Authors: Jane Smiley
"Oh, boy! And after three girl. Now mother no need bear any more baby!" She
flicked the pony with the whip again. He freshened his trot. Soon they were out of town
and in the countryside. A buggy ride was a rare treat. The rain on the bellows top was just
a freshness, fragrant now with the scent of the spring grasses and the earth. In front of
them, the hills (rough and ridged, not smooth like hills in Missouri) rose up east of the
city. Even at this distance, Margaret could see a few human figures in the orchards that
spread in a ragged, flowering cloud across their lower contours. She sensed her breathing
evening out; she was not gasping any longer.
At the next turn back toward town, the pony went left. Soon he was walking
along, calm, but with his ears pricked. When they arrived at the stable, a boy of about
twelve greeted Mrs. Kimura and took the pony and the buggy. She patted the boy on the
head and bowed to him, and he bowed to her, exactly imitating her. Then she put
something in his hand. Dora said, "May we go to the shop, Mrs. Kimura? I'm sure my
friend and cousin Mrs. Andrew Early would be honored to make the acquaintance of your
husband."
"Please come," said Mrs. Kimura. Dora and Mrs. Kimura were the same height
and looked, Margaret thought, like intimate friends, leaning toward each other and
chatting with perfect familiarity about Naoko--was she accompanying Mrs. Kimura to
births now? And Joe and Lester (who, Margaret thought, must be the two sons)--how
were they doing in school? The midwife was of course polite to Margaret, asking her
about fog on the island. She gave no indication that she remembered that visit to
Alexander. By the time she opened the door of the shop and invited them in, the upright
laughing driver of the pony cart had vanished, replaced by someone softer and more selfeffacing. She was, Margaret thought, Japanese again.
It was late morning, and the room was light. Mr. Kimura was seated behind the
counter with paper and brushes, and he and Mrs. Kimura greeted each other, then he
greeted Margaret and Dora. He did not get up. On the counter were some stalks of
bamboo growing in a tall green pot. He resumed stroking with the brush while Mrs.
Kimura went through to the back, and Dora nudged Margaret over to a spot where they
could see his paper.
The clump of bamboo on the page was thicker than the clump in the pot. He
rendered each stalk with one stroke of the brush, tilting or pressing it here and there.
After adding each stalk to the thicket on the page, he stippled in the leaves, youthful and
transparent, seeming to glow in the sunlight that filtered through the stalks. As they
continued to stand there, he finished with the bamboo, paused, laid down his brush and
picked up another one. This he dipped into a different pot, and then he applied a nibbling
rabbit to the lower third of the page. Without seeming to lift his brush, he shaded in what
looked like fur. Only now did he glance at them.
When he stood up to assist them, his movement made Margaret feel a bit tall for
the shop, so she backed awkwardly toward the door, but Dora happily pointed at some
cups and a teapot in white porcelain. They were not in the Japanese style--they looked
more as if a potter had used Japanese techniques to make an English tea set. Dora
nodded, and he took the set off the shelf. He wrapped it and offered it to Dora, who
counted out the money and laid it on the counter. They bowed. They shook hands. This
exchange was accompanied by a lot of smiling. Dora began to put the teacups in her bag.
Margaret divined that Mr. Kimura did not speak English, and covertly looked around the
shop. For a moment, Mr. Kimura paused in front of her, and seemed to be waiting to
serve her. She shook her head just the barest bit, and then he did a surprising thing--he
went to the paper he had been working on, took it off his table, rolled it up, and offered it
to her, Margaret, where she was standing beside the door. She must have looked startled,
because he nodded. Dora muttered, "Darling, you must accept," and so Margaret smiled
and held out her hands. He put the roll into them.
Just then, Mrs. Kimura emerged from the back, this time dressed in a gray kimono
and looking entirely Japanese. Mr. Kimura resumed his seat, and Mrs. Kimura seemed to
herd them toward the door, where she shook Dora's hand, then Margaret's, and bowed to
them, saying, "Please, Miss Dora and Mrs. Margaret, you must come again." She held
Margaret's gaze only a moment longer than she held Dora's, but that was enough.
"Oh, darling, of course we shall," said Dora, comfortable as always.
When Margaret got home and unrolled the picture, she saw how charming it was,
as soft as the mist of the day, and as sweet, in its way, as the view she'd had of frothy,
blossoming trees against the green hillsides. A dragonfly, which she hadn't noticed,
drifted above the nibbling rabbit. Somehow this detail gave her special pleasure.
* * *
ANDREW and Dora had differing views of the war in Europe. Andrew was
grateful for the pall that the war could, should, cast over silly European ideas about the
universe. If cosmology was a race, then his rivals were suffering an inevitable and welldeserved setback, while American astronomers, equipped with the best telescopes in the
world, were marshaling their observations and organizing them into worthwhile theories.
"I have been in Berlin," he informed Dora. "I saw how they think. They are not
pragmatists like we are, or, indeed, like the English and the Scots. The theoretical cart
always before the empirical horse, always! It's an easy way of doing things. Well, now,
just because they and their countrymen are so belligerent, they are discovering that the
easy way is the hard way. I can't say that I feel sorry for them, really."
Few on the island did. The island had always been a place where ships were not
only built, but repaired or refurbished and refitted, and if Margaret had thought that
things were busy and noisy and crowded before, she soon learned what those terms
actually meant. Dora was in favor of the war, too, because Dora considered any war a
font of interesting stories.
As for Margaret, she was not at all sure how to pronounce "Ypres" when she saw
it in the
Call
. When she read about the Christmas Truce, she fully believed that the truce
could and would stretch into something more permanent. From California, the war
seemed pointless except as a spur to economic activity. No one in California thought the
U.S. would enter the war. If the Germans said that the English were shipping armaments
on European passenger ships, the wisdom among the navy men was that they would be
fools not to; that was why the
Lusitania
went down so quickly.
Stimulated by the war, Andrew's book was practically writing itself. Dr. Einstein's
pre-war fame was a perfect example, Andrew claimed, of cronyism in science. Someone,
a very young man, in fact, came up with some crazy ideas ("the younger the better, the
crazier the better"), ideas that sounded plausible to those who didn't actually know
anything. These ideas were picked up by a few dupes outside of the scientific world-industrious amateurs, society matrons, university students--and publicized around the
world (an unfortunate effect of wireless and radio, though in principle, of course, Andrew
was in favor of every invention), and then real scientists had to answer questions about
these theories (a waste of time, really). Real scientists must talk in equivocal terms about
everything, so the newspaper people didn't see the underlying disagreement in the
remarks those scientists made. The ideas in his own book, he told Margaret, were much
more systematic, better worked out, and they would be rapidly demonstrated soon after
they were laid before the astronomical community, even if he had to bypass
The
Astronomical Journal
to make his case. The crazy theory got a headline, and then the
truth got nothing. Andrew wrote the
New York Times
a letter--not for the letters column,
but privately, pointing out that their coverage of astronomy and physics was at best
patchy and at worst "a scandal." He offered to serve as an independent expert for them,
entirely free of charge. The
New York Times
did not respond. Even so, he maintained
hope. "Soon," he said once, triumphantly, "they will agree with me."
Dora teased Andrew with some new theory of Einstein's that she had heard about,
but he was so close to finishing his book that he didn't even get irritable, just waved his
hand mildly. "Einstein is wrong, my dear. Obvious to anyone with the least astronomical
training."
"Why is he wrong?" asked Dora.
Andrew leaned forward. Margaret could see that he was speaking to the
San
Francisco Examiner
, not to their friend and relation Dora Bell. "The simplest thing to tell
you is that what he says is the way the universe is can't be the way it is. Or, rather, it can't
be
shown
to be that way. If it can't be shown to be that way, then it isn't that way--it is not
the universe, but just a thought. Einstein's so-called theory takes something that we have
measured, a force, and interprets it as something that is geographical--a slope, let's say. In
his view, a ball runs down a slope because it is sloped, not because there is a force pulling
it down. He ignores completely that the force has been measured and that the
measurements show the force to be a powerful one. This thing is no different from any
other story about the beginning of the universe. You know that myth, the myth of Ptah?
It's the Egyptian myth. Ptah spoke, and as he spoke, everything he said was created.
Who's to say that story isn't true? Except for the fact that it can't happen. Observations at
Mount Wilson and the Lick will soon show that it can't happen."
"Einstein is a flash in the pan, then?" said Dora.
"A comet across the cosmological heavens, my dear." Margaret saw that Andrew
had made a joke. And a few days after this conversation, he took time away from his
book to write a letter to a journal in England, out of Oxford, in which he said more or less
what he had said to Dora, though without the illustrative references to Egyptian myth,
and they published it in the winter.
It was Leonora Eliot who told Margaret that Dora was lobbying her editor to be
sent back to Europe--didn't she know? Everyone at the paper knew. It was almost a joke,
the idea of little Dora wandering about the war zone with her pistol and her hat and her
stylish shoes, scribbling about how to grow potatoes in the trenches.
Margaret said, "Dora's never written about potatoes."
"Survival is her subject," said Leonora.
Pete Krizenko was Margaret's only recourse. In the months since their supper,
Margaret had seen Pete once, when he came upon Dora and her having tea in the Garden
Court, and Dora, in spite of always pooh-poohing her affection for him, had outdone
herself in smiles just to see him. At the time, Margaret had been both skeptical and
disapproving. But as she lay awake in her bed the night after Leonora's remarks and
imagined her life without Dora's vivaciousness (and money and shoals of friends), she
decided that Pete was preferable, if the war in Europe was the alternative. The next day,
she walked to Mrs. Wareham's, but when she turned into that block she hesitated--were
she to ask Mrs. Wareham about Pete, Mrs. Wareham would certainly tell Dora, and Dora
would laugh and tease, deftly turn her aside, and end up in Europe just out of pure
contrariness--and so she directed her steps to the Kimuras' shop. She had no idea of the
nature of the Kimuras' friendship with Dora, but she felt she could rely on their
secretiveness, or perhaps upon what was merely an appropriate sense of discretion.
A customer came out as Margaret went in. She found Mrs. Kimura behind the
counter, putting some things away, and although Mrs. Kimura gave her a friendly smile
and a small bow, Margaret suddenly quailed at her errand and, instead of asking after
Pete Krizenko, picked up first a packet of noodles, and then a pair of chopsticks, and then
a newspaper with Japanese writing on it. While she was holding these things, her eye was
caught by a picture--a heron, it was, standing beside a stone near some sort of
overhanging tree, one leg bent--and she gazed at the picture without taking it in, but
pretended to take it in. Another customer came through the door, bought something, went
out again. Margaret continued to stare at the picture. Mrs. Kimura walked around the
counter and stood beside her. The top of her head came to Margaret's chin. Mrs. Kimura
said, "This painting from Japan. Mr. Pete gave to Mr. Kimura." She pointed to the red
seal on the upper left corner. "Famous painter."
Margaret said, "I haven't seen Pete in a while."
"He come. He go."
"How do you contact him?"
"Mrs. Margaret send note?"
Margaret saw that she was being understood perhaps better than she wished to be.
She said, "Yes." She turned away from the picture. Mrs. Kimura was looking up at her.
She seemed amused, and so Margaret nodded. Mrs. Kimura handed her a pen and a small