The Syme Papers (65 page)

In, it should be said, increasing desperation. For by this time the chase had grown rather tired, the scent stale. Pitt butted his head against the incontrovertible fact that Syme’s methods could never get beyond
conceivability.
No, let us be kind, and controvert; let us grant him even
plausibility,
and leave it at that. For there, Pitt grew more and more (and more and more unhappily) convinced, Syme’s theories
must be left.
In spite of Phidy’s best protestations to the contrary:

How, Pitt asked, had Alfred Wegener’s (equally powerful) eruption of the understanding resulted from such a
pretty nonsense
? The more I wriggled behind the eyes of Sam Syme, and stretched my fingers into the hands of Sam Syme, the clearer I saw that he did not heed his eyes, and he did not attend his hands. His thoughts ate the air, crammed with visions; you cannot feed theories so. How had such a mind ever conceived that great revolution in geologic science, the notion of a cracked shell and shifting internal plates? Yet from some unhappy compulsion Pitt continued the fluvial experiments, as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on – as if, at any moment, the dancing flame might cast a glancing light, not into the depths of the earth, but rather into the remotest recesses of Syme’s imagination.

Until one evening I sat, muddy and dispirited, in my own backyard. Or, rather, the rack and ruin of my backyard. Moles, it seemed, had been at it. Cut and tangled grass roots poked out from several heaps of scraped earth. A soft-bellied bag of winter leaves had split against the fence, and spilled over, and stank of rot. The boys’ bicycles lay upended in the … I should say lawn, but there was little enough of that left, after the winter, and my experiments – their wheels spinning slightly, at a kick of the spring breeze. A bitter-sweet odour of burned vegetation filled the nostril. Little piles of blackened earth, singed and crackling dandelion weeds, charred twigs, littered the yard, as though a bomb had dropped – oh, shall we say, two hundred years ago? – and Nature had never quite … recovered. The magic lantern itself was caked in several layers (subtly and variously shaded) of dried mud; the beautiful cut glass tarred by smoke; the magnesium match burned and shrivelled to the wick. I palmed the dirt from the neck, and drank a slug from my bottle of – no longer quite so
scientific
– gin.

As I rose from Pitt’s broad and muddy bottom to his haunches, and rolled the ankles of my chinos away from my dirty feet, I glanced into the glow of the opened kitchen window. Ben was staring at me. The doorbell jangled, breaking the silence of my misery, harsh and out of tune.

‘That’ll be pizza‚’ Susie said, in the intimate muffle of a conversation from another room. ‘Who’d I give the money to?’

Quiet. (How much Pitt loves the joy of looking in, and taking no part!)

‘Who’d I give the money to?’

‘Oh, me‚’ Aaron said.

‘Go on, then. Be quick. Tell them that’s forty minutes and we want the discount. It’s after seven, and we called at half-past six. Can you manage that, or should I come?’

‘No, I got it.’

‘Stays light till six already‚’ Susie said, mostly to herself, as one door closed and another opened.
‘Here.
Imagine that – in February. Doug!’ she called, her voice, it seemed, bearing a suggestion of incandescence from the kitchen glow, as it flew into the darkened yard. ‘Doug!’

‘Mom‚’ Ben said, still staring. ‘Why is Dad burning up the garden?’

He said it, you understand,
without
that dose of irony, habitual to him (his father’s son in this); he said it rather out of shame or curiosity – though something matter of fact about the tone suggested sadness, and the former.

‘Coming!’ Pitt called (standing still), in that echoing fashion of the inward bound that implies excess of weariness and distance travelled. ‘Let me just get cleaned up.’

‘I don’t know‚’ Susie said. ‘It’s an experiment.’

‘What’s he trying to prove?’

‘What he’s always proving. That everybody’s wrong, and he’s right.’

As he stood under the shower, Pitt considered how far from the true path he had strayed. How sweet the scrub of the brush against his fingertips, as the water beat him warm again! But it could not scratch the dirt from under his nails, nor bristle his black nubs pink and clean.
‘Du mußt dein Leben ändern!’
the poet said; and Pitt spat the words into the rush of water. The magnesium lantern had proved not only a failure in itself, but demonstrated, in terms at once clear and tangible (or, rather,
muddy
and
muddling),
how
easily Pitt might be led into the lost worlds of his own thoughts. (Perhaps they had finished supper by now; and he could grab a slice.) Yes, yes:
du mußt dein Leben ändern!
He closed his eyes against the burning stream.
You must change your life!

I remembered surprising Ben lately in our bedroom – where I found him standing above the opened drawer of my desk; the sort of guilty discovery that would have sent the blood to my cheeks as a boy. My mother’s thin bones and girlish figure beside my father’s brute mass composed a contrast Pitt’s lonely childhood did not like to consider in its intimate union; no boy does, I suppose, but there seemed something particularly awful in the thought of my prim
mother
abandoned to such pleasures in the arms of my cheerful and greedy dad. ‘I don’t know‚’ she might have said, ‘it was your father’s idea; not very
me.’
But Ben never blushed – Susie’s easy motherhood must take some credit, along with the boy’s unabashed curiosity, and perhaps, even, a tithe of praise is owed to Pitt himself, for the simple friendship of their marriage, in spite of present … bickerings is too light a word. It is even possible Ben came in to see if his parents’ bedroom offered any clue to their unhappiness; a good place to look first, Pitt concedes, in the usual run of things.

But in fact Ben seemed content to peer into the drawer, holding his shortened arm against the handle. He glanced up at me briefly and looked down again, as if refusing the interruption; and I guessed only then that he had found a copy of the Syme Papers, and they had absorbed his no doubt uncomprehending gaze sufficiently for him to stand, a minute or half-hour perhaps, reading, lifting each sheet as he finished, and laying it face down on my desk. Another minute passed. I did not wish to move or close the door or speak; anything might break the spell; and even tiptoeing backwards from the scene implied that slight burden of expectation a reader baulks at, especially a boy. Yes, I longed for
him
at least to read and understand me – though Ben was too young perhaps, and would acquire my lessons no doubt soon enough, and from a richer, less literary inheritance. Pitt couldn’t remember what he’d come in for; and determined to fetch something, anything, from
the cupboard, as if that were all, and the kid was too ordinary and insignificant a presence to occasion comment. Say, for example, his Oxford sweatshirt for a blustery Sunday afternoon at the beginning of March. I did not move; he lifted another page and laid it blankly with its fellows on the thin pile.

Every author knows the spell, the crystal delicacy of the silence with which he regards his reader. I am not here, runs the undertone of his incantation, I am not here, I am not here. Pray, by all means, continue. The spell is binding, too, for the writer feels, as if in point of fact he is only fractionally present, while his remainder breathes and thinks, just around the corner of his sight, upon the page in the reader’s hand. (Afterwards I looked at the heap on my desk; Sam was taking Phidy, at Tom’s insistence, around the barn, where the double-compression piston lay entangled in its own decay.) He turned another page, bending beneath his thumb, whose dirty print (sweating slightly, perhaps?) creased the line ‘I had no answer to this; and so we stood there, in the thinning must of the old barn, while the shadows played upwards from the ground and engulfed the ceiling it seemed in black flames … ‘– yes, Pitt looked, and counted too, afterwards, seven pages in all. As Ben turned the last of them, he said, glancing up again, with a trace of irony I could not measure: ‘When can we draw on them, Dad?’

Not
‘can
we draw on them’, as he might have asked a year ago, simply eager and indiscriminate, but
‘when’
–
conscious already of the process by which his father’s work outlived its always questionable uses and survived as scrap to be recycled and reborn beneath the son’s brighter and happier and messier penmanship. (Was it reproach or expectation? Sweet concern for his mother’s fate? Acceptance of his father’s? Which, I wondered, in sudden silence – having turned off the tap, I stood a minute in the drip of the shower-head.)

Yes, Pitt would begin again, from scratch. (A sadder, wiser Pitt.)

Avoiding such nonsense as the
magnesium lantern,
and those maps of the internal earth, on which he had wasted these impassioned months.

He would go on, as he should have begun. By reproducing, in exact detail, Syme’s marvellous experiment of the burning, whirling globe.

Joe Schapiro and I spent six rain-soaked days of the spring recess bent over Phidy’s manuscript, from Joe’s first cup of tea and cold pizza in the morning to the drop of Laphroaig he knocked back before turning in. Joe was a bachelor, with a certain gentlemanly taste in his graduate students; and on the second morning I caught a glimpse of an oversized T-shirt stretched below a scuttling bottom, as it retreated to the bathroom. By the end of the week, Dr (‘not yet, Joe!’) Bianca Baumgarten, ‘visiting from the University of Hannover’, used to sip her coffee, wrapped in a blanket from his army days, while we worked. Mostly in Joe’s garage, because I didn’t want Susie to see me – ‘at it again’, she would have said.

He rattled the garage door into the ceiling every morning, to catch the natural light, such as it was – coloured white in the battering of rain that hit the drive each day that week, in drops fat enough for us to pick out not only their individual shapes, but the dozen splintered sparks of water into which they shattered. Mostly, I remember the noise, the trample of a thousand cats and dogs on the tin roof – such intimacy of the sky upon our heads! Joe cleared off a warped ply table, sweeping the sawdust and bent nails into a garbage bag; and we spread the twenty-odd sheets of my translation before us, which recorded Phidy’s first encounter with the great geognosist Sam Syme and the wonderful experiment (at fifty cents a head) he was engaged upon: the tale of creation, in a clamour of smoking coal and running ore, spun out before our eyes by a device that seemed, among Sam’s other advances, to anticipate the common bicycle: ‘I will do my best to describe the contraption – I can give it no better name – upon which the Professor, well, perhaps
rode
is the only word for it …’

Well, this was our text; and you may yourselves imagine the difficulties we faced in translating an eyewitness account (a hundred and eighty years old) into a modern and practical reality. Joe was wonderful: unhurried, meticulous, patient equally with his head
and hand, as the two strove to match a conception of the experiment and its physical execution with each other. Pitt was all haste and bother, a perfect
volcano
of notions that overflowed as soon as they erupted, and cooled in the very act of forming. He despaired, equally, of any delay, as soon as they encountered it, and any decision, as soon as they settled upon it; but flatters himself, that in his own awkward way he spurred his partner apace, and kept them, as Susie would say, ‘at it’.

Even
Doktor
Bianca Baumgarten – as Pitt persisted in calling her, above her blushing, increasingly petulant, protestations that ‘we
anticipated
– it is all very much premature – a question, if I may be permitted, of
pre hoc
casting some doubt over the
propter’
–
put her very pretty foot in at one point, and demanded to ‘look over the original, as I cannot imagine the German language could ever be twisted into such an ugly knot’. (Syme’s enthusiasms proved once again infectious; even after two centuries quarantined, as it were, in anonymity. The atmosphere of the garage, heavy with wet, thick with our stale and mingled heats, loud under the banging of the roof, suggested nothing so much as
a great pot on the boil,
lid rattling, the whole brew about to
bubble over
at the excess of internal excitement.)

Pitt ventured to persuade ‘the
Fräulein’,
as he dubbed her now, that
Doktor
Benjamin Karding, from the University of Neuburg, had corrected these proofs
himself,
and confirmed Pitt in their accuracy.

‘Dr Karding is’, she stammered, bursting with insult, ‘a … a very …
little man,’
she declared at last, astonishing herself by the vehemence of her persuasion.

‘He is a long and willowy gentleman, of great eminence, personal and public‚’ Pitt assured her.

‘I think I know my own tongue‚’ she snapped.

‘Now, fellas‚’ Joe said, never stirring, running a line across the drafting board.

‘Lifted and retracted, for example‚’ the
Fräulein
declared, glancing over a transcript of the original, ‘I find to be a very poor approximation of
“Bein hoch und Bein runter”,
a simpler and, I believe, altogether more poetic expression.’

How sweet it proved for Pitt, to hear Syme picked over in this fashion! The lift of his leg, long since and eternally retracted, briefly restored by the touch of her quibble, the
huff and puff
of him, the physical expression of his theoretical enthusiasms, tangibly presented to his biographer, in the shape of the
Fräulein Doktor,
poetically raising her leg
hoch
and stamping it
runter,
by way of practical demonstration. Perhaps it was cruel of Pitt to tease her, but he did not rest, until the crescendo of her ‘No, no, no’ reached such a pitch of exasperation that it broke free of the pristine perfection of her English, and squealed into the native honesty of her
‘Nein, nein, nein’
at last.