyone’s ability to say anything meaningful about the matter.

  Mrs. Schreck served tea, but did not drink directly from her teacup. Instead, with a quick jerk, she poured a small amount into her saucer. Using two hands, she managed the flat plate up to her lips for a quick sip without spilling. She caught me staring at the process.

  —I do this the Old World way. Also, good for the shakes.

  An overhand wave of the palm assured me not to take her seriously about anything.

  Age varies as widely as accents. Growing into a new body resembles learning a foreign language. Some inhabit their final years with the grace and ease of native speakers. Others retain the obstinate accent and diction of an earlier tongue, adolescents imprisoned on cytology’s Ellis Island. One waits for sixty to go instantly doubled over; another centenarian thinks ten nimble sentences for each one she speaks.

  Mrs. Schreck, over eighty, instantly appeared to me at the office Christmas party as one who, having lived through the century’s spectrum, simply adds each decade to an expanding repertoire. If she were sillier today than on that evening fingering the hole in the ambulance driver’s cap, it testified that the old have behavior as rich and diverse as their years.

  The view from Mrs. Schreck’s kitchen window revealed her building’s courtyard, a spur of the street, and a vacant lot beyond. Snow continued to fall, fat, thick, and general, even heavier than at my recent blinding, falling so rapidly that it created the illusion of falling upward. Believing that the snow’s continued fury made the threat to my health even greater, Mrs. Schreck made me drink my tea to the dregs and towel yet again until my skin went raw under the persuasion of linen. Only then did she spring into action for herself.

  —Hemel. Now I really got to play hooky.

  With a quick step equal parts anxiety and joy at the world’s coming to an elemental stop, she left the room to place a call to work. I heard her negotiate with a superior in a language midway between English and German. I took the opportunity while she was in the next room to poke around. Aside from the old cabinet radio, the only other substantial piece of technology was a massive player piano, pedals down and roll threaded. The bench housed many rolls ranging from a nineteenth-century song, “Mijn Kleintje,” that could not have been played without crumbling into pieces, to a relatively recent one called “Henry’s Made a Lady Out of Lizzie,” complete with lyrics sheet describing Ford’s overdue abandoning of the Model T in favor of the Model A.

  I closed the lid and continued my surprise inspection. A narrow bookshelf held a few cheaply bound books in Dutch, German, and French. The only English books were a cookbook, a pamp
hlet of religious devotions, and, inexplicably, a newsstand book on Ted Williams written in the 1950s when the Red Sox were in the heat of a pennant race. The path of even the straightest of lives winds strangely.

  About the room, a thousand trinkets and bangles lay in various states of antiquity: a stereopticon with views of the great cities; a singing, alabaster angel. A moldering boxed game from 1920 promised “All the excitement of a great railway journey.” A castiron plane perched destructively on the cover, bearing the tornaway decal, “irit of St. Lo.” Nearby, a gum-arabic print showed a young version of Mrs. Schreck in the steerage of a passenger liner. I had only explored the smallest fraction of the hoard when Mrs. Schreck returned briskly.

  —They beg me to stay indoors. I say, “Who will clean?,” but they beg me. They think I will slip on the ice and break my hip. Old people are always breaking hips. Then the insurance finds out they hire someone above retirement age.

  Then, with a troublemaking squint of her eyes, she added:

  —I said nothing about your whereabout.

  And she pressed something into my hand that turned out to be a chocolate bonbon.

  —Now we really play hooky. Sit and talk. You tell me, first, why you came.

  —Well, I . . . thought we could start that friendship we talked about.

  —Ha. Friendship never in all history brought anyone out on a snowstorm without help.

  She jerked her palsied thumb toward the window, indicating the storm. I pictured being snowbound here a few days; it would be almost fun, picking through the mounds of memorable chaff. The never-predictable Mrs. Schreck could entertain me for the duration.

  —Perhaps you’ll like I should tell you my story of the Peace Ship some more.

  I nearly swallowed my lungs at this piece of telepathy. At the Christmas party, I had trotted out for Mrs. Schreck the whole elaborate story of my obsession with the Detroit photo. She, in turn, had given me everything—photographer’s name and correct nationality, date, location of the image—all the facts I needed to put my obsession to rest. If I had come now, as she suggested, to hear more of her other tale of that evening—the Peace Ship—it was because the facts behind the photo were not enough. I was the laboratory researcher, repeating the experiment long after the data are in.