Authors: Jane Smiley
"Where don't you want to be the most?"
"Missouri."
"That's the safest place, maybe."
"Well, yes, darling. It's unprecedented."
When Dora probed Margaret, Margaret talked about the house--not up a steep hill,
anyway--about the charitable work the ladies on the island were doing. Dora kept
smiling, then said, "I love your life. When I would think about you in Europe, it was
always such a comforting thought: Andrew like a big moving pillar, stalking down the
street, never deviating from the path he had set, and you buzzing around him, his very
own human being."
"Dora!"
"Oh, I wasn't thinking that you were enslaved or anything." She peeped at
Margaret from under the brim of her hat. "Or, rather, while there are those women's rights
advocates who think that marriage is a form of contract slavery at best, I wasn't thinking
of you in that way. The thought just always made me give thanks for soundness and
stability and the knowledge that, somewhere in the world, things were going on as they
always do."
Margaret merely said, "You do talk like a woman who never got married."
She meant to be saying one thing, but Dora thought she was saying another. She
tossed her head. "Don't you know? I was so short and plain and wayward, no amount of
money could purchase me a husband."
"You haven't lived in St. Louis in thirty years. I'm sure there were candidates."
Dora looked around the tearoom as a hostess might, watching her guests take their
leave. Then she looked at Margaret. She said, "What was the last book you read?"
"So Big
. I'd like to read
Show Boat
."
"Have you heard of
The Well of Loneliness?"
"No."
"Gertrude
Stein?"
"I know that name."
"I'm going to give you a copy of
The Well of Loneliness."
"But what about Pete?"
"I told you that years ago."
"That he asked you for money?"
"Did I say that? Didn't I tell you--"
"What?"
"Darling, he is married. He's always been married. He saw her when he was in
Russia. She's a terrible Bolshie, and he likes to pretend that she's dead, but she isn't dead
at all. I think that's why he changed his name, so she'll think
he
is dead."
"Do they have any children?"
"I don't know. If you ask him, he'll tell you that she strangled them in the cradle. I
suppose that there's always the chance that a child will turn up to haunt him, but he's
covered his tracks pretty well."
"We know him."
"But we don't know anyone else who does, do we?"
"The
Kimuras."
"Secret-keepers
extraordinaire,
n'est-ce pas?"
"I hardly know them, but they're very nice to me."
"They don't gossip, do they?"
"No."
"There you go. Pete is safe with them."
"And with you."
"I don't know enough to be a danger to him--no names."
"But what did he do in the Revolution?"
"What did he tell you?"
"I got the impression that he escorted hapless aristocrats to Paris and rented
apartments for them."
"He did do that. Three times. He was good at that. But that wasn't a full-time job."
"What was a full-time job?"
"Have you heard of Antonov?"
She shook her head.
"Well, there were more factions in Russia than just the Reds and the Whites.
There was a faction called the 'SRs,' who splintered off the Bolsheviks after the October
Revolution, mostly because the peasants didn't like Red grain seizures, and Antonov was
their leader. All of Pete's relatives in Ukraine hated the Bolsheviks because they were city
boys and had no respect for peasants. By 1920, Antonov's supporters were armed to the
teeth. It was quite a popular and well-organized movement, and Antonov was a smart
fellow."
"What
happened?"
"Well, I'm not sure in which order this was, but the Bolsheviks rounded up the
women and children and put them in starvation camps as hostages. In the meantime, they
cleared out the forests where Antonov's army was hiding out, using gas. They just filled
the forests with gas, and the Blacks, as they were called, died in droves."
"We never heard about this."
"Didn't
you?"
"Poison
gas?"
"That's the new way, I'm afraid. Pete says a million died, but I don't know. I'm
sure it seemed like the end of the world. Anyway, Pete was there part of the time, and
part of the time he was beating the bushes for money and guns. But they hadn't foreseen
how ruthless the Bolsheviks were. Pete said to me, 'I knew them all along. I just didn't
know
this
about them.'"
"The
wife?"
"She must have been one of them. It's a wonder to me that he escaped, and,
having escaped, that he can smile at all, but Russians are fatalists first and foremost.
Antonov was killed in '22. After that, Pete was in Europe for a while. I don't think he
dares go back to the Soviet Union, of course."
"Maybe he changed his name because of that."
"Maybe."
Margaret said, "I never believed he was Russian. I finally decided that he was an
Irishman from Chicago pretending to be a Russian. His accent is so ..."
"Fake?"
"Well, nonexistent now. But always uneven."
Dora stirred her tea thoughtfully, then said, "I believe the big parts. Most of the
big parts. I don't mind the other parts. I don't know about the accent. Other people have
said that, too. But he grew up speaking lots of languages, and he's a good mimic. I knew
an actor in England who could speak in fifteen accents, including French, German,
Italian, and Spanish, and if you heard him through a wall, you would think he was five or
six men and women having a conversation."
When the weather was pleasant, she went back to Tanforan with Dora. The banter
between Pete and Dora was the same as it had always been--affectionate but ironical. At
one point, Dora said, "I want to ride one," and would not be denied. Pete said, "No, you
may not, but if you come dressed properly, you may hack the pony." They went on about
this for ten minutes, laughing. Margaret trotted behind them, overlooked. As they left,
though, Pete squeezed her hand, and said, "I'm settled now, you know. I've found a house
in Atherton. Here's the address. I was rather hoping that you could make the time to bring
Andrew." He pressed a square of paper into her hand. It had a telephone number, too.
Andrew was fond of the telephone. He called Len late at night when he changed his
views on things.
LELIE S CANLAN appeared unannounced on a train from the east, and Len
acted as if he were happy to see her. She was no longer quite the pale, retiring thing she
had appeared to be in her wedding picture. She came for supper twice and talked
incessantly--it was really rather remarkable, Margaret thought, that her voice could hold
out. Len, no mean talker himself, remained silent. The woman even out-talked Andrew,
who didn't say a word through dessert. Len had now completed his five-hundred-page
manuscript entitled
The Genius of Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early
. The
publisher was in Kansas City. They planned to print a thousand copies. However, Len,
they said, had to cut the manuscript to fifty thousand words. Andrew said, "They have
told him, 'Folks are interested in Captain Early as a specimen of a certain era, but not
as
interested as all that.'"
Lelie was incensed at the time wasted. All Margaret said was "Goodness"--her
surprise was that the publisher thought anyone at all was interested in any way.
For a day or two, Andrew and Len stormed about the new house, decrying the
blindness of the publisher, but then they reconciled themselves. Now, as a result of the
imminent publication of Len's book (he got busy with cutting and, newly emboldened,
informed Andrew in no uncertain terms that he and only he, Len, was in charge of the
final product), Andrew had to get his own volumes into shape, so that the books could be
published at the same time and thus fulfill Andrew's dreams for a "one-two punch." Her
typing time went up to five hours every day. At first she could barely stand it, and when
she sat down at the typewriter, she felt a trembling, physical rage as she put her fingers
on the keys. She thought of a sailor she had heard of on the island who learned to type
very fast by putting a brown paper sack over his head, and then got so that he could only
type with the sack over his head, and as she thought of this man, she was able to begin
her typing. There were no teas with Dora at the Palace, no more trips to Tanforan.
The goal, Andrew said, was to get an absolutely clean thought, an uninterrupted
idea of some six hundred pages (two volumes) that would unfold itself like a column of
smoke rising into the clouds. The ideal would be that he would write and she would type
from page one to page six hundred in one long session, but, of course, humanity was not
made for ideals. The lower needs of humanity would always break up ideals with food
and sleep and distraction. However, they did start at the beginning and go straight to the
end, and Andrew did his best to remain on the subject. It took three months. In the last
half of this period, Andrew simply dictated, usually from memory, and she took his
dictation, invaded again by the universe, so thoroughly invaded after a while that the rest
of her thoughts and memories and yearnings were scoured away. She cooked; she typed;
she slept. They finished in the same week that Len sent off his manuscript to Kansas City.
She dozed for three days.
But Andrew and Len needed no time to recuperate. They endlessly discussed the
optimum season for publishing their books. They imagined themselves taking a crosscountry trip and doing a set of joint lectures on the Chautauqua circuit, except that, for
the most part, Chautauquas had fallen by the wayside. They envisioned a set of radio
addresses, in which they would alternate lecturing with conversation about Andrew's
great ideas--"an educational revolution" was the term they used. However, they found
they had no access to the radio. They had worked for so many years on their books, and
now that the nation was preoccupied with the aftermath of the Crash, fewer people than
ever cared about the universe. They lamented what might have been if they had worked
more quickly, if they had known then what they knew now, but, ultimately, they decided
that the power of their ideas would carry the day.
All this time, Andrew talked a lot about his death, as if that, perhaps, were the one
key to his ideas' prevailing. He was sixty-four now, and his father had died at fifty-four.
Andrew had no sense of how quickly he might pass on--preferably of natural causes.
Now that his book was to come out, the sooner the better was fine with him. He chatted
over supper about the possibility of dying at just the right time with perfect equanimity,
and also, Margaret thought, with no concept of what it would actually be like not to exist.
Dora was visiting for one of these suppers. She sat across from Andrew over the
roasted chicken and talked first about a woman she had met who had given birth to her
child by the side of the Lincoln Highway, just near Reno, and then set the baby in the
middle of the road, "as the most merciful thing" she could think of, "since there was six
others plus that one," then about Eleanor Roosevelt, while Andrew fell silent only to
resume, as soon as Dora was finished talking, his catalogue of overlooked geniuses who
died in despair. That evening, his favorite was Johannes Kepler. "His mother was tried
for witchcraft," he said. Dora stared at him. "Of course, Kepler was a sociable man. One
had to be, in those days." When he got up to go to his study, it occurred to Margaret to
betray him, to betray him utterly, by taking Dora for a walk and asking for help. She
could describe this feeling she had, that her marriage had become an intolerable torture,
that the sight of his head ducking slightly as he went through doorways of the new house
was repellent to her, that she felt warm, humid air press against her when he entered the
room, that his voice made her want to scream, that she thought he was a fool and even a
madman, and that she was going mad herself, that, from the outside, every marriage
looked as bad to her, because she knew every house she passed was a claustrophobic cell
where at least one of the partners never learned anything, but did the same things over
and over, like an infernal machine, and the other partner had no recourse of any kind, no
way out, no one to talk to about it, not even any way to look at it all that gave relief. The
doorways of the new house were very high. It was mere habit to duck his head for them.
She almost said it, but she could not.
Later that night, in bed, she wondered why she had simply gotten up from her seat
with a smile and begun taking dishes off the table while Dora told her about a man she
had met named Nucky Johnson who she was sure had ordered the execution of someone
else--Margaret lost track of the rest. How could she so want to talk, and yet so much hate
and fear talking? But what would be her recourse? When was it that Mrs. Tillotson had