The Rags of Time (17 page)

The basement of the house in Somerset is fitted out as a game room—dartboard, pool table, hoop set low for little kids now grown taller than their father, desktop IBM from the Dark Ages. On one wall the shelf with trophies from prep schools the boys attended. The playroom runs the length of the house, which is large. Seen from the road, we are struck by its Georgian Brick grandeur. Look at that one, we say, preferring it over Tara or the Renaissance Castle. Get the circular drive, the Monticello lampposts. Yes, it’s late, the lights are timed to go off. In a moment there will be only the dim illumination in one basement window. Above, every room lies in darkness.

Doc Warner has come down to the game room, finding his way through the house he has known for half a century. One son sleeps in his boyhood room. He has scheduled his flight back to California by way of Newark to visit his father. He thinks the old man should sell the place, settle into a retirement community, stay at the Harvard Club when he goes to town, town being, for Doc, always and only New York. He has been taught to make little of his father’s awards. Doc, he doesn’t know incus from Inca, dorsal from dormouse, so the jokes went when he and his brother were kids. Until recently, Doc has been an honored physicist at Bell Labs from the early days of his work on high-speed memory to his late paper on fractional quantum effects, his home away from home which we might call AT&T, but he prefers the old name, the old days, prefers to live alone in this house, his wife of many years dead, his boys long gone to their professional lives. This visiting son lives in Marin County. He is a pediatrician with a wife who cares about the suffering out there in the world, with a grown daughter currently reinventing the druggie indulgences of the Sixties. He sleeps in this mausoleum of his parents’ marriage under the slant ceiling of an eave, well out of the way of family life, which is how he always liked it, far above the flowery chintz, the soothing greens and cheerful gold that never graced the big house with the warmth his mother yearned for. He wakes when he hears his father’s stumbling footfalls below as Doc heads for the stairs known to be slippery, known since his mother turned her nose up at the idea of carpet over the beveled lip, the lovely oak rise of each step. Doc has a knee prone to collapse, a fractured disk in his lower spine. The real doctor knows that the banister wobbles, not sturdy as it was when he slid down it to his mother’s annoyance. His father is going to the rec room, an old ritual that he will honor. He will wait till he hears Doc slapping back down the hall in his slippers, then sleep again in his room with the premed textbooks, photos of a trivial first love and tennis teams left far behind, nothing that matters.

Doc Warner is still in the game . . . faint praise for the old man when he drops in at the Labs. The elevator is no longer where it should be, security a nuisance. Recently he suffered the insult of a uniformed kid demanding his visitor’s pass. He’s made it to the kitchen stooping through the low door leading down to the playroom. Heat from the furnace, new in 1982, is trapped, not rising this first cold night. He thinks of his son who has delayed his trip home from a conference on attention deficit disorder to check him out. Does the boy remember his mother stored the extra blankets in the chest at the bottom of her bed? His son is a proper pediatrician who can take care of himself. In any case the old Doc’s made it down two flights of stairs to the hi fi, a turntable hooked up to a dusty black speaker. He takes the LP out of its sleeve with the profile of Wagner on the cover faded to a ghostly negative, the composer facing off with a bare-breasted Rhine maiden, her thick thighs straddling a golden horse. How carefully he places the record on the turntable, lifts the arm with the needle.

Doc’s waxy eyelids close tight as green twilight rises in the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth just as the composer dictated each and every aspect of the production. Then darkness, deep slashes of the coming light. He finds his way to the chair, the one and only taken from the back terrace, placed here for his purpose. His purpose is to listen to
Das Rheingold,
to hear the maidens’ mocking laughter . . .
hei-a! hei-a! hei-a!
. . . till Freia swims upward toward the watery spill on the rocks.

Varner, she called him, one letter short of genius, but maybe he was a genius, the student who came from America to study
Deutsche Physik.
“Secure then are we and free from care. . . .” The flowers, the wine, the long train ride from the University at Leipzig all paid for with his small stipend. He was her prize, a young lover to stick like a flower behind her ear. And when he returned to her not long after the war, it was with combat ribbons and medals of victory pinned to his chest. He carried with him the picture of a little boy with his mother, a common pie-faced girl, pretty enough in an apron over a maternity frock. There is this in his favor: the medals and ribbons were only on display when he first went to visit his soprano still in Bayreuth. She was now teaching, but there were few students. At night she sang in a cabaret, cynical lyrics dodging defeat. He brought her food, not flowers, brought her news of his discoveries, ongoing intelligence, poor foolish man no longer a student telling her that Hitler never had a go at the bomb, never had the magician’s pot of uranium 235, implying the Science
Volk
never had the wit or the nerve, not even the man he had studied with, the great Heisenberg. And when the Captain went back to his work on the secrets that would never be fully disclosed, just bandied about in biographies and thoughty plays, Mother Goose who flew through the air on a very fine gander, sits this night in her workroom above Central Park turning the page while the Rhine maiden—
ha
. . .
ha
. . .
ha
. . .
ha
—accuses
he who the sway of love for-swears
. . . .

—as the soprano, the wanton in darkness, having wrapped her strong thighs around the body of Varner,
ach Varner, meine liebe. Turn the page:
that bitch now reaches to the black telephone, whispers to her lover, the loyal party member who had worked on the German rockets built by concentration camp slaves. And with misinformation on the bomb never made, he attempts to discredit the testimony of the American Captain in the name of their Führer . . .

In the cellar of a grand suburban house, an old gentleman—much honored, the life of the lab with his discoveries behind him—sits so straight in his chair with the sharp pain of a ruptured disk, he might be a man of military bearing. He has taken off his flannel bathrobe, folded it neatly in his lap as though he is at a performance. For the purpose of this story, he is in the second tier of the opera house designed by Richard Wagner to suit the grandeur of his work. The record that Doc listens to is as perfect as the day he bought it at Sam Goody’s on Sixth Avenue, one of his many trips to the city for Bell Labs that combined business with pleasure. He remembers his delight in discovering it, the Deutsche Philharmoniker rerecord ing of
Das Rheingold
, of course. His interest is in the opening scenes in which his Freia abandons herself to laughter—
hei-a ja he
. . .
hei-a ja
. He believes he can distinguish her sweeping high notes from those of the maidens, believes that she was in her prime, though the original recording was cut at the end of her career. She is young to him always.
Die Minne macht ihn verrückt . . . ha!
The cruel pain of her laughter, yet he would give his heart for the gold. He grasps the stiff arms of the chair. Tonight, the slow retrieval, the smudged vision of his wife, bundled in her bathrobe when she found him sitting Indian style on the floor of the playroom, head bowed to the magnifi cent rise of the maidens’ mockery, his eyes tearing up.

“It is that sort of music,” he said.

Next day she placed this stiff iron chair close to the speaker, breaking up the set perfect for lunch on the patio. When matters cultural were on the table, as though they both must shoulder the blame, she confessed her addiction to museums, reported with an indulgent smile, “My husband is devoted to Wagner, from his student days, you know.” Apparently she found his emotion reasonable, never questioned why only
Das Rheingold
in the game room—
hei-a
. . .
hei-a
—for love had lost him his wits!