Authors: Jane Smiley
she and Andrew got outside, the boys next door, the Lear boys, were already walking
around on the roof of their house. "It isn't like this all the time, by any manner of means,"
called out Mrs. Lear with a smile. She let the four boys walk around on the roof of the
house all that day and did not make them go to school. The boys' names were Theodore,
Martin, Hubert, and Dorsett. Mrs. Lear's name was Winnifred. Captain Lear commanded
the
Leader
and would be at sea until Christmas.
The bed was delivered, and she and Andrew explored the fringes of marital
relations. According to Beatrice, a woman was lucky not to conceive a child on her
wedding night; with Andrew, this good fortune was not a matter of luck. Even so, they
proceeded in what Margaret thought was a stately and warmly clothed manner to full
marital relations. Since neither of her sisters had described with any exactitude what
marital relations were, she found them unexpected, rather like the blue color of Neptune.
But for Andrew, the lure of the observatory was strong. Their walks about the island and
her visits to the observatory were what seemed to make him happiest and most
affectionate. Any new variety of bird or detected movement of a star caused him to
squeeze her hand, or even kiss her on the top of the head and tell her about all the other
birds and stars he had seen over the years and around the world.
Margaret had no idea who she was anymore, since she was no longer an old maid
in a small Missouri town where bitter cold was succeeded by dogwood, then lilacs, then
breathless heat, then the bronze trees and gray skies of autumn, and at last snow again, so
she kept her eye on Mrs. Lear.
Mrs. Lear was naval to the core. Her father was a retired admiral living in New
York, also on an island (Long Island). He had known Admiral Farragut himself (a very
famous man whom Margaret had never heard of) and had been present when Farragut
shouted to his crew, "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!" ("Or maybe Papa was
belowdecks just at that moment, but he was on the ship!") Mrs. Lear loved her house, she
loved Mare Island, and she was as comfortable with the navy as most people were with
their immediate families. When Margaret exclaimed at the row of enormous houses, with
their porches and porticoes and assiduously tended gardens, she said, "What do you think
the navy is for? It is for cheap labor!" And then she laughed. And it was true. Every time
Margaret looked around, it seemed, something was being done for her by a young man-he was washing her windows or cutting her shrubs or mowing her grass or carting away
her rubbish.
Mrs. Lear had lived all over the world and served strange things for tea--no
cucumber sandwiches for her; rather, oranges, grapefruit, artichokes, oysters, tortillas,
cheese made from goat's milk and sheep's milk that she had learned to like in Algiers and
bought on her weekly trips by ferry to San Francisco. She would eat the egg of any bird,
just to see what it tasted like. She enjoyed a certain sauce that was made of hot peppers,
the hotter the better, and she had plants full of tiny, pointed, jewel-like red peppers that
she showed Margaret but wouldn't let her touch. When the boys tumbled down the stairs,
she laughed. When they ran in the front door and out the back, she laughed. When they
rolled around on the grass, punching and fighting one another, she laughed. When they
called out to her from the upper windows of the house, turning the heads of passersby,
she laughed. There was nothing too strange or too lively for Mrs. Lear, which led
Margaret to believe that a life in the navy was far more stimulating and less serious than
life in Missouri.
Andrew very much liked the Lear boys, and took them up the hill after supper to
look through the telescope at the observatory before they smoked their last cigarettes and
went to bed. And the Lear boys were unfazed by Andrew. When Hubert or Martin came
over, Andrew would instantly call out, "How many inches is four meters?" and then time
the child until he worked it out. Or he would come out of his office into the parlor and
say, "All right, boy, my wagon is being pulled by my horse at a walk. I'm taking a
hundredweight of pears to Napa. Each pear weighs four ounces. Every hundred yards, I
throw a pear out of the wagon. It's fourteen miles to Napa. How many kilograms of pears
do I have when I get there? And how many pears?" He would not let the poor child leave
the house until he had done this problem.
He didn't mind that the Lear boys were allowed to run about, to jump on and off
things, to swing on ropes from trees. Or that they walked the railings of the big porch as a
matter of course (including up and down the stair railings), improving their balance--a
boy with a naval future had to perch like a squirrel and climb like a monkey. They rolled
their own firecrackers with newspaper and black powder. They wandered away and came
back soaking wet from swimming in the bay, reminding him of swims in the Missouri
River with his own brothers. And the Lear boys were never disrespectful. They
"ma'am"ed and "sir"ed everyone as a matter of course, snapping upright and not quite
saluting. More than once, Margaret was walking down the street and heard a greeting
float out over her head--it was Hubert or Dorsett, balanced on the railing of one of the
second-story balconies. As soon as the child saw her, he would shout, "Evening, ma'am!"
and nod politely, no matter what he was doing. Andrew considered it ideal that the boys
loved explosions of all sorts, which they called "ordnance." And that Theodore lived for
the cranes in the shipyard. Marital relations, Margaret came to understand, were meant to
reproduce this happy chaos, a return, for Andrew, to the boyhood he remembered, and for
her, perhaps, the resurrection of a childhood she had missed.
One day, Mrs. Lear said, "You could have knocked me over with a feather this
morning. I was in the nursery, looking at plants, and I heard Mr. Burgle speaking German
to someone, who spoke right back to him, easy as you please, and who should I see but
Captain Early!
Ja
and
nein
and
auf den Bergschrund
and I don't know what all."
"Didn't you know Captain Early was educated in Germany?"
"Whatever for, my dear?"
"For astronomy and physics. At the University of Berlin. I mean, after the
University of Missouri."
"But why didn't he go to an American university, like Harvard?"
"I don't know." In fact, though he was always informative, Andrew hardly ever
said a word about his past, or his feelings. It was as if his feelings were entirely
accounted for by what there was to know. Nor did he delve into her feelings, seeming to
think that, whatever they were, they were her business.
Another time, Mrs. Lear said to her, "Captain Early has very big feet, if you don't
mind my saying so."
"He's a tall man."
"Goodness me, well over six feet--not made for a sailor, my dear, not at all. But
do tell me, does he have his boots specially made?"
"I
believe
so."
"But
where?"
That evening, when Andrew came in, she took a good look at his boots, which
were a rich deep brown, and not really like any boots she'd seen in Missouri. She couldn't
believe she had lived with these boots now for two months without noticing them. She
asked him. He said, "German Street."
The next day, when she reported this to Mrs. Lear, the lady's eyebrows lifted.
"My dear, I'm sure he means Jermyn Street, with a 'J.' It's in London."
Margaret said, "I should ask him."
"You could," said Mrs. Lear, "but I find keeping a sharp eye out is more
instructive. Captain Lear hates to be asked questions. My father was just the same way."
This conversation led her, the next afternoon, into his wardrobe, where she looked
at his clothing for some minutes. He had five pairs of boots, four uniforms (he wore a
uniform every day to the observatory), a stack of shirts and other linen, five hats in
various styles, three summer suits, and three winter suits. He had two dressing gowns, of
silk, which he wore about the house in the evening. She didn't know what was more
surprising to her--that she had gone so long without investigating Andrew's wardrobe, or
that its contents were so much finer than the contents of her own.
Spurred by this investigation into Andrew's wardrobe, she tried another--she
looked at all the books in his library, which was a small room at the back of their house,
to which the door was always closed. The shelves in their parlor were well stocked with
Dickens and Verne and Conan Doyle and Rhoda Broughton. In his office the books were
in German, French, English, Dutch, and what looked like Norwegian. She could not make
out what any of them were about, even the English ones.
She ate with him, walked with him (it wasn't just birds he liked, but plants and
snakes and rabbits), listened to him sing (he had a pleasant baritone, and sang lively
songs in German), and watched him read (which he did, quite often, at meals, apologizing
to her for not being able to break a lifelong habit). She cooked for him. He liked bacon
fried in a skillet, then pushed to one side so that two eggs could be fried, sunny-side up,
in the bacon grease until their edges were crispy and brown but their centers were still
warm and a bit runny. At midday, he liked a steak, and in the evening, he liked a soup,
especially a pea or bean soup cooked with a ham hock. He liked her to boil up the greens
he brought home from walks--telling her they were nutritious and good for the digestion.
But there was nothing he loved more than new information. Their little house was
a riot of books and papers. The first ferry of the morning (which arrived before 6 a.m.)
brought all the current editions of the
San Francisco Call
, the
Chronicle
, and the
Examiner
. Of course there was the Vallejo paper also, and if you scoured Vallejo, you
could get the
Sacramento Bee
. Dozens of copies of
Scientific American
sat by the kitchen
door, where Andrew left them to go out to the rubbish or not, depending on whether he
was offended by articles being run. The copies of
Nature
, another science journal, more
respectable in Andrew's estimation, sat on a table in the front room for a long time, the
stack growing taller and taller, but eventually that stack, too, wound up beside a door, its
fate always in the balance, because it, too, ran articles that Andrew disagreed with. In
addition, he had many correspondents, and received many letters every day, though not as
many as he sent out.
Much of their conversation was about charlatans and idiots who held ridiculous
notions. All these notions were much the same to her, since she didn't hold any scientific
ideas at all beyond those of Jules Verne. For example, there was the metric system. Little
did she know that, whereas in Missouri and even California people spoke of pints and
pounds and rods and bushels and pecks, in France people spoke of grams and meters and
centimeters, which were all scientifically related to the circumference of the earth.
Germany had been a measurement madhouse before 1870, according to Andrew, with
every town measuring its own ells, and the
Meile
different in Baden from what it was in
Bavaria, and that didn't even begin to take into account the
Wegstunde
, the
Klafter
, and
the
Zoll
, which was an inch, more or less. Andrew could not forgive the British
Parliament for voting, in a "demented medieval manner," to decline to put the British
Empire on the metric system. Margaret mentioned this to Mrs. Lear, who said, "Oh, my
dear. That is marriage. As far as Captain Lear is concerned, the navy is riddled top to
bottom with fools who were promoted for no apparent reason. But it could be worse--it
could be the Royal Navy!" She laughed. "Better for them to air their complaints than take
to drink over them!"
Andrew talked endlessly about the universe.
First, she had to be educated about everything that was known about the universe,
such as the rate of acceleration for falling bodies, and laws of thermodynamics. Entropy
was a concept that she grasped instantly. When he was explaining it to her, she imagined
herself, first, busily cleaning house and cutting up a ham hock for baked beans, then, as a
result of entropy, lying on a sofa and reading Rhoda Broughton. She didn't have too much
trouble, either, with Newton's ideas about gravitation or his three laws of motion, except
for the third one. Her life experience seemed to indicate that if you weren't careful, often
the reaction was stronger than the original action, not equal to it. Against Mr. Newton's
"equal and opposite reaction," she suggested "sow the wind, reap the whirlwind." Andrew
laughed as if she were making a joke when she said this, and kissed her on the cheek.
Once he felt that she had a rudimentary understanding of the universe, he
explained to her how he had changed its nature by identifying a multitude of double stars.
These were two suns orbiting each other, rather like a couple spinning in the middle of a