Private Life (36 page)

it has fallen to me to keep the lights burning as best I can. I appreciate how very much

you contribute to that essential effort."

After that, a reporter from the
Times
came to the island and asked him about

earthquakes. Earthquakes were caused by ocean water leaking downward into clefts in

the ocean floor, the clefts in turn caused by the creation of new ranges of mountains

under the sea. Since the earth was solid iron, Andrew had not worked out the mechanism

by which new mountain ranges were being formed in the Pacific, but the evidence was

incontrovertible that something literally earth-shaking was going on--now, with the

telegraph, Andrew told the young man, reports of earthquakes came in all the time.

He went on to Einstein (Margaret peeked from the kitchen into the front room,

and saw the reporter sitting in a chair like a rabbit in a trap, Andrew patrolling the front

door). Up to now, Andrew had seen Einstein's German nationality as the telling flaw in

his theory, but certain scientists at the observatory in Pasadena (he refused to name it

aloud) declared that part of this relativity theory had been proved by their observations,

and he--Einstein!--was allied with that very cabal who had always rejected Andrew's

work and had spent so much of their time industriously demeaning and denying the truths

of his own theories and had worked against him after he exposed their incompetence in

the early days of their careers. That light from a star curved exactly in a certain direction

and to a certain degree when it passed the sun during an eclipse was absurd, and their

certainty about these findings ("They say that these results don't ever have to be tested

again! Where is science
there?")
was enough to have him charging around the room in a

fury. The
Times
reporter kept putting his hat on and having to take it off again.

When, a few days later, Andrew was quoted in a sidebar to a rather short article

about these findings, he fired off a lengthy letter of elaboration.

For a few weeks, there was a modest flurry of correspondence about the issue.

Some doctor from somewhere wrote in, attacking the very idea of relativity--Andrew was

miffed that the mail from California was so slow as to prevent his letter from getting

there first. Then came a "French fellow with a ridiculous name" who planned to combine

relativity and Newtonian theory, who was interviewed by the
Times
correspondent in

France. At last, Andrew's letter appeared, decisively and finally refuting Einstein on the

grounds that (a) those in Germany who knew Einstein best didn't have one good thing to

say about his theory, (b) Einstein himself didn't consider it proved, (c) you couldn't have

a proper theory which didn't explain centrifugal force, a force as strong as "five million

million steel cables each a foot thick," and (d) no account was made of the Aether, which

could not simply be ignored!

As a corollary to this letter in the
Times
, he wrote a special column for the

Examiner
headlined "The Universe Is Filled with Aether and I Have Seen It." The paper

gave him almost an entire page for this column, and he included careful drawings of

particles of Aether--delicate six-pointed starlike motes, lightly touching at the tips of

every arm.

Andrew's tone in his letter to the
Times
was very forceful (Andrew might have

said "heroic") and, Margaret thought, a little condescending here and there, but

understandably so, given his barely contained exasperation that these issues had to be

gone over again and again. Einstein's theory was "the Gorgon's head, always having to be

cut off again."

They were sitting at the table a week or so later when he opened the paper, not

intending to read it while they were eating, precisely, but only to glance at it a bit, as he

always did at supper. But of course, fatal to a tranquil meal, his gaze went directly to his

own name, and traveled voraciously down the column of print even as his hand holding

his fork holding his morsel of boiled potato was raised toward his mouth. His eyes got

wide, and he grunted twice, and then groaned. He set his fork on his plate, read the

column again, stood up from the table with the paper in his hand, and walked out of the

house. She didn't see him until the next day--he slept at the observatory. When he did

come home, at about 10 a.m., the only thing he said to her before going into his study was

a despondent "Even when Einstein agrees with me, they attack."

It took her a while to find that letter in the
New York Times
. He had not saved it,

either in his study or at the observatory, and that edition of the
Times
turned out to be

missing from the library in Vallejo.

It was not easy to get to San Francisco--even in his unhappiness, they maintained

his schedule of book composition and journalism, along with a talk in Santa Rosa (a long

trip) and another in Sacramento.

But at last she told him she had been invited to a luncheon in San Francisco by the

wife of the Base Commandant, and, flattered, he let her go--Margaret had heard about

this luncheon by eavesdropping. Now she was in a library in San Francisco. Outside, it

was raining. Her umbrella shed water next to the leg of the table. The room was quiet.

The librarian left the room, and she couldn't help looking around once and over her

shoulder for a large presence, but he truly was not there. It was one o'clock on a Tuesday

afternoon. She laid the paper on the table.

The letter wasn't terribly long. Mr. "W. M. Malisoff" was no one she had heard

of--not one of Andrew's old familiar enemies, or one of the obstreperous youths who

occasionally cropped up in his conversation. Malisoff was no one, but he refuted

Andrew's article point by point. Centrifugal force, he said, was merely a concept like any

other; it was not five million million steel cables a foot thick pulling something toward it,

it was a couple of words. Of the Aether, he said it doesn't exist. No purpose in contorting

one's understanding of the universe to say that it does when it doesn't. She thought of

Andrew's careful, starlike drawings of the Aether. She read the letter twice. It was not,

properly, an attack but, rather, a dismissal. And although she would not have said that the

principles in the letter were clear enough in her mind that she could have repeated them

or defended them, they nevertheless seemed true to her, instinctively, exactly true. As she

read Mr. Malisoff's words, she knew what had motivated him to write--Andrew's

blustering, grandiose claims, his circular reasoning. She knew that as well as if God

himself had whispered it in her ear. Just then, she saw Andrew as the world saw him, and

she did it all at once, as if he had turned into a brick and fallen into her lap--who he was

was that solid and permanent for her--he was a fool.

As she returned from San Francisco to Vallejo on the ferry, Margaret thought that

if someone had asked her five days ago, or ten years ago, whether she "believed in"

Andrew's work, she would have said, "Of course," without even thinking about it, but

now she saw that "belief" was a kind of parasite that she had taken on by typing, by

listening, by worrying about his reactions to the name "Einstein." She was infected with

the "Aether" and with a vision of the universe that not only was alien to her, but was

suddenly (in the middle of San Pablo Bay) terrifying in its vastness. Nothing worked as a

charm against it, or a corrective, or a remedy. The book she had brought along to read

dropped from her hands, ineffective against the images.

A few days later, she went to her knitting group. As she was taking off her

overshoes and shaking out her umbrella in the front hall at Mrs. Tillotson's (Mrs.

Tillotson, who still bore her married name, had returned to the knitting group bolder and

more self-confident than ever), she heard the words "She is a saint!" When they stopped

talking as soon as she entered the parlor (living room, Mrs. Tillotson called it), and

everyone smiled at her, she knew that the saint was herself, and that they had been talking

about her with some animation--their eyes were bright when they looked up to greet her.

Lucy May had said the same thing. It was peculiarly painful all of a sudden to know that

her friends and relatives valued her life not for anything she had done, but for what she

had put up with. It was like being told she was a dolt, only in nicer language. The next

week, she didn't go back, and when she saw Mrs. Tillotson on Marin Street one day a

while later, she turned away from her, even though she knew Mrs. Tillotson had seen her.

But there was no defense against the typing. He was into volume two now. He

projected another four years of hard work before he could even think about publication.

He would not make the same mistake twice.

Except that, Margaret knew, he would.

1923

1928

THE ISLAND GOT QUIET, since everyone in the world agreed that there would

be no more wars--civilization had learned its lesson. The navy made up its mind not to

build many ships, and especially not large, expensive ones. The mishap with the

California
, a huge cruiser that upon launching had broken away from its restraints and

skidded all the way across the strait, only to get stuck in the mud off Vallejo, was perhaps

the reason that the island had begun to look awfully small and old-fashioned to a lot of

people. Would it become an airfield? Would they build submarines? Was the future in

airplanes landing on the decks of ships? Was Oakland more convenient for all of these

operations? Why was the shipyard on the island, anyway? Why had anything happened

the way it had? No one could remember, and starting anew seemed altogether more

possible than sorting it all out. Andrew's job changed, too. Whereas he had once overseen

the dropping of the time ball, now he sent out a set of time clicks by radio transmission.

And time itself was different now, more a matter of counting something than observing

the heavens. The navy kept asking Andrew when he thought he might retire. He kept not

saying. He knew that when he was gone they would tear down the observatory, his nest

and mole hole.

One day, Andrew brought Pete home for supper. Was it really ten years and more

since they'd heard from him? But there he was, walking down Marin Street, in Vallejo,

not dead after all. He looked down-and-out, but in his characteristic way--his clothes

were classic and a little well taken care of, rather than flashy and new. Margaret put the

short ribs on the table. Andrew said, "When you say that you lost all your money, do you

really mean all?"

"My pockets were empty. But they aren't quite empty now. I have a job training

horses." His travels had smoothed his accent still further--or else he wasn't bothering to

maintain it. It was now unidentifiable.

She said, "What kind of horses?"

"Racehorses. At Tanforan." Tanforan was a racetrack somewhere south of San

Francisco. Margaret had heard of it, but never been there. She said, "Racing is illegal in

California, I thought."

"Betting is illegal, but not for long. Training isn't illegal. We just send them down

to Caliente on the train when they're ready."

Andrew pressed him. "On your way to another fortune?"