As she had over the phone when the old fellow’s name came up, Alison missed a beat. Mays covered, nervously.
—He’s a . . . civilized man, wouldn’t you say? A . . . civilized one?
Mays had meant to say “cultured,” “worldly,” or “experienced,” but not finding the right match in these fell back both times on “civilized,” though the choice surprised him. He reached inside his travel bag and withdrew a heavily scored, ancient sheet of heavy stock. He unfolded it and spread it on the clean linen: three young men caught in the action of walking, looking out over their right shoulders at something—at an observer remarkably unobtrusive.
—I wanted to show him this.
Perhaps on the sheer weight of having been alive when the photo was taken, Arkady could tell him what it signified. Yet what could a doddering Austrian, floating in and out of sense, tell him of the hard-and-fast photo? Little. He might give the year according to the fashions, or—a long shot—the part of Europe shown in the indistinct background.
The odds of his finding out anything more about the photo from Mr. Krakow, or anyone else, were astronomical. An oil portrait might be traced to a national style, a school or movement, even to an individual technique. But a photo, especially one so without artifice, could have been done by anyone affording a camera.
Yet it was not the photographer’s name Mays wanted to extract from Arkady. That held only clinical interest. Nor did he need to know more about the three subjects than the sketchy biographies his mother had supplied. He wanted to know what the boys looked at. From the instant he had come across the photo in the east eave, he recognized that faraway look: the viscous, rheumy eyes of Krakow, the past looking full-faced into the present and recognizing it.
Attempting to find the urgent memory that the past posted forward to him, Mays had gone the way of the Great Personality, the way of Bernhardt and Ford. He had been paid off in coppers, but was not satisfied. Krakow was his last, direct link back: an ordinary fellow who looked on the present without being able to shake the memory of the Old World, the old order. Krakow could tell him what it was these boys saw just over the photographer’s shoulder.
Alison bent down over the creased photo. The same woman who could see no resemblance between Peter and Theo Langerson in the Heir photo now, without prompting, put her finger on the middle figure of the parade, saying:
—You look good in a black suit.
She straightened from the waist and regained her Edwardian propriety. In another accent altogether, she pronounced:
—He died the night you called me from Illinois.
For a strange instant, Mays thought she still referred to the middle figure of the photo. Then realizing that she meant not his great-grandfather but his one, contemporary link to that urgent look, he kept silent, not wanting to sully the old man’s passing with something so silly as words. Guilt, remorse, relief, nostalgia, and appreciation, silent, all sound the same and cannot be told one from the other. Alison broke the emptiness.
—I am his sole beneficiary.
—His . . . ? Did you know?
—Out of left field. The wife thing, the delusion I first grabbed you to rescue me from. Jesus, Peter, he even wrote it in his will: “I am of sound mind. I know Miss A. S. is not my wife, yet the resemblance is so strong. . . .”
—That I’ll leave her my estate?
Alison closed her eyes and nodded. Mays, fighting the urge to ask how much was at stake, heard her whisper:
—It wasn’t much. He must have dug pretty heavily into the annuities to keep coming here for meals, to keep up the Old World grace. Still, there’s enough to send me back to school.
Mays again reached for Alison’s forearm, as if to restrain her. He grasped the worst: she would abandon him. While he sat morbidly tied up in the past, she had set her sights on the future and now had the means to reach it. She would collect that holy of holies—a technical education—on which Mays had never had more than a dilettante’s grasp.
His leads to the past had died. He was too old to retool for the future. The only thing he cared for—and that, fiercely—was the present, and a chance to know this woman in front of him. And she was leaving. He forced himself to be adult.
—Computers?
Alison gave him a sardonic, lip-lifted smile.
—What do you take me for? That was last week. I thought I might study a few languages, then travel. See what’s left of the places he used to ramble on about. It’s his money after all. Know any good chaperones?
She gave Mays a look signifying that there’s no such thing as No Chance, or that the only history worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.
Mays made out the shape of the headwaiter across the room, craning toward their booth, anxious over Alison’s delay. Alison waved off his worry, suggesting the fellow could go stew in the house marinade. Mays looked up at this woman’s face, once again trying to interpret her features. The Viennese, Krakow, had found in these features a hint of the long-ago lost. Yet neither wife nor waitress replaced the other; the old man had set them side by side, variations on an irretrievable original.
Here was the only possible explanation of the viscous look in Arkady’s eyes when Mays had first met him. In Alison, Arkady had stumbled on one of those moments of intersection, the plane of the past cutting into the plane of the present and, in the side-by-side juxtaposition of the two, showing the closest hint of the three dimensions of the original template, which preexists the negative and lies outside time. He had read into Alison’s face the forward-posted memory of his long-dead wife: they were concurrent. No observation without involvement; no fact without interpretation.
That same intersection of planes, Mays realized, lay behind the compelling look of the farmers on their muddy road. They looked over the photographer at him, at their own continued existence, the face of our time. The same compulsion lay behind his vision of red hair in the Vets’ Parade: a past-in-present, the side-by-side interference of two worlds. History tips the second view slightly, and parallax combines the two into the full three dimensions of the original image. That original image, the only one possible, was the only and motionless dance.
He folded the print into its old four quarters and with a smooth motion swept up the penny rolls and headed toward the exit from The Trading Floor. Reaching it, he stopped long enough to remember that, under the strength of his insight, he’d forgotten something important. He focused on the stunned Edwardian across the room. Loud enough to carry, he called out:
—So does he get the girl?
Judging by the pall that settled on the business lunches and Boston money peering out of the dark wood and damask, the propriety of the place was forever compromised. Yet the phosphor ticker above the bar showed no dip at this calamity. The staff went apoplectic, eyes on Miss Stark. She said nothing.
—So when do we sail?
Mays’s second bellow was louder than his first. The look that spread across Miss Stark’s face suggested there would be time enough for travel, time spreading out infinitely in two directions.
Mays was to experience one more sense of concurrency that day, when he arrived at Micro Monthly News to find that nothing had changed since his departure. He threw his still-unpacked luggage under his desk and set to work, not on his “Accumulator” column or any editing assignment so hopelessly past due as his were. Instead, he marshaled his meager knowledge of grammar and began to draft a letter.
He hoped to employ the miracle of electronics to mass-produce a hundred copies of this letter and mail them off to celebrities, clergy, business contacts, even names from the phone book, enclosing, in each one, the first-ever Penny for Peace. But by two o’clock, he’d gotten no further in the letter than “A few of us would like to get together and try to keep the boys out of the trenches this Christmas.”
At a quarter after, Brink, walking past his desk for the third time since he returned, did a double take. Collecting herself, she said:
—Peter, might I ask you to report your vacation days before taking them next time?
He gave her a three-fingered salute. If the Japanese were really serious about this Technowar, they could land an army of occupation unopposed. In the ensuing small talk, Brink let out that Bullock had left her and his job for place or places unknown. It seemed that the accounting books of a certain Trans-Air Transport, in which he had had all his clients heavily invested, had turned out to be masterpieces of creative writing.
Mays apologized, although he was almost certain it was not his fault. Brink, stolid, never far from the continual edge of happiness granted those born into their proper era, went about her job.
Duly notified of the return of another warm body to harass, the great, flightless, egg shape of Delaney swooped from nowhere in a flurry of cardigan, scattering papers over half of Mays’s desk. Peter braced himself for the worst. Instead of the obligatory vaudeville, Dougo contented himself with picking over Peter’s belongings. Coming across a commemorative cent, he eyed it suspiciously, then slapped his hand down hard on the desk in imitation of a quiz-show contestant hitting the ready-to-answer button.
—Henry Ford.
He made his own bell clang, and awarded himself the coin as prize.
—And these three rubes . . .
He picked up the print from Mays’s desk, the spot normally reserved for enshrining the dead or members of the immediate family.
— . . . are Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt at Yalta.
The plant barricade around Moseley’s desk rustled, and out of the crack in the foliage peeked the rare species in question: on all sides of Mays—here at hand, across town at The Trading Floor, even so far away as on a muddy road in a decade that would never again open except to the cheap and readily available silver halide print—lay that most elusive, universal, persistent quantity, always in need of foreign aid, the Other Fellow.
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About the Author
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Meet Richard Powers
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More by Richard Powers
Excerpt from Prisoner’s Dilemma
About the Author
Meet Richard Powers
RICHARD POWERS is the author of thirteen novels. His most recent, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Book Award, and he has been a four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.
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More by Richard Powers
PRISONER’S DILEMMA
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“Prisoner’s Dilemma is magnificent. Set it up there in the stratosphere with the American novels we study like pictures in the sky.” —The Nation
Something is wrong with Eddie Hobson Sr., father of four, sometime history teacher, quiz master, black humorist, and virtuoso invalid. His recurring fainting spells have worsened, and knowing his ingrained aversion to doctors, his worried family tries to discover the nature of his sickness. Meanwhile, in private, Eddie puts the finishing touches on a secret project he calls Hobbstown, a place that he promises will save him, the world, and everything that’s in it.
A dazzling novel of compassion and imagination, Prisoner’s Dilemma is a story of the power of individual experience.
THE GOLD BUG VARIATIONS
* * *
National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee
“The most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity’s Rainbow. . . . An outright marvel.” —Washington Post
Stuart Ressler, a brilliant young molecular biologist, sets out in 1957 to crack the genetic code. His efforts are sidetracked by other, more intractable codes—social, moral, musical, spiritual—and he falls in love with a member of his research team.
Years later, another young man and woman team up to investigate a different scientific mystery—why did the eminently promising Ressler suddenly disappear from the world of science? Strand by strand, these two love stories twist about each other in a double helix of desire.
OPERATION WANDERING SOUL
* * *
National Book Award Finalist—Fiction
In the pediatrics ward of a public hospital in the heart of Los Angeles, a ground of sick children is gathering. Surrogate parents to this band of stray kids, resident Richard Kraft and therapist Linda Espera are charged with keeping the group alive on make-believe alone. Determined to give hope where there is none, the adults spin a desperate anthology of stories that promise restoration and escape. But the inevitable is foreshadowed in the faces they’ve grown to love, and ultimately Richard and Linda must return to forgotten chapters in their own lives in order to make sense of the conclusion drawing near.
Excerpt from Prisoner’s Dilemma
The first indication that Pop had been seeing something more than heebie-jeebies for all those years came a few weeks before the end, when the old guy leaned over to Artie on the front porch of an autumn evening and said, distinctly, “Calamine.” Father and son had come out after dinner to sit together on this side of the screens and see November along. They enjoyed, in silence, one of those nights that hung in the high fifties but could easily go ten degrees either way within the hour. Artie staked out the rocker while his father, as usual, exercised eminent domain over the kapok bed long ago banished to the porch because chez Hobson—a twenty-year repository of everything the family had ever owned—could not take one more cubic foot of crap without spewing it all through every doorway and window.
Silence had gotten them this far, and there seemed to Artie no reason to improve on it. He tried to chalk up his father’s mumbled word to an involuntary spasm in the man’s cerebral cortex, a first burst of verb salad accompanying the return of autumn. He hoped, for a moment, to hide from it, let the word fall to the ground and add to the November earthworm-stink and humus. But Artie had no place to hide from Pop that the old man himself hadn’t shown him. So he put his knuckles to the bridge of his nose, braced his face for what was coming, and asked, “Say what, Dad?”
“You heard me. Calamine. I say what I mean and I mean what I say. I plan my work and work my plan. When the tough get going, the . . .”
“Got you, Pop.” Artie preempted quickly, for once Edward Hobson, Sr., was let out of the verbal paddock, he could go all night without denting his capacity for free association. After a quarter century, Artie knew the symptoms. In the man’s present condition, it was pointless to ask him straight out just what he meant by the word. Artie tried reconstructing: Calamine, zinc oxide, iodine—nothing in that direction. Dad’s invocation was certainly not a medical request. Dad abhorred all medications. His sickness was nothing so trivial or topical as dermatitis, except that in crowds, for the express purpose of publicly shaming any other Hobson with him, he had been known to sing, “It’s no sin to shake off your skin and go dancing in your bones.”
Artie leaned back in the rocker, farther than safe. He cocked his hands behind his head and again tried to reverse engineer the train of thought behind his father’s teaser. Calamine, Gal o’ Mine, Our Gal Sal. Possibly. Probably. Who could say? In part to forestall the old man from clouding the air with additional clues, Artie announced, “Technicians are working on the problem.”
He looked away to the far side of the screens. Under the rustic, ineffectual globes of small-town streetlamps, men of the 19th Precinct, scions of Second Street, used the unseasonably late warm weather to apply a last-minute manicure of preventions to their houses and lawns before the assault of winter. One or two broke from the routines of ownership to throw listless waves in the direction of One-Oh-Three, without expecting any return gesture. Neither father nor son disappointed them.
A snatch of Thanksgiving tune, “All is safely gathered in,” flashed through Artie’s head, so he sang the line out loud, buying time. Singing mad
e him feel incredibly foolish. He knew a glance at the bed would show his father grinning victory. So he did the only thing possible given the situation. He sang, louder, the next line: “E’er the winter’s storms begin.”
Artie thought that, with as little as De Kalb, Illinois, had to offer absolutely nothing except the claim of being the place where barbed wire was invented—there was nevertheless a stretch of fourteen days in fall when no better place on earth existed. Even given the immediate circumstances, he was somehow glad to be here. He paled at the prospect of scrapping his whole semester for nothing—increasingly likely with each new day he spent away from the law-school books. He could not really afford this unplanned trip back home. He had hoped to put the visit off until Thanksgiving, swing out for a few days, share some hormone-injected turkey with the rest of the gene pool, maybe watch a football game with the sibs: engage, for once, in the simple holiday fare the pilgrims intended. But the old refrain had again surfaced, drawing him unwillingly back into the crisis of family: “Your father is not well.”
Artie tried to imagine his mother saying, for once, “Your father is sick,” or even, “Your father is ill.” But he could not hear her voicing either. The woman had long ago caught from her husband the contagious part of his disease, the part Artie himself had inherited: the hope that everything would still come clean if you only sit still, understate everything, and make yourself as small a target as possible.
“Ah, Ailene,” Artie mouthed, almost audibly. He wondered if Mom ever gave up waiting for the miracle cure. He probed her words the way one might test a newly twisted ankle. Not well. But Artie did not dwell on his mother’s stoic refrain. He had a more immediate test at hand. His father, perpetual high school history teacher, unrepentant grand games master, had issued a challenge: Identify the following. And Artie swore not to budge until he proved more capable of making sense out of fragments than his father was of fragmenting sense.
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance Page 39