All Those Vanished Engines (16 page)

Interesting what you say about thinking in a different language. I've noticed that too. It's not just a matter of speed or comfort, but it's the quality of thought that varies, as if you've switched to a different key signature in music.…

Her own handwriting was beautiful, a careful italic. These letters were Xeroxed copies of typed originals, preserved, I thought, with posterity in mind. But occasionally, like Philip II, she would write notes in the margins.

Frugal, she had used wastepaper to make the copies. I turned one piece over. It was a letter to my father, also typed, and then crossed out with a purple line from top to bottom. Probably he had never responded. My mother must have fished it out of the trash beside the downstairs desk, where my father had finally disposed of it more than a quarter-century after it was written, perhaps around the time that he retired:

Roy Whitney

The Sprague Electric Company

12 Marshall Street

North Adams, Massachusetts

Dear Professor Park,

I am grateful for your response. In my experience with the Physics Department at your college, they are not interested in real-life applications. As I say, these discoveries have come as a by-product of various projects undertaken during the late war, more than a decade's worth of research that I have pursued on my own time. Much is still classified, of course. But some of these phenomena are full of applications for civilian use. If the college could, for example, provide seed money of even $15,000 the potential rewards would be enormous, as well as any benefits to the field of rocket propulsion. I have already approached the NACA, and have also sent letters to Dr. Bode and Dr. Clauser, directors of research at Bell Laboratories and the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation (respectively) with no results. But I feel under the auspices of your department, and especially such a distinguished scientist as yourself, the Committee on Space Technology might be able to reconsider my proposal.…

3. T
HE
G
HOST IN THE
A
IRSTREAM

Before I left Baltimore, I'd had a conversation with Traci Knox about the end of her book. She had taken to heart something I had said, something about the constraints of a single-viewpoint narrative, whether first- or third-person. I told her to consider switching, in later chapters, to another point of view so as to vary the tone, and to introduce another source of information. I didn't say completely what I thought, which was that I was tired of her narrator and her incessant complaints.

But I wasn't prepared for the choice she made. Scenes from Jason Hall's college experience, instead of being described in a series of conversations between the heroine and her lover, now were narrated directly from the point of view of a new character, the English professor's teenage son.

“I think it's a bold choice,” I said, in the coffee shop on Charles Street. “But I wonder if you know enough to do him justice. Or like him enough. Viewpoint characters, you have to like them a little bit. I mean, didn't you say you thought he was kind of a loser?”

“That's what Jason said. But I'm thinking the truth is maybe more complicated, and it's not as if Jason always told the truth. I think now maybe he was jealous of that kid. Just because of his proximity. Jealousy would have been a new experience for Jason, and one he didn't understand very well. Besides, they were friends, in a way. When he was living there during his junior year, he said he used to go into the kid's room and listen to Miles Davis.”

“But you never met him.”

She made a quick gesture with her hand. “You're the one who's always telling me to invent a little more, not worry about the facts. Make up your mind. No, I never met him. Not as far as I know. Besides, maybe I did see him once, at least at a distance.”

I looked into the bottom of my teacup and said nothing. I had wondered how she had managed to render the English teacher's house so precisely; no doubt Jack Shoots was a brilliant young man, but I found it hard to imagine him describing the layout of the rooms in such complicated and colorful detail. “He brought me up there once,” she said, “and he pointed out the house—he didn't think anything about it. I didn't let him know I was interested. But I saw a kid on the front porch. Glasses. Curly hair. I figured he looked a lot like his mother. At least that's what I'm going to write.”

“On the front porch? That could have been anybody,” I said.

Irritated, she shook her head. “Sure, but that's the person I'm going to describe. Do you have a problem with that? Besides, you're wrong. He doesn't have to be likable. Nobody in this story is likable so far. He doesn't even have to be credible. Jason used to talk about him a lot. Even when I was half-crazed I was struck by some of the things he said about him, or what he said about himself, how he'd come home after school and his mother would be sitting in the living room with some adoring student, and he realized that she knew everything about this kid and nothing about him. He said it made him feel half-lonely and half-safe. That always struck me. He had an upstairs room at the back of the house. No one bothered him back there except for Jason.”

Traci had a habit. She used to twiddle a curl of her gray hair under one ear. She was doing it now. “He told Jason a story once. When he was about eight, he spent a year in England where his father was at Trinity College. They lived outside Cambridge in a little subdivision. He had to wear a school uniform, shorts and kneesocks, and a crewnecked sweater and a tie. One day in December, a bunch of kids took him out into a field on the other side of the road. There was a fence of concrete posts strung with wire. The bottom strand of wire was only about a foot above the ground. These kids tied his hands behind his back and tied the end of his necktie to the bottom wire, and left him. It was about three in the afternoon and it was already getting dark. He just squatted down in that ditch, jerking his head back and forth, over and over again, until the tie finally came apart. By that time it was nine o'clock at night. He went home and he didn't tell his mother what had happened. And this was the odd thing: she wasn't even worried. She hadn't even called the police.”

As she spoke, I was thinking of the scene in Traci's novel where the woman drives around the parking lot with her son screaming in the back. “What kind of mother is that?” she asked. “Something like that could ruin someone forever, just the one afternoon.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, startled. When she glanced up at me, I continued. “I mean we'd have to get a sense of the damage it did. Otherwise there's no point bringing it up.”

“I don't think you'd be able to trust anyone ever again. I don't think you'd be able to commit to anyone or anything.”

“Just that one afternoon,” I said.

“Sure—you could never forget that.”

But actually, I had kind of forgotten. Now I remembered: the damp, cold, dark mist, the relentless rhythm as I jerked my head back. The boys were named Nicky Toller and Clive Bates. Now I could see their faces after all these years.

As I envisioned it, the scene put me in mind of a scene I intended to write. Betrayed by Amnian mercenaries, Captain Lukas is tortured for information he refuses to divulge. He shines in moments like this. He can take a lot of punishment. Left to his own devices, he's much better at resistance than at any kind of action.

For reasons known ultimately only to themselves, the Amnians force him to squat for hours on end, perhaps in obeisance to their hideous divinity, whose altar, sensed nearby, is nevertheless hidden in the mist. “It's possible he was lying for dramatic effect,” I said. “Maybe you want to keep that possibility alive when you describe the scene.”

She gave me an exasperated look. “What are you talking about? It's perfect.”

Unlike my mother, whose experience with my autistic sister stretched out day after day, all of them more or less the same, Traci believed decisively in cause and effect. You can always recognize that in an author, especially from a sketch. Every scene is arranged in careful order. Each one has a purpose. Here is part of the new chapter, which she'd written out as an example of what the new point of view might sound like:

… That summer he had grown his hair long and acquired the habit of playing with it. There was a long curl of hair under his ear that had taken on a special sheen. In the evening he'd stayed up late talking to Jason and listening to
Bitches Brew
Worshipping at the shrine of Jason Hall, so to speak, and in the morning he found his mind was still full of him, and the sight of him sitting up against the wall of his room rolling a joint, his big eyes limpid and intent, his straw-colored hair a mess.

And in the morning he went downstairs to pour himself a cup of café au lait. He sat down at the kitchen table. He hitched his feet up on the pedestal, its base carved in the shape of rampant lions, whose eyes he and his mother had painted green and white when he was a child. His father sat across from him but paid no attention, a small man with a big head and a crop of thinning hair, which stood up nevertheless like a clown's wig.…

There was an aimless, misfiring attempt at conversation, and then:

At ten, his mother led Elly downstairs and sat her down in the rocking chair, where she rocked desultorily and mumbled to herself. Still in her early teens, she had an indefinable sense of ancientness about her.… And as his mother made breakfast, he looked up at her face. How odd it was, after his conversation with Jason, that he was able so easily to see her as if she were a stranger, her short, curly black hair just beginning to turn gray; her thick, unflattering glasses; and the ugly mole on her nose—a plain woman with the airs and self-confidence of an attractive one.…

In the morning after I had seen Constance at the bar, I looked this excerpt over and drafted an email:

The goal of a point-of-view change is to establish a sense of a different voice, and something written and perceived by a different person. Do you think you have achieved that? To me, this section reads like an attempt to describe these subsidiary characters directly, and not through J's eyes and your heroine's memory of what he said. PS—I also don't picture the mother making breakfast. I don't think she ever made breakfast. To tell the truth, I don't picture her getting out of bed until everyone else is up. In these descriptions you might want to find ways to suggest a deeper narrative, like for instance maybe she's sick of dealing with the disabled sister, and maybe even clinically depressed.

I fiddled with this email for a while. But I couldn't get the tone right, and finally it seemed petty to me, and I didn't send it. Instead I went downstairs. Elly had made café au lait, and set a place for my father, a big cup and saucer, and a smaller dish with an array of vitamin pills and other supplements. I hiked my feet up onto the lions' head pedestal, which my older sister had decorated with pink and white paint so long before. In time my father shuffled in from the front room. He was leaning on his cane, and I noticed how diminished he seemed, a small man with a big head, now, in contrast. Since my mother's death he had posted old photographs of her throughout the house, portraits not of her old age but from the first years of their marriage, or else publicity photographs from when she had first started to write books. In all of them she had the anxious, self-conscious look that was perpetual with her, but as my father took his seat now, with difficulty, under one of them—a head shot, shoulders hunched, leaning her cheek upon her hand—I could see as if for the first time how beautiful she had been. Of course it never had occurred to me when she was alive, or even looking at these same pictures, which were familiar. But perhaps age gave me distance; in these portraits she was younger, after all, than I was now.

My father looked at me across the table and then dropped his eyes. More and more as he aged, he had come to resemble his own father, Edwin, an architect and surrealist painter (
Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance,
etc.) who had died in a New Hampshire nursing home around the time I'd left home for the first time. All his life he'd been a cheerful man, given to aphorisms, some of which I'd taken to heart. (“Never argue about a sum of money less than seven dollars and fifty cents.” “Achievement is the consolation of the mediocre mind.”) But he had been unhappy in the nursing home, prey to worries that eventually took all his time. He had once convinced himself, for example, that the reason my step-grandmother, Winifred, now visited him so seldom was because, alternately, she'd been kidnapped by operatives from Eastern Europe, or else had been elected mayor of Hanover and was too busy. In reality she had developed multiple sclerosis and found it hard to make the trip.

“Tomorrow morning I have to go home,” I told my father now. “Nicola is getting restive.”

He smiled. He didn't like Nicola, didn't like his grandson's name, the whole Romanian connection. And of course he knew what I was going to do today, although we hadn't discussed it much. After breakfast, I had an appointment with the financial people at Williamstown Commons. It wasn't exactly a secret. But what was there to say? Even so, to deflect us from the topic I asked instead whether he had ever had any contact with the people at Sprague Electric over any kind of scientific project, or problem in applied physics. But he couldn't remember anything about that, or else didn't want to talk about it.

“What about Elly?” he asked, and I laid out the options one more time.

“Besides,” I said, “nothing is going to happen right away.”

His blue eyes looked so mournful and so childlike that I had to leave. I went upstairs and smote for a while, trying to get Captain Lukas to finally make a stand.