The Whole World (2 page)

Newnham is the part of town where a lot of faculty live. It has big houses and pleasant, uncrowded doctors’ and dentists’ offices. Stephen Hawking lives there; I saw him once, whirring by.

Liv took me there to Gretchen Paul’s house to help with the project she was working on.

She rang the bell, and then got out a key without waiting. “Gretchen doesn’t mind,” she explained. “She just wants me to get it done.” The furniture inside, all dark and solid, was interspersed with exotic objects. I figured they must travel.

Liv hadn’t yet been able to figure if their money was hers or his. Gretchen’s husband, Harry, didn’t work. Well, he worked hard, but he didn’t work for money. He bred canaries in a special room upstairs, and was almost always home. He was gentle and seemed like the kind of person who would repair something thoroughly. His last name was Reed; Gretchen used her mother’s last name.

Harry offered us tea and brought it to us in the library: a pot, cups and saucers, milk and sugar. British cookies are brittle, meant for dunking. These had been made from scratch. Harry had a towel tucked into his belt, and wiped his hands on it as he left us to the work. We giggled. I felt like I was in kindergarten, playing tea party. We clinked our cups together in a happy toast. This is what saucers are for: I almost splashed onto Liv’s work, but the little dish caught it and saved me.

There were photos spread all over the table: sepia grandparents and black-and-white babies, vacation shots from the fifties, and orangey snaps of seventies teens. They were in piles, some large and definite, others small and spread out, in the beginnings of a system, like Liv wasn’t sure yet exactly of their classification. “Those are the same person,” I pointed out, indicating two black-and-white photos near each other but not stacked. The woman was beautiful; her eyes and mouth were striking, even at the two different ages represented.

“Maybe,” Liv said. “Or they could be sisters. Or, if they are the same, which of the two sisters is it? See?” There were two “definite” piles, one each for two similar-looking but not really identical women. In those, you could clearly see the widow’s peak on one, and the pointier chin and side part on the other, that differentiated them. The unsorted photos I’d pointed out could each be either.

“No idea,” I finally laughed. It wasn’t a simple project.

One of those sisters was Gretchen’s mother, Linda Paul. The other sister was Gretchen’s aunt, Ginny. Gretchen needed Liv to figure out which was which.

“Gretchen’s mother died recently,” Liv explained. “Linda Paul was this novelist, well, was a long time ago. She was kind of a big deal back in her day. Anyway, Linda always forbade Gretchen from writing a biography of her. She wouldn’t even let Gretchen have these. They were all boxed up in her attic. But now …”

Gretchen was in the garden; we could see her through the window, kneeling, pulling up weeds. She had to identify them by feel. Liv said she worked out there to think. She said that you could tell how stuck Gretchen was on something by how she tossed or punished the weeds as she piled them up.

Harry came into view behind her. He gathered up a small tree that had been leaning up against the shed. Its roots were still in a ball. He took it away and we heard the car doors open and shut.

“What’s he doing?” I wondered. The tree was pretty. It was a lilac.

“Oh, they had a fight about that a couple of days ago. He bought it for her, but she didn’t want it.”

“Mmm,” I replied, still staring out the window. Liv tapped my arm.

“Do you notice anything about the garden?” It was lush and vivid, but so were so many gardens here. The rainfall makes it easy for things to grow. “All the colors …?” Liv hinted. “Don’t you find that funny?”

I wasn’t sure. “I guess it’s strange for a blind person to focus on color.”

“Do you get it now?”

“Get what?”

Liv looked up at the ceiling, annoyed with my incomprehension.

“Just pretend I’m stupid, okay?” I told her.

“He wanted her to have a lilac because she’d smell it. But she thinks that’s condescending. She hates any kind of special consideration. Newnham or New Hall or Lucy Cavendish,” she said, naming Cambridge’s three women-only colleges, “would have loved to have her. Instead, she came to Magdalene, not too long after they’d finally gone mixed. Some students wore black armbands over women getting in. Does that sound to you like she wants it easy?”

I looked out the window. Gretchen hunched over the earth, digging at something resistant. It was weird to think about how even if she looked up she couldn’t see me back. She probably didn’t even know I was there.

Liv said, “She hates that she needs my help to sort these pictures. I think she picked me because I’m not in her department. It would be, you know, awkward, to let one of her own students see her vulnerable.”

A tune started up in my bag. It grew in volume as I rooted around for the phone. It was Nick calling. “Oh, hi!” I said. Liv didn’t have a cellphone; that’s why he had to call me. “We’re in Newnham.”

The three of us had gotten together before, at the Fitzwilliam. Liv had shown us around, art being her thing. “No,” I said. “This time it’s my turn. We’ll go to the Whipple.” The Whipple is the museum of the history of science. That was my thing.

Later Nick would take me to the Sedgwick, which has geology and dinosaurs. And privacy, in his office upstairs. But there were weeks before we’d get there.

I mouthed to Liv, “Nick?” and she gave a thumbs-up.

“He says he’ll come meet us here in an hour or so,” I said after I hung up.

“Who?” Gretchen asked. I jumped. The house has plush rugs all over; I hadn’t heard her approach.

“Gretchen!” Liv chirped. “This is my friend Polly. She’s helping me with the photographs. I hope that’s all right. I know you want the work done quickly and, well, two heads and all that….”

“I certainly hope there’s been progress.”

“Oh, yes!”

“If you require assistance—”

“I don’t require it, it’s just helpful to bounce thoughts—”

“So long as she isn’t a distraction.”

“She won’t be.”

“I won’t be,” I echoed.

Gretchen turned to me. She knew where I was because of my voice. “Are you a student?”

I squeaked out, “Peterhouse. NatSci.” It’s an abbreviation for Natural Sciences, pronounced like it has a K instead of a C.

“You’re American,” she said, getting that from my few words. “My mother attended a boarding school in Virginia.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off the box in her hands. It was a dirty, decrepit shoe box nestled in a plastic grocery bag.

“Can you tell me what this is?” she asked.

We stepped close and looked in. Small bones and plastic jewelry. Altogether it was shaped like a little dog. The plastic necklaces had been wound around the rib cage. The beads were bright, like tiny beach balls.

Liv jumped back. “Uh, that was a dog, I think.” Her hand went over her mouth, like she might throw up.

“I found it in the garden,” Gretchen said. “Someone must have buried it a long time ago. What are those plastic nodules …?”

“They look like a kid’s toy jewelry,” I said.

“Ah!” She smiled. “How Egyptian.”

She turned toward Liv, still holding the thing. Liv backed up a little. “I want to emphasize to you the importance of the photographs set in foreign countries. Linda’s travels are an essential aspect of her character. As foreigners yourselves, I’m sure you can appreciate that. I expect results won’t be compromised by socializing. You have responsibilities. You have
obligations.”
She was really serious. The box quivered in her hands. The bones and beads in it rattled lightly.

She turned and headed back outside.

“Oh my God!” said Liv. “What was that?”

We held hands like little girls.

Later, at the Whipple, Liv reveled in the children’s activity corner, full of compasses and telescopes and other fun things for kids to try. She put on a felt vest and offered Nick the box of Velcro organs, teasing that he couldn’t put them all in the right place.

He wasn’t listening to her. He was looking at a telescope. He looked up and asked me if I knew the constellations. I don’t, really, besides Orion the obvious.

But I think about stars a lot. How, up close, they’d be fire and death; and just far enough away, like the sun, they’re life and warmth and daylight; and farther still, even so far away you’d think they wouldn’t be anything, they’re navigation and myth and poetry. Gretchen was like that about her family: Past the age when she needed a mother, and even past Linda’s death, Gretchen was still getting something out of her.

Gretchen’s mother, Linda Paul, had written a series of five books about a young woman, Susan Maud Madison, trying to make it as a writer in the fifties. Presumably this was all semiautobiographical. I saw the books in Gretchen’s library, on their own shelf, with dustcovers still well intact though aged. Her mother had inscribed each one to her—“To my darling daughter”—with what I calculated to be the year Gretchen would have finished the equivalent of high school. Next to them were braille versions, which Gretchen had commissioned. The covers showed a woman with short blond hair and an exaggerated expression apparently romping through comic adventures with her social set, who, the plot summaries informed us, didn’t approve of the heroine’s ambition.

Nick and Liv and I saw a pyramid of paperback versions in the window of Heffers bookstore downtown. Heffers used to be Cambridge’s indie bookstore, and even after being bought out by a chain it’s still got a local feel. Prompted by Linda Paul’s death, the store had made a special display.

We stopped in and I picked one up, reading aloud: “‘Susan Maud did her duty: She spread her towel out on the sand next to Margo. She slid off her wrap to create the illusion that she intended to sunbathe. Margo nodded in approval, and then jogged to catch up with Dick. Susan Maud pulled a notebook and pen from her bag, leaned on her elbows, and began chapter four. She hadn’t written twenty words before a pail of water was tossed onto her back. “Come on, Susie!” Dick called. “Get your feet wet!” Susan’s back arched in shock and, for a moment, anger. She pressed the soaked notebook facedown onto the towel, blotting the words to stop them sliding down the page. Then she sat up, smiled brilliantly, and retorted, “You bully! I’ll bet you can’t run fast enough!” She grabbed the bucket and filled it in the surf, tempted to add a stone or a crab. She chased him down the beach, finally soaking him on the top of his head. He shook his hair out like a dog and grinned, finally cool on the hot day. She hadn’t hurt him at all.’”

“Wow,” Nick said. “Edith Wharton it’s not, but still there’s something
House of Mirth
about it, what with the heroine wanting to be two kinds of mutually exclusive person at once.”

Apparently, these books had made a minor splash back in their day. Gretchen had found several instances of real women with the main character’s name, and she’d sent letters asking if their mothers had called them that on purpose. One was even a writer. Maybe it was a pen name, in homage? Maybe Linda Paul’s influence had resonated. Maybe Gretchen wasn’t the only one to adore her.

“My turn!” Liv announced, picking up a different volume. But when she read aloud the woman at the checkout glared at us. Liv speaks a little loudly. I nudged her to read a little more quietly, that was all. I didn’t mean for her to stop. But she closed the book and put it back.

This is how Nick got involved. It piqued his interest. We all started working on the photos together. Liv got paid to produce the actual index; Nick and I just helped because we all liked being together.

Nick rented a room from a family in a town house on the east side of town, near the big shopping mall. The father was a lecturer in mathematics, the mom was a journalist, and the two girls, eight and ten years old, went to Perse Girls, an elite day school. They were an Indian family, and he got to share their spicy cooking, which he told me they’re pretty generous about. The house was tall and narrow, with his room and bathroom on the top floor.

One time I waited for him in their small kitchen. Mrs. Chander had covered the dining table with papers, which made the place feel productive and cozy. She too was sorting into piles. Aahana and Aashika played in the small garden out back, building something that looked complicated. Mrs. Chander smiled and told me that they were building a replica of the Chateau d’If, the prison from
The Count of Monte Cristo
, to impress Nick, who’d challenged them to try it. They plainly adored him.

I’d seen Nick with the girls on the playground nearby. He took turns holding them up to reach the monkey bars. He was fair. They each got equal chance.

That’s what it was like with me and Liv, and him hanging out with both of us. Liv joined the Magdalene choir, so they saw each other a lot at practices. He sometimes worked out at Kelsey Kerridge when I was there for yoga.

He was being fair, I think. We were given equal chance.

We made some progress with Gretchen’s project, but it was slow going. Most of the photos weren’t labeled at all, and those that were labeled were not necessarily done so correctly. Because Gretchen had gone blind gradually, she could describe people and places to us, veto certain hypotheses, and describe scenes that she remembered from childhood. She’d seen the oldest photos when she was small, and remembered when most of the rest had been taken. This was usually helpful, but often not; sometimes she would insist that something was some specific way when we could plainly see it wasn’t. She got prickly having her memories challenged.

Gretchen tensed around me and Liv. She took offense. I think she was one of those women who interacts more easily with men.

Or at least, more easily with Nick. She was tense with her husband too.

In one of the baby pictures, Gretchen’s little-girl dress reminded me of something I’d worn when I was little. That’s all. I said to her, “I had a baby dress like this. The plaid one.” I said it in a nice voice, and in a complimentary way. Gretchen asked, “What dress?” which was a reasonable question, except that the way she asked it was like a wild animal sniffing the air. She was looking for a fight immediately. “I didn’t have a plaid dress.”