Roger's Version (15 page)

Dale, seated again, reached out and took her onto his knees.

Verna’s head slowly rotated on its strong neck and she said, “Great place, Nunc. You professors do all right for yourselves.”

“It’s all a question of seniority,” I explained. Actually, Esther’s father had been generous.

The fire crackled, and abruptly tumbled upon itself in a spurt of sparks. Richie got up and rearranged the logs with the tongs. Paula leaned forward from Dale’s lap toward a silver cigarette case that Esther’s father, whose name is Arnold Prince, had given us on our fifth anniversary. He, an Albany widower, had “done well,” as they say, and after five years of docile marriage we had earned this sign of blessing; also from then on he, in princely fashion, had begun to release to Esther fractions of her inheritance, giving her a certain nimbus of independence and added value. We had married at a civil affair in Troy, New York, the city nearest the town that had housed our scandal. What a decided pleasure, really, it had been, affronting public opinion: as sweet as returning soldiers sometimes admit the act of killing to be, as sweet as we know the discomfort and failure of others to taste. Yet fourteen years later I had slipped into conformity of a slightly reshuffled sort, my father-in-law’s blessing, as represented by his polished gift, clutched in the slippery grip of my mulatto grand-niece.

I asked Verna, “Could I get you anything to drink?”

She said, “Oh, Lordy, yes, Uncle Roger. I thought you’d never ask. I’d love a Black Russian.”

“Uh—what goes into it? Vodka and—”

“Kahlúa.”

“As I feared. We don’t have any Kahlúa.”

“How about a Grasshopper, then?”

“And
its
ingredients are—?”

“Oh, come on. Guess.” Was she playing with me?

“Crème de menthe?”

“To be sure; but then I don’t know what-all they put in on top of it. Real cream, I know, and some other crème de something. Then they shake it all up with cracked ice and pour it into a cocktail glass and put it on the bar. It’s delicious, Nunc; haven’t you ever had one?”

“When do you go to all these fancy bars?” Dale asked her, from the settee. His big hands were cupped to keep the cigarette case from being dropped on the glass table. Paula was sucking one silver corner of the lid, which she had pried open. A wad of tinted, dried-up English Ovals had fallen out; they had been in there since our faculty party last May.

Verna smirked and preened at him, for having asked, and glanced sideways at me, sensing that I was interested. “They don’t have to be all that fancy; the one down at the end of Prospect, with the burnt-out upstairs, makes a great Grasshopper.”

“Who takes you there?” Dale asked, which is what I had wanted to ask.

“Oh … guys. What’s it to you? A girl’s gotta have
some
fun, you know.”

“Like the song says,” Richie said, amused at himself for thinking of it, and cocky from handling the fire competently.

“Right,” Verna said, to Dale. “Like the man says, like the song says.”

There was in her manner something of learned vulgarity, imitated, I supposed, from punk girl singers, and from Cher and Bette Midler—from a certain vein of American brass going back at least to the Andrews Sisters.

“I could make you a Bloody Mary,” I suggested.

“That’d be great,” she drawled to me, as if to a bartender she was flirting with, to annoy the guy who had brought her.

A great concussion filled the room—possessed it, from Bokhara rug up to dentil ceiling molding. Paula had dropped the cigarette case upon the glass table. Dale and Richie looked startled and guilty; Verna, who had been lighting a cigarette, sighed so the match went out, and then struck another. “See, Nunc?” she said. “She’s a bitch.”

I went over and said, “No harm done,” though my keen eyes detected an insect-shaped scratch on the glass, and a bent corner of fine sterling. I polished the case as best I could on my tweed coat sleeve, and dumped back in the tinted cigarettes, so desiccated that several of them broke in my fingers.

In the kitchen, Esther was wrestling with the food; her hair was flying apart, shedding its pins. She grimaced at me like Medusa and said, “Never again!” She says that every year, at Thanksgiving.

When I came back with Verna’s drink and another glass of wine for myself, the young people had gone into a huddle by the table, and were muttering in a language I didn’t know. Youth: the mountain range that isolates it in a valley far from our own grows steeper, I think, as capitalism ever more ferociously exploits it as a separate market, beaming at it whole new worlds of potential expenditure—home video games and rear-entry ski boots and a million bits of quasi-musical whining cut by laser into compact discs. Ever more informational technique, ever more inane information. I saw that they were huddled because Dale was sketching on the back of an envelope little boxes connected by lines. The envelope, I noted in my sociological mood, was the telephone company’s: our nation’s trust-busting guardians broke up AT&T, with the result that our bills have become as bulky as love letters, and the line
crackles like Rice Krispies when we pick up the receiver. I saw that the boxes had words in them:
OR, AND, NOT
. The rudiments of the new Gospel. “And you see,” Dale was saying, primarily to Richie, but Verna and even Paula appeared to be also listening as his pencil point raced along the lines, “a current and no current, a one and a zero in terms of the binary code, will give a hot output from the
OR
and not from the
AND
, but if the
AND
output then goes into a
NOT
, it comes out—”

“Hot,” Verna said, since my dear Richie was silent, baffled. Young male heads, seen from above, so oval and shaggy and blind, invite in their helplessness a ruffling. The boy looked up at my fatherly touch with a scowl of annoyance. He was with older youth now and wanted to succeed, to blend in. I gave Verna her Bloody Mary.

“Right,” Dale said. “And if instead of a single bit we put four together, in a half-byte, so it looks like this”—he scribbled some zeros and ones; his handwriting was messy and displeasing, as that of scientists for some reason tends to be, as if precision of thought precludes that of presentation, and
vice versa
, clergymen, especially Episcopalians, invariably sporting fine italic hands—“and then another, which looks like this, what is going to come out of the
OR
circuit?”

After a pause during which Richie was given a chance to answer, Verna offered in her scratchy voice, “Oh one one one.”

“Hey, you got it!” Dale exclaimed. “And out of an
AND
circuit, the same input?”

“Simple,” she said. “Oh oh oh one.”

“O.K.! And, Richie, if the
OR
circuit was then linked up to a
NOT
?”

“One oh oh oh,” I pronounced from above, after the silence had become painful.

“Obviously,” Dale said, still sketching. “And you can all see
how with just these three simple switches, or gates, you can set up any complexity of ins and outs to analyze your input. For example, you can run these same two four-bit numbers into
AND
gates along with their own inverses, produced in these
NOTS
here, and then take those two outputs through an
OR
; what the output tells you, oh one one oh, is where the original inputs agreed: it’s cold where they did and hot where they didn’t.”

“Neat,” Verna said. Half her Bloody Mary was already drunk. She was now smoking one of the English Ovals, a mauve-tinted one.

“You should be going to school,” I told her.

“That’s what I keep telling her,” Dale said.

“Tell it to Poopsie here,” she said.

“Eedy-da,” Paula uttered, clutching at Dale’s paper with saliva-slippery fingers and rumpling it.

He retrieved the paper, smoothed it, and prepared with his pencil point to attack our ignorance still again. “Not to overdo,” he said, “but this gets us right into Boolean algebra, and it’s so beautiful you’ve got to get at least an inkling. Boole was some guy in the middle of the nineteenth century who developed an algebra for dealing with logical concepts, true-false statements basically, but it turns out to be just the math you need for the circuitry inside computers. An
OR
gate, for example, really adds, in the terms of Boolean algebra, where one plus one isn’t two or zero, as you might think from the binary base, but one; I mean, positive plus positive is still positive. And an
AND
gate multiplies, really, when you think that anything times zero has to be zero, and so it takes two positives to produce a positive. What the
NOT
gate does is invert, really, so you write that with a hat like this over the number: the inverse of zero equals one, and vice versa. And that’s basically all Boolean algebra does; but there’re a lot of theorems
that follow from these basics, and it’s amazing what you can do. It tends to look confusing, but it’s simple at heart.”

“In a pig’s eye it is,” Verna said, a little blearily now. Richie had already eased away and was back to poking the fire: carbohydrates sinking back into the carbon atoms compounded in the heart of a star millions and millions of years ago. I thought of Dale’s pencil point. Had the universe really been once that small? “Don’t poke it too much,” I warned my son. “You’ll make it go out.”

“We’re about to eat anyway,” Esther said, from the archway. She came closer in her zigzagging green velvet and said to Dale, “I was listening, a little bit, to your lesson. It sounded fascinating. I was wondering, would you ever like to come, say once a week, and tutor Richie? He’s having a terrible time with bases.”

“
Mom
, I’m
not
,” the boy protested. “Nobody in class is getting it, the teacher is lousy.”

“The teacher is black,” Esther told Dale.

“That shouldn’t make any difference,” Verna said quickly.

“I know,” Esther sighed. “One of these young black women with some third-rate education that these expensive liberal schools feel they have to hire. I’m all for it in principle, but not when it’s making the children stupid.”

“Richie’s not stupid,” Dale said, entering the silence Esther had stunned into being with her illiberal declaration. “I’d be happy to tutor him, if we can find a time. My hours are kind of funny, with the time-sharing and all. For my graphics I have to split a VAX 8600 with a girl doing pattern recognitions.”

“I’m sure,” Esther stated airily, “we can find an hour to suit our mutual conveniences. Richie, come help me lift the turkey out.” Peremptory, unrepentant, full of electricity, she turned her back on all of us.

“Nunc?” A small reedy voice poked softly at my side.
“D’you think we could sneak another Bloody Mary in before all that food descends?”

Throughout the meal, the endless oppressive Thanksgiving feast that squeezes breath from the chest and all space of maneuver from the mind, I was conscious not only of Verna, whose sallow flesh with such confident indolence pressed against the bulging wool of her red dress, and whose flitting gestures and casual declarations seemed to my wine-tinted awareness infinitely if vaguely promising, but of Esther as seen through the eyes of Dale Kohler: an older woman, petite and wearily wise, yet with a maternal depth of tolerance and nurture beneath her crisp, taut-pulled manner.

“Does anybody want to say grace?” she had asked, the meal arrayed.

She knew it pained me to, though I could manage. The old words would roll, once my rusty mouth flopped open. I had actually composed the opening phrase and bowed my head when Dale’s eager voice broke in: “I’d be happy to, if nobody else wants to.”

Who could object? We were his helpless victims, cannibals to his missionary. He made us all hold hands. His evangelism had been learned in a folksy, nasal school. My ears shut as his words droned upward, in that voice we hear all the time over at the Divinity School, the singsong voice of homegrown Christian piety: believing souls are trucked in like muddy, fragrant cabbages from the rural hinterland and in three years of fine distinctions and exegetical quibbling we have chopped them into cole slaw salable at any suburban supermarket. We take in saints and send out ministers, workers in the vineyard of inevitable anxiety and discontent. The death of Christianity has been long foreseen but there will always be churches
to serve as storehouses for the perennial harvest of human unhappiness.

A few of Dale’s words bored into my brain, some kind of remembrance, before we stuffed our faces, of all the starving and homeless in the world, particularly East Africa and Central America, and my mind skidded off into wondering whether the UNICEF God Who would respectfully receive such prayers were not a frightful anticlimax to those immense proofs via megastar and mammoth tusk, and skidded further into thinking of meals and betrayals—the salt spilled by Judas, the chronic diet of Cronus, dinners whipped up by Clytemnestra and Lady Macbeth, the circle of betrayal established wherever more than two or three gather or a family sits down as one. Verna’s hand was in my right hand and she had a rapid pulse; Richie’s was in my left and there was heat here, too, the Oedipal animus, and on my side paternal coolness, the tigerish tendency to view the cub, once born, as a competitor as pleasant to extinguish as any other. A competitor born, furthermore, into the heart of one’s own turf, which he fills with his electronic static and smelly socks and ravenous ill-educated appetite for what our cretinous popular culture assures him are the world’s good things. Emerson was right, we all have cold hearts. And my frosty mind, as Dale’s voice breathily aspired toward its final curlicue of blessing upon this food about to be so guiltily digested, skidded out of our house entirely, into the Kriegmans’, whom I imagined, as Jews and atheists, to be taking the day more lightly, without any of the spiritual cholesterol implicit in our Puritan forefathers’ self-congratulation, and to be having more fun. Jews are probably right: one Testament is enough. There were, in fact, quite a lot of Jewish converts to Christianity initially, but when the Messiah failed to reappear, as firmly promised to the first generation, and as an additional disappointment the Temple
was destroyed in the year 70, they quite sensibly lost heart and let the Greeks take control of the expanding operation.