Love and Hydrogen (18 page)
“We should have hot dogs,” Crystal said.
We all went in the house.
Her mother and her retarded brother were in the living room with the shades down, watching TV. I thought it was weird that her mother hadn't come out.
“Nice to meet you,” I told them.
They were both fat, but not hugely fat. The brother had black hair combed sideways and his eyes were half closed. I couldn't tell if that was part of the way he was retarded or if he was just sleepy. His mother was sitting next to the biggest ashtray on earth. It was wider than the lamp table it was on.
Crystal said I should get the bag from the porch. She told them while I went to get it that I'd given her this huge bag of clothes. They were looking at me when I came back in.
“Merry Christmas!” I said, because I couldn't think of anything else. I put it on the rug in front of the TV.
The house smelled. There were dirty coffee cups on the windowsill. I had my hands flat against my thighs.
Her father poked in from the kitchen and said, “What's in the bag?” but then didn't wait to find out. He called he was starting dinner.
Her brother dug around in the bag. Her mother watched. I still didn't know his name. I was still standing by the front door. Crystal felt bad at the way things were going but I couldn't do anything to help her feel better.
“So what's in there?” she said, like everything was okay. It was horrible.
Her brother pulled out stuff I didn't even remember throwing in. Some things I could still wear, and a blue velvet dress.
“Oh,” her mother said, when her brother held up the dress.
A
Penthouse
magazine was lying around in plain sight. The room was cold and everyone was bundled up. You could smell sweat. The kitchen was on one side and they had framed pictures of Crystal and her brother around the door leading to the other rooms. It was a longer trailer than it looked.
The kitchen was clean. We ate in there, watching the TV on the counter. I looked every so often at the floors and the ceiling, and Crystal caught me at it.
We had pound cake for dessert. Her father and brother got into a fight about how much her brother could have.
Afterward we hung out in Crystal's room. It was across from her mom and dad's. Her brother was going to sleep on the sofa. I thanked her parents for the very nice dinner, even though I hadn't seen her mother do anything. They said we should get ready for bed soon.
That was fine with me. It was about 7:30.
Her half of the room was neat. She had a throw rug, and her bed was made, with some books arranged big to small on a bookshelf in the headboard. Her brother's side was filthy. You could see that she'd tried to pick up. There were loose Oreos in some slippers under the dresser.
“You can sleep on my bed,” Crystal said.
A poster of a muscle car flapped out from the ceiling over her brother's bed, like a sail. I told her I could sleep over there, but she said no.
I was still standing in the middle of the room. I didn't want to be there, and she knew it.
“Do you want to see some of my books, or play a game?” she said. “I got Clue.”
“Okay,” I said.
She didn't move. She sat on her brother's bed. I sat on hers. I smelled soap.
“Should we go to bed?” I finally said. She shrugged, looking down at my feet.
We brushed our teeth and got into our nightgowns. Even the water tasted weird. I was glad I brought my own towel. We called good night down the hall and got into bed. Then she had to get up to turn off the light. She got into bed again. The parking garage across the street lit up the whole room.
“Are you having an okay time?” she said, from her brother's bed.
“Yeah,” I said. She shifted around on her back. They were watching some kind of travelogue in the living room and we both lay there, listening to it. I think she felt so bad she couldn't even ask them to turn it down.
“My cousin Katie has so much money,” she said.
“Did you hear me?” she said.
“What am I supposed to say?” I said.
She sighed. It was like a bubble filling the house, pressing on my ears. I hated it there.
“I don't know why I say some things,” she said. She started to cry.
“Are you crying?” I said. “What are you crying for?”
It just made her cry to herself. I hadn't asked very nicely.
“Why are you crying?” I said.
“Oh,” she said, like she was going to answer, but she didn't.
We both lay there. I made a disgusted noise. I breathed in her smell on the pillow. She was quiet after that. The travelogue went off. I wondered if her brother had to stay up until her parents went to bed.
It was so bright in the room I could read my watch. When it was 11:30, I said, “I should go.”
“What do you want from me?” she said, exactly the way my brother does.
I got up and got dressed without turning on the light. “I should use the phone,” I said. She was still on her back.
I went out into the hall. The house was dark. The phone was in the kitchen. My mother answered on the second ring. I kept my voice down. I was worried she was going to make me explain, but she didn't. She said, “Are you all right?” Then she said my father would come.
It would take about a half hour. I had to wait. I hung up and went back into the bedroom and shut the door. “My father's coming,” I said.
“Fine,” Crystal said. She was sitting up. “You want the light on?”
“No,” I said.
We sat there. I thought about the way I'd thought of her the night before. The night before I'd thought she needed beauty in her life.
“Take your clothes with you when you go,” she said.
“This is totally me. I'm just being weird,” I said.
I was going to quit the classes the next day by phone. If she tried to call me she'd find out the number I'd given her was fake. Like we said when a total dork asked for our number: I gave him my faux number. And she'd think I couldn't deal with her being so poor. She wouldn't realize it was everything else I couldn't deal with. I knew I deserved exactly what I got, all the rest of my life. And when I was stuck with her in her bedroom I didn't want her to deserve any more, either. But before that, for a little while, I wanted good things for her; I wanted to make her life a little better. I wanted to make her think, That Lynnâthat Lynn's a nice girl. And wasn't that worth something?
DESCENT INTO PERPETUAL NIGHT
Impractical but Exciting Early Machines
When I was a boy I came across in my father's library an engraving of Father Gaspard Schott's design for what he termed an “aquatic corselet,” composed of leather with four tiny panes of looking-glass, which let its passenger walk safely about the floor of the sea. It looked like a huge and inverted four-sided pail. In the engraving two bare feet tiptoed along a sandy bottom. According to the caption it had been published in 1664.
It was my first experience with what I came to understand as my near-constant state: that of being inarticulate with amazement. “Inarticulate is right,” Mary, my first wife, and Elswyth, my second, and Miss Hollister, my present assistant, each remarked, upon being told that story. In the case of Miss Hollister, I congratulated her on having confirmed data that had apparently been obtained at great cost by earlier observers.
The Bathysphere in Its White Coat
My name is William S. Beebe and I am the head of the Department of Tropical Research for the New York Zoological Society. During 1927 and 1928 I considered various plans for cylinders that would be strong enough to sink deep into the ocean, but all of them, due to their flat ends, proved impractical. It soon occurred to me and others that there is nothing like a ball for the even distribution of pressure, and so the idea of a perfectly round chamber took form and grew. By 1929 Mr. Otis Barton at his own expense had developed and actually constructed a steel sphere large and strong enough for us to enter. The final design measured only four feet nine inches in diameter, but its walls were an inch and a quarter thick, and it weighed five thousand pounds. Any heavier would have been too heavy for the winches available in the Caribbean. Our dive would take place off one of the abyssal shelves a few miles from the Bermudan coast.
There were to be three windows: cylinders of fused quartz three inches thick fitted into steel projections resembling the mouths of stubby cannons, quartz being the strongest transparent substance known, and transmitting all wavelengths of light. The windows were eight inches wide. Because of the sphere's shape they turned in toward one another slightly, as if cross-eyed.
Opposite the windows was what was politely termed the door. It had a circular four-hundred-pound flanged lid that was lifted on and off with a block and tackle, and fitted with ten fist-sized bolts around the hole. It was fourteen inches wide.
A swivel at the top of the sphere held the lowering cable. Beside that the electric cable, carrying light and telephone wires, entered through what we called the stuffing box, formed of an inner brass and an outer stainless-steel gland between which the cable was sandwiched with layers of flax and oil packing and tightly bolted with hammered wrenches.
Below that, inside, oxygen tanks were bolted lengthwise to the walls, like benches. Trays in which powdered chemicals for absorbing moisture and carbon dioxide were exposed sat on brackets just above our heads. A crate-sized box of a searchlight occupied nearly all of one side. It had its own window.
One day I was drawing with my finger the shape of a deep-sea fishâ
Bathytroctes
âon the stall in the gentlemen's room, when the appropriateness of the prefix struck me. I coined the name,
bathysphere.
The name stuck.
We painted the thing white, in the hope that it would attract sea life.
Corals and Fish Four Fathoms Down
When a previously impenetrable portion of a zone foreign to human presence suddenly becomes accessible, then every corner of man's mind susceptible to enthusiasm or to long-accumulated curiosity is aroused to the highest pitch. Those zones might be geographical, technical, historical, or emotional.
Our knowledge of deep-sea fauna was comparable to an African explorer's after he'd penetrated a mile into the continent's jungles, and seen two birds and a lizard. Were there rhinos? Lions? Elephants? How would he know?
Science had steamed about, lowered weights on a wire, and recorded the depth of the bottom. We'd dragged along tiny dredges and nets, and stared at whatever miserable and crushed specimens were slow enough to be caught by them. Because of the pressures recorded, the deepest any human being had made observations before the bathysphere had been a little beyond three hundred feet. We knew the ocean's depth in some places was likely to reach a mile and a half: eight thousand feet.
The Evolution of Human Diving
I was born in Brooklyn, New York, eighteen years after Darwin had published his
Origin of the Species
and six after he'd published
The
Descent of Man.
Rutherford B. Hayes had just completed his first year in office. Colorado had just achieved statehood, and had chosen as its state bird the prairie lark finch, that gregarious ground feeder. A great cholera epidemic had just ended, and my mother had taken to calling me “Little Lucky.” My luck had held, as it always would. In 1899 at the age of twenty-two I became the youngest curator of ornithology in the New York Zoological Society's history, and proceeded to make expeditions to Central and South America, the Orient, and the West Indies. After a while, as a joke, some of my coworkers back in New York had sold my desk.
Cruikshank's Idea of Life in a Bell
Miss Hollister believed I hadn't been doing my utmost to affect her parents' situation. I protested this interpretation more than once. I'd written a letter. I'd mentioned the situation to the head of the Society. I'd offered to telephone whomever she would wish. It wasn't clear to me how much more I could accomplish.
Her parents wished to emigrate but her father had run afoul of his government because of a petition he circulated to protest the requisitioning of a wetlands hatchery. The hatchery was in a valley south of Mainz.
“A petition?” I asked, during one of our first discussions on the subject.
“Apparently it identified the reason for the requisitioning as military maneuvers,” she told me.
I tried to look sympathetic, not seeing the point.
“Strictly
verboten,
according to the Treaty of Versailles,” she explained.
“Ah,” I said.
This had been on the voyage down to Bermuda. She had been watching me double-check my figures for projected oxygen consumption.
“Hollister is German?” I had asked politely.
“Holitscher,” she said.
“Ah,” I said.
We had had a dalliance and this had complicated things. Waiting for me to respond further, her ears had colored with impatience and humiliation.
“Can you
help
?” she had asked again. She was much younger than I. She had a very American directness. This had been a partial cause of our dalliance.
The new government was by all accounts even less understanding than the old one. Her father was at that point in a prison in Darmstadt awaiting trial. His lawyer had been told that the charge might be sedition but his lawyer assumed that to be a scare tactic.
There seemed to be an unstated understanding that we would talk about this further. She wore shorts made from cut-off men's pants, and a floppy white hat against the sun. Sleeveless white shirts that billowed in breezes.
The Evolution of Human Diving
At the age of twenty-five I married Mary, my first wife, at sunrise at her family's plantation in Virginia. Her family had roots from the colonial days. Her grandfather was a Supreme Court judge. We went to Mexico for our honeymoon to obtain specimens for the Zoological Park. We published an account of our trip entitled
Two
Bird Lovers in Mexico.
Mary wrote the final chapter and provided tips for female travelers in the tropics. Over the next seven years we traveled fifty-two thousand miles and visited twenty-two countries. A year after our return she fled to Nevada to begin the six-month residency requirement for divorce. Because of my celebrity as an author, it was very public. The front page of
The New York Times
carried her account of events under the headline
Naturalist Was
Cruel.
Fourteen years later, aboard a friend's yacht, I married Elswyth, my second wife. She was twenty-five years my junior. She was the surprisingly famous author of the play
Young Mister Disraeli.
She wanted only to stay in our farmhouse in Vermont and write; she detested the tropics and travel. I hated cold weather. She wrote a play about me called
Stranger in the Hills.
A Diver Can Attract Fish with a Crowbar
When I first put on a diving helmet and climbed down the submerged ladder, I understood almost immediately that I had escaped from dry land etymology and entered an entirely new world. It was on a reef off Bermuda that I had named Almost Island: it was so shallow, and surrounded on all sides by abyssal depths dropping away into blue. Herring schooled above me like a tiny storm of silver comets. Parrotfish barged slowly along. Yellowtail floated about moving their jaws in an absentminded, adenoidal manner. A crinoid waved its orange ferns. The reef stretched up and up, alive with plumes and sea fans, brain coral and sharp-spined urchins. I stood amazed, vainly trying to catch the fish.
I found that what seemed to be a desert of animal life could be converted into a hectic oasis by a few strokes of a crowbar on the reef, fish rushing in from all directions to the source of the exposed food. I invented submarine slingshots and speared what I wished with barbed arrows of brass wire. I found branched arborescent growths into which I could climb.
One starlit night, when my eyes passed just below the level of the water, the illumination of the wavelets was like cold fire. From the bottom, the boat's keel was molten silver. Jellyfish and sea worms showed blue.
And I considered, hauling myself up the rope, sergeant majors and wrasse following me to the surface, the way the concrete intellectual returns from aviation have finally been superficial: the atmosphere itself being transparent, and our already having obtained knowledge of its upper reaches from our experience with heights such as lofty mountains. The same was true of our penetration of the tropical jungles: the new understandings and difficulties had arrived as a matter of degree, but not of kind.
“You're forty-nine years old,” Elswyth remarked in a letter. “Isn't that a little too far along for Undersea Adventure?” “No,” I wrote back.
All These Instruments Plus Two Men
By the spring of 1930 the sphere was nearing completion. In April I moved my field laboratory to Nonsuch Island, which had been donated by the Bermudans for oceanographic work. The pronoun “I,” it should be noted, throughout should be considered as divided into four, four of us comprising the staff of the Department of Tropical Research: besides myself, John Tee-Van, General Associate, Gloria Hollister, Research Associate, and Jocelyn Crane, Technical Associate. For this trip Miss Hollister had brought a friend with her. Miss Crane would be helping with the charts for recording time, depths, and temperature. They'd been schoolmates. Miss Crane looked at me sharply at times when she fancied I wasn't paying attention.
We had a barge, a seagoing tug, and a seven-ton Arcturus winch. The barge was outfitted with twin boilers to drive the winches. A simple meter wheel measured the amount of cable paid out.
The distance between the generator and the bathysphere would cause a drop in voltage, necessitating the use of specially made ninety-volt lamps. The electric light circuit could also be used as an auxiliary signaling apparatus, in the case of a failure of the telephone lines.
In the trays we had calcium chloride (anhydrous porous, #8 mesh) for moisture, and soda lime (#4 mesh) for carbon dioxide.
The crew necessary for a descent turned out to consist of, besides our staff, a steersman for the barge, two men to tie the telephone line to the main cable, deckhands for paying out and hauling in, a generator hand, and a man at the meter wheel who also tied tape onto the cable at every hundred feet.
We made a trial submergence to one thousand feet with the bathysphere empty. It came up with the windows intact and only a quart of water at the bottom.
“Do you know anything at all about National Socialism?” Miss Hollister asked while we watched Mr. Tee Van work the pumps to empty it. She had her arms folded.
Spray whipped our faces as the tug dragged us about and then pulled us back to shore against the wind and the waves. We could attempt a descent as early as the next day if the weather permitted.
“Probably more than the next fellow,” I told her.
“Then you understand some of my reasons for concern,” she said.
I'd been hurt by her tone. Across the deck, Miss Crane was packing away the logbooks. One never had to justify concern for one's parents, I told her. The night of our rendezvous I'd talked about my parents. My father had been a dealer of paper, often away on business. I'd been an only child. We'd moved a few times and eventually settled in East Orange. We'd often visited the Museum of Natural History together on the elevated train. My father had wept at my first publication, a letter to the editor in
Harper's Young People's
Magazine.
Miss Hollister had been greatly moved. We had been in my quarters on a steamer. I had invited her in. She had switched off the electric light after I had finished my account. The ship had wallowed a bit. She had eased me into my berth like someone attending an invalid. She had whispered her given name, Gloria, into my mouth. She had had a long face. Wispy blonde hair. Skeptical eyes. A long nose, and lips that were moist even after a day on the water.
“The German people have been through a terrible time,” I told her.
She nodded and waited for me to continue. Mr. Tee Van stood about with his hands in his back pockets, waiting to ask a question. I excused myself and dealt with him.
She was still waiting after he went about his business. I said, “By which I mean we have to be wary of too easily judging the choices they made and why they made them.”
She lowered her eyes as though she'd burst into tears, and I was swamped with helpless rage.
What I hadn't done was offer her father employment in our tiny Department. She believed it would make all the difference in terms of the possibility of an exit visa. Of course, we had no budget for it and he had no expertise for what we were doing. He barely spoke English. But this was in her mind a white lie that would save a man's life.
She was prone to hyperbole.
“Let me work on another letter,” I told her. I myself was routinely accused of hyperbole. I had sympathy for those who suffered from it.
She raised her chin. I had to turn from her expression. Had I agreed to mention a job? Was I simply putting her off? I could see from her eyes that she couldn't tell.
She followed me, though I wasn't clear on where I was going.
“I realize that the very last thing we need are distractions,” she said. Now she was weeping, though discreetly.
“Yes, yes,” I said.
“And I want you to know how terrible I feel having to bring this up now,” she said.
“Yes, yes,” I said. “Please don't worry about that.”
She stopped me with a hand on my arm. “Thank you,” she said. “Your father will be all right,” I told her.
“Thank you,” she said.
I didn't make it my practice to offer phantom positions as immigration aids. And I had no right to bandy about with the New York Zoological Society's reputation. As far as I could ascertain, her father's credentials were enthusiasm, a bookish background on spoonbills, and a willingness to break the law, and little else. But who knew? Perhaps the situation was as dire as she feared.
No one spoke to me about our little scene. It had never been clear to me how much information of a personal nature our little company had shared.