Private Life (21 page)

moon is getting farther away from the Earth, and so it has to go farther to get around the

Earth, and so the months are also getting longer. But, interestingly, the days are getting

longer faster than the months are getting longer. A man I knew in Europe has shown this-George Darwin. He's the son of Charles Darwin."

She pretended that she didn't recognize the name.

"Eventually, a day and a month will be the same length, fifty-five days, and then

all the forces will be in balance, and, supposedly, things will stay that way. Personally, I

don't believe that, but--" He shrugged, stood up, and came around the desk. He was

excited. "But, my dear, you are wondering what this means about the origin of the

moon."

"Of course." Margaret had learned that there were many things that Andrew

wondered about that would not cross the mind of anyone else. It was his greatest talent,

wondering about things. He was two men, really. When he was wondering, he was a

likable, congenial, and sociable person. When he had stopped wondering and was

convinced that he knew the answer, he became stubborn and stern.

He guided her to the window. The moon certainly looked farther away now--not

as huge and bright, but more its remote, normal self. "Darwin would say that we have

entered the theater in the middle of the opera. If we had come in toward the beginning,

the moon would be moving faster, it would be much closer and would fill the sky."

Margaret tried to imagine this while Andrew slipped his arm around her waist.

He said, "If the Earth was so hot it was molten, and it was spinning so fast that a

day lasted five hours or so, then what shape might it have been?"

"Kind of an oval?"

"Yes, indeed, more on the order of a cucumber, a very hot, liquid, fiery cucumber.

And what might happen?"

"An end might break off?"

He

nodded.

"And that would be the moon?"

"Darwin said so."

She could tell by the way he pronounced "Darwin" that Early
didn't
say so. She

said, "Why would only one end break off? Why not both?"

Now he kissed her on the forehead. "A very good question, my dear, and a perfect

example of what is wrong with that theory. The fact is, the cucumber would not have

been the final shape. The final shape of the rotating molten Earth would have been a pear.

But,"
he exclaimed, "no one has ever figured out a way to make that pear go fast enough

to split off the moon, and they never will. Guess what has happened in the last ten years."

"What?"

"These ideas have been shot all to hell!" He laughed triumphantly. "Because the

molten rock in the spinning cauldron isn't simple at all! It is not just iron and lead and

gold and platinum and I don't know what all, mixed together and cooling down and

solidifying bit by bit; there's something else in there."

"What is that?" Margaret actually felt herself get a little excited.

"There's uranium and there's radium."

"What are those?"

"Those are unstable elements that, even when they are just sitting there in the

middle of the rock face, are giving off electrons and changing, moment by moment, into

something else. All uranium, for example, will someday be lead." He gave her a satisfied

look, then said, "All lead, they might then conclude, was at one time uranium."

"What does that mean about the moon?"

"Well, the moon has had a lot longer time to get into its present orbit than most

men have thought. Billions of years rather than millions or hundreds of millions.

Something else entirely could have happened. Time is of the essence, my dear, not so

much when times are short, but very much when times are long, longer than anyone in

the history of mankind has ever conceived of." He said this in a ringing voice, hugging

her to him. She waited a moment, then said, "So--how did the moon get to be where it

is?"

"The Earth captured it!"

"Has the Earth ever captured anything else?"

"Possibly. I don't know yet."

"Oh." It seemed as plausible that the Earth could capture something as it did that a

person could claim a stray dog. Mutual attractions, she thought, were mutual attractions,

whether you called them "gravity" or "affinity."

"I often think that I was born to think about the moon. The moon is that large

object in the room that everyone stumbles over and no one thinks about."

He was jolly. He guided her into their bedchamber.

On his side of the bed lay a couple of books by an Englishman named Havelock

Ellis,
The Sexual Impulse in Women
and then another one,
Sexual Selection in Man
. By

happy coincidence, Dr. Ellis had also written a book entitled
A Study of British Genius
.

Andrew kept the first two books to himself, but he read parts of this third book aloud to

Margaret over supper, and in deference to the information in all of these books, he had

shortened his hours at the observatory.

Andrew felt that, although he had not suffered from a delicate childhood, he fit

perfectly into Dr. Ellis's model. "Delicate children were the ones who died in Missouri,"

which illustrated the equally exciting idea of natural selection. It was one thing to be a

hereditary genius like his colleague George Darwin, coddled and cultivated from

childhood in the easy circumstances of bourgeois English life, but to be a hereditary

genius from a world where the easiest thing for any child to do was to succumb was all

the more reason to value one's own genius.

The genius book revealed that genius could be inherited from either the father or

the mother, which got Andrew fired up about their future child. According to Andrew's

reading of Dr. Ellis, any child of theirs had a perfectly acceptable chance of being a

genius. Indeed, if he and she had
both
been geniuses, it was all too possible that the

physical and mental drawbacks of
too much
genius would outweigh the double inherited

dose. Margaret asked him which of his own parents was the genius. All things

considered, Andrew felt that it had been his mother, though it could also be true that her

talents of method, application, and organization (and poker playing, Margaret thought)

had been uniquely capable of meshing with those of his father, who had often played a

game of sums with the boys in which he added up numbers they furnished him in rapidfire shouting matches. His father was good at picking up languages. He could talk to the

Germans in German and the French in French and the Spanish in Spanish. His father's

various talents hadn't been well developed by education, according to Andrew, but "Look

at my brothers and me. Only one tall poppy!" That was the right ratio, in the opinion of

Havelock Ellis. Therefore, Andrew and Margaret were ideally matched--her lack of

genius ("but there is a perfect balance between your womanly nature and your entirely

acceptable level of intellect, my dear") was exactly the leavening their hypothetical son

would require. Or sons. If the ratio in Andrew's own family was four to one, then that

was probably a fairly representative ratio.

However, Dr. Ellis had led to no more interludes of marital relations until the

moon intervened. The moon was a great facilitator of marital relations, since Andrew was

so excited about his new theory that he was almost always in a good and affectionate

mood. And so it was not long after their conversation about the Earth's capturing the

moon that Margaret found herself pregnant again. Mrs. Lear was thrilled. Margaret was

thrilled. Andrew was thrilled. He thought that the naval base was the perfect place to rear

a squadron of boy geniuses--like the Lear boys, only more thoughtful and quieter, not

only rolling firecrackers out of black powder and old newspapers but also reading books.

The first pregnancy, short as it was, had prepared her, and this one seemed all the

more normal for that experience. She was not ill or uncomfortable; the days didn't slow to

a soporific crawl. She pursued her rounds of cooking and shopping and walking and

taking the ferry to San Francisco once a month. Andrew was busy in his office, turning

his moon ideas into a book. It really was astonishing how the city had resurrected itself,

though of course she never passed any of the streets she associated with Mrs. Early or the

fire--Market, Third, Mission, Van Ness--without thinking about the two ladies so

intensely that they seemed to inhabit the whole city at once. If, against Andrew's wishes,

she produced a girl, she intended to name her Anna.

Soon enough, her condition was visible, and, more important, the child had

quickened within, and as she felt every movement--first a fluttering, subsequently more

strenuous but undifferentiated activity, then precisely identifiable kicks and punches--she

allowed herself to make pictures in her mind, as well as baby clothes. In fact, she felt

something that she didn't know how to talk about, especially to the very practical Mrs.

Lear--a sense of awakening. As the child grew in her body and in her mind, there were

other things that awakened with it. She dreamed of her brother Lawrence, holding her

hand and preventing her from stepping in front of a trotting horse pulling a cart, but she

didn't know if such a thing had ever happened. She dreamed that her father was in the

next room, trying to talk to her, but she could barely make out his words, no matter how

hard she tried. Scenes that Lavinia had described to her, of her father gaily roughhousing

with her brothers, recurred to her vividly, as if she had seen them, though she could not

have. This awakening was almost painful, considering, as her mother had always told her,

that what was given could be snatched away--would be snatched away--but she let it

happen. It came to seem the necessary prerequisite for giving birth.

Mrs. Lear made her go to a doctor in Vallejo. He was a young man, about her age,

from Chicago, and his name was Dr. Bernstein. "He's a Jew, then," said Andrew.

"Of course he is," said Mrs. Lear. "Don't you want the best possible care by the

best-educated doctor? Your other alternatives are Dr. Gray, who is nearly seventy; Dr.

Howard, who is not very clean and who has"--she lowered her voice and whispered-"very fat fingers"--Andrew knew better than to ask what she was saying--"and Mrs.

Kimura, the midwife." At first, Andrew accepted Dr. Bernstein as a necessary evil, but

Margaret quite liked him--he was married to a beautiful French woman with her own

healthy and quite stylish children, a boy and twin girls. Margaret saw their Jewishness as

something desirable and cosmopolitan, and then Andrew was won over, because Dr.

Bernstein addressed him as a colleague. They frequently discussed the works of Dr. Ellis,

both about sex and about genius. Margaret was careful to tell Andrew whenever she went

to see Dr. Bernstein, or encountered him anywhere, that he had asked after Andrew.

Andrew agreed that it was good that they had gotten "a true man of science" to usher their

young genius into the world.

It was soothing to talk to Andrew and Dr. Bernstein about the pregnancy and the

birth; it made Margaret feel lifted into a higher, more knowledgeable realm. When

women talked about birth, as they did in her knitting circle, it was always in the direst

terms. Mrs. Tillotson would tell about a woman she knew who had seemed fine until she

got a terrible infection and died within hours, then Mrs. Arness would top that with a

story about a woman she knew who was in labor with her first baby for forty-nine hours,

and the baby was born dead, and the doctor had to use an instrument to "scrape the

remains out of her." And then Mrs. Jones, with a glance at her, would top this story with

one about her cousin who had never gotten out of bed after the birth of her third child--it

had been ten years now--"and the stink! Everything like a sieve in there now!" Mrs. Gess

put a stop to such conversations when she found herself pregnant, too.

The main difficulty seemed to be that Dr. Bernstein was in Vallejo and they were

on the island. Should labor commence, who would take the ferry to whom--she to Dr.

Bernstein, or Dr. Bernstein to her? Privately, she imagined that, in a pinch, Mrs. Lear

would run over and deliver the child, but she never said this to either man of science. She

wavered, and wondered aloud to Mrs. Lear whether perhaps Dr. Howard, who lived on

the island, might suffice. Mrs. Lear sat her down and exclaimed, "After all these months,

Margaret, I cannot believe that you haven't gotten the point of my precautions. I do not

want to scare you, I want to alert you. Your father, and Dr. Howard, and all the old-time

doctors didn't truly understand about cleanliness. They said they did, but they didn't and

they don't. Should you call him, he would come to your house by horse and buggy. He

would harness the horse and drive him and tie him outside your house. No doubt he

would pat the horse and give him a nosebag to occupy him during the birth. After that, he

would pick up his dirty old satchel and carry it into the house. But from the moment he

put the nosebag on the horse to the moment he birthed the baby, would he be absolutely

perfect in his cleanliness? If your labor was not far advanced, would he eat something?