Authors: Jane Smiley
do, Early! Question you must, and if the old men fume and fuss, you must not pay a bit of
mind.' I consider our meeting to have been a great success, but though I have written
three letters to him since, I have not received a reply." He made at least four trips about
Europe, meeting or attempting to meet astronomers he admired.
Margaret had thought Darwin's first name was Charles; undoubtedly there was
another one. She dared not ask, though.
There was one letter that he sent his mother not long after her famous trip to
Baden, where he joined her for a month. In this letter he remarked that "Miss Maria
Meyerhoff and Miss Meyerhoff seem to have gone away without a word of farewell," but
there was nothing to indicate the extent of his relationship to either of the girls, and,
indeed, whether they were German, English, or American. The Meyerhoff sisters were
not mentioned again, nor was any other girl. She winced a little at how these encounters
might have gone, with Andrew so big and intent and frank-spoken, but it was no business
of hers, was it? None of this was any business of hers, no matter what Mrs. Lear said, but
she read on.
The schooling in Berlin only put off the most pressing question, and by the time
he was finished, Andrew was ready to find a place for himself in Europe--even in Russia.
A return to the U.S. he seemed to view as a last resort. He wrote, "I have sent off the
letter to Struve in Dorpat. Mauritz read the letter for me and complimented me on my
felicitous German. I know I could learn Russian with perfect ease, if given the chance."
An inquiry had been made at Yale, which resulted in the following remark: "Should I go
to Yale (though I know this is a fond wish of yours, dear Mother), I would find myself
teaching not only mathematics (and the highest level would be simple calculus), but also
chemistry and geology (!), not to mention elementary biology. No astronomy, as there is
no observatory! (Even Crete, Nebraska, now has a new observatory!) The great thing
now, anyway, Mother, is to go south--to South America or South Africa. There is an
observatory in Lima (PERU, not OHIO--I know Ohio would be preferable to you,
Mother!) run by Harvard University. But we would be far away from my brothers, and so
I hesitate. I will not hide from you that I am in a great quandary. For your sake, I've
thought of BORDEAUX and BESANCON, but the likelihood of the French accepting an
American, especially one educated in Berlin, is altogether remote."
These letters were dated with Andrew's customary precision: "Operncafe, Unter
den Linden, Berlin, April 2, 1894, 7:02 PM-7:22 PM." The dates and addresses did give
her a strange feeling. Margaret imagined him sitting "under the linden trees," sipping an
elegant cup of coffee and eating an apple tart of some kind in an impossibly fragrant
world, surrounded not only by lindens, but by pots of geraniums and roses and daisies
and other blooms of all kinds and colors, with mysterious notes of music floating among
the various perfumes, and a horde of silent, graceful bicycles streaming by.
After she read this packet (and carefully replaced the letters where she had found
them), she made up her mind that Andrew was not so different from other young men,
after all. He had not left (many) implacable enemies behind him. He had gone to a
different country and fit himself into it with some success. She said nothing in particular
about her investigations to Mrs. Lear, but one day, after Captain Lear had been home for
a month, and they were eating beef and mutton and potatoes every night and the boys
were sitting up straight, speaking only when spoken to, and ending every sentence with
"sir!," Mrs. Lear remarked to Margaret it was a wife's first duty not to be taken by
surprise.
And it was true that now, when he said things like "People themselves are the
problem," she thought she understood what he was getting at. "The lens looks at
something. The mirror refracts it. These instruments are not perfect, but they are more
perfect than the eye, and the eye is more perfect than the mind."
She asked him whether he planned to send his paper on the bullet holes in to a
journal. He said, "Here is the paradox. It only takes one man to find out what is true, but
he cannot live long enough or see widely enough to do it. Ten men see ten truths, and
then they spend ten years arguing amongst themselves. A hundred men are ten times
worse, and a thousand ten times worse than that. I've come to despair at how the truth is
dissipated and distorted with every mind that turns upon it." He shook his head. They
were walking to get the San Francisco papers and some vegetables and bread. He
squeezed her hand.
She said, "I looked at the paper, Andrew. It makes perfect sense to me."
"My exile is the best thing that could have happened to me, after all. Here I am,
out at the edge of the world." He stared down at her. "Even though the physical world has
no edge, my dear, the scientific world does! And at this edge, I am relieved of the
constant necessity of human intercourse, and so my mind becomes freer by the day." She
nodded, and put her hand through his arm. He smiled and patted it in an affectionate
manner. But the paper remained where it was.
* * *
MRS. L EAR guessed her condition before Margaret did, one day when she drank
tea and then felt her stomach turn at the sight of some smoked eel. It was about time, said
Mrs. Lear, and then she insisted ("for the sake of the child") on reviewing Margaret's
recent history with an eye to ascertaining "the breeding date," and, "my dear, the
foaling
date." She said, "These things do not happen by themselves, as much as you might be led
to believe that they do. My own mother told me that she did not understand how she
came to have nine children until at least number seven, when some ladies in her sewing
circle took pity on her and told her. But it's best to be well informed and not turn your
modest gaze away from the whole subject, as so many are tempted to do." She estimated
that Margaret was about six weeks along, which would make for an early-fall "foaling
date"--"Not at all bad, though when the time comes to take the infant out for air, you'll
have a bit of rain, but we shall consider that when we must."
Each day, she intended to tell Andrew what she suspected, but failed to do so.
"Breedings," as she now thought of them, were neither frequent nor easy. Some days, she
made the case to herself that the very rarity of these events was reason enough to tell him
that an effort had been crowned with success. Was Andrew any more knowledgeable
about "breeding" and "foaling" than Mrs. Lear reported her mother to have been?
Possibly not. This was her excuse. What she didn't tell Mrs. Lear was that there seemed
to be no way actually to produce the child she imagined, whose face came into her mind
unbidden, simply a face, appealing but remote, with no maleness or femaleness attached
to it.
"Goodness me!" exclaimed Mrs. Lear. "You look so shocked, my girl. Shocked
every day. But of course you do! I cried my eyes out the first time. Captain Lear had me
in Lima, Peru, and for a while it looked like China, if you can imagine that. But you do
get used to it. It may take years and one child after another, but you do get used to it. I am
not saying, into your ears only, that I don't sometimes find it a relief that Captain Lear is
off to sea again next month, because I do, though of course he is a wonderful man, all
things taken together."
Margaret walked about the island, and then about the town, staring at the children,
boys and girls, young and old, being carried and walking by themselves, running,
skipping, rolling hoops and playing marbles, fishing in the bay, and working, too, since
the general population of Vallejo was enormously varied, and plenty of children were
selling fruits and vegetables and eggs and newspapers and tobacco, or shining shoes or
driving carts or riding horses or carrying things home wrapped in paper. She began to feel
quite sanguine about the foaling, which would be followed by another breeding, and then
another foaling, and then another breeding, and so on. Whatever Andrew's propensities
with regard to marital relations, he clearly understood that marriages produced children,
and, according to the evidence of his jovial pleasure in the Lear boys, he was bound to
greet her news with pleasure, but still she didn't tell him.
It was almost March, her first in California. The rain poured down and the fog
closed in. When the sound of the rain was not blocking out every other (except, of course,
the constant clanging and roaring from the ship factories, but she had gotten used to that),
the fog brought in a litany--ships calling to one another as they crossed the bay, ferry
whistles and shouts of men, officers calling orders to sailors over in the quarters,
bantering and laughing from the street. Once in a while, she heard someone singing. Even
the calls of birds emerged from all the racket, especially at those fugitive moments when
human sounds had suddenly fallen silent, and a crow would squawk or a heron would
cluck or a goldfinch would carry on a conversation right outside her window.
She began to feel what Mrs. Lear referred to as "morning sickness," though these
bouts did not take place in the morning. On the third or fourth evening of this, she was
reading by the electric light, and she felt the strongest surge of nausea yet. Her first
thought was that she should not have eaten, or, indeed, even cooked, the liver she'd made
for supper. She had forced herself to eat a few bites--she decided while she cooked the
liver (which Andrew had brought home) that she would tell him the next day, and then,
perhaps, they would adopt a blander and more agreeable diet.
She went into the kitchen to fetch a piece of bread, and suddenly vomited into the
slop bucket beside the table. Then she felt so tired, much more tired than she had ever felt
in her life, that she staggered back into the front room and fell into a sleep, or into a
stupor, right there in her chair, with the electric light on. In the morning, Andrew told her
that he had come in very late and attempted to awaken her, but with no success--so little
success that he was alarmed and took her pulse, but her pulse was strong and not
quickened, so he turned out the electric light and went to bed.
When she awoke in the chair, stiff from her night's rest, the sun was shining and
she felt much better after a few stretches--rested and not at all sick. She tested herself by
eating some bites of bread and drinking some tea--both went down well. Andrew came
out of the bedroom, and a few minutes later, he and she were laughing at his
consternation at finding her "practically comatose," and afterward, when they ate lunch-sardines--she still felt perfectly fine. As soon as he went out, though, as soon as she sat
down again to read, she found that she could not keep her eyes open, and she slept away
the afternoon. Before she managed to awaken, Andrew had returned and found her, then
gone next door to Mrs. Lear and elicited the whole story from her, including the probable
"foaling date" and her bouts with morning sickness. When she awoke to make supper, she
found that supper was made--a boiled chicken with slivers of carrot and parsnip and some
baked beans, which were pleasantly sweet and easy to partake of. All of this Andrew had
persuaded Mrs. Lear to provide--but, indeed, she was a kindly woman and needed no
persuasion. They had a lovely evening, with Andrew staying at home and reading aloud
the first chapter of
Belinda
in a sonorous, faintly Irish accent, and smiling, but pointedly
refusing to allude to anything outside of the room--nothing in the past, nothing in the
future, nothing in the world or the solar system or the universe. For that one night, it
seemed, Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early allowed himself the luxury of a few hours of
superstitious silence, where plans were not overconfidently expressed and hopes were left
to mellow unsaid.
But such momentary measures did not work. By supper the next evening, it was
clear that the little face she could not help conjuring was not the face of this child.
Andrew, too, was disappointed, and stayed with her for the next two nights, but, truly, it
was a small thing, Mrs. Lear told them, common as dirt, though sad enough, of course.
Her own mother had miscarried at least three times, in addition to the nine children, and it
was possible that Mrs. Lear herself had miscarried between Dorsett and Hubert, when she
was down with something for three days late one spring. And as for her sisters, well, she
had despaired of her sister Edith's ever having a child. She said, "I'm sure it's better not to
know, but now you do." And she did. By the end of that week, that episode was finished-she looked at the children all around her in yet a different way, as a population of beings
that she was cut off from, as if by a thin screen. And then that, too, passed.
* * *
AS nosy as she had been, looking for Andrew's letters, checking the labels of his
suits and shoes, peering into his books for clues to his life and his character, the next