Authors: Jane Smiley
He shrugged. But he grinned, too. "I'm living in a stall at the racetrack for the
moment."
Andrew said, "How is that?"
"Fragrant."
They laughed. Andrew really laughed. Perhaps, Margaret thought, Andrew
considered Pete his best friend.
"No, truly. It's a fragrance I'm quite familiar with, and one that is very consoling
to me. But I had to change my name to get a job as an assistant trainer."
"What's your name now?" said Andrew.
"Pete Moran. Irish is good at the racetrack--not so traceable as English, though I
considered Peter Charles Cecil. I put on a bit of the Irish when I talk, and wrap those
horses as if I larned the trick as a lad in Tipperary, and it works well enough. My chief is
a fellow from Australia. Whatever I do is fine with him, as he's crooked as an elbow."
Pete laughed this time.
Margaret said, "I think you've been Irish all along. Tipperary by way of Chicago."
Pete
grinned.
Margaret said, "What have you seen of Dora? We've lost track since she quit the
paper. Andrew's editor says she's writing a book."
"I did see her, twice. Just after the war, I saw her in Paris. I was walking down the
Boulevard des Capucines, and there she was, dressed to go to the Opera. She had on a
nice hat with a peacock feather, and she was with a very famous man named Henri
Bergson, who has made a whole career of books about laughing. They were laughing."
Now Pete laughed. "It was contagious just to see them, even though I had been mooning
about the city, wondering what was to become of me."
She waited for him to go on, and made herself not prompt him.
"The next day, I took her to lunch. She had spent all night interviewing prostitutes
and hadn't slept in thirty-six hours."
"Interviewing
prostitutes!"
"Yes, indeed. She interviewed them concerning their political opinions. She told
me that no one ever asked them about those sorts of things, but they were happy to talk,
because they had decided views and good ideas."
"For her book?"
Pete
nodded.
"Then I saw her three or four years ago in Menton, each day for six days or a
week. I'm telling you, she is the toast of the Riviera. She knows everyone, and wealthy
American visitors go first to Dora to be spruced up. To have a few ruffles removed and a
few pleats added, you might say."
"She was always very well dressed, even when she was sixteen and she looked a
fright," Margaret said.
"Practicing," said Pete.
There was a pause, and then she said, "Were you ever going to marry her, Pete?"
"Dear Margaret," he said, "you were the only person in the world who considered
it at all desirable."
The look he gave when he said this, though, told Margaret that there was one
other person.
"How did you lose the last fortune, then?" Andrew insisted.
"I can barely remember, it was so long ago. Let me see. Of course, when I left
here, I had a satchel full of dollars with me, which I should have left behind in a bank.
My fatal mistake was that I thought I could do some good with it. I must have been
thinking like an American! I thought I would help this friend in Petrograd and that
relative in Moscow or Kiev. I should have remembered that what seems like a fortune
when you embark here turns to nothing in Russia. My friends who were still in Petrograd
were very deluded. They didn't want to flee in a third-class coach from St. Petersburg as
they still called it, and find themselves a room in an outer
arrondissement
in Paris. The
fellows who were prepared for that had already done so. These friends who had shillyshallied, some of them very dear, I must say, could only abide first-class carriages, and
porters to carry their bags, large apartments, and much idle time for grieving, helped by
enormous portions of champagne." He smiled. "How could I deny them? And so I did
not."
"But what about those Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and the Tsarists and all?"
said Andrew.
"They stole my money, too, but I expected them to. My old pal Joffe went so far
as to have me beaten, so I gave him a thousand. 'My last thousand!' I kept saying, and
perhaps he believed me, or perhaps he only told Lenin he did. Then there was my cousin,
who when I last was in Russia was only a boy, and had since served in a Cossack
regiment in the Tsar's army, and when I saw him in 1918 was back in their town. He
swore up and down to me that he only wanted an up-to-date rifle, and he would then set
about making his living off the land. He would kill birds for food, and he knew where all
the best furs for trapping could be found. He showed me a list of his contacts--he was
going to smuggle sables and ermines to the West. I procured the rifle for him, and the
stock of ammunition, but the first thing he did was shoot his wife and her lover, and then
himself. That had been his plan all along. And then the rifle was stolen by the police and
disappeared, though I would not have wanted it back."
Andrew looked a bit shocked. Pete smiled and went on: "Who's to say that the
three of them didn't get the best of it? They would have impressed him into the Red
Army. Personal troubles, no matter how deadly they are, were small beer in Russia those
days."
"You gave your fortune away," declared Andrew.
"Did I? When I left, I was thinking of something else entirely. Buying wheat or
lamp oil. Wartime speculation can be very lucrative. Oats? I can barely remember.
Something scruffy and venal. I recognized my mistake at once--contacting old friends!
But it's hard on your pride to return from America with nothing to show for it, and so I
did not. I returned from Russia with nothing to show for it!"
Margaret asked, "Did you starve?" She was conscious of the dishes of food on the
table.
"Everyone starved. Starvation is a potent weapon, and the Bolsheviks are happy
to wield it. The cheapest way to get rid of the opposition is to starve them. Lenin did it
the expensive way, shooting them, but the Soviets can no longer afford that."
"Starving them on purpose?"
"Why not? Why not?" He shook his head, then said, "Americans will never
understand Russians. Perhaps I don't understand them myself anymore."
There was a long silence while Margaret cleared the table. Really, she still didn't
know what to make of Pete. Andrew said, "We looked at those things of yours while you
were away. Didn't know what we would do with them."
They all understood that the end of this sentence was "if you died."
Margaret said, "We had one fright, when the powder magazine exploded at the
beginning of our war. But I have to admit, I only thought of the screens after I'd already
wondered if we were all going to be blown to bits."
"May I look at them?" said Pete.
He and Andrew carried them in, then unwrapped them.
Andrew said, "Mightn't you sell these, then? I mean, for funds."
Pete didn't answer.
First the gold one, then the man in the boat. She glanced at Pete. His face had a
look she had never seen on it before--no skepticism, no bemusement, simply a smile of
unconscious delight. He looked handsome for once. Margaret carried the platter into the
kitchen.
When she came back, Andrew had started hmphing and knocking about. But Pete
was still silent, entranced. "Well, you know, you did inspire someone," said Andrew.
"My dear, you must show Pete what you've acquired."
She was instantly embarrassed, but said, "I've bought a few of my own now. Mrs.
Kimura sometimes goes with me to Japantown. We got to be friends when she taught me
to drive an automobile."
She brought them out and set them on the dining-room table. There were three of
them. Pete looked at them for a long time without saying anything. Andrew had barely
glanced at the prints, and was now marching about the room. Margaret knew he was
tempted to go into his study and get to work, and she wished he would--his steps seemed
to shake the house.
Pete pointed to a nighttime scene framed by a window. "See the lights of the boats
on the river? The artist drew these boats one by one, just as they would look in daylight,
then he printed on the pale yellow for the lights, and after that the black, for night. My
guess is that this went through eighteen printings or more, and that was after the artist
carved the block. They print books in the same way, carving each page by hand."
He went back to the snake. "This is very good. Though the horse, in this other
one, is a very exuberant horse, and the fetlocks and hooves are correct. Very difficult to
do. But the snake, the snake is a most discomforting one. The snake is almost lost in the
wealth of detail, but then it asserts itself and cannot be wished away."
Andrew stopped stamping about, harrumphed, and said, "Are they valuable?"
Pete glanced at Margaret, caught her eye, and then said, "They are well chosen."
He left that night for the San Francisco ferry, and disappeared again. It was
Margaret who wrapped the screens and the scroll and put them away. Of course he could
not have them in a horse stall, but surely, she thought, he had other, closer friends who
might take care of them.
ONE DAY, a young man showed up at the door. It was foggy, which made the
man seem rather mysterious. The house was quiet--Andrew was at the observatory, and
she had been putting off her typing. The fellow was almost inside the house as soon as
she opened the door. Bespectacled. A black-and-white tweed suit, a vest, a pince-nez, and
a nervous manner. He asked for "the captain."
"Captain Early is out. He should be back in half an hour."
"I'm
Scanlan."
"Scanlan?"
"Len Scanlan? You were expecting me? Dr. Len Scanlan?" His valise was on the
porch.
She shook her head. She had never heard of Dr. Scanlan, but when Andrew
walked in, he was perfectly acquainted with him. Dr. Scanlan--or Len, as they called him
thereafter--was writing a book entitled
The Amazing Discoveries of Captain Andrew
Jackson Jefferson Early
. Dr. Scanlan was a graduate of the Iowa State College of
Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (though in veterinary medicine, not physics or
astronomy).
Len stayed with them, sleeping on the sofa, for two days, and he had a disturbing
way about him--he was the sort of young man who always stood too close, always peered
over her shoulder to see what she was doing, always seemed to have closed one of her
drawers just before she entered the room. His fawning manner was meant to be
reassuring and achieved the opposite. On the first morning, Len declared that he would
do his own typing, which should have relieved her, but offended her instead. When he
said, "I know shorthand. The Gregg system. Do you know it? I expect to get down
everything Captain Early says, word for word," she felt an unreasoning dislike of the
Gregg system and vowed never to learn it. He told her about himself. He was from
Mankato, Minnesota. He had two sisters. His mother and father had passed. His father
had been a pastor at the First Congregational Church of Mankato. His older brother had
died in the influenza, over in Germany, after the war. His mother had never gotten over
that, because his brother was the favorite, "tall, like my father, and very prepossessing."
One of his sisters was married to a man who owned a dry-goods store, and one of his
sisters taught in a girls' school. He was a great admirer of Captain Early, and read
everything he wrote. He had a special subscription to the
Examiner
, which was delivered
all the way to Minnesota, and plenty late, but always "fascinating." He had copies of both
Captain Early's books, and strongly disagreed with what Andrew now said about any
failures of style and effectiveness; Len had been struck by both of them on the very first
readings--"so lucid and self-evident; classics." He had then investigated Andrew's other
writings, and had decided, as a hobby, to organize them chonologically, which, of course,
had opened his eyes to the truth as well as the beauty of Andrew's system. He had
humbly written to Andrew, to broach the topic of a few interviews by mail, and here he
was. The project had mushroomed, and taken over his life. But he hated veterinary
medicine, anyway. "A farmer might pay a man to save a cow, he
might
, but a pig, he'll
give you a buck or two to slaughter the beast and haul it away--
if
you can persuade him
not to throw it in the farm dump, which is always, believe me, right above the crick." He
shook his head.
All Andrew said was "Dr. Scanlan is dedicated to truth in a way that few young
men are."
Len found himself a boarding house, and he and Andrew quickly worked out a
schedule. Andrew worked on his own book or articles in the morning, from eight until
about eleven-thirty, handing pages to her, which she was to type. At around one-thirty or
two, he walked up the hill to the observatory, where he met Len. He stayed there for three
hours or so, then came home and organized his work for the evening. And he came home
with an evident sense of well-being, was especially cordial over supper. Once a week,