She’s telling me what I always knew, even at eight. That Maeve, next to Buddy, with him, was always one person, Maeve alone another. What I see now though, is something new.
“That’s your mother, isn’t it?” Janacek says. “I’ve not met her yet. That’s why I came. But I haven’t managed to. You know she won’t talk to any of us?”
“Why should she?”
“Only that sometimes this means the person has a very bad thing inside, that dare not be said.”
A child’s vocabulary. But it ticks.
Maeve is sitting beside Buddy; they’re together. But Maeve is now Maeve alone. That’s the difference. Is that so bad it can’t be said?
I see now that she’s not looking at either of us. Not at the doctor, not at me. There are still vibrations between her and me, from a lifetime together, but she’s unaware I’m catching them. That is another difference.
What if she’s not keeping things anymore? Objects. People. Not keeping them even to change them, to throw them out for something else. Not even keeping the coats—to be kept. And if she’s not keeping Buddy, the vibes tell me, is it a matter of divorce?
You don’t divorce a child, a son. An only son and child. And my majority has nothing to do with it. If her gaze travels past me, it has nothing to do with sons-and-mothers jazz, or any of the psycho-dramas well-meaning people are told of. She’s not keeping me on—that’s clear. Clear from the moment I entered the house, if I’d looked at it. Sure it hurts. But is that the worst?
“But she did invite you here,” I said to Janacek.
“I doubt she even knows my name. Your father did. He invited us all.”
“He did. How do you know?
“He talks to me now and then you know.”
“I see.”
Standard for what people say when they don’t, Betts. An adult phrase. Hilarity even came over me again; maybe that’s what chance is.
Remember Tufts, our programming instructor, came to the school twice a week from down in Dutchess County, where lives the IBM God he was always going to take us on a day-trip to see; but did never? How he used to tweak the ears of those he liked best, the ones who were serious—usually you and me—just when we had our heads bent, going at it hardest, how that jarring tug would come, in an arc that made us see stars. Treats us like reform-school boys, I said to you; what if he is such a good man at his stuff? You said no, studying was like a surface-tension you could get glued in; he wanted us to kick past. He ruined a set-up for me once though. But when he came to you, you’d already put everything to bed lightning fast and were ready for him. He bent down sideways, like a great wheedling moon, and said, “Right, Betts. You can tug my ear.” Though you were our best, we marveled. “How you handled him!” we all said. “Sweet drunk, like my father, I know what to expect.” You said to me later. Oh, you were our best. Not why I chose you though, to help me out here.
Remember how I visited you in India? Just four months ago, in the small house that fitted you too well. With its over-large nameplate. Never knew your middle name was Maitland. Fits you fine. I had never visited such a house before. You could tell me nothing, of all I knew you knew. Somehow I had to make you talk to me of those feverish schooldays—the lab hours after which you and I crept back to work and came out dazzled, walking across the yard in a silent double-migraine, to slide just in time into our seats in mess-hall, to chomp cold broccoli, cornbeef and ice cream—while the universal chessmen marched in our heads. With Tufts’ astral voice still barking at us what we called “Tufts’ Lord’s prayer.” Reorganize the problem; define it. Determine the method; mechanize the method. Break down the chart. Remember human error. Debug. The flow-diagram is the flow of logic. Code from the diagram. Test … Getting the application into production never really interested him; he was a teaching man; how we respected him for that! … But about that day at dinner—standing near you in the heavy Indian sun, I reminded you of it, and of what you had done. We were a school that said grace before a meal and gave thanks again after, very Protestant, each boy taking his turn; that day it was yours. You’d always laughed at me for loving the computer terminology for its old associations; the “assertion box”—by using which, Tufts said, a processor could assert his own individuality; the “memory box”—where the installation stores. These terms were chosen like the Oedipus complex they talked about in psych class, you said. “Just a throwback to a former world.” And I said, “I’m a throwback.”
But that day, when you stood up to say grace, you winked at me. Enable all traps! you barked, and the hall roared. When you stood up again at meal’s end, they were snuffling expectantly through their winter-wet noses. Real computer language was what you loved, those agreed-upon alphabets that couldn’t be profaned—the very name ALGOL could wake your smile. You stood up, fiddled stagily with the remains on your plate, wrinkled your high Northumberland nose. All drunks have drama in them, you once said. Remember human error, you said, and walked out. When the headmaster called you in afterwards, you were lectured not on your manners to God, but on the difficulty of keeping publicly insulted cooks. “So much for the application of knowledge, Bunty,” you said.
So when you turned eighteen, Tufts got you a research job at IBM. I visited you there too, the last time I saw you, except one. You had your own installation, or the squire’s share of it. “Still call it Batface?” I said, but got no answer; you were over my head now. And maybe IBM’s. They had you working on sub-routines, for godsake. But you were twenty, not in college, and war-vulnerable. On a nearby memo pad, somebody had written: Define Macro Skeleton. “What’s MACRO?” I said. “I forget?” I saw you were dashed. “A form of pseudo-instruction.” But it came back to me like a long ride on the motorbike, after months of nothing between the knees but women. “Or vice versa,” you said. By after dinner, we had each covered our respective miles. On your desk there was a book called Calculating Engines. “Charles Babbidge, born 1792. Anticipated everything. Including IBM’s new 7090.” I asked what that was. “This.” You laid a hand on it, like a man does on the throbbing that owns him. “Batface.”
Then looked at me darkly, lively fairhaired Anglo as you still were, silver under night’s study-lamp. “Don’t you fall for any of Norbert Wiener’s leftover boys, Bunty pal. Predicting the black future when computers get out of control. All the future’s already in the past, see. And ready for us. All of it.”
I reminded you I wasn’t at Harvard, but merely at a nearby institution, where I had taken pains to see that my most complicated course was one on Whitehead and Russell. “In words, John. That old terminology. I’ve wonked out on the other. It’s too applicable, just now. And MIT is dirty well applying it.”
I was eighteen now, and my draft number was low. We discussed ways of not going. “Ways of not applying ourselves,” you said. “You’ll go on playing it by ear, Bronstein, I know you.” You were going out to New Delhi. For a subsidiary of IBM.
“Where the needs are still very binary,” you said, with your old smile.
This I remembered. “Tuft’s law.” It was Tuft’s contention that since computers talk in binary code—based on the number 2, instead of the decimal—and since man, from feet to hands all the way to the on-off nerve systems of the brain was himself such a collection of twosomes, that the computer was therefore as human as any of his creations to date. Sometimes Tufts would use “binary” and human interchangeably; one Christmas he gave us a discourse on “binary” love.
“Where’s he now?”
I hadn’t known he was dead. Of the error of drink.
The Lord is dead, I thought, but I can smell his disciple, in the early Fishkill morn. On my way out, you made me a present of Babbidge. I have to say I never read him fully; backpacking is hard on the mind. But when I found you in New Delhi, not at the address on your card, but no trouble at all, I remembered what you’d said of him as I left. “The government gave him seventeen-thousand pounds to build his Analytical Engine. He
couldn’t, because the mechanical skills of the age weren’t equal to the job. He once said he’d swap the rest of his life for three days, five-hundred years later. And look.” You jerked a finger at Batface. “Less than a hundred and fifty years, Bunt. Isn’t that sad?”
I thought of that when I saw you again. John Maitland Betts, you were right. All your future was in the past. You knew what to expect.
I seem to be collecting sadnesses. A backpack is more expansible than I thought. Don’t mention skeletons to me, Betts, for a while. But that day, looking down at you in your house-grave, I thought I could define yours. There’s a country beetle that winds its horn out there around four o’clock, maybe to remind one to listen to the heat’s silences and be warned; you didn’t seem to hear. Your head will never again be your house.
I trust you to hear me now. The mechanical means now provided being my own memory-box. With those synapses they say spurt each to each, in an input-output of two by two. Help me recognize the problem. I’ll determine the method. Ignore all traps or interruptions due to time, distance and graves. In the termination of Batfaces anywhere, we shall disable them.
Hear old Tufts’ voice, homing like a four-o’clock beetle in the after-hours of prep-school America. “But, disciples, the computer remembers any disabled traps. And when they are finally enabled, as we say it, they take place in a built-in sequence. Oh beautiful, gentlemen. Socko beautiful.”
Then came the swig from the vest-pocket flask, brought out with a stiff one-two-three flexion: fingers, elbow, mouth—a ritual that he honored for a priestly moment afterward, eyes closed. Then went on talking, as if it had all been done in the dark. “And disciples, the building of systems which are to operate in real environments—with people! With other machines! With nature!—that’s the real challenge in programming.”
We found it all in our manual, later. But it remained as he said, beautiful. Enable all traps. Let the dining hall laugh. You and I could never get over the thrill of it. Of that sluice-gate moment when all the interruptions are cancelled, and the sequence pays off, pays and pays. How we squawked of it to each other, from bicycle to bicycle, under the Babbidge-light the stars were already sending us from their past, while we rode through people, machines and nature—all waiting to be hemmed in. I thought I’d found a religion. At fifteen. You’d found Tufts.
I got over it.
Because all computers have to be lied to, Betts. At times. The data has to fit the problem. No morality involved. Old Batface will do exactly what you tell it to—right or wrong. As all the manuals assure us, it is the perfect fool.
But it can’t lie, like a man does. To itself.
Recognize the problem, Betts? And right behind you, Tufts? You two would make a good audience. Best information processors a boy ever had. The internal world of the 7090, deals in microseconds; wouldn’t any life be quickly dealt with? But you could handle it alone, Betts, even from the India of your little house.
This particular installation—on whose magnetic tapes we could record all the data a twenty-one-year-old life can muster—belongs to my father. That won’t matter. It doesn’t know.
Pick up your past, Bronstein. According to leading authorities, it has your future in it.
Process the question. Start with any one of them.
Why did Buddy lie?
Has he before?… Put that in too…. And to whom.
EOF END OF FILE.
“I see,” he said.
He saw Maeve was going to leave them again. In a minute she’ll rise like a sleepwalker, pay them all her absent smile, and ease out that door, a plain refectory one, but thick as money could make ’em, when the year nineteen-hundred-and-twenty was bringing over monasteries from Spain.
J. P. Morgan and Hearst brought them, and the good Jewish bankers, working in their own way for Christ. Then the gangsters got them, and the theatre people. And now us. Underneath, are the monks and angels walking in the wood all the same, choralling from that tapestry up there, on whoever’s wall? And those mini-animals that grin and glee down at the bottoms of Italian painting before perspective, heavy-headed little ghouls on pin-legs? Does Buddy know how much Europe has taught me? I can’t see him as a monk, but I can in a Dutch burgher’s hat, wide with finance. And in a ruff, the family one, stiff with grandfather-starch and lacy hints from the family women. Holding him up. He’s staring out of the picture with the same pink abstraction about the eyes that Rembrandt saw clouding the eyes of one of the councilmen he painted; maybe they both had difficult wives at home. Since 1575, Dr. Jannie, that has been a worry. I can see why Buddy talks to you—even if neither of you knows.
When my father goes heavy and quiet like that, reddening like a solemn baby holding its breath against the bitter world, he never does anything physical. He’s not even touching Maeve’s hand. There was never anything to be scared of.
She’s going to get up. Nevertheless.
I never saw my father before. Those lines of force.
Only—the door got there first. Opening with a rumble from the wheelchair behind. By now, every door in the house would have my grandmother’s gouge in it. And every person she met. Maybe she had humor once; certainly there was sharpness; it’s all gone to ill-will. Of the kind people our age simply don’t have.
I don’t mean to exalt us. It’s only that in our own minds, we’re still saving people, not discarding them. No matter what we do, we still have general connections, not specific ones. Not narrowed down. That’s the barrier even between us and the next ones on—I’ve felt it already. I don’t mind it being called innocence. I wish it could be kept. Sometimes, I almost think it can be. If I could teach memory not to chafe in one rut for so long that it finally has to justify that rut. I can try.
“Why, the woman’s got an old AWVS uniform on.” The lady on my right—Mrs. Camel. Mrs. Drexel Jackson, as she’d informed me. Now that I myself had joined the animals, I no longer saw her the other way.
“Mrs. Reeves, you mean? What uniform?”
“American Women’s Voluntary Services, World War Two. That marvelous old blue.”
Poor Reeves, hoping that when friends meet her along the Avenue, they’ll think she’s some kind of volunteer. But she needn’t have; by now she’s got that limp look of people whose story you pass by, you haven’t got time for. I can tell she knows that’s what her story is. At school, much as I hated to pass by people like that, I did. It’s catching, otherwise.
Reeves brought the chair to a smart stop, waving her other hand meanwhile. She had our notice. Mother MacNeil helps her out there.
“Up on the balcony! Mother talked!”
My grandmother hadn’t budged from what she was when I first saw her. Every morning, in Amenia, she combed her hair at the kitchen mirror with a liquid that kept it dark, yet scorned to do it secretly. Her hands hadn’t spread with work, but gone pinched. In Leinster once, where her quarter of us had come from, on the border between Englishtown and Irishtown I met a postmistress reminded me of her. Wouldn’t deign to read your mail, but begrudged you it. A Kilkenny cat. Jonathan Swift went to school there. And learned something.
None of us three family was eager to inquire what she’d said, up there on the balcony. Any miracle would be so strictly her own.
But Dr. Jannie leaned forward eagerly. “What did she say?”
“It was when Bunty answered his father’s toast.” Reeves flushed, for the Yiddish maybe. If it was.
It was part of the gibberish the party-boy says at one point to his father; I couldn’t repeat it if I tried. I had faked it. It was from where he seems to be saying “A son. A son. A son is given.” Or a man.
… ‘A son is given’ is from the Messiah, I know that. We sang it in the glee club at the academy. And ‘My son, my son’—that’s David to Absalom. When he finds him hanging …
But that’s what I thought I said.
“She’d just been praying, as usual. She’s saying the Hail Mary, I think, if you listen
close; I’m not too familiar with it. Anyway, she says it eight times a day. Hail Mary full of Grace. Either that, or else my name.” Reeves gave an odd smile. “Sometimes I think she confuses the two of us. Anyway, she slammed the door of her prayer-thing shut—she’s got a lot of strength—and said right out, “Hear that? They’ve got him. Get me downstairs.” Straight out. I had to bring her the back way—where the ramp is. But now she’s clammed up again.”
“What is your name?”
Reeves eyes got bluer. Not only the uniform. Contact is hard to resist, even if manners tell you to. “Mary Grace.”
Mother MacNeil was struggling jealously. Her mouth ran about like a mouse she couldn’t catch.
Jannie gave her his full attention at once. “Yes yes, yes yes yes.” His hand smoothed hers, buttering it with a new, light voice that came oddly out of his bear bulk. Yes, a dancing bear that somebody had long ago ringed. Neither an ugly cripple nor a handsome robot, yet his flat face, deep-slit eyes, and that long, plumb line from nose to upper lip, did make me think of toy-types like the Tin Woodsman or Pinocchio, some creature that had been created from behind, more plainly so than the rest of us. Not a ghoul, Jasmin had said, explaining why she had gone back to him—and why she left again. Only the ghoul’s son. “With a mother like his, whom could one go to—to be a child?” She hadn’t wanted to tell me his story. “It puts him in your power, Bunt, anybody who hears.” But I must have had her in my power without knowing it. After she told me, she lay very still. Since we spent most of our time together in bed, I have few memories of her any other way. He has all those.
“Yes, yes—try.” He held my grandmother offside like a vet holding a hurt animal. “Isn’t it marvelous, there’s nothing like it in the world.” He breathed deep. “She is hunting necessity.” He bent his head to hers.
“Go on, go,” he said. He was weeping joy, or sweating bright balm. It’s his necessity, flashed over me. He wants her to do it for him. To show him the lengths to which people can go.
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