Part 10

“Communication,” he answered. “She had to cut off communication, and once cut off it’s not easy to restore. At least that’s one aspect. Another is more tricky. The holdup happened more than a month ago, but do you suppose the affected mind reckons so precisely? Is a precise reckoning possible? Duration may, for all we know, be an entirely subjective thing. Yesterday for you may be today for me. We recognize this to some extent when we speak of hours passing slowly or quickly. The girl may still be undergoing the agony of repressing her screams; the holdup, the murders, are not in the past for her, but the present. They are taking place in a long drawn out instant of time which may never end during her life. And if this is so, is it any wonder she is unable to relax, to let down her guard long enough to realize that the present is present and the crisis is past?”

He pressed his middle thoughtfully. “Now, if it is possible to recreate in her mind by stimulus from without rather than by evocation from within the conditions leading up to and through the climacteric, she would have a chance to vent the emotions she was forced to swallow. She might, I don’t say she would, she might speak again.”

I understood such a process would necessarily be lengthy, but as time passed I saw no indication he was reaching her at all, much less that he was getting any results. One of the Spanish-speaking fellows, a botanist who came and went from the haven at erratic intervals, translated my account of our meeting and read parts of it to the recumbent girl, following Midbin’s excited stage directions and interpolations. Nothing happened.

Outside the futile duty of coaxing the girl to participate in Midbin’s sessions I had no obligations except those I took upon myself or could persuade others to delegate to me. Hiro Agati declared me hopelessly incompetent to help him in the kiln he had set up to make “hard glass,” a thick substance he hoped might take the place of cast iron in such things as woodstoves, or clay tile in flues. He conceded I was not entirely useless in the small garden surrounding their cottage where he, Mrs Agati—an architect, much younger than her husband and extremely diminutive—and their three children spent their spare time transplanting, rearranging, or preparing for the following season.

Dr Agati was not only the first American Japanese I had ever met; his was the first family I had known who broke the unwritten rule of having only one child. Both he and Kimi Agati seemed unaware of the stern injunctions by Whigs and Populists alike that disaster would follow if the population of the country increased too fast. Fumio and Eiko didnt care, while Yoshio, at two, was just not interested.

The Agatis represented for me one more pang at the thought of banishment from the haven. Since I knew neither chemistry nor architecture, our conversation had limits, but this was no drawback to the pleasure I took in their company. Often, after I was assured I was welcome there, I sat reading or simply silent while Hiro worked, the children ran in and out, and Kimi, who was conservative and didnt care for chairs, sat comfortably on the floor and sketched or calculated stresses.

Gradually I progressed from the stage where I wanted decision on my application postponed as long as possible to one where I was impatient to have it over and done with. “Why?” asked Hiro. “Suspense is the condition we live in all our lives.”

“Well, but there are degrees. You know about what you will be doing next year.”

“Do I? What guarantees have I? The future is happily veiled. When I was your age I despaired because no one would accept the indentures of a Japanese. (We are still called Japanese even though our ancestors migrated at the time of the abortive attempt to overthrow the Shogunate and restore the Mikado in 1868.) Suspense instead of certainty would have been a pleasure.”

“Anyway,” said Kimi practically, “it may be months before the next meeting.”

“What do you mean? Isnt there a set time for such business?” Sure there must be, I had never dared ask the exact date.

Hiro shook his head. “Why should there be? The next time the fellows pass on an appropriation or a project, we’ll decide whether there’s room for an historian.”

“But ... as Kimi says, it might not be for months.”

“Or it might be tomorrow,” replied Hiro.

“Don’t worry, Hodge,” said Fumio, “Papa will vote for you, and Mother too.”

Hiro grunted.

When it did come it was anticlimactic. Hiro, Midbin, and several others with whom I’d scarcely exchanged a word recommended me, and Barbara simply ignored my existence. I was a full fellow of Haggershaven, with all the duties and privileges appertaining. I was also securely at home for the first time since I left Wappinger Falls more than six years before. I knew that in all its history few had ever cut themselves off from the haven, still fewer had ever been asked to resign.

At a modest celebration in the big kitchen that night, the haven revealed more of the talents it harbored. Hiro produced a gallon of liquor he had distilled from sawdust and called cellusaki. Mr Haggerwells pronounced it fit for a cultivated palate, following with an impromptu discourse on drinking through the ages. Midbin sampled enough of it to imitate Mr. Haggerwells’ lecture and then, as an inspired afterthought, to demonstrate how Mr Haggerwells might mimic Midbin’s parody. Ace and three others sang ballads; even the dumb girl, persuaded to sip a little of the cellusaki under the disapproving eyes of her self-appointed guardians, seemed to become faintly animated. If anyone noted the absence of Barbara Haggerwells, no one commented on it.

Fall became winter. Surplus timber was hauled in from the woodlots and the lignin extracted by compressed air, a method perfected by one of the fellows. Lignin was the fuel used in our hot water furnaces and provided the gas for the reflecting jets which magnified a tiny flame into strong illumination. All of us took part in this work, but just as I had not been able to help Hiro to his satisfaction in the laboratory, so here too my ineptness with things mechanical soon caused me to be set to more congenial tasks in the stables.

I did not repine at this, for though I was delighted with the society of the others, I found it pleasurable to be alone, to sort out my thoughts, to slow down to the rhythm of the heavy percherons or enjoy the antics of the two young foals. The world and time were somewhere shut outside; I felt contentment so strong as to be beyond satisfaction or any active emotion.

I was currying a dappled mare one afternoon and reflecting how the steam-plow used on the great wheat ranches of British America deprived the farmers not merely of fertilizer but also of companionship, when Barbara, her breath still cloudy from the cold outside, came in and stood behind me. I made an artificial cowlick on the mare’s flank, then brushed it glossy smooth again.

“Hello,” she said.

“Uh ... hello, Miss Haggerwells.”

“Must you, Hodge?”

I roughed up the mare’s flank once more. “Must I what? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

She came close, as close as she had in the bookstore, and I felt my breath quicken. “I think you do. Why do you avoid me? And call me ‘Miss Haggerwells’ in that prim tone? Do I look so old and ugly and forbidding?”

This, I thought, is going to hurt Ace. Poor Ace, befuddled by a Jezebel; why can’t he attach himself to a nice quiet girl who won’t tear him in pieces every time she follows her inclinations?

I smoothed the mare’s side for the last time and put down the currycomb.

“I think you are the most exciting woman Ive ever met, Barbara,” I said.

_13._ _TIME_

“Hodge.”

“Barbara?”

“Is it really true youve never written your mother since you left home?”

“Why should I write her? What could I say? Perhaps if my first plans had come to something, I might have. But to tell her I worked for six years for nothing would only confirm her opinion of my lack of gumption.”

“I wonder if your ambitions in the end don’t amount to a wish to prove her wrong.”

“Now you sound like Midbin,” I said, but I wasnt annoyed. I much preferred her present questions to those I’d heard from her in the past weeks: Do you love me? Are you sure? Really love, I mean; more than any other woman? Why?

“Oliver has had accidental flashes of insight.”

“Arent you substituting your own for what you think might be my motives?”

“My mother hated me,” she stated flatly.

“Well, it isnt a world where love is abundant; substitutes are cheap and available. But hate—that’s a strong word. How do you know?” “I know. What does it matter how? I’m not unfeeling, like you.”

“Me? Now what have I done?”

“You don’t care about anyone. Not me or anyone else. You don’t want me; just any woman would do.”

I considered this. “I don’t think so, Barbara—” “See! You don’t think so. Youre not sure, and anyway you wouldnt hurt my feelings needlessly. Why don’t you be honest and tell the truth. You’d just as soon it was that streetwalker in New York. Maybe you’d rather. You miss her, don’t you?”

“Barbara, Ive told you a dozen times I never—” “And Ive told you a dozen times youre a liar! I don’t care. I really don’t care.”

“All right.”

“How can you be so phlegmatic? So unfeeling? Nothing means anything to you. Youre a real, stolid peasant. And you smell like one too, always reeking of the stable.”

“I’m sorry,” I said mildly; “I’ll try to bathe more often.”

Her taunts and jealous fits, her insistent demands did not ruffle me. I was too pleased with the wonders of life to be disturbed. All I’d dreamed Haggershaven could mean when I was sure I would never be part of it was fulfilled and more than fulfilled. Haggershaven and Barbara; Eden and Lilith.

At first it seemed the bookstore years were wasted, but I soon realized the value of that catholic and serendipitous reading as a preparation for this time. I was momentarily disappointed that there was no one at the haven to whom I could turn for that personal, face-to-face, student-teacher relationship on which I’d set so great a store, but if there was no historical scholar among the fellows to tutor me, I was surrounded by those who had learned the discipline of study. There was none to discuss the details of the industrial revolution or the failure of the Ultramontane Movement in Catholicism and the policies of Popes Adrian VII, VIII and IX, but all could show me scheme and method. I began to understand what thorough exploration of a subject meant as opposed to sciolism, and I threw myself into my chosen work with furious zest.

I also began to understand the central mystery of historical theory. When and what and how and where, but the when is the least. Not chronology but relationship is ultimately what the historian deals in. The element of time, so vital at first glance, assumes a constantly more subordinate character. That the past is past becomes ever less important. Except for perspective it might as well be the present or the future or, if one can conceive it, a parallel time. I was not investigating a petrification but a fluid. Were it possible to know fully the what and how and where one might learn the why, and assuredly if one grasped the why he could place the when at will.

During that winter I read philosophy, psychology, archaeology, anthropology. My energy and appetite were prodigious, as they needed to be. I saw the field of knowledge, not knowledge in the abstract, but things I wanted to know, things I had to know, expanding in front of me with dizzying speed while I crawled and crept and stumbled over ground I should have covered years before.

Yet if I had studied more conventionally I would never have had the Haven or Barbara. Novelists speak lightly of gusts of passion, but it was nothing less than irresistible force which drove me to her, day after day. Looking back on what I had felt for Tirzah Vame with the condescension twenty-four has toward twenty, I saw my younger self only as callow, boyish and slightly obtuse. I was embarrassed by the torments I had suffered.

With Barbara I lived only in the present, shutting out past and future. This was only partly due to the intensity, the fierceness of our desire; much came from Barbara’s own troubled spirit. She herself was so avid, so demanding, that yesterday and tomorrow were irrelevant to the insistent moment. The only thing saving me from enslavement like poor Ace was the belief, correct or incorrect I am to this day not certain, that to yield the last vestige of detachment and objectivity would make me helpless, not just before her, but to accomplish my ever more urgent ambitions.

Still I know much of my reserve was unnecessary, a product of fear, not prudence. I denied much I could have given freely and without harm; my guard protected what was essentially empty. My fancied advantage over Ace, based on my having always had an easy, perhaps too easy way with women, was no advantage at all. I foolishly thought myself master of the situation because her infidelities, if such a word can be used where faithfulness is explicitly ruled out, did not bother me. I believed I had grown immensely wise since the time when the prospect of Tirzah’s rejection had made me miserable. I was wrong; my sophistication was a lack, not an achievement

Do I need to say that Barbara was no wanton, moved by light and fickle voluptuousness? The puritanism of our time, expressing itself in condemnations and denials, molded her as it molded our civilization. She was driven by urges deeper and darker than sensuality; her mad jealousies were provoked by an unappeasable need for constant reassurance. She had to be dominant, she had to be courted by more than one man; she had to be told constantly what she could never truly believe: that she was uniquely desired.

I wondered that she did not burn herself out, not only with conflicting passions, but with her fury of work. Sleep was a weakness she despised, yet she craved far more of it than she allowed herself; she rationed her hours of unconsciousness and drove herself relentlessly. Ace’s panegyrics on her importance as a physicist I discounted, but older and more objective colleagues spoke of her mathematical concepts, not merely with respect, but with awe.

She did not discuss her work with me; our intimacy stopped short of such exchanges. I got the impression she was seeking the principles of heavier-than-air flight, a chimera which had long intrigued inventors. It seemed a pointless pursuit, for it was manifest such levitation could no more replace our safe, comfortable guided balloons than minibiles could replace the horse.

Spring made all of us single-minded farmers until the fields were plowed and sown. No one grudged these days, for the Haven’s economic life was based first of all on its land, and we were happy in the work itself. Not until the most feverish competition with time began to slacken could we return to our regular activities.

I say “all of us,” but I must except the dumb girl. She greeted the spring with the nearest approach to cheerfulness she had displayed; there was a distinct lifting of her apathy. Unexpectedly she revealed a talent which had survived the shock to her personality or had been resurrected like the pussywillows and crocuses by the warm sun. She was a craftsman with needle and thread. Timidly at first, but gradually growing bolder, she contrived dresses of gayer and gayer colors in place of the drab school uniform; always, on the completion of a new creation, running to me as though to solicit my approval.

This innocent if embarrassing custom could hardly escape Barbara’s notice, but her anger was directed at me, not the girl. My “devotion” was not only absurd, she told me, it was also conspicuous and degrading. My taste was inexplicable, running as it did to immature, deranged cripples.

Naturally when the girl took up the habit of coming to the edge of the field where I was plowing, waiting gravely motionless for me to drive the furrow toward her, I anticipated still further punishment from Barbara’s tongue. The girl was not to be swayed from her practice; at least I did not have the heart to speak roughly to her, and so she daily continued to stand through the long hours watching me plow, bringing me a lunch at noon and docilely sharing a small portion of it.

The planting done, Midbin began the use of a new technique, showing her drawings of successive stages of the holdup, again nagging and pumping me for details to sharpen their accuracy. Her reactions pleased him immensely, for she responded to the first ones with nods and the throaty sounds we recognized as understanding or agreement. The scenes of the assault itself, of the shooting of the coachman, the flight of the footman, and her own concealment in the cornfield evoked whimpers, while the brutal depiction of the Escobars’ murder made her cower and cover her eyes.

I suppose I am not particularly tactful; still I had been careful not to mention any of this to Barbara. Midbin, however, after a very gratifying reaction to one of the drawings, said casually, “Barbara hasnt been here for a long time. I wish she would come back.”

When I repeated this she stormed at me. “How dare you discuss me with that ridiculous fool?”

“Youve got it all wrong. There wasnt any discussion. Midbin only said—” “I know what Oliver said. I know his whole silly vocabulary.”

“He only wants to help you.”

“Help me? Help _me_? What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing, Barbara. Nothing.”

“Am I dumb or blind or stupid?”

“Please, Barbara.”

“Just unattractive. I know. Ive seen you with that creature. How you must hate me to flaunt her before everyone!”

“You know I only go with her to Midbin’s because he insists.”

“What about your little lovers’ meetings in the woodlot when you were supposed to be plowing? Do you think I didnt know about them?”

“Barbara, I assure you they were perfectly harmless. She—” “Youre a liar. More than that, youre a sneak and a hypocrite. Yes, and a mean, crawling sycophant as well. I know you must detest me, but it suits you to suffer me because of the haven. I’m not blind; youve used me, deliberately and calculatedly for your own selfish ends.”

Midbin could explain and excuse her outbursts by his “emotional pathology.” Ace accepted and suffered them as inescapable, so did her father, but I saw no necessity of being always subject to her tantrums. I told her so, adding, not too heatedly I think, “Maybe we shouldn’t see each other alone after this.”

She stood perfectly immobile and silent, as if I were still speaking. “All right,” she said at last. “All right; yes ... yes. Don’t.”

Her apparent calm deceived me completely; I smiled with relief.

“That’s right, laugh. Why shouldnt you? You have no feelings, no more than you have an intelligence. You are an oaf, a clod, a real bumpkin. Standing there with a silly grin on your face. Oh I hate you! How I hate you!”

She wept, she shrilled, she rushed at me and then turned away, crying she hadnt meant it, not a word of it. She cajoled, begging forgiveness for all she’d said, tearfully promising to control herself after this, moaning that she needed me, and finally, when I didnt repulse her, exclaiming it was her love for me which tormented her so and drove her to such scenes. It was a wretched, degrading moment, and not the least of its wretchedness and degradation was that I recognized the erotic value of her abjection. Detachedly I might pity, fear or be repelled; at the same time I had to admit her sudden humility was exciting.

Perhaps this storm changed our relationship for the better, or at least eased the constraint between us. At any rate it was after this she began speaking to me of her work, putting us on a friendlier, less furious plane. I learned now how completely garbled was my notion of what she was doing.

“Heavier-than-air flying-machines!” she cried. “How utterly absurd!”

“All right. I didnt know.”

“My work is theoretical. I’m not a vulgar mechanic.”

“All right, all right.”

“I’m going to show that time and space are aspects of the same entity.”

“All right,” I said, thinking of something else.

“What is time?”

“Uh?... Dear Barbara, since I don’t know anything I can slide gracefully out of that one. I couldnt even begin to define time.”

“Oh, you could probably define it all right—in terms of itself. I’m not dealing with definitions but concepts.”

“All right, conceive.”

“Hodge, like all stuffy people your levity is ponderous.”

“Excuse me. Go ahead.”

“Time is an aspect.”

“So you mentioned. I once knew a man who said it was an illusion. And another who said it was a serpent with its tail in its mouth.”

“Mysticism.” The contempt with which she spoke the word brought a sudden image of Roger Tyss saying “metaphysics” with much the same inflection. “Time, matter, space and energy are all aspects of the cosmic entity. Interchangeable aspects. Theoretically it should be possible to translate matter into terms of energy and space into terms of time; matter-energy into space-time.”

“It sounds so simple I’m ashamed of myself.”

“To put it so crudely the explanation is misleading: suppose matter is resolved into its component....”

“Atoms?” I suggested, since she seemed at loss for a word.

“No, atoms are already too individualized, too separate. Something more fundamental than atoms. We have no word because we can’t quite grasp the concept yet. Essence, perhaps, or the theological ‘spirit.’ If matter....”

“A man?”

“Man, turnip or chemical compound,” she answered impatiently; “if resolved into its essence it can presumably be reassembled, another wrong word, at another point of the time-space fabric.”

“You mean ... like yesterday?”

“No—and yes. What is ‘yesterday’? A thing? An aspect? An idea? Or a relationship? Oh, words are useless things; even with mathematical symbols you can hardly.... But someday I’ll establish it. Or lay the groundwork for my successors. Or the successors of my successors.” I nodded. Midbin was at least half right; Barbara was emotionally sick. For what was this “theory” of hers but the rationalization of a daydream, the daydream of discovering a process for reaching back through time to injure her dead mother and so steal all of her father’s affections?

_14._ _MIDBIN’S EXPERIMENT_

At the next meeting of the fellows Midbin asked an appropriation for experimental work and the help of haven members in the project. Since the extent of both requests was modest, their granting would ordinarily have been a formality. But Barbara asked politely if Dr Midbin wouldnt like to elaborate a little on the purposes of his experiment.

I knew her manner was a danger signal. Nevertheless Midbin merely answered goodhumoredly that he proposed to test a theory of whether an emotionally induced physical handicap could be cured by recreating in the subject’s mind the shock which had caused—to use a loose, inaccurate term—the impediment.

“I thought so. He wants to waste the haven’s money and time on a little tart he’s having an affair with while important work is held up for lack of funds.”