Charmed Particles (4 page)

He spent his nights under the covers of his bed, flashlight in hand, poring over the book's images and captions—
Smiling Mothers and Their Wooly-Headed Brood, Men of a Tribe of Sinister Reputation, Witch Doctor of Darkest Africa and His House of Fear: With keen, cunning eyes…he sits by his primitive stock of quackeries…. Expert in hypnotism, trances, and sleights of hand, he rules the village
—imagining the day when he might venture out into such a world of mystery and exoticism.

This strange object
, he underlined in a stubby pencil by light of his flashlight,
with bits of iron, small bells, rusty nails, copper coins, and other metal rubbish dangling about him, and holding a weird drum, is a Shaman priest in ceremonial garb, ready to conduct intercourse with supernatural powers
.

In the section titled
The Secret Album of Africa
, the young Randolph drew a careful question mark in the margin beside the caption reading:
The African has not the European's sensibility to pain
.

From
The Secret Museum
, he had found his way to Livingstone's accounts of his travels through the dark continent, and from there he had graduated to Thesiger's travels in Arabia, Grant's
A Walk across Africa
, and Sven Hedin's treks through the Himalayas, having already decided that this was the life for him.

In between his expeditions and assignments for the magazine, Randolph lectured on his adventures, traveling mainly through the small towns of the American Midwest, where he seemed strikingly exotic himself. He had met Rose at one of these lectures—a young girl itching to stretch beyond the rural farm community where she had grown, confined, into a smart and curious young woman, listening with rapt attention to his presentation. Then, after the lecture, coffee at the Cozy Café and Diner, during which she had peppered him with question after question and Randolph had fallen under the spell of Rose's bright, curious eyes.

And so at eighteen Rose had eloped with Randolph. They married aboard a steamer en route to Ceylon (she sent her parents a telegram by way of announcement), honeymooned among the Wanniyala-Aetto people, where the local women, clucking in disapproval at Rose's shocking lack of skill as a homemaker, had taught her to gather edible roots and berries, and, alarmed to find that she had never been taught to prepare pittu, a staple of any respectable meal, had taken it upon themselves to teach her.

By the end of their honeymoon, Rose was as taken with exploration as Randolph.

During the Imilchil Betrothal Fair in Morocco, Randolph and Rose watched, transfixed, as the young men dressed in djellabas stood unmoving, displaying their silver daggers, a sign of wealth, the young women moving past, assessing this plumage, the Middle Atlas Mountains rising up around them. At the Palace of Winds in Jaipur, they turned their faces up to the small windows lining the walls, imagining the royal concubines, kept secluded there, peering out over the city. In Madhya Pradesh, they visited the sandstone temples of Khajuraho, admiring the erotic sculptures that decorated the walls.

With each expedition, Randolph felt he was unveiling a bit of the world, coy temptress, slow to reveal her secrets. He came to life on these trips—at night, around the camp's fire, the sound of animals all around them, and later, sleeping side by side under the stars, the sound of native drums from the bush.

Two years into their travels Rose discovered she was pregnant. She told him at a Shinto temple, whispering the news into his ear over the monks' chanting.

They decided she would go home, to the small farm town outside of Chicago where she had grown up. But the small farm town had changed during Rose's absence. The National Accelerator Research Lab had arrived, transforming Nicolet, and so what Rose found when she returned was not the sleepy rural town she remembered, but a bustling, blooming suburb.

Rose bought a house in a neighborhood in the middle of what she remembered as the Anderson farm and which was now called Eagle's Crest. On one side of Eagle's Crest, there now stood Heritage Village, a living history museum where reenactors in period costumes performed the settling of the country, manifest destiny, conquering the prairie day after day for tourists and school groups. And on the other side of the neighborhood, beyond the rolling, manicured greens of the new golf club, which had been built on land that had once marked the border between the Amundson and Heggestadt farms, there now stood the imposing National Accelerator Research Lab, its twenty-story Research Tower rising up over the prairie.

The townspeople were split in their opinions regarding the purpose of the Lab. Some argued it was a secret research facility for UFOs. Some believed the scientists there were studying invisibility, the better to battle the Communists. Others swore it was a testing ground for remote viewing experimentation.

But the truth was at once more magnificent and more mundane. The Lab was a facility for the study of high-energy particle physics, where scientists employed a particle accelerator to collide protons and antiprotons, watching the detectors for signs of new, smaller particles, all the while attempting to puzzle out the mysteries of string theory, supersymmetry, gauge theories, leptons, neutrinos, and quarks.

In building the Lab, the government, noting the principle of eminent domain, had, as they put it in the official literature,
annexed
the surrounding land holdings, each family finding one morning on their doorstep a grim-faced government official whose job it was to break the news.

In a letter to the editor of the
Nicolet Herald-Gleaner
, one local farmer wrote that he considered it “dastardly to build such a facility on some of the richest farming soil in the world.”

Rose's parents had not, like so many of their neighbors, lost their farm to the Lab. But they had seen their small rural town transform around them, swelling and sprawling as neighborhoods sprung up to accommodate both the displaced farm families and the Lab's scientists. And so, when Rose returned to Nicolet to raise Lily, this was the town she found.

Some of the former farmers still longed for their land, refusing to attend the annual picnics the Lab put on for the displaced families, during which they were invited back into their homes, many of which had been moved via trailer to a small, clustered area the Lab called “the village” and now housed offices or the families of visiting physicists.

But not all of the families had been so resolute. Once the initial shock and surprise wore off, there were those who, recognizing the declining role of small family farms and watching their taxes rise year by year, had been pleased to accept the price the government offered, had been watching for years as the land surrounding Chicago grew from farmland to suburb and had realized that, Lab or no Lab, it was only a matter of time.

Rose pushed Lily up and down the aisles of the grocery store. Lily, perched in her seat in the cart, offered a running commentary on what she thought they needed. A bright and precocious child, she'd begun speaking in full sentences. There had been no preliminaries, no warm-up sounds, no baby's babbling in imitation of adult language. “Look at that dilapidated building,” she'd said abruptly one morning, pointing from her car seat in the back of her mother's station wagon. One day she'd been silent, regarding her mother with her wise baby eyes, and the next, she was conversant. Now she chattered on as they made their way up and down the aisles.

The woman at the checkout picked up the eggplant and the mango as they traveled down the conveyor belt, eyeing them suspiciously—a not infrequent occurrence during their shopping trips. Often, the clerk would hold up some unfamiliar produce and ask Rose what it was and how on earth one cooked with such a thing. Rose was happy to to explain, and sometimes shared one of her favorites among the many recipes she'd collected on her travels, but she suspected that these women, who regarded this strange new produce with misgivings, infrequently tried her suggestions, feeling safer, she imagined, with sensible vegetables like corn and green beans.

“It's an eggplant,” Lily chimed in from her seat in the cart, making what the clerk considered to be a disconcerting level of eye contact. “You might know it instead as an aubergine.”

Since her return to Nicolet, few of the faces in the store, the post office, or the library were familiar to Rose. No longer bound to family farms, many of Rose's generation had moved away, so that those left behind were mainly her parents' age.

Back at home, Lily played with her blocks on the living room floor while Rose read aloud. They were beginning Deutscher's three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky.

“The reign of Tsar Alexander II was drawing to its gloomy end,” Rose began. Lily listened as she stacked her blocks, arranging them into neat configurations. “The ruler whose accession and early reforms had stirred the most sanguine hopes in Russian society, and even among émigré revolutionaries, the ruler who had, in fact, freed the Russian peasant from serfdom and had earned the title of the Emancipator, was spending his last years in a cave of despair—hunted like an animal.” Lily smiled up at her mother as she read aloud.

In a strange way, Rose's return to Nicolet felt liberating. She had returned not as the Rose Webster they had all known, but instead as Rose Winchester, wife of a renowned explorer, mother of an exceptional child. There, flanked on one side by the Lab and on the other by the pioneer reenactors of Heritage Village, Rose settled down to raise their daughter.

She and Randolph were devoted, besotted, if unconventional parents. In his letters home, Randolph sent stories he'd invented and illustrated for Lily, which Rose read to her at night, mother and daughter together marking out the path of Randolph's latest expedition on the globe beside Lily's bed, her chubby toddler fingers tracing her father's travels all over the word.

Rose had been Randolph's constant and steady companion through years of travel together. And then, just like that, as though something had come over her as surely as it had when she had met and run away with Randolph, she knew that she would be happiest home in Nicolet with Lily. That Randolph would be happiest out in the world. And thus they had arranged their peculiar little family, Randolph visiting every few months, a situation much commented upon by the—especially older—ladies of Nicolet (friends of her parents, who were by then long dead, for life on a farm is hard labor, tiring on a man and a woman), who were never sure whether they should think of Rose as an abandoned woman left with a child to raise, or as one of the new feminists out to remake what they had always thought of as a perfectly functional world.