The Rags of Time (11 page)

In Tolstoy’s
Death of Ivan Ilyich,
read just weeks ago, a posturing public servant reviews his life to discover that his ambition has been a burden to his family. As it was to Tolstoy’s, so we are told by Nabokov, spreading the guilt around. Prompted by this confession, I swing toward you on my ergonomic chair. You are at the door of my workroom. I speak of the years you’ve put up with my scribbling.

Apology dismissed, you suggest we close the little house in the Berks this year
, As a precaution.

Caution on your mind these days. While I have a formal gratitude for your care, what might happen if I throw it to the wind? I mourn the loss of our wrangling, the way you screen my fancy through reality check. We will miss the view of the garden safe in its blanket of snow. Still, we are in perfect accord.

You closed the flue, discarded the ashes good for the garden.

Here in the El Dorado the fireplace in our apartment was sealed up before we settled in. A pretentious display of marble. The mantel’s crenellations and brass rosettes refer to some striver’s hope in the wake of the Great Depression.
Elegance—
now you see it: now you don’t.

In any case, the little house is closed as a precaution. I’m confined to the safety of our twin towers and the Park, all stories within reach, legends of the season. I mean to say: more than a magician’s trick, though plain as the nose on my face, the decorative dead wood in the fireplace is not
seen
anymore. The screen to protect us from hot embers, useless. Antique Roadshow stuff—an astrolabe, highboy, cradle,
Death of the Virgin
, Goya’s
Disasters of War
(second state).

 

Sylvia Neisswonger is strapped into her seat heading east. To her right she sees the image of a plane on a small screen. To her left, bright blue sky stretches above suds of cloud as far as the eye can see. Perhaps that distance can be figured. Martha, her stepdaughter, measures depths of the sea, so why not the distance to beyond? The plane on the screen is trailing a red line as it flies across America, eating up the distance from San Diego to JFK. Sylvie can’t figure how to call this image up. She looks to her seatmate’s screen. He’s a young man, young to her, with a beak of nose on a fleshy face. To Sylvie he looks assembled—floppy ears, receding chin, his body a soft bulk. He has fallen asleep, thumb in the page of an airport thriller, not thrilling enough, though a car bomb in the act of exploding a U.S. Army vehicle is blazoned on
Run for Cover.
Soldiers in splotched camouflage stand, thank heaven, safely aside. Carts with salty snacks and beverage of choice have been wheeled down the aisle. In the hum of the pressurized cabin, she hears the occasional cough, a shrill cry, perhaps the baby who gave her a grin when infants, the old and infirm were boarded first. She pops the flesh-colored hearing aids out of her ears. The dumb show in the cabin surrounds her.

Quite deaf, though not infirm, as the guards at the Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla might tell you, tell that every day of her visit, Mrs. Waite, as she is properly known, climbed uphill to have lunch with Martha. They were more than welcoming. “Gallant”: that’s the word she searches out, Perez and Bonfilio not checking the visitor ID that hung round her neck, quick to escort her up the steps, open the door as though the Institute were a first-class hotel, not a temple of science. Perez has three children. His wife’s name is Lola. Bonfilio is studying bookkeeping at night. Calling out loud and strong—
Beautiful day, Mrs. Waite.
How they did love to chat when she made it to the top of the hill, breathed easy. Waite, her legal name on two documents submitted at the airport in New York, is the name of her stepdaughter, Dr. Waite, Martha. Checking through Security brought back the memory of her first U.S. passport and the name she was born with: von Neisswonger. Yes, her mother, Inga von Neisswonger, had charmed the American consul in Toulouse. The papers he procured were not fraudulent; her passport with the photo of a wistful girl, stunned by the camera, hair braided tight, perfect little snowflakes knit into her Tyrolean sweater.

My brother Otto had a sweater with the very same snowflakes
.
Absurd, our father said,—snowflakes never match. Each one has its own crystal network.
Pleased with herself for telling Martha that story with its bit of crystallography, for it’s hard to find common ground, always has been, to come upon a moment when she was not the woman with the trace of an accent, with words sought for in plain English. When she was not that intruder—C
all me Sylvie
—who came all of a sudden years and years ago to an old house in Connecticut to take the place of Martha’s dead mother.

Martha said:
Most likely not woven
, then held forth on the invention of knitting machines, correcting Sylvie not as sharply as Papa Neisswonger had corrected his son. Sylvie understood about the Jacquard loom, that it didn’t knit sweaters. She was ten years old at the time, some years older when her mother told the story, the way Inga told family stories to her new friends in New York, always leaving out the name of her son as though
Otto
might scratch, a painful burr in her throat. It is quite ridiculous, this loose strand of a childhood sweater that will lead Sylvie where she goes too often this past year, to the stucco villa in Innsbruck with its red-tiled roof, handblown glass in the windows transforming the garden to a shimmering mirage. Shuffling memories, laying out the cards.

Both von Neisswonger and his son were escorted out the double front door to the purring Mercedes by Nazi officers with thick Berlinerisch accents, Otto clutching his scuffed football like a ruined globe in his hands. Sylvie had once planned to go back to see the house, now a small hotel—how odd it would be to see her room rented for the night, her little bed with its white coverlet transformed to the vast comfort of king-size, the frieze of twined edelweiss painted out. She had once thought to return with Cyril, show her old lover the house on the river Inn, the imperial squares of the city, the Alpine mines her father worked, summer and winter. She will not go now, now that he’s gone, lies with May, his wife of many years, leaving Sylvie the comfort of his family. A wonder how they have sorted themselves out. As she packed for the yearly visit to Martha,
My trip to California must do me,
said to the neighbors who knew nothing of her abandoned journey to Innsbruck but would look after the house in Connecticut, take in the mail, overwater the plants. The house of Bob Waite, her late husband, she had explained to one of Martha’s pals at the Institute.
Late. I have never understood that expression.

Better late than never,
the fellow said, a rude remark now she thinks of it. They were a funny crowd, these men and women who keep track of the wind, who search for holes in the sea, who count time in the millions of years, a time when the waters rose, a time before the Great Flood became a Bible story. Now the deluge was all too real, happening fast in their calculations of melt. A stargazer, declared a crank by these scientists, believed he had found Noah’s Ark, what was left of it, poking up in a satellite picture of Mount Ararat. The waters were now rising, not receding, so what did he hope to salvage, they asked—a blockbuster script? The animals, two by two, cast from the San Diego Zoo? The
Titanic
in biblical dress? Sylvie had thought to stop their laughter—
The ark was sturdy, sealed with pitch
—then thought not, for she was their guest, the powdery old lady listening in at the end of the table. Martha took her side. Prehistoric sea creatures found at Yellowstone, so why not? Plucking a hair from Noah’s beard, DNA coaxing—could be
Jurassic Park
.

Sylvie believes that as soon as she left each day after lunch, the scholars went back to talking their winds and waves while she braved the freeway in her rented Toyota, found her way back to Martha’s cottage. Still, they seemed to her quite silly, these brilliant seashore observers laughing at last night’s TV, making jokes of the State of the Union. Well, the State of the Union was perilous, they well knew. She did not cut into their play, though it was all too easy to translate White House blather they laughed at to the German propaganda of the Reich.
Heimat. Vaterland. Ehre.
As for Noah, the one just man, she searched the shelves in the cottage wanting to read what God ordered by way of an ark. Martha did not own a Bible. Sylvie is certain about the pitch, the viscous caulk Bob Waite applied each Spring to his trawler. The smell was god-awful, impossible to wash the black stuff out of his clothes. Each year when he finished, that thrifty man threw his ruined jeans and work shirt away.

Far as Sylvie can see, these lunch breaks at the Institute and an occasional barbecue are Martha’s only life beyond the lab. There’s her bicycling team on Sundays and a correspondence with a professor at Woods Hole that seems to have gone beyond ice cores and ocean sediment. Martha, well into middle age, is flustered as she speaks of coming east to present a paper at a conference organized by her—pausing for the appropriate word—her
mentor.

So mentor it is, though Sylvie hopes he is more. She will call Martha when she gets home to Connecticut. Still early in California, her big athletic girl with clipped gray hair will answer on the cell even if she is in the midst of climate calculations or e-mailing her prospective lover of an event some million years ago. What she remembers of Martha’s industry, what she told the scientists at lunch one day, was the story of when this Sylvie was brought to the house on a hill, Bob Waite’s unwelcome surprise. She took his children to the shore, the rim of sand on Long Island Sound, that small puddle, and the girl she did not yet know dug, dug until the water seeped up from China, saving the pebbles and a necklace of slimy seaweed to examine at home. Martha’s future, Sylvie told these men and women plotting the fate of the Pacific coast, was written in the sand.

And she sleeps as the red line makes its way across New Mexico up to Denver, till chicken or beef, hard to tell, though she recalls cupping her ear to hear the selection. She eats only the bland cookie, sleeps again, and when she wakes, the big screen at the front of the cabin displays a young man with a smirk on his face driving a mountain trail, a treacherous journey, though Sylvie’s seatmate is laughing—the hearty ho-ho of that
Mitteleuropa
actor in the old movies, jowls shaking in joy or despair. She imagines the thrill of the chase, the tough words of a cop who looks fierce . . . well, not really. Laughter across the aisle as the clown drives off the cliff, a well-known clown, and next thing he is jumping the cables on the set, flubbing his lines for the retake. Oh, they are only making a movie. Sylvie enjoys the pantomime, easily guesses the stuntman’s flirtation with the script girl, then nods off again, a dreamless sleep without fear, without longing—and when she wakes, the little plane on the small screen’s heading toward western Pennsylvania, and the long descent toward New York and home.

Her seatmate comes on friendly—
I’m in sales
—though she’s not asked, can’t hear the name of his product.

Resets the digital devices in her ears.
Sales?

Heavy equipment. Farming, construction. Nurse the infrastructure of developing nations . . .
Jed does not offer a last name. He’s Jed; she’s Sylvie. Developing nations—
you’ve got your Asians, your South of the Border
—will continue to need his backhoes, cranes. Jed flies business class.
Coach this trip, personal time.

But suppose,
Sylvie suggests,
suppose the fields in Asia are underwater.

Wall-to-wall rice paddies? That’s a good one.
On his laptop he brings up pictures of his daughter, a piglet with her father’s floppy ears, blessedly not his beak.

Lovely bright eyes.
Sylvie says,
Not rice paddies
.
Where there is now landmass, we may experience seeping salt water, estuaries
.
I have been visiting my stepdaughter.
Sylvie attempts a quick course on the Gulf Stream,
temperature twelve degrees above normal
,
while in the Pacific we may experience
—finds herself tangled in alien language—
short cycles of stability.
From Jed’s indulgent nod, she suspects he’s heard it all, figured it into sales of his products—mapping the deluge, the snowless peaks of Kilimanjaro as seen on TV. She retreats to the airline magazine. Jed finds his place in
Run for Cover.
Sylvie flips the pages with many items the efficient traveler might need—inflatable hangers, golf bags, foldaway tents, bug zappers, ponchos for rainy adventures. Home is addressed in doormats, tea cozies, safety grips for the bathtub, electric heaters. Martha has said to come live with her for the warm weather, said it so cheerfully Sylvie barely detected the duty in her stepdaughter’s voice; and then she thinks of the chill Waite house in Connecticut, carpenter ants chewing hand-hewn beams to sawdust, mildew in the basement, but the pearwood mantel is sturdy and there’s the fanlight over the front door. Sunshine or shadow, each morning as she comes downstairs, the delicate tracery puts on its show, a subtle retort to squared-away Yankee design.