The Lost Time Accidents (44 page)

“All right, then,” Enzie grunted at last, scrambling to reach stable ground. “You can have your little dinners, if they mean so much to you. But no more than once a month. And no questions about my work, you understand?” She clenched her eyes shut. “This is important, Genny. This is
wichtig.
No talk about the future whatsoever.”

“There’s a war on, dear, in case you haven’t noticed,” Genny said, taking a drag of her Virginia Slim. “The whole world might get atomized tomorrow. The last thing
anyone
wants to talk about is the future.”

*   *   *

If it strikes you as bizarre, Mrs. Haven, that my aunts should have thrown open their apartment, once a month, to both the dregs and the elite of late-sixties Manhattan, you’d be no more confounded than Enzie herself. And it was arguably the surprise of her duration (barring her later discoveries re: the chronoverse and the subjective mind) that she came to enjoy Genny’s soon-to-be-notorious Wednesday nights at least as much as her wayward sister did. The first dozen or so were harmless enough—assorted Bowery hopheads, a neighbor or two, the token physics grad student for Enzie to browbeat into a corner—but the mélange of Genny’s extravagant cooking, Enzie’s nutty-professor routine, and the sheer incongruity of the two of them there, in that apartment, in that neighborhood, at that particular juncture in the fourth dimension, proved an irresistible cocktail to Aquarian-era New York. Much was made of the sisters’ obvious lack of social cunning, and of the fact that they were never seen at anybody else’s parties—or in Enzie’s case, anywhere else at all. Scores of rumors entered circulation, none of them flattering, each of them heightening the Tolliver sisters’ mystique. Freaks were
en vogue
in those years, after all, and Enzie and Genny fit the bill superbly. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility, either, that they took a half-conscious pleasure in baffling all attempts to comprehend them. There can be safety, of a kind, in being misperceived.

A slew of anecdotal portraits were written about my aunts after their deaths: some affectionate, some lurid, a few of them nearly book-length. All the standard explanations were put forward. Often as not, the gossip rags viewed them as an old sapphic couple—incestuous, possibly, but more likely not sisters at all—which rumor neither of them seems to have discouraged. They were photographed often, and appear to have enjoyed striking poses: Carl Van Vechten took a snapshot (later much reproduced) showing Genny in a rumpled and corseted ball gown, and Enzie in a lab coat, playing the mad scientist to the hilt, resting her hands on her sister’s plump hips in what can only be described as a proprietary manner. Genny, for her part, is staring into the camera more frankly than I ever saw her do in life, secure in the knowledge that only a handful of people would see the result.

It’s not the least of the ironies in this history, Mrs. Haven, that this portrait would be reproduced in every newspaper in New York just a few decades later.

Van Vechten was far from the sisters’ only illustrious guest during their heyday, though their quota of Bowery bums and shop clerks never wavered. Harry Smith was a regular, entertaining all comers with his trick of tying human figures out of string; Eldridge Cleaver, by at least three accounts, showed up one night in ’69 with Sinatra’s stepdaughter—the one who couldn’t sing—but split when he saw William F. Buckley stagger drunkenly out of the loo. The dinners had become huge productions by then, almost monstrous: one night Genny counted fifty-seven dirty champagne flutes. The Aga Khan graced the General Lee, as did Joe Dallesandro, Charles Mingus, Buckminster Fuller, and Joan Didion, who published an account of her visit when “The Tolliver Case” was the talk of the town. I include it here in its entirety.

ENZIAN AND GENTIAN TOLLIVER: A
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT.

It’s a pretty nice evening and not much is happening so someone suggests that we go see the Sisters. Not having any idea who the Sisters might be, I wonder aloud whether they won’t object—it’s past ten o’clock on a Wednesday—but LaMont waves my question aside. “They’re having one of their nights,” he says, as if that explains things.

Who are the Sisters? I ask.

“The Sisters,” LaMont says again, with feeling. “Those crazy shut-in birds in Spanish Harlem.”

I remind him, politely, that I’ve only just arrived from Sacramento.

“They’re hermits,” says Jessup, coming to my rescue. “At least the older one is. She’s a physicist or something, but she spends all her time in that crumbly flat in that crumbly building with the ridiculous name. It’s called the General Lee, if you can believe it. And it’s smack in the middle of Harlem.”

The General Lee, it turns out, is what one might expect—a poor man’s Dakota in soot-stained concrete—but the Sisters are another thing entirely. One is plump and wide-eyed and childlike, and the other reminds me, to a startling degree, of Joan Crawford in the role of Mildred Pierce. There is only a strangeness about the eyes, and a kind of desperate indifference to fashion, to hint at the kinship between them. They are named, apparently, after a species of Austrian herb. Their accents are unclassifiable. One doesn’t think of them paying electric bills, or using the telephone, or addressing one another by their Christian names.

“It’s time for a ‘Mischung!’” the more compact sister, the one named Gentian, announces at the top of her voice. “Everybody switches to the right!”

We all change seats as directed, with the exception of the Sisters themselves. The feeling is not so much of a dinner party as of teatime in some rarefied asylum. The table sags under the weight of a huge mass of china, nearly all of it filthy. The party seems to have been going on for as long as anybody can remember.

It’s always six o’clock, I say to the guest on my left, an eager young man from Montevideo. To my surprise he recognizes the quote, and completes it for me, as if we’re exchanging a password.

“Yes, that’s it. It is always teatime, and we’ve no time to wash the things between the whiles.”

Time is a pet topic here at the Sisters’—in some curious sense, the only topic—though I haven’t fully realized that yet.

On this particular Wednesday—a slow night for the Sisters, I gather—only thirty-seven people have shown up for dinner, so there is plenty left over for us. When I praise the leek stew to the one who looks like Mildred Pierce, her head turns with a jerk, and I find myself in the considerable heat of her attention.

“We are discussing the ‘grandmother paradox,’ Miss Didion. Do you know what this paradox means?”

I believe it has to do with time travel of some kind, I reply.

“Time travel into the
past
,” says Enzian. “The grandmother paradox is the primary objection to such travel. Summarize, Gustavo, if you please.”

Gustavo, who turns out to be the nice young man from Uruguay, and who describes himself to me, later that same evening, as a “forensic physicist,” leans gracefully forward.

“A man chrononavigates into the past, to a time before his parents were conceived. This man, by chance or design, sets a chain of events in motion that results in the death of his grandmother. Does our chrononaut himself cease to exist?”

“Gracías, Geraldo.”

“De nada, maestra.”

The table grows quiet. It’s clear that I’m expected to respond. I’ve had a number of gin-and-hot-waters by this point in the evening, so I ask why the poor little grandmother has been singled out for destruction. Why not the time traveler’s mother, for example? Come to think of it, why not his father?

Gustavo considers my question. “Quién sabe,” he says. “Too sentimental?”

“That is not here or there,” Enzian cuts in. “The objection has always been that these two realities—the reality containing the chrononaut, and the reality in which he has been extinquished—cannot both exist, and yet they
must
both exist. The chrononaut has to exist in order to extinguish himself; but as soon as the deed is accomplished, he must therefore vanish.”

I acknowledge that this would seem to pose a problem.

“But there is a solution,” she says, laying her mannish hands flat on the table. “Paradoxes ought not to exist—but they continue to do so, despite our objections. Some even exist physically: for example, the Möbius strip.” She pauses briefly here, assessing me. “The Möbius strip, Miss Didion, shows us how effortlessly the universe can accommodate incompatible realities. We can stare at a Möbius strip, hold it in our hands and examine it, and still refuse to understand what we are seeing.”

The conversation is tending toward the metaphysical, someone observes.

“Allow me to quote from Ouspensky,” a bespectacled negro says suavely. “‘What does “metaphysics” mean, ultimately, but physics considered from a place above?’”

At this point things start to get lively.

“You must bring your ideas to the world,” my Montevidean acquaintance urges. “Take them to Princeton—to the Institute for Advanced Study. Oppenheimer is there. He may listen.”

“I have no interest in the opinions of that death fetishist,” Enzian snaps. “My father had no dealings with Dr. Oppenheimer, and neither shall I.”

For a while no one speaks. At the far end of the table a man with a grizzled gray beard is slurping Chablis out of what appears to be a soup tureen. He is later identified for me, by my husband, as an editor of the “Partisan Review.”

“Your duty is to make your findings public,” Geraldo insists. “Don’t let the scientific mainstream seal your lips. Tesla didn’t. Ouspensky didn’t.”

“Tesla died in a Fifty-Fourth Street flophouse,” the negro observes. “Ouspensky died in a basement in Surrey, neglected and anemic and alone.”

Enzian shakes her head. “If the world wants me, gentlemen, it knows where to find me. I’ll be happy to receive it here, in my home, on the second Wednesday evening of the month.”

LaMont rolls his eyes at this, and Jessup shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

No one else says a word. It seems a pathetic statement, textbook megalomania, the ravings of a bush-league Caligari.

In a certain sense, of course, it was all of these things; but in another, truer sense, it was not. Twenty-five years have passed since that statement was made. It was the humid late summer of 1969, and a great many things that seemed febrile that August now strike us as perfectly sane. The world has finally come, two and a half decades later, to see the Tolliver Sisters in their home. We stare, all of us, at the blurred photographs in the
Times
and the
Post,
and consider the evidence closely, from every available angle. And still we refuse to understand what we are seeing.

In his windowless cubby in Cheektowaga, meanwhile, Orson was tucking his magnum opus into bed. The novel had taken him longer than he’d expected—much longer—but he wasn’t complaining. Lopsided and inelegant though it was, it pleased him in a way no writing of his had ever done before. It was a
book
, for one thing—not just grist for the pulps. It might even make him some money.

More and more clearly, as he whittled and buffed, Orson came to see his novel as a paean to Reason. How he’d managed to be born into a family that approached science the way a witch doctor approaches medicine he had no idea, but he was resolved, more than ever, to go his own way. His plan was twofold. He would serve as an example, by living according to Reason’s dictates, as an Ayatollah lives by the Koran; and he would spell out his beliefs, in his novel, for the whole world to see—if it was willing to put in just a little effort.

As you can see, Mrs. Haven, he was thinking like a cult leader already.

He’d gotten into the habit of taking books down at random from the parlor bookcase at Pine Ridge Road, and in a clothbound edition of the poems of Sir Richard Francis Burton (which had almost certainly been Sonja’s) he found a couplet that would soon become his personal motto, and be printed on the frontispiece of
The Excuse
:

Do what thy manhood bids thee do,

from none but self expect applause;

He noblest lives and noblest dies

who makes and keeps his self-made laws.

Below this, in Greek (it was that kind of novel), was a distinctly more appropriate epigraph:

ώρα κάνει ανόητοι όλων μας

Which, loosely translated into English, means

Time makes fools of us all.

“I’m finished,” Orson told Ursula one evening. “At least I think I am. Christ, I hope so.”

They were lying together in the second room on the right at the top of the stairs. Although it was drafty—it was drafty everywhere in that house—they were both sweating lightly. Ursula lay flat on her back, still a bit short of breath, smiling one of her classic equivocal smiles. She took hold of his ear and pinched it.

“You’ve been finished before,” she said.

“This time is different.”

“You’ve said
that
before, too.”

“I’m sending it off tomorrow. The whole manuscript.”

That got her attention. “Tomorrow? You’re sure?”

“Genny’s found me an agent, if you can believe it. Apparently he’s a bona fide piranha.”

“Is this a good thing, a piranha?”

“Depends on who gets bit.”

She was quiet a moment.

“Does Genny know what the book is about? Does Enzie know?”

He made a face at the ceiling.

“They’ll be furious, Orson.”

“They can see it when it’s published.”

“Orson—”

“I don’t want to talk about this, Ursula. Not now.”

Conversation lagged for a time.