Authors: Jane Smiley
he'd used had kept throwing samples before him, tempting him to spend more and more
money, taking advantage of his vanity. It wasn't the money wasted, because, thanks to
investments, he was pulling money out of the air, but what would a scientist think when
this heavy, deluxe publication arrived in the mail? It didn't look scientific. He had
thought, another vanity, that his name alone would carry some weight, and maybe it did,
but there was something about the book, he saw now, that was a kind of faux pas. And
his haste in printing the thing had been matched by his haste in sending out copies, and
now ...
By October, he was literally tearing his hair and wringing his hands. He haunted
their house, but then he began to range more widely--over to the observatory, then the
Officers' Club, then into Vallejo. On one of these days, after she had cleaned the kitchen,
she picked up one of the books and looked at it herself.
She managed to glean the gist of his argument, though it took considerable
perseverance, many cups of tea, and a walk down the block to clear her head. It wasn't so
much that she didn't recognize anything--that moon-capture theory was there, set into the
millions of years and millions and billions of what you would call cubic miles of space.
What she understood seemed plausible. First there was gravity, which was a force exerted
between masses, its strength dependent on their size. Then there was motion--those
masses hurtling here and there, though not by any means quickly enough for someone
such as herself to detect their movements with the naked eye. To gravity and motion, you
added in the uneven population of space, empty here, full of galaxies there. When you
combined that unevenness with the gravity and the motion, it was obvious (Andrew
claimed) that the populous places were going to get more populous and the emptier
places were going to get still emptier, because in the populous places, masses would
come together and forces would get stronger and stronger until everything clumped
together, and why not, given how long it was going to be? In the end, everything would
clump together into one big mass, and then, within that mass, everything would change as
the mass got hotter and hotter, and then the mass itself would get smaller but denser, and
nothing could stop this from happening. The logical end to this process would be the
disappearance of all mass, for once the mass had advanced to its logical conclusion,
which was a dot that weighed as much as everything in the universe, the empty part
would disappear also, though what constituted "disappearance" in this case she could not
have told you. No doubt the problem was that words could not convey actual events, and,
indeed, actual events were hardly imaginable. If you did find yourself, as she did,
imagining something, then what you were imagining was wrong. But poor Andrew was
more or less stuck with using words to describe their doom.
Except that, according to Andrew, his own researches showed that the universe,
as big as it was, contained no empty space. This reminded her of something that Sherlock
Holmes often did, which was to give the obvious solution, and then give the real solution,
which relied on the one factor that only Holmes had discerned. The real story about the
universe was that, although it appeared that gravitational force, mass, and motion would
eventually produce collapse, the universe was actually filled with Something. Newton
himself had known that the universe was filled with Something, and for convenience's
sake, this Something was called Ether, or, to distinguish it from the chemical ether,
Aether. This Something was the substance of the universe, some kind of thing that
exerted a repulsive force insofar as it counteracted the tendency of the traveling masses to
clump together in accordance with gravity and therefore eventually to contract to the size
of a dot or a pinprick or an invisible point. The balance of these two processes (the
Something filling the universe and pushing things away from one another, and gravity
pulling things toward one another) resulted in a more or less even continuum of
contracting and expanding. This process, Andrew seemed to be saying, was what was
called Eternity.
She felt his presence while she was reading. When she was finished reading, she
held the blue heavy book in her hand and contemplated it, not, now, as a miraculous
object, but as evidence. There were people she knew who never once in their lives
pondered the nature of the universe. Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark, all
of that was enough for them. Andrew was from her town. What in the world had set him
on this path? A teacher? A book? Whatever it was, it was in some sense an argument
against education--wouldn't he have been happier with smaller thoughts? As an investor,
he was a whiz. As an observer of nature, such as after the earthquake, or out in the
marshes, he was exact and careful. He could draw a bird or a flower or a diagram of a
sewing machine. But day after day, year after year, he thought only of the universe,
which he could not see.
Through the winter, Andrew pounded about the island on great walks which led
him past the post office, and so he had to go in to see if some stray item of mail had been
put, belatedly, into his box. When
Science
or some other journal came into the house, he
tossed it on the table unread, and then circled around it for the rest of the day, eventually
picking it up, leafing through it, and tossing it on the table again, with more vehemence.
These magazines he didn't allow to stack up, as he had before--he threw them away in
disgust after one perusal. His rage and dissatisfaction seemed to fill the place even when
he was quiet. Margaret didn't dare engage him in discussion of these matters, because it
seemed dangerous to her to give him a direction for venting his anger. She imagined him
on his walks, his feelings flying out into the open air and exploding harmlessly, far from
human habitation. Or, since the island was, if possible, even noisier than usual, she
imagined his feelings diminished and subsumed in the general racket.
She distracted him, instead, with a safer topic--the war news. Did he really think,
in December, that the Germans wanted peace? Was Wilson's letter about this sincere, in
Andrew's opinion? Had his travels in Germany taken him to this area they were now
calling "the Hindenburg Line"? And she did distract him: Andrew exclaimed that this line
represented something about the Germans--it was mysteriously east of where many
German outposts had been--but then the mystery was solved (vindicating him once again)
when the Germans destroyed everything to the west of the line, stitched the blasted
territory with land mines, and retreated into their impregnable fortress.
But, whatever the news, it did not keep his mind off Einstein for very long. He
threw the scientific journals away, then retrieved them from the trash pile, read them, and
saw that Einstein's silly theory was gaining adherents in spite of the war. He thought,
though bitterly, that he had to write another book, a better one, refining and clarifying his
theory, and incorporating the improvements to it that he had come up with. He stormed
about the house (and the island), lamenting the injustice of having to write another book.
And his mood began to lift. On the one hand, he told her, he could easily let
himself continue to indulge in vain regrets about how he should have written the book
differently, or how he had been, in his enthusiasm, premature. On the other hand, he
could revise his work, which would take two or three years but result in something more
persuasive. Really, he said, he could see it quite clearly, and it was certainly true that
every bitter pill contained within itself the sweet grain of a larger renewal. How often did
he compare his situation to that of C----now? The very five-inch telescope that he had
looked upon with such chagrin the day he arrived on the island was now precious to him,
while certainly C----, who then seemed so fortunate, must now feel enslaved by his
monster. If he just explained himself a little more clearly, he would win in the end.
Margaret found herself offering to type for him two hours every day--it seemed a small
thing, a way of assuaging, or directing, or deflecting the energy coursing through the
house. She had learned to do it, and it was easy for her--not that different from knitting.
WITHIN two days of the Zimmermann telegram, in which Germany tried to enlist
Mexico against the U.S., and California turned out to be, at least in Margaret's
imagination, very close to the front lines, Dora received permission to go to Europe--first
England, then France, then who knew? Her column was to be called "In Another Part of
the World." Margaret was shocked. For the entire autumn, Dora had talked to Margaret
admiringly about Pete, and though she hadn't actually spoken the word "wedding" or the
word "marriage," there was an intensity to her feelings for him--he had brought her an
orchid in a pot made of a coconut, he had taken her to the Cliff House for oysters.
Remember the way he had accompanied her to Fresno to interview that man in jail named
Osmond Jacobs who had a powder burn on his cheek the day after the bombing and
anarchist connections? At the jail, Pete had helped her conduct the interview in French.
When they came to the island for two suppers, they sat close together and finished
each other's sentences. He took her to meet the editor of a famous poetry magazine, and
the two women gossiped like old friends about Ezra Pound. Pete promised to introduce
Dora to Emma Goldman, and Dora talked about writing a book.
But then she had her ticket--on the
Norfolk
, through the Panama Canal, thence to
Southampton. She was to leave in ten days.
DORA made one last trip to the island, by herself. With her she brought some
things of Pete's--a scroll and two screens, all wrapped in various layers of silk and paper.
Pete had disappeared. Dora said she didn't know where to, but Margaret suspected that
she did. Margaret was reluctant to take the artworks, because she was sure they were
valuable, and Quarters P was a monument to disarray. But evidently she had to--there
was nowhere else for them as safe as the island. More important, Dora herself looked to
Margaret petite and easily damaged, all the while laughing and excited for her new
adventures. And then, on the very Monday after she set sail, a letter arrived for Andrew
from an editor at the
Examiner
, inviting him to serve as science correspondent for the
paper. The editor said that he had heard that Andrew was "one of the foremost
astronomers in the world" and "entirely up to date on every new scientific development"
and "one of the smartest men in California" and "a prolific writer." He would be paid a
penny a word.
It was a shock, but once war was declared, shocks came every day--one day they
heard that the Germans blew up one of their own ships as it was being boarded by
marines. Within a few days after that, San Francisco Bay was being blockaded against
enemy ships, a destroyer was attacked off Long Island, Field Marshal Haig, the British
commander, was advancing first one mile and then another against the Hindenburg Line,
and killing thousands of civilians while doing so. But even so, for the first while,
Margaret could not help seeing the whole thing as the wreck of her own life and her own
plans--she thought about Dora every day while she was out with the other naval wives
who lived on the island, gathering provisions or charitable contributions, while she was
sorting clothing and medical supplies to be sent to Europe, while she listened to herself
talking about harvests and factories as she had never done before (although she could
hardly imagine what it was they were talking about--wheat, barley, oats, workers, bosses,
pig iron, output).
AND then spies blew up a powder magazine over by the bay one morning around
breakfast time. The explosion was a body-shaking roar followed by a brilliant swoosh as
that building and several others around it went up in flames. Margaret grabbed the edges
of the table, the dishes jumped, her glass of water fell over, and Andrew's cup of coffee
rattled in its saucer. It was much more frightening than the earthquake had been, or the
small explosion that had welcomed her to the island so many years before.
Andrew leapt from the breakfast table and left the house. Margaret went out more
slowly, first to the stoop, and then to the walk. Everyone on the island was outside, either
running toward or staring at the biggest fire any of them had ever seen. She got her shawl
and bag without giving Dora, or Pete, or their "marriage" a thought, and ran to the
hospital. Her friends were there--they didn't know what they could do, but they thought
something would present itself, if only fetching and carrying. At the hospital, she heard
all the rumors--about the marine who had been knocked cold on patrol three nights before
by an intruder, and about the men who had been seen around the island, and about how
there were Germans all over the place whom the navy itself had charge of, and who was