All Those Vanished Engines (25 page)

When I was a child I kept the thought of this velvet pouch as a picture in my mind, and referred to it mentally whenever I heard a story about something large contained in something small, as often happens in fairy tales. I had seen it briefly, when my grandfather had first pressed it into my hands. It was about six inches long, red velvet worn away along the seams. Some of the stitches on the “T” and the “h” had come undone.

But I wondered, when I was young, was I special in any way? Perhaps it was my specialness that could explain my failures, then and always. At a certain moment, we cannot but hope, the ordinary markers of success will show themselves to be fraudulent, irrelevant, diversionary. All those cheating hucksters, those athletes and lovers, those trusted businessmen and competent professionals, those good fathers, good husbands, and good providers will hang their heads in shame while the rest of us stand forward, unapologetic at long last.

Thinking these inspirational thoughts, in the third week of September—the third sequence of ember days of the liturgical year, as I had learned from various Wikipedias—I drove up to the Park-McCullough house again. As usual that summer and fall, I had not been able to fall asleep in my own bed. Past two o'clock in the morning, Theodora Park's velvet purse in my pocket, I sidled up to each of the mansion's doors in turn, and tried the second key I had found among the roots of the willow. Some windows on the upper floor were broken. Ghosts, I thought, were wandering through the building and the grounds, but I couldn't get the key to work. Defeated, I stepped back from the porte cochere; it was a warm night. Bugs blundered in the beam of my flashlight. The trees had grown up over the years, and it was too much to expect that a ship or dirigible would find the space to land here safely. The same could be said of Bartlett Hill in Preston, which I had visited many years before. Logged and cleared during colonial times, now it was covered with second- or third-growth forest. From the crest overlooking the Avery-Parke cemetery, you could barely see the lights and spires of Foxwoods casino, rising like the Emerald City only a few miles away. I found myself wondering if the casino was still there, and if the “ruind hutts of the Pecuods” had “burst afire” as a result of the ship coming down, or as some kind of signal to indicate a landing site. Whichever, it was certainly interesting that in Robert Claiborne's account of the battle on the French-style mansion's lawn, “the roof of the house had caught on fire.”

Interesting, but not conclusive. As a scholar, I was trained to discount these seductive similarities. I had not yet dared to unbutton the velvet pouch or slip my hand inside, but with my hand firmly in my pocket I stepped back through the broken, padlocked, wrought-iron fence and stumbled back to the main road, where I had left my car. And because, like three-quarters of the faculty at Williams College, I was on unpaid leave for the fall semester, I thought I would drive down to Richmond and see Adrian, who was now thirty years old—a milestone. That was at least my intention. I had a reliable automobile, one of the final hydrogen-cell, solar-panel hybrids before Toyota discontinued exports. I would take Route 2 to 87, making a wide semicircle around the entire New York City area, before rejoining 95 in central New Jersey. I would drive all night. There'd be no traffic to speak of, except the lines of heavy trucks at all the checkpoints.

So let's just say I went that way. Let's just say it was possible to go. And let's just say that nothing happened on that long, dark drive, until morning had come.

Beyond the Delaware Bridge I saw the army convoys headed south along I-95. North of Baltimore it became clear I couldn't continue much farther, because there was no access to Washington. There were barricades on the interstate, and flashing lights. Shortly before noon I got off the 695 bypass to drive through Baltimore itself—sort of a nostalgia tour, because Nicola and I had lived on North Calvert Street and 31st, near the Johns Hopkins campus, when Adrian was born. I drove past the line of row houses without stopping. Most of them were boarded up, which could not fail to depress me and throw me back into the past. I took a left and turned into the east gate of the Homewood campus. I wanted to see if my old ID would still get me into the Eisenhower library, so I parked and gave it a try. It was a bright, cool day, and I was cheered to see a few students lying around the lawn.

I needn't have worried—there was no one at the circulation desk. Once inside the library, I took the stairs below street level to one of the basements, a peculiar place that I remembered from the days when I had taught at the university. The electricity wasn't functioning, but some vague illumination came from the airshafts, and I had my flashlight. With some difficulty I made my way toward the north end of that level, where a number of books by various members of my family were shelved in different sections that nevertheless came together in odd proximity around an always-deserted reading area. Within a few steps from those dilapidated couches you could find a rare copy of Robert W. Claiborne's book
How Man Learned Music.
A few shelves farther on there were six or seven volumes by his son, my uncle, on popular science or philology. In the opposite direction, if you didn't mind stooping, you would discover three books on autism by Clara Claiborne Park, while scarcely a hundred feet away there were a whole clutch of my father's physics textbooks and histories of science. Still on the same level it was possible to unearth Edwin Avery Park's tome (Harcourt, Brace, 1927) on modernist architecture,
New Backgrounds for a New Age,
as well as the
Handbook of Simplified Spelling
(1920), by my great-grandfather, Henry Gallup Paine—an oddly Utopian piece of writing. Filling out the last corner of a rough square, at comfortable eye level, in attractive and colorful bindings, stood a row of my own novels, including
A Princess of Roumania.
It was one of the few that had come out while I was living in Baltimore, and I was touched to see they had continued to acquire the later volumes either out of loyalty or bureaucratic inertia—certainly not from need—up to the point where everything turned digital.

It is such a pleasure to pick up a book and hold it. I will never get used to reading something off a screen. I gathered together an assortment of texts and went back to the reading area, rectangular vinyl couches around a square table. Other people had been there recently; there were greasy paper bags, and a bedroll, and a gallon jug of water. The tiled floor was marred with ashes and charred sticks, and the skylight was dark with soot. But I had proprietary instincts, and would not be deterred. I put down my leather satchel and laid the books down in a pile, squared the edges, and with my flashlight in my hand I played a game I hadn't played in years, since the last time I was in that library.

The game was called “trajectories,” my personal version of the
I Ching.
I would choose at random various sentences and paragraphs, hoping to combine them into a kind of narrative, or else whittle them into an arrow of language that might point into the future. For luck I took Cousin Theo's velvet pouch out of my pocket, ran my thumb along the worn places. I did not dare unbutton it, thinking, as usual, that whatever had once been inside of it had probably dried up and disappeared. The pouch, I imagined, was as empty as Pandora's box or even emptier. How big was a caul, anyway? How long did it take for it to crumble into dust?

I set to work. Here was my first point of reference, from my uncle Bob (Robert W. Jr.) Claiborne's book on human evolution,
God or Beast
(Norton, 1974), page 77:

… To begin with, then, in that the women to whom I have been closest during my lifetime have all of them been bright, intellectually curious, and independent-minded. My mother was involved in the women's rights movement before World War I, and until her retirement worked at administrative jobs; at this writing she is, at eighty-six, still actively interested in people, ideas, and public affairs. My sister is a college teacher and author.…

Given this sort of background, it will probably not surprise the reader much to learn that for most of my life I have preferred the company of women—interesting ones—to that of men. Not just some of my best friends but nearly all of them have been women. Evolution and genetics aside, then, I obviously find women distinctly different from men—and so far as I am concerned, vive la difference!

And on page 84:

Thus it seems to me very probable that human males possess a built-in tolerance for infants and young children, as well as a built-in interest in them and capacity to become emotionally involved with them—a conclusion that seems wholly consistent with what we know about human societies. I would also suspect that, like both baboon and chimp males, the human male has a less powerful tendency to become involved with the young than does the female. I can't prove this, and indeed am not certain that it can ever be either proved or disproved. Nonetheless, it seems to me at least arguable that the emotional rewards of fatherhood are somewhat less than those of motherhood. Be that as it may, however, the rewards exist and I, for one, would hate to have forgone them.

In these passages I could see in my uncle a wistful combination of pedantry and 1960s masculinity. As I read, I remembered him telling me about a trip to visit his father in the Virgin Islands when he was a teenager. He had found him living with an alumnus of the music school, a boy also named Robert, whom he had already passed off to the neighbors as his son, Robert Jr. Loud and gleeful, sitting on his leather sofa in the West Tenth Street apartment, my uncle had described the farcical misunderstandings and logistical contortions that had accompanied his stay.

But what about this, a few more pages on? Here in the flashlight's small tight circle, when I brought it close:

The point bears repetition, because it is important, and because no one else is willing to make it. (I've checked.) …

I thought this was a promising place to start, and so I laid the book down, picked up another at random. It was
The Grand Contraption,
a book about comparative cosmologies that my father—the husband, as it happens, of the “college teacher and author” mentioned above—published in 2005. Here's what he had to say to me, on page 142:

Once more the merchant looked around him. Far away on the road someone walked toward the hill, but there was still time. A little smoke still came out of the eastern pot. There was no sound but he went on, softly reciting Our Father. He crossed himself, stepped into the center of the triangle, filled his lungs, and bellowed into the quiet air, “Make the chair ready!”

But it is time for us to leave the demons alone. Even if supernatural beings are an important part of many people's vision of the world, they belong to a different order of nature and should be allowed some privacy.

I didn't think so. Looking up momentarily, glancing down the long dark layers of books, reflecting briefly on the diminished condition of the world, it didn't occur to me that privacy was in short supply. It didn't occur to me that it had any value whatsoever, since a different order of nature was what I was desperate to reveal.

But I was used to these feelings of ambivalence. Leafing forward through the book, I remembered how studiously my father had competed with his own children. After my sister started publishing her own histories of science, he switched from physics to a version of the same field, claiming it was the easier discipline, and therefore suitable to his waning powers. Princeton University Press had been her publisher before it was his. And after I had started selling science-fiction stories in the 1980s, he wrote a few himself. He sent them off to the same magazines, claiming that he wanted to start out easy, just like me. Though unprintable, all his stories shared an interesting trait—they started out almost aggressively conventional, before taking an unexpected science-fiction turn. At the time I'd wondered if he was trying to mimic aspects of my style. If so, could it be true that he had found no emotional rewards in fatherhood?

Disappointed by this line of thought, I glanced down at the book again, where my thumb had caught. The beam of the flashlight, a red rim around a yellow core, captured these words: “The point bears repetition.”

That was enough. I closed
The Grand Contraption
with a bang that reverberated through the library. Apprehensive, I shined the light back toward the stairway, listening for an answering noise.

After a moment, to reassure myself, I opened a novel written by my father's mother, Frances, Edwin Avery Park's first wife. It was called
Walls Against the Wind,
and had been published by Houghton Mifflin. On the strength of the advance, my grandmother had taken my father on a bicycle tour through Western Ireland in 1935. This, from the last pages:

“I'm going to Moscow,” Miranda told him. “They have another beauty and a different God—” The tones of her voice were cool as spring rain. “It's what I have to do. It's all arranged.”

“Yes … I wish you'd understand.”

“I'm going almost immediately. I'm going to work there and be part of it.” Her voice came hard and clipped like someone speaking into a long-distance telephone. “Will you come to Russia with me?” she challenged her brother. “Will you do that?”

Adrian flung back his head, unexpectedly meeting her challenge. His eyes were blue coals in the white fire of his face.

“All right,” he said. “I'll go with you.”

She wanted them to go to Russia. It was the only thing she wanted to do. There was a fine clean world for them there, with hard work and cold winters. It was the kind of world she could dig into and feel at home in. She did not want to live in softness with Adrian. Only in the clean cold could the ripe fruit of his youth keep firm and fresh. She gave him her hand across the table. Perhaps it would work out—some way. Russia. In Russia, she thought, anything can happen.…