World and Town (12 page)

“Fisher,” whispers Hattie. “See it?”

Carter nods.

“I’ve lost two dogs to fisher,” she says.

“You’ve become an animal lover.”

“You’ve gone bald.”

“You wear two pairs of glasses.”

“I still have my teeth, how about you?”

“Most of them.”

“How extraordinary.”

They laugh; the shadows of the balsams cross clear to the opposite shore.

Hattie has never noticed the shed back behind the Turners’ cottage, though of course it’s always been there—a stone’s throw from the Hatches’ place, but buried in brush way back when. Now all’s been cleared out, and the shed is almost as visible as the new house. Look, the Hatches’ chimney!—beautifully reused, and the whole house not bad, as modern houses go, though nothing like the Hatches’ well-worn place, with its tree-trunk posts and extra-deep porch and gargantuan ice house. Now Carter slides the shed door open; and there’s his wood shop—his tools hung up short to long beside a tool bench, and the whole room the very picture of order. It could almost be the lab—there’s even a radio—except, of course, that it smells of sawdust. One wall is taken up by a window looking out onto a meadow and trees, in front of which sits a skin-on-frame kayak-inprogress, set on sawhorses. This is an upside-down canoe-shaped thing with a half-skeleton of ribs lashed to it now, but pretty soon it will be covered with nylon, says Carter; it won’t always evoke road kill. Hattie laughs, admiring its long spine. A chordate, she says, and he laughs, too—yes—as he pulls a stool over, adjusting its height so she can experience its marvelous leather seat. She jounces a little while Carter points out how gradual the stern is; the boat’s pivot point will be well toward the bow.

“Meaning it will fairly fly through the water,” he goes on, “even as you feel everything—every current. Can you imagine what that will be? How live an experience?”

She shakes her head, smiling. Carter the enthusiast—how well she knows this man. When he was young it was bluegrass; later, it was yoga; now it’s West Greenland Inuits. He pulls over a tottery wooden stool for himself.

“They would custom-fit every kayak with the rider himself as the measure. So that the cockpit would be the sitting width of your hips plus two fists, for example.” He places his fists at his hips. “And the depth to sheer would be a
fistmele
, meaning the width of your fist plus an outstretched thumb.” He extends his thumb like a hitchhiker; he always did have long thumbs. “These are really shallow boats.”

“Wonderful.” She swivels as she listens.

“Isn’t it? I love the Inuit mind-set,” he goes on. “So human-centered. Of course, it was still what Meredith—you remember Meredith—used to call a web of significance. Do you know what I mean?”

She shakes her head.

“ ‘Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’—Max Weber. She loved that. ‘Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.’ ”

Not
slipping
—just repeating himself as if in lecture hall. Hattie smiles.

“Of course, we all do spin webs, but at least the Inuit web was more than a denial of death. As so many are,” he goes on.

“Religious webs, especially.”

“Yes. Not exclusively, of course.” He gestures with his hands. “But religious webs, especially, yes, with all that emphasis on the afterlife. Whereas the Inuit web was about fish. Boats. Survival. This life.”

“As opposed to immortal achievement?” She does not mean to sound cutting. Still, she is relieved when he does not answer but simply looks at her a moment with his mouth open, his fingers lightly pressing his lower lip against his teeth—a private thing he did all the time in his teens, but that she hasn’t ever seen him do once since, not even at the lab.

“Do you see,” he says suddenly, “what a waste of time all this is? How gloriously inefficient I’ve been?”

Attached to one sawhorse is a wooden placard, with what appears to be the boat’s name branded on it:
DISCONCERTED
.

“I’m trying to force myself off task,” he says. “My life having turned into one long concerted effort.”

“You were turning into Anderson.”

He laughs. “Who’s waiting for his Nobel now, you know, for his genome work.”

“The Nobel your dad didn’t get.”

“Miss Confucius!” He laughs again, open-mouthed. “How have I lived without you?”

“Though he didn’t want it anyway, did he?” She swivels some more, stretching her back.

“He did and he didn’t. He always said he wanted his picture to hang in the halls of his alma mater; you know how they have that long line of scientists. But with his picture facing in, he used to say, so that it wasn’t about glory. So that it was about his contribution and his place.”

“And was it?” She stops. “Hung face-in, I mean.”

“Of course not. Though you know, I don’t think he really would have minded. He wanted to be a person who didn’t care about status. He admired people like that. But it was probably the one thing he failed at—getting past it.”

“The way you’re trying to get past it now.”

He gazes at her in the half-dark, his arms crossed, one finger held up to his smiling lips. She is still, she can see, his favorite student.

“Unlike Anderson,” she goes on, “who’s picked up the torch for your father—even going on from cytogenetics to the genome.”

“Isn’t it almost too—what did you use to say in China?”

“Filial?”

“Precisely—
filial
. Isn’t it almost too filial? I do love that word. Fili-al.” He laughs. “The sort of translation that amounts to a nontranslation, don’t you think? I mean, what does that mean to a Westerner? It was good to see you at Dad’s burial, by the way, even if you left without saying hello.”

She grips the soft saddle.

“Most un-Confucian of you.”

“Well, you know, I was never the Confucian you all made me out to be, to begin with,” she ventures casually.

More interest than surprise. “Did we push you?” He cups his knees with his hands.

She shrugs and swivels some more—the stool squeaking in one direction but not the other, she notices.

“Of course, our brains have a tendency to sharpen contrast, as you know,” he begins, and she knows what he is going to say next before he says it: Witness lateral inhibition. The way the eye neatens up the edges of things. The way it suppresses any blurring data it may be receiving—any contradiction. And of course, it’s all true—how the mind seeks clarity, how the sharpening goes down to the cellular level. And, more, how the brain makes “sense” of the cleaned-up data—how it constructs a “world” out of the world using certain rules of thumb. She hears him out. But then she says, “No one wants to be boxed up, Carter,” and that’s that. “Anyway, I survived.” And it’s true, of course. Whatever anger she once felt about this is distant and wavery now. Edgeless, as if some lateral inhibition for emotion’s been turned off. “It was just plain rude to leave your father’s burial the way I did. I’m sorry.”

“You were avoiding me and ambivalent about my father.”

There’s no denying it.

“As were many, by the way,” he says. “Legions, even, we might say.”

A fly promenades down one of the boat’s ribs; she shoos it away.

“But as you were saying.”

“As I was saying. Yes. Meredith used to say, you know, that I worked on the eye in order to avoid seeing.”

“Seeing what?”

“Any number of things. For example, that I didn’t really care about science.”

“But of course you cared about science.”

“ ‘Happy is the man,’ she used to say, ‘who can wrap himself in his web of significance and die in it.’ She said I was a man who didn’t even make his own web. That I wrapped myself in my father’s web, like Anderson. That I wanted my picture hung in the same hall as my father, because that was what mattered to him. She became a judge, you know.”

“Meredith?”

“Appellate. Which she always said was the most boring kind, but if I ever knew why, I can’t remember now.” It’s getting dark; he stands to pull the light cord, which is weighted at the bottom with what looks to be his old wooden pocket knife. “When she left me she left the bench, too, and became a Buddhist. Said she was becoming too compassionate to be a good judge anyway.”

“Poor Meredith always was so helplessly kind.”

He laughs again, his bald head lit up now, his shadowed face ghoulish. “Precisely. The Dalai Lama came to her school, and she became just fascinated—started going from one retreat to another. As if Buddhism isn’t a web of significance? I don’t know. She gave a lot of money away, saying she didn’t see how there could ever be justice as long as we had capital accumulation. Possessions.”

Hattie’s toes kick against the inside of her walking shoes. “Do you think she was right?”

“I think she had the makings of a totalitarian,” says Carter. “Then she died without asking for me once. As if I were this Terrible Mistake. This guy who refused to confront what his own research showed. You know the drill.”

“ ‘Vision is a tool geared toward action, not truth.’ ” She straightens her back.

Carter lifts his chin. “Precisely. It distorts as much as it presents, giving but a most partial understanding of reality in toto. And so on.”

“First lecture of the semester.”

“I obviously don’t disagree with her. Her take, though, was that we will do anything to maintain the illusion that the world we apprehend is reality. For example, I might believe myself to care about truth and the advancement of knowledge, but that would only be my self-serving illusion, beyond which lay a deeper truth. To wit—”

“Uh-oh.”

“—that I wanted to be the brother with my picture in that hall.”

“How kind.”

“Don’t let anyone tell you Buddhism breeds patsies.” He sets his feet on a low rung of his stool. The knees of his yoga pants gleam yellow; the stitching of the raised seam has come undone here and there.

“How do you know she never asked for you?”

“Our kids were there.” Carter looks out the window, though there is hardly anything left to see now—no individual trees, just movement. Shifting; the wind’s picked up.

“I’m sorry.”

“That was after our older daughter married a carpenter and didn’t invite me to the wedding.”

“Maisy.”

“That’s right, Maisy, very good. She said she didn’t think I would want to be invited. That I considered weddings bourgeois and wouldn’t approve of her choice, either, given that he didn’t go to college. And of course she was correct about the latter.”

“But still.” Hattie turns her palms upward.

“Precisely. Her data were correct, but her conclusion was wrong. Influenced as it was by things Meredith told her.”

“Divorced people will say anything.”

“They should really warn you of that when you get married.” He grimaces. “She told Maisy I was perfectly capable of grilling her intended at the rehearsal dinner. That I thought all young men were grad students.”

“Aren’t they?”

He laughs his big laugh. “She said that if she were Maisy, she would marry a carpenter, too. She loved that Einstein quote about how all knowledge just leads to further obscurity. But is that right?”

“What would life be if we didn’t have knee surgery, you mean.” Hattie works her shoes off.

He nods. “And doesn’t Buddhism have limits? The Tibetan nomads have no antibiotics, but the tombs in the Potala Palace are solid gold. I saw them when I was in Llasa—one of them weighed thirty-seven hundred kilos. Can you imagine? A regular behemoth.” He scratches his nose with his pinky—his digit moving with precision, almost elegance. “I don’t mean the Tibetans should be oppressed, of course. I just mean I myself am not converting anytime soon.”

“You mean, here you are. You got your work done and are now conducting a personal experiment.”

He looks at her sheepishly—embarrassed to have been set back on track like a grad student, maybe. “Yes.”

“Trying to live like an Inuit. And coming here to Riverlake to do it—to start over. As people will.” She nods a little to herself. “You’re here to spin your own web—get out of the rat race. See what there is to live for besides having your picture in that hall.”

“Where it isn’t going to hang anyway, by the way.”

“You can’t let that bother you, Carter.”

He shrugs—his look not hard, the way it can be, but almost inquiring.

“You’ve done good work. You have,” says Hattie.

“I was slipping by the end.” His gaze drops to his lap. “I know you won’t believe that, Hattie, but I was. I was making mistakes. At night—I was making mistakes at night.”

So she was right about why he retired.

“Could you have just been exhausted? You’ve never gotten enough sleep.”

“It’s more than that.”

“I’m sure you were functioning better than you thought.”

“I was holding my e-mails until the morning, Hattie. So I could look them over before sending them.”

The insistence.

“Make sure they weren’t junk,” she says finally. Gently.

“Precisely.” There is something like relief in his voice. “In the daytime, I digressed.”

Wandering after
the wraith of an idea
.

“And I was out of new ideas.” He looks out the window. “I’d run out.”

“You’ve done good work, all the same, Carter,” she says again. “You have. And say you really have had a drop-off in invention. Say your grasp of detail isn’t what it was or that you’re slower or make little processing errors. You still have experience to make up for it. Judgment. You can still contribute.” And wasn’t his web just a web, as Meredith said? Something that served him for a while but was finally just a web, to be put aside when it no longer served him, like a boat? “Who knows what else you know, now that your left hemisphere’s kicking in more,” she goes on. “You can’t only have become stupid.”

“I’m becoming wise.”

“Now there’s a tragedy.” She smiles. She’s always been the older of them, but until now has never felt older. Though is she the more enlightened of them or can she simply not appreciate what this moment means to him—what it is, even, having never flown at his altitude?