All Those Vanished Engines (17 page)

Later I went past the college graveyard and visited my parents' stone, my father's part of it still incomplete. The day before, I had dug in some purple asters for my mother's sake; she'd always put an end to summer that way in her own garden. The stone itself had been a complicated undertaking. My older sister had chosen the epitaph, inevitably, from the last lines of the
Paradisio,
the description of the mechanical universe, powered by love's engine, but also unaccountably a book: “… a single volume, bound by love.”

And in the afternoon I drove over to the Commons, the first time I had been there since my mother's death. I chatted with various members of the staff, dedicated women who had worked hard, in my mother's case, with a taxing patient. When she had fallen over the banister she had broken or fractured a whole list of bones. After she was released from the hospital we had brought her here, ostensibly for physical therapy before she returned home. But she had lost faith in that.

After I had filled out the forms, I went to the nurse's station on the ground floor, a terrible, Dantean circle of old people in wheelchairs, dozing or talking or doing nothing. Once I had thought my mother didn't belong in this place. But eventually she fit right in. Bent over from osteoporosis, she would keep herself busy when I wasn't there, copying out poems that she knew by heart, page after page, first complicated ones (the religious sonnets of John Donne) and then more simple ones (“There was a boy whose name was Jim, his friends were very good to him. They brought him tea and cakes and jam, and slices of delicious ham…”).

Once in the gazebo out back, I had told her about Nicola's pregnancy, and then suggested I would bring her and the baby up to see her—her first grandchild. In fact, that didn't happen. But I remember showing her pictures as she sat in the sun, snapshots of the apartment in Baltimore, and one of Nicola, much distended. She put her finger on it. “What was it … your grandfather … said? Never marry … a Romanian.”

In her last years she suffered from progressive aphasia. My grandfather, to her, was always my father's father. She never spoke of her own. As it happened, I remembered this particular aphorism differently—I had always been fascinated with Romania, its history and literature, its language, its women. I had written books.

In a moment, anyway, she relented. “Just because I can't talk … doesn't mean I can't feel.”

I peeked in on the room where she had died. She'd been plagued by an anxiety that she would wet herself, which obliged her to ask to go to the bathroom every twenty minutes or so. I had taken her in her wheelchair, and was waiting for one of the aides when she had a seizure. I brought her back to her room and laid her down on her bed, and got in next to her. People asked for permission to get a doctor, but I refused. It would have been too late anyway. “It's okay,” I said, my arms around her. “You did your best.”

Now as I left, I passed a room on the first floor and noticed the name beside the door. An old man sat on the side of his bed, his hair white and yellow and unkempt. “Mr. Whitney,” I said, “could I come talk to you?”

Startled, he looked up. His eyes were rimmed with pink. “Somebody told me you worked in the old boiler house at Sprague Electric. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“I don't much care for all that,” he said. “What that is.”

There was a tray of food on a stand, and he resumed peering at it. I came in and sat down on the chair beside his bed. Someone had arranged some family pictures on the dresser. I recognized Constance among some other people her age.

There was some scrambled eggs and toast on a plate. The cover was off, but the food looked untouched. “What about this?” he asked.

But I had questions of my own. I asked him whether there had been a secret jet-propulsion project at Sprague during the war. He was staring at my lips, and his eyes took on a hunted look. “I don't much care for it. Whatever it looks like.”

“Well,” I said, “it doesn't look like much. I know you weren't able to get funding.” I was tired of this subtle linguistic dance. I was looking for a breakthrough. I took out my laptop, on which I had a slide show of the power plant. “It looks like something's been removed from there,” I said, indicating one of the big tanks. “You can see where the bolts have been cut away. Was there a pump there? A hydraulic pump?”

“Pump?” he said. His face took on a creased, thoughtful expression. “I don't know there was a pump.”

I clicked through the pictures, a beautiful display, the engines in their glory, dusted with snow in the light of a March afternoon. The day I'd taken these pictures, I'd discovered a pair of red-tailed hawks nesting at the top of the conveyor belt. Pigeon feathers and small bones had filtered down and made a pattern on a ramp of snow. “I see,” he said. He opened his mouth, then closed it again as if deciding not to speak.

I was tired of his gibes. I was not feeling patient. It is difficult to put someone into a nursing home when they don't want to go. “Please,” I said.

At first I thought I would get nowhere with this last appeal. Roy Whitney was subsiding on the bed, falling slowly onto his side, until he peered at me through the bars of his bed.

I got to my feet. With no desire to go home, I stood in the doorway for a moment, wasting time. But then Roy Whitney began to speak, and it was obvious from the difference in tone that he had dropped the embarrassing impression of senility that had made contact difficult up to that point. He turned onto his back and closed his eyes, and as if to himself he started talking about the frustration of trying to switch back, after the end of the Second World War and the termination of a number of Department of Defense contracts, to making small electronic components for commercial products, and of course steam. He referred to several projects I had heard of, like the technology behind the timing switches for the atomic bomb. But then he went off into other areas where I could scarcely follow him, partly because he made no attempt to explain himself or even acknowledge I was listening. Later I imagined this was because he still felt bound by the protocols of wartime secrecy, while at the same time realizing this was his final opportunity to tell his story, or part of his story, or some version of his story. His voice seemed to come from someplace far inside, as if produced by a mechanical process no longer under his control. The vocabulary he used was increasingly specialized, but even so, ignorant as I am, I could not but guess at the excitement of these nascent technologies, even as his tone and his delivery grew increasingly arid and more formal. I could not but glimpse at the excitement of his early research, all but forgotten now, into optical masers and microwave amplifiers in the 1950s. I could not but glimpse into a field of privately funded research that anticipated modern photovoltaics.

I sat back down beside the bed. From that distance, under the angled lamp, I was more aware of his physical form, the hiss of his voice, escaping as if under pressure, the dry, corroded tubes of his esophagus, which at moments seemed to suffer an unexplained blockage. I was aware of the interior hydraulics, the flow of various fluids under his skin, which age had rendered almost transparent. I watched the pulse in his neck and on his temple. Subsiding onto the pillow, he had knocked his spectacles askew.

Finally he stopped talking, and instead he slept. I stayed with him for several minutes, listening to the groan of his internal organs. Then I left him and walked out into the late afternoon. But because I had no desire to come home, I drove instead into North Adams and called Nicola from a street corner, but she didn't answer.

Later, I had dinner by myself in a downtown restaurant that reminded me of the coffee shop on Charles Street where I had last seen Traci, and which also served wine in the evenings. Then I had asked her, as an experiment, to think about the entire trajectories of her characters' lives, and not just the place where they intersect the story. “This boy,” I said, “imagine what he's like when he gets older, what he does, how he behaves. Is he … angry, do you think?”

She had been playing with her hair, and now she made a small quick gesture with her hand. She could only give the question a second's thought. “Not angry, but maybe consumed with his own fraudulence. Hollowed out. Maybe everything good that ever happened has been because of chance. That's what he thinks. Something like that. I picture him remembering his mother after her death, totting up the ways she disappointed him, keeping score, even inventing whole scenarios to punish her.”

“Or maybe punish himself,” I said. “How does he do that? In what context? Is he a writer?”

Again that quick, impatient gesture, and a deliberate sniff. “We can't all be writers.” She shrugged. “I picture him summarizing everything over a glass of wine in a place like this. Trying to atone, while simultaneously going over the whole list of his mother's flaws. Unable to forgive the littlest thing because he misses her so much.”

I frowned. “That doesn't seem right to me. Why would he do that? Does he have some kind of secret, do you think?”

She shrugged. “Don't we all? Let me see—what's his? Maybe it was hard for him to see her fall apart. Maybe he was happy when she died.”

“That doesn't sound so terrible…”

She'd touched the stem of her glass with her forefinger. Angry, she'd glanced up. “Then maybe that was only part of it. Maybe he was overjoyed—still is. Trust me, it was terrible, whatever it was. And it's not over yet.”

I had printed out some passages, sketches from the end of Traci's book. Now in North Adams, sitting alone as the sun went down, with careful and deliberate charity I went over them again. This time I paid no attention to the little mistakes. Instead I searched for what might teach me something, and I reread this section:

To forgive yourself is to forgive others. To forgive others is to forgive yourself. At this moment, grasping at hope, he imagined a small scene, pitching it as something midway between imagination and memory. He saw her as an old woman, her eyes full of a simple adoration, reaching out to squeeze his hand. Late in life she had had cataract surgery, with the unexpected result of correcting her myopia. The thick, unflattering glasses she had always worn were now unnecessary, and he could see her eyes …

The first line of this, particularly, was nothing I would ever put into a piece of writing. There was no place for this kind of corniness, for example, in
The Rose of Sarifal.
It didn't even sound original.

And yet, how was it possible for me to have misunderstood it? I crossed it out, and marked in the margin, “Maybe too much? Maybe tone this down? Maybe delete? Surely this only works if we get a sense of how you yourself contribute to your own brokenness.” But I am not ashamed to say that I had tears in my eyes, and at the same time I was happy and relieved, because it occurred to me that after more than thirty years of anxious suffering Traci would be able to finish her book, and that it would be good, because she was a good writer, false sentimentality aside, better than many, better than, for example, me.

After I had paid my bill, I walked along the river. I was expecting someone, and at the corner of Marshall Street I turned to see her watching me from across the street, a pale old woman in a pleated, shapeless dress that fell almost to the pavement—she seemed to have no feet. How long had she been waiting? Immediately she walked away, only turning her head at intervals to look back. Her right hand trembled, her hair was wild and unbrushed. She entered the gate into the Mass MoCA complex, and I followed her across the bridge. At sunset, the lights of the installation were just going on. I walked up the ramp and into the old power plant. Among the boilers and the condensation tubes, I moved through competing zones of sound, bongs and rattles and the hiss of steam, some of which seemed natural and appropriate, a memory of the sounds these engines had once produced. Others were obviously invented, too rhythmical, too sweet. I heard the buzz of my text, my pseudo-interview with the nonexistent engineer, but I didn't listen to the words. I had lost the old woman among the condensation tubes. Instead I followed the beams of amber and blue light, the piercing oscillations of lime-green. And my eyes were drawn to another part of the installation, which I have waited up till now to describe: an Airstream trailer suspended on a catwalk forty feet above the stream. With solar-paneled wings, it pretends to be the remnant of a voyage to the sun, undertaken by a Dr. Carusi in the 1970s. Shards of parachutes flutter in the scaffolding. The door is open. You can climb up through the boiler house and out into the open air, and climb inside. The wind shakes the catwalk and the Airstream shudders, as if with the illusion of flight.

PART THREE

Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance

1. S
OON

Before her marriage, my mother's mother's name and address took the form of a palindrome. I've seen it on the upper-left-hand corner of old envelopes:

Virginia Spotswood McKenney

Spotswood

McKenney

Virginia

Spotswood was her father's farm in a town named after him, outside of Petersburg. He was a congressman and a judge who had sent his daughters north to Bryn Mawr for their education, and had no reason to think at the time of his death that they wouldn't live their lives within powerful formal constraints. He died of pneumonia in 1912. He'd been shooting snipe in the marshes near his home.

I have a footlocker under my desk that contains the remains of my grandmother's trousseau, enormous Irish-linen tablecloths and matching napkins—never used. The silver and china, a service for twenty-five, was sold when my mother was a child. My grandmother married a Marine Corps captain from a prominent family, a graduate of the University of Virginia and Columbia Law School. But their money went to his defense during his court-martial.