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  Dora said, “Oh, Margaret.”

  Margaret changed the subject back to Dora’s adventures.

  What Margaret didn’t tell Dora was something larger and more nebulous—that it was Andrew himself who seemed dangerous. Not so much dangerous to her, Margaret, but dangerous to any child they might have. When she remembered those weeks with Alexander in the room at Mrs. Wareham’s, what she remembered was not the fog of Vallejo, but the fog of Andrew, his voice booming like a horn, his breath filling the room, his body casting a cool shadow over the baby, his inquisitiveness a probe, draining Alexander’s own small life force. Could any infant withstand such a thing? That Andrew, with the approval of Dr. Bernstein, stayed away from her—that he no longer read Havelock Ellis, or aspired to a houseful of youthful geniuses—was more than fine with her.

  • • •

  AT the end of the summer, Dora happened to come on the ferry, intending to stay for the weekend and then take a horse up to Napa to explore. She put herself up at Mrs. Wareham’s—in Margaret’s room. Margaret had kept the room at Mrs. Wareham’s, at first because she couldn’t bear to give it up, and later because it gave them access to Vallejo when they didn’t want to take the trouble to get the ferry to the island. She kept Alexander’s cradle there until one of the ladies in her knitting circle asked if she could give it to her daughter for her grandson, and Margaret saw that she was right, and kind, in her intentions. As a result of her keeping the room, and using it, Mrs. Wareham had become her good friend. The two of them spent many evenings knitting and discussing, and lamenting, the wild habits of Mrs. Wareham’s son, Angus. Andrew was as good with Angus as he had been with the Lear boys—since Andrew was up most nights, and was tall and strong, he didn’t mind rousting Angus out of the bad neighborhoods, carting him home drunk, and putting him to bed without disturbing Mrs. Wareham. And it gave him the opportunity to exercise his curiosity about something other than the universe—he declared to Margaret that he could have mapped Vallejo if there were a call for that sort of thing. Angus had finally, in the last year, gone into the navy. He was now a sailor over at the island, about to embark upon his first mission, to the Bay of Fundy.

  Dora stayed that night with Mrs. Wareham. By the next morning, when Margaret arrived for breakfast, the two women had settled it between them that Margaret’s room was to pass to Dora. Dora fancied the idea of a retreat, not so much because she wished to rusticate herself and take a rest, as because she wished to have yet another place to explore and another group of friends.

  While Mrs. Wareham’s daughter, Cassandra, and Naoko served breakfast to the boarders in the dining room, the three of them sat down to a table in Mrs. Wareham’s bedroom that was set with a selection of dishes: bacon, toast, some fried eggs, but also green tea and small bowls of a Japanese sort of savory soup that they all liked. Dora had never tried the soup or the tea before, but once she had imitated the way that they lifted the bowls to their lips with two hands and sipped it, she was enthusiastic.

  Mrs. Wareham told her it was called miso.

  “And you have it every day?”

  “Well, sometimes we have flapjacks.”

  They laughed.

  “Naoko has introduced me to quite a few things that I never knew existed. Or, let’s say, that they didn’t have in Red Rock, Ontario.”

  Dora said, “In France, we had crêpes, which are thin rolled-up flapjacks with stewed fruit. Stewed! Well, in St. Louis, they have stewed fruit. In France, they have white peaches simmered in brandy.”

  “Mrs. Early taught me to make those crêpes,” said Margaret.

  Dora said, rapturously, “If you have managed to stay up all night, and you find yourself on the Boulevard Saint-Germain very early in the morning, you may have white peaches simmered in brandy, or strawberries dipped in crème fraîche flavored with oil of violet.” She sighed.

  Mrs. Wareham said admiringly, “So lovely!”

  Naoko came into the room to report that two new guests had arrived, looking for lodging. Mrs. Wareham pushed her chair back and stood up, while Dora’s attention fell full upon Naoko.

  Margaret viewed Naoko and Cassandra as a pair of young girls who were very well behaved and did what they were told—a testament to Mrs. Wareham’s system and resolve as the proprietor of a respectable boarding house in a town that could be rowdy and even dangerous—but Dora was more curious. Possibly she had never seen a Japanese person before, or, at least, one who was trapped in the same room with her and obliged to talk.

  Naoko had been born in Vallejo and spoke perfect English, but she had what Margaret thought of as a Japanese way about her—always retiring and graceful, always, apparently, yielding to Cassandra, but, according to Mrs. Wareham, getting her way in the end, “because Cassandra is so impulsive and inconsistent, I don’t know that she remembers what she wants from one moment to the next!” The family had a shop on the edge of Chinatown, which in Vallejo was a small but wild place that Margaret had never dared to walk through. Though Margaret never forgot that it was Naoko who stoked her fire and kept the room warm while Margaret held Alexander in her arms and let her mind drift about, that it was Naoko who was silent while everyone else was chattering incessantly, the girl was too young for them to have achieved an actual friendship.

  Dora said, “I read a book about Japan by Lafcadio Hearn….”

  Naoko smiled.

  “I would like to go to Japan, and then cross China and Russia and visit Moscow and St. Petersburg. Most interesting place on earth. I would dress as a boy.”

  Margaret laughed. “Your mother—”

  “She would be happy, because I would bring home a Cossack husband who had himself three other wives and was looking to import them all to St. Louis to go into the beer business.” She turned to Naoko. “So, Naoko, where do you live? Does your father send home a lot of money to his parents?”

  Naoko seemed a bit startled by this question, but still friendly. Margaret didn’t step on Dora’s toe to remind her of her manners—Dora had made a success of having no manners. Naoko said, “They live on Maine Street, near Marin Street. I, too, have thought that it would be interesting to go to Japan.”

  One for you, thought Margaret. Naoko pointed to the soup. “My father sells things. Miso. Rice. Rice noodles. Calligraphy brushes and paper. My mother is the sanba for the Japanese here.”

  Margaret said, “That’s a midwife.”

  Naoko said, “My mother’s mother was a midwife in their village in Japan. She rode a bicycle and was much respected because she could read and write. When my mother came here, she saw the same need in California.”

  “Do you like California?” said Dora, sounding idly curious, but with an underlying eagerness to her tone, which demonstrated to Margaret that she was planning to write something.

  Naoko smiled politely and said, “I’ve never been anywhere else. But my mother says that life is very luxurious here compared to Manchuria.”

  “I thought they were from Japan.”

  “My parents came here because my father’s parents lost two sons fighting with the Chinese. It appeared that my father would be next, so they found the money to send my parents here.”

  Mrs. Wareham, who had come in in time to hear this last remark, observed, “I always say, ‘Don’t go north unless they drive you there in a gang press, and even then, better to get shot for escaping than to end up in Red Rock.’”

  “Very practical,” said Dora. She looked at Naoko. “I want to meet them.”

  Of course she did, thought Margaret.

  “I’ll prepare them,” said Naoko. She smiled and ducked her head. Mrs. Wareham said, “I suppose these new ones will be needing some linens, dear.”

  Naoko nodded and left the room.

  “How old is she? She’s not married,” said Dora.

  “She’s planning to be a midwife as well,” said Mrs. Wareham.

  Dora’s eyebrows lifted with glee.

  When Margaret was accompanying her to the ferry
a while later, she said, “I haven’t met Naoko’s parents, except that once, a few days before Alexander died, her mother came to see him.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She held him and stared at him. I don’t know what I thought. I thought she was going to perform some magic that doctors and astronomers would laugh to scorn, but that would work.”

  “And she didn’t.”

  “No.”

  DORA was happy to gossip with Andrew, and he always sat longer at the supper table when she visited. When she interrupted him, he didn’t mind. One evening, she stopped him mid-sentence and asked, “What about Tesla?”

  “Ha!” exclaimed Andrew. “Nikola Tesla! There is some talent there, though he is Middle European to the core! Have you met him?”

  Dora had.

  “Very strange man. Very strange man. Talkative. Interrupts you all the time with ideas of his own. Never actually listens to anyone else, even when that person might perfectly well understand his ideas, and might even have a better idea himself. You know about Edison, don’t you?”

  “Hmm,” said Dora encouragingly. “I’ve met him, too.”

  “That was a bit of a brouhaha.”

  Dora sat up. “Do tell,” she said.

  “You know that Edison hates Tesla and Tesla hates Edison, don’t you? Tesla said that Edison promised him fifty thousand dollars if he solved a problem or two; then, when Tesla did the work, Edison said, Ah, it was just a joke! Americans talk big, didn’t you know? Tesla ended up digging ditches for Edison Light there for a while. Adding insult to injury.” Andrew shook his head.

  “I interviewed Edison once,” said Dora. “Down in Florida.”

  “The both of them always get talked up for the Nobel, but I can’t see it. The Nobel Committee can’t stand a fracas of any sort. That’s why they always give the thing to the nice boys. Slow and steady wins the Nobel, you know. For example, my theory about the moon will be far too innovative for them. I already understand that.”

  He shook his head and leaned forward. He said, “But to my mind, that’s not the interesting thing about Tesla. The newspapers always grab the stick by the wrong end. Inventors are a dime a dozen. You take a boy and you put him in a room with a stick and a ball of twine, a couple of rocks, and a piece of wire, and he’ll invent something. But Tesla did something else, and the newspapers didn’t touch it, and now it’s ten-year-old news, but he got signals from Mars and Venus.”

  “Signals?” said Dora.

  “Yup,” said Andrew. “You know he had that lab in Colorado Springs for a few months around the turn of the century. Some Europeans funded it. A man of science is always having to go hat in hand to somebody with money. That’s the real scandal, if you want to write about something.” He pursed his lips. “Anyway, he was testing the transmission and reception of radio signals over long distances, and he was receiving a lot of them, as you may know. The universe is a noisy place. And when he pointed the receiver toward Venus and Mars, he got clicks. Clicks in twos and threes, sometimes fours. Never got that from anywhere else, either. Noise is noise. It’s random. That’s why it’s noise. But clicks are clicks.”

  “Do you think there were communications from Mars and Venus?” exclaimed Dora.

  “Well,” said Andrew, “at the time, I wondered. It’s a seductive idea. What else is God, really, but an extraterrestrial Being? But, finally, I decided not from both of them. That’s the flaw in the whole idea. If you’re getting signals from both, then it’s the equipment. He’s mad, of course. He told me one time, in Washington, that he was born at midnight in the middle of an electrical storm, and that lightning struck at the moment of his birth. Oh, I had a laugh over that, but Tesla was dead serious.”

  Dora and Margaret laughed, too.

  Andrew smoothed down his mustache and chuckled. “Megalomania, I call it.”

  “How were you born, then?” said Dora.

  “My dear, there are no legends to that effect, but perhaps, if I am to become famous, you could make one up for me.”

  “I might,” said Dora.

  “But he’s never shy about Einstein. He shows Einstein up to be a fraud, and people listen to him, as they should.” Andrew had begun talking about Einstein only that fall, but already the man was lodged in Andrew’s head. “If Einstein’s looked through a telescope, I’ll eat my hat. It’s all very well to imagine the universe was this way or that, but if you have never looked at the heavenly bodies, what good would such imaginings be?”

  Though it was late when they finished gossiping, Andrew accompanied Dora to the Vallejo ferry on his way to the observatory. Dora felt comfortable anywhere, and at any time of the day or night. She needed little sleep, and she felt no fear of wandering the streets, either in San Francisco or in Vallejo, which was a lively, tough town, full of sailors and shipbuilders and foreigners. “Well, darling,” she told Margaret, “I have a little something in my pocket. A last resort. Never had to try it except one night in Rome, with a gang of boys. They ran off in the end. If I need it, I will use it.” Margaret was sure this was a pistol of some kind. A Missourian never minded a pistol, even a woman from St. Louis.

  THE moon book had been a failure, according to Andrew. Yes, it had been published, and yes, it had been reviewed, mostly favorably, in The Astronomical Journal and Scientific American, and in Science, itself, as well as an obscure German journal and three newspapers. But the Attraction Theory had failed to displace the flaming-cucumber theory. “Drama is what they want, my dear,” said Andrew. The Attraction Theory had not gotten him off the island and over to Berkeley or down to Pasadena or back to Chicago, and he was restless, day and night. Another thing Margaret did not say to Dora was that their grief, hers for Alexander and Andrew’s for his moon book, did not make them more sympathetic to each other, but less. Their lives were mostly private now, lived side by side as necessary, but whatever there had been for them both—in the earthquake or the moon book or their hopes for Alexander—had dissipated the way certain qualities of light did. The reason she didn’t mention it was that Dora would have said, as the ladies in her knitting group would have said, what did she expect? Did she not know what marriage was? But she didn’t, did she? Except from listening to Lavinia’s tales of those early days, when she had only sons and no daughters.

  Andrew published another article in The Astronomical Journal, the first since the article about the craters. It was nothing about the moon—rather, he had rustled up his sets of double-star observations, made in Mexico so long ago, and he had attempted to coordinate these with observations made by other astronomers before and since, and to use the observations to propose a universe in which double stars were more common than single stars. The solar system, he thought, might be the remains of the sun’s former double. Although the mass of all the planets and their moons and the debris between Mars and Jupiter that had been (Andrew was certain) a planet was less than the mass of a star that would have equaled and balanced the sun, the difference could be accounted for by time and attrition. All of this sounded plausible to Margaret. Everyone knew the sort of effort it took to maintain a stable partnership, and why should stars be different from married people?

  On the whole, the reception of this article was positive, and two or three astronomers, plus a Mr. Akenbourn in South Africa, wrote him admiring letters.

  Then, one day (it was July, because Margaret was in the kitchen making strawberry jam and thinking about Lavinia, who had died at Christmas, and whom Margaret had seen only once since leaving Missouri, when Elizabeth and the girls had brought her out for a month’s visit; the visit hadn’t been terribly easy, with the girls only seven and five and Lavinia visibly failing; it had, in fact, been a sad and difficult visit, but Margaret was thinking about how to persuade Elizabeth to come again, grueling trip though it was; Lucy May was nine already, and Eloise, seven), she heard the shattering of a window. She stood stock-still in surprise, then went to Andrew’s door and knocked. No response. She opened the door.


  Andrew was red in the face and breathing hard. After the article appeared, Andrew had spent some of his money on a typewriter, and begun another project, much more important than the moon book. The typewriter was not easy to use, but it appealed to his pleasure in innovation. He attempted to master it off and on, though he railed against the arrangement of the keyboard, which had not been done according to any scientific principles that he could see. The typewriter had gone through the window and was lying out on the grass.

  She said, “Did the—,” but just then he picked up a copy of The Astronomical Journal and threw it down on the desk. She saw that he was not frustrated with the typewriter at all—the typewriter had simply been the nearest heavy object.

  She picked up the journal.

  The letter was right in the front, a long one, from a man named Dr. Martin Lovel, who worked at an observatory in Michigan. According to Dr. Lovel, he had worked with Andrew in Wisconsin, and knew, from both his own experience and his own inquiry into “the researches of Early,” that Andrew had falsified data both in Wisconsin and in Mexico, and then had covered up this “fraud” when confronted by Dr. Lovel while Dr. Lovel was “a mere graduate student.” Dr. Lovel had felt threatened by Andrew, who “was some nine or ten inches taller than I am” and “coldly angry.” And although Andrew had given Dr. Lovel a good reference, there had been several interchanges between them that could have been (and were) construed (by Dr. Lovel) as threatening—“I was given to understand, in private, by Dr. Early, that recognition of my work would not be forthcoming if I didn’t drop my accusations.” Nevertheless, upon seeing Andrew’s article in the spring, Dr. Lovel felt he had to protest—because Dr. Early’s theory rested on bad data, and though plausible on the surface, it was “rotten beneath.”