World and Town (30 page)

“And doesn’t that make a difference if your own family isn’t doing so hot,” says Hattie.

Sophy scrutinizes her nails, which are short on one hand and long on the other. “I just wish they’d kill each other already,” she says.

“Is your dad still hitting Sarun with the newspaper?”

“You asked me the same exact thing before. In those exact same words.”

“Did I?”
Hattie gone batty!
Though didn’t Sophy just say something she’d said before, too? “Just checking, Sophy.”

“Checking up on us.”

Checking
in
on you, Hattie would have said. But, well, never mind. With teacherly patience, she says, “Does it bother you?”

Sophy considers, strumming. “I probably shouldn’t say that anyway.”

“No,” says Hattie. “You shouldn’t.”

“So why didn’t you say so?”

“Would you have wanted me to?”

“I don’t know. I guess. If you’re going to think things. Yeah, I would.”

“Well, all right then. Next time, I will. I won’t hold back.” Should she be promising this? Too late. “Next time I’ll say, ‘Don’t say that, Sophy! That’s terrible!’ ”

Sophy laughs so hard she has to cover her mouth. “Where’s Annie?” she asks. “Aren’t we going to have cookies?”

Y
et more e-mails about money, and then this one:

Dear Aunt Hattie
,

I don’t know how to write this, but my son Alexander has died. It is a terrible story. He was, as you know, fifteen, and friends with his cousin, a year older. Of course that cousin had been having problems, as we all knew. But he’d been living in Australia. We did not see him so often, anyway. We knew he would not come back from Australia even for his father’s funeral. But we did not know he was so-called paranoid schizophrenic until he came to a family reunion and beat my son to death. But that is what happened. While they were playing horseshoes, apparently they had some fight

Hattie reads this e-mail again.

Can this really be because of the graves?

She begins to write,
I cannot begin to say what sorrow
, but then stops. What can she say, really? That will help. What can she say that will help?

You’ll but lie and bleed awhile.…

No.

At the end of the e-mail Hattie wants to say,
For all of the horror of this, I just do not believe that moving my parents’ graves will make a difference
, but does not. What use can it be, parrying belief with belief? And what can the grieving hear anyhow? What with the sound of their own hearts so loud.

Hattie understands.

Still: How many more of these appeals can she read?
Dá guān—
she sets up a file, so that when the next e-mail comes, she can simply click on it and drag it over. Then she gets out her inkstone and brushes. Though how heavy the inkstone today! And does it not seem that she is going to be working on the knots between her bamboo segments forever? Like the character for heart,
xīn
, only without the dots, she thinks; but somehow they hook back wrong and seem to connect nothing.

She goes for a swim.

H
attie had majored in biology in college. After graduation, though, she had gotten a job teaching Chinese at a private school, where she probably would have stayed except that one hot Fourth of July, Dr. Hatch asked her how she liked it. And when she said that she liked some things but had maybe had enough of pattern drills, he said she should go back into science
.

“
Science?
”

“
You know. The systematic interrogation of the natural world.” He speared some figs on the grill; his bald head shone
.

By then Hattie was no longer avoiding Carter, but when he drove up the driveway, she did still take note
.

“
I hadn’t thought of it,” she told Dr. Hatch—noticing, as she spoke, that Carter had gotten himself a new VW convertible just like his old one, only blue. He had the top down and his radio on—bluegrass—and got out of the car alone
.

“
Well, perhaps you should think about it,” said Dr. Hatch. “You were good at it.
”

“
Was I?
”

“
You can’t really be surprised to hear this.
”

“
Oh, no, Dr. Hatch. I am. I am.” A hot dog rolled off her paper plate; Dr. Hatch eyed her as she rescued it, grass clippings and all
.

“
You like to shake things, I’ve noticed,” he went on. “Give things a shake and see what’s what.
”

“
Do I?” And was he giving things a shake himself? He did like to get things going, she knew. “I don’t know that I shake anything on purpose. But there’s a lot I don’t know about the world. So maybe that’s, I don’t know.” She hesitated. “A disturbance.
”

Carter winked at her as he entered the yard but then went to stand as far away from her as possible—a game they used to play. But was it a game now? She tried to focus on her conversation with Dr. Hatch
.

“
…   though there’s more to your avowed ignorance, isn’t there? he was saying. “Than simple ignorance. You’re interested in reality. The
ding an sich,
as they say. The noumenon.” (This was Dr. Hatch as Renaissance man.) “In knowing where it lies, what it is—never mind that it always lies just beyond us, somehow. That we are like blind men groping an elephant. Even the nature of the blindness interests you. The limits of our senses, of our processing apparatus. Am I right?
”

What blind men? What elephant?

“
I guess I’m interested in how differently people think, if that’s what you mean. How differently people see.” She hesitated. “And what we can’t see, because of how we see.
”

“
The blindness that goes with vision. That vision depends on, in fact.
”

“
Yes. Or—not even interested. Aware of it, I guess.
”

“
Thanks to Carter’s work with the Nerve-Muscle Program. That huge quantity of information that comes into the eye but is filtered out by the brain representing the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
”

“
What’s filtered out.” She nodded
.

“
You are aware of people’s arrogance.
”

“
Their certainty.
”

“
Their mistaken, arrogant certainty.
”

With what arrogant certainty he said that!

“
My mother used to say, ‘We must see that we don’t see,’ ” she said
.

“
A point that’s been made since Plato,” Dr. Hatch went on. “But
that in your case, stems, no doubt, from growing up in another culture. So that you’re aware of other ways of seeing. Other lenses.
”

“
No doubt.
”

He gave her a hard look; he had Carter’s eyes. (Or, she supposed, Carter had his.)

She hung her head
.

He softened. “As people realize and don’t, I imagine,” he went on
.

“
It’s hard to explain.
”

He looked at her. “Don’t accept not fitting in,” he said then. “No one fits in.
”

“
I see.
”

“
Be a part of the picture,” he said. “Make yourself a part. Remake the picture if need be.
”

Her grass-flecked hot dog rocked a bit on her plate. “I’ll try. I mean, I’ll do that.
”

“
Don’t be a gadfly. The sort who brings disorder instead of perspective. Who dismantles but doesn’t rebuild. Who fails to understand what it means to build to begin with, really. What force and imagination it takes to get the simplest thing done. Gadflies are a nuisance and a distraction
.

“
I won’t become a gadfly,” she promised
.

He gave her a sympathetic look. “I’m sure it’s hard to be adventive. Temporarily naturalized, that is.
”

She didn’t know what he meant, and yet did. “It is.
”

“
My mother was in your situation once upon a time,” he said. But he did not go on and, whatever he meant, she did not ask, for Carter had snuck up behind her with a clean hot dog for her plate. He then disappeared once again
.

She ate the hot dog but refused to look and see where he had gone. As Carter did or didn’t notice, but as his father did, of course
.

He said nothing, though, apparently having other things on his mind
.

Dr. Hatch was a clean-cut man, with a neat head, of course, and neat ears. His crisp shirt had not softened in the humidity; his Swiss watch gave off a silvery cool. And yet he was triumphing, at that moment, over more than the weather. For having experienced a salad with grilled figs in California, he was now conducting an experiment himself—wanting to see, he said, whether embers too spent for fish or meat weren’t just right for figs. Which would certainly have been fine
with Mrs. Hatch had he not bought bags and bags full of subjects for his experiment; figs were expensive in their neck of the woods. Moreover, she had never known anyone in the family, she said, to care for figs in any form. Still, he maintained that he had not overbought; and now his grad students agreed he should have bought many more
.

“
Have a fig,” offered Dr. Hatch in closing—insisting that Hattie take a whole half-fig, even if it was the last one. “Take it! Take it!” he urged. And finally, she did take it, even as Dr. Hatch turned to Mrs. Hatch and said, still smiling, “You might put some work into your battle-picking.” To which Mrs. Hatch drew up her egret neck and raised her fine chin—a patrician affair that had something to do with who her family was before it went to seed. It was Carter who, suddenly reappearing, stared at the ground, looking as though he was going to bawl. He sat on a lawn chair, his feet turned out like a duck’s; the back of his neck stretched on and on, sunburned and knobby
.

Hattie did not sit down with him
.

She was twenty-four then and had not heard from her parents in years. Of course, she and her Iowa family were still writing letters; though working from Tanzania wasn’t easy, Uncle Jeremy and Susan were particularly dogged about “trying other channels,” as they put it. And yet even so there were days when Hattie probably would have drowned herself, except that she didn’t want to drown herself in an American lake. She wanted to drown herself in a Chinese lake, where people would find her and think of the poet Qu Yuan. She didn’t want people just to think she was nuts
.

So she wrote down Dr. Hatch’s words and tucked them into her wallet. She replayed the moment he said them, leaving out the swipe at Mrs. Hatch and the awkwardness with Carter. And she went back to school for her doctorate—taking some courses, then starting work on synaptic transmission in Guy LaPoint’s lab. That was before Guy’s lab got folded, over his protests, into Carter’s—a brand-new proposition and, seeing as Carter was in his twenties, a small coup. Of course, people got their careers started earlier back then; they got their Ph.D.’s faster, and Carter was Dr. Hatch’s son, after all. Not the very most brilliant son, but still a wunderkind, working in a new field. And what interesting stuff he was working on—Dr. Hatch wasn’t the only one who thought so—the connection between cortical interneurons and the firing of a simple cortical cell. The very process, in short, through which data from the outside world registered, or failed to
register, as something “seen”—the place where the objective world was filtered, and perception made
.

You mean,
Lee would say later
, where we all go a little haywire.

By the time Hattie ended up working on her dissertation with Carter, she was no longer uncomfortable with him. And yet theirs was hardly a normal advising relationship. They avoided personal subjects, and they certainly did not share food or clothes. Every now and then, though, Carter would look up and say, “Miss Confucius. You will understand this.
”

And then, while Hattie’s lab mates looked on with envy, Carter would work out some point with her as if there were no other living being in the room. Everyone knew that Hattie could get through to Carter if he was tied up, or draft a letter in a pinch, and he never rewrote her papers. What’s more, they spoke, sometimes, in a kind of code
.

“
A mollusc?” she might ask as he looked over a paper from a rival lab, for example. (Lowly molluscs, lucky creatures, having no blind spots, thanks to the superior design of their optic nerves.)

“
No,” he would answer. “I see a blind spot here.” Or else, with grudging respect: “Well, yes. You’d have to call it a squid.
”

Certain committees were the Sudd—impossibly clogged with vegetative matter, like their namesake, an un-navigable section of the Nile. And certain members of certain committees were epiphytes, bombillators, Ignoriahs. Their own lab, of course, was the Hatchery
.

Or maybe the Junior Hatchery: There was, it seemed, no escaping Carter’s father—El Honcho Hatch, as people called him. When Carter grew a beard, for example, people said it was to bug El Honcho Hatch. And was Carter not just like El Honcho in his impatience? The time that he said that people who could not get to the point should go into psychoanalysis instead of science, for example—did he not sound like El Honcho then? It was the El Honcho in him, too, they said, who told a certain dean to stick to fund-raising. They called him, what else, El Hatchette or—more and more—El Hatchet
.

Carter, luckily, was used to this sort of thing, he said
.

Hattie was seeing Joe at the time—a colleague from back when she taught Chinese. Carter was married to Meredith, the provost’s daughter, a lawyer. Whom Hattie didn’t dislike, exactly, though she did think Meredith’s living room a lot of hooey, what with its sunken conversation pit and its coffee table full of crystal balls. The fawn-arium
,
Hattie called it; and it always seemed to her a kind of extension of the living room that Carter was not allowed to eat dinner at the lab, or to do lab work at night. A matter of taste more than of out-and-out jealousy. So that if something had to be run, Hattie would do it herself or with a lab mate; Carter would have to call on the sly, to check in. Whispering, so that Meredith couldn’t hear them, even though it was really all just shop talk. Spurious data. Lab dynamics. What went wrong, what they should try differently. New directions, new projects. He was good at conceptualizing things; she, at designing experiments; and neither of them was ever so happy as when they were getting results. Results! She remembered how slowly he would speak when they had a finding—how excitedly he would ask her to describe exactly what she’d seen, and how carefully she would respond. And what an extraordinary thing it really was, to see truths emerge. To know that the work would be cited and built on—to know that for all time, for any researcher who cared to try it, that truth would hold. It was as if Hattie had finally set foot on solid ground—as if she had arrived in a country that would not vanish. And to share such an arrival with someone else—well, was not “home” a feeling of sharing the same reality?