Authors: Jane Smiley
to see who it is. And when we have a knitting circle, the first thing he asks afterward is
whether anyone said anything about him."
"You daren't tell him that they didn't say a word?"
Margaret smiled. "I don't know what I dare tell him, other than 'They all asked
after you.' But I don't know what to do with him. He doesn't know what to do with
himself!"
"He's a grown man," said Dora. "He'll think of something."
Dora was being sent back to Europe over her own protestations. It was not, she
told Margaret, that she was too old, it was that the events in Europe were too large, and as
large as they looked from her perch on Sutter Street, they would be that much larger once
she got to New York, and overwhelming once she got to London. But in fact she was too
old, Margaret thought. She said, "Your usual snooping?"
"I don't snoop. I interview. People want to answer my questions, and I write down
what they say."
"But you describe them. You say, 'He looks directly at me, but his left eye tracks
toward the donkeys on the hillside.'"
Dora laughed. "That's not snooping. Snooping is reading their mail and listening
to gossip about them."
"You've done a little of that."
"Well, I did, during my high-society period, but when someone looks at you
surreptitiously while she's telling a juicy story about someone else, or just happens to
leave her diary open at a certain page when she knows you might be alone in the room,
you do what is expected of you. I haven't gone into high society in ten years."
"So why go back to Europe?"
"Believe me, I don't want to go. In 1916, I couldn't imagine anything more
exciting than to have your ship attacked by a U-boat and write your last dispatch and stuff
it in a bottle while you were drowning, knowing that an editor from the
New York Herald
would inevitably find it and put it on the front page."
"And
now?"
"Now I know that it will be hard to find hot water for a nice bath, and there will
be a constant stream of people in every city who will deserve to eat more than I deserve a
new hat, and that friends from long ago who were once truly simpatico will now be
disgorging the most impossible sentiments about Anglo-Saxon purity or the rights of
Italians to a
'mare italiano'
or whatever they call it." It seemed to Margaret that Dora
must be thinking of a particular person, but she didn't say anything. Dora leaned back and
said, "My mother would say at last I am receiving my just deserts. You know, she used to
say, 'Now, Margaret saw a hanging as a child and promptly forgot everything about it, as
she should have. Dora never saw that hanging, and so she has always gone looking for
one.'"
"I never heard that." Then Margaret said, "The truth is, I've never seen anything! I
didn't even see that hanging, as far as memory serves. I should have just gone to Europe,
and now it's too late."
"I should have taken you with me years ago, but now is not the time." Dora's tone
was sympathetic, but idle, as careless of what she had enjoyed as of what Margaret had
not enjoyed.
"Andrew wouldn't have stood for that, as there was typing to do. I have been such
a fool!"
Dora's eyebrows lifted at this flash of anger, but she didn't respond other than to
say, "He would have gotten used to it."
"I wish you'd said that fifteen years ago."
That night, in her bed, Margaret lay awake thinking of her conversation with
Dora, how she had strayed into indiscretions that she had resisted for years, and how it
had felt. There was the surprise that nothing she had said surprised Dora, and then there
was the other surprise, that what she had said was still so emphatic, in spite of the
equanimity she thought she had attained. No, she was almost sixty and she had not been
to London or Paris or Rome, and there was no going there now. Yes, she was balanced,
as she had gotten into the habit of congratulating herself for being. But, she saw, she was
balanced on a very narrow perch.
POSSIBLY, over the years, she had hosted some ladies' circle or another two or
three thousand times. Sewing, knitting, collecting toys and clothing for poor children,
raising funds for soldiers, planning Christmas programs and Thanksgiving dinners and
Easter-egg hunts. In every case, if Andrew was in the house, he would come to the
doorway, bow to the ladies, greet the ones he knew by name, and then excuse himself to
go off to other business more worthy of his attention. On this particular day, he came into
the dining room with his hat already on and his jacket over his arm. He nodded to Mrs.
Hermann and Mrs. Roberts. He greeted Mrs. Tillotson and Mrs. Jones, and Miss Jones,
who was Mrs. Jones's unmarried sister-in-law. Margaret said goodbye to him with a wave
and dealt out the cards, one down, one up. She heard him open the front door, and then
she heard the front door close. As she was dealing the next round of cards to those who
wanted them, though, he appeared again in the doorway. The ladies placed their bets. She
dealt out a card to Mrs. Jones and one to Mrs. Roberts. Mrs. Roberts said, "I'm busted,"
and Mrs. Jones took the pot. Andrew said, "I thought you ladies were knitting, my dear."
Mrs. Jones said, "We've knitted enough mufflers to stock I. Magnin."
"You're playing blackjack?"
"Yes,
Andrew."
To everyone in general he said, rather proudly, "My mother played blackjack all
through my childhood. She called it 'vingt-et-un.'"
"Did you play with her?" said Miss Jones, evidently surprised that such a huge,
gruff, gray-mustached man as Andrew had had a childhood.
"For a while there, we played every day. My father made a sketch of us one night.
We were so intent upon the game that we didn't realize he was even in the room."
"How old were you, Captain Early?" said Mrs. Roberts.
"Oh, about seven, I guess. She started playing cooncan with me when I was five
to keep me occupied, because I was a terribly restless child. I liked blackjack better."
Margaret shifted in her chair, ready for him to leave.
"What was cooncan?" asked Miss Jones.
"A type of rummy," said Andrew.
"You should play with us," said Miss Jones, and, lo and behold, he sat down with
a thump in a chair and pulled it up to the table. Margaret felt disappointment set in, like a
flu.
Miss Jones continued, "You should write your memoirs, Captain Early. I'm sure
they're very interesting."
"Do you think so, Miss Jones? I don't need to do that. A young man once wrote
my biography." He smiled in a dignified manner, and spread himself a bit.
Margaret was relieved that, before he could offer the girl a copy, Mrs. Roberts, on
the other side of Andrew, gave a squeak that drew his attention. Mrs. Roberts was a
retiring soul who played without any strategy at all, and her stack of chips was already
noticeably smaller than everyone else's. Andrew glanced at her, and must have seen her
hole card, because when she took a hit and was busted, he leaned over and whispered in
her ear. She turned and said, "I don't know a thing about that, but you may show me, if
you would like."
He sat with them then for about two hours, whispering first to one lady and then
to another and another, until they stopped for tea, when he put on his hat and went out.
That night, over supper, he said, "Your lady friends have a deplorable feel for
strategy. I wonder if Mrs. Roberts even knows that there are fifty-two cards in the deck."
"Possibly not. She only comes for the gossip."
"She is being robbed blind."
"Andrew, if she loses two dollars, it's a bad day. The stakes are low. Think of it as
the price she has to pay for an afternoon's sociability."
"When are these ladies coming again?"
"They agreed on Monday." She saw that it was inevitable, but also that it kept him
off the streets. That part was a relief.
On Monday morning, he put a leaf in the table, and over the course of the next
few weeks, he installed himself as their tutor. His method was to help first one lady and
then another with basic strategy. After that, he told them a bit about card counting, and
then the higher mathematics of probability. He pitted the ladies against one another. Mrs.
Roberts stopped losing all the time, and Miss Jones began losing a little more often.
Margaret saw, possibly for the first time, just the palest shadow of Mrs. Early in the son
who was now older than his mother had ever been. She was not as uncomfortable as she
had expected to be--it was interesting to see him in the midst of so many ladies. He had a
manner, stiff but gallant, right out of 1895.
In these games, Andrew never expounded upon any of his theories about the
universe or the
Panay
, nor did he talk much in general--he was too busy whispering to his
designated pupil to hold forth to the rest of them. Margaret felt fond of him, in a distant
way.
Having succeeded with the cards, and still mindful of Mrs. Wareham's urging, she
furnished him with a dog. Andrew was not opposed to a dog. For her, the idea of owning
a dog had died with Alexander--at first it seemed like too much of a substitute child, and
then it became a habit they had not developed. But one day she went to the pound, and
she adopted Stella, whose previous owner had been transferred by the navy to South
America. The animal was a terrier mix, housebroken. She walked nicely on a leash, and
did not jump onto the furniture unless invited. Margaret was in the kitchen with the dog
when Andrew came in. Stella walked over to him, sat down in front of him, and looked
up into his face. Margaret said, "Her name is Stella."
He said, "Is it, indeed?" Of course her name was Stella--no other dog could be
adopted by an astronomer. That evening, he invited Stella onto the sofa, and she sat
quietly while he petted her on the head. That night, he made a bed for her in the corner of
his bedroom by folding an old quilt, and the first thing Margaret heard in the morning,
before she was quite awake and when it was still very gloomy with fog and darkness, was
the sound of the kitchen door opening and closing. She sat up and went to the window.
Down below, in the backyard, she could just make out Andrew, with Stella at his heels,
opening the back gate and heading out for a walk.
Such a charming, bright-eyed, and well-behaved dog imparted her own
respectability to Andrew. It was the perfect solution--he walked all over town and people
engaged him in conversation, about Stella or about dogs in general. In his usual fashion,
he exerted himself, and in short order, he had taught Stella to shake hands, sit up on her
hind legs, roll over, jump a stick, and balance a piece of bread on her nose, then toss it in
the air and catch it. When children stopped him to pet her, he took pieces of bread out of
his pocket and showed off her tricks.
Then he took up movies, although she could have counted on one hand the
number of movies they had seen. He had never liked silent movies; he had sat through
Charlie Chaplin in
The Circus
without cracking a smile. As they went home, he said,
"Tell me, my dear, why does he wear those shoes and turn his feet out in that way? Does
he suffer from the aftereffects of some childhood illness?"
"No, Andrew, it's supposed to be funny."
"But funny in what way? Incongruous? Mechanical? Simply silly or ridiculous? I
would have liked to enjoy it, I must say."
"You've enjoyed vaudeville. It's like that."
"But it goes on so long you can't stand it anymore. At a vaudeville show, at least
if you didn't like the act, you knew it would soon give way to another."
After the talkies came in, he could not tolerate scenes of the sort where the two
actors were driving in a car and a film of the passing landscape was playing behind them.
He would say, aloud in the theater, "We saw that tree five seconds ago." However, after
his interest in blackjack waned, Andrew discovered pictures. He was amazed that, while
he had been ignoring them, they had become more sophisticated. The first one he came
home and told her about was
Gunga Din
, which was playing at the Orpheum in
downtown Vallejo. He had lots of questions: Who was this fellow Cary Grant? Was this
movie based on Kipling's poem, and if so, how could you base a movie on a poem?
Didn't the Khyber Pass look rather like the Sierras?
She said that Cary Grant was a big star, as was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (Andrew's
response to this was "Why is that, my dear?"), that you could base a movie on anything,
and that probably the film was made in the Sierras rather than in the real Khyber Pass.
A few days later, he went to see a movie about Jesse James. In this one, he liked
"the fellow Henry Fronda," but, he said, "how do they not know that Jesse and Frank's
mother wasn't killed? She lived to be eighty-five years old! And they had them robbing
trains. They robbed banks. That was the point." He couldn't see how a movie that was so
inaccurate could have been allowed to reach the screen. She said, "Andrew, did you talk
to anyone during the movie?"
"Well, I did tell a few people around me that the story was all wrong."