“Not America.” Henri shakes his head and leans on the ax, looking out over the water. “This is something else. . . .”
At home in my apartment I imagine these scenes while cars zoom by on the freeway overpass that arcs a dozen feet outside my window, making the glass rattle with each truck that goes by. Sitting in my armchair below the shadow of a wilting potted fern, I push aside the plastic trays from my microwaved dinner and watch as night falls over the city. Overhead, only a handful of pale stars are visible through the haze. And I’m struck by the thought that Henri Latoledan (and young Peter Force, and you) would have glanced up at these same points of light, and how maybe this is all that binds us together now: these lonely fires in the sky, a million light-years away.
“AND WHAT is this you’re trying to do here?”
Cheri-Anne turns from the window of the Ohio mansion, to find her tutor tapping the sheaf of papers that she handed him ten minutes ago. She leans across the desk to study the line of equations he indicates with his silver pen.
“That . . . oh.” Seeing the mistake, she crosses out an exponent and rewrites it outside the parenthesis. “It should be like this. You see?”
“Hmm.” He glances up and meets her eyes with a blue stare of somewhat unsettling intensity. She looks away. “I thought so.” He smiles indulgently at her before resuming his study of the formulae.
Cheri-Anne gazes out the window again. The sunlit room where she takes her lessons is on the second floor of the house, and has a view over the garden to the shimmer of the great lake in the distance. Yellow spring light, the color of parchment paper, tints the harp on its stand in one corner, the shelves of books, the desk by the windows where they sit.
Covertly she glances at her instructor and wonders how long he will last. When Mr. Coulter had been hired to replace his predecessor, she had been delighted—more, she admits ruefully now, by his looks than by his qualifications. Increasingly, though, she finds herself chafing at the glacial pace of study that he insists upon. Outside, the small white triangles of sails glide silently over the horizon of the lake.
Mr. Coulter clears his throat, picks up his glasses, polishes them, and affixes them to his perfectly straight nose. “Well.” He shuffles the pages of her work and takes the glasses off again. “I understand the math, but my dear girl”—he chuckles—“honestly, I can’t make head or tail of what you’re trying to do. These equations simply don’t work.”
“Yes, exactly!” She realizes that her voice is too loud and lowers it. “You see? They’re both true and false—or rather, it seems impossible to demonstrate they are either.”
He nods patiently. “Yes, but obviously they’re false. The problem is just in the way that you’ve written your maths.”
“But—” She struggles to find a way of explaining this most recent inspiration that kept her awake and sitting at her desk all through the previous night, filled with racing thoughts until dawn. “It seems to me there is some paradox about the numbers themselves in this proof. As if ”—she struggles for an analogy—“as if I were to tell you: ‘The next sentence is true. This sentence is false.’ You see? There is a fundamental inconsistency. And here”—she points at the paper—“given this class of recursive formulae, there must also be a set of recursive signs for which . . .” She gazes at him, hoping she has conveyed some inkling of the beautiful, self-annihilating, logical perfection she imagines.
“That’s simply gibberish. My dear girl, mathematics is not about word games.” He frowns and runs a hand through his blond hair. “You simply can’t do this sort of thing. Now, then.” He hands the papers back to her and turns his attention to the primer they have been working from.
She accepts the thin sheaf and holds it protectively against her chest, studying the movement of Mr. Coulter’s hand and feeling her cheeks prick with red. Maybe he is right, she thinks; maybe she is only fooling herself with these ideas. After all, who would seriously listen to the wild daydreams of a seventeen-year-old girl from the provincial Midwest? Still, she tells herself, she will send a letter to Professor Riemann anyway—more as a gesture of defiance against the invisible walls around her than in hope of a response, as all her previous letters to Göttingen have gone unanswered.
“Now, then,” he continues, “why don’t we try a few more interpolations?”
She exhales a shaky breath. “We’ve already done the interpolations.” Her voice sounds sulky in her own ears, a petulant child. With an effort she reins in her emotions. “Perhaps we might try something new?”
“Now, now, Miss Toledo.” The tutor smiles indulgently. “You still make mistakes, and you know that practice makes perfect. Perhaps next week we can try some more advanced material.”
Finally he leaves and she stands with a sigh, wishing that she could loosen her corset. Her neck and shoulders hurt. She paces in circles around the room until the maid arrives with a plate of finger sandwiches and tea, her usual refreshment between lessons.
“Cook told me you’ll be having a new gown for the ball next Friday,” the maid chirps, bright-eyed. “Is it true?”
“Yes. I will.” She pictures the monstrosity of taffeta and ruffles the tailor insisted upon, wincing inwardly. Trying to make her look like a fancy layer-cake that some tedious, well-bred young man from a Boston family will bite down upon. And that is all I am to them, she thinks with a surge of anger and something like desperation: a well-trained confection of ribbons. Even to her father, with all his vague romantic ideals—an ornament to be polished and bartered, for the continuance of the Toledo dynasty.
“And it’s true there’s lace up the sleeves, brought all the way from France?” the maid burbles.
“Yes. It is true.”
“It sounds lovely,” the servant girl sighs, pouring the tea. And when she has departed, Cheri-Anne stands motionless beside the desk, where steam from the lavender bone-china cup rises to disappear in a shimmer of air, distorting a tiny patch of the yellow afternoon world outside the windows.
Sipping her tea, she thinks about the equations dismissed by Mr. Coulter. What she imagines with these formulae and the paradox they demonstrate, about some fundamental imperfection within mathematics itself—the right phrase coming to her now, belatedly—has a feeling of simple, fierce rightness that brings a nearly physical stab of longing. She absently lets one hand wander over her breasts, down to her thighs, the touch like a stranger’s through the layers of dress, petticoats, and corset. If only, she thinks—but then doesn’t know how the sentence should, or could, end.
On the mantelpiece, the gilt ormolu clock chimes and she opens her eyes. In a few minutes her harp teacher, Mrs. Hammond, will arrive. She looks out the window again and feels an abrupt and overpowering sense of frustration at the confining elegance of the music room around her, the impossible gulf between herself and the white sails in the distance, the smallness of her life.
She puts down the teacup, hot liquid sloshing over the saucer. The walls and ceiling close in on her, pushing the breath from her body. She pictures a series of disconnected, violent images—the murder of Mrs. Hammond, the metronome’s needle quivering in the shrewish old harp teacher’s eye socket. The maid screaming in terror, servants running from the mansion as it is engulfed in flames—
Squeezing her eyes shut, she searches for calm. None of this matters, she tells herself. This place is only temporary, a passing obstacle between herself and the world where she belongs: Paris, London, New York, the cities where great ideas are explored in famous laboratories.
But when she tries to picture Paris, she finds that her memories of the few days she spent in that city have grown faded from overuse, like the faces of coins fingered into vague impressions. The size of its gray buildings and boulevards, the glimpse of a cathedral through the curtains of a moving carriage.
She has not left Ohio since she returned from Europe two years ago, kept at home by her father’s inept and clinging protectiveness. From below, she hears the butler, Nonce
, open the front door and Mrs. Hammond’s shrill greeting. Not much longer, she thinks. She opens her eyes, plastering a smile on her face in preparation for the harp teacher’s arrival. And she imagines herself far away from here, stepping off a train in New York, onto the stage of real life.
SHE RECALLS THIS NOW, sitting in the subway workshop. It is morning and the fire in the stove has died during the night, her breath steaming in the chill air. Beyond the dirty windows the shapes of New York are a dim jumble.
She shakes her head and shivers, fighting the tug of these memories. Even while her recollections of this Ohio-that-might-have-been offer a reassuring familiarity that she craves, they are also freighted with a growing sense of peril. Because how can these things belong to the same life, she wonders—feeling herself tilt toward hysteria—these recollections, and the dingy room where she now sits? And for the thousandth time in the past week, she struggles against the terrifyingly obvious conclusion that she has simply lost her mind and slipped into some kind of delusion.
She remembers waking up in a park and not recognizing her surroundings. She remembers waking up and finding herself in an impossible place, where the Kingdom of Ohio has nearly been forgotten. An impossible world, where seven years can disappear without a trace.
Where, ever since her arrival, the boundaries between things seem to be blurring more and more: the diminishing distance between herself and every other lunatic woman who begs on street corners for pennies, the distance between reason and something else, older and darker . . .
The mechanic stirs in his cot and she glances over at him, seeing his face as if for the first time. Sleeping, he looks younger and more vulnerable, the prematurely weathered creases around his eyes smoothed away, a lock of brown hair falling across his forehead. For a moment she has the impulse to bend down and touch his cheek but quickly checks herself, vaguely shocked at even thinking such a thing. He is only a helpful stranger, someone who happened to be nearby when her endurance ran out. Silently she watches as he groans and sits up, fumbles to light the stove and begins to make tea. They eat breakfast in near silence, both of them awkward and unsure of how to act in the other’s presence.
“So what are you going to do?” Peter finally asks.
“I suppose I am still trying to decide myself.” She looks away from him, a wave of panic rising in her chest as she contemplates again the overwhelming dimensions of her situation. One step at a time, she tells herself, clinging to the vague plan she has formulated over the last days, the slender hope it offers like a life raft in an angry ocean. Form a hypothesis, construct an experiment, search for verification. She silently recites these words to herself as a man tra against the terrifying unknown.
Then she draws a shaky breath and offers the mechanic a shaky smile. “There are certain errands I must attend. But if I may impose on your generosity, I hoped that I might spend one more night here?” She blurts the question, stumbling over her words.
He hesitates, then nods. “Guess that sounds all right.”
“Thank you. I only wish I knew how to express my gratitude.”
A number of impossible suggestions in this regard flash through Peter’s mind, most of them featuring the memory of her exposed legs from the night before.
Feeling uncomfortably conscious of his gaze and the space between their bodies, she finishes her tea and stands. For a moment they look at each other, neither knowing quite how to part ways.
He opens his mouth—but before he can speak, she is gone, the door banging shut behind her.
FOR A TIME AFTER her departure, Peter sits in the workshop trying to make sense of what she has told him and to put his thoughts in order. Outside, he can hear the clang of engines and the shouts of the excavation crews—unlike the mechanics, the rock men work seven days a week. On other mornings, similarly unoccupied, he might have gone out to talk with Paolo, or listen to Tobias and Michael trading jokes, but today the thought of doing so seems like a burden. He feels strangely distant from the life of the city that unfolds on the other side of the clapboard walls. As if he has been imperceptibly enveloped by the private world of her story, like the shimmering curve of a soap bubble’s wall.
Shouts of traffic and the clamor of pedestrians from beyond the workshop door. He blinks away these wandering thoughts and glances up at the battered wall clock—only half an hour has passed since she left, but it seems like days. Thinking about her, Peter can see clearly enough what’s happening: how she’s using some tall tales and her pretty face to buy his generosity. He can see this but, to his dismay, he realizes that he’s falling for it anyway.
Suddenly overcome by the need to be somewhere else, and disgusted by his own gullibility, Peter stands and pulls on his coat, crossing to the door. Outside he hesitates, then starts walking toward the tip of land called the Battery, where the East River meets the Hudson.
It is a long walk and he chooses it deliberately, hoping that the cold and distance will help clear his head. It is a foggy winter day and he thinks of how the arc of water beyond the Battery will be shrouded in gray, enclosing the city and making the metropolis feel somehow intimate, all sounds muted by the waves. This is what I need, he thinks, and pushes through the crowd, hands in his pockets.
A dozen blocks later, though, he stops. What if she returns while he is gone and, not finding him there, disappears forever? Worse yet, what if she’s discovered by the company guards and tells them how he’d let her stay in the garage, a clear breach of regulations? He tries to tell himself these worries don’t matter and to keep walking, but they only come crowding back. So despite himself, he finally starts back toward the workshop.
Approaching the construction site, Peter notices a cloud of ugly black smoke rising from somewhere inside the subway-works. One of the engines broken again, he thinks, his heart sinking. Then a clamor of shouts erupts from behind the wooden fence and he breaks into a run. As he nears the gate a crowd of workmen comes surging out toward him, surrounding a knot of struggling figures.
Peter cranes his neck trying to peer through the mob. With a start he sees that one of the men at the center of the melee is Tobias, his shirt torn and face bloodied, being pulled along by three burly company guards. Shoving forward, Peter grabs the nearest workman by the arm. “What’s happening? What happened here?”
The workman—one Peter hasn’t met before—grins stupidly. “The boy went crazy. He starts yelling, smashing them machines.”
Abruptly Tobias wrenches himself free and wheels so he is almost facing Peter, his arms outstretched. “They’re killing us!” he shouts. “You see? They’re—”
Then the guards are on top of him, wrestling him to the ground. The crowd of workmen falls back as two uniformed policemen appear and join the fray. As Peter watches, Tobias is dragged off into a waiting police wagon. The doors are slammed behind him, and abruptly as it started the whole incident is over. The wagon rumbles away, the crowd slowly disintegrates into knots of muttering conversation.
Peter stands outside the construction-site gate, gazing after the departed wagon. All of this has been too sudden, too distant from his earlier private thoughts, for him to comprehend. He feels a hand on his shoulder and turns to find Paolo standing beside him.
“Paolo, what—?” He looks at the other man helplessly.
Some inner struggle is briefly visible on the Italian’s face. “It is a brave thing,” he says at last. “A stupid thing, and brave.”
“But why? What did Tobias do?”
“You don’t know?” Paolo smiles sadly. “Tobias and his brother, always they have been full of ideas. They hate the rich bosses, the capitalists.” He shrugs. “So now he decides to do something.”
“But—” Peter shakes his head, struggling with this idea and trying to reconcile the memory of Tobias’s laughing face with the shouting, furious figure of a few moments ago. “Why start smashing the engines?” he asks. “Seems to me like they make the work easier.”
Paolo regards him sil
ently. “Sometimes I think rich men build machines so we become more like the machines ourselves,” he says finally, then walks away.
PETER SPENDS the rest of the day fidgeting in the workshop. He tries to pass the time by working on a broken pneumatic hammer, but is so distracted that his efforts only damage it further. Turning Paolo’s words over in his head, he remembers what Tobias said weeks ago about the managers of the subway project—bloodsuckers, all of them.
He has always been distantly aware of the very rich—the mine owners in Idaho and then, immeasurably wealthier, the royalty of this city—but until now he’d unconsciously assumed that such people existed on a separate plane from his own. Now the realization that these worlds might somehow be connected, perhaps one and the same, fills him with a kind of wonder and outrage.
He thinks about this, and then about her—whether he’ll see her again, what it might mean if she does come back. In a dim way, he almost hopes that she won’t reappear. Things would be simpler like that, he decides; although he can’t say why, there would be a mysterious completeness to their brief acquaintance if it simply ended like this.
In the evening, after the excavation crews have left, when someone taps on the door Peter experiences a moment of disappointment as he opens it to find her standing outside. Beyond the workshop, silver twilight is fading into darkness. As he lets her in, he sees that she is pale and drawn, unsteady.
“How”—he stumbles over the words—“how are you?”
“Tired.”
Awkwardly, he ushers her to the stool beside the stove and she sinks down onto it. He sits across from her as she leans toward the iron grate, staring at the coals, blank exhaustion on her face. The jangle of nervous energy in his chest makes it hard for Peter to stay still. Realizing that he is staring at her, he forces himself to look away. For a few minutes neither says anything.
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