Private Life (15 page)

dance floor. However,
he
was not swinging
her
about--together, they were describing the

circle. Andrew had found 246 of these doubles, of which 103 were confirmed by others

and another thirteen were provisionally accepted. However, the remaining 130 were not

accepted by certain men who were temporarily influential in the world of astronomy. The

doubters would soon yield. "Herschel figured out that the solar system is moving through

space, toward the constellation of Hercules, and it took fifty-four years for him to be

proved correct." Andrew often spoke of Herschel, and with such fondness that it took

Margaret several months to understand that Sir William had died in 1822, some forty-five

years before Andrew himself was born. Andrew laughed his cheerful rumble. It was

Herschel who discovered Uranus, along with the satellites Titania and Oberon; it was he

who believed that Earth was not the only inhabited planet; it was he who named the

asteroid; it was he who discovered the existence of infrared radiation; it was he who

made many of the telescopes in use in England; it was he who would have ratified

Andrew's own discoveries, if only he had lived to see them. Double stars had once,

Andrew told her, been hurtling about space as the sun does, solitary, accompanied only

by random satellites, but these stars had exerted a pull on each other in passing and

captured each other.

Margaret's letters to Lavinia were long and cheerful. She listed all the new things

she was doing and thinking about. Lavinia usually wrote with her own news, but once she

said, "Andrew is an unusual man. I, for one, never doubted that you would rise to the

occasion. And in even the most ordinary marriages, Margaret, there are plenty of

occasions to rise to."

Andrew did not bother to celebrate Christmas, so Mrs. Lear asked her if he

believed in God; she had heard from someone on the base that he did not, and she had

never observed Andrew and Margaret going even to the nondenominational chapel. At

supper, Margaret asked him. He said, "Isaac Newton believed in God, my dear. He

looked out into the stars, and he saw that they were fixed, and he made up his mind that

God had set them there, just where they were, at the beginning of creation. He saw, too,

that the stars were so far away from Earth that the average man could not imagine how

far. And he could not help seeing that there were more stars in some parts of the sky than

in others, and so, eventually, he had to admit that it was going to be fixity or gravity, and

you could not have both. If the stars were not uniformly set into the sky, then they had to

move toward one another or away, and eventually the universe would change, and, he

thought, there might therefore be a universal collapse, as more and more stars gathered

together in one spot. And so, because he did not think that God would allow this sort of

thing, he decided that, from time to time, God puts the stars back where they should be,

as an Almighty should be able to do. Of course, then they must ask the question why God

set up the possibility of movement in the first place. Why not just make all the stars

equidistant and equally large and dense, so that they don't move?"

"Why not?" she said.

"Does God want to keep himself occupied?" Andrew took a bite of his ham steak

and shrugged. It was a rainy day, and their windows were shrouded with gray, but they

could hear the clanging and booming of ships being built a few hundred yards away.

Andrew shook his head, then said, "Simply because, not. Because that is a question not to

be asked."

"I

asked

it."

"You may ask it, of course, my dear. I don't mean it is forbidden, as there are no

forbidden questions. I simply mean it is not a question that I would ask. I am content to

know that the stars do move, and to leave aside, for the moment, the purpose of their

movement."

"So you don't believe in God?"

"I usually leave that question aside, too, but if you must have me respond to it,

and, indeed, must fit your conception of me into the world of the naval base here, where

Captain and Mrs. Lear and everyone else believe that God attends to their every thought

and action, and judges them day by day, then I would say that, at this point in my life, I

have come to understand God as a Being for whom it is my privilege to search, rather

than as one for whom it is my obligation to perform."

They ate quietly for a while. Then Andrew said, "Am I to assume that you

yourself believe in God, my dear?"

"My mother always said that the ways of God were not to be understood by

mortals, and I do believe that anyone from Missouri can understand her sentiment."

He nodded. It seemed that, from their different perspectives, Andrew and she

agreed on the subject, but when she spoke of this again to Mrs. Lear, Margaret said, "I

think he would say that God is different from religion." Mrs. Lear disagreed with this

sentiment, but their friendship was not affected.

One day, he borrowed a shotgun from Hubert Lear, and the two of them went off

on a walk to the western part of the island. They were gone all day. When they came

back, Andrew was as excited as she had ever seen him--he and Hubert Lear had taken

plenty of ammunition, but they had shot no squirrels or rabbits, they had shot only mud.

They had shot mud from many angles, including several times when Hubert climbed as

far up a tall tree as he could go, carrying the shotgun in a sling and the shells in a separate

sling, and from that height (some thirty feet, Andrew thought), Hubert had shot straight

down into the mud. After each shot into the mud, Andrew would inspect the holes the

shot made, and, he said, "Every single one of them looked like a crater on the moon, and

so, my dear, I see that the moon is being bombarded by shot of all sizes, and craters have

been formed, and many of them have remained pristine, just as when they were first

introduced into the surface."

He was exceptionally excited by this idea, and had written it up by the next day,

but he didn't send it to a journal that day, or the next day. It was still lying on his desk a

week later. When she asked about it, he declared that it wasn't ready, that it required more

thought. One evening, after he had gone to the observatory, she read it and replaced it on

the desk, at just the angle he had left it. It was clearly written, and the idea seemed simple

to her--beautiful, too, and fun, in its way, with Hubert up the tree shooting into the mud.

Anyone, she thought, could appreciate this idea. Still he wouldn't send it. The papers sat

on his desk just as she had left them, week after week.

FROM this, it was but a step to glancing into other papers that were lying around.

Andrew saved everything. At first the stacks were daunting, full of numbers and

equations and words that she didn't understand, like "parallax." But there were others as

carelessly left about--for example, an old note from one of his professors to the president

of the university in Columbia. It read, "Arrogant scoundrel. Stirs trouble among the

students. A monster of self-seeking impudence." There was no name in the letter, no real

indication of whom the professor was referring to, but of course, upon reading it, she

searched more assiduously, and soon enough found a packet of letters from Andrew to

his mother from those days.

In the first two years, he wrote only about his daily thoughts and occasional

pleasures and successes, as a boy away from home would. His tone was affectionate and

thoughtful, and Margaret was pleased at what she had found. In the spring of his second

year, though, he wrote, "Dearest Mother, I know you will be disappointed in me, but I

must report that I have done what it seemed proper for me to do at the time, and although

the consequences are not what I would have wished (and I hasten to report this to you, as

you will soon hear from others), I do not, as yet, regret my action, but I know that you

have frequently counseled me to conduct myself with more caution. I am writing to say

that I have failed to heed your advice, and will possibly be sent home from the college."

It emerged in subsequent letters that Andrew had paid three other students to cede to him

their allotted hours on the college telescope, a seven-and-a-half-inch model that he was

eager to master, and in order to cover this up, he had helped them falsify their

observations--letting them (or encouraging them to) copy his observations and present

them as their own work. This arrangement had obtained for some three months, until the

professor, growing suspicious of one and then another of the three students because of

their inability to reproduce the observations they said they had made but didn't seem to

remember, discovered it. Andrew then could not resist pointing out to the professor that

the observations were his, and were all of the first order--accurate as well as numerous

and "of better quality than the Professor's own work, which I of course would not have

said had I not spoken in haste, but the remark was nevertheless true, and if he had not

known it to be true, then he would not have offered to break my jaw for me." The other

students received failing grades, but Andrew had to receive an A--his observations were

indeed of the first quality. That professor, however, refused ever to work with Andrew

again, because he had been "deceptive." Margaret guessed that it was this man who had

written the original note. She could imagine their confrontation only too easily--Andrew

would have loomed over the professor, employed his natural eloquence, said things he

should not say, and in a deep and prideful voice. But Margaret was not entirely put off by

the incident--she appreciated his honesty and his remorse. And anyway, in the

intervening years, he had learned to govern his temper.

But her curiosity was piqued--after some days, she found herself rummaging in

his desk again. She brought this up in an oblique way with Mrs. Lear as they enjoyed a

bit of winter sunshine while sipping oolong tea on Mrs. Lear's porch. The boys were at

school, and Captain Lear was expected home any day. Mrs. Lear knew what she was

getting at as soon as she said the words "private papers." Mrs. Lear laughed. "Goodness

me!" she exclaimed. "Why should a husband's affairs be private from his wife? He might

easily find himself embroiled in more and more difficulties. I'm sure your mother would

tell you the same thing. Do you know Mrs. Rudolph? Perhaps not. Captain Rudolph

was"--she leaned forward and lowered her voice--"court-martialed. They lived in the

third house down. Dorothy Rudolph kept finding objects about the house, bejeweled

daggers and carved jade boxes and such, and she didn't have the sense to investigate their

origins. She didn't even look into Captain Rudoph's bank book, just held out her hand

once a week for household funds. He was stealing these things! Very strange. She might

have stopped him, but she didn't understand her conjugal responsibilities. My goodness,

Margaret! If there are papers to look into or drawers to open, then do it while you have

the time."

And so she opened and looked into.

After Andrew graduated from college at Columbia, some fifty miles from their

town, he went away to the University of Berlin, in Germany--everyone in town knew

this, because it redounded to the credit of the entire county. Andrew wrote, "But, dearest

Mother, if you think more deeply about the matter, you will see that there is nothing for

me at an American institution. It almost doesn't matter what 'work rumor has done

against' me--the resources your preferred institutions put into mathematics, or astronomy,

or even the sciences, altogether, are laughable when not shameful." And then, from

Berlin, he wrote, "They do think I am brilliant, dearest Mother. They do exclaim at how

quickly I have picked up the language and the customs. They do admire the precision of

my observations, but of course, they are hide-bound in their way, and very German and

very Jewish, some of them. They stick together. I am endeavoring to remember, as you

say, that all people stick with their own kind. And I am doing as you also bid me: I am

NOT voicing everything I think, and I am not letting my temper get the best of me, even

late at night, and I AM watching what I drink, because, as you say, it is evident that drink

affects ANGLO-SAXONS somewhat differently than it affects GERMANS. Even so,

they expected, they now say, to find once they got to know me, that I was ARMED at all

times!"

The letters from Germany were not as numerous as those from Columbia-"Darling Mother, my studies so enthrall me that weeks go by without my realizing. Just

to illustrate, I said to my friend Mauritz the other day, 'Isn't it about time for Easter?' And

he laughed and explained that it was already three weeks since Easter, and had I not

noticed that he was away visiting his family in Dusseldorf for five days around that

time?"

Andrew was industrious about seeking out mentors--"I have been to England and

met George Darwin! He was most kind to me, even after I told him (politely, dearest

Mother!) that I question some of his findings, but he said to me, 'That is what young men