Authors: Jane Smiley
wide--the size of an illustration in a book--a moonlit scene. In the dim distance, to the
right, a pine-tree-covered hill rose out of a flat plain. The whole upper half of the picture
was made up of a sky, the tiny stars picked out in varying intensities (this was a picture
she thought that Andrew would like). In the foreground, to the left, was a sizable leafless
tree. Looking at the branches, Margaret realized that the ground was covered with
moonlit snow. Mr. Kimura waved his hand over the figures bunched at the base of the
tree, and Mrs. Kimura said, "Foxes under moon." The foxes were pale yellow, their
bodies merely outlined. There were fifteen or twenty of them, looking to the right, clearly
on the alert for something. Though they did not look like any foxes she had ever seen,
they had the demeanor of foxes.
What was remarkable to her about the print, like the painting, was the feel of the
weather--so chill and still. Only the foxes, picked out by the light of the invisible moon,
were animated. Mrs. Kimura said, "Utagawa Hiroshige very famous in Japan."
Margaret regarded the picture. The odd thing was that, even though she wanted it,
or something like it, and even though Andrew had plenty of money, and even though she
had learned to drive the car, and even though she went to San Francisco every couple of
weeks, she could not imagine how to get such a thing for her own, such a grand and
comforting thing.
THE F RANKLIN was a soothing sage green with black fenders, a tan top, and a
black leather interior seat--indeed, the seat was thickly padded and sewn with deep tucks,
like a luxurious sofa. The steering wheel was some rich golden wood. The front end of
the car swept downward, giving it a birdlike quality. The top folded forward or back, as
one wished. The man they bought it from parked it on the street in front of their little
house, and Margaret watched through the front window as Andrew promenaded out of
the house, marched down to the street, and then stopped and put his hands in the pockets
of his navy-blue captain's jacket with the stripes on the sleeve. He pushed back his cap
and lifted his chin and stared into the engine. Then he paraded around the car once or
twice, opened up the hood, and stared at the air-cooled engine. If people stopped to look
(and they did--navy men were always interested in machinery), he would tell them more
about the air-cooled engine than they wanted to know--that it dispensed entirely with the
problems of water-cooling, and that this famous person and that famous person would
own only a Franklin. Margaret was ready to drive it--and she did drive it one time, over
the causeway that now made Vallejo more accessible but had not replaced the ferry, and
around the streets of Vallejo, to Mrs. Wareham's and then to the Kimuras', just to show
them. But it took a week for Andrew to get in.
Then they did get in, Margaret in the driver's seat and Andrew enormous beside
her. She let out the clutch and stepped on the starter, and they rolled away from the curb
to the sound of the wheel spokes knocking. After that she saw him more in the car than in
the house, and at closer quarters. It surprised her that he would leave his work, but it
seemed that the feeling of rolling along, of being looked at and admired, of having to say
nothing while knowing that the Franklin was saying something for him, was a feeling he
could not get enough of. And then he was invited to give a speech, and instead of turning
down the offer because he had too much writing to do, he went. She drove him all the
way to Fairfield. His speech was not about the universe at all, but about the bubonic
plague--his vindication with regard to the influenza gave him a great fondness for
diseases of all kinds, so he read up on every infection in the news. He chose the bubonic
plague as more dramatic than the influenza--the Yunnan outbreak in China in the 1850s
and, once a war broke out there and thousands of people fled southward, outbreaks in
Canton, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Bombay, Calcutta, and then on to Africa. Perhaps, Andrew
exclaimed, perhaps the members of the audience recalled the plague outbreaks of 1899 in
Egypt, or South Africa, or Hawaii, or, indeed, in San Francisco? San Francisco was the
only city in America to host an outbreak of the plague. Did they remember (a few heads
in the audience nodded) the first outbreak in 1900 and the second five years later, just
before the earthquake? Did they shiver, as he did, not only at the gruesome symptoms,
but also at what might have happened after the earthquake if Dr. Blue (a navy man) had
not acted with such wisdom and dispatch? Of course they did! And did they know that,
even as he was speaking to them here in Fairfield, the California countryside was full of
plague-carrying rats that were crawling with fleas? Sixty thousand had died in Canton, a
hundred thousand in Hong Kong alone! Where was the plague now? Who could say,
except that it seemed to be in Russia, or, as they called it now, "the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics" (he said this with a snort).
The audience could hardly sit in their seats.
He went on to diphtheria, scarlet fever, cholera, typhus--describing symptoms and
outbreaks, giving advice (washing hands, boiling drinking water, properly disposing of
sewage and garbage). "We know how to stop these grave ills in their tracks, how to
conquer them or keep them at bay! But we have to be alert! We have to attend to rather
than ignore the living conditions of our fellow citizens, and the hygiene of our friends and
family members!"
The talk was a sensation.
Through the fall and into the spring, he gave a version of this speech in Vallejo,
Napa, Dixon, Benicia, as far south as Atherton and San Jose, as far north as Calistoga.
They drove to all of these places, and Margaret was startled by the variety of the
California landscape. Groups asked him back, and he returned, joyfully, with a
presentation about the universe.
From his talk about the universe, you would have assumed that that fellow in
Europe--what was his name?--Einstein, who was getting so much play in the papers (but
really, as she looked around at the audience, more people looked blank at the name than
otherwise), was a mere fabulist. For these lectures, Andrew carried a small thick book
with a red leather cover, and right in the middle of the lecture, he would hold the book
above his head and exclaim the word "Gravity!," then let go of the book, which would
land with a smack on the stage. Then he would say, "The Earth has gravity! Gravity is a
force. If the Earth did not have gravity, then this book would not drop to the boards here,
but would floooooat on the air. And the
book!"
--he would pick up the book--"the book
has gravity, too! The book is drawing the Earth to itself, just as the Earth is drawing the
book to itself! The sun exerts this force! The moon exerts this force! You exert this force!
I exert this force!" Then he would turn, with his arms raised in a sweeping gesture, and
say, "Do you see any hills on this stage? Do you see any slopes that might cause this
book to
sl-l-l-ide
down toward the stage?" Long pause, a few shaking heads. "Do you?"
Some man always shouted, "No!"
"So gravity cannot be a slope, created by curvature. There is no curvature here.
Remember this--you can't have one thing in one part of space and another thing in
another part! You can't say that the universe is curved but this stage"--he stomped his
feet--"isn't, so gravity works one way in one place and another way in another place.
Gravity is a force!"
In a talk of an hour (including questions--he was great at answering questions), he
demolished Einstein in about ten minutes and spent the rest of the time explaining what
the universe was really like. After these talks, men buttonholed Andrew and gave him
their own theories, while women patted Margaret on the hand and said, "So brilliant!
How fortunate you are to be married to such an interesting man!"
When, much to Margaret's surprise, Einstein made a well-publicized trip to
America, and then, according to Andrew, "went about hawking his crazy opinions
everywhere," Andrew wasn't as offended as she expected him to be. He just shook his
head, and said, "The ignorant and the enthusiastic are impressed, my dear, but see here-no invitation from Harvard, and Princeton has only let him in the back door. I am sure he
expected much more, given his connections. My strategy must be to go on as I have
begun and put my faith in the inherent good sense of our countrymen." The only other
time he said anything about it was one day in the summer, after reading one of his longdelayed papers from the East. "Here. You see, Patne agrees with me. He maintains that
Einstein partook of our American generosity, but now has spurned us. No great loss. No
great loss indeed." At lectures, Margaret noticed that, while Andrew stuck to his usual
script, his tone when discussing the fellow was more heavily and openly amused. When
Einstein won the Nobel Prize at the end of that year for "The Photoelectric Effect" and
not for his "silly theories," Andrew felt he had been vindicated. He mentioned the prize in
one lecture, in Oakland. He said, in response to a question about it, "You see, he might
have been an excellent scientist if he had focused his ideas. It is a very sad thing when an
intelligent man compounds the demonstrable with the ridiculous."
At the same time, he dedicated himself to his correspondence. Many of his
columns grew out of questions readers wrote in to him: How does ice form on a window?
Does whiskey serve to disinfect the body? Did he foresee any imminent earthquakes?
The scientific ignorance of the average newspaper reader came as an appalling shock to
him, but only redoubled his sense that his newspaper and public-speaking work were
important. He composed many more columns than the
Examiner
published--even without
a war, the pages of the paper were filled, unaccountably to Andrew, with many other
things besides science.
Little did these small-town lecture and Chautauqua committees who were directed
to Andrew by the
Examiner
know that he would have gladly spoken to them for free. He
took what they offered, and some of them were flush and offered as much as a hundred
dollars. As she drove along the narrow gravel roads, grateful that they had a Franklin, so
easy and reliable (Franklins were some of the first cars to drive coast to coast, Andrew
told her), it hardly seemed possible that they would be stranded somewhere and left to die
of exposure, and they weren't. When they got back to Vallejo, she felt, simultaneously,
that they had done a very brave thing and a very easy thing.
But even as the lectures were his form of altruism, his absence from the book
worried him. Each day, she typed up what he had written the day before--some two or
three thousand words--and then he would go over it the next day and the next, changing
his ideas and metaphorical illustrations. After he went over it, she retyped it and he went
over it again. To have such flexibility--to go into print again and again--was a glory to
him. Margaret typed forty and then sixty and then eighty words per minute, just like
knitting row after row of garter stitch, and she really had no idea what she was typing.
Her time was her own only when he was making his drawings of the universe, such as his
drawing of the Aether--six-pointed shapes like stars with elongated arms that touched at
the tips--but he liked her to stay within earshot. More than once, while he was drawing,
he got up and came into the front room, where she might be reading a book. He noted her
presence and nodded, then went back into his study. There was a chafing quality to his
constant attention, and the days of Dora, when Margaret had thought nothing of leaving
on the ferry whenever she wished, seemed gone without a trace, but what was her
argument against his--the book was all-important! The lives of human beings were a kind
of futile chaos, a chaos that preyed upon him every single day. To wrest a good idea, the
right idea, from this chaos was a man's highest purpose and first obligation. Didn't she
agree with that? He was nearly sixty, and though he was in exceptional health--"You're
fifty-five."
He looked at her but didn't answer.
She said, "I just think it's--Most people make themselves out to be younger than
they are."
He went back into his office before she ever finished her remark.
ELIZABETH wrote her that Lucy May was proposing to travel to California, to
Los Angeles, to visit some of Mercer Hart's relations, and wanted very dearly to visit
Margaret on the island before going south.
The Lucy May that Margaret picked up at the railway station was someone she
would not have recognized--tall, dark, nervous, eager. As soon as she saw the girl,
Margaret understood why Elizabeth had written her three letters in three days, unable to
stop detailing her worries about the long train trip, and ordering Margaret to send her a
telegram as soon as Lucy May arrived. They went to the telegraph office.
Andrew came out of the house when they drove up, and peered at Lucy May. As